Apology to Roadkill Redux

The Artswipe

Rat series, 2009 and ongoing

mobile phone photos

I'm back from the dead dear readers, as is my new series Rat, which I shot while holidaying in Venice. Here's a taste of things to come. It's a deep work and speaks to notions of sociotemporality, as does all my work.

Head Up My Arse or Dead in the Arse... I can't decide

Folks, it's been way too long between vodka milkshakes. I heard a search party happened; then there was a funeral. The body was never found so they cremated a blow up doll from Club X. Imagine the smell of burning plastic and hot air. Well that is the smell I have been experiencing of late, having had my head up my arse. And I can tell you it's dead in there. Dead in the arse.

The Artswipe is taking a holiday from blogging for now. I'll be back when the air has cleared, I promise.

Love you all. Especially you.

xxx

The Artswipe is BITCH

Deborah Kelly in collaboration with Tina Fiveash

The Big Butch Billboard

The Artswipe has been away - as you all know because you all keep hassling me to come back to the five and dime - because she has been living large as a billboard. It's that time of year when we all get sucked into a gay vortex (yep Mardi Gras time). And The Artswipe gets sucked more than anyone. In fact I just came back from getting a full body wax in anticipation of 'Monday Milktails', an Oscars bash to celebrate the Gus Van Sant movie Milk, where Sean Penn is gay for pay. The best kind of gay actually because at least when you're paying someone to be something, you can complain when it doesn't live up to your expectations. Complaining is what I do best. If there is a comments box, you can be sure I will fill it. 

Enough about that, what's new in queer cultcha? That queer provocateur of the visual arts Deborah Kelly has, in collaboration with photographer Tina Fiveash, produced a billboard that pays homage to the Maria Kozic is BITCH billboard from 1989. Kelly replaces Kozic's fetishised powerdrill wielding Ken Doll assassin with a butch dyke called Mahalia Jones. It's as simple as that - take a hetero feminist icon of the late 80s and replace her with a stylised blow-dried butch dyke wannabe straight out of The L Word. Kelly's billboard does for queer butch culture what metrosexuality did for straight men - stylising the signifiers of gender/sexual identity into shallow advertising speak. Or maybe that is the point?

The Big Butch billboard is currently showing at Australian Centre for Photography and in regional locations. On March 7, the butch ones among us cart the billboard down Oxford Street for the Mardi Gras parade. I can hardly contain my excitement.

Greetings and Salutations

The Artswipe's plan for a new look MCA at Circular Quay

The Artswipe has not posted now for over a month, and some of you want to know why. Well I have been busy with public speaking engagements at self-esteem building seminars (the most recent called "I too can love me"), fundraising for AIDS charities (so no more people "die of gay"), and advising on the future of the Museum of Contemporary Art building redevelopment (my approach: an architecture of the jumping castle).

If that wasn't keeping me busy I've attended John and Kelly's son's funeral - simply a tragedy, and I mean that. I've never been big on Scientology - anything remotely suggestive of science makes my eyes water - but in these times of grief and vulnerability, I'm likely to cling to whatever gives me comfort, whatever keeps me close to the celebrities I love.

The moral of this story? Well there is none when you're morally bankrupt (or "reek of moral turpitude," as a preacher man once said of me). But I will say this, and I do apologise that it has come so late:

Happy new year Artswipe readers!

The Artswipe is on annual leave until early February, when I will be back with reviews, spews, and clues. I promise to keep on delivering the high level calibre content you have come to love and hate. Indeed, I have a lot to live up to after one anonymous commentator (who I probably made up) dubbed The Artswipe "the Entertainment Tonight of the Sydney artworld."