Cida de Aragon & Steffen Lehmann

Steffen Lehmann has sent some information about the completion of the work that Cida de Aragon and he have been working on for Brisbane.
This will be of particular interest to those who had the opportunity to meet them both at Art inTent.

Re: *Resilience* - The Women Suffrage Memorial in Brisbane.

"According to the dictum of Adolf Loos, only memorials and tomb stones are worthy of true architectural attention (Loos, A: 'Ornament and Crime', Vienna 1910). 'Architecture is about monuments and graves', said the Viennese architect at the turn of the 20th century.

I am pleased that a small memorial project in Brisbane has come to completion:
The completed artwork by media artist Cida de Aragon in collaboration with Steffen Lehmann is located in close proximity to Brisbane City Hall
and King George Square.

The Women Suffrage Memorial commemorates one hundred years of women's right to participate in state elections. It commemorates the centenary of women suffrage and is a reflective, quiet place where people may walk and sit in the shade. It is a permanent artwork visible from all sides and surrounded by high-rise buildings, so scale was crucial – the memorial needed to be large, with an abstract graphical reading of the historical facts. It therefore uses texts on steel panels and an inserted light box, expressing both resilience and delicacy.

The three silver-coloured steel volumes form a cross in plan - symbolizing the cross on the ballot paper of the first state election in1907, when women were allowed to vote. The kaleidoscopic repetition of the faces represents each of the three female pioneers as well as all women of Queensland. The light box shows historical portrait photos and creates a dignified visual presence, while the slanted steel elements (a metaphor for the struggle) create a sheltered space in the urban landscape.

The work deals with the complexity of contemporary memorials and the problem of commemorating historical achievements in the 21st-Century. It acknowledges the contribution of these dedicated and resourceful women, whose legacy, fought one hundred years ago, is still ongoing and unresolved, as even today we find discrimination against women, for instance in the form of unequal pay. With this commission, we could explore some important questions, such as: What is the connection between collective memory and commemoration? What are the challenges of integrating memorials into the urban fabric, and how is the appropriate scale determined.


End of May, the memorial will be inaugurated by the Premier; the project has also just been selected to be exhibited at the forthcoming Architectural Biennale in Venice (Sept. - Nov. 2008), as part of the Australian exhibition."

I hope you have a chance to see the memorial at your next visit to Brisbane's CBD.

Best wishes,
Steffen

Professor STEFFEN LEHMANN
Ph.D., AADipl.

Chair, School of Architecture and Built Environment
The University of Newcastle.
s_Lab space Laboratory for architectural Research and Design
Homepage: www.slab.com.au

Editor, 'Journal of Green Building'

Sharyn Walker?

If you have not caught up with Sharyn Walker’s latest forays into public space, real and virtual, her recent 'blog projects' were worth a look . She has put them on hold for now, but when they are restarted we will put up a link
The project is a very nice example of open process work, that invites you into the artist’s 'making in-progress' while playing with the illusion that you think you know who that person is. The subtext is an examination of processes of identity formation.
Using the internet as a medium is now a well established art form, but as a strategy it takes on greater significance and political force given the context of Gosford’s lack of material infrastructure for contemporary art. It also gives Sharyn a potential audience of millions. Sharyn has achieved an impressive amount and variety of work in the past year.

A Place of Fear

Firstly an update on the report to council; on new directions for the regional gallery, on bringing contemporary art to the centre of Gosford, and the benefits of funding Terri Latella’s YAG.
Trevor Drake, who introduced the motion to Council, tells us that he is working on the report behind the scenes with Debra Schleger (who we know has been trying to facilitate a greater art presence in Gosford CBD).

Yes! – we have discovered that the acronym YAG stands for Yerin Art Gallery.
According to the Gosford Library local studies page, Yerin means A Place of Fear (but in the case of its being the origin for the place name Erina, as “a place of fear” it is applied to a place of initiation)

ORLAN: Post-Identity Strategies

Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia) April 16th - May18th. The exhibition produced in collaboration with Michel Rein Gallery, Paris.

