A Love Song study
I have a sunrise that is not real, but also, not fake
Documentation of my work, I have a sunrise that is not real, but also, not fake, installed at West Space in Melbourne, which ran 28th October through to the 19th November 2011, in the SuperKaleidoscope curated Spectacle/Obstacle.
I Am What I Play
Collaboration with Marian Tubbs for the Sydney Fringe Festival event I Am What I Play held at the Cell Block theatre, National Art School Sydney, October 2011.
ROCK MY WORLD
Sneak preview from Das Superpaper Issue 22 (out March 2012)
Curated by SuperKaleidoscope
View at Das Platforms
The Das Platforms website is up, and the Spectacle/Obstacle review from April’s Firstdraft show on Das 500 now has a URL. It is pasted below.
Sincerity
Michaela Gleave (2011) Image courtesy the artist
Spectacle/ Obstacle
Spectacle/ Obstacle
Firstdraft, Sydney, 27 April – 15 May 2011
To get the best vista, you would stand across the road in Prince Alfred Park before entering Firstdraft, witnessing a golden radiance shimmering forth from the window, drawing you inside with its warmth, light and promise of magical things.
Up close: the ripple of Rebecca Bauerman’s Untitled Cascade is created by a portable fan turning its head this way and that, creating a Mexican wave of long gold tinselly strands. The magic ebbs out, replaced with banality that the hum of a fan signifies. It’s glitzy sure – in the spirit of a mid-year dance concert.
Like me, you might be one of those people for whom technology holds a mysterious aura. Even if this technology is a circa 1980s SONY television with an electric charge that you can wave over the screen, the resulting pretty sounds and colours may still elicit a response like that of the intrepid journeyers who trembled before the plumes of smoke and fireballs that was the Great and Powerful Oz. The more time spent with Pia Van Gelder’s Video Bells the more you can see what’s going on behind the curtain.
I won’t argue whether this was right or not: on opening night, an audience member lit one of the artworks on fire. I admit, standing in front of the word SINCERITY spelt out in sparklers in the wall – I felt like doing the same. You would not have this option later on because the remaining sparklers have been removed, burnt, and returned to the wall as bent and bubbly black sticks. A fire extinguisher has been placed nearby as reminder and the original damage stands as testament to the event. AM also deals in traces, but while Michaela Gleave’s Sincerity starts with an evocation of ‘truth’ and later exists as the eftermaele[1] of an event, Justin Balmain’s work invokes a double fraud. His subject is the superficial and drug skewed world of nightclubbing. His installation transposes a staged destructive aftermath into the gallery.
Is a spectacle an obstacle, obstructing because it distracts? InUniverse from curators SuperKaleidoscope we are again to be wowed with cheap tricks, mirrors and lights throwing a starry sky into the floor and through the wall. A portrait of an astronaut adorned with medals sits above the construction. Looking to space as our final frontier and dreaming of infinity surely distracts from the here and now.
Fallacy may be assumed in any display of spectacle, and perhaps similarly the tendency of a metaphor is to replace the actuality of both what it describes and the thing invoked to describe it. Greta Alfaro’s video In Ictu Oculi shows what may be lost when invoking tropes of all that is vulturine, vulturous, vulturish. For me, this figure of speech has never described the funny hoppy action these birds use to get across the ground, a subdued social atmosphere, caution in approaching a feed, or even a magnificent wingspan. This video is still highly staged; raw meat is hidden under a dinner party setting and the microphone at the table emphasises the clattering of cutlery and crockery over the vulturine sounds. Here In Ictu Oculi, and the show as a whole reveal that there are different levels of truth.
Exhibiting artists: Justin Balmain, Rebecca Baumann, Michaela Gleave and Pia Van Gelder, Greta Alfaro.
Curated by Kim Fasher and Sarah Mosca for SuperKaleidoscopeas part of the Firstdraft emerging curators program.
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[1] For Eugenio Barba, “that which is said afterwards”, particularly of performance.
West Space
Spectacle Obstacle
Group exhibition by curatorial collective SuperKaleidoscope
28 OCT 2011 – 19 NOV 2011 · WEST SPACE · GALLERY 1
OPENING: THURSDAY 27 OCTOBER 2011 6-8PM
Gallery link here
SuperKaleidoscope examines the brighter and darker facets of spectacle. Spectacle Obstacle explores the way artists deal with the concepts of spectacle and optimism through installation, video and sound. Threads that will be explored include the origins of the spectacle as a captivating event, the spectacular versus the real and the spectacle as a means of capturing sensations of joy and delight.
Rebecca Baumann’s work encourages the spectacle in a poetic pursuit to manufacture a single joyous moment. Similarly, Michaela Gleave attempts to create a sensory spectacle in order to invoke a child-like sense of delight in the viewer. Justin Balmain creates an environment of visual destruction, the chaos of the aftermath of an event being the spectacle. Tim Brunige’s sound works and video sequences draw the audience into immersive landscapes. Using everyday objects, Pia Van Gelder is an inventor, transforming found materials and combining them with electricity to create the spectacle of an orchestra of technology.
