Daily Dose

Stevie Nicks as an artwork courtesy of Commander Cody

Apologies to all (ie both) of my loyal readers for being AWOL. The last few weeks The Artswipe has been holed up at home sick as a dog. I contracted a case of apathy. Who'd have thought that was sexually transmitted! I went to see the family doctor and all she could do was offer some aesthetic advice and tell me to avoid coming into contact with anything white. Maybe I should stop seeing a PhD and visit an MD like the rest of the world because whiteness if just too fucking pervasive to avoid. But if you must know what The Artswipe is endorsing at the moment, here goes.

My favourite new media piece of recent times was The Worm by Channel 9 (Sunday, October 21, 2007). That was hypnotic and quietly compelling. My favourite text art was from the Good Weekend (October 13, 2007) - especially this quote from an article about Stevie Nicks:

So 1993 comes rolling around, and Stevie Nicks is finally convinced that that the protracted high dosage of Klonopin might be killing her. So she does exactly what you or I might do. She instructs her personal assistant, Glenn, to take her daily dose - just to see what effect it has. "I said, 'It won't kill you, because it hasn't killed me, but I just want to see what you think... Well, after an hour... he said, 'I can't fix the stereo and I don't think I can drive home'. And I said, 'Well good - just stay there because I'm studying you.' And he was almost hallucinating. It was bad".

So I am reading this in the doctor surgery waiting room. That's the best place to read the Good Weekend as you can be waiting a long time and the dullness of the magazine is a perfect match to the dodgy interior design characteristic of such places. As I contemplate what it must be like to be Stevie Nicks, I have a killer idea for a performance piece. I will get my doctor to prescribe me high doses of Klonopin - a hearty tranquiliser endorsed by none other than the white witch herself - and hand it out at the next art opening I attend.

I will call this piece 'Studying' the White Cube (just like the white wing dove) 2007.

Later in the article Stevie talks about why she founded "The Stevie Nicks Soldier's Angel Foundation". In case you don't know, this foundation promotes the use of music in the rehabilitation of of US servicemen and women wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan by providing them with iPods. And that's just what those brave soldiers need.

It had crossed my mind that the consolation prizes offered to Australian Idol contestants as they get booted off (juicy plasma screens and then some) are probably more generous. But at least the gift of music heals like nothing else. Stevie just knows that it's better to scratch your phantom limb in time to the beat of Rhiannon than to the bitter bombless silence of American life post-wartime.

Production Values

The Anna Nicole Show

"As Anna Nicole Smith, the unblushing celebrity whose antics were at once garish and pitiful, collapsed in her suite at a Florida hotel and casino, people sat feeding coins into slot machines five floors below. It was a very American death."
- Ben Cubby & Emily Dunn, "End of a Party Girl," Sydney Morning Herald, 10 February 2007.

These two sentences introduced today's Herald article about the life and death of celebrity train-wreck Anna Nicole Smith, whose life literally derailed the other day when she was found dead in a hotel room. Artswipe has always admired Anna Nicole because she embodied the white trash American dream more than any other. Stitched to the nines in shit for brains cheap glamour, Anna Nicole's circuitous path to fame mirrored the Paris Hilton brand except one was born into hotel money, the other died in a hotel with oil money amassed along the way. Anna Nicole's second husband, a Texan oil tycoon, was a million years her senior when she married him at 26 years of age. He dies, she inherits, and her claim to the cash is contested at Supreme Court. At the time a judge asks Anna Nicole about her situation to which she replies: "I just wanted to make a name for myself." The judge presses her: "What name is that?"

"Anna Nicole Smith," is her winning reply.

Maybe she's a little smarter than the former stripper seemed in the media spectacle groundswell following her every chemically-enhanced hiccup. Born Vicky Hogan in 1967, she changed her name to Anna Nicole at the edge of 17. Around that time Anna Nicole was busy getting married to her first (unwealthy) husband and giving birth to son Daniel, who died suddenly five months ago - a mere three days after Anna Nicole's second child was born. When she changed her name to Anna Nicole, she knew fame was all about the name. Her name. For Anna Nicole, her name was an epic neon wonderbolt lighting up the dank cesspool of famous-for-being-famous celebrity skank. Where Paris Hilton's star emits greenhouse gasses, Anna Nicole's saintly sheen could multitask by eclipsing the planet, sending us into a tailspin of darkly drrrty moments that momentarily plugged the hole in the ozone. Those not content to just look on and admire her gifts to the globe could feed coins into her slot machine. It was a very American life.

One of Anna Nicole Smith's paintings

If she knew her name could attract attention, it was no more honed to perfection than in her reality TV show, The Anna Nicole Show (2002-04). In an episode from the second season, "Something Trendy This Way Comes" (2003) Anna Nicole shows her artist side. This was the side Artswipe loved the most. You see, Anna Nicole fit perfectly into the "outsider artist" tradition, which is odd because she was not really outside of anything. She was so in. Regardless of what, where or whom she was "in," Anna Nicole's paintings sported that outsider naïvety, suggesting either arrested development or postmodern chic, you decide. If she'd lived earlier she would have been one of Warhol's superstars, and fought with Brigid Berlin for "just one more qualude, daaarling."

According to Anna Nicole, "part of having an art opening is schmoozing the crowd and sometimes the crowd schmoozes with the artist." One such schmoozer appearing on the show is David Galgano, an art dealer who apparently sells a lot of Andy Warhol work. Talking up her artistic ability while Anna Nicole nods ever so shyly, Galgano describes her work as "pure" and "painted from the gut." Having bought one of her pink paintings, he promises Anna Nicole that he'll hang it in his home next to the Rauschenberg.

Anna Nicole was a pop artist briefly during one year of her life, and Artswipe really admires that. If she'd lived longer, it's near certain she would have curated blockbuster exhibitions at MOMA or the Tate Modern. We just know if Anna Nicole made a pilates or work-out video it would have been so fucking cool that some visionary curator would have shown it on a triple projected screen at the 2010 Venice Biennale. Australian skateboarding video artist Shaun Gladwell would be so jealous she thought of it first he'd ask Anna Nicole to collaborate with him on a video work. Anna Nicole would say no because production values are not just her art, they're her life.

Why Anna Nicole's work isn't represented in all the major collections around the world Artswipe will never comprehend.

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.