Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor : Vineta Lagsdina

Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor Bowing Fences George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre Melbourne Festival 18 October - 3 November. When thinking about the rustic Australian fence, and then considering that the world's longest fence is the so-called Dingo Fence and Rabbit Proof Fence I might have been expecting rather spatial and long gradual transformations of sound overlapping amongst terrestial currents as I entered the Victorian Arts Centre. But even as I crossed St. Kilda Road I could hear the drama of deep pulsations, rhythms ricocheting through the architecture to spin off into celestial harmonics. Jon and Hollis were in full swing, a bow in each hand and moving along the 16 meter length of piano wired fence. Jon swings a fine bow as most of us know and was the more spectacular performer, with Hollis holding good ground but watching him more than he watched her. As an artist I notice these things. Nonetheless it was exciting. The installation was kind-o'-neat in it's layout with barbed wire separating the (instrument) fence and posts; with images, stories and sound documenting the lives and voices of people who build and live with these fences. At other times the previous day's performances would be playing during gallery hours which were up to 11pm. And it seems that "Bowing Fences" continues as an expanding concept for Jon Rose, as well as a travelling one. Vineta Lagzdina

Janet Cardiff : Nicole Katz

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B Whitechapel Library, London Ongoing Take the tube to Aldgate East. Come out on Whitechapel High Street. To the left is the Whitechapel Library (to the right is the Whitechapel Gallery), go in and ask for the Janet Cardiff piece. You'll be given a discman. Press play and follow the instructions. "I want you to walk with me," she whispers insistently, "there are some things I need to show you." Do everything she says. You'll want to, for her voice is as hypnotic as it is intimate. The Missing Voice was commissioned by Artangel in 1999 and continues to live quietly and intensely in the Whitechapel Library. For over a decade now Canadian artist Janet Cardiff has been creating site-specific audio walks all over the world. This one takes place in east London, which has the greatest concentration of contemporary art spaces in all of Europe. (When you're done with The Missing Voice, grab a map from the gallery next door and keep walking.) As you twist through the streets of the East End, Cardiff's multi-layered narrative spills into your ears. The plot - a detective mystery - is secondary to the experience, but it sets the pleasantly insidious tone. "Try to follow the sound of my footsteps," she breathes, "so that we can stay together." The tapping of the footsteps are like heartbeats in your ears. The duality of the streetscape and Cardiff's observations of it are uncannily timed. For this brief spell, your thoughts are subsumed by hers. You see what she sees, you hear what she hears, and perhaps, you feel what she feels. Whispered intimacies born behind closed doors, late at night, are overheard on noisy, unforgiving city streets. The labyrinth of the city mirrors the corridors of the mind. Its history pounds with the melancholy of memory. "The city is infinite every possible permutation, unlimited but cyclical." The narrative winds from past to present, dreamtime to daytime; and between the irreconcilable permutations of the heart and the reality of the street. "Sometimes when you read things, it seems like you're remembering them." And sometimes when you hear things it seems like you're dreaming them. Cardiff's lilting, hypnotic voice is intrinsic to the poetry of this piece. I'll say no more, for the mystery of the work is its beauty. All you have to do is listen. Nicole Katz

