Author Archives: Lucas

petition to raise artists fees

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Sydney Art Seen Society: meeting no. 1
Thursday, 8 July 2004, 7:30pm
Reginald Murphy Hall, Kings Cross

Gail Hastings and Lisa Kelly organised this meeting to lobby for “a raise” in artists fees for exhibitions in Australian galleries and museums which receive government funding. They have been distributing a petition to that effect. About 40 people were in attendance, at my rough estimate, maybe half of them being artists. The other half were, I reckon, “soft spies” – that is, folks who work at government funded galleries who came along to check out what might happen. It was a rainy night, and Sydney people being who they are, it was probably a pretty good turn out.

There was some contention as to the details of the “demands” in the petition – at least $2000 for solo exhibitions, and at least $500 per artist for group shows. Some artists, like Marg Roberts, reckoned that this amount was just as tokenistic as asking for $50. For Marg, something in the realms of $20,000 was more realistic.

Damien Lawson made a clear comparison between galleries and employers, both of whom have it in their interests to reduce “labour costs” to a minimum. He advocated a more “french” way of organising artist’s wages, something ongoing like a “living wage” and referred to a big artists strike in Paris which ground the big summer arts festivals to a halt. The “living wage” idea (was/is this in place in New Zealand?) also would accomodate the vast majority of artists who DON’T exhibit in government-funded galleries. Lawson’s points were important, I thought, because no matter what the nuts and bolts are of the “demands,” it will be essential for artists to have some kind of solidarity and collectivity in order for it to succeed. Artists seem to always suffer from this idea that we are “individuals” – not to mention the very opportunistic and competitive nature of the contemporary art world.

Chryssy Tintner from Viscopy was there, and she was good to have at the meeting because she pointed out the discrepancy between what is standard procedure in the paying of royalties for the use of music in commercials, for example, and the amount paid for the reproduction of artworks. It’s all part of the same set of rights that visual artists don’t have…
Tamara Winikoff from NAVA was there too – she provided essential information about the ongoing campaigns that NAVA has been involved in to try to improve artists rights – it will definitely be necessary to continue to collaborate with NAVA.

One of the issues that was glaringly obvious was the rarity of this kind of meeting – that artists are not very good at working collectively – and it would be good to get more information about the history and activities of the ArtWorkers Union – it may be necessary to revive the union to become once again a workable grassroots organisation.

A follow up meeting will take place at 2:00pm on Saturday, 17.07.2004 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales coffee shop.

For more information and the full minutes of the meetings, email sydneyartseensociety@yahoo.com

…………………………………………………………………….
ps the original call out for this meeting was:

SYDNEY ART SEEN SOCIETY: meeting no.1
WHOA! Was that a banana skin I just slipped on! or just another sliding
art-institution standard?
URGENT PUBLIC MEETING please pass on to others
WHEN THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004
WHERE REGINALD MURPHY HALL
Corner of Greenknowe Ave and Elizabeth Bay Rd, Kings Cross
TIME 7:30 to 8:45pm
The Sydney Biennale opened recently, which provided the opportunity for
many artists to meet and a number to recognise in each others misfortunes
the rapidly declining viability of the local, visual art situation here.
While the Howard Government may have commissioned the Myer Report to analyse,
nationally, the extent of artists’ troubles, its recommendations have not
only not at all been felt within the visual arts at the ground level (ie. by
artists), but also little address the pervading ‘dumbness’ (in both senses
of lacking intelligence and a stifled dialogue (lacking speech)) that is
creeping through our major art institutions and throttling an engaging and
internationally recognisable contemporary visual culture here. Sydney is
quickly becoming the black hole of the Australian contemporary art scene,
the place where contemporary visual artists get swallowed up and disappear:
their work unacknowledged, its potential wasted. Need this be so?

If you feel like some dangerous discussion, please join us at this informal
meeting to rekindle a much needed dialogue and to work out ways to kick-start
a re-engaged, contemporary visual culture in Sydney. At least
come along and sign our petition.*

* A petition will be present that calls for a standard artists’ fee of no
less than $2,000 per individual exhibition and a pro rata payment no less
than $500 for group exhibitions to be adopted by all publicly funded, visual
art institutions, nationally.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT CO-CONVENERS GAIL HASTINGS AND LISA
KELLY AT sydneyartseensociety@yahoo.com

The Sydney Art Seen Society has been formed as an urgent redress of the
current decline of standards in the professional environment of contemporary
visual art in Sydney, where the production of visual culture is being more
and more determined by art-institutional programmes rather than these
programmes being determined by the art. By facilitating a meeting place for
artists to discuss, debate and discern solutions to the prevalent issues
hindering progressive visual art here at present, the Sydney Art Seen
Society aims to stimulate the development of a more vigourous and potent
contemporary visual culture in Sydney, based on the vital and critical
practice of visual artists.

