the art life

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

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

Labels: Art Life TV show, Pedro de Almeida

The Art Life 2 begins on March 17th, 2009 at 10pm on your ABC.

Labels: Art Life TV show, painting, thinking

Greetings. After months of meeting 'n' greeting artists, travelling here and there in a van and then spending countless hours in the edit room, The Art Life Series 2 is ready to go. Oh yes.

Episode 1 is called Starry Starry Night and it can be seen on Tuesday, March 17 at 10pm on ABC1. Episode 2 - Who Made Who will seen on the following Tuesday, March 24 - and the final epsiode Lust for Life - on March 31.



Why is the show on "so late"? Glad you asked. The 10pm Tuesday time slot is now traditional ABC territory for the arts. You think "Tuesday, late night" and you think "art". That half hour even has even got its own name - "Artscape". The later time slot also means that programing can be more, how shall we say - "adult oriented" and feature nudity, frequent coarse language, drug use and adult themes. We have worked very hard to ensure we live up to that promise and without wanting to give too much away, we can say that this new series has more salty language than Fleet Week.

Some of you are no doubt saying "Yeah, but I like the bleep machine... and I need my rest." We're happy to announce that the new series will be repeated the following Sunday on ABC2 at 7pm. Because the eps will be screening before the 9.30pm watershed, offending language will be "bleeped" [sadly losing nearly everything Renny Kodgers says], offensive images will be pixilated [there goes most of episode 2] and images of deceased relatives will be sensitively fogged. So if you can't stay up "late", forgot to program TIVo or just want to watch the shows without the dirty words and images, you can see the show on the 22nd and 29th of March and April the 5th.

Can't be arsed with broadcast television, want to watch the show on your phone or have a yen to bootleg the thing on peer-to-peer? We're delighted to advise that yes, finally, can't-believe-it's-happening but Art Life 2 will be available as a vodcast from iTunes and your ABC. Details to follow.

Labels: Art Life TV show

Danielle Freakley from The Art Life 2...

Labels: Art Life TV show

The Art Life Series 2 coming soon in early 2009.

Labels: Art Life TV show

The Art Life Season One is available on DVD*. Featuring all three episodes presented in their entirety, in 16:9 format and in stereo, the set comes on one handy disc packaged in a collectable plastic-look DVD box featuring handsome cover art by Narelle Autio. A bargain at $39.95 [including p&p] the DVD features the complete Art Life series screened on ABC1. To be among the first to purchase a copy all you'll need is a credit card and a PayPal account. Go to Barefoot Communications, click on the link "Pay with Paypal" and you're away!

Labels: Art Life DVD, Art Life TV show

It's official - The Art Life Season One is now available on DVD*.

A bargain at $39.95 [including p&p] the DVD features the complete Art Life series screened on ABC1. Packaged in a handsome plastic-look DVD box with cover art by Narelle Autio, the three episodes are presented in their entirety, in 16:9 format and in stereo... And you can't say fairer than that!

To be the first to purchase a copy all you'll need is a credit card and a PayPal account. Go to Barefoot Communications, click on the link "Pay with Paypal" and you're away!

Labels: Art Life DVD, Art Life TV show

We’re on the other side of the old order of things and the world suddenly seems like a better place. As the blood letting continues we are once again reminded not so much of an election but of the end of the movie Downfall. Who would have thought we’d live to see the back of John Howard? Roll on the new era...


Tweet.

There’s one thing we can look forward to right now - a Federal Government with an arts policy – something this country hasn’t had since the early 1990s. Instead of piecemeal spending promises, we’ll get a commitment to a program and that program will be accountable to government oversight and the electorate. Younger readers of The Art Life will have no real idea what that fact means, but it’s far preferable to the free market philosophy of the old guard. Certainly the events of the weekend have made the National Association of Visual Arts happy. They fired off a press release first thing this morning which read in part:

“After years of disappointment, finally Australian visual artists will see one of their long held ambitions realised, with the introduction of the Artists Resale Royalty Scheme. This will bring them into parity with artists in England, across the whole European Union and a number of other parts of the world […] NAVA believes that the current version of sedition law poses a considerable threat to artists’ freedom of expression. It asks that the new Attorney General not only removes the word ‘sedition’, but also makes all the changes recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission. As an important support mechanism for artists trying to build their careers, NAVA strongly endorses the proposed ArtStart social security scheme to change the way Centrelink deals with artists.”

