ARI Remix Newsletter | (Re) Presenting 2020-2021 | Celebrating a Decade of Collaborative Memory Work | Ten Year Anniversary Issue #4 | Spring Summer 2021
Hello. Happy Summer 2021 
We at the ARI Remix collective hope all is as well as can be as this fourth, and second last, issue of our Ten Year Anniversary newsletter series ker-plonks into your desktop. We are thrilled to bits to be celebrating ten years of collaborative memory work this year.
For many artists this shared Covid experience has been a good time for setting to work, sifting through the personal archives and adding personal stories to the ongoing memory work we perform. Joining together a critical mass of fragmentary information and digital copies of ‘at risk’ artists’ ephemera has yielded an extraordinary ARI Remix archival process.
Thanks so much to all the artists who have so generously contributed during the past decade.
Remembering artist-run culture and heritage together has helped to enrich and nuance the online environment with previously hidden, inaccessible, marginalised narratives and testimonials.
This month on December 15 2021 we formally conclude ARI Remix Project One; Stage Three 2011- 2021. We could not have done it without your ongoing and enthusiastic support, care, love and generosity, thank you with our deepest heartfelt gratitude.
We thought we’d share a few key ARI news items and links, personal reflections and memory highlights this month from current and recent ARI memory activities.
With this penultimate issue of the ARI Remix News, just one more to go in the New Year 2022 as we formally sign off from Project One [2011-2022] we extend our very best well-being thoughts and well-wishes to you, your families, friends and kinship circles for the summer season ahead, have a Magical Festivus 2021 and see you again for with our final Project One newsletter issue in January or February 2022. Meanwhile, take care, stay safe, go well…
My love and hugs,
Paul Andrew
Interdisciplinary Artist & ARI Remix DIY Coordinator
email: artsmedia[at]gmail.com
(Re) Presenting hidden histories, marginalized narratives and heritage aspects of Australian artist-run culture…
As I am making this short newsletter about artists working with varied technologies, including sound art and super 8mm filmmaking, both rich veins of artistic practice I am reminded of something that Brisbane based sound art and experimental art expert Nicholas Zurbrugg wrote in 1989;
…my point then, is that contemporary composers and sound artists frequently work in quite a vast interdisciplinary sonic realm in which radio is just one potential source of material and distribution. To be sure, many conservative writers refuse to combine the signs and the sounds of their art by working for radio, for record, or for tape. As the American novelist William Burroughs reminds us,
Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing . … Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege.’
At the same time however, many of the more adventurous writers, composers, artists and ‘performers’ of the ’80s have systematically made themselves extremely available to ‘the things that technology is doing’….
https://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/2.2/Zurbrugg.html
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It’s time to sign off, this Saturday Dec 4 5pm onwards at The Walls Art Space, thanks dear Rebecca Ross and Chris Bennie for nine years of ARI magic and fab collabs on the Goldie…join in the celebrations here…
Over the years, Blak Dot has championed the voices and stories of First Nations (Local and Global) creatives through over one hundred exhibitions, events, workshops, residencies, and our well-loved annual Artist Market…
Vale Robert MacPherson, Artist, Brisbane b.1937-d.2021 our sincere condolences to family friends and artist colleagues with such sad news about Robert’s death. With an art career spanning 40 odd years Robert was part of a cohort of artists who considered the philosophical implications of what constituted a work of art. In his early career he was an artist of local renown in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s as part of a founding group of artists and other visionaries who didn’t fit the commercial gallery model at the time and who helped establish the IMA in July1975. Important work with artists involved in Brisbane alternative spaces including Q Space, Q Space Annexe, Anti Music {1980-1981] and Institute of Modern Art IMA exhibitions including “Recession Art & Other Strategies” in 1986 are a few key examples. Many of us were and still are deeply inspired by the evergreen Robert MacPherson and his artist colleagues for inspiring us to start up our own artist-run spaces in Brisbane at the time and throughout the 1980s. In 1986 we could see very clearly and incisively about the value and potential of starting independent DIY experimental and social art/artist spaces and keeping/ caring for artists’ archives with potential for future exhibitions and collabs. Bless you dear Robert for immeasurable and ongoing inspiration and helping us all to actively treasure and seek out the joy of the mundane and everyday…..
