Speech Texts

Ai Weiwei

2008-05-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

continued
Sometimes with Ai Weiwei’s work I don’t get it, but I feel it. His review show, Ai Weiwei: Under Construction at Campbelltown Arts Centre, conflated a lot of those immediate bursts of enjoyment I have with his work, because for the first time I heard him talking about things, using words in a way that made me want to think about the world with more gravity while throwing a lightness back at it. There’s three hours of footage from Fairytale in the show. In one of the earlier moments, Ai talks about the expression of the work being important from the beginning. Fairytale is such an overwhelming concept that often the idea that the artist is expressing it gets lost in the scale of human movement and human change. But the act has a form and Ai has a heart for narrative; so for the narrative to adhere there has to be a residual presence of it. A cluster of probably a hundred black and white suitcases in the first gallery at Campbelltown spelt out the collectivity of the Kassel Fairytale, how objects take on the messages of their context and can hold these messages for long enough to transmit them to an audience far away from Beijing or Kassel. (Another tiny moment of expression, in the video Ai asks if they can add mushrooms to one of the communal dishes, “mushroom goes with beef, no?”). The suitcases sit in front of group photographs of Chinese nationals swept off to Germany — there are girls winking with bright, shapeless hats on their heads and middle-aged men who look straight-up and you wonder if they sneak looks at Ai Weiwei’s blog from their desk computer during the day. A compulsion to insert narrative into Ai’s work is unrelenting …

IT’S DANGEROUS NOT TO THINK OF THE WORLD AS DANGEROUS

Template came tumbling down in a gusty storm in Kassel and Ai told the camera that it’s better because a person couldn’t do this because people don’t have the same touch as nature. He’s not an artist working in the singular. He seems to listen attentively to the world. An oily coat on a coat-hanger with a condom attached by a metal eyelet to the front has the sublimated and humorous tone of Duchamp, and the I-have-a-penis preoccupation of Wang Xiaobo. Usually artists who work with clothing have a strong sense of their personal narrative in relationship to a wider social context (Yayoi Kusama, Lucy Orta, Duchamp, Andy Warhol); an idea persists in these wearable forms that clothing is the meeting point between an internalised logic and shared logic. It can be an interesting space.

Ai’s work with wood was probably what I most wanted to see up close — I’ve always seen them as a kind of talisman or a reminder to keep looking at things and re-imagining them. Never let objects become fixed or stagnant. Always keep a flow, frenzied or gentle, keep a flow. What’s the work called? Colour Test I think. Mounds of disposed wood: some like the rocks that jutted out of water landscapes in the documentary about nature in China the other night on SBS; some with aged carvings that have been slowly worn away into gentle, cartoon-like curls. They’ve all been painted in matte and pastel colours and are gathered into a space on the ground. Not quite Stonehenge, more cognitive than cosmic. I don’t feel the nostalgia that a lot of people feel with this wood, that’s been taken from the wreckage of Hutongs. There is a pragmatism that cuts through a longing for the past — the more urgent impulse to construct a future. Dr Charles Merewether, the curator of Under Construction, refers to Ai’s work as a “history of the present”, an immediate reflection that follows any action. Again I think of a weighty understanding with light projections, perhaps to displace a trapping cycle of pessimism.

Hao Guo, James Deutsher and I flew to Campbelltown for 40 hours to see the show and go to the opening, then the conversation between Ai and Charles Merewether the next day. Sitting outside at the opening and getting fresh air, I looked down at my camera case and saw a palm-sized huntsman half on the concrete slab we were sitting on and half on my scarf. At another moment I probably would have overreacted, but Ai’s work had momentarily displaced the feeling of self being at the centre of the universe, so I enjoyed watching it walk away and negotiate a thin blade of grass.

Ai seemed tired and precise at the conversation the next day, but we waved when he sat down and he waved back (ah, connection!). The sparse audience kept on wanting him to talk about his ‘position as a Chinese artist’ when the floor was thrown open for questions, and he kept retreating in a way that made the idea of artists thinking about themselves in relationship to the ‘artworld’ kind of ridiculous. He said, “I only feel like I’m Chinese when I do things like this.”

Chinese tables and Chinese vases must translate to so many people as ways of dealing with Chinese-ness, but they’re just the objects around Ai and he is clearly responsive to social environments. Kind of flustered from the tedium of trying to remove this blanket of ‘Chinese artist’ that seemed to be smothering him on the small stage, he made his most lucid appeal, basically saying we’re humans first and that “people often see artists as someone more clear than you, but I’m just a confused man and we have to do something and we call it art.”

