Tag Archives: Exhibitions

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Finissage der KunstAktienausstellung

Saturday night was the Finissage of the KunstAktienausstellung in Uferhallen. Some hours were spent wandering around the entire Hallen looking at art, trees, clouds.

In the generator hall an installation artist was working on his project for an upcoming exhibition. It is a TARDIS. The hall in itself is vast and high-ceilinged, and the late-evening light sent a warmth and glow through what in winter is as oppositely cold and grim. In this sat a square wooden cube, about the size of a large, high-ceilinged room.

On the far side was something that played such delightful havoc with my perception; a slit perhaps half a meter wide exposing the innards. Whiteness and light so uniformly even and depthless as to confuse me to think I was staring into something infinite. An optical illusion yes, but on a grand scale and one that subtle enough to not be aware of.

The paint was drying and I found, once I entered, that by covering my eyes so as to desensitise them to light, the effect was magnified. As was it by blinking exaggeratedly, or moving around, holding a hand up. I became a little silly in there, once even thumping into a wall I had no idea was so near. Dr Who would love it, I think – though he has his own ‘bigger on the inside’ box.

The photos can’t convey the perceptual weirdness of it, a physical dislocation almost like being drugged, still … photos …

sun in generator hall sun in generator hall

its bigger on the inside its bigger on the inside

uferhallen tardis uferhallen tardis

some clouds, crooked building, ufo some clouds, crooked building, ufo

suspended disc and traveling robot lights suspended disc and traveling robot lights

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Paul Emmanuel – Fleece Paintings

Paul Emmanuel, whom I met in Taipei ages ago, has an exhibition opening in a couple of weeks. Farms, sheep, painting, baaaaaaa!!! (download the pdf here)

paul emmanuel fleece painting

Oriel Myrddin Gallery
8 January – 26 February 2011

Paul Emmanuel’s most recent body of work Fleece Paintings are just that, unrefined sheep fleece onto which the artist has applied variously coloured oil paints.

The fleece is sourced locally from farms surrounding the artist’s studio in the Brecon Beacons and the works themselves are named after each of these farms. The initial inspiration for these works came from the artist noticing scraps of matted fleece in the grass and caught in the barbed wire fencing enclosing the fields around the farm where he lives and works. These paintings are also inspired by the use of sheep marker; different colours daubed directly onto the animals back as a way of delineating one flock from another.

— Oriel Myrddin Gallery

paul emmanuel – fleece painting paul emmanuel – fleece painting

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art sunday

Some rather nice art has fallen my way recently, falling around something that might become abjection. Of course it induces controversy, squeamishness and nervous laughter, the kind that says, ‘I don’t understand this and maybe I don’t want to.”

I wasn’t sure how to write about all this. At first I thought I’d make a separate post for each one, then thought the two exhibitions with trans* people in them should go together, though awkward because of the dogmatic and shrill noise from a couple of trans* blogs. One of the pieces – Buck and Allanah – I discovered on the blog of a trans porn star, which in a roundabout way comes over to alien tentacle rape. To avoid more confusion, I decided to throw it all here.

Emile and I sit somewhere in Berlin talking about art (well, mostly making noises, and sometimes talking about art). Tentacle porn comes up, thinking of Hokusai and my wondering where this might exist now. Emile sends me some links. Genki Genki. I wonder how nice this might be to do while suspended upside down.

I’m not sure when I started reading Danielle Foxx’s blog, but I enjoy rather a lot. A long time ago I wrote about Buck Angel and Allanah Starr making porn. A trans man and a trans woman, both quite huge in the porn world getting it on for the cameras. I thought it was beautiful at the time and still do. Reading Danielle, I find they have been cast in bronze.

Then I discover – same day even – an exhibition by artist Andrea Cano and photographer Manuel Antonio Velandia turning Barbie and Ken into trans* women and men. (The whole thing is more interesting in Spanish, because it got hijacked by a bunch of english-speaking, right-on trans-activists who started out by calling the work a product of straight, cis- fetishists until it turned out Andrea is a trans* woman, so then without missing a beat went on to loudly decry her for stereotyping trans*women as hookers whores and streetwalkers with a plastic surgery obsession. Blah. No wonder I prefer trans* porn to trans* (pseudo) academics.)

I like the statues of Buck and Allanah, part of an exhibition by Marc Quinn. I don’t find his attention to particular bodies so easy to reconcile though, and the gallery statement is a bit awful also. It smacks of sensationalism and gawping idiots, “Looka tha freeeks mama!!!”. But equally, the strident victim speech from some trans* blogs on the Andrea Cano exhibition, the current heavy obsession with trans* guys in the queer scene, along with a not unproblematic indulgence into femme play make it all a bit heavy and burdensome.

Aaahh… problems all around. So.

