un Magazine got in touch with me to see if I’d write a piece on humour for this humorous issue. They asked me because I’m a woman, and I make performance-based work which always seems to have a humorous twist to it, somewhere. For instance, with my West Space show last year, I had people […]
Two Harpic Lemon Toilet Rim Blocks is an ongoing series of interventions involving the installation of toilet rim blocks within the toilets of various art galleries and museums across Victoria. As a wry service provision and play on the colloquial use of the term lemon, the series suggests an institutional irreverence that extends to include […]
i wish the earth would j swallow me. Keep on dancing till the world ends. Dreams of the volcanoes in Tāmaki Makaurau violently convulsing. Clasping hands together under the table. Our breath moving in sync. Stripping back the flesh to reveal the whiteness of our bones. Grinding bones into dust. Bone marrow and blood absorbed […]
In the early years of the twenty-first century, a very clever executive producer at Bravo had the multimillion-dollar idea of pairing the character clichés of Desperate Housewives with the consumerist content of MTV Cribs. In 2006, The Real Housewives of Orange County was born. Ratings soared over the late 2000s as The Great Recession ravaged […]
Andrew Frost : Is there ever a wrong time to laugh at an artist’s work? This is a question that has worried me. I suppose the answer is, when the humour isn’t intentional. But it’s a tricky business. I remember going to a few early shows by Guy Benfield and thinking the work was really […]
Following his third arrest, Christopher D’Arcangelo’s father Allan D’Arcangelo, a prominent painter at the time, asked him, ‘Why are you going after the art institutions? You should be going after the banks. They’re the real criminals.’ With this preface in mind, it could be said that the two distinctly separate practices of Christopher D’Arcangelo, and […]
I can never have a poker face. Anybody looking at me can tell exactly what I’m thinking. — Gena Rowlands In May 2016, I invited 100 men to participate in a short scene derived from a John Cassavetes film, Opening Night, as part of a 24-hour durational performance at Australian Centre for the Moving Image […]
Blackmore and cinematographer Bonnie Elliott’s beautifully constructed visuals detail the exhaustive preparation, posing and filtering of each subject’s photos. Multiple methods of image production are at play here: the subjects take selfies that are interwoven into the production of the documentary shoot, and we are no longer sure of whose image is whose. The footage […]
A painting must always contend with space and, because of this, it can also liberate and expand space. Sometimes with maximum effort and sometimes with almost no effort at all. A tile is a unit, a component of a whole. A whole is complete, subject to a parameter, an outline that demarcates where the whole […]
I met Katherine in 2014 on Facebook and looked up all her work online. Later, I was over at my friend’s house where Katherine was recording Human Pesticide, a noise project with Brennan Olver. She was shouting in an American accent ‘Fuck the world. Set it on fire. Fuck the state and the system. Symphony […]
Recently, I was on the phone describing Heidi Holmes’s installation at West Space in September 2016. ‘It’s this incredibly great work’, I said. ‘Normally there are big windows along one half of West Space gallery, but Heidi has built a room that covers these windows, with only a small square of light peeking out — […]
This article was conceived in response to the authors’ mutual participation in The Selfie and Social Activism Symposium at the University of NSW in December 2016. The event explored self-representation and critical agency within a broad visual context. This piece traces some of the tangential links between seemingly disparate areas of research; of Tim’s paper […]
Vicki Van Hout : Kill me now! Kill me now! Kill me now! I’m going to get done for saying… I’m going to get done for saying… I’m going to get done for saying… Kill me now! Marian Abboud : Stop saying that, say something catchy and intellectual, you’re going to get in trouble for saying […]
Desert Body Creep Angela Goh Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) 24–28 January 2017 She starts with a series of statuesque poses while a Willow Smith track plays: I left my consciousness in the 6th dimension. I wonder where the mind of a dancer goes as they run their body through a routine for the […]
Mish Grigor The Talk Performance Space 2–5 November 2016 My uncle first told my mother he was HIV positive in 1983, the same year I was born. For many in East Sydney in the early 1980s, diagnosis meant death. For my uncle, this did not come as quickly as for many, mercifully; he died of […]
A body lies hiding beneath a thick sheet of black plastic, the kind used by firemen to extinguish fire. Giving way to movement and form, the plastic becomes a percussive skin used to thrash out sound. A release of manic energy. Finding quiet in the rage. ‘I used that a lot to go into that […]
I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals. Brigitte Bardot I have not always loved dogs. I used to only love art. That was my main love. But things changed when I met Farnsworth. Farnsworth My partner Matt and I had driven up […]
In Art and Ventriloquism, David Goldblatt examines the complex back and forth that occurs between artist, artwork, and audience as a mode of exchange akin to the way in which a ventriloquist animates their dummy. Goldblatt draws many comparisons between ventriloquism and art-making in terms of how they both facilitate a unique mode of speaking […]
At the heart of the increasingly gentrified East Brunswick sits the artist-run gallery Punk Café, a name that makes a considered link between punk and the Australian middle class — exemplified by ‘café culture’. Like many of its contemporaries employing the language and aesthetic of punk antiestablishmentarianism, such as Info-Punkt (GE), Punk Café features a […]
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. — Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, 1973 1. Charcoal is a residue, the remaining carbon and ash left behind when a plant or animal has had all of the […]