It’s moving work because it spreads itself out so openly, it balloons into moments of universality then retracts into personal treatments of culturally wrapped objects. (At the conversation I took notes. The first thing I wrote down was a categorical description of what Ai was wearing; everything was different shades of dark blue except for his black shoes). Charles asked about growing up as the son of displaced intellectuals — he responded by suggesting people must be punishing him by always asking about history, because he has a bad memory and doesn’t remember anything: “People are always trying to find a logical result from the past.” I guess if the past has no logical conclusion then possibilities for the future are unfettered. Nothing fixed, everything always in a state of construction.
Liv Barrett
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A dinner with... Erick Beltran

2008-02-04T06:25:00.000-08:00

What does a dinner about translation look like?
There are about 30 people seated around a U shaped table. There is an artist talking about translation. There are people who follow, there are people who try to follow, and there are people who wait until they can talk. The artist speaks in French, his French is fluent, not so much because he speaks the language very well but because he knows he makes himself clear. While the artist articulates his discourse, the guests translate his message however they can to make it comprehensible. The event has a certain intensity, at least for those who follow and who eat at the same time (there is a lot of wine circulating as well). There is something about digesting food and words, digesting a frog and a diagrammatic system of translation. The process is not even parallel but analogical and simultaneous. There is no dessert because this dinner has no end (as the artist explains).
Catalina Lozano

The part of the presentation I liked best was when he put his crab juice smeared hands on his laptop bringing the medium of our togetherness into a theoretical place.
Geoff Lowe

une réunion de travail,
un dîner entre amis - délicieux -
il y a eu presque un meurtre ou quelque chose comme ça, non ?
cuisses de lapin, de grenouille et de poulpe, chocolat-ail-persil
mais où est donc passée la soupe de cuisses d'anguille ?!
sympathique cafouillage synesthésique
l'artiste s'est mis en quatre: il a affronté deux jours durant les muscles morts,
il nous a servi un prêche sur la pensée des particules
j'ai oublié de demander le nombre et la liste des recalés
peut-être constitueront-ils la prochaine tablée...
Cédric Schönwald

Klaus Speidel's response was removed at his request by SPEECH

I don’t really speak French. I understand a few words but this usually leads me to misunderstandings. But there is also a pleasure in not really understanding what’s going on. First plate was frog legs, pan fried with garlic and parsley. The second, cold seafood salad with calamari, octopus, tomato, lemon juice, herbs and perhaps bread. Erick described the plate in terms of a discourse about civilisation, Diogenes in relation to the octopus. Next plate, something to do with geometry as a mental way to resolve things, using the triangle for instance, mussels cooked with an egg custard and spinach. This idea that everyone has a shape in their mind to help solve problems… energy, molecules, specific idiograms. Casanova, Orson Wells, seduction between one system and another, between machine and process – and the changing form, ‘le trouve’? (I was a bit lost here and I asked the person next to me to translate a little but he said he didn’t understand either.) The next plate was steamed broccoli cooked with chestnuts, onions and celery and the next a Mexican dish, le tre kiki – Holy Trinity – three persons in one is a monster, an indigenous dish of baked green peppers stuffed with meat and raisins with an almond cream sauce. Body, knots, a surface… development and negotiation of coodination of points. Ghost sensations, amputations, these feelings diminish with time but the person feels some sensation for ever – like mental illness… a trilogy. Crab with chili and cinamon and, if I understood right, a little tortilla dough for flavour. The final course was rabbit cooked in a thin chocolate sauce, the ultimate pleasures apparently – and a construction related to architectonic systems. I liked the formality of the dinner, the place names, the white tableware, wine and water glasses, everything matching. It did make me anxious that Erick stood and spoke throughout the entire dinner and didn’t sit down to eat with us.
Jacqui Riva

NetAlert: Be afraid, be very afraid

2007-11-07T02:53:00.000-08:00

NetAlert is one aspect of our general culture of victimhood: a general set of attitudes leading us to believe that we are all victims in some way. Steeped in fear and uncertainty, this kind of culture fosters infantilisation. Whether it is admitting and facing some kind of victimisation, seeking help from the multitude of ‘experts’, or seeking increased security online, we are more increasingly fearful and protective of our very mode of existence. Children become the focal point of this process – the imaginary fantastic site where the collection of all fears is projected. In part, this is because of the uneasy relationship that the west has with child sexuality: sexualisation of children through advertising coupled with hysteria over the threat of perverts and paedophiles, and increased prolonging of adolescence (30s are the new 20s). Thus the need for over-protection, because this need is ultimately about protecting fantasy and controlling imagination.

At the same time, this culture fosters self-gratifying exhibitionism: Myspace, Facebook, Blogs, and similar web-diary technologies are as much about networking as they are about creating, projecting and distributing an image of yourself for your imagined audience. Although, this kind of technology creates a ‘safety-barrier’ where we control the information disseminated, nevertheless today more than ever, we are willing to make public the details of our private lives. This perhaps also explains why we are equally willing to submit ourselves to increased control and surveillance under the banner of security.

