October 2016

trouble 139

A Burrinja national touring exhibition project that commemorates the 60th anniversary of the British atomic test series at Maralinga, SH Ervin Gallery, Watson Road/Millers Point, The Rocks (NSW), 24 September – 30 October 2016.

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: (cover) Jonathan KUMINTJARRA BROWN, Frogmen (detail) 1996, synthetic polymer paint, natural ochre and sand on canvas, 122 x 92 cm. Copyright: the artist estate. Paul OGIER, One Tree (detail) 2010, carbon pigment on rag paper, 94 x 117 cm. Copyright: the artist. Hugh RAMAGE, Taranaki 2014, oil on canvas, 42 x 37 cm. Copyright: the artist. Adam NORTON, Prohibited Area 2010, acrylic paint on board, wooden poles and bolts, 240 x 122x 7 cm. Copyright: the artist. See blackmistburntcountry.com.au for full touring dates and details.

CONTENTS BLACK MIST BURNT COUNTRY

A National Touring Exhibition ..................................................................

COMICS FACE

Ive Sorocuk ..............................................................................................

A TALE OF TWO DRAWING PRIZES

Dr Mark Dober ..........................................................................................

TRAVELS IN CLOWNLAND: PART TWO

Judith Lanigan .........................................................................................

OCTOBER SALON

Over zealous ...........................................................................................

FINDING THE ART IN PHUKET: BUTTERFLY ON BANGALA

Anthony S. Cameron ...............................................................................

02 07 08 16 32

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COVER: Jonathan KUMINTJARRA BROWN, Frogmen (detail) 1996, synthetic polymer paint, natural ochre and sand on canvas, 122 x 92 cm. Copyright: the artist estate. Black Mist Burnt Country, A Burrinja national touring exhibition, SH Ervin Gallery, Watson Road/Millers Point, The Rocks (NSW), 24 September – 30 October 2016 - blackmistburntcountry.com.au Issue 139 OCTOBER 2016 trouble is an independent monthly mag for promotion of arts and culture Published by Trouble Magazine Pty Ltd. ISSN 1449-3926 EDITOR Steve Proposch CONTRIBUTORS Ive Sorocuk, Judith Lanigan, Mark Dober, Anthony S. Cameron, love.

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DIS IS DE DISCLAIMER! The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication. The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions. All content in this publication is copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior permission of the publisher. Trouble is distributed online from the first of every month of publication but accepts no responsibility for any inconvenience or financial loss in the event of delays. Phew!

This comic first appeared in Trouble October 2010

Drawing Prizes A Tale of Two

Art Gallery of Ballarat & Bendigo Art Gallery by

Dr Mark Dober

It may seem surprising that drawing prizes are popular when drawing itself seems to lack a presence in the various institutionalised surveys of Australian contemporary art that come along from time to time (such as Melbourne Now at the NGV in 2013), but rest assured they are flourishing. Two current prizes in my neighbourhood, in central Victoria, are the Rick Amor Drawing Prize (Art Gallery of Ballarat, ended 2 October), and the Paul Guest Prize (Bendigo Art Gallery, ends 16 October).

Drawing and painting are related skills and practices, yet we regard them as having their own distinct character. Painting tends to feature colour, while drawing tends to the monochrome, particularly black and white. Drawing master Godwin Bradbeer, who judged the Paul Guest, noted in his opening remarks that painting and drawing are, respectively, like someone with their clothes on, and with their clothes off. In other words, drawing can be viewed as providing direct access to the artist’s inner mind and workings, while painting can be viewed as being more concerned with outward appearances.

While a number of the exhibiting artists (including myself) have been represented in both drawing exhibitions, I was curious to know whether there was much that was different between the two exhibitions. Did the aims of the these prizes diverge, and in what ways?

First, consider the Rick Amor Drawing Prize. Gordon Morrison, Director of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, in answering my questions about the aims and character of the Prize noted: “With respect to the Rick Amor prize ... there are some basic determinants that you have to take into consideration. The first is that this Prize was an initiative of Rick Amor himself and the prize money has been put up by him since its inception. The second is that it is a prize for a small drawing, and that means it is for a work on a sheet of paper no larger than A3 in size. Why? Because the artist who has put up the money for the prize has expressed a concern for fostering drawing ... as part of a practicing artist’s working method.

A Tale of Two Drawing Prizes / Mark Dober

“This is not, therefore, a prize about large, highly resolved work, nor is it necessarily about ‘cutting edge’ image making. It is about producing an effective image working within a defined set of parameters – the size of the sheet. In some ways you could say, therefore, that this is a prize put on by an artist for artists, and is concerned with encouraging a particular set of working skills.”

