Australian
Art Criticism and Its Discontents
Luke
Morgan
‘Without
wishing to be rude, in my view what
you are doing is a pointless exercise.
There is no art criticism in Australia
today, and hasn’t been for
some years.’
Christopher Heathcote
AUSTRALIAN ART CRITICISM is a toothless
pander that may not even exist. At
least that is what some of this country’s
most prominent critics, past and present,
think. Christopher Heathcote, for
example, who was senior art critic
for The Age during the early
1990s, believes that art criticism
has ‘been shut down by vested,
mainly institutional, interests’
and that the system rewards only the
‘most servile conformists’.1
In his opinion: ‘Serve out your
time brown-nosing the bureaucracy,
and you too will land a cushy sinecure
in some part of the museo-academic
ziggurat.’
If Heathcote’s was an isolated
view, then it might be disregarded
as nothing more than spleen. Disturbingly,
however, he is not alone. Almost without
exception, the critics who were canvassed
for this essay answered ‘No’
when asked whether they thought there
was a healthy critical climate in
Australia today, albeit for different
reasons. Some lamented the ‘impenetrability’
of much critical writing on the visual
arts, its perverse imperviousness
to comprehension. Several drew attention
to the increasingly intimate relationship
between art criticism and art promotion
or marketing, whose feeble offspring
is the primped and powdered puff piece.
Others pointed to the steady shrinkage
of column inches dedicated to art
criticism in the major newspapers.
For one respondent, newspaper criticism
itself is an entirely ‘degraded
genre’ with little influence,
purpose or point. Still others think
that there is too much art and too
much art writing, a large proportion
of both of which is banal and forgettable.
In sum, criticism appears to be in
crisis, again.
The natural state of criticism may
actually be one of perpetual crisis,
as Kenneth Burke has recently argued
in the Chicago-based journal Critical
Inquiry. Certainly, the current
(or continuing) crisis of Australian
art criticism, if that is what it
is, is by no means a unique or provincial
phenomenon; the result perhaps of
some kind of nationwide laissez-faire
anti-intellectualism or excessive
materialism. The views of local critics
parallel, often quite closely, those
expressed by their North American
counterparts in recent years.
A report entitled The Visual Art
Critic: A Survey of Art Critics at
General-Interest News Publications
in America (2002), by the National
Arts Journalism Program at Columbia
University, is particularly interesting
in this respect. Among the responses
solicited from art world figures were
the following: ‘The reviews in
specialized art magazines should be
the highest form, since the writers
have looser deadlines and frequently
more space. But often, they are the
most droning, poorly written, hermetic
of all.’ (Sidney Lawrence, Head
of Public Affairs, Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution); ‘Criticism at both
newspapers and specialized art magazines
can, in some sense, be seen as a form
of marketing. In the end, one wants
a critical review, even if it is negative,
if only to receive the attention.
Even a bad review brings people in
the door.’ (Matthew Drutt, Chief
Curator, The Menil Collection, Houston);
and ‘Newspaper art criticism
in America today is entirely disconnected
from serious discourse on art’
(James Elkins, Professor, School of
the Art Institute of Chicago). These
are more or less identical sentiments
to those of the Australian art critics
mentioned above.
Some of the issues at stake here may
be familiar, even tired, or at least
always present in one form or another.
What seems different is the palpable
tone of resignation. In the past,
polemical pieces about the crisis
of criticism have often served as
prolegomena to some new critical programme,
often driven by a defined theoretical
position or dissatisfaction with the
ex cathedra pronouncements
of the established critics. In Australia
today, however, few critics seem interested
in reforming criticism (not, of course,
that they necessarily should be):
some duly note the problems as if
they were necessary evils to be kept
at arm’s length as much as possible,
while others flatly deny any interest
in criticism or, to be more precise,
what they describe rather disdainfully
as ‘reviewing’, preferring
to think of themselves as practising
other forms of art writing altogether.
