Artists talks for Articulate Turns Six: What Next - Saturday 17 December 3-5pm

Artists' talks by : Sue Callanan, Chantal Grech, Cecilia White, Rox de Luca, Ro Murray, Nola Farman, Paul Sutton, Pamela Leung, Margaret Roberts, Renay Petita /Raw Contemporary 

  
ROOMSHEET

FAIR ISLE 3 OPENS WEDNESDAY 23 April 6-8pm

FAIRISLE3 ROOMSHEET

The second FAIR ISLE opening is 6-8pm Wednesday 23 April with work by: Linden Braye, Sue Callanan, Sach Catts, Clara Chow, Brigitta Gallaher, Barbara Halnan,  Justin Henderson,  Andrew Simmons,  Sardar Sinjawi,  Vicky Versa, John von Sturmer and Skye Wagner. This is the third iteration of FAIR ISLE, and will be open 11am - 5pm  Sat - Sun 26 - 27 April.

Clara Chow BUST (CHONGKWONG)

Andrew Simmons JERK (detail) 2014 

Justin Henderson Redfern Gold 2014

John von Sturmer Turtle's Head 2012

JOHN VON STURMER - DIARY OF AN ART EVENT

Hanging by a thread, or Fair Isle on the line (April - May 2014) 

Part 1

Wednesday 16 April: The idea of the homunculus, the little man, remains. A fixed element that has emerged slowly – but it was there from the start, more or less. The initial impetus was the ‘sleeve’ I found on the street – and then there was another sleeve, both made of brown paper, beautifully. I thought they were for flowers but I think T’s guess is correct: the prototypes of sleeves and thus suggestive of arms. We go from there to other body parts and the body itself. And the notion of the figure as an element of design.

Knit me a cardigan, please do, and knit me a cardigan

Later I would understand that the body is what dominates and shapes the room. Architecture is the art of the body. And so to enter architectural space …

And then the notion of pattern, the many layers of the epidermis …

It took one look at the room with the objects in it, many of them well crafted, one of them (Sturgess’s paper piece) beautiful: refined, elegant, I could stick it in the elegant apartment that I don’t have. Here, in my actual apartment it would join the general high-class grot!

K’s remark was decisive: ‘Make it yours’. Not only did I take that on board, abandoning the ‘sleeves’ but gradually converting whatever I was to produce into my own history. All art is biography, I might say – and so it is. But it doesn’t come automatically, as it were; it’s not auto or self in that sense. But it does come unbidden

Thursday 17 April: The room as I saw it yesterday is a mess: confusion, a tangle, competing egos. The wall still dominates – for indeed it is a space in which the wall does dominate. Sue’s concertina pipe (Sue Callanan, Fixtures and Fittings) has the virtue of adding width to the space as it ‘worms’ around, ‘knitting’ the room together. Otherwise it is a mad jumble sale, all competing for attention. Alone much of the work would be good but with these odd juxtapositions in which there is no real communication, everyone heading towards their own Godhead!

But isn’t that how it is, the modern condition, the gaggle-babble insistence of voices all broadcasting on their own special frequency – and a sense here that everything is enlarged beyond what it or the room can endure? Too big too big too big, the death of intimacy – and control. Incomprehensible. And we, those trying to take it all in, uncomprehending, confused, alarmed even. It’s disconcerting. When I left the room I said to myself ‘space debris’.

Mostly when I leave a gallery – certainly the AGNSW – even with its mediocre or fatigued art - I look afresh at my world, the world, the world out there. All becomes art. In this case it wasn’t that the outside provided unexpected artistic pleasures – but it came as a relief. I’d escaped the abattoir, the slaughtered carcases of ideas that, smaller and less aggressive, might have appealed. What might have thrived as bilbies became monstrous charolais, a scene from Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978). In the actual abattoir the bodies of the slaughtered animals create a sort of seriality – so that they get reduced into themselves – and into the ‘row’. There is a rhythm: tick tock, the dread metronome of death rings out, tick tock tick tock. And we are driven to look at Man Ray’s metronome with a new – if again uncomprehending – eye. For in the metronomic the repetition is in the action, a sort of reverse pendulum – not in the object itself. It reduces all time to a simulacrum of itself

Maybe this is true of all objects

Ah, the room, space. There are the walls, the floor, the ceilings, the ‘cubicle’ that is created by these elements. Three surface spaces (look up, look down – but principally look across) and a space that things fold or disappear into, die almost like tombstones. This is why I like Sturgess’s work: it is a flue, it sends some vapour up into the air. All the better that this vap’rous substance is invisible - an untainted if not entirely safe exudation. (No exhalation is entirely safe!) It creates a flux in itself, it lives and breathes. It’s stillness is only apparent. It may even speak – a silent voice but not mute, not by any means. An extended sigh – or a secret growl

I look for a fourth dimension – even though I may have found one: the cubicle with its heavy air at the bottom and its lighter air at the top. For mostly everything seems wedded to the wall – or the floor. I think if I had my choice again I might just put in a concrete pipe – one of those Hume pipes, diameter about 4’. The fourth – or is it a fifth? – dimension is a passage, a moving through: a liminal space, some might say, a worm hole, a tunnel, the sort of cave speleologists are so fond of, a tight squeeze which cannot be too cluttered. In this respect Sue’s piping only has exteriority: we can follow it with the eye but we can’t place ourselves inside it. We cannot experience the interiority of the pipe, of being enclosed in that half-exuberant blood vessel …

