Opening the show with a crowd favourite, sass and bide provided monochrome looks, sequined panels, large scaled prints and elegant black velvets with crystal trimmings. This winter the now signature sass and bide cape will be a wardrobe staple for every fashion woman.

 In true Ellery style cap sleeves, accentuated hips were mixed between classic cool and evening cocktail. Arthur Galan created leather vixens with black fedoras capes and gold embellishments.

Christopher Esber  reinvented the black dress with his simple hem line and sculpted hips, the open pleating reveling a metallic underlay, beautiful in its simplicity and mix of classic style and modern edge.

The show continued on a sleek modern path, with the Harper’s BAZAAR teams take on sporty luxe. Karla Spetic  stood apart from the dark wools, leather, and oversized coats with pastel pink and sherbet orange, a playful sporty take on girly hemlines paired with white converse shoes. Bassike provided us with leather monochrome dresses and sporty caps, bold colours and soft silhouettes for the glammed up take on sporty dressing.

The runway was wrapped up in an abundance of capes both structured and draped, in leather, wool , metallic and fringed. Alongside monochrome tailoring they are set to be our wardrobe staple this winter. An idealistic cohesion between an assortment of designers, unified through the subtle effortlessness of L’Oréal Paris’ straight pinned hair, nude lips and smokey eye.

LMMF team

lmff.com.au

As visitor-participant in Tiravanja’s artwork, you are encouraged to engage and forge relationships in ways that are usually unthinkable in a gallery context. Here, you may interact with the artwork through your senses: you may touch, sit at the table, read the Thai newspaper, chat, taste, ingest. Indeed, relationships are paramount, lines are blurred, and you and your fellow gallery-goers become the artwork.

How? At around noon every Friday, Saturday and Sunday a member of staff serves a Thai lunch to four unsuspecting – and surely hungry – visitors to Level 3. As a facilitator, it certainly is tantalising for me too: collecting the ‘tiffin’ (a food box of stacked metal compartments) from the table in the gallery space, and replacing it with the Thai newspaper, my stomach begins to whine. With tiffin in hand, I then board the tram and make my way up to Cookie, run up three levels of stairs (a nice symmetry with NGV!), and ask wonderful Chef Op to fill the tiffin with four different delicious dishes. Now loaded with steaming, aromatic, appetite whetting load (how hungry I am), I retrace my steps to the Gallery and lay the table for our guests. Yes, how nice it is to encourage visitors to ‘do’ art!

Why not join us for some delicious Thai food next weekend?  Not only will you get to satiate your third-floor-hunger as part of your Gallery visit, dining (amazingly) as part of and amongst works of contemporary art, but you may even make a friend in one of your fellow participants. What could be more satisfying than sharing an art experience over a good meal – with good company?

It’s therefore difficult to faithfully reproduce Wall’s highly meticulous tableaux on paper. As a souvenir of the current exhibition at NGV Australia, however, Jeff Wall Photographs does this well. Across nearly ninety pages, the book gives a generous and stylish overview of the Canadian artist’s first major retrospective in the Southern Hemisphere.

Essays by Gary Dufour, Chief Curator, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator, Photography, NGV and New Zealand academic Mark Bolland provide thoughtful reflections on Wall’s life and work. Of course, it is essential to see the works in situ to fully appreciate their scale and quality. Wall’s most famous photograph, The Destroyed Room (1978) which opens the exhibition, literally glows, inviting closer inspection of its intensely detailed composition. The vast digital montage A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai) (1993) and the deep black tones of Night (2001) do the same.

Thomas Demand began to make films around 1999.  Often showing ‘familiar’ subjects; falling rain, the perpetual motion of an escalator, or the relentless movement of a CCTV camera; his film work is quite mesmerising. The films are produced using stop-motion animation, an extraordinarily labour-intensive process of constructing moving images by photographing one frame at a time. This involves taking one shot, then slightly moving each element on the set and photographing the scene again, repeatedly. When projected in sequence these individual images contrive to create illusion of almost natural movement.

Pacific Sun is a short film that recreates the below footage captured on a CCTV camera. The film shows the moment in July 2008 when the P&O cruise ship Pacific Sun was hit by a giant swell that caused it to tip wildly from side to side. Over the one hundred seconds of the film we see an initially subtle movement that escalates to violent swaying as the full force of a huge wave hits the ship. Projected at a height of more than three metres, Pacific Sun is an immersive viewing experience comprising 2400 individual images. When projected on a loop it recreates a moment in time over and over again. The very ordinariness of the setting Demand depicts in this work – the ubiquitous bar on a cruise ship – is juxtaposed with the unexpected things that have occurred. He shows the moment when the ‘ordinary’ became ‘extraordinary’.

Michel Blazy (born Monaco 1966, lives and works in Paris) has a long history of working with organic materials and is interested in exploring the beauty of decay and the poetic possibilities of the passing of time as these materials are allowed to deteriorate over the course of an exhibition.

The artist’s repertoire to date has included a large mushroom-like form made entirely of soy noodles; sculptures constructed of squeezed-out orange halves; paintings of mashed potato and beetroot purée; pizza paintings and pasta sculptures, and a sculptural grotto on which mung beans sprouted and grew over the period of display. Opening up the controlled environment of the museum to the unpredictability of natural processes and effectively creating a multi-sensory and ever-changing experience as these perishable materials physically change, Blazy’s installations encourage audiences to question notions of repulsion and disgust and re-think our assumptions about aesthetic beauty.

