extrinsic publication: the gertrude st. projection festival, 2010

so today i have some exciting news.  actually, i got the email a little while ago, but i’m programmed not to believe these things immediately, so it took a little while before i felt comfortable publishing it.  one of my photographs – a collaboration with writer-theorist jo latham – has been chosen as part of the 2010 gertrude street projection festival.  our work is one of about 20, chosen from 80+ entries, so it’s pretty exciting.  the photo was part of a series of four, which we exhibited late last year (and this one’s my favorite if the lot; it’s always nice when people like the work you think is awesome).

Kit Webster, Enigmatica (installation shot), MARS gallery, Melbourne, 2010.

kit webster is this year’s feature artist; he works specifically with media, projection and sound, and he’s apparently doing a site-specific work for the festival, which should be pretty cool.  i’ve seen some of his work before, but it was years ago, and i’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with, as well seeing what else is being shown.

Kit Webster, Enigmatica (installation shot), MARS gallery, Melbourne, 2010.

opening night is friday, july 9, 7pm – so if you’ve got some time, you know what to do…

wonderful assemblies: tim burton at ACMI

 

Poster from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993.

Wednesday night was the opening of Tim Burton: The Exhibition (imaginatively named, I know) at ACMI. There was a red carpet and everything: a long line, lots of camera flashes on the way in, and circus performers to amuse the onlookers. Of course, the only person I really noticed (in that celebrity way) was Burton himself, but I’m told there were other ‘people of note’ around as well; my date apparently walked in with Eric Bannagh. Naturally there was the usual opening night paraphernalia – alcohol, music, speakers – but on closer inspection the whole thing had a distinctly unusual underpinning. There were drinks served in globe-shaped bottles marked with poisonous skull-and-crossbones’; the strings trio played a delightful collection of rag-tag-style music in a variety of minor keys; and clearly somebody behind the scenes had a lot of fun designing the food: Big Fish fingers, trays decked out with tiny, perfect cupcakes and assorted Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-esque sweets, and (my favorites) the ‘human meat pies’ a la Sweeny Todd. The advantage of working on a retrospective, I suppose, is that one has a whole career to reference instead of having to pick just one theme.

 

Tim Burton: The Exhibition opening night, Baloon Boy, ACMI foyer, 2010.

ACMI itself has been showing Burton-ish signs for weeks. There’s a giant Nightmare Before Christmas stripy-stocking snake-monster out the front, and an enormous, melancholy, blue Balloon Boy floating in the foyer. On the night the interior was lit to match, reds and blues that made it hard to get a good photograph, but certainly went with the general mood. The choice in speakers was a little…unfortunate. Despite his presence, director Glenn Lowry of MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art, New York) made no comment, and Burton himself got less stage time than anyone else. When he did speak it was in a sort of haphazard interview format rather than a talk of his own, and while of course he was scruffily, self-deprecatingly charming and thus forgiven, it would have been great to hear more from him directly about what we were about to see. The problem with interviews is that one is at the mercy of the interviewer, and in this case the questions asked left a lot to be desired. I would really have been much more interested in hearing Burton’s own take on the show; considering he finished the speech with a suggestion that the work would be best appreciated by those who had taken advantage of the bar, I imagine it would have been enjoyable.

 

Tim Burton: The Exhibition opening night, Gaping Maw, ACMI foyer, 2010.

The exhibition itself is…well, it’s Tim Burton, so when I walked in – the stairs down to the ACMI gallery, by the by, have been specially framed for the occasion. One now enters via a very toothsome, gaping maw – I was pretty certain I was going to see something I liked. And I did. Most definitely. The exhibition contains precisely what the name suggests: 100% Tim Burton, so if you’re a fan, it’s worth seeing just for that. There are hundreds of drawings, paintings, and storyboards. There are even pages ripped straight from the sketchbook. One of Burton’s greatest strengths, I think, is satire (something he doesn’t get enough credit for, and is certainly hard to find in, say, his latest disneyfied creation) and one of the great perks of this show is an array of drawings that are frankly hilarious, and highlight this under-acknowledged gift for caricature and observation.

 

Puppets from Mars Attacks, photo by Mark Gambino, 2010.

