The National 2017
new Australian art
AGNSW 30 Mar – 16 Jul 2017
Over a period of some weeks I visited all three venues presenting the latest version of an Australian wide survey of the latest in Contemporary art, The National, at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art and Carriageworks. They read as three individual group shows, with little to tie them together even with the device of having Agatha Gothe-Snape and Alex Garownski place works at each of the venues. I am writing this piece only on the AGNSW version of the Exhibition.
You come upon the 1st work nestled in the darkened ante foyer of the Gallery; the entrance area before the cavernous main space of the Ground Floor. Alex Garownski's facsimile of a section of the support columns at Carriageworks, one of the other National venues, sits darkly in the marble and stone remnant of the original building. For anyone who has spent time down there at the old sheds in Redfern, they are immediately recognizable. I headed to the material description wondering how he copied the steel and cast iron. All plaster, mdf and verisimilitude. Impressive in scale but my next thought was where are they going to end up? Maybe just pop them down at CW; hide them in one of those cavernous spaces; seems a shame to think they will be dismantled, trashed.
The Gallery has given over separate rooms/spaces to individual artists for this section of The National. For the visitor, it is a challenge to be immersed in one artist’s work at a time; no moving along the wall or across the floor letting things slide in and out of focus, looking for that spark of connection, recognition; this is not part of the program. For the artists it challenges them to develop large-scale projects; and for most of them they have embraced this challenge with gusto. It allows them the somewhat unlimited production assistance a large Institution offers to fully develop their conceptual, social, political and historical themes and make a major project.
But something happens in museums. The large and sterile spaces can drain life out of the work and leave it like a living thing suspended in Amber. The works sparkle and shine, displaying their worthwhile intentions but they remain a bit distant. One example is the Tiger Yaltangki paintings; although not a major developed project these 3 signature paintings somehow suffer the same fate. Their mad lyrical and spontaneous glamour, so obvious when seen in a group show like Desert Mob at Araluen in Alice Springs, are slightly drained. Somehow the works sit on the walls lost in whiteness and LED lighting.
So is this my problem? Am I missing something? Am I demanding something other and missing what is on offer? I suppose I want that connection, visceral and emotional that connects me to the work and I am just not getting it. The only exception is Khaled Sabsabi. The inchoate painting, ostensibly touch ups, on his photos from Beirut, post the war of 19xx draw me in, give me no answers and stay with me. For most of the remaining artists, for all their intelligence, invention, production values, and worthiness, their projects somehow remain distant. It is an institutional distance I find difficult to bridge.
There is much worth in the show. The intentions of the artists, the curatorial imperative, the Institutional demands, create spaces that leave little room for those touching moments that turn a project, a painting, an object into something we connect to like oxygen in a vacuum.
Agatha Gothe-Snape is an exception in a different way. She somehow seems to be playing in that problematic Institutional space; it is like a doppler effect, you can’t quite position yourself in relation to the work; it is neither there nor not there; like a noun in a sea of adjectives; a fact amongst speculative propositions.
I think it involves ideas around love. That love is obvious in the work; in the patterns of Gunybi Ganambarr, the careful glass objects of Yvonne Scarce, in the care and attention of all the artists to their individual projects, but for some reason the earnestness in the display, the production and the curatorial intent, drains that emotion out of the work and the febrile thread that allows the viewer to connect, has become stiffened by too much attention, by too much slightly misdirected care, and leaves me viewing closed systems that will not quite let me in.