Arts Interview - Nicky McWilliam

An interview I did for Arts Interview with Nicky McWilliam, director of Eva Breuer Art Dealer. The topic was Stress and Wellbeing, something that many arts workers are familiar with.

http://artsinterview.com/2011/09/05/arts-interview-nicky-mcwilliam/

John Kaldor Family Collection, AGNSW

This one is more of a reflection than a review, because while the works are spectacular, there are more interesting forces at play behind the scenes that I would like to explore.

The AGNSW’s shiny new 3000 square metre marble basement level has, as its inaugural exhibition, a vast display of works from John Kaldor’s donated collection. Worth a cool $35 million, the works are exhibited in the new contemporary gallery baring the Kaldor family name.

The exhibit is indeed impressive, including works from many of the most important art movements of the late twentieth century and the new millennium. Kaldor is one of the world’s foremost collectors of Sol LeWitt’s works, and the artist is generously represented in the gallery – note the LeWitt row. Along with LeWitt, his Conceptualist counterparts adorn the walls and floor of the gallery, including Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Pop Art icons Jeff Koons and Robert Rauschenberg are present, as are video and photographic big-names like Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Australia’s golden boy of the moment, Shawn Gladwell. Of course, Christo’s wrapped gems are also on display. Unsurprisingly, artists who have been brought out (or will be shortly) through Kaldor Public Art Projects are also represented, including Barry McGee, Urs Fischer, Ugo Rondinone and Michael Landy. 

Along with the works from his private collection, Kaldor had also commissioned three new works by artists already in the collection; Rondinone, Richard Long and a very cool reproduction of a room in the collector’s own home created by those from LeWitt’s studio.

Something of note however; the very generous donation of this collection cost the gallery (ie. NSW government) about $30 million in itself – money spent to refurbish the basement floor, which was originally the storage room, and hence moving storage of artworks off site. While I am obviously a fan of government spending on the arts (I know which hand it is that will most likely feed me), it is interesting that Kaldor has found a cheeky loop-hole that many of his wealthy collector peers from around the world have not discovered (or at the very least, not pursued). Usually, when an art collector has a substantial amount of works in his (yes, mainly his) possession, he will most likely fork out his own money to build a fancy facility to match the fancy art that it will show – Charles Saatchi and Francois Pinault (whose museum ostentatiously sits almost adjacent to Venice’s Biennale venues) are notable examples, as is Australia’s own eccentric iconoclast David Walsh with the opening of MONA at the beginning of this year. This way, the collector gets to share his work with the public, and also bask in the glory of his collection, which is first and foremost a portrait of him as a collector, and by extension a person, and only secondly a presentation of whatever eras of art from which he has collected. And of course, the running and maintenance of these private galleries has ongoing costs, for the life of the venue – Walsh’s, for instance, will cost about $10 million per year to run. So it seems then, by comparison, that Kaldor may have side-stepped a costly project through the relatively small donation of $35 million worth of art; the AGNSW and NSW government carry the costs of building the venue, and of course the costs of maintaining it and staff in perpetuity, while Kaldor gets to share his collection with the world and have his name on the gallery wall anyway. It’s a win-win for the business-savvy art lover.

Last, but certainly not least: going back to my point about any private collection being primarily a portrait of its collector. Notice the names that are listed here: there is one woman, who appears in partnership with her husband. In fact, out of the vast collection of works donated by Kaldor, 194 are by male artists, six works are collaborations, and two works are by female artists. These statistics prove a far cry from claims of this being the most ‘comprehensive’ collection of contemporary art, as Mr Capon would have you believe in various pieces of press. It has occurred to me that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this – Kaldor simply chose to keep the works made by women and donate the men’s ones. But I doubt it. So beware when you go to see this admittedly impressive display of works – there are women Conceptual, video, photographic, Pop, etc, etc, etc, artists, even if Mr Kaldor did not deem it necessary to collect them equally. [Image (C) 2011 Alan Miller]

Barack Obama - Dreams From My Father

Published in 1995, when only a small handful of people knew him as the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father is a beautifully-composed memoir about the events, discoveries – things in general – that had shaped the future president’s understanding of the world and his place in it. In a (large) nutshell, the book traces Obama’s unorthodox origins, as the son of a white Kansas girl and a Kenyan man who left the young boy and his mother when he was just two; through to his carefree childhood roaming the backstreets of Jakarta with boys the same skin colour as himself; back to living with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii during his adolescence, where he discovers the politics of race and its inequalities; then to his troubled, drug-taking, conflict-ridden years in college; to his work as a community organiser in the worse-hit areas of Chicago; and finally to his home-coming in Kenya where Obama unearths the secrets and untold stories of his identity.

