Comments (5)
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michael L :
20 Dec 2014 7:47:50pm
I should be getting used to this but I am sick of good programs that only feature east coast (Sydney/Melbourne) events and issues. Coming from Adelaide, I feel so excluded that I no longer watch.
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karen :
29 Dec 2014 3:50:17pm
how about a show from each state every week? there is so much great creative activity & talent out there - didn't a recent report say that 85%? of australians are involved in some form of creative activity? wouldn't that warrant a few hours of tv a week?
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Ture Sjolander :
08 Feb 2015 12:50:40pm
Australia Day is indeed the Exclusion Day.
Speaking English with an OZ accent may help.
But why imitate them?
Merde!
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Rob Wilson :
01 Oct 2014 4:46:33pm
I like James Valentine's approach to The Mix and the material he illustrates for us.
I loved the story about the artist who refused to explain his appliqué and embroidered hanging at Primavera at the MOCA and insisted that the work speak for itself. After all he is not going to be there to explain it for everyone who sees the work in the future wherever it is hung. This attitude is what makes American Psycho a true work of art as repulsive as many of the ideas in its black humour are in many ways. It stimulates strong feelings and the treatment of the movie version stimulates in the viewer thinking about the role of aesthetics in our dealings with each other and thinking about the significance of aesthetics for each of us. And the artist refuses to explain the work or be an apologist for it. The inference the artist forces us to draw is that the work says what the artist wanted to say. Later Bret Easton Ellis was heard to remark in amazement at his own work "I can't believe I wrote that"; which doesn't make him a hypocrite at all but only attests to the achievement of the work.
But back to The Mix and James Valentine. Even when he had trouble prising responses out of his guests it was entertaining. James was trying to find out how mid-career Australian artists survived and he asked his guests Bec Dean and Andrew Forest to name some mid-career Australian artists. After James had thrown that line out he pulled it back in but something had apparently taken the bait and all he had was a bare hook. It seemed as if neither of his guests knew any mid-career Australian artists or they were keeping them a secret. Then James asked if these un-revealed artists had a 'recognisable Australian style' in their art. A brave question! He was told that many Australian artists were each working in many different mediums these days; what the guests said might be called 'multi-disciplinary'. Wow 'multi-disciplinary' eh?
But multi-disciplinary a style?
In those terms Michelangelo’s 'style' could be called proto-Australian since he was ‘multi-disciplinary’ for if any one was a multi-disciplinary artist then he was; a painter of fresco in plaster, of oil and tempera on wood, a sculptor in marble, in polychrome timber and in bronze, an architect, a draughtsman, a poet and song writer, a civil and military engineer.
But the slipperiest eel giving the most vacuous non-answer in response to James' eager quest to find out about current mid-career Australian artists was Bec who, when asked for the name of an Australian artist working in this 'multi-disciplinary 'style' named Costa Georgiadis' guest on Gardening Australia in October 2012, Diego Bonetto. Diego took Costa foraging on waste ground in the city of Sydney for weeds which could be eaten. This 'art' of Diego was characterised as an 'experience'. A word redolent of the vocabulary of art in the milieu of mid-sixties Sydney with its 'happenings' but it is nModerator: Hi Robert -
Thanks for your thoughtful response, unfortunately it seems to have been truncated because of the 500 word limit on our comment feed. Please submit the remaining comments in another comment post. We're keen to read the rest!
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Rob Wilson :
03 Oct 2014 12:45:18pm
Continued from the previous truncated comment beginning from the sentence which was cut.
A word redolent of the vocabulary of art in the milieu of mid-sixties Sydney with its 'happenings' but it is now 50 years after the event and probably 20 years before this curator Bec was born. Diego is still taking people on these 'experiences' two years after he took Costa. See the webpage Trybooking. These forays of Diego's into the waste ground of Sydney to open the eyes of its residents were characterised by James' guests as 'me communicating with you'.
Diego might in addition to the 2 hour 'weed experiences' that he runs; he might indeed work in different mediums which could be called ‘multi-disciplinary’, marble, paint, appliqué, print, video, sound and movement but I'm yet to hear of it. I doubt if his present work could be called an example of the 'multi-disciplinary' and 'recognisably Australian style' in art. If it is art in the Balinese sense of "We don't have any art. We do everything as well as we can" then the same might be said of me showing you around my flat.
Or maybe I'm missing something and someone can correct me.
Excruciatingly entertaining segment of The Mix in any case. And we felt for poor James especially since he had done his best to get out of his guests what was in there. He even took them to a pub and bought for them and brought to them their choice of drug (a whiskey and a beer) before settling down to the interview. Maybe he should have waited til they had consumed the alcohol and it had loosened their tongues a little.
But on the display at MOCA I recommend the video of Shaun Gladwell pirouetting on his skate board on a small concrete slab in 2000; a wonderfully minimalist and stirring slow motion work against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean breaking at Bondi on a dark, rainy and overcast day to sounds by Kazomichi Grime. Then there are the collaborative works by women of the Western Desert. You can feel the collective enjoyment of the women sitting, talking and painting together and finally the Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement is another video evoking collective enjoyment; this time the Lebanese Sufi community in 2011 singing, drumming and playing in a joyful but conscientious attempt to get closer to their God. The sort of joy and the sort of service which the Islamic State in the Levant would try to step on but which can find a place in Oz in a gathering conducted on mats on the floor of the Greenacre Scout Hall.
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