HR #3

Reply to Christopher Dean's review in HR.2
The review of 'No Ideas' by Christopher Dean makes
some pertinent points about 'critical stupidity'.
However, while matters of interpretation are for
reviewers to decide, the article goes further and
makes claims about my statements and intentions for
which there is no basis.
I have never made a statement containing the words 'I
have no ideas of my own' or even words to that effect.
This is therefore not the reason for my asking other
artists for instructions for paintings.
The show was not, as claimed, an attempt to
demonstrate any points about 'curatorial concepts'. I

Donovan Ward: Ash, Dust & Trade Marks at Bell-Roberts, Cape Town
Long Street runs down the middle of Cape Town. It's a sparkling parade
of exotic nightclubs, township hustlers, randy backpackers and
streetwise undergraduates. Looming behind Long Street are the granite
cliffs of Table Mountain. Sometimes, when clouds gather menacingly on
its peaks, it seems like a tidal wave about to crash down on this
glowing neon strip-as though the whole continent of Africa is about to
descend on this merry scene with its gross humanity, its post-colonial
pre-renaissance, its angry future.

Near the end of Long Street, Bell-Roberts Gallery hosts exhibitions by

Event for Touristic Sites: an interview with Lucas Ihlein by Gianna Murazzo

Gianna Murazzo: I really like the idea of those t-shirts of yours! I think I remember seeing a few of them at some other art site - are they the same ones?

Lucas Ihlein: Yep, you can see 'em at www.pica.org.au
and on adelaide indymedia too...
adelaide.indymedia.org

GM: If you'll allow me, I'll write a few thoughts i got from that project of yours ...

UNIVERSAL GROOVES: ED KUEPPER SHAKES UP CLASSIC AVANT GARDE FILMS

When I was a kid, a lot of disturbing things happened round me. But… happiness became my whole theory of life. Not hedonism but happiness of a lasting kind, like art. Art replaced God for me very early on. I ducked anxiety, but it was still there, it had to be there somewhere. The 'Tusalava' octopus-spider was a kind of death figure.
Len Lye (1901 - 1980)
Len Lye's dazzling handmade films have stood the test of time and continue, over 20 years after his death, to provide uninhibited joy and inspiration to audiences and artists worldwide. Now with the support and blessing of the Len Lye Foundation, Ed Kuepper has awoken latent artistic potentials within Lye's high-speed abstract paintings and drawings on film. The visual-music fusion that results achieves moments of genuine awe and unfamiliar beauty. Kuepper recently previewed his new set of instrumental pieces in the lounge of David Pestorius' suburban Brisbane home, prior to a giving a giant-screen performance in Melbourne as part of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's Live@ACMI series.

SUMMER VISIT, THREE NOVELLAS, Antigone Kefala, published by Giramondo, 2003, 120 pp, $20 (pb)

Summer Visit is a structurally puzzling book. Taken as a whole, it offers the reader none of the usual comfortable resting places; there are no highs or lows to identify with easily. Death, loss and absence pervade the three novellas. In the first novella, Intimacy, the central character's dreams are more animated than her waking life from which she appears displaced. Grief and loss have numbed her response to reality. At the end of the story a death, dreamt, imagined, or remembered startles the reader.

SWIFT, Fairytales of the Heart and Mind,
(Evolved from EVE)
roS
Warby
MargIe medlin
helen
mountFort
Together

SWIFT is a solo performance that is not a solo show. The lighting, film projections and sound are integral to the conception. The moments of live cello performance highlight the collaboration. It is a work that takes you on a wonderful journey conceived by Ros Warby as choreographer and performer, together with Margie Medlin in set design, film and lighting and Helen Mountfort with cello and tape composition. It is intimate and also……..

Spinning
Wonder with
improvIsatory

About Paradise Parrots and Other Australian Legends of Place and Identity, i.m. G.B. (1940-2003)

Seven cities once disputed Homer's birthplace. As many regions have claimed parrots as their own. While Romans drew talking parakeets from India's dawnlands, Tang courtesans obtained them from Paradise. The home of Guacamayo, the great American Parrot-Trickster is Guatemala or thereabouts - although the claim of the Brazilian Bororos to be parrots and the name Parrotland (bestowed on Brazil by macaw-struck conquistadors) argue a different origin. Further south a medieval Arabic periplum plumps for Java, on the grounds Javanese parrots spoke every language. Furthest south, Gerard Mercator's world map of 1569 discovers a Psitacorum regio on the coasts of an immense Antarctica-like blankness (collectively denominated Terra Australis Nondum Cognita). The point of these parrot tales is that geographers and historians, who identify Mercator's region of parrots with Australia, fail to see what kind of genealogy they establish. To surmise that Portuguese mariners were the first Europeans to chance upon Australia and discover its parrots is not to backdate Australia's colonial and natural history. It is to suggest an entirely different legend of Australian place and identity.

What does art really do? A reflection on art, context and agency.

We all knew that USA won his latest war against Iraq the moment we saw on our televisions the huge head of one of Saddam Hussein's social realists statues being covered with an American flag. This was the image the media liked and broadcasted ad nauseam. Much could be read into it. What happened next was even more interesting: the American flag was replaced with a pre-Saddam Iraqi flag, then the statue was torn down from its pedestal by a tank, and attacked by Iraqis. The statue was literally bashed to death, and with it the rule of Saddam Hussein. These news story, repeated on a loop by television stations all over the world as the 'it' story on Iraq invasion and defeat, made me reflect on what art really does. In the specific case what the statue did. Media images of course are powerful, much more than art, and the American flag on Saddam's head is now an iconic image of our recent history. What I kept going back to was not so much this image, but the following footage showing people attacking the statue, as if the statue itself was invested with the power of Saddam Hussein. In a certain sense, it was, and by killing the statue, political and social change were endorsed.

Sarah Goffman: XXXXXXXL -Front Room, Sydney, December 2002

In June I met Sarah at Ruth's party. It was an Australiana theme and Sarah
was dressed as a swaggy. At that time, Block gallery was across the road
from Ruth's place, and Jason and Oscar took me over there to see Sarah's
show. I got to see it twice because, later, we went there again to find a
stash of beer.
This night-time viewing has remained with me because Sarah often uses
coloured lights in her installations, and the effect was striking in a
modest and poetic way. Here, there were rotating gels, so that things were
bathed in shifting hues. This added to the floaty, underwater feel of the

Eva Hesse: Tate Modern, London, November 13, 2002 - March 9, 2003

Eva Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936. In 1939, the family escaped Nazi persecution and came to New York. In 1970, she died of a brain tumor. By 1965, in the second half of a career that was to span just a decade, Hesse had stopped painting and had begun to make sculptures and installations. Using such experimental materials as latex, fibreglass, polyester resin, rubberised cheesecloth, rope and cord, vinyl tubing and papier-mache. Due to the way in which she worked with these materials, they have become dangerously unstable over time, and so much of Hesse's work is now disintegrating, literally disappearing. The brevity of her life and the condensation of so many ideas into a single decade, give her work an atmosphere of urgency and immediacy. And so within Hesse's life and her work, there inherently lies the very tension at the heart of existence.