Watching and looking

This post is dedicated to J, whom I thank mercifully for reminding me that sometimes people might look at this space (and perhaps want to read something since February)...

Apologies for being tardy - you'll be glad to learn I have renewed determination to have a March listing, if not at least for the sake of a tidy archive list! I am thinking of a litany of excuses I could write here such as: a bout of flu that lasted two weeks and resembled meningitis; being attacked and clawed during a feirce netball match leaving my nose bloddied and missing a few layers of skin; falling from the doctor's bed during a check up and tearing tendons in my hand; limping with a swollen, bruised foot for days after a drunken punter walked across it in stilettos while i diligently worked, moonlighting in a nightclub on the weekend; but it would all sound like such fictitious hoop-la that noone would believe, let alone accept any such drivel as an excuse for my mediocre mood and absence from the computer...

                                     Milk crate hoop, Woolloomooloo, Bliss Jensen

Anyway, back to the matter of looking and watching - I am still on the hunt, to provide Sydney-siders with the most comprehensive digest and 'tour' of milk crates around town (refer earlier post). I thought I'd quickly share this little gem with you. It's worth noting, the nearest basketball court is a good kilometre away at the Cook and Philip Park sports complex where entry fetches a pretty premium so you can enjoy the top of the line equipment. But here in a quiet, leafy Woolloomooloo backstreet, the idea of basketball is democratised and set amongst the rustic charm of the neighbourhood. What I most enjoy about this milk crate is the intended pun. It is fastened to the exterior wall of a great heritage building that also happens to be the local community gymnasium. Remember to always look up!

Corner Dowling and Nicholson streets

Woolloomooloo

Sydney NSW

where on earth is that?

Martin Sharp - Sydney artist

Walking into the exhibition you can’t deny there is an immediate visual impact and WOW factor! Sharpe’s work IS instantly recognisable and from a truly brilliant and original mind.

The accompanying room brochure states this exhibition “shows discerning insight into the man, and social issues of our times...” but I’d disagree that merely hanging pictures ‘salon-style’ upon the walls does no more than illustrate how prolific the artist is, and reading the content of the pictures by themselves merely elaborates the personal taste and passion of the artist. Labels with basic catalogue information certainly do no more to unwrap the artist’s involvement in cultural and political contexts or present any deeper thinking about Sharpe’s involvement in other artistic causes such as the Yellow House.

Once I got over the initial frustration of the lack of interpretation, I could begin to appreciate the 120 paintings, posters and mixed media display for what they were. Perhaps this "art for art’s sake" approach was the basis of the curatorial brief? I did enjoy watching the audio visual of the Tiny Tim world record for professional non-stop singing; it was a classic Sharpe production, highly enjoyable, with 100% wit. Moving on, I came to acknowledge that Sharpe is indeed a Sydney talent worth dedicating and showcasing, but thought that perhaps the curator was hiding behind the glory and talents of this artistic master. In this case, there could have been so much more storytelling, than simply the idea of Sharpe’s work in terms of “the medium is the message”. Just because there was so much pop culture material and references surely doesn't mean it is not worthy of a few digestive words here or there? I felt that there was a certain amount of curatorial laziness in cobbling together a bunch of disparate media, that was this exhibition. Surely just delving into a couple of what may be hundreds of amazing personal stories about Martin Sharpe “the artist” could have brought a sense of life to this immense body of work.

Highlights included: Patrick White’s Signal Driver Belvoir st theatre poster 1980s, Sideshow in Burlesco, Nimrod theatre poster 1979, Eternity haymarket acrylic on board 1981 and David Gulpilil in The Thousand Dollar Bill painting 2002-2009, but overall the experience left me disappointed. If only the curator was as much a talented, artistic, individual thinker and activist as Martin Sharpe.

Ho-hum....

Museum of Sydney
Corner Bridge and Phillip St,
Sydney, NSW 2000
Saturday 31 October 2009 — Sunday 14 March 2010
9.30 – 5pm daily
$10 adults, $5, concession/child, family $20, members free

Femme Fatale: The female criminal

“As a double exception, the criminal woman is a true monster. Criminals are an exception in people and women are an exception among criminals.” I was really drawn to this quote at the beginning of the exhibition, probably because the statement illustrates attitudes of a time gone by so well and also cleverly introduces the provocative curatorial direction of the Femme Fatale exhibition.