The Paper Mill
I have some works works in the group show As It Stands at The Paper Mill, co-curated by Sian McIntyre, Aaron Anderson and Christopher Hodge.
On until the 1st October.
Spectacle/Obstacle living The Art Life
This article was originally posted on The Art Life on the 6th May 2011, and is republished here purely for educational purposes relating to my current MFA candidature at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney. I would like to thank the author, Meredith Birrell, for taking the time to explore the exhibition and for her review.
Meredith Birrell takes a peek behind the curtain…
You might be mistaken in thinking the art world has gone in for some cheap and tawdry entertainment at Firstdraft if you just looked in the front window. Inside a gold tinsel curtain shimmers provocatively. Part of Firstdraft’s emerging curator’s program, SPECTACLE/OBSTACLE is a group show that features installations, kinetic sculpture, video and photography. Yet it’s really the invitation to peer behind the glittering façade of the spectacle to the emptiness or ugliness beyond that is the serious business of this show. With such a theme, it might be tempting to take a bombastic standpoint, yet it is incredibly restrained and its logical flow-through allows for breathing space where conversations start to reverberate between works.
Gallery Installation (clockwise) SuperKaleidoscope, Universe, 2011, Mixed media, dimensions variable. Rebecca Baumann, Untitled, Cascade, 2010, Tinsel curtain, fan, 1.2k Selecon zoomspot
Pia van Gelder, Video Bells – Rimington Scales, 2011, Interactive 6 channel audio video installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artists. Photography: Craig Bender
Rebecca Baumann’s glittering Untitled, Cascade marks the entry to the exhibition and functions as both a stage curtain and an obstacle. Do you burst through the middle or edge around the side? Its sense of fun sets a positive tone for the show, but it also makes one’s visceral responses an acutely self-conscious process. The viewer is now the participant. Perceiving is an active process, both in a phenomenological sense but also in the context of post-structuralist theory, where ideas of authorship and hierarchies of meaning (from artist down to audience) have been undone. As co-curators Sarah Mosca and Kim Fasher explain in their catalogue essay, “ the spectator is constantly observing, selecting, comparing and interpreting.” The works in this show demand audience participation. It is, after all, the audience for whom the spectacle exists, without one it loses all meaning.
Justin Balmain, AM.
Mixed media, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of artist. Photography: Craig Bender
In Justin Balmain’s installation, AM, a deconstructed memorial to deceased New York DJ, DJ AM, stands for the post-spectacle, the post-event, the death of the performance and performer. On learning of the passing of this popular cult figure online, Justin’s response was to make something that looked at the unpleasant side of celebrity culture. He first made the work in 2009 and has re-worked it for this show. When the lights go up and destroy the beautiful fantasy of the club environment, what is left, says Justin, are the “cigarette butts…passed out drunk people, people coming down, and the detritus of the night.” (via email, 2/5/11).
There is a kind of denial here too, for even as we see this ugliness, it is the beauty of the event that stays in our memory and the fantasy of celebrity lives on for the fans despite the observance of its dark underbelly. This refusal to see the darkness is underscored by the obstructing black mirrored wall that fronts and ‘props up’ Justin’s installation, an obstruction to our perception, but critical to the whole function of the spectacle. It is all façade and surface. The morning after, with all its destroyed artifacts and tackiness is a metaphor that functions here on several levels.
The penultimate spectacle, deep space, is explored in the collaborative piece by SuperKaleidoscope, Universe. Like a seventeenth century Dutch perspective box, the content is concealed in a wooden structure and can only be seen from each side, for which you have to get down on the floor to access. Yet the interior rewards with manifold reflections and perspectives created by mirrors, commenting on states beyond the tangible. I find a direct link between those golden age Dutch painters and their sophisticated visual puns and these artist’s reflections on pictorial flatness and depth, real and virtual space and the impossibility of a genuine representation of anything.
Michaela Gleave, Sincerity.
Sparklers and paint, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of artist. Photography: Craig Bender
Our powers of imagination and recall are required for Michaela Gleave’s work, Sincerity, where the title word is spelled out in sparklers on a mustard yellow wall. Again, Michaela forces us to question the genuineness of what we observe. It is an often touted view that ‘true’ meaning lies behind the presented mask, of our personas or of art, but there is just as strong an argument to be made for the locus of meaning to be right on the surface and that the distinction between false façade and inner truth is actually a false one. These questions have no definitive answers and this work opens up this conversation. On opening night when I was there, the question on everyone’s lips was, will the sparklers be lit? In a surprising twist and against the gallery’s initial intentions, the work was set alight and we all had to evacuate because of the smoke! In this way, the work became an even greater spectacle, just not the one everyone had probably imagined. Like Yves Klein’s 1957 work One Minute Fire Painting, in which 16 firecrackers were set alight in a blue panel, it is the transitory nature of the spectacle and the powerful memory it evokes that are critical to its meaning.
