Gallery Visit III
Museum of Contemporary Art
If you’ve been keeping up with my social media or my blog, you’ll know that my partner and I went on holiday in Sydney recently. I wrote about our visit to the Art Gallery of NSW in my last blog post, a part one. This post is part two – when we visited the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), the day after.
I’ll just come right out and say it. I’m not a fan of contemporary art. I always prefer what’s on at the Art Gallery of NSW. The exhibitions at the MCA are interesting, but they don’t sing to me the way the ‘traditional art’ (I say this in big air quotes) that’s at the Gallery of NSW does.
(That’s not to say that I don’t like contemporary art. Because, technically, all of the art produced today could be considered ‘contemporary art’. The definition of the word contemporary is ‘belonging to or occurring in the present’, so all art made in the present day is contemporary art... but I digress.)
One of the two exhibitions that really stuck with me was the MCA Collection: Perspectives on Place exhibition. Drawn from the MCA’s collection of over 4,500 works, these pieces explore all aspects of place; from physically being in a space, to land changes over time due to politics and environmental factors, to a place’s significance in rituals and culture.
Conceptually, this exhibition interested me greatly. Each individual has different experiences throughout their life that affect how they perceive place – they impact one’s sense of belonging, which can be vital to one’s sense of self.
I definitely enjoyed the wide range artworks in this exhibition.
The colours and forms in these paintings.
Operation Hurricane #3, Operation Hurricane #2, Operation Hurricane #6, Peter Maloney (2016), metallic and synthetic polymer paint on paper.
The nostalgic, suburban vibe of these photos.
A Long Time Between Drinks, Simryn Gill (2005 - 2009), offset prints, framed.
This absolute monolith of a painting. The colours were so vibrant, and there were so many intricate details the closer you looked (It was a team effort, painted by nine people! I imagine it was quite the bonding experience).
Kalyu, Kumpaya Girgirba, Kanu Nancy Taylor, Ngalangka Nola Taylor, Ngamaru Bidu, Wokka Taylor, Muuki Taylor, Jakayu Biljabu, Bowja Patricia Butt, Noelene Girgirba (2014), synthetic polymer paint on linen.
One of the most expansive works was Cartoons for Joseph Selleny. I find there’s something so satisfying about a work that contains multiple parts – Cartoons for Joseph Selleny had large charcoal on paper works, a drawing installation that encompassed a whole room, and an artists’ book that you could take away, which also included a poster!
Poster taken from Cartoons for Joseph Selleny artist book.
Cartoons for Joseph Selleny (2014), wall drawing installed by Tom Nicholson with Helen Bird, Peter Burne, Alice Elliot-Pimm, Bernadette Jones, Jarryd Lynagh, Flin Sharp, Gabrielle Petrevski, Monica Rudhar and Mitchell Thomas.
Cartoons for Joseph Selleny, Tom Nicholson (2014), charcoal on paper, charcoal on wall, offset printed book.
Cartoons for Joseph Selleny, Tom Nicholson (2014), charcoal on paper, charcoal on wall, offset printed book.
I love that each part is a different medium, and that some parts are tangible and touchable (I love taking away booklets and flyers from galleries, like they’re a memory of what you’ve seen). The connections from each part weave together, different fragments that makes up the whole work.
The other exhibition that stuck with me was Doug Aitken: New Era. Most of Aitken’s works on display in this exhibition were large scale sculptures with LED lights, whole-room-filling installations, or enormous continuous-screen video works.
Works like these.
Sunset (black), Doug Aitken (2012), hand-carved foam, epoxy, hand-silkscreened acrylic, LEDs.
Untitled (sleeping body), Doug Aitken (2020), chromogenic transparency on acrylic in aluminum lightbox with LEDs.
Don’t get me wrong, they are very effective hanging on the gallery wall.
Or other works like twilight, an installation that looks like a public phone, but is made up of motion-responsive LED lights. It was very satisfying to walk around.
Sonic Fountain II was just plain incredible. A huge, milky pool raised up in the middle of the dim gallery space, surrounded by rubble. Water falling from the ceiling, timed to drip… then stream… then cascade. The effect was mesmerising, I stood against the wall for at least ten minutes watching the water (sadly it didn’t make for good photography, though!).
(There was also an odd feeling of disconnect, the fact that that much water shouldn’t be in something as sterile as a gallery space.)
Sonic Fountain II, Doug Aitken (2013/2015), live installation with computer-controlled 9-valve fountain, tinted water, basin, 9 underwater microphones, speakers, looped sound.
Although SONG 1 was a part of the New Era exhibition, it was displayed in a separate space downstairs purely because it was so big. An eleven-metre circular screen with seven projectors, SONG 1 featured numerous people singing lyrics from the 1930s song I Only Have Eyes for You.
The main section of the repeated lyrics went like this:
I only have eyes for you
You are here
And so am I
Maybe millions of people go by
But they all disappear from view
And I only have eyes for you
SONG 1, Doug Aitken (2012/2015), 7-channel composite video, 360 degree surround screen, 32:28 minutes (looped).
Sitting for fifteen minutes, surrounded by the circular screen, listening to people sing, it really got me thinking.
In my second year of university, I wrote an essay on Anish Kapoor, a sculptor. He makes a lot of large-scale sculptures and installations, some with moving water parts like Sonic Fountain II. The whole time I was writing this essay, I was thinking… artists need help making these large-scale installations, right? They can’t do it on their own, it’s gotta be a team effort.
So, if the artist doesn’t have the hard skills to make the artwork, is it really their artwork?
Where do you draw the line between the artist’s idea for the work, and the person (or team of people) who made it?
(Another example similar to Kapoor is the artist team Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and their huge fabric installations.)
Maybe it’s less a question of ownership (because I suppose the idea for the artwork would remain the artist’s intellectual property), and more a question of credit.
Movies have credits at the end, naming every single person who helped make the film. Songs are the same, crediting the writers. Books have acknowledgements, thanking editors and publishers.
Where are the credits for art?
Doug Aitken probably filmed the video for SONG 1 himself, but who are the people singing? The wall text states SONG 1 features ‘ordinary people and professional performers’. Who are these people?
(Even in the booklet for the Matisse: Life & Spirit exhibition at the Gallery of NSW, it mentioned at the very end that Matisse had ‘assistants’ to help him in creating his cutouts. This could have been because of his ill health, but the practice of having assistants isn’t uncommon, and dates back to the Renaissance period.)
This isn’t a personal criticism on Doug Aitken’s artworks, by any means. I enjoyed his exhibition immensely – it just happened to kickstart this thought process in my brain that I’d been mulling over, ever since I wrote that essay on Anish Kapoor.
No practitioner can be expected to do everything themselves, artists included. Sometimes, creating something is a team effort – and someone has to be team leader (the artist!).
But I like to remember the unsung helpers.
Keep up with my art journey!
