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Sunday 12 October 2008
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We're staying with the theatre for the -ISM in Art this week. Samuel Beckett was the first of the absurdist playwrights to be internationally successful, and it's Absurdism that's our subject, with William Henderson, director of the new production of Endgame.
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What would you think about performing in a play where you don't know your lines -- you've never read the script, you don't even know what the play is?
Another Melbourne Festival event is a new play by Jenny Kemp, who both writes and directs her work. Kitten features three actors who perform the multiple personalities of Kitten, a woman whose husband has disappeared. Plays that explore the female psyche, as this one does, are familiar territory for Jenny Kemp.
Casey Bennetto is best known as the creator of the musical satire Keating!, a surprise hit of a show that's had seasons all around Australia over the past several years.
Sunday 05 October 2008
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It's mostly remembered as a student revolt in Paris, but May '68 was also a workers' uprising and coincided with a month-long general strike that paralysed the nation and nearly brought down the government of President Charles de Gaulle.
Back to Back Theatre has just won a New York Dance and Perfomance Award, known as the Bessies, for their show Small Metal Objects, an on-location performance they did in New York at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.
Art At The Heart is the huge regional arts conference currently underway in Alice Springs. There are big topics to talk about. For example, arts projects that are designed to deliver some kind of social outcome, to reduce disadvantage, and improve people's lives in some way. How do you know whether they work or not? It's always been hard to measure tangible outcomes from arts projects and it's something that's often resisted by artists anyway.
Did you know that the very first arts grant in this country, is said to have been made way back in 1818? This was when a poet by the name of Michael Massey Robinson, was given two cows from the government herd, for his services as Poet Laureate. That was 'in-kind' support perhaps, but the first formal, 'hard cash' assistance for the arts, the Commonwealth Literary Fund was set up one hundred years ago. So, to celebrate the centenary of arts funding in Australia, and to talk about who gets what and why these days, we're joined by Chris Puplick.
The ISM this week is for anyone who's ever felt out of place in a theatre or a gallery. Say you've managed to score an opening night invitation -- are you clear on what's expected of you?
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The musician, writer and conceptual artist DJ Spooky is coming to Australia this month, to perform at the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Sunday 28 September 2008
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Of all the wars ever waged in this world, it's the ancient story of the Trojan War that's most seared into the western consciousness and imagination. The story of how the Greeks sailed to Troy to claim back Helen, of how they got through the walls with the ruse of a Wooden Horse, and how they destroyed that great city. It's a story that's been told and retold for thousands of years.
Artists have always drawn inspiration from nature. But as global warming is forcing us to find a new ecological balance, what can art do?
Black Habit is a series of field recordings that trace the path of electricity -- from taking a piece of coal out of the ground to switching on a light bulb. Not easy sounds to record, and they took the sound artist Philip Samartzis three years to do.
Black Habit is a collaboration Philip has done with Michael Vorfield, whose pictures sit alongside the sounds.
This week's ISM in art is a musical one, and it has a lot to do with the discovery of what sound does to your brain. Jim Cotter is a composer and he also teaches composition at the Australian National University in Canberra.
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This year is the bicentenary of the Spanish war of independence, against France and Napoleon Bonaparte. And admid the celebrations, Spanish cultural critics are re-examining the connection between Goya and the Spanish soul.
Sunday 21 September 2008
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Andrew Davies is the acknowledged master of literary adaptations in the United Kingdom. Over the past twenty years, he's turned more novels into TV series and films than you'd think possible. So many of the costume dramas that you've seen on ABC-TV like Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair and Bleak House, as well as adaptations of contemporary novels the House of Cards series and the Bridget Jones films for example. His feature film of Brideshead Revisted opens in Australia next month.
As the world's financial markets spin into meltdown and as predictions of climate collapse increase, an exhibition focusing on modern ruin seems spookily more and more relevant.
Eroticism is of course an ancient and ongoing fascination in art, but also a controversial one, as attitudes to what is and isn't acceptable eroticism shift.
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A powerful image that permiates the history of western art is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Louis Ruprecht is the author of a book called God Gardened East, subtitled 'A Gardener's Meditation on the Dynamics of Genesis'.
The Chariot Race in Ben Hur -- if you've seen it you won't have forgotten it -- or the actor who played Pontius Pilate, Frank Thring. He was that larger-than-life fruity Australian actor who always wore black clothes, gold bling, and a sardonic expression.
Sunday 14 September 2008
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The end of art, according to some, has been coming ever since Marcel Duchamp got that urinal exhibited in an art gallery ninety years ago.
The End of Art is the title of a book that came out a few years ago by the American critic and scholar Donald Kuspit. He says that ever since Duchamp, contemporary art has abandoned its function as the visual wing of the house of poetry and has fallen into entertainment. And more recently Donald Kuspit's view that contemporary art is failing us has been taken up by the author of The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes.
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In Brisbane, people who love their gardens have found an interesting way to share them. It's sort of taking the Open Gardens Scheme to a whole different dimension. Brisbane Backyards was a project of the Brisbane Festival, and it's where people volunteered to open up their gardens as a performance space for the festival; so the public could come along to music played by a variety of artists in a private domestic garden.
It's a journey into the sublime today, with Luminism. Ted Snell is Professor of Contemporary Art at Curtin University in Perth, and Dean of Art at John Curtin Gallery.
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Baz Luhrmann says his latest film Australia, due for release in November, was influenced by outback films from the 1940s and 50s -- films like The Overlanders and Jedda. Also the 1950s English-made movies about rural Australia that starred Peter Finch: A Town Like Alice, Robbery Under Arms and The Shiralee. Peter Finch portrayed the typical bronzed Aussie stockman, the character type that was later taken up by Bryan Brown and that Hugh Jackman has inherited.
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