My wife and I bought this beautiful inflatable artwork “Nana” by Niki de Saint Phalle at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) on our recent trip to that state.

Today Engogirl and I went to the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (GOMA) to see their excellent current “Optimism” exhibition. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to take any photos because of copyright issues but because I didn’t realise that was the case, I did take a few of works that caught my eye, until a security guard had a few words to me.

Patricia Piccinini’s work based on Vespa motor scooters was hilariously playful.

Kathy Temin’s, “Bringing it all back home”, was like walking through a fake fur covered Dr Seuss landscape.

We also checked out the rest of the gallery and we came across Ron Mueck’s “In bed”.

It was absolutely mind blowing how realistic his sculpture was and I included Engogirl in the shot so you can see how big it is. There was a security guard sitting right next to it and I asked her if many people tried to touch the sculpture; to which she replied, “all the time”.  I wasn’t surprised, as it seemed to be almost begging to be touched. It just looked so soft and lifelike.

On the way to a wedding last weekend I was caught in a traffic jam in the King Cross tunnel and I saw this stencil graffiti.

As we slowly crawled by it, I asked my wife to photograph it. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like most graffiti and I really hate tags, but I do have a liking for stencil graffiti. Because the tunnel caters to heavy traffic, it wouldn’t usually be possible to take the shot above.

It looks as though whoever put the graffiti up, must have felt real pressure to get out of the tunnel as soon as possible. The light sabre is misaligned and one of the eyes wasn’t completed. On one hand, the drips remind me of what Andy Warhol said to the famous art dealer, Leo Castelli, when he was asked why he had drips on some of his Campbell’s soup tin series; “so you can see that it’s a painting”, and on the other hand, David Hockney’s photo collages. One of the reasons why Hockney made collages of scenes like “Scrabble, Hollywood, 1 January 1983“, is because he wanted to give a sense of time passing.

The evidence of the stencil’s hasty production makes me think about the time span and near panic it would’ve been made in. So for me the graffiti, inadvertently makes me think about the act of painting and time passing.

Thanks to Grasswire from Slovenia (where I will be visiting next year) for his comment and posting a link to this crazy video about traffic and tunnels in his country.

After seeing this video, I’m starting to have second thoughts about driving in Slovenia.

Yesterday, my wife and I with some friends (Jade, Claude and Stephen) went to see the 12th annual exhibition of “Sculpture by the sea” along the shoreline between Tamarama and Bondi beaches. This year was the first time my wife and I have gone to the exhibition (mainly due to the fact that we tend to be on holidays elsewhere at this time of the year) and we were so impressed that I’m sure we will go to it again (if we are in town) next year.

Sculpture by the sea is free to the public and occurs on the coastal walk between Bondi Beach (the nearest large beach to downtown Sydney) and Tamarama Beach. The walk is always beautiful, but during Sculpture by the sea it becomes a wonderful stroll past the amazing products of some very talented people’s imaginations.

In some people’s minds, art is something remote, that is kept in the temples of culture we call museums. The Sculpture by the sea exhibition counters such preconceptions by being so accessible to everyone and as such it has proved to be a great success with the Sydney public. It was certainly very well attended.

Below is a small sampling of the works on exhibition.

The work below is by Rod Mc Crae who was one of my teachers at the Sydney Institute of Design when I studied there. Rod is an incredibly talented man. His drawing skills are amazing and his mind is so creative. I used to be constantly amazed at how talented and inventive he is.

This work is a reference to Alice the elephant who was used at Bondi 97 years ago to provide elephant rides at the beach. The elephant figure is only one of a larger group of whimsical carnival characters.

The life sized plastic soldier below seemed so full of pathos. Amazing and sad at the same time. It made me think about when I was a child and how long ago that was.

Marguerite Derricourt’s “Flight of the Bogong” is about how the bogong moths (an important seasonal food supply for the Aborigines) during their migration from Queensland in the north to the Snowy Mountains in the south, end up being drawn in their millions to the brightly lit cities. 

A bit like people really, when you think about it.

When my friend Stephen saw the sculpture below he said that it reminded him of the best urinal in the world, that he’d ever seen at least, in a bar of of the Xin Tian Di area of Shanghai. Stephen said that the urinal was full of glass objects like the sculpture that one could empty their bladders on.

And I thought to myself, “why not!”

