This time I’m talking about a German painter called Gerhard Richter and his current exhibition at GOMA called ‘Gerhard Richter: The Lfe of Images‘. Although I’m from Scotland I have a bit of German name, so I thought I would check this guy out.
Know what? He’s got to be one of the best! Apart from the fact that he has painted a great portrait of a dog called Jockel (who looks just like me!) – it’s hard to tell us apart don’t you agree!
This artist is pretty old now – like 80 or something? Don’t know what that is in dog years but it sounds old, and this exhibition is the first time that lots of his paintings have been seen in Australia so it must be very special.
He can also paint landscapes, flowers, skulls, candles, portraits and big colourful paintings he calls ‘abstract paintings’. There is one really cool painting called Meadowland which looks soooo real I thought I could smell a rabbit in the bushes! There are other big, blurry paintings that look like the world whizzing past when I run really fast. There is also a black and white painting of one of those very noisy jets called Phantom Interceptors that fly over our house sometimes!
There is a big misty painting of the sea called Seascape – which looks like the sea where I come from, and really good pictures of some of his kids and wives and stuff. There’s another painting of a skull which is a bit spooky… (humans can be a bit weird though) – this painting also makes me hungry. There’s so much to see in this exhibition! I will have to go back again (and see if that rabbit really is there!)
Don’t miss this show – ‘Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images‘ – it’s in Brisbane all through Summer – and especially don’t miss checking Jockel (145-5) out (I wonder if I have any German relatives?).
The exhibition is supported by UAP, Griffith University, The Johnson Art Series Hotel and other corporate, cultural and Government partners. ‘Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images’ is supported by the Australian Government International Exhibitions Insurance (AGIEI) Program. Funding for insurance has also been provided through the Queensland Government Exhibition Indemnification Scheme, administered by Arts Queensland.
Feature image detail: Gerhard Richter’s Jockel (145-5) 1967
Future Collective member Belinda Elderton reports on the art, the tough decisions, and the collective camaraderie of the group’s recent project pitch event
At a time when the marriage equality survey is causing the Australian people to question the value of their vote, the QAGOMA Future Collective members demonstrated the uplifting power of democracy at our annual pitch event.
Now in its third year, the pitch is the culmination of the year’s memberships and sees the group decide how to direct their donations.
The pitch has been an integral part of the growth of the Future Collective, as members value the ability to have a real say in acquisitions made by QAGOMA. As in previous years, three curators were provided a platform to deliver their case for funding a programme or acquisition to the Collective.
The pitch
After a stirring introduction from Simon Elliott, Deputy Director, Collection and Exhibitions, highlighting the ever-expanding Future Collective membership and providing a recap of the two prior acquisitions made with funds from the group – Abdul Abdullah’s ‘Coming to terms’ series and most recently Helen Johnson’s ‘Women’s work’ – it was Bruce McLean, Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, who talked first.
Tony Albert is an artist whose politically engaged practice uses vintage kitsch ‘Aboriginalia’. The Gallery owns Sorry, a major work by this artist, and McLean outlined how building Albert’s presence in the Collection is a priority as he is a significant artist from Queensland with increasing prominence nationally and internationally. McLean proposed a commission for a group of card towers which would allow the Gallery to introduce a new and different aspect of the artist’s practice to the Collection.
Simon Wright, Assistant Director, Learning and Public Engagement, was up next with a pitch that tugged at the heartstrings: a new early childhood development program. Surely, in a more pressured environment, Wright’s use of cute baby images would have been scandalous, but the ‘oohs and aahs’ in the room gave an early indication of a solid tactical gambit. The second part of the presentation included support for other children’s programming as well as a digital publishing and learning initiative.
Finally, past winner, Peter ‘it’s not all about winning’ McKay, Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, gave us a veritable light-bulb moment with a pitch for a major installation work for the Gallery.
With the pitches finished, tours for the group of the newly upgraded storage space and the Australian Collection rehang (which features the new works commissioned from last year’s pitch winner Helen Johnson) gave time for the Collective to deliberate prior to the vote.
With a show of hands and a quick count of absentee votes, the winner, by a narrow margin was to commission a new work by Tony Albert! Albert is sure to continue to be an influential artist as his practice develops and the Collective’s ability to add the new work to the QAGOMA Collection lays a strong platform for the future of contemporary Indigenous art at QAGOMA.
The Future Collective has again demonstrated the power of the group with many individual contributions allowing for a substantial acquisition. Over time, as the group continues to grow, there is hope that more than one pitch can be awarded funding at each pitch event.
Thanks to all the Gallery staff that organised, presented at and attended the event.
Join the future collective
Belinda Elderton has been a member of the Future Collective since 2015 and, with her husband Darren, is a member of the QAGOMA Foundation.
From 24 March 2018, GOMA hosts its largest solo exhibition devoted to an Australian artist. Patricia Piccinini’s complex offspring, and some unusual new siblings, come together for ‘Curious Affection’, comprising sculpture, photography, video, drawing and large-scale installations.
Gabriella Coslovich recently met the artist, and several of her creations, at her Melbourne studio.
Under a crisp blanket of brown wrapping paper lies a red-haired, ape-like creature, cradling a seemingly human baby to her chest (Illustrated). I look into the creature’s warm, hazel eyes and see a mix of resignation, benevolence and sadness. ‘This is a blended family’, explains the creature’s creator, Patricia Piccinini, in her soft, light voice. ‘She is a transgenic creature . . . She’s part human, part orangutan, and her baby is more human but a little orangutan’, she says, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’, coos Roger Moll, Piccinini’s studio manager, as the three of us peer under the crinkly paper at this mysterious, maternal figure. ‘You don’t think “beautiful” is the right word?’, he prods when I struggle to answer. She is, I suppose, beautiful, in the weird, disturbing way that we have come to expect from Piccinini’s work. There is beauty in the creature’s humanity, in her kind and sage expression — and in Piccinini’s visible affection for this life-like fusion of human and ape. What is the creature’s story? Is she man-made? Created purely for her use to human beings? A surrogate? Why else the sadness in her eyes? Instinctively, one seeks a narrative for this strange, soulful beast, who reminds us, uncannily, of our own animal nature.
From the moment Piccinini burst onto the contemporary art scene with works such as 1997’s ‘Protein lattice’ series (unforgettable images of physically perfect women posing with hairless mice sporting ears growing out of their backs), she has probed humanity’s desire to control and manipulate the natural world. For 20 years, her creations have straddled science fact and fiction, born of the artist’s rich imagination and her desire to question — but not judge — developments in biotechnology, genetic engineering and other fields. Many of her works are instantly recognisable, seared into the public’s imagination, such as The Young Family 2002 (Illustrated), her famed depiction of a placid, curled up creature with long floppy ears, pups suckling at her teats; or The Carrier 2013 (Illustrated), of a fragile elderly woman being carried by a mellow-looking man-beast, hairy of body and balding of head.
‘Curious Affection‘ features major new commissions alongside significant works from the past 15 years, and has inspired new scholarship in an exhibition publication of the same name. When we spoke, some months out from the opening, Piccinini and her small team of technicians — 3-D modellers, sculptors, mould makers, skin casters and hair punchers — were busy putting the final touches to new work, indeed, to what will become entire new worlds. ‘It’s a family reunion’, Piccinini says, as she introduces me to the new family members taking shape in her vast, rambling studio, a former clothing factory in a narrow backstreet in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Collingwood.
Piccinini’s studio is a wonderland of weirdness: I have seen a muscular human torso with a fan of elbows emerging from its side; reference photos of skin texture, colour and discolouration; silicone moulds for the faces of two transgenic lovers, perhaps part human, part chimp; and a very short, impish chap called ‘the pollinator’, with eyes as large and round as a kewpie doll’s and a luxuriant cape of red hair cascading from his body. ‘It’s real hair and it’s punched in one at a time,’ Piccinini says, admiring the pollinator’s long, bodily locks.
The pollinator’s arms are raised, and his hands are long and thin, ready to pollinate — they will eventually hook into a surreal sculpture of disembodied, ballerina-lithe legs in an almost arabesque pose. At the time of writing, the legs were lurking in the front office of Piccinini’s warehouse studio, waiting to be joined to the impish creature. ‘Nature has the most extraordinary ways of reproducing itself, and a lot of it is cooperative’, Piccinini says. ‘I’m interested in how we all co-exist and are connected, especially through this process of reproduction and how awe-inspiring it is and how we live amongst it.’
Like much of Piccinini’s work, the pollinator was inspired by the natural world, and yet it goes beyond the natural, prompting us to consider new possibilities and to ask: what responsibility must we take for our creations? Piccinini sees her works as catalysts for discussion — she does not take sides, nor does she tell people what to think: ‘I expect people to look at them and then in their own lives respond, whether it be how they raise their children, or how they act at work, whatever it is, and that’s what builds culture’. She leads me up steep wooden stairs to a small mezzanine where one of her technicians, Liz Rule, is meticulously inserting hair, one strand at a time, into the head of one of the transgenic lovers whose casts I saw downstairs.
‘You can’t make a work like this without care and thought’, Piccinini says, admiring Rule’s handiwork. ‘Look at these softies’, she says, pointing out the short, fluffy hairs that appear around the creature’s hairline, just as they do along the hairline of humans. ‘Well,’ Rule explains, ‘I was looking at your softies yesterday and I was thinking I must put some in’. Rule has worked for Piccinini for eight years, and the two have become solid friends. At her feet, a little wire-haired dog sleeps peacefully, oblivious to the round-faced, pig-featured, teenage boy with fine golden hair lying on the floor nearby. His back has an armadillolike covering that mimics the patterns of a sandshoe’s sole. ‘He’s so cute and lovely with his beautiful golden hair . . . He’s a wonder of nature’, Piccinini says tenderly. Once again, I’m caught with a quizzical look on my face. ‘What are you thinking?’, Rule asks. I confess that I’m finding it hard to be charmed by the teenage boy–pig. ‘You may be repulsed by this, but you won’t be repulsed by what Patricia’s trying to say’, Rule suggests.
This bizarre amalgam of organic and inorganic body parts, titled Teenage Metamorphosis (Illustrated), is not so far from reality. A team of US scientists recently developed the first human–pig hybrids in a move that could eventually lead to these hybrid creatures being used to farm organs for humans. As ever, Piccinini’s work has its eye on contemporary developments and explores the implications of such breakthroughs. Her answers are never straightforward. Piccinini’s work has the capacity to elicit radically different emotions: delight, compassion, intrigue, and, yes, repulsion. While it’s often discussed in relation to advances in science and technology, perhaps less noted is her work’s ability to engender empathy and acceptance of difference. What exactly is ‘normal’ and who decides? Why do I fear what I fear? These are the questions that are continually raised by her work, and they’re questions of great relevance today. ‘How we relate to difference is a pivotal theme in my work’, Piccinini says.
It’s a huge thing. You’re pulled in because you’re intrigued and you see the warmth and connection between these characters, but at the same time you’re pushed away because they’re unfamiliar and unknown, it’s not right, it’s not natural. This dynamic opens up a space for you to be really present and say, “Well, what do I actually think here, and what do I actually feel?”
Patricia Piccinini / Photograph: Phoebe Powell
At 52, Piccinini has a childlike curiosity and dreaminess. She speaks with quiet conviction about her work and is not interested in the ironic posturing of postmodernism; she doesn’t want to alienate those who aren’t in on the joke. Her work, she says, is ‘warm’, ‘a beautifully crafted love letter’ inviting people into her ‘dream landscape’.
At GOMA, that landscape will include a field of 3000 transgenic flowers, each a metre high, that appear to be cultivating human organs; a grotto filled with 700 porcelain ‘mushroom bats’, and an abstract inflatable work (Illustrated) that will rise up over three floors of GOMA. The inflatable follows on from Piccinini’s controversial Skywhale (Illustrated), a huge hot-air balloon of a whale with many pendulous breasts, commissioned for the Centenary of Canberra in 2013.
For Peter McKay, GOMA’s Curator of Contemporary Australian Art, Piccinini is a weaver of contemporary fables, a storyteller whose works may potentially offer lessons to those prepared to spend time with them. ‘They’re enchanting, too,’ he says. ‘They make us realise what it is to be alive. It’s not every artist that can do that, or even thinks about that kind of thing.’ From the outside, it may seem as though Patricia Piccinini has never been far from the artistic limelight — she represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, and her work has been exhibited in museums around the world. But the reality is not so simple. As she has said:
It is a life where there is not a lot of security, and that’s why I try and make the most of every opportunity. But at the same time it has been a life where I get to be one of the meaning makers. I’m part of the meaning-making process in this culture. We can’t just get all our meaning from politics or from science. It’s a great privilege and I don’t take it for granted.
Gabriella Coslovich is a Melbourne author and freelance writer specialising in the arts. Her debut book, Whiteley on Trial, about Australia’s most extraordinary case of alleged art fraud, was published by Melbourne University Press in October.
Extract from ‘A wonderland of weirdness’ by Gabriella Coslovich published in the Gallery’s Artlines magazine, issue 1, 2018
Exhibition publication
Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection
film prograM
Production still from The Shape of Water / Director: Guillermo del Toro
Elizabeth Finkel, former biochemist, and Editor-in-Chief of Cosmos Magazine, a science magazine that she co-founded in 2005, comes to terms with Patricia Piccinini. This is an extract from ‘Lines in the sand: A science writer comes to terms with Patricia Piccinini’ from the exhibition publication supporting ‘Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection‘.
