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Twigs for an eagles nest

2009-04-04T10:02:00.006+11:00

Support for art, advice from W B Yeats

TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND
SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL
GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE
WANTED PICTURES

You gave, but will not give again
Until enough of Paudeen's pence
By Biddy's halfpennies have lain
To be 'some sort of evidence',
Before you'll put your guineas down,
That things it were a pride to give
Are what the blind and ignorant town
Imagines best to make it thrive.
What cared Duke Ercole, that bid
His mummers to the market-place,
What th' onion-sellers thought or did
So that his Plautus set the pace
For the Italian comedies?
And Guidobaldo, when he made
That grammar school of courtesies
Where wit and beauty learned their trade
Upon Urbino's windy hill,
Had sent no runners to and fro
That he might learn the shepherds' will.
And when they drove out Cosimo,
Indifferent how the rancour ran,
He gave the hours they had set free
To Michelozzo's latest plan
For the San Marco Library,
Whence turbulent Italy should draw
Delight in Art whose end is peace,
In logic and in natural law
By sucking at the dugs of Greece.

Your open hand but shows our loss,
For he knew better how to live.
Let Paudeens play at pitch and toss,
Look up in the sun's eye and give
What the exultant heart calls good
That some new day may breed the best
Because you gave, not what they would,
But the right twigs for an eagle's nest!

December 1912

Coincidently, an exhibition of architecture for animals:

Fritz Haeg – Currently at he Whitney, NY.

W.A.G.E.

2009-03-30T18:07:00.001+11:00

DEAR ARTIST,

SO, I HAVE TO TELL YOU THE CRAZIEST STORY...

A MUSEUM HIRED ME TO PUT ON A SHOW.
SO I WENT TO WORK AT MY STUDIO.
AFTER LABORING FOR 6 MONTHS,
AFTER TWO WEEKS OF INSTALLATION,
AFTER COUNTLESS MEETINGS WITH THE MUSEUM,
I PUT ON A SHOW. A GREAT SHOW!
I SENT THE MUSEUM MY INVOICE.
THEY SENT ME A CHECK MADE OUT FOR A TON OF EXPOSURE.
MY LANDLORD KEEPS ASKING FOR A RENT.
I SIGNED OVER MY EXPOSURE.
TURNS OUT I DON'T HAVE A STUDIO ANYMORE.

MISSING YOU,
W.A.G.E.

re-posted from Art-Agenda

Marcus Westbury Dinner

2009-03-24T00:40:00.002+11:00

Pulling the wool

2009-03-15T10:35:00.003+11:00

For the anonymous knitters and knotters amongst us:

Desert Town

2009-03-15T10:24:00.004+11:00

For those who think of Gosford as a cultural desert, here is how Marfa made culture in the desert.
From last weeks Chicago Tribune.

Marfa makes an art out of quirky.
Josh Noel | Tribune reporter
March 8, 2009
MARFA, Texas—Much like mornings and evenings in this high-desert town, afternoons are sleepy and not much happens. About lunchtime, that makes a faded silver lunch truck blasting tinny 1970s FM hits the town's cultural, social and culinary center. Parked in a gravel lot along Marfa's quiet main drag, the Food Shark offers an unlikely bounty of fast food: homemade falafel, mole-rubbed pork tacos, fresh veggie panini, triple-chocolate espresso cookies baked that morning. The biggest surprise, however, comes in your change. It's a $2 bill. That little scrap of currency is what makes Food Shark unlike so many lunch trucks and Marfa unlike so many towns of 1,887. "I figure when someone is walking around and they look in their wallet and they see that, they'll think of us," said Adam Bork, 38, an artist and musician who started Food Shark with his girlfriend two years ago.
And there you have Marfa, deep in the mountain desert belly of West Texas and three hours from a major airport. It is always performing, always surprising, always subtly weird. Marfa is so subtly weird that it is missing the one thing any self-respecting West Texas town really needs—a dive bar. But it does have a gourmet grocery store, a National Public Radio affiliate, nine art galleries, three contemporary art museums and the most lasting work by the father of minimalism, Donald Judd, planted in the desert at the edge of town. It has the Marfa Lights, an unexplained band of colored orbs that float above the horizon to the east. James Dean's third (and last) major film, "Giant," was shot here, as was " No Country for Old Men," which landed the president of The Marfa National Bank a tiny but memorable role: the gullible hick who gets a cattle gun in the forehead on the side of a highway. In short, Marfa is a strange and strangely charmed town that shouldn't exist. Chip Love, a warm, chatty 51-year-old, was offered the "No Country" role after a friend who knew Joel and Ethan Coen asked him to chauffeur the filmmakers while they scouted locations. He's not sure why they cast him, but he's content that his film career apparently started and ended with a movie that won the Academy Award for best picture last year. "That's the thing about this town," Love said. "You can always be in the right place at the right time. Or even the wrong place at the right time." But the other thing about Marfa is that it's still a blown-out desert town. It's tough to tell which faded stucco buildings are shuttered forever and which aren't. Stand in the middle of town in the middle of the day and you'll see a truck roll by, then maybe another. Then nothing. Then a bicycle, then a car, then more nothing. Most memorable is the wind. It blows through clean and strong and brings the smell of rain from 100 miles away even if the rain itself never shows. For decades, this was a ranching town, pure and simple.

