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.

Mounted Branch

This poor plinth, one pillar of the art world, was found hiding in the bin behind the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Maybe this itself was an artist's installation, which the saving of the poor plinth ruined (one need only place the dumpster and it's contents inside the gallery, and of course be an artist, for such to become art). Be that as it may, this plinth and its surrounds bewitched us with the presence of Robert Morris, and soon we could not fathom where the art began and the body ended. (The Mounted Branch is, of course, the Mounted Police Barracks across the road from ACCA and the Victorian College of the Arts... necessary to keep in check the revolutionary nature of contemporary art)

In this photo you can see how the act of being luggage at a tramstop has been transformed into a mysterious art object.

Here a waiting commuter has sacrificed their inviolable corporeality to becoming art.

Art today is very transportable. One even finds it in the very air that inhabits cultural Melbourne's famous trams.

Yet art, especially if performative, is serious business and therefore hard work. This living sculpture is taking a nap... or is he/she?

Fishing in Footscray

Fuck Capitalism!

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The cult of the new is, despite certain claims to the contrary, as intrinsic to the contemporary art market as it is to capitalism. Maybe this is because the former is dictated to, albeit with a large degree of mystification and reified self-denial, by the latter. In each case, which is the same case, we may feel left behind by the succession of the new. Despite the seeming futility of rebelling against all this, we must, as they say, 'keep the flame alive'... especially after finding an old fold-up battering ram and some Dionysian spirit... or rather spirits.

you missed a bit

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hoover me

no use crying over spilt milk

Paul Celan's Death Fugue is, of course, one of the greatest poems of the greatest of all Post-War poets. This milk may not be black milk, but nonetheless it was found to be cracked and left lying on a street corner by a stranger who obviously abhorred cracked containers of milk.


After some photos, we took this milk home and we did drink it, but not before it managed to leave a trail, not unlike a trail of candy, that the cats of the culture industry could track us down with.


Thankfully gravity is on our side, and the cracks between the pavement provide an ample maze for any liquid Ariadne's thread to lose itself within, and to lose those cultured cats who hope to follow it to 'The Next Big Thing'.


Dreams of success can provide no reliable Ariadne's thread in our present world, unless ones enjoys following the threads of steel wool used to clean soiled coins. Maybe a love of mutability, affirming the mutability of love, and an expenditure without hope of earning interest in this life nor 'interest in eternity', however, carries a gravity all its own, and 'It is enough, the freight should be/ Proportioned to the groove.' (Emily Dickinson)

entertain me

Telstra - Ostraya's formerly publicly owned telecommunication's giant- has opened a premium Melbourne retail outlet: T [Life]. Communists, as the colloquial wisdom runs, prefer to drink herbal T- lets shorten Tea, for marketing purposes, to T- because they don't like proper T. Telstra prefer to place life in brackets behind the T their company logo drinks, and me, naturally for any advertising expert, follows in brackets after any mention of entertain. I'm not sure whether life and me are thus quietly subordinated, within the Symbolic, to a Name of the Father adhering in T and entertain, although a good cup of T can be entertaining, but is less so if one drinks merely out of fear. But what becomes forgotten in all this is the anthropocentrism of telecommunicative technologies, ergonomically speaking. For horses, although insultingly measured in hands, have no hands, and hooves are certainly something no mobile telephone manufacturer considers when designing telephone ergonomics.


Hence a quiet protest appeared amongst the entrance to T [life], which we were fortunate enough to capture the results of. The communicative technology here utilised against anthropocentric telecommunicative devices is, like the body, much more ancient and reliable than the all-too contemporary technologies it critiques. And there is no contract involved, which means no credit check! But horses, like all who have a cultured stomach, are also very sensitive to art and art history. But we shall allow the audience to decide on whether or not the critique is naively avant-garde or ironically sentimental, or just plain horsing around.

one potato, two potato

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At first we thought we'd found the hiding spot of the 7th Earl of Lucan, Richard Bingham, who has not been seen since murdering his children's nanny one November evening in 1974. But no, we'd found some bags of art, otherwise known as potatoes. Alas, there was, thankfully, no blight involved: capitalist overproduction had dispensed with the spuds, whose apparent uselessness, as production's unsightly excess (they were, afterall, unwashed potatoes), was now free to become apparent as art.

