the art life: June 2006

End of Financial Year Madness

Friday, June 30, 2006

TEAM Art Life wears Pierre Cardin's 1968 Winter Range.

TEAM Art Life will be taking a short break and will return with a full update on Wednesday July 12. In the meantime, lay on the couch, relax and tell us your art world dreams...

The World Game: Fantasy World Cup Comp!

The response to our Fantasy World Cup Competition was terrific. We had a lot of inventive suggestions for football teams of artists, critics and assorted other art world people in various provocative and litigious arrangements. Many of the teams made no reference to art or artists and gave scant regard to the fact that most of the team [if not all] might be dead. Our prospective team managers also seemed to relish the possibility of inter-team rivalries and potential on-field stoushes between players. Andrew Nemeth, for example, proposed a team comprised of the women in Picasso's life

Goalkeeper: Jacqueline Roque

Sweeper: Olga Khokhlova
Fullback: Fernande Olivier
Centre-back: Carlos Vallentin
Wingback: Gaby Lespinasse

Deep-lying forward: Marie-Therese Walter

Centre midfield: Eva Gouel
Defensive midfield: Francois Gilot
Attacking midfield: Dora Maar

Winger: Georges Braque

Centre-forward: Genevieve Laporte

Reserve: Gertrude Stein

Ballboy: Pablo Picasso

Some say Braque was a 'girl', but we're pretty sure he was a man. Jesse Stein, working hard despite 4am wakeups for matches on SBS, nominated three teams, some possibly meeting in our Fantasy A League later in the year:

Team 1: hommes fous internationaux

Francis Bacon – L Fullback

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Attacking third

Le Corbusier – Midfielder

Clement Greenberg – R Fullback

Jeff Koons – R Forward

William Rubin – Defensive third

FT Marinetti – Sweeper

Jackson Pollock – L Forward

Diego Rivera – Stopper

Richard Serra – Goal Keeper

Vladimir Tatlin – Centre

Team 2: signori grigi

Edmund Capon – L forward

John Coburn – Centre

James Gleeson – L fullback

Pro Hart (Red Card, no longer playing) – R fullback

Ian Howard – midfielder

Robert Hughes – Defensive third

Terence Maloon – Goal keeper

James Mollison – R forward

Mike Parr – Attacking Third

Daniel Thomas – Stopper

John Wolseley – Sweeper

Team 3: Woeste Australiërs
(That means Fierce Australians in Dutch, by the way)

Richard Bell – Defensive third

Gordon Bennett – Stopper

Rex Butler – Centre

Alan Cruickshank – R Fullback

Adam Cullen – L Fullback

Andrew Frost – Goal Keeper

John Macdonald – Midfielder

Charles Merewether – Sweeper

The Kingpins – L Forward, R Forward and Attacking Third

We had a lot of random entries into the comp via Comments. Spiv, our favourite dysfunctional public servant, nominated a team with their positions, but the breadth and depth of footballing talent on display would put this team into serious contention:

Yoko Ono, Rover Thomas, Rodchenko, Munch, Dick Watkins, Malevich, Blinky Palermo, Sonja Svecova, Andy Warhol, Jimmy Page, Johnny Thunders, Sid Nolan, William Faulkner, Ginger Meggs, Jeff Fenech, Martin Sharp, Ralph Balson, Johnny Cash, Pavrotti, Neil Young, Ginger Riley, Jackson Pollock, Micheal Jackson, Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt van Rijn and Gunter Christmann!!

The bench - Philip Guston, William S. burroughs, Vicki Papageorgopoulos, Kippenburger, Leon Golub, Spike Milligan, Anna Nicole-Smith, Ad Reinhardt, Barbara Smith, Kazuo Shirago and Alison Knowles.

Pity you can only have 11 players on the field at any one time.... We also were very much taken by C-Diddy's team too, but he or she may have some issues with player poaching with Jesse Stein...:

Bas Jan Ader as coach, another veteran dutchman to be the tactical genius behind an aussie team, with Mike Parr as assistant coach, he can give the team earnest and impassioned pep talks, and cut limbs off to scare the troops.

Team as follows:

strikers:

Patrick Swan, Vicki Papas, The Kingpins

Midfield:

Brian Fuata, Tony Schwensen, Marita Fraser, Soda_Jerk, Michael Moran, Jonno Bailey (fresh from a training sabbatical in scandanavia)

Backs:

Husseyin Sami, Dan Templeman, Tim McMonagle and Sally Smart and Melody Ellis.

Keepers:

Ella Barclay (sober) and Ella barclay (the other 99% of the time)

Super-Subs:

Ms&Mr;, Sam Smith and Rob McLeish

Water Boy&Girl;:

Emoh

Team Carpenter:

Ricky Swallow

Motivational Banner Maker:

Rose Nolan

Diddy's team has a lot going for it with fresh talent and chutzpah in the back field. Going on a different tack, Toulouse Le Plot has an "older adults" team with plenty of experience where it counts:

Goalkeeper : Gordon Bennett

Striker : Imants Tillers

Centre Forward : Peter Booth

Deep-lying forwards : Howard Arkley

Winger : Ian Burn

Attacking midfielder : Stelarc

Defensive midfielder : Mike Parr

Centre midfield : Rosalie Gascoigne

Wingback : Gordon Hookey

Fullback : Richard Bell

Sweeper : Susan Norrie

We don't know how Bennet got in there, but we're sure he'd be an expert goalie, at least as good as the real thing. Kunia's Team Ya Ya drew its talent from across the world and would be a hard beat:

Team Ya Ya

Goalkeeker Christo

Left Back Dianna Arbus

Centre Backs Tracet Moffatt, Rover Thomas

Right Back Whitney Chaddwick,

Playmakers Georgia O'Keefe, Alfred Steiglitz

Wingers John Berger, Michael Riley

Fowards Margaret Preston, Destiny Decon

Reserves: Matisse, Paul Klee, Arthur Boyd

It's certainly great to see Berger back on the field. [Hopefully he can keep his mind on the ball and not on the private ownership of the field]. Duckypoo tried several attempts at teams, but we liked his last two the best:

An all Aussie Team of Art Dealers ( Mens 11 )

Goalkeeper : Denis Savill
Striker : Anna Schwartz
Centre Forward : Vasili Kaliman
Deep-lying forwards : Nevin Hurst
Winger : Rexy Irwin
Attacking midfielder : Brenda May ?
Defensive midfielder : Bill Nuttal
Centre midfield : Stuart Purves
Wingback : Martin Browne
Fullback : Charles Nodrum
Sweeper : Horst Kloss

Interchange:
Ray Hughes, Sir Frank Watters John Buckley

An all Aussie Team of Art Dealers ( Ladies 11 );

Goalkeeper : Paul Greenaway
Striker : Anna Schwartz
Centre Forward : The Sullivan & Strumpf chicks
Deep-lying forwards : Eva Breuer
Winger : Conny Dietzschold
Attacking midfielder : Jan Minchin
Defensive midfielder : Brigit Pirrie
Centre midfield : Libby Edwards
Wingback : Roslyn Oxley
Fullback : Dr Gene Sherman
Sweeper : Susie Beaver

Interchange: Stella Downer Karen Woodbury Lauraine Diggins

Late nights and too much beer make Duckypoo something-something: unfortunately Frank Watters is not yet a "sir", Paul Greenaway is a man and Brenda May is a woman. Had these glaring mistakes not been made, the Poo was in serious contention for the prize.

However, it's a game of two halves, which is a football-esque way of saying that the winner of our incredible prize pack goes to an artist and a great team manager: Alasdair Macintyre. A man with a clear head and a sound grasp of art-football history, McIntyre put together a very classy team with talent, showmanship and quality. We also tip our hats to McIntyre's gumption in naming the team after himself:

Alasdair Macintyre’s Australian Artist World Cup Soccer team.

Formation: 1-4-4-1

Goalkeeper: Rupert Bunny (chosen to lull the opposition into false expectations for he is anything but, between the sticks)

Sweeper: Sydney Long (Ideal for the “long ball” from the back)

Defense: Lloyd Rees (central defense, and has the towering height to head in a goal from the odd corner-cross)
Leonard Shillam (a rock in central defense)
Danila Vassilieff (Russian born, former Cossack… would you try and get past him?)
William Bustard (not a great defender, but a great name for the crowd to chant, and for the goalkeeper to yell, even when he’s referring to the ref.)

Midfield: Sydney Ball (chose himself)
Charles Condor (swooping in from the wing)
John Peter Russell (continental know how in the mid-field, qualified to play for France, but opted to represent Australia))
E. Phillips Fox (creative core of the mid-field, fox by name…)

Strikers: George Lambert (“energy like a comet”, and “a job-lot Apollo”, if he doesn’t score, who cares? There’s always the glamorous photo shoots!)

Subs: Donald Friend (An extra striker to give Lambert “a friend up front”)
Jeffrey Smart (A late sub, with inside knowledge about the Italian defense)

Shock Poll Shock: We're Staying!

Thursday, June 29, 2006

When I leave the art world I will

Maintain a dignified silence 16% [11]

Become a media pundit 1% [1]

Write an amusing roman à clef 4% [3]

Invest my money wisely in debentures 1% [1]

Wait for a retrospective then storm back more relevant than ever 9% [6]

Return to tabletop dancing 20% [14]

I aint going nowhere sucka 49% [34]

70 votes total

Connect The Dots

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

It’s only been a couple of weeks since the Biennale of Sydney opened but already it feels as exciting as last week’s milk. Which is to say, not very exciting at all, not very interesting and possibly a bit stinky. BOS 2006 is a curious success and also a strange kind of failure. Dr. Merewether’s organisational principle [don’t call it a theme] of looking at artists who are caught in the worldwide diasporas of a mobile population with money and time on their hands to make art about their situation, has been by far the most successful Biennale quasi-theme in years.

BOS 2006 is probably the best Biennale in terms of this organisational principle since Rene Block’s extravaganza in 1990 because individual works are not required to address, or be seen in relation to, an overall theme. They are simply what they are and can be seen as such. When the Esteemed Critic trudged around the BOS venues and wrote about the experience in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend, he did so in the belief that it all says “something” about the contemporary art world, a revelation he discovered as he looked under rocks and into the sky for the signs and portents of the imminent collapse of uncritical thinking. Ironically, the 2006 BOS is a return to something more rational, yet the individual works are found to be wanting. What the art in BOS points to is not so much a “something” about contemporary art that one can deduce with enough insight and imagination but in fact is really nothing more than a representative sample of Merewether’s taste in art. Take it or leave it. For our part, we found our thrills and we moved on. Meanwhile, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is the next artistic director of the BOS 2008. This factoid hasn’t been officially announced, but the Italian-born New York-based curator has been doing the rounds of Sydney’s artist run galleries checking out what’s what and who is who. We’re not sure if that means the next Biennale will be the plastic bag biennale, but we have our suspicions…

Hany Armanious, Intelligent Design [detail], 2006.
Polyurethane on form ply, 30.5x237.5x8cms.
Courtesy Roslyn Oxley 9.

