Pearls From Perth
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday April 4, 1997
Art might come a poor second to property, cars and boats when Western Australia's millionaires decide to part with their money, but the galleries work hard to provide a vibrant and diverse mix, writes JOHN McDONALD.
FOR anyone who ever feels that Sydney is a long way from the rest of the world, I would recommend a visit to Perth. In a city where the climate and lifestyle are so pleasant as to induce a sense of terminal complacency, it is hard work to keep the wheels of culture in motion. Although Western Australia has more than its share of millionaires and successful businessmen, the acquisition of art occupies a low place on their list of priorities. The commercial galleries live in hope that eventually these mythical plutocrats will come in and start spending, but property, cars, boats and sundry investments stand in the way. One of the effects of Perth's geographical isolation is that the buying of art, clothes and other "luxuries" is often combined with travel - to Sydney and Melbourne, Europe and America.
If running a gallery is always a brave, reckless, almost foolhardy gesture, in Perth it requires a special resilience. At the invitation of the city's private and public venues, I flew west at Easter, for a first-hand look at an art scene of great vitality. In three days I visited Galerie Dusseldorf, Delaney Gallery, Stafford Studios, Gallery East, Artplace, Perth Galleries, Indigenart, Goddard de Fiddes, Craftwest, Gomboc Gallery and Sculpture Park, the Fremantle Arts Centre, Craftwest, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), the Lawrence Wilson Gallery at the University of WA, and the Art Gallery of WA. In trying to do justice to all these places, the first version of this article read like a WA extension of the Metro listings. On second thoughts, I have dropped the piecemeal descriptions, even at the risk of disappointing a large number of friendly and hospitable people. One overwhelming impression is that few galleries in Perth are able to survive on a program of one or two solo shows at a time. While this is not the case for the two leading commercial galleries, Galerie Dusseldorf and Delaney Gallery, and the ultra-chic Goddard de Fiddes, most dealers will show paintings, sculptures, ceramics and anything else that might sell, in an effort to cater for a diverse and fickle market. Craftwest is a well-organised retailer of West Australian craft, while Indigenart - arguably Perth's leading venue for Aboriginal work - resembles a warehouse that combines marvellous tribal paintings with decorative arts and tourist bric-a-brac. Ron and Teri Gomboc, on the outskirts of town, host multiple exhibitions, including an annual sculpture survey, and even have an informal artist-in-residence program. PICA, under the creative directorship of Sarah Miller, is a beehive of cultural activity.
Two of the most promising developments are Brigitte Braun's Artplace, which sells the work of young artists at affordable prices, and David Forrest's Gallery East, which shows only Asian art, historical and contemporary - with recent exhibitions ranging from Indian fabrics to Japanese shunga prints, to graphics and small sculptures by Yayoi Kusama , a high priestess of "Happenings" in the 1960s, who is now enjoying a return to worldwide fame.
Recriminations and regrets abound in a relatively small art community, but there is nothing but positivity about the incoming director of the AGWA, Alan Dodge. After 21 years at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Dodge is full of enthusiasm for his new role, and is enjoying a honeymoon period. He succeeds Paula Latos-Valier, who gradually lost the confidence of her constituency without making any major blunders. On the contrary, her skilful negotiation of a financial black hole means that the new director inherits a much healthier organisation. Like a reforming politician, Latos-Valier could rightfully feel she has been rejected after making some selfless decisions, but the change is a reminder that a gallery director must also be a figurehead, a public relations expert, and a showman. Alan Dodge will be obliged to combine management abilities with a certain degree of razzamatazz.