That changed when Judd moved to Marfa in 1973. He was tired of how predictably his art was being shown in New York, so he looked west to integrate his life and his work into a stark landscape. He investigated Baja California and Tucson, Ariz., but settled in Marfa because it was "most practical," a guide told me during a visit to Judd's home, a former military storage complex that doubles as a museum. "He didn't say much more about it than that," the guide said. Judd, who died in 1994, later installed 100 aluminum boxes—each the exact same size but with the space divided differently inside—in an abandoned military garage at the edge of town. He replaced the garage's sliding doors with floor-to-ceiling glass, which makes the desert a backdrop for his silvery boxes and allows golden western light to dance through them. He invited several fellow artists to also install work on the grounds, the whole of which is now a contemporary art museum called the Chinati Foundation. It draws art lovers from around the world. Judd arrived when Melissa Livingston, 41, was growing up in Marfa, her father running a hardware store that is still open. Today she is a desk clerk at the Thunderbird Hotel, a blissfully spare, hip place where guests can check out a manual typewriter or Stack-o-Matic record player—with albums—for their rooms. At first Judd was just "some New York artist," Livingston recalled, but then he built those boxes, which confused a fair number of locals. Tourism picked up, then came the artists and then the galleries. The transition from ranching town to ranching/art town (ranching still comes first) has brought more strangers and makes Livingston less eager to let her children run free. But the growth has been good. "I'm sure some people were resentful at the changes, but the artists have fit in," Livingston said. "At gallery openings, you'll see all types. Some of the ranching types, they like it, and sometimes they're like, 'Hmmm.' " Judd didn't just bring status and art to Marfa; he started a pattern of the art-minded moving to this little Western outpost—or at least buying second homes. What has resulted is a strange little place where you can pass a storefront in the darkened downtown on a Wednesday night and find Julie Speed, whose work sells for as much as $40,000, dragging chalk across an easel. She streaks a few lines, hops back to evaluate, bobs to the music, leaps forward, then does it again. It could be a front-row seat for her next masterwork. One day I drove the dirt roads just out of town to find some locals who were here before the art. The door I randomly knocked on, however, belonged to Vilis Inde, 50, and Tom Jacobs, 52, a gay couple who moved from Minneapolis four years ago to do what people do in Marfa—open a gallery. Their inde/jacobs gallery is housed in an old stucco building near downtown, but a replacement, designed by a Swedish architect, is under construction up the street. It will be one of the few new commercial buildings in town, but there's a creeping feeling more construction will follow—and soon. Inde and Jacobs, who have lived in New York and Chicago, respectively, said they're quite at home in what might be West Texas' most open-minded town. Inde said he "snuck into Texas by coming to Marfa." "I don't consider myself a Texan at all," he said. "Our friends and our conversations are what keep us here. Our lives are interesting. That's the whole point of this place." Most nights there's something going on in Marfa. As in one thing: a reading at the Marfa Book Co., a gallery opening, someone playing music in some living room. The trick is finding it. Locals have their networks. Which is why there's a simple recommendation for making your way in Marfa: Talk to people. Walk up to strangers and say, "Hi, I'm (insert your name) from (insert your hometown). I'm in Marfa for a few days, and it seems cool. Any suggestions about where to eat or what to check out?" You will meet nice people who are proud of where they live. It was the energy of those people that sold me on a town that, frankly, doesn't look like much when you arrive. And the energy shows itself in subtle ways: Europeans crossing the street with the latest New Yorker under their arms, shockingly memorable food, big ideas. Marfa's real reward came from the distance between what you'd expect from a West Texas town of 1,887 and what you get.

The big picture

2009-03-01T21:56:00.005+11:00

To make up for slow postings – here is a longish one.
Via Nettime.

Richard Grayson: Well here we are...the end of Planet Finance
Essay published in Broadsheet, Australia, 2009

Chanel is pulling its flagship sponsorship project for contemporary art. A newspaper story (the Guardian 29 Dec 2008) describes how in the face of fears that the 'supposedly recession proof luxury market' is falling victim to the credit crisis, the perfume and handbag company is not only shedding 200 jobs but bringing its highly publicized global art installation 'Mobile Art' to an early end for fears that this 'quirky marketing operation' has become a luxury that the brand could no longer support.

Architect of choice for the Art World, Zaha Hadid teamed up with Karl Lagerfield and Chanel to create a futuristic pavilion designed to travel for two years throughout Asia, the United States and Europe. The legendary Mademoiselle Chanel herself, publicity reminded us, had
in the past supported the likes of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky and Jacques Lipchitz, and now twenty contemporary artists including Daniel Buren, Blue Noses - (the 'rascals of Russian contemporary arts' apparently) Sylvie Fleury, Sophie Calle, Yang Fudong, Subdoh Gupta, Yoko Ono and Wim Delvoy, had been commissioned to collaborate with the fashion house to make work where 'all of the pieces will be conceived in relation to one of Chanel's most emblematic accessories - the quilted handbag.' The intention was that 'resulting from their singular points of view - poetic, audacious and as yet unseen - the multiple facets of this mythical bag and its universe are revealed.' An intention that would make it 'a revolutionary event, uniting one of the greatest architects of our time, some of our most innovative artists, and an icon of the fashion world - the quilted bag.' The Project 'reaffirms once more our (Chanel's) devotion to creativity and to the avant-garde' and exemplifies how the company is 'a modern brand' that is 'constantly moving forward, cultivating the extraordinary and its innate sense of the moment, CHANEL is resolutely open to the world and turning towards the future. It is this propulsion that incites CHANEL to perpetually create surprise, from one continent to the next, and to so deeply impact on our collective imaginary consciousness.'

