Cetate Arts Danube, the other art-camp I visited in August, has been situated since 2008 on the same premises as the one in Tescani, but the methods of work are somewhat different. Initiated and supported by the Joana Grevers Foundation in Bucharest, the art-camp in Cetate is hosted in a mansion built between the end […]
Stamm 2015
Franti, out!
Careof is a not-for-profit space in Milan hosted in a public architectural complex called La Fabbrica del Vapore (The Steam Factory) which, at the beginning of the 1900s, was where trams were built. The site is next to the calm beauty of Cimitero Monumentale, a tidy layout of trees and tombs of various styles and […]
Secret art places: Part I
The exhibition Nouvelles histoires de fantômes, prepared by Georges Didi-Huberman and Arno Gisinger and presented this year in the Palais de Tokyo, discussed the after-life of images, trying to explain how the visuality of the present is being formed after a century of art that had been politicized since WWI, and how our artistic memory […]
Play your cards right (or how we never talk about money)
In the Melbourne art world, that ‘homeless’ look of a few years ago has seemingly been replaced by the gym-going-drunk-Mum and the Lumberjacktivist (part lumberjack, part Occupy bystander). I think the living-out-of-a-cardboard-box style was a bit more reflective of where artists are at – not homeless, but just surviving. Perhaps I’m wrong to look to […]
The holiday d’art
I recently returned from a few weeks in London and Venice. Was it fun? It was okay. Did you see lots of stuff? Yes. Was the art good? Yeah. Did you buy me anything? No. Did you take many pictures? HEAPS. My intention for getting away was split evenly between some research I’ve been meaning […]
Things I learned from ‘The Diplomat, the Artist and the Suit’, a documentary about architecture firm Denton Corker Marshall
1. In the competitive field of architecture, three things are essential to success: The first is a level of diplomacy, required in the courtship and management of clients. The second is a high degree of artistry or design skill, indispensable for obvious reasons. The third is a suit. Many budding architects, in their hubris, neglect […]
Township Museum and Creepy Long Fingers
Getting down to writing this text has been a struggle. Battling a recent and obsessive addiction to the game Township has meant that moments between paid drone-work are filled harvesting digi-corn and carrots, feeding cattle and trying to level up to the point where I can buy a museum and a ship to sail to […]
Performing relative states
“As for going along and watching people perform … There’s nobody in my experience … EVER … (who) you’d have gone to a game and could identify more rapidly than you could Buddy on the field …” 1 The Wheeler Centre held Relative States, a series of interviews between creative couples, such as father-daughter duo, […]
How to quieten the mind
Lately my brain has been full of the effects of change and heat and nervous anticipation, and even in the quiet moments it is hard to find even a minute or two of contemplation from which an original thought or opinion might form itself into something worth spinning into the outside world. The last thing […]
Against nature—Charles Lim and ‘Sea State’
We have a personal bomb shelter in our flat in Singapore; most homes do here. It’s a hard thing to reconcile. In my mind household bomb shelters are something that Hollywood invented via nuclear disaster movies such as The Road. Sure bomb shelters seem a long way from Charles Lim’s Sea State Singapore Pavilion exhibition, […]
Pirate – bug – museum
An unspectacular football match between Steaua Bucharest and the Norwegian team Rosenborg Ballklub which took place last week made me realise that ten years ago, almost to the day, these same two teams had met with the same result (Steaua losing to Rosenborg). The entire situation, together with the chronological coincidence, made me recall an exhibition […]
Orange around
Diaphanous fellow, marked by time, screening what I know so well. Heavy head, overhead, spare and barely touching as we pass. I can see your seams and your seams see me. I could also hear you, what were you thinking? I was thinking about touching you, but your guard was nearby. I used to know […]
Scroll, scroll, double tap
This month I thought I was going to write a really long piece about art on Instagram and artists using Instagram and galleries using Instagram and Instagram #takeovers and how I personally use Instagram. I was also going to make some observations about the strange things that pop up in your ‘Discover’ page and how […]
Three thousand years of people being bastards to horses
MEDIA RELEASE: The National Gallery of Victoria is delighted to present the first exhibition on the relationship between man and horse. ‘People being bastards to horses’ assembles images of this magnificent animal put by man to work and war, and subjected to extreme exercise for his amusement. Panoramic in scope, the exhibition features works from […]
Boo!
Examining some petrified Jurassic wood samples at the museum recently, the curator commented on how much they looked like little fossilised mushrooms. They seemed like rotten but still cute versions of the foam mushroom sweets I loved as a child. The concept that they were ‘petrified’ was also intriguing. I imagined them cowering and trembling, […]
Prince screws
About a year ago I read the collection of essays, Pulphead, by the American magazine writer John Jeremiah Sullivan. I’d seen his work here and there, and knew he was good, but a collection presents the opportunity to see where the piecemeal work of a pen-for-hire might add up to something larger. There are brilliant […]
Matt Hinkley bumps and sprained ankles
A few months ago I sprained my ankle. I kept checking it, to see how it was swelling and discolouring. As the day wore on, I saw it grow to the size of a separate appendage, bulging out from the normal line of my ankle. The flesh became tighter, like a sausage about to burst, […]
Alit on the flax
Someone posted a Colin McCahon painting on Facebook recently and I found myself feeling that familiar deep-seated response I get whenever I encounter his work, even as Facebook fodder on a phone screen. It’s a kind of nostalgia for a country you no longer live in but have unconditional love for, a feeling that is […]
Free action
A figurine of Nelson Muntz, Simpsons class bully, stands primed with a baseball bat. This was the exhibition publicity. The installation followed suit with a new monstrous 40-metre wall diagonally bisecting the entire gallery. At the very back, on the side hidden from the entrance, a baseball bat is chained to the wall. And sure […]
A tantrum in triplet
Jane Montgomery Griffiths wrote an article introducing her adaptation and its context prior to the opening night of Antigone, directed by Adena Jacobs at the Malthouse Theatre. Perhaps too optimistically, she states that: “Creon’s 5th century misogyny has a very different meaning in the 21st century.” Whilst this may be true, it is apparent that […]
Parks and roubles
It’s my first day in Moscow and I need to get roubles. The hotel I am staying at instructs me on how to find a bank. The lobby is spacious and shiny and I am not sure which facility I have entered. I ask someone if I can exchange currency and they take me to […]
What is read and what is real?
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 […]
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 […]
Doing it right: Recorded responses to ‘Art as a Verb’
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 […]
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 […]