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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