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 lot of heavy breathing they include:

“Ryan Gander’s The Medium [pause]. Works in prominent and unexpected points in the gallery speak to me of good ways to think about exhibition making and audiences looking.”

“Artworks are stand-ins for people … there’s real humanness on display … These works remind me of myself, people I know. Works sharing something familiar are bound to do that. [There’s] something profound about the repeated process… ”

“There’s a grouping of seminal works by artists such as Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci … sit[ting] in the back of the gallery, displayed on monitors in a circle … it’s like a central nervous system … like a historical backbone to the show. [This grouping] … makes these works feel stronger, more important, like ‘going home’ to visit your parents. Wait, what does that mean? Note to self, be nicer to Mum and Dad.”

“I should make a list of all the verbs within the show … looking, smiling, eating, learning, clapping, [pause] singing [trails off]”

“Being surrounded by so much ‘doing’ … makes me question what I’m doing, what I SHOULD be doing. [pause] Keep going.”

“This show is like a maze, a guided tour and a labyrinth. I like it.”

“It’s like I am the final work in the show; it’s like I am a verb!” (Embarrassingly, I am not alone in the gallery when I say this out loud.)

At the end of my visit and when I feel like I’m done, I linger in the foyer to enjoy Ceal Floyer’s Til I get it right, a sound work that’s followed me around my whole visit. It’s on repeat both in the gallery and, happily, in my head long after I leave.

So I’ll just keep on/ ‘til I get it right…
So I’ll just keep on/ ‘til I get it right…
So I’ll just keep on/ ‘til I get it right…

Art as a Verb, Artspace, Sydney, 4 June – 26 July 2015.

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.

F: K. It’s called All the King’s men.

S: I just got it.

F: It articulates the inexorable currents of capitalism, neo-colonialism and civil war with reference to the concentration of media ownership, deforestation and corporate greed.

S: It’s a khaki skull with a glass eye and a bullock mandible for teeth.

F: Don’t you like it?

S: It’s very nightmares—I mean interesting. It’s very interesting.

F: Great. When the exhibition closes, I’d like you to keep it.

S: No no, that’s okay, I couldn’t possibly—

F: I insist.

S: Oh. Thanks. I’ll, um, put it in a prominent place and look at it often.

F: There are 20 more of them for the show.

S: 20?! There are 783 works already.

F: I know right. It will be as though Denton Corker Marshall and Kurtz from Apocalypse now opened a canal-front wunderkammer.

S: What’s that noise? Is that an electric knife?

F: I’m working on a new sculpture: A 1:30 scale replica of an AK-47. Guess what it’s made of.

S: Soap?

F: Cold.

S: Sardine tins?

F: Colder.

S: American currency?

F: Colder.

S: I feel like you’ve asked me to guess the medium as though it’s a normal medium when in fact it is really unconventional which no-one would ever guess—

F: Bread!

S: Okay.

F: I think I’ll make a baker’s dozen. What do you think?

S: I think that’s a lot.

F: Do you think any of the other pavilions will be doing bread?

S: I don’t know. Guns maybe, but probably not in wheat. I think the other pavilions are going paleo. And minimal.

F: You’re anxious about the quantity of works, Boss. I feel you. Relax. Every sculpture is an integral part of the glorious, nihilistic whole. Including each cuckoo clock.

S: Each what?

F: I’ve knocked up a few dozen grandfather and cuckoo clocks for the show.

S: A few dozen.

F: To balance out the 40-odd sculptures from the Tjanpi Desert Weavers collab.

S: I think I’ll start a new spread sheet.

F: Don’t forget to add the bank-note nests from GOMA—

S: Wow.

F: —a heap of new sardine tins, and a tapa cloth. Maybe two.

S: I’m going back to sleep. Can we talk about this tomorrow?

F: Tomorrow’s tight. I’m packing a shipping container of Whanganui River driftwood for freight to Venice.

S: Amazing.