Documenta 11 : Nicole Katz

Documenta 11 - Platform 5 Kassel -Nicole Katz June 8 - September 15 Documenta, the exhibition, is the fifth in a series of discourses (or platforms) exploring the spaces inhabited by culture in our global society. From March 2001 to September 2002, in Vienna, New Delhi and elsewhere, the following worthy subjects were debated: Platform 1: Democracy Unrealized; Platform 2: Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice & the Processes of Truth & Reconciliation; Platform 3: Creolite & Creolization (an exploration of global cultural miscegenation) and Platform 4: Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. Kassel, the last of the platforms, is in the words of the Artistic Director, Okwui Enwezor, said to give concrete form to all of Documenta 11. The scale and ambition of Documenta 11's mandate is both heart-warming and frustrating. The global trend in the art world towards self-consciously socially engaged art is an understandable, even laudable, response to the wholesale emptiness of corporatised popular culture in our increasingly wealthy capitalist/democratic societies; especially when contrasted with the astounding poverty that continues to flourish in the rest of the world. And so art has come to be an extension of activism. Art as a place where inequalities are acknowledged and for a time redressed. Art as a place where the most cruelly oppressed can scream, and presumably, be heard. To put it another way: Equal Opportunity Art. Palestinian despair. Uruguayan torture. Congolese resistance. Moldovan railway workers. Black/white tension in the UK. Contemporary Lebanese historians. Inuits under siege. In a way there's something Utopian about all these groups and issues intersecting and colliding in the generous embrace of the art world. And after all, where else do you get to see and hear about all these things? But on the ground, the complex and ambitious mandate of Documenta 11 translated into a stunning array of artistic banality. It felt like the art world's answer to the Earth Summit. Every oppressed minority represented, irrespective of artistic merit. Endless rooms of installations that looked suspiciously like libraries, offices and information booths jammed with reams of A4 paper explanations. Stills and videos that looked like they'd been lifted straight from National Geographic, and worse still, CNN. Perhaps it is a measure of the degree of desperation felt by these people (for I hesitate to call them artists) that has lead them to communicate in such plain and direct language. Perhaps it is this that fuels their desire to deal in facts and figures rather than metaphors and images. Perhaps the last place for these people to turn to is the art world. All these possibilities may be true, but what sings truest of all is that no matter how eloquently the curators and directors and academics and critics and collectors shout about this kind of work, prose can never be transmuted into poetry. There were, mercifully, some notable exceptions to this general rule, but not nearly as many as hoped for. These were, disappointingly, almost all by established artists. But perhaps I am being exigent and idealistic, for some say that a single gem among hundreds is worth the trek to Kassel. And in some ways, I am inclined to agree. For it felt like some kind of magic, winding through room after room of work in search of those moments. And however few and far between, those gems have pleasantly lodged in the visual memory and continue to weave their artistic spells. In Shirin Neshat's Tooba on two screens facing off, men and women are again polarised and unreconciled. In the green sepia of a lonely mountain landscape, a lone woman stands by a single tree that has been bricked in. Her skin is worn as the tree's bark. Opposite a band of men are slowly and menacingly advancing on the woman/tree. Just as they scale the wall, she dissolves into the tree. Tooba is an imaginary and allegorical place, but one that is also biblical and primal. Neshat, as ever, has surrounded herself with an expert film crew. The camera is sharp and devoid of sentimentality; the music is taut but lyrical; and the editing so beautifully coordinated that in spite of only ever seeing the screens side-on, you never for a second feel lost. On the contrary, this feels like an entirely different way of seeing. William Kentridge's Zeno Writing is a frantically paced animation made using not more than twenty charcoal drawings that are constantly reworked and reframed. There are amorphous, numb landscapes; maddening ledgers containing blind columns of texts and numbers; iron lace that decorates and suffocates; bourgeois interiors with grotesque dancing chairs; and most memorable of all a possessed typewriter with keys that jump up and flail about like a drowning man waving his arms. Words and images appear only to be melancholically smudged out seconds later. Kentridge simultaneously evokes the landscape of the mind and the landscape of war and hatred/the political landscape of his native South Africa. Each of the five acts, for the atmosphere is decidedly theatrical, are bracketed by black smoke rising and black smoke falling. Appearing, disappearing, recurring and reinventing. In Homebound, Lebanese artist Mona Hatoum takes you inside to a place that looks like your home gone very wrong. The room is wired off with sharp, smoothe wires. Beyond that all of the familiar domestic apparatus, much of it skeletal and metallic, are connected by electric wires and heavy clamps. Periodically an object lights up and emits a pitiful wail, like a man gasping for his last breath. The title of the piece may be taken quite literally, whether the person inside be homebound because dying, or homebound because a political prisoner, or simply a civilian caught in the crossfire of a monstrous war. Her name was Chantal Feyzdjou. She was born in Tehran in 1955 and died in Paris in 1996. Her piece, Products of Chantal Feyzdjou, is an enormous installation with hundreds of blackened, obscure objects. Each one of these, on sooty, mauve labels, bears the title of the piece. Rows of dirty bottles, jars and sachets containing incomprehensible, dead objects. Crates of black gunk and bolts of filthy fabrics and most disturbing of all canvases hanging from stretchers like raw hides at a tannery. The gross morbidity of the installation in the cavernous main of hall of the museum, coupled with the strangely intimate and obsessive labelling of each one of these futile objects, gives the effect of being inside the artist's very own sarcophagus.

