Tasmania produces many talented and creative artists. There must be more artists on the ground here per head of population than anywhere else within Australia.

Not only do that originate from here but they have been in arriving here from other places in numbers over the past ten years.

Today, Tasmania is a hotbed of creative talent across all arts disciplines and Jonathan Kimberley is a good example of one such welcomed new arrival.

Jonathan Kimberley is a graduate of RMIT Art School who has spent the past ten years traveling Australia. Five of those years were spent in the East Kimberley's working as an art coordinator at the Warmun Art Centre at Turkey Creek.

Part of his Australian experience has been trips to Tasmania, he made eight successively over years. He has since settled in Tasmania and the paintings in this exhibition are primarily Tasmanian in content.

His close experience with Indigenous Australians infuses his work. His work is not about a view of landscape so much as about 'country'. About a knowledge and an experience of country from within.

Exhibition continues until Wednesday 25 June 2003.

dick@bettgallery.com.au

Thursday, June 5, 2003

Welcome to the world of...

http://www.fineart.has.it

TSO... a review

Wing-sie Yip, conductor
Sharon Prero, soprano
Slava Grigoryan, guitar
Female Voices of the TSO Chorus

Maxwell Davies Antarctic Symphony (Symphony No.8) (Australian premiere)
Westlake Antarctica - suite for guitar and orchestra
Vaughan Williams Sinfonia Antarctica (Symphony No.7)

When it comes to combining orchestras, as the TSO and the AYO, did on Sunday night, its a risky business.

The cultures, styles and strengths and weaknesses of each are different. But on this occasion the risk was worth it. This was a fine concert with the ensemble playing stunningly well.

Under the baton of the relatively unknown, but definitely talented, Wing-se Yip, the TSO's rendition of Vaughan-Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica had all the resonance, grandeur, melancholy required to allow it to stand up to the scrutiny of a comparison with previous great versions that should be in every serious collectors' pile - Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic or the more recent Bryden Thompson version with the London Symphony.

Sharon Prero has a gorgeous voice and her soaring sound from the balcony in the final movement provided a suitably sad, without being melodramatic, reminder of Scott's doomed trek.

The Orchestra's first half was a little more mixed. Contrary to some reviewers, for example John Stafford in The Mercury, I like the Antarctic Symphony of Peter Maxwell Davies.

It reminds in parts of Alan Hovhaness' Mt St Helens Symphony - the tectonic shifts of the ice and the volcano are similar in intent and sound and Maxwell Davies gets it right.

But the Westlake - in spite of Grigoryan's technical brilliance - seemed a mixed bag as a work. Partly popular in tone and partly trying to be somewhat atonal, one wondered about the point of this reflection of the Antarctic. Give me Vaughan Williams any day.

Sunday, March 30, 2003

A Glass Half Empty

Lack of funding is a common complaint or excuse, but there are many other equally visible obstacles stacked against visual artists’ careers in this state. Need an image to review an exhibition that’s already been open for a week? No problem if you’re a trained therapist blessed with the patience of a lion tamer, but a test of the nerves if your newspaper can’t hold the page and your livelihood depends on getting stories into print. When this writer observed too many dead light bulbs malingering at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery recently, staffing problems were blamed. Although illumination is a priority in other state cultural institutions, TMAG’s dead bulbs went unchanged for a week, suggesting that its difficulties may be more deeply entrenched than we realise.

After a brief hunt for a new mind to meet the exquisite philosophical challenge of dragging the last of Australia’s 19th century state cultural institutions into the 21st century, the Tasmanian Department of State Development recently hired Bill Bleathman, a career public servant whose eight years in arts and museum management were as DSD’s representative at TMAG, during former director Pat Sabine’s tenure. It has been said that TMAG’s low morale, lame exhibition standards and crippling budget problems were exacerbated during this time, however it is clear that no director, whether visionary or enslaved to DSD’s diminished ideals of cultural excellence, could perform adequately under the current parliamentary act guiding TMAG’s destiny. The institution’s problems are compounded by DSD’s management and commercial outreach theories focused on tourism and how to turn as many of the institution’s functions into ìbusiness unitsî as possible.