Up for only the 24-hour period of White Night Melbourne, Final bouquet 2 is not to be missed. In some ways the wonder of these quick turn-around events is the fact that once over, you could almost be fooled into believing that the presence of a work such as this only existed in your imagination, as by the time the gallery re-opens at 10am on Sunday morning, every trace of its existence will be gone.

A dynamic form of calligraphy in space, the loops of magnetic tape perform a wild, irrational dance. Dramatic in scale and marvelous in motion, Double O conjures the awesome energy of elemental forces from the most humble of means.

Born in 1969 in Plunge, Lithuania, Žilvinas Kempinas lives and works in New York, and represented Lithuania at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. A past recipient of the Calder Prize, his work has affinities with Alexander Calder’s mobiles and wire frame drawings.

Double O was recently acquired by the NGV, and introduces a decidedly kinetic, optical and phenomenological presence into the collection. Expanding traditions of minimal and abstract sculpture, Kempinas’ simple yet ingenious installation animates the gallery with the visual dynamics of drawing in space and the sonic register of an industrial breeze.

Žilvinas KEMPINAS
Lithuanian 1969–, worked in United States 2002–
Double O 2008
video tape, fans, ed. 6/6
(a-d) 375.5 x 358.0 x 251.5 (variable) (installation)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Loti & Victor Smorgon Fund, 2012
© Žilvinas Kempinas/LATGA-A, Vilnius. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney

Max Delany
Senior Curator, Contemporary Art

Demand’s early studies, in the 1980s and early 90s, were in sculpture and he built his constructions out of paper and cardboard. At this time, photography was simply the tool the artist used to document his sculptural work. Around 1993, however, an important shift occurred in Demand’s practice. His meticulously constructed objects were no longer the final works. The photographs that had previously served as an efficient means of recording his ephemeral sculptures instead became Demand’s prime interest. From this point on his models existed, not to be seen as three-dimensional sculptures but, to be photographed in two-dimensions.

The act of building his sculptural subjects  is a bit like the architectural process and involves drawings, plans, engineering, even quantity surveying. A finished work may contain hundreds of thousands of hand-cut and assembled paper elements. Another of the more extraordinary things about his constructions is their scale. Demand extrapolates and estimates dimensions of the elements in his source images and then reconstructs them at life-size. The environs Demand builds have an amazing fidelity.

In the process of making his photographs, Demand literally inhabits the structures he builds, walking in and around them. He does so not only to find the right position to photograph from, but also to establish a relationship with a place. Demand describes this act as unsettling, saying, ‘When I walk around them I feel a strange sense of destabilisation. You transpose yourself to a time and place in which you could never be’. The scale of his models enables him to physically relate to them as if to the original object or scene – a model bath is big enough to sit in and a forest clearing is large enough to enter and walk through. Demand’s working process therefore enables him to have physical encounters with things, places and times that exist elsewhere or in the past.

Rae had been one of the ‘best and brightest’ of the National Gallery School students and in 1887 left Melbourne bound for Paris. It was a revolutionary time in French art and from the little we know of Rae it appears that she was open to many of these new influences. Rae exhibited a version of In the woods with the breakaway ‘New Salon’ during the 1890s, a great achievement at that time. Rae never returned to Australia and has become somewhat lost to Australian art.

If you have any information on the whereabouts of this painting please contact facebook@ngv.vic.gov.au.

Australian Impressionists in France opens at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia on 15 June. Tickets on sale now.

We are asking you to #showyourbackyard to win a prize pack worth almost $1,500 (rrp). Melbourne’s Lucy Feagins from The Design Files, Australia’s most popular design blog, has  helped pull together the prize and will be the judge of the winning entry.

The Prize

$500 gift voucher thanks to our friends at IKEA

Backyard spruce up with items selected by Lucy Feagins from The Design Files  worth $996.50 including:

• Basil Bangs umbrella & umbrella base
• Pop & Scott custom made swing
• Mister Moss hanging plant

How to enter:

1. Download the Instagram app for Android or iPhone
2. Take a snap of a backyard/backyard experience between 11 February and 5pm on 24 February 2013
3. Edit your photo using the Instagram process
4. Upload the photo using the hashtag #showyourbackyard (privacy settings must be set to ‘public’ for us to retrieve your photo)

The fine print:

1. Competition opens Monday 11 February 2013 and closes at 5pm EST Sunday 24 February 2013.
2. Limit of three entries (photo posts) per profile/person
3. Entrants must be Melbourne residents (sorry folks!)
4. The winner will be determined by Lucy Feagins of The Design Files on 27 February 2013
5. The winner will be notified via Instagram via a comment by @ngv_melbourne on their winning image

Please read the full terms and conditions here.

He was quite specific that the secondary walls had to be full height to create a sense of beautiful rooms rather than a space that has been partitioned.  Once this was done he began work on the layout of the show. He carefully planned the sequence in which you would encounter each work, setting up an interesting play between the works.  How we read these is an entirely individual experience.  Recently someone said to me that they thought the placement of Lichtung/Clearing next to Paneel/Pegboard was an interesting comment on forest clearing and the devastating impact that pulp mills can have on the environment. Until then I had never seen those works in that way.

In conversation during the installation, Thomas explained that he was not interested in putting together an exhibition that then toured around the world.  The usual practice of curating an exhibition and then ‘fitting’ it into different exhibition spaces in a number of venues holds little interest for him.  So each time you see a Thomas Demand exhibition it has been curated, designed and installed for that particular space.

This is perhaps most obvious when you enter the rooms where the films are showing. From the brightly lit first room you can see through the door way into a darkened room lined

with floor to ceiling curtains, but not really. What you see is a darkened room hung with wallpaper that the artist made to look like the kind of sweeping curtains that you might find in a cinema or theatre.  It’s theatrical and spectacular but once you enter this space the real treat is Demands films.

Hear NGV Curators talk about Thomas Demand and his work here.

Watch the In Conversation with Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand here.

RL: Firstly, can you tell us how you and Graeme Murphy worked together on Romeo & Juliet?

AI: Graeme was interested in taking Romeo & Juliet into a different light, rather than  expressing the classic element only. This meant we could tweak it in a way that was more relevant to modern day. So that’s how it started and we worked in this way.

I was visiting Melbourne quite frequently because I felt it was best for me to actually be at the wardrobe department rather than working in Sydney. The Australian Ballet has an amazing facility and wardrobe team so it was crazy not to use this. Graeme was working with the dancers upstairs in a rehearsal room and I was in the wardrobe department downstairs. So I remember going back and forth showing him what we had done.

RL: You would kind of cross fertilize?

AI: Yes, it gave me great direction. I had a better understanding of what sort of movement was involved, and an understanding of the feeling in the scene and the sort of emotion that the character was expressing. And then sure, we worked vice-versa. Especially in the mornings before he started working with the dancers, Graeme came to see what we had done. It was great to hear from him from time to time. He would say, “Oh I feel very inspired by seeing all this”. It was also great to see that he also incorporated costume into the movement he created.

RL: So your designs were actually inspiring him?

AI: Some parts of it, yes. There is one scene for example where Romeo & Juliet get married in the temple and there was a particular dress that we provided. Graeme worked on the movement with dancers utilising the shape of the dress. It’s very fluid.  

RL: One of the costumes that we have in the NGV’s Ballet & Fashion exhibition is for the character of Lady Capulet from the Ice Palace scene. I love the costume. There are four layers in the skirt and they’re all quite different. Of course it’s very difficult for the exhibition visitor to see all those layers but when you look at the footage you see how it all works, it works beautifully. In terms of those layers, how did you know how it was all going to work with the dance?

AI: I saw the movement of Lady Capulet’s character and I thought it was important to show off the under layers of her dress. It appeared when she danced with Lord Capulet. She was turning around and the movement was quite strong and so I thought I might add something a little bit unexpected. That’s why I used metallic fabric and I think it showed off quite nicely.

RL: Was there anything from your experience on working with Romeo & Juliet that you brought into your own collections afterwards?

AI: Yes, I was so absorbed by Romeo & Juliet for 12 months so when I was designing my own collection I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had applied a particular colour palette to both families, Capulet and Montague. One was cold, one was hot and I used a similar concept for my own collection. But not necessarily shape or the way it was made. It was just the concept of the colour. The colour palette and my own collection were very in sync.

Best known for his poignant and evocative depictions of animals ROA’s work is typically found on the walls of abandoned buildings and features in major cities across the world. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential artists working in this genre.

I first became aware of ROA’s distinctive work when I discovered a wall he had painted in Kreuzberg, Berlin, and since then have followed his practice. While ROA was in Melbourne for a small solo exhibition at Backwoods Gallery late last year I made a point of catching up with him and, on the NGV’s behalf, invited him to undertake the commission.

ROA has a genuine interest in the welfare of animals and his work typically expresses the plight of the fauna local to the sites of his murals. While in Australia he spent a good deal of time at Melbourne’s Healesville Sanctuary where he talked with the keepers and vets about some of our more vulnerable indigenous wildlife.

ROA completed Trapped platypus in a five hour session on the night of 5 December 2012.

When taking a masthead developed by Graphic Design into the gallery space, scale, materiality and colour are critical. The title wall signals a shift from public space to art space and visually introduces a dialogue with the rest of the gallery. Emphasis can be placed on connections in the narrative of content through design, reinforcing themes of the exhibition. The Jeff Wall title wall employed the established masthead and referenced a dark red colour prominent in the first work seen in the exhibition – Destroyed Room. This image is also used on the cover of the publication where a dark maroon was used for the masthead, so dark red tones emerged as a logical palette.

Adjacent to this work in the gallery is Wall’s Double Self-Portrait, 1979. Along with ideas embedded in the exhibition of how we look at and appreciate beauty, are notions of reflection, perspective and identity. Thus materials that might reflect or refract interior views or the self in the gallery space were investigated. Ultimately the design developed into a masthead of raised red mirror letters. A laser cut substrate was painted the same shade as the wall to provide depth, the laser cut red mirror acrylic was then mounted to this and produced at a scale of around 2 metres wide, a size determined to work best spatially and ensure visibility. The position of this title-wall means that the art is the first introduction to the exhibition; the exhibition is then formally introduced through the text of the title wall. On closer inspection, this title wall reflects that first artwork, the wider gallery interior and eventually the very person experiencing it.

I suggest that you go and buy it so your cat can be up-to-date when discussing important cat matters. Or give it to someone for Christmas so their cats also do not feel left out. Go on, off you go, hurry up. Food for the cat’s mind is almost as important as tuna in their bowl.

Can you tell us briefly about your background?

I’m a Kiwi who crossed the Tasman more than twenty years ago to study graphic design in Melbourne. My love of books cultivated an interest in book design, and that has been my primary focus over the last ten years.

