One by Julia Gwendolyn Schneider, called “Un-Collectable Art: The Australian network »un-collectable artists« and a critical urban development project in Sydney” in the Austrian magazine springerin.

Here’s how her article starts:

We are all familiar with the art league tables published every year, those canonisations, which seem to be unfair, arbitrary, and to a large extent fictitious and which are primarily about fame, along with money. The »Australian Art Collector Magazine«[1] also publishes one of these rankings once a year; a kind of art market speculation, for which the Do-It-Yourself utopias of some Australian artists were always an irritant.

You can read it online here.

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Also, Royce Smith, who was in Sydney during the NUCA heyday (2004, when the bubblegum cards were launched) wrote an article called “Cultural Development? Cultural Unilateralism? An Analysis of Contemporary Festival and Biennale Programs” in The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society Vol. 36, No. 4. The article is available here.

Here is a small quote from the article. We should note (although these are minor points) that NUCA was not really a group of “students”. And the bubblegum cards were presented guerrilla style at the Sydney Biennale only because it happened to coincide with the project, not as a particular pointed critique of that large arts festival, which can come and go as it likes, it doesn’t really bother us either way. However, with those small points in mind, bravo Royce!…

As a result of the perceived breach between practice and institutionalization, these students, along with other like-minded artists, created a loose collective known as The Network of Uncollectable Artists, or NUCA. Their mission was to provide a forum for local artists whose works, performances, acts, or interventions were ill-suited to the Sydney Biennale’s structured frameworks of documentation and display. Allowing anyone to submit works for consideration, the NUCA collective judged submissions on a numerical scale that concomitantly adopted and mocked the conventional, binary thinking that tends to pervade institutional aesthetic judgments and established new systems of valuation that acknowledged the works’ overall connectedness to culture and to both conventional and nonconventional paradigms.

Their “1–5” scale — examining anonymity / authorship, site difficulty / easiness, done-for-love / done-for-money, do-it-yourself / reliance on funding—allowed works to be numerically referenced using baseball card-style ratings (see figure 3). The fifty projects with the highest total scores were documented on cards, packaged in groups of five with a piece of peculiarly flavored orange bubble gum, and sold for three dollars by students carrying the cards inside trench coats.

Annie Kennedy from Erskineville has made a documentary about people and life in her own suburb. It will be shown in a park in Erskineville. The screening event itself is just as much a part of the artwork as the contents of the film.

Kirsten Bradley from Cicada is doing a beautiful experiment with cardboard and open space called About, Above:

Three cardboard planetariums, installed throughout the Sydney CBD. You are welcome to duck inside, and to stand for a moment (or as long as you like) inside a solar-powered simulation of the night sky.

These cardboard universes, created with pinholes, contain a starchart accurate to 12 Midnight on Friday 22nd Feb, 2008. A solar-powered simulation of what is hidden, about and above, on a nightly basis…

Read more about her project here.

Nobody, the Sydney artist crazy about weeds, has extended his practice in a more controlled direction. His latest project at First Draft sounds like it could be a conceptual artwork from the early 1970s - set up a fixed-boundary situation and see what might happen:

1. A planter was filled with sterile potting mix and left in the garden for 4 months, allowing environmental seeds to colonize it.

2. A cabinet got filled with dirt from the garden itself and left to develop for 3 months, the species sprouting are the one present in the soil already.

Read more here.

Marcus Westbury, formerly the artistic poobah of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival and before that TINA in Newcastle, has created a TV show on ABC called Not Quite Art.

It’s a 3 part series and you can find plenty of media coverage about it already online, not least of which it’s own page on the ABC website.

Marcus interviewed NUCA’s Lucazoid for the show, a segment that will go to air in the second episode, about uncollectable artists. Particularly featured (so we believe) is NUCA duo NoBody and Maxine Foxxx with their Weedkiller project.

Marcus was running the Next Wave when NUCA presented its bubblegum cards back in 2004. He was with TINA when SquatSpace did its infamous unreal estate project back in 2002. And he’s as iconoclastic, cranky and self-deprecating as we are.

