That was the year that was: VISUAL ARTS

There’s been no end of drama in Melbourne’s visual arts community this year.

Leading the way was the high profile imbroglio between influential curator Juliana Enberg, and young artist Ash Keating. Their very public dispute at an opening at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in June, centered around Keating’s appropriation of artwork by Barbara Kruger, herself the focus of a popular ACCA exhibition this year (pictured at left) which he had recycled from a dumpster behind ACCA.

A compatriot of Keating’s videoed the slanging match between the artist and the curator (a potential invasion of privacy as far as Enberg was concerned) and the resulting tape became the art world equivalent of John Safran’s famous interrogation of Ray Martin (originally shot for the pilot of a subsequently axed TV series in 1998, but never shown – at least on the national broadcaster – until screened by Media Watch in 1999).

As far as I know, the video Keating’s mate shot of Enberg has never been screened, while after threats of legal action from both sides, and allegations that the influential Enberg had threatened to ruin Keating’s career, the whole affair slipped silently out of sight.

At another Melbourne arts institution, the National Gallery of Victoria, curator Geoffrey Smith became the focus of an investigation into his professional conduct because of his even then defunct relationship with private gallery owner Robert Gould.

Before the whole sordid story was aired in public, with the major ramifications that entailed for the way conflicts of interest are handled throughout the visual arts sector, the affair was settled out of court.

The total cost of the legal battle was $280,000 - almost $4,600 a day – which if spent on art, “would have allowed the gallery to purchase a major work by a famous Australian artist such as John Brack, Brett Whiteley or Norman Lindsay,” according to that bastion of art appreciation, The Herald Sun.

Most farcically, Smith had to sue the NGV before he was allowed to take his elderly mother to see the Charles Blackman retrospective (left) that he had spent more than two year’s preparing, which opened at the NGV on August 11.

A less public dispute, but one with potentially more impact on artists’ ability to incorporate pre-existing works in their art (a long-established tradition, and the visual equivalent of sampling) occurred at this year’s Melbourne Art Fair.

A work by artists Helen Johnson and Michelle Ussher, exhibited at the Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces project room, was removed from public display after a complaint that it contravened protocols with regard to the representation of Aboriginal people.

The resulting dispute recalled the drama engendered by Paul Goldman’s 2002 film Australian Rules, and highlighted the sensitivities associated with representations of indigenous Australians by non-indigenous artists; particularly when pre-existing images from the historical record are appropriated by contemporary artists.

The complex arguments associated with this issue cannot be done justice in this column, but readers who wish to know more about the event should log on to the forums at www.eyeline.qut.edu.au, where it is discussed in detail.

In other visual arts highlights this year, the Heidi Museum of Modern Art reopened after significant redevelopment; Next Wave Festival grew an international art village out of shipping containers in Docklands, and took over the old Police City Watch House in Russell Street for New Ruins; Mark Hilton’s Collective Autonomy at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces challenged us to rethink our notions of contemporary Australian culture; and local artist Lily Hibberd cast a paranoid eye over our everyday surroundings in I Want To Break Free (pictured, right) at Richmond’s Karen Woodbury Gallery.