Dead Aphorism [1991-2006]
Colour photocopy on foamcore.
Exhibited at "Metaphysical TV [still]", May 2006, Loose Projects, Sydney

"Metaphysical TV" was the name of a group of film makers working in
Super 8 in the 1980s who generated their content by shooting directly off the tv
screen. The work in this show will not be screen-based but will be
stills and prints relating to the original obsessions of the group.

This show is also the first in a series of Loose Weeks at Loose
Projects.
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May 24 to May 27, 2006. Opening Wednesday, May 24, 6pm.
Loose Projects, 2nd Floor, 168 Day Street, Sydney.

A flu pandemic that could strike without warning and kill millions is on its way.

With the world economy locked into open trade and globalisation, and security wracked by terrorism and fundamentalism, you could forgive the planet’s leaders for being distracted. It’s hard to conceive of anything so tumultuous that it could deliver us beyond the post-September 11 era of suicide bombers and chronic poverty, religious fanaticism and rampant militarism, of record profits and jaded celebrities, cosmetic surgery and low interest rates.

Nothing, except a global influenza pandemic. With the conditions ripe and the world overdue for another global outbreak, government and corporate decision-makers have been jolted in recent months to consider the consequences.

Human flu pandemics spread quickly to all parts of the globe and typically infect more than a quarter of the total population. They deliver high levels of morbidity and mortality and cause major social disruption. There were three pandemics in the 20th century: in 1918, 1957 and 1968. In 1976, governments planned for an outbreak that never came. And there have been false alarms, where novel strains of the virus have been identified but have ended in few cases and limited human-to-human transmission. But in January 2004, health officials became alarmed at the outbreak in humans of a new and dangerous strain of the virulent H5N1 virus, better known as avian or bird flu in Asia. Officials believe all the prerequisites for the start of an influenza pandemic have been met save one: the establishment of efficient and sustained human-to-human transmission of the virus.

After H5N1’s first appearance in humans, in Hong Kong in 1997 when six out of 18 confirmed cases died, the spread ceased after authorities culled Hong Kong’s entire chicken population of 1.5 million. But the virus itself did not disappear. It simply retreated to China’s southern Guangdong province, where it had first been identified in ducks. Between 1998 and 2003, H5N1 evolved through 17 strains at high speed, becoming more pathogenic and resilient, hopping hosts from wild to domestic birds, and to mammals such as pigs and, since 2004, to humans again. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation says 140 million birds have died or been destroyed and the combined losses to gross domestic product are estimated at $US10bn to $US15bn ($12.97bn to $19.45bn). Since the first case in Vietnam in December 2003, there have been 111 laboratory-confirmed human cases of avian flu, with 57 deaths in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and now Indonesia. What has virologists worried is the potential of H5N1 to recombine into a virulent new human-to-human strain, capable of unleashing an unprecedented contagion around the world that would kill millions.

With the first official instance of human-to-human transmission reported in September 2004 in Thailand, the World Health Organisation declared the world had now “moved closer to a new pandemic than it has been at any time since 1968”. In February this year, WHO announced it had entered the pandemic alert period – phase three in its six-phase alert scale, where there are incidents of human infection with a new strain but as yet no human-to-human spread. Some experts believe we have already moved to phase four, with confirmed clusters of cases of human-to-human transmission in Vietnam and China and, last month, in Indonesia. More recently, the fact that migratory birds had spread the virus from western China to Russia’s European frontier in just three weeks – spurring five suspected human cases in northern Kazakhstan – have pushed consensus on the near-term probability of a pandemic from “if” to “when”.

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SHE’LL BE RIFE
How the pandemic would devastate Australia. If a pandemic with an attack rate of 25% (one-quarter of the population affected) were to occur again in Australia and there was no vaccine or treatment available, over a six-eight week period it could lead to:
* 13,000 to 44,000 deaths
* 57,900 to 148,000 hospitalisations
* 2.6 to 7.5 million outpatient visits.
The figures are estimates only and the likely outcomes associated with a pandemic will depend on many factors such as the transmissibility and virulence of the virus, and the availability and success of health and social interventions.

(Source: Australian Government Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza)

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With the virus permanently established in birds in large parts of Asia, “the threat to human health will persist as long as the problem persists in animals”, says Dr Peter Horby, public health expert with WHO in Hanoi. Alarmed by the inadequacy of national and international plans to cope with such a global health emergency, two respected American journals, Foreign Affairs and Nature, in a co-ordinated effort devoted their July issues to “The Next Pandemic”.

In the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, 400 million people were clinically infected and more than 40 million people perished, out of a global population of 2 billion. A pandemic of that order today would kill between 180 million and 360 million people within 18 months. World trade and international travel would be brought to a standstill, plummeting productivity would usher in economic depression, and the short supply and unequal distribution of effective drugs, coupled with overwhelmed public health facilities, quarantines and restrictions on the movement and association of citizens, would lead to social unrest that would destabilise governments everywhere, notwithstanding the exponential increase in security threats from insurgents and terrorists. Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious disease expert for the American Department of Homeland Security, writes in Foreign Affairs: “The reality of the coming pandemic ... cannot be avoided. Only its impact can be lessened.”

That’s the worst case scenario we should prepare for if we are to heed the warnings of respected health experts. The messages are getting through. In recent weeks, governments, international agencies and corporations have taken steps to brace for the coming calamity. Scientists, while alarmed, still cannot tell us when the pandemic will occur — it could be tomorrow, in six months or six years. But they have told political leaders it’s time to scramble, to begin planning for the worst and hoping for the best.

Still, no politician wants to risk being called Chicken Little. Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott told reporters last week: “There’s a fine line to be trod here between scaring people over something that might never happen and alerting people to something that may very well happen.” The federal government has walked that fine line in recent months, implanting the notion of pandemic preparedness into the public’s brain stem, while emphasising that we’re still in a “no worries, she’ll be right” phase.

Following WHO’s lead, Australia in March went to “Overseas Three” in its own six-step pandemic scale. In June, the government’s “Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza” was launched, along with a new slogan: Prepared and Protected. Abbott laid out Australia’s game plan: “The initial objective would be to attempt to prevent its appearance in Australia for as long as possible. Once there was a case in Australia, we would be determined to limit its spread within this country for as long as possible. And once there was a widespread outbreak, treatment and prevention, prophylaxis, would be our principal objective.”

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THE SPANISH FLU
Estimated deaths
* 1918 pandemic 40 million
* World War I 8.3 million

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With WHO estimating at least a six-month lag from outbreak to the development of an effective vaccine, much has been made of the efficacy of the key anti-viral agent oseltamivir, with the tradename Tamiflu. Recent reports that the government has “cornered the world market” in Tamiflu ignore conflicting evidence that many of those infected with H5N1 who took Tamiflu still died, often from the secondary pneumonias that take the heaviest toll in such pandemics. “In responding to a pandemic,” Osterholm notes in Foreign Affairs, “Tamiflu could have a measurable impact in countries with sizeable stockpiles.” Like Australia. But there is “no evidence” that Tamiflu helps if the patient develops the “cytokine storm that characterises the recent H5N1 infections”. Here the immune system fights the virus with such ferocity that the lungs in a sense melt and the patient suffocates.

Public statements from all sides of politics in recent days reflect a lack of engagement with the nature of the threat identified by experts. Greens senator Bob Brown has called for Tamiflu to be sold over the counter, instead of only by prescription. The distinction is moot if there isn’t enough to go round. If the pandemic obliges by striking when we are ready, there will still only be one dose available for every five Australians. Latest clinical trials indicate the effective dose of Tamiflu is much higher than previously expected, meaning even less of the drug to go round. As for vaccine, Osterholm predicts it “would have no impact on the course of the virus in the first months and would likely play an extremely limited role worldwide”. And the government’s agreements with two overseas vaccine manufacturers may come to nothing should their host countries nationalise vaccine production in the event of a pandemic, as the US did in 1976 when it refused to share vaccine for the swine flu pandemic it was expecting but never came.
In a speech to the Australia Indonesia Business Council on August 1, Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd identified “one of the key challenges in the early detection of bird flu was the reluctance of poultry farmers to report the disease for fear their entire flocks, and livelihoods, would be destroyed”. It may be a challenge in China, but for Australia the more pressing concern is when the human-to-human transmission takes hold and the disease sweeps in like any of the “normal” seasonal flus. In this situation, border protection becomes immaterial. According to Foreign Affairs’ Laurie Garrett, “No nation can erect a fortress against influenza ... national policy-makers would be wise to plan now for worst case scenarios involving quarantines, weakened armed services and dwindling hospital space and vaccines.

“The greatest weakness that each nation must individually address is the inability of their hospitals to cope with a sudden surge of new patients ... the potential for pandemic comes at a time when the world’s public health systems are severely taxed and have long been in decline.”
In this context, last week’s announcement by Abbott and state health ministers that they would stage a “mock outbreak” in December to test hospital capacity will be scrutinised – that’s if we get the luxury of having a trial run. The government’s worst case estimate is that in the event of a pandemic, 2.6 million people would need medical attention, with up to 148,000 hospitalised. We should expect that these numbers will be put to the test.

In the event of a pandemic, the flow of free and accurate information will be more than an ethic; it will be a matter of public health and safety. The last time the spectre of 1918 was invoked was in 1976 when US President Gerald Ford put the nation on alert. Swine flu never materialised, and Ford and confidence in the US public health system were damaged.

Chinese authorities were heavily criticised for suppressing news of the SARS outbreak, and then minimising its seriousness. Now there are worrying signs again from China. In July, a Hong Kong laboratory had its research on the H5N1 strain suspended by China’s Ministry of Agriculture. The ministry also dismissed research by the lab on the recent H5N1 outbreak among migratory birds in western China. The WHO has complained that China is not sharing samples of the outbreak strain.

All this highlights the need for international organisations like the WHO to be free to monitor any pandemic impartially. However, such organisations are critically under-resourced. The WHO has an annual budget of just $400m, and can intervene only when invited by a country.

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THE BUG PICTURE
* H5N1 has found a new ecological niche in poultry in parts of Asia.
* The virus is now more deadly in poultry and in the mammalian mouse model.
* New animals – cats and tigers – are becoming infected for the first time, suggesting the virus is expanding its host range.
* Domestic ducks are excreting large quantities of virus without showing symptoms.
* Viruses from 2004 survive longer in the environment than viruses from 1997.
* The virus is killing at least some wild migratory birds.
* These changes have created multiple opportunities for a pandemic virus to emerge.

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First published in The Bulletin

A LONG time ago, in a land far away, The Blob was one of my favourite movies. Apparently they're doing a remake. That's about all I can be bothered finding out about the remake of the The Blob at this stage.

If you want to know more go and look it up yourself. There are stacks of online resources where you can get all the information you could ever possibly want - and never possibly need - about The Blob and the remake of The Blob. All the goss, all the speculation, all the dross that's unfit to print, but that's so easy and painless to publish online.

And herein lies a problem. The web is awash with too much publicity for nothing worth promoting. Too much spin masquerading as informed opinion. Today movie marketing and film culture are interchangeable, indistinguishable. It is almost exclusively a commercialised sphere - not exactly news in an era of unprecedented penetration of the market into everyday life, almost everywhere on Earth.

American cinema, in particular, is looking wan and tired as its big screen epics heave and clumber round the cineplexes, creating carefully staged ripples of soon-to-be-forgotten pyrotechnic spectacle. As a mass cultural phenomenon, The Movie seems to be losing its conceptual lustre before our very eyes, fragmenting into re-usable chunks of corporate output, part of a matrix of cultural products that includes games, DVDs, marketing and merchandise. Profits are up, gravitas is down.

The surging games industry, now a bigger entertainment "sector" in raw market terms, is itself driving much movie content, while throwing up a greater challenge to the global cultural hegemony of "Hollywood" than TV ever did in the '60s. TV's challenge spurred a financial crisis in the movie business. Today its challenge is one of relevance, supercession and obsolescence. If Hollywood doesn't speak for America Inc. or serve the nation as Washington's mouthpiece anymore, who does it speak for? Moreover, who cares?

The US movie business is geared to serving shareholders and corporate masters over audiences. In fact they're in the business of creating audiences; it's the audience that's the product, not the movie; it's the audience that delivers the profit, not the movie. Most movies are just steaming piles of creative and intellectual waste made only to deliver us - and we're just here to be seduced then abandoned (A.K.A. entertained). This is rarely a satisfactory contract, and irreparable disconnect is imminent, if not already upon us. Even in the face of unprecedented competition for entertainment dollar, the movie business appears on a mission to drive away its key profit driver - its audience - through sheer boredom and indifference.

In other words, enough words wasted on the remake of The Blob. I may catch it on cable in a year or two. Then I'll forget it immediately.

Australian sculptor Ricky Swallow, a mastercraftsman carving out a significant niche in the artworld, joins hallowed company with his appearance at the Venice Biennale, writes Michael Hutak.

TIME is running out for rising art star Ricky Swallow. The Venice Biennale is only eight months away and Australia's official representative is feeling the pinch. Two large blocks of jelutong, the Malay hardwood that this master sculptor favours, are still being chainsawed down to size by an assistant, not yet ready for Swallow's chisels and hammers to hone into an immaculate replica of the human skeleton that sits at their side, waiting patiently. Across the studio another curio, a bicycle courier's crash helmet overrun with snakes, is only just taking shape. The man himself is softly spoken, slight, and slightly harried.

"I believe you should only do one thing at a time," he tells The Bulletin on this grey London afternoon in his East End studio. "But right now my head is in three pieces instead of one. This one [the helmet and snakes] should have been finished by now. That one [the skeleton] needs to get started, and the other involves taxidermy and I still have to see a taxidermist next week." The time pressure and logistical demands of the Biennale are intense. "We can't afford to let things lapse into overtime - it's not like you can get an extension - and when things are sitting around half done, it can make me quite anxious."

He needn't be. The centrepiece of his show in the Australian pavilion on the Giardini de Castello will be his acclaimed "masterpiece" Killing Time, recently acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW. During the Renaissance the masterpiece was the work that marked the end of an artist's apprenticeship, whenceforth the artist joined the ranks of master and could set up his own studio. Killing Time has afforded Swallow just such a rite of passage. Seven months in the making, it is a graceful, compelling and uncanny full-scale replica of Swallow's childhood family table, decked with a messy array of "freshly" killed sea creatures, and country kitchen detritus - all meticulously carved from jelutong. It is the art-world equivalent of a barbecue stopper, with the devil in the detailing: "It's an attempt to try and catalogue all the things that I've killed," Swallow says dryly.

Astonishing as it may seem, Swallow is completely self-taught in wood carving, relying on persistence rather than formal training. "You've either got some sort of gift for it or you haven't. I've always thought it better to be a pirate than an expert in any medium; it's better to find your own attitude within it." At one point, when he declares, cautiously, that he thinks "skill is back", it comes almost as an admission. Yet it is precisely his skill as a craftsman that has put him front and centre with critics and collectors alike. While his contemporaries wring their hands about what it means to be an artist in the age of digital reproduction, Swallow has been busy carving hand-made 1:1 replicas of obsolete consumer items and pop cultural icons - a cardboard bust of Darth Vader, a metal detector made of PVC and epoxy, a BMX bike, an '80s ghetto-blaster, a Pirelli tyre, an Apple Powerbook and mouse made of wood - objects rendered with such precision that the artist's hand is actually effaced.

"For me a work is finished when it looks like no one's touched it," he says, "because what I do when I carve is somehow to eradicate that process, kind of removing the mark, in a way I keep promising to leave some more of those marks and I think it's gonna happen with this guy [pointing to the skeleton] because ultimately it's a known fact that I've made them."

We might be tempted to look for a conceptual smuggler in Swallow, an artist able to ferry subversive ideas to the cognoscenti while everyone else remains dazzled by the simple novelty of a contemporary artist who is master of his medium. But since moving to London last Christmas after two years in Los Angeles, Swallow has been taking cues not from Duchamp, Warhol or even Damien Hirst, but from 18th-century masters like art history's most acclaimed still-life painter, Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, or forgotten styles like the vanitas, popular in 17th-century Holland, where images are composed with a symbology of death and mortality. In works such as Everything is Nothing (2003), in which a skull inhabits a sporty adidas hood, the execution is delivered with a light touch, and the work is anything but morbid, speaking instead of transcendence.

"I've always been attracted to the skeleton ... it's something that's been ingrained in my brain since I was a kid, through things like skateboard graphics and my brother's heavy metal posters. I'm now trying to arrange these influences with other more classical influences."

Thus Killing Time, for example, is not just an eccentric inventory of the sea creatures Swallow has "ended"; it is also a portrait of his father's profession (a fisherman), one that Swallow had the option of continuing. "Out of all my parents' [five] children, only my eldest brother pursued fishing for a while. Now he's stopped so the work also marks a pause in that tradition if you like."

In Venice, Killing Time will occupy the upper space of the pavilion while down below a second large-scale work, a wood-carved wall hanging, will mimic the still lifes of Chardin. "Upstairs things are preserved in time," he says. "Downstairs is much more about showing the ravage of time."

The Australia Council, the federally funded body which backs the Venice venture, has high hopes that Swallow's work will, at the very least, be timely. For the artist, expectation is high: "I haven't been banking on Venice but it is an opportunity to really start things internationally on a different level ... having your country's pavilion in Venice is the biggest opportunity you could get to be seen and, hopefully, respected in the art world."

