Isn't It A Lovely Day To Get Caught In The Rain?*

*

Once upon a time I grew up in an overgrown and sprawling city called Sydney. I left home five years ago and visit sporadically, however, this time going back it now feels like I am a visitor. I know my way around in a way I think I shall never forget, yet somehow it is not my city anymore. In three days I had six months of catching up to do, seeing people and making sure that I had a chance to have a look at what is happening in art in Sydney. Having forgot my phone charger and having a useless phone I was confronted with the fragility of communication in a digital age, I lost a lot of my chances to co-ordinate seeing people and instead threw myself with vigour and vim in to the art side of things. From the people I did see there was much grumbling about bad weather. I can say for certain it is not half as cold as dearest Canberra yet it is inarguably damp, a sort of indecisive rain coming and going all the time with those occasional moments of splintered bright shiny/reflecting everywhere sunlight only possible on wet days. I was so heartened that I was not the only eager art fan. It may have been an excuse to be indoors, or perhaps school holidays, but everywhere that I went was packed full of people engaged in contemporary art. Fuck yeah.

First discovery of the adventure was that Mondays are a bad day for art. Drifting back memories of foreign travels and finding oneself in the wrong city on the wrong day with nothing but closed signs. My art-history compatriots and I attempted several abortive art adventures; attempts at Carriageworks, Dank Street Galleries and White Rabbit all thwarted. Oh well, the only possible solution was a deliciously restorative pub lunch steak and a beer.

Somewhere along the way I got Ruby Tuesday stuck in my head… Who could pin a name on you when you change with every new day? Tuesday, the sort of day for an island adventure. We very nearly missed the ferry taking us on a bumpy rainy day ride across the harbour to Cockatoo Island. Once a prison and then a ship building hub, now it is equal parts history and hot arts venue. Since 2008 it has been one of the key exhibition areas of the Biennale of Sydney. Two winters ago I spent many days out there as a volunteer, freezing, and wandering around absorbing the ambience of the island. I sort of think a bit of blustery rainydayness suits such a caper. But I digress. The 2010 Biennale has been called Songs of Survival: The Beauty of Distance in a Precarious Age. It touches on the condition of our age, caught somewhere between the end of post-colonialism and the collapse of hyper-consumerism, stretched taught between all the ends of the globe.

I really enjoy work that says hell to occupational health and safety, fuck the sanctity of protection. We live in a dangerous and unprotected world, why not extend this to our cultural experience? The whole of Cockatoo island is full of things to fall over and fall in and hundred years of leaching industrial chemicals. Kader Attia’s piece Kasbah takes this to the extreme. A section of the large turbine hall has been floored with found pieces from shanty towns, recreating the vista of rooves from above, stretching for about 50 by 20 metres.

Kader Attia, Kasbah, 2010

The rooves are complete with abandoned tyres and bricks and stretching-to-heaven television aerials. The audience are invited to roam over the whole structure. The experience is caught somewhere between the freedom of runnin’ an a jumpin’ childhood escapade and the feeling of the biennale’s titular precariousness. The surface is uneven and each roof edge is sharp corrugated iron. There are high eves with steep slopes. Every step feels like it might end in falling over and injury. Reaching one end of the field you realise there is no way out but to go back again. Looking down you attempt to imagine a property underneath, stretching the size of the house and creating its inhabitants. The shanty town is particular to Attia’s nomadic experience growing up in Africa and but could be any number of places from that continent to Asia or South America.

The island was overtaken by a slew of video work, which in general I have little patience for. However I was drawn in by the work of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo, whose arresting and repulsing film Confesión showed her being forcibly drowned and ripped from a tin drum of water, speaking to the experience of far too many of her countrywomen. Saturation was a theme with the multi-channel work of both AES + F’s Feast of Trimalchio and Isaac Julien’s vision of China and diaspora in Ten Thousand Waves 2010. Both are mesmerising.

scene from AES + F's Feast of Trimalchio, 2009

Feast is a reinterpretation of the Satyricon reworked as a gluttony of excess and subversion, old and young clamouring for youth on exercise bikes, tennis courts and skis, being pampered and massaged, gorging and drinking.

scene from AES + F's Feast of Trimalchio, 2009

The world is a dream-like confluence of tropical island paradise and palatial ski resort. In which the multicultural cast swap their marks of identity; Caribbean men clad in Chinoiserie shirts, all at one time or another but servant and master. The hyper-reality is undercut by a purposeful digital transparency in which each artificial manipulation is evident. Others picks of the island include Roger Balen and Shen Shaomin. Before I move on, there is a little mystery that is niggling at me. I really like this video piece, it was on the lower island, yet it appears nowhere on the website or the guide as far as I can find. Absent from the map. It showed two sweaty men playing table tennis, their scores counted by an old fashioned plastic flip chart. This goes on for a while until the camera pans to reveal that there is no net, instead anaked woman caught in the midst of the game, bruised by the balls that hit her. An allegory of war, I suppose. The best I managed was to find this picture, once again without info.

