Past Programs
Arts and Culture - 2008
ISMs: Obscurantism Read Transcript
30/11/2008
Today's ISM is for anyone who's ever felt baffled by a work of art, who feels it's all meaningless, pretentious claptrap. Don't get it? Don't worry, you are not alone.
Shane Warne the Musical
30/11/2008
Picture this: an Aussie bloke with blonde hair and blue eyes, little bit chubby, dressed in white—with a cricket ball in one hand and a mobile phone in the other...
Eddie Perfect leads the all-singing, all-dancing spectacular, directed by Neil Armfield and featuring the one and only Warnie.
Shane Warne The Musical starts in Melbourne on 10 December then next year, from March, it travels to Perth.
ISMs:Optimism Read Transcript
23/11/2008
To coincide with 'Contemporary Australia: Optimism', the exhibition currently on at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, this week's ISM is from Julie Ewington, the show's curator. And the exhibition is on through to February next year.
Martin Boyce
23/11/2008
A new artwork has taken shape in the former exercise yard of the Old Melbourne Gaol, now the RMIT University Alumni Courtyard. Called 'We are Shipwrecked and Locked', it's the work of Martin Boyce, the Scottish entrant in the forthcoming Venice Biennale. He describes it as 'a strange sculptural desert island.'
The project is funded by the Kaldor Public Art Project, in which the art patron John Kaldor, brings a prominent contemporary artist's work to Australia: when Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude came to town in 1969 and wrapped up part of Bondi Beach, that was a Kaldor project. Since then there have been many others, including Jeff Koons. Martin Boyce is the latest and he spoke to Suzanne Donisthorpe.
Tasmanian State Theatre Company
23/11/2008
All of the major cities around Australia have state theatre companies. They are subsidised flagship theatres, charged with delivering the best Australian and overseas plays, both new and old.
But Tasmania has had no such professional theatre company for years —ever since Zootango in Hobart folded. Until this year that is. In May, the Tasmanian Theatre Company was born and the name itself signals the intention to be regarded in the same light as those other state theatre companies around the country.
So far, they've put on two productions of Australian plays: Joanna Murray Smith's Bombshells, a series of monologues and song and dance numbers about six women, female archetypes; and a play by Tom Holloway, called Don't Say The Words, which is a modern retelling of the Greek tragedy Agamemnon, about an army officer who comes home to his wife after being away for years at war.
The artistic director of the new company is Charles Parkinson. For ten years he was the artistic manager of HotHouse Theatre in Albury, he's directed shows for the Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne Festivals and he was also artistic director of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus.
The job of running the Tasmanian Theatre Company is a return to his island home after being a mainlander for 22 years.
Lyn Gallacher caught up with Charles Parkinson in Hobart.
Artworks feature: Lucia Mocenigo
16/11/2008
The Artworks feature today is about Venice at the end of the eighteenth century -- and in particular one woman's story. Lucia Mocenigo was a high-born Venetian living through one of the most turbulent periods in European history. She's now best known as Lord Byron's landlady (she charged him a fortune to live in her crumbling palazzo -- and together they're largely responsible for creating the romantic, tourist image of Venice.)
Now, Lucia's great-great-great-great-grandson, the Italian journalist and author Andrea di Robilant, has written her life story, using her diaries and personal letters. Julie Copeland met up with him in Rome.
ISMs: Humanism Read Transcript
16/11/2008
Perhaps the most potent work of art symbolising the ideas implicit in Humanism is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, as God's outstretched finger reaches across space to touch Adam's. Jason Smith is the director of Heidi museum, and he is today's guide to humanism.
Beyond Sacred
16/11/2008
Last week on Artworks, Julie Copeland talked to the Sydney pathologist and art collector Colin Laverty about how you make a collection. This week Julie is taking the conversation further with him, to tease out ideas about the way we look at contemporary Aboriginal art -- as fine art, or as ethnographic art.
These are ideas that are also taken up in a book that Colin has just put out, called Beyond Sacred: Recent paintings from Australia's remote Aboriginal communities.
John Romeril wins the Patrick White Award
16/11/2008
The Patrick White Award is an annual prize given to an Australian writer. Worth $30,000, it comes from a trust that Patrick White set up with the money he received from winning the Nobel prize for literature. It's awarded to a novelist or a poet or dramatist, whose work hasn't received the recognition it deserves.
