“Graffiti” is a loaded term, almost a call to war! “Art” is a warm fuzzy word. Graffiti is a sharp terrorism for a large sector of the  Australian population. In the latest Big Issue featuring Amy Whinehouse [August 11 – 29] the “Orstralian Kulture” article is a warm fuzzy graffiti story about the chalked  “Eternity” , a word plastered around Sydney by Arthur Stace in the 50’s and 60’s. This word and its text now has Tradmark ownership over it by Sydney City Council. “Eternity”  is  iconic. On ABC Radio National Art Nation today [August 21, 2011]  I listened to a a fascinating story about Yarn Bombing – knitted graffiti being “put up” by all kinds of people who knit and crochet who then hang their works around the city in public places without formal council permits. On line ABC feature “The Drum” last week featured a thoughtful piece on a teacher getting a smack in the mouth by a group of kids he challenged who were tagging the back of a train in Sydney’s West. He was not taking a neo Nazi zero tolerance approach to this art form but did posit the question about how we respond to this activity as a society.  Cultural values around the arts are developed by the people, the market, the artists, the government arts departments and law enforcement agencies over generations. What is it about graffiti that is ok for some but not for others that we need to change or accept? Why do so many people want to be at our place [Jugglers] for events, to paint, for photo shoots? What is it about this last bastion of freedom of speech, as some have suggested, that evokes such a divide?

Its official and getting its own bit of excitement. A great night, great crowd and Keith Burt walks away with $4000, Carolyn V Watson gets $500 [Highly Commended] and the crowd favourite [$500 Oxlades Gift Voucher] will be announced on August 19. [You can still vote by email]. What to make of it? As still new to this intensity of engagement with the arts, I am overwhelmed by the skill, draughtsmanship and imagination of all the entrants and in particular the 20 finalists. Here are marks on paper, board and canvas that tie us to ancient history and mark making. The rendering of imagination and representation visually. One pen or pencil or stick [van Gough used a bit of straw once] into ink or whatever onto the vellum onto the wall and then for the beholders to respond. Kids do it so well and their freedom of expression is not to be limited by colouring between the lines. Blake’s rule was to make sure that in life as in drawing, boundaries were well defined. I have discovered blind contours and find that funny looking shapes make for new interpretations of shapes and how my mind sees things and send messages to the pencil to the paper. We will be doing this drawing prize for a while yet and our life drawing every Wednesday is another chance to keep messages moving from eye to hand to paper.

Yesterday ABC RN broadcast a conversation on a recent retreat by indigenous artists at Bundanoon – [the glorious Shoalhaven property bequeathed to the Nation by Arthur Boyd and family] The question that arrested my attention was how can Australian indigenous artists find a place to begin in their own critique of their own work, including negative criticism. Vernon Ah Kee [one of last year’s judges at the Marie Ellis OAM Drawing Competition at Jugglers] commented that indigenous art has slipped into mediocrity because no one makes negative comment or gives a robust and considered critique of works. Critique is essential to conceptual and skilled development.

I see the critique and criticism of works by the graffiti sub culture by those artists and others on the edge or outside of it. Within our exhibition and studio life at Jugglers there is both a robust and non-existent critique of work.

Vernon’s comments were motivational.

 

Racing man sits most mornings at the Metro in the Valley.I look for him when I make it through the Fortitude Valley Station Ticket gate. Sometimes I sketch him as I sip my coffee.  He sits in the same seat and he does the same thing – he fills out the Racing Form for his foray into hope and fantasy. His legs are masked in compression bandages, his trachea sliced by a tracheotomy probably for throat cancer, his neck and face and scalp patched with skin and scale from skin cancers and who knows what. This week when he was away one morning,  I sat in his seat to see what it was like to be there to see what he sees, at least to see what he looks at when he is not pushing his pencil stub along the Form Guide. Representing a person on my sketch pad and on my digital screen, and sitting where he sits still hasn’t let me into his soul. I don’t want to go there yet. I like my fantasy of him as an object to represent.

A lady was killed yesterday at Keperra Railway Station. A run away motorized chair accident and train. A teenager who knew her wanted to do some art for her in memory of Joyce and so he did a piece at Jugglers. 

I think that what we do at Jugglers Art Space has a resonance with what some Christian religions talk about at Easter in their “Stations of the Cross.” We sit down with artists and artists sit down with us and we inspire a few and we get others into painting murals on QR stations or let great artists loose on our back wall. Clickety clack through life making marks on paper or walls. Jesus Christ made a mark. So have lots of people. We are making marks. Marks on paper or walls. We are all being affected by each other in this clickety clack mark making business. Stations of art or the art of stations.

“Ben Quilty paints as if there is no tomorrow.” 33 year old Quilty uses aerosol and thick paint. ABC Arts Space did a 30 minute piece on him. I add him to my aerosol mates Andy Warhol and Pro Hart as he represents his male ego mortality and toranas in his frenetic paintings. When he lost a good mate at a bucks party – the guy drowned – reality grabbed him by the throat. Quilty’s roots are part  rev head mateship. Germaine Greer filled the space on this doco with her insights into him and maleness.  With a bit of  a shift from male mortality, he just won the 2011 Archibald with his portrait of 88 year old still life painting icon Margaret Olley. Some one said “He drives the market, the market doesn’t doesn’t drive him. ” Interesting. So these two – a contemplative still life painter painted by a “bogan” rev head are visual art saints and successful and satisfied and having an impact on the market. Great art story and he is certainly telling visual stories. And he is articulate and intelligent and honest. Having a couple of little boys and a wife fill his world now. And he still has his Torana!