I’m interested in telling stories about the world we live in. That is one of the reasons I’m interested in science. Science explains how the world works, and also becomes the expression for how we want the world to be — or how we fear it might end up. When we end up talking about how the world might be, that is a wonderful place for an artist to explore. Patricia Piccinini
I first encountered Patricia Piccinini in 2003. She had shot to global fame representing Australia at that year’s Venice Biennale. I was in the process of writing a book, Stem Cells: Conflict at the Frontiers of Science. One of her key pieces in the Biennale was The Young Family 2002, a shockingly realistic sculpture of a human-like mother with her babies. Her pink fleshy body is pig-like, but her face and expression is human. Three of her babies are suckling; a fourth gurgles on its back, clutching its foot just like a human baby. I was dismayed by the piece — it seemed to embody even more of the dystopian reaction to stem cell science that I was trying to battle with my book.
Patricia and I were both responding to a scientific revolution. In 1998, researchers in Australia and the United States finally cracked the problem of how to cultivate stem cells from human embryos. Like the embryo, these cells had primordial power — they could multiply and give rise to any organ. But unlike a human embryo, which rapidly relinquishes that power as it morphs into a body, stem cells keep their power forever. The potential was obvious. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the heavens, embryonic stem cells captured the stuff of human life. Any number of human illnesses and injuries might be cured — a new pancreas for a child with juvenile diabetes, new spinal nerves to restore movement in a paralysed person, or new brain tissue to replace the loss caused by Parkinson’s disease.
Dystopian narratives abounded as the Australian government, like others around the world, debated how to capture this biological fire without being burnt. In my view, those narratives were not useful. There were also several ethical arguments mounted against stem cell science. One that seemed to gain the most traction was that it was unethical because it required the destruction of human embryos — strange given that these five-day-old embryos did not have a single nerve cell, were ‘surplus’ and, hence, destined to be thrown out. Furthermore, even with fully mature human beings, we harvest their organs when they die to save the lives of others.
Another argument proposed that even if the initial uses of stem cells were acceptable, the ‘slippery slope’ of technology would seduce society into going places it shouldn’t. One of the key dystopian tropes involved human–animal chimeras, just the sort of idea Piccinini had given physical form to with her ‘young family’. Piccinini’s work catches you unprepared — it’s the slippery slope in action.
In my book, I argued that there’s no such thing as the slippery slope. Technology is not in the driver’s seat. There are checks and balances. At each point along the road, we decide whether or not to continue on our journey. For me, an important example of the robustness of those checks and balances was the genetic modification of human embryos. The technology has existed since the 1970s; it’s the same technology that has created goats with spider silk in their milk or fast-growing pigs.1 Yet, decades on, people were not being genetically engineered.
We had drawn a moral line in the sand — for good reasons. One was the unforeseen biological consequences; after all, our gene pool is the result of millions of years of natural selection. The diversity and imperfection we see in the human population reflects an optimised set of genes that allow us as a species to survive plagues and changing climates, and to adapt to new food sources. And that has led to genetic trade-offs. For instance, to make the haemoglobin that carries oxygen through the bloodstream, you need a beta globin gene. If you inherit a ‘sickle cell’ form of the gene, you are at risk of anaemia and blocked blood vessels. On the other hand, you are protected against dying from malaria. But what of the other genetic tradeoffs we don’t know about? For the sake of future generations and the plagues and cataclysms they must face, it was considered too risky to tamper with a genetic legacy we don’t entirely understand.
Another argument against the genetic engineering of embryos was the concern over creating a genetic upper caste. As bioethicist Laurie Zoloth warned:
Our knowledge of unforeseen consequences is too poor; our capacity for greed and narcissism too strong; our society already too unjust to begin to design babies to a spec sheet.
According to Zoloth, who served on the US Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, ‘It [genetic engineering of human embryos] has been rejected by every political, religious and ethical body that has considered it’.2
So, in 2015, it was a shock when Chinese scientists announced they had crossed that moral line. They had genetically modified human embryos to correct a defect that causes beta thalassemia, another type of anaemia.3 The modified embryos were not capable of becoming babies; they were faulty embryos, rejected from an IVF clinic because they had been fertilised by two sperm. Nevertheless, the experiment heralded the beginning of another revolution.
This modifying of human embryos had been enabled by a new technology. CRISPR was a form of genetic engineering so precise, it had been renamed ‘genetic editing’.4 Traditional genetic engineering was clumsy — to successfully engineer a single embryo required attempts on hundreds or thousands of embryos. This degree of waste was deemed acceptable with animal embryos, but not with the ten or so embryos a woman typically produces during an IVF cycle.
Like many others, I was amazed — there was no moral line in the sand after all, and technology was driving us to a place we had not intended to go. Francis Collins, the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), proclaimed his agency would not fund research viewed ‘almost universally as a line that should not be crossed’, although others like the National Academy of Sciences took a different view.5 They argued the risk of mistakes was too high to allow a genetically modified embryo to develop into a baby. However, they believed that research to refine the embryo editing technique should continue. And it has.
In 2016, a second Chinese team edited embryos to make them resistant to HIV by modifying a gene called CCR5; then, a third Chinese team corrected faulty genes that cause beta thalassemia and favism.6 Those experiments were all marred by errors — while one part of the DNA was correctly edited, errors were introduced in others. And, importantly, not every cell in the embryo was fixed. However, in 2017, a US group achieved error-free editing of a human embryo. In this case, they repaired a mistake in a gene (MYBPC3) that causes sudden cardiac arrest in one in every 500 people, without introducing errors elsewhere.7
Another moral line in the sand was crossed in 2017, this time concerning chimeras — creatures that are a mix of more than one animal. The name is drawn from Greek mythology, and refers to a fire-breathing beast with the head of a lion, a goat’s body and a serpent for a tail. In January 2017, I was taken aback by a paper reporting something almost as startling: a human–pig chimera.8
It was not exactly as Piccinini imagined: the chimera was a foetus that was destroyed four weeks into its development. Most of its tissue was derived from pig cells, but about one in 100 000 cells was human. None of the human cells contributed to the foetus’ brain function, as far as the researchers could tell.9 This was an important point of clarification because of an even stranger paper published in 2013. Researchers had grafted human brain cells (‘glial progenitors’) into mouse embryos, and, according to those researchers, the mice ended up smarter.10 (This finding was a surprise given these types of cells don’t actually relay signals; rather, like a maintenance crew, they help neurons stay in tiptop condition.)
Why would anyone want to make these chimeras? The answer is to grow spare parts for people. Scientists have already grown a replacement pancreas for a mouse in this way. Mouse stem cells were introduced into a rat embryo whose DNA had been ‘edited’ so it could no longer make a pancreas. The mouse stem cells filled in for the missing organ. The rat-grown mouse pancreas then ‘fixed’ the diabetes of a sick mouse for 370 days.11
Researchers have been trying for years to coax human embryonic stem cells into making organs in culture dishes; however, these ‘organoids’ are not particularly functional. Imagine a builder trying to construct a freestanding functional bathroom. Without the surrounding walls and plumbing, it won’t work. Biologists seem to be facing a similar problem with freestanding organoids, and building them within the framework of a developing embryo seems to be the answer, for now.
So the potential exists to generate a human organ for someone in a pig using their own stem cells, but there is also an ethical risk. Researchers are concerned that human cells will contribute to the development of a pig brain. Could they inadvertently produce a pig with a human-like consciousness? What if human stem cells ended up as human eggs or sperm? If chimeras mated, could a human be born? In August 2016, the US NIH announced it would lift its moratorium on the creation of such chimeras for research purposes.12 In 2018, some 15 years after she created it, Piccinini’s ‘young family’ has even greater resonance. Her humanlike pig mother captures an ethicist’s worst nightmares.
I understand now that Piccinini did not intend her ‘young family’ as a dystopian trope, as she told me when we met in her studio:
I take science as a given. My art is about opening up a space where things don’t become
black and white, they’re not good or bad, they’re related to how we feel about things and
that could change, it’s not static. And I think that’s the strength of art; it’s part of the
dialogue around how we shape our society.13
I now see The Young Family as a deeply informed work that addresses profound issues: one is the roller-coaster relationship we have with modern medicine. We look to medical expertise with great hope when we or our loved ones fall ill, but sometimes we are bitterly disappointed. Piccinini experienced that roller-coaster as a teenager watching her mother battle cancer, and she was subsequently drawn to pathology museums to sketch grotesque specimens in formalin bottles. It is easy to see how she forged her idiom — her language of human flesh.
Ultimately, Piccinini’s body of work addresses the profound question of what it means to be human. It also explores the boundaries of humanness — and queries the otherness of animals, of cyber-forms, and of humans who don’t resemble ‘the norm’. As we enter the twenty-first century, a time where we can engineer flesh to create perfect human babies, or chimeras — and, soon enough, machines with human intelligence — the question of what it means to be a human being grows more poignant.
It certainly feels like we are on a slippery slope — and losing our balance. Technology has not just changed what is physically possible, it has also rocked the ethical landscape. Past moral certainties no longer apply. We must explore the benefits and risks of what has become newly possible.
Caught up in our frenetic lives and dizzied by the pace of change, Patricia Piccinini invites us to stop, momentarily, to examine what has been captured in the freeze frame and explore our responses as we enter this brave new world.
Endnotes 1 Adam Rutherford, ‘Synthetic biology and the rise of the “spider-goats”’, Guardian, 15 January 2012, <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/14/syntheticbiology-spider-goat-genetics>, viewed September 2017. 2 Laurie Zoloth, ‘Designer babies crawl closer’, Cosmos Magazine, issue 65, October–November 2015, p.36; see also: <https://cosmosmagazine.com/society/designer-babies-crawl-closer>, viewed October 2017. 3 ‘Fact Sheet 34: Thalassaemias and Sickle Cell Disease’, Centre for Genetics Education (New South Wales Government), November 2012, <http://www.genetics.edu.au/genetics/Genetic-conditions-support-groups/ FS34KBS.pdf>, viewed September 2017. 4 Viviane Richter, ‘What is CRISPR and what does it mean for genetics?’, Cosmos Magazine, 18 April 2016, <https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/what-crisprand-what-does-it-mean-genetics>, viewed September 2017. 5 ‘On human gene editing: International Summit statement’, International Summit on Human Gene Editing, 3 December 2015, <http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12032015a>, viewed October 2017. 6 Beta thalassemia is a blood disorder that reduces the production of haemoglobin; haemoglobin carries oxygen to cells throughout the body. Favism is an allergic reaction to fava beans, causing a severe haemolytic anaemia. 7 Elizabeth Finkel, ‘Error-free editing of human embryos achieved by US researchers’, Cosmos Magazine, 3 August 2017, <https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/error-free-editing-of-humanembryos-achieved-by-us-researchers>, viewed September 2017. 8 Jun Wu et al, ‘Interspecies chimerism with mammalian pluripotent stem cells’, Cell, vol.168, issue 3, pp.473–86. 9 Megan Molteni, ‘First human–pig chimera is a step toward custom organs’, Wired Magazine, 26 January 2017, <https://www.wired.com/2017/01/first-human-pigchimera-step-toward-custom-organs/>, viewed September 2017. 10 Robin JM Franklin and Timothy J Bussey, ‘Do your glial cells make you clever?’, Cell Stem Cell, vol.12, issue 3, pp.265–6. 11 Tomoyuki Yamaguchi and Hideyuki Sato et al, ‘Interspecies organogenesis generates autologous functional islets’, Nature, vol.542, issue 7640, pp.191–6. 12 Jocelyn Kaiser, ‘NIH moves to lift moratorium on animal-human chimera research’, Science, 4 August 2016, <http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/nih-moves-lift-moratorium-animal-humanchimera-research>, viewed September 2017. 13 Patricia Piccinini, interview
Dr Elizabeth Finkel is a former biochemist and co-founder of CosmosMagazine. She is the author of Stem Cells: Controversy on the Frontiers of Science, which won a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2005, and of The Genome Generation, published in 2012. Her work for CosmosMagazine has been awarded four Publishers Australia Excellence Awards. In 2011, she was named the National Press Club’s Higher Education Journalist of the Year, and in 2013, her CosmosMagazine story ‘Fields of Plenty’ won the Crawford Prize for agricultural journalism. In 2015, Elizabeth won the Department of Industry and Science Eureka Prize for Science Journalism for her article ‘A Statin a day’, the first print article to win the award in 11 years.
At a time when most Australian galleries were temple-like buildings that upheld the exclusivity of art appreciation, architect Robin Gibson’s Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) was truly extraordinary: through the language of Modernism, Gibson’s intention was to democratise art and bring it to the people.
Louise Martin-Chew spoke with QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM on his plans for the building which opened 36 years ago in June 1982.
QAG’S ARCHITECTURAL EVOLUTION
The Queensland Art Gallery is arguably the most successful building designed by architect Robin Gibson AO (1930–2014), and was widely admired when it opened in 1982 — Gibson received the prestigious Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture that same year. It was visionary for its time, and Gallery Director Chris Saines remains impressed by Gibson’s foresight, his ability to design for functionality as well as the quality of his aesthetic vision. ‘The beauty and legibility of this building’, he says, ‘is a product of Gibson’s relentless application of an organising principle. Every space is generated off a 2.5-metre-square grid — an open and modern response to a classical design tradition’.
Queen Elizabeth Silver Jubilee Fountain celebrations at the Queensland Art Gallery site, 11 March 1977Architectural drawing, Queensland Art Gallery
QAG under construction, with architect Robin Gibson AO (left) and then Gallery director Raoul Mellish, c.1981 / Collection: QAGOMA Research Library / Photographs: Richard Stringer
Queensland Art Gallery, 1982
While some were critical of the brutalist, monolithic appearance of the Gallery’s exterior, the internal spaces are both functional and beautifully managed. Saines notes that:
CHRIS SAINES |It is a satisfying building in its harmony between the scale of the body and the spaces. While there are the grand elevated spaces of the Watermall, others are relative to human scale. The mezzanine around the edge of the Watermall offers breaks and half breaks between the floors. This is also a building with notable natural light. In Gibson’s era, art was primarily about painting. Within a painting’s construction and viewing is a parallel engagement with the business of light.