The iron urchins below was one of the few peices that obviously reflected the enviroment that the exhibition took place in.

As soon as I saw the work below I thought of the computer game “Riven”.

The “Fragment” below immediately reminded me of  “Cow up a tree” by John Kelly in Melbourne, even though it has nothing to do with the same ideas addressed by that work. I guess I thought about Kelly’s work because it has a tree with a black and white element in it.

I just wish I could’ve taken a photo of the “Humpback gunship” without the cluttered background so it could be seen more clearly.

There were many more works than what I’ve shown here, but of course I couldn’t put all of them up (damn the internet and how slow it is). What I’ve shown here aren’t necessarily the best works but they are the works I was better able to photograph due to the lighting conditions (shooting into the sun for example) and the masses of people in the way.

Yesterday was one of those perfect clear spring days where the weather was just right. Sunny and warm without being uncomfortable. It was such a great day spending time with friends, walking along a beautiful coastline looking at art. Pretty hard to beat and it’s one of the reasons why I love living in Sydney. 

My wife and I bought this pot in Santa Fe two years ago.

As anybody who has been to Santa Fe can tell you, it is just one giant art market.  As a matter of fact Santa Fe is the second largest art market in in the US.   Most of the quality painted and sculptural art is sold out of the galleries on Canyon Rd. Unfortunately for people like my wife and I who don’t have unlimited funds to splash out on art with, much of what was on offer in Canyon Rd was simply out of our reach.

The stores that surround the Old Town Square are where one can find plenty of amazing native American pottery. Again, much of the pottery, due to its quality and the renown of the artists who created it, was too rich for our blood. Sure, it was beautiful, but it was just more than we could afford.

Because my wife was in Santa Fe for a seminar I was able to spend a few days hunting around in the smaller shops away from the town centre. I finally found a nice pot by Corrine Chino that I could afford.  So, from my experience, if you have limited funds and you’re in Santa Fe, and like us you’d like to take home something made by the indigenous population, I’d say, that is well worth your time looking through some of the less glitzy looking stores on the edges of town.

Last night my wife and I went to an exhibition called “Godog & the Ascension of Dag Girl” by a friend of ours, Mai Long at the very lovely and new NG Art Gallery. The exhibition consisted of a sculpture installation

and a series of 25 drawings.

Much of Mai’s previous work has dealt with the cultural dissonance that she feels as a consequence of her mixed racial heritage. Mai was born in Tasmania to an Anglo Australian mother and a Vietnamese father. Although Mai was born here in Australia, many people still assume that she was born overseas, and it is still common for her to be asked where she originally comes from. Mai also lived for a time in Vietnam when she received a grant to study there and was also identified as a foreigner in Vietnam. It would seem that no matter where Mai goes, she’s often seen and treated as an outsider.

For about the last 8 years Mai has represented her mixed race as a mongrel dog (her words). In this latest exhibition, Mai’s work of papier-mâché dogs is covered in the writing of many languages to represent how one can look at something that has meaning and not understand what it actually means.

When a dog by Mai that is similar to the large dog that is at the background was first shown in public in Perth Western Australia erlier this year, it caused quite a storm in a teacup within some sections of the Vietnamese community here in Australia. There was a demonstration and the curator of the show, (from the Casula Powerhouse that collects Mai’s work), had the windows of his parent’s house, that he was staying at, smashed and paint thrown around the inside.  The curator was also threatened with physical harm and was so distressed about the danger he was putting his parents in that he left to go back to Vietnam and is waiting for Mai’s exhibitions to come to an end before he returns to Australia.

So what is the big deal about a bunch of papier-mâché dogs? One of the issues that Mai addresses with this exhibition “(Mai’s words) is the mismatch of historical memories across cultural and sub-cultural groups; and the seeming impossibility of explaining one to the other.  It is this schism of realities and the pain and trauma is causes for all those affected that Dag Girl aspires to ascend”. Another, is how a small vocal minority of the Vietnamese here in Australia are still focused on issues that are over 30 years old.  There are old open wounds and grudges that are still being nursed. A small group of refugees from the American backed southern part of Vietnam see the recent immigrants from Vietnam as traitors and for them the war never really ended. It’s a bit of a paradox that although this small group enjoys democracy and freedom here in Australia they don’t feel certain sections of their own community have the right to do so.