There is also an extensive collection of material from his films: costumes, videos, notes, and – my absolute favorite – puppets. A whole case of puppets from Corpse Bride, and some from Mars Attacks, too, including a gorgeous unclad armature (for anyone not interested in puppets I understand this will hold only passing interest, but for people like myself, it’s almost worth going just for that). Unfortunately, despite all finger-crossing to the contrary, the show does not include any set pieces from the stop-motion films. I would have loved to see, say, the Everglot’s entry hall from Corpse Bride, or a piece of the Nightmare township, but ah well, at least there are sculptures of the inhabitants. There are also three costumes from Alice in Wonderland (Alice’s blue and red dresses, and the Mad Hatter’s outfit and hat) which I spent an awful lot of time examining (no zips on the clothes! All lovely old-fashioned fastenings! Though I can’t say the same for Alice’s boots, more’s the pity [I am a boot snob and zips on laced boots offend me deeply]). There are also sculptures by Burton himself – which I’d never even seen photographs of before – which I found thoroughly fascinating. Few directors, I think, not only draw but sculpt their thoughts during the design process.

 

Sculptures by Tim Burton, photo by Mark Gambino, 2010.

I do, however, have a gripe with the curation. It looks, for anybody familiar with the reference, an awful lot like the brilliant Pixar exhibition a couple of years ago: plain dark walls, good spot-lighting, work exhibited cleanly and at regular intervals. This approach worked beautifully for Pixar, but with Burton’s work it looks…forced. As though – ironically enough, considering the hype about the artist’s involvement in the show, and the gallery’s attempts at ‘Burtoning-it-up’ to the max – someone has once again attempted to fit his fantastic brand of crazy into neat, mainstream boxes. It’s like seeing an imagination laid out on a medical table; everything clinically dissected, labeled, in its place. In other words there was in the curation none of the vibrancy and nonconformity so vital to the work it was trying to display. I know that in part successful curating is about making work easily accessible, readable, etc.; but brilliant curation should do that while working with the art in question, not just around it. I don’t think the lackluster presentation should dissuade anyone from seeing the show, but I certainly found it disappointing.

 

Replica’s of Jack’s heads from The Nightmare Before Christmas, photo by Mark Gambino, 2010.

All in all, though, I’m very glad I saw it. It left me with a great creative high and a swathe of ideas and inspirations. In short, if you get the chance, I recommend taking a look. Tim Burton is, after all, some sort of genius in many visual ways, and if you block out the sterility of the gallery environment, this show is a lot like being gifted with a couple of hours to sneak around in his imagination. I don’t really think that’s something on which, given the option, one should miss out.

photographic roundup: all about tim burton

tim burton on (or in front of) the set of the corpse bride, 2005.

this is the image that lodged itself most firmly in my mind this week – i’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s in the comments!  last week rendered some pretty gorgeous results in that department (if you haven’t yet, check out some of the links people left – just beautiful).  for anyone who missed it, the photographic roundup is a weekly post of images that have captured my fancy over the past seven days – and an open call for any visual wonders my readers may have uncovered, as well.  please don’t be shy.  i’m fascinated by the photographs that enchant other people, and i’d also like this to become a sort of resource, over time – a whole section of my blog devoted to wonderful, magic-inspiring pictures.

 

film still of jonny depp in sleepy hollow, 1999.

this week, though, i need to apologise for being late with the roundup; i tried so hard to get this posted yesterday, but to no avail.  i tried on 4 – 4! – separate occasions to get this post up, but the gods of the internet were against me, had deemed friday the 26th as a day without published designs on fragility.  ah well.  the internet is like that, sometimes.

 

publicity shot of the white rabbit, alice in wonderland, 2010.

anyway.  this week’s photographs are all about tim burton, because frankly, most of the images i’ve encountered have had him to blame.  i went to the opening of his ACMI exhibition the other night, and henceforth my mind has been full of his work.  this week has also had a lot to do with kittens, but i just can’t bring myself to post meaningless (albeit cute) pictures of random itty bitty cats, so that one will have to wait until next week when hopefully i can post photos of my own.  i’ll put up a proper review of the burton exhibition+opening night tomorrow, but fridays (or rather make-up fridays) are image-focused, so images it is.