Saines worked at QAG from 1984 until 1995, and on his return, when he took up the QAGOMA directorship in 2013, he noted the many changes to the building that happened in the intervening years. The idea of restoration began when Saines reopened a sealed window wall in QAG’s Philip Bacon Galleries (7, 8 and 9) — a decision celebrated by staff who were grateful for the restoration of daylight in the space, which houses works from the international collection, and for the vista to the fountain outside. Heritage listing of the entire Gibson-designed Cultural Centre in 2015 added an additional imperative to this work, but for Saines, the incentive to restore QAG lies in enhancing enjoyment of its collections and the unique nature of the place:
CHRIS SAINES |As a visitor to this gallery, you were originally offered connections to the city, then you moved into the gallery and the Watermall, which is flooded with light. Gibson’s building speaks to the Brisbane River, with the Watermall in precise parallel with the river outside. It is a spacious and airy volume, with daylight streaming in both ends. However, former public spaces, including the original Gallery society rooms and library, have long been closed off as back-of-house accommodation needs increased over time. They were spaces the public could really enjoy. This access to the river, at the same time as the art collection, was Gibson’s democratic civic gesture.
However, the reinstatement of Robin Gibson’s architectural integrity is not about nostalgia, and the heritage listing itself does not suggest that the building should be frozen in time. New display cabinets echo the proportions and style of the Gallery’s ceiling coffers, as do the seats being progressively updated throughout. Gibson may not have envisaged these newly designed items, but they refer to his proportions and motifs in a contemporary iteration.
Art is not known to cause major changes in mainstream society, but it is quietly revolutionary — from Picasso’s Guernica 1937 and Charles Dickens’s novels, to the current use of Australian Indigenous paintings in native title claims to provide evidence of continuous occupation. The recently unveiled display of Australian art in QAG’s Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries (10, 11, 12 and 13) combines Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art with other Australian works produced in the last 150 years, and this opens visual conversations, challenges existing conventions, and choreographs an interchange of styles and cultures. It is an important example of cultural diplomacy, and revolutionary in a way that may not be fully appreciated for years. Saines describes this change simply as ‘a gesture of restoration’, adding that:
CHRIS SAINES |We needed to remix the collection in a way that took account of 99 per cent of Australian cultural history. We know now that Indigenous culture spans some 60 000 years. The time since colonisation is less than one per cent of that.
Saines’s 17 years in New Zealand, a country that manages its recognition of Indigenous cultures differently to Australia, is visible in this change of focus:
The reimagining of the Australian Collection captures major historical moments from first contact to colonisation, and exploration to immigration. Bringing the Indigenous and contemporary Australian collections together with the Gallery’s historical holdings, the display emphasises stories about Queensland and Brisbane from the region’s own perspective.
CHRIS SAINES |The back galleries show the way in which Australia has multiple art histories, not just a post-contact history. We are elevating that story. It doesn’t feel radical; it is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
What may be less obvious is that this change of focus has taken place in concert with the continuing architectural refurbishment. While the restoration of sight lines in the Australian galleries echoes the architect’s original vision, the reopening of windows and portals offers the luxury of light and air — not just to the physical space, but also to the works on display and the histories they represent.
The next priorities, with some slated to begin in 2018–19, include reopening closed circulation paths and sight lines where public access to river views is currently limited, restoring access to previously public rooms on the mezzanine level, and reinstating the walkway above the Watermall, which originally led to a gallery space devoted to works on paper. Removing partitions on the Watermall level will also restore the openness of the decorative arts gallery.
A view of QAG from the Victoria Bridge, Brisbane, 1982 / Collection: QAGOMA Research Library / Photographs: Richard Stringer
The revolutionary nature of Robin Gibson’s building, commissioned by Queensland’s conservative Bjelke-Petersen government, is all the more extraordinary when it is considered that most Australian galleries at the time were temple-like buildings (like the Art Gallery of New South Wales or National Gallery of Victoria), and presented art as an elitist enclave. Gibson used modernist language with the intention of democratising art and bringing it to a civic level. As the architect attested in a statement in 1982:
CHRIS SAINES |It is not only a place for the collection and exhibition of our artworks, it is a place where the walls and barriers of the Gallery are broken down, where there is a constant source of interchange between the art world and the public.1
Robin Gibson AO looked to modernist international precedents to design the Cultural Centre that has since become integral to Brisbane’s architectural iconography. The coming changes at the Queensland Art Gallery will honour his visionary design, and recognise the exemplary building that is his legacy.
Endnote 1 See ‘Our Story’, www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/about/our-story/architecture, accessed November 2017.
Louise Martin-Chew is a freelance writer, whose current projects include a biography of artist Fiona Foley. She spoke with Chris Saines in November 2017.
I thought I was too old to go through all the trouble. I didn’t really believe that changes would affect me anyway. At that age, with that and skin, it is not all that easy to grow different over night. It so happened that I was developing a drinking habit for a while, and counted on it to keep me safe from doubting and questioning the new emerging order.
Back then, there was quite a fuss and buzz over the unexpected rate at which tails were growing. They tried to play it down for a while, but more and more wharfies and factory workers couldn’t keep their balance and do their jobs anymore. Production stopped, roads got blocked, there were fires and floods everywhere. It was all over the news. And God! All those talk shows! They wouldn’t have doctors on, it was a bit too late for that, but aestheticians and physiologists and New-Wave gurus preaching how to adjust to daily life and reach fulfillment with tailed-bodies.
I thought I’d be safe still. More and more often, I had these lower-back pains and tension; as it were just about to crack open an egg. Some little tail was probably emerging. All fine by me. I never expected to be completely unaffected either. Not growing a tail at all, it would have raised suspicion. Having an atrophic one was more wary.
Still, an Envoyée knocked my door one day, identifying me as a person of interest to the Department. I was kindly asked to join the Department’s research efforts to support the full transitioning towards new bodies. I knew then the tail-growing was only the beginning. The Envoyée did not see any point in denying it. As a matter of fact, he implied that the project would comprise both the replacement of malfunctioning body parts with organically grown new ones, and the assisted assimilation of factory-designed elements. ‘It is the Department’s highest priority to create the new un-ageing body. Regardless of any potential cutbacks in what it concerns the body shapes that we all became overly accustomed with and unseemly fond of by now,’ he winked at me.
‘But I’m too old for this’, I protested to the prosthetic hand already filling in the forms. ‘What is old?’ an asexualized voice talked back. ‘Our new emerging order does not provide anymore for such concept.’ ‘It is not that I am not grateful for this opportunity, which I fully am’, I tried one more time, ‘but perhaps a younger one – I stuttered realising I shouldn’t have used the word, a person with less experience than me, I mean, would benefit more from it.’
‘But everyone will eventually benefit from it’ the voice reassured me. ‘Your experience as technician is of high interest to us at this level. It is the creature modeling work experience that recommends you for the position’.
It was only then when I remembered. I remembered you and your rose garden, I remembered how I was the first to grow a tail and how you taught me to hide it by wrapping it all around my body. I remembered how you were carrying with you a little needle and thread to help us, to fix us and a little notebook to draw each time you couldn’t help us, you couldn’t fix us.
I remembered how my tail grew bigger and bigger, how heavier, how fleshier. How it was more and more difficult breathing. How it ultimately suffocated me. You were already gone by then. Your roses withered. You would have never borne to seeing me dying. But I still had your little notebook. I followed your sketches. Slowly, painfully, I began re-making myself.
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Crisia Miroiu is joint winner of ‘Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection’ Emerging Creatives Writing Competition. Propositions on Imagined Futures: How can art and science be used to imagine a shared future.
Feature image: Patricia Piccinini’s The Bond 2016, installed in ‘Curious Affection’, GOMA 2018
How can art and science be used to imagine a shared future? Ask the kids. They know how to do it.
Get them early, before they’re taught that science and art are in conflict. That’s wrong. Art and science are united by creativity. In art, it’s obvious where people use their imagination. It can be harder for people to understand that science is just as creative, especially if their only experience with it was in a classroom. Science is not a detached, clinical compilation of facts in a textbook. That is how it’s presented to society, but that is not how it’s conducted.
The facts are the output, but science itself is a process of discovery. Scientists work on questions that don’t have answers and, sometimes, questions that have never been asked. Curiosity leads the search and creativity finds the solution. Scientists are explorers and problem solvers. Science isn’t about what you know, it’s about what you ask and how you ask it. The keystones of science are curiosity and creativity.
Kids are born with the potential to be scientists and artists, but we train them out of it. If they dare to dream big, society tries to wake them. Soon enough, they want to grow up, get through school and into a stable desk job. They want someone to tell them everything they need to know – right and wrong and nothing more – because that makes their lives simple and easy.
The children who escape, who grow into scientists and artists, have something in common. They ask why and why not. There is a difference between thinking and knowing, and these kids like thinking.
There is a thrill in creating a thought and making something out of it. When we seek the instant gratification of pre-programmed answers, we miss out. If we linger on what we already know, then our world is full of answers and there is no room left for imagination. The more we know, the less we tend to think. We cannot even imagine how much more is out there.
Thinking is difficult. You need to accept that you don’t know all the answers and resist the temptation to accept, at face value, the first suggestion that comes along. There is a fine line between imagining things that could fill the gaps and deluding yourself into calling it a fact.
The more you learn, the more you realise how much you don’t know, and will never know. If you start thinking, you will quickly gather more questions than answers. It’s terrifying. It’s hard.
Don’t let that stop you.
There is beauty in complexity and ambiguity. Embracing uncertainty is humbling and life-changing. It opens your mind to things beyond right and wrong. It removes a filter, and suddenly you no longer see the world in plain black and white, but in its wonderful and mysterious nuances.
You see a more complete picture, because the world isn’t clear-cut into right and wrong, into scientists and artists. The closer you look, the blurrier the distinction becomes.
If artists don’t experiment, they won’t create anything new. If scientists aren’t creative, they don’t make discoveries. If you take away the hours of practice in different areas and go to the core of a person you will see that scientists are artists, and artists are scientists. They are just the people who refused to grow up.
The future?
Combined, art and science have the power to unite humanity with understanding and creativity. There is no conflict, they reinforce each other. We already know this. We can imagine the technology and advancements.
Here is a question we haven’t answered: why haven’t we made this ideal future a reality yet?
I think the answer is clear. We don’t have enough artists and scientists. So let the robots take our desk jobs. Instead of programming kids in binary right and wrong, we’ll program the AIs and we’ll teach the kids how to think. That would be a good start.
Then, we can ask the kids to imagine their future, and when they grow up, they’ll be ready to create it.
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Lauren Thornton is joint winner of ‘Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection’ Emerging Creatives Writing Competition. Propositions on Imagined Futures: How can art and science be used to imagine a shared future.
Feature image: Patricia Piccinini’s The Young Family 2002, installed in ‘Curious Affection’, GOMA 2018
Queensland textile designer Olive Ashworth (1915–2000) made a major contribution to Australia’s visual culture. Authors and academics Nadia Buick and Madeleine King have explored the works of this local artist , whose stunning designs are part of the new Australian collection display at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG).
A new taste for the tropics
Vividly coloured, lightweight fabrics made up in leisurely — or barely there — silhouettes, are hallmarks both celebrated and derided as Queensland style. Our distinctively tropical environment has been formative in the work of local designers with international success: from Paula Stafford, regarded as Australia’s original bikini designer, to Brisbane fashion house Easton Pearson. Olive Ashworth deserves recognition among them. During our years spent researching and writing about Queensland fashion for our online project The Fashion Archives, and subsequent book titled Remotely Fashionable (2015), Ashworth’s designs — which might be Australia’s answer to Josef Frank’s1 — became personal favourites.
The designs of Olive Ashworth
Olive Ashworth / Collection: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland / Images courtesy: Nadia Buick and Madeleine King
Over four decades of the twentieth century, Ashworth sustained a successful practice as a commercial artist, designer and entrepreneur at a time when such pursuits were dominated by men. She drew inspiration from Queensland’s natural features, flora, fauna and lifestyle, developing a unique visual language across graphic design, advertising, and textile and fashion design. Her work coincided with, and contributed to, Queensland’s steadily growing reputation as the ‘Holiday State’.
In this century, however, Ashworth’s legacy has been largely overlooked. It is exciting, therefore, to see her work recognised in the new Australian galleries at the QAG, where it was last exhibited some 35 years ago. Design: Reef fantasy 1971 is a classic Ashworth piece depicting a splendid array of underwater life in rust, turquoise, acid yellow and cobalt blue. The presentation of her designs as a kind of wallpaper in the new hang highlights the versatility of her work as a commercial artist.
Having trained in Melbourne in the 1930s, where her talents were rewarded with several medals,2 Ashworth returned to her hometown of Brisbane to head the art department of Australian tourism and food company Burns Philp. At the end of World War Two, she launched her own commercial design and advertising company, Olive Ashworth Publicity Services, which operated until the mid 1960s. This business was keenly timed with an emerging postwar tourist market surrounding the development of island resorts in Queensland. Her imaginative brochures for formerly wild destinations, such as Heron Island, were instrumental in making the Great Barrier Reef an accessible and glamorous tourist destination. She dedicated much time to studying the reef from an underwater viewing observatory, producing pencil, gouache and watercolour sketches of the sublime displays of coral, shells and fish. These sketches were reproduced in tourist brochures, and carefully repeated as patterned prints for textiles. Her early work was quite faithful to what she observed on the reef, although influenced by graphic styles and colour palettes of the time; her later work became more stylised, perhaps in keeping with Australia’s kitsch sensibility of the 1970s and 1980s.
