Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Melbourne: A Pillar of Art



















All readers either know or should know that Me!bourne considers itself the cultural capital of the 'straya-mate (That's Australia for you clear tongued foreigners). After taking for a stroll the plinth we found in a bin behind the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art last year, we discovered why: Melbourne is an art object, held atop a plinth. And if its on a plinth, then it must be... art!



















No matter where the plinth was placed, it was found to be supporting the city. Here it can be seen proudly displaying, in "its own, self-diclosed area, which is is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which [the] special laws [of art] apply", Melbourne's famous tram tracks, now stripped of their utility and rendered as... art.



















Bourke St Mall wasn't excluded from becoming an object of artistic ponderability.



















Last but not least, here is a view of the Melbourne-art-object from the ground up. Little did the inhabitants of the city know what had become of the ontological status of their habitus that night.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

ANNA SCHWARTZ exhibits beyond the cube



















In Melbourne, you are a nobody in the art-world if you haven't either exhibited in or been kicked out of Anna Schwartz Gallery. Thankfully Anna is showing some initiative and is extending her portion of the gallery-dealer system art-sausage factory beyond the confines of the gallery walls.



















We have been told that this work is 'exploring the notion' - and what would a contemporary art work be if it wasn't exploring a notion - 'of time not as a continuous succession but as a non-necessary series of discreet, individually self-contained times, linked by the guiding thread of the tactile,' by which is meant skin, in this case animal skin.



















Further, 'the work recalls the minimalist interventions of Dan Flavin, but replacing neon, which is an overused and therefore exhausted medium in contemporary art, with the light of the sacred, namely animal flesh. Hence, through the intersection of discreet self-contained moments of time and the sacred light of the flesh, the work phenomenologically exposes the viewer to a deep sense of eternity that is always present once one escapes the illusion of successive, linear temporality'.
Interested buyers can contact the dumpster behind the Coles supermarket, Spencer St, Melbourne, which proudly sponsored the artists by donating the materials.

D'oh!



















Art today is all about communication.



















Not only about communicating with art history, as this comment on the ready-made lobster phone is doing, but about communicating with the art consumer. Is it suggesting that commoditised communication, hand in hand with a technology that, steered by the capitalist desire to forge new forms of communication and to turn every form of communication into a source of profit, has become a Homeric cry of D'oh, a mere reiterative chattering where nothing is ever said, where everything is half-baked, yet where this nothing-said takes the form of an excess of chatter?















Or is this work just a ball of dough dumped upon a telephone? You, the art-consumer, must decide for yourself.