On the face of it, then, art criticism
seems to be in poor shape, its condition
critical, as it were. Perhaps it has
simply become yet another victim of
the cultural logic of late capitalism,
complicit and willing in its own execution.
The aim of this essay is to find out
whether this really is the case through
comparing the opinions of the critics
themselves.
How
do art critics approach their task?
What are the purposes of art criticism
in this country? The views of two
of the most visible newspaper critics
in Australia — Robert Nelson
(The Age) and Sebastian Smee
(The Australian) — have
a certain amount in common. Both are
interested in contributing to a ‘conversation’
about art. Smee also seeks ‘to
persuade others around to my way of
seeing things’, whereas Nelson
approaches his writing as an opportunity
to ‘learn, test my views, find
out what I really think and, if I’m
lucky, how others react to it’.
On the one hand, then, for these critics,
art writing is a form of advocacy,
especially for Nelson, who straightforwardly
hopes that his work will ‘increase
the interest in art, the volume of
spectators and the curiosity of those
who are already interested in art’.
On the other hand, they both see themselves
as participants or, perhaps better
in the case of Smee, interlocutors
in a broad dialogue about art.
‘Interlocutor’ is better
because it implies the additional
(legal) meaning of ‘interlocutory’,
by which is meant a preliminary decree
or judgment. Smee, for example, comments
on what he calls the ‘queasy
business’ of judgment, but stops
short of suggesting that it can or
should be avoided. At any rate, the
idea of judgment or evaluation is
inherent in his professed desire to
‘persuade’. Sasha Grishin,
Professor of Art History at ANU and
principal art critic for The Canberra
Times, makes no bones about it:
‘The broad approach of my art
criticism is both explanatory and
judicial. You explain the object,
the oeuvre or the exhibition within
a broader context of art history,
aesthetics and art theory and then
evaluate the contribution.’ Similarly,
Daniel Thomas, who, although he points
out that his approach has always been
‘chiefly from the position of
an art-museum collection curator [Art
Gallery of New South Wales and National
Gallery of Australia] or director
[Art Gallery of South Australia]’,
did write about art for the Sunday
Telegraph in Sydney and the Sydney
Morning Herald during the 1960s
and 1970s, and continues to do so
for this magazine (including this
issue), is no shrinking violet when
it comes to that ‘queasy business’.
In his view, the chief purpose of
art criticism is: ‘to assess
the aesthetic excellence of works
of art and then present them to their
various publics, with interpretation
of their meanings. Sometimes also
to address the cultural significance
of works of lesser quality.’
Grishin’s point about the ‘explanatory
and judicial’ objectives of his
art criticism would not necessarily
meet with the agreement of other Australian
art critics. Rex Butler, Senior Lecturer
in Art History at the University of
Queensland and critic for The Courier-Mail,
believes that one of the problems
with most newspaper reviewers is that
they ‘try to “explain”
works of art to those who presumably
don’t know’. He goes on
to claim that the ‘great artist–critics
never do that: they take the opportunity
(even within the mass media) to bring
about something new, to write something
that will live on after the exhibition,
the audience and sometimes even the
artist’. Charles Green, Associate
Professor and Reader in Art History
at the University of Melbourne, makes
a similar point about ‘artist–critics’
when he says that the strongest pieces
in issues of Artforum (for
which he is the Australian correspondent)
from the late 1960s — the journal’s
most influential period — were
not the reviews but essays by artists.
Butler’s dim view of newspaper
‘reviewing’ raises an important
issue, one that he has himself discussed
on a previous occasion. In his book
An Uncertain Smile: Australian
Art in the ’90s (1996), he
argues that ‘all ambitious art
criticism in Australia is formed by
its opposition to the dominant newspaper
critics’, the irony of which
position, given that he is himself
now a newspaper critic, he is fully
aware of. The point, however, remains
and it is one that a number of respondents
touched on.