Matthew Barney : Nicole Katz

Mathew Barney's version Cremaster Cycle Ritzy Cinema in South London, November 2002 In his monumental cycle of five films, video artist/renaissance man Matthew Barney takes reality and deliberately, masterfully and endlessly creatively abstracts it. The films, made over the last deacde, and in which Barney himself performs, were shot out of sequence - 4, 1, 5, 2, 3 - and it is unclear if they are intended to be viewed in any particular order. As Barney says, "the stories themselves are somewhat interchangeable" On Sunday November 3, at the Ritzy Cinema in South London, all five films were shown in numerical sequence. I attended this mega-marathon - from 2pm till 11pm - and although I confess to still being mystified as to the artist's intentions, I was nevertheless enthralled from start to finish; for Barney's visual eye is sharp, seductive and, above all, original. In the first offering, Cremaster 4, all of the elements are present which will be repeated, redrawn and recast in the subsequent films. It was shot in 1994 in the Isle of Man and is part sports tv (motor car racing), part musical theatre (tap dancing) and part sci-fi (a post humanoid crawls through a maze of vaseline, but more on that later). What is true of his first film seems to be true of them all. They are all self-enclosed systems of aesthetics that reference themselves over and over again. They are like a new language and as such are taught by repetition. And like all language, its origins can only partially be explained. The environment is highly stylized and tightly controlled. Baroque is a word that has often been used to describe Barney's work and it is perhaps fitting, with its excesses, elaborate interiors and detailed costuming. Satyrs, nymphs and mythical partially human figures tap dance, sing, scale interiors, race cars and perform creepy operations in environments that are abstracted enough from reality to transport and detach. There is little that feels familiar here, and Barney seldom lingers in any one of his many locations, for part of the seduction is the way in which his invented reality moves and responds to the stimuli of his imagination. His is a highly protean world whose meanings are not easily recognizable, if at all, and whose only tangible law, it seems, is the law of change. And for that reason it is perhaps akin to a biological system, for Barney desires to create an internal system of his own, an artistic anatomy that is as functioning as it is hidden. The title is perhaps the most obvious key to unravelling the helix of his work. Cremaster are a set of muscles that control the height of the internal male reproductive system. Muscles that are said to respond to temperature and fear. "The five chapters of the story are about an organism that is changing, and the system that changes that form alters from chapter to chapter." That system is Barney's brain, and it is an artistic fountainhead from which sculpture, painting, installation, photography, choreography and film (in many of its genres) pours forth in a prodigious display of the power of imagination. In lieu of any graspable narrative thread, I found myself searching for Barney's leitmotifs, for his chain of imagery, that essentially links and binds the films. Things like magic shoes and women's stockings, hexagons and pentagons, and vaseline. Like Beuys and fat; Yves Klein and that blue; Matthew Barney will surely forever be remembered in the same breath as vaseline. It is his ectoplasm, his glue. Sexual only in theory, for on the screen and in the quantities in which he uses it, the vaseline becomes industrial and horribly messy. No matter how many orifices it oozes from (that would be plenty), it remains asexual. As in fact does the entire atmosphere of all his films. In Cremaster 1, a giant vaseline sculpture of the female reproductive organ surrounded by grapes is the centrepiece in the film which takes place in two giant zeppelins. It grows, it melts, it dominates and it is carefully guarded by slickly dressed hostesses. Other recurring images are women in multiples, or women as clones, often balled up in tight spaces and usually scantily clad. In Cremaster 4 they are mechanics and mutants. In Cremaster 1 they are a retro chorus line of dancers, being controlled from above by a mysterious woman who is squashed into a tight white space. In Cremaster 5 they are water sprites and hand maidens. In Cremaster 3 they seem lifted from an Esther Williams film, only with slightly less clothing. There is the hexagon, which is referenced over and over again in the beautifully constructed sets. In floor tiles and iron lace, in wooden panels and bee hives. There is the pentagon, significantly portrayed by the Chrysler building, setting for Cremaster 3. These are Barney's basic units of life, his alga, emblematic of the entire cycle of his work. There's a lot of all-Americana going on. There's the cowboy movie (2), the sports channel (athletics in 1, rodeo in 2, racing car driving in 4), boys and their cars (in 2 and 3 and 4). But as Barney says about these references to American traditions, "I don't think that by the time they've been hashed through the project they're representative of what they necessarily are in everyday life." Of course, there is nothing even remotely pedestrian or tangible in his imagery. And it is precisely because of that consistent detachment that Cremaster is both seductive and cold. The action of the films seems to switch dramatically between opposing spaces. Often one that is locked and desperately claustrophobic, the other open and often in a domineering and majestic landscape. These seem to provide a tension, or conflict that does not exist between his characters. It's not that the characters are all in harmony, it's that they are more like robotic sculptures than sentient beings. In 4, it moves from a stifling vaseline injected tunnel to the Isle of Man. In 1, it shifts from under the table in the zeppelin to the football field (shot in Barney's hometown of Boise, Idaho). In 5 it moves from underwater shots to snow encrusted landscapes. In 2 there is the vaseline smeared interior of a mutant car and the vast space of Canadian icefields. And in 3 there is the locked interior of the elevator shaft of the Chrysler building and beyond that Manhattan. Barney uses music/sound effects in place of dialogue and to great effect. These interior and exterior worlds are personified by the sounds that each produces. The stifling interiors of the vaseline tunnel in 4; and the zeppelin in 1, are especially overwhelming as the tight spaces are filled with the grinding noises of an aeroplane engine. Music beautifully takes the place of dialogue, but the absence of tangible narrative is more difficult to replace. It is certainly to Barney's credit that he succeeds as well as he does with as little narrative as he has. The films, in particular number 2, are hugely entertaining, and that is largely because of Barney's endlessly energetic vision. His mysteriously attired characters who perform inexplicable tasks with great purpose, his lavish and magnificently constructed sets that indicate places that seem familiar and yet are uncomfortable and uninhabitable; and the landscapes he has chosen which are as monumental as the ambition and reach of these films. And yet, this virtual absence of narrative is a curious thing. For the films themselves imply a narrative as well as deny one. They are films insofar as they are shown in cinemas which is an exhilarating way to experience video art, but it is precisely this context which seems to demand a narrative. Barney offers precious little. The deliberate obscurity is offset by his seductive images; and the seductive images when seen piled on top of one another are actually very entertaining. Stories are built around objects and places. The initial point of departure is an image and from that a crudely assembled narrative is pieced together. Barney says he's interested in something that "appears to be narrative motion-picture" but is clearly not. "It's difficult to do that. It requires pulling back in ways unnatural to that form - not allowing characters to develop in ways they want to develop, or in ways a viewer wants them to be developed." And herein lies the central frustration of Barney's work. There has been an enormous amount of material generated about the Cremaster Cycle as it seems to have been universally greeted by critics and public alike with great excitement. You could read, for example, that Harry Houdini, who features in C2 is Gary Gilmore's grandfather, who also features in C2 and is apparently resurrected at the beginning of C3. Budapest, the setting for C5 is Houdini's birthplace. Norman Mailer, who wrote the few words uttered in C2 also plays Houdini in the film, and the book Barney quotes from here is about the infamous killer Gilmore. Richard Serra who does lots of things in C3 also throws hot vaseline on the top rung of the Guggenheim in exactly the same way as he threw lead in the late 1960s. What all of this reveals is a small aperture into the mind of the artist. His interests, the construction of his visual vocabulary, the way in which he has stitched his films together, how each one minutely references the other, how much planning and thinking has gone into the work. But what it will not reveal is a coherent interpretation of the Cremaster Cycle. Is it about creation? Yes, it's about Barney's creative engine. And this is as much its strength as its weakness. I wonder what will remain in the days, months and years after the initial impact of the visuals recedes, for a lack of human emotion will always ultimately provoke apathy. Especially in the final film of the sequence, number 3, which runs at just over 3 hours, and culminates in some dreadful stuff shot in the Guggenheim Museum, including a punk band that really feel like they should not be there, and stand out as being the only entirely unoriginal, pretentious element in all the films. However, perhaps most tellingly for me is the music in Cremaster 5, which was shot in Budapest in 1997, and is more literally baroque than any of the other pieces. It is partly shot in the Budapest opera house where a character called the Queen of Chain (played by Ursula Andress) lip-syncs an aria. The words were written by Barney and he had these translated and sung in Hungarian. The singing is mournful and ornate, and from the music alone we can deduce many things. From my knowledge of Hungarian the last word sung, the last word of the entire cycle translates as, "Forgive me". Forgive me, she sings, forgive me for not explaining, I say or you could just let the visuals roll over you, and perhaps even away from you, and leave all that literal stuff for someone else. Nicole Katz

