UOW: day 3

it's the beginning of day 3, and i'm on the phone to ITS again. 

i'm sure that if i've ever really hurt anyone in this life, i'll be coming back as an ITS worker in some university. surely it has got to be the shittest job in the world. i bet mark zuckerberg spent half a day working it and unleashed facebook on the world as a result (i know, i've seen the social network, it's really 'cos he didn't get laid).

whilst being amongst other artists and educators and students is great for arts practice, dealing with university admin for 25% of that time has been extremely frustrating. 

like, i want to cry.

i can see why artists prefer a studio/independent cell model to an institution model because simple things like accessing the internet are relatively easy. even on an overloaded multi-router tangled mess like the one that CIA had. 

so far i've had a very lovely time meeting loads of great artists and teachers. i've had lots of coffee and talked quite a bit. i've met up with an honours student whose work crosses over nicely with mine and all that has been great.

i've now got two workstations set up - one in the creative arts faculty, which i am using for admin garbage and sewing, when i get to it. and i've also got a tech set-up on at the digital media centre on innovation campus, for working on my arduinos. it's in a small black-box room, with amazing sound qualities, lighting, space, great flooring and access to all kinds of gadgets and media things. projector? sure!

i met glenn anderson, the UOW geek overlord who has recreated Orac from  Blake 7 with arduinos, who has kitted out these great electronics kits for everyone to use and is super nice and helpful. actually, being over at the innovation campus is very welcoming and i have a feeling i'll be spending more and more time there.

i think ideally i would like the tech setup to be amongst other students, but actually it's also nice just being around students who are there for media arts and interested in that kind of thing. and glenn and i have already compared notes for arduino shields. i might help him make a chucky-doll :)

not being able to access the internet, though, is majorly problematic.  are you seeing a pattern here? amazing equipment, friendly people, infrastructure breakdown. i think this is the main drawback of the institution.

open source programming is all online, so again my work on arduinos has stalled. argh! i want to tear my hair out. luckily, i have a multi-headed practice and can find something else to work on until the admin_sys jerks send paperwork somewhere. 

by the end of the two weeks here, i really wanted to have a prototype of a garment, that i could at least start to test at electrofringe and two listening projects.

at the moment, i have had coffee with sarah miller, brogan bunt, boni cairncross and lucas ihlein; lunch with derek kreckler, michelle elliot, mike leggett, lucas ihlein and brogan bunt; three blogposts, bookmarks on lilypads, the wave shield, planning diagrams, research notes and two workstations. 

i'm known for my impatience, so take all of this with a grain of salt. but it's something for me to bear in mind for the future.

i think i'm going to get coffee and do a listening project. hopefully the act of listening for 30 minutes in the middle of campus will help calm me down. and at least i'll have some documentation of that, and an understanding of the university that way. perhaps i should have done this on day 1.

UPDATE: i've done a listening project - it was very successful and firmly grounded me back in my practice and on the site. i'll write about that later, and will post it on the listening to the city blog later.

i now also have net access. i'm a happy camp(us)er again.

was it successful?

so, the listening and being exhibition is over and to be honest, i don't really know how to assess it. which has prompted some interesting thoughts about how to value performative/experiential works.

so, how do i know if my work was successful?

i haven't come from a performance or even a contemporary art background, so a lot of what i'm learning through my arts practice is having to stretch over from tradition image-making and art-historical language. which, naturally, doesn't quite fit.

old-fashioned parameters of quality mostly include sales, or publishing. people's opinions matter too, but seeing as i was hardly available to to hear them, it's hard to say. and i haven't put in place a formal process for getting feedback by my peers yet (more on that later).

added to that, during an exhibition, as the work gets realised, and i spent time with it, the goalposts shifted slightly. i think i would have initially felt the work successful had people interacted with it, and a few of the catalogues had been taken.

but once i decided to perform the work myself, i realised that i also wanted to research more deeply the nature of listening reflectively and that set up new parameters. and then as i listened, i thought about the work even more, and built in even more ways in which the work could be meaningful and they added another layer of 'is it working'-ness to it.

so now i'm properly confused :)

in short, i think the work worked.

and yet it still has some life in it yet - as an object, as an 'instrument', as a set for more performances, and as a means of greater research. i think this might be what's called 'setting the bar higher'.

and i think this self-critical process is also good and perhaps a mark of my own maturing -  years ago i would have been crippled by the 'not enough-ness' of it all and not coped with the greyness of achieving success.

