"A" Pecs

The Artswipe

Stuck in Traffic Again 2007
Digital video (still)

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.

Pissing Contests

When it comes to bathrooms that look this good, gender is irrelevant.
Above: the female (top) and male (bottom) bathrooms at Carriageworks.

Recently at The Art Life, a debate raged about gender representation after Carrie Lumby reviewed a fairly banal Herald article. Adam Cullen and Ben Quilty were called up (among others) for quotable quotes in this article about art audiences getting bored of testosterone-fuelled art and it's hard to resist taking the bait. Not quite sure I saw the point of the Herald article or the Lumby write-up, but I've never been so entertained as I was when reading the 70something comments it sparked at The Art Life. And I just love how so many who commented clamour for the last word, returning again and again to strengthen their stance on whatever it was they were trying to make a point about. The Artswipe doesn't care for the last word. I'm too sophisticated for soft cock pissing contests. Rather I decided to put on a Guerrilla Girl mask and contribute to all this 'research' about gender representation in the arts by undertaking the following gallery crawl during the week:

Gallery Barry Keldoulis: Chris Fox, Hitesh Natalwala
MOP Projects: Alex Lawler, Marita Frazer, Emma White
Firstdraft Gallery: Clip Art: Kate Smith, Soda_Jerk (Dan & Dominique Angeloro) & Sam Smith, Ben Frost, Grant Stevens, Elvis Richardson, Deborah Kelly, The Motel Sisters (Liam Benson & Naomi Oliver)
Performance Space @ Carriageworks: Ruark Lewis & Jonathan Jones, Ross Gibson & Kate Richards
Tin Sheds: Petra Gemeinboeck
Sherman Galleries: Marion Borgelt
Stills: Magnum New Blood: Antoine D'Agata, Jonas Bendiksen, Alec Soth, Trent Parke, Mark Power
AGNSW: Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy

Total Male Artists: 16
Total Female Artists: 12

If I had not gone to Stills, which was showing five male Magnum photographers, my gallery crawl would have been almost 50/50 in terms of gender representation. Not that that really says anything because generally I'm more interested in whether the art is any good. And overall it was a fun trip around Sydney, but my favourite works for the day were all the more interesting because they were about art and sex. So thanks to Carriageworks for introducing me to your male and female toilets. I've never seen a better or more expensive installation in my whole life!

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

Buffy, not a Heather

The Artswipe
SwanSong, 2007
Mobile phone snaps

The Artswipe watched Law and Order: Criminal Intent last week just because the plot rip-offed the Anna Nicole Smith story. Kristy Swanson was the actress playing the facsimile of Anna Nicole (who in Criminal Intent was a fat white whale named Lorelai Mailer). Kristy was my idol when I was about seventeen-years-old and was the original Buffy, before Sarah Michelle Jessica Parker Posey took over the tiara. Or whoever it was.

It's always pissed me off that the Buffy TV show was so popular. I remember talking to an academic once who wrote a paper on Buffy as a metaphor for pre-Oedipal nipple envy. I'm not sure if I got that right, but it sounds good. But really, Buffy on TV was a bunch of turds, whereas Buffy the movie was a basket of kisses. And it was all because of Kristy. She wasn't quite as talentless as Heather Graham; not quite as "Amanda" as Heather Locklear; but Kristy Swanson was like a "Heather" - the kind of chick who embodied the blow-waved rich-bitch archetype who we all wanted as a "friend or a fuck", to quote from the legendary Heathers (1989).

Anyway, Kristy Swanson is a method actress to be reckoned with! She put on all this weight and channeled Anna-Nicole in a way that gave me goose-flesh, as the Americans say. I've never been quite the same since. The lingering question since watching Criminal Intent is: Why wasn't Kristy Swanson a bigger star?

Well, as they say in the classics (and on suburban church marquees): Answers to Life's Big Questions Can't Be Googled.

Crown Jewels

The Artswipe
Crown Jewels, 2007
Collage

After reading the following news report at the Internet Movie Database, titled "Queen Storms Out of Photo Shoot", The Artswipe made the artwork you see before you.

