Trouble October 2018

trouble 161

Gothic Beauty:

Victorian notions of love, loss and spirituality Bendigo Art Gallery 6 October 2018 - 10 February 2019 IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Bill HENSON, Untitled 2011/2012, archival inkjet pigment print, 127 Ă— 180cm. Edition of 5 + 2 A/Ps. | Jane BURTON, It is Midnight, Dr. __#2 2016, type C photograph, 99 x 110cm. Courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery Hobart. | Michael VALE, The red triangle 2018, oil on linen, 112 x 92cms. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery. | Juz KITSON, You are everything; ripples moving ever outwards 2017, Jingdezhen porcelain, merino wool, rabbit fur, marine ply and treated pine, 105 x 62 x 30cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery. | John GLOVER, Figures in a stormy wooded landscape (detail) c 1831, watercolour. Collection Bendigo Art Gallery. | Jess JOHNSON and Simon WARD, Mnemonic Pulse 2014, still from single-channel high definition digital video with audio. Courtesy of the artist and Darren Knight Gallery. | JW WILSON, King Cophetua and the Beggarmaid (detail) 1906, oil on canvas. Collection Bendigo Art Gallery. | Julia deVILLE, Sentience 2012, stillborn deer, rubies 18.45 ct, pear-cut garnet 0.7 ct, 18 ct, white gold, sterling silver, bronze, black rhodium and antique platter. Collection Bendigo Art Gallery.

Photograph: Terence Bogue. Image reproduced courtesy of the artist.

Bendigo Art Gallery, View Street Bendigo (VIC) - bendigoartgallery.com.au

CONTENTS

GOTHIC BEAUTY

Benigo Art Gallery ...................................................................................

REV. TIM COSTELLO AO FAITH, FAMINE & THE FRONT LINE

Deep Trouble ..........................................................................................

PROF. JENNIFER BYRNE SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF POST TRUTH

Deep Trouble ..........................................................................................

KALDOR PUBLIC ART PROJECTS HALF A CENTURY IN THE PUBLIC EYE

Art Gallery of NSW ..................................................................................

OCTOBER SALON

Superlative ................................................................................................

FINDING THE ART IN PHUKET: A DROP IN THE OCEAN

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

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COVER: HOTHAM STREET LADIES, On Disappointment (detail) 2018. HOME made GOOD: Christmas at The Johnston Collection 2018 | 19, East Melbourne (VIC), 1 October 2018 – 5 February 2019 - johnstoncollection.org - hothamstreetladies.com Issue 161 OCTOBER 2018 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 Dr Mark Halloran, Anthony S. Cameron, love.

FOLLOW on issuu, facebook & twitter SUBSCRIBE at troublemag.com READER ADVICE: Trouble magazine contains artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and the names, images or artworks of deceased Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. Treat Trouble intelligently, as you expect to be treated by others. Collect or dispose of thoughtfully.

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!

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episode # with Dr Mark Halloran

Rev. Tim Costello AO

Faith, Famine & The Front Line Rev. Tim Costello AO is the former CEO and current Chief Advocate of World Vision and a member of the Alliance for Gambling Reform. We first touch on his family life by discussing the political, religious and socioeconomic history of his parents. Next we talk about the influence of faith, secular humanism, morality and ideology, and examine the rise of secularism which resulted in the French revolution and some of the greatest genocidal horrors of the 20th century. We then discuss refugees, and the personal cost of being at the front line of civil wars, mass graves and famine.

Rev. Costello talks about our moral responsibility as Australians for the refugees on Manus Island, and the sense of hopelessness he encountered there. Rev. Costello also expresses his concern for the anger, loneliness, isolation and anxiety that is becoming epidemic in society and blames this on the ‘echo chambers’ created by social media. Finally, we discuss his work with the Alliance for Gambling Reform.

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double

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episode # with Dr Mark Halloran

Prof. Jennifer Byrne

Science in the Age of Post Truth Professor Jennifer Byrne has spent her scientific career analysing childhood and adult cancers at a molecular level. Her PhD studies mapped loss of chromosome 11p15 loci in embryonal tumours, and she then identified a novel gene family during postdoctoral studies in France. Professor Byrne is Head of the Children’s Cancer Research Unit in the Kids Research Institute at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, and Professor of Molecular Oncology in the Discipline of Child and Adolescent Health, Sydney Medical School. She was recently recognised as one of Nature’s “ten people who mattered in 2017”, for exposing and large number of flawed and fraudulent genetics research papers and helping to design software to detect them.

