the art life

Nina Power: One of the most important media for the Autonomia was radio. The obvious contemporary comparison is the Internet; it offers the possibility of putting out material quickly, and of constructing para- or non-academic discussions, as you did with Semiotext(e) at a time when French theory was still mostly untranslated. Perhaps there is less room for the kind of fetish items that the early Semiotext(e) books became. Now there are blogs, online books, and so on. How do you feel about this development?

Sylvère Lotringer: It certainly offers an enormous range of possibilities that didn’t exist before, but increased dissemination and accessibility doesn’t replace hard theory. Actually the introduction of the electronic media in the late 1970s marked the end of French theory in France. Philosophers of this great generation were replaced by publicists, like Bernard-Henri Lévy. Theory is not synonymous with blogging, nor is multi-tasking with thinking. The books that we publish are a long-time intellectual commitment on their authors’ part and we have hardly scratched the surface. We are interested in everything that helps us diagnose the future, where we are going, what can be done, and that is far from clear at this point. We are presently moving from a humanistic space to a more global and ecological horizon. So we need an ever wider range of theories, not less, and the re-introduction of Italian social thinkers as well as Peter Sloterdijk’s amazing philosophical extrapolations are part of this project. Radio certainly had its time, but it is no less interesting for that. Actually it has been experiencing a revival. Technological advance isn’t everything. The Autonomists’ radios were not just radio, they were part of a total – not a global – environment, and they could mobilize the population whenever the police tried to raid them. These were political groups embedded in a local community, they knew who they were talking to. Can these communities be extended on a wider scale? Not in the same way. The Internet seemed to be the answer at the time it was introduced, but it has quickly become a new form of mental pollution. The CIA, apparently, is now working on a ‘gated’ equivalent that will keep hackers and other rogue idealists off-limits. The Internet certainly allows for a direct connection between people, but it still depends on long-time memory and a central organ. It assigns individuals a place that pre-exists them and abstracts them from their own environment. This is just the opposite of the idea of ‘general intelligence’ that Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno have extracted from Marx, which implies social creativity and public cooperation. Like other recent technological inventions, the Internet runs the risk of reproducing itself at the expense of the very sociability it was supposed to provide. It expands our world and reduces it to nothing, enforcing a culture of non-stop communication that is taking its toll on human temporality and its capacity to connect to the outside..."

Intelligence Agency: Theorist Sylvère Lotringer talks to Nina Power about art and the market, the failings of capitalism and how radical thinking can help us survive 'the system' - from Frieze.

Labels: interviews

Sydney arts community rallies to save one of the city’s most important venues for emerging and experimental art

Recently named by Creative Sydney as one of the cities’ top ‘Creative Catalysts’, Firstdraft Gallery - Sydney’s oldest Artist-Run Initiative, has been giving big breaks to budding artists since 1986. Some of Australia’s top young artists got their start at Firstdraft. Now we need your help.

Firstdraft lives in a building that has been served with a compulsory Council fire order. In the coming weeks and months, we must undertake significant renovations to our much-loved space in order to keep our doors open to the public.

Firstdraft will be rebuilding, rewiring and providing disabled access to our 3 galleries and 2 studios. And for that we need money we don’t have. Imagine if Firstdraft were to close... future biennale stars, gallery curators and the next generation of up-and-coming artists may not get the start they need.

That’s where you come in. Firstdraft is holding an emergency fundraiser auction at the gallery on Thursday 3 September 2009 to raise $20,000 for the cause. Former Firstdraft directors and artists, as well as fellow galleries, are rushing to donate artworks for auction in support of one of Sydney’s most important venues for emerging and experimental art. The auction will be hosted by Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art.

We need your support too. Come along and snap up some killer bargains. Tell your friends. Get involved! Every dollar raised will go to keeping alive a space that has added to the cultural vibrancy and creative spirit of Sydney for over two decades.

Who: works have been generously donated by artists and galleries such as: Del Kathryn Barton, Mike Parr, David Griggs, Lauren Brincat, Christopher Hanrahan, Sarah Goffman, Simon Kennedy, Brett East, Tom Polo, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Michaela Gleave, Mikala Dwyer, Helen Hyatt-Johnston, Jake Walker, Christine Cornish, Jessica Maurer, Rachel Scott, Mitch Cairns, Penelope Benton, Jess Oliveri, Sonny Day, Rod Jacka, Lionel Bawden, Jumaadi, Will French, Kate Scardifield, Tom Polo, Shane Haseman, Gallery 9, Gallery 4a, Breenspace, Stills gallery, Anna Schwartz gallery and Kaliman gallery, plus many more to come.

