ABC Unleashed: Whip it Good!

As the Spring Racing Carnival begins in earnest this weekend, Michael Hutak says new rules restricting how jockey's whip their horses are causing controversy.

Outside Melbourne Cup time, Australia's multi-billion dollar horse racing industry usually attracts the attention of the wider general public for all the wrong reasons: betting scams, race fixing, money laundering, "colourful" racing identities, horse doping and claims of animal cruelty are the typical narratives.
However, 2009 has been a year for rougher-than-usual hand-wringing for racing's bosses, faced with a public outcry over horse fatalities in jumps racing, the disturbing re-emergence of positive swabs for performance-enhancing drugs, cyber-attacks from the Russian mafia on Australia's booming online betting shops, and, taking centre stage at the moment, sweeping changes to the rules regarding the use of the whip in races.
The grand irony to all this negative publicity is that the racing game loves nothing more than a public row, and that's exactly what it's got following the introduction of the new whip regime at the start of the new season on August 1.
Racing NSW Chief Steward, Ray Murrihy, explained the new rules to the ABC: "Up to the last 200 metres they can only hit a horse 5 times. You can't lift your arm up above your head. (We have had certain jockeys who use to use the whip as if they were chopping a log with an axe.)
In the last 200m, you have to give the horse an opportunity to respond. You can't hit it every stride, but only every second stride, and on one occasion in the last 200m you can hit three strides in a row."
The cause célèbre came on August 22, when Sydney apprentice Daniel Ganderton was fined his riding fee and winning prizemoney percentage (about $4000 in all) and suspended for six race meetings after his winning the Group 3 Silver Shadow Stakes at Randwick on a three-year-old called Deer Valley.
Ganderton flouted the new restrictions, riding his mount with the whip right to the line, to win the race over another rival which was ridden within the new rules. Ganderton told stewards the horse wouldn't have won without the extra pressure, however, while the jockey copped the punishment, his mount kept the race, prompting calls of foul from punters and owners.
The Silver Shadow being a coveted event, the "winner" was now a much more valuable stud proposition, while the owners of the runner-up got zilch.
Even Murrihy admits that had the Silver Shadow been run on July 31, there would have been no fine, reprimand or suspension for Ganderton. "No, none at all. Wouldn't have contemplated it."
Jockeys, and high-profile owners and trainers have since gone ballistic, threatening what amounts to the turf equivalent of civil disobedience. "I'll be doing everything I can to win" said leading jockey Peter Robl. "And if that means hitting more than the allowable three strides in succession, then I'll be doing it. You won't find any other rider that won't do it in a million-dollar race when you are neck and neck with other horses."
Adman and racehorse owner, John Singleton, chimed in with advice to jockeys not to "worry about your fine, I'll pay you double the fee, just win the race". Big-time bookie, Robbie Waterhouse complained it was hitting his hip pocket: "Everyone is talking about not wanting to bet unless they see horses ridden out with the whip. I think it is starting to have an effect on betting turnover."
His wife, leading trainer Gai Waterhouse, dismissed the new restrictions as the unwanted handiwork of "do-gooders". Others bizarrely claimed it was all the fault of meddling "greenies".
While such carefree commentary is refreshing in an an age when sportspeople clog up the tube with banalities and platitudes, Robl claimed he'd been "misquoted" when pressed by stewards and said he would comply with the new rules.
The stewards then warned trainers and owners that it was an offence under the Australian Rules of Racing "if instructions are given or inducements are offered by any person that might result in a rider breaching the whip rules".
It may be an offence but enforcement is the issue. The jockeys also claim the new rules "are putting the health and safety of riders at risk", while they count how many times they've hit the horse instead of concentrating on riding naturally. Murrihy counters: "There's been markedly less interference in races. We haven't had a suspension for careless riding in the last 200m since the whip rule started."
It's not like the jockeys didn't know what was coming; the changes were announced in March after a wide ranging public inquiry conducted by the Australian Racing Board, taking submissions from both racing industry insiders, horse and animal welfare groups and the general public. They've had six months to prepare. Now they want the rules changed to allow them unfettered discretion to use the whip in the last 100 metres. The Australian Racing Board will hear their case next Thursday.
It's true that Sydney jockey Blake Shinn would have almost certainly lost last year's Melbourne Cup on Viewed had he ridden to the letter of the new rules.
By my count he hit the Bart Cummings-trained gelding 26 times in the last 200m. A rule punishing jockeys for excessive or improper use of the whip has been in place for more than two decades, however it was rarely enforced and never in living memory when horses are fighting out a tight finish.
"Historically, as long as horses were in contention for a placing, stewards were very reluctant to deem any riding excessive," admits Murrihy. "You could have had two horses fighting out a finish being hit 40 or 50 times with the whip. Now I don't recall ever in my career stewards penalising riders for being excessive when a placing was in contest. These new rules are designed to bring Australia in line with most other countries and with community standards that find it a bit abhorrent that a horse can be hit 40 or 50 times with the whip."
The new regime is more in line with South African rules which came into effect on January 1. In the UK, where animal welfare groups have been very successful in targeting abuses in horse racing, the whip is used very sparingly, and Murrihy says "it's fair to say now around the world the very best riders use a lot less whip".
Australian jockeys historically have an international reputation for being very tough on the animal and that strong whip riding was an accepted practice. Murrihy says people would be outraged today at the style of three-time Melbourne Cup winning jockey Jim Johnson, last week inducted into racing's Hall of Fame.
Australia now is only playing catch-up and many of today's best riders such as Kerrin McEvoy, Damien Oliver, Corey Brown, use much less whip to great effect. The modern jockey is more athletic, with more upper body strength and a propensity to put the whip away in the closing stages and really push their horses to the line.
It's generally accepted that the best "hands and heels" rider in the modern era was Peter Cook, who rode from the 60s to the 80s. Cook was a quiet, kind rider who could get the best out of a horse without the whip and who seldom resorted to it even in the tightest finish.
However punters, if one were to treat them as an undifferentiated mass, still want to see the jockey win at all costs, ideally with a whip in each hand with every last ounce extracted from the animal in a tight finish. To most, the whip is the accelerator.
Murrihy says ultimately it's counterproductive. "If you belt a horse hoping to instil a fear of the whip, chances are you'll make it into a dog. It won't respond to the whip, it gets sick of getting a hiding, it lays down and won't do its best."
The other innovation in force since August 1 is the exclusive use of a "less severe", padded whip which has a bark worse than its bite. Critics point out, if you're hitting horse with a whip and it supposedly doesn't hurt, then why restrict its use at all? Murrihy says the new whip is more accurately described as "a kinder whip, not that it doesn't hurt.
There's a general abhorrence to belting animals with anything, so if you simply say I'll give you a whip that doesn't hurt as much and you can hit it 40 times in the straight with this, I don't know that gets you over the welfare hurdle!"
Lou Reed used to sing about the whip "in love, not given lightly", and PETA believes the whip should be restricted to consenting adults only. However the whip is part and parcel of the relationship between human and the domesticated horse, a bond of master and slave stretching to pre-history.
In the equestrian world eventing and dressage, there are rules prohibiting and penalties applicable for excessive use of the whip. So it should stay in racing, and it will.
New rules in the racing game are always met with resistance by vested interests. When the administering of steroids for racehorses was banned in the early 1990s, many trainers claimed it would be the end of racing as we knew it. For some it nearly was: one leading Sydney trainer didn't train a winner for four months after the ban came into force.
In fact predictions of turf Armageddon have been the rote response when, for instance, whenever a "foreign" horse won the Melbourne Cup, when mobile phones were allowed on racecourses, when the TAB was first introduced and then when it was privatised, when the AJC Derby was moved from the Spring to the Autumn, when female jockeys were first given licences, when Robbie Waterhouse was banned over Fine Cotton and 17 years later when he was allowed back on the track, when cable TV broadcasts of the races began, when betting exchanges were allowed to operate, when night racing started - every change has been met with claims of falling sky.
All I can say is, as a journalist, it sure makes great copy.

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‘Reality’ bites at the La Budget Biennale

Displays of unbridled wealth are tipped to give way to retro recession chic at this year's Venice Biennale, the world's oldest, most-venerated annual contemporary art event. Held this year in the shadow of the global financial crisis, the international art market, a luxury market, is set to be reminded that collecting art is mostly discretionary. Michael Hutak reports.

Like last year’s return to minimalism on the catwalks, this year’s 53rd International Art Exhibition will reflect global belt-tightening with a back-to-reality motif from Swedish curator, Daniel Birnbaum, who will present "Making Worlds," which he says will emphasize process and materials and will be "closer to the process of production and the venues of creation and training -- the studio, the laboratory -- than traditional museum-style exhibitions”.

