Ace of Hearts

It has come to my attention that curator Anthony (Ace) Bourke, who has carved out a long and distinguished career working with contemporary indigenous artists like the late Michael Riley, Tracey Moffatt, Gordon Bennett, Brenda Croft, HJ Wedge, among others, and who has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Sydney, State Library of NSW and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, was a "lion tamer" of sorts in a, let's say, past life of sorts.

Ace Bourke, Christian and John Rendall

Talk shows in the US and Australia have been a-buzz with a YouTube clip featuring a young Ace with his pet lion "Christian". The clip popular with YouTube fans shows Ace and friend John reuniting with Christian in 1969 after he'd been released back to the African jungle after spending some quality time in Swinging London. The clip has been watched over 4 million times, has Whitney Houston playing over the top for total camp value, and has even on-screen subtitles summarising the beautiful tale. Read more about how the clip became a YouTube sensation here.

Why aren't all curators this cool!

Kissing to be Clever

God loves a polyphonic ringtone

Why did I come back from my holiday during the whole World Youth Day circus? Those pesky pilgrims really are getting up my nose. Is it just me, or has Sydney turned into a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and I mean the 1978 version with Donald Sutherland)? It really is an alien podscape out there in Sydney my friend. All those self-same backpacks and passes around their necks. Are they backstage passes to heaven? If there is an outbreak of bird flu in the next few days, don't look at me, look at those hoards of high-fiving, tambourine shaking, Mexican waving pilgrim folk. Just the word pilgrim freaks me out, like it was invented to explain how one recovers from depression: Grim? + Pill! = Pilgrim.

Today while trying to get from A to B but having to wait for the tedious ZZZZZs of time wasted at roadblocks to make way for the Pope's passage through the city, I overheard a fat American pilgrim yell at a homeless person for being in her way - she had somewhere to be: front row, centre left for Popemobile no doubt. I went over to the homeless man, let's call him Charlie. I held Charlie for what felt the longest time and he said to me, "can you spare some change?" I asked him if he could break a fifty.

This whole Youth Day spectacle has really gotten out of hand. What's youth got to do with it? Clearly we live in a land where the spectacle of youth has received short thrift amidst the hysteria levelled recently at Bill Henson and then the Art Monthly mob. I really hope a few rosy cheeked pilgrims take the wrong ferry at Circular Quay and end up at Mike Parr's headless chicken porn torture installation at Cockatoo Island. "Mummy, I thought we were going to Manly for an ice cream cone. How did we get to this smelly island of seagull poop and scary wreckage?" This is dialogue from a play I'm writing called Prayers for Percy Pilgrim. You know how it ends: 20something Percy just can't reconcile his Catholicism with his adult fetish for breast milk, no matter how much he calls it communion.

I digress. There appears to be some art related responses to the whole shebang. For instance that celestial beacon of hope, Pope Alice, will stage a "kiss in" for the queers among us at Taylor Square this Saturday 19 July. Kissing to be clever indeed! The Artswipe has been a supporter of the homosexualist cause for some time now. Without the gays there would be no musical theatre and Amyl nitrate, among other things. I even watch Ellen on YouTube sometimes. What kind of world would it be without the GLBT on turkish, hold the mayo? Look, The Artswipe would be there participating at this kissathon on Saturday, but since seeing Pretty Woman on the big screen in 1990, I have been firm about my no kissing policy; it's better that way. Emotional attachments rarely work when you're an online persona like me. When Al Pacino, in the iconic gay flick Crusing (1980), asks his rough trade, "Hips or Lips?", we don't even need to hear the answer. Ask a pilgrim, hips win hands down. And I'm not talking the child-bearin' kind.

Relational Aesthetics Again

The Artswipe
This is Performance Art, 2008
Probable Biennale Satellite Event

The Artswipe has had a lovely holiday. Thanks for asking. I spent my three week annual leave just wandering the cold streets of Sydney looking for an artworld I can call home. I've wizzed through the Biennale exhibitions but haven't absorbed enough to be quite honest. I did see these guys sleeping at Circular Quay and wondered if this was either a Biennale Satellite Event or simply a definition for Relational Aesthetics. I have overheard people at art parties saying, "The Artswipe is all about Relational Aesthetics." I'm still unsure what that is but I'll pay that. I have a theory that Relational Aesthetics is a way of helping our ugly relatives become aesthetic. I'm guessing it's when the whole family pulls together to help Aunt Sigourney pay the facelift bills.

If I get around to writing about the Biennale it is bound to be about Cockatoo Island. I've been there a few times already. In fact I was at the artist party there and am still convinced to this day that someone slipped Rohypnol in my drink. How else could I account for lost time and the strange feeling I had either been impregnated or dipped in hot Camembert (a sensation I've only experienced with Skanky Jane and it was early in our marriage). I have been to Cockatoo Island since the party and seen bits of art but way to many art people to be able to absorb it meaningfully. I'll go again soon with my Artswipe notepad and mobile phone camera.

Meanwhile, The Artswipe has been a bit quiet on seeing anything else in Sydney. Here is my review of what I am yet to see: Scott Redford at Breenspace, John Citizen (aka Gordon Bennett), Mitch Cairns at MOP, James Angus at Ros Ox (Dale Frank too, I suppose), and then some. I suppose all these shows will close soon and then I will be damned to an eternity of not knowing whether I missed out on brilliance or bile. I sense a country song coming on.

