Soft power: ‘Antipodean Stories’ in Milan

AUSTRALIA. Antipodean Stories, exhibition installation view, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan, 2019–20, with the work of Patricia Piccinini, Fiona Hall, Judy Watson and Jill Orr; image courtesy the artists and PAC, Milan; photo: Nico Covre Vulcano

Milan is one of Europe’s most vibrant cities, and the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea is its centrally located contemporary art space. Its annual program includes solo projects by major Italian and international artists – Tania Bruguera is upcoming – and in recent years has focused on a series of exhibitions of contemporary art from specific nations. It is in this context that the current exhibition ‘AUSTRALIA. Antipodean Stories’ (until 9 February) is presented to Italian audiences.

Guest curator Eugenio Viola has invited 32 artists and collectives, of different cultural backgrounds, interests and experience to participate: Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Khadim Ali, Brook Andrew, Richard Bell, Daniel Boyd, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Barbara Cleveland, Destiny Deacon, Hayden Fowler, Marco Fusinato, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Julie Gough, Fiona Hall, Dale Harding, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Archie Moore, Callum Morton, Tom Nicholson (with Greg Lehman), Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Patricia Piccinini, Stuart Ringholt, Khaled Sabsabi, Yhonnie Scarce, Soda_Jerk, Dr Christian Thompson AO, James Tylor, Judy Watson, Jason Wing and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. Viola worked with many of these artists while he was Senior Curator at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and he travelled widely during his two years based in Australia. He is now Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Bogotá in Colombia.

‘Antipodean Stories’ does not present an overriding theme or statement; rather, Viola’s curatorial approach encourages conversations between works and meaningful juxtapositions. He is interested in practices that reflect the diversity of cultural, political and social perspectives in Australia, informed by current thinking and everyday realities. The exhibition assembles a strong representation of artists whose works examine a range of concerns such as race, identity, gender and class; colonisation and its legacies; national issues of history, knowledge and agency; and contested stories and suppressed narratives. Many of the artists critically engage with social and political issues; others draw more broadly on conceptual, linguistic and performative approaches. The exhibition unfolds with meaningful connections from room to room. Several works were made specifically for Milan, and the program includes performances by Fusinato, Parr and Ringholt, screenings of Soda_Jerk’s TERROR NULLIUS (2018), workshops, talks and roundtable discussions. A major publication features photographic documentation of the installations and performances.

Here, artists of all disciplines lead the critical inquiry, enlisting their individual circumstances, histories and intellectual rigour in the service of cultural provocation. ‘Antipodean Stories’ reflects on themes that invariably relate to an Australian context; yet in times of international ‘soft power’ – including artist projects that specifically address the state of society and the world – the exhibition transcends the local and resonates globally.

Judith Blackall is an independent curator and writer. She contributed a catalogue essay for ‘AUSTRALIA. Antipodean Stories’ and travelled to Milan for the exhibition installation and opening.

Resonance: Fiona Foley at the National Art School

Fiona Foley: Who are these strangers and where are they going?, exhibition installation view, National Art School (NAS), Sydney, 2020; image courtesy NAS, Sydney; photo: Peter Morgan

Fiona Foley’s last survey exhibition to be seen in Sydney was in 2009–10 with ‘Forbidden’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. A decade later, ‘Who are these strangers and where are they going?’ at the National Art School (until 8 February) includes her most recent work that describes the depth of her interest in Queensland’s vexed histories and their control of Aboriginal people, as well as photographic series and installations since 1984. Her largest series of photographs, ‘Horror Has A Face’ (2017), acknowledges her family connection to the Bogimbah Mission (on K’gari/Fraser Island). It tells the story of the failure of this colonial intervention, exposing the power imbalances that existed between Aboriginal people and their ‘protectors’, and the role of opium in enslaving the Aboriginal population.

‘Who are these strangers …?’ premiered at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale last year. It was shown in Ballarat’s historic mining hall, a building with high warehouse ceilings and small anterooms along the side. More works are presented in Sydney, with a smaller footprint that in many ways tightens its delivery.

It opens with Foley’s new film Out of the Sea Like Cloud (2019), which tells the first contact story between Badtjala people on K’gari/Fraser Island who witnessed the passage of Captain Cook’s Endeavour past Takky Wooroo/Indian Head. The film segues into a colonial opium den, then conducts the lead character through a dreamlike passage where he wakes on K’gari to reclaim his place, innocence and sanity. The words of the song echo the film’s hypnotic mix of reality and fantasy throughout the exhibition spaces, with works that discuss opium on the ground level, and those more focused on identity and racism upstairs.

It is the (literally) shifting ground (with corn, carpets and oyster shells on the floor) of what curator Djon Mundine refers to as Foley’s ‘memory, truth and consciousness’ that is most evident in the exhibition. While it highlights the consistent conceptual core of Foley’s art, the soundtrack of the film gives the work an emotional resonance which is hard to resist. Her ongoing challenge to the ways in which Aboriginal people have been represented, and wresting back control to narrate a different story (drawn from Queensland’s archives) build powerfully. Foley’s ‘Badtjala Woman’ photographic series of 1994, featuring herself in the guise of one of her ancestors, is a reminder of how well she has delivered a resonant image – always.

Louise Martin-Chew, Sydney

Symphonic: Robert Klippel at TarraWarra

ASSEMBLED: The Art of Robert Klippel, exhibition installation view, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2019–20; courtesy the Robert Klippel Estate, represented by Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney, and Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich; ? Andrew Klippel; photo: Andrew Curtis

Stepping into ‘ASSEMBLED’, the current survey of Robert Klippel’s vast range of sculptures, drawings and collages at TarraWarra Museum of Art in Melbourne’s Yarra Valley, is a bit like walking into a concert hall with the orchestra playing at full pitch. There are the deep booms of the timpani and the smaller lighter notes of flute and triangle, with the overall rhythm and movement of the piece pushing through space with all the power of a steam train – to unashamedly mix metaphors in the same way as Klippel would mix found objects with the industrial processes that had long ago first breathed life into them. Tiny clothes peg-like sculptures of twisted metal and multicoloured wire are lined up in vitrines, casting faint shadows like a faux army of miniature terracotta warriors. Contrast them with the monumental sculptures assembled from found objects, and parts of other objects, often silhouetted against the rolling green Healesville landscape outside that, under blue skies, presses in for a closer look through the large plate-glass windows, high as a double-decker bus.

These ‘Great Wood Sculptures’ – as Geoffrey Legge, co-founder of Watters Gallery in Sydney and longtime friend of the artist, calls them – really dominate TarraWarra’s lofty gallery spaces. They astonish. Legge likens Klippel’s vocabulary of forms to Shakespeare. Deborah Edwards is another big fan. She curated Klippel’s major exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2002 (he died in June of the previous year). In her biographical notes for the catalogue essay we discover much of the backstory to his personal grammar, syntax and Shakespearean breadth: there is his childhood in Sydney’s Potts Point with its daily changing landscape of merchant and naval vessels; and his early training and employment in the wool industry (his family had a textile business). Later, after working on a minesweeper during the Second World War, he lived and worked in London (befriending James Gleeson), Paris (he came to know André Breton and the remaining circle of surrealists) and New York (also inspiring a generation of students at the Minneapolis School of Art).

