Papers by Oliver Watts
For Art Month Gregory and Watts have created a series of videos and paintings unpacking the compl... more For Art Month Gregory and Watts have created a series of videos and paintings unpacking the complexity of the simple cocktail. As the cocktail sees a slow revival thanks to Mad Men and Hipsters they ask what’s so important about a cocktail? The performance of making and drinking cocktails is one of the many rituals of class, in fact that functions all the more through the contemporary mask of irony. This knowledge functions even through denial (“I don’t know how to make a Manhattan”) particularly in art where artists are still expected to pretend their field isn’t elitist. Gregory and Watts make and drink a series of cocktails to unmask the myth of their own position as well as the myths/history/ideology of the sites in which they make them. For example Cosmopolitan The Block situates the making and the drinking of the Sex and the City “girls favourite drink” in the newly gentrified Redfern area. The Block, once was an area of Aboriginal managed housing but it has recently been sold off. What are the complicated interests and histories running through the site that can lead to two artists, surrounded by “alcohol is prohibited” signs, to make a Cosmopolitan
In 1961 Klein anonymously deposited an ex-voto at the Convent of Santa Rita in Cascia, Italy. It ... more In 1961 Klein anonymously deposited an ex-voto at the Convent of Santa Rita in Cascia, Italy. It was a devotion to aid his new commission for the Gelsenkirchen Opera House, Germany. The offering took the form of a small see-through plastic box containing five compartments: one filled with blue pigment, one with pink pigment, one with gold leaf, and the other two with the prayer text and three gold bars from his sale of the Void. This object is clearly animated by belief. The private prayer that Klein wrote asks for success in his new commission, protection from enemies, and the longevity of his art.
Law, Culture and Visual Studies, 2013
This chapter follows a politico-theological approach to the law, which also includes among other ... more This chapter follows a politico-theological approach to the law, which also includes among other trappings of theology, icons. The law’s image is based on command, authority and sovereignty and relates to the order of the Lacanian big other, or the symbolic order. Subjects, however, respond to this symbolic order in different ways: some may hysterically call out to be recognised and some may follow blindly. This chapter looks at art in early modernism when the authority of the law and particularly sovereign power is still effective. We will explore early modernism as the original attack against the State’s right to make and control images. On the cusp of monarchical control and the birth of democratic freedom, a particular challenge was mounted by Honore Daumier’s paintings and caricatures. His battle and jailing for his terrible indignity against the king’s body marks the birth of an emancipated space for the modernist artist (outside the power of the court). His freedom is guaranteed from some other sovereign body outside the frame. This chapter suggests a new approach to the modernist canon and the avant-garde. It suggests that modern art’s seminal attack was an attack against the sovereign (monarchical) effigy and its replacement by the republican effigy or Marianne. In this way even in democracy the effigy is persistent; democracy was still imaged in relation to the monarch and an alternative sovereign body.
The artist-run-initiative (ARI) has been through many incarnations and phases that are difficult ... more The artist-run-initiative (ARI) has been through many incarnations and phases that are difficult to chart. But there can be no doubt that as an artifact of culture that has existed as a quantity since at least the 1980s, it is now steeped in its own history and politics. Today, with the turn to the so-called 'postcritical' and the 'trans-historical', the ARI is cast into the fray of competing ideologies and subject-positions. It is not quite an identity crisis, but the ARI surely means something very different from what it did, say, twenty years ago. Indeed the notion of the 'post-critical' is key here - which suggests that there is no longer an outside space where one can more legitimately critique commodity capitalism and mass culture - since emerging artists can no longer take for granted that they have a more raw and therefore more authentic view of the world. Perhaps the opposite; the younger artist finds him or herself overly embroiled in the whiles of the world. These changes have also been borne out by my own direct experience as director and co-founder of Chalk Horse Gallery in Sydney. In the same week we were asked to hire extra professional lighting for a Master's show by the supervising lecturer, we were also criticised by another art academic for being 'too professional/commercial' in providing a room text explicating a work - as if room sheets had no place in the avant-garde underground space. The post-critical age is one of no critical gold standard and countless (justifiable) standards of expectation.
Sturgeon, Artbank, 2015
Australian art sits uncomfortably in relation to flows of cultural capital globally. This paper e... more Australian art sits uncomfortably in relation to flows of cultural capital globally. This paper explore the strategic options for visual art in relation to Australia's position.