Two years ago during BOS 2002, Roslyn Oxley had an exhibition of work by Hany Armanious. Like many galleries around town trying to hitch their wagon to the BOS with exhibitions by artists with some sort of international profile or, at the very least, exhibitions by their best artists, Oxley has a number of artists with international profiles who could conceivably fill that spot but few have as much artistic credibility as Armanious. Of all the Grunge alumni, it is Armanious who has stayed the closest to his roots, exploring the elegant yet crusty beauty that is his trademark. For 2006 Intelligent Design is a show of sculptural works that display his dexterous use and understanding of materials. The title piece of the show is elegant and simple and looks as though it could have been made back in the heady days of the early 90s. A series of polyurethane hooks arranged on a backing board present the viewer with a repetitive visual field. In the middle of all this is a small polyurethane horse’s head turned upside down so it too could be used as a hook. In the context of the rest of the piece, it’s a pretty funny visual gag playing on the similarity of the forms, but given the title of the work, it also plays on the idea of conspicuous parallel evolution. How can an inconceivably complex organism exist without the intervention of a higher intelligence to guide its creation? Or is it just a coincidence?

Hany Armanious, Bubble Jet Earth Work, 2006.
Glycerine, worm castings, air. 159x80x140cms.
Courtesy Roslyn Oxley 9.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Armanious’s work makes similar kinds of logic inversions in various spectacular ways. The macabre The Danger in Extracting Meaning is an elaborate visual pun that offers substantial aesthetic thrills, from the fake snow that blows around inside the box to the banana legs on the bottom of the piece to the electric jug plug that powers this Jack The Ripper-meets-art criticism diorama. In the work Bubble Jet Earth Work Armanious has created a machine that makes drawings on long rolls of paper. Using a bubble blowing machine and a slowly moving sheet of paper, the froth from a can of Guinness [along with some glycerine and worm castings], stains the paper in delicate brown circles, then piles up in huge mounds in the gallery. The machine is a thing of beauty, a witty and insightful demonstration that no aesthetic system can exist without outside input. Whether this is an example of a deep religiosity we can’t say, but from the point of view of the purely secular, Armanious makes works of real authority that demonstrate an almost peerless command of materials.

Rob McLeish, Big Mouthfuls Forever #4, 2006.
Pencil and chewing gum on paper, 29 x 39 cm.
Courtesy Esa Jaske Gallery.

Rob McLeish’s Lick The Loser and Make Them Stick at Esa Jaske Gallery has a lot connections to the work of Armanious and other artists of the early Grunge period and it’s the kind of contemporary art that people who don’t know anything about contemporary art will look at and say, what the hell is that supposed to be about? If you don’t know anything about the last – ooh – 30 years or so of art history, of conceptualism, of contemporary European photography, of theories of the abject, or had an eye for a joke, you’d be scratching your head in complete befuddlement. On the other hand, if you did know about these things then you might rate McLeish’s work as highly as some of the younger artists in the Sydney art world rate Melbournite McLeish. McLeish takes images he finds on the internet and then traces the photos with pens on a light box giving them an almost photorealistic look to what on closer inspection turns out to be messy, scratchy, graffiti-like drawings of drab American kids in drab backyards, lolling about on trampolines, making faces or getting dirty for their web cam. Let’s call his work International Abject because there’s a lot of this kind of stuff around [cf SLAVE] and it appears not to have borders. If McLeish can claim any individuality to this work it’s through the choice of the images and the particularly distressed and artless aura they give off, but aside from a couple of works that raise a laugh – Big Mouthfuls Forever Series #4 which features the big doofus from Slingblade - there aint nothing going on here but the rent. Interestingly, the connections to McLeish’s work are traceable to his Sydney contemporaries, and perhaps that’s why a whole slew of artists in Sydney reckon this guy is the bee’s knees. However artists such as Chris Hanrahan, Todd McMillan, Matthew Hopp, Ella Barclay and Viki Papageorgopoulos [among others] have cottoned on to the fact that the difference between trash and treasure is the surface gleam and the idea lurking behind it. Without the first thing, it’s tough going, without the second, you’re just wasting your audience’s time. But more crucially you have to demonstrate you know this fact, and you have to do it in the work itself.

Linde Ivimey
Jacob and the Angel II, 2006
Steel armature, cast acrylic resin, dyed cotton and silk, natural fibre, cast and natural eagle, sheep and chicken bones, 92 X 88 X 33 cm.
Courtesy Martin Browne Fine Art

No one would mistake Linda Ivimey’s work for anything but a highly traditional and exquisite aesthetic experience. Her elaborate sculptures in the show Old Souls- New Work at Martin Browne Fine Art take their cues from the stories of the Saints, with guest appearances from The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse and The Twelve Apostles. The various sculptures feature bones and hair, costumes and sculpted faces under sack cloth [sans ashes], frozen moments of mutual destruction and endless penance. Ivimey’s sculptures are incredibly evocative, reaching down into the root mythos of Western society, bringing up imagery that, while it may seem pretty obscure to those without knowledge of the life and miraculous deeds of St. Emmeranus [for example], one feels it as much as you might know it. It’s as if figures from a Peter Booth nightmare have stepped out of the painting and into a three dimensional world. There is also a very dark sense of humour at play, a small figure in one corner of the gallery, a child like figure with furry feet and a body made of chicken bones seems to smile back at you. We urge any visitor to this exhibition to take whatever precautions against evil spells they feel is necessary.

Shock Poll Shock: Public sculpture?

Public Sculpture?

Somewhere to hide my stash 5% [4]

Good for shade in summer 6% [5]

Something to lean against 7% [6]

A shocking eyesore 9% [8]

Criminally neglected 20% [17]

X-cellent for sk8 18% [16]

Will nicely meet bogus council requirements 36% [31]

87 votes

Heavyweight Champions

Monday, June 26, 2006

Geoffery Newton, Cullen V Watkins. Coloured pencil on paper, 2005.
Courtesy of the artist and neon parc, melbourne.

WHAT: picture this: selected works from ANU School of Art's 2000-6 painting alumni show

WHEN: NOW Closes Sat 8 July 2006

WHERE: SYDNEY COLLEGE OF THE ARTS GALLERIES, The University of Sydney, Balmain Road, Rozelle (enter at Cecily St), Tues-Fri 11-5, Sat 11-4.

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Nigel Milsom, Untitled (Chorus), Oil on Canvas, 2006.

Firstdraft

Nigel Milsom - Choir

Exhibition open: Wednesday June 28 to Saturday July 15, 2006
Opening night drinks: Wednesday June 28, 2006 6 - 8pm
Firstdraft opening hours: Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm

Artist’s Statement: I sat down on the bench at the bus stop opposite the park near where I live. It was 7:15am and I was on my way to work. Beside me on the bench was a postcard, I picked it up and stared at the image on the front. It appeared illusive but powerful, the harder I stared trying to make out the image, the more it faded until it disappeared completely leaving the postcard blank. At the same time, I heard music coming from the Community Hall across the roadway, mournful voices singing to the haunted sounds of the piano accordion. The singing became louder and more intense.

A short time later, buses nowhere. A distressed woman came to me, 7:17am, holding to her breast a postcard similar to the one I picked up minutes earlier. Looking at me with tears in her eyes she cried, Here is a postcard from Spain to you from me. The bull on this postcard looks angry as though he’s going to attack someone. That bull looks crazed and possessed. Maybe someone has provoked that bull?

I turned away confused. The distressed woman began screaming, punching her fists in the air, whilst the CHOIR from across the roadway continued to sing dramatic, painful hymns. It was now 7:20am, still no bus; I jumped up angrily and began the long walk to work with soreness in my eyes.

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Zuza Zochowski
'Handmade'
Opening Saturday July 1 from 5-7pm
Sheffer Gallery,

Exhibition dates 1-29 July

Zuza's paintings explore memory, atmospheric light, composition and the saturated colours of seasonal landscape. This particular series was influenced by the miniature worlds captured by polaroids. Zuza uses photography as a reference and then applies her own interpretation to the captured moment on canvas. Suggestive and enigmatic in their quality, the viewer is drawn in closer to the small scale works which reveals Zuza's experiments with embroidery and drawing onto the canvas.
The resulting works are intimate portraits of a specific place at a given point in time, often suggestive and enigmatic within their simplicity.

SHEFFER GALLERY
38 Lander Street , Darlington 2008 Sydney
opening hours Wed - Sat 11-6pm
T -61 02 9310 5683

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Art Movement: Explorations of Motion and Change

PAUL BAI TOM BURLESS DANIEL CROOKS M3ARCHITECTURE ROBERT PULIE SARAH RYAN JOHN TONKIN CURATOR: RICARDO FELIPE

OPENING 6–8PM, TUESDAY 27 JUNE FREE

LEVEL 4, 702 HARRIS STREET, ULTIMO, SYDNEY NSW 2007—BESIDE THE ABC BUILDING (OFF BROADWAY)

GALLERY HOURS: MONDAY–FRIDAY 12–6PM ALSO OPEN SATURDAY 1 JULY, 12–6PM

Daniel Crooks, Static No.9 (a small section of something larger), 2005.
Still (detail) from DV/DVD, 13:23 minutes.
Courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney.
Everything in the universe is constantly shifting and changing. Art Movement is about how we perceive this perpetual motion, and how it can be represented. New and recent works conceptualise actual and impossible physical movement. Video, lenticular photography, sculpture, interactivity and architecture are employed to explore contemporary states of constant flux. Art Movement will be accompanied by an exhibition booklet with a text by Gabrielle Finnane.

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Danielle Freakley
We must support ourselves
One Night Only Conceptual Performance at Spacement Gallery
Thursday the 6th of July, 6pm – 9pm, 2006

This one-night-only project, curated by Danielle Freakley, incorporates a breadth of Melbourne artists including: Kate Daw, Kate Fulton, Jon Campbell, Katie Jacobs, Grant McCracken, Sue Osborne, Rowena Martinich, Paul Compton, Matt Sully, Noam Shoan and Ash Keating among others.

Danielle Freakley’s one-night-only performance at Spacement Gallery incorporates several of Melbourne’s local emerging and established artists. In the shadow of Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, the project sets up a very real and dynamic tension between: Artist, Artwork, and Audience. Each of the 13 participating artists will show their most familiar (or ‘representative’) art piece. They will stand before their artwork – almost as though on display themselves, as ambassadors for their practice. The twist in this exhibition is the silence that will pervade the gallery. There will be no verbal communication between artists or audience. As a way of turning the usual, familiar gallery-opening ritual inside out, this exhibition creates a dynamic where the audience must attempt to judge the artwork in unison with the appearance of the artist. As its ambassador, the artist and the artwork are inseparable. The opposite also holds true: the audience will feel the artist’s judgment on them. As is typical of Freakleys exciting and prolific art practice, her works often upset the usual order of the exhibiting process. Embracing sharp wit and humor, she very cleverly turns the art-world in on its head by unraveling the underlying systems upon which it is founded, and revealing the personal tensions which play such a significant (and often painful) role in an artists career. Her on-going exhibition project ‘Artist Running Space’, for example, involves herself as the primary subject of the work as a living, breathing gallery space dressed in white from head to toe, upon which artists ‘install’ their work (see documentation and ‘floor plan’ on www.artistrunningspace.com).

