Fashion Hazard Ahead

Dear the guy from film that ends in death, thank you for the ANZAC cookie. I must admit, at first I was apprehensive, I had had a bad experience with an ANZAC cookie before, but yours was delicious on the train on the way home and I could tell that people around me were jealous. So caramelly, golden delicious. Tonight being the first night I succeeded in being in the city and catching the train back to Hawthorne East, thus sparing me the $30-20 cab ride home, depending if we go via Carlton because we think it is on the way and we can share a cab. I was at the second / last Next Wave presents the Last Tuesday Society present Comfort Zone. See my comments on last week's Comfort Zone if you want, this week was the same deal, different performers.

I make this look good - Matthew Kneale and High Vis Dandy, photo - Sally Lewis.

So, High Vis Dandy is this absolutely fabulous performance/ installation work, not to mention playful and outrageous intervention in to public space (speaking of taking it to the streets). Their setup comprises of a trady’s ute, industrial sewing machine, workbench/ runway, some pretty serious traffic barriers and a variable message board (you know, big screen, ‘road works ahead’ / ‘40km speed limit’). They have set themselves the unenviable task of making orange and reflector panels look good. I have nothing against orange per se, it’s just if you overdo it you can look like a prison inmate, carrot, or Hare Krishna faithful. No such fate for the High Vis Dandy – they turn risk aversion in to a fashion statement. Tutus, tailcoats, one I thought I’d call the Sergeant Reflector Pepper vest, and turned out brocade lining! These and similar pieces I believe are the outcome of the sewing workshops the group have been holding in the lead up to the performance/install. Anyone could get involved so, ‘I can’t find one that’s nicely tailored and sexy’ is no longer an excuse for not wearing high visibility safety wear on your bike. High Vis Dandy is about more than looking good though. Aptly set up in the high fashion, aka ‘Paris’, end of Collins St, I saw the group on their fourth day of performing four daily sessions of cyclical performative actions and they had staked quite a presence alongside the likes of Rolex and Prada. It is a jibe at fashion, known to colonise any demographic towards its evil marketing ends. The Dandies take a lunch break from their hard work. A trady cliché and good opportunity for some product placement. They pout and pose and drink their Big M choccy milk like good product pinups. The work is also an elbow nudge at the dominance of ‘the masculine’ in trade-based work places. It subversively proposes an alternative identity to the Australian ideal of manliness (hard, rugged, practical) by appropriating a symbol of this manliness – the high visibility workwear – and making it over and camping it up. While High Vis Dandy was a delight to watch and certainly open to various interpretations and experience, I’m going to go with, ‘You can be safe and practical without being a macho jerk. You can dress well and be creative about how you look without being a mindless-consumerist-whore’.

High Vis Dandy, 17-21st May. Collins St Melbourne, as part of the Next Wave Festival. Artists: Jessica Daly, Matthew Kneale, Daniel Kroener, and Zoe Meagher.

You lent me your laptop and all I did with it was throw it off a bridge

Well it's a cold and shitty day in Melbourne. I'm out to Deborah Kelly's lecture later on to find out why Kelly keeps on fighting the good fight.

I got to go to the closing-night of Ashley Dyer's And Then Something Fell On My Head last night. I was interested to see whether the concept was as simple as the title would have me. Pretty pencils rained erratic yet purposeful from scaffold. The audience was split, the 2 groups sitting on either side of the 'auditorium' (not really) - one group had extraneous safety wear, white suits and rubber gloves. I received an insight from the project's dramaturg Simê Knezevic that the 2 groups were named The better equipped/ The unencumbered. White shrouds dropped from different places atop the 10 metre or so scaff and became the surface for video projections, mostly of a man (Ash Dyer) crawling and falling. More things dropped poetically, all also seemingly office related; water cooler bottles, clean paper, dirty tissues (people are always sick in offices right?). Ashley appears every now and then, in the same shirt/tie/suit pants combo of the video, and looks around perplexed and in wonderment, occasionally his body reacting to the pencils, water bottles or paper that gets too close. The lighting is moody and only some times frustrating. Designer Travis Hodgson aims for the sensory (as opposed maybe to the pictorial), flashing lights towards the audience and at times leaving us in darkness. It's both spectacular and meditative, even if I can't help thinking it is about an office worker who got lost in his daydream. There was a publication that might have shed some more light on the ideas in the piece, but these were not available to all audience members.