One example of how Mai has been addressing this issue is with simple symbols such as the one below (you can see it on the muzzle of the large dog behind Mai).

The red and yellow dots represent the colours of the Vietnamese flag.

It could also be said that the red represents the communists and the yellow represents the American backed southerners. The small colours are combined to produce a much larger orange circle. The corollary being that the total is greater than the sum of the parts. The Orange also represents Agent Orange which Mai sees as a symbol of how the Americans took advantage of the internal political struggles in Vietnam. By calling attention to Agent Orange, Mai is trying to say to the Vietnamese community that when they fight amongst themselves they weaken themselves to the extent that outsiders with their own agendas will take advantage of the distracted and fractured Vietnamese people.

Orange is also a colour of Buddhism and the orange balls in the dog’s mouths is a reference to the balls in stone dragon and temple dog’s mouths that can be seen in many parts of Asia and allude to playfulness. If you’d like to read more about Mai’s work click here to read the exhibition catalogue (2.25mb PDF) which also has a very interesting essay by Gina Fairley a freelance art writer and co-director of Slot gallery (which has also exhibited Mai’s work)

Luckily there was no demonstrations, at last night’s exhibition.  It would seem that the people who have indulged in the thuggish behaviour in the past aren’t ready to step out of their own community and cause trouble.  The fact that there was ex-Minister of Parliament and a few reporters in attendance probably deterred those who would rather operate in the shadows.

All this talk about Agent Orange brings to mind one of my favourite punk bands of the same name and because Mai and her partner Stuart (he has a surf tour company and yacht charter business up in Indonesia) both surf, I thought I put up this little video.

Marrakech is known as the red city and is not hard to understand why, when you see the colour of the building exteriors as you walk through the old narrow streets.  Almost about every old building in Marrakech seems to be like a fortress with very few ground level windows (that always have metal grilles over them) and solid steel front doors.  The buildings appear to rise up like solid defensive pillar-boxes out of the ground. There aren’t very many clues of what the interiors are like other than a few colours around the doorway that act as a decorative prologue to the story inside.

When I was in Morocco, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that the Moroccans must have felt under threat from marauders.  The streets are so narrow, and all the ground level entry points have been strengthened.  I can imagine how difficult it would have been for people trying to attack a Moroccan town when every house is a stronghold.  Any marauders packed together in narrow streets would’ve been pelted with rocks and arrows from the flat rooftops above.  Just like shooting fish in a barrel.

Not only are most of the houses built with defense in mind, but they are also act as peaceful sanctuaries from the hustle and bustle of the outside world.  Walking through the typical Moroccan town is similar to being a rat in a high walled maze.  Kilometre after kilometre of high walls and steel doors.  To me the whole country seemed to communicate through its architecture that strangers were not welcome. There is a definite sense of the difference between the life lived indoors to that experienced outside in Morocco.   

Either you are part of the close family that resides safely in cool courtyards behind thick fortified walls, or you’re the stranger that is kept at arm’s length, outside and vulnerable in the labyrinth.

Another thought that occurred to me when I was in Morocco was how people who live close to the land, will when they have enough money, change their environment so that it stands in contrast to what occurs naturally.

In Morocco only poor people’s houses are the colour of locally available materials.  Many of us who live in the cities of the developed world have romanticised ideas about people who live on the land and how they are in harmony with the environment.  Truth be known, the people who work on the land tend to be in opposition to the land. For example, many farmers see trees as things that need to be cleared so the land can be made more useful. 

As soon as Moroccans get enough money, they will paint their houses in brighter colours such as blue or pink. Here in the more developed the parts of the world, I suppose because bright colours and shiny surfaces are the norm, we tend to value more natural textures and colours.

Several hundred years ago in Europe, thin tanned people were not considered to be beautiful and painters like Paul Rubens idealised pale, plump women. Nowadays, in the developed world thanks to our sedentary lifestyles, obesity is common and pallid skin is the norm, so the uncommonly thin and tanned are deemed to be beautiful.

We mostly see blue skies during the day and yet for about 15 minutes we have red and orange sunsets, which so many people seem to enjoy and would describe as being beautiful.  We humans hanker after the uncommon. We often ascribe great value to rarity, and we quite often feel that rare things are beautiful.