The plug was pulled two stops into the global tour. It had been launched in Hong Kong and took up residence in Central Park New York, but never made it to London and the other global cultural - and financial - capitals of its tour. 'Considering the current economic crisis,' a spokesman said, 'we decided it was best to stop the project.' Instead, 'we will be concentrating on strategic growth investments.' (Vogue Magazine 22 Dec 2008).

'The producers of the abysmal 1998 movie Lost In Space should sue for copyright against the spacecraft, Jupiter II,' wrote Rob Dawg on zahahadidblog after his first sight of the plans for the Chanel building, and Hadid's design does closely echo the weird organic shapes of futuristic alien technologies and flying saucers as imagined by Hollywood. And vice-versa, which is probably a convergence of computer software. And the ship's sudden return to earth makes it an early manifestation of the vast quantities of space-debris that we can expect to crash down around our ears as a result of the spectacular break up 'Planet Finance'. It is a Roswell moment, when Hadid's sci-fi pavilion, its 'propulsion to create surprise' suddenly exhausted, becomes the junk of an alien civilization, stranded, earthbound. Its corpses and culture are laid out in front of us. Inanimate. Dead. And looking sort of weird and fake.

'Planet Finance' is the name given by groovy rightwing academic, Neil Ferguson, to the vast financial sphere that has overshadowed our universe for the last few decades. He describes how in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was some $48.6 trillion, but the total market capitalisation of the world's stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger than the stuff of the world and the total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger ('Wall Street lays another egg' Vanity Fair December 2008). Planet Finance was not only bigger than Planet Earth, it was faster. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign-exchange markets and very month $5.8 trillions traded on global stock markets. In its swampy atmosphere (made up, it might be hypothesised, of gaseous testosterone, cocaine, Porsche exhaust and swirly-eyed lip-smacking greed) new financial life-forms evolved. The total annual issuance of mortgage-backed securities, including the seductive new 'collateralised debt obligations' (C.D.O.'s), rose to more than $1 trillion. The volume of 'derivatives' - contracts such as options and swaps - grew even faster and by the end of 2006 their notional value was just over $400 trillion. With its growth the structures and logics of this new planet increasingly became the dominant ones here on earth. 'The Market' became the paradigm that shaped every activity and undertaking. Planet Finance's masters of the Universe became the masters of our world and we lesser beings subservient to their
appetite and needs.

Contemporary Art had a particular and precious place in this new intergalactic culture, and its artifacts have provided a bridge between the previous values and narratives of the older, smaller, planet and the ideals and aspirations of this new stellar civilization. Art has always had an intimate relationship with the rich and the rulers of the world, both temporal and spiritual, and its attraction to our new extra-terrestial masters was precisely its occult intimacy with power that has stretched across different civilizations and periods of human activity. Contemporary art helped validate and sanctify these new electric structures. Art was the
symbol that spoke of the mystical power of the über-commodity: a special sort of object - or action - that transcended the mundane to translate us into glorious heavenly vortexes of Platonic value. Which is why artists - possibly after having been kidnapped, anally probed, and their brains scrubbed clean by space technology to remove primitive ideas of worth and value, not to mention a sense of the ridiculous and the unseemly - found themselves happily making work about a padded handbag in a pavilion designed for space travel.

By some happy numerological quirk of fate, on the same day that Lehman Brothers was collapsing, Sotheby's in London was half-way through a two day event, one of the most notorious contemporary art auctions seen in this (or the last) century. Damien Hirst was selling off 223 new works made by his numerous assistants over the last two years to eager buyers. Shockingly, for the commercial art world, the sale was not through his dealers, which is the normal way of flogging art, with carefully vetted collectors and where contacts are nurtured and developed. Instead it was through an Auction House, where there are far fewer boundaries between the artifact and punters with the desire to 'invest'. When the auction was first planned it seemed a very good time for such an event. From October 2004 onwards, according to ArtTactic research, the 'Hirst market had seen an average increase in prices of 207%, or a 39% annual compound return', and under the gavel, if you have the cash - or credit - you're a player and then it's just a matter of bulking up to have a wad big enough to beat any other person who is also after what you want. The simple logics of the Market prevail to determine 'value' rather than it being arrived at through arcane alchemies by secretive cabals of dealers, museums
critics and collectors. Hirst has a manager called Frank Dunphy whose previous experience was in the world of circuses rather than the art world so he doesn't give a hoot for its structures. He was at one time, gloriously, Coco the Clown's accountant - a job not without honour - and also represented all of the world's jugglers. He and Damien met over a pool table in a London private members' club and he likes auctions because they are so democratic. 'You bring your money along,' he said to Waldemar Januszczak (Times Sept 7 2007), 'you put your hand up and you've got it.' His passion was conceived a few years ago when he decided to auction the contents of Hirst's restaurant, the Pharmacy, which was going out of business, and watched with astonishment as people 'started bidding hundreds of pounds for a used restaurant glass.'

