Thursday, November 5, 2009

Poster



Oh, did we mention, artists include:
Alex Kiers
Hoof & Antler
Mountain Woman
Cy Norman
Emmanuela Prigioni and Luke Tipene
and even more.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
NEWSFLASH NEWSFLASH

Special appearance by Hossein Ghademi and his Sufi Choir, and a film work from Sasha William Cohen.

w00t!

Haiku

Follow impulses
Like little bubbles, pop
Is is summer yet?

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Dead or Alive comes... Alive!

Oh dear. Some days I try to write and all that comes out is cheese. Gooey cheese. Like the stuff you can spread on toast, or the stuff Kraft added to vegemite to make iSnack V2.0 which I'm pretty sure they've pulled from the shelf.

Cheeseball heading aside, thanks all who came and participated in Monthly Friend#3 'Dead or Alive' at PACT. PACT has been the stomping ground for many a young performer in Sydney. Sometimes I feel like it is my mother, artistically. (I don't know why it is gendered such, something about stereotypes of femininity and nurturing.) It is the mother of lots of young Sydney artists, making them my siblings, artistically. Like the wonderful collective that run Quarterbred, who are based at PACT and with whom we worked to present MF#3. I guess what I'm trying to say is, 'Dead or Alive' was kind of like a big extended family gathering, and our friends and public were invited. (Seems cheese and convoluted metaphors go hand-in-hand.)

Enough! What actually happened? We want hard facts. Photographic evidence.


Funny things happen when all these works come together, effectively forming an impromptu dialogue. Sophie Webb (above) merged her self proclaimed 'mainstream' tendencies, with everything she could remember about performance art.


Jane Grimley is performance art.

Nick Sun, everyone's favourite comedian blends Performance with stand up comedy.


These are from my (Meg's) piece. I asked people to put messages in bottles and later set up a dialogue with them on stage.


Thanks to Sarah Versitano for the photos. Coming soon: Monthly Friend #4 POP, at Serial Space, 20th November. Don't get confused, it is a Friday.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Pretty Fly(er)


I can almost taste the cupcakes as Bake Sale for Art finalise the lineup for this Saturday. Malcolm Whittaker, Jane Grimley, Nick Sun, Meg Garrett-Jones, Dara Gill, Willurei Kirkbright, Sime Knezevic + even more!

Big thanks to Mitzi McKenzie-King for the flyer.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Rollin with the Fringe Fest

Bake Sale for Art have their Tiger Two Times hats on until this Friday for the rest of the Melbourne Fringe presentation of 'Nature League in North Melbourne'. Audiences have been picking up, we finally got programs, and we have got some really great, sometimes surprising, feedback.

Here's some things people have said about Nature League: "It's like a Renoir", "It's pretty much Pink Floyd's The Wall", "Gorgeous, wacky and delightful" (Peta Murray, playwright), "I'm a pretty highly strung person and I haven't been this relaxed in years", among adjectives like "magical", "trance-like", "creepy" and "idyllic".

Feels like we are rolling along nicely after the saga of getting down here. That is, our van broke down just out of Tarcutta, which is a truck stop of a town halfway between Sydney and Melbourne that does a surprisingly good hamburger and a mean instant coffee. So budget has been blown out for the hire of another van and the sad little borrowed van is still waiting for some TLC from Tarcutta Motor Repairs.



Nature League shows 7:30 and 8:30 every night till Friday, it's $5 and, bias aside, it is really worth seeing. So if you're in Melbourne come along, and if you have friends in Melbourne tell them to come. Other Sydney peeps worth seeing are Claudia O'Doherty from Pig Island doing 'Monsters of the Deep 3D', and Pip Smith and Lexi Freeman's 'Invert'. They are all in the Artshouse complex in North Melbourne at different times, so one could see them all in one night of amazing, entertaining performance. Book at Fringe Website.

Spruiking.

I also wanted to mention that the next Monthly Friend will be upon us before we have time to say, "well here we are back in Sydney." We have decided upon the theme..
DEAD OR ALIVE
Curtorial blurb coming soon. It will be on a Saturday afternoon, 17th Oct, at PACT Theatre as part of the October Quarterbred. Contact us if you are interested in doing something. bakesaleforart(at)gmail.com.


Monday, August 17, 2009

August Monthly Friend


August Monthly Friend is coming up fast. Works from emerging artists will be presented at Bill and George in Redfern- a 'creative headquarters', and 'artist run initiative, community merging point, and inspired hub for adventurous conversation', according to their website

The theme for this round is ASKEW AMISS AWRY - Mystery, amnesia and tangential wanderings. Discovery in miscalculation. Beauty in malfunction. A world in crisis. A world in chaos. Won't someone pick up the pieces and put it all back together again?


We are really excited about the lineup:
Matt Rochford
Penny Spankie
Frank Mainoo
Emmanuela Prigioni
Steven Winnall
Annaliese Constable
Georgie Meagher & Jade Markham
Applespiel artists
Nick Sun

There is also a sick Monthly Friend zine/program in the making with other creative works, artist info, recipes, and an essay or two.

