Tuesday, September 27, 2011

DONE SPOKE

Here's a link to a some semi-public speaking I did last week on Radio Valerie. I'm discussing the Peace Party Puzzle I'm making, which secretly is an art and science project too. Thanks Ronan and Sam,
(a couple of Peace Party Puzzle Packs are coming your way!)

I come in around 53 mins in and hang around for quite a while :


Listen up HERE !

Sunday, September 25, 2011

ARCHIVAL SOLUTIONZ

















Just want to say a massive shout-out to Geordy Muir (Genre if you're predictive texting). Geordy works at NZ Archives. For his birthday I sent him a bunch of hardcore playful literary treasure that he has agreed to archive in a funny yet serious fashion, which is his style anyway. He is famous for this hard-hitting quote that he said to me in the car once :

Rules are like routines, they're made to be broken.

Happy Birthday !!!

Thanks for magnetic fishing to Sade with me when I was down!

Thursday, September 22, 2011

TRANCE PARTY

My friend Elle Loui, who helped me re-integrate into society after a magical ongoing trance party of my own just helped induce one in some others with her party art show at rice and beans :

If Elle Loui August and Matthew George Richard Ward's WONDERING HOW WE EVER CAME TO THIS THANK YOU, FOR INSTANCE. OR POSSIBLE OR JUST WHATEVER WHATEVER WHATEVER!!!! (rice and beans) was something a reviewer could reliably call theatre or dance, and expect to be understood, then the world would be a somewhat different place. If I say to you that I experienced this as a type of post object art - whose scattering of bodies across the blank slate of Rice and Beans seemed to deny literal scrutiny and require of the visitor other means of perception, integration into the work - then you might be well served in terms of perceiving an absence of commodity, but completely mislead in other ways, for this was no dry intellectual exercise. What type of person has the temerity to dissect and codify when it is live bodies at stake? A theatre reviewer? Speaking recently with the director of the just-finished Avenue Q, we reached an typical impasse with his assertion that "physical theatre" was a redundant term - all theatre being intrinsically physical. Which, abstractly, is completely true, but in practice is completely not. Much, if not practically all of what we call theatre is involved in encasing non-literal, animistic, flesh-based communication in a great sheet of words. "Wondering....." , on the other hand, felt a bit like wandering down to a great rivers edge to watch an ancient species at play - but that is only if you chose to see it as spectacle at all. It felt more like a rite intended to awaken atavistic pathways in the brain. When I left - after about an hour- I literally could not speak. The world seemed enormously present, and language seemed too..... easy a strategy; too coarse. I offer no guesses at method or intention on the part of the performers, and in terms of what i "literally" witnessed - two people denying (passively, it seemed) eye contact or interaction, and moving in the space -any description beyond the most basic would mislead. Entertaining, informing, transporting an audience are all splendid goals for theatre - but literally putting them in a trance is, in our modern context, something of a paradigm shift. Some say it was not always so. Certainly it has not deserted us for good.

Jimmy Currin

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

DAY OF RECKONING

Tomorrow (Thursday 22 September) I will be reckoning some stuff on Ronan's radio show, Radio Rascals from 6:45pm ish Melbourne time.

Mostly I will be talking about a Peace Party Puzzle Project I'm playing at, which is sort of an Interactive Evolutionary Time Capsule project, that fits in with the weekly theme of TIME pretty appropriately. It is an infinitely complex yet bodaciously simple project. Founded on an intricate framework of hot vivacious connections (neural and otherwise) and the puzzling yet exhilirating destinations they can and will lead you to if you invest your joules in their exploration. Then there are the joules of interest you gather on your investment, which are worth their weight in snacks!

It is an exercise in SEEING WHAT HAPPENS, jotting it down, and sending it to someone for some reason. Then realising the reason that you did that, jotting that down, and so on ...

FYI, it is NOT a chain letter, it's totally off the chain. The process is simple, WHAT HAPPENS is the complex part.


Anyway, tune in if you like, you could be one of the 50 listeners !


LIVE from above the ice cream shop,


here : http://www.radiovalerie.org/index.php?/ongoing/yeah/

Monday, September 19, 2011

GOLD ENVELOPES






















Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment.

The Buddha said: "These four are the foodstuffs, ye bikkhus, which sustain the creatures that are born, and benefit the creatures that seek rebirth. The first is edible food, coarse or fine; touch is the second; the thinking capacity of the mind is the third; and the fourth is consciousness."


Whoops, just quoted some more C.G Jung,
from "Phenomenes Occultes"
Psychology and the Occult

Friday, September 16, 2011

ART FORUM



with Dan and Caroline

Part of a new series where Melbourne party artists Caroline and Dan get down to the nitty gritty about art and what we want out of it in a chatty conversational tone.

Episode One :

C : I want to engage people pretty hard.
D : I think that's what we all want. Hard engagement.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

TEXTICLE






















I just found this drawing on my friend Rob's blog. It's by me, and was the first drawing I've ever had in an art show, at the Melbourne Art Fair last year. That's mine and my siblings bling fossilising deep in that sediment there. Joanna's gold nacho, my gold banana earrings and Sean's gold blackberry and hamsa. (Not sure who the diamond ring and pearls belong to.)

Have come a really long way since then and now I've had two things in art shows (official ones) and many many more things in Home Art Shows around the world. Generally though there are two sides to my art so one half might get concealed when it comes to framing.

I lost this one between the pages of some book and am still waiting for it to spring back out at me.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

THE OPAL EMBARGO


This essay by Jessica 'Coco' Hansell is a MUST READ for anyone who's not a chicken. So on the money I will not cheapen it with adjectives.