Sarah Goffman as Glue Gun Warrior Woman

Some crazy things I have experienced in art land, which have been very thrill-a-minute: Terminus Projects (a space without a place) hosted a Bazaar at the Clair Hotel on Broadway on 6 July. Artists like Joan Ross, Renny Kodgers, Sarah Goffman, Rachel Scott, Danielle Coonan, Lisa Andrew and many others had stalls where they sold their artist wares. For instance Sarah Goffman made words out of glue gun glue (see picture); Joan Ross sold lots of 'nothing', Renny Kodgers was offering his spreadable hot meat. What a manwhore he is! The twins behind Matchbox Projects were being powerhouse saleswomen of their own cause - all they needed to get the point across further was a flow chart and PowerPoint presentation. In case you haven't been accosted by them, they have a readymade portable exhibition space made of perspex and which to the untrained eye is really just a briefcase. Someone should roll them for that briefcase and throw it in the river. Enough already! Simon Barney did that years ago and with so much more panache. Aside from that being a cause for an Artswipe art tantrum, the brief 24 minutes I spent at the Clair were well spent indeed, despite the serious indigestion from Renny's man meat. Geez I hope he's clean!

The other bit of art I have seen of recent days is that ubiquitous performance artist darling Sari Kivinen do her thing in a glass aquarium-like tank last weekend at Exquisite Corpse at Oxford Art Factory. The Artswipe has written about Kivinen in past posts. A refresher course: Kivinen's live schtick is composed of three sister selves who all have major booze issues. The three girls do dysfunctional things like sucking their toes in public and reciting psychobabble poetry. It's got shades of Tori Amos weird and Patti Smith cool. Behind the bar was a kinetically edited video projection of Kivinen playing out her madness with the help of artists Liam Benson (who was recently seen in SafARI at Gaffa) and Bridie Connell (who has work showing at present at At the Vanishing Point in Newtown). After witnessing Kivinen transition between her three selves for what seemed like a schooner eclipse, I went into the dark night and felt whole again.

Sari Kivinen performing at Exquisite Corpse at Oxford Art Factory

Lets Get Out of this Country

Child with Monochrome (probably a Malevich, but I'm not sure)

Hi Folks, The Artswipe is still on annual leave. I'll be back soon I promise. Meanwhile, the culture wars persist, with the latest issue of Art Monthly Australia igniting debate about the issue of child nudity.

Magazine Puts Naked Child on Cover
Daily Telegraph, Sunday 6 July 2008

A taxpayer-funded magazine has used a picture of a naked six-year-old girl on the cover of its July edition in protest against the treatment of artist Bill Henson.

Angered by the "hysteria" over Henson's pictures of a 13-year-old girl, the magazine also has a number of highly sexualised images inside, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper says.

Art Monthly editor Maurice O'Riordan says he hopes the July edition will restore
some "dignity to the debate", the paper says.

It says an angry NSW Premier Morris Iemma on Saturday threatened to withdraw the magazine's funding.

The July edition of Art Monthly Australia also includes several provocative photos of children posing naked in adult jewellery as well as naked teenage girls.

In the editorial, Maurice O'Riordan says he chose the picture of the young girl in the "hope of restoring some dignity to the debate" and to "validate nudity and childhood as subjects for art". Mr O'Riordan, who does not have children of his own, told The Sunday Telegraph he does not care if it stirs community complaint.

"Maybe this is bold, but I don't see the need to give in to that sort of hysteria or the prospect of complaint.

"I couldn't really understand the furore."

Art Monthly Australia receives more than $50,000 in funding from the federal government's Council for the Arts and lists the NSW Ministry for the Arts under sponsors and partner. The state government has issued grants to the magazine in previous years.

Mr Iemma immediately threatened to withdraw future funding after he was contacted about the images on Saturday.

"Images of this kind are distasteful, exploitative of children - a cheap, sick stunt at the expense of a young child," he said.

"We've now reached a sad point where some people think naked kids can boost their sales and get them a headline. We will have no role in funding them while they use images that exploit children."

More than 5,000 copies of the magazine have been distributed across Australia.
The magazine also includes images by Bill Henson.

In May, police raided the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Paddington, confiscating several images by Mr Henson, including the photographs of a naked 13-year-old girl.

The photos sparked major national debate and angered several organisations, including child welfare groups, with Mr Iemma labelling the works "offensive and disgusting".

Mr Henson was cleared of any wrongdoing following a police investigation.

A spokeswoman for the Australia Council on Saturday defended its decision to help fund the magazine. She said the council regards Mr Henson as one of the country's premier artists.

Terrible Twos

The Artswipe

BRB 2008

la-bamba print, ed: limited

Courtesy Google Images

The Artswipe turns two next week (on the 21st June). I am a Biennale baby - born amid culture two years ago. A difficult birth - shat out completely. To celebrate, I'm thinking of just getting away - you know, getting in the car and just driving, far far away. I might even get as far as Kellyville or Kogarah. I'm sure there are Biennale satellite shows happening in such places and I plan on reviewing the shit out of them.

