the art life

Up in the Rudy Komon Gallery at the Art Gallery of NSW is Unscripted, a selection of works from the collection [and a few ring ins] that use text in some way. There is a wall blurb that accompanies the show but we can’t remember much about it except that it says “cubist and dada” in lower case, which is odd, since they’re the names of things, proper nouns, and therefore we think it should be Cubist and Dada. Think about it. OK. Like, imagine, world war two in lower case. It doesn’t feel right or respectful to the memory of the diggers who fought and died for the upper case recognition of capital A australia. Some have said that Unscripted is somehow ‘not good enough’ – that a museum show has a responsibility to be encyclopedic and complete every time the gallery opens its doors, which is hogwash, since this is work mostly from the collection done on a budget and it’s like rearranging the furniture in your house. You might invite people over to have a look at the new arrangement and say, do you like the way we’ve moved the TV over there and put the Jason Recliner near the door, creating a kind of faux passageway? On that basis, yeah, we liked it.

As one customs dog said to the other, we’re really beginning to like the smell of this cocaine! Woof!


Rosalie Gascoigne, Metropolis, 1999. Retro-reflective road signs, 232 x 319.7 x 1.6cm. Courtesy: Art Gallery of NSW.

You know the general consensus about Rosalie Gascoigne is that she was a landscape artist, right? Her collage material was sourced from the landscape and she arranged her works like landscapes so the next thing you know Stephen Fennelly is badgering the old lady into admitting it on TV. Finally, uncomfortable, she says “I suppose so” and instead of a radical experiment in collage [with interesting connections to theories of the way matter is distributed in the universe courtesy of the influence of astrophysics], we have a rather mundane landscape art. That's disappointing since there's so much more there but it’s what the punters can handle, see, so let’s call Gascoigne’s work decorative text. Her Metropolis from ‘99 is very pretty indeed. Mike Parr’s Language and Chaos III from 1990 has lines of text over fragments of self portraiture. Colour does not normally seem to be a big part of Parr’s work but this piece on multiple sheets of paper, with its charcoal black lines and snaky, indecipherable hand scrawl, was very pleasing to the eye. Saying that Parr’s work has decorative elements seems like sacrilege but then so is Imants Tillers’ work. Victory Over Death (For Paul Taylor) quotes from Colin McCahon’s Victory Over Death and eulogises the late Art & Text editor, which is all fine and good, but does anyone have enough energy to summon anything resembling interest when it comes to Tillers work anymore? We just blank it out now and enjoy the colour and shapes.

No one could accuse Ian Burn of having made decorative text. His work is old school conceptual stuff with the chocks pulled out and the wind blowing in your hair; three naïve landscapes each with text painted over the top - “Artists think”, “Artists think with” “Artists think with their eyes open.” It makes us wish we hadn’t thrown away our Art & Language membership cards, to wit, a man goes into a bar with a duck under his arm, the Bartender says, “What'll the pig have?” The man says, “That's not a pig, that's a duck!” “I know,” says the bartender, "I was talking to the duck."

In a similar spirit of never-say-die, Peter Tyndall has a work from ‘95 in the show [and weirdly the majority of the works in the show are from the early to mid 90s] called detail: A Person Looks at A Work of Art/Someone Looks at Something. We respect the hard line ethos of Tyndall and the way he has managed to brow beat museums into making sure that his title cards follow exactly his specifications (layout, font, ordering) and thus furthering the purity of the conceptual gambit: detail (it’s only part of the ongoing project) A Person (that’s us, the viewers, individually) Looks At A Work of Art (we are looking at a work of art, an object) Someone Looks At Something (yet the specificity of the named [us, the viewers] is called into question as is the specificity of the artwork [relieved of its special status as an object different to any other quotidian object not so named as ‘art’]). Every time we see a work by Tyndall our brains start to boil partly because his work has the effect of throwing us back in time to 1983, sitting in our parent’s living room smoking our mother’s Escort’s, listening to the Jane Cessna & Essendon Airport LP while flipping through a copy of Art & Text, the one with the candy bar on the cover, while having a lazy wank on the sofa, and partly because the Dick and Jane conceptualism bores the crap out of us. God, they weren’t the days, and they still aren’t.

Looking at Robert McPherson’s work from 1999, Mayfair: Summer farm, forty five signs for Micky Monsour, is like taking a dip in cool water after the hard dusty work of the rest of the show. MacPherson’s use of text and image is masterful, casually building up the relationships between the idiomatic use of half words, numbers and images in a colloquial pictographic language. The black and white egg shapes, the flow of arrows and the up and down arrangement of the words keeps the eye flowing back and forth over the work and its sheer visual pleasure is equaled by the artist’s deftly subtle approach. Perhaps disappearing under too much subtlety is Simryn Gill’s Forest, 1996-98, eight panels of photographs of a forest. We tried everything – matching the number of panels with the names of the plants, the bananas, the palms, making up an acrostic from the artist’s name, her gallery – but we’re pretty sure that there are no words or text in this work. [We hasten to add that after the Zina Kaye incident two weeks ago, we acknowledge there may be words hidden in the work, if only we could see them. Emails to the usual address].

Scott Redford is represented by a work called photo: The Pizza Boy from 1995 and the wall label specifies everything in the work – a mirror, clothes, shoes, etc. There’s some motorcycle clothes on the floor, a mirror casually placed against a wall with stickers affixed a la some guy’s bedroom and the words And the motorcycle boy is never coming back painted on the wall. That’s from the movie Rumble Fish and is a piece of graffiti seen on walls that refers to the character played by the once-beautiful-but-now-just-scary Mickey Rourke. We like pizza and our favourite pie is called L’Inferno and you can get it from Danny’s La Bussola on Victoria Street in Darlinghurst. It’s very spicy. We’re not sure if they do have home delivery, oh, and if you ring up and say “do you have mushroom pizza?” and they say “no” it’s because the guy on the phone doesn’t know that a champignon and a mushroom is one and the same thing. That’s the tricky thing about words – meaning - and the tricky thing about art by Scott Redford, and the artist as well, is that we’re scared of him, ok, and we fear using the wrong words because he’ll ring you up, or send you an email, or leave a comment, and then you’re fucked, ok? OK?

Kate Benyon is an artist whose work we have only seen in magazines and many fine art writers whose opinions we respect think very highly of her work. 100 Forms of Happiness is a work comprised of chenille sticks bent and shaped in the form of Chinese characters that apparently all mean a type of “happiness”. The white sticks are arranged on a big black rectangle that serves as the background for the words – or calligraphic shapes – and the sculptural objects become highlighted as you get closer, the background disappearing and the whole art work starting to look like some random pipe cleaners bent in funny shapes. Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, something, something, blah, blah, blah. [Look, it’s Chinese so we’re just taking it on trust – for all we know the whole thing could be just made up].

Speaking of proper nouns, as we were, we are sad that so few people in Australia know that the name “Gordon Bennett” is an exclamation of disbelief in the UK. Like someone in Australia might say “Fuck a duck!” someone in England would exasperate “Gordon Bennett!” From the point of view of the signified, how apt, we think. Gordon Bennett’s Notes To Basquiat Series have never convinced us. From the point view of painting, the works are incredibly poor in comparison to Basquiat, who knew something about texture, and in comparison to Basquiat’s use of text, Bennett’s paintings are faint echoes of something far better. As to how they work as an Indigenous artist appropriating African American content and identity, apparently subverting them into a commentary on black Australian identity – we just don’t know.

Adam Cullen, bad boy? Look, just forget about it alright? There’s no badness here. There is no badness. Here, there is no badness. We read an old review of a Cullen show from 1999 recently and the writer was trying to reconcile what Cullen had done in the show with the received-via-the-media preconception the writer already had about who the artist thought he was. Talk about tortured. “You don’t live up to my expectation of who I thought you thought you were so therefore you failed.” [Or indeed, as some readers of this blog have exclaimed, supposedly living up to the so-called reputation, and then sighing in exasperation ‘I told you so!’] Get over it and just use your eyes. In Unscripted the AGNSW has Anything I Say Or Do, from 2001 and it’s a classic Cullen – big heads, devil face, dismembered torso, a splodge of paint. And text: ANYTHING I SAY OR DO WILL BE HELD AGAINST YOU, A CORRECTIVE SERVICE and best of all STILL BORN STILL BORN IN AUSTRALIA. As an aphorist, Cullen is hard to beat and his supple and punning use of text puts the lie to the whole unthinking bad boy concept. He’s just too smart. In terms of the composition too, there’s a lot there - from the way he combines illusionistic three dimensional space with 2D drawing space, the precarious and wrong looking balance between the forms and the resolve the whole work has and then there’s the way the subject of the art fits so perfectly with the medium. If you’re still not convinced you’re beyond help.

Mikala Dwyer has nice piece of furniture in the show, Peter Kennedy has a very large piece that drains a lot of wattage powering fluro tubes, Janet Burchill has a saw horse and a painting that goes with it and Matthew Jones spent ages copying by hand an edition of the New York Daily News printed the day before the Stonewall Riots. We note them for the sake of completeness, but we conclude with a piece by Rose Nolan (who we now acknowledge is not a pseudonym for Robert MacPherson but a different person entirely). Help Me To Do Things Better (2003) is two rows of six pennants, red lettering on white. The top row reads like this [you’ll have to turn your head on its left side to see what it looks like hanging in the gallery]:

Better
Things
Do
To
Me
Help

The second row looks like this:

Things
Better
=
=
=
=

You can see why we confused her work with MacPherson can’t you? It’s so incredibly simple yet so effective.

Labels: exhibition, public galleries, reviews

There’s a certain inevitability about a show that harnesses Melbourne’s self-professed status as a subcultural capital. Throughout the ‘90s, Melbourne - or at least its subcultural residents - claimed ‘world’s best’ standing in the high stakes of Goth, NRG, ARIs – all the stuff that makes the ‘youth dollar’ big business. We still have sweet memories of artists racing from their familiar haunts of op shops and mini skips to snaffle vinyl and PVC in Brunswick Street boutiques, with Tony Garifalakis leading the shopping spree for candelabra and mascara. With ten years passed since the word ‘techno’ became passé and baby Goths became old-skool, there’s no better time than now to translate ‘90s subcultures as an exhibition. Just enough time has gone by to rekindle fond, formative memories of Goth-stepping to Bauhaus and Neubaten in five inch platform boots, just in time before all we start squeezing out the bubs and moving back to the leafy eastern suburbs.




