Jo Higgins

February 1, 2018

Writings

Art Collector Issue 84: Undiscovered

Jo Higgins

February 1, 2018

Writings

Profiles on artists Paris Norton and Shireen Taweel for the annual ‘Undiscovered Artists’ issue of Art Collector magazine - probably one of my most favourite issues to write for.

Articles via the links above.

Skulptur Projecke Münster 2017

Jo Higgins

August 30, 2017

Writings, Review

I think the Munster Skulptur Projekt might be my favourite international art event. A deeply thoughtful, once-a-decade, whole-of-city sculpture project that began in 1977, it refreshes a curiosity about public art and public space and a critical lens, whichever direction you look (“is that a park bench or is that a sculpture?”) as you treasure hunt your way all over the city on foot and by bike.

Seminal works from earlier iterations - Claes Oldenberg, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Rosemarie Trockel, Ilya Kabakov - remain dotted across the city in this gradual accumulation of permanent incursions in the cityscape, with temporary works turning up in lakes, Asian grocers, community gardens and tattoo parlours.

I was lucky enough to come 10 years ago and so it’s a fascinating benchmark of your own life as well over a 10 year period - remembering who I was and how I felt at 27 and how it feels to be here, now 37. Wondering if I’ll get to come again when I’m 47.

I’ve spent the last few days riding all over the city and for better or worse, these are just some of the works that have lingered in my memory.

Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017

Mika Rottenburg’s work perplexes me – in a knotty, compelling, deeply absorbing way. It resists a didactic translation – all you have to work with is slippery associations, surreal visuals and moments of strange humour – but if you give into it, a narrative does emerge and it is unsettling. There are things said about borders, about food and conspicuous consumption, labour, value and globalisation. The film element of Cosmic Generator is like a deep dive into the bowels of someone who garnished their tacos with some LSD. It explores an underworld – literally and intellectually – of mass production. People dressed as tacos and archetypal businessmen crawl through tunnels, towards or away from what we don’t know. Strange details punctuate throughout – the gaudy painting on the wall of the Chinese restaurant comes to life and the Ibis shits a golden egg while the deer vomits hi-vis yellow.

The camera pans through the shop-room after shop-room where bored Asian women are illuminated and/or buried in inflatables, fake flowers, lights and tinsel. It’s gloriously weird and the scenes are punctuated by close-ups of the smashing of coloured lightbulbs. To get to this 20-minute film, you have to enter through an otherwise-ordinary, though not abundantly stocked, Asian supermarket that carries elephant ceramics and blow-up pineapple tubes and tinsel and a faint sense of despair. It’s a useful framework and in moving through the store to the backroom that hosts the films you become an unwitting part of this whole transaction. And the bare shelves and unkempt store only heighten the gaudy excess of the film’s shop interiors. As a whole work/experience, it stays with you, even as you plough through countless other works in the course of the Project – wrestling to draw together all of your impressions and responses.

Aram Bartholl, 5V, 2017

I have to admit that my initial impression – based only on an image of the work – was that Aram Bartholl’s 5V was a strange affectation. So I’m glad I read about it before experiencing it. Despite the obvious technical expertise required to create the work – a campfire-generated phone charger – there is something staggeringly simple, elegant and poetic even, about Bartholl’s work. Connecting the world’s oldest innovation – fire – with its newest – the Internet and mobile communication, Bartholl challenges us to reimagine or remember communication as a space and encounter and as a consequence of community coming together around a fire; not as a series of tweets, texts or emojis. As a measure of how far we’ve departed from this old form of coming together and communicating, it was fascinating, and sad, to observe my own hesitation and quiet fear about approaching the work and having to talk even to the MSP invigilator. Though the smell of an open fire is so instantly familiar and comforting. I wasn’t expecting to like Bartholl’s work so I’m thrilled that it surprised me the way that it did because I really loved it.

