The following letter was written by Paul Hopmeier to friends about his response to the Sydney Modern. He has kindly agreed to share the letter here. Please stay posted for other reflections on The Sydney Modern.
‘The New Gallery’
This building is low-density, lots of space and little art. Art per cubic metre feels about a quarter of the old gallery. I have observed some architects who for some reason suffer from painting/sculpture envy. I think of Architecture as an entirely different discipline. Architecture has, or used to have, the role of not only lifting our spirits but fulfilling a function. However, the joke used to be that if a building didn’t have leaks, it wasn’t good architecture. There have been comparisons of the new gallery with the Opera House. Architecture usually has an interior and an exterior. The exterior of the Opera House just gets better. The interior was disturbed by political interference but I love the views looking up the stairs at the insides of the shells. The function starts with getting us to our seats, but the eminence of the building stays present here. With the new gallery on that sloping site, it can never have the exterior presence of the Opera House. Could it possibly improve with age? The spaces in the Opera house, except for the views onto the harbour, are generally functional. The new gallery has sumptuous architectural views where you might have considered places for viewing art. Maybe I am being curmudgeonly, why shouldn’t architecture and art share the space more equally?
Photo: Robyn Powell Davies
My first experience of ‘Democracy Curating’ was at the Pompidou in 2014, Salon hangs with framed newspapers, children’s art and Matisse all muddled together. Neither doing any of the others any favours. This is the curating style of the new gallery. Exhibitions ranging from the gaudiest popular culture to subtle inclusions of Han sculpture, Ukiyo-e woodblocks and a few very fine barks. This is how you can claim this is ‘Art for all’, but maybe it results in being for no-one in particular. The intention is blatantly to get bums on seats because that is what scores in the end if you are an administrator.
I started in the tank and what a wank. Theatricality is not theatre. This is a drama and humour free zone. Dada encrustations carefully designed, an oxymoron, to fit in a container when dismantled and move through the secret door to the tank on built in wheels. The lighting by its random patchiness creates a curiosity that would never exist if you could see the bloody things but in the end is just annoying. The lights run on tracks across the ceiling and are computer controlled to maintain obscurity not clarity. They come on for a very short time and only ever light part of the accretions. You never get to see the whole thing. The blurb explaining this is hilarious. This is the best part, truly fabulous as in fables, except fables have a whiff of truth to them. Remember Wittgenstein, ‘Things are what they are’, no matter how you try and sell them.
The title is, ‘The End of Imagination’ yet the blurb says these things came from very wild imagining. If you were asked to create a monument to, ‘the end of postcolonial struggles for independence’ on the Moon in 34,340 (presumably) CE, what would you come up with? Neither this nor 500 years on Mars or wind in 7,376023 BCE when apes were around, and man was about to separate from Chimpanzees came to my mind when walking through the tank. Yes, these are all unanswerable but are these ‘sculptures’ answers to the unanswerable or is the blurb wondrous pretension? I obviously lack any poetry because rather than be made aware of the closeness of human extinction, which I think I was supposed to feel, I considered how these things were fabricated, transported from Argentina, set up here and how annoying the lighting was.