"Like many social artists, Hill sees most of her work as both introverted and extroverted. It is in fact a skillful updating of what used to be called 'Life Art'. In an aesthetic echo of the American dream, Hill's work has gone from downscale (street vending, rummage sales) to the pseudo-corporate (board meetings, TV shows, fashion show). Yet it still offers an endearing mixture of Dada, pop, performance, process art, and conceptual art, recycled for the 21st century with a certain fin de siecle élan. Her trajectory provokes insights about the relationship between lifestyle and 'baggage', mobility and status quo, packing and unpacking (postmodern intellectual processes in themselves), the familiar and the foreign, cultural memory and amnesia, as well as the dangers of uncritical service. There's no telling how far she will go in this direction, but as she pushes the envelope, Hill is also pushing the letter. And that can only be good for art. Is Volksboutique a bargain? A gift? A joke on art? In its ambiguity lies its success. I know I'm right because, after all, the customer is always right…"
http://www.volksboutique.org/front_workshop.html
Archive for October, 2004
have been scratching my withered brains for ways to “frame” my project for possible postgraduate study next year. its due in a few days, and it’s been a really difficult process. see, it has to be “cohesive” and “achievable within the time frame”. and a lot of my activities are pretty disparate and scattered. kinda like different hats i wear when collaborating within different groups. over a few rewrites i’m getting closer, i think, to throwing an umbrella over the things i’m into by thinking about “networks”.
it could work, for (at least?) 2 reasons:
-first, the obvious connection is an extension of the network of uncollectable artists, which i helped start up last year, and which (despite the successful launch of our bubblegum cards) is yet to really take off as a “network” per se, at least not to the utopian extent i would like…
-second, it would give me the chance to immerse myself in some heavier reading about networks of all types, to find out how they work, and why, and what to expect of them. it all ties in with the web course that i’m doing at tafe too, of course…
some very funny network links have popped up from googling about…such as this one by Charles Kadushin called A Short Introduction to Social Networks:
“A and B are friends as indicated by the double arrow. C and D are also friends. E, D and F are a clique. F has a special liking for G but it is not certain that G reciprocates. Now imagine that A is a Jew and B is an Arab and d through G are also Arab. All the letters but G are men. G is a young woman with an important father. Other things being equal, what are the odds that A and B will remain friends?”
(you have to see the accompanying diagram to make sense of it!!)
another article i found which makes me feel more optimistic about my potential project is entitled Applied Network Theory by Jon Udell. He writes:
“The research suggests a kind of grand unified theory: networks made out of anything (molecules, nerve cells, electrical grids, transportation systems, web links, human beings) obey the same laws of growth and arrive at similar structures. In every kind of network, a few nodes differentiate. They attract more links, become hubs or routers, and radically shorten the distance between arbitrary endpoints.”
Udell goes on to make connections between social networks, blogs, software development and the film industry…
The following is an email i sent to the ArtRadio e-group* on April 15 2003…
It seems like a long time ago, but my mate Nobody (who did the excellent WeedKiller/PestController project at an abandoned drive in cinema in 2002, together with Maxine Foxxx) was scouring around for projects related to his own…I remembered reading about Japanese artist Yasunao Tone. I thought this post might live well here, on this blog!
…………………………………………………………………………….
Hi all.
Just a note to offer a sketch of an idea I had about five minutes
ago. Or rather, an idea I stole from a Japanese fluxus artist I was
reading about. His name is Yasunao Tone, and in the most recent
Yokohama Triennial (whatever that is) he presented a work called
"Parasite/Noise". Here is a quote about it:
"Functioning as an altered audio guide to the exhibition itself, Parasite/Noise
consists of headsets which ‘play a text read aloud which has nothing to do with
the exhibited works themselves’, thereby creating a disjunction between
what is seen and what is heard, between the ‘meaning’ of the work
witnessed and the heard text. As Tone posits, the work is a ‘pseudo
audio guide’ reasserting such guides as interfaces between audience and
art. Yet for Tone this interface offers the chance to redirect
‘meaning’ by sabotaging the one-to-one equation of what the museum
says and what the art work does. Here the very authorial language of
art institutions is shortcircuited through what Tone calls ‘paramedia’
a kind of parasitic alteration that leads to an altogether different
signification. "
What I like about the piece is that it offers a new form of dialogue
around the venue, the exhibited thing, and the viewer
in a way which is not separate from the time and place that those three
poles converge. This is in contrast to a published article or radio
broadcast which by their very nature ‘stand apart’ from the thing they
are discussing (unless what they are reflexively discussing is that act
itself of reading or listening).
What I reckon could be even more exciting about
Tone’s project would be if it were completely unauthorized and
unsolicited by the institution. From my experience working in the MCA,
the words and texts which emerge parallel to the exhibition (like wall
texts, media releases, catalogues) are all heavily vetted and approved
by various levels of hierarchy, often resulting in atrophied and dull
statements which say only the most predictable things. It’s even
somewhat unheard of to encounter a staff member openly saying that
they didn’t like such and such an exhibition for whatever reason
(except with reference to its public/critical popularity or lack thereof.)
What I was thinking was that we (the artradio
group, or some of us, or others too) might prepare such an unauthorized
audio guide to a big show at the MCA (or wherever else) It would give
us the chance to hone our audio skills in the production of broadcast
quality programmes while still waiting approval to parasite onto one
or another of those radio stations. As to how it could
work, that might be open to the group to evolve whether an individual
was in charge of an individual exhibition tour, or individuals took
on the same show in however many different ways, or some collaborative
way was found to tackle the whole thing.
What do you think?
lucas
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
*(An e-group we established to try set up an artist's radio programme on radio fbi in sydney - a project which never got off the ground due to (what we regarded as) fbi's precious ideas about programming)
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_39/ai_75830815 - another interview with nicholas bourriaud
http://place.unm.edu/relational_art.html - university of new mexico relational arts programme
http://www.burchfield-penney.org/news/default.asp?prid=927 - burchfield penney arts centre
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/ - jill/txt -a great blog with media/networked art/technology links aplenty
http://www.test.org.uk/archives/000979.html - gleaning, exchanging and vernacular media essay from test blog
have not posted for a while here…
i’ve started a web design course at tafe, so conceivably bilateral will be moving to a better coded, diy home soon.
have also been working towards a comprehensive squatspace website.
also: will post up some writing soon that was published in latest spinach7 mag - about a super project called splint. check out splint’s beautiful website.
in the meantime: watch unco artist andrew harper (witch from tassie) - he has a film up at www.hobartunderground.com - it’s his celluloid curse against the current government.
also: if in Melbourne, go visit Spread of the Empire - by unco artist Forest Keegel at the Melbourne City Square corner of Collins and Swanston Streets. The work will be on display from midday Friday October 8th until 2pm Sunday October 10th
more info is at the Melbourne environmental art website http://ausmag.de/xxx/enviro/
(the website is made with frames (ugg) so you have to click to “programme” and “melbourne city square” and “page 2″ to see info about this great project.)
From the press release: “Spread of the Empire refers to the colonisation of Melbourne. White flour was part of the currency used to supposedly purchase the land Melbourne stands on, and will be used to symbolise the white settlement and City grid being stamped onto the land.”
ps - get your entries in for the NUCA unco grants due at end Oct - see the blog entry from August 2 2004 for details!!