Turner Prized

Michael Hutak profiles Australian critic and curator Jonathan Turner.

While the international success of Australian artists has become commonplace, it's much rarer to encounter a writer/curator making their mark in the rarefied circles of the international contemporary art scene. Which is what makes Sydney-born's Jonathan Turner Continental presence so noteworthy. Turner, working out of Rome and Amsterdam, has since the early 1980s curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the U.S., Thailand, Macau, Australia, New Zealand. He recently won the prestigious Premio A.B.O., awarded annually to the most influential critic/curator in Italian contemporary art and beyond. Previous recipients have included Rome's current Mayor Walter Veltroni, artists Joseph Kosuth and Enzo Cucchi, English collector Alex Sainsbury, and Danilo Eccher, director of Rome's Museum of Contemporary Art.

"Although it is just an ugly piece of metal, it is in solid silver," Turner quipped in an interview with Australian Art Collector on his rooftop terrace in central Rome. "They even bottle a special wine for the event." The award is named for its patron, Achille Bonito Oliva, director of the 1993 Venice Biennale and best known for single-handedly promoting the influential Italian contemporary movements, Ipermanierismo (Hypermannerism) and transavanguardia, (Trans-avantgarde). Turner first worked with Oliva in Venice in '93 when Turner was on the selection committee of Aperto, the section at Venice dedicated to emerging international talent which that year featured a young Sydney artist, Hany Armanious. Turner considers Oliva "one of the most brilliant, fascinating, charming, and also irritating men you are likely to meet. He was extremely important figure in Italian and European contemporary art in the 1960s and 1970s and invented, the Italian version of neo-expressionism. He identified it, he put it together, and basically proposed a completely different view of what Italian art was considered at the time, which was the arte povera, championed by Germano Celant."

Turner triangulates his time between Rome, Sydney and Amsterdam: "I've put on Italian and Australian shows in Holland as well as Dutch shows in Italy and so on." The author of scores of artists' monographs, he writes widely on European contemporary art for titles like ART + Auction and Flash Art, and has been the Rome correspondent for US magazine Artnews for more than 20 years. In Rome he has been a driving force behind the annual contemporary art fair RIPA and has had a long relationship with Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome's leading contemporary commercial gallery, where in 2005 Turner curated and an all-Australian group show that featured Tracey Moffatt, Maree Azzopardi, Paul Ferman and others. Turner has also curated shows in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, mainly the Nederlands, for Australians Patricia Piccinini, John McRae, William Yang. In Australia he is probably best known for bringing a touring exhibition of iconic French art photographers Pierre et Gilles to Sydney and Melbourne in 1995. "I work a lot with Roslyn Oxley, Martin Browne and Robin Gibson in Sydney and with Tolarno in Melbourne and Libby Edwards." In the summer of 2007 Turner returned to Australia to curate solo shows for Azzopardi and Ferman.

However it's his internationalist approach that earned him the ABO. "I only work with artists whose work I appreciate. There are a lot artists, both Australian and otherwise, who I've been working with for more than 20 years … I'm not Italian, but I also don't view myself or my work as being a national representative of anything. And again, even though I've lived in Rome for more than twenty years now, I've returned every year to Australia to work - and I feel 'at home' wherever I am."

In this era of the touring blockbuster, Turner believes the independent contemporary art scene has adjusted well by "moving beyond elitism and is thriving. I'm seeing more private philanthropists than I did before, and more collectors and patrons are taking up the role of developing artists that business used to occupy more. I used to work a lot more with business, I'm not now. The corporations that are breaking up collections that they have spent years putting together are very ill-advised."

Turner's criteria for working with collectors: "Anyone with passion is perfect. A good collector tends to have such a strong vision of what they want and like that it's a pleasure to work with them. A collector is never wrong, just like an artist is never wrong." His approach to curating revolves around the demands of the space: "I only organize shows when I know exactly where it is going to be seen. I don't attempt to helicopter a show in, and say here it is, fit it in however you can. Each show must be tailored to the space it will be shown in. You don't try to pander to a particular taste and neither would you pretend that you're so fabulous that people must accept it from on high."

Turner eschews any adoption of a general philosophy of curating: "It can be ad-hoc. Artists tend to need help. And if I think they have talent and I like their work, then if I can help them I do. I'm a bit like a one-man Ministry of Culture." Meanwhile, the art life beckons and our interview ends: "I have to rush, I am going at midday to see two newly restored paintings by Caravaggio, which will be nice for the soul, since both are owned privately, and neither I have seen before."

