april 2006 subject index

Australia/holland anniversary
OPENING DOORS @ yuendumu
Open Doors - Aboriginal Art Museum

rembrandt anniversary
leiden windmills
flower fields of Keukenhof

printmaking
basil hall editions
kenneth tyler collection NGA
print auction - brisbane
otto dix at nga

australia
Ngapartji Ngapartji Theatre Arts Project
adele boag gallery
bald archy

art theory & criticism
Universal Museum
stolen art
origins of aboriginal art
bach v bach
indigenous code of conduct
women in contemporary art
theory of happenings

feature artists
blek le rat
brassai
swoon on blakkbyrd
Nic Coviello
banksy on oz
Gutai
the youth of today

opportunities
call - brisbane
call - albury
counterfeit art 8
south coast print workshops
artist books workshop - sydney

conferences & biennials
berlin biennial

other
Easter Bilby Campaign

resources
artforum - australia & NZ guide

basil hall editions

Basil Hall Editions staff 2003-2004
(l to r) Jo Diggens, Basil Hall, Matthew Ablitt,
Monique Auricchio and Natasha Rowell

Basil Hall Editions (BHE) was established in 2002 by master printer Basil Hall.The studio is located in tropical Darwin in the far north of Australia and is available to artists and art centres who wish to collaborate with experienced printers in the production of most forms of printmaking. and

BHE produces over 150 editions a year and boasts the most experienced team in Australia currently working with Indigenous artists, employing up to 5 printers. The workshop is fully equipped for etching, silkscreen and relief printing. A small lithography press has recently been added.

Basil has been working with Australian and overseas artists for 22 years, producing over 2000 editions (assisted by teams of printers) as Director of Studio One in Canberra, Northern Editions in Darwin and now Basil Hall Editions.

Contact Basil Hall Editions
30 Buchanan Tce
Nakara NT 0810
AUSTRALIA
Phone/Fax (08) 89270605
basil_hall_editions@ozemail.com.au
http://www.basilhalleditions.com.au

check out the studio photos

at garma 2003
garma 2003 Article

at garma 2004
panel

with Gary Shead

at Ernabella

wins business award

at injalak

at NGA

OPENING DOORS @ yuendumu

Exhibition [as presented on the artists' website]

Opening Doors The Warlukurlangu Collection and 12 of the original, famous Yuendumu School Doors at the Aboriginal Art Museum

Oudegracht 176
3511NP Utrecht
The Netherlands

www.aamu.nl

=================
http://www.yuendumu.nt.gov.au/

WARLUKURLANGU ARTISTS ABORIGINAL ASSOCIATION website.

links

"The name 'Warlukurlangu' derives from an important Jukurrpa (Dreaming) and means 'belonging to fire.'

The art centre plays an important role within the community by providing a variety of cultural maintenance and educational activities. With the ongoing work of a dedicated elected Committee, Warlukurlangu is committed to improving opportunities for the self expression and empowerment of Warlpiri people.

Download our video here.

Established in 1985, the Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association Inc. is an Aboriginal owned and governed non-profit Art Centre located at Yuendumu Community, 300km north-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, Australia.

Representing over 260 Warlpiri and Anmatjerre artists, the art centre specialises in the production of a wide range of acrylic paintings, large commissions and traditional ground installations. The Warlukurlangu Artists are renowned for their diversity and use of colour while maintaining the cultural integrity of their work.

The art centre plays an important role within the community by providing a variety of cultural maintenance and educational activities.. With the ongoing work of a dedicated elected committee, Warlukurlangu is committed to improving opportunities for the self expression and empowerment of Warlpiri people.

In recent years the work of Warlukurlangu Artists has featured in exhibitions hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria, M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; the Glasgow Museum, Scotland and the Gifu Museum of Fine Arts, Japan and the Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht.

Yuendumu Doors
In 1983, five artists, including Paddy Japaljarri Stewart, Paddy Japaljarri Sims and Roy Jupurrurla Curtis (other artists are deceased) painted 30 school doors with Dreaming designs, negotiating the content with other Warlpiri men and women who also collectively owned the designs. Twenty-seven Dreamings were represented on the Doors, referring to more than two hundred sites in Warlpiri and Anmatjerre territory.

During the early 1980s many of these places were only just becoming accessible to Warlpiri again through the land rights process. In this way, the Doors represented more than affirmation of the artists' links with country; they indicated the readiness of the artists to assume the political and social repsonsibilities for those places.

The painted Doors were also intended to remind the Yuendumu schoolchildren of a web of sites and obligations extending across their country. The Doors remained at Yuendumu, resisting erasure for 12 years despite the desert wind and sun, and robust treatment from Warlpiri schoolchildren.

In 1987, Warlukurlangu Artists in association with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, produced 'Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors' book. Featuring colour photographs, descriptions of the Dreamings in Warlpiri and English, iconographic explanations and maps, this book is available from Warlukurlangu Artists for AUD$30 plus postage.

Now the Doors are unhinged. The entire series of 30 are held in trust by the South Australian Museum, whose association with the Warlpiri people extends back to the generation of first contact with Europeans earlier this century."