How did your design inspiration for the gift book series come about?

The fact that the books were intended to be gifts immediately sparked the idea of precious objects, wrapped up in beautiful gift paper. On a subliminal level, I heard the dreamy tones of Sarah Vaughan singing ‘My Favourite Things’: brown paper packages tied up with string. It all seemed to reinforce the concept of the book design looking like a gift, complete with a gift tag (printed on the cover to contain the title) and wrapping paper folded cleverly to form the book jacket.

Can you tell us about the process of designing the jacket (which impressively folds out to become gift-wrapping paper)? 

Determining the folds of the jacket took a long time. It was imperative that the artist’s work was cropped perfectly when folded and that the subtitle was positioned centrally on the cover. I created many mini mock-ups in working this out. I find that nothing beats a physical mock-up to determine how to layout the artwork; in this case, the challenge was to ensure the jacket folded up correctly!

Was there anything unique about designing with reproductions of art?

There were definitely unique boundaries to work within. It was paramount that the design respected the work of art. My initial idea was to create a pattern for the gift-paper-jacket by rotating and repeating the works of art – perhaps a natural inclination for a designer, but not so respectful of the works. Placing a work upside down was completely out of the question. In the end, the design was resolved by making sure that each work of art appeared in its entirety on the unfolded jacket.

I know you’re not meant to say so, but do you have a favourite between Curious Cats, Dashing Dogs and Flourishing Flowers?

It’s like children. Of course, if I was to have a favourite it would be Curious Cats. What can I say? I’m a cat person!

Curious Cats, Dashing Dogs and Flourishing Flowers are all available in the NGV Shop for $19.95 each.

KG: More than half of Indonesia’s 240 million citizens are under 29 years of age. Is this reflected in Yogyakarta’s contemporary art
scene?

EB: While there may not be a lot of government financial support, Yogyakarta has an amazingly energetic contemporary art scene that is driven by artists. They really have to, and do, make their own opportunities. One of the ways this is done is through collectives – pooling their resources and creating merchandise to fund bigger projects or to develop their work. Most artists are part of one collective or another – as a way of sharing ideas, skill sets and creating merchandise to fund bigger projects or to develop their work. Some of the most exciting collectives I saw or met were Ace House Collective, Simponi, Fight for Rice and Evil Candy Machine. The Insitut Sensi Indonesia (ISI) is a big presence in the city, and it seemed most of the artists I met whilst there had studied there.

KG: It strikes me that there is a strong sense of community between the contemporary artists in Yogyakarta. Was this your experience?

EB: Definitely! While I didn’t understand any of the Bahasa people spoke into their phones, I would hear ‘Edwina … NGV’ and suddenly Edwin Roseno would be organising for me to see an exhibition at Mes 56’s new gallery space, or to see HaHan’s latest inflatable sculptural piece because someone had heard he was doing a test. When I saw HaHan’s inflatable sculpture, he organised a friend of his who does his videography to come and meet me. Now Zul is interviewing Jompet and Eko in Yogyakarta for the interpretive material that will be incorporated into our exhibition. It was really great – very connected, very supportive and ultimately, incredibly generous. There is also a really strong connection between artists and curators from Melbourne and Yogyakarta. Lots of Melbourne artists and curators have done great residency programs there. Now we just need to find more ways and means to bring Indonesian artists and curators to Melbourne. I hope this exhibition at the NGV is a catalyst for doing further work together.

Embracing these avant-garde collaborations between classical art forms suggested a design honouring those qualities that make them so distinctive. Developing a concept reflecting the dynamism of performance in a static environment was a chief concern. The desire to somehow simultaneously present a close look at the detailed craftsmanship while suggesting movement was central to the design, as was the notion of theatrical staging. Each case was designed to highlight the individual works displayed within. Achieved primarily through contrasting colour and form, a cohesive design aesthetic across the exhibition offers a new platform to enjoy these diverse works together, as one representation of the brilliance contemporary fashion and ballet have to offer.
The most challenging aspects of designing this exhibition lay in the sourcing, design and production of mannequins to support the delicate and complicated costumes. Standard mannequins tend to be based on ‘model’ proportions. Given the small stature of ballet dancers and the completely different dimensions of the ‘real people’ used in the Netherlands productions, a number of the costumes didn’t fit the mannequins we have in our collection.

Because loaned artworks must be kept safe, we were unable to remove them from the gallery. This meant very detailed documentation and careful designing was critical in creating new, costume specific mannequins. In one case (for Viktor&Rolf’s costume for Giacconda Barbuto) we ended up borrowing a Kylie Minogue mannequin from the Arts Centre next door, she has great ‘ballet’ proportions!

After watching the ballet performances featured, the scenography of Robert Wilson emerged as a strong reference for design inspiration. The exhibition design developed into oversized silhouettes treated 2 dimensionally in the 3rd dimension, a bold 1980s colour palette and dramatic lighting.

In capturing the vibrant mise-en-scenè of a functioning set design for each case, playing with colour, light and particularly depth of field and framing devices, movement is suggested despite fixed parameters. The decision to suspend some costumes on clear torsos further encourages one to engage their imagination, conjuring the idea of motion and dance without relying on literal or physical manifestations of it. Christian Lacroix’s Can Can costumes visually hint at kinesis by a lift of the skirt to the mannequin’s hand. While suspended head-pieces allow the imagination to fill in the gaps, to imagine the dancer, the body and performance, and wander into a world where dynamism clashes with quiet intricate detail and transforms this merging of the art forms.