She is not afraid to disrupt the order of experiencing art, and setting up new gallery models by which to present (or inhabit) the work. As such, she has recently been gaining wide acclaim for her adventurous projects. Having recently gained her Masters Degree in Fine Arts at VCA in Melbourne, she has been exhibiting widely throughout Melbourne and Australia. Recent highlights include ‘Artist Running Space’ Mori Gallery, Sydney (June 2006), ‘Sedition’ Casula Powerhouse, NSW, ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of in choosing Happiness’ AVA Gallery, London, 2004 ‘Check Point’ Mori gallery, Sydney, ‘Work in Progress’ Spacement, Melbourne.

DATES: One night only performance: Thursday 6th of July 2005 6-9pm
WHERE: Watson Place, Melbourne, Also by appointment 187 Collins St, Melbourne 3000
WEB: www.spacement.com.au
EMAIL: [email protected]
CONTACT: 61 [0] 3 9639 2560

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PELT

Ivar Lehtsalu
Real-tearing Stream

Opens at PELT on the Wednesday 28 June 2006.
Exhibition Runs: Thursday 29 June - Sunday 9 July

Opening hours: Thu - Sun, 12am-6pm

Real-tearing Stream is a collection of sound, and video created solely within a digital systems. Each element has been duplicated, cut, layered, stretched, separated and reconstructed to appear 'real', or perhaps as a recording of something real. What is heard is then only files of data, created from themselves, which have been stored in various digital mediums after creation.

Ivar Lehtsalu is a Sydney based electronic artist that primarily uses software and digital systems to create sound and video works. Ivar is currently finishing his Bachelor of Electronic Arts (Honours) degree at the University of Western Sydney. Ivar is also an electronic musical improviser who has played impermanent.audio, Nownow festival, Electrofringe Festival and regularly at other events in Sydney, Penrith and Wollongong. Ivar has contributed to various group shows as a part of Sydney collective Dysfunctional Feed. This is Ivars first solo exhibition.

Helping Us To Help You To Help Yourself

Last week, out of the blue, just like that, you wouldn't credit it, can you adam and eve it, TEAM Art Life received a generous donation from a mysterious Canberra-based benefactor. Thank you sir/madam! The donation will go towards funding our many activities, some of them actually related to the art world, but will almost certainly help us keep our spirits up during these trying times. Since in all likelihood you don't live in Canberra, you'd be asking yourself - how can I help support the only genuine art democracy on the web? You can do it in one of two ways - you can make a donation directly by clicking on the "Make a Donation" button on the right hand side of this page [just under the poll]. You'll need a credit card and trust in PAYPAL, but we can guarantee our readers, money goes in one end and comes out the other. It actually works. The other way of supporting The Art Life is to make all your Amazon.com purchases by clicking through to Amazon via the small advertisements at the bottom right of page [below all the links]. Whenever you buy something from that clickthrough a percentage of that purchase will be credited to us and we'll get a whopping [undisclosed amount]. It doesn't actually come to us in $$$ but we get what the American's call "store credit" which helps to defray the costs of expensive DVD purchases from the Criterion Collection. We tip our hats to certain individuals who recently purchased Air Guitar by Dave Hickey and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

Speaking of helping - you are an artist who has their own web site. It has taken ages to build and it is very very nice. How do you get loads of people to look at it? Simple - send us the URL and we will add it to our ever-growing list of top Australian artist web sites. Same deal if you're an artist run gallery, organisation or non-commercial project. Our email address is theartlife[at]hotmail.com.

A reader recently asked us what happens when you click on the email address under the heading "Email" on the right hand side of this page. "I am sent into a loop I do not understand," he said. If you are using a PC, you will see a pop up asking you from which address you want to send your email. If you have an online mail server like Hotmail or Yahoo, just type in your address and your account password and you will be taken automatically to your account. You then simply type your message. Before you send the mail, you need to remove the words NO SPAM from the end of our email adress. [We've put that there in the hope that it will deter automated spam from inundating our inbox with offers of free sex, penis enlargement or offers of a $1 million from African fraudsters]. If you are using a porgram such as Outlook, just cut and paste the address from the page and send it to us that way. If you are using a Mac, when you click on the email address, your computer will ask you for your credit card details - enter them as prompted, then wait as money from your account is transferred to Apple Inc. You won't be able to send an email to us, but Steve Jobs will be that much richer and your G5 will gleam all the brighter and whiter...

How do you get your Art Life updates before everyone else? When we publish a full update we like to send out an email advising readers of the new content. These emails usually contain extra jokes, a quote of the week, and are often themed around some hilarious topical conceit, our favourite movie or song. If you'd like to get on board, send us your email address and we'll add you to our list.

Art Life Fantasy World Cup Comp!

Friday, June 23, 2006

To celebrate Australia's progression into Round 2 of the World Cup, we're pleased to announce The Art Life Fantasy World Cup Competition! We're offering a lucky reader a special, never-to-be-repeated PRIZE PACK that includes DVDs, magazines and an attractive tote bag! Wait, you're saying, what the hell does this have to do with art? As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team", an observation as true to art as it is to the beautiful game.

Prize pack leader!

So what do you win exactly? FOUR DVDs - Rise of The Roos: The Road to Germany 2006 narrated by Les Murray, The 2006 Hyundai A League Inaugural Season in Review, Sizzling Sydney: 2006 Hyundai A-League Champions Sydney FC in Review and the piece of resistance, Johnny Warren's Football Mission [narrated by Anthony LaPaglia in his scary trans-Pac accent] - "This fascinating and moving film charts the rise of the soccer legend, from his early days growing up in Botany in the south of Sydney where he dared to choose football over rugby league, through his illustrious playing career both at his club St. George and as "Captain Socceroo" and his continuing influence throughout his life on the sport he loved both at home and abroad". BUT WAIT - You'll also get your hands on the extremely limited, much prized and highly sought after official BIENNALE OF SYDNEY: ZONES OF CONTACT 2006 PRESS PACK which includes a map of the venues, a bottle of Santa Vittoria water, a pamphlet of Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact highlights, a packet of Auoria Coffee Flavoured Mouth Strips [Caffe Latte flavour] and three special copies of Australia's leading art publications: Australian Art Review issue 09 November 05 - February 06 [this copy returned from The Hills Newsagency RRP $18.95], the last ever issue of State of The Arts with a special "fashion expose" and lead article "heroin's effect on art" - a must have as they won't be priniting any more of these babies - and a copy of the latest [summer 06] issue of Art Asia Pacific published in New York and featuring some Australian and Euorpean art and a special feature on architect's Lego fantasies!!! All of this delivered to your door in a Biennale of Sydney tote bag!!!*

So what do you have to do to win this incredible prize pack? Nominate your fantasy world cup art team [11 members] comprising either Australian or international artists, alive or dead. Would Brett Whiteley make a great striker? Could Modigliani transfer his talents with the neck to great headers? Could plucky Mathys Gerber take his ball talents to the professional field or would Daniel Von Sturmer be too much of a wuss to be in the midfield? Is Picasso the obvious choice for goalie? Would winger Donald Friend be trusted in the change room and could star manager Tim Storrier take the team all the way to the finals? Email your team pick to theartlife[at]hotmail.com and we'll publish the best teams. The winner will be announced after Australia faces Italy in Round 2.

*[We won't be including the packet of biscotti from the Press Pack as it was already past it's use-by date when we got it and it tatsted like crap anyway].

Space Science

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Michelle Outram, Not the sound bite, 2006.
Courtesy the artist and Terminus Projects.
Photography: Jamie North

Should artists be seen and not heard? Or should they be put in a glass booth for our inspection? This latter option is now possible thanks to Michelle Outram’s Not The Sound Bite a performance installation piece which is part of Terminus 2006. Each Saturday and Sunday between 11am and 3pm in June [and that means there’s only one weekend left, hurry] Outram gets into the glass booth for an a long performance piece accompanied by a soundtrack of antique political speeches over by a spooky electronic soundscape of distant bells and low tones. Outram makes like Robert Shaw, gesticulating in slow motion, wiping her face against the glass, getting up on a little ladder and making mock heroic poses. The piece takes place at Speakers Corner, which is not really a corner, but a zone designated as a place where free speech can be exercised in the form of public oratory. As recently as the late 80s, Speakers Corner was a thriving side show of religious nuts, right to lifers, women’s rights activists and anyone else with an axe to grind and a step ladder [or upturned garbage bin]. It’s now a rare sight to catch anyone exercising their democratic rights and Outram’s Not The Sound Bite feels remarkably like elegy for the death of free public speech. In the weekdays when the artist is elsewhere, the glass booth stands empty, waiting for something to happen as the speeches drone on and one and you begin to understand why politics is now a soundbite – it’s pretty much all you need to know.

Jay Ryves, Sky Village, 2006.
Courtesy the artist and Terminus Projects.
Terminus Projects have installations all over the city, some real, some virtual. Jay Ryves’s Sky Village is almost entirely virtual except for a mass mail out to residents in Waterloo and Redfern advertising a fabulous new apartment development smack bang in the middle of Meritontown. This stunning development offers apartments ranging from studio to four bedroom, all with parking, close to amenities, shops and the thriving shopping precincts of Surry Hills. Prices start at around $500k with finance available to approved clients. We have been looking for a new city location for The Art Life offices and we’re thinking of moving into these fantasy villas. The problem is – are they real? They certainly feel as thought they are.

Caroline Rothwell, Hybrid, 2006.
Courtesy the artist and Terminus Projects.
Photography: Jamie North

Much of the work in Terminus 2006 plays on the fantastical possibilities of their locations, attempting and mostly succeeding in evoking the strange, the uncanny and the positively depressing. Caroline Rothwell’s sculpture Hybrid takes its form from a botanical illustration of Sydney Cove from 1793 by Thomas Watling, an artist of early Colonial Sydney. Located in First Fleet Park next to the Cahill Expressway and stumbling distance from the MCA, Rothwell has taken Watling’s image and turned it into a towering inflatable that looks remarkably like a piece of ginger, or maybe a triffid as it hides from the world among real plants and trees. In the day time the work looks forlorn, but at night it takes on a menacing aspect with dramatic lighting and its slowly undulating surface.

David Haines, Reverse Time Gate, 2006.
Documentation of press preview by TEAM Art Life.