Obama’s introduction sets the tone for the entire book – it is honest, modest and realises the vanities of recounting one’s ‘life’ mid-way through. He genuinely acknowledges his untrustworthy, almost falsified, memories (backed up predominantly only by verbal histories), and concedes that they are tainted by the 20/20 vision of hindsight and the wisdom and retrospective understanding that time allows. And yet, Obama pushes on with tales of his childhood with a loving, yet ambitious mother and her Indonesian husband, and the day he began to realise that his skin was different and somehow undesirable. He recounts the one time that he met his father, at age ten, the awkwardness and tension that washed over them both, and the fact that he would carry the man’s impossibly high-standards as a benchmark for all successes and failures in his life. Even when the mythologised image of his father would be shattered, in a single chapter which compounds the man’s life story as told to Obama by his half-sister, the man’s image, his absence and contradictory life, would continue to shape Obama’s own troubled grapplings with the world around him. Such troubles are exacerbated in a large portion of the book simply titled ‘Chicago’. Here Obama discovers for himself, and subsequently reveals to his reader, the now debunked international image of the USA as land of freedom and prosperity. Interwoven with Obama’s own story are those of the people whom he meets during his years as an organiser, and of course the lessons – political, social and personal – that he learned from these years. What he witnessed in the most racially, and hence economically, divisive areas of Chicago was not unlike the poverty, deficiencies and overall sense of hopelessness that he would come to see during his first trip to Kenya. And one of the gems in Obama’s book is the way in which he reflects on such encounters with humbling, insightful and deeply honest empathy for society’s Others, neither excusing or blaming them, but rather seeing a possible version of what could so easily have become himself.

The story’s third and final section is ‘Kenya’ when, in the summer before beginning Harvard Law School, Obama journeys to his father’s land to meet the family he never knew and to discover the truths about his father. Obama first recalls the beautiful, sobering feelings of ‘returning’ to an unfamiliar home, where his name is first recognised as a relation to Dr. Obama, his late father. ‘No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tone,’ he writes. ‘My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand.’ What transpires from this web is something I can only describe as both mind-blowingly complex in their inter-familial conflicts, yet strangely familiar and universal for the same reason. Due to the ongoing practice of polygamy in Kenyan society, Obama has a myriad of half-siblings, countless aunts and uncles, and even a paternal grandmother who is not biologically his. But while Obama may come from a stranger-than-usual mixed family, the dynamics, conflicts, fleeting moments of familial love and loyalty, have an uncanny familiarity, even for those of us from the most ‘normal’ of family situations. His encounters with family and the obligations, expectations and allegiances expected from people you’ve never even met, but with whom you share an unbroken bond, resonates with a universal familiarity, particularly for those of us who have families in economically unstable countries like Kenya. Obama writes with brutal honesty about the mess and confusion that is his inheritance, which he initially begrudgingly accepts, but comes to fully embrace as an indelible part of who he is. And towards the end, Obama is told the story from the beginning, starting with his father’s father, in the remote deserts of Kenya, when white people did not exist, to when they eventually came with their irreversible changes, to Barrack Obama senior meeting a young girl at Hawaii University, through to his final demise. I devoured these pages of family history, paralleled by that now-ubiquitous tale of colonialism that has made its way to the far corners of the Earth, seeing again its effects in yet another part of the world. When the story ended I felt with Obama an overwhelming catharsis; a sense that his long and harrowing journey to manhood had finally come to a sufficient conclusion.

Obama’s story, while extraordinary and extremely peculiar, resonates with a sense of commonness that we can all empathise with. That search for your identity, the wrestling between your inherited culture and the (white) one you grew up in, the fact that you never quite fit into either world whole-heartedly or without reservation. His is the universal story of difference, of living in and through disparate cultural identities that are all supposed to be your own, but that you can’t completely claim. Obama’s captivating and eloquent prose captures the heart, honesty and humility of this story. It speaks to our own insecurities about self and place with neither dogmatism nor false optimism. The story’s simple, yet powerful, conclusion leaves us with a sense of peace, contentment, and the knowledge that, at short intervals in time, everything is alright with the world. [Image from http://www.mylib.in/]

John Legend & The Roots - Wake Up!

‘Wake Up!’ a collaboration between John Legend and underground hip hop band, The Roots, is a unique, refreshing and poignant album. Best known for their jazzy, neo-soul/rnb sounds, here the eclectic rhythms of the band’s instrumentals are perfectly partnered with Legend’s soulful vocals and some timely (and timeless) subject matter. 