"In the Self-Hybridization series (Pre-Colombian, African and the more recent Native American), ORLAN continues and extends her journey through an infinity of possible physical identities. By using various canons of beauty and aesthetics from different times and places, the artist creates “living” totemic figures, “almost tangible in their virtuality, fascinating in their disturbing appearance and seductive in their artificial otherness.”

Orlan is best known for the surgical-operation-performances of the early nineties where she transformed the operating room into an artist’s studio, and appropriated plastic surgery as a creative art form mirroring the mutating paradigm of contemporary art."

Australia 2020

The issue of arts funding was on the agenda at Belinda Neal’s forum at Erina on Saturday in preparation for Australia 2020.

The session dealing with Topic 3, Towards a Creative Australia, was guided towards consideration for the individual creator by Chris Bearman’s opening address.
Along with the obligatory ‘we have so many talented people here’ (Which other place will not say the same?) the discussion tended to focus on local problems rather than national objectives. In particular, our dilemma, and consequent funding limitations, occasioned by the region being categorised as neither urban nor regional; lack of cohesion and cooperation within the local arts community; a crisis in art education, and the talent drain.
However it was possible to get on record, yet again, the essential component in moving Towards a Creative Australia, that is, adequate financial support and respect for the individual artist and small to medium sized art organizations. I say “yet again” as the research has been done indicating the imbalance between the funding for the primary producers and that of the major institutions and a burgeoning class of arts managers.
It was pointed out that the platform for any hub of creative industries is provided as a collateral outcome of having a dynamic contemporary art scene, that individual and small group art funding is less that 7% of the Oz Council’s arts budget, and that the mean income for visual artists is a little over $17,000 per year. The percentage is even smaller for individual artists, when it is realized that state and local governments concentrate their resources on infrastructure.
Australia needs artists to make their unique contribution to the national debate and cultural environment. This often entails no financial return to the artist. To have a Creative Australia we need to provide greater financial support, to let artists do what they do best -– make art.

It was interesting to see in the session on Topic 4, Future Directions for Australian Economy, that Caroline Veldhuizen concluded her opening address with a Powerpoint presentation that showed four key objectives for the economic development of the Central Coast, and that two of them could have been lifted straight from Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class.
Her graphs showed, amongst other things, the growing importance of the knowledge based enterprises, but still maintained the ignorant categorising of art with entertainment and recreation.

The session on Agriculture was dominated by issues of Intellectual Property rights, something that artists, also ‘primary producers’ and creators of immaterial value, are also grappling with.

Unfortunately I was not able to stay for all the sessions, but regardless of whether the ideas somehow make their way to Canberra, the Australia 2020 initiative already has been useful as a form of dialogue to raise big picture issues, as well as serving as an indicator of how we can reshape political processes.

Logos

Below is a contribution to Australia’s preparation for the big sports event in Beijing, thought it worth passing on for all those who have not yet seen it. (received from Nina Angelo)

No news on the Report to Council being prepared. It seems that it will be at least a week before the process for preparing it will be addressed. Likewise no one seems to know what YAG is.

Posting has been a bit sparse lately with deadlines approaching. Yes, it is that time again when we artists are reminded of our place in the scheme of things, as we compete for scraps of financial support to keep the practice afloat.

We know where you've been

Bio reading of the city.

Work by Tuur Van Balen, student of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London, who, at the work-in-progress-show at RCA, offered tap water (kindly provided by Thames Water) and asked visitors to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. He added the samples and postcodes to a map of London which contained biological information.


He commented “I'm interested in how cities are not as much made up by streets and buildings as they are made up by our behaviour and experiences.
These experiences are heavily mediated by technology, just look at the way mobile communication networks totally reshaped our cities.
We're on the verge of a new area, an area that relies on the understanding of our body and the understanding of our DNA. What does this mean for the cities of tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? ...


