Day 78: Breaking News?

Only 5 days to go and I just received the following from the BoS, “Liam Gillick has decided to transform the lecture format of a public conference into a series of personal discussions with the audience over email and/or the telephone. If you would like to be included in Gillick’s new project of individual talks, I encourage you to authorise the Biennale to send the artist your name and direct contact information, if you have not already done so.”

Gillick was previously scheduled to actually meet the public, including drinking sessions at the pub, in a series of lectures called Relations of Equivalence: Three Potential Endings. More

During an early morning floor talk on Saturday, 2 August, Dr Dougal Phillips offered a small crowed of Biennale goers a little insight to the mind and works of the Italian Futurist composer, Luigi Russolo. Dr Phillips was to be accompanied by sound artist, Alex Davies but he was unavailable to attend on the day. In his absence however, the talk generated a discussion about early twentieth century modernism’s foresight into the sound scape of our contemporary era.

Russolo was born in 1885 in Portogruaro, Veneto, Italy. Russolo’s father was director of the Schola Cantorum in Latisana and organist at their local cathedral. After moving to Milan at the age of sixteen, Russolo attended Accademia di Brera (the Academy of Fine Arts, Brera) where he studied drawing and painting. In his early works, Russolo employed a divisionalist, almost pointillist technique to depict the increasingly industrial landscape developing in Italian cities at the time. More

Watch this extraordinary 24 hour event unfold from beginning to end in the Concert Hall at Sydney Opera House for the 16th Biennale of Sydney.

Comment on this vodcast… More

A Little Wit Missing?

I sneaked out of Biennaled Sydney to visit the Melbourne Art Fair last week – and was struck by the difference between the commercial and the aggressively unsaleable offered by BOS. In fact, the only meeting point I found was on the Annandale Galleries stand where William Kentridge had pride of place following its ‘Telegrams from the Nose’ show in Sydney.

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Did you know that human saliva contains a chemical that has pain killing properties? I certainly didn’t until I encountered the work of the Serbian born, Singapore based artist Ana Prvacki. For the Biennale of Sydney, Prvacki created a musical performance work that explores the provision of a pain eliminiating service as well as the tangible by-products of music production. As a result of playing her flute for a period of two hours, Prvacki produced an amount of saliva that was collected and then transformed into a music-derived pain killer through a simple alchemical process. The music-derived pain killer was then used to create a wet wipe product called salivesalve which was then wrapped in shiny foil packaging exactly the same as that of commercially available wet wipes.
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