Artbash: All Topics

Art Theory and History : Death to the Antipathetic Notion of Research-Based Artists & Artworks : bunrush

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 09:45:17 +1200

After writing this rejoinder I realized that this topic deserved an OP airing of its own.

re White Lead's hyperlink to the 'microscopy artist' -

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/03/science-and-art-under-the-microscope.php

If I have to look at, listen to an artist talk about, or read about another research-based artwork I swear I'll get the dry-heaves.

Research-based artwork is the triumph of the academy (and the committee) over the meandering, arational course of creative/intellectual development of visual ideas.

Using the term research to describe the process of arriving at a point of departure for a body of visual art is mummery of the most predictable sort. The 'research artists' dons the raiment of science and thus affects a posture of (supposed) legitimacy, normalcy, and pseudo-scientific rationality. In doing so these ass-mites-of-the-artworld pretend to be socially licensed, franchised alongside the sciences they inadvertantly parody.

Art research - unlike real scientific endeavors produces no verifiable proofs, double blind studies or socially useful spin-offs. The only thing (at least as far as I can tell) that art-researchers do is - displace art that might be interesting to engage with, please committees, make the audience for such artwork feel quite pleased with themselves because of the 'understandable' nature of such work's intents, working methods, and end results, and provide programming for the myriad public art spaces that entertain (almost exclusively) such pseudo-art and self-satisfied audiences who dine on its calorie-free fare.

I hesitate to use the term Petit-bourgeois - but if ever there was cause to proclaim the triumph of that bunch this would be the time and place for artists who make the other-kind-of-art to run up the white flag and eat an honor-bullet before the unwashed breach the barricades and carry our corpses to be publicly displayed like so much research-based-art.

Now, if you would, imagine.....the sound of dry heaves echoing in an abandoned atelier.

Press Releases : Call for Applications: Rita Angus Artist's Residency 2010 : st_luke

Sun, 7 Mar 2010 13:32:32 +1200

The Wellington Institute of Technology is delighted to announce that applications are now open for the Rita Angus Artist’s Residency for 2010.

The Residency supports an artist to produce a new body of work that reflects upon the interplay between technology and culture. The Residency also encourages the artist to enter into dialogue with the Wellington arts community and to exhibit and discuss their practice. The Rita Angus Residency is being offered in association with the Wellington Institute of Technology’s School of Creative Technologies.

For more information, and to apply, visit the website at http://www.weltec.ac.nz/residency/rita_angus_residency.html

Applications should be received by 5pm, Monday 3 May, 2010. Direct enquiries and applications to hamish.tocher@weltec.ac.nz .

Educational Presentations : TROLLS : william blake

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 21:14:37 +1200

I just received this from an object sculptor, he was a little disturbed at the legacy of the recently departed Auckland City Arts Administrator.

Not sure where the article appeared but it is by Frances Morton who is Metro Magazine arts editor.

No Plonking
Auckland streets are to be transformed by an expansive new public art programme.

Red light, dark alley – in most scruffy, late-night, downtown spots this would mean one thing. In Auckland’s Fort Lane, a glowing red line zigzagging overhead from building to building extending the length of the lane carries a more complex message.
“The red neon light refers to the notion of the red thread as a metaphor for the road, the journey and the memory of history,” wrote Swedish artist David Svensson in his proposal for the work Eyelight Lane, which is the first of several ambitious new projects currently under development through Auckland City Council’s public art programme. It will be erected as soon as testing has been carried out to determine if neon or LED is the most appropriate and cost effective material.
Eyelight Lane may not fit with many people’s preconceived idea of public art – often a piece of sculpture plonked in a square. It is part of a curatorial citywide approach by the council’s public art team, which was established in 2008 to focus on commissioning high quality, site appropriate works with support from an expert panel of art professionals that includes artist Judy Darragh, architect Nicholas Stevens and Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines.

Trish Clark, art consultant and chair of the advisory panel on public art says “plonk art” is problematic in Auckland’s public spaces. “There’s a great deal of mass in the existing public art works. The intention in the new areas was not to put a great deal more mass into that area but be working in a much lighter and more interesting way.”