While many exhibitions draw from the NGV Collection, curators also rely on the generosity of lenders. Australian and international museums, galleries, libraries, universities, performing arts organisations and private and corporate collectors have all contributed short-term loans to NGV exhibitions over the years. Many inward loans come to us with catalogued information provided by the lender but sometimes I am asked to confirm a few details, and occasionally I get the opportunity to catalogue inward loan works in full.

About this time last year I was assigned as cataloguer to the recently opened exhibition, Ballet & Fashion. Due to a fundamental lack of skill I never attended ballet classes as a kid, however, a year 12 research assignment got me hooked on The Australian Ballet so I was delighted to become involved with an exhibition that helps celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. Equally, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the exhibition’s curator, Roger Leong, to catalogue several of the loans – admittedly in part because we got to visit The Australian Ballet’s costume department where they embroider, bead and sew all kinds of magic into being.

With costumes from productions like Romeo & Juliet, Swan Lake and Gâité Parisienne and designers like Akira, Valentino, Rei Kawakubo and Viktor&Rolf there is more than one ‘wow’ moment in this exhibition. My favourites turned out to be loans from the American Ballet Theatre Collection – costumes for C. to C. (Close to Chuck), designed by Ralph Rucci and the two Can Can costumes for Gâité Parisienne designed by Lacroix. These costumes were made in New York by costumier Barbara Matera and are amazing from the inside, out.

Ballet & Fashion is a joint project between The Australian Ballet and the NGV. The exhibition runs until 19 May 2013 and is located on Level 2 at NGV International.

I came across Meiro Koizumi’s My Voice Would Reach You in late 2010. I saw a link between the isolation of the main character of his work and the ideas around communication that I was thinking about. Koizumi has dealt with the subject of social alienation a number of times in his work and My Voice Would Reach You is a beautifully poignant articulation of this. Made in 2009, My Voice Would Reach You takes place over two parts – first we see a young man on the telephone set against the backdrop of a busy and populated Tokyo street – he is having a loving conversation with his mother, making plans, sharing memories and thoughts for the future. The second part of the work comes as a shock; we realise that the protagonist is not speaking to his mother but a call centre operator, who we hear politely trying to make sense of this one-sided conversation.

I found this work deeply moving – the sadness of the emotional rupture in the character’s life at the loss of his mother, his isolation and the depth of his yearning for this lost connection. Working alongside this is the pathos and sheer absurdity of his attempt to rediscover a lost connection with his mother, by conversing with a call centre operator. The comedy of this is irresistible, yet remains underscored by the poignancy of his feeling.

The performative strategies of this work, articulating isolation and loss, and emphasising communication and its pitfalls, made it a wonderful inclusion into the biennial program. I have been very pleased to work with NGV staff to present this work on the mezzanine level at NGV International, situated next to the Asian Galleries. It is my hope that NGV audiences will enjoy this work and perhaps be inspired to take the opportunity to visit other sites of the exhibition, including our key presenter RMIT Gallery on Swanston St.

Meiro Koizumi is based in Yokohama, Japan. He has an extensive exhibition history in Japan and also internationally in Amsterdam, Australia, UK, Seoul and China. He is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam and has an upcoming solo presentation at the Projects Series in MoMA, New York in January 2013.

Links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Lf0WANVPs

http://www.experimenta.org/exhibitions-projects/currentExhibitions/current-2.html

Highlights of volunteering at the NGV: riding a scissorlift, touring the subterranean corridor labyrinth, getting to wear a very official lanyard and meeting other people who are also a bit crazy for painting. Painting can be a very solitary pursuit, so painting in company is lovely. I like seeing the work that goes into exhibitions, and getting to just jump in and be involved with that mess was super. It might be the endless corridors or the automatic sliding walls, but it was a bit like being inducted as an undercover agent, breaking into a secret vault and systematically covering the walls in geometric pattern.

Generally, any painting practice is good painting practice. Only now I get to allude to the many paintings I currently have exhibiting at the NGV; they’re all olive green semicircles (see image to the right), but the point still stands, I have hundreds of them.

Due to its industrious habits the bee has come to symbolise hard work, diligence, industriousness and orderliness. Because it is also the producer of honey, the bee also symbolises sweetness and benevolence.

The bee had long been a symbol of the Christian Church and had been adopted by some saints (St Ambrose, for example, who likened the Church to a beehive) and was used in the seventeenth century by one of the leading Papal Dynasties in Rome, the Barberini family. For Christians those attributes of industriousness, diligence and good order were combined with the beneficence of the bees’ production of honey which symbolized both religious eloquence and the virtue and sweetness of God’s grace.

According to legend the bee never sleeps so it has also come to imply vigilance and zeal – both attributes Napoleon was happy to own. In seeking an appropriate emblem for himself, Napoleon looked to one of his great heroes and antecedents, the Emperor Charlemagne who had adopted the cicada as an emblematic device. Napoleon mistook its outline for that of the bee and, recognising the conventional symbolism associated with the bee found it suitable for his purposes.

Numerous versions of the bee were commissioned by Napoleon – from tiny sculptural representations, usually gilded and commonly attached to items such as snuff boxes, to the embroidered motifs on his coronation robe and printed or painted images on wallpaper.