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First published in
Australian Art Collector
No.40, April 2007

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Mona Hatoum: Exile from main street

Endoscopy, electricity and estrangement drive the thought-provoking art of Mona Hatoum.

"I don't know where this is going," interjects Mona Hatoum during an exclusive interview with The Bulletin last month. "Is this about me or is it about the work?" Well, when you're one of the most lionised figures in contemporary art, about to mount your first Australian show, and it's called Over My Dead Body, then it's got to be about both.

A survey of Hatoum's sculpture, performance and installation since 1992, the show was nabbed for Sydney by Museum of Contemporary Art director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, when she saw it at Berlin's prestigious Hamburger Kunsthalle lastyear. Hatoum will be in Sydney to oversee the show's installation and participate in public Q&A sessions.

"Much of my work gives a sense of uneasiness with the world," says the Beirut-born Palestinian, who has lived in Britain since 1975 when civil war broke out in Lebanon. "There's an estrangement or alienation ... A lot of works refer to everyday objects which in being transformed become unusable or threatening. There's an undercurrent of some kind of malevolent force." For instance Incommunicado (1993) presents a cot as designed by sadists, made from cold steel with a base of razor-wire where the mattress should be. Malevolent indeed, but in terms of pure design, it is cold, seductive and beautifully executed.

More recent work such as Homebound (2000) "deals with the home and can be seen in terms of women and domestic entrapment, domestic violence". An array of objects - tables, chairs, cups, lampshades, beds - are wired for electricity and alternately glow and buzz. Surrounding the exhibit is a wire fence that has the spectator wondering if it too is electrified. Hatoum says "it's really just to make people question their environment". One much-visited theme refers to architecture as "a kind of institutional violence - as structures that imprison, constrict or regiment the body in some way." In Light Sentence (1992), a "swinging lightbulb casts moving shadows against the wire-mesh [cage] and the whole effect is kind of woozy, like the ground is shifting under your feet." And let's not forget surveillance. InHatoum's celebrated Corps Etranger (Foreign Body), a microscopic camera makes a strangely compelling journey. "The film is shot inside my body using endoscopy," she explains. "It's very seductive but also disgusting. People want to follow it and see where it's going ... it has this double edge to it. It's like invading the boundaries of the body and taking surveillance to an extreme."

Hatoum is also keen to set the record straight on the media’s tendency to distort and “sex up” her biography as some sort of “exotic other”.

“It is a problem,” she laments. “Some people always think that I’m speaking as someone who grew up in Lebanon or from the experience of an exile. It does sometimes enter into the work because I have been displaced, because I’ve had to deal with very different environments, leaving my culture and entering another culture, nothing is secure or stable or understandable, but it doesn’t mean that everything I do is framed by my biography. The geographic part is not what makes the work.

“People often call me a refugee, but please do not describe me as a refugee,” she continues. “It’s an insult to refugees to call me one and I don’t want people to think I’m trying to get any mileage that way. I mean I’m exiled from Lebanon, my parents were exiled from Palestine, but they were never actually refugees.” Hatoum cites a recent monograph that said her my mother (who died three years ago) was living in Sabra and Sha-tila camp, “which is simply not true.”

“I don’t where people get these bizarre facts from. One writer said Light Sentence was about the architecture of the Palestinian camps – I mean how did they come up with that? They obviously have never been to a Palestinian camp, these places grow up very organically, there’s nothing programmatic or regimented about them.”

Hatoum’s is the exemplary post-Cold War contemporary art resume: a graduate of London’s esteemed Slade School of Art, represented in serious public collections from MoMA to the Tate, she had her first solo show at the Pompidou in 1994; was short listed for the Turner Prize in 1995 (and was favoured to win but was pipped by the Shark-embalming controversialist, Damien Hirst); joined Jay Jopling’s white hot stable at White Cube gallery in London the same year; was included in the Charles Saatchi’s landmark landmark 1997 show, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection; and since the early nineties has been traveling the globe, mounting shows of destabilising wit in public galleries, museums and art fairs, all to a chorus of gut-wrenching, teeth grinding approbation.

Not that it’s gone to her head. She denounces any association with the YBA’s and renounces the patronage of Saatchi: “I’m ten years older than all these guys. The only reason I was in Sensation is that Saatchi got his hands on one of my works. In fact at my first show at White Cube (in 1995) he wanted to buy everything and I said no, I didn’t want to be part of that. He managed to get hold of a couple of works and that was why I was in Sensation but now he’s since sold them all.” (Coincidentally, Deep Throat (1996), the work that appeared in Sensation, still stands as Hatoum’s auction saleroom record, selling for £60,950 at Christie’s London in 2002, against an estimate of £25,000-£30,000.) In an age when artists rush to play self-promoting entreprenuer, constructing celebrity to seduce collectors and seeking publicity to attract commissions, Hatoum’s unguarded commitment to art before the art system is refreshing, and undoubtedly (and ironically) one key to her success.