This year's winner is the very deserving Melbourne playwright John Romeril whose very first plays were performed 40 years ago in 1968 -- A Nameless Concern at La Mama in Carlton, directed by Graeme Blundell and The Kitchen Table at Monash University.
From the Hands of Our Ancestors
16/11/2008
From the Hands of Our Ancestors is an exhibition about to open in Darwin, at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Featuring the arts and crafts of East Timor, it's the first-ever international display of the national collection since independence.
Joanna Barrkman is a curator at the Museum and Maria Alice Casimiro Branco is from Darwin's East Timorese community. After independence she went back to East Timor to work on cultural reconstruction and community development. In the upheavals of the last few decades, a lot of the precious, traditional art and craft of East Timor was lost or damaged or destroyed.
From the Hands of Our Ancestors -- from Nov 21 to July 12 at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
Artworks Feature: Engaging Visions
09/11/2008
This Artworks feature is about a group of artists involved in the environmental catastrophe that is the Murray Darling Basin, with its dire water shortages, the death of ancient redgums, the desiccation of wetlands, and growers burning their orchards.
But for many of us outside the food bowl, it's hard to connect with all this personally -- to understand the dilemmas and difficulties, the competing interests and personal tragedies.
An art project called 'Engaging Visions' is trying to change that by using the visual arts to talk about how environmental issues affect the people living within the Basin.
Featuring:
Dr John Reid, convenor of the Field Studies Program, coordinator of the Environment Studio at the School of Art, Australian National University,
Dr Sara Ryan, photographer and former senior ecologist with the CSIRO,
Dr Grant Whiteman, manager of Riverland Operations, including Calperum and Taylorville Stations and the McCormick Centre for the Environment,
Yvette Frahn, artist, educator and dryland farmer,
Gary Duncan, painter, sculptor and conservationist,
Fran Ilfould, photographer and painter, ANU School of Art,
John Chigros fruit grower, Berri,
Charles Tambiah, photographer and Engaging Vision researcher, Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University.
ISMs: Neoclassicism Read Transcript
09/11/2008
For the ISM in art today, we're heading to revolutionary Russia and a socio-musical paradox, neoclassicism. Taking us there is the musician and breakfast host on ABC FM, Emma Ayres.
Colin Laverty - the Laverty Collection
09/11/2008
Have you ever thought about becoming an art collector -- diverting whatever spare cash you can muster to purchases large or small?
Colin Laverty is a pathologist in Sydney and, along with his wife Elizabeth, he's been collecting art for forty years. For the last twenty years they've been focusing on Aboriginal art -- to the point where they now have what's described as 'the most important private collection of Indigenous art in the country'.
Julie Copeland is speaking with Colin Laverty about the art of collecting, and the particular issues to do with collecting Indigenous art. The book of Colin Laverty's collection of paintings from remote Aboriginal communities is called Beyond Sacred; we'll talk with him more about that next week.
Daniel Keene goes to Paris
09/11/2008
It seems a strange thing that there is an Australian playwright who's more famous in France than he is here. It's quite usual, for example, to see billboards in the Paris Metro advertising his plays on at the major theatres in Paris.
Daniel Keene has been writing plays for thirty years. Together with director Ariette Taylor he has himself produced most of his plays performed in Australia, in small theatres, in an association called the Keene-Taylor Project.
But for the last ten years or so, his plays have been performed more often in French than in English.
Amanda Smith speaks to Daniel Keene and, in Paris, Severine Magois, who translates Daniel Keene's plays, is speaking with Rhiannon Brown.
Herculaneum
02/11/2008
Ancient tradition connected Herculaneum with the name of the Greek hero Herakles. It is the Greeks who named the city Herculaneum. But in 79 CE, along with its neighbour Pompeii, the rich Roman resort town of Herculaneum was buried under around 20 metres of lava, mud and ash by the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius.
The volcanic water, ash and debris which covered Herculaneum, plus the extreme heat, left it in a remarkable state of preservation for over 1,600 years, until it was accidentally discovered by some workers digging a well in 1709. But after Herculaneum was excavated, and many of its treasures carted off(some are in the Archeological Museum of Naples) exposure to the elements means the site has slowly deteriorated.
Enter the British School in Rome, who oversee the Herculaneum Conservation Project. This past European summer Julie Copeland travelled to the site of Herculaneum for Artworks, where she was shown around by the director, Andrew Wallace Hadrill.