Klippel was 42 before he had his first solo exhibition in Sydney at Clunes Gallery, returning to Australia in 1962 with a container of 19 ‘junk metal’ sculptures. Eventually, over the following decades, his output would total over 1200 sculptures and countless drawings and collages. When I view these at TarraWarra, I am reminded by turns of Luna Park fairgrounds and the inspirational sculptures of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Klippel, however, went beyond the experiments of this seminal twentieth-century artist when he declared in 1945: ‘sculpture must be revolutionised without the figure.’

Kirsty Grant, the formidable curator of this exhibition, has for my money created one of the highlights of the 2020 season so far, taking us deeper into the experimentation and the craft that went into Klippel’s late twentieth-century sunburst of creativity.

Peter Hill, Healesville

A significant Streeton rediscovery: 'The Grand Canal' (1908)

Arthur Streeton, The Grand Canal, 1908, oil on canvas, 93 x 169cm (36.61 x 66.54in); private collection; photo: Glen Watson

The Grand Canal (1908) by Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) has remained in one family’s ownership for over a century, mostly out of public circulation, and not featured in major Streeton publications. Until now, the provenance of the picture, its date and title, have been unresolved.

The rediscovery and identification of this picture is made all the more remarkable by the work being one of Streeton’s larger and more important paintings. His Venetian series is leading in his oeuvre, and this work is core among the Venetian paintings, in both scale and accomplishment. Streeton honeymooned in Venice in May 1908, and visited again in October of that year. Of 85 catalogue entries in 1908, when most of Streeton’s Venetian works were painted, 78 works are Venetian scenes.

The view in this painting is similar to that in paintings by Canaletto and other greats, including Canaletto’s The Grand Canal looking South from Ca’ Foscari to the Carità (c. 1726–27). On 8 October 1908, in a letter to Baldwin Spencer, Streeton wrote: ‘… I’ve painted on 66x36 from the top of Palazzo Foscari – commanding a fine view of the Grand Canal.’ (See Ann Galbally and Anne Gray, Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890–1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 114.) The stretcher size corresponds exactly to the newly identified work.

This research unearthing The Grand Canal (1908) is timely: informing the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) of the existence of the work has seen its inclusion in their forthcoming exhibition ‘Streeton’, which opens in September 2020. AGNSW Director Michael Brand describes it as ‘the most important painting in the selection of Venetian subject works from 1908’. The painting was last shown at AGNSW for the ‘Loan Exhibition of the Works of Arthur Streeton’ in 1931–32. Since then, it appears not to have shown until 2016 and 2018, in exhibitions curated by the writer. It was not included in the ‘Arthur Streeton Memorial Exhibition’ of 1944, where up to 11 of 135 Streeton artworks exhibited were Venetian scenes.

Publication of this finding brings the painting to public attention now in late 2019 following two other Streeton paintings having re-emerged into circulation in the past five years. In 2016, And the Sunlight Clasps the Earth (1895) was rediscovered in a private collection in Tasmania after around 120 years out of view, and Ariadne (1895) was largely unseen in a private collection in Sydney for 70 years until its 2014 sale.

The painting is no. 346 in The Arthur Streeton Catalogue of 1935, one of two major Grand Canal works listed. The picture can be so identified principally through a visual record of the alternate Grand Canal picture, no. 365, owned by Robert Mond of Sussex (1867–1938) which was printed in the 1919 publication The Art of Arthur Streeton and titled The Grand Canal Venice (exhibited in 1908 at the New English Art Club). Arthur Sydney Baillieu (father of artist Sunday Reed) is established as the owner of The Grand Canal (1908) both with the purchase confirmation that I have found through Streeton’s letters (Baillieu acquired the work from the Victorian Artists Society exhibition ‘Mr Streeton’s pictures’ in June 1914 – see Galbally and Gray, p. 133), and by the painting’s exhibition at AGNSW in 1931–32 as I have discovered from a label on the painting’s verso.

There are no large Grand Canal works documented by Streeton in 1927, when a smaller picture Grand Canal, Venice was painted – it is near identical pictorially to The Grand Canal (1908) – or indeed at any time between 1908 and 1935 when his catalogue of works was published.

For the reasons outlined, I attribute this artwork as being Streeton’s The Grand Canal (1908), catalogue entry no. 346 in The Arthur Streeton Catalogue of 1935. The painting has reached the current owner via Arthur’s sister Amy Adelaide Shackell, passing by descent within the family.

Dr Sarah Schmidt is an Australian public gallery director and curator who manages public and cultural diplomacy for the Australian Embassy, Beijing. She was previously Director of Hamilton Gallery and Deputy Director of the Art Gallery of Ballarat. This is an edited excerpt from an essay to appear in a forthcoming edition of Art Monthly Australasia.

Sweet and sour: Anne Wallace’s ‘Strange Ways’ at QUT Art Museum

Anne Wallace: Strange Ways, exhibition installation view, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 2019; image courtesy QUT Art Museum, Brisbane; photo: Carl Warner

‘Strange Ways’ surveys nearly three decades of Anne Wallace’s compelling, unnerving paintings. The exhibition is the first substantial presentation of the artist’s work in her hometown since ‘Private Rooms’ at the former Brisbane City Gallery (now Museum of Brisbane) in 2000.

Wallace’s practice is remarkable for its singular commitment to figurative painting. Although informed by the artist’s ongoing engagement with cinema, literature and music, her paintings actively resist a conventional narrative reading. Using her considerable technical skill, Wallace draws viewers into seductive images of alienation, ennui and trauma, withholding just enough information for us to fully apprehend the image.

The exhibition brings together around 80 paintings and works on paper, including rarely seen early works, most notably Sour the Boiling Honey (1991), a formative example of Wallace’s oeuvre. Painted when she was 21 years old, a staged tableau unfolds across three large panels depicting adolescent boys and girls at play by the sea, with the androgynous central figure representing the artist herself.

It is fascinating to view Wallace’s early works, concerned with adolescent experience, alongside subsequent ones, which are often focused on a solitary (adult) female figure, her back turned or avoiding the viewer’s gaze, set inside airless interiors characterised by their unusual treatment of perspective and lack of extraneous detail. Wallace reflected on this ambiguity in an essay published in Recent Paintings (Arts Queensland, 1999): ‘What I like about representational painting is the fact that an image can be trapped forever and, if there is a sufficient lack of information, it will never go back or forward or yield up its story.’

Curator Vanessa Van Ooyen has sensibly avoided a chronological or didactic display, opting instead for thoughtful juxtapositions that emphasise the consistent trajectory of Wallace’s practice, eliciting gradual developments in style and content. Pleasure Garden (2019), a recent counterpoint to Sour the Boiling Honey, depicts another group of androgynous youths, languidly sunbathing in a fertile garden. In this and other recent works, Wallace zooms out from the tightly cropped scenes of her earlier paintings, the previously dominant figures now subordinate to the overall composition.