We’ll have to wait and see how these issues develop over the coming months and years, but of this we can also be sure: the art world is a much happier and shinier this sunny Monday.

Site News: In other and more important news, Ben recently wrote to us to wittily complain:

None of your haikus
follow the haiku structure
5 - 7 - 5, geez.

It depends on whether you follow the classic structure of the haiku or not, but we tend towards the free form approach of Basho and more recent haiku writers who believe it is only the essence of truth, brevity and three line form that really matters when writing a haiku.

Forget the syllable count
and the season words,
we’re modern man, geez.

Art Life Xmas Special: Starting Thursday this week we launch our Holiday Season extravaganza in which we will attempt to review every exhibition on in Sydney. In the past we did this by restricting our reviews to certain maps in Art Almanac but this year we have decided on a different approach – we’re going to do it by streets of art – Glenmore Road, Queen Street, George Street, Abercrombie Street. It’s true that not a lot of galleries are on all these streets but it’s a systematic methodology that’ll catch a good 70 percent of everything on. No exceptions!* [*Some exceptions may apply].

Art Life on Your TV: Thanks to our readers who left messages of encouragement following the screening of our archive-footage TV year-in-review-roundup A Year In The Art Life that screened on November 13.. A number of readers asked why we chose to present our “PTCs” [that’s TV talk for “pieces to camera”] on a miniature golf course. We were looking for a visual metaphor for the entire art world, and since the Art Gallery of NSW and Museum of Contemporary Art were obvious and over-used choices, we realised that the skill-challenged, frustrating but picturesque world of putt putt was an obscure but completely apposite choice.

We also had a number of enquiries about whether the show would be available for either vodcast or download. Sadly, since the whole show was ninety percent archive, and the music was lifted from a gold mine of cocktail classics, the cost would be prohibitive for a show with a very short shelf life. We keep hearing rumours that the show might end up on YouTube in the very near future. If such a thing were to happen, we'd be against it, naturally, because not only would it “rob artists of their rightful incomes”, we’d also be contributing to “video piracy, which is a major problem in Aus-tral-li-yah…” We’ll keep you posted.

Art Life on Your DVD Player: We’re thrilled to announce that after months of intense negotiations, The Art Life TV series will be available on DVD very, very soon. How soon? Very soon. In time for Xmas soon? Yes, most probably. The single-disc edition will be out first, available through select art world outlets and probably online. We’re currently finalizing art work and other printing and publishing details, such as clearing the quotes we’ll be using on the cover such as Jarrod Rawlins’s “comic genius” superlative from Broadsheet. In 2008 we’ll be releasing a three-disc Art Life: Ultimate Edition on HD-DVD, BluRay, regular DVD, with all the original episodes, a making-of documentary on the documentary, interviews with cast and crew and a director’s commentary, alternate endings and outtakes.

Art Life On Your TV II: A number of people have asked if there will be a second series of the Art Life in 2008. The answer is a “yes” with a caveat. Yes, there will be a second series in 2008, but we just don’t know when it will be. We are currently working on a treatment for Series 2, so we can’t say too much at this time, but we can tell you this: it will be a trilogy of prequels to series one explaining how we were seduced by the dark side…

Art Life On The Web: Stay tuned for a very exciting announcement about the future of The Art Life blog…

Labels: Art Life TV show, reader comments, site news

Six hundred and twenty nine posts, 250,000+ visitors since 2004, 25,000 podcast downloads, hundreds of exhibitions visited, hundreds of artists mentioned, thousands of works of art in the file, posts from our correspondents in Rome, Venice, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney... Can we continue?

A very special thank you to readers who made donations to The Art Life in 2006 - most don't want to be named and shamed, but we know who you are and you go on our list of Special Friends. You too can help us celebrate the holiday season [please note our PC avoidance of naming Christian holidays] by making a donation - all you need is a credit card. Follow the PayPal instructions.