Takin it to the streets

I've let this get way out of hand. I am overwhelmed here about the prospect of writing about all the Next Wave stuff I have seen since I last reported. Yes. I should have gotten back to you sooner. But as soon as I left one thing, there was another to dash to. Now I have art fatigue, and a bit of a hangover. I'm sure you understand my dilemma(s).

This afternoon I attended the 4th and final Next Wave forum, 'Taking it to the streets'. Mostly about art in public spaces (whether existing or a public space that is created through the work). I particularly appreciated Lucas Ihlein's hand-drawn diagrams illustrating the ideal process timeline as a series of many mini-deadlines, as opposed to the less appealinng burst of high-stress, panic, waste and mindlessness, followed by the fireworks, and then fallout (debt, neglected friends etc), and then a period of recovery. This fits nicely with his larger ideals of art being a part of everyday life, existing in the real world, and yes in the art world too if you like (which is in the real world, he clarifies). But anyway, I was inspired, which is why I am here in Victoria State library at 5.30 on a Sunday Evening trying to tick off some mini-deadlines. Orchestrator of Next Wave's Chicken Stampede, George Egerton-Warburton also spoke, mostly taking us through his circuitous tangential logic (yes that works, think about it: you go on conceptual tangents only to reconnect with aspect of your original point of departure). Sorry.. circuitous tangential logic that sees the stampede of 300 chickens through a main street to Jeff Khan's backyard where they can be adopted by the public, as a necessary public action, giving visibility to livestock, commenting on the inherent loveliness of autonomous systems (not unlike meth-labs), and is a step forward in self-sufficiency and the future of Australian cultural identity. Unfortunately the RSPCA do not agree and have prevented the stampede citing that there is no guarantee that the chickens will go to good homes. These are chickens that, Egerton-Warburton says, will likely end up on cage farms otherwise. Instead there will be a 'Fucking Chicken Sound Stampede', in which participants are invited to stand in for the chickens and stamped the street making chicken noises. So come along next Sunday and have a cluck.

There. A mini deadline met gallantly. I didn't actually talk about any of the works, but the library is closing. Coming soon you will have Brown Council, Sugar Coated, the High Vis Dandies, Some Film Museums I Have Known, and more!

Mel Burn! It's hot! (actually it's pretty cold)

I know all you Bake Sale faithfuls are going to be wondering where the hell I (Meg) am this Saturday at Clubhouse. (I'm hoping my Mum will go to represent anyway, and so be one of the spare parents on offer. Yeah, I'm pimping my Mum. In a nice way. What?) I can't come because I'm in Melbourne for the Next Wave festival's Text Camp program.

For those of you in Melbourne, and also for my own benefit of noting/not forgetting, I want to mention some of the Next Wave emerging art things I've caught in the few days I've been here. The Last Tuesday Society's 'Comfort Zone' was almost worth going to just for a visit to Witches in Britches. It's a theatre restaurant. You go through a spooky foam, cobwebby, uv paint/black light tunnel to get in, I tell you, the excitement is just beginning! (I want to disclose my professional interest in theatre restaurants, as someone with a Bachelor of performance and a good deal of actor training under my belt, I was sizing this place up as a promising place of employment. Do we have any theatre restaurants in Sydney? Anyone?)

Maybe once this was a serious pub.