Protective technology such as NetAlert is about consumption. In today’s society, online technology is a product that when consumed represents a certain lifestyle. Whether creating a profile on Myspace, downloading hard-to-find niche music, or discussing Saw 4, this kind of technology enables us to experience a lifestyle through participation in a community. This includes the way in which this kind of technology normalises transgression, where we are all urged to ‘explore’ and ‘reinvent’ ourselves. It also includes the way in which this transgression takes place within (increasingly) controlled environment of the internet. Thus, NetAlert enables parents to work even harder and longer, while having the computer assume symbolic responsibility for the security of children. It combines the lifestyles of successful career and dedicated parenthood, with the intensively moral agenda that underpins NetAlert. Because, the kind of protection it offers is more about minimising the freedom of choice through monitoring, classifying and controlling of our activities.
1 See http://www.netalert.gov.au/ for details
2 Jodi Dean’s excellent blog ‘I cite’ regularly discusses many of the issues raised here. See http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/
Uros Cvoro
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Roni Horn

2007-09-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

A Kind of You: 6 Portraits by Roni Horn
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Melbourne, Aug-Sept
continued:

Each image is like a comma or pause in a sentence that gives us a story that we must construct intuitively.
Bronwyn Loxton

Horn shows us that the slightest change in expression can make the difference between vulnerability and dominance.
Chloe Snait

You are the Weather constantly shows the one girl with the same expression but relies on differences in background content and use of colour and colour temperature to provide feelings of different seasons, such as bright summers and dark & cold winters.
Jayden Leggett

Roni Horn's elusive images invoke a compelling sense of investigation into the interior monologues of her chosen subjects, reflecting and representing their own personal changes through altering environments, emotional states and stages of their life.
Louise Pilkington

Her gaze follows you around the symmetrical room in a taunting mischievous manner.
Renee Verkerk

This exhibition depicts the range of different expressions created by the emotions that people express in their life.
Carly Lagana

Portrait of an image, a beautiful series, the French actress Isabelle Huppert plays a roll for each set, at times she is very confronting other times restrained.
Christina Shiels

Encompassing, there is no escaping the raw emotion.
Tara Marinucci

Each imperfection and every beauty (Isabelle Huppert) are subjected to the world’s eyes.
Keely Frearson & Stephanie Mercoulia

The images of Isabelle Huppert show the over-saturation of movie stars – an image that we have forced upon us on a daily basis.
Michael Burgess

There is a strong sense of history and substance in the repetition of the photography.
Kate Sheehan

The series allows us to closely examine the bodily process of expression, showing us fragments of a multi-layered personality.
Sarah Schade

Horn casts a shroud of ambiguity over her weather watchers.
Jonathan Encavey

You can see these pictures like a time lapse, where the atmosphere, colour of the water and the time of day give different expressions of the face.
Camilla Rabben

The clown head uncontrollably and violently rolls around and around, smearing those demanding, painted red lips over the image.
Sorcha Wicox

Face, raw and fleshy.
Ben Callinan

Distorted muted faces remind the viewer of a childhood memory that varies slightly each time you revisit it.
Angela Lang

This exhibition creates a desire in the viewer to note Horn’s style, alter it slightly, build on it and produce one’s own version of many moments in time.
Megan Kenny

I see the series as a wind blowing through the room. The tone of the pictures changes from warm to cold, as the strength of the wind would change.
Margrethe Stenevik
image: Roni Horn, You are the Weather 2002, 2003, courtesy ACCA
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Doomsday Celebration

2007-03-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Geoff+Jacqui,

I have duly received yours of February 27 together with the Doomsday Celebrity exhibition photos and, alas, I must decline a review, much to my regret.

.... I find the style turgid, cliché-ridden and the attempted evokation (sic) of French medieval life is pretty dismal. What happened? Well, I don't know; maybe that was not your subject, but at any rate this is not...

Forgive me for being perhaps undiplomatic about my opinion of your work, but I prefer to be clear about my reasons in a situation like this.... and please forgive me for this disappointing letter.

Best regards,
Elizabeth

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DOOMSDAY CELEBRATION

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. Jacques Ranciere’s statement seems to be the most apt when I think of Doomsday Celebration, a small-scale exhibition at castillo/corrales gallery in Paris. The title of the exhibition is an allusion to our era, which is getting more and more idiotic with paranoia. In the exhibition space no more than 5 works are installed with an intergenerational approach. A photograph, a drawing, 5 books and a faded photograph coupled with a diary. None of the works in the exhibition are easy to decipher and none of them can easily be classified under a theme. Even though each work differs widely from each other, upon closer examination the series of books make one wary about the bigger picture of the exhibition. The President Kissinger and Kissinger Affair books are attributed to the controversial publisher Maurice Girodias who was in his heyday in the 1950s and 60s in Paris. This work can be taken as a hint of blurring the fiction and reality occurring within most of the works in Doomsday Celebration.

Pelin Uran

image:
Maurice Girodias President Kissinger (1974; trad. Fr. 1997)

********
I have no idea how people think they can keep getting away with events like these! A whole lot of indecipherable rubbish that someone gives an intellectual alibi for and now you all believe it. I really feel sorry for anyone sucked into this. If I want words I’ll take Gerald Manley Hopkins. What about the rest of us who really care and search for meaning in our lives?

