Thursday September 29 – Monday October 3 Newcastle
This year was the very first time I had ever attended TiNA and I’m already lamenting all the years I missed out on. For the uninitiated, This is Not Art is an annual independent arts festival held in Newcastle that showcases the work of emerging and experimental artists from a variety of disciplines all over Australia. TiNA first began in 1998 and has continued to grow and expand ever since and now includes four sub festivals under the TiNA banner; Electrofringe, presenting experimental electronic art; Crack Theatre Festival, which has everything to do with experimental, fringe, and cross artform theatre and performance; Critical Animals, a creative research symposium and the National Young Writers Festival. Entirely free, TiNA is the definition of surviving on the smell of an oily rag.
With four festivals running simultaneously the program of events is slightly overwhelming with around 250 events happening over five days. I’m not sure how someone is meant to be able to attend even half that, but try they did! Arriving on the Friday night meant I was already two days behind and so admitting defeat before I had even begun I ended up at TiNA rival, Sound Summit festival to get a much needed beer. Sound Summit used to be a TiNA sub festival but is now its own separate entity, yet still occurs on the same weekend. Arriving late also meant I missed the chance to see three of my friends participate in Writer Wants a Wife, a Perfect Match style event where festival attendees got the chance to find their one true (festival) love.
If I thought heading to Newcastle meant escaping Canberra for the weekend, I quickly realized I was very, very wrong. The TiNA (and Sound Summit) programs were filled with representatives of the nation’s capital and our always underrated contemporary arts scene. Canberra arts multi-tasker extraordinaire and co-producer of You Are Here Festival, Yolande Norris was one of three co-producers for the Critical Animals festival. Canberra graphic designers newbestfriend did the festival program and advertising, The Last Prom celebrated the end of days on Sunday night while Last Man To Diediscussed Transcendence, Zoya Patel represented for Canberra writers, while Glen Martin and Christina Hopgood were also making sure no one forgot that Canberra was taking over.
My Saturday began with Australian Matter and Memoir. Particularly interesting was Jes Tyrrell’s talk on her visual arts PhD project exploring the interpretation and representation of memory through interviews and a future multimedia installation work. This was followed by a discussion of culture jamming including a diverse panel of street artists and one member of The Chaser’s War on Everything discussing the relevance of culture jamming in the so called ‘digital age’.
Seeing Space, Land and Language meant missing out on a discussion of the hackerspace movement, by Canberra’s very own Make Hack Void. However, I was lucky enough to catch a beautifully engaging and lyrical talk by ex-Canberran Emily Stewart on ecopoetics (though I am still unsure what that actually means…) and her own process of writing. Continuing on in the bare surrounds of Newcastle’s former lock up, the very charismatic John Olstad discussed his work studying the linguistics of small atoll communities in Papua New Guinea. He left free no opportunity in which to demonstrate his own prowess of language and to emphasise that he did in fact live on a tropical atoll, no big deal.
A highlight for the whole weekend would have to be the Big Top Ball held at the Festival Club on Saturday night – any excuse to dress in costume is fine with me especially when it could possibly involve seeing men in acrobat outfits and many a beard. Too many festivities that night though meant Sunday was quite the challenge even without the torrential rain. Not camping was the best decision I ever made.
Struggling through the rain and the pain was worth it to see The Landscape of Crisis, three papers presented by Sophie Lamond, Clancy Wilmott and Rebecca Giggs all of which concerned the discussion and representation of environmental crisis in art. This event would be one of my highlights for the weekend, not only because of the compelling ideas and work presented but also because this was my first encounter with the infamous ‘serial pest’ of Australia, Peter Hore. Well known for interrupting the funeral of Michael Hutchence, he is responsible for numerous shenanigans and always attends as many TiNA events as he can, giving his responses freely and loudly. His issue on this day was with the fact that the moon landing never happened, classic conspiracy theory.
Overall, I have some regrets about not seeing very much performance and sound work. In fact, there was a massive gap in my program regarding Crack and Electrofringe events. For me, TiNA ended up being more of a conference and less of a festival, which was both good and bad. My inevitable and obvious conclusion is that like any festival, TiNA could have been a million things and ultimately it was a choose your own adventure situation. Without the opportunity to go back and take the storyline you missed out on. Well, until next year anyway.
THE MAN WHO NEVER SLEEPS:
JOHN WATERS has a reputation for boundary pushing that knows little peer in modern pop culture. His name is a shortcut for pithy quips and savage rejoinders that suggest a man forever ready for a well-practised punch line, lilt of the head and arch of the eyebrow.