By forcing TMAG to constantly rationalise itself against non-arts and museum industry benchmarks this strategy represents an explicit devaluation of the Museum and Gallery’s primary role as the cultural flagship of the state. It’s a bit like asking a llama to lap dance at a job interview hosted by crocodiles. TMAG’s biggest obstacle may lie in its Board of Trustees’ professional disengagement with the modern business of running a state museum and art gallery. Bucking national trends which have been successfully modernising public ownership of Australia’s cultural institutions, and in spite of State Premier Jim Bacon’s Ministerial role in the Arts portfolio, TMAG’s Board is jam packed with public sector executives, members of the Royal Society, academics, local councillors and small business owners. Artists have yet to be engaged in public trusteeships in Tasmania. ìThey’re lousy with money and they drink too muchî, a senior advisor to the Arts Minister said several years ago when I queried this anomaly. This probably explains what keeps Tasmania’s reputation for cultural provincialism alive during these racy early years of the 21st century, in spite of all the talent here.

Somehow, Tasmania’s senior bureaucrats are convinced that the island’s s heavily promoted creative growth spurt is possible without contemporary artists’ involvement. How else would one of the most extravagant displays of political propaganda I’ve seen in this country, have made it onto TMAG’s recent exhibition schedule? ìSmugglers and Contrabandî, a Department of Customs and Quarantine touring show, exhibited wigged mannequins wearing smugglers’ outfits, false bottomed suitcases, bizarre samples of confiscated booty and stern warnings about the consequences of smuggling drugs, wildlife and other contraband. At lunchtime during the show, Customs staff housed in a small caravan on TMAG’s grounds would bring out a stuffed bear as part of a public outreach program. If ìSmugglers and Contrabandî had been exhibited in a similar institution in the United States, there would have been an outcry about ham-fisted governments using cultural institutions to promote political agendas. Did we need to be told that the Commonwealth of Australia’s Department of Customs and Quarantine are very good at catching smugglers? Why are cultural dollars being used to repackage that important function in our society? Most importantly, does ìSmugglers and Contrabandî truly belong in Australia’s state art galleries and museums? If so, the arts in this country have far more problems than the Myer Report’s recommendations for increased funding can hope to overcome.

What gets me is that although the Australian public has warmly embraced an extensive range of sophisticated technological and social innovations over the last two decades, this evolutionary leap in acceptance of new ideas has passed many provincial arts bureaucrats by. Professional estimations of the Tasmanian public’s threshold for engaging with dynamic, well-presented artistic challenges, preferably with the lights switched on; appear to be at an all time low. Tasmania’s poorly aimed visual arts marketing and promotions outreach consistently misjudges the pace of public acceptance of the many dynamic new concepts bombarding us through television, the internet, newspapers and other vigorous mediums. This is easier to get away with outside larger competitive urban centers, but the net effect of not reaching audience markets is exactly the same in the arts as it is in all businesses. From external perspectives, Australia’s idiomatic conviction of itself as a captive urban market is a premature filter disqualifying a variety of globally accepted social and cultural innovations which actively contribute to the evolution of creative, intellectual and economic growth elsewhere. It is certainly bad for the distribution of new forms of artistic expression throughout this country. By discounting the value of engaging small audiences more intimately with artistic discovery, we’re mismeasuring important cultural market growth determinants that propel the uptake of new art forms and emerging cultural expressions elsewhere. In the late 1970s when classic kinetic and new media art forms had all but disappeared from New York’s visual arts radar, 20th century Korean master Nan June Paik’s installations could only be found in Minneapolis gallery owner Carl Solway’s back room which also stored the unsold work of emerging painter David Salle and sculptor Joel Otterness’s wild recycled copper pipe mechanisms. Provincial Minneapolis’ embrace of contemporary art’s risky ideals and exhibition standards supported the development of the Walker Art Centre which some 20 years later, remains one of the world’s foremost critical standard bearers in the visual arts.

Australia’s cultural economies are differently wired than US and European arts markets. Historical perceptions of the impact of distance play an overly determined role in developing contemporary audiences’ involvement with the arts in this country. So, like all innovative products and new concepts entering the Australian experience, either from outside or within our society’s creative resources, contemporary art must perform a wider social function in Australia’s many smaller population centres because there are fewer comparisons to be made. But it would be patronising and economically dangerous to stereotype pressing national needs for contemporary art to win more friends in the provinces, as a particular symptom of Tasmania’s cultural backwardness. Breaking down tacit managerial dread of the visual arts as a problematic cultural concept for regional audiences means building public inspiration for critical strengths and standards. That’s going to be hard if you’re dumbing it down with Commonwealth departmental sideshows.

