doubles

Bonjour!
This is the one of  images for the invitation to a party I'm helping organise that I didn't think would be too suitable but for some reason puts me in a party spirit.  Like your in Slovakia or something and your madly trying to find where the disco is and your friend has just passed out in the field (or maybe that's me) and you're really losing it in your great coat.. Yeah!
Lately I've become a professional party planner (amongst my many other professions)...or perhaps I'm just a dilettante, as this seems to be what many of the fine dilettantes I know spend a lot of time doing.
Anyway hello! its been a while.... Brrring brrring

I wanted to call this post Hemispheres but it sounds like some ponderous "literary" title..(errr maybe it is?!) But I still want it to be about this topic...in that kinda double life, upside down way. North and south, east and west, day for night, moons that wax and wane in different directions, water that get sucked down the drain in the opposite way, autumn,spring. Simultaneous time...lives. Twins.

                                 "Cookie and Millie in Girls room at the Mudd Club, New York City"
                                            Nan Goldin, 1979.

"French Chris at Drive-in, New Jersey" Nan Goldin, 1979

These are some pictures of the all round amazing woman, party girl and maybe dilettante Cookie Mueller. Apart from starring in lots of John Waters films and No Wave cinema and an assortment of NYC downtown plays and being a muse for Nan Goldin, she was also a pretty interesting writer. My favourite story so far is about her and Divine driving in the Provincetown countryside to an op shop in a VW bus and having an accident where it rolls upside down and they scramble out and Divine lifts the whole thing and places back it back the right way. Cookie writes "From that day on I always felt really safe when I was with Divine"

I am using that story because it's, well, adorable and I really like Divine and it also illustrates this post's "themes" in an obscure, roundabout sorta way. I also remembered a poem that I'd read that Cookie Mueller and Richard Hell wrote which also related to this

 transcontinental. discombobulated, alien, double life feeling that I'm trying to get at. Its called "Life Among the Alert in Europe" and I'm not going to use the whole thing as its kind of strange. The "illustrations" today are mostly just random images from my phone and give a vague explanation of what I've been doing lately.....but my doppelgänger will be sending her images at a later date (sun baking on the Amalfi coast and enjoying the spring whilst rehearsing for her opera recital)

From Monty's Last Greatest Show on Earth Party...Tres magnifique!

"Do Shine" from Foreverland exhibition with Michael Needham

An Except form Life Among the Alert in Europe.....by Cookie Mueller and Richard Hell

Detail from "Map of an Englishman", Grayson Perry, 2004

"After NY, the life in Italy, France and unknown

ancient landscapes provide the party who will stay

up late

"Map of an Englishman" Grayson Perry,2004

open

wide oceans

of avenues leading to drifts of being awake

"Niagara Smoking Topless" Cary Loren,1974 and Drawing by Niagara from "Return of the Repressed" Destroy All Monsters exhibition, Prism Gallery, 2011.

and someone you have never met before (in the mirror)

Or perhaps have seen so well (as through a window pane)

Why is it that people look so much better in Europe?

Is it the landscape that sweeps out behind their heads,

Is it the older buildings they stand up against..."

I did warn you it was a bit strange....Anyway back amongst the Alert in Carlton I am admiring the autumn colours again...except its just gone very wintry and blown nearly every lovely yellowey and orangey leaf off every single Europeaney tree in town. Everything is bare and raw, pink and scrawly.

Oh yeah but we were talking about doubles

How many double doubles can we can come up with? Umm lets do the obvious and worst first..double trouble, double jeopardy, double indemnity (wow these are all sounding like bad Hollywood film titles) double jointed, double life (yeah i know I already said this) double entendre (ooh) double cross, double bed, double agent, double bass, double chin, double take, double barrelled, double feature...

From Michael Needham and my "Foreverland" project. This is a a golden rainbow light installation we put on top of 30 storey Park Towers housing estate in South Melbourne. 

Double rainbow....yeah well that's a nice one... and not quite as diabolical as the rest

What does one do when stuck in the role of the less fortunate doppelgänger whose braving the inevitable cold of winter in antipodean shores??...find mushrooms i guess..Oh my, look at this beauty!

From "The Surround" Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, 2009

I ate it and found myself with her

"Midnight Sun in Norway" Aurora Aspen, 2012

and she was still, perfect, absolutely vivid. 

foreverland

this post is going to be about not much... my head is a big white nothing at present. It reminds me of the state you can go into when you're on a plane and you look out the window and the sun takes hours to set as you drift through unknown time zones and look at endless golden horizons and eat aeroplane food and watch in flight movies. 

"Dusseldorf, Flughaven II" Andreas Gursky, 1994

"Schipol" Andreas Gursky, 1994

"Desk Attendents" Andreas Gursky, 1982

I'm doing an art project at the moment to do with public housing estates so I've also been thinking about big brutalist architecture and how they repeat and multiply throughout the world and how much I like them. I think I just like sort of nothing and in-between spaces in general.

                        I also like shiny things

and moving things and speed and monumentalism...Oh dear maybe i'm a futurist

Is Karl Lagerfeld a futurist? Jeez look at this crazy fashion show..haha.

