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.

Sex: A New Artist Run Initiative

Spacedating

Giving artists something (or someone) to do during gallery-sitting shifts

In Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Kate (Angie Dickinson) goes to a museum, sits down and looks at a painting of a woman who returns her gaze. The viewer and the viewed caught cruising one another. Kate alternates between looking at this painting and another of a large baboon, who also stares at her. Such are the spectatorial gaze relations of paintings and people who look at them. At times Kate is distracted by people who move throughout the gallery. At other times she takes down some notes - some kind of shopping list and nothing to do with her experience of the paintings. A man with sexy sunglasses sits down and they begin an elaborate game of alternating between looking at each other and the art. Eventually they fuck. Soon after she is killed.

This has to be one of my all time favourite art scenes from a film because it illustrates the complex power relations enacted in places where spectatorship is encouraged, indeed expected. Galleries and museums are places where we look, and what better joy do we get from pretending to be absorbed in the art, when we're really checking out someone's arse. Something about art must make people horny.

You can imagine my excitement upon encountering Spacedating, a new concept in gallery sitting at artist run spaces in Sydney. I encountered Spacedating quite randomly on YouTube and to find out more watch the video posted below (which is cleverly constructed using the scenes I described from Dressed to Kill). After searching for more info about Spacedating online, I discovered that young artist Grzegorz Gawronski seems to be behind it all. Basically we all know minding galleries can be tedious and boring. But that can be remedied by joining a Spacedating database comprised of students from Sydney art schools. Next time you mind a gallery, ensure you participate in 'spacedating' a peer listed at the database. Nothing beats an afternoon fuck in a white cube. Except maybe a good old fashioned blow job in a (pre-digital) photo dark room.

Much like porn can be defined by the paradigm shift of the condom (i.e. rubber or pre-rubber) art sex is defined by whether we do it in digital or pre-digital spaces. Based on data or databased. You decide.

Inventing the Wheel

The Artswipe

Church of the Poison Mind, 2007

Mobile phone snap

So the NSW State election is over. Yes, I resisted casting a vote for the Australians Against Further Immigration party. I just can't get behind that. You see, I was handed the 'How to Vote' form and I couldn't get past the letters AAFI. Wondering if this party might not prefer starting a global rumour that Australians Are Fucking Idiots, I decided I'd rather die with shit in my mouth than vote for a party that doesn't understand how the colour wheel of life is, well, the best kind of wheel. (Wagon Wheels are good too).

After seeing this poster on a church-like building near where I voted, I started thinking more about colour - both in racial and aesthetic terms - and decided I would start my own Artswipe campaign to make immigration more important than ever before, if only to annoy the white type of Aussie Christians who take it upon themselves to create hybrid faiths that link cultural intolerance with religion and bad banner making. Then again, I haven't seen a pink church before. (Actually I'm not even sure if it is a church). Being that pink is so charged in meaning for chicks, fags and the occasional metrosexual, maybe we can give this little church - or whatever it is - the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps we should all inject cultural difference with a fresh coat of pink paint. Maybe this was not, after all, a church of the poison mind. And maybe, just maybe, it was not populated with a true blue crew of white washed rednecks adorned in green and gold.

Artswipe's Art Life

The Artswipe

Mythbusters, 2007

ET Pez dispenser, masking tape, black texta

The Artswipe makes a guest appearance on The Art Life reviewing three video installations currently showing in Sydney while Team Art Life make television. You screen, I screen, we all screen for iScreen. Or something like that.

Grab a choctop and read it here.

I Heart Attack

The Artswipe

Heartfelt, 2007

Collage on paper (now on web)

Yesterday I was going through my inbox - most of it just spam or MySpace alerts - and an email with a delectably saucy subject line caught my eye. "Hot Australian News" it proclaimed. My mind raced. What could it be? Had Chrissy Amphlett made a comeback by urinating in public? Was Savage Garden reforming? Did Olivia Newton-John find her missing husband? Was an interesting artist representing Australia this year at the Venice Biennale?

No such luck. The said email came from Ronnie. Just Ronnie. No surname. Oh dear - has that boy who picked on me at school found me through School Friends Dot Com? Has he resurfaced all these years later to remind me with his petty taunts that my nipples are still high-beaming like they were that fateful day on the school's volleyball court. That fateful day, where ball sports meet water. You know the rest.

But this is no Ronnie from my barely suppressed past. Not even one of the two Ronnies. The suspense was killing me, and while I suspected Ronnie was just another thorny weed in the spam-a-lot gardens of my bulging inbox, I decided to take the risk and open his so-called hot Aussie news.

And hot it was. So much so that it inspired some really cutting edge collage.

--

SYDNEY, March 11, 2007 08:56pm (AEDT) - The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard have survived a heart attack. Mr Howard, 67 years old, was at Kirribilli House in Sydney, his prime residence, when he was suddenly stricken. Mr Howard was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital where the best surgeons of Australia are struggling for his life.