What I'm trying to say, loyal reader, is I am taking leave for a week or two, and will come back with some Biennale of Sydney coverage. From what I've heard, it's a real sense fest. Like the thematic premise goes: it's a revolution that turns. I'm not sure what it "turns into". Perhaps you can tell me, by posting a comment. Go on, "turn me on". Just don't "turn on me". I couldn't bare it.

Issue 3: The School Zone

Art World issue 3

version 1 & version 2

The Artswipe promised not to mention Bill Henson again. I only said that because I expected the whole kiddie-art c-type photo-scandal to have blown over by now. And also because I am so fickle - remember I write these blogs drunk. 

Has anyone read the magazine Art World? I subscribe and so should you. Approximately three days after the Henson scandal erupted, I received issue 3 of Art World in the mail and - God Forbid! - it featured Bill Henson artworks. A detail of the image used on the "offending" invite from Roslyn Oxley69 Gallery that caused the furore in the first place actually made the cover of the magazine. That's it, I'm calling Miranda Devine. Miiiirrraaannnnddddaaaa! Miiiirrraaannnnddddaaaa!

Big thumbs up as they say in critic circles to Art World for being so intuitive and having the insight to be so timely. They have their finger so up the pulsating arsehole of culture, I can barely breathe. Asphyxiation fantasies are popular again - they were a bit ho-hum for awhile there thank you Michael Hutchence. The Artswipe is having a sexual revolution and you're all all invited. I'd send glossly fold out DL invite cards but my budget was given over to rubber life vests.

Back to Art Word magazine and how it contained several of the naughty Henson pictures. Ooh ah. What's this? Today I get Art World in the mail again. This time the cover features spent paint tins. Intriguing to say the least. At first I thought a whole month had passed me by and I had not noticed (such is being in your early-late-mid thirties). But wait, this is issue 3 of Art World "repackagaed" without the "offensive" Hensons. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw! How did this happen? Why has Art World re-issued issue 3? Did the police seize the magazine? I'm shocked. We do live in a Police State.

I have a copy of issue 3 v1 and issue 3 v2 and will be displaying both in vitrines at my place during 40km per hour School Zone afternoon hours (I think its 3-4:30pm? Who knows what the morning hours are?) My Henson appreciation courses will be creative creche pow-wows for the critically finetuned. I may even take to eBay trading. I have several Henson books that are now out of print, and a casual glance in the realm of online auctions reveals that such fodder is very lucrative indeed. I may sell my Art World issue 3 v1 on eBay. That's where I sold my virginity after all.

I was 13 at the time. The first cut is the deepest, as Rod Stewart once said.

Fatso Whale

Nike Savvas

Atomic: Full of Love, Full of Wonder 2005/2008 (detail)

Installation at Casula Powerhouse

Photo: The Artswipe

The Artswipe has been a nervous mess of late - all this Bill Henson talk has made me quite twitchy, aware that any minute a huge tsunami of repression could wash over a population of stupid masses who are happily drowning in their self-perpetuating hysteria. Grow up Australia! Grow up now! If you see me in the corner, twitching and in a fetal position, it's not because I'm being photographed by Bill Henson; it's because I'm pissed off. I never wanted to live in the 1950s and seeing I was born in 1970, now is not the time for time travel.

The Artswipe promises never mention Bill Henson again, because frankly other art shows are doing the rounds. And because I won't give it power.

So I went to the Casula Powerhouse today as I have been simply dying to see how the renovations turned out. Plus there is this shit-hot show called Australian. I bet Baz Luhrmann is pissed off - his movie Australia is about to come out and he probably thought he was tapping into something that had never been done before. Well think again Twinkle Toes Luhrmann, your movie frankly doesn't have the budget Casula Powerhouse does. Yes, Casula was given a trillion dollars to pimp their space. And just as well: power stations are so 'modernity' - give me the digital age already.

I got off the train at Casula and thought for a second about how this is Ivan Milat Country. The murder rape fantasy eventually wore off and I made my way to Casula Powerhouse. It's quiet there; I'm used to the flightpath of my inner west terrace. I tremble nervously as I made my way across the narrow road that crosses the railway line. All of a sudden I am stuck - fuck it, I can't move, I really am stuck! I have become such a fatso whale that I am increasingly finding it impossible to move through entrances and exits. So much for accessibility. I have been eating a lot of carbs these last few months and now as a result, I won't be able to get into the Casula Powerhouse because the pedestrian access across the rail line is so narrow, so "fat-ist". Even the producers of the "hit" show Keating! share my anxiety.

The Artswipe
How I Got Fat (Thank You for Your Donation) 2008 (detail)
Installation at Liverpool McDonalds

As the Liverpool Leader reports:

Casula Powerhouse staff braved a few bumps while setting up for the musical Keating! A crew of about 25 people rolled up their sleeves on Monday to help unload the set, which travels by a semi-trailer that was too big to manoeuvre down a narrow road and cross a railway line leading to the Powerhouse. Theatre producer Lyn Wallis said the 'bump-in'' theatre lingo for setting up a show ran smoothly despite the obstacles. 'It's been a well-executed operation,' an excited Ms Wallis told the Leader. 'The show's been touring in the semi and there's a tonne of equipment. We managed to negotiate the semi down to the bottom of the hill and close to the railway line, which was a surprise. From there we used three small trucks to load the set to the theatre.'