ISMs: Impressionism Read Transcript
02/11/2008
Today's ISM in Art is everybody's favourite -- Impressionism. Most of our ISMs so far come from the twentieth century, but Impressionism is ninteenth century and it refers to that loose group of artists whose paintings were considered too awful to be shown at the Paris Salon, so instead they showed their art independently. They painted outdoors, their subjects were contemporary and everyday, especially landscapes and still life.
They were interested in light and colour and spontaneity -- you can see the brush strokes. The paintings of these artists; Monet, Cezanne, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley look beautiful to our eyes now so it's hard to imagine how truly ghastly they were thought to be in the 1860s and 70s. Even the term Impressionism was a derisive one -- given to them by an art critic.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales has an exhibition on at the moment called Monet and the Impressionists. And Terence Maloon is the special exhibitions curator there. He's remembering the day he was first beguiled by Cezanne's onions.
Monet and the Impressionists runs until January 26 (Australia Day) next year.
Alex Stahl, sound artist
02/11/2008
In Melbourne, the Princes Bridge across the Yarra is the city's best-known river crossing. But if you head under this bridge there's a walkway on either side of the river and, at dusk, you'll find the place full of the sound of birds who fly in to nest there, and of trams and cars rumbling overhead.
This, plus the fact that the bridge was designed by Percy Grainger's father, makes it a sound artist's paradise, and sound artist Alex Stahl has turned the bridge into a giant electro-acoustic sound instrument.
And when he isn't exploring artistic intersections between engineering and sound, Alex designs circuit boards for space rockets AND he's chief sound engineer for Francis Ford Coppola and works on sound for all the Pixar films.
His installation in Melbourne is called Echolocation. In it, the bird-calls are captured by microphones and looped and sampled and then played back into the streetscape.
During the recent Melbourne International Arts Festival, Natasha Anderson caught up with Alex Stahl, under the bridge with the birds.
Tracks
02/11/2008
This is a story about the meeting of two cultures and much needed rain. Two dancers, David McMicken and Tim Newth, run the Darwin-based dance company Tracks. For the last twenty years, they've been working in the Tanami Desert with the Warlpiri people and particularly with Warlpiri elder Steve Tjampitjinpa. Their project is called Milpirri, and it began when Steve Tjampitjinpa approached Tim and David with the idea of creating a performance that would involve the whole community.
In Warlpiri the world 'milpirri' means thundercloud, a particular sort of cloud that's formed by the mixing of hot air and cold air, so that when it comes together there's some friction and some tension. But after that, the rain falls and brings nourishment and new growth to the land. All the animals and people then flock to this new growth and a feast is held.
Steve Tjampitjinpa Patricks's idea was to take this concept of milpirri, and perform it in a way that would help the community, at a time when they were stuggling to come to terms with their first instance of youth suicide.
Dr Stefano Carboni
02/11/2008
Dr Stefano Carboni is the new director of The Art Gallery of Western Australia. He has just taken up the post fresh from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he was curator and administrator of the Department of Islamic Art.
Ngapartji Ngapartji
26/10/2008
Earlier this month, Trevor Jamieson and Scott Rankin won a Deadly Award for most outstanding achievement in film, TV or theatre - for their stage production, Ngapartji Ngapartji. Trevor is a performer, and a Spinifex man from the western desert of Australia. Scott Rankin is a theatre director and the founder of Big hArt, an organisation that's mission is to create both art and social change.
Ngapartji Ngapartji is Trevor's story, or more particularly his family's story -and it includes their experience of the Maralinga nuclear tests. Ngapartji Ngapartji has been performed all round Australia, to great acclaim.
It's more than a stage show though. Like a number of Big hArt projects it aims is to bring together remote indigenous communities and local artists to find ways of telling and preserving stories and in this case preserving language as well. It's performed partly in English and partly in Pitjantjatjara.
Although Pitjantjatjara is one of the stronger Aboriginal languages (it has around two and half thousand speakers) - it's still considered endangered.
Lyn Gallacher recently saw a production of Ngapartji Ngapartji in Alice Springs and spoke with Trevor Jamieson and Alex Kelly, the creative director of Ngapartji Ngapartji.
