Exhibition review: Isidro Blasco 'Sydney Interiors'

Yellow Office, 2013, C-print on museum board, wood and hardware, 35x35x10cm 

Walking into the Isidro Blasco exhibition can look at first like a high-end, post-modern Hobbyco store. There is a lot of plywood joinery and delicately assembled collage that would of required dexterity of a practiced model maker in order to get to their finished state. Categorically they fall between wall mounted sculpture or 3D photo montage, depending on what angle you’re looking from.

This is Blasco’s third solo show at the formidably tasteful Dominik Mersch Gallery. Born in Madrid and now New York based his works are a combination of collage, photography, architecture and deft skill with a glue gun. The format varies from exhibition to exhibition but the themes remain constant. Blasco’s works are all meditations on place, space, memory and perception.  

Sydney Interiors is a continuation from his 2011 Australian residency and shows (Tilt at DMG and The Laneway Project with the City of Sydney). These previous exhibitions were surveys of exteriors in the city: laneways, skylines, aerial views and streetscapes that Blasco configured in his distinct style of collage-construction. His 2013 exhibition is again the result of a two-month residency in Sydney where Blasco turned his attention to the interior to produce a body of work that examines the values we place on our inside environment.

The subjects in this exhibition are domestic, commercial, private and public Sydney interiors. Apparently his initial plan was to record the interiors of celebrity Sydney-siders but he abandoned that pursuit in the early stages of the project. Perhaps he read too much of Andrew Hornery’s column or maybe he just felt easier around the arts set. Either way it’s for the best as viewers now get to see inside some of the beautiful, humble and historic interiors of this city.

Audiences can take instant delight in these works, as they are immediately accessible on both conceptual and experiential level. There is a simple thrill in getting up close and looking in, around, over and behind the montages. The tiny scale of the works forces the you to come right up to the display and requires you to physically move around in order to see more sections of the collage. It is also like the gallery equivalent of an open-house inspection as you get to perve on their bookshelves and see what’s in the pantry. It’s as if you are physically in the space, you have to look around corners and up walls in order to see what’s there.

The montage process requires Blasco to take numerous panoramic photos of the area from the same angle. He then cuts them up and reconstructs them in 2D and 3D forms in accordance to a sense-view rather than a realistic view of the space. What this does is create a much more intuitive way of looking that is much more akin to how we really absorb our visual field.

Interestingly, the approximate bandwidth of the human retina is about 8960 kilobits per second, which is equivalent to the amount of content on two sheets of typed paper. The point being is that we take in so much more visual content than we are aware of and most of it just becomes lost data. What Blasco’s work does is record all of the details- indiscriminately and compulsively recording the full spectrum of what we look at and what we actually see.

Of a similar vein is the after-image phenomenon that Blasco refers to in a number of his essays. This is the wonderful sensation of the optic nerve fooling the brain into seeing something that’s not there. Being in this exhibition is a little bit like looking at stills of after-images, all overlapping and merging into each other outwitting the eye and mind.

The wooden support structures that hold the works are both a practical and aesthetic consideration. Instead of a concealed and neat system we see this erratic plywood nest, jutting out at awkward angles. These exposed skeletons give the works architectural as well as sculptural qualities. They can also read like a wood-frame construction or scaffolding gone mad. This is perhaps a coincidental comment on the modus operandi of most arts enterprises: well-organised chaos.  

The more conceptual aspects of Blasco’s practice are his ideas on the significance of place and space and the influences of perception and memory. Sydney Interiors is like a visual essay on these themes. You can’t help but feel the sincerity and kindness that Blasco brings to these reconstructions of private places and shared spaces. He treats all the subjects with affection and sensitivity, giving as much attention to the modest and humble as he does the illustrious and ornate.

Some of the standouts include The Godess II, a panoramic interior of a grand old Valiant car resplendent in its original turquoise upholstery. Yellow Office is a fabulous fly-on-the-wall view of the power station that is Wayne Tunnicliffe’s desk. In comparison to the other works this one really bursts against the confines of its surface area. Groaning bookshelves bulge out at the viewer and hide Tunnicliffe under the abundance catalogues. 

Hibernian House is more accurate description of how most ‘creatives’ live, which usually is cramped, communal and fairly subsistent. This work is unwieldy in its assembly and juts out in all directions, aptly describing the nature of this creative residence that grants so many artists the ability to work and live in this frightfully expensive city.

Ultimately what Blasco’s work prompts us to think about is how and through what significance does a space turn into a place? Are places made through the tangible things they contain? Or are places made by the intangible memories and presence that we attach to them? And is a psychological and emotional sense of place what we need, rather than space itself?

This exhibition also illuminates the fact that how we see our world is entirely different from how others see it. We use perception and memory as primary tools to build the framework that becomes our reality. The idiom that it is perception not truth that matters is perhaps the most fitting summary of Blasco’s works in Sydney Interiors.

And in art as in life, perception is everything.

Artists | Art works | Art’s work | Arts workers

they have the right idea

Artists

Art works

Art’s work

Arts workers

These are the main operators of a sprawling, complex and fragile web that is know as the visual arts. And while it may appear to the onlooker that as an industry we are united by the gossamer of passion and creative spirit, the reality is that we are all eking out a strained and increasing leaner livelihood trying to do the things that justify our existence (read funding).

Some of you may of read Saturday’s SMH article on the ‘Tit-Farm’, featuring a bohemian rundown house filled with artistic demi-goddesses in sheer vintage skirts, nursing kittens and babes under a warm, dream catcher diffused light (in art, even a bad news story is aesthetically pleasing…). Tit-Farm was used to highlight the how difficult it has become to be an artist in Sydney with the spiraling costs of living matched with uncertain and irregular income streams.

