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 […]
August 2015
Important objects: A conversation with Lynda Draper
Tom: By any chance did you see that email I sent you at the horrendous hour of 1:30am? Lynda: Yeah I saw it at 3am! I had a bit of a think about what you asked [laughs]. It’s quite strange having to speak about what I do, having to put it all into words. I […]
Art versus craft, the final word
Dear Stamm, I graduated from the VCA’s Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 and I now work primarily in the field of ceramics. At the opening of my first group show, I was asked whether what I make is craft or art. I’m not sure I know what the difference is. Can you help? Bethany […]
Loompanics, Bik Van der Pol and how to fake an arts residency
Of course, the most important thing is to appear busy and active. Around midday, make it look like you have left the building already. Wear sunglasses to suggest you have been on a walk and not in bed watching Amy Schumer videos. Buy food and drink in advance and produce it at regular intervals to […]
Trinket
Earlier in the year I traveled to Los Angeles. Nothing major, just two weeks in and out of the city, a little bit of time in Desert Hot Springs, on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park. Probably the most commonplace thing you can say about the city is that you spend a lot of […]
Sarah Aiken ‘Set’: Prestidigitation or so I like to imagine
An effective architectural plan can realise through floor plans and elevations a solid three-dimensional building. We imagine it forming in our minds and in that moment qualities of abstraction occur. Once initiated in this trickery, we can carry it with us anywhere. Might we become trained in our capacity to imagine more, to handle more? […]
The suffocating genre-blue: On being wrong
I feel compelled to write about science fiction, which is something I really don’t know much about. Whilst recently bedridden with the flu I watched more episodes of Battlestar Galactica than I care to relate. Suffice to say that by the time wellness again washed through me, my mind was a loop of Bear McCreary […]
Taking notes
A little while back, Terry Smith (Discipline, no. 3, 2013) described the ‘comedy of disciplines’ that is the contemporary art scene. His hierarchy went like this: cultural studies art theory ———- art history art criticism curating collecting art dealing studio talk art making What’s interesting is how Smith draws a line these days between the […]
The impossibility of describing Trisha Brown’s ‘Scallops’ (1973) without moving the body
Five bodies stand in a large room. Standing on blue-grey-speckled linoleum, toe, ball, heels, skin stretched not too tight, weighted. The toe that rests next to the big toe is longer than the latter. Equal pressure in, up, out and down Arms hang The smallest toe on the right foot is cuddled under its neighbour. […]
Beached
There is an Inside Amy Schumer sketch that I have been watching over and over: a woman bumps into a friend on a New York sidewalk, and compliments her on her looks, but in the ensuing moments the friend subverts the quality that was praised by firing off a list of negative aspects she sees […]
A tale of two cities
The tenderness of the Korean summer, with typhoon traces on top of a “viral” atmosphere imposed a different rhythm to the city of Seoul and its surroundings. It almost looked like it was ordained to re-discuss the paradigm of the big city, with stories that go back almost a hundred years. The astute observer would […]