Red Shoes
26/10/2008
We've talked before in Artworks about the symbolic power -- in fairytale and fashion -- of Red Shoes. Red as a colour is dynamic and dangerous, and red shoes carry connotations of dangerous transformative power. A new telling of the Hans Christian Andersen story The Red Shoes is being performed in Perth right now at PICA, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. It's an adaptation by Humphrey Bower and is directed by Matthew Lutton. Ash Gibson Greig composed the music.
Red Shoes: a Theatrical Fairytale, at PICA Performance Space, Perth, till 1 November.
The Red Shoes: WA Ballet, touring 15 November to 6 December.
Vale James Gleeson
26/10/2008
Last Friday, the funeral of our most famous surrealist artist, James Gleeson, was held in Sydney.
James Gleeson was born in 1915 and died just short of his 93rd birthday. He was a committed surrealist. His whole artistic output, over 70 years, was an expression of the art movement that came out of the horrors of the First World War and from the theories of the unconscious.
In 2004, a major retrospective of James Gleeson's art was held at the National Gallery of Victoria. Lou Klepac was one of the curators of the show. At the funeral on Friday, Lou paid tribute to the artist and, back in 2004, he spoke about James Gleeson's creative process.
A number of James Gleeson's paintings were exhibited earlier this year in the big show at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, called Australian Surrealism. James Gleeson, by the way, was chairman of the acquisitions committeee for the gallery in Canberra in the 1970s, and had a lot to do with its establishment.
And even though as a painter he was a surrealist through and through, his artistic heroes were old masters like Michelangelo, Goya, and Turner. So although his paintings were often strange pile-ups of architectural or organic forms, with titles like 'The Attitude of Lightning Towards a Lady Mountain', it's been noted that the delicacy of the surfaces in his paintings was always masterly.
He is speaking with Julie Copeland, back in 2004. He was 89 at the time and it was on the occasion of his National Gallery of Victoria retrospective.
Artworks Feature: Music for theatre
19/10/2008
When you go to the theatre, do you ever really notice the music and sound that's part of the show; where it's coming from, how it's working, who might have composed and designed it?
Perhaps when the sound design for a performance is working well you don't notice it. That's certainly the theory of Peter Farnan of Boom Crash Opera fame -- his compositions for theatre include productions with Back to Back, Melbourne Theatre Company, Company B, the Malthouse and OzOpera.
In this Artworks Feature he's joined by another composer, Darrin Verhagen, and they're reflecting on what's involved in writing the music for dance and theatre. Darrin's done the compositions for two Melbourne Festival shows: Jenny Kemp's play Kitten, and the contemporary dance company Chunky Move's show Two Faced Bastard.
John Cargher tribute and giveaway
19/10/2008
Our colleague John Cargher, who died in April this year, presented Singers of Renown on this network, as you know, for over forty years. ABC Classics has now put out a three-CD set, 'A Tribute To John Cargher', and there are ten of these to give away.
To be in the running, send an email with the answer to this question: what is the name, and the composer, of the opera that was the theme music for Singers of Renown?
Also, on Tuesday 21 October at 6pm, the Victorian Opera is performing a tribute to John Cargher, presented by Julie Copeland at Victorian Opera's HQ, Horti Hall in Victoria Street in Melbourne.
Tickets are $25 full, $20 concession (booking fees may apply). Book at Ticketmaster or 1300 723 038.
Fan Letters - Sycophantism
19/10/2008
This week on Artworks, there's no actual -ISM in Art as such, but a nod in that direction with an artist who's interested in the by-product of celebrity culture -- sycophantism.
Adelaide artist Mark Seibert has turned the fan letter into an experimental artform. He writes letters to famous people (which he generally doesn't send, but he has published). They're letters that are, he freely admits, an ego trip on his part, because he's letting the celebs know that he's on the same level as them (although Mark would say he's actually better, because he's ironic.)
The letters are addressed to musicians such as Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, The Strokes and Miles Davis.
Mark Seibert will be performing his fan letters on 30 October at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. It's part of a series of workshops to do with letters running in conjunction with an exhibition at ACMI called 'Correspondences'.
Luminist
19/10/2008
Luminist is a show by Valerie Sparkes which features enormous wall-sized digitally manipulated photographs of a fantasy St Kilda, the iconic Melbourne beach-side suburb.
Showing at Eildon Mansion, 51 Grey St, St Kilda, to 6 November.