Over the next three years 16 major and 25 smaller works will be popping up throughout the city. Wayne Youle has developed a text-based work for Fort St, Kate Newby’s work will be incorporated into the council’s upgrade of Elliott and Darby Streets, Billy Apple is transforming two areas near Eden Park in time for the Rugby World Cup and graduates and emerging artists are being given the chance develop their skills working in the public realm by creating small works for 25 micro-sites in the zone between AUT and the University of Auckland which the public art team have dubbed the Learning Quarter.
In addition, two existing sculptures will have new homes.

Terry Stringer’s Mountain Fountain is being relocated from Aotea Square to the forecourt of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell and Michio Ihara’s Wind Tree, which has been hidden away in storage for the last seven years will be installed in the revamped Wynyard Quarter, aka the Tank Farm.

The Wynyard Quarter will be the site of some of the largest and most exciting projects and is attracting interest from some heavy-hitting international artists. The advisory panel has invited artists to submit proposals which fit with the three curatorial themes - water, transparency and water - which were set up by Pontus Kyander, the council’s former public art manager who departed at the end of last year to be director of a gallery in Norway.
Clark notes it is rare for such a cohesive strategy towards public art to be conceived alongside a new urban development. “In terms of world approaches in city public art, this is absolutely at the forefront,” she says. This month New York-based British artist Anthony McCall, who currently has an exhibition at Wellington’s Adam Art Gallery, is visiting the site in preparation for putting together a proposal. McCall is holding a public talk on March 1 at the Town Hall about his career, which began with making experimental films in the 1970s and will be marked with a retrospective at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum of contemporary art next year.

In the pipeline:
- A text-based work by Wayne Youle for Fort Street.
- Works by Kate Newby incorporated into upgrade of Elliot and Darby Streets
- Two areas near Eden Park transformed by Billy Apple, for the Rugby World Cup
- A work by London-based Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary for the Wynyard Quarter
- A new commission by American Spencer Finch for the Wynyard Quarter
- Graduates and emerging artists create works for 25 micor-sites in the zone between AUT and University of Auckland.

Frances Morton

Reviews : What the : Enoch

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:53:26 +1200

My first 'Fringe Festival' experience since moving to Wellington, in a little gallery off Dixon Street. I got there quite late,I think, as the action was just wrapping up.

A video art piece playing... looped street scenes accompanied by a semi-naked semi-alive Anton Newcombe type singing in a strange baratone voice and who had evidently mainlined a vodka-P cocktail as some point during the evening... Someone told me that they had found him on the street one night. Said blues wailer/Weil character was accompanied by a pretty good drummer and some discordant guitar.

Don't know if music shows are a regular feature or not but I certainly hope so. No one I talked to the next day had heard of the place as a music venue... But I will defintely be back given the pretty fresh and sophisticated look of the gallery itself and the generally bacchanalian feel of the show, or at least the bit I caught, which I felt was a welcome change to the staid rather boring art shows/galleries I've been to in recent months.

Architecture : Early warning signs for political fascism. : Pan

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:16:20 +1200

In 2007 New Zealand Banned Forms of Political Satire, after only six members of the 121-seat parliament voted against the measure.

The measure was taken after some MPs were offended by pictures of sleeping politicians, or politicians making rude gestures.

There is always something to say for both sides to the story, in this case there is a big difference between that which satirizes and that which denigrates MPs.

Is there an alternative?

Off-site Articles : Take Me To The Kittens... : Quint Baker

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:04:48 +1200

Artist Liam Gerrard 25 has produced a 2.5 metres tall charcoal and acrylic work dubbed the "Face of Evil" and is the portrait of Clayton Weatherston, the convicted murder of his former girlfriend, Sophie Elliott. It is one of 93 works to compete in the Adam Portraiture Award, open in Wellington tomorrow. My stomach is turning... Is this a crime, to exhibit such a work? Is this too soon? Can anyone remember the last time a portrait was this controversial?

Art Theory and History : The Dead End Deception : Flipper

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:30:34 +1200

According to Plato art seemed so injurious to the pursuit of truth that it should be banned from the ideal state. His translators suggest that his primary concern was irrationality in art and the relationship of it to knowledge. How interesting this is when the art of our time is playing out in that way by how it is currently divorced from mass comprehension. It seems too that the life it leads in reality is indeed fulfilling Plato’s fears although not in the way his translators suggest.

To explain what I mean look firstly at the biggest debate that surrounds art presently, its surface distrust. Is it surface distrust? Maybe in Warhol’s time, but now it seems there is rather a lack of trust altogether or it is replaced by a type of education of ‘surface distrust’ which is ‘inspiring’ more creative individuals then ever to miss the original point of art. What then was the original point? Well if there is one thing that hasn’t changed is a unanimous consensus that art is on the order of both society and culture. As Plato suggested art would lead to the biggest problems for society but in that respect art itself wouldn’t be exempt from its own end product either. The point then lies not in arts irrationality but rather in the translation of what Plato might have meant by his explanation of ‘the ideal state’ for he too was an artist as much as he was a vehicle for truth. It is I believe the same ‘dead end’ concept Jim Morrison liked to sing about, the type of art our time is likewise preoccupied with.

As I see it its the rendition of Plato’s vision that seems to be problematic, not the vision itself. After the train of thought is presented by the original and is then given a once over by a translator’s written illustration, truth as a whole becomes intercepted, obstructed. This is because the interpretation of Plato’s meaning advocates that whatever truth or non-truth exists in art doesn’t derive from knowledge but instead that all knowledge that the artist possesses is rather inspired or 'breathed into' by the gods. This leads to present a version of Plato’s original version, as the artist being a kind of divine mouthpiece and thus eliminates the possibility (because Plato was himself an artist) of it being a part of a bigger picture, the life cycle of culture, or the order of a society over a period of time. The way good and evil distinctions for instance cause truth to wander away from common perception is a device for mass control and causes a kind of degeneration synonymous to this concept, a type of systematic simulacrum effect on culture.

Plato was not a hypocrite but did consider himself an artist. So how does this stand up to reason? In order to represent his ideal state within the limitations of what reallity allowed him to say at the time he had to speak in terms of metaphors and then like now his interpretation became a solid stationary representation. The interpretation then once perceived and rewritten became a mimesis, devoid of the origional illustration of continuity. Thus my proposal suggests that when the time is ripe, art and reality are so far divorced from the truth that a moral sacrifice is needed in order to ‘see’ truth again.

These are big names I’m referencing, ones I don’t know half as much about as I should and probably already been challenged like I have attempted to countless numbers of times. On the other hand, all the depressing empty gallery talk recently leads me to this response, that given that art is after all a representation it is likewise susceptible to leading a parallel life after representation. This doesn't lead to the death of it but is rather a continuous theme I believe every piece of good art and litrature comments on by how it represents a society or culture over time. So what was previously rendered in parts will now perhaps be forming a whole.

Rants : Is all art terrorism? : Quint Baker

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:43:10 +1200

How can one find peace? Today I was having a fag at the back porch, sitting in a dark green plastic chair staring at some pea pods strewn on a vine down an old aqua colored garden wagon. And I thought "You know perhaps Quint you should try and do some flora works... hmmmm nice one, they might even become collectable, because it really would be doubtful that you could stick with the usual conventional flora works that granny artists do". But if I did would I finally find peace? There is a statement I have vowed to myself saying "I will nolonger be a tool of art anger". I mean, I don't want to be that cynical guy pulling the surround apart. I want to be enjoying myself in peace. As a human baby feeling my toes into the soil. A sweet little girl back from an aweful school camp said earnestly to me this afternoon that everyone was just so judgemental there. Like you couldn't do a thing without them judging you. Well I said in reply, "Myspace is like that! Everyone is judgemental". The sweet little girl kinda looked at me strangely, because my consolidation didn't quite fit. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be cruel and judgemental. Many years ago there was a CD released called "Natures Best" and that showcased all the best New Zealand songs. Well a dude I know is creating an oppostion CD release called "Natures Worst". Already there is a song sorted by a contributor called "Spoilt" that is in response to Dave Dobbyns "Loyal". I mean is that negative? I mean does everyone feel like they just ate a creme egg in the dash board sun and now in need of a shower? Dave Dobbyn is one of the governments most favoured sons and he could do with being knocked down a peg or two, but oh dear I am doing it again, I am being evil.

Rants : In Arcadia : william blake

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:16:59 +1200

Nigel Healy is sitting at the glass desk in the office of his gallery that lurks in an expensively fashionable part of the city. He is wearing a handmade Italian linen suit in a natural shade known as ecru. The jacket alone is worth more than some of his artists earn in a year; but one or two would still prefer to paint on it, than be seen in it.

