drapery service and coffee service

some rough notes, thinking about expanded cinema, Bourriaud, Museums etc…

Sussi suggested doing expanded cinema stuff at the kelleberrin cinema …. i had heard about domenico’s cinema in that town, thought it was a marvellous purchase. so i would definitely be into doing something out there. i reckon the locals would be into expanded cinema, i think, being “movies”, it might transcend the “wanky” conceptualism of its contemporary productions in art.

i really liked bourriards comments about the opening hours of museums: ( http://www.stretcher.org/interviews/i1.php ) …

Stretcher: Palais de Tokyo has unusual hours, noon to midnight. That simple shift changes the gallery into a more social space. In effect, it embodies the notion of relational aesthetics at an institutional level. How does relational aesthetics change what you do as curators?

NB: There are two ways of building an institution. One way is to build a jewelry box to present objects and the other one is to conceive of it as an open market where everything is removable and you can change things all the time. That was the main idea at Palais de Tokyo. I think we cannot present art the way we did in the last century because now we’re in 2002. We have to start from people’s behaviors and the way they live. The idea with Palais de Tokyo was to adjust the art institution to the way people live in their city and obviously, it had to be open until midnight. about how they arent admin spaces like banks, so why the hell should they have bank hours? this is very pertinent of the mca where i work in sydney (changing the exhibitions, and doing education workshops with visiting kids)…our hours are 10am-5pm…a decision totally based on the wage structures of the public service… the museum is basically only used 7 out of 24 hours in the day. nuts.

sussi’s drapery service idea (making curtains for locals of the rural west australian town of kelleberrin) sounds marvellous. she writes,

The Drapery Service became just that. As IASKA was a former drapery store, it really has left a hole in the access to basic drapery. Though I didn’t realise that fully to begin with, people who genuinly needed a sat of curtains signed up. The project was for the ‘open space artist program’, so v.early on I promised a Drapery tour for the opening of the main event ‘centre for S.A.L.T. expression’. I visited peoples homes with my sewing machine, scissors, fabric etc and taught them how to make a set of curtains. I’m fairly amazed at the generousity of Kellerberrin to let a complete stranger into their home to take photos of the living room and then come back to overtake their kitchen table for about 4 hours and agree to having a set of curtains that were ‘westrail yellow’ on the outside. I was v.hesitant about the tour…but transposed the gallery audience into a mobile spectacle in the form of a tourist bus. I have made a commitment to some people in Kellerberrin to continue to make curtains with them – so thats my weekends for the next month.

as my crusty friend arthur russell would say, very “generous” and i think you cant go past generosity for breaking through non-art audience’s preconceived ideas of the pretentiousness of art and artists… i wonder what did the curtain recipients think of the idea that what sussi was doing was “art”? or did that not come up? i saw some stuff on the bourriard interview web page (see link above) about an artist called christine hill who seems to be interested in similar things…

at the eaf in adelaide, the premise of my project (called “bilateral”) began with planning for a simple traditional-form “exhibition” there. i had been on the artists regional exchange (ARX) to perth, singapore and hong kong, and made pieces of art in each of those places. it was a way to show them all together in one place. yet i never felt comfortable just doing a “static” show…since the ARX work had been made under “residency” conditions in each of those towns…so i thought to stay in adelaide for the duration of the show…have a residency there too…initially I concieved this as a way to go about making something new in that place, an analogue to the time i’d spent in the three ARX cities…but it turned out different, as it does…due to the specificities of the situation…

which were, i was living in the gallery with this art i’d already made, and i found that if i hung out in there during gallery opening hours (tues-sat 11-5pm for about 3.5 weeks), it was nigh-on impossible for me to “make” anything new, as i spent the entire time chatting with visitors. although the city was playing host to me, in fact within the gallery it was I who was the host, making coffee and sitting them down on some couches for a chat.often we’d talk so long that they’d have to rush off, realising that they hadnt even taken time to “see the art”. I loved that. the talking was the thing. I made some good friends, I spent lots of time with some very boring people, i think i also went a way towards “humanising” a space which had been previously described as cold and grey. (there is a short article about it on the realtime website at http://www.realtimearts.net/rt53/hoskin.html )

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