I’ve been in Melbourne for Richard Mosse’s new film, Broken Spectre, screening at the National Gallery of Victoria, and away from the laptop for a while. Needless to say, if I don’t look at the laptop for a day or so the emails reach avalanche proportions and everything backs up. My only consolation in this regard was a conversation earlier this year, with the Arts editor of the Guardian, who revealed that her email barrage was about four times larger than mine on a daily basis. Who’d be an editor?
Now that Australian politics has become sensible again, I’m unable to muster much indignation in these newsletters, but the relative stability Albo has brought to these shores is not going to save us from the escalating craziness of the rest of the world. Putin’s war in the Ukraine just gets uglier and nastier by the minute, while in America, they’re heading towards the mid-terms with a bunch of Trump-endorsed candidates who are virtually certifiable. But does this mean they are unelectable?
What a tame, calm, laid-back place Australia is, even if we’re going to have to weather a huge economic whammy over the next year or two. It seems the Boiled Egg is now willing to support a National Anti-Corruption Commission after bitterly opposing it while in government. This is bold, inasmuch as he did more than a few things himself that deserve investigation, but he really has no choice. All he can hope for is to suck up to Labor and try to soften the terms of a Commission the independents would like to strengthen.
This week’s art column focuses on the Portia Geach Memorial Award at the S.H.Ervin Gallery. It’s an annual affair for women portraitists that’s feeling increasingly comfortable as women tend to dominate in most institutional shows at present. There shouldn’t be a problem with this, so long as they are dominating for the very best reason – ie. they are making the most significant art.
The Herald, in its wisdom, is still sitting on the Cressida Campbell piece I was asked to write at lightning speed before the show at the National Gallery of Australia had even started. I did my bit, but the article seems to have found a place on what is looking like a well-stocked shelf.
To ease the burden on that shelf, I’m running a piece on the exhibition, Light, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, that I wrote when the show opened in June (!!). Despite various requests from me, and protestations that they would be running the review, it still hasn’t seen the light of day, if you’ll pardon the expression. The show runs until 13 November, so if I post now there will still be some benefit, unlike the Steve Lopes and Queer reviews that were allowed to expire.
The film column looks at Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which has become the most-talked-about-film of the year for all the wrong reasons. When one separates the movie from the scandals and celebrity nonsense, it has a good deal going for it, but it plunges off the rails in a way that makes it hard to fully endorse.
Finally, it’s farewell to Peter Kingston, who died this week after a long battle with cancer. Kingo was an artist who will always be closely connected with Sydney and its Harbour, which provided so much of his subject matter. I’ve been critical of his work from time to time, but there’s no denying he attained a special stature in this city that will ensure his niche in art history. I have one of his small Boofhead sculptures that stands next to a small figurine of Lao Tze – a great Chinese philosopher alongside a great Australian philosopher.