Atul Dodiya’s Kochi–Muziris Biennale installation in a disused laboratory comprised upwards of 200 framed photo-portraits standing on half-size partitions and benches, and hanging on walls. Snapshots taken with a digital camera showed mainly artists and other participants in the Indian art scene, all the individuals in ones and twos and threes, interspersed with the odd […]
March 2013
Falling into a hangover. Don’t show images fast
So I’m wondering … I was in Greece recently talking to two brothers about the situation there, and they presented Sweden as a utopia. Social democracy. It worked. Did it work? Could it work over a sustained period of time? How might you get some? One month later I was in Klaipėda, Lithuania, at Falling […]
Beam me up Scotty (1): eulogy for a leader
So, my favourite tweet from the evening of 23 February came from @FakePremierTed a couple of hours before the official 7 pm kick-off for the 24-hour White Night event. Premier Ted Baillieu (albeit Fake) dutifully declared: ‘White Night Melbourne tonight. As Arts Minister, I have to smile at the hippies and pretend I like them. […]
In the hood
I first saw a reproduction of In the hood by David Hammons in the late 1990s, in a Phaidon publication called The art book. Still at school, my experience of art was limited to a love of Brett Whiteley, Jean-Michel Basquiat (as memorialised by Jeffrey Wright in Julian Schnabel’s then-recent film) and perhaps a few […]
Backyard shed jams
The centre-piece of Tim Price’s painting show in the back room at Utopian Slumps appears to be Backyard open city, which is the idyll, a utopian idea of a painted backyard. Happy painter, crafty as he is, all-consumed by his perspective of the scene. There, deep in middle-class contemplation, a responsibility to be cynical seems […]
Comfort grunge
Despite appearances, grunge is deeply optimistic; it knows that the sacred and the profane cohabit (what a relief) and that if there’s enlightenment to be found in this world, it’ll be found at the bottom of a pizza box. Woodstock cans were the currency of choice at teenage paddock parties. As funny and cringe-inducing are […]
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 […]
Survival stories
Remote Aboriginal communities are sites of polarity. Yirritja and Dhuwa, Garth Brooks and Azealia Banks, boundless flood-plains and land permits, transcendent beauty and Third World squalor. Were you a privileged white girl with an art-history degree you might find a two-year stint at one of the epicentres of this opposition—a community art centre—divergently exhausting and […]