So he is pretty familiar with the NUCA territory…

Speaking of TV, check out Playkool the great DIY kids show which will be showing on community TV, and you can buy DVDs to watch it at home if you’re outside the broadcast zone.

Greg from Don’t Look Gallery in Dulwich Hill (Sydney) has done it again. The projects he generates from that little ramshackle shop on Canterbury Road never cease to amuse and delight. His latest press release had us rolling on the floor laughing, as the kids say these days. And Nerds FC is bloody great.

Matt Rochford (AKA ‘Rochy’ from ‘Nerds FC’) moves into Don’t Look Gallery

You are invited to an exhibition…
Dulwich Hill DayZZZe

Matt Rochford (AKA ‘Rochy’ from the current season of ‘Nerds FC‘) needs somewhere to live for a couple of weeks. I’ve offered him the gallery window. He will, of course, be furnishing it to his liking; installing his bed, TV, the odd pot plant or two and anything else he can fit into this very modest living area.

The downside to this arrangement is that he will be on constant display. He won’t be able to scratch his butt without the whole street seeing. Further, seeing he’s getting this space rent free, Matt will become my circus animal, my freak show. At least eight hours a day a commentator will provide thrilling updates on Matt’s every move. Every itch, every scratch will be analysed and replayed in slo-mo for the public’s edification.

I will also expect Matt to play to the camera and the transient audience. He will put on little performances to get the attention that he craves. He will try his best to communicate to the passing traffic with hand gestures and scribbled signs. Matt will also have houseguests. Come join the show, have a chat to Matt on his laissez-faire talk show. Have your 15 minutes of fame in Don’t Look’s front window.

Join us for Matt’s house warming on July 4. American Independence Day will mark the end of Matt’s independence for the next couple of weeks.

WHAT: Dulwich Hill DayZZZe

WHEN: Opening (’Matt’s Housewarming’) Wednesday July 4, 6pm
Thur June 21-30 (Thur-Sat 11-5)

WHERE: DON’T LOOK Experimental New Media Gallery
419 New Canterbury Rd (Near Marrickville Rd), Dulwich Hill

WHO: Matt Rochford (AKA ‘Rochy’ from ‘Nerds FC’)

CONTACT: Greg Shapley - Ph: 0401 152 434
EMAIL: dontlookgallery@gmail.com
WEB: myspace.com/dontlookgallery

[NB: the above Nerd heading a soccer ball image was pinched from the SBS website. I have no idea if that is “Rochy” - chances are it’s not].

http://www.isnotmagazine.org/articles/read/64

and speaking of extreme prolonged projects, this fellow photographed everything he ate for a year. A few people have done this one, from memory, a Singaporean guy (can’t remember his name) - it’d be interesting to put em side by side to compare.

Find out more about the “all I could eat” fellow here:

http://www.patrickboland.com.au/thisiswhatiate/exhibition.html

In other news, Luca from NUCA went up to the Tweed Heads Regional Art Gallery to present a slide show about NUCA. The bubblegum cards are in the Multiplicity show curated by Glenn Barkley and Katie Dyer which is on up there now. By the way, if you go to the MCA page you can download uncollectable artist Deborah Kelly’s pdf prints for your own printing delectation!

Finally, uncollectable Kirsten from Cicada is off to Banff in Canada, doing a residency there. You can follow her adventures here.

workshop.nonstop
Opening Wednesday 7th Febuary 6pm, at Loose Projects, Sydney:
This is a project organised by Lisa Kelly to bring together artists working in ongoing collaborative, co-operative, communicative practices. The exhibition itself is a kind of a workshop. Here’s the detail:

CLUBSproject : Bridget Currie : Kate Fulton : Christopher L G Hill : Lucas Ihlein : Lisa Kelly : OSW [Open Spatial Workshop] : Spiros Panigirakis + guests & collaborators [adelaide: melb: sydney]

