It’s Archibald season, so if this issue lacks its usual rigour, be mindful of our distraction. Your Stammers have just emerged from two weeks huddled around a transistor radio, listening for any forecast of what excellence and sheer invention we might expect from the nation’s most prescient art prize, and awaiting the announcement of which […]
April 2013
Washing machine
Alex Vivian has been making work at home. Watching the TV, in front of the fan, making things he’s collected go through processes. He conditions things. The works in this show are four small collages on ‘snack plates’ atop $2-shop canvas stretchers and a hat on a pedestal. The collages use a lot of materials […]
Voice-over
In May 1985 an Australian woman and her husband working for the UN were kidnapped in Pakistan and held hostage. At some point during the months of search and negotiation the Australian Government flew the woman’s parents to the Afghan border and an area they believed the hostages to be. The helicopter touched down and […]
The whole lot: ‘Theatre of the world’ at MONA
The simplest signs or gestures, like […] lines of paint or holes, whether they come from an Aboriginal woman artist, or from Papua New Guinea, or from an Italian artist, Lucio Fontana, can all become symbols of the whole of the totality, that is, the representation of immaterial life. Jean-Hubert Martin, 2012. Responding to prompts […]
Something something video-film-paint something (1)
Steve McQueen crossed over in 2008 with Hunger. Gillian Wearing did it in 2010 with her doco/art film Self made, which got neither a major release or a spot in a film festival in Melbourne. On 17 March, at LongPlay in North Fitzroy, Doc(c)o Club returned with a screening of Wearing’s film. A couple of […]
New ACCA
‘Exhibitions that don’t have an inventive display feature are doomed to oblivion’, says Hans Ulrich Obrist. ACCA rebuilds its exhibition formats all the time, every time. There’s never been a baseline for its architecture or ambition, no opportunity for being nil, no bare bones—although ‘tin shed’ might suggest otherwise. Martin Creed’s The lights off (2005), was […]
You need a bad operation
As Dr Octagon (aka Kool Keith/Dr Dooom—all personas fabricated by American rapper Keith Matthew Thornton) said, ‘you need a bad operation’. This was just before he gruesomely cut the body open, with ensuing sounds of screams, blood spurts, farts and confusion. Robin Hungerford’s video, The fix, showing at Bus Projects in the exhibition Thank you very much, is a […]