Maria Kozic - Art Collector

First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 10 October-December 1999
A RT I ST P R O F I L E
CRITIC ADRIAN
MARTIN ARGUES
THAT MARIA
KOZIC’S INTENSE
RENDERING OF
POP ART
ESCAPES THE
PIGEONHOLING
OF BOTH
RADICAL AND
CONSERVATIVE
CRITICS…
Maria Kozic
Pop Go the Weasels
I
n the recent art-and-essay video documentary Negative Space, the
British filmmaker Chris Petit (Radio On), armed with his modest,
hand-held, digital camera, cruises the highways and byways of
America looking for one of his cultural heroes, iconoclastic movie
critic and painter Manny Farber. At some point along the way, he
pulls in as a guide to this terrain the no less irascible art historian,
Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy.
Hickey spins a good, loving line on pop art – one of the great
forms of 1950s and 60s culture that indelibly formed his sensibility.
He quotes the observation of his famous friend Peter Schjeldal
about the weirdness of a huge Roy Lichtenstein canvas (the one that
basically blares out the word ‘Wham!’ in vivid, eye-popping colours,
in a stunningly simple but dynamic graphic design) finding its home
in London’s Tate Gallery. “The Brits just don’t get it!”, roars Hickey
with glee, as he puffs frantically on his cigar and curses up a storm.
“It’s just – ‘Wham!’ That’s all it is, right there in front of them!”
No matter how long Hickey’s imaginary Londoners (a dour lot)
stand there, trying to decipher the significance, the gesture, the
political context involved in that ‘Wham!’, they will never get it –
the pure fact, the pure sensation of it. Lichtenstein’s painting
need not even be considered as ironic or cheeky, or a further
blow in that endless, fruitless campaign to reconcile, once and
for all, high culture with low art. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be considered only, or primarily, under such lights. Whatever such pop
art does to our relative and ever-changing sense of values, it
does so in a time and space at one remove from the emotional
immediacy and sensuality of the work.
TOP RIGHT: Maria Kozic, Head (Gun),
1988. Acrylic on canvas, 150x206 cm.
COURTESY: ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY
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I experienced that wham-like shock of immediacy
the first time I clapped eyes upon Maria Kozic’s Crush
series in the mid-1980s. These large, vividly red canvases, renditions of amorous clinches drawn from
various classic Hollywood movies, like From Here to
Eternity, were way beyond the petty intellectual games
and debates that had surrounded the Australian neopop and popist art of the early 1980s. I knew instantly,
as I took in the plaintive force of these Crush paintings,
that the newly forged postmodern rhetoric of pop – all
that talk of ‘second degree’ art, of quotation and displacement and cultural context – was just clutter, at
best a pretext, and at worst an impediment to appreciating this amazing new work by an artist I had
admired since her art school debut in the late 70s.
As Kozic’s reputation and achievement grew both
in Australia and abroad (she now resides in New
York), one heard the inevitable scurrilous, suspicious
rumours that surround any local tall poppy of real
note: that her art was based on the latest thing displayed on the cover of express-posted copies of Flash
Art; or that it was cooked up with a gang of co-conspirators (mainly male) in a microwave oven of
new-fangled critical theory, as if to opportunistically
provide handy illustrations for the newest artspeak.
But Kozic’s art has always forged itself on a different
level entirely. Her work is boundlessly clever, witty and
“Pop culture –
of which Kozic
is a voracious
and passionate
connoisseur –
is the air
she breathes,
her lifeblood“
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inventive – but has nothing to do with the urbane puzzlings of recent art theory. It is conceptual, but always
direct – like Lichtenstein’s Wham! – drawing upon and
enacting a wide range of sense perceptions, bodily
memories and emotional torrents (sex and violence are
big topics in her work). Above all, it is intense – at times
scary to the point of being overwhelmingly horrific; at
other times unexpectedly placid and poetic, reminding
us of the deep and unforced childlike qualities in her
sensibility. Kozic’s art is logical and precisely realised to
a fault; but it grows from intuitions, dreams, impulses
and visions both everyday and subterranean.
Kozic will forever be associated with pop art and
pop culture. Historic (we might even say classical)
pop art inspired her with its ethos, its directness, its
vivid palette, stylish framings and ingenious transformations of ‘found’ material. Pop culture – of which she
is a voracious and passionate connoisseur – is the air
she breathes, her lifeblood: from midday TV
Hollywood movies to the paroxysmic heights of
Japanese toys, manga and anime, Kozic is perpetually
enriched by the shocks and delights of the new. In the
wake of Warhol, she embraces commercial commissions for the artistic and material possibilities they
enable – the opportunity to work in every imaginable
visual and sculptural medium from the smallest (a
postage stamp) to the largest (an inflatable logo-toy
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 10 October-December 1999
atop Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art), via posters, t-shirts,
record covers, installations...