Gordon further commented on the process by which artists are selected as finalists: that this was done by himself and by an exhibitions designer, who would shortlist between one quarter and one sixth of the entries. While Gordon is responsible for selecting the judge, he also takes input from Rick Amor. Usually, the judges are practising artists who have some knowledge of drawing from their own professional practice; once the judge was a curator from the NGV. I wondered if the Prize money of $12,000 might be increased to attract “bigger names”. Gordon countered: “$12,000 is actually rather a lot for a smallish drawing, even if it is an acquisitive prize. We actually like the mix of ‘big name’ and ‘relative unknown’ participants and don’t feel the purse has much to do with who has participated.”

As for my own research, I read all the artist statements, and these were characteristically of a personalised nature, particularly where portraiture was concerned. I tabulated the numbers of works that fell into one genre or another: portraiture and the figure were dominant. I sought a sense of how much of the work was sourced from photographs, drawn from life, or imagined: these were roughly in equal proportions.

The winner of the Rick Amor Drawing Prize was Peter Wegner. The artist’s drawing, Three Days with Em is a perceptual work – drawn from life. It may be that the small scale requirement of the Rick Amor encourages a proportionately greater number of artists to submit work made from life.

On the evidence of this exhibition, drawing from life encourages an investigative approach. That is because in the perceptual process mark making

PREVIOUS SPREAD: John PASTORIZA, Pinol Magnolia x soulangeana ‘Vulcan’ 2015, watercolour on paper. Entry for the Rick Amor Drawing Prize 2016.

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is organically linked to the artist’s visual experience as it unfolds in real time.

Responding to the presence of the subject the artist can give expression to intuitive feelings. Wegner’s drawing is typical of this in that it is imbued with a sense of humanity.

Now consider the Paul Guest Prize.

While exhibiting work of all sizes, including small works, a key difference of the Paul Guest Drawing Prize is that works of a much larger size generally are on show. Hence, there are fewer works overall to be seen than there are in the Rick Amor.

The impact of this difference – at least at first sight – is that work in the Paul Guest appears to have a more commanding presence. This initial response can be further heightened by greater name recognition. While the prize money of $12,000 is the same as for the Rick Amor, it could be that the greater scope for larger work in the Paul Guest encourages artists to enter a tableau work they may consider more ambitious and more representative of their achievement than the Rick Amor affords.

Simone Bloomfield, the curator of the Paul Guest Prize, noted in response to my questions that “selecting a range of drawing styles, along with a high skills base” were key selection criteria for the shortlisted works.

The Paul Guest Prize began in 2010, named after its benefactor, a retired lawyer and avid collector of contemporary art, who initiated the Prize and put up the prize money. Simone notes, however, that Bendigo Gallery previously had the Robert Jacks Drawing Prize and the Works on Paper Prize, and so has always supported drawing.

As with the Rick Amor, portraiture and figure compositions are widely in evidence. Peter Grziwotz’s winning work, Study of St Jerome as a self-portrait, is not a direct observational response to the subject, as the artist told me that he referenced a photograph when making the work. Though realist in style, the work seems motivated by an idea, as the title suggests.

In conclusion, a tendency to the perceptual at the Rick Amor and a tendency to the conceptual at the Paul Guest is exemplified by the winning works in 2016, and illustrates the difference that underlies the two prizes.

A Tale of Two Drawing Prizes / Mark Dober

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Peter GRZIWOTZ, Study as St Jerome for a self-portrait 2016, charcoal on paper. Winner of the Paul Guest Drawing Prize 2016.

THIS SPREAD: Peter WEGNER, Three Days with EM, 2016, graphite and wax on paper.

Winner of the Rick Amor Drawing Prize 2016.

MARK DOBER paints in the landscape: his most recent exhibition was of oil paintings and watercolours made at the You Yangs. He has a PhD in Painting from Monash University. Mark runs plein-air painting and studio workshops and is also a freelance art writer. He lives in Castlemaine - markdober.com

TRAVELS IN

PART TWO

4. The Garden of Unearthly Delights, and ‘jizzing the gag’ The next night I walked down the pathways between old gum trees, garlanded and festooned with coloured lights, towering over the bars and coffee stalls, attractions and amusements. This is the Garden of Unearthly Delights.

In front of me was an old Spiegeltent dated 1908. It was a wooden structure built for travelling, packing down and setting up easily. It was decorated with stained glass and the interior was rich with mirrors and velvet, turned brass poles and chandeliers.

