Hybrid World
Issue 24:4 | December 2004
The constant interchange of artists and ideas globally, encouraged by the world network of artist residencies has resulted in new genres of hybrid practice. Multiculturalism is reassessed, together with indigeneity, Pasifika, Asian threads and the South as a cultural force.
In this issue
Bridget Riley on Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley is an artist who has pursued her own agenda for over thirty years with no concessions and has made a place for herself within the heart of the art world not only with her work but through her extraordinary desire and willingness to communicate. On the occasion of her major survey exhibition in Sydney in the summer of 2004 at the Museum of Contemporary Art she kindly assembled for Artlink some excerpts from some of these interviews.
The Importance of Being 'Un-Australian'
Melbournes Moomba festival held in 1956 replaced the annual celebration of the winning of the eight-hour day. Thus an occasion that had originally been devised to commemorate an important victory of the Australian labour movement was transformed into a bipartisan celebration of civic pride and family values.
The New Cosmopolitans
During his visit to Melbourne in April this year, Bombay-born, Oxford-educated, Harvard professor, Homi Bhabha spoke of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, the global citizenry of refugees, economic migrants and minorities within cultures who must learn about translation because you survive that way.
Shifting Gears: Asian Traffic
Asian Traffic was, outside the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT), one of the most ambitious efforts undertaken in Australia aimed at exploring the multifarious nature of new Asian art and its complex intersection with contemporary Australian culture. Visitors were forced to join the Asian Traffic coming and going from the Asia-Australia Centre in Chinatown, Sydney, and in its ever-changing guises and fluid shifts in direction, the project successfully circumvented any traffic jams.
Location Location Location
The position of long-term visitor or unfaithful citizen affords a view from both within a culture and outside it. The art of Pasifika is as diverse as its people, it is a 21st Century hybrid reality. Pasifika is urban.
Towards Ubuntu: The Way of the South
Melbourne is the host city of the South Project, a project designed to celebrate the creative energies of people living in the southern hemisphere and create south-south dialogue between artists of the countries of the south. South 1 encouraged all kinds of responses: philosophical and whimsical, creative and conceptual, contesting and renewing ideas, in the first gathering of its kind.
Exchange Value # 1. If It's Tuesday it Must be a Conference on Art and Globalism
As with Feminism in the 1970s certain ideas are in the air and finding widespread expression amongst artists and art institutions. Globalism impacts upon artists options and this phenomenon of artists and curators on the move is the result of the explosion of communication around art. Peers looks at the influx in globalism and its various influences in the Australian and international art scene.
Exchange Value # 2. Keeping up the Momentum
Britton follows up from Peers examination of Art and Globalism to discuss the trends of international art residencies and the evident exchange in cultural values and creative receptibility that comes as a result of working in a foreign country; the buying of time away from other strategies for staying solvent - part time or full time jobs, or feeling under pressure to make work with commercial appeal .
The In-Between: Hybrid Arts Laboratories as Places to Question
Hybrid art laboratories - both funded and semi-funded - are dotting themselves around the Australian arts landscape. Most of them involve time away from the everyday, where experience can be intensified and where a new set of meetings between artists can take place. It is an experimental environment encouraging a mode of artmaking that struggles to exist between art form and another, one identity and another, one technology and another, one world and another.
Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong
Sutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan, India, in 1962 and immigrated to the UK with her family at the age of three. Her subsequent life and studies in Britan have resulted in a truly cross-cultural, multi-layered dialogue within her work. Her 2004 film Birdsong encapsulates the realisation of a young boys dream (in this case her son). Sutapa believes for a child, there is nothing that holds them back if you allow them to dream....
Audience Implication: PVI Collection
Back in 1998, the PVI (Performance, Video, Installation) Collective were a neat group and a fledgling collective. In 2004, seven years and eighteen major works later, the group has expanded to include new members, in addition to remote cells and networks of groups and individuals across Australia. The PVI refer to themselves as shape-shifters, and in this sense the shifting evolution of the collective has been influenced as much by the consequences of their national and international residencies as their addoption of new technologies.