Several draw a distinction between
‘art criticism’ and ‘art
reviewing’, despite their otherwise
very different conceptions of both
of these activities. Peter Timms,
who is currently a Tasmanian art critic
for The Australian and the
author of the polemical book What’s
Wrong with Contemporary Art? (2004),
expresses the difference in the following
terms:
I
make a distinction between art criticism
— which I take to be the discussion
of art as a whole, and its social, psychological
and political role, and the formulation
of methodologies — and art reviewing
— which uses the theories and methodologies
of criticism and theory to comment directly
upon specific works or exhibitions.
There’s an implied hierarchy here,
of course, which would have criticism
as the more complex and specialised
activity and reviewing the more day-to-day.
I write criticism when I’m writing
an essay for an art magazine or a book,
whereas I write reviews in the newspapers.
It’s not a clear distinction, but
it is, I think, useful as a rule of
thumb. In fact, I prefer reviewing because
I feel happiest when I’m writing
for a non-specialist audience.
Green
makes a similar distinction, though
Timms would be unlikely to agree with
much else that he says:
All
discussions on art criticism go off
the rails since they tend to only
think about art reviewing and that,
in turn, is hijacked by newspaper
art reviewing. But these are the least
interesting, least important and historically
least relevant forms of art criticism.
The more interesting and longer-lasting
forms of art criticism are essays
for public art spaces or art museum
catalogues, and essays in art magazines,
and essays in books.
In
fact, Green’s view of newspaper
reviewing is significantly dimmer
than Butler’s. According to him,
the news-papers are ‘the province
of populist policemen’. As judges
and arbiters of taste, the chief role
of the newspaper critics is thus to
(patronisingly) ‘police the field’.
He adds that the state of newspaper
reviewing ‘is so dire that commendation
would be a serious long-term problem
for an artist’.
This
issue, perhaps more than any other,
is highly divisive. If, for Green,
the newspaper critic, or rather ‘reviewer’,
is nothing more than a populist policeman,
the kind of art criticism that he
thinks is historically more valuable
— essentially a more specialised
and, it needs to be said, academic
form of art writing — is, in
Timms’s caustic phrase, ‘the
literary equivalent of pissing against
the wall’.
These are diametrically opposed, if
equally trenchantly expressed, viewpoints.
On the one hand, we have an image
of the newspaper art critic as a buttoned-up,
perhaps elaborately moustachioed and
truncheon-wielding policeman-pundit,
laying down the law wherever he goes.
On the other, there is the academic
critic, whom we encounter behind a
wall somewhere, probably a sandstone
one, emitting a steady stream of baffling
dissertations.
There would appear to be little common
ground between these two positions,
though it is worth pointing out that
in Australia many of the newspaper
critics wear several hats at once.
Nelson, Grishin, Butler and Green,
for instance, all hold down academic
positions in addition to their newspaper
roles. On this point, Grishin quite
reasonably suggests that art critics
will write in different ways for different
audiences. As he says: ‘A TV
or radio interview will be very different
from a scholarly journal or a regular
column in a daily newspaper.’
This makes a lot of sense and implies
that there is no reason why someone
might not write for a newspaper, a
specialised journal, a book or an
exhibition catalogue in quite different
registers. Peter Hill, Senior Lecturer
at the School of Creative Arts at
the University of Melbourne, and a
widely published art critic (as well
as, perhaps uniquely, a sometime lighthouse
keeper), calls this adoption of different
‘voices’ for different publications
‘splitting the eleven’:
Back
in the early seventies, in the Tavern
bar in Dundee, there was a throw when
playing 301, a popular game of darts,
called Splitting the Eleven —
and I have only ever seen it played
in Dundee. If your total score reduced
to one hundred and eleven you were
allowed one throw of a dart to try
and land it between the legs of the
actual number eleven on the dart board
to win the game outright. I rather
liked this quirky off-beat move compared
to the professional dart player’s
constant attacks — and very professional
attacks — on the triple twenty.
So I am not a professional art critic
… I am a ‘Heroic Amateur’.