Finally, after a combination of sweaty discombobulation and holding my breath, the good Lord used his invisible fist to push me through the tough Westie terrain. (Or some volunteers came out to help me...) All of a sudden the angels started singing "Hallelujah." At last, I was inside the Casula Powerhouse after a struggle screaming out for its own screenplay.

Australian, the inaugural exhibition at the revamped Casula Powerhouse, is curated by Nicholas Tsoutas and according to the website:

Casula Powerhouse commissioned Australia's hottest contemporary visual artists to transform the newly refurbished arts centre into a spectacle of colour, texture and movement. Combined, the artists have 40 biennales between them, and are among the most exciting practitioners today. The exhibition features 12 new works, in a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, installation and textiles.

Like most Australians the artists have cultural and family ties in other places and it is this which informs their work. Australian celebrates the complexity that makes this country such an interesting place to live and presents some of the freshest and most dynamic work being created in this country today. 

Great, I love "hot" artists. Since I've put on so much weight the art "hotties" have stopped picking The Artswipe for casual sex at art opening so I have been a bit sex deprived. But that's OK, masturbation is free. And if you're an art lover like me, you can always use those quiet moments of ecstasy to imagine all kinds of sexual adventures with Shaun Gladwell's skateboard or Nike Savvas's balls.

In case you're thinking this exhibition of "hot" art only features Gladwell and Savvas, think again. It also includes Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy (so hot right now), David Griggs, Raquel Ormella, Guan Wei, Dani Marti, Gordon Hookey and others. The hottest moment was the wonderful ceiling installation of motorised kinetic chandaleirs by Suzann Victor that greets you upon entering the space.

Unfortunately it's downhill from there. David Griggs presented an installation called Donkey Root and unless the sizzle of your Winfield Blue ciggie lighting up a friend's Marlboro Light has made a comeback in "hotness" stakes, then it may as well be met with a frosty reception.

I suppose this exhibition has set up a couple of impossible tasks. Much has to do with the title: being called Australian, it heralds itself as both grandiose and remote. Australian erects claims about "cultural difference" in a self-conscious and tokenistic manner befitting something that heralds its "hotness" before anything else.

Weirder still, the show advertises the involvement of "writers", Prof. Ien Ang, Prof. Andrew Jakubowicz, Assoc. Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis, Dr. Juan Salazar and Dr Paula Abood. The very least you could expect then is some killer publication to accompany this ambitious exhibition. At least when Captain Cook "discovered" Australia he wrote it all down and it was later published. This exhibition purports to depict what being "Australian" is all about through art and instead of publishing anything, the writers involved are put to work penning the didactic wall texts accompanying the artworks. Surely a catalogue is not much to ask for? For starters, it's usually where the curatorial rationale is located. The writers were also put to work as "speakers" at a three day conference. I was at a pie eating contest and couldn't attend, so I hope they performed the necessary intellectual audit of all the issues involved.

Considering the $13 million government funding Casula Powerhouse has received for the refurbishment, and the media hoopla greeting its re-opening, I expected to be dazzled. Alas, I have been more dazzled by parking inspectors and abortion clinics.

Flick through the Casula Powerhouse program and you quickly realise the space has been given over to the priority of high-turnover theatre productions. "Bums on seats" is the technical term used in the industry to describe this phenomenon. It appears that Casula Powerhouse's days as an art space are endangered. The program does not indicate what the next visual arts show will be, and that's because they probably don't know: it is still months and months away. The dates for Australian are 5 April - 7 September. Who ever heard of a regional gallery holding an exhibition for five months? Don't trip over yourself in the wild stampede to see it before it closes! In contrast, the theatre program rolls over with swift conveyor belt regularity.

On my lonely all-stations train ride home, I imagined what it might be like to exhibit at Casula Powerhouse. Some of us are hopelessly aspirational, I know. But then I remembered how fatso whales like me have no place there; we can't even get through the pedestrian crossing! The weight loss has to begin with either me or them. No doubt I'll be the biggest loser.

Don't Give it Power

John A. Douglas

Screen Test # 1(Americana), 2008

c-type photograph on alluminium, 1400mm x 1000mm

Courtesy the artist and Chalkhorse

Who would have thought the Bill Henson scandal would in fact turn out to be such a red hot scandal? Every single party I attended at the weekend (I was invited to at least a dozen) was aflutter with the news. One person told me she would not speak about it as she had vowed "not to give it power". I took my hat off to her and we had a healing moment together. Every news channel was buzzing and I couldn't get enough. Even Rudd had his say! Oh dear, does this mean art will start becoming micromanaged by the media watchdogs? Has a precedent been set by Henson, whereby contentious artworks, no matter how potentially dull, will always come under the scrutiny of the moral majority? It's not as if this hasn't happened before - art scandals are a periodic affair. But never before has an Australian Prime Minister chucked in his two cents. Or at least that I know of.

But to leave your Monday morning on a brighter note, here is my favourite moment from the Henson media coverage. On Friday evening (23 May 2008) a commercial news network (I forget which one) covered the closure of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery opening on Thursday night (22 May) by including comment from an artist who was there during the shut down. The artist was John A. Douglas and he said something about the closure being an outrage. What made it funny was they wrote his name on screen as "John MacDonald".