This one is a little plainer than most. It looks as if it has had a harder life. This speigeltent is called le Cascadeur, named for the stunt clown, the slapstick, the clown that falls down, the doer of falls. It’s a difficult art. It not only takes an acrobatic body and mentality, and a tendency to bounce rather than bruise, but also a purity of focused intention. There is nothing less convincing than someone who is not surprised by an accident.

The Cascadeur was originally part of the Bosco Theatre, another Speigeltent that has been in the Garden of Unearthly Delights for many years.

In the 1930s the original owners sent the back half of the Bosco away to have a new roof made for it, but then couldn’t pay the roof-maker, who then confiscated that half of the tent for the unpaid bill, made a new front and called it the Cascadeur.

The Bosco and the Cascadeur wandered around Europe like separated Siamese twins for many years. The Bosco made it to Australia and was bought

by Scott Maidment, whose company Strut n Fret founded the Garden of Unearthly Delights. A few years later Scott was told by a couple of magicians that there was a tent very like the Bosco that might be for sale, and so the two tents were brought back together as separate venues, co-incidentally on their hundredth year anniversary, here in the Garden of Unearthly Delights.

This year the Garden has eleven venues, one hundred and four different shows, and the doors will open for audiences to enter over twelve hundred times. Thousands of people will come through those front gates. This is one of the places where Clowns work.

But ... before we go inside the Cascadeur I have a confession to make.

Come closer. I need to whisper.

I may have caught fear of clown.

I have just been to see a Fringe show, performed by a ‘clown’ and I

PREVIOUS SPREAD & RIGHT: The Garden of Unearthly Delights photos by Andre Castellucci.

wriggled and wanted to leave and felt quite claustrophobic. Then I went with friends to another Fringe venue outside the Garden, but didn’t get any further than looking at the program full of falsely shy, yet somehow pompous and contrived, explanations of shows that sounded more like workshop exercises than entertainment, with cute pictures of a whimsical nature of people doing not very much.

I feel a distinct aversion and a lurking claustrophobia at the thought of seeing a clown show. It sounds like Fear of Clown, doesn’t it?

That’s going to be inconvenient, possibly even disastrous, given the quest we are on. I’m sure it’s not contagious, but I don’t even want to say the word. For this trip, this treasure hunt, however, I will have to summon up a bit of courage and give it one more go. Otherwise this is going to be a very short book.

Inside the Cascadeur a good-looking young man, twenty-five years old, acrobatic, charismatic, dressed in the style of the thirties, wants to show us a romantic film, but nothing is going right. The character is quite clumsy and the props seem to want to destroy themselves and prevent him from achieving his aim. It’s an escalation of problems, and his attempts at solutions only complicate things further and the twists and turns of this clown’s mind, the wilfulness of his props, and the further problems thus created, kept me and everyone else in the tent entertained until the finish. The show is called ‘Kaput’. The clown is Tom Flanagan.

I could now say the word ‘clown’ without wanting to throw up or run away. My brain felt like it had been cleaned by an hour spent in simple and surprised delight. This is not ‘circus clown’ or ‘party clown.’ This is clown descended from those old silent movies.

Tom Flanagan was a student of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, which is a school in Albury on the border between New South Wales and Victoria, where selected students undertake a high level program of circus skills, often with Russian and Chinese trainers.

Traditionally, circuses often rested up in Albury to use the skilled wagon makers and have equipment made or fixed. A clown – Micky Ashton – decided to stay, and a circus school developed around him. The school has also contributed in a major way to the development of new circus in Australia by opening its doors once a year to professional adult artists to train with their trainers.

Tom said ‘The Flying Fruit Flies taught me how to be an acrobat, but not really how to be a clown. There are different journeys for everyone. I had to find it. I had to find it by meeting people. Derek Ives, Captain Frodo, Mooky Cornish, Gareth Bjaaland, and those friends who inspired me to be funnier, and clown more. Hanging out putting up the tent and stuff – that’s how you

Clownland / Judith Lanigan

learn things.

‘I learnt a lot from Mooky Cornish (a Canadian Clown who performed with Cirque du Soliel). She taught me to slow down. She’d say “man, I’d hate to have sex with you, you’d jizz all over my face before my pants were off, you just blow your load every time. Chill the fuck out and let the audience see what you’re going to do before you jizz the gag all over them.” ‘ ‘Why do you do it?’ I asked - not “jizzing the gag”, but the show itself.

‘People laughing is the best, and it’s the best thing for people I think.’

‘What do you think is the essence of Clown?’ I asked him.

‘I think Clowns need an objective and an obstacle. You’ve got your objective, and you get to that objective the most far afield way you can.