At 29, Swallow is the youngest artist to be despatched to Venice since Australia's 1954 Biennale debut, when Sidney Nolan, William Dobell and Russell Drysdale flew the flag. Swallow joins an honour roll that also includes Arthur Streeton, Arthur Boyd, Mike Parr, Rosalie Gascoigne, Howard Arkley, Imants Tillers, Rover Thomas, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and in 2003, Patricia Piccinini - a veritable Mount Olympus of post-war Australian artists.

"It's a compliment to be in that company but I don't think I make necessarily Australian work," he says. "You don't go over there to represent your country ... but I do want to land quite heavily in Venice. I do want to put a kink in some general perceptions about what happens in Australia. Because of the geographical distance and clich‚s about what Australia's about, there's not much awareness about how much good work's being made down there."

He believes he had to leave Australia to grow as an artist. After winning the $100,000 Contempora 5 Prize in 1999, Swallow was named Australia's most collectable artist two years running by Australian Art Collector. It all got too much. "When things were taking off in Australia and there was a lot of attention, I thought, 'Too much too soon, this is bad news and it's gonna really mess me up'. I feel less like that now. I'm starting to be recognised as an artist who has an international profile. The audience is bigger, more opportunities are opening up, whereas in Australia I can think of a handful of contemporary artists who stayed and have almost exhausted their museum opportunities and I'm not sure what else they can do next." Swallow is content to be an ambitious little fish in art's biggest pond - London is now the irrefutable epicentre of the known art universe.

Our interview took place on the Monday after London's biggest weekend in contemporary art in recorded times. No less than three major contemporary art fairs were mounted, with more than 250 of the world's leading galleries representing the work of 3000 artists. The biggest of the three, the Frieze Art Fair, attracted 42,000 visitors and turned over the equivalent of $64m in sales. In only its second year, Frieze is now the world's pre-eminent art fair, further indication that Swallow has chosen the right place at the right time. After being courted by leading London gallerist Stuart Shave at the Basel Art Fair in 2003, Swallow decided to not only move to London but also to cut formal ties with his American dealer, paring back his representation to Shave's Modernartinc, his long-term Sydney dealer, Darren Knight, and the Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand.

Key to Swallow's work is investment of time and labour. These are unique objects, not multiples that can be dashed off by the score by assistants. But if success is measured by demand, then Swallow is feeling the pressure to increase output. "It's funny, but the more pressure there is, the less I've made every year. But because the pressure is there, because commercial galleries are businesses as well, it was a conscious decision to work with fewer galleries for now."

London may be home but he admits to recurring bouts of homesickness - for sunny California. "I still have attachments there and the climate is pretty seductive. You gotta dig deep to find the love in London. But I'm in a great position, I have a gallery that I think I'm gonna be really happy with, I'm in a relationship I'm happy with [with fellow artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, whose art-world fame eclipses Swallow's after her win in the prestigious Beck's Futures prize this year], I have the best studio I've ever had and I live in a nice place. All that softens things but it's still a hard city - even if you stand up, you're often not counted."

What does appeal to the diligent Swallow is the work ethic: "People work hard here; I know artists whose studios are like the Temple of Doom but they still go there to toil every day."

Taking the long view that we're all destined to dust, Swallow remains indifferent to the obligations recent art history places on young artists. Instead his art seeks to transcend death by rendering the everyday immortal. His armoury isn't irony: it's sincerity, skill, discipline, hard work - and a chisel.

"Three or four years ago when I was working in different types of media, it was all about looking at what I wanted to say and how best to say it. But since I've been working in the wood for the last three years, it's almost like I've found a medium that still challenges me all the time. There are pieces I can imagine that wouldn't work as a carving but this is the medium I'm working in and I've chosen to stick with for a while."

Swallow's neo-traditionalist gambit at Venice will be to invoke the past that lasts, an imaginary arcadia when paint was paint and being an artist meant more than turning on and off a light switch. Swallow eschews post-modernity's obligation to transgression and radicality for their own sake. "I don't have any moral stance on art. My role as a contemporary artist should be to mark the times."

Against a contemporary landscape that's cut its ties to hands-on talent and skill, Swallow's selling proposition is his talent and skill. Come Venice next June, we will discover if he's indeed swimming against the tide or if one Swallow doth a summer make.




First published in The Bulletin, Volume 122; Number 47

A select slice of Paris’s art collecting elite gathered at elegant rooms on Avenue Matignon earlier this month for auction house Christie’s first-ever exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art. Thirty or so works on preview had been selected especially to tempt European tastes, pulled from 168 lots to be auctioned in Sydney on October 12. Last week another tranche of dots-and-dreaming lots from the sale went on view at Christie’s New York.

The sale itself represents a shake-up in the entire sector. With only sporadic competition, the Aboriginal art auction market has been virtually the personal fiefdom of Sotheby’s aboriginal art specialist Tim Klingender for almost a decade. But this year five different companies are conducting sales of Aboriginal art, with the French-owned Christie’s expected to snare the biggest slice of market share from its arch international rival.

Aboriginal art has been booming at home for more than 5 years, yet internationally the market remains underdeveloped, and even puny compared to other collecting categories. And while European collectors like Thomas Vroom or Karl-Heinz Essl still account for roughly a third of all auction sales of Aborginal art at the top of the market (above AUD $150,000), less than a score of such players operate at this level. Shaun Dennison, who joined Christie’s in March to head its new Aboriginal art department, is instead hunting growth opportunities at a lower level, in the middle band, both at home and abroad.

“We’re looking to widen the market,” said Dennison, “starting with diverting sales of non-Indigenous Australian paintings to Aboriginal art.” In a sale with a total value of $2.5m to 3.5m, about 40 per cent of the lots are estimated under $10,000, and just two above $150,000, top lot being Digging Stick Dreaming by Maggie Watson Napangardi. Dennison expects 50 per cent of sales to come from overseas buyers in Europe and North America.

Dennison has put together a sale short on numbers but high on quality, culling 168 works for sale after viewing more than 1000 works.” Dennison has also framed his sale as “modern Aboriginal art”, which he defines as from 1971 to the present day. “It’s from the time Geoffrey Bardon commissioned the Papunya boards to the present day and its restricted to works on board, paper, and canvas. We aren’t offering any barks or artefacts or watercolours pre 1970, none of the Hermannsburg artists like Albert Namatjira.”

Christie’s catalogue raises the bar in providing detailed provenance for every lot, something never seen in the sector before, from Sotheby’s or anyone else. “It worries me when an artist is painting for 10 or 20 different sources,” says Dennison. “So I’ve also tried to restrict myself to artists who have shown a commitment to selling through one or two agencies - such as Maggie Watson Napangardie and Gallery Gondwana, or Ginger Riley and Alcaston Gallery. That’s where the top quality emerges.”

So who attended the Paris preview to savour the swag of Emily Knwarreye’s, Rover Thomas’s and others? A mostly aging crew of permanent waves and intellectual beards: twinsets and pearls for Madame; basic black wrapped round gourmand waistlines for Monsieur. Canapés and champagne downed to an ambient didgeridoo soundtrack rounded out the picture. Nary a black person to be seen in cooee of this soirée - either Aboriginal or otherwise, in this, Europe’s most multi-ethnic metropolis.

In the absence of her husband and Ambassador to France, William Fisher, art-loving Kerry Fisher at least flew the flag with an egalitarian resolve: “It wouldn’t matter if it was an 'Australian-Australian’, a ‘European-Australian’ or an 'Aboriginal-Australian', we come to all the artists’ shows,” said Fisher. “We try to patronise everyone as much as we possibly can!"
Madame is not alone. Attitudes toward Aboriginal art in Europe remain confused and diffuse, undermined by the carpetbaggers selling sub-par art by the metre on the internet, and held back by poor marketing and persistent if antique notions that contemporary art by indigenous Australians is “folk art” and only of “anthropological” interest, and thus sits outside the scope of the serious modern or contemporary art collector, or the museum curator.

“It’s so very far away, your country, so it’s good that these works are shown here,” offered impeccably-tailored Eric Agote, a Parisian insurance executive and budding collector. “You always must be speaking to Europe if you want more of us to become aware of how original these works are.” Agote owns works by Balgo Hills’ Ningie Nangala and Greenie Purvis Apetyarr, artists whose works wear the bold graphic designs and direct use of line and colour so favoured among European collectors of Aboriginal art.

“Collectors here love the line, they love structure and clarity,” said art dealer, Stephane Jacob, a former student at the Louvre who has been selling Aboriginal art in Paris for more than 8 years. “What flys in Australia can flop in Europe, and vice versa,” said Jacob. “You find that artists who paint very direct, clean and colourful works - like Linda Syddick Napaljarri or Dave Pwerle Ross - sell very well here but not so well in Australia. But good luck trying to sell a Eubena (Nampitjin) here. …”

Dennison agreed, nominating a work in the sale by Balgo Hills artist Helicopter Tjungurrayi, pegged at $4000 upper estimate, as “being very cheap for Europe”. Jacob said prices are also often higher in Australia because, “understandably, Aboriginal art is traded much more heavily there.”

“In Australia you have a lot of private investors driven by individual superannuation funds: they buy, they sell. Here we think in the long term: we buy, we keep.”


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Abridged version first published in The Bulletin

Rex Irwin has been dealing in works by “important Australian and international artists” from his first floor rooms in Queen Street, Woollahra, since 1976. Irwin’s business is built around a stable of respected, mostly mid-career local artists, and a trade in works by some of the world’s most famous modernists, from Picasso, Hockney, Freud and Auerbach, to Australian icons like Fred Williams and John Brack.

Never lost for an opinion, Irwin is well placed to comment on the changes and trends that pervade Australia’s dynamic market for fine art. He spoke to Michael Hutak.
-------------------------------------------------

MICHAEL HUTAK: Can you tell us a bit about how you started in the game?

REX IRWIN: I learnt my trade back in the 1970s from Frank McDonald, who was a partner with Terry Clune in the old Clune Galleries at the Yellow House [in Kings Cross, Sydney] - Olsen, Whiteley and the rest of them showed there, but Frank would also put on shows of work by (highly regarded 19th century landscape painter) von Guerard before anyone had really noticed him. Frank eventually started his own gallery and was an old-style art dealer who would do things like travel to Paris to find long lost (Rupert) Bunnys from the paint shop where Bunny used to buy his paints. He was essentially repatriating Australian art.

MH: What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed since you started you own business?

RI: When I first came here (to Queen Street) the focus for art was almost exclusively in Paddington. Then after the ’91 recession Queen Street picked up, then suddenly a few years ago Sotheby’s moved in, Shapiro’s, Deutscher~Menzies, Michael Carr and it’s now very much at the centre of things. Now it’s become much like Bond Street in London. We’ve been here since 1976 and we’ve never had street frontage, then earlier this year we managed to get a lease on the shop in our own building and it’s been very good for making us simply more visible, and we find we’re getting new clients in off the street.

MH: Have you had a high turnover of clients over the years?

RI: Clients have a rhythm; you might have a QC, who’s been earning millions, who finally becomes a judge, drops back to earning $150k and stops collecting. There’s lots of new flashy money and like everyone else we need to get some of that, but we’re not as good at getting it as others, such as Denis Savill. I’m walking slowly after them, Denis is in a tank running them down. But Denis is a dealer who likes to own all his pictures... People consign things with us.

MH: Is this new money driving a booming art market, or is it just attracted it?

RI: New money is always attracted into art when the economy is performing well. But the difference between today and the last boom in the late 1980’s was that back then people were borrowing to buy assets. Today people are spending their own money, which means the market is built on genuine wealth and can’t really collapse today, like it did then.

But the truth of the matter is the market isn’t booming anyway. Just because you see seven pictures by Smart, Boyd or Whitely get high prices at auction, doesn’t mean there’s a boom, it just means that seven pictures achieved high prices. The market is meanwhile happily plodding along with that great bulk of collectors who buy something here, then buy something there. It’s those happy plodders who’ve kept us going through the dark years, and they were dark.

The high rollers can come in here and say all they want is a Jeffrey Smart - who used to show with us before he went over to Australian Galleries - because they’ve read about the sales for $300k plus, and there are always opportunists who come into the market when times are good to handle those sort of clients.

But for mine I’m happy to offer them a work by Fred Williams or Nicholas Harding or Lucien Freud and say “this will hold its value”. But what I’m not prepared to say is “you will make 20 per cent on this in 12 months”. The problem for us with these new clients is when they toddle off and buy from the opportunists and find their 20 per cent doesn’t materialise they say “fuck it”, and swear off buying art forever. That’s the great pity, but that’s also the price of greed.

MH: How has the rise in the auction trade affected your business?

RI: I have nothing to do with auctions. I neither buy nor sell at them. I would make two bids at auction per year, but only on behalf of a client. However I don’t believe the dealers shouldn’t feel threatened by the auction houses. For every painting where the hammer falls $500k, there is an underbidder walking the streets the next day with $480k to spend.

MH: Is there too much talk about the market today? Have we lost sight of the art?

RI: You can’t have too much talk about the market, I think it’s legitimate and necessary and inevitable, but there is too much talk today about money. Money is not the be-all-and-end-all. In the end we’re about bringing people into contact with that intangible quality that comes with the great work of art. Otherwise we might as well be selling pork-belly futures. And when all is said and done, what we are selling is our expertise and judgement of what a picture is worth. That’s why our regular collectors don’t bargain, whereas new clients try to bargain all the time.

AAC: What’s your view of the growth in art purchased through DIY super funds?

RI: I think the trend is very good because where a private person once might spend $10k per annum on art, they can now spend $30k to $40k, as long as one gets proper advice in setting it up. I’m told around 10 per cent of your fund should go towards art, anything above 20 per cent and you’re asking for the attention of the taxman.

I don’t believe these proposed pooled art funds are a particlarly good idea. I’m reminded of the British Railways Pension Fund which in the 60s and 70s bought a huge array of objects – furniture, jewellery, porcelain as well as old masters and fine art. After twenty years it had still made only one per cent more or less than blue chip stocks.

I don’t think (the so-called "managed art funds") will wash, there are too many fees off the top and your little picture needs to make 50 to 60 per cent on resale for you to see an overall return. Speaking to someone who was putting one of these funds together, I understand they’re not actually for people who want to collect art or build a collection but are aimed strictly at investors.

MH: Do you deal with many such “investors”?

RI: We are not “investment advisors”, we are art dealers, but I do have people, usually young people, who come into the gallery with a wad of money wanting to invest. I say to them: “I will be happy to invest this for you as long as you do exactly as I say. If you want chop and change and buy and sell you’re on your own.” We sometimes have so called art consultants who present themselves as “investment advisors” coming through looking to buy works for their clients.

MH: Do you offer a commission, discount or “finder’s fee” to these consultants?

RI: No, of course not, fuck ‘em. We deal in art, not in clients. The art world is magic, it’s great fun, and all the cowboys and cowgirls are not going to affect the bedrock of the business which, for me, is very much built on dealing with private clients one-on-one. We don’t deal much with corporations, which mostly are selling at the moment. But the point of running an art gallery is to put artworks on walls so that people might see and appreciate them. We showed a first edition of Goya’s Disasters of War and we had literally thousands come through. More than 70 per cent of the people that come through the gallery are there just to look and that’s a major part of what we do.

MH: What about managing your artists? How do you approach that?

RI: Some artists need managing, some don’t. ALL artists need ‘nannying’; they need their paints bought and their bottoms wiped occasionally. We are very active in promoting our artists. We’ve just assisted Gwyn Hanssen Pigott mount a show at the Tate St Ives (in Cornwall, U.K., runs till September 26).

MH: Do you follow the international art fair circuit?

RI: We’re not really interested in art fairs. We went to the Hong Kong art fair twice in the early 1990s when Mr Keating was in power and believed the region should be interested in us. I notice Gene Sherman is always showing in Asia but I really don’t know that Asia is any more interested in us than it ever was. Art markets are parochial; there are very few artists who fly internationally. Of course, we do deal in the work of such artists – Picasso, Hockney, Auerbach, Freud -

MH: Tell us about dealing in the market for Freud prints.

RI: We are one of only two galleries in the world (the other being Marlborough Gallery, London) licensed by Freud’s sole agents, Acquavella Galleries in New York, to sell his prints and we’ve had great success doing just for over two decades now. Twenty years ago I knew Freud’s London agent, James Kirkman, well, and we sold our first prints to clients here for just $1000. Today they go for $75k. It’s been a considerable part of our business over the years. We’ve survived the peaks and troughs over the decades but in the last three years especially we’ve been getting more and more successful.

MH: To what do you attribute your success?

RI: I love to bring people into contact with beautiful things and I have a truly wonderful life. But really it all boils down to forging strong connections, and being good and middle class and paying your bills. Earlier this year I had dinner with David Hockney one night, dinner with Hockney and Lucien Freud the next night, and then lunch the next day with Frank Auerbach – all those sorts of personal friendships are wonderful and invigorating but it also helps the business. When they go back and see their dealers I have little doubt they might say: “I had dinner with Rex the other night. Make sure we save something for him.”


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Abridged version published in Australian Art Collector

Sales of racehorse art often ride on the animal rather than the artist, as the auction of a portrait of the great Carbine attests.

