Road Works

Road Works (or My Favourite Pothole)

An invitation.

At the Mangrove Mountain Country Fair this year (18th October) there will be a new category in the art section open to all ages and mediums.

We are looking for art made in response to the pleasure of negotiating a way along the road surface of Wisemans Ferry Road, or any other road in the Mangrove Mountain districts, as you experience the impact of a kaleidoscope of colours, materials, textures and topography.

The road is a metaphor as well as a physical, political and economic reality. It has aesthetic values and has been a defining element in the district’s historical development.

The subject can be approached in a wide variety of ways. Already we have people interested in making paintings, digital images, prints, photographs and sculpture.

To make the challenge less hazardous, we have a collection of digital images of the road surface available to work from if required. A CD is available on request.

We would like to invite you to enter. The deadline for works to be delivered to Mangrove Mountain Hall will be in the week leading to the 18th of October. More details will be posted when finalised.

If you need more information, or have any questions, contact:
Neil on 041 1136 145 or nlbb@hunterlink.net.au

There will also be updates at: www.onmangrovemountain.blogspot.com

By coincidence, and as incentive, we record that Huma Bhabha is the recipient of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's 2008 Emerging Artist Award. She will debut an exhibition of new work at the Museum on September 14th. For this exhibition, she has created Bumps in the Road, a figurative sculpture made of clay, wood, wire, Styrofoam, metal studs, acrylic paint, cast iron, burlap, newsprint, sand, and ash.

A Sense of Place

The current exhibition at the Gosford Regional Gallery, A Sense of Place, reflects a lack of clarity in curatorial intention and inconsistencies in process. This is a pity as ideas about identity and place are worthy of deeper consideration than was possible given the brief, seemingly to entertain guests of the Sister City Convention.
With curator Tim Braham on sick leave and an urgency to get the shop open in time, some of the artists having been included in an intensive educational process and others brought in at short notice, it is not surprising that the exhibition (including some interesting individual works) was too disjointed to deliver an opportunity to question notions of 'place' more extensively.

The following text was included in the installation can. you. here, and touches on a few concepts that might be of interest.

Place is an imaginative process, a destination.
It is virtual in the sense of its virtuality being an aspect of the actual. (Deleuze)
Beyond topography it is a story, or stories, that need to be told and retold. Topography too is a cultural construct, so place is intellectual property, cultural property.
A location’s particularity exists in a network of differences, so it’s meaning is fluid, relational, and contested.

A sense of place, or consciousness of the particularity of location, with associated emotional responses, requires all the senses. It also needs memory, knowledge and suspension of ego. It is intuitive and creative, involving a complex array of cognitive and perceptual processes. It is assisted by a form of perception sometimes referred to as “allocentric perception” – letting oneself be informed by circumstances – ‘listening’, rather than interpreting situations as opportunities for personal gain.
Understanding of place also can be expanded in the light of changes in technology, in particular rapid transport and digital communications. Of particular interest is what the sociologist Manuel Castells calls “the space of flows”.
The space of flows is best thought of as a myriad of translocal networks, held together by continuous circulation of people, materials and bits. The key element about the space of flows “which justifies us to speak of it as a unique space despite its constitutive fragmentation” is that it enables us to connect distributed entities as if they were in one place, thus fundamentally affecting social geography.
In this environment we live simultaneously in different time ‘spaces’. Amongst these are the slow lived time of social transactions, industrial time of commercial and institutional production and, now of great significance, instant global digital communication.
Distant communications linking people globally is as fast as local connectivity and much faster than ‘on the ground’ transaction. Our sense of place is conditioned by tensions arising from trying to mesh the gears of these different social processes.
Tensions also arise from trying to accommodate what is perceived as a ‘natural” definition of place, that based on physical features and historical identities, with juridical and political-administrative areas. The Mangrove Mountain area, as defined as an entity by geography and history, is divided and administered by three different local councils.
A sense of place is something that must be continually reproduced. It is not something that is solely a result of individual perception of the distinguishing features, but is also the result of the mechanisms that produce collective identity through public and political pedagogy and “learned prosthetic memories”.

Places are distinguished not only for their place-myths, but also for their differences to other places. This is not only the negative understanding of what is lacking in relation to other places, but also what is construed as appropriate for a place; places for this and places for that. Of course the place-myths can also be seen as ways to accentuate differences to reinforce local identity as Levi Straus pointed out in The Raw and the Cooked.
An example of construing or compelling place identity can be seen in the recent state planning strategies, which designated the Mangrove Mountain districts, with an arbitrary eastern border, the F3, as being zoned to protect the potential for extractive industries, with disregard for the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants.
Places are also memory banks for societies. They retain the rhythms of repetition, routine, deportment and gesture imprinted in the somatic memory of individual inhabitants. Many of us can remember where we were when we heard of some significant event taking ‘place’. And we might also recall being ‘out of place’ when our behaviour did not match the prescribed forms.
In this way ‘place’ is causative, it “puts us in our place”, but perhaps this is what we test for in our awareness of a “sense of place”, a feeling of being at home, of belonging, of communion.


