Though I have judged my fair share, I have never liked art competitions. They invite laziness and lack of self confidence in our generous, but unsophisticated bourgeois, who, after all, buy most art in WA. Competitions encourage the belief that any old “expert” views are better than one’s own experience. They suggest, to the gullible and anxious, dishonestly in my view, that art is just another sport, empty of any original significance, with artists as mere winners and losers. In most art competitions, judges are required to compare apples to elephants as if they were the same species and, inevitably, end up simply deciding which they like best. I tend to like elephants- they’re more fun.

Moreover, through the incredible financial leverage competitions exert they deliver the community of artists into the hands of our home, not too well qualified or at all widely experienced, local “experts”, who often have their own partisan, provincial interests to maintain. The ‘right’ outcome can confirm their status as experts and their careers. The award of a few thousand dollars can establish an entirely illusory pecking order amongst our best professionals. The primary function of art competitions is to create a market for art, good or bad, through this pecking order. With a market comes discipline and silence no one wants to rock the boat - consider the immense irrational resistance to criticism of local heros like Robert Juniper or of indigenous art holus bolus.

Competitions then, far from encouraging adventurous or original work, reinforce the goals and aspirations of those who make a living on the periphery of the visual arts - usually a far better living than artists themselves can manage. They present an extreme, amplified, version of the inequities, banalities and hypocrisies of our art scene. Not surprisingly, they grow more popular everyday.

None of this is intended to suggest conspiracy or duplicity amongst those involved, who are usually there from the best of motives. Rather the very idea of a competition with a winner always corrupts art and artists by forcing them into single file. It compels enormous compromises, the acceptance of the dull and the worthy as the best we can do and a fragile paranoiac anxiety not to be found with the “wrong” kind of taste. Everyone acts over enthusiastic, no-one wants to be first to question the cause. Sooner or later though the naked emperor must be told.

Perhaps this was why the launch of the BankWest Inaugural Contemporary Art Prize at PICA felt transparent like a gathering of imperial cast offs, The assembled posse lacked enthusiasm, let alone joy, for what was around them. They had far less passion than a Telstra shareholders AGM, perhaps, because, like the Telstra board of directors, the stakeholders in WA culture inc want a nice quiet life and are prepared to bore us all to death to get it.

The least important thing about art competitions is the winner. In this case it was Untitled Painting, a rather pedantic exercise in post sixties hard edge decoration by Trevor Vickers. It looks like a set of cream double doors with over large circular handles in dark red, like the waiters’ entry in restaurant kitchens. Each door is neatly outlined with strip of the same dark red. If you’ve seen it before, and most of us have, this stuff is lean, mean and tricky but ultimately, expensively boring. The word minimal is often used to tag Vickers work for naive consumers. Minimalism was once a serious game of artmaking. Vickers work completely lacks the critical edge of the great minimalists - Stella, Judd and so on.

To nominate another winner, to play the competition game by their rules as if it mattered, would be simply to help WA culture inc stay in business. It is more useful to compare Vickers’ work with the winner of the other big ticket show in town the City of Perth Art Award.Tony Windberg’s Visitors, stands, apparently, at the opposite pole of taste and style from Vickers piece. It is a well worked piece of graphic photo realism, like three overblown kodak prints joined together.

Yet Windberg and Vickers have much in common. Windberg’s banal, sickly technique stands at the same distance from the great photo realists - Close, Estes and co as Vickers intellectual banality does from the great minimalists. A close look at the jeans of the man in the middle of Visitors show how little Windberg cares for the optical and material irritations of specific forms and texture. The work as a whole exudes the mind numbing dullness of an out of date tourist brochure.

Surprisingly the works of Vickers and Windberg function as winners in an identical manner. They are both shells without substance, competent pastiches of some once powerful moment in art that has left vague traces in the WA school art syllabus but not much else. First and foremost they are acceptable performance outcomes and for that very reason they have nothing of interest to say and no truths to reveal. The judges justified their choices with purely performative rhetoric as if they were talking of second string racehorses. To repeat myself it doesn’t matter what wins an art competition in WA, so long as nothing really interesting or original happens. Competitions here are all about control. Like sheep who have gone astray we must all learn to baah baaah in the right order.

The hang of the Bankwest show tells the story. The large works in the main hall might have been exciting in 1970, even then they would have been a little en retard. Only Paul Uhlmann’s juxtaposition of grainy grey painterly gestures and a digital print of clouds in, A Fire That Does Not Burn and the treacly spots in Alex Spremberg’s, Whispers hint at an awareness that heroic painting might have long ago reached its use by date. In the back galleries Lisa Wolfgramm’s dark grey and blue #87 also suggests that something small but painterly and above all interesting can be rescued from the wreck of all this small time, small town ambition.

The most interesting work is crammed into the very back corner gallery where visitors may not see it. This is the salon of the half refused. where anything likely to cause optical or social friction has been banished. I found Angela Stewart’s oil paint and cibachrome , And Camille, difficult and disturbing but powerful enough to rip your eyelids off, well worth contemplating for while.

Beginning with a feminist account of Camille Claudel the hapless protege and mistress of Rodin Stewart produced an intense account of desire and despair in which the dilemmas and agonies of the body, erotic engagement and the creative imagination are worked through in terms of the tense dialectic of the mechanical and gestural image. This is the same dialectic that interests Uhlmann but Stewart has the courage to use it to get to the guts of the problem of being an artist, especially a woman artist, here, where WA culture inc collapses all representations into a self serving hall of mirrors.

Opposite Stewart’s work. Concetta Petrillo’s mannerist version of the last supper Il Cenacolo presents a transcription of photo portraits in oils of 13 players mainly important dealers and collectors in the Perth scene lined up as in Leonardo’s ubiquitous icon. All of them, ironically. are too busy to count as members of WA culture inc which makes the current situation even more puzzling. Petrillo’s conceit may tempt the viewer to ignore the delightful qualities of her painting especially visible in the figure of art dealer David Forrest on the extreme right.

Thomas Hoareau’s, The Future of Painting, (My 6PR Painting Part One) completes a trio of pieces in which the difficulties of an authentic painterly practice in Perth are worked through in various kinds of blocked or paradoxical figuration. A delightful portrait of Hoareau’s son Theo holding a paint brush terminates in a naked, luminous orange brush stroke, curved across the canvas. The right half shows Theo and his mum a year or two earlier. The difficulties of memory, images and a growing crisis in the very act of painting inform this remarkable work.

The City of Perth award poses similar problems about the value of painting and image making here. Gosia Wlodarczak’s use of digital prints as the basis for some complex gestural drawings of domestic interiors in Graffiti for Interior produces a sense of vision as a network of neurotic touches. Phillip Berry’s, James Street 2001 shows a busy street with kids and passersby in Berry’s familiar magical style in which every thing seems immersed in close soft edgeless light. David Lamb’s warm night cityscape Street Walker Barbie, shows how local imagery and identity is always contained corrupted by the word from elsewhere, in this case a barbie doll in a trendy pink dress. On the whole the City of Perth was the most depressing display. The artists seem to have somehow given up, surrendered to the inevitability of the mediocre the banal and the boring.This was just not their best work.

These dim, grim competitions show that a serious crisis is unfolding in local art. As the market tightens and institutional careers are entranched their products become ever more boring. Artists like Stewart or Uhlmann, concerned with the paradoxes and difficulties of painting and the image, in the WA context may well be working towards a more vital situation in which painting takes on renewed energy from tensions with local experience but we must look elsewhere for their exciting original work.