Although Kozic’s links with pop art and pop culture are real,
avowed and vital, I wonder sometimes whether such reference
points do not simply serve to put up fussy, unnecessary barriers
between audiences and her work. At the risk of broaching polemics,
I think it is necessary, in order to clear a path before Kozic’s singular gift, to take the pulse of the whole critical-educational scene
surrounding and often limiting the appreciation of Australian art at
present. For, if any of us experience vague stirrings of discomfort or
trouble as we take in Kozic’s prolific work, it is essentially because
of the way we have been prodded to worry, in grand and lofty terms,
about the contemporary situation of art and culture in general.
And here I will need to take on not the underground, art-school
theorists who once ‘problematised’ Kozic’s art to the nth degree,
but those above-ground commentators and reviewers who today
grumpily eye her work from a high
moral and aesthetic ground.
“Warhol’s retort
One of the most common lines of
assault in contemporary art reviewing is
was that pop
to ascribe to a work or an artist a highwas more about
flown intention, and then to mock the
result for not living up to this intention.
‘liking things’ in
This two-step punch is the common
our crazy, new
manoeuvre uniting art conservatives of
world, rather
all stripes from Giles Auty to Peter
Timms. It is modern art that especially
than decoding
invites this mauling, since impossibly
or destroying
inflated aims – drawn from the language of radical politics and theoretical
them.”
philosophy – can be so easily attached
to it (thanks largely to the earnest but
not always elegant or lucid scribblings
of curators and catalogue writers).
Conservative critiques of this sort typically proceed via formulations like: ‘This artist wants to destroy the institution of art, but his
work is bought by galleries and he wins awards and receives
grants’; ‘This piece bathes in the open-ended, anything-goes ethos
of postmodernism, but it fails to reveal a multiplicity of meanings’;
‘Contributors to this group show aim to subvert all forms of western representationalism and logocentrism, but yet they are still
painting on canvas and giving their works solemn titles’.
Such reactionary reviewing is a form of shadow-boxing: it
scarcely requires the presence of the artwork itself. It is more theoretical – more dependent on signs, fictions and abstract concepts
– than the theories it so mercilessly derides. All its practitioners
need is the merest indication of an abstracted gesture arising from
the artwork, something that triggers an appropriately apocalyptic
alarm bell in the head of the ever-vigilant, hyper-sensitive, cultural-watchdog critic.
So, in place of attempts to describe, decipher or enter into the
spirit of an artist’s expressive register, we read trigger-happy attacks
on fashionable theorems, politically correct platitudes, and institutional artworld follies (all of which, let it be said, do indeed circulate
in abundance). And, of course, contemporary art, thus reduced,
vaporised into mere cliché and evacuated of any possible sense, is
in the same breath decried as reductive, vague, empty of meaning...
There may be no mode of art more prone to this kind of feeble critique than pop art, in all its diverse historical manifestations. The
easiest way to disable such art – armed with a few ringing, choice
quotes from Jean Baudrillard’s early 80s piece ‘Is Pop an Art of
Consumption?’ – is to punch up that same old song on the art-review
jukebox: ‘Pop aims to parody and subvert the ersatz products and
manipulative tricks of a filthy consumer society, but it itself becomes
a mere artworld commodity, aping what it seeks to criticise’.
Warhol’s eternally plain, stony-faced retort to such rhetoric – that
pop was more about ‘liking things’ in our crazy, new world, rather
than decoding or destroying them – has never quite served to dis-
Maria Kozic Is Bitch railway poster promoting the 1991 Bitch series exhibitions. COURTESY: ROSLYN OXLEY9 GALLERY
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arm those commentators who have their anti-pop defences and
prejudices built wall-high. Sometimes, in fact, it seems that nothing even halfway simple about pop can be advanced in public –
since one of the more regrettable legacies of the artworld follies of
the 1980s has been a proliferation of ironic and counter-ironic
moves, nothing ever offered or taken without intense, hermeneutic
suspicion (commonly known as paranoia).
Pop’s simplicity – its inventory of loves and hates, methods and
obsessions – is immediately converted into a Byzantine cultural politics of simulacra and masquerade, a furious square-dance where
values of authentic and counterfeit never stop whizzing around each
other long enough to settle into any comfortably identifiable place.