Accordingly, we can expect a more muted stanza in 2009 when the four-day preview or 'vernissage' kicks off on June 4, with the official opening two days later, when avant garde totems, Yoko Ono and John Baldessari, will be honoured with Golden Lions for careers that have “revolutionized the language of art”. Displays of unbridled wealth are tipped to give way to a revival of recession chic, and the corporate celebrations aboard the flotilla of luxury yachts, in six-hundred year old palazzi, and at swank already booked out hotels like the Cipriani, or just about any along the Grand Canal or the Lido, will be careful this year to avoid any association with the holders of so-called toxic assets.

Venice is in fact a many-headed “Mostra”, from the art olympics of the national pavilions at both the Giardini and scattered in palazzi throughout the city; to Birnbaum’s curated survey show at the Arsenale, to the ad-hoc independent and satellite shows which simply add to the frolic and ferment.

There will be enough on show to attract more than 50,000 artworld cognescenti to this treasured city to party, play, network or sell. The hard sell in Venice is not restricted to art objects or artists. A growing band of sovereign states turn up to buttress their national brand and draw a reflected glory from their official selections. In 1988, Australia was the last country to secure a lot on the hallowed bohemian Arcadia of the Giardini, one of just 26 elite nations, although our pavilion is widely regarded as a difficult space to present contemporary art, and is often mistaken as the restrooms for the imposing French pavilion which conceals it.

Selection for one’s national pavilion at Venice is often the peak of an artist’s career. While no correlative studies are extant, the attention an artist attracts in the lead up and at the Vernissage always effects prices. In 2007, emerging artist Shaun Gladwell was no exception when the work that appeared in curator Robert Storr’s official survey show, Storm Sequence, later sold at auction in Australia for $84,000, the highest price paid for a digital artwork in Australia.

Clearly the Gladwell phenomenon is still to peak, considering the Sydney-based artist’s selection again for the Australian pavilion this year. Given his 2007 Venice triumph, and his prominence since (he’s been in over 20 group exhibitions since), the perhaps predictable rumblings among Gladwell’s peers have come asking why another artist was not given the opportunity to enjoy the international exposure afforded by being the official selection? Professional development or professional jealousy? We asked Doug Hall AM, commissioner for the 2009 Australian exhibition, what the rationale was for selection in terms of international development of Australian contemporary art.

“Shaun Gladwell was selected because the selection panel thought he was the best fit in terms of the quality of his work, his international profile and career trajectory,” says Hall. “Shaun is a great Australian artist – and that above all was the main selection criteria. His work is fresh, relevant and speaks with an international voice. He was selected from five short-listed artists who submitted proposals to the 11 member selection panel.

“The fact that he was chosen as part of Robert Storr's curated show at the 2007 Venice Biennale wasn't a consideration - only past official Australian representatives are ineligible. We weren’t going to penalise an artist for being successful. The fact that Shaun exhibited Storr's show in 2007 adds to his value in representing Australia in 2009 – it allows a more in-depth exploration of his works by the various curators, artists, and other attending the Biennale.

“It's artists like Shaun, who already have some international profile, that exposure at the Venice Biennale tends to benefit most.”

Influenced by the outback, and Mad Max movies, Gladwell will present a “suite of videos accompanied by sound, photographic and sculptural works”.

The 53rd International Art Exhibition, directed by Daniel Birnbaum, runs from June 7th to November 22nd, 2009 (preview on 4th, 5th and 6th June 2009). Go to: labiennale.org/en/art/


Satellites of Art

The energising art team of Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro get their widely expected big break with selection by curator Felicity Fenner for Australia’s major satellite show in Venice, Once Removed to be held at The Ludoteca, a former convent conveniently located in the sestiere between the main art venues of the Giardini and the Arsenale. Along with works by Vernon Ah Kee and Ken Yonetani, Healy & Cordeiro will present a new installation cut again with the rich vein of irony at play in works like last year’s show in Berlin with former Australian galerist, Gitte Weise. Works like Intelligent Design or Dust to Dust (which presents pulverised Ikea coffee tables in oak and glass vitrines) can be expected to attract critical attention, supported by pair’s judicious talent for incorporating objects and detritus found on site into their works. As we write the pair are preparing a massive installation for Venice at their Sydney studio, using a stack of old VHS cassettes and a caulking gun. Living as artworld intinerants with shows all over the world in recent years, Healy and Cordiero emerged out of Sydney’s lively artist-run space scene at the turn of the millennium and are represented by Sydney dealer, Barry Keldoulis.

Art champions package it up

Australian art bureaucrats consider Venice the premier forum for presenting our contemporary art to the world; a form of cultural diplomacy that brings real commercial benefits to Australian artists lucky enough to be chosen. The Australia Council contributes a base budget of $700,000 towards the Australian participation in Venice 2009. This is supported by a fundraising program (cash and in-kind) which takes cues from the previous two efforts managed by John Kaldor, art patron and 2005 and 2007 Commissioner. Kaldor fashioned the program with both "supporter packages" for individuals and corporate packages, similar in structure to the marketing of headline sporting events. There are two levels of supporter in the 2009 program – “associates” can give $2000 or more and “champions” can give $10,000 or more if they choose. While there are no quid pro quo’s, those that give can then partake in a series of special supporter events both in Australia and in Venice during the Vernissage. They can also receive Vernissage passes – near impossible to get without connections. However, “this is an act of giving for giving’s sake,” as Commissioner Doug Hall AM says. Major corporate sponsors this year are UBS and The Balnaves Foundation. Already in excess of $1 million in cash and in-kind contributions has been generated by the program. Should one suspect that Venice is the sweetest taxpayer-funded junket in the public service, the Australia Council assures us that “all official Australian events are geared towards raising the profile of the artists during the Vernissage period and boosting attendances at both the Australian Pavillion and Ludoteca. The council says maintaining profile during the Vernissage is crucial to attracting leading curators and other thought leaders to see the works. Collectors interested in becoming a supporter can contact the Australia Council on 02 9215 9090.

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First published in Australian Art Collector No.48, April-June 2009

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Race Invaders

Michael Hutak writes about our responses to the globalisation of that distinctively Australian event, the Melbourne Cup...

<Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal and spontaneous, not perfunctory. I can call to mind no specialised annual day in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation, and preparation, and anticipation and jubilation. No day save this one.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

When Mark Twain attended the Cup in 1895, Melbourne's population was barely a million and yet 10 per cent of the colony's population turned up that day to witness the event, a remarkable turnout. With Melbourne's population today roughly 3.5m, the Cup is only now again approaching the sort of mass appeal it enjoyed at the turn of the 20th century. Crowds of around 400,000 are expected over the four day carnival, precisely double the attendance in 1993 when Irish champion Vintage Crop became the first internationally-trained entry to win the race, heralding the advent of the Cup's "modern era", an era that coincides with the march of globalisation in trade and communications and in the horse racing business. The success of the event in recent years has been driven in part by the considerable public interest generated by the international contingent that hails typically from UK, Ireland, France and more recently Japan.

So it's Cup time again, and the international horses have arrived in numbers looking to win Australia's greatest horse race, this year worth a hefty 5.65 million Australian pesos. Eight internationals will start in the race and they make up seven of the top ten in the betting market, surprising considering for the visitors, it is no easy feat to win, with just two wins since Vintage Crop's (Media Puzzle in 2002 and Japan's Delta Blues in 2006). Add Australia's strict quarantine conditions to the rigours of travelling a horse across the other side of the world to race two miles, often in scorching heat, then for most the adventure ends up a folly costing at least $100,000.

Still, each year, as the first Tuesday in November doth approach, so crescendos the chorus of whining from local trainers and owners who can barely contain their protectionist disgust at the perceived superiority of the international runners. This Spring His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, was the first to deflate the national ego two weeks back when his classy chestnut All The Good strode away with the Caulfield Cup. This cued locals to bemoan more pillaging of homeland's glory, but they neglected to mention the win was the Sheikh's first Group 1 win in Australia in more than a decade trying.

On cue, the tabloids have been cranking up the emotive language in a brew of envy, gall and indignation: "we" are at "the mercy of the raiders"; the "foreign invaders" are so good they have an unfair "stranglehold" on the Cup; there are "fears" this year that "foreign" jockeys will "blight" the race by engaging in team riding, an illegal practice. And the broadsheets have also got into the act: "Australian racing's defence of the Melbourne Cup from a European blitz took a battering," railed the Sydney Morning Herald when construction tycoon Lloyd Williams' 2007 Cup winner, Efficient, was scratched from this year's event during the week. The nation must be at risk when it's left to a former casino boss to "repel the European Invasion" and save the nation from turf capitulation and global embarrassment.