I think the Genki Genki porn is brilliant, bringing to the world of internet porn a lineage in Japanese and asian art that goes back at least to Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. Buck and Allanah is poignant on its own, but a little empty in a post-Jeff Koons Cicciolina when seen in the milieu of exhibition and gallery. Barbie and Ken, part of Invisibles: Natures transgressive it likewise so. I smile, it makes me happy to see such things at all, but its worth comes more from the weight of theory loaded on to interpret it. And mostly that theory is decidedly lacking, asinine.

In and of itself, the latter two are not especially interesting. What causes such a work like Buck and Allanah to exist in the first place is the profile of their lives as both porn actors and trans*, and how these interact. I was thinking of Jenny Saville’s painting, Passage here. For me also, I find them more interesting as people, and what they publicly say about their identities. Perhaps then this work is something of a public service announcement, or political art in the vein of Jenny Holzer? Hmmm… no.

If they would do a film with Genki Genki, the universe would be perfect.

buck and allanah buck and allanah

invisibles natures transgressive - 1 invisibles natures transgressive – 1

invisibles natures transgressive - 2 invisibles natures transgressive – 2

genki genki - 1 genki genki – 1

genki genki - 2 genki genki – 2

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köpenickenstr wagenburg

I’ll try and remember where I began. It was last night. Was I searching for something for someone? Was I searching for someone? I am with someone in Berlin who is not here, yet follows with me, my aimless trails, and leads me also, because… what do you say of a home you decided to leave? And then through another, newly discovering, find it again?

I have walked up a street towards a bar that leads to Kottbussertor U-bahn often enough, maybe three times, for it to bear the resemblance of known. Each time until today I missed entirely the gallery. I decided after ballet, and having some spare time, and deeply anxious about my dwindling savings, to do mostly walking and looking, anonymous, and from the studio explore a little Köpenickerstr, which I saw through the windows across the Spree, warming up to dance another day in the past. And from there up this street with the amusing-to-me name to the gallery. In the streets are wagenburgs and in the exhibition, a small history of wagenburgs in Berlin.

I had to retrace my steps as Schwarzer Kanal was over this street I must turn down, mmm… what to say of old buildings left as they were abandoned, made into homes with flowers in window boxes, a certain kind of detritus and wilderness that is distinctly a squat. Fences I can peek through and like a magic garden of giant mushrooms, old wagens, trucks, delivery vans, even perhaps ancient train carriages all cluster, a herd come together. Also though I feel embarrassed to peer into someone’s home like this, as much as it does instill a feeling of home in me.

Up the street with the funny name, I mean Adalbertstr over the damms, Engeldamm and, I forget the other, past on one side a quite beautiful and empty building of red brick and white windows, the small oval leaves bright greys and oranges on the soft oh-so-European green. On the other more wagenplatz, and a kinder, I forget again how to say, a childrens’ farm, an old, thin but perhaps not unhappy horse and sway-backed black donkey, another horse lying in the stable, all munching on straw, horse wanders over, takes a shit, wanders back.

I reach the exhibition, Wagenburg – Leben in Berlin at the Kreuzburg Museum up many flights of stairs, oh is something special. I will take Daniel to it when he returns, and perhaps buy the exhibition catalogue… One video was of Schwarzer Kanal, women talking about the place, location, tenuousness of its existence, the bicycle workshop, and one woman, short hair, maybe a leather jacket, I can see her in my thoughts but describing evades me, she says about addressing sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and I thought oh… maybe coming to Berlin to find somewhere I feel is home, hoping that there is difference in places enough to make livable, all these thoughts, it is the right decision.

Later, in the rain and darkness, I move to Schonhauserallee, look from the balcony at the city in night.

schwarzer kanal bleibt schwarzer kanal bleibt

köpenickerstr apartments köpenickerstr apartments

schwarzer kanal on köpenickerstr schwarzer kanal on köpenickerstr

schwarzer kanal abandoned library schwarzer kanal abandoned library

walking up adalbertstr walking up adalbertstr

corner of engeldamm and adalertstr corner of engeldamm and adalertstr

leaves and bricks… leaves and bricks…

bricks again, green seminar bricks again, green seminar

pirate rebel queer wagenburg pirate rebel queer wagenburg

wagenburg leben in berlin - kreuzburg gallery wagenburg leben in berlin – kreuzburg gallery

schonhauserallee at night, raining, alone… schonhauserallee at night, raining, alone…

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gute aussichten – junge deutsche fotografie

My last full day in Berlin, an afternoon adventure with someone who takes rather splendid photographs herself of derelict amusement parks and summer berries… to Pottsdam, and a vast gallery pockmarked occasionally with bullets and shrapnel from the war. gute aussichten – junge deutsche fotografie was mostly quite engaging, some beautiful photography by recent graduates who understand what they are doing and have an artistic sensibility. I returned to the photos of Kazakhstan peasants because, well… it is Kazakhstan. The sheen of metallic playground toys in sepulchral gloom also. A documentary essay of a hotel or guesthouse in former East Germany, near Leibniz I think was well partial to my taste for decay.

