Note:I felt queasy. About my free associating memories, ideas, and fantasies and their word form. I’m like gonna make like a poet, now? Without irony, even? Without even, irony? Without, even, irony? Seemed so. So I asked the poet Ken Bolton for comment. In his words: ‘I got involved’. In his other words: ‘I just […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
DAMP, Big Pencil Drawing 2010, acrylic on timber, resin, vinyl and graphite on paper. Courtesy the artists. Photography: Matt Stanton
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
the Double Coincidence Studies for an understanding of the economic system I circulated an invitation asking for people with knowledge of economics to participate in a drawing project. My aim was to have a conversation with these people about their knowledge of the economic system and to document that conversation with a drawing. Five people […]
‘I wouldn’t know how to tell you what I do … I’m a respirateur — a breather’.[^1] — Marcel Duchamp In 1919, Marcel Duchamp was waiting to board a ship in Le Havre, bound for New York, when he decided to present a work to his affluent New York hosts, the Arensbergs, whom he believed […]
Office of Australia 23 January – 20 February, 2010 Box Copy, Brisbane Joseph Breikers of Boxcopy is also present David M. Thomas : How do you see a strategy such as institutional critique functioning within a space like Box Copy? Dirk Yates : For me the initial impetus for providing a critique about this small […]
The monument as a public art form has had a significant impact on art history and the way in which civic space and the geography of cities have been experienced. Yet the monument has a more complicated function than its official status as memorial. Its heroic subject matter and dominant presence in public space allow […]
In 2006, French artist Marie-Jeanne Hoffner undertook a residency at Monash University and it was during this period that she and Melbourne-based artist Stephen Garrett discovered an affinity in their approaches to making art. In the same year, Garrett in fact built part of Hoffner’s work for her exhibition Heimlich — What Belongs To The […]
Street art constitutes a diverse set of acts, gestures and mark-making insinuated and acted out within the physical space of our daily lives.[^1] The unsolicited creativity evidenced within the public sphere is a means of expression not only restricted to rebellious spasms, but more expansively to an articulation that seeks the pleasure of taking an […]
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 […]
There are some activities in life that have a natural way of bringing people together. Real things: talking, cooking, craft. With each of these communal rituals, the central act of coming together is often more important than the products produced. Long before the concept of community art centres or Stitch ’n’ Bitch cafes,[^1] women were […]
‘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 […]
Surveying the lands of the 21st century, we can’t help but notice a few things. The first observation relates to the revered shaman and charlatan Joseph Beuys, who was overheard making the histrionic claim that ‘everyone is an artist’. Twenty-four years on and it is clear that Beuys’ idea was more an act of imagination […]
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 […]