This chapter follows a politico-theological approach to the law, which also includes among other ... more This chapter follows a politico-theological approach to the law, which also includes among other trappings of theology, icons. The law's image is based on command, authority and sovereignty and relates to the order of the Lacanian big other, or the symbolic order. Subjects, however, respond to this symbolic order in different ways: some may hysterically call out to be recognised and some may follow blindly. This chapter looks at art in early modernism when the authority of the law and particularly sovereign power is still effective. We will explore early mod-ernism as the original attack against the State's right to make and control images. On the cusp of monarchical control and the birth of democratic freedom, a particular challenge was mounted by Honoré Daumier's paintings and caricatures. His battle and jailing for his terrible indignity against the king's body marks the birth of an emancipated space for the modernist artist (outside the power of the court). His freedom is guaranteed from some other sovereign body outside the frame. This chapter suggests a new approach to the modernist canon and the avant-garde. It suggests that modern art's seminal attack was an attack against the sovereign (monar-chical) ef fi gy and its replacement by the republican ef fi gy or Marianne. In this way even in democracy the ef fi gy is persistent; democracy was still imaged in relation to the monarch and an alternative sovereign body.
Art Monthly Australia, 2013. iss. 257, pp. 20-24
This paper combines visual studies and jurisprudence in a reading of popular images of a princely... more This paper combines visual studies and jurisprudence in a reading of popular images of a princely body. Last year Prince Harry threatened to bring the Royal Family into disrepute after a certain night in Las Vegas. Grainy phone images, and the accounts of Olympic swimmers and party girls all drew a picture of debauchery and orgiastic display. On the other hand Prince Henry (Harry), like certain Shakespearean Henrys, is the perfect warring prince, leading his men in Iraq in an outpouring of princely virtue and Renaissance civic humanism. The mass media have publicised shots of Harry in his white steed, an Apache helicopter. The sovereign body has recently been revisited in jurisprudential scholarship from Agamben to Pierre Legendre. The sovereign body is a site of refusal or failure of symbolic interpellation, like the grand criminal or terrorist. The sovereign body marks the mythical site of law's authority. One small group of performance artists, the English royal family, live the fantastical structures of the law as their quotidian reality. In a democracy such an icon of transcendental founding of the law in sovereignty is suggested but often repressed by the 'post-ideological' trappings of the administered or disciplinary society. What Harry does, like Agamben and Legendre, is to uncover this Renaissance (Romano-Christian) image magic in modernism. KEYWORDS Law visual culture celebrity monarchy transgression
Transparency, Power and Control, eds. Anne Wagner and Vijay Bahtia, Ashgate Publishing, 2012
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
law.unimelb.edu.au
The laws of sedition and treason, newly 'reinvigorated' for the modern Australian context by the ... more The laws of sedition and treason, newly 'reinvigorated' for the modern Australian context by the Anti-terrorism Act (No2) 2005 (the Act), are decidedly pre-modern. This paper looks at the terms of these provisions in regard to their ideological use; terms such as sovereign, government or constitution are used as rallying points for ideology and become markers against which to define the Other, the terrorist. In a modern society where power is shared by and through society the pre-modern notion of an individual representing the authority of the law is surprisingly anachronistic.
