More from the Post-Eternal Phase

December 24, 2024 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, LIFE | 0 Comments | 0

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 17 November 2024

Modern Art is, to an alarmingly increasing degree, pure fraud. It operates on ruthless market principles, clothed in doubletalk, agitprop, and gobbledegook. It has largely abandoned aesthetics and no longer seeks, were it even able, to be evocative. We call it the “Post-Eternal Phase,” because its representative works leave the mind as soon as one turns away, and its work is complete as soon as the cheque is cashed. As Robert Hughes once memorably observed, the role of modern art is to hang on the wall and get more expensive (a gaffer-taped banana, anyone?).

The Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay in Sydney (memo to tourists: it’s pronounced “Key”) is wonderful, yet often features material tailor-made for the Post-Eternal Phase. Some recent samples suffice to prove our point. First, we show what in our humble opinion (and we could be wrong) best represents the abominable, shoddy, amateurish, pitiful, and useless examples of the Post-Eternal Phase:

By Julie Rrap – Alexandros, Phidias, Michelangelo, even Henry Moore and Brancusi, are grave-spinning

“8-1965” by William Turnbull (like a dull view from a plane)

“Loop. A model of how the world operates” by Brook Andrew (‘it can take you somewhere else’, says the artist. Thank goodness)

“Khurasan Gate variation II” by Frank Stella, 1970 (“‘Cos I gotta lotta wall space”)

No, not shelving; “Breaker” by Hilarie Mais, 1988, a grid “form regularly associated with Western modernism” (and Eastern prisons)

“Mayfair; smoko for Tommy Lamare” by Robert MacPherson, 1992-2002, weathershield paint on masonite, international modernism complete with ludicrous hotdog

Sequence of 4: “An orange constructed one’; “Brown and white striped one”; “Lime green constructed one”; “Brown constructed one” (all 1993) by Rose Nolan – cardboard, wire, rope, tin can lids and perspex (time for some demolition?)

“Nugget” by Robert Rauschenberg (1976). Perhaps there is an upside to be ‘house trained.’

A man with 2 clogs: “Short man with two dogs” by Linda Marrinon

Where’s the Ku Klux Klan when you need them? “East Tenth” by Philip Guston, 1977

“EK” by Ken Reinhard 1972 – how to give Pop Art an even worse name

Now, for some light relief, let’s consider what the MCA displays that shows some wit, some genuine endeavour to bridge the divide between artist and viewer: