keep an eye on Charlie’s blog for the occasional surprise

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Here’s a set of 64 mini-vids by the mobile politics collective. Work your way past the rather funereal and ungroovy front page, (black screens we don’t like) and on the right hand side you will find directional buttons which allow you to see sets of four tiny thumbnails of each video. Well worth the journey, and along the way you’ll find works by Lucien Leon, Ivo Lovric, Charlie Sofo, Dan Bell, Reuben Ingall, Liang Luscombe, and Trish Roan. Click on an image and you’re there! And there’s another button below if you wish to download. How you get it on your phone is another story…

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Here’s one of the new works Charlie Sofo will be showing at ArtWranglers from next Friday afternoon. Various Stuff, (80 x 60, variable dimensions, enamel on plywood, gel pen, 2008), is one of six new works in the show Colour is Knowledge. Charlie talks about his process in the following way:

It’s amazing that we can make art and continue to talk about things like colour and line. But that is exactly what I’m thinking about: colours and lines.

Colour is knowledge. I’ve tried to use colours as indicators. I’ve coloured surfaces with the colour of other surfaces. I’m interested in the sort of colours that you might find on a colour chart in a paint shop. Ordinary colours.

I’ve drawn lines and tried to define the lines between colours.  I’ve drawn coloured lines and I’ve coloured inside the outlines of particular things.

The new work will be on view from 5.00pm on Friday, 31st October, at 18 Morphett, St, Dickson. If you can’t make the opening, an ArtWrangler or two will be “at home” to all from 10.00am to 5.00 pm from Saturday and Sunday, November 1st and 2nd, plus Tuesday November 4th (the holiday) and on Saturday and Sunday, November 8th and 9th. Outside those hours, during the intervening week, we’re happy to show you the work by appointment by calling 02 6257 0949 or 0402 726 951.

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Diary note: Charlie Sofo’s show COLOUR IS KNOWLEDGE will open at ArtWranglers from 5.00 pm on Friday 31 October.

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Seems there’s a beat-up at the SMH in anticipation of the launch of David Marr’s new book: The Henson Case.  In this advertisement for next weekend’s Good Weekend the SMH pix editors parody their own self-censorship, brought on themselves by the Bill Henson controversy of a few months ago. David Marr’s account of the issues raised by the various reactions to Bill Henson’s work do not engage with the substantive questions of the weak nature of the defenses already mounted: the prior arguments based on context and intentionality (it’s erotica, not porn, so that’s OK) are about vested interests, and not the 21st century reality of the way images are now distributed and consumed. Henson and his dealers have sold and continue to sell individual works out of context, and to distribute such out-of-context works on the internet, so the stable door is wide open… Nobody appears to be willing to mount a defense of this aspect of the “case”.

On September 15 we posted a reference to a Bill Henson photograph of a different order to any of those that were in the spotlight back in May. This (trigger warning) image was put to auction last week by Menzies Art Brands, on their online catalogue, and it’s still there. (We wonder whether Henson gave copyright permission, but that’s another issue). We asked then whether such examples of his work could be defended in the same terms as the discourse which emerged in May, and subsequently.

Throughout this debate, ArtWranglers has always taken the position that the world of the internet has radically changed the context in which images such as these are (now) seen and interpreted. Defense of the work in its original context, or a defense based on the autonomy of its artistic intent, seems to us to be no longer sufficient once the work is “out there” circulating on the internet. There, it occupies a different contextual category, and is therefore subject to different values, criteria, and critiques. Surely it is no longer a matter of where each of us may draw the line between (say) erotica and pornography, or whether the artist’s intention supercedes its new context in the wider world of vernacular photography. Once it’s “out there” in cyberspace, there’s nowhere to draw a line, and just as individual works may challenge our assessment of the whole corpus of Henson’s work, so such works as the above now need to be assessed (and defended) in the expanded field of internet imagery. Perhaps. What do you have to say about that, David? And there are more questions for David to answer on The Art Life. Read also Jonathan Green’s comments on Crikey. Regrets? A few…

And a growing caution in interview with Leigh Sales: “The photographs are beautiful and nothing Henson has done in the last few months with all of these photographs breaks any law and none of them are remotely pornographic.” and “The Internet has changed the way we view photography. There is a sense in which no photograph can actually be corralled anymore. Everything is potentially available to anybody anywhere in the world, once it gets on the Internet. We still have to deal with that, that apprehension of the Internet, because it’s changing the way we consider art, photography, all sorts of things. Part of the purpose of my book is to look at the history of that fear of the Internet, and try to work out whether in fact we need to be so afraid. I don’t think we do.”

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Somehow, we didn’t know! Enjoy it here.

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Charlie Sofo has produced a new body of work for his first solo exhibition in Sydney: Particular Particles at Darren Knight, opening this Friday 19th July.

Charlie writes: The works in Particular Particles are very quiet, but full of order and time. Some of the pictures are almost invisible. I’ve focused in on particular things, marginal materials and minor processes. In the work Eyes I repeatedly cast the eye of a needle in paint. I turned out hundreds of these tiny forms and pasted them on a sheet of cardboard creating a field of sorts, a concentration of eyes. In the work Clothes Lint I picked, rolled and pasted individual balls of lint from 16 items of clothing. The result is a patchwork of lint – an ordered collection of superfluous materials. I’ve tried to make something out of almost nothing. Each piece is based upon a simple idea that has been expanded or carried through to its logical end.

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Go to mobilepolitics and click on the top left thumbnail and download your free Charlie Sofo!

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Sometimes earlier works by ArtWranglers artists are worth remembering. Charlie Sofo’s work is usually small in scale, but visitors to the ANU School of Art Library will realise that for Charlie, scale is no more than the limits of an idea. This work one step at a time 2004, made while Charlie was a third year student at the School, is still an ArtWranglers favourite. Is it the largest photographic print in Australian art? It was made using a roll of minilab paper, a torch, a darkroom, a processor, a drier (which broke down during the process) and thus lots of helpers. The paper was fed from one light-proof box to another, and each footprint exposed by torchlight. Dimensions unknown.

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[this is a detail of finger-grease, 2007, which the artist describes as "paper, finger oil and grime"]

There’s two days left to see Charlie Sofo’s studio exhibition at Studio 17, ANCA Dickson, 12.00-5.00pm, this Saturday and Sunday. Email Willa for a list of works still available… or, see what you missed, in his gallery in the sidebar ->

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