Queen Elizabeth II stormed out of a recent photo shoot when acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz asked the British monarch to take off her crown. The royal was posing for a series of official photos at her Buckingham Palace home - to mark her state visit to the U.S. earlier this year - when Rolling Stone snapper Leibovitz went too far. The Queen was less than amused when she was told she looked too dressed up for the occasion. The photographer asked the Queen to wear Order of the Garter robes and a Diamond tiara, but had a change of heart on the day, asking, "I think it will look better without the crown. Less dressy. The garment robe is so ... extraordinary." The Queen them fumed, "Less dressy? What do you think this is?" She then left the room, reportedly muttering, "I'm not changing anything. I've had enough of dressing like this, thank you very much." The extraordinary scenes were caught by a camera crew filming a documentary, entitled A Year With the Queen. Leibovitz, who did eventually manage to complete the portrait pictures, recalls, "She doesn't really want to get dressed up anymore. She just couldn't be bothered and I admire her for that." The documentary will be aired on the BBC later this year.

Cereal Killer

Photos by The Artswipe

Don't question my sense of focus - someone must have spiked my drink

The Artswipe features in a show at Mori Gallery, Sydney. The show in question is by Sari Kivinen and Contributors, and is called Serial Box Art Degree, an exhibition about the 'art school problem' we are facing in Australia. "What problem?" I hear you ask. "I'll pretend you didn't ask," is my reply.

Seriously, it's that perennial art education problem. The one Artswipe has already touched on in earlier posts. A MySpace friend called "i should use this space for a cool pseudonym" recently sent me a drawing of a hand metaphorically engaged in a bit of 2B self-portraiture. In case you don't get my drift, the image featured a hand mid-wank, sans-cock, and rendered in the finest of grey lead pencil. I'll reproduce it below so you can get a sense of what's going on in the world today: yes, masturbation is back. Cyndi Lauper called it "she-bopping" back in the 80s. These days we call it person-bopping.

Fuckshit.... I always do it, mix my metaphors, tie my shoelaces in all kinds of choreographed configurations. How do you get from art school politics to masturbation? The link is so arbitrary, like signification itself - something the future gens might never know about if artschools die in the ass (no AIDS jokes please). But that's exactly what is happening. There was that whole UWS art blog protest last year and it hasn't gone away. If anything, those kids have gotten more angry and more radical with their aesthetic ethics. Sari Kivinen got the kids together crit-style for a rambunkshious (sic) opening night of art school protest. There were cereal boxes everywhere made by a bunch of contributors, Artswipe included. See my serial box photographed out of focus above... It's called The Visual Identity Manual and it is a Lent calendar featuring images from the UWS visual identity style manual. The what-not-to-do-with-the-logo. Well, if I was the designer of that little gem of a corporate tertiary logo, I'd say you should go off and avoid all visual references to Nike.

Note on focus: all photos above are out of focus because someone spiked my drink with some Rohypnol (aka roofies, aka date rape drug par excellence). Need I describe the rest of my night? Well, prior to having a few extra sexual cavities, I witnessed a grand happening at Mori Gallery featuring a whole bunch of post-Spotlight performance artists, including Schappylle Scragg, La Donna Rama, Sonic Yootha, Dr Bernice Leach and the Motel Sisters. They all spiced up the evening with rollicking day-glo fashions. I am always getting in trouble for forgetting to turn the irony off when I leave for work - these kids are proof that the irony should never be turned off. If anything they make me wanna lay flat on the irony board and get steam pressed Prisoner-style. As long as the stray sequin doesn't catch fire, we'll all be OK. Casula Powerhouse director Kon Gouriotis opened the exhibition. I whispered to my friend Scooter, "What has he come as?" Scooter wasn't prepared to commit to a response (ever since he's had the Presidential pardon, he's been so fucking non-committal with authority, let alone the regional gallery kind). Seeing there was so much performance art going on, I couldn't focus on Mr Gouriotis's lengthy speech because I was too entranced in his own choice of costume: black pin-striped pants, brown shoes and turtle neck (as the Americans say). Sample and mash.

