RE: [-empyre-] in-situ

["nat & ali" <josiejuxta@hotmail.com>]

Hi everyone,
Apologies for the late intro.... have been coping with the rundown (cold) 
and comedown of the 2004 exhibition festivities.... and nat is 2 weeks off 
having baby? she has a real excuse, ali really has none.

We?ll just give a little insight into how and where our collaboration works 
which is relevant to this forum as the space we inhabit to build our ideas 
has always been very ambiguous.

For the past five years we have produced a shared, singular body of work. 
Autobiography serves, in some sense as an original impulse for our 
collaborative practice.  By working both inside and outside the gallery 
system, we investigate the borderline between high and low culture, or fine 
art and popular culture.

Often we begin by referencing daily newspapers, magazines articles and other 
selected tabloid media as a research archive (often conducted in cafes etc).
Our works, including performances, attempt to construct and explore 
relationships between an event and its mediation. They often involve 
interacting with people who participate as themselves and contribute their 
experiences in a mixture of scenes, both staged and documentary in form. 
Here too, the viewer plays a role, as the works often originate in a social 
environment, where co-operation and participation are part of the total 
experience, (such as recently documented auditions for a Reality Television 
Series, or World class sporting events like the Australian Open Tennis 
Tournament, World Cup Rugby, or The Grand Prix). The work often evokes ?a 
here and now?, have and have not? aesthetic.

Within galleries we work in a variety of mediums to make large site-specific 
installations. These are informed by our friendship and shared experience, 
and by our obsession with popular culture, especially the mass media. We 
attempt to enliven the local art scene by being self-promoters both within 
and outside the gallery system and, as seen in our installation for the 2004 
? Culture Now exhibition, we become a sort of  welcoming party for 
contemporary art.
Work outside of the gallery system includes appearing in the ?famous faces? 
section of Woman?s Day Magazine (2000), posing at the opening of the 
Melbourne International Film Festival, alongside Sigrid Thornton - star of 
?The Man from Snowy River? (circulation 45000) and 'We Love Art' Campaign 
2000, a public performance on a float in the Melbourne Fringe Festival 
Street parade work we sat on a car, (nat?s own beat up, unroadworthy 1981 
Toyota Corolla), surrounded by a walking group of family and friends, who 
brandished placards bearing slogans like 'Art is O.K' and ?We Love Art?.
Our work often attempts to champion the artscene itself, or the community of 
artists and patrons that we are a part of.

Much of our work is like a controlled ?peepshow? into our lives so far, 
which zooms in on aspects of the truth ? often highlighting some of the more 
absurd aspects of contemporary lifestyles including identity and gender 
politics, our reliance on consumer society, and social exchange within 
contemporary art practice

Hope this can contribute to the forum discussion somehow...
no real excuse for the lateness..whoops
Yours in art
nat&ali xx





> From: "Alexie Glass" <aglass@acmi.net.au>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> To: <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] in-situ
> Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 09:24:50 +1000
>
> Hi its Alexie, sorry the intro is a day late... here's something to kick 
> off this weeks forum
>
> Location, Location, Location. These three words could represent a manifesto 
> for the 21st century. Abducted from the spruikers of lifestyle TV and real 
> estate agents, and co-opted into the vernacular of contemporary visual 
> practice, the paradoxical lure, absurdity, and emphatic demands of the 
> phrase don't diminish. In fact, this earnest catch-cry exposes questions 
> about the binary relationship of information de-centralisation to the 
> reality of global urbanisation.  Does place matter? Some might say location 
> in contemporary art is currency, because the right location can ensure 
> access to audiences - that's cultural capital. And history documents a set 
> of responses to this condition. Land art in the 1960's was a snub to the 
> centre, a refute to capital. Installation art and site specific practice in 
> the 1980's and 90's was often implemented as an action to subvert and 
> expose while still engaging the paradigmatics of certain spaces: think 
> museums, galleries, and, in the case of much public art, urban spaces. Over 
> the past decade the colonisation of online space is yet another departure 
> from the vagaries of the flaneur who simply strolls, tantalised by taste, 
> experiencing the multiplicity of the arts as a visual buffet.  In-situ 
> suggests a greater interactivity, whether that equates to pressing buttons 
> or a cognitive awareness for the viewer of their experience of destabilised 
> space. New media and process-based collaborations articulate another view 
> again. So, for artists, perhaps the question is what - if any - are the 
> aesthetic, political and contextual concerns that situated practice is 
> evoking?
>
>
>
>
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