in fact, years ago, i'm pretty sure i just would have wanted you to like it and leave it at that.
how depressing.

now i think the greatest disappointment for an artist is to have completed everything that she wanted to say.






feedback etc.
all of these thoughts and some of these questions have actually fuelled a desire to create a better format for feedback for my work. and perhaps for others like it.

i've had the pleasure of being part of the feedback, etc group that has started up in perth and i really missed it when i was in melbourne. and, i became aware that the clubs model it uses works best for static, gallery-based, exhibitions that can be observed and discussed easily in real-time. this is not so easy for works like listening and being, or even the how to do things with words event from last month.

so, tomorrow night i'm going to head up a discussion about developing a model for feedback on work of this kind. we'll start to unpack what we consider 'meaningful' for an audience, and what our own parameters are. and even ask where performative work really resides - is it in real-time, or is it in our memories?

and if any of you guys have any ideas, please, chuck them in the comment section:

how to you assess the success of an experiential or performative work - especially if you were not there at the time?


i'll post the results here (and probably cross-post on the feedback, etc site too.)

listening and being live

hey peeps,

here are some links to some live channels i've set up for the listening performance today (28th june).

it's the first time i've done anything like this, so please forgive tech difficulties or straight-up operator errors that may occur.

ustream:

UPDATE : I CAN'T GET USTREAM TO WORK WITH MY iOS DEVICE stay tuned..


Live streaming video by Ustream

but you can video call me

skype:lauren.listen

listening and being thoughts

my exhibition is open at bus now and i've done two small performances there. and i feel OK about it so far.



after opening night and a two-hour intense performance amongst a packed room full of artists and art-lovin' hipster-types i felt fantastic! i thought the work looked good and conveyed something of what i'm trying to say about the place of listening in public.

and then in the few days since, and after a second performance on friday - a four-hour durational task cut short due to pain and logistics - there's been the ubiquitous doubt creeping in around the edges. it's so boring -  the nagging question about whether the work says what you want, and the discovery that sometimes it says things you don't want it to.

but, here are some of the little surprises, ideas and snippets of something-or-other that have been raised in the long hours of listening to my own dialogue, some of which might be interesting to you guys. and, if you've seen the show, i'd love to get your feedback.

things about listening i considered
what am i really listening to?
am i thinking things in order to have something to listen to?
listening to oneself is a frightening concept for many. under the guise of "not understanding", many people are afraid of what the work asks them to do.


things about being i considered
if i wasn't here, at this time, doing this work, could i exist?
being didactic and direct does not necessarily achieve understanding. and neither does being loose and aloof. can art ever purport to give understanding?
is listening the action between the nothing and being?

things about art and performance i have since considered

1. tino sehgal makes work in which movement and energy (including singing/sound) changes the dynamic of a space when a person enters it, creating a situation.
i noticed that when i am sitting and listening in the space, and someone enters the space, a situation is similarly created, in a subtracted way: stillness and the sound being absorbed by me changes the dynamic and the nature of the space and their relationship to it.

invariably people quieten themselves and become aware of their own sounds.



2. a lovely elderly painter came into the gallery the other day and whilst the work reminded him of happenings from 40 years ago, his criticism was that the work was too reliant on text. we discussed the lack of imagination in audience and the academic nature of art. and he suggested that artists who were doing those happenings in sydney all those years ago, were doing them because they found it the best form of expression.

i took it to mean that i am not performing these works because it's the only way to express what needs to be said, but that i'm doing it this way because i'm responding to written work. ouch.
i can see his perspective, but i have to say it was nice, at midnight last night, sitting up in the bath and saying out loud 'no, fuck you, listening IS the only way to talk about listening. and text ISN'T a substitute - it's just the next best thing.






i've posted the list of what i heard (recall only, not direct transcription) on the listening to the city blog, which i have started updating. i'll upload some pics there too.


on tuesday 28th june, i'll be doing an 8-hour performance at the gallery, between 7am and 3pm. if you're in melbourne, you're welcome to come and join in.  i'm also going to be setting up a video stream so that you can 'come in' to the gallery, even if you're not physically there.

it will probably via skype and ustream.

keep an eye out and i'll be spamming the networks on monday with the links.



photographers:
sarah barber
jared harris

how to do things with words

last friday night, my flatmate leigh and i put on an art event in our house: how to do things with words.

