Tasmania’s annual Dark Mofo winter arts festival would be better named the “Look at Me, I’m so EDGY!” festival. The brainchild of the poker millionaire who founded the Mona gallery in Hobart, it’s of a piece with the “edgy” art gallery: a whole lot of attention-seeking tat pretending to be art. Well, this is a city that runs almost entirely on the back of the taxpayer (nearly one in three Hobastard workers is in a government job of some kind, and the public service is the fastest-growing sector). No wonder they think that a gallery whose centrepiece is a literal shit-machine is the pinnacle of art.
The festival has always prided itself on peddling juvenile “shock” art: from decorating Hobart with upside-down crosses to slaughtering and dismembering a bull live on stage. It’s all rather infantile and tiresome, really. As Marc Bolan once said, “If you know how to rock, you don’t need to shock”. The same goes for the visual arts: only the untalented and lowbrow mistake flinging poo at a canvas as “art”.
Speaking of untalented and lowbrow, Dark Mofo’s planned 2021 centrepiece turns out to have been a barrel-scraping too low for even the Hobart left-elite.
Spanish artist Santiago Sierra has attacked the “superficial and spectacular” treatment of his artwork Union Jack, saying a “wave of reactions triggered its “public lynching”.
The artist, who planned to exhibit a British flag soaked in the blood of First Nations peoples at Hobart’s winter arts festival Dark Mofo, issued a statement early Thursday morning that accused Australian journalists of coverage that “stirred up the mood and built up the indignation to suit their own needs”.
Sierra said his quotes had been decontextualised and he had been “left without a voice, without the capacity to explain and defend” the piece.
On the contrary, he’s been given nothing but a platform to yammer his “voice”. But, the more he tried to “explain and defend” his “art”, the more obvious it was that his is merely talentless hackery trying to shock its way to the top.
Dark Mofo asked First Nations peoples for blood donations late last week after revealing it had commissioned Sierra, who has previously exhibited controversial works at galleries such as London’s Tate Modern.
Indigenous artists and activists condemned the work but on Monday evening the festival defended it on the grounds of artistic expression. Less than 24 hours later creative director Leigh Carmichael apologised and said the artwork would not be exhibited.
David Walsh, the owner of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art of which Dark Mofo is a spinoff, also said he had made a mistake in approving the work and said “it’s no wonder everyone is disgusted”.
It looks like he’s finally cut himself on all that edge.
Robert Hughes might have called Modernism “The Shock of the New”, but he never mistook mere shock for art. Hughes might well have been anticipating the garbage that is Dark Mofo’s stock-in-trade when he concluded his groundbreaking survey of Modernism with this gloomy observation:
“I don’t think there’s been such a rush towards insignificance in the name of the historic or future as we’ve seen in the last 15 years…a kind of dumb show…I don’t think we are ever again obliged to look at a plywood box or a row of bricks or a videotape of some twit from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself and think, ‘This is the real thing. This is the necessary art of our time. This needs respect.’ Because it isn’t, and it doesn’t. And nobody cares.”
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