Place awareness is an aspect of locality, and is deepened by memories associated with that place, and of previously known places, and personal emotions associated with them. In this way it is an aspect of self-recognition. Matching of this complex individual psychological matrix with the perceived attributes of a place, gives us our nuanced sense of belonging.

No News

The postponed June meeting of the Gosford Regional Gallery Advisory Committee has not yet been rescheduled.
Likewise there is no news of any progress with the Cultural Spaces and Places Report.
We would ask candidates for the September local government elections about their arts policies, but we don't know who they are.

No Comment

Was unavailable when asked for a comment about the recent naked attempt at newsworthiness. So offer some pictures instead.

Nudist Zone, FIB-Art '05, Intervention on the beach of Benicassim, August 2005. Via WMMNA

Baa. - Will we bother?

From its beginnings Gosford has been described as a “sleepy hollow”. While much energy has been expended counting sheep, posts to the Back Page have been slow in coming.

So if you are eagerly waiting for something to happen, perhaps you can relax by counting sheep at the sheep market website (there are 10,000 in case you don’t get finished). The site takes a minute or so to load.

[Thousands of workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk webservice were paid two cents to "draw a sheep facing to the left." Their sheep drawings were collected over a period of 40 days.]

Gosford Art Flux Forum (GAFF) has not been sleeping, but incubating projects and talking with Gosford Real Estate people about a temporary place in Gosford for art. There is little interest in that quarter. There have been some leads followed, but commercial interests in Gosford seem not aware of the importance of art and culture in urban renewal (at least not to the point of sustainable action)

GAFF applied to join Gosford BID (Business Improvement District Association) to contribute expertise to discussions on ways forward for Gosford centre, but the application was not accepted.

In this regard Frank Sartor’s recently released Central Coast Regional Strategy has one or two (that’s about all) mentions about art and culture.
Here they are:

[There are] “forecasted high rates of growth for cultural industries as well as accommodation and hospitality. The Region’s tourism advantages are also likely to increase.

"5.3 Councils are to investigate strategies to ensure sufficiently zoned land to enable the provision of comparatively low cost premises for start-up business. Centre strategies should include provision of low-cost office and studio space to assist business start-ups for cultural activities."

"Priority will be given to:
• expanding retail and commercial activities in the city centre and ensuring that these functions are not put at risk by residential development
• encouraging and facilitating the development of strategic sites in the city centre that help to achieve the vision for the regional city
• integrating the waterfront with the city centre and developing marina, performance and artistic cultural activities as well restaurants
• requiring a high standard of urban and building design within the town centre
• investigating how through-traffic can be better managed through the CBD or redirected around the CBD."

How many sheep have you got to by now?

No News.
GAFF’s Cultural Grant applications to Gosford City Council were both unsuccessful.
One was to produce a Gosford Art Journal focused on contemporary art, as a pilot for a quarterly publication, and to document past achievements by local artists and groups in the field.
Another was to produce more out-of-gallery projects in the centre of Gosford, including rental assistance for a temporary contemporary art coordination and project place in Gosford centre. The project was a blueprint for a much needed function identified through GAFF research in discussions with practitioners and in the forum at Art inTent.

No doubt there were many worthy projects competing, so for now energies will have to be redeployed and invested where there is a better prospect for sustainable outcomes.

Still on the drawing board.
GAFF Contemporary Art Future Forum
Exhibition by Irish artists (approx 14) coming in October.

Other news.
There has been an indefinite postponement of the June meeting of Gosford Regional Gallery Advisory Committee.

Up at Christ Church, Meredith Brice (merrybrice@hotmail.com) has organised an exhibition, w.a.t.e.r, opening on the 19th of July.

Those of you who know Anne Graham will be interested in an opening of her work (with performance) at the Gosford Regional Gallery on the 18th of July.

A meeting for members of eO inc. is scheduled for the 27th of July to decide about winding up the association.

Meanwhile - enjoy the Sydney Biennale !!!

Number 7,298 is cute.

In the Vineyards '08

7 October 2008 - 18 January 2009

A massage from Tara:

"I am happy to invite artists to submit a proposals for 2008 exhibition of Sculpture in the Vineyards.

Continuing on from last years success, we hope to put together just as interesting and diverse an exhibition.
Please visit the website for more information and follow the link to the blog for some of last years highlights."

