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

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).

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.