the art life

From Joanna Mendelssohn...

The Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Director Daniel Birnbaum, says that the title Making Worlds ‘expresses my wish to emphasize the process of creation’. The problem is that for the most part this process seems to be that of assembling flat-pack furniture. The over all impression of the official exhibition is of art with so few boundaries that it is completely interchangeable, and indeed its component parts often appear to be the same as they cross both nationalities and generations.

If this seems a bit harsh, then consider this. Liam Gillick from the UK, has his solo gig at the German Pavillion where he has constructed a giant raw timber modular kitchen, complete with stuffed cat. The kitchen is based on the Frankfurter Küche (Frankfurt Kitchen), the original modular kitchen designed in 1926 by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.


Liam Gillick, How Are You Going To Behave?
A Kitchen Cat Speaks for the German Pavillion, 2009
Germany is well represented in the Palazzo with Wolfgang Tillmans’ essentially decorative metallically hued exploration of colour in photography . Meanwhile the Nordic countries, working under the supervision of the artistic duo Elmgreen and Dragset have combined in the Norwegian and Danish pavilions, both critiquing the supposed surface splendour of over-designed lives.

In the politest way, the 24 artists involved in these projects have blown a huge raspberry at the art collecting class. The Danish pavilion has been transformed into an investigation into a dysfunctional family, via the fictional agents “Vigilante Real Estate” who propose to sell this discordant home via leaflets and a tour by a frightening ‘agent’.The culture that brought the world Ikea is now deconstructing what those over-designed lives might be. Meanwhile, at the Norwegian pavilion, they present a ‘crime scene’ where one of the over-designed, over-considered collectors of modern art and modern people has been ‘murdered’. It is a harsh assessment of the very class which travels to consume events such as the Venice Biennale.


Col Tempo, The W. project
Péter Forgács’s installation
As always the national pavilions are a mixed bunch. Some of them are relentlessly dreary, self-important and over indulgent. But there are some high points. Roman Ondak at the Slovak Pavilion is a breath of fresh air. His installation has been to create a garden, where nature reclaims the art. This is the place to recover from the harsh assessments of Péter Forgács in the Hungarian Pavilion. Col Tempo takes actual footage of the Nazi experiments into human body types (and an interview with a survivor) and links it to portraits. The 60 year old Forgács layers his art with family memories of the Holocaust and personal memories of life under the Soviets in this acknowledgment of human evil. In a nod to its colonial reach, Dutch Pavilion has been given to the Indonesian born Fiona Tan has created Disorient, an ironic video installation contrasting opulence and poverty in modern Indonesia, with a voice over narrative from the voyages of Marco Polo. Is another case of cross cultural transfer. In this context Shaun Gladwell’s MADDESTMAXIMVS is both raw and polished; a bit like the movie Legally Blonde where Reese Witherspoon goes to the law students’ party dressed as a Playboy bunny.

The very slick presentations of the Giardini are contrasted in the Arsenale, which is on the whole a disappointment as components of old ideas are recycled again. This is where visitors go to see the new, the cutting edge, yet the high point is a 2002 installation by Lygia Pape, the Brazilian artist who died in 2004.

Sometimes however this can be fun as with the Barcelona duo, Bestué/ Vives, whose 2005 Acciones en el Universo (Actions in the Universe) shows a series of often hilarious surrealist installations in an apartment. In the midst of this one of the artists appears to be stuck across the corridor, heavily made up as ‘Old Bruce Nauman’. This is more than appropriate as the US has exerted a great deal of marketing effort to ensure that the aging conceptualist is the ‘star’ of this year’s Biennale. He is not, but a great deal of fluorescence has been recreated in his name. Bestué/ Vives video also includes a riff on Ikea furniture, which returns to the central theme.

The best part of this Biennale is not to be found inside either the Giardini or the Arsenale, but in the many exhibitions scattered throughout the city. This is the context for Once Removed (curator Felicity Fenner; artists Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Yonetani, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro) at the Ludoteca.

As well as the freshness and strength of these installations, the actual placing of the exhibition is brilliant. It is on the path that leads out of the Arsenale so the jaded visitor coming from that seriously disappointing exhibition walks into its unpretentious open door and is bowled over by Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro’s huge monument to video cassette culture. This is followed in the second room by Vernon Ah Kee’s assertion of surfing as a part of Aboriginal resurgence and completed with Ken Yonetani’s magical sugar corals.

