On June 11, 2015 I visited Artspace in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo for the exhibition Art as a Verb. Whilst there I decide to make ‘voice notes’ on my iPhone, perhaps as a live commentary on the experience of seeing. Playing them back, I realise that I’m yet to master this technique, but in addition to a […]
July 2015
If I was curator: An imagined conversation
Fiona Hall: Suzette. Suzette: Ms Hall? F: Sorry to call late. S: What time is it? F: It’s Wrong Way Time. Hahaha! S: … F: It’s 3am. S: Jesus. Don’t you sleep? F: I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Hey. Just finished another sculpture for the Biennale. Shall I text you a pic? S: Oh. Sure. […]
Asbestos
Certain objects in museum collections can never be taken out of storage and exhibited. Buried in the mineralogical stores of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, is a collection that poses a particular risk – Asbestos. The numerous samples are either in solid rock form or the more interesting and dangerous fibrous types which look like beautiful […]
A short line between three points
“Exhibitions are texts that make their private intentions public.” This quote is loosely paraphrased from Paul O’Neill, the English curator-artist-theorist. I won’t pretend I’m up on his work because I’m not, at least not to any great extent. But this idea caught me. I now realise why: it’s that word, private. The idea that an […]
Athens ‘House of Truth’ and ‘Hang ‘Em High #1’
At Documenta 12, 2007 as part of the living newspaper Chimurenga (Cape Town), editor Ntone Edjabe created DJ sets as performances called a House of Truth. Borrowed from a drinking pit in the old Kofifi, where the makers of the infamous Drum magazine gathered nightly for informal seminars with Can Themba as resident deconstructor, at the […]
Bright light wakes you early in the tropics, which may reduce anxiety
I escaped a tropical downpour into Hito Steyerl’s Too Much World. The rain came straight down like a wide curtain, heavy and loud. Inside, the overriding mood was Scepticism Inc., a meta-melange of corporate training video, hotel room cable TV, real estate fly-through, political message, financial collapse, weather report, biography and probably even more than […]
Modern zombies
What is it about zombie paint? Or this show at Arndt in particular? Sure, it’s the cool, distanced abstraction that has come to epitomise New York influences, especially the way they’ve revived the big 9’x6’ format canvas. Most artists’ work, too, hones down a single, sometimes beautiful, line of thinking. There is a temporal necessity […]
A conversation with Kalinda Vary
The handstand! Can we talk about that? We both had a very different approach to that To the hand stand? Yep I credit you with getting me to do one You were strategic about it I wasn’t I was just trying to do it all at once and failing because of that Usual practice Ha! […]
We swim in unknown unknowns
We have entered a period of barbarism, she says. (S. Sontag) Did I tell you I have been in living in Rome since the beginning of the year? Rome is beautiful but full of tourists, and shits. I mean real dog poo on the pavement. It’s really dirty, as my parents kept saying when they […]
Moving images
In a busy and eclectic area of Hong Kong, on the 17th floor of a commercial building, a not-for-profit space for art and performance was opened in 2014: Midtown Pop. For the conservative mind, the association of different forms of business or living with art can seem uncanny. But within the expanding space production in […]
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 […]