But innerwald, a series in the Tropenhaus in the Zoologisches Museum, Bauernhof by ___ oh such a delight. I wanted to lick and scratch the dirty, warm glass, smear the moist dirt a little, humidity and fecund growth, then trace with my eyes for a long time the trails of what unknown sliding, perambulating creatures, threads like unravelled cells. And the monstrous shadows, an ogre looming over a bed of hay, a clutch of twigs caught mid-startled shock in the light, geraniums that seem most unfriendly, the penumbra of a bison’s fur and horn.

Certainly to visit Berlin’s Zoological Gardens upon my return.

innerwald - abstrakt innerwald – abstrakt

innerwald - geranien innerwald – geranien

innerwald - moos innerwald – moos

innerwald - reisig innerwald – reisig

innerwald - schattenpferd innerwald – schattenpferd

innerwald - schnecken innerwald – schnecken

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perform your grief

Emile in Sydney! Then in Europe on tour with Curseovdialect! Then doing Masters in Amsterdam. See you in Nederlans for Kunst, Brot und kaffeeklatsch.

‘Clip Art’ Group Show

Performance Anxiety’ a new short video on Bindi Irwin and the death of Steve Irwin, YouTube mourning and grief in the twenty first century will be showing at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney – opens Wednesday 8 August, 6-8pm exhibition continues to 25 August 2007

“Clip Art”
Ben Frost, Deborah Kelly, The Motel Sisters, Elvis Richardson, Kate Smith, Soda_Jerk & Sam Smith, Grant Stevens, Emile Zile
Curator: Daniel Mudie Cunningham as part of the Firstdraft Emerging Curators Program

” Clip Art showcases artists who make work about clips formed from fragments of moving and still images or through a combination of graphics and sound. Clip Art investigates the oppositional nature of meaning made from clip-based work and responds to the recent fascination with applying aural terms like sampling and remixing to the visual domain. Whether witty interrogations of popular culture or nostalgic trips through the visual archives of the recent past, Clip Art champions the analogue and handmade as much as it does daring things with digital technologies. “

danielmcunningham.com
firstdraftgallery.com

emile zile - performance anxiety emile zile – performance anxiety

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it returns to wilderness

Letter-hyphen-town has been what most cities I’ve lived in have been reduced to since Emile in Zürich shortened it to Z-town. Adelaide being A-town in my imagination, it was sort of poignant to find a zine of the same name, an archaic, photocopied, cut-paste typewriter and xeroxed pre-blog self-publication devoted to the unseen bits of Adelaide, urban archaeology for the geekiest of miniscule travelers.

At the worst party in the world on Saturday, I met the author, who looks like Ben Lee, has a small orange bicycle pinned to his lapel, and enthuses on three things: bikes, urban architecture and zines. I heard he’s done his Ph.D. on zine culture, which didn’t surprise me at all.

So amidst the still continuing rain, and following his instructions, today I peered through the temporary fencing of Gouger Street’s own impromptu wetland. Even with quantities of plummeting water, the swamp hasn’t risen to the normal tide mark that stains the girder-propped concrete structures at the deepest end of the evacuated block, but besides the detritus of the dissembled architecture, the inclined concrete shoreline, and litter tossed over the fences, this is a wetland.

The water is stained a tannic rust colour, reeds and other flora that dwell in the intermediary landscape between water and earth cover the mounds of the extracted basement, and I was told also it’s not uncommon to see birdlife, frogs, and other wetland dwellers populating what was once just a hole in the ground.

He’s published I think three zines devoted to these urban voids, places where no one really looks, or gazes just slide over, so in my spare time I think I’ll be doing a bit of exploring.

Later, Alison and I went to Port Adelaide for an exhibition her sister is production manager for. Again more wetlands, a bank manager’s residence only recently excavated since the internal stairwell was concreted in some years past, and now is something of a tomb undergoing restoration, then instructions to go … that way … vague waving on finger in an easterly direction towards the woolsheds.

Port Adelaide for whatever reason befalls a city wherein its existence is owed to the continual flow of merchandise through its boundaries and that current falters, is a town of colossal ghost buildings, vacated, ossified warehouses, windows glazed over from abandonment like cataract-ridden eyes. The canyons of the woolshed warehouses, vast brick and glass houses of empire are only alive where wattle trees are beginning reclamation, all decorated with ‘For Lease’ and ‘For Sale’ enticements.

