ABC Unleashed: Whip it Good!

As the Spring Racing Carnival begins in earnest this weekend, Michael Hutak says new rules restricting how jockey's whip their horses are causing controversy.

Outside Melbourne Cup time, Australia's multi-billion dollar horse racing industry usually attracts the attention of the wider general public for all the wrong reasons: betting scams, race fixing, money laundering, "colourful" racing identities, horse doping and claims of animal cruelty are the typical narratives.
However, 2009 has been a year for rougher-than-usual hand-wringing for racing's bosses, faced with a public outcry over horse fatalities in jumps racing, the disturbing re-emergence of positive swabs for performance-enhancing drugs, cyber-attacks from the Russian mafia on Australia's booming online betting shops, and, taking centre stage at the moment, sweeping changes to the rules regarding the use of the whip in races.

‘Reality’ bites at the La Budget Biennale

Displays of unbridled wealth are tipped to give way to retro recession chic at this year's Venice Biennale, the world's oldest, most-venerated annual contemporary art event. Held this year in the shadow of the global financial crisis, the international art market, a luxury market, is set to be reminded that collecting art is mostly discretionary. Michael Hutak reports.

Like last year’s return to minimalism on the catwalks, this year’s 53rd International Art Exhibition will reflect global belt-tightening with a back-to-reality motif from Swedish curator, Daniel Birnbaum. "Making Worlds," says Birnbaum, will emphasize process and materials and will be "closer to the process of production and the venues of creation and training -- the studio, the laboratory -- than traditional museum-style exhibitions”.
Accordingly, we can expect a more muted stanza in 2009 when the four-day preview or 'vernissage' kicks off on June 4. Displays of unbridled wealth are tipped to give way to a revival of recession chic, and the corporate celebrations aboard the flotilla of luxury yachts, in six-hundred year old palazzi, and at swank already booked out hotels like the Cipriani, or just about any along the Grand Canal or the Lido, will be careful this year to avoid any association with the holders of so-called toxic assets.

Video surge drives social networking

As we hurtle headlong through the cultural and technological revolution that is ushering in our digital age, we find video is touching the lives of more people than ever before: on screens and monitors, through cameras and phones, at home and at play, in business and public administration. Nowhere is video more ubiquitous today than on the internet and it is incredible to consider that YouTube was launched barely three years ago. With 36 percent of US Internet users downloading video streaming online by the end of 2006, up from 28 percent at the end of 2005, online video has replaced music as the key driver of growth in digital media, and social networking is fast emerging as the "dominant online behavior", according researcher Ipsos. By last June, online traffic using web browsers overtook file-sharing peer-to-peer networks for the first time:

"Chalk it up to YouTube and other Internet video sharing sites. The surge in HTTP traffic is largely a surge in the use of streaming media, mostly video... YouTube alone has grown so big that it now accounts for 20 percent of all HTTP traffic, or more than half of all HTTP streaming video."

From an advocacy, publicity and marketing perspective, the viral video has opened a vital new channel for organisations to reach a younger, ever-more eclectic public.

ABC Unleashed: Race Invaders

Michael Hutak writes about our responses to the globalisation of that distinctively Australian event, the Melbourne Cup...

Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal and spontaneous, not perfunctory. I can call to mind no specialised annual day in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation, and preparation, and anticipation and jubilation. No day save this one.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

When Mark Twain attended the Cup in 1895, Melbourne's population was barely a million and yet 10 per cent of the colony's population turned up that day to witness the event, a remarkable turnout. With Melbourne's population today roughly 3.5m, the Cup is only now again approaching the sort of mass appeal it enjoyed at the turn of the 20th century.

ABC Unleashed: The Meltdown Cup

When John Howard dedicated his government to transforming Australia into the world's greatest share-owning democracy, the sly fox was tapping into that kink in the national identity that we love to gamble. That the nation "stops" for the Melbourne Cup is often cited as key evidence in this claim. But if the share market maintains its current trajectory, Cup Day may roll around to find a nation already dead in its tracks.

Russian Pavilion, Venice Vernissage

Grand Tour: stop, revive, survive

This Northern summer offers an once-in-a-decade opportunity for collectors to sample the latest trends in international contemporary market. Michael Hutak previews a blockbuster European season.

