Lourdes: a slight return

So, as you might have read in my previous post, I plan to once again revisit The Pilgrims, a work undertaken in Lourdes and Paris with Canadian Filmmaker Toni-Lynn Frederick in 2004. Excuse me if I’m repeating myself – I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I know I cover it briefly in my artists statement for The French Connection – but I could never extract a satisfactory ‘outcome’ despite trying several times. With the project already in my mind, hearing Sarah Rodigari speak of her project, Strategies for leaving and arriving home recently was like someone had just cleaned a window, metaphorically speaking. As Sarah talked about the art contained in the walking and the journey itself, it dawned on me that this is precisely what had happened on our own journey in 2004.

In 2004, Toni-Lynn Frederick and I met in Paris, and flew together to Lourdes, in it’s low season.  Throughout our week in Catholic Mecca we looked, we felt, we shot film and video, we held long (recorded) conversations about our experiences growing up Catholic and the details we remembered as well as the details we questioned.  We cast great doubt upon the sanctity of St Bernadette. We ate at the same mixed-asian restaurant, Xuan, every night, with a fruity but charming Vietnamese host who delighted in giving us complementary sake in little pornographic cups while giggling and presented us each with a sweet but wonky watercolour painting to remember him by when we ate our last meal there. Mine is of a water-buffalo. I can’t remember what TLs is.

Then we collected 4 litres of the famous Lourdes water, so often attributed with miracles by the faithful, took it back to Paris and used it to  mix up chemistry in which we developed the film we had shot.  The black and white film developed to blue on blue.  That heavenly ‘Virgin Mary Blue’. I was thrilled.

But until I heard Sarah speak, I hadn’t realised that this journey, from Paris to Lourdes and back was the work and that there was no other outcome I could edit, mix or display that could be any more the artwork than this journey itself.  I also realised that all who know of this project seem to have accepted that unquestioningly over the following years, and that was only me, and perhaps Toni-Lynn, who ever had any thoughts otherwise.

So, my plan now is to create a new, dedicated online archive of what physical and data remains there are of The Pilgrims.  Letters, diaries, photos, video and yes, the resulting delicious blue clips of film. I’ll add reminisces along the way and make sure Toni-Lynn has access so she can too.

I asked her how she felt about my revelation and resulting archive plan and offered her one of the stills I’ve sent to The French Connection and she replied:

Yes, Pilgrim, go forth with my blessing... the 3 nuns look like a rock band. This would be my choice… I’m excited you’re doing this. The project still has life for me; wish we could do this together. It was a great excursion. I loved it.

I loved it too.

So stay tuned, it will be a long process and with no-one in particular waiting on it, it can take as long as it does.

I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. While travelling we plotted our next collaboration. A trip to Mexico where I would attend a wrestling school and TL would document (Yes I have loved the Lucha long time). I know this has now been seen on screen numerous times and perhaps has a flavour of a slightly unsavory exoticism, but we could still do it, right?  And we could take husbands and a toddler yeah? It would be great wouldn’t it?

Duet for Strangers: Tricky and Jess (2012)

This is an approximation of one new work which I hope will be seen (gallery space pending) in Touchy Feely next week. The two videos will play on small monitors placed in relation to each other in the room and loop constantly. That looping is not going to happen here of course, but you can hit play on both and get a sense of what will be.

The genesis of this work is that these two friends of mine who have never met and do not know each other have each, independently, expressed that they think they are capable of making the most annoying noise that is humanly possible. And these are those noises.

I’m happy with this in many ways.  I was so tired of looking at my own face as I worked that I stopped making videos last year.  I obliterated that face with paint. I made audio works. I am gently edging back but to look at these two brilliant creatures instead is, for me at least, sweet relief.

And I can’t help but romanticise it. I think they will be like two sweet, strange little birds calling to each other in a room.

Happy New Year.

P.S. Apologies in advance to my dearest husband who works in the gallery where these will be.

UPDATE: Due to the number of artists and space being at a premium and all that, this work WON’T appear in the Touchy Feely exhibition after all. It waits patiently for it’s eventual venue. Please stay tuned for a post on the work that will DEFINITELY be in.

the fourth post title. all previous and deleted filled with comparative, self-loathing

How lovely are these embossed foil pans by Israeli artist, Idan Freidman? From his Profiles Project, he taglines the project in his Flickr account with the line ‘ordinary people disposable objects’ and by ordinary people, he means his friends.

I’m a bit obsessed by the entity named ‘friendship’ right now, and these are such a fragile devotional object to the cause. So nice. I would love to be this kind of artist. Gifted and free of bullshit.