DUE TO THE IMPOVERISHED STATE THE CURRENT SITUATION FINDS VISUAL ARTISTS,
MEMBERSHIP IS FREE, ONE NEED ONLY JOIN AT A MEETING

SPLINT MATE

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[this article was written in early July 2004, and originally appeared in Spinach7 Magazine, under the title SPLINT MATE. Before that, it emerged as a scrappy blog entry here.]

LUCAS IHLEIN argues that ‘interactive’ arts practice means more than pressing buttons; and assembles a gammy billy-cart to prove his point.

Much has been made of recent advances in new media art — particularly the development of ‘interactive’ and ‘immersive’ environments and installations. Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and its German sibling Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie [ZKM] pride themselves on supporting artists who experiment with new ways of overwhelming our senses with sound and image. The public (so the marketing department tells us) is hungry to see futuristic interfaces between human and machine. Yet how many of these artworks succeed in engaging museum visitors beyond “press here and see what happens”? How often is it that a simple, old fashioned conversation is more rewardingly ‘interactive’ than the choose-your-own-adventure style new media works to which we are increasingly exposed?

Around the same time that ACMI launched its teched-up exhibition 2004: Australian Culture Now in Federation Square, CLUBSproject inc, an artist-run venture above Melbourne’s Builders Arms Hotel, presented multipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances (mMa). Taking place in July, mMa was an ongoing series of “art conversations” taking the form of “collaborative events and activities […] by and between people whose practices construct, explore, and enact multiple social relations”. The most sophisticated items of ‘new media’ in mMa were video cameras and television sets — all of which have been more or less available as artists’ tools since the early 1970s.

Among the myriad of old media projects at mMa was Splint, a kind of organic Meccano set made by Jason Maling and Torie Nimmervoll. Described as “the way of the stump and the strap”, Splint is a toy/tool-kit, hand-made from wood, rope, and leather that deliberately comes without instructions or hints.

Nimmervoll and Maling rarely present Splint within an art gallery context, which they claim can restrict free play and participation (they prefer to work in schools or public places). Gallery visitors usually come with a tentative not-sure-if-I-can-touch inhibition, which they learn from the conventional presentation of art. Splint’s makers set arbitrary (and often silly) tasks for themselves and willing participants to carry out — usually within an urban context. For instance, “use the apparatus to scale a tall, sheer wall”.

When I arrived at CLUBS my friend Damien was already sniffing around Splint — he was instinctively drawn to it, but wasn’t sure exactly how to tackle its mysterious inventory of spare parts. The elements of the kit seem very much like found industrial tools for the engineering of a car. They look like something ‘proper’ — something extremely well made with a (hidden) intended purpose. The kit is divided up into “cells” – each cell contains wooden disks, various lengths of rope, spiral-carved “stumps” (much like medieval cricket stumps), and a leather harness and hexagonal mat. All are engineered to withstand the hammering they receive from enthusiastic users, and are often repairable when damaged or worn out.

Splint lends itself to — and almost demands — collaboration. Soon enough Damien and I were diving into the metal cases containing the stumps and rustic-smelling sisal rope, and attempting, in our uncritically-masculine way to make our own ‘billy-cart’. This playful, absorbing construction task kept us going for a few hours, and even when our makeshift vehicle ended up in the pits, with a tragically split chassis, Maling didn’t chastise us — “I guess we’ll retire that piece,” he said with a shrug.

Cleverer than us were a duo of (also male) theatre designers who set about designing a comfy and functional chair out of the versatile kit. The dedicated pair, concerned not just with the use-value, but also the look of their piece of furniture, gave themselves the limitation of not using any knots. Such aesthetic concerns are very much a part of the Splint experience. The kit comes complete with a “self-assessment” system — a blackboard (pictured) upon which participants can rate their own progress — using criteria like “environmental negotiation, utility, gameplay, geometry, physical negotiation, and aesthetics”. And Maling and Nimmervoll have kept a log of results at regular intervals during the evolving life of Splint.

