Being Heard

There is something surprisingly silent about Lauren Brincat’s drum sextet Other Tempo.

Staged in the vestibule of Carriageworks, where it is showing as part of the 2019 Liveworks festival of experimental art, the work is at once an inanimate mute installation and a multidisciplinary live performance that splits our attention between the visual and the aural, challenging the common idea that sound is only heard and image only seen [1]. As an inanimate installation, Other Tempo is comprised of six drum kits that sit in the Carriageworks’ foyer throughout the two-week long festival. These are set against a pink wall above which is suspended a curled-up silk drape. On Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, the installation is ‘activated’ with live performances.

It would have to be against our own selves

In the “Estranged Labour”, Marx argues that capitalism treats workers as slaves, their bodies used as mere machines of production, an activity in which they have no say. As such their human potential is denied and they are kept in their primal, animalistic state. As a solution, he proposes material abundance, the abolition of bourgeois property relations, reduced working time and simplified work. To an extent, these propositions have been implemented in the so called developed western societies of the 21^st century where workers are treated far more humanely than they were in Marx’s time – they work for an average of eight hours a day, have paid holidays, superannuation founds, etc. As such, they are left with a decent amount of free time, which in Marx’s view is a time to exercise their humanity, to discover the skills and abilities that differentiate them from animals. However, what Marx does not address in his writing is that the greatest problem of capitalism is that it permeates all spheres of human life, not just the time spent at work.

Pushing Boundaries: performance art in China (and its relationship to photography)

Zhang Huan, 65KG , 1994, performance, Beijing, China

In ‘Performance art and its constraints’, Thomas Berghuis outlines two distinctive characteristic of Chinese performance art: its reliance on auxiliary medium and its collaborative nature, both of which apply to the work of one of China’s best-known performance artists, Zhang Huan.

Rodchenko’s Twisted Views

Alexsander Rodchenko, Pioneer with a trumpet, 1930

With multi-story buildings and high scaffoldings, rapid vehicles and airplanes, the early twentieth century urban and technological developments literally revolutionized the way we see the world. Soviet era photographer Alexander Rodchenko maintained that photography must respond to the new reality of urban life and capture images from radically “different vantage points.”[1] Rather than following the traditional belly-button or eye-level perspective (which pictorialist photographers inherited from paining) camera should capture events “from inside, from above down, and from below up.”[2] Only in this way can camera fulfill its task[3] and function as prosthesis of the eye, offering the view that is truer (more objective) than the naked eye could ever capture.[4]

Queer Art & Identity Politics

“I don’t believe that gender, race, or sexuality have to be identities, I think that they’re vectors of power.” Judith Butler

Drew Pettifer, The Decisive Moment, 2009.

It is necessary to “radically challenge the entire concept of an identity based upon sexual orientation,”[1] wrote Elizabeth Ashburn in her 1996 publication on lesbian art. Twenty years on, American feminist and queer art theorist Amelia Jones finds it necessary to echo Ashburn in her 2012 book Seeing Differently reminding us to “think beyond […] the grain of binary models of identity in favour of multiple, intersectional, and relational processes of identification.”[2] Sexuality must converge with issues of race, gender, geographical and socio-political location, class, religion, age, etc. to reveal the immense complexity and diversity of subjectivities. Jones likens this intersectional approach to anamorphic viewing which distorts the one-point perspective to reveal a new, previously neglected viewing angle.[3] The result of this perspectival distortion is de-objectification, de-fetishisation, and abandonment “of oppositional othering.”[4]

HEX: A triumphant return to joy, passion, and exuberance

Recently I spoke to Australian contemporary dancer and choreographer JAMES WELSBY whose work HEX explores the legacy and impact of the 80s AIDS crisis through the lens of the generation that was born in its wake. Combining contemporary dance with queer club performance, HEX provides an experience of both celebration and reflection; it is a tribute to those who have been lost, but also a celebration of the community they shaped, and which continues to grow. 

