the art life

anyone who witnessed a series of performances called Day to Day by artist Aleks Danko which took place in 1974. The performances entailed Aleks Danko being gagged, blindfolded and tied to a chair while holding a stopwatch; they ended when an alarm clock rang marking the passage of one hour. One of the performances took place on six different days of a week at each of the locations below:

o In Central Street Gallery, 1 Central Street, Sydney;

o A corridor in the Domain Car Park, Woolloomooloo;

o A corridor in St James Station;

o In the Devonshire Street Tunnel;

o Next to an electricity sub-station on Art Gallery Road, the Domain;

o Lady Macquarie’s Chair.

Anyone who recalls seeing these performances, and would like to contribute their recollections of Day to Day, 1974, to an art project being developed by Anne Kay, is invited to call Anne on 0425 294 894 or email: mail@annekay.net for more information.

Labels: art projects

"I am writing to you about an event that I thought the art life might be interested in posting about. On Saturday 28th March at the Dendy Opera Quay in Sydney, I went to see the film 'I adore myself' (which was wonderful) about the life of Yayoi Kasuma, who as you probably already know, currently has a large retrospective show at the MCA and is a well known contemporary artist from Japan. After the screening, the audience was told by the cinema to wait in their seats. Then in a few minutes something bizarre and amazing happened. Yayoi Kasuma herself made a brief appearance, beautiful in her pink and black polka-dots and bright pink wig. She slowly walked into the cinema theatre and bowed a few times while the audience clapped and then quickly left. The audience and I didn't know quite what to do, so we stayed in our seats for a while thinking that she would return, but alas it was a quirky and short appearance. It was an amazing and surprising event, as strange and unique as her character. After the event, the audience was bursting with discussion about her quirkiness and why she came. It seemed to me to be a modest tribute to her fans. I luckily had my handy digital camera with me, and took a photo of her from my seat, but only managed to get a wide-angle shot, but have attached it for you in case your keen to put it up. Thanks - Liz Sherman."

Labels: Kasuma

Presenting work by Anthony Berlet, M.D., Antonino Cassisi, M.D., Michael Cohen, M.D., Scott Spiro, M.D.

Leon Dufourmentel, a pioneer in plastic surgery, said in 1948, “...If I went to Picasso for my portrait, he would probably make me a monster and I should be pleased because it would be worth a million francs. But if Picasso came to me with a facial injury and I made him into a monster, aha, he might not be so pleased.”


Anthony Berlet, M.D, Before and After, 2009.

This quotation expresses our view, which we hope to share with you in this exhibition, that plastic surgery is a most challenging art form—perhaps the most challenging art form, for our materials are not canvas or clay. Yes, we embrace the great obsession of artists throughout the ages: the human body. But our material is the human body.

We are asked, on a daily basis, to do the impossible, to make the real ideal, to bridge the gap between reality and fantasy. Plastic surgery is the constant struggle between beauty and blood supply

There is art in everything we do. The initial evaluation requires a keen eye. The surgery plan requires artful preparation. The execution can best be described as a well-choreographed ballet of many different steps. Through this dance of medicine and art, science and aspiration, we seek an outcome as beautiful as any painting or sculpture. Every day, we strive to outdo Pygmalion.

Is perfection possible? We know it is not, and yet, that is our calling. We work with terrible constraints, not the least of which is the subjective nature of art itself. Nowhere are human feelings more various and more complex than in perceptions of the body and of the self. We are, all of us, acutely aware of how others see us.

Our field is sometimes associated with excess. We hope to convince you otherwise. For each individual committed to our charge, the stakes could not be higher. In this exhibition, we intend to convey the great care with which we diagnose, counsel, prepare, execute and maintain our artistic creation, with vision, clarity, passion, ingenuity, compassion and, yes, art.

This exhibition will show the many ways in which we express ourselves as artists, borrowing and shaping perceptions. Take a moment to step into the experience of others, whose lives have been transformed at our hands, we trust for the better.

We hope you will come away from our exhibition with a fuller sense of our aesthetic, reconstructive and post-traumatic disciplines. In the gallery space, we want to give you a glimpse into our world, which is never our world alone. Ours is truly the most intimate, the most personal of arts. When we are finished, the product of our labors can turn to us and say, "I am art." That, at least, is what we strive for.



Emerging curator Felix Ratcliff takes a closer look at the face in VISAGE - a significant new exhibition of contemporary painting opening at Firstdraft gallery.




Robert Habel, Paessagio Urbano Italiano, Rogues Gallery, 2008.
Oil on canvas, 170x170 cm.


VISAGE showcases recent work by seven contemporary artists who variously and idiosyncratically explore the face, portraiture (including self-portraiture), the figure and anthropomorphism as primary subjects in their current practice. Individual approaches to these subjects and themes range from the geometric and pattern-based to the semi-abstracted, organic, wilfully distorted and surreal.

