Michelangelo honed his practice by meticulously copying art from Roman antiquity. Rembrandt’s apprentices slavishly copied (and then sold) works by the master, forever creating confusion in art markets. Over the last two centuries artists have torn free of this regulated and hierarchical relationship, but how do artists now respond to the work of others, to the methods and practices of those who came before them? How do they engage and concurrently add to the canon that at times seems weighty enough to crush them?
The Re-invention of Gravity: Responses to works from the USU Art Collection asks current artists to look to these hefty precursors afresh. Taking a work each from the University of Sydney Union Art Collection as their starting point (an impressive collection that boasts over 700 pieces, some dating back 500 years), each artist has defied the intense gravity of history to create art anew.
Nicholas Greenwich responds to a historical, anonymous photo of an empty Union locker room with a stark and disturbing digital print entitled ‘The meek and the proud’. Solemn, detached faces hang on clothes hooks; one is man-handled into a paper bag, as one might pack a leg of lamb. There is an unsettling timelessness to this image, perhaps commenting on the tendency of institutions to homogenise people into products.
TITLE: The Re-invention of Gravity: Responses to the University of Sydney Union Art Collection
ARTISTS: Imants Tillers, Vilma Bader, Arthur Streeton, Kate Beckingham, Warren Knight, Penelope Cain, Chris O’Doherty, Jason Christopher, George Milpurrurru, Hayley Megan French, Nicholas Greenwich, John Wardle, Richard Kean, Shaun Gladwell, Johnathan McBurnie, D Stuart-Grieve, Armelle Swan
Curated by Anna McMahon and Bartholomew Oswald
WHEN: Opening Thursday August 30, 6pm. Aug 31 – Sep 14, 2012. Mon-Fri 10am-5pm.
Artists’ Talk: Thursday September 6, 1pm.
WHERE: Verge Gallery, City Road, Jane Foss Russell Plaza, The University of Sydney
COST: FREE (food and refreshments provided)
CONTACT: Greg Shapley on (02) 9563-6218, g.shapley@usu.usyd.edu.au
Image Credits(composite image attached):
Artist unknown – glass plate negative (USU Art Collection)
‘The Meek and the Proud’ by Nicholas Greenwich, Pigment Print on Cotton Rag, 108cmx128cm
Due for release code {poems} is a book edited by Ishac Bertran
“When things get complex, as they may indeed be getting, the distinction between tools and the things that can be made with them begins to dissolve. The medium is not only also a message, it is an essential counter-valence to our own impulses towards the creation of meaning, beauty and knowledge. The tools we think we are using also use us: They push us around, make us think new things, do new things, even be new things. Language is no different, of course, although in its supremacy and ubiquity, it is even more elusive, difficult to perceive. The very words you are looking at right now are like compact little cryptograms—a written convention, talking back at you in codes.
Poetry is language speaking for itself. It is, at its best, where what is being told is coincident with the telling. The words written, or uttered, pop out at us, while in the same moment, constellations of meaning emerge; the components and its composition resonate, vacillate, on the page and in the air. Many of the constraints and styles of poetry we know have developed in order to allow words to express themselves, or show themselves as the mediation of a mental image. Programming languages for computer hardware, no matter how “high level” or abstract they are, are by necessity far less elaborate than traditional forms of writing and speech. But the structure and function of these new languages give them special advantage in clarity: These languages (syntax, sequence) and the results they produce (ideas, ‘executables’) are absolutely inseparable. By design, computing languages are created in order to express specific ideas, creating certain kinds of action or manipulation of other codes (data). In this sense perhaps, software is always, and already, poetic. It is precise description, and pure syntax—the signifier and signified—clearly coincident in the machine.
Ishac Bertran’s code {poems} is an edited book project that exposes the materiality of computer programming languages. Here are presented a small sampling from a compiled book of poetry written by software engineers, artists and other code writers, “exploring the potential of code to communicate at the level of poetry.” (code-poems.com) The project solicited for online, public submissions from code-writers in response to the notion of a poem, written in a software language which is semantically valid (i.e.: it compiles). This solicitation winds up revealing the inner workings, constitutive elements, and styles of both a particular software and its authors. From a large number of submissions, a selection of poems will be printed as a bound volume in 2012.”
Source: in continent. 2.2 (2012): 148–151
Expressions of Interest for participation due Monday 3 September 2012
The Assembled Self is a project about the experience of genotyping (genetic testing) and how this affects an individual’s sense of self. It is driven by our interest in how genetic testing alters the narratives through which people anchor their own, their families, and their communities’ identities. The project involves a collaboration of researchers and artists conducting a creative research project where artists produce new works (phase 1) to be presented to generate public conversations around genetic testing and identity (phase 2). The Assembled Self is holding a research development workshop on Saturday 22nd September to think through these ideas and find artist collaborators.
Subject to a successful funding application, 8 artist collaborators will be provided with financial and logistical support for their artistic contribution to The Assembled Self.
This project is conducted by Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, University of Sydney and School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales. It is supported by Australia Council for the Arts and PerformanceSpace.
For further information, please contact Estelle Noonan or Julie Mooney-Somers assembled.self@sydney.edu.au.
http://theassembledself.wordpress.com
The Imaginary App - CALL FOR ARTISTS
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky and Svitlana Matviyenko, editors of The Imaginary App, an anthology of art and scholarship on app-computing, invite artists and designers to submit entries for a traveling art exhibition and publication of selected works in our anthology. Our exhibition will feature original icons of nonexistent apps.
Apps are placed at the tips of our fingers on mobile screens. They offer themselves as channels that navigate us through uncanny media networks and rhizomes. They are shortcuts that guarantee direct and immediate access to what we need beyond the screen. We live in the hope that ubiquitous computing will help us maintain our public and private lives relationships, work, and leisure and apps promise to make computation even more seamless and the media environment even more subliminal. If anything, apps reveal how much we depend on this promise when we imagine our being with each other as being with technology.
The goal of this project is to challenge the limits of technological assistance endorsed by the slogan: “There’s an app for that.” What are the most desirable, terrifying, or ridiculous apps that haven’t been and, possibly, will never be released? Formulate a concept of an app. Translate it in the language of design.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT
http://djspooky.com/imaginaryapp/
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO SUBMIT
http://djspooky.com/imaginaryapp/call/
DEADLINE
October 15, 2012.
