Groundwork and PACT invite applications from emerging artists for inclusion in the Tiny Stadiums Live Art Weekend. The Live Art Weekend will be presented on June 2-3, 2012, in Erskineville village and surrounds.
Download the application form and more information HERE.
Application deadline: Monday 13th Feb, 5pm. Late applications will not be considered.
Email your application to assistant@pact.net.au with “Live Art Weekend Submission” and “your name” in the subject line.
Curatorial Criteria Groundwork are seeking applications for bold, immersive and site-specific works by emerging artists that respond to the concepts centre and margins. Artists working across the disciplines of performance, dance, new media, sound and visual arts are encouraged to apply.
Experimental, interdisciplinary and community engaged works will be prioritised, as will projects that critically consider their location or context and shift how the community access public space. Artists living outside of Sydney as well as local artists are encouraged to apply.
Some questions that you may wish to engage with in your application are:
Does the work consider or respond to the histories and geographies of the local area? How does the artist want to involve the local community? Does the work take risks artistically? Is it achievable logistically?
The Live Art Development Agency has put a call out for writing related to live art or radical performance practices for their Live Art Almanac Volume 3. Deadline is January 31, 2012 – get yer skates on..
See below;
We are seeking recommendations for material to include in The Live Art Almanac Volume 3. What articles or reviews have you read, what new stories have you spotted, what emails did you receive or forward to a friend, what blogs have you visited, what texts crossed your path? Did they engage you, provoke you, amuse you, or make you rethink Live Art and radical performance? If it caught your eye and had something interesting to say then we want to know about it.
We welcome all kinds of submissions for The Live Art Almanac Volume 3 – from more traditional forms such as journal essays, newspaper reviews, transcribed interviews, symposium papers, public lectures or book chapters, to digital forms such as blog entries, Facebook pages and Twitter conversations, to even less conventional forms of “publishing” such as emails, diary entries, and letters. The submission must be engaging, provocative, and thoughtful writing on and around the contemporary cultural landscape in which Live Art practice sits and must shed light on the various debates and ideas in circulation within that landscape.
The CWA (Country Women’s Association) mission statement addresses the best of community, giving and commitment to God. For anyone who grew up in the country or the ‘regions’ outside of the big cities in Australia, you will know well the CWA, a robust organisation of women lending helping hands to people and providing important community support in times of need.
In Hobart a group of artists have come together to form a new branch, the Hobart CBD branch of the CWA, Tasmania. And although there is an artistic purpose for this, they have ACTUALLY legally formed the branch. You can read here an excerpt from their website;
A little over a week ago today, we lined the edges of the meeting room at the State Headquarters of the CWA in Tasmania. Like a bunch of slightly misplaced exotic birds, we had each swept, a little breathless from rushing, into the room. As the numbers grew so did the mix of surprise and delight on the faces of State and Southern Tasmanian Presidents Shirley Morrisby and Christine Booth. In Shirley’s 39 years in the organisation, it was the first time she had had the opportunity to open a new branch and her pleasure in the task reflected a desire within the organisation to reach out to new generation of members who might be able to carry on the mission of the organisation.
In so many ways as artists we try to form a sense of belonging, either within our own circles or to try and reach out to the wider public. In the CBD CWA branch as well as perfecting crocheting, knitting and cake baking there is a deeper and more honest attempt at community building.
The Australia Council invites live art practitioners to propose national and international tours for live art work.
Your live art work must be ready to tour, and have confirmed one or more presentation partners. This could include festivals, theatres, galleries or community spaces who can support you to present your work regionally, interstate and/or overseas.
Hopscotch is a Market Development initiative, in partnership with the Inter-Arts Office. The aims are to:
support innovative Australian live art by developing new national and international markets
extend the life of live art works through touring
build knowledge, expertise and networks for presenting live art
increase artists’ professional networks and income levels, and diversify their income
maximise audience engagement with Australian live art
Who can apply? Australian live art practitioners can apply as individual artists or as a group. You will need to articulate your work in the context of Australian and/or international live art practice.
What can I apply for? You can apply for up to $10,000 to tour your live art work to presentation spaces which may be regional, interstate and/or overseas. You can only request Hopscotch funding to support travel, freight, accommodation costs and per-diems (a daily amount to cover basic personal expenses while on tour – you can refer to the Australian Tax Office’s per diem guidelines as a guide).
