Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 2, 2005. For further information on MANDY MARTIN, refer here: http://www.mandy-martin.com/
If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
adrift on a sea of information at a time when the world's night is a destitute time. In the age of the world's night, the abyss of the world must be endured.
---- Adelaide is home. Work is often in Canberra. Relaxation is in Victor Harbor. I'm a frustrated photographer & philosopher who has lost his way in life. I used to be a policy wonk. Now, as a knowledge worker I have trouble learning to live in a complex digital world. Personal expression is the way I critically cope in a technological mode of being.
If graffiti is seen as street art, as Marcus Westbury argues, then some of its forms are very stereotyped. It's the same throwup form repeated over and over again with different colours, but little attempt is made to transgress the form.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, wall, Adelaide, 2007
If street art is alive and happening now, in contrast to the collected art displayed in the grand art institution, then this expressive form does not say very much about our everyday life in Australia. In contrast to the underground, experimental and DIY culture this kind of throwup graffiti becomes boring and tedious. There is nothing to engage with.
Nor does the graffiti form refer to other visual creative forms, or to help establish or reinvent a rustbelt Adelaide as a creative and interesting urban cultural centre where art and music is made in disused industrial buildings or run-down bowling clubs. Nor does it seem to be a part of the street culture of DYI fashion, music, art that is happening in the spaces of derelict warehouses that have become studios.
Marcus Westbury works with the familiar notions of high and low culture to argue that these spaces are crucial for low art. The kind of work generated by The Empty Show movement can develop if artists have studios in the art spaces in the derelict buildings, which would otherwise stand empty if not being used by artists to make things. These spaces/studios become the incubators that grow into this:
A better quality of Broken Yellow's excellent video of The Herd's reinterpretation of Redgum's classic 'I was only 19' can be found here.
| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 03:21 PM | Permalink
Gary,
I saw the first part of Marcus Westbury's No Quite Art, which connected the old industrial cities of Newcastle to Glasgow. I was impressed--- he's dead right.
Why don't city councils in rustbelt cities get behind this kind of street pop culture? Help to incubate it and provide artists with a career?
Gary,
I saw the first part of Marcus Westbury's No Quite Art, which connected the old industrial cities of Newcastle to Glasgow. I was impressed--- he's dead right.
Why don't city councils in rustbelt cities get behind this kind of street pop culture? Help to incubate it and provide artists with a career?