Other pavilions are not found so easily. Steppes of Dreamers, the Ukraine’s great evocation of mysterious desolation is well worth the effort of searching though the confusing alleyways of Venice, especially as the upper floor of the Palazzo Papadopoli presents a mysterious and threatening narrative . The project curator Wladimir Klitschko, stresses his career as a boxer in his official biography, and also in the poster at the Academia. Two of the three artists (Illya Chichkan, Ogata Kinichi and Mihara Yasuhiro) are from Japan. It’s good to see nationalism in retreat.


Sheza Dawood, Triple Negation Chandeliers (White, Blue, Pink), 2008
Neon on aluminium frame, 190x220 cm.
There is a sense here in Venice of the age of empires in both wax and wane. This is especially so in East-West Divan, a collaborative effort from the heartland of the former Persian Empire: Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. This is a hard one to find, upstairs from Lithuania, more or less north-west from the railway station. It is however one of the more rewarding experiences. Khosrow Hassanzadeh has paintings based on ordinary women who fit the US description of ‘terrorist’ by virtue of their nationality and religion. Shezad Dawood presents a triple chandelier proclaiming the central tenet of faith 'There is no God, but God' in fluoresent light, Muhammad Imran Qureshi presents Moderate Enlightenment, miniatures for the modern world. Farzana Wahidy’s photographs of Afghanistan are able to concentrate on people in more intimate way than the standard sensationalized work of western photojournalists.

The other surprise national exhibition is far easier to locate as it is on the main tourist drag between the railway station and San Marco. Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation for Iceland is called The End. There is a glorious chutzpah to this presentation, and it is no surprise to discover that staff from other pavilions regularly cruise by on their days off. In a darkened room a standard four wall screen projection shows the artist and another playing folk music, filmed in the Canadian Rockies. In terms of interest this is about the same as the Canadian pavilion (ie pretty dull). The visitor then goes to another room where an open door shows the (real) Grand Canal flooding a studio with Venetian light while the artist (from the video) paints a young male model. This exercise will be repeated for six months. A stack of beer bottles indicates the main form of refreshment, and there is a strong sense that people from Iceland really appreciate Italian summer weather.



Oddly enough the best contemporary art exhibit on view in Venice has nothing to do with the Biennale, except for the timing. On the island of Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore, Peter Greenaway has directed a tribute, an exposition of Veronese’s Wedding at Cana and is proof, if ever any were wanted, that great art can be nourished by art of the past, and that there is no essential conflict between the creative tools of our age and those used throughout history. The site is the refectory of the Monastery which was the original home of the painting before Napoleon plundered it for the Louvre. Greenaway’s meditation on this work is played over a full size reproduction where figures are highlighted, music played conversations created, and visual relationships analysed.

I am not sure that it is worth the long flight just to visit Venice for the Biennale, but this work alone, with its layers of meaning, and all surrounding beauty is well worth the jet lag.

Labels: exhibitions, Joanna Mendelssohn, Venice Biennale

Labels: charity auctions, press releases

Was John Kelly - artist and occasional Art Life correspondent - actually at the 2009 Venice Biennale? We may never know, but his powers of prescience are amazing [ see here for his preview review of the Australian representation]. In a curious follow up, Kelly has written on the adventures of one Inspector Kellouseau, art detective at the palaces of kunst:

Kellouseau saw it but could not believe it. He whispered to Brigitte. "Do not be alarmed but a 'bum' is in the Great Barrier Reef."

"Oh no, Jean, a bomb?"

"No, not a bomb, a bum."

Brigitte saw it, a beautifully shaped bum at one end of the installation. "Ooh Jean, you are so observant."


Ken Yonetani, Sweet Barrier Reef (detail), 2005.
S, 160 x 1200 x 600 cm, installation view, Artspace, Sydney; photo Darren Hopton.
Courtesy the artist / Dianne Tanzer Gallery

Kellouseau saw more sugary genitalia and realization struck him. "Ah, it is OK, dear, I forget we are in Italia and representations of genitalia, no problem, excuse um moi."