Nigel has just smoked a cigarette past the filter, which explains the contorted leer on his face.

Nigel has been stood up; he had planned to have a ‘non-earner’ in the gallery this month, an installation by an outsider artist; however the artist and his work have vanished. He has had the gallery rebuilt, commissioned preview articles in art magazines and invited top clients for a lavish and expensive opening, which is just a few hours away.

“I should have known Mac would let me down… bloody lunatics. I should have made Tracey stay with them overnight. Fucksake, who can I get to fill the slot now?” thinks Nigel.

The gallery is pristine. The old kauri boards have been sanded and waxed, the walls have been replaced and laser levelled. Their surfaces have been regibbed, plastered and are having their final coat of paint. The space is a patchwork of scents: resinous kauri, damp plaster, fresh paint, glue and beeswax. A colour temperature light system is being test run by a technician and the space is quietly changing from cool to warm, like the start of a new day.

Healy also has a terrible hangover, which explains his inability to smoke a cigarette properly. A shout cuts through his headache like a saw.

‘Hey Nige’, when’s the farkin skip arriving?’ queried Terry the builder, loudly. ‘We’ve still got all the old framing to get rid of, mate.’

‘Oh fuck off’ thought Healy, but knowing that builders tend to be more temperamental than artists, he was politic, “ I will ask Tracey to get onto it’

“Better make it a farkin bigun, there’s all the old gib and seven big bags of sawdust as well”, yelled Terry from a few feet away.

A really stupid idea was forming in Nigel Healy’s cocaine and alcohol challenged mind. He spoke into his latest gadget, a fountain pen, bluetooth radio intercom, not realising how foolish he looked. ‘Tracey get on to the art school and get me a couple of interesting looking post grads, we will need them to do a site specific work, in the gallery, with timber and sawdust, tell them its about entropy or something and then find Ewan Woodie, we will need him to write it up. Oh and Tracey can you order the biggest skip you can find and get them to leave it out the front of the gallery, no don’t worry about the traffic, it should be quite sculptural, yes.. good.. see you back for lunch?. Ciao’

Healy puts his intercom pen back in his jacket pocket not realising that it was still transmitting and would continue to do so for the rest of the day.

‘Hey Terry’ shouts Nigel, with a faint stereo reverb that makes him resolve to go easy on the stimulants in future. ’Just stack all of that shit in the middle of the gallery and then you guys can knock off.’

Ewan Woodie the day before.

‘What can I say about this kind of thing; I can contextualise it as art if I am asked to, or more accurately, payed to. But what do you think? Are you swayed by my reviews and see this ‘arrangement’ in a new light, or are you one of those who see me as a secure and steady stream of bullshit? Or do you just hit the delete button?’

Healy had commissioned a piece on his latest find, an ‘outsider artist’ called ‘Mac’, who decorates the forests with old clothes, some pieces are like flags others, where the garments are filled with branches are quite figurative, but there is no art to Mac’s arrangements, only obsession. Healy insisted we meet the artist on site rather than at the gallery “for the true experience” and indeed, after a large reefer, the sun lit the silks and cotton and leaves in a riot. The tree people became sinister, atavistic totems. Mac and his smelly friend Bob were whooping and dancing in strange costumes, obviously off their heads. Sam got some of the scene on camera but didn’t quite catch the mood; I dare say in much the same way that something will be lost when Healy displays this nonsense in his gallery as an installation.

If this was a freelance job, and if Mac weren’t such a psycho, I’d do my usual on this lot; a big colour spread to exploit the art and then lay into the reasons why it could never be art. That way we all win, the newspaper loves the piccies, the public loves the rubbishing and the artists don’t care as long as they get the big picture published… well most of them don’t.

‘Bob’ the night before.

‘Mac, he’s a quiet one I’ve been sleeping rough with him for a while now and he’s never no trouble. His thing is clothes, oh and trolleys, some from the supermarket, a couple of kiddie’s pushchairs and at the moment an orange wheelbarrow that he nicked from a building site. He will fix his transistor radio to the trolley, tune in to a rock station and disappear for the day. He comes back with all sorts of stuff, some good, some not so; fags, booze, food, all good; but road cones, any bright plastic, rope, string, clothes, more clothes and underpants; men’s, women’s, kiddies, bloomers, g-strings, y-fronts, the lot, all freshly washed. He hangs them about the place, in the oak trees or on lines that he rigs between them like flags at a caryard. And his scarecrows, they just appear, I’ll find one in the bush and sometimes I get a hell of a fright.

