Carol/The Revenant/Spotlight

I've been listening to the BBC's Kermode & Mayo's Film Reviews on podcast for sometime now and it's got me thinking how much I enjoy listening to conversations about films. I think I like listening to them even more than having actual conversations myself.

It was on Kermode & May's program that I heard Cate Blanchett describing working with Todd Haynes on Carol, Leonardo DiCaprio disclosing the 'transforming' experience of working with an 'artist' shooting a 100 minute film with dialogue that covered half an A4 sheet of paper for The Revenant and my new Hollywood Husband Mark Ruffalo - sorry Edward Norton, you've been displaced  - on ensemble acting in Spotlight. They were all wonderful subjects: serious, engaging, generous, totally committed to their craft and getting their films seen. I can report in the world of professional film people at the top of their game seem to try hard and give it their best.

I know that probably sounds cynical, it's not intended that way. Some days I just feel like the distance between our private and public selves is a gap so wide it pulls apart logic and sense. I got to thinking about this recently reflecting on my feature film rewrite which was a herculean effort. Writing every day for a month was gruelling. Doing it with two monkeys on school holidays with Christmas in the middle felt like a folly of the highest order. Moving between work and home was something akin to daily time travel, right down to edgy camera shakes to signify the awkward transition. It was discombobulating in every way and felt harder with each passing day. The needs of small children –  their moods and variable temperaments – and the exhausting detail of domestic life, as well as the demands of a complex and large creative project almost broke me, except it didn't. Even virtual strangers stopped me to tell me "Looking gggreeeaat". Go figure.

It's even stranger to consider that writing is an imaginative interpretation of the space between those different spheres - our public and private selves - and how we feel and behave as we inhabit them. Off air at BBC headquarters maybe Mark Ruffalo kicked himself for describing himself as an 'activist' - and not just a wealthy movie star. Cate Blanchett could have disconnected and thought "Banging on about the theatre, AGAIN". Leo? I couldn't even speculate. What I'm imagining is not really for sharing publicly. It's staying private.

By the way they were all fine films. All three of them.

The Right To Know

This week I sat in front of 20 Preps studying Journeys and told them the story of our family's migration to Australia from Poland when I was precisely their age. I had their rapt attention. It's that kind of story, which includes our family separated across continents, my father's trip by boat to Africa, my mother's escape from Poland with four small children over the mountains in an unreliable car and our eventual reunion in Vienna before the long journey by plane to Australia. 

My own background as a refugee was one of the reasons I was so glad to participate in Red Cross' exhibition, The Right To Know, which tells eight stories of family separation and reunion thanks to the efforts of the Red Cross Tracing Service. It's difficult not to be moved by the stories of sadness, longing and loss told so achingly concisely. 

Designer Cate Hall and I worked on the project out of her backyard studio calling out measurements to each other against a background of children's voices, and Cate's large, doleful black rabbit hopping silently around the yard.

It was the beginning of winter. There was a birth – beautiful Nina in Adelaide – and the shock of Otto's diagnosis of diabetes to contend with the week the artwork was due at the printers. To be honest I was grateful for the chance to lose myself in meaningful work. I laid out photographs of Emmanuel – his warm, positive and dignified face – alongside quotes that were horrifying in their meaning. His story begins: "I was only 14 years old when my family members were killed, when I witnessed that mass killing." 

Moving graphic elements around millimetre by millimetre in Illustrator and changing pixels sizes in Photoshop, I felt fate's cruel hand: good and bad fortune, historical and geographical forces. What choice do we have but to keep moving forward one foot in front of the other? 

The Right To Know

Immigration Museum

400 Flinders Street, Melbourne

Until 25 October 2015

www.sweetpolka.com

www.catehall.com.au

Whisper in my mask

Whisper in my mask

TarraWarra Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art

16 August – 16 November 2014

TarraWarra Museum of Art has been mounting biennial’s for eight years. The exhibitions are designed to chart new developments in contemporary art. From the outset the museum has engaged external curators to conceive exhibitions that explore an idea, theme or tendency in contemporary art practice. Whisper in My Mask, the fifth in this line is a collaboration between curators Natalie King and Djon Mundine. King, who amongst other shows, curated Up Close: Carol Jerems with Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and William Yang at Heide in 2010 is interested in edgy subcultures and relationships - between artists, milieus, individuals; Mundine’s writing and curatorial practice has focused on Aboriginal art, including the remarkable Aboriginal Memorial (1987-1988), 200 hollow log coffin poles from Ramingining, a project similarly geared towards the collective. 

While King and Mundine have gravitated towards different curatorial subjects, in their joint catalogue essay King and Mundine offer an insight into their shared methodology: “ The relationality  of curating individual artists, community, society, inside and outside the gallery, and creating a conversation between objects and community through a number of devices and on a number of levels, is something we unconsciously just thought was our normal practice.” King and Mundine’s practice foregrounds relationships, collaboration and conversation and this is evident in the assembled artists and works. This methodology underpins the biennial in a myriad of ways, and, in fact, forms the most cogent framework for thinking about the exhibition itself.