Stanley Brouwn : Andreas Gedin

Stanley Brouwn, Documenta 2002 stanley brouwn befindet sich im moment x fuß entfernt von diesem punkt at this moment stanley brouwn is at a distance of x feet from this point en ce moment stanley brouwn se trouve à x pieds de ce point (stanley brouwn befinner sig i detta ögonblick x fot från denna punkt)Thomas -KOLLA ÖVERS! Sökandet efter Mr. Brouwn Det talas om konstnären som en aktör som intar konstscenen. Att synas och att kommunicera från denna scen är konstnärens uppgift. Documentautställningarna i Kassel vart femte år är en konstens olympiad där deltagarna kan sägas ha vunnit bara genom att bli utvalda till att delta. Men en av deltagarnarna i den pågående Documenta 11, konstnären Stanley Brouwn,väljer ovanligt nog att minimera, för att inte säga anonymisera, sitt deltagande. Det publiceras inga personuppgifter om honom i katalogerna och det verk han representeras med utgörs endast av ovanstående trespråkiga katalogtext Påståendet ovan är både exakt ­det är en logisk utsaga­ och inexakt ­x är en variabel, en okänd storhet. Det ögonblick som omtalas är också en variabel eftersom det utgörs av alla de ögonblick då någon kommer att läsa denna text. Avståndet mellan konstnären och den punkt läsaren befinner sig på i det ögonblick hon läser texten är också okänt. Vi vet inte om Brouwn just nu står och läser denna text över axeln på oss eller om han sitter och dricker gin och tonic i Djakarta. Samtidigt understryker Brouwn att det finns en rumslig och tidsmässig exakt relation mellan honom och läsaren. Det är därför knappast en tillfällighet att Brouwn anger avståndet mellan texten/läsaren och sig själv i ett mänskligt mått ­fot. Han har i andra sammanhang utfört ett flertal verk som bygger på kroppens mått, som till exempel måttenheten ²steg². Steglängden är förstås också en av dessa variabler, ett av dessa ²x². Katalogläsare som stöter på Brouwns anonymitet blir nyfiken. Den mask av anonymitet han ikläder sig lockar läsaren att ta reda på mer. Det är den som gömmer sig man letar efter. Ett skäl till att Brouwn uttagits till Documenta 11 ­ som handlar om kolonialism ur olika aspekter ­ kan vara att mätandet är den historiska kolonianismens kärna. Den som lägger land under sig måste kunna mäta upp det. Konsten att mäta, och i förlängningen förmågan att framställa riktiga kartor, är historiskt sett nödvändiga förutsättninmgar för ägandet. I this way brouwn (1960-61) frågade Brouwn olika människor han stötte på på gatan på gatan om vägen till en särskild plats och bad dem rita en vägbeskrivning på en bit papper, som han sedan sparade. I ett annat projekt strödde Brouwn ut pappersark på en trottoar. Arken med de slumpmässiga avtrycken där fotgängarna deltagit ofrivilligt blev ännu ett av Brouwns klassiska och bitvis okända verk. Fotavtrycken är nära besläktade med variabeln x i textverket i Documantakatalogen. Liksom det fotavtryck ärkekolonisatören Robinson Crusoe* fann på stranden är de ett arketypiskt uttryck för mänsklig existens på samma gång som den människa som foten tillhör är okänd, är ett x. Jag har letat efter Brouwn tidigare och har lyckats finna ut att han är född i Surinam 1935 och bor och verkar i Amsterdam. Han deltog bland annat i Documenta 5, 1972. Han producerar små vita, kvadratiska böcker som anger olika avstånd och mått. Om Stanley Brouwn i stället för att anonymisera sitt delltagande uppgett sin biografi och ställt ut sitt textverk som en bild hade han inte fått den särskilda uppmärksamhet som denna artikel innebär. Andreas Gedin *Läs gärna den franske författaren Michel Tourniers mästerliga roman Fredag, som handlar om hur Robinsom lägger ön och Fredag under sig, för att sedan "förfalla", ge sig hän naturen och "det naturliga². Andreas Gedin

