Friday, April 28, 2006

everywhere and nowhere [time and time again]

Last year I was asked to write a catalogue essay for an exhibition by Mira Gojak at CLUBSproject in Melbourne. The exhibition was the first of what CLUBS calls "peer productions" - it's a commission of sorts, but in the CLUBS spirit, the activity of commissioning a project by an admired artist and partly funding it is, in actual fact, the provision of a permission for the artist to realise a project in a space free of the usual constraints.



Mira's show featured a work from 1998 titled herd of unending blue and a work made for the exhibition titled ruin. The juxtaposition of these two works made something mysterious and beautiful, and pointed tantalisingly towards a meaning to be made out of it; and a meaning to be made from the artist’s decision to show works encompassing that period of time. But the thing that is really wonderful about Mira’s work is that eludes easy interpretation and definition.

Saying this now sounds as simplistic as when I tried to say it then - writing about an artist whose work and practice you admire deeply is difficult, so my essay became about that difficulty, amongst other things. I still don't know how to feel about the text, but it is published and it is available online, at the CLUBSproject website, which is here

uitnodiging kaart



an invitation to the exhibition 3 large drawings at Hotel Mariakappel in Hoorn, N.L. in which my work is included.

I am showing alongside André Alves from Porto, and Andrés de Santiago from Barcelona. It's exciting and kind of nice to be involved. Best of luck to the other A's, and many thanks again to the HMK.

The show follows twee projecten [two projects] in Rotterdam, now there is three large drawings, the next show I am in will perhaps be called be called four enormous and wonderful new works. I can't wait.

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Sunday, April 23, 2006

more on the scale of things



On my visit to the National Gallery of Ireland today I saw this painting, which is by Orazio Gentileschi, painted sometime around 1605 and is titled David and Goliath ... which somehow seemed to fit with my current interest in the scale of things.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

more Spring, more sun



The sun is out and the weather feels warm. Back in my hotel room, after a day of walking about in Dublin, I take off my shoes and pad about in bare feet, it's Spring.

In Dublin I have what is a familiar sensation for me in Europe - that of the loss of my sense of scale. I don't know what it is - it is just that, when I get to places they somehow seem to be bigger in certain directions than I expect them to be. From Australia, European cities look small. When you get there (here) they seem huge.

I visited the Irish Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition by Orla Barry called Portable Stones - which featured a film of the same name, and a selection of text based works.



There was also a retrospective of work by Howard Hodgkin - who interests me because his works are just so - err, wilfully wrong, and he uses colour in such exciting ways, reminding me of adventurous home decor in the late 1970's and early 1980's (without being retro, that is) & there was also a collection of photography from the school of "isn't it interesting how people who aren't part of the middle classes live" which makes me feel that I should be making comments like "I feel blessed to have a University education".

I'm still thinking about the Orla Barry film. It is unusual for me to sit through any video piece that is longer than a few minutes, but with this film I sat through the entire hour and five minutes. It is a story involving implausible situations, anachronisms; it has the quality of those old, old myths that survive only as fragments. I'm still not sure if I like it. There is one image that stands out in my memory; two men walking through sand dunes on a deserted island, a wild place, the track littered with discarded water bottles. Which sums up – something, - the impossibility of a wilderness existing in this modern age, without people to see it. This is perhaps the key to why I liked the film.

The film deals with aloneness, with being without speech, -a state that the artist suggests repeatedly as being different from being without means for communication,and a state that is different from being silent. It seems like a plea for something like poetry, ‘letting words speak their meaning’ rather than trying to force them to conform to our own intentions. But also, the film deals with the fascination that aloneness has for us, - like the wilderness, we cannot imagine someone (or something) existing without human witness. The acknowledgement that someone or, the world, might not exist for us, but despite us is terrifying and almost impossible to conceive of; … and the fear that if we abandon the state of being in society with others (other humans) we become something less-than-human.


