Buddha@hotmail

Gonkar Gyatso, Buddha@hotmail, 2006, stickers, pencil on treated paper, 71.12 x  50.8cm. Image courtesy the artist. Gyatso is represented by other work in APT6 which runs 5 December 2009 to 5 April 2010: www.qag.qld.gov.au/apt6

EDITORIAL: #226 Summer 2009-2010

Six of one, half-dozen the other …

The acronym on everyone’s lips this month is APT6, the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial, a flagship event for the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and arguably Australia’s cultural footing in the region. This time round APT6 introduces contemporary art from its hitherto unrepresented countries of Iran, Turkey, Tibet, North Korea (DPRK), Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia. In this spirit, our lead article by Singapore-based photographer/writer Zhuang Wubin focuses on the subject of contemporary photography in Cambodia, exposing the myth of its sudden, post-1990 materialisation, and fleshing out motivations and methodologies for some of its leading proponents, including Vandy Rattana who is represented in APT6.

QAG is on the receiving end of praise and damnation in this issue: the former through Daniel Thomas’s illumination of Diane Moon’s recent survey exhibition Floating Life, Contemporary Aboriginal Fibre Art exhibition; the latter through Tess Allas’s Letter to the Editor which, despite its sardonic humour, finds serious faults with a concurrent survey of prominent Brisbane Aboriginal artist (and former QAG board member), the late Ron Hurley – Nurreegoo: The Art and Life of Ron Hurley 1946-2002.

In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria’s current survey of local (now LA-based) ‘hot-shot’ Ricky Swallow has reviewer Veronica Tello equally divided. The show is ‘superbly presented’ though falls short, according to Tello, with its over-reliance on biography at the expense of a more developed art historical framework. It is partly on this basis that Anne Kirker, in one of four book reviews this month (to help with your summer reading), admires Stuart Koop’s Crackle… Contemporary Art from the middle of Nowhere. Swallow is one of Koop’s seventeen featured Australian artists, and Kirker makes an example of his discussion of Swallow’s Killing Time to commend how the book ‘spares us the dead weight of CV facts except when an explanation of content warrants a biographical insight’.

The air of melancholy within Swallow’s oeuvre may seem odd for a summer show though it seems to hang like heavy humidity in Ashley Crawford’s assessment of Immemorial: Reaching back beyond memory, an exhibition of tropical exchange (between Darwin and Yogyakarta) which asked its ten artists to respond to notions of familial heritage and ancestry. This emphasis on the personal and ancestral does in fact give great depth to Jon Altman’s tribute to Central Arnhem Land artist John Mawurndjul. In publishing Altman’s speech at this year’s presentation of the Melbourne Art Foundation’s Artist Award to Mawurndjul, we set in train two divergent concerns in this issue. Inspiration from the bark paintings of Mawurndjul and the late L.B. Nadjamerrek in the work of young Newcastle artist Lucas Grogan was a catalyst for the Art and Appropriation Post the Apology symposium at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts earlier this year. In this light, Altman’s speech is followed by Métis (Canadian Aboriginal) artist and academic David Garneau’s critical keynote address at this symposium. An articulation of Mawurndjul’s art in and of ‘country’ also precedes a trio of articles addressing the work of other Australian artists dealing differently with, for want of a better word, ‘the landscape’: Zsuzsanna Soboslay on Mandy Martin; Jan Jones on Michelle Hiscock; and Sasha Grishin on John R. Walker.

This month’s cover image by young Chinese (Sichuan province) artist Song Wei feeds into the APT’s platform of cultural specificity and diffusion. It also pays tribute in this regard to the work of private gallerists, the independent cultural brokers, with Wei’s Hamburger (2008) currently showing in the exhibition 30 Degrees curated by Australians Brian Wallace and George Michell, gallerists in Beijing and Shanghai respectively. Sydney gallerist Conny Dietzschold’s take on twenty years of dealing internationally makes a rigorous subject for interview, and timely as Canberra art lovers farewell longstanding, celebrated gallerist Helen Maxwell with her gallery’s final show this month.

This month’s editorial image by Gonkar Gyatso, the first Tibetan artist in the APT, practises the age-old conflation of commercialism and spirituality. In its delineation of something less cyber and more contemplative, however, I turn to this month’s Obituary for L.B. Nadjamerrek (1926-2009) and to the terrible slew of recent deaths in the Australian art world for which our next issue, March 2010, will serve to publish more in-depth obituaries. I refer in particular to the passing of curator Nicholas (Nick) Waterlow (1941-2009), photographer Sue Ford (1943-2009), and to fellow arts editor/publisher Janice (Jan) McCulloch. We are all the more rich and wise through the gift of their lives.  

Yours (in summer serenity)
Maurice