it started with my whinging about not really being able to find that many places to have exhibitions in perth, to which leigh replied: "why don't you just have one here?". of course!

so, we made it a joint effort, with all the works and activities about text and art.

the evening went a little something like this:

first light, last words
a wall-work by me which now lines our Victorian hallway. a series of six painted rectangles, mostly yellows with one blue which are symbolic of what i wake up to see each morning. i have a window above the doorway that my bed faces and each morrning, when i awake in a darkened room, all i can see is the refraction of the sunlight (or cloudy light) that comes in from the front door window.

underneath these 'light' works, is a string of words. these are the last words i heard before i fall asleep in the weeks leading up to the show:



library of annotated books
a work benjamin forster and i did, in which we found and collected only books that were annotated - where people had underlined or made marks in an effort to remember, or determine important ideas or valuable points in a book. We rearranged leigh's shelves in the loungeroom and the kitchen, making them into a library. having only books that were annotated surrounded the room with meaning and important information. none of those books were superfluous or ambivalent.

both of us made further notes about the notations on the wall. benjamin created a poem within the notation, by directing the reader to sections of each book. like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, except benjamin already chose it. and it's more narrative than adventure. my notes grouped the books in which sites were described by sound, referred to texts of previous works and highlighted the meta-notation of two books. ie. notated books that contained imagery of notation (by bruce nauman and claes oldenburg).

12-hour reading club
lead by leigh, the 12-hour reading club chose somebody to read an excerpt, or a work, on the hour, every hour, for twelve hours. with general discussion session starting at 7 and our first solo reader was robert cook, who read some of roland barthes' the fashion system. i kicked off the final session at 6am on saturday morning, reading the introduction from j.l. austin's how to do things with words (see what we did there?) and in between was a variety of poetry, silliness and seriousness.

when each reading started, the room full of people was quiet, then there would be some questions from the 'audience', which would kickstart well-behaved discussion. which would then generally descend into hubub and chit chat for the rest of the hour, slowing down just in time for the next reading.

the evening was a great mix of formal, critical readings - those ones we always mean to read, but never quite have time - and hilarious pop-culutral humourous pieces, revealing more about us than we perhaps like. we had a loungeroom and kitchen full of people, with wine, chai, hot chocolate and leigh's home-made soup. it was warm and cosy and a fantastic atmosphere.

there were waves of guest who arrived too - some who came right on time at 7pm, those who filtered through after dinner at about 9, then the late-comers - the young whippersnappers who turned up at midnight. one of them, joanna, stayed all the way until the end! what a champion!

during the evening's proceedings, visitors were encouraged to create their own catalogues, using leigh's collection of vintage typewriters. few did - more interested in the active discussion and chit chat about words than creating them. similarly, we set up a print station from which people could choose a section of annotation to have transcribed and given to them. it wasn't so popular. but that's OK - the excitement and camaraderie of the evening was fabulous enough as it was anyway.




when leigh and i finally rose, after midday the next day, we chatted over a champions breakfast and were quite pleased with ourselves. we had a house full of intelligent, interested, erudite and amiable people who enjoyed each other's company and had the opportunity to think and talk about interesting things for an evening, learning how to do things with words.



NOTE: there are more images coming. i just left them at the studio, it's late and i really wanted to just post this tonight. stay tuned for illustration soon.

a festival of lying beneath

so i've been having a 20-minute nap at 3:30 every day since the 3rd may.


big deal, you say. 
fair enough, i say.


but, the nap is actually a specific artwork - a response to the what lies beneath project as part of the tiny stadiums festival (which is a great festival) and finished today with a fabulous day of radness (or so i hear).


as part of their project, the students and staff from UOW Media Arts 101 designed a series of alarmtrack sounds for smartphones, inspired by trips to the steelworks at Port Kembla.


each day, i climbed up to a little 'bed' i've made on a landing in a workshop space here at cia. i slept for 20 minutes and woke up to that day's track. you'll see i've been keeping track of my response to the tracks-as-alarms in the comments here. and a few of them i've cross-posted over at their blog (just for a nice bit of rss feedback, yo).


now that the festival has come to an end, i thought i'd post the rest of my comments and some pics from the process here as a full post.


you'll see that the process hasn't been clean - it hasn't worked like clockwork. which is great, because clockwork is pretty simple. co-ordinating a nap, songs, smartphone alarms and downloads into my day isn't really. well, not as simple as clockwork.