Friday, April 21, 2006

London, England




Toast. Wonderful toast. Some people miss television, I missed having a toaster, or a grill, anything to stick a slice of bread under or in and make it all golden and brown. I love my toast with jam, with peanut butter, with avocado. I love making tea in a pot and eating toast. I love drinking too much and coming home to toast. The presence of toast makes England a wonderful place. My visit to London this time differs from previous experiences - I spent my few days there before leaving for Ireland strolling in parks. It's spring, really Spring now and Brockley Park, Regents Park, and Greenwich park are glorious places. Very different to London during a heat wave (2003) or my quixotic search for a winter coat along Oxford Street during January this year. The parks are a different view on London. It's gorgeous, it has open space, there are happy people there. I'm looking forward to going back.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

no title




My last view of Het Wilde Weten.

I left the Netherlands today, discovering, to my great surprise, that I was almost ten kilos in excess of the baggage limit. I continue to be mystified by this as most things that I have bought (some novels, a very beautiful yellow 30cm ruler, and two small exhibition catalogues) have been posted back to Australia seperately. I did purchase some sensible underwear from HEMA, but when I weighed this at my friend's house in London later in the afternoon, it turned out to weigh as little as you would expect.

L.P., one of my English friends, puts it down to careless packing. I simply wonder if that 'baggage' is stuff that I took with me from Australia and haven't managed to 'work through' in my time away, or whether it is new 'baggage' that I'm taking away from the Netherlands. It is, always, a place that gives me allot to think about.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

today

some thoughtful words about my exhibition from the lovely and wonderful Annelys de Vet. Her blog is here http://www.xs4all.nl/~annevet/. Go to the "Reflecteren" menu and scroll down to "Weblog". The entry about me is Zondag, 09 April. If you want to translate, I use Alta Vista babel fish translation, ... here



Thoughtfulness is the reason that I make work, to be thoughtful, cause thoughtfulness ...

really something for you



a brightness in my day, and genuine excitement after visiting the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven - One of the things that I enjoyed seeing there was an exhibition of drawings and maquettes by the guy who built this hot pink structure, which is a covered bridge and entrance to the cafe at the rear of the building. His name is John Kormeling. The text on the top of the shed reads echt iets voor u, which translates as "really something for you" and was commissioned by the museum to respond to community perception that the organization is elitist. (not for "them").

The covered bridge crosses the water that surrounds the museum on two sides, and the text is perhaps an invitation for the uninitiated to make the leap of faith over the water and find, on the other side, that there really is something for them ...

this makes me think about what is currently so problematic about our relation to one another - it is what always is problematic, knowing who is outside, who 'you' is (not I), know who "I" is (not you) and the more specific problems to do with (advanced) culture, it's audiences and its aspirations. Because it can never really be one thing for everyone. The more complex question, which makes this work seem, um ... cynical (?), is about how we enable people to feel that they have ownership of culture in the public domain, and are able to enter the critical discourse - rather than insisting that they like it necessarily.

So perhaps the reason that I liked this work is that it is forcing me (one of the "I") to think about what the problem is. I wonder if the people who "they" are trying to encourage to cross the bridge are thinking about it.

I liked the Van Abbe Museum, anyway.


and I liked Dan Perjovski.


and I'm glad that I liked Lily van der Stokker as much as I thought I would.

[rather a beastly way to treat an artist] ... [not a penny gets you ... a large solo exhibition in a large museum]

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

place


a path through the trees in the Kralingse Bos.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

install: day five





The show opened yesterday. These are the things that I like:
firstly, the feeling of stillness that I had when the work was installed in the gallery. This accompanies doing what you set out to do.

secondly; the fact that all the work is documentation of some kind ... the government drawings are documents of a conversation or a process, the photographs are documentation of the conversation or the process in action; the wall drawings are installed elsewhere and represented by preparatory studies and photographs. So I guess you could call the show a kind of index.

third; the people who I like the most in the Netherlands were at the opening.

forth; we ate good chinese food after the opening.

I think what I miss most in Melbourne are Quan 88 - a Vietnamese resturant on Victoria Street; David and Camy's dumpling house in China Town; sitting outside the Builders Arms in in the early evening during summer and drinking beer (the Builder's Arms is now a completely different pub, since gentrification, however). It is difficult to disassociate the people who I do these things with from the quality of the food and the atmosphere that is particular to each place. How I miss them!