Out of the chaos of the Revolution and the Terror, French society slowly started to collect itself. A subculture of aristocratic and fashionable young people established themselves around the “salons” held by these women of means, charm and education. They provided the setting for a society of shared political allegiances, cultivated conversation, parties, balls and amorous dalliances. They attended the theatre and drew attention to themselves in public by adopting a supposed simplicity of dress – or as one wit described it “undress”.

A group of these women became known as “Les Merveilleuses” – literally, the Marvellous or Wonderful. They cultivated garments based on the almost transparent, body-revealing garments of Greek and Roman sculpture and even the Roman hairstyles of tumbling curly hair. The boldest of these women, Madame Hamelin, whose portrait by Andrea Appiani is in the Napoleon exhibition, notoriously appeared in public virtually naked beneath the flimsiest of muslin dresses, sometimes bare-breasted. The young widow Rose de la Pagerie, the Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, was less extreme in her dress than her friend Madame Hamelin – although no less alluring.

Many of Les Merveilleuses were friends or in various ways connected with and either married to or attached to well-to-do and powerful men. Their male counterparts were known as Les Incroyables (the Incredibles), and were the dandies of their age, adopting extravagantly expensive and decadent forms of fashion, and notably dispensing with wigs.

Initially the wearing of simple Greek and Roman-like garments served to reinforce Revolutionary rejection of the excesses of the Ancien Régime, and nakedness in art signalled purity, however the sheer garments of Les Merveilleuses – their simplicity notwithstanding – were decidedly erotic.

It was first spotted by the colonizing British in 1797 and given the name Ornithorhyncus (combining the Greek words for bird and nose). But its existence baffled scientists for decades and it was widely believed that it must be a hoax. Sir Joseph Banks, the eminent British naturalist, doubted that such a creature could exist until he was sent a preserved specimen from New South Wales by Governor King.

But it was Banks who first delivered such a specimen to France in 1802 as a gift to fellow scientist and friend, Georges Cuvier at the Natural History Museum, and where Napoleon was fascinated enough to closely examine the specimen and join in discussions about the classification of the newly discovered mammal.

The Naturalist François Peron was the first Frenchman to study this “ultimate expression of the strangeness of Australia’s animals” while in Botany Bay during Baudin’s 1880-1804 expedition to Terres Australes. He ensured that one of the expedition’s artists, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, made accurate studies of this curious animal, which was warm-blooded, laid eggs, had digit claws, no teeth or mammae and only a single cloaca (opening) for both excretion and giving birth – the details of which are carefully recorded in his beautiful watercolour included in the Napoleon Exhibition.

Designed to be held in the hand, or housed in custom-made albums, cartes-de-visite are small, humble objects. Despite this they can reveal unique information about early photographic and cultural histories, personal histories, as well as histories of the fashions and hairdos of the day.  The term derives from the French for ‘calling cards’, and refers to albumen silver photographs adhered to a card measuring around 10×6 cm. Cartes-de-visite were hugely popular with the colonial population of Australia. The format and relative affordability meant that images could easily be posted back ‘home’, and helped to democratise the photographic process.  The upper and lower classes, famous and anonymous people were all now able to have their studio portrait taken – many for the first time.

This image was taken in the studio of S. Spurling, one of a long-line of photographic studios operated by members of the Spurling family in Tasmania from the 1850s until the 1940s. Stephen Spurling (1847-1924) specialised in studio portraits, where he experimented with flash photography and electrical lighting.  This is an interesting example of such studio work with a tightly composed composition that focuses our attention completely on the sitters.

Styles of dress, particularly in the more frequently changing women’s fashions, can assist in identifying a time period for photos such as these, which are usually undated. In this image, the woman’s dress and her hairstyle point to the first half of the 1870s. At this time dresses were typically cut with a separate bodice and skirt, with either a square neckline, or as here, in a V shape. A narrow upstanding collar, often with a frill, finished the neckline, and the bodice, sleeves and skirt were embellished with contrasting fabric or trims. The full skirts, having evolved from the crinoline of the previous decade, were supported by a bustle at the back. Another distinctive indicator of the era is the swept up hairstyle framed by coils of hair and a comb, which this young woman favours. At this time, dresses, including day dresses, were commonly made of silk taffeta or satin, a fabric we would consider today as luxurious. However it was still a number of decades before synthetic fabrics were developed and readily available.

One of the surprising things to consider when looking at these grey and brown, albumen silver photographs is that during the 1860s and 1870s, there was actually a preference for vibrantly coloured fabrics, spurred on by the discovery of aniline dyes. These synthetically produced dyes produced a range of, among others, bright greens, blues and mauves. Surviving dresses from the time attest to the popularity of these new-found colours.  See for example this ‘day dress’ by Bright & Hitchcocks of Geelong.

Menswear is somewhat harder to readily identify, as men’s fashions tended to evolve more slowly and changes were more subtle to read. In the 1870s men’s tailored suits comprised a coat or jacket, a waistcoat and trousers. Our man appears to be wearing a morning coat which typically had a cut-away or angled front and a double breasted waistcoat. Full bushy beards and moustaches were the fashion and the man’s unusually high coiffed hair has been carefully combed into place with the use of hair oil.

Although Stephen Spurling ran a photographic studio in Launceston from 1873 in St John Street, his Brisbane Street studio (which is recorded on the mount of this photograph) opened in 1878. This invites questions about the earlier style of the woman’s dress, and whether the photograph could have been taken at the first studio and printed later. Our research into Australian fashion of the later nineteenth century indicates that there was not usually a significant time lag in the adoption of current fashions.  As with many cartes-de-visite, more questions are raised than answered.