but it has been an interesting process for a couple of reasons. 


process has become enjoyable again. i do love doing projects where i do a small thing for an extended period of time, setting up a cycle. 


sleeping is an interesting action to undertake within art. there are lots of artists that do it, and i have also, previously, but it still throws up fascinating results.


and what is the relationship between sound and sleep. we have a very different perception of sound in this altered space and alvin lucier has done some amazing works about the relationship between alpha wave brain patterns and sound.


i have been groggy every day. and each alarm fucks with my waking in a different way - some more than others. coming back down to work at my studio desk after an afternoon nap is also a strange action - my cheeks are all red and my eyes are a big blurry. instant work and sociality after sleep is not a usual process, so i end up feeling a bit discombobulated.


and there's also this great feeling of sleeping with others. no, not in that way you pervs. i mean, i know that there are a bunch of other people all doing the project - we're all sleeping and waking up to these crazy alarms. it's almost the same as watching the FA Cup final and seeing on twitter that all your mates in the UK are watching it too - there's this silly little feeling of 'hands across the globe' kinda thing. it's not absolute truth, but it's a nice feeling anyway.


and, it has also been a good opportunity to take 20 minutes to not think about art. to enforce the siesta way of thinking into my day. a much-needed meditation time, or something. a model that isn't really used in art production - we just kill ourselves, or work crazy hours and come into the studio on the weekends. but rarely do we say 'oh, i'm just going to switch off for 20 minutes'. 


well, i don't anyway. until now.


even though i've been all the way across the country from the base of the project, it has been a chance to also show the 'sharing' model of art making. i can participate in a project, without having to be on site. that time, or action replication are the only points of connection. it's something for me to think about too - in current/future projects: the place of reproduction in feeling connected to.


well done to all the media arts students who made some great alarms and to lucas for being the usual thinkin' man he is. it's been lovely to sleep with you all.






laying beneath




































responding to laying beneath

ok, so i cocked up the order a bit. i napped, but didn't really sleep. and i woke up to alex's awake to a dream instead of snookie. but that's ok, i'll fix it up tomorrow.

i'm documenting it too. and today i looked like a puppy on a sheepskin rug. i need to work on it a bit.

but, the track itself was lovely and the tick-tock-tick-tock running through it was a reminder that i was late to a very important date, but with some kind of sloppy saggy clock that was squishing time.

03 May, 2011 16:11

oh dear, it's getting worse. i didn't nap today because there was a fun workshop using displaced vision and baby monitors.

damn.

ok, i'll be back on track tomorrow. and i'll post pics. this project is starting badly, isn't it.

04 May, 2011 17:13

yay! today it worked. and the today's track kinda fucked with my sense of space a little. i went into some weird other worldliness universe as i came to - the cricket=type sprinkle sounding electronica peppered my brain a little. it was great.

06 May, 2011 18:07

wow. i needed that sleep today. i awoke to jessicah haliday's piece (which was supposed to be the day before..i'm so on this), but it was quite a lovely way to wake up. gradual filtering then quite intense electro wah wah wah. my brain felt quick speckled afterwards.

07 May, 2011 16:05

 08.05.11 i forgot to post about my wake-up, but it was so lovely. i actually wanted to keep lying there. funnily enough, i'm starting to wake up two minutes before the alarm goes off. turns out it doesn't take much to reprogram sleep in the afternoon :)

holy crap! i woke up quickly this afternoon. three sharp bangs and i was up and stopped the alarm. i didn't even listen to the rest of it (sorry jamie). and i was so flustered that i banged my head on one of the beams. excellent for waking up quickly. not so great for waking up and still feeling functional.

09 May, 2011 16:28

dammit. i didn't properly sleep this afternoon. must have something to do with the coffee i had about an hour beforehand. which is a shame, because i quite liked the tick-tock-tocking of the alarm

10 May, 2011 16:00

google erased some of my comments in their fall-out
but i keep forgetting to write down what i think about the alarms too.

13.05.11
i haven’t been to india, but i imagine the sound of clinking bells and steel cutlery in the morning to sound a little like this. waking to the sound of running water is just mean :)

14.05.11

the truck reversing noise matched strangely with some crickets that were in the building. in fact i woke up when the crickets started, thinking it was the alarm. and then the alarm kicked in. it was a confusing afternoon that one.

today's the last one was great - a slippery slope of something rolling down brought my mind rolling with it from subconscious to consciousness - like a bowling ball rolling back from the pins.

