NICK Mitzevich, the new director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, has called the gallery's selection of work from the Charles Saatchi Gallery in London a "must-see" exhibition, but of course he would say that; readers will make up their own minds.
This is in fact a show that tells you a lot about what an adman thinks art is, and since the culture of advertising and media has become pervasive in contemporary consumer society it unfortunately corresponds to what a lot of ordinary people, too, have come to expect of art. And that, basically, is any kind of surprise, however epidermal, any little itch or tingle in the numbness brought on by the overload of media stimulus; anything that feels like a pulse of life, whether it comes in the form of curiosity, disgust or prurience. It is no surprise that an earlier but aborted exercise in self-promotion by this centre of art world marketing should have been called Sensation, for such is really what the Saatchi view of art boils down to.
But more of that presently. As one would expect of art sponsored by an advertising firm, the packaging is as significant as the contents. Those who were asked to the exhibition's opening are unlikely to forget the oversized, vinyl-padded invitations. Vulgar? Meta-vulgar? Neo-vulgar? You decide. The Art Gallery of South Australia itself is covered in red and white signage announcing "the Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide" as though the whole institution had been swallowed by this art world octopus.
As you enter the gallery, staff offer you a floor plan, except that it too is headed Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide. The waiters and waitresses in the cafe are wearing the same logo. When you get a ticket, a band is attached to your wrist, as if you are a patient in a hospital or a prisoner in a lunatic asylum. Saatchi has to brand you too as you enter his marketing web.
Equally or even more symbolic is the fact the rooms that normally display the older non-Australian parts of the collection, the ones that give the AGSA its distinctively friendly, warm and human feeling when you first enter, have been emptied to make way for Saatchi. Half of the gallery in effect has been hollowed out, making it feel like a lifeless shell. Does one really have to suck up to Saatchi quite so hard? If this is the first significant project of the new director, it does not bode well for the future.
So what does the art of an enormously rich adman look like? Mostly junk, of course, because it has to differentiate itself from the slick consumer products he spends the rest of his time promoting. The logic of consumer society reduces everything to the status of products distinguished according to the principles of market segmentation and price points. There are products for the mass consumer, ones for the middle class yet others for the rich.
Mass products are marketed to stress value for money. Luxury products are promoted to emphasise the quality and rarity of the primary materials employed and the expertise, craft and tradition that go into their making. Because art is considered as another category of consumer product, but one that exists on an even higher level than ordinary luxury products, it has to be differentiated from this category; and the obvious way to do that is to claim it has transcended skill and craft, flaunting the cheapness of its materials and a contempt for execution.
The logical sequence is easy to follow, but its premise is radically fallacious because art is not at all a consumer product; not, that is, something that we consume. The engagement with art is of an entirely different nature, more akin to giving than taking. There is a yielding and a self-abnegation in the experience of great art, as though we were lending it our own vitality to bring it to life; yet we come away feeling somehow that our own lives have been enhanced.
Not in the Saatchi show, however, which is full of plastic bags, old cardboard boxes, bits of polystyrene and other cheap materials, all meant to be reconfigured into objects that transcend the normal scale of monetary value for consumer commodities. But the trouble with these various objects, apart from the matter of principle, is that they are terribly the same, terribly predictable and indistinguishable from truckloads of similar stuff that one has seen at every biennale for as long as one can remember.
The paintings in the exhibition are also extremely feeble. The predominant style, apart from some woeful instances of postmodern irony, is a reheated stew of abstraction and pop of the kind that has been around, on and off, for 30 or 40 years. A heavy dash of graffiti added to the mix is hardly original either, needless to say. In fact, if you saw this work without the wraparound presence of the entrepreneurial Saatchi brand, you would think they came from some minor backwater of the contemporary art world with an insatiable appetite for grunge.
Among the few attempts at something more subtle, there are several large paintings by Maaike Schoorel, whose intention, laudable on the face of it, is to make audiences who have been desensitised by the unrelenting stimulation of mass media look more carefully and attentively. To this end she has painted scenes like a family dinner in just a few thin colour washes, so that we have to make an effort to decipher the image represented. Unfortunately, this only takes a second or two -- but perhaps this is a long time in the world of mass media? -- and then there is nothing further to detain us.