One of the most important products of Splint is also one of the most intangible: the collaborative relationship which stealthily develops between the two or more ‘players’ as they work on a common task. This was evident in the knotted brows of the chair-makers as they quietly tackled problem after problem with the utility of their ad-hoc furniture, while not wanting to sacrifice the aesthetic decision to avoid knots. Splint is thus a tool for learning, not only about physical construction, but also about how to negotiate joint decision-making in a (self-determined) task. This educational aspect renders the kit ideal for workshops with children — and watching them work with the elements of Splint helps Maling and Nimmervoll improve its materials and design in a constant process of evolution.

When I returned to CLUBS a few days later, I found our billy-cart had been recycled by subsequent participants into a harness and rope ladder for scaling the exterior wall of the Builders’ Arms Hotel — a MacGuyver-style emergency exit system from the bustlingly sociable art venue.

Each time I visited mMa it was jam-packed and chaotic. Groups of artists seemed to be cooking up projects in every corner, and newcomers were warmly welcomed to join in. Soup was doled up as you walked in the door, and free tea and coffee were available. These humble, hospitable gestures may seem minor, but I don’t doubt that they were as thoroughly discussed and orchestrated as any of the other rich and interactive elements of mMa.

…………………………
addendum for blog:

Also part of mMa:
-a vast repository of artists books, zines, articles and journals, set up in a comfy couchy carpeted space next to a ricketty photocopy machine.
-a re-creation of Azlan McClennan‘s censored artwork – complete with a planned forum to discuss the issues surrounding the work, on Sunday 4th July…
-an old Mac Classic set up so that visitors can log in their immediate responses and messages regarding the show (presumably these responses will be posted on the CLUBS website shortly)…
-documentation of The Laws Project by Damien Lawson and Kylie Wilkinson – this piece began with the distribution of hundreds of fridge magnets outlining the US government’s INTERROGATION RULES OF ENGAGEMENT – rules which became apparent following the scandal surrounding the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.
Wilkinson and Lawson followed this up with a “re-enactment” (in Federation Square) of the famous photograph of the Iraqi prisoner balancing precariously with a black sack on his head.
-and there are DOZENS more projects coming up during the rest of the mMa…

The launch afternoon of mMa was jam-packed and chaotic. Soup was doled up as you walked in the door, and tea and coffee were constantly available for free. These humble, hospitable gestures may seem minor, but I don’t doubt that they were as thoroughly discussed and orchestrated as any of the other elements of mMa.

mMa was organised by Bianca Hester as a part of Resistance Through Rituals, coordinated by Lisa Kelly at Westspace.

the art of snoopping

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On Wed 7 July 2004, Jaye Hayes presented an evening of "snoopping" @ West Space. In the invitation to the event, she wrote:
"NUCA has lured me out of the shadows for 1 nite only to share the SNOOPP story for Resistance Through Rituals. there'll be some kind of explanation of my behaviour & various bits of antenna trash, plus a tour of the local gutter network.
so come along for a cup of tea & a chat 🙂
jaye"
—
NUCA #41 : Jaye Hayes | snoopp
snoopp vs 2.0 (2004)
subliminal non object oriented piezoelectric processor
http://subliminal.va.com.au/snoopp
She crawls into inner-city gutters after dark, a mobile cellular operator, a subliminal insect on an obscure mission. She is submerging, diving into the darkness, a bug in the code of the street, a disturbance in the energy field. The de-visioned dancer becomes a renegade radiobody, picking up signals & generating bodytext transmissions. She operates as an interactive micro-media unit; embodying the meta-physics of micro-radio.
Gutters are a network, she finds a portal & hacks in. As she jams the architecture of the indent, she mobilizes other possibilities. A temporary telemetric system emerges as the radiobody tunes in to the spatial signal & starts generating feedback. Inside the loop, her data-body dislocates across time-space dimensions creating a re-spatializing sequence; an electro-magnetic interference zone. Dissolving into waves of white noise, she becomes a distributed radio-kinetic entity.
Radio text & signal data are redirected via tech-tools while other residues remain at street level. Night after night, lurking in the dark, mapping the nodes of the network, a tiny telemetric insect shedding data, creating links to an elsewhere…

………….

after the event, Jaye wrote the following:

an experiment in SNOOPP sharing >>>
 
a back room, a faraday cage, a radio bunker, a listening library, a snoopp cell, a receiving dock.
i opened a gateway to my subliminal world & invited low-level listening & personal space-sharing.
the cosy room filled with warm bodies. 'it felt like being in your bedroom.'
but the critical mass solidified an expectation of 1-to-many broadcasting….
 
