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, […]

Omega Alain Declerc, (France), Tony Garifalakis (Australia), Joaquin Segura (Mexico), Jeanne Susplugas (France) and Ewoud Van Rijn (Netherlands) Curated by Tony Garifalakis VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 26 March – 24 April 2010 Curated by Melbourne based neo-gothic artist Tony Garafalakis, this powerful group exhibition included five artists from France, The Netherlands, Mexico and Australia […]

‘Images proliferate. Am I wrong in being reminded of the printing of money in a period of wild inflation? Do we know what we are doing? Are we able to evaluate what we have done?’[^1] — Wright Morris, ‘In Our Image’ In August last year, I made my first ever trip to the Museum of […]

Karaoke Theory Andy Thomson Light Projects 12–31 October 2009 Visually sparse, Andy Thompson’s Karaoke Theory saw the gallery at Light Projects almost empty. The sound of a woman singing, however, filled the gallery — her voice emanating from two small speakers on the gallery floor. The lyrics were passages from the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, […]

‘…But these langues that fragmented open up a multitude of lingwix can extend to a liquid form that is ever changing and not with surface, but open, closable, but with effort opennable again. Like with a loop of talking the words can sound like completely different words and once they do you can’t hear the […]

Canadian Pharmacy Dan Arps, Hugo Atkins, Stuart Bailey, Mike Brown & Jan Lucas, Stephen Bush, Danielle Freakley, Greatest Hits, Ian Haig, Andy Holden, The Kingpins, Sarah Larnach, Jan Lucas, Rob McLeish, Elizabeth Newman, Alexander Ouchtomsky, Sean Peoples, Gareth Sansom, Gabrielle de Vietri and Alex Vivian. Neon Parc, Melbourne 3–27 February 2010 Canadian Pharmacy is the […]

The cinematic works of the legendary New York filmmaker Jack Smith and the lesser known, but equally important, Brighton based filmmaker Jeff Keen, present us with two highly developed versions of the trash aesthetic. In his oft-cited appreciations of Maria Montez and Josef von Sternberg, Smith rails polemically against the hegemonic naturalism of both Hollywood […]

Facts Charlie Sofo Utopian Slumps, Melbourne 5–19 December 2009 Charlie Sofo is a collector. This was made patently clear in Facts, an exhibition in which Sofo carefully accumulated, categorised and displayed items and mementos that constitute the by-products of everyday urban life. From scraps of paper and discarded rubber bands to private phone numbers and […]

Jake Wotherspoon’s Opening Performance (2010) for Re/Gendered at Platform featured a creature, too hairy to be human but not hairy enough to be ape, reclining in a cabinet.[^1] With a derisive stare articulating the boredom and misery of the caged curiosity, its gaze was directed at the crowd and the cabinet beside it housing two […]

1200CC Mary Tricky Walsh, Mish Meijers & Alicia King CAST Gallery, Hobart 17 October – 8 November 2009 — Reverse Cargo Adam Cruickshank Craft Victoria, Melbourne 22 January – 5 March 2010 — Year of the Metal Tiger Dan Bell (in De Tetris Totems, Lisa Radford & Kati Rule) Sutton Gallery Project Space, Melbourne 4–27 […]

In Marina Abramović’s recent retrospective, The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a naked man and woman stood facing each other in a doorway. As patrons were confronted with the challenge to come in close proximity to a naked stranger, they were simultaneously required to decide which anatomy was […]