The biological map in the interim show was an 'intervention' using the show as a platform to get feedback on these ideas. By gathering urine samples, I want to make people think about how their biological waste contains information. Pissing in public might become like leaving your digital data up for grabs, spitting in the streets like leaving your computer unprotected on the internet.”

Professional Practice

Just back, and clearing out the inbox, so thought I would share these snippets from Nettime before deleting.

"I think we need a non-commercial public sphere, as a complement to other proletarian and marginal public spheres which can put pressure on the state and make up for the insufficiencies of formal democratic representation. In other words, I think there should be an anarchic civil-society sphere that produces political confrontation and conflict. I am not naive or bitter enough to think that can be the only dimension of social existence!"

best, Brian

“I visited Glasgow about 18 months ago and was able to sense in a matter of days the attraction the city holds for creative people, and the way the arts are being used to regenerate what was formerly a declining industrial centre."

The complicitness of artists and 'arts professionals' in the instrumental use of the visual arts as propaganda for the rapid neoliberal structural readjustment of the city really could not be more explicit. However, I am bemused by the seemingly prevalent academic spectre of an art "passionately producing alternative visions and utopias for today’s late capitalist society".

Cheers,
Leigh

"What would happen if art stops with relentlessly criticizing the existing state of affairs, or with passionately producing alternative visions and utopias for today’s late capitalist society? What if art would, on the contrary, fully identify with and affirm the prevailing norms, values, practices, etc., even adding some oil to the fire? The latter would, in other words, demand of artists to no longer automatically assume the role of the ‘good guys’, the eternal idealists, dreamers, etc., who always try to make the best out of the current situation, pushing the system to be something other and better than it is. It would, inversely, ask of them to stop protecting society from what it wants and turn it into the worst version of itself, so as to confront it with its own unsustainability and undesirability."
Ned Rossiter on:
Cultural Activism Today, The Art of Over-Identification

YAG???

A motion was passed at tonight’s Council meeting which might be of interest.

The gist being that a report to council will be prepared on:
1. Developing an indigenous and others cultures gallery at East Gosford;
2. That Council review the purposes and role of the Regional Gallery in the long term, and its relationship to the City Centre and previous plans for its expansion and;
3. Determine the economic benefits of supporting YAG with the development of a gallery and contemporary art space in Gosford, including how it would interact with Gosford City art and culture policies, plans and strategies.

The motion was stitched together by Trevor Drake and Terri Latella.

I do not know what YAG stands for, but it would seem to be a non-profit association currently being cobbled together by Terri Latella, who will be on its executive. A site is already being negotiated at the eastern end of Erina Street.

You know something is going on here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.
(Bob Dylan)

Tactical cartography

The emotional mapping project at Art inTent is being covered on the Gosford Times blog, for those who have not checked it recently.
When discussion came around to the work of Christian Nold, I was interested to hear from Anne Graham about new work she is doing using emotional responses measured by GSR (Galvanic Skin Response), and the significance memory had regarding the feelings people had about places, which were picked up by the apparatus.


Christian Nold's Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which, over the last four years, more than 1500 people have taken part . In the context of regular, local workshops and consultations, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device, and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.



Another useful read on the subject is Jessica Clark's The New Cartographers, which contains good links. To quote a little, "In many ways, these mapping tools are re-locating us as the center of our personal universes. We no longer go to maps to find out where we are. Instead, we tell maps where we are and they form around us on the fly, a sensation that can be comforting or stifling. After all, while finding the right map can orient you, having dozens can threaten to tip the signal-to-noise ratio toward cacophony."

"Maps are everywhere these days. The ubiquity of global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile directional devices, interactive mapping tools and social networks is feeding a mapping boom. Amateur geographers are assigning coordinates to everything they can get their hands on—and many things they can’t. “Locative artists” are attaching virtual installations to specific locales, generating imaginary landscapes brought vividly to life in William Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country. Indeed, proponents of “augmented reality” suggest that soon our current reality will be one of many “layers” of information available to us as we stroll down the street."