15 May, 2011 17:19

what lies beneath

lucas ihlein is a great artist, super nice man, excellent teacher and one of them go-getters you just want to be. well, i do anyway.

he's part of this great tiny stadiums festival and has made a cool work about sound and sleeping and alarms, in conjunction with some of the media arts staff/students at UOW. in my old 'hood: wollongong.

i've signed up to receive a customised alarm each day and will be doing a daily sleeping work at CIA during the festival.

partly as a fun way to interact with the festival from afar. and partly as a chance to do an extension of a work i did in berlin (kunsthaus quartier), where i slept for six hours through an alarm that played jim white's song it's a perfect day to chase tornadoes on repeat.

i know some of you love a bit of sound. and a bit of download fun. and cute things you get to keep every day. go and sign up for the daily track here. and go see some other stuff during the festival if you can.

UPDATE: I'll just post a little report in the comments section each day. i'll upload documentation to flickr and post a link in the comments too.

time vs money

i haven't been so exhausted working in ages. but it's been a fun week.

i'm working on this still-kind-secret project at cia in perth involving people and space and measurement.

yesterday we (my partner in crime, steve, and i presented to the board  a bit of our methodology, some of our early findings and threw out a few questions/points of discussion about our project. which is kind of hard to describe to you guys, because it's a) still confidential and b) we're yet to properly describe it to ourselves.

but we're close.

what i can say, though, is that money is easier to achieve than time, and we're more motivated to make people go away, than we are to make them come here.

and we found that through a program of depth testing and intense focus and insight developments, complex social engagement protocols.

otherwise known as tug of war.

[pretend there's an awesome picture of the teams holding a rope here]


it was brilliant. danger zone from the top gun soundtrack played in the background, primal grunts and angry reserves of energy were drawn on.
michael, tony and kelly - the money team pulled time (steve, kate and bonnie) over the line,

in the second round: come here vs go away, it was a tough match. everyone learnt from the first round's experience, they dug heels in, yelled, encouraged each other, grit teeth and the swearing came out. at the end of it all, there was more prepulsion for go away and just not quite enough energy for come here.


we all learned something that day.

innere stimme

on monday night i went to the last few hours of a beautiful, simple and powerful performance at veneklasen/werner gallery near checkpoint charlie. directed by olaf nicolai, it was part of an ongoing project series devised between the gallery and soundfair. 

within robert schurrman's opus 20, there is a line of compositional notation between the treble and the bass lines, entitled innere stimme. the pianist, with both hands occupied, cannot play the piece, but it is intended to be an internal, underlying and (silent) aspect of the work itself. nicolai's work was a 30 hour endurance ongoing performance of this piece in which four performers interpreted the 'secret track' across the three large gallery rooms. 

the work was the kind of work that makes me cry: it was so engaging, so powerful in its execution - the acoustics in the gallery were fucking divine, and could be enjoyed at a variety of levels: from pure entertainment to deep spiritual connections as the harmony and dischord of the performers often connected to hymns and historical or religious music. there was a period where the male performer resembled something from a guido reni work of st. sebastian - except our performer, sartorially speaking, classic hipster/barley replete with arse hanging out the back of skinny jeans. it was perfect.

perceived personalities - given that i stayed for a while and perhaps it's the habit of audience (especially in a performative context), i found myself ascribing personalities to each of the singers. based on their dynamics, their interaction with the space, their movements, body language and their dress: The Opera Singer, The Hipster Grandad (his voice at time reminded me of my Grandad, who has a beautiful bass voice and who i remember singing whilst shaving), Billie Holiday and The Playful One.

dynamics -  given that there were four performers and only three rooms, there was an inevitable interaction between the peformers. i'm not sure how it had been for the previous 27 hours, but it was fascinating to watch. some just didn't and couldn't interact with each other (anymore), either their musical styles were two different, their personalities clashed or both. it was interesting to watch one performer enter a room and see the other either match or reduce their 'output'. you could read a stack of power-based dynamics into the experience. volume and resonance became tools for domination, as did dischordance, repetition and something i'm calling amusicality. i made that word up, but i'll explain it in a bit.

