Facebook, The Age. Facebook, The Age. When will I ever ‘Facebook’ The Age? Status imminent to ‘Facebook’ The Age … (The newspaper I mean). You see I’m at Frieze Art Fair in London. I see a Rob Pruitt he’s doing well. The huge portrait of Sasha Grey the porn star is doing well, Koons is doing REAL well, bit of funs never hurt anybody is doing well. I’m implicit dreaming I’m an old money collector. Fantasy is along for the ride. Facebook, The Age, Facebook, The Age. Instagram. Scroll, scroll, scroll away. Saltz on ‘The new uncanny’, blah. Facebook, The Age. Facebook, The Age. Now I’m in a Lear Jet two-seater with Drake checking out what he’s gonna buy from that poor show of Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth, those post-Damian Hirst tiddly bits. Facebook, The Age, Facebook, The Age. Now Instagram. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, keeping on scrollin now ‘Facebook’ The Age. Facebook, The Age. Media is a medium, damn the creator. Facebook, The Age. Soulful Soldier this Oscar Murillo but he’s just like a cashed up Basquiat getting Tupac money twice over. I suppose it’s not his fault. Schnabel’s heaving ho heave ho. Get out of Drake’s jet in NY to go MoMA PS1 and see why Mike Kelley killed himself. Facebook The Age Facebook ‘The Age’. Kanye’s New Video ‘Bound 2’ Kim Kardashian’s assets. Final Facebook + The Age. In the words of Kelley ‘When SPERLUNKING sometimes you have to stoop … sometimes you have to go on ALL FOURS … SOMETIMES EVEN CRAWL … CRAWL WORM’

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Gagosian Gallery and Galerie Max Hetzler, Frieze London, Regents Park, 17–20 October 2013.

Mathew Day Jackson, Something ancient, something new, something stolen, something new, Hauser & Wirth, New York, 6 September – 19 October 2013.

Mike Kelley, MoMa PS1, New York, 13 October 2013 – 2 February 2014.

George Peeps a dude in a bazza down Bells Beach. A dog acknowledges George albeit insignificantly. Doggedly dog takes in terrain to the refrain:

‘Now it’s the last week of summer! Let’s focus, let’s take care of business! You know the rules, wake up, drink, eat, drink, work, drink etc. Let’s take care of business!’

Meanwhile George gets stuck into the sand brah, feels it between his fingers, between his toes. Hand as spade, here is gesture, here is form. If there is a God he is surely watching now.

It’s alchemy time: the sea, moon and paraplegic shore break are to be the only witnesses of this act. George gets down close to the wet sand and penetrates it with spaded hand. His visions are embedded in the landscape, not happy to let them die he resorts to filling the reliefs with plaster in the tip of the high tide.

Using the high tide as a medium this way ensures they will not be fully obliterated by the force of nature.

Instead of fading away peacefully, the million or so grains of sand traverse the highways of south-western Melbourne until they become grandiose and puffy under the critical gaze of Gertrude Contemporary.

George Egerton-Warburton, Dog, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, studios 11 and 12, 7 September – 28 October 2013.

Walking up to Kate Newby’s ceramic wind chimes at Between being and doing, a group show at Utopian Slumps, I was aware that I wouldn’t be able to hear them clink in the wind from inside the gallery. I was talking to the curator about another piece of Newby’s in which she traced two outdoor desire paths to where they each met and then filled the worn cross-path puddle with concrete. I thought it was an interesting action. The way Newby’s art works for me is its play on landscape; it wants to be outside and doesn’t really seem to need the gallery. Don’t get me wrong; it looks good in the gallery and brings the outside in, but it’s transient, ready to roam.

Last Wednesday night, Melbourne Nite Art happened and roam it did—a bunch of drunk women broke one of the chimes by using their hands to emulate a devastating wind. As the gallerist came to the rescue they fled with the broken chime. Out it went. I thought it was poetic in a weird way as Newby’s romance is elsewhere already. Off the grid.

