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.

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

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.

Swamped

Sarah Goffman
Kingswood Swamp, 2004
From Alien Invasion, MOP Projects catalogue, 2005

Courtesy of the artist and MOP Projects

It's no secret, Artswipe gets pathetically nostalgic for art school life all the time. Oh those were the days. I recall the good times, sitting around in circles biting each others' heads off (or giving some good old fashioned art school head) in "crits" while the lecturers swanned around reminding the kids that art is hard so get used to it!

You can probably imagine then, the anguish I have been experiencing in recent weeks with all this bullshit about the National Art School's potential merger with the College of Fine Arts and the closing down of the University of Western Sydney's fine arts and electronic arts programs.

Where will the kids go to make art? Is it a coincidence that anti-sedition is all the rage with the Howard government at the same time art schools are a dying breed? Sedition laws, which significantly impact artists, were passed less than a year ago, and now art is being threatened again in a way that's linked to the government. The lifeblood of the arts – its government funded university art schools – are under threat. Higher education itself has never been part of Howard's agenda. Adequate funding to keep alive a culture of educated types is just not relevant in a country that, for instance, celebrates Steve Irwin and shuns Germaine Greer. If Greer gets stung by a bee, has a severe reaction and dies, will her funeral be televised? Will people avenge her by killing all the bees?

The brilliant thing about NAS and COFA is they are such dynamically different institutions. I'm not going to play favourites and say one has a better approach to art education because they both excel in their own unique ways. As for UWS, well that place produces art student powder kegs who come from the west or choose the west for their art education. I've fantasised many a time of what it must be like to make art in the west, or at least show at Casula Powerhouse. Casula features in most of my dark fantasies because Ivan Millat once drove through there picking up a hitchiker. In one of my favourite night sweats, I am a conscientious citizen who jots down the number plate, goes home and paints it, acrylic on canvas.

Oh and all the fantasies I could conjure about UWS. All those parklands surrounding the vast campus. Artswipe would never catch a train all the way to Kingswood without being guaranteed some good old fashioned date rape in those dark woods. So basically I'm yet to catch that train. I mean, really, the Kingswood campus even has a fucking swamp! And the swamp's inspired artists like Tracey Moffatt and Sarah Goffman to make art and I'm pretty sure they didn't study art at UWS. Basically a university with a swamp needs an art school attached to it. Mandatory.

Tracey Moffatt
Artist at Work, 1997
(represented in Sydney by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery)

Swamps bring out the Julia Kristeva in all of us and it's at art school we read that wonderful book, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). My favourite line: "During that course in which 'I' become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit" (emphasis added). While Kristeva wasn't talking about an art course per se, she may as well accept the fact that we all read this at art school and it became the mess mantra. Remember that old saying that there's a time for everything under the sun? Well, that includes having your perfunctory grunge period, where you go all abject and degenerate, piss all over the car park, photograph it, photocopy the photograph, post it on the noticeboard (the one which is only read by engineering students) and document it all over again but this time with whatever body fluid is your favourite that week. When I went through my grunge period, dandruff was my medium because I was saving my body fluids in a time capsule. The Powers of Horror was my textbook - I was really getting into subverting boundaries, borders and binaries - and I paid enough in library late fines to have been able to buy at least three copies of it.

Well, art school date rape has taken on new highs because it seems UWS has been raped and pillaged of its esteemed arts programs. Sari Kivinen, who was a shortlisted for the 2006 Helen Lempriere Traveling Art Scholarship and reviewed in an earlier Artswipe post (you might remember Sari drinking her multiple personalities under the table, or at least in the kitchen sink) is spokesperson for the blog Save UWS Arts and internet petition. Organised by UWS students, the blog and petition are gaining much momentum and support, which is great. Stay tuned for protests - if you're lucky they may even take place at the campus bar, which I'm told is called The Swamp Bar.

Art Worth a Million Starbucks

"Art School" fashion spread by Virginia van Heythuysen

Photo by Juli Balla (from Sunday Life, August 27, 2006)

Nostalgic for art school life, I've been wondering now for some time what the art kids of today are up to. What's hip for art hipsters today? This very question was answered today by The Sun-Herald, a newspaper that often answers life's big questions. When I'm not sure what to eat, for instance, I look at the celebrity photo pages because without a doubt an image of what's trendy in finger food is positioned between party snaps of Antonia Kidman and Peter Morrissey. All the big names in Australian culture no less! When I need to invest intellectual shares in current affairs, I turn to Miranda Devine for an enlightened stance on all things right wing.

Today's art hipsters rarely appear in the Sunday press, unless of course Urban Style columnist Fernando Frisoni has snapped them during a day of cruising East Sydney for young hotties garbed in recycled clothing, designer accessories and lusty trout pouts. My anxieties that art school chic is not media worthy on Sundays were quickly extinguished by the Lifestyle section of the Sunday Life magazine supplement of The Sun-Herald. Filling four pages are fashion snaps of a young white girl/boy couple getting around town suitably disengaged and absorbed more in consumer cravings than each other. Titled "Art School," the subheading claims, "Pop-art punk delivers maximum impact: 15 minutes of fame guaranteed."

In the first image, reproduced here at The Artswipe, the boy chats on his mobile phone, his hair carefully simulating that skanky unwashed look popular with skaters and crackwhores. The fine print lists the designer items worn and the grand total for a budding male artist's Art School image is $1322. Let's hope he's the next Matthew Barney so he can pay off those mounting student loans. As for the girl, Art School cachet costs $2054 and a Starbucks latté. Maybe she'll be Björk to his Barney, so the whole episode in elegant-slumming with a HECS debt will be worth it in the long run.

And what do you think these kids make at art school? Well their thing is critiquing consumer culture, because that never dates. They heard Johnny Boy's song, "You Were the Generation that Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve," and were so inspired they made a painting appropriating the song's title before going shopping because it's, like, a political act, man. What struck me about this art duo is how invested they are in a seething electroclash of binary oppositions. Pop Art meets Punk (well, according to the subheading at least). And Campbell Soup always works when it's followed with a Starbucks chaser.