Street Art of Newtown

Newtown, in Sydney, has to be the capital of Australian street art. Or maybe I just notice it more because Newtown is close to where I live and I spent a lot of time there. And for good reason: it has a vibrant cafe and street-culture so it's a good place to go walking. And back streets and lane ways are where where the street art action is.

Parked cars, trees and signs are a problem when photographing
street art.

I'm a late convert to the world of street art I think because it comes from dark places that I'm only dimly aware of: the culture of action graphic novels ("comic books" if you're over forty) and the internet blog-playgrounds of budding teenage fantasy artists.

Whether it's original or lifted from a graphic novel
street art can pack a punch.

Most of the images are lost on me but I guess it's the same with a lot of art. I'm for look and like---or not like. Life's too short to try to psycho-analyse artists.

Nefrititi is thinking something. I can make out a backwards 3, a 4 and a 2.

Still, you have to be impressed by some of the techniques. Of course they're not all Renaissance frescoes.

He's hot.

I do tend to like the spare images that don't cover everything and scream at you and which sometimes make use of a natural feature such as a crack in a wall or a window or a drainpipe.

This is a piece of a larger work. The message in the bottle in very poignant:
"Dear Tanja, I'm smiling across stormy waters to be..."

I'm not as fond of walls with a name or word emblazoned on it in gigantic, shaded saw-tooth letters, no matter how expertly they're been painted even if I can make out what they say. They're just super-size tagging.

This is also just a piece of a larger work that looks like an
illustration of a dystopian world from a fantasy novel.

I live in a house that has a big side wall on the street, ideally suited for street art, but I admit that I try to keep it just the way it is. When it does get tagged---and it does-- I'm out there quick-smart with a bucket of paint to paint it out.

If you know who this guy is, please leave me a comment.

The City of Sydney has an Aerosol Art and Graffiti Policy and crews that paint out unwanted graffiti. They must have a lot of paint on hand because they're pretty good at matching any wall colour. They do try to determine whether what they're about to paint over qualified as artwork so the "best" works remain for us lane-crawler street art voyeurs.

See pequevrs.blogspot.com for more art by this artist.

Some of these artworks are commissioned and done with the permission of the owners of the walls but others just magically appear. Garage roller doors are favourite places for the latter.

Stencil have the advantage of being quick.

Stencils are good for commando raids but they're not all as clever as Banksy.

It's sad to see a work like this tagged by every teenager carrying
a Sharpie or a Copic Marker.

There are times when I wish I knew the story.

This is only half of a larger work.

Once again, I couldn't get the whole image because of parked cars.

Finally, a reference that I recognise.

For more Newtown Street art images, click here. 

Goodbye Colosseum

Hurry, last days! If you want to see the Colosseum before it's dismantled at the end of February then now's your chance. This isn't, of course, the Roman entertainment centre of old but its brilliant re-creation, the "Legosseum" of Lego-master Ryan McNaught of the City of Melbournium. 

The Legosseum is at the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University. Entry to the museum is free and, if you can find your way to the Quadrangle, it's just inside the southern entrance.

I can't imagine how much time it must have taken Mr McNaught to create this marvel. It certainly wasn't built in a day. On four or five trips to the Museum (Did I mention that it's free?) I spent hours poring over the detail and discovering things I'd previously overlooked. There is so much to see both in the building itself but also the people, ancient and modern.

The "Legosseum" of Ryan McNaught at the Nicholson Museum...

I did enjoy seeing the real thing on a trip to Rome a couple of years ago but I think the enjoyment came more from imagining how life might have been in the year 80 AD when the Colosseum was completed than admiring the ruin itself. And it really is a ruin: over the centuries every bit of decoration that could be carried off was looted and, when that was gone, the site became a quarry and much of the original stonework also disappeared.

...and it's Rome counterpart.

To stand in a place where emperors and popes stood and where countless people and animals met their deaths for the enjoyment of the people really was a buzz. And so it is too with McNaught's more politically correct creation.

McNaught cleverly recreated not just the ruined Colosseum as it exists today but the Colosseum as it would have looked in its heyday, complete with gladiators and Roman soldiers and also modern day tourists..

The old with the new.

Next to the Legosseum is a re-creation of the Arch of Constantine, built a couple hundred years after the Colosseum on orders from the Emperor Constantine the Great after his troops won a decisive battle, a battle  which---had it been lost---might have hastened the end of the Empire. A good enough reason to build a triumphal arch. 

The Lego Arch of Constantine.

There's a bit of Lego-licence here as real Arch isn't immediately next to the real Colosseum.

The pre-Lego version of the Arch.

Not everyone loves Lego. Most parents have spent endless hours searching for pieces under carpets and furniture and retrieving them from over-filled vacuum cleaner bags. And Lego bits are the bane of bare feet. More than a few parents have had "bricks" and helicopter rotors surgically removed from their person. But who isn't impressed with some of the Lego creations we've seen on the internet? Have a look at the Lego recreation of Barack Obama's first inauguration. (Click here)

Lost to Lego: two young Legomaniacs contemplating their next creation.