A proposed solution is to provide sibsidised housing and work spaces for artists by classifying them as ‘key workers’ who are entitled to affordable, inner-city rents and other benefits or concessions would make their existence much more secure. The plan proposed by Saint Clover (aka Lord Mayor) aims to have some positive affect on the thousands of artists that are struggling to survive and maintain artistic output in this brutally expensive city. And it’s not just the cliché of the emerging artist starving in the garret, I know prize winning, gallery represented artists that are only just hanging on.

And I also know a huge amount of highly educated, over qualified and extremely experienced arts workers have to live and work in the city, just scraping by and making very consequential sacrifices in order to remain working in this field. There aren’t articles written about them or policies dedicated to assisting their profession. There is no gallery assistant grant or subsidized housing for arts administrators. And the other alarming, but not surprising fact is that they are mostly women, quietly persevering and taking on more and more work without any extra remuneration or time in lieu to compensate.

What the wider community must also realize is that the arts, outside of publicly funded institutions, is largely unregulated and unchecked. If it were held to other industry standards such as paid overtime, defined roles and monitored work loads the fact is that this country would not have a visual arts sector. The visual arts could not afford to exist. Arts workers are just as ‘key’ as the artists they work tirelessly to support and promote.

This is not an argument of us-and-them, artists and arts workers are utterly codependent. What is required is a broadening of the assistance and support networks that are in place for artists in order for arts workers to gain some benefits as well. We’re all part of the same equation working for the same outcomes, therefore if is crucial that artists and art workers are given the same support and opportunities to thrive.

How to create a hipster art collection

 

I came across this piece of satirical gold the other day and while it could be retail’s version of Portlandia, it got me thinking about the ideas behind it. I have always maintained that art needs to look at the retail sector in much more detail and realize that what is happening in retail now will be happening in art galleries in three to five years time. For example, we all know that physical shops are a species in decline and retail is going through a Darwinian style evolution which will result in online ‘experiences’ that will mimic the bricks and mortar encounter.

We also know that galleries are closing in waves due to a combination of consecutive years of economic downturn, reduced investment in art and a more restrained collecting mentality. Whereas retail has shifted and adapted to the market, commercial art still seems to be stuck in a Queen Street fantasy, thinking that the market will hop in their German made cars and come to them. While this is still mostly true, what commercial art isn’t addressing and Freedom Furniture is, is that in five to ten years the collector will be a different species that has been raised on a diet of accessibility, availability and visibility.

So scorn as much as you like (or laugh, because it is brilliant), but Freedom Furniture knows that their future market will be the ‘hipsters’ and they must speak their language, understand their psychology and most importantly come to them. Commercial galleries need to study their future buyers, start to foster a collecting culture amongst them and take the gallery experience to them; be it physical, online, pop-up, pop-down or pop-corn, whatever it takes to engage with the next generation of collectors.

The Value of Art By Michael Findlay

 

The Value of Art 

By Michael Findlay , Prestel, 2012

Art-lit appears to be an increasingly popular genre, from Sarah Thornton’s libel- causing Seven Days in the Art World to tales of ambitious gallerists in Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty and Tom Wolf’s latest novel Back to Blood, set in the feeding frenzy that is the Miami Art Fair. And not to mention the plethora of ‘how to buy and sell art’ titles that date faster than a Women’s Weekly cookbook.

Sitting somewhere in between all these is Michael Findlay’s The Value of Art. It’s part market report, part memoir peppered with thoughts ranging from lack of sincerity of current collectors to the rapid rise and future predictions for the Asian art market.

As far as dealer pedigree goes, Findlay is at the top of the ladder. He is a director at Acquavella Galleries, New York and was previously Head of Impressionist and Modern Paintings then International Director of Fine Art at Christies, New York. While he can speak with great authority, it does seems odd considering where Findlay is situated to be criticising the behaviour and mentality of a market that he and his associates have undoubtedly profited from.  

Findlay divides the book into four sections, symbolically naming the first three for Zeus's daughters, the Three Graces, in order to analyse complexities of modern art.

Thalia is the Goddess of Fruitfulness thus representing the commercial marketplace and financial lures of art, candidly explaining exactly how money makes the art world go round, up and of late, down.

Part two is Euphrosyne, the Goddess of Joy, metaphor for the social aspect of art. This is both the positive, communal act that art stimulates as well as the social power that is derived from being part of the “Big Numbers” set.

The third section is Aglaea, for the Goddess of Beauty, which for Findlay is where the real, intrinsic value of art lies. The final section is ‘Marley's Ghost: Past, Present, Future’ where he bemoans the cult of the collector that now micro-manages the art world; the dangers of instant gratification in art and the superficial ‘glancing’ culture in which we live.

Given the top shelf art that Findlay has handled through his career, readers must steel themselves as even most quotidian examples he gives involve names that read like a room sheet at The Met.

Consequently he is much more compelling when he loses the ‘art speak’ and talks frankly about the industry he knows so well such as gallery and auction house PR being disguised as ‘news’ and industry gush replacing fair and learned criticism.

Findlay reinforces the mantra of all successful collectors: buy what you like not what you think the market will like and that the best investment you can make is in developing your eye and understanding. He advises collectors to look at all types of art and to get to know the dealers and artists but remain aware of the dynamic of these relationships.

Another tip is to be adventitious, dedicate a percentage of your buying budget for works by emerging artists because every established artist was once an ‘unknown’. And most importantly, if you love the art you live with its value will only ever increase.