“Tunnel – self portrait – is part of a series that focuses on the notion of stranger in a strange place; the challenges and outcomes of spending time in new and foreign lands. I am interested in exploring concepts of disengagement from place and self, and the notion of homesickness, and familiarity…”
“for those who haven’t heard me bitching about this damned social network, have i got a blogpost for you!
“everybody’s on facebook now. it’s no news. all my friends are hassling me to join, the suit walking down liverpool st is pontificating about why facebook is better than myspace, hell, even time magazine is writing about it. and and yet i dig my heels in. why?
“because it totally shits me that facebook has just gentrified online social networking and suddenly, hey, it’s OK!! myspace has been around for years and while i’m not one of those ‘i’ve been doing it for years’ type folks when it comes to this crap, what shits me about it is that all the ‘adults’ who didn’t understand myspace, took the piss out of it, or just plain avoided it, are now on damned facebook. yes, myspace is rubbish. i know that. it fucks up a lot and is full of posing teenagers. but same goes for facebook – just posing adults and slightly better designed! it’s just bloody AOR for online social networks, for fucks sake! huey lewis and the news for digital civilisation.”
Bastard Facebook, She Sees Red
Found Ely Street, Angel Park, Skanky Jane’s Ruses of Pleasure
“After reading the news report at the Internet Movie Database, titled Queen Storms Out of Photo Shoot, The Artswipe made the artwork you see before you…”
“to put the following review in some reflexive perspective I’ll admit that i’m feeling just a lttle mentally fragile.
“OK more than usual.
“My major form of stress management consists in reading obscure bits from “the Logic of Sense” and then posting random shit on various people’s myspaces – of which the absolute highlight has to be ‘the motel sisters’ – well – my favourite bit is the britney Spears song – and recently I found myself singing along to ‘toxic love’ thinking of evil vicious ex-girlfriends and then I started reciting bits of the logic of sense about alcoholism splitting the eidetic into a permanent fissure from the present……
“And then I thought – shit I really need to see some art…”
Unheimlich Art & Mayhem
“The idea of an infinite road, of perpetual traffic forever does not seem so far fetched. I am stunned whenever I happen to be out on the road during peak hour where people wait patiently for the traffic to crawl through the latest bottleneck. What happens when a 45 minute wait turns into a 2 hour wait? Then a 6 hour wait? You may as well set up camp at this point. Which is what happens when there is a brake-down outside of Sydney at the end of a long weekend just outside of sydney. Traffic slowly coming to a stop, passengers eventually overcome by boredom and curiosity get out of their cars and have a look around. Wander up the street trading speculation with neighbouring cars on the reason for the gridlock.”
The Perpetual Traffic Machine of New New York, Super Colossal
“The explanatory texts supporting conceptual art are often evocative, sometimes hilarious, but seldom illuminating. A dialect of mainstream ‘Academese’, they can seem to the outsider like a secret code, with their own rules and absurdities. What was it that the SMH’s ‘esteemed critic’ unkindly said of Charles Merewether’s Biennale 2006 (Zones of Contact) catalogue introduction? “A flotilla of clichés adrift on a sea of jargon” or something like that. An esteemed blogger’s recent SMH article about 2008 Biennale Director Christina Christov-Bakargiev’s exposition on her theme ‘Revolutions that turn’ was equally funny, if more benign…”
The Beauty of Incomprehension, Le Flanuer
“Even for our most successful artists, art income is never regular, and most will need to access welfare at some stage. Indeed, a well defined and sympathetic welfare policy can benefit artists more than even government grant systems. Unlike many countries (most notably New Zealand) Australia has no welfare policy designed specially to assist artists, or to get them out of welfare and into their unique line of work. Often when artists receive government grants, Centrelink officers themselves do not know what to do. In ‘Work for the Dole’ schemes, the greatest community benefit people come up with for artists seems to be as bus-shelter painters, when our artists today work in many media, such as video or sound, and in sophisticated ways. And unlike actors – who can look for acting related jobs for the first year of professional practice – artists have to choose between lying on their forms or compromising their long term work prospects. Art and Dole exists to collect our personal tips, to help get around these basic problems. Art and Dole also supports lobbying initiatives, to help change the current out of date welfare system.”