Anyway, I have drifted from the point. Again. If you prefer more linear trajectories sign every petition in town, protest every cause, and re-enroll in an artschool. I'm sure there's one at a TAFE near you. Really, go back to artschool if you aren't there already. Do a PhD or DCA or RTA even. They're in vogue this season. Going to artschool is the most sustainable thing you can do in this age of forest carnage and climate change. As petrol prices soar, I beg that you catch the train, ride the bus and enjoy it at student concession prices.

Illustration by Gareth aka

i should use this space for a cool pseudonym

McCritical

The Artswipe

Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese,
pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun, 2007
Found image collage

It was appropriate that Britain should have been represented by that undisputed queen of narcissism, Tracey Emin. She responded in typical fashion, demanding that she only be accommodated at a hotel that had a certain “thread count” in the sheets. She wanted a room for her secretary and a private boat. In return, she produced a series of small, laughably bad drawings; scrappy shapeless paintings; piles of sticks that passed for sculpture; and outline doodles in neon. The theme needless to say was Me, Me, Me.

Her fans were rapt in admiration. “Tracey”, as she is known by all the world, was on hand to do a lot of swearing. For some, this served as confirmation of her genius. If further proof of sainthood was needed, one of the catalogue essays was written by a clergyman who gave a religious spin to Tracey’s art and expletives. For those like me who were not so anxious to worship at her alter, it seemed clear that in terms of her fame and her talent, Tracey is nothing less than the Paris Hilton of contemporary art. (John McDonald, “Festival of False Gods”, Sydney Morning Herald, June 16-17, 2007).

If Tracey Emin is the Paris Hilton of contemporary art, John McDonald is the Dan Brown of the art critic world. Let me explain.

A week before old McDonald bagged Emin, that bourgeois Herald supplement Good Weekend ran a cover story profiling artists in their studios. Basically a puff-piece to promote John McDonald’s new book, Studio: Australian Painters on the Nature of Creativity, the cover featured Aida Tomescu. I could review this article here at Artswipe in case you missed it, but Good Weekend reader Melanie Flynn of Hawthorn East, Victoria, sums it up perfectly in her letter to the magazine's editor, published this weekend:

The promise of an article about Australia’s top artists (June 9) was sadly short-lived as the author bought into the career story of art critic John McDonald. Surely most people who work within the industry have heard this story time and again and, for those who haven’t,it is hardly gripping stuff. If you are going to descend into the banality of art-world politics, please don’t promise something more by placing a full-page image of a female artist on your cover, who you then hardly mention in the accompanying article. (Good Weekend, 30 June, 2007).

I agree. It’s hardly gripping and it didn't really make me want to rush out and buy the book. McDonald would tear shreds off any other critic who’d dare to produce such nebulous, glossy coffee table criticism. Granted, a book on artists in their studios is an interesting idea; it appeals to our voyeuristic tendencies to know every bit of minutia about celebrity. And indeed, there is a whiff of celebrity about this book in that it appeals to the kind of personality-driven excess that McDonald gets all huffy over - evidenced by his jibe at Tracey Emin. More info on the book is available here and you can even download a nine page PDF sample of the book here.

Studio is available now and for a mere $80 you can furnish your coffee table with a copy. “That’s too much money,” I hear you cry in dismay. Think about it this way: Big Macs cost $3.25 each. With $80 you could either buy John McDonald’s book or visit your local McDonalds and order 24 Big Macs.

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.

King Shit

Newell Harry

Untitled (gift mat #X) No Point Being King Shit of Turd Island, 2007
Pandanus and dye, 126x203 cm (irregular)
Courtesy of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

