46. Sach Catts | Unicycle performance

Sach Cats, a student at the Sydney College of the Arts brings a documentation work to SLOT that records a performance from last year. The performance that was absurd, cruel and demanding mimicked the regime forced on the powerless, unemployed and dispossessed of our society. Sac Cats describes his performance clearly -

“In the performance I was enclosed for eight hours a day in a white windowless room, learning to ride a unicycle over a period of a week. I adhered to a strict schedule, which allowed for two fifteen-minute (morning and afternoon) tea brakes and a 30 minute lunch break. I clocked in and out recording the times on a time sheet, at 9am and 5pm and for each break. I also noted any toilet breaks and had to deduct these from break allowances, unless of course I was ill and they were allowed as part of sick leave. At the end of each day I filled out a performance evaluation sheet where I self-assessed my performance against ten Key Performance Indicators”

Unfortunately Sach was unsuccessful in his attempt to learn how to ride a unicycle, which he describes as “inherently absurd” and continues “As a vehicle it is useless, it constitutes only an entertainment value: a circus trick…it is ultimately pointless” Of course riding the unicycle was not the issue - he continues “At some point, what I am performing shifts from positive skill acquisition to negative servitude of a mal-adaptive occupational and analytical logic.” In this second regard his performance was entirely successful.

His performance as a document speaks clearly of the absurd impositions that are placed on individuals who fall short of specific social requirements that may be “ultimately pointless” except as gratification to those who impose such regimes on those who are not like them.

Wendy Carlson’s 2006 essay on the artist published on his web site begins - “When Ian Milliss began exhibiting in the late 1960s at Sydney’s Central Street Gallery - the artist run centre of hard edged abstraction - his work consisted of modular, repetitive, geometric shapes grouped together to produce a series of ‘folding’ illusionistic canvases. Even these earliest of works done in his teens display his interest in ambiguity and multiple readings, the clash of illusion and reality that was to develop into the preoccupation of his entire 

career.” She seems to have also exactly described this much later work - Darwin in Wallerwang.

Ian was an adolescent prodigy of the Avant Gard who has become its elder statesman, the one who remembers its history, which is the subject of much of his art work and writing.

This is an amiable work, precisely scaled, inventive and playful - Ian described it to me as an encounter with a wood-working workshop that he has set up in a property he is renovating at Wallerwang, near Lithgow west of Sydney. Hence the title Darwin in Wallerwang, where his modular form, the stool has evolved. First as a set of sculptural inventions and second as a re-definition of the modular form, its self a common device employed by New York School artists such as Donald Judd, who were a touch stone for the artists 

associated with Central Street Gallery. Beyond maintaining the aesthetic principals they pioneered Ian’s exotic elaboration on their austerity might be said to breath life into a moribund, chauvinistic and imperialist idea of art foisted on us by the Cold War era U.S.A.

All over the 3rd world old tin cans and empty bottles are fashioned into serviceable kerosene lanterns. As they are in the Philippines where they are called Lampara in Spanish or Kinky lamps, which describes the way they are made. Across Manila the street hawkers sit beside them as they sell their goods into the night and in the provinces they offer the barrios a gentle alternative to the almost nightly, brown out. They are the burning heart that reinvents the shanty as an altar in the cathedral of randomness.

Travelling across the islands I noticed that these lamps, sold in “native” stores and at market stalls. They changed design as I moved from town to town, as did their function. In Calbayog, a town with few cars on Samar island they are the headlamps of pedi cabs. On tinny Bantanion Island off the coast of Cebu they are Parol, a maritime equivalent of the Kinky lamp serving as navigation lights on boats, big and small, powered and sail. The island of Siquijor has no lamps for sale. On the west coast of Negros lamps are large and gracefully, of finely crafted complex design while on the east coast Kinky lamps are small and brutish things. 

The lamps from the island of Panay are imported to Leyte island where “indigenous” lamps seem not to be made. Clearly the Kinki Lamp responds to the makers ability and taste as well as its function. This exhibition is my sampling of the Kinky lampsavailable in the islands of the southern Philippines, the Visayas, in early 2003. Further afield I found similar lamps in Chau Doc on the Mekong River near the Vietnamese / Cambodian border. It was distinctly Vietnamese in its decoration and in a village near the Borobudur on Java, with out apparent irony I found a range that was made from discarded light bulbs.

