Slim Barrie knew Georgia O’Keefe. Or did he? Everything is true in Slim Barrie’s world. It’s the viewer who makes the connections. See the outcomes in his sculptures, reliefs, furniture and drawings at ArtWranglers for the two weeks following the opening this Friday from 5.00pm. Slim’s show will be open from ten to five on Saturday and Sunday 9th and 10th and 16th and 17th August, and by appointment in between.

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There are things at Lakes Entrance that only Slim Barrie can see. Like the little-known Lakes Entrance Monster.

Slim Barrie will be showing sculptures, reliefs, furniture and drawings at ArtWranglers for the two weeks following the opening this Friday from 5.00pm. Slim’s show will be open from ten to five on Saturday and Sunday 9th and 10th and 16th and 17th August, and by appointment in between.

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Apparently not everyone stayed home for Charlie Sofo’s opening at Darren Knight! Thanks to the pilgrims, Sydney came to a standstill, but all the right people made their own pilgrimage to Charlie’s show. Everything was sold - to Queensland Art Gallery, ArtBank, and six other astute collectors. Next opportunity? ArtWranglers in October… (a guaranteed pilgrim-free zone).

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Axel Poignant: “Young Women, Croker Island”, (1948/printed c. 1979), silver gelatin print, on Ilford Galerie, 267 x 388, © Roslyn Poignant (Axel Poignant Archive)

Axel Poignant’s show Some Significant Portraits 1938-1952 can still be seen! We will be open house this weekend (10.00 to 5.00) and subsequently by appointment.

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Charlie Sofo has produced a new body of work for his first solo exhibition in Sydney: Particular Particles at Darren Knight, opening this Friday 19th July.

Charlie writes: The works in Particular Particles are very quiet, but full of order and time. Some of the pictures are almost invisible. I’ve focused in on particular things, marginal materials and minor processes. In the work Eyes I repeatedly cast the eye of a needle in paint. I turned out hundreds of these tiny forms and pasted them on a sheet of cardboard creating a field of sorts, a concentration of eyes. In the work Clothes Lint I picked, rolled and pasted individual balls of lint from 16 items of clothing. The result is a patchwork of lint - an ordered collection of superfluous materials. I’ve tried to make something out of almost nothing. Each piece is based upon a simple idea that has been expanded or carried through to its logical end.

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Axel Poignant: “Young Women, Croker Island”, (1948/printed c. 1979), silver gelatin print, on Ilford Galerie, 267 x 388, © Roslyn Poignant (Axel Poignant Archive)

As part of VIVID, the National Photography Festival, ArtWranglers will be showing Axel Poignant: Significant Portraits 1938 - 1952. ArtWranglers will be open to the public from 10.00am to 5.00 pm from Thursday to Sunday, July 10 to 13, and on Saturday and Sunday, July 19 and 20. Outside those hours, the collection may be viewed by appointment on 02 6257 0949. Please refer to the side-bar for biographical details and further images.

Many of the works in this exhibition are either the last prints available from the Axel Poignant Archive, or one of a very small number of prints available on the market. For example Young Women, Croker Island is a unique print, and has never been previously exhibited or reproduced. A list of works with details of prints and prices is available on request.

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For those readers on the Bill Henson trail, the July issue of Art Monthly Australia contains key articles by Denise Ferris and Martyn Jolly, Adam Geczy, Donald Brook, and more… Very timely for the debates which will no doubt be raised in the context of the upcoming VIVID National Photography Festival here in Canberra. The cover image is by Polly Papapetrou, Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs (detail) 2003. If you want to read back along the Henson trail on this site, type “Henson” in the search box to your right… And follow the consequences of Art Monthly Australia’s stand in the SMH , the ABC, News (more Malevich than Papapterou, a Moral Rights issue in the making), something called Scopical. On Monday Perthnow interviews Olympia herself, (now eleven, and angry with the PM) and quotes from Martyn Jolly’s ABC interview this morning. And more on The Art Life. The A.C.T. Chief Minister Jon Stanhope is the only politician not running for cover, or threatening to “review” AMA’s funding: see his measured comments on the ABC. The Malevich-like blanking of the image only serves to intensify the frenzy… And Gerard Vaughan, Director of the NGV…

On the ABC the Prime Minister avoids the use of the word “revolting”, but (as reported in The Australian) says Mr Rudd today said work such as that shown in this month’s edition of Art Monthly Australia did the opposite of restoring dignity to the debate over depictions of children in art. The taxpayer-funded magazine used a picture of a naked six-year-old girl on the cover of its July edition in protest against the treatment of artist Bill Henson. Angered by the “hysteria” over Henson’s pictures of a 13-year-old girl, the magazine also has a number of highly sexualised images inside, according to the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. Art Monthly editor Maurice O’Riordan said he hoped the July edition would restore some “dignity to the debate”. Mr Rudd was asked if the picture restored dignity. “If you ask for my personal view, no it doesn’t. It does the reverse,” he told ABC television. “My view hasn’t changed on this. We’re talking about the innocence of little children here. “A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way. “I have very deep, strong, personal views on this, which is that we should be on about maximising the protection of children. “I don’t think this is a step in the right direction at all.” Mr Rudd said he had no idea what the motivation for the Art Monthly pictures was. “But I’ve got to say my interest and the interest of many Australians, I think most Australians, is to protect little children and restore some innocence to childhood,” he said. “Frankly, I can’t stand this stuff.”