From the artist's point of view, an auction also has a strong attraction, as it considerably reduces the cut of the middleman: a commercial gallery selling a work will normally take between 40 - 50% of the sale price in commission, not so with auction houses. Until brave Damien came along and proved that they weren't worth the paper they were written on, there was an unspoken agreement between the auction houses and the commercial galleries where the galleries would handle the recent work, and the auction houses take care of the older
stuff. The demarcation line between 'old' and 'new' was traditionally defined as being some five years back, but as the markets speeded up it closed to a two year gap. But Damien has abolished even this. It is a sign of how perfectly of his time Hirst is that much of the journalism about the auction focused not on the art but precisely on how he had innovated new financial and commercial structures. 'But like all modern visionaries, Hirst saved his greatest innovations for the marketplace itself,' wrote bloggingstocks.com. He took risks, cut out middle men, maximised returns and presented examples of the best of his signature lines - the animals in formaldehyde, the spotty paintings, the spin paintings, shiny shelves of drugs etc - so maximising opportunity for those wanting to buy into Brand Damien. The auction was widely described in newspaper finance pages in the aspirational, thrusting, frontier poetry of the share prospectus, and it is significant for Brand Hirst that Damien is a boysy stubbly
unaffected down-to-earth-guy, a bit wild, a bit of a chancer, a jack the lad, not a snob or stuck up.

Last year the Cambridge Judge Business School analysed the demographics of City Traders to discover that the person handling billions and billions of funds and making millions in fees was most likely to be a 26 year old white male. These last decades have been built on the actions of young men taking hazy testosterony risks for shed loads of money and Damien is the sort of guy a city culture can understand and identify with. As these 26 year olds get to be a little older they become his market. He makes work about money, and he makes money, and is therefore value embodied. His career has bracketed the period - now ending - that has seen more of these millionaires buy and sell more art than at any other time in history. It is difficult to have a proper contemporary art collection without a Damien, as collections are no longer about individual interest or taste but operate as symbols that prove that you are a possessor of taste, that you like what other people like, are part of a group - a group that shapes and is shaped by the market. So you start off with a little formaldehyde, a dot painting perhaps, and then another, or perhaps get a drug cabinet thingy, then maybe add a Richard Prince Nurse or car, a
Koons, a Nauman maybe and yes we'll have a Gursky.....et voi bloody la ...something to add to the yacht, the blonde and the Bugatti and harbourside waterview apartment.

And buy in they did. There was much sucking of teeth before the days of sale as to how the downturn was going to bugger this up, how Damien was going to become a schadenfreude cropper, but no, the stubble cheeky-chappy shark-pickler pulled through, making even more than had been projected from his sales to secretive Russian Oligarchs, precious plutocrats, shy hedge-fund managers, and no doubt galleries and dealers with a stake in Damien, desperately eager to prevent a slip in the auction value of his work. The sale made the artist some £98
million pounds, a world record for an artist (but a small profit in the financial trader worlds of his buyers).

Slavoj Zizek in his paperback 'Violence', talks of the 'phatic' function of language, which is its use to maintain and describe social relations though ritualised formulae such as greetings, chit chat about the weather. Roman Jakobson, who developed the idea liked to quote this dialogue from Dorothy Parker:

'Well, here we are' he said.
'Here we are' she said. Aren't we?'
'I should say we are' he said."

'The emptiness of contact thus has a propitious technical function as a test of the system itself: a 'Hello do you hear me?' writes Zizek 'The phatic function is therefore close to the meta-linguistic function: it checks whether the channel is working. Simultaneously, the addresser and addressee check whether they are using the same code.

' Hirst's work shares this emptiness of the 'here we are': each product in the auction represents a line of manufacture in his practice and each line of manufacture serves to sketch out, in the
simplest and most general terms comprehensible even to a young dazed dealer, burnt out hedge-funder or Oligarch's partner, what 'art' (in general) might be 'about': beit 'Death and mortality (pickled thing)' or 'Spinning Colour and Abstract Painting', 'beauty and butterflies'
or 'Big shiny expensive attractive object of no other function'. These prove and test the channels of Value and Exchange, the poetics of marketisation and commodification that are the new code for the machine, the mechanisms that run this new planet. All the diverse operations of the art world over the decades of Planet Finance have ultimately had one end; the glorification of the ideal of Private Property.

That this art in the end represents only itself and the functions of value rather than any complex alternative religious, moral, immoral or political sphere (as art used to claim to) supports perhaps Alain Badiou's proposal that we live in a social space in late capitalism that is progressively 'worldless'. Planet Finance, is without a worldview of its own, and there is not a 'global capitalist civilisation', rather it operates in and across all civilisations: Christian, Hindu or Buddhist, East or West. Its global dimension can only be expressed through the 'Real' of the global market mechanism. Certainly the Contemporary Art now being produced by and exchanged in the new markets of China and India is largely undifferentiated from the global forms of 'Contemporary Art Fair Art.'