Taking the modes of workshop & continuous self-organisation as broad starting points of reference, workshop.nonstop invites practices that propagate their own working contexts & conditions - via projects, spaces, blogs, networks, publications, critical writing & making- to a project that will unfold as an open, multidimensional diagram of a workshop. Developing throughout february and hosting a range of dynamic interstate and local practitioners, workshop.nonstop will fittingly explore just how loosely a project might be devised, coordinated and realised…

opening event: wednesday 7th february 6-8pm
featuring performance by MofFarFarRah

February 7 - 24
note: gallery hours extended to 6pm thurs-fri for this project

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} TRAM OVERHEARD journeys of dialogue {
Fri 2nd February, departs 4.28pm Fridays from Federation Square

This project, organised by Mick Douglas, involves a bewdiful old tram trundling thru the streets of Melbourne. Every Friday night there’s an “overheard conversation” by 2 luminaries, and some performance action after that. The journey is free! Here’s the detail for this week:

STEPHEN MUECKE + MARK MINCHINTON + TRUST, MOVEMENT, TRAVELING
Stephen Muecke is a Professor of Cultural Studies with a long-term interest in Indigenous Studies, transnational cultures and new ethnography who is currently researching culture and commerce in the Indian Ocean.
Mark Minchinton is a performance maker, Associate Professor in the School of Human Movement, Recreation & Performance and Foundation Director of the Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Unit at Victoria University who recently completed a 650km performance walk, web-writing, and installation project for a UK Review of Live Arts that began where his grandmother was born as a ‘black’ woman, and ended where she lived and raised a family as a ‘white’ woman.

} TRAM OVERBOARD journeys of performance {
departs 6.53pm Fridays from Federation Square
ZARAFA lead an intoxicating gypsy musical voyage
Zarafa are a Balkans and Near Eastern ensemble led by Pin Rada and Mark Planigale who explore gypsy and Eastern traditional songs and instrumental music from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Morocco.

} TRAM OTHERWISE journeys of encounter {
laps the city 5.16–6.53pm and 7.43–9.16pm Fridays
OTHER PEOPLE, OTHER WORLDS, AND THINGS OTHERWISE

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And NUCA’s Keg Roll, with Zanny Begg, have assembled this behemoth project, ifyouseesomethingsaysomething, you’ll need to look at the site to get to grips with all the events. A little spiel:

If you see something, say something will be a discussion, exhibition and publishing project in Sydney in February 2007. Principally this will revolve around an exhibition that will involve a small number of international and Australian artists. Artists will be invited whose work has explored aspects of dissensus – by either questioning prevailing notions of consensus or by exploring new possibilities of social agency. Rather than being an exhibition of political art this exhibition will aim to question how we actually understand the connections between politics and aesthetics.

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please send any amazing uncollectable projects to info@uncollectables.net !!

I was amazed to see that wikipedia had no history/knowledge of artist run initiatives in any of its entries on contemporary art or art galleries.

I’ve added references to it where i could see it fit, and created a few new topic categories to make it fit in better, including:

International Contemporary Art Scenes
Australian Contemporary Art
Artist Run Initiatives
Australian Artist Run Initiatives and separate listings for The Farm, First Draft, Loose Projects, MOP Projects, Downtown Art Space, etc - whatever quickly came to mind. There is also a section called “Art Galleries” that needs a good talking to.

anyway, lots of mistakes (and mainly omissions) - I’ve very quickly written the bare minimum to get the ball rolling. If you see merit in these being included, please create your own pages, histories, or make any additions or changes to what’s there. And forward this info to anyone you think should have a presence on it. I don’t really know the rules, i just hit ‘edit page’ at the top. If you want to create a new page you just write [[Name of New Section]] somewhere, save it, click on the link you’ve just made, and then create the new page. I don’t know how the editors control if things stay there, but I guess we’ll see. other people adding things may help. There should really also be a section on artist’s publications.
cheers all,
andrew

[another pic here.]

