Category Archives: uncollectable art

A Melbourne Engagement

This coming weekend I’ll be in Melbourne for Next Wave Festival. I’m speaking in a forum entitled “Taking it to the Streets” (!).

All the Details are here.

Come along to help me celebrate an early Bob Dylan’s Birthday!

2010 Next Wave Festival Club, 1000 £ Bend, 361
Sunday 23 May, 2pm-3:30pm
Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne

This forum will explore the potential for publically-sited art to meaningfully engage with social issues beyond the art world. If one accepts that art can and should be marshalled towards social justice, then what are the specific artistic competencies that are best deployed towards these ends? What have been some of the successes and failures of socially and politically charged art in the public realm? And can art enact social change and still be good art?

speakers:

Deborah Kelly (Chair)
George Egerton-Warburton
Lucas Ihlein
Iain McIntyre

Not Quite Art back on the Tube

7 Replies

not quite art series 2

Marcus Westbury’s Not Quite Art is back for a second series.

You may recall the first series (episode 2) featured NUCA (and yours truly, prancing around in a blue jacket waving bubblegum cards). [You can download that episode here].

The show is a remarkably courageous move by the ABC to feature cultural phenomena beyond recognisable high art.

This time around, Marcus looks a bit more confident in front of the TV cameras. Less dissing of the concert hall and opera house, and more enthusiastic, positive investigation of how “low art” channels of distribution (or “audience creation”) are growing exponentially, lending “not quite art” the means of spreading itself all around the world.

The first episode of the new series, then, was fittingly devoted to the grand-daddy of these distro-systems, The Internet. At times, in fact, Marcus’ enthusiasm seemed a bit like a (redundant) commercial for the web (and for Google Corp., whose proprietary application YouTube got a fair bit of free advertising on our ABC!)

But of course you don’t need to sell the net to anyone, and YouTube needs no ads. It does quite nicely on its own. And it’s perhaps The Internet, as a “character” in its own right (rather than any individual example of folks wot use/abuse it) that is the protagonist of this brave new cultural era.

The episode featured the chooky dancers (who did the greek zorba and went “platinum” on youtube) Jodi Rose (who makes bridges “sing” and won a prize for best aussie blog a few years back) and Brisbane’s Yahtzee, who publishes compelling high-paced video-reviews of computer games and is an internet phenomenon in his own right.

These were all interesting case studies. And I reckon Marcus could have substituted any of a thousand alternative not-quite-artists to make his point, and that point would still have come across strongly:

“The Net Is Changing The Way We Live Our Lives.”

Which we all already know. Maybe in 20 years it’ll be interesting to look back on Not Quite Art 2008 and have a giggle at how full of wonder we were about it all, “back then”.

Fittingly, the ABC have decided to vodcast the episodes as they roll out. Amusingly (given the subject matter of the first episode) it is unavailable for download to international viewers from the ABC website.

Huh?

So for any of you internationals out there who wanna see what it’s all about, I hereby give you, Not Quite Art Series 2 Episode 1. Go crazy.

PS: here is episode two.

…and here is episode three…

Join NUCA

1 Reply

The Network of Un-Collectable Artists (NUCA) is a brand new nation-wide affiliation. NUCA connects those who gravitate towards ephemeral projects, participatory experiences, illegal art actions, and activities that oddify everyday life. Some members make unwieldy installation projects, while others alter billboards, project images in abandoned spaces at night, or exchange ideas rather than objects. Some simply make dead ugly paintings that would never sell.

Because such artworks are often fiendishly tricky to document, they seldom grace the columns of "recognised" publications. NUCA is building a publicity machine of its own, so artists may exchange essential info about their activities, collaborate on new projects, and connect with Un-Collectable others.

For Next Wave 2004, NUCA will launch "Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists", a set of BubbleGum cards documenting the activities of these elusive individuals. The Un-Collectable BubbleGum Cards will be distributed by itinerant vendors at the various festival venues, and naturally, it will be damn hard to "collect them all".

NUCA would like to invite you to join its ranks. Please send an email introducing yourself and your interests, to nuca@bigfoot.com to get the ball rolling. We will publish members' pictures and information on our website, which will also house a discussion board.

A little more about Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists:

NUCA would like the project to explore "collectability/collectivity/collection etc" in its many senses.

Just because the project is about being "un-collectable" does not mean that selling a piece of art disqualifies you. Problems with "collection" are to be explored. [NUCA member Mickie Quick, for instance, has complained that his small civil disobedience kits (Refugee Island) are collected and put on the mantlepiece by "politically minded" but not "politically active" friends and colleagues, which for him kills the piece entirely.]

The project should bring out those issues.

Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists is intended to be humourous, and by necessity it can't become self-important. That is what it should work away from: the dubious practice of cross-referencing by "credible" sources who "say" that an artist is collectible and are therefore slavishly followed by the market (who knows if this really works anyway, but it makes for some ghastly magazine filler).

Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists is part of the Next Wave Festival, whose theme for 2004 is UnPopular Culture.

expanded cinema/deborah k

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yes i wish i could bring valie export too. recently she was invited to london to give a talk on her work (she lives in germany and austria) and she said she couldnt make it (at the last minute) due to the flying thing. she doesnt want to fly in aeroplanes. the transcript from that talk that she didnt give (but she sent the text anyway) is at sensesofcinema journal which is at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/contents.html

(but the site seems to be playing up at the mo, i cant make it work. hmm)
she writes really clearly about expanded cinema and its pervasive connexion to the rest of her work.

i hear ya about art about art. i must admit to having been a nerd about some of that conceptual art stuff (in the past, in the past!) which irritates the shit out of me now.

expanded cinema however is messy, its people getting together in small rooms and showing each other stuff and talking about it, its a bit like the sydney moving image coalitions super 8 nights. its about doing stuff with very little resources, and it was very much about the london filmmakers co-operative, a unique organisation which controlled the production, collection, and distribution of its work. i am very keen to see the project happen in sydney, partly because of the dire state of the film scene there (and the video installation "scene" if you can call it that). the film scene, well, squatspace has been ranting about that for a few years, the tropfest business and the fox studios hollywood production sweatshop. the video scene, because for some godforsaken reason it seems fascinated by the idea of "immersion" and "virtual reality" yet seems to do these things so badly. i even went to the zkm organisation in germany (the home of video-immersion-virtualreality) to see if i was wrong, but i dont think i am. its a resource-heavy parade of gimmickry. this is the kind of thing that expanded cinema artists were (and still are) against, yet theirs is a forgotten history. so its partly a historical-reconstruction project. i want to remind sydney artists that you dont need huge resources to make interesting moving image work.

yah, i wouldnt worry too much about the collectible thing. a few posters sold to a gallery certainly wont qualify you for a rush at the next madrid art fair.

but seriously, im keen for the project to explore "collectability/collectivity etc" in its many senses. so if you work with "collectives" often, that may be an interesting angle to explore for this one.

also, problems with collection are to be explored i reckon. mickie has complained about a similar issue, that his small disobedience kits are collected and put on the mantlepiece by "politically minded" but not "politically active" friends and colleagues, which for him kills the piece entirely. the project should bring out those issues.

for me, you are a prime candidate, even if you sell them posters to the gallery. i hope you do. we all need the cash.

50 most uncollectable is meant to be humourous and by necessity it cant become self-important. that is what we are working away from, the self-important cross-referencing of "credible" sources who "say" that an artist is collectible and are therefore slavishly followed by the market (who knows if this really works anyway, but it makes for some ghastly magazine filler).

ruark of course has his own motivations, and there is something to be said for his proactive attempt to insert the work into the collections of major galleries. strategic historymaking or something.

alla best

lucas

NUCA Update

1 Reply

The Network of Un-Collectable Artists (NUCA) is a brand new nation-wide affiliation. NUCA connects those who gravitate towards ephemeral projects, participatory experiences, illegal art actions, and activities that oddify everyday life. Some members make unwieldy installation projects, while others alter billboards, project images in abandoned spaces at night, or exchange ideas rather than objects. Some simply make dead ugly paintings that would never sell.

Because such artworks are often fiendishly tricky to document, they seldom grace the columns of “recognised” publications. NUCA is building a publicity machine of its own, so artists may exchange essential info about their activities, collaborate on new projects, and connect with Un-Collectable others.

For Next Wave 2004, NUCA will launch “Australia’s 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists”, a set of BubbleGum cards documenting the activities of these elusive individuals. The Un-Collectable BubbleGum Cards will be distributed by itinerant vendors at the various festival venues, and naturally, it will be damn hard to “collect them all”.

NUCA would like to invite you to join its ranks. Please send an email introducing yourself and your interests, to info@uncollectables.net to get the ball rolling. We will publish members’ pictures and information on our website, which will also house a discussion board.

A little more about the Australia’s 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists:

NUCA would like the project to explore “collectability/collectivity/collection etc” in its many senses.

Just because the project is about being “un-collectable” does not mean that selling a piece of art disqualifies you. Problems with “collection” are to be explored. [NUCA member Mickie Quick, for instance, has complained that his small civil disobedience kits (Refugee Island) are collected and put on the mantlepiece by “politically minded” but not “politically active” friends and colleagues, which for him kills the piece entirely.]

The project should bring out those issues.

Australia’s 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists is intended to be humourous, and by necessity it can’t become self-important. That is what it should work away from: the dubious practice of cross-referencing by “credible” sources who “say” that an artist is collectible and are therefore slavishly followed by the market (who knows if this really works anyway, but it makes for some ghastly magazine filler).

early unCollectable notes…

Bilateral

/// art / exchange / events / re-enactment ///