Wilderness @ AGNSW

For all of the galleries that cluster in particular Sydney neighbourhoods, amidst posh terraces or polished concrete warehouse conversions, there is precious little evidence of contemporary artists, in particular painters, at work in our few public galleries. It's a great shame. No matter what their best intentions the showrooms, and that is what they are, of commercial galleries are scary places and it would be disingenuous to believe that a casual engagement with art is likely to flourish into something more serious under the gaze of hawkish gallerinas. As a result the public conversation around art is limited to travelling blockbusters and celebrity portraits.

It's good to see 'Wilderness' a show of contemporary painting supported by The Balnaves Foundation at Sydney's AGNSW. The show's title is a little misleading, the common thread between these fourteen Australian artists is not the landscape per se but figurative painting. That might sound like a pretty loose thread, but it's unusual and refreshing enough.

Ground is overlapped between the various works, both in terms of theme and pictorial style. One tendency is a certain airbrushed sfumato used to render naturalist images flat and graphic. This is a technique shared here by both Andrew Browne and Mary Scott. Browne is represented by three large monochrome images of dead branches and detritus. Each is picked out in a chalky bone palette on a deep black ground. The images are suggestive of other things, animal skulls, faces, contorted limbs. However they are more reminiscent of a gothic Howard Arkley, their closest relation being the sinister enchanted forests of the Grimm's tales. Mary Scott's hummingbirds are similarly less interesting than their backstory. The large flat surfaces look like they could be rendered on a giant LCD screen as over sized birds come out of ghostly camouflage. It's somehow unsatisfactory and reminded me of giant canvas prints of frangipane flowers that you see in homeware shops. Of this fuzzy tendency the strongest showing by far is that of Fiona Lowry. Her forests are rendered dreamlike by one or two colours on a white ground in a feather light paint. One piece in particular "They come to me days and nights and go from me again" is compelling in its otherworldly directness. A full length image of a bearded naked man seems to hover in an hallucinatory forest. His head thrown back in a kind of ecstatic surrender he might be related to the saints of Zurbaran or Rinera or he may simply be an old man liberated from the world. It's an arresting and memorable work.

The show also contains a lot of pop-art psychedelia which is more eye-catching than it is interesting. Alex Pittendrigh's big swirly canvasses look less like inner distorted visions and more like an hommage to hippy album covers and tie-dye posters and, as such, pretty pointless. More worthy of consideration, but no less ugly, are Stephen Bush's day-glo fantasia's of melting ecology. "Shout on the Hills of Glory" presents a children's book log cabin amidst dripped and dragged masses of glossy paint. It's heavy handed and not accomplished enough to convey much more meaning than 'look at me'. It's not a huge surprise that work like this should be included, it's a distorted view of landscape painting. However that oppositional stance doesn't really ring true. Landscape painting, whether the chocolate box variety or something more academic is fairly peripheral to the established canon of contemporary art, so it's a pretty soft target. The size of the works too betrays an exhibitionism that has overcome any real insight or sensibility.

On artist, well represented here, who has taken on a range of pictorial conventions and created something genuinely moving and stimulating is Julie Fragar. A series of works here show a man, the same in each, posing with the carcasses of animals he has killed whilst hunting. The images range in size and colour, each is painted in a loose impressionistic way, catching a sense of immediacy and drama. Each too may well simply be copies of trophy photographs, for the pose in each is familiar from those magazines such as 'Bacon Busters' or 'Boars and Babes' that are so often the object of internet mirth. Some images are then painted over with cryptic slogans, that never quite obscure the scene beneath. What makes these interesting is the blank expression of the hunter, his face a little bewildered, slightly suspicious. It's not a patronising rendering, it manages to be sympathetic, but it seems to represent an existential emptiness, perhaps even a suppressed dread. These are very good, very thoughtful and intellectually subtle works.