Family First at the VCA Gallery does more than just lock subculture within ‘90s nostalgia though. Uber-spunk curator and sometime Rosetzky model, Mark Feary, has hooked his show through a great premise – a parodic play on the politics that made all non-evangelical Victorians cringe and apologise to interstate friends in 2004. Instead of the Bible-toting heterosexism of the infamous political party, Feary offers a different conception of Family First that:

refers to alternative kinds of families or groups of individuals that may serve as surrogate families for the broken, the disenfranchised, the rejected, the bored, or those who fall between the cracks… it is something that can be adopted and adapted to any group of like-minded individuals seeking community and acceptance without sacrificing individuality.

This could have been a banal justification for Feary to curate a vanity show of dragging friends together for a kick-arse opening with free booze but the show is pretty tight and very funny, with a strong focus on Goth that suits the ubiquitous Melbourne winter blues.

New York artist Marco Roso starts the show with Headbangers of the World Unite… Hell is Here, a short video clip projected onto a makeshift wall with the soundtrack seeping throughout the gallery. Long-haired beauties head bang like Tommy Lee in a Pantene ad, each throw of the hair cleverly and seamlessly spliced together to make sweaty metal heads seem tantalisingly sexy.

On the reverse of the same wall and dotted throughout the gallery are Garifalakis’ goth-style paintings framed in gaudy gilding and set between worn-down candles. While Garifalakis’ aesthetic is extremely familiar after recent shows at Conical and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, the paintings make clever ties with other works in the exhibition. On one adjacent wall, Matt Griffin’s photo collages and wall drawings connect heavy influences from Garifalakis, The Kingpins and Gothy zine images. On another, Blair Trethowan presents a series of ransom note-style collages. Trethowan has carved into newspaper articles and book pages, sticking excised letters and words onto song lyrics and posted reminders to Trethowan from Centrelink that his payments have been stopped. It’s a bit arts-and-craftsy, with a dash of therapy to quell the panic-inducing blackmail of Centrelink reminding us that being an artist isn’t, you know, a real job.

Other works don’t tie the knot with Garifalakis or the overall premise quite as well, especially Shaun Gladwell’s videos of skaters sliding through car parks and break dancers shaking their thang at train stations in slo-mo. The two videos, reduced to tiny TV monitors tucked behind a staircase and down a side passage, are stale after their glamorous showcasing at ACMI for 2004, with Gladwell’s well-worn turn to skater culture a blip amid the slasher kitsch that dominates Family First.

The stand-out work though is Garifalakis’ Ruin of Empires, a massive hang of photocopied collages covering a wall in the VCA back room. Calvin Klein models’ faces are redrawn as skulls with requisitely and impossibly high cheekbones. Skulls pash skulls amid adbusted slogans advertising ‘skullfuckers’ and how we must ‘learn to burn’ or have razor lips, ‘time to kiss some wrists’ a line that we particularly love. Faux-horror sells big time and there’s nothing more bonding than a bit of teenage torment, even if we’re over thirty and living in Fitzroy. Whether the work is a moment of self-reflection on the premise of Family First and its marketing of old subcultural angst, or an up-yours to it, however, is harder to determine.

Labels: exhibition, Melbourne, reviews, sculpture

Photocall: 12/06/2005, 10:00am, Il Giardini, 51° Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Biennale.

It's all hushed and woody inside the beach shack - bar the blandishments of the paparazzi.

"Miz Blanjet! Ova here Miz Blanjet!!" Frozen half-smile. "Cate!" "Cate!" Inscrutable but intelligent. "Miz Blanjet!" Nothing, almost completely blank, except for the raised, plucked eyebrow visible above the rim of the eyeglasses. "Miz Blanjet" today is oozing hot and brainy, and she and everybody else knows it. Our Cate is waiting with the artist, some sculptor.

Martin Browne is hovering. Is Cate a client? Browne blushes. "Yes," he says quietly, but proudly.

Gradually the glitz gives way to the art. You want to fondle the skeleton, rub up against it; and you'd happily pull up a pew at the kitchen table to kill some time over a cuppa. Touching the works of course is verboten. Touching the journalists however, is fair game.

Italian security guards bussed in to handle the Italian paparazzi feel free to manhandle the usual suspects of Aussie arts journos, possibly under the erroneous assumption that we would be muscular in our questioning. No, no curveballs today. Our Cate has more insights than the press, which is how it should be.

"Ricky's work is particular but it isn't particularly Australian – the more particular you are the more universal you become." We ask young Rick what the role of celebrity is in contemporary art today. "It's not something I pursue." Thanks mate.


The Australian Pavilion, Venice.

Soon we were all herded out on the patio for speeches. Sources close to 'Our Cate' say she was pissed off at the way she was used by the Oz Council in the launch, with focus thrown on her not the artist. Sad and true, but, er, what did she honestly expect? That we would all simply look the other way? Other sources say several high profile Aussies from different artistic fields were approached to form a kind of "A-Team" of Australian arts on the porch. In the end only Cate turned up. So much for teamwork.

Much the same sentiment could be heard by the prominent gallerists who'd been left off the A-list for the Australia Council Party that night at the ridiculously ritzy Hotel Cipriani. The dealers complained that they'd been blackballed because they didn't fork over $5,000 to John Kaldor to become Champion Donors of the Australian representation at Venice. The Oz Council says Kaldor raised more than $750,000 towards the total cost of $1.4 million to mount the Australian representation. Now let's see. There's Ricky's plane ticket, his hotel, freight and insurance for the artworks, the catalogue, Cate's rider… hmmm that leaves about $1.375 million. Most of it would have been splurged on the upper crust party… Bellinis and canapés for the Champions to mingle… with each other! You'd think Kaldor would have at least invited Gilbert & George, having brought them out to Australia 1973. Certainly all the reflected hipness and cooldom one seeks from the art world was completely absent among the bevy of champions, corporate types and collector couples on the "trip of a lifetime". All everyone wanted to talk about what a blast the New Zealand launch was the night before - no door policy, no black tie, no crass elitism, all art party hardy!

Back for more Ricky the next day and Tilda Swinton swans in with a scruffy bunch of admirers. Killing Time: "It's fantastic, isn't it? It's amazing!" She approaches Ricky's bike helmet with snakes (AKA. The Arrangement). "Gorgeous!" A po-faced teen is a bit stumped: "Does he do this with lasers or computers?" No, he actually does it with his bare hands.

Herein lies the seeds of a problem. Some whisper amongst themselves that once you strip away the "gees this kid's bonza with a chisel," you're not left with much. Viz the sixty-something American couple overheard leaving the show: "This is just craft!" Ingrates, to be sure, but they have a point. Charlotte Day, the show's curator, counters that Ricky is more about intimacy than innovation. And Swallow himself turns such slurs around without care. The centerpiece of the lower half of the space, the skeleton (The Exact Dimensions of Staying Behind), bears the artist's chisel marks which in earlier works would have been effaced, indicating a more confident phase, as Swallow is happy to leave evidence of the artist's hand. "I feel less apologetic now about the craft," he tells us. "This is a performative activity, there's no real reason for it to be invisible. I have no problem now unveiling the process if you like. The problem becomes knowing when to stop."

Labels: art politics, article, international exhibitions

The 51st Biennale of Venice is like the Royal Easter Show when it was still at Moore Park, only there are no thrilling rides, no side show alley and no fairy floss. There are pavilions, however, and show bags and folks down from the country in strange clothes that time forgot. There were a record number of participating countries this year and were numbered in a handy short guide one could buy for 6 Euros. Australia was first at Number 1 and ended with the Peoples Republic of China at Number 55.

A prize is awarded to the country whose artist is [according to a secret criterion reported to involve the intervention of the Holy Spirit and some heavy back room drinking sessions] the most significant. This year the prize went to Annette Messenger whose ostentatious and over-scaled works filled the French Pavilion in the same way the way the Atlantic filled the Titanic, except the artist used old cushions, train sets and billowing silk instead of icy water. The delicate act of transubstantiation that results in a pile of old rags becoming a metaphor of great complexity sank under the burden of all the meanings projected onto it.

Australia was represented by Ricky Swallow [born near Melbourne] and raised in the glare of attention, nourished by the rich milk of the public purse and now representing all the aspirational ambitions of a parvenu culture. Admittedly, the Australian Pavilion has been receiving considerable international press attention but as the International Herald Tribune reported it was for “the coup of having Cate Blanchett give the opening remarks“, which concluded with her observation that Swallow’s work was proof of the richness and diversity of contemporary Australian culture. Given the preponderance of old master Dutch Still Life references and shallow quotes from American Pop traditions it seemed to the largely European audience that she was reading from a script work shopped by the Australia Council that had been designed to paper over the void that has opened up between Australia as a multicultural paradise of yesteryear and the darkness of a decade of John Howard's rule.

Blanchett may have believed what she said but it does not make it true. Swallow’s works individually possess some idiosyncratic charm but as the prominent German dealer Joerg Johnen (Johnen & Schoettle Gallery Cologne and Johnen Gallery Berlin) remarked, when exhibited in this quantity were “old fashioned, like some arts and crafts product that should have been carved in Oberammergau”. Johnen is a highly respected dealer with an international reputation, a background as an art historian and a stable of respected, innovative artists such as Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall and also for the easy money the notorious wood carver– Stefan Balkenhohl. What makes his observation of more than passing interest is that in February Johnen was interested in Swallow, having seen his work reproduced in the magazines [that coincidentally carry advertisements for the galleries that exhibit it]. Johnen was disappointed and in this he had an abundance of very good company as not one European or American curator we spoke with found anything of real merit in the works or their Gold Coast boutique-like and overly precious installation.

There was a lot of hand made, wood based work at the Biennale both in the Arsenale curated by Rosa Martinez and in the Giardini where the older national pavilions are established. Getting the most attention was Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner whose highly poetic tree house, assembled from turned furniture elements that, like Swallow’s sculptures, evoked a residual Baroque memory because of their elegant curves and complex joinery. The Israeli pavilion was carpeted with a heavily patterned petite bourgeois rug that reinforced the sub text of a film projected in the upper part of the exhibition area that showed the tree house being assembled by the artist as an elaborate, rather obvious metaphor for the “squatting” of the occupied territories by Jewish settlers. The work was amusing and the artist wore a hilarious fake beard and laboured mightily on his edifice.


Gilbert & George.

There were several heavy weight stars lighting up their respective national pavilions with Gilbert and George at the British and Ed Ruscha at the American. There is something simple and elegant about the work of Ruscha - like a vodkatini - they are best when composed of two basic ingredients – text and image. His project titled The Course of Empire was a sure hit, just like a dry martini at cocktail hour. The paintings were not really challenging and one was very much like the other – large expanses, cinematic space with the words floating above the image like a corpse in a Los Angles swimming pool.

