I’ve been working on these lately:
Green Bans Art Walk, with Big Fag Press and Cross Arts Projects.
Yeomans Project, with Ian Milliss
Archive for the 'spatial politics' Category
Thursday morning, 6:55am – Bob The Goat trots into our goat-deprived lives, thanks to the power of good old fashioned broadcast radio. In all the excitement, I almost forget my commitment to the West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial. I’m supposed to make a pennant to commemorate the festival!
Friday night, 10:30pm – at Kylie and Damien’s place, Lisa and I set up a little fuzzy-felt sheltered pennant-making workshop. With sharp scissors flashing, the corner of my tongue sticking out of the side of my mouth, and the help of some stinky craft glue, I put together the goaty pennant you see hanging proudly alongside its buddies in the photo above. (The reverse side says, simply, BOB).
(I was quite pleased with this craftily constructed artwork, especially given that I only began making it just before midnight, and after consuming a few glasses of a very good wine Damien cracked open. However, I cannot take all the credit – a big shout out to this website, from which I pinched the basic goat-face formula…)
Saturday afternoon, 3:30pm – under the hanging pennants, at 135 Union Street, West Brunswick, a tribe of goat enthusiasts gather expectantly to await Bob’s arrival. We’re about to start the Great West Brunswick Goat Walk!
Continue reading ‘The Great West Brunswick Goat Walk’
[keg and I present at the final round-table discussion]
Keg and have been attending Artivistic here in Montreal. It’s a DIY kinda conference about the junctions between art and activism, and this particular edition seems to be about occupation and space and nature. Big topics and sometimes the delegates struggle with large theoretical issues – the best sessions are grounded and case-study based. See a few pictures from the conference here.
Some of my favourites from the conference:
Continue reading ‘Artivistic Fragments’
…what I’ve been up to lately…
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Together with Eve Vincent, presenting at this conference at COFA:
http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/newsevents/news/news_0115.html
our abstract:
Participation and Experience: Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty
The desire for an active spectator-participant was a key goal of avant-garde art during the twentieth century. Rhetoric surrounding such art practice often connected “aesthetic interactivity” with the ideal of a wider participatory democracy. During the 1960s, in an attempt to overcome the separation between “art and life” which characterised the museum-based practice of much modernist art, artists like Allan Kaprow developed “Happenings” which occurred in the everyday places and rhythms of city life. Utilising the tools bequeathed by Kaprow’s Happenings, artist group SquatSpace now runs the Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty — wherein the “work of art” is to facilitate discussion about neighborhood life and community organising in inner-urbanSydney. This paper moves through the perennial question “but is it art?” in order to examine the Tour of Beauty as a case study of “Art as Experience” (John Dewey). This co-presentation engages two perspectives — SquatSpace collective member Lucas Ihlein talks about the making of “the tour as art”, and Eve Vincent speaks from the perspective of a participant-audience member.
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Continue reading ‘Participation, Experience, Public Art, Radio’
Ian Milliss has just uploaded his new website. True to character, it’s information rich, but lacking in images. I like this a lot.
Ian is a legendary Aussie conceptual artist and an inspiring activist, having been involved in the defence of Darlinghurst’s Victoria Street squats in the early 1970s. There are some terrific articles about all his activities at the site.
Here are a few of my faves:
- New Artist. Around this time, Milliss stopped exhibiting art altogether. This document gives an idea why…(1973)
- The Barricades. In which he takes an aesthetic approach to describing the construction of barricades at Victoria Street. (1974)
- Don’t moan, organise! (with apologies to Joe Hill) by Ian Burn and Ian Milliss. In which Burn and Milliss call for the restructuring of the Sydney Biennale along artist-run lines. (1979)
There really is a lot of great stuff on Ian’s site. It will become essential reading for many of us involved in art and activism, and who are interested in finding new ways to be artists (rather than just content providers to an existing system).
[nb: the following is the first blog entry for the project Bilateral Petersham. For the rest, head on over to http://thesham.info]
Petersham_04_04_06
The clock ticked round to midnight and I sat in the kitchen watching it. When all the hands pointed to twelve, I took two photos. Without the flash, the clock looked yellow and blurry. Flash-frozen, on the other hand, it looked like it had been caught in the act. Embarrassed at having been sprung doing something vaguely shameful but essentially harmless.
That’s how I brought in the third of April. The beginning of “Bilateral Petersham,†aka “my Petersham project,†aka “The Petersham Lockdown.†There was no tangible difference between one moment, where I was not “on the job,†and the next, when the “project†had officially begun. No fanfare, no ribbon cutting, no glass of champagne. I went to bed and read a bit and then fell asleep.
