Author: Stephanie Britton
Issue 27:4 | December 2007
Editorial: Food Bowl
Editorial: New futures in art education
Maria Bilske and Belinda MacGill
Editorial: Indigenous storytelling in a digital world
Larissa Behrendt and Pauline Clague
Editorial: Local colour
Editorial: Ways of seeing
Julianne Pierce
Editorial: Human Flow
Editorial: Considering the animals
Editorial: Positioning Feminism
Are you an artist, reading this? If so, do you consider what you do as work? The tension between vocation (eg Buddhist monk) and job (eg salesperson) is a constantly swinging pendulum, between living and breathing your occupation and separating your life into work and leisure. At various times and contexts it is possible to do away with the distinction eg for fulltime students or volunteers or perhaps when socially-conscious artists aspired to work with trade unions to integrate art into the working lives of blue collar workers. (1)
This issue samples some of the choices enjoyed by artists today in their working lives and some unusual, even quirky, ways in which this is played out. Guerilla and street art is not a 9-5 job, and residencies are a way of life. There is also a sub-genre of artists who labour at their work, long hours of repetitive actions. A growing acceptance in the society of the notion of collaborative teamwork is perhaps behind the trend for artists to leave the studio for the melting pot of group activity. Concertina, the collaborative group in SA combines forces on a project basis. Others are variously designated as Clusters, Intensive Workshops, and Art Labs in which individuals across arts disciplines are hand-picked for maximum synergy. (2) Here we look at ReSkin organised by ANAT but there are many more. An ongoing Science-Art Lab, Symbiotica, exists at the University of WA. Stelarc has been able to pursue his bio-technology art at the MARCS Lab at the University of Western Sydney with the assistance of a generous ARC grant. The results of the Flinders University Cultural Diversity Cluster were showcased at the inaugural OzAsia Festival at the Adelaide Festival Centre in October in the exhibition Undiscovered Country.
Another escape from solitary work is a new version of the old Australian tradition of bush camps. These might be groups of like-minded artists, or put together by organisations eg @24HR Art in Darwin who in 2007 mixed a group of strangers together, Indigenous and otherwise, for a week or two in a paperbark forest in Arnhem Land. Here Guan Wei reflects on what he got from this experience. Space precludes us including reports on the occasional artist camps run by Bush Heritage Australia on ecologically significant land which it is acquiring, protecting and regenerating all over Australia, the mission being that artists can interpret visually the plight of the land and the need for action to save threatened habitat. (3) Artist Mandy Martin has been a leader in running workshops in their reserves eg Ethabuka in the Simpson Desert in western Queensland and Borradaile in Arnhem Land. In less rugged circumstances, regional cross disciplinary arts residential centres like Bundanon on the Shoalhaven in NSW and Kellerberrin in the wheatbelt of WA combine the stimulus of nature with potential meetings of minds.
Many who over the past 20 years have learned to blend art practice with academic positions in order to gain status for art as research on an equal footing with that of non-art academics, are now struggling to maintain this in the face of techtonic shifts in university core values. The difficulty of finding a natural place for art as research in academia has suddenly become a fight for survival in which those art schools which fail to get over the 'Research Quality Framework' benchmark can lose the right to offer higher degrees. Bang go the art-based MAs and PhDs with which we have all become familiar. There is a way to go before this very convoluted issue is resolved, but most university-based art schools are currently grappling with it.
In another catastrophic shift, the destruction of the CDEP scheme which used to support many artists and artsworkers in Indigenous Centres has caused havoc in the ecology of these workplaces.
The Howard government's 'Work Choices' package, embodying its current enterprise bargaining-style industrial relations (IR) laws, has created much debate and angst in the population. Beloved of many employers, it is seen by workers to have begun to tip the socially potent work/leisure equation into deficit, setting the agenda for further fraying of the social fabric. In the arts sector, the smartest practitioners have always lived and (and the quieter ones died) by enterprise bargaining – with patrons, dealers, funding bodies, museums, prize-organisers etc – with virtually no reference to the collective bargaining of unions. After all, most artists are sole practitioners who decide what work they do and when. Work Choices. Efforts in the eighties to form an Artworkers Union fell into a tautological hole. How or why would or could artists be affected by industrial relations legislation?
Changes to the nature of art practice have created a new landscape for artists – they work within universities, on residencies, on public art commissions, or in tandem with art museums, and the work of those who become the currency for investor-collectors is sold and resold through the high rolling auction system, run by the likes of Sothebys and Deutscher Menzies. Behind the scenes some big IR shifts have occurred. Michael Keighery's article over the page shows ways in which IR and artists are not altogether strange bedfellows.