That’s what every great clown has got. He has got an objective and a problem, or rather a lot of problems, and he just fails along the way, and then fails with a kind of success story to it. Clowns see the obstacles in life and make fun of them, where usually you’d just get angry. They try to laugh at life.’

5. Inside the Odditorium, and the Candy Butchers Follow me behind these painted banners hung on the high wire fence. We’ll just slip through this gap, and carefully close the gate behind us. Stay on the path behind me.

I stopped outside a striped piece of awning, hung as a curtain into the back of a large rectangular marquee. A tall man with a broad strong shoulders and chest like an archetypal Highlander looked out from the behind the curtain and beckoned me inside. This is Gordo Gamsby, aka The Great Gordo. Back in chapter One he was with ‘Dirty Pat’ in the picture of the men dancing on mousetraps while wearing white buckets around their necks to stop them looking down.

Inside the tent it was quite dark. Tables were lined up in front of mirrors, stacks of cases and boxes lined the walls of the back of the tent, and a curtained entrance off to the right led to Sideshow Wonderland. I followed the Great Gordo to the left, to the Odditorium. In front of me was a glass case in which was displayed a two headed rooster, a duckling named Dido that was born with two bodies and one head, a two headed rabbit and a cycloptic Silky chicken. A very pretty six-legged baby deer sat beside a two-headed lamb with two sets of front legs. The jars at the back of the shelf were full of preserved piglets, one of them born with eight legs. Next to them a half chicken half duck known as Chuck sat next to a Fijian mermaid, half man half

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fish, discovered off the coast of Mexico in 1882. Beside a shrunken head was a dagger made from a human leg, a skeleton of a Siamese twin, the head of the yeti, an albino kangaroo born in 1951, the skull of a two headed calf and the penis bone of a Walrus.

All this has been collected by Chayne Hultgren, aka ‘The Space Cowboy’, Australia’s most prolific world record holder. One of his records was swallowing twenty-four swords at the one time. This Odditorium is part of his private collection.

Gordo Gamsby, resplendent in a military jacket, was preparing to open the Odditorium and its accompanying tent, the Sideshow Wonderland.

We talked about the Dirty Brother’s show The Dark Party. ‘A lot of the show came out of Dirty Pat’s brain,’ Gordo said, ‘the look of it, the hobo clowns, that all came from Pat Bath, but we have all put ourselves into it and we’ve been doing it for a number of years now, and every time we do a show someone will come up with a new idea, to change or add something.’

There is one trick of Gordo’s in The Dirty Brothers show, where Dirty Pat sits playing a saw, and the tune is Hawaiian, and then Gordo enters in a grass skirt, reluctantly hula-ing and … I had to ask.

Me: ‘When did you first start stapling the flowers of a lei onto your chest?’

Gordo said ‘That is kind of where the whole show came from. Pat’s wife Kyra and Pat would do an act where Pat would play the saw with a candelabra balanced on his head, and Kyra would spin a hula-hoop around her body and the hoop would snuff out the candles. Then Pat and Shep decided to put me in the grass skirt,’ he laughed. ‘They made me wear the outfit.’

Me: ‘What I love about that piece is also your underplayed reluctance about the whole thing.’

Gordo said: ‘Well, that wasn’t acting to start with.’ He laughed. ‘That was the first time I had done a show with my shirt off. I didn’t want to be in the hula skirt to start with but it has developed into a whole new thing.’

I prompted him ‘And then you take the flowers from a lei ...’

Gordo: ‘And then I take the flowers from a lei, the basis being that my lei is broken and I have to put it on somehow.’ He shrugged. ‘And I just happen to have a staple-gun in my pocket.’

I asked, ‘Would you describe the Dirty Brothers as Clown?’

Gordo said ‘It’s very much Clown; dark clown, dark sideshow clown. It draws from a lot of different things, but you wouldn’t call it ‘dance’ for example.’

Me: ‘Even though you do dance quite a bit.’

Gordo laughed. ‘Even though we do dance a bit ... It’s “sideshow noir”, silent sideshow, clowning sideshow, and clowns do have a history of being hurt with things like slapstick over the years, but not quite like what we are Clownland / Judith Lanigan

Still from: The Dirty Brothers Sideshow present The Dark Party.

doing. I would call it more extreme. I guess the tricks and stunts are sideshow stunts but the show is focused on the clown-ness of it rather than the stunts.

We do the stunts but we put them in a clown context.’

‘Have you studied clown?’

Gordo shook his head, ‘No, my exposure to clown is playing with other clowns, all I’ve ever done is play with other clowns.’