F: Great. Nighty night.

S: Night.

Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time, 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2015, Italy, 9 May – 22 November 2015.

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 lush hair or candy floss.

Crocidolite, blue in colour, is the most dangerous form of asbestos. Most Crocidolite mines have now been closed and, as is the case with Western Australia’s Wittenoom, have also been erased from maps and road signs. There was an abc news story a couple of years ago about a love affair between two of the last eight residents: an Austrian who moved there to herd cattle and the lady that ran the gift shop that sold bumper stickers reading ‘I survived Wittenoom’. You can get these sometimes on eBay. The mineralogical curator told me that extended exposure to Asbestos, like radioactivity, can sometimes be better than a shorter exposure, followed by withdrawal.

You can just about handle the Hunterian Museum asbestos samples as they are sealed in plastic bags, but their packaging poses another unexpected risk: mice are very partial to nibbling the bags. Mice will not live long enough to die from asbestosis, but the more the fibrous sample bags are compromised and handled, the more likely they are to shed their fibres and ‘puff up’, meaning potential inhalation by staff.

There are several towns and cities called Asbestos (none in Australia) – towns that are named after or celebrate certain industries or products: Port Sulphur, Louisiana;  Sodium, Wyoming; Neon, Colorado; Toyota City, Japan; Bournville, UK; and Woodfibre, British Columbia.

“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 exhibition, as opposed to an artwork or practice, might have ‘private’ intentions is not something we usually think about. How we might articulate this without falling back on didacticism (as in, ‘this is what the exhibition is about’) is surely a key question.

It’s an open one, as is this, which surely follows: How is it that an exhibition might constitute something other than an idea?

That word, ‘private’, also makes sense here in another way, now I think about it.

Small works are more intimate. When I curated this exhibition, ‘A Short Line Between Three Points’, I’d wanted for some time to do something that focused solely on small objects.

There were certain artists I was interested in, of course, and practices that traced certain lines of thought or, in the instance of Aubrey Tigan’s Honest Man Rigi, patterns of exchange.

But if I’m honest about it, it came down to intimacy: what you can hold in your hand, or thereabouts.

Small works draw you in; they limit the surrounding space. In this, you become enclosed in a fashion totally at odds with the expansiveness of large-scale practices. The bodily relation is different. It’s a very specific feeling, a kind of intensity that feels totally contingent upon size.

Process is part of this too. The three artists here – Karl Weibke and Matt Hinkley, alongside Tigan – enact processes that are intensely theirs; as different from (and similar to) each other as they are from others. This too draws you in.

We can also point to more pragmatic things when we talk about making exhibitions: that curators are bound to certain administrative, financial, and logistical realities, and that these also shape what it is they do.

It’s worth mentioning, in closing, that such parameters are almost endlessly variable. This is why there is never only one version of an exhibition, just as there isn’t a definitive edit of a text.

In this, an exhibition comes down to what’s possible in the moment. Or in this case, what you can fit in carry-on.

A short line between three points, (Matt Hinkley, Aubrey Tigan, Karl Weibke), Laurel Doody, Los Angeles, April 25 – May 21, 2015.

Exhibition text: A short line between three points.

NOTE: I am indebted, of course, to the brilliant and indefatigable Fiona Connor. Laurel Doody is her (ongoing) brainchild: she invited me to take part in the program, provided the chairs and made the space beautiful, among many other things. Thanks also to Emily Anne Kuriyama, who wrote a closing text for the exhibition and to whose phrasing I owe something, particularly this line: ‘Each artwork is relatively small — no bigger than the sum of my two hands, palms up, held side-by-side’

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 House of Truth, fluids, bodies and burning minds mix freely.

Whereas Edjabe’s first German House of Truth was free-wheeling and body pumping, the second was pretty hostile. All groups standing on the periphery of the dance floor, biding time, but present and waiting, radiating an awkward intensity. Edjabe looked around and said, ‘Good. Sometimes this is better.’