Some viewers may find the lack of artwork and expanded labels frustrating, given the significance of Wallace’s titles and their intertextual references which provide a valuable entry point for her paintings. This criticism is offset, however, by the substantial exhibition publication featuring newly commissioned texts on Wallace’s work by Gillian Brown, Francis Plagne and Van Ooyen.

QUT Art Museum is to be commended for its commitment to presenting focused survey exhibitions of mid-career Australian artists. On view until 23 February, ‘Strange Ways’ represents a rare opportunity for Brisbane audiences to see a comprehensive survey of Wallace’s work. The exhibition will then tour to the Art Gallery of Ballarat and Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art during 2020.

Hamish Sawyer, Brisbane

Remote control: Simon Denny’s ‘Mine’ at MONA

Simon Denny: Mine, exhibition installation view, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, 2019; image courtesy MONA, Hobart; photo: MONA/Jesse Hunniford

‘Mine’, Simon Denny’s current exhibition project at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, attempts to represent the mostly unseen, planetary-scale processes of extraction – the plundering, accumulation, enclosure and colonial expropriation of natural resources which are fundamental to the interests of modern capitalism. In our increasingly decentred and dematerialised world, it is difficult to comprehend the scale and specificity of these processes, let alone grasp the ways in which they are naturalised and licensed to cut through patterns of human cooperation and social activity. Compared to our little lives and devices, the seemingly disparate networks of extraction are so immensely huge and their combined impact so vast and abstract, that they resist easy representation. The unrelenting dynamic of these anthropogenic processes have led us to the climatic mess we are currently in. Yet glimmering in the corner of Denny’s ‘Mine’ is the faint insistence that such complex systems-thinking now empowers us to begin reckoning with the devastation caused through this voracious process of extracting value from the natural world.

Denny’s research practice has involved interacting with the new breed of global business entrepreneurs, or people engaged in critical work investigating how these new technologies interface with our lives and affect our relations. Typically, he adopts the rhetoric and aesthetics offered up by these subjects and institutions, as a kind of ambivalent performance, appropriating the innovations of disciplines outside of art and espoused by these new tech industries. While Denny has deployed familiar tactics of immersion in ‘Mine’ – activating, implicating and putting people in different relationships to the material he is working with – his framing of the project in the media and in person signals a more definitive position than he had previously presented. This more straightforward enactment, however, is haunted by ghosts of his earlier techno-libertarian ‘fanboy’ days. It is as if the contradictions engendered by his previous indifference remain unresolved – despite the clear politicisation of content and an obvious change in the artist’s attitude.

Indeed, if Denny’s dystopian Disneyland holds up a mirror to a violently destructive industry in order to reflect the depressing commercial and sociopolitical realities of our time, the mirror also excludes or deflects. In both entertaining and implicating his audience to manifest certain behaviours, Denny manages to divert the critical attention away from his strategy of ‘remote control’ – meaning his authority to situate people in a scripted relation to spatial power. This strategy emphasises the prescribed patterns of action and invisible layers of interactivity which, deep within MONA’s ‘Mine’, are effectively putting us to work. The additional augmented-reality layer (a virtual double space) creates an eerie experience of art where the line between entertainment and exploitation blurs to a point of alarm.

Oscar Capezio, Hobart

This is an edited excerpt from an essay to appear in a forthcoming edition of Art Monthly Australasia; ‘Simon Denny: Mine’ is currently on view at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art until 13 April 2020.

Between art and life: The 8th Korea Artist Prize

Jewyo Rhii, Love Your Depot, 2019, installation view, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2019; ? Jewyo Rhii; photo: Alex Burchmore

After travelling to Singapore this June for ‘Awakenings: Art in Society 1960s–1990s’, I received an invitation in October to the equally spectacular ‘The Square: Art and Society in Korea 1900–2019’, at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). This was my first encounter with an art scene perhaps unfamiliar for many readers in Australia, but remarkable in depth and diversity.

A highlight of my stay was the MMCA’s exhibition of works shortlisted for the 8th Korea Artist Prize (on view until 1 March 2020), awarded on 28 November to Jewyo Rhii. Although little known outside Korea, this is one of the most prestigious honours an artist in that country can attain. Rhii was chosen ahead of the three other finalists selected in March – all women at the height of their careers with international reputations for interrogating artistic, social and cultural issues of global significance.

Love Your Depot (2019), Rhii’s prize-winning installation, offers a solution to the precarious working conditions she has endured throughout her career, travelling constantly in search of opportunity while entrusting her work to storage facilities that can’t guarantee security or consistency. Despite the endemic scale of this issue, it often remains hidden behind gallery walls with other under-acknowledged aspects of the industry, from marketing and sales to conservation and disposal. Rhii exposes these after-lives of the work of art in a cavernous ‘laboratory’ that can serve as a storage space, public forum or broadcasting studio, flexibly adapting to suit participating artists. Shelves and stacks filled with paintings and sculpture are the most engaging aspect of the installation, calling to mind the trend for ‘open storage’ sweeping South Korea’s arts sector and used to great effect at the MMCA branch in Cheongju, and the nearby National Palace Museum.

The other finalists adopt a more eclectic perspective on social issues. Birdsong entices viewers to enter Young In Hong’s To Paint the Portrait of a Bird (2019): a caged passage between two austere chambers, on the walls of which birds projected in silhouette tower over bare, twisted branches, their magnified size and shadowed anonymity blurring the boundary between spectator and spectacle. Embroidered textiles arranged to resemble a Confucian ancestral shrine introduce a note of domesticity – rather than a family patriarch, however, the central hanging is adorned with yet more birds, perched on the limbs of a stunted tree, as if seeking solidarity in their shared confinement.

A comparable reclamation of patriarchal space is enacted by Hyesoo Park, whose project unfolds like a social experiment, with the artist as chief investigator. The first stage of her work involved the distribution of a survey built around the question, ‘Who is your “we”?’, to which almost all participants responded ‘family’, even while naming friends and lovers as their most trusted companions. Park cites this contradiction as evidence for her guiding hypothesis: that traditional family bonds are declining in South Korea but have been artificially prolonged as a state mechanism for social control. Like Young, she exposes inequalities and stereotypes masked by Confucian emphasis on ‘family harmony’, noting the pressure felt by women to marry and have children. Her Perfect Family, a satirical reimagining of state-sanctioned initiatives, proposes a market-driven solution, questioning whether domestic bliss can be sold as a package deal.

Ayoung Kim has chosen, like Rhii, to focus on the hidden social crises produced by constant motion and precarity, though her attention to their impact on human relationships suggests closer parallels with Park’s work. For Tricksters’ Plot (2019), Kim has added further conceptual complexity to her Porosity Valley video project, first shown at the 2017 Melbourne Festival. Shocked by the detention of those seeking asylum in Australia, she draws a comparison with the prejudice faced by Yemeni refugees on Jeju Island, south of the Korean Peninsula. Her disorienting digital installation cites a range of sources, from Mongolian folktales to Octavia E. Butler’s techno-feminist novels, to complicate the stereotype of refugees as a threat to the status quo by highlighting their social invisibility and, above all, their essential humanity.

