AusArt Monday

One of my favourite artists of all time, Brett Whiteley.

State Library

Oh, the State Library. It's in a gorgeous section of Sydney right next to the Botanic Gardens, just up from Parliament House and not far from the Art Gallery of NSW and also the pointed beauty of the harbour and Opera House.

Forget about the surrounds - you could spend days in the library itself. I've only been twice, to see exhibitions they've put on, and regret not budgeting enough time to settle in for a while each time.

Last time there I spent a bit of time staring at the wonder of the reading room and then got down to business. First... Where the hell are the toilets here? But on my way down the halls I got a little distracted...



Why on earth do we have such a nice set of doors down the end where the toilets with the crappy pebblecrete dividers are? Let's stop and have a closer look. Click on the picture and you might be able to read it.



Ahhh. The Shakespeare Library. Fantastic! The plaque beside it says it was refurbished as a gift from some kind concerned person for the bicentenary of the colony back in 1988. I was excited at the thought of holing up into a room with such a beautiful door to read Shakespeare. I don't think many others have shared the same excitement (or maybe they have had too much excitement in the past?), because the doors were locked solid. I tried to peer through the keyhole, but did not get much of an idea of the space beyond.

I hate that the efforts of restoration cannot be shared by the general public. All I got was a few photographs and the dubious experience of being seen squinting through a keyhole in the vicinity of the public toilets.

Sunday Smart

Sunday Smart

Hunter Street

The centre of Planet Newy has a bunch of old shops laying around doing nothing except become more derelict. Our council is going with the easy option of waiting foir a massive property developer to snavel it all up and fix it in one big sterile and uniform go, than actually maintaining a city that has a sense of heritage.

What do empty shops cry out for? Tagging.



I normally look upon tags with distate. They have no sense of artistic placement, no splash of impact. They're just there as a personal brand stamp on easy target. This one caught my eye, however. I like the associated shadow that it casts.

Sunday Smart

More of Sydney

Here's another not so great night shot of the Vivid Light Show in Sydney recently.



I think the fact that it was raining made the installations all the more beautiful, even though navigation was not so great. Throngs of people with prams and umbrellas and backpacks and cameras and tripods. What a nightmare! No wonder we ducked into any available bar we came across for a "rest" as much as possible.

Once you've stopped tracing the curl of the light ribbon in this installation with your eyes, you look up to see the rest. Nestled just over the back to the right is the Harbour Bridge. If you turn around just a little more to the right you would see a strip leading off toward the Opera House, with more interactive fun installations all along the way to it.

Turn around to the left and you're looking back along Circular Quay, the main transport hub of the harbour, with a set of wharves and train station. The station and several of the hotels behind it are lit up, so that when you are coming across the harbour (either on the bridge or by boat) you will be recieved by a coordinated feast of colour.

Sunday Smart

We continue in Smart style, following the themes of roads, curvature and stark signage... with a container on the back of a truck thrown in. I love in this one how the cones and curvature of the barrier draw your eyes to the fact that maybe it's actually you that has been barricaded, but that traffic and industry do not stop, in fact they just go around you regardless.

Lit Up

Our weekend trip to Sydney was primarily to see the Vivid Light Festival taking place around the harbour. I know Dive is going to be salivating in anticipation of Sydney photos, so here are some extremely amateur shots of the Opera House as a starter.



Oooooh!



Ahhhhhhhh!



Oh WOW!



...and other comments similar to those at a fireworks display. Except this doesn't have pungent smoke and the occasional burning chunk falling out of the sky.

Sunday Smart

Sunday Smart

This is my favourite of all Jeffery Smart paintings.
I love the portions of reflection.
I love that the worker placing the arrows is also part of the reflections.
I love the deliberate every-which-wayness of the arrows themselves. I love that they are set up with no point at all.

I love especially that, typical of all road workers, there one dude standing around in the background doing bugger all.

Sunday Smart

"I feel it's just some sort of game if it's just abstract." - Jeffrey Smart

Sunday Smart

"Sometimes I'll drive around for months despair, nothing, nothing, then suddenly I will see something that seizes me.. a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows and I send up a prayer because I know I have the germ of a picture" - Jeffrey Smart

Sunday Smart

“The truth is I put figures in mainly for scale…” - Jeffrey Smart

Sunday Smart

“I find myself moved by man in his new violent environment. I want to paint this explicitly and beautifully… only very recently have artists again started to comment on their real surroundings” - Jeffrey Smart

Postcards from Wallsend II

As promised earlier here are a few more shots of graffiti goodness found in Wallsend, Newcastle.

Take a walk along Ironbark Creek, which really turns out to be a storm drain, and you'll come across a few of these beauties:

A whole-wall collaboration:



The best portion of a wall that stretched forever (and also more of the face theme):



More of the face theme again, this time under a roadway.

Would you do this?