Less easily explained but fascinating and charming, is James Morrison's polyptych 'Freeman Dyson' A man who might be clad in moss has fallen to earth, perhaps from space, maybe from another time. The piece has the same obsessive detail and illustrative quality one sometimes finds in outsider art. It shows a hyper-real world where details are so clearly rendered they seem to be demanding our attention. It's a strange and charming experience this imaginary portrait of a quantum physicist and futurist who is now in his nineties. Its real achievement is not the narrative and interpretative possibilities it opens up but how strange and magical it makes a mundane landscape seem through its almost molecular detail.

It shouldn't be a surprise that so much of the most interesting work here is that which casts strange new light on people and their experience and perception of the world around them. Louise Hearman's beautiful and disturbing little canvasses might remind us of the dreams of Magritte or the nightmares of Goya but they work very specifically in their own way. She isolates faces, objects and animals in fields of darkness or oddly lit landscapes. The work has a surreal sensibility but is suggestive rather than explicit, it begs questions but it's never quite clear what those questions might be. Her use of nature is effective because the subtle naturalism helps achieve that disjointed dream like association. The work is beautiful and uncomfortable, which seems appropriate for a show called 'Wilderness' as our relationship to nature hasn't been and isn't always easy. Hearman shows how we internalise nature in order to articulate things for which we have no other vocabulary, how our interiors are every bit as strange and picturesque as the world around us.

On Printmaking in the age of Romanticism @ AGNSW

There's a blue and pumping vein of individualism that has run through the artistic movements that have left their mark most clearly on our culture. The Renaissance presented the objective truth of the individual at the centre of art it gave bodies the dignity of singularity. Abstract Expressionists claimed the ultimate ascendancy of the individual's interior world and painted its mucky birthing into the external. Romanticism bloomed with the celebration of subjectivity, our selves governed the world as we experienced it and its meaning comes from how we see it. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales's exhibition 'Printmaking in the Age of Romanticism' we see how a subjective view of the world, where the land and the elements become expressions of our inner selves, was also an attempt to make sense of life in an uncertain world.

At either end of this of the lush red walled space created for the exhibition is a reminder that romanticism had some of itsroots deep and dark in the revival of the gothic. In the first room William Blake wrenches the tombs of Westminster Abbey that he saw as a boy into sinuous life, whilst Fuseli lifts the curtain on a dark pre-Freudian life of English literature. At the end sits the Charles Meryon's 'Vampire' and the Paris Morgue. This look over the shoulder back to the awesome certainties of a medieval world came at a time of massive social and economic change, as the industrial revolution rolled out of the heart of England. Romanticism sat across a period where radical politics confronted economic upheaval. Subsequently it is far more complex than it is often presented. The gothic strain is less a nostalgia and more a search for precedent and universal values to apply to the present in the past. The nature worship and sublimity of landscape is an external echo of the power of humanity and imagination

Nature looms large (and there is always an awful lot of looming in Turner) and another key theme here is the romantic longing for the pastoral. William Blake uses Virgil's pastoral's as jumping off points for a series of minute stylized wood engravings that present a very English paradise. Edward Calvert's series of tiny jewel like images hark back to a mythical England, a pre-lapsarian innocence. 'The Chamber Idyll' is sgriking in its modesty and guileless eroticism. Framed by beams that almost provide a proscenium there is a tremendous sense of voyeurism as we see a woman undress for her lover, around are symbols of passion and fecundity. This small exquisitely engraved piece is worth the visit alone.

The work of William Blake is always at least fascinating. His line filled figures are like El Greco's, pure spirit captured in flesh whilst, even if his personal symbology is opaque to viewers today, its drama is undeniable. The selections hear from 'The Book of Job' represent him perfectly, bordered with text, some biblical, some his own composition they show an absolutely vital spiritual ques, a negotiation between the Old Testament and a personal visionary mythology. Job's story is of faith and patience in the face of Satan, this is a strong point of identification for Blake and the personal gives these enormous power. What is most striking here is Blake's technique, eschewing stippling or shading he works in pure line and this gives a dynamism that almost makes the paper twist and clench.