2
Here is yet another image of the art
critic to add to the gallery: the
amateur and possibly slightly tipsy,
but nonetheless heroic dart player,
swaying a little perhaps on the sticky
carpet of a pub but capable, all the
same, of pulling off an upset with
one unexpected throw. It is hard to
resist adding the author, publisher
and art critic for The Australian
(1994–2004) Susan McCulloch’s
comment here, though it evokes quite
a different type of drinking establishment:
‘My father [Allan McCulloch,
the long-serving art critic for the
Argus and the Melbourne Herald
from the 1940s to the 1980s] always
used to say that art is like wine
… you don’t have to drink
a whole bottle (or spend hours looking
at something) to judge its quality:
it is something you pick up instantly.’
Obviously,
the audience for newspaper art criticism
has a different complexion from the
audience for the criticism that appears
in the specialised literature (less
apoplectic some might say). Even this,
however, may be too much of a generalisation.
Joanna Mendelssohn, who has been an
art critic for The Bulletin,
the Sydney Morning Herald and
The Australian and is, like
so many of the other critics, also
an academic (at the University of
New South Wales), thinks that: ‘Although
The Australian is a daily broadsheet,
the reviews section of the arts pages
tends to attract only those readers
with a specific interest in the arts.
In that sense, there is little difference
between these reviews and those written
for a specialist magazine like Artlink
or Tema Celeste.’
How do the critics themselves envisage
their audience(s)? To whom or what
do they feel their primary responsibility?
Unsurprisingly, answers to these questions
vary considerably, but they can be
boiled down to the following. Some
feel that the critic is, in the first
instance, responsible to the readers
(Timms, Smee, McCulloch, Mendelssohn).
Mendelssohn argues that one should
simultaneously write for several kinds
of reader — the general reader,
the informed reader and the artist.
She is the only respondent to consider
the critic to be obliged to the artist,
but adds a couple of interesting qualifications.
Sometimes, she thinks, it is better
not to even bother to review a poor
exhibition by a young artist; that
the critic ought to pass over it in
silence. At the other end of the spectrum,
if the work of an established artist
is ‘tired, overpriced and lazy’,
then the critic should say as much.
Not everyone may have the stomach
for this. According to Mendelssohn:
‘I wrote that about the last
exhibition of the late Brett Whiteley.
Years later Graeme Blundell told me
Whiteley had wanted to take a contract
out on my life as a result.’
Grishin states that the critic’s
main responsibility is to the art
and him or herself: ‘Otherwise
you might as well tell us what the
Lord Mayor’s wife wore at the
opening.’ In a similar vein,
some claim that the critic should
be mainly responsible to his or her
critical ‘conscience’ and
to history. The most extended response
of this kind was from Nelson, and
is worth quoting at length:
I
would like to say [the art critic
is primarily responsible to] both
the moment and posterity; but I realise
that this is vain. We are not responsible
to the market, though it would be
good if more art were bought. We are
not responsible to the galleries,
though it would be good if more foot-traffic
resulted from the exposure. We are
not responsible to the publisher,
though it would be good if they had
the confidence that we have a buoyant
scene from which to launch critical
debate. We are not responsible to
the artists, though it would be good
if they enjoyed more confidence and
sense of support. We are not responsible
to the ‘mums and dads of the
suburbs’, though it would be
good if they felt emboldened to exercise
their curiosity more. We are not responsible
to art historians, though it would
be good if the material — good
and bad — were archived and used
by historians as a sign of the times.
To whom are we responsible? Only to
ourselves! Our subject matter is art;
and authority is fundamentally laundered
through the tumble of autonomous individual
perceptions.
Somewhat
surprisingly, perhaps, given his general
anti-pathy towards the ‘populist
policemen’ of the newspapers, Green
makes a broadly similar point (though
this may just go to show that critics
write in different ways for different
publications): ‘The critic should
not be the slave of her/his clients,
i.e. artists, though this is often the
case. The critic, like the artist, is
responsible to her or his own conscience
and sense of history and nothing else.’
