Chaser Annual 09

I would rate this as the third best annual. Maybe the fourth.

Travel Story: Hawaiian Islands

Click here to download this story as a PDF, with Julian Kingma’s photos.

Room sheet: Julian Meagher at Chalk Horse

The Invisible Truth Of Bodies

“OK, then, story number two – did he dissect a cat for artistic purposes? ‘For sure. Now here is the deal.

Just another blog.

There’s every chance no-one is reading this at present.

Profile: Fiona Hall

Fiona Hall has a very different reputation London from the one she enjoys here. Here, her reputation as an energetic, original contemporary artist has brought her accolades, in a six room, two level retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. There, she is known as the woman interested in banknotes with boats on them. Like beehives, sardine cans, camouflage and Tupperware, the notes are the currency of Hall’s work; idiosyncratic, even arcane objects that she collects into systems of her own making. In the work When my boat comes in, the system says something about trade: the money is covered in illustrations of cash crops that originate in the same countries the bank notes themselves do. Got that?

It’s also a work in progress. One of the many ideas and thoughts animating Hall’s meagre frame is a list of banknotes that need crops, and crops that need banknotes. “It’s been a really fun challenge,” she says. “And it’s an ongoing work I still have a list of banknotes that need crops, and crops that need banknotes. Every time I go into that specialist banknotes shop, even if I haven’t been there for months, they remember me, and usually have something to show me.”

Like so many of Hall’s works, When my boat comes in uses unorthodox juxtaposition to tease out the volatile, fraught, often hidden relationship between nature and humanity. The vagaries of the natural world – where a particular plant grows, and what its uses are – have launched and crumbled empires, shackled millions into slavery and a few into wealth, and left their indelible mark all over the world. Paper currency was one consequence of trade, and in Hall’s view, it’s still part of systematic oppression and exploitation, as dangerous as the old forms of slavery, and far more insidious.

Even the show itself is ordered with a unique taxonomy – the rooms aren’t presented chronologically, but around six themes: CONSUMPTION, BODY, SYMBIOSIS, TRADE, TERRITORY and PARADISE – and watching the carefully labelled and packed items being unpacked, the MCA feels like one of the natural history museums where Hall spends so much of her time. “The world where I grew up is a Western world, where the drive is to classify everything, to pigeonhole it,” she says. “And that seems to have a lot to do with how the Western mind somehow comforts itself. Because we think that to be able to name something is to know it… we acknowledge now that we’re finding and classifying things that are on the brink of extinction. But to classify something doesn’t mean we value it.”

The valuation is a passionate process for Hall, but it doesn’t become polemical, even when its political. Tender, a series of bird’s nests made from shredded US dollars, could be called a protest, but Hall describes it as “a lament”. “In our culture, it’s the role more of advertising and the media to assert one position or another,” she says. “It’s perhaps more interesting to present a set of circumstances. You create a state of affairs, that… you might have some very strong ideas in your own mind about what you’re trying to say, but you hope that you make it something which different members of a multifaceted audience that comes to look at art. Different people might read something in different ways, and I don’t think it’s the artist’s role, and certainly I don’t feel it’s my role to aim is to create work that ” has clarity with its agenda, but it’s not hitting a message home in a blatant way. I’m trying to investigate a territory, with less dogmatic approach. It’s assertive, but its not prescriptive.”

As a corrective to advertising hoardings and saturated colour, Hall’s dealings with consumerism are oblique and nuanced – a jumble of Tupperware containers with lights inside them flash messages in Morse code. No translation is given. The unrecognised message is an SOS resulting from “being trapped in a world of our own making, but it’s not really of our own making. Perhaps over time, over an extended time, my artistic practice is one which makes you realise more and more how extraordinary the world is. And it makes you realise how lucky you are to be experiencing it, and makes you feel even more fortunate if you happen to be able to investigate that world and then have an audience to respond. It’s a privileged position.” (Time Out Sydney, 12/04/08)

Profile: Grant Levy

PE teacher Grant Levy started playing poker online for fun – and three years later went on to become the first Australian to win a million dollars playing poker on home soil. He still teaches PE.

The skills to make a million in poker and make a million in life aren’t very different. I think there’s more similarities and correlations than differences. In poker and business, if you don’t have a smart mind and you’re not mentally tough, you’re not going to succeed. Mental toughness is the biggest thing, you need to sit around for 14 hours a day four days in a row, without making a mistake, to be able to win.