It swings round every ten years, the "harmonic convergence of super exhibitions", according to Artnet, that has signposted the phenomenal growth of the international market since the 1970s. 2007 will see the big four of contemporary events -- the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, documenta XII and the Münster Sculpture Project -- all open within a couple of weeks in June. This fortunate freak of scheduling delivers Basel, the Biennale, documenta, held once every five years, and Münster, held every ten years since 1977, to all strata of the international art milieu: artists, curators, gallerists, critics, consultants, bureaucrats, Museums, foundations, dealers, publishers. Oh, and collectors.

Turner Prized

Michael Hutak profiles Australian critic and curator Jonathan Turner.

While the international success of Australian artists has become commonplace, it's much rarer to encounter a writer/curator making their mark in the rarefied circles of the international contemporary art scene. Which is what makes Sydney-born's Jonathan Turner Continental presence so noteworthy. Turner, working out of Rome and Amsterdam, has since the early 1980s curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the U.S., Thailand, Macau, Australia, New Zealand. He recently won the prestigious Premio A.B.O., awarded annually to the most influential critic/curator in Italian contemporary art and beyond. Previous recipients have included Rome's current Mayor Walter Veltroni, artists Joseph Kosuth and Enzo Cucchi, English collector Alex Sainsbury, and Danilo Eccher, director of Rome's Museum of Contemporary Art.

d/Archive: Michael Hutak

Archive of super 8 films courtesy d/lux/media/arts.

Quai to the Kingdom

TEARS flowed freely at last week’s press preview of the landmark Aboriginal art commission at the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum in the heart of Paris dedicated to non-western art. Surrounded by the media and basking under the artwork that has colonised the ceiling of one wing of the complex, East Arnhem Land artist Gulumbu Yunupingu broke down as she contemplated the moment. “I can’t believe I am here in Paris, underneath this, my gift to you. My painting brings us together and brings us healing; I am proud that you people here in Paris recognise my painting ... We standing here together. We are standing here strong.”

It was a cathartic moment at the end of a four-year journey that began when French President Jacques Chirac personally petitioned Prime Minister John Howard to join in his pet project on the Seine: a museum, a paean to the diversity and creativity of the world’s people, a project that could not be complete, implored Chirac, without a cultural contribution from Australia’s first people.

Dead Aphorism [1991 - 2006]

Dead Aphorism [1991-2006]
Colour photocopy on foamcore.
Exhibited at "Metaphysical TV [still]", May 2006, Loose Projects, Sydney

Metaphysical TV [still]

"Metaphysical TV" was the name of a group of film makers working in
Super 8 in the 1980s who generated their content by shooting directly off the tv
screen. The work in this show will not be screen-based but will be
stills and prints relating to the original obsessions of the group.

This show is also the first in a series of Loose Weeks at Loose
Projects.
---
May 24 to May 27, 2006. Opening Wednesday, May 24, 6pm.
Loose Projects, 2nd Floor, 168 Day Street, Sydney.

Death on a Wing

A flu pandemic that could strike without warning and kill millions is on its way.

With the world economy locked into open trade and globalisation, and security wracked by terrorism and fundamentalism, you could forgive the planet’s leaders for being distracted. It’s hard to conceive of anything so tumultuous that it could deliver us beyond the post-September 11 era of suicide bombers and chronic poverty, religious fanaticism and rampant militarism, of record profits and jaded celebrities, cosmetic surgery and low interest rates.
Nothing, except a global influenza pandemic. With the conditions ripe and the world overdue for another global outbreak, government and corporate decision-makers have been jolted in recent months to consider the consequences.

Venice Biennale: It's the thought that counts

The invisible, the maudlin, the magic at the 51st Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte - AKA the Venice Biennale.

“Ohhh! This is so contempory [sic], contempory, contempory.” So mocked the fake gallery attendants in a singsong that greeted art lovers who wandered into the German Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most prestigious contemporary art festival.

Employed by 29-year-old Berliner Tino Sehgal, the attendants were the artwork. Their catchy refrain would prove difficult to shake, as some 15,000 critics, curators and collectors – and more than a few stray movie and pop stars – hummed their way across the sinking city, devouring the latest the art world has to offer.

Market penetration

A LONG time ago, in a land far away, The Blob was one of my favourite movies. Apparently they're doing a remake. That's about all I can be bothered finding out about the remake of the The Blob at this stage.