Gilbert and George at the British Pavilion were what you would expect – they were there, they were accessible and they were great. We would normally look upon an opportunity to comment on their work as an exercise in obsequiousness, however even the great have their bad days. In the British pavilion the crowded, slightly cloying atmosphere generated by the almost wall-to-wall photographic collages reminded us of Walter Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa’s eyes – ‘a little wear’ G&G;’s attempt to contemporise topically their [now well known] images of slightly dangerous looking youths by the addition of Arabic textual components retroactively cheapened their earlier works. The installation of the Ginko series was oppressive – almost like some floral deodorant used to mask the odour of fatigue and creative exhaustion. They are great artists, tested by time – innovative, challenging and they will survive. Watching them work the crowd outside the pavilion was like observing a preternatural phenomena being replicated in a test tube and we could not but help think that one work of incontestable authority on a wall would have deepened the mystique time and the media have deposited on the singing statues as a form of everlasting patina.

There was a lot of film work present some of which deserved the attention it received and some which did not. Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij at the Netherlands Pavilion projected a film and called it an installation. Technical problems distorted the sound made sitting through its 40 minutes more than a little tedious but it was a smart white Dutch tale of power, corruption and commodity exchange in English. The Dutch accent in qualified English sounds South African and feels like you’re being sold cheap diamonds. Everyone we spoke to liked it and the circle of admirers around the curator Martijn van Nieuwenhuysen was a direct testament to its popularity. The much more enjoyable Luxembourg entry – a film shot in suburban Luxembourg utilizing a reconstructed Venice of dry canals and occasional snow flurries - was equally popular. Its protagonists were a curator, and artist and a collector, there were scenes of impressively complex dialogue but as it was in English with a French accent it seemed somehow polished with an easy sophistication.

There were several really exemplary pavilions. Singapore’s pavilion was curated by Eugene Tan who proposed a work by Lim Tzay Chuen that would have involved excising a 70 ton sculpture of a winged lion [the symbol of Singapura or Lion City] and removing it to Venice. The operation - code named MIKE – didn’t happen. Instead the pavilion consisted of two purpose built lavatories of extravagant proportions, impeccably stylish and sumptuously appointed an oblique reference to the hygienically obsessive, brand conscious and incredibly prosperous condition of the island. This brilliant and subtle attention-getting strategy resulted in one of the few endless quews at a pavilion. The piece was a curatorial favourite, a conversation starter and crowd puller whose opening was used to announce Singapore’s intention to begin its own Biennale next year.

Another pavilion attracting attention was the Austrian artist Hans Schabus who had constructed a mountain over the pavilion’s existing roof structure evoking an alpine peak. It was quite incredible to climb within this fantastic compilation of tar, wood and nails and to gaze out over the Giardiani from the latched viewing windows scattered at various levels. Its sequestered encapsulating atmosphere implied the attic in Kafka’s The Trial and reminded the viewer of Austria’s proximity to the East.

The Romanian pavilion was left empty by artist Daniel Knorr as a metaphor for Eastern Europe’s flight from its own history towards association with the west was also deservedly popular. Traces of the pavilions former activities remained in paint stains and irregularities in the wall and a reader [that time will render invaluable to post colonial studies] was published to commemorate the act and was available free to all visitors.

The Thai pavilion also contained a work of incredible beauty called Those Dying Wishing to Stay, Those Living Preparing to Leave which consisted of a lecture to an audience of dead people laying upon mortuary stretchers. Lithuania’s pavilion featured a large overview of films by Jonas Mekas. While we were there we saw the prodigal Simon Rees who now works for Lithuania’s Contemporary Arts Centre captivating Nicholas Serota [Tate Gallery director] with the people skills those of us who know Simon greatly miss. As Simon remarked later “It’s really strange how things start to happen for you in a completely different way when you actually live in Europe.”

There was a lot of light but attractive work as well. You know the stuff we mean – conceptually sound, well executed and conscious of the critical relationship between the work of art and the environment in which it is acknowledged as such. Most characteristic of these and probably the most picturesque was the work of Jorge Macchi representing Argentina. Installed in the Old Oratorio of San Filippo Neri alla Fava was a blue trampoline, which replicated exactly the curvilinear shape and size of the baroque ceiling painting above it.

In the Arsenale in an independently curated program titled Always a Little Further, compiled by Rosa Martinez were traces of what would have normally been considered ambitious new forms of practice. There were certainly some wonderful things and some astonishing unexpected inclusions beginning with some long overdue international attention for the Guerrilla Girls. Some of the most interesting inclusions were those were political activism was translated into highly aestheticised encounters with the present day and the fact that some places are a lot nicer than others.

Regina Jose Galindo video works of earlier performances in which she shaved her body or walks between the Police headquarters and the Ministry of Justice with a basin of blood, which she used as a novel form of ink pad to colour her feet while walking, leaving as she passed bloody foot prints in commemoration of the women killed in places like Mexico or her homeland Guatemala. This was accompanied by film of a hymenoplastic surgery or the recreation of the virgin’s membrane prior to marriage, often by backyard butchers, with fatal consequences.

For many the surprise inclusion was of the Australian born performance artist Leigh Bowery. He was accorded an enormous area on the central axis of the Aresnale indicating his importance as a pivotal figure in the crossover between art and life that was the exhibitions underlying thematic. If you are from Sydney it was a familiar sight. In 2003 the Museum of Contemporary Art devoted not inconsiderable resources to the development of what is acknowledged as a milestone show of international significance. Take a bow Russell Storer for advocating Take A Bowery, as almost everything in the Venice installation began its life as a component of the MCA project, and the slides provided by Sydney closely referenced by the curators providing the template for the installation in Venice. The individually cast mannequins which Grahame Rowe utilized as the central display mechanism in his seductive design for the show, the relationship between the Fergus Greer photographs and the separate sculptural “looks” - as Nicola, the Widow Bowery calls them - and the strategic use of the large quantity of remaining video material successfully articulates the essential nature of a body of work that has become hugely influential. Bowery is acknowledged internationally as quite possibly the most original and authoratative artist to have emerged from Australia in the last 30 years with a number of prestigious museum projects planed to promote that legacy.

Strange it is indeed how these things work out- Australia did manage to produce a much sort after art star at the 51st Biennale of Venice - a great original, taken seriously in his own terms and not those injected into the work like some form of steroid. Ironically, he was also from Melbourne. Let the sunshine in.

Labels: art politics, international exhibitions, personalities

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Labels: site news

“Go to as many openings as possible, network well with many other artists and volunteer your services s often as possible to things like the Biennale, artist run spaces and your Alumni organisation. It shows you are serious and humble” – Cash Brown.

“You do it by doing it. If you get the fear, conjure up your inner lemming and jump off the face of it.” - Ash Hempsall


The Academy Of Women, Adam Cullen. Courtesy of The Artist.

"The academy of women is the greatest and most important institution that mankind can have, and it should be avoided as much as possible." – Adam Cullen

“Yes well. The art life is the good life and a public life Stuck between pleasure and pragmatism I would advise a young artist to be prepared to make your own opportunities, curate your own shows - doesn't mean you can't be in it, run a short term gallery, write a review even if you don't get it published, communicate often with other artists, say what you think, be radical, question everything, support your artist friends and they will support you - And work on simultaneous career of art and earning a living - not necessarily the same thing - but an important issue to keep in mind - don't miss out on the benefits of a permanent type job that doesn't have to define your identity but at least could provide for your expensive art making practice and your old age.” – Elvis Richardson.

Labels: article, faqs

Talk about suffering for art. Fabric maker John Kaldor had to break a golden rule when he took on the role of commissioner for the Australian exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Having declared before the last Biennale that he and partner Naomi Milgrom would duck the opening because it was "tedious", Kaldor was top cheerleader when the Australia Council threw open its pavilion full of Ricky Swallow's sculptures overnight.

"If you want to see the art it's better to go in off-peak times. Same with any exhibition, avoid openings," Kaldor declared in 2003.

Having overcome his crowd phobia Kaldor took to his Biennale role with gusto, rattling the tin to decibel levels not experienced before. Kaldor inspired dozens of local corporate warriors to hand over $5000 or more for the privilege of becoming a Biennale "champion"

Jeni Porter, Opening Fright, Sydney Morning Herald.


Helen Coonan made her apologies but the crowd were quite happy when they got Cate Blanchett instead.

The Minister for Communications, Technology and the Arts was sorry she couldn't be around to open 30-year-old Ricky Swallow's show at the 51st Venice Biennale, the world's most prestigious exhibition of contemporary art.

But for the large crowd of Australians this was not too crushing a disappointment when they heard Blanchett would be Senator Coonan's replacement.
Before the official ceremonies, the media were herded into a pavilion in two groups -first photographers, then reporters, to enjoy an exclusive audience with Blanchett and Swallow. The questions were banal and the answers predictable, but nobody's enthusiasm seemed to falter.

John McDonald In Venice, Coonan can't but Cate can for Australian art, The Sydney Morning Herald.





Australia's Ricky Swallow has also been the beneficiary of a long-standing promotional programme, extolling his undoubted merit as an inventive sculptor of immaculate, haunting humanistic figures and artefacts.

Labels: cinema, international exhibitions, old media

If you could only give one piece of advice to a young artist what would it be?

"Start at the top and work your way down" – Marc Alperstein.

"Just keep going, it's not the best who wins, it's the most persistent" – Lindon Parker

"There are a few pieces of advice that I think might have made my pursuit (and still very much pursuing) of a career as an artist a little smoother than it has been, and these are pretty basic but important things:

1. Have a sound knowledge of your chosen medium.

2. Go overseas and spend time looking, making and studying work in a situation without the pressure of selling work.

3. Work bloody hard

4. Be ready for the isolation that can happen when preparing for shows (my dog is my link to sanity in the studio), and having a good CD collection comes in handy about now!

5. Your peers are an important network - the support, advice and friendship of other artists- who can understand what you are going through and provide critical feedback is a big bonus.

These are only a few practical and fairly obvious tips, but they have made my life easier" - Anwen Keeling.

"Consider your other [career] options and pursue one of those" – Gail Hastings.

"Just do the work; it is about longevity and creating a whole body of work over time" - Judy Darragh.

"Don't shit in the nest" - Clare Firth-Smith.

Where possible do only one thing at a time – Lucas Ihlein.



Found taped to a telegraph pole outside Tim Olsen Gallery.

