Writings, News
Jo Higgins
Routledge publication: Youth Programs in Art ...
Routledge publication: Youth Programs in Art Museums - An International Perspective
Writings
Jo Higgins
Art Guide Australia: Field Notes. A Grassroots ...
Art Guide Australia: Field Notes. A Grassroots Approach to Public Art
Events, Review, News
Jo Higgins
Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and ...
Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and some Art, Art, Art....
Writings, News
Jo Higgins
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
News, Writings
Jo Higgins
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published

travel

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Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and some Art, Art, Art....

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Writing the grant acquittals for my Berlin conference has been a valuable opportunity (and a useful deadline) to really sit down and make concrete what I learned and gained from the opportunity to attend and present at the Connected Audiences Conference back in May. There’s been some immediate benefits - new contacts and conversations underway with colleagues in the US and UK - and so many new examples of best practice youth engagement within a museum and evaluation context. I’ve written more about the conference here but honestly, the thing that really makes these kinds of trips so special is the opportunity to experience some phenomenal exhibitions that, by virtue of geography and ambition, you just don’t get to see everyday in Australia. Some of the absolute standouts?

Alfredo Jaar: The End of the World at KINDL - Centre for Contemporary Art. An audacious use of scale and architecture to highlight the insidious relationship between ‘critical minerals’, climate change and colonialism.

Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry at Sprüth Magers. A dizzying, dazzling, occasionally visceral stereoscopic film installation that traverses layers of German history, social spaces, urban landscapes and the squalid interiors of a glass recycling bin...

Mark Bradford. Keep Walking at the Hamburger Bahnhof - political, poetic, vulnerable and wondrously tactile (his video work Deimos, 2015 was just one highlight) - as well as the group exhibition Museum is Motion with works by Elmgreen & Dragset and Jeremy Shaw, whose audacious multi-screen installation Phase Shifting Index just blew me away.

Fujiko Nakaya’s latest site-specific fog installation, Cult of Mist at the Neue Nationalgalerie - the full bodied, physiological sense of delight-as-fog that literally envelopes you is something I’ll remember for a long time.

Neue Nationalgalerie was also where we also encountered and got completely obsessed with artist Sarah Wenzinger’s Mediation Ex Machina. A loose parts machine with cranks and wheels that offers a lottery of postcard prompts for critical and curious looking through the gallery. It was so sophisticated, so playful, the prompts were * chefs kiss * - singular, thoughtful, specific, accessible for anyone (not least because they were bi-lingual.) That encounter alone made the trip to Berlin worthwhile.

Other highlights included Janet Laurence: The Burnt Sea at Alfred Ehrhardt Siftung, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Gropius Bau, Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds at the ifa Gallery Berlin, Olafur Eliasson: the lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities at neugerriemschneider and It's Just a Matter of Time at the Palais Populaire, with a group show drawn from the Deutsche Bank collection including works by Julian Irlinger, Heidi Bucher and Shilpa Gupta.

And then there’s just Berlin itself - the architecture, the surface level history, the graffiti and street art, the small wine bars and green parks. This trip would have been a lot more stringent and stressful without the space to really be present and opportunistic in the best, most creative, most professional way so I’m really grateful, again to Create NSW and Creative Australia for the support to undertake this trip.

OTHER POSTS

Los Angeles art binge

This year has been so busy, between writing commissions and stepping in as the Publications Editor at the Biennale of Sydney and running the National Gallery’s Digital Young Writers Residency that I haven’t known which way is up.

It’s been a good problem to have but a bit of literal distance has made me appreciate it all the more.

I’ve just got back from a trip to LA with my Mum and sister and so this is just a shameless grab of photos of some of the extraordinary art we saw. Proof of (artistic) life and a reminder of the joys of just looking at art.

Some of the highlights:

Ed Ruscha and Simone Leigh at LACMA, Mickalene Thomas at The Broad, Josh Kline at MOCA, WInfred Rembert at Hauser & Wirth….

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Harpa Concert Hall, Reykjavik

So Reykjavik is a funny little place. Perhaps my expectations of a European capital city have been mis-managed after visits to Berlin, Istanbul, Paris… but Reykjavik, as I suppose naturally befits the capital of a country where there are more sheep than people, is small, kooky, quiet and strangely, wonderfully, contradictory.