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Friday, April 07, 2006

wall drawing install: day four


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Wednesday, April 05, 2006

wall drawing install:day three




It's all about me. The show opens this Friday. Below is the press release for the exhibition.


Andrew McQualter
Two Projects
Het Wilde Weten
7th – 16th April, 2006

Open Wednesday to Saturday 13:00 – 18:00, or by appointment: telephone - 06 3848 3261

Andrew McQualter is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. His work is primarily concerned with the practice of drawing, a process through which he pursues an open, questioning and diverse investigation.

Following a three-month period as ‘guest artist’ with the artists’ organization Het Wilde Weten, he will present two projects in the project space.

Studies for the shape of government is a collaborative drawing project. Following an open call for participants, McQualter has produced a series of nine drawings that document the participants’ subjective knowledge of the system of government in the Netherlands. The process of making the works enabled the artist to explore recurrent themes in his practice, such as the visual representation of concepts and relationships, as well as conducting a kind of “consciousness raising” exercise with artists living and working in Rotterdam.

The presentation Two Projects at Het Wilde Weten, will also include documentation of two site specific wall drawings. These works have been executed in guest artist’s accommodation at Het Wilde Weten and at Hotel Mariakappel in Hoorn. Based on the artist’s observation of visitor behaviour in galleries and museums, both works depict an encounter between a museum visitor and an audio-visual display.

The wall paintings are intended as a gift to subsequent artists using the accommodation. Like many of McQualter’s site specific wall paintings, these works mix whimsy with seriousness – pointing out the absurd nature of everyday situations. However, beneath the humour, a moral seriousness is implied. These images create a feeling of antagonism between sites of production and sites of display - placing a situation that is public into artists’ intimate and private space. Like his collaborative project, these works reflect on the responsibility of artists as citizens, producers and participants in the dialogue around contemporary culture.

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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

no title

photos of the work I made last week arrived today. Many thanks to the wonderful artists who run the Hotel Mariakappel and to the photographer, Huig Bartels.


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wall drawing install: day two

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Monday, April 03, 2006

wall drawing install: day one



I have started installing in my bedroom at Het Wilde Weten. This work is a companion piece to the work that I completed in one of the "guest" bedrooms at Hotel Mariakappel in Hoorn last week. The installation process was also documented in Hoorn, but I managed to delete the photos entirely from both my camera and from my computer when I returned to Rotterdam on Friday night. Such events leave me with the feeling that the universe is trying to tell me something. I said as much to the artist who coordinates the program at Hotel Mariakappel in an email the following day - the reply was along the the lines of "What do you think that the universe is trying to tell you?" We'll see if the universe can be a little clearer over the next few days ...

Thinking about my work, (as one does, living in a different place for three months, with little else to think about apart from one's practise) I am always uncertain about why I do what I do - and this is one of the things that I have hoped to resolve here - arriving at some kind of clarity about the connection between the disparate elements of my practise, or an idea about how they interrelate.

Perhaps they don't.

I do have this, which is from an email I wrote to a curator in Australia, following a request for information on my work for an application ...

[...] I basically have two lines of investigation – one collaborative, which entails thinking of situations that enable me to investigate the dynamics of a relationship through a shared activity, and through that activity, looking at systems of knowledge and interaction, but in the end it is about the process by which we are all (ideally) co-creators of cultural forms (such as architecture or government); the other includes my figurative drawings, which are intended to manifest ideas about the practice of art and to create a kind of antagonism between sites of production and sites of display –


if the collaborative drawing project I am doing here does something like this: [from a friend in Melbourne]
it makes me think of lots of things, about how successful those welfare economies have been, but it also makes me think about the rise of global conservatism, how those economies are changing and becoming less inclusive. I think it will also remind people of the gap between the certainty we feel about our political assumptions and the lack of knowledge we have about how the political system actually operates and is structured.

then what do the wall drawings do?

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