Universal Museum

Eighteen of the world's great museums and galleries have signed a statement supporting the idea of the universal museum. The statement was drafted at their last meeting in Munich last October, and presented to the British Museum for publication.

Their directors are all members of an informal group of museums worldwide which meets regularly to discuss issues of common interest.

One of the most pressing of these is the threat to the integrity of universal collections posed by demands for the restitution of objects to their countries of origin.

Museums and galleries such as these are cultural achievements in their own right. They bring together the different cultural traditions of humanity under one roof. Through their special exhibitions and their permanent displays they endow the great individual pieces in their collections with a worldwide context within which their full significance is graspable as nowhere else.

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, said "This declaration is an unprecedented statement of common value and purpose issued by the directors of some of the world's leading museums and galleries. The diminishing of collections such as these would be a great loss to the world's cultural heritage."

The Statement and Signatories

Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums

The international museum community shares the conviction that illegal traffic in archaeological, artistic, and ethnic objects must be firmly discouraged. We should, however, recognize that objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of that earlier era. The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.

Over time, objects so acquired—whether by purchase, gift, or partage—have become part of the museums that have cared for them, and by extension part of the heritage of the nations which house them. Today we are especially sensitive to the subject of a work’s original context, but we should not lose sight of the fact that museums too provide a valid and valuable context for objects that were long ago displaced from their original source.

The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artifacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums. Indeed, the sculpture of classical Greece, to take but one example, is an excellent illustration of this point and of the importance of public collecting. The centuries-long history of appreciation of Greek art began in antiquity, was renewed in Renaissance Italy, and subsequently spread through the rest of Europe and to the Americas. Its accession into the collections of public museums throughout the world marked the significance of Greek sculpture for mankind as a whole and its enduring value for the contemporary world. Moreover, the distinctly Greek aesthetic of these works appears all the more strongly as the result of their being seen and studied in direct proximity to products of other great civilizations.

Calls to repatriate objects that have belonged to museum collections for many years have become an important issue for museums. Although each case has to be judged individually, we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. Museums are agents in the development of culture, whose mission is to foster knowledge by a continuous process of reinterpretation. Each object contributes to that process. To narrow the focus of museums whose collections are diverse and multifaceted would therefore be a disservice to all visitors.

Signed by the Directors of:

The Art Institute of Chicago
Bavarian State Museum, Munich (Alte Pinakothek, Neue Pinakothek)
State Museums, Berlin
Cleveland Museum of Art
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Louvre Museum, Paris
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Prado Museum, Madrid
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The British Museum, London

December 2002

source: the british museum website

more on the universal museum

usa museums 10
europe museums 9

other countries including Australia and New Zealand 0

blek le rat

Homelessin France, by Blek le Rat. 6/2005

the stencil manifesto

"While studying Engraving and Archictecture at the « Ecole des Beaux Arts » in Paris I got acquaint with the subject. So, in the seventies I learned the art of etching and the techniques of lithography and seriography, while the study of architecture waked my conscience measurable public space. " ...


"In October 1981 in Paris, rue des Thermopyles, we painted for the first time on an old dilapidated house where we wanted to reproduce an American piece. But what a Fiasko! So I suggested making stencils, an old technique, ancestor of seriography and later used by Italien fascists for their propaganda. I remembered having seen a little effigy of the Duce (Mussolini) with a helm, a relic of the Second World War, in Padova (Italy), when I was there with my parents in the early sixties Well, once the technique and the material were found, again we just had to act."

intro movie

blek's work

videos of blek at work

first website http://bleklerat.free.fr/
second website http://blekmyvibe.free.fr/

stolen art

The contentious issue of ownership of artefacts has become global, with numerous countries agitating for return of what is rightfully theirs. This has prompted those in possession of disputed artefacts to come up with "universal museums" that proclaim to "secure items for humanity." In December, 2002, 18 of the world's leading museums joined forces to declare that they would not hand back ancient artefacts to their countries of origin. They claimed that their collections are for the "good of the world."

These museums include the Art Institute of Chicago; Bavarian State Museum, Germany; Prado Museum, Madrid; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

more on stolen african art

origins of aboriginal art

Forget everything you ever learned about the origins of the contemporary aboriginal art movement. The mystery is now solved, the histories re-written - it was invented by a dutchman.

I quote.

"Not until the early 1970's did the Aboriginals begin making pictures that were not bound to the site or the body on which they were created. The occasion was the journey of the Dutchman Hank Ebes and two Australian gallery owners into the bush where they encouraged the Aboriginals to paint their traditional subjects on canvases with ochre and acrylic paints. This paved a way for a popularisation of Aboriginal art and culture which had been surpressed since the British colonisation of the Australian continent in 1788."

Interesting critique of the British. I wonder who the nameless "Australian gallery owners" were? How kind of Mr Ebes to show them what to do.



EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE

Mr Ebes also had to teach Emily Kame Kngwarreye how to make her art. Note; she is "Emily" whilst he is "Hank Ebes, the collector".