Comfort Zone was more than a variety night in a cool venue. The premise of asking artists to present short works far outside their 'specialty' made for some exciting, fingernail-gnawing, often-awkward, always interesting stuff. Making friendly with the Next Wave curatorial theme "no risk too great!" there was indeed a feeling that these performers could at any time fail at their attempts to do something different. Burlesque troop Caravan of Love's Eva Johansen did make a very convincing mime. Poet laureate Telia Nevile made a cute and very earnest hoola-hooper. I'm not sure what the Suitcase Royale were doing, but maybe their was a clue in them being announced as the "auteurs of Melbourne performance". They let the audience make the performance, so they didn't author it themselves. They also didn't talk and usually they talk a lot. Is that right? It is always more obvious when performers draw attention to what has gone wrong, and this could well have degenerated into self reflexive, apologetic embarrassment. But the performers were really trying. They were good at being bad , moving it from amateur to strangely artful. Whole new line up when they do it again next Tuesday.

Last night we went to Short Message Service. "An experiment" in which two performers (Mish Grigor and Jackson Castiglione) in a simple black box theatre take their instructions from text messages sent by the audience. A lot of these messages manifested in dialogue spoken by the performers, a short-coming I think, as one audience member texted "words words, enough of all these words". It was fun to see the two acting out your instructions, 'I am the puppet master!', perhaps some audience members were thinking. Interesting that immediately the performers were put in to a state of tension between sexual advances and insults. A reflection of the caliber of the audience? "It could have gone somewhere higher" one of my companions commented, intellectually I think she meant. "That would have been impossible", my other companion (her daughter) retorted. Indeed, the slow response time - in audience's texting speed and in filtering through to the performers, and the very minimal structure made it hard to build upon situations and ideas. So what if it was more structured? "It should have been set in a safari" suggests my companion, "that's lame mum", says Amy. At one point I was compelled to text, "Jackson, the audience is not happy with the gender politic in this show". Mish seemed a lot more passive, Jackson often the aggressor. Again, is this the audience, or the way their instructions were responded to? It worked best when the performers were forced to engage with each other, such as Jackson commentating on Mish 'as if she were a gazelle in the savanna and he were David Attenborough' (by the way, we got a glimpse of what the actual text messages where only at the end.) Every audience will of course have a different experience and it will be good to see where they take this experiment next. It's on til Saturday (22nd).


Oh! And! Controversy at Next Wave. An Age article condemns the Dachshund U.N. as cruelty to animals. The argument cites a violation of the RSPCA policy of "freedom to express normal behaviour" as grounds for this claim. I'm not sure what to think, as I haven't seen it yet. I was looking forward to how cute all the little doggies would be as stand in delegates for the countries who established the human rights commission in 1947. Aw, look at Belgium! He/she wants to eat its own tail. The article also refers to freedom from distress, but also says that owners were encouraged to only stay as long as they thought their dog was comfortable. I tend to think that keeping dogs as pets in the way we do isn't natural, nor is breeding shit out of them so the have tiny stumpy legs and long sausage bodies. It's all animal husbandry. Don't eat a cow. Don't buy a pedigree dog etc etc. There is also a chicken stampede later in the program at the end of which people are allowed to adopt a chicken in the name of self-sufficiency, and, I would add, not supporting the treatment of chickens in farms. Anyway, THIS is degenerating into a rant. Stay tuned for more Next Wave musings.

Afternoon Tea with the Folks, you are invited.

"You might be parents. You might have parents. Afternoon Tea with the Folks is a platform for those on either side of that generational dichotomy to get together and talk about where we've been and where we're headed.

Are they still waiting for you to switch from a creative work to a real profession? Do you need to apologise for that time you got ridiculously drunk on wine spritzer and ended their party early by vomiting on the dance floor? Mum? Do you? Our guest host, Malcolm’s mum Jude Whittaker is still waiting for her thank you in his Logies speech. Maybe your parent is equally anticipant about the day when you take your cat/dog/rabbit back in to your care...

This is an is an informal dialogue between young artists (not exclusively!) and parents or parent figures. If you don’t have these available we will have spares, so come anyway. Including performances from Malcolm Whittaker and July McKenzie and Cal Clatworthy (Mitzi’s Mum and Auntie), embarrassing anecdotes about you, and of course a delicious array of afternoon tea goodies. "

Facebook invite

2-4, next Saturday, free!