Finally, for the philosopher's view on work, we asked Donald Brook to respond. His The Work of Art takes us back to the big picture.
Stephanie Britton
1 Poetry readings by living poets to members of the builders labourers union on building sites were apparently not only tolerated but enjoyed. But this faded away. See Before Utopia – A non official Prehistory of the Present Ian Millis interviewed by Helen Grace. http://www.ianmilliss.com/documents/BeforeUtopiaInterview.htm
2 These have been pioneered by the Australian Network for Art & Technology and the Multicultural Committee of the Australia Council in tandem with organisations like Flinders University Drama Dept, and The Performance Space.
3 See www.bushheritage.org.au/
Fremantle Print Awards
Judith McGrath
Fremantle Print Award 07
Fremantle Arts Centre
8 September - 21 October 2007
Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater
Felicity Wright
The CDEP (Community Development Employment Program) was axed by the Howard Federal Government throughout the Northern Territory though is still current in South Australia and Western Australia. The Program was launched in 1977 by the Fraser Government and has been a very valuable way of getting Aboriginal people to be engaged productive community memes in art centres and other activities. A number of key Aboriginal art centres rely on CDEP staff for printing, administration, preparators, artists and craftspeople. It is a vital component in building community self-reliance and pride.
A Bush Camp in a Mysterious Land: Guan Wei
Guan Wei
Chinese-Australian artist Guan Wei first visited Australia eighteen years ago but it was only in 2006 that he went bush for two weeks with nine other artists, on an artists camp organised by Darwin's contemporary art space 24 Hour Art in collaboration with Injalak Arts and Crafts in Western Arnhem Land. His vivid experiences of the great outdoors, its sounds, animals and birds, led to his A Mysterious Land series. He worked with local Aboriginal artists, was shown rock paintings and found similarities between Aboriginal culture and Taoist philosophy.
A Relationship can't be Outsourced: Tracey Clement
Dominique Angeloro
The idea of slow art takes on a gripping intensity in Tracey Clements textile works which use ideas of duration and repetition to refer to womens traditional work and skills - a huge ball of wool, a giant button-covered blanket, full-size bodies made from thread and most recently a miniature city of salt and wire. The excessive though delicate relationship between the artist and the work becomes evident in the resulting artefacts. She admits to watching very bad DVDs while on the job.
Work Wanted: Keith Wong
Keith Wong
An artist advertising art in the yellow pages as an artwork turns out not to be a light matter.
Julie Gough
SASA Gallery, Adelaide
John Maitland's Energy Architecture
John Maitland is the sole director of Energy Architecture, an Adelaide architecture firm committed to environmentally sound and socially responsible architecture established in 1990.
The Creative Potential of the Awkward: Sarah crowEST
A look at roughly the last five years of 2007 Samstag scholar Sarah crowESTs art practice of objects, performances and videos. CrowESTs manifesto is to maintain flexibility in her thinking; to do or consider the opposite of that which is usual or customary and to make something very messy. Her work often explores the functions of the alter ego in contemporary visual arts practice.
Mirroring our Dialogue: Danielle Freakley as 'The Quote Generator'
Penny Trotter
The Quote Generator is a three year public art project where the artist only speaks in quotes which she instantly attributes. For the first year Danielle Freakley will quote from commercial products, the second year from friends and acquaintances and the last year from herself in the past.
Unknown Worker in Art: Alan Lukey
A retrospective survey of the work of Alan Lukey who died in 2003 aged 51 organised by fellow artist John Foubister with the help of Jill Lukey was shown at New Land Gallery in Port Adelaide, 21 April to 10 June 2007. Lukey was a South Australian artist who painted abstract and meditative works and lived on the Fleurieu Peninsula between 1977 and 2003. He also made public art works often in the shape of waves.
Tautology
Anneke Jasper
Emma White
MOP Projects, Sydney
Artworks Out on the Beach Townsville
In September 2007 in Townsville Stephanie Radok attended the Perc Tucker Regional Gallerys Strand Ephemera, a biennial outdoor sculpture and installation exhibition first held in 2001. The Strand is a 2km landscaped beachfront park where local and interstate artists placed their site specific works which ranged from an Aeolian harp by Nameer Davis to a throne made of seasponges by Wendy Robertson. An enthusiastic audience of children and Strand-strollers made their way from work to work thinking about art and its myriad manifestations. Commissioned artists making work in shipping containers were Craig Walsh, Bonemap, Donna Marcus, Chris Fox and Richard Goodwin.