Another One Just like the Other Ones –The Australian Art Review

You have to admire John McDonald  - every time he is brushed aside, he bobs upright, just like one of those jolly clowns, – with his paranoid view of the art world and his carefully tended list of art world enemies intact. It is a significant achievement to have created a new art magazine and web site but sadly as the first issue of Australian Art review shows John has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

McDonald learned, long ago, from his mentors the Little Peters – Peter Thompson and Peter Fuller - how to catch attention through controversy, mean spiteful tricks and the old perennial, self-righteous ingratitude.

There is plenty of this; his fulsome editorial begins with the traditional, ritual attack on Mike Parr, the artist at the top of his twenty-year-old hate list. I sometimes wonder if Parr once insensitively spurned John’s advances, how else to explain his perpetual carrying on, like a woman scorned.  No doubt we can look forward to detailed reports on Parr’s bad behaviour in every new issue - along the usual McDonald lines - Parr abuses Taxi Driver, Parr is Rude to his Hairdresser, Parr Fails to Pay his Milk Bill on Time, Parr complains about the Coffee at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Parr buys Critic a Drink.

For openers it was Parr upsets Female Journalist –(Feathers fly at Conference). Not content with his own malfeasance the McDeester, strictly on the QT, gave Margot, (it was she!) a free kick at Parr without any obvious editing or right of reply. Just to show how lazy and unprincipled McDonald can get, here is Mike Parr’s view of events. To get his story straight, all the venerable John needed to do was to ask the odd witness.  In common fairness he might even have asked Parr – just as I did

The title was "Political Art". There were 5 of us on the Forum with Margot Kingston the first speaker. She opened up by saying, "I don't know much about art but I have just attended the Prime Minister's service for the victims of the Bali Bombing". What followed was a shamelessly tabloid exhortation about "the face of the enemy" and the duty of the artist in this time of national catastrophe. I wasn't the first speaker on the panel to protest, but when I suggested that she was exploiting us all with blatant emotionalism, which I compared to tabloid excess, she suddenly stood up, kicked over her chair, screamed "you bloody lefty!" and stormed out of the room. The possibility of the Forum had been effectively sabotaged.

I find it extraordinary that John MacDonald, who wasn't there, and Margot Kingston herself, can go on about this because she shocked everyone that day. Her hysterical outburst and exit was the culmination of protests from the panel. My objections added to others simply tipped the balance. Her lack of shame about her behaviour and her attempt to exploit the incident further, aided and abetted by the unprincipled John MacDonald, is frankly disgusting. Her attempt then to emotionally grandstand on the basis of Bali and her aggrieved feelings now only add to the dismal blindness of her behaviour, which continues.

Ho Hum! and Hum again! Is this spat the most interesting, most consequential thing, that’s happened in the art world this quarter?  I’ll wager its not!  But even if it were McDonald has made damn sure that the actual event  -a conference about the possibility of art as a form of dissent has received no coverage at all in his mag. The issue of artistic dissent, indeed artistic scrutiny of contemporary experience has never been more urgent yet the Australian Art Review tells us nothing about the substance of debate at the conference.  What happened?  Did any one provide a convincing case for or against art as dissidence right now? - at this moment?  McDonald wasted five columns on an issue that that merited maybe a paragraph and gave the reader no information about the event itself.

His other ancient enemies also get a thorough drubbing. McDonald repeatedly calumniates the hapless Brian Kennedy, without any hard facts or issues in justification. He always forgets that it was the gullible indeed generous, buffoon Kennedy who appointed him to the post of Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery. While there he exhibited a radical inability to deal with the Australian art scene on the ground, as it happens day to day, a lamentably thorough lack of scholarship and no inclination to do any. He capped this off with his laughable Federation Exhibition, which demonstrated that he also lacked the talent, ticker and tough mindedness to produce a clear synthetic presentation of the Australianness of Australian Art. For him, these cumulative failures must have been traumatic- like finding your parents de flagrante on the lounge sofa. He has repressed the lot – how could HE have been so completely wrong? .