"Emily has created DREAMTIME's most monumental work, my country ... Originally the work was not planned as a composite installation. However when over several weeks Hank Ebes found Emily painting new pictures, which she all designated "My Country, My Country, My Country," the collector conceived the idea of assembling the 53 panels into one large work."

About Ebes.


"The Dutch-Australian pioneer Hank Ebes was one of the first people to encourage the Aboriginals to paint on canvas. Until the 1970s they had created their images on evanescent materials: on dirt and sand, and often those images were washed away."

Wonder who the nameless artists he is sitting with are? And which international museums they have exhibited in?

"Hank Ebes has made a name for himself as one of the world's greatest and most passionate connoisseurs of Aboriginal art. ... While tending the gallery he has amassed a private collection totalling more than 11,000 works of art."

Wonder if the amount paid to the artists reflected the true market value of their work? And what the current valuation of "11,000 works of art" is?

They were selling unstreched canvases less than a metre square for an average of 400 Euro each here at the Utrecht Aboriginal Art Museum yesterday. Larger canvases were up to 2000 euro. (taking the most conservative estimate, 400 x 11,000 is 4.4 million Euro or $7.3 million AUD: at 2000 euro each, we are talking $37 million AUD). What proportion of the guess-timated $7 to $37 million has been returned to the Aboriginal art communities these works came from?

"First they say that you are an idiot. Then they say that you have been lucky. And when you die they will probably say that you were a genius" Hank Ebes

You using the 'infinite improbability drive' Hank? News for you mate - you have yet to progress past stage one. Only "idiot" is probably not the word.

source: Arken Museum of Modern Art Presentation Sheet for the Dreamtime Exhibition.

"In the exhibition DREAMTIME, ARKEN presents more than 100 Aboriginal paintings from Ebe's private collection."

Only three of the artists are named.

"DREAMTIME offers an opportunity to experience contemporary art from a remote corner of the world, by the indigenous Australians. This is art that the Western art institutions traditionally have failed to do justice. The exhibition also illustrates a trend which has been on the rise for the past decades: the extension of the West's artistic map of the world."

Nice to know that we (the Australian art community) are a complete failure with respect to Aboriginal art isn't it? And reassuring to know that all will be ok now that Europe has discovered us.

Unfortunately this presentation is typical of the type of mis-information that exists in Europe about Australia and Australian art and culture. They either haven't got a clue, or they invented it.

bach v bach

It is not often that one of the world's great composers is accused of plagiarising his wife's work, but a Darwin music expert has cast doubt on whether Johann Sebastian Bach wrote all his own material. The conductor of Darwin's Symphony Orchestra and Associate Professor from the Charles Darwin University, Martin Jarvis, believes Bach's Cello Suites were composed by the German musician's second wife, Anna Magdalena.

full story

Martin Jarvis says there is no doubt Anna Magdalena was a talented musician. She was a student of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1714 and married him in 1721. Prof Jarvis says if in fact Anna Magdalena did compose some of the music, she would never have been credited for the work.

"Being a woman at that point, there was no likelihood that she would have been recognised as a composer," he said. "Had she remained unmarried maybe she would have been, but once she got married, it was this way for all women in society at that point, that they became the property of their husband and their intellectual property was their husband's too.

"We have lots of other examples in music history of women getting married and then publishing the music under their husband's name.

kenneth tyler collection NGA

tyler collection

This website is dedicated to the Kenneth Tyler Collection of prints, proofs, multiples, illustrated books and screens at the National Gallery of Australia. The Collection also includes documentation, film, sound, photographs and printing matrices. The menu on this website provides the Tyler Collection history, a biography of Kenneth Tyler, a list of current projects relating to the Tyler Collection, information about artists who made prints at the various Tyler workshops and their works, essays relating to the Collection and its display, an exhibition history, access to video and media rich material and a glossary of printmaking terms..

Over time this site will grow as further information is added. The Tyler Collection consists of nearly 6,000 items and it is the Gallery’s intention to provide the public with information regarding these as we proceed with our documentation and research.

"As a printmaker and publisher I can only be as successful as the artists I work with and the art we create together..."
Kenneth Tyler in 1995

brassai

In 1932, Gyula Halasz adopted the pseudonym, Brassai, which means literally 'of Brasso' (his native town)With his new Voigtlander Camera Brassai decides to capture the world, from this point on Brassai completely devoted himself to photography.

Brassai enjoyed photographing the Parisian streets mostly at night, when he could capture the lives of prostitutes, gays, lesbians and those who gathered in pubs and brothels.

Brassai's alternative form of art would later lead him to take interest in graffiti on the walls of Paris.

May famous artists such as, Pablo Picasso, Henri Miller and Georges Braque, collected Brassai's Graffiti.

Further down the road, the editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, asks Brassai to be a regular contributor to the publication, with absolute freedom to chose his own subjects. Brassai's association with Harper's Bazaar lasted some twenty-five years, right into the sixties.

and goya

more

more

print auction - brisbane

2006 annual print auction

Impress Printmakers Studio will be conducting their annual print auction on Thursday 27 April at the Brisbane City Council Library Theatrette, City Plaza, 69 Ann St. Pre-auction drinks and viewing of works from 5pm with the auction commencing at 6.30pm. Absentee bids are possible.