You can read more of Kellouseau's adventures at Circa Art Magazine.

Ken Yonetani's sugar sculptures were included in the exhibition Once Removed curated by Felicity "Flic" Fenner. Our attention has been directed to this curious video in which Fenner explains the intricacies of curating the show:

Labels: curators, Venice Biennale

It has been fun in recent years to make the occasional gentle dig at Edmund Capon, the director and chief curator of the Art Gallery of NSW. Capon is a consummate professional and an astute media player. He happily appears on television to promote gallery flagship events like the Archibald Prize or to mock himself in a faux-documentary with The Chaser. He seems to be a man like Barack Obama, one who appears to be having far too much fun in the top job.

On the other hand Capon has been away more than a few months of late, sojourning in London and Paris, jetting back into town occasionally to take care of management issues. He is also said to be the ultimate Rudd-esque micro-manager, popping up in the furthest and loneliest corners of the gallery during his strolls. But more important than any managerial quirks is the fact that the gallery has prospered and expanded under his stewardship to become one of the glittering success stories of Australia's cultural institutions.

Since Capon arrived from London in 1978 to take up the post, the gallery has grown with the addition of galleries, cafes and restaurants, while expanding its green presence over the nearby freeway and its sculptures into the Domain.

And having only a modicum of continuing funding coming from the State Government, he has made friends with the city's leading art benefactors, philanthropists, art-friendly corporations and international lending institutions to keep both the gallery in the black and the punters walking through the doors.

It's just a pity his time is nearly up. At 69 he can't have much time left before retirement beckons. The speculation is that he can go whenever he likes, perhaps within a year, or maybe he'll work out his contract as he sorts out his legacy and his official farewell - rumoured to be a mega-exhibition. But before he goes, and we get swept up in the sentimentality of the occasion, now is as good time as any to turn our minds to what the gallery might be like under a new director.

There will be a mighty tussle for Capon's job, with no shortage of aspirants among Australia's gallery directors; there is also the better-than-even chance that an overseas candidate will be chosen, as is the traditional route.

What is more interesting is how the public face of the gallery would change. The gallery of the pre-Capon era is but a distant and dim memory but the impression is of a gallery far less interested in pleasing crowds and more dedicated to contemporary art.

Speaking from a self-interested position, we would love to see the gallery exhibit contemporary art more consistently and be less driven by prizes. While exhibitions like the Anne Landa Award for Nnew Media and Video are something to look forward to, more survey shows of contemporary art and exhibitions culled from permanent collections are alternatives to biennial hoopla.

Perhaps the development of the gallery's new space for contemporary art using the multimillion-dollar gift from the art philanthropist John Kaldor will help make this a reality. We can only hope.

More important, however, is that the gallery is literally sitting on one of Sydney's major cultural assets — an asset yet to have its potential fully exploited. That is the Domain Theatre, the gallery's fully equipped cinema currently used for its film programs and public lectures.

Attempts to create a cinematheque in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art came to nothing after a long and tortuous saga that was closely linked to that gallery's ongoing funding problems. Brisbane's newly opened Gallery of Modern Art features a state-of-the-art cinematheque that has an extensive and lovingly curated program of films that attracts art tourists from Sydney and Melbourne.

The Art Gallery of NSW's modest film and video screening program is testament to the hard work of dedicated staff with a deep love of and commitment to cinema. It would be great to see those efforts rewarded with more resources to turn a shoestring operation into something of which Sydney could be proud.

We wish Capon well in the future and have no wish to send him off on a rail. It's just interesting to think, while the current arrangement is fine, there are certain aspects of the old dame that might just be better off under new management.

This op ed orginally appeared here.

Labels: article, op ed, public galleries

Glenn Brown, Nausea, 2008.
Oil on panel, 155 x 120 cm (61 x 47.2 in)
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

"Borrowing from art history and popular culture, Glenn Brown transforms a familiar visual history into something extraordinary and alien. Paintings by Rembrandt, Fragonard, Salvador Dalí, Frank Auerbach and many others, including the illustrators for science fiction novels, have all been used by the artist as starting blocks. Yet it is not original paintings that Brown turns to for inspiration but reproductions – images printed on postcards, in books or digitised on the internet. Brown is fascinated by how an image changes when it is reproduced. Often cropped, its scale shifts as it is transferred to a new format. Texture is lost and colour distorted as the inaccuracies of the printing process take hold. Brown adopts these various accidental alterations as painterly strategies, grossly exaggerating them to question what it is to paint and to transfer people, places and objects into this medium. In his work, naturalistic colour becomes putrid or kitsch, figures are elongated and enlarged into the grotesque, flesh grows or begins to rot and heavy impasto brush marks, painstakingly copied, are rendered completely flat..."