Raga Dolls Salon Orchestra: Late Harvest - Imagined Music of a Forgotten Australia, ABC Classics 476 6907
Concert in Canberra
Wesley Uniting Church, 22 National Circuit, Forrest
3 PM Sunday October 26
$25 or $18 Concession, Full-time students $15. Children under 12 admitted free.
Bookings Wesley Music Centre on(02) 6232 7248.
The Rape of the Sabine Women
19/10/2008
Eve Sussman is a 'sculptor who shoots video'. She's made a film that's been screening at the Melbourne Festival, inspired by a painting, the Intervention of the Sabine Women, by Jacques-Louis David from 1799. It's a very dramatic painting, set in the earliest days of Rome, and shows women trying to stop a fight between men: the Romans and their neighbours the Sabines.
It's based on the myth, 'The Rape of the Sabine Women' and Eve Sussman's film, also called The Rape of the Sabine Women, transports it into the 1960s: an ancient Roman story with the look of La Dolce Vita.
Julie Copeland is speaking to Eve Sussman.
Two shows Sunday 19 October, 4pm and 6pm at the Australian centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.
DJ Spooky - That Subliminal Kid
19/10/2008
The New York musician, conceptual artist and writer DJ Spooky is the man who is convinced we are all people of the text. DJ Spooky -- That Subliminal Kid, alias Paul D Miller -- spoke to Suzanne Donisthorpe about global DJ-ing, and escaping information overload in the wild spaces of Antartica, where he has recently been to record sound for his Melbourne Festival show, Terra Nova Sinfonia Antartica.
Final show: 9pm today, October 19, at the Arts Centre Playhouse, Melbourne.
Casey Bennetto
12/10/2008
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.
For the Melbourne Festival Casey is presenting a new show, at the Spiegeltent, the famous tent of mirrors, and actually it's a history of the Speigeltent that he's doing, a fanciful history.
A Largely Fanciful History of the Spiegeltent, October 11 and 12 as part of the Melbourne Festival.
Kitten
12/10/2008
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.
Kitten is on at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne until October 25.
Tim Crouch
12/10/2008
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?
This is what happens with a show called An Oak Tree, on as part of the Melbourne Festival. It's an English production, a two-hander that was originally performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005. Since then it's toured the world. One of the two roles is taken by the creator, Tim Crouch. The other is performed by a different guest actor each show -- without rehearsal.
An Oak Tree on until Mon 13 October at the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre.
England on from 15 to 18 October, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square.
ISMs: Absurdism Read Transcript
12/10/2008
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.
Samuel Beckett's Endgame Oct 20 to Nov 8 at the Eleventh Hour Theatre
170 Leicester St Fitzroy. Bookings through Melbourne International Arts festival.
DJ Spooky Giveaway
05/10/2008
The musician, writer and conceptual artist DJ Spooky is coming to Australia this month, to perform at the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
DJ Spooky calls himself a 'rhythm scientist'. He mashes up sounds and images to form meditations on the world as he sees it. As far as Spooky is concerned, we're now all people of the text, as opposed to people of the book (old technology).
His latest project is Terra Nova Sinfonia Antarctica, which involves sounds and images that DJ Spooky made when he travelled to the frozen south -- a long way in distance and every other way, from his home in New York.
If you are or can be in Melbourne between the 16th and 19th of October -- and you want to win a double pass to Terra Nova Sinfonia Antarctica, you need to answer a question that relates to a project that Spooky is doing with Radio National's online collaborative space called Pool.
The question you need to answer is: What is the name of DJ Spooky's project on Pool? Follow the links below and all will be revealed.
Good luck!
Art At The Heart
05/10/2008
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.
Kim McConville is one of the keynote speakers at this conference. She's a co-founder and executive director of an organisation based in northern New South Wales called Beyond Empathy which can and does measure the results of its arts projects.
Lyn Gallacher spoke to Kim McConville.
Back to Back Theatre: Food Court
05/10/2008
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.
Back to Back is a long running regional theatre company based in Geelong in Victoria. It's an ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities and right now they're rehearsing a new show that they'll be performing with the band The Necks. During rehearsals, Amanda Smith spoke to two of the actors, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price, and the artistic director of Back To Back, Bruce Gladwin.
Food Court, performed by Back To Back Theatre and The Necks, Melbourne International Arts Festival: 9-12 October, Malthouse Theatre - sold out! Also 29-31 January 2009, Geelong Performing Arts Centre: Bookings 03 5225 1200
