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Jo Higgins
Published outcomes - National Gallery of ...
Published outcomes - National Gallery of Australia: Digital Young Writers Mentorship
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Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: 'Air' at QAGOMA
ABC Arts: 'Air' at QAGOMA
Writings
Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: Megan Cope is building a living, ...
ABC Arts: Megan Cope is building a living, breathing artwork on Minjerribah
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Jo Higgins
Exhibition essay: Topographies of painting - ...
Exhibition essay: Topographies of painting - Gregory Hodge, Sullivan + Strumpf
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Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: Richard Bell at documenta fifteen
ABC Arts: Richard Bell at documenta fifteen

Review

REVIEW: Christian Boltanski, Chance, Carriageworks

Christian Boltanski, The Wheel of Fortune, 2011-2014

I had the opportunity to attend the opening of Christian Boltanski’s Chance last week and to clap eyes on the man himself. I’ve written elsewhere about his ongoing and intensely moving work Les Archive des Coeurs but Chance, in its first Australian outing, proves just as contemplative and yet another deft expression by the artist of the randomness of life.

Reels of black and white photographs of the squished faces of Polish newborns, taken from newspaper announcements, stream through an enormous metal structure like a factory assembly line.

Christian Boltanski, The Wheel of Fortune, 2011-2014

The inconsequence of these independent ‘miracles’ when thrown together en masse is made all the sharper when a bell rings and the projector shudders to a halt, highlighting one random baby, which, regardless, still looks much like the next. Is this one human, singled out, destined for greatness? Notoriety? History? Or will the filmstrip crank back to life and commit them to obscurity once more? Wheel of Fortune indeed. It would be cruel if it wasn’t depressingly true.

Other elements that make up Chance include Last News from Humans, two huge scoreboards at either end of Wheel of Fortune. These counters are constantly ratcheting up huge numbers in red and green respectively. How Boltanski has got his hands on these statistics I don’t know but the flux of life is brutally quantified by this livestream of numbers totalling all the deaths and births taking place around the world in that moment.

And lastly there’s Be New. This work reminds me of his earlier work Les Suisses Morts, where identikit faces are assembled from the photographs of dead Swiss. Here the dead Swiss are intercut with the Polish newborns, their foreheads, eyes and mouths flickering like fruit in a slot machine. It’s up to the visitor to hit stop and thus create their own unique portrait – one of a possible 1.5 million combinations.

Christian Boltanski, Be New, 2011-2014.

All these works have enormous potential to be quite morbid and certainly depressing but Boltanski himself describes all his work as a desperate attempt to preserve

life and there is something beautifully epic about these narratives of life and in/significance and chance that is quite humbling.

Until 23 March.

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The problem with 'Australia'

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So I went to the press preview for 'Australia' at the Royal Academy on Tuesday. I'm writing a review for Artlink and for a couple of weeks now I've been worried my instincts (that it would be disappointing, conservative, terrible... that my snobbery and cultural bias would cloud my objectivity...) would get in the way of me looking at the show with an open mind.

And so I tried. And I failed. Because it really isn't great. Does it warrant the casual racism and vitriol dressed as criticism it's receiving in the British press? Well, no.  But it's not great. It's not even very good. I'm going to need to let my thoughts percolate for a while yet in the hope that something by way of coherent argument emerges. Because right now it's just an exasperated mash of frustrations.

I can't believe this is the same institution that hosted the seminal Sensation back in 1997. I mean, where's all that curatorial chutzpah gone?

What a missed opportunity. National Gallery of Australia, I'm blaming you too.

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A round-up: Miles Aldridge, Somerset House; Katharina Fritsch, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square; Michael Landy, ‘Saints Alive’, National Gallery

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Yesterday I took in a couple of exhibitions in and around central London. What follows is more a collection of immediate responses than any sort of at-length review. Take from them what you will…

First up, Miles Aldridge, ‘I Only Want You to Love Me’, Somerset House, 10 July – 9 September 2013

Miles Aldridge for Vogue Italia

A career retrospective of sorts of the fashion photographer Miles Aldridge, this tight show was bright and shiny and visually stunning with lush, saturated colour and a highly strung sense of pop.

Aldridge’s creative collaborations with Italian Vogue in particular are pretty impressive – he conjures these dark, female domestic narratives and tableaux, working initially from sketches and stories,  which Vogue then dress in high couture. Think super-saturated plasticised Stepford Wives and a compelling, creepy beauty.

 

From here, it was a short walk to Trafalgar Square to see Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth, 25 July 2013 – 2014.

Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, 2013-2014

The latest Fourth Plinth commission was unveiled in Trafalgar Square this week, Hahn/Cock by German sculpture Katharina Fritsch. There’s a lot of mileage to be had in this work in the form of cheap gags but as an obvious metaphor for all the other male posturing going on in Trafalgar Square – from statues to street performers – it’s a straightforward enough work to appreciate with enough visual bang to be an effective addition to the Square.

And what with giving Boris Johnson the chance to make a complete, well, cock of himself by not being able to say the word ‘cock’ on its unveiling, well that was just a free gift with commission really.

Lastly, a visit to see Michael Landy, ‘Saints Alive’, National Gallery, 23 May – 24 November 2013

Michael Landy has been at the National Gallery since 2009 as the eighth Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist. Bringing his interests in assemblage, destruction and the story of things to bear here, Landy’s seven mechanical sculptures bring to life the deaths of several saints including Jerome, Thomas, Francis of Assissi and Catherine of Alexandria who are portrayed elsewhere in the gallery in paintings by artists including Botticelli and Carlo Crivelli.

These larger than life sculptures are animated by the pushing of pedals and pulling of levers and there’s something quite shocking about seeing Saint Jerome thump his fibreglass chest with a heavy rock in the hope of quietening his impure sexual thoughts, never mind Apollonia reliving her torture by yanking her teeth out with a pair of pliers.

There’s a great beauty to the sculptural, mechanical elements of these works and Landy’s preparatory collages, which decorate the walls of the first hall, are just exquisite. It’s well worth a visit.

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I acknowledge the Gadigal and Bidjigal peoples of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the unceded land on which I live and work and I pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.