Click on the link below to get the latest information on the health of the Prime Minister:

The Australian - keeping the nation informed [this bit was hyperlinked]

The Hon John Winston Howard became in as Prime Minister of Australia on 11 March 1996, becoming the 25th person to occupy the office of Prime Minister since Federation. This followed the Coalition's decisive Federal election victory on 2 March 1996...

[then more boring bio... to paste it all here would contaminate this blog big time].

--

It just seemed too phony (and grammatically incorrect) to be true, so I resisted clicking on the hyperlink for fear I'd download a heart attack of my own. Good detective I am, I went straight to Google and typed in four words: John Howard heart attack. The first story to emerge details the "phishing bait" scam. (Not sure what 'phishing' is so don't ask... All I know is since 'fat' was spelled 'phat' by the once-cool hip-hop kids of yesterday, I have been intrinsically suspicious of any 'ph' combinations).

As one of the articles about the hoax email reports, "The phishing scam attempts to redirect visitors to a site which claims to be for the newspaper The Australian, but which was actually registered in Canada on February 14 this year... News-driven tactics have become increasingly common, as phishers seek to convince users that their messages are valid. Recent examples have included the US Superbowl and storms in Europe as topics. Many phishing mails direct users to sites which install trojan software which can take over their PCs and be used to form botnets for the further sending of spam."

So this all happened about a month ago. Poor John Howard's been in hospital all that time, and I get the email only yesterday. If phishy-dish spammers did their fucking job properly - and on time - I could have at least been urged into sending my heartfelt, homemade 'get well' card on time.

Exquisite Corpse

The Artswipe

Exquisite Corpse, 2007

Video still

MySpace is a place where 'friends' unite each other in interesting creative projects and play. Queen of the realm, The Divine Miss White, has spent the last four weeks promoting various bloggers on her page and if you hadn't noticed, The Artswipe was one of four featured during the week of 18-25 February. Last week, all sixteen of her featured cast of diverse bloggers were engaged in a challenge to create a literary 'exquisite corpse'. The Surrealists first played this collaborative game called 'exquisite corpse', whereby one participant would create an image then conceal most of it, revealing only a small section. The next artist continues the image by using the visible bit of the previous participant's contribution. As The Divine Miss White details on her MySpace blogging challenge, the game can be played as a writing exercise:

« write in turn on a sheet of paper
« fold it to conceal part of the writing
« then pass it on to the next player for further contribution

The Artswipe contributed to the 'corpse', which was adjudicated at MySpace by The Divine Miss White over the last seven days. Below I have reproduced The Artswipe's section, preceded by the last three words (transcribed in italics) written by the blogger to play the game before me, and whose words inspired my creative turn. If you care to read the entire corpse, check it out at MySpace.

As for the inspiration for my 250-words-or less tale? Well, I tried not to give it too much thought as I was so wanting to channel some good ol' fashioned stream of consciousness. That's what the Surrealists would have wanted. But as I'm just too much in the moment, and really such a cerebral dilettante, I really felt it important to adapt an anecdote I recently overheard at an art party, where an artist broke up with their painter partner because his art was shit.

--

fight another day.

Admitting defeat had always been out of the question. But after witnessing the aesthetic horrors of his so-called art, I just knew it best we break up. I'd met him twelve months earlier through a friend of a friend of a friend of someone who knew Allen Ginsberg – or was it William Burroughs, I can't recall. That whole Beat poetry connotation of the nomadic drifter trailblazing through the American heartland really stirred up my reproductive system. And because he was an artist – a connoisseur of meaning making – I just had to have him. While the sex was creative, he held out on showing me his art. All I knew was that he "painted with light" as it was written on his business card. So I go to his art show held at a converted factory used for the occasional exhibition, happening or yoga class. A few people I recognize are mingling with red cask wine in plastic cups. I don't see any art. Meg, whose claim to fame is that she's related somehow to Sharon Tate – or was it Roman Polanski, I can't recall – tells me his art "negotiates fault-lines in everyday visuality". Meg is studying sociology and can sometimes be such a cunt. When she realizes my frustration at not grasping her university babble, her eyes drift heavenward, prompting me to look up and behold the elusive art. All I see is a skylight upon which a light-switch was crudely painted.

Notes on a Vandal

The Artswipe

I Can Eat Cake with Ellen, 2007

Mixed media installation

Unfortunately, the 79th Oscars did not prove Artswipe's psychic ability. With only nine categories correct in my Oscar party predictions, I had no other choice but to eat cake with Ellen. As she was so desperately unfunny in her hosting ability I later threw it in her face. Damn it, if I had remembered Melissa Etheridge sang the song for An Inconvenient Truth, I'd have surely guessed that one because lesbian is so hot this year along with Oscar's ridiculously racist ode to all cultures great and small. This year's focus on nominations over winners just demonstrated how despite our differences, we're all winners. Bless.

Anyway kids, see you next year at Oscar's 80th. Meanwhile you can see me at the local community hall practicing my contemporary shapeshifting shadow dancing. This week we're taking the Twin Towers as our inspiration. I might wear my Crash Parties, Not Buildings outfit.