At Devonshire Street tunnel at the Devonshire Street end, David Haines has installed an audio piece called Reverse Time Gate. Those familiar with Haines’s work, from his sound and audio performances to his collaborative videos and photographic images, knows that he has a knack for creating incredibly eerie works that create an uncomfortable sense of dread. Reverse Time Gate is no exception. Using concealed microphones, a computer records 15 seconds of audio and then, through speakers, plays the recording backwards. Mixing the recorded sound with the live acoustics of the space, Haines has taken the invisible audio world of the space and amplified it into the consciousness of the hapless passerby. We don’t know how most people react, but for us it was deeply unnerving, akin to a the Cthulhu breaking through the floor.

James Lynch, The Party's Over, 2006.
Courtesy the artist and Terminus Projects.
Photography: Jamie North
There’s an article about James Lynch in the latest Art & Australia which helpfully explains that is work is ambiguous, dream-like and defies easy explanation. So that’s our work done… Lynch’s participation in Terminus 2006 is by way of a video called The Party’s Over which screens between 4pm and midnight in the food court of World Square, which, at that time, is mostly deserted except for people walking between shops. On a screen The Party’s Over loops around and around, a sequence lifted from the film The Party treated to look like an animated sequence a la Lynch’s other videos, or if you haven’t seen them, like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. The sequence is from the Peter Sellers ‘romp’ and features a sad elephant hijacked by beautiful people, covered in slogans including THE WAR IS OVER. In the context of the context [as it were] the video evokes in inescapable sense of sadness, neither dreamlike nor ambiguous particularly, but filled [or drained] with such ennui it’s hard to look upon it.

Terminus Projects is the baby of Sarah Rawlings and Clare Lewis and falls under the precarious title of an “independent curatorial initiative” which can often translate as some nice art in a nice location - usually a university gallery. Happily, Terminus Projects is a major success for a project that was put together on a shoestring budget and the will to make it happen, and even more impressive that the majority of the works really come off. The parlous state of public sculpture in Sydney is one thing, but the complete non existence of contemporary art outside of corporate atriums is nothing short of pathetic. Terminus goes a long way to rectifying this situation and we wish them well in their ambitious plans for 2007.

Sci Fi Space

An artfully programmed compliment to the Biennale is Custom Living, the new exhibition by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro at Gallery Barry Keldoulis. Unlike their previous GBK show which was mostly handsome photographic documentation of their recent projects, Custom Living is a series of sculptures which address the mutability of public and personal space in what the architecturally savvy like to call “the built environment” but which to everyone else is just life in general. Like their spectacular Cordial Home Project in which they completely dismantled a suburban house and packed its materials into a tight space within a gallery, Custom Living demonstrates the duo’s ability to take extremely complicated objects and devise ingenious storage solutions for them.

Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy, The Plastic Menagerie, 2006.
Pine vitrines and inflatable animals, 300 x 230 x 195 cm.
Courtesy the artists and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.
Perhaps taking the “ingenious storage solutions” concept to its logical conclusion, the pair are now working with Ikea shelving, which are incredibly attractive bits of laminated wood called Lack, and have sandwiched together variously themed paperbacks retrieved from German artist warehouses. How one thing should lead to the next is part of the artist’s charm. We were particularly taken with the series of quasi-religious texts given the Lack treatment. Elsewhere they have compacted cardboard under a folding picnic table and in another piece, rearranged all the artists belongings left in a Japanese studio. A complete reverse of their normal process is The Plastic Menagerie, a series of inflatable animals given a very formal wooden home. If there was ever a piece of art which could fit in a suitcase or be folded up, it would be these happy creatures.

Manu Luksch, faceless [excerpt] 2006.
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.

Our visit to GBK was not, however, primarily motivated by the Healy and Cordeiro show. We saw the words “science fiction” and “CCTV” in a gallery press release and we were down there like a shot. Austrian artist Manu Luksch has a four monitor video installation called Faceless screening at GBK. Living and working in London, Luksch discovered that under UK law, anyone caught on tape by one of that country’s countless CCTV cameras has the right to request footage of themselves. Getting at the footage is hard work because although it is available the authorities resist requests, probably realising that if everyone asked for their footage, then the whole security apparatus that relies on the cameras would be useless. When you can actually get a hold of the footage everyone but the person [or persons] requesting the footage has their faces blocked out by black dots. Luksch hatched a plan to create a narrative video work by performing certain actions in locations covered by CCTV and then requesting the footage, editing it together and creating the finished work.

Faceless is possibly one of the best narrative video art pieces we’ve seen in a long time. The artist’s narrative is a winsome, low key affair that winds up in a high stepping dance number on the windswept forecourt of a London housing estate. Yet although its fictive space is somewhat wonky [set in 2030 the readouts on the screens clearly state it was shot in '05], the work has an incredible presence because Luksch has used one system of image capture to create a work for which that system was clearly not intended. The warping of the security apparatus for the aesthetic and joyful intervention of the artist upsets the law-and-order imperative of CCTV, and her play with the time frame of the work and its images redeploy the various technical aspects of CCTV to the disposal of the artist. It is both a humorous and soft centered work that still manages to evoke the dread of so many low res images awash through he web and mainstream media. We were half expecting some bland, grey scene of a truck passing or a person entering a tube station to suddenly erupt in the staggered crimson frames of a terrorist explosion, yet the work resists the sensational for the everyday and becomes all the more miraculous because of it.

Art Life Radio: Houston, We Have A Problem

Our promised online audio of last Tuesday's appearance on Eastside Radio will have to wait another week as we have encountered a major technical difficulty - the tape is blank! We'll advise our readers next week of our next Eastside show. In the meantime, we will be making a guest appearance on a radio station that all readers can access, regardless of where you live. TEAM Art Life will be guests on The Deep End, Radio National's top ranking arts show, at 3pm next Tuesday, June 27. That too will be available online, honest.

Blog Friends United

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

"21 January 1965. Francois Truffaut wrote: 'There will be as many literary references in Fahrenheit 451 as in all of Jean-Luc’s eleven films put together.'"

Sarsaparilla

"On the Parisian front, there have been a couple of articles lately about the Musee du Quai Branly and its Aboriginal art component. There's some sense that the importance of the Australian contribution has been over-emphasized: at least the French seem to be taking the line that Australia is but one country among many who have contributed to the making of Chirac's monument. They are also busy defending the museum as an institution that honors the world's cultures, rather than one that glorifies France's colonial empire: the politics look a little different to those in France than they do to proponents of Aboriginal art in other countries. On the Australian side, there seems to be a bit of a letdown. Miriam Cosic's article in the Weekend Australian notes that some feel the art has been reduced to interior decoration. She also quotes Stephane Jacob, a longtime promoter of Aboriginal art in Paris, as warning that Australia must view the opening of the Musee as a beginning, rather than a culmination, expressing the hope that the Australia Council will assist in mounting exhibitions in Paris in the future.

Aboriginal Art & Culture – An American Eye

Sydney Ladies Artists Club

"Notwithstanding the slender turnout from the SLAC/Bilateral Petersham contingent, the hot topic of female spectatorship at raunch events like live jelly wrestling was spectacularly and disturbingly foregrounded during last week's excursion to The Oxford Tavern."

Sydney Ladies Artists Club

"When my canvasses start out with black circles, one can be almost certain that something’s wrong. Is it a sphere? Is it a black hole? Does it denote presence, or absence? Nevertheless, all that’s left is for one (in this case, me, the one holding the brush) to go with the flow, and listen to the circle. What is it saying? What does it demand? Am I nuts? most likely…"

Semiophile

Flete’s Flog.

"Scene Two: Dinos and Jake Chapman building public art. Just behind where the beach is situated there are some snow covered slopes where Dinos and Jake are constructing what looks like the legs and paws of a lion (or some other big cat) on the side of the mountain. Each leg measures about a kilometre and it looks as if they have been carved out of snow but they are actually using chickenwire armature with plaster on top to simulate snow. One of the brothers is angry because the other isn't pulling his weight. Some areas of the leg remain unfinished. They are both wearing ski gear. Random skiers use their sculpture as a ski jump, flattening the paws - proof that this sculpture was meant to be ephemeral and that nature prevails…"

MikoFanClub

"My favourite bit of the biennale so far has been Olga Chernysheva's video pieces at the ACP (australian centre for photography) - which is up the fashion strip end of PAddo. (257 Ocker Street). Nice weird, quirky details- like little boys grimacing in front of gyrating cheerleeders, and some old woman polishing her medals and preparing a picture of Stalin at the end of some march - meld nicely with a longer moving piece going through a train..... the room has a nice couch and thick black curtains too. Actually maybe my favourite biennale bit is the foyer of 4A in Haymarket. Its all Pink! FLOURO PINK - with HELLO KITTY curtains!!!! (mayhem reccommends that you buy a pie or some chocolate nearby and then just go and stand in the pink space and you'll feel ocmpletelly happy even if you don't understand the art..."

Art & Mayhem

"At (yet another) forum yesterday on crrritics, the Australian's Arts Editor Miriam Cosic told me she was shocked at the lack of rigor in Australian academic and alternative writings about art. That may well be true, but rigor is not conspicuous in some mainstream reviewing, either. John Slavin's review of Defixiones is a particularly fine example of this. Among other things, it shows a staggering ignorance of 20th century poetry. That wouldn't matter if he wasn't writing about it with the authority of Melbourne's major daily broadsheet behind him - many people are staggeringly ignorant of any poetry - but since he was, I think it deserves pulling up."

Critic Watch

"Why is Kathryn Stats so successful as an artist. Kathryn writes "I think a good painting is like a good musical composition." Kathryn states, "It has harmony and rhythm, contrast and theme, sometimes even soloists. Those elements rarely just occur in a natural landscape. I find that I emphasize with detail and color, omit some things, mute others, even rearrange elements to create a composition that conveys my visual experience, my joy, to the viewer. It is this challenge that keeps me painting."

Art Notes

Poll Shock: Biennale regrets?

My only Biennale regret is...

I won't get to see it all 19% 16

I wasn't asked to be artistic director 17% 15

My suggestions for catering were ignored 5% 4

I left my purse/wallet in the VIP toilet 6% 5

I woke up with someone not my spouse/partner 3% 3

I didn't wake up with someone not my spouse/partner 19% 16

My artwork was damaged in transit 1% 1

I lost my head to old fashioned postmodernism 2% 2

I lost my head to new fangled modernism 1% 1

Where's my damned cheescake?!! 27% 23

86 votes total

How Typical

Monday, June 19, 2006

What people don’t understand is that you are a passionate about art. Sure, when you were younger you let your head go for some fashionable nonsense but that was just a passing phase. Pretty quickly you realised that the immutable truths of art are ageless. Fashion comes and goes and when the tide of the supposedly “new” thing recedes, what is left are the solid foundations that have guided art throughout time – beauty, truth, insight and skill. Together these things are what make art so vitally important to our culture. Without them art is just fizz and pop with no resonance, no importance or substance. Art must stand apart from fashion, from the world of the flip and the throwaway. It must connect to the serious philosophical impact that only it can carry. The sad part is, so few people understand what all this means, how terribly important it really is, and quite frankly, how typical.