Jonathan Bottrell Jones and Jim Viveaere : Tony Green

Jonathan Bottrell Jones (Australia) and Jim Vivieaere (New Zealand) "‘RED OUT September - Auckland Society of the Arts Gallery There’s a story here. It began with an e-mail exchange between these two artists of colour -- Jonathan Jones in Australia, Jim Vivieaere in New Zealand. . Then two thick courier packets arrived here from Jonathan with 142 rectangular sheets of card. Each one looks like it was a part of one large painted piece, a broad blood-red meander on white, with sun images here and there, a map-like painting of a territory. Each one has a word on it, made it seems of letters cut out of magazine adverts. Black thread runs through the meander, stitched by machine. Each sheet had a tissue paper covering, so that the meander looks like blood showing through flesh. Jim put them on one wall, 34 along the bottom then irregular towers of them nearly to the ceiling. It is plain that the meander is now broken up, the original order dispersed, the black threads no longer join the pieces together, the threads hang loose, no apparent syntax holds the English words together. The disintegration of systems of text and image are equated here with the destructive damage to the culture of the colonised people. Jim Vivieaere has removed some of the protective tissue paper that covered the painted sheets. The result is visually dramatic, as if stripping away skin to expose blood red arteries. On the adjacent wall Vivieaere he put up an inscription, telling something of the relation between the two artists, their family, and telling also of Jonathan’s flying other artists in a ‘plane, so they can see the land from the air, laid out, of course, like a map. The inscription ends by remarking that this is the last show ever to be put on by the Auckland Society of the Arts, the long history of which, back to the nineteenth century, coincides with colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, particularly the colonist hope that the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia will be Bred Out. This was shortened to “ ‘RED out in the punning title of the show, with its blood red meander, inscribed on the floor in blue. There is more than a little irony in the conjunction of a primarily colonist artists’ art society and the history of colonisation. My sense of it is, this was a strong show, with good reason to provoke disquiet, a good way to end the Society’s exhibiting history. Art institutions are by no means politics-free zones. It is fitting that the last show of a society which originally measured its art by British academic standards should be by artists of colour - and that it should openly manifest a social history that had, within the art institution, been largely ignored or kept out of sight. Tony Green

Sue Pedley : Margaret Roberts

Sue Pedley Sound of Bamboo, Royal Botanical Gardens Sydney Sound of Bamboo was a three part installation by Sue Pedley in the Sydney Botanical Gardens in September 2002. It used red wool and found bamboo, inspired in part by her experiences during residencies in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. It also continued a longer term exploration of the surprise created by strong colour in unexpected locations - as food colouring bleeding through white plaster or coloured wool interwoven with natural settings - as intrusions which present the locations as much as themselves. In Sound of Bamboo, the red woollen yarn was woven through two bamboo stands in the lower part of the Gardens, making two enigmatic horizontal blocks of red colour, one also reflected in the water beside it. They could not be confused with the colour of flowers or the pattern of leaves or insects, leaving viewers without explanations for their peculiar presence. They made more sense by putting your head into the bamboo stand itself, looking down into the weaving of red wool and green branch from above - giving its spatial abstraction more room to compete with the more familiar context of the garden. Once viewers arrive at the 'third' part of the work, however, we realise that the 'first' two also operate as pointers, as Sue herself called them, or as warm-ups or even spread-outs, in some way secondary to the third part of the work in the larger bamboo, but still essential as tails or strands further out in space. In this third part, the red and orange woollen fabric segments wrapped around the hollow bamboo tubes in the larger bamboo stand make vertical lines of colour which gently disturb our interpretation of space. The stand of bamboo has various references for different people - its reference to Asia being one - but it also is part of the ordinary lived world in which it is unambiguously a stand of bamboo. The disturbance occurs because the wollen wrappings confuse scale, and - perhaps assisted by the intense activity of graffitti-marks cut into most of the bamboo tubes - suggest we are also looking at a drawing. The work thus playfully asks us to accommodate something as both ordinary and unambiguous at the same time as being more open and multilayered in meaning. The ambiguity of scale hints at the similarity between a stand of giant bamboo and a bunch of grass, for example, an ambiguity which can also flow over into consideration of the dispersions involved in the location of an emblem of nearby Asia in a Botanical Garden originating in in distant Europe. It is the gentle integration of the space of art-activity with ordinary lived space which enables consideration of meanings inherent in the latter. Margaret Roberts

