art crush- Eric Yahnker

Foreigner Corner, 2010

REVIEW: Rock Solid- Pieces of Eight

Pieces of Eight describes itself as a contemporary jewellery and artist made object store. Contemporary jewellery means that there is no Tiffany here, just a Melanie, Melanie Katsalidis who is the creative captain at the helm of Pieces of Eight and she’s boldly sailing into 2011 with a store hosted exhibition: Rock Solid. Katsalidis has called on Meredith Turnbull to curate a band of artists for Rock Solid who include: Dan Bell, James Deutsher, Anna Ephraim, Bianca Hester, Christopher L G Hill, Leah Jackson, Susan Jacobs, Madeline Kidd, Dylan Martorell, Rob McHaffie and Masato Takasaka.

Each artist has delved into their practice and reproduced their ideas and forms at a wearable scale. One of the best examples of this is Christopher LG Hill’s reinvention of a material he uses quite often, plastic bags, being reformed into bracelets. The finished product is a nod to a material that he utilises in his own arts practice, but not a replication of his usual treatment of the material. Pieces of Eight also recognised Hill’s astute connection with his materials and have provided a blog post on the exploration of his connection to the matter: http://piecesofeightgallery.blogspot.com/2011/03/piece-of-day-plastic-fantastic.html

Takasaka has also contributed to the exhibition by constructing an installation of his patented forms of angular colored card, paper and tape in the Pieces of Eight storefront windows above in and around the entrance.

This exhibition is an affirming salute to the artists involved and their ability to adapt and construct their ideas in new ways and forms. Respect to Kasalidis and Turnbull for also hosting floor talks and uploading the talks (http://piecesofeightgallery.blogspot.com/2011/03/floor-talk-meredith-turnbull-curator-of.html ) to Pieces of Eights blog, this action, and their effort, is very much appreciated and helps add another, more informative layer to the project and exhibition. Thank you Pieces of Eight for your generosity.

Not only is Rock Solid a strong exhibition thanks to critical curation and the artists own intimate connections with their practices but also because of the wealth of support material and documentation available online. Kudos are much deserved.

http://piecesofeight.com.au/

art crush- Dylan Difalco

ARTICLE: Duchamp, Nietzsche and the Spectacle of the Live Creative Act.

SDM crew are painting a mural for the NGV Studio space in the Atrium of Federation Square. It’s a public endeavour: 20 metres of spray paint fuelled graffiti tagging in a public area with a lot of foot traffic on the weekend. In this instance, the street art is legal and condoned by a state institution and everyone is noticing.

The creative, and often illegal act, is made public and is housed safely behind an extensive glass wall, protected like a curio in a cabinet and guarded from would be vandals. The NGV Studio space is at one of the entrances to the Atrium and the public walking past are restaurant and bar goers, families with young children from the NGV Kids Corner, Gallery hoppers and attendees to events for both the L’Oreal Fashion week and Multicultural Arts Victoria which are also being hosted on Federation Square; a mass of the general public are being made privy to a usually secret practice that would ordinarily be carried out under under the dark cover of night and, by our current laws, illegally.

The public creative act is intriguing to the general public and they come forward to comment on the skill and technique of the artists as it occurs live in front of them. The public witness images and colours coming forward out of the void of a blank wall. The artists purposeful actions and deft movements become a form of calligraphic magic, an aesthetic alchemy and the audience in turn turns the creative act into a performative one. (1)

The creative act also becomes one of unintentional performance, especially in such a public space. A crowd grows and they admire a silent visual song with their eyes, completely unknown to the performers who have their backs to the viewing public as they work, however their unseeing 2D creation, no longer an abyss, stares back. (2)

The SDM crew are subtly educating the viewer about graffiti history by a painting all the pieces with a set colour scheme in their own individual styles, a technique utilised by the first crews in New York during the modern birth of graffiti in the 1970’s so that allegiances could be identified regardless of where, geographically in the city, a piece was sprayed. The traditional uniformity is a nod to the both the American and Australian grandfathers of aerosol.

