the art life

Via Weetstraw.com

Labels: seasonal greetings

Tino La Bamba's quest to ride a motorised dragster from Sydney to Lismore was an astonishing success but it is only now that the startling details of his adventure are becoming known. La Bamba, who may be somehow related to Renny Kodgers [second cousin?], made an unexpected appearance on Prime News:



More details of La Bamab's trip can be found on his webiste, such as this intriguing tidbit:



"Word is continuing to spread of my remarkable odyssey. The largest newspaper in the district, The Northern Star interviews me. They are keen to hear of the knowledge that I have gleaned by travelling through this harsh land. I speak to two men. A writer and a photographer who have been sent to cover my story. They stare up at me wide eyed as I impart my observations on the landscape that has surrounded them their entire lives. They ask me if I have encountered any hostility as I passed from pueblo to pueblo. I tell them that I have only encountered “hostility tamed”. They look at me like I make no sense. So I explain to them that if ever there was a moment of aggression it was so quickly abated that it would be incorrect to call it hostility. The appropriate term is “hostility tamed”. I tell them that yes I came across a lot of this."

Read more at Tinolabamba.com.

Labels: performance art, the hero's journey

Professor Joanna Mendelssohn was among those first contacted by members of the media in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Nick Waterlow and his daughter Chloe Heuston. In this article on the ethics of news reporting - originally commissioned and written for the Jesuit Communications Australia website Eureka Street - Mendelssohn describes her experiences of the subsequent news reporting.

In the early evening of Monday 9 November 2009 Chloe Heuston and her father Nick Waterlow, guiding spirit of many Biennales of Sydney and mentor to generations of artists and arts administrators, were killed in a knife attack. Chloe’s two year old daughter was injured, while her sons - aged four and four months respectively- were not.

I first heard of these events at 11 pm that evening when I was contacted by Geeshe Jacobsen of the Sydney Morning Herald, who asked me if I was aware that Nick Waterlow could be one of two people who had died that evening. When I expressed a sleepy surprise, she clarified the situation by describing it as “the murder-suicide”. My response was that if there was a murder-suicide, then the murderer could not be him. I told her that Nick Waterlow did not do murder. Again she repeated that it was a murder-suicide and that the man was 68 years old. She was so adamant about the murder-suicide that I went to bed convinced Nick Waterlow was alive. The next morning’s edition of the Sydney Morning Herald was published with Nick and Chloe’s photographs, as an accompaniment to the story of the killings, which effectively identified them as the victims. The murder-suicide story was quietly killed.

Because the journalist did not apologise either for her behaviour or her initial allegation, I later complained to the Sydney Morning Herald. I received a call from Peter Kerr, the executive editor, who apologised on behalf of the paper. The next week Geeshe Jacobsen had the new byline of “Crime Editor”.

There is a reason why police delay the naming of victims of crime. They need time to notify the immediate family, so that the news can be broken to close friends and other relatives. The decision by the Sydney Morning Herald to effectively announce that Nick Waterlow and Chloe Heuston were dead well ahead of any official notice, added an extra layer of grief to those who were close to them. Nick’s neighbours had another problem. He had lived with his partner Juliet in a block of apartments in Potts Point. That evening a journalist, identified as being from the Sydney Morning Herald, buzzed apartments in the block, attempting to contact her for an interview.

Photographers and television crews descended on the hospital where the injured child had been taken and filmed her as she was rushed into surgery. The ambulance officers did well in covering the little girl with a blanked to protect her from the flashing lights of the cameras, but the photographs still appeared in daily papers, on television and remain on the Web.

As the Sydney Morning Herald had identified Nick’s place of work; television crews, photographers and journalists made an early beeline for the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, where people were trying to come to terms with the death of one of their most loved colleagues. Fortunately the university employs skilled public relations staff, so a media conference was arranged with the Dean, Ian Howard. His voice became the formal response of the arts community to the loss of one of its favourite sons. Good media management meant that the university’s meeting with faculty staff was timed for 12 noon, which coincided with the police media briefing.

Later some journalists returned to COFA, staking out the gallery, to see who entered. Restrictions on contacting university staff didn’t stop journalists from phoning or calling in with increasingly absurd questions, or demanding that staff help them to contact the family. One of the problems the journalists faced is that those who work in the arts are reasonably used to dealing with the media, and did not see anything especially enticing about being quoted in the popular press. When no intimate details were forthcoming, the media claimed that Nick Waterlow had been “intensely private” and commented on the “tight-knit” arts community as they created anecdotes and attitudes on his behalf.