Edjabe has spoken of the Chimurenga Chronicle as a newspaper which looks at everything from an analytical place, an ideological place and a philosophical place – not a physical place. This is in itself contradictory, because newspapers are in their foundation made to mark time, whilst being material in their logic to the street. They are an access point. They make contact. In Chimurenga, they have embraced complexity in a logic of emergency. He discusses how they have embraced opacity, to liberate them from this shut hole of relevance.

Hang ‘Em High #1 was a show and performance at the Velvet Room, in January 2015, Athens, Greece. Like a reverse-install, it consisted of a series of artworks hung high in the space, and a level stage for the performers. It was packed, like a scene out of the Seaview Ballroom circa 1970’s. Lakis Ionas of The Callas spoke of how ‘we are trying to combine the excitement and the physical impact of music…with art. So…in this way (of having all artworks as high as we can in the Velvet Room), we are able to have a packed room full of sweating bodies dancing and drinking… We believe that our main point of curating these shows is to create a big installation including artworks, bands, lights, smoke, booze, chit chat, lust….

Both Edjabe’s House of Truth and the Velvet Room’s Hang ‘Em High #1 have a physicality to them. You feel things, you touch things, and bodies touch you. Within these instances they generate a kind of timeliness that seems to be highly designed to purpose a heightened firstness, as a here and now with talons to the past and opacity for the future.

In Hang ‘Em High #1, through the high install, people could lean against the walls and lean into each other. Through the high works, you looked up, noticed the smoke-laden air, the abstracted tapestries and the perspective of a higher view. The physical curation ideologically directed a sideline sensation of noticing you were looking, a bit like being reminded that a painting is constructed on a two dimensional surface, when you can see the untreated linen coming through. And through this opacity, what comes? Look hard, feel well. In truth, not something I always do.

Hang ‘Em High #1 (Antonakis Christodoulou, Dora Economou, Extra- Conjugale, Lakis & Aris Ionas / The Callas, Andreas Kasapis, Eleni Bagaki, Leonidas Papadopoulos, Panos Papadopoulos), Velvet Room, 17 January 2015, Athens, Greece.

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 this.

Until the last room, where I sat in a grey-walled space, watching conservators picking and scratching at a wall in a room in a Frankfurt university, in search of the myth or reality of Adorno’s Grey. Their slow, white-coated labour of incremental excavation half a world away was projected onto a screen split into four vertical boards propped against the wall, as if ready for removal at any time. A provisional idea expressed in material form.

A few weeks later, Ross Manning’s mechanical mobile, Memory Matrix and Antiquity (for synchronized multichannel video) 2015 reached down into the same gallery space from the ceiling, projecting colour calibration screens on the floor from decommissioned projectors. These slowly colliding and intersecting readymade test-patterns of light were without subject matter, beyond themselves.

Melbourne in late autumn was all of its clichés: crisp, cool and dark and full of everything. In the final room of Kaleidoscopic Turn at NGVA, the magnetic video tape floating between two whirring fans in Zilvinas Kempinas’s Double O 2008 drew a hovering frame around Elizabeth Newman’s Untitled 2013 on an adjacent wall. Newman’s minimal work featured a section of slumped and sagging fabric – the result of a simple, three-sided, rectangular cut – which seemed to resist the tenuous optimism of this constantly suspended drawing in space. The gesture delivered a material scepticism, quietly yet insistently spoken.

Hito Steyerl, Too Much World, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 13 December 2014 – 22 March 2015.

Imaginary Accord (Agency, Vernon Ah Kee, Gerry Bibby with Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, Zach Blas, Ruth Buchanan, Céline Condorelli, Peter Cripps, Sean Dockray, Goldin+Senneby, Raqs Media Collective, Ross Manning, Marysia Lewandowska and Hito Steyerl), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 11 April – 11 July 2015.

The Kaleidoscopic Turn, National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), Melbourne, 20 March – 23 August 2015.