For many members of the public, graffiti is associated with illegal vandalism, so for those rubbernecking as they walk by, there is an interest in the illegal and suggested excitement and danger that is implied within graffiti culture. Within the gallery context however, all elements of danger are removed: OHS is adhered to, a guard sits watch over the graffiti artists and protects them as gallery contractors while they work, there isn’t even the risk or aerosol or paint fume inhalation thanks to multiple industrial exhaust fans. The dichotomies and contradictions of a traditional subversive art form within the framework of the state gallery are evident, and I think that this fact is half of the appeal. I can’t decide out if this is a house pet posing as a predator or vice versa. (3)

In many ways this is also the performance of postmodernity sandwiching historically high and low brow art forms together and as Debord predicted, like any spectacle, the public are eating it up. (4)

(1) “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” –Marcel Duchamp

(2) “If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

(3) "Forget her, she's a predator posing as a house pet." - Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Fight Club’.

(4) The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle), Guy Debord, 1967

Note: no apologies for the appalling lack of order among the citations and thankyou to David Hurlston for the conversation.

REVIEW: The Sun Room- Viv Miller

Light is crucial to our existence, in many ways. Its metaphorical associations encourage higher evolved inquisitive thinking and moralistic behaviour, its warmth is integral to our biological existence, it enables sight and vision. The sun which our dear planet revolves around is the sole source and deliverer of our planets life giving and vision enabling light.

In the 17th Century the nature of light was debated fiercely by Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton; Newton believed that light consisted of particles and Huygens believed that light consisted of waves. Eveventually this was nullified with the introduction of a new theory: wave-particle duality.

Huygens and Newtons initial argument spawned centuries of research and work conducted by physicists, including Einstein, that has helped form the current scientific theory that all particles, not just light, also have a wave nature, and vice versa.

Viv Millers recent paintings hone in on the dual wave-particle phenomena of light. The exhibition is aptly named ‘The Sun Room’ and each work within contains a blazing re-envisioning of the our closest stars radiant power. Light streams from the white-hot orb in expanding serpentine tentacles of radiation and simultaneously dotted in cubic photon packets within our earthly atmosphere.

In some paintings a meagre portion of our planet is represented, the top of a barren hill or a far off oceanic horizon whilst the rest of the picture plane is dominated by the burning celestial force, whilst other works present the viewer with the impossibility of being bathed in the radiative force with an excess of energy exploding across the paintings surface.

See Viv Millers ‘The Sun Room’ before the exhibition finishes on the 2nd of April at Neon Parc.

REVIEW: The Lucky Country- William Mackinnon

As a contemporary painter, Mackinnon has placed what he saw within his painting framework and with the employment of multiple mediums used in a variety of ways; concerns regarding the future conservation of the work have been boldly disbanded in favour of the materials having conceptual value.

William Mackinnon, Kintore ii (Nataa Nungurayi), 2010, acrylic and enamel on linen, 99 x 100cm

Close examination of the artworks surface reveals clever meta-material usage: thick, vertical, blocks of colour are actually strips of fluoro painters tape adhered to the canvas amongst the layers of paint and the red, dusty ground has been painted with ochre from the earth, a natural pigment used for traditional paintings by indigenous people of the area.

William Mackinnon, Happy and sad (Johnny and Walangkura), 2011, acrylic, oil and enamel on linen, 99 x 120 cm

There is strength in Mackinnons work in his ability to flex and adjust his style into a custom, malleable mould for his subject matter to sit within rather than altering reality to fit his style. Unlike Fred Williams whom captured the literal landscape, Mackinnon boldly aims to depict the psychic and social landscapes as well as the physical country and environment of the Kimberley.

REVIEW: House Me Within a Geometric Quality- Platform

‘House Me Within a Geometric Quality’ is a group exhibition curated by Patrice Sharkey at Platform featuring Liang Luscombe, Antonia Sellback, Esther Stewart, and Masato Takasaka.