In the course of a string of high-camp, schlock films in the late ‘60s through to the early ‘80s (Mondo Trasho, Pink Flamingos and Polyester), his numerous stage shows (one of which – Hairspray – was a movie, then a stage show, then a movie of the stage show) or his memorable performance on The Simpsons as himself, the Baltimore native gives the impression of a man who refuses to take it easy.
In fact, when most people his age are in the first stages of their retirement, Waters maintains a gruelling work rate that would shame most writers half his years. “I don’t mind it, I guess I got it from my father…the early bird and the worm. I jump straight out of bed and get to work – writing, creating, and thinking of things. I work about ten hours a day.”
Aside from a probing body of work that runs the gamut from an obese transvestite eating dog shit (Divine’s legendary turn in Pink Flamingos – a performance forever linked to the outrage it caused but according to the man himself, “I never set out to outrage people. And besides eventually society catches up with me!”), to Johnny Depp playing a dopey teen star in the relatively straight Cry Baby, Waters has been afforded some minor luxuries. Like a beach house at Cape Cod or as he calls it “The Gay Fishing Village. I’ve been coming here for 47 years and it’s an insane beach town for artists and lunatics.”
His beach retreat is more than just a place to party with the bears (we’ll get to that in a minute), it’s also a time for relaxation. “I go swimming everyday for half an hour. It keeps my sanity.”
Fortunately with New York a six-hour drive away his neighbourhood for half the year isn’t swarming with skinny-jeaned hipsters. “Sure, it has always been an artists’ community and pretty crazy. Every summer they have bear week. This weekend is Gay Family Week. They have sporty lesbian week. Then they have women’s craft, which is a little drearier. And then on Memorial Weekend we have Baby Dyke weekend when all the college girls come and they act wild. They get into fights and get naked. It’s hilarious.”
What followed was a manic 20-minute discussion about the Australian Electoral system, Julia Gillard, yuppies, The Wire and preparing his one man live show for Australian audiences. Space (and a deleted file) prevents further discussion, so I’ll be at his forthcoming This Filthy World show hoping for a repeat performance.
John Waters will bring is solo show, This Filthy World to The Canberra Theatre on Tuesday October 25. Tickets are available through canberratheatrecentre.com.au for $75/$69 concession.
450-1. Not a scenario you would normally bet on. Canberra author and editor IRMA GOLD did; and won. Gold’s Two Steps Forward is the sixth and final book in a series of short fiction collections by Melbourne-based publisher Affirm Press called Long Story Shorts. Submissions were called for, 450 manuscripts landed and, much like her namesake suggests, Gold was at the top.
Two Steps Forward’s central theme is that ofpeople pressing through difficult circumstances. Miscarriage, single parenting, poverty, drug abuse; the rich gamut of human suffering is covered. Despite seemingly grim subject matter, dogged hope pulses through the characters and their stories. “It’s something that I’ve always been interested in exploring through fiction,” Gold says. “How people in difficult situations struggle towards some kind of happiness. How sometimes they don’t get where they wanted but instead discover happiness in smaller things.”
The 12 stories on offer do what a good short should; dipping briefly and adroitly into a life long enough to take away something about the characters, their stories, and how they reflect our own lives.
“I have no idea where most of my stories come from,” Gold says. “The characters arrive in my imagination – quite unexpectedly – and I allow their stories to unravel. Tangerine is a good example. An image came to me of a man and a young girl standing on a train platform in the middle of the night. They were ill at ease with each other and I didn’t know why, but I wanted to find out. The story grew from there about a father who is trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter… Writing, for me, is the art of discovery. Where the characters and stories end up can be surprising. That’s part of the pleasure of writing.”
Miscarriage features in two of the collection’s stronger stories. Gold deals with this sensitive subject in a way that is simultaneously unflinching, brutal, emotionally open and refreshingly raw.
“I wanted to write about miscarriage in a way that was real,” Gold says. “Miscarriage is so common and yet it rarely seems to be represented in fiction in anything other than clichés. A hand clutched to the stomach, a rush of blood, and then it’s all over. It rarely happens like that. So I wanted to write about characters who were authentic, and really draw the reader into the complexity of the experience. It’s been very heartening to get so much positive feedback about these two stories from both men and women.”
‘Resonance’ is a quality all writers, particularly those of short fiction, aspire to. That Gold’s Your Project and Sounds of Friendship are currently dancing through this author’s head suggests she has achieved just this. “I feel great affection for all my characters, even the unlikable ones,” she says. It’s likely you will too.
Irma Gold’s Two Steps Forward is out now through Affirm Press.
A NEW HORIZON contains more than 70 highly conceived works that reflect how major shifts in Chinese culture were felt and reinterpreted by two generations of artists working from the origin of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to the present day.