His current arguments for his conservative viewpoint are identical with the shallow fragmentary hypotheses of that show. We can expect the Australian Art Review to show the same pointed posturing and hyper opinionated indifference to anything that lacks instant vitriol or mainstream mean mindedness.  It will simply become even more boring and repetitive with every issue. It will contribute little or nothing to assuage the desperate need for clearly articulated advocacy, criticism and argument about Australian art.  This is a tragedy because it could have been otherwise.

There is an undoubted conservative case for contemporary art, a Tory case as Peter Fuller used to say, but John McDonald is not the man to put it. He has neither the intellect nor the humane sympathy that it requires. In particular he has not an inkling of the ethical and communal necessity of art as an adventure, an experiment and our one permanent promise of freedom. McDonald seems to think that these ideas are left wing –more fool him. The organised left, even well founded left wing opinions died in the Arts aeons ago.  No less a person than Michael Lynch now administrator of London’s South Bank was shocked by the lack of response to the Iraq affair and all the rest, from the art community when he returned home at Christmas  - I would hardly describe Lynch as a lefty.  Nor would I describe John Howard as conservative, as McDonald does. Howard is a radical, one of the most communally divisive,  manipulative, socially destructive leaders we have ever had.

What we have now is not a pathetic lumpen struggle of left versus right, but a radical crisis of self-confidence, bad faith, complacency and corruption in the arts such as has been not seen for a century.  McDonald has contributed more than his fair share to this sad state of affairs but his blindness continues unabated.

He still affects to believe that events such as the presentation of Patricia Piccinini at the Venice Biennale are a scandalous lefty bureaucratic plot.  Oh No John! No! - The scandal is that she is a barely adequate artist peddling some out of date ideas to a group of people who think that supporting her is a good way to advance their own careers. As readers of 8 Ball know, there is serious disagreement about Piccinini, in East Perth at least.  In his editorial, McDonald calls for some sign of public dissent about her work but seems constitutionally unable to provide it himself or find someone who can perform the journalism and the analysis necessary to do it well.  It would have been a fantastic lead article.

Instead McDonald chose the dumber than dumb,  “Robert Klippel Australia’s Greatest Sculptor? “ – interviews with the walking dead of the art world. Well Gag me with a Spoon! Who gives a Fuck? Who is Australia’s Greatest Wanker?  I don’t want to pay $16.95 per issue for this opportunistic crap. I want a brilliant two thousand-word essay on just what it is about Klippel that recommends his work to me as a great adventure, a uniquely thrilling, original encounter – at least better than watching TV. I happen to believe that about Klippel but McDonald has offered me nothing to add to my experience.  Instead of a dialogue, he wants to impose a snide mean minded league table on art! Could it be that he has taken aim at the silly weak-minded creatures that invest on the art market? Given his past record the thought of McDonald as an arbiter of patronage turns my intestines inside out over my desk. 

Andy Warhol once remarked that he liked Suzi Gablik’s criticism best because all she did was to write down the names of the people who went to the parties. The Australian Art Review has almost attained Warhol’s high standard.  There is no criticism at all, anywhere in the mag, just a lot of society column stuff and digital chat and, oh yes, horoscopes the requisite touch of fashionable frivolity. One could usually rely on Christopher Heathcote for a straight ahead critical analysis, but the kryptonite touch of McDonald has reduced him to just another deadly driveller.

I don’t care about the tittle tattle of the Melbourne art scene or the unanimous disapproval of an anonymous group of environmentalists but Heathcote occupies more than half his space with this unreliable guff before he mentions Sue Norrie, the artist whose work he purposes to discuss. I do care, passionately, about a detailed hands-on account of what our critic experienced right there in front of the work – but there is not one line of that, just more junk journalism and the ritual charge that some people felt that Norrie was glamourising her subject – pollution. So What! In a Pig’s Valise! I detest Norrie’s sloppy over hyped work but I would like to have some good new reasons as to why I am right or indeed wrong about her.

As for The Australian Art Review, you would do better in any art school coffee bar. And you would save the $16,05, which is enough to pay for coffee for a week.   Plus the mag is really ugly I have rarely seen such bad design  - not the kind of thing to leave lying around your studio – the neighbours might talk!