Carbine, the 1890 Melbourne Cup winner and the greatest racehorse to grace the ­Australian turf before Phar Lap, made a brief return to the spotlight last week – as Lot 62 at Sotheby’s Sydney sale of fine Australian art.
The handsome, if flattering, portrait of “Old Jack” was painted by Frederick ­William Woodhouse snr in 1891, the year Carbine retired from racing and began an influential stud career. The work stood out like a beacon in a catalogue clogged with the usual quality saleroom fare of Olsens, Boyds, Blackmans, Smarts and Co.

After a brief bidding war, the painting was knocked down for $34,000 against an upper saleroom estimate of $20,000 to horse breeder Grahame Mapp, owner of Hobartville Stud near Richmond, NSW, reputedly Australia’s oldest thoroughbred stud. With buyer’s premium and GST, the price tag was $41,095, the second-highest price for a Woodhouse, according to Australian Art Sales Digest, which also notes the Englishman arrived in Australia in 1857 and painted every winner of the Melbourne Cup from 1861 to 1890.

Strangely, Sotheby’s catalogue notes talk exclusively of Carbine’s superlative track and stud record, making no mention of Woodhouse, even though he is among Australia’s most highly regarded “equine portraitists”.

“That is typical with this category,” says Clare Smith, specialist in sporting art at Christie’s, New York. “With themed sales like these, interest lies partly in the artist and partly in the subject matter. Many works in this category are bought by clients who have a personal interest in racehorses, whether owning or breeding or even gambling.”

Mapp is a case in point: he bought the painting for the horse, not the artist. “The money didn’t matter; I just wanted it. Bravo, which narrowly beat ­Carbine in the 1891 Melbourne Cup, was bred at Hobartville. I ­normally never go to auctions but a friend brought this work to my attention and I had to make a quick decision. I actually arrived halfway through the ­bidding and decided to take a punt.”

Mapp plans to find a permanent home for the work in Hobartville’s convict-built, ­Francis Greenway-designed homestead. “It will stay here forever,” he told The Bulletin.

If he ever changes his mind and decides to sell, Mapp would be well advised to offer the work in London, where sporting art aficionados would appreciate the work for both Carbine, as the sire of three English Derby winners, and for Woodhouse, who studied under John Frederick Herring, one of sporting art’s most sought-after artists.

“Themed sales are a successful way of marketing certain works outside the traditional classification by period or style,” says Smith, who has put together a 138-lot sale of works depicting noble steeds, heroic scenes of hunting, and often bizarre canine subjects for Christie’s December 5 sale of sporting art in New York.

Mapp also happens to be the breeder of Toulouse Lautrec, winner of the Carbine Club Stakes at Randwick at Easter.
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First published in The Bulletin

With the share price of troubled Tempo Services hitting a five-year low of $1.02 on May 4, its chairman, John Schaeffer, could at least survey the recent dispersal of his art collection warmed by the knowledge he was getting top dollar. However, as the dust settles from the "garage sale of the century" at Rona, Schaeffer's $28m Bellevue Hill mansion in Sydney's eastern suburbs, collectors are entitled to ask: was it worth the hype?

It was to Christie's, which spent a small fortune promoting the sale. If there are any other cash-strapped multimillionaire art lovers out there, Rona was a great ad for Christie's, which shifted 570 lots - $5.19m in paintings, sculpture, furniture and decorative ephemera - at top-gun clearance rates by lot (85.3%) and by value (88.7%).

"For the vendor, these house sales work," one industry insider said. "Most of the big-ticket items [at Rona] wouldn't have done so well if they'd been put through a normal multi-vendor 'dec arts' or fine arts sale." This was echoed by Roger McIlroy, Christie's Australian MD, who praised "the market appeal of single-owner collections of quality with impeccable provenance".

He then added, tellingly: "It augurs well for the ongoing private sales from The John H. Schaeffer Collection." Rona was really just an elaborate prelude for the main game: the sale of 15 of Schaeffer's most valuable pre-Raphaelite pictures in London on June 9 at Christie's (as well as several more being offered privately through St James's dealer, Angela Neville).

Included is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pandora, for which Schaeffer paid a record œ2.6m ($6.6m) at Christie's in 2000. The upper estimate next month is just œ1.2m ($3.1m).

But Schaeffer's losses aren't just his own. Of the 94 paintings and sculptures he has lent the Art Gallery of NSW since 1999, just one remains in the gallery's care: Gerrit van Honthorst's Merry musician with violin under his left arm (1624).

Meanwhile, Christie's has denied that it snatched the Rona contract from under Sotheby's nose by offering to conduct the sale for, as one press report claimed, "zero seller's commission, against a backdrop of allegations that Schaeffer owed Christie's London money".

"John Schaeffer has always honoured his financial obligations to Christie's," says McIlroy. "We did not conduct the sale for zero commission but negotiated a much reduced fee, which reflected both Christie's desire to handle the sale and the need to spend money to make money."

Spend it they did, on 7500 catalogues, 10,000 brochures, an international print advertising campaign and no less than five private parties targeting "high-wealth individuals". More than 3000 people traipsed through Rona to gawk and dream.
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First published in The Bulletin

The modernists have been trumping the contemporaries in the salerooms, while a Picasso scooped the pot, writes Michael Hutak.

There's an inverse – some would say perverse – law of the Australian art market that says the more conventional the wisdom, the less sway it holds. An example: in the past few years, we've been told the moderns favoured by old fogeys are on their way out as the market moves to accommodate cashed-up young fogeys, who allegedly prefer contemporary art and art photography.

Last week's round of fine-art auctions threw that theory on the scrapheap as record sales of modernists such as Ian Fairweather and Margaret Preston cast the passed-in works of hitherto hot contemporaries Tracey Moffatt, Tim Maguire and John Kelly into a new, uncertain light.

Since 2001, eight prints of Moffatt's 1989 photograph, Something More #1, have found buyers for sums up to $117,500. However, punters finally brought something less to Christie's last week, marking the first time the artist's calling card has failed to sell at auction. Maguire's flower power also wilted badly, with just one of 10 works offered selling – a 2000 oil that still brought a tidy $135,625. Two of Kelly's cow canvases – only recently a must-have item, according to the pundits – passed through the saleroom friendless. Christie's sold just 60% of its catalogue for $4.9m; Sotheby's just 52% for $4.4m.

While the art trade prays that the gloomy grosses and dismal clearance rates were more an aberration than full-blown market correction, at the Art Gallery of NSW, it's all blue sky for Edmund Capon. The director was ebullient over his gallery's new acquisition, Fairweather's 1936 oil on compressed card, Tea Garden Peking. "It's a very big work and probably the most significant from his Chinese period," Capon says. “When we think of Fairweather we think of this strange, nomadic creature and this work sees him, I would say, at his most exotic.”

The Art Gallery Society coughed up $552,600, three times Christie's high estimate, and more than double the artist's previous auction record, set in 2000. Any suggestion that that was too much brings Capon out swinging: "We made a decision to get this painting so we went out and got it."

"We paid a record price but in the fullness of time, it's what matters for the collection that counts," says Capon. "The estimate was $120,000 to $180,000 but I knew that was ridiculously low. Our Fairweather collection is not terribly extensive, we have about twenty-odd works, but I’d say we’ve pretty much got him covered now.

“Certainly the price we paid bears much more relation to reality than the US$104m (AUD$143m) paid for that Picasso [Garçon à la Pipe at Sotheby's last Wednesday]. I mean, no painting is worth that much… That is just a trophy and I think it’s ultimately offensive when one considers recent events on the world stage.”

He has a point. For the cost of one painting, you could have bought every work sold at auction in Australialast year, and most of the year before that.

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Abridged version first published in The Bulletin

With pressure mounting for the introduction of a resale royalty on works of art every time they change hands, auction houses are becoming anxious, writes Michael Hutak.

Fine art worth more than $91m changed hands in Australia's booming auction market last year, yet the artists responsible for those works (or their heirs) saw not a red cent of it. One auction house, Sotheby's, shifted $7.9m of Aboriginal art at one sale last June. Yet living conditions on many of the remote desert communities where the finest indigenous artworks originate remain a national disgrace.

Media attention on anomalies such as the late Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula – one of the originators of the dot-painting phenomenon who spent his final years in abject penury while works he had sold for $30 went for hundreds of thousands in the saleroom – has accelerated calls for a resale royalty to be introduced in Australia.

Such a royalty, also known as a droite de suite after the French scheme that has been in place since the 1920s, is a fee – typically fixed at about 5% of the hammer price – that goes to the artist every time an artwork changes hands in the secondary market. Support for such a scheme gained momentum in 2002 when Rupert Myer made a resale royalty a key recommendation in his federal government inquiry into visual arts and crafts funding.

However, the prospect of a new tax on collectors has the secondary art market in a lather as it collectively points towards a fast-falling chunk of sky.

"It's been highly unsuccessful in France," says Paul Sumner, chief executive of Sydney auction house Lawson-Menzies. "And it hasn't actually reduced the gap between rich and poor artists – it just rewards artists who are already successful."

Sumner, who has just an-nounced that his firm will take on market leader Sotheby's for a slice of the lucrative Aboriginal market, says Lawson-Menzies will pay 2% of its normal commission on sales of indigenous works into a new foundation that will donate funds to improve health and living conditions in Aboriginal communities.

The foundation hopes to raise $200,000 in the first year. However, Sumner acknowledges the impetus for setting it up is to derail the resale royalty juggernaut. "We're trying to head it off," he said. "We think it will be a nightmare to administer and ultimately will only hurt the artists."

But citing a 2003 Australia Council study, which found that 50% of Australia's artists earn less that $7500 a year from their art, Labor arts spokeswoman Senator Kate Lundy argues that artists couldn't be hurting much more than they are now.

The creation of a decent ongoing income stream for artists "is way overdue and it's Labor Party policy to introduce a resale royalty", she says. Lundy, who introduced a private member's bill on the issue in the Senate on March 11, concedes it has no chance of passing without government support. However, she says she's "calling the government's bluff on this. There's simply no excuse for them to delay their response to Myer any longer."

Last September, a year after Myer reported, then-Arts Minister Richard Alston promised a response on resale royalties before the end of the year. Six months later, his replacement, Daryl Williams, who also retires at the next election, is backing away from the idea.

"The government will only commit taxpayers' money to developing an implementation strategy if it is satisfied that we should implement a resale royalty scheme," a spokesman says. In other words, it's not satisfied.

Labor's draft bill is modelled on European Union legislation, where a droite de suite will extend to member countries from 2006. Lundy was advised by the National Association for the Visual Arts, the Australian Copyright Council and Arts Law, which have urged the government to act on Myer's recommendation and implement the scheme.

"We need a decision," NAVA executive director Tamara Winikoff says. "This issue has been kicking around for 20 years and it should be a bipartisan issue. We're very pleased that Labor has committed itself to a bill, and we urge the government to support it."

Not everyone in the trade is contrary. Sotheby's Tim Klingender has gone on record several times in favour of a droite de suite. "I think it would be great if it could be made workable," he says. And leading Melbourne Aboriginal art dealer Gabrielle Pizzi believes a resale royalty is "an inevitability".

But she warns: "Some people will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to it."

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First published in The Bulletin

Auction prices fetched by some Australian contemporary artists are rocketing. And those about to take off display obvious signs.

The hullabaloo over painter Tim Maguire hit the heights last November when Untitled 1997, a massive split-screen canvas, brought $329,000 at Christie’s Melbourne – the third time in 2003 that a new peak was set for Maguire's florid photo-realist visions. Just one year earlier Deutscher~Mennzies had offered a comparable work with an estimate of just $10k-$15,000 (it sold for $35,250).

The latest benchmark sent market watchers into overdrive: Maguire was the new John Kelly, who was the new Garry Shead, who was the new Bill Robinson, etc. Such headline-grabbing sales are more salacious evidence of art’s potential for a quick return-on-investment, and the cue for another tranche of cashed-up, dumbed-down, saleroom ingenues to turn up, grab a paddle and start splurging.

But those hoping to get a piece of “the next Tim Maguire” should also note that the savvy buy and sell on the way up, not at the top of the market. The time to pick saleroom sensations is before they become headline fodder. Maguire, however, did fit a model that made him ripe for reaping so here’s a quick checklist for pinpointing who’s next.

First, go for beauty over brains. Ugly doesn’t wash in the saleroom, no matter how much the critics might wax lyrical. Second, stick to contemporary artists, the market’s current growth area. Third, seek out artists in their late 30s and 40s with a good body of work behind them; those who have shown they can conduct a sustained professional practice. Fourth, opt for artists who have been on the critics’ radar for more than a decade but are still new or unknown to the saleroom, ie. those with less than 50 works offered at auction. And lastly, if you plan to hang the work awhile before moving it on, it helps to like it.

Still sound like too much work? Forced to tip, 45 year old Queensland-based painter, Dale Frank, fits the Maguire model to a tee. Ever-present on the contemporary scene for over 20 years, the prolific Frank shows with the country’s leading galleries and has impeccable critical credentials, with reams of favourable reviews, several monographs published, and a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2001 to boot.

Represented in every major state gallery collection, Franks’ luscious abstract works already bring vast slabs of colour to white-walled foyers and living-rooms from Kirribilli to Kew. Yet Australian Art Sales Digest records reveals just 47 works have ever been offered at auction.

However, again last November, Christie’s set a new artist record of $21,150 for a handsome 2 metre square painting. That was the jump on previous sales that canny collectors look for and it is a very attractive floor price for works that could easily climb to $100,000-plus without raising an eyebrow.

[For the record, I don’t own any of them.]


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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

After another record year in sales in 2003, the Australian fine art market has entered its second decade of sustained growth, still some people are never satisfied. When Deutscher~Menzies kicked off the 2004 season earlier this month with the highest grossing mixed-vendor sale of fine art ever held in this country – more than $8.4 million - it was greeted with either sublime indifference or churlishness at the failure of several high-value works by high-profile artists to sell, and of others to only meet the low end of the estimate set by the auction house.

One pundit dubbed the sale “a patchy start” to the year, pointing to passed-in works by saleroom favourites like John Brack, Norman Lindsay and John Olsen. Keen market watchers wondered if D~M had overestimated the strength of the top of the market, others saw instead "buyer fatigue" in the face of the runaway price inflation of some “top drawer” artists in recent years.

D~M’s national director, Damien Hackett, told The Bulletin his firm was “very concerned when high value items pass in, during any sale, but this can and does happen for many reasons, not just a weakening of the market… each sale is an individual transaction with its own specific circumstances attached.”

“With regard to John Brack,” said Hackett, “we had estimated Backs and Fronts ($450k to $550k) believing it to be one of the most important works to have come onto the market ever. The result, at $477,825, was in fact the fifth highest price ever achieved for a Brack. One important collector decided not to bid on the Brack, as he intended, because a family tragedy occurred a few days prior to the sale."

Hackett maintained the market for Brack remained strong, despite another work, The Club from 1989, passing in on an estimate of $230,000–260,000. He put the poor showing of other works down to “a number of clients who thought that some of the high value works would ‘fly’ and so did not enter the bidding. As a result, they were dismayed that they had missed out on things, especially the (Ian) Fairweather and the John Olsen”. Rather, the number of dealers buying, or under-bidding, on works in the $100,000 plus market meant “you would expect that (the dealers) are confident that there is more growth in the top end.” After $91 million in sales nationally last year, a 15 per cent increase on 2003, we guess they would be confident.

However one sector keen to get out of art quicksmart may offer the first tangible signs of a market reaching its tipping point. The great Australian corporate art sell-off resumed in 2004 with last week’s dispersal of Western Mining Corporation’s corporate art collection at Sotheby’s rooms in Melbourne. An aggregate of $1.28 million would have pleased WMC patriarch Hugh Morgan, the gross just pipping the high estimate for the entire sale. And with 21 new individual artist records – most notably for the late 20th century modernist, Leonard French, and moody Melbournite, Rick Amor - at least WMC found out they'd bought the right works. The clearance rate was an astonishing 98 per cent by lot.

Corporate sell-offs have become the bedrock of Sotheby’s market leadership in Australia: in the past two years they’ve flogged off the once-prized collections John Fairfax Ltd, BP, AXA and Kerry Stokes. Several other firms have sold off their collections confidentially through the saleroom, and Sotheby’s Managing Director, Mark Fraser says he knows of no major corporations that have started collections in that time. It will be interesting to watch for any moves by Wesfarmers, Macquarie Bank, Westpac or ANZ to liquidate their art assets. Fraser nominated these companies as having the finest corporate collections still extant in Australia today.

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

Profiles written for "Australia's Most Collectable Artists, 2003" from Australian Art Collector Magazine.