Green does not mention any obligation
to readers, which would be certain to
raise the ire of Timms and thus returns
us to the fault lines of the dispute
about newspaper reviewing and art criticism
‘proper’, as some would have
it. The point of Timms’s vivid,
if waspish, image of the micturating
critic is that he or she couldn’t
care less about readers. He thinks that
‘the whole critical culture in
the visual arts, both here and overseas,
is permeated by contempt for the public’;
and, staying on roughly the same metaphorical
ground: ‘Criticism is hermetic
and frequently disappears up its own
fundament.’
A more troubling issue than this probably
irresolvable difference of opinion about
the relative merits of newspaper criticism
and other forms of art writing is the
possibility that no real criticism worth
the name actually appears anywhere,
including the specialised art literature;
that, as I suggested at the outset,
art criticism in general has become
so moribund and listless that it no
longer has any bite and has been reduced
to pandering and promotion.
Almost all the critics whose views were
sought for this essay alluded to the
relationship between art writing and
the market. This is, of course, a long-standing
concern, not just for critics, but also
for art historians. There have always
been gossipy rumours about such and
such a figure, who is usually eminent
and often also suspected of being a
KGB spy, Taliban sympathiser or your
choice of villain, and whose scholarly
efforts to rehabilitate the work of
a neglected ‘school’ or period
happen to coincide with his or her interests
as a collector. This cuts both ways:
Bernard Berenson, the connoisseur of
early Italian painting, was, he felt,
well and truly exploited by the dealer
Joseph Duveen, and never properly reimbursed
for his expertise and authentications
(compared, that is, with what Duveen
himself was making out of them).
Works of visual art, to state the obvious,
can have extraordinary, even obscene
commercial value. It is no wonder, therefore,
that the art critic may be periodically
faced with ethical dilemmas of varying
complexity and obduracy associated with
the nexus between criticism and promotion.
Mendelssohn’s view is widely held:
… there is a reduction in the
amount of newspaper space allocated
to the arts, and the growth of a generation
of newspaper editors who are themselves
not sufficiently well educated in
the arts. They are therefore susceptible
to seduction by the PR industry. As
I’m sure you are aware, the growth
of professional lobbyists is one of
the worst aspects of modern media,
and arts publicists make many of the
rest look like rank amateurs. There
is a special need for knowledgeable
writers and com-mentators on the arts
who know enough to cut through the
bribes (international trip to promote
this exhibition? meet for lunch at
Lucio’s?) and general schmoozing.
That said, both Green and Daniel Palmer,
Lecturer in Art and Design Theory
at Monash University and a freelance
critic, present a noteworthy alternative
point of view. Green, as we know,
thinks that the situation of newspaper
reviewing is so impoverished that
a critical notice could actually harm
an artist’s long-term prospects.
He also argues that critics have little
influence on the market; that, in
other words, their ‘promotional’
activities make no difference. Some
people, especially in the commercial
gallery sector, might disagree with
this, but Green goes on to claim that
the ‘proper functions of criticism
have … been appropriated by curatorship.
Completely.’ Palmer makes a similar
point: ‘Needless to say, art
criticism in Australia currently functions
primarily as a form of promotion.
Curators and gallerists are far more
powerful filtering agents than the
cacophony of critics … Since
critics are largely powerless; ethical
questions are rarely faced.’
In an era of proliferating biennales
and a genuinely globalised art world,
this is a persuasive argument. The
curator has become one of the primary
gatekeepers of the contemporary ‘canon’.
To receive the imprimatur of selec-tion
for an exhibition at a prestigious
venue with an international reputation
may be more desirable for today’s
artist than a critical review in a
newspaper or the art press, though
of course every little bit helps.
It might be added as a corollary,
that the rise of the curator is paralleled
by the rise of the collector, both
of whom may appear to have little
need for the critic. As the American
critic Jeff Perrone has suggested:
‘You have automatic power if
you walk into a gallery and have five
million dollars to spend. When there
are people like that around, who needs
critics?’3
This is probably an unnecessarily
pessimistic, not to mention simplistic,
view — a sort of reformulation
of Roland Barthes’s once-controversial
thesis about the ‘death of the
author’, rewritten as: ‘The
birth of the collector must be at
the cost of the death of the critic.’