Her highly publicised design Aquarelle c.1954, inspired by seagrass floating on the reef, was a finalist in the prestigious Leroy-Alcorso Textile Design Competition that year, and helped Ashworth transition from tourism advertising to textiles. Her use of distinctively Australian motifs secured her an international market, and won favour with local audiences.
At the end of World War Two, Europe and the United States had a new interest in Australia’s geographical context. James A Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Tales of the South Pacific (1947) and the subsequent Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1949) brought international attention to the motifs of the region; the Academy Award-winning film of the same name revived popular interest in 1958. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Ashworth’s colourful tropical designs resonated with the international market in this same period.
Card promoting Olive Ashworth’s Turelin design / Collection: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland / Images courtesy: Nadia Buick and Madeleine KingOlive Ashworth’s Turelin, ‘Australia’s answer to the sarong’ / Collection: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland / Images courtesy: Nadia Buick and Madeleine King
Ashworth drew not only on the imagery of the Asia Pacific region, but also on styles of dress. As she had done with her prints, she gave local flavour to an established design, particularly when she marketed her printed-cotton wraparound garment, the Turelin, as ‘Australia’s answer to the sarong’. By the 1970s, Ashworth had expanded her business with the launch of a clothing and textiles label called Indigenous Designs of Australia. The name of this new venture was likely an extension of Ashworth’s belief that ‘Australian motifs should be more widely used in textile designs’,3 and calls to mind Margaret Preston’s use of Aboriginal imagery and motifs in order to advance a new ‘Australian’ style in design and art. Though Ashworth’s designs did not appear to directly appropriate Aboriginal art, as Preston’s had done, Ashworth used Aboriginal words to name her garment designs — a practice common at the time, but troubling from a contemporary perspective. The final decade of her career brought a new business name, Olive Ashworth Specialty Cottons Boutique, and exhibitions at the Queensland Art Gallery (1982), the Gold Coast City Gallery (1988) and the State Library of Queensland (1991).
With much of the state’s touristic identity borrowed from elsewhere — such as the imagined landscape of (non-native) hibiscus and frangipani found in holiday brochures and on souvenir tea towels — Olive Ashworth’s major contribution to Australia’s visual culture was in capturing the distinctive elements of Queensland’s natural landscape. The Great Barrier Reef was an enduring source of inspiration, and Ashworth helped to craft the visually iconic status of this natural wonder, which remains a quintessential, if threatened, symbol of Queensland.
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Olive Ashworth in her studio c.1991 / Collection: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland / Images courtesy: Nadia Buick and Madeleine King
Watch more as we go behind-the-scenes with Conservation
Endnotes 1 Austrian-born Josef Frank (1885–1967) was a Jewish architect and designer who moved to Sweden in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. In Stockholm, he worked primarily for interior design company Svenskt Tenn, where ‘he reinterpreted favourite historic styles in more than 2000 pieces of furniture, but he was — and remains — best known for the textiles he designed featuring surreal organic forms in vibrant colours.’ See Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Josef Frank: Celebrating the anti-design designer’, New York Times, 19 January 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/arts/design/josef-frank-celebrating-the-anti-design-designer.html, accessed 14 December 2017. 2 Joan Kerr, ‘Olive Ashworth: Biography’, Design & Art Australia Online, https://www.daao.org.au/bio/olive-ashworth/biography/, 1995 (updated 2011), accessed 29 November 2017. 3 ‘Won prize for textile design’, Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 20 June 1954, p.12, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/101720884, accessed 14 December 2017.
Dr Nadia Buick and Madeleine King are Brisbane based curators and researchers, and the editors of Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style (2015). They established the online journal and curatorial outfit The Fashion Archives in 2012, examining the past and present of fashion in Queensland, and were awarded the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame Fellowship in 2014 for their project ‘High Street Histories’.
Feature image detail: Olive Ashworth’s Textile length: Reef fantasy 1971
Tony Albert’s largest ever solo exhibition is now at the Queensland Art Gallery, through his practice, writes Coby Edgar, Albert uses familiar objects and humour to render visible Australia’s uneasy colonial history.
Tony Albert has obsessively collected what he calls ‘Aboriginalia’ since his childhood. His artistic practice involves collaborating, repurposing and reimagining popular culture paraphernalia, social and political movements, in order to tell the stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Recognisable to an Australian society of the not-so-distant past, and drawn from the trinket cabinets of many white Australian households of the 1950s and 60s, the kitsch ashtrays and decorative boomerangs that feature in Albert’s works also float in our collective subconscious, like fragments in a vast psychological universe, discarded, until now: Albert, an empathetic, opportunistic thrift-store shopper, rescues them. Unearthed and re-contextualised, he renders them strange and reveals the uneasiness behind their existence.
Since childhood, Tony Albert has been a collector of Aboriginalia
By themselves, these items are simply fragments of an ignorant past; en masse, however, Albert sees them as the remnants of a much larger historical meteor, with the power to change the landscape of our own personal planets. The objects commonly depict naked children playing with animals; bearded men — naked or with a loincloth — often wearing a headband and holding a tool of some description (usually a boomerang or spear); or young women with bared breasts. The figures are set within a landscape — the ubiquitous xanthorrhoea or eucalypt nearby — or dancing around a fire. Sometimes their bodies are painted, or there are patterns painted on their tools. Perhaps it was a way for white Australia to connect indirectly with Aboriginal culture without having to interact with any individuals; hence, the proliferation of tea towels, plates, paintings on black velvet backgrounds, ashtrays, coasters, playing cards and small sculptures — cultural collateral that captured only the vaguest likeness of Aboriginal peoples. Albert uses these same objects to tell the stories of the people they replaced. He gives them back their dignity, while bringing to light the contemporary issues that stem from our unresolved history. Through his practice, Albert says what we already know in a way that we can process, using objects familiar to us — using humour to depict the brutal truth. Sometimes, the poison is also the antidote.
Albert’s works, which are culturally and historically educational, and created with an optimistic stance, make our unsettling past seem almost palatable — at least, at first. The history is uncomfortable; he merely asks us to remember it, and to guard against its repetition, offering a way forward so that the cycle can be broken. Artists such as Destiny Deacon, Daniel Boyd, Brook Andrew and Vernon Ah Kee also repurpose and reclaim objects and imagery of Aboriginal people. More often than not, the images these artists rework were originally taken by ethnographers or anthropologists, and without the permission of those depicted. These artists highlight the stereotypes and misrepresentation of an entire country of sovereign First Nations peoples, and bring them back into our living, breathing society. The works remind the viewer that living descendants of these same misrepresented subjects are able to tell their own stories, and tell them truthfully.
The artist, Carriageworks Studio, 2018 / Photograph: Mark Pokorny
In Albert’s 2010 reworking of Daddy’s Little Girl 2 1994 by Gordon Bennett (one of his greatest artistic influences), he addresses Bennett directly, saying that: ‘The cycle of racism is ever present. We must hope that it will be broken’.1 The production of culturally problematic mass media, the derogatory items in tourist shops, and the social stereotyping of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, can’t be changed overnight, but, in the name of breaking the cycle, Albert takes items that are typically belittling — be they media stories, objects or historical events — and shows the individualism behind them. He reframes his chosen subject in a way that is true to his lived experience and the experiences of those around him. By reclaiming the dispossessed and misrepresented in history, and instilling the truths, or perceived truths, he hopes that there will be real change in our world.
Tony Albert has spent a lot of time supporting other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their careers. He inspires and encourages curators, artists, art workers, community members and elders to tell their stories, and he works in many different corners of the art world — as a mentor, board member, collaborator, judge, panellist, collector, donor. In 2003, Albert and a group of artists established the proppaNOW collective, to challenge an art market that expected them to produce ‘dot’ paintings, and to create a network of conceptually like-minded artists. proppaNOW provided mentorships and encouragement — a mode of practice that he continues in his solo career, by facilitating workshops and collaborations all over the country. For Warakurna – The force is with us 2017, he worked with 40 artists from the Warakurna community; Pay attention 2009–10 involved 25 artists, including Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, Archie Moore, Judy Watson, Judith Inkamala and others; and he worked on Frontier wars (Flying Fox Story Place) 2014 with Alair Pambegan, just to name a few. It seems fitting that Albert’s first major solo exhibition, ‘Visible’, curated by Bruce Johnson McLean, is being staged in Queensland — it’s the home of his ancestors, it’s where he was born, and it is where his career as an artist was first realised and continues to be fostered.
In our globalised world, it is increasingly easy to connect with others and share our stories, while referencing the many social, political and historical happenings that influence our lives and culture. Albert taps into the use of social media, popular culture and familiar objects, such as refuse from fast food giant McDonald’s, the Star Wars movie franchise, and superheroes Spider-Man, Superman and the Hulk, to connect with, give power to and inject love and appreciation into people who feel forgotten by the rest of Australia. By using the familiar, and encouraging Aboriginal people to insert themselves into the picture, Albert gives many people and communities the tools to write themselves into the Australia we live in today.
Tony Albert is successful as an artist in part because he listens to history, and to the community. He believes we are ready, as a nation, to rewrite history and, this time, to include the stories of First Peoples (alongside the many races and religions we have shared this country with for over 230 years). This is not the reality of a distant future in a faraway time and place, but something that is already happening: we are collaborating, colliding, and our personal planets are undergoing their ‘big bang’ transformations. Albert is helping us to communicate across time and space.
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Endnote 1 The artist, quoted in Daddy’s Little Girl (after Gordon Bennett) 2010 (Watercolour and pencil on paper, printed ink on paper, painted timber blocks / Dimensions variable / Private collection, Israel), as noted in Hetti Perkins and Maura Riley, Tony Albert, Dot Publishing (an imprint of Art & Australia Pty Ltd), Paddington, New South Wales, 2015, pp.50–1.
Coby Edgar is a Larakia, Jingili, Filipino and English woman from the Northern Territory. She is the Assistant Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
‘Tony Albert: Visible’ is at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), and the Children’s Art Centre project ‘Tony Albert: We Can Be Heroes’ is at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 7 October 2018.
Feature image: An arrangement of Tony Albert’s collection of ‘Aboriginalia’, 2018 / Photograph: Natasha Harth
Extract from the Gallery’s Artlines magazine, issue 2, 2018
In the garden of good and evil is Brisbane artist Judith Wright’s most recent work in an ongoing project that aims to construct the imagined life of a lost child. Here, the artist gives some personal insights into the many elements of this moody multimedia installation, which ultimately tells of the resilience of memory and life.
The garden continues my reflections on vulnerability, love and loss. Though the works are inevitably touched with melancholy, there is often an element of the sanguine. For many years, I have returned to the idea of a lost child.
While this installation is presented in 2018, its many elements started back in 2003. The present installation is, in a sense then, a memorial piece to this lost child. We all experience loss at some point in our lives, as we do love. This duality is expressed throughout the work — light/shadow, body/spirit, love/loss. It seems impossible to experience one without the other.
With that loss held in the hearts and minds of those who loved them, I have sought to create a timeless garden replete with strange creatures and birds, some created from the offcuts of the sheltering ‘family trees’. My characters wander and play in this imaginary space. The idea that this play might be accompanied by music made real sense to me, and contemporary composer Liza Lim has enriched the installation with a sound piece. Together with the theatrical lighting, the sense of foreboding, the dramatic impact, is increased.
My former career as a ballet dancer has perhaps been influential in my work. Dancers on a stage are acutely aware of space and the special relationships between one’s own body and those of the other dances. Clearly, the capacity of the body to convey emotion is central to this performance. Sir Robert Helpmann was director of the Australia Ballet when I was in the company. He was a master of stagecraft, and working with him was an inspiration for many young dancers. The choreographic team, Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon, fellow dancers of the time, with whom I have since worked on one of my videos, would, I know, concur with this. We have a future project in mind!
I enjoy working across various media using painting, sculpture, video and performance. I have long been fascinated by the Greek philosopher Plato who recounted how the shadows cast on a cave wall prompted humans to first represent themselves; and indeed by Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who recounted how Kora of Sicyon traced her lover’s shadow on a wall to preserve his memory. Her father, Butades, the first ancient Greek clay modeller, used his daughter’s drawing to create a clay model of the youth’s face.
The notion of shadows is a key feature in The garden, with the work being articulated not by drawing but by cast light. Roughly handcrafted wooden forms cast their silhouettes across the tall white walls of the gallery. The play of light animates so that they dance amidst the dark pooling and sharp reliefs. As shadows they express both presence and absence in the same moment. Again these dualities emerge — form and shadow, strength and vulnerability, appearance and disappearance.
I have always used my body to define the scale of my work. The large works on paper that I have made time and again measure my full reach. My choice of life size figures — the mannequins that become the actors in this drama. Their scale and that of the large paintings are determined so that our engagement with them is human. My dolls create a tension between the living body and the inanimate object — of life and death forces. As the body is an instrument of the dancer’s craft — similarly for me, now, my artistic decisions remain filtered through this constant.
As technology moves us further away from our physical bodies, a consideration of the role of the senses seems timely. This shift surely leads us back to materiality, to tactility — the feel of a surface — skin, hair, wood, paper. Without the ability to touch, loss becomes absolute. An awareness of touch and sight dictates my chosen materials. They always carry earlier histories and traces of their other lives and I love gathering their disparate parts and assembling a new, reconstructed self.
I have worked for many years now on creating installations — each one continues my meditation on the fragility of the human condition. Awake 2012 celebrates a life. A Journey, from the same year, propels its characters forward on a journey through the underworld to their Destination (2013), where the protagonists experience an alternate world or state of existence. From there comes The Ancestors 2014, in which these lives are maintained, for a time, in the minds and hearts of those who loved them. Finally, In the gardenof good and evil 2015–18, we take a further step into the world of the imagination. It is a space in which characters can frolic and play, a space for revelry, with perhaps just a hint of a nightmare.