Since the late 1990’s Garry Shead has shot into that pantheon of Australian modernist figurative painters who can command prices in excess of $100k. Son of a Sydney North Shore estate agent, Shead is privately influenced by the occult, and works in themes which can traverse several series over several years, taking inspiration from sometimes oblique corners of Australian culture: DH Lawrence’s time on the NSW South Coast, the 1954 Royal Visit by Elizabeth Windsor, and, most recently, the “Ern Malley” poetry hoax of the 1940s, which see him tackle ceramics for the first time – urns etched with poems by Ern! Championed as logical inheritor of the mantle of Boyd and Nolan, Shead quickly embraced the comparison in a recent interview: “Definitely… I like the story telling aspect of painting. I like to express in painting something that’s already there but hasn’t (yet) been done in visual terms.” Sasha Grishin, Head of Art History ANU, the author of several books on Shead as well as catalogue essays for the artist’s exhibitions, says Shead is now “painting at the height of his powers.” He believes Shead is “arguably Australia’s finest lyrical expressionist painter”, adding that his prices continue to grow dramatically. In 1993, the year he won the Archibald Prize, Shead sold just two works at auction for an aggregate of $693. A decade later and one of 39 works at auction included The Secret, which Christies offered with an $80k upper estimate. It brought a new artist record of $129,250 – a spectacular indication that supply is failing to meet demand.

Gordon Bennett
Queenslander Gordon Bennett went to art school in the late 1980s, where he openly embraced the postmodern positions of the time, a legacy still seen to today in a practice the artists describes as “conceptual painting based on the semiotics of 'style' and paint application, images and text, historical and contemporary juxta-position.” Of mixed Scottish, English and Indigenous Australian heritage, Bennett was brought up as a 'white' Australian and has only investigated his Aboriginal heritage as an adult. While issues of race loom large in his work he denounces the term “urban Aborignal” artist as racist, and prefers to be understood as an artist pursuing strategies of appropriation. Dr Ian McLean, who lectures visual arts at the University of Western Australia, is impressed with the long-term commitment Bennett has shown to his practice. McLean compares Bennett to another Aboriginal artist, Judy Watson, who are both “very different painters, but in less than 15 years each has produced an impressive and substantial body of work and built very successful careers as artists.” Says McLean: “Both found their feet quickly and now are at critical stages in their career. However they have demonstrated stamina, commitment and talent as artists, and so probably are yet to produce their best work.” Bennett is well represented in major state galleries but most works remain in private hands. A rare appearance at auction in 2002 saw Bennett achieve his current saleroom peak of $47,500 for an early 1993 canvas. Always the provocateur, his most recent show at Sherman Galleries, in August 2003, conflated camouflage and Islamic designs with ungainly portraits of Saddam Hussein.

ADS Donaldson
Profiled in issue #24 Of Australian Art Collector, this Sydney abstractionist has had a red letter year culminating in making our list for the first time. Donaldson’s select international following walked away with works from the Armory art fair in New York in March and then at Art Basel in June, the world’s most prestigious art fair. In April Donaldson collaborated with fellow artist Elizabeth Pulie for a show at Sarah Cottier’s now defunct Gallery, where he also exhibited 3 enormous large scale silver and blue paintings. Another show of hard-edge abstract paintings at Pestorius Sweeney House in August prompted Brisbane and AAC critic Rex Butler to write in The Courier Mail that "the issues signaled in this modest little suburban gallery will come to dominate the coming century of Australian culture – the battle between ‘Australian’ and ‘unAustralian’ ways of seeing ourselves." Commissions for Aldi and the City of Sydney and another group show at the Kunsthalle Palazzo, near Basel, followed. Already next year Donaldson has group shows lined up in Wellington, New Zealand in March and at the Ivan Doughety Gallery, as part of the Sydney Biennale.

Ian Fairweather 1891-1974
With a body of work estimated at just 500 major works, this Scottish born ‘citizen of the world’ is often acknowledged as one of the most important artists of the 20th century to work in Australia. Fairweather spend between the wars travelling throughout Asia and Oceania; living first in China, later in Bali, the Philippines and India, taking in creative and cultural influences as he went. He first visited Australia in 1934, and took a studio briefly in Melbourne after the WWII but wouldn’t settle permanently until 1952, when he moved to Bribie Island, north of Brisbane. There he became involved in the local indigenous culture and would become the first and perhaps only non-Indigenous artist to successfully incorporate Aboriginal art into his practice, where it joined with disparate influences such as post-impressionism, Chinese calligraphy and Cubism in the realisation of outstanding abstract paintings. Most highly regarded are the abstracts of the late 1950s, early 1960s but works from throughout his career are keenly sought. Many already grace Australia’s major state collections, as well as overseas at the Tate and Liecester galleries and the Ulster Museum, Belfast. Although saleroom prices have been steadily trending up in recent years [his current auction record of $255,500 came in 2000], there is still value and room for significant growth. “For one of Australia’s most important 20th century painters,” says Sotheby’s Chairman, Justin Miller, “his works still seem reasonably priced to me when compared to the million dollar plus prices paid for iconic works by other truly great Australian painters.” Drawings and watercolours, which are more plentiful, may be easier to come by.

Robert Macpherson B.1937
This Brisbane based conceptual artist is an unlikely “grand old man” of Australian contemporary art but with more than three decades of cutting edge practice behind him, that’s just what he is. Macpherson has become a regular feature on our list, first appearing in 1999. Michael Snelling, Director of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, goes as far as saying MacPherson is “probably the most interesting artist working in Australia today, although he may well remain an artist's artist.” Snelling characterises the artist as “conceptually tough, viscerally mesmerizing and continues to make work that is both local and global - parochial and universal…” The broadening of Macpherson’s reputation became complete in 2000 with the major survey show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Trevor Smith, recently appointed curator at the New Museum in New York. The show took over the whole bottom floor and some of the second at AGWA. “A scaled version toured to the MCA and looked just as impressive second time round,” says Snelling, “The catalogue was the best on an Australian artist seen here for many a year.” Macpherson was Australia's representative at the 2002 Sao Paolo biennale, and then in Face Up, backed by the Australia Council, at the prestigious Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin. Continues to be attractive to admirers of contemporary art, although works rarely surface on the secondary market.


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First published in Australian Art Collector magazine, Issue #27, Jan-Mar, 2004.

The art market has finally realised it can no longer ignore 90-year-old photographer Wolfgang Sievers , writes Michael Hutak

Collectors have been hearing for years that photography is "hot", and a stroll through any major international art fair will confirm that it has become the medium of choice, especially for younger contemporary artists.

Australia's art scene is overrun with snap-happy shutterbugs, with some, such as Tracey Moffatt, Rosemary Laing and Patricia Piccinini, making an impact in art world centres of gravitas such as New York, Venice and Cologne.

But do the sums match the hype? Is photography really a serious alternative for collectors looking to diversify away from, for example, the lucrative but monotonous trade in late-20th-century modernist painting?

"It is still possible to buy a good collection of photography for the price of a good painting," says Daniel Palmer, a critic and lecturer in the history of photography at the University of Melbourne. "But the real plus to emerge from the interest in artists such as Moffatt and Piccinini is that it has helped to establish traditional photography as a genuine collectable."

By "traditional", Palmer means "old-school" photographers such as Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, Lewis Morley or, as a case in point, the vastly under-appreciated 90-year-old Wolfgang Sievers, AO.

Born in Germany in 1913, Sievers studied at the Bauhaus and is revered as one of the most significant architectural -photographers to work in Australia, with many works in state archives, libraries and galleries. However, he has been ignored by the art market. Australian Art Sales Digest records show that in the decade to 2003, barely 10 works surfaced at auction, all selling for sums less than $1000. Or not selling at all.

Then, at Lawson-Menzies' Sydney auction in July, a 1959 silver gelatine photograph of a sulphuric acid plant in Hobart brought $2350 against an estimate of $900. The word was out by the time Sievers walked on crutches into Melbourne's Centre of Contemporary Photography to donate a 1986 print of a 1967 photograph for last week's charity auction to benefit the centre.

The auction, conducted by Christie's, was a runaway success, with 59 works by the cream of Australian photography garnering $79,360 for the CCP. Admittedly a paltry sum compared with the fine-art market but still vital signs of life for the 100 or so -collectors bidding at the sale.

And it wasn't a Moffatt or Piccinini that topped the sale but the Sievers, which fetched $8800 - an almost four-fold hike on the Lawson-Menzies sale.

-MICHAEL HUTAK

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First published in The Bulletin, 2 December 2003, Volume 121; Number 48

The market aand experts differ on the value of early and late works by the legendary indigenous artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Undoubted highlight of last month’s bumper Sotheby’s Aboriginal art auction was the sale of the late great Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s 1991 canvas, Untitled (Spring Celebration).

Bidding on this sensual colour field of green, brown and yellow dots was the most competitive at the 560-lot sale, with four bidders on the phone and several dealers and collectors in the room vying for the prize.

The hammer eventually fell for a Swiss private collector who bid $463,000 – more than three times Kngwarreye’s previous auction benchmark, one of 17 saleroom records set for individual artists at the $7.4 million auction.

But what’s in a record? Are we to assume that this work was the pinnacle of Kngwarreye’s extraordinary achievement?

“These aren’t her best works in my opinion,” says Emily expert, Margot Neale, curator of Kngwarreye’s landmark 1998 national touring retrospective – the first ever for an Aboriginal artist.

“They’re very beautiful and there’s a quiet poetry about these early dot paintings,” says Neale. “But Emily didn’t pick up a brush until 1989, when she was in her late seventies. These works are only two years into her [eight-year] career," said Neale, now director of the First Australians Gallery at the Australian National Museum in Canberra.

“In my opinion Emily really came into her own with those looser, more gestural works of 1993-94, when she put all her verve and passion into it.

"She had enormous physical strength in her arms and hands from a lifetime of camel-driving and in the later works she really gives vent to that physicality on the canvas.”

The market begs to differ. But then the market judged at Sotheby’s corresponding sale in 1995 that a similar work to the new record breaker, Flowers of Alagura 1991, was worth only $2,300.

Meanwhile works from what Neale (and others) regard as Kngwarreye’s best period are still going for more modest prices of around $30,000 and up. Canny investors might look to what is called counter-cyclical buying and snap up these bargains while they last.

But, again, for those that buy for money there is always a downside – they will eventually have to part with a work of art whose aesthetic value is priceless.

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Abridged version first published in The Bulletin

Is Don, is not so good: Legend drives the market for items with a direct and personal connection to Don Bradman during his playing days

Nostalgia aint what it used to be – today it’s big business, especially if your name was once Bradman.

Like an artist who must expire before his works soar in value, the Don’s passing in March 2001 has ushered in an era of record prices for collectibles at one end of the scale, and rapacious trading of memorabilia at the other.

Christie’s London set the benchmark in June when Bradman's baggy green cap from the 1946-47 Ashes cricket series attracted a record auction price of AUD$88,835. And last month the prodigy’s most famous ‘baggy green’, worn in his final innings in 1948, was sold privately for an unconfirmed $425,000.

Christie’s Australian head of decorative arts, Richard Gordon, says the July sale should not be cited as a new benchmark for the Bradman market simply because it was so unique. “Given that he may have never had another chance to buy it, it was clear the purchaser was prepared to go to great extremes,” says Gordon. “It now seems very unlikely to come onto the market again in the near future.”

Gordon acknowledged that the market for such genuine collectibles – items that had a direct and personal connection to Bradman during his playing days – was being driven by the legend that has built up around the Don.

“These items are steeped in such history and the man himself seems to generate such divided passions in people – he is not universally loved.”

Tell that to the purveyors of the burgeoning market in mass produced memorabilia and limited editions. Bradman’s attempts to devalue his signature by flooding the market – it is well known he would sign anything put in front of him in an effort to ‘decommercialise’ it’s significance – has done little to dull the appetite of cricket fans for anything vaguely associated with their hero.

A random search at online auction house EBAY found 124 Bradman items up for grabs ranging from a signed bat - starting reserve $9,999 and purchased from “a close friend whose grandfather was said to have known [the late] Clarrie Grimmet,” - to a used 1996 paperback on the Don, asking price $2.

In between one can bid on still more bats and books, plus stamps, coins, posters, pewter and porcelain figurines, trading cards, coasters, balls, audio tapes, videos - even a “very rare” fork and spoon set.

Just $150 will open the bidding on a shop-soiled entry ticket to the Australian’s tour match against Surrey in 1934. Bradman made 61 not out that day. Talk about tragic.

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

Aboriginal art continues to bring the bids and bouquets at Sotheby's in New York.

SCANDALS ASIDE, the Aboriginal art sector has been the most dynamic performer in last five years of Australia’s booming fine art market and Sotheby’s upcoming winter auction of Important Aboriginal Art has become the key barometer of the sector’s health. Each year the local franchise of the NYSE-listed company trumpets “the most valuable collection of Australian indigenous art ever assembled for sale”. Each year the boast is proved correct.

In 2002 Sotheby's shifted a record $5.1 million worth of precious paintings and rare artefacts. This year the 560 lots to be knocked down at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on July 28 and 29th have been pegged at an upper estimate of $9.69 million. With more than 20 lots listed with estimates above $100k, saleroom records will likely fall for the established hit parade of indigenous artists: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Alec Mingelmanganu, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Dorothy Robinson Napangardi and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

However, this year’s indisputable highlight, the massive 5 metre by 8 metre Ngurrara Canvas 1, underlines the collaborative nature of much Aboriginal art. Painted in 1996 by 19 artists from the Great Sandy Desert to demostrate their Native Title claim to 800,000 hectares, it is valued between $300,000 and $500,000. Consigned by the artists themselves, it would look nice in a State gallery where everyone could contemplate its ongoing significance: the land claim is still in dispute.

After seeing off a brief challenge from rival auctioneer Deutscher-Menzies in the late 1990s, Sotheby’s virtually has the serious end of the market to itself. This year, with the war in Iraq casting its shadow, the firm’s Sydney-based Aboriginal art specialist, Tim Klingender, cancelled the traditional New York preview, but made up for it by scoring a front page article on the sale in The New York Times. This week (July 23) The New Yorker magazine publishes a similar glowing appraisal.

Sotheby’s prints around 4500 catalogs for the sale and despatches 500 in equal measure to collectors in Europe and North America. Klingender says there are around 100 serious private collectors who consistently bid for works worth more than $50,000, and only about 10 kindred spirits who can afford to wave their paddles at works worth more $500,000. “They are a disparate group of people,” he told The Bulletin, “mainly Swiss, French, Dutch and American. What they all usually have in common is that they’ve visited Australia at some stage and fallen in love with Aboriginal art.”

The record price for an indigenous artwork was paid not by a private collector but by the National Gallery of Australia, which went to $786,625 to secure Rover Thomas's All That Big Rain Coming From Top Side for the national estate, at - where else? - Sotheby’s 2001 sale. The firm has three more important ‘Rovers’ on offer this year with upper estimates scraping $350k. Yet, as The New York Times acknowledged: “The one group of Australian citizens rarely seen in galleries and salesrooms are Aborigines themselves, who are too poor to buy the products of their own culture.”

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First published in The Bulletin

Australian Art Collector caught up with Australian Galleries' Stuart Purves in Rome, where the dealer was passing through en route to Tuscany where he planned to take possession of the latest raft of works from his octogenarian stable star, Jeffrey Smart.

STUART PURVES: I’ve come to Italy to honour Jeffrey [Smart], who’s in his early eighties now, and why not, we’ve been dealing with eachother for over a quarter of a century. I am a second generation dealer and I had two parents [Anne and Tam Purves] who were full-time art dealers. Believe it or not I’m the oldest continuing art dealer in the business. I can’t believe it coz I’m still young and that shows you how young the art world is in this country. But what it all comes down to that it is art before money. It really isn’t a business, instead you’re more like a leaf floating down the river, steering a course. There’s no real competition in the art world because everybody is in a sense heading in the same direction - to find that kernel of proper and inspiring art. There’s too much chasing of the money in it today. The money’s there, it’s always been there for good things–

MICHAEL HUTAK: -but as a dealer your responsibility is two-fold - one to your collectors and one to your artists–

SP: -and one to myself! I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’ll wring as much out of it as I can. But what you have to ensure first is that you’re putting good work forward, and then make a powerful shot at the money. Not the other way round.

MH: - there’s no mint to be made out of mediocre art.

SP: You can for a while, but then it goes back to that adage that eventually you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

MH: What effect has the rise of the auction scene in Australia had on your business?

SP: Absolutely fantastic. If you took the auction scene out of the galleries now, the prices would go back to about a quarter of what they are now. They’ve popularised it and they’ve proved it. The thing is they have also destroyed some artists as well, but they are quite forgiving in that they don’t talk about that much, whereas they sure as hell make a big fuss about the things that go up. It’s a bit like an undercurrent, it’s inclined to drag everything along – rubbish, weeds, sand, shells, crabs the whole lot - and I think that’s the effect it has had on the entire art world.

I remember one day, I was at Euen Heng’s place, we’d been dealing with him for quite some time and he’d never been offered at auction and I was looking at the work as we were about to have an exhibition. So I was looking and thinking, this work was just fantastic and I thought what can I do here, and I turned to Euen and said ‘We’re going to double the prices’. They were $9000, they would now be $18,000. Well, he went pale, I got in the car with a dry throat thinking 'what have I done?', but I might tell you they sold better at $18,000 than they had at $9000. His previous clients who’d bought three or four were thrilled because the works they’d bought had immediately doubled in value and it was simply a case of saying, well if we don’t respect this artist’s work how can we expect anyone else to?

But the whole thing was also timing. I didn’t do it when it wasn’t ready. I didn’t do it until the day I looked at these paintings and thought, shit, this guy is a real artist and we had better respect that. It’s not as flippant as that either. We changed our attitude on framing, we produced a proper catalogue, we backed it up, we played the right music for it and it’s worked out very, very well.

