New Values opened last night

photos: William Seeto

New Values with Amanda Williams and Uri Auerbach opens Friday 16 September 6-8pm

New Values shows photographs and sculpture

Opening Friday 16th September 2016
Exhibition continues Fri - Sunday 11am-5pm,
17 September - 2 October
Finissage drinks Sat 1 Oct 2pm

"According to (Tristan) Tzara, the ideal 'dwelling place' is 'the prenatal comfort' of the mother; and so, against the 'aesthetics of castration called modern, he calls, outrageously enough, for an 'architecture of the womb.' ” Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods

L: Uri Auerbach, Untitled (Vatican Museum) III, 2015; R: Amanda Williams, Untitled (Walking on the moon) 2016

 
Events, accidents and associated crises are situations that we will always encounter however big or small, public or private, tragic or rewarding they may ultimately be. Life is propelled into being by such moments and the world around us, contained and spinning in an ever-expanding universe, is the result of one such event, a very big bang – the original accident perhaps?

The way we contend with and emotionally process such events has changed dramatically in recent times. Events in one hemisphere travel at the speed of light towards the other via image, text and sound feeds. Moments are captured and disseminated instantaneously and often before the event has finished unfolding, with the resulting ruptures in continuity having a profoundly unsettling influence on our collective and individual psyche. Technology allows for and encourages people to share and connect second by second opening up a space, a void, into which we are encouraged to seek support and feel 'at home', a place where the personal becomes public, and the public, becomes personal. The event and the representation are seemingly interchangeable, and the “world out there” is both as real and as unreal as it’s virtual double.

New Values offers no answers. It simply offers a view into the psyche of two artists embracing the day-to-day realities of life in the event cycle. Traversing the terrain is emotional and rewarding.

Biographies:

Amanda Williams is a photographic artist interested in architectural modernism and the history of photography. Current work engages with the allegory of the cave and the concept of entropy by using materials and processes that evolve and change over time – such as the use of unfixed and solarized gelatin silver prints and bleached C-Type prints. Recent group exhibitions include #memoryarchive Photo Award, Photobook Melbourne 2016, GAFFA Photo Fest Award, 2016, Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award 2015, Bowness Photography Prize at Monash Gallery of Art 2015. Recent solo exhibition: Towards a New Architecture, Firstdraft Sydney 2015.

Amanda Williams 
Amanda Williams 

Uri Auerbach works across photography, sculpture and installation to explore the social creation of meaning. His practice traces the evolution of socially constructed narratives that have become distorted, mutated or corrupted over time. His works typically address concepts that have become hollowed out by use and filled with new, often contrary meanings. Areas of this research have included fame, progress, leisure, and masculinity. Uri Auerbach’s work, A River is currently showing at UNSW Galleries as part of the 2016 John Fries Award.
 Uri Auerbach 

Thanks to Penny Ryan from Adrian Hall's yes YOU WILL be

Thanks to Penny Ryan, for the loan of "Confined Hearts Project" instagram:#confinedheartsproject . .

     Sydney visit always a pleasure no matter how infrequent, a privileged society in many ways even for some humbler folk. But under attack: a volatile time. And as the grander visions receded and reality took over for me, the real issues - global even; became more clarified and prominent as they are seeming more so, here in Sydney, and everywhere. Those diverse issues as oddly linked, as post-communist criminality and populist-fascism on other Continents. And locally also seem more conspicuous, as virulent.

     My daily communication with Sidney Boyo, on Samos, Greece, is becoming more sad. His more pressing refugee camp issues with riot, protest, predators, children and violence, and desperation: hunger, boredom, sanitation, privation; simply 'terrible' his word, which with the photos which have arrived, resonate with the true awful meaning of that word. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.

     So my heart goes with you on your Confined Hearts mission, Penny - for whatever manner we might find to illuminate the plight of those confined peoples: who after all are ourselves - our kin, our suffering conscience; no matter how small, how in the scheme of things futile or absurd seeming; I believe for all our dignity as human beings it is essential that we do strive. Thank you for your trying.