And one crazy blogger found “children posing naked in adult jewellery” in AMA, which some journos have faithfully repeated!!!

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White man got no dreaming is the title of the work by U.S. artist Michael Rakowitz at the Biennale of Sydney - yet another remake of the Tatlin Monument to the Third International, (see also the Wikipedia entry) a version of which we’ve just seen in the context of the Ai Wei Wei show. This is the latest in a long string of reconstructions of this monument, but unfortunately the Biennale PR (always vulnerable to naivete fuelled by enthusiasm) has billed it as “the never-before constructed monument to the communist revolution.” (Josephine Tovey, SMH, in the Biennale special promotion last weekend).

Perhaps this Biennale should be retitled Revolution Recycled, given it’s didactic and historical bent? On the one hand, including all the references to historical social revolutions (even Maximilian Robespierre gets a page!), and on the other, anything to do with circular forms. Coming from an American visitor, the White man got no dreaming reference is particularly grating: it’s a reference to the title of the book of collected essays by W.E.H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979. The pirated title itself derives from a more complex passage spoken by a Murinbata man, Muta, which reads:

“White man got no dreaming, him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different. Him got road belong himself.”

Its context is a passage written in 1953 (p. 24) which reads:

“Clearly, The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man. If I am correct in saying so, it is much more complex philosophically than we have so far realised. I greatly hope that artists and men of letters who (it seems increasingly) find inspiration in Aboriginal Australia will use all their gifts of empathy, but avoid banal projection and subjectivism, if they seek to honor the notion.”

By contrast to Stanner’s lifetime of interaction with Indigenous Australians, Rakowitz’ reference to an Aboriginal perspective could scarcely be thinner, or more opportunistic. As the BoS describes it, “Rakowitz has constructed a full-scale contemporary version of avant-garde Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s model for Monument to the Third International (1919). Tatlin’s tower, which was to have been made of spirals, was never built; today, it is a symbol of revolutionary and visionary thought. Rakowitz’s Tatlin tower, White man got no dreaming, is a rebirth of collective hope, as it recycles discarded materials from old houses, soon to be demolished, owned by the Aboriginal Housing Company in Redfern, Sydney.”

Are we missing something here? What’s the connection between Tatlin’s tower and the Redfern reconstruction project (the Pemulwuy Project)? Is it that they are both visionary, in some way? Is that all there is? No wonder the Redfern residents had reservations about it (as he relayed to us in his ABC interview last Sunday)…

For context, here’s another example of another contemporary reconstruction of the Tatlin Tower (in 2000) by the French artist Michel Aubry, exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Vassivierre (partly constructed out of Sardinian cane, the culmination of a long-running series of works in the same medium celebrating the icons of 20th modernity). And of course there’s also the first reconstruction, at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, conceived by the late Pontus Hulten in 1968. And there’s bound to be more…

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Painting is a zone photography will never occupy. The Lovis Corinth exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris neatly demonstrates what the defenders of the Bill Henson case can never evoke. The eminent art historian Roger Benjamin’s defensive invocation of the term “gestualism” will never meaningfully transfer from the material inventiveness of painting (the substantive reality of which - in, say, a painting such as Corinth’s Innocentia above – will always be an object as much as it is an image) to the pictorialist effects of a Henson. A painting is always a (material) construction of reality, even if the subject matter of the painterly images is not always representational. By contrast with a photograph, paintings and sculptures are always artefacts of the manipulation of matter, artefacts of the imagination, before they are images or representations. Hence the specific aesthetic pleasures of the Corinth exhibition.

Benjamin’s attribution of qualities of painterliness in photography do not shift the essential optical objectivity of the photographic engagement with the subject – the reality of the subject/camera/photographer/image/audience nexus will be present no matter what effects of print, scale, or framing context may be orchestrated by the photographer/artist. The photographer’s subject carries her identity with her when she leaves the studio in a way the painter’s subject never does. And Benjamin’s “whiff of the sublime” – surely an agency of a heavenly order - invokes an authority we thought photography was instrumental in eliminating, way back when.

(see the following link to The Australian news story that the NSW DPP will not recommend proceeding with charges against Henson)

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Pencils ready? If you’re in Melbourne the inspirational Slim Barrie is currently to be seen in the context of international outsider art at Monash University Museum of Art until 21 June. Curated by Glenn Barkley and Peter Fay, the panoptical exhibition Without Borders: Outsider Art in an Antipodean Context puts Slim in the context of fifteen other international and Australian artists. If you’re in Sydney, be patient and you’ll see the show at Campbelltown Arts Centre from 29th August. But if you’re in Canberra you’ll see Slim Barrie’s two- and three-dimensional illuminated drawings at ArtWranglers from 8th August.

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