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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