The exhibition features 16 individuals and groups, including a number of collectives; boat people, a Sydney based collective of 10 who contributed a video-based work, The Tjanpi Desert Weavers, a dynamic social enterprise that were commissioned by the biennial to make sculptures, as well as artistic collaborations: Destiny Deakin and Virginia Fraser, Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, and Karla Dikens’ who took photographs in partnership with Lismore Soup Kitchen and Southern Cross University, and sisters Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano. 

Whisper in My Mask explicitly draws on the trope of the mask. The accompanying exhibition catalogue essays elaborate an understanding of the origins, meaning, symbolism and use of masks in Western and indigenous cultures. Masks allude, we know, to human disguise, to camoflage, to erasure, secrets and hidden meanings. How then is this theme articulated across the exhibition? The curators have taken a broad perspective selecting artworks that either formally or by way of subject probe this idea. Walking through the gallery space there was a palpable sense of intensity. Between Polinexi Papepetrou’s photographs of clowns, some wearing costumes made of the Union Jack, boat-people’s video instillation Muffled Protest depicting the collective artists sitting on the steps of the Sydney Opera House with their faces covered by the Australian flag, Tony Garifalakis’ photographic camouflage portraits, and Nasim Nasr’s video installation of a weeping woman wearing a chandor,  I felt the full impact of so many potent symbols in close proximity. Fiona Foley’s sculptural installation of towering serif letters spelling out Black Velvet rendered in wood and metal (referring to the racial slur and not simply fabric) ratcheted it up a notch. Foley’s words loomed like a provocative headline in an exhibition that read like a newspaper; a cacophony of people, stories, recent events demanding action.

An edited version of this review appears in the forthcoming issue of Artlink 34 #4 Sustainable? out in December.

image: Tony Garifilakis, The Hills Have Eyes, 2012

Gaps

David Rosetzky and I have been working on a feature film for as long as it takes to learn to speak, crawl, walk, sleep, eat and take up the violin. I can say this for certain because the project's inception  coincided roughly with the year of Hazel's conception. Given Hazel is on on her way to school next year, I would have thought it would have progressed further but I've been writing for long enough to know creative writing, as practised by moi, is painstakingly slow work. Occasionally thinking on it is cause for a grade 'A' funk but I've come to view it as a correction. I chew through other kinds of work at a scary clip. I am almost reconciled to the fact that I am unlikely to view my work in a cinema (I should have been born a decade earlier and taking my small, indie films into production back when Steven Soderbergh was fretting about the sexual mores of Andy McDowell and the Kino was the only art house cinema in town). For this reason I took extra pleasure in seeing David's 30 minute video Gaps at ACMI since I played a part in its creation. Officially I am down as co-writer though I am the first to admit that's a stretch given not one of the words uttered by its fabulous cast were familiar to me. Drawn loosely from material developed by us, it is a beautiful, hypnotic exploration of similarity and difference. I found it warm and graceful thanks largely to Stephanie Lake's earthy choreography which shifts speeds and plays with movement in simple, affecting ways and the sound track that is twangy acoustic. That I had a hand in this lovely work is a testament to magical thinking. 

Gaps at ACMI until February 2015 (though the long screening time is no excuse to miss it!)

Community and Context

 

Franck Gohier, Big Boss, 2012, 4-colour screenprint, hand-printed on acid-free, carbon-neutral 290gsm ivory board. Courtesy artist and Red Hand Prints, Darwin:www.redhandprints.com

We're All in this Together

In the course of my work I often ask artists why they make art. Some shrug, others try and put it into words. Listening to artists respond to the question is like watching someone trying to catch a cloud. When it comes down to it there is rarely one simple reason. Like most things in life it’s complicated.

Art making is not a way of life that makes much sense within the parameters of late capitalism. In dollar terms a cost benefit analysis weighs in at cost over benefit nine times out of ten. I don’t think I am speaking out of line when I say that artists’ often have a fragile sense of their economic self worth. For those without the cushioning effects of inherited wealth it’s a painful internal odyssey. Few worker bees think about value – the value of their work, how they are valued, what they value, where they belong – as much as artists. In some way it makes them particularly sensitive to the question of community.

Community and Context draws together artists working in the ‘expanded field’ of printmaking and the assembled objects in the gallery include sculpture, artist’s books, typography, poster art, etchings, wall drawing, and screen-based work. The exhibition attests to the broad boundaries of printmaking. Moving between the works feels like working a puzzle – there’s a strong sense of interconnectedness between artworks. Many of the works display an interest in history, from early printmaking traditions referenced by Ruth Johnstone in her wood engraving, photocopy and kinetic sculpture and eX de Medici and Rosalind Atkins Our Corporate Who Art in Heaven, an etching and engraving that combines botanical illustration and gas masks to subversive effect.