Labels: fund raisers, press releases

"Three signed watercolours by Adolf Hitler are to be sold at auction next month in Nuremberg in southern Germany, scene of the Nazi war crimes trials, a local paper said on Thursday. The paintings from 1910 and 1911 are entitled "Zerschossene Muehle" ("Bullet-riddled Mill"), "Weissenkirchen in der Wachau" -- the Austrian town depicted -- and "Haus mit Bruecke am Fluss" ("House With A Bridge Over A River"), the Nuernberger Nachrichten said.

According to the catalogue of the Weidler auction house, bidding will start at 3,000 euros (4,270 dollars) when the paintings go under the hammer on September 5. In April, the same auction house sold two watercolours signed by the Nazi dictator to a private collector for 32,000 euros but some works have fetched much higher sums.

In 2006, 21 works sold in Britain for 118,000 pounds (126,000 euros, 171,000 dollars). And earlier this year, a series of Hitler watercolours were sold at a British auction house for over 100,000 euros.

As a young man, Hitler had pretensions as an artist, applying to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. However, he failed to gain a place at the academy and was told his drawings showed a lack of talent. He was advised to study architecture instead but refused to shelve his artistic ambitions, making money in his 20s by copying scenes from postcards and selling the results to tourists.

via Google News

Labels: bad art, painting

"A collection of Frida Kahlo oil paintings, diaries and archival material that is the subject of a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press on 1 November has been denounced by scholars as a cache of fakes. Finding Frida Kahlo includes reproductions of paintings, drawings and handwritten letters, diaries, notes, trinkets and other ephemera attributed to the artist. They belong to Carlos Noyola and Leticia Fernández, a couple who own the antique store La Buhardilla Antiquarios in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The publisher describes it as “an astonishing lost archive of one of the twentieth century's most revered artists...full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humor”.




"According to an interview in the forthcoming book, and to emails from Noyola to The Art Newspaper, the couple acquired the items incrementally from 2004-07 from a lawyer who in turn had acquired them from a woodcarver who allegedly received them from the artist. Noyola tells The Art Newspaper he has more than 1,200 Kahlo items in all. He would not disclose how much he paid, but says: “We did acquire the collection with the belief and some groundwork done to prove that it is in fact authentic and thus paid accordingly.” He states that the collection is not for sale and will not be for sale in the future."

ARt Newspaper

Labels: art news, fakes

Justin Cooper, Fear and Same Sex Love, 2009.

"Today, we appear to fear just about everything. One reason why we fear so much is because life is dominated by competing groups of fear entrepreneurs who promote their cause, stake their claims, or sell their products through fear. Politicians, the media, businesses, environmental organisations, public health officials and advocacy groups are continually warning us about something new to fear - Justin Cooper

Got new work you'd like to share? Send images and description of your work to thearlife at hot mail dot com. Images should no larger than 350k each

Labels: drawing, new work

Last week's post It Don't Add Up was a contribution from a reader, an actual doctor in an actual university who knows about such things. The reader's point was simple - the formula for the creation art didn't quite mean what the Biennale of Sydney thinks it means.

Kaz Maslanka dropped by to alert Art Life readers to a post-in-reply at the group blog Mathematical Poetry. According to the blog's headache-inducing upper case mission statement:

...mathematical poetry is an artistic expression created by performing mathematical operations on words or images as if they were numbers. One may find this baffling because it seems we are confused about knowing the difference between the states of quality versus quantity. But it is through the fusion of this dichotomy that mathematical metaphor is spawned. Mathematics has always been used for denotation. However, our interest is to use math as a language for connotation.