So, it is on SATURDAY night, 29th August.
Doors open at 7pm.
Entry is 10 bucks and includes a zine-gram.
Bill & George is at Level 1, 10-16 William St, Redfern. Easy to get to from Central or Redfern stations.

Love to see you there!

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

It’s ficto-critico. It’s all star. It’s pretty good.


The first Monthly Friend afternoon is all go for June 20 at the Red Rattler in Marrickville. Performances, presentations, and installations merging artistic forms with the world of theory will be presented by some incredible young and emerging artists...
Take this flyer from us, email it to all your friends, and come along.

xx

Happy Birthday Futurism! Poesia Visiva Symposium

Futurism turns 100 this year. Meanwhile, an impressive collection of 60s and 70s Italian concrete and visual poetry formally stored with the University of Sydney’s Italian Department has found a new home in the University Art collection. The connection between these two becomes clearer in the accompanying ‘Poesia Visiva’ Symposium held at Sydney Uni on the 29th May. The history of the concrete/ visual poetry movement and of the University's collection was traced in a series of lectures acedemics and curators. We are told that the collection was generously given to the University by Adriano Spatola and Giulia Niccolai in a visit to Sydney in 1978. Apparently Spatola gave an outrageous performance in a pub in Sydney, I couldn’t find the video but here is another of Spatola reciting. The works in the collection are mostly in Italian, but no matter for non-Italian speakers because the idea is of a refusal of 'poetry' as narrative-based and lyrical, instead using language for its sounds and formations. In the case of Betty Danon's [a featured artist's] poems and paper sculptures an escape altogether from existing structures of language is sought, replacing words with symbols, dots and lines.

Michele Perfetti, Siamo Tutti Insieme (We are all together) 1977

Tim Fitzpatrick spoke in the symposium of the ‘Theatrical Fireworks' of the Futurists, citing their impact on consequent theatre movements and on the Futurists' Itallian descents, the concrete/visual poets. The Futurists rejected conventional structures of language and narrative in the theatre, but is the trajectory to concrete and visual poetry a straight forward one? In comparing the war-mongering, nationalistic and fascist politics of the Futurists with the liberal feminist and anti-imperialist message of the concrete/ visual poetry a rupture is seen. Fitzpatrick quotes Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto - “Glory to war – the world’s only hygiene”.

Barbara Campbell maintained a performative presence throughout as the symposium’s in-house artist, bringing the concrete poetry discussion up to date by tweeting short observations on the forum inter-spliced with segments of Italian concrete/visual poetry, and interestingly updates of a Mosque bombing in Tehran. This reminder of conflict worked to counter the Futurist mantra that war is beautiful, and perhaps problematises any celebration of Futurism. This part also links to what could be seen as Barbara’s ongoing project of vigilance towards the Middle Eastern conflict. You can "follow" her on bcperformance if your one of them (tweeters).

After the talk fest we found out that our programs were megaphones all along (with a bit of adjustment) and Barbara Campbell led a group recital of some of the poetry. The exhibition is definitely worth a look at the University of Sydney Art Gallery until the 19th July.


Audience with megaphones. Sorry. It was so dark!

Friday, June 5, 2009

Tankman Tango in Sydney


It’s hard to believe that the image of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, and of the attack on thousands of Chinese citizens by the Chinese army, are images easily forgot. But extreme censorship in China enforces a policy of historic erasure, ensuring that for many Chinese the incident simply didn’t happen. For us in the west, I suppose it’s a matter of ‘forgetting’ past and ongoing human rights abuses as our economies have swelled from the exponential economic progress of China.


Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, marked in locations around the world with the public art event, dancing the Tankman Tango. The work by Deborah Kelly, referred to also as forget 2 forget, takes one of the most pervasive images of the 1989 protests, a lone, anonymous man and his shopping bags standing in the way of a column of tanks, and creates a mass dance, a real “social movement” Kelly puns in a Sydney Morning Herald article here. The dance, choreographed by Jane McKernan to resemble to the original tankman’s “dance” was performed by groups in Perth, Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane, Auckland Singapore, Belgrade, Brussels, Paris and probably more, anyone could organise a group and learn the dance on youtube, (performed by Tiek Kim Pok)



Between 5pm and 7.30 last night, Georgie and I were among the masses (70 or so) doing the tango on the Sydney Opera House forecourt. During the hour and a half of repetition of the basic steps, people would occasionally join or leave the group. I popped out of for a short time for a bit of a rest, but also to witness the dance. It was quite spectacular with the moving spotlights lighting up the drizzly wet air, steely stares from dancers, and the unison flinging of plastic bags. The participants solemnly leaving between the repetitions could have been a symbolic gesture towards dissenters silenced or fallen, while others always returned to fill the ranks. I’ll upload some pictures when I hunt some down.


Sydney Opera House

While watching I also noticed how ugly those lights on the Opera House are, installed as part of Luminous as part of ‘Vivid Sydney’. It looks like a Ken Done tea towel. Call me a sour grape, just don’t remind me how much this vacuous display of technical virtuosity cost in taxpayer money.


Ken Done.