acoustics - interaction with the space: each of the performers used the track and their vocals to interact with the space in different ways. each had quite different vocal styles, so their interaction with acoustics was quite different. the more operatic singers (The Opera Singer and The Hipster) played with resonance, a lot. Billie Holiday didn't really interact with the space itself at all, maintaining a 'performer' stance the whole time - constructed poses, chanteuse facial expressions and the kind of style expected on a stage, in front of a mike. If i'm perfectly honest, she gave me the shits. I can't explain why. The Playful One probably gave everyone else the shits but i enjoyed watching her the most - she used a huge variety of vocal/sound to really investigate both space and the work. There were times where she literally sang the piece into and across a  corner to see what the space sounded like. She sang to the floor, sang like a spanish housewife, sang like a child, sang at the top, middle and back of her voice - she whispered and made completely amusical sounds (that's what i meant earlier). She really played with as many variables as possible. Maybe out of boredom, but i found it fascinating. And enjoyable - she kind of fucked with the rest of the more-serious voices going on, whilst still being able to sing harmoniously if it was called for.

i had intended to go in for an hour and ended up staying for almost three times that, because the work was so rich, especially for me, with my specific focus on sound/public/private/spatial thang, it was a valhalla. in fact, it's the kind of work that i wish that i made myself and i realised i have a long way to go before then.

I have one criticism of the work, which is actually its ending. in her biography, marina abramovic speaks about controlling the end of the peformance - either clearing the gallery before she brakes the illusion, or making the ending a specific part of the peformance. either way, it being considered. i tried it last week, to the best i could, and i found it worked. the nicolai piece didn't end. in all the promotion, the work was intended to finish at midnight and we all waited for either the gallery staff to signal the end, or the performers, or the artist - something. but, it just petered out, some of the performers stopping, others going on for ages afterwards. no closure; no opportunity for the audience to give a round of applause or celebrate the work. i think these things are important. and after all that, i left feeling a sense of unfinished. maybe i'm too critical.

this aside, the work was stunning, and has stayed with me for an age. i imagine that it will for a while longer.

a perfect day to chase tornadoes (red)

For those of you in Berlin this weekend, I'm doing a little intervention/performance as part of SuperKaleidescope's exhibition, A Perfect Day to Chase Tornadoes (White) at the Kunstquartier Bethanien in Kreuzberg.

It's the final day of the exhibition and let's just say that the work will be a goodnight and goodluck gift.

The exhibition is open from 11:00 - 18:00 and i'll be there most of the day. Come and say hi.

bon voyage

tomorrow, my friend marcus brown is starting his latest (very intense) project: an 800km walk from munich to hamburg. technically he's doing it to meet a very important man, from whom he'd like a job. but i know that the real outcomes will be a whole stack of other interesting things.















in the spirit of marina abramovic and francis alÿs, the work/walk will also end up being about longevity, pain, distance, the condensing of space, interaction, isolation, travel and labour.

well, that's what i think anyway.

it's a fucking long way. and the journey will be incredibly painful for marcus - i wish him all the best.

image credit: marcus brown from flickr
francis alÿs, the green line - the guardian

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

craft cubed and whitebox

if you had've told me 3 years ago that i would continue to create work that actively includes craft practices in spatial and media arts practice, i would probably have vomited on you. or at least told you that you had the wrong lauren brown.

but, it's true. my short time spent at craft victoria influenced me profoundly and i find myself creating works that relate to fashion, thread, wearability, patterns, measurement and insertion.

craft victoria have reinvented their winter festival program from a single textile-based festival, to one that encompasses a range of craft/making practice and aims to remind everyone that there's more to craft than bloody knitting scarves.

one of the interesting projects is called whitebox - a selection of video works that interact with the ideas, materials or gestures of craft practices. this year they also relate to the festival theme of childhood. and i'm privileged to have a video work in there: ariadne's tangled mess.




it also includes some spanky works by some of my fave peeps: dell stewart, cory archangel and holly mcnaught.



the festival opens tonight at craft victoria and there are a stack of exhibitions, commissioned works, satellite events and online programs to participate in. check out the site for all the deets.

leigh bowery

my friend and performance artist (in a printer's body) marcus brown, mentioned leigh bowery a while ago and it has taken a while to sink in.

today i happened upon a book of his fashion shoots with fergus greer and i have been instantly obsessed.

i'm craving a bit of OTT identity/gender-bending mischief in the fashion/performance style of things at the moment. there's a whole lot of stuff that just feels kinda vanilla. maybe i'm just jaded and restless. maybe i'm too gen x slacker for my own good.