Finally, there are some examples of mapping as an art of rhetorical engagement; a process where art does not simply reflect upon its context but, as Trevor Plagens says, takes a "position" within what ever matrices of power constitute that reality.
The following quotes are from An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Ed. Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2007. (Ten essays with accompanying maps)

"There is a Long tradition of making maps that present alternative interpretations of various landscapes and reveal implicit relationships between power, control, and spatial practice."

The essay Tactical Cartographies, by the Institute of Applied Autonomy, which I thought pertinent to our project in Gosford, contained the following:

"Embracing the potential for maps to be used in advocacy is an explicit recognition of maps as rhetorical devices. In short maps don’t merely represent space, they shape arguments; they set discursive boundaries and identify objects to be considered. When individuals make their
own maps, they offer an expression of what they consider important, what they consider to be "of interest," and for what they are willing to fight. In openly acknowledging the rhetorical power of maps and positioning themselves as interested parties taking sides in contentious debates, tactical cartographers offer a direct challenge to the presumed neutrality of mapmakers as mere visualizers of spatial data. Tactical cartographers make claims about
landscapes, but also about their own status as authors of spatial narrative. In creating maps that confront power, tactical cartographers claim their right to set the rules of debate and to provide interpretations of local events with both an authority and a contingency equal to
official representations."

inTent update

Art inTent update.

An inspiring presentation was given by Steffen Lehmann, Astra Howard catalysed a valuable discussion about local issues, we were joined by artists Cida de Aragon and Anne Graham who contributed insight gained from their extensive practices, artworks by Sharyn Walker and Judy Harris appeared in the Park, people contributed to an intriguing emotional map of Gosford, Councillor Vicki Scott attended representing herself as well as the Mayor, and Member for Gosford, Marie Andrews, opened the event and stayed well beyond her scheduled time to take part in the open forum session.


The forum will continue, and a time will be scheduled soon for this, as the conversation was extremely productive, but had to be curtailed when the tent removers arrived.

Professor Steffen Lehmann – Key Note Presentation.

Matters arising, DVD projections, and further psychogeography outcomes will be presented in Gosford as soon as approval can be obtained for a site.

Unscheduled installation/tableaux by Judy Harris

The mapping project proved popular, and requests for late additions have delayed its display. We expect it to be on the Gosford Times blog within the next couple of days as a work-in-progress.

Liz Wright considers her options.

We must acknowledge once again Marie Andrews’ engagement and interest in the future of art in the Gosford region.

[Images thanks to Sharyn Walker and Fiona Doyle]

inTent forum

Forum/discussion sessions at Art inTent

Schedule.
Following presentations by professor Steffen Lehman and Astra Howard, there will be a short break after which Anne Graham will address issues arising from her considerable experience as an artist, and I will speak about locality and regionalism in a global context, as well as critique the function of 'art for social betterment'.
Integrated with words from Anne and I, will be round table discussions about local issues in light of the presentations.

The nature of Click Here as a project will be put in the context of related projects of urban intervention occurring around the world in what is becoming a mainstream genre of practice.

The purpose of the discussions is to share our perceptions about the current character of contemporary art and to envision its future in the local context. From this we will move towards some proposals and strategies for the next steps forward in Gosford.

Some recurring topics have emerged from recent conversations with local artists, and we will endeavour to address these as well as issues arising on the day.

Local opportunities for strengthening art milieu (resources and impediments)
Communication and coordination
Locus focus
Financial support
Education, and critical context needed for, contemporary practice.
Action plan

Art inTent

Art inTent

Announcing the next activity in the Click Here series of art interventions in the centre of Gosford, Art inTent (Ceci n’est pas Baba).

Art inTent is a being organised by Brown’s Cows Art Projects and Gosford Art Flux Forum, who will be joined for this event by eO inc.

Open from 11am, in a tent in Kibble Park on Saturday the 8th of March will be presentations and restagings of past projects in the Click Here series, including the Bloomsday psychogeographic dérive. There will also be an opportunity for people to contribute their impressions to a collective “mapping” of Gosford.