Okey doke. So, bracing ourselves for a set-to, we clicked on the link to find the following [plus a complete repost of our own words, so we now return the favour]:

Problems Encountered With Mathematical Poetry

Here is a perfect example of why mathematical poetry will have problems at least in the near future. In the [Art Life] blog entry [...] the author is complaining that the originator for a set of equations published in the brochure for the Biennale of Sydney is numerically illiterate. Curiously enough I think they should have said mathematically illiterate for numbers are not involved in these examples. That said, I am not sure that it is true that the originator was mathematically illiterate as well. The author claims that the expression, “Art = tyranny” is a false statement yet, historically there has been countless examples of art that has been inspired by or executed to express tyranny. A good example would be the artistic turmoil created around 1911 in Zurich Switzerland, for the entire Dada movement’s intention was to be tyrannical (Anti-Art)… as well as the copy cats that came after. Obviously the problem brought to question in this brochure is how one reads an equation. Is the equation to be read as poetry or science? Too many people think that an equation is automatically scientific in its expression. If this myopic attitude is left to continue, mathematics will be in denotative chains forever. When one reads poetry one searches for the proper context to give it meaning in relation to their life. One looks at the many facets of a poem to see what it is pointing to. “Art = tyranny” is a perfect expression for Dada, Punk or any other nihilist form or art.

Now to give our author the benefit of the doubt we could agree with him/her if the originator’s intention was scientific however, I can hardly see scientific intent in this expression even if it were meant to be.

An intention not to break the law doesn't excuse someone from breaking the law, does it? [We heard that on CSI once, and it sounded good...]

Labels: Biennale of Sydney, fake controversies, maths

That’s where you come in. Firstdraft is holding an emergency fundraiser auction at the gallery on Thursday 3 September 2009 to raise $20,000 for the cause. Former Firstdraft directors and artists, as well as fellow galleries, are rushing to donate artworks for auction in support of one of Sydney’s most important venues for emerging and experimental art.



Imagine if Firstdraft were to close... future biennale stars, gallery curators and the next generation of up-and-coming artists may not get the start they need. They need your support.

Go along and snap up some killer bargains. Tell your friends. Get involved! There will be works on auction to fit all kinds of budgets and lucky door prizes!!

Further information: Firstdraft Fundraiser

Labels: appeals

"The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons extends Wade Marynowsky’s development of custom-built robotics and interactive, performative media. In this installation, Marynowsky explores roboticist Masahiro Mori’s theory outlined in The Uncanny Valley (1970), which suggests that in designing humanoid robots one should not aim for total human likeness, but for an alternative to an uncanny appearance. 

Media artist/artistic director; Wade Marynowsky, Electrical engineer; Aras Vaichas, Programmer; Jeremy Apthorp, Lighting; Mirabelle Wouters Costume; Sally Jackson.
 - 

Performance Space at the Carriage Works

Labels: new work

"Except for Ken Yonetani’s Sweet Barrier Reef, a rather dull comment on the effects of consumerism on nature, the Australian off-site project Once Removed curated by Felicity Fenner offers a refreshing insight into the predicament of displacement. Undoubtedly part of the show’s appeal is the extraordinary location, the Ludoteca, formerly a convent in a prime position between the Giardini and the Arsenale. At the entrance is a chapel, where Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro present their impressive new work Life Span. 195,774 VHS tapes are stacked into a neatly arranged plinth, responding boldly to the religious architecture of the space. What is immediately striking is the weight and solidity of this monument, an exaggerated reminder of the obsolete material packaging of globally circulated screen fantasies. But the artists also reflect on the passing of time and its multiple scales; neither the crumbling walls of the old church nor the black plastic surfaces of the tapes can speak of eternity. The combined running time of these tapes is the average human’s life span when VHS was released, 66.1 years. Thinking of how many hours of pornography fill the monolith, the idea of this content flashing before one’s eyes at death is also staggering. The rumours around Venice before the opening were that the Australians had ‘video porn’ on show. Needless to say, Once Removed has been well attended..."

the future now, minus nations, alexandra crosby: the 2009 venice biennale, RealTime Arts

Labels: Venice Biennale

"Rhys Chatham is a guitarist-composer with an impeccable pedigree: He studied with electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick and hipster minimalist La Monte Young, played in Tony Conrad’s Dream Syndicate (other notable alumnus: John Cale), founded the music program at the Kitchen, underwent a stylistic Damascus at an early Ramones show, and influenced Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and hordes of younger experimental rockers. His 1977 composition Guitar Trio remains a landmark for minimalism, guitar music, and genre-bending alike.



"A 1989 work for one hundred guitars, An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, eventually led to 2005’s four-hundred-guitar epic, A Crimson Grail, which premiered at the Basilique du Sacré Coeur in Paris. The latter was the work, revised and trimmed to a sensible two hundred guitars, that was to make its New York debut in August 2008 until a heavy rainstorm forced its last-minute cancellation. With long, shallow tents protecting the guitarists and their amps, Saturday’s performance was the rain check, so to speak, though the weather was remarkably beautiful..."

