Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
On Friday night, I went along with some friends to the opening of the Brisbane Artists Run Initiatives Festival at Jugglers Art Space. And a good night it was. And last night I saw the wonderful Linda E and Poly Toxic @ the Powerhouse as part of the Pasifika Festival.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I wanted to take the opportunity prompted by having received some photos taken by my mate lightsight to plug once again the Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives Festival, which I wrote about last week, which sees three Brisbane galleries - Kiln, Jugglers and Flipbook - promoting and hanging work by unrepresented and emerging local artists throughout this month. The Festival website hasn’t done a sterling job of updating, so referring to the individual gallery pages is probably the best way to get a sense of what’s going on. I hasten to add that one of the advantages of attending gallery openings - aside from art appreciation (and maybe purchasing - I’d have loved to have snapped up some of the octopus themed art if I’d been more in funds) - is sometimes free cheese. Along with wine and good company, of course!
We featured some of Marcus Westbury’s commentary on cultural policy here at LP around the time of the 2020 summit. Here’s a guest post which originally appeared at his blog - it’s the text of a talk he gave to a forum on “Creative People” organised by the Department of Culture and The Arts in Perth as part of the process they’re undertaking of developing a policy framework for Western Australia.
One of my obsessions at the moment and the focus of the next series of Not Quite Art is our changing cultural geography. By that I mean how the cultures that we are exposed to, that influence and obsess us are circulating in the world.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I spent Friday night on an art gallery opening crawl - at two of the three galleries that were featuring works in the Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives Festival - Kiln in Paddington (which has the most steampunky art website in the world, I would venture to wager) and Jugglers in the Valley. Danielle O’Brien’s prints and paintings started an octopus theme, which continued on at Jugglers. Later on, I enjoyed the Five Spice Tofu and a Shanghai Beer at the fabulous Super Bowl in Wickham Street - so a really pleasant evening.
I didn’t have my camera with, but here are some photos of Kiln from an opening last year. It’s a transformed former tram substation, so a wonderful example of post-industrial architecture, and you can see why it sits nicely with a steampunk theme.
I was watching Skins on SBS just now - for the first time. I suspect I’ve been missing something I’d have liked, and I’m not sure why I never tuned in before. Anyway, Cass and the crew were having a dinner party and someone (I don’t know all the characters’ names) remarked - “just like adults”.
I can remember when I was at uni in the early 90s, and a sudden dinner party craze hit certain circles I moved in. I don’t think it was that anyone was a stellar cook, and the cooking wasn’t necessarily the point of attraction, but more the sort of enactment of an “adult” ritual. If there was any generation that really did the whole postmodern performative irony thing, it was us Gen X kids. We were caught on the cusp of a transition between fairly fixed social patterns - of our parents’ generation - and complete fluidity and the decay of practices and traditions to the extent where they don’t even have sufficient force for (affectionate) parody to have much meaning. When does “adulthood” begin now, and what marks the transition? Are there bourgeois signifiers like joining service clubs, and dressing for dinner? It’s pretty hard to grasp the force of some of Bunuel’s movies from the sixties which parallel a culture which now seems aeons distant in terms of its purchase on living tradition and lived experience.
Anyway, it was all kinda fun, and I have fond memories of some of these nights, including the notorious naked dinner party on Hawken Drive (which I’ll write about one day, maybe, in pursuing my argument that Gen X was more nekkid than Gen Y). One day, we still have to do the Edwardian dinner party, and indeed the Mrs Beeton’s dinner party. They’ll be about wine and dressing up more than food, I think.
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
I’m still a bit pressed for time, what with the phd thesis - second draft now under construction - and the first week of semester, but I did manage to sample a bit of the Brisbane Festival goodness last week, going to two gigs on Tuesday night. Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier were, as expected, totally brilliant, and Feasting on Flesh was a fine piece of burlesque cabaret. (It’s on til Saturday if anyone wants to go.)
There are a lot of really neat ideas in the planning of the festival this year - including quite a few free events in the burbs, and the rather interesting idea of hosting bands in people’s backyards. That’s a nice way - along with the Spiegeltent in Queens Park - to make it a bit more of a genuine festival than just having people traipse off to headline theatre and dance performances at QPAC. I wish I had more time to enjoy more of it.
