1. 10 May


     Signers Suitcase (Sleeping)

    (Roman Signers)

     

  2. 9 May


    Hotel Kings blogger JF Payne: Can Dialectics Break bricks? 

    “Imagine a kung fu flick in which the martial artists spout Situationist aphorisms about conquering alienation while decadent bureaucrats ply the ironies of a stalled revolution. This is what you’ll encounter in René Viénet’s outrageous refashioning of a Chinese fisticuff film. An influential Situationist, Viénet stripped the soundtrack from a run-of-the-mill Hong Kong export and lathered on his own devastating dialogue. . . . A brilliant, acerbic and riotous critique of the failure of socialism in which the martial artists counter ideological blows with theoretical thrusts from Debord, Reich and others. . . . Viénet’s target is also the mechanism of cinema and how it serves ideology.” (PFA Program Note)

     

  3. 2 May



    Opening tonight: May 3, 6pm

    FRONT GALLERY

    The past is easy

    Steve Cox, Jennifer Mills & James Morrison

    Curated by Julia Powles

    image

    Steve Cox ‘Project # 4 - The girl with stiff plaits’, digital image 2013’

    The past is easy  is focused around the irretrievable loss of a photographic archive. Although the archive was in many ways small and insignificant and was without clear or structured methodology to define its collection it was nevertheless designed to function as the trigger for a range of memories and associations. 

    The lost photographs documented in an ad hoc fashion the childhood and early life of a woman. Despite her devastation at losing the archive and the strong emotional attachment she had to it, she actually found it hard to recall more than 10 of the lost photographs.

    Based on descriptors of the missing photographs, as remembered, by the woman who once owned them Steve Cox, Jennifer Mills and James Morrison have remade new versions of the events recorded by these now lost images.

     

    Steve Cox, Jennifer Mills and James Morrison are Melbourne based artists. Julia Powles is a Melbourne based artist and curator.
    Jennifer Mills and James Morrison are represented by Darren Knight Gallery.

     

    MIDDLE GALLERY

    The Future Is Long Enough For It All To Come True.

    Lewis Fidock

     

     

    image

    In stillness and silence the objects sit the show; covered by light or darkness they stand confronted with their own inanimate reflections. Both the projection and the physical form duel for a debatable presence of actuality amid the gaze of the spectator and the emptiness of the after hours.

    The objects presented in this exhibition seek to develop an opportunity to gain a sense of personality by extending to you the offer of a relationship with a bittersweet depiction of artistic trends from the past and present along with references to the outsider and the amateur.

    The work looks at the role of an object in trying to achieve status, monetary value and ultimately a lasting sense of meaning. These objects display themselves in a way that aims to critique the more familiar modes of presentation by reconfiguring the salon hang and the role of the plinth in showcasing an object.

    Born on the 1st of October 1988, Lewis Fidock is an emerging artist currently residing and working in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

    Lewis is studying Sculpture & Spatial Practice (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) (2013) and in 2012 he was the recipient of both the Majlis Encouragement Award and the Fiona Myer Award.

     

     

    REAR GALLERY

    simply_sweet28

    Marianne Diaz

     image

    On view in the Side Gallery will be simply_sweet28, a video projection of a woman in a wedding dress dancing to her webcam. The woman impersonates a medley of gendered and racial stereotypes which are distorted through the lens of disposable imagery and memes from the internet.

    Espousing a rough home-video aesthetic through cheap digital FX and low budget staging, simply_sweet28 invites viewers to examine the internet as a site between the imaginary and the real and to question the authenticity of its representations.

    Marianne Diaz re-stages cultural cliches and stereotypes through imagined scenarios and quasi-narratives.

    Her work uses literalism to frame the absurdity of stereotypes by referencing conventions of humour, hyperreality and performance. Through video and altered object , Marianne seeks to ascribe a sense of the ‘fake’ to all materiality and its representations.

    ’ An RMIT Link Arts & Culture supported presentation’

     

  4. 28 Apr



    Hotel kings blogger JF Payne

    image

    Corpse of Art : mixed media, 2003 
    Reconstruction of the Kasimir Malevich in coffin made according Suetin’s plan as he was exhibited in the House of Artists Union in Leningrad in 1935. 
    Photo: Jesko Hirschfeld. Courtesy: Galerija Gregor Podnar

    http://irwin.si/works-and-projects/

     

  5. 26 Apr



    Hotel kings blogger JF Payne

    “The curators promoting this “laboratory” paradigm—including Maria Lind,Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van der Linden, Hou Hanru, and Nicolas Bourriaud have to a large extent been encouraged to adopt this curatorial modus operandi as a direct reaction to the type of art produced in the 1990s: work that is open ended  interactive, and resistant to closure, often appearing to be “work-in-progress” rather than a completed object. Such work seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux. There are many problems with this idea, not least of which is the difficulty of discerning a work whose identity is willfully unstable.Another problem is the ease with which the “laboratory” becomes marketable as a space of leisure and entertainment. Venues such as the Baltic in Gates head, the Kunstverein Munich, and the Palais de Tokyo have used metaphors like “laboratory,” “construction site”, and “art factory” to differentiate themselves from bureaucracy-encumbered collection-based museums; their dedicated project spaces create a buzz of creativity and the aura of being at the vanguard of contemporary production.