There is evidence of both the literary and the fantastic throughout the exhibition. These prints are often narrative, taking their subjects from the Pantheon of English literature Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. These often feel like the most dated and least compelling work (although we ought to remember that their narrative function means that success or otherwise can be achieved through different criteria than those we apply today). Fuseli's grotesqueries look like English literature's greatest hits. In rendering Shakespeare and Milton so vividly he renders it literal, and as a result it looks one dimensional, there are also oddly jarring moments, like the hilariously English looking Miranda in his Tempest picture His paintings, with their smokey blackness hide, and subsequently provoke, more. The Miltonian work of John Martin is similarly dramatic whilst being oddly unmoving. His hell looks like one designed by Albert Speer (and his Babylon cold be a collaboration between DW Griffith and Saddam Hussein) and the sheer blackness of the work shows us why we think of dark as inky. The problem with the deployment of typically romantic technique in these literal contexts is the loss of the power of suggestion, subsequently Fuseli and Martin feel like curiosities.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the show is the presentation of Turner's prints in their different states, in particular 'Dartmouth Cove' this is less of technical interest but a powerful example of the romantic ethic. The twin states of Turner's pastoral landscapes, in particular are an illustration of both technique and meaning. In the earlier etching his lines are crisp and descriptive, in the second state he applies a layer of darkness, that comes over like the dark forebodings of a coastal storm. It is more than meteorological, the darkness takes is a layer of meaning, the picnickers are threatened, Turner feels and sees turmoil. This is how landscape becomes personal and symbolic.

Print is a comparatively egalitarian art form, these images here could be disseminated widely and would have an enormous impact on visual culture. It is important to remember that so many of the artists of the period were politically committed and active and often the romantic themes of the historic and the pastoral were intrinsically linked to calls for natural justice to be restored or declarations of the dignity of working people. This political expression is most clearly visible in the endlessly inventive satires of Honoré Daumier. In the lithograph 'Bring Down The Curtain this Farce is Over' a Comédie Francaise clown is about to put and end to a parliamentary sitting. It's worth remembering when contemporary artists talk about transgression that in Paris in 1834 sedition was life-threatening and this period was bookended by two revolutions.

The exhibition is composed of French and English artists, which form the gallery's holdings this is a shame that the scope could not have been expanded with loans, the contrast between this present and German artists would have been interesting. Of course the one of the greatest artists of the period also was the supreme printmaker and it would have been a coup to bring in Goya's tortured, wry and pessimistic Spanish Romanticism into the mix. However there is extraordinary work here and it allows us to see how a movement developed in response to a changing world and used the resources of history and nature to try to assert man's place, it's a good story.

On Patricia Piccinini

Nothing should work about the art of Patricia Piccinini.  Her special effects mutation sculptures ought to be kitsch, their appeal to the post-structuralist theories of gender, identity and biology politics ought to obscure any deep felt response and their confrontinal transgression (or at the very least the fact that you can use such a phrase about them) should set off all sorts of artwank alarm bells.  Somehow none of this is true and in 'Evolution', a retrospective exhibition in Hobart's Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, she makes a deep appeal for cerebral, visceral and emotional connection.

Piccinini has a very particular practice.  She creates sculptures, and also short films, drawings and photographs, that have a special effect like level of realism (most reminiscent of Ron Mueck's experiments with scale) even as they represent impossible mutations between human figures and pigs, reptiles or apes.  It sounds awful (and I mean 'bad', not simply repellent), but the figures manage to avoid being beautifully executed freakshow exhibits.  Once inside this feels a long way away from vogueish shlock and I found myself moving through deep felt and often contradictory responses.  A typically moving piece is 'The Long Awaited', on a bench a boy seems to fall asleep with the head of a wrinkled, grey haired, naked sea creature cradled in his lap.  It is achingly affecting, the creature with her wrinkled dugs might be Tiresias or an ancient mermaid, but she also exudes an immense weight that might be resignation or peace.  The boy too is ambiguous, his features hint at Down's Syndrome but the most striking figure is the way his tiny hand cradles the creature's immense head.  'The Long Awaited' speaks eloquently of acceptance and benediction, there is something wrenching in its grace.

