SASHA GRISHIN AM FAHA
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Grishin's Art Blog (GAB)

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GAB 29 (Grishin's Art Blog 29)

29/5/2018

8 Comments

 

Exhibition ephemera in Australian art

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Installation view of The Field, National Gallery of Victoria, 1968

The fastest growing and most ill-disciplined part of my art library is something that I euphemistically term Australian ‘exhibition ephemera’.  This includes invites to exhibitions, exhibition media releases, price lists and an increasing number of glossy exhibition catalogues of ever-growing proportions. 
 
The National Gallery of Victoria’s The Field Revisited exhibition in 2018, with the facsimile republication of the original The Field catalogue of 1968, reminded me how unconventional the show was in 1968. 
 
The whole presentation of the exhibition on aluminium sheeting, perhaps not so successfully captured in the resuscitation, (whereas in 1968 the works seemed to leap out off the wall, in 2018 they seem to float on a rippling sea of silver), was unprecedented in Australian art. The lavish catalogue, funded largely with American money, also set a new benchmark for public gallery catalogues in this country.

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NGV Triennial catalogue 2017
 
In the only serious study, that I am aware of, focussing on exhibition catalogues published by public institutions in this country, an excellent thesis by Dr Jim Berryman, The Field catalogue is taken as a starting point in Australia of the transformation of the catalogue from the humble documentation of an exhibition to an autonomous scholarly publication or a flashy piece of merchandising. 
 
Today, the National Gallery of Victoria is the largest (by number of titles) art publisher in the Southern Hemisphere and catalogues published by most of the state, national and regional galleries have become weighty and voluminous publications.
 
Public galleries and museums may feel the need to produce substantial publications and, not infrequently, these are the most authoritative collections of recent scholarship on the subject extant.  The same cannot be said of the majority of publications coming from the commercial sector. 
 
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NGA scholarly exhibition catalogue, Anne Gray, Arthur Streeton at War, National Gallery of Australia, 2017
 
Sadly, the need to produce a catalogue, with many commercial ventures, has become a process of legitimation, so that a gallery or an artist feels that they require a published catalogue to justify their exhibition.
 
The perceived wisdom is that the bigger and glossier the publication, the more important is their exhibition. 
 
Several years ago, I embarked on an impossible project, reasoning that the more impossible the project, the more necessary it was to attempt it.  The project was to write an account of contemporary art practice in Australia and part of the methodology was to acquaint myself with as much of the art activity in this country as possible and weave this into a lengthy narrative. 
 
In my archive, exhibition ephemera has been growing roughly at the rate of one metre of shelf space per month.  In my storage method, I had isolated about 600 artists or art collectives who are of particular interest to me and who receive their own folder or archival box for storage of their ephemera plus an electronic folder, while the rest are filed alphabetically.  This in turn is cross-referenced with books and other publications.
 

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NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair, 2016
 
The avalanche of glossy catalogues devoted to very minor and completely forgettable art practitioners in the past couple of years has become a serious storage problem. 
 
Comparing notes with friends and colleagues working professionally in the arts, I have to report that most of them, despite the archiving instincts of our species, confess to systematically placing virtually all of the commercial catalogues arriving in the mail into the paper recycling bins.
 
I think that it is only the National Gallery in Canberra that still attempts to run the ‘grey box’ ephemera archive for all of Australian art, originally established by the far-sighted inaugural director, James Mollison. 
 
In the private sector, the maverick art book and ephemera collector Ray Coffey has set up an Australian Art Ephemera Library, which was publicly launched by Kevin Rudd earlier this year.  Coffey stores his archive in adjoining houses in Brisbane that he has acquired for this purpose and he systematically scans and digitises his holdings.
 
I must confess that I am an object person who loves paper and despite spending two-thirds of my life in front of the computer, I have an overwhelming preference for a tactile book, rather than the lifeless screen of any of the mechanical reading contraptions.
 
This is especially true of publications on art where, if well designed, the ‘voice’ of the images combines with the qualities of the paper and the weight of the type to create a holistic experience. 
 
Reading something online is more than adequate if the only purpose is information, that is, if you are reading only for content. The physical publication is necessary if you wish to experience the subject that you are reading about. 
 

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Landmark Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibition catalogues from QAG
 
In exhibition ephemera publications, we have reached something of a watershed moment.  The mass of hardcopy publications has become unsustainable – economically, environmentally and conceptually. 
 
If a decade ago, such publications were linked with a ‘wow’ moment and people paused in their steps to examine them and stored them on coffee tables and bookshelves, today they frequently attract little more than a passing glance before they graduate to the recycling bin. 
 
I would argue that electronic invites and e-catalogues today have a longer life expectancy than physical publications and are more likely to be stored digitally than their physical counterparts. 
 
As we are now transitioning away from commercial art galleries staging solo exhibitions as the primary mechanism for marketing art in Australia, perhaps the time has arrived to more completely embrace digital technologies for the promotion of art and artists. 
 
Perhaps printed catalogues, especially in the private sector, should be increasingly reserved for publications that are in themselves conceived as works of art and not simply vehicles for disseminating commercial content about art and artists. 
 

8 Comments
Bob Jansen link
30/5/2018 07:37:35

Sasha,

An interesting read. I concur with your comments re commercial catalogues, I too throw them away most of the time unless it is for an artist I know or admire.