People have written you off as a reactionary but that is wide of the mark. In truth, you have no opposition to anything that is genuinely new. But that’s the problem. Nothing is truly new. It’s just a rehash of something that’s been done before, and not done very well, and people without your experience applaud it for all the wrong reasons. When you try to point out the precedents for this so-called “new thing” the peanut gallery drowns you out with brute cat calls and idiotic attacks. And really, how typical. People do not want to hear the truth. You have been around for awhile and have seen a bit in your time, so it would be reasonable to assume that you might have something interesting to say, some insight to offer. But people aren’t interested in having their ideas challenged by real experience.

Over time it has become increasingly obvious that people such as yourself are in the minority. People with a rational, logical and reasoned response are few and it would seem on your days of greatest despair that the things you know to be true are being lost to a world of ignorance. You need only look around in your beloved art world to see that money is being wasted on exhibitions of negligible artistic worth, on grants to artists who are simply rehashing 100 year old ideas or given to "artist run" galleries who don’t even know how to hang or light a painting properly. And let’s be honest here, how typical. If people actually took the time to learn about art in art schools that actually taught art history then there might be some genuine progress and there might be something truly new. But the state of art schools is just another appalling and depressing symptom of the malaise. The people who come out of these places call themselves ‘artists’ but whatever it is they are making it doesn’t look much like art. The odds are, given all the hundreds of graduates popping out of these arts schools every year, that there would be one talented, genuine artist among them, but there aren't any - they’re getting the life squeezed out of them before they even get a chance. It’s like a factory farm. It’d be funny if it weren’t all so sad and so, so bloody typical.

How many times can you go around and around the same ideas and feign even the slightest interest? It's the reason you stopped going to galleries. You might pick up the occasional art magazine but you just as quickly put it down again. What can anyone possibly tell you that you’ve not already seen written by someone with far more knowledge, intelligence and insight than the latest crop of no-hopers? The answer is nothing. If the art is derivative then so is the writing. The pictures are even worse. It’s like a personal insult that these people are so deluded as to think that any of this is new, or interesting, or worth anything, and that someone like yourself could just so easily tell them if they were even in the slightest bit interested in listening . But they aren’t, and you know, painfully,how typical.

Art Life Radio

TEAM Art Life will be making the first of a series of weekly appearances on Eastside Radio's Arts Tuesday program. The show kicks off at the ungodly, unartly hour of 9.30am and can be heard by tuning your radio receiver to 89.7FM. For those with day jobs, educational commitments or for those who don't own a radio, we will be posting an edited and downloadable MP3 of the segment here later in the week.

Free jazz!

Tomorrow we'll be discussing with host Sean O'Brien the Biennale of Sydney, the BOS satellite shows, our pick of notable works in the three main venues and Tony Johansen's ill-fated legal challenge to Craig Ruddy's Archibald Prize win. Later in the program O'Brien will be interviewing visiting BOS artists Mona Hatoum and Hayati Mokhtar. Eastside Radio is Sydney's premier jazz station so we'll be playing some choons - Charles Mingus of course [probably something from his solo piano set], Alice Coltrane and Rasheed Roland Kirk. There might even be time for a few cuts by contemporary crypto jazz-rap acts Air Audio, Quasimoto or maybe Minotaur Shock. We can only hope.

The Art Life's 40 Minute B.O.S. Tour

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Too busy to waste time gazing at dozens of art work looking for thrills? We’re here to help – The Art Life’s 40 Minute B.O.S. Tour will guide you through selected highlights of this year’s Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact. All you’ll need is a spare 20 minutes to look at the works and an idling taxi waiting outside the venues. With time for travel, obligatory visits to coffee shops and bookstores, you’ll be in and out of there so fast the rest of your busy, busy executive-lifestyle day will be free to manage mergers, handle acquisitions and do whatever else it is you do with your time…

Adrian Paci, Noise of light, 2006.
Installation with chandelier and ten generators. Chandelier, 6x4 meters, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist,Gallerie Francesca Kaufman, Milan.

Start at Pier 2/3 Hickson Road, The Rocks. The first work will be easy to spot – it’s Adrian Paci’s Noise of Light chugging away in the exhibition space. The work is a witty, erudite and contemporary alchemical synthesis – sounds [generators] become light [the chandelier]. Strangely and unexpectedly spiritual Noise of Light has exactly the right level of impressive showmanship and material simplicity.

Antony Gormley, Asian Field, 2003.
Clay from Guangdong Province, China, 210,000 hand-sized clay figures made in collaboration with 350 people of all ages from Xiangshan village, north-east of the city of Guangzhou in south China. Courtesy of the artist, Jay Jopling/White Cube, London and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

Antony Gormley’s Asian Field, a massive installation piece which takes up the entire second floor of the Pier 2/3 space, is the Biennale showstopper. Although some cynics have suggested that Gormely is the consummate capitalist Westerner artist jetting into a third world country to cheaply fabricate his sculpture [and assuming that there is anything wrong with that], any doubts are immediately dispelled by the sheer magic of Asian Field. The first of the two rooms is a series of photos of the men and women who created each individual figure next to a photo of the figure they made. The second room, viewable only from the doorway to the massive space, is to look upon a vast sea of figures stretching seemingly to infinity. The most unanticipated reaction to this work is the profound sense of humanity it evokes, certainly in the numbers pressing forward and the god-like perspective of the viewer, but more directly in the realisation that every single figure is ever so slightly different. One-world-feel-goodism? Maybe, but the theatre is stunning and the emotion is real.

Milenko Prvacki, Building, 2001.
Oil on canvas, 300x400cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Over at the MCA there is plenty to love – Julie Mehretu and Stephen Vitiello’s Open Work is one of the best installation pieces we’ve seen that’s utilised the large first room of the gallery. Drawing directly onto the high walls in pen, ink and wash, and using hanging speakers at different levels, the work is an action drawing done in response to the pulsing electronics. In a similar fashion of free association, Dimitry Gutov’s video installation Thaw uses the burnt, left over floorboards from a previous show as the artificial roof to one of the MCA’s tiny downstairs galleries. In the video a man comically falls into icy water in a desolate piece of wasteland before accompanied by dour music and a quote from Dostoyevsky. Those darn Russians invented irony. Upstairs and equally noteworthy, the time stressed should try to catch a glimpse of Navjot Altaf's video installation Lacuna in Testimony - Version 1, a calming, meditative piece that wisely takes the non-narrative route. You're in, you're out. The first sighting of a painting in the B.O.S was for us Milenko Prvacki's series of large scale canvases such as the one illustrated above, Building. It's a remarkable sight to see such a mild mannered and pleasent work in the Biennale. Born in Yuogoslavia, the artist now lives in Singapore, which may explain the paintings soft approach, but it is nevertheless welcome among all the projections.

Ghada Amer, The Big Red Rose RFGA, 2004.
Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 182.9 x 162.6cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery, New York and London.

At the Art Gallery of NSW, there are far fewer works than at the MCA or Pier 2/3, but what they lack in numbers they make up for in show biz. The big wall to your right as you walk in is a massive painting installation called Cloud, by John Reynolds, made up 6944 canvas squares, each featuring a colloquial saying from his home country of New Zealand. Many are trans-Tasman [“Technicolor yawn] others more mysterious – “maori time”, “kia ora” and “couch kumara”. To your left, almost hidden away in the area usually reserved for recent acquisitions and Australian modernists, Liu Xiadong has a multi panel painting called Hot Bed, which might be mistaken for an internationalist contemporary leisure class art but which we took to be a sly parody of just such an emerging class in the artist's homeland of China. The final work on this flash tour of the B.O.S. is a series of canvases of semi-abstract erotic scenes by Ghada Amer, an Egyptian artist resident in New York. Using embroidery, acrylic paints and gels, the works alternate between semi-abstract nudes to luxurious and colourful abstraction. Now it's time for a coffee.

Dead Cow : A Short History of the B.O.S.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

The word Biennale comes from the Italian meaning “an expensive art event held every two years”. Modeled on the Venice Biennale, The Biennale of Sydney began in 1973 and was held at the Opera House. Opened by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, the B.O.S. didn’t yet have subtitle and was directed by Anthony Wintherbotham, a ‘co-ordinator’. The 1973 B.O.S. is chiefly remembered for the fact that there wasn’t another one for three years. Realising that a serious art exhibition needs a colon, 1976’s B.O.S. was called Biennale of Sydney: Recent International Forms, a dull but honest explanation of what would be seen in the show. Directed by Thomas G. McCullough, the exhibition was launched by famed lover of the arts, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Another three years passed and 1979’s B.O.S. European Dialogue was curated by Nick Waterlow and featured, among other show-stoppers, Daniel Spoerri’s dirty dinner plates falling off a wall and a dead cow watching a video of a man taking a shit. Contemporary art had arrived in Australia!

Daniel Spoerri - Eat art...

The 1982 B.O.S. Vision In Disbelief set the standard for the mega-Biennale. Curated by good bloke Bill Wright, VID featured 209 artists and was spread out across the city. Including international pop stars turned artists like Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno, the B.O.S. got the punters in… and the Vice Squad cops who raided the exhibition, confiscating Juan Davila’s Stupid As A Painter. 1984’s B.O.S was swept up in giddy post modernity and instigated the still vital trend for random colons in exhibition titles. Under the direction of Leon Paroissien, Private Symbol: Public Metaphor featured big names from the US like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger and good-time guys Gilbert & George from the UK. Paroissien, who would later go on to share the direction of the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Art, is also remembered as the guy who got a Biennale happening every two years. The cover of the B.O.S. catalogue, meanwhile, by John Lethbridge, is a time capsule of high 80s design. The 1986 B.O.S. Origins Originality + Beyond was directed by veteran curator Nick Waterlow who used the event to investigate parody, irony and the burgeoning connection between visual art and Buffalo Girls. To this end, Malcolm McLaren visited Sydney and “tagged” a wall at the Art Gallery of NSW. Only those distracted by Glenn Baxter’s amusing comic strips survived this deeply embarrassing event. It was also an opportunity for punters to get a gander at the work of rising late-80s NYC art stars such as Eric Fischl. The 1988 B.O.S., again curated by Waterlow, was called From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c1940 – 1988, major survey of Australian art. The show toured in its entirety to Melbourne for the first and last time. Huge in scope, masterful in execution, hardly anyone went distracted as we were by fire works and Bicentennial ships.

"They've arrested Malcolm!" Sadly, they hadn't.