"One of my art teacher's Inge King told me never to get married, which at 18 I had no idea what she was on about. I married at 23 and now almost 40 I think I know what she meant. Brad Buckley told me never to marry another artist, and well, I did that too, so really I didn't listen anyhow, ‘cause I was young and an artist. Another art teacher told me to stop falling in love. Maria Gazzard told me to never expect things will be done for you. That it is purely up to "ourselves" to make things work. This I still hold on to. So now the tables have turned and I am to offer advice? Young artist, always tackle the fear" - Sarah Parker.

"You have a blank piece of paper and it’s up to you what do or don’t with it" - Christian Capurro.

"All the best things in life happen through other artists" – Julian Dashper.

"Bend your mind with discipline and focus"– Bunny Star.

"Lie, beg, cheat and steal" – McLean Edwards.

"Don’t rush it. Be in for the long haul, so plan accordingly. In other words, work out if you want to be in a band that splits up when you are 30 or still playing at 70" – David Noonan.

"Please make sure you document your work properly and then store this documentation in a safe place" – Sean Cordiero.

"You can either be creative with your life, or worry about what people think of you" – Lucia McCarthy.

"If you’re starting out, try volunteering at an artist run initiative and expand your network from there" – Vicki Papageorgopoulos.

"Discover your "master eye". To find out which is your master eye, point at an object a room's length away, both eyes open. Now close your left eye. If your finger is still pointing directly at the object, your right eye is your "master eye". This is true of most people. However, if your finger is no longer pointing exactly on target, your left may be your "master eye". Check this by repeating the experiment and this time closing your right eye. If your finger is now still pointing at the object you sighted with both eyes open, your left eye is "the master". Because a shotgun has only one sight, at the tip of the barrel, it is impossible to aim it correctly if you have the gun to your wrong shoulder in relation to your "master eye". It takes some people years to find this out, but don’t give up. The ability to use a shotgun skillfully latter in life is essential. Thank you for listening" - Nigel Milsom.

"Keep your HSC artwork - if you can get past the initial cringe, it's sure to give you kicks later on. Nothing tops teen expressionism" – Soda_Jerk.

"Making work and having a career are separate. Make the work YOU want to make, and the career will follow" – Debora Warner.

"Liquid Nails" – What.

"Try and make money unimportant. Resenting not having any is a waste of energy and will turn you into a tight arse" – Laresa Kosloff.

"Never allow yourself to be photographed while moving a Nixon" – Tony Schwensen.

"Have an alternative source of income BEFORE you become an artist - get some rich parents, give up a lucrative career in IT or advertising, or have a cushy job in the public service, but have some money to keep you going because it's too depressing having a low-paid mcjob and trying to establish an art career" - Rodney Love.

"Cutting straight to the point, an artist without money resembles moggy in the park. Is this the aspiration beating in the breast of creative souls? Perhaps not. But the reality of creating artwork is that it belongs in the realms of commercialism. Not the creative spirit though, so the quest of the artist must be to produce an income to support the commercial aspect of art production while preserving an untainted perspective of life through peripheral focus. It’s easy, find a job that pays well enough to cover the bills and buy the paint, make babies when your still in your twenties, spend every waking minute summing up life and don’t forget to keep a journal so that when the kids leave home in your forties you can really remember what it was like to be young and revisit your creations with the experience of it all" – Lindon Langdon.

"Meet your deadlines" – Emil Goh.

"See the original, train outside your language, know more than the curator, fear less than the gallerist, talk and read" - A. D. S. Donaldson

"Look between things and you’ll see, the journey is the destination" - Gaël Hiétin.

"Take high quality photographs of your work. Word of mouth is a good thing, but wont get you a spread in a magazine" - Brendan Lee.

"If I were to give just one piece of advice to a young artist it would be to work your arse off. Get into the studio early, leave late. Make new work constantly. Don't wait until you have a show coming, always have something on the go. You only really feel like an artist when you are producing art. Being constantly involved in the process of making art keeps your hand in. It keeps your mind attuned to the task of realising your ideas into a physical works of art. The concept is obviously the core of any artwork but all artworks are physically produced whether it is painting, video, installation, etc. The process of making the work is about how you engineer that idea. You are more likely to have major breakthroughs when your line of thought isn’t being interrupted. If you are constantly making new work you will have continuity of thought in the development of your art making process, that's why it’s better to work a little each day than one or two days a week. You will also need to have actual physical work so that when an opportunity comes, such as a visit from a curator, an invitation to be part of an exhibition, or if you want to enter an art prize which requires recent work, you will always have something new to show" – Tony Lloyd.

"Don't let your peers down. Be easy to work with. Spot me a fifty. Be thorough in your research - know your references. Buy me a beer. Don't be so earnest all the time. Be serious in your conviction. Buy me another beer. Go to galleries, a lot, seriously. It seems a lot of people don't. Of course, read The Art Life " – Christopher Hanrahan.

"Stay away from the commercial galleries for as long as possible and be skeptical of the hype. Truncated careers are the norm in the art world, so if you realize early that it will all probably come to nothing you've got a better chance of making a contribution. It's the careerists who run out of steam and the junkies who get hooked on Government money. The best antidote to John MacDonald and the MCA is collectivization, in the same way that Conceptual art and performance are the best antidote to Ricky Swallow. Live out of the country for long periods but in the shakeout make it happen here" – Mike Parr.

"Go on your own trip" – Alicia Frankovich.

Labels: article, faqs

GrantPirrie’s current show
Brainstorms: momentary psychological disturbances is a peculiar animal. It’s another in the trend for curated shows in commercial galleries that feature artists not “with” the gallery but selected by a curator – in this case GP’s Clare Lewis and James Steele. It’s interesting to speculate just why this phenomenon is so widespread – it’s not as though public galleries and museums aren’t bursting with curated exhibitions, and artist run spaces regularly alternate between group shows and curated themed exhibitions. Whatever the reason, if the majority of private gallery group shows were curated with as much thought and intelligence as Brainstorms, the art world would be a much better place.

We did say, however, that the show is a peculiar animal. Perhaps eccentric would be a better way of putting it. Here’s what the catalogue has to say about how the varied range of work in the show – by Kate Cotching, Eleanor Avery, Chris Bond, Léa Donnan, Zina Kaye, Adam Norton and Sam Smith – are linked:

In 1970, Alvin Toffler coined the term 'Future Shock' which became popularly understood as 'a condition of insecurity, distress and disorientation in individuals and entire societies, brought on by the inability to cope with rapid societal and technological change'. Thirty-five years later, as we continue to endure the increasingly refined barrage of mass media and the dehumanising manipulations of information technologies, one wonders what the cumulative effect of so many years of 'shock' might be? Although of course most of us lead relatively normal lives, there remains an underlying sense of terminal velocity. We are no longer 'shocked' by the undemocratic tendencies of government, the continuing erosion of moral values or even the absolute integration of capitalist ideologies into our everyday existence.

While the works on display in Brainstorms: momentary psychological disturbances have not been produced explicitly with protest in mind, our inherent state of inertia invites a level of critical artistic intervention which stands subtly against the grain. It has been suggested that our cultural climate bears distinct resemblances to the classical Baroque period. Whereas historically the Baroque figured the human dwarfed by the abundant splendour of God's work, we are dwarfed by the raw immensity of our own. The hyper-abundant overproduction of our 'Neobaroque' stems from the denial of its unstable foundations, bereft of all meaning.

The basic thesis of Toffler’s book was that from the vantage point of the early 70s, the human race was about to face a massive change through the profound influence of ‘future’ technologies. The “shock” part of the future would be the effects of that technology on our ability to adjust emotionally, psychologically and socially. Although Toffler’s visionary sampling of predictions of life in the early 21st century have mostly come to pass, the ‘shock’ of the new hasn’t really arrived. Instead of fractured Western societies divided between the technologically rich and poor, commercial markets have evolved into niche markets that recognise the survival of a brand is dependent on its widespread availability and acceptance. You may be comparatively poor but you live in a house with a PC and a widescreen TV, you read the web and you buy entertainment on mass. More significantly, instead of an alienation effect brought on by technology, we have embraced it.

Artist’s responses to the contemporary world of the early 21st century seem to be more in line with the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, the Pre-Raphaelite’s and the Art Nouveau artists who rejected modernity in favour of a poetic, personal response to their creativity, foregrounding subjectivity. Most younger artists working now have rejected the polished surfaces of Post Modernism in favour of an eclectic mixture of conceptualism and craft. In a world that is so Baroque, it’s curious that its individual components are so minimal. The closer you get to the fractal detail of what individual artists do, you find that the madly crenellated edges of the Baroque fall away, and instead of the ever-receding recreation of the larger scale, the individual components of single artists practice are a lot simpler. Instead of being bereft of meaning, art is profoundly imbued with the artist’s personal world view and their approaches to materials.


Zina Kaye, The Agents All-Black: Rocket Event, 1996. Courtesy: GrantPirrie..

The works in Brainstorms: momentary psychological disturbances bear out this hypothesis. Kate Cotching makes brain numbingly complex and detailed paper cut outs coloured with ink. Some pieces are single words in speech bubbles extracted from the 2D world of paper and cast into a heap from which the gallery visitor must extract their meaning. Another work piles different landscapes one on top of another into a spider web of delicately balanced parts. The craft element of Cotching’s work is matched by the porn derived collages of Léa Donnan. Mandalas created by mirroring and repetition using vellum and textiles seem to be the absolute epitome of a low tech response to the mass bandwidth of web flesh.

Eleanor Avery’s combination of painting practice and sculpture remind us a little of the work of Melbourne painter Sally Ross, exhibiting the same intensity of detail and dedication to creating exact surfaces out of unlikely materials. Whereas Ross is a painter who uses delicately woven gestures from pens and paints to build up an image, Avery’s 2D works use solid areas of ‘texture’ (fake wood grains, solid colours) to create a story book world that’s like a meeting between an Ikea how-to manual and Dick Bruna for adults. Avery’s sculptures are even more intensely ‘crafty’, building bridges and ladders from a range of unlikely materials mixing up scale, intention and result. It’s heady stuff.

Chris Bond’s painted book covers again reinforce the return of craft to contemporary art. Pasting on a new hand-painted cover to a real book, Bond’s book works are apparently meant to be taken one hundred per cent seriously. Although he puts his own name on the covers and the titles suggest some ironic readings (Anatomy of Failure by CP Bond, A Measure of Chaos by Chris Bond) these are not (apparently) intended. The sheer detail of Bond’s magic act is mesmerizing, recreating tiny crumples and folds, fractures and bends in what appear to be a classic 60s paperbacks but which are in fact fake. Bond goes further out with his series of works under the name Edith Mayfield, a fictional avant garde Australian artist from the turn of the 20th century that Bond has invented as an alter ego to create works that are both real and imagined simultaneously.

