Domestic Displays

I recently visited Redfern for the first time in several months and clocked the sharp gentrification evidenced by a quick influx of small bars and delicious coffee. Now a place just slightly cheaper to live than Surry Hills, it would be fair to say that perhaps the artistic community are partly the perpetrators of such gentrification, and as the rent rises, may soon to be of victims of it.  Nevertheless, HOUSE WORK – a curatorial project by Diana Smith, confirmed Redfern is currently crawling with artists.

For the project artist and curator Diana Smith invited her peers that live within walking distance of each other to open up their homes for one afternoon to the public. I left home expecting to visit several loungeroom cum- galleries, perhaps with sculptures on dining tables and some video art on the television. I was pleasantly surprised to encounter something more integrated with the daily workings of domestic life.

I began at Nick Coyle, Alice Gage and James Harneys sharehouse, greeted by the hungover flatmates who encouraged us to play 1970s boardgames. Naturally witty, Nick powered us through wheel of fortune while Jimmy made guacamole in the kitchen. We could have easily stayed for the afternoon, competing against whoever walked in the door, but were determined to visit every abode before sundown.

At first I thought Dara Gill had hired performers to undertake ‘tasks’ around his place, but quickly realised the situation when we were offered rubber gloves. Strangely compelled, I became focused on cleaning the windows while others scrubbed mould on their hands and knees. Surprisingly the house was filled with satisfied grins, leaving Dara with a whole vegetable garden and his DVD collection both alphabetised and genre-specific by the end of the day.

Perhaps less welcoming were Julia Holderness and Henry Kember who had skyped into their lounge room from a bed in a symmetrical flat down the hall. As they sipped tea and read Sunday Life we desperately tried to gain their attention, firstly by poking around their kitchen , and finally by grabbing watermelon from the fridge, and enjoying a slice. This left the invigilator a little on edge, who had clearly been briefed to allow participatory activity until things got stolen. He let us have one slice before wrapping the tropical fruit in glad wrap and asking us to think about how we would feel if strangers simply grabbed things out of our fridge. On later enquiry it was confirmed the artists were happy to see their almost slimy melon get eaten.

Keg De Souza offered us a couple of things from her fridge – home brewed beers and freshly baked cakes. Her boyfriend wasn’t around but he had recreated his sound installation which used cassettes tapes attached to balloons to make noise. This made it the most gallery-esque home and I think I would have preferred some of Lucas Abelas eccentric stories over a beer.

Our last stop was an appropriate finale. Shane Haseman, Ella Barclay and Rosealee Pearson had stayed up all night – the evidence was on the kitchen table. Upstairs we witnessed all flatmates in deep subconscious after popping sleeping pills, and in between spying their book collections, we eerily watched them breathing deeply. A sound recording of them drunk the night before confimed they weren’t acting, the snores were real, and after taking a couple of photos, we left feeling like creeps.

HOUSE WORK cleverly played with the intersection between routine, art and daily life, generating a sense of play without any frightening theatrical participation or a plonking of works made for gallery contexts. It was localised tourism on the most micro scale – made for those who take pleasure in checking out other peoples shopping trolleys and in investigating bathroom cabinets. With it also came a great sense of neighbourliness, a coming together of like-minded strangers walking around the street nodding at each other, eating, scrubbing and chatting, making for a satisfying way to spend a sunny afternoon. HOUSE WORK also showcased one element of a suburb at a time of flux, making me wonder if those share-houses will still be inhabited by artists in a few years time.

Lara Thoms

HOUSE WORK curated by Diana Smith for Perfromance Spaces WALK program Sat 10 December 2011. Photos by Alex Wisser.

Hobart gets Touchy Feely

Thinking of going to MONA FOMA in January? Well you might also like to catch Touchy Feely.

Touchy Feely will be five days from January 25 to 29 packed full of artist-led talks, workshops, performances and presentations held at Inflight ARI, Hobart, Tasmania. Curated by Amy Spiers and Pip Stafford, it will bring together a number of interstate and Tasmanian artists – including Lara Thoms, Liz Dunn, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Sally Rees, Paula Silva, Judith Abell, Jason James and Elizabeth Woods – to discuss central issues facing socially engaged, participatory and relational artists today.

Why Hobart?