David

********
Since ‘Inside the White Cube’ appeared on the bookshelves some thirty years ago, we are used to consider the space in which an exhibition takes place as important as the objects themselves. Whereas the context gains weight not just at the level of art production, and instances of Institutional Critique are incorporated by the very institution itself, Doomsday Celebration brings us a little step further by staging the last show of a gallery which activity is planned by its owners backwards. What at first glance seems just bad fait, ultimately indicates the notion of process and time as the determining factor of this show.
Artists Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda show a small photograph that portraits the technical and artistic cast of a film on 35 mm that they shot. Taken by a member of the troupe on the last day of work, this is the only trace of the work, since the artists were the only one to be aware that there was no film in the cameras. Reversing the reproducibility of the medium, Jay and Q’s work resulted in a performance to which the interpreters were the only public. If the failure of the project was an inherent element of this work, in an early work by Vito Acconci this was unplanned. For a determined period the artist was having a relationship with two girls at the same time, recording the ménage a trios in a diary and assigning to each, daily, a score. (Not surprisingly) one of the girls attempted suicide, thus putting an end to the project. Conceptual art and its legacy also informs Gardar Eide Einarsson’s piece: a chart, a work that addresses process, time and procession and that at the same time indicates in the formal expression of early works by Acconci, Kosuth, Bochner, that went under the name of office aesthetics an orientation of the show. The exhibition takes place in what has been a gallery, and then an office. A context, therefore, that perfectly frames the show as it performs and interprets the closing of the shop. A sad last goodbye, and then another activity will replace the gallery. Yet, entering the space, it all feels a bit too staged, thinking of Michael Asher’s seminal work at Claire Copley gallery in 1974, where the removal of the wall that separated the office and the storage from the exhibition room stripped bare the space of its aura and the sense of loss was more provocatively accompanying the recogniction of a gallery as market and adminstration-led activity.

Cecilia Canziani

********
Doomsday Celebration fonctionne comme une bombe à retardement, où le temps décompté n’est pas rendu visible. Les œuvres présentées sont les indices d’une catastrophe, d’une révélation, potentiellement à venir, parce qu’un événement n’a pas eu lieu, ou parce qu’il va peut-être avoir lieu. L’instant T, le lieu, ne sont pas communiqués. Le visiteur-témoin est piégé entre l’information qu’il détient, peut-être d’une extrême gravité, et l’absence manifeste de précision. L’histoire est en marche, faut-il l’embrayer, en être un des acteurs? Où refuser le jeu de la manipulation. Cynisme et fatalisme. La bombe a déjà explosé, combien y a-t’il de morts aujourd’hui?

Nadia Fartas

********
Damn!!! I Missed the Doomsday Celebration in Paris!!! How could they celebrate without me!!! It better not happen again!!!
However, it must still be on!!! Otherwise I couldn’t be writing this and you can’t see what I am writing now!!! The Celebration could be everywhere!!! So I am going to start my own Celebration right here and now!!! How long can this celebration go for??? Who cares!!! Being happy starts from now!!! Cheers!!! ä±ît!!! ha-ha-ha!!! la-la-la!!! yeah-yeah-yeah!!!
Cheers!!! ä±ît!!! ha-ha-ha!!! la-la-la!!! yeah-yeah-yeah!!! Doomsday!!! Why hasn’t it still not come!!! Come on, come on!!! I am going to lose my patience!!! I hate waiting!!! Come on, come on!!! Don't keep me waiting too long!!! Don't make me worry about the future again!!! Don't make me choose!!! Don't want to pick which is better, or what is wrong!!! Don't want to endure this suffering anymore!!! Tell me tell me please!!! When it is coming??? Don't lie to me!!! Ok ok ok!!! yeah yeah yeah!!! Do I look like a fool!!! Your are all full of shit!!!

Cheers!!! ä±ît!!! ha-ha-ha!!! la-la-la!!! yeah-yeah-yeahÅc

Hao Guo

********
Conceptual art goes too far

Le truc avec cette expo, c’est le code. Tu dois frapper à la porte, deux fois pas plus, et surtout ne rien dire à celui qui t’ouvres la porte. Alors seulement peut-être tu verras un type qui te conduiras en bas de l’escalier où Vito t’attends, une batte de baseball à la main.
Sérieusement, quel intérêt d’exposer Acconci, disons l’art conceptuel dans un espace alternatif ? Cela signifie trop à mes yeux : il faut en revenir aux fondamentaux ; comme rien de radical, ou de valable n’était survenu depuis lors, et surtout pas en ce moment. Bref, alors qu’exposer Aconcci dans les année 60 dans une petite galerie, c’était fou ; aujourd’hui c’est snob.

Judicaël Lavrador

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Doomsday Celebration at Castillo/Corrales, Paris

There is an undercurrent of let-down with this project, an exhibition
I'll never get to see. There is also, it seems, an atmosphere of
pre-destined failure running through the small group of ephemeral
works, documenting a collection of ill-fated or misguided endeavours.

Each of these scraps of productivity, scraps of life, represent an
idea, a plan, an ambition; but one that somehow fell short and was
always going to. Artist, writer, architect; each can craft illusionary
schemes for themselves, designing plots and scenarios to sit within.
In art reality fades, dreams surface. The back-up plan can and
probably will fail, but in this doomsday celebration, there is
evidence of the will that can be found in quiet and desperate
attempts.