Ayşe Erkmen, On Water, 2017

Ayşe Erkmen’s On Water is a treat, especially after several thankless kilometres biking through the industrial outskirts of Munster. A submerged pedestrian bridge that connects two sides of a large canal, visitors can cross the bridge and stroll from one side to the other and from a distance you appear as if walking on water, hence the title. Several things struck me while making my way across the back across.

The first, a sense of despondency that a risk-averse city like Sydney would never allow such a thing – no guard rails, no excess of life flotation devices, no lifeguards – and the second, a sense of possibility – to entertain the idea of what might happen if you did step off – that nanosecond where you did stand on water before plunging into the cold and rather unappealing canal – the risk and the folly and the faith. It was a brief, if intoxicating thought. The two sides of the canal are actually quite different – one very industrial, the other gentrified with a boardwalk and bars – so the incentive to cross and explore the other side is little to none, otherwise – and yet, historically, I imagine they worked in simpatico. My only criticism, if it could even be called that, was the deep and uncomfortable impression of the steel mesh bridge underfoot. Not even the cold refresh of water on red hot tired feet could distract from the pain. But perhaps with the temptation to step off and walk out onto the water being right there, a constant reminder of keeping your feet somewhere solid is no bad thing.

Pierre Huyghe, After Alive Ahead, 2017

Pierre Huyghe’s After Alive Ahead has been receiving countless plaudits but I can’t help but wonder if this is the art world illuminati overcompensating for the fact that Huyghe’s strange, abandoned environment in the old Munster ice-rink is beyond their grasp. Because it was certainly beyond mine.

Past encounters with Huyghe’s work have been highly memorable – his Frieze Projects aquarium in 2011, where a lobster took up residence in the skull of a Brancusi bronze sculpture; even his wonderfully bizarre environment at 2012 documenta – with its pink-legged dog and hive of bees-as-beard on a reclining marble statue, all in the wilderness surrounding Kassel’s lake. But After Alive Ahead felt disjointed and as empty as the part-excavated rink. Apparently there were peacocks who were meant to inhabit the space, but they became too traumatised and had to be removed. The connections between the absent birds, the crater-like surface of the rink, all muddy puddles and lumpen stalactites, and the illuminated fish tank at the centre were resolutely unclear and the introduction of an app, which projected hovering black pyramids on a camera screen was baffling. It seemed to promise a narrative – or at least a navigation of the space in some way – but I was left feeling like I was either not using it properly or using it properly and completely missing the point.

The whole experience, instead of feeling organically weird, felt stymied and staccatoed. Apparently an exploration of ecosystems, cell reproduction and cancer growth, After Alive Ahead ultimately felt overthought and a bit contrived. It made for a disappointing, unmemorable experience.

Louise Paramor profile for Art Collector magazine, issue 78

Jo Higgins

January 19, 2017

Writings

I had the opportunity to interview Louise Paramor for the latest issue of Art Collector magazine. I really loved exploring her work and so appreciated the chance to write about it.

You can read the profile here.

Lottie Consalvo: mid-fall, Alaska Projects

Jo Higgins

April 27, 2016

Writings

My text to accompany Newcastle-based artist Lottie Consalvo’s recent exhibition mid-fall.

Alaska Projects, Sydney, 27 April – 15 May, 2016

Lottie Consalvo is contemplating time. Years, nano-seconds, moments of eternity, transition, points of no return – these moments of between and becoming are explored in her current series of abstract paintings.

Consalvo’s interdisciplinary practice includes performative and often quite specific autobiographical references and this collection of works represents not one, but a series of moments in time. They are observations of quietly transformative experiences – from her 12-month long durational performance, Compartmentalise in 2012, to her recent travels around Ireland absorbing its rough hewn beauty – all stone circles, limestone and rain – and its reverence for spirits and shrines.