I’ve always been competitive. When I started playing, I never struggled. I’ve never been a player that’s gone out there and lost a lot of money playing. But at the same time, I didn’t have the success I’d had in the last six months. It was a steady progression, but I really enjoyed playing. I used to be heavily into my sports.

I don’t really get intimidated. Everyone’s getting two cards, I know how to play the game. But there’s a lot of players I sit back and watch and respect. Joe Hashem has won a world championship, and I’ve played him a couple of times – he’s quality. When you’ve won a tournament, people go after you. People play a lot differently against you. Since I’ve won, they’re a lot more aggressive, and they don’t mind if they’re an underdog in their hand, they’re happy to get their chips in, because either way they’ve got a story. If they lose, they’re expected to lose against the champion, so to speak, and if they win they’ve got bragging rights. You have to change the way you play as well. I throw in a couple of things here and there, and if people start to get a read on me, I’ll change my strategy a little bit. But when people see you on TV and read about you, they tend to know how you play.

During a tournament you run on adrenaline. When you’re playing 14 hour days, it’s so draining, but I tend to drink a lot of coffee, or Red Bull, to keep me awake and buzzing. As soon as you finish it’s just this massive crash. And when you’ve just won a tournament, the magnitude of what you’ve done doesn’t sink in until after a day or two. I remember when I won in Sydney, it took me a good week to catch up on sleep and just start to get my life back together. I have a young family so they don’t know what I’ve done the night before. They wake me at 6am after I finish playing at 4am. It’s not all glamour. I tried to stay as normal as possible after the win. It’s helped in terms of the fact that I own two houses without a mortgage, but most of it is stowed away in shares, and term deposits and things like that. We don’t want to go out and have the extravagant million dollar lifestyle, so to speak.

Professional gamblers gamble on everything. Prop [proposition] bets are just the way of life in the poker world. Mine are done at the poker table – we’d bet on whether the next card is going to be red or black, who will last longer at the tournament, things like that. One bet I regretted was where I had a bet with one guy at the Aussie Millions, about how many starters they’ll get at a certain tournament and I set it at 500, and he had to pick the over or under, and he picked over, and absolutely smashed it by 60 or 70 starters. I was on the line trying to get some people to not come in. That wasn’t too much fun.

My students love it. They keep giving me a little sledge – “the million dollar man” – every time I walk past. And they ask me for some money so they can buy some lunch. They see it as a bit of celebrity walking around the place. There’s a few, some of the older kids, who’ve been playing for a couple of years just with their mates, card nights around the traps, and they play for a little bit of fun here and there, and they always offer to play me and say they’ll beat me, say I’ve got nothing. But I say “Sledge me as much as you want boys, I’ve got the runs on the board.” (Time Out Sydney, 2/04/08)

Review: Sam Leach – negentropies

Imagine you are a documentary maker, filming a Galapagos tortoise at the point of mishap. Watching it tip onto its back, you must decide whether to intervene, and change the course of nature, or allow things to run their course, and let the thing perish. Sam Leach’s work is drawn from moments of intervention or non-intervention in the lives of animals like these, except we don’t know who has flipped the tortoise – or which way.

The word the Archibald finalist has chosen for the title, negentropies, comes from the idea proposed by the Erwin Schrödinger that the energy life “feeds” on goes against the grain of the universe. In 19 classically detailed painting, most painted on copper encased in a thick layer of resin (copper itself being a material notoriously prone to entropy), Leach presents a coterie of strange animals. Not just animals but specimens, prey, chimeras: beings trapped in a zombie state somewhere between life and death. A regal albino peacock has no feet. A hare in a snare on closer inspection is a Pig Rabbit Pig. How, or even if, these animals died it’s impossible to tell. Despite the detail of the paintings (Leach’s practice is inspired by the classical Dutch still-life tradition and perhaps also earlier, more macabre Northern European Masters like Dürer and Hans Holbein), the narratives are obscured.