Labels: plastic surgery, press releases

"Popular culture is both the prolific producer and voracious consumer of the beauty myth and its heroes and heroines, who provide creative fodder for Deidre But-Husaim. Her edgy painted portraits of insouciant youths offer a curious combination of knowing innocence. But-Husaim sources her subjects on modeling websites, appropriating the blurry imperfect Polaroid shots of hopeful fresh faces desperately seeking to be the next ‘It’ boy or girl … Like a talent scout, she daily trawls through hundreds of images of aspiring models searching for that indescribable quality that sets one apart from the other: the smattering of freckles across a nose, a pair of piercing blue eyes, a birthmark or a ‘caught in the headlights’ expression. En masse these androgynous bright young things become ciphers upon which we may project our own ideals of beauty and youth. For But-Husaim they are a blank canvas onto which she superimposes elaborate ‘tattoos’ of her own design elevating her subjects in the process from the status of banal beauties, and rescuing them from obscurity. But-Husaim’s adornments are rather elaborate baroque and rococo embellishments of the artist’s creation, such as exquisite chintzy floral vines and delicate birds. Byron, whose name and visage conjures up both the poet and more contemporaneously the 1980s romantic lyrics of Morrissey and The Smiths, is all flowing locks and feminine features. Decorated with a spray of pretty flowers he is redolent of a new sexuality, not one thing or another, just beautiful..." - Alison Kubler.

Deidre But-Husaim

Labels: new work, painting

And so we prepare for the broadcast on Tuesday 17th March, 2009 of the first episode of The Art Life 2. So proud, so excited... But what goes into the making of a show? Who is behind it? And will someone please do something about that buzzing sound... PLEASE!

Labels: Art Life TV show, Pedro de Almeida

From Isobel Johnston...

If you’ve ever fancied listening to an artist talk about their work followed by a dinner with like-minded people then you should think about contacting NG Gallery. It can offer you such an evening. Or you might even like to take one of its newly devised practical art classes. Or try one of the National Art School’s short courses; sign up at TAFE or something on offer through WEA. If the hip and young side of Sydney’s art world is more your thing why not do a one of the myriad of events on offer at the ARI’s from First Draft to St Peter’s Lane to MOP, Slot or Peloton. From Art After Hours at AGNSW, Arthere , Open Sydney to Bundeena’s Art Trail or open studio days – there’s a lot on offer, all of it educational and most of it fun.



Education has always been around as part of the art world and as an integral part of the role of various galleries, although historically it has been primarily the domain of public institutions from ‘big’ museums to medium scale publicly funded organizations. What has changed is that in recent times we are seeing a shift to education programming by commercial galleries and ARIs.

To grow new clients first you must educate them. This might sound more than a little trite yet there is a logic to it as the benefits far outweigh the costs in setting up such programs. This kind of benefit has a great deal more to recommend it than the older style of audience building, which relied upon ‘wining, dining and wooing’ of only wealthy potential or existing clients.

This blossoming of education is maybe a feature of the times, a means of building "client bases", "investing in the future" or "getting through the tough economic times". It is also marks the difference between the new breed of gallerists who have thrown off the mantle of exclusivity to act as a conduit between the artwork and the general public, perceiving their role in terms of a public relations strategy which involves welcoming everyone with the same level of enthusiasm as opposed to an older style manner of conducting business which often made the uninitiated feel like badly dressed customers in a boutique store. Meeting artists, hearing them talk about their work is now a feature of most commercial gallery programs. Tours, soirées and other opportunities to mingle, hear and socialise with artists are also now a feature of the art gallery world.

Michael Reid Gallery is the first commercial space that springs to mind. It has offered education programs in conjunction with and as an adjunct to his exhibition programs for the last few years. More recently, a new breed of commercial galleries like Sullivan and Strumpf, Gallery Barry Keldoulis and Breenspace have shown a way forward that brings a sense of pleasure and engagement with both the artwork and the audience. If the art market is to be revivified then making people feel welcome and enabling them to find the experience enjoyable seems at least one positive outcome of the economic times.

Will it work? And of more immediate concern will it be the silver bullet to ward off tough times for galleries big and small? There’s nothing like keeping busy while we wait and see how the local, national and global art markets recover. But maybe we are in fact glimpsing a shift in the structure of these businesses where selling work becomes only one of their activities. Maybe we’re moving to a new phase where education, entertainment and places for social engagement take on a more a directly remunerative role rather than merely being add-on benefits only available to the serious collectors.

Labels: art market, commercial galleries, Isobel Johnston

Guy Maestri'Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu

Labels: Archibald, here we go again, painting

Some artists aren't as successful as others because...

There's a conspiracy to keep them out 7% 12
Some art is more popular and who knows why 13% 24
The art world is driven by slogans and brands 8% 15
Thems the breaks 25% 45
The untalented are promoted by the witless 18% 32
Only history will decide what's good and what's not, just like George Bush said 8% 15
The whole system is rotten 20% 35

178 votes total

Labels: poll

"There is a general ambience of the youthful idealism readers may recall once having shared. It is an age when love and sex and relationships are being discovered, as well as the beauty of the natural world and of art and literature, for the sense of beauty is something that mysteriously awakens with puberty. It is also the age at which the mind begins to apprehend the world around itself and become aware of the suffering of others, and of the existence of evil and injustice: revulsion and indignation are manifestations of a new moral sense that will soon be muted by self-interest and the realities of survival... The discovery of intimacy, the feeling, so intense when first encountered, of closeness in a private world and simultaneously of alienation, is poignantly evoked in Laura Stortenbeker's series of photographs of boys and girls in bird masks..."

Christopher Allen on Artexpress, Teen Spirit, The Australian, February 28th, 2009.

Labels: Le Coq, old media