Artsing about

Six exhibitions and one cabaret show in five days - it must be festival time!

The 20th annual Midsumma Festival hasn't even officially kicked off yet, and already things are hotting up. Admittedly two of the exhibitions I saw on Sunday had nothing to do with Midsumma, but still...

Thanks to the social joys of Facebook, on Sunday I trouped off to the NGV Ian Potter Centre with a fine group of folk to catch the final day of the Gordon Bennett exhibition. A major retrospective of this important Australian artist's career, it was a dazzling exploration of his themes of appropriation, identity and history over the three decades of his career. Some of Bennett's work I'd seen before, such as The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, as it's part of the NGV's permanent collection; but much of the work, such as his Notes to Basquiat paintings were new to me. Fascinating stuff; particularly his most recent, minimal work, which displays remarkable vigour within its non-representational lines.

Thence it was off to the Arts Centre, and the Nick Cave exhibition (on until April 6), which was extremely well attended; the majority of viewers being under 30, so far as I could tell, so the Arts Centre must be very happy with the demographic it's attracting to the show. While the exhibition's degree of devotion, almost worship of Cave was a little off-putting, certainly the assemblage of ephemera, diaries, scribbled lyrics and explanatory notes and interview snippets from Cave himself was fascinating in the extreme. An accessible, quirky and exhaustively detailed look at the life and career of Melbourne's gaunt grandfather of goth.

On Wednesday I attended the launch of Queer City, Midsumma's CBD-based visual arts program, a conga-line of viewers traipsing from 45 Downstairs to the City Library, the Majorca Building's display cases, and thence to Loop.

The work at 45 Downstairs left me cold. David Lehmann's detailed bead works, while intricate, struck me as little more than decorative fetishism that failed to explore the subject of masculinity, and its commodified delivery via the internet, in any depth. His premise reads well on paper, but felt shallow. Equally empty was a series of works by T.J. Bateson; drab tonal pieces allegedly evoking nature, but for me at least, saying nothing at all. The most successful of the three artists showing at 45 was Tim Craker, but even then his piece, Mixed Marriage, left me unfulfilled; as if the work, a net of plastic cutlery and chopsticks and a visual meditation upon cultural difference, was a work in progress or an idea that had yet to be fleshed out.

Sunsets, Troy-Anthony Baylis' work at the City Library, was more complex in its execution; warm woolen works with an almost painterly texture, making me think he's definitely an artist to keep an eye on; while Glass Wing, a video work by young queers from the YAK project (a social support group for same-sex attracted youth in the CBD), was more than competent in its juxtaposition of the personal and the emotional with the impersonal nature of the landscape in which our relationships are born.

A program glitch meant that the Degraves Street subway display cases run by the Platform Artists Group were unavailable; so after a quick inspection of the cabinets they operate in the Majorca Building, I headed home, rather underwhelmed, to prepare for Thursday morning's radio show. I suspect there are much stronger works in Midsumma's visual arts program this year; I just have to find them.

Certainly Chaos and Revelry, an exhibition at Brunswick's Counihan Gallery, raised the bar for Midsumma art; if you like the neo-Baroque and camp, that is. I dropped in to last night's opening for half an hour; finding some of the works deeply satisfying (Ex De Medici's piece for instance; and a video work by Alex Martinis Roe) while other works, such as William Eicholtz's deliberately kitsch sculputures, weren't to my taste at all.

Finally, I ended this week's art diet with the opening night last night of Vaudeville X at the Arts Centre Black Box.

This barbed and clever cabaret takes aim at the foibles of the middle class; from snobbery to social welfare to the vapidity of backpackers and society's thinly veiled contempt for the poor; but as much as I occasionally shrieked with mirth during the show last night, something about it didn't quite gel. I'm not sure if it was the venue - the Arts Centre Black Box is an appallingly lifeless space, lacking good acoustics and atmosphere - or the jaded opening night crowd, who really didn't seem to be as engaged as they could have been; or perhaps it was simply the case that, being three years old now, Vaudeville X simply doesn't resonate as once it could. That said, while I found it weaker than Intimate Apparel, Michael Dalley's latest show, and one of my personal highlights at last year's Melbourne Fringe; it was still extremely entertaining, with predominantly strong performances only occasionally weakened by the odd spot of lacklustre sound.

Michael Dalley and High Performance Company in Vaudeville X @ the Arts Centre Black Box, until February 2. Details at www.theartscentre.com.au or www.midsumma.org.au