MH: And that’s now Heng’s new base level.

SP: Absolutely, and I think we’ll be doing it again, because he really deserves to be up there and one of the ways you can call that attention is to raise the prices. I mean you can show and show and show, but sometimes you have to make the leap of faith and back your artist’s talent.

MH: What happens when say an artist like Jeffrey Smart has a breakthrough sale at auction that is streets ahead of his current gallery price? How do you cope with that?

SP: It’s pretty easy. You just add a zero to everything you’ve got in the stockroom. (laughs) But, what it means is this: it’s time. It’s as simple as that - the market has told you. Because for every sale like that there’s an underbidder. Jeffrey is a perfect example, he’s been a perfect gentleman in every sense of the word, and his paintings have honoured him in the same way.

Like I said we’ve been representing Jeffrey for over 25 years and the first painting we sold of his was a thing called The Dome. It’s quite famous now, and we sold that for $6000, good money in those days but now we sell similar works for $250,000 maybe $300,000. I think it gets back to the fact that Jeffrey’s senior, and the art world is interested much more in itself than it once was and therefore it is looking back to its senior artists, and they are few in number on the ground. It has to go that way. He’s also had recent retrospectives, [Art Gallery of New South Wales’ director] Edmund Capon is a fan and that doesn’t go astray.

I’m now becoming more interested in the contemporary area. When my parents ran the gallery, you have to think I grew up with Sydney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams, John Olsen and Brett Whiteley, and then I’ve done my own reshaping and I’ve made the gallery quite big – I mean it’s now four galleries in two cities, a production department, it employs 14 people, it needs ten thousand fresh dollars of profit every day to stay in business, we have a publishing program. But the other thing is I feel as though I've got to keep growing with it so an artist can grow through the gallery, doesn’t have to leave and go somewhere else.

Think of Brian Johnson, Violet Guila, William Mora, Rudy Komon – the common factor with all those dealers is that their galleries died with them and I don’t want that to happen to our gallery. It’s a long term family business, it will be 50 years old on June 13th of 2006, we’re going to do a big production book for that. We’ve got a record of every exhibition we’ve ever had going back to 1956, the date and what pictures were in it. We’re scrapbook people. (I might tell you our house burnt down in 1970 and we lost an enormous amount of records, two Boyd Bride paintings – the impact killed my father, he died at 59 years old.) But we’ve got 25 volumes of newspaper clippings, the State Library has a program where they keep our correspondence. I’m interested in shoring up what my parents started, I’m interested in my own success with this group people that I represent now, and I’m interested in starting two contemporary galleries, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, so that the whole thing continues to roll on.

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Abridged version published in Australian Art Collector

Jeffrey Smart has virtually no market outside Australia, yet short supply keeps his work in demand

With his latest show at Sydney’s Australian Galleries another sellout, evergreen artist, Jeffrey Smart, appears at 82 years of age to be at the height of his powers and success. Netting almost $5 million in sales, the show comes hot on the heels of another record auction price: $439,450 for the 1990 work Near Pisa Airport, paid in late August at Christie’s sale of the BHP Billiton Collection.

Smart’s signature style – the industrial settings and motifs, the clean lines, bold colours and precise attention to composition – settled in when he left Australia in the late 1960s for the rural idyll of a Tuscan villa. From his studio there, for almost four decades, Smart has meticulously produced 20 to 30 major works per annum, feeding shows for his Australian dealers who can barely get their hands on works before they are sold.

Not too many investments outstrip Sydney real estate but Smart’s average price at auction has more than trebled since 1997.

Melbourne football identity, Sam Newman, kicked things along in 1998, blaming too much red wine when he paid a then-record $288,500 for Guiding Spheres (Homage to Cezanne) II at Christies Melbourne. The tabloids scoffed at the folly, but Newman, it appears, knew exactly what he was doing (or was acting on sound advice). The major touring retrospective of Smart mounted in 1999 by the Art Gallery of NSW sparked another jump in values and a minor rush on Smarts - 27 oils were offered at auction that year with only four unsold.

While they are a genuine blue chip investment, we are unlikely to see an glut of works by Smart filling auction catalogues any time soon.

Unlike, for example, Brett Whiteley (around 15,000 works) or Arthur Boyd (some 20,000), Smart’s lifetime output numbers only about 1000 major paintings. Exacting a rigid quality control, he has often destroyed works which, in his opinion, haven’t made the grade. Rarely does an inferior work reach the market. In the past ten years only 145 paintings have been sold on the secondary market through the auction room.

No more than 100 major works are in state or public galleries, the rest are held tightly by private collectors who typically would have bought them straight out of a show with his dealers.

The short supply has meant Smart has virtually no market outside Australia, yet he does have international standing. Global art auction data firm, artprice.com , rates Smart No.407 among the top 9,000 artists at auction, just below Mexican Frida Kahlo (402) but above the more-renowned contemporary Joseph Beuys (447) and venerable English master John Constable (436).

Today Smart enjoys his fame without paying the price. “I don’t really want to be well-known here in Italy, I’d like to lead my quiet life here,” he told The Bulletin when we visited recently. “It’s very thrilling to go back to Australia and find out you are Mr Famous.”

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First published in The Bulletin

Auction stations: The export market for indigenous artworks is being stymied by bureaucracy, argue the auction houses. But not surprisingly, Michael Hutak reports, the bureaucrats disagree.

What is more important? Australia’s multi-million dollar international market for Aboriginal art, or the value of that art to the cultural heritage of the nation as a whole? That’s the crucial question driving tensions between international auction house Sotheby’s and the federal government’s Movable Cultural Heritage Committee.

Five months after its annual sale of Aboriginal art in July, Sotheby’s is still waiting for the MCHC to decide whether seven works knocked down at the auction will be granted export licences to leave the country with their new owners. The auction house faced a similar situation in 2000 and the subsequent denying of export permits for three works resulted in the sales being cancelled and, according to Sotheby’s, the vendors being unable to achieve the proper market value for their paintings.

Sotheby’s 2001 sale again broke all auction records for Aboriginal art, with sales totalling $5m. But for the company’s Aboriginal art specialist, Tim Klingender, the worrying statistic is the percentage of works bought by overseas collectors, which fell by more than a third from 69% to 39%.

“It’s been nothing short of a disaster for us,” says Klingender. “International confidence in the Aboriginal art market is being affected. We have been advised by the largest private collector of Aboriginal art in the United States that he will not bid on any lot that does not have an export permit prior to the auction being held.”

Klingender says he told the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, which administers the relevant act, before the sale that some 75 works fell within the act’s guidelines for assessment. But the department would accept only 15 applications, eventually denying export licences to seven works.

After the auction, the department required 16 more works go to the MCHC for assessment, seven of which are still in limbo. A spokesperson told The Bulletin that to process 75 works within Sotheby’s timeframe would have “overburdened the committee; delayed other applications for objects that were definitely intended for overseas export; and risked a more superficial assessment of the cultural significance of the works”.

Klingender claims Sotheby’s has no problem with important works being banned from leaving the country as part of cultural heritage. But he maintains “the irregular meetings of the MCHC contributes to a process that is unacceptably long and frustrating to all involved”. He says: “We want the whole process to be streamlined. The expert examiners of works who advise the committee should be remunerated for their time and expertise and time limits and deadlines placed on their assessments.”

Brenda Croft is the indigenous art expert on the heritage committee. An Aboriginal artist and curator who has just been appointed curator of indigenous art at the National Gallery of Australia, she is unmoved by the auction house’s criticisms.

“People [on the committee] aren’t just there sitting on things,” she says. “We aren’t out to hamper the market but I don’t have a great deal of empathy because I’m not here to further the interests of the auction houses or commercial galleries. Our primary interest here is to protect cultural heritage, not to facilitate sales of work.”

With key US and European collectors refusing to consider works without an export permit in place, one leading Melbourne dealer in Aboriginal art said the act had effectively halved international prices and it was having a knock-on effect in the domestic market, creating an artificial, two-tiered market.

“I don’t take that argument on board,” says Croft. “There are many, many works that have secured permits. And besides, with a lot of the works that do go overseas, the onsale doesn’t go back to the artists, anyway, because these are secondary sales.”

This differs from the situation in the European Union, for example, where artists have a legal right of resale – or droit de suite – in which they are granted a percentage, usually 2% to 5%, of any resale of an original work.

“We’re not here to stop people selling,” says Croft. “But in my own mind I’ve had problems with seeing indigenous works sometimes seemingly traded like stock and bonds, particularly when I know there’s no right of resale to the artists.”

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First published in The Bulletin

For a professional actor on a mid-career surge, Ben Mendelsohn is uncharacteristically modest... “I’ve been doing this (acting) since pretty much the beginning of my teenage years, and I’ve been financially independent since I was fifteen but it’s not really a career, is it? It’s a series of jobs, is what it is! I mean, you will never get to be ‘Head of South East Asian acting’. You might have a great life but it’s not a career.”

It’s mid-morning and we’re talking in a café overlooking Bondi Beach. “Bondi’s got a bit hectic – I’m shifting basically. I remember seeing this great TV special when I was 12, it was about Penthouse Pets and one of ‘em lived in Bondi – and I remember all these shots on the beach and I thought what a promised land – Bondi! I love living here but it’s getting very hectic.”

Mendelsohn is dressed smart casual, freshly shaved, hair combed and still wet from his morning shower. His world weary delivery, punctuated by a steady succession of ‘Styvo Reds’, are at odds with his image, which is reminiscent of a naughty boy wagging Sunday school. How refreshing, we comment, to find an actor not obsessed with his public image; a thespian, no less, unencumbered by “vaulting ambition”. Oops, spoke too soon…

“Oh, I have very unhealthy ambitions,” he protests, “but I don’t see the point in advertising ‘em, y’know? I don’t see the point in sitting down and telling you (slipping into mock American accent) what I’m gonna do next. Coz if I do it I’ll do it and we’ll know about it then.

"I can just see that quote coming up – ‘I have a lot of unhealthy ambitions’.”

If there’s blood coursing in his veins he should. On the back of good notices for his supporting role in the Hollywood blockbuster VERTICAL LIMIT, Mendelsohn is on a roll, with last year’s SAMPLE PEOPLE garnering him favourable press and anticipation high for his new release, a comedy drama called MULLET, which reunites the actor with David Caesar, his director in the 1995 hit, IDIOT BOX. And with CHILD STAR, his third film with director Nadia Tass, set for release in a couple of months, now is a good a time as any for ambition.

“Since the whole Vertical Limit thing my face has been back in the newspapers, and I’ve had a few more scripts come my way. I mean I’ve been in this business so long that I’m not expecting that much. It’s about working, y’know? About getting a bit of money in the bank, enough to not have to work for a while. I mean I don’t give a fuck – y’know? I don’t give a fuck.

“I hang out with a couple of actors but most of my time isn’t spent with other actors. My private life is not in the business. I’m not a big networker and luckily I’m not in a position where I need to do that and I’m glad about that. You’d go fucking mad – all you talk about is how much you’re working or how much you’re not working – I think about that stuff enough, I don’t need to pump it up any more.”

Having spent half his young life in the limelight, he’s more than accustomed to the drill. A new film, a round of publicity, same old questions: “It’s all bullshit, mate,” he intimates in reassuringly hushed tones.

Mendelsohn has been in the public’s consciousness since he was 15 and the HENDERSON KIDS was a hit on our TV screens. And it’s been more than 14 years since his remarkable film debut in the director John Duigan’s groundbreaking THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE, a film that also launched the career of his contemporary, Noah Taylor.

He remembers the film fondly. “It was slated as a telemovie, in amongst a bunch of films that Kennedy Miller were doing for TEN. They loved it so much in the first weeks that decided to go ahead and make it into a feature. I had no idea it was going to be so big.

“Duigan was fuckin’ great! He’s like a horse whisperer. He’s got the abilty to point you in a direction and just let you go. They’re the ones I like to work with, and look at the performances he got out of us – they’re pretty fucken on the money!”

Mendelsohn won the first of his AFI Awards for the role, and a string of distinguished performances ensued in some of the local industry’s best films of the late 1980’s and 1990s - THE BIG STEAL, SPOTSWOOD, MAP OF THE HUMAN HEART, SIRENS, METAL SKIN (attracting his second AFI Award), COSI, and IDIOT BOX. He’s an actor that relies on his natural gift and sheer charisma. You can drop all that method "bullshit"!

“One of the misconceptions about performance is the idea that you can get it perfect, that the more you wring your hands about it the better it’s gonna be – that’s bullshit. If a director or another actor asks me what my motivation is, well, I tell ‘em it’s got nothing to do with them.

“I wanted to be a spy when I was a kid,” he says straight-faced, which somehow figures perfectly. “I left school at 15, and I haven’t ever formally studied acting. I mean talking about acting is a bit like fucking for chastity, y’know?” He checks for a second, and is obviously keen to impress that he’s still very serious about his work: “That doesn’t mean I don’t do whatever I need to do to get the performance up there, I just think there’s a certain cult that focuses more on the preparation than on the actual result whereas I think here’s a lot to be said for just jumping in and doing it. I do like to think I’m getting better at it, but I don’t know that! I’m very critical of my own work and I see the bits that don’t work before the bits that do.”

Mendelsohn’s aim is to be ‘in the moment’ when the camera is rolling, a characteristic self-evident in his easygoing performance in MULLET, a modest but moving comedy drama set in a small south coast fishing village. Headlining a bevy of accomplished Australian actors like Susie Porter, Andrew S Gilbert and Steve L Marquand, Mendelsohn carries the film with an easy Aussie charm. He plays the lead role of a bloke in his late twenties who returns home from the Big Smoke. When Mullet upped and left after three years earlier he didn’t tell a soul, and so his friends, family and ex-girlfriend don’t exactly accept him back into the fold with open arms.

“Mullet’s a guy whose taken a turn in life and he can’t go forward without taking a counter turn… and so he has to go back home and try and reconcile what it is he’s trying to leave behind. Which is place, where he comes from, the situation with his family.”

Mendelsohn himself comes from Melbourne, but he’s been “living in Sydney close on ten years. I lived back in Melbourne in 96/97 for a year or so… I still see myself as an expatriate Melbournite more than a Sydney boy."

And after the exposure afforded by VERTICAL LIMIT, what about the ‘States? “Yeah, what about the ‘States? I dunno, I guess I’ll go over and have a look. I was there recently very briefly, saw a couple a people. I’ve got an agent there but I don’t talk to her. I got an agent in Britain too, but I don’t talk to her either.

“I’m Australian based until I’m not. More or less.”

One thing’s for sure, when he does do it, we’ll be the first to know.

MICHAEL HUTAK
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First published in Australian Style

A renewed engagement with Asia was the pitch when the heavy hitters of art and capital congregated at the Art Gallery of New South Wales today (Wednesday). They were there to hear former PM, Paul Keating, officially launch the Institute of Asian Culture and Visual Arts, or VisAsia,.
With its headquarters in Sydney, and corporate backers like IBM and Malaysian construction giant IPOH Garden, the peak body is promising a ‘great leap forward’ in cultural co-operation throughout the region.
In a quest to develop new audiences for art and new sources of corporate funding, VisAsia will pool the resources of the AGNSW’s own Asian Art Department with those of other major public galleries in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, China, South Korea, and Vietnam.
The unique model is the initiative of AGNSW director, Edmund Capon, and prominent trustee and 1996 Australian of the Year, Dr John Yu, who will serve as VisAsia’s first chairman.
Capon said VisAsia will provide the new Asian Art Gallery (opening early 2003, part of a $13 million re-development) with a steady stream of quality exhibitions from partners like the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore.
Capon said he had personally invited Keating to appear because of the latter's ability to "send a message”.
“Our political body language toward the region in recent times has not been what you would call warm,” he said.

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First published in The Bulletin

In between dealing with a hostile press, public brawls with former and current staff, controversial appearances before Senate estimates committees, and complaints about the air-conditioning, National Gallery of Australia director, Brian Kennedy, has found time to pursue a painting – one with an asking price of $8 million, no less. News broke last Wednesday in The Australian that Kennedy would acquire British artist Lucien Freud’s 1999 painting After Cezanne for a sum that would make it most expensive painting ever purchased by an Australian public gallery.
However on Friday Kennedy told The Bulletin that he was “taken by surprise when the story appeared,” and that the Gallery’s negotiations with the artist, who still owns the work, were continuing. As we go to press, Kennedy still has a $1m shortfall to make up from private benefactors in order to clinch the deal.
Suspicions that Kennedy himself leaked the story seem unlikely, given that it is highly unusual to seek publicity for a work you hope to purchase. There are fears now that Freud may now even raise his asking price, now that he is aware that the work is so keenly sought down under. And for the sale to fall through now would surely be a highly embarrassing nail in Kennedy’s professional coffin.
Informed reaction to the acquisition has, in general, been positive But not everyone is happy. One former director of a major Australian state gallery told The Bulletin that the NGA’s “whole collection policy needs to be reviewed and sharpened. Why in 2001 are we buying up the work of British artists? Why aren’t we looking to the Pacific or Asia or here in Australia for that matter?” And one leading benefactor to the NGA declared if he “had the choice of spending $8m on a British artist or a similar sum on Australian work I know what I’d be choosing.”
However William Wright, curatorial director of Sydney’s leading commercial gallery, Sherman Galleries, dismissed such criticism as shallow. “In New York they wouldn’t blink at such a purchase. It’s a worthwhile purchase.
“It’s a large composition, an excellent transcription of a remarkable earlier work (Paul Cezanne’s L’Apres-midi a Naples) that the NGA already owns. Freud is the best living artist of his kind by a long chalk and we have too few of them here.”
Should it make the voyage, After Cezanne will bring the tally to four Freuds in Australian collections, three of them in public galleries.
The Art Gallery of Western Australia purchased Freud’s Naked Man with Rat (1977) in 1983 for just $78,000. Today it is valued at $6.5 million, marking the $8m for After Cezanne as a fair market price.
The AGWA’s deputy director, Gary Dufour, says his Freud’s worth to his Gallery since it’s purchase has been more than simply fiscal.
“For smaller public galleries like ours, if you don’t have works in your collection that others want to borrow, it affects your ability to borrow works in turn,” said Dufour. “Our Freud has spent half it’s time with us out on loan to galleries all over the world – in Paris, Washington, London, Berlin, Frankfurt - if we hadn’t been loaning out the Freud for the past decade most of these major international galleries would not even know we existed.”
Asked which Freud was the superior work, Dufour said he wouldn’t comment only to say “I’m pleased that we have the one that we have.”
In the mid 1980’s the Art Gallery of New South Wales had the chance to buy an important Freud but decided the asking price of $360,000 too high. Three months later the work was eventually sold for $1.2 million.