The concept of chiaroscuro enters my mind nearly every day as I think about the things we enjoy and value. I wonder why we like them.  I’d say that we tend to want things that are different to what occurs most of the time in our lives.  Perhaps there is an inherent desire for contrast in our avaricious little hearts.  When we live in the natural world we lust after the unnatural and the new. We are so like the Satin Bowerbirds, surrounded by nature in the forest but are besotted by a bright shiny bits of blue glass. 

Conversely, we who live in the developed world, that is full of bright shiny things, surround ourselves (if we can afford it) with natural textures such as distressed timbers, quarried stone and antiques.

Over the years I have given quite a bit of thought about what I want to photograph. I take photographs for different reasons. Sometimes I shoot a subject only because I want to record it so I can use it to illustrate a point I want to make in text.  Other times, I like to shoot photographs because I want to capture a phenomenon, which could be anything from a rainbow to the interaction of people on the street, with each other. 

I have mixed feelings about phenomena.  Capturing some phenomena like sunsets, seems so pointless, as it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Just be there and push the button.  Do things have to be difficult to be worthy, I wonder? On the other hand, some phenomena, like capturing a decisive moment has much honour and is what I consider to be probably the most difficult and worthy form of photography. 

For me, textures are almost like sun sets. It’s almost like walking into an art gallery and photographing a Rothko. Just be there and push the button.

I went to an exhibition of landscape paintings earlier on this year, and I can remember being struck by the thought that a landscape without some clue of when it was made, decontextualizes the subject so much that it is almost rendered into a pointless decorative exercise. This was particularly brought home to me when I looked at a painting in the romantic style of the early 1800s of a sunset in the Yosemite Valley. Not only was the image kitsch, but because there was no sign, other than its style, of when it was painted, it could have been painted yesterday. I can remember thinking to myself, “what is the point?” 

“Why bother?”

The reason why I am so concerned about setting images within time is because photographs that capture a slice of life from a time passed, fascinate me.  I just love looking at photographs taken in the street years ago, with crowds of people.  I find myself thinking about how they are probably all either old or dead. I also wonder about what sort of lives they had plus the historical context that they’d lived in. I look at the faces of the children and wonder about the world they lived in and how it has all gone for ever.

Photographs of textures don’t really say much about anything other than the nature of the surface, that one has recorded.  Sure enough, textures can show marks made by people much the same way as a photograph of petroglyph can. 

I remember walking in the bush up in the blue Mountains, just outside of Sydney when I came across some aboriginal hand stencils in a protected rock overhang. I had no idea when these stencils were made and they looked so fresh that I thought they might have been the work of a modern-day vandal. Perhaps they were made recently, or perhaps they were made hundreds, if not thousands of years ago by an aboriginal with a mouthful of red ochre that he spat over his hand that he had placed against the wall. In short, I couldn’t place them in time.

Every time I see evidence of a human made mark on rock, I begin wondering why it is there.  What was its purpose? What were they trying to say or achieve by making such marks?

When I was on Cockatoo Island recently I saw many painted marks made on sandstone that had been chipped away by convicts 150 years ago.  I suspect that these enigmatic marks had some sort of purpose that helped the shipbuilders but their meaning has now been lost.  I wonder if some future archaeologist will spend some time trying to figure out what they all meant and what was their purpose.

Although I don’t really respect images of textures or sunsets for that matter, and I have tried to swear off taking pictures of such things, I don’t seem to be able to help myself. To me textures and colourful things are like chocolate chip cookies in a cupboard. I know that for my own good, I shouldn’t take them, but they know my name and they call to me.

And I am weak.

This weekend, my wife and I visited the Biennale of Sydney exhibits on Cockatoo Island. The Biennale is so large with about 180 artists participating, that its venues are all over town.

Cockatoo Island is an old shipyard that started off as a prison during the convict days of early European settlement in Australia. 

It’s a fascinating place that is a mixture of convict made sandstone buildings and heavy industry which used to be out of bounds to the public up until very recently. The fact that the shipyard was on an island meant that it became no longer economically viable due to the high cost of bringing in materials. The shipyard was closed down over a decade ago and has been allowed to fall into disrepair. 

The neglect of the buildings on the island has led to the creation of what can only be described as a bonanza of textures.

 Peeling paint, rusted iron, decaying cement and manually chipped sandstone relics of brutal utilitarianism.