Contemporary Art didn't have a good boom and its going to be interesting to see how its going to cope with the bust. When I write that it didn't have a good boom I also need to write that it had an extraordinary and orgasmically brilliant boom, the best boom that it has ever had (But it's still a question as to how its going to cope with the bust). Its boom as bad and good because it got sucked up into this glorious new planet and bathed in a golden shower of cash. It was
feted and lauded and has perhaps never been so desired and valued (even if they didn't quite know why). Art became a locus of aspiration for so many people. And it has sort of lost its head, its sense of its direction, was seduced by the big end of town, the big end of history. After all, before, if you were a member of what was called the avant-garde, it was all going to be cold dank warehouses and the respect of your probably hirsute peers: but in this new world art slowly came to represent models of innovation (models which could not be applied elsewhere but what the heck, that helped keep the damn thing pure) and glamour, and ineffable value. It was housed in American Express Halls, Chanel Pavilions and Oligarchs' hallways. Far nicer places than before with far better food: and let's face it, frequented by a better class of person. And Art has become very comfortable there.

The only 'avant-gardist' movement that the visual arts has generated since the deregulation of the banks has been 'relational aesthetics' with its weedily modest exploration of how 'art' might echo - and aestheticise - operations of capital and consumption in the new electronic economies. Museums and Public Galleries have been the matrix for such undertakings, and have helped validate new product (and movements) through their aura of being disinterested and magisterial arbiters of culture and value which operate in a sphere that lies outside the vulgar material world. Simultaniously - (and in tandem with practically all that which used to be considered the 'public sphere) they have been frantically privatising all their functions and operations, either willingly or through the pressure from government - through the embrace of private sponsorship and donation, the presence of financiers, fund managers, fund raisers,
private collectors and dealers on boards of management and collection committees. Their curatorial expertise has haemorrhaged to the private sector to work for private galleries or advise the new non-knowing collectors on how to build and invest in their contemporary art-
portfolio.

Thus curators and critics from the public sector have ended up shaping the collections of shipping magnates and Greek socialites and they have bought works that have been validated and given provenance and value through being shown in museum and public exhibitions curated by (the same) curators and critics. If Hirst's work has echoed the operations of value and commodity on Planet Finance, the complex incestuous imbroglio of the museums and non-commercial galleries with the commercial world has replicated the labyrinthine complexities and failures of financial regulation that has allowed the extraordinary boom and the unbelievable bust of the financial market model. Like the regulatory finance company Standard and Poors, museums and curators around the world have been issuing the equivalent of top AAA ratings for products that no-one really any longer properly understands. As with the regulators, the valuations have been of direct financial benefit to the people who support and pay the evaluating body. It is a situation where, as one of Standard and Poors' employees wrote, something 'could be structured by cows and we would rate it.' ...Or it would be shown.

For a while, around the time of the Hirst auction (without cows) there were voices claiming an art world exceptionalism, based on the arguments that a) it was 'Art' and therefore above 'all that sort of thing' and/or b) that as 'Art' it was really only of interest to a group of people who were so mega-mega-mega-rich that the fluctuations of salerooms and banks wouldn't effect them. Even though Damien Hirst as the mascot spirit of that age now passing, slipped through, which seems fitting, this doesn't seem to be generally holding true. Sotheby's has just let 120 people go in the USA. In May they sold a Bacon painting for $86 million American to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, their most recent sale failed to shift a similar one at under half the price. Galleries are shutting their doors. It is, as a friend just back from Art Basel Miami said, 'Like someone just turned a tap off.' Things are falling back to earth.

It's early days in what promises to be the long death of a galactic civilization so it is going to be hard to discern how things might reshape themselves under this bombardment, how a re-ordering might be imagined, how art and the art-world might re-articulate new models of
value. The developments of the last few decades suddenly seem to make it redundant. As James Buchan writes, 'In societies governed by fashion and luxury, the public finds that there is almost nothing that it cannot do without.' ('Frozen Desire, an enquiry into the meaning of money.') Looking over the wreckage of the 'Mobile Art' tour, Karl Lagerfield was visited by a strange moment of lucidity, 'Today,' he mused to the interviewer 'everyone can say that something is for financial reasons when they want...for me, artistic reasons are more important. I always thought the building was a sculpture. I prefer it empty.'

See also: http://ensemble.va.com.au/Grayson/texts/WellHereWeAre2009.html
© Richard Grayson 2009

D File #1

2009-02-15T21:44:00.003+11:00

In his notes on Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt wrote: "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments. Irrational judgments lead to new experience. Formal art is essentially rational. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically."

A Fine Art

2009-02-15T21:29:00.002+11:00

Students who were at the Ourimbah Campus of the University of Newcastle when the Fine Arts programme was abolished, were no doubt amused by the photo accompanying the campus's promotion by Professor Stephen Crump in the Sun Weekly.

Art's Birthday 2009

2009-01-20T08:18:00.003+11:00

Art's Birthday 2009, Town Centre Complex, Gosford, at the Gosford Art Flux Forum's
IDEA EXCHANGE

Idea Exchange Bureau

2009-01-12T22:43:00.005+11:00

GAFF
Gosford Art Flux Forum

Idea Exchange Bureau

A free exchange bureau, trading in art (and other) ideas, will operate in one of the vacant shops in the Town Centre Shopping Complex, Gosford, from the 17th to the 25th of January, 2009.

On site services.

Idea Exchange.
- Bring in your idea and exchange it for one brought in by another customer.
- Repairs. Customers can bring in old ideas for repair, restoration, redesign or battery replacement.
- Used and pre-loved art ideas recycled.
- Buy Nothing. Get one Free.

Counselling.
- Individual consultations and group sessions available.

Installation - Changing daily.
Visual Archive
Reading Room
Outdoor siting and erection of a 'Big Thing', The Big Idea roadside tourist attraction for Gosford.

