And we admire works which recognise their antecedents in a way that enhances both sets of experience: see #9 Untitled after Tony Woods, 2009 (Synthetic polymers, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 505 x 505).

Yuri Wiedenhofer, the inspired/inspiring ceramic artist who lives on a mountain behind Tanja, the man who milks death adders for a living, ran into some more mundane challenges when he tried to build his fire sculpture on the beach at Bermagui. This was to be the culmination of Sculpture on the Edge, but the censorious local intelligentsia got in the way. It was planned to be a much more ambitious affair, with bottles, sea grass, and offal, but the locals had apparently had enough of high culture for one week, and so his materials were edited during the night. Even so, the show went on, and thanks to Chris Polglase for the pics…

Rose Montebello: The Feeding Tree, colour photocopies on card, 2009.

Rose’s work will be on show at ArtWranglers from 11.00am to 5.00pm on Saturday and Sunday, 21st/22nd and 28/29th March. Visits in between by appointment please.

Her latest series of works focus on images of predator and prey. If these seem to be strangely bleak representations of the natural world, it’s a consequence of their unnatural origins as in the pages of 1950s and 60s National Geographic and Reader’s Digest natural history books. In The Readers’ Digest Family Guide to Nature and Encyclopedia of Animals you will find surprisingly optimistic descriptions of “the natural world”, the wonders of which are depicted in glowing colour photography. In these pages, published in the years before the environmental crisis, and before the first Silent Spring, Rose finds Nature described as an uncomplicated and magical world, where its denizens are hyper-represented in the artificially enhanced colour print technology of the time.

From what now seems like a kind of exaggerated naturalism Rose Montebello finds images which now seem strangely unsettling, and she works at making them even more so. “The Feeding Tree” is the accidental title of this group of works, derived from the original page title of the photograph of an Osprey eating a fish which is now transformed into a Rose Montebello.  The theme of predator and prey suggests all is not well in our natural world…

For years she has made use of various optical and perspectival devices to create images of her subjects which re-compose the three-dimensional presence of the thing, enhanced beyond its photographic original. While a hologram does something similar, the holographic illusion has no tangible physical object. Similarly, stereoscopic illusionism occurs in the brain, even though the visual illusion seems to float somewhere in front of you, in your visual field. Digital technology now allows something similar, and as you move towards IMax the scale of the technology and its special effects increases exponentially.

Rose works at the other end of technology, with printed images on paper, using poor materials, at domestic scale, creating image-objects which are laboriously assembled, layer by layer. Her works look back towards the wellspring of 20th century modernism, the invention of collage, where the artist’s fascination with the phenomenology of vision is put to the test by dissection, reassembly and the reinvention of appearances. At its best, works of art such as these are “questioning machines” (to paraphrase William Rubin’s term), which engages the viewer in a play of appearances, materials, and processes. These open windows into the artist’s thought processes and motivations. The “questioning machine” enables us to question the artist’s own questioning process. This is as it should be. Enjoy the opportunity Rose provides for us…

Rose Montebello is at ArtWranglers for the next two weeks…

ArtWranglers has to admit our bias. Plonk sculpture rarely does anything for us. So most of the work in this exhibition would look better in a gallery than on the green lawns of the headland. And so despite its drama and beauty, the Endeavour Point Headland is rarely used by the Edge sculptors as anything other than an open air gallery. Nothing this year matches the imaginative excitement of last year’s Hanna Hoyne’s Soulsearchanaut tethered between the two largest Norfolk Island pines. We admit we have a preference for sculpture which engages with its surroundings, or which challenges our expectations of what a sculpture can be. Perfection within tradition has to be exceptional in some other way to break out of its comfort zone. Edge will never revive the tradition of the Mildura Sculpture Triennal of the 60s and 70s, where confrontation and engagement with the environment became the norm. Edge now performs a different role.

So a sculpturefest like this is worth the special efforts it takes to make it happen. Why? If you’re a painter, it happens all the time. Survey shows, curated shows, competitions and non-juried exhibitions make up the majority of our gallery experiences. Think how rarely you see more than a couple of sculptures at a time. So this kind of event is worthwhile on three different axes. A sculptural metaphor. One is that we get to see what sculptors are up to, and compare the aesthetic experiences they have to offer, side by side, en masse. The second axis, heading in a different direction, is the democratic opportunity it affords to people who are not professional artists, who don’t have the advantages of a University training  – like the contingent of ten who came this year from the ANU School of Art. And the third axis is that this is art in the public domain, in main street, and so everyone gets to have an opinion. The first gives us an opportunity for new challenges, experiences and insights. The second has proven to be a surprising launch pad for people who never imagined their art might be appreciated, that making art could be so rewarding. The third is equally valuable. Sculpture need not be a creature of the elites, the ivory towers, or the white cubes of the museums. This kind of art can be the kind of social glue that affirms the way we value social spaces and social life. Outsiders and Insiders rub up against each other, and great things happen as a consequence. Sometimes the Outsiders become the Insiders, and previously unknown local artists become celebrities. As it should be. Let’s have a look at some examples we haven’t shown in our earlier post. Here’s local artist Frank Maconochie fighting off the paparazzi as he tries to demonstrate his Three Stools or a Lamp…

