Opportunity :: Artist scholarship announced by Brisbane Artists Academé
Posted by elliott bledsoe at 9:31 AMThe Brisbane Artists Academé has introduced an annual scholarship for on successful Brisbane artist.
The inaugural scholarship is valued at $2500 worth of selected term classes throughout the upcoming year. They successful application will worth with the Academé staff to develop a program to suit their qualifications, allowing them to take customise their experience to suit their creative practice.
Eligibility: Any Brisbane-based artist aged 18 years or older. You do not have to be enrolled at the Academé
Application: Submit a resume, a 300 - 500 word statement on why you should be chosen, what you would like to particularly learn and why and 3-5 images of your paintings or drawings. Submissions should be emailed to Krisstie Byrnne or posted to Brisbane Artists Academé, PO Box 3201, Newmarket Q 4051
Dates: Closes Friday 30 January 2009, 7pmContact: Krisstie Byrnne, phone 0402 342 421, email krisstie@brisbaneartistsacademe.com.au
Opportunity :: The literary genius of alphabet soup, Eat Your Words competition
Posted by elliott bledsoe at 11:50 PMArtworkers Alliance is running a competition for Australian emerging arts writers called Eat Your Words. Eight successful applicants will be invited to attend an intensive writing workshop here in Brisbane where they will collaborate with academics, visual artists and arts writers "...to help foster the development of critical arts writing in Australia." Selected works that come our of that workshop will be published in the July 2009 issue of Artworker.
Eligibility: Emerging Australia-based writers aged 30 years or younger.
Application: Submit the entry form, a resume, a 600 word arts related article, an application statement and biography.
Dates: Closes Friday 30 January 2009, 5pm (See full Words calendar)
Eat Your Words is with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts and administered by Artworkers Alliance.
Youth Arts Queensland has announced it is taking applications for the 2009 Young Artists Mentoring Program. Who is it out there that you really look up to? Who could give you experience, insight or opportunities to take your creative practice or arts work the next level? Find yourself an experienced industry or arts bod mentor and get an application in.
YAMP is a 9 month program. It's a chance for both the mentor and mentoree can benefit from sharing knowledge, industry networks, ideas and experience.
To be eligible to apply you must be a resident of Queensland and aged 18-26 inclusive at the application due date. Applications forms and guidelines are available on the YAMP page. Applications are due by close of business on 14 November 2008 and will be selected by the YAMP Advisory Committee. If you have any questions get in touch with Sarah Woodland, the YAMP Program Manager on (07) 3252 5115.
curatorial council: Brisbane City Council's public art program controls our streets, our landscape and our thoughts
Posted by elliott bledsoe at 2:25 AM
Was just flipping through today's City News and came across two articles sitting side-by-side which so clearly and simply demonstrate Brisbane's (and many other municipal council's) approach to art in public places. On page 10, left-hand side, you have an article about the installation of a number of new public artworks and other initiatives "Brisbane City Council is using to entice pedestrians down CBD laneways and away from main thoroughfares". The only work mentioned in the article (although not by name) is pop-sculptor Christopher Langton's piece "Façade"; a giant double-sided face printed on a PVC-sphere and held up by a steel cable.
"Façade", along with a number of other works and events–including the Turbot Street Party which will include "Experiments in instinctive reaction" by Janice Kuczkowski, Alexander Lotersztain's "Twig street furniture system", Nicole Voevodin-Cash's "Escapespace" and "Admissions" by West End design-studio Inkahoots, as well as Rodney Glick's roaming trail "Compostism"– are part of Inhabit: Ideas for Better Living, a new initiative from Council's Neighbourhood Planning and Development Assessment Committee and curated by the Museum of Brisbane. This is MoB's blurb:
Inhabit is a new Brisbane City Council program of public art and events that will transform forgotten and overlooked places throughout Brisbane's CBD. During July and August, laneways, 'pocket parks' and concrete nooks around the city will be re-defined by innovative sculpture, design and events.