Virtuous Networks
While many art institutions are just coming to terms with incorporating networked media into their exhibition programs, the genres have been exponentially expanding and mutating. In recognition of the newly hatched species that is networked media art, the ISEA2004 (the nomadic biennial festival held in Finland, Estonia and onboard a Baltic cruise ship) and the Australian ARS ELECTRONICA, dedicated a stream of their conference and exhibition programs to networked themes.
The City of Light: Video Projection and Public Art in Adelaide
The recent initiative of the Adelaide City Councils Public Art Program Luminosity has seen the commissioning and exhibition of five temporal public art projections between June and December of 2004. The objectives of the initiative aim to foster the Citys image as a centre of creativity and innovation, supporting established and emerging artists through the encouragement of quality new media art, thus making a contribution to the social and cultural substance of the city space.
Fakery and Fabrication in Photomedia
A series of photographs, still images from Monika Tichaceks 2002 video/performance work Lineage of the Divine, were exhibited in Japan in Supernatural Artificial, an exhibition of nine contemporary Australian photomedia artists. Tichacek exploits a heightened intimacy between viewer and work to construct complex and ambiguous scenarios that simultaneously delight, unsettle and confound.
SenseSurround: Empathy Between Human and Machine
The artists featured in ACMIs latest exhibition of new media work, SenseSurround, both use and develop cutting edge audio/visual technology to enhance sensorial experience for the spectator. The idea was to use the film soundtrack to trigger massively boosted low frequency signals, below the audible threshold, in the theatres. This would cause vibrations of the ear-drum and the body of the spectator and provide the sensation of earth tremors.
A Response by a Fringe Dweller
Debates about what is mainstream, whether in global or national terms, seem to perennial. Some have claimed Aboriginal art is now mainstream. Stephanie Radok takes this notion apart.
'Aboriginalism' in Europe: On the Way Out?
Subsequent to Nicholls three month residency in several European regions, she has been examining some of the ways in which Australian Aboriginal art is currently being perceived, received and curated in this part of the world. As she states, the Salzburger Kunstvereins programme, juxtaposing photographic works and video installations by Destiny Deacon and Lisl Ponger was the only one of the four European Indigenous art exhibitions she saw that made any serious and genuine effort to address the postcolonial legacy of Anglo-European colonialism.
SameDifference: 04 Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth (BEAP)
SameDifference 04 Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth (BEAP). Director: Paul Thomas www.beap.org DistributedDifference: Cultures of Conflict The Bank, Midland, Perth, 10 Sept -12 Nov. Curator: Jeremy Blank. SonicDifference: Resounding the World The Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Fremantle, 9 Sept 10 Oct. Curator: Nigel Helyer. Drift Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 26 Aug -26 Sept. Curator: Bec Dean.
SameDifference: 04 Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth (BEAP)
PerceptualDifference John Curtin Gallery, Perth 8 September - 12 December Curator: Chris Malcolm BigDifference Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth 12 September - 3 October Curators: Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
Out of the Dark
Out of the dark - night shots from indigenous artists is an exhibition I experienced online via the cyberTribe website. If you have not browsed the site, then you should. WiseART Gallery in Brisbane presented the physical exhibition from 7 –27 August.
Instinct
Emily Floyd, Sharon Goodwin, Irene Hanenbergh, Louise Hearman, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Ronnie Van Hout, David Noonan, Lisa Roet, Kathy Temin. Curator Lisa Vasiliou Faculty Gallery, Monash University 9 September - 5 November 2004
[in]stall(s)
Rebecca Coote, jonathan Hodgkin, Kylie Johnson, Nick Maxwell, Mish Metjers, Hanna Parssinen. Sally Rees, Tristan Stowards, Tricky Walsh, Matt Warren and Tiffany Winterbottom Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart 19 August - 5 September 2004 A Tasmanian Living Artists' Week Exhibition
1/2 Way: Scott Redford the Collages
Dell Gallery at Griffith University Queensland College of Art, Brisbane 13 August - 19 September 2004
Savvy: New Australian Art
Savvy: New Australian Art QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 6 August - 17 October 2004
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