Sydney's Art Gallery

Most of the time I was in Australia I spent in Melbourne, but I did spend a few weeks in Sydney as this is where my best friend has moved to for her exchange year in Zoology. So whilst I was there I decided to visit Australia's largest Art Gallery, I did mean to go to the National Gallery of Victoria but I just never got round to it, I wasn't really impressed by what was on in Sydney so I just didn't make an effort for it.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is on the edge of the Botanical Gardens, which are just beautiful and there's so much wildlife, little birds and white parrots will comes and eat out of your hands and sit with you if you have food. As I walked into the gallery the first section in the entranceway was a mass of embroidery hoops of chinese slang words that have been put into the chinese dictionary since the development of technology. It was very cutesy with lots of dangily threads and I think because I couldn't read chinese I did move on from it quite fast. 

Then we went into the rooms where all the old australian master's were, there were a lot on gold mining, and the war and then they had a room of european masters and painting from the nineteenth century of cumbria and fox hunting so strange. We then moved back to the modern section where there was a really cool exhibition by Jitish Kallat. 

So basically this was three really large walls of Mahatma Gandhi's speech and:

On 12 March 1930, Mahatma Gandhi gave a speech that marked the beginning of his ‘salt march’ in which he walked 390 kilometres to the coastal town of Dandi in the Indian state of Gujarat. There he gathered salt, refusing to pay the tax imposed by the colonial British Government and therefore breaking the law. This simple and now famous act inspired nationwide civil disobedience and is seen as the beginning of an intensified Indian independence movement. Gandhi’s legacy of non-violent protest continues to influence political action worldwide.
In Public notice 2 2007, Indian artist Jitish Kallat renders Gandhi’s historic speech in its entirety, letter by letter. Each letter appears to be made from bone, as though Kallat has exhumed these words from their historical resting place. As Kallat says: ‘In today’s terror-infected world, where wars against terror are fought at prime television time, voices such as Gandhi’s stare back at us like discarded relics.’

 I'd never read this speech before and it was really moving, there's one line from it which I think even now, 85 years later since this speech was given we as a human race still are tackling. "Let no one commit a wrong in anger. This is my hope and prayer." It's cheesy but it really moved me.

The only qualm I did have with it, was that I was so disappointed the bone lettering I looked very closely at, I'm pretty sure the letters were mass made. I think it might of had more of an impact if they were individually crafted. I tried to inspect them as closely as I could and I'm pretty sure there was casting mould lines on them.

I continued around the art gallery, and I was really surprised to see such a large Matisse Section. I didn't realise Henri Matisse was so influential even on this side of the world. I guess it's something I've always underappreciated though, it was such a big deal to have his work out in Sydney, but for us everything in Europe is just so accessible, but out there that culture the society has really had to fight for to see.

But that's not to say they don't have there own. So Aboriginal art is huge. These weird totem poles are actually examples of gravestones that the aboriginals use. Now I went to an exhibition at Melbourne museum to try and understand said culture, but I think because I was mainly in the south and I didn't meet any and everyone I met was really western I just didn't understand. It comes across, that they have been treaten badly in the past by the white colonies but they haven't really helped themselves, they seem to be uneducated, still struggling with housing and because they come from the most desolate part of the country it's where the drug and drinking problems seem to be. Obviously this is a broad waving of stick and not all are like this, there are a lot of talented aboriginal artists, but it is mainly very complicated patterns they do, there's no training of form or perspective in paintings but that's there style. Also in the Melbourne Museum exhibition on Aboriginal people they had a really heart wrenching video on the people making bits of art work like a factory to fob off to tourists, like boomerangs with patterns and so on, mind numbingly painful to watch but they still seemed happy.

After my trip to the Art Gallery I saw the Opera House for the first time and oh my gosh, it was so seventies inside! Even the toilets felt like I was out of an austin powers movie! Also this architecture is not aging well. I am a firm believer that any pebble dashing floor just should not be acceptable anywhere, no way did I think it would be at this Iconic landmark! I was not impressed! However sydney did have a double decker metro system which was super impressive!