‘When you are in that other world do you identify as yourself?’

‘Sometimes. I draw from my own experiences and my own personality.’

‘So you feel like it is you when you’re on stage?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes, but when we are The Dirty Brothers, those characters ... well, they’re not very nice guys, they’re not really guys you would want to hang out with or invite to your parties or anything, so we do change a bit. When we put the make up on we start being in character. Shep and Pat do pick on me a little bit when we are in make up.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘They gang up on me and Shep definitely drops and gets a bit sadder when he puts his make up on.

We will be a bit nasty towards each other, do things to each other when we are in makeup and in costume that we would never do to each other outside of it. We are much more lovely to each other in real life. They are like my big brothers, but onstage it is more like nasty big brothers. I get picked on quite a bit, but that makes me more loveable.’

‘Which is funny because you are definitely the biggest of the three. In fact you’re bigger than both of them put together. You’d just have to give them a bit of a flick and they’d be on the floor.’

Gordo laughed and said. ‘Well, yes, but its never come to blows.’

Outside the Odditorium the sound of spruiking had got louder. Brian

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Bielemeier, aka Magic Brian, appeared briefly, nodded at Gordo, and it was time for the first audience of the day. This may look like a simple experience to the punter, just a walk through a door, but I know that a hundred different ambience-creating elements have been carefully brought together to transport the audience into another world, the space warp mind bend that this sort of experience offers. Suddenly shy, I quickly gathered my bag and coat, and stepped out of the way and wondered where to go next.

It was cold. I had another layer of clothing in my bag and decided to change in the toilets. I stepped inside one of ten cubicles. Then, while still wondering what should be the next step, I had trouble getting toilet paper out of the dispenser. The toilet paper roll was stuck and I reached into the holder to free it and pulled out a flyer for the Candy Butchers show.

‘Candy Butchers’ is carnival slang for the sellers of fairy floss.

Inside the Big Top were two men and two women wearing hygienic white dust-coats, hectoring the crowd into buying fairy floss and squabbling amongst themselves. The bickering escalated, with superb timing, into a fullon knockabout battle that finished when the last man standing threw himself into a back-sault to land flat on the floor.

I laughed so much at the pleasure of watching it that I cried. The opening scene had completely removed me from anything I had been feeling and thinking before I sat down, and in quick succession the Candy Butchers had made me laugh, shocked me, scared me, made me laugh, made me gasp, and then made me laugh again. At that point I’d been there for less than ten minutes. That was the pre-show.

Nothing was predictable. The tall awkward ‘boss’ tells us his story of lost love, with a length of rope via a series of “she loves me, she loves me knots” and then tries to end it all by creating a noose in the rope, complete with a soliloquy on love and death. This is Derek Ives. Here he takes us into his own personal world, a strange place where he loves, and then accidentally kills, a shovel. But the highest status is not necessarily the one in control. It is a thick and complex mess of manipulations and misunderstandings.

One of the women – Azaria Universe – performed the sexiest burlesque fan dance I’ve ever seen, with three sticks of fairy floss. Most of the show involved some status transaction or another; in fact all of the characters in the show exhibited some sort of delusion or madness.

DJ Garner, the acrobat, explained to me later that it is all about detail; there are elements in the show that are just for them, such as the fact that he is the only one who handles forks. When the bucket is handled by anyone else it has spoons in it, and the bucket that Azaria rides up to the trapeze contains knives.

We, the audience, don’t ever see those details, but they are there. > The Candy Butchers photo by Jeff Busby.

I leave the tent feeling that I have just, in an hour, experienced life fully.

This feeling reminded me of how I felt leaving the oxygen bar at the airport in Singapore. Alert, yet relaxed. I felt quite fresh, as if my thoughts and ideas had been jolted out of their rut. Oxygenated.

What has really happened is that my neurons have been stimulated to take new pathways, grow new connectors, and meet each other in different places.

A neuron is a nerve cell, the basic building block of the nervous system.

Neurons transmit information throughout the body. They are your thoughts, ideas, emotions and reactions. When people say alcohol kills your brain cells, what they really mean is that the over-consumption of alcohol is killing your neurons. While neurons supposedly do not reproduce, new connections between neurons form throughout life. These are the pathways. New pathways are created by learning and experiencing new things. Depression and some cognitive dysfunction are neurons that have just travelled in fewer and fewer pathways, meeting fewer other neurons.

6. Wacko and Blotto Below is excerpt from an obituary written by J.B Priestley, about W.C. Fields, after his death in 1947. It may help you understand where we go next. “I saw him long before he found his way to Hollywood, before 1914, when he was touring the halls in England with his juggling and trick billiard table act.