Law Text Culture, Jan 1, 2006
Chalk Horse Exhibition, 31 July 2015
Artist Room Sheets and Catalogues by Oliver Watts
Mathew McWilliams has a diverse practice that ranges from rubbings to photographs. He often uses ... more Mathew McWilliams has a diverse practice that ranges from rubbings to photographs. He often uses the mark making and techniques of orthodox conceptualism (from the 60s and 70s) but, in a contemporary way, and reinvests the conceptual approach with a real interest in beauty and aesthetic outcomes (including poetic possibilities and slippages, chance and painterly allusions). His work is conceptual art plus. For example this show if it was put into conceptual terms would be about the self-reflexivity of photographic process. It would talk about a conceptual recipe that should be repeatable in a global way anywhere: 1. Fold or scrunch paper; 2. Take a photo of that paper ; 3. Print the photo back onto the original (now folded or scrunched paper). The work would amount to a conceptual feedback loop where the photograph quite dryly, merely references itself and nothing much in the world. The 70s were replete with such painting machines and mechanical drawing. The master of that form was Sol le Witt who some say invented, quite consciously, phone in art; he set up an art algorithm and then got associates to complete the work in various galleries around the world. The buyer bought a contract for the algorithm. It is not a surprise that McWilliams will be showing in a curated show at Pallazzo Cesi in the Umbrian town of Acqua Sparta alongside Sol le Witt works later in 2016. In the end the McWilliams' works are incredibly beautiful (like Sol le Witt), as if a bureaucrat was found with poetry in their top draw, or indeed drawings coming off the printer. Although he has experimented before with this gambit this series is also tinted and is his most painterly yet. McWilliams suggests that many of the colours and the repeated horizontal forms are reminiscent of one of his personal loves: Rajasthani miniature painting. I can see that but I also see the gamut of western painting from the dusty pinks of Renaissance fresco to the zips of Barnett Newman with many Romantic and Impressionist landscapes in between. The work is printed on a huge drum printer, an original 80s art printer, the sort that the neologism giclee print was invented for (because inkjet just sounded too technological and machinic). In this printer's hands ink smudges (over McWilliams' folds) and the registration often slips. It is this painterly gesture, a machine with a sense of chance, that truly earns it the name, giclee. The title of the show is even more Romantic. The recent storms that Sydney was rocked with, those January and February storms that remind you that Syd-ney is a Pacific island capital, moved the printer, now artist seismograph, with ground tremors that registered on the works as more inky marks. But it is for me the relationship to time that makes this work really contemporary. In a small way we can see it in the desperate attempt of the giclee printer to sound French and old, like a lithograph, rather than global and anywhere now, like an inkjet printer. McWilliams work is a study of temporal compression. It speaks to the future, and to utopian abstractions, but it also looks the world like the first ink on soft vellum. The framed paper is at once calligraphy, but also photography (which it is) but also a return to painting. If as Boris Groys says " contemporary " art is a being with time, rather than being in time, this work absolutely describes that state. McWilliams floats above time and artistic styles and puts a large sheet of paper over all of it, like a net, capturing as much as he can. Oliver Watts
LOWER GROUND 171 WILLIAM STREET, DARLINGHURST SYDNEY NSW 2O1O AUSTRALIA PHONE +612 938O 8413 WWW.... more LOWER GROUND 171 WILLIAM STREET, DARLINGHURST SYDNEY NSW 2O1O AUSTRALIA PHONE +612 938O 8413 WWW.CHALKHORSE.COM.AU Philjames often puts two disparate images together. Mother Mary holds a laser beam; a Smurf floats over a bucolic scene; and the Hamburglar (or at least a cousin of the Hamburglar) is marrying an Edwardian Kleine Burger. Most commonly starting with a found object, print or painting, Philjames hijacks the image with an altogether different image in another register. There is nothing worse than explaining how a joke works, and the same applies for the work of Philjames. The synthesis that occurs is more than the sum of its parts and it is difficult to pin down. It opens up new possibilities for the viewer to explore while at the same time maintaining some of the singularity of the original artefact.
Cover: Fondest Gypsy, 2015, watercolour and gouache on vintage postacard c.1910, 42 x 32cm framed... more Cover: Fondest Gypsy, 2015, watercolour and gouache on vintage postacard c.1910, 42 x 32cm framed (detail) Reverse: Whole Lotta Love #1, 2015, watercolour gouache on polyester, 98 x 118cm (detail) Above left: Six Non Blondes, 2015, watercolour and gouache on 6 vintage postacards c.1910, 53 x 55cm framed Above right: Liebeslied, 2015, watercolour and gouache on 6 vintage postacards c.1910, 53 x 55cm framed The artist would like to thank Danny Morse, Chester Flyod Morse, Chalk Horse, Alaska Studios and team, Philjames, Jenni Carter, as well as the Morse and Marynowsky families.
Chalk Horse Gallery Show Cat.
Stars + Stripes: Ameican Art of the 21st Century from the Goldberg Collection is a Bathurst Regio... more Stars + Stripes: Ameican Art of the 21st Century from the Goldberg Collection is a Bathurst Regional Art Gallery exhibition in conjunction with Lisa and Danny Goldberg, toured by Museums & Galleries of NSW. Curated by Richard Perram OAM
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Papers by Oliver Watts
Artist Room Sheets and Catalogues by Oliver Watts