You must detail the artist fees and income within your budget, as confirmed with your presentation partner/s. We acknowledge that live art practice is experimental and may connect with emerging arts spaces so that full fees are not always possible, however you must clearly demonstrate the strategic opportunities and future income this presentation will generate.
Applications that demonstrate strong commitment from presenters and partners, including appropriate artist fees and other co-funding, will be more competitive against the selection criteria.
Restrictions:
This initiative does not support purchasing capital items, production costs or artists fees. These must be outlined in your budget, with fees and in-kind support from presentation partner/s confirmed in support letter/s.
Applicants with outstanding acquittals for Australia Council grants are not eligible to apply.
What is live art? Live art is a term used to describe work in which artists explore the live experience of artistic processes, pushing conventions of theatre, performance art and site-specific work. It may also engage local communities and diverse audiences to develop, create and participate in the live event.
Live art networks include LALA (Live Art List Australia) and the Live Art Development Agency, supported by the Arts Council England. Recently the Australia Council has supported live art initiatives including the Visible City laboratory with the Melbourne Fringe festival, the P4 (Pilot) project with Performance Space, PICA and pvi collective, and the upcoming Live Art Cultural Leadership program with Field Theory and Performance Space. See recent Hopscotch grant recipients and stay tuned for stories about these live art tours.
Background This is an Australia Council Market Development initiative, in partnership with the Inter-Arts Office.
Market Development aims to increase the visibility and viability of Australian arts with programs and initiatives that complement the sector plans of the artform boards. It is responsible for:
connecting Australian art with markets and audiences, nationally and internationally
building knowledge via research and evaluation
strategic investment and initiatives to help artists reach their full potential.
The Inter-Arts Office is part of the Arts Funding division, and supports new artistic practice that does not fall within the existing funding guidelines of the artform boards. This includes creative processes such as interdisciplinary and hybrid arts, and experimental projects involving artists and practitioners from other fields. See news and details of some of the interdisciplinary arts projects Inter-Arts supports.
what: CIA Studios “Quiet Time” Creative Lab with Reckless Sleepers
where: CIA Studios, 480 Newcastle St, West Perth
when: 5th – 16th December, 2011
application deadline: Monday 29th August, 2011
assessment: mid September, 2011
notification: end September, 2011
Tactical media arts company pvi collective are delighted to announce a call out for applications to participate in a Reckless Sleepers Creative Lab here at CIA Studios in Perth, WA.
about Reckless Sleepers:
Reckless Sleepers are an internationally renowned interdisciplinary performance company based in the UK & Belgium. Their work evolves from research and development based residency models. Their ability to impact on rigorous research based methodologies for participating artists as well as work site-specifically across artistic disciplines and generate performative outcomes from their workshop models fits perfectly with CIA’s ethos of finding ways to nurture the development of Australian interdisciplinary practice with the support of like-minded peers.
‘Quiet Time’ CIA Creative Lab 2011:
Mole Wetherell, director of Reckless Sleepers, will run the inaugural Australian adaptation of ‘Quiet Time’ for 8 Australian artists for ten days at CIA during dec 2011. The lab will focus on participant generated content that encourages artists from a range of disciplines to use the city as a basis for research and stimulus. The idea is to develop works through the processes of observational research that leads to singular or group devised performance works occurring on-site in the cityscape.
Accepted artists will be exposed to the many strategies that have supported the creation of reckless sleepers projects, these processes offer practical solutions for making performances or translating an idea into a one-off performative event.
Successful applicants will be provided with a small stipend.
Travel allowance funds are available for regional and/or interstate artists.
For more info or to be sent an application form please email:
kate@pvicollective.com
An Initiative of the IETM-Australia Council for the Arts Collaboration Project and supported through the Australia Council for the Arts Infuse program. CIA Studios is supported by the Department of Culture and the Arts.
exist-ing events 2011 @ various venues in Brisbane
What: live art, performance art and action art
When: October 12, 2011
November 18, 2011
December 9, 2011
December 17, 2011
exist ARI are running regular Live Art/performance art/action art events called exist-ing where artists are encouraged to try out new works, discuss and learn more about Live Art, view international live artist screenings, and present performance or live based artworks to an audience.