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 I respond to. These zombie painters feel like they waste plenty of time, or have plenty of time on their hands. Or maybe it’s that they spend more time talking and thinking about what they might be doing than actually doing what they do. I don’t mind this. There is something healthy and satisfying in environments where there is always a lot of talk.

Zombies are thankfully not team productions either it seems, and by working alone at the end this adds something ‘felt’ and affirming and implies something existent and in the world with you. These artists propose material physical weight, even as this accentuates the thinner repetitive history of what they are doing, so the double effect carries a sense of pointedness and willingness but is still actually an open breath.

Yet some of the propositions (paintings) were so slim as to be simply daft. It kills me they can get away with it.

Needless this revival of ‘the big 9’x6’format’ has another correlation of sorts in an exhibition down the road at the NTU CCA Singapore.

Simryn Gill’s installation of grids of square photographs along monolithic walls draws a straight line with conceptual/minimal tactics of the 60s and 70s. There are no interferences, or spatial slang or wandering at all. Photographs of Malaysian living-room interiors, decaying unfinished building sites and dissected tropical leaves are presented in serried mono-pattern.

It’s a strange installation: a confluence of authority and critique that comes across as slightly acerbic, or astringent. The actual spaces and experience that Gill reads colloquially via the photographs are attenuated up against the ambivalent effect of hard grid formations and monumental walls — possibly here is a point, I can’t be sure.

The sense of existent emptiness and distance comes with an awareness of the contemporary art gallery. Gill’s practice looks to a certain feasibility in this. The exhibition is a collision of place and space. Gill fends off any suggestion of seeking solace or further clarity in specific pictures, or thinking one might inevitably ‘get closer’. Like she says, it might be a matter of hugging the shoreline.

Simryn Gill, Hugging the Shore, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 27 March – 21 June.

I Know You Got Soul (Phoebe Collins-James, Liam Everett, Amy Feldman, JPW3, Kika Karadi, Hugo McCloud, Joshua Nathanson, Alex Ruthner, Diego Singh, Marianne Vitale and Jeff Zilm), Arndt, Singapore, 19 April — 21 June.

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! Yes but you would have figured it out at some point
Or gone to some training facility
?

Eventually hopefully
I was at the stage filming myself standing upright but pretending I was upside down

That’s incredible

I was trying to invent some sort of clothes pulley system that would flip my skirt over my head at the right moment

How did you go?

There’s some pretty ridiculous footage
I don’t think its clear WHAT I was trying to do

That’s amazing

But it’s a good example of my desire to improv with the immediate rather than solve the problems

Problem-solving as inefficiency is something I often fall into
Oh right!

It is? Tell me more
Tell me I’m not alone

Definitely – this kind of circumnavigating, working with what you’ve got. I often make the problem bigger than is necessary
You’re not alone and it’s fun

And do you think the solution to chasing your tail down a rabbit hole is conversation and sharing with others to break the ever-expanding problem?
It’s so fun
I think it’s an act of defiance

I think both are important, knowing when to have a conversation

Yes and free will

Exactly
Exercising free will in a probably ineffective way
So liberating
A quiet fuck you

Glorious
It’s a really great exercise or practice. I often feel hopeless though when I feel like I’ve failed
I just did a pivot

And then your boss asks “What sort of art do you make?” and quietly under your breath you say “Fuck you.”

Kalinda Vary, NOW GO OVER THERE AND STAND ON THAT CHAIR, TCB, Melbourne, 6 May – 23 May 2015.

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 came to visit. They live in the North of the Country, you see, close to Switzerland.

Here, despite the fact it is Italy’s capital, as the black cars of MPs and foreign ambassadors constantly remind us, the Public is a woolly notion. Tourists in their improbable outfits eat gelato and pizza from improbable places and play with their recently acquired selfie sticks. Here is my two cents: the selfie stick will become a thing in post post-internet art.