This project is supported by funding from Leichhardt Council

Adrian Hall's yes YOU WILL be ends for now

watch last day exerpts on vimeo

watch last day exerpts on vimeo

email this morning - 

adrian, it has been a pleasure and a very interesting experience, working with someone at such a remove and yet so close somehow, filled with lots of time compressions, ellipsis and strange contingency. i hope it has worked out inarticulately, as only good work can, as good work only can, and that your mind has been spinning as contentedly as mine has contemplating how weird everything is, and how frail and beautiful and vain our most carefully thought out structures are, and how absolutely not tragic it is that all of it will turn to dust. makes it more of a celebration somehow. a space ritual. Chris Fortescue

This project is supported by funding from Leichhardt Council

 

yes YOU WILL be - final weekend

Yes YOU WILL be is a live work fluctuating in intensity over 3 weeks, a continuity or collection of occurrences, with some more specifically planned than others. All are collaborations of some sort—with past works, with other artists or with visitors to the space. They are accompanied by the detritus of earlier occurrences, including videos and objects they left behind.

Those planned for the final weekend are:
Friday 9 September 3-5pm
Saturday 10 September 3-5pm
Sunday 11 September 4-6pm - with stuff from Chris Fortescue, John Gillies and more

The space is open from 11am each day, and other occurrences may begin at any time, prompted for example by the arrival of a visitor, continue with narration prompted by something—such as the random image in the projection-sequence of past events or occurrences—and come to a conclusion by a decision by visitors to leave, or by Adrian to bring the narrative to a conclusion. As Adrian says in one conversation, 'there is the constant stream of traffic outside the door, and I am inside, and it's diffusing the traditional barriers between that outside and this inside that intrigues me the most. . .'

While not originally presented as part of the project space project (the strand of Articulate's program in which artists use the space as a project space, for which Articulate was originally set up), Yes YOU WILL be clearly belongs there—as we would expect as Articulate's interest in project space work comes primarily from what its founders learned with Adrian back in the Sculpture department of Sydney College of the Arts in the 1980s.

Cyclops / basketcase

This project is supported by funding from Leichhardt Council

Adrian Hall - yes YOU WILL be - final weekend coming up

reply to Chris Fortescue in Vienna: 6 September 2016 11:07:16 AM AEST, Re: haus wittgenstein

Wonderful story Chris.
Thank you.

I have looped Ingrid playing the three bars,
and it will be set today, up on a smaller monitor,
where it will quietly insist that extreme passion for
simple seeming chords might span centuries and continents.
And live on as throbbing guilt for absurd and trashy times.
Not nostalgia, but reminders that "sublime" is a state
which can exist today as a model for which to strive.

That fortunes might have been spent, that workers were nagged,
that immoral drifts of questionable swag dispensed in this manner -
all placed in their context by that remaining structure.
Intense, obsessive, vainglorious but in essence: true.

There is a fine novel I have, a four hour flight away,
around those individuals and their fortunes,
I shall find it for you. It rung a bell on your first letter,
which is how I came to ask that question,
'might there be a slide of that haus ?'
I have asked young Viennese about it -
even Googled with one to view it by satellite,
so he could recognise it as the place near
his highschool/academy/nannas . . .
he could have I feel, described the local MacDonald
Burghery better, and with more interest.

Time spent, which seemed necessary -
on door handles, on those lights, on the shutters;
for dark evenings perfectly illumined
for the sound of exquisite mechanical pianos resonating,
buffeting the audiences - stirring their refined emotions,
to more significant realisations. Perhaps.

Here, at my big round table, I sit;
letting the flicker through the vertical glass doors;
of vehicular torrent tear into the city for daily breads . . .
along the road from Parramatta.

Ingrid, plays those gentle sounds while underlying them,
the dreadful triple confession reverberates.

Tomorrow Margaret Seymour visits to rescue
my failed vain dreams of streaming,
and logging and blogging and doing -
all synchronously.

I have discovered, at 73 there are limitations
which need be attacked despite,
and then recognised despite the prideful self.
A team of techies would have helped,
but what we have is closer to reality,
and in simpler manner
the simple truth of a simple and elderly chap.

In a little more time, I shall send you pix,
and evidence of your fine contribution,
with Margaret's help it shall be "up there"
wherever that is. And you might get to it first.

At the great round table . . .
with uncommon regard for your efforts.
A.

Below,
a Reconstruction - photographed by Margaret Roberts of:

" Art in the Age of Mechanical Engineering -
a Story of Ice and Foolishness."
First performed alone, from Motueka, Tasman  to Aramoana, Otago, Aotearoa. October 2015.
17 hours, then to the Blue Oyster Ancillary, Dunedin, for eighty dollars in shrapnel.