Rhii, Young, Park and Kim take very different approaches to their chosen subjects, testing the boundaries of artistic practice, but are united by their desire for broader relevance beyond the museum and their attention to some of the most pressing issues of our time: gender inequality, shifts in family structure, the precocity of a life in motion, and the prejudice and paranoia of refugee politics. Despite the unfamiliarity of their names for many in Australia, their work transcends national borders.

Alex Burchmore, Seoul

In the receiving seat: Lee Mingwei’s 'Sonic Blossom'

Lee Mingwei, Sonic Blossom, 2013– , performance view, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2019; photo: Saul Steed; ? Lee Mingwei

Sonic Blossom (2013– ) continues Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei’s interest in the economy of gift exchange between strangers. As an international artist raised in Asia and living and working between North America and Europe, Mingwei’s gentle, poetic practice enacts gestures of connection in a way that reflects a powerful desire to belong – to traditions, cultures, places and to others.

As with many of the art projects he has conceived and undertaken in a career spanning over 20 years, the artist has drawn on personal history – time spent at his mother’s bedside during a bout of serious illness and convalescence, listening to Austrian late classical composer Franz Schubert’s Lieder (song for voice and piano). The experience brought forth a memory of his mother frequently playing Schubert’s music while Lee was a child.

Love, fragility and the impermanence of life hover over the performative encounters of Sonic Blossom. In the gallery, visitors are invited to take a seat in a single chair positioned in the centre of the space. A singer – there are several who rotate during the course of the day – stands at a distance of several metres and, facing the seated person, sings their heart out.

Originally created for the opening of Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2013, Sonic Blossom has since played to audiences from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Museum MACAN in Jakarta.

For the Adelaide iteration curated by Director Rhana Devenport for the Art Gallery of South Australia (presented with support from the OzAsia Festival and Contemporary Collectors, until 1 December), Lee has commissioned Japanese-Australian fashion designer Akira Isogawa to create a costume for the singers. The resulting piece is a deconstructed ceremonial, architectural and intriguing garment that recalls the majesty of mayoral robes.

Like all gift exchanges, acts of generosity are not without tension and the acknowledgment of mutual obligation. Will the seated visitor, now the object of the collected gaze, display gratitude or pleasure or will they squirm in discomfort? Will they enjoy the gift or resent the attention?

I was present for two Lieders, including the participation of a young father holding a baby. Those of us present were enchanted by the baby held on a lap in this colonial building filled with the sound of a clear, strong, sonorous voice. Singer to seated guest, gallery visitor to state institution: it was a gift well received.

Anna Zagala, Adelaide

Making sunshine: Jim Lambie’s ‘Wild Is The Wind’ at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Jim Lambie: Wild Is The Wind, exhibition installation view, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; image courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; photo: Luis Power

For Australian audiences who might have last encountered Jim Lambie’s work with Zobop (1999– ) – the space- and mind-warping floor installation made from pulsating lines of rainbow-coloured vinyl tape reconfigured at the MCA for Juliana Engberg’s 2014 Biennale of Sydney – the Scottish artist’s latest show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney is a quieter, more spontaneous affair.

‘I made this yesterday,’ says Lambie on the eve of the opening of ‘Wild Is The Wind’ (on view until 23 November). Suspended from the ceiling by a string of op-shop beads is a railway sleeper, hovering above the floor at pillow height. It is ‘this deep sleep moment’, the artist explains of the central work, around which the exhibition revolves as a kind of intriguing dreamscape.

Along a high wooden beam overhead, Lambie has arrayed a line of jam jars stuffed with wads of old T-shirt fabric, resembling little pots of paint as if awaiting the artist’s brush or imagination to be dipped into. Around the walls are grids of reconfigured doors, some tequila sunrise-hued, others as if turned from the light, and in between burst sprays of coloured sunglass lenses welded into metal constellations. Lambie, who trained at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s, seems to be deconstructing the optical process of perception, delineating spectacle into simpler, sparer notes. When taken together, he hopes that audiences will gain ‘a new perspective on the space’.

In keeping with his background as a deejay, Lambie has called the exhibition after the song most recently covered by David Bowie on his 1976 album Station to Station, and a sense of musical improvisation is very much alive in the show. Sitting on a small white shelf is a bunch of carrots, dripping orange paint onto the wall and floor – a single gesture also performed on the eve of the show’s opening. ‘It’s about being here and now,’ he says, his thick Glaswegian accent punctuating the air.

Beyond the Sydney show, Lambie’s career continues to buzz. He is included in Tate Liverpool’s current survey of op art, bringing Zobop into psychedelic communion with work by seminal figures like Bridget Riley, Jesús Rafael Soto and Victor Vasarely: ‘It’s nice to be in such esteemed company.’ And there are projects coming up in Dunedin and Tokyo.

But apart from a brief stint in New York early last decade, Glasgow continues to be Lambie’s artistic muse. ‘You know, the weather’s so bad that I guess the reason there’s such a vibrant music and art and literature scene is that you have to make your own sunshine,’ he says only half-jokingly. ‘So there might be an element of truth in that.’ Right now in Sydney, the Glaswegian sun strobes more softly.

Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney

Other ways of seeing: Ella Dreyfus’s ‘Under Twenty-Seven’ at Bondi Pavilion Gallery

Under Twenty-Seven, exhibition installation view, Watt Space Gallery, University of Newcastle, May 2019; image courtesy the artist

Ella Dreyfus’s powerful and yet subtle artworks ask us to think about what is at stake in the gaze of the adult viewer when confronted with the spectacle of boys growing into young men. She asks us to pause and think about not only what we see, but what we want to see.

Images of children and young people are highly politically charged these days. We are living through a long-deserved reckoning about the sexual and physical abuse of minors. We are witnessing a calling to account of some of our most revered institutions and authority figures.

This reckoning has created a climate of enormous anxiety around images of children, as Dreyfus knows all too well. A high watermark of this alarm was in 2008 when artist Bill Henson was accused of paedophilic instincts for his hauntingly staged images of young people on the cusp of puberty. Even though she only photographed her young male subjects naked from the waist up, Dreyfus has also dealt with a host of strong emotional reactions to her portraits: from last-minute parental sanctions on exhibiting them to public commentary.

Throughout her oeuvre Dreyfus has challenged the lens through which we see bodies and asks us to reflect on why certain ones are either invisible or actively censored. As Jacqueline Millner suggested in her 2005 catalogue essay for ‘Under Twelve’, the first suite of works in Dreyfus’s current series, it is the relationship between subject and object that goes to the heart of the trouble that animates concerns over images of children and young people. Are they subjects or objects of our gaze? What is the relationship between our desire to protect and our impulse to control?

What this remarkable new suite of works presents us with is the opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the young men who originally sat for these images 14 years ago and, in turn, to reflect on our own subjectivity as viewers. The changes in the bodies and the gazes of the subjects of the portraits are not only striking but strikingly different. It is tempting to read across them in a linear fashion: to use the changes in their gazes and poses as evidence of a particular relationship to emergent masculinity. But that would be to fix them in our imagined world of the transition from child to adult. And that is exactly what Dreyfus asks us to consider.