This show takes a close look at women and crime in Australia from the convict era through the booming years of the infamous inner city Razor gangs of 1920s Sydney. It is a relatively small exhibition space but is absolutely crammed with fascinating historical artefacts and other objects, multimedia and pop-culture memorabilia. The content comes together to paint a vivid picture of the female as the screen siren, the comic vixen and the temptress and seductress of detective stories as well as the revengeful wife, murderous lover and underprivileged opportunist. The exhibition cleverly exemplifies how beliefs about wicked women are cross-cultural and have evolved from archetypal stories of Eve, Medusa and Witches, transcending myth over time, to be embedded in our popular consciousness today.

Don’t let the content of psychopathic murderers, incarcerated criminals, violent offenders, prostitution, sly grogging and stark criminal records with photographic evidence deter you from seeing this exhibition. It is a classy and sassy romp through culture and Sydney’s dark past, injected with just as much humour as there is chill-factor!


7 March, 2009 - 18 April 2010
Weekends 10-5 (booked school groups during the week only)
Closed Good Friday and Christmas day
Adult $8, child/concession $4, members free

Justice & Police Museum
Corner Albert and Phillip Streets
Circular Quay NSW 2001
http://www.hht.net.au/museums/justice_and_police_museum

Brett Whiteley Studio – Iconic Whiteley

Another hidden treasure of inner Sydney, the Brett Whiteley studio is a source for endless inspiration. If you have been living under a rock the past century and do not know who Brett Whiteley is to the Australian art scene, then this exhibition is for you. It is a survey of the many decades of Whiteley’s career from his lesser known work of his late teens and early twenties including landscape abstraction, Christie, and Zoo series, through to his popular Lavender Bay, Paris and Bird series.

The exhibition includes 33 paintings in the downstairs gallery including the self-portrait masterpieces that won him the Archibald Prize on more than one occasion and over half a dozen mixed media assemblages creating a smaller but dynamic and also significant survey of Whitley sculpture.

One of my favourite pieces would have to be the large canvas after French inspiration, titled Fifteen great dog pisses of Paris, 1989, hanging in the upstairs studio lounge. It is a large perspective view of the banks of the Seine with ominous patches intermittently staining the walls, distracting from the majestic, painterly view and upsetting the overall romantic oeuvre that has been recreated. To me this picture is true Whiteley slapping the viewer in the face with his warped and overtly subversive take on the world.

While, you couldn’t ever call Whiteley’s paintings ”pretty” , there is a world of beauty and seduction in his fluid lines, gestural brushwork and bright hued compositions, as there is humour. The unfinished six panel board upstairs in the studio is as fresh, interesting and whimsical today as the day it was left unfinished due to his tragic death in 1992. The studio itself is somewhat of a shrine to the artist with every accoutrement left in situ; the library of books, paints, bed, home furnishings, wall quotes, newspaper clippings and graffiti; giving a spooky sense the artist is still at work. Overall the environment of the studio is crammed with the back story of whitely. It’s worth picking up the old black telephone and listening in on the Andrew Olley interview, where you get a tangible sense of who the artist was and what made him tick. There is a candid discussion about Brett’s battle with drug addiction which perhaps plays a vital part in both the artist’s accomplishments and demise.

There is no denying Brett whitely has left a massive mark on Australian art, a legacy that continues to foster other artists’ talents through the Whitely Travelling Art Scholarship today.

The smaller changing upstairs exhibit of the annual prize this year displays the winner, Nicole Kelly. Her painterly freedom and lavish paint application creates modern and abstract landscapes “without baggage and clutter for the past” (as Whiteley himself would put it). For Whiteley, Abstraction was “Liberating... There is a freedom of mass, line and tone. A sensuality with things slightly out of focus”, and for Nicole Kelly this ethos is also strong.

I look forward to the next changing exhibit at the Whiteley Studio so I can return and discover some more hidden gems I missed this time round.



Brett Whiteley Studio
2 Raper St
Surry Hills NSW 2010
(02) 9225 1740
Free admission
10am-4pm Saturday & Sunday
Thursday & Friday booked school groups
12 September – April 2010
http://brettwhiteley.org/

Untitled - Window Box Installation

A collaboration between Mell Kyriakidis, Sven Simulacrum and Michaela Davies at Medium Rare

I never liked Cabbage Patch Dolls so this one made me smile...

I stumbled across this scenic window display while running some errands on the weekend and found the ghoulish toy sacrifice just too sweet, adorable and humorous to ignore adding it to my list of must see neighbourhood treasures. Medium rare is one space, dedicated to the avant-garde, experimental work and the independent arts community, worth following!