Glenn Brown Retrospective, Tate Liverpool

Got new work you'd like to share? Send images and description of your work to thearlife at hot mail dot com. Images should be smaller than 350k each.

Labels: new work, painting

The paltry offerings from Australian art critics sojourning in Italy for the 2009 Venice Biennale have been thus far the usual predictable fare - pithy putdowns for art they have no time for, offering instead a blanket refusal to enage with the subject of the art while making no attempt to parse intention from context. Such is the lot of art critics with travel budgets but lacking a real understanding of contemporary art in the big bad world. Happily, the web offers the work of Jerry Saltz, art critic for the New York Magazine whose latest column is an intelligent and thoughtful disscetion of the problems - and successes - of the Biennale experience:




"Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. There are now more than 100 biennales around the world (most of them put together by the same 25 celebrity curators, drawing from the same pool of 100 or so artists); Venice is often called “the most important” of them. The main show of this year’s Venice Biennale is the work of Daniel Birnbaum, a well-respected 46-year-old Swedish critic and curator. His “Making Worlds,” held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni delle Biennale and in the magnificent Arsenale, attains an enervating inertia of exhibitions and brings us to a terminal state of what we’ll call “the curator problem.” The show, containing the work of 90-plus artists, doesn’t offend or go off the rails. Rather, it looks pretty much the way these sorts of big international group shows and cattle calls now look; it includes the artists that these sorts of shows now include. It’s full of the reflexive conceptualism that artists everywhere now produce because other artists everywhere produce it (and because curators curate it). Almost all of this art comments on art, institutions, or modernism. Basically, curators seem to love video, text, explanations, things that are “about” something, art that references Warhol or Prince, or that makes sense; they seem to hate painting, things that don’t make sense, or that involve overt materiality, physicality, color, or strangeness..."

Jerry Saltz, Entropy In Venice. The New York Magazine.

Image: Still from Steve McQueen's Giardini. Photo: Courtesy of: Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and The British Council. via New York Magazine.

Labels: art criticism, Venice Biennale

"Anybody who wants to understand what hip hop is all about needs to see a film called Style Wars." -KRS-One






Legendary hip-hop documentary and timeless film classic Style Wars (1983) is coming to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) this July as part of the First Look program.

Shot in NYC in the early 1980s, Tony Silver and photographer Henry Chalfant's groundbreaking film documented the new language of hip hop - graffiti, rap, breakdance. Bringing subway battles between artists and civic guardians to the fore, Style Wars gives voice to some of New York's legendary writers including Kase 2, Skeme, Seen UA, Cap, Mare 139 and Dondi. A precursor to both Wild Style and Beat Street, Silver's film is vivid, legendary and a rare big screen event.

Labels: cinema, press releases

Culprit Tech

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Labels: graphic design, illustration, new work

Labels: press releases

I'm not going to the Venice Biennale 2009 because...

I have "flu like" symptoms 18% 14
I was asked not to go by the Italian government 6% 5
My busy schedule prevented it 6% 5
I'm just so over Europe in summer 11% 9
Conflicting international exhibition committments 8% 6
I got dumped by the MCA's so-called "friends" 6% 5
A pending court apperance prevents me 8% 6
All of the above 38% 30

80 votes total

Labels: poll

The Guardian UK's art critic Jonathan Jones has written a blog entry on George Orwell and Salvador Dali. Jones's comments come as the Dali exhibiton Liquid Desire opens at the National Gallery of Victoria. Knowing that certain pundits are fond of quoting or citing Orwell when it comes to questions of social responsibility in the arts, Jones has an interesting take on Orwell's attitude to Dali and the avant garde:

George Orwell isn't usually thought of as an art critic. The author of 1984 is rightly remembered as one of the great political journalists and witnesses of the 20th century. But his contribution to the literature of modern art is also worth celebrating. In 1944 Orwell wrote an essay called Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí. It's a meditation on Dalí's book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, and concludes that the artist's works are "diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact".

