What is Artswipe?

It seems The Telegraph has found me out. After all this time of artworld anonymity, it has been revealed. The Artswipe is "cyber granny", not supernanny as some have conjectured. The Telegraph "outing" is timely, seeing it came just after Simpleposie from Toronto pondered in her "question for the day" a querie that most Sydney-siders stopped asking long ago, "What is Artswipe?" (scroll down to question #2156 - I thought I had lots of questions!)

Apparently it doesn't stop there. YouTube has found me out as well. Smile, smile, smile.

Starfuckingbucks

People say the Internet shrinks distances, makes you global. I used the think so too. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that life before the Internet - God forbid, life before Blogger - could be just as intimate, just as global. That is of course if you have a healthy fan base. And there's no point being coy about it, The Artswipe has many fans, so many that crowd surfing has taken its toll and my fan club president has taken to chronic fatigue. Because you all know that I like to give something back to the fans, I've decided to bite the bullet and share the love. What better way to give of yourself than as specially made merchandise, editioned in endless multiples. A commercial gallery dealer tried convincing me to limit my editions to 6 + 2 AP (read 'Artist Print') but my better judgement warned against cheating a commodity whore's own logic of global domination.

Without further adieu, The Artswipe coffee mugs are now available on special order. They feature the logo on one side and the collage Heartfelt (recently voted by the fans as one of their all-time favourite visual moments) on the other. Price on application: theartswipe at hotmail dot com

Agender: Apolitcal

I'm not one to linger on sexual politics. I have no agenda or a gender - The Artswipe is free of such constraints. Apolitical you could say. People into sexual politics need to get laid more. "Don't speak," I always say when conversation turns to third wave feminism, "Just feel." Not so long ago, the artkids used to chant, "Fuck politics, lets dance". These days, I look for a lover with a slow hand, Pointer Sisters style.

One thing I will say as a coda to Artswipe's previous post about gender in all its complex statistical banality: it remains important to this day to always know whether to leave the toilet seat up or down. And art journalists more than anyone should respect this simple etiquette by at least investigating the gender of their subjects. Sometimes you can tell because a woman artist might have two protruding mounds emanating (for want of a better term) from her chest. A male artist might have a "bulging canvas," as they say in the classics. And then there's the "third sex" - all those queers and diasporicals. That's another story for another time.

The point of this post. Unlike John McDonald, I might not be the hugest fan of the Aida Tomescu canvas. Tomescu features in McDonald's book Studio: Australian Painters on the Nature of Creativity, reviewed elsewhere at Artswipe. I suspect old McDonald owns one of her paintings and is hoping his endorsement in today's Sydney Morning Herald article might manifest their value fourfold. A case in point:

Tomescu has grown in confidence, becoming much more certain of her artistic certainty. It is the kind of self-revelation that some people seek in psychoanalysis, or a radical change of lifestyle, but for Tomescu the entire drama has enfolded within the confines of the studio. It is not a process that allows for detailed descriptions, just as paintings resists verbalisation.

OK. McDonald mentions her "studio" again. Get over it. All artists have studios - not just the artists he cites in that banal book. As for the reference to psychoanalysis and "radical change of lifestyle" - thank you for pointing out the tenets of bourgeois boredom once more. Finding psychoanalytic solace in art went out with Art & Text. As for radical change of lifestyle? See Andrew Frost's brilliant article elsewhere in the Herald called "If the artists are young the reception is cool". It is here you will find artists who have a lust for life, a zesty yet critical take on "change" and "lifestyle" without being concerned with something regarded as so "radical" as to be perceived as a bit Mick Jagger in reality.

Apart from being chuffed big time that Mr Frost cites The Artswipe as one of the blogs that tries to "pick up the slack" due to the lack of artist-driven publications produced in Australia, I'm also aware that there is a subtle jibe in placement here (being that Frost's article appears some eight pages after McDonald's). You see, Frost laments that emerging art culture in Australia is as ephemeral as the young careers that loom large but sometimes peter out, due perhaps to intensified mental strain - which is all well if you can afford psychoanalysis! But alas, on Centrelink payments, not many of us can afford the Herald, let along a Freudian couchtrip. As Frost points out referring to a hypothetical pup of the artworld, "our esteemed art critics probably wouldn't have liked their work."

So who are these "esteemed critics" Frost speaks of?