she attempted to reboot.
she deployed tactical failure.
she let them feel their way in.
she followed the flow.
she was speechless.
she hung out in the library.
she was dull & happy.
she scanned their bodies for signals.
she made personal connections.
she made lists.
she drank tea.
she became buffologous.
she started invoking willow.
she let andrew set the tone.
they waited for something to happen.
it didn't.
she let it go on that way for a while.
some people got immersed.
some people got impatient.
she was too subtle for some.
she surrendered to talkback.
she was curious.
she was conversational.
she was unprofessional.
she was a duckling (ugly).
she showed them her antenna trash.
she made a circuit of radiobodies.
she channel surfed.
she consulted the books.
she held onto the rock.
she played the inbetweens.
she led them out into the rain…

magic in melbourne

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I'm down in Melbourne for NUCA's participation in Resistance thru Rituals, which opened on Thursday night June 24. Andrew Harper, the witch from Hobart and Australia's 24th Most UnCollectable Artist, made the trip to Melbourne for the show. At the Westspace opening on Thursday night, he performed part 4 of his "Flying Spell" – an ongoing series of incantations which, from my meagre understanding of all things witchy, is about transformation and movement. This spell is a positive progression from his previous "Celluloid Curse Against the Current Government" (completed a year ago) in which John Howard was cursed, not to die per se, but simply to "know what it's like to be me" – and I'm thinking Harper's undertaking was no small task.

The curses and spells themselves take the form of a continuous barrage of screaming-banshee diatribe which alternates between Harper's endearing Tassie-ocker directness, and an anachronistic channeling of olde-englishe beseechings (full of "thee, thou, dost", etc). When casting spells, he simultaneously projects super8 films full of "shadowy" images. In the case of "The Celluloid Curse", the film was burnt, along with hair clippings and fluid drippings donated by members of the "audience" – and the ashes sent to our esteemed national leader in the mail.

One somewhat sceptical spell-witness on Thursday night wondered when the FLYING would kick in, given that it was a "Flying Spell" Harper was enacting. When questioned, Harper was philosophical – he didn't exactly know, since the spell was only up to part 4 (perhaps half-way through?) – or what form it might take. But he DID say that he had started the spells just before becoming part of the Network of UnCollectable Artists, a serendipitous connection that had resulted in his "flying" to Melbourne this week. So perhaps our Tassie Witch is already working his magic…

multiple and miscellaneous in melbourne

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Over at CLUBSproject, which I reckon is the most exciting gallery project in Australia right now, they're doing mcultipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances (mMa) – "a series of collaborative events, objects, actions, activities, documentation and information by and between people whose practices construct, explore, and enact multiple social relations." It's a mouthful, but basically we're talking artists who want to use the gallery as a "venue" rather than as a pristine display case.

CLUBS has a great deal going with the Builder's Arms Hotel in Fitzroy, where they get to use a few large, rough rooms above the pub for free – and rather than just renting them out for "static exhibitions" the committee consistently offers the space up for events which allow playful and dynamic interaction, often with an accessible and lo-fi approach. Damien, a veteran artist and activist who I met during mMa, commented that CLUBS was moving towards the kind of model a "Social Centre" aspires to [for more on social centres, see http://scan.cat.org.au] – and that it was exhilirating to see artists embracing this very progressive form of organising.

Damien and I got stuck into Splint, a kind of organic meccano set made by Jason Mailing and Torie Nimmervoll. At first we sniffed around it, not knowing what to do (like most projects at CLUBS, no explicit "instructions" are offered) – but soon enough we were diving into the metal cases for the hand-carved wooden stakes and beautifully-smelling sisal ropes, and attempting to make our own "billy-cart".

I can't speak highly enough about Splint – the playful, absorbing construction task kept us going for a few hours, and even when our makeshift vehicle ended up in the pits, with a tragically split-chassis, Mailing didn't chastise us – "I guess we'll retire that piece" he said with a shrug.

Cleverer than us were a duo of theatre designers who set about constructing a fully functional chair out of the versatile Splint kit, and even gave themselves the limitation of not using any knots! (Which famous architect said "It is harder to design a chair than a building"?)

One of the most intangible "products" of splint is the collaborative relationship which stealthily develops between the two or more "players" – and this was evident in the faces of the chair-makers as they tackled problem after problem with the utility of their ad-hoc furniture while not wanting to sacrifice their aesthetic decision to avoid knots.

Right next to Splint was CXXXXX's Breath piece – a fluxus-like task where friends were encouraged to step up to opposite sides of a piece of perspex projecting from the wall, and gently breathe condensation onto its surface. The sensation was intimate and confronting – the perspex allowing both participants to get very close to one another without quite touching – and some folks responded by utilising "distancing" strategies – laughing to break eye contact, or deliberately breathing onto the perspex away from the face of the other.