Postscript: after publishing this post, I commissioned Skanky Jane to produce an animated GIF image of Artswipe's Oscar predictions merging ever so psychedelically with the actual outcome. It can be seen below in the Prize Queen post as I replaced the old image of the Oscar predictions with a kind of Before and After extravaganza. Thanks SJ!

Prize Queen

The Artswipe

"In addition to God and the studio, I'd like to thank Skanky Jane for making

this animated GIF of Artswipe's Oscar predictions vs the actual outcome", 2007

New New Media

"Artswipe also hopes to do a quick run around town and take in some art shows in their last days, to stave off that bitter feeling of neglect art experiences during the Christmas shut down. Maybe even shed some Oscar tips."

So were the concluding remarks of Artswipe's first blog post for the year. Some art shows were viewed but I just didn't see anything worth the words that hadn't already been uttered somewhere else. That prize show The Anne Landa Award exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW was quite festive, and certainly more interesting than it was the year before. But while Monika Tichacek deserved her win for the (now rather old) video work The Shadowers (2004), the hype and scandal publicly aroused by her lesbo-sadomasochistic work made me less responsive to it on second viewing (I first saw it at Artspace in 2005 and became an instant fan).

What interested me, seeing it in the hallowed context of an art prize at the AGNSW, was how The Shadowers - perhaps to its detriment - stood out because Tichacek was the only female artist represented among a group of seven video and new media artists. But maybe the gender inequity was abated by the surplus of female energy contextualising Tichacek's work. After all, The Shadowers was a piece about female desire and queer sexuality produced by a woman (Monika Tichacek, with some help from performers Aña Wojak and Rosanna Mastroianni). Then it is curated by a woman (Natasha Bullock) into an art prize exhibition named in honour of a woman (Anne Landa).

Usually I tire of the very gender stocktaking I've just outlined because politically correct divisionism is, like, so 1995, but it seems a suited observation in retrospect because the boys represented are such boys. Really, the encircling gangbang of male artists at the Anne Landa Award was so pungent with the whiff of blueballs, soccer practice and dickcheese that it was a relief to be in Tichacek's black curtained safe place... No wonder she sews her legs together. Any self-respecting woman would.

There it is, Artswipe promised an art review. The Anne Landa Award closed on the 11 February. Hope you got to see it. I'm certainly a better person after seeing Tony Schwensen's nipples in yet another absurd performance video situation. If you're now pissed you missed it, let me know and I'll lend you my copy of the $25 catalogue.

If the Anne Landa Award stoked your inner prize queen, then hop along to my favourite opening night of the year. It's The Academy Awards aka Oscars (just in case you didn't know). It's not curated by anyone that I know of. Artswipe did promise some Oscar tips, and this year Artswipe's done some homework and seen a lot of the films. After the last few posts I've indeed realised what a celebrity-themed February it has been. So much so that Aquarians and Pisceans are so fucking cool in that Britney-esque way right now, wading the complex depths of a glittering hirsute ocean. Bid or Buy it Now.

If you can't get tickets to the Oscars, it's best you don't ask because they don't offer freebies to volunteers like the organisers of The Biennale of Sydney. My recommendation is you make your own little gift bag and watch on TV. It's very democratic that way and TV is the people's medium. My video artist friends may want to watch it as a 3 channel dvd installation, that's up to you.

Why did I pick my picks? Leonardo DiCaprio as best actor because he's as cute as a button. Starring in Blood Diamond and The Departed, he really did work hard. Leo's made like at least five movies now since What's Eating Gilbert Grape. What a working class man. Maybe Alan Arkin as Supporting Actor because he's old. Definitely Helen Mirren because everyone says so - indeed, she's the ultimate Prize Queen. I suppose Jennifer Hudson as Supporting Diva because we need to think for a minute we're at The Grammys instead of perhaps the abortion clinic they call American Idol.

Scorsese will win for The Departed because I don't think he's ever won before. Babel has to get something - it does critique American gun cultures and terror-inspired politics in an ever-so-ambiguously-even-handed manner that it might just be this year's Crash (Best Picture Oscar 2005). Does that mean Babel could be Best Picture? I hope so. If not it will get one of the throwaway awards from the two Screenplay categories.

Notes on a Scandal should get the other Screenplay award, simply because it was so nasty. The Philip Glass score may win for Notes on a Scandal, because Academy voters may cast an intertextual vote this year. Meaning, Philip Glass scored The Hours. The Hours was about Virginia Woolf. Notes on a Scandal makes numerous smartypants references to Woolf throughout. Notes on a Scandal is really in such Room of One's Own that it is Artswipe's personal pick for the Best Picture - even if it's not nominated in that category. But then again, it's all about women's business and like Monika Tichacek's The Shadowers, it's got enough deliciously amoral lesbian ingredients to warrant a major Australian art prize. An Oscar, perhaps not.