You know how there can be periods of time in art gallery land when there's just nothing much worth seeing? Well that's not the case this month. Artswipe has basically been suffering from aesthetic overload. Especially on Thursday night when I did my usual string of 'opening night dog fights' - my term for when multiple openings happen on a single night. Which is exactly what happened on Thursday night when I bypassed the dull hodge-podge of abstraction in the group show Lion at Sarah Cottier Gallery for Newell Harry's View from the Couch at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Between the booze and schmooze at Roslyn Oxley9, Artswipe saw the future and it is called Newell Harry. (Maybe he will write that I said that on his CV?) Harry's work oscillates between slick neon text signs placed amidst things reeking of either rust or the rustic. A series of handcrafted 'gift mats' sporting slogans like No Point in Being King Shit of Turd Island and Stoned Cold Turkey Cape Flats Shacks are highlights, their presence in the polished whiteness of Roslyn Oxley9 suggesting a critique of how authenticity gets all wrapped up in the handmade. When Edward Norton sits on the toilet in Fight Club ordering things from an IKEA catalogue for his uptight uber-white apartment, he professes to having even purchased things that had subtle imperfections and marks of the hand: "proof that they were crafted by the honest, simple and hardworking indigenous peoples of wherever". Whether it is meant to evoke this tension, seeing Harry's work in a slickly commercial enterprise like Roslyn's suggests a similar critique of how the codes and markings of 'otherness' are commodified through authenticity.

Vivienne Shark LeWitt
Australian Terrier with Provincial Lady, 2006
Acrylic on linen,77x61 cm
Courtesy of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Interestingly, Newell Harry is set alongside Vivienne Shark LeWitt, an artist who has been showing with Roslyn Oxley9 since 1982. LeWitt has always been an artist whose naïve sensibility is not unlike two other women artists of the same generation and gallery stable: Jenny Watson and Linda Marrinon. Together LeWitt, Watson and Marrinon were big deal artists working (depending on your view) alongside or parallel to the eighties post-pop art scene and united by a supposed 'feminine sensibility', the painted stuff of the girlhood imagination – horses and storybook romance. Even a sailor or two. Linda Marrinon's 1980s painting I Sailed to Tahiti with an All-Girl Crew is an all time Artswipe favourite to this day. But the problem with LeWitt’s suite of new paintings in the smaller gallery is that they weren't simply overshadowed – they felt irrelevant. As if the moment had passed and a new one (see Newell Harry) already upon us.

Michelle Hanlin
Spirit Fingers, 2007
Acrylic on canvas, 101x101 cm
Courtesy of Gallery9

Michelle Hanlin is another young artist whose work recalls the good old days of eighties girly-pop-painting (in fact she could be the new Linda Marrinon) but there’s something very now about her as well. Hanlin's show at Gallery 9, Rendered Unconscious by Spirits which I saw when it opened a week ago, is a solid and exciting collection of paintings and sculptures. Themed around the ideas and icons of spirituality (candles, churches, death, sainthood, etc) Hanlin has created a delightful body of work that teeters on being aesthetically nauseating – its pastel tones garish and kitschy, recalling bubble gum, rainbows and Care Bears. Maybe Hanlin likens spirituality to the same kind of palette as a teenager's bedroom: nebulous cloud-like confectionary composed of powder blues, Paris Hilton pinks and funeral blacks.

Drew Bickford
My Degenerates, 2007
Watercolour and ink on paper, 21x29 cm
Courtesy of MOP Projects

For Geoff Overheu and Drew Bickford, exhibiting at MOP, there ain't nothing pretty in pink about this funeral. Don’t even think about wearing black, because the funeral was probably cancelled and/or televised. Maybe the circus was in town instead. Overheu and Bickford contaminate MOP with a pungent whiff of rotting abject flesh: Bickford through surreal illustrations of freakish human monstrosity, and Overheu through white plastic bovine sculptures either rotting on the floor or melting down the walls. I haven't seen a show in awhile that has been so visceral, yet oddly aware of restraint. It's as if it all could tip over into sheer madness (often the best thing about shows at artist-run spaces) but is instead held together by a keen, perhaps obsessive eye for presentation. Like a serial killer pinning down new spoil.