A perennial problem for the AGWA is the difficulty of attracting overseas "blockbuster" exhibitions. The distance and small audiences make it barely viable to send these shows to Perth, even though the gallery has a pressing need for such guaranteed crowd-pullers. The Government, and Art Exhibitions Australia, have promised to address this issue, but it will always be an uphill task competing with Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. The AGWA is hosting Inside the Visible (until April 12), an unusual exhibition, subtitled "an elliptical traverse of 20thcentury art ... in, of, and from the feminine". The show was initiated by an art foundation in Flanders, developed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, then sent to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, before finishing in Perth - which may be the perfect destination for an event that prides itself on its self-conscious marginality. For those immersed in contemporary feminist aesthetics, the show is a riveting experience, but the rest of the population may find it bewildering. Boosted by the recent Festival of Perth, attendances have been satisfactory, but I spoke to many people who felt the work was too diffuse, too slight, too lacking in purpose and identity. No doubt the organisers would argue that this is precisely the point: in 20th-century art, "the feminine" exists as a collection of discreet, subversive gestures, resisting the hierarchies of heroic, male-dominated modernism. Although the thought of anything in art or culture being "subversive" is liable to induce catatonia, the idea is tantalising enough not to be dismissed lightly. Much of this exhibition, with its monumental 495-page catalogue, puts forward a persuasive argument for the distinctive character of the feminine experience of art. So while there are few obvious resemblances between the work of artists such as Emily Carr, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Martha Rosler, Claude Cahun, Mona Hatoum, Sophie Tauber-Arp, and a host of lesser-known figures, one is prompted to tease out an ever-shifting web of affinities.
Perhaps the greatest skill shown by the curators is the ability to present potential weaknesses as though they were crucial to the success of the project. For instance, it may seem frustrating and unsatisfactory to see only small, tokenistic examples of work by the Canadian painter Emily Carr, or indeed most other participants, but there is some tactical cunning in showing a mass of scattered fragments that do not add up to a workable portrait of any specific oeuvre. All the artists are enlisted, albeit unwittingly, in the delineation of an overriding concept that resists being pinned down and defined: the feminine. It is hard to escape the feeling that Inside the Visible is ultimately a curatorial fiction - an off-beat piece of didacticism that distorts as much as it reveals. The artists are not taken at their own worth as individual creators, but as feminine subjects who each add a piece to a jigsaw puzzle that resists completion. It is an intriguing exhibition, but one which treats works of art as illustrations for an elaborate intellectual exercise. Artists and audiences could justifiably feel a little patronised.
It should be noted, in passing, that by far the best exhibition in Perth at the moment is the Holmes a` Court Collection of Aboriginal art at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery, University of WA. This is the only Australian venue for a show that was put together for a museum in Hanover, Germany. It includes impressive works by Rover Thomas, Ginger Riley, Peter Skipper and Jarinyanu David Downs - whom I single out, for purely subjective reasons, from a strong field.
After my whirlwind tour of Perth galleries, I retreated to the south-west corner of the State to visit the reclusive artist Howard Taylor, who has lived in the forest near Northcliffe for almost 30 years. Although he is nearing 80, Taylor has never received the recognition he deserves in the eastern States. There was a solo exhibition at Sydney's Coventry Gallery many years ago, and the occasional inclusion of a work in large surveys, but Taylor remains an enigmatic figure. At last year's Australian Contemporary Art Fair in Melbourne, Doug and Magda Sheerer of Galerie Dusseldorf devoted their entire display to Taylor's work - with dazzling results. For many people the show was nothing short of a revelation.
With the ACAF airing, and the publication of Ted Snell's 1995 monograph on the artist, through Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Taylor's work is becoming less of a secret. What is most extraordinary is the seamless continuum he constructs between painting and sculpture, landscape and abstraction. For Taylor it is all part of the same process, with his manner of life reflecting the concerns of his art. Small naturalistic drawings of the forest, of sand dunes, of the sun and moon, may lead to large-scale paintings and constructions with a refinement and serenity unmatched in Australian art. Here, the word "spiritual" may be used without embarrassment. While an accomplished minimalist such as Robert Hunter subscribes to a purely formal, abstract logic, Howard Taylor achieves similar results through a continuous engagement with the natural world. His subject often seems to be light itself, particularly light filtered through various kinds of atmosphere. He has reached the point in his life where he almost never leaves home, letting his wife, Sheila, deputise for him at openings. He detests the etiquette of the art world, and says he doesn't like people. In person, Taylor is an old-fashioned Australian archetype - taciturn, lean, with chiselled features, never without a fag or a pipe in his hand. His work and his hermit-like existence do not represent a choice, but a journey for which no alternative route was considered or desired.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald