Nicholas Mangan Notes from a Cretaceous World Published by The Narrows in association with Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2010 Hardcover, 88 pages, 115 × 217 mm, edition of 500 I remember lying on scratchy carpet as a kid, watching the Common-wealth Games on TV, and yelling with admiration as Nauru’s single athlete, a chubby teenage weightlifter, […]

It has become apparent that Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) in New South Wales are trying to exist in a climate where both state and local government are publicly pushing to increase the profile of their community and volunteer generated activity. Working in opposition to this, however, is pressure stemming from local government in the form of […]

The Memorial Coordinated by Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson Death Be Kind, Melbourne 29 June – 25 July 2010 In The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard famously imbued the spatial tiers of a building — its cellar, bedrooms or roof — with a series of phenomenological and psychological connotations: the attic with intellectual contemplation […]

Do we sense patterns or impose them? Is it a compulsive human function to make order out of chaos? I have found myself creating a pattern. I’d note a thread of a concept, technique or reference that seemed to connect the works of Sean Bailey, with the installations of Nathan Gray — the colours, the […]

Rounds Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 26 June – 25 August 2010 Rounds is fundamentally based upon dialogues between artists, their artworks and their processes. Conversation is integral to the twenty-nine artworks presented at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA). Nine emerging Western Australian artists have been involved in the project, conceived by artist […]

Free Store Kim Paton 38 Ghuznee Street, Wellington 22 May – 6 June 2010 Kim Paton’s Free Store was part of a larger series of projects, run by Letting Space, which proposed to ‘engage a wider public in the vitality and relevance of installation and performance‐based contemporary art practice outside an institutional gallery framework’.[^1] Effectively, […]

Ambianxe Marco Fusinato The Spring Press #9, 2010 The Spring Press, Sydney LP, 180 g, virgin black vinyl Edition of 250 Ambianxe is yet another affirmation of Marco Fusinato’s situation as an artist within the context of the technologised global society. Albeit acting within the marginal economical form of the limited vinyl LP, this embrace […]

Lionel Marchetti and Yoko Higashi Presented as part of Liquid Architecture sound festival 3RRR Performance Space, Melbourne 2 July 2010 The energetic headlining performance of this year’s Liquid Architecture sound festival featured Lionel Marchetti, an Italian born practitioner of musique concrète, and his partner Yoko Higashi, a contemporary Japanese Butoh dancer. With his ad hoc […]

SUPER MARKET As part of Always Moving: A Performance Laboratory in Several Parts Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne Saturday 3 July 2010 In an environment where, despite recent shakiness, capitalism seems as infallible as ever, instances of rebellion like SUPER MARKET can feel tokenistic. But perhaps in this time of reduced public space and emaciated political agency, […]

When Kate Newby scrawled ‘we must build in the open’ in her idiosyncratic script onto the floorboards of Gambia Castle as part of her 2007 exhibition On the benefits of building, I always assumed she was privileging the ‘open’ as that improvisational, and yet urgent domain of self-actualisation. In a culture premeditated on the associative […]

Burros Ballot Ry Haskings TCB art inc., Melbourne 9–26 June 2010 TCB art inc. played host to Ry Haskings’ coy spatial investigations in his most recent exhibition, Burros Ballot, which reflected a practice that has developed from a boisterous humour to one of oblique strategies. His interest in the frame as the platform for staging […]

Pebble Botanica and (there will be a) New Garden Benedict Ernst Innovators 1 at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 10 April – 9 May 2010 The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust The perceived alterity of the East has long been a […]

The First Working Retrospective of the Fauxist International Curated by Vivian Ziherl Metro Arts Galleries, Brisbane 7–19 June 2010

Lazy Slum Tape Projects and Six_a Blindside, Melbourne 19–21 August 2010 The opening of Lazy Slum at Blindside coincided with the Nicholas Building’s annual open studio event. Lazy Slum, a collaboration between Melbourne collective Tape Projects and Hobart group Six_a was described by Blindside as a ‘cross-disciplinary experiment in what happens when you build a […]

Amongst other initiatives arising in the -current community-obsessed zeitgeist is the commencement of Melbourne’s own FreeSchool. This alternative form of pedagogy has distinct legacies and structures in different countries, springing from education movements that defied state (or church in the case of countries such as Spain at the turn of the twentieth century) institutionalised education […]

Here you are, standing on the edge of the precipice, feeling your blood thump against the abyss. Look at you, contemplating that awesome and terrible vastness. Friedrich would be proud. You stand here and you think: what could I say to you, Universe? Monkey! Monument! Heartbeat! Sunset! Who is receiving these vibrations, anyway? Which bit […]

The Public School is an autonomously organising direct-education project initiated in Los Angeles in 2007. Identified as ‘a school with no curriculum’, The Public School sessions are developed from the starting point of a class request posted to a website which then gathers a student body and, finally, a teacher. At the time of writing, […]

Australia cannot pretend to be Europe, the differences are vast and deeply significant to us, and these differences are what we must realise so that we might develop a consciousness of our situation-identity.[^1] Having recently spent the month of July in Australia — mostly in Melbourne as part of Gertrude Contemporary’s Visiting Curators Program — […]

In recent months I have responded to two unusual project call-outs to meet with artists I did not know: one occurring in a tiny office at the Abbotsford Convent and another in my bed. As an artist who has sought to create my own encounters with strangers, I was curious to find out why these […]

The following is a recent interview with Eugenio López Alonso, the Mexican art patron responsible for facilitating La Colección Jumex, the singular largest art collection in Latin America, funded solely on the profits of the Jumex Group, one of the biggest juice producers in the world. Credited with single handedly pushing contemporary Mexican art and […]

‘If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?’— Buckminster Fuller Sydney painter Tom Polo is an advocate of eavesdropping on public transport and at exhibition openings. His ear is a funnel to an internal […]

TS2Slow Art CollectiveIncinerator Arts Complex, Moonee Ponds5–13 September 2009 Focusing on issues of sustainability, the Slow Art Collective presented itself as a group of canny gleaners at its inaugural exhibition, TS2 (Transfer Station 2). Utilising in-kind sponsorship, the collective networked extensively with a number of recycling services to bring over 15 tonnes of ‘e-waste’ to […]

Jenny Holzer ACCA, Melbourne 17 December 2009 – 28 February 2010 The question of how art can respond to the politics of war hangs like a guilty cross about the neck of contemporary art. With an eye to the — often art-fuelled — activism of the Vietnam war era, there is a growing sense that […]

A small block of tofu makes inroads into an emerging discourse. Operating out of Tokyo since 1899, the Morinaga Company might be said to manufacture a fairly standard block of soya bean curd. The label on their prime-selling foodstuff — a firm, long-life block of the stuff — reads: ‘This revolutionary package locks out light, […]