He was funny even then, and I seem to remember him balancing a number of cigar boxes and staring with horror at a peculiar box, in the middle of the pile, that wobbled strangely, as if some evil influence were at work. All his confidence, which you guessed from the first to be a desperate bluff, vanished at the sight of this one diabolical box that began to threaten him with the nightmare of hostile and rebellious things ‌ And this, I fancy, was the secret of his huge and enchanting drollery ... That he moved warily in spite of a hastily assumed air of nonchalant confidence, through a world in which even inanimate objects were hostile, rebellious, menacing, never to be trusted.

He had to be able to juggle with things, to be infinitely more dexterous than you and I need be, to find it possible to handle them at all.

Clownland / Judith Lanigan

They were not, you see, his things, these commonplace objects of ours. He did not belong to this world, but had arrived from some other and easier planet.

All the truly great clowns – and Fields was undoubtedly one of them – have the same transient look. They are not men of this world being funny … They are serious personages who have, through some blunder on the part of a celestial Thomas Cook, landed from the other side of Arcturus, on the wrong planet.

They make the best of a bad business, but what is easy for us – merely picking up a bag of golf clubs or moving a chair – is horribly difficult for them. Things that give us no trouble offer them obstacles and traps, for nothing here is on their side.”

(Provided by Bob Burton from a biography of W.C. Fields called Man On The Flying Trapeze by Simon Louvish.)

You see a little white caravan outlined in a festoon of lights and surrounded by a white picket fence, sitting in the middle of the Garden of Unearthly Delights. The windows are closed and curtained and the gate is shut.

The door opens, a man looks out and invites you in.

There is no-one else around. It is not show-time yet.

Inside the caravan two men in t-shirts and jeans sit surrounded by a sea of toys, as if a packing crate full of them had been exploded in the air in every direction, and it is only the walls of the caravan that has held them all in.

The men offer you a seat, a coffee, a drink, a cigarette. You clear some toys from the bench seat and squish in between two enormous costumes hanging from the cupboard doors; exaggerated even for clown costumes, made of metres and metres of fabric held wide with hoops.

The two men joke with each other as they set out containers of greasepaint on the counter. One of them reaches past you for a ‘wig’, if that is what you would call a head piece made out of painted ‘gap-filler’ resembling the hair of a clown times ten.

The two men raise their glasses to each other and say, “see you after the show”. They are definitely saying goodbye, at least for the moment. They smear white over their faces, drawing in heavy black lines. Suddenly the very air is different. The two men are gone and two other slightly crazed beings are there in their place. One reaches for the costume beside you, and it is time you left. Go have a drink, something to eat, and come back.

It is dark. The festoon of lights that outline the caravan are lit, and the back end of the caravan has been opened to reveal the counter. Smoke billows out. Suddenly you are in the middle of a post-apocalyptic version of Waiting NEXT SPREAD: Still from: WACKO & BLOTTO in Shut Up 6/6.

4

for Godot, if that play were set inside a clown caravan to a soundtrack of distorted carnival music played at the wrong speed as a background to a lot of swearing and arguing. The parts are played by a washed up alcoholic circus clown and a delusional acrophobic cannon clown who was born with a conjoined chicken twin sister. It was strangely fascinating and slightly discomforting; an odd experience. This is Wacko and Blotto.

Your neurons have definitely been jumped into some different places.

Their press says: “Wacko and Blotto defy description, they are the laziest, rudest, most childish, silly, mental clowns in show business and just may have a show better than the greatest show on earth.”

Their website explains the show thus: “Wacko and Blotto meet some deeply rooted needs in humanity: violation of taboos, the mockery of sacred and profane authorities and symbols, reversal of language and action, and a ubiquitous obscenity.”

Andy Forbes, aka Wacko, said this: ‘We used to joke that anything we would plan would always go very differently once Wacko and Blotto got involved. For example, Derek Ives (Candy Butchers) came into the van and offered some great ideas about the show, and we developed this plan – you do this fire thing and put on the smoke machine, and then this happens, and that happens, etc. He gave us this great advice and both me and Andy Mac (aka Blotto) were going ‘yes, this will be great’. And then of course Wacko and Blotto come into the scene and they are just completely different characters.

They don’t listen to me and Andy, and they did a completely different version of the whole fucking thing. Whether or not it was funny I have no idea. I think it’s an interesting example of how detached we are from those characters, even though we agreed to it and gave respect to the Ives and planned it out.

But Wacko and Blotto are loose cannons, and in any given moment they will do whatever the fuck they want.’