This exhibition highlights the importance of work from over 50 years ago, instead of the current trend for the latest and loudest works from China. It teases out the skill, sincere philosophy and great innovation of Chinese artists. Underscoring the changes in style in the show are changes in time. It is interesting to note the shift of work created for the benefit of society and state to work created for the individual and the market place.
Zhou Shuqiao’s Spring Breeze and Willow (1974) oil on canvas, paints a group of radiant young people about to participate in the Cultural Revolution re-education program. The social realist scene uses bright colours and a tight composition confirming unity and happiness. Some equally enamored Tibetan youths in Pan Shixun’s Walking on the Road (1964) oil on canvas, are pictured paving their own roads, literally and figuratively, suggesting their freedom under China.
Shang Yang’s Dong Qichang Project-27 (2009) mixed media, references the poeticism of Chinese 16th century painting and artfully incorporates digital images hinting at evolving modes of communication. Contemporary ideas are also captured without using modern technology. For example Chen Ping’s Dreaming of the Mountain from my hometown (1998) ink and wash, holds true to the classical way of rendering a landscape.
Avant-garde art of the ‘80s took its punkish inspiration from outside China. This is evident in the chiseled imagery in Wang Yingchun and Yang Lizhou’s political scene, Taihangshan Steel Wall (1984), ink and wash. At first it looks like a carved rock-face, representing strength. But it shares Picasso's abstracted approach to movement in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and touches on German Expressionism.
As an exchange Australia sent NAMOC an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous work that was admired for its ability to transcend cultural paradigms because of its uniqueness or otherness. The idea that art can speak to universal truths, like pain, anonymity or survival fills the contemporary wing of this exhibition.
In a way the National Museum of Australia and the National Art Museum of China are showing both art works and also artifacts. The breadth and craft of the work in the show is wide, as is the story that the works tell as a whole about the development of Chinese society and culture.
A New Horizon: Contemporary Chinese Art from the National Art Museum of China will be on show at the National Museum of Australia until Sunday January 29, 2012.
When, in their tenth year THE WHARF REVUE finally made their first trip to Canberra at the start of 2010 with their lauded production Pennies From Kevin, the whole week's shows sold out and the group returned for a second week. They seemed to have previously underestimated Canberrans' insatiable craving for raucous political satire, so it's good to see they're not making that same mistake again, bringing their new production Debt Defying Acts! to The Playhouse this October.
A comedy/musical group developed by Drew Forsythe, Phillip Scott and Jonathan Biggins - and this time around joined by At Home with Julia's Amanda Bishop, The Wharf Revue's productions are renowned for their incisive, cutting musical sketches which take aim at anyone and everyone in the national and international political and related spheres.
"It's funny to say that a week is a long time in politics. A lot of the issues have remained the same," says Biggins, of the topics that receive the greatest air time in Australian politics. "We've been banging on about the same stuff – war on terror, climate change and boat people – for 11 years now.”
The personalities involved, on the other hand, do change. Pennies from Kevin was written prior to Abbot taking charge of the Opposition, and (obviously) while Rudd was still in power. Although Abbot is an endless well of jokes for any sketch writer, Gillard is less so, according to Biggins.
"The interesting thing is, Julia Gillard is not actually that funny, although Amanda Bishop does a great impression of her. Rudd and Downer, on the other hand, were gifts that kept on giving. But how could you do Nicola Rox? Would you want to? We try to get the ones that are easy to have a bit of fun with."
Canberrans' ravenous devouring of Pennies from Kevin may perhaps be reflective of the public's growing alienation with political debate and reporting; a disaffection that has grown exponentially during the Gillard/Abbot year(s). "The 24 hour news cycle has been very damaging to the political process," says Biggins. "Like Lindsay Tanner talks about in Sideshow, the quality of political reporting in this country is absolutely abysmal."
Thankfully The Wharf Revue, in trusted fashion, will give all offenders a good serving this October. "We have Rudd in a Phantom of the Opera type sketch – he steals Julia and takes her away. We also look at Gillard's continuous focus groups from the view of the French Revolutionaries," Biggins explains. "You know, 'Hmm, should we storm the Bastille?', 'I don't know, let's create a focus group to discuss it'. If everything was run through a focus group nothing would ever get done."
The Wharf Revue's Debt Defying Acts! performs at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, from Tuesday October 18 to Saturday October 22. Tickets are available through canberratheatrecentre.com.au for $43/$35 concession.