as fabulous as her costumes are, lady gaga just doesn't really cut it for me - she's still doin' the ditsy diva with the pretty clothes business; american apparel and vice mag for the kids tried to pretend they were pushing boundaries but really, they were just perpetuating the same old skinny lolita pervert bullshit for the white middle class douchebags of the future. our own schapylle scragg is a breath of fresh air, but she doesn't get as much playtime as she used to (ahem. mayhem).


anyway, enough of my ranty business, i'm gonna go back and buy the book i spent an hour poring over and i'm looking forward to reading more about the sunshine kid, watching the legend of leigh bowery and making up for my terrible ignorance to date.


images: leigh bowery from from the inside out and fergusgreer.com

marina abramovic made my cry made me cry

a while ago i discovered this beautiful tumblr blog about the marina abramovic show at MoMA. every couple of days, i see these beautiful tear-stained faces staring intently at an absent figure, the amazing performance artist.

for me, her absence becomes immediately present, and i also cry. it's like an echo of what is really happening, which is also an echo of what is really happening.

perfect.

and most-excellent used of blogs/flickr for performance/contemporary art.

tangles at plug'n'play

this week is pretty crazy with Next Wave Festival opening: lots of shows, performances, launches and gigs to go to.

One that you should all come to is the Plug'n'Play night at Horse Bazaar. After you've been to the Next Wave opening at the Meat Market and then the Festival Club at £1000 Bend, wander up the hill a little and have a chill/dance/looksy at the DJ/VJ stuff going on there. I have a video work there - an extension of the work at Seventh Gallery.

Here's the official blurb:

Anyone who owns a technogadget knows that process of having to disentangle the mess of cords. On a daily basis we unravel our headphone cables, untwist the laptop power cord, separate the printer from the scanner from the ethernet cable from the toaster. It is the modern condition of having to sort out our bloody technology.

Ariadne’s tangled bloody mess reflects this frustrating process, and sets it up as a metaphor for other kinds of disentanglement. It is a slow tracking projection, the unravelling and undoing a knot of red cable. In greek mythology Ariadne gave Theseus a length of red thread to find his way back from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. The term has become a way to describe the methodical process by which we solve problems – a way to talk about logic and order, integral to technology design

And the deets

where: Horse Bazaar
379 Little Lonsdale St
Melbourne

when: Thursday 13th May, from 8:30pm

death, silence, performance and architecture

For some absurd reason, i'm reading Michel Foucault's Spectacle of the Scaffold.

Morbidity by the French philosopher seemed a fitting chaser to the sexual introspection and feminist meanderings of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Suffice to say, i'm having some weird dreams at the moment.

Anyway, Foucault speaks about the public changes of death-as-punishment and they appear to coincide with political changes of modern democracy. It seems that one man, one vote, also inspired the idea of one man, one death - that the punishment of torture by a thousand deaths (first drawn and quartered, flayed, then dragged along behind a horse and cart before being burnt at the stake and ashes scattered to the wind, etc) was barbaric (!) and not fitting a system that sought equality and civilisation. He describes the history of penal changes in which punishment is gradually separated from a corporal act into that of the soul (or at least the mind) - a concept which is well-known by the legal peeps, but i found it disturbingly fascinating.

All of this has got me thinking again about death.

Death as the ultimate silence - a true absence of sound.

Death as a political consideration - one necessarily built into the public system of governance, law and order and infrastructure. In terms of death-as-punishment, it is the absolute removal of a citizen's place in society: the removal of one voice. And such a lack of voice is in fact the only silence in the public realm. It is primarily an undesirable one. Not this utopian, desired, i-just-need-some-peace-and-quiet silence, but the true absence of sound.

Death as an act to be performed- that the performance associated with capital punishment - in all its forms across the centuries - have been a performance of creating death and silence.

Architecture of death - the gallows, the guillotine, the dungeon and the death row prison ward - all architectural types for the creation of silence. Foucault speaks of the ever-lengthening distance between The Executioner and the prisoner - no longer does he even touch the body, but now presses a button. Has the designer who is charged with the task of designing these spaces begun to take on these roles?

These are just a few loose ideas, but something which has been an unexpected aside to my research into sound/listening/silence in public.