Nowadays, few people really believe
that the author has somehow been,
or should be, killed off and replaced
by the figure of the reader. Barthes
was, at any rate, writing a polemic,
and his statement should be taken
in that spirit (despite his own fatal
encounter with a laundry truck in
Paris). Likewise, if contemporary
art amounts to something more than
yet another commodity, then there
will always be a place for criticism,
though perhaps its most effective
format(s) and modes of address will
be different (on which, see below).
Grishin and McCulloch mention a further,
peculiarly, though not uniquely Australian
ethical dilemma associated with indigenous
art. For Grishin: ‘A key problem
is also dealing with indigenous art
as a non-indigenous art critic. While
the question does get canvassed from
time to time, it is rarely confronted
in everyday criticism.’ McCulloch,
who is well known for her work in
this area, says that: ‘The most
uncomfortable I’ve found regarding
this is, of course, reviewing or —
as I do/have done — reviewing
and critiquing industry practices
… in the Aboriginal art world.
It’s perhaps surprising the incredible
vitriol (and worse, direct threats)
which this can attract … possibly
why so few are prepared to tackle
reviewing in this area; it gets mixed
up with racial issues which are uncomfortable
to say the least.’
Obviously, the field of indigenous
art is no less immune to colonisation
by the market than any other. All
essentialism aside, the lack of indigenous
commentators on indigenous art in
this country’s mass media is
a significant problem (though there
are a handful of high-profile indigenous
curators). In this respect, the discourse
of Australian art criticism compares
unfavourably with that of other countries
such as New Zealand, where there are
a number of influential commentators
on Maori art issues who define themselves
as Maori and, like their critical
counterparts in Australia, also hold
prominent positions in universities.
In the end, then, we are left with
a field that might be described as
follows. Over there is a group of
strait-laced conformists, assiduously
bowing and scraping before the big
art institutions — the ‘museo-academic
ziggurat’ — until they are
finally admitted into the coveted
inner sanctums. Elsewhere is another
group, easily identifiable and eagerly
initiating and maintaining conversations
with anyone who will listen. Then
there are the artist–critics,
whom some of the others show signs
of admiring, but who usually live
in the US. In the foreground, a group
of policemen can be spotted, waving
their truncheons and barking out their
verdicts. Further back, a few figures
can just be made out behind a wall,
too absorbed in their private affairs
to pay attention to the policemen
or anyone else for that matter, except
perhaps the artist–critics. If
you look hard enough, you can sometimes
see a handful of stragglers, who periodically
venture out, drink in hand, to fool
around with darts, some of which hit
their mark. Comparatively thick on
the ground are the shady proxies of
the market in their silvery suits,
all of whom keep portraits of themselves
in locked rooms that they are careful
never to enter. Far less in evidence
are the indigenous critics. Finally,
best dressed and most glamorous of
all, presiding over the terrain as
a whole, even during their regular
absences overseas, are the curators
of contemporary art.
This is, of course, a caricature,
but a forgivable one, I hope. It at
least serves as, if not a gallery
of rogues, then a message in a bottle
— however cartoon-like —
constructed out of the comments of
the critics who so generously responded
to my queries. Above all, it suggests
that art criticism in Australia, as
elsewhere, is a polymorphous phenomenon
that occurs in a range of venues and
voices. (In his 2004 book What
Happened to Art Criticism?, James
Elkins describes art criticism as
a ‘hydra’ for this reason.)
So
what kind of shape is art criticism
in this country in? There is little
agreement on the relative merits of
the forms that art criticism takes.
As I have suggested, this is one of
the most contested issues, the poles
of which are well represented by the
irreconcilable positions of Green
and Timms. There is equally little
agreement on audiences and responsibilities,
which is almost certainly a consequence
of the very different objectives of
the various genres of art writing.