Some things we got wrong: It's isometric projection, not isomorphic which is apprently some kind of Star Trek thing, not anything to do with architecture, or James Angus. Susan McCulloch writes for The Australian Financial Review [or at least did so when covering the opening of Gallery of Modern Art], not The Austrian. Dr. Joanna Mendelssohn , writes for Stage Noise with Diana Simmonds, a new arts web site that some are calling "the new Art Life". Katrina Schwarz is now the editor of Art & Australia, certainly not just 'with' and has been so for some months - she is currently gently kicking arse. We're sure we probably got some other so called "facts" wrong along the way, and had them pointed out to us. We hope you understand.


Some Things That Almost Happened: Our bid to curate Primavera 07 was knocked on the head almost before it even began. We're hoping for 2008 and are sure that our thematic grouping idea of selecting artists by their inventive use of goauche and interest in relational aesthetics will be as relevant two years from now as it is today. Mid-year, we were nominated for the Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critical Writing. It's an annual award worth $15,000 and we fantasised for months about how we were going to spend the money. We'd even got as far as writing an acceptance speech that began "On behalf of TEAM Art Life, the Commonwealth Bank and the good people at American Express, we'd like to say thank you..." Our fantasy evaporated when it was announced that Robert Forster, ex-Go Between and rock critic for The Monthly, had got the prize. Normally we'd have become incredibly bitter, but there were three mitigating facts. 1] Forster is a very good writer 2] he's had a really tough year and 3] our work is littered with ill conceived jokes, factual inaccuracies and is nothing if not uncritical. So, good on you Forster.

Media News: Posted below is our final podcast for 2006. Please enjoy it. The podcast also marks the final appearance of our Art Life spokesperson in that role. The individual concerned has now left TEAM Art Life as it became obvious to all that things were starting to "slip". After a long and frank discussion, an "agreement was reached" and we're looking forward to a "new begining" in 2007.

More Media News: For those of you who can't be arsed listening to the podcast [and why would you?] we're pleased to announce some other exciting media news. In 2007 The Art Life will be coming to the screens of Your ABC in a three-part TV series. We were approached by the ABC at the begining of 2006 to see if we were "interested". Of course we said, yes, we are interested and so began an exhaustive series of "talks" aimed at developing what is called an "idea". People think that the ABC will take any old crap hurled at them so long as it involves an English detective and so we proposed The Art Life Murders, a hybrid art documentary/detective show to star Richard Griffiths as an "art detective" who goes around solving crimes such as who stole a certain George Stubbs painting from an English country estate. The ABC said the idea was "great" and that everyone was "very excited", but perhaps it was aimed at the "wrong demographic". We then proposed a TV series called The Art House aimed at "young people" while retaining art credentials. The show, set in the late 60s and early 70s, took place inside the rambling house in Double Bay shared by Brett Whiteley and Tim Storrier. Brett, wild and crazy, Tim, sensible and sober, both chasing their dreams - and girls! "It's The Odd Couple meets the McCullochs Encyclopedia of Australian Art!!" No go on that one. So we came back with Art Life Fixits!, a panel discussion show with two regulars - Diana Simmonds and John McDonald - and a guest judge - who look at the work of emerging artists and tell them how to "fix it". The ABC said "Look, we've already got twenty of those, can't you come up with something else?" We had Monkey Tennis ready to propose but instead said "How about a three part documentary on certain aspects of contemporary art?" Voila! And so, sometime around August 2007, The Art Life will make its debut [and hasty exit] from television schedules. For those of you who can't be arsed watching TV [and why would you?] we are negotiating to vodcast the episodes.

El Morte: We managed to get through the year with only one death threat, or more precisely, a series of threats that escalated to a death threat. But whatever form it took, the great thing about people putting their wishes in writing is that we get to keep them in our back pockets for later. In the words of a famous fish and chip shop owner, 'in the event of our deaths', you will know who is responsible.

Are We Really Dead? We have been contemplating the end of the blog. Three years is a long time on the "blogosphere" - in human time that's about 150 years, and as someone remarked to us "it's not as though you killed a child!" meaning, we don't have to save our souls by doing this. At first we thought, that's right, we haven't done anything wrong. But then our minds inevitably go back to that night. Sure, we'd been drinking a little, and we should have called a taxi - but we didn't. We got into the car and drove into the night... And then we see the moist eyes looking, a keening voice, "noooooo!"... We blog to forget.

The Art Life will return in 2007.

Labels: announcements, apologies, Art Life TV show, podcast, site news