And then there's Bart. Winner of the race an extraordinary 11 times, every year the old marvel clambers up onto the soapbox to tell why the foreigners should stop coming. This year Cummings said it was a case of "spot the Aussie", prompting a good comeback from Ireland's Aiden O'Brien, Coolmore's private and the world's leading trainer who is here with Cup favorite Septimus and two other lesser lights. Asked why his horse, the highest-rated stayer in training, would win: "Septimus, when you ask him, he gives it all.''

The visitors aren't averse to making their own threats, with UK jockey John Egan facing charges for calling local officials "tinpot Hitlers"! On Sunday Tom Magnier, son of Coolmore tycoon John Magnier, threatened to scratch Septimus, making the extraordinary claim that the Flemington track was "not safe, and we'd rather take the horse home than race in the cup... if the track isn't watered." The visitors always call for the track to be watered to improve the chances of European horses which prefer soft racing surfaces. Officials usually oblige, prompting more push back from the locals that the internationals are getting preferred treatment.

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Twain's comment above illustrates the extraordinary popularity the Cup and horse racing held in earlier times in this country. It's not unreasonable to claim that Australians have historically displayed an obsession with the turf not seen among any other people, not even the country which was its cradle: mother England. In fact the thoroughbred is a man-made, in-bred genetic freak which to be eligible to race must be able to trace its family tree back to just three foundation Arabian stallions imported to England in the 18th century. The bluebloods of the turf hold a flattering mirror to the British aristocracy, to which it is its plaything. Breeding is everything, old chap, and the notion that we can breed "the best" with "the best" to realise the equine equivalent of a monarch, the champion racehorse, is the kind of ideology that can launch both a global empire and beget generation upon generation of upper-class twits. With inherited wealth to spare, the poms take their time with their horses, racing them sparingly while young, breeding them to stay the "classic" distance of a mile and half and beyond.

In Australia, it's different. Racing has been a working class and mass entertainment, and we often hear that in Australia the racetrack is the great leveler, where both toff and tradesman are equal before the judge's decision. (Tell that to the 'greencoat' standing guard at the Members' Enclosure gate.) Since the Cold War, we have bred for speed, not stamina, and for a quick return. We buy them as yearlings and race them into the ground at two and three, and then pass them off like a sub-prime loan to the nearest sucker at the first hint of unsoundness. Two year olds scampering with all the precocity of a Chinese gymnast are our go, pounding their baby legs over sprint courses for big prizemoney in races like Sydney's Golden Slipper. As for the Melbourne Cup, its two mile marathon distance has always been an anomaly, and before the era of the "overseas raiders", local trainers used to greet the "Kiwi invasion" of stayers in the English mould with a similar derision.

The Antipodean breed, while technically a thoroughbred, has historically not run thick with the bluest blood of the most influential UK and continental sirelines. Not until the 1990s, when the bloodstock industry went through a period of consolidation and globalisation which has seen the emergence of two dominant global breeding and racing operations: Ireland's Coolmore Stud and Dubai's Darley, owned by Shiekh Mohammed. Following the Shiekh's $400m purchase earlier this year of the country's biggest stable, Woodlands Stud, the two rivals have each established large Australian operations. Coolmore's billionaire owners race Cup favourite Septimus while the Sheikh's big hope, All the Good has been scratched. The racing game as it turns out is a fount of tolerance for the big spending Emir who, along with his brother Sheikh Hamdan build a global empire after rescuing the British racing industry from terminal decline when the local aristocracy were going through a tough patch in the 1970s.

With 24/7 coverage online and on cable TV, racing fans now follow the best horses on a global racing calendar: the Dubai World Cup in May, the Kentucky Derby and Royal Ascot in the Northern Summer, the Arc de Triomphe in October, the US Breeders Cup and the Melbourne Cup in November and the Japan Cup and Hong Kong Internationals in December. The ascension of the Melbourne Cup to the attention of this exalted audience has been due in no small measure to the trailblazing efforts of Weld and Vintage Crop and those that have since made the journey in numbers with, it must be said, not much success.

However the Cup going global seems to have ruptured the proud maelstrom of the Australian turf and the role a horse race plays in the national narrative. In a globalised world dominated by the large developed and emerging economies, "little Australia" must punch above its weight to stay in the game. But faced with international competition in the Melbourne Cup, the locals view themselves as wanting, their bubble of self-congratulation lanced like a boil full of hubris. For the rest of the year they remain convinced that our racing and horses are the best in the world. Except, when one looks at the results of the international horses, three cup wins in two decades, their dominance is also a myth. The key to this conundrum? Anthropomorphism. Thoroughbreds do not vote and are not citizens. Horses are stateless, have no truck with nationalism, couldn't care less about good breeding and have no idea what a cultural cringe is. They win because of talent and circumstance, not what it says on their trainer's passport.

Hutak's Cup tips: New Zealand four year old Nom du Jeu has a regal carriage, a powerful finish, deep wells of stamina and class to spare. Dermot Weld is back again with the classy mare Profound Beauty. With a postage stamp weight of 51.5kgs, and Glen Boss wasting to make the ride, the smart money is on. Melbourne grey Barbaricus has been the local revelation of the Spring. Will race handy and fight on to the finish.
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The Meltdown Cup

When John Howard dedicated his government to transforming Australia into the world's greatest share-owning democracy, the sly fox was tapping into that kink in the national identity that we love to gamble. That the nation "stops" for the Melbourne Cup is often cited as key evidence in this claim. But if the share market maintains its current trajectory, Cup Day may roll around to find a nation already dead in its tracks.

While the Spring racing hots up with tomorrow's star-studded Caulfield Guineas meeting, several big corporate sponsors of racing have announced they are are pulling their heads in at this year's Melbourne Cup carnival, courtesy of the global financial crisis. Investment banks are dropping out, stockbroking firms are winding back, headline sponsors are cutting costs posing the proposition that this year's Cup may see less gross fare for the ruling class and more fanfare for the common man. A paradigm shift from the pusillanimous to the parsimonious.

Being a long-time racing journalist, turf student, and devotee of the thoroughbred, I must admit to greeting this development with more than a degree of delight and a shiver of schadenfreude. For this turf traditionalist, the collapse of global capitalism is a small price to pay if it can make the big end of town less conspicuous at the track, and restore the focus back onto the horses, the hoops and their ding-dong battles for Group 1 glory down the Flemington straight. (Note to the uninitiated: racing aficionados adore alliteration, hyperbole, jargon and cliché.)

Once upon a Spring, it was the horses that were the stars, but since the mid-1990s attention on the nags has steadily diminished and the Cup carnival swung fully into the posture of the "Major Event", replete with corporate marquees, private boxes, hospitality on steroids, all-pervasive PR, marketing gone mad, and world's best practice gladhanding and networking.

Across the racecourse the strategy has worked: the Melbourne Cup Carnival is Australia's largest spectator event attracting well over 400,000 over its four days. Inside the so-called Birdcage is Australia's pre-eminent Major Event corporate location: a sprawling rabbit warren of elegant impermanence, corporate tents filled with celebrities major and minor, a roll call of inherited wealth, trust-fund kids, captains of industry, scions of the judiciary, society matrons, dubious divas, ladies that launch, fund managers, IP lawyers, media moguls, paperback writers, ad-men, minions of marketing, hangers-on, free-loaders... all guzzling as much free champagne and gorging as much gourmet finger food as is inhumanly possible.

"Major events are not fun, they're exhausting," says a media industry CEO who last year scored a coveted invite to the Birdcage's most sought after venue, the Emirates tent, where he witnessed the paparazzi go berserk over the fashionista face-off between Jennifer Hawkins (Myer) and Megan Gale (David Jones) against a backdrop of bubbling Venetian fountains inside the marquee. This is not as enticing as sounds. "You may be rubbing elbows with the elite of the elite, but you're still standing in queues for dining tables, in the company of people you wouldn't normally spend time with, overindulging in ways you know you will regret the next morning."

As corporate muscle displaces tradition, many long-term members of the Victoria Racing Club feel diminished when they previously felt exalted. There was a time when the Members Enclosure was the elite domain; today it's a kind of purgatory of privilege: still too exclusive for the public enclosure, not yet accepted into the Birdcage's cosseted inner sanctums. Maybe the pendulum will swing back a little for the old-world hoi polloi this year as hard times bring a reality check to the masters of the universe. Heaven knows they deserve a break.