Inhabit has been created to promote new ways of thinking about our city. The artists showcased were asked to respond to the theme of 'Ideas of better living'. Urban growth is often linked to the idea of postive progress or 'living better'. But what does such progress mean for city residents? Inhabit explores this by reinventing the CBD's ' in between' spaces, such as service lanes. These places will become short term venues for a new experience; transforming the everyday into something memorable and unexpected. These installations of art also reflect the ever-changing nature of the city and the way we use it.
For full details, check out the program (PDF). I plan to write up something about "Façade" and the Inhabit exhibition soon (once I've managed to get around and see all the works) so I won't say much here. Except of course to draw your attention to the VERY established-nature of all of the artists in the program except Kuczkowski. A HUGE congratulations to Janice, but of course, it does beg the question, 'why doesn't council spend money on emerging artists?'
So that little tanty out of the way, I should say that this sounds like a really great initiative. But what got me thinking more broadly about it's place within the whole-of-Council attitude towards art in public places (not just "public art) was the article next to this. On the right-hand side is an article about council's plan to "ramp up its war on graffiti".
Here we are trying to get rid of graffiti art when the National Trust of Australia and Heritage Victoria are trying to protect it in Melbourne. They have a pragmatic approach outlined in their Graffiti Management Policy which distinguishes between works of low creative value such as 'tagging' and works of higher creative value:
Recent consultation has shown that many community members distinguish between
tagging, which is considered undesirable, and murals or street art, which are generally valued more highly.
The policy goes on to emphasise Melbourne's commitment to providing space for this 'legitimate' graffiti art:
- The City of Melbourne will work with property owners, managers and occupiers, graffiti writers, Victoria Police and local communities to investigate providing legitimate avenues for murals and street art to be displayed.
- The City of Melbourne will engage with the arts community regarding murals and street art, for example, in conjunction with cultural festivals or arts development projects in the public domain.
- The City of Melbourne will positively engage with graffiti writers in mentoring and arts programmes to facilitate opportunities for legitimate artistic expression and to divert their efforts away from illegal tagging and towards high quality work.
No such commitment here. Brisbane rather focuses it's policy solely focuses on dealing with graffiti, its "removal" and its "prevention". It even has a documents which discuss urban design that reduces the 'canvas space' available (PDF) to this form of creative expression and access to that space (PDF).
What I noticed reading these two articles together was a resounding (albeit implicit) underlying message coming from Council: 'if the art is put there by us, then it is ok'. To me this throws up a number of concerns; who has curatorial control? Who is 'allowed' to present work in public places? Which messages are the people of Brisbane encouraged to engage with?
Most cities around the world don't like graffiti very much. They have heavy-handed, zero-tolerance policies and entire teams of clean-up crews scrubbing down walls everywhere. Melbourne has always been one of very few exceptions to this. And today, the National Trust of Australia and Heritage Victoria sought to protect the works of art adoring many an alleyway wall in the heart of the city.
The National Trust's Manager of Cultural Heritage, Tracey Avery is reported to have said, "I see in Melbourne that graffiti art is an important part of the spectrum of cultural and design activities that Melburnians engage with." But Melbourne City Council thinks that a move to protect graffiti in the city would just encourage more "vandals".
Banner is a derivative work of Graffiti - Hosier Lane, Melbourne CBD by Toots Fontaine. The original is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.
Now I am not going to get into a debate about what is 'graffiti art' and what is vandalism. I certainly believe that some forms of art in public places that is not derived from a government-funded and/or government-backed initiative can and is art. Not all of it. I personally find it hard to see much cultural and social value to 'tagging' beyond one (or at most a concentrated group of 'taggers') getting off on seeing their name about the place. But I support more creative works, and think that councils should relax a little when dealing with this 'vandalism'.
I think that this push by the Trust and Heritage Victoria could have other repercussions. I actually think, like curator and artist Andrew Mac does, that it might go against the ethos of graffiti culture. He said:
The work is ephemeral. It's not meant to last. It lasts purely as long as the weather and other graffiti artists allow it to last. When you interfere with what is an organic process like that, you actually make the graffiti stagnant and what makes graffiti thrilling and interesting to the public and to other graffiti artists is the fact that it's a never-ending changing kind of living art form.