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Judith Wright is a Brisbane artist who works across a range of media including painting, drawing, video, sculpture and installation
In the garden of good and evil is at the Queensland Art Gallery until 2 September 2018
The advent of social media is changing the way we visit galleries and how we perceive and experience art. While ‘selfie’ culture prompts extensive public debate, many cultural institutions now actively encourage visitors to engage with their organisation through digital platforms. Adam Suess unpacks his research into the use of Instagram in art galleries, especially at our recent Gerhard Richter exhibition ‘The Life of Images’.
In 1826, French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured what is known to be the oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera. Nearly 200 years later, it is estimated that over 1.3 trillion photos will be taken in 2018 alone, with the growth attributed to the global rise in mobile smartphone ownership and social media use. Modern smartphones include highquality cameras, making amateur photography cheaper and easier than ever before. Many of us carry smartphones wherever we go, changing the story of personal photography from a practice once reserved for capturing iconic moments, such as birthdays and holidays, to something more ephemeral, spontaneous and mobile.
Instagram has more than 800 million users and is arguably the world’s most popular social media platform dedicated to sharing digital images. A search for QAGOMA’s own hashtag #qagoma displays a wealth of visitor photography, especially from its most popular exhibitions. The Yayoi Kusama exhibition ‘Life is the Heart of a rainbow’ at GOMA during ‘Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images’ attracted thousands of visitor posts to its associated hashtag #KusamaGOMA.
The use of Instagram in art galleries raises interesting questions about its effect on our experience of art, and whether it could be leveraged to deepen our engagement with the arts more broadly. The popular practice of taking selfies has polarised opinion in the debate on photography in museums and art galleries.
Museum Selfie Day occurs on 17 January each year and celebrates museum selfie taking — the #museumselfie hashtag on Instagram holds more than 55 000 images. Many cultural institutions promote social photography to generate affinity with museums, yet some consider that it interrupts their visitors’ experience. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has prohibited photography inside the exhibition space to avoid what they term a ‘nuisance’ to other visitors. The de Young Museum in San Francisco took a softer approach by introducing ‘photography free’ viewing times to meet the diverse expectations of visitors.
However, recent research suggests that selfie sharing represents only a small component of Instagram use in cultural institutions; the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada analysed 263 693 social media visitor images, including those on Instagram, finding that selfies represented less than four per cent of the total visitor images.1
I conducted a study at GOMA coinciding with the ‘Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images’ exhibition. The study, part of a Griffith University PhD project examines visitors’ use of Instagram. I am intrigued by how people experience and respond to art, and I wanted to investigate what we could see and learn through the lens of Instagram that may not ordinarily be seen.
Previous research at cultural institutions has shown that visitors used Instagram to re-curate exhibitions, extend dialogue outside the physical building, draw attention to exhibition objects, and link themselves to the exhibition.2 In my study, I observed 550 Instagram posts made by visitors to the Richter exhibition, using grounded theory for analysis. I interviewed a subset of 17 visitors to critically understand why they had posted part of their experience to Instagram. The results of my study showed three major findings:
Visitors who used Instagram extended and evolved their aesthetic experience
Instagram shaped the way visitors sawand used gallery spaces
Sharing images on Instagram promoted their experience and built affinity with the exhibition, artist and Gallery.
A number of scholars contend that the goal of an aesthetic experience is to know something, and to achieve this goal we construct an aesthetic experience through an evolving process.3 When faced with art, our mind seeks information in an effort to build knowledge. Like individual building blocks that together form a whole, our aesthetic experience evolves as we acquire information and physically experience our surroundings, fulfilling our goal of constructing knowledge.
Participants in my study reported using Instagram as part of their visit to evolve their aesthetic experience through language, relationships, creativity, technology and place. Instagram also amplified aspects of their observation, making them more mindful of how they might represent their experience on Instagram, such as mimicking or copying Richter’s signature blurred style.
Instagram also extended the aesthetic experience of some participants. An aesthetic experience extends when it stretches beyond the time and space of the physical visit, starting earlier and finishing later. Extension complements the concept of an evolving aesthetic experience, as it allows more time and space to build knowledge and engage in reflection.
Since the exhibition was a ticketed event, many participants commented on how Instagram gave them an opportunity to glimpse other visitors’ experiences before deciding whether to attend the exhibition themselves. Participants also used Instagram to reflect on their visit afterwards during a period of contemplation when they decided which image to post.
Instagram also influences how people move through the gallery space, and visitors often took close-up photos of the intricate detail of Richter’s tapestries or placed themselves between the photographer and the artwork. Richter’s Atlas overview 1962–ongoing highlighted this relationship; this section of the exhibition was an extensive 400-panel extract of the artist’s collected photographs, sketches, collages and cuttings displayed along a long corridor in the exhibition. Several visitor Instagram posts reflected the Atlas exhibit as a space rather than a composition of individual works — visitors represented themselves as being in the exhibition space, rather than looking at separate objects.4
An Instagram post of Atlas overview 1962–ongoing, from Gerhard Richter’s exhibition ‘The Life of Images’ at GOMA, 2017 / Image courtesy: Instagram.com/@meandmy2guys
Watch as we install Gerhard Richter’s Atlas overview 1962-ongoing
The final major theme that this study found was the impact of visitors sharing on Instagram. Participants shared by viewing others’ images on Instagram, and shared their own for others to see, like and comment on. The didactic in GOMA’s entrance foyer encouraged visitors to be part of the exhibition by sharing their images using the hashtag #thelifeofimages, and many participants responded positively to this pro-social dynamic.
Sharing our aesthetic experiences is encouraged by galleries — it promotes the acceptance of others’ interpretations and supports the belief that art is experienced democratically in a neutral environment. Sharing also benefits the gallery and artist by promoting the exhibition to the community through peer-to-peer endorsement.
Instagram has created a new form of engagement for artists, galleries and their visitors. The initial research indicates that such technology can teach us more about aesthetic experience, the use of space, and the social dynamics of sharing our experiences of art. Instagram offers new ways to extend, evolve and amplify visitors’ experiences, and the arts community should be enthused by the opportunities that this presents.
Adam Suess is a PhD candidate at Griffith University. Adam is interested in new media, geographicity and art galleries. His PhD explores how visitors use Instagram in art exhibitions.
Endnotes 1 W Ryan Dodge, ‘Unpacking 263,000 visitor photos at the Royal Ontario’, Medium, 11 May 2018, <https://blog.usejournal.com/httpsmedium-com-wrdodger-unpacking-260-000-visitor-photos-at-theroyal-ontario-museum-e35a51aa9f6b>, viewed June 2018. 2 Kylie Budge, ‘Objects in focus: Museum visitors and Instagram’, Curator: The Museum Journal, vol.60, no.1, 2017, pp.67–85; Kylie Budge & Alli Burness, ‘Museum objects and Instagram: Agency and communication in digital engagement’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol.32, no.2, 2017, pp.137–150; Alexandra Weilenmann and others, ‘Instagram at the museum: communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2013, pp.1843–52. 3 Rika Burnham, ‘If you don’t stop, you don’t see anything’, Teachers College Record, vol.95, no.4, 1994, pp.520–5; Gianluca Consoli, ‘The emergence of the modern mind: An evolutionary perspective
on aesthetic experience’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.72, no.1, 2014, pp.37–55. 4 Kali Tzortzi, ‘Museum architectures for embodied experience’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol.32, no.5, 2017, pp.491–508.
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John Russell, like his contemporaries Claude Monet and Henri Matisse, were particularly captivated and inspired by the small island of Belle-Île, with its vivid turquoise waters, steep cliffs and craggy rock formations. Roger Benjamin visited France’s wild Atlantic coast to explore the island’s resonance as a motif in French painting.
In June 2018, before the height of the European summer, lecturing duties found me in La Rochelle, a venerable seaport on the Atlantic coast below Brittany. A curator friend invited me to stay on the remote island of Houat, off the narrow Quiberon peninsula that juts out into a shallow bay dotted with islands. Only upon peering closely at the map did I realise that Belle-Île was the island neighbouring Houat.
Belle-Île — a place of fable in the history of modern art. I had wanted to see it since my mid-twenties, spent researching the early career of Henri Matisse. The trainee painter had stayed on the island in the successive summers of 1896 and 1897, travelling with a now-obscure peer called Émile Wéry. Matisse also received lessons in colour on Belle-Île from John Peter Russell, an Australian painter and friend of artists. John Russell is chiefly remembered today thanks to research by Ann Galbally, my fine arts teacher at the University of Melbourne, who studied Russell for her doctorate and published the first book on him in 1977.1 QAGOMA holds fifteen works by Russell in its Collection, including several that date from the period he spent in France.
John Russell, Australia/France 1858-1930 / La Pointe de Morestil par mer calme (Calm sea at Morestil Point) 1901 / Oil on canvas / 61 x 95cm / Gift of Lady Trout 1987 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern ArtJohn Russell, Australia/France 1858-1930 / Roc Toul (Roche Guibel) (Toul Rock (Guibel Rock)) 1904-05 / Oil on canvas / 98.4 x 128cm / Gift of Lady Trout 1979 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Russell, Wéry and Matisse all painted Belle-Île in the wake of Claude Monet, who helped popularise the site as a destination for summer tourism in a series of great canvases of the Côte sauvage (‘wild coast’) in the summer of 1886. Monet’s Port Goulphar, Belle-Île 1887, acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in 1949, has particularly resonated with Sydneysiders, who have always appreciated the appeal of great waves hammering a good sea-cliff. Thanks to this work by Monet we had heard of Belle-Île — but who ever travelled there? Maybe Dr Galbally, who located the Château de l’Anglais, the large country house built by Russell for his young family just metres inland from the same Port-Goulphar, and Matisse’s biographer Hilary Spurling.2
The inner harbour of Le Palais with Vauban’s battlements on right, Belle-Île, France, June 2018 / Photograph: Roger Benjamin
During my visit to France, the boat trip out to Belle-Île was a routine affair, conducted on a large diesel car ferry. Unlike the Island of Houat, on which private cars are forbidden, Belle-Île accepts tourists’ cars, ferried across at great expense while their holiday-making owners take in the view from the upper deck. The island has a long naval history, enshrined in the massive fortress — designed by Vauban, Louis XIV’s engineer — that overshadows the festive little port of Le Palais. Local histories emphasise the 1759 Battle of the Cardinals in Quiberon Bay, which saw a British fleet of forty ships defeat a French fleet intent on invading England.
The island well deserves its epithet of ‘the Beautiful’; in midsummer it is all green hedgerows, narrow winding roads lined by thick grass, fields of ripening wheat and rows of poplars. Villages of single-story stone houses, be they vintage or modern, punctuate the 17-kilometre length of the island. At its mid-point, just inland from Port Goulphar, is an enormous nineteenth-century lighthouse visible far out to sea.
Tourism and agriculture are Belle-Île’s two main industries, fishing having fallen away. Wealthy Parisian families might own a maison secondaire on the island. Many of the larger buildings in Le Palais contain hotels, and the easy hire of lightweight transport — bicycles and mopeds through to very small cars (mine was a Renault ‘Twingo’) — service the environmental and beach tourism of 2018.
What struck me in Le Palais was the lack of publicity about Belle-Île as a motif in French art. I would have though a little historic museum was obligatory, at the very least. Reproductions of Monets were not in every second cafe, as I expected. One morning in Le Palais I found a bookshop where, tucked in among the picture-postcards and guidebooks, was a well-researched hardcover, Belle-Île en Art, by local historian Henri Belbéoch.3 From it I learned that, although various artists painted there prior to Monet, in his wake literally dozens of artists — most of them impressionists of more or less orthodoxy — made the train trip to remote Quiberon and thence to Belle-Île. Their numbers included impressionists such as Armand Guillaumin, Henry Moret and Maxime Maufra, Fauves such as Jean Puy and Georges d’Espagnat, through to surrealist painter André Masson and the abstract artists Jean-Paul Riopelle and André Marchand.
Views of Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile, France, June 2018 / Photographs: Roger Benjamin
My mission was to personally experience the motifs that Matisse, Monet and Russell had painted on the wild Atlantic coast,4 just as I had recently researched the visit of Russell and Tom Roberts to Granada, Spain, in 1883.5 The landscape did not disappoint. The waters along the Côte sauvage, famous for their immense storms, were completely calm on this summer afternoon. Port-Goulphar (described in the catalogue as a ‘fjord’), ‘The Needles’ (a kind of celtic Twelve Apostles) and Port-Coton (named for the great scuds of foam whipped up by winter storms) succeed one another along a three-kilometre stretch of coast. Pulling up in my Twingo, it was easy to park and to walk along well-kept gravel paths just metres from rocky cliffs that fell thirty or forty metres to the water. Peering straight down from such giddy heights, I saw that the clear waters were tinted green — as Gustave Flaubert wrote in his matchless travelogue of 1847 — by seaweed laid over grey pebbles.6 There were no restraining bollards or fences; instead, prim little panels exhorted visitors to respect the native vegetation and to remove their litter.
Left: Port-Coton, Belle-Île, France, June 2018 / Photograph: Roger Benjamin / Right: Henri Matisse, France 1869–1954 / Rochers à Belle-Île (Rocks at Belle-Île) 1897 / Oil on canvas / 73 x 59.5cm / Collection: Nock Art Foundation, Hong KongPort-Coton, Belle-Île, France, June 2018 / Photograph: Roger Benjamin
All I could hear was the whistling of the breeze straight off the Atlantic, although near the site of Russell’s former mansion, a reception centre was hosting a high-end wedding party whose very vows, to my chagrin, were broadcast towards the fabled cliffs where rustic landscapists had once roamed free.