Hatoum was visiting London in 1975 with her parents when the unholy hell of civil war broke out in Lebanon. She would remain in London pursuing a career as an artist. Now it’s collectors and curators who pursue Hatoum and the curators are winning. “I prefer to have my work bought by museums - I’ve only ever done one private commission,” she admits. “I’m always being asked to do private commissions but I don’t really like that very much… I want the work to exist in the public domain and be visible to as many people as possible.”

Firmly in mid-career, approaching two decades at the peak of her profession, can there still be much to wring one’s hands about in this life? You bet. “If one feels alienated or whatever, the fact that one becomes successful, has a bit more money in the bank or becomes recognized as an artist won’t necessarily change that,” she replies. With lesser lights you might doubt their sincerity, but Matoum displays such a healthy indifference to flattery and critical distance from success that it’s obvious she remains steadfastly uncomfortable about the state of world and burns with a need to say so – no matter how wacky, obscure or difficult the saying might be. And hey, it’s contemporary art and she can get away with it.

“Recently I was asked recently why I wanted to be an artist and I replied probably because artists are permitted to break rules. I always felt I was in a very restricted society growing up in Lebanon and felt that art was one way out of that, a licence to go crazy and do whatever I want.”

“For me, the impetus behind making works that show the world as an alien, foreign or maybe hostile place is in some way to articulate the experience of people who are culturally displaced, exiled, or feeling like a foreigner wherever (they) go – I mean that’s not a feeling one can ever change or that ever changes.”

The entire world will remain a foreign land for Mona Hatoum until she departs it. Luckily for posterity and the world’s patrimony, her artworks will remain to prod, provoke and stimulate us into considering what it means to belong to a society, a culture, a people - but also what it means to not belong, to be lonely in the crowd.

Over My Dead Body is at the MCA, Sydney, March 23-May 29
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First published in The Bulletin, Volume 123; Number 12