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Kaldor Public Art Projects Celebrates

HALF A CENTURY IN THE PUBLIC EYE Art Gallery of New South Wales until 16 February 2020 Half a Century in the Public Eye, is an exhibition created by acclaimed British artist Michael Landy and presented as a collaboration between Kaldor Public Art Projects and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). The exhibition surveys the rich history of Kaldor Public Art Projects through original artworks, archival materials and re-presentations of past projects, from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast (1969), to Jeff Koons’ flower Puppy (1995), Marina Abramović’s In Residence (2015) and Jonathan Jones’ barrangal dyara (skin and bones) (2016).

The exhibition revisits each of the past Kaldor Public Art Projects and brings them together for the first time.

Kaldor Public Art Projects presented its first project in 1969 with Christo and JeanneClaude’s iconic Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, and has since presented 32 public art projects, which have transformed the cultural landscape of Australia.

The first organisation of its type anywhere in the world, Kaldor Public Art Projects has helped redefine the possibilities for public art in Australia and internationally, and has had a profound influence on the way that Australians see and experience contemporary art.

“We have worked with the world’s leading artists to present new works which are anchored in the local context, challenging perceptions of familiar or forgotten public spaces, and transforming the way that Australian audiences experience art,” said Mr John Kaldor, AO. Kaldor Public Art Projects will also premiere a major artist project in the first half of 2019, presented free to the public in Sydney. Further details of activities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the organisation will be announced early in 2019.

< Kaldor Public Art Project 24: Michael Landy during the installation of Acts of Kindness, Martin Place, Sydney, 2011. Photo: Paul Green.

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IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Kaldor Public Art Project 1: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, 28 October – 14 December 1969 Photo: Harry Shunk. | Kaldor Public Art Project 3: Gilbert & George, The Singing Sculpture, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 16 – 21 August 1973. Image courtesy AGNSW Australia. | Kaldor Public Art Project 6: Sol LeWitt, View of Lines to points on a grid. On yellow: Lines from the center of the wall. On red: Lines from four sides. On blue: Lines from four corners. On black: Lines from four sides, four corners and the center of the wall, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1977. | Kaldor Public Art Project 27: 13 Rooms, curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Xu Zhen, In a Blink of An Eye, 2015 performed for 13 Rooms, Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, Sydney, 11 – 21 April 2013. Photo: Jamie North. | Kaldor Public Art Project 10: Jeff Koons, Puppy, Museum of Contemporary Art forecourt, Sydney, 12 December 1995 – 17 March 1996. Photo: Eric Sierins. | Kaldor Public Art Project 33: Anri Sala, The Last Resort, Observatory Hill Rotunda, Sydney, 13 October – 5 November 2017. Photo: Peter Greig. | Kaldor Public Art Project 28: Roman Ondák, Measuring the Universe, 2007, Parramatta Town Hall, 25 January – 14 February 2014. Photo: Paul Green | Kaldor Public Art Project 5: Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman performs Sky Kiss, composition by Jim McWillliams, above the Sydney Opera House Forecourt, 11 April 1976. Photo: Kerry Dundas.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (NSW) - artgallery.nsw.gov.au - 50years.kaldorartprojects.org.au

october salon

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Paul E. MASON (b.

1947), Baudin’s Costal Profile Reliquary 2018, pewter, wood, resin, Kimberly coastal rocks, diorite, aluminium, gold leaf, 61x20x26cm. PAUL E MASON: LOOKING FOR BAUDIN - 21st Century Reliquaries Encounter c.1800 Terra Australis. & LEFT: Unknown artist (Leipzig Germany) after Gustave MUTZEL (b.

1839, d. 1893), Australische fauna, 1894.

Chromolithograph on paper. Art Gallery of Ballarat, gift of Ted and Gina Gregg, 2013.

Animalia Australis.

Ararat Gallery TAMA, Town Hall, Vincent Street, Ararat (VIC), 19 October 2018 – 20 January 2019 - araratgallerytama.com.au

ABOVE: George BALDESSIN, Acrobat 1964, etching and aquatint, 30 x 30 cm, edition 10.

GEORGE BALDESSIN: Work from the Estate, Australian Galleries, 28 Derby Street Collingwood (VIC), 23 October - 11 November 2018 - australiangalleries.com.au

october salon

ABOVE: Maz DIXON, Paragon #1 2018, oil and graphite on board, 50 cm by 45 cm. The Life Exotic, Fox Galleries, 79 Langridge St, Collingwood (VIC), 20 October — 17 November 2018 foxgalleries.com.au NEXT SPREAD: Joni DENNIS, Aye Aye Captain 2018. Winner of the $15,000, ANL ‘Maritime Art Award’ (Acquisitive), 2018 ANL Maritime Art Prize, Mission to Seafarers, 717 Flinders Street, Docklands (VIC), until 26 October 2018 - missiontoseafarers.com.au

FINDING THE ART IN

Phuket A Drop in the Ocean

by Anthony S. Cameron

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The steel comes out of the forge the colour of straw and trapped in the liquid moment that has had me mesmerised for years. In the liquid moment, the steel can take any shape you choose: you can persuade it into a sharp point, a Fibonacci curve, a stout square counterpoint to the fluid roundness of its body, or a spiral that terminates in the cold blue crossover between the liquid moment and the frigid indifference of its normal state. In the liquid moment, the steel is transformed into something you want to run your hands over, a tactile thing that winks flirtatiously at you and runs a hand half way down its thigh; a volatile seductress that might just drive you beautifully mad.