Rhys's Pieces, Art Forum Diary

Labels: art news, music

The Biennale of Sydney has put out an advance brochure that contains the two equations:

art + beauty + empathy = power

power – beauty – empathy = tyranny


Anyone with a primary school understanding of mathematics knows that if you solve these equations for the term ‘art’ you will discover that the claim being made is that

art = tyranny

If the Biennale of Sydney wants to communicate its ideas in the form of equations, perhaps it should run them by someone with a primary school level of numerical literacy before publishing them. Didn’t anyone in the accounts section twig that the Biennale of Sydney is spreading the message throughout the world that art equals tyranny???

Here is the mathematical solution:

art + beauty + empathy = power

art + empathy = power – beauty

art = power – beauty – empathy

given already that power – beauty – empathy = tyranny

then it follows

art = tyranny

Labels: emails, maths

Documentary on Rider Spoke by Blast Theory, presented in Sydney 2009 as part of the British Council's Creative Cities programme in East Asia.

Can't see the video? Click here to view.

Labels: game theory, interactive, Locative art

"Money might be best described by Jean Baudrillard’s fabricated quotation from Ecclesiastes: ‘The simulacrum is true.’ In modern times, money’s material value is disconnected from its assumed value; it is basically nothing more than a promise. Rather than being backed by either silver or gold, it is based on confidence in a certain institution – in the Federal Reserve, in the case of the US, or the Bank of England, in the case of the UK. In an era of bailouts and the euphemistic ‘quantitative easing’, both institutions are more than a little precarious.



"In the US, designer Richard Smith wants to save our currency by re-branding it. Without waiting for government approval (or perhaps realizing that Obama has more than enough on his plate), Smith set up his own initiative to re-design the dollar. To that end he established a competition that ended – appropriately enough – on the fourth of July. A British brand consultant based in New York, Smith is already known for re-tooling the image of gold for the Gold Council, and has worked for both retail corporation Target and Exxon Mobil (all of whom may well want a say in the future of the dollar bill)."

The Buck Stops Here, Frieze

Labels: $$$, graphic design

"Adrian Dannatt: Pharmacy, which was shown at the Cohen Gallery in New York in 1992, feels kind of religious. As a viewer, it’s like being inside one of the vitrine pieces.

Damien Hirst: I’ve always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscape or civilization, with some sort of hierarchy within it. It’s also like a contemporary museum of the Middle Ages. In 100 years time this will look like an old apothecary. A museum of something that’s around today.

AD: In France they have glistening pharmacies meant to be the most up-to-date imaginable, but they already look dated because it’s such a ’70s idea of Modernism.

DH: They provoke an idea of confidence, of trust in minimalism. I love medical logos, so minimal, so clean, there’s something dumb about it. I like the idea of outside and inside. The cabinets could be people and the drugs internal parts, and they relate to different parts of the body.

AD: Is the theme of escape in pieces such as The Acquired Inability to Escape (1991) and The Asthmatic Escaped (1992) related to the idea of inside/outside?

DH: I like escape formally, as an idea. There’s a religious element to The Acquired Inability to Escape. The one at the Tate has four slits — if you took an imaginary line through from the camera lens you’d get a cross. That’s something you don’t see but which is an important part of it..."

Life's Like This Then it Stops. Interview with Damien Hirst, Flash Art, 1993

Labels: interviews

New York Beat Movie (Downtown 81) – 1981: Rambling, amateurish and often incoherent, this film portrays the day-to-day routine of Jean-Michel Basquiat: artist and (sometime) musician, as he tries to survive amidst rappers, junkies, gangsters, strippers, models and uptown art-lovers. It's an interesting time capsule of Post-Punk, No-Wave New York, with some fascinating vignettes of 80’s New York, but it doesn’t feel like a finished movie. However some rare and raw performances from Deborah Harry, DNA, James White and the Blacks, Lydia Lunch and Basquiat himself with his own band, Gray, make for moments of excitement among the tedium.