It is hard to pinpoint where exactly this collective obsession with all things jeweled, glittered, hyper-coloured and kitsch came from. Nor a love of magical crystals, skulls, fur and all that verges on the macabre. Possibly we all watched too much My Little Pony as children, read too many of Grimm’s fairy tales and ate too much sugar. Luckily for us, these elements will come together in one mega exhibition at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, PAGAN POP. An exhibition which curator Yolande Norris hopes will strike the viewer, “like a hammer to the face”.
Norris has brought together the work of nine local and interstate artists for Pagan Pop. Some are young emerging artists and some are nationally recognised including Celeste Aldahn, Tamara Dean, Julia deVille, Jessica Herrington, Robbie Karmel, Owen Lewis, Kate Rohde, Helen Shelley and Marian Tubbs. These are all artists whose work makes you long for the past. Your forgotten dreams and childhood fantasies will be remembered and your unknown desires ignited. Pagan Pop is all about getting in touch with your more primitive urges; that primal part of yourself that wants nothing more than to get back to nature by dancing naked under the stars.
Julia deVille takes on the gothic in her sculptural work, which includes a velvet covered horse skull, a sword and a human skull. Yet within this disturbing and macabre subject matter, deVille injects a light hearted humour, such as giving the horse gold teeth or covering the skull in glitter.
The photography of Tamara Dean is decadent and lush, hyper-real theatrical scenes that are highly stylised and evoke dreamlike scenarios reminiscent of mythological stories and ancient cultures. Just like a dream, these are scenes that at first seem so familiar, but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be frighteningly strange and foreign.
In contrast to the dark and sinister work of deVille and Dean, Kate Rohde’s work explodes with colour and kitsch. Her hyper-coloured and bejeweled faux taxidermy animals can’t help but bring a smile to your face and are complemented beautifully by Celeste Aldahn’s pink, fluffy dream catchers.
In Pagan Pop, curator Yolande Norris has captured a trend that is prevalent throughout popular culture currently. A trend she describes as a, “collective desire for a time beyond memory…a desire for all things natural, mystical and primitive”. Pagan Pop explores the ways in which artists interpret these desires through their work, knowingly or unknowingly, and questions what this mass nostalgia for a past we never experienced says about our contemporary society. This is one exhibition not to be missed and personally I can’t wait to be struck in the face.
Pagan Pop opens at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House, from 6pm Friday October 14 and continues until Saturday November 19. Entry is free.
The Canberra Theatre Thursday September 29 – Saturday October 1
Last year, a group of ANU Arts students threw down the gauntlet, challenged the Revue monopoly held by the Law faculty, and pulled it off with sybaritic legerity. For a less talented group of dramatists, eschewing the marmoreal aloofness and politics-focussed elitism of the ‘upper class’ legal students could have backlashed into a glut of the low humour better reserved for British InBetweeners clones. Instead, the bar was set higher than Steven Hooker’s bunk-bed. This year’s cast of quidams faced up to the challenge with admirable temerity and an irenic change of attack.
Ten months of blood, hidrosis and tears by a group of 20 or so unknowns ended in triumph as they exceeded capacity at all five shows; they even approached a sell-out for their dress rehearsal.
Plays on language, paronomasia and a GPS-load of historical impersonations led the field, but the moments of originality were what grasped the heart of your humble correspondent. For the first time in living Revue memory, an original song had been penned by the band, amply showing off the musical skill of the eight-strong group (live and exposed on stage left). For those unfamiliar with the Revue format, pop standards are ubiquitous, appropriated for the humour of the day, from in-jokes between coevals to addressing the big issues. This risible example was no exception, opening with an ironic lambasting of ‘First World Problems’ the question – apparently in earnest – “How many maids does it take to change a chandelier?” We were reprimanded, “Foreign aid shouldn’t be a one-way street,” and approached on a level we could all understand: “Do you know how hard it is/ to find a perfect soy?/ Do you know how hard it is/ to detail my Rolls Royce?” No evidence was to be found that the cast were a set of young tyros; lighting, sound, acting, writing, and deliveries were close to unblemished, and the actors were seen to be genuinely enjoying themselves.
The individual performances, with their true expressions of talent and moments of pathos, constituted the truly gripping portion of the night. A hipster take on Bohemian Rhapsody, complete with guitar solo – “My opinion clearly matters/to me” – Murdoch as King Lear on his humblest day, and a perfect Queen Elizabeth II, all elicited sighs of amazement amid the roars of laughter. All in all, oscitation was not to be seen in the audience, and the editorial line skirted magnificently between the twin treacherous chasms of the highbrow in-joke and the gutter-skit. I’d like each of the actors to be able to throw in their resume, that they were “a credit to the art-form, a masterwork, unvitiated talent at its original best, and a gift to the audience”, but I’m afraid I’d be open to accusations of embrocation. Let it be said: five stars and worth your attendance in 2012.