If you want to know more go and look it up yourself. There are stacks of online resources where you can get all the information you could ever possibly want - and never possibly need - about The Blob and the remake of The Blob. All the goss, all the speculation, all the dross that's unfit to print, but that's so easy and painless to publish online.

And herein lies a problem. The web is awash with too much publicity for nothing worth promoting. 

Mona Hatoum: Exile from main street

Endoscopy, electricity and estrangement drive the thought-provoking art of Mona Hatoum.

"I don't know where this is going," interjects Mona Hatoum during an exclusive interview with The Bulletin last month. "Is this about me or is it about the work?" Well, when you're one of the most lionised figures in contemporary art, about to mount your first Australian show, and it's called Over My Dead Body, then it's got to be about both.

A survey of Hatoum's sculpture, performance and installation since 1992, the show was nabbed for Sydney by Museum of Contemporary Art director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, when she saw it at Berlin's prestigious Hamburger Kunsthalle lastyear. Hatoum will be in Sydney to oversee the show's installation and participate in public Q&A sessions.

"Much of my work gives a sense of uneasiness with the world," says the Beirut-born Palestinian, who has lived in Britain since 1975 when civil war broke out in Lebanon.

Art Market Notebook: Summer 2005

Chalk up another astounding performance for the Australian art market in 2004, begging the question, just how long can these good times roll?

The most transparent barometer of artworld economic activity remains the auction scene and 2004 continued the stellar growth that has marked the longest upward trend in the domestic market's history. In terms of total sales at auction, the market has been growing at around 10 per cent per annum, according to records kept by the Australian Art Sales Digest. At the time of writing, 2004 was on target to break the magic $100 million barrier in total sales at auction, meaning the secondary market has increased in volume five-fold since 1993 when turnover was just $19.4 million.

Where’s the money coming from? 

Deal Me In: Shaun Dennison

Christie’s entered the burgeoning fray of the indigenous art market in October with a 168-lot auction in Sydney. The man plotting the strategy for the venerable French firm is tyro auction specialist, Shaun Dennison. Melbourne-based Dennison, a management consultant by trade and an art collector by passion, has only been collecting himself since 1996 – the year Emily Kame Kngwarreye died. Christie’s new Modern Aboriginal art specialist, spoke to Michael Hutak at the Paris preview of the sale in September, then by email after the sale in October.

Michael Hutak: Can you remember the first artwork you bought?

Ricky Swallow: Wood for Thought

Australian sculptor Ricky Swallow, a mastercraftsman carving out a significant niche in the artworld, joins hallowed company with his appearance at the Venice Biennale, writes Michael Hutak.

TIME is running out for rising art star Ricky Swallow. The Venice Biennale is only eight months away and Australia's official representative is feeling the pinch. Two large blocks of jelutong, the Malay hardwood that this master sculptor favours, are still being chainsawed down to size by an assistant, not yet ready for Swallow's chisels and hammers to hone into an immaculate replica of the human skeleton that sits at their side, waiting patiently. Across the studio another curio, a bicycle courier's crash helmet overrun with snakes, is only just taking shape. The man himself is softly spoken, slight, and slightly harried.

"I believe you should only do one thing at a time," he tells The Bulletin on this grey London afternoon in his East End studio. "But right now my head is in three pieces instead of one. This one [the helmet and snakes] should have been finished by now. That one [the skeleton] needs to get started, and the other involves taxidermy and I still have to see a taxidermist next week." The time pressure and logistical demands of the Biennale are intense. "We can't afford to let things lapse into overtime - it's not like you can get an extension - and when things are sitting around half done, it can make me quite anxious."

Aboriginal art in Paris: In your dreaming

A select slice of Paris’s art collecting elite gathered at elegant rooms on Avenue Matignon earlier this month for auction house Christie’s first-ever exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art. Thirty or so works on preview had been selected especially to tempt European tastes, pulled from 168 lots to be auctioned in Sydney on October 12. Last week another tranche of dots-and-dreaming lots from the sale went on view at Christie’s New York.
The sale itself represents a shake-up in the entire sector. With only sporadic competition, the Aboriginal art auction market has been virtually the personal fiefdom of Sotheby’s aboriginal art specialist Tim Klingender for almost a decade. But this year five different companies are conducting sales of Aboriginal art, with the French-owned Christie’s expected to snare the biggest slice of market share from its arch international rival.