1990 Festival
Visual Arts
Festival Exhibitions
Visions, Maps and Dreamings
Frida Kahlo
The visual arts exhibitions have always been a big draw for the Adelaide Festival and this year’s are no exception. There are differences this time, though, which are likely to set patterns for the future. Firstly, the festival organisers themselves have initiated exhibitions and taken care to incorporate themes in the overall programme.
Daniel Thomas, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, is well pleased with this trend. “Clifford Hocking is a maestro,” he beams, “a maestro is someone who brings things together, which he has done in a way no other Adelaide Festival director has. He had a clear idea of a Latin American component running through the programme. Tango,” -Thomas raises an eyebrow to announce his pun- “is a footnote to Frida Kahlo.”
Commissioned by the festival management the Frida Kahlo exhibition was the result of what Daniel Thomas describes as “difficult and complex” negotiation. Curated by Charles Merewether, it remains on display until April 8 when it will move to Perth for its only other Australian showing. Drawn from a variety of sources including the private collection of Robert Holmes a Court, the Kahlo exhibition is the first to be indemnified by the Bannon State Government. Thomas sees this as a significant precedent not only because it circumvents the cumbersome federal process but it makes it possible to initiate further small-scale exhibitions from Adelaide.
Charles Merewether is singularly apt when he refers in the catalogue notes to Frida Kahlo’s piercing insights. Born in Mexico City in 1907 she began painting in 1925 while convalescing from horrific injuries sustained when the bus in which she was travelling collided with a streetcar. From the age of eighteen until her death in 1954 Kahlo was tormented by physical pain and endured a series of largely futile operations which left her addicted to drugs and alcohol. At the age of twenty-two she married the celebrated Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. Twice her age she lived in turbulent, violent relationship with him for twenty five years.
It is only relatively recently that Frida Kahlo’s work has come out from under the shadow of Rivera’s fame. Unlike his gargantuan murals of heroic colllective purpose, Kahlo’s art is miniature and idiosyncratic. Like Artaud or Sylvia Plath her subject is herself, her own case. Echoing the naivete of traditional Mexican ex voto offertory painting Kahlo’s works often flatly deny perspective and with niggardly brush strokes she matter-of-factly depicts her life as hospital patient, martyred lover and sorceress.
The effect can be alarming as in the stark violence of A Few Small Nips where the blood from the tortured woman splotches even on to the picture frame and imminently, it seems, into the world of the viewer. Henry Ford Hospital, a naked self-portrait, also on a blood-stained bed, depicts the artist surrounded by surreal objects- a snail, a metallic looking pelvis, a totemic foetus and a vulvate flower. The pictures teem with images of fecundity and profusion with succulent botany, sleek cats and nonchalant monkeys. But, as in The Bride who becomes Frightened when she sees Life Open, cut melons, paw-paws, coconuts and pineapples become sinister Venus fly-traps,elements of still-life poised to strike. Another work is actually entitled Still Life with Prickly Pears.
As the accompanying photographs in this exhibition of Frida Kahlo attest, she was herself an art object, dressed eccentrically in Mexican ceremonial costume, she braided and decorated her hair as if in sacrifice or obsequies. Her griefs and terrors are unleashed upon a world that recognises them as both forbidden and familiar. The particulars of personal cauchemar also reveal the national psyche. With a necklace of thorns Frida foresuffers all and is inexplicably triumphant.
For that reason The Broken Column, which might have seemed terrible to contemplate, is curiously consoling. Like Sylvia Plath, in life Frida Kahlo was defeated but in art she is fierce and resolute. Eyes raining tears, the spine a column of crumbling culture, her body tormented by tacks and a racking brace, the image paradoxically suggests reconstruction, even perhaps a costume fitting for a future conquest. The heavy brows and level eyes bespeak extraordinary resilience.
As a complement to the Frida Kahlo exhibition, Charles Merewether has assembled recent Mexican works by Monica Castillo, , Nahum Zenil, German Venegas, Georgina Quintana and others in Out of the Profane, identifying what he calls ” a hybrid reality, a culture of differing and conflicting realities, where the past and present merge.”
At the Armoury, part of the splendidly restored Migration Museum on North Terrace, a photographic collection, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, reveals the revolutionary lens of Alexander Rodchenko.His portraits of Mayakovsky have immortalised the writer’s glowering image long after his poetry has receded. Rodchenko’s work of the twenties and thirties celebrate physical culture and images of progress, radio towers, cogs, pylons, the angular, abstracted icons of the body electric.
But there is also affection in the Radio Listener, a winsome portrait of the photographer’s daughter , and two homely works of his old Soviet mum complete with specs and fag. Rodchenko’s celebrated photomontages can also be seen -as in the cover for LEF where a giant fountain pen is unleashed from a biplane against a simian figure about to loose an arrow. Another work entitled Political Football has sportsmen in English bobby helmets towering over stadiums full of troops. Rodchenko’s work embraces the everyday and the modern, ideology and abstraction, with verve and humanity. Buffeted by the fractious dictates of Stalinism Rodchenko nevertheless escaped gulag and firing squad, and continued to make photographs of the unusual in the ordinary.