Images have a capacity to remind us as much about what we can’t see as what we do. Photographs are always framed in multiple ways: by the photographer’s lens, by cropping or digital alteration or by the subjective gaze of the viewer. What Dreyfus asks us to notice in these quietly eloquent portraits is precisely this. She reminds us that when we look, there are always other ways of seeing and that, ultimately, it is impossible to fix the object of our vision with our gaze.

Catharine Lumby, Sydney

This text originally appeared as part of a longer essay accompanying Ella Dreyfus’s exhibition ‘Under Twenty-Seven’, currently on view at Sydney’s Bondi Pavilion Gallery until 3 November.

Collective thinking: ‘An Idea Needing to Be Made’ at Heide

An Idea Needing to Be Made, exhibition installation view, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2019; courtesy Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; photo: Christian Capurro

Alison Britton wrote in 1981: ‘It is hard to explain my own inability to stop making vessels. It could be somehow inherent in the training of a potter.’ In viewing the exhibition ‘An Idea Needing to Be Made’ currently showing at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art (the title of which also quotes Britton), the words of this British ceramicist and writer are a reminder of the influence of the vessel throughout history and the role of the potter creating works of function and beauty.

The curators Glenn Barkley and Lesley Harding have brought together 12 very different artists/groups who explore such questions (as posed by Harding in the catalogue) as: ‘how can a vessel function as both something to be used and also about use; why is the past an eternal present in ceramics practice; and in what ways can an artwork be understood as a collection or a suite of objects?’

John Wardle Architects were commissioned to design the overall look of the exhibition and to invent a large plinth, as a way of presenting the objects beyond conventional museum furniture to something more experiential. The result was a collection of 45 found, altered and painted tables that fit together and fill Heide’s long exhibition gallery.

Of the 12 artists selected, work from the estate of the late Gwyn Hanssen Pigott sets the tone, as she was a maker who created her own suites of objects. Five sets of her work have been presented in an adjoining room and are a reminder of her keen eye for the differences and similarities in grouping work together.

Ten of the other artists represented are on the large plinth, and have become their own collection or suite of objects This is not necessarily a bad thing – it is what museums do – however, the artist’s individuality is of less prominence than the overall viewing of the idea. All have presented individual selections from their own practice, and include Britton, Kathy Butterly, Kirsten Coelho, Pippin Drysdale, the artists of Ernabella Arts, Simone Fraser, King Houndekpinkou, Nicolette Johnson, Kate Malone, Laurie Steer, and Kang Hyo Lee, whose much larger work is on the floor in an adjoining room.

‘An Idea Needing to Be Made’ is a conversation that will continue beyond the show’s 20 October closing. This is a good thing. The exhibition catalogue is a lasting document of great beauty, where the work can be seen in its individual splendour.

Merran Esson, Melbourne

Stand the way you tease: ‘Tainted Love’ at CCAS

Jordana Bragg, Enthusiastic Valentine, 2019, installation view, ‘Tainted Love’, Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), 2019; HD video, mirror ball and disco lighting, 3:30 mins duration; courtesy the artist and CCAS, Canberra; photo: Brenton McGeachie

It starts with a flicker of light, hard white from the pool, the kind that hits you and makes your eyes split. This video by Jordana Bragg opens the exhibition ‘Tainted Love’ at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (until 12 October). The show is named after Soft Cell’s synth-pop cover which soared to become a 1980s gay anthem, paralleling the rolling dark tidal wave of the HIV epidemic. Curated by David Broker, the exhibition takes six different artist perspectives on love and delves into ideas of loss and longing. Developed as an idea during the 2017 vote for same-sex marriage, Broker’s selection of artists speaks to voices from the LGBTIQA space but ultimately stands free from a resolute position. The works of Troy-Anthony Baylis, Bragg, Karena Keys, Angus McGrath, Nathan Nhan and Suzanne Treister intersect in their responses yet speak frankly in their individuality.

Bragg is both boy and girl and neither at the same time. Shaved head, inked and tattooed, the camera rolls over tanned Sunbaker-like shoulders as Bragg sits by a window, still but for the faint breath of a curtain. Palm trees sway over a heart-shaped pool. Later, shirt off with a black shadow carving a ‘V’ on the chest and smoking a cigarette, Bragg looks at us with sullen, challenging eyes. The colour red weaves through the video, draining a stained-glass tulip on the door and echoed in the fading break lights of a car as it pulls away. We connect and disconnect with Bragg, caught in the push-pull of desire as the heart goes cold.

The sense of distance and trauma is also explored in Baylis’s work. Denied knowledge of his ancestral Jawoyn country, the artist explores a longing for the home of his bloodlines, a place he has never visited. Emotional Landscape 17 (2008) and Emotional Landscape 19 (2009) are large canvas ‘episodes’ that resonate in their warm black-red surfaces. Rhythmic lines of paint also carry a repeated ‘X’ in white-out correction fluid, referencing both the final kiss that seals a letter and the whitewashing of Australian colonial history.

Loss and embodiment are evoked in Keys’s works which hang from the ceiling like disco skins cast off the bodies of their wearers. Wrapped and glued, painted and tucked, they are visceral in their pearlescent surfaces, echoing Eva Hesse’s fragile soft sculptures yet with a darker gut of colours. The abject quality of them is not lost, with a compacted golden lump hanging alongside a silvery fall. We don’t look at Keys’s works, we feel them. They are both inside out and outside in – gleaming, lustered internals.

With such gestures, ‘Tainted Love’ draws you into its darkened space of conflicted feelings: could love somehow mark the death of us? Somewhere along the way, do we lose ourselves to it, for better or for worse?

Rosalind Lemoh is a 2019 Critic-in-Residence at ANCA, Canberra, in a special project partnership with Art Monthly Australasia.

Embedded in the land: ‘Material Place’ at UNSW Galleries

Material Place: Reconsidering Australian Landscapes, exhibition installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2019, with the work of Bonita Ely, Gunybi Ganambarr, Megan Cope and Mabel Juli; photo: Zan Wimberley

What is our relationship to place within settler colonial Australia? What methods and materials might be most fittingly employed to represent land use today? In what ways can art address the environmental issues unfolding in our current moment? These are some of the questions posed by the deftly curated exhibition ‘Material Place: Reconsidering Australian Landscapes’, at UNSW Galleries in Sydney until 7 September. Offering a diverse range of approaches that includes Google Earth imaging, drone footage, kinetic sculpture, as well as the more traditional artistic techniques of painting and carving, the exhibition brings together 12 Australian artists, half of whom are Indigenous.

In the first gallery space, the visitor is greeted by a number of distinctive sounds. One of these is an ominous amplified clicking noise that emanates from Nicholas Mangan’s 2018 installation Termite Economies. On top of a purpose-built table sits an earth-coloured model of a termite tunnel that has been amalgamated with a small goldmining structure. The result looks a bit like a theme park water slide in miniature. To the right, a television monitor is supported by a tall wooden plinth. It displays footage of bone-coloured termite mounds that rise into the air like heavily dimpled buildings. The work is based on studies undertaken by the CSIRO into the ability of termites to locate gold. It imaginatively adopts this curious example of capitalism’s desire to transform any form of life into a prospective source of wealth, thereby critiquing the subjection of nature to an economic calculus.