There is a sort of echo of this outside: a bathtub in the shop window of an establishment that sells bathroom items. Just across the road. It’s an elegant shape. Across the bottom in large regular letters it says PARADIS. Maybe for someone. I treat it as an anagram: SID A RAP, RAP SAID, PAR SAID, PARSED, PARSLEY, PERHAPS … The shape and run of associations, the gradual deformation and re-working of the original impulse which – paradoxically – only emerges later, virtually at the end of the day. We in fact work backwards, towards the original impulse[1]

We head towards Body Parts …

continued -  PDF of Diary of an Art Event parts 1,2 & 3

John von Sturmer

e-mail: johnvon@bigpond.com

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[1] From PARADIS we might have gone down a different route: PARADIS … PARODY … PARODIC… PARDON! There are threads – and threads

FAIR ISLE 2 open Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 April 11am - 5pm

L-R: Rose Ann McGreevy, Sue Callanan (artwork& person),
John Von Sturmer (person), Helen L Sturgess, Brigitta Gallaher
photo Brigitta Gallaher

front: Sue Callanan, back: Alan Rose

Bettina Bruder

L-R: Rose Ann McGreevy, Barbara Halnan, Sue Callanan

Barbara Halnan, Helen L Sturgess

Skye Wagner

Eye of Horus: Lost and Found - open day Saturday 10 March 11am - 5pm

You are invited to the last day of Eye of Horus: Lost and Found, a project by Toni Warburton, in dialogue with John von Sturmer:


Saturday 10 March, 11 am - 5 pm
 at Articulate project space
497 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt 2040.

Eye of Horus: Lost and Found - John von Sturmer's Reality Check

Day 1

OK, so you can wake with a question: What is ‘real’? When have you or do

you feel most real? When do you feel reality is on your side – or against you

for that matter? Somehow we think that reality should be our ally – but is it?

What we might say is that any experience or encounter with the real –

whatever that is – defines our view of what the future will or should be.

Utopianism is never, as it were, off the planet, for it is based in experience.

Experience guides us, whether we like it or not or know it or not. Standing

against experience is the injunction. That too is an experience. To be told

what to do or how to think. We can conform or we can refuse or we can

hover in a sort of questioning state. In each case our relationship to our own

experiencing is modulated or shaped – to such a degree that if we think about

it we may think that refusal – of the command, as we shall call it – is the only

real emancipatory strategy. But freedom from what? Only the command

itself, of the freedom to experience experience as experience itself?

Today I’ve been asked to participate in an art show/event. Short notice. That

is probably good. It may even suit given my commitment to the immediacy of

the now.

Now, what is that? Something that in the next hair’s breadth/breath will be

then, involving a shift from experiencing – ‘We are experiencing this now’ – to

‘I experienced this’. Except we may already be in anticipatory mode so that

the experience is casually shelved or put back in the drawer like the knives

and forks we have just neatly dried. You hang up the tea towel. On it there’s a

view of a woman’s back. On one side there is a knife – the right side of

course. On the other side, the left side there is a fork. Please note carefully,

the symbolic order is nicely maintained. Scrupulously, we might even say,

except that what is characteristic of the symbolic order is that it is merely

enacted. So that what we experience as real may simply be the enactment of

the symbolic order. That is our ordering reality. To experience the symbolic

order as the symbolic order you have to recognise its symbolic function or

aspect.

(click here to continue reading)

Eye of Horus / Lost and found - Day 6

above 2: Pavagadh (Gujarat)

 Above: Toni Warburton; Below: John Von Sturmer (objects for scanning)

 

 below: Toni Warburton

TONI WARBURTON 'Eye of Horus / lost and found' 27 February - 11 March

This project will retrieve  some things  that are not completely lost, not completely forgotten: a collaborative artists’ book / ideas for exhibitions / project proposals that  have  ideas that stick / drawings  about walks / drawings about mountains / 8mm films / photographs / dialogues.

Installed at articulate today

Token gestures

(Placed In a line on the floor beside the brick wall)

Watercolour tracings of objects in hand  onto print out of 4 pages of  reality  check  by invited artist John von Sturmer

“The plan was for me to simply continue to write (not so simple) and to produce a new text every day - as well as a scan. Therefore my work would be self-documenting. Of course this immediately draws attention to the restricted and selective nature of all/any documentation/documenting process”jvs

1 Pocket Diary/ 2.zip pencil case/ 3 change purse and penknife/4 open ray ban sunglasses case/ 4. wooden comb

Retrievals Placed on gallery floor

Waterfall words to a song by Jimy Hendrix  (tw)

Image scan and scan manifesto text  (jvs emails) January2012

Mountain drawings on canvas and muslin

Redemptive gestures

Yesterday I put the animation rostrum designed and made for me by my father ,and consigned to the weather without my knowledge, into my car. 

Today I placed it  on the floor of  the gallery,  under  the stair case,  and  began to write a text   about the 8 mm animated films I made with the help of this contraption.

Toni Warburton

Eye of Horus / lost and found is the eighth of Articulate's project space projects