Rosemary Forde

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Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville

2007-03-12T05:27:00.000-07:00

The second Seville Biennale marked Okwui Enwezor’s return to the “mega-exhibition” format for the first time since 2002’s Documenta_11. It also marked a shift in his critical focus: from the series of postcolonial displacements that underpinned Documenta_11, to a single-city exhibition grounded in a single theme. Enwezor reprised Sigmund Freud’s theory of ‘das unheimlich’ (literally translated here as ‘the unhomely’) and filtered it through contemporary geopolitics after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, with particular reference to the ‘unhomely’ internment camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and the ‘bare life’ of its generally rightless and unsighted inhabitants.

If the theme sounds somewhat broad – particularly when coupled with the exhibition’s sub-title of ‘Phantom Scenes in Global Society’ – then this breadth was more than compensated by the astonishing literalness with which some of the artworks approached contemporary politics. Images of war abounded. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s photographs showed American and Iraqi militants in battle, dully reminding us of the truism that all parties to a war commit violence. Josephine Meckseeper presented a suite of banal photographs documenting demonstrations against neoliberal globalisation – as though documentary photography of itself suffices as some kind of political stance. And the Spanish group El Perro exhibited a sculpture of a (presumably American) youth skateboarding atop three hooded, naked figures crouched in a pyramidal form. Just in case we didn’t ‘get’ the Abu Ghraib reference, El Perro kindly presented a photograph of an American soldier skateboarding in Iraq as well.

As representation after representation of journalistic images or twee references to oil passed me by, I couldn’t help but wonder whether art’s relationship to ‘politics’ could actually be something more than literal re-presentations of known scenes. What ever happened to institutional critique, for example, as an engagement with art’s own discursive politics as well as the Realpolitik surrounding art? This was a particularly pertinent question given both the biennale’s general lack of engagement with the locations housing it (the decayed Royal shipyards and a former monastery in the equally decaying 1992 World Expo playground) and its strong focus on relatively ‘conservative’ media such as painting and drawing. These media, we must remember, were largely perceived by critics to be lacking in the video-heavy Documenta_11. Had Enwezor capitulated to the desires of the art press? And could art’s politics be more than an opportunistic exploitation of images of people and lands that are themselves being opportunistically exploited today?

Some of the Biennale’s more intriguing works certainly confronted these questions head-on, especially Gerhard Richter’s gunmetal-grey Abstraktes Bild (2000) and its mute challenge to the very possibility of imaging war. Such works were, however, exceptions to the curator’s rule. For this was an exhibition overwhelmingly crushed beneath the burdens of the world – and of art’s own yearning for political relevance within it.
Anthony Gardner

image, Thomas Hirshhorn installation 2006
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A refreshing week with Martha Rosler

2006-12-29T04:44:00.000-08:00

I have just attended a week-long seminar, from December 10-15, given by Martha Rosler within the program of unitednationsplaza. unitednationsplaza is ‘exhibition as school’, a seminar program based in the city of Berlin which was initially planned for Nicosia, Cyprus as a part of Manifesta 6. The program is organized by Anton Vidokle in partnership with individual artists, artist collaboratives and philosophers.

Martha Rosler’s seminar consisted not only of evening lectures but also of a video screening program. This included approximately 70 videos made between the 1970s and 2002 by activists or by artists from Canada and the Americas (two of the 70 videos were by Martha Rosler herself). Included works matched the initial utopian idea of video as a vehicle for provoking social transformation. This quality could be mapped in almost all the works since all were addressing different aspects of the social and political world. Selection of the videos was very telling because it is simply not easy for European audience to encounter most of the works, with the possible exception of Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1975) or Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-1979), which have been shown in art exhibition context. The other unifying aspect of the works was that they were shot in the street, technology allowing the artists to use rather lighter equipment.

The leading interest of works from the 1970s was criticism of television either as a total negation or as an effort to find alternative ways within television to reach the people. In this context, it was refreshing to see the video work of Richard Serra, Television Delivers People (1973), an American artist widely known for his minimalist sculptures made of industrial material. Media-activist collective projects Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish triggered reflection about the alternative ways of working within the television system. During the 1980s video activists and artists made videos primarily about AIDS, about racism towards minorities and about class and gender politics. Hector Sanchez’s Life in the G: Gowanus Gentrified (1988) and Miriam Hernandez’s Millie Reyes, 2371 2nd Avenue: An East Harlem Story were exemplary works of the activists working together with youngsters in order for them to tell their own stories. In addition to the problems of the 1980s, videos from the1990s scrutinized the problems of the city. Paul Garrin’s By Any Means Necessary (1990) highlighted the political stance of the state towards homeless people. Some videos, especially more recent works about the war in Iraq such as Norman Cowie’s Scenes from an Endless War (2002) and Deep Dish’s Shocking and Awful, raised the question of how to provoke the attention of the public to things happening in the world without recourse to propaganda?