Further information and viewing of works available from Friday 21 April at www.impress.org.au

Background


Impress Printmakers Studio Brisbane Inc. is a non-profit, community, visual arts organisation. Impress commenced operations in February 2004 out of the need to create a printmakers access studio for South East Queensland. We have since grown and developed into a community minded organisation that seeks to develop partnerships and collaborations with other community groups and businesses and develop projects that will benefit the wider community. We have already developed links with printmaking groups and studios in other states including Warringah Printmakers Studio, The Printmakers Association of Western Australia, The Hong Kong Access Studio and the newly formed Tasmanian printmaking group.


"on a roll" exhibition

call - brisbane

SOOB 2006 call for submissions

The Straight Out of Brisbane (SOOB) Festival is completely stoked about announcing their 2006 Call for Submissions. They're interested in hearing from Brisbane and Australian artists, curators and anyone else who cares about independent and emerging arts, culture and ideas. If you're interested in getting involved in SOOB 2006, head to the Call for Submissions page Submissions close June 1.

indigenous code of conduct

**** NEW ETHICAL RULES FOR AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART

The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) has begun work on a new Indigenous Commercial Code of Conduct. These industry endorsed best practice guidelines will set standards for previously unregulated commercial dealings between Indigenous artists and commercial interests.

The project is funded by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council and is a joint project of NAVA, Desart and the Association of Northern Kimberly and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists.

For further information: Contact Merrilee Kessler (NAVA) ph 02 9368 1900 or email nava@visualarts.net.au

call - albury

**** PUBLIC ART RESIDENCY PROJECT, ALBURY CITY

Albury City is offering an artist in residence project in which three artists will be engaged to develop a series of sketched proposals for possible site-specific artworks throughout the Albury City cultural precinct. A fee of $5,000 is offered (per artist).

For further information and application details: go to
http://www.alburycity.nsw.gov.au/arts/cultural/20063282674102.htm
Applications due: 5.00pm Monday April 24 2006

berlin biennial

The exhibition of the 4th berlin biennial, titled Of Mice and Men, opened to the public on March 25, 2006 and will continue until May 28, 2006. The show includes works by more than 70 artists in twelve venues that dot the entire span along Auguststraße, Berlin-Mitte.

festival links

kw institute

swoon on blakkbyrd

Grandfather

In making these, Swoon cuts several layers of paper at once, creating what I would call a very limited 'print run.

You call this paper cutting, carving?

"Because it’s with a knife, cutting out, the physical process is like carving."

"This and this. (The woodcut prints and the paper cutouts) Start out looking really similar. I start out with a big messy charcoal drawing. And then with the prints I stay a lot closer to the original drawing. And with the cutouts I pare it down. Instead of keeping the line of the mouth I would just cut out a little bit of it. So it’s like the same drawing but rendered really differently." "It’s almost like the rules of the medium are what dictates with this. With the cutouts I try to simplify it because it has to stay within the paper, with the prints I keep it scribbly, because I can. Because the cutouts have to stay in one piece, you have all these different physical visual rules that you have to obey. Whereas with prints you can kind of do whatever you want. Sometime limitations are good." from gammablog

see swoon feature on blakkbyrd

Easter Bilby Campaign

The Australian Bilby Appreciation Society urges you to buy Bilbies not bunnies this Easter. For we will only be able to pressure the chocolate companies to donate money to help conserve the Bilby if people are buying chocolate Bilbies.

However, we also suggest that you buy your Bilbies from companies that are supporting Bilby conservation and that you buy a few less chocolates this Easter, and use the money saved to make your own donation to Bilby conservation.

Also, if the store you are shopping at doesn't stock Easter Bilbies, make a point of asking, "Where are all the bloody Bilbies?".

==============

The Anti Rabbit Research Fund of Australia (now known as the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia) began using the Easter Bilby in 1991 to highlight the damage that the introduced rabbit does to the native environment. They arranged for the first chocolate Bilbies to be produced in South Australia by Haigh's Chocolates, Melba's Chocolates and Cottage Box Chocolates in 1993. Now many more chocolate Bilbies are available each Easter. The Easter Bilby is an important reminder to Australians of the plight of our native wildlife.

========
see you after easter

counterfeit art 8

How to tell your fine art is a forgery

So you're concerned that your artwork might be a counterfeit reproduction? Don't feel bad. You're certainly not the first to buy the Mona Lucy by Leonardo Davinsky.

The rules of this game are thus: You will take any famous painting or artwork (any period is fine) and alter it in such a way that it is obviously a forgery, as in the themepost. As always, quality is a must.

link

leiden windmills

http://grid.let.rug.nl/~welling/maps/blaeu.html

If you look carefully at this map, you can see the windmills on the walls of Leiden circa 1652. If you zoom in (JPEG image) to the point at the mid left where the river Rhine (Rijn) exits the city walls and crosses the moat, you can see the bridge and adjacent windmills. This is the site of the Rembrandt family mill that was demolished by the spaniards in the seige of 1574.


the relief of leiden


The city walls and mill had been rebuilt by the time of Rembrandt's birth in 1606 and a mill stands on the site to this day.