If you are an artist interested in performing, presenting, testing out a new work or revisiting an old one with us, we would love to hear it!
If you make work that might be Live Art, performance art, action art, happenings, or cross-disciplinary live realms, we want to hear from you:
Please forward your short and brief proposal to: exist@live.com.au
Please refer to above dates and include your availabilities
We are open to exploring ideas, testing out new things, and providing a platform for things to grow.
We are also interested in national and international live-art works via film file or skype presentation.
exist aims to make spaces where artists, audiences and communities can engage openly; spaces where one can pause; ask, discover, surrender, to being – to existing.
Cheers from the exist team
Melody, Nicola, Thomas & Bec
Last weekend I went to Open Engagement in Portland Oregon USA.
The Open Engagement conference is an initiative of Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA concentration. Directed and founded by Jen Delos Reyes and planned in conjunction with Harrell Fletcher and the Art and Social Practice students, this year’s conference features internationally renowned artists Julie Ault, Fritz Haeg, and Pablo Helguera. The work by these artists’ touch on subjects including democracy, group work, the boundary (or lack there of) between art and life, education, and transdisciplinarity.
This year’s Open Engagement sets out to discuss various perspectives on art and social practice. Through conversations, interviews, open reflection on experiences, and related projects created for or presented at the conference we will be looking at five themes that encompass ideas connected to social practice: Peoples and Publics, Social Economies, In Between Places, Tracking and Tracing, and Sentiment and Strategies
My experience of the conference was three solid days of listening to Artists from across the US discuss their work in relation to Social Practice, what it is, it’s history, it’s relation between art and activism, it’s role as ‘useful’ art, it’s parameters. I absorbed a lot; I am still processing it. As with all, festivals, conferences, symposiums etc, the people you meet, the new friends you make and the conversations you have can often affect your experiences and help shape perspectives and of course this is what happened to me. Rather than write about it, I wanted to share this with you as directly and as quickly as possible.
In an attempt to introduce you to some of the inspiring people I met, on the last day I recorded a series of short interviews with some of these people. The recordings are pretty raw, you will notice … Um..Um..Um… The stereotypical Ozzie ‘um’ is there way, way too much, forgive me, I was constantly being ‘glamoured ‘ by these dudes and often found myself lost for words.
I tried to keep each interview to a total of 15 minutes and asked questions that would give you a context, like what is social practice ( does it matter?) and what is Open Engagement…
I hope these recordings give you a glimpse into the nature of the conference, the content and work being discussed over the weekend.
Edie Tsong’s explorations in interactive portraiture have used traditional media as well as performance, facsimile, videoconference and plasticene. She has exhibited her works nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Mattress Factory, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Time-Based Arts Festival, and April Meetings in Belgrade, Serbia. Tsong lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
3. Kelsie Nelson – Artist and new local Portland resident
4. Michelle Swineheart – PSU MFA Student
5. Joseph del Pesco and Christian Nagler
The aging of Social Practice and How to get to know your parents through political economy
Unfortunately our conversation had to be cut short, I have included what I have anyway because I found this research project fascinating, I want to know more and thought you might to.
Joseph del Pesco – An independent curator, art journalist, and perennial collaborator. While he’s organized projects and exhibitions for museums internationally, he has also disbursed artist grants, presented video programs in private homes, distributed posters and other ephemera through informal channels, and produced content for the internet.
Christian Nagler – Works as a writer/teacher in San Francisco. Recent work can be found in forthcoming issues of the journals Encyclopedia and Paul Revere’s Horse. He has been a resident at Millay and the Anderson Center, and has received a fellowship from the Wallace Foundation. He directs the Colima Project at San Francisco State University, a social practice project focused on immigration issues. He is currently working on a novel, a book of essays, and a series of performance texts.
Since Guy Debord and the situationists in the 1960′s, walking has been seen as a political act against urbanism or capitalism or as a more abstract poetic intervention into the rules and structure of the city environment.
Drawing together some walks by artists in the recent (and not so recent) past;
Performance Space’s 2011 series of ‘walks’ which you can see here includes Sarah Rodigari’s planned walk from Melbourne to Sydney. As she packs up her life and sells everything she owns, she will move to another city, by putting one foot in front of the other.