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First published in The Bulletin

An auction market in contemporary Australian art appears assured after the French-owned international auction house, Christie’s, conducted its second successful sale in the emerging category in Melbourne last week.
Bidding was brisk and competitive with a respectable 70% clearance rate on the 131 lots, which ranged in estimate from $1000 to $180,000.
Top selling lot at $99,875 was the late Rosalie Gascoigne’s ‘Lantern’1990. Other winners on the night were collectors of Brisbane conceptual artist, Robert Macpherson, whose ‘Scale from the Tool’ 1977 set a new saleroom record for the artist of $70,500, confirming his rank among Australia’s senior living artists.
Other artists to post strong sales include Ken Whisson ($49,350), Imants Tillers ($44,650) Robert Hunter ($32,900) and Dale Hickey ($32,900)
With few dealers or museum curators active, Christie’s Head of Contemporary Art, Annette Larkin, said buyers at the sale were predominantly younger, private collectors. “We also had a several successful bids from ex-pats in South East Asia - young lawyers and bankers earning US dollars in Hong Kong and Singapore who were eager take advantage of the exchange rate.”
The sale aggregate of $918,000 was, according to Larkin, “excellent, considering several big ticket items didn’t sell”. She said the total compared favorably with the $1.2 million achieved at Christie’s inaugural contemporary sale, held in Sydney last August.
The poor performing items were works by Howard Arkley, whose prices had skyrocketed since his untimely death in 1999. The formerly buoyant market for the artist’s airbrushed, day-glo images of suburbia took a stumble when four of five lots failed to meet reserve.
Arkley’s ‘Eastern Suburbs Pink Home’ - the sale’s ‘hero’ lot - was passed in at $130,000 against a low reserve of $150,000, however prominent Melbourne gallerist, Anna Schwartz, believes the correction was long overdue. “Howard would be turning in his grave if he knew his works were being passed in at that figure, but we can see the market for his work is in the process of correcting itself.”
Some dealers have been critical of Christie’s foray into their territory but Schwartz was supportive, saying the sale was “the best advertisement commercial galleries could get. Not enough of the art-buying public are knowledgeable about contemporary art – auctions like this educate them.“

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First published in The Bulletin

Dir: Stephen Soderbergh

...never fails to seduce.

It's beyond trite to say this is an landmark film, even though it is one of the most gripping and suspenseful thrillers I've ever sat through. This stylish and multi-faceted film sees Stephen Soderbergh display a command of the director’s craft that he only promised in earlier films like sex lies and videotape, King of the Hill or The Underneath. Latterly we have become accustomed to him bringing his independent smarts to the studio system in films like Out of Sight, or his crossover mainstream hit of last year, Erin Brockovich, a film which forced me to flip my view of Julia Roberts from appalling to appealing, such is the maestro's skill.

But Traffic is something else again - a film so accomplished it attracts critical clichés like moths to a flame. It is nothing less than the most authentic portrait of America’s drug trade yet committed to celluloid. With an all-star ensemble cast, filmed in 8 different cities and over 110 locations, it is a vast undertaking that takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride of intrigue, suspense and drama. Traffic’s tableaux is populated by characters which traverse all strata of the supply and consumption of illicit drugs, from the highest officials - both honest and corrupt - to the frontline victims of hard core addiction. Sparing us sermons on why people shouldn’t take drugs, the film ultimately demonstrates how America’s policy of waging an unwinnable supply-side "war against drugs” has only ended up entrenching organized crime, corrupting the public sector, and punishing the victims of addiction, while doing precisely nothing to stem the rising destructive tide of drug use at all levels of society.

Such a thesis is built quietly, subtly by a screenplay that intertwines three stories: an honest cop (Benicio Del Toro) trying to function within a “entrepreneurial” police force corrupted by the ruthless cartels that traffic drugs across the US/Mexico border; a conservative judge (Michael Douglas), whose appointment as the President's new national anti-drug czar coincides with his daughter's (Erika Christensen) slide into addiction; and a naïve society matron (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose bourgeois life is thrown into turmoil when her husband is arrested for drug trafficking. Hitherto, she thought he was an upstanding pillar of society.

Soderbergh mixes up the cinematic styles for each thread of the narrative, for instance the Mexican sequences are given a dreamy treatment, shot hand-held by Soderbergh himself in saturated colours on a stock so grainy it could be Super 8. The sequences where Douglas’s anti-drug czar goes on a fact-finding mission to “the frontline”, inspecting border crossings, or high tech anti-trafficking facilities have a semi-documentary feel, again shot hand held. Zeta-Jones sequences are shot like movie-of-the-week, as her lady-that-lunches, faced with losing everything, must swot up on the family business of engaging hit men, laundering money and dealing with the Tijuana cartels.

The detailed portrayal of police work rings true, in fact the whole films proffers a “no bullshit” authenticity, wrapped in the hip, contemporary apparel of independent filmmaking. This is intelligent cinema that assumes - and demands - an engaged and interested audience. That said, it flows freely and with ease and never fails to seduce. The cast is so good they render superlatives meaningless. Just go and see it. Then we can talk.

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First published in Australian Style.

Dir: Stanley Kubrick

Released at the height of psychedelic hysteria, Kubrick’s supra-philosophical mind fuck was billed as the ultimate trip, but was dismissed by critics as little more than a ponderous light-show with a few riddles thrown in for diversionm, and thus didn't rate even a nomination for Best Picture at the 1969 Oscars. Carol Reed’s musical, Oliver! won that year, with Kubrick nominated for Best Director but also losing out to Reed. Thirty three years later, if you haven’t seen 2001 on the big screen, then take the chance while it’s going. But if you’re all Kubricked out - and who isn’t after the orgy of hype surrounding the maestro’s death and the release of Eyes Wide Shut - rent Oliver! instead and see what all the fuss was about.
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First published in Australian Style magazine, national. April 2000

From Seattle to London to Sydney, squares and swingers alike are revolting against the rock 'n' roll ethos in the name of cocktail culture.

TO SEE Tony Bennett become hip once more, and the Carpenters become suddenly cool, is like watching the tip of an iceberg finally appear on the horizon. What's really going on is a worldwide resurgence of interest in a much-maligned, misunderstood musical genre: easy listening.

The broad church of easy listening - also known as "lounge" - stretches from the '50s bossa nova to Brian Eno's ambient music; from the exotique sound of Martin Denny to the Ray Conniff Singers to Phillip Glass; from Lawrence Welk, to Klaus Wunderlich's Hammond Organ Sensation, to Moog Plays the Beatles.

With a radiant Audrey Hepburn on the cover, the hip London magazine The Idler devoted its latest issue to what it has dubbed lounge culture, and declared the birth of the Cocktail Nation. Says The Idler's Joshua Glenn: "Today's crop of young people are suffering from metal fatigue. We have grown up listening to nothing but primitive id noise, and we can't take it any more."

Glenn says lounge music is "merely the soundtrack to the cocktail hour, that time-out of time during which one seizes the chance to relax completely, to live for the moment". It is an existential condition grunge rockers might call nirvana, but which "citizens of the Cocktail Nation call Happy Hour".

Now Sydney's loungers will finally have a venue to call their own when a group calling themselves The Adult Contemporary Swingers launch a new nightclub next Sunday night at a rejuvenated Les Girls nightspot in Kings Cross, now under the studious management of the local impresario Ian Hartley.

"We're calling it The Tender Trap," says organiser and easy- listening devotee Sean O'Brien. "It will be a celebration of cocktail culture at its most sophisticated and savage - multisensual stimulation for the Moog generation," a straight-faced O'Brien told the Herald.

Although the playlist will feature Brazil '66, Bacharach, The Fifth Dimension and Tijuana Brass, O'Brien insists The Tender Trap is not about kitsch. "Kitsch implies a certain shallow crassness. This will be highly tasteful and very deep. The Tender Trap is about reclaiming what it means to be an adult. It's a pastiche of Australiana and Americana from the mid-'50s to the mid-'60s - a bit "Rat-Packerish", some Las Vegas primitive exotica, a bit of Beat - for once the parents will understand."

Simon Holmes, the manager of Half a Cow Records in Glebe, says: "While there's always been a hard core of people hip to cocktail music, it has definitely become fashionable of late."

Holmes says three things can account for the surge of interest in Easy listening: "First you've got the release of two books in the past year called Incredibly Strange Music, by San Francisco publishers Re/Search." (Re/Search's Modern Primitives edition some years back single-handedly made body piercing popular and gave grunge an aesthetic to call its own. Its Incredibly Strange Music volumes are like bluffer's guides to the underground world of obscure, cult and exotic recordings.)

Second, Holmes points to the crossover success of American bands like The Coctails from Chicago and especially Combustible Edison, the tuxedo-clad combo led by Michael "The Millionaire" Cudahy, a former member of Urge Overkill with impeccable punk rock credentials. Combustible Edison (apparently named after a renowned '60s cocktail) have emerged from the American underground as the breakthrough "lounge" act. It is significant that they are signed to Seattle's SubPop label, the company which pioneered the Grunge aesthetic with bands such as Nirvana.

And third: "There's a feeling that there's no longer much innovation in popular music, especially in guitar rock. So there's a relief to be had in the whole easy listening thing in that it's light-hearted, and I think its popularity is a reaction to the (bombastic nature) of rock. Also a lot of acts like the Coctails only release their work on vinyl - it's pre-'60s and pre-rock, not just in style and attitude but also in technology."

Tuxedos and cocktail dresses will be de rigueur at The Tender Trap, but O'Brien insists there will be no "door policy" with one exception: "'80s power dressing is totally out |" Jeans and thongs are OK, so long as they are worn with a Beat Generation demeanour.

While it all may sound way too nostalgic for some, The Idler's Cocktail Nation Manifesto provides one cogent answer: "That a thing is original is no guarantee that it is the best ... a wig is better than unwashed hair |"

* The Tender Trap will be launched this Sunday night at 7 pm at Les Girls, 2 Roslyn Street, Kings Cross.

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First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

It's knock-off time. Time to wend your way back to your quarter-acre of heaven, your dream home in the 'burbs. But something's not quite right here.
There are 36 perfectly formed sand castles on the back patio, and three chocolate brains in the kitchen, gathering mould. The upstairs toilet is wall-papered with signs warning"Danger - Corrosive" and in your daughter's bedroom there's a neon sign blaring "No never means yes".
And where's the TV gone? Someone's put it in the roof, but you can watch it through the periscope in the walk-in wardrobe. Suddenly you scream: "This is not my beautiful house | This is contemporary art |"
You have stumbled into Sweet Dreams, a satellite exhibition for Perspecta, the Art Gallery of New South Wales's biannual survey of contemporary art.
Sweet Dreams is the brainchild of the curators Isobel Johnston and Suhanya Raffel. They have chosen eight artists to design work specifically for"Balmoral", a dream home at Homeworld II, the country's largest project home village at Prospect, near Blacktown in Sydney's west.
"I think this is a pretty logical step," says Johnston. "Many artists today are working with domestic ideas and this house can provide a venue where you have an audience which was already prepared to look at the notion of the home when they come to view the work."
Raffel says the show is another example of the growing interest by artists in working outside museum and gallery spaces.
"But we were also aware that a lot of art in public spaces has been difficult and not particularly successful because the work was usually in 'nowhere' places like billboards or in transit on the backs of buses," Raffel says. "This site, however, comes with it's audience. The audience has come to buy a home, not to go to an art gallery.
"Sweet Dreams also shows that there is a growing awareness at the art gallery of its responsibility to greater Sydney."
The curator Victoria Lynn has talked about this year's Perspecta as dwelling on, among other things, "the shadowy side of urban nightmares and suburban utopia", and Sweet Dreams embraces that spirit to the letter.
Eugenia Raskapoulos chose the daughter's bedroom for her neon installation for obvious reasons.
"Neon can be such a seductive, beautiful source of light but the message it carries here isn't such a pretty sight," she says.
"Because alongside all those dreams of owning a house and having a wonderful family, there are many women out there who have been oppressed within this environment. Rape can and does start at a very young age with incest and my piece is dealing with all those issues."
A number of the works are time-based sculptures which emphasise decay and disorder, such as Neil Wing's chocolate brains and Therese Saaib's 36 sand castles. Saaib fully expects the elements and visiting children to gradually destroy the precisely formed castles.
It was Robyn Bracken's idea to watch TV through a periscope in the closet. Her piece plays formally with the mechanics of perception but there's also a symbolic dimension.
"In a house like this the television is often the focal point of family life so I just wanted to dislodge it from that pride of place into a secret, closeted place."
So why would a commercial builder like Clarendon Homes willingly let a bunch of artists loose in one of their packaged dreams?
"Ultimately the public's perception will be that we are involved in what's happening today," says Clarendon's marketing manager, Peter Brown.
"It's not about house design or development of future housing trends. It's a personal view by the various artists of their interpretation of the family home."
The exhibition runs seven days a week until November 21.
Caption: ILLUS: Step inside for chocolate brains...the artists with marketing manager Peter Brown (right), all part of an unusual project. Picture by Ben Rushton.
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 19-10-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 23
Section: News and Features
Length: 756
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In an innovative move, the Museum of Contemporary Art has linked up with six inner-city galleries to promote young contemporary artists.
In an innovative move, the Museum of Contemporary Art has linked up with six inner-city galleries to promote young contemporary artists.
Directors of the six galleries played host yesterday at an open day to museum members. Today, members and the public will be able to visit and view the work of 17 emerging artists in their studios.
"Originally, the event was exclusive to members," the museum's Natalia Bradshaw told Inside Sydney. "But, because the museum is still so new, we've decided to open up Saturday's studio walk to everyone, so people can experience the type of member benefits the museum offers.
"We want to be the catalyst for people to take an interest in, and learn more about, contemporary art. And these visits to artists' studios will be the perfect introduction."
The six galleries behind the venture are the Beatty Gallery, Kunst, Legge Gallery, Lime, ROM and Pendulum.
The idea for the visits came from Rosemary Luker, director of the ROM Gallery at Taylor Square.
"It's really all about two things: making the art more accessible to people, and making the public - and potential patrons - more accessible to the artists," she explained.
"There are similar studio visits held every year in the Marais district in Paris and in Berlin, and they're extraordinarily successful."
Luker said the artists would work in their studios throughout the day, on hand to discuss their work with anyone who popped in.
Participating artists work in a wide range of media, stretching from Brad Allen-Waters's metal sculpture to George and Ilza Burchett's large murals and frescos.
Those interested can pick up a map of the studio locations from the MCA in Circular Quay.
Caption: Illus: Show-offs ... from left, Faith McGirr, Constantine Nicholas, Gary Christian, Stuart Watters, George Burchett, Liz Miller, Simon Hartas, Joe Filshie, Maree Azzopardi, Brad Allen-Waters, Ilza Burchett, Jose Garcia-Negrette. Picture by DEAN SEWELL
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 4-9-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 15
Section: News and Features
Length: 417
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First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