The 1990 B.O.S, the pithily titled The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art, was directed by German art dealer Rene Block. With a phone book sized catalogue the B.O.S. is still paying for, TRB attempted to illustrate the entire thrust of 20th Century art looking at “the distinctive historical connections of the ‘readymade’ from the early 1900s to the 1980s, based on the work of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia.” Its heroic failure to achieve its grandiose aims is still spoken of with an ANZAC-style reverence and is remembered as one of the best BOS since its inception. The 1992/93 B.O.S. under the artistic direction of Tony Bond was titled The Boundary Rider was held over the long hot summer of December-January 1992 and 1993 and featured non-European/American artists and assorted Australian trouble-makers. The press went wild for Orlan and her brand of garish, tasteless performance art in which she attempted to transform her body via plastic surgery into a facsimile of features from famous art historical sources. Jurassic Technologies Revenant the BOS of 1996 is sometimes referred to as The Quiet Biennale because no one went. Under the direction of Lynne Cooke, JTR had a title no one understood, featured artists no one wanted to see and was held in galleries no one visited. Artistic director Jonathan Watkin’s 1998 BOS Every Day fared little better but is mainly remembered as the Biennale Martin Creed, 2001’s Turner Prize Winner, came to Australia to fill up a room on Goat Island with balloons. The title of the ‘98 BOS also had an unfortunate and startling similarity to the tag line to ads promoting the then just-opened Australia’s Wonderland [“Escape the every day”] leading punters to expect rides, balloons and beer.

Keep your eyes on the wabbit - BOS 2002.

The Biennale of Sydney in 2000 was called Biennale of Sydney 2000 making it a lot easier to spot. It also saw the welcome return of Nick Waterlow and a ‘curatorium’ – a crack team of international curators - producing a well remembered ‘greatest hits’ Biennale that surveyed everything that had happened since 1973. No subtitle? Never mind. Richard Grayson was the artistic director of [The World May Be] Fantastic the 2002 Biennale of Sydney. Aside from the first time inclusion of a parenthetical title in the history of the B.O.S., the exhibition was also the first ever curated by a practicing artist [with ‘advice’ from artists/curators Susan Hiller, Ralph Rugoff and Janos Sugar] Launched by a panel of dignitaries including then Lord Mayor Frank Sartor – a man with an intimate knowledge of the art world – the 2002 BOS was a mixed blessing. Highlights included Mike Nelson’s fake Reptile House in Kings Cross and Simon Paterson’s in-flight instructional video. The downside was a huge array of fake libraries and unwanted references to Borges and Italo Calvino. After two well liked exhibitions, the 2004 BOS On Reason & Emotion was considered a bit of a wash out. Directed by Isabel Carlos, no one could doubt the sincerity of the selection and the presence of Bruce Nauman gave the show some badly needed star power, but much of the show was weak and unfocussed with a theme so opaque no one really understood what it meant.

And that's the story so far...

Free Cheesecake!!!!

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MOP Projects 29 June - 16 July 2006

GALLERY + PROJECT ROOM

In FACTS.FIGURES an integrated exhibition concept has been formulated in which the (pseudo)documentary character of art is an important issue.

The FACTS stand for concrete reality, which is the starting point for all artists, whereas the FIGURES capture the final shape of their works. Smaller or greater manipulations belong to the instruments which all artists have at their disposal regarding their personal intentions. The field of tension lies between on one hand the form of art that presents itself in disguise as reality and on the other hand the reality presenting itself in a manipulated shape as a work of art. In other words an analysis with the purpose of presenting reality in an intensified form as art or an analysis aiming to reflect or comment on reality as it appears.

Guillaume Bijl, James Ensor in Oostende ca. 1920, 2000.
Still from digital video, 1'50".

Based on these ideas the following artists will participate in the show (in alphabetical order):
Guillaume Bijl (B), Ton Kraayeveld (NL), Frans van Lent (NL), Zeger Reyers (NL), Ad Schouten (NL).

FACTS.FIGURES was curated by Ton Kraayeveld and Frans van Lent. Co-ordinated by Adam Norton.

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The Beware of the God project continues to look at the rise of religiosity in public life.

New today on Beware of The God is Chloe Martin's impeccably researched backgrounder on the very quotable Senator Eric Abetz.

Great friend of hysterical homophobes the Saltshakers, comfort of secretive political players the Exclusive Brethren, Abetz bears a good close look.

NEXT on Beware of the God: The science of religious gay bashing.

Ever wondered where on earth the religious right in the US and Australia get their 'evidence' for why same sex couples shouldn't be allowed to adopt, have their relationships recognised, or enjoy freedom from discrimination? Evidence like: how homosexual men are more likely to murder than any other population sector? Like how lesbians are 29 (TWENTY-NINE!) times more likely to pass on a sexually transmitted disease ON PURPOSE? It'd be hilarious, If groups like the Australian Christian Lobby weren't using it to influence politicians busting to believe.

We investigated, and the results form the first Beware of the God newsletter, coming soon.

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Don’t miss this free live art performance at the Damien Minton gallery this Saturday, June 17 at 4pm.

Hobart Hughes, aka John E Hughes, has been involved in animation, puppetry, sculpture and performance since 1979. He is well known as a founding member of the Darlinghurst based multi media animation theatre group called Even Orchestra. Hughes’ music clip for Mental As Anything Let’s Cook was selected for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1982. Since 1995, Hughes has lectured in animation and multimedia at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, UNSW.

This performance, Museum of Theatres #1 Terminal Mite is a work of live art about organisms and consciousness. He juggles the notion of narrative with shifting presence and cheap video camera. Essentially it is a dance of tiny objects manipulated into animation and doubt. Full of show biz and psyche of song, above all it is a ripping yarn unravelled and re knitted into a head cosy.

visit Hobart Hughes.blogspot.com

damien minton gallery, 61-63 great buckingham street redfern T: 02 9699 7551 open wed to sat 11 to 6.

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R O B M c L E I S H

Lick the Loser to Make Them Stick

14 June - 8 July 2006
Opening Wednesday 14th of June, 6 - 8 pm
Esa Jaske Gallery
27-39 Abercrombie Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia

Rob McLeish, Lick the Loser to Make Them Stick, #13.
Pencil and paper on paper, 43 x 55 cm.

Gettin Ill Like Heather Mills

Shock poll shock! Once again the proposition that reader's comments should be moderated has been soundly defeated and so it's up to you to be well behaved and sensible:

Poll: Art Life comments should be moderated

Yes 41% (58)
No 59%
(83)

Total votes 141.

We recently asked readers to vote in a poll indicating which Australian art magazine they had never read. There were two ways of answering the question. The first, and most obvious approach, was to answer the question honestly and so it was no surprise that Flaps, a magazine with a tiny print run, should come out on top as the country's most unread art magazine:

Poll: I have never read...

Art & Australia 19% (38)

Aust Art Collector 16% (31)

Aust Art Review 8% (16)

Un Magazine 6% (11)

Eyeline 3% (6)

Broadsheet 3% (5)

Art Monthly 2% (3)

Real Time 3% (6)

State of The Arts 7% (14)

Flaps 34% (68)

Total votes 198.

As voting progressed in this poll it occured to us that there was a second way of voting - to vote against a magazine you don't like by claiming you'd never read it. This may explain the unusually high numbers of votes for Art & Australia and Australian Art Collector. Considering the ubiquity of both titles and allowing for the likelihood of someone picking up a copy in a dentist's waiting room, we think the result may be skewed in some sort of misguided political statement against just such ubiquity. Say it aint so people!

Must Try Harder *

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

The Australian's Editorial: Cultural Cringe. June 9, 2006.

Bad art and bad teaching reflect a postmodern malaise.

WHAT do a perforated shipping container, a medical student who can't tell the difference between a heart and a liver and a poster advertising the movie Gandhi have in common? No, they are not all exhibits in the current Sydney Biennale [Biennale of Sydney] – only the shipping container made it in this year. [Good opening – topical events, rhetorical question catches the readers attention!] Rather, they are all symptoms of a ~~postmodern~~ [too vague] rot at the core of Australian academic and cultural life [are these two things really separate?] that seeks to divorce art from beauty [this is a very big claim without an example], replace skills-based excellence with warmed-over sociology and inject a politicised, deterministic view of the world in which identity groups trump individuals into virtually every sphere of life [This is a major statement based on a series of presumptions your reader may not agree with. You need to back each of these claims up with supporting examples and evidence.] Thus [You cannot say ‘thus’ as you have offered no supporting evidence to then claim that one thing necessarily follows the other.] "conceptual artist" Milica Tomic is lauded [by whom? example?] for getting a pair of 'roo shooters to pump a container full of lead. And hers was hardly the most ludicrous exhibition in the current Biennale [This statement is forceful and contentious, but you offer no other examples of what are more ‘ludicrous’ art works. You have also thus far failed to convince the reader why the form of the work – the container full of holes – relates to the idea behind the work in question. This needs expanding. ] In medical schools, anatomy classes have been slashed to make room for courses in cultural sensitivity [Again, no specific example to back up this sweeping statement. Is anatomy needed in all medical courses? What is wrong with cultural sensitivity? You are failing to convince the reader]. And across Australia, high school English classes are turned into political battlegrounds where books – when they are read at all – are only allowed to be filtered through the dusty and unoriginal prisms of race, sex and class. [Starting a sentence with a conjunction is a neat rhetorical technique to imply that the next statement follows from the last but your three examples are not related art, medicine, school curricula – why are these three things brought together in your argument?] In Western Australia, Year 12 English students have even been asked in exams to compare movie posters advertising Gandhi and Spider-Man 2, though Premier Alan Carpenter has, encouragingly, stepped in to fix the worst outrages in that state's gradeless, outcomes-based curriculum [Why is one thing related to the other? Which school? Why are examples of popular culture unsuitable for the classroom?] . This newspaper has for years taken a stand against such silliness, and not just for aesthetic reasons [Cite just one example to back up this claim. Also what do you mean by ‘aesthetic reasons’ and what are you referring to – school curricula? Art? medical schools?]. While the danger of doctors who are trained more as sociologists than medicos is readily apparent [is it?], an attitude of lowest-common-denominator relativism threatens society and the economy as art, critical thinking [what does this mean?], and knowledge for its own sake become ever more divorced from the lives of everyday Australians. This should not be the case. [You have failed to make the case it is so – generalities and examples without proof do a disservice to your argument]. Art should inspire and uplift [Is that it’s only role?] while great literature should highlight the universal themes and emotions of human existence – of which politics and class warfare is only a small part [This is a very muddled statement – you need to be clearer about what you mean by ‘universal themes’. You cannot claim that some ‘universal themes’ are less universal than others]. Great paintings such as the Mona Lisa have an immediacy that draws the eye while also letting the audience linger in another time and place [Good!] Meanwhile, literature is routinely taught in both suburban public schools and elite private academies as "texts" to be read from a Marxist or feminist paradigm and treated as nothing more special than an episode of Neighbours. [This supports your thesis but again, it is very vague. Which schools? And – what do you mean by using quotes around “text” Is this some sort of point? You have also not effectively argued why Neighbours should not be held to the same critical standard as literature – is that not what you are arguing for elsewhere?] But as the Australian National University's dean of humanities, Simon Haines, told the Lowy Institute this week, students don't need "political roughage" to make literature palatable or relevant, and the deconstructive theory being taught in Australia's high schools is at least 15 years out of date[Good example – but why is “deconstructive theory” out of date? Because it is old? Is the Mona Lisa irrelevant because it is old?]. Likewise, historian Henry Reynoldshas declared that in the teaching of history, currently fashionable ~~postmodernism~~ [too vague - also, style guide 'Post Modernism'] is out of date, describing it as "lots of lights and colours (that) doesn't get you anywhere" [Excellent – funny].