Geoff Overheu
Nullarbor, 2007
Plastic, dimensions variable
Courtesy of MOP Projects

Lost Property

The Artswipe

The Global Village, 2007
Photograph (no print edition because we ran out of trees to make paper)

The Artswipe encountered this street sign today in a quaint suburban village in the western suburbs of Sydney and felt a surge of Public Sphere Pride. "Sustainability St: It's a village out there". This street sign really should have been in last year's Biennale of Sydney. It's the kind of text art Australia is crying out for. Speaking of art and the western suburbs, Artswipe popped into the Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewers Bequest today to see the much anticipated Vivienne Binns retrospective. When I was at art school we all considered Ms Binns a legend. Binns is one of those artists who is really iconic for a couple of significant works, which unfortunately overshadows an art practice still going strong. Cases in point: Binns made a landmark community art project called Mothers Memories, Others Memories (1979-81) which was significant for the way it engaged a community of women in Blacktown, a suburb in Western Sydney. Binns also made iconic feminist paintings like Phallic Monument and Vag Dens in the 1960s. The latter features a big psychedelic vagina with teeth (luckily no orthodontic braces). It's 1970s second wave feminist art par excellence. You know, all anti-aesthetic and angry and political. If feminism was battery operated, you'd need D-size Duracel because making the personal political can require quite a bit of charge! It's a message that must be heard - a message about owning your vagina, owning your politics. Perhaps even your teeth as well. I've often dreamed about my teeth falling out: common dream stock I've heard. If I have that dream again, I'll check whether my teeth have fallen into my vagina, doubling probably as a Lost Property depot ("So that's that's where the remote control went!") Come to think of it, even though she's been regarded by critics and historians for works such as these, the rest of Vivienne Binns' oeuvre is kind of like art historical lost property. Fortunately this great show, curated thoughtfully by Merryn Gates, remedies that.

Vivienne Binns
Nylon over the Lachlan, 2006
Acrylic on canvas 130.3 x 165.3 cm
Courtesy of Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest

Secrets and Lies

The Artswipe

Pass the Salt, 2007
'Video art' still

At the end of 2006 I felt that there were just some topics that had been thoroughly exhausted in last year's Artswipe blog. I'm not mentioning any names but one starts with a Big O and I don't mean Roy Orbison, bless his heart.

OK, so admit it, I got sucked into Oprah's special on this new age junk DVD called The Secret. The ads for Oprah's special featured soundgrabs from Oprah saying she'd found some "secret" from all the way from "down under". Nothing irks me more than the phrase Down Under. It is like that phrase is reserved for Americans - maybe because Australia sounds too much like Austria? Who fucken knows.

Anyway, the chick from Down Under who professes to have a bestselling secret is Rhonda Byrne. Good old Rhonda, who sports this cute little bindi on her forehead, wrote a book about the so-called "science" of positive thinking. The book is now a best-selling DVD that instructs duped and desperate consumers how to make lots of cash, have lots of sex, have lots of fun, have lots, lots, lots, lot. Last time I checked there was this guy in the Old Testament called "Lot" and he had this wife who turned into a pillar of salt, as you do.

On the news this morning there was a story about how new research indicates that iodised salt is brain food, and that there are moves to put it in sliced bread so Australians will become a smarter people. Is it just me or was that news story implying that "Ossies" aren't too bright? Maybe we should all go "down under" with Lot's salty wife and get a bit smarter in the process? I lost a few brain cells this week watching TV so can someone pass the fucking salt?

Whatever the case, The Secret is supposed to be a miracle drug that makes everything better. Success is measured by excess, so there's no wonder Oprah's eating it with a spoon. Oprah even claims that she knew the secret all along - she just didn't have the wisdom of "teachers" like Rhonda Byrne to articulate and package it. The Secret works like this: Buy the DVD and Paris Hilton might go to prison for more than a paltry 20something days. Read the book and George Bush might eat some salt. Watch Oprah and you may get a lifetime subscription to her magazine or bookclub. Goody!

A single mother was profiled on Oprah talking about how The Secret helped her out of the downward spiral of debt. Another woman told how she hadn't had sex with her husband in a year. Now they're whorin' all over the goddamn place. What beautiful stories. Then an ad break came on. Belinda Emmett's album is out in case you didn't know.

I plan on buying The Secret. As part of my positive thinking adventure I will envisage a world where bullshit new age culty propaganda does not exist and people eat more salt.