This is reminiscent of Marina Abromovic’s The Great Wall Walk (although without the drama of a partner walking the other way of course).
It is nice to see that some city governments are seeing the cultural benefits of not only walking but having artists lead this process, Rodigari, Jess Olivieri and Jason Maling’s recently completed project under the auspices of the City of Melbourne, the League of Resonance conducted personalised intimate tours around the urban space (amongst other events).
And in Los Angeles which is a rampant car city is an interesting approach to this issue, literally showing people what is out there. Another side of LA is opened up by Will Self in a documentary called Obsessed with Walking, where he does some crazy things like walking from LAX airport to his city hotel.
And finally another one from Ms Rodigari – Excursion with Eels from Visible City 2010.
Field Theory was dreamed up by a group of artists with varying interests and practices.
It is fair to say that all of us are interested in different ways in which to engage people in experiences of meaning. If that sounds a bit vague it is because the actual parameters of the work that we have carried out is so broad and does not follow a simple and easily definable pattern. If one was to look at what we have created separately in the past year, (beyond the Field Theory funding model) it would look something like this;
- researching an underwater choral work about coral
- undergoing a year long investigation into what it takes to be an expert
- directing an 11 artist collaborative project which yielded 40 new works in 3 weeks
- creating a socially engaged project with the City of Melbourne to enliven/activate an area of the CBD for a transient local community
- creating an interactive tug-of-war on a train
And that’s just a couple of the projects.
SO with such a wide variety of interests what is it that has brought us together to create Field Theory?
Field Theory is an alternative funding model, an attempt to try to enable the type of projects that we are interested in to continue and thrive. It came about through a filtering of discussion around how to fund a project like Jason Maling’s three year The Vorticist. Funding bodies are not set up for an ongoing or iterative project like this and we are not artists who can claim triennial funding or the like.
The main differences to those projects are that we maintain curatorial control over the artists that are selected to be funded. The reason for this is that we want to engage in a more personal or intimate exchange with the community that are supporting the projects.
Each supported artist is asked (in return for the $5000 that they will receive for their project) that they will send one gift to every Field Theory member (The Field Theory organisers assist with the sending of the gift). This then cements the economy of exchange that will be built up over the period of the membership.
TO our surprise (delight and consternation) there were some very enthusiastic Field Theory members who once they had given their $100 to the cause then also wanted to come and be in every work and support in other ways. Part of our theory was that there was a crowd of people out there who were eager to take part in some activities that were art related and we were correct, however we were not ready for the response and this presented a challenge to us.
If we are to throw open the doors to people having a stake in a work then how far does this go? In films when there are large funders or backers for a project there is some influence these fat cats will have. What about the thin cats of live art funding? What is the rate of exchange for Field Theory?
I guess this is something we will continue to investigate as we move forward into our second year.
We are a few weeks away from completing the final Field Theory project for its first year. Very soon after that we will put the call out for the next years members. Please stay tuned to the Field Theory website over the next month.
Australia’s David Williams and Jason Maling star in the latest edition of the Live Art Almanac (Volume 2). Read Jason here or purchase the whole kit and kaboodle here;
Australia Council announced today their new Live Art touring initiative Hopscotch.
This pilot initiative supports national or international tours of innovative Australian live art. Your work must be tour-ready and you must have confirmed tour presentation spaces.
Objectives
This Australia Council initiative aims to increase national and international touring opportunities for Australian artists to:
extend the life of Australian live art works through touring
build knowledge, expertise and networks for touring live art
increase artists’ income levels and diversify their income streams
maximise visibility, audience knowledge and appreciation of Australian live art.
Scope
This fund provides support for the following activities:
one-offs – defined as one or a series of consecutive presentations of your work in the same city, town or presentation space
tours – defined as a series of at least three consecutive presentations of your work in three different cities, towns or presentation spaces.
You can apply for up to $10,000 to tour your live art work to presentation spaces which may be regional, interstate and/or overseas. Requested funds can be used for travel and freight costs only.
Background information
Live art is a term used to describe work in which artists explore the live experience of artistic processes, pushing conventions of theatre, performance art and site-specific work. It may also engage local communities and diverse audiences to develop, create and participate in the live event.