Never judge an article by its final sentence. Benefit of Clergy is a rare attempt to express, or to honestly attain, an ambivalent view of something that divides people into irreconcilable camps. Modern art is controversial; it was in Orwell's day and it is in ours. It's not meant to be consensual: it's meant to be a slap in the face.

In his notes on Dalí, it's clear that Orwell isn't a big fan of surrealism, the shock art of his time. He is genuinely repulsed by the scatological details of Dalí's art that today scarcely cause a shrug. But what's fascinating and laudable is his attempt to find what he calls a "middle position" between conservative philistines who condemn the avant garde, and its promoters who indulge everything that someone like Dalí does and refuse to see it in a moral or political context.

Labels: blogging, exhibitions

We really should have been paying attention these last couple of months.

First, we discovered that way back when, Andrew Bolt, that scion of climate change denialists and insightful political analysis had had a go at us.

Then, when the second Art Life TV series went to air in March Tim Blair - another right wing political pundit for the Terror and a stand-in on Insiders when Bolt is off checking annual temperature stats - got all upset about a turn of phrase in the voice over for episode two.

Then blow me down Dorothy Parker, "hard left one-woman media watch" [not Michael Duffy as posted here earlier, oops - thanks Dave for the heads up] had TWO MORE TILTS.

First up, Parker had a go over our op ed comment on the People's Choice winner of the Archibald. Her harshest criticism was to compare us to the great Jack McDuff:

Funny how the young turks, when they get a taste for exposure on the ABC and a page 3 picture story in The Sydney Morning Herald, turn into Esteemed Critics, having spent their time out of the sun sending up rotten Esteemed Critics like John McDonald and Sebastian Smee. Just a pity, and something of an irony, that as esteemed critics they seem incapable of saying anything sensible, or short of that, at least saying what they think.

Ow, that really hurts.

Parker also took us to task, in the guise of blogging on Tim Blair. Quoth Parker quoting Blair:

“The Kingpins are four artists exploring ideas about identity,” explains the ABC’s Andrew Frost. Then again, Frost also believes “ambiguity is the natural by-product of art that mocks the whole idea of certainty,” so who knows what the hell he’s talking about."

The standard approach of the blogger is take a quote, usually out of context, and then rain scorn down upon on it. It's something we've been doing for years but unlike our right wing brothers, we refrain from claiming that whatever it is that's been said is illogical. The great fake-out of people like Parker , Blair and Bolt [especially Bolt, good lord...] is to claim a higher understanding of "critical thinking", "logic" or "common sense". The statement quoted above is as simple as they come - when artists embrace ambiguity as part of their art, certainty is questioned. It's not that hard to understand is it?

When it comes to people who know nothing about art, a bit of book lernin' can go an awfully long way.

Speaking of people who know nuthin - Bolt had a go at us for - erm - made up reasons of his own invention

ABC art critic Andrew Frost says it’s wrong to judge art by its content as well as form, and attacks another critic as “biased” for doing so:

It’s quite a natural state for any critic whose credibility is staked on the dubious notion that art must be judged on quality and virtue alone...Recent art controversies have been largely fuelled by people without much of a clue about what contemporary art is about. The spectacle of Bill Henson’s good name being dragged through the mud, Mike Parr’s dead chickens “shock” at the Biennale, the naked kid on the front of Art Monthly, all of these events of the recent past are reflective of a view that believes that art’s only role is to be beautiful while reinforcing archly conservative notions of good taste and decorum.

What’s curious is that this criticism (which does not even state fairly the position it seeks to counter) is made of a judge for a prize for religious art. What’s sad is that this oh-so fashionable morals-free stand leaves critics like Frost unable to criticise the sexualisation and exploitation of even pre-pubescent children, or to differentiate between babble and profundity, between dead chickens and deep insight. They are like people judging conversation only by the grammar or raised voices.