Outside in the cheap seats, for the great plethora of punters who cram into Flemington's public areas over the carnival, this is all academic. Such is its scale, the crowd today is its own story and the disconnect with the races, while subtle, is certainly palpable: horses parade, races are run, winners return to scale, race after race but people are having too much fun to pay too much attention.

Part of racing's mythology is that Phar Lap's 1930 Melbourne Cup win gave heart and hope to an Australian public dispirited by the Great Depression. However in both the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s, racing in general suffered from a reduction in gambling, resulting in reduced prizemoney, racetrack closures and a contraction in the breeding industry. Having just got over last year's equine influenza outbreak, the oulook is bleak.

With levels of personal debt in Australia today reportedly twice that during the Great Depression, and no nag the calibre of Phar Lap set to line up in this year's event, it seems like no one in their right mind should be gambling this Cup Day. And yet many will do just that. Collectively we will splurge like a nation plea bargaining temporary insanity, to the tune of at least $125m. Just whack it on the national plastic. For this one day of the year, we will splurge and gorge and guzzle - and when we wake up the following morning, head hurting, wallet empty, we will have little option but to say to ourselves: you can't complain Australia, you once had had it, and had it good.



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First published online at ABC Unleashed

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Russian Pavilion, Venice Vernissage

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Grand Tour: stop, revive, survive

This Northern summer offers an once-in-a-decade opportunity for collectors to sample the latest trends in international contemporary market. Michael Hutak previews a blockbuster European season.

It swings round every ten years, the "harmonic convergence of super exhibitions", according to Artnet, that has signposted the phenomenal growth of the international market since the 1970s. 2007 will see the big four of contemporary events -- the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, documenta XII and the Münster Sculpture Project -- all open within a couple of weeks in June. This fortunate freak of scheduling delivers Basel, the Biennale, documenta, held once every five years, and Münster, held every ten years since 1977, to all strata of the international art milieu: artists, curators, gallerists, critics, consultants, bureaucrats, Museums, foundations, dealers, publishers. Oh, and collectors.

La Biennale di Venezia

With former Museum of Modern Art curator, Robert Storr, taking the reins, hopes for renewal for Venice are high this year. Curators of the world’s longest-running biennale have negotiated a rocky critical road over the last few stanzas. After the sprawling over-determined glut presided over by Italian contemporary art godfather, Francesco Bonami in 2003 (11 co-curators and 375 artists), came a vastly pared-down but no more engaging over-reaction from Spanish co-directors, Rosa Martínez and María de Corral, in 2005 (some 80 artists). Storr, who has had an unprecedented lead-in of 36 months since his appointment to prepare, is expected to deliver a more coherent vision, one that he has claimed will openly celebrate “the plural” as “the very essence” of art. For the Italian Pavilion, which is always given over to the director to make his own special statement on the contemporary scene, Storr has selected artists that include photographer, Rosemary Laing. New York represented Laing is the first Australian to be picked for the Italian Pavilion, eclipsing the past efforts of venerated Australian Venice veterans such as Nolan, Boyd, Kngwarreye or Tillers.

In the national lineup at this, the 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice’s Olympian pretensions finally widen to include previously “unexplored” territories, with the addition of Turkey, India and Africa for the first time. This pitch has been mired in controversy over the choice of works from the Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art for the African exhibition, following reporting of Sindika Dokolo’s alleged links with Angola’s repressive diamond trade. Despite this development, the opening up of the Biennale to African art is a good thing, and means to reflect an international art scene which operates in an age of globalised trade and technological convergence, increasingly estranged from any notion of (an occidental) centre. Of course, Venice during the three day Vernissage literally embodies that centre, as the artworld’s rich and powerful, from billionaire collectors to celebrity artists, converge to see and be seen with 30,000 of their closest friends and admirers.

The Australia Council attributed 2005’s record attendance of 187,000 visitors to see Ricky Swallow at then Australian Pavilion to the efforts of entrepreneurial commissioner John Kaldor. Kaldor led a donor group of some 75 collectors around Venice who had paid a minimum $5000 to earn champion partner status as a supportor Australia’s Venice presence. All very corporate. Chosen to play for Australia this year are three artists – Susan Norrie, Daniel von Sturmer, and Callum Morton – whose work, in a break from tradition, will be presented in three different locales across Venice, a move away from the exclusive use of the unfortunate beach shack that doubles as the Australian Pavilion on the hallowed Giardini di Castello. This year von Sturmer’s video will inhabit the difficult Giardini space, while Norrie will show at the Fondazione Levi and Morton at an uncertain venue. Tracey Emin (Britain) and Sophie Calle (France) will add class to the contest. If you haven’t booked your room yet, you won’t be going.

www.labiennale.org/en/art/

Vernissage: June 7, 8, 9 for invited guests. Runs till November.

Art 38 Basel

After some well-earned R&R on the Veneto, most art life aficionados will car-pool private jets to deposit them in Basel, Switzerland, for the world’s premier commercial art fair. If Venice is for the artworld’s collective brainstrust, Basel is set up for its collective trust funds. At Art 38 Basel -- it’s their 38^th year – organizers invite about 300 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries which will display the often engaging wares of 2000 of the world’s leading artists; a show so exclusive, some of the world’s most prominent dealers can’t buy themselves an invite. For collectors, all this worlds’ best practice might make Basel appear as though its put on for those to whom six-figures for an artwork is small change. And it is. Still organisers claim the fifty thousand visitors it gets over 5 days “come to see the most rigorously juried selection of what the international art market has to offer, and to meet the insiders and stars of the art scene.” In a pluralist artworld this may seem hype, but it’s also true.

Art Basel divides itself up into Art Premiere (for multiples and editions and emerging galleries), Art Statements (a series of solo shows by selected artists) and Art Unlimited (for large-scale installations and projects). After you’ve snapped up a Miro, a Rusha, two Hirsts, and a Warhol, mingle with the great and good at the cafés on the Messeplatz. From “Down Under”, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery will travel to Basel for the twelfth consecutive year. And outside the main exhibition, the Liste 07 survey of young artists is always interesting and the extraordinary Beyeler Foundation, just outside Basel, will still have its landmark, Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art running (till 15 July.

www.art.ch/go/id/ss/

Tuesday, 12 June, 2007 Vernissage for invited guests, runs till 17 June.

documenta XII

If Venice anoints the artists who will be sold at Basel, Kassel is where they typically made their name. Known for breaking the careers of younger artists, documenta’s key venue is the Fridericianum, opened in 1779 as Europe's first public museum. Bombed by the Allies in 1945, it’s damaged frame would be the venue of documenta I, in 1955 by Arnold Bode, whose exhibition of works by modernist icons such as Arp, Beckmann, Klee, Matisse, Mondrian, Kandinsky, de Chirico, Chagall and Picasso, among others, at once renewed post-war German art connection with its past and renounced the repression encapsulated by the Nazi’s infamous exhibition of “Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art in Munich in 1937. Over the decades documenta, always influential, became archetypically monumental. Okwui Enwezor’s documenta XI in 2002 drew 650,000 visitors but was criticised for being so broad it verged on indigestible. documenta XII director Roger Buergel was tight-lipped on any concrete details at a press conference in February, and confirmed just two artists: Ferran Adria, who is actually a leading Barcelona chef; and Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, who will present a Bach cantata performed by a deaf choir. Buergal, an art historian, has revealed that he wants to ask his audience three questions: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and the ever-popular, Education: What is to be done? The cognoscenti’s concern is if we can’t come up with the answers who will have failed? Buergel or us? Kassell, the town, is a mixed bag. When visiting Australia earlier this year, curator Ruth Noack, coincidentally, also director Buergal’s partner, told the Sydney Morning Herald the “food is terrible, the hotel’s suck,” and “people only go to Kassel… for the art”. It gets crowded.

www.documenta12.de/informationen.html?&L=1

Vernissage: 14 & 15 June 2007.

sculpture projects muenster 07

It cannot be merely coinicidence that MoMA, New York, will open a 40-year retrospective of US sculptor Richard Serra’s monumental minimalism just two weeks before the fourth international Münster Sculpture Project, or the sculpture projects muenster. Mounted every ten years since 1977 in this lively German university town, Münster is the pinnacle for contemporary sculptors, and has been a bellwether to the careers of the likes of Serra, Jeff Koons, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and Martin Kippenerger. This year 35 artists have been invited to create new, site-specific work in the city. Expect works from Thomas Schütte, Rosemarie Trockel, and Mark Wallinger to attract attention. The reliably brilliant and esteemed curator, Kasper König, will again oversee Munster, which he has nurtured since the beginning with Klaus Bussmann of the Landesmuseum in Munster.

http://www.skulptur-projekte.de/aktuell/?lang=en

Grand opening, 16 June

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First published in Australian Art Collector

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Turner Prized

Michael Hutak profiles Australian critic and curator Jonathan Turner.

