Current and Upcoming

Dave Hullfish Bailey - City Cat Project - Other Locations
"Dada in the Post-Colonial Field" - Other Locations
Heimo Zobernig - Pestorius Sweeney House
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Dave Hullfish Bailey
City Cat Project
2009


Los Angeles artist Dave Hullfish Bailey will return to Brisbane soon to continue work on his CityCat Project with Aboriginal leader, playwright and activist Sam Watson.

Bailey has said “if there's a one-liner about what my [site-based projects] attempt, it has to do with replacing an iconographic vision of place with an inhabited, on-the-ground geography". The artist’s CityCat Project enables us to think this ambition, and the complex space of art it proposes: an unfolding ecology of relations between producers and audiences, histories and locations, aesthetic decisions and political effects.

Commenced in 2003 with a brief to develop a public project for The University of Queensland Art Museum, Bailey's response led him to invite Watson to site, choreograph and theatricalise unannounced interruptions to the routine routing of Brisbane’s popular CityCat ferries, which since the late 1990s have played a key role in the redevelopment of the Brisbane River as a civic and touristic amenity. Watson's elaboration of Bailey's proposal not only involved the momentary translation of passing 'scenery' into lived 'place', but constituted a silent yet powerful assertion of Aboriginal culture and history, land-rights and self-determination. So much so, that at a public forum on 3 December 2006, Watson declared the event to be a Dreaming story that local Aboriginal people would tell, re-tell and, hopefully, re-stage into the future. This remarkable development, which is believed to be unprecedented in the history of contemporary art in Australia, further underscores the elasticity of traditional Aboriginal culture and the preparedness of elders to evolve it in dialogue with western aesthetic sensibilities.

While the river performance is at its core, the CityCat Project has activated and continues to activate multiple forms, contexts, producers and audiences, and includes drawings, photographic works, field recordings, exhibitions, architectural interventions, public discussions, printed works and publications. It is this multiplicity of sites and radically collaborative yet authorially fractured process, which substantially functions outside the branded space of art and in dialogue with traditional Aboriginal culture, that marks the CityCat Project as emblematic of advanced art today: an art that reorganises its own relationship to its audience and to its authors.

On Saturday 9 May between 10am–4pm Watson will further elaborate the river performance for the first time since declaring it a Dreaming story. Proceedings will involve CityCat ferries travelling upstream between:—

(a) the West End stop and the The University of Queensland terminal; and

(b) stops at Hawthorne and New Farm Park (10am–12noon only).

In addition, an exhibition by Bailey will open at the Pestorius Sweeney House (Cnr Crescent Road/Eblin Drive, Hamilton; CityCat stop: Bretts Wharf). The exhibition, which will continue until 11 July, will comprise drawings and photo-based works, including a multi-part photo piece first shown as part of the artist's critically acclaimed installation at the Lyon Biennial in 2007.

On Sunday 10 May between 3–5pm Bailey and Watson will reflect upon the procedures and implications of the CityCat Project in a joint presentation in Auditorium 1, State Library of Queensland, Cultural Centre, Stanley Place, South Bank, Brisbane.

Since 2006 Dave Hullfish Bailey has undertaken major projects for the Secession (Vienna), Centre d'Art Santa Monica (Barcelona), and CASCO Office for Art, Design and Theory (Utrecht). In 2007 a selection of Bailey's projects, including his CityCat Project, was presented at the Lyon Biennial, while in 2009 CASCO and the Sternberg Press (Berlin) will publish the artist’s book What’s Left, with contextual essays by Jan Tumlir, Lars Bang Larson and Emily Pethick.

The City Cat Project has been realised with the generous assistance and support of Brisbane City Council, TransdevTSL Brisbane Ferries, The University of Queensland Art Museum, State Library of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, The Printing Office, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific, and Donovan Hill.



Dave Hullfish Bailey + David Pestorius
"Dada in the Post-Colonial Field"
Friday 17 April, 2009
Spaces of Art Conference
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney


This paper will reflect upon the procedures and implications of Bailey’s CityCat Project with particular emphasis on its critical 'updating' of Dadaist tendencies: its proliferation and confusion of spaces, information and agency (including institutional frameworks and the branded spaces of art), and its radically collaborative yet authorially fragmented process, which assumes its participants may not share common knowledges, aesthetic languages, nor political aims. It will also consider what may be the project’s most significant, and most surprising, outcome: its important status for local Aboriginal people and Watson’s public declaration that it will be re-told and re-enacted into the future, much like the ancient Dreaming stories that it alludes to.

Spaces of Art is presented by Artspace Visual Arts Centre in association with the Art Gallery of NSW and Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.



photo: Paul Bai

Heimo Zobernig
27 February - 7 March, 2009
Friday/Saturday, 12 noon - midnight
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane


Over the next two weekends the Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig (b. 1958) will present a special day/night exhibition at the Pestorius Sweeney House.

Described by the Tate Museum as “one of the most significant artists working in Europe today,” Zobernig’s recent 25 year survey at Tate St Ives was centred around his ‘updating’ of Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Grid 3: Lozenge Composition (1918), a project initiated in 1965 by the Australian artist Ian Burn (1939–1993). An almost perfect modular grid in diamond format, the Mondrian painting anticipated the minimalist injunction to activate and render reflexive the subjectivity of the viewer. However, where Mondrian stopped just short of this ambition, Burn’s Yellow Constant (1965) and related works discarded the last vestiges of a fixed and contemplative viewing position, not only prompting the spectator to become ambulatory, but enlivening the space of the room itself.

In 2004 Zobernig took up from where Ian Burn left off, deliberately undercutting the earnest academicism of Burn’s hard-edge painting with a handcraftedness that fluctuates between the subtle and the slightly absurd. In the end though, the same fundamental questions are being asked: When is a painting finished, who finishes it, and how is the paradigm shift from artist to viewer to be critically analysed and understood? In addition to the materially diverse experiments of these works, Zobernig has often adopted an unconventional approach to their display, something which further emphasises their minimalist polemic. The artist also regularly makes ‘slapstick’ performance/videos, which echo and complexify the questions these paintings seem to be asking. Over the last decade, many of these videos have deployed the technical trickery of chroma-key production, but in a fairly crude 'low-fi' way, reminding us of the artifice involved and thereby questioning the use of such techniques and materials as a metaphor for the viewer’s own projection.

Confounding traditional notions of exhibition and performance, for this unusual show Zobernig will pair one of his diamond grids from 2006 with his video No. 23 (2005) in a space-related installation that takes its cue from the 8’ ceiling of the venue, an International Style house built in 1965, the same year Burn made Yellow Constant, itself an 8’ lozenge. Zobernig's painting here is also an 8' lozenge — the only work from the series, which now numbers around 20, to adopt the same dimension of the Burn work. But rather than hanging the painting on a wall, the artist will install it more like a sculpture, freestanding in front of and obscuring the view through the abundant glazing of the naturally lit space. The looping video No. 23 will be projected onto the adjacent feature-wall, its moving image only becoming fully legible as night begins to fall.