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Diversity bound by identity

A group exhibition of Aboriginal art steers away from familiar stereotypes, writes MICHAEL HUTAK.
SINCE its emergence as a dynamic cultural force in the 1980s, Aboriginal art has become submerged in a myriad of stereotypes.
For a fresh perspective, those seeking to forge a new connection with the culture of indigenous Australians would be wise not to miss Narratives, the latest show at Boomalli Gallery, in inner-city Chippendale.
Mounted by Boomalli's resident curator, Hetti Perkins, Narratives displays the work of four generations of Aboriginal women painters, offering insights into each artist's practice, and revealing the sheer diversity to be found in contemporary Aboriginal art.
And as the title implies, the thread that binds the generations is not just race but the will to tell of their lives. Beginning with the 24-year-old Kgamilaroi artist Peta Lonsdale, whose work has graphically portrayed her early experiences avoiding the mission system, Narratives offers not just a snapshot of contemporary Aboriginal painting but a stark image of a people who have suffered yet survived to tell the tale.
But, importantly, Perkins praises Lonsdale for "deliberately avoiding the'victim' mentality".
"Peta finds faith in the strength of Aboriginal society and culture to reinterpret our circumstances and find a positive resolution," says Perkins.
The South Australian artist Kerry Giles, in her early 30s, left her white mother at 16 to rejoin her "mob", the Ngarrindjeri people. Since then she has found a voice in her painting, prints and photographs and has few qualms about imbuing her work with striking political messages.
"This is documentary," she says. "It's graffiti." The massive canvases she is showing in Narratives depict before-and-after aerial views of the Murray River: before and after white settlement.
The first she calls her "pretty boy" painting: "It shows how the river Murray used to be before colonial people. You've got the whole ecosystem, full of bush tucker: musta, brolga, wombat, goanna, catfish, yabbie, freshwater turtle, periwinkles, mussels, stumpy-tail lizard and all the bush berries." A self-sustaining environment.
The next two paintings depict the gradual destruction of the river system culminating in Ugly Painting, Ugly Subject, a harrowing, almost nihilistic vision of the river. It is a conglomeration of quotes and newspaper clippings depicting the graphic degradation of the environment.
"It's past crisis point," says Giles. "People take pretty photos of dead trees that were killed by salt. It's a graveyard of dead trees.
"For instance, today the Ngarrindjeri people have to ask at farmyard doors to get the rushes to weave the baskets that they've been weaving for thousands and thousands of years because there are no rushes left.
"Paintings are not just pretty pictures on the wall - they are identity."
Elaine Russell, in her early 50s, is only just beginning her career in the visual arts and Narratives is her first major exhibition. "I always knew I could draw, but I've only been painting for 12 months," she told the Herald.
For Russell, painting is an expressive medium which gives her an outlet to tell of her past: "There are so many more stories I have to paint. I love it. It's so new to me. When I get a brush in my hand I just can't stop.
"And everything I've painted I've sold, so I must be doing something right|"
Russell's disarmingly straightforward paintings depict her childhood experiences on the Murrin Bridge Mission, during the era when fair-skinned children were forcibly removed from their parents' care.
"We did what we were told - if we didn't we wouldn't get our rations. It all left me very resentful of the whites in my teens, but it's OK now, I'm married to a white."
The paintings are supported by short texts, an extension of oral history traditions and reminiscent of the work of fellow Aboriginal artists Ian Abdulla and Harry Wedge. Her work reflects the "regimental and policed nature of mission life", according to Perkins.
The last of the foursome is Pantjiti Mary McLean who has been encouraged by a fellow Kalgoorlie artist, Nalda Searles, to introduce figurative elements to her practice of dot paintings. It has unleashed in Pantjiti a seemingly unending creative source.
"Mary's work is about everyday things. What you see is what you get," says Searles. "There's no dreaming here; it's all a huge story about everyday life
"She lives in a small settlement on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie where she's the only artist, so in a sense, she is working alone.
"Her work has become so popular because it's so colourful and joyful. There's never any violence in her work - there's abundance and the bush is alive and flourishing and so are the people.
"Because Mary doesn't read, her work is not linear and goes in all directions. She just turns the paper around and around."
Searles described an "enormous" painting Pantjiti has produced for the Tandanya Aboriginal Arts Centre in Adelaide. "It's four metres long by one-and-a-half metres wide and there are literally hundreds of figures on it, all coming together in a big celebration," she says.
"She's found her calling and now paints everyday. She's a wonderful inspiration to the children in the community."
Pantjiti Mary McLean also has a solo exhibition of works on paper called Homelands at the Aboriginal and South Pacific Gallery in Surry Hills, until July 16.
What drives Pantjiti, now in her 60s, to paint?
"It comes from the happiness in my heart," she says.

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First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

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New dimension for Tokyo filmmaker

INSIDE SYDNEY: The visiting Japanese filmmaker Keita Kurosaka has made a whirlwind visit to Sydney where he was special guest at Matinaze, a survey of independent films screening this month at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Kurosaka - a leading figure in Japanese independent film and a lecturer at Musashino University near Tokyo - said his first visit to Sydney had added a new dimension to his work.
The visiting Japanese filmmaker Keita Kurosaka has made a whirlwind visit to Sydney where he was special guest at Matinaze, a survey of independent films screening this month at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Kurosaka - a leading figure in Japanese independent film and a lecturer at Musashino University near Tokyo - said his first visit to Sydney had added a new dimension to his work.
"I am encouraged by Australians," he explained. "I have new confidence that my films can communicate with overseas people, rather than just for the Japanese.
"Back home people take my films very seriously and are too self-conscious to laugh.
"But here they laughed spontaneously - and the difference was very stimulating. It was a cheerful, open and lighthearted response."
However, the harbour city left Kurosaka with some curious impressions. "I am particularly surprised that the public toilets are so clean | In fact, your city is very clean and well-organised. But where are all the people? There are hardly any people |"
He explained his dazzling animations: "I want to give new possibilities to the things we take for granted. I want new angles on daily life."
While he acknowledged a debt to traditional Japanese ways, Kurosaka said"the past is not so important - we use what is good and ignore the rest. More and more in Japan, it is not past versus present but commercial versus non-commercial. TV has all the power in Japan."
Considering its population, Kurosaka said Japanese citizens give much less public support to independent cinema than Australians - and it showed in the confidence of our films and filmmakers.
"Your young filmmakers, their themes and styles are not rigid but more relaxed and smooth," he summed up.
The Matinaze screenings continue on Saturday with a program of Japanese films including Kurosaka's latest work The Age of Box.
Caption: Port: Keita Kurosaka explained that his Sydney visit would add a new dimension to his work. Picture by PAUL JONES
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 18-5-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 465
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First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

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