I don’t get why this bloke Healy wants to put this shit in a art gallery, he must be soft in the head, I don’t think that Mac is gettin nuthin for it neither. Lest he hasn’t said nuthin bout any cash. I don’t know why Mac gives the bastard the time of day.

Kids have been following Mac again, better watch out for that. They’s a bloody nuisance and as sure as the rain they will bring trouble.

Mac surprised me last night by giving me a piece of advice. We’d been drinking our brew, of course, and the schoolies had some dope. Mac was relaxed, not his usual silent watchful self; he said, “Bob” and he paused for a heartbeat “always take a natural fibre over a synthetic” and his long, sad face broke into a beautiful smile.

Senior Constable Fairweather on the day of the opening.

At exactly 7.45 this morning I observed two vagrants making a campfire behind the gardeners hut at the old St Mary’s Hospital. We accosted the vagrants and evicted them from the grounds.

St Mary’s was closed in 1989 and is now derelict. I was acting on information supplied

by a Mr Wilson who had been walking his dog through the grounds on the evening of the 27^th. He had witnessed several vagrants in a state of serious intoxication. He had also noted branches ‘decorated’ with clothes and the vagrants were wearing several layers of women’s underclothing. This would explain the rash of washing line thefts over the past months.

More seriously Mr Wilson stated that he saw pupils from St Mary’s college participating in the debauchery. After enquiry to date, none of the pupils have been identified.

Under the circumstances it was decided that constables, Blithell, Pudney, Scrimshaw and myself should apprehend the vagrants. They are at present in the cells and the mental health services have been notified.

Artbash : Business as Usual : william blake

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:07:47 +1200

Leonard Fox paused in his writing to scan the horizon; aquamarine became azure rising to cerulean, a grey lizard crabbed from the shade of a stone to stare at him; it was 30 degrees in the shade. Leonard flipped the postcard over and it showed a remarkably similar horizon, except with dozens of small white plastered cubes, stepping down to the sea; the cubes all had identical cerulean blue windows. The postcard was to send to his mother in New Zealand.

It was another postcard that had set Leonard on the path that found him lying by the pool and owning the luxury modernist villa on the Greek Island of Spanakopita.

After a spectacularly modest career as a landscape painter, Leonard had hit upon the postcard plan. It was a simple plan and all that it needed was courage and time and nothing to loose. He sent postcards to MOMA, the Tate, and various Guggenheims and to all of the top galleries. He sent postcards to all of the big art magazines and the best dealers and then included them in his curriculum vitae.

With this magnificent CV Leonard was a shoe in for a CNZ ‘just let loose- 100% pure Kiwi’ travel grant; which produced more carefully chosen postcards from around the world. Soon anyone who considered themselves important in the art world hungered for a Leonard Fox postcard.

Now Leonard was rich and was living in exile from his Porrirua roots. It was a burgeoning exile managed by his gravel voiced agent Nigel Healy. Nigel had turned the postcards into cash and then into real estate or as he explained to the tax man the ‘manufactories of the raw production’ and grudgingly secured a fine concession from the revenue. Leonard and Nigel now owned thirteen deluxe properties around the world.

Leonard picked up his Mont Blanc and put his mothers address in the allocated space below the stamp and wondered about a beginning. Just then Nigel appeared, clinking with drinks.

“Who’s the postcard for Len?” he asked casually handing Leonard a tall, icy faintly blue drink.

“My mother back in New Zealand” he replied.

“What?” Nigel choked slightly while sipping on his gin. “You can’t fucking do that!” he coughed,” don’t you understand what an unproductive work like that could do to your stock?”

“…But its to my Mum” he replied weakly in a squeaky voice, as Healy took the card.

“No…no…no” scolded Nigel and flicked the card casually but accurately over the marble terrace into the azure.

Paul Gibbon had just made the breakthrough: it was a small lozenge of paint in the bottom corner of a giant striped painting. The stripes were in tones of grey: yellow grey, blue grey and light grey. The major passages were applied with house painting brushes and rollers but the finishing detail was worked up in glazes using the biggest kolinsky sable brush that money could buy. Gibbon had long ago dispensed with canvass had worked through plywood, then aluminium panel and now painted exclusively on titanium sheet which floated exactly 5mm from the wall and was custom made in Finland. The whole work reeked of good taste and considered expression.

