gesture and procedures

there is an amazing exhibition on at ACCA at the moment. i haven't had a lot of time to devote to checkin' out exhibitions at the moment, but this one is right up my alley.



the new macpherson commission is bianca hester's massive work Please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning - it is a whole-gallery installation on action, movement and tension. from the school of fischli & weiss, it's an opus of balance, possible action, phenomenology and spatial composition.

(that's her above). bummed i missed out on seeing the horse!

the other show is a group exhibition of artists who work across concept/performance and action - gestures and procedures is great title for it, actually. a whole swag of my personal favs are in the show: marina abramovic, mike parr, francis alys, vito acconci, john baldassari, anastasia klose, beth arnold, tony schwensen and bruce nauman.

it was the kind of show i had seen on my european trips, so a perfect send-off for my impending departure.

i had actually seen a fair few of the works, which is reassuring and comforting sometimes. and they were all good and obvious inclusions. except, perhaps, daniel von sturmer's works - i would say that von sturmer concerns himself more with traditional, material and construction considerations, rather than process/gesture. but that's just me being a tad pedantic. and nothing to take away from how good mr von sturmer is as an artist.



i love mike parr's early body work - 100 breaths, and the ulay/abramovic aaa-aaa was great to see IRL. as was the abramovic art must be beautiful/artist must be beautiful. i'm reading her biography at the moment and these works are even more powerful within a context of an intense life story.



even though i have to store them in my best friend's garage for the next 6 months, i grabbed a couple of beth arnold's discarded object project posters, one of the objects - an old granny cart - was from carlton north, near my old haunt. i couldn't help but get a bit sentimental about that one. heh.



i actually really loved the video work by delphine reist of an empty fluoro-lit room in which the fluoro globes would 'randomly' fall down and smash on the floor - the noise was amazing and the heist of it was pretty damned delicious too. i'll be chasing up more work of hers, that's for sure.

i didn't have a lot of time to spend in the show, but still a great, great exhibition of works that are about the particular type of art i like - where art is a verb and space is an indirect object.


image credits: acca website, the age and eternalnetwork.fr