I know you think it's too morbid a subject for a Sunday morning, but how's this for timing:

- Yesterday was the Melbourne Zombie Shuffle
- Daniel Mudie Cunningham resurrected his Funeral Songs blog and
- Elvis Richardson and Claire Lambe have opened a new space called Death be Kind which opens on 29 June with The Memorial.

camp pell lecture

a couple of days before leaving for my lightening fast sydney/brisbane escapade, lucas (the great connector) emailed me about tony birch/tom nicholson's work at artspace, which needed some [artist-as-]participants. i can't remember lucas' description exactly, but it mentioned a lecture, tom nicholson, a building in carlton and a spare spot on the 26th february.

lock me in!

i have been really interested in tom's work for a while and his sound/performance/list collaboration 'lines toward another century' with andrew byrne with had me hopping from side to side.

thanks to a bit of a crazy schedule, i didn't have time to do any research into the project, which worked in my favour i think. i just rocked up, said hello to the gals at artspace, got instructions and launched into it. no time for over-analysing - plenty of time for that during the performance.

the darkened room featured included 5 desks, with a desk lamp and a series of projections behind the 'stations'. each participant/artist read the lecture aloud and to themselves, according to the instructions, as we were giving a paper to a room of 30 students. easy. kinda.

the inbuilt difficulties (and points of interest) included reading at the same time as everyone else, the combination of reading internally and aloud whilst maintaining the same timing and the slight physical duress of sitting in the high-contrast environment for 40 minutes at a time. i always forget how quickly my body is affected by durational work.

despite having to concentrate quite heavily, i found myself thinking A LOT about the work in a variety of ways. so much so that it has taken me about a week to work out what the hell i need to say about it.

camp pell is based in and around royal park, melbourne, and the lectures are about a series of images from the state library of victoria. the idea behind tom's research of the imagery was to not just imagine the context for the photos in question, but to catalogue and corroborate the stories and history of the time/place. unsurprisingly, the complex relationship to imagery, history and colonialisation comes up very early in the piece.

the area in question is very "local" to me - i ride across, around, through there regularly and is a permanent fixture in my psychogeography. reading about this place and its history/image-history was instantly transportive. rather than imagining the events or the landscape of the images, it was like i was remembering those places. the works, for me, were quite different to enacting an arbitrary narrative. they were infused with a sense of my own experience. which, as any good installation artist knows, is the stuff you want people to take from a work.

the sound elements to the work were also interesting to me - the syncopation of vocal relay and the differing tones was amazing. not to mention the randomness of timing. having to share the soundscape with others at times was amusing - another aspect to the territorial nature of the work - but also the sense of authority with which we all projected our voices. in a way, it homogenised the pitch and weight of our ranges. in the way that i guess memory will desaturate imagery, a lecture format desaturated our vocal contrasts. i think this is an area that my vocologist friend tim noonan would have been fascinated by.



reading aloud is physically exausting too, and i think that this shared effort required to communicate the work is another interesting point of connection with other artists and the work itself. it became a visceral task, which has become physical memory, as well as a mental one. something infinitely bound with psychogeography and a relationship with the indigenous manner of remembering ones place.

as well as remembering and listening, i learned a lot. despite the line in my lecture about 'only the most demonstrative student could have gotten away with not hearing about this history of the ill-fated [burke and wills] trip' i actually knew hardly any detail about the crazy hair-brained voyage up the guts of the place. in history lessons i only ever remember wondering why the hell they started the trip in the first place and thought it was blatantly obvious to trust the local indigenous kids to help you survive. but i guess, at 15 i hadn't really discovered the true nature of the proud white colonial male.




as an aside, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the burke and wills trip is on the 20th august this year and no doubt, there will be commemorations of some kind. it will be interesting to see what, exactly. given that its place as a valuable point in our history has become an uncomfortable indication of our true colonial history (ie bumbling idiots with too much money kill the only help they get and are survived by the only member of their trip who is humble enough to follow guidance from local aboriginal tribe). i'm almost intrigued enough to go along. almost.

other points of goodness in the work are the obvious conceptual links between art and text, art and language, language and meaning, text and meaning. not to mention tom's regular investigation into publication/archive/library/reading-as-political-action and the contemporary nature of artist-as-participant/audience-as-participant in performative works. i can't even begin to digest all that stuff today, i'm glad that i was able to participate - it gave me a burst of food for thought and reminded me why i make the kind of work i do, and to follow the lead of artists like these guys.


image credits:
artspace.org.au
tomn.net
burke wills.net