Lucas Ilhein : Gianna Murazzo

lucus or lucas mi piace tantissimo la tua idea-realizzazione di queste magliette! avevo visto delle tue t-shirt anche in un altro sito su un tuo progetto; sono le stesse? se permetti, !, ti scrivo quello che il tuo progetto mi spinge a pensare come idea matrice, idea-madre: penso che la tua scelta , cosl forbitamente (=astutamente, nel senso buono! ), diretta, di un messaggio, apparentemente semplice, con una scritta rossa su maglietta bianca (i colori + diretti e semplici), con questi luoghi comuni sfrontatamente evidenziati, h una buona idea. : non solo perchh ha in sh un senso di universalit` = di includere + popoli, quindi senso di internazionalit`, (+ persone che vedono la tua opera, se questi sono di paesi diversi, possono scherzarci su a ritrovare il proprio Paese, ) ma poi per un messaggio + profondo, voglia di conoscere i vari popoli (magari) e di andare aldil` dei luoghi comuni, (o no?) e poi questo prendere un luogo comune per ironizzarlo, annullarlo, cosa a cui porta lo scriverlo;perchh il "rosso" "mgs" non pur essere che per mettere in evidenza la banalit` e l'ignoranza che si nasconde dietro ad ogni generalizzazione. ...........inter....me......zzo........ wisher......... ma lasciando lo sguardo critico e "acido", che ogni dito a scavare trae.................. io vedo in questi luoghi comuni anche un comico voler raccontare, voler avvicinare.... gi` perchh se non h vero che tutti i giapponesi sono industrializzati o che tutti i libici sono terroristi ((-naturallement no, tu le connai bien-!- )) o che tutti gli spagnoli sono pigri, eccetera eccetera eccetera, in tutto questo ch un qualcosa che d` un'impronta di personalit`, impronta che d` qualcosa di un popolo, chh se uno nasce in un posto anzichh un altro di conseguenze ce n'h tante, e lo si sa!, allora c'h qualcosa che in questi luoghi fa sorridere e magari proprio perchh tu ne sei la esatta prova vivente contraria! non voglio aggiungere pesantezza alla nuvola bianca che mi hai parato dinnanzi... la mia visione h immagino molto banale, mea culpa! comunque mi piace tanto l'uso che fai e hai fatto delle parole stampate nella tua arte.. h un modo diretto di inviare un messaggio, per nulla banale, nel tuo caso. c'h una freschezza e una serenit` in cir che fai, che io ammiro. tante volte l'arte contemporanea per smuovere lo spettatore cosl ormai amorfo da tutto (sono immense le cose che lo raggiungono, circondano, bersagliano ogni giorno) bh per prendere attenzione deve produrre shoch! e molto spesso h molto pesante quello che propongono, pesante nel senso di sofferente, aggiungono cioh sofferenza e disagio...il che a volte va bene, non dico no. ma tante volte h solo fumo di zolfo per dare l'idea che si h vicino a una miniera, che perr non h mai esistita... i'm sorry i'm writing long long and not clear(maybe) speach (discorso) fammi sapere se le critiche che hai avuto per il tuo lavoro sono state buone e se tu sei soddisfatto di esso, e di esse. un fumoso saluto ,[e con le farfalle color di zolfo della campagna in ottobre di Virginia wolf,] g Ps:il cantautore h paolo conte, italiano , famoso dapprima in francia, poi in italia. per me un grande. ma anche vincent gallo, genere completamente diverso, non scherza! per filosofia della musica stiamo studiando il femminismo in musica e il fatto che per tanto tempo non ci sono state compositrici donne (ci avevi mai pensato? le donne studiavano musica poco e solo per l'ambiente familiare) e poi abbiamo trattato di alcune compositrici del primo '900 e met` '900. adesso mi piacerebbe percorrere la storia dell'artista Laurie anderson, che francamente non cononsco, se non come immagine di performer........................................... .................parole parole parole............... ciao ciao Gianna Murazzo

Devin Johnston : Louise Wisser

Devin Johnston Telepathy Paper Bark Press Sydney 2002 “To start with, I look up ‘Devin’ / and approach my subject with circumspection. / I find, half hid in etymology, / not a person at all…” ; a landscape mosaic, lush as snow, and laid etymon for etymon as if they had never been misplaced. Telepathy, as collection, provokes the [mother] tongue from land. its language making translation a matter of time rather than place, reviving words otherwise laid to rest, rendered both into a sense of this-moment mythology. and although Johnston takes care to momentarily relieve us of the anguish (“Though anguish shares / no etymology with anguis - / ‘snake’ in Latin”) of a language made foreign, there remains much that is read as sound only; echoes that make the sense of “Bats” - “The sky is / chatoyant. / The earth is grum, / and we are cant.” This being a sense capable of mapping a terrain out of a sound. Telepathy, as titlepiece, spans the signifying moments of one woman’s life into the grave. her impassables to language as self-directed existence find eventual expression in a “melisma of misery” uttered from the grave, otherwise the recollections of her life are void of the faculty of speech. her diary entries are the voice translated as occupied space. one’s own. they share the same format as “Journal Entries”, the only other selection to so succinctly prove the occupation of a woman’s mouth, “The hardest fact / a little stone / held in the mouth / and wetted, shone”, by the obscuration of her word. To end, “I found the simple face / of unrelenting snow” inscribed with the histories/topologies of unspoken words a particularly tactile form of ‘distance feeling’. Louise Wisser