While the international success of Australian artists has become commonplace, it's much rarer to encounter a writer/curator making their mark in the rarefied circles of the international contemporary art scene. Which is what makes Sydney-born's Jonathan Turner Continental presence so noteworthy. Turner, working out of Rome and Amsterdam, has since the early 1980s curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the U.S., Thailand, Macau, Australia, New Zealand. He recently won the prestigious Premio A.B.O., awarded annually to the most influential critic/curator in Italian contemporary art and beyond. Previous recipients have included Rome's current Mayor Walter Veltroni, artists Joseph Kosuth and Enzo Cucchi, English collector Alex Sainsbury, and Danilo Eccher, director of Rome's Museum of Contemporary Art.

"Although it is just an ugly piece of metal, it is in solid silver," Turner quipped in an interview with Australian Art Collector on his rooftop terrace in central Rome. "They even bottle a special wine for the event." The award is named for its patron, Achille Bonito Oliva, director of the 1993 Venice Biennale and best known for single-handedly promoting the influential Italian contemporary movements, Ipermanierismo (Hypermannerism) and transavanguardia, (Trans-avantgarde). Turner first worked with Oliva in Venice in '93 when Turner was on the selection committee of Aperto, the section at Venice dedicated to emerging international talent which that year featured a young Sydney artist, Hany Armanious. Turner considers Oliva "one of the most brilliant, fascinating, charming, and also irritating men you are likely to meet. He was extremely important figure in Italian and European contemporary art in the 1960s and 1970s and invented, the Italian version of neo-expressionism. He identified it, he put it together, and basically proposed a completely different view of what Italian art was considered at the time, which was the arte povera, championed by Germano Celant."

Turner triangulates his time between Rome, Sydney and Amsterdam: "I've put on Italian and Australian shows in Holland as well as Dutch shows in Italy and so on." The author of scores of artists' monographs, he writes widely on European contemporary art for titles like ART + Auction and Flash Art, and has been the Rome correspondent for US magazine Artnews for more than 20 years. In Rome he has been a driving force behind the annual contemporary art fair RIPA and has had a long relationship with Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome's leading contemporary commercial gallery, where in 2005 Turner curated and an all-Australian group show that featured Tracey Moffatt, Maree Azzopardi, Paul Ferman and others. Turner has also curated shows in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, mainly the Nederlands, for Australians Patricia Piccinini, John McRae, William Yang. In Australia he is probably best known for bringing a touring exhibition of iconic French art photographers Pierre et Gilles to Sydney and Melbourne in 1995. "I work a lot with Roslyn Oxley, Martin Browne and Robin Gibson in Sydney and with Tolarno in Melbourne and Libby Edwards." In the summer of 2007 Turner returned to Australia to curate solo shows for Azzopardi and Ferman.

However it's his internationalist approach that earned him the ABO. "I only work with artists whose work I appreciate. There are a lot artists, both Australian and otherwise, who I've been working with for more than 20 years … I'm not Italian, but I also don't view myself or my work as being a national representative of anything. And again, even though I've lived in Rome for more than twenty years now, I've returned every year to Australia to work - and I feel 'at home' wherever I am."

In this era of the touring blockbuster, Turner believes the independent contemporary art scene has adjusted well by "moving beyond elitism and is thriving. I'm seeing more private philanthropists than I did before, and more collectors and patrons are taking up the role of developing artists that business used to occupy more. I used to work a lot more with business, I'm not now. The corporations that are breaking up collections that they have spent years putting together are very ill-advised."

Turner's criteria for working with collectors: "Anyone with passion is perfect. A good collector tends to have such a strong vision of what they want and like that it's a pleasure to work with them. A collector is never wrong, just like an artist is never wrong." His approach to curating revolves around the demands of the space: "I only organize shows when I know exactly where it is going to be seen. I don't attempt to helicopter a show in, and say here it is, fit it in however you can. Each show must be tailored to the space it will be shown in. You don't try to pander to a particular taste and neither would you pretend that you're so fabulous that people must accept it from on high."

Turner eschews any adoption of a general philosophy of curating: "It can be ad-hoc. Artists tend to need help. And if I think they have talent and I like their work, then if I can help them I do. I'm a bit like a one-man Ministry of Culture." Meanwhile, the art life beckons and our interview ends: "I have to rush, I am going at midday to see two newly restored paintings by Caravaggio, which will be nice for the soul, since both are owned privately, and neither I have seen before."

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First published in
Australian Art Collector
No.40, April 2007

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d/Archive: Michael Hutak

Archive of super 8 films courtesy d/lux/media/arts.

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Quai to the Kingdom

TEARS flowed freely at last week’s press preview of the landmark Aboriginal art commission at the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum in the heart of Paris dedicated to non-western art. Surrounded by the media and basking under the artwork that has colonised the ceiling of one wing of the complex, East Arnhem Land artist Gulumbu Yunupingu broke down as she contemplated the moment. “I can’t believe I am here in Paris, underneath this, my gift to you. My painting brings us together and brings us healing; I am proud that you people here in Paris recognise my painting ... We standing here together. We are standing here strong.”

It was a cathartic moment at the end of a four-year journey that began when French President Jacques Chirac personally petitioned Prime Minister John Howard to join in his pet project on the Seine: a museum, a paean to the diversity and creativity of the world’s people, a project that could not be complete, implored Chirac, without a cultural contribution from Australia’s first people.

The $398m project, the first major museum to open in Paris since the Musée d’Orsay in 1986, attracted controversy from the outset. First due to its origins in two vast state collections of art and artefacts (some 350,000 objects) pillaged primarily from France’s former colonies, and secondly for its self-serving function as Chirac’s bricks-and-mortar legacy in the city where it all began for the former mayor.

In a multicultural nation recently racked by a rioting immigrant population drawn from former colonies, Chirac said the museum was an homage “to peoples who have suffered conquest, violence and humiliation”. Curiously, no solidarity with such black-armband sentiments was forthcoming from the large Australian contingent of benefactors, bureaucrats, curators, artists and their representatives in Paris to celebrate the product at hand, the $1.4m Australian Indigenous Art Commission at MQB.

There was much talk about this being the largest ever Aboriginal art commission, about the respect in Europe for Aboriginal painting, that it was finally being recognised in the cradle of modern art as one of the great movements of the 20th century. All of which is true, but the tone was hollow. As one local dealer in Aboriginal art complained, it was a story not underpinned by cultural cringe but overlaid with “cultural arrogance”. Another local said it had been “a difficult collaboration from the French side. The Australians seemed to think because they were paying for it, they could dictate to us.”

Official claims from both camps that the project puts “Australian indigenous art at the heart of the architectural project” are overstated if not inaccurate. The Australian artists’ efforts augment not the museum proper but its administration block: an ancillary, conventional modern office building which bears no immediately apparent relationship to the striking, unique structure housing the main collection. Putting architect Jean Nouvel’s protean reputation to one side, rather than a meeting of media, it appears the art has been accommodated into an already designed structure.

This accommodation, overseen by Sydney architects Cracknell & Lonergan, has nevertheless installed a visually stunning result, melding the designs and motifs of the eight artists into what are essentially typical workplaces, and avoiding what could easily have been a lapse into mere décor. The works, by artists of such standing as Yunupingu, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, and John Mawurndjul, are elegantly transposed onto the building’s surfaces using the structure as a gigantic framing device. As co-curator Hetti Perkins noted: “It is finished and it is good.” However, while the ceiling designs have been installed to be seen by passers-by from the street, the public will not have unfettered access inside. The permanent exhibition of Australian indigenous works in the MQB suffers for being tucked away and hung in relative obscurity, doing an injustice to the works on display, headed by a selection of barks acquired in the 1950s arranged floor to ceiling as if in a fin-de-siècle salon.

The Australia Council has attracted criticism for jumping at high-profile overseas opportunities which play well at home but leave no lasting footprints. This may be changing, with the announcement of a three-year program to promote indigenous art overseas, of which the MQB is the first project.

And when arts-loving adman Harold Mitchell was approached by the AC to donate $350,000 to secure the project to completion, he had long-term caveats. “We were excited by the project but suggested they take it a step further. So we pitched in another $150,000 for a publications program for 10 years and set up our young curators’ program.” Each year a young indigenous Australian curator will take up a residency at MQB and develop a project in conjunction with the museum.