Adam Norton’s nostalgia for nuclear armageddon is unnerving. According to the catalogue Norton’s lead radiation suit “reignites the issue” of bomb paranoia but looked to us to be more a heart warming reminder of our childhoods when we waited every afternoon for an all out nuclear strike. Impractical and implausible, the suit, along with a suit case of “homespun” items, doesn’t really tackle past generations ideas of the future but rather reinterprets them for the iPod generation who seek texture over Apple white or Sony black..

Sam Smith’s video installation Big Small World is the finished piece recently previewed in the Turning Tricks show at First Draft. Benefiting from a more sympathetic viewing environment and expanded to include sections shot in Japan, Smith has honed his video work into something that looks startlingly like contemporary art. The narrative sci-fi elements are still there but they have been significantly toned down and in their place is a quirky notion of materials and space. Using video technology to play with scale, Smith acts out a series of vignettes which finds the artist bouncing around in shots set up to foreground the spatial relationships between solids (roof tops, blocks of wood, streetscapes etc) but which also describes their ultimate fakeness.

One of our favourite pieces in Brainstorms is two photos by Zina Kaye called The Agents All-Black: Rocket Event from 1996. The artist describes the work:

I built a black shiny rocket with a small solid fuel engine. I asked a group of artists to dress up in black and arm themselves with cameras. We met in the park behind my studio at Central Station. I let off the rocket and we all photographed it an each other. The rocket came down with a parachute. I picked it up and we left the area.

The two photographs, the only evidence of the performance, are a sublime meeting of an idea and its dissolution . We love its Rocky and Bullwinkle ‘secret agent’ theme and its nostalgia is beguiling. The photos abound with rich and suggestive readings but the most successful part for us is that it is evidence that artists use technology for their own ends. A secret performance in a public place that is ephemeral and quickly forgotten reinforces an entirely personal version of the space race. The world may be a cruel and unforgiving place, but artists make their own place in it.

Labels: painting, photography, reviews, sculpture

Emails and comments to The Art Life have been running hot lately – wild accusations, flames and abuse along with some suggestions, questions, notifications of events and exhibitions. Before we get to the contentious stuff, Lisa Havilah, the director, Campbelltown Arts Centre wrote to tell us about a special C’town exhibition:

Just wanting to let you know that the new $10m Campbelltown Arts Centre is being launched on the 30th June at 6:30pm. Some people would argue that the best contemporary art projects happen in Western Sydney. Hoping that you may be able to join us. Project Number one is C'town bling: A celebration of Campbelltown, youth, and the relationship between youth culture and contemporary art.

Artists: Brook Andrew, James Angus, Kate Beynon, Jon Campbell, Carla Cescon, Adam Cullen, Shaun Gladwell, Matthew Griffin, Bill Henson, Christopher Langton, Fiona Lowry, The Motel Sisters, Kate Murphy, Susan Norrie, Raquel Ormella, Luke Parker, Patricia Piccinini, Prins, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Tony Schwensen, Jasmine Steven, Ricky Swallow, Kathy Temin, Blair Trethowan, Ken Unsworth, Regina Walter, Paul Wrigley. More than half of these artists have made new work for the show. Curator: Anne Loxley Date: Thurs. 30 June - Sun. 28 Aug.

Meanwhile, a participatory web project for performance artist Barbara Campbell invites writers to tell her what to do. The rules are complicated and there will be a test afterwards:

Writers everywhere are invited to contribute submissions to an online performance project by Barbara Campbell titled 1001 nights cast.

1001 nights cast A DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE BY BARBARA CAMPBELL WEBCAST #0001 IS ON 21 JUNE 2005 AT 21:58 FROM PARIS AND CONTINUES FOR 1001 NIGHTS

In 1001 nights cast, Barbara Campbell performs a short text-based work for 1001 consecutive nights. The performance is relayed as a live webcast to anyone, anywhere, who is logged on to http://1001.net.au at the appointed time, that is, sunset at the artist’s location.

A frame story written by the artist introduces the project’s nightly performances. It is a survival story and it creates the context for subsequent stories generated daily through writer/performer collaborations made possible by the reach of the internet.

Each morning Barbara reads journalists’ reports covering events in the Middle East. She selects a prompt word or phrase that leaps from the page with generative potential. She renders the prompt in watercolour and posts it in its new pictorial form on the website. Participants are then invited to write a story using that day’s prompt in a submission of up to 1001 words. The writing deadline expires three hours before that night’s performance.

1001 nights cast is a project generated by the forces of that great compendium of Arabian tales, The 1001 Nights also known as The Arabian Nights. The project explores the theatrics of the voiced story, the need for framing devices, the strategies for survival, the allure of the Middle East and its contrasting realities.

Enter. Wander. Tell others.

A few of people dropped by to tell us what they thought of us. Peter Maloney left a pithy and straight to the point comment in reference to our review of Cherine Fahd:

You really are a nasty piece of work.

Later, when we posted our news piece on Martin Sharp’s well-deserved weekend honour [see below], Pedant worked overtime to find something to object to:

How come your fantasy exhibition comes as no surprise? Some kind of boy's own show that is oh-so-predictable from Artlife, which seems to have degenerated in to predictabilia, opinion-wise. Hate or forget or misspell the girl artists, but lap up the boy painters' ejaculations. I've absolutely nothing against Martin Sharp though - he hardly fits your bad boy stereotype.

We would have thought that being hauled into court over so-called obscenity charges, not to mention the artist’s well known advocacy of the alternative bohemian lifestyle would certainly make him a bad boy, not least in the eyes of “the man” but to all of straight society. As to our predictability - guilty as charged. It is predictable that we would like the things that we like. Pedant also touched a nerve with this talk of “lapping up the boy painters' ejaculations”. Let’s just get this on the record – we’re not gay. [Ok, there was that one time at Epping station in 1979 on the way to the DEVO concert at the Hordern, and that time after the performance night at COFA and the time that guy stopped to give us “a lift” at South Head at Bondi and then… Look, we’re not gay, ok?]. As to forgetting, misspelling or hating the “girl” artists – hey, women artists, can’t live with ‘em… [In the current climate of fear, we should add that that is a joke and if anyone would care to peruse our back catalogue they’ll see that we’re totally in support of the sisterhood].

There have also been some ominous and vague accusations that somehow The Art Life has a “correlation” with “reviews” in Australian Art Collector Magazine. We have no idea what they mean but as to the question ‘have you ever written for AAC’, the answer is no, The Art Life has never written for the magazine. Have we ever written for any other magazine or publication? As a matter of fact, we have. A regular column by TEAM Art Life will be appearing in a well known art magazine very soon and we have some contributions to books coming soon, the first in September, so please enjoy.

Finally, Craig Waddell wrote to us:

I was reading one of your articles apologising for getting myself and Ben Quilty mixed up, I am afraid you have it wrong again - I don't paint skulls. Mine’s the goopy painting in the Wynne prize.

We hate it when the world refuses to accommodate our perceptions and although we tried to convince Waddell he did paint skulls, he was adamant he didn’t. The artist has a show coming up at Mary Place Gallery – skulls or no skulls – that’s opening on August 15th. If Waddell's website is anything to go by and his new landscapes are great and we’ll be there for sure.

Labels: announcements, reader comments, site news

14 June 2005 Media Release

Ricky Swallow wins hearts at Venice

More than 15,000 international art curators and critics have seen the exquisite works of Ricky Swallow in the first four days of the Venice Biennale. A record 5,000 people attended on the third day of the preview.

David Jaffe, senior curator at the National Gallery in London said "The magic of Ricky is how he can track a fish fin or a seam of a beanbag to animate the forms and vitalise them to communicate with us. He changes our relationship with the everyday and so enriches us." Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, chief curator, Castello di Rivoli in Turin said "It is rewarding and at the same time intriguing to see how his sculpture is informed by the physicality of the object, the extraordinary skills of crafting it, all within a striking conceptual framework."

His exhibition of new and recent sculptures - This Time Another Year - was officially opened by acclaimed Australian actor Cate Blanchett on Thursday 9 June, who said "In the sculptures Ricky Swallow excellence certianly shines... this is visceral stuff - blood, guts, death, the theatre of display, the pivot point between bloom and decay."

After the first day of the exhibition, Mr Swallow said, "The feedback from people has been amazing. To have finsihed the work and handed it over to such an appreciative audience is the ultimate reward."

Australian Commissioner John Kaldor said "Our selection of Ricky has been affirmed with Vincente Todoli, director of Tate Modern, and Philip Rylands, director the Peggy Guggenheim Museum impressed with his work. Davide Croff, president of the Venice Biennale, congratulated Ricky at the official opening of our pavilion. I extend my appreciation to Ricky Swallow, curator Charlotte Day and the Australia Council team whose hard work made this success possible."

Jennifer Bott, CEO of the Australia Council said, "Our warmest congratulations go to Ricky and Charlotte for presenting a stunning exhibition of work that is both compelling and subtle. It is work that demands a personal response and demonstrates artistry of the highest level."

The exhibition will tour to PS1, an affiliate of MOMA in New York, in January 2006.

Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale is the world's oldest and most important critical forum for contemporary visual arts and is open to the public from June 12 to November 6 2005. The Australia Council, the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body, has managed and funded Australian representation of the Biennale since 1954 and has featured artists such as Judy Watson, Bill Henson, Howard Arkley Lyndal Jones, and Patricia Piccinini.

For more information

Labels: international exhibitions, press releases

When we heard that Eddie Maguire had been awarded an AM in the Queens Birthday Weekend honours list we decided to call our nearest Flight Centre and arrange to leave the country as soon as possible. Eddie is responsible for good works in the form of raising $5 million to support families affected by cancer. Fair enough we thought, until we also saw that Eddie was to be honoured for his services “to broadcasting”. If the Australian nation wants to honour Eddie Maguire for the Melbourne Footy Show and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, we may as well honour him for his services to knowledge and humility.

We hung up the phone when we saw that one of the country's greatest artists had been honoured. Martin Sharp was made a
Member of the Order of Australia for his services to “the pop art movement and support for young artists.” The Sydney Morning Herald ran a short profile:

"I feel quite young myself, apart from physically," said Sharp, who last year underwent a triple heart bypass and had a stroke. The artist is embracing new experiences delivered by his health shock with youthful zeal. "Air's a different experience - I used to smoke 75 cigarettes a day; it's how one copes," Sharp said.

Yet even as he savours an atmosphere unfiltered by tobacco, Sharp said the salvation delivered by St Vincent's Hospital surgeons has also sentenced him once again to the responsibilities of his calling.