Mystery work, photo via Jamie Williams

Enough art adventuring for now, more to come.

Bang.

By Ryan Sneider

Livin' in an 8 bit world

This week saw the thirtieth birthday of Pacman and to celebrate Google turned their logo into a playable version of the game. It was estimated that the time spent playing by bored workers around the world wasted 4.8 million hours of worktime equivalent to $120, 483, 80 of lost productivity.

In the spirit of 8-bit procrastination I came across this excellent short film 'Pixels' by the very talented Mr Patrick Jean.

and this, I couldn't resist.

and for Alex, some real chiptune

Enjoy.

Pro Cras Ti Nation.

The internet, oh boy the internet, all the places you'll go when you're trying to not do whatever it is you're meant to be doing.

Looking at things that are sort of not terribly exciting, but suddenly mesmerising. Like this

L'angoisse de la page blanche from dessert_first on Vimeo.

Wow.

And this

arrived at after watching Ice, Ice Baby and then Vanilla Ice AKA Robert Van Winkle apologise for all the shitty music he made.

And this, to top it all off and sum it all up

A Confrontation.

Right now I am doing lots of research into environmental art and I've come across something I just had to share.

In 1982 Agnes Denes, a Hungarian born, American land artist re-appropriated an abandoned block in New York City and used it to plant a field of wheat. Underneath the towers of the World Trade Centre, with the help of two assistants and a group of volunteers she cleaned up the city detritus, created an irrigation system and grew the wheat. She successfully created a pocket of countryside in the midst of one of the world's most urban environments.

Lady Liberty behind the field

In doing so, Denes reached that elusive moment in art: Creating an iconic and powerful image that became emblematic for a movement. The work is known as 'Wheatfield, Battery Park City - A confrontation.'

Agnes in her wheat field.

The work attempted to communicate messages regarding the management of resources and the scarcity of food in an ever more over populated world as well comment on the divisions of space that we have constructed in the modern age. I like the vibrancy of the work and the reclamation of apparently dead space. It draws attention to the potential of life in an environment that is often considered barren and unnatural. The wheat that she grew was given to the horses in the cavalry of the New York City Police. As well seeds from her crop travelled around the world in 'The International Show for the End of World Hunger.'

Harvest

The work was recreated in 2009 in conjunction with the Barbican show 'Radical Nature' on a disused railway line in Dalston, East London. This time it was accompanied by a mill and a bakery to turn the product of the work into bread to share. However, as Madeleine Bunting asks in her essay for the Royal Society of Arts, Art and Climate, the project was ambitious and possibly missed its mark. The project took place in a non-art space, yet still failed to reach widely beyond the scope of an art audience. Is it the prerogative of art in contemporary society to engage in community building? Bunting cites Tim Smit's project Big Lunch Project as more successful. Smit simply asks that neighbours sit down together to share food that they have grown and talk. This too, by encouraging home grown food, asks city dwellers to consider how the food that they have eaten comes about and to share that experience.

It is interesting to see how community participation and sustainability are being used as motifs in contemporary art. More to come.

Patterns

I think I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I really like patterns. I still remember being in kindergarden and getting piles of shapes and colours to rearrange. Maybe that's where it all started. Here are a few things that appeal to that same sense of aesthetic organisation and pleasure.

Andreas Gursky's Photography

Florence Broadhurst's Wallpaper

Michael Wolf's Hong Kong Architecture Series

Goat Of The Day

Ok, so this post is pretty much just nicked from my love for you is a stampede of horses, but the goatiness was just too good to refuse. Montreal based artist Brad Woodfin has painted a series of mysterious goats for his latest exhibition: The Returning. The combination of goats AND art together is getting me all jittery with excitement.

Giarra

Le Classique No. 342

Betorz

I'm sitting writing this in a cafe and a stranger just walked past, atonally mumbling some mangled lyrics: Sheep are very boring, goats go to heaven. Too perfect.

If I Could I Would Build You A Whole New World Out Of Paper

I love paper. I like drawing on it, writing on it, reading it. I like the way it feels and all the possibilities that can stem from something so bland as a single white square of it. One of the oft-told apocrypha of my childhood is that one christmas I was sitting on Santa's knee and upon being asked what I wanted for christmas, I answered 'A big roll of sticky'. Barbie be damned, all I wanted was a big roll of sticky tape so I could stick pieces of paper together and make things. When I got older I became enchanted with the story of Sadako and have contributed twice to sending one thousand paper cranes to Hiroshima's Children's Peace Monument. 

