Hi.
Okay, I could suggest a number of things about why there has not been one of these for some time, but really, this is potentially somewhat dull. We have lives, there’s a plague, we’re all bust and exhausted by the grinding churn of late capitalism. You know, I know.
Instead, I saw some art that was on all too briefly and I had thoughts about this art - two shows - and here are some speculations and suggestions. Not reviews but something.
IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN I LOVE YOU
Joel Crosswell
Michael Bugelli Gallery
TOMB.
Joel is a somewhat singular artist because he’s quite experimental, in a nervy, near-frantic sort of way. He’s done some amazing work, he’s won some prizes, and he’s made some art that did not work so well, and it’s all very emotive and raw. His influences are often from B-culture - a world of horror films spliced in with gangster rap and other nasty-ish stuff; his drawings have something of an influence of horror novelist Clive Barker, who illustrated some of his own texts and makes sculptural works - but that’s not everything, Mr Crosswell is quite the magpie. Joel’s fish humanoids that won the Tidal prize a few years back had a dollop of HP Lovecraft’s Deep Ones (and Tidal sounds like a good title for a horror flick set in an isolated fishing community).
What Joel does can shift around: He’s had much success with sculptures, but he’s toyed with performative work that I saw as having a potential relationship with Butoh, an experimental dance form that originated in Japan and deals with the grotesque (which is a massive oversimplification, but I just wanted to nod to it). Grotesque is at the core of what Joel does - he’s a maker of weird and unsettling art. There’s a bit of that in this new show: there’s a video that features the artist stumbling around some flowers in a gas mask, and it’s quite creepy, and it’s also got an echo of Butoh to it. Gas masks get to me a touch: they are a potent symbol of the post-apocalyptic to me, and there’s something dehumanising about them, something that suggests fetish and toxicity. They seemed to be about a lot as motif in the 80s, when there was a lot of cultural anxiety about things like HIV and the potential for nuclear conflict.
See? Creepy. It suits the whole show, which is also creepy. Joel has made a number of complex collages that feature cascading bouquets of scavenged imagery, made into whole works that use cohesion but still teeter on some sort of potential for collapse and dissolution. Collage is likely one of my most beloved art production methods. I love the way it uses, or can use, detritus and the leftovers of culture, they way it doesn’t rely on skill as much as it does intelligent lateral thinking and the understanding of context as a form in itself. I like the audacity of collage: we’re not supposed to destroy reading matter, but collage does - it sees new potential in everything, new stories and commentary, derived from the destruction of the old. Collage is irreverent, but it is also a doorway, and it’s the primal undercurrent of twentieth century art: it appears as a technique again and again: even now, those memes we share on social media have creative elements of collage.
It’s a method of divination: take these elements, mix them together, see what comes that is new, and what that tells us.
I think Joel came across as hideously anxious in these images, and given the state of the world right now, that’s really not unreasonable. That’s where the images have some feral success - they seem to have been constructed with some swiftness, arising from a nervous urgency to react to the apocalyptic status of the world. The sky is ripped to shreds and the heat is terrifying, and getting worse.
This is a time of massive anxiety. Joel seems to tap into this, and to have gathered a myriad of images that capture and comment on - well, heaps, but I found these works distinctly political, angry, expressive and energised. They’re chaotic and rough, unrefined - but this works distinctly as an immediate and potent reaction, filled with emotion and passion. There is consideration and much attention paid to tones and to the collection of images, but the actual act of making and creating, putting it all together, is bristling with an urgency to get the idea out, not to refine, but to just get the vision out in the world. A rough beast of a show, if you will.
If I never see you again I love has energy, crassness, the desperate eroticism born of panic and most importantly, a lot of rough, bloody chunks of idea. Joel’s avoided slickness, and found something visceral and prophetic.
RILL
Moonah Arts Centre
Part of Mosaic Support Services Festival of Arts
Rill was a beauty of an exhibition that slipped in and out of MAC too quickly I feel: it should have been on for an entire month. Them’s the breaks, but the show's brevity motivated me to write something about it just to note it was there, because it had a real exuberance and some really arresting work.
Anna Hall
Bradley Fysh
Brad Ward Performance residue
Michelle Simms
Matthew Dean (detail)
The formal range of the works really drew me in to the world of the exhibition, and while some works were rough, the surprise for me was a whole lot of refined processes going on - but this show seemed to be part of a longer process that allowed the people making the work to find methods and experiment with them. There was video animation as well, and a performance work I saw filmed snippets of, that I wished I’d caught on the night, but the rich, varied content was more than enough to engross and thrill me. There’s a lot of cliché one can find to get bogged down in with work like this, and describe it as ‘raw’ or ‘refreshing’ or even ‘honest’ but, ah, nup - it was presented in a manner that allowed me to get past that and dig into how experimental and process driven the work here was. People had been given ways to make their work, but also choices about presenting it, and that led me to ask myself about why we show all art in the way we do, and how there’s apparently a ‘right’ way to present art, which there probably isn’t really. Rill managed to upend a few assumptions about what art is just by existing, and then there was example after example of interesting artwork that had a particular strength. I quite loved the images made by Michelle Simms, which drew me into a question about the investigation of the potential of materials; Bradley Fysh’s highly stylised bat Sigil images had a pleasing murky, damp oddness to them and Anna Hall’s cascading watercolours stood out as being very painterly. There was a lot more: Rill was super dense - some thirty artists were involved here - but it was not overloaded, and crucially, it wasn’t indulgent: there was not an ‘every child wins a prize’ feeling here. Instead, I got the idea that the work had been refined over time and was now quite developed, and if there was a process (which I gather is the case) that led the participants to this outcome - it was highly successful. Julia Drouhin and Maria Blackwell, the curators, have done quite a job in letting this group of artists be themselves.
OKAY.
That will do for now.
Buy me a coffee if you’re feeling generous.
Feedback and ideas well come.
There’ll be more ranty stuff, I have a few things to get off my chest.
thanks very much for your time.