Exhibition making is constrained by logistics: space, time, and the laws of physics; contacts, politics, and money. There are artists and lenders to convince, bills to be paid. Status is important in securing work. Artists, galleries, and collections make judgement calls about where their work is placed. Everyone wants to enhance their reputation, their cultural capital.

It’s easy to put works in conversation in a slide lecture or reproduced in a book. It’s another thing to bring them together in a room. Art works tend to be more-or-less unique things, which have to be sourced, transported, insured, invigilated, and returned. Here’s a great example …

One of art history’s classic cause-and-effects, compare-and-contrasts, is the pairing of Titian’s Venus d’Urbino (1538) from the Uffizi in Florence and Manet’s Olympia (1863) from the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. Manet knew the Titian, though perhaps not in the flesh. He was riffing on it, updating it, 325 years later, replacing a goddess with a prostitute. The point is made in so many slide lectures and art history texts as to have become a cliché. However, the works themselves had never shared a wall.

So it was shocking to step into the exhibition Manet in Venice in the Doge’s Palace in 2013, during the Venice Biennale, and see these two unique works finally brought together in the flesh. As they are roughly the same size and proportions, it looked like the classic two-projector art-history comparison. It looked great, obvious, but as a curator I was too aware of the epic negotiation and complexity involved in making this juxtaposition of priceless works happen. 
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If you haven’t seen Presence—the Olafur Eliasson show at Queensland Art Gallery—go immediately. It’s great to see Eliasson’s works presented with confidence, at scale. Ten out of ten. When I went again the day after Boxing Day, the place was crawling with punters, especially the epic Lego table. I wrote a short account of that work when we showed it in Demented Architecture at City Gallery Wellington in 2015. Click here. Olafur Eliasson: Presence, Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until 12 July.
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In the past, we looked to religion to tell us what to do. In Duccio’s time, our art was all icons and altarpieces. However, we would become increasing secular and enlightened. In 1882 Nietzsche wrote: God is dead and we killed him. Once we killed external authority, we had to invent our own rules, to work out what to do for ourselves, to take responsibility, create our own morality, find our own way. That lead to doubt and disruption, existentialism, and to modern and contemporary art, art based on questions not on answers.

We’re now entering a new epoch. AI. We’re creating superintelligent machines that will think better than we can, that will guide us, make decisions for us, and answer our prayers—that will be close to authoritative. Having long since killed god, we are now effectively creating a new god—one that can create images of us and for us. Will contemporary art survive? Perhaps we won’t need artists to come up with audacious new images and ideas anymore. How could they compete with the abundant creativity of AI? If AI does it better, will it make human endeavour and insight seem superfluous?

If contemporary art doesn’t survive, perhaps contemporary art museums will, not to present new art, but to present contemporary art as a thing of the past—answering to a nostalgia for a time when artists felt compelled to struggle, to create new ideas and images, new forms of thought and feeling—a time when human creativity and agency mattered. Perhaps contemporary art will become like ancient art is for us now, something we want to connect with through our humanity, despite being historically estranged from it. 

I asked ChatGPT to picture archaeologists excavating Duchamp readymades. It produced the image above. Interestingly it got the date of Fountain wrong, unprompted, making Duchamp a contemporary of Duccio. Was this error or insight?
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I was just in Nipaluna/Hobart for Dark Mofo, where I happily reunited with an old friend, Ronnie Van Hout’s Quasi, on the roof of Henry Jones Hotel. This six-metre-high public sculpture merges the artist’s unsmiling face with his left hand, standing on its index and ring fingers. This disembodied ‘partial self portrait’ was created in resin and polystyrene using scans made from the artist’s body. Is it a joke about ‘the hand of the artist’ taking on a life of its own? The title suggests something fake, an approximation, but it’s also a nod to Quasimodo, the disfigured, misunderstood romantic hero of Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. 

Christchurch Art Gallery commissioned Quasi as a temporary public sculpture and installed him on its roof in 2016. From this elevated position, he surveyed the city, still recovering from the 2011 earthquake. He quickly became the talk of the town. Like his namesake, Quasi was misshapen and misunderstood; defended by some, ridiculed and vilified by others. His polarising quality made him the perfect public sculpture—a talking point. Curmudgeonly critic Warren Feeney was the head hater, leading the charge for his removal, publishing ‘Ten Reasons Why Christchurch Art Gallery’s Quasi Must Go’ in The Press. However, in acting like the frightened, vengeful, mistaken Parisians in Hugo’s novel, Feeney and Co. only played into Van Hout’s game of projection, paranoia, and pathos.

In 2019, Quasi found himself homeless, when his Christchurch tenure came to an end, on schedule. When I was Chief Curator at City Gallery Wellington, we opportunistically relocated him to our roof for the cost of the freight, a little engineering, and some helicopter time. In Wellington, he did his job again, prompting waves of fake-news mass-media coverage and social-media speculation. He continued to operate like a Rorschach blot. One local considered him obscene—a naked hand! A kind soul suggested knitting him a glove, to help him survive the Wellington winds. Someone else thought he looked like Trump. A fake interview with Quasi appeared online, and he began appearing in city promotions and ads, and as a mascot for Hopstock 2022, a local craft-beer festival. As people had fun with him, he became a signifier for the capital.

