Giving Up

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peanuts never give up
(thanks to Charles Schultz for this drawing, and to this page for some motivational thoughts: “What separates the losers in life from the winners is that the winners press on.” Yikes. )

Liz Pulie, erstwhile publisher of Lives of the Artists Magazine mentioned to me recently that she was interested in giving up.

How can I explain? It’s been a while since she put out an edition of her mag. Has she given up production? Not really…it’s just that…like my Bilateral Blog, enthusiasm and energy to write comes in irregular bursts, and it can seem like things are getting stagnant, or that the whole project is set to collapse during the quiet times.
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SHELVE – notes from the archive

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shelve at cross arts

In April 2006, SHELVE (a sculpture I made back in 1997) was included in an exhibition at the Cross Art Projects called “Art Language – Every Publishable Place”. The page about that show is here: http://www.crossart.com.au/art_lang.html.

A few more pictures of the work are here. Ruark Lewis who curated the 2006 show at Cross Art, asked me to answer some questions about the work.

So here are my thoughts. Rough and unedited for the sake of the archive- Continue reading →

Bilateral Blogging – Essay about Bilateral Kellerberrin now available

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Bilateral Kellerberrin Screenshot

An essay I wrote about my blog-as-art project Bilateral Kellerberrin has been published in The International Journal of the Arts in Society. (You can download a pdf here or here.)

To give you a broad idea, the essay is about blogging as a new(ish) form of artmaking, requiring us to think in new(ish) ways about its ethics and aesthetics. It also involves a bit of thinking about some of the ideas in Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, particularly the idea of micro-utopias and the difference between art that occurs in -vs- out of an art gallery context. I’m following John Dewey’s concerns (from Art as Experience) that art should not compartmentalise itself into special architectural spaces, but try to find ways to co-exist with every day life on its own terms. I claim that blogging (as I used it in Bilateral Kellerberrin) has the capacity to do this.
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Sustaining Practices in Melbourne

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speed dating at the sustaining practices workshop

On Saturday I went to Melbourne to facilitate the running of a participatory workshop organised by Clubs Project Space , called Sustaining Practices.

The first activity was a speed dating session, in which 2 minutes was allowed for blah-blah-ing about what your particular concerns were. I used a dinger to shift them along to the next date. I made a 9 minute mp3 recording of the dating. It’s loud and fun! You can listen to it here [9 min, 4mb, mp3].

The Clubs crew sent out the following info before the event, to encourage participants to bring along ideas which would shape the course of the day: Continue reading →

expanded cinema residency at performance space

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Louise Curham and I have been doing a residency at the Performance Space in Sydney, (March 5-25, 2007) to work on trying out some re-enactments of Expanded Cinema events from the early 1970s. We’ve been posting up our reports over here: http://teachingandlearningcinema.org

we know nothing

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the freezer was getting stinky

our icecubes smelled like fish

there were some frozen bones and heads in there

the remains of meals eaten too far from garbage day

it would have been too soon to put them in the bin 

so we froze them

 

but months pass and the freezer becomes an icey trash can

and i wonder        –          i ask lizzie

how can something frozen       give off smell?

 

i suppose

she says

things are always melting

at their surface

 

but this doesn't seem right to me

 

how can something melt if it's below zero?

 

all of which simply shows       

we know nothing

much 

about smell 

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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Augusto Boal and Theater of the Oppressed

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A short while ago I went to Adelaide to run part of a workshop on experimental public art practices. I tried some exercises from Augusto Boal’s book “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”.
Here are a few links I noted about Boal from around the net…

http://www.theatrelinks.com/oppressed.htm

http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=162

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/12.11/15-boal.html

http://ctoatala.org/maps.html#australia

http://www.northernvisions.org/boal.htm

Participation, Experience, Public Art, Radio

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…what I’ve been up to lately…

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Together with Eve Vincent, presenting at this conference at COFA:

http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/newsevents/news/news_0115.html

our abstract:

Participation and Experience: Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty

The desire for an active spectator-participant was a key goal of avant-garde art during the twentieth century. Rhetoric surrounding such art practice often connected “aesthetic interactivity” with the ideal of a wider participatory democracy. During the 1960s, in an attempt to overcome the separation between “art and life” which characterised the museum-based practice of much modernist art, artists like Allan Kaprow developed “Happenings” which occurred in the everyday places and rhythms of city life. Utilising the tools bequeathed by Kaprow’s Happenings, artist group SquatSpace now runs the Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty — wherein the “work of art” is to facilitate discussion about neighborhood life and community organising in inner-urbanSydney. This paper moves through the perennial question “but is it art?” in order to examine the Tour of Beauty as a case study of “Art as Experience” (John Dewey). This co-presentation engages two perspectives — SquatSpace collective member Lucas Ihlein talks about the making of “the tour as art”, and Eve Vincent speaks from the perspective of a participant-audience member.

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The Art of Knowing

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"It is by the manipulation of materials that we come to know those materials, that is, to know a part of our world, and this is also how we come to know how to do various things with materials. That is, knowledge is, paradigmatically, the skilled making that is the primordial meaning of 'art'. And of course: in this process, we also come to know various propositions, for example, those embodying procedures for the further development of skills. We come to be able to describe, say, clay, and the vessel made of clay, with a depth and an appreciation that only arises in thorough and involving experience. And this in turn ramifies into our experience of the vessel thus made, and of similar vessels: as we understand more, our experience of use is enriched. Indeed, the experience of making a vessel may lead to a cherishing of vessels and their makers, an understanding of and respect for persons and things that could not arise by other means."

 

p 131 – Crispin Sartwell, The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions, State University of NY Press, 1995.