Along with the Legosseum, the Nicholson Museum has lots of displays---static and video---of Roman antiquities as well as their collection of other ancient relics so, even after the Lego is gone, the museum is well worth a look. Despite its small size, the museum it prides itself on having "the largest collection of antiquities in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere."

Check with the Museum for its opening hours and then hurry on down.

Okay, but is it art?

Sydney's 18th Biennale has finished. This year it was at four venues: Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the NSW Art Gallery, and Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay. Children's Book Week has kept me on the hop but I did manage to see almost all the Biennale artworks. 

With over 100 artists represented from forty countries there was a lot to enjoy but of course not everything was for everyone. Okay so not everything was for me. Do bricks and leaves on a floor, or cloth hanging in a vast room, or some decrepit furniture on a platform qualify as works of art? I'm not hard to please. I just want works of art to make me feel something---other than exasperation---or works that make me think. It's also important that works of art pass the I-could-do-that test.

I'm afraid that these rocks scattered around a room didn't pass the I-could-do-that test. At first I didn't think that it was one of the entries but then I noticed the sign on the floor that said "Please do not touch the artwork".

How about this midden of oyster shells and tea cups? If you knew that it was the work of young Aboriginal artist, Jonathan Jones, who wanted us to think about the oyster middens of pre-European contact days with today's detritus---sort of a meeting of the middens---would that make a difference? Interesting but is it art?

How about a collection of tents in a vast warehouse. Inside the tents are television sets showing images of people in Cairo talking. This is Susan Hefuna's "Celebrate Life: I love Egypt." There is a lengthy explanation of the artist's intentions and a statement about the tents having been made in Cairo.

How about Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture, "Cloud"? The kids seemed to love running in and out of it. Are real clouds themselves or only artificial ones?

One of the problems for me was the written explanations of the artwork. One artist used "irony to create empathy" another "employs everyday objects and materials, de-constructing them to reveal their underlying codes". Another artist "overturns the relations between the work and its space". The artistic directors said that "the artworks gathered here engage with new models of reciprocity". New models of reciprocity? 

I gave up reading the explanatory material.

Things began to pick up for me with Canadian Artist, Cal Lane's "Domesticated Turf", a sculpted shipping container made to look like some kind of European gingerbread house. Clever and a lot of work sawing out all those bits of steel to liberate the cottage within. I was impressed.

And I loved New Zealand artist, Peter Robinson's, huge Styrofoam chains draped over some of the old rusting ship-building machinery. I didn't read the description of this installation but the internet tells me that Robinson "pursues multiple formal trajectories in his use of polystyrene, as if with its associations of disposability the possibility exists for any number of sculptural experiments to be tested, cast aside, reworked, reconsidered". Better to just look at it and enjoy it, I say.

For me the most impressive work at Cockatoo Island were Maria Fernanda Cardoso's Museum of Copulatory Organs, reproductions of reproductive organs. These much magnified---thanks to electron microscopy---models of male and female insect genitalia were not only wonderfully realised but quite beautiful simply as sculpture. Does an accurate reproduction from nature qualify as art? I think so. Certainly photos or paintings from nature can be art. Here science and art overlap. 

Back on dry land I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay in Sydney to see the both the new wing and the Biennale exhibits there. Yeesookyung's Translated Vase, the Moon and Park Young-Sook’s Moon Jars easily passed the I-could-do-that test. 

And, by the way, don't tell everyone but the MCA has a cafe with the best view in Sydney. (See heading photo above.)

Liu Zhuoquan, Two-Headed Snake was the stand-out for me at the MCA at least as a technical feat. Using an old Chinese technique of painting inside bottles the artist made the bottles appear to have snakes in them. There were a huge number of bottles and the detail was quite breathtaking. Art? Well I felt something.

Also at the MCA, Alwar Balasubramaniams Nothing From my Hands. For me these are unknown shapes pushing out from behind a wall. (Click on his name and it'll take you to a talk by this fascinating sculptor.) 

Most moving of all for me was Judith Wright's installation, A Journey. (For a better view of it click here.) This is a haunting work, displayed nearly in darkness. Whatever it's "about" (and here I did read the artist's explanation) I found it moving. It's not a great technical feat but, well, for me it works and that's all that should matter.

This Judith Wright, by the way, is not the late Australian poet but a former ballet dancer, now a a visual artist living in Queensland.

From the Museum of Contemporary Art I went to the Art Gallery of NSW. Those are paper bags from designer shops that you can see in Perspex cases on the wall. the top of each one has been intricately carved  in such a way that the carved bit, hanging down but still attached to the top, forms a tree.

These are the work of the Japanese-born New York artist, Yuken Teruya. These have both beauty and a definite wow-factor. They were hard to photograph. To see his work properly click here.

The Sydney Biennale is over but there's still so much on the internet, including videos of the artists, that it can still be enjoyed from a distance. But if you're in Sydney and want to see a small but wonderful collection of contemporary art from China, you might want to go to The White Rabbit Gallery. It's a private collection but, as with the MCA and the NSW Art Gallery, there's no entry charge. Here it's important to read the descriptions and to talk to the very helpful gallery attendants. This show is called Double Take for a reason.