Postscript: John A Douglas, who was interviewed at The Art Life recently, emailed The Artswipe today and said:

Let me tell you that a precedent has been set - it was the first time I had gone to try and look at some work (yes I said to the media his work is actually a bit passe and boring) and been attacked by a media scrum. Basically some guy gave me the wrong info and said that he and the gallery had been charged. In hindsight I think they wanted to get a reaction and i was it. I turned around and suddenly all the cameras were on me (without my consent) as they couldn't get a word from the gallery. I can tell you it was art history 101 to the media - they must have thought I was John McDonald which shows how fucking moronic these guys are.

Kindergarten Cop

Not a Bill Henson image.

What's new in "pedo" culture? Ask Bill Henson, whose exhibition opening at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery featuring nude thirteen year old models, was shut down last night by police. According to The Australian, "Police said they wanted to speak to one of the models before deciding whether the show would go ahead." How controversial! It's like the time Juan Davila's Stupid as a Painter was impounded by police in 1982. Bill Henson has been making similar looking images for years - alas, the tiresomeness of it all. In fact, he has courted similar controversy as his work frequently displays bored, naked youth cavorting in moody landscapes.

I'm not into making grand claims about the moral code of art featuring twinky pre-teen talent, but I do think that police should shut down shows like this. Not because of child protection - that is so passe. Rather, police should shut down shows by artists who keep on churning out the same old, same old. Seen one Bill Henson, seen them all. I would reproduce one here but it seems the Roslyn Oxley9 website has been shut down too. Heavens to Betsy!

I have no real thoughts on whether sexually charged depictions of kids are appropriate in artistic contexts. It's a rather boring debate. If the semi-formed pre-pubescent body is your thing, well so be it, who am I to judge? Sometimes I wonder whether artists into this kind of thing (Larry Clark is another case in point) should just spare us all, get it out of their system and fuck their models once and for all. Maybe then we'll be spared of the ongoing fantasy.

Let's Get Lost with Found Objects

The Artswipe
Is this found object an Adam Cullen? 2008
Mattress, spray paint, a 'can-do' attitude
Dimensions: queen size bed
Courtesy mid-career

Tonight The Artswipe attended the opening of Let's Get Lost, a mid-career survey by bad man artist Adam Cullen, at the Art Gallery of NSW. I have been a bit of a Cullen fan for some time: his swift brushstrokes do it to me every time. Last weekend's Sydney Morning Herald article on Cullen (Saturday May 10, 2008) quotes the patron saint of paint John McDonald, who says, Cullen's "colours are chosen to be as lurid and as in your face as possible. The images are often chosen the same way. The whole thing is knocked up with a contemptuous speed."

Being so time-poor these days, it's best to just get to the point, I don't have all day, give me speed and make it a double! Thanks Christ for Cullen - while the rest of the Western world is busy with their Blackberry Blue Tooth Redneck Whitegoods, Cullen is busy whipping it out like a sharp shooter whose idea of foreplay is target practice at the firing range. Like a dirty date-rape mattress, Cullen's paintings number crunch the very idea of a zeitgeist into the sound of one back cracking. What's wrong with being "in your face"? It's better than being stuck "up your own ass".

On my way to the Art Gallery, I happenstanced upon an Adam Cullen artwork in the street. Or maybe it was just a found object, I can never tell. Fuck art for getting so so blurred with the everyday. Whatever it was, I believed in my heart, soul and rectum that it was a satellite installation for the AGNSW show. It was beautiful - a lonely, spent mattress propped up against the fence of a block of council flats, a medium with a message of two powerful letters - AC.

I always admired Duchamp for signing a urinal R. Mutt. Perhaps Cullen is following the grand tradition laid down by his anarchic Dada forebears; that by signing his initials he lays claim to an impulse to piss hard and good on an embracing establishment. Maybe he hadn't finished writing on the mattress? Perhaps he took a tea break with every intention of coming back and completing the initials to form the words: A. Cunt.

Tip Jar

The Artswipe vs Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Untitled Til Tomorrow, 2008
Public Art

I visited my local tip today and saw a really great installation by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro. I love those guys! Such a grip on public art.

PS. Thanks Memphys for yesterday's post. Can you ask permission next time? Flat white with two sugars, you know the drill.

Work Experience

Something for Kate

Um hey, firstly let me just say I'm not actually The Artswipe... I'm just here on work experience. My name's Memphys, I am in Year 11. I haven't really got long to write as The Artswipe has just gone down the road to get us some battered savs for lunch - extra chicken salt. Anyway, my careers advisor said that I was suited for working in the public arena so here I am. I was really excited at first because I thought I could go down to Channel Nine and work with my Uncle Gavan; he's the audience warm-up guy for Mornings With Kerrie-Ann. But Uncle Gavan said that I was a bit too emo for Kerrie Ann's audience. I guess he would know.

So now I'm alone at The Artswipe nerve centre. Some of the the stuff lying around in here is a bit random. There is a lot of really bad posters on the walls. One says "Welcome to my Wonderworld" and has a picture of some guy kissing a dog. On The Artswipe's fridge is a picture of a monkey eating a banana and sitting on the toilet. But I've been keeping myself busy playing with the velcro dart-board (velcro balls instead of actual darts). There is a scoreboard next to it. That disturbs me a bit. Isn't this site a solo operation? Whatever.