If you missed, the Space Between, Buy Nothing – Get One Free, Astra Howard’s SPI vehicle, Scoop Shadow, or Streaming by Korean group KoPAS, this will be your chance to catch up.
There will also be new works, information about contemporary art groups in the region, and a mini-workshop/introduction to a project by eO inc.

Marie Andrews, MP for Gosford, will be there to officially open activities at 1pm.

The Key Note speaker at Art inTent will be Dr Steffen Lehmann. Art inTent is the next in the Click Here series of art activities being conducted in the centre of Gosford by GAFF and Brown’s Cows Art Projects, assisted by a Cultural Grant from Gosford City Council.

Dr Steffen Lehmann is the Artistic Director of the ‘Back to the City’ project in Newcastle, a new biannual public arts festival about temporary interventions in public space. Its aim is to gain new readings of the city and experiment with innovative forms of collaboration, bringing into focus the revitalisation process of Newcastle's city centre.

“Steffen brings a wealth of international experience and extensive knowledge of curatorship to the exhibition of public art. His practice, teaching and research demonstrates an enduring commitment to involve the local community in excellent exhibition projects about the contemporary city. He is a German-born architect and urban designer and holds the Chair in the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle. He is Founding Director of the s_Lab Space Laboratory for architectural Research and Design (Sydney-Berlin).”

In regard to the Gosford Art Flux Forum, Click Here project and Art inTent, he said: “I congratulate the organisers. This exciting initiative is based on a continuing dialogue between the different disciplines, and different worlds will be engaging with each other in this collaborative site-specific endeavour.” – Professor Steffen Lehmann Ph.D., AADipl. Chair, School of Architecture and Built Environment. The University of Newcastle.

Elephants boycott The Room

As with the parable of the six blind men asked to describe an elephant, six topics examining aspects of contemporary art practice in Gosford will make up a framework for open discussions. These hybrid performance installation-roundtable discussions have been designed to facilitate informal conversations. Come along and give your opinion! Neil Berecry-Brown will offer some thoughts on locality and regionalism in a global context, as well as critique the function of 'art as a tool for social betterment' in relation to local practice.

Joining us will be Professor Anne Graham, School of Drama, Fine Art & Music, The University of Newcastle. Anne Graham is an artist and an academic; she teaches performance, installation and sculpture. She has exhibited in the Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals, the Biennale of Sydney, Perspecta and in many curated exhibitions nationally and internationally. In 2000 she completed ‘Passage’ a major permanent public art work for the City of Sydney. She has recently completed major public artworks for the Tweed River Regional Gallery and the Newcastle City Council. She has worked extensively in Japan and has recently designed a public park for the Second Echigo Tsumari Triennial in Nigata Province, Japan.

Astra Howard, who was in Gosford in December with her SPIV project, will present documentation and ideas about her innovative form of art. Astra Howard is an Action Researcher/Performer working predominantly within public city spaces. She has completed a PhD centred on facilitating communication via performance-based interventions. Her most recent solo works have been commissioned by the City of Melbourne, the Frankston City Council and the Queensland Department of Communities. Astra also works in a crisis accommodation centre in Sydney, designing and facilitating educational programs and professional services for the homeless, marginalised and disadvantaged community.


During the event no harm will be inflicted unnecessarily on elephants in the room, real or imagined.

Details of the discussion section of the schedule will be posted before Saturday.

Double Click

It seems the "With One Click" post has been ruffling some feathers.

Big Tent Revival

Big Tent Revival. Second Coming of the Tent to Kibble Park.

Weather permitting, we will pitch the Art Tent,
“Ceci n’est pas Baba”,
on Saturday the 8th of March, 2008.

(Image credit - Banksy)

With a Programme to Edify, Amuse and Provoke.

