In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life. — Karl Marx 124,908 took place in the city of Rustavi, Georgia, as part of the 2nd Tbilisi Triennial: ‘Self-Organised Systems’. The title of the show expanded the threads of Lucy R Lippard’s ‘numbers shows’. Curator Tara McDowell and host, Galaqtion Eristavi (of Georgian […]
Saskia Doherty is an early career visual artist and writer based in Melbourne, working across drawing, printmedia, sculpture, ceramics, bookmaking, photography, video, sound, performance, text and poetry. Presented here is an audio artwork based on Saskia’s artist pages in this magazine, The deep clap of bronze against bronze reverberates over a stretch of space.
Wizard Rolling is a collaborative work between Andrea Eckersley and Susan Jacobs, combining Jacobs’ material investigation into the melting point of gallium with narration from excerpts of Eckersley’s article The artist as transcendental empiricist (featuring discussion of artworks by Jacobs and Canadian artist Elizabeth Zvonar) in un Magazine 10.1 magazine. Andrea Eckersley is an artist […]
Sophia Dacy-Cole is an MFA candidate at Monash University. Her research concerns the co-mingling of process philosophy, contemporary art and grassroots activism. This is the full interview with Sophia and artist and theorist Erin Manning on her keynote For a Pragmatics of the Useless at the Transversal Matters conference, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, […]
Vincent Silk is a writer. His work has appeared in Seizure, Archer, Going Down Swinging, MIX NYC, Slit, Alien She, and elsewhere. Here Vincent interviews Despo Debby from the Australian sex worker art collective Debby Doesn’t Do It For Free about visual art and performance through collective and anonymous, art-making and current political issues in […]
Mashara Wachjudy is a Sydney-based emerging artist currently undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts at UNSW/Art & Design. Wachjudy’s work attempts to focus predominantly on the intricacies of cultural identity and belonging through the complex and interwoven relationships between place, time and culture. Wachjudy’s debut solo exhibition, Outside Inside, was […]
[^1] There was a sense of urgency to communicate with the objects before our time was up. I had to let them know we are still out here, waiting for them, remembering them; that they weren’t forgotten. — Julie Gough, Trawlwoolway artist, 2015.[^2] The title of Soviet writer Sergei Tretyakov’s 1929 essay ‘The Biography of […]
Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole — Lázló Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance.[^1] Moss is hard to draw. I’m sitting in the garden of a small temple on the outskirts of Kyoto. In front of me is a thick carpet of moss, only occasionally pierced […]
Imagine yourself strolling into a gallery. You pause at the entry to read the introductory wall text but find yourself struggling to see much over the shoulders of other patrons. Rather than stand on tiptoes, you use your phone to scan the QR code pasted on the wall. You are instantly taken to a page […]
What is immediately striking about Boris Arvatov’s co-worker theory lies in a social reconfiguration of the relationship to the object; rather than urging a slowing or cessation of commercial production, Arvatov advocates for relationships with the material that are meaningful and productive. Where Arvatov sees the saturation of ‘thing’ as a ground for contemplation and […]
A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. — Vladimir Nabokov, […]
Meret Oppenheim made her furry-lined teacup on a whim. She made it quickly when she was young, then she spent a large part of the rest of her career trying to replicate its triumph. She was forever a slave to that early object’s success. We saw David Byrne sing Burning Down the House some years […]
Shelley McSpedden & Meredith Turnbull : Russian Constructivist theorist, Boris Arvatov, promoted the potential of ‘things’ to act as dynamic agents for social and political change. Does such a model of objects have relevance to the work that you do? Tahjee Moar : Boris Arvatov’s notion of ‘co-worker’ and the potential of ‘things’ to act […]