At the heart of the matter is an abdication of responsibility by the traditional guardians of the culture [Who or what are these guardians? What is a ‘traditional’ guardian’?]. Many universities, once incubators of great thought, have been infected by the mould-like spores of cultural studies [Presumably the ANU is not infected by these spores as you quote an ANU academic above, so you cannot make such a sweepings statement – either they have or they haven’t]. Education faculties, where our teachers are trained to teach our young, emphasise theory and sociology rather than ground graduates in the subjects they will be teaching [Is it some ‘theory’ not relevant to education, or the theory of education – you need to expand this point]. An elitist drive to overthrow traditional chalk-and-talk teaching in favour of politics and trendy theories such as critical literacy and outcomes-based education exacerbates the skills shortage [How? Example please] and short-changes those at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder [How?]. While smart kids and those from families with money and education will largely survive educational faddism thanks to tutors and intellectually rich home environments [Are you claiming that these tutors were educated outside of the ‘mould infected’ universities or teacher’s colleges? If so, where? This claim would seem to undermine your argument] children without those advantages or who suffer specific learning difficulties are left out in the cold. The abandonment of phonics for whole-language literacy instruction – which teaches children to recognise entire words as if they were Chinese ideograms rather than using the building blocks of written language to sound them out [Why is this a bad thing?] – has proven disastrous [evidence to back up your argument would make this statement more effective] for those with ~~reading trouble~~. [Reading difficulties?]. And in the age of Google, which throws up millions of competing bits of information in a split-second, it is all the more necessary to teach kids critical thinking and facts of history separate the plausible from the just plain daft [Or a more effective search engine!]

Australia was spared much of the turbulence [historically vague] that hit the US and Europe in the late 1960s. The fallout, in the form of academic obsession with politics and postmodernism [example!], didn't hit the country's campuses until the 1970s [You mean Australia’s campuses? This is incorrect]. But this new movement was made particularly powerful by the fact that when the drama of adolescent rebellion, driven by vast numbers of youth raised in previously unimaginable privilege and luxury [Does luxury mean the anti-war protests were therefore wrong? You need to rethink this line of argument] played itself out writ large [cliché] in the streets and on the campuses of cities such as Paris, Chicago and Berkeley [cliché], the culture's [one culture?] guardians didn't fight back but instead rolled over. An entire generation of students were essentially told [this is an inference on your part, not a statement of fact] that their youthful worldview was correct and superior to that of their professors [evidence?]. As a result, the rising generation never matured or learned to value the things they never stopped rebelling against [This is a fallacious syllogism. You need to support this line of reasoning with facts]. Thus the reflexive antipathy [?] to all things Western that infects so many state curriculums: witness science courses that teach that Western science "is only one form among the sciences" (as occurs in South Australia) [what do you mean by this?] music classes where turntables are treated on a par with classical instruments (as was proposed in WA) [good example] , and the "black armband" school of history which treats Australian history as nothing more than a tale of racism and colonialism [an example here would be good, otherwise too vague and emotive].

But there are signs that today's youth is doing some rebelling of its own. After spending a dozen years in classrooms where they are told to feel ashamed of their countries [By whom, about what? This is a very strong statement with no example or evidence to support it], thousands of young Australians make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli each year to honour their country's past and reflect on the values that make Australia special [this would seem to undermine your main argument - if they are taught otherwise, how is this happening?] Medical students rush to fill tutorials to learn the anatomy no longer covered in standard curriculums [example please!]. And, much to the chagrin of ageing baby boomers who lament the lack of activism among current university students, today's young Australians have little enthusiasm for storming the ramparts and occupying the vice-chancellor's office.[again, an apparent contradiction in your argumnent]. In the 2004 election, more "young fogies" aged 18-to-24 voted for John Howard than Mark Latham [Where did you get these stats? How does this statement follow on from the previous claim?] Last year, BBDO [which is what? An advertising agency, a market research company? If so, who commissioned the study? It may have some bearing on the reliability of the survey] released a survey which found that, unlike their parents' generation, today's young adults are showing a renewed interest in religion, marriage and putting children before careers. In short, they are doing what their elders taught them to: question authority. [Good strong ending which, unfortunately, also contradicts your main argument. Who is encouraging this questioning? The 'guardians of culture'? If so, how? If not, does it mean the education system you are criticising allows criticism? This is a very confusing argument.]

[Overall your use of language is good – strong, clear statements written in an accessible style. However, most of your claims are not supported by examples or evidence. You make the assumption your reader already agrees with you and knows the background to what you are talking about. Since you intend to write for a general audience you need to offer more concrete information so your reader understands what you mean. You haven’t backed up your opening statements and the examples you cited don’t seem to be related. Is there something else you need to explain to the readers so they understand how these things are connected? Also, it would be helpful to bring the closing of your argument back to the starting point to make it more effective. A disappointing effort after the excellent work you did on the Australian Wheat Board Inquiry. 4/10. Please come and see us after class.]

[* With appropriate acknowledgement to Bank]

The Art of Speaking [in Public & Otherwise]

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Giving a speech is a dead art. In the 19th Century when public oratory had reached its peak audiences were often expected to listen for hours to long speeches that were often delivered under dreadful conditions – in the freezing cold of a North American winter, for example, as Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “four score and seven years ago” Gettysburg Address in 1863. But Honest Abe knew what he had to say and he kept it short, astounding his audiences with fewer than 500 words. He got up, said his piece and he was off. Perhaps this and other lessons might be applied to people giving speeches today – small things like knowing your audience – what are they interested in? How long can they comfortably listen? Is the bar still open while you’re talking?

The Art Life was told that Senator Helen Coonan is a smart woman who lacks public speaking charisma. Although her speech launching the 2006 Biennale of Sydney was lengthier than the Gettysburg Address, it was only about 5 minutes long. Do you suppose the audience of freeloading art world types with drinks in their hands could at least stand quietly and listen? Well, for a few minutes, maybe… Coonan made the mistake of assuming that the art world audience wanted to hear a bunch of poorly conceived puns and jokes and lame analogies strung together, all of it leading up to a play on the BOS title ‘zones of contact’. The Senator lost the audience within a minute of the start and as the noise in the room threatened to drown out her tiny voice, a restless hubbub spread around the room…

Now imagine you’re the Chairman of the Biennale, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis. Your guest of honour has just been rudely shunned. What do you do? You get up and tell the audience that the Federal Government has been great for the art world, or at least the Biennale – hey, how about that Myer Report everyone! - and we should all be thankful [Yell from the back of the room: "How about implementing it!"] You’d also best mention the name of the outgoing Federal Minister for the Arts Rod Kemp and hope you get a rousing cheer [which you do] and acknowledge such a cheer with the words “great to see some conservative fans in the crowd!” The Art Life has seen a lot of crazy, crazy stuff in the art world, but we’ve got to hand it to Belgiorno-Nettis – he taught us all a lesson and he did it with a smile on his face. What the art world needed to do was take a leaf from the book of Museum of Contemporary Art head lady Elizabeth Ann Macgregor who we captured in an unguarded moment during the media launch of the BOS [see video above]. Listening to BOS artistic director Dr. Charles Merewether she was a model of decorum and sensitive listening skills. That’s why she’s in charge.

Who was there [click to enlarge]

The real reason people had come to the opening of the BOS was of course to be seen and to see other people seeing them. It’s the way things work and we were more than happy to do the looking. From an ethnological point of view the art world is made up of a series of tribes. In a larger sense you might have the contemporary art crowd v the traditional art people, but within the contemporary art world there are many subsets or smaller tribes. The head of these small tribes are art dealers and thus you will find that the fabulous are surrounded by the merely talented. One art dealer after another passed our vantage point with various artists in tow looking excited and happy to be there. How does one deal with this situation if you are, for example, from out of town? You muster some local muscle and wade in. Redoubtable Melbourne gallerist Anna Schwartz proved her art world cred by walking into the MCA BOS opening with none other than Wendy Whiteley. To add to the impression of grandeur, both were wearing headgear – Whiteley going for feathers, Schwartz sporting a kind of urban hoodie thing. We spotted Sydney über dealer Martin Browne going solo without artists, surrounded by old ladies who just wanted to touch his hands. “Oh Martin!” said the old lady nearest us and we had to agree, the man looked marvellous. Barry Keldoulis looked similarly spiffy as he talked to a throng of admirers. We’re thinking Kerry Crowley may have brought a bodyguard with her but it could have been one of her artists Clinton Garafano staring down unwanted attention. We looked, we smiled, we were brutally rebuffed. Notable exceptions to the tribe leaders present were the missing Shermans, Grant Pirries and Kaliman - but just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Bill Wright was there and although he is not technically for the moment a gallery director it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have followers. They are artists, but we don’t know their names.

The BOS opening is chance for other art world luminaries who are not dealers but who wield even more influence to skulk around in the shadows with a hopeful look on their faces. Such as person was Alan Cruickshank, director of Adelaide’s Contemporary Art Centre, a man with the demeanour of someone’s best friend. He was our Ghost of Xmas Past at the BOS opening. Every time we turned around he was there. We spotted Alisdair Foster, director of the Australian Centre for Photography, wearing a mac outside the MCA and were told by someone the guards wouldn’t let him in, but that couldn’t have been true. Victoria Lynn from that Melbourne place that shows all the videos was there and we saw her laugh. There were clusters of art consultants and collectors too. Art consultant Virginia Wilson was standing next to Crikey art bloke Stephen Fennelly who was standing next to another extremely tall person. Nearby the not-so-tall but immensely powerful art collector Dick Quan was surrounded by a glamorous entourage. It made us want to skip through the crowd like a school girl on a spring day – the art life!

Yeah, yeah, but what about the artists? We saw artists by the bucket load. Ken Unsworth walked through the crowd looking like the spectre of a better art world someplace else and Imants Tillers was there wearing a jacket straight outta the 1980s. Younger hipper artists showed up too – two of The Kingpins, Monika Behrens, Caroline Rothwell, Kathy Cavaliere, Tim Silver, Grant Stephens, Del Katherine Barton, Tracey Clement, Soda_Jerk, Lisa Jones, Nigel Milson, Christopher Hanrahan, Ron and George Adams, that guy who always wears the hat, Hayden Christensen from Star Wars and James Pinker the drummer with the legendary SPK!