The police had indicated that the person of interest was his eldest son, Antony, who was reported as being a schizophrenic. In 2006 Nick Waterlow had been marginally involved in a major touring exhibition on art and schizophrenia, For Matthew and Others. This information triggered stories claiming the exhibition was evidence of his concern. Photographs of Antony Waterlow were distributed and published in the media. It was unfortunate that The Daily Telegraph published a photograph of Nick’s other son, Luke, and captioned it “Antony Waterlow partying with friends”.

Chloe’s husband, Ben Heuston, had been in England when she was killed. The media, including the ABC, staked out Sydney airport to record his distraught face as he returned home. Later, after he collected the children from hospital, the media pursued them, and subsequently published images of the fugitives.

That the circumstances of this family and their friends were turned into tabloid entertainment is perhaps not surprising. Frontline neatly parodied this kind of death-knock journalism years ago. However when the tabloid media hounded Lindy Chamberlain family in the 1980s they were not joined by the ABC and Fairfax broadsheets. But in 2009 “quality” press were ahead of the pack in journalistic bad behaviour.

The ABC broadcast footage surreptitiously recorded inside the church service at both funerals as a part of its evening news bulletin. In style and content the stories in the Sydney Morning Herald were interchangeable with those in The Daily Telegraph.

I keep wondering how to categorise the way news media have acted over these deaths. Is the failure to respect the feelings of those close to Nick Waterlow and Chloe Heuston a failure of ethics or a failure of empathy? Perhaps it isn’t possible to develop a functioning code of professional ethics without some sense of empathy. Whatever the reason, this has hardly been journalism’s finest hour.

Labels: old media

Amy Marjoram writes to The Art Life about an exciting new online project. Starting life as the exhibition Mod Off held in Melbourne last month the project has now migrated to a blog and hopes to collect the work of artists dedicated to finding new uses for old things with slight [or complex] modifications.

From the Mod Off site:

"Mod Off is now going to exist as an ongoing online archive of Modified Objects.

"In curating the Mod Off exhibition we were consistently surprised by the Mods we encountered, some were simple others incredibly complex - but they all challenged our expectations about objects, the way we relate to them, and many pushed our ideas of what a Mod can be. We look forward to the continuation of this exciting project and hope you will show us your Mods. Please email amymarjoram@gmail.com with images and any descriptions you have, please include your name as maker of the Mod (or mark as Unknown if you have witnessed a Mod of uncertain provenance) and the person who took the image.

"We will not re-post Mod’s that people have come across online but we are happy to hear about Mod’s on the internet that may expand our research. We immensely look forward to seeing the objects you have made or encountered & identified as Mods in your daily life.

Thankyou, Amy Marjoram & Yvette King"

Visit the Mod Off blog

Labels: art projects, x-post

Louise Morrison and Matt Dickmann, Mr Ernest J. Langridge's Resignation, 2009.
Found objects and painted steel.


Mr Ernest J. Langridge's Resignation, detail.
"Mr Ernest J. Langridge's Resignation is one of the artworks in the Show Character exhibition held at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA). Guest curator James Doohan (aka Jonah Dames) invited each of the artists to respond the idea of a "character". In this collaborative work, Louise Morrison's reflections on backyard inventions and the persistance of hope meet Matt Dickmann's interests in aerodynamics and structural simplicity."

Got new work you'd like to share? Send images no larger than 300k each plus a short statement about the work to the art life at hot mail dot com.

Labels: new work, sculpture

The global financial crisis

Has had little or no effect on the Australian art world 6% 6
Is yet to be properly felt 30% 29
Is eating away at the bottom of the market 22% 21
Is evening out the haves from the have nots 22% 21
More hysteria than fact 21% 20

97 votes total

Labels: poll

This tribute to Brian Dunlop has been released by Eva Breuer Gallery:


Brian Dunlop (1938-2009, Untitled (Self-Portrait) 1985
Lithograph 12/20, 32.5 x 31.5 cm.

"It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Brian Dunlop (1938-2009) one of Australia’s greatest painters and a dear friend. Brian died yesterday morning, 9 December, in Melbourne after a long battle with a congenital heart condition. He was 71.

"An artist of great sensibility, of great intellect and virtuosity, Brian was an exceptional professional; sought after by collectors, revered by his colleagues, and loved by all who knew him. The body of work he leaves behind includes some of the most important figurative paintings produced in Australia. The best of Brian’s works exude a poetic vulnerability and sensuality, perhaps seen in a silent pause or the lift of a curtain in the breeze. For many years Brian restricted his range of subject matter to the interior with window, often including a figure or still life. In these works "The room represents the mind, the windows the eyes looking out, curtains are the eyelids. A window is the division between inner and outer, spiritual and worldly. The figure later stood in the doorway, the threshold; then she ventured outside into the landscape." Whether painting the figure or the landscape, overpowering everything in Brian’s work is light. In April reflecting on his latest compositions he wrote, “The correct balance can be pure energy.”