It is this ephemeralness that I think would be lost if the walls of Melbourne were to be protected as a heritage item. You consider what happens to a building which becomes heritage listed. Once a building is listed (in Queensland) there are a number of limitations that apply. Would this mean that walls that became listed could not be altered? How would you even begin to enforce a rule like that? Isn't the rhetoric that they can't stop graffitists as it is? How would you stop new graffiti being added to existing cites of works? And why would you want to?
Tracey Avery did address this:
We recognise that it may not be possible to list graffiti for the long-term because of it's ephemeral nature. So it may be that we end up saying that what the best thing to do is take proper records of it and interview artists and take public comments and then that itself becomes a visual and oral history about graffiti. But we may not be able to protect the individual pieces themselves.
I'll be keen to see how this pans out.
It's just as well two things have happened in recent times:
- That the photography of Ryan McGinley has moved out of just being 'perversity' and firmly concreted a place for the 'nude-teens-doing-crazy-things' genre of photography within modern photographic practice; and
- we had this masculinity crisis thing; fragmenting and diversifying the experience of masculinity.
His body of work to date has focused on documenting the every-day experiences of non-hegemonic masculinities. For Pettifer, his lens is not focused on men who fulfill the archetypal masculine identity. Rather, he is interested in the 90s concept of cake boys: skinny, effeminate boys who blur the line between male and female, androgyny and indeterminacy. Their bodies are a cite of contestation.
Cake Boys: Photographs, in two series is about juxtaposition. Even the way the photos are displayed draws conceptual lines between categories. One is a set of relatively mundane images of these hollies–taking the train, watching the cricket–taken with a voyeuristic desire to document and hung on the wall in a conventional mode of displaying photographic works. Their candidness, rather than their subject matter, makes them interesting.
But the other part is more provocative. A piss-take of literal interpretation, Pettifer has iced five cakes with photographs of these same boys at different stages of undressing. These are not a sordid set of images but rather a sort of everyday eroticism. An exposé by the photographer of a secret sexiness in these boys' seemingly unobtrusive lives.
To his batter of exposed torsos, hips and penises he added a generous dash of virility, youthfulness and ambiguity. Poped it into a tray, added heat and let it rise to create a sweet set of salacious sponges.
The cake analogy throws up questions of consumption, materiality and, ultimately, decay. As Roger Nelson says in the exhibition essay, "...the cakes' heightened consumability as edible objects paradoxically curtails their ability to be consumed as art objects." Again, another divide.
There is a definite raw truth in Pettifer's work that is Goldin/Tillmans-esque, but with more than a touch of Mapplethorpe in the recipe. This is one set of cakes worth having a slice of. Are napkins provided?
Online gallery of selected works
With the permission of Drew Pettifer I have included a selection of images from the exhibition.
Launching Thursday 12 June, 6pm-8pm | Closing Saturday 28 June, 4pm-6pm | Free entry
Open Thursday to Saturday, 12pm-6pm
For a little while now I have been hearing about this concept gallery on the Gold Coast (of all places). We've all seen such things come and go down at GC so I never followed it up, expecting it to fade away among the neon lights and tanned bodies as quickly as it had come. But I salute The Blkmrkt Project, the concept gallery I speak of, for sticking it through. One year on and they are still hanging some of the most exciting contemporary art around. They are worthy of support, and first chance I get I'll be down there to check out the space and upcoming exhibitions.
And here's your chance to be part of the action. They have two hanging periods available at the gallery coming up: one from 14th - 18th August 2008 and the other from 1st - 14th November 2008 (not that dates may vary). Interested? Well download yourself the submission form and the floor plans, write up a shit hot application and email it off to shayle@blkmrkt.com.au (she'll also take enquiries if you want to know more).
In their words:
blkmrkt encourages experimental and installational works and would love to hear from contemporary artists.
Who said cool shit doesn't happen on the Gold Coast?!
the blkmrkt project, 1/17 Harvest Court, Southport (map) | Open Wednesday to
Friday, 10am-4pm, Saturday, 10am-2pm | Free entry
Friday, 10am-4pm, Saturday, 10am-2pm | Free entry
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