I was interested to read of the loud condemnations by Morris Iemma and Kevin Rudd of the cover of the latest issue of Art Monthly Australia. The cover features detail from a print of Polixeni Papapetrou’s Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs. In this artwork, the artist’s then six year old daughter, Olympia Nelson, is portrayed naked. My first thought was to wonder whether either Iemma or Rudd had actually seen the magazine in question, and that’s still unclear to me. My second thought was to wonder whether one of the media themes of the day - embodied in this piece by Nicholas Pickard in Crikey - had any merit. Pickard argued that the magazine’s editor, Maurice O’Riordan, was a “total fool” who was playing into “Hetty Johnson’s hands”. The two subtexts appear to be that the Bill Henson controversy had faded away, leaving artists to go about their business as normal (or something), and that O’Riordan was courting more controversy in order to increase sales of his mag, heedless of the dangers of raking up the cinders of the fire the Bill Henson controversy started.
But, unlike a lot of people who might have an opinion about this new controversy/furore/”debate”, I thought I might go and buy a copy of the magazine in order to form my own view. So I did.
Writing in the Australian Review of Public Affairs, Kylie Valentine proves that it is possible to say something new about the Bill Henson controversy. It struck me that one huge absence in all the debate that swirled around Henson’s images of adolescents was any contribution from the subjects themselves. Lots of adults jumped into the breach to fill this void, speculating about how the models would feel about being the subjects of this sort of art, or how they might feel at a later date. It was an entirely defensible position, of course, for the photographer’s subjects to maintain silence on grounds of privacy, and it’s worth noting that a number of Henson’s former models did speak out, though their voices seemed to be almost entirely ignored in the “debate” that took place.
Those who’ve been following the Bill Henson controversy might recall that the June/July 2008 issue of Art World was pulped because it featured some of the images at the centre of the media storm on its cover and inside its pages. It’s now out - with a different cover - and it includes an interview conducted by Edmund Capon, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with Henson. Because I think a lot of what he says about the process of creating the photographs touches on many of the points discussed here regarding the whole brouhaha, I’ve reproduced some excerpts of the interview which seemed pertinent to me over the fold.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I’m currently existing in the rather strange zone of being just about to complete a first draft of my PhD thesis, which means that my social life is on hold, as are outings generally. (And I’ve just been saved from impending insanity by getting an extension from my supervisor til Monday.) Anyway, I blogged on Sunday about visiting the Lifeline Bookfest, which as a bibliophile is always one of the highlights of my bookshopping year. I did take some more time out on Monday to pop back in for an hour or so, to remedy the ommission of fiction from my previous visit - so I could relax and get back to writing, feeling as if I’d “done” Bookfest properly.
My modest haul was all Australian fiction, with the exception of a Robertson Davies novel I unaccountably no longer seemed to own - perhaps lent to one of those nasty book thiefs many years ago (I have a good memory for these things, and I’ll be chasing down my obscure Robert Graves and my Montaigne one of these days).
As was probably predictable, the media circus has moved on from the controversy over Bill Henson’s photographs. But at LP we try to keep focusing on stories the media is quick to forget, so this post updates our previous courage on the Henson furore. Because the discussion has died down, it may be that people are able now to engage in analysis which is more considered and less immediately coloured by the dividing lines inscribed by the “debate” in the media.
That’s certainly the case with this piece in Eureka Street from Andrew Hamilton, Jesuit Priest, ethicist, editor and educator, who has, for my money, written the most acute and concise summation of the ethical issues involved I’ve seen. Writing in the Higher Ed, Newcastle academic Kelli Fuery focuses in on what she sees as the central questions:
Art, specifically contemporary art, has often been at the centre of contentious cultural debate when it comes to categorising, containing and policing aesthetics, taste and acceptability. So why does the photography of Henson reignite this debate? What is at stake here is the anointment of the artist and the function of art within culture and society.
Those of us who remember Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland will also recall the intimate links between civil liberties, democracy and censorship. Stephen Keim, the prominent Brisbane QC who distinguished himself with his courage in conducting Dr Haneef’s case in the Federal Court last year, certainly does remember. One of the ironies of Kevin Rudd’s intervention in the Bill Henson controversy is that recent Queensland Labor governments have been doing their utmost to dispel our state’s older image in large part through promoting creativity and culture - and perhaps because of the legacy of the Joh era, concerns about liberty and the link between freedom of speech and democracy are still very present in the Brisbane of 2008. So I was very interested to read Keim’s contribution to today’s Crikey, which I’m reproducing (with permission) over the fold.
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