When we were in South Korea, we found the Kim Dal Jin Art Archive. Mr. kim was a journalist who spent two days a week going around every gallery he could collecting the catalogues. He has built up an amazing collection of such ephemera for South Korean art, going back to the early nineties. His collection is now administered by a group of supporters and has been recognised as the most significant collection of its type in South Korea. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the equivalent of the NGA, has also formed a collaboration with the archive and now stores much of the material in one of its locations. If you ever got to Seoul, look this place up, it has an amazing collection which includes some Australian artists as a result of some collaborative exhibitions as well as the recent Cultural Conversations project exhibition in Seoul from which we donated monographs and catalogues to the archive with the consent of the artists, such as Guy Warren, Yvonne Boag, Ann Thomson, Andrew Christofides and Alun Leach Jones.

Reply
sasha grishin
30/5/2018 16:33:17

From 1977 to 2007 I assembled a fairly comprehensive collection of exhibition ephemera from all galleries in the ACT region. Subsequently I lodged all of these with my personal archive at the National Library of Australia. The next instalment will happen on completion of my contemporary practice book.

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Dr G Willis
30/5/2018 15:57:12

Interesting article Sasha -
I remember seeing Terry Wheelan's collection of small catalogues in 2000.
They took up most of the living room floor of his North Fitzroy house. He had also attempted some sort of cross referenced catalogue system to go with it - but as you might imagine - it proved virtually impossible.
More interesting - was the idea that he had - in principle - bequeathed the collection to the Getty Museum in L.A. Despite interest from the NGA.
I am inclined to argue for the significance of the smaller catalogue.
The big ones reinforce institutional preferences - a world which demonstrates relatively little interest in Contemporary - Australian art.
Thus I tend to think the smaller often ephemeral catalogues are where you find the beating heart of Australian Contemporary art.
- Cheers G.

Reply
sasha grishin
30/5/2018 16:36:28

I agree that in the past, the smaller catalogues were the more interesting ones - like my cherished copy of the Antipodean catalogue of 1959. Today, 80% of the small commercial catalogues that I see are simply vanity publishing of very little merit.

Reply
RAY COFFEY
4/6/2018 22:36:54

Hi Sasha,
So great to see so many enthusiasts and their solutions to the many problems, sheer bulk, lack of time, changing formats, and personal choice.
I fear that the public institutions (certainly due to lack of funds) are failing the public. In Queensland we no longer have an arts librarian despite holding the monumental James Hardy Collection and Norman Lindsay Letters (both thanks Pat Corrigan). The focus seems to be on digitally presenting the major works which leaves the minors wanting.
My collection, now 5 decades of passion and 16 tons, is all finally housed in a recently built two-storey library extension to our new suburban house/home. The ephemera collection runs to 150+ meters of shelving and has no criteria for inclusion. Those "forgettable" artists are there in abundance, and I enjoy collecting their details. Who in 1953 would collect John Brack at Peter Bray Gallery?
The catalogue of my collection, currently 18,000 pages, listing alphabetically by artist/Gallery, then chronologically, and includes thumbnail images of catalogue covers and paintings, has resolved, in my mind, two major issues.
Firstly, whether the image of a work should be included where it was exhibited, or when it was created. The obvious answer is when created, with cross references to provenance, where exhibited, where illustrated (including auction catalogues) thus at one point of reference you have often multiple images of the one painting, various assumed titles, ownership, where exhibited, where illustrated, auction records including estimates and sold prices.Everything a researcher or purchaser would require.
Secondly, the sad event of galleries only publishing emails instead of the traditional hands-on invitation, catalogue and price list. Here I copy the images from the gallery website (and details, price) into the artist's file, again maintaining chronological order.
Yes! I must admit, I'm falling behind at a great rate of knots,but I love working with this material, and every step is a step forward.
Would love to share so pass my email to enthusiasts.
Ray, in Brisbane

Reply
Sasha Grishin
5/6/2018 11:34:33

Ray, you have created a great resource may it long flourish. When Brack exhibited at Peter Bray in 1953, most of the art critics thought at a great new talent had emerged

Reply
Bob jansen link
5/6/2018 10:21:31

Ray,

I manage the output from artist Yvonne Boag, my partner. Like you, I have created an archive, in digital form, for all her work. It has images of each work, places where exhibited, publications she has appeared in with actual PDF copies or URL links if possible and an 'active' cv, where cv entries are linked to works, exhibitions, publications, etc. we are maintaining her current output but the legacy stuff is problematical because of it's her size. But we are working through it.

You can see the archive online via Yvonne's web site, http://yvonneboag.com.au, by following the link to the archive.

Technically it is a FileMaker Pro database hosted online and allows us to track movements via consignments as well.

Reply
Sasha Grishin
5/6/2018 12:11:57

Bob, watch FileMaker Pro and its various versions. I have set up a database using this software to discover that upgraded versions will not read earlier versions and transfers are difficult and you are left with a pdf database.

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    GRISHIN'S ART BLOG

    Sasha  Grishin  AM, FAHA is the author of more than 25 books on art, including Australian Art: A History, and has served as the art critic for The Canberra Times for forty years. He is an Emeritus Professor  at the Australian National University, Canberra; Guest Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Honorary Principal Fellow, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne.

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