This exhibition is a real credit to Sharkey’s casting as a curator, especially for calling Takasaka on board. Not only does Takasaka have an art-boner for edges and corners in his own work but his contribution for ‘HMWaGQ’ has been to bring together the work of almost 40 more artists from the ‘Everything Always All Ready-Made Wannabe Studio Masatotectures Museum of Found Refractions 1994-2011’, or in other words: it’s Takasaka’s own personal stash, a collection of work with ‘geometric qualities’ that Takasaka has gathered together from other artists since 1994.

With this mass of work Takasaka has transformed the rectangular Platform window boxes into wonder chambers built into the wall, each one a sonnet, or a hidden cave wall shrine, dedicated to the glory of the holy trinity, 'colour, shape and form', visually sung by a chorus of artists.

With photography used in advertising and hours spent screen gazing online, we are bombarded by images that contain clearly recognisable subject matter, and with the recent addition of 3-D technology to personal video and visual-based electronics, the representational just got a little more real. Colour, shape and form may be the building blocks that form the images we see but they are rarely celebrated in their own right.

‘House Me Within a Geometric Quality’ puts colour, shape and form at the fore and focuses on them as the subject matter as opposed to them being secondary, as components of an image that is representational of the real as they so commonly are.

REVIEW: Goblin- Grant Nimmo and Adam John Cullen

After seeing Grant Nimmo and Adam John Cullen’s ‘Goblin’ at TCB and realising the work was based on fluke similarities and meaning born from the unplanned meeting of phenomena/forces/objects/bodies/thoughts/etcetera I decided to google the main idea of everything being connected, followed by a ‘man’ for good measure, because, like, that’s the way that clichéd and stereotyped hippies who believe in such concepts talk, man.

Goblin (exhibition view)

The very first result from searching ‘everything’s connected, man’ was an article titled with virtually the same phrase from a sustainability site (2), and as with everything on the internet, the main protagonists are cats (coincidence?).

In the 1950’s Borneo was plagued by malaria, so they called up the friendly folks at World Health Organisation who recommended they cover the island with DDT. Sure enough all the mosquitoes carrying and spreading the malaria died but so did all the other insects, including the wasps which’d usually eat the caterpillars that’d consumed the thatched roofs of the locals.

All the lizards that lived on the island dosed up fairly highly on the DDT as well, which caused the cats that, ate the poisoned lizards to die. With the cats out of the way the rats saw their chance to rise up, overpopulate and begin spreading septicemic plague. Goodbye malaria, hello plague.

The World Health Organisation decided the cure to Borneo’s septicemic plague being spread by rats by using the Royal Air Force to parachute live cats in with ‘Operation: Cat Drop’. Oddly enough, despite happening over nine thousand years before the beginning of the interwebz, the very true tale mirrors the fictional, and lulzworthy (2), worlds that exist in lolcat image macros (parashoot kat: i kan haz plague ratz naow?).

‘Goblin’ encompasses all of these ideals: death, humour, cuddly animals, bright colours, chance juxtaposition and visual puns. The work has been created with the recognition that the chaos governing much of fate can often be interpreted in multiple ways, sometimes with acerbic irreverent humor that could see even the most stoic soul turn maudlin: the bones of the dead are decorated with thick coats of desecrating spray paint, corpses are hung on fences in positions to mimic a cheerful or celebratory high-five with plush children's toys and collaboration between Nimmo and Cullen means organising images of what was once pornography alongside photographs of endangered species and popular 1980's action film icons.

Goblin tears up conventional associations until April 2nd at TCB gallery.

(1) http://www.jacqueslecavalier.com/like-everythings-connected-man/

(2) Lulz: Beginning as a plural variant of ‘lol’, ‘Lulz’ was originally an exclamation but is now often just used as a noun meaning interesting or funny internet content- Encyclopedia Dramatica

art crush- Matte Stephens

Matte Stephens is a genuine cool cat. He lives and breathes the aesthetics of an era past. His practice isn't just a facsimile of prior culture, but a continuation. His home is adorned with classically cool designed furniture: an Eames folding table, Knoll Saarinen tulip chairs, and a Nelson ceramic clock, that are all living out the rest of their days contentedly in functional usage instead of being stored or on display. Stephens doesn’t just talk the talk or walk the walk: he lives the life.