Free feudal barter store, Christopher LG Hill’s Studio 12 show at Gertrude Contemporary, has Hill filling the space with his own work; publications, paintings, sculptures, records, toys, collages, Asian milk drinks. The wooden lattice that covers the floor is like a tilled field from which the objects shoot upwards. Some things are more mulched down than others but these parts give nutrients to the work as a whole and there are some juicy fruits to be taken. Everything in the show is up for grabs and free. I took a mirror-tiled bust of an adolescent home.

And then there’s new work by Melinda Harper at Block Projects. Her paintings strike me as rich, like she needs what she paints. Each feels executed as though the finest things in life cost a bit but not heaps; cadmium red and yellow, cerulean blue, studio rent.

Harper’s painting style is nonchalant and frank. The aesthetic action versus its perceived monetary value; greasy tendrils of oil paint that crisp up where the masking tape hasn’t sealed thoroughly; the coolness of her one coat of oil paint. The work is not over-prepared like a lot of bad flat designer painting of the moment, it has soul. It’s done as it needs to be.

Between being and doing (Kate Newby, Joshua Petherick, Sriwhana Spong, Alex Vivian), curated by Brooke Babington and Melissa Loughnan, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 27 July – 17 August 2013.
Free feudal barter, Christopher LG Hill, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 25 July – 23 August 2013.
Melinda Harper, Block Projects, Melbourne, 23 July – 17 August 2013.

The Australian Centre for Concrete Art is mostly 2D paintings on walls and not sculpted concrete as the name may suggest—big formal paintings on the sides of houses and shops in the CBD of Fremantle, WA. The original aim of the participating artists was to create a clique and define a distinction between their painting and that of their perceived copycats. As the project got underway, they transcended their chummy elitism and focused instead on rewarding the everyday viewer’s glance—the public person who opens their car door and peers up to see a 16 x 16 metre painting. In a way, it started as slightly pervasive, but the actually paintings hold a dignified respectful presence.

The AC4CA is like an open hive of living paintings. They get painted over in time, but during their lives within the grid-like streets of downtown Freo the paintings pop out into the pedestrians’ view, resembling characters due to their serial similarity. There is the mothership, a colossal painting commissioned by Alex Spremberg in the form of a 6-storey car park with conceptually painted ceilings, floors, columns and walls. A painting that has to be driven to be believed. There is a topographical offset to the landscape that surrounds it, the commercial zone, the horizon of the Indian Ocean and the massive cargo ships with their huge paint jobs. This urban beautification is feel-good and surreal in that the entire district of Fremantle feels oddly activated by painters engaging the high with low.

Artists involved in the project are Pam Aitken, John Nixon, Trevor Richards, Alex Spremberg, Julian Goddard, Andrew Leslie, Jurek Wybraniec, Helen Smith, Jan van der Ploeg and Daniel Gottin.

I was a mind-wandering art installer working at Heide in 2007 when I discovered Mike Brown. His work made me wonder if he was exhausted all the time, exhausted from the hyper nature of his art-making, from the unhinged wrist spasms of his gestural painting, and the complex assemblages. His work gave off a warm afterglow of radiant energy from the hot act of making, remaining potent and ready to engage the viewer forty years on. Brown’s style is steeped in that 1960s through to 1990s pop-hippie-Oz-magazine thing. But Mike Brown’s work also transcends that time bracket and shares similarities with the art-making of today: the cool attitude, the material nature, the ‘hyper’ aesthetic, and the irreverence.

I remember installing Brown’s Kite. Once it was up on the wall everyone took a step back, the curators came in to see it. It was still controversial, still a big deal. Kite, consisting of an octagonal frame covered with collage and brush-and-ink writing, presents a charged yet eloquent dressing down of the mid-’60s Sydney art establishment and its stars. Mike went knives-out for everyone: Hughes, Klippel, Olsen, you name them. Brown declared the critics lame and the artists stagnant, and called on his peers to make progressive art.

