drawing connections

July is the month for the Sydney Drawing Festival. There are exhibitions and events on all over Sydney - but there doesn't seem to be a website advertising the whole lot. It seems to be an offshoot of the International Drawing Research Institute's annual (?) conference. There's stuff on at the Australian Museum, at the Botanic Gardens, at the Power House Museum, and at various Historic Houses Trust properties.

I've got so used to having a website for everything, and everything in its website that it's quite a challenge to understand an event, or a Festival without that framework.

chrysler valiant ranger

A couple of weeks ago I went with Joy Lai to the MCA to see an exhibition put together by groups of artists from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin. Joy had been to the opening night and thought it was lots of fun. And it is.

One of the Sydney exhibitors is Simon Barney. His work is called No Ideas. There's a table and some index cards, and you write instructions for a painting on the index card, and if he likes the idea, or instruction, that you've given him, he does the painting, and you get it at the end of the show! How cool! Here's what he says about it:

Participation has lately turned into a mass marketing strategy. It's a vote of some kind, a group decision, at best the chance of choosing between options. It no longer suggests autonomy so much as a kind of averaging to which we are subjected. For each work is instead to be made with one person, for that person. The instructions are a starting point . . . the paintings here in the museum are the work of the artists and visitors who put up the ideas; and they'll each be carrying their artwork out the door, taking it home - if they want to.

Joy and I both put in our ideas, and they're both getting painted.

Joy's instructions were about painting a glacier and putting on cotton wool and rice. My instructions were a kind of description of the car crash that Peter had where he rolled the Valiant coming up the hill out of Cronulla, crashing into the milk truck coming the other way. I wonder what it will look like.

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Here's a blog which goes with the exhibition: situation