12 - 30 December 2009
Free (to look through the window)
Medium Rare Gallery and Studio
70 Regent Street
Redfern NSW 2016
http://www.mediumrare.net.au/

Fashioning Now: Changing the Way We Make and Use Clothes

...well the milk crate is still up in the tree another month later...and I have added no more words to this blog. Now the panic of guilt has made me succumb to beating out an apology to Timo Rissanen... and a heartfelt farewell to an enterprising and great creative thinker!

Timo Rissanen shirt and leggings, image © Silversalt Photography

I was privileged enough to receive an invitation to the University of Technology Sydney VIP fashion shows scheduled as part of the end of year fashion and textile expo of student projects. Visiting UTS I realised this was a HUGE undertaking and the parades were but a small part of an overwhelming display of the State of Design (borrowing the Victorian design festival moniker), promoting the faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, DAB student portfolios for 2009. The parades themselves were seamless in production, exquisitely atmospheric and the ingenuity of the fashion abundant. This made me reflect on the DAB faculty and the creativity I’ve seen there also in a recent exhibition Fashioning Now curated and produced by UTS staff.

The exhibition showed 9 artists under the broad thematic areas of “source, make, use and last”. The overall investigation pulling the artists together was sustainable philosophy and practice in fashion design today. While across all areas of culture we are now coming to debate and investigate sustainable and environmental solutions, I must admit I was sceptical about what the fashion industry was contributing in this area.

Thankfully this exhibition opened my eyes to some ingenious solutions and practices, from polymer research developing biodegradable fabrics, to Timo Rissanen’s perfectly formed “0: waste” philosophy in pattern making. Rissanen’s intricate and spectacular pattern illustrations epitomised the aims and objectives of the exhibition. They spoke a language beyond ‘fashiony’ fashion and more about how a garment holds its intrinsic value through the design and fabrication, utilising every scrap of fabric to prevent landfill waste, as well as encompassing a facility for alteration. Just as Issey Miyake garments stand the test of time, the exhibition promoted the raise en d’être of ‘quality not quantity’ in a number of the displays.
 
Alex Martin, a performance artist, showed another novel approach to anti-waste and an alternative to the high volume turnover in the fashion industry in her ‘Fashion Detox Diet’. Her whimsical project involved wearing a brown dress for all 365 days in the year, a thought provoking response to the throwaway culture of fashion. You can see more about the little brown dress project here.
 
Reflecting on this exhibition and the recent DAB end of year student shows, I look forward to other ground breaking programs from the University of Technology through 2010. Unfortunately (but fortunate for him) Timo Rissanen leaves the UTS to take up a lecturing position with Parsons the New School for Design in New York. His passion, creativity and forward thinking will no doubt be missed in the Sydney fashion and academic circles.
 
Farewell and good luck to a true talent!

UTS Gallery (University of Technology Sydney)
Level 4, 702 Harris Street Ultimo
Monday – Friday 12-6pm
8 July – 28 August 2009
http://www.fashioningnow.com/
Curated by Alison Gwilt and Timo Rissanen
(Design Architecture and Building Faculty) DAB
Exhibition tours to Fremantle Arts Centre mid 2010

Remember to look up!

I was provoked to respond to a freind's blogpost titled "Back from vacation? don't waste a precious clear mind..." (you can read it here)

…hmmm, well, I am in fact back from a break, but, it seems for me, a holiday is more like a lobotomy. My mind is a mere blurry quagmire of mush. I've only just realised September has slipped me by. Insane work deadlines aside, perhaps it is "the melancholy of things complete" that explains my brain slump....Damn you Wittgenstein!

Along with the regular “what day is it?” holiday mentality, I’ve found myself forgetting to pay bills, leaving my mobile phone at home (on more than one occasion), absently walking past the dry-cleaners when there’s two parcels waiting for me and returning from the supermarket with soap instead of toilet tissue!

Has my frenetic daily work routine conditioned me to function as an astutue human being? Are my two jobs, radio show and blogs now an essential part of me subsisting as a “regular schmo” in the real world? Will I ever be able to relax, take time out, switch off and have a holiday ever again – without my sensibilities and entire life falling apart in the process?

I only have one random recollection from September and that is... Remember to look up! You may enjoy some simple pleasure from the weirdness that appears when you gaze above every once in a while. This milk crate, high in a tree kept me smiling and imagining for hours. It appeared in stealth-mode, camouflaged so perfectly against the blue sky and patchy foliage.

Just remember if bills aren't paid and phones are lost there's still worse things that could happen. ...you could be struck by a kamakaze inanimate object at any time.

In a tree - in perpetuity
corner of Crown and Stanley St
Darlinghurst NSW 2010