This critic of the Barbarian Age seems dangerously detached from the intellectual tradition he now picks over like a scavenger sorting through sculptures, looking for bronze to melt into shop fittings. On the role of art, and the sin of disengaging from its moral content, I’d advise him to read the musings of finer creative minds which have grappled with these issues since the Renaissance - Georgio Vasari in The Lives of the Artists, Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, and George Orwell in Benefit of Clergy.

We wouldn't be the first to note Bolt's predeliction for cutting and pasting slabs of quotes out of context, and that dot dot dot in the quote from the SMH article was a mighty big slice. But you know what? Who cares? We've come to love Bolt and his mad protestations that climate change is a liberal media conspiracy, his claims of common sense, critical thinking et al. He's great on Insiders, and even better when Malcom Farr tells him to shut the fuck up. He's great TV.

Bolt's comments came to mind when we discovered that The Guardian UK's art critic Jonathan Jones has written a blog entry on George Orwell and Salvador Dali. While it's pretty clear that dunces like Bolt know nothing about art, it's still shocking that HE hasn't even bothered to read the books he's suggesting we read [read more above]...

Labels: blogging, punditry

"The best thing I’ve seen so far is the focused survey of the work of Bruce Nauman in — ta-da! — the U.S. pavilion. There’s a gallery of Nauman’s bronze hand sculptures and another with hanging heads spewing water. A third, with a turning mobile of taxidermy forms alongside a video of a man skinning a fox, and a video of a man making a balloon toy and someone spilling coffee, forms intricate interweaving psychic grids of chaos, anxiety, reverie, and violence. The other good show was at the British Pavilion. There’s been a lot of complaining about the long lines and mandatory scheduling there, and most of the reports I got from people who did go said the 40-minute video by Steve McQueen, Giardini, was “disappointing” and not worth the wait. But I was surprised by how resonant and haunting the film is. There’s no story to speak of, just shots of the Giardini off season, between biennales. You see boarded-up buildings, close-ups of insects and plants, greyhounds foraging for food, piles of garbage. Even though McQueen’s sense of filmmaking is pretty pedestrian, it’s a real Venetian death trip.

"From there I saw as many of the pavilions as I could. My Worst in Show award was a three-way tie between Australia, Japan, and France. Australia’s Shaun Gladwell parked a burned-out Road Warrior–ish car outside the pavilion. Inside there’s a video of motorcycle rider stopping to contemplate a dead kangaroo in the middle of a desert. Protruding from the side of the pavilion is a motorcycle. In the Japanese pavilion, Miwa Yanagi exhibits a series of huge, god-awful photographs of grotesque naked women. In an accompanying text, a writer raves that these crappy pictures “will bring great joy not only to the Japanese Pavilion but to the Venice Biennale as a whole.”

Saltz: Highlights of the Venice Biennale; Plus, Worst in Show, New York Magazine.

Labels: Venice Biennale, video art

Jonathan Monk, Deflated Sculpture no. I, 2009.
Stainless steel. 104.1cm(H) x 68.6cm(L) x 45.7cm(W).

Casey Kaplan Gallery

Labels: new work, sculpture

Lucas Ihlein writes:

Just thought to let you and your dear readers know that we've been doing a re-enactment of allan kaprow's wonderful "push and pull - a furniture comedy for hans hoffman" (1963) down at locksmith project space. it's the first time this work has been staged in australia. the project will finish this saturday. all the details, including some great timelapse films and panorama photos, are at our website: Push and Pull - cheers Lucas Ihlein, Nick Keys and Astrid L'Orang.

Caption: This panorama (click on picture to see detail) has been sutured together by Pat Armstrong from photos taken by Tom Spiers on Saturday (Day Five). This composition of the room was the result of Pat Armstrong’s suggestion that we should organise the room in a colour spectrum. Apart from the opening night this was the single biggest burst of energy and activity Push and Pull Redfern has seen thus far.

Sounds exciting, but what is the project? The project info explains:

Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann(1963) is a participatory installation in which visitors arrange and re-arrange domestic objects and junk. The work was originally conceived as a parody of Allan Kaprow’s painting teacher, Hans Hoffman, who often used the phrase “push and pull” to describe the dynamics involved in two dimensional composition. Kaprow expanded Hoffman’s concept of compositional strategy, moving it beyond the canvas and into social space.

Participants in “Push and Pull” plan and implement alterations to the gallery space, co-operating or competing with each other in an ever-evolving furniture dance. “Push and Pull” is a microcosm of the tensions involved in all spatial negotiations in urban environments.

We are excited to present this piece, for the first time ever in Australia, thanks to Allan Kaprow’s Estate.

The show runs until Saturday at Locksmith Project Space, 6 Botany Road Alexandria/Redfern Sydney, Australia until June 13, Thurs-Sat 1-6pm

Labels: exhibitions, installation, performance art

Jane Polkinghorne has taken up a mighty denim challenge - to wear a significant denim item on or about her body from April 2009 until April 2010:

From April 30, 2009 my aim is to wear denim every day for a year. By denim I mean everything from the definition of denim fabric… to fabric that emulates the look of denim… like this beautiful faux denim patchwork suit found on Digital Vintage.
Yours for a snap at only US$60!!



Every day I’ll post a picture of my outfit and give a description proving it’s denim-ness. And by wearing denim I mean a denim bottom, a denim top and at least 1 denim accessory. It’s gunna be tricky. I better get on that internet web thing to look for clothes.

June 10 marks the 48th day of the denim year and Jane is starting to feel the grind of running a blog and other art projects at the same time:

Today is the first day that doing this blog thingy has felt like a chore. Oh well. I have committd to doing it for a year so I just have to suck it up.

It’s cold outside, but warm inside my denims.



Top: Fletcher Jeans jacket, the first denim jacket I bought as an adult and still going strong

Bottom: Back into the Industrie skinny jeans. I think my thighs have gained weight since I wore them last week. They feel subtly tighter

Accessory: Mavi denim shoulder bag… little size, big style

We urge all readers of The Art Life to regularly visit Jane's denim blog and give this magnificent projcet the support it needs. And remember Jane, only 317 days to go!

Labels: denim, lace, performance art

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Labels: spam letters

Ross Racine, Goldenwood Shores, 2009. Drawing, 60 x 80 cms.




Ross Racine, Highland Farms, 2006. Drawing, 30 x 52 cms.



Ross Racine, Subdivision, Cedar Valley. 2006. Drawing, 38 x 50 centimeters.

"Drawn freehand directly on a computer and printed on a high-end inkjet printer, my work does not contain photographs or scanned material. The subjects of my recent work may be interpreted as models for planned communities as mush as aerial views of fictional suburbs, referencing the computer as a tool for urban planning as well as image capture..."

Ross Racine's web site.

Got new work you'd like to share? Send images and description of your work to thearlife at hot mail dot com. Images should be smaller than 350k each.

Labels: drawing, new work

Thursday June 4 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and the subsequent massacre of an unknown number of students. Perhaps the most famous image to become associated with the event is the single frame of photojournalism that is known as "Tank Man". As the New York Times reports:

“Twenty years ago, on June 5, 1989, following weeks of huge protests in Beijing and a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, a lone man stepped in front of a column of tanks rumbling past Tiananmen Square. The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses.

It all started with a man in a white shirt who walked into the street and raised his right hand no higher than a New Yorker hailing a taxi,” James Barron wrote the following day in The New York Times. The picture appeared on the front page of this newspaper as well as in countless other publications around the world.

To this day, the identity and fate of the man in the picture remain unclear. A riveting documentary, “The Tank Man,” by PBS Frontline in 2006 explored his fate. Yet still no one knows for certain who he is or what exactly happened to him. The image is largely blocked on the Internet in China. Despite its iconic status and historical significance elsewhere, most young people there do not recognize the photograph..."

Like many iconic images of historical events - the street execution of a Viet Cong fighter during Tet, the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima, the Zapruder film - they come to define not just our memory of the event but also its meaning.

The New York Time's always fascinating photojournalism Lens blog discusses the history and context of the original image by Charlie Cole:

"As the tanks neared the Beijing Hotel, the lone young man walked toward the middle of the avenue waving his jacket and shopping bag to stop the tanks. I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him. But the young man cut it off again. Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart and I looked at each other somewhat in disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed. I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there..."

After running their initial story about four photographers who captured the moment in 1989 on Wednesday, the New York Times was contacted by Terril Jones, another photographer who had a brand new angle on the incident:

"While working as a reporter in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he shot many photographs and recorded several hours of video. It wasn’t until weeks afterwards, when he had returned to Japan, that he discovered the magnitude of what he had captured — an iconic moment in history from an entirely unique angle.