"Having inherited his love of painting and drawing from his father, Brian won a scholarship to study at the National Art School from which he graduated at the end of the 1950’s. There was a strong tendency towards abstraction in Sydney at that stage and it wasn’t until he reached Rome some years later that Brian found his ‘true’ way. “Justin O’brien had looked at sketches and drawings I had done in Rome and said that they were more 'true to you' than the abstract work. He said 'Keep doing them, and they will evolve', so I did.”

"Brian had an insatiable appetite for the history of art, particularly European art, as a practising painter. “I have also always liked what I regard as the true American tradition which includes a deep respect for nature and wilderness and social comment (Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth).” Of continuing interest to him were artists as different as Piero della Francesco (he had seen all his paintings), Vermeer and Braque. After working for twenty years in and near Port Fairy on the south west coast of Victoria, Brian had recently moved to Beechworth, where he painted his last exhibition.

"Brian was part of the gallery family for more than 15 years. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones. We farewell him with the greatest respect."

Labels: obits, press releases

Imagine the scene if you can. You’re at the Art Gallery of NSW, or the Museum of Contemporary Art, or perhaps at the “National” Gallery of Victoria, for an opening party. It’s the standard fair: art world people, drinks, canapés, speeches. After a couple of hours the doors are thrown open. The public streams into the gallery, all smiles, many of them extended Islander families, and head towards a stage area en mass. Reggae superstar O-shen comes on and the place goes crazy – the band kicks in, dreads flying – it’s like the second coming of Bob Marley. Not only is the band great, the crowd totally into it, but so are the art people – and even crazier – all the galleries are still open, drunk people wandering around looking at art, museum guards smiling, no doubt mentally totting up the overtime. A grand dream? Too many of Brisbane’s infamous trumpet reefers? No – this really was the opening party of the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial. All the usual art world talk of “inclusivity” and “reaching out to the community” usually amount to very little. This time GOMA and the APT made the egalitarian gesture into something real. This is how all major gallery openings should roll. [Note to the 2010 Biennale of Sydney – maybe think of combining with All Tomorrow’s Parties? You can only hope to match the fun of the APT.]




The APT exhibition proper opened to the public on Saturday morning. It made recording some of our interviews tricky. While we were in the middle of interviewing New Zealander artist Robin White and her Fijian collaborators Leba Toki and Bale Jione, people gathered around, listened quietly, walked into shot, stood in front of the camera, and took photos. The end of the interview was a write off, the sound obliterated by another NZ artist, Rohan Wealleans, screaming from the adjacent gallery. It was a performance involving a canoe. Wealleans performance was described to us by some onlookers as “showbizy” and “like a 1st year art student’s idea of a performance”. We missed it ourselves but can attest to its volume. We cannot attest to the exact identity of the performer. It was said that Wealleans, who we’d wanted to interview for our APT special, was too sick to travel to Australia and had sent his identical twin brother in his place. Yeah right. We’ve seen Adaptation and we know how that works.

Chinese artist Chen Quilin’s family home was demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. All the people from her home town have been scattered to other cities, relocated, lost in the greater Chinese population. Many other towns and villages met the same fate and the sadness of losing a family home to the waters was compounded by the fact that many of the former citizens were obliged to destroy their houses with little more than a hammer. One of Chen’s pieces for GOMA is a complete reconstruction of a house from a flooded area – in fact, the house comes from a village that neighboured Chen’s, a place where she had played as a child. Accompanying the installation is a video that documents in dream-like sequences the hopes of the relocated villagers. It’s poetic, moving and rather beautiful. Talking to Chen through an interpreter it was humbling to discover an artist whose reasons for making her art were so clear, forthright and deeply emotional. Many of the artists we have spoken to such as Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmian, White, Toki and Jione – and many others – talk about their work in a manner that is both direct and uncomplicated.



What is the name of the director of the Gallery of Modern Art? His name is Tony Ellwood. Tony Ellwood. As in Jake and Ellwood, we’re on a mission from God etc. TONY ELLWOOD. Thank you.

Labels: APT, public galleries

The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial opened the brand new Gallery of Modern Art in 2006. It was a stupendous event. Interstate art lovers came to witness the cutting of the red ribbon, the brass band at the entrance playing God Save The Queen and the glorious sight of men throwing their toppers into the air. Hoorah for Modern Art! Hoorah for Brisbane!