Lichtenstein’s direct ‘Wham!’ is suddenly more obscured, more veiled
than ever. And the intensity of Kozic’s art is fudged, overlooked,
abstracted into some comment (subversive or complicit, depending
on your politics) upon consumerism or gender stereotypes or mediainduced desensitisation… in the end becoming, far too often, just a
pawn in a zealous game between those who wish to espouse or promote current art theory, and those who wish to unmask or outflank it.
The French cinema scholar Nicole Brenez (curator of experimental film for the Cinematheque Française) states plainly in her
recent essays a higher, contrary principle that has too often been
lost (if it was ever grasped) within the Australian art scene: art is
always in advance of theory, always leads it. Today’s cutting-edge
art is always finer, more complex, more mysterious in its moods,
moves and effects than yesterday’s critical theory can allow us to
immediately gauge and express. This is true even of a form like pop
art, which can appear these days traditionalist in its mining of
familiar materials and tropes. And it is especially true of the art of
Maria Kozic, which perennially leads its viewers into a new world by
way of shocks gentle and violent, provocations exact and disarming, revelations sweet and profound.
•
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“Kozic’s art grows
from intuitions,
dreams, impulses
and visions, both
everyday and
subterranean.”
Maria Kozic, Calender Girl, 1999.
Acrylic on canvas, 212x137 cm.
COURTESY: ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY
Maria Kozic, The End, 1996.
Acrylic on canvas, 100x200 cm.
COURTESY: ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 10 October-December 1999
Maria Kozic
Collecting Kozic
aria Kozic, the 42-year-old Melbourne-born multimedia
artist, has produced a large body of work that includes
sculptures, paintings, films and videos as well as largescale installation pieces. She has also released CDs of her music
collaborations with Melbourne cultural identity Phillip Brophy and
produced short-run magazines such as Things, T.I.T.S. and Dynamite.
Her work draws inspiration from ‘trash culture’ such as comic book
illustrations, cult films and pop music. As an artist, Kozic’s allegiance is to no single medium, but to a pop art sensibility.
Kozic, based in New York since 1995, first came to prominence
in 1978 as a member of Tsk Tsk Tsk, a music, performance, film and
visual art collective. Kozic was also producing her own work and
was featured in influential exhibitions such as the National Gallery
of Victoria’s seminal Popism show curated by Paul Taylor. Kozic’s
work had also appeared in the 1981 Biennale of Sydney and by the
time of the inclusion of her work in the 1986 Venice Biennale as part
of the Aperto section, she had emerged as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.
Although Kozic is often associated with Australian art of the
1980s, some of her most ambitious projects have been executed in
the 1990s. Wolf Pack, an installation of papier-mâché wolves exhibited in Australian Perspecta 1991 at the Art Gallery of NSW, was an
audience favourite. Its combination of a populist sensibility with
theatrical lighting and sound effects was a neat distillation of
Kozic’s aesthetic. Other projects in the 1990s such as her Blue Boy
inflatable from 1992, installed on the roof of the Museum of
Contemporary Art, and her provocative Maria Kozic Is Bitch posters
mounted at locations around inner city Sydney and Melbourne in
1991, were playful and media savvy. Blue Boy was part of the Birth of
M
Maria Kozic, Wolf Pack (The Lair), 1991. Papier-mâché, wire, lights and sound, various dimensions.
COURTESY: ROSLYN OXLEY9 GALLERY
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Maria Kozic’s The Birds installation at the National Gallery of Victoria, part of the Popism show,
1981. COURTESY: ROSLYN OXLEY9 GALLERY
With the presence of contemporary art at
auction on the rise, Kozic represents a unique
opportunity for the astute investor.
Blue Boy exhibition and the street and railway posters promoted
her Bitch series at City Gallery in Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9
Gallery in Sydney.
Kozic’s canvases command prices around $3,500 through her two
Australian dealers, Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne and Roslyn
Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. In the secondary market Kozic has been
under-represented. Works from the 1980s, Clutch I, II and III, (1984)
sold at Joels in 1993 for $1,650. Two years later, Lichtenstein Dot, a key
early work from 1986, achieved $1,380 at Sotheby’s June sale in
1995. Although only three works have been offered at auction
(Meow, a screen print from 1983, sold for $220 at Joels in 1995) all
were sold, albeit at modest prices. With the presence of contemporary art at auction on the rise, it would appear that work by Kozic
represents an opportunity for the astute investor.
Kozic’s work has been acquired by public galleries including the
National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art,
the Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Her work can also be found in private and corporate collections
such as the Loti and Victor Smorgon Collection of Australian Art,
and Artbank.
New work by Maria Kozic can be seen at Anna Schwartz Gallery,
Melbourne, throughout December.
- Andrew Frost
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