Artists from as far back as the mid nineteenth century talked about the spectacle as a paradigm of modern life, in which our senses are constantly dazzled by the array of diversions in the newly industrialised, urban word. This sensory overload has surely grown, especially since the advent of the internet. One of the questions this exhibition asks is, what are our blockages as perceivers and receivers of information? This exhibition interrogates our relationship with the spectacle – as relevant today as ever – not with the aim of finding answers, but more likely, of finding more questions.
SPECTACLE/OBSTACLE
Firstdraft Gallery, until May 15th
Greta Alfaro, Justin Balmain, Rebecca Baumann,
Michaela Gleave, Pia Van Gelder
Curated by SuperKaleidoscope
Photography: Craig Bender
Firstdraft Emerging Curators Program
Upcoming April-May 2011 exhibition that I am included in at Firstdraft, curated by Kim Fasher and Sarah Mosca at SuperKaleidoscope.
SuperKaleidoscope http://www.superkaleidoscope.com/current-projects.php
A Room for Emma Goldman
Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian
I would especially like to thank Sevak Dilanchian, Kim Fasher, Sarah Mosca, SuperKaleidoscope, and the National Art School Sydney for their help, support, encouragement and love. Thanks Y’all.
This recent work, A Room for Emma Goldman, is one I had been thinking of for some time now, and had the opportunity to realize for the occasion of the SuperKaleidoscope ‘Featured Artist’ page for november 2010. Upon that page is text written by myself, and a bio put together by Sarah Mosca, along with some imagery of the installation. For this (fuck you image) post the aim is to go into the ideas behind the work in some more depth outside of the SuperKaleidoscope site, which can be viewed here.
I’ve always considered this work (the initial idea at least) best functioning as a duality, a contradiction, between what one is viewing, through the projection, to what one is potentially hearing via the headphones. In this work, the audio is the image maker, being facilitated through an Apple iTunes visualizer setting, using the Fountain Music plug-in as a means to generate imagery through the sound as it is played through iTunes.
This particular plug-in was chosen purely for its visual qualities. I really wanted to produce imagery that was alluring and beautiful, that generated a visual form to function as something inducive of a certain state. Here, the state I was after was one of bliss, akin to the transcendent aims of psychedelia and mysticism. This becomes the platform to create a shock between how the actual imagery appears, and the vehicle which gives that imagery its form.
iTunes functions well as the location for the audio, and the projection through the visualizer as it adequately facilitated my purpose as a means to bring together the visual, with the aural, components of the work. The aim was to give form, through a visual language, to the text of Emma Goldman.
This visual element becomes duplicitous, determinate on the viewers level of interaction with the work, through the audio text streamed within the headphones. The audio within the installation, that facilitates the generation of imagery through the iTunes application visualizer, is a reading of Emma Goldman’s 1927 book Anarchism and Other Essays (available through LibriVox). Here, then, arises a contradiction between the ‘blissed out’ intent of the imagery, and the content that allows that imagery to become manifest. I was very much interested in the possibility for the negation of a visual state, or experience, upon contact with the means that allowed the illumination to become manifest.
With the headphones positioned with the beanbag’s, the invitation is to become comfortable before the work. Beanbag’s could be understood as a means to relax into a ‘blissed out’ type of space through their cushioning and enveloping of one occupying them. Certainly there is a reference to the Beatnik generation of ‘zoning out’ , facilitated through drugs, music, and psychedelia. On the flip of this, there is action, for it was in fact this generation that articulated the philosophies of people like Emma Goldman through protests, equality, sexual liberation, and destabilization of government. I like also the formal quality of coloured beanbag’s dispersed throughout the room. There is an interconnectivity of people within a space through the form of the beanbag, even though there exists a clear spacial separation between individuals. This is why I was adamant in their usage, even when they proved difficult to obtain and other options were more readily available for the installation.
At some future point I aim to discuss more in-depth the work of Emma Goldman and my interest in the philosophy of Anarchy in the context of what we now view as Subculture. I’m sure there is a dominant cultural thread that I am missing, and everything outside of this is either categorized as “kitsch’, or ‘sub’. Many subcultural groupings that I have experienced clearly have a lineage to the thought and outcomes of Anarchy. Punk is an obvious one, but skateboarding, disco and surfing culture have an invested location within ideas expressed in Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays. Some of these ideas and resulted sociological shifts, are what gives developments like Punk the possibility to exist.
A Room for Emma Goldman is a working project with an intent toward demystifying the stereotype of a male dominant expression of Anarchy, identified through the image of a young man hurling a bomb, crystalized through the May 4, 1886 Haymarket affair, where a pipe bomb was hurled at police, killing an officer. This image served to solidify public resent at the time toward the movement, and help form our (mis) understanding of Anarchist philosophy and action today: namely violence. Emma Goldman was arrested, jailed, deported and persecuted. She was however, often praised and celebrated as an academic and thinker, the outcomes of which are experienced day, and adequately negate the stereotype of Anarchism equating to destruction.
Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian
Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian
Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian
Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian
