In the Melbourne art world, that ‘homeless’ look of a few years ago has seemingly been replaced by the gym-going-drunk-Mum and the Lumberjacktivist (part lumberjack, part Occupy bystander). I think the living-out-of-a-cardboard-box style was a bit more reflective of where artists are at – not homeless, but just surviving. Perhaps I’m wrong to look to […]
Amita Kirpalani
Orange around
Diaphanous fellow, marked by time, screening what I know so well. Heavy head, overhead, spare and barely touching as we pass. I can see your seams and your seams see me. I could also hear you, what were you thinking? I was thinking about touching you, but your guard was nearby. I used to know […]
What is read and what is real?
The joke is that you can’t find a television in Fitzroy. The joke is that the arts scene doesn’t know what Delta wore on The Voice last week, or who won the Masterchef finale. So it seems most amusing that we have Transmission, Ryan Trecartin and Tracey Moffat’s Art Calls showing at the moment, and […]
Ryan Gander looks like Karl Pilkington and they are both misanthropic northerners
“What move?” “Which restaurant?” “Whose bunion?” Perhaps it is inadvertent rudeness via inattention until the conversation hits a note I want to hear. Or maybe I’m undertaking less than expert multi-tasking (trolling and hand-washing or sauteeing and waxing). But lately, I’m in the habit of asking the wrong questions at the wrong time. Picking up […]
Right thurr
In the corner of the exhibition Unsettled sculpture is the larger of Carolyn Eskdale’s two untitled works and it has been on my mind. The exhibition provides tactility at a distance and relief from the expectation of audience performance. ‘Tis the season of the more didactic and the make-your-own about town, but to paraphrase Chingy, […]
Back and forth
Do you like this quote or not? I love the Plath quote. ‘If a neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.’ Sylvia Plath, The bell […]
Ryoji Ikeda
I was reading about Ryoji Ikeda’s test pattern (No 5) as being perfect for iPhone documentation. How depressing. But it’s true, see my snapshots below. Described as ‘a system that converts any type of data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. Through its application, the project […]
Grievous bodily collage
On Saturday 1 June Victoria Police removed parts of a larger installation by Paul Yore titled EVERYTHING IS FUCKED exhibited in the Like Mike exhibition at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts. The action followed a complaint made to police. Paul was questioned by Victoria Police on Monday 3 June and subsequently released without charge on summons. The exhibition […]
Obiter dickta
The camera transforms its operator into a creep. The eye not pressed to the viewfinder holds a wrinkly squint. So the camera operator always appears as if she or he is semi-disgusted with what has been found in or orchestrated especially for the viewfinder. Long hours, for some, are spent like this. The squinting eye […]
Period piece
I am afraid of silence I am afraid of the dark I am afraid to fall down I am afraid of insomnia I am afraid of emptiness Is something missing? Yes, something is missing and always will be missing The experience of emptiness To miss What are you missing? Nothing I am imperfect […]
Traumatic acts and therapeutic structures: A few ideas in, around and associated with Stamm
by Jonathan Nichols & Amita Kirpalani I The idea of a ‘traumatic object’ is around and can be found lurking in conversations about dOCUMENTA (13). Between us this year, the language of trauma is closer to being caught up with what happens with art making and art writing. Which is slightly different. As I read […]
invisiblevisible (with Emily Cormack)
OK, the document you sent to me had seven lines in it. And about twenty-six words. Is that enough? As I said it was just a start. Is this part of our writing together? The initial bickering? Anyway, it seems when talking about works like these, you and I want to talk about them as […]
How to be
The point is, don’t become an asshole. As art-world participants we should be mindful of this, particularly at a moment when the current logics and cults of interaction, participation, production and performance feel especially social. Most of us are over-institutionalized and yet only partially professionalized. ‘Don’t become an asshole’, is demanded of Pecker, the emerging […]
Good behaviour
In preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, 4 million households in Beijing received etiquette guides which focused on things like how to queue correctly, that when standing in public one’s feet should be in the shape of a ‘V’ or ‘Y’ and, my favourite, that there should be more than three colours represented in any […]
Mikala Dwyer—agent orange
Last time we were here together we kissed inside the circular Olafur Eliasson installation on the second floor. Orange and you all around me. Tongues inside each other’s mouths, laughing out loud at our lust. Despite this version of elementalism requiring supplicant bodies to complete or form the work’s whole, we heckled these neat edges. […]
OMG
Tony Schwensen’s exhibition at Kalimanrawlins is based on a YouTube meme: a chimp, in the Honolulu Zoo, fucking a live frog that had hopped into his enclosure. Over five million hits. The YouTube video is an unshockingly blurry depiction of its title: Video what the hell another freaky monkey rapes frog orally!. One of the works […]
‘I’m not even supposed to be here today’, Clerks (1994)
When I was a pre-teen, it was the fully-fledged teenagers I knew who were able—as perhaps only teenagers are—to recount swathes of dialogue from the 1994 film Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith. I can’t help but quote critic Brad Laidman (surely not his real name?) at length, since Laidman’s review/lament encapsulates both the film’s plot […]
Touching the surface: Angelica Mesiti
The vivid and the beautiful operate as an amnesty from the abundance of provisionality. But is it a satisfactory reprieve, say in relation to labour-intensive craftwork as another alternative? Specifically, I’m wondering how to find a space for ineffability in Mesiti’s work, beyond its surface—something problematic, a cleft where I can apply my own undirected […]
The clock and the rock: Aesthetic of the emblematic
4:17 pm. What happens to time if we fold it in half like a piece of paper, and then unfold it? Are the wrinkles at the end or the beginning? This is a poorly recalled line from one of the 6000 films sampled in Christian Marclay’s epic video work, The clock, currently on view at […]
Vogue-ing for the dictaphone: Alex Martinis Roe
One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t undo a blurt or even a short rant. Perhaps because I speak to think, like most of us do … right? On Friday February 17 from 2 to 4:30pm, formerly Melbourne, now Berlin-based artist Alex Martinis Roe facilitated a workshop she designed as part of her work […]