Thanks for the Add

One such image that you find when you type

"thanks for the add" into Google Images

It's been almost 6 months since The Artswipe began. In that time, Artswipe has been super busy keeping up appearances, because after all, appearance is the one tool of an artist's trade that gets used the most. Woodwork was never my thing. Instead, I was too busy reading Cultural Theory for Dummies while all the butch kids at school were making wineracks for Fathers' Day.

But back to appearances. As you might notice, Artswipe has taken the lead of Skanky Jane and moved to Blogger Beta. Why they'd call such cutting edge technology after a redundant form of video I'll never know. But such are the mysteries of life in the cybernetic fold.

And with change comes the desire to rebrand. So I called the offices of (RED) as they're this week's hot dollar brand for Artswipe readers. I figured (RED) could redesign Artswipe and in return I would promise to sign up for Adsense and donate what ever spare change dribbled in, should Adsense actually work. So I looked up (RED) in the White Pages (thinking for a minute that perhaps whiteness was just a little too pervasive). Dialling the long international number, it rang for three times before a woman who announced herself as Sandy answered the phone. I asked if I could speak to Bono.

"Who's speaking, puurleease?"
"Artswipe from Sydney."
There was a pause... It was like Sandy had put her hand on the receiver so I couldn't hear her chatting to a superior.
"Hello, Sandy... Hello (RED)?"
After a minute she returned and in a rather gruff voice told me Bono called me an talentless shit-for-brains Aussie twat and that I was never to call again. "NEVER!"

Now that I have just finished selling my U2 CDs on eBay - Zooropa didn't sell - I have decided to just pick another template because after I finished Cultural Theory for Dummies, I could never get through Visual Communication for Cultural Theorists. It just didn't take. But admittedly, I feel really uncomfortable using a premade template. I feel like David Byrne might see right through me and know that I have been guilty of using PowerPoint presentations; or that I once made a birthday card using clip art; or that I have forwarded spam emails (the kind that ask you to read some unfunny story, make a wish, choose a number and send it to people equaling the number you chose times 500); or that I have been secretly yearning to start a MySpace page.

You may remember in one of my early posts (again Bono themed) I wrote about resisting the lure of cultivating "friends" in MySpace. From what I could tell at the time, MySpace users usually had a vocabulary of four words, and when put in a sequence they would read:

Thanks for the Add.

If you have a MySpace page you can "Add" friends. Really, it's all about redefining what friendship is. If having "friends" in the 90s meant courting Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston, having "friends" today means digging Lily Allen (because she is like, so MySpace, man!) and - ummm - knowing that you can stalk that 14-year-old kid next door who I think I saw masturbating through the venentians, but I can't be too sure... There was a YouTube or a MySpace logo involved, that's all I can remember. Since then I have had to reacquaint myself with my therapist. You see, the last time I visited my shrink it was because Sarah Cottier Gallery was not having opening night events for her exhibitions. Well, Sarah emailed recently to say that's all changed and that she added me to her mailing list. Thanks for the add, Sarah!

So now I only visit my therapist when I have MySpace cravings. The voyeuristic kind. The kind that make me want to look up all those mofos who I hated at school to see if they have a MySpace profile and then hire that 14-year-old from next door (who is an Internet hacker, by the way) to corrupt their code. But before then I look at how they've let themselves go; how they're miserable fat alcoholics who still work at Wendys or Lone Star (in management of course). But that rarely happens because most of us have pseudonyms these days, and can be hard to track down.

Artswipe shudders at the thought of being so hard to track down, so if we don't connect here, "friendship" comes free at Artswipe's MySpace page: www.myspace.com/artswipe

Be my MySpace "friend" and I promise to stamp you with this homespun handmade treat:

See Anything Suspicious

Rose Nolan
SEE ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS, 2006
(Sourced from Sarah Cottier Gallery website)

Welcome back Sarah Cottier Gallery. Elegance returns yet again to the Sydney artscape. Reading an article in the latest Australian Art Collector (issue 27) which interviewed Sarah about the re-opening of her gallery, I experienced a curious sensation of porous nostlagia. As you all know, Artswipe lives for nostalgia, so the news about Sarah's new chic Paddington digs just took me back to those heady days in Newtown (November 1993 - April 1997) when Sarah (and partner Ashley Barber) reigned supreme with a stable of artists that included the likes of Mikala Dwyer, Hany Armanious and Matthys Gerber. When Sarah exhibited Sylvie Fleury's haute-couture rocket ship in December 1994 I was in some kind of transubstantiated heaven. Then they moved to a very epic space in Redfern (December 1998 - November 2003). It was there I got dizzy in John Nixon's monochromes and Maria Cruz's cryptic word play.

So an email is forwarded to me a few weeks ago from an Artswipe fan. Attached is a PDF invite to view the first Sarah Cottier phase three exhibition featuring work by Simon Barney, Stephen Bram, Marco Fusinato, Matthys Gerber, Rueben Keehan, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Elizabeth Pulie, Andreas Reiter Raabe, Koji Ryui, Gemma Smith and John Spiteri.

Cool. Love them all. Can't wait for the opening. Artswipe, like all serious bloggers, is a major art opening fuckslut. You could never ever know how disappointed I was when I read the next line of the feline-grey-type-on-white-PDF, which said "No opening, but we're open."

Surely, that can't be true. How could I possibly attend during gallery hours? The thought of going to an exhibition and not seeing the work through a haze of overcrowded piss-elegance is just too impossible to fathom. How could I actually claim to have seen art in its true context: through a filter of air kisses, knowing nods, art market mayhem, Fiorelli fashion frenzies, literacies in text-art alliteration.

"Turn your frown upside down," said my therapist when I bared my heart and soul during one vulnerable hour of psychic power. "Being seen at art openings speaks to your inability to let go of being seen seeing, looking at being looked at, among many other cross pollinating circuits of spectatorial desire … And really, you can always go to the Primavera opening." It wasn't until much later that I realised how my therapist, once again, couldn't be more on the money. It's like my therapist looked into my black little heart and saw a desperate pit of nothingness consumed by viewing art through a scrim of mass body contact. Shame on me for being so into group dynamics.

How did I become such a fucking mess? Where did life begin, where does it end if not for a few quality opening nights lightly salted with some shit hot abstraction? How am I expected to engage with meaning without feeling part of a mingling audience that rims the champagne glass of light and dark, court and spark? Never one to brave my own paranoia that serious art commentary is best served with crab cakes and wasabi peas, I decided to visit the gallery, braving the white walls, fearing the slow burning echo of my own shallow presence. And low and behold, Rose Nolan, that brave pioneer of all things red and white, said with finite clarity in three words what most of say in at least ten:

See Anything Suspicious