It will feature:
Presentations and restaging of past projects in the Click Here Series, including the Bloomsday psychogeographic dérive.
Make your mark!
There will be an opportunity to contribute your impressions to a collective “mapping” of Gosford.
Technical wonders!
We will make use of new technical advancements on the Magic Lantern, the Lumière brothers’ Cinematographe, and Edison’s “Talking Machine”, the Gramophone (all demonstrated in the Gosford School of Arts in the 1890s), in the form of DVD and PowerPoint projections.
Live Conversation!
As with the parable of the six blind men asked to describe an elephant, six topics examining aspects of contemporary art practice in Gosford will make up a schedule for open discussions. These hybrid performance installation-roundtable discussions have been designed to facilitate informal conversations. Come along and give your opinion!

During the event no harm will be inflicted unnecessarily on elephants in the room, real or imagined.

Watch this space for updates, schedules and details.

with just one click

Appearing in the Express Advocate, 30th January, and other places.
Story picked up from the Gosford Times.

Scoop 2

The installation of a crocheted intervention/restoration in the Memorial fountain in Burns Place Gosford happened on Australia Day, 26th of January, an even more peaceful and quiet Saturday than usual in that part of town.
Congratulation to Sharyn, Betty and Robyn for subtle work, which softly-softly engages in public issues with a positive and generous attitude. The context of the work, both materially and politically, gave it particular relevance.




While crocheting is usually regarded as craft, the use of crocheting in art does not mean it is merely craft in the decorative sense.
“Many contemporary artists are using craft to make diverse and timely political statements. Because creating crafts is so often social and communal, they can play a vital role in the public sphere” from, introduction to the “Crafting Protest” seminar program at the New School, New York, coincidentally also on the 26th of January, 2008.
One might also add that the use of social and communal processes in itself positions the work such that it critiques careerism and the artist-marketing model of practice.
Further information on the eO blog.













Burns Place: Click Here

"Scoop"

Click where?

Burns Place, Gosford on Saturday the 26th of January.

To be seen this week in Burns Place, Gosford, an intervention by three artists who will install a crocheted replacement part in the vandalised memorial fountain designed by Gerald and Margot Lewers. The crocheted “shadow” is to be a substitution for the missing “scoop” shaped copper part of the original sculpture.
This project was initiated and coordinated by Sharyn Walker with the collaboration of Betty Saez and Robyn Wainman.
Sharyn has been leading a campaign to have the long neglected piece of civic art respected and restored, and its designers duly recognised.
The irony of artists crocheting a cosy, woolly, leaky substitution, in these days of water shortages and global warming, to a fountain turned off due to the mismanagement of water supplies, goes somewhat to slaking our thirst for complex content in publicly engaged work.
It is also nice to see public art that is not intended for entertainment, but woven modestly into the fabric of our urban experience.

This subtle mending, with a view to subsequent proper restoration, reminds me of the Mended Spiderweb series by American artist Nina Katchatadourian. Other works can be seen on her web site.

The following is a quote from Katchatadourian’s site. A bit long but worth it for the way it reveals an open ended dialogical working process that yields to natural processes without the work loosing any of its tension and strength.

“In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.
The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned. The larger, more complicated patches where the threads were held together with glue often retained their form after being thrown out, although in a somewhat "wilted" condition without the rest of the web to suspend and stretch them.”

It is to be hoped that the work in Burns Place by Sharyn, Betty and Robyn will similarly result in the repair of the fountain’s original design.

Images from the installation, and background information, will be posted following the installation on Saturday.

It seems that subversive sewing circles and other such seditious activities are slipping social commentary past the surveillance systems (they are watching you Sharyn) in the guise of craft. Susan Hillman’s camouflage sweaters being an example we have covered earlier.

Some more examples can be found in "The history of guerilla knitting", a talk by Rose White at the recent Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
Also - the exhibition, Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting - Museum of Arts & Design, NYC.




And- David Cole’s “Knitting Machine” project which used two excavators wielding telephone poles as needles to knit a giant American flag in the courtyard of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Lets get immaterial.

The incredible lightness of art.

Brown’s Cows’ 2007 Click Here happenings in Gosford, the Space Between and Buy Nothing, Get one Free, juxtaposed immateriality of poetry presented as ephemeral illuminated text (light) with the physicality of performed experience (the Body). With this in mind, the installation “Projections” by Jenny Holzer, currently at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, has particular resonance.