I recently watched on YouTube a 1987 Marcello Mastroianni interview on Letterman, and I thought the Italian actor was great at making the presenter uncomfortable and mastering the duplicitous game of pretending his English wasn’t that good. He was talking about cities and shit, too.

I have been doing production work for different artists within an institutional context lately and have been thinking quite a bit about the profession I am in, and how art making is changing, which, I know, is so art historian of me, but maybe worth casting some thought upon.

I have been struggling with given formats and the difficulty of breaking the mould on how accustomed we are to them, and is proven perhaps by the failure of communicating to other people the possibility of other ways. And this isn’t about the shaky English we employ in the art world…

“Is there a dinner?” was what was asked of me a few times at the opening of the last exhibition I have organised. I am increasingly shocked by the rudeness of some “professionals” of the art world, their ruthlessness and utilitarianism. I was also debating in my head about the lack of material awareness: this constant outsourcing of work that makes them forget the dynamics, complexities and ultimately the real consequences of their requests, or their last minute changes of heart. “Pressing enter is not all it takes!” I feel like shouting at times.

I am more and more wary of the tendency in the arts to debate about immaterial labour, while exploiting the goodwill of people with no remuneration, or justify through theoretical means what often comes from pretty mercenary considerations about how to progress a work, or parasite an institution to get to the next. Is this way of thinking sustainable? Is there a day when someone will muster the guts to say: “Hey wait a minute. NO. I am not behind this. I am not doing it.” Can we stop employing double standards? And preach one thing only to then deny it with actions and the conditions in which the work occurs?

I speak from the perspective of someone that chose willingly to be a curator, with all the implications of the definition and considering I do a different job (or more than one) every day, depending who I am working with. It also means thinking beyond any selfish goals (again speaking for myself) and creating a context for the audience, but also with the artist, and building up something that hopefully doesn’t start and end with an exhibition or an event but whose effects (no I am not talking about money) continue to be in the world.

“But the goal of great art is the same whether one approaches it seriously or dubiously. To make something new, to transcend, one must have an honest relationship with what is: history, context, form, tradition, oneself. Dishonesty is the biggest obstacle to making original, great art. Dishonesty undermines a work’s internal integrity — the only standard by which a work can succeed. If the work becomes a vehicle for one’s ego, personal or political agenda, self-image, desire for fame, adulation, fortune — human as these inclinations may be — the work will be limited accordingly.”

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 Hong Kong, such a place punctuates the provisions for the future.

Just a few days before the commencement of Art Basel Hong Kong, M+ Museum opened an exhibition that translates an important principle of how our society functions today – MOVING – acknowledging key aspects of borders, mobility, migration and transition. The mobile aspect of this conceptual enterprise is immediate, as the building of M+ Museum is under construction, and a series of nomadic projects have been developed in the last four years, aiming to test and slowly introduce the museum into the daily economy of Hong Kong. It all comes together in a logical association regarding the functionality of the institution and its scope – the mobile museum and the moving image. Cinematography played an important part in the curatorial demonstration, referencing the highly acclaimed film production set in Hong Kong and its special aesthetics. It was a vulnerable opening scene taking place in and outside a noodle shop from the film Floating Life, directed by Clara Law and released in 1996, that the curator had used as a “Madeleine” to discuss the mixture of feelings in a migrant’s life: nostalgia, fear of displacement and the uncontrolled switch between public and private.

By connecting all these elements, the exhibition Moving Images transposed the beholder in a complex visual experience. The setting of the video works was molecular – not too many extra walls, not too much darkness or unwanted headphones – and each art work had a well-defined position in the space, building the context for the next work the viewer would discover. Because of this rhythm, that was almost like a musical score, the visitor was naturally moving in the space of the exhibition. It is quite hard to find an exhibition where one can freely move and compose a specific relation with the space. Maximum attention was given to the labels, which were actually tiny light-boxes generating small doses of light.

