Past! Present. Future? (book)/Cluster 2
2. Collection by Rote: An Outdated Practice?
Most of the works in the Spazju Kreattiv Art Collection are paintings and drawings. The majority of these types of works have entered the collection through the customary obligatory donation procedure that was established by the what was then known as the Museums Department in Malta way back in the 1970s.
Among the many ways to evaluate the contents of any art collection, there are those pertaining to the provenance of works and the way a particular cluster of works inform an art historical moment in a way that would not be possible without it after a substantial number of years have passed. These two ideas guide the selection of the works in this section of the book.
Five artists in this category are noteworthy outside the Spazju Kreattiv Art Collection. Their works have been discussed by Maltese art critics in numerous contexts. It is therefore somewhat more complicated to discuss their isolated works in this collection, when other works they have produced are better known exemplars of their output. One cannot but wonder whether this is the case because of their reticence to the the obligatory donation clause, which Fondazzjoni Kreattività abolished in 2016.
In the work from Open Verse (2007) by Trevor Borg we can gleam a young artist’s expression as he searches for a recognizable style. However, this particular piece is certainly hard to imagine as among the best works by this artist who has gone on to be in the Malta pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, with work that was given an early preview during the 2018 edition of the Valletta International Visual Arts (VIVA) festival. In a similar vein, John Grima’s Legacy of a Nation (2004) belies his bronze statue of Franceso Laparelli and Glormu Cassar, commissioned by Heritage Malta in 2018 as a permanent monumental installation outside St James Cavalier’s north side, barely 100 meters away from the entrance to MUŻA.
The late twentieth century Maltese abstract painters Charles Cassar and Philip Chircop are the predecessors of a generation of young painters who populate a substantial part of the Spazju Kreattiv Art Collection. Cassar’s Cellophane Wrappings (2003) and Chircop’s N.27 (2010) provide appropriate context for the lineage on which at least a dozen painters whose works are in the Fondazzjoni Kreattività Art Collection would knowingly or unknowingly acknowledge as significant influences on their own works.
Sheep (2003) by Noel Attard, The Darkened Path (2004) by Mark Sagona, Aħmar (2004) by Christopher Saliba, Texture (2006) by Keith Balzan, and Żebgħa no. 36 (2006) by Patrick Mifsud capture the rise of abstract painting into the Maltese mainstream by the first decade of the twenty-first century. These in turn pave the way for an untitled collage work from Il Suono del Silenzio (2009) by designer Jean Karl Izzo, the ceramic piece Confluence (2010) by art teacher Charlot Cassar and Marinara (2010) by Zepp Cassar from Australia, which gives a hint of this line of development in a specific part of the Maltese diaspora.
In a similar vein, through arguably removed from the exaltation of abstraction proposed here, James Vella Clark, who repeatedly exhibited his paintings at the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, enters the collection from the same period with Valletta View (2003) and other harbour view from his 2008 exhibition Two Harbours.
By contrast, Henry (2005) by Victor Manduca stands out as a work imbued with the artist's potential. Little has been seen from Manduca’s work since his exhibition from which this piece was extracted. Thus, it can be argued that the potential became an unfulfilled promise, waiting in the collection for a more mature companion piece that never arrived.
Two photos in the collection can be seem to hold a similar prospect in photography. One is Gravel (2007) by John Grech, while the other is Charles Paul Azzopardi’s Soleus (2016). Particularly when seen with all the other works with which they were originally exhibited, it’s quite possible to imagine even more notable work entering the collection under their producers’ names.
Celia Borg Cardona’s Crossroad II (2014) may be viewed in similar light to the paintings by Charles Cassar and Philip Chircop. However, this would probably be misleading from an art historical perspective. It is probably more useful to see how the gender gap addressed elsewhere manifests itself here. From Janet Caruana Savage’s By the Sea (2001), it not hard to see how Catherine Cavallo’s The Other Side of Life (2004) finds its place within this collection. Both these pieces contrast well with each other Weekend With Grandma (2014) by illustrator Moira Zahra, which was originally exhibited in a collective exhibition of figurative works entitled Xebgħa Nies (trans. A Whole Lot of People) featuring works by Debbie Caruna Dingli, Kenneth Zammit Tabona, Andrew Diacono, and Steve Bonello, among other. Charlene Calleja’s Untitled 8 would not have been too out of place in that collective. However, it comes from her solo exhibition Interiority Disclosed held just a few months later, between December 2014 and January 2015, at what was soon to be known as Spazju Kreattiv.
Seen together, these works mark the Spazju Kreattiv collection substantially. They are a cross-section of most of the types of works that used to enter the collection on a regular basis before the Foundation revised its acquisition policy and waived the obligatory donation of works by anyone who exhibited within St James Cavalier. It is also useful to note that this coincided with a change of pace in the way exhibitions started being organised with the Spazju Kreattiv programme, albeit with some degree or other of curatorial choice throughout different management arrangements.
By the latter part of the second decade, it had become fairly evident that there was a shift from making space available to whoever, within reason, wanted to exhibit their works with the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity spaces whenever they were available to a situation where exhibitions are part of a year-long programme of activities that involve audience development and sector-wide engagement as an essential part of the process. The introduction of what is clearly the Spazju Kreattiv programme brought with it a move away from showing works that can just as easily be exhibited at other venues available across the Maltese islands.