‘And you have no control over that? I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we do. And it is when we stopped making preconceived plans and let go, that the magic would really happen with the audience. If you are willing to take a risk then you are in the game.’

NEXT ISSUE: Popup Clowntown & Circus Royalty.

Judith Lanigan is the daughter of a journalist and a detective. She studied her circus specialty – hula hoops – at the Moscow State Circus School and documented her experiences in A True History of the Hula Hoop, published

by Picador in 2009. This series is extracted from her latest book, Clownland, released by Aerofish Media in August 2016 - judithlanigan.com.au

october salon

Gerard BYRNE, Jielemeguvvie guvvie sjisjnjeli (Film inside an image) 2015-16 (still). Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London, Milan and New York. Life Inside an Image, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Ground Floor, Building F, Monash University, Caulfield Campus, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East (VIC), 1 October - 10 December 2016 - monash.edu.au/muma

Maticevski: Dark Wonderland, Commodity Gown FW15 2015. Courtesy of Bendigo Art Gallery. Photographer David Field. Bendigo Art Gallery, 42 View Street, Bendigo (VIC), 13 August - 20 November 2016 - bendigoartgallery.com.au

october salon

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Roz AVENT, Cracked (detail) 2016, charcoal, ink & acetone, 124 x 153 cm. Roz Avent: Nature Brute, The Lost Ones, 14 Camp Street, Ballarat (VIC), 14 September – 9 October 2016 - thelostones.com.au THIS SPREAD: Blak DOUGLAS, Tjarutja Tragedy 2016, synthetic polymer on canvas, 100 x 200cm. Copyright: the artist. Black Mist Burnt Country, a national touring exhibition project that commemorates the 60th anniversary of the British atomic test series at Maralinga, SH Ervin Gallery, Watson Road/Millers Point, The Rocks (NSW), 27 September – 30 October 2016 - shervingallery.com.au NEXT SPREAD: Robyn STACEY, Studio, The Cedars 2016, type C print, 110 x 143.6cm, edition of 5 + 3 AP. Dark Wonder, Stills Gallery, 36 Gosbell Street Paddington (NSW) 8 October to 5 November 2016 and Courthouse Hotel, Taylor Square, Darlinghurst (NSW), 8 & 15 October, 11am-2pm, 9 & 16 October, 11am-3pm - stillsgallery.com.au

october salon

LEFT: Elizabeth LIDDLE, Cornucopia Australis 2011, digital photograph on cotton rag paper, 80 x 60cm. Manningham Art Collection. Courtesy the artist. Utopia du jour, Manningham Art Gallery, Manningham City Square (MC²), 687 Doncaster Road, Doncaster (VIC), 21 September - 5 November - manningham.vic.gov.au/gallery THIS PAGE: Lewis FIDOCK, Brain 2016, cast rubber, pigmented resin, printed plastic, acrylic paint, spray paint, natural cobwebs, natural mold, varnish, araldite. Image courtesy of the artist. Flea: Lewis Fidock, Minerva, 4/111 Macleay Street Potts Point, Sydney (NSW) 16 September — 22 October 2016 - minervasydney.com NEXT SPREAD: Tajette O’HALLORAN, Idle ours 2015, from the series Christmas time, Australia, pigment ink-jet print, 42.0 x 59.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

2016 ​William and Winifred ​​Bowness Photography Prize, MGA​​(Monash Gallery of Art)​, 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill (VIC), until 16 October 2016 - mga.org.au

FINDING THE ART IN

Phuket A butterfly on Bangala

by Anthony S. Cameron

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One of the most bizarre and absolutely fascinating streets in the world has to be Bangla Road, Patong on a Saturday night.

To the sober eye, the world of Bangla Road is like chewing gum stuck to your shoe: it’s kind of annoying, and leaves you feeling vaguely sullied. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to scrape it off. Hundreds of bars line this mad street, all with pretty Thai girls in tight skirts and high heels holding drinks special boards and staring blankly at the moving human feast. ‘Priscilla’ style ladyboys prance theatrically up the street in long gowns, flashing their plastic tits at anyone who catches their eye for the briefest of moments, whilst ping pong show touts and guys with monkeys on little chains vie for your attention and a hundred sound systems spill sodden dance tunes out onto the worn pavement at your feet. Neon lights flash on and off and moving lights ballyhoo the street, bathing the entire Bangla Road circus in a surreal array of colour.