Ironically, Mitchell admitted he doesn’t collect Aboriginal art himself. “Bugger me, I just don’t,” he told The Bulletin. “But I will now. I actually just believed in this project – I reckon it will be very good over the long term both for Aboriginal people and Aboriginal art. And we’ll be going up to some of the art communities later this year and we’ll make sure we pick up some pieces then.”.
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First published in The Bulletin

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Dead Aphorism [1991 - 2006]

Dead Aphorism [1991-2006]
Colour photocopy on foamcore.
Exhibited at "Metaphysical TV [still]", May 2006, Loose Projects, Sydney

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Metaphysical TV [still]

"Metaphysical TV" was the name of a group of film makers working in
Super 8 in the 1980s who generated their content by shooting directly off the tv
screen. The work in this show will not be screen-based but will be
stills and prints relating to the original obsessions of the group.

This show is also the first in a series of Loose Weeks at Loose
Projects.
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May 24 to May 27, 2006. Opening Wednesday, May 24, 6pm.
Loose Projects, 2nd Floor, 168 Day Street, Sydney.

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Death on a Wing

A flu pandemic that could strike without warning and kill millions is on its way.

With the world economy locked into open trade and globalisation, and security wracked by terrorism and fundamentalism, you could forgive the planet’s leaders for being distracted. It’s hard to conceive of anything so tumultuous that it could deliver us beyond the post-September 11 era of suicide bombers and chronic poverty, religious fanaticism and rampant militarism, of record profits and jaded celebrities, cosmetic surgery and low interest rates.

Nothing, except a global influenza pandemic. With the conditions ripe and the world overdue for another global outbreak, government and corporate decision-makers have been jolted in recent months to consider the consequences.

Human flu pandemics spread quickly to all parts of the globe and typically infect more than a quarter of the total population. They deliver high levels of morbidity and mortality and cause major social disruption. There were three pandemics in the 20th century: in 1918, 1957 and 1968. In 1976, governments planned for an outbreak that never came. And there have been false alarms, where novel strains of the virus have been identified but have ended in few cases and limited human-to-human transmission. But in January 2004, health officials became alarmed at the outbreak in humans of a new and dangerous strain of the virulent H5N1 virus, better known as avian or bird flu in Asia. Officials believe all the prerequisites for the start of an influenza pandemic have been met save one: the establishment of efficient and sustained human-to-human transmission of the virus.

After H5N1’s first appearance in humans, in Hong Kong in 1997 when six out of 18 confirmed cases died, the spread ceased after authorities culled Hong Kong’s entire chicken population of 1.5 million. But the virus itself did not disappear. It simply retreated to China’s southern Guangdong province, where it had first been identified in ducks. Between 1998 and 2003, H5N1 evolved through 17 strains at high speed, becoming more pathogenic and resilient, hopping hosts from wild to domestic birds, and to mammals such as pigs and, since 2004, to humans again. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation says 140 million birds have died or been destroyed and the combined losses to gross domestic product are estimated at $US10bn to $US15bn ($12.97bn to $19.45bn). Since the first case in Vietnam in December 2003, there have been 111 laboratory-confirmed human cases of avian flu, with 57 deaths in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and now Indonesia. What has virologists worried is the potential of H5N1 to recombine into a virulent new human-to-human strain, capable of unleashing an unprecedented contagion around the world that would kill millions.

With the first official instance of human-to-human transmission reported in September 2004 in Thailand, the World Health Organisation declared the world had now “moved closer to a new pandemic than it has been at any time since 1968”. In February this year, WHO announced it had entered the pandemic alert period – phase three in its six-phase alert scale, where there are incidents of human infection with a new strain but as yet no human-to-human spread. Some experts believe we have already moved to phase four, with confirmed clusters of cases of human-to-human transmission in Vietnam and China and, last month, in Indonesia. More recently, the fact that migratory birds had spread the virus from western China to Russia’s European frontier in just three weeks – spurring five suspected human cases in northern Kazakhstan – have pushed consensus on the near-term probability of a pandemic from “if” to “when”.

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SHE’LL BE RIFE
How the pandemic would devastate Australia. If a pandemic with an attack rate of 25% (one-quarter of the population affected) were to occur again in Australia and there was no vaccine or treatment available, over a six-eight week period it could lead to:
* 13,000 to 44,000 deaths
* 57,900 to 148,000 hospitalisations
* 2.6 to 7.5 million outpatient visits.
The figures are estimates only and the likely outcomes associated with a pandemic will depend on many factors such as the transmissibility and virulence of the virus, and the availability and success of health and social interventions.

(Source: Australian Government Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza)

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With the virus permanently established in birds in large parts of Asia, “the threat to human health will persist as long as the problem persists in animals”, says Dr Peter Horby, public health expert with WHO in Hanoi. Alarmed by the inadequacy of national and international plans to cope with such a global health emergency, two respected American journals, Foreign Affairs and Nature, in a co-ordinated effort devoted their July issues to “The Next Pandemic”.

In the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, 400 million people were clinically infected and more than 40 million people perished, out of a global population of 2 billion. A pandemic of that order today would kill between 180 million and 360 million people within 18 months. World trade and international travel would be brought to a standstill, plummeting productivity would usher in economic depression, and the short supply and unequal distribution of effective drugs, coupled with overwhelmed public health facilities, quarantines and restrictions on the movement and association of citizens, would lead to social unrest that would destabilise governments everywhere, notwithstanding the exponential increase in security threats from insurgents and terrorists. Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious disease expert for the American Department of Homeland Security, writes in Foreign Affairs: “The reality of the coming pandemic ... cannot be avoided. Only its impact can be lessened.”

That’s the worst case scenario we should prepare for if we are to heed the warnings of respected health experts. The messages are getting through. In recent weeks, governments, international agencies and corporations have taken steps to brace for the coming calamity. Scientists, while alarmed, still cannot tell us when the pandemic will occur — it could be tomorrow, in six months or six years. But they have told political leaders it’s time to scramble, to begin planning for the worst and hoping for the best.

Still, no politician wants to risk being called Chicken Little. Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott told reporters last week: “There’s a fine line to be trod here between scaring people over something that might never happen and alerting people to something that may very well happen.” The federal government has walked that fine line in recent months, implanting the notion of pandemic preparedness into the public’s brain stem, while emphasising that we’re still in a “no worries, she’ll be right” phase.

Following WHO’s lead, Australia in March went to “Overseas Three” in its own six-step pandemic scale. In June, the government’s “Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza” was launched, along with a new slogan: Prepared and Protected. Abbott laid out Australia’s game plan: “The initial objective would be to attempt to prevent its appearance in Australia for as long as possible. Once there was a case in Australia, we would be determined to limit its spread within this country for as long as possible. And once there was a widespread outbreak, treatment and prevention, prophylaxis, would be our principal objective.”

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THE SPANISH FLU
Estimated deaths
* 1918 pandemic 40 million
* World War I 8.3 million

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With WHO estimating at least a six-month lag from outbreak to the development of an effective vaccine, much has been made of the efficacy of the key anti-viral agent oseltamivir, with the tradename Tamiflu. Recent reports that the government has “cornered the world market” in Tamiflu ignore conflicting evidence that many of those infected with H5N1 who took Tamiflu still died, often from the secondary pneumonias that take the heaviest toll in such pandemics. “In responding to a pandemic,” Osterholm notes in Foreign Affairs, “Tamiflu could have a measurable impact in countries with sizeable stockpiles.” Like Australia. But there is “no evidence” that Tamiflu helps if the patient develops the “cytokine storm that characterises the recent H5N1 infections”. Here the immune system fights the virus with such ferocity that the lungs in a sense melt and the patient suffocates.

Public statements from all sides of politics in recent days reflect a lack of engagement with the nature of the threat identified by experts. Greens senator Bob Brown has called for Tamiflu to be sold over the counter, instead of only by prescription. The distinction is moot if there isn’t enough to go round. If the pandemic obliges by striking when we are ready, there will still only be one dose available for every five Australians. Latest clinical trials indicate the effective dose of Tamiflu is much higher than previously expected, meaning even less of the drug to go round. As for vaccine, Osterholm predicts it “would have no impact on the course of the virus in the first months and would likely play an extremely limited role worldwide”. And the government’s agreements with two overseas vaccine manufacturers may come to nothing should their host countries nationalise vaccine production in the event of a pandemic, as the US did in 1976 when it refused to share vaccine for the swine flu pandemic it was expecting but never came.
In a speech to the Australia Indonesia Business Council on August 1, Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd identified “one of the key challenges in the early detection of bird flu was the reluctance of poultry farmers to report the disease for fear their entire flocks, and livelihoods, would be destroyed”. It may be a challenge in China, but for Australia the more pressing concern is when the human-to-human transmission takes hold and the disease sweeps in like any of the “normal” seasonal flus. In this situation, border protection becomes immaterial. According to Foreign Affairs’ Laurie Garrett, “No nation can erect a fortress against influenza ... national policy-makers would be wise to plan now for worst case scenarios involving quarantines, weakened armed services and dwindling hospital space and vaccines.