 

mary ellen mark, christina ricci on the set of sleepy hollow, 1999.

so.  any pictures that really amazed and enchanted you this week?  please do post them in the comments!

beautiful things: the art of romaine brooks

romaine brooks, self-portrait, 1923.

so i hope you’ll forgive me the flying post – i plan to come back and write about brooks properly (once i have more time and, more importantly, more research) but i discovered her work on one of my usual internet jaunts, and couldn’t resist the lure of an immediate post.

romaine brooks, peter, a young english girl, 1923-4.

there is more information here, for anybody in a hurry (i plan to scope out the archives myself, at a later date, and report back), but for the moment, let me just say that ‘the epitome of elegance’ really does seem an appropriate tagline, from what i’ve seen thus far of brook’s work.

romaine brooks, una troubridge, 1924.

i came across this painting first, quite by accident, at sublimefemme unbound (the topic was monocles – and really, why wouldn’t it be?  also, i must now look up this troubridge character.  she looks fascinating).  i rarely find painters i love quite this much at first glance. 

turn of the century women artists are hard to track down (i should know, i’ve tried often enough).  any suggestions on other female painters of the era worth looking up?

beautiful things: the strange acessories and interiors of eunsuk hur

i honestly can’t figure out the context of this work (or, perhaps, its purpose), not least because the biography section of the site comes up with a blank page (always unhelpful).  but whatever hur’s work ‘is’, it is undoubtedly beautiful, which i do appreciate in and of itself.  i love the textures, but most of all i am enchanted by the blending of wearable and interior art – i’m fascinated by the confusion of the wearable/non-wearable divide.

and those 3-dimensional wallpapers are pretty damn stunning.  again, i’m not sure whether this is the purpose of the work, but i’m taking what i can get and running with it (though ‘nomadic wonderland’?  ‘nomadic’ is one of those generic ‘ethnic’ reference words which i’m really not sure can ever be applied ’well’ to an object or collection thereof.  it’s like calling something ‘tribal’; so generic it actually means nothing, but evocative of some romanticised ‘primative’, and thus culturally appropriatory none the less).

unfortunately the website is enough to drive a person crazy – particularly if one happens not to be possessed of the world’s speediest internet connection – waiting for every picture to load really kills the visual impact.  i know the theiving of images is a big concern for a lot of artists, and ostensibly flash prevents this – or at least makes it a little more complex – but i have to admit it’s not an argument that holds much water, to my mind.  the price for making people sit around and tap their fingers whilst waiting for your work to load is just too high; i’m pretty sure i stumbled across hur’s site on 3 separate occasions before i actually made it far enough through the frustration to see any beautiful photographs.

plus.  why refuse free press?  or: for more information refer to this article by asia-pacific artist hazel dooney.  it has some rather compelling arguments for making your images as thievable as possible (and simply watermarking obsessively).

 

what do you reckon?  better to control your images absolutely, or let people use them and just make sure anyone who sees it knows it’s yours?

photographic roundup: miu miu, lady gaga, vanity fair, and a reader request

 today i have a bit of a reader request.  the idea is this: that those who see this post leave a beautiful picture (or collection thereof!) of their own in the comments, or a link to a picture roundup of their own.

shoes by miu miu, source unknown, via shoelust

without a doubt i spend most of my time on the internet looking for beautiful, fascinating, or inspiring images.  in fact i find so many each week that i’ve decided, instead of posting willy-nilly, to pull together my favourites every friday and post a weekly ‘photographic roundup’.  images are pretty much the reason i started using the internet.  i have thousands on my computer, and i organise them more obsessively than i do anything else in my life.  i’m not sure whether it’s the art history background or my own special brand of crazy, but i get terribly upset when i can’t figure out who made an image, where i sourced it from originally, etc., etc..  i have so many fantastic visual pieces on my computer that it seems a shame to let them just gather digital dust.  i feel like they should go back out into netspace for others to look and wonder at.

in the same vein i would love to see what other poeple have stumbled over and wondered at this week, and to create in the comments a sort of digital exquisite corpse.  the beautiful thing about this is that everybody wanders the net differently, seeks out different things, uses different searchwords; i’m fascinated by the bredth possible in an image collection put together by different people and the things they find lovely. 