The thing to remember about the art world is that no matter how good it seems wherever you are, there’s always someplace better somewhere else. It’s the force that keeps everything moving. The better place at the BOS opening gala was the ‘artists party’ at Wharf 2/3 at Hickson Rd. Invitations to the MCA BOS opening were fairly easy to come by, but the special tickets for the AP were [apparently] extremely rare. Somehow we got in, so they couldn’t have been too rare, and the strange thing was that once we were in we found that there was a huge number of people standing around drinking, chatting and eating ham sandwiches. Hey someone said, the difficulty of getting a ticket was an illusion to create a sense of exclusivity and yes, we had forgotten the golden rule. We later learned that at the door – manned by tough PR ladies and security guys hired from a Central Coast leagues club – they were giving away tickets to anyone who asked. It was madness.

We wandered around the Wharf greeting friends and well wishers and admired Antony Gormley’s incredible terracotta army located upstairs. Someone gave us free drink vouchers. Servants came past with platters of food – pizza, steaks, a stuffed swan. Dancing girls draped in precious jewels pranced about getting their photos taken by paparazzi. Fashion photographer Juli Balla was wearing a furry jacket. A man in the toilets said to another bloke that he didn’t like Sydney too much because there are too many white people here. Both laughed. Ray Hughes walked in with a beautiful lady on his arm and ordered a drink at the bar like a gadfly from the '40s. When it was suggested to us that “Charles Merewether is so hot right now” we had to agree, he is so hot right now.

We were full of love and booze and ready to make everything right in the world. Then we discovered something terrible – there was another party, a private gathering of VIPs in a separate room. The room had its own security guys and you couldn’t get in without a special coloured tag. We didn’t have a tag and we couldn’t get in. A young artist of our acquaintance was trying the old strategy of being the doorman's mate but there was no way the hoi polloi were being let in. This is a private party, sirs, so please go away. What a fucking outrage. We wandred around in a daze and saw that the crowd was starting to thin dramatically, the DJ was playing a mash up of The Clash [Should I Stay Or Should I Go] mixed in with some oud and Paul Pena vocals. We gave away our free drink vouchers and decided it was best we go, not stay.

AM > A > DIRTY > RO > BOT">I > AM > A > DIRTY > RO > BOT

Monday, June 05, 2006

There are a lot of things we have been planning to do. Some of them have been stymied by technology, others haven’t happened for logistical reasons. For example, how could we work a link Dorian Lynskey’s musical map of the London Tube [in which the artist substitutes the names of various musicians and bands for stations and thereby creating a relational chart of music history] into a blog about the contemporary art world in Sydney? Well, we just did and thank god, because it’s been bugging us for months. Other things missing were some excellent additions to our artist’s links including Susan Fereday, Danny Ford and Juno Gemes. We are always expanding these links so if you want in, just send us an email.

Michael Jackson via Minnie Riperton...

Speaking of Juno Gemes, she had something to say:

Just taking a midnight browse on my fave site but please a correction! As one of the founding members and full time resident of The Yellow House I can clearly state that Mike Parr was certainly not a founding member or a member of The Yellow House. Where did you get such an absurdly inaccurate idea from? We are real truth talkers, so away with such falsehood please. Check Yellow House Catalogue from AGNSW show...any mention of MP ....never! Please correct tout de suite! Regards from the midnight owl on truth watch - Juno Gemes.

The post that Gemes is referring to was a press release from SafARI that we posted as part of our recent round up new exhibitions and events. We have been putting this sort of low res press material on the blog for well over a year which – as they used to say at Bondi RSL – is for the information of members and their guests. We decided some time ago that The Art Life would be published bi-weekly and since we have thousands of readers dropping in every week, we could use the down time to help promote the activities of artists, galleries and other organisations that don’t get a lot of coverage elsewhere. [Which is not, as one reader suggested, a reason to be ashamed. We have plenty of reason for sorrow and regret, oh yes, but not this…]. We post this material as a service for readers and cannot take responsibility for outrageous claims or other falsehoods in said posts. We accept therefore that Mike Parr aint all that and so do SafARI:

CORRECTION: A previous version of this page, the SafARI invitation and the SafARI catalogue have all stated that Mike Parr was also co-founder of the artist-run initiative Yellow House in 1970. This is incorrect. We apologise for any embarrassment or inconvenience arising from this error.

David Bromley is looking fo chicks [click to enlarge image]

It’s hard to believe that anyone would be embarrassed by that error, we certainly aren’t, so let’s just put the mistake down to youthful over excitement. Some artists however, should be embarrassed but aren’t. Such an artist is David Bromley who has just completed a month long tour of Byron Bay looking for... ladies. An Art Life reader forwarded us one of the artist’s flyers and [on the basis of strict anonymity] explained:

I thought you might like a look at this poster which has been all over Byron Bay and in the local free press for some time. I picked one up at my favorite cafe - Succulent. I guess that David Bromley has employed someone to source women? to be his models? Its good that he has a 'theme' I suppose and that he's quite egalitarian ... you don't need to be a 'Byron woman' ... you could for instance be a Scandinavian backpacker ... ? Tried to contact him via his website to confirm that he's not being ripped off but there was no 'contact' email… there is an image of him in what appears to be stripey pyjamas which seemed appropriate…

Appropriate? It’s completely appropriate, as Bromley is getting more like Hugh Hefner all the time.

This week is dominated by the opening of the Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact, which is being called “the no theme biennale”. We are very excited – it’s the best catered event of the year, indeed, of the two year drought between international art fests. We’re going to be covering the show in all its glory but in addition there’s something else, something very exciting and new for this blog. We don’t want to jump the gun just yet and go off half-cocked, but very soon The Art Life will be [temporarily] crossing media into your non-visual airwaves for a couple of weeks. Details to follow as they are sorted out! In the meantime various artist run galleries and commercial spaces are cashing in on BOS excitement with exhibitions and events with a semi-biennale no-theme of their own. The most audacious is Loose Projects Cones of Zontact, an 85 artist extravaganza opening at the gallery, this Thursday May 8 at 6pm.

We are proud to announce that although The Art Life is not technically part of the show, we have come up with a COZ performance piece that all readers can do in the comfort of their own homes, offices or wherever else they access this blog. It’s called Cones of Zontact: I Am A Robot. Stand up straight with your arms and hands stiffly by your side. Now raise your forearms from the elbows so your hands are flat and are at a 90 degree angle to your legs [so they stick out from your body like a robot]. In a mechanical robotic voice, say the following: “CONES > OF > ZON> TACT… I AM A ROBOT” while moving your arms up and down. Repeat as many times as you like, perhaps moving your body slightly from side to side.

Another quasi-BOS event of note is Tracey Clement’s show Border Zones at Groundfloor Gallery from June 14 [opening 6pm]. Clement is perhaps better known as the writer of the Sydney Morning Herald’s art coverage in Metro, but she’s also an exhibiting artist having been in rather good group show at Peloton earlier this year. For her gig with Groundfloor Gallery she’s exhibiting more of her exquisitely constructed sculptural clothing. We would at this point probably also mention that Roslyn Oxley9, Kaliman Gallery and Gallery Barry Keldoulis have shows well timed for the pleasure of international Biennale visitors, but a reader recently scolded us for mentioning Kaliman nine times in the space of one review [albeit a review of a show there and the new gallery space]. In light of our blatant favoritism to these commercial galleries, we have decided not to mention them again until the next time.

The figure shows the scale of the drawing...[click to enlarge image]

Gosia Wlodarczak sent us a press release last week because she’s finished a drawing. Now, normally that would not be enough reason to put out a press release, but in this case Wlodarczak has done a huge drawing that’ll be on show in Canberra very soon. The artist explained:

Maybe it is not typical to send around an announcement when one finishes a work, but this is a special case, at least for me. Skin of the Wall consists of 676 panels (wallpaper mounted on board) and its size is 440(h) x 1,691(w) cm and the area it will occupy when installed is 74,5m square (over 800 ft square). The process of creation is finished, but the work has one final stage to be completed – installation. It will happen on the beginning of August 2006 at Helen Maxwell Gallery in Canberra (exhibition: 4 August – 3 September, drinks with the artist: 11 August, 6 –8 pm). Please find attached a computer-generated panoramic image of the work. Due to the size of our interior space and the work size, it was impossible to photograph the work as a whole. The image consists of 7 sections, which were during production, assembled on our floor and drawn separately then photographed section by section.

One Night Only

A highly subjective view of David Lawry and Jaki Middleton's installation...

There’s this gallery. It’s in Alexandria, in an old building. Some artists also live in the building and have their studios there too. They thought it would be a good idea to have a gallery where people would come along for one night and see the work, have a few drinks, have a chat, smoke some cigarettes, do some crazy dancing, then go home [if they were wise]. It all seemed like a fun idea. So the artists did a huge amount of work making the gallery space which they have called The Rehearsal Room and the one-night-only shows are called One Night Only [or possibly The Tonight Show depending on who you ask]. They had their first opening last week for their first show. There were some good artists in the exhibition like Todd McMillan, David Lawry and Jaki Middleton and some other artists whose work we like but which we haven’t seen in years and years, like Leo Coyte [who spends most of his time playing guitar in the band Further]. So anyway. The gallery was so packed you couldn’t see the work, you couldn’t move around and it was so cold the beer was actually frozen. Beer + cold = a sudden need to use the toilet. Unfortunately the Rehearsal Room does not have a toilet, so it was a choice of walking through the rain to the pub [not actually a choice if you were female] or you could walk across the road to go to the toilet behind the trees overlooking the car park of the Australian Technology Park [if you were male and wanted to make a new friend in the semi-darkness]. We learned that the reason the gallery is not open beyond the opening night of each show is because the building doesn’t have much security and besides, the studio of an older, famous Australian artist is just upstairs from the gallery and there is a chance that someone might break in and steal the artist’s etchings [which would be worth, oooh, a couple of grand in the secondary market]. There were no room sheets available apart from the ones stuck to the wall, but since there were so many people standing between us and the work we couldn’t see the numbers anyway, so it was a guess as to whose work was whose, and so we just admired the spinning top [which we were told later was by Lawry and Middleton] and a big Frankenstein head that was probably Coyte’s and a little red wagon with a painting next to it with the words “good grief” on it which could only have been McMillan’s. And then people started to go home and we wondered at the madness of it – all that effort that so few people could actually see [and they had even gone to the effort of printing invitations to the opening and sending them ‘round to all the other artist run spaces encouraging you to go] and we wondered who would ever be crazy enough to write about it since the show was only on once, there were no images available, no web site to look at and even the artists didn’t get a second chance to show you the work because the day after the show there was nothing to see. This is foolishness on a grand level – crazy and wasteful, so much energy and time expended for one night only. But on the other hand, it is the art world in microcosm. Why do we love the contemporary art world? Because it’s about the love of it, man, and the gesture, and to hell with the consequences.

[Late extra: Apparently the shows at The Rehearsal Room are on for a whole month but you have to call in advance to arrange an appointment to go and see it for yourself. Also, apparently, room sheets are expensive to make and end up in your washing machine so instead of providing them for people in the actual gallery, you need to email the organisers and ask for one: the address is the_rehearsal_room[at]hotmail.com.]

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