“The greatest weakness that each nation must individually address is the inability of their hospitals to cope with a sudden surge of new patients ... the potential for pandemic comes at a time when the world’s public health systems are severely taxed and have long been in decline.”
In this context, last week’s announcement by Abbott and state health ministers that they would stage a “mock outbreak” in December to test hospital capacity will be scrutinised – that’s if we get the luxury of having a trial run. The government’s worst case estimate is that in the event of a pandemic, 2.6 million people would need medical attention, with up to 148,000 hospitalised. We should expect that these numbers will be put to the test.

In the event of a pandemic, the flow of free and accurate information will be more than an ethic; it will be a matter of public health and safety. The last time the spectre of 1918 was invoked was in 1976 when US President Gerald Ford put the nation on alert. Swine flu never materialised, and Ford and confidence in the US public health system were damaged.

Chinese authorities were heavily criticised for suppressing news of the SARS outbreak, and then minimising its seriousness. Now there are worrying signs again from China. In July, a Hong Kong laboratory had its research on the H5N1 strain suspended by China’s Ministry of Agriculture. The ministry also dismissed research by the lab on the recent H5N1 outbreak among migratory birds in western China. The WHO has complained that China is not sharing samples of the outbreak strain.

All this highlights the need for international organisations like the WHO to be free to monitor any pandemic impartially. However, such organisations are critically under-resourced. The WHO has an annual budget of just $400m, and can intervene only when invited by a country.

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THE BUG PICTURE
* H5N1 has found a new ecological niche in poultry in parts of Asia.
* The virus is now more deadly in poultry and in the mammalian mouse model.
* New animals – cats and tigers – are becoming infected for the first time, suggesting the virus is expanding its host range.
* Domestic ducks are excreting large quantities of virus without showing symptoms.
* Viruses from 2004 survive longer in the environment than viruses from 1997.
* The virus is killing at least some wild migratory birds.
* These changes have created multiple opportunities for a pandemic virus to emerge.

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First published in The Bulletin

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Venice Biennale: It's the thought that counts

The invisible, the maudlin, the magic at the 51st Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte - AKA the Venice Biennale.

“Ohhh! This is so contempory [sic], contempory, contempory.” So mocked the fake gallery attendants in a singsong that greeted art lovers who wandered into the German Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most prestigious contemporary art festival.

Employed by 29-year-old Berliner Tino Sehgal, the attendants were the artwork. Their catchy refrain would prove difficult to shake, as some 15,000 critics, curators and collectors – and more than a few stray movie and pop stars – hummed their way across the sinking city, devouring the latest the art world has to offer.

In the 51st Biennale to inhabit the elegant Giardini di Castello and some 40 other splendid Venetian venues, that offering boiled down to reams of video art, stacks of installation, oodles of photography, a painting or two, and a sizeable dose of the proudly unclassifiable – works such as Sehgal’s, or works such as could be found (or rather not found) at the Romanian pavilion. Here Daniel Knorr decided that the exhibition space, left unkempt since the 2003 Biennale, looked fine just as he found it. It was the latest in a series of works he calls “invisible” art. It’s the thought that counts. And in the cerebral world of contemporary art, that’s often all there is.

In the elder statesperson category, the transatlantic alliance posed by professional iconoclasts Gilbert & George in the British pavilion and the magnificently maudlin works of American painter Ed Ruscha was more than matched for Old Europe by veteran French installation artist Annette Messager, whose gorgeous, if incomprehensible, telling of the tale of Pinocchio won her the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion.

No such ethereal mind games at the Australian Pavilion, where art ain’t art unless you can see it, smell it, pick it up and either buy it, or damage it and have to pay for it. New traditionalist woodworker Ricky Swallow presented his new selection of hand-made sculptures carved from jetulong to augment his 2003 masterpiece Killing Time, which took pride of place in the dimly lit pre-fab pavilion that could double as a demountable schoolroom or a stylish beach shack, circa 1988.

London resident Swallow scooped the pool on the opening day of the press preview, thanks to the hallowed presence of Cate Blanchett, who was convinced by Sydney art dealer Martin Browne to lend some Hollywood glamour for “Team Australia”. Blanchett quickly took it away with her again after a chaotic photo opportunity and a rousing, generous speech – “This is visceral stuff: blood and guts, death, the theatre of display, the pivot point between bloom and decay ...” – leaving only Swallow’s menacing works to fly the flag at these art olympics. Sadly the publicity coup generated by Our Cate only deflected attention from Swallow’s gruesome 1:1 dioramas of “freshly” killed animals, skeletons, skulls and vipers: “Blanchett supports artist in Venice” read a typical headline.

Elsewhere, reviews have been favourable. London’s Daily Telegraph listed Swallow as one of the Biennale’s “Ten Hot Artists”, lauding his “certain boyish cool”. More important for the artist’s career was the steady stream of art world heavyweights who popped in to ogle: Tate Modern director Vincente Todoli, Peggy Guggenheim director Philip Rylands, Biennale president Davide Croff, and curators from Britain’s National Gallery and New York’s MoMA. And über-curator Robert Storr, already appointed director of the 2007 Biennale, spent an hour with Swallow and his curator Charlotte Day, dissecting the work the day before the exhibition opened to the press.

Swallow, stoic son of a fisherman, remained above the hubbub even as he bathed in the limelight: “Having been cooped up in abstract isolation for the better part of a year producing these works, it’s been very rewarding to see them suddenly unleashed to this sort of reception,” he told The Bulletin. “But I really don’t think we’ll be able to assess what it means to show here until all this dies down a little.”

The Australia Council spent $1.4m on this year’s Venice adventure, more than half of it coming from private funds marshalled by Sydney arts patron John Kaldor, who was appointed official commissioner. The funding structure set up by Kaldor looked more like an Olympic bid, with its hierarchy of corporate and private donors. To be included in Kaldor’s inner sanctum cost $25,000. For $5000, you got listed in the official catalogue as a “Champion Donor”, plus a private tour of the Guggenheim and tickets to an ultra-exclusive Australian party at the Hotel Cipriani, an event that put plenty of noses out of joint among the large Australian contingent in Venice. While the event may have (briefly) “boasted” a celebrity in the form of Rolling Stone guitarist Ron Wood, the tenor was more that of the launch of a new managed fund than a celebration of a gifted Australian artist – or of Australian art for that matter.

The real tale of Australia at Venice was a repeat of 2003, when the only living Australian artist on show was the one we got to choose for our own pavilion. The Australia Council says they invited Biennale co-curator Rosa Martinez to visit Australia to assess artists for the curated shows outside the Giardini, “but she couldn’t find the time to come”. Beyond the national pavilions, Martinez and co-curator Maria de Corral have put together two spare but exhilarating shows of just 90 artists with stellar works by the great, such as Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Marlene Dumas, and the very, very good, such as video artists, South African Candice Breitz and Korean Kimsooja. This is in stark contrast to 2003 director Francesco Bonami’s sprawling effort, when he enlisted 12 curators to mount a show of 350 artists.

It wouldn’t be a Biennale without controversy and this year another German, 2001 Golden Lion winner Gregor Schneider, obliged when his proposal for a huge black metal cube for Piazza San Marco was deemed too provocative. The work, a replica of the sacred Ka’ba in Mecca, caused consternation among organisers who were “concerned that it could hurt the religious emotions of the Muslim community”. Fears that the work would render the city a target for terrorist attack shows just how far freedom of expression has been wound back in the post-September 11 era.

The Venice Biennale runs until November.

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First published in The Bulletin, Volume 123; Number 12

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Market penetration

A LONG time ago, in a land far away, The Blob was one of my favourite movies. Apparently they're doing a remake. That's about all I can be bothered finding out about the remake of the The Blob at this stage.

If you want to know more go and look it up yourself. There are stacks of online resources where you can get all the information you could ever possibly want - and never possibly need - about The Blob and the remake of The Blob. All the goss, all the speculation, all the dross that's unfit to print, but that's so easy and painless to publish online.

