Focus On Contemporary Australian Art
This recent survey exhibition from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) is the fourth in the series addressing Australian art of the present. Each with a different curatorial slant, these shows are shaping up to be a fascinating compendium of diverse artistic practices and modus operandi. ‘Making it New’ was premised on Ezra Pound’s pronouncement of how the past informs the present and future in a pendulum-like motion. Accordingly, curator Glenn Barkley has achieved a refreshingly ‘unlikely’ grouping of eighteen practitioners of varying ages and career stages, from the venerable Ken Whisson to X Generation’s Archie Moore (neither of whom would ever have expected to be exhibited together), and diverse media from Tom Moore’s Bosch-like glass works to Alison Alder’s political screenprints. While the genre mixing is not particularly remarkable, what is destabilising and edgy is the refusal in most cases not to corral the work by a particular artist to one designated space or to limit the reading of their work to a strict thematic.
The labyrinthine feeling of the show is compounded by the use of all available space on level three of the museum and the fortuitous over-lap of the concurrent ‘Primavera’ exhibition of emerging artists. For instance, from that show Ross Manning’s incongruous constructions and sublime prismatic reflections lead the way directly to the work of Neil Taylor (who is almost twice Manning’s age) upstairs. Taylor’s obsessive handmade wire constructions replicate the character of his Melbourne studio with its walls festooned with small geometric shapes, Calder-like figures, entwining nets, coupling shapes like two hammers bound with wire, and so forth. The laboratory feel of this exhibition extends to the deliberately wonky drawing machine for making