Elevated slightly off the floor, a liquorice-coloured conveyor belt, Ngalkan (2015), is encountered in the next room. It has been intricately incised with sacred triangular and diamond-shaped designs by Indigenous artist Gunybi Ganambarr. Displaying an innovative use of materials that responds to the erosion of his people’s land rights, the discarded rubber conveyor belt signals the removal of minerals from Yolngu land through mines and refineries that have now been decommissioned.

In such ways, ‘Material Place’ explores the intersections of colonisation, mining, Indigenous cultural heritage and attachment to place – ideas that are thoughtfully weaved through the subdued spotlit exhibition to create a compelling dialogue between the works. Meditating on some of the most pressing issues of our time – environmental degradation and our relationship to nature – the exhibition eschews a tone of urgency and catastrophe in favour of foregrounding Indigenous knowledge and culture, practices imbedded in extensive research and those that take an experimental approach to materials.

Benison Kilby, Sydney

Verve and breadth: Virginia Cuppaidge at Newcastle Art Gallery

Virginia Cuppaidge: The Nature of Abstraction, exhibition installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, 2019, with (from left): Saix, 1974, and Lyon, 1972; image courtesy Newcastle Art Gallery

‘Virginia Cuppaidge: The Nature of Abstraction’ has been a major project for the Newcastle Art Gallery. The 19 works, many borrowed from prominent public collections, document a distinguished career, based in New York from 1969, when the Brisbane-born painter first moved to this global centre of artists and galleries to experience at first hand the evolving history of abstraction.

The exhibition, which runs until 21 July, also marks a closer engagement with Newcastle since the artist’s return to Australia in 2017 to live in sight of the sea in this city. Although she painted only in New York, Australia has always played a role, with residencies and regular exhibitions including at the iconic Gallery A in Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s. American critics frequently found an Antipodean breadth and openness in her paintings. By comparison, Australians discovered a cosmopolitan verve on a scale unknown here. (Featured in the exhibition are six-metre paintings, made at a time when canvas of this size was unavailable in Australia.)

At her first New York showing in 1973, Cuppaidge received a favourable comment from Clement Greenberg, doyen of the new abstraction. She continued for 40 years to exhibit successfully as well as teach. The artist is currently writing her recollections of early days in New York, and planning a new studio.

In the exhibition, curated by Sarah Johnson, we see her work evolve from a flat geometry into increasingly vibrant expressionism. The earliest works feature a segmented rectangle in restrained chalky colour. By the late 1970s, the painting has changed radically. A vast work, presented to the University of Newcastle’s art collection, recalls the immensity of the sky in layers of opaline sponged-on paint, punctuated by crisp arabesques, holding back the void. The picture plane deepens in the 1980s and 1990s, when layers of increasingly biomorphic forms writhe and rear in confronting, sometimes frantic colour. The most recent painting in the show, Bee Map from 2012, suggests a new feeling for harmony and resolution.

This has been an important exhibition for Newcastle. Not only does it offer an opportunity to display major generous gifts from the artist, but it also reconfirms the stature of a significant Australian modernist.

Jill Stowell, Newcastle

Dreaming of sleep: ‘Zzzzz’ at MAMA

Zzzzz: Sleep, Somnambulism, Madness, exhibition installation view, Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), 2019; image courtesy MAMA, Albury; photo: Jules Boag

The intimate private-made-public reflection in Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), a five-hour film of his sleeping lover John Giorno, is on show at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) as part of curator Mark Feary’s ‘Zzzzz: Sleep, Somnambulism, Madness’, a group exhibition showcasing various media and including work from Australian and international artists. Like Sleep, every piece in this exhibition is designed to carry the audience to a subterranean place – to reflect on consciousness and the fragile human state.

Erica Spitzer Rasmussen’s 2015 nightgown constructed of 2000 sleeping pill prescriptions is a reminder of the reliance of many of us – over two million Australians – on chemical substances to help meet this basic need. The paper gown, suspended in the blackened grand foyer entry, hangs alongside a futon that invites the visitor to enter the exhibition lying down – reclining to watch a filmed performance by Barbora Kleinhamplová in collaboration with Tereza Stejskalová. Presenting the argument for the ‘right to sleep’, the performance contemplates how attitudes to work and life have shifted while highlighting the benefit of transformation through dreams and adequate rest. The performers protest against ‘the myth of the successful sleepless’.

Visitors may become a little perturbed by the dark space upstairs and the quietly provoking themes. This is not an exhibition that can be casually or quickly strolled through. Classifications of normal and abnormal, reality and illusion are examined in the video work Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008) by Javier Téllez – filmed in Germany with mental health patients. And Ronnie van Hout’s monotone monologue considers the sensation of being trapped within the sleeping state. ‘Are you asleep?’ he shouts. ‘I’m asleep, you’re asleep … wake up!’

Presented in partnership with Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary, and on show until 18 August, ‘Zzzzz: Sleep, Somnambulism, Madness’ successfully cultivates a conversation about the politics of sleep, the potential transformative theatre of dreams, as well as our level of awareness in waking life.

Bec Bromley Humphries, Albury–Wodonga

Oh my God! MONA’s new tunnels to enlightenment

Ai Weiwei, White House, 2015, installation view, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, 2019; image courtesy MONA, Hobart; photo: MONA/Jesse Hunniford

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart has unlocked a new subterranean complex of tunnels and chambers dug from the sandstone bedrock of the Berriedale peninsula. The new excavation contains a central nave and connecting passageways that burrow up from the dark underground galleries towards the water’s-edge ‘Pharos’ wing – ‘a temple to light’. Another anti-monumental milestone in MONA’s evolution, ‘Siloam’ is a jewel in the crown for the self-professed secular church and adult Disneyland. What better place to watch the impending apocalypse … but not before you have a go on the art rides, take a ‘journey through the birth canal’ and ‘commune with your inner spotlight’.

With grand gestures to the transcendental, ‘Siloam’ leads us on a modern-day procession ritual involving the idolatrous installation of David Walsh’s contemporary-art memento mori. Just like Jesus leading the blind man to the Pool of Siloam, we too are promised the gift of sight – hallelujah! By way of ascending or descending through Christopher Townend’s sonorous installation Requiem for Vermin (2019), the sloping tunnel unites a spacious split-level temple that is illuminated by an aperture high above. Nestled quietly beneath the Carrara marble floor (of this new-age temple to transfiguration) is the mouthpiece to Oliver Beer’s Mona Confessional (2016–19), a somber experience which, like prayer, requires us to express our deep-seated feelings to a distant, unknown audience located up above.

The raw stone walls of the cavernous chamber dramatically frame the white-washed wooden bones of a Qing dynasty house (Ai Weiwei’s 2015 White House) that tiptoes on crystal balls; these transparent glass ‘foundations’ glibly reduce the surrounding architecture into a tidy visual metaphor: a spiritual horizon inverting dark and light, ‘the MONA experience’ as the medium between our earthly interior and some other Elysian elsewhere.