His version of the tank man has never been published until now.

For 20 years the negatives rested in Mr. Jones’ belongings, following him across the world throughout his career as a journalist. He contacted The New York Times after reading the accounts of the other four photographers in Wednesday’s Lens blog.

Mr. Jones’ angle on the historic encounter is vastly different from four other versions shot that day, taken at eye level moments before the tanks stopped at the feet of the lone protester. Wildly chaotic, a man ducks in the foreground, reacting from gunfire coming from the tanks. Another flashes a near-smile. Another pedals his bike, seemingly passive as the tanks rumble towards confrontation..."

Click through to see Jones's image.

Labels: journalism, photography

“. . . these canisters hold the cremated remains of patients from an American psychiatric hospital. Oddly reminiscent of bullet casings, the canisters are literal gravesites. Reacting with their ash inhabitants, the canisters are now blooming with secondary minerals, articulating new metallic landscapes.”

— Geoff Manaugh, Contemporary

David Maisel, Library Of Dust 1470, photographic print.

Labels: photography

The Art Gallery of NSW opens a major new show this Thursday [June 4] called Intensely Dutch. The gallery's publicity calls the show "uncompromising, confronting, optimistic" as it looks at 15 of the most important Dutch artists of the post WW2 period. As the blurb says:

"A new young generation of Dutch artists took to modernity as never before. For them it was a time of renewal. Bright colour, impasto and vigorous handling were particular features of the work of many post-war Dutch artists. This exhibition presents the art of fifteen of the most important Dutch artists of the post-war period, including those associated with the CoBrA movement (Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille and Lucebert) and art informel (Jaap Wagemaker, Jan J Schoonhoven and Bram Bogart) and those who preceded them, like Bram van Velde and Willem de Kooning, who rose to prominence internationally post-war..."

In addition to the show the AGNSW are also hosting a forum and a lecture:

Labels: forums, press releases, public lectures

The Anne Landa Award for Video & New Media Arts


Has officially jumped the shark 36% 29
Represents a tactical retreat from over hyped video art 6% 5
Promoting Australian V&NM by inviting os artists to take part 19% 15
The thing is the what now? 17% 14
Is all good baby 22% 18

81 votes total

Labels: poll

Labels: performance art, press releases

It turns out that not only is Sean Lowry a doctor, but he's also a former member of herbal-hippy-metal band Def FX. For those who came in late - or perhaps have conveniently forgetten what it was like - the early 1990s were a lot like the way things are now, just more crap, and Def FX were the promising young band of the day. Why are we telling you this? Because Sean Lowry is back in his guise as successful contemporary artist with a mission, namely to post a "collection of popular songs reinterpreted within the moving image." We're not certain what "within" means in this context, but Lowry's Wikipedia entry explains thusly:

"Sean Lowry (born 1968) is a Sydney based artist, writer & musician. After considerable commercial success in Australia, Asia and North America during the 1990s with seminal Australian electronic rock band Def FX [...] [he] is now exhibiting a body of experimental audiovisual work (recently exhibited in San Francisco and broadcast in Germany in 2008 under the moniker of Lapdancer). A panelist at “The Contemporary Collaborator In An Interdisciplinary World” (2008 Annual Conference of the College Art Association, Dallas-Fort Worth, USA), and a Lecturer, Creative Arts/Fine Arts, School of Drama, Fine Arts and Music, University of Newcastle, Australia (awarded University of Newcastle 'Lecturer of the Year, 2007'), Lowry is currently developing a major publishing project titled 'The Agnostic Model: Beyond Art & Anti-Art'. A new album titled 'I Got My Headphones & My Laptop' is due to be released in 2009. A new audiovisual project titled 'Lapdancer2: a collection of popular songs reinterpreted within the moving image', will also be exhibited/released on DVD/CD in 2009."

The first in the series for Lapdancer 2 videos is a rendition of Smoke On The Water [featuring Charles Famous] and - perhaps giving some clue to the meaning of "within" - presents a man in his pants at a council tip:



Further videos in the series can be seen at Sean Lowry's YouTube Channel

Labels: music, video art