   

still from alejandro, by lady gaga and steven klein, 2010, via fatshionista 

(i love this photograph.  it is, incidentally, not a photograph at all, but rather a still from lady gaga’s video for alejandro, depicting the artist with one of the actor/dancers in the clip.  it’s such a fantastic image, though.  this incredibly intimate pose, but with assigned gender-roles thoroughly reversed.  i know people make a fuss about the fact that the men in this clip wear heels a lot, but (as i will likely get around to exploring further in another article) i don’t think clothes actually count for that much subversion on their own.  it’s the body language that makes this subversive, not the garments; the publicisation, in a popular forum, of a queer reimagining of nominally heterosexual sex.  plus it’s just beautiful.  i don’t find much of klein’s work particularly engaging, but i have to admit, i love this video.  and i think the madonna comparisons really fail to take into account such blatently queer moments as this.  fatshionista, by the by, has quite an interesting comparison between alejandro and madonna’s express yourself on her blog.)  

 

naomi watts for vanity fair italy, may 2010, via outsapop 

so – any lovely pictures to add?

beautiful things: cindy sherman

cindy sherman, untitled (as marilyn munroe), 1982

 

(edit: well, that’s one problem fixed.  not happy yet, but this is a little better) i have realised that, in fact, i am not sold on this new layout after all.  it’s the fact that i can’t change the collumn widths.  i post far too many pictures for this tiny little space to be practical, and it’s going to drive me crazy.  alas, i am too tired, and have far too many words to write, to alter it now.  next week.

however, i will at least leave you with an image (which, i’m afraid, you may not be able to see clearly until i change the layout.  ah well, apologies) from the paper i’m writing.  it’s by the ever-intriguing, mystery-shrouded cindy sherman, and next week i may do a second post about her with actual, you know, analysis.  it seems disrespectful to do otherwise.  she’s so worth writing about.

beautiful and terrible: one pretty film, one awesome blog, one offensive blog post.

so to begin with, this may be one of my favourite commercial/cinematic dance sequences to date.  it’s from rob marshal’s nine, a film which is utterly sexist, but graced by stunning visuals, beautiful costumes, some gorgeous dance and song sequences, and judi dench playing a charming costumier (this last alone would have added significant points, but combined with the others…well, it was worth watching once, at least).  this clip features fergie (yes, of dubious black eyed peas fame), and though she and the other dancers seem to have gotten the bottom of the barrel, costume wise (look up marion cotillard’s wardrobe, for example, and you’ll see what i mean), the choreography is gorgeous.  i love tactile dance pieces, though they don’t come along terribly often; the percussive element alone is great (though a little more common – think of stomp, or tap dogs), but the use of sand is better.  sound obscure?  you really ought to watch the clip.

still from nine, directed and produced by Rob Marshall, 2009.

i also discovered, today, a pretty fantastic blog.  it’s called the seventeen magazine project and, as implied, it’s about, well, seventeen magazine (which is, for those neither in the know – good for you – or inclined to look it up – why would you bother? – one of those awful glossy rag-mags aimed at mutilating the aesthetic sensibilities, self-worth, and world view of teenaged girls).  the seventeen magazine project…’embraces’ all this.  it is the undertaking of one pennsylvanian highschool student to live, for an entire month, by the precepts of the june/july issue of seventeen.  by following this doctrine she hopes to ‘shed some light on the modern teenage experience’.  it’s pretty hilarious.  or at least, i enjoyed reading it.  it even includes pie-charts on, say, the number of current male ‘heart-throbs’ (does that really have a hyphon?  is it one word?  do i ditch the second ‘t’?) with some kind of vampire affiliation (for the record, that’s most of them).

still from nine, directed and produced by Rob Marshall, 2009 (because i refuse to post a picture of a seventeen cover instead).

less impressive by far is this post.  to begin with i feel compelled to state the obvious: ‘ftm’ and ‘butch’ are not synonymous.  they are two separate identities.  in some people they do coexist; in some they are melded together to form a complex whole.  but not all those who are ftm are butch, and not all who are butch are ftm.  to assume that ftm and butch are always part of the same continuum (a continuum in which, it is inferred, butch is, shall we say, a ‘softer’ version) is to violently undermine, and do great disservice to, both.  for a start, it creates a hierarchy (already present, in myriad forms, in both the lesbian and trans communities, but something i think we should be actively fighting, rather than perpetuating or condoning), whereby a female-to-male trans identity is superior to that of lesbian butch, and more than that, is perceived as some kind of ‘end point’ for all female-bodied people with more masculine identities. 

