Sign of the times
September 23, 2005
Sydney Morning Herald
It's the art of social commentary, writes Sunanda Creagh - if you've got something to say, show it.
They say there is an old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.
For the photomedia artist Merilyn Fairskye, there's a sinister familiarity to the saying. "For many artists, this is a most interesting time," she says.
"When you think about all the issues that an artist might address, there are so many contradictory things happening."
Fairskye has a video install- ation, Connected, in the Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition Interesting Times, which displays work engaging with social and political issues in Australia.
Connected is a collage of footage from the top-secret Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, and includes interviews with residents.
It's a controversial place, but Fairskye's work is not overtly opinionated or inflammatory. Instead, she tenderly pieces together the residents' stories, reflecting rumours and the facility's strange isolation from its surrounds.
"Pine Gap is a highly secretive base, supposedly a joint facility, but, in fact, it underlines the true nature of our relationship with the United States, which is a very subservient one, and secrecy is a part of that," she says. "It's a work that explores those unofficial stories, rumours, innuendo - all the things that happen when something is very secretive."
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Fairskye says her aim is not to fire up our inner activist, but to reflect an issue in contemporary Australia and ask us to pause for a minute.
That's the idea, says the exhibition's curator, Russell Storer. "I was quite keen for the show not to be written off as a political show. It's not so cut and dried, black or white, left or right."
Rather than deciding on a theme and then hand-picking works to suit it, Storer toured the studios of Australian artists and saw the theme emerge naturally. "I was responding to what I thought was an increasing interest in social and political work both locally and internationally.
"I was interested in work that responded to a mood - a sense of paranoia and anxiety that contrasted with that 'relaxed and comfortable' idea of Australia.
"A lot of the work is uneasy - maybe not directly issue-based, but gives a sense of psychological unease," he says.
There's no better way to describe Shaun Kirby's installation, cousin beast. At first glance it's a pleasantly clean, white table. A closer look reveals a massive arachnid leg poking out the side. Underneath, a giant brown spider lurks. It's a scary work, not just because it's a huge spider, but because it reflects a hidden menace just below a seemingly shiny surface.
Also in the exhibition is George Gittoes's documentary Soundtrack to War, which focuses on the pop songs US soldiers listen to as they negotiate the carnage of war in Iraq.
Deborah Kelly's Beware of the God is situated outside the museum - in railway stations and public parks and on postcards. The gallery even has a projector on its roof - and if rain looks likely the words "Beware of the God" will be projected onto the clouds above the harbour.
These are tough issues, but Storer wants it known that the priority is the aesthetic: this is good art first and thought-provoking art second.
Art with a social conscience is not new and we'll always live in interesting times. But it's up to artists to keep engaging with contemporary society and to resist simply making fashionable or collectable work, says Storer.
"We know that art isn't necessarily going to change anything, and certainly something in a museum isn't necessarily going to change the world," he says.
"But art has a special place in society. Artists raise very complex questions in a way that writing can't, film can't, newspapers can't."
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Culture Jamming
At home being an outsider
September 23, 2005
Sydney Morning Herald
Cultural jamming has developed artistic as well as political elements, writes Sharon Verghis.
Meet Xavier Cha, the "guerilla gardener" who makes artistic and political statements not with a paintbrush, but a pair of garden shears: she hacks her name into the manicured hedges of the super-rich in Beverly Hills. Then there's the Sydney artist Mickie Quick and his altered traffic signs, and Lonely Station, practitioners of billboard alteration.
They are culture jammers, activists who have targeted the mass media through alteration - often with humour - of everything from billboards to magazine advertisements. Culture jamming has its roots in the politics of protest, but it is increasingly attracting the attention of curators.
Featured at such festivals as Tilt and This Is Not Art, as well as in shows at Stephen Mori's Day Street headquarters, culture jamming is also the theme of an exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, entitled Disobedience. The exhibition features South African artist Kendell Geer's radical reworking of the iconic "love" poster to say "bomb", and Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz's 2000 work, the cartoony F--- All Forms of Political and Cultural Discrimination. It highlights works that traverse the grey area from politics to art, says co-curator Zanny Begg.
There are Raquel Ormella's photographs of Che Guevara that document how the revolutionary's image has popped up on everything from Zippo lighters to ice-cream flavours. And there are images by Dean Sewell, a former Herald photographer who has documented the work of Lonely Station, perhaps the city's most audacious culture jammers, who have scaled smokestacks, highway billboards and buildings to rework images. He has captured figures imposing an image of an Abu Ghraib-style hooded figure on an advertising billboard near Sydney Airport.
In Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs, the cultural commentator Mark Dery describes one form of it as "an act of sympathetic magic performed in the name of all who are obliged to peer at the world through peepholes owned by multinational conglomerates for whom the profit margin is the bottom line". Billboard alteration began appearing in the US in the 1970s as a protest against corporate advertising, with the McDonald's golden arches, and later, the Nike swoosh, popular targets.
The phrase "culture jamming" is most commonly attributed to the college band Negativland. North American practitioners range from the veteran Adbusters, home of Buy Nothing Day and Unbrand America and led by the hoary culture jammer Kalle Lasn, to the Billboard Liberation Front, the legendary billboard bandit Ron English, and now, newer disciples such as Cha, who calls her covert topiary-trimming "tagging, Martha-Stewart style".
In Australia, groups such as BUGA UP, which was founded in 1979 and targeted the tobacco industry, have influenced such contemporary groups as Squatspace and the Network of Uncollectable Artists. The Sydney artist "Keg" was one of the latter's founders and argues that culture jamming, with its zines and websites, now has artistic as well as political elements.