Matt Stephens, 'Adventurer's Club', Gouache on Panel

Matte Stephens will be exhibiting in Sydney and Perth at Outre Gallery in March and I’m sure he’ll find our Australia to be an exuberant cornucopia of inspiring architecture, design and culture.

Our Australian culture is an absurd symbiotic mash-up of differing traditions because of a blend of multicultural influences and our cities are strange combinations of architectural styles and opposing theories of design all coexisting: where else in the world can you walk a city block and stroll past buildings dressed in Art Deco, Modernist, Nouveau, Baroque whilst passing a woman in a fluorescent Indian sari, a business man busy on his laptop at a bus stop donning vintage Reebok pump hi-tops and a troupe of eccentrically clothed Asian girls that look like they’ve teleported in from Harajuku milling at a Belgian waffle stand?

Matte Stephens, 'Patrons were surprised to find a giant snail in the main gallery of the National Arts Club', Gouache on Panel

This kind of reality constructed from multiple juxtapositions, features heavily in Matte Stephens work: a giant snail surprises visitors at the National Arts Club and a Cat named Irving who has a penchant for bowties and monocles contemplates the nature of human consciousness which manifests as multicoloured triangular hive-forms.

Matte Stephens, 'Irving ponders the nature of consciousness', Gouache on Panel

I’d love to be captured and mythologised in a Stephens pastel gouache noir portrait: my existence reduced to soft-coloured bliss whilst featuring my own eccentricities and personality quirks.

Stephens work isn’t ‘nostalgia’ based, its ‘now-stalgia’.

LINKS:

Matte Stephens at Outre:
http://www.outregallery.com/browse.aspx?Category=292

Matte Stephens:
http://www.matteart.net/matte_stephens.html

Best On The Net

So there I was trawlling through a gazillion lousy art review websites at night and I came across this gem:

http://tiny.cc/blin0

ENJOY!

art crush- Roseline Rannoch

REVIEW: Crystals of the Colossus- Shida

Shida drops a new mythology in his painted works. A mythology of men as their own demons, warriors, made in the image of their gods. His exhibition ‘Crystals of the Colossus’ at Until Never read like one the the original Grimm Brothers Fairytales: characters with beautiful facades that mask a faintly visible grotesqueness. Their flesh is brightly coloured, evoking a sense of nymph-like magic and goodwill, yet their faces bare smiles of triangular sharpened teeth and eyes that glow maniacally.

These protagonists and antagonists, each a glossy illuminated yin or yang, appear both ancient and futuristic. Their large skulls and elvish ears are equal parts science fiction and medieval fantasy. Shidas subjects athletic bodies are gracefully posed, articulating joints and often simulating movement.

Some images appear to be direct references to very specific folklore, such as St George and the Dragon (above),

whilst within other paintings Shidas characters seem to reflect the poses and atmosphere of works from history’s greatest artists, such as Picassos Young Ladies of Avignon crossed with the composition of a playboy bunny pillow fight (above) which ends up being an uncomfortable flaunting of female nakedness because of its visual distance from realism.

Check out Shidas work from Crystals of the Colossus at: http://www.untilnever.net/projects/crystals-colossus

art crush- Taylor Baldwin

REVIEW: Agvas De Marco- Dylan Martorell

Nothing ever dies. I once heard a metaphor that explained the idea of nothing ever really dying by likening living organisms to hippy communes. All the cells, nutrients and biological building blocks that belong t a living organism are the members of that hippy community. They all share the same vision and ethos. They are dedicated to its ongoing survival. They procreate. They, the members (the cells) of the commune (the living organism) call in help when it’s needed (eating, drinking, medicine). Later, much later, when the organism dies and begins to decay, the members that it consists of shake hands and part ways. They might join another organism. Or they might fossilise.