AMID debate over the launch of the NSW Art Gallery's Contemporary Benefactors' Scheme, administrators defended the move yesterday as the only option to counter dwindling government support.
The controversial scheme - designed to entice younger, free-spending collectors into the gallery's circle - will be launched at a $75-a-head gala dinner in the gallery's main entrance hall next Saturday.
Amid debate over the launch of the NSW Art Gallery's Contemporary Benefactors' Scheme, administrators defended the move yesterday as the only option to counter dwindling government support.
The controversial scheme - designed to entice younger, free-spending collectors into the gallery's circle - will be launched at a $75-a-head gala dinner in the gallery's main entrance hall next Saturday.
At the heart of the art world's angst is a proposed auction on the night of works donated by Australia's leading contemporary artists, with the proceeds going back into buying more contemporary Australian art.
"Some artists have been a bit iffy about the idea," confirmed Sydney artist Rosemary Laing, who's donated one of her works now hanging in the gallery's"Strangers in Paradise" show.
"And I understand the argument: it's a disturbing trend, in that artists are always expected to make the work and mount the show for next to nothing, and now they're being asked to donate work to attract benefactors.
"This sort of thing has been going on for 10, 20 years. But this time it's the art gallery instead of, say, Artspace."
But the gallery's curator of contemporary art, Tony Bond, is adamant the move is a one-off.
He explained: "I've always been dead against the idea of getting artists to cough up in this manner. There's a lot of it goes on all the time at the alternative spaces but it's the first time we've done it here.
"However, these are modest works which don't compete with the artists'commercial practice.
"The real issue is we don't have any funds for buying contemporary Australian art because of government cutbacks."
Bond said a "massive gap" had emerged between State Government grants and the gallery's actual running costs. As a result, areas such as local acquisitions and maintenance of the collection have slowly had funds siphoned off simply to run the gallery.
The gallery's international programs had remained buoyant because they were supported by fixed bequests. But Bond says the Australian contemporary collection program has been starved of funds: "We have the Rudy Komon Memorial Fund, which produces about $25,000 a year. But that's it.
"We need at least $100,000 a year to get a decent program going."
Sydney galleries have been encouraged to book entire tables at the launch, and Roslyn Oxley and Gene Sherman are two directors who've already taken up the offer.
"I knew Roslyn and Gene would participate, but Stephen Mori has been a bit equivocal about it," Bond noted.
"I know one of his artists felt it was not an appropriate sort of thing for an artist to be doing, and I don't have any problem with that. It's a personal decision."
Mori declined to comment.
After a pre-dinner stroll around the Surrealism exhibition to the tones of a wind quartet, patrons will sit down to a menu designed by renowned Sydney chef Anders Ousbach.
Sotheby's Robert Bleakley will conduct the auction of the works of 16 of Australia's leading contemporary artists: Ian Burn, Debra Dawes, Anne Graham, Bill Henson, Michael Johnson, Janet Laurence, Rosemary Laing, Lindy Lee, Hilarie Mais, John Nixon, Bronwyn Oliver, Mike Parr, Julie Rrap, Imants Tillers, Mark Titmarsh and Ken Unsworth.
Bond expects the event to raise at least $20,000, but added: "During the evening we also hope to sign up patrons for the benefactors' program, which means a commitment of anything from $500 up."
Meanwhile, Laing sees the initiative as long overdue. "I support the event because, from a broader outlook, it's in my interest as a contemporary artist."
Caption: Illus: Art for auction...Tony Bond with a self-portrait by Mike Parr which will go under the hammer next Saturday. Picture by Ben Rushton.
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 31-7-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 15
Section: News and Features
Length: 765
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First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

Premier John Fahey's announcement this week that Sydney College of the Arts(SCA), now amalgamated with the University of Sydney, will be relocated to a new $19 million facility at Rozelle means, publicly, an end to 18 years of poor accommodation and inadequate funding. But behind the scenes the country's leading art school remains embroiled in a bitter power struggle among senior management.
At the end of last year, the friction became so intense that the university's vice-chancellor, Don McNichol, was forced to intervene.
He commissioned an inquiry and appointed an independent facilitator to bring the college back from the brink.
The inquiry's confidential report - Inside Sydney has obtained a copy -finds a prevailing climate of "distrust, side-taking, suspicion, low morale"resulting in a "lack of effective decision-making and action ... a climate not conducive to allowing an obviously talented and committed staff to give of their best".
In the eye of the storm is internationally recognised Sydney artist Richard Dunn.
SCA's director since 1988, he sees the genesis of the problem dating back to the college's amalgamation with Sydney University in 1990.
Dunn commented: "If you join an institution and they say 'this is how you must be' - and it's very different from how you were - then there are bound to be difficulties.
"The uni created a school within the college and then appointed a person to head the school. It hadn't been structured that way before and there was confusion about roles and duties."
And according to the vice-chancellor's own report, this led to escalating conflict between Dunn and the head of the school, Associate Professor Helge Larson.
As the acrimony grew, lines of communication collapsed and, notes the report, "previously neutral staff (were) being drawn into factionalism ..."
Inside Sydney was unable to contact Larson but, according to Dunn, his current job will no longer be there when he returns from holidays next month.
Dunn revealed: "He will be my deputy, now that the vice-chancellor has decided to remove the school from the college and adopt a structure where the director also has the duties and responsibilities of head of school."
Dunn said he was willing to work with Larson on his return.
"I'm sure we'll develop a good working relationship, but we need to sit down and talk about where we go from here.
"There are ongoing problems with a minority of people, but that's nothing surprising."
While the new structure is still to be ratified by the university's senate, the independent facilitator, former Dean of Arts Dr Pat Lahy, took up her role last month.
"I'm trying to move the college more into line with the way a faculty at the university works," Lahy explained.
"In a faculty there's more collegiality, people have more input into the decision-making process and some say in what happens.
"And I'd like it known that the process is working."
Constituted by the Whitlam Government in 1975, SCA has coped with sparse funding and poor accommodation ever since.
Scattered over three ramshackle campuses in Glebe and Balmain, it has produced a steady stream of graduates who have slotted straight into the vanguard of Australian contemporary art - such as Jane Campion, Lindy Lee, John Young, Janet Burchill and Dunn himself.
The acting vice-chancellor, Professor Susan Dorsch, told Inside Sydney SCA was an asset to the university, and the move to the heritage-listed, 19th-century Kirkbride buildings at Rozelle Hospital would go a long way to solving the college's problems.
She said: "They've been labouring in bad accommodation for such a long time that Kirkbride must have a positive effect, mainly because it removes that climate of uncertainty."
Dunn agreed that staff relations had improved since Lahy came on board.
"It's slowly being worked through," he said. "Essentially, we have a staff working under appalling conditions producing students who are incredibly good."
Caption: Illus: SCA director, Richard Dunn ... hoping for an end to the bickering. Picture by GARY McLEAN
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 24-7-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 15
Section: News and Features
Length: 808
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First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

INSIDE SYDNEY: Artspace, Sydney's first publicly funded contemporary art gallery, celebrates its first decade next week, culminating with a party at its expansive new home in Woolloomooloo on Saturday. Artspace, Sydney's first publicly funded contemporary art gallery, celebrates its first decade next week, culminating with a party at its expansive new home in Woolloomooloo on Saturday.
Gallery director Louise Pether recalled: "Looking back, there have been such phenomenal shifts in the last 10 years.
"Originally Artspace seemed a real 1970s concept, in that anybody could exhibit and it was catering for people straight out of art school.
"But gradually the artist-run galleries have become more numerous, to the point where today you have spaces like First Draft WEST, Arthaus, Black and Lime all filling that gap.
"That leaves us somewhere between them and the Museum of Contemporary Art or NSW Art Gallery."
Before shifting last year to the new $1.5 million Gunnery Visual Arts Centre at Woolloomooloo Bay, Artspace occupied the first floor of an aging Surry Hills warehouse for nine years.
"Artspace was important because it was the first space in Sydney to address contemporary art, as it was practised at the time," explained artist and former Artspace committee member Merilyn Fairskye. "It combined an international outlook with a commitment to local artists and writers. But, just as crucially, it provided a place where artists could learn to negotiate the art world and begin to take control of their careers."
Pether - who succeeded previous directors Judy Annear, Gary Sangster and Sally Couacaud - estimates that 550 artists have participated in more than 200 exhibitions since Artspace opened but said the Gunnery necessarily meant a shift in emphasis for the exhibition program.
"Suddenly, we're in these quite splendid premises. It's corporate - almost glamorous - and the art really has to look good, otherwise everything falls apart.
"So, in terms of experimentation and risk-taking, the sorts of shows we have here will be different to those we experienced at Surry Hills.
"We've decided we're no longer a place for first exhibitors. But we are still a place for emerging ideas, and these can come from any generation or an artist of any experience."
Caption: Ilus: Art of time ... Abby Mellick, Julianne Pierce and Louise Pether, of Artspace, ready to celebrate the gallery's 10th birthday.Picture by PETER RAE
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 17-7-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 15
Section: News and Features
Length: 476
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

INSIDE SYDNEY: Leading Sydney gallery owner Roslyn Oxley yesterday confirmed major changes to her contemporary art business, including a dramatically smaller stable and plans to move from her Paddington landmark. "We had an offer for this space which really surprised us," she explained. "So we're considering the move because, economically, it's really too good an opportunity." With commercial galleries enduring a sluggish market, Oxley said she has no option but to meet the challenge.
"What we're doing is contracting. We're fairly small, in terms of personnel, and it's become very hard to manage artists properly. So we're paring down our stable.
"At McDonald Street (her earlier Paddington exhibition space) we could have five shows running at once. But in this gallery we can only have one or two at the most - and I find we're only concentrating on the artists we're really interested in.
"It's not fair to the others. So perhaps they'll get full attention somewhere else."
Oxley nominated 17 artists as a workable target - and said claims that she had 72 on her books at the height of the 1980s boom were "absolute garbage".
She added: "At our peak we probably had 35. But that's not full representation. At any one time you've only got the capacity to represent fully 12 or 15 people at a maximum."
In slashing numbers Oxley is echoing the trend set by new players on the Sydney scene such as Gene Sherman's Goodhope Gallery and the Sarah Cottier's new gallery in Newtown (scheduled for launch late this year).
Both are entering the market with small, select stables - and have secured representation of some of the biggest names in contemporary Australian art, including former leading lights from Oxley's gallery such as Dale Frank (now with Sherman Goodhope) and John Nixon (Sarah Cottier).
Oxley worked for 20 years as an interior designer (both in Australia and in New York) before returning to begin her gallery in an old rented warehouse in McDonald Street, Paddington, in early 1982.
Showcasing risky, emerging artists, Roslyn Oxley Gallery was an inst ant success.
Oxley had the foresight to buy a warehouse in Soudan Lane, Paddington, before the 1980s property boom - and relocated there in March 1990 after a lavish refurbishment.
"We always planned to move here, if we couldn't buy McDonald Street," she recalled.
"And we're not thinking of selling this place - just renting it out and relocating the gallery.
"But the whole thing is still under wraps, and I'm not going to tell you anymore until we've completed it."
On the current market, she summed up: "It's become more and more difficult... Quite frankly, I'd prefer to sell socks.
"But the art's the thing and, although it's hard, it's a fabulous business to be in.
"I'm very optimistic about the art that's coming out of Australia. It has a real edge that keeps coming through, and this is without doubt a very exiting time."
Caption: Illus: Roslyn Oxley ... "Quite frankly, I'd prefer to sell socks." Picture by DEAN SEWELL
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 10-7-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 15
Section: News and Features
Length: 605
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

WHILE we're still dining out on our trans-Tasman triumph at Cannes, it's worth remembering Jane Campion found her first mainstream audience at the Short Film Awards which preface the Sydney Film Festival each year.
Campion's A Girl's Own Story, winner of the 1984 Rouben Mamoulian award, had the State buzzing that year with talk that a stunning new talent had arrived. What wasn't new was the talk itself - the awards always generate much debate, and are viewed in the industry as a snapshot of the coming generation
The Dendy Awards, as they are now known, are on again at the State Theatre tomorrow, beginning at 9 am, and the screenings are open to the public.
Taking the name of the current sponsor, the awards have traditionally occupied the festival's opening day since their inception in 1970. A cigarette manufacturer was sponsor until 1978, when the Greater Union Organisation took over. Sydney's progressive arthouse cinema, the Dendy has been sponsor since 1988.
This year, from more than 100 entries, 20 films have been chosen for screening and will vie for $2,500 in prizes in five categories.
Strictly speaking, the Dendy sponsors awards in just three of these: fiction, documentary and general.
The two other awards are the Yoram Gross Animation Award, first presented in 1987, and the Ethnic Affairs Commission Award, instituted last year to encourage films which reflect Australia's cultural and linguistic diversity.
Another $2,500 prize, The Rouben Mamoulian Award, is chosen from all the finalists by a panel of judges made up of overseas guests at the festival. This year the Taiwanese director of Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee, heads the panel
There are four entries in the fiction category (which begins screening at 10.30 am) - Flowers by Request, directed by Susan Wallace, Just Desserts, directed by Monica Pellizari, Mick Connolly's Opportunity Knocks and Anne Pratten's Terra Nullius - with Pellizari tipped to win.
Among the entries in the documentary category is Jan Aldenhoven's and Glen Curruthers's Kangaroos - Faces in the Mob, which was shown earlier in the year on ABC TV. The film follows the progress over two years of a mob of eastern grey kangaroos.
Other entries include Noriko Sekiguchi's When Mrs Hegarty Comes to Town, an examination of cross-cultural exchange between Japan and Australia, and Steve Thomas's Black Man's Houses, which seeks to redress the myth that Tasmania's Aborigines are extinct.
In the general category, for films which don't quite fit into any other category, Ross Gibson's Wild is favoured to win. Wild is a melange of docu-drama, cinemaverite, experimental cinema and academic film essay.
In the Ethnic Affairs Commission Award, Christina Andreef's loosely autobiographical Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship is among the entries. It was also selected for Cannes this year.
------------------------------
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 10-6-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 25
Section: News and Features
Length: 604
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

INSIDE SYDNEY: Gallery director Helen Hansen has returned from this year's prestigious Chicago International Art Exposition reporting a surge of interest in Aboriginal art in North America.
"Aboriginal art is starting to break seriously into the United States, which is why we've made two trips there in the past six months," the co-director of Paddington's Hogarth Galleries told Inside Sydney yesterday.
Hansen returned on Tuesday from Chicago, where Hogarth became the first gallery ever invited to show Australian Aboriginal art.
"There's enormous interest," Hansen said. "They were fascinated by the connection between the land and the sand and dot paintings. On the other hand, a high percentage of people knew something about Aboriginal art because they had seen the Dreamings Exhibition at the Smart Museum in Chicago in 1989."
Hogarth's showing in Chicago was boosted by the enormous interest generated by Aratjara: Art of the First Australians, a major survey of Australian Aboriginal art showing in Dusseldorf, Germany, until July.
Hansen noted: "By our reckoning, the largest collectors of Aboriginal art in the world are in America."
She added that works of Emily Kame Kngwarreye - paintings of the desert country for which she's responsible as a tribal elder - attracted great interest.
"People were just bowled over by the energy of this woman," Hansen said.
"They'd ask if she'd seen the work of certain contemporary European artists and we'd say not only has she not seen it, she's an 82-year-old Aboriginal woman who lives in the Australian desert and speaks very little English. They'd be amazed at the artistic overlaps and similarities."
John Mawandjul's bark paintings were also a hit with the Americans, with one major work selling for $6,000.
Hansen said the surge in international interest in Aboriginal art was not merely a romantic return to the West's obsession with exotic, so-called"primitive" art.
"The American market has gone beyond that," she said. "It's more sophisticated, and Australian Aboriginal art these days is part of mainstream contemporary art. That's the way we show it - certainly not as primitive art -and people judge it on its own merit. And on that basis, it does extremely well."
Caption: Illus: Helan Hansen, co-director of the Hogarth Galleries in Paddington... found enormous interest in Aboriginal art in the United States. Picture by STEVE CHRISTO
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 3-6-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 504
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

INSIDE SYDNEY: Australian Galleries director Stuart Purves yesterday revealed that he no longer intends to wind down his Sydney operation.
"I've done enough airing of my emotions," Purves told Inside Sydney. "It's been tight. I've been wounded and depressed and said we would close.
"But then I gathered myself again, and now it's business as usual. I probably should have said nothing."
Purves announced in January that his million-dollar, four-year experiment at the sumptuous Paddington gallery would close - and Australian would consolidate from its Melbourne base.
"We'd made all the necessary arrangements and our bank was encouraging us to close," he said. "But right at the point when we were about to make the move - literally in the last few months - the market began to lift.
"And there's nothing like a couple of sales to give an art dealer a personality change."
In response, Purves has restructured his organisation to revitalise the Sydney end.
"Janine Purves, my wife, will be taking a much more active role," he confirmed. "She'll be based in Sydney, and I'm going to oversee the whole thing more from Melbourne.
"I'm taking my Sydney administrator Marie-Claire Courtin with me. She's the best personal assistant in the gallery world."
Purves has also appointed Stella Downer, who managed Macquarie Galleries for seven years, as his Sydney manager.
Australian Galleries was established in Melbourne in 1956 by Anne Purves(Stuart's mother) and her late husband Thomas, and has been a mainstay of the country's art establishment ever since.
But the Sydney gallery was Stuart Purves's initiative: "I started Sydney because I wanted to make a stroke in my own lifetime.
"Tim Storrier found this building for us, and Brett Whiteley designed it on the back of an envelope. Alexander Michael, the interior designer, then did all the detailing and we worked on it for 57 working weeks.
"It cost just under $600,000 to purchase - and we spent a good deal more than that again just doing it up. We realised we were over-capitalising, but we felt that wasn't the point.
"We had to spend the money - not only to get the sort of space we wanted, but also to demonstrate a commitment to Sydney."
That commitment was shaken earlier this year when John Olsen, after 20 years with Australian Galleries, went to Gene Sherman's nearby Goodhope Gallery.
"I certainly felt flat when John moved on," Purves said. "But there's life after Olsen and I wish him well."
Purves added he's ridden the "boom and bust", and that the art market has finally begun to stabilise.
"From 1986 to 1988 it went through the roof - and we all thought we were catching up with Europe and our hard work was paying off," he recalled.
"But what you found out was the money wasn't there. Like everything else, people were buying paintings with money they said they were going to make.
"So it all went over the top and we were just kidding ourselves.
"But the markets are like the oceans - they find their own level. And prices have come back to a level where everyone can participate."
Australian has Sydney shows planned for John Coburn, Daevida Allen and Justin O'Brien.
Caption: Illus: "Enough of airing of my emotions...." Stuart Purves to keep galleries going. Picture by MICHELE MOSSOP
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 26-5-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 675
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