This map shows Leiden in 1575 and helps explain the military strategy behind the seige. Click on 'high resolution' and you can zoom in and see how the city walls and windmills looked at the time of seige.

There's a good painting in the Lakenhal that shows the spaniards in siege and the windmills on the city walls.



this painting by Goyen also shows the windmills.

Rembrandt in Leiden

The mill today - molen 'de put'.

Nic Coviello

Watch as the master makes screen printing look easy. Nic shares a couple of tips on his mix of inks and how he feels about the clean up part of the process. We also see some samples of his finished works on paper.

Part 3 small
play movie

Part 3 large
play movie

credits
website
more info

re-blogged from Romanblog

women in contemporary art

"women cannot really make a career for themselves in art"

+++ Society/ France: The place of women in contemporary art

France - Libération. In a lengthy commentary, the French writer Marie Darrieussecq denounces the ostracism that female artists suffer. +++
http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=373731
webpage

the article translated by babelfish

Come from the literature, I discover the world of art, and I learn there much things. For example, that the women cannot really build of work. It is written in the catalogue devoted to the painter Jean-Marc Bustamante (collection "contemporary Creation", Flammarion editions, 2005).

Christine Macel, who questions it with Xavier Veilhan, asks him why the women "do not hold the distance", why if little "exceeds the ten years". "You (Bustamante, Veilhan, or Thomas Hirschhorn, note), you produce much, you experienced in different dimensions, there is a kind of flow. I wondered recently why it was not the case among women." And I think of Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Gina Pane (this word of "flow"), Rebecca Horn or Jenny Holzer, who still have of effect all their evidence to make.

One owes in Christine Macel the decisive Dyonisiac exposure, which I saw at the beginning of 2005 with the Pompidou Center. Exposure devoted to promising artists, and very instructive: vis-a-vis with the list of the names, fourteen male first names, I had concluded from it that there was no promising artist in the world today...

Bustamante increases (it would be necessary all to quote of its text inspired, where one finds the breath dix-neuviemist and imposing of Michelet or Renan): "Yes, the man needs to conquer territories, the woman finds her territory and it remains there... The women seek a man, a man wants all the women. The woman, as soon as it found its territory, it remains there... The men are always in the search for virgin territories."

According to a prejudice which goes up with the first outlines of anthropology, the woman is made for the private space (the hearth, "personnel" which will further quote Veilhan): in short, vaginal and uterine interiority. As if the shape of the sexual organs could found a thought.
A préhistorienne as Claudine Cohen shows that there is a total scientific fiction to think that Mr. Cromagnon drove out the mammoth while Mrs. Cromagnon awaited it in the cave... Both were, at best and with the daily newspaper, large hunters of wild weasels.

It is true that as soon as a woman penetrates on the so-called ground of the men, she is made treat of "phallic woman": it is the term of Macel to describe Louise Bourgeois. By a start of thought historicisante, it then tries to excuse these poor delayed females: "the women could only express themselves as artists very recently, as from the years 1970, before it existed little about it." Sonia Delaunay, Maya Deren, Lili Brig, German Richier, Barbara Hepworth... the list could be long those who were artists before the Seventies.

Admittedly, a woman who creates must take again tools or a language already formatted by a world of men, which can add to the confusion of those whose thought is already confused. Dominated must indeed pass by the field of dominating to be extracted some. A historical alternative was to reinvent the traditionally female tools and symbols, which explains why the Seventies actually saw so many knittings, cloths and houses, cyclic blood and female moods put in scene in art. Without anything to remove with their formidable second reading of the bodies and stereotypes, Orlan, Middle-class men, Messager... have all evolved/moved then in their explorations.

However, Bustamante disputes any capacity with mobility to them. I continue to read, increasingly astonished, learning for example whom Nan Golding "really any more moved" once only it found its line. But it is in the general information that Bustamante reaches its true epic dimension: "the men take risks much greater, like being hated, to be in the polemic, to be a long time in difficult fields."

But perhaps that Bustamante is right. With the stupid way of Mr Homais: a speech insulting but convenient, immémorialement conventional. It is so much reassuring, which the woman remains at the house! With, in more (today the women work), this great shiver with few expenses, to have the impression to say prohibited things... With the men, therefore, difficult things! If the woman is made for the close relation and the easy one, it is undoubtedly because its baby the tète. And it must be because they are frileuses that the women artists "knit" so much, and because they are limited that they do not seek to conquer "virgin territories". It is true that one still finds people to exclude Orlan from the field of art, or Pipilotti Rist, or Sarah Lucas... Or for saying that they do not take any risk, especially not that to be hated... However, this concept of artistic risk that Bustamante employs, I know it well: it also date a little, at least seventy years, since virile "the horn of bull" of Leiris.