Recently the Australia Council has supported live art initiatives including the Visible City laboratory with the Melbourne Fringe festival, the P4 (Pilot) project with Performance Space, PICA and pvi collective, and the upcoming Live Art Cultural Leadership program with Field Theory and Performance Space.
This is an Australia Council Market Development initiative, in partnership with the Inter-Arts Office.
Arts Development
Market Development aims to increase the visibility and viability of Australian arts with programs and initiatives that complement the sector plans of the artform boards. It is responsible for:
connecting Australian art with markets and audiences, nationally and internationally
building knowledge via research and evaluation
strategic investment and initiatives to help artists reach their full potential.
Inter-Arts Office
Part of the Arts Funding division, Inter-Arts supports new artistic practice that does not fall within the existing funding guidelines of the artform boards. This includes creative processes such as interdisciplinary and hybrid arts, and experimental projects involving artists and practitioners from other fields.
Three things have happened in the last month that I think will forward the discussion around Live Art in the country and region…
The first is Visible City, I won’t go into it as I was intimately involved in the project and it really is for others to speak or write about in more depth once they get their heads around it. The archive of the work is here. Over the next few weeks I will be uploading the audio from the two Salons which took place as part of the project – the first around the topic of Live Art in Australia the second around criticality and rigour in Live Art. These discussions were recorded by Sally Ann McIntyre (NZ) and are a great resource for all.
The second thing is that Jason Maling’s piece Inbetweenness has been selected to appear in Live Art Almanac Volume 2, this is a great coup for Jason and also for lala which is where it was ‘published’. It is great to see some local content in that UK publication. We will let you know when it finally rolls off the presses!
The third is that after a year of going it alone I have decided to open out the editorial team of lala to other voices, more varied practices and to other cities. So I would like to welcome Sarah Rodigari. Jen Jamieson and Amy Spiers to lala and look forward to their contributions and broadening of the dialogue and criticality of the blog. I will give links and biogs to them in a small moment…stay tuned.
When lala (live art list australia) started it felt like an important thing to do – something necessary in the ecology of those artists who as Jason Maling put so beautifully in his essay sit ‘in-between‘.
In recent times I have begun to wonder if this ‘live art’ thing is another fad, like the ‘locative media’/'tactical media’ fad of 4 years ago.
If you title something ‘live art’ will it get picked up by the Inter-Arts office? will it be seen as cool by visual artists who are sick of static installations and performance artists sick of the rigidity of the theatrical formula?
This is a pretty sobering thought, and considering the title of this weblog I am actually questioning my own existence.
After discussing this with some colleagues there were some pretty interesting comments ranging from “I am sick of the term, it is overused and no longer representative” to “I am glad there is a banner under which we can all stand”.
Both of these are actually true, some people need something to grip onto, they struggle with the idea that there can be an experience that you have to negotiate as you view it.
At the same time for both the Next Wave Festival and for Melbourne Fringe Festival these delineations are made by a combination of both staff members and artists, without a clear understanding of what live art is.
For artists such as Madeleine Hodge, Sarah Rodigari, pvi collective, Unreasonable Adults and Jason Maling who have all been a part of the live art scene in the UK and Europe it must feel very strange to be hear the term being bandied around so much here.
Personally in putting together lala (live art list australia), the question always with everything i do is ‘is this live art?’. Sometimes I don’t know, sometimes it is just a feeling, sometimes I look back at a work or an artist and think – that ain’t live art…
Perhaps like a lot of our food and coffee influences in Australia we have to accept that a replication of UK style live art is not realistic here and that the type of interdisciplinary, conceptually driven work that is happening here is not live art but antipodean live art. Just as we have taken in influences by the diasporas from Europe, Asia and Africa, so we also have done in contemporary art.
Influenced by the Japanese body methods that Sydney Front and Gravity Feed were using in the 1980′s, pushed by the injection of video and interactive media as well as Indonesian installation art in the 1990′s and fed by the explosion that has come out of PACT and Performance Space in Sydney and the Next Wave Festivals of Marcus Westbury and Jeff Khan, this antipodean live art scene is unlike any other in the world and perhaps I personally need to let go of the ‘looking to the UK’ for guidance in what we are doing and embrace this bulging scene as something that has its own journey.