Basquiat – 1996: ‘Basquiat’ tells the real life story of an anonymous and homeless graffiti artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, as he is ‘discovered’ by Andy Warhol, becomes an art star almost over night and then tragically dies at the age of 27 from a drug overdose. ‘Basquiat’ is stylish but dishonest portrayal of the artist. Directed by New York artist and former friend Julian Schnabel, the film seems to be a platform to aggrandize his own legacy, instead of Basquiat’s. He went so far as to paint all of Basquiat’s paintings for the film, as well as portraying his own role in the film as the sole friend and saviour to the troubled artist. The actor Jeffery Wright felt that his performance of Basquiat had been “appropriated” by the director, and the end result is an overly egoistic mess that fails to portray the purity or authenticity of Basquiat’s art.


Read more - New York Art Rebels on Screen, The Telegraph UK

Labels: art movies, cinema, No Wave

Paula Garrard, Reverberate 1 & 2 (detail),
Installation view. Oil on canvas, 130 x 160cm.

"We are exposed to so many colours through the mass media bombardment of visual imagery and advertising that the connection between seeing and experience is often overlooked. These paintings are about taking a moment to explore ‘seeing’: a perceptual encounter, a visual fantasy trip which detaches itself from expectation. Colour, line and form negotiate with one another and funnel one’s vision into a multitude of equally competing directions. The eye is at once repelled and intrigued. Together, the works are not just a collection of objects, but a visual and perceptual experience - Paula Garrard."

Exhibiting at Regional Art Space – 11 July – 6 September, Dubbo Regional Gallery – The Armati Bequest, Western Plains Cultural Centre.

Labels: new work

Man on the moon: artists exploring space, 21 July 2009: Celebrating 40 years since man first walked on moon, artworks inspired by lunar exploration. The Guardian.

Labels: exhibitions, the moon

"A clever child might argue that the unicorn could exist because it is no more absurd than the narwhal whale. The twisted tusk of the narwhal is what was supposed to grow from the head of the horse known as the unicorn. The centrepiece of a 15th-century Flemish mille-fleurs tapestry in the Victoria and Albert Museum is a unicorn, with a horn exactly like that: a narwhal tusk projects from its forehead, and a heavy tail with flukes, like a whale's, flourishes above its back. The background is studded with symmetrically placed flowering plants, plus the odd exotic game bird. I would give much to know what the tapestried picture means. Are all the featured creatures imaginary? Is the invented world of human fantasy here presented as superior to reality? Without knowing more about the idea of the unicorn, there is no way I can know what I am looking at.



"A horse with a horn is not a contradiction in terms, unless I define a horse as a hornless creature. It makes no odds that a horse has no need of a horn. The narwhal does nothing with its "horn", which isn't even a secondary sexual characteristic because some females have them as well as males. The tusk is actually an overgrown incisor tooth. In theory, horses, too, could start growing a tooth into a tusk and then into a horn. Rhinoceroses have single horns made of modified hair; the mane of a horse could one day develop into a kind of horn. It hasn't happened – as far as we know – but no evolutionist should discount the possibility..."

The eternal fascination of unicorns, Germaine Greer, The Guardian UK.

Labels: art criticism

Labels: press releases

"The young women were unusual for stopping. Most of the museum’s visitors passed through the gallery oblivious.

"A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.

"Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride..."

At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus, New York Times

Labels: art museums, public galleries, tourism

Tate Britain, the home of British art from 1500 to the present, is seeking to appoint a Director to lead the Gallery. The new Director will succeed Stephen Deuchar, who has been appointed Director of The Art Fund, joining Tate Britain at a time when a major programme of capital development is under way and when the opportunity to develop a vision of engagement with historic and contemporary British art has never been more exciting.

Reporting to Nicholas Serota, Tate's Director, the successful candidate will be responsible for the strategic vision for Tate Britain, building on the successes which have been achieved in recent years. He or she will conceive and execute the public programme at Tate Britain, representing the Gallery both externally and internally, whilst also working within the Director's Group developing the Tate-wide Strategic Plan.

Candidates for the post will need to command respect across the organisation of Tate, have extraordinary creative vision and demonstrate an ability to work collaboratively with senior colleagues in line with Tate's cultural objectives.

Please contact Tamsin Chandler of Liz Amos Associates on +44 (0) 20 7664 8601 or at tamsin.chandler@lizamosassociates.com to learn more or to receive an application pack. Information is also available at http://www.tate.org.uk or http://www.lizamosassociates.com Closing date: 14 September 2009.