Ultimately playing out ‘The End’ across three discrete chambers is The Divine Comedy (2019), conceived by Alfredo Jaar (via Dante) and, presumably, executed by an array of assiduous engineers and Tassie labour. MONA literally straps audiences in for a coal-fired, techno-fuelled trip straight from hell, transitioning in purgatory (featuring a curious film with artist Joan Jonas) and onwards into paradise. Like all good comedies, it begins so badly that the successive episodes have to withstand an additional weight of expectation.

Oscar Capezio, Hobart

Beyond geography: ‘Vanishing Point’ at the ANU School of Art & Design

Vanishing Point, exhibition installation view, ANU School of Art & Design Gallery, Canberra, 16 May – 14 June 2019; photo: Ellen Dahl

An island carries too much detail to comprehend and relies on the creation and implementation of borders. The group exhibition ‘Vanishing Point’ considered the island ‘as a concept where opposing ideas converge’. The participating artists (Consuelo Cavaniglia, Ellen Dahl, Yvette Hamilton, Taloi Havini and Salote Tawale) weren’t interested in just talking about specific places; the show was located in the non-literal vanishing point where specificity and boundaries collapsed. In this way the space became imperceptible; both micro and macro at once. These ideas played out in the exhibition (first presented at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and, from 16 May until 14 June, at the ANU School of Art & Design Gallery) through a variety of different approaches to the photographic.

Although ‘Vanishing Point’ rarely utilised traditional photography, the works within it all directly engaged with ideas of the photographic through light, and further its futile attempt to capture and inhabit things. Cavaniglia’s Filters (2018) was a prime example of this: comprising three criss-crossed acrylic sheets, transparent and coloured, hung from the roof. It first appeared as something closer to conceptual sculpture, but the photographic emerged through a process of limiting and allowing light in a fleeting endeavour to contain it.

Havini’s an imaginary line I (2018) is a blurry photograph of land, which was reproduced on a big block in the middle of the gallery, verging on monolithic if not for its softness. Photography often employs a subjective and forced viewpoint, but in an imaginary line I the audience was prevented from becoming a casual voyeur, and left struggling to perceive the land in front of them. Regardless of orientation, the island never came into focus, and this indistinct zone is where the show was conceptually situated.

‘Vanishing Point’ was about floating within, around, into, and outside a space, being in the liminal and surrounded by porous borders which maybe never existed in the first place. Much more time and focus could be devoted to these works; I found myself lost for a long period staring back at Tawale in the video component of the absorbing Constant interruption, always changing (2018). Searching for a face to guide me, I could find only Tawale coldly looking back, uncapturable and distant, but very much present.

Angus McGrath is currently Critic-in-Residence at ANCA, Canberra, in a special project partnership with Art Monthly Australasia.

Reigniting the past: Three explosive displays of Chinese art at the NGV

Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape, exhibition installation view, NGV International, Melbourne, 2019; ? Cai Guo-Qiang; photo: Sean Fennessy

This winter at the NGV International is devoted to the grand sweep of China’s history, from the ancient Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) to the current generation of young artists. Until October, the gallery is home to three displays of Chinese art combining past and present. In defiance of the icy wind and rain outside, each display offers a variation on a central incendiary theme, balancing meditative stillness against explosive spectacle.

As I entered the warmth of the gallery on a late May morning, my eyes were drawn to a blaze of colour in Federation Court. ‘SO – IL: Viewing China’ (until 4 August), a glacial conflagration of pink, green, yellow and blue acrylic vitrines, designed by New York-based architects Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu, rivals the bombastic splendour of Leonard French’s iconic stained-glass ceiling in the Great Hall. Yet it was the objects within these vitrines that captured my attention: Chinese white porcelain of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and its European imitations, once valued for their monochrome purity but here rendered kaleidoscopic by the mirrored podiums in SO – IL’s luminescent cases, revealing qualities of surface and tone that might otherwise be missed.

Beyond the bustle of Federation Court, an entirely different atmosphere suffuses the blockbuster pairing of ‘Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality’ and ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape’ (until 13 October). Entry to this dual exhibition is gained through a dim passageway, with six screens along one wall playing a looped sequence of digital terracotta warriors dissolving and reforming in swirls of shimmering dust. A soundtrack of ethereal chime music recalls the resonant tones of Zhou bronze bells, cleansing the air of polluting influences. Overhead, a trail of porcelain starlings blackened with gunpowder signals Cai’s tutelary presence.

In the main exhibition chamber, after passing through two galleries filled with a dazzling array of Zhou, Qin (221–07 BCE) and Han dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE) treasures, visitors are confronted by eight terracotta warriors in two rows of perspex cases. As in ‘Viewing China’, mirrors are used to great effect: one is mounted behind each warrior, facing another on the back of the case in front to create a mutual reflection in which single figures are multiplied into ranks of identical officers, infantry, archers and bureaucrats, receding into a seemingly limitless optical void. Viewers, too, are reflected, inviting a comparison of clay and flesh in which the imposing stature of the warriors provokes a realisation of our own mortality and vulnerability to the passage of time.

Another parallel with ‘Viewing China’ can be found in Cai's two porcelain installations: Transience I (Peony), a mound of ceramic blossoms, and the 10,000 starlings of Murmuration (Landscape) (both 2019). Like SO – IL, Cai has saturated the white glaze of his starlings and peonies with iridescent bursts of colour, though, rather than the play of light on acrylic, he has deployed his signature mastery of gunpowder. Flowers and birds alike have been exposed to controlled explosions that have left them unharmed but coated with pigmented residue: charcoal black in Murmuration and a festive blend of red, green, yellow and blue in Transience. Cai used the same process to create the three ‘gunpowder paintings’ commissioned for this exhibition: broad expanses of silk and hemp paper scarred with calligraphic trails and crackling pulses which nevertheless, like the Buddhist deities in SO – IL’s vitrines, exude a meditative tranquility amid explosive light and colour.

The dialogue between ancient and contemporary is continued on the gallery's top floor with ‘A Fairy Tale in Red Times’ (until 6 October), a selection of work by 26 Chinese artists on loan from the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. Many of these artists rival Cai in reputation and their work resonates just as powerfully with the first emperor’s disinterred armies. The slumped shoulders and resigned expressions of migrant workers replicated in resin for Zhang Dali's ‘Square’ series (2014), for example, offer a striking counterpoint to the impassive stoicism of the warriors, while the ragged pigeons tearing at their clothes are a far cry from Cai’s majestic flock of starlings. The display also includes rising stars like Cheng Ran, whose video work with French artist Item Idem, Joss (2013), lingers over the burning of cigarettes, handbags and other luxuries modelled in paper as offerings for the dead, voracious tongues of flame recalling Cai’s controlled explosions.

Yet the people and objects variously immortalised and immolated in these works are not proud warriors or emblems of a glorious heritage – they are the forgotten and overlooked, denigrated emblems of human greed and desire. This is the most incendiary aspect of all three displays: their shedding of new light on things that have long been hidden, ignored or denied.