Lottie Consalvo, mid-fall (study), 2016, edition of 1 and 2 AP, size varied, glicée print on cotton rag. — Lottie Consalvo, *mid-fall (study)*, 2016, edition of 1 and 2 AP, size varied, glicée print on cotton rag.

Lottie Consalvo, Hanging mountains, 2016, acrylic, charcoal and plaster on board — Lottie Consalvo, *Hanging mountains,* 2016, acrylic, charcoal and plaster on board

This travel and Consalvo’s latest series of paintings have actually occurred in the middle of her latest 12-month durational piece, Desires, wherein she has given herself permission to do those things that make her happiest. The works in mid-fall do not explore any particular desire. What they reflect is Consalvo’s ongoing fascination with states of mind, in particular memory and how certain psychological states reflect physically and within the physical world.

In mid-fall Consalvo considers time, momentum and the nature of transition; something she is necessarily experiencing as a consequence of her long-durational performance work. Here, the habits and rituals of her everyday life are incrementally transformed by the terms of the work and she looks back only in order to observe her progress; to locate those tipping points of no return (which she so deftly illustrates in mid-fall (study) and then again in mid-fall). There is nothing regretful or nostalgic in these considerations, simply a conscious fascination with process, memory, transformation, and the possibility for ritual within it.

Shrines have long been of interest to Consalvo; as places for solitude, faith and reflection and in these works she draws on experiences of reverie – standing in the rain at Powerscourt Waterfall in Wicklow, Ireland – to her own small moments of ceremony – collecting and grounding coal from her garden fire to embed in her painterly surfaces – to create a series of visual spaces that resonate with the quiet emotional energy of these experiences.

Lottie Consalvo, Stones fall faster than water and I will always love you, 2016, acrylic, charcoal, beads and plaster on board. — Lottie Consalvo, *Stones fall faster than water and I will always love you,* 2016, acrylic, charcoal, beads and plaster on board.

Several works in the series, including Stones Fall Upon Tall Men, make direct reference to the visual forms of totems and shrines and in addition to the use of coal Consalvo has also used casting plaster. Drawn to its associative fragility and painterly qualities, she incorporates it both within the painted surface and sculpturally, to emulate the collections of stones. The contrast between these bright whites and the pure black only highlighted by the rest of Consalvo’s deliberately subdued palette of earthy, dark tones.

These recurring motifs – the stones, the totems, and these senses of falling or yielding towards new states of being – are necessarily abstract. Flying and Falling, one of the earlier works to be created in the series is unsurprisingly the most figurative and reflects another moment of transition within the series – away from the literal and didactic – towards something more instinctive and emotional.

By abstracting these notions of reflection, memory and momentum, Consalvo instead meditates on the power of certain places (be they literal, emotional or psychological) to bring about transition and change. So long as you have faith enough to let go.

20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is here it's just not evenly distributed

Jo Higgins

March 18, 2016

Writings

The 20th Biennale of Sydney has just opened, under the Artistic Direction of Hayward Gallery curator Stephanie Rosenthal. The future is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed runs until 5 June at venues across Sydney including Carriageworks, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Artspace and Cockatoo Island.

I had the opportunity and privilege to contribute to the Biennale’s exhibition guide, writing about 14 international and Australian artists including Johanna Calle, Celine Condorelli, Yannick Dauby & Wan Shuen Tsai, Keg de Souza, Bharti Kher, Germaine Kruip, Bo Christian Larsson, Minouk Lim, Jumana Manna, Melik Ohanian, Bernardo Ortiz, Falke Pisano, Christoph Schlingensief and Alexis Teplin.

You can read my artist profiles here.

Art Collector Issue 84: Undiscovered

OTHER POSTS

Skulptur Projecke Münster 2017

OTHER POSTS

Louise Paramor profile for Art Collector magazine, issue 78

OTHER POSTS

Lottie Consalvo: mid-fall, Alaska Projects

OTHER POSTS

20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is here it's just not evenly distributed

OTHER POSTS