Also part of mMa:
-a vast repository of artists books, zines, articles and journals, set up in a comfy couchy carpeted space next to a ricketty photocopy machine.
-a re-creation of Azlan McClennan's censored artwork – complete with a planned forum to discuss the issues surrounding the work, on Sunday 4th July…
-an old Mac Classic set up so that visitors can log in their immediate responses and messages regarding the show (presumably these responses will be posted on the CLUBS website shortly)…
-documentation of The Laws Project by Damien and Kylie Wilkinson – this piece began with the distribution of hundreds of fridge magnets outlining the US government's INTERROGATION RULES OF ENGAGEMENT – rules which became apparent following the scandal surrounding the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.
Wilkinson and … followed this up with a "re-enactment" (in Federation Square) of the famous photograph of the Iraqi prisoner balancing precariously with a black sack on his head.
-and there are DOZENS more projects coming up during the rest of the mMa…

The launch afternoon of mMa was jam-packed and chaotic. Soup was doled up as you walked in the door, and tea and coffee were constantly available for free. These humble, hospitable gestures may seem minor, but I don't doubt that they were as thoroughly discussed and orchestrated as any of the other elements of mMa.

[a tidied up version of this blog entry, focusing on the SPLINT project will appear in the upcoming SPINACH7 magazine…]

[ps – i have posted that article up online now. See here.]

more ’bout NUCA…

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[the following was published in Resistance Through Rituals, to accompany the exhibition project with the same name, curated by Lisa Kelly at WestSpace in Melbourne in 2004]

NUCA (The Network of UnCollectable Artists) is one of those “organisations” that we artists seem to build around ourselves to legitimise, or somehow “bulk out” our puny activities – you know, like The Office of Utopic Procedures, the Pedestrian Bureau or the Organisation for Cultural Exchange and Mishap.

Why do we do this? Why fetishise or glamorise “the office”, when working in one generally involves a series of mundane, brain-wasting tasks? Of course, things would be different if you worked in the marketing department – where all the ideas get cooked up, all the media stunts, all the big-banner splashy stuff. We schleppers can’t stand the marketing department – their ideas always seem so lame-o (and even if they’re good, they’re lame, because we didn’t get to think them up).

But we can be the marketing department, and all the fat-cat execs rolled into one, when we form our own organisations, in our spare time. We think up the projects, we write the press releases, we chair the meetings, we control the budgets! It makes us feel pretty damn important. (Of course, we have to do all the crappy jobs too, but we kinda like that – it keeps us in touch with where we started out, right?)

And – we get to use acronyms! And make websites and letter-heads, and feel like we are part of something bigger. No longer are we just individual artists hammering away trying to make it in the artworld – we are making our own worlds! Finally, we get to feel like we belong.

All of that excitement is pretty far from the stagnated, bloated (but rapidly expanding) art-admin sector, which feeds off the fear-of-failure of some of our great creative souls. But are our small organisations really very different from the biggies? Besides having a chunkier budget and employees, what differentiates the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) (for example) from the grassroots Sydney Moving Image Coalition (SMIC)? Ambition! SMIC isn’t on the move, they’re not full of people who are here this year, and onto another, better paid job next year.

Simon Barney said it right when he said (and he’s said it many times, and will say it again if you get him talking) that his Briefcase Gallery (openings in a Sydney pub every second Tuesday) is an end in itself. Barney seethes whenever he reads the notion (and it’s quite often) that artists’ organisations are a “stepping stone” for emerging artists – an entrepreneurial venture designed to launch young hopefuls to a career beyond this one (and of course, only a lucky few will ever make it).

If this entrepreneurial model is widespread (and in the case of many recent Sydney Artist-Run-Galleries, it probably is) it’s irritating precisely because it’s such a waste of energy for all the losers. Like minor-league baseball, you’ve got to pay to play, precisely at the moment when you can least afford to.

That’s why it’s refreshing to be involved with entrepreneurial ventures which deliberately and directly attempt to establish non-hierarchical (and inexpensive) networks between artists. One of the most inspiring I have come across is the London Biennale, which, since 2000, has linked and nurtured the space-less and the budget-less. David Medalla, the Biennale’s venerable founder, envisions:

A do it yourself free arts festival. This means that artists who wish to participate are solely and entirely responsible for their participation: for his/her show, funding, transport, publicity, insurance, documentation, venue. We do help one another but only through voluntary and free choice. We have no bureau and therefore no bureaucrat.