He only painted stripes. He saw them as boundaries or horizons, collisions or pairings. He could paint the same work over and over and the small detail of the lozenge could salvage him from the “insanity” that Kipling referred to in his famous quote “as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. He had heard this often enough at his A.A. meetings but preferred Einstein’s version as being positivistic and progressive, “ The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking”

Gibbon had come to the attention of the art world early on with a large work on canvass, three metres by ten, with black and white stripes and a, relatively small panel of gamboge yellow, entitled ‘The Wasp’. Art critic Evan Woodie had cried foul, and sketched a dismissive review; agreeing that the work was committed by a white Anglo male, but lacked a sting in the tale. Gibbon’s next piece identical, except for the panel being layered in cadmium red and being titled’ The Bull” was panned in Woodie’s column with a photograph and the simple dismissive headline ‘Bullshit!’

Woodie was back in his paper the following day with another photograph, this time with a hand to his rapidly closing eye and bleeding nose and a furious looking Gibbon being forcibly restrained by his dealer, Nigel Healy. Paul Gibbon’s career had never looked back.

The breakthrough that Gibbon had made in the latest piece was painting the lozenge in the same shade of grey that surrounded it. It relieved Paul from the responsibility of finding an eloquent colour to shoulder the burden of the work and it was a continuation of the stripe while not being part of it… It was the actualisation of Einstein’s ‘different level of thought’.

Paul lit a victory cigarette with his paint smeared lighter and he poured himself a good measure of scotch. The peaty drink seemed to ease the headache that he got daily from the paint fumes. He wondered what that cunt Woodie would make of this masterful painting.

Nigel Healy adjusted his left shirt cuff by exactly five millimeters to better expose the navette cut ruby cuff link. It was one of the small details that he felt set him apart from the rest. On the right cuff was a link of similar cut, but emerald, of about two carats; he was going sailing later in the day.

But he needed to earn his keep this morning and so he was representing a sculptor by the name of Brigitte Castle, an older woman but still strikingly beautiful, even if she was dressed like a mechanic.

They were in the grubby offices of Kitschen Engineering, a failing manufactory only just keeping afloat by the good sense of the foreman who had insisted that they reinvest the meager profits of producing stainless steel kitchens into the latest technology and so just keeping ahead of the Chinese importers. It was for this technology that they were here.

Brigitte looked unimpressedly at the ageing lad manager,Dave Kitschen, a migrant from the North of England, shaved head, black and white striped soccer shirt, smoking a taylor made; she was reminded of a mangy whippet her father once owned.

“You want fookin’ what?” Dave fumed.

“We want a whale Dave” Brigitte patiently explained. “A sperm whale, made out of stainless steel”

“ I suppose you will want that life size an all” laughed Dave sarcastically.

Nigel thought it was time to straighten things out before they got out of hand.

“ No Mr. Kitschen, not life size; twice life size actually. Oh and we will pay handsomely. It should get your er.. business out of the doldrums”

Jimmy, the ferret eyed alcoholic foreman who was leaning against the doorjamb interjected.

“ We can do it, no worries, with the cad-cam cutters, epicycloidic rollers and the nitrogen-plasma welder, we should be able to knock off a project of that scale”

“I know, that’s why we are here” said Nigel through his teeth.

Dave observed the ill matched couple for a moment and then asked the seemingly dumb question. “Why?”

Brigitte began her story, which was polished by use to a deep luster. It described other work made by other factories, her philosophy of form and, in this instance, a deep distrust with the still dominant patriarchal hierarchy, in society.

“..and that’s why I’m calling the piece ‘Moby’s Dick’; it’s twice the size of Melville’s .”

That was a couple of years back and Dave thought back to how much of a wanker he was then, not up for it, it was Jimmy who saw the opportunity. The whale job was a good earner for the company but did little for the artist if he remembered correctly, she made hardly any money from the job but that agent guy seemed to do ok.

Dave looked out from his new office at the recently installed promotional orca at the front gate, business was booming, whales, pods of dolphins, seals (with or without balancing balls), schools of tuna, swordfish: the whole marine world was his oyster.