Echoes of war and the tensions of nationhood appear in other works. Study the digital prints of Neil Emmerson and the comical Abu Grahib-like figures lolling on the ground. Or Ruby Pilven’s installation Micro-boundaries that uses stamps to mimic the alienating procedures of institutional bureaucracies as they relate to asylum seekers. Or Stewart Russell’s silky national flags draped over a stand, like some kind of forlorn and forgotten relic from a United Nations meeting.

Failed colonial endevours pop up elsewhere. Check out Franck Gohier’s humorous screenprinted poster Big Boss, in which the Phantom, a popular comic book figure in indigenous and pacific communities finds himself knocked out by a boomerang. Gohier’s poster can be situated in a longstanding tradition of politically engaged posters from Australian poster workshops stretching from Earthworks Poster Collective to Redback Graphix and beyond that drew on the vernacular to draw attention to various social issues and causes from the 1970s through to the mid 1990s.

Caren Florence/Ampersand Duck’s Book of Michael Pageplay: WAR/RAW 1 & 2 pays tribute to Michael Callaghan (1952-2012), the founder of Redback Graphix. Callaghan’s work at the time of his death focussed on the Iraq war. It brought together a deep sense of compassion for the victims of war and violence and contempt for the doublespeak of its perpetrators. Caren Florence/Ampersand Duck and Callaghan had been in discussion about a collaborative project at the time of his death. War and history.

Australian political printmaking informs Emily Floyd’s series of prints, made as part of the Australian Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Printmaking Scholarship. Floyd devised the work after hearing a radio program about the Sydney-based collective Earthworks (1972–1979). Utilizing aquatint, an intaglio printmaking technique where texture is applied onto a plate (in this instance both copper and aluminium) Floyd's predominantly small works make bold proclamations such as 'It's Time' and 'The Problem Is the Solution' in display typefaces that recall William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Arranging the type into simple shapes, particularly circles, squares and diamonds, the prints bring to mind the principles behind alternative education philosophies. Floyd is clearly fascinated by the subject, she has exhibited an oversized Steiner rainbow in the past. Staring at Floyd's prints you feel poised on the cusp of a mystical revelation.

Trent Walter’s deadpan work, Cover Version #1 (Island) and Cover Version #2 (Expose), similarly appropriate graphic traditions from yesteryear. Walter draws on an existing archive of text and images to re-imagine historical magazines that fall somewhere between academic journal and National Geographic. His works display a strong awareness of the history of production processes. In this respect they are pitch perfect. There’s no doubt that Walter is making some kind of statement about imperialism but its difficult not to feel seduced by their seriousness and nostalgic optimism. Are they critique or celebration? A bit of both?

The history of printmaking is the history of the book and unsurprisingly books, and the associated field of typography, loom large in this show. Gene Bawden’s investigation into the “turnabouts” pattern devised by early Australian designer Florence Broadhurst pushes letterform from the legible to the decorative and abstract. Nicci Haynes, Thomas Coish and Jonas Ropponen take books as a point of departure but arrive at vastly different destinations. Haynes’ obsessional re-working of the Irish classic Finnegan’s Wake into an installation of shredded pages has a touch of the crazies. It’s a place that Jonas Ropponen and his paper mache bust also ventures. In each of these artworks paper has been shredded and pulped, folded over and overprinted.

To counter the drama, there are scenes of repose. Raymond Arnold’s lush and detailed representations of local landscapes, Bridget Hillebrand's monochromatic mountain climbing maps, John Loane’s abstract etchings and Marion Crawford’s sparkling, delicate disks that twirl and in space. They gesture towards a state of grace, remind us of our connectedness to the world around us, one another.

Catalogue essay for Community and Context.

6 February – 12 March 2013 

MADA Gallery
Monash University Caulfield, Building G
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East Victoria 3145

t +61 3 9903 2882
e MADA.Gallery@monash.edu

Monday-Friday: 10am-5pm
Saturday: 12-5pm
Sunday and Public Holidays: Closed

Stephanie Radok, Weeds of the City, 2010

I've been checking the blog and feeling a bit disappointed that there hasn't been a new post for a couple of days now. Then I remember: oh yeah, if I want to read it, I have to write it.

I'm late writing here because I've been busy writing elsewhere, for Australian Art Collector. Actually, writing is an exaggeration. More like collating, since the 6 stories are haiku in length. Fifty short words. But it does mean in the week before, I reach out – to artists, galleries, publicists and auction houses – in order to have some material to file. I always find more than I need. Like Stephanie Radok's lovely weeds painted onto beer coasters. What is it that's so appealing about these little works? Is it their taxonomic quality? Modest scale? Their pleasing sense of variety though they are unmistakably paintings made by a single hand? I like all of this about them and more.