The Earl's of Lucan, apart from being famous for disappearing after committing in-house murders and leading the disasterous Charge of the Light Brigade, were also involved in Ireland's Great Famine, 'owning' over 60,000 acres of Land. The Irish Landlords- English nobility who very often hadn't placed a foot in Ireland- and their tyrannical Middlemen made conditions so bad for their peasant cottiers- celts who had once freely grazed cattle across the land- that single crops became the norm. Thus a single potato disease could wreak terrible suffering, famine and death, and lead to an Irish Diaspora. Some say the English are responsible for genocide. Well, that's a bit of a simplification of a highly complex and exploitative chapter in colonial history. But what does precise history matter when we have, here, art and entertainment! Art that can so allusively exploit, um, i mean problematise and explore notions of colonisation, economic exploitation, the Irish/Australian convict connection, the history of the readymade, happenings, art povera... and bags of dumped, um, potatoes. Does being unwashed make them abject?

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Who cares what lies beneath the cobblestones, anyway, when there are some very complex art objects opportunistically placed amongst a found barrier atop the cobblestones! We don't need a Paris Commune, for we have art to capture all our radical sentiments, and art institutions to re-construct, critique, reference and, um, exploit radical historical protests within! As you can see by the politically interested gazes, we have thoroughly created a situation whereby art can radically liberate untrammeled desire!


Now we shall all be free to wear brown polo shirts, khaki shorts, and beautiful, rustic sandals, all in the culturally tanning glow of art!

anyone for bagels?

These bagels were hankering to inflict a damming cultural critique upon the late-modern urban environment. But the bakery who failed to sell them during the day, at night dumped them in the trash. Lucky for the bagels, whilst passing their bin we happened to smell their revolutionary potential. So we liberated them and released their force- in a very orderly manner- upon the Melbourne CBD. Look at the hypnotized spectators, fixed by the penetrating eyes of the bagels.

Is it a homage to Carl Andre? Is it art? Is it a geometrically aligned collection of Bagels? Is it a terrorist threat? Were they liberated from a bin?

For 30 minutes, crowds gathered and dispersed, basking in the cultural capital of this artifact which, not readily falling beneath any other explanatory sign, passers by called 'art'.

No-one dared disturb the gaze of the bagels.

That is, until one of Melbourne's ubiquitous street cleaners decided to review the installation for Art Forum...

bed skating

This minimalist object- otherwise known as a perfectly good single bed- was found nestling amongst trash in a Melbourne alleyway. Here it has been mysteriously transported to a new exhibition site- a tram stop.

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Note the avid young gentleman who kicks the art-object. Being a loyal supporter of dematerialized art, he took the presence of the bed as an affray upon his critical sensibilities. So he kicked the bed in a privileged example of relational aesthetics. Then he called us faggots (two men upon a bed may be OK in private, but there is still some way to go until such behaviour is publicly accepted).

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A subtle performance.

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Public art at its most engaged... and engaging!

samosas

This installation of samosas was inspired by the outdoor sculptural works of Donald Judd... and by the bin they were found sitting upon. They only needed to be liberated from a double-knotted plastic bag to become high art.


Notice how the geometrical positioning of the samosas denies the functional intention of what were formerly 'chairs'. What beautiful artifacts!


The serial placement reveals a strange, unfamiliar objecthood.

hand job

Here our lovely model styles... a beautiful new hand!

In the advent of malfunctioning traffic signals, who needs those paid thugs the police to direct traffic? A rubber hand can do the job much more efficiently, and much less threateningly.

The situationists called this detournment... we just think it is a beautification of public art.

Wow! Is that a performance artist interpreting the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus? When did Hermes start wearing blue?

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Somebody better call emergency...

... call an emergency reporter from Artlink magazine: the art-market is going to go through the roof!

The best way to copyright something is to send a copy to yourself through the mail!