I’ve learnt that it’s dangerous to mention I spent the first twenty-something years of my life living in ‘The Emerald City’, for it invariably leads to the question that seems to fascinate Melburnians of all ages, races, genders and creeds: ‘how do the cities compare?’ An innocent enough question, perhaps, but it is typically asked with […]
As a retrospective, Kusama — showing currently at the Tate Modern — satisfies the standard requirements for historical span and conceptual consistency across material and spatial frameworks. However, these paintings, sculptures and installations seem so directly transmitted from the artist, it’s difficult to assess what kind of dialogue they’ve participated in over the decades. Stepping […]
Design has become something of a lingua franca for the present. Design artifacts — both custom-made and mass-produced — are widely acknowledged as prime agents of ideology, identity, social distinction and meaning. Designers are highly adept at leveraging aesthetics to create heightened desire and depth of experience, but only a few outlying areas of design […]
In the contemporary era, the ability to perform consolidates the biopolitical affects of a designed subject.[^1] Such notions are intrinsically involved in the ‘tacit but increasing inscription of individual lives’ into a society that now prioritises the ‘primacy of the private over the public’.[^2] According to Boris Groys, this is also accompanied by the contemporary […]
Gertrude Contemporary Art Space’s walled-up front window feels like a rebuff to my bad habit. When the traffic is quiet I sometimes idle my engine, forget the road and superficially consume the front space like a teenager cruising down Chapel Street on a Saturday night. I admit my drive-by window-shopping is not qualitatively dissimilar to browsing […]
This year’s annual Kinetica Art Fair, hosted by the Kinetica Museum in London, attempted a balanced representation of analogue and digital art practices. In this way, the 2012 event marked a break with Kinetica Art Fairs of years past, which have traditionally privileged the display of digital media. For Kinetica Art Fair 2012, ‘kinetic art’ was […]
La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo June 16 – July 24, 2011 Curated by Caroline Phillips Interior Architecture brought together eight very different artists who employed a range of processes and materials in their exploration of the body in space. What was refreshing about this exhibition was the fact that architecture was examined in […]
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and multiple off-site venues 24 August 2011 to 6 November 2011 Curated by Grace McQuilten Mis-Design was an expansive, multi-layered project with exhibitions occupying the Ian Potter Museum of Art as well as off-site venues such as the McDonald’s car park, Collingwood, and the Alphaville clothing store […]
Rossella Biscotti is an Italian-born artist currently based in Amsterdam whose work reconsiders or revives histories that have been ‘swept under the carpet’; often censored by authorities interested in preserving an official public memory of a figure, event or period. In the following interview I ask Biscotti about her recent work focused on the infamous […]
In 2012 the Aboriginal Tent Embassy will commemorate forty years of Indigenous political activism at its Canberra site. Set on the front lawn of what is now Old Parliament House (OPH) and surrounded by monolithic buildings, such as the High Court of Australia, Treasury offices, National Gallery of Australia and National Library of Australia, the […]
We Are Here (WAH) was an international symposium for artist-run initiatives, developed by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), in collaboration with Firstdraft. It was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, ArtsNSW, the Copyright Agency Ltd, the City of Sydney and the Freedman Foundation. Held in Sydney from September 1–4 in […]
Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney Produced in collaboration with Performance Space, Sydney 23 June – 2 July 2011 Within & Without was a portrait of Manila. A hybrid theatre work set in a scaled-down replica of the city made from recycled cardboard boxes, it saw a sprawling and chaotic metropolis transplanted into Blacktown Arts Centre in […]
A collaborative text between Adrien Allen (director of Conical, Inc., Melbourne), Dr Hélène Frichot (senior lecturer, Program of Architecture, RMIT University) and Bridie Lunney (artist). Lunney’s exhibition Suspension Test at Conical in March 2011 engaged Frichot’s text and Allen’s space. Interleaving these three voices together expands an account of the work, while acknowledging its inseparability […]
Simon Maidment is the director of Satellite Art Projects, a not-for-profit arts organisation focused on presenting ambitious public projects outside of the gallery context. Working across platforms, Satellite’s projects and commissions involve collaboration between artists and other specialists — including architects, engineers and designers — to realise engaging site-specific public artworks. Trent Walter : What […]
Walking is not a medium, it’s an attitude. To walk is a very immediate and handy way of interacting and eventually interfering within a given context.[^1] — Francis Alÿs The practice of walking as a leisurely activity and not simply as an unavoidable mode of mobility and convenience is one that many of us take […]
Barkly Arts Centre, Footscray, Melbourne 3 June – 1 July 2011 Curated by Jessica Scott, artist-in-residence Footscrayism was one of three exhibitions produced as part of New Skin, a key outcome of the artist-in-residence program at Footscray’s Barkly Arts Centre, which required each artist-in-residence to utilise community involvement in their individual projects. Untangling Footscrayism from […]
A dwelling is extracted from the fine print of planning and building codes. A modest architectural prosthesis, connected physically and psychically to four apartments. Here the architect rests, calibrates acts in which to reconfigure the city’s code. In another location, across an ocean, a handful of portable structures stand, blue tarpaulins taut. A small village […]
In March of this year at Rear View Gallery, Melbourne, and Artbank, Vancouver, Kate Moss and Marilyne Blais simultaneously constructed transient and temporal structures through the use of found materials, Skype, projectors and volunteers. We Build Up became a communal structure that was both a mirror of itself and a quixotic attempt to join architectural […]
Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells, 2010–2011 Various libraries: Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, Warsaw, Stockholm, Copenhagen. No-one comes to a library to stay there.[^1] — Ant Hampton English artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells collaborated for the first time on The Quiet Volume, in which they explore the social and imaginative space created within a library. […]
Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 10 June – 16 July 2011 Curated by Amita Kirpalani At the end of the exhibition Catching Trucks, a brief film clip played on a small screen located next to the reception desk. The scene was from Agnès Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I which investigates contemporary gleaners; the people who […]
Elizabeth Newman & Nicki Wynnychuk Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide 19 May – 18 June 2011 Art that looks like furniture, and furnishings that look like art, and polychromes that look like monochromes, but only because the lighting’s too low, and monochromes that look polychromatic, but only because you’re standing too close. This is a […]
The work creates a space. Work makes its own dimensions. The body finds the most comfortable way of rearticulating its movements and repeating its techniques, edging outwards and converging inwards, marking out a perimeter within which all tools are at easy reach, and all the while remaining focused on the work. The work creates a […]
‘Work for life and not for palaces, temples, cemeteries, and museums’, wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko. His thought is profound but how does it play out? David Harris (aka DJ Toecutter) and Phoebe Torzillo built a yurt and lived in it for a year. Upon learning this fact, I had the hypothesis that their decision was most […]
Three projects by Danius Kesminas and collaborators Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 5 May – 23 July 2011 Curated by Max Delany Visually, Danius Kesminas’s three projects included in Monash University Museum of Art’s survey show — covering his work with a varied cast of collaborators over the last decade — defied viewers to […]