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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