Inspired by the almost-revolutionary zeal of the Obama Presidential campaign in 2008, Legend, who was heavily involved in the crusade, hooked up with The Roots to commemorate that moment of change. The result is a studio recording of just covers – soul music from the radical era of the 1960s and 70s, when inequality and mass social change co-existed. The artists’ twenty-first century interpretations of some of the most obscure songs of that period is so seamless and contemporary that it requires real concentration to actually realise that these are covers.

‘Wake Up!’ the title track, with two different versions bookending the record, is an uplifting anthem which calls for greater accountability from those in positions of social responsibility; doctors, teachers, builders to ‘change together’. Tracks such as ‘Wholy Holy’ by Marvin Gaye, ‘Little Ghetto Boy’ by Donna Hathaway, and ‘Hang on in There’ by Mike James Kirkland cast light on the collective ills that still exist, carry messages about social awareness, engagement, and consequently incite the kind of social action that was relevant then, and continues to be today. The album reaches its climax with ‘I Can’t Write Left Handed’, originally performed by Bill Withers, an eleven-minute saga about a single Vietnam War soldier, which has telling parallels to today’s war-torn situations. The lyrics tell the story from the perspective of a young man who got shot. Legend’s jarring vocals are underscored by some simple piano chords, drum beats and a gospel backing, which reach their crescendo in a three-minute culmination of guitar riffs, cymbals and the sax. And finally, ‘Shine’ is the only original track, written and performed by Legend, and is a beautiful ballad proclaiming the potential of every individual to ‘shine’, if given the appropriate human opportunities to which we’re all entitled.

Within the increasing apathy of today’s popular culture, this album shines as a timely reminder of the interconnectedness of human beings and the responsibilities we have to each other and our world. From its socially-conscious themes to its grass-roots undertones, the album offers a sense of hope and encouragement for the progressively desolate and disparate state of humanity. That, and it just sounds really good! [Image from www.rap-up.com]

Ken + Julia Yonetani - Still Life: The Food Bowl

Ken and Julia Yonetani’s latest exhibition, ‘Still life: the food bowl’ is just as exquisite and ecologically pressing as their previous works. The result of a nine month residency in Mildura, the sculptures in this exhibition are made entirely of salt from the Murray River. The exhibition comprises of three Greco-Romanesque plinths (made of salt) on which small salt sculptures of fruit, vegies and lobster rest; a large table displaying a salt-sculpted feast of much of the same produce, five empty frames which represent the five senses, and a large salt and metal chandelier suspended just inside the front display window. Currently showing at the Artereal in Rozelle, the website describes the exhibition as such:

Along the Murray-Darling basin, known as Australia's 'food bowl' because it produces up to ninety per cent of Australia's fresh food, 550,000 tonnes of salt is pumped out of the ground every year to try and stem the increasing rise of highly saline ground-water.

Still Life: The Food Bowl is made from this groundwater salt. It draws on the still life genre as an artistic tradition that emerged as current agricultural practices were being developed, bringing new food produe to the tables of a rising European bourgeois class. (http://www.artereal.com.au)

Much like the sugar of Yonetani’s monumental ‘Barrier reef’, here the salt is a metaphor for the excess and gluttony that has come to characterise human consumption throughout history, through to the present day. As Artereal’s website states, salt acts as ‘a powerful, sacred substance that maintains life by enabling food preservation, but also induces the death of ecosystems and the collapse of empires.’ Indeed, the way in which the salt sets to become sculptures, hard like stone, is demonstrative of what happens to an environment largely neglected and sacrificed to fulfil the wants of human desire. It was this environment that the Yonetanis witnessed first-hand at Mildura, and it is the one they now urge us to consider.

Within the installation is a dialectic of abundance and scarcity indicative of the human condition. While there is a lavish array of food, moulded from the produce of the ‘food bowl’, it is unmalleable and bland – lacking colour, material variety, and flavour. The empty frames which adorn the gallery walls – adjacent to the still life which sits virtually still, solid on a table in the middle – emphasizes the ironic beauty of this installation. The frames contain nothing, but are supposed to represent the five senses, while the subject matter of still life sits before them, drained of their visual vibrancy, uncontained within the frames and unable to stimulate the senses. The imposing chandelier, illuminated by both artificial and natural light, intricately composed yet hollow in the middle, reinforces this tension and accentuates the theme of excess.

The exhibition is brilliant, permeated by the quiet, reflective message that has come to characterise the Yonetanis’ works; eerie in its silence, yet persistent in its call to action. It is on show until 2 July. [Image from http://arterealgalleryblog.blogspot.com]