Other works similarly fail to engage us for longer than the moments it takes to see the point. Thus Edward Kay's Bon Viveur, in which the grotesquely hedonistic subject is painted with a penis on his face, is essentially a cartoon. So is Donald Urquhart's A Joan Crawford Alphabet, which could perhaps be funny if the overwhelming effect were not of a kind of camp complacency.
Art can take different forms, but one requirement is that it be capable of engaging the mind of the viewer for longer than the time it takes to walk past. It is here again that we see the corrosive effect of the consumer paradigm, which leaves no room for a more sustained involvement.
The other unpleasant thing about this sort of work is its simultaneously pseudo-critical and utterly indulgent attitude to mass culture. Thus there is an enormous picture
of singer Cher as Che Guevara, whose reference to Warhol is too obvious to dwell on. Here, we are assured on the label, "left-wing radicalism becomes fused with celebrity obsession" -- and guess which one wins out?
One the few works with a bit more wit and bite is Olivia Plender's cartoon series, kitsch though it certainly is. There is feeling in Clarisse d'Arcimoles's series of photographs in which she and members of her family have re-enacted pictures of themselves as children; her work is at times funny, at times touching, but it can hardly be said to be particularly original. Idris Khan's works are also striking at first sight, but they are in fact variations on themes by distinguished German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher.
A wall of photographs by Clunie Reid is an interesting case. Some of the images are arresting, but her justification of them shows a failure to understand what she is really doing. "I'm interested in advertising," she writes, "the way in which images of bodies and objects have a relationship to the way our view of the world is constructed.
"By vulgarising this imagery, my work explores the hidden mechanism of image construction . . ."
Well, yes, images of bodies and objects in advertising do have a relationship to the way our view of the world is constructed -- what a piercing insight! But as for "vulgarising", it is quite the contrary.
What Reid does is to aestheticise this material, first of all simply by converting it from prolefeed colour to high-art black and white, and second by breaking up and recombining bits of commercial imagery so that its instrumental function is cancelled and the resulting fragments can become the object of a more disinterested admiration.
But none of this amounts to deconstructing the messages of advertising for the audiences targeted by publicity campaigns. It is rather an opportunity for the very kind of people who make the ads -- not the exploited but the exploiters -- to gaze at their handiwork in narcissistic admiration of their own cleverness. No wonder Saatchi, the adman, likes her work.
Admen, media people and other purveyors of mass commercial culture have been the beneficiaries of a particularly self-serving fallacy promoted by one of their kind in the past few years. The idea of the "creative class" propounded by Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, allows all such people, as well as motivational spruikers, computer programmers, hairdressers and others, to feel they are, culturally speaking, on a par with intellectuals, composers and artists.
They're all creative people, aren't they? Except that this facile and slippery category of creativity blurs the distinction between those who are concerned with truth or beauty and those who are busy producing brainless but seductive distractions for the masses or, even worse, those who deliberately manufacture lies and disinformation to exploit human weaknesses for commercial gain. The value-free category of creativity fosters precisely the aesthetic, moral and intellectual sloppiness that we witness in the adman Saatchi's art.
It is a remarkable but disconcerting experience to pass from the Saatchi collection into the Elder Wing, with its grand spaces recently redecorated and full of the gallery's exceptional collection of Australian art from the colonial to the modern periods. The two halves of the gallery seem to suffer from a split personality verging on derangement. It is not possible to consider both sides as aesthetically comparable.
The Elder Wing makes the sterility of the Saatchi collection even more painfully evident: it seems to reflect the same despair and moral dereliction that were evident in the recent British riots. But you also realise the meanness, ugliness and sheer lack of generosity and imagination in the Saatchi exhibition have rendered you temporarily unable to respond to work that is honest and alive. Instead you walk around the elegant new hanging seeing only the interior decorator at work, another of the motley crowd of the creative class. No doubt it will be possible to enjoy the new rooms as they deserve once the adman's art is gone and the cynical pall it casts is lifted from the gallery.
Saatchi Collection in Adelaide
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
until October 23
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
until October 23
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