BOOMBOX SYMPHONY HITS SYDNEY STREETS

On Saturday, December 16, Sydney-Siders are invited to participate in a Christmas parade like no other… Unsilent Night is the work of New York based composer Phil Kline. It’s a surreal, specially crafted composition written especially for a procession of boom boxes.

For the last 15 years, Kline has lead choruses of boom boxes through the streets of NYC to much critical acclaim. Now, for the second time running, this strange but beautiful symphony will hit Australia.

“The moment my partner and I heard about Unsilent Night we couldn’t wait to bring it to Sydney,” says Sydney event organiser, Daz Chandler.

“It’s such a unique event and one that encourages people to come together and celebrate sound, the silly season and the notion of community.”

Kline places the different parts of his composition on cassettes, the organisers distribute them on the night to those wanting to be involved and then, at the given signal, participants simultaneously press PLAY. When the cassettes start rolling, “they blossom into a marvelously crafted symphony” (Time Out New York) and the crowd begins to snake eastward, following a pre-determined route until the piece ends at Taylor Square, Darlinghurst less than an hour and a few kilometres later.

Last year for the first time Unsilent Night took place in Sydney. Daz Chandler says that the procession was an enormous success and attracted people of all different walks of life.

“It was simply amazing – it brought together a full spectrum of Sydney’s community. There were mums and dads, musicians, artists and even a a couple in their 80’s!”

The Village Voice describes Unsilent Night as “a marvelously fluid, traveling spatial sound sculpture that disintegrates and reforms at nearly every stop light.”

When performed in the confines of a city, Unsilent Night reverberates off the buildings and streets, resulting in a drifting cloud of ethereal undulating sound. In effect, Kline’s music and his volunteer co-performers become single elements in a two-block-long stereo system.

Since its debut in New York in 1992, Unsilent Night has become a cult holiday tradition in Manhattan, drawing crowds of up to 1,000 participants. Daz Chandler hopes that the event will continue to thrive in Sydney.

“Everyone who took part last year wanted information on the next boombox symphony. I am confident that this year, the event will draw even more people.”

WHERE: Town Hall steps
WHEN: Saturday 16th December, 2006
7:45pm for an 8pm start
WHAT: Bring a boom box or just come along for the ride!

*The event is free, and will be held rain or shine.

For further information, please call Daz at Staplegun Productions on Ph:0407-523-753

Keg Roll and Mickie Quick, founding members of NUCA, gave a presentation about the bubblegum cards and unco art in general at the generationext event at Sydney’s MCA on Sunday 19 November. Mickie showed some of his infamous culture jams, and the kids were given the task of making their own culture jams with photocopy and letraset, to win big prizes! (NUCA was invited to participate since the bubblegum cards are in the Multiplicity show at the MCA at the moment).

Unco radio (Art and Mayhem) has recently posted interviews with Astra Howard and Claire Conroy.

and…

DIEGO BONETTO – Weedy Connection Tour
Wollombi will have its very own WEED TOUR…

This installation by Diego Bonetto takes visitors along the creek behind the Stonehurst Cedar Creek Winery Cellar.
The tour will guide participants through a number of display panels highlighting some plants commonly known as weeds. The resulting sporadic info-points are augmented by a reader and a map that the visitors will use to discover the plants in their habitat.

The framing of “illegal” and unwanted flora within a spectacle context will draw attention to the concept of “permissible species” as a social construct. Weeds are defined by a nation’s laws, and what is declared a weed in one place may be a precious resource in another. There is a significant metaphorical connection between this definition of “weed” and the arbitrary restriction imposed on human migration by national governments.

Diego Bonetto (aka Nobody) is a Sydney-based multimedia artist.
Bonetto’s interdisciplinary approach to art-making allows him to work collaboratively and individually, with no loyalty to particular media and materials. He is a key member of artist group SquatSpace and the Network of UnCollectable Artists. His activities create dynamic social criticism resulting in site-specific, project-driven interventions.

http://www.nobodys.info/
http://www.squatspace.com/
http://weedyconnection.com/

And here is a short doco of the previous weedy project Weedkiller/Pestcontroller