Not knowing how to answer that slippery question (ie you do the math) I think it best to turn the question back to my original concern: gender, the arts and journalism. (Can you tell from my subtle yet meandering logic that I was high school debating champion?) That aside, for all my criticism of John McDonald, bless his soul, at least he recognises Aida Tomescu is a woman. Herald journalist Tracey Clement - champion of young artists everywhere, unlike some - for some inexplicable reason, has taken Tomescu's "bulging canvas" literally. As you can see below in Clement's Metro Picks (SMH Metro 31 August 07), Tomescu has man-morphed. But that's OK. Clement was too busy checking out everything in the artworld - not just some "mini-goats-cheese-pizza-East-Sydney-art-studio-crawl" - that she assumed for a moment that whatever might be McDonald fodder could actually be anything but male.

The Death of Affect

TV Moore, installation view, courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

So Art Life did a (celebrity?) blogroll and profiled The Artswipe's Crown Jewels post. Thanks Art Life! But now I am experiencing incredible self-inflicted pressure to post something new, just in case new traffic comes my way. So I have been thinking, what can I write? What have I done, where have I gone, what have I seen that I could review? What does Artswipe usually do apart from watching trash TV, taking mobile phone camera pics and shooting the breeze about art school daze? Artswipe does art. So here's a new review of what I've seen in the pre-Primavera and Lempriere Sydney art-circuit. And yes, stay tuned... Arty will probably feel compelled to make some kind of mention of the Primavera and Lempriere - or at least eavesdrop on some opening night banter. What else do you do when the circus comes to town?

So Artswipe saw TV Moore's show Fantasists in the Age of Decadence at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and it was pretty cool. There was this PVC-clad Humpty Dumpty which took my fancy. It had that gimp vibe about it. Strange for a white cube, the space was mood-lit and admittedly the atmosphere made me a bit horny. There's nothing worse than stumbling into bad lighting, so thanks to Oxley9 for turning down the dimmer switch. Especially on opening night when everyone looked kinda edible. In the next room were screen works displayed on Macs by Michael Bell-Smith. They kind of looked like screen savers for the Facebook crowd.

David Rosetszky
Nothing like this, 2007 (video still)
16mm film transferred to DVD 16:9
colour, sound, edition of 6+2AP, dur. 24:36 min
Courtesy Kaliman Gallery

I also saw David Rosetzsky's show Nothing Like This at Kaliman Gallery. The glacial cool of Rosetzsky's work has always confounded me somewhat. I always feel compelled to read the work with my existential goggles on. But this time I just let go of all those academic urges and felt its message. Young kids - probably straight off a Larry Clark set but shampooed - wade in the water. They've probably just had unsafe sex standing up in a change room stall at The Gap without moving a facial muscle. Now they're washing off in the river. These 'children of the corn' couldn't be expected to do any less. 'Affect' is a big little word these days, overused at every turn. In my humble opinion Rosetzsky celebrates the death of affect and for that reason alone I commend him.

Joan Fontcuberta
Abu Ghraib, 2005
Courtesy Australian Centre for Photography

Australian Centre for Photography is going for the G-spot - Google and Gays. Joan Fontcuberta is a Spanish artist who makes art from Google images. Like, who doesn't? Obviously she's not familiar with The Artswipe, who has bought fucken shares in Google images! According to the press blurb, Fontcuberta "has used the popular internet search engine Google to create large, colourful photo-mosaics that construct an elegant metaphor for the internet-era's liaisons between mass media and ideas of collective consciousness." I found this work exploring the "liaisons" between cliche and crap. Sorry, I'm not buying it. Download a famous Abu-Ghraib image, re-jig it with Mac software and, PRESTO!, you have pictures within pictures. Gee I've never heard of that before, well, at least not as an "elegant metaphor".

Kenneth Anger
Invocation of My Demon Brother 1969
ultrachrome archival photograph (film still)
Courtesy Stuart Shave Modern Art

Then there was the gay show called The Brotherhood. Organised by Neon Parc, I was hoping with this show for at least a whiff of some crusty foreskin. That's what you usually get with "gay photography". It's always the shot in the arm you need at the end of a long day. A tie-in with a magazine called They Shoot Homosexuals Don't They? I was hoping for something as special as such a subversive magazine title might suggest. And yes, there was something special. A Kenneth Anger film, Invocation of my Demon Brother 1969, made it all worth while. Anger was a legend of queer culture then as much as now. Enough said. The rest of the show was not so well hung. Rather, it limply hung from the walls as if the gallery was a noticeboard. Flicking through They Shoot Homosexuals Don't They? I noticed that all the same pictures hanging at the ACP were reproduced there, but the format does it more justice than this strangely vapid exhibition, which next to Googlegrams looks like bits of the web that only materialise when you type "Stroking a Big Cock" into Google Images... And, as you can see below, that is exactly what I decided to do.