Back at my hotel outside Le Palais, the hotelier knew little of the visual arts and was surprised to hear that an Australian had been one of the most prolific painters of Belle-Île 120 years before. Visitors to the mainland provinces of Vendée and Morbihan are today more likely to be professional rugby players or trainee vintners than artists. The Sydney painters Euan Macleod and Luke Sciberras are fascinating exceptions.7
My last morning on Belle-Île saw me up with the lark, heading to the remote northern tip of the island and the port town of Sauzon, with its lighthouse and chugging fishing boats. A few miles beyond lie the rocky outcrops of Les Poulains (‘the Colts’), a dramatically picturesque zone of craggy schist monoliths breasting the waves like young horses. Although embraced by painters, the locale is best known today for the Château of Sarah Bernhardt, an unprepossessing blockhouse sheltering among grassy folds close to the sea. A century ago, the world-famous actress sought seclusion there in the twilight of her career. Today, the odd dog-walker or jogger aside, a few illustrated panels vaunt the project of restoring the dune vegetation and the shingle beach to its pristine, savage beauty.
The Pointe des Poulains, Belle-Ile, France, June 2018, with the Château of Sarah Bernhardt in the upper left / Photograph: Roger Benjamin
My impression is that Monet said just about all there was to say on Belle-Île as a motif for painting. He brilliantly grasped that, on the Côte Sauvage, the plateau is almost flat before the cut-away of the crags, giving versatile horizon lines that are as solid and natural as those provided by the sea. Not content to merely copy Monet, Matisse had trouble with the cliffs and fjords in the half-dozen views of them that survive. He often seemed to prefer the modest goal of depicting the farmhouses emerging from the muddy plains of Kervilahouen, the village where both Monet and Matisse lodged. He also dealt with the port scene at Le Palais, bringing the hulls of small steam packets and fishing boats into proximity with the vast — and in his works almost unintelligible — geometric forms of Vauban’s spectacular fortress.
John Russell, Australia/France 1858-1930 / Rochers de Belle-Ile (Rocks at Belle-Ile) c.1900 / Oil on canvas / 65 x 81.3cm / Purchased 1971 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Chosen for the cover of the AGNSW retrospective, ‘John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist’ 2018
Russell is said to have destroyed Belle-Île canvases in despair following the death of his muse (and the mother of his seven children), Marianna Mattiocco in 1908. Of his surviving works, Russell outdid his friend Monet in conveying the sublime energy of the tempests that battered the Belle-Île coast every winter; Russell had, after all, lived there for two decades. The best time to visit Belle-Île for ‘les tempêtes’, my hotelier told me, is in the depths of January, when a hardy new breed of winter tourist appears to witness extreme weather. Would that I might one day join their number, and complete my pilgrimage to the Côte sauvage, begun as an accidental tourist on a cheery June day.
Roger Benjamin is Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney
Endnotes 1 Ann Galbally, The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977. 2 Wayne Tunnicliffe (ed.), John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2018. The exhibition runs from 21 July – 11 November 2018. 3 Henri Belbéoch and Florence Clifford, Belle-Île en Art [self-published], Plonévez-Porzay, France, 1991. 4 See Ursula Prunster and Ann Galbally, Belle-Île: Monet, Russell & Matisse in Brittany, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2001. 5 See Roger Benjamin, Emilio Escoriza and Emma Kindred, ‘Tom Roberts and Friends at the Alhambra’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol.15, no.1, 2015, pp.52–74. 6 Gustave Flaubert, ‘Belle-Isle’, in Par les champs et par les grèves(Voyage en Bretagne), Paris, 1881. 7 The exhibition ‘Belle Île: Luke Sciberras & Euan Macleod’ ran from 13 July to 2 September 2018 at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Sydney.
Delve deeper into your collection
John Russell, Australia/France 1858-1930 / Amandiers et ruines, Sicile (Almond trees and ruins, Sicily) 1887 / Oil on canvas / 64.5 x 81.2cm / Purchased 1989 from the estate of Lady Trout with a special allocation from the Queensland Government / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern ArtJohn Russell, Australia/France 1858-1930 / Coraux des Alpes (The route du Littoral on the West side of Cap d’Antibes, looking towards Nice, the Baie des Anges and the Alps) c.1890s / Oil on canvas / 59 x 59.2cm / Purchased 1968 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern ArtJohn Russell, Australia/France 1858-1930 / (View from Hotel Jouve, plage de la Sallis, looking towards the medieval walls and the Grimaldi Castle, Antibes) 1892 / Oil on canvas / 60.7 x 73.9cm / Gift of Lady Trout through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1980 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Feature image detail: John Russell’s Rochers de Belle-Ile (Rocks at Belle-Ile) c.1900 / Chosen for the cover of the AGNSW retrospective, ‘John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist’ 2018
Design Tracks is a highlight in the QAGOMA Learning calendar. Each year the Gallery works closely with program partners at GILIMBAA to bring together Indigenous Australian artists, designers and leaders in the creative industries to connect with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students.
Now in its fourth year, 2019 will see alumni return with new voices from the performing arts, media, fashion and visual art between 27 – 29 August. Jo-Anne Driessens, one of five lead mentors from Design Tracks 2018 shares her experience of last year’s program.
In 2018, Design Tracks students gathered again at QAGOMA during July which is a great time of year in Brisbane, the winter months create stunning blue skies, a hype of fitness activity along the Kurilpa boardwalk, the buzz of cars driving on the freeway and occasional waves washing up from the City Cat. With the perfect setting, all dedicated QAGOMA staff and mentors are prepped and equipped to receive the next generation of committed Design Tracks students ready to explore, gather, create and connect towards a unique public art pitch relevant to the Cultural Precinct.
There is a true sense of ‘teen spirit’ and eagerness to understand the challenges that lie ahead over the three day program and an obvious sense of enthusiasm for everyone involved. With five Indigenous mentors assigned to a small group each, it was important to make an immediate bond so the work towards the design challenge was instant. Being one of the five mentors involved it was just as a rewarding experience for myself as it was for the students involved, allowing the conversations to flow more freely as the time passed by throughout the program.
The fact that the Design Tracks program is all about challenging young minds to think out of the box towards their own design concepts, the environment to do this was ideal and there was no shortage of resources. The students were able to experience first-hand public art examples such as Judy Watson tow row, 2016 work that welcomes all foot traffic in, out and around GOMA’s front entrance. The benefit of the tow row work also provided a strong link between QAGOMA and the Queensland Museum as the original fishing net that Watson referenced for the bronze sculpture was presented during the students visit to the back storage areas of the Museum. It was so good to see an Indigenous staff member at each major institution receive all of the student’s. Each Indigenous staff member holds an important role and are able to share not only the story of the collections they are in contact with, but their own story and journey into those roles – which was just as important for a program designed to highlight career opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth.
When the floor talk with Bruce McLean and Tony Albert occurred, I remember standing up the back with a colleague of mine and we both commented on how great it was for the students to experience this moment in time with someone like Albert and at this stage of his career and wondered whether the students might reflect back on to draw on this type of inspiration one day.
The icing on the cake was revealed at the end of day three when all mentors and students had to finalise their public art commission and present to an industry panel being the Gilimbaa team who provide ongoing support for the program and are practically an integrated part of the Cultural Precinct based on Grey Street.
The results were impressive and innovative with all students congratulated with detailed feedback provided by the panel which helped the groups understand a final and important layer to completing the challenge. Who knows? Each original mini-model from the groups could very well be archived and possibly accessioned one day to sit amongst the other significant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects in the collection for many more generations to enjoy.
‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) features a diversity of indigenous voices — the largest contingent in the Triennial’s history — who share a common experience of dislocation through European settler occupation. Brisbane-based Indigenous artist Ryan Presley looks at how the practices of five of these artists engage with the legacy of colonialism and speak to the resilience of First Nations people across the world.
A First Nations Perspective
The broadbrush definition of the Asia Pacific in APT9 sweeps such a large swathe of the globe — from Iraq to Japan, Tasmania to Mongolia — that it requires a most attentive viewer to unravel the rich and intertwined visual cultures represented. The overwhelming common thread throughout this vast region, however, is a shared experience of the colonial exploits of European settler occupations. The curators of APT9 have not shied away from this, and the exhibition takes a thoughtful and critical perspective on Australia’s part in this colonial history of mapping, occupation of land, and maritime and currency control.
More than a dozen of the 80 artists and collectives in APT9 are Aboriginal or First Nations people of their particular country, marking the highest ratio of indigenous artists ever represented in the Triennial.1 A diversity of indigenous voices is especially important in surveys such as this, which can easily stumble into previous versions of imperial showcasing of ‘expositions’ and ‘curiosities’. The presence of empire and its amphibious quality, relying upon and occupying both land and sea, is present in the recollections of several of the artists featured.
The performances by the Brisbane Kiribati community feature song and dance in response to the ‘Tungaru: The Kiribati Project’ included in ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9). Tungaru is a collaborative project inspired by the strong connections that New Zealand born artist Chris Charteris has made with his ancestral homeland and extended i-Kiribati family. The indigenous name for Kiribati is Tungaru, which means to gather together in a joyous way.
Women from the Brisbane Bougainville Community Group Inc. perform a range of dances from across the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. The women are supported by Bougainville men creating the dynamic rhythmic sounds of the traditional bamboo band, but using PVC pipes and flip-flops. Women’s Wealth is an art project that engages with the ongoing importance and richness of women’s creativity within the predominantly matrilineal societies of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and nearby provinces of the Solomon Islands.
In this spoken-word performance created specifically for APT9, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner uses the symbolism of the weaving process and weaving circle to explore how women’s roles and identity are shaped by Marshallese culture, the nuclear legacy, and a climate-threatened future. It draws inspiration from the Japanese dance art form of butoh to capture the metamorphic influence of the nuclear legacy on the bodies of women. The work is a weaving of words and movement, each strand connecting local wisdom with discourses of global relevance, opening the weaving circle to a new audience in APT9 – a circle defined by the open flow of learning, creativity, and a spirit of humble resilience that connects and characterises weavers of the Marshall Islands.
1. Simon Gende
Simon Gende, from the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, is known for his paintings that provide humorous and insightful commentary on society, religion, history and contemporary events. In 2017, the Gallery hosted Gende during a visit to Brisbane so he could access the extensive government archives amassed when PNG was controlled by Australia. His interest in the Australian Government’s ongoing sway over PNG is expressed in Australia wokim nupela setelite 2018 and Gas shortage 2018. The latter work is a focused reminder of a particularly colonial trope of exploitation, referencing the nowshelved plans for a massive gas piping system to be assembled to funnel gas from PNG as far south as Gladstone, Queensland.
The project was cancelled by Australian fossil fuels company Oil Search in favour of a liquid natural gas project within PNG that looked ‘more financially attractive’.2 The revised project, led by ExxonMobil and financially backed by the Australian Government, is the country’s biggest resource venture, which has already done tremendous damage to the internal economies of PNG — funding for education, health, law and order, and infrastructure have all drastically diminished due to the gas mine.3
SUBSCRIBE to QAGOMA YouTube to go behind-the-scenes at events and exhibitions / Papua New Guinean artist Simon Gende known for his often humorous and insightful commentary on international events and icons discusses his artwork.
Mining magnates also feature in the jocular paintings of Vincent Namatjira. Depicting seven of the wealthiest people in Australia, ‘The Richest’ series 2016 includes Gina Rinehart, who was a staunch campaigner against the tax on mining super profits. Along with a united front from her industry and lobbyists, they managed to nullify the proposed tax. A projected $12 billion in state revenue in the first two years alone has since been lost to the broader federal public.4 A perceptive curatorial ploy brings together all three series — ‘The Richest’, ‘Seven Leaders’ and ‘Prime Ministers’ (all 2016) — to give the audience a potent statement from Namatjira about the nature of power relations within the settler colonial state of Australia.
In an adjacent gallery, Kapulani Landgraf’s collage works make powerful statements on indigenous experience in Hawai‘i since the United States annexed the islands in 1898. Her practice captures a contemporary indigenous view of sacred places and land issues, particularly in Honolulu, where foreign investment has necessitated dredging wetlands and clearing land to make way for high-rise, luxury apartment complexes. Lele Wale (to leap for no reason) 2016–18, in particular, addresses this desecration, and Ho’okahi Po’ohiwi (be of one shoulder) 2016–18 adds that these sorts of practices remain fiercely contested by the Kanaka Māoli people. The second work alludes to a specific event, post annexation, where the Mō’ī Kamehameha people lined their canoes along the shore of O‘ahu in an act of mass demonstration stretching from Waikīkī Bay to Wai‘alae Beach in Honolulu. The warriors then marched shoulder to shoulder, chanting as they filed towards the inland mountain range, in a display of strength and appeal for solidarity.
Aotearoa New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana sees her work as a comment on Pacific Islander history, culture and tradition. Her video installation inPursuit of Venus [infected] 2015–17 reimagines scenes observed by Captain Cook, and accompanying voyagers, of the peoples they encountered on their multiple journeys across the Pacific Ocean. Pacific bodies often became the imagined projection of ‘Venus’ in the colonial gaze, although, as Reihana highlights, ‘it’s really hard not to exoticise something that is actually naturally beautiful’.5 In her approach, she has carefully considered how to balance competing perspectives to the global audience. By employing Joseph Dufour’s wallpaper design Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Savages of the Pacific Ocean) c.1804, Reihana has reactivated the panoramic tradition of ‘the expansive, all-encompassing image of the world envisaged by 19th and 20th century world expositions’.6 It is this method that necessitates work like in Pursuit of Venus [infected] for triennials such as APT9 — work that is aware of the complexities of its own production and the contexts in which it will be shown and viewed.