How could you do that and survive in the Australian art world? As small as it is now and was back then? Those artists, critics and galleries he ran down in response to the Hungry Horse calendar of ’63 would surely have seen red and returned fire in career-stymieing ways. LOL.

Mike Brown the dude lived hard. He made beautiful work but was always poor. He fell in love, fell out of it; and celebrated the positive aspects of life, bringing to the fore slogans like ‘Power to the People’ and ‘the Miracle of Love’.

Mike Brown lived the artist’s life at the lofty heights that some freak out about. But his life seemed charmed if his work is anything to go by.

The sometimes chaotic world of Mike Brown, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 4 May – 13 October 2013.

I wanted to make work that looked synthetic and graphic in its depiction of space, being heavy on the ‘Modern Painting’ trip (dominantly hard-edge abstraction) and also looking as if the compositions have been constructed in real space, sculptural and landscape. A melding of paradoxical spaces. The works have a play on a light source which reveals a certain sense of depth by the fall of the shadow, while the shadows themselves in some cases are wrong and allude to some fakery or bad coding on a video game or CGI. The paint is treated thickly and stresses to retain and exaggerate the coarseness of the bristle.

Trevelyan Clay, For the shadows fall, OK Gallery, Perth, 13 June – 14 July 2013.

Alex Vivian has been making work at home. Watching the TV, in front of the fan, making things he’s collected go through processes. He conditions things. The works in this show are four small collages on ‘snack plates’ atop $2-shop canvas stretchers and a hat on a pedestal. The collages use a lot of materials to build up their presence. At first view from across the room they read like paint, deep, murky and worn. There is no paint, but Vaseline over square patches of coloured fabric gives a similar impression. Op shop jumpers, polar fleece and the nose of Goofy (which appears like the coarsest Band-Aid ever) are treated with Vaseline, dirt and toilet paper. The hat too has been thrown in the washing machine with a handful of toilet paper, making it wilt and abstract.

The process is one of public sublimation for Vivian. The snack plates he collects in Melbourne second-hand shops have a hypnotic bodily formality to them and a serial nature, alluding to masses of eaters. The toys and jumpers are like skins. Collectively, the rubbed-in dirt, Vaseline and toilet paper are the grubbiness of shared pasts. These abandoned and collected things feel frozen in time, ready for hell. Through his processes Vivian extends and amplifies the decay of their ‘lives’ within the gallery’s white walls.

Alex Vivian, Dirt season lookbook, Sutton Gallery Project Space, Melbourne, 7 March – 6 April 2013.

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 to arise.

The other three paintings will take you further afield of the pastoral. We’ll never be any good gives us a big old shit on an aeroplane apparently pushing aside a Francis Bacon self-portrait while Gina’s Dad surveys the Pilbara. More topical oddities occur in Bonus points, which shows a politician or miner with armed guards chilling with Aboriginal elders. Lastly, 500 ml mother brings us all home to the domestic lounge room where a deflated figure passes out as another figure sets up in front of a mirror/tablet to ponder their own worth. These are contemporary happenings rendered introspectively, caught in frame, making for a wholesome image for the artist. The paintings’ characters and situations suggest there is political observation without a pronounced message—perhaps it’s hidden in code. This could be frustrating to some, as if not quite enough: ‘Why go there and not go all the way?’ But within the ideal of Prices’s painting, the actual painting comes first and the political subtext later in a way that might prompt further enquiry and conversation.

While these paintings are deep, luminous and virtuosic, they are not conventionally fine. The aesthetic has a strewn-all-overness. They look quick, spilt, but equally can be considered slowly. The space is either beautifully defined or obliterated. The thin layers of cheap acrylic retain the texture of the canvas and allow Price to play with notions of painting as luxury.

Here, painting is backyard shed jams where the artist embeds himself within the world and keeps outside conversations rolling. In the tone of the late Robert Hughes, I conclude: Luxury goods as they are, there is a luxury they are not afforded.

Timothy Price, Nice painting, nice price, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 9 February – 2 March 2013.