can't believe I never...

Can’t believe I have never been to Luna Park. That enormous face with the gaping mouth and buggy eyes right next to Sydney Bridge has, to be honest, always put me off. Felt the rides and stuff behind it would be mundane in comparison, and certainly not up to the glorious decrepitude of Coney Island in New York. Plus, I really hate going on fairground rides - I get very sick very quickly, to the extent that even looking at big dippers etc., makes me a bit queasy. But, weirdly, Dr. Cornel West (African-American scholar and activist) was giving a public talk at the Big Top, Luna Park (yes, that is what I said) so I went early to take pictures at twilight. And of course it was a magical place - both in its own right as a fading, small but determined amusement park and as a location to look back at Sydney Harbour and Opera House. Took photos until my battery ran out.  

back to cockatoo

Now I am back in Sydney after the trip,  beginning to plan my next moves, jobs etc. Most immediately is to make sure that I see as many things as I can before I leave. Places I have previously missed or done  momentarily. So last Saturday was Cockatoo Island and Luna Park. I love Cockatoo Island, a very relaxed way to walk about in the layers of Sydney convict and industrial heritage. Already planning to go to the Underbelly Festival, glamp on the island, and to hire a tinny* from there.

Tinny - Australian slang for a little aluminium boat, usually with an outboard on the back

retreating

Feel like I have not stopped since I got back from China, and couldn't decide if going off to a writers’ retreat for a couple of days was going to be productive or exhausting. But turned out to be wonderful; fantastic group of people in an lovely building - part of the Bundanon Trust - designed by Glenn Murcutt with Wendy Lewin and Reg Lark. Everyone worked quietly and studiously each day and then shared dinner and conversation. Perfect. And domesticated but hilly bush to walk in, with enough kangaroos and wombats around to trip over.

vivid

Made a plan to come back on the ferry from Manley after dark to see Vivid around Circular Quay; lots of light installations and projections onto buildings (including the Opera House). Of course incredibly crowded and the folks pretty jet-lagged, but did enjoy extraordinary series of animations onto the Customs House, entitled enchanted Sydney. 

another favourite

And whilst we are doing my favourite tourist places in Shanghai, I have to mention the Urban Planning Exhibition Center. A fantastic mix of left-over heroic communist iconography (and centralist planning) together with some really interesting exhibitions about the history of the city, all wrapped around an atrium containing a massive 3-D model of the city.

white rabbit

Had a fab visit last weekend with K to the White Rabbit gallery.  This is centred on another wealthy private collector's personal enthusiasm - this time contemporary Chinese art.

And also a great place to get chinese teas. 

no labels but lots of logo

One of MONA’s deliberate anarchies is to not label the work. Instead if you want you can hook up with iPods and/or headphones (the O guide) and learn about the art as you go; from a series of different voices, including Walsh’s own reasons for buying a piece. However, the project is supported by a large amount of written material – Monanisms, the catalogue for the opening show; the Making of MONA about the whole project; and David Walsh’s memoir A Bone of Fact. We may not be given ‘proper’ art-gallery-type instructions about how to read the art (who made it, when, what out of, where and in what context) but there is a tremendous amount of post-modern, post-everything ‘stuff’ which surrounds the collection, infused by all the irony, partiality, cleverness, and witty asides one has come to expect. How long this will seem ‘on-trend’ rather than deeply dated waits to be seen.

shocking?

The collected work at MONA focuses on the visceral, the ritualistic and the mythological (with some post-modern ‘Disneyland’ thrown in); picking up a rich thread in modern and contemporary art and tying it back to ancient Egyptian artifacts and the like. We are meant to be shocked – by the building’s unexpectedness, by the lack of labels on the work, by the refusal of ‘artwank’ and by the work itself. 

It is, of course, an artificial controversy (one that Walsh himself only seems often bored by). We have already had, after all ‘ the shock of the new’ of modern art, and it is nearly 20 years since Saatchi’s Sensation show spotlighting the supposedly notorious Young British Artists (the YBAs) and their enthusiasm for the distasteful and bloody.

Walsh’s collection, though, brings that attitude decidedly into the 21^st century and into the act of collecting and displaying work itself. The current guest exhibition is Matthew Burney’s Riverof Fundament, which seems a perfect fit. Other large permanent pieces such as Anselm Kiefer’s Sherivath ha Kelim, give some organizational structure to the space. This has it’s own pavilion (entered via a long dark and musical concrete pipe, which suddenly spits you out into really unexpected daylight).  It is also a ‘classic’ marker of the kind of work on show. For, despite all the hype, the work on show is both an incredibly coherent selection - whether you like it or not- of where much contemporary art has been going.

holidaying in Hobart

Have just had an amazing couple of days in Hobart; one to visit the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) – a kind of hugely impressive vanity project by the professional gambler and art collector David Walsh – and the other to climb up (well actually down) Mount Wellington.

MONA is all the critics say. You reach it best by boat up the river Derwent to Berridale (the Mona Roma, done up in dazzle camouflage, and with plastic sheep to sit on) then up a long flight of steps to what appears as a small single storey pavilion – a converted existing house on the site – with a tennis court literally in front of the entrance, plus cafes, pavilions, a stage and rolling lawns between.

Then through a mirrored front door and back down and down via a spiral stair cut directly through the sandstone into what feels like a huge subterranean gallery, dark and windowless. A second Piranesi-like staircase made of corten at the other end meanders back up through the levels, in and against a deep cut of exposed and often wet sandstone, that slices a linear void through length of the space.  The project, by architects Fender Katsalidis, is quite stunning and unlike most of what we know of galleries; or at least conventional airy white box versions. Of course, the space signals what the collector/collection is about – an odd mixture of incredible sophistication and naughty boy. Which I enjoyed enormously, even the obvious bits, because it still manages to feel refreshing.

harry and penelope’s house

As always, the intention to do lots of cultural things has not really worked out. Booked tickets for Expanded Architecture (installation/architecture/dance) but then didn’t make it. Have still not got to Anne Ferran’s photographs at the Australian Centre for Photography, or the contemporary Chinese work at White Rabbit Gallery, or the dream home/small home exhibition –already finished! – at the Museum of Sydney. But K and I did (through luck rather than planning) get to visit inside the iconic Harry and Penelope Seidler House, a tour led by Penelope herself, as part of the current Seidler exhibition. Well-weathered piece of concrete modernism, with prime examples of furniture from the 1970s. And bumped into somebody I have not seen for many, many years, also visiting, which was nice.