July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Surreal in the City: Festival time in Adelaide
By Stephanie Radok
During the Festival Adelaide comes alive in a special way. Of course the general partying and delightful chance meetings, the intellectual and aesthetic stimulation it is known for are enhanced by the Adelaide Fringe and Womad. And every night Adelaide’s cultural mile on North Terrace, from the Art Gallery of South Australia to the Samstag Museum, will be lit up by Australian lighting experts The Electric Canvas to make simply walking out for a coffee a surreal experience.
This year Artists’ Week runs over six days with Elder Hall the venue for most of it, except for artists’ talks at specific exhibition venues. Assiduously attending Artists’ Week hugely improves your enjoyment of the broad Visual Arts Program as artists, curators, writers and other luminaries speak and you get to know who is who and what is what, ask questions, engage and network.
The chief international speakers at Artists’ Week are three artists with great stubble and include LA-based video clip maker and video art re-thinker Doug Aitken, who is giving the Keynote Address but unfortunately is not making a work in Adelaide. ’Dirty Realist’ Thomas Rentmeister from Germany will be piling up fridges and baby cream at Greenaway Art Gallery, and neon tube arranger New York-based Chilean Iván Navarro is also doing his thing at Greenaway. Then there is light and media artist Mischa Kuball at the Experimental Art Foundation, whose works look like wine cask innards (sculptures made from his digitized brain waves) with letters of the alphabet projected onto them. To counteract the machismo of these four art stars are Chicks on Speed, pop-fashion-music-graphix groovy women with songs about art world personalities and the trials and tribulations of art. Listening to the Chicks on broadband I heard them ask in a song ‘Where are all the women?’ and answer ‘They’re under the men.’ Funky but with an incisive undertow the Chicks will perform at the opening party as well as talk at Artists’ Week.
Specific questions being discussed at Artists’ Week include: Is combining music and art dumb or just plain fun? Is more art being made using the city as a canvas? Are we in a period of conservative art? How do curators work with artists and contribute to their creative practice?
Artists' Week, Chicks on Speed
Is it possible for Australia-based artists to have international careers? Are people in the visual art community too polite to one another? Speakers include curators Rachel Kent, Victoria Lynn and Jason Smith, with artists Chicks on Speed, Philip Brophy, Danius Kesminas, Shaun Gladwell, Evan Roth from Graffiti Research Lab, Arlene Texta Queen, Deborah Kelly of Beware of the God fame, Adam Geczy, Jenny Watson, Daniel Von Sturmer and Festival gizmo-designer Michael Kutschbach. Ashley Crawford, Courtney Gibson and Marcus Westbury will bring a media focus to the debate. Whilst collecting art will also be addressed with Miami-based collector Dennis Scholl speaking as well as giving a Masterclass with John Kaldor who will be giving advice on what to look for, when to buy and when to sell.
Art publishing will be covered during Artists’ Week by the launches of four new issues of Australian art magazines, all but one published in Adelaide: Broadsheet and the Contemporary Art Centre’s new publication Visual Animals, Artlink’s new issue Fuel for Thought: oil, energy, conflict and art, and the latest comeback of Melbourne-based un magazine and the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s filter magazine.
The second show ever at Adelaide’s new Samstag Museum will be Penumbra: contemporary art from Taiwan curated by Sophie McIntyre, and featuring work by ‘rising young stars’ never seen in Australia before. The 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Handle with Care promises to, in the words of curator Felicity Fenner, “negotiate the sometime uneasy relationship between intellectual and intuitive readings of art”. It encompasses artists from all over Australia and will fill all the underground galleries of the Art Gallery of South Australia. At the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia more disquiet will be present in Rosemary Laing's photos all taken in South Australia and about journeys in deserts made by early explorers as well as those by recent immigrants and refugees. The South Australian School of Art Gallery will be glittering as clothing encrusted with pearl shell buttons by Kay Lawrence will be shown alongside pearl shell ornaments by Aubrey Tigan. The South Australian Museum will be counterpointing Ngurrara: The Great Sandy Desert Canvas with artefacts, crayon drawings and maps from a 1953 anthropological expedition, while a retrospective of work by Lawrence Daws at Greenhill Gallery will include prints, paintings and drawings. The dark horse or the slow burn of the Visual Arts Program, in more ways than one, may well be Clandestine at Tandanya with the irrepressible Destiny Deacon.
Thomas Rentmeister, Work in progress for Adelaide Festival 2008, 100 used refrigerators, Penaten cream, styrofoam, laundry, linen. Image courtesy: the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide.
The Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts runs until 16 March
Stephanie Radok is an artist, writer, and editor based in Adelaide.