I started thinking about this all again the other day because I saw a fantastic documentary called Between The Folds. I just love watching passionate people get excited about something wonderfully esoteric that they've adopted as a passion. At first I thought the documentary would just be a series of lovely, slightly crazy people talking about making animals out of paper. However, Vanessa Gould has crafted an elegant documentary that flies through the realms of craft, to art movements and mathematicians exploring the possibilities of paper as a modeling tool. 

I think it is something very special if someone can manage to get me so excited about maths. This guy conveys infectious enthusiasm for the subject:

Erik Demaine

As well as making incredible mathematical origami 

I also stumbled, quite by accident, upon James Roper, who has incorporated origami into his sculptural installations.

Construct, Into The Fold exhibition 2005-2008

I want to go home, ignore my obligations and fold creases to make something unexpected. I want to go and write letters to someone I haven't talked to in a long time, with a pen and a nice piece of old paper. Go home and make a cup of tea and curl up and inhale the smell of old book pages.

Procrastination and Pretty Pictures

Hippopotamus, 2007

 

I've been wasting time recently playing link tag on the interwebz trying to dredge up bits and pieces that may be relevant to my thesis. Today playing that game I came across Belgian artist Carsten Höller.

Mirror Carousel, 2005

He is a practicing contemporary artist who also holds a doctorate in biology which does so tickle my fancy for intersections of science and art. 

Upside Down Mushroom Room, 2000

I think his art holds a good balance between well crafted and realised form and whimsy. He works across a whole gamut of media, which also makes me happy. 

Höller's work also relies heavily on user involvement and participation, an idea which is becoming more and more interesting to me. I wish I could experience his slides first hand. He has installed giant tubular slippery dips in galleries across the world. It just looks like such fun, the way art should be. You can view an interactive 360 degree photo and read more about his slide at the Tate Modern here. Enjoy.

No Really, I Don't Mean To...

The Rabbits' Village School, 1888 

I feel sort of hesitant about writing this post because it is starting a trend. A tag that has been used more than once. Taxidermy. It isn't that I have a fondness for it, I just sort of come across the various examples and they suck me in to a vortex of horror and fascination. 

The Upper Ten or Squirrels Club, Date Unknown

What is it that possesses people to take dead animals, stuff them and then rework them into hideous anthropomorphic poses? I was reading a book about museums and came across the work of Walter Potter. A man who devoted his life to create tableaux comprised of lots of very cute and very dead animals. 

Kittens' Tea and Croquet Party c. 1870s

Count 'em, thirty-seven kittens playing croquet. A further garden of furry delights and tales of taxidermy can be discovered at A Case Of Curiosities.

Trash Bag

Hunting around for links between art and environmentalism I came across Nico Van Hoorn's Trashlog. Every day for three years he found something on the street that had been discarded and posted it to his website.

 I like it for lots of reasons. I like the aesthetic of bright and graphic objects dislocated from any meaning or utility. I like imagining the paths the objects took from their production to their disposal. 

I like knowing that something that has been forgotten by its original owner has found a new home. I like that it makes you think about all the things we throw away carelessly. 

I like the tenacity and determination of someone who can keep going with such a banal exercise to create something quietly wonderful. 

The Internet: The Good, The Bad and The Simply Curious

You just came on here to check your email and then all of a sudden you've been here for four hours, and you're several cups of coffee and many confused, delighted and disgusted facial expressions later. Welcome to the internet. 

This week I have thoroughly enjoyed trawling through Ashkahn Shahparnia's website which is a combination of his own graphic work 

and funny little bits of debris that he finds inspiring

(It's not all text, lots of pretty pictures too) 

I have been horrified and addicted to Crappy Taxidermy, a train-wreck-don't-want-to-know-but-can't-look-away inducing tidbit passed along to me by my partner. 

I've also had my curiosity piqued by the work of young Mr. Robin F Williams a 25 year old New Yorker. I can't quite decide if I love it or hate it? 

Over The Hills And Far Away

"The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; 
and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy. 
The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitÌs body, a country dropped from the sky; 
ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines. 
Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. 
Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.
Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.
i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

After almost 5 years of knitting the rabbit found its final place in the italian alps (close to Cuneo). It waits there to be visited by you. You might even take your time or check back every now and then as the rabbit will wait for you 20 years from now on."

gelitin 

Hase / Rabbit / Coniglio

Artesina, Piemont, Italy

2005 - 2025

Lego'd

Imagine all the people living life in pieces.... 

A series of famous photographs re-imagined in lego, here

I Don't Want To Play Blog Anymore (An attempt to learn how this caper works)

The Amazing LED Sheep