Continue reading ‘Beginning Bilateral Petersham’
This chunk of text comes from a book called One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, by Miwon Kwon, 2002, MIT Press, p46-7. It struck a chord with me because it seems to cut through some of the rhetoric I crap on with from time to time. I was thinking about this paragraph in terms of my project Bilateral Kellerberrin, which although not site-specific in a late 1960s sense (ie inextricably anchored to physical location), does grow out of the circumstances of the time and place in which it was planted.
Thus, as Kwon writes, "site" is not only a physical place, but also a set of conditions, social, discursive, temporal, and physical, which situate a project, make it comprehensible to its audience or participants. But the idea of Bilateral Kellerberrin is transferrable (in fact I am looking to transfer the same project to my home suburb of Petersham in Sydney, to see what will happen) – hence the following:
Generally the in situ configuration of a project that emerges out of such a situation is temporary, ostensibly unsuitable for re-presentation anywhere else without altering its meaning, partly because the commission is defined by a unique set of geographical and temporal circumstances and partly because the project is dependent on unpredictable and unprogrammable on-site relations. But such conditions, despite appearances to the contrary, do not circumvent or even complicate the problem of commodification, because there is a strange reversal now by which the artist comes to approximate the “work”, instead of the other way around as is commonly assumed (that is, art work as surrogate to the artist). Perhaps because of the absence of the artist from the physical manifestation of the work, the presence of the artist has become an absolute prerequisite for the execution/presentation of site-oriented projects. It is now the performative aspect of an artist’s characteristic mode of operation (even when working in collaboration) that is repeated and circulated as a new art commodity, with the artist him/herself functioning as the primary vehicle for its verification, repetition, and circulation.
this email came through from Perdy Phillips, in Perth. She recently organised a sound project called "strange strolls":
Hi There
Today [17 Dec 2005] is the last day of the strange strolls sound and walking art
project at the Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Henry Street
Fremantle, Western Australia.This project saw 16 Australian and international artists create sound
walking tours of Fremantle. The viewer/listener hired a standard CD
Walkman from the Gallery and headed out into the streets of the West End.
Audiences were taken away from the everyday by the sound experience
created. The 14 different sound walks were extremely varied. Some
artists lived locally and their works reflected personal connections to
place. Others had never been south of the Equator. Central to the project
was the differences created between what you hear and what you see: the
imaginative journeys undertaken extended the experience of the body and
made the streets living, luminous and imbricated.For more details see http://www.perditaphillips.com/
For those of you who could not make it you can purchase a catalogue at
http://www.lethologicapress.org/Also, a big thank you to everyone who assisted with the project during
the last three years.Perdy
strange strolls
Curator: Perdita Phillips. Catalogue writer: Nyands Smith.
Participating artists: Begum Basdas (Turkey/USA) Viv Corringham (England/USA)
Robert Curgenven (NT) Lawrence English (QLD) Aaron Coates Hull (NSW) Maria
Manuela Lopes and Paulo Bernardino (Portugal) Minaxi May (WA) Roxane
Permar (Shetland) Perdita Phillips (WA) Ric Spencer (WA) Kieran Stewart
(WA) Aili Vahtrapuu and Virve Pulver (Estonia) Walter van Rijn
(England/The Netherlands) Dorothee von Rechenberg (Switzerland).
Via Antipopper:
"What makes a place interesting? How do we relate to it, and why — especially if we come from somewhere else? How do they become familiar or strange? These questions are what Parramappa is all about. Young people from refugee and newly arrived migrant backgrounds wandered Parramatta, taking photos and writing stories about different places. Choose a map to zoom into and find out about each neighbourhood."
This caught my attention: terminus projects.
…here are some key statements which interested me, from their "about" page:
-"Terminus Projects is an independent organisation that initiates site-specific projects of artistic and cultural relevance."
-"we commission artworks, performances, seminars, publications and events which reflect on the experiences which transform our perception of time, space and place."
-"Pioneer innovative and alternative sites for presenting contemporary works and ideas."
-"Instigate collaborations and exchange between practitioners, academics, and local communities on a national and international level."
Thus far, terminus projects seems to be presenting artist's video works in the sydney underground train video advertising network – these videos will pop up while commuters are waiting for trains, in between the product ads and the ads masquerading as "news."
It could be that terminus may begin to operate a bit like an Aussie version of Artangel. Which would be great. The organisers seem to be very professional, able to attract funding for ephemeral/site specific projects, and somewhat entrepreneurial, without being just about self-promo. They're young too.
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