The Artswipe

Belinda, 2007
'Video art' still

Peripatetic Poems

The Artswipe

Public Service Announcements, 2007
Mobile phone art

Thanks to everyone for admiring my mobile phone photos. These are two taken in the last week. One of the pavement near my house. The other in the car park of the gym where I should probably have a life-time membership.

Together I think these photos tell a story.

I will be back with some writing within the next week. I'm not making a TV show like The Artlife so I don't have an excuse. But I've always believed that if you don't have anything to say that you should shut the fuck up (or take photos).

Dry Me Kangaroo Down, Sport

The Artswipe

Dry Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, 2007

Another mobile phone moment

Welcome to the month of May, I have really nothing to say. So here's a picture I took yesterday in the toilets at work while drying my hands. It can be awkward enough finding yourself in the toilets with a colleague, making small talk and all. It can be harder to fathom when they come to work dressed as kangaroos and emus.

Mufti Days have never been my forte.

Green House, Gas

Gordon Matta-Clark

Splitting, 1974

When Big Brother premiered Sunday night, I felt myself being drawn in again against my will and better judgement to watch the damn thing. When the franchise contaminated the globe as a pioneering instance of reality television's banal biopowers some seven years ago, I must admit I was transfixed, lulled into a narcotized state. Reality and panopticism was being streamed (somewhat) live and for like at least Andy Warhol's famous fifteen minutes I was hooked. But that was then, this is now. I haven't watched it since, well, not until I found myself hypnotised on Sunday night by what appeared to be Gretel Killeen's botoxed forehead.

The cast of clones assembled for this season's turkey-slapping marathon appear to be predominately conveyor belt Caucasians – they're that generic. The girls are blond and pretty in that puked-up Supre kind of way, while most of the boys pass the dumb hunk honours with flying colours. The brunette barmaid from Darwin is there for a bit of rum-n-coke realness. There's also a self-confessed male nerd whose only claim to a six-pack is perhaps drinking one, while you could cut glass on the rest of the lads' torsos.

I'm not even going to bother outlining any more of the housemates. I'd rather die with shit in my mouth. But what did pique my interest is the excessive extent to which the show's producers have scripted sustainability and social responsibility into the design of the house. You see, this cast of whiteys get to compete and do whatever they do in a house designed on Green principles. Big Brother's executive producer Tim Tori said in a news article, "Big Brother is a reflection of society so like many households around Australia this year we are going green". Tone Wheeler, an architect and educator who was a consultant to Big Brother during its re-design has said that the Big Brother house could be a leader in showing Australians how easy it is to make a house green. Among its features are an air-to-water purifier which transforms water from thin air. Then there are design features throughout the house made out of recycled refuse.

The Heineken World Bottle

Why didn't they just try and revive Heineken's World Bottle? As legend has it, the beer entrepreneur Alfred Heineken commissioned an architect to design "a brick that holds beer" after witnessing a Jamaican beach littered with beer bottles in 1960. The "world bottle" was manufactured (but never released) by Heineken as bricks that could make a Green house. Because Heineken bottles are green, the eco-design of the Green house visually suggests a botanical greenhouse.

The beer is more plentiful in Queensland than water so surely a Heineken house would have been suitable? Due to harsh water restrictions housemates can only shower for a few minutes at a time. It probably doesn't stop the show's producers changing the water in the jacuzzi regularly. Surely the jacuzzi will become one big alcoholic punch of rabid STDs. So congrats to Big Brother for being so green; something has to balance its promotion of mindless consumption. Just check out the ridiculous merchandise and product placement tie-ins you can purchase at the online Big Brother shop. Bumper-sticker ecology has never looked better than it does on Big Brother t-shirts. One of them reads, "The Grass is Always Greener on the Inside".

There's even art made by some environmental artist featured on some the walls inside the house. According to Gretel, the artworks are being auctioned at the Big Brother website. I couldn't find information about these artworks at the website, but why would you want them anyway? Bits of organic materials encased in glass - you can buy that shit at Ikea. Big Brother's producers should have instead commissioned an artist to remake Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in the yard? Or do a Gordon Matta-Clark by cutting the house in half? Such artistic interventions would have been much more interesting than framed pebbles and sand. I really don't think Big Brother viewers are creaming their jeans over an artist's work being featured in the house.