When it comes to persuasion, the ball-pein hammer is my tool of choice, and as you can imagine, I have many different weapons of mass persuasion. I have a brutal transformer for every occasion. There is something really satisfying about bashing steel to make art. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like I am bludgeoning the beauty into something, squeezing art through the cracks like overflowing toothpaste out of a tube, and, like the toothpaste, there always seems to be some there.

Sometimes I know what shape I am looking for and sometimes it finds me.

Usually it comes to me after a few heats of the steel and more than a few minutes of staring hypnotically at the white hot coals and listening to the quiet roar of the blower. Lately it has been teardrops and egg shapes that have sprung up out of the flames like grasping hands and had me sweating over the anvil, a rag tied around my hammer hand to stop the sweat loosening my grip and sending the hammer careering off into an unsuspecting corner.

I flatten and draw out the end of the steel and plunge it back into the flames before I have had time to be consciously aware of what I am doing. I stare away from the fire at the lump of fishing boat timber that will be the base of this latest work and try to fathom the beating it must have taken in its life. Tattered rope hangs off its scarred, partially burned face, the remnants of a dozen paint jobs streak across its surfaces like a pile of empty beer bottles in the early morning light, catching the bursts of sunlight, however brief, that point to better days. An array of gouges scream across the four sides, testimony to the brutal beauty that exists out there. How many tired men had hung onto this piece for dear life as the Andaman did its best to add them to a sea floor

Finding the Art in Phuket / Tony Cameron

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already littered with the debris of three generations of plastic worshippers?

How many ropes had been wrenched taut around its base during a storm? How many hooks had embedded themselves in this lump of timber before it had finally broken free and ended up on my local beach?

One of my favourite phrases in blacksmithing is ‘upsetting’. I mean, what do you have to do to upset a hot piece of steel? Talk derisively about its mother?

Rubbish its football team? Turns out all you have to do is hit the cold end and squash the hot end on the anvil, which ‘upsets’ the steel and creates a bulge like a 40 year old beer gut. And I guess I would be pretty upset too if I was ‘persuaded’ to look that way.

So here I am, about to sink an over-persuaded, fairly upset, tear dropped shaped piece of steel into a tortured chunk of timber and then hang used cigarette lighters off its hollow heart.

They say you shouldn’t stare into a forge, that it will make you mad. But I was already mad before I got here, way before the forge and I came together as a team. Mad for life, mad for experience, mad at the world, and mad that I felt helpless in the face of the institutionalised insanity we call consumerism.

I was mad as hell, like any other person with their eyes and ears open, that the profit-driven decisions by the powerful few were driving humanity to extinction, and not only that, they were marketing the extinction to us and profiting from that as well.

I pull the steel out of the forge one more time and fine-tune the shape that will house the one single teardrop I have formed out of the red, yellow and white lighters that I find strewn across the high tide line of the beaches here. I lay the steel down on the concrete floor to cool and stare at the flaming teardrop of lighters I had laid out earlier. And then I remember at last, the question that had me bending steel over a hot forge on an equally hot day in Thailand. I remember asking myself one night, if the ocean could shed just one tear, what would it look like?

A flaming tear that no-one can see.

Call it bleak if you like, but if you make art out of the rubbish of humanity, how can it not be bleak?

Some of us scream, some howl, some laugh sarcastically at the human condition. Others look the other way, or stare at a TV screen for their daily dose of a favourite show which is nothing more than a lobotomy on the

Finding the Art in Phuket / Tony Cameron

instalment plan. Some deny it, some drink it under the table, or fuck it into next week when they have a bit of time off work to go and buy more shit that they don’t need. Some make music or a movie out of it, or turn it into a musical and tour the world with it. Others jump in front of whaling ships, chain themselves to old growth forests or float over reefs to try and stop the carnage.

We all have a way to make it through, to make sense of it all.

It doesn’t matter how you scream, it doesn’t matter whether anyone else is listening. You don’t have to post a status update about it or a selfie with your arms wrapped around it. The important thing is that you are screaming.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go back to bashing steel now and dreaming of a better world.

This article was first published in Trouble April 2017. Photos by Tony Cameron

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).

His books are available on Amazon here. You can find his sculptural furniture on Facebook here.