Anyway I started with the Gursky images because they suggest all the obvious references of strange nowhere contemporary spaces and the associations with communism and strange socialist housing experiments as well as capitalism, or post capitalism or whatever the fuck we're in at the moment. Malls and supermarkets and freeways and airports and "global" afflictions and "alienation" and consumerist societies and art in the age of mechanical reproduction and ahhhhh! Oh and I also remembered that whenever I get back to Australia I feel like I've come back to hell..a very bright, white, latte swilling hell..but hell all the same.

so its a comfort to me to remember these spaces are here as well. I get this nowhere feeling often in weird smelling, weird lighting institutionalised spaces and the built civic environment in general and you know, car parks and the like.. but you also get it in nature..Biodiversity can often look quite plain.. big swamps and wetlands and deserts. Anyway they're all these big beautiful blanks, where you can just pretend you're anywhere... nowhere. Its serene.

Andy Warhol described Edie Sedgwick as a "wonderful, beautiful blank" but you could just apply this to anyone, or anything really. (I was going to put a photo of Edie but decided to put Andy and his assistant/artist Ronnie Cutrone instead)

"The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonalds

The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonalds

The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonalds

Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet"

(umm actually i think they may now Andy)

hmm how did we end on beauty? Its just kind of unavoidable sometimes, its also quite personal. I find this a beautiful photograph..it is an unknown woman,by an unknown purpley bush,by an unknown photographer, I found somewhere on the internet I can't remember. oooeee the endless sea.

                                       
                                  somewhere place, elsewhere space, never never land, forever land..
                                                          gee, you really are a beauty, aren't you?

angel dust

Untitled (2008-2009) Bill Henson

Happy New Year! here is a sublime rock and ten thousand angels for you to admire  

"Fireflies at Night" Yayoi Kasuma, 2000

Lately I've been thinking about lights and artworks with lights involved and well. you know, magic and loss and madness and celestial beings and electric forces and wavelengths and static and superstars and comets. I've also been having a little holiday..

One of my favourite holidays was riding a bike for miles down a beach at night and then swimming with millions of phosphorescence in the water while clusters of shooting stars fell on the horizon. So this post is going to be about that!..well, sorta.  Also something to do with angels and light and spectacular things. Sounds a little vague I know..Maybe just let the lights dazzle you for a bit

From Yayoi Kasuma "Mirrored Years" Exhibition at MCA but can't find title

Yayoi Kusuma is so spectacular I don't really know where to begin. I definantly don't want it read like the Gagosian biography on her which doesn't even mention her obsessive compulsive neurosis and that she has lived in a mental institution by her own free will since 1973 (something she is fairly open about and which she see's as very much related to her work). But her influence on artists such as Warhol and Oldenburg and numerous others is now acknowledged and her incredible body of work including sculpture, installation, performance, painting, video, writing, is as well. In an interview with Grady Turner in BOMB66/ Winter 1999, whilst talking about her body painting, she kinda neatly summed up her art works effect in general

"Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama's hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the universe. This is magic"

light installation st kilda style

                                 From Alan Vega's "Collision Drive" exhibition at Deitch Projects, 2002

Obliteration, magic..One of my favourite musical seraphim's Alan Vega, also kinda talks about this in reference to his also quite lovely sculpture works.  He said that early on when he started out as a painter he wanted a particular painting to be all one colour but whenever he moved in the room it changed colour so he grabbed the light and smashed and crushed it into the painting..and thats how he started sculpture....

"Fountain of light" (unfinished) Ai Wei Wei, 2007

                           

"Chandelier" Ai Wei Wei, 2002

"Untitled" (America) Felix Gonzales Torres, 1994-95

Someone once asked Felix Gonzales Torres who he created art for and he replied "Ross"...his longterm boyfriend who died of AIDS six years before himself.... Sigh...sob. The unbearable lightness of being.

Anyway we're going to segue into a different light realm now, you know lighten up a bit.. actually it's a field. The Ganzfeld.. from the German, meaning total/ complete field. I first had this experience looking at a James Turrell installation..which was like looking into space and  trying to find a horizon line or any visual brain clue until your head just kind of exploded.  Apparently you can achieve an even more startling effect by taping two half ping pong balls over your eyes and listening to radio static. I haven't tried it myself but whilst perusing the cognitive science journal Cortex (not sure how this came about exactly) I found peoples descriptions of their hallucinatory experiences of the Ganzfeld effect. So I'm going to transcribe them for you.

"Bridgets Bardo" James Turrell, 2008. Turrel describes the experience of the Ganzfeld effect as "feeling with your eyes".

Also check out his incredible observatory within a crater in the Ariozona desert.

"I saw a hand holding a large piece of chalk and writing on a blackboard something like a mathematical formula" (I'm starting with the most banal)

"A young woman passed by on a bicycle, very fast, she crossed the visual field from the right to the left, with her long blond hair waving in the wind"

Mary Nimmo Moran, NY, 1842-1899.

"a clearing in a forest, a place bathed in bright sunshine and the trunks of trees all around"

From Michelle Usshers "Lucienda" exhibition. Uplands, 2010

"Boy Leading Horse" (Detail) Pablo Picasso, 1906.

"a horse as if coming out of the clouds, a white horse that jumped over me"

"Marcel (Hidden reflection)" Ryan McGingley, 2009

 "We were in a cave with water, we made a fire as my friend had fallen in and her clothes were wet" (this is my favourite)

"Wing of a Roller" Albrecht Durer, 1512

And finally "The image of the scene was very clear. And yes, the colours were very vivid"

ahh yes perfect..angelic.