Alex Burchmore, Melbourne

What’s love got to do with it: ‘Marriage’ at Penrith Regional Gallery

Freya Jobbins, Party 1 and Party 2, 2019, installation view, ‘Marriage: Love + Law’, Penrith Regional Gallery, Sydney, 2019; plastic assemblage; photo: Silversalt

In her winning entry to the Australian Women’s Weekly ‘Happy Marriage Contest’ of 1961, Mrs Elsa Hertzberg of Bondi wrote that: ‘a happy marriage is one shared by a couple both of whom possess what I consider the essential ingredient – IMAGINATION.’

Imagination was also the ingredient that lifted the NSW State Archives exhibition ‘Marriage: Love + Law’, recently shown at Penrith Regional Gallery (30 March – 16 June), out of the realm of pure social history. Contemporary artists Blak Douglas, Freya Jobbins, Danie Mellor and Raquel Ormella were asked to respond to the colonial construct of marriage, and the results were more sobering than they were celebratory.

Through a four-tiered wedding cake of cavorting Barbie dolls, Jobbins succeeded in embodying a history of marriage in Australia which has often seen its citizens become playthings of the powers that be – first as a means to further control its convict arrivals, then as a way to bestow ‘respectability’ on its settler class, leading to the more recent contractions and expansions of the Marriage Act 1961 under the Howard and Turnbull governments.

Ormella tackled the most recent turn of events delivered by a national postal survey with her rainbow-coloured collection of bridesmaid dresses. But rather than suggesting liberation, these garments were bound and clamped, with the artist both welcoming marriage equality and wondering ‘at all the restrictions, social constructs and expectations that remain around the ceremony and legal marriage contract. May we continue to undo these too.’

The wider impact of the laws around marriage were explored by Indigenous artists Douglas and Mellor. Through their more withering works, marriage was revealed not as a vehicle for civil union or social cohesion, but for racial division. Douglas’s triptych of pointillist pop paintings pointed out the erasing by-products of the Aborigines Protection Act (1909), which deemed where Indigenous people lived, worked and married. And also employing text, Mellor’s 2019 photographic print Transubstantiation spoke of how the colonial granting of land through ‘marriage portions’ effectively robbed Aboriginal people of their Country.

Despite marking Australia’s recent gains in marriage equality, ‘Love + Law’ left the impression that, through commissioned works such as these, historical inequities remain underlying one of our most sacred social institutions.

Michael Fitzgerald, Penrith

Regional dialogue and homely conversation: ‘Awakenings’ at the National Gallery Singapore

Siti Adiyati, Eceng Gondok Berbunga Emas (Water Hyacinth with Golden Roses), 1979/2017, installation view, ‘Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s’, National Gallery Singapore, 2019; image courtesy National Gallery Singapore

At the National Gallery Singapore’s Coleman Street entrance on my first night in the city, as I left the damp heat of an early June evening for the cool marble chambers of what was once City Hall, my eyes came to rest on a bed of impossibly golden roses, their gilded petals catching the rays of the setting sun. Yet this thriving growth of emerald green, one of 142 works selected for ‘Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s’ (until 15 September), a comprehensive survey of over 100 artists from 12 Asian nations, conceals a sinister reality: these are water hyacinths, ravenous weeds that choke rivers and render streams stagnant, while the roses striving upward from tangled leaves are plastic imitations, enchanting yet lifeless, and even more polluting than the hyacinths that surround them.

Indonesian artist Siti Adiyati conceived this fusion of nature and artifice for a 1979 exhibition by Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (the ‘New Arts Movement’) which formed in response to the ‘Black December Affair’ of 1974, a dispute between student artists and the Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts. Her work vividly captures the three main curatorial themes of ‘Awakenings’: the questioning of convention by artists across the region from the 1960s to 1990s; the influence of the city and consumer capitalism in these decades; and the emergence of new forms of social activism and political organisation. As one of 14 artists to sign the ‘Black December Manifesto’, Adiyati was committed to that document’s vision of a new Indonesian art typified by diversity and innovation, as shown by her radical turn away from conventional media for Eceng Gondok Berbunga Emas (Water Hyacinth with Golden Roses) (1979/2017). The combination of living plants and plastic flowers also reveals an incisive social critique, exposing the consumerism encouraged by President Suharto as little more than a semblance of prosperity that failed to conceal the suffocating realities of poverty and authoritarian control.

The location of Adiyati’s work in an entrance courtyard reveals another broader theme, not only in ‘Awakenings’ but throughout the gallery’s exhibition program, and even in the institution as a whole: the activation of transitional spaces. The architectural identity of the gallery rests on its fusion of City Hall with the former chambers of Singapore’s Supreme Court, transformed by glass-and-steel canopies and bridges into a 64,000m2 edifice. This architectural union finds an echo in the 2018 projects commissioned for the gallery’s ‘OUTBOUND’ initiative, in conjunction with ‘Awakenings’: Australian Gary Carsley and Singaporean Jeremy Chu’s The Regency Made Me Blind, and Nowhere by Jane Lee, another Singaporean. Both are installed, like Adiyati’s garden, in transitional spaces – the steps and landings between floors – that have become sites for encounter, transgressing conventional boundaries between artist and viewer. For Nowhere, the tangled skeins of paint in Lee’s Raw Canvas, first shown at the 2008 Singapore Biennale, are repeated in the seat of a bench on which viewers are invited to sit and contemplate a mirror mosaic on the opposite wall, their distorted reflections incorporated into the painting behind them.

On the floor below Nowhere, the murmur of voices draws gallery visitors to another recreated installation: Korean artist Lee Kang-So’s Disappearance, Bar in the Gallery (1973). For the first iteration of this work, Lee transplanted tables and chairs from a much-loved chumak tavern to Myeongdong Gallery, Seoul, introducing a homely camaraderie to the austerity of the ‘white cube’, with the promise of makgeolli rice wine and friendly conversation. For ‘Awakenings’, Lee’s vision has been revived in the largest of two passageways connecting the three gallery spaces in which the exhibition is installed, roughly coinciding with its core themes. Visitors must walk past these tables to reach the final section containing some of the most politically charged works, including Tang Da Wu’s They Poach the Rhino, Chop Off His Horn and Make This Drink (1989) and FX Harsono’s What Would You Do If These Crackers Were Real Pistols? (1977/2018), the impact of which lingers as the sequence of galleries leads back to Lee’s tavern.

Here, the underlying aim of the exhibition emerges most clearly: to inspire discussion, reflection, a realisation of connections between works, and between different cultural, political, social and personal worlds. Set against the backdrop of bleachers with a capacity of thousands on the green of the Singapore Cricket Club outside the gallery, readied for National Day on 9 August, these discussions recall the civic functions for which the gallery buildings were intended. More importantly, they reiterate the guiding ambition at the heart of ‘Awakenings’: to seek a shared purpose uniting the tangled threads of history and everyday life, not by imposing a single point of view, but by recognising the multiple perspectives that have developed across the region from the 1960s to today.

Alex Burchmore, Singapore