If the Whiteys get to hang out in the Green house, the ethnics (minus a blond white guy whose dreadlocks probably make him black on the inside) get to hang in a mysterious white room – a kind of reality TV purgatory where the last of the four to survive its sensory deprivations can be allowed access into Greenland. It's so colour-coded, so complex! What's more the white room can be viewed on a Plasma screen, making the white room a kind of Big Brother within Big Brother. This babushka doll simulacrum makes sense because the housemates are so clone-like in appearance that they may as well be carbon copies of each other. Pity Baudrillard died before he got to see this.

Speaking of carbon copies, you can't help but wonder if the house and its adjunct white room are carbon neutral. Does that Plasma screen give off carbon emissions? It appears the white room doesn't even have the same green features as the house, and if it does, Gretel couldn't be fucked talking about it. Regardless of whether the house is green or gold, white or black, trash or treasure, its attempt to buy into the whole eco mindset is as sincere as the mobile phone advertising inundating Big Brother. Does 3, the mobile phone company sponsoring Big Brother, really care about the environment? Last time I checked, phones were one of the major causes of landfill. Big Brother is basically a floor plan for planned obsolescence. If the show survives another season, this time next year the house will have been knocked down and redesigned according to the whim of a twelve year old's distracted attention span. Surely the poster children for sustainability.

One such poster child

Rite of Passage

Terry Zwigoff captured the pretensions of art school ennui so vividly in Ghost World (2001) that I expected his more recent feature Art School Confidential (2006) to be a masterpiece. A straight to video affair in Australia, Art School Confidential is about Jerome (Max Minghella) a wannabe Picasso who believes being a famous artist will get him laid. Poor virgin hasn't had a great time convincing the ladies of his worth. Actually no one at art school thinks much of Jerome. Anyone can be a "Picasshole" it seems. And who would give Jerome a second glance – he basically goes to art school because of the supposed "erotics" of life drawing. First myth of art school is that life drawing is the most fucking boring thing you'll ever do, and the skanks who pose in real life usually stink of whatever is leaking from their unattractive junkie stained bodies.

But art school doesn't have a home in real life anymore. (I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the fact that Sydney art schools seem to be either closing down or restructuring themselves out of existence). As Zwigoff's film has it, art school – like a lot of art – is the stuff of cliché. Jerome's art school buddy Bardo (Joel David Moore) rightly point out that the school is littered with human clichés. There's the pretentious art theory idiot, the kiss-ass dork, the angry lesbian, the meditating hippy and the mature age back at school mum. Even Bardo notes that he's the embodiment of art school cliché: the drop out who keeps repeating the first year of different majors until finding an interest that sticks. But here at art school, everyone may as well drop out because as Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich) points out, only one in a hundred will make a living from being an artist. Of course Sandiford is yet another cliché: the art school instructor whose own career is a long-running gag whose punchline no one gets anymore. When Jerome sees Sandiford's geometric paintings, he inquires how long he's been into the "triangle thing". "I was one of the first" is Sandiford's reply.

The rest of the plot's not even worth fleshing out. There's Audrey, the boring blond life model (Sophia Myles) who actually fulfils Jerome's fantasy of idealised erotic muse. There's even a silly subplot about a serial campus strangler. There's a wasted cast of Jim Broadbent as a disillusioned alcoholic artist – perhaps the slurring is enough justification for the weird UK/US hybrid accent. Angelica Huston is sadly extraneous in two brief scenes as a art history professor with great legs. And while the dialogue is not nearly as funny as it thought it was, there's some corkers, the best occurring when Jerome is criticised by a class mate for being "so September 10".