ENTRIES CLOSE ON JULY 31

Tara Morelos - curator
2008sinv@gmail.com


"Artists are invited to submit proposals by Thursday 31 July 2008 for selection be included in 2008 Sculpture in the Vineyards
Set in the picturesque Wollombi Valley, Sculpture in the Vineyards features an innovative array of large-scale outdoor and site-specific works by local, regional and city based artists. Wollombi, already home to many artists, writers and performers, provides fertile ground for a festival-like atmosphere as a new community of artists come together for the opening weekend.
Sculpture in the Vineyards provides the artist with ample opportunity to showcase their work, engaging visitors over the three month exhibition period by inviting them to enjoy contemporary sculpture amidst the springtime beauty of the Millbook Estate, Undercliff, and Stonehurst Cedar Creek vineyards. Over this time, visitors will also be able to sample unique boutique wines, participate in a creative workshop and join in one of three guided bus tours of the exhibition for an informal and fun day out in lower Hunter Valley."

Art Centre

It is good to see they are moving ahead with waterfront arts infrastructure in Norway.

New performing arts centre in Kristiansand in Norway

Of course Gosford had a state of the art centre for the arts at one time. The building is still there!

Renewable Energy

The immanent demise of eO inc. was given greater poignancy with the announcement of an exhibition at Malmo Konsthall, The Hamsterwheel.

“The Hamsterwheel is an exhibition initiated by the Austrian artist Franz West, and was originally presented at La Biennale di Venezia, 2007. The exhibition has since then travelled to the Festival de Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, and Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. At each exhibition venue the presentation of the works and relation to each other changes dramatically.

The Hamsterwheel can be seen as a playful comment to the wheel of life – the life as an artist. A wheel where we struggle to go forward, to get ahead. That always takes us forward, and still – at the end – nowhere. The exhibition attempts to show art as turbulence.

Having for many years watched, and been part of, many artists initiatives driven by committed, energetic, optimistic artists, that finally collapse under the pressures of a huge voluntary workload with little financial support or return, the “hamsterwheel” seems an apt metaphor.
But is the impassioned energetic activity simply wasted? One suspects that there is a drive mechanism attached to wheel, which, as artists instinctively struggle to go forward, generates power to keep the top heavy apparatus of the art industry lurching onwards.

Replica of a human hamster wheel, used in the 1700s to 'put the sick person back on the right track'. From the Glore Psychiatric Museum.

It is amazing that an activity carried out by a group of people, the majority of whom cannot make enough money from it to earn a living, can give rise to the huge infrastructure of well paid administrators, managers, cultural planners, curators, critics and writers, academics, gallery operators, government officers etc. We are of course grateful for the contribution they make to the industry.

Designed by Swedish physician Gustav Zander in the late nineteenth century

Mourning the Morning

eO inc., Central Coast Contemporary Arts Initiative, has over the past five years, striven to progress the Central Coast’s Contemporary Arts agenda. Unfortunately, despite the passionate commitment of its members, a point has been reached when they can no longer sustain the energy required to keep eO alive.
Therefore, eOinc. announces that, Shell Collection will be eOinc.’s final exhibition, and the last in a successful programme including f3Xit, col-aberration, re-View and Kvinna-Nainen-Women. Earlier in the organization’s life, it was the agency that sent four Central Coast artists to an Environmental Art Symposium in Korea, and the foundation organization for the Dawn Light Symposium at the Gosford Regional Gallery in 2005.





Central Coast artists Meredith Brice Copland, Sandy James and Maumer Cajic in Cheongju.




Meredith and Sandy proudly display their eO T-shirts






This is not the occasion to detail why it is so difficult for independent artist-directed organizations, or individuals, to be positively engaged in contemporary art in the region. It is enough to say that the art community is diminished by the ending of eOinc. The details are well known, and constitute the hill up which, inevitably, one gets tired of pushing shit.
It is not surprising if artists decide to just get on with their work, and go somewhere where there are more people pushing in the same direction. In these times when the scope of art is global, Gosford needs leading edge artists more than the artists need Gosford.
Engagement is not so difficult if the forms pursued fit the cultural paradigms in vogue, but critical practice will always contest orthodoxy, even in its experimental guise.
Yet despite this, there is a core of contemporary artists who live locally and who would like to see local practice able to participate in the broader intellectual and critical milieu that constitutes contemporary art. It is tragic to see the passion and enthusiasm, the time and effort, the generous community spirit, worn down.
But – don’t be surprised if a few ex-eO members pop up unexpectedly. They might have been pushed to the fringes, but there be a feral and fertile place to play.

The dimming of the Dawn

eO incorporated is proud to present its final exhibition!

Hanging out

Berlin street performer Johan Lorbeer

Just hanging about. Don't try this one in Kibble Park, Gosford, Johan. Loitering is prohibited, according to the sign in William Street, with a penalty of $500.
(I thought that was one thing parks were for)

Thanks to Sharyn for the link.

It never rains

"Rising seas will swamp thousands" (Express Advocate, 14th May) No news there.

Margaret Roberts, who as part of her work in the Dawn Light Symposium in 2005, shows anticipated sea level at the Gosford Regional Gallery.

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)