Laura Jocic (Assistant Curator, Australian Fashion and Textiles) and Maggie Finch (Assistant Curator, Photography)

Muslin is most typically an unbleached or white cloth, produced from finely combed cotton yarn. It originated in Northern India and first appeared in Europe in the 17^th century. Becoming increasingly available with the English occupation of India in the 18^th century, it found great popularity at the end of that century in France. Popular with British women in India, its open weave allowed the movement of air, and therefore was suitable for hot, dry climates. Muslin clothes were traded by ancient Greeks from the Indian port of Maisolos (or Maisala) and perhaps the name muslin originated from that place name. Marco Polo apparently praised the muslins available from India. The word muslin is also used colloquially. In the United Kingdom, many sheer cotton fabrics are termed ‘muslin’ and their uses are many; for instance, muslin is used for making various cheeses which require the milk solids to be separated from the whey.

Because the muslin trade was essentially cornered by the British, this delicate fabric had to be imported from England. This posed a serious problem for Napoleon – not only because he has closed French ports to English trade because of the hostilities between their countries (the Continental Blockade), but also because Napoleon was anxious to re-establish the textile industries in France following the Revolution. He was famously impatient with women around him who continued to wear muslin and was known to lose his temper with both Josephine and his step-daughter, Hortense, reportedly either tearing their fashionable dresses or spoiling them by dousing them with coffee and officially banning the wearing of muslin. His reasons were serious (though his temper must have been irksome) and connected with propping up France’s textile industry. He required formal dress to be worn at all times at court, thereby reintroducing a clientele for silks and velvet largely made in Lyon.

On another occasion, earlier in his career, Napoleon is recorded as damaging a lady’s dress for quite a different reason: he is known to have spilled a drink on the dress of one of his Officer’s wives while in Egypt as a seductive ruse to get her into a private room to undress her!

The application of digital imaging doesn’t change this equation. While clearly more sophisticated, the tools of the digital darkroom mostly resemble those of its analogue predecessor — much of what I do in my work relies on the earliest photographic processes of dodging and burning (lightening and darkening) images.

It is helpful for me to consider light in the musical terms which masters, like Adams, have laid out. Alfred Stieglitz, before him, used the comparison to give photographs the capacity for abstraction — a quality at odds with the indexical nature of photography, but one which music embodies. In relation to my own practice, this means that my ‘performances’ in the darkroom can, in search of expression, stray further from the score.

View Sam Shmith’s work and see how other artists explore light in  Light Works  at NGV International open until 16 Sep 2012

In 2008 a work called Toy elephant was required for the touring exhibition Gallery Ark. Our record for the work was incomplete at the time, so, one afternoon I took myself off to storage with my trusty tape measure and camera along with a worksheet and pencil to take down particulars.

I was expecting no more than a business as usual experience, however, the cleverly balanced manufacture and overwhelming charm of this piece left me smiling for hours.

Toy elephant was written into the NGV’s stockbook in July 1980. At the time of its acquisition little was known about it beyond the inscribed patent year and that it was ‘probably American’. Fortunately, serendipity was onside (and internet explorer online) when Toy elephant was re-catalogued twenty-eight years later.

A few moments of searching produced an identical piece offered for sale on a popular auction site. The vendor had owned their elephant since 1978 and the advertisement included a detailed description and several photographs. The inscription on their elephant matched our example and so it seemed likely that the two pieces were by the same maker. Further research confirmed that the Connecticut manufacturer Ives and Blakeslee were well known for their cast iron toys, including animals with moving parts. With a bit more sleuthing we were able to track down the company’s history and bring our record for this work up to date. Meanwhile the elephant offered for sale was sold and while its new owner is unknown, it’s nice to know that our splay footed, wobbly legged Toy elephant, with its dinky string tail and swivelling trunk, has at least one sibling out there somewhere.

You can see Toy elephant on display 31 March 2012 – 3 February 2013 in the Kids Space on the ground floor of NGV International as part of An Excellent Adventure; a dedicated kids exhibition designed to complement the themes of our more grown up Winter Masterpieces exhibition Napoleon: Revolution to Empire.

Links:

About: Toy elephant’s entry in Collection Online

Exhibition: An Excellent Adventure 31 March 2012 – 3 February 2013

Gallery: NGV International Kids Space

Exhibition: Napoleon: Revolution to Empire 2 June – 7 October 2012

Many ‘fully’ catalogued artworks are just one conservation treatment shy of full medium analysis, one census record short of a complete artist’s biography, one eureka moment away from a confirmed production date, title or attribution. While the task of cataloguing is a process of discovery, cataloguers aspire to know what’s what. We secretly like our art signed and dated and believe that the only good reference is a primary one. The term ‘mixed media’ makes us cry.

The Cataloguing Department records and verifies the physical and historical particulars of art in the NGV Collection in collaboration with curators, registrars and conservators. Our goal is to one day see each and every artwork fully documented and described and we aim to ensure that the terms of reference used are as consistent as possible.

Cataloguing takes patience, perseverance, attention to detail…, and it helps to be a bit of an art nerd. With one foot placed in collection management, another in research and a toe or two in art handling and conservation, cataloguers require a broad range of skills and often train as curators, archivists, conservators or artists before discovering that the path they tread leads to…, Cataloguing Land.