Recounted with actions at Articulate Project Space, Sydney, September 2016."

Kevin Sheehan who lives 'up the mountains'
is working with those three bars, the refrain -
which cropped up, here last Thursday incidentally.
As did Ingrid too of course.
I am trying to pull together a fitting occurrence for this Sunday.
Possibly solo/verbal/ranting/rolling/reminiscing/recollecting
p'raps I shall try a conducted Google visit to Vienna,
projected?
We shall see . . . when we see.
Good thoughts - y'all.

This project is supported by funding from Leichhardt Council

Adrian Hall - yes YOU Will be - part of a conversation

This is the fairly accurate transcription of the beginning and end of a conversation that was recorded on Sunday 4 September between Adrian Hall and Margaret Roberts about yes YOU WILL be, a work in which conversations are one component.

What lead you to use this word 'occurrence' to describe what you do?

'Occurrence' is a word which was used by a painter in Dunedin whose name is Kim Peters, who wrote a little thing recently on my behalf and that was her word to describe what I get up to. Usually I say 'live work' and leave it at that.

A few years ago I made lengthy works with 2 other friends/colleagues, Alastair MacLennan and André Stitt—one version of 10 days in Dunedin and then 2 years later they raised funds from the British Council for me to go to Belfast for another for 5 sessions.  Both of them are really energetic people. I mention this because when it came for me to promote them initially in Dunedin I was checking on how they wanted to be described, and so on. Andre is also not a performance artist, he is well known in the northern hemisphere for his Akshuns. He grew up on building sites after graduating from the Belfast College of Art. 

Alastair does things he calls actuations. He is very disciplined, almost metaphysical, shamanistic—some of these words are not right—and studied zen buddhism for many rears, starting with live work after being given an insoluble riddle by his zen master in Chicago. The riddle was 'how to improve the world by painting'.  After being asked that riddle Alastair worked in various cafes & restaurants washing dishes for period of 2 years while he thought about it . And during that time he found it necessary to make a lot of live work in the street. We are talking 1970s and 80s, and this process possibly started in Nova Scotia in Canada, after which he moved around various places and ended up in Belfast. He started doing one-day performances on his studio day, when he went out into the Belfast streets. It was really very dangerous as it was a war zone, patrolled by the British army. 

Alastair would do 8-9 hour works. One in particular is where he transformed a covered bridge between two buildings into a bus, almost by accident, because he arranged chairs in it like a bus. You walked down the centre isle of this covered bridge–it was lousy weather at the time as it was a normal Belfast winter.  I came down there 3 or 4 times a day, and Alastair was hunched in one of the nearside chairs by the window with a little transistor radio or something  to his ear and on it was a loop of Elvis singing Blue Moon, that melancholic teenage song from the late 50s. After I passed through this space several times I sat down thinking Alastair is at it again, but he's a nice chap, so I sat down 3-4 rows behind him, clutching a bunch of papers from admin at the art school. I just sat and I had this peculiar experience whereby every bus I had ever ridden on and every journey anywhere, I was living them all again. And it seemed to me in this space that Alastair had created just by 2 or 3 dozen regular office chairs, it seemed that all those chairs were occupied by people, other people, and it was the strangest experience I had ever had in an art space.  

That was all there was to it. It was alive and I am neither superstitious or a cosmic believer, if anything I am a sceptic, but I was affected by this simple arrangement of chairs and the figure of the man with his head against the condensation-streaked  window and this melancholic song, all day. So when he says actuations I know exactly what he means because that is what he tries to set up.

 And for myself  I have been doing live works since I worked with Yoko in the mid 60s. I helped Yoko with Cut Piece in Europe, possibly only the second time after New York, and they were nearly always done on a stage and they were very rough and very ragged and left a lot to be desired in many ways. It makes me laugh how Cut Piece is so venerated now as when it was done in London it was such a shambles—her husband at the time and I were standing either side so that when largely drunken poets came out of the audience we were watching out. Very few people took it very seriously, or participated. It was really very tame, not the dangerous thing it turned into. 