Wellington had its own earthquake in 2016, and the knock-on effect saw Civic Square become a construction site and City Gallery close. Last year, after five years, Quasi was retired. His departure seemed like a terrible loss for the city. But being relocated to Hobart can only add to his itinerant mythos. He seems to activate latent meanings wherever he goes.
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When I’m in Paris—which isn’t often—I like to go to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to see one of my favourite pictures: Kees van Dongen’s The Sphinx (1920). It’s not the greatest painting, but the attitude it captures … priceless. Dutch-born, Paris-based, Van Dongen was a fauve. Early on, he painted good-time girls, prostitutes and dancers, florid and flirty, in ripe colours, with big eyes. Later, he became a high-society portraitist, celebrating classy ladies in chilly whites and silvery greys. The Sphinx belongs to this later phase, although I haven’t been able to find anything about the sitter, Renée Maha. When I first saw The Sphinx, it disarmed me. Hands come in from stage left offering a vase of chrysanthemums, only to be greeted with a chilly ‘unamused’ glare from the languid, elongated sitter. Sure, there’s a misogynist element here. The Sphinx was a merciless mythic being with the face of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of an eagle, who would kill you and eat you if you couldn’t answer her riddle, solve her enigma. The painting is also a classic example of metonymy. That vase of flowers is like the painting itself, being offered to the ice queen by Van Dongen as the painter-supplicant, seeking her approval. Instead of solving her riddle, he simply reflects it.
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There’s a street poster for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s current Julie Mehretu show just around the corner in James Street. Advertising in Brisbane suggests the show is backed by a sizeable marketing spend. But the title—A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory—hits an odd note for a museum needing to pull in Circular Quay passers-by and tourists for its pay shows. Were the Marketing and Education Departments asleep at the wheel? I’m a pointyhead art curator yet even I find the title pretentious and off putting. I have no idea what it means. I couldn’t find a definition for ‘transcore’ in any proper dictionary. But it was listed online in the Urban Dictionary as ‘referring to scene guys or any guys that look like girls that try to look and act hardcore’. And ‘imaginatory’ just means ‘imaginary’, it seems. But I’m none the wiser. For their Mehretu show last year, Venice’s Palazzo Grassi went for the innocuous but nevertheless gettable title Ensemble, which at least makes sense, with Mehretu sharing the stage with a bunch of guest-star artist friends. Despite the title, I’m looking forward to Mehretu’s Sydney show, and to seeing Rene Magritte, Angelica Mesiti, and Cao Fei at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Bumper crop. Lots of reasons to visit Sydney.
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My favourite mean opening for a mean review: ‘One thing you can say for Buzz Spector is that he does his homework. The bummer is he hangs it in galleries and calls it art.’ Lane Relyea, Artforum, May 1992. Can it get any worse?
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I recently dropped in to London’s National Gallery, where a new acquisition—Abraham Bloemaert’s Lot and His Daughters (1624)—was proudly on display. The label was telling: ‘Genesis recounts how Lot and his family fled the destruction of Sodom, with Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt on looking back to the city, seen in the background of this painting. The main scene—a triangle of primary colours—shows Lot’s daughters, believing only they remained alive on earth, taking the desperate measure of seducing their own father in order to perpetuate the human race.’ And there they are, in the artist’s imagination, plying their tired papa with booze, oysters, themselves. Only in the movies.
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When I began reading Artforum—in the early 1980s, on deskcopy at Elam art school—the idea that New Zealand would one day figure in its pages seemed inconceivable. New York was the centre, New Zealand the periphery; New York was Broadway, New Zealand was off-off-off Broadway. In 1992, Julian Dashper would address this in a project in Artforum. Feeling excluded, he bought advertising space to make a page project, where he fantasised, first, being on the magazine’s cover, and, then, in its reviews pages. Later, Dashper would be instrumental in bringing (now-disgraced) Artforum publisher and advertising man Knight Landesman to New Zealand and things started to turn. With this contact and, crucially, with a global turn in the art world, we began to see more New Zealand content, with Anthony Byrt becoming a regular writer. Nevertheless, I was surprised to open the latest issue of the magazine to find New Zealand suddenly permeating it. There’s a double-page spread reproducing Richard Serra’s Te Tuhirangi Contour at Gibbs Farm, and another of Mataahou’s Takapau, Golden Lion winner, kicking off the Venice-response section. There’s a feature on Christoph Büchel by Simon Denny, a review of Dan Arps in Whangarei by Anthony Byrt, and an interview with Vera Mey, co-curator of the Busan Biennale. All this coverage is there as a matter of course, not as the result of any special prompting or pleading. It’s exciting, but also deflating. It’s like discovering the holy grail, only to realise the quest is over. We can no longer aspire to join a club that won’t have us as a member.
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Ken Downie took this photo of me around 1987. He photographed everyone in his circle in Wellington as if we were worthy of the David Bailey Box of Pin-Ups treatment—as if photographing us like stars might make us stars. It’s weird viewing this image of myself looking so sensitive and thoughtful (when I wasn’t), unlike now (when I am).
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