There are clues though: subtle symbols, veiled references. There are Greek letters picked out in pixels of Defcon red, laden with alchemical, even occult overtones. There are telling titles: Leach’s own tortoise, Des Esseintes Tortoise, is a collapsed, parched looking creature, in sickly embryonic pink. It’s the pitiful creature from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against Nature), the tortoise covered in jewels by a neurotic, aesthete nobleman, Des Esseintes. Des Esseintes wants a moving, sparkling, living ornament, but ends up with a dead animal suffocated by art. In Leach’s version there’s a single, tiny blue sapphire on the animal’s shell. Hidden somewhere in the artist’s cabinet of curiosities, there’s something like culpability. (Time Out Sydney, 2/04/08)

Interview: Robin Nevin

The first lady of Sydney theatre is moving back from the boardroom to the boards, and speaks about her relief at relinquishing control of the Sydney Theatre Company, and the fresh excitement of performing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

You’ve spoken before about the difficulty of changing back into an acting role after not acting for a while. Did you have that problem this time? Not so much, for a couple of reasons. One reason is that I’m no longer doing the big job of running STC, and that’s made a significant difference, a difference I really could not have imagined. For 15 years, I’ve been in management positions, and have been acting and directing at the same time as holding those very responsible positions. I think (as I’ve noted on other occasions) that you do develop a different side of your brain, and different muscles and different skills that are required when you’re running an organization, skills that are very different to those required by an actor. But now, I’m free of the pressure of responding to any of those learned skills – skills that I have really developed quite impressively, as far as I was concerned. Now I don’t need them, I can abandon all of those and just simply be an actress in the room.

How else is The Year Of Magical Thinking different? That’s one reason – really feeling huge sense of relief having relinquished that position. The other one is this is a piece… it’s not like a play, so in a way it requires the same skills but others as well. For a start, it’s an enormous learning task. It’s a whole evening, an hour and a half, where it’s just me. So I’ve had to learn this very quite massive piece of work. And it requires a relationship between the actress and the audience. I haven’t yet had that, because I haven’t yet had an audience and I’m really looking forward to the last piece of the equation. But as I said it’s not like being in a play – it’s a different experience – and so I think for those two reasons. And because I had seven weeks’ break, which I haven’t had in 15 years.

You sound like you could just shrug off that management side of yourself, as if it’s been a separate entity to you. Do you think that’s possible? No I’m still me, I just don’t have all the responsibility, therefore I don’t have to apply my mind to those sorts of issues and challenges that I was consumed by. Apart from the daily issues that might arise, there was the major planning cycle of STC play programming. It’s offloading an enormous number of responsibilities and challenges, and so my brain, the space in there… there’s space to think, I’m not running.

You have to be a bit clairvoyant planning such long seasons. How do you ensure something stays relevant? By responding to artists really. I had a strong awareness of the threat of staying power of various wars. So indeed my programming was influenced by Iraq, our presence in Iraq. But in terms of trying to second-guess the future, the best way to do that I think is through artists. Apart from your general awareness of what’s happening in the world around you, conversations with artists reveal their significant imaginings, and they’re in touch with the world and their own place in it, so you respond to them. But then there’s the politics, and well, what can you do. You’re constantly working with new arts ministers, different politicians, new sponsors – you just learn how to do that. I’m not quite sure how to answer your question.

Was it a difficult thing to let go of the company? No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Have you not picked this up from what I’ve been saying? People were very sympathetic. There were kindly comments last year, predicting that this year I would find it difficult to let go and hand over. The reverse is the case: it was instant. I was very prepared for leaving, very ready, very prepared and looking forward to it. Of course, I did have the question in my own mind, ‘how would I respond to letting go of such an enormous file of challenging matters that had to be dealt with constantly?’. What would I do with the space in my head? What would I do with my ideas? However the space in my head has been absolutely been filled with The Year of Magical Thinking. I think Joan Didion is one of those women you’re happy to have in your mind. She’s a highly intelligent and articulate women whose personal stories are very vividly told. I’m happy to have the brain space filled with Joan Didion’s story.

How have you dealt with this play? What sort of preparation do you do to convey something of this length by yourself, when you have no other actors to work with? And how does a director steer you through that process? It’s not always hard slog, though much of it is. Because it’s structured in such a fascinating and accomplished way the challenges along the road have been many and varied. They’ve really absorbed me. The woman is telling, giving an account of her year of magical thinking, and I think she does it in a very generous way, in service to the people to whom she’s talking. But along the way, while she comes along for the evening prepared to share this story with her audience, she becomes tricked by certain memories, which trigger off little emotional cues and she gets trapped by those things. And they’re quite difficult to uncover and shape and define and relive. Also what I’ve found, which I’ve never encountered in my life before on stage, is that the actor gets tricked also into a sudden uncovering of the emotional well, and so an emotion erupts unexpectedly and I’ve never encountered that before in my life. Each time I do it, I find this emotional response happens in a different place. That’s entirely unexpected and entirely unusual. It must be exciting as well. The whole thing is exciting; it’s kind of tortuously difficult and exciting at the same time, if you can get your mind around that. I mean an actor will know what I’m talking about. It’s a very big challenge, but I’m ready for the challenge. I’m really excited about getting an audience, because that’s where the key to the evening lies, in my relationship with the audience. I talk to the audience directly. There are many examples, and many moments when I get drawn into quite a deep and internal reflection. But I always go back to them. (Time Out Sydney, 2/4/08)