"I thought I was going to leave a big mess behind - that at last I didn't have to do all that work, but now thanks to them, I have a lot more work to do," said Sharp, whose resume includes the iconic covers of Oz, the "obscenity trial" magazine published in 1960s London by expatriate Australians.

Fans of Sharp's hard edged comic book style and his gear 'n' groovy paintings would also note with glee that Sharp was responsible for the cover of Cream's Disraeli Gears, perhaps the 60s album cover, certainly equalling if not actually bettering Peter Blake's Sgt Pepper's cover for The Beatles. Sharp also took writing credit next to Eric Clapton for the song Tales of Brave Ulysses, the result of a meeting between the artist and guitarist in London in 1966. A good account of the artist's adventures and film making exploits with Garry Shead, and later with Tiny Tim, can be found at Miles Ago

It's nice to see Sharp getting the award, especially after surviving a triple bypass operation and a 70+ a day cigarette habit, and vowing to get back to his work after lingering on the edges of the world. We'd love to see a full scale exhibition of his work at some suitably ritzy gallery, perhaps as part of our fantasy exhibition we have been imagining for a while called From Bodgie To Grunge: Bad Boys Whatcha Gonna Do? that would feature the work of Sharp, Mike Brown and Adam Cullen (among others). The interview with Sharp in the SMH concludes withg a couple of observations that prove that Sharp has seen beyond:

"You can't live in the world of drugs; you might get some ideas there, but living in this dimension's hard enough," Sharp said.

"Looking at the world I do think it's been very well art-directed - there's a design there and it seems to make sense to fit into the design as best as possible."

Labels: awards, painting, pop art

The road outside Gitte Weise Galleries [Sydney/Berlin] is a parking nightmare and with the slabs of newly laid bitumen, random cones and bollards, if you end up at Gitte Weise Galleries it's because you really meant to be there. We know we’ve said some rough things about the GWGS/B and the work we’ve seen there, but as we got out of our Art Life bus we really wanted to give the latest show by Cherine Fahd a good review. We had started to think that our high handed dismissal of her entire body of work as being the redux-Moffatt we all had to have was just too mean and we’d gone way too far. This time we’d go in with an open mind and hopefully we’d come out smiling.


A giant squid, yesterday.

The latest show, Looking Glass, is a suite of 11 large scale (90x120cm) lambda prints on metallic paper, all tastefully mounted and highly polished. The room notes to the show lay out the artist’s conceptual gambit:

When looking through the viewfinder into that beautiful framed world everything moves in slow motion; our daily rituals, the ways we exist in cities, the ways we observe nature and each other. Gestures too, appear charged in some way. As if at any moment, a sudden glance or movement captured by the camera, opens up a window onto a world, which is ordinarily denied the casual everydayness of looking. As if the very act of looking, the choice to look is what put us there. Or perhaps it is the reality of seeing things through a zoom lens; everything appearing closer and nearer…

It would be cruel and unusual to rip into this excerpt from the room notes because artists aren’t paid to write and we should just be reading this for clues to artist’s intentions, but this miasma of half thoughts and unfinished sentences is actually a fair reflection of the work. Fahd’s latest work is a series of images of people ‘existing in cities’ – tourists, people on their lunch break, lovers in a city park, an artist painting and so on. After photographing them, Fahd has used a computer to blur the image around the central figures so they stand out from the background in a sharp edge contrast.

The works are among the worst contemporary art we have seen in a very long time. Hoisted out of the artist run scene into commercial gallery representation well before she had developed anything resembling a personal voice or a sophisticated idea, Fahd’s new work fails on nearly every level. Aesthetically it is so poorly conceived and executed you wonder just what the artist thought she was doing. Although there is an international school of photography that posits a bland or flat aesthetic akin to casually snapped pictures, the selection of images, the framing and the ways in which the works are sequenced mark them out as thoughtful contemporary art. It’s one thing to use the aesthetic, it’s entirely another to be that aesthetic. Fahd's work aren't pretending to be dull and falt, they are dull and flat.

Fahd’s work’s use of computer technology is naive and ordinary, akin to the result one might get from a guided tour of Photoshop. The technique adds little to the image. It may well be that a carefully selected shot may open “up a window onto a world, which is ordinarily denied the casual everydayness of looking” but it doesn’t necessarily make it interesting. Adding in a bit of gaussian blur doesn’t do much for either the concept or an image already suffering such a lack of aesthetic distinction. The images are reminiscent of real tourist snaps and if it weren’t for the anodyne and absurdly literal conceptual gambit, you’d give them little time as either art or someone’s holiday happy snaps. Unfortunately the concept is so weak it wears off as soon as you look away, a rather sad denial of the casual everydayness of looking itself.

Labels: commercial galleries, photography, reviews

People who live in Sydney have a secret envy of Melbourne. It’s a place where sub cultures get taken seriously, where vast, glittering art palaces are funded by the public purse and art magazines are given away free to any who ask for them. It’s disturbing to discover then that Melbourne has been going through its own Sydney envy of sorts. The big event for June is the new show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (it would have to be, judging by the caning ACCA’s last show, NEW05, received). ACCA has teamed Beuys wannabe Wolfgang Laib (a show bound for Sydney in August at the Art Gallery of NSW) with Sydney Grunge alumnus Nike Savvas, which sounded like an odd juxtaposition. Luckily for us, ACCA didn’t disappoint, resembling a rave with its own chill-out room attached rather than the highly esteemed institution it keeps telling us it is. Wooh, so Sydney!

The first room is devoted to Atomic: Full of love, full of wonder, Savvas’s massive installation of 100,000 variously coloured ping pong-style balls strung up to look like a cubic colour chart, with each ball jiggling on the spot thanks to heavy duty fans blowing a gale into the work. ACCA’s cavernous galleries are notoriously difficult to curate, with works tending to be dwarfed by the enormous yawn of the space and its 15 metre high walls that stretch back about 30 metres. What better way to combat the space than simply to fill it so that viewers are blocked by walls of balls, ranging from red down the bottom to blue at the top with the full spectrum in between? Standing back, we thought it was a cute touch, like remixing a pointillist painting through Photoshop or CAD to give it three dimensions. Up close, the bouncy balls brought on slightly less cute bouts of nausea, tempered slightly by nostalgia for early ‘90s dance parties when the pill kicked in and the eyesight started jiggling like it was money well spent and there was no way the come-down could be as bad as last time.

It’s apparently not the response Savvas was looking for, having made Atomic as a homage to the good ole Aussie bush, an exoticising nostalgia that only high-flying ex-pats can really lay claim to. Gone are those wonderful memories of traipsing new shoes through kangaroo and sheep shit, or getting sucked by vampyric leeches for the art world's virtual recreation of same. We’re not sure that a wobbly colour chart quite fits our understanding of the Australian landscape, but it’s refreshing to see that artists can still invoke this hoary chestnut and not be embarrassed about it.

If your eyesight is still vibrating like a punching bag, we’d recommend shifting to the Laib wing for a transcendental moment in front of his yellow square of hazelnut pollen lightly sprinkled over a glossy metallic base. Having one’s vision dilate and fold into enviro-friendly op art might sound tweely retro, but it’s still more enthralling than Laib’s rack of beeswax boats, delicately scattered rice or a stone slab daubed with milk. Josef Beuys was one thing but anaemic Beuys is something else entirely. The ACCA staff were more than happy to chill amid the beeswax after spending ten hours a day stringing balls together, and who could blame them? But art as an analgesic against the daily grind seems an odd way to resurrect the Beuysian ghost.

Labels: Melbourne, public galleries, reviews

Could we really have thought that there are just too many people doing the photography-video thing? Could we have really gone all fogey and started blaming the medium for the lack of interest we find in work in galleries? Pretty soon we’ll be saying that painting is making a comeback and to hell with your lambda prints and your edition of six videos, we want quality etchings and we want ‘em now! Ahem.

Monika Tichacek is so hot right now we’re not even ashamed to use the word ‘hot’. With her show The Shadowers at Sherman Galleries being only her third solo show (the other two being at Artspace in Sydney and Karen Woodbury Gallery in Melbourne), an appearance on the cover of Australian Art Collector and eight awards and scholarships – including the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2001 - since graduating from The NSW College of Fine Arts in 1999, Tichacek is being set up as the “It Girl” of the moment. Naturally, we were already cynical before we had set foot in a gallery and looked at her work. Surely, we thought, Tichacek can’t be that good, can she?

The answer is yes and no. Although Tichacek has only had three solo shows she’s been in nearly 40 group shows and she obviously knows how to construct an artful image that echoes her influences while making a claim for individuality. The work’s glossy sheen – and we’re only talking about the photographic works in Sherman’s The Shadowers – is remarkably slick. Using lightjet prints mounted behind acrylic, The Shadowers images are stygian noir narratives buffed up to a showroom shine. If black could glow, then this is what it looks like.


Monika Tichacek, The Shadowers' #4, 2004. Light jet print, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney.

The downside of the images is that the influences are perhaps a little too obvious. Who knows if Tichacek is actually influenced by Matthew Barney but it sure looks like it in some of the works. The Shadower’s #16 features a vampire like figure with dead eyes and some kind of facial prosthetic that appears to come straight out of Cremaster 3. The works also lack cohesiveness as a series. Many artist/photographers work this way but very few seem able to make each image as strong as the best of what they do, some feeling more like filler than individual works that stand on their own. Tichacek’s 13 prints suffer from this lack of focus but unlike many other young artists working in photomedia, she is able to create some iconic images.

The Shadowers #1 is the image of the show. The work has a pair of legs standing against a black background. Dressed in spangly shorts, stockings and heels, the shapely legs of the female figure hold apart a viciously threaded spider’s web of twine that pierces the skin in welts. It’s an image that is rife with a frank sexuality that isn’t shy to speak up for its otherness. The Shadowers # 4 with its play between ectoplasmic transference and the nether world of pornographic play matches #1 in its intensity while#13’s vampire blood rites manages a precarious balance between the inspired and the self conscious crappiness of high camp.

It’s easy to forget that the heat around certain artists and their seemingly sudden and inexplicable rise to prominence is sometimes the result of a real talent at work. Something needs to stoke the fire. It was a pleasant revelation to discover that Tichacek has the talent to back up up her sudden notorierty.

Clinton Nain’s work deals with one of the most fundamental aspects of making art – a heightened appreciation and understanding of materials. People forget that making art is about the very stuff that actually makes it and an appreciation for materials gets relegated to the lower depths of Pre-Modernism next to sculpting stone and egg tempera techniques. It’s something you’re supposed to know but not supposed to talk about (except if you’re a painter and want to discuss grinding your own whites). Given that Nain’s work also carries with it a decidedly post modernist notion of subject in the form of a highly astringent strain of irony, the meeting of materials and concept feels like a complete surprise.