Art’s Birthday Party.

On the 17th of January, to celebrate the 1,000,046th international birthday of art, as proposed by French artist Robert Filliou in 1963 - there will be a reenactment of the making of the first work of art.

In the spirit of Filliou’s No-Plays there will be no opening.

No-Play #1

This is a play nobody must come and see. That is, the not-coming of anyone
makes the play. Together with the very extensive advertising of the spectacle through
newspapers, radio, T.V., private invitations, etc. . . .
No one must be told not to come.
No one should be told that he really shouldn’t come.
No one must be prevented from coming in any way whatsoever!!!
But nobody must come, or there is no play.
That is, if the spectators come, there is no play. And if no spectators come, there
is no play either . . . I mean, one way or the other there is a play, but it is a No-Play.
Robert Filliou, c. 1964

Robert Filliou lighting the cake at Art's 1,000,010th Birthday Celebration, Aachen 1973. Photo: Neue Galerie, Stadt im alten Kurhaus, Aachen, from - Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, 1995.

Ideas can be brought in in person at the appointed times (TBA) or forwarded via gaff@brownscows.com

Textures of Place

2009-01-12T22:38:00.003+11:00

Textures of Place consists of 4 installations/works in progress which are to be presented in vacant shops (on level one) in the Town Centre Shopping Complex, Gosford, from
the 15th to the 27th of January, 2009.

The exhibition is being ‘facilitated’ by Ccabd (Central Coast Artist Business Directory)
in conjunction with GBID (Gosford Business Improvement District) and Gosford City Council.

Shop spaces have been allocated to:
Peter Baka
GAFF (Gosford Art Flux Forum)
Josephine Laina
Sharyn Walker.

2009

2009-01-01T11:07:00.002+11:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Grow Australia

2008-12-14T22:14:00.002+11:00

7 Plants, 7 Continents

Grow for Australia!!!

www.collectiefmei2007.nl/greenhouse/

Be quick, ends soon.

Heterotopia

2008-12-09T23:30:00.003+11:00

While on the subject of books about urban space and design, there is another good one just out, Heterotopia and the City, Public Space in a Postcivil Society edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter. It "discusses the concept of heterotopia: urban spaces that carry multiple, fragmented meanings. Heterotopia and the City seeks to clarify this concept and investigates the heterotopias which exist throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels, and festival markets."

"Heterotopia, literally meaning 'other places', is a rich concept in urban design that describes a world off-center with respect to normal or everyday spaces, one that possesses multiple, fragmented, or even incompatible meanings.... The term was coined by Foucault in the late 1960s but has remained a source of confusion and debate since."
The book combines theoretical contributions on the concept of heterotopia, with a series of critical case studies that probe a range of (post-) urban transformations, from the 'malling' of the agora, through the 'gating' of dwelling, to the 'theming' of urban renewal. Wastelands and terrains vagues are explored as sites of promise and resistance in a section on urban activism and transgression. Heterotopia and the City provides a collective effort to reposition heterotopia as a crucial concept for contemporary urban theory and redirects the current debate on the privatization of public space.

In both this and Steffen Lehmann's book, art is assumed a "natural" instrumental or relational role, which needs to be critiqued, as the practice could be seen to have become 'formalised'.

While pondering this I came across this comment by Calin Dan on Nettime.
"Autonomy entitles art to float freely in the interstices of the social fabric, to experiment and to steer in unexpected directions. When experiment and steering relate directly to the fabric itself, the art discourse looses autonomy and gains relational power (in the sense designed by Nic. Bouriaud). Relational art has an increased chance to acknowledgement, but also - naturally - to criticism, coming not only from the comfortable inner circles, but also from the structures to which the respective discourse 'relates'. Needless to say that both concepts (autonomous, relational) have no axiological power; they are not about quality, they are about method.

Back to the City

2008-12-09T23:02:00.004+11:00

For those who found the talk at Art inTent interesting, you might be interested in a publication edited by Steffen Lehmann.

The 'Back to the City' book was launched last week at the office of SUTERS Architects in Newcastle.

It is a very well produced book which addresses many aspects of a form of art practice now well developed in urban contexts. It is good to see that the field is being opened to theoretical examination, even if the $90 price tag will direct it to the design/architecture end of the market.

Details of the book:

'Back to the City. Strategies for Informal Urban Interventions'
Edited by Steffen Lehmann
Contents:

15 essays by leading authors (academic papers, all fully refereed); authors include University of Newcastle academics, such as: Prof. Michael Ostwald, Prof. Anne Graham, Dr Steven Fleming, Michael Chapman, Dr Angela Philp, and others.
The book includes the documentation of 28 site-specific, temporary installations in Newcastle, Berlin, and Brisbane.
The book discusses models of interdisciplinarity, the value of small public spaces, and the potential of temporary interventions as a resource for urban renewal.

Bio.
Professor STEFFEN LEHMANN
Ph.D., AA Dipl.

UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Urban Development for Asia and the Pacific
Chair, School of Architecture and Built Environment The University of Newcastle
Director, s_Lab space Laboratory for Architectural Research and Design
Editor, 'Journal of Green Building'

On the same occassion, the book Temporary and Permanent, by Cida de Aragon was launched. It introduces some of the major interdisciplinary, collaborative works by this Brazilian/Australian artist, who brings her design and architectural background to her work. Cida was also at Art inTent, as you might recall.