Language is a fundamental aspect of self-representation and recollection and is subtly but powerfully deployed in the work untitled (giran) 2018 by Jonathan Jones. Viewers are struck by the swoops and peaks of the feathered tools that gracefully arc and flow across the curvature of the wall. The soundscape resonates with bird calls, pining winds and spoken Wiradjuri language. Recent histories have seen Aboriginal people imprisoned for speaking their language in public spaces, with its previous criminalisation a frequent occurrence in colonial centres of Australia.7 This was the case for the Wiradjuri people, one of the most territorially expansive First Nations groups within the south-east of the continent. untitled (giran) features several tools important to Jones’s Wiradjuri people, such as the dhala-ny (hardwood spear point), bingal (animal bone awl) and bindu-gaany (freshwater mussel shell), each of which is attached to a variety of feathers that were donated by contributors across the country. This powerful combination of traditional tools, natural materials and language speaks to the resilience of Aboriginal peoples in the face of the changing winds of society.
Collaborator Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr has been a pivotal influence in this thread of Jones’s work, as well as in the wider community. In the New South Wales town of Parkes, more than 1000 people — ten per cent of the population — learn the Wiradjuri language every week. This initiative crosses the primary, secondary and TAFE sectors and has resulted in a rise of Aboriginal student attendance, as well as a decrease in racist sentiments held by the non-Indigenous students.8 Here lies the importance of appropriate representation of Aboriginal peoples as well as a broader public exposure. The exhibition of such work, and QAGOMA’s recent acquisition of Jones’s installation, is part of a wider educational imperative.
It is also worth noting that APT Kids has, from the beginning, been a key mechanism for — and a measure of — engagement, understanding and response across cultures. During the inaugural program in 1999, there was a participation record of 16,785 children. As of APT8, that has now expanded to a whopping 142,408 child participants.9 There is no doubt that this is an important programming element, especially considering Australia’s settler colonial status and the prevalence of xenophobic statements in our national discourse.
Australia’s settler heritage and historical focus on our relations with England and Europe, which has only in more recent decades been redirected towards our geographic neighbours, in no way suggests we are the natural host for the Asia Pacific Triennial. However, few would reject the statement that APT serves as an essential event for the betterment of our diverse population. This Triennial has been carefully considered and the artists have provided thought-provoking works, with the First Nations artists’ contribution of particular and increasing relevance. In these fraught times of imperial bubbling and rupture, these works are beacons of hope and influence signalling us away from despair.
A young visitor explores Vincent Namatjira’s Power Portraits 2018 in APT9 Kids, Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) / Photograph: Marc Pricop
Dr Ryan Presley is a Brisbane-based artist originally from Alice Springs. His father’s family is Marri Ngarr and originate from the Moyle River region of the Northern Territory.
Endnotes 1 First Nations artists in APT9 include: Lola Greeno, Jonathan Jones, Vincent Namatjira, Alair Pambegan, Margaret Rarru, Helen Ganalmirriwuy, James Tylor and the Karrabing Film Collective (Australia); Simon Gende (PNG); Lisa Reihana and Areta Wilkinson (Aotearoa New Zealand); Kapulani Landgraf (Hawai‘i); Idas Losin (Taiwan); Mao Ishikawa (Okinawa); and Tcheu Siong (Laos). 2 ‘PNG-Australia gas pipeline project suspended’, ABC News, 1 February 2007, <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-02-01/pngaustralia- gas-pipeline-project-suspended/2184830>, viewed December 2018. 3 Christopher Knaus and Helen Davidson, ‘Australian-backed gas project fails to deliver PNG economic boom – report’, Guardian, 30 April 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/30/australian-backed-gas-project-fails-to-deliver-pngeconomic-boom-report>, viewed December 2018. 4 See Kali Sanyal and Paige Darby, ‘Taxation – Resource super profitstax’, Budget Review 2010–11, <https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/BudgetReview201011/TaxationRSPTax>, viewed December 2018. 5 Lisa Reihana speaking in ‘Abdul Abdullah visits the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane’, [THE MIX], Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1 December 2018. 6 Francis Maravillas, ‘Cartographies of the Future: The Asia-Pacific Triennials and the Curatorial Imaginary’, in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and Practice of Modern Asian Art, eds John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi and TK Sabapathy, University of Sydney East Asian Series and Wild Peony Press, Sydney, 2006, p.251. 7 See A Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Berghahn Books, New York, 2004. 8Our Mother Tongue: Wiradjuri,, dir. Suzi Taylor, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 8 June 2012, <https://open.abc.net.au/explore/22207>, viewed December 2018. 9 Statistics provided by the QAGOMA Children’s Art Centre. Does not include the touring program or additional implementation of curriculum kits.
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APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Lisa Reihana has been supported by Creative New Zealand
The sober colour and aural palette of Yuko Mohri’s contemplative sound installation Breath or Echo blends quietly with the architecture and landscape of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and Brisbane city, writes local sound artist Luke Jaaniste.
Watch the performance in response to breath or echo
Yuko Mohri’s breath or echo
Breath or echo: to be the source of utterance and life (a breath), or to be merely a reflection of what was generated elsewhere (an echo). Shall we read this as a question? Is art, and all cultural artifice, a breath of fresh air, or an echo of it? Either way, both die out. Organisms eventually stop breathing (including you and me) and echoes dissipate. Everything decays.
But in decaying, some trace carries on. History is the trace of such decays, as Walter Benjamin mused in On the Concept of History (1940), which is the source of Yuko Mohri’s title:1
The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before? is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today?2
Japanese sound and intermedia artist Yuko Mohri first created Breath or Echo for the Sapporo International Art Festival in 2017. It was inspired by her experience of decay within an old mining town, Otoineppu, which she visited as part of her creative process, along with the work of sculptor Sunazawa Bikky (1939–81).3
For ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9), the work has been re-situated in GOMA’s River Lounge, continuing the connection between sound art and this area of the building.4 What we experience upon entering the space is a series of musical and industrial objects and electronic gadgets spread across the entire panorama of the windowed platform that overlooks the Brisbane cityscape. Alongside the sounds and sound-objects, light bulbs flicker from three of Mohri’s trademark street lamps (sourced locally for this installation) that have been placed laterally on the floor. Linger long enough and you will hear four interweaving layers of sounds. The most constant layer, which frequently comes and goes, is a high-pitched metallic bell-like shimmer, made from metal washers, discs and sticks knocking against old industrial electrical fittings, electromagnets and concrete blocks. Occasionally, we also hear a low guttural sound emerging from a piano laid with its back on the floor; five strings attached to wires stretch up to the ceiling, and automated units fibrillate the strings. Accompanying these industrial sounds is a slow, strange melodic duet between two upright pianos, which have been modified to play automatically via attached electronics, like modern-day player pianos. The fourth layer, a recitation of spoken-word poetry, emanates from lonely loudspeakers that can only be heard by stepping outside to the deck overlooking the nearby State Library of Queensland.
The work’s sober colour and aural palette blends quietly with the concrete, glass and white walls of GOMA, and the white concrete and metal pylons, rails and roads of the Kurilpa Bridge and Riverside Expressway that skirt the city of Brisbane and which form a real-time living backdrop. The effect is like a fractured kaleidoscope of memories, something contemplative, distilled and even lonely, producing what has been described as ‘improvised ecosystems’:5 an auditory and object-laden landscape punctuates the air with minimal, occasional, accidental, random incursions. Such sounds are reminiscent of the aural activity of cityscapes — random accumulations of noise that can be musical if we wish to listen to it in this way, as John Cage and many other ambient and environmental experimentalists have encouraged us to do.
Breath or Echo is a collaborative work, and Mohri invited the input of a range of other artists: piano music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, poetry by Bikky Sunazawa, poetry recitation by Camille Norment, along with programming by Yuya Ito and lighting engineering by Keiji Ohba (Ryu). Nonetheless, Breath or Echo bears all the hallmark qualities of Mohri’s style, evident in her growing body of installations, including Moré Moré (Leaky): Variations 2017–, Parade 2011–, Divertimento for Child’s Room 2016– and Calls 2013–, which have been commissioned by and exhibited in major galleries in Asia, Europe and New York.6 Mohri’s artworks have a beginning date but remain ongoing projects; across multiple exhibitions and versions they appear and shift in configuration, operating in a ‘site-responsive’ space somewhere between touring and sitespecific realisation.
In creating her installations with simple, elemental components and basic gestures, Mohri’s work speaks to and intersects with a whole range of cultural trends and art-historical tropes: found objects and readymades, immersive installation and soundscapes, automated music and kinetic sculpture, collage and assemblage, and the materialisation of ephemeral media.
Luke Jaaniste is a sonic, spatial and social artist. As one half of Super Critical Mass (with Julian Day), he was a participating artist in APT8. He is trained in music composition, has completed a PhD in ambient experience and works as a solo and collaborative artist and performer.
Endnotes 1 Artist statement, Yuko Mohri, <http://mohrizm.net/works/breathor- echo>, viewed December 2018. 2 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Dennis Redmond, Global Rights Books, 2001; first published as Über den Begriff der Geschichte, 1940, <https://www.globalrights.info/2016/09/ the-concept-of-history-walter-benjamin-download-book>, viewed December 2018. 3 Artist statement, Yuko Mohri, <http://mohrizm.net/works/breath-orecho>, viewed December 2018. 4 In APT8, the River Lounge was the site for Super Critical Mass’s work for bells and community participants, Open Plans. See <https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/
apt8/artists/super-critical-mass>, viewed December 2018. 5 Jyni Ong, ‘Artist Yuko Mohri creates improvised ecosystems through found objects’, It’s Nice That, 15 October 2018, <https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/yuko-mohri-improvised-ecosystemsart-151018>, viewed December 2018. 6 See works listed on artist’s website, Yuko Mohri, <http://mohrizm.net/works>, viewed December 2018
Delve deeper into APT9 with Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner
In this spoken-word performance created specifically for APT9, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner uses the symbolism of the weaving process and weaving circle to explore how women’s roles and identity are shaped by Marshallese culture, the nuclear legacy, and a climate-threatened future. It draws inspiration from the Japanese dance art form of butoh to capture the metamorphic influence of the nuclear legacy on the bodies of women. The work is a weaving of words and movement, each strand connecting local wisdom with discourses of global relevance, opening the weaving circle to a new audience in APT9 – a circle defined by the open flow of learning, creativity, and a spirit of humble resilience that connects and characterises weavers of the Marshall Islands.
Watch the performance Lorro: Of Wings and Seas
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APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Yuko Mohri has been supported by the Ishibashi Foundation, Japan Foundation and the Australia -Japan Foundation
The Hon. Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO, Former Governor-General of Australia, offers her personal reflections on Margaret Olley’s work, how Olley’s paintings were introduced into her life and why her flower studies are a favourite.
Visit the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 13 October 2019 to view the free exhibition ‘Margaret Olley: A Generous Life’, which examines the legacy and influence of one of Australia’s most beloved artists, a charismatic character whose life was immersed in art.
Margaret Olley shared her life with us from wherever she made her studio. Her life was a celebration of art, beauty and love. Quentin Bryce
Margaret Olley’s legacy and influence
Watch two long-time friends of Margaret Olley – Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO, and Philip Bacon AM, collector and dealer for over 40 years, as they reflect on the legacy and influence of the artist. Filmed at GOMA on the opening day of ‘A Generous Life’.
In Brisbane we always believed that Margaret Olley belonged to us. No matter where she travelled, where she settled, we knew that this subtropical city of fragrant and colourful jacarandas, poincianas, frangipanis and allamandas was held in her heart.
It is where her precious gift as a painter began to emerge, to be nurtured and encouraged; where her deeply loved family lived in the expansive weatherboard historic Queenslander named Farndon, with space for aunts, cousins and masses of friends who came to stay. Her mother Grace offered hospitality in spades, the stuff of legend . . .
Every time she came back, Margaret felt she was coming home. What we felt was love, a gentle familiarity and true delight in her work. We recognised and understood her contribution to beauty, the art of the everyday and the poetry of objects. She shared her life with us from wherever she made her studio, the landscapes, portraits, architecture, murals, panoramas, interiors, the view from her window.
For me, it has always been the flowers that are Margaret, that evoke the most tender emotions; heart skipping and breathtaking. Their colour and light, rich sensuality and naturalism. With calm composure, the restraint of quinces lying on a plate. Lush and sensuous, the sheer joyousness of ranunculus jammed in a jar.
Brian Johnstone, Marjorie Johnstone and Margaret Olley at the Johnstone Gallery 1957 / Image courtesy: State Library of Queensland
I viewed my first Olleys in the 1950s at the Johnstone Gallery, then located in the Brisbane Arcade in the city. I went there with my mother on our special expeditions to town, just the two of us. There was a pattern to those memorable trips. We would start at Allan and Stark for cosmetics, then down to the Penny’s Building to see milliner Kath Dahl about hats. Next, fashion designer Gwen Gillam in the Arcade for a new dress, a silk cocktail frock, flower at the neckline – probably for show week.
The Hon. Dame Quentin Bryce AD, CVO Former Governor-General of Australia
An extract from Margaret Olley–A Generous Life, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2019. Read in full Quentin Bryce, ‘Margaret Olley: From the heart’ pp. 162-177.
In celebration of NAIDOC Week, we have invited award-winning author and Mununjali woman Ellen Van Neerven to develop a series of written responses entitled ‘Collecting Australia’, which draw inspiration from works featured in our Australian Collection.
Hear van Neerven at 2.30pm on Saturday 13 July 2019 in the permanent Australian Collection, Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), during her Poetry Reading tour featuring the artworks of Dale Harding, Destiny Deacon and Judy Watson. Alternatively, contemplate these three works in your own time using the poetry as inspiration.
This is the first of three blogs combining their work with van Neerven’s poetry.
I wrote this series of poems, ‘Collecting Australia’ in two places: in the Gallery sitting before the works, and abroad in Germany, where I had a travel engagement.
I understand the newly developed Australian Collection as a reimagination. What is Australia anyway?