The people power of the London Biennale is, obviously, a pisstake of the current global Biennale art circuit phenomenon. A Biennale that anyone can be in? But what about QUALITY? (From my experience in London, lack of quality was never really an issue, in the way that overblown, half-baked ideas often are, in the “real” Biennales)

In the same way, the Network of UnCollectable Artists (NUCA) is simultaneously stupidly-outlandish and deadly-serious. This puts us in league with The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) in Massachusetts, Peter Hill’s Museum of Contemporary Ideas (MOCI) in New York, the multi-national Danger Museum (DM), and Rodney Glick’s International Performance Space Tammin Australia (IPSTA). All share a love of ridiculous yet inspirational propositions, and a penchant for snappy acronyms. They are silly ideas which get talked about so much that they become reality.

NUCA’s first big, silly idea was to publish a magazine featuring Australia’s 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists. As a concept it was immediately oppositional – we wanted to lampoon the Australian Art Collector magazine, which publishes annual lists of artists to look out for on the market. This kind of art market speculation has always been a complete anathema to our desire for a do-it-yourself utopia. We envisioned a roughly photocopied zine secretly inserted into each copy of the Australian Art Collector in every magazine shop around the country.

But as NUCA’s growing core began to think more about the idea, and began to email it around, and as the enthusiasm poured in, we realised that there was a wealth of artists who identified with the term “uncollectable” for all sorts of different reasons – and that our publication could serve a purpose beyond satire – it could become a kind of document of their activities.

Six months later, the Network of UnCollectable Artists hardly even remembers its oppositional roots. NUCA has become a self-legitimised network in its own right. The magazine idea has evolved into a set of (un)collectable bubblegum cards (it will be nigh-on-impossible to collect a full set). These cards were first sold by our itinerant vendors in Melbourne during the 2004 Next Wave Festival.

The meetings and exchanges born during that festival offered NUCA’s “core” the chance to expand and decentralise – and our participation in resistance through rituals will be a coming of age – the moment when we go beyond our bubblegum cards, and enter a richer level of artist-organised activity, (fingers crossed) sans bureaucracy.

Your networking begins here:

Network of UnCollectable Artists:
http://www.uncollectables.net

International Performance Space Tammin Australia:
http://www.glickinternational.com/artwork/2001/01_08.htm

Danger Museum:
http://www.dangermuseum.com

Museum of Contemporary Ideas:
http://toolshed.artschool.utas.edu.au/moci/home.html

Museum of Bad Art:
http://www.museumofbadart.org

Office of Utopic Procedures:
http://www.westspace.org.au/publications/#utopic

Organisation for Cultural Exchange and Mishap:
http://www.westspace.org.au/publications/

London Biennale:
http://www.londonbiennale.org

Resistance Through Rituals
http://www.westspace.org.au/projects/resistance.htm

Clubs Project Space
http://www.clubsproject.org.au/

Sydney Moving Image Coalition
http://www.innersense.com.au/mic/sydney.html

Australian Art Collector Magazine
http://www.artcollector.net.au/

Briefcase Gallery
http://www.artspective.com/profiles/simonBarney/profile.php

noos from noo york

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On the way back from Montreal, we spent a few days in Brooklyn, nosing around there and Manhattan… two highlights:

Anthony McCall's film installation Doubling Back (2003) at the Whitney Museum.
Rumour has it that the recent resurgence in interest in McCall's films of the 1970s [especially Line Describing a Cone] has prompted him to get back into the game. Line Describing a Cone. is like no other film – during its 30 minute duration, a single point of light grows, inch by inch, to form a circle on the screen. The screen, however, aint where the action is – the room, filled with fog, becomes a container for a massive sculptural object – a cone of light – and an audience is free to roam, and play with the shell of light as it curves over your head. The piece is marvellous as a reductive structuralist film – literally, all you have is light and duration, and McCall makes you aware of the travelling path of the light beam – but it's also a great participatory experience, and very liberating, once you get over the inhibition to play that's been programmed in as a natural part of film and art-viewing practice.