In this work text images of lines of poetry are projected from opposite ends of the gallery, flooding the space with poetic illumination. Giant beanbags on the floor anchor people to their physical presence and accentuate discrepancies in scale.
Following the last post on BP which posited Gosford ‘crater’ as a gallery to flood with the poetry of art actions and forms, Holzer’s installation provides a useful metaphor for a way that art might function in relation to the material world, constantly devising and refining a meta-text to succinctly clarify our contemporary “being, doing and becoming”. (As well as being an impressive work in itself).
Art seems to have amnesia for the immediate past and reinvents styles from twenty or so years previous, erasing the intervening forms and practices of artists as the industry pushes to champion "new emerging talent" in the market place. Urs Fisher’s work in the last post immediately recalls Gordon Matta Clark, Richard Long, Robert Smithson and others.


An installation Shibboleth 2007 at the Tate Modern by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo shares the same pedigree, and like Holzer and Fisher the artist has chosen the ‘Art’ space as referent context for meaning.
It might seem perverse, but the element of risk in the works is appealing. Is it a return to the Sublime or simply a reaction to our increasingly designed, controlled and sanitized environment and a desire for authenticity?
It could be argued that the current fad for art performances and installations that restage significant historical events, despite their essentially ironic positioning, also engage this desire.


An example of this form some of you might have seen was the reenactment at Artspace Sydney of Joseph Beuys’ “Coyote” (I like America and America Likes Me, 1974) by English artist Andre Stitt and a dingo.
Andre is interested in doing some work in Gosford with his group from Cardiff in 2009, so perhaps we can talk to him about it then.







Reenactments and projections from Click Here are scheduled for the tent in the Park in March.

Gosford as Gallery

Kibble Park was selected for the recent Click Here event by KoPAS to amplify awareness of the topography that defines Gosford Town, and the hidden flows that naturally and emotionally effect our sense of place.

[I am using Gosford ‘Town’ rather than ‘City’ as I think it better reflects the reality – not aspirations. A city is such because it has an identity derived from its constituent activities rather than because of a governmental designation and being a jurisdiction of governance.
A place also can be defined by what it is not, in comparison to other places. Here is a list of City attributes. How does Gosford score?
Central research library, museum, town hall, contemporary art centre, botanic gardens, moving image theatre, central park, university, artists studio quarter, quality newspaper.]

The proponents of various town planning strategies for Gosford, and who talk of ‘precincts’, seem unaware that the town is an integrated whole, with movement corridors and appropriate sites for functions geographically indicated.

Gosford Town itself is ONE precinct encompassed by Rumbalara Reserve, Presidents Hill and the Waterfront – and in any case, is too small to be dissected further.

The Click Here project assumes the Gosford ‘hollow’ as its locus operandi, in old art-speak, its Gallery. So it is interesting to hear of the work by Urs Fischer who dug a ‘Gosford’ shaped hollow within a gallery.



Extract from the New York Times:
“At Gavin Brown, Urs Fischer takes a jackhammer to Chelsea its self.
By Jerry Saltz
Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown's Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while. Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subversion that is central both to the history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art but also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this work is brimming with meaning and mojo. It was also a Herculean project.
A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole. Fischer's pit is titled You, and it took ten days to build, costing around $250,000 of Brown's money. (Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it.) The gallery's ground-level garage doors facilitated the jackhammering and removal of the concrete floor and the use of a backhoe to excavate tons of dirt and debris, after which a crew closed off the space with immaculate white walls. There's also a cramped antechamber, superfluous but well executed: A smaller reproduction of the main gallery, down to the air ducts and electrical outlets, it’s sort of a mini-Me You. Ducking through its pint-size entrance is like going though a door in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. You have to crouch as you enter and watch where you step in preparation for the more precarious and thrilling main event beyond.

Streaming

Following the performances in Gosford, we will relax with the artists at a picnic on the beach at Terrigal. You are welcome to join us - BYO whatever.