Three years later and the media day for APT6 is a much smaller affair. The speeches - while delivered by a robust line up of dignitaries - somehow doesn’t quite match the fun of last time. Tony Ellwood, boss of GOMA, makes a silky smooth speech that is, for the listener, rather like having your fur stroked by an open fire. Some dude from corporate sponsor Santos explains why they have signed up for a 5 year support deal for GOMA and mentions some things that we couldn’t quite hear – or see. It is a professional hazard of covering big art openings to have your sight line spoiled by roving camera persons looking for a groovy angle, but it’s quite another for a man in a yellow shirt to stand right in front of you and then discover that said gentleman is wearing a yellow shirt that features life-like portraits of him in the nude, semi nude and he has images of his face on his shoes. Perhaps the man from Santos said something interesting, who knows, but the bloke in the yellow shirt was looking away from us, and giving us THE FINGER AT THE SAME TIME [see picture]. Then it was the turn of Anna Bligh to officially open the APT. How quaint to visit a state where the Premier is still the same Premier as yesterday. Good lord. Bligh, who polled in Queensland as the worst premier in 30 years, still manages to deliver her speech with warmth and a low key sense of sangfroid – a rare quality in any politician.



Your choice of travel reading does much to set the scene for your experience of another place. Our selection - largely an unconscious decision plucked at random from an ever-growing pile of unread books - was Ian McDonald’s 2004 novel River of Gods. It couldn’t have been a better choice. The novel imagines India in 50 years time and evokes the super-density of Asia and the street-level hyper reality of contemporary Indian street life. The region – however one wants to define it such a loose and Eurocentric notion - represents a present so wildly at odds with Western sensibilities that it’s more suggestive of a future than any science fictional possibility. The APT is like the 3D walk-in version of River of Gods. Thukral & Tagra’s installation of a wallpapered room replete with sculptures, a TV playing YouTube clips, bespoke furniture, a table tipping on its end, busts of the artists that protrude through the walls, shelves containing images of the artists painted on consumer goods, a small photo of Paris Hilton [and much much more] is almost impossible to take in as a collection of discreet objects. Rather, the whole room is an assault on the senses, partly a play on consumer culture, part a celebration of celebrity. Its lack of manners is charming at every level.



Kohei Nawa’s PixCell-Elk #2 is the work on the cover of the APT catalogue. It's the cool binary to T&T’s hot aesthetic clutterverse. To walk into Nawa’s pristine white room and see a taxidermied elk covered in glass and crystal balls is an eerie and unsettling experience – it feels like perception itself is being subtly tweaked. It also suggests SF, but in a smoother and more familiar mode. The artist denies the SF connection saying he imagines the usual experience of SF to be more a disjunction, a shock, like when the alien bursts out of a chest. His installation is meant to be a smoother transition, Our camera is set up in the room with the artist and translator and, when we ask his views on his own work, he is like many artists we talk to at the APT - torn between the desire to create a certain experience but just as keen to avoid an overly proscriptive reading. This is the floating world of contemporary art, and there’s no use complaining about it.

Labels: APT, Art Life TV show, public galleries, sci-fi

Yoshitomo Nara [left] and Hideki Toyoshima: YNG
Nara [Yoshitomo] and Hideki [Toyoshima] of GRAF are YNG. They both wear sky blue t-shirts and blue jeans. They are a TEAM. Nara wears vintage red trainers and a Revolver period Beatles cap, Hideki wears black trainers but no cap. They both speak English perfectly but prefer to answer questions in Japanese. Happily GOMA has a translator on staff, and soon a very nice young woman named Shioko arrives and does a fantastic job. Everyone nods and smiles. Question: “Nara – the Ramones are a constant reference point in your work – what is it about them that is important to you?” Answer: “Ha ha! I was in high school when they released their first album. I am very old. I am 50. Perhaps like you?” Question: “What is the purpose of putting a studio on the back of the van?” Answer: “There is no purpose.”