INSIDE SYDNEY: At 26, William Barber has already seen 130 friends and acquaintances die from AIDS.
Two years ago Barber himself discovered he had the virus - and tonight at Newtown's Bare Gallery he'll open his first exhibition of paintings and poetry which tell of his experience.
"I want to show that, even though you have a terminal illness, there's always the opportunity to do more," he said yesterday.
"My art is straight from the heart. When a friend dies, that's when I paint or write.
"Or sometimes I'll paint a friend who has just found out they're HIV - to catch them when they're happy and healthy."
Barber painted one work the day he found he was going to die. He called it Diagnosis. "A couple of days later I was so depressed I ripped it to pieces," he said. "Since then I've stuck it back together, to show I've felt that way but worked through it."
The show chronicles not only the human impact of the AIDS pandemic , but one man's efforts to come to terms with it.
"I've lost so many friends to AIDS, and this work is about them," he said.
"At least when I die, there'll be a record of how somebody felt as they went through it.
"But the main reason I'm having the exhibition is to show those people who've helped me out of the doldrums, that their support has paid dividends."
People like Sister Noelene White of the Good Shepherd Community at Kings Cross.
"William is a person who's confronting HIV," said White. "He hasn't given up on life.
"Instead he's made the courageous move to bring something positive out of his situation.
"He's using his experience to educate others. He addresses adolescents and helps them understand that people with HIV are, first and foremost, people."
Barber believes his exhibition of vivid, semi-abstract works is premature. But he realises time is not on his side.
"I always thought I'd be a serious artist when I was 50 or 60," he said. "Now I know I'm not going to have the chance to get to that stage.
"I don't want to make people accept me. I just want them to understand."
Caption: Illus: Fighting on ... Artist William Barber with his dog Monty in front of his painting Headspace. Picture by ANDREW MEARES
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 25-5-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 480
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

Sarah Cottier's Newtown gallery, due to open later this year, is the talk of the Sydney gallery set - especially with the selection of one of her young stars, Hany Armanious, for the prestigious Venice Biennale next month.
Armanious is one of only five Australian artists ever selected for Venice.
Cottier had planned to stay quiet about her venture - not scheduled to open for six months yet - until her stable was finalised. But her hand has been forced by the selection of her hottest prospect for the 45th Venice Biennale.
Cottier told Inside Sydney yesterday: "Hany has been selected for Aperto, which functions as a platform for emerging artists under 40.
"It's very prestigious - and Hany was delighted, if bemused, when he found out."
Armanious's star is rising rapidly - his work has appeared in four major shows in the past year: the Sydney Biennale; Wit's End at the Museum of Contemporary Art; Shirthead at Mori Annexe; and Monster Field at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery.
Cottier described Armanious's work as disconcerting.
"Hany takes everyday objects directly around him and assembles them into a sophisticated, perverse personal index.
"His work ranges from the whimsical to the grotesque."
Cottier, a former editor of Interior Design magazine, left Yuill/Crowley Gallery last month.
The Sarah Cottier Gallery, as it will be known, will be based in the former smallgoods factory now used as a photographic studio by Cottier's business partner and husband, Ashley Barber.
"We see setting up in Newtown as taking the art to where the artists are,"Barber said.
"The art community is moving away from the city core," Cottier said. "When the Paddington galleries were setting up, there was a community there which supported them. But they've exited now."
With the Sydney art world undergoing a turbulent period of readjustment in the wake of the recession, rumours have been rife about who Cottier will be representing.
"The full picture will be clearer when I've massed a stable," she said. "But it will be small and focused - probably about eight to 10 artists."
Apart from Armanious, Barber confirmed that former Roslyn Oxley stal wart John Nixon had also made the move - a coup for the new gallery.
"We have five or six artists we're sure about, but John and Hany are the only two we can discuss at the moment," Barber said. "We don't want to be ruffling feathers at this point.
"Because of all the movement going on, it's not politically expedient to discuss it.
"However we're not offering artists huge financial incentives to come across to us. We're attracting people with a new context and focus, a new identity."
Caption: Illus: Sarah Cottier ... "The art community is moving away from the city."Picture by PETER RAE
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 20-5-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 565
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

INSIDE SYDNEY: The visiting Japanese filmmaker Keita Kurosaka has made a whirlwind visit to Sydney where he was special guest at Matinaze, a survey of independent films screening this month at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Kurosaka - a leading figure in Japanese independent film and a lecturer at Musashino University near Tokyo - said his first visit to Sydney had added a new dimension to his work.
The visiting Japanese filmmaker Keita Kurosaka has made a whirlwind visit to Sydney where he was special guest at Matinaze, a survey of independent films screening this month at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Kurosaka - a leading figure in Japanese independent film and a lecturer at Musashino University near Tokyo - said his first visit to Sydney had added a new dimension to his work.
"I am encouraged by Australians," he explained. "I have new confidence that my films can communicate with overseas people, rather than just for the Japanese.
"Back home people take my films very seriously and are too self-conscious to laugh.
"But here they laughed spontaneously - and the difference was very stimulating. It was a cheerful, open and lighthearted response."
However, the harbour city left Kurosaka with some curious impressions. "I am particularly surprised that the public toilets are so clean | In fact, your city is very clean and well-organised. But where are all the people? There are hardly any people |"
He explained his dazzling animations: "I want to give new possibilities to the things we take for granted. I want new angles on daily life."
While he acknowledged a debt to traditional Japanese ways, Kurosaka said"the past is not so important - we use what is good and ignore the rest. More and more in Japan, it is not past versus present but commercial versus non-commercial. TV has all the power in Japan."
Considering its population, Kurosaka said Japanese citizens give much less public support to independent cinema than Australians - and it showed in the confidence of our films and filmmakers.
"Your young filmmakers, their themes and styles are not rigid but more relaxed and smooth," he summed up.
The Matinaze screenings continue on Saturday with a program of Japanese films including Kurosaka's latest work The Age of Box.
Caption: Port: Keita Kurosaka explained that his Sydney visit would add a new dimension to his work. Picture by PAUL JONES
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 18-5-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 465
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

INSIDE SYDNEY: This year's Archibald, Wynne and Sulman exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW may have closed on Sunday, but the debate rages on.
Surprisingly, the controversy has not sprung from the Archibald, but from the Sulman prize for subject, genre and mural painting.
Under the bequest from Sir John Sulman, the gallery's trustees choose an artist to select the works and judge the winner of the $5,000 prize. This year, the painter Imants Tillers had the task of sifting through more than 600 works in just one day.
But while Tillers emerged in the 1980s to join the leading rank of Australian contemporary artists, his Sulman selection has triggered a major debate.
Many Sydney art world heavyweights took the show as a slap in the face.
"It is an outrage," said the Woollahra dealer Rex Irwin. "They were the worst possible pictures, most with little or no merit.
"It was an intellectual wank at the expense of those selected - and an insult to those who weren't."
Speaking from his Surry Hills gallery, Ray Hughes declared: "I don't know what Tillers is up to, but the Sulman's just becoming a haven for undergraduate art - for people more concerned with stacking their CVs."
Irwin added: "Perhaps Tillers used the opportunity to make a political statement. But that's not what a prize is all about.
"All it did was make a fool out of the art gallery."
But the director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Edmund Capon, said the criticism of Tiller's judging was "extraordinarily pretentious".
"One expects to see the signature of the curator to come through, and good on him too. I don't have a problem if we ruffle a few feathers," Capon retorted.
He noted that Tillers represented a radical choice on the part of the Gallery's trustees, but a necessary one.
"Imants represents a different breed, a younger generation who are very active, very established," Capon said.
"They have a voice, and a right to be heard alongside the views of those more mature members of the art world.
"Personally, I didn't much like the end product either. It was rather like a fascinating chamber of horrors, with some truly fairground pictures."
However, Annandale Galleries director Bill Gregory said he "found it quite a lot of fun because it was very subversive".
"I thought it was a send-up at first. But I realised he was trying to explode the whole concept of selecting, of being a judge."
Tillers, who is mounting a show in Latvia, could not be contacted by Inside Sydney for comment.
Sue-Anne Wallace, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay, believes this year's Sulman was "awkward", but that Tillers has, at least, shaken things up a bit.
"The Sulman is crucial to our artistic heritage," she said, "and one thing Tillers has done is make people think about the Sulman, about where it is going."
Caption: Port: Imants Tillers ... debate continues over the Sulman.
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 12-5-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 604
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

Aboriginal barrister Robert Bellear will receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Macquarie University this morning.
The award is in recognition of his professional and personal commitment to the advancement of his people.
"I'm sort of a doer rather than one who goes on about what he's done,"Bellear said last night. "But I'll certainly accept the award. It's not a token gesture, and I feel I've probably earned it."
Born in Murwillumbah, the eldest of nine children, Bellear left school early to help support his family, working as a mechanical engineer.
He graduated from the Law School at the University of NSW and was admitted to the NSW Bar in 1979.
From 1979 to 1983 he was a member of the NSW Corrective Services Advisory Committee and was appointed Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1987.
On behalf of the Northern Land Council he undertook a number of land rights cases for traditional owners.
Bellear co-founded the Aboriginal Housing Company in Redfern and worked as director of Redfern's Aboriginal Medical Service, Aboriginal Legal Service and Aboriginal Children's Service.
"It's the Year of Indigenous Peoples," he noted. "And people - both Aborigines and nonAborigines - have got to strive to educate each other in their respective cultures.
"While, slowly, there have been gains, Aborigines are still behind in education, health and housing to name just a few.
"But to gain a reasonable education, for example, one has to be mindful that kids have to go to school with a full stomach.
"Things are a lot better than they were 10 years ago, and multiculturalism has gone a long way towards bringing about equality.
"But I hasten to add there's still a long way to go."
Caption: Port: Bellear ... "sort of a doer".
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 29-4-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 393
---
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

Reeling from recent controversy at Australia's oldest commercial art dealer, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney's art world has been besieged with calls to get its act together.
"We all think the art world has this patina of gentility about it. But it doesn't," leading arts lawyer Shane Simpson told Inside Sydney. "It's not about chardonnay - it's about getting paid."
Bought by Eileen Chanin in 1978, Macquarie Galleries has been embroiled in acrimonious claims and counter claims about the use of artists'proceeds - and the brouhaha has renewed calls for commercial galleries to adopt more conventional business practices.
Australian Commercial Galleries Association chairman Frank Watters, OAM, owner of Watters Gallery in Darlinghurst, is moving to address the problem.
"Anyone we thought was guilty of malpractice has been dropped from the association," explained Watters, who's in the process of reviewing the group's guidelines for membership.
While he wouldn't cite the offending galleries, he did maintain it was the artists' responsibility to hold their dealers to account.
"You had everyone bitching away. But when we set up an ethics committee, we couldn't get a single artist to file a complaint," he noted.
"And what you often find is there's no clear understanding between the artist and the gallery in the first place.
"But we are taking steps. I feel quite optimistic, and I wouldn't have said that a year ago."
Simpson, however, believes the only answer is legislation: "Self-regulation might boost the reputation of the industry.
"But there'd be no enforcement of any guidelines, and not every gallery is a member of the association."
Ian Collie, director of Sydney's Arts-Law Centre in Woolloomooloo, advocates use of trust accounts and written contracts, and is organising a public forum on the issue.
"There's no reason why an artist-gallery relationship should be any different to that of a solicitor-client or a real estate agent-landlord," he said.
"Moneys held by agents should be kept in trust and not be made available for cash flow."
As for contracts, Collie claimed the visual arts were the only branch of the arts not to embrace the written agreement.
"They are the norm in music, film, theatre, almost everywhere," he said. "But visual arts people still rely on the good old verbal contract."
However, Frank Watters disagrees: "Contracts just don't work in these situations.
"We've never had a contract with an artist in 30 years, and our record as an agent would be unparalleled."
Inside Sydney surveyed other Sydney members of the Australian Commercial Galleries Association on their attitudes to trust accounts and written contracts.
* Gisella Scheinberg OAM, director of Holdsworth Galleries, Woollahra: "I couldn't care less about trust accounts. I never use anybody else's money. I have plenty in the bank.
"I tell the artist my policy, but I don't believe in contracts. You can't tie down artists. It doesn't go with the artist mentality. Anyway, you can't sue them, they haven't got anything."
* Brian Hooper, manager of Coventry Gallery, Paddington: "All arrangements here are by verbal contract. As for people jumping around saying 'trust account, trust account' - they involve legal and commercial obligations which require extra expense.
"The artist has ultimate power in any artist-gallery relationship: they can withdraw."
* Lin Bloomfield, of Bloomfield Galleries, Paddington: "We're not selling washing machines. It's a very personal relationship between an artist and a gallery. I've been representing some artists for 20 years and I've never had a written contract.
"We do keep trust accounts, but I don't think they're necessary. Where the trust comes into it is between the artist and the gallery."
* Robin Gibson, Robin Gibson Gallery, Darlinghurst: "Half our artists are in the red. We advance them money and pay things in advance for them - such as framing and so on. I don't know how one would work this if one couldn't dip into the account to actually pay it.
"But I know if I didn't pay my artists in time, they'd be screaming. And I've seen what were otherwise good relationships come to grief over contracts. I'd rather take the risk that the artist will stick by me, as I'm prepared to stick by him."
* Roslyn Oxley, Roslyn Oxley Gallery: "We've set up trust accounts for artists mainly on commissions. But we make it our business to pay up front, and quickly, so we don't have much need for them. And often we extend money to the artist and they owe us.
"A lot of people pay off paintings, which complicates it further. We have had contracts, but there's no point in a contract if an artist doesn't want to work with you."
* Rex Irwin, Rex Irwin Gallery, Woollahra: "I don't use trust accounts and I will do what I've always done. Our reputation is still fine. I'm against regulation in principle.
"Making lots of rules and regulations won't help. It hasn't in any other business, has it? I don't believe you can teach people ethics.
"But let's not be too hard on the art world. I don't think greed is a disease peculiar to us.
"It's shake-out time from all that excess of the 1980s. And in the end we'll be left with the people who were there in the first place - because they're the ones that aren't in it for the money."
Caption: Illus: Frank Watters outside his gallery. Picture by DEAN SEWELL
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 22-4-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 1030
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

(USA 1989;dist: Newvision Film; rt 104 mins)

Mystic Pizza has modest aspirations: it aims to draw the viewer's identification only, it seems, for the film's duration. Beyond that it enters the realm of the forgettable: that ever-growing catalogue of 'films-I-have-seen'. Rack up another one. Get ready for the next.
Not that this viewer's identification was ever held with gay abandon. Mystic Pizza plays out a string of Hollywood cliches all aimed at clinching the sale - ie.getting you to love the characters and be right in there gunning for the predictably happy outcome to their trials. This is a feel-good-again movie, where everyone's happy by film's end, leaving you with a feeling in your stomach like too much cheesecake.
Lip service has been paid to '80s shifts in mores - there's swearing, open talk of contraception, the central characters are all women, etc. But that's where contemporaneity ends - it's all 'seek and ye shall find', 'diligence will be rewarded', 'follow your feelings', like some scripted version of Snakes and Ladders. And, like a dutiful daughter, the film effaces it's technical performance directing the viewer to transparently concentrate on the story.
To be fair, the film isn't irredeemable: it is well paced, cinematography is of a high standard, all the actors try hard and are, indeed likeable, but, really, this film is made for Americans, who really go for this sort of thing. However, if life-decisions, blossoming adulthood, and sexual awakening among the post-pubescent of a fishing village in New England sounds like fun to you then Mystic Pizza is recommended. Others might find the pastry thiick with too much cheese buried under layers of overcooked ham.
-Michael Hutak

First published in Filmnews

Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington, Sydney.
August 16-September 10, 1989.

...In Gallery Two a young artist, Michael Hutak is showing World View, which consists of a 20-minute video plus several photographs taken from it. These photos have been enlarged via colour photocopies and applied to canvas.
Hutak's footage from such sources as Hollywood religious epics, crime and spy movies, and even an interview with the Pop artist, Andy Warhol, is spliced together, and then recombined, using a sound track often at variance with the images.
This results in an amusing, terrifying or enigmatic juxtaposition.
One scene of a plane on fire and crashing towards the ground is repeated obsessively, giving it a nightmarish quality. Asked if his work was a comment on postmodernism, Hutak said: "It's bubble-gum postmodernism. Lots of postmodernism is about overload and the death of meaning. I want the images to look definitive but escape a definitive meaning at the same time." The work is powerful, and, although slogans emblazoned on it appear to provide the images with a superficial didacticism, on closer examination the idea of a straight forward interpretation fades and the signs make a slippery escape.
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Byline: CAROLE HAMPSHIRE
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 24-8-1989