Trawling through the occasional weirdness that is eBay, I came across this wonder:

Item Specifics

Condition:
New

I am selling a big space on my back, 50cm wide, by 75cm long for anyone who wishes to buy it. It would be a perfect opportunity for a small or large business to purchase the space on my back and advertise Their company logo, details and web address through tattooing. I will contact the press, once your purchase has been made, and have them cover the story through newspaper, internet and television news. This gives your business, major free advertising, not just on my back, but via the media who would jump at the opportunity to cover the story of the guy who sold his back for advertising. I will not get anything inappropriate tattoo'd on my back. To sweeten the deal, i will also throw in a 30cm wide and 15cm long spot on my chest as well for a web address, logo or ontact details. The offer isnt just open to advertising, but artists who want there work bought to life , tattoo artists who want their work and them selves exposed in the media.

The guy has put up a Buy It Now price of twelve thousand dollars. At first glance that's a lot. But from the picture provided, the guy is about twenty. Say he'll keep kicking until he's somewhere around seventy-five, as is the life expectancy for males around here. That's fifty-five years of advertising for twelve grand. It works out to be less than sixty cents a day. So this guy will live and die advertising your product for a pittance. Idiot!

This Is Not Art

There is a festival on in town - This Is Not Art. They had a Sunday afternoon fair that I decided to go along to, somewhat for inspiration for my brain and somewhat just to sit back and peoplewatch.

There was a uniform for all the contemporary artist types in attendance.

If you're female, you must:
1. Wear stripey socks pulled up to uneven heights on the legs.
2. Wear outrageously bright leggings, with a definite favour toward flouro pink.
3. Have access to your own sewing machine and manufacture some kind of sack to wear that you obviously flaunt as expressive and arty, but in reality - it's just a sack made from your old curtains.
4. Shave off the hair on one side of your head and not bother with brushing the other side. Bonus credo for cultivating dreadlocks.
5. Sport a satchel of hand-sewn nature consisting of a patchwork of bits of other hand-sewing failures.

If you're male, you must:
1. Cultivate facial fluff. Do not shave, do not trim, do not wash.
2. Wear some sort military jacket, but avoid camouflage print at all costs.
3. Have some sort of metal bits hanging off your face.
4. Blue denim is not your freind. Wear black, black, and more black when it comes to pants.

I wandered past rows and rows of zines, wondering at how these people can happily charge five bucks for ten poorly photocopied pages of bad poetry and stick figure drawings. I wandered past jewelery stores that all seemed to make use of shirt buttons. Fancy an earring with a shirt button on it? Why thanks, that might come in handy some day. I wandered past racks of sewing machine "retro" [=sack] atrocities and hand-made political buttons.

This Is Not Art. Damn right. What could be a really inspiring festival exploring the personally defined lines between art and atrocity left me feeling like I had seen to much atrocity. As for expressing individuality, how can you do that when you all look the same?

Challenge and Intrigue

"Take a picture of something you find intrigueing and write about why."
I put a challenge on the table, and then I was stuffed. I can't make a challenge without doing it myself - that would be a little unfair.

I found myself asking people I knew for help. Define intrigueing? What would you find intriguing? I googled it, possibly in a vain hope that the age of too much freely available useless information might be able to assist me. Instead I went onto a run of useless linking and wasted an hour of possible photo hunting time. The day was wasting.

There's plenty of things I find interesting or visually appealing enough to capture as a photograph. I find patterns in industry appealing. I find patterns in nature appealing. Look through my backlog of shots and you'll find a shitload of trees. In particular dead trees. And telegraph poles. I've just lately started to realise that unless you're a botanist, trees are cool for a few shots and then you're over it. I need a record of my people, as well as my places. This is what I find intrigueing lately. Faces, detail, personality.



A funny thing happens when you point a camera at a person. They try to hide. Or pose, if they're extroverted. Or be a dickhead, if they are somebody like me who is too lazy to hide. I've lost count of how many shots there are with me giving the finger. I've started trying to find the people, but not always the smiling for the camera people. I want the bored person, the pensive person, the captivated person and the contented person. The flash of a genuine smile. The reality.




These are my friends, people I can drag along on random trips to nowhere because I have a car and they don't. Come on. We're going somewhere. Where? Dunno. People who are happy to hop on into the car and waste an afternoon with no set destination. Who will find something amusing no matter what. These are my people. Real people.

Yet another cool street art project

This post started life with the intention of becoming a blurt of massive proportions. I've had an amazingly shithouse week - some really high highs but some absolute crash and burners as well, which override all the good stuff too easily. So I did an image search for "fuck the world" just to add some colour to an otherwise drab outpouring of personal crap and it all changes for a while.

I came across FUCK this website, home of a project that asks people to stick stickers of the word fuck in funny places. The explanation:

I don't know, just had the idea one day and thought it would be funny. So I printed out stickers in a bunch of different sizes, took them everywhere with me, and started taking photos. It quickly turned into an obsession, and I ended up with a book. So, now it's your turn, let's see what you can do. Get some stickers and take some photos. Believe me, once you start, you'll never look at signs the same way again.

You can actually buy the stickers from this website and they are supposedly strong and removable. I really like the disclaimer that goes with them - this is supposed to be about collecting funny images, not FUCKing up people's personal property. Don't be an asshole and leave the stickers on signs around children's playgrounds. It's good to see some culture jamming with principals.