Category Archives: Writing by others

Environmental Audit – artists book

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Here’s a link to the Environmental Audit artist book.
An artist book drawn from the Environmental Audit project by Lucas Ihlein, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2010. This artist book was published to coincide with the exhibition “Diagrammatic: Works by Lucas Ihlein and Collaborators”, curated by Jasmin Stephens, Deakin University Art Gallery, 11 April – 18 May 2018, supported by the School of Communications and Creative Arts, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University. Design by Fiona Hudson

Daoshan Dude

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English Translation of lyrics from Daoshan Dude, by Wu Tiao Ren

Daoshan dude, Why are you wearing broken shoes?
Daoshan dude, Why don’t you have your hair cut?
Daoshan dude, Why are you still riding the worn out bike?
Cocky.
You are cocky. You are cocky. You are cocky.

It’s going to rain.
My mum is waiting for me to have supper.
But what can I do?
I’m in a watch house.
My mum said “come home and eat”
It’s all my fault
I am cocky.
You are cocky.

Productive Anonymity

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The ability to experiment without much at stake except your own process of discovery… time to think and to not think; to look at art; to waste on dead-end art projects that no one will ever see again and that your best friends may remember better than you will … the ability to do things with just enough attention to make you feel like you are part of a world and can go forward, but not so much that your gesture becomes a trademark and a creative prison.

Artist Mira Schor, from an article on The Brooklyn Rail, Feb 2013.
Quoted in the book The Art of Critical Making, in conversation by Patricia C. Phillips, with Silvia Acosta, Daniel Lefcourt, Andrew Raftery, Kevin Zucker, Cas Holman (all staff at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)).

Servile Youth by Lisa Kelly

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Way back in September 2002, Lisa Kelly wrote a long, detailed, wide ranging, muckraking essay about artist run galleries, art writing, and careerism…

The essay, entitled “Servile Youth” was originally published in the Elastic printed project, Sydney 2002/2003 in the chapter ‘Points of View’ coordinated by Anne Kay.

I stumbled across a pdf copy recently, and it struck me that it was just as relevant as ever. Lisa tells it like it is.

Read it here [pdf].

Under the Counter: Interview with Ken Bolton

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ken bolton at club foote
[Ken Bolton at Club Foote, year unknown…]

Earlier this year, I came across a very enjoyable interview between Ken Bolton and Robert Cook. I have long enjoyed the writing of both gentlemen: Bolton a poet, publisher and the man behind the counter at Adelaide’s Dark Horsey Bookshop, who had just put out a collection of his writing on art; and Cook, a curator whose essays are always a great pleasure to read.

One of the things I liked about this interview is that the interviewer does not attempt to hide behind a curtain of anonymity, trying to absent himself in order to ‘get to the facts’. Rather, he puts himself in the picture. Both authors are self deprecating, amusing and intelligent.

I approached Cook and Bolton after I saw the interview, and asked if they wouldn’t mind me cross-publishing it here, in the hope that it will have a bonus life, augmenting its tenancy as a PDF on the Broadsheet website. Many thanks to both (the below is a slightly tweaked version of the one published in Broadsheet). Thanks to Peter and Alan over at Broadsheet for permission to cross-publish.

For the record, the bibliographic details for the original interview are:

Robert Cook, “Under the Counter: Interview with Ken Bolton”, in Contemporary Visual Art + Culture Broadsheet, 39.1, 2010.

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Art as public forum: the art of blogging by Laura Hindmarsh

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Laura Hindmarsh, an artist from Perth, recently wrote an article for UN Magazine entitled Art as public forum: the art of blogging.

Laura and I met just over a year ago when I was visiting Perth and working on the Bon Scott Blog. Together with her colleagues Claire and Anna, she sometimes makes projects under the name Inter Collective. The collective runs a blog parallel to their ephemeral art practices. When we met last year, we shared thoughts about our various motivations for blogging alongside interactions “in real life” (or as Lauren would say, “IRL”).

For one thing, as artists operating within an educational institution (at the time Laura was an honours students at UWA in Perth) blogging gave visibility to her otherwise “blink and you miss it” / “you had to be there” practices – making those practices available for “assessment” by the university system. But of course there’s more to it than that…

You can download Laura’s article in UN Magazine here (but you have to get the whole magazine as a 12MB pdf). For ease of use, I reproduce it below.

Laura also has some interesting ideas about the effects of keeping a blog on the experience of time. In one email she sent me, she used the term “structural intervalling” as a way of thinking about how daily blogging breaks time down into chunks which become manageable… but there wasn’t room for such complexities in this essay. Hopefully we’ll hear more on these ideas from Laura soon…

On with her article–
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Lone Twin interviewed by Christopher Hewitt

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the following is a cut and paste from this word document here (or here if you want google’s transformation into html).

-It’s a spiel and interview about Lone Twin, which was put together by the wonderful Christopher Hewitt for the 2004 Brussels KunstenFESTIVALdesArts. I’m pasting it here because it’s really interesting, and because there’s not much of this depth available on the web about Lone Twin.

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BANALITIES FOR NAPOLEON (by Ruark Lewis)

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3. Arbitration makes great sense

9. Mending the parts of holes that leave nothing till the end

10. To send the food to friends

11. A van unbeknown

13. And enter in the swim of things

16. The nature of the rock

19. Film is shot at angles

20. And speaking all the time

21. United let us fly

22. The key is in the trees where books are concerned

25. Dissolves her lips against the glass

27. Nothing higher nothing lower

29. Forms four times exactly what they are

31. They bathe and leave the trees undressed

32. The animal is criminal

35. A broken zodiac

37. To mediate to mediate

39. In time the memory of a child returns

40. The egyptian is a bird

43. The book is nong

46. The sting is kunt

48. Because of greed the worker is condemned

49. Flick flack swings song tools the cause of motion

50. Deep ends of oil smooths out phenomena

51. In comfort and distress

BANALITIES FOR THE PERFECT HOUSE (by Ruark Lewis)

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1. Arbitration makes slim pickings

2. The best parts are mostly left to last

3. Stodge belittles starchy foods

4. A van below the motorway wears you down

5. To swim around

6. One, two, three, four, five, six are convincing cracks between the rocks

7. Angular sightings deliver films

8. A female of the species

9. Your letter to bananas

10a. Trees conceal small books

10b. Her extended lips against the glass

11. A pedant nut is formed by fourths

12. Well dressed and bathed he leaves the house

13. Excited like an animal

14a. The wicked smashing of the trees

14b. To mediate against philosophers

14c. Is the source of stories

15a. Nong

15b. Kunt

15c. Without the tools of negotiation the workers are condemned

16. The nature of the swing has caused the motion

17. A phenomena is massaged by oil

18. Is a comfort in distress

19. The principle of universities is formed with money

20. The left hand and the dumb

21. He has nous for rooms

22. She had nous for knitting

23. United in the union of the students

24. A crossing of the floor is no longer possible