The Artswipe

Stroking a Big Cock, 2007
Courtesy Google Images

Happy Birthday to Me

Thursday 21 June marks the first birthday of Artswipe. Such tender early years. To celebrate, Artswipe might eat some trifle, the kind grandma used to make. Grandma - the dear old cheese - would put some coins in the trifle sometimes; part of the fun was not knowing if you'd chip a tooth on a twenty cent coin. I miss grandma, I wish she'd been around long enough to share in my birthday milestone.

Apologies to all seven of my avid readers for being a slack bitch this month with the blogging. It's been a busy month running with the wolves, you know what I mean. The Artswipe was in a show this month at Commissioner Pilgrim, a new gallery at Arncliffe, at a street called Forest Rd. As an artist, I delight in such paradoxes - forests built on roads, that kind of thing. The lovely artist who works there Jemima Isbester asked Artswipe on MySpace to submit the I Can Eat Cake With Ellen image. Get down there and see it. I missed the opening because, well, Artswipe doesn't get out much these days. Since 9/11 it's been a hard slog. But slowly together, all of us, everyday, everywhere, are re-building community. And when you're having your first birthday at Blogger, that is enough of an incentive to outgrow the tallest buildings and the bitchiest art crowds.

In addition to my full belly of trifle and chipped tooth, I'm celebrating with a new image courtest of lovely Lucia, my second best friend at MySpace.

Artswipe's Art Life

The Artswipe

Mythbusters, 2007

ET Pez dispenser, masking tape, black texta

The Artswipe makes a guest appearance on The Art Life reviewing three video installations currently showing in Sydney while Team Art Life make television. You screen, I screen, we all screen for iScreen. Or something like that.

Grab a choctop and read it here.

Welcome to 'The Artswipe'

Blogging, hey... Never thought I'd join in, but here I am. Frankly, I am not blogging because I need it, rather it needs me. Having read so many blogs over the last year I realised I am far more narcissistic than everyone else in the world, so I too should publish my everyday musings. Come to think of it, I nearly called my blog "An Ethnography of the Everyday" but it wasn't pretentious enough, not even for me. I decided on The Artswipe because it rhymes with "asswipe" and it alludes to The Art Life - a now famous blog documenting the fabulous hi-fi lows and low-fi highs of the artscene in Sydney.

Where else would you go than The Art Life to form an opinion on Australian contemporary art? Because folks, the once legendary journal Art+Text died c.1989 and now a tepid zombie artrag masquerading as Art&Text lived in its place for awhile before that died in the ass as well. And then there are other art publications, but I can't mention them right now because I am probably a subscriber, contributor, editor, typesetter, distributor, reader, or all of the above. If you haven't heard of The Art Life, then maybe it is only famous for a bunch of Australian artists who need a blog to make sense of and validate their "everyday." Come to think of it, I promise never to refer to the "everyday" again as long as I keep this blog alive. Instead, this blog is about "mostdays" or "somedays" or "whenever I fucken feel like it."

To be frank, The Art Life rocks in a salacious Woman's Day kind of way. And I decided to blog not just to provide my own minority counterpart to The Art Life phenomena. Rather, I decided to blog because my voice is the voice of a generation. Which generation? I have yet to decide. Which voice? Well I prefer to lipsync as it is my favourite medium right now.

But as to which generation I might speak for? Well, if I had lived in Dublin at just the right time -- 1960 to be precise -- I may have actually been Bono. AKA Bono Vox. I think "vox" is how you say voice in an Irish accent. And Bono? Well, he would have been me if he didn't mind waiting 15 years to be born. Because it was 15 years after Bono that a pre-internet, pre-aids, pre-teen, pre-fab sprout incarnation of The Artswipe was born.

The Artswipe is really my shot at being totally indulgent, and wondering how many people look at my blog and wonder if I am a, like, human artwork attached to a $50 per-month broadband plan. Lately, I have been fascinated by artists who believe they are living, breathing, art. I tried to fuck a few of them because I thought it might rub off, and that I too would be a living masterpiece. (I won't mention names, you know who you are). But art, like language, is a virus: it is better transmitted through jazzy corporate templates found on free blogware than body fluids. And no, this is not a U2 fan forum, so don't squabble over your favourite song, political statement, or rumoured date for their long-postponed Australian tour. The Artswipe is a place where metaphors come to graze and audio commentaries come in written form.