Where Doubling Back goes beyond and above Line Describing a Cone, is in its infinitite loop-ness. While the earlier piece had a definite beginning and end, and a fixed audience, the newer one plays continuously, and visitors can casually enter and exit the gallery space. [in this case, the film was screened all day, every Sunday, as part of the Whitney Biennale]…In that dark room, I lost all sense of time – I think I watched the piece all the way through twice, but I couldn't be sure…

In addition, the shapes in Doubling Back are far more complex than the simple cone – two curved lines intersect each other, each moving almost imperceptibly slowly, constantly changing their curvatures. Concentrate on the movement, and you don't see it – look away for a few minutes, and you'll notice the change. The curved lines at times scoop under your knees, sometimes forming very a very tight leaf-like shape, and at other times they open right out, soaring above and around your head. Standing in the middle of these shapes, and gazing back towards the projector, I felt curiously disembodied – like my eyes, in my head, were my only sensory organs. But when I walked back out of the conoid shape, the light caressed my skin and I could palpably feel its tickle like the surface tension of a liquid.

Doubling Back was a delightful, subtle experience, in the midst of an exhibition [the Whitney Biennial] otherwise too chock-full of bitsy art and gossiping visitors.

[ps… you can see a page on McCall at the Whitney Museum's website, but I can't link to it directly – you will have to go to it [http://www.whitney.org/biennial/] and select "Explore Biennial Artists" in their stupid Macromedia Flash web pages…] … better still, have a look at a pic of Doubling Back here: http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424029518/_Anthony_McCall_Doubling_Back.html

Vito Acconci archive at Barbara Gladstone Gallery
Acconci is a legendary New Yorker whose artistic output [performances, videos, texts, photographs] between 1969 and 1973 was enormous. It seems evident from his work in this period that he was working some heavy shit out, personally – especially in his private relationships. In one work he would obsessively follow a stranger in the street, in another he masturbated under a temporary floor, apparently fantasising about the gallery visitors walking above him. He tried to stuff all of his partners long hair into his mouth, and thus get closer to "consuming" her; and in one durational piece, he waited each night at the end of an abandoned pier for lone visitors, to whom he would tell a [presumably damaging] secret. In many of his works Acconci used the formulae established for "conceptual" art-making to push the limits of his own psyche, to go beyond the "normal" and the "comfortable, especially with regards to daily behaviour.

With his work of the early 1970s I never get the idea that Acconci is simply "making art" or playing out hollow gestures for philosophical or intellectual pleasures. His work is moving and personally challenging, even at a distance of 30 (!) years.

In this show in New York, hundreds of type-written "scores" for performances and activities are presented, alongside photographs and video, where available, of the processes/outcomes. Plenty of the scores, it seems, were never realised, or else were self-sufficient and required no documentation.

One of my favourite pieces [which also I saw recently at the ICA in London] is a video in which Acconci, circa 1972, presents a slide show of some of his work from the previous years. There are two levels of "disclosure" in the slideshow. In the first, the artist, his back to us, selects a slide and points to aspects within it, explaining very simply and logically what he was attempting to achieve. Every so often, however, he gets up, walks to the wall on which the slide is projected, and turns sideways, whispering, as if to somebody just off camera, a woman who he is obviously close to. And he says things like "…but only you, only you would know what this piece was really about, only you know what happened between us that July, when she came and began living with us, and the tension, the jealousy was thick in the house…" and so on. What I found moving about this work was the need, the tangible need to disclose, everything, and so to avoid letting "Art" take over, for the work to become merely an "art-work". The risk is clear – Acconci's art activities could (and did?) change his life.

[links: Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Acconci Studios]

 

Interview at Chaos Generation

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Kirsten Lowe has interviewed ME for Chaos Generation web zine. It's a long-winded, egotistical rant ranging from my earliest days as an ignorant-post-fluxist, to my current flash-in-the-pan preoccupations. She was also generous enough to post up pics of some o' my projects, including Bilateral [2002] (where I lived in an Adelaide gallery for a month), and the little-known HENIHLE Booth [1996], created in collaboration with Mick Hender.

I first met Kirsten when I gave a "talk" about zines and postering, at the Australian Centre for Photography, to accompany an exhibition called My Xerox Weighs a Tonne, organised by Melbourne's Misha Hollenbach and Shauna Toohey (Perks & Mini). I didn't like the show, but, not wanting to dwell on the negative, talked about some more potentially interesting uses of DIY media/exchange. (My argument was that Hollenbach and Toohey had turned zine/postering into a "mere" style – which was conducive to an "exchange of prestige" between the "grungy street artist" and the "respectable gallery", but not much more.)

As Chaos Generation's editor, Kirsten keeps an eye out for events like this to promote and review. She has a very wide range of interests (much wider than myself!) and doesn't mind mentioning (for example) TropFest and SquatFest in the same page, with equal enthusiasm. It's this non-oppositional approach to her do-it-yourself publishing venture that I like.