The women artists would be thus a little cookings. They "are cut off in the social box where one wants to see them well" (Veilhan). But if one includes in the concept of artist the music or the letters, then indeed, one Duras or Jelinek always was afraid of the polemic, Björk always dug the same furrow, and Simone Weil was known for its side plan-plan. It would be thus in art and strictly in art which the women are good only to produce works with the hook? It is true that there are the laws of the market... The galleries, which expose them little... And certain women themselves which, as soon as they have a small end to be able, like Christine Macel, magnificiently integrate the prejudices on their sex.

That the men and the women produce different works seems to me a rich idea, interesting, more than alleged the often put "neutral" for the "male" word. But as by chance, this difference is generally used to minimize works of the women. Fortunately I write, I am not "an artist", if not I would dare to think that I have a brain, whose form is not inevitably that of a uterine cavity.

otto dix at nga

War: the prints of Otto Dix
17 December 2005 – 30 April 2006
nga.gov.au/Dix
War: The prints of Otto Dix showcases Otto Dix’s war portfolio Der Krieg of 1924, a collection of 51 etchings with aquatint which is regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century.
more info

Curator’s perspective
Wednesday 12 April 12.45pm
An introduction to the exhibition by Mark Henshaw, Curator, for a tour of the exhibition followed by light refreshments in the Members' Lounge. $15 members and their guests Bookings essential.

banksy on oz

What do you know about Australian graffiti artists/designers?

From what I've seen Australian graffiti is like the classic New York stuff after its had the colour and contrast turned up a notch. ( that means I like it )

interview

website

artforum - australia & NZ guide

link

Gutai

from tate glossary

Japanese avant-garde group. Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) was formed in 1954 in Osaka by Yoshihara Jiro, Kanayma Akira, Murakami Saburo, Shiraga Kazuo, and Shimamoto Shozo. The word has been translated into English as 'embodiment' or 'concrete'. Yoshihara was an older artist around whom the group coalesced and who financed it. In their early public exhibitions in 1955 and 1956 Gutai artists created a series of striking works anticipating later Happenings and Performance and Conceptual art. Shiraga's Challenge to the Mud 1955, in which the artist rolled half naked in a pile of mud, remains the most celebrated event associated with the group. Also in 1955 Murakami created his reportedly stunning performance Laceration of Paper, in which he ran through a paper screen. At the second Gutai show in 1956, Shiraga used his feet to paint a large canvas sprawled across the floor. From about 1950 Shimamoto had been making paintings from layers of newspaper pasted together, painted and then pierced with holes, anticipating the pierced work of Lucio Fontana. In 1954 Murakami had made a series of paintings by throwing a ball soaked in ink at paper. In 1956 Shimamoto went on to make works called Throws of Colour by smashing glass jars filled with pigment onto canvases laid out on the floor. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois has said that 'the activities of the Gutai group in the mid-1950s constitute one of the most important moments of post-war Japanese culture'. Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan holds a large collection of Gutai work and archives. The group dissolved in 1972 following the death of Yoshihara. There was a retrospective exhibition of their work at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1999.

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the gutai manifesto

info page translated from french with pics
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Atsuko Tanaka

Atsuko Tanaka is one of Japan's most renowned avant-garde artists. She was a member of the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) which was founded by the respected artist Jiro Yoshihara (1904-72), a gestural, abstract painter and influential teacher, in 1954 and existed until 1972. The word "gutai" is composed of two signs, "gu" meaning tool and "tai" meaning body, and it is variously translated as "concreteness" or "embodiment". In quest of "an art which has never existed before", the young artists experimented enthusiastically not only on paintings but also with various activities like open-air or staged events which were precursors to the Happenings of the late 1950s in New York and anticipated today's installation or performance elements.

flower fields of Keukenhof

When we caught the train to Leiden today, part of the agenda was to check out the Lisse flower fields on the way. Its not quite ready yet.

photos
more photos



news: The recent spell of cold weather meant that there wasn't much colour at Keukenhof when it opened last week. Spring seemed a long way off. But a few rays of sunshine, a rise in tem-perature and hey presto the Keukenhof is transformed. The park has burst into bloom and because spring came later than usual, it presents a completely different picture from previ-ous years. Visitors can feast their eyes on Iris Reticulata, winter aconites, snowdrops and early crocuses, all bulbous plants which are flowering prolifically, something that is unique for this time of year. It just goes to show: there's a bright side to everything.


tulips: For more information: www.hortus-bulborum.nl or www.bulbsonline.org

south coast print workshops

Antpress was established in January of 2005 and is the brain child of printmaker and painter Andrew Antoniou ARE.

This contemporary print studio is located in Mollymook on the NSW south coast - 3 hours from Sydney and 2 1/2 hours from Canberra. Just a cooee from gorgeous Mollymook Beach.

It is equipped with a brand new and finely built Hansell Press which sports a bakelite press bed with dimensions of 90cm x 190cm - large enough for serious printmakers and archival editioning. There is ample working space and the studio is sunny and well lit.

Antpress is offering a wide range of print making workshops during 2006 designed for different groups and skill levels. Professional printmaker Andrew Antoniou has over 30 years experience both as a teacher and artist. He spent many years editioning the work of established printmakers and well known artists and has himself works with major collections both here and overseas.