Most think that the market, lobbyists,
public relations people and so on
— the whole commercial enterprise
of art — has too much influence
over art criticism in general, however
subtly or unobtrusively. Green and
Palmer also make the convincing point
that the art critic today has nothing
like the influence of the curator,
that in a sense he or she has been
relegated to the sidelines —
running up and down the line, perhaps,
rather than playing referee, but even
in this demoted position being frequently
overruled. There is, as well, a distinct
lack of indigenous voices in our predominantly
white, middle-class critical firmament.
Given this rather discouraging prognosis,
it seems worth asking, finally, whether
there are any signs at all, however
faint or obscure, of health in Australian
art criticism today. Some think that
there are. A few respondents drew
attention to two relatively new ventures
— one in Sydney, the other in
Melbourne — that may suggest
more effective models for criticism
as a less compromised pursuit. The
first is the online blog The Artlife
(www.artlife.blogspot.com), and the
second is the Melbourne-based un
Magazine (www.unmagazine.org).
Both have emerged out of, and continue
to represent, local constituencies
that are deeply engaged with the contemporary
art of their respective cities, though
un Magazine increasingly attracts
submissions from other parts of the
country besides Melbourne.
The Artlife blog consists of
an informal mixture of criticism,
reviews, news, gossip and commentary
on what it might describe as the ‘antics’
of art world figures, including some
of the critics canvassed for this
essay, all in a self-deprecating,
witty and ironic style. It has become
essential reading for anyone interested
in the Sydney art scene. However,
it is written anonymously, which is
not exactly an approach that could
be described as ‘without fear
or favour’, to borrow McCulloch’s
phrase for what art criticism should
aim to be. Perhaps if The Artlife
bloggers were to reveal their identities,
their ability to dish the dirt from
the inside, so to speak, would be
compromised — nobody would talk
to them anymore. All the same, it
seems indicative that this kind of
independent criticism requires anonymity.
How long their anonymity will last
— they occasionally claim that
they will tell their readers who they
are in the near future — is uncertain.
Maybe The Artlife will turn
out to be the Nikki Gemmell rather
than the R. Mutt of Australian art
criticism.
un Magazine is a free online
and paper journal of local record,
founded and edited by the artist Lily
Hibberd. It seeks to document the
exhibitions of young and overlooked
artists, to date primarily in Melbourne,
often at spaces that are ignored by
the mainstream art journals. The magazine
also actively publishes new writers,
many of whom are artists themselves
or students who have not previously
appeared in print. It has no house
style and often comes across as a
chaotic but compelling collection
of critical voices.
Hibberd spoke recently at a symposium
on the relationship between art practice
and art education organised by the
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
(Hatched 05). In her paper,
she offered what amounts to a manifesto
for art criticism as it, hopefully,
evolves. For the sake of a final,
alternative view, she is worth quoting:
We need the kind of publications that
allow for a diverse array of opinions
and responses to be generated by the
artistic community, allowing both
established and emergent voices to
co-mingle … The very least we
should expect is that art magazines
in Australia start to engender a dynamic
environment for art writing that allows
emerging artists and writers the chance
to develop critical dialogue with
their community and within their own
practice.4
It
is difficult, but of course not impossible,
to imagine anyone disagreeing with
her.
Endnotes
1Unless otherwise noted, all quotations
are from correspondence with the author.
2 Peter Hill, ‘Artist Camouflaged
as Critic’, unpublished conference
paper presented at the Art Association
of Australia and New Zealand annual
conference, Sydney, 2005. I am grateful
to Peter Hill for allowing me to see
his paper and for his permission to
quote from it.
3 Cited in Eleanor Heartney, Critical
Condition: American Culture at the
Crossroads (1996), p.68.
4 Lily Hibberd, ‘Why Write about
Art?’ Hatched 05, Perth
Institute of Contemporary Arts. www.pica.org.au/art05/Symp-hibberd.html.
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