Leisurely staring at a painting or simply popping in for a beer at an opening night will no longer cut it.
Melbourne’s contemporary art galleries are attracting more diverse audiences as they increasingly curate demanding, participatory and interactive programs, writes Marissa Shirbin.
In part, it’s all due to a surge in “relational aesthetics” says Gertrude Contemporary’s Communications Manager, Amita Kirpalani.
Marissa talks with Gertrude Contemporary by user1285518
“Relational aesthetics” refers to the production of art outside of private and independent spaces.
“It was sort of picked up in the 90s and more recently has been really mined for its potential to really engage with audiences,” Ms Kirpalani said.
”In the last five years it’s become the moment to engage with different community groups and different audiences who wouldn’t necessarily come into the gallery,” she says.
This year, Gertrude Contemporary exhibitions included an artist-run market, tattoo parlour and reading room.
Midori Mitamura, Art & Breakfast, Tokyo (detail), 2008. Photo: Midori Mitamura
Over at Monash University’s Museum of Art (MUMA), Japanese artist Midori Mitamura’s Art & Breakfast involved the artist cooking and eating breakfast with audiences inside the gallery throughout June and July.
The Ian Potter Museum of Art is currently home to artist Adam Kalkin’s Tennis Academy – an art piece that asks visitors to play inside a mock tennis court and “make the art” as they do so.
Penny Modra, senior arts writer for The Age, says the rise of relational aesthetics in Melbourne makes galleries less intimidating and is beneficial for commercial reasons.
“Let’s look at it in the marketing perspective. I think gallerists are hip to the news cycle and the news cycle is incredibly responsive to dates.
“If you run an exhibition there are two dates: the opening and the closing. So to add more dates into your exhibition (through events) is to get more coverage and more people to the show, which isn’t a bad thing because there is not much art coverage, at least not in the daily papers, in Melbourne,” she said.
With more people coming to shows, Ms Modra says galleries that run on grant funding are also better off.
“The whole system of grant money is unfortunately really bogged down in numbers. Numbers are outcomes. You need to show that what you’re doing is having an outcome.
“If you can have more reasons to invite people in to the gallery event wise, you should do that. That’s a really cynical reasoning I guess,” she says.
Ms Modra says the upcoming Next Wave, Melbourne’s biennial emerging artist’s festival, will be dominated by “relational aesthetics”.
Last year artist Bennett Miller invited audiences and their sausage dogs to Dachshund U.N. – a scale replica of a former U.N office wherein all 47 of the national delegates were replaced with live dachshunds.