A Pack of Lies

Hi Blog and Blogees.

I’ve been very busy with a small boy but in the gaps I have finished something new and rather large (in content if not physical size).

A Pack of Lies is an artwork I have made for podcast.   That’s right, podcast.  It’s an underutilised venue for audio artworks I think and I hope works well for this kind of narrative piece.

It consists of a series of readings by friends of falsified biographies of my life, which have been crudely adapted from those of famous musicians, actors, sportspeople and artists.

For me, it’s nothing short of astonishing to listen to, and the fact that it is beyond impossible for me to glean what the experience of this work might be for someone who is NOT me, has been somewhat liberating.

I’m usually very audience-conscious, perhaps far too much.  So now this particularly ‘me,me,me’ work is out there and I would really welcome any feedback on it’s successes and failures.

Thank you to my voices: Emma Bett, Monica Coates, Monique Germon, Louise Guest, Andrew Harper, John Ingleton, Kate Kelly, Harry Kollatz Jnr., Amie Oliver, Carol Ransley, Cath Robinson, Peter Robinson, Neil Rowe, Pip Stafford, Matt Warren and Yvette Watt.

You can download A Pack of Lies for free at http://lies.podomatic.com or if you prefer you can access it through the iTunes store, also for free.  Just search my name and the title in the ‘podcast’ section.

And do come back here and let me know how you got on.

I’ll put a spell on you 2

The incomparable Diamanda Galas.  Devil, devil, devil…

I’ll put a spell on you

…and while I was working on the Jazz Festival project today I followed a musical path (via Nina Simone if you’re asking) back to one of my all time fave guys.

What a song.  What a performer.  What an awesome loon for the ages.

I give you… Screamin’ Jay Hawkins…

I’ve got the horn for the work of Dr Lakra…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seriously. How beautiful is that?

And why can’t I find a title for this image that I found at We Make Money Not Art?

The Holy Trinity’s 1200CC Mary: Worshipping the Teenaged Wasteland

Don’t cry
Don’t raise your eye
It’s only teenage wasteland

Pete Townshend, Baba O’Riley

Photo by Kevin Leong

I remember massive, red dirt mounds, the byproduct of ‘new-ness’ that seemed to signify something as potent as an egg about to hatch.  Incomplete but habitable houses, in fresh subdivisions, in brand new suburbs, marked out by the rust coloured piles shoveled to the perimeter.

These mounds were a site for throning oneself, for staring out into a choice of undeveloped bushland in one direction or back to the established town in the other.  They were places to gain independence and some privacy before school or around teatime, at the darker, bookends of the day.  Maybe you would share a sneaky cig and swap heady and naive, adolescent divination; the sort of thing that might predict a future destiny (rock star, leader of an alien investigation task squad, world’s best hairdresser) or lover (rock star, pop star, porn star, that guy/girl whose dad owns the shop where you buy your chips).  These mounds became sites of aspiration and of fantasy.

In the name of the suburb, and of the dirt and of the feral cat,

Amen.

Here the mounds are transposed indoors and the adolescents are the imaginary male alter egos of three female artists.  Instead of imagining themselves as famous musicians or movie stars, these egos instead imagine themselves into the cornerstone of catholic doctrine: Capital G, God, his half-human son, Jesus and that mysterious bird, the Holy Ghost.  And why not?

In a spirit of pure fun, the trappings of the faith are translated with a camp and juvenile ad-hoc flair. The focus of the site is the grotto of the Virgin Mary, the previously unsullied mother of Christ, who opens her blue marshmallow robe to display six breasts like a beast in a strange marriage of Coney Island freak-booth and an Amsterdam shop window.  She bears the scars of having been toasted and served up to the faithful in gooey lumps scooped onto popsicle sticks.  Served up by masked pussycat alterboys (better behaved than feral),  I can tell you now she was sickly sweet but not entirely unsatisfying.

At the opposite end of the room in place of a confessional stands a hut made of cardboard boxes, where inside one can ‘relieve oneself’ (in private and by candlelight) of sinful thoughts with the aid of a ‘girls with guns’ magazine and a blurred, obscure video of a female figure disrobing.  Oh look it’s Jesus!  Wank for Jesus!  He’s got tits too and he’s all flesh.

In his physical form he roams the space in a black gimp suit, his intestines outlined in a flesh coloured felt (he always was a little desperate to prove, wasn’t he?).

I’m human too guys, see guys, just like you.
But wait.. aren’t you either the son of God or a cyst that grew legs…?

Another video depicts the Holy Ghost floating and gesturing its owl-headed way through the universe, its many-phallused collar there to penetrate you, to open you up to Gods word.  It floats around like an old Stevie Nicks video.  Stevie Nicks – with dicks.

