Each year the Monash University Museum of Art holds an exhibition solely devoted to aspects of the collection. This year, the Museum asked four artists to curate their own mini-exhibition of works in the collection: Stephen Bram, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, and Juan Davila.
Three rooms, three discrete exhibitions, three separate explorations of the kinds of work that might inform the artist(s), reflect an aspect of their practice or the kind of work they most admire. As the museum itself suggests, the results can be viewed as installations of the artists and indeed the placement of the chosen works in the three spaces is particularly vital to each project.
Stephen Bram uses his introductory text not so much to disrupt the idea of an explanatory note by the artist as to use it to demonstrate what he wants art to do. It's a possibly imagined exchange between Bram and a presumed therapist about his difficulties with writing his explanatory piece for the exhibition. It's gently self-deprecating and gives an introduction to the processes enacted in his exhibition.
Elsewhere Bram has said something to the effect that he wants viewers of his art to consider the relationship between the artwork and the space outside and around it. Many of the works that he has chosen enact such a confrontation.
Three of the works overtly privilege text, refusing to see it as the 'other' of art and seeming to use text to push the viewer back into her own imagination and contemplation of the artwork and the world.
Ian Burn's 'Undeclared glasses' features dense black text on a cream background under glass. The text considers the difference between merely seeing something and apprehending it, challenging us to think about this distinction at the same time as we are busy trying to interpret the meaning of the artwork as a whole.
Mutlu Cerkez's 'Ah hi I'm (21 November 2021)' confronts with its bold, pared-down conception of the words people use to describe themselves and their desires to potential lovers in a commodifed world. It reveals a cliched yet hazy version of the self that the white capital letters on a dark, painted background render as unashamed announcement/advertisement but it's humorous in its total lack of subtlety.
The work that seems to speak most directly to Bram's is John Dunkley-Smith's 'Perspectives for conscious alterations in everyday life #5'. This consists of a dense series of linear geometric forms rendered in pencil, endlessly overlaying each other. This work deals with issues of geometry, the act of looking at art, and perspective -- a kind of meta-art -- and this is also what Bram explores in the work of his included in the exhibition, 'Untitled', in which painted geometric forms dramatically indicate perspective to suggest architectural and spacial forms.
Also noteworthy is John Nixon's 'Untitled' 1987-1992 and 2003-2006. These works consist of a series of minimalist collages, neatly laid out on a grey trestle table, that combine plain coloured paper, personal mementoes and vintage advertising, including German advertising headlines.
The collages quietly celebrates order, pattern and colour while breaking down divisions between pure art and the lived experience of the commercialised world. Because of their horizontal positioning we are forced to examine them as 'artifacts' rather than art on a wall.
Burchill and McCamley's exhibition has a (non-exclusive) interest in feminist art practice. Perhaps the most outstanding works in this collection are the 25 large photographic prints that comprise Tracey Moffat's series 'Up in the sky'.
These dramatic black-and-white pictures represent a Stolen Generations narrative, with absences that the viewer herself must fill in. The photographs capture moments of transcendence and exuberance in harsh rural settings. Many of them reflect a poverty and sense of disconnection from the earth that seem to diminish the spirit but the subjects are never entirely lost in the impersonal, sometimes dominant skies that feature in the overwhelmingly outdoor settings.
Burchill and McCamley asked a colleague, Paul Bai, to comment on the existing work of theirs included in the exhibition, 'X table', a treated poplar table in an elongated 'X' shape that, with its oval and round holes with silver- and blue-coloured inner rims, appears to jokingly resist any call to practicality. Bai comments ironically on this non-commercial surface by strategically placing on it a cash register paper roll and ruler.
Another quietly stunning work is Jacky Redgate's 'Untitled' 1990 '[From Anonymous (probably Daguerre or Niepce de Saint-Victor) table prepared for a meal, c. 1829]'. This installation/model, featuring crafted objects supposedly set up to be photographed, seems to celebrate the aesthetics of space, form and composition within the still life genre.
Juan Davila's is the most self-consciously thematic of the three exhibitions. He considers that the museum is a storehouse of memory and his chosen collection presents images of Melbourne by a wide range of artists, many of them canonic.
These works are closely grouped together on one wall while his own work, 'A panorama of Melbourne', runs down the entire length of the opposite side, in a dialogue with the group. The work, a silk screen on paper, features a series of historical depictions of a changing Melbourne, including the dispossession of Indigenous people, and ending with a city whose main raison d'etre is a techologically based commercialism.
There is a move both in the grouped works and Davila's 'Panorama' away from the human scale and the idea of human habitation to something much larger, abstract and alienating -- a megalopolis, with corresponding suburbs that Davila describes as 'dormitories lacking any support facilities'. The exhibition shows not just different versions of Melbourne, but different Melbournes, some lost for good.
Pehaps the most obviously outstanding of the grouped works is Howard Arkley's iconic 'Family home -- suburban exterior', the bungalow's bright cartoonish exterior suggesting optimism but also sinister secrets hidden behind the brick veneer. Jane Burton's haunting photograph 'I did it for you' reveals the strange, alienating melancholy of the suburban home at dusk: the lights are on, but is anyone actually home?
Chris Barry's 'Nocturne 1' presents a cityscape that is eerily, preternaturally alive but devoid of humanity. Arthur Boyd's 'Wimmera landscape with hunter' presents a dried-out landscape that could be representative of Melbourne's current drought.
Wolfgang Sievers's three black-and-white photographs of Toorak properties portray architecture as art, suggesting that there's a cultural potential to Melbourne and the city in general that goes beyond commercial imperatives.
Other prominent artists represented here include Charles Blackman, Peter Booth, Noel Counihan, Bill Henson and Rosemary Laing.
Primary Views is an intellectual exhibition with strong conceptual elements, asking much of the viewer. It thinks about curatorship in new ways, and questions the idea of the artist as a fiercely individual entity forging her own path and seeking to outstrip her predecessors.
Primary Views is at the Monash University Museum of Art, Clayton campus, and runs until 28 March.
Photo: Christian Capurro
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