If it was closer to Adelaide, it would be to the city what Brooklyn is to New York, and perhaps with twenty years of lifestyle gentrification encroachment and its supporting population it could be … for a short time a place for artists. For now, it’s just rusted out Al Capone stretch limousines up on blocks guarded by a pair of rapacious attack goats.

gouger st construction wetland gouger st construction wetland

low tide at the gouger st end low tide at the gouger st end

reeds on the slope down to the water reeds on the slope down to the water

gouger st wetland near the carpark gouger st wetland near the carpark

banker's residence morse code installation banker’s residence morse code installation

port adelaide attack goats of doom port adelaide attack goats of doom

al capone's stretch limousine al capone’s stretch limousine

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emile zile mediakunst am berlin

Emile has been living in an old convent in Rotterdam for a while now, in residence at Het Wilde Weten, and yes I am experiencing envy and similar emotions over his being in Europe.

He has a solo exhibition at Spielraum in Berlin opening next week (yeah I know I blogged it before but here’s all the details, and anyway it’s my blog). You can watch the trailer for the show too, all fun planes crashing, protecting Australia from terrorism, Anton Enus and other famous news anchors, animated gifs, heavy metal. Bits of Apocalypse PRD 岭南启示录 too. Go to Berlin. Art.

Emile Zile: Die Kunst und die Veränderung der Massenmedien

Vom 16. März bis 1. April 2007

Eröffnung am 16. März 2007 um 20 Uhr
Performance Emile Zile um 22 Uhr
www.emilezile.com

Eröffnung am 23. März 2007 um 20 Uhr
Pixel-Pirat II: Angriff des Astro Elvis Videoklon Die Abschirmung
Preview Trailer: www.sodajerk.com.au/sj/ppii.html

Dispose. contemporary in association with SpielRaum Berlin is pleased to present a pivotal guide to Australian artist Emile Zile and The Art of Mass Media Mutation. Zile’s critical relationship to the destruction and re-creation of the mass media for a spiritual renewal reinforces his potentiality to liberate minds from the notions of mass media culture.

Emile Zile is an Australian-Latvian artist working in single-channel video, live video, installation and performance. Using the mass-media as raw material to be sculpted, re-staged, mutated and shifted, Zile’s work attempts to locate the poetic in a barrage of popular culture. Embracing broadcast banalities and inhabiting the media to make comment upon it, he has appeared on Australian national television to up-stage a gameshow host, installed photographic portraits of Jerry Springer Show audience members in a gallery and performed live video for a hybrid performance work in Guangzhou, China; appropriating 15th century Chinese erotic illustrations, ‘Apocalypse Now’ the film and contemporary American death metal.

Zile’s socio-political stagings, interventions, video and installations have been receiving recognition both nationally and internationally in a diverse range of festivals and galleries including UrbanDrift Berlin, Rotterdam VHS Festival, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and the Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Triennial. He is currently resident studio artist at Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam.

More information: www.disposeonline.co.uk

— Speilraum Berlin

emile zile emile zile

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art, and the mutation of mass media

Emile says everything is grey, and “phishy weather”. That would be Glasgow, then. But, ART! He’s showing videos from Australian media artists and doing a performance at the Spielraum in Berlin in association with Dispose. All the details are on the flier. Click, etc…

emile zile – art, and the mutation of mass media emile zile – art, and the mutation of mass media

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超牛b的余震 － Aftershock in Guangzhou

ex-Feng37 has been burning a posting storm through Canton recently, and I suspect he’s moved out of Fangcun and found a better stash of special-K from a higher class of Chaozhou motorbike taxi and is going all fickin’ 牛!! over Aftershock – Contemporary British Art 1990-2006, and that the British Council even slapped together a sina blog for the exhibition in Chinese.

Mislinked by 在桥下流 (that reminds me of the scent of piss flowing under the stinking haizhu bridge), this tranny rockstar space (yeah I try, but more like a tranny windowlicker lounge) is overjoyed that Guangzhou has put on such a show for me first with the documentary film festival, and now with a couple of my favourite artists all hanging out along the 珠江. I’m quite upset I’m in the wrong hemisphere though.

Pretty much every Young British Artist who has gilded the pockets of dealers and collectors over the past 15 years gets a look in, but who cares, most of them are conceptually vacuous crap with no sense of humour unless it’s irony. What I care about is Tracey Emin, as in love, sex, death … rape, abortion, drunkenness, sexual intimidation and violence, and Jake and Dinos Chapman whom I have wanted to screw (either one) ever since Zygotic acceleration, Biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model.

Spanning the years 1990-2006, Aftershock will tell the story of how Britain experienced a revolution in contemporary art. During this period art became a hotly debated topic in the media as young artists injected glamour into the British art world; the art market flourished and audiences for contemporary exhibitions multiplied, culminating in the phenomenal success of Tate Modern, London’s first museum of international modern art which opened in 2000.

— British Council – Aftershock

jake and dinos chapman - ubermensch jake and dinos chapman – ubermensch

tracey emin - the simple truth tracey emin – the simple truth

余震 - aftershock 余震 – aftershock

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