In recent years Hobart has been the base for a series of intriguing and exciting projects of a relational, socially engaged and live art nature. Recent examples include David Cross’ Iteration:Again and Paula Silva’s “artist-run” CWA branch. For this reason, it seems timely and appropriate to gather together artists in Hobart who are interested in participation and social engagement to meet and exchange ideas, express misgivings about our field and engage in hearty and passionate debate.

Why the theme?

Touchy Feely is organised around a central question: Is socially engaged and relational art too sentimental? As the instigator of this project, I raise this question because “sentimental” and “comfortable” have been pejorative terms used to challenge art I have made, as well as work by artists I like. I have begun to take these criticisms seriously.

Indeed, in recent decades there has been a “social turn” in contemporary art, here in Australia and internationally. This turn is characterised by art projects that emphasise participation, dialogue and community engagement to activate the public. It has given rise to an optimistic notion that art can be marshaled to tackle wider social issues and create emancipatory social relations. These practices take a variety of forms, some more politically overt than others, however what they all have in common is that they are artistic attempts to offer new social models of being and living together.

In an effort to re-­humanise and re-­connect a society atomized and alienated by capitalism, increasingly artists are adopting socially ameliorative strategies. But has this resulted in a sentimental and friendly artistic impulse, that is at the expense of complexity and criticality?

In response to these concerns Touchy Feely will seek to address the following questions:

• Should the “skill set” of art be instrumentalised to make a better world?
• Is there a role for hope, compassion and optimism in art, without having to take an evangelical or moralistic position?
• In our current situation, is it actually politically irresponsible to creatively express despair, unease and tension?
• Is contemporary art marked by a facile cynicism, heartlessness and nihilism?
• Or is relational and socially engaged art in Australia too sentimental, ethical and uncritical?

If you can’t make it to Hobart, you can still follow the discussions on our blog: touchyfeelyhobart.tumblr.com. We will regularly post updates and videos of talks during the event.

If you’d like more information or wish to contribute something remotely send an email to amyspiers@gmail.com.

Amy Spiers

You Got Me But Baby I Got You

Responding to Thrashing Without Looking.

A feisty party game I got to play twice – first as what I’d call ‘predator’, and then second as ‘prey’. The audience is divided and there are no spectators here – except perhaps the Aphids crew, who bring us twelve-at-a-time into their latest private experiment in live cinema.

The four predators convene around a high table of champagne glasses, perched anxiously on bar stools with no idea what we’ve just walked into. We make small talk about awkward first dates before our mischievous host brings us back to the menu. We’ve each been given a smorgasbord of hypotheticals about our ideal first date, and begin to make choices that we’re quietly sensing might be about to become realities. Would I go for table tennis, or dinner, or just kissing all night long? I can see a packet of tic tacs sitting discretely on the table.

We’re making a karaoke video clip and the four of us are about to play starring roles. Our host introduces the crew and the cameras. The eight people I just stood next to in the foyer are now stranded in the middle of the arena, strapped into video goggles and unaware – or all too aware – that they themselves are being watched. I just filled out a list of my preferences, but I was certainly not in control.

It’s the racing mind that makes Thrashing so titillating. As prey I felt like the butt of a cruel joke,  learning very early on that you’re one of the singles  in the video, consciously being picked or not picked by other audience members. As potential dates quickly came and went, giving me champagne and then taking it away, the desire in me to maximise each moment waged war with the self-awareness that made me constantly adjust my posture and retreat  into my shell. The hollow sensation of unrequited romance washed over me in glorious slow motion.

But as predator it was bewilderingly fast. Acting on snap decisions and looking only for immediate gratification I made the worst small talk, danced dirty against unwilling strangers, and did indeed kiss all night long. Our conquests were documented and fed live into the goggles of our prey – we were making this video for our own entertainment.

From either side – and much like most first dates – it seemed impossible to win. The twelve of us had completely different experiences of this work, and the gulf between me and my date could never really be crossed. When the goggles came off we all rushed to shake hands, and swap stories and  internal monologues and half-dreams. Thrashing is a filmically mediated reconstruction of the dating game, mixing volatile intimate encounters between strangers with that slightly numb feeling that comes from the realisation that your dream date is the stuff of stock footage.