Martyn Coutts
Martyn Coutts sometimes calls himself a Live Arts practitioner.
Ok lala is not sure what the protocol is around this but will post it anyway in the interests of dissemination and the common good. IN TIME: LIVE ART CASE STUDIES
(12AM Awake and Looking Down – Forced Entertainment)
Tim Etchells’ text commissioned for Programme Notes: 2007 LADA and Arts Council England, Editors Daniel Brine & Lois Keidan p 22.
After naturalism, after Brecht, after the absurd, after the Kitchen Sink and musicals, after collaborative this and experimental that, after the multi-disciplinary high-and-low budget, high-and-low-brow extravaganzas, after empty spaces and physical theatres and all that very visual theatre and all that theatre that is also installation and all the performance theatre and the dance drama and the dance theatre and the loud music and the strange slow images and the even-stranger jump-cut images, the re-definition of mime to include talking and the reinvention of dance to more-or-less exclude dancing as such, after all of it, after the fragmentation and the swearing, after the violence and the microphones and the yelling and after the reading and the formal shock horror, after the content scandale and the buggery, the no-star reviews and the cacophony of tipping seats, after all that ‘is-it-really-acting’ and ‘is-it-really-theatre’ and ‘is-it-really-art’ etc etc etc perhaps we can say now, finally, that theatre can be what we want and need it to be in order to meet audiences and look them straight in the eyes with a question and an attempt to talk about what its like to live in this world now. After all that perhaps we can just say that the door is open. That the space is one of possibility – that anything can happen in the next one hour and 45 minutes, that no one needs permission from a parent or guardian or the approval of a responsible adult, the Mayor, the Lord Chamberlain or the Ghosts of Shakespeare, Osbourne or any living dead critics from any national newspapers, I mention no names. The door is open. Anything is possible. All of the above, and anything more (or less) or anything totally different that anyone feels inspired, inclined to compelled to bring to the table, to the stage. That’s all anyone ever wanted after all; that the door be open and left that way so that more people can get their foot through it, artists and audiences.
On Live Art
In addressing and critiquing notions of time, live art performance is also able structurally to undermine some of the most enduring cultural forces and narratives of our time:
the progress of ‘civilisation’, the accumulation of culture. The scrutiny that performance brings to temporality thus has a vital significance in the accelerated cultures of late capitalism. Here, time has become a commodity that is highly regulated: speed is the primary value and time wasted is money lost. Frequently deploying a contemplative and ‘wasteful’ expenditure of time, performance continues its long wrangle with the forces of capitalism.
In the continual search for definition of live art I have come across these great articles – the first by the Live Art Development Agency in the UK.
The term Live Art is not a description of an artform or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks. Live Art is a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibilities of liveness by artists who chose to work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms.
The full article is here; in what appear to be a positioning statement for LADA.
Also of interest is Joshua Sofaer’s writing;
While live art practices still battle for acceptance even within art institutions themselves, the increasing globalisation of live communication through internet and digital television widens the possibility for performance based art practices. Not only does this plethora of home access media mean artists can go directly to the people, rather than relying on them to make a trip to a gallery, nightclub or warehouse, it also means that there is an increasing premium on live interaction. The renaissance of cinema, after decades of decline caused by television, is tribute to the public’s need for interaction at an event they can collectively witness in space and time. Either way, virtually or in the flesh, the future looks bright for live art.
Hello, this is the start of an idea, as most live art is.
After a gathering in Perth with pvi collective at their symposium “this is the time… this is the record of the time…” discussions between artists seemed to be leading towards a way to connect artists living in separate states who shared a simlar practice or language.
With a regular blog and a monthly mailing list, lala aims to generate discussion, keep artists informed with goings on and raise the profile of the live arts in Australia.
lala is maintained by me, Martyn Coutts, but will rely on artists in other centres writing, calling or sending me smoke signals to tell me about whats happening. (I am super keen to meet some Brisbane live artists as things seem to be really cooking up there!)
Also, if there are burning questions, or discussion points that you have for an audience then send them to me and I will post them on your behalf.
CALL FOR LIVE ART WEEKEND SUBMISSIONS
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