Ides are Out: monday april 3rd.

Well, Rohan has gone into the radio vaults at Auntie and his tonsils are never to brave the ariwaves of any community radio at least not unitl howard kills off the ABC completely or they somehow get resuccitated with some decent management. Alas. Fortunately, phillippe has stepped into the void with some damn fine music and dulcet tones to match. We've just got him until easter and then someone called DAZ take over the monday overdrive slot. I hope she likes me.

Today we had Ruark Lewis on the show discussing ARTLANGUAGE show at Cross Arts which opened on Saturday (among other things)

ARTLANGUAGE: EVERY PUBLISHABLE PLACE
At The Cross Art Projects
33 Roslyn Street, Kings Cross, Sydney (opposite St Lukes Hospital gates)
Exhibition continues to: Saturday 29 April 2006.

I've got more details later.


We also discussed the SNO show which opened on Friday and that Ruark attended but that I missed. NSO stands for SYDNEY NON OBJECTIVE and its at First Floor, 175 Marrickville Rd, Marrickville. the current show goes until April 29th, and ruark said it featured walls painted with lots of pretty lines which made him want to hum. It sounds like the first year painting project at SCA. (they had to paint their studios with all these coloured squares) but the line up is goo with Helen Smith, Matt Hinkley, Tony Triff, Jan Van de Ploeg.Ph: - 0431 434 904

The reason I missed SNO, was that I toddled over to the tin sheds to see Amanda Robins's exhibition "What Lies Beneath". She's the queen of exquisitely invaginated fabric and the big graphite drawings took my breath away as I felt myself dissolve into the surfaces. Diaphanous membranes are go. If you wanna see sublime (I do apologise for that word) pencil workd - get donw to the tin sheds and try not to let the architects scare you off. the tin shes is on the right hand side of the courtyard to the sydney Uni architecture building on City Road. the Exhibition closes 22 April 2006. Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 11am-5pm

For people who missed hobnobbbing with the biennale Set on saturday, The Power Institute Reception has Talk with Charles Merwether, Curator of the 2006 Biennalle of Sydney about the BIENNALE: ZONES Of CONTACT. Drinks happen from 6pm tomorrow night (Tuesday 4th April). the talkfest happens at 6.30. Its in Mill Lecture theatre, room 309 of the mills building on sydney uni and they are charging $10/$20.

I'll probably be at either: some brush art exhibition opening at KUDOS gallery near COFa in Paddington, or at some show at UTS gallery featuring new british designers.

Gallery 44 at 44 little Oxford Street Darlingithurts has a show called "Reapplying Past Practices" whihc opens this thursday April 6pm. They say they've got pop up books, cross stitch, crotchet, pin hole photography and other stuff and the artists are Megan Yeo, Benja Harney, willima Walkinston, Mary Flaskas, Kelly Robson and Jessica Lewis.

We didn't mention the above on the show, but Lucazoid just emailed me the invite whihc has an attractive image of a cross stitch dude in army fatigues. I'll actually be in Bathrust that night - coz i'm gonna check out their great little ARI cafe: the Warpstanza - before it closes down.

I'll also miss this bloody amazing thng at Casual Powerhouse (Damn! 0 they got some good stuff lately) which i called SNACK ART: Low Calorie high Intellect. I've chucked in the press release coz its so damn witty!

Snack Art manifests as vending machines that become art galleries that dispense inexpensive yet refreshing, curious and original artworks by a select group of artists. Satisfy both your aesthetic hunger with the tempting range of Snack Art or your physical hunger with the tasty Snack Food as both products cohabitate within the Pataphysical Pending Machine.

Artist Jane Naylor has assembled a group of artists to exhibit in a new form of art gallery and persuaded business man Paul Long of Victory Vending, to become a gallery owner. Jane said about the process “I talked to many vending operators about this project, but Paul was the only one ready to give it a go. From my first pitch he took me seriously, I admire his respect of the absurd. I knew Paul was the right sponsor for this project right after he told me his main competition was Coca Cola.”

The project also manifests in other ways as well. There is a mobile machine which turns up randomly in public places, The Periodic Pending Machine. Appearances are advertised on the web site and this machine has work unsuited for the Flagship machine for a variety of reasons - more flexible delivery allowing a wider variety of sizes and shapes of artwork to be dispensed , smaller editions of work, inclusion of a wider range of artists for shorter time. This machine will also engage in conversation with you explaining the artists work, telling you about the artists practice and their other work, discussing art matters or just engaging in persiflage. The appearances of this machine may be obtained from the web site www.leichhardtacademyofstyleandhealth.com


List of Artists involved at this time in both machines - Jane Naylor, Terry Culver, Jayne Dyer, David Evans, Shane Forrest, Richard Larter, Motel Sisters, Sylvia Ross, Mona Ryder, Gina Sinozich, Jen Waterhouse, Claretduskymoonpie and Friends-(Haline Ly, Vinh Lam, Lang Leav, Nha-Ca Margaret Nguyen)


Anyway - back to ruark. He played a small sound piece from Banalities - that he'd edited and prepared a few years ago at 2SER. My voice recording of Ruark's SOUND INTERPRETATION OF A PRINT BY JAQUELINE ROSE sounded a bit too rough for broadcast, so I'll try to edit it, now that MArk so nicely trained me in Adobe Audition.