Anyway, Yoko did events, Andre was akshuns, Alistair did actuations, I have always tended to do live work because I was stuck for a word. The live work I have been doing -  I have done guerrilla works that  are perhaps unremarkable but sometimes very effective. One on the roof of a car which ultimately led to the loss of my academic job as it was provocative. I am very jealous of and thoroughly believe in the power of art, and artists should always try to have the last word. Its our strength and our fortitude for that which allows things I believe to be transformed.  Alastair transforms in a subjective way within the field of experience of the viewer and other kinds of transformations may be enacted more directly by provocations and so on.

So occurrence is the best word for what I try to do at the moment because I am most interested in forms that are possibly anti establishment, anti institution and anti frame, and this situation here, although it's in an art space, you cross the threshold and art might happen, I feel privileged to be able to follow my own nose here and create the kind of blurred situation or state between reality and something that I am nudging along, in order to see what will happen. And its unpremeditated largely and the work which I have made in the in the past always has that blurred edge even if they have been in designated art spaces—or not. At the moment occurrences feel right - there is the constant stream of traffic outside the door, and I am inside, and it's diffusing the traditional barriers between that outside and this inside that intrigues me the most if you think of ...

.....

This idea that you discovered yesterday, that what you call an occurrence can seem to just happen, is that connected to all those other ideas we have been talking about?

Not directly. For the next few days I am going to be employing all my  awarenesses and all my experiences to recognise a moment where they might automatically come into play. Yesterday was a magical moment, everything was almost right, I was tired enough, relaxed enough, panic-stricken enough, and three total strangers caused me to act in a way which became appropriate in the way that I perceive the world, and an occurrence happened, I think,  that had a beginning and an end, it had a moral and it was drawn from my vivid experiences, and those people let me do it to them. They followed me around and they left at the end. And because of my intensity and desperation in doing it, I think they went out at the end feeling more informed in a way  about the world they were stepping into. That's very arrogant for me to say that, but I felt that and I believed that, and when you saw me last evening I was still in the state of ecstasy about having experienced this very spontaneous thing. 

I believe it was  very much like when I was an art student, a teacher told me that the wonderful things about a Rembrandt drawing was that it didn't make any difference if it was 20 seconds in the doing of it,  2 minutes in doing of it or 2 days in the doing of it. It was almost as if Rembrandt was so attuned to his draftsmanship and observation of the world that he could pull away any moment and that would be a coherent statement. So if you took the whole time that it might take somebody to do that drawing or that etching, and that was a salami, you could take a slice of salami from any part of that giant sausage and it would be coherent and that was the genius which was Rembrandt—that a 3 minute drawing would have the power and acuity of a 3-day drawing. 

And that was because he was primed and ready to commit that thing within the terms of his experience and the terms of his expectations and the terms of his abilities. He was primed. Yesterday it felt right to me because I was primed to be activated, and without any conscious planning, was able to draw on the things around me, draw on my own experiences, draw on my own abilities, such as they are which are very modest, and create 35 minutes of transformative magic in a space which was in a peculiar way receptive.  And just for that short space of time, for those 3 complete strangers, something happened which was mysterious. And I know it was powerful because you came in at the end and I said there is no documentation, but it happened. That was part of the magic, this very extraordinary thing happened, they actually hung with me and were prepared to be bored. That was trust. I carried on doing very boring and simple things. That was my trust that they might find it interesting or they'd go away. They didn't.  They hung in. Together we accomplished this journey which was a literal narrative on my part, but it happened, and that pleased me greatly.   

You were talking earlier about trust in buildings and so on - perhaps one of the functions of being an artist is to induce lack of trust or awareness and as you were talking about trust in the building I looked up at that rock above your head and i thought  if that is not questioning the safety of this structure and everything about it, and even the safety and your confidence in being, then I'm a Dutchman. 

This project is supported by funding from Leichhardt Council

Adrian Hall - Yes YOU WILL be - second weekend starts

Peter Callas "I would have run but I had a heavy head Cold." 1980

together with video from Chris Fortescue, of Ingrid Seier playing Wittgenstein only three bars, Grand Piano - Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna.

"I Destroy, I Destroy, I Destroy."

Starts at 6.00pm, Thursday 1 September

features Nathan Thomson, Kevin Sheehan, Adrian Hall as:

"ALIAS - Offshore"

see more on vimeo

This project is supported by funding from Leichhardt Council