It’s that time of year when there’s so little real news that all sorts of crazy projects can make their way into the mainstream media. All you need is a press release.
The Sydney Morning Herald in its venerable and highly regarded news section Stay in Touch is reporting the strange case of Woolongong ‘student’ Nicael Holt who is selling his indentity on E-bay. Along with his name, his friends family and other relationships, Holt claims to be selling everything that makes him who he is. The erstwhile student then plans to travel the world sans identity on the proceeds and perhaps work a few bar jobs in Barcelona trading collecting glasses for food and accomodation.
It’s a nice sounding idea until you realise hat it’s also completely unoriginal. UK artist Michael Landy destroyed all his possessions in a work called Break Down where he had everything he owned ground into dust and recycled. Landy performed the whole thing in an empty Oxford Street London shop front, attracting the same kind of suspicious publicity Holt is getting today. Part of the problem is that when artists start performing acts of such sheer obviousness the mainstream media get sucked in while being similtaneously dismissive of your efforts. Landy and Holt have enough nous on how to play the media, but not quite enough to have a decent idea to go with it. Another irony is the possibility that while Holt is traveling the world he might just run into other identity-free individuals…
Speaking of nous, Melbourne artist [and occasional friend of The Art Life] Mary Lou Pavlovic has a new project. After her sky writing performance, her footy poster work and National Gallery of Victoria protests, we frankly wondered what she would come up with next. Pavlovic has foxed us again by using the pages of Australian Art Collector as the latest venue for her traveling ‘art museum without walls’. AAC now runs to several hundred pages, jammed packed with ads for virtually every gallery in the country. Pavlovic has bought herself a page for her exhibition up the front of the magazine and the cryptic image of the artist with a rat in her gob [and a fetching wig on her head] is a startling reminder that the magazine reaches all levels of the art industry. We at first thought that the image was actually a parody of Patrina Hicks’s Shenae and Jade [currently on the cover of the latest Photofile and it’s Animal theme issue and which can be seen here] but we was wrong. It’s much more than that:
The PavModern Museum is pleased to announce the launch of a new artwork placed in the latest edition of Australian Art Collector Magazine. This is the Fifty Most Collectable Australian Artists 2007(issue 39 Jan – March 2007).
The work is the latest in a series of guerilla style artworks/events commenting on the artworld that is increasingly deployed by PavModern.
It appears in the place of a full page colour advertisement. Artist Mary Lou Pavlovic is dressed in what easily passes as the garb of a corporate cultural gate keeper. This art woman stares sedately out at the viewer – the only problem though is that a big rat protrudes from her mouth.
The work is an artists comment about outside systems that place value on artists and their work, on artworld hierarchies, dodgy art world politics (that were highlighted in the media last year at the National Gallery Victoria) and whether what we are told is of value financially equates with intellectual and creative values.
It’s intended to cost $18.95 – the cost of the art mag.
It’s an attempt to define a space where these sorts of issues can be raised.
PavModern is Melbourne artist Mary Lou Pavlovic’s museum without walls. Other projects have included The Commonwealth Games Series – artworks and performances staged outside several of Melbourne’s leading art venues. These questioned the relationship between art, sport and exhibitions. Also the 2004 Jake Chapman Lecture tour inspired by the National Gallery Australia’s refusal to take the ” Sensation” art exhibition which Jake Chapman’s work was a part of. PavModern also organised the 2002 Matthew Collings Lecture Tour.