Tasmania, with its singular and sometimes mythologized zoology, is a perfectly eery home for Piccinini's work.  'Evolution' is interwoven into the fabric of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.  A room with thylacine remains and a massive diorama of native wildlife (much of it unique to the island) serves as the ante-room to the exhibition, which has already colonised its displays.  In a newly polluted diorama (where manmade garbage sits between Tasmanian devils and wallabies) a contorted shark like figure that could be plucked from Dante's inferno, 'Bottom Feeder', appears to scavenge for rubbish.  Elsewhere museum staff carry pink and hairy baby creatures in black slings.

The most striking, not only physically but also for its mixture of resonance and quiet, is a room sized diorama called 'Perhaps the world is fine tonight'.  It creates the illusion of a mountain top at night, overhead fly a pair of eagles carrying, like perverted storks, a scrotal mass of flesh.  Below a girl is asleep, perhaps, on a stone that in its altar-like flatness suggests she may even be a sacrifice, it might be one of Goya's 'Caprichos' rendered in fur and fibreglass.  She has neatly removed her shoes and seems at peace for around her she is watched over by a host of curious timid Tasmanian devils.  For once, in the representation of these marsupials, no fang is bared and they appear at once solicitous and concerned at what this intruder in duck egg blue might be.  The whole work is shadowed with unease, we ought to feel uncomfortable, and yet the sense of peace and acceptance in the face of the alien and sinister (and I think that so much of Piccinini's work is about our need to accept the other and the difficulties that we face in doing so) creates a welling sense of optimism.  

Piccinini's world is not a version of 'E.T.' where here mutants are pedalled off into the moon glow by some plucky curatorial staff.  'Evolution' has been skillfully curated so that we first walk through pain, suspicion and anxiety, the world is not always a happy one for these creatures.  One, in the video piece 'When my baby (when my baby)' is not much more than the bunched and crinkled brow of orang-utan fur seen through a veil of tears.  

One of Piccinini's best known works, 'Big Mother' follows.  A naked neanderthal-like woman, as much baboon as human, but for her pink vulnerability, suckles a human child whilst hunched warily, one club like hand hanging down a reminder of animal power.  Beside her are two pieces of pale blue luggage, they hint that she might be displaced, a refugee from something awful, certainly a stranger in a strange land.  For all her strangeness, her shell like spinal column forcing through her skin, the mandril like cheeks we still look for anthropomorphic points of connection and we find them in her eyes.  She looks into the mid-distance, not quite at ease and familiar enough for us to wish to take the fear away.

Much of the effect and affect of the work in 'Evolution' comes from a dislocation of our expectations, children ought to be afraid of things with claws and an exoskeleton.  By the time we reach 'Undivided', where the creature from under the bed (and from the equally vulnerable piece 'Surrogate') might have climbed into it to join in a tender protective cuddle.  Again the scaly textures come up against pale blue (the key colour, with fleshy pink, in Piccinini's palette) flannelette and it is hard to say which is the most vulnerable or yielding.  

Piccinini's extraordinarily detailed sculpture renders flesh realistically, to the point where veins break through, hair bristles and wounds weep.  The realism is emotional as well as physical.  Pre-teen children, human or not, are a constant throughout.  The point of vulnerability is obvious but no less effective. This is not necessarily art about childhood or motherhood, although both are here and illustrate themes well.  Childhood represents an assumption of the ability of children to accept the 'other' prior to social conditioning, their responses are direct and unmediated.  Similarly motherhood represents a point of transformation and anxiety, 'Evolution' in practice.

There is so much flawed, tender and confused humanity in 'Evolution' that it easily transcends most conceptual art.  There a plethora of technological and theoretical collisions that the work passes through, but this is not an exhibition about mutation.  Piccinini shows that through contact and exposure humans can evolve to accept one another, that peace and comfort come from engagement.  This is basic but true, and it is why this exhibition is essential.