Art school has become a ridiculous place where one goes seeking authenticity but leaves corrupted at best. The basic message of Art School Confidential is that the supposedly good artist (Jerome) will never be noticed, let alone taken seriously. The bad artist – usually naïve "outsider" type – gets the girl and the attention. Phony art "crit" talk is used to talk up the bad art as something that is good precisely because it has "unlearned" representation or some such shit. Phil Morrison's Junebug (2005) and John Waters' Pecker (1998) did much better jobs of depicting art world tryhards getting all wet over "outsider" nowness. Even TV shows like The L Word and Six Feet Under have made better (read entertaining) situations out of stock art school archtypes. In series four of The L Word, Bette Porter (Jennifer Beals) becomes Dean of an LA art college and gets to fuck a student before turning attention to the deaf lesbian artist in residence (Marlee Matlin). In series three of Six Feet Under, Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) "finds herself" after experimenting with collage, chemicals, chicks. Real rite of passage stuff. Come to think of it, where there's a rite of passage, there's bound to be a few overused clichés. And it seems they get no more relentlessly regurgitated than in depictions of that thing we call art school.

Cultural Currency

The Artswipe

Cultural Currency (I [Heart] The Shire) 2007

Mobile phone memory

The Artswipe has really been getting into the suburbs lately. Who hasn't? It's the suburbs where you're gonna find that piece of literary gold or visual motif that just ties you're whole oeuvre together - you know - culturally speaking. Actually no, I don't know what I mean, but cultural currency is very now, and I hear it's all taking place in the suburbs. Or at least it's in suburbia where you could stop someone in the street and ask if they know what cultural currency actually is. Just to prove a point, I stopped a little old woman on the street and asked her if she knew. Poor old dear just gave me some spare change. Bless her cotton socks.

The Artswipe
Cultural Currency (Hard to Breathe) 2007
Mobile phone memory

Going down on the South has always been a dream unrealised. So yesterday I took a trip down to Cronulla Beach, in Sydney's southern suburbia badlands aka the Sutherland Shire. It's been years since I've had a Chiko Roll on the white sand dunes of Cronulla, had a surf with the old gang, used the old metal detector to find a quick buck. Oh those were the days. But wait, there's also those times I avoided being raped in a carpark by a pack of guys expelled from Northies pub for being too drunk - overhearing them referring to each other by their nicknames: Whopper, Tyson-T, Mad Cunt - was almost enough to make me beg them for it! Christ, the Chiko Roll gets a bit fucking boring after awhile.

The Artswipe
Cultural Currency (Ride) 2007
Mobile phone memory

Memories fade. There's only the here and now. Or Eternity by Calvin Klein if you're, like, in a real hurry and don't have time for past or present. So I'm at Cronulla reminiscing about the old days. I've got my old tapedeck with me. You know the ones which take about ten double D batteries and has separate play and record buttons, which have to pressed simultaneously to record your favourite song. Don Henley's Boys of Summer was one of them back in the day. Today it's just the news. And what news it was! A tsunami warning and the beach is evacuated. I'd expected at best a little race rioting - but a tsunami - who knew?! "Ocean beaches along Australia's east coast have been closed after the Bureau of Meteorology issued a tsunami warning today. Coastal areas from northern Queensland to eastern Tasmania were placed on alert after a large earthquake which measured 8.1 on the Richter scale jolted the Solomon Islands this morning. All of Sydney's ocean beaches have been closed," as one report noted.

The Artswipe
Cultural Currency (Car Parks Aren't Safe) 2007
Mobile phone memory

The jaunt down memory lane didn't exactly last long enough to help solve the cultural currency riddle. I could stay on the beach and maybe drown with a tsunami that's bound to probably suffer a bout of performance anxiety, which is in fact what happened as it didn't reach Australian shores. Shopping malls always make great places to seek shelter from disappointment, an apocalypse or your usual garden variety zombie infestation. George Romero knew it when he made Dawn of the Dead. Following his lead, I made my way to Miranda Fair. It was there I learned that cultural currency has a uniform. A white t-shirt that says "I [heart] The Shire" and a tie featuring the Australian flag. Not the Indigenous one, the other one. You know, the blue one with the Union Jack and a bunch of stars on it. The one flaunted with gay abandon in the front yard of about every second house you pass on the way to the beach. Quick, SMS and say you love me, that you call Australia home, that you'll be there when I need you most. Like the time I could barely breathe through the grief I felt, we all felt really, when the Crocodile Hunter of my [heart] found solace in his own franchise in the sky.