As a poet, I love the challenge of responding to artworks, meeting them with my own craft. I was deliciously drawn to Dale Harding’s Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue 2017 which covers a whole wall. I sat by this work for… I guess it was over an hour. The first poem I wrote was ‘Footnotes on a timeline’, and it captures all of my immediate feelings about the work. The shovel handle stencil motif in this artwork inspired ‘Call a spade a spade’. I saw an interview with Dale where he talked about the woman figure on the right in this artwork as representing women’s work and our matriarchal cultures so I wrote ‘The woman looking down’ about my own mother and grandmother and great-grandmother.
Dale Harding introduces Wall composition in Reckitt’s Blue / Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to be the first to go behind-the-scenes
Harding considers a fuller history of art production in Australia – from Indigenous (pre-European) to colonial to contemporary times. The tension in the Euro-centric perspective on Australia followed me in Germany, where I had a revelation of sorts. It is important to frame colonisation in two ways: events in Europe, events in Australia, there’s a direct relationship. I participated in a postcolonial walking tour in Bremen, in the north of Germany, where I saw what invading other countries had brought to Germany society. The city, the harbor and the waterways was created and shaped by this. Not ‘post’ anything, colonisation is still alive and well, it just goes by other names. By using a made-up spelling ‘Urup’ in my poem ‘Postcolonial musings in Urup’ I wanted to apply an Aboriginal sensibility to the word, and in doing so frame Europe as the other. Put the sharp microscope back on countries like Germany, The Netherlands, England and France, uncover the trails of exploitation, and see how they are still designed by default to exploit other countries.
While I hiked the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) in the south of Germany, I was struck by a feeling of sadness, haunting. I wrote about this in ‘a ship-shaped hole in the forest’, and I became interested to retrace the Cook’s Endeavour back to its source. Facing history from this angle, I felt oddly calm.
As well as having Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) heritage, I have Dutch heritage, and when I visited my family in the Netherlands I thought about my mixed-race body, two very different perspectives in my genes. ‘Funeral Plan’ is about this.
The following works reflect on what it means to ‘collect’ Australia, and how the tension between the Eu-Grip and Dhagan (Aboriginal land) manifests. I hope my words on this art in turn inspire future art and/ or creations/ imaginings.
Watch as Dale Harding creates Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue / Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to be the first to go behind-the-scenes
Footnotes on a timeline
Burnt in blue to circumnavigate the strange land of evanescence, the blue line they call time moving all forward, bluing the blackfellas they dared called savage – you can’t steal from savages. There was infinite wealth to steal. Do you understand what it means to be a beneficiary of colonisation? Can we creep through the timeline and draw against the ancient-modern binary?
I can point on one side of the wave my ancestors’ story, I trace it through, they thought they cleaned it up but they built the shallowest grave. Their sold their soul for gold and coal and oil and we line our stomachs with water, it will be our armour, we are the people that can live inside our dreaming, live inside the sea, like inside a turtle’s heartbeat, live inside the sun on the sand, warm this country for centuries because we are the real entities. Don’t turn a blind eye please, all we need for you to see is that climate is our only bank. If we don’t have healthy water, air, earth, we got nothing. So where does your money go, where does your time go, my time and your time are on this timeline.
There’s time for us to read out all of the footnotes, go over the fine print. They burnt records of us in fires, the stole the evidence of our survival. But check my blood, I’m from here. This country is a haunted house, governments still playing cat chasing marsupial mouse. How many lies on your timeline? Have you ever felt like you’re just killing time? We’re still smoking sores. Let’s carbon date it, baby. We have time to read out all the footnotes of a timeline in Reckitt’s Blue.
A heart a heart A diamond a diamond A club a club Call it invasion not settlement Call it genocide not colonisation Call it theft not establishment Don’t call January 26 Australia Day Don’t shy away from telling the truth Don’t say ‘no worries’ say ‘I worry’ for the future of our country, our environment if we fail to listen and to act Don’t say ‘we’re full’ Say we’re open Call yourself an ally Call yourself a mate
is my mother she’s stressing the way come here my jahjam the ancestors whisper come now, sit on my shoulder you’re safe you listen you think of us
“Postcolonial” musings in Urup
Urup colonised itself and now has a belly ache
like the snake that ate a kangaroo
local languages hang in the balance
the river pushed for commerce
coffee grounds on the railway tracks
cotton seeds in the air
merchant houses built on backs
wolves asked welcomed back
beavers needed to clean the river
the red squirrel fends of the grey
migrant children play football on the hills
gold draped buildings fester in the city
here their traditions honoured so why isn’t ours?
let’s get the U-Grip of our Dhagun
A ship-shaped hole in the forest
Such a sad sight: a ship-shaped hole in the forest still recovering from the fright of colonisation The straightest pine cut into masts elm into keel and stern post white oak into hull, floors and futtocks For the farms: streams of straw and cattle graze on the deforested floor.
While the ship sails in the southern seas the ship-shaped hole thousands of years deep aches and aches the people burn their furniture to stay warm try to regenerate with new trees left with commercial forests and waldsterben.
no consent was asked from the materials of “discovery” in Yugambeh our names for boat and tree that makes the boat are the same material handled with care spirit lives in the same name so do I call you tree or mast as I walk through the wood full of so many ship-shaped holes?
Funeral Plan
what can you do with your body? it’s just one body
my Aunt and Uncle are burying themselves in a curated forest it costs $4000
when history becomes necessary the sadness belongs to me
I am not aware of my power you watch me build my weapon
Ellen van Neerven (Meanjin, July 2019)
Dale Harding
Working in diverse techniques and traditions, including painting, installation, sculpture, domestic handicrafts, stenciling, woodcarving and silicone casting, Dale Harding is renowned for works that explore the untold histories of his communities. Harding has a particular interest in ideas of cultural continuum and investigates the social and political realities experienced by his family under government control in Queensland, with a focus on matrilineal antecedents.
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Acknowledgment of Country The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Turrbal and Yugara (Jagera) peoples who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
Feature image: Dale Harding Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue 2017
As a poet, Ellen Van Neerven loves the challenge of responding to artworks, meeting them with her own craft. This poem inspired by Destiny Deacon’s Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer is from a series titled ‘Collecting Australia’, and includes poems created for the works of Dale Harding and Judy Watson.
This is the second in a three blog series, combining Van Neerven’s poetry with works within the QAGOMA Collection.
Collecting Australia
I deliberately chose artworks from Queensland artists to respond to, because this is where I’m from. I wrote ‘Portrait of Destiny’ because Destiny Deacon is always highlighting our people through portraiture and I wanted to flip this around and highlight her and how strong she is, contributing to this very Indigenous way of honouring each other and those who have come before us.
Deacon’s Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer is about the poet, actor, director and playwright who was born in Daly River, Northern Territory of Australia. Eva Johnson began writing in 1979; her first play was titled When I Die You’ll All Stop Laughing. Her writing spoke about Aboriginal Australian women’s rights, the stolen generation, land rights, slavery, sexism and homophobia.
This series reflects on what it means to ‘collect’ Australia, and how the tension between the Eu-Grip and Dhagan (Aboriginal land) manifests. I hope my words on this art in turn inspire future art and/ or creations/ imaginings.
Thanks, Sis, for dropping the ‘c’ for us urban blaks
You gave us way to break free of the whitefellas expectations
define our identity on our own terms
Thanks for taking the white people’s invention
putting your blak eye behind the lens publishing protecting
the humanity of us women us men us children
You know I also feel when I’m sitting on the couch
I am always feeling too much
storytelling sometimes is the only way out
you gave those dolls a home!
Brunswick Sista wherever you go living room Island
darkroom gallery classroom kitchen lecture hall
you fly tid you fly
Ellen van Neerven (Meanjin, July 2019)
Destiny Deacon
The politics of representation and their implications for Indigenous people are at the core of Destiny Deacon’s artistic practice, which is largely photography, but also film and installation. Her works combine wit and anger to subvert ethnographic misconceptions about Aboriginal people. Deacon’s low-tech, snap- shot type images humorously redress stereotypical Anglo-European portrayals of Indigenous peoples and seek to confront viewers with unacknowledged prejudices and anxieties. In doing so, she takes control of how Aboriginal peoples are represented.
The image Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer 1994 is appropriated from J M Crossland’s painting Namultera, a young cricketer of the Native’s Training Institution, Poonindie 1854, in the collection of the National Library of Australia. Deacon had seen the work on loan at the National Gallery of Australia and later improvised with her friends Eva Johnson to pose, with the assistance of Virginia Fraser, artist, writer, editor and curator, to stage the image. In Deacon’s version however, the subject’s cricket bat has been replaced by an axe.
The subject, Eva Johnson (b.1946) is an Aboriginal Australian poet, actor, director and playwright, and was named Aboriginal Artist of the Year in 1985, and in 1993 received the inaugural Red Ochre Award from the Australia Council for the Arts for lifetime achievement.
J M Crossland, England/Australia 1800-1858 / Namultera, a young cricketer of the Native’s Training Institution, Poonindie 1854 / Oil on canvas / 99 x 78.8cm / Collection: National Library of Australia
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Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Turrbal and Yugara (Jagera) peoples who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
Feature image: Destiny Deacon Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer 1994
The Indigenous voice of Australia is over 65 000 years old. During NAIDOC Week 2019 (7-14 July), with the theme of ‘voice, treaty and truth’, we have invited award-winning author and Mununjali woman Ellen Van Neerven to develop a series of written responses entitled ‘Collecting Australia‘, which draw inspiration from works featured in our Australian Collection.
This is the last of a three blog series by van Neerven, and features Judy Watson, combining her artwork with van Neerven’s poetry. You can also read poems inspired by Dale Harding and Destiny Deacon.
Collecting Australia
The poem, ‘sacred ground beating heart’ takes its title from Judy Watson’s painting. I have always loved this work so I appreciated the chance to write to it. Plus the title just lends itself well to poetry!
I wrote this series of poems, ‘Collecting Australia’ in two places: in the Gallery sitting before the works, and abroad in Germany, where I had a travel engagement. I missed my Country a lot while I was away. I think this work really captures what that connection is like, how deeply it is felt through your whole body.
sacred ground beating heart 1989 is pinned to the gallery wall, and remains unstretched as exhibited, rebuffing the classical traditions of European paintings.
sacred ground beating heart ancient sound feeding art we’re all sleeping on a sensation bigger than us, bigger than the body if you roll me I’ll be thunder if you squeeze me I’ll be dance move, jahjam, move put your feet in the earth recover yourself don’t stop dreaming softly spin all the way around sacred ground beating heart ancient sound feeding art
Ellen van Neerven (Meanjin, July 2019)
Judy Watson
Through paint and pigment Judy Watson, a descendant of the Waanyi people of north-west Queensland, offers evidence of intimate encounters with the heat, air and moisture and pulse of the earth – the geographical emblems of her heartland. These emblems are linked with Australian Aboriginal totemic beings or culture heroes who metamorphosed into landscape features such as hills and rocks, and who continue to manifest their presence as meteorological or astral phenomena. The unstretched canvas has been stained by layers of wet and dry pigment, creating a velvety, sensuous surface which is then marked by distinct touches of colour. The imagery suggests an aerial perspective of parched land, a depiction of distant homelands or a material translation of an emotional state.
Judy Watson discusses sacred ground beating heart / Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to be the first to go behind-the-scenes
Subscribe to YouTube to go behind-the-scenes / Watch or Read about the Indigenous Australian Collection
Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Turrbal and Yugara (Jagera) peoples who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
John Honeywill, offers his personal reflections on Margaret Olley’s work and how her spirit has shaped his practice. Visit Honeywill at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) until 29 September 2019 in Open Studio as he shares his studio practice and provides insights into how he works.
The free exhibition ‘Margaret Olley: A Generous Life’ is at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 13 October. Delve into the influence of one of Australia’s most beloved artists, a charismatic character whose life was immersed in art.
John Honeywill at Open StudioOpen Studio at the Queensland Art Gallery
I met Margaret Olley once. In 2009 she came to her old school — Somerville House, where I taught art for many years — to be honoured for her contribution to Australian culture. Like most Australians, I knew Olley through her paintings, the portraits, her biography and the photographs of her home. She had been woven into my consciousness for many decades, though I did not know her personally.
I finished teaching in December 2017 to focus on my painting, and four days later I began a residency at the Tweed Regional Gallery. I was invited to respond to the objects in the Margaret Olley Art Centre and made six paintings for the group exhibition ‘A Painter’s House’, held in conjunction with three other artists (Monica Rohan, Lewis Miller and Guy Maestri) who had done similar, earlier residencies. The initial impression of clutter in the re-creation of Olley’s Duxford St home quickly changed into an appreciation of a richly lived-in space as I spent time in the rooms, selecting and handling objects, becoming increasingly aware of the personal nature of these bowls, jugs and bottles and the stories they held. Her paintings included so many of these objects.
I felt a sense of responsibility as I used Olley’s objects in my own work, reinterpreting them and their conversations with each other. I have been very fortunate to have had this access, as it has enabled a positive shift in my paintings. My deepest gratitude is for being able to spend time there, because each visit back into Margaret Olley’s rooms became more emotionally touching — a combination of happiness and gentle intimacy that gave me a sense of the private world of this uncompromising, wonderful artist.
John Honeywill, Artist and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation member
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Open Studio artists are: John Honeywill: 8 Jun – 29 Sep 2019 / Natalya Hughes: 5 Oct 2019 – 27 Jan 2020 / Grace Lillian Lee: 1 Feb – 24 May 2020 / Madeleine Kelly: 30 May – 5 Oct 2020 / Abdul Abdullah: 10 Oct 2020 – 24 Jan 2021
Feature image detail: Margaret Olley Hawkesbury wildflowers and pears c.1973