    One could argue that in this context, project-based works-in-progress and artists-in-residence begin to dovetail with an “experience economy,” the marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experiences.  Yet what the viewer is supposed to garner from such an “experience” of creativity, which is essentially institutionalized studio activity, is often unclear.

    - Exert from Claire Bishops Antagonism and relational aesthetics 

    http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Claire-Bishop_Antagonism-and-Relational-Aesthetics.pdf

     

  6. 26 Apr


    Hotel kings blogger JF Payne: 

    Laibach - Victory Under The Sun (1988)


    It is against the background of this constitutive tension of the Law between public-written Law and superego that one should comprehend the extraordinary critical-ideological impact of the Neue Slowenische Kunst, especially of Laibach group. In the process of disintegration of socialism in Slovenia, they staged an aggressive inconsistent mixture of Stalinism, Nazism, and Blut und Boden ideology. The first reaction of the enlightened Leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as the ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals; however, their support of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling: “What if they really mean it? What if they truly identify with the totalitarian ritual?” -or, a more cunning version of it, transferring one’s own doubt onto the other: “What if Laibach overestimates their public? What if the public takes seriously what Laibach mockingly imitates, so that Laibach actually strengthens what it purports to undermine?” This uneasy feeling is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically a subversive attitude. What if, on the contrary, the dominant attitude of the contemporary “postideological” universe is precisely the cynical distance toward public values? What if this distance, far from posing any threat to the system, designates the supreme form of conformism, since the normal function of the system requires cynical distance? In this sense the strategy of Laibach appears in a new light: it “frustrates” the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but over-identification with it - by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, over-identification suspends its efficiency. (In order to clarify the way this baring, this public staging of the obscene fantasmatic kernel of an ideological edifice, suspends its normal functioning, let us recall a somehow homologous phenomenon in the sphere of individual experience: each of us has some private ritual, phrase [nicknames, etc.] or gesture, used only within the most intimate circle of closest friends or relatives; when these rituals are rendered public, their effect is necessarily one of extreme embarrassment and shame - one has a mind to sink into the earth.) - Slavoj Zizek

    http://www.reanimator.8m.com/NSK/zizek.html

     

  7. 22 Apr


    Blogger JF Payne

    Samuel Beckett- Not I (1973 production staring Beckett’s favored actress Billie Whitelaw)


    Also stay tuned for interviews with Sean Crossley, Aimee Howard and others over the next couple of weeks. 

     

  8. 16 Apr


    I like the idea of paintings behaving badly. My work knows very well that it has to be in an institution but they rebel against that, they do what the like! - Angela De La Cruz 

     

  9. 16 Apr


    With a characteristic flourish of perversity linking painting to pasta, Martin Kippenberger identified the most important problem to be addressed on canvas since Warhol in an interview of 1990–91: “Simply to hang a painting on the wall and say that it’s art is dreadful. The whole network is important! Even spaghetti … . When you say art, then everything possible belongs to it. In a gallery that is also the floor, the architecture, the color of the walls.” If we take Kippenberger at his word, a significant question arises: How does painting belong to a network? This late twentieth-century problem, whose relevance has only increased with the ubiquity of digital networks, joins a sequence of modernist questions: How does painting signifying the semiotic aporias of Cubism or the non-objective utopias of the historical avant-gardes? How can the status of painting as matter be made explicit (i.e.,through the incorporation of readymades, and the rise of the monochrome and seriality as well as the gestural techniques of dripping, pouring, and staining)? And How might painting meet the challenge of mechanical reproduction (as in strategies of appropriation spanning Pop’s silk screens of the 1960s and the Pictures generation’s return to painting in the 1980s)? None of these problems exists in isolation or ever disappears; instead, there are shifts in emphasis in which earlier questions  are reformulated through newer ones.-

    Exert from Painting beside itself by David Joselit

    http://www.reenaspaulings.com/images3/0911djoselit.pdf

     

  10. 15 Apr


    Touch me tiger- By Diego Ramirez