Antpress is unique, in that it offers high quality 2 day workshops in a beautiful garden setting, in a well equipped and sunlit studio - that also includes two artistic & delicious lunches served in a recently renovated home/gallery.

theory of happenings

The Theory of Happenings


The happening, as Kaprow developed it, is a non-verbal, theatrical production that abandons stage-audience structure as well as the usual plot or narrative line of traditional theatre. Although a compartmented organization may be used, the performers are considered as objects -- often kinaesthetically involved -- within an overall design of environment, timing, sound, colour and light. Found environments are often used and built upon, but the events are not casually arrived at, nor are they entirely accidental and spontaneous.

His view was that the Assemblage was to be "handled and walked around", the environment" was to be "walked into", but the happening was to be a genuine "event" involving spectator participation and no longer confined to the museum or gallery. Performers are encouraged to capitalize upon unplanned occurrences while acting out fantasies based on real life within a certain roughly pre-ordained structure that suggests symbolic and universally basic themes and meanings. A field of aesthetic operation is thus created in relation to life, combining artfully determined materials with strong associational properties, and dimensions with events and things from the sphere "outside" of customary definitions for art.

more on kaprow
interview
more on happenings

the youth of today

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT

THE YOUTH OF TODAY
7 April – 25 June 2006

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
Römerberg
60311 Frankfurt, Germany
phone: (+49-69) 29 98 82-0
fax: (+49-69) 29 98 82-240,
welcome@schirn.de
http://www.schirn.de

Press preview: Thursday, 6 April 2006, 11.00 a.m.

A growing emphasis on the media, individuality, and commercialism is producing a constantly increasing diversity of youth scenes. Girlies, greasers, hooligans, rappers, ravers, streetballers, train surfers, traceurs, and yamakasis are just some of these disparate “artificial tribes” to which today’s young people feel they belong. Whereas during the cold war of youth cultures one still had to decide between clear alternatives like punk or pop, young people today, as a rule, pass through a whole series of scenes. This exhibition shows how contemporary art confronts the various life worlds of teens, twens, and postadolescent thirty-somethings whose experience of youth culture often extends into their family lives and careers. This presentation of the 160 works of 50 international artists such as the Young British Artist Tracey Emin, the American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and a large number of newcomers will outline the influences of youth culture on society’s aesthetic and political realms.

The exhibition “The Youth of Today” is sponsored by Sireo Real Estate. Additional support comes from the Mondriaan Foundation, The British Council, as well as from the Embassy of the United States of America and the Embassy of Canada in Berlin.

Matthias Ulrich, curator of the exhibition: “Instead of offering still another category after the ‘Golf Generation’ and the ‘Reform Generation,’ the exhibition is mainly concerned with tracing the connections and inconsistencies within the worlds of young people and their different life forms and to open heterogeneous ways into adulthood from there. Both the subjects and the aesthetics of the works presented reflect the wide range of options informing the way today’s young people feel in a positive and in a negative sense.”

The enormous variety of youth scenarios, styles, and genres mirror a chaotic and ambivalent field of young people’s cultural production. The adolescent generation’s universe is accompanied by a multi-media flood of information which clings to it like its second nature and resolves contradictions, or so it seems. There is no generation conflict, and the thirty-somethings apparently are into the same codes as the teens and twens – in terms of language, music, and clothes. The unisex label not only deterritorializes different bodies and sexes. It also brings forth different strategies of identity formation allowing new social contexts: communities and urban spaces. So what about today’s re-constitution of the (sexual, socio-cultural, urban) subject? What follows from the autonomy of the sexes and the destruction of traditional role models?

The rebellion – against parents, adults, prevailing values, and the state – so frequently associated with youth also manifests itself in the multi-optional character of an open society. Skaters vs. hippies, punks vs. eager beavers, ravers against the night, and all together against war. The once desirable and timeless ideals have been reduced to human scale and human time. The loss reveals a re-formation of the individual as a post-modern, fragmentized subject. And it is the collage and the assemblage again that – as artistic means refined by computer-based sampling, animation, and digital imaging – permit the creation of a heterogeneous “new” world. Proliferating environments and installations, such as the artist Laura Kikauka’s studio “Funny Farm,” reflect these complex contexts and are the basis for unique possible worlds generating themselves in which comics and psychedelic holography, punk and sexual desire coexist.

The exhibition also explores the relationship between individual and group and the place young people assign themselves in society – issues prevailing in different youth cultures and their lifeworlds. In this regard, the club forms a multi-layered field of forces where young people search for a language of their own – for speechlessness as a different, a physical language – and hope to find an autonomous, exempt space which unites the political, sexual, and aesthetic utopias. The importance of hedonism as a model of the nineties club culture lies in its rejection of intellectual dominance and the subversive role of the body. The body suggests itself as a writable and rewritable surface on which signs freely form units and personal identities constitute themselves. Many of the shown works explore this changed body and present it in surroundings that strike us as claustrophobic. This contrast between bodily and spatial topology is not only a main concern of Pierre Huyghe’s and Collier Schorr’s work but also at the core of Mike Paré’s “Teenage Geography” and Bjarne Melgaard’s reactionary anthropoid apes.

