Art and About
Friday, my employers sponsored a "renewal day" for the office staff. This is an annual event, a kind of retreat, and a variety of options are presented to allow the employees to refresh their spirits, in contemplation or in more active endeavours. I was too late for the bushwalk this year (and missed out entirely last year, due to one thing and another at home), but this year had a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where we visited two exhibitions in the presence of a Uniting Church minister doing his PhD in Art History. This was followed by lunch at the Buena Vista Cafe, located at the top of the law courts building just above Hyde Park, and a trip to the New South Wales Art Gallery, where we were treated to the Archibalds.

Our first stop at the MCA was to see a retrospective of Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian artist, largely working in video, but also sculpture and performance. Very confronting in its content throughout, especially in its focus on identity issues, Ms. Hatoum's work is dark and violent, transforming everyday objects and experiences into objects requiring a thoughtful response to modern life and the marginalization of various persons of our world society, whether exiles, refugees, women, or the lower classes.

Rosemary Laing's photographs also work in a transformative mode, but are more, perhaps, subtly manipulative. Famous for her "floating brides" series, she's done much more interesting work, to my mind, although the brides do have a resonance of the iconography of the Christian martyrs. The carpets in the forest aren't even the best of her work, but are certainly the most playful. It's her other landscape juxtapositions, however, that stand out for me, showing off not only her painter's eye for composition and color, but also displaying her acknowledgement of the drive to domesticate the natural world lest it overwhelm us with its enormity and strangeness, which itself tells of our dislocation from our essential being.

Completing our tour of current art, along with a few dozens of others, we took a quick trip through the '05 Archibald prize entries, exhibited along with the Wynne, Sulman, and Photographic Portrait prizes. The winner of the Archibald, the annual competition for portraiture paintings, John Olsen's "Self Portrait Janus Faced" has been controversial (as usual with this prize - last year's pencil drawing of the actor David Gulpilil caused a stir for not having been painted, for example), but I think it was perhaps indeed the most worthy entry, although I also considered Ben Quilty's "Beryl" a remarkable work of great distinction. The other prizes had their stand-outs, too, not least being the photograph "Ali and Rahma" by Cassandra Mathie, and not just because it's a photo of two refugees from Darfur, Sudan, but because it captures in their eyes, their stances and bearing, their experience, both there and here, what it is to pick up and leave and adapt and perhaps never return, perhaps never be able to relinquish the past because never be able to pick up a future for longer than day-by-day. This, like the others did, is what art does best, despite our guides' suggestion that art has changed somehow in its role, rather than in how it accomplishes its task, the content and techniques used.

So my renewal day option was a success overall. I actually feel enhanced in my spirit from an outing with the arts.