Art Monthly July 2008 Number 211

NATIONAL Peter Timms

peter.timms@internode.on.net

Death of Robert Rauschenberg

Artist Robert Rauschenberg died in Florida on 12 May, aged 82. He was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925. Along with his friends John Cage and Jasper Johns, he injected a spirit of anarchy and exuberance into American art in response to the introspection of Abstract Expressionism, combining paint, photographs, printmaking techniques and assemblages of junk materials into richly allusive semi-abstract images. After a period in the army during the war, and a series of menial jobs while studying art in the late ’40s, he held the first of many solo shows at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951. In 1959 he was (very controversially) awarded the main prize at the Venice Biennale. He was given a retrospective at the National Gallery, Washington, in 1976 and another in 1998 at the Guggenheim, NY. Rauschenberg is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the postwar period.

Budget

Last month’s federal Budget included an allocation of $1.5 million over 3 years for the establishment of a resale royalty scheme for Australian visual artists, fulfilling an election promise. $7.6 million has been provided for the Indigenous Art and Craft Industry Support scheme. The Australia Council will administer $5.2 million for an artists-in-residence program in schools and universities, and $6.6 million over 4 years for ‘young and emerging’ artists. However, $4.3 million has been cut from Regional Arts Australia and there will be no funding for the implementation of the Indigenous Australian Arts Commercial Code of Conduct being prepared by NAVA.

Not good for all

The resale royalty scheme, although welcomed by most artists, is not so popular with collectors or those in the secondary market, since it will add 2-5% to the cost of buying or selling a work. Auctioneer Chris Deutscher maintains that the scheme will discourage collectors. But you could say the same of the buyer’s premium, which the auction houses themselves introduced some years ago.

Video does Venice

Sydney video artist Shaun Gladwell will represent Australia at next year’s Venice Biennale, which opens in June. He is developing a work entitled MADDESTMAXIMVS, comprising five thematically-related videos accompanied by photographs and sculptural elements, which he says is inspired by the Mad Max movies. Four other artists – Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Yonetani, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro – will also show work at Venice in an Australia Council-funded supplementary exhibition.

High prices

Francis Bacon’s Triptych, 1976 has set a world record price for a postwar artwork, $US82 million. It was perhaps unfortunate that the Melbourne Age reported this on the same page as a story about Burmese cyclone victims dying of malnutrition ... Lucien Freud’s portrait of Sue Tilley, a very large London job centre supervisor, sold at Christie’s in New York last month for $US33.6 million, which is said to be an auction record for a living artist.

It’s a minefield

‘Periodic semantic readjustment’, was how anthropologist Roger Sandall dismissed new guidelines, prepared by the West Australian and South Australian education departments, on how to address Indigenous Australians; a sign, Sandall says, of the ‘deranged obsession’ of academics with terminology. Still, you don’t want to be caught out saying the wrong thing, so start adjusting your semantics now: ‘Dreamtime’ is no longer appropriate. Substitute ‘Dreamings’ or ‘The Dreaming’; ‘Native’ is out, ‘indigenous groups’ or ‘language groups’ being more acceptable; ‘Primitive’ is out (hasn’t it been for the past half-century?) while ‘complex’ and ‘diverse’ are in. Even ‘Aborigine’ is now frowned upon, ‘Aboriginal person’ being preferred (though what the difference is escapes me). ‘Rituals’, ‘religion’, ‘myth’, ‘tribal’ are among many other terms that are now taboo in relation to Aboriginal persons.

Puncturing fantasies of innocence

The hysteria generated on both sides of the argument by Bill Henson’s aborted exhibition at Roslyn Oxley Gallery has reignited the debate about art and censorship. Following a complaint, police from the Child Protection and Sex Crimes Unit raided the gallery on May 23, confiscating photographs depicting nude teenagers. Kevin Rudd and Morris Iemma fuelled the moral panic with intemperate comments about the works although neither had seen them. Arts Minister Peter Garrett dithered, as usual. Cate Blanchett, who chaired the arts panel at the 2020 Summit, subsequently organised an open letter to the PM Rudd, signed by a large number of prominent people, asking him to reconsider, which he refused to do. Later, several other galleries with works by Henson, including the National Gallery of Australia and Albury Regional Gallery, were also raided by the police, and the magazine Art World, which had printed a story on Henson featuring the seized works, had to pulp its June-July issue, at a cost of $100 000. A word that keeps cropping up is ‘innocence’. In times of social upheaval and uncertainty, people need to believe that innocence still exists, and today, as in Victorian times, their fantasies of innocence are projected onto children. So perhaps it’s not children’s innocence that people are trying to protect so much as adult constructions of it. As many people have pointed out, children’s sexuality is exploited mercilessly in corporate advertising, but artists, of course, are a soft target.

Up a tree

Danie Mellor, born in Queensland and now resident in Canberra, has won the $15 000 National Works on Paper Award, organised by Mornington Peninsular Art Gallery in Victoria. Mellor’s work depicts two koalas up a tree with a fantasy landscape behind. Judges were Susan McCulloch, Jason Smith and Lisa Roet.

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