But I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing here. The Artswipe hasn't really left me anything to do. I just came back from boiling the jug before and there was a ball of Blu-Tack about the size of a mango on the table. I have been going around the walls and using it to clean off old crusty Blu-Tack bits. I think that's what it's for.

But this place has something to do with art (apparently), so I thought I'd turn my hand to something creative. I've been working on a Blu-Tack relief sculpture around the door frame. I'm not really sure how it's going to turn out but at the moment it's a sculpture of two dresses fighting. One is Kate Ritchie's Logies dress (Gold Logie, 2008) and the other looks a bit like my cousin's winter school uniform...just not brown.

Anyway, because of some of the el-cheapo 'Yello-Tak' (?!) that has infected my media, Kate Ritchie looks a bit like she has either pissed herself or is giving birth to giant yellow tapeworms. Perhaps I will call it Piss Kate. As it happens we studied Andres Serrano at school last semester. I don't know what the fuss was all about. My mum got locked in the laundry for a whole weekend once when dad took us kids to Movieworld; she filled a whole Brita water filter with wee.

So I think The Artswipe will be back soon, the shops are just up the road. I'd better go, I think I can smell battered savs. Plus it's mufti day next Monday and I have to start thinking of something to wear.

Feeling your way in like Helen Keller

The Artswipe vs Bill Viola

Fire and Ice (Splashdance) 2008
Video art
Courtesy Art Gallery of NSW

The Artswipe went to see the Bill Viola meditation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales last week. You know, I was feeling elemental. It was a real fire and ice kind of day.

Just quietly, I have never seen what the Bill Viola hullabaloo is all about. In the video at the AGNSW these figures float in space like microcosmic specks of matter before crash landing (via a really tricky edit) into water. They float. It's all slow motion and affecting. I wept for days after.

Before "experiencing" the phenomenological power of this work one has to make their way into the darkened gallery it inhabits. And it's one of those kinds of heavy duty spaces where light is blocked out, stamped out, eradicated. You're feeling your way in like Helen Keller, trying to not trip over anyone, let alone accidentally fondle random genitalia. So the eyes have not yet adjusted and the speck-like figures orbiting in darkness make the space even darker. I start freaking out thinking about someone else's repressed junior high memories involving back alley ways and car parks. I've always been a shoulder to cry on, which means I have a lot of baggage. Whenever watching video art by international art stars all that dark baggage comes to the surface. All the pain and shit.

So I grab my mobile phone as a light source to guide my passing into Bill Viola's dark space. His dark hole of elemental substance. The Nokia makes a good torch. Someone sitting in darkness watching the video yells out as soon as my Nokia lights up: "Please don't!"

You know what: Get Fucked Anonymous Bill Viola Fan in the Darkness! I was just trying to do the right thing by OHS and not tread on anyone or encounter, as I said, random genitalia.

Moral of the story: The Artswipe is so over international artstarvideoart about darkness and light, floating and fire. Rebirth already - I'm sure your mother would love the comeback.

I already have Earth, Wind and Fire in my record collection.


Postscript: Melbourne artist Kate Smith emailed The Artswipe a reproduction of an artwork she made in 2005 that taps into the same themes dealt with here:

Kate Smith
Can You Feel It, 2005
Acrylic on postcard
Courtesy the artist

Special Offer: Photorealism

The Artswipe generally makes it a policy not to post exhibition notices or other emailed art spam. Even recent petition-related emails about that "starving dog installation" could not tempt me. Maybe the dog was doing the 40 Hour Famine and was being sponsored - did anyone think of that?

Such thoughts were floating through my solar plexus when I received an inbox gem that just had to be posted. After all, it has genuine merit and, folks, as we live in a meritocracy it would be socially irresponsible for me not to post it. Moreover, in these troubled times it's important to be assured that if you wanna buy art to ensure you are "commissioning a real painting" that comes "in museum quality".


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Note: This masterpiece is hand painted by a real artist - No digital or printing techniques are used. You are commissioning a real painting.

Stomach Liner

The Artswipe
Fluff, 2008
Endurance performance
Courtesy Coles

The Artswipe discovered a new nutritious product this week. It's called Fluff and it is available at your local Coles for approx $3.29. I've used it to line my stomach before drinking cask wine served at Firstdraft last Wednesday night. For those of you who haven't seen the Firstdraft show, don't worry about it, you'll get over it, we always do in the end.

Fluff came in handy that night (I didn't spew once!) and it's bound to come in handy this week as another circuit party of art openings are almost upon us (Roslyn Oxley9, James Dorahy, MOP, Chalkhorse and probably more). The Artswipe plans on being present at all of them, with Fluff in hand.

The one that has really piqued my interest is Oblivion Pavilion, a group show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery featuring several emerging type artists, most of whom make art with a "naive" sensibility - something particularly in vogue at present. Oblivion Pavilion includes Marley Dawson, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Matthew Hopkins, Emily Hunt, Tim Schultz, Raquel Welch and is curated by Amanda Rowell. In case you've misplaced your dream dictionary (I left mine on a bus last week) don't fret, the exhibition statement for Oblivion Pavilion makes a handy proxy:

Gonadal inclination is on the decline in the original amusement zone. The slumbering brainchild is concussed and abandons all pre-programmed language to riddles. We are left to process life’s rich pageant with dumbed-down neuronal and emotional apparatus and tinker with schizophrenic tools in order to assemble meaning. Memorials -- flashbacks in the story department -- are witnesses to system’s upheaval. Imagination compensates across the memory gap.