They send their regards to those they met in Kibble park.

GRG Advisory Committee.

2008-12-01T21:26:00.002+11:00

There has been some confusion about recent advertisements in the local newspapers calling for applications for community representation on the Regional Gallery Advisory Committee.

Correspondence from Debra Schleger, GCC Arts and Culture Manager, has clarified the position.

A decision of the committee, which some of you know about, to end the committee was not made with a quorum, so has not been enacted.

In response to a recent Council resolution, on November 4th, expressions of interest have been advertised for community representation on the various committees including the Regional Gallery Advisory Group. This is for community not organisational representation.

This means that anyone interested in being part of the committee, including existing community members, will be required to submit an application.

Check the council website for details about submitting an expressing of interest.

Naked or Nude

2008-12-01T21:20:00.003+11:00

Recent controversies about the public display of ‘unacceptable’ prepubescent naked imagery in art, has highlighted the way in which photography is regarded as a special case in its relation to ‘reality’.

Pick the real frog.

Simon Martin. Untitled (2008), a single-screen video installation.
High definition, CAD (computer assisted design) animation.

“In 1998 Martin made a photorealist painting of a strawberry poison dart frog based on a found photograph. Untitled returns to that same source image though here it is rendered in a fully three-dimensional state. The animation of the frog could be seen as a collection of establishing shots, carefully observing the creature and exploring the virtual space of the synthetic image. Moving between stillness and motion, Martin's digital rendering of the photographic image creates an uncanny effect and a self-reflexive comment on the construction of images.”
www.chisenhale.org.uk

This is an Argentinian ornate horned frog.

Bruce Barber

2008-11-18T14:04:00.006+11:00

Before Fiona Woods returned to Ireland, she had a chance to meet up with Bruce Barber and others in Sydney.

Fiona Woods, Anne Graham, Pauline Barber, Bruce Barber, Neil Berecry-Brown, Stephen Mulqueen (NZ artist doing residency in Newcastle) and Patricia Flanagan (foreground)

For any readers who might have been at the Ourimbah campus in 2004, you might remember Bruce who was in doing a residency at Newcastle at the time. And those with longer memories, might remember his great contribution to the Chimera Conference, held in Sydney in 1995, organised by Synapse Art Initiatives.

His exhibition at Artspace, (blurb below via Artspace website), is well worth a visit.

14 November - 14 December 2008
Reading and Writing Rooms
BRUCE BARBER

Image above: Bruce Barber, Kiss, 1973, Slide/sound installation. Photograph: Colin McLaren, Courtesy the artist

"Since the early 1970s Bruce Barber has worked across performance, installation, film, video and photography developing propositional and situational works that engage and question social and political regimes of power. Originally from Auckland where he studied at Elam School of Art in the early 1970s within the highly influential and experimental sculpture and intermedia program, Barber has been based in Canada for three decades, retaining professional ties with New Zealand and Australia.

This major survey project, the largest to date undertaken on Barber’s practice, encompasses the full range of his work from performance actions, found situations and video work of the early 1970s through his multidisciplinary Reading Rooms begun in the 1980s and Squat Projects of the 1990s and beyond, culminating in a new reading room project regarding immigration, identity politics and alterity developed in-situ whilst undertaking a visiting artist residency at Artspace.

Bruce Barber is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he is Professor and Director of the MFA Program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. He has exhibited and published extensively internationally since the early 1970s. He is editor of Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization (1983), Conceptual Art: the NSCAD Connection 1967–1973 (2001), Condé and Beveridge: Class Works (2008) and co-editor, with Serge Guilbaut and John O’Brian of Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State (1996). A new two-volume set of his writings has just been published as Performance, [Performance] and Performers: Essays and Conversations 1976-2006.

Irish Artists at Mangrove Mountain

2008-11-10T16:51:00.006+11:00

We were pleased with the success of our international contemporary art presence, “library from the ground up”, at the Mangrove Mountain Country Fair. Fiona Woods, who has now returned to Ireland after completing her residency with Brown’s Cows, presented the work of the artists’ collective very well, making accessible an emerging form of art practice to people with widely different levels of cultural experience.

Participating artists included:
Astrid Adler, Monica de Bath, Marie Connole, Alan Counihan, Amanda Dunsmore (UK), Maria Finucane, John Hanrahan, Eileen Healy, Emma Houlihan, Patricia Hurl , Tamás Kaszás (HUN), Máirín Kelly, Maria Kerin, Aileen Lambert, John Langan, Clive Moloney, Fiona O' Dwyer, Deirdre O' Mahony, Áine Phillips, Jim Ricks (USA), Therry Rudin (CH), Seán Taylor, Fergus Tighe, Vincent Wall, Fiona Woods.

Perhaps one of the most valuable experiences of the residency was the discussion (ongoing) about art making in a local, rural or regional environment in the context of current art theory and urban practice.

In Belfast on the 17th of December, Fiona will be participating in a debate WHERE ART GROWS GREENER? - art in a rural context.

Thanks to Kiera O’Toole for her assistance with the installation.

Neil Berecry-Brown
President
Mangrove Mountain & Districts Country Fair

2008-11-07T18:01:00.003+11:00

The winner of the Road Works (My favourite Pothole) category at the Mangrove Mountain & Districts Country Fair this year was Sharyn Walker.