At the shows finale I slow-danced with a stranger who couldn’t see me, but held me close. We  swayed softly together to the music of Wendy Mathews. Later that night I shared an awkward gin and tonic with a stranger as we sat listening to the very same song, in French.

Thrashing Without Looking saw me coming.

Mark Pritchard lives in Melbourne and makes theatre. He trained at the VCA, UOW and PACT, and is a Kickstart artist for the 2012 Next Wave Festival.

Thrashing Without Looking was presented by Aphids at Artshouse.Created by Martyn Coutts, Tristan Meecham, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Thoms and Willoh S Weiland. Sound design by Alan Nguyen.

www.aphids.net

Photos by Bryony Jackson

Tiny Stadiums 2011 overview

Tiny Stadiums is over for yet another year. This year the festival began at PACT in Erskineville on the 4th May with the opening nights of Applespiel’s Executive Stress/Corporate Retreat and Nat Randall’s Cheer Up Kid and culminated in a weekend of Live Art on the streets of Erskineville on May 14 and 15. If it is boring to talk about the weather, please let me bore you for a moment. Sydney had been drowning for months; thus it was some kind of supernatural inspiration that provoked us to move Tiny Stadiums from March to May for the first time this year. The festival culminated on two of the most spectacular days of the year. Bright blue skies, crisp air, warm sunshine: perfect Autumnal weather for wandering around a small village and engaging in all sorts of live art.

LIVE ART WEEKEND:

The Live Art weekend is the defining feature of Tiny Stadiums. We curate the festival with small works that you can engage with simply if you stroll down the street. We love the fact that we drag the art community out of the gallery and into the sunshine. But the really fun thing about the festival is the surprised responses from locals who do not know how to engage with the work because it entirely out of context.

This year the festival’s epicentre was the Town Hall with Dan Koop’s Wish We Were Here project, Lara Thoms’s The Experts Project, Amy Spier’s Meeting Point, Jen Jameison’s popchannel, and Beth Arnold’s Transplanted Surfaces all situated in the hall’s immediate vicinity. While Just down the road we had New Planes Zine Cart, and Keg de Souza’s Gigloo (The Gigloo unfortunately only made a brief appearance, replaced by Drop-in Book Club on Sunday; a marquee in which Applespiel interrogated locals about their favourite and least favourite books). We didn’t have any big performances on the street as in previous years. Most of the works enabled a sort of interesting form of hanging out near Erskineville Town Hall. Meeting Point enabled you to meet people, The Experts Project facilitated conversation, popchannel lured you into a trance and The Gigloo and Book Club allowed you to chill out in the park.

But the festival looked much more static than it was. Lucas Ihlein’s What lies beneath (small soundworks for the sleepy), along with Arnold’s and Koop’s work offset the simplicity of this basic layout. Ihlein’s work found its way into the bedrooms of local residents: they could download sound-art alarm clocks on their smart phones and be woken to the sound of industrial noise. So Tiny Stadiums literally got into bed with its audience this year! As well as this, Beth Arnold’s work was spread out over the entire suburb and a walking tour was required to engage with it. So Tiny Stadiums made its audience do some sight seeing and exercise this year! In Wish We Were Here, Dan Koop hand delivered postcards from festival attendees to anyone within a five-kilometre radius of the Town Hall. So Tiny Stadiums managed to engage and audience of people who didn’t even know about the festival! All in all the Live Art weekend was a great success, and lured hundreds of people outside and onto the streets of Erskineville on a majestically sunny weekend in May.

PACT PERFORMANCES:

This year we tried something different with the work down at PACT; the season of shows was longer and had more performances. We treated it more like a traditional theatre than a space for Live Art performances. This gave the shows room to settle into the space and for word of mouth to spread around town before the shows were finished! Applespiel’s new show, Executive Stress/Corporate Retreat, was essentially a corporate skills development conference in the form of a performance; they investigated the hilarious and terrifyingly empty rhetoric of corporate motivational workshops, and built a show on that special kind of spin. It was an experience to participate in a performance like this. But, Applespiel’s show divided the audience in two: those who took part in the Elite Program and those who just watch. Those who take part in the Elite Program are involved in about 90% of the performance and those who watch can be as involved or as passive as they like. On opening night we had a pack of drunken hecklers who felt left out of the Elite Program. But on the second night, a small audience meant that there was no one else to heckle and all the audience was participating in the program. This show divided the audience in another way. Of the people I spoke to, those who participated in the Elite Program were thankful that they weren’t made to undertake tasks that were too traumatising and humiliating. Where as the passive spectators essentially wanted to see dancing monkeys; in other words, they were sometimes disappointed that Applespiel didn’t make the Elite Program participants work harder on the stage. This was the first outing of this great new show, on an important contemporary issue, hopefully it will get further air time around the traps in the coming year.