Luckily Cockatoo Island has been recognized as being culturally important, and there has been an effort to preserve and restore many of the machines and buildings. Interestingly, one of the really amazing things about Cockatoo Island (which is in Sydney Harbour) is that you can camp there. At $45 a night, it is not cheap, but the facilities are amazing, with hot showers, clean coin operated stainless steel barbecue areas, a communal refrigerator, even a microwave oven. The icing on the cake is that it all comes complete with views of Sydney Harbour that people pay millions of dollars to own houses near.

Prime real estate open to the masses to enjoy rather than being sold off to the rich so they can wall it off and exclude the hoi polloi.

Our friend Peter had invited us to come and camp on the island with him and his friends, several months ago and we had said yes.  By the time Friday came around, and it was time for us to go, I was having second thoughts because it is the middle of winter here and it had been raining. As luck would have it, the weather was unseasonably warm, and we had the most perfect conditions. Two beautifully clear and warm days divided by a perfectly still and calm evening.

Because it is winter, there was hardly anyone else in the campground and we more or less had it to ourselves. At dusk, a campground employee came around and lit a large fire in a brazier, for all of us to sit around. It was all so civilised and comfortable. The really incredible thing about staying overnight was that we were able to roam around the deserted island at night and go just about go anywhere we liked to take photographs.

Another advantage of camping on the island was that we could take our time to look at the exhibits.  Most of the exhibits were video installations, and while I’m not really a fan of such things, there were several pieces that were quite powerful.

I think that the piece that both my wife and I enjoyed the most was a projected video installation on two large screens by the American artist Mark Boulos which deals with the plight of the disenfranchised Nigerians living in the Niger River delta area that is currently being plundered by international oil companies.

On one screen we see young Nigerian men with machetes and guns, wearing balaclavas declaring how they are prepared to fight the Nigerian government, which they see as robbing them of resources and giving them nothing but poverty and oppression in return. On the other screen is video of traders in the Chicago commodities market yelling and screaming to make deals as they frantically make their arcane hand signals to other traders across the room. As the videos progress, the Nigerians become more vehement in their declarations of animosity towards a government that they feel has betrayed them and white people, who they see as robbing them. Meanwhile on the trading floor, tempers start to flare and the hub-bub from the trading increases in intensity until it becomes an almost deafening crescendo.

Boulos has made a very powerful statement about what a large disconnect there is between the exploited and the exploiters.

Another interesting video installation was by Chen Xiaoyun from China, which had an enraged man in the middle of a large muddy field with a whip at night. The man cracked his whip as several trucks circled him. The man seemed full of all of this pointless to rage and the trucks were going around under his direction in the mud not really achieving anything other than making a total mess of the place. To my mind, it seemed to be a metaphor about the Chinese leadership. A lot of misdirected rage and the pointless exercise of power that was not achieving anything of worth. It was almost funny, whilst being ultimately very tragic.

Probably the most confronting work that we saw was that of Mike Parr and his work “MIRROR/ARSE”.  One of the videos was of Parr, sticking his little finger into a candle to see how long he could hold there, while it was being burnt. It was absolutely horrific to watch his finger as it turned black and shook violently as he screamed. Parr also videotaped himself as he had his lips sewn together in solidarity with the illegal immigrants and refugees held in detention here in Australia. It was excruciating to watch.

I felt very conflicted as I watched such painful things. 

On one hand, I can understand Parr wants us to think about the nature of brutality being committed all around the world.  On the other hand, I wonder about the nature of people’s desire to see such things. I found myself thinking of Fellini’s Satyricon and the scene where an actor, cuts off one of his fingers for the entertainment of a bored audience, who toss him a couple of small coins for his pains. I was also reminded about when I saw a Chinese acrobatic troupe which came to Australia in the early 1970s.  It was quite interesting that in the program for the show, the Chinese government had made a point of stating that they weren’t going to risk any of their performance lives in any death-defying feats without some form of safety harness or net, because they thought that the desire to risk people’s lives for entertainment was a bourgeois concept.

As we headed back home by ferry the good weather came to an end and the rain came. During a lull in the storm a rainbow formed over the city.

The only graffiti I like seeing is clever stencil graffiti. I saw this brillant example painted on a bus shelter window in Bangkok last year.

I also saw some excellent stencil graffiti in Puebla and San Cristobal de Las Casas in Mexico two years ago in 2006.

If you’d like to see some interesting stencil graffitti in Slovenia taken by Grasswire click here