Labels: jobs

"Just when the withering economy is shrinking art, antiques and design sales, there is a rise in attendance and interest in historic homes and artist sites in both the US and the UK.

“There is definitely something in the air, with growing numbers seeking out the simple pleasures offered by the National Trust,” says Fiona Reynolds, director general of the UK-based National Trust. Total visitors received in May were 1.98m, an eight per cent increase from the same month last year. Overall, attendance has climbed 24 per cent so far versus 2008.



“Staycations” in the US seem to be driving attendance at some National Trust properties. “We have anecdotal evidence confirming that people are spending less, staying closer to home and visiting more of our sites,” says James Vaughan, National Trust vice president for historic sites in Washington, DC. But the US National Trust, with a membership of only 250,000, pales in comparison to the British National Trust, which has 3.6m members.

"In the US, some artists’ home and sites in a consortium of 36 such National Trust properties are witnessing the biggest bumps in interest. For example, at Chesterwood, the home, studio and gardens of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), which are nestled in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, attendance has risen 50 per cent in May alone, reports Chesterwood director Donna Hassler. Visitor numbers to the home and studio of artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in East Hampton on Long Island rose 20 per cent in the past year. Attendance at the Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church’s Persian-style home Olana has always been steady. “But now it’s up ten per cent compared with last year,” says Olana director Linda McLean. “Because we’ve opened the second floor as well as a new gallery and added a new tour, both new and repeat visitors are coming.” In Darien, Connecticut, visitors to architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House have increased 20 per cent so far compared with 2008..."

Recession fuels attendance of artist sites and historic homes, Art Newspaper

Labels: art news

"Visitors to the German capital over recent days may well have felt transported back to the heady weeks following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, amid icy winds, blizzards and an inimitable spirit of euphoria, 117 artists from 21 countries gathered to paint works on a 1.3km (1,420yd) stretch of the concrete divide that had previously been out of bounds in the communist east.

"Twenty years on, most are back at the East Side Gallery (a 1.3km section of the Wall), poised on ladders, paint brushes in hand, to re-create their often provocative images - remember Birgit Kinder's Trabant bursting through the Wall? - and to give the gallery a much-needed makeover.



"Their crumbling paintings look as though they have been attacked with acid, thanks to the weather and the traffic that thunders past the world's largest outdoor gallery. There's also the graffiti by tourists keen to leave their mark. This time around, more durable paints are being used and the murals will be protected with anti-graffiti spray.

"Dimitri Vrubel, the Russian who reproduced the passionate kiss - an expression of Soviet-era brotherhood between the Soviet dictator, Leonid Brezhnev, and his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, is back on site, protected by a steel fence..."

Where art and politics come face to face, The Observer

Labels: art news, murals

This much anticipated exhibition is a vivid display of Vickers’ unique visual language and growing mastery over a variety of media. From intimate drawings and photographs to a spectacular chandelier installation of LED lights, bones, and toffee, The Light at the End of the Tunnel is a Train draws you into a world of fragility, undulating flux and the beautiful death.



“If you think you know what you are looking at you think you are in control; you are in control of the visual field, the enfolding and unfolding space, and the restrictive possibilities of the physical body to impact your presence and identity. Play with that certainty and the world you inhabit becomes a mysterious and compelling space of unrecognisable fluidity and (in) tense doubt…

Vickers tests our capacity for accurate observation and self-justifying empirical verification. The truth-value of the work and our own identity is partly at stake… what we expect to see, what we see, and what is real. Any thought to embrace ethereality and sensuality as an escape from the vicissitudes or the temporal transitions of the real is depleted by the inviting and complex ambiguity mobilized through Vickers’ presentation of this new body of work”.

Excerpts from catalogue essay by Gary Sangster (former Curator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC; Director, the Contemporary Museum, in Baltimore; currently based in Sydney, at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales).

Labels: press releases

From John Kelly...

It could be an advertisement for some super blue detergent, but the Baie des Anges on the Côte d'Azur is not chemically enhanced. The sea really is the colour of the cloudless sky. I feel summer bliss lying under an umbrella reading Werner Spies catalogue essay of Robert Longo's MAMAC [1] retrospective. Occasionally I look up to the horizon or dip into the cool sea whilst Christina and Oscar play in the shallows. We have come here to enjoy the beach and the restaurant, Castel, with its sun-beds tucked into the corner below the Quai des Etats-Unis, right under the Hotel Suisse where Raoul Dufy used to paint and just opposite Vieux Nice. From my prone position I can see the yellow house where Henri Matisse once lived, the roller door on his large studio window half open. Maybe even Matisse's ghost continues to enjoy the blue of beyond.