And herein lies a problem. The web is awash with too much publicity for nothing worth promoting. Too much spin masquerading as informed opinion. Today movie marketing and film culture are interchangeable, indistinguishable. It is almost exclusively a commercialised sphere - not exactly news in an era of unprecedented penetration of the market into everyday life, almost everywhere on Earth.

American cinema, in particular, is looking wan and tired as its big screen epics heave and clumber round the cineplexes, creating carefully staged ripples of soon-to-be-forgotten pyrotechnic spectacle. As a mass cultural phenomenon, The Movie seems to be losing its conceptual lustre before our very eyes, fragmenting into re-usable chunks of corporate output, part of a matrix of cultural products that includes games, DVDs, marketing and merchandise. Profits are up, gravitas is down.

The surging games industry, now a bigger entertainment "sector" in raw market terms, is itself driving much movie content, while throwing up a greater challenge to the global cultural hegemony of "Hollywood" than TV ever did in the '60s. TV's challenge spurred a financial crisis in the movie business. Today its challenge is one of relevance, supercession and obsolescence. If Hollywood doesn't speak for America Inc. or serve the nation as Washington's mouthpiece anymore, who does it speak for? Moreover, who cares?

The US movie business is geared to serving shareholders and corporate masters over audiences. In fact they're in the business of creating audiences; it's the audience that's the product, not the movie; it's the audience that delivers the profit, not the movie. Most movies are just steaming piles of creative and intellectual waste made only to deliver us - and we're just here to be seduced then abandoned (A.K.A. entertained). This is rarely a satisfactory contract, and irreparable disconnect is imminent, if not already upon us. Even in the face of unprecedented competition for entertainment dollar, the movie business appears on a mission to drive away its key profit driver - its audience - through sheer boredom and indifference.

In other words, enough words wasted on the remake of The Blob. I may catch it on cable in a year or two. Then I'll forget it immediately.

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Mona Hatoum: Exile from main street

Endoscopy, electricity and estrangement drive the thought-provoking art of Mona Hatoum.

"I don't know where this is going," interjects Mona Hatoum during an exclusive interview with The Bulletin last month. "Is this about me or is it about the work?" Well, when you're one of the most lionised figures in contemporary art, about to mount your first Australian show, and it's called Over My Dead Body, then it's got to be about both.

A survey of Hatoum's sculpture, performance and installation since 1992, the show was nabbed for Sydney by Museum of Contemporary Art director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, when she saw it at Berlin's prestigious Hamburger Kunsthalle lastyear. Hatoum will be in Sydney to oversee the show's installation and participate in public Q&A sessions.

"Much of my work gives a sense of uneasiness with the world," says the Beirut-born Palestinian, who has lived in Britain since 1975 when civil war broke out in Lebanon. "There's an estrangement or alienation ... A lot of works refer to everyday objects which in being transformed become unusable or threatening. There's an undercurrent of some kind of malevolent force." For instance Incommunicado (1993) presents a cot as designed by sadists, made from cold steel with a base of razor-wire where the mattress should be. Malevolent indeed, but in terms of pure design, it is cold, seductive and beautifully executed.

More recent work such as Homebound (2000) "deals with the home and can be seen in terms of women and domestic entrapment, domestic violence". An array of objects - tables, chairs, cups, lampshades, beds - are wired for electricity and alternately glow and buzz. Surrounding the exhibit is a wire fence that has the spectator wondering if it too is electrified. Hatoum says "it's really just to make people question their environment". One much-visited theme refers to architecture as "a kind of institutional violence - as structures that imprison, constrict or regiment the body in some way." In Light Sentence (1992), a "swinging lightbulb casts moving shadows against the wire-mesh [cage] and the whole effect is kind of woozy, like the ground is shifting under your feet." And let's not forget surveillance. InHatoum's celebrated Corps Etranger (Foreign Body), a microscopic camera makes a strangely compelling journey. "The film is shot inside my body using endoscopy," she explains. "It's very seductive but also disgusting. People want to follow it and see where it's going ... it has this double edge to it. It's like invading the boundaries of the body and taking surveillance to an extreme."

Hatoum is also keen to set the record straight on the media’s tendency to distort and “sex up” her biography as some sort of “exotic other”.

“It is a problem,” she laments. “Some people always think that I’m speaking as someone who grew up in Lebanon or from the experience of an exile. It does sometimes enter into the work because I have been displaced, because I’ve had to deal with very different environments, leaving my culture and entering another culture, nothing is secure or stable or understandable, but it doesn’t mean that everything I do is framed by my biography. The geographic part is not what makes the work.

“People often call me a refugee, but please do not describe me as a refugee,” she continues. “It’s an insult to refugees to call me one and I don’t want people to think I’m trying to get any mileage that way. I mean I’m exiled from Lebanon, my parents were exiled from Palestine, but they were never actually refugees.” Hatoum cites a recent monograph that said her my mother (who died three years ago) was living in Sabra and Sha-tila camp, “which is simply not true.”

“I don’t where people get these bizarre facts from. One writer said Light Sentence was about the architecture of the Palestinian camps – I mean how did they come up with that? They obviously have never been to a Palestinian camp, these places grow up very organically, there’s nothing programmatic or regimented about them.”

Hatoum’s is the exemplary post-Cold War contemporary art resume: a graduate of London’s esteemed Slade School of Art, represented in serious public collections from MoMA to the Tate, she had her first solo show at the Pompidou in 1994; was short listed for the Turner Prize in 1995 (and was favoured to win but was pipped by the Shark-embalming controversialist, Damien Hirst); joined Jay Jopling’s white hot stable at White Cube gallery in London the same year; was included in the Charles Saatchi’s landmark landmark 1997 show, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection; and since the early nineties has been traveling the globe, mounting shows of destabilising wit in public galleries, museums and art fairs, all to a chorus of gut-wrenching, teeth grinding approbation.

Not that it’s gone to her head. She denounces any association with the YBA’s and renounces the patronage of Saatchi: “I’m ten years older than all these guys. The only reason I was in Sensation is that Saatchi got his hands on one of my works. In fact at my first show at White Cube (in 1995) he wanted to buy everything and I said no, I didn’t want to be part of that. He managed to get hold of a couple of works and that was why I was in Sensation but now he’s since sold them all.” (Coincidentally, Deep Throat (1996), the work that appeared in Sensation, still stands as Hatoum’s auction saleroom record, selling for £60,950 at Christie’s London in 2002, against an estimate of £25,000-£30,000.) In an age when artists rush to play self-promoting entreprenuer, constructing celebrity to seduce collectors and seeking publicity to attract commissions, Hatoum’s unguarded commitment to art before the art system is refreshing, and undoubtedly (and ironically) one key to her success.

Hatoum was visiting London in 1975 with her parents when the unholy hell of civil war broke out in Lebanon. She would remain in London pursuing a career as an artist. Now it’s collectors and curators who pursue Hatoum and the curators are winning. “I prefer to have my work bought by museums - I’ve only ever done one private commission,” she admits. “I’m always being asked to do private commissions but I don’t really like that very much… I want the work to exist in the public domain and be visible to as many people as possible.”

Firmly in mid-career, approaching two decades at the peak of her profession, can there still be much to wring one’s hands about in this life? You bet. “If one feels alienated or whatever, the fact that one becomes successful, has a bit more money in the bank or becomes recognized as an artist won’t necessarily change that,” she replies. With lesser lights you might doubt their sincerity, but Matoum displays such a healthy indifference to flattery and critical distance from success that it’s obvious she remains steadfastly uncomfortable about the state of world and burns with a need to say so – no matter how wacky, obscure or difficult the saying might be. And hey, it’s contemporary art and she can get away with it.

“Recently I was asked recently why I wanted to be an artist and I replied probably because artists are permitted to break rules. I always felt I was in a very restricted society growing up in Lebanon and felt that art was one way out of that, a licence to go crazy and do whatever I want.”

“For me, the impetus behind making works that show the world as an alien, foreign or maybe hostile place is in some way to articulate the experience of people who are culturally displaced, exiled, or feeling like a foreigner wherever (they) go – I mean that’s not a feeling one can ever change or that ever changes.”

The entire world will remain a foreign land for Mona Hatoum until she departs it. Luckily for posterity and the world’s patrimony, her artworks will remain to prod, provoke and stimulate us into considering what it means to belong to a society, a culture, a people - but also what it means to not belong, to be lonely in the crowd.

Over My Dead Body is at the MCA, Sydney, March 23-May 29
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First published in The Bulletin, Volume 123; Number 12

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