The second show in the double bill was Nat Randall’s Cheer Up Kid: four short, thematically linked monologues and four different characters (I’m counting the ‘Nat Randall’ character too!). A hybrid of devised performance, traditional character acting, and stand up comedy, this work had audiences crying with laughter and then almost crying. Plenty of people left the show saying it was both completely hilarious one of the saddest shows they’d ever seen. Randall’s performance explores, complicates and (I would say) critiques the distinction between being a child and being ‘childish’, and also by contrast being an adult and acting grown up. Randall has been testing these characters out around various performance mic nights, and this was the first time they all came together under the one neon sign. This work will be seen again around town, to be sure, and keep your eye out for it. One local artist declared ‘Everyone I know should be here seeing this tonight’. We would agree; it is a very clever and unique show.

This special report from Quarterbred organiser Jen Hamilton
You can find her excellence here;
BLOG: http://bicycleuser.wordpress.com
UPCOMING: http://www.performancespace.com.au/?p=7175

Rate of Exchange

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.

So we created a model that uses crowdfunding. This has precedents in organisations like pozible in Australia, friendfund in Germany and The Awesome Foundation and Kickstarter which came from the US.

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.

fieldtheory.com.au

Martyn Coutts is a
Field Theory organiser.

Quarterbred – live art overlords? Or just nice guys? You decide.

lala talks with Mish Grigor from Sydney performance curators Quarterbred.

Quarterbred, can you tell me how this started?
Well, the lovely Lara Thoms and Di Smith were having an ongoing conversation about how amazing the PACT space is and what it has meant to a lot of artists and groups in Sydney in the last few years, but that it was only being used by one section of the wider community… So they called a meeting with a bunch of cool dudes like myself and we started dreaming up ways to open it up to new communities of artists and audiences, to put on new types of work at PACT, and also to promote the types of work that couldn’t really happen anywhere else. And then we talked to the ladies who run PACT and they have been amazingly supportive in providing space and heaps of other support, and from the amazing works that were coming out of Quarterbred we decided to start Tiny Stadiums, and etc etc etc

And why? who are you?
Why? I guess cause of the big shifts that have been happening in Sydney over the last few years, with Performance Space moving to Carriageworks and what that means for the communities around the organisation, and PACT shifting its focus to more of a ‘present-y’ type of role, and because we felt like there were loads of inspiring artists around who needed a place to try stuff out, and cause we just get really excited from a curatorial perspective by all the works that we have been able to support and provide a context for, and various other reasons.

We are an army! I copied this from the website cause I couldn’t be bothered to type it all out…
Kate Blackmore is a Sydney-based video/performance artist and new media archiver. She is also one quarter of the artistic collaboration Brown Council. www.browncouncil.com
Ashley Dyer is a performance maker, producer and workshop facilitator. He is currently working on three new collaborative projects involving dance, installation and music.
Mish Grigor is a performance maker and cross disciplinary artist, working primarily in the collaboration ‘post’ who devise new performance works.www.postpresentspost.com
Matthew Kneale is a Melbourne-based project director focused on making live performance/installations in public spaces. He is also a set and costume designer who has worked nationally on opera, dance and theatre.www.matthew.collabo.net
www.highvis.org
Jade Markham is an artist-in-general who also works at the library, studies and performs collaboratively. She makes super 8 films and slides too.
Tim Maybury is a musician, writer, curator, broadcaster and educator in art theory.
Emma Elizabeth Ramsay works in video, community radio sound and installation
Sarah Rodigari is a live artist who creates performance, video and installation through public encounters and social exchange. She is also one half of Panther.
Diana Smith is a video/performance artist, curator and writer. She is also one quarter of the artistic collaboration, Brown Council who create hybrid performance and screen based works. www.browncouncil.com
Lara Thoms works across new media, installation and performance. Her work is often interactive and interdisciplinary, responding to untraditional spaces and audience relationships. www.spatnloogie.com

