A list about 3 types of people

1. Those of you who have sent me lists.
You will be interested to hear that after 2 1/2 years of collecting your lists,  I am finally doing something with all the lists that you have sent me. I can't say exactly what it is yet cause I love the grand drama of a great unveiling, but its on the horizon.

2. Those of you who have lists and wonder if you shoudl send them to me
Yes, I am still collecting lists. Here are a couple of ways that you can send them to me:

Post to:
Room 1 Level 3, 329 Little Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000
You can send original or photocopied lists

Email to:
hannah_bertram@iprimus.com.au
You can send photographed or scanned images or type your list directly into the email.

3. Those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about.
You can read more about it on my website - click here

Carpetry and the satisfaction of precision

I applied my knife cutting skills to making cardboard marquetry this week. This involves cutting patterns out of cardboard to make a negative space, then cutting the exact same pattern out of a different piece of cardboard and inserting it into the first bit of cardboard. I'm discovering that it takes micro-millimetre precision and a whole new world of satisfaction is experienced when you get it exactly perfect.

Initially I thought it was parquetry that I was making but a quick glance at Wikipedia tells me parquetry is the geometric version of inlayed wooden patterns and marquetry uses curved and natural designs. Good to get the lingo right as I had previously thought that parquetry went on the floor and marquetry went on furniture. My wordy confusion was equally matched by Lisa' who throughout the day blended the words 'cardboard' and 'parquetry' which resulted in her referring to it as 'Carpentry' and which i have now morphed into a blend of cardboard/carpet/marquetry and come up with 'Carpetry'.

I want to go to a dress up party

Some days life is more fun than art. B and her friends were invited to a Lady Gaga costume party and the hours spent making costumes and doing ostentatious make-up and hair do's was the most fun I have had since .... when? Maybe since I made a similar silver costume to wear to an Andy Warhol Silver party at the Chelsea Hotel.



The essay I promised to post


Difficulty and the intellect.

The ideology of being a well-meaning anti-elitist is hard to let go of. There is a perceived political correctness in trying to make art that can engage the ‘general public’, a virtuousness of trying not to be high brow but to be on the same level as the ‘average person’. At the same time there is something really admirable about being an expert in your field. We can’t get enough of sporting heroes and we are impressed by those who develop new technology. In art however there seems to be a perception of intellectual elitism that is exclusive and impenetrable. Of the vastly diverse talks within the seminar program, four interrelated moments stand out for me. Each of them were points that stimulated an exploration of this projected elitism and which in turn allowed me to reconsider my approach to intellectualism within art, once I’d addressed the broader issue of arts’ position within the context of our wider society.

In a round table discussion documented as part of the 2004 Australian Art Now exhibition catalogue Pillip Brophy commented on an essay he recently wrote for Callum Morton. He described it as being a

“typically long-winded, lurid, self collapsing attack on architects and has no redeeming value for anyone except Callum…. You either get it or you don’t. If you don’t then that’s the sign that there is space beyond your critical monocle.” [1]

Initially this came across as being deliberately exclusive, to knowingly alienate the reader/viewer by publishing a private joke between the writer and artists and comes across as being boringly high-brow and narcissistically self absorbed. When I’m looking at art, when I read about art or when I hear an artist talking about their work what I am partly hoping for is a sense of connectedness. An ‘aha’ moment, or the kind of mild epiphany of understanding which Alain De Botton refers to as the ‘finger placing ability’[2].

“It stretches an ability to describe these (similarities) far better than we would have been able to, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own yet could not have formulated on our own”[3].

For the majority of speakers at the seminar program this was most certainly the experience, but what do you do when you’re confronted by someone who says if you don’t get it then it’s your fault. You’re the philistine with the gap in your ‘critical monocle’. Generally speaking this accusation gets read as coming from an elitist position. When we are confronted by something that is hard to understand we call it pretentiousness, impenetrable theory with irrelevant language. There is a reactionary feeling not of connectedness but of alienation and elitism.

Occasionally Public art is put forward as a solution to break down elitism. However in an example sited by Amanda Rodriguez Alveres, art in public places does not necessarily engage the audience any more than art in a gallery. She referred to an incident with MICO in which they realized that one aspect of their presumed audience was illiterate and therefore could not read the banners and posters that MICO had been dispersing around the city. Whilst the deinstitutionalization of their collaborative work was often successful in its engagement with the general public, we might conclude that it’s not always the audience that doesn’t understand art, but that we fail to understand our audience. It also highlights that the argument about elitism isn’t about access but more specifically about accessibility. Just because art is on the street doesn’t mean it is any easier to understand, or that the invisible barriers of exclusive language are broken down just because the physical walls are removed.

Another more dubious response to making art more accessible is the intervention of education officers, and explanatory text panels in larger galleries. Admittedly for some people this does provide an easy entry into the work, but predominantly what these two things do is flatten the work. They dumb it down and simplify it into dictatorial bite size grabs. And the over explaining of the work often does a disservice to subtlety and complexity, and frequently tell you what you should be seeing or experiencing and denies you the opportunity to contemplate the work yourself and consider your own experience of looking the art.

It might be suggested that the argument about elitism in art is not just a matter of choosing one extreme or the other but more about examining this term so you can make a better decision about where you stand in relation to it. A few weeks ago I read an article by John Armstrong that allowed me to come to terms with the accusation of elitism in art. He defined elitism as the artificial barrier of “pretentious talk, prohibitive expense, rituals of etiquette”[4] which results in a fairly small audience of those in the know. Whilst he claims this is true of the arts he identifies that it is only true in as much as it is true of any subculture or micro-culture within society. He sites sport as an example, having its own language, its particular manner of behavior, and its own insular codes. There are rules and a history and value that to an outsider appear foreign. The only reason he claims that we accept this in sport is because of its popularity. As basic as it may sound what this has helped me to identify is that we are making art within a particular context and therefore its language is specifically relevant to that space.

So it would seem that it is not the exclusiveness of art that is the problem, its not that it is elite. Perhaps it is the difficulty that is the problem. In his article Armstrong proposes that it’s easier to falsely project blame onto external barriers such as snobbery and pretentious language than it is to admit that you are too apathetic to rise to engage properly with creations of human imagination[5]. This perhaps is more the issue; that we lack the discipline to pay attention long enough to make sense of the complexities we face in art. Personally I find that it’s not so much apathy but bewilderment that prevents me from embracing intellectualism in art. It is such an awkward struggle to unlock mental complexity, at best I am clumsy and fumbling and at worst I wonder if even English is a second language to me. What is most frustrating though is when you suspect that you don’t have the tools to dissect it.

So what tools are required? In John Nixon’s crowd pleasing talk he said that art is an endurance event, and I suspect that this is the key to getting through difficulty. He spoke with an economic use of language that was refreshingly simple. But his straightforwardness was surprising because it was only a simplicity of oral language not of concept. It certainly wasn’t basic because his practice lacks depth, it was uncluttered and refined by what I can only assume has been a long process of mentally distilling the expansiveness of his practice. I think I’ve heard this process referred to as finding simplicity on the other side of complexity. What this illuminated was a possibility that clarity and confidence will come over time through sheer persistence and dedication.

In Jonathan Franzen’s Essay Mr Difficult  he says that enduring difficulty can make you feel virtuous “as if I’d run three miles…been to the dentists, filed my tax return and gone to church”[6], but realistically it’s not something we do if given the choice. We live in a society were we make all the demands, we are required very infrequently to think abstractly, to probe an issue deeply or to spend time in silent contemplation. We equate complexity with hard work which we begrudgingly do despite knowing that we can sometimes actually benefit from it. What is sometimes overlooked is that philosophical thinking and intellectual wrestling can also be incredibly rewarding. Serious research, deep abstract thinking and rigorous reading can provide a pool of richness that can’t be acquired by skimming the surface of a topic. When I’ve persisted with difficulty I know it has given me a greater capacity to make more precise, appropriate and considered decisions about my work. And if nothing else, has contributed to a greater understanding and fuller appreciation of art.

Perhaps it is time to let go of some of the skepticism I have about intellectualism in art. Having addressed the fact that I have chosen to be part of a serious community that may not be popular but as a result of its demands can be rewarding in its challenges, it makes no sense to be intimidated by difficulty or intellectualism. It’s time to do some polishing of the critical monocle.



[1] Waite. D (ed). Two Thousand and Four. Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria. 2004


[2] De Botton A How Proust can change your life. Picador. London 1998 p28
[3] ibid p 28

[4] Armstrong John. ‘Elite Elitist’ A3 The Age. Monday, August 16, 2004 p7

[5] ibid
[6] Franzen Jonathan. How to be Alone. Harper Perennial. London 2004 p245

VIVIDiot

Took a stroll around the Circular Quay after deinstalling my exhibition in Sydney and stumbled across 'VIVID festival'. On its website the event is described like this...


Vivid Sydney will colour the city with creativity and inspiration, featuring breathtaking immersive light projections on the iconic Sydney Opera House sails, performances from local and international musicians as part of Vivid LIVE and a free outdoor exhibition of interactive light sculptures.


http://vividsydney.com

In real life however the 'breath taking immersive light projection' on the Opera house and other surrounding buildings resembled nothing more than giant screensavers. Green lines go down, red lines go across, green lines go down, red lines go across, green lines, red lines, green   red   green   red and so on. Yes it was colourful and yes it was big, but really so what. It was pure technique with no content, it was mere decoration. The 'interactive light sculptures' were equally uninteresting and only confirmed my deep scepticism for the word 'interactive' in relation to art. Most of the interaction that audiences had with these sculptures was simply to do a basic action and the art work would change - ride an exercise bike and a light will turn on, wave your arms around and a colour will appear on a wall, stand in front of a glow in the dark screen and your shadow will be cast on a wall. Too often interactive art takes the position of being accessible simple because the audience takes part in the creation of the work, but this accessibility is a dubious pursuit because it assumes that much art is inaccessible, which leads to accusations of elitism.



I was going to have a little rant here about the misplaced pursuit of anti-elitism in art but then I remembered an essay I wrote during a Seminar program at uni which says everything I want to say here, so I'm going to post that instead.

Saturday - survival surrender and success


Solution 1 - Get a tarp!
This sad looking 'marque', was only in slightly better condition, than our spirits. It was dismal. The rain still leaked down the walls, there was no room to move, I stuffed up the pattern in my haste, the mud stank in the claustrophobia of the tent, the slightest breeze tore the tape off the walls and little rivers would trickle over the work. It was pathetic, I was pathetic, the work was disappointingly even more pathetic.



Solution 2. Get help. 
On friday night I sent out an SOS text to friends, family and artists - please help, I can't pay you, and you'll have to work on your hands and knees possibly in the rain with stinky filthy mud. Surprisingly people offered to help and so with the support of friends family students and artists we had an incredibly enjoyable and productive day. 



Solution 3. Get organised.
All the materials were put in labeled containers. Plastic storage cotainers were used to orgaise all the materials. Everyone working knew what the "Rain plan' was - protect the stencils, get the tarp!!! We also had umberella's (what a remarkable invention), knee pads, daylight and good cheer.


Solution 4. Enjoy the day for what it is not what I hoped it would be.
I had said yes to this gig for reasons which sound good solid and rational - good exposure and great pay. But i should've said no a thousand times over for reasons that are irrational and idealistic. Firstly I have been agonisingly bored of the dust stencil work for a while now, secondly the conditions weren't going to allow me to make work to the standard I like to perform at, and lastly the time frame (3weeks) to produce the work meant it was rushed and unresolved. And despite the 'money and fame' more than either of these things I am driven to make the best work I can make. I want to be satisfied with what i produce and present. 

But, its interesting because once I let go of my own disappointment and intentions I had a good day. It was heart warming to have so many friends help out, and it wasn't just the manual labour that they helped me with, it was their enthusiasm for the work that soothed me. It was good to surrender, to hand over my work and let other people enjoy the process of making it, in the same way that I have enjoyed it over the years. I felt like each of them treated the work with the same level of care and respect that I would and it was a humbling experience to be so supported. 




By Sunday evening, after the barricades were cleared away and the materials packed up and the crowds were leaving the area, I had time alone to look at the work. I was more relieved then I have ever been, and quietly pleased with what we had done. 

Feeble friday


Despite a lengthy time traveling around Australia in a bus and a childhood filled with camping holidays in the drizzerling British countryside, I still don’t cope very well in the outdoors. Even in the comparatively tamed outdoors of a city landscape I find myself ill prepared to deal with the elements, I never carry an umbrella and I can get scorched by the sun just crossing a street. Give me a warm dark cafe, bar, gallery or bookshop and I know how to ‘be’, but in the face of weather I am feeble, and yet there I was making a large work from mud and ash underneath a grey Melbourne sky on a late May weekend.

On Friday night I was optimistic, twitching to get going and in reasonably high spirits about the work and the weekend. Lisa and I trundled down Swanston street with our nana trolley’s full of gear and folios full of stencils and the untainted possibility that this might be fun. The plan was to get one layer of stencils finished, so that on Saturday we’d be under less pressure. We had tested out the materials against the rain during the previous few weeks and knew that once the ash and mud were dry they were pretty resilient. What we hadn’t tested was my resilience.

The night sky grew dark and as we worked the street lamps cast our shadows across the damp steps making black pools over the black stencils and black ash. In the blackness, bleakness arose – we couldn’t see, but were compelled to continue trusting instinct and knowing that we really couldn’t afford to stop cause the work wouldn’t get done in time. Then it rained, at first just a little, so we kept going. As it got heavier, we couldn’t see if the ash was getting washed away or not but we kept going - on hands and knees, on cold wet concrete, with hair dripping and hands blackened with ash, the stencils getting soggy and deteriorating quickly and a welling dread swelling in my stomach, rising in my chest, clamping itself in my throat.

Eventually we stopped and took shelter under a near by tree. From the depths of the trolley I managed to locate 3 beers and like sad drunks we stood in the shadows of wet darkness and laughed a mildly hysterical laugh at what a bad situation this was. From our position up on the hill we looked down to the river and watch other artists – prepared outdoorsy artists, installing their work under the shelter of customer made white marquees, beside vans that were smoking pot-bellied stoves.

We needed a better plan.


I'm making a new temporary installation for the National Gallery of Vicotria's 150 year celebration. As part of the weekend festivities 26 local artists and community groups have been asked to create work in response to key works from the NGV collection. These responses will then be located on a trail between NGV International and NGV Australia at Federation Square. 


My work will be created from Yarra River mud and responds to 'The Melbourne Centerpiece' a trio of ornate gold candelabras. It will be located in an alcove on the Prices bridge and on the steps to the Alexander Gardens. Fingers crossed that there's no rain.

The work is up for 2 days - 28 and 29 May. 

Check out the NGV website for more info about what else is on http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/ngv-150-party










Burkowski keeps me company

Spent Saturday cutting and contacting stencils whilst listening to Burkowski: Born into this, DVD. 

Roll the dice

if you’re going to try, go all the

way.

otherwise, don’t even start.



if you’re going to try, go all the

way.

this could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs and

maybe your mind.

 

go all the way.

it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.

it could mean freezing on a
park bench.

it could mean jail,

it could mean derision,

mockery,

isolation.

isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of your

endurance, of

how much you really want to

do it.

and you’ll do it

despite rejection and the worst odds

and it will be better than

anything else

you can imagine.




if you’re going to try,

go all the way.

there is no other feeling like

that.

you will be alone with the gods

and the nights will flame with

fire.




do it, do it, do it.

do it.


all the way

all the way.




you will ride life straight to

perfect laughter, its

the only good fight

there is

Charles Bukowski.