Susan Norrie : Simon Maidment

Susan Norrie Undertow Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Melbourne The thing that struck me most seeing this exhibition at the new ACCA was how Susan Norrie seems to deal with intent. Not her own but the intent we as an audience are invited to attach to the subjects depicted in her video work. People are predators and protectors simultaneously, mud is made thinking, emotional, determined to escape its origin. A balloon flexes its rippling torso impatiently. A cloud of dust ominous not in its effect, but in it’s considered, measured movement. The largest of the video works was completely fantastic, a brooding piece made up of bits and pieces of footage Norrie has selected from film and television archives and processed to give us grainy, black and white imagery that looked more like a scene from Ring than the Channel Nine News. When slowed down to within an inch of disrupting the persistence of vision, there is all the time necessary to deliberate on the individual scenes, and their resonance as a whole, and imbue them with a sense of dread; apocalyptic scenes of nature turning on a city, the populous escaping, a military involvement. The proximity of Flinders Street, disrecognised /unrecognised/in the footage by that deliberate, noxious looking cloud (Terrorists? War? Nature?!), certainly energises the experience. Certainly it’s the soundtrack that accompanied the piece that infuses the world of Norrie with portent. A globulus composition, its synth chords welled up and filled the space as a dense shifting mass (in part due to ACCA’s idiosyncratic acoustics). I’ve never really been much of a fan of “look what we are doing to our planet” art, and this extends to one of Norrie’s video works that was shown at ACCA, slowed down greyscale video of birds covered in oil being - I don’t know; dealt with? - a piece that really didn’t have the depth of the rest of the works. I was hurt and disappointed when the largest video finally looped and I saw the opening shot (which I’d missed on the way in), a wave rolling along... A goddamn wave - after all this enigmatic city footage looking like The X-Files or Akira. But half way through the pan the wave begins to morph, it loses its froth and becomes fire, black fire spreading across a bed of liquid. Fantastic. The installation itself I found a mass (mess?) of conflicting scales, the freestanding boxes housing the projectors all different distances, different heights and the largest video too large for the material yet slightly too small for the wall. It was interesting then that the smallest work shown was also the one that acted for me as bookend, introduction and conclusion to the largest of Norrie’s pieces. Simply it was a silent presentation of Welles’ film of Kafka’s The Trial writ tiny, drawing us into the undercurrents of Undertow; authoritarianism, helplessness, confusion, dread, impending yet suspended doom - yeah! Simon Maidment

Simon Barney : Christopher Dean

Simon Barney No Ideas Front Room, Sydney AS STUPID AS A CURATOR It would be hard to imagine a politician or a hairdresser boasting about their own stupidity. If they did the scenario might be as follows: "I'm a politician and I've got no idea how to run this country" or "I'm a hairdresser and I've forgotten how to do a perm". A world consisting of unresolved government policies and bad hair-do's would be the obvious result. In contrast to this painters often like to boast about their own stupidity. The steady decline of the status of painting in capitalist economies goes part of the way towards explaining this trend. Andy Warhol would often request that interviewers provide him with both questions and answers. This strategy of active passivity allowed artists such as Warhol to reclaim their lost sense of cultural authority. Simon Barney takes this level of 'critical stupidity' one step further by insisting that other artists provide him with instructions for paintings because as he claims in an artists statement "I have no ideas of my own". The result is a show titled 'No Ideas' which was recently held at an independent gallery called Front Room. For this exhibition Barney contacted six artists with the request that they each provide him with ideas about what he should paint. This information formed the basis for six abstract and figurative paintings in both oil and acrylic which formed the basis of the exhibition. To prove his well developed sense of stupidity the oils were not allowed sufficient time to dry and entrapped the lustful fingers of visitors like flies in ointment when they touched the works at the opening. In keeping with the spirit of this exhibition the six artists who supplied ready made ideas are not listed in this review because No Ideas is an attempt to demonstrate that even if a curatorial concept is devoid of ideas it is always perceived as being more important than the original concept of an individual artist. Christopher Dean

