art crush- Vasilis Asimakopolous

Vasilis Asimakopolous

REVIEW: Private Gladiator- Janet Beckhouse and André Ethier

The exhibition shares its name with a pornographic remake of the blockbuster ‘Gladiator’ from 2000, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russel Crowe. The pornographic remake, ‘Private Gladiator’, is a blatant scene-for-scene refilming of Gladiator, except with over 9000 times[1] more sex. It is also touted as being one of the most expensive pornographic films ever, although its budget would be insignificant compared to the $103 million dollars it cost to make ‘Gladiator’.

The work by Janet Beckhouse and André Ethier mirrors this act of remaking that occurred with Gladiator and Private Gladiator: both extreme variations of what we know about the world with a liberal dose of extra sexuality and energy added.

Beckhouse’s work is littered with skulls, bones, seaweed and mutated sirens of the sea, exposing their junk boldly, like they’re usin’ their goods as the bait for man-trap, akin to the feminine monsters in classic Grecian tales of heroism and adventure.

Each figure is a possible strand or divergent that could have occurred in our own evolutionary history. This idea is given strength by the fact that these beastly femme-fatales are perched within their ceramic dioramas on the side of a vase surrounded by human skeletal remains, our remains, we the failed, unfit, human species.

clockwise from top left: 'Crocodile Woman', 'Blessed Relief', 'Grow Fins', and 'Flame Woman', 2011, Janet Beckhouse.

The work is baroque, flowery and leafy. Ceramic isn’t necessarily a delicate medium, museum pieces have proven that it can survive thousands of years, and yet Beckhouse crafts it so ornately. The subject matter occupies a similar dichotomy: the women are physically young and beautiful, but their poses and claws or sharp teeth tell us that they are wild and dangerous, as does the underwater graveyard they live in.

This is work that teenage boys would be very much interested in, from a hormone driven perspective, there is tits and ass, baring all to the viewer with some even adopting the lewd open mouthed expression of blow-up sex-dolls, all framed by grisly elements of death. Generally speaking though, there is more care and meticulous craftsmanship in the work than an average teenage boy would be capable of.

'Untitled', 2007, André Ethier, (courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery)

André Ethier’s paintings account for the other half of the work in Private Gladiator. Ethier’s 2-D works bounce layers of bright coloured washes, often spectrally clashing, a visual effect that manically vibes and hums, as if in a drug or fever fuelled state which resonates at the same frequency as the energy and movement in Beckhouses sculptures.

This visual static-mania depicts the visions of an altered state of possible alternative evolutionary forms: hybrid shamans with celestrial flames radiating from their heads, bouquets of mutant plant life mimicking delicate and aroused human genitals, picturesque summer meadows occupied by sedate animal-men with manes that take styling cues from both the carnivorous African lion and the now extinct 1960’s, free-lovin’, hippy-archetype, and the portrait of a star-cheeked, cyclopic, bearded man.

The exhibition as a whole is both balanced and in conflict between the two fantastical strains of work as a collective as it is obvious the work is by two different artists, working in two different disciplines and mediums, yet both stylistically complement each other so well. Private Gladiator flits in spasms between sex and death, the fragile and the dangerous, creating fantasy by slightly perverting what is real and known.

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[1] Dragonball Z, ep. 28, ‘Goku’s Arrival’. Within the episode, the Saiyan warrior Nappa asking "Vegeta, what does the scouter say about his power level?" Vegeta replies, "It's over 9000!" and then crushes the scouter in his hand. The scene is completely overdramatic and the power level 9000 seems to completely arbitrary. The scene was made famous and achieved meme status when it was posted by the user Kajetokun on YouTube in its entirety once and then replayed several times at a variety of speeds, and interspersed with a clip from GaoGaiGar. The term has now come to mean ‘a great deal’ or an simply an unquantifiably-large amount. Dragonball Z became known for its focus on fighting and violence yet created as a cartoon and marketed at children. Ten points if used to describe violence and pays homage to the original context.

Review: V.A.- curated by Dylan Martorell

‘Red wire goes to the red plug, yellow to the yellow, its easy’

‘but theres a whole bunch of red and yellow plugs on the tv and the dvd player’

‘plug the cables into the red and yellow ‘output’ plugs on the dvd player and plug the other end of the cables into the ‘input’ plugs on the back of the tv, because the video and sound is going out of the dvd player and into the tv’

‘Got it’

...

‘is it working?’

‘yeah but theres no sound’

‘jiggle the plug, is the plug pushed in completely?’

‘oh yeah, its working now’

An AV cable (AV being short for Audio Visual) is the link that allows the transmission of sound and image between compatible electronic media devices. Dylan Martorell curates ‘VA’ at utopian slumps, an inversion of AV, a group exhibition that consists of artists that make visual work first, and are secondly, also interested in sound, visual before audio, ‘V’ before ‘A’.

The exhibition is a visual sonnet to sound, played out by the overall composition of the collection of objects and images, a symphony for the eyes. Martorell adopts the dual role of both curator and exhibitor, the concept behind the exhibition is one which applies to his own practice and bringing other artists that also have similar interests and ideas provides the depth of investigation that occurs with multiple perspectives, rather than the tunnel vision and ego that can invariably accompany a solo exhibition.