Teddy Cruz at the CCA

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Down at the Canadian Centre for Architecture last night, I  attended a lecture by Architect Teddy Cruz, who works between San Diego (USA) and Tijuana (Mexico). He showed these powerful slides of the long long fence that runs between California and Mexico, "holding back the tide" of human movement to the richer northern state. The fence, constructed from the recycled steel landing mats that were used in the first "Gulf War" a decade ago, stretches right into the ocean. I find these images, fencing off the beach itself, to be quite violent, and certainly the graphic nature of the fence itself has been an inspiration and focus for many of the art projects initiated by the Border Art Workshop and others.

Cruz made some fascinating observations about the economies of exchange going on between the two border cities. For instance, humans are "traded" north, whereas discarded construction materials (like old tyres, wooden shipping pallets, and even entire demountable houses, are "traded" south). You can see quite clearly from aerial photos of the border territory, that the settlement of Tijuana is crowding to the border, pushing right up against the limit of the wall…whereas the settlements of San Diego seem to be retreating from the wall. One of the things Cruz seems to be constantly tackling is the issue of zoning. In an interview, he says:

"So many metaphors about this wall.  This city [Tijuana] crashes against this wall.  Its almost like the wall becomes a dam that keeps the intensity of this chaos, supposedly, this density from contaminating the picturesque suburban order of San Diego.  I call it a zero-setback at the border, because it’s a whole country leaning against the other in a zero-setback condition, again speaking of urbanism.  A zero-setback condition that is very much out of the idea of space in the United States."

[I understand the term "setback" to refer to the minimum legal distance between a property's boundary and the building on it. Setback is obviously something of more concern in the "sterile" suburbs of San Diego than in the more ad-hoc construction of Tijuana.]

When working in the United States, often with non-profit housing organisations to provide shelter for immigrants, Cruz often seeks to incorporate the seemingly chaotic land-use patterns from south of the border. For instance, recognising that small "unofficial" economies (like micro veggie markets) are a part of the lifestyle of the residents, he finds ways to make the housing spaces adapt to "mixed use" – such as having fences between properties fold down horizontally to become ad-hoc market-stall benches, or going beyond the density laws by building illegal small apartments which share kitchen and bathrooms (and hence doubling the population density). All these things are an attempt to adapt the land to the way of life of the residents, instead of the other way around.

Surprisingly, Cruz has found that the local councils are responding positively to his agitation – apparently they get hardly any input from architects about the need to change zoning regulations. And this is one of the most sobering points of his lecture – that architects need to push to be able to design not only the boxes that fit into the existing "invisible borders" within a city itself (property boundaries, zoning restrictions) but to also shape and move the borders themselves.

[postscript August 2006: more on teddy cruz here (thanks to Ian Milliss for the link) :

http://resilience.geog.mcgill.ca/blog/index.php/2006/03/15/teddy-cruz-what-adaptive-architecture-can-learn-from-shantytowns/  ]

Detroit/Windsor

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In early February 2004 Jane and I attended the excellent Media City film and video festival in Windsor, (Ontario, Canada). Windsor is the city that Mike Moore features (briefly) in Bowling for Columbine, as a contrast to Detroit (which is just across the river in the USA). Canadians, he claims, leave their doors unlocked, and don't kill each other with guns, even though they still own a lot of them. Well, we don't know about the guns, but have yet to meet any Canadians who admit to leaving their front doors unlocked. So, Moore might have been taking a little cinematic licence on that one. In Detroit, however, there are plenty of open doors, windows, and rooftops just asking to be walked into. In a one hour walk from downtown up Woodward Street towards the Detroit Institute of Arts, (where we saw the amazing Diego Rivera Industry mural) we shot almost 60 empty buildings, including some stunning old skyscrapers – and, a short walk away, the sombre ex-Railway Station, apparently empty for more than 20 years. I have posted the pics up here.

Scooting around the web, it's obvious that I am by no means the first to document some of the abandoned sites of Detroit. The excellent Infiltration gang has a whole page o' links, and this local infiltrator at detroitblog has strong and sometimes convincing views about the city's empty spaces as a rich architectual heritage (not needing fixing), evidently a view not shared by the blightbusters group, who want to buy 'em up, fix 'em up (or knock 'em down). There is also an article about trees growing on the rooftops of long-forgotten downtown blocks, and a very thorough photographic tour, and spirited discussion forum about Abandoned Detroit. A very funny (though in the end quite sobering) weekly "un-real estate" listing is posted in the Detroit Metro Times newspaper. There's heaps more if you have time and are handy on google. It's obviously a big issue for many many locals.