After a couple of drinks, everything changes: the uncomfortably surreal becomes somehow tolerable, and perhaps even comforting; the relentless grab for your dollar becomes mildly flattering banter; the soundtrack of a thousand wasted people stumbling in and out of clubs becomes music to your ears. It’s not like you have to be drunk to enjoy it, but it sure does help. As for my wife and I, we were neither sober nor drunk, having come to this street for another reason: we were here doing ‘research’ for my (at the time untitled) second novel, so we teetered between the worlds and watched the madness of Bangla Road get into full swing in front of us.

It is one of the last places you would expect to witness a moment of intense human beauty, and yet somehow we managed it.

Patong works on you slowly at first, tenderising you with small blows before coming in with a roundhouse punch that leaves you senseless, broke, and wondering where you are. Patong is your self-esteem floating on a belly of lies and deceit, of one-dimensional moments being bumped into on crowded streets, tripped over by drunks, and hammered beyond recognition by relentless shots. It is the eardrum bursting from too much bad music coming out of plastic tweeters and people shouting at you to be heard. It is the quiet moment just before you begin pissing when you hear the sound of footsteps, slow and sure. It is the years of living etched into your face in a matter of hours.

Everyone seemed to be wearing t-shirts and singlets with various ‘clever’ Finding the Art in Phuket / Tony Cameron

messages spread across them. Beer t-shirts, ‘No Money No Honey’, ‘No I don’t want a Massage, Tuk-Tuk, New Suit or Elephant Ride’, all the testimonies to the mad grab for the tourist dollar that people buy to mark their holiday. To us it looked like some kind of ugly uniform designed to lure pickpockets, tuk tuk drivers and tired, freelance whores. And it seemed to be working.

We had been there for maybe four hours, me writing notes and little phrases and my wife taking photos of the human zoo stumbling past us, their phones thrust out in front of them like miniature walking sticks. By 1a.m. it was one tragically funny human scenario after another going past, dragging their heels or walking barefoot due to lost flip flops, the feet blackened and torn by broken glass within minutes, their brains fried from one shot too many, their room keys lost somewhere along with their money and cards.

We had just decided to head home when my wife saw her.

She was standing out in the middle of the busy street holding a sign that said “Ping Pong show”. She didn’t look much older than 15, she had herself all done up in that Japanese schoolgirl look, complete with the pigtails. My wife noticed something unusual about her, something knowing, and when I turned and looked at her, I could see what she meant. There was something in her face that PREVIOUS SPREAD: Patong street at night, photo by Rashad Pharaon.

ABOVE: More avid readers on Bangla Road, photo by Roxy Cameron.

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had seen too much too early and it had given her a wise look underneath her cutesy smile for the tourists. She still had a skip in her step and a brightness in her eyes at 1a.m. There was something about her that the street could not defeat. She knew it. The street knew it.

She must’ve felt us staring at her and she gave us a sideways glance and a cheeky grin as she approached the next potential customer staggering towards her. She danced to his left and right and slid under his outstretched hands, giggling like it was all some kind of joke. She manoeuvred herself behind him and turned him around and pushed him gently off in the direction of the ping pong show. She gave him a little kick in the butt to get him going whilst giving us the side of a huge grin. She turned and faced us, raising her arms up as if to say ‘whatever it takes, right?’ We couldn’t help but smile back.

Suddenly a huge butterfly flew down and landed right next to an overflowing rubbish bin. The girl noticed the butterfly, and immediately went over to it. She reached down and gently allowed the butterfly to climb onto her outstretched hands, then slowly stood up. We looked at her, she looked back at us with an expression of childlike wonder as the butterfly spread its wings out slowly in her hand, over and over, like a slow dance. Even from where we stood gobsmacked, we could see the delicate hues of violet and yellow that were spread across its wings like some sort of triumphant flag. It was a thing of exquisite beauty on such a dirty little street. The girl put her face next to the butterfly, as if she was whispering some nugget of wisdom, or maybe some kind of plea to get her out of here, I don’t know. All I knew was that my mind was now racing. Then she let the butterfly go with an upward thrust of her arms and watched it escape into the crowd with this beautiful forlorn look on her face. The butterfly careered off a lady boy’s headdress before making it out above the electric wires that hung limply from post to post like some sad line of honour.

I wrote the line “memories die just like a butterfly on Bangla”, not knowing that I had just found the title for my second novel, whilst my wife snapped away and the night took a hold on us.

ANTHONY S. CAMERON is an Australian ex-pat living in Phuket, Thailand, and the author of two novels, Driftwood (2014) and Butterfly on Bangla (2015).

Born in Melbourne, he escaped in his early twenties to central Victoria, where he designed and built a sustainable house, raised two sustainable children. His books are available on Amazon here. > Taking a break from the pole to catch up on some reading, photo by Roxy Cameron.