It used to be that we could easily tell who was a member of the art world art. There was a dress code – especially in Brisbane. Men wore jeans and western shirts, or perhaps a suit with pointy shoes and a thin tie. Women wore flat shoes and brightly coloured sleeveless tops with matching skirts. Many people seemed to wear cool eye glasses. Nowadays it’s hard to tell who is who – everybody wears more or less the same thing and the proliferation of facial hair – beards for men [and even for some women] - has cruelled what was a very easy game. Dan from DAMP sports a Hawaiian shirt and suit, wears a hat and has a very neatly trimmed beard. Nat [formerly of Nat & Ali and now in DAMP again after many years away] wears a gold top with a tiger owl on it and says she wants to look like someone famous. Kylie looks like your classic image of an artist from Brisbane, but she too is from Melbourne. Damn you! At the top of their plinth we discuss what their project – is making a place for people to meet the work? Or is it the whole process? DAMP are masters of the evasive answer – they give very good interview. We ask if they have ever been on TV before – has Sunday Arts come knocking? It seems they haven’t and so we commend their skill at only giving answers to questions they wish had been asked. It’s like interviewing politicians. We ask a blunt question – is DAMP a cult? Hmmm. Maybe.

Friday is Media Launch Day and that means lots of people flying in from interstate to look at art and enjoy GOMA’s incredible offering of finger food. Our last visit in 2006 was memorable mostly for the superb quality of the buffet lunch. Freeloaders everywhere hope that one day GOMA be awarded a Michelin star or two.


Brisbane... bike city
We may have been hasty in considering Brisbane a dump. That opinion was mostly based on a) experiences in “the Valley” [a topographical impossibility since “the valley” has no appreciable hill from which to see it], b) parts of the city [making a harsh judgement on Brisbane because of the volatile street kids you encounter in the Mall is rather like judging the whole of Sydney based on the people you see on George Street on a Sunday afternoon] and c) the stinky weather. This view is both unkind and unfair. All of ese doubts were swept aside when we got a look at the city’s incredible cycle paths built along the river. Walking back from GOMA we saw dozens of people whizzing by on handsome bikes and could only wish that we had brought the GIANT Perigees with us.



Tomorrow: Subodh Gupta, Kohei Nawa, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Ayez Jokhio and the Aquilizans.

Labels: APT, Art Life TV show, Brisbane, public galleries

Greetings from the sunshine state. The first thing you see out the window of the aircraft as it descends into Brisbane are mud flats. This isn’t meant to be symbolic, it’s just the way it is. In a similar fashion outside the Gallery of Modern Art is a permanently-sited sculpture by Scott Redford, a big bit of glitzy neon vintage Gold Coast signage that promises NO ABSTRACTIONS. It’s an empty promise of course, but it is appealing.

GOMA is a beautifully presented gallery with absolute water frontage, stunning city views, light filled galleries - many with ensuite bathrooms – and it’s only a minutes’ walk to nearby cafes, restaurants and Brisbane’s busy CBD. Two doors down is the heritage-listed Queensland Art Gallery, a definite fixer-upper with huge potential that would suit either young families or perhaps couples looking for a challenge. Both contain art. All of GOMA has been given over to the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial, with small portions of QAG [piano bar, water court, adjacent galleries] similarly dedicated.



We’re on a preview walk-through to see the highlights. And they are very highlighty. Shirana Shahbazi’s gi-normous painting/photographs line the walls of GOMA's Long Gallery and they overlook Yoshitomo Nara’s tiny mobile studio, the collaboration between the Japanese painter better known for his knife-wielding little girls and the Osaka architects GRAF. Together they took a Nissan campervan and stuck a wooden house on the back. On the top is one of Nara’s little girls holding a mic and yelling HEY HO LET’S GO! The immediate reaction on seeing this is to grab our imaginary air guitars and – heads down - crank out the first few bars of Blitzkrieg Bop.

GOMA’s galleries are filled with sounds of getting ready – hammers, saws, the beep-beeps of slowly reversing orange trucks. Among all the activity we see the work of numerous brand name artists whose work looks fabulous, albeit missing wall texts and bearing WET PAINT signage. At the end of the main gallery is the second biggest plinth we have ever seen. It appears to be made of marble and stands some 150 meters high. As you get close you discover it’s a sham. Inside, the edifice turns out to be hollow and full of detritus from the 15 year career of Melbourne art group DAMP. It looks like a club house inside, with crappy share-house furniture, a kettle and many mugs, t-shirts, to-do lists and assorted junk arranged just so. The idea is that you climb up to the top of the plinth via an interior stair case and once at the top, have a conversation. About what?



TEAM Art Life are in Brisbane to make a TV show. The program will be another in our series of shows where we stand around pretending to look, and then sometimes get caught in the act of actual looking, and then we talk to people about their art and what they think will happen when people look at it. The Art Life at The APT will screen on ABC1 in early February 2010. Later today, we’re meeting DAMP and then the curatorial manager of the APT Suhanya Raffel, then on to Mr Nara and Graf, and then we will go outside lie in the long grass and listen to the gentle sounds of Pacific Reggae.

Labels: APT, Art Life TV show, public galleries