Evolution is biological jerry rigging. Martorell uses jerry rigging as a construction technique in order to create a bright coloured, plastic arte-povera yacht titled ‘The Raelian Kraal’. Old and broken objects have become reused and replaced, in order to keep their new collective form, The Raelian Kraal, in complete working order.

Martorell’s plastic arte-povera constructions have function, unlike many other artists whom also utilise societies plastic detritus as an artistic medium. His works are different and disparate objects collaged into new functioning forms. The objects are united in their collective function, even if the new function of the unified group wasn’t necessarily the original function of the individual objects before they were assimilated.

This idea of ‘functional unity’ is not missed by Martorell who has also included a social and relational element to Agvas De Marco. Throughout the exhibition Martorell has invited different groups of people to conduct discussions, musical performances and workshops. These groups of people can be seen as ‘relational collages’ or ‘social collectives’, and are similar in their functional unity to the objects that compose The Raelian Kraal. For a complete list of events and gigs check the online schedule at http://raeliankraal.blogspot.com.

The Raelian Kraal will have its water launch in late March.

Fluid Intelligence, A Clockwork Orange, Leet and the Evolution of Thought.

The first time I read A Clockwork Orange I found Alex’s Nadsat language annoying. Annoying enough to give up reading it, and for good reason: it’s a composite of altered Slavic and Russian words, rhyme, out-dated language (which to me was out-out-dated because it was written 22 years before I was born) as well as Burgess throwing in his own number of created words.

It wasn’t until I’d se3n Kubrick’s film adaptation that Nadsat made any s3nse: it needed to be heard, and seen in context. I hon3stly wonder3d how people had und3rstood the book at all before the film had be3n made. How could p3ople compreh3nd the d3ad symbols and signs on the pag3?

Fluid Intelligence is th3 nam3 given to the ability to b3 abl3 to le4rn through patt3rn recognition and probl3m solving; b3ing able to adjust thinking and cognitiv3ly ad4pt, a kind of perp3tu4lly adv4ncing st4t3 of m3ntal evolution. The dust j4ck3t of th3 first edition of A Clockwork Or4nge f3atur3d ev3ry l3tt3r of th3 titl3 print3d in a diff3rent font, an 4ctive if not simplifi3d ex4mpl3 of th3 ad4ptive thinking m3thod th4t would b3 r3quir3d of th3 r34d3r w4s right th3r3 on th3 cov3r.

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art crush- Derek Weisberg

art crush- Carson Fisk-Vittori

Writing About Writing About Art.

I like art and I like words, on all levels: creating, experiencing and thinking about them. Its difficult to say if one is better than the other, that would be like comparing an apple to a pear; they are just different. My preference see-saws between the two.

Sometimes I like words more than art because they have the potential to be more utilitarian, it don't have all these needless, superfluous decorations and images to beautify the ideas like art. This is only a thought I have occasionally, of course because I also relish in vapidly illustrative forms, like artwork on kitsch home wares and common culture tee shirt image designs. On my days of loving words and their simplicity that trumps visual art by in terms of communicating ideas, I usually eat simply also, taking pleasure in bread, butter and water, and prefer to walk places rather than catch trams for destinations a short distance away.

Its difficult to choose what format the writing will take. I could revel in sarcasm, hiding big concepts behind juvenile bravado, but does anyone take that seriously? Will the distance between myself, the writer and the audience cause them to think I'm a fool as opposed to just posing as a fool? If I write too seriously, too academically, I feel fake. A fraud dressing up words in sheep's clothing. As you can see I've never been very good at mixing my metaphors. That path in between entertaining and intelligent when writing is not an easy one to navigate.