The White Rabbit rotates its collections about every six months and the present show opened at the beginning of September so you have time to get there in you're in or around Sydney.

Here's a taste to get you in:

Above is Zhang Chun Hong powerful calligraphy-like drawing of a long braid on a scroll that stretches down the wall and across the floor.

Taiwanese artist Ah Leon’s Elementary School days. This deceptively simple wooden table and chair are not what they seem but I won't spoil it for you except to say that Ah Leon is a ceramicist. There, I just ruined it for you.

Above and below is/are Li Hongbo's Paper, two identical figures sculpted from honeycomb paper, one of them with it's head beginning to ravel and the other stretched all around the floor. Li Hongbo was one a a few artists represented at the White Rabbit who also had works in the Biennale.

My favourite of the trompe-l'oeil works was this one. I inspected it closely and was about to walk away when a museum attendant stopped me and explained that this wasn't two chunks of a log connected by chains. This is two chunks of wood with the connecting piece of wood carved to make the "chains". No matter how closely I looked, those chain links looked like metal, not wood. A definite wow factor but is it art? 

Absolutely. Well I think so anyway.

Vivid Sydney

At the darkest time of year here in the Southern Hemisphere, what could be better than a public event featuring light? For the fourth year in a row, Sydney has pulled out all the stops to present the Vivid light show festival. This year is the most spectacular one so far.

If you're in or around Sydney between now and when the show ends on Monday, June 11th, rug up and make your way to Circular Quay where most of the action is. It's fabulous and it's free and it's on from six pm till midnight every night. As with so many Australian events it is "the biggest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere". (It must be dispiriting to be an African, a South American or a New Zealander and be constantly edged out by Australian fireworks displays and light shows.)

The show has many works of art involving light but the highlights (sorry) are the projections on various buildings including the Customs House (now the City of Sydney library), the Opera House and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Last night there were tens of thousands of people out but, because of the height of the projections, no one blocked our view. The only danger was tripping over tripods because of the phalanxes of serious photographers.

The artworks were done by various people including the German light designers Urbanscreen who made the Opera House light projections, the Australian artist Justene Williams' Motion Collaboration # 1 projected on the wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Electric Canvas whose wonderful cartoon sequence, City Life, is projected onto the Customs House. Judging from the crowds, "Urban Life" is the show-stopper. And, by the way, all these displays have very cleverly designed soundscapes as well. Great stuff. Best in the Southern Hemisphere for sure.

As you can see, my own little pocket camera really can't do the artwork justice. Next year I'll take the proper camera and, yes, a tripod.

Here's a link to a better video of "Urban Life".

Now click on the following link and have a look at Urbanscreen's superior video: "Lighting the Sails".

If you can't make it this year---and I realise that for my Northern Hemisphere blog-friends a quick flight to Sydney is probably out of the question---at least have a look at last year's Custom's House light projection. This year's doesn't seem to be on You Tube yet. And, if you've missed it, unlike the transit of Venus---which we saw last week in Sydney---you won't have to wait till 2117 to see the next one.

Buddha's Birthday

No longer just the home of "football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars" Australia is now a multicultural country. When I say this to friends overseas it's greeted with mild suspicion. It doesn't fit with their pigeon hole of what Oz is really like. Pigeon holes are a good way of reducing a complex world to bite-size digestible chunks. But maybe it isn't suspicion I sense from them but confusion. That could be from dropping in that quote while singing it to the tune of the old Holden TV ad. Of course then I have to explain that "football" here (Australian Rules Football) is nothing like their football(s), that meat pies aren't sweet and that Holden cars are made by a subsidiary of General Motors. I should stop singing that ditty.

Multiculturalism has brought us, among other things, wonderful food.  What took me to Tumbalong Park at Darling Harbour last weekend wasn't the food but Buddha's Birthday Festival. The food did play a part in my going because I was invited by vegan friends and the food stalls at the Festival had vegan food. But there was a lot more to the festival than food stalls. By the way, the festival is free, everyone is welcome and there are two days of events of all sorts.

Nan Tien Temple organises a Buddha's birthday Festival every year. If you live in or around Sydney you've probably seen, or even visited, Nan Tien's huge temple ("the biggest Buddhist temple in the Southern Hemisphere") on the hillside just south of Wollongong.

Buddha's actual birthday is celebrated around most of Asia on the eight day of the fourth lunar month, that is on April 8th although this year's Sydney festival was held on the 12th and 13th of May.

I'm not a Buddhist but a bit of a fellow-traveller. It would be hard to disagree with Buddhism's Three Acts of Goodness:

     Do good deeds
     Speak good words
     Think good thoughts

(I'm a bit weak on the third one.)

So put it in your diary for next year and check your local listings. It's good family fun and a welcome break from eating meat pies. (Does anyone actually eat the old gravy-on-cardboard any more?)

Some lovely singing ((in Chinese) from a talented young performer.

Irish dancing might seem out of place but the Festival welcomes many cultures

Bathing the Buddha

To any of you who signed up for Selby, Emily Eyefinger and my fabulous, (free!) Newsletter: there's another issue coming very soon; just as soon as my cold lets me finish it. If you're a kid and you haven't signed up already, what are you waiting for????