Art Problems

“A number of years ago I agreed to take part in a long term study of gambling practices in Victoria. I would get a phone call every six months or so asking me the same questions. While answering I thinakfully reflected I didn’t have a traditional gambling problem in the way they survey was targeting, but if they had been asking me about the financial risks I take being an artist I am certain I would have been scoring off the charts.

The pervading myths and stereotypes of the artist have always been economic whether they are starving in garrets or selling their work for outlandish prices – art is a con, seducing artists and the public alike with its snake oil charms of access to freedom, self-expression, genius, talent, unconventional lifestyles, beauty, taste, infamy and status.”

Performance Artist 4EVA︎

Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, this major new commission emerged from an invitation to unpack the rich repositories of the Performance Space archive.

ABOVE: PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4 EVA︎ - Silk scarf 65x65cms Fundraising commission for Performance Space 2023 Photo: Tania Vukicevic.



Oct 19 2023: PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4 EVA︎ - digital mural installed at Carraigeworks for Future40 @ Performance Space Liveworks Festival 2023. Photo: Document Photography courtesy of Performance Space.

Oct 19 2023: PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4 EVA︎ - digital mural installed at Carraigeworks for Future40 & Liveworks @ Performance Space Liveworks Festival 2023. Photo by Document Photography courtesy of Performance Space.

The artists Virginia Fraser and Elvis Richardson have adopted a curatorial pose to collaborate on a series of magazine covers, combining portraiture with attention-seeking headlines for a so-far fictional publication FEMMO™. Where other curators might select, arrange and present tangible and digital objects in galleries, the editors of FEMMO™ have organised indexical text objects on a (very big) page.

FEMMO™ promises articles its producers would like to read. FEMMO™ imagines a world where feminism is central to, and informs, every topic. In particular FEMMO™ has fun with the artworld’s gender biased status-quo. The National Library of Australia declined to issue FEMMO™ with an International Standard Serial Number because it had “no content”. FEMMO™ disagrees. FEMMO™ is joining the surface litter of Australian art history.

From melted trophies resilvered in The Impossibility of Losing in the Mind of Someone Winning 2008 to upscaled trophy embelishments in Rose Window awarded the 2014 ROI Art Prize and geometric trophy shapes rendered in aggregated polished pigmented concrete. The meanings and representations of the trophy remain of enduring interest.

Artist Lifestyle 2018

Artist Lifestyle presents machine style, hand painted, enamel on aluminum, for shiny, capitalist marketing promises, both a sales pitch and a word of warning, depending on the target audience. Is the artist lifestyle for you? Anagrams of Artist Lifestyle feature on each panel and together mysteriously unpack a hidden truthfulness, underlying expectations and assumed promises within its self referential reshuffled letters.

The words generated seem to speak directly to the contested social and economic value of art and the role of being an artist today. Artist lifestyle questions how personal, civic and national identity are formulated around artistic acts, objects and events.