Several of the works in the exhibition were discussing “the right to the city” (concept introduced by Henri Lefevre in his book Le Droit à la ville (1968), meaning the initiative of the individual to change and improve urban life, and shape it in a way that it serves the common welfare) together with the transformations Hong Kong has experienced in its modern history. The relationship with the water and the transient population was accurately constructed in Dominique Gonzales-Foerster’s video piece, Central (2001), filmed on super 8 and 35 mm film. Central is a melancholic filmic portrait of Hong Kong, focused on the people passing by Victoria Harbour, carrying their memories and expectations in a silent tour. The narrator mediated the sensitive actions in the film, inviting the observer to compare Hong Kong in 2001 with Hong Kong in 2015.

The photographs depicting spectacular botanical formations, part of a series realized by Simryn Gill and entitled Forest (1996 – 1998) pointed out the colonial history of South East Asia, bringing out questions of memory and oblivion, of seeing and not being seen. The quality of the silver gelatin print was deepened by the artist through the use of strips of text that were attached to the photograph, codifying the image.

The intensity of a re-imagined dancing scene from a night on the streets of Cairo re-edited by the artist Hassan Khan in the video Jewel (2010) combined with the placid movement in Chen Chieh-jen’s piece Empire’s Borders I (2008 – 2009), which discussed the discriminatory treatment encountered by Taiwanese and Chinese migrants triggered various visual diagrams revolving around the critical phenomenology of migration and identitary transformation.

The project unfolded as a room in a room in a room, in a way celebrating the infinite possibilities of video art and film, and on the other side creating a blueprint of an exhibition that has kept on creating itself and becoming independent. Starry Starry Room (2012), the painting of the young Hong Kong artist Firenze Lai, can serve as a synthesis of this “moving visuality”.

Mobile M+: Moving Images, (CAMP, Paul Chan, Chen Chieh-jen, David Diao, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Simryn Gill, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Isaac Julien, Kan Xuan, William Kentridge, Hassan Khan, Firenze Lai, Li Ran, Charles Lim, Anson Mak, Ellen Pau, Koki Tanaka, Wang Gongxin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Chai Siris, Wong Ping, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Yuan Goang-Ming, Zhang Peili and Zhu Jia). Curated by Yung Ma, M+ Museum at Midtown Pop, Hong Kong, 13 March – 26 April 2015.

“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 the thread mid-conversation when the chat is in full swing, and where those in the circle are with heads thrown back, all pre-big-laugh laughs. The storyteller is stalking attention and why would they stop to answer me?

Like his 2011 site-specific Artangel commission, Locked Room Scenario, (a ‘para-possible’ group show of invented artists the visitor was denied access to), Read Only lets you in, but only a little bit. No emotional shapes but apparent connective tissue, like a father who finds it difficult to say he loves you Gander doesn’t do feelings.  Soooo needy, but I’m left wanting. Conceptualism doesn’t deal in hugs though, never has.

I’m not convinced it’s compelling storytelling, is it? Reaching towards so many Modernist signifiers in his work, we are denied the transformative. But this is prankstraction, and I can’t help thinking about the video interview I saw where it’s possible to see him working on hundreds of groups of index cards, containing images, jokes, scenarios, propositions, patterns, all lined up, just so, ready to be executed with a virtuosic command of materiality.

Most reviewers, critics and curators refute the title of ‘Conceptual artist’. Gander jokes about it, and all prefer ‘ideas artist’ or ‘inspiration-from-everything artist’. I prefer Ideas Man-boy. He comes from a long art historical genealogy of Ideas Men, each following the leader. And here in Melbourne, where public lectures, visiting artists and touring exhibitions can set off flurries of investigations into spirituality, choreography, the economy etc,  will this set us off back into the bad old days of tricksy sk8er Unmonumental-ism? And while I’m asking, why is everyone wearing these? Are they really that comfortable?

Ryan Gander, Read Only, ACCA, Melbourne, 4 June – 2 August 2015.