Loose Change Menu: an apt title for a rather ill fitting yet satisfying jumbled assortment of artworks. On the whole, it’s a haptic exhibition: giant poster prints of an old couch drape over the walls, literally spilling into the creative studios next door; an unearthed tennis pole from a game of swing ball is lounging […]
1. Sampling I originally tried starting this with a quote from Kenneth Goldsmith quoting Douglas Huebler but, as you pointed out, we ended up trying to start at a dead-end. Misquoting it, re-opens it: the world is full of objects, more or less interesting.[^1] An updated notion of genius would have to centre around one’s […]
‘Knowledge’, as described by educational institutions, is disciplinary knowledge. There is no way to know how much knowledge is held in an object of knowledge (a report, for example) until one has done the work to understand how a field of knowledge is constructed. No report is self-authoring, containing all the knowledge needed to understand […]
Last year I spent a couple of days visiting a friend in Frankfurt. During this visit, I sat in on a class run by Michael Krebber at the local art school. Krebber is an artist known for his ambivalent, ironic and relatively antagonistic position, and his classes are known for being quite loose and free-form. […]
The late Giovanni Intra once wrote an article in the journal Art & Text about the contemporary Los Angeles sculptor Evan Holloway, telling a story about how the artist locked custom-made steel boxes over parking meters in the street outside his studio, with the title When Bad Attitude Becomes Form. The phrase has always struck […]
The Mappa Mundi: an example from history of another internet. Although revolutionary in scope, the internet’s quest to amass knowledge into one repository isn’t a new idea. There is a lineage of both libraries and encyclopaedias stretching back to ancient times, for example the great library of Alexandria and Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, written in AD77. […]
The amalgamation of art schools into university frameworks over the past decade has meant a new development in advanced degrees; the birth of the studio-based Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In many ways this was an inevitability, part of the increasing tertiary accreditation of visual arts/studio arts courses over the late twentieth century. In Australia, initially […]
Our conversation took place on Thursday 25 April 2013. Present were Elvis Richardson (artist, former director of Death Be Kind and editor of online blog CoUNTess), Helen Grogan (artist, curator, co-director of art space and curatorial project Open Archive) and Eugenia Lim (artist, co-director of Channels video art festival). The trio discussed tactics for negotiating […]
Tom Ellard is a ‘musician’—a term he describes as ‘an old descriptor for a sound/video/interactive artist’. While it is hard to establish all aspects of his work briefly, Ellard is best known as founding member of electronic and industrial band Severed Heads (officially active from 1979 to 2008). For those wondering, think tape loops, discordant […]
Mentioned in the same breath as anyone from Christian Marclay to David Shea and Grandmaster Flash, British avant-garde turntablist Philip Jeck has built an oeuvre via the act of pillaging, appropriating and manipulating a record collection that traverses a vast span of music history. But Jeck’s approach to records—and the devices he uses to extract […]
The question of research in relation to practice is one that every artist undertaking a PhD must struggle with. Below is an attempt to lay out my own understanding of this relationship as I enter the Winter of the final six months of my PhD candidature at Monash University. For if, treating it [fine art] […]
Post-irony: the beginning One day, my roommate, who is not an artist, but is still interested in art, asked me to define my art practice. As I later retold our conversation to some art school friends, I noticed how I kept positioning my roommate as someone who is outside the art world, which simultaneously feels […]
I was invited to deliver a paper on a panel of young researchers, editors and curators at Impresario: Paul Taylor | Art & Text | POPISM, Monash University, 1 September 2012, a forum held in honour of the work of the late Australian art critic Paul Taylor, founder and editor of Art & Text. This […]
Arts Research? WTF?! Who the hell would consider bringing together such antipodal signifiers unless they were a bureaucrat or a pervert or both? Under what institutional conditions could such a rebarbative oxymoron even make sense? Surely the term freights all sorts of seamy occlusions and destructions? But perhaps my surprise—even shock and horror—at the very […]
The child is a born researcher. —Loris Malaguzzi The term ‘educational turn’ is gaining momentum in contemporary arts theory. Artworks within the definition seek to transmit or create knowledge from and between an artwork and its participants, the knowledge often stems from other disciplines such as sociology, science, history and psychology. This desire to learn, […]
I feel I’m in a beautiful private garden, in the middle of the city. I look up and see all the buildings and the beautiful sculptures. On Tuesdays, when the gallery is closed, it really does become our private space. It’s that sense of privacy in a public environment that I enjoy.[^1] —Isobel Crombie Throughout […]
Much of what I find funny in life emerges from the exhibitions I go to, so when the art’s humourless, I tend to feel a bit deflated. If work doesn’t have an element of humour in it, it’s hard for me to imagine the artist having any fun creating it, thus making it hard for […]
Scanning the landscape of local contemporary art practices, the body in motion presents itself in a variety of different guises. As a doing-body that negotiates space in Bianca Hester’s constructed environments; a choreographed dancer’s body in Sriwhana Spong’s videos and collages; and a medium — literally, a communication vessel — in Adelle Mills’ short, edited […]
What are these films, what outlandish name distinguishes them from the rest? Do they exist? I have no idea as yet, but I do know that there are certain very rare occasions when, without the aide of a single subtitle, the spectator suddenly understands an unknown tongue, takes part in strange ceremonies, wanders in towns […]
Two years ago, the word ‘philanthropy’ would have meant very little to many artists, particularly to those with emergent or experimental practices, however the way that we now think and talk about philanthropy has shifted. A combination of the recent rise of online crowdfunding platforms, high-profile philanthropic donations to public art institutions, such as the […]
In ‘The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation’, an article published in the March edition of e-flux journal about the relation between ‘creatives’ — artists, art writers, curators, artisanal brewers, bakers, and baristas (who have the social capital in Melbourne that philosophers have in France) — and the protests of the Occupy movement, […]
1 The cult of the dead was not alien to them, nor a certain respect for those who were absent. It seemed these people with their Slavic faces, fresh and cruel, slept in a photographer’s prayer-room.[^1] I’m where the light is black-orange. The city is known for its lack of Soviet infrastructure and staunch and […]
Whilst taking part in an MFA seminar discussion regarding Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and using it as a model to understand an audience’s reception and production of an art experience — my thoughts became very literal.[^1] Could I have admitted to my 2002 Year-Eight metalwork class that I lacked oxy-acetylene welding experience and that […]
Social class (or simply ‘class’) is a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centred on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories. — Jimmy Wales Just as I was considering it possible that the existence of the three-tiered class system I was […]