The inclement weather dogged us for the entire trip, a long weekend with my husband and in-laws, but it didn’t in any real sense ruin our time there. It just added to the odd factor. And I mean odd in the most compelling “you had me at hello” sort of way. Even now I still can’t put my finger on Reykjavik. It has no discernible CBD, no crowds, most of the buildings have a fabricated layer of corrugated iron to them, the whole city feels subdued, muffled even, and yet the mornings are littered with the detritus of clearly wild nights before. There’s a sense perhaps, and I still can’t quite articulate it, that something is happening only its happening somewhere else.

And yet. And yet. They serve consistently world-class food in unassuming buildings that play to their strengths of lamb, fish and slow food, and in small but incredibly stylish stores all the way along the main street Laugavegur, they sell interesting, thoughtful, beautifully crafted works of design, art and fashion (albeit at considerable prices.)

Oh, and they have also built the most staggeringly beautiful, confident, poetic, enormous music hall, with a facade by Olafur “sun in the Tate” Eliasson that makes you almost want to weep.

Harpa was only half-built when the 2008 global financial crisis decimated Iceland’s economy and the building was consequently – and controversially – finished using government funds while the rest of the plans for a redeveloped harbourside were abandoned.

And so it sits at a scruffy end of the harbour, this lone, truly magnificent jewel. It’s a testament to the vision of Eliasson and the Danish architects Henning Larson that it’s resolutely not a glimmering beacon of financial folly but something so much more subtle, beautiful, poignant and stand-alone impressive.

Clad in reflective geometric glass in opalescent shades, inside the roof consists of mirrored tiles and strong lines that use staircases to clever visual effect. I have no clue what the acoustics are actually like but if the outside is anything to go by, the actual concert hall must just be unreal.

OTHER POSTS

A visit to Paul Cezanne's studio

Entrance to Paul Cezanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence

I’m on holidays in the south of France and yesterday we drove to Aix-en-Provence to visit to Cezanne’s studio. Cezanne was one of several major 20th century artists (Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh...) who invested considerable time in this beautiful part of the world and when he died in 1906 the studio of this Aix native was closed shut with everything left as it was. In 1925 it was bought by Marcel Provence to protect its historical value and in 1954, under the then-ownership of Aix-en-Provence University it was opened to the public, and it’s now managed by the city of Aix and being in this part of the world.

My earliest, most distinct encounter with Cezanne and his evocative bowls of fruit, was as one of a bunch of postcards my Mum brought me back from a visit to the Louvre when I was a teenager. Even then its quiet beauty struck me, for reasons I still can’t articulate, so to snoop around his studio, to get the opportunity to experience what was a very personal, creative space for someone with considerable art history heft, was incredible. 

One of the guidebooks I read mused that Cezanne would probably be horrified at the thought of all these people trampling through his private studio and well that’s probably true but it didn’t stop us.

For me there’s something so intrinsically special about getting to see where an artist works and, particularly when considering the work of older or more historical painters, to break down the experience of looking at their work to imagine them in that space; against that particular moment in broader history, putting brush to canvas. Sometimes, looking at really dull works by, I don’t know, Velazquez (sorry Velazquez fans…) it’s often only the dexterity of the paint stroke that fascinates me. That and picturing whoever painted it wearing velveteen pantaloons while they did.

Thankfully velveteen pantaloons were long gone by the time Cezanne came to be painting his still lifes and portraits of card players and geometric plein air landscapes that would go on to shape and inform the development of Cubism.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Saint-Victoire, 1904, oil on canvas

Paul Cezanne, Mont Saint-Victoire, 1904, oil on canvas

We weren’t at the studio for terribly long - it’s not a huge space - but Aix itself is very pretty; a classic, buzzy university town with excellent people watching, great food and lovely squares and narrow streets to wander. Despite the torrential downpour that engulfed us as we left, the visit to Cezanne’s studio will be a highlight of this trip for some time to come.

OTHER POSTS

I live and work on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people and acknowledge their unbroken connection to this Country. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, because this always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.