The magnificent, used, Parol in this exhibition is from Bantanion Island and was traded there, much to the amusement of its previous owners, for a new Parol I had purchased on near by Masbate Island. On Bantanion the fisherman carry their Parol, like their anchors, to and from their boats, lashing the Parol to its stanchion before each journey. Floating at night on a black sea under a sky ablaze with stars they become an earthly reflection of the cosmos and each Kinki a star.

Gerry Tan is a Filipino artist and teacher who works with a wide range of media. He has constantly been active as a painter making work that is more a consideration of the nature of painting than it is of an expressionistic reflection of the self.

David Griggs is an Australian artist noted for his aggressively expressionistic paintings that he describes as psychedelic.  In 2006, David Griggs was granted a three-month Asialink artists residency in Manila. And like other Australian artists he was captivated by the cites energetic vibrancy and entranced by its art scene. It is charged with an infectious energy and indescribable magnetism that celebrates collaboration as opposed to artistic introspection. Enthused David has made Manila his second home where he is committed to a dialogue with his colleagues.

David is also a keen skateboarder, which in sympathy with Manila's diverse art scene is key to this work. It has been drawn with a skateboard. Blistering marks charge across the surface of the work, fearlessly. Without hesitation or deliberation these marks achieve the oneness of gesture and mark that expressionists aspire to. In a formal sense the scale of the mark is tied directly to the scale of the works surface by the physical constraints of drawing. While the integrity of its process has been observed through a video of the works creation. The romance of expression has met with its classical counterpoint - Filipino conceptualism – where it is infused with exhilarating freedom. 

I set out to construct two intercepting narrative sequences with Throughway.  

The first sequence begins with the vertical metal bar of the window frame that bisects the window of SLOT’s exhibition space. Behind that is a group of 5 timber posts standing vertically in the exhibition space of SLO. Finally I have traced and painted a further 2 posts on the wall of SLOT.

The second sequence is a set of colour photos, running horizontally across the wall left to right so that they sit on top of the painted posts on the wall and separate them from the posts in the exhibition space. What is not obvious is that the photos retrace, as far as 

possible the walk Ian Fairweather would have taken in 1930’s Manila from his studio to where he bought his paints.

These two different kinds of narrative sequences, that might be considered contradictory in form intersect on the surface of the wall. A transcendental point where the literal space of the exhibition space abuts the illusionistic space of the wall. In a cartographic sense my work connects the place of the window, which is shared by the you and me through a set of metered steps to a place in my imagination of enormous significance, Fairweather’s walk.

This is a sign posted walk through transcendental space, a Throughway, from here to the place where Ian Fairweather bought his paint.

Tony Twigg

In celebration of SLOT’s 5th birthday Gina Fairley negotiated with the owners of vacant shops along Regent Street and Botany Road near SLOT to host selected exhibits previously mounted in SLOT. She has also negotiated a grand from the City of Sydney Council to fund the material costs of the project - to provide supporting screens and lighting for the exhibits and rent paid to the shop owners.

The artist reinstalling their exhibits are: Rita Bila (Hind/fore quarter) Marina Dearnley (Tribal tapestries), Merilyn Fairskye ((Exposure), Junyee (Separate realities), Mai Long (Aqua Mutt), Tony Marano (The sculptors of Iloilo), Ian Milliss, (Darwin in Wallerawang) Constantine Nicholas, (Endgame)  Anonymous Signman (Home made modernism), Tony Twigg (6 Fishboxes). 

They were joined by two other artists who presented new works, Ruark Lewis (Banalities of Bible) and Tracy Luff (Pivotal 5). Also two near by art galleries that maintain window galleries presented their own artists, Grant Perrie exhibited Cash Brown (Priceless) and Locksmiths exhibited Peter McCarron (Civilisation). 

In all 16 window projects are exhibited day and night along Regrent Street/Botany Road where shops usually stand empty behind shut roller doors.