What sort of events do you do?
Well, this October Quarterbred we have Bunheads, a hair and art event, as well as an afternoon of Monthly Friend, put on by the girls who just did ‘Nature League in North Melbourne’ at the Fringe, and residencies for some Sydney artists who are part of Next Wave’s ‘Kickstart’ program.
In the past we have done a roller disco, created a ghost house, had showings of new contemporary dance works, been a place for development for works like ‘Emergence’, that toured the country, or ‘Six Minute Soul Mate’, that won Adelaide Fringe. We have had sound art nights, live art weekends, a performance documentation video library, symposia, bbqs, short works nights, heaps and heaps and heaps of stuff.

And what is the criteria for your events?
Well, all of the directors have really different interests and practices outside of Quarterbred, so the basic rule is if we are all excited about a project or group of artists, then it gets in.

And so many ladies, what does Ash think?
Well Ash has two boyfriends now, new to the team, so there isn’t SO much of an imbalance…

There is a strong sense that the audience/performer relationship is important in the work that you are curating, if we call some of these works ‘live art’ can you tell me what your engagement with this term is? It seems to me that the idea of theatre and performance art and visual art all seem to blend here and that this generation of makers from Sydney that have come out of PACT don’t see the boundaries between these things.
Its true, and one of the criteria that we asked people to address when we have put out callouts for ‘Tiny Stadiums’ is the experience that the audience will have. I think that basically comes from us as curators, or us as audiences, having an interest in seeing work that engages with the typr of audience experience it is creating, even if that type happens to be more traditional ‘sit quietly and watch’ in style.
This term ‘live art’ is still something that we are getting our head around, and its weird that it has come into such usage across the country in the last two or three years, with TITTROTT, and EXISTin08, and Live Works, and Melbourne Fringe naming it as a category… I guess for us there seem to be a lot of blurring between the terms that you have mentioned, or artists trained in visual arts who are now making works that might be seen as theatre or whatever… And there are projects that might have been called something else ten years ago but now seem somewhat attached to the term ‘live art’… But mostly for us the works that we are programming aren’t exploring crossovers of form as the main part of their idea, they are just using the tools that they have seen used by other artists… It doesn’t really feel like these types of projects are new, it just feels like there is a context and a community around these works, both locally and nationally, and so lots of people are trying it out or becoming interested in ‘live art’ as a way to make sense of their ideas… Maybe….

Do you have a sense of lineage of this type in Sydney, through people like Sydney Front, Gravity Feed and Deborah Pollard etc?
Not at all. What we are doing is totally original and unlike anything that has ever happened before.

And finally the way that Sydney performance has invaded Melbourne through Next Wave i feel is a healthy breaking down of barriers between the two cities, i was talkign to Martin de Amo and he hadn’t even met some key people in Melbourne’s dance scene, indeed to some he is quite unknown despite how ubiquitous he is in Sydney. Do you feel like a cultural ambassador for Sydney or are you a citizen of the world?
Umm… We love Melbourne. And we also love Sydney. Quarterbred has just appointed three directors in Melbourne because we are interested in getting more of a direct connection going… We feel really lucky to know some amazing artists down there. We’re really only invading Melbourne so that we can make more friends like that, and discover their work, and show it off to our Sydney friends.

Some of these questions are nonsense and were meant as witty repartee that you and i would have had in a live interview. The kind of scripted mayhem that is employed on killer shows like Good News Week and Spicks and Specks. Just think of me as a fat Mikey Robbins (he’s not as funny when he is thin), and you can be Myf Warhurst.
Is this still part of the interview? It’s a nice touch. Although a small disclaimer, I am actually a lot more funny when I am offline. That is, in person, when I can just work ”Off The Cuff” and let the lines come to me in response to the often hilarious comments that you are throwing at me fast like flaming arrows of comedy gold.
I hope that you frame this correctly when you publish it online in your e-letter.
Also, I like to think of our conversations as less ‘Mikey vs Myf’ and more “Gretel Killeen vs Big Brother”. You are Gretel and I am the earpiece and you are aging but smarmy and I am small but informative, making jokes directly into your inner ear and telling you what to do.
Yeah?

Mish Grigor is prone to bouts of paranoia and balloon-phobia, do not approach her in public.