Dreamings, a major exhibition of Aboriginal works curated by Dr Peter Sutton, Head of the Anthropology Division, has returned from showings in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, to a refurbished display space at the South Australian Museum. With all but four or five exceptions the 103 paintings, figurines, toas and other objects on display are 2oth century works. It is an impressive collection, augmented by a substantial catalogue prepared by Dr Sutton and associates, Christopher Anderson, Phillip Jones, Francoise Dussart and Steven Hemmimg.
This exhibition is comprehensive geographically and generically with sculptures and bark paintings from Cape York Peninsula through Arnhem Land to Central and South Australia. It also seeks to locate the works in aesthetic and cultural context.
Peter Sutton writes in the excellent and copiously illustrated Dreamings book – “The meaningfulness of Aboriginal art to Aborigines has gradually been emerging from a long period in which it has been ignored by non-Aborigines, apart from a few anthropologists, collectors and art curators. These meanings have thus far remained largely irrelevant to the appreciation of Aboriginal art works as objects of intense attention, as forms with high aesthetic potential. An acknowledgment that they mean something literal to Aborigines, rather than any particular grasp of the relationship and the literal meaning and aesthetic experience, has tended to constitute the basis of a kind of distant respect for the content of the works.”
In explaining Dreamings as Ancestral Beings operating in an eternal present Sutton emphasises concepts that do not easily compute for the desacralised Western mind. That the world around us might all be imbued with precise meaning, that the land is actually its own map- these ideas are not readily dreamed of in our philosophy. So in providing an opportunity to widen our conceptual grasp of Aboriginal metaphysics and showing that Aboriginal art is as full of condensed and coded meaning as DNA, this exhibition challenges us not only to recognise these works as art and not artefacts or curiosities but also to acknowledge the integrity of culture which continues to produce them.
It is no wonder this exhibition had an enormous impact on the more than half a million Americans who visited it in the US or that the Asia Society Galleries in New York was so enthusiastic to tour it. From Djawida and Bilinyarra Nabegeyo’s Female Lightning Figures ( ochre on bark from West Arnhem Land) to the Toas from Lake Eyre and the increasingly familiar acrylic painting of the Western Desert, Dreamings presents an extraordinarily rich and varied display of individual and collective imagination.
Building on work carried out conscientiously by many collectors and researchers, Peter Sutton and his associates have assembled a remarkable exhibition and an equally valuable book on a subject of moment to anyone interested in sustainable futures whether for the world or the mind. Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia has been published by Viking and retails at $35 paperback. To coin a phrase, every home should have one.
An innovation for the Adelaide Festival in 1990 has been the introduction of the Adelaide Biennial. Modelled on the Whitney Biennial of American Art, it proposes a view of trends and achievements in recent Australian work. Mary Eagle, Curator of Australian Art at the Australian National Gallery, was chosen as guest curator of the Biennial (not to be confused, by the way with the internationally oriented Sydney Biennale) with a brief to seek work “throughout all regions of Australia and to think twice before choosing work from Melbourne or Sydney -those big art-market cities that make younger artists feel oppressed. The wider audience for art is more likely than the artists to take it for granted that the best art can crop up anywhere.”
Mary Eagle also wanted to make an exhibition drawn from life- “the art did not rise out of theory, or art journals, but from a broader social experience.” She remarks on the tendency in past decades for works “to be like commercials, to seek instant attention, to persuade immediately.” As Daniel Thomas has noted, Eagle has chosen “slower and quieter work, worth looking at longer. This is work whose material presence is important. The craft aspect- paint craft, wood craft, is important. There is a sensuous physical presence of the work of art ,not just its imagery. This has been welcomed by practical artists.”
There is an evident richness in this respect whether in the disturbing contradictions of solidity and disconnection in the figures of Tom Albert’s Conversation with a Sceptic or the lush brushwork of Jeff Burgess’s gouache, Gatepost: Moorleah. There is wit and ingenuity of material in Rosalie Gascoigne’s Hill Station, 1989 (in builders board and galvanised iron) and in Monaro, constructed from shredded soft drink crates. A high point in the exhibition is Fiona Hall’s series of twenty-three sculptures in tin and aluminium. From wound-open sardine tins meticulously filigreed genital images are revealed which in turn sprout into botanically precise domestic, exotic and native plants. The effect is both sardonic and erotic, a garden of earthly delights with a cutting edge.
Mary Eagle has included works by Aboriginal artists Rover Thomas, Tjunkaya Tapaya, Dorothy Gallaledba, England Bangala and Les Midikuria , as well Gordon Bennett whose Outsider powerfully confronts themes of cultural conflict. Of the thirty eight artists represented , eleven were born outside Australia and this multiplicity of influence is apparent. The exhibition reflects diversity in subject matter, gender perception and medium, works on video, installations, photographic montages are all included.This exhibition, sponsored by Santos, will continue, in Adelaide only, until April 16.
Daniel Thomas wanted the Biennial to complement the Artists Week programme and his hopes have been fulfilled. With guest speakers such as Robert Hughes and Geeta Kapur providing opposing views on the ‘centres’ of art and their spheres of imperial influence and division between artists and art theorists about the lingua franca of discourse, Mary Eagle’s examination of art at the margins and contention for an art of the visible world rather than of the world of art theory has anticipated important and interesting questions. Daniel Thomas couldn’t be happier -“It has touched the moment perfectly, she has fulfilled her brief -perfectly.”
Murray Bramwell
“Kahlo is the Thematic Centrepiece” The Australian Financial Review, March 23, 1990.