I return to reading Spies' engaging and convincing essay where he links Longo's imagery and technique to the film, On the beach. It immediately takes my mind back to Melbourne, the city I grew up in and where I studied at RMIT University. For a year I lived opposite the school in the Oxford Hotel, a hotel catering to students in a fading glory of its former self. It's where Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck stayed whilst filming Stanley Kramer's film about the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Gardner was quoted as saying that Melbourne was an appropriate place to make a film about the end of the world! If only she were alive today to see the vibrancy of a city transformed.

Nuclear annihilation is a long way from my mind as Castel spray us with a cool non-radioactive mist as we take morning coffee. On the way back to my beach bed I pick up an invitation to Nöel Dolla's latest exhibition, [2] but I do not need to leave the beach to see his work. Overhead at Castel is Restructuration spatiale (1971 - 2009), a work consisting of polystyrene balls playfully dangling from the canopy, all coloured similar to the warning flags on the beach. For a number of years Dolla has organized exhibitions under Castel's awnings and this year it consists of his former students from Nice's Villa Arson. They include David Ancelin, who fills a life buoy with concrete and places it in the outdoor showers. Fingered into the concrete is a love heart and presumably Ancelin's phone number, making the buoy useless for saving lives but maybe a functional calling card. A bright orange life-vest is encased in an emergency glass cabinet whose practicality is disrupted by the formality of a black tie hung casually around the neck of the jacket. Another work is a photograph of cacti which has text inscribed into its soft flesh by Benjamin Hugard. The text references gunplay and murder in America and is titled Dead Kennedy's, 1959-2009 (I fought the law). Dolla and some of his fellow exhibitors also teach at the threateningly named Villa Arson, an art school a tram-ride away from the beach. This art school has an autonomous campus, accommodation, restaurant and an art centre that is highly regarded internationally. One would imagine that Castel would not be a place where most aspiring Villa Arson art students would consider exhibiting, and therefore it is refreshing to see Dolla and his friends, including Pascal Pinaud (Kebab à voeux, 2001) literally on the beach.


Henri Matisse house, Nice
If the teachers are relaxing, Dolla's most recent graduates of Villa Arson are in the gallery just above. You only need to climb the stairs and cross the road to Galerie de la Marine. The title of the exhibition is Santé, which is a French salute to one's health, usually accompanied by the clinking of glasses. Generally the work is of a high standard and looks conceptually and materially well handled, as one would expect of this school's graduates. I find the work interesting and refreshing, especially for what is not there. The presence of video is noticeably absent, and given its prevalence internationally and that Villa Arson has an extremely well equipped audio-visual department, its lack of dominance is worth noting. A flatscreen TV was on the wall but its screen was black. Only one other work dealt directly with video, and that was incorporated into a sculptural armature that alludes to some form of mathematics. All the other work is tactile painting, sculpture and installation.

Due to my lack of French, I struggle through the essay by Arnaud Labelle -Rojoux. The gist of it seems to wish these young artists well, whilst warning them of the pitfalls of the market and the 'star academy.' Labelle-Rojoux ends by quoting Chuck Berry with "C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell." The show is in two parts and continues at Galerie a. de Nice in the old town; as you meander towards it you need to traverse the kitsch tourist art that abounds in the small shops and ateliers surrounding the Cours Saleya and Matisse's studio. There you will find the usual fare of tourist art and the caricature artists. You might know the sort I mean, the ones who use a tonal charcoal drawing of Elvis or Marilyn as an advertisement for their skilful realism.

Just outside the old town is the Galerie Soardi. It is now one of Nice's most impressive contemporary commercial galleries. The exhibition on show is House of colors by the German artist Tilman. It is a lively, playful exhibition with boxes of colour bouncing off the walls and floors as if they have just dropped in from Teletubby land. [3] I read Tilman's CV and see he lists his teacher on the first line. I wonder if this is a German tradition, for it seems unusual to credit any one teacher in a CV (one has so many?). I am also fascinated to see a name I am familiar with, David Thomas, a lecturer at RMIT University. David was teaching there when I was a student. [4] I remember him as having an obsession with the colour yellow, so I enjoy seeing his name as a curator of an exhibition that included Tilman in Melbourne. [5] I leave the Soardi in an upbeat mood, heading towards MAMAC.