We chinwagged about charles Merwether and the forthcoming biennale of sydney which is meant to be about social activism and art and where Ruark is the only Sydney artist. the biennale is in June. We just like jumping on juggernauts.

So the ARTLANGUAGE show was kinda cool, and I guess my liver is happy that they didn't have any red wine on sale coz I drank heaps later that night. Lucazoid had a wooden sculpture saying SHELVE or was it SHELVES?. Its on a shelf in the bookstore section of cross arts, and lucazoid wore a very bright green tracksuit top at the opening which set off the teal painted wooodwork of his peice somewhat masterfully.

there were some black painted banners, and black painted square paper things, all with white words on them, and some green mesh cut outs. I and many others loved Patrick Jones's plaquards - (on light corrugated plastic) - which were large print outs of photographs of melbourne stencil sites. During the commonwealth Games, melbournes' prolific and interesting and like, vintage stencil art scene has been beige washed beyond belief - and any form of art not inside a gallery or the commonwealth games opening cermoney has been banned - and so a bunch of artists staged a protest by wandering around with these big plaquards wiht photographs of the graph art. and who said simulacras aren't powerful?

My other fav bit was the mapping of the squatspace tour of beauty of the Redfern Waterloo Authority area. They are having another TOUR Of BEAUTY on SUNDAY APRIL 9th - so meet at Xarts at 1pm. I'm intrigued how my favourite bits in the show - were artefacty things - where language was a remnant of soething else - and became more meaningful than just a formal play. Mind you Jacqueline rose's print and Ruarks perfromances of Banalities and KAFKA - were great...... but then I also really liked how Ruark had these postcards wiht the text of the Banalities piece - so the text became an artefact o a perfomrance.

Anyway - I've tacked on the press release and you can get down to Xarts beofre the 29th April and check it out and se if I'm totally full of shit, or insanely obsequious to Ruark.

The Cross Art Projects opening announcement

ARTLANGUAGE: EVERY PUBLISHABLE PLACE

33 Roslyn Street, Kings Cross, Sydney (opposite St Lukes Hospital gates)
Exhibition continues to: Saturday 29 April 2006
Cross Conversation: see below
Information: Jo Holder 9357 2058 or 0406 537933

ARTISTS
Pam Aitken, Sophie Coombs, Franz Ehmann, Lisa Kelly, Lucas Ihlein, Patrick Jones, Ruark Lewis, Jacqueline Rose, Alex Selenitsch, SquatSpace, Ania Walwicz

ARTLANGUAGE: EVERY PUBLISHABLE PLACE
ArtLanguage: Every Publishable Place puts current artistic concerns about social poetics, activism and the function of the public/private voice within a tradition of artists working with the placement of language and image in the ordinary world.

Curator Ruark Lewis places work by eminent language artists Alex Selenitsch, Franz Ehmann and Ania Walwicz alongside that of an emerging generation. The exhibition unites aesthetic sensibility and avant-garde traditions with a critical approach to the dissemination and display of art. The artists embed social concerns within larger ethical and aesthetic fields, building forms of local practice that are not overtly oppositional but which access and involve global public opinion. In this way their art functions as an alternative form of publication.

Why is this type of practice so relevant today? Because the working model it proposes, wherein ideas, experience and opinion are modeled in an art gallery or other public context, runs counter to the neo-liberal status quo of technocrats and closed doors, manipulated concerns and sedated villagers.

Most artists in the exhibition see language as a traditional avant-garde or experimental tool and relish its capacity for subversion. Sophie Coombs's work 'Piece' and Lisa Kelly's sculpture 'Powerless Circuit' use epigrammatic humour. Other artists, more sombrely, refer to classic modernist writers in a type of homage, paid, for example, by Pam Aitken to Samuel Beckett and Jacqueline Rose to Franz Kafka.

Others use performance modes as social commentary. Patrick Jones's roaming graffiti wall, 'A Temporary Autonomous Zone', slyly critiques the absurd zero tolerance laws forbidding graffiti during the Commonwealth Games. The artist group SquatSpace urges us to get a feel for the complex issues of state re-development in the Redfern and Waterloo area by getting on-board a 'Tour of Beauty' and talking to locals. Other artists show ongoing series of works externally, like Franz Ehmann's hand-painted roadside signage and Ruark Lewis's 'Banalities', protest banners which place obfuscating letters and jargon within their disputed public context.

These artists are asking vital questions and looking for answers in discussions outside powerful institutions and hegemonies, in all forms of publishable places.

Curator Ruark Lewis
Ruark Lewis has had a successful two-decade career as an artist, performance artist, curator and writer who operates across a range of disciplines. His work is featured in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney entitled 'Zones of Transition'. He founded Haiku Review web-art journal.
Co-ordination: Jaime Wheatley

CROSS CONVERSATION
SquatSpace: Redfern Waterloo Tour of Beauty
When: Sunday 9 April 2006, 2PM
Meet: Lawson St, Redfern under the (ex)TNT Towers.
Tour lasts 4 hours
Enquiries: 0422771092 or info@squatspace.com

Ruark Lewis: Banalities for William Street
(after Kenneth Slessor).
When: Saturday 22 April, 2pm

MORE
SquatSpace Tour Of Beauty www.squatspace.com
Haiku Review www.haikureview.net