Brent Harris : Penny Webb

Brent Harris Grotesquerie Kalimany Gallery Sydney Realism, by tooth and claw, in a Brent Harris catalogue - A 32-page catalogue was published by Kaliman Gallery, Sydney to coincide with the exhibition "Brent Harris: Grotesquerie". The show of paintings and woodcuts ran from 24 October to 16 November, 2002, having previously been shown in Melbourne. The booklet is beautiful. One of the works in the show is reproduced on the cover; the artist's name appears discreetly, lower left. In place of an introductory essay, the catalogue presents an extract from a story by Gillian Mears, titled "Sad Quarrion", from her collection "A Map of the Gardens", recently published by Picador. Quarrion is another name for a cockatiel, the caged bird in Mears' story. The four pages of text are numbered 141 to 144, presumably preserving their original published form. The text's status as extract or quotation is enhanced by having been printed on a browny-grey rectangle, creating a page within a page. Significantly, the gorgeous paper stock (low sheen, washable) also, subtly, presents this text as an image. But this typographic image is as lumpy as Harris' paintings are smooth: the letter forms are a riot of unreliable descenders, botched terminals and furry stems. In contrast, Harris' images appear controlled, fluid and flat, as indeed the canvases are in reality. But, with regard to propositional content, there is less discrepancy between Mears' text and Harris' images. Words such as "grotesque", "animal", "fairy tale", "oversized" and the question, "Couldn't he have been just for once the prey not the predator?" resonate with Harris' characters although no "animal gleam of light" disturbs the flatness of his astonishing images. But "Split me in two so I can grow", the last line of the extract, directly sets the scene for the paintings that follow. Harris, who had been working with increasingly organic-looking abstract forms for some time, spent two months in Japan in 1999, learning woodblock printmaking. The flowing lines, elliptical shapes and folds familiar to anyone interested in Japanese woodblock prints and their influence on Western composition during the 19th century have become, in Harris' hands, the means to stage a provocative, psychological drama. The move was from amorphous mass to your worst nightmare, painted in the most tasteful way, in large, flat areas of warm black, warm white, much smaller areas of pale yellow, winey red, browny red, pale grey and two restricted instances of orange. The same palette might be found, for example, in the late-18th-century prints of Kabuki actors by Toshusai Sharaku. In the first image, "Grotesquerie (No. 1)", the head and shoulders of a yellow-haired figure who looks up and over "her" shoulder at a sort of rubber-glove head, with two fingers or two horns on the top. The spatial relationship between the two characters initiates a pictorial economy that uses repeated elements _ a traditional approach disparaged by modern Japanese printmakers _ across the other works. But Harris' vocabulary of shapes and sinuous lines stunningly articulates some basic oppositions: between figure and ground; black and white; masculine and feminine. If you've ever been to a tailor's shop, you're likely to have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds, of patterns for garment parts hanging up. After a lifetime of perfecting the craft, a tailor can combine and adapt these templates to construct any garment required. Harris' pictorial economy operates in an analogous way. He creates scenes out of body parts, cut to the measure of his desires. With masterly precision, he evokes threat, anxiety, confusion, pain, panic, despair, endurance and longing. His two or three characters are at once familiar and unfamiliar, menacing and pathetic. While this may be an aspect of the ``splitting in two'' that Mears' protagonist anguishes over, the doubling produced by the unstable boundaries between the figures is unnerving. NEW PARA In that the work is representational, it posits a world. Any realism is a good thing: the more nuanced our visualisations and the more developed our descriptive powers, the more enriched our perceptions of the world we inhabit are likely to be. But it was written of Sharaku during his brief but spectacular career in 1794-95 that "his excess of zeal to draw the real realistically led him to produce strange works". Harris is a radical realist working with comparable poetic power. Cowfish or cuckold, predator or prey, flayed or flagrant: this is not a story to be told in words. Penny Webb

Australia Council : Rainer Linz

The Australia Council An arts policy as long as your arm There has been much discussion of the recent ministerial appointments to the Music Board of the Australia Council though surprisingly, very little protest action from artists. The Australia Council was established by an Act of Parliament, with the mechanism of "arms length" decision-making written into the legislation. This is basically an administrative mechanism that makes it more difficult for Federal politicians to directly intervene in grant making decisions. In other words, the legislation is designed to undermine any casual political interference in the arts. While the minister of the day may - that is, having good reason - appoint members of a Council Board directly, only the Board itself may appoint members to any committee that serves it. Thus the makeup of a peer assessment panel for instance, is determined solely by the Board for here the minister has no say by act of Parliament. Public discussion of the recent political appointments to the Music Board seems to centre on two main factors, namely the appointees' apparent affiliation with youth orchestras, and the resulting lack of expertise on the Board in other areas of music. At least one piece of this puzzle has been missing. This is the observation that once upon a time, the various Boards of the Australia Council and their peer assessment panels were quite properly and distinctly separate. That is no longer the case, as Music Board members routinely sit on their own assessment panels. This blurs the distinction in their roles as policy makers and policy implementers, and creates a perceived conflict of interest. By means of a simple administrative change the Council has opened a conduit directly from the Minister's office through to the assessment panels, effectively bypassing the intention of the Australia Council Act, and demolishing the mechanism of arm's length funding in the process. The Australia Council legislation relies on artists themselves to be the ultimate defenders against coarse political favouritism; they are the ultimate champions of the arms length process. It should have been clear to every artist then, as the Australia Council engaged an advertising company to coin the slogan "supporting the value of the arts" (as opposed to simply "supporting the arts"), that something untoward was in the wings. For where privilege and patronage rather than good policy are allowed to drive public arts funding decisions, all of society pays not once but twice. It pays firstly for the hobbies and petty preoccupations of our politicial incumbents, and secondly for the skewed and impoverished understanding we can only hope to have of our own culture as a result. Rainer Linz