i-muse 2

The new Iris sculpture (far right) made it safely into the gallery!! Haven't quite settled on a title yet: The current contenders are i-muse 2 and y-i .

The sculptures seem to be getting along fine with Binu Bhaskar's current exhibition Human Race,

Link to Picasa Album/Human Race Binu Bhaskar

Iris and Janina

Iris - well the latest sculpture based on her, was allowed out of the studio for the first time yesterday, here she is doing a pretty good imitation of Foo. She came into being with Walter Burley Griffin, (the white quiff) Marion Mahony, obscured by Walt (what's new eh?) and Gammer, black in the background - seems only right that she stays with her friends until she finds her feet. Iris and the gang are on their way into the gallery - Cowwarr Art Space.

Janina Green, good friend and regular at the art space, stayed for a couple of days last week, while she was here there was a bush fire up at Licola, clearly visible from the backdeck. It does make you think - the rest of the state was under water and we had fires!

Janina doesn't seem to believe in any of your mamby-pamby hand held stuff - here she is, field camera, tripod and massive wheelie bag, snapping away at the remains of the fire. We did check with the CFA that it was OK to go up!!

What appeals to me about this picture is that it contains a fair representation of one of the definitions of Romanticism - the smallness of mankind in relation to nature.

By my way of thinking the semi adds to our understanding of Romanticism, you know a sort of contemporary Turneresque element, remember the time he strapped himself to the mast of a small ship to experience "nature"? Don't you love how the truck crosses the white line - but Janina seems oblivious to it!!!

Del Kathryn Barton silly - New Sculpture finished

Finished this one, new one started, been fishing (didn't catch much), had a great Christmas, met up with old friends, life is pretty nice and then we get that silly story about Del Kathryn Barton's charity snap. And its got to me. No I'm not going to side with the art world on this one because its a complete beat up. It has nothing to do with censorship at all. No one seems to dare to say that these artists entered into agreement with someone to create works to raise money for the Sydney Children's Hospital, an organisation with a very well known policy about the depiction of children, which, of course, is perfectly reasonable. Then Barton purposely ignores this by producing an image of her half naked son covered in spots, and along with the organiser does a classic, "What me!"

At best you could call it downright stupid or naive, but of course she's not that silly, she would have known that there was a huge possibility of a bit a fuss. Artists seeking cheap publicity are getting too thick on the ground for my taste. Using a charity event for this is even lower because really the artist clearly isn't making any serious effort at all to genuinely raise money for the hospital.

There is only one straight forward and simple way for us artists to make money for the charities that we support and that is to give them a high quality examples of what we are best known for.

So thumbs down to Barton from me for being so mean spirited and even insulting towards the Children's Hospital by sending in an ordinary snap of a spotty kid instead of something she does really pretty well.

No one seems to have asked Del Kathryn Barton if she paid her son at the full advertising rate for modelling for this picture before the flack occured, if she didn't surely that constitutes a real exploitation of her own child.

image aquired from SMH with no obvious restictions like copyright

Louisa goes to Court

Louisa 2 was unveiled at the Supreme Court, Melbourne, last Friday and there she will stay, not because she's been naughty but because she's got an important job to do. The idea of sculpture performing roles is not new, in fact it's almost as old as civilization, it may have gone a little out of vogue in recent times, but from my perspective this is the best reason for public art.

The court can be a stressful place and Louisa's role will be to help calm people. A courtyard has been renovated with the aim of providing people with a quiet, possibly meditative space; the sculpture's purpose is to act as a focus for this. The bluestone "benches" on either side may not the world's most comfortable seats but they do offer people the chance to sit with Louisa rather than entirely on their own. I think Louisa will be a good listener.

Whilst this is not a sculpture depicting justice, the fact that it is in a court will mean that she is unlikely to avoid being compared with the tradition of portraying justice as blind folded (to aid impartiality) and carrying scales (to weigh argument) and a double edged sword (to dish out punishment). A fairly fierce representation guaranteed to communicate the power of the courts to all.

Louisa does not symbolise power, she's human, caring and considerate.

When I told the model for this work, Louisa Waters, that she'd be going to court, she said, "Hmm I've never seen myself as being completely legal - but then again my star sign is Libra".

Rembrandt self-portrait with Leica M9

A friend on the Leica M9 forum (luf) sort of brought up the question of what makes Rembrandt great, the answer I posted follows......................

As for Rembrandt and what makes him great, easy answer - he invented the M9 of his day and used his Noctilux wide open - his was better than ours because it could focus on both near things and far things simultaneously and could infinitely vary the bokeh. Nice tool eh? He also had low light nailed! But in truth those things, fabulous as they may be, aren't the half of it, top of the list in the intangible category is his ability to create something that reminds viewers of what it means to be human. Next would be that he invented a way to show the core values of the society he lived in by democratising both subjects and composition. In the end art is just the human expression of what it means to be alive now, and as NOW is always changing art just follows suit. Contrary to popular myth no artist has ever been ahead of their time. A few have been deluded And poor old Rene takes the cake - no wonder he looks so sad!

Twentysix Gasoline Stations for Sale

Endless Present

Robert Rooney and Conceptual Art

Adverts for this exhibition made my old memory race as some years ago when I was teaching at GIAE (Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education) The Head of the Art theory department gave me the little set of Artist Books pictured above, evidently the library was clearing out dross, he'd been given them, wasn't interested in them and passed them on to me.

I located them all on one of my bookshelves coincidentally squeezed between Micheal Foucault's This is not a Pipe and Bernard Berenson's Seeing and Knowing which made me think that maybe I had been cataloguing all the loony stuff together! That's hardly fair, but I kind of have the right to say that, as I started off making an art that later was called Conceptual. Patrick McCaughy called it "Duchampian".

Whilst Foucault's views and the conceptual items gained currency the Berenson essay, first published in 1949, was dismissed and ridiculed as just an outburst of a bitter old Renaissance scholar. He did say that there is no such thing as abstract art because abstract means idea, the very opposite of a tangible thing like a painting or a sculpture. By his logic he would have said that the only abstract art was what was called conceptual. This essay has haunted me for much of my life as I've never found a way to beat it. Should be compulsory reading.

Anyway - I don't know what Twentysix Gasoline Stations are worth, or Sunset strip for that matter, or the other items, but I'm happy to consider offers!

When is book not a book? When it is art! James Collins said some interesting things about the aesthetics of conceptualism - also worth following up.

Update: Have just checked out what these things are worth, or more correctly what people are trying to get for them - so I'll add the idea of a swap into the deal and what interests me most at the moment are 24mm, 28mm or 35mm lenses for my Leica M8.

Bondage for beauty

Poor Iris has had to put up with a lot from me this week, first she was bound and gagged, then left hanging off a crane for few days and unmentionable violations were performed on her all in the name of art, beauty?

It's been a funny week, funniest thing of all, I had another of those emails from someone in China who was offering to make* my sculptures for me, maybe I'm missing something but I just can't understand why anyone would want to send their art out to be made by someone else. Its far cheaper if you do it yourself, you remain free to change and modify the work right up until the end and you never have to limit your vision to something that can be made by someone following your plans.

*make or worse fabricate, obviously from the Latin: fabricare, what's wrong with carve, sculpt or even create!