God on the other hand is all about God.  All beard and cloudy arms he’s a show-off dazzling us with rainbows and lightning, endlessly impressed with his own skill.  As he inhabits the space, his desire to pop a wheelie is almost palpable.

In the name of the Bearded, and of the Gimp and of the Bird-Headed Hippie,

Amen.

The Trinity come together on occasion to patrol the space on pink dirt-bikes and communicate through electronic voice boxes mounted inside the heads of feral cats on frighteningly wired wristbands.  High tinny voices scream at you to ‘get off the dirt’ and remind you that you are just a visitor here.  But you may stay to admire their work; the rainbow made of fence palings and tree branches and the glowing rain cloud made of plastic milk-bar straws that releases a static rain of glue-string.  There is even a satellite dish made of cardboard and fairy lights to draw prayer from the ether.

Wow.

Here is a universe and a theology created on site. But remember, this is not really the Godhead.  It is three young boys pretending to be the Godhead as evidenced by the ornamental aesthetic of skulls and guns that litter the dirt.  But this is not really three young boys.  It is three women pretending to be three boys pretending to be the Godhead and the presence of these three women is still felt in the retro 80’s aesthetic (the era of their own adolescence for the most part).  The fairy-floss pinkness of the bikes, the marshmallow and the cats and the rainbow itself, which immediately evokes sickly (but highly desirable at the right age) Lisa Frank stationary and scented erasers – all these speak strongly of ‘girl’.

It’s an identity matroyshka.  We begin rooted in reality with the Arthead (three female artists) nested cosily within the fantasy identity of the Dickhead (three adolescent boys) who are in turn enclosed by the colourful outer shell of the Godhead (the three pronged cosmic deity driving the universe).

Sally, take my hand…

OK, I’m up for it.

In the name of the Artists and of the Boys and of the Cosmic Engine,

Amen.

Sally Rees, October 2009

This text was commissioned by CAST for the 1200CC Mary catalogue.
1200CC Mary continues at CAST Gallery until November 8, 2009.

Some thoughts in the wake of viewing a collaboration

A Tendency to Construct @ 6A A.R.I. 9 May – 7 June 2009

I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I’m no scientist, but as I understand things, first of all there are elements.  Everything that comes after is the process of adding one thing to another thing and perhaps applying a catalyst.  But elemental substances themselves? They’re pretty much dead.

I have never failed to be touched by the nature of both creativity and chemistry to produce something out of nothing.  Or at least something out of something that seems like nothing. To infuse the dead with life.

I know how Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is perceived.  A cautionary tale, convenient for creationists to scare the creative away from operating in God’s territory.  But I can start life, or at least energy in an egg cup by adding white vinegar (CH3COOH) to bicarbonate of soda (NaHCO3).  It makes CO2 which escapes as a gas causing the bubbling and leaves behind H2O, water of course.  And you and I and all life could be viewed quite simply as a series of similar chemical reactions and constructions operating on an infinitely grander scale.  Anyway… I guess this lab-coat digression preceding the subject is because since I was a child, I have always perceived Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a metaphor for creative endeavour, with an understanding that things will sometimes fail.  And of late I have to come to realise that the art quite simply, is the things that don’t fail.

So, what happens when there are two creators?  Or indeed, zoom out the microscope further and view the equation this way: add one artist to another and what is the result?

Of course the answers are as infinite and varied as the skills, intent and leanings of the artists involved but here, the result is an anatomical diagram of creativity.  Both these artists, as in love with the creative process of others as with their own, celebrate creativity through the works construction, proximity, content and a rather generous intention.

Artists enliven the spaces they inhabit and the Brinckman/Robinson collaboration has produced something that tracks the paths of creative endeavour in this concrete bunker that the local scene knows as 6A, attempting to mark and map it’s arterial progress and the eddies of rumination.

The rhythms of the resident artist’s ums stolen from between their words about art and making, form a heartbeat that fills the open spaces, each marking individual work areas with animated waveforms of the sound, vaugely medical in appearance.

Is it romantic to present these ‘thinking sounds’ in such a way?  The word is that God made man in his own image, and regardless of the truth of that theology, I certainly know the reverse to be as, if not more true.  Our own bodies are our starting point for understanding everything else.  Why then shouldn’t creativity take the form of human anatomy?  Come on. We measured things in ‘feet’ until half the world realised it was easier to count by 10s…

What appears to me as a large anatomical heart hangs from the ceiling but if I could turn the room on it’s head, it’s an oxygen tent.  There is a perceivable ‘digestive tract’ that flows from the cluster of electrical wall plugs emerging from the heart/tent and flows through the narrow passage, branching though the main space and out into the carpark where a pink wire oesophagus breathes the energy of the thing back out into the world.