Martorells own work (above) thunders like a jazz festival of found objects, a collection of loud bold plastic-povera artefacts rearranged into a greater orchestral composition by confident intuition, and applying utilitarian connective elements (like string and cable ties) that hold the end product together, much like the repetition of chords and riffs that will bind a song together.

There is an obvious fusion of genres in Martorells work: a heavy metal styled medieval goblet sits above Aztec or Peruvian patterned matting, next to a Rastafarian coloured budgerigar, and a jerry rigged industrial xylophone made from rusting scrap-metal panels, all elements harmoniously in chorus, singing out loudly, and brightly.

These assemblages of Martorells also appear to be functional instruments of sorts that could be used to make sound, simply because of the transparent use of actual musical instruments, old speakers or other audio equipment, as well as other non-musical objects of which it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine being used as makeshift instruments themselves.

In comparison to Martorells work as loud sight-noise, John Nixon’s Colour Rythym Discs (above) are ordered, bold, staccato punctuations of specific and condensed colour-studies. Using the measurements of antiquated vinyl records as the uniformed foundations for his straight-edged, abstract paintings, which with their small scale and unique shape, read like colourfield miniatures, or more geographically, they are the result of what would happen should the colourfield be subdivided into more manageable, smaller suburban plots of land: individual partial-spectrum inquisitions joined by similarity of format and underlying material ground.

These Colour Rhythm Discs of Nixon also poke fun at arts general lack of function; even though the Colour Rhythm Discs are imposters masquerading as vinyl records, the charade is short lived and the discs knowingly reveal their musical impotence as they superfluously rotate on a operational record player, each of them performing a perfect impersonation of a Cage 3’14” remix.

The idea of images or information in disguise and the artists hand in the removal of function is also the crux of Marco Fusinato’s Mass Black Implosion (Aggolomeration, Anestis, Logothetis) Variation II (above left) and Victor Meertens The Hidden Records of Historic Paintings and his unplayable ‘cooked’ LP records (above right). In Fusinato’s work, he adopts the written language of music but converts the markings till they are an unreadable and functionless layered mass of information. Meertens takes advantage of the multiple definition of the world ‘record’, using the pun as the punchline for his defaced LP record sleeves whilst the records themselves have been reduced to mutilated shadows of their prior pristine forms, structurally disfigured by searing temperatures.

The real strength in Martorell’s curatorial casting is that he has chosen artists that recognise the unique nuances that make the visual and audial different, and instead of trying to translate these specific portions of non-transference, they are bought to the fore in their exclusion and absence: the lack of sound in Nixons discs, Martorells functional detritus reformed into a collective, non-usable art object, the information of sheet music made redundant by Fusinato, and Meertens musically-crippled and physically-mutated vinyl records. These works only highlight how neither the image or sound can supersede the qualities each other, but each can be used to individually bolster the other when dancing in duality, like in a film, the harmonius melding of audio and visual as AV, or, VA.

art crush- Karen Henderson

Review: RMIT First Site

There is a trio of shows by RMIT students at RMIT’s first site gallery that is worth seeing, and whilst the three exhibitions and artists are separate, the nature of their work and underlying concepts are very complimentary of each other; all of the exhibitions have work which features material metamorphous over time. These similarly themed shows are the result of thorough exhibition planning and programming by First Site’s gallery curator, Simon Pericich. The hard work on his part is much welcomed when a suite of exhibitions like these come along.

Gallery one is occupied by Ara Dolatian and his installation titled ‘perceptual’. The title may come across to some as being a little bit loaded, being a composite of the words ‘concept’ and ‘perception’, and is a little bit misleading in this regard as the work is not about the concepts of perception or any other meeting ground between the two.

Instead, Dolatian has constructed a system in which dyed liquids encased in vessels, slowly and gradually escape their confines, by their own unseen means, along a network of fabric thread by soaking into and along these fibrous pathways.

This in itself is an interesting and colourful experiment but even the structures that have been assembled by Dolation to aid the process and support the lethargic quest are incredible works in their own right.

These stands are quite simple tripods with shelves branching out at different heights, they’re almost multi-layered lecterns, platforms from which spectral information is delivered, oozing out slowly in its own time.

The tripods and the vessels are really exquisite objects also, filled with beautiful small imperfections and character, earnest in their production. The vessels containing the dye are ceramic similes of ye-olde-style milk bottles, cast in white slip, slightly lopsided and irregularly formed. The wooden stands appear to have undergone the lengthy process of being carved by hand, whittled down indiscriminately, judged by the artists discerning eye so that interest can be found in the varying widths and sizes.

This idea of the artists hand in manipulation of medium and the presentation of a materials live metamorphous in front of the viewer as a performance conducted by the object itself, sans-artist, is repeated by Linda Loh in Gallery Two and Skye Kelly in Gallery Three, although there are differences in their approaches to the concept.

The exhibitions are on till the 18^th of September.

http://link.rmit.edu.au/first_site.html

art crush- Dylan Difalco

art crush- Taylor Baldwin

art crush- Derek Weisberg