The videos were mostly content driven and the ultimate aim was to be able to disseminate the works to as many people as possible—be it in the art world or among the general public. As a result, the seminar foregrounded a crucial aspect of video, which is easily overlooked at the moment. This feeling was amplified by an exhibition taking place simultaneously at a contemporary art museum in Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof entitled The Art of Projection: Films, Videos and Installations. The videos included in the show, especially those dating from the 1990s onwards, revealed how works are becoming more and more monumental and sculptural in stark contrast to the low-tech, low-profile features of the early days. The Art of Projection, which was just one of many similar shows, made me realize once more how much video has lost its emancipatory aspect particularly in comparison to the videos I had seen over that one week.
Pelin Uran
is a Turkish curator currently based in Berlin

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'Politics in Aspic' Zones of Contact

2006-11-21T01:02:00.000-08:00

2006 Sydney Biennale June-August
'Politics in aspic', a close friend said of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney Zones of Contact, and try as I might I cannot disagree with him.
Artistic Director and Curator Charles Merewether, along with the biennale staff, have made a big biennale. To the casual observer Zones of Contact may seem to be more about numbers than problems or solutions.

From 100 collaborating curators, 44 countries visited by Charles Merewether, 85 artists and 16 locations, through to Antony Gormley’s impertinent installation Asian Field, this edition of the Sydney Biennale, moulded in aspic or not, is the art history biennale, a treatise for the underrepresented with an adjunct exhibition.

Zones of Contact, Merewether’s framework, has resulted in a political and sociological semblance where, to quote the catalogue, ‘zones in daily life’ (‘war zone, hot zone, danger zone, no-fly zone, border zone, strike zone, combat zone, free zone, comfort zone, forbidden zone, pleasure zone, erogenous zone, symbolic zone') are symbolic of our contemporary lived experience.

Such a broad framework has resulted in a disjointed and self-conscious exhibition. The various zones do not interrelate or exchange, not that it is essential that they do, however, this biennale fails in its address of the contemporary lived experience that is ‘fragmentary, inconclusive, without totality’ precisely because the attempt to represent those geographies, discourses, and politics that are considered underrepresented by the western institution is misrepresented. The artists working for the underrepresented actually live and work in the centre.

Excluding the incoherent zoning, there were intermittent examples of work that confidently announced their own more plainspoken concerns, objectives and histories. Albanian born Adrian Paci’s Noise of Light 2006, a six metre high chandelier hung from the ceiling at Pier 2/3 under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, is powered by ten noisy and polluting petrol generators that are started every half hour or so. Kazakhstan’s Almagul Menilbayeva’s installation comprises three videos I will never forget this 2005–06, SteppenBaroque 2003 and Apa 2003, which are displayed on monitors sitting on a bed of soil and viewed from a makeshift scaled down roadway. Naked women dance, roll and swirl in rivers and snowscapes in what Menilbayeva describes as ‘Punk Romantic Shamanism’. Paci and Menilbayeva both work within the bounds of contemporary sociological praxis by using an aesthetic as critique or commentary as opposed to the more familiar documentary mode found throughout Zones of Contact.

At Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Câlin Dans’ Emotional Architecture2—Sample City 2003, where a man roams Bucharest carrying a door on his back, is one of the more engaging video works found in Zones of Contact. With many video works lasting more than 30 minutes, the documentary mode becomes ineffectual and counter intuitive in the biennale context because the installation of the works does not allow for effective shared viewing. Fighting for headphones and beanbag space does not invite patient engagement with complex and sensitive subjects.

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has installed 72 robotically controlled fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the foyer. Controlled by three computerised surveillance systems, the lights of Homographies 2006 spin 360º tracking your movement through the space. Light relief from the numerous documentaries, this work is a novel one-liner critique of the surveillance heavy world we have created.

Similarly engaging but more complexly layered in its relationships with the viewer is Damián Ortega’s Inverted Power 2006, where from a crucifix shaped frame hang house-bricks on strained rubber ropes. Ortega’s work, along with Milica Tomic’s Container 2006 at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, show the possibility of contact with local histories, politics and sociologies in a compact and reticent form. Tomic’s Container, a shipping container filled with bullet holes, becomes a monument to a reported event where the US Army in Afghanistan shot at a shipping container filled with captured Taliban after the captives had requested some airholes.