Even so, several promising young Tasmanian artists’ shows made their point in recent weeks. Richard Wastell’s ìfiresî at the Bett Gallery advanced the artist’s earlier landscape focus in a new series blending painterly clips of epic vistas glimpsed at the speed of a passing car, with conceptual stylishness. Wastell’s multi-panelled paintings are an intelligent engagement with Tony Clark’s 1980s dioramas. Wastell switches backward and forwards between several painting styles and formal images to compose single images and small groups of charred and flaming trees into an animated dramatisation of fire’s iconic forces. The exhibition’s signature painting ìFire Front 1î shows three distant trees blurred by heat, light and speed. In the second of its five paintings, a single flaming tree disappears behind a hot smoky haze. This central image of symbolic blackened forms suggests flattened coils of smoke or burnt trees. The floating matt charcoal silhouettes on unbleached linen recur throughout the show as one of the visual devices lending Wastell’s ìfiresî series its shifting cinematic immediacy. The artist shares another of Clarke’s strategies in repeating casually drawn motifs as emblems of nature’s randomness and its easy to see Wastell’s selectively staged dramas of fire, light and speed forming a productive dialogue with the senior artist’s sophisticated inquiry into the modern experience of landscape. The difference is that Wastell’s richly painted skies; fat brushwork and passion for pure colour declare an unreserved faith in painting’s multi nuanced performance in the artistic perception of nature. Yet, as a series, ìfiresî doesn’t always intellectually enlarge upon Clark’s stimulating conceptual mannerisms with sufficient pressure to sufficiently intensify their mutual artistic aims. Nevertheless, Wastell’s reflective paintings make their own intuitively graceful standards quietly known.

Megan Keating’s installation ìThe Ballet of Nothing Moreî at CAST couldn’t be more different. The artist filled the gallery’s large white space with masses of large red paper cut out soldiers and fighter planes, teasing out a pleasing militarised rhythm to characterise her personally enlisted platoon of international personnel. Keating’s high kicking peacekeeping force of red paper soldiers wear jackets shadowed in pink, with rifles, ammunition and bayonets bending lazily from the walls. Red paper fighter jets buzz in formation up and down the walls. Keating learned the technique in Beijing from watching elderly craftswomen delicately snipping coloured paper portraits. This and the sight of Chinese Red Army marching through Tiananmen Square left an indelible mark. Her paper cutting techniques are a laboriously intricate way of discovering images, but the medium is unexpectedly adaptable for Keating’s ambitiously aimed visual prod at the mechanics of soldiers’ physical culture. She’s one of few Australian contemporary artist currently investigating the changing face of international conflict, so ìThe Ballet Of Nothing Moreî is especially pertinent in abstracting rank and file images in these uneasy times.

The third hit in Tasmania’s late winter season was John Vella’s ìProduct Linesî project, launched at the new Launceston Academy of Art in mid August. A collaboration between the artist and Amcor

Fibre Packaging Corporation tested Vella’s alternative box assemblage system based on the company’s standard flat pack formats. Vella’s series of white folded boxes march across the gallery floor and are perforated with negative imprints of selected packaging details like handles or ventilation grids. He says he’s trying to ìunite the logic of industrial production with the intuitive (sometimes irrational) impulses of art makingî, so initially ìProduct Linesî boxes appear disconcertingly ordinary in honour of their mainstream manufacturing origins. As sculptural entities, these cardboard objects are dependant upon light and dark contrasts and hidden volumes to achieve spatial weight and control. Yet this work doesn’t engage effectively with packagings fundamental marketing dynamics so never fully capitalises on the utilitarian integrity of the medium. Even so, ìProduct Linesî unites Vella’s considerable flair for integrating classic pop languages with several fascinating 21st century conceptual questions.

There is no question that a number of emerging contemporary artists here are making intellectual headway with national and international creative issues, in spite of the Tasmanian visual arts organisation’s sleepy professional performance. So isn’t worth establishing higher industrial standards for supporting the state’s courageous bank of cutting edge artistic talent more effectively?

Jane Rankin-Reid is an arts columnist with The Sunday Tasmanian. Her essays have recently been published in The Guardian and Island.

This article is reprinted from the October 2002 edition of Art Monthly Australia.