I have ” pushed” the idea that art is slow – slow conceptually as the intuitive births the theme and image and then the medium, line and tone and so on. I work that way best and as a very new serious visual artist, my attempts birth slowly conceptually. I feel totally at sea around what medium to use because I can really only use a pencil and pen and ink. And my lines are pretty ordinary and tones are shades of black – which I like. In conversation with some aerosol artists lately their beef was that slow didn’t work for them. Their best work came from fast pressured and pressurized [excuse the pun] action. They like their work best when they are under the pump and it resolves best for them then as well. From docos, Pro Hart seemed to be a bit manic, churning out countless pieces that tell stories of his space but speak less of quietness and reflection. Same for Andy Warhol. We wondered if maybe the way their minds are wired  is what they should go with. Embrace the speed! Do your best work! Art is either good or bad! And maybe that speaks for me as well. Which means, if nothing else, I won’t produce much but if I take the time and put the work in I might at least be satisfied with pieces that are resolved, resonate and tell something about me in my space and hopefully might approach “good art.”

Art in non art places are dissonant images and sounds attacking the safe clinical controlled world we struggle to luxuriate in.The “Underscored” music festival at Jugglers [March 19,20] did this beautifully. Skilled and inspiring lentels dropped on cymbals and tappping on bowls. Poetic. “It’s in the spaces that you find the meaning!” The evolution of graffiti – aerosol on the “wrong” canvas. The poetics of space means letting dissonance lead us to beauty or to a holding of questions in the face of someone elses beauty or ugliness. In the words of Tyler Durton “Fight Club” – “…Just let go!!”

RElaunch is a great show continuing until Feb 25. Excellent vibe on the night with blues band “Radiola” and improv performance responses to the art works by John Rohrig. Fanctastic stuff! All the works are worth mentioning and buying but indigenous artist Anthony Walker’s works with authentic certification for buyers mesmerize me.”Song lines” [pictured]

Dirty clean red beige burnt green shiny grubby
If the market controls the art, who controls the artist?
If the market controls the church, who controls the priest?
If the market controls the school, who controls the teacher?
If the market controls the hospital, who controls the doctor?

Between the brush and the brain, the sketch and the slouched figure what is in it? In the hands on clay and the console button is anything else there? “…she moves in a mysterious way…” Epiphany is normal human experience missed by untrained antennae. Driving, sleeping,swimming, digging, running, eating, meditating. The ordinary is the holder of the other ordinary.

After the storm comes
the rain stops to run quick steps
and silence descends.

There is something backward about removing works of art to maintain order. A controlled environment, eg a gallery is the space where the filters have done their job.  In a city, galleries are beautiful and good and inspiring things. But why would someone want to chop off the digits of artists and calligraphers who have slipped by the controlled filters of law and order and made steel canvases moving galleries – indeed, art in NON-art places? A caller to ABC radio last week suggested this as a possible deterrent for the perpetrators of the “graffiti scourge” on our trains. Violence is no deterrent! While our miners demand relaxing of restrictions on toxins into our rivers and streams and insurers leave generosity out of their code of conduct post the floods, another approach to art in non-art places might be to celebrate the skill, beauty and imagination of our street artists. The national gallery [ACT] is now “collecting” street art and admits it becomes less than what it was by storing it in its white boxes. Tax payers money spent on collecting street art in safe places is some kind of violence to creative expression and could be seen as not much more than lopping off fingers and diluting the stream of creative expression.

The morning after the floods the air was heavy. Off to work and free public transport but my head was still running with images of floods, mud and community love. At Ferny Grove station the train was full of colour from one end to the other. Unprecedented in Brisbane. Smiles on some passengers and smiles and a laugh from the staff at Fortitude Valley. I guess the normal guarding protocols were on flood alert at Maine Yards. An invitation to bring beauty to the trains? The Coco pops ad on Bowen Bridge Road that promote sugar filled fat building is justified because the advertising protocols are in place. Boundaries destroyed by raging flood waters somehow birthed some colour in my world.

8 Years accretion of aerosol paint means living with tough conviction in an easy world. Read the full version of this talk at http://www.urbaneyes.com.au/outofthisworld.

Peter Fonoglio, John Rohrig and Andrea Breen shared the space at Jugglers Art Space on Friday night with visual,text, sound and improvisational performance  documentary on PL HIV in Papua New Guinea [Peter] and personal inner  journeys [John and Andrea]. Peter’s Giclee prints and installations are dominated by red, black and greys and  invite further reflections. So too do John’s prolific output of framed collages and ceramic/air dried scultpures and Andreas painted tiles, sound scapes and poetry. John’s and Andrea’s arts therapy practice emerged in both the works and the invitation to the audience to respond to the exhibition on paper. This 3 artist show is not one for the art investor or collector as much as it is an invitation to return, reflect and take the time to get a bit more understanding of what each of these amazing artists is saying and might not be saying. Having my sister exhibit and perform at Jugglers was a great highlight for me.

In the catacomb tunnels of ancient Rome the scrawling signs on walls for the walking dead was a funery mark, a statement of impending death. Seeping, dripping, dank stone wall props carried the graffiti artists into their final mark making installations. Marks now of international significance. Raw, unconsidered, intuitive. And the city fathers lounged on marble, celebrated their sensuality and kept their above the ground city mark free. The making of marks on vellum, stone and wood is an anthropological human activity. Why paint the city beige?

A wry smile seat has gone from our back yard.  Getting money out of anybody for this Jugglers venture is like a disappearing green face on a seat. But it’s pretty amazing the things that happen. The crowds, the vibe, the art, the sales, the programs, the artists, the conversations, the inspiration, the ideas, the repartee and the disagreements. For art. For all of us. For the fun. For the memories. No regrets!