Although the NGV’s Cataloguing Department has little in common with a theme park, it does sometimes feel like another world. Our work is carried out behind the scenes, often in storage, sometimes in conservation labs or photography studios and occasionally in gallery spaces or private homes. The tools of the cataloguing trade are many and varied – they need to be. The NGV acquires a broad range of art – Australian, International, Ancient, Contemporary, 2-D, 3-D and digital.

We work with hefty bronze sculptures, delicate ochre paintings and intricate installations. We hold our breath as we lift fragile ceramics to check the base for inscriptions, we climb ladders and drill lids back onto storage crates. Our ‘useful box’ contains a variety of tape measures, set squares, torches, magnifying lenses and of course gloves. Of equal importance are our research tools. We utilise a number of traditional and online resources including books, catalogues and magazines, local and international archives, databases, indexes, auction records, and newspapers.

The information compiled by cataloguers is shared with you in a variety of ways. It makes its way on to display labels, appears in published exhibition checklists and image captions for media kits, brochures and even postcards of works in the collection and is also accessible online.

During my years as a cataloguer I have worked with a wonderful variety of artworks and through them I have learnt that there is a great deal to see at the NGV.

So beloved of this style of hat, Napoleon had around 170 made for him and he wore it until the day he died. He took four hats with him when he went into his final exile and one of these is still with him in his coffin in Paris but another can be seen in Napoleon: Revolution to Empire.

Josephine shared a similar background, coming from minor aristocracy from the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean and thus also speaking French with an accent.  Born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie, her family arranged a “good” marriage to a much older man, Alexandre, the Vicomte de Beauharnais, with whom she had two children. Because they were Royalists they were both imprisoned during the Terror. The Count was beheaded (Josephine narrowly escaped) leaving her a widow of some means but needing to make her own way in the world. A beautiful and vivacious woman, she quickly found a well-connected protector, whose mistress she became.  Able to mix in the cultivated circles of the “nouveaux riches”, she quickly became one of the ultra-chic, sexy and sought-after, cultured women known as les Merveilleuses (literally, the marvellous ones). At the centre of Salon life where people of consequence mixed and met, Josephine (6 years older and worldly-wise) clearly impressed the still unsophisticated young Officer, who, despite his rising fortunes in the army was still something of an outsider.

Rose de Pagerie, as she was then known, was anxious for the security of marriage – and already something of a financial burden on her protector who was evidently anxious to be free of her (it was he who arranged their introduction). She met Napoleon in September 1795, and he was soon in love with her, dazzled by her glamour, social confidence and charisma. Shortly after, in the first of hundreds of passionate love letters to her, he wrote:  ‘Your portrait and intoxicating party yesterday evening have left my senses no peace’. They married on March 9, 1796 – and thereafter she was known by the name he preferred to call her, Josephine.

Enter exhibition design.  In an attempt to visually unify the exhibition, design techniques are employed in simple ways.  Incorporating one colour (the bright orange from the Dulux Enviro range – Fiery Glow) and one logo from the catalogue cover, to media and advertising, to children’s labels and feature wall colours, this technique aims to establish the exhibition contextually.

Drawing on themes of the hand-made, a bright orange string line travels along the gallery perimeter.  Appearing as a hand-drawn line that travels throughout the exhibition, defining the various gallery spaces as all part of the one exhibition without relying on signage, and highlighting themes of individual craftsmanship and the personal narratives of the artists.  The logo on the title-wall is also made out of this string (common builders string bought from a hardware store) and provides a cohesion to the design of the exhibition.

Finally, in an attempt to engage one of our primary audience groups for this exhibition – students, both in person in the gallery and with our online content, a competition encouraging students to photograph themselves in the space was created.  The design for this involved graphic designer Connor Bryt who designed the logo and masthead for the exhibition, marketing who created the facebook page for it and exhibition design who designed the poster inside the gallery space on the title-wall and in fact, designed the entire title-wall with this specifically in mind.

For more photos of the exhibition space visit the Top Arts Hub

My most recent book purchase has been a first edition copy of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967). It was ex-library and irresistibly cheap. Published in 1967 by Cheshire Press, it has an incredible green, and somewhat psychedelic cover and wonderful 60s bubble typeface. It also uses a cut up image of the central figure of Botticelli’s Primavera 1482 which can be found in the Uffizi in Florence. (To the left of this there is also an image of a girl from what looks like an Australian Impressionist painting that I am struggling to identify!) Joan was of course the wife of our previous Director Daryl Lindsay, and the book was in part inspired by the William Ford painting At the Hanging Rock 1875 that is currently on display at NGV Australia.

I find myself reading Lindsay’s beautiful book because of my work on the upcoming Fred Williams exhibition. I’m very interested in the mythology associated with the Australian bush. It is fascinating how Australian people have related to the bush, its beauty and its threats, and how this pervades much of our cultural output.

Thanks to Williams, I also find the incredibly impressive volumes about this artist by past NGV Directors Patrick McCaughey and James Mollison, and exhibition curator Dr Deborah Hart weighing on my desk. I have the great pleasure of working closely with Deborah to bring the exhibition to Melbourne. As the eminence of his monographic authors implies, Williams is one of our most significant landscape artists, and his work can be found in the collections of the Tate in London, and the Met in New York, as well as all of Australia’s major galleries. He was also the first Australian artist to have a solo exhibition at MoMA, New York.

Williams stands out for me because he is one of the most technical and academic painters, yet he does not alienate his audience. You only need to see and experience his work, you don’t need to know about it in advance. This exhibition is certainly not to be missed, make sure you come along.