Amidst the ruin, the thought factory, a mechanical and apparently risk-laden contraption processes incessantly. It conveys discrepancies between work and play, a nuts-and-bolts-type scenario constructed via the difference between effort and effortlessness, alternating between building an empire against and giving in to sometimes agreeable, sometimes disagreeable forces.

The subject is adrift in a world not firmly located. Substance and the limits and comparative scales of things are fully negotiable. Fluids emanate from the medium. Eggs, classical architecture etc. are equally fragile forms. The structure of the eye is part of the structure of the brain. In a fit of decoration, architecture gives birth to furniture.

Language is architecture. The variable product of the combinative function. Mottos are props, signposts by which to navigate personal inclinations and flag sympathies within the heart of things. A face – an edifice – answers a question. It adorns the gates of exalted memories. It rearranges things to find new meaning. Living has been only due to the kindness of others.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Car Park

Michael Atherton conducts Car Orchestra at Campbelltown Arts Centre

The Artswipe was driving around this afternoon, lamenting the self-imposed death of my Seatbelt Series and wondering what my next serious body of work would be and how it might suit a future Sydney Biennale. All of a sudden my creative reverie was interrupted by a cacophony of horn honking. I turned my attention to the car radio and realised the incessant racket was not coming from the road but from a story broadcasting on Triple J's Hack program.

I was about to slip back into my fugue state, when journalist Antoinette Chiha referred to the din of horns as "music". Shades of Bjork making pulp of paparazzi pond scum came to mind. Indeed the horns were music belonging to the "wind section" of several utes parked at the amphitheatre of Campbelltown Arts Centre at the weekend. The inhabitants of the utes were being "conducted" by classical music composer Michael Atherton along with the "fusion" of mag wheels, car engines and rap artists.

I have always been afraid of being raped in the eardrum so I was about to switch the dial before realising it was either Triple J or possibly dying a slow death to the "junk in my trunk" of some Black Eyed Pee Stain on 2 Day FM. So I sat there in traffic, having a serious "Michael Douglas in Falling Down moment", gritting my teeth while Atherton was interviewed about how his choice of cars as music generators were inspiration derived from his professional stomping ground of western Sydney. It strikes me as odd that Atherton, who is a music professor at the University of Western Sydney, would perpetuate such dull cliches about western Sydney, as if it's the only part of the world that's ever witnessed a proliferation of "car cultures". Add "cultures" to another word, stir and you have a phenomenon. (For example: when I get home I engaged with some "instant coffee culture", answered the phone for "unsolicited call centre culture", before turning on the "TV culture" and settling in for a night ending with a "sleep culture" filled with dreams where I had at least three cultural studies PhDs).

Usually I'm never so moved with what I hear on the radio to get all "Artswipe culture" about it. But it struck me that western Sydney lost a whole lot of its culture recently due to the closure of several art degrees at the University of Western Sydney (the whole saga documented at this student run blog) and here is this UWS professor reducing western Sydney culture to a shallow car cliche. It seems music is the only arts-related degree left after the fine arts, electronic arts, theatre and dance degrees all bit the proverbial bitumen. If Atherton is the jewel in that degree's crown, I'll hedge my bets that their music degree could be restructured as engineering. Perhaps western Sydney regional galleries should start boycotting any UWS related involvement in their events. Unless a car rally convention is on the cards.

Life is a Highway

The Artswipe
More from The Seatbelt Series, 2007-08
Mobile phone moments

The Artswipe was pulled over by a police officer working the beat last week. I should have expected it really - how long can I go without being pulled over for using a mobile phone while driving? This may be the end of The Seatbelt Series, kids. Let this be a public safety message: don't make art with your mobile phone while driving at the same time.

Despite the rumours, not all cops accept bribes and blow jobs.

Home Economics

Refreshed AGNSW Donation Box: 12:20pm

Already I feel a new acquisition coming on: 2:05pm

The Artswipe's last post lamented how hard it is to save up for a quality art collection (even one consisting of editioned multiples). Today I visited the Art Gallery of NSW and realised I had it all wrong. The key to saving for an artwork is in the kind of money box you use. No longer will I keep that little silver shoe pewter money box (a gift from Godmother Ella when I was still stewing in the womb) in the second drawer of my bedside table where it occasionally gets a deposit of spare change left over after buying my weekly smack supply. I am going to abandon the old shoe and install a perspex box just near the front door of my apartment. As you enter or leave - depending on whether you are coming or going in your tastes - feed that good old silver and gold to the new Artswipe Donation Box.

To nominate what you think The Artswipe's first donation funded acquisition should be, leave a comment and tell the world.