Zones of Contact is an academic exercise. Idealised as a platform for the underrepresented, the resulting exhibition is obvious and conventional in its intention, and notably disengaged with local issues such as Sydney’s recent race riots and other pertinent social and political zones in Australia. Where are the immigration zones, the racist zones, the mandatory detention zones?
Jarrod Rawlins
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Italian curators in Melbourne

2006-10-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

After having spent almost two months in Melbourne we consider the truly distinctive element of the city, and a source of pride, its strong presence of artist-run spaces and artist-run initiatives. We have been very surprised how artists have brainstormed projects that they would like to see realized, have found financial and other resources, have created artworks, curated shows, and even written critical texts. We spent lot of time visiting about twenty, often hard to uncover, artist-run spaces, such as Kings ARI, Clubsprojects, Conical, Westspace and Ocularlab. We also met more than 50 artists and visited their studios (either the younger generation such as Paul Knight, Matthew Griffin and Nick Mangan or to the previous one including Jon Campbell, Marco Fusinato and Daniel von Sturmer). Everyone was really generous, sharing lots of information: curators in Melbourne and Sydney spent hours with us speaking about the contemporary art scene and its background. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art ACCA hosted a curatorial lab for us: over 4 days we met and saw the works of David Rosetzky, Stuart Ringholt, Gabrielle de Vietri, Christian Capurro, Alex Pittindrigh, Laresa Kosloff, Richard Giblett, Andrew McQualter, Kathy Temin, Domenico de Clario and Glen Walls among the others.

Over the six weeks at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces as part of the visiting curator program there, we visited the studios of the artists who were in residence. The level is qualitatively high and all the artists working there show interesting energies, for example Lily Hibberd’s paintings and her publication projects such as unMagazine, the installations of Alicia Frankovich, the ones by Simon Horsburgh or Mira Gojak – both re-using everyday objects and giving them a new life - and also the works by Kiron Robinson, Michelle Ussher, Nick Selenitsch and Rob McHaffie. The other remarkable artists we met at Gertrude are Bianca Hester, Viv Miller, Christian Thompson, Alex Martinis Roe, Kate Fulton, Katherine Huang, Natalya Hughes and Starlie Geikie.

In our residential Studio 18 at Gertrude and in the project space Studio 12 we presented a selection of works by more than 35 Italian artists such as Marzia Migliora, Diego Perrone, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Domenico Mangano, goldiechiari, Alice Guareschi among others. We also hosted discussions and a floor talk on the Milan art scene. We were also very happy to welcome exhibition visitors to the studio and to exchange information about Italy.

We got the feeling that Australians feel far away from the European and American art scene (in terms of geographical distance). What we found bizarre is that so far there’s not been so much connections with the closer Asian context. The structure of the art scene is younger in comparison to the European one: for example there are not so many curators – especially independent curators – and the masters or schools in curatorial studies are something quite new. That’s probably one of the reasons why there are so many artist-run spaces. Surely what’s happening in Melbourne could never happen in a city like Milan: the real estate costs in Melbourne makes affordable to artists to have their own space and to promote their work and the work of other artists. Also the remarkable long-term support from the City Council, the Region and the Government to artist-run initiatives make their life easier.

We noticed this feeling of “far away” also when visiting commercial galleries in Melbourne such as Uplands, Neon Parc, Sutton Gallery and Anna Schwartz. Surprisingly the influential galleries are not so many and while we are used to see the work of foreign artists in Italian galleries, Australian galleries work mainly with local artists. This attitude belongs to a more general and wide approach that aims to promote Australian culture both locally and internationally. Good examples are the emphasis on the Venice Biennale Pavilion - considered the best foreign showcase for local art and deeply supported by Australian Council for the Art, as well by private sponsors – and the amount of well payed scholarships, residencies and prizes for artists for living or studying over seas for at least a year.
Chiara Agnello and Roberta Tenconi were in Australia between July and September 2006 as part of the project M.M.M. (Milano.Melbourne.Milano), a cultural exchange program between Italy and Australia supported by Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, MUMA Monash University, Comune di Milano – Relazioni Internazionali, ACACIA Associazione Amici Arte Contemporanea, C/O careof.

The Readymade in the Age of Google Economics

2006-07-29T01:47:00.000-07:00

Victoria Park Gallery
250 Johnston Street Abbotsford Melbourne, July 2006
featuring Be Young & Shut Up Council (Azlan McLennan & Michael Ascroft)

I did not see all of the images in this exhibition. I did not sit down. I did not watch the looped footage stop and begin again and again. I did not stay long. I felt sick. I wanted to go outside. I asked myself – what is the point of presenting these images in an exhibition framed by the history of readymade art?

While the content of The Readymade in the Age of Google Economics is not simply polemic but revolting (McLennan in particular has outshone himself on this front), it was not the material that I took primary issue with. It was the framing of that material. McLennan and Ascroft’s found internet footage (the video of that infamous beheading on one screen, a still image of a figure with its head recently blown off on the next) – has nothing to do with Duchamp or his legacy. But according to the artist’s statement, the sites have been garnered in order to raise questions of context and artistic value, information and accessibility. The text reads: “how does readymade art tackle advances in technology regarding the effortless access to existing information, which may address the particular provocations, strategies and outcomes of certain state and military operations? When analysing current power struggles, does the appropriation of publicly accessible media for artistic purposes - from civilian body count figures, to anti-US guerrilla groups' beheading videos - classify as incitement?” In my opinion, these are simply the wrong questions to ask. Not only are they irresponsible (toward the information in which McLennan and Ascroft are trading and towards the history of the readymade), they do not account for the exhibition’s strategy. To me, the presentation of googled images no more equates to an analysis of “current power struggles” than the installation of a couple of internet terminals “tackles advances in technology”. We are left with the question of incitement: in itself, dull fodder.