Culture jamming taps into the notion of raw or "outsider" art or "art brut" expounded by the painter Jean Dubuffet - art created by society's misfits. Mickie Quick says there's even a kind of canon: "People are definitely responding to it as part of a history of street art. If you really like an artist's style or stencil, you imitate it. It's a definite subculture."
There are a number of factors driving this subculture, says the Sydney artist Zanny Begg, who co-curated Disobedience. Artists' disgust with Sydney's blue-chip art market, their exclusion from its glossy galleries, the city's prohibitive rents, and the closing down of artist-run spaces have fuelled a growing movement which sees any blank wall as a potential canvas, not just for traditional graffiti-style murals, but elaborate, sophisticated imagery which in effect allows them a viewing space, and exposes them to an audience.
It's also driven by less pragmatic factors: identity politics, the increasing interest in the anti-globalisation movement and a backlash against the frenzied commodification of visual images. Begg says it's certainly fed by disgust with Sydney's overcommercialised art market, and the tyranny of "rich people buying pretty art to stick on their walls". This way, artists are doing damage to the tight links between the creative and commercial spheres. No price tag - like Naomi Klein's no logos - is one way of flipping a finger to the art market's whimsies and fashions.
Culture jamming can be an illegal activity that costs councils and businesses thousands of dollars. But Begg asks why is it OK to plaster an ad for a product on a blank wall, but not if you're not flogging a product?
September 23, 2005
Sydney Morning Herald
Cultural jamming has developed artistic as well as political elements, writes Sharon Verghis.
Meet Xavier Cha, the "guerilla gardener" who makes artistic and political statements not with a paintbrush, but a pair of garden shears: she hacks her name into the manicured hedges of the super-rich in Beverly Hills. Then there's the Sydney artist Mickie Quick and his altered traffic signs, and Lonely Station, practitioners of billboard alteration.
They are culture jammers, activists who have targeted the mass media through alteration - often with humour - of everything from billboards to magazine advertisements. Culture jamming has its roots in the politics of protest, but it is increasingly attracting the attention of curators.
Featured at such festivals as Tilt and This Is Not Art, as well as in shows at Stephen Mori's Day Street headquarters, culture jamming is also the theme of an exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, entitled Disobedience. The exhibition features South African artist Kendell Geer's radical reworking of the iconic "love" poster to say "bomb", and Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz's 2000 work, the cartoony F--- All Forms of Political and Cultural Discrimination. It highlights works that traverse the grey area from politics to art, says co-curator Zanny Begg.
There are Raquel Ormella's photographs of Che Guevara that document how the revolutionary's image has popped up on everything from Zippo lighters to ice-cream flavours. And there are images by Dean Sewell, a former Herald photographer who has documented the work of Lonely Station, perhaps the city's most audacious culture jammers, who have scaled smokestacks, highway billboards and buildings to rework images. He has captured figures imposing an image of an Abu Ghraib-style hooded figure on an advertising billboard near Sydney Airport.
In Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs, the cultural commentator Mark Dery describes one form of it as "an act of sympathetic magic performed in the name of all who are obliged to peer at the world through peepholes owned by multinational conglomerates for whom the profit margin is the bottom line". Billboard alteration began appearing in the US in the 1970s as a protest against corporate advertising, with the McDonald's golden arches, and later, the Nike swoosh, popular targets.
The phrase "culture jamming" is most commonly attributed to the college band Negativland. North American practitioners range from the veteran Adbusters, home of Buy Nothing Day and Unbrand America and led by the hoary culture jammer Kalle Lasn, to the Billboard Liberation Front, the legendary billboard bandit Ron English, and now, newer disciples such as Cha, who calls her covert topiary-trimming "tagging, Martha-Stewart style".
In Australia, groups such as BUGA UP, which was founded in 1979 and targeted the tobacco industry, have influenced such contemporary groups as Squatspace and the Network of Uncollectable Artists. The Sydney artist "Keg" was one of the latter's founders and argues that culture jamming, with its zines and websites, now has artistic as well as political elements.
Culture jamming taps into the notion of raw or "outsider" art or "art brut" expounded by the painter Jean Dubuffet - art created by society's misfits. Mickie Quick says there's even a kind of canon: "People are definitely responding to it as part of a history of street art. If you really like an artist's style or stencil, you imitate it. It's a definite subculture."
There are a number of factors driving this subculture, says the Sydney artist Zanny Begg, who co-curated Disobedience. Artists' disgust with Sydney's blue-chip art market, their exclusion from its glossy galleries, the city's prohibitive rents, and the closing down of artist-run spaces have fuelled a growing movement which sees any blank wall as a potential canvas, not just for traditional graffiti-style murals, but elaborate, sophisticated imagery which in effect allows them a viewing space, and exposes them to an audience.
It's also driven by less pragmatic factors: identity politics, the increasing interest in the anti-globalisation movement and a backlash against the frenzied commodification of visual images. Begg says it's certainly fed by disgust with Sydney's overcommercialised art market, and the tyranny of "rich people buying pretty art to stick on their walls". This way, artists are doing damage to the tight links between the creative and commercial spheres. No price tag - like Naomi Klein's no logos - is one way of flipping a finger to the art market's whimsies and fashions.
Culture jamming can be an illegal activity that costs councils and businesses thousands of dollars. But Begg asks why is it OK to plaster an ad for a product on a blank wall, but not if you're not flogging a product?
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