Inventing Meaning and the Wheel

Shaun Gladwell

Guide to Recent Architecture: Fountains (excerpt), 2000-07
PAL DVD, 4:3, stereo
Edition of 30 + 2 AP, loaded on USB flash drive embedded in skateboard wheel
Videography: Michael Schiavello, Gotaro Uemtasu
Sound: Kazumichi Grime
Courtesy the artist and Artspace

We live in a time where meaning is made multiple by the burden of interpretation. The more we think, talk and write about things, the more meaning is generated. One day soon, so much meaning will exist in the world that we will have to implement a kind of population control to limit meaning’s ongoing multiplicity. You certainly wouldn't want to be claustrophobic in a world overtaken by meaning. Give me the wide open spaces, I say. Call in pest control - meaning has taken over.

These were thoughts going through The Artswipe’s busy brain this morning while deciding whether to wear denim or stretch cotton – getting dressed for the day can sometimes be such a post-structural challenge. I eventually decided on a corduroy pant-suit embroidered with hearts and moons on the back right hand pocket (a semi-vintage heirloom passed down from Aunty Patsy who told me she went to Woodstock when I knew for a fact she never made it out of the housing commission where she grew up and eventually died). I picked up my baseball cap and wore it backwards just to mix things up a bit. Marveling at how much I looked like a skater dude, I picked up my mobile phone and sent a text to a friend that read, “sk8ers rock 4eva”. Later I got a reply that read, “hay artsvipe stay gold dont change keep up tha good werk lol xo”. I have since deleted that friend as they either can’t spell for shit or use predictive text – two qualities I look for in a friend.

It’s this little anecdotal gesture, communicated through costume and family memory that (probably) goes some way in illustrating how multiple meaning really is. I’m sure you could appreciate the subtle nuances and still take away something new that says less about me than you. It was either that anecdote or the one about catching the bus while wearing rollerblades and I don’t have all day to get my point across. But while we’re talking about things with wheels let’s illustrate meaning and its multiplicity by examining what’s new in art multiples. Over at Artspace you can purchase a Shaun Gladwell multiple of Guide to Recent Architecture: Fountains (excerpt) (2000-07) presented on a USB flash drive embedded in a skateboard wheel. The edition is 30 + 2 Artist Proofs and the price is $1650. According to the Artspace website:

Guide to Recent Architecture: Fountains is an ongoing experimental self-portrait project in which various urban spaces featuring water fountains provide the stage for skateboard performances. Each performance describes a relationship between the designed and proscribed functions of the civil space in which the performance takes place, and the reinterpreted function of the space as a skateboarding park. In Guide to Recent Architecture: Fountains (excerpt) the featured performance takes place at Cook and Phillip Park – one of Sydney’s most renowned skateboarding sites, and a space that has undergone constant redesign in order to displace the skateboarders who use it. Named after the colonisers, ‘Cook and Phillip’ is in turn colonised by these skaters.

That sounds convincing enough so I've been saving up to buy four of them so I can build my own multimedia skateboard with a some wood custom cut from Bunnings. Imagine how fast such a skateboard would go! Just to be powered with such meaning is all one can ever really ask for in this brief lifetime. What I admire about Gladwell is how he makes his work relatively accessible to the more working class among us art collectors but then withholds by only providing the video in excerpted form. It’s like the time I went to the cinema and said, “I only have a fraction of the admission fee” to which the ticket vendor replied, “We can let you watch the trailers but then you have to leave”.

With that in mind I checked how much I’d saved in my goal of owning four “Glad-wheels” and only had $19.95, just enough to purchase Australian Art Collector magazine and see what’s out there, more affordable and perhaps a little kinder to my class-conscious self-esteem. I stumbled on the pages of “Undiscovered” artists and the one who took my eye was a chap called Renny Kodgers (aka Sydney artist Mark Shorter who my sources confirms has a day job – coincidentally – at Artspace). One day I'll go to Artspace, introduce myself to Mark Shorter and see if he can cut me a deal on a “Glad-wheel”. Or better yet, maybe I could take a liking to what art multiples his nom-de-plume, Renny Kodgers, has on the market and invest my money where the sun don’t shine.

And shine it don’t because one of his works is called American Anus (2007), a series of four photographs of Renny in spangly red sequined suit and cowboy hat, in an edition of 5 and a mere $900 each. More alluring is a signed prosthetic penis, in an edition of 20 and the dollar dazzling price of $300. His DVDs are POA (price on application) which I take means he will learn how to burn DVDs on his computer when and if the demand sets in. Another picture reproduced in Art Collector is from The Heat is...On! performance at Chalk Horse in November 2007. At the time, it was there I first learned of this mighty generous performer, who sweated it out with art punters in a communal steam room installed in the smaller of Chalk Horse’s spaces. Having seen how impressive his manhood is - in the flesh, so to speak - I must say it is great he had it cast for art as a prosthetic member readymade for whatever interactive delights I’m only guessing are left up to how far your imagination extends. And extend it will! Knowing I'm never gonna enjoy the sweet ride of those four "Glad-wheels" I tried saving up for, what better ride than Renny's latex love.

Before I go, let me share Renny’s philosophical approach to artmaking as quoted in Art Collector:

For me [my performances] are about how the audience engages with the artwork and how the meaning changes as it progresses.

There you go: meaning and the multiple perfectly summed up by the “undiscovered” Renny Kodgers. If you can’t afford a multiple, then take that little bit of homespun wisdom home for free.

Renny Kodgers
The Heat is...On! 2007
Digital C-Type print
80 x 40 cm. Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Photo: Rowan Conroy
Courtesy the artist