Of course, and as these artists are well aware, it is necessary to protect the capacity for the gallery, and specifically the artist’s run space, to act as a ‘safe house’ in order to circumvent censorship and provide a space for disclosing material barred wrongly from the public domain. This is all well and good. But this is not what McLennan and Ascroft are doing at Victoria Park.

Just prior to her death, Susan Sontag wrote that, “To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames…” There was much potential for this exhibition to avoid such simple “designations” and to frankly address the complexities of its hellish subject. But that would have required more than the presentation of research under the banner of art or even free speech. It would have required first identifying what the actual subject matter was, and then addressing the motivations for its re-presentation. Instead, McLennan and Ascroft have taken the coward’s path, finding refuge in formalism and spurring on (in the name of controversy) those tired debates as to what should and should not be shown in galleries. It’s almost frustrating – the issues are laid out, but the stakes go unnoticed. As the proverb goes: when a wise man points to the moon, only a fool looks at the finger.
Amelia Douglas

The other side of things (on the other side)

2006-05-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

Haraldur Jonsson, Sigurdur Gudjonsson, Darri Lorenzen, Birta Gudjonsdottir & Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar, curated by Birta Gudjonsdottir
Bus Gallery
117 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne, April-May 2006

image Sigurdur Gudjonsson
I had never been to BUS Gallery before so I was up for the new experience - “Artists from Iceland”. I think my partner Jessica’s view of the exhibition was doomed before we got to exhibition, so many factors contributed to her mood before arriving. It was on empty hungry tummies, after a strange run in with a homeless man and spending a little while walking around trying to find the gallery in an unfamiliar part of the city. What was in the exhibition (or the building itself) didn’t help to ease any anxiety or tension that accumulated prior to viewing.

The building was dark and raw with brickwork, building beams and structural inside supports showing. The works within the space showed a quiet unease, separateness and somehow seemed to capture the moment before a scare. In hindsight, we sought out the video work in the next room to comfort ourselves, assuming it would be predictable and passive like television or popular commercial cinema.

We were faced with more of the aforementioned only now that it was moving, life-animated; it was real and therefore worse. Breaking point came when the piece played scenes of darkness which were inexpectedly broken by a flashing of a horror-face screaming, like a strobe from the darkness prompting a shriek from my partner. We hadn’t seen the whole film and were not sure how long it was but she was quite anxious to leave. I almost felt that the exhibition was there for us as art’s representative of “shocks and thrills”, like that of the recent spate of shock-horror films from Hollywood and all its cinematic extensions (Wolf Creek, Hostel, Evil Aliens, High Tension). I am also interested in what I would think of the exhibition if I had of viewed it in a content, relaxed and clinical manner but maybe I wouldn’t have got as much out of it.
Ace

Colleen Ahern

2006-05-02T20:46:00.000-07:00

Angels on Airwaves
Neon Parc
1/53 Bourke Street Melbourne, May 2006

Bedtime 2006 oil on board 30x30cm
Colleen Ahern is kind of like Elizabeth Peyton. She makes art about pop music. Whereas Peyton’s works look like they have been made by a music fan, Ahern’s paintings have a studied and, in some cases, Old Master look about them. Most of the paintings are portraits of people like Tom Waits, PJ Harvey and Leonard Cohen, but there were also pictures of a concert, a girl playing guitar and this weird triptych of naked chicks on bicycles. While the show was hung pretty sparse, the arrangement of the works seemed to reflect different sensibilities in the treatment of the subjects. The Harvey painting looked rushed and was probably the least successful work in the show. On the other hand, paintings like Winter were Richteresque in their execution; as were Cohen, London and Asylum. Overall it was a really good show, but I think that it could have benefited from more works and works of different sizes.
Jules

Rosebud

2006-05-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

a collaboration between Kate Daw and the weavers of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop
262-266 Park Street Sth Melbourne, May 2006

installation view
At the opening of ‘Rosebud’ I probably paid more attention to the workshop than the exhibition. There were hundreds of spools of thread, many half finished works, all accompanied by a small print out or photocopy of the original they were replicating. Or reproducing. Or interpreting. Whichever you like. I wanted to touch everything.
Fabrics and threads do that, where paintings and drawings don’t really. They’re tactile. I think when you touch things (or when a feeling comes over you that you want to really badly), it’s far more intimate. And you remember those sensations. My grandma’s silk cushions in her living room. The floor of my dad’s house rubbing the soles of my feet. Even my bed sheets.
I bought new ones a bit back and I couldn’t really sleep at all the first night. They didn’t feel right. I decided to ease myself into it, like a small child. I had to stick with the new linen, but I got to keep my old, hole ridden pillow case until I could learn to let it go. I’m sure it sounds abit silly, but it was quite an adjustment for me at the time. And then I moved house. The trials and tribulations of attempting to make everything that was unfamiliar feel like home. And then I thought to myself (or realised), that I probably just care too much.
Jade Venus