It was good to see the development and increasing complexity of Sharyn’s work. She is acquiring a unique language of form and materials, and an idiosyncratic take on socially engaged practices that has modesty, wit and conceptual clarity.

Special awards were made to John O’Toole whose animation was produced at the Mangrove Mountain computer centre, and Laura Kostalas (Junior section).

The Back Page team will be road testing the Pot Hole Covers soon and posting a report.

Thanks to Tim Braham for judging this category in the Art section. (note: at the time of judging John O’Toole’s animation was not available)

Art on the Mountain

2008-09-24T22:47:00.006+10:00

Ground Up Artists’ Collective

A one off opportunity to see this presentation!

Fiona Woods, a member of the Ground Up Artists Collective, and until recently, Regional Arts Coordinator for North Clare, Ireland, will be presenting
library from the ground up
at the Mangrove Mountain Country Fair on the 18th of October.

She will be bringing from Ireland two groups of work - library from the ground up, which consists of books, catalogues, reports, films and documentary material on DVD, soundworks, posters, comics (and a tea towel!) relating to the work of the 26 artists from the Ground Up Artists' Collective, to present the organisation through the members’ temporary public art, community-based research and discursive art events in rural contexts. Fiona Woods has curated a selection of work from the library for the Mangrove Mountain and Districts County Fair, including an exhibition of drawings.

Fiona is a visual artist whose practice includes curating and writing. Her recent work has focused on issues relating to art and public space in non-metropolitan contexts.
In October-November she will be creating new work on a farm at Mangrove Mountain, NSW, and talking with other artists and organisers also working with art practice in rural/regional contexts.

She devised Ground Up, and Shifting Ground (www.shiftingground.net) and is currently coordinating Verge, an art journal that will engage critically with art in non-metropolitan contexts across the world.

Supported by The Arts Council of Ireland and Gosford City Council.

Inquiries, Neil Berecry-Brown:
nlbb@hunterlink.net.au

Refresh

2008-09-20T21:04:00.003+10:00

New SPRING 08 exhibition at the Christ Church art space, Anglican Parish of Gosford.

The Opening Event for the R-e-f-r-e-s-h exhibition will be held at 3 Mann Street, Gosford on
SUNDAY 28TH September 2008, 7pm - 9pm

More information can be found here.

Image from the WATER exhibition

From Marie Andrews

2008-09-20T20:54:00.001+10:00

Extract from a letter received from Marie Andrews regarding her representations to the Minister for the Arts on behalf of Mr Berecry-Brown.

“Mr Berecry-Brown's suggestions, in particular the number of opportunities for arts development in the Regional City Strategy including an educational/cultural precinct and a cultural centre in the city have been noted.

I understand that Gosford City Council recently made the decision to utilise a building in the city centre as a regeneration hub with the aim of encouraging artists to live and work in the city much along the lines proposed by Mr Berecry- Brown. I have asked that the relevant staff at Arts NSW follow this development and provide further advice.”

It is good to know that our Member for Gosford is working to help the development of art.

Debra Schleger, Cosford City Council Manager Arts and Culture, informs us that she is on the case, but nothing concrete to report at this stage.

In passing

2008-09-06T22:17:00.003+10:00

A quick update.

The Regional Gallery Advisory Committee finally met at the end of last month. It was resolved that the committee be disbanded. Only two members of the community managed to be there. The minuted resolution will be forwarded to Council, as will a recommendation that Council establish an Art and Culture Reference Group to give advice directly to Council.

At the meeting Councillor Drake advised that there has been no progress with the Cultural Spaces and Places Report.

There appear to be no announcements of substance about the arts from new candidates in the upcoming local government elections. The records of those standing again for re-election speak for themselves, and reflect the current state of affairs.

There is a rumour that Gosford Council staff are planning some art activities for Gosford town centre, but nothing more is known by the Back Page.

Road Works

2008-08-21T23:40:00.005+10:00

Road Works (or My Favourite Pothole)

An invitation.

At the Mangrove Mountain Country Fair this year (18th October) there will be a new category in the art section open to all ages and mediums.

We are looking for art made in response to the pleasure of negotiating a way along the road surface of Wisemans Ferry Road, or any other road in the Mangrove Mountain districts, as you experience the impact of a kaleidoscope of colours, materials, textures and topography.

The road is a metaphor as well as a physical, political and economic reality. It has aesthetic values and has been a defining element in the district’s historical development.

The subject can be approached in a wide variety of ways. Already we have people interested in making paintings, digital images, prints, photographs and sculpture.

To make the challenge less hazardous, we have a collection of digital images of the road surface available to work from if required. A CD is available on request.

We would like to invite you to enter. The deadline for works to be delivered to Mangrove Mountain Hall will be in the week leading to the 18th of October. More details will be posted when finalised.

If you need more information, or have any questions, contact:
Neil on 041 1136 145 or nlbb@hunterlink.net.au

There will also be updates at: www.onmangrovemountain.blogspot.com

By coincidence, and as incentive, we record that Huma Bhabha is the recipient of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's 2008 Emerging Artist Award. She will debut an exhibition of new work at the Museum on September 14th. For this exhibition, she has created Bumps in the Road, a figurative sculpture made of clay, wood, wire, Styrofoam, metal studs, acrylic paint, cast iron, burlap, newsprint, sand, and ash.