Why the Archibald Prize is like professional wrestling

Take an award, and add history and controversy until it becomes a phenomenon. The result is something like the Oscars, where merit is no longer the chief criterion guiding the judging. Now add farce, and horsetrading. We have the Eurovision Song Contest. Make the controversies endless, the rules diaphanous, rig the outcome and give the administrators, judges and critics roles in the thing being judged. We have the World Wrestling Entertainment Championship… and the Archibald Prize.

It’s a useful analogy if only because professional wrestling has such a powerful vocabulary for describing the workings of public spectacle. There’s no phrase that captures the emotional currency of the Archibald  Prize better than “cheap heat”, the provoked boos and cheers that follow the scripted insults of a Heel (villain) or the “win it for the fans” boosterism of a Babyface (hero).

The chief Heels are the critics. Foremost are the tag team outfit of John McDonald and Leo Schofield, gloves-off veteran fighters who drag chairs into the ring before the match even begins. It’s their job to rubbish the prize generally, and the popular choices specifically. The show of “often dreadful paintings” (Schofield) is “transcendentally awful” (Schofield, 2004); or “one of the worst in living memory” (McDonald, 2007). These two have the benefits of being credible and sincere, but there’s no doubt they take some relish in playing spoiler.

Criticism was always fun, but now, with the internet, it’s also easy. Before, Heels and their fans would have to actually attend the prize to write it off; now, they can form their first impressions online, scrolling through a series of thumbnail-sized, low-res reproductions that are readymade for dismissal. Jammed into a jpeg, Vincent Fantauzzo’s portrait of Heath Ledger looks like it belongs propped up on boardwalk next to a psychedelic poster of Jim Morrison. In the flesh, it looks like an able, rich painting with a rather obvious thematic overlay; in other words, a classic Archibald finalist. But Fantauzzo is also a classic Archibald non-winner: it’s not yet his time.

Calling the Prize rigged is strong medicine. But as professional wrestling fans know, there’s a big difference between something being choreographed and something being rigged. Usually only the outcome, not the course, of a match is fixed, and what pre-determines that outcome is a grand, curling narrative, carefully plotted beforehand. It’s no secret that the Archibald is a prize with a waiting list, those in the queue selected for their talent, but also their seniority and persistence. It’s part lifetime achievement award, part back scratch (or scratch back), part popularity contest and part art prize. Barring illness or insanity, all those on the list will win eventually; it’s just a question of the sequence.

Not only was Fantauzzo not on the de facto list of prospective winners (though he may be on the edge of that list now), he’s just too much of a Babyface to win. The same tide of public sentiment that pushed him to the final two also left him stranded at the high water mark: no matter its merits as a piece of art (and those were debatable), a Ledger win would have resulted in a Royal Rumble, a rush of heels climbing in to suplex the Prize’s already jelly-legged credibility. Too popular to lose, too popular to win, Heath lacked that lack of a certain something needed to be the winner.

For the painting that takes out the Archibald Prize is always what in WWE parlance is called a “tweener” or a “grey”: neither face nor Heel, these ambiguous, chameleonic creatures don’t inspire great passion in friend or foe. The process of picking a winner almost always picks a good artist, and sometimes, like this year, it even picks a good painting. But even Del Kathryn Barton’s very good work is still a tweener, a median point between public expectation and art world tastes, between controversy and anodyne safety. Try to imagine the same painting featuring her vagina instead of her children. It would be both more representative of her practice, and completely inconceivable as a finalist.

Will it ever change? Some, like the Art Life’s Andrew Frost, have suggested the Prize modernise by casting off the rules, or through some curatorial vigour from the trustees. But this would ruin the fun, and start off its own type of hype carousel. Look at the Turner Prize in the UK, where, playing to the cheap heat of the tabloids, it’s the judges, not the critics, who turn Heel.