it also assumes that all ftm persons are inherently ‘masculine,’ which entirely disavows a capacity for personal gender identity, and – more importantly, i think – merely reaffirms the idea that our biological bodies (even if we alter them) must match our actions.  in other words, sex and gender must correlate.  boy bodies must coincide with boy behaviours, female bodies with male identities must enact masculine traits.  i take serious issue with this.  i also think it is, on any genuine, considered queer theoretical inspection, ridiculous.

in addition to these points, the article utterly negates the ways in which these identities, and elements of them, are constantly evolving, melding, breaking and reforming in communities and individuals, a process which allows men to be femme, trans persons to be genderqueer, femmes to be masculine, etc..  when you place identities on a sliding scale, instead of appreciating each as having the potential to be a new and disparate concept of its own, you not only bind them together in inescapable hierarchy; you disallow the wonder of interference, cross-pollination, blending; not only in individuals, but in whole subcultures, and the theoretical realms they so often spawn.

objects of desire: bicycle by adeline adeline

as evidenced by the picture, i am sick, but i am keeping hope alive with this delightful piece of mechanical whimsy:

granturismo donna 1, by adeline adeline

and thoughts of my very own imminent bicycle reclamation.  i remember the joys of cycling only vaguely, from when i was about 10 years old, but from what i understand it’s a bit like flying – who doesn’t want more of that?  plus, bikes are pretty.  and the freedom of being able to get wherever i want to go, fast, no matter the time?  that’s quite fantastic too.

also, this shop has some pretty delightful baskets.   just need some sort of attack-cat/feline mascot to tote around with me…

wonderful assemblies: the secret museum, at observatory

image from the secret museum press release, by joanna ebenstein.

one of my biggest gripes with the city in which i live is our woeful excuse for a museum.  my issues are multifold: the collection on show is underwhelming and small, the curation is in popularist rather than informative style, and the space is awful (for example, they ran out of money during the construction of the children’s wing, and had to cut down on the size, thus rendering it just under the minimum height required for building the planned second story.  hence they have one level of exhbition space instead of the planned two.  it’s also designed to look like a rubix cube…but there are more than 6 colours involved.  my inner geek – always ready for action – gets particualrly pissed over this last point.  what kind of moron designs an educational building to look like an inaccurate maths puzzel?).  not to mention the fact that entry was prohibitavly expensive last time i checked (to pay for the building’s construction, says my cynical side), which is, i think, pretty much the most problematic policy you can come up with over a so-called ‘public’ building.

natural history museum lobby, london, by darrell godliman.

none of this would distress me as much, of course, if i hadn’t grown up with the old museum.  i understand that the space was smaller, not to mention that it did sort of take over the entire city library (thus rendering the books hard to house and even harder to access), and therefore finding some sort of new location was probably a good plan.  but being forced to witness the ‘upgrade’ of something gorgeous into something less…that’s always pretty awful.  plus the old museum was in that lovely victorian style.  glass cases, the orignal victorian window-boxes fitted out with animals displayed in elaborate origin-appropriate sets, wooden floors, high ceilings…it felt like a museum ought to feel.  mysterious, fascinating, and just spooky enough to give you a spinal shiver when you rounded a corner and came face to face with a partially-wrapped eqyptian mummy or diplodocus skelleton (something always leads me back to the dinosaur section - just the other day i was researching the megalodon – ie. possibly the most terrifying thing in the world: a giant, giant shark.  it could eat jaws and still have space for that oil rig with which bhp is so busy messing up the gulf of mexico).  i like that in a museum.  it’s a sort of visual/tactile onomattopea; the space makes you feel like its content.  history.  bones.  things so ancient it’s hard to wrap a tiny human life around them.

museum national d’histoire naturelle, paris, by richard ross.

the current exhibition at observatory, in new york, is a bit like that.  it’s called the secret museum, and it deals with quiet back rooms, childish skelletons (you know how enamoured the victorians were with preserving foetuses), wax medical models, all sorts of wunderkama and magic, with an edge of mortality and the deeply macarbre.  it’s run by a collection of intriguing individuals including joanna ebenstein, author of morbid anatomy, who is also the artist behind secret museum , “a photographic exhibition exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world in photographs and artifacts.”  i really wish it and observatory were in my part of the world.  i would very much love to see this one (there’s even going to be some delightful sort of closing party over the weekend).  as it is i must, not for the first time, make do with a fantastic flickr set; which is, i feel compelled to say, probably not (like so much that goes on in museums, when you think about it) for the squeamish.