Queering the Language with Astrid Lorange

ASTRID LORANGE is Sydney based poet, performer, researcher and academic whose recently publish book ‘How Reading is Written’ explores the legacy of Gertrude Stein and challenges the settled conventions of language. Astrid believes that language – both in writing and reading – should be open to experimentation; always kept fresh and innovative. Language, in other words, should be a constant discovery. On 27 February 2015, I’ve interviewed Astrid on Eastside Radio 89.7FM. 

Challenging the notion of Queer Art with Zvonimir Dobrovic

German choreographer Raimund Hoghe

Internationally acclaimed curator, Zvonimir Dobrovic is currently in Sydney as guest of Performance Space and 2015 Mardi Gras festival. On Friday 27 February, he joined me on Eastside Radio to talk about his practice and the new, extended meaning of queer art.

Zvonimir is known for his unconventional approach to curating queer. His vision of queer art widens the common association of queer with the LGBT related content and includes all art that is subversive (but never violent); all art that questions normativity and conventionality. The art, in other words, that is a disruption to business-as-usual, to normative assumptions that lead to marginalisation and discrimination of any kind.

Hear Zvonimir reflect on socio-political relevance of queer art and explain why he believes that art (and non-didactic art in particular) has a power to broaden the per-existing limiting and marginalising narratives, more effectively then some other initiatives. He also explains why it is important to keep queer art indexical rather then iconic, where iconic is seen as repetitive and formulaic while indexical points to something new and unexpected, something that we have not yet though of. The indexical art is an art of discovery. If we follow Zvonimir’s definition of queer art as disruption of status-quo then we could say that indexical art is by its very definition queer. Or, in other words, that art that is not indexical stops being queer.

“When trying to understand or determine queer art, let us remember that the beauty of queer is that there is no essential queer art object or subject. Queer art is not an objectifiable identity, domain, or dwelling, but is rather produced as a contrast against which normalcy is produced and codified. Hence, queer art never is, it never fully arrives. It is always, disrupting, refusing, and resisting the ever-shifting power of normativity and dominance, …” ~ tinyurl.com/nnxhv5j

Dear Sylvia ~ Plath

‘Dear Sylvia’, a group photomedia exhibition inspired by life of American poet Sylvia Plath is currently on at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) featuring the works of nine female international artists who examine the representation of the female body and the female condition in contemporary society – whether this society is developed, Western world (i.e. France, UK, Australia, Netherlands) or a country such as Romania, Ukraine, Palestine, South America, and Israel where not only female, but human rights in general are under constant and extreme threat.

Through variety of photographic styles and genres, these nine female photomedia artist depict female body as both fragile and suffocated, as well as a powerful and vibrant agent of revolutionary change. In doing so they portray the complexity of Sylvia Plath’s own condition as unconventionally passionate women, a spirit eager to fly high and free in a society where freedom, joy and superfluous love was discouraged, perhaps even ridiculed.

On Thursday 5 February, I spoke to Claire Monneraye, the exhibition’s curator and Marlous van der Sloot, a Dutch photographer whose body of work features in the exhibition and examines the ways photography can be used to restore physicality to our overly rational minds; to encourage return to senses in what could be seen as a “touch starved” society. Marlous images re-establish connection between animal and human creating distortions that prompt us to re-learn to see.

Sydney Feminist Posters

To coincide with the 40th anniversary of International Women’s Day, the University of Sydney Art Gallery has put together an exhibition “Girls at The Tin Sheds: Sydney Feminist Posters 1975–1990″ featuring works from the women artists and poster-makers who worked at the Tin Sheds, a hothouse for social and political debates.

Dazzling and provocative, these posters tackle some of the most pressing issues of the time – feminism, Aboriginal rights, anti-nuclear testing, etc. – the themes that, unfortunately, seem as fresh and as relevant today as they were back then.

Senior Curator of the Art Gallery, Ann Stephen has joined me for an interview on Eastside Radio 89.7FM (broadcast on 5 February, 2015) to talk about the origin of these works and the era of their production.