The arguments in favour of the Prize in its existing format are well-known: it’s better to have people talk about any art than no art, the controversies sell paintings as well as papers, and dragging people to the gallery requires the long hook of tradition, conservatism and routine. There’s a type of fan in wrestling called a “smark”, a port-manteau of “smart mark”. They’re the ones who know it’s not real, but wouldn’t have it any other way. Smarks appreciate that hoopla is itself a kind of art. (Time Out Sydney, 19/03/08)

Interview: Dumpster Diving

Freegans Fez Chepe, 23, and Jason, 24 (who wouldn’t give his last name or be photographed), attempt to live without buying anything at all. They feed themselves by “dumpstering”: combing waste bins for useable food. Both volunteer for Food Not Bombs, a group that uses reclaimed and donated food to feed the hungry.

How does freeganism work?

J: For me, it’s not about not spending money, but trying not to spend money as much as possible. If you can get something for free, do so.

FC: I want to live outside that spending paradigm. It’s not lazy, because you work for your food. Every day is a challenge. We venture out to find food and find a means to cook things. It seems like a harder life sometimes. I do it because I think participating in a capitalist system is very violent. It’s political for me. By the way, that beer you’re drinking now – it came out of a dumpster. I wanted you to see what it was like.

It’s very good. How would you describe your politics?

FC: It’s about harm minimisation. I care for people, which is why I volunteer for Food Not Bombs; and it’s why I want to teach. I’m a semester away from being a high school teacher. My politics and my ethics are inseparable but I am realising that living this way is not a sustainable solution.

You’re eating the products of capitalism. How does that sit with your politics?

J: We’re making up for inadequacies in the system – to ultilise all the resources they’re wasting. So we’re recycling, preventing waste…there’s an environmentalist slant. FC: We’re rats in the system. There’s a lot of different words for dumpstering food. Some people call it skipping, but one of the names for it is recycling recycling food. But it’s not sustainable: if everyone squatted and if everyone dumpster dived, we’d be in trouble. It’s not a solution but my attitude to it is, while I partake in my other activism, I need something to sustain me. J: I differ here. I don’t consider myself an activist; I just want to live for free, and I want to use the system. I’m not opposed to capitalism, and I’m not for capitalism either. I just want to live on the cheap.

Does Food Not Bombs ask for donations?

FC: We do, but the majority of our food comes from dumpster diving. We’ll dumpster every Friday and dive in! The waste is lovely…

Do those you’re feeding know where the food comes from?

FC: We have a moral obligation to let people know where food is from. A “dumpster” has such tainted yucky connotations, when really it’s just a different container of food.

Do you worry about your health?

J: It’s a risk I’m willing to take not to have to work nine to five just to pay for food. There are general rules: you avoid dairy and meat. Most of the other things are sealed in plastic or in packages. When they’re not sealed, I like to wash them.

FC: To be honest, I don’t really mind too much about it, because I kind of have a really dirty life anyway. My squat right now has no electricity. We have running water, but I think my lifestyle has probably pumped my immune system up higher than a lot of people anyway. I’ve not gotten sick in years of eating dumpster food.

Do you pay for entertainment?

J: You can sneak into gigs easily, you can dumpster beer, and if you go to pubs you can drink abandoned drinks. Although I got a spiked one at Big Day Out (I snuck in).

How do people respond to you?

FC: It ranges from just complete confusion to absolute hostility. I’ve been beaten up by gangs of kids before. Security guards just want to save their arses. “You can’t do this. If you eat something from here, and you get sick and you sue, we’re fucked.” People are so paranoid of being sued in this society; it’s kind of taken away the humanity and the whole point of it all… Most people are really generous with you if you’re honest and have an open heart.

What’s the most prized find?

FC: I’d say avocados. I don’t want to get into specifics, but there’s a dumpster in the Leichhardt/ Newtown area which is famous for its avocados. I’m always hoping for the day I find sun dried tomatoes or artichoke, something really nice.

J: Sometimes we’ll go to the bins at Woolworths, and we’ll find 20 loaves of bread and a bin full of vegetables, and five bags of coffee.  I appreciate packaged goods, with long use-by dates: rice, oils, pantry stuff. It’s a treasure chest. I was thrilled when I first started. I just couldn’t believe the things that people threw away. (Time Out Sydney 5/03/08)