A Tendancy to Construct (installation detail). Trudi Brinckman and Cath Robinson 2009

At the opening of this exhibition I hear one of the artists talking with a gallery visitor who finds the medical nature distressing, it recalls for them memories of tragedy, the loss of a loved one in a hospital setting but the artist is insistent – it’s a life support system, this structure keeps things alive, it doesn’t kill them.  Actually I think it could go either way.  Creativity is perilous like that. Isn’t everything interesting balanced on a knife edge?

The thing that makes me both edgy and excitable is the dangerous potential; clustered, arterial groupings of tubes traverse the space,  half with the capacity to carry electricity, half to carry water.  Even if activated, those two things would be kept separate by their plumbing and cabling… but one error… one place of wear against another and it’s a danger zone. Bzzztt!  An out of control electrical charge that could stop a heart but if controlled and reigned in, could reactivate another.

Any collaboration is a risky exercise, and here is the result of that risk taken.  Two artists who know little about each other but admire each others work and want the experience of making in unison, not in tandem.  Emerging from the inevitably tense stage of negotiation, circling one another from a distance to get a feel for how best to play this out, they enter the gallery, combine, catalyse and depart leaving behind the outcome of their activity (their construction/baby/monster).

It is unfortunate for us that all we get to see is this outcome: the process being as valued by the artists (if not more) as the result and the work itself seeming to aspire to honour that process.  But this is not how it works.  If we’d been there, we would have spoiled the chemistry.

Sally Rees  May 2009

high mash-up

Scot Cotterell is many things.   My attempts at descriptive analogy feel rather predictable and inadequate; I want to describe him as an octopus with tentacles reaching out attempting every way to ‘make’, but an octopus has too few arms to describe him accurately.

I can however, (over)simplify Scot for easy consumption by breaking down his practice into three main headings; a musician, an artist and a curator; and by describing the approach to all he does as being borne of a do-it-yourself aesthetic and fed by a broad cultural acceptance of the ‘readymade’ object.

A natural hacker and skilled circuit-bender,  Cotterell’s method is one of assemblage, adaptation and adoption of existing technologies and aesthetics. A champion of the ‘open-source’, even his paintings exist as doodled,  modular units, capable of being endlessly rearranged.

Everything he produces is haunted, both by this desire to ‘tinker’ and a tremendous sense of the mortality of things; technologies, ideas and pop cultural objects in particular.  Most things it seems, inevitably become obsolete but Cotterells live sound performances using recovered and rewired electronics are a Valhalla for obsolescence.

What Cotterell consistently does is repackage the already familiar for us to re-consume. For an audience he will publicly and ornamentally amass his own collection of defunct electronica (HOARD:chronology 2006), purchase and destroy a pristine Fender copy on camera (Guitar Burn 2007) or conduct a unique social experiment, copying and repeating the graffiti tag of a local vandal throughout a popular Hobart recreation area (Repeater 2008).

Guitar Burn Scot Cotterell 2007. Electric Guitar, Ventii Premium Lighter Fluid, Fire, mini-dv/dvd. video still

His recent installation The Fall, I like to call ‘high mash-up’.   It was the embodiment of his modus operandi and the perfect culmination of the previous 5 years practice.  A white gravel courtyard punctuated by half-buried, mirrored, disco balls that seem to have plummeted to earth like meteorites;  a black monolith, not unlike Kubrick’s famous 2001 genesis-generator containing a small screen that plays a looped performance by a local doom-metal act and in the centre, a contemporary, faux-rococo garden fountain, rendered in a nauseating hot pink and spurting thin, brown streams of Coca-Cola.  Like a coded message from a contemporary soothsayer, it gave timely, charismatic and oblique warning of the inevitable price of excess.

The sum of the parts is not something glib.

I could describe him as a delicious smoothie made from an electronics swap-meet thrown in a blender with a teenagers bedroom.  Or a beautiful alien gas made up of familiar elements but with a whole new smell and the possibility of appearing as a solid or a liquid as easily as a mist.

But I suspect my analogies, although descriptive and entertaining to invent, are possibly impotent and defunct, because put most simply: this is how we make art now. Cotterell is a contemporary artist, like most of us, unbound by a single means of expression.

Now we communicate with a cluster, not an arrow.

Sally Rees,  April 2009

This text was commissioned by Scot Cotterell as an introduction to his work for the audience of his upcoming residency at DF_ARTE in Santiago di Compostela, Spain