On Yinka Shonibare @ The MCA

Walking through the Yinka Shonibare retrospective at Sydney's MCA you have the overwhelming sense of something clever being done, you know this because you're told it repeatedly.  This comes less from the content of the works than the context, "the legacy of European colonialism, class structures and social justice" as its themes are described is serious stuff.  Who wants to be on the wrong side of the fence on any of those?  There's an awful lot of biography that you're asked to ingest with Shonibare, Anglo-African childhood, boarding schools, paralysis, somehow all of these formative influences give meaning and depth to what's presented within the show.  All this feels oddly manipulative as though we're being given the parameters of how to interpret this art before we get a chance to encounter it.

The first piece you come across in the MCA is 'The Swing (after Fragonard)' a lifesize tableau of the central figure in Jean-Honoré Fragonard's 1767 rococo masterwork "Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette' .  We see a woman in full flight on a swing, her ancien regime tuille dress rendered in a bright African fabric.  Around her is an arc of greenery that hints at the mise en scene of the of then original.  The most important deviation is that the mannequin is headless, something variously accounted for as a premonition of the guillotine or a device to render race and identity inscrutably ambiguous.  And that's it.  It's big and it's bright and it's about art and it looks meaningful.

The subsequent rooms deliver much the same, the biggest space taken up by 'Gallantry and Criminal Coversation' a piece made up of a full size carriage suspended overhead and groups of lifesize mannequins (again dressed in eighteenth century European costume tailored from African 'Dutch wax' fabric).  The headless mannequins are variously sucking and fucking one another in groups of two or three.  The effect is a little sexy and a lot comical.  What it surely isn't is thought provoking, it looks like exactly what you'd expect an trying to be smart and shocking to produce.

The large scale video work 'Un Ballo in Maschera' has a far greater capacity to charm, each sigh and breath of fabric, the imperfect choreography and the ritualised motions are all entrancing.  The air is heavy with the trappings of meaningful silence but I was left wondering if this was just a case of taking the Africanised aristrocratic costumes to another historical locale, no further meaning or understanding has been added, it's just his 'thing'.

For all it's appearance of profundity and smart alec emptiness the show is beautiful, the Goya pastiche of 'The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa)' is technically accomplished in a CGI way but for once, however heavy handed it might be, I make a connection between Goya's sly hymn to the Enlightenment and the nightmares it brought to the native people of various colonies.

Clever and sensual as they are the show lacks even a hint of empathy and that's the problem.  Shonibare's work must look good on a critic's laptop, but it's devoid of the human, the art historical reference screams 'important' but the ever present quotation marks suck out much of the feeling.  The net effect of all those decapitated mannequins is to deprive us of any point of connection, we see a point made over and over again and the initially sumptuous installations quickly become banal, like someone has locked a wannabe Duchamp in Madame Tussaud's. 

Post-modern conceptual art fetishises paradox, here Shonibare is disappointingly predictable, it presents conflicting signs, removed from context by scale or placement and expects us to applaud its insight and audacity.  Of course the revolutionary value of irony is questionable in a culture like ours, it's a devalued currency and the more often we see it used as a proxy for insight the less effective it is.  The problem with the work in this show is that once the basic paradox is established: the meaning of works from the western canon changes when they come into contact with African subjects, that's pretty much it, the insight remains visual and theoretical,  juxtaposition sets up an intellectual conundrum but never touches on anything human.

In the end I'm not sure it matters.  Just the size of these works tell you that they're made for galleries, they're anything other than personal.  The exhibition as a whole ticks off just about everything that makes the art establishment feel good about itself: subversive sex, post-colonial angst, art history with a knowing wink and big flashy installations.  I don't doubt that Shonibare has an interesting point of view on the shifting cultural plates between Africa and Europe but these trite appropriations look more like a very knowing artist feeding critics a series of art-theory soundbites in the confidence that they'll always bite.