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Hany Armanious is no stranger to institutional acknowledgement. His inclusion in an extensive list of major exhibitions and biennales since the early 1990s (including Venice, Johannesburg, Sydney and last year’s Busan Biennale), indicates the credibility of his work, at least among an influential group of curators and critics. There has, however, been a surprising lack of critical consensus concerning the significance of his work. Before we consider Armanious’s recent quasi-retrospective at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA), it is worth briefly recalling some of the more noteworthy critical responses.
In the 1990s, most critics claimed Armanious as a leading proponent of ‘Grunge’, Sydney’s answer to the international trend towards ‘abjection’ in contemporary art and related tendencies in popular culture. Grunge art was characterised by the use of surface gesture and strategies of juxtaposition to engender meaning. It was a critique of art-as-institution, metaphorically giving ‘Art’ the finger by desecrating the White Cube with detritus and scum brought in from the world outside.
Although certain critics (for instance Jeff Gibson) pursued the idea of Grunge in a positive way, some viewed it as a wholly negative contribution to contemporary art. In 1998 John McDonald dismissed Armanious’s work as ‘little more than a series of gags’, and bemoaned that this ‘joker’ should be given such extensive institutional recognition. He remarked that his inclusion in the 1993 Venice Biennale Aperto had been as a ‘token Australian’ (with ‘the added advantage of having been born in Egypt’) in a year that had a ‘multicultural theme’. He added that Armanious’s selection for this ‘puerile and depressing’ exhibition was ‘chiefly for his obvious lack of aesthetic merit’.1 Benjamin Genocchio joined the critical fray when he... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline