HR #1

Susan Hiller
witness 2000
biennale of sydney 2002

watch ! he is listening ! "had focused on our house, when we
passed by our house" a six year old boy stands in a moon lit
gallery, motionless & alone parentless but poised, a car- stereo
speaker "we realized that it could not be a meteorite not beneath
the clouds" denuded of its plastic cladding and attached to a
long length of sheathed "a blue white light" copper wire is
cupped to one ear, a serene babbling "a blue green illumination"
emanates from 599 other speakers, each uttering testimonies to
ufo sightings and alien "a few men dressed in silver" abduction,

SOPHIE COOMBS - "X marks the spot"
'Front Room' Sydney
Autodidactic: a drawing and an etching.

Sophie Coombs shows a room- piece empowered by its sense
of absence. In this room is juxtaposed two gestures. They are collected together in the spirit of a spontaneous improvised mark. Here the sign is abstracted to form a brooding dialogue. It's sensability is that of the autodidact. In the pristine white gallery environment, a space so white that an X cross that she struck directly on one of the walls becomes an action, a taunt, a sign of its own limitations. This crossing action is set up theatrically, and one might suspect it as a strategy the artist uses to insure that viewers inspects the small etchings on the opposite wall with a new respect. Her

War Boy
Kief Hillsbery
Picador, 2000

Hillsbery's novel War Boy opens with a declaration by its
narrator: "I'm Rad I'm deaf I don't talk I'm fourteen I'm telling the
story. And storytellers lie so why bother you ask." Rescued from
a scenario of deep family violence by twentysomething mentor
Jonnyboy, skateboarder Radboy travels to San Francisco and
makes several discoveries about his own life. He and Jonnyboy
meet up with Finn and Critter, a pair of 'kweer tweekerboyz', all
are variously punks and skins, with convictions and hearts of
gold.

Told in first-person from Radboy's point of view, the dialogue

Bully
Lions Gate Films 2001
Directed by Larry Clark
Written by Zachary Long and Roger Pullis
Based on the book Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge by , Jim Schutze

As a photographer, Larry Clark has, since the late 1960s,
documented the sex and drugs lifestyles of certain groups of
American youth. His classic photobook Tulsa put him on the
map, and since then he has produced various bodies of work
that focus on the intensities of that period in life that might
generally be called adolescence. His 1980s book Teenage Lust
was more about sex than drugs (but for Clark, they are almost

What a buckskinner does.

Well, for a hobby I enjoy making brain-tanned buckskins from
deer hides. So I'm a buckskinner. Actually, I don't skin the deer
myself, nor do I go hunting to kill them. I don't kill anything. I get
all the deer hides for free from the local butcher during
deer-hunting season, since the hunters only want the venison
meat.

Brain-tanning is the native, primitive, aboriginal way of preparing
hides, practiced around the world for thousands of years.
Modern chemical tanning is a poor substitute. It's done by
scraping the fur and the layers of dermis and epidermis off the

Maddie Leach's Ice Rink and Lilac Ship

Gallery Six, Waikato Museum of Art and History / Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
July 2002

Potentially one of the highlights of New Zealand's 2002
exhibition calendar is Maddie Leach's Ice Rink and Lilac Ship. A
stretch of ice purpose built for skating upon ran 28 of this writer's
paces down the length of a generously sized well lit gallery
space. In an adjoining gallery, a slow contemplative video
projection of massive ship passing over ocean all in Lilac,
seeming to act as sounding board, increasing the resonance of
the star attraction: The Ice Rink.

Diego Bonetto and Emma Jay

Dear.....
The work I wanna tell you about is by Diego Bonetto and Emma
Jay. Diego is an artist studying at the Uni of Western Sydney, and
Emma is a dentist. Both are activists who are keenly involved
with the Midnight Star Squatted Social Centre at Homebush.

Out at the Kingswood campus of the Uni of Western Sydney
there is a beautiful decrepid old drive-in cinema. It was operating
from the '60s til 1984, when the manager said that it was the
onset of video rental stores that was forcing him to go outta
business. (Diego found that in a local paper from the time - I love

Andreas Gedin's Ich Bin Ein Berliner
Freespace, Sydney, May 11 - June 8, 2002

"Ich bin ein Berliner" means "I am a Berliner" (and can also
mean "I am a doughnut"). In 1963, JFK went to West Berlin. His
visit came just a year after the ignominious Wall had sliced the
country and its people in two. Kennedy gave his speech right
beside the Wall so that it would be heard by the people of East
Berlin. The video begins with a voice over of JFK's speech. At
the time, his famous words "Ich bin ein Berliner" were a
message of political solidarity with West Germany. But in
today's Germany, what is the meaning of "Ich bin ein Berliner"?