Clinton Nain, No Entry Home, detail 2005
Acrylic, bitumen on canvas, 152 x 92 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

Nain’s work has mined the artist’s personal experiences as a gay Aboriginal man and the stories of his family for his subject matter. His use of bleach to paint directly onto unprimed canvas was a conceptual double whammy - not only did the works have a convincing and beautiful singularity, the subject was reinforced by the connotations of the materials. The works were paintings about being paintings as well as being about something else. It was an art value-add that one rarely encounters in the single channel world of ‘big idea’ post modernity.

The Dirty Deal Aint Clean finds the artist expanding his painting in new directions courtesy of the possibilities of bitumen, acrylic and enamel house paints, White King bleach bottles (in a nod to his previous use of symbolically overwrought found materials) and inks on canvas. Since the possibilities for a ghastly mélange are so high, it’s a tribute to Nain’s skills that the show’s 22 works hold together so well. Using a simplified and idiomatic symbolic language that so honed it resembles cartooning, Nain’s work declare their subject without hesitation.

We found ourselves lost in the sheer beauty of his minimalist use of materials. The loaded surfaces of Nain’s canvases in their big stretches of single colours are wracked with lines and cracks and reminded us of 60s and early 70s abstraction and the monstrously dense surfaces of canvases by painters like Elwynn Lynn and Keith Looby, not that Nain is referencing the muddy fields of pre-acrylic sludge but his unblushingly bold use of surface is a close relative.

"[Ricky Swallow] is essentially self-taught – "I had to start at ground zero" – but he received valuable assistance in the early stages from a couple of experienced woodworkers and a book called How to Carve Realistic Birds".

– Sebastian Smee, Carving a niche in time, The Australian, June 6.

"Starling once drove from Italy to Poland to exchange the doors and hood of a red Italian-made Fiat for white ones produced by the company's Polish plant. His moped ride across a Spanish desert, which included using the hydrogen-powered motor to gather water with which to paint a rather beautiful watercolour of a desert cactus, was even more quixotic".

– Adrian Searle Memories, mopeds and a brush with oils, The Guardian, June 3.

“When Sydney art dealer Martin Browne agreed to take on young figurative painter McLean Edwards in 2002, it was on the condition that Edwards stop giving away his paintings.

"Somebody would be around and they'd say, 'Oh I like that', and he'd just hand it to them," laments Browne.

Handing his paintings out wasn't such a big deal in the 1990s when his work wasn't worth so much, says Browne. These days, Edwards' disturbing, sometimes comical and always surreal portraits go for close to $50,000 at auction.

"So," explains Browne, "there's waitresses out there that he once fancied at a noodle bar turning up at auction with paintings worth tens of thousand of dollars."

– Clay Lucas, Studio Chaos Suits Edward’s Style, The Age, May 30.


"But why are women so acquisitive? What makes teenage girls drool over £1,000 handbags? Rosler shrugs languidly. "I'd actually say men are much more acquisitive than women, but they focus on big stuff. They do real estate and cars. Women do their bodies. The female role depends on being responsible for the body, and that translates into shopping. We're told it's in our genes, so we might as well lie back and enjoy it."

- Caroline Sullivan, Jumble fever, The Guardian, June 3.

“Why spend three years at art school unpicking knitted teddy bears or making a forest out of plastic bags or creating a short film about singing vaginas?”

– Ted Snell, Shape Shifters , The Australian, June 4.

"Turner judges have broken with recent tradition to shortlist Carnegie, an artist working in conventional genres such as landscapes and still life.

Darren Almond, whose work includes photography and video, has also made the shortlist, alongside installation artists Simon Starling and Jim Lambie. The overall winner of the Turner Prize will be announced on 5 December.

Bookmaker William Hill made Carnegie even-money favourite to win the award, followed by Starling with odds of 3/1. Almond and Lambie were both classed as 4/1 outsiders.

Still Life Painter Up For Turner, BBC Arts.

"It was called the biggest art heist in history - and Italian workman Vincenzo Peruggia's theft made Leonardo da Vinci's portrait the most famous painting in the world. Annoyed by how many Italian works were in the French collection, Peruggia took the Mona Lisa from the wall of the Louvre while he was alone in the room and walked out with it under his smock. It was missing for two years - but the French public queued in their thousands to see the blank space on the wall and the Mona Lisa's fame was guaranteed.

Greatest Art Heists In History, BBC Arts.

"Martin Gayford: The contrast in these paintings is between seeing them close up – where they seem quite loose and brushy – and at a distance, where the look quite photographic…

Damien Hirst: Yeah, they look great from outer space!"

Paint It Like It Is: What Damien Did Next, Martin Gayford, Modern Painters, March 2005

The world outside Sydney is a fiction. It’s what people who live in Sydney like to invoke when they’re talking about people other than themselves. At Nell’s show Happy Ending at Roslyn Oxley Gallery there are a series of works that manifest this fiction from the point of view of someone who was born and raised in Maitland before moving to Sydney. The works, a series of paintings and a floor sculpture, are themed around the vernacular language of life and death found by the sides of Australian roads – the crosses that have been erected in memory of car accident victims – and in the pantheon of necromantic imagery such as ghost faces from video games and the curled snakes of tattoos and panel van art that makes up the underworld of popular imagination.

To people living in inner city Sydney this kind of material feels strangely exotic and yet eerily familiar. It is the language of white Australian suburbia and the landscape of “Greater Sydney” that mass of land that stretches north and west to take in Maitland and Newcastle, south to Wollongong and west to the mountains. There are exhibitions and then there are room notes. The room notes to Nell’s show make a few rash claims, the most interesting of which includes these two quotes:

That teenagers get killed in cars is a statistical given. Fate tallies the magnetic attraction of death. Kids catapult along bitumen like suckers for punishment. Right on target, in the thick of it, Nell grew up in Maitland N.S.W., not far from the industrial town of Newcastle, (live according to rock music -have fun at all costs - clock-up some big ones - witness life spin out - see them all lose it) But, happily, Nell escaped more-or-less intact and made for the big smoke ... Once upon a time...

And…

Freeways grant you access to the Australian landscape. (It's all elemental out there.)

It certainly makes you wonder how far “out there” the unnamed author means. If he or she means outer space, yes, it’s noble gasses and metals and absolute temperatures in space, but any closer to Earth and the claim starts to look shaky. It may well be that once outside the cafes of Darlinghurst the highways that stretch to Erina Fair look like the road to Hades, but in practice it’s no different to Upper Forbes Street. Just as there was a cross on the side of the road just near the golf course at Umina to commemorate a much loved local police officer, there was a wooden cross stuck to a tree outside the Christian Scientist Church in Darlinghurst to commemorate the death of a local prostitute. Nell’s apparent escape to Sydney away from authenticity is a double bonus – not only do we get to enjoy working class exotica, she gets to tell the tale as well.


Guardians of The Eastern Dark, Nell, 2005.
Courtesy of the artist.

It’s unfortunate that the work is framed by this essay because the paintings are strong enough on their own, and so evocative of their source, that adding these kinds of fictions does no good for anyone. The playfulness of their theme and the lightness of their execution is a real delight an, next to the showroom feel of the group show taking up the gallery’s big space, there’s a lot of soul in the work. Nell’s conflation of pop culture elements is pure fun – the ghostie from the old Pac Man game wearing an eye mask is titled The Ghost Who Walks Never Dies connecting the 70s icon of arcade games to the ever lasting Aussie mythos of Mr. Walker, a.k.a. The Phantom. In Am I Ever Going To See Your Face Again?, the title of the sculptural work that recreates a road side memorial, complete with Jack Daniels bottle, a lizard and a mound of dirt/plastic - the spirit of Doc Neeson reaches down from rock heaven to accompany the soul of the departed to afterlife to the tune of The Angels greatest hit. There’s also an interesting nod to a very obscure piece of Aussie rock history in the work called Guardians Of The Eastern Dark. Rock nerds would know that The Eastern Dark were the band project of the late James Darroch, former guitarist with The Celibate Rifles, who was killed in a car accident while on tour in the early 80s. Knowingly or not, Nell has managed to bring together a complex array of allusions that support and reinforce one another while remaining true to her home - you can take the girl out of Maitland, but... Rock on.

Labels: commercial galleries, painting, reviews

We have of late been suffering from acute phonotony, that debilitating ennui brought on by too much photography. Although we had promised to review the Citigroup Private Bank Australian Photographic Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW we just couldn’t rouse enough enthusiasm for the job. Contemporary photography is, on the whole, very dull and although we recognise the artistry of creating glacially beautiful surfaces, it leaves us unimpressed and unmoved, struggling to tell the difference between artists and art and advertising. It all looks the same.

One of the current trends in contemporary photography is a tendency to quote the styles of advertising, to attempt a high gloss sheen that boasts big budget production values and edges the work towards the mainstream of everyday image making and reception. Looking recently at some photography hung in the window of a clothing store we were impressed by a shot of some nice kids in nice clothes walking down a street in what looked like a town in the old West. One guy was on a vintage motorcycle that looked like it was straight out of a Motorcycle Diaries. He rode alongside a group of teenagers who were walking purposefully forward a la Reservoir Dogs. Where were these kids going? Where they the Wild Bunch, well dressed revolutionaries who were going to take the fight to “the man” (as they would have in the mythical 60s) or were they on their way down the street to Starbucks? They weren’t going anywhere, were frozen in a moment of mysterious, impenetrable nothingness framed in the window of a shop that sold jeans.

We were reminded of this experience when we went to see Darren Sylvester’s debut show with Sullivan & Strumpf: Darren Sylvester: We Can Love Because We Know We Can Lose Love. Sylvester is another artist who attempts to create that high gloss sheen of contemporary art aesthetics that edges so perilously close to the empty rhetorical quotations of advertising. But unlike fellow Melbourne artists such as David Rosetzky or Adelaide’s Deborah Paauwe, Sylvester manages to pull off the production level to which he aspires. Instead of the hokey faux-Christian TV advertising look of Rosetzky’s work or the wincingly artistic execution of Paauwe, Sylvester’s work marshals cast, crew, lighting, makeup and costume into a flawless product that effaces its own production values in the quasi-serious quotations of emotional states described in the titles: Our Future Was Ours, Single Again, Your First Love is Your Last…


Your First Love Is Your Last Love, Darren Sylvester, 2004. Courtesy Sullivan & Strumpf Fine Art.