On my way I stop in front of a model shop where the space vehicles in the window remind me of the Yves Kline spacecraft that I already know from the MAMAC collection. Klein has a whole gallery devoted to his 'blues', but this curious rocket -type sculpture seems atypical. In the toyshop a glass case contains an assortment of guns and I ponder whether they are real or replicas; I can't decide, but ask, why do guns and toys coexist as if it is normal?


Robert Longo, Bodyhammer, 2009.
Installation view, MAMAC.
Guns also co-exist with art at MAMAC. Niki Saint Phalle shoots her canvases on one floor whilst hand-guns also greet you in Robert Longo's retrospective. They are all titled Bodyhammer and then the name of the gun is listed - Uzi, Colt 38, etc. They are huge charcoal drawings that force you to look down the barrel of the gun. This show is where the colour of the Côte d'Azur, of Matisse's yellow house, of Dufy promenades, of Tilman's boxes, of Klein blues and Dolla's coloured balls are counterd by the blackness of Longo, a New York artist. At first glance it is impressive, with the weight of the massive black drawings dominating the white galleries as if some massive burnt offering has given Longo an unlimited supply of black soot. However, it does not take long before the technique begins to irritate. In lots of ways it is incredibly immature, as Longo simply copies the tonality of photographs as many amateurs do. There is no doubt he does it with grand ambition and they are impressive if only for their scale and competence. However, it is the sort of technique that one might find in any first-year drawing class or by the caricaturist on the Cours Saleya. Normally this type of drawing would be discouraged by art lecturers around the world, for there is no sense of enquiry or investigation, just a surface that slips into an easy mannerism, a type of therapeutic, unthinking drawing. After one decides the photo to be copied, there is a process of obsessive copying of tones. In Longo's defense, he is obviously aware of the limitations of this drawing technique and he takes it to the extreme point in scale; the result may not be Elvis or even Marilyn, but an impressive if shallow installation.


Robert Longo, Bodyhammer, 2009.
Installation view, MAMA

In Untitled (the face) a huge wave is peaking as it rolls in towards an unseen shore. Is it a nightmare of a Tsunami that is out there lurking or a surfer's paradise? Probably the former, for it is juxtaposed against a charcoal drawing of a nuclear explosion, Untitled (mike test / head of Goya), 2003, dominates the gallery at 183 x 244 cm. The idea of threat is continued with two drawings of sharks breaking the black sea to bare their teeth as they do in any number of TV documentaries. Even money is seen as a threat in a series of life-size small drawings of American multi-denomination bills, which are titled Weapons of mass destruction. It seems an appropriate reflection of a recent America, where politics have been simplified to the point of being either black or white, even their presidential elections. "You're either with us or against us" [6] and the threats are coming thick and fast from man and nature. Guns, sharks, mushroom clouds and tsunamis are all threatening a population frightened by the contemporary politics of fear. Even though the exhibition is an impressive installation, each work is individually titled. Read individually or as a whole, Longo's drawings promote a series of simplistic and stereotypical images that have no more depth than the paper they are drawn on. I prefer Dolla's balls to the dollar bills of Longo.

I leave MAMAC through its bookshop and arrive on the beach with a Noel Dolla catalogue. I lie in front of the azure sea and read about his 1999 MAMAC exhibition where he used a similar set of coloured balls on Place Yves Klein (where a Sol Le Witt large mural now sits in the window) and realize the title of the work at Castel is the same as his earliest exhibited piece in 1969. His use of fishing tackle and floats on strings literally ties his work much more convincingly to the beach than Longo's sharks and tsunamis. As the sun sets, the Baie des Anges turns a velvety black. We enjoy the last night of our summer holiday with a lovely meal on the beach. I look up and see a portly man leaning on the balcony of Matisse's studio, his ghost maybe?

Notes:

[1] Musée des arts modernes et contemporains

[2] Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne

[3] The Teletubbies is a kids TV programme with strong, pure, fresh colours.

[4] Though he did not teach me directly.

[5] Composite realities. 'CPP' stands for 'Centre for Contemporary Photography'.

[6] President George W Bush issued this statement in November 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/)


This article originally appeared here. Thanks to the author and Circa.

Labels: drawing, painting, postcards, sculpture