And here’s Dan Lorrimer’s ode to Wilbur and Orville (on the beach, where a different kind of interactivity can happen):

And despite its random plonkiness, here’s Randall Sinnamon’s Boar, which had a surprising subtlety and presence…

So you have to congratulate Jan Ireland for her determination and commitment to have pulled it off again, against all odds. We heard nothing but praise for the many successes of this event. The enthusiasm of the artists is infectious. Here’s the gaggle outside a place of High Gastronomic Culture.

And here’s Jan with Amanda Stuart’s Alpha Myths.

For more pics go to glasscemtralcanberra

Here’s a Rose Montebello work in progress for her ArtWranglers show opening on Friday 20th March. There’s a queue forming…

Here’s a show for the summer! We want to see Bondi Jitterbug: George Caddy and his camera at the State Library of NSW until 22 February. Be sure to click the slideshow – and go to the Library Shop to see them all. This fabulously transgressive “beachobat”, (Roya Geale, Bondi Beach 1941) caught our eye in the press advertisements. If the date of this photograph really is 1941, it pushes back the history of the (illegal) two-piece a few more years… And, boy, this vernacular modernist makes Max Dupain look a bit sober…

Seems there’s a beat-up at the SMH in anticipation of the launch of David Marr’s new book: The Henson Case.  In this advertisement for next weekend’s Good Weekend the SMH pix editors parody their own self-censorship, brought on themselves by the Bill Henson controversy of a few months ago. David Marr’s account of the issues raised by the various reactions to Bill Henson’s work do not engage with the substantive questions of the weak nature of the defenses already mounted: the prior arguments based on context and intentionality (it’s erotica, not porn, so that’s OK) are about vested interests, and not the 21st century reality of the way images are now distributed and consumed. Henson and his dealers have sold and continue to sell individual works out of context, and to distribute such out-of-context works on the internet, so the stable door is wide open… Nobody appears to be willing to mount a defense of this aspect of the “case”.

On September 15 we posted a reference to a Bill Henson photograph of a different order to any of those that were in the spotlight back in May. This (trigger warning) image was put to auction last week by Menzies Art Brands, on their online catalogue, and it’s still there. (We wonder whether Henson gave copyright permission, but that’s another issue). We asked then whether such examples of his work could be defended in the same terms as the discourse which emerged in May, and subsequently.

Throughout this debate, ArtWranglers has always taken the position that the world of the internet has radically changed the context in which images such as these are (now) seen and interpreted. Defense of the work in its original context, or a defense based on the autonomy of its artistic intent, seems to us to be no longer sufficient once the work is “out there” circulating on the internet. There, it occupies a different contextual category, and is therefore subject to different values, criteria, and critiques. Surely it is no longer a matter of where each of us may draw the line between (say) erotica and pornography, or whether the artist’s intention supercedes its new context in the wider world of vernacular photography. Once it’s “out there” in cyberspace, there’s nowhere to draw a line, and just as individual works may challenge our assessment of the whole corpus of Henson’s work, so such works as the above now need to be assessed (and defended) in the expanded field of internet imagery. Perhaps. What do you have to say about that, David? And there are more questions for David to answer on The Art Life. Read also Jonathan Green’s comments on Crikey. Regrets? A few…

And a growing caution in interview with Leigh Sales: “The photographs are beautiful and nothing Henson has done in the last few months with all of these photographs breaks any law and none of them are remotely pornographic.” and “The Internet has changed the way we view photography. There is a sense in which no photograph can actually be corralled anymore. Everything is potentially available to anybody anywhere in the world, once it gets on the Internet. We still have to deal with that, that apprehension of the Internet, because it’s changing the way we consider art, photography, all sorts of things. Part of the purpose of my book is to look at the history of that fear of the Internet, and try to work out whether in fact we need to be so afraid. I don’t think we do.”

As Peter Fay remarked, how fortunate are we to have two Howard Finsters available in Sydney for this show? This one When Jesus calls be ready… (1983) from Ray Hughes’ collection is one of Finster’s “sacred” works, is one of perhaps 46,000 such works produced between 1976 and 2001. Makes Emily look like a slowcoach! See them both at Without Borders: Outsider Art in an Antipodean Context (previously at MUMA), now at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Find details, links and bios on their site. Here’s Peter, Slim, Mary Anne Voyazis and Elizabeth (guests from the NGA) on the second last day…