Pose and transformation count among the traditional exercises when it comes to internalizing adult models or rebelling against them. They may also support the personality’s reconstitution and the young people’s individualization when employed as strategies of differentiation between themselves and adult persons. Thus, the significance of pose and transformation is equally undermined though – turning into a “shifter,” as Rosalind Krauss has called it, i.e. a semantic shell that can be moved in all directions without ever taking root. Today’s youth lives in more than just one youth culture, they go through several scenes, one after another or sometimes different ones at the same time. Growing up – whether in a positive or in a negative sense – cannot be seen as an absolute value providing a point of orientation from which today’s youth might derive current forms of meaning. They develop autonomous systems that are complex enough to find no sympathy and flexible enough to combine with other systems. Complexity
primarily describes the end of universal aims and the possibility of singularization. Matt Greene’s Gothic post-hippie dreamscapes reminiscent of de Sade, and Rita Ackermann’s girl paradises full of tough Lolita vamps all strike us as equally closed and untouchable microcosms.


LIST OF ARTISTS: Abetz/Drescher (DE), Rita Ackermann (HU), Joe Andoe (US), Marc Bijl (NL), Anuschka Blommers / Niels Schumm (NL), Slater Bradley (US), Daniele Buetti (CH), Ian Cooper (US), Annelise Coste (CH), Sue de Beer (US), Amie Dicke (NL), Philip-Lorca diCorcia (US), Iris van Dongen (NL), Tracey Emin (GB), Luis Gispert (US), Anthony Goicolea (US), Janine Gordon (US), Matthew Greene (US), Lauren Greenfield (US), Kevin Hanley (US), Esther Harris (GB), Rachel Howe (US), Pierre Huyghe (FR), Laura Kikauka (CA), Clemens Krauss (AT), Hendrik Krawen (DE), Liisa Lounila (FI), Marlene McCarty (US), Ryan McGinley (US), Alex McQuilkin (US), Martin Maloney (GB), Bjarne Melgaard (NL), Alex Morrison (CA), João Onofre (PT), Lea Asja Pagenkemper (DE), Mike Paré (US), Frédéric Post (CH), Bettina Pousttchi (DE), L. A. Raeven (NL), Julika Rudelius (DE), Collier Schorr (US), Kiki Seror (US), Ulrike Siecaup (DE), Hannah Starkey (IE), Tomoaki Suzuki (JP), Alex Tennigkeit (DE), Sue Tompkins (GB), Gavin Turk (GB), Alejandro Vidal (ES), Banks Violette (US).

images

artist books workshop - sydney

Artists Books with Judy Barrass



Date: April 22nd & 23rd 2006
Time: 10am - 4pm
Venue:
Warringah Printmakers Studio
Cnr Lovett & Condamine Sts. MANLY VALE

This workshop introduces ways to create books that are more than just containers for images or text. The emphasis is on both the book as a sculptural object and on alternative ways of recording and presenting information and concepts. Participants will learn several simple book structures as the starting point for an exploration of the ways elements of the book can be modified and manipulated to express ideas. Maximum 12 people. full details

judy barrass

adele boag gallery

coming exhibition

28th April
5 Sydney Artists

Work by Michael Kempson, Euan McLeod, Rew Hanks, Chris O'Doherty and Bruce Latimer.

Address
138 Unley Road, Unley South Australia 5061
http://www.adeleboaggallery.com

Open
Tuesday to Friday 11 - 5, Saturday 1 - 4

bald archy

The work sends up the Archibald Prize winning painting by John Olsen, Self-Portrait Janus Faced.

The winner of a satirical portrait competition says he wanted to bring toilet humour to the masses through his portrait of 2005 Archibald winner John Olsen.

Matt Adams's picture Brown stain-Janus faced has won the $5,000 Bald Archy, which is billed as a satire of the Archibald portrait prize.The work features Olsen holding a stained pair of Y-front underpants. The 29-year-old artist says the portrait is really a joke.

"When I was blocking it in and painting, I stood back and started laughing to myself," he said. "I think that is the point of the Bald Archy."Adams says he hopes the work will "rouse the general air of acceptance that pervaded last year's [Archibald] decision". "I couldn't shake the feeling that John Olsen had won for no tangible reason, other than he was John Olsen," he said. "Although I listened intently to both him and Edmund Capon expound the virtues of the painting to the great uneducated, I couldn't but feel sorry for the hundreds of artists who had submitted paintings thinking that was the requirement for contesting the prize.



Light years … John Olsen says his Self-Portrait Janus-Faced depicts him looking back on life with the sun at his head.

"When really, you had needed to have not won the prize on a previous occasion, after being led to believe that you had." The Bald Archy is the only art competition in the world judged by a sulphur-crested cockatoo, named Maude.

A statement put out by award organisers says Maude liked Adams's work "not only because of its succinct comment on last year's Archibald winner, but also because it was an actual portrait rather than a horde of midgets crawling across an ancient skull, as in the recent Archibald Prize winner".

This year's Archibald Prize has been won by Marcus Wills with his portrait Paul Jurasek Monolith.
from the abc