This is the “point of difference” with Sylvester. Instead of just reveling in what he has achieved and feeling comfortable that his work could easily sit next to the likes of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson (albeit on a much smaller scale), Sylvester’s work wants to place some sort of emotional state into the captured, single frame narrative. Viewing the works without the titles is a remarkably empty experience. Your First Love is Your Last Lovefeatures a kid, the detritus of his after-school Subway snack on the dining room table of his upper class home and what is presumably the piss-off letter in his hand. He looks glum but dry eyed. Without the title you can more or less work out what is happening in the image but it’s a distant sensation. With the title, however, the whole narrative comes into focus and the evocation of a discernable emotional state is there.

So do we actually feel for this kid, or are we just enjoying the quotation of the feeling? For us it was a bit like being on drugs where you would swear that you really are feeling something but as soon as it wears off you know it was just the drugs talking. In Sylvester’s show, the emotion that’s apparently invoked is a fleeting parenthetical aside to the image. We don’t know if the works in this show were meant to be taken seriously as emotional statements or whether they are “emotions”, or if indeed they were engaging with the estrangement of feeling we routinely encounter when we see art and advertising this glossy and lavishly produced, but for once we knew what we really wanted at the Sullivan & Strumpf exhibition – where were the wall notes? We wanted someone to please tell us what we were meant to be experiencing.

The seven photographic works were accompanied by a video piece called Don’t Lose Yourself In Tomorrow, a four and a half minute loop. In the piece a young kid about 7 or 8 is seen in bed in his bedroom which is a shrine to Pokemon – Pokemon pyjamas, sheets, curtains, lamps and night lights – and he is sleeping. On a stool next to the bed is a Mac widescreen laptop from which spooky ambient music is heard and a screen saver pulses in time. Waking, the kid gets out of bed and looks out the window. He gets back into bed and as he falls asleep the image cuts away to the screen saver and then to increasingly manic looking close-ups of a Pokemon lamp, as though the Pokemon is sending the kid signals in his sleep. The kid wakes, gets out of bed and looks out the window – and so the loop goes around again.

As a title Don’t Lose Yourself In Tomorrow is a bit of a time warp in itself as no self respecting kid would be seen wearing Pokemon in 2005, but this is art, not reality. As a video work, the production values are amazing, the piece appears to have been shot on 35mm with dollies, tilts and pull focus and despite some heavy handed editing in the “spooky” bits and “tense” music, the effect is mesmerizing. But with the added element of duration, the ambiguity of the work – both in intention and effect – is less than enthralling. One reader commented here last week that Sylvester’s work is like Post Rock, like it is the thing but has a brainy, jazz-tinged self conscious edge.

Avalon is an apartment building in Brisbane on the corner of Harcourt and Brunswick Streets on the border between New Farm and Fortitude Valley. Built in 1929, the building has 26 apartments that are listed by letters instead of numbers, the first being A, the last being Z. Inside these old dark wood apartments live a collection of people as varied as the inner city – workers, retried people, artists, writers, dancers devout monks and others. In its 75 year history, the building has gone from being a respectable up market residence for professionals to a safe haven for prostitutes, to (briefly) a methamphetamine lab, to being affordable long term inner city housing.

You might think that Avalon is a kind of bohemian enclave but the reality is that it’s just a building with a long history, perhaps like many others in cities around Australia. But the difference between this building and others is that it now has its own biography, a book called Avalon: Art & Life of An Apartment Building edited by Ricardo Felipe, a resident himself.

Felipe wrote to us an asked if we’d like to have a look at the book and although we didn’t know anything about it we said, sure, send it along. Opening the book we realised that this was much more than just a documentary companion to a show that was held at the Museum of Brisbane about the building. The book is organised using the same alphabetical order as the building and includes historical documents, pieces on the history of the building, reminiscences from residents of different periods and works of art made by artist who have lived or still live in the building including Jun Chen, Leonard Brown, Sandra Selig, Luke Roberts and Skye Raabe. Avalon: Art & Life of An Apartment Building is a fascinating read, alternating between the everyday experience of people who lived in the building in the 30s and 40s up to now and including juicy tidbits of information and scandal, such as this excerpt discussing the 1937 case of the “The Camera Blackmailers”:

THE BARONET OF AVALON: Sir Siddartha Affleek, c. 1937. Perhaps only one member of the aristocracy has ever lived at Avalon, although his next address was Boggo Road Prison: Sir Frederick James Siddartha Affleck, 9th Baronet of Dalham, County Suffolk, England. In his book Sunshine and Rainbows historian Clive Moore describes the illicit exploits of the Affleck brothers:

The "camera blackmailers" case, as it became known, rocked Brisbane in 1937, when a Brunswick Street apartment building, still standing today, became infamous as a centre of a gay pornography and blackmail racket.

The Honourable Sid Affleck first came to the attention of the Queensland police in late 1937 when he and his brother Dalham, with Ernest Barker, were charged with conspiring to, and actually blackmailing John W. They had threatened to accuse John W., a blond twenty-one-year-old shop assistant at Pennys Department Store in nearby Fortitude Valley, of committing an act of gross indecency. One evening in early September, Dalham Affleck met John W. on his way to All Saints Church, luring him back to his flat in the Avalon building in Brunswick Street "to see some eastern articles".1 Once there, Dalham Affleck king-hit John W., knocking him out. The young man claimed to have regained consciousness to find himself lying on a bed wearing only his singlet, with the two Affleck brothers going through his belongings. While their victim was unconscious, the Afflecks had photographed him committing "gross indecency", presumably oral sex, with Dalham Affleck. When the police raided the flat in November they found a camera concealed in the wardrobe, focused on the bed, along with negatives and photos of other young men in similar positions. In evidence the Afflecks admitted running a club for "jaded business men who desired to come there for a play-around and be photographed in the nude. We have never demanded money from any of them and I can call them to prove it".2 During the Affleck's tenancy. Flat G in the Avalon building seems to have become a gay brothel, the brothers providing themselves or other young men for sexual services for well-to-do business men, and indulging in a bit of blackmail on the side ... Today, the Avalon apartments in Brunswick Street remain in good repair, the street corner now a well-known haunt for prostitutes, both male and female. One cannot help thinking that if Sid and Dalham Affleck had still been living there they would have had a hand in organising their activities.”

Interior of Luke Robert's Avalon apartment.

There is also a tour of the building with photographs of apartment interiors. Given the limited variation of the floor plan, looking into how each resident organises their lives and possessions in limited space is an insight into how people respond to architecture. Some are messy and some are neat, while others have converted their modest spaces into cool interiors worthy of Better Homes & Gardens. There is also a fantastic spread of a series of photographs taken by Luke Roberts documenting the ways in which a dead space at the top of a set of stairs is used by different residents – either moving in or out – to temporarily store their furniture. Going further afield, the book also has a mini photo survey of the uses of the name Avalon in different locations around the world, a piece on the origin of the name, and for the sake of completeness, an interview with Bryan Ferry on his experiences with apartment living and recording the Roxy Music album of the same name. Avalon: Art & Life of An Apartment is being distributed nationally by Modern Journal to selected art and design bookshops.

Our discussion of artists making movies and artists as the subject of movies [see below] prompted some readers to remind of us of two Australian artists who have directed feature films; Tracey Moffatt’s Bedeviled and Philip Brophy’s Bodymelt. Although these films could be considered natural extensions of both artist’s work rather than volte-face career turns such as David Salle and Julian Schnabel, they are indeed feature films made for cinema release (or straight to video oblivion in the case of Brophy).


Age of Consent, Dir. Michael Powell, 1969.

The 52nd Sydney Film Festival is hosting a world premiere screening of a restored version of Michael Powell’s Age of Consent, a film about a fictional artist based on a book by a real one.

Powell of course was the British director of such famed [and infamous] movies including The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus and Peeping Tom. It was the controversy that followed the release of Peeping Tom (considered by some at the time to be ‘evil’) that forced Powell to relocate to Australia where he made two films; that amazing time capsule of Sydney in the 60s called They’re A Weird Mob (1966) and three years later, Age of Consent (1969).

This latter film was based on a novel written by Norman Lindsay and features many of the hallmarks of that great sybarite artist – lots of nudity, languid lying about on tropical beaches, some fevered painting executed with grim determination by James Mason (done by Lindsay) and yet more nudity. As the Sydney Film Festival describes the plot, “Mason plays an ageing jaded artist who returns to his homeland to seek inspiration, he finds it in Cora, a nubile innocent played by a 20-something Helen Mirren.”

We have intense memories of seeing this film on TV in the early 1970s which, as far as we can recall, was uncut and featured so much unblushing cavorting that we became life long fans of Helen Mirren. Apparently, we were wrong, as the only extant version had the music by Peter Sculthorpe replaced and the nudity removed. The new print has every last second restored and the music put back in and the SFF has a screening which will be introduced by Kevin Powell, the director’s son, and Anthony Buckley, the film’s editor.

The critical reception of the film was tepid at best and although thought to be a sure fire hit, failed at the box office. More recent studies of Powell’s career find it difficult to find much good to say about it, the most generous being a summary of the director’s work by Adrian Danks at Senses of Cinema:

The two films that Powell made in Australia - They're a Weird Mob (1966) (scripted by Pressburger under the pseudonym Richard Imrie) and Age of Consent - can either be read as diluted versions of Powell's visionary cinema or as in keeping with the constantly adventurous, inquisitive and playful dimensions of the last 30 years of his career (they also revel in the humour that percolates throughout much of the director's work). Though less ambitious aesthetically, these two films and those which follow, can be compared positively to the late work of the great Classical Hollywood masters such as Hawks, Ford and Hitchcock.”

From Phatspace:

International Ate: Phatspace International Video Exhibition

In conjunction with Phatspace's ongoing new media projects; Ate and the Phatspace Video Library, we are excited to announce our first International Video Art Juried Show. We are seeking to exhibit a collection of new video works from both national and international emerging artists.

All works submitted will be assessed by a judging panel consisting of artists, curators, gallerists, critics and peers. 8 works will be awarded “Best in Show” and will feature in a 3 week exhibition at Phatspace, all expenses paid. The winning artists will also feature on a DVD publication that will accompany the show.

All works submitted will be archived into the Phatspace Video Library, which is a viewing lounge for new media arts open to the public during gallery hours. This resource is often used by curators, students, artists and members of the public and is an excellent opportunity to get your work seen. If someone is interested in your work we will put them directly in contact with you.

If you are an artist working with video/new media art then we want to see your work! Send a show reel on either DVD or Video formats (PAL please!) along with a short bio and a paragraph or two about your work.

The postmark deadline is 1 August 2005. The judge’s decision is final and the 8 exhibiting artists will be notified early September. The exhibition will run from 27 October to 12 November 2005. Phatspace.