One desire I have when writing is to match the form of my writing to the subject matter, for example: when I'm writing about a repitition, I'm tempted to follow suit and write in a repetitive fashion. On one occasion I was writing about how art academia can be needlessly complex and I had to fight the urge to write in an overly complicated, convoluted way. Needless to say I still feel a twinge of desire to write the word 'write' a lot.

Truth of the matter is that most big art ideas or concepts can usually be described in plain English with just a word or a sentence, and this isn't a failing of the art works ability to be conceptually rich and complex, but more of an achievement of language and human understanding, for example, 'relational aesthetics is just art that uses people and human interaction and that (the actual actions between people) or the documentation of the interaction as the art', 'post structuralism is the super melding of everything because the structures and hierarchy of different subject matter no longer exist', 'Romeo and Juliet is about a love so great that not even life is worth living without it' and 'Mash-ups are musical collages'. Complex can be made simple quite easily.

Blogs are notorious for being opinionated, but, I don't think I've ever read a newspaper article wasn't opinionated also. Its what we do as human beings when we communicate.

The biggest problem is that the author knows their own thoughts and opinions, whereby which they have little value to the author because they are common, so the difficult part is the justification of writing and recording thoughts to be transmitted to others. I end up evoking one part of the spirits of dead punk rockers and one part of Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox and just screaming 'Cuss it! I'll write what I want! Whoever has a problem with it: cuss them!'. Every piece of writing written about writing about art should end with both a reference to punk ideology and a Wes Anderson film. You can't get more opinionated than that.

ARTICLE: Radiohead are The King of Limbs

Two days ago saw the online release of Radioheads eighth album The King of Limbs. Radiohead have never been pop-performers, and if that is what you expect, then you haven't listened to much Radiohead. One online reviewer described as being 'like Radiohead, but with none of the catchy parts'. Personally I don't think fans will be disappointed, Thom Yorkes sliding vocals feature and his mastery of a far reaching vocal range is evident as he supports a much more percussively sounding Radiohead than there has been before. For the most part it seems to have been very well received by fans and critics, scoring around 8/10 on most websites, however, this is not an album review.

What caught my attention was Radioheads strategy for releasing the album, which they plan to release in three stages. The first release of The King of Limbs was two days ago, online, a clear pronouncement of Radioheads ability to keep abreast of the way music is currently being sourced, shared and experienced. The second release date will be for an actual physical CD version of the album a little over a month later on March 28th. The real crowd pleaser, and the main reason for this article, will be the third release of the album: the 'newspaper' edition.

The 'newspaper' edition will include 'two 10 inch vinyl records, in a special record sleeve many large sheets of artwork, 625 include tiny pieces of artwork, a compact disc, and a colour piece of oxo-degradable plastic package'(1). In a world in which media, both video and audio, is becoming ever increasingly digital and intangible, this is an amazing act of generosity through production. The sheer amount of physical collateral that will no doubt surround and conceptually support what Radiohead have created musically with the album.

The obscure title has been rumored to refer to an ancient oak tree, I foresaw, like Lovecraft, visions of the dark lord Cthulhu and many limbed cephalopod-like sentries. The album artwork could be read in this way quite easily as could elements of the music: the dominate percussion in parts shares similarities with the drumming of a tribal ritual, Yorkes own vocals "I’m moving out of orbit, turning in somersaults" sound like the articulation of Lovecraftian travel between our world and the dimension of the Great, Dark, Old Ones. Yorkes dance moves in the music video for 'Lotus Flower' are extremely energetic and erratic, making it easy to imagine a fit or demonic possession as he sings “I will sink and I will disappear/I will slip into the groove and cut me up and cut me up.”

I for one am enjoying the new album and my well-whetted appetite is keen to see how this new direction for the band brews and ferments over time.

For a more detailed and extensive album review check out Greg Kots review on 'Turn It Up' (http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2011/02/album-review-radiohead-king-of-limbs.html).

(1) Swash, Rosie (14 February 2010), 'Radiohead to release new album this Saturday', The Guardian (London)

art crush- Anton Henning

Anton Henning, Film Noir