Curator David Pestorius staged The Brisbane Sound at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in February/March 2008 examined how art and popular music in Brisbane critically collapsed into one another during the post-punk years of 1978–1983. Inspired by the anti-establishment challenge of Conceptual Art and the ‘Do-It-Yourself’ imperative of Punk, artists created bands, while musicians embraced graphic design, publications, film and other experimental possibilities….
Exhibition | The Brisbane Sound | IMA Feb-Mar 2008 | http://www.davidpestorius.com/exhibition.html
Artist Gary Warner collaborated with artist John Nixon in Brisbane during the heady days of Anti Music, Q Space and Q Space Annexe, in this episode of his ongoing archival art initiative Sonic Sketchbooks Gary re-presents aspects of that period. Gary and John named their experimental sound art group The Black Spots and John published this track in his Anti Music Sampler on the London-based Audio Arts series of cassette releases. They can be listened to online at the Tate London’s website.
Sonic Sketchbooks 48 | https://www.sonicsketchbooks.net/index.php/48-2/
Artist Gary Warner found these records in his personal collection taken at the University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, circa.1978 any memory of this event maybe, so many memory mysteries emerging in personal collections in this networked and participatory era :)…..
Retrieving and recovering hidden, lost or misplaced artist-run resources and ARI publications is an important element of the memory work we do. In this interview artists Alex Stalling and Elysha Rei chat about their important work and historical impact at made. Creative Space established in Toowoomba in February 2011. Ten years after the artist-run initiative closed many of the artists reunited again for a retrospective exhibition this year. It was an affecting experience for everyone. Alex and Elysha have also kindly shared three of their fabulous ARI catalogues in their memory post…
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Lasso opens in Toowoomba, adding to a rich and diverse history of artist-run culture in Toowoomba…
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We found a manila folder brimming with fabulous Brisbane Independent Filmmakers’ ephemera recently in the That Space archives and have made it into a memory post here for you to enjoy and share. 16 mm and Super 8mm filmmaking, analogue video were key modalities for artists, activists among others working in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s. Commentators suggest that small guage filmmaking first emerged out from the conception of amateur cinema as a type of democratic folk art and that small-gauge film; generally understood as anything under 35 mm, was an important tool for artists since the 1940s and 1950s for documenting the lives of people at their grassroots, and increasingly since the 1960s counterculture for documentary purposes, music clips and for a wide range of experimental art making practices.
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Super 8mm was an important technology in Brisbane in the 1980s. Artist Dale Chapman kindly shares this 1984 Super 8mm film made during his studies at Queensland College of Art in 1984. Super 8 often reflects the vernacular, the mundane and a local sense of place and belonging, The artist mentioned to me that he always imagined it would be edited “one day” with sound, a track by XERO and Irena Luckus, but as many of us experienced at the time, working with available analogue technologies in the pre-digital climate presented a range of limitations and challenges which seem unimaginable today in the Web 2.0 environment….
(Re) Presenting | ARI Remix Artist’s Super 8mm Series | The Surrendering | Artist Dale Chapman 1984
Super 8 filmmaking which artists often understood at the cusp of the intersecting analogue and emerging digital era as a type of video art was important for queer filmmakers. In 1989 after leaving Brisbane I learned about analogue video at Metro Screen in Paddington, Sydney, joined the Sydney Super Eight Film group and made this work as a humorous tribute to the many unknown and uncredited actors, artists and “hangers on” who trailed Andy Warhol in his avant-garde experiments…..
In lovehotel [2000] Linda Wallace produced one of the most influential and widely-seen Australian video works of the past 20 years. A fragmented narrative featuring the streets of Tokyo and New York, flowers, faces, bodies, multiple layers of imagery and text, lovehotel tells of a feminine ghost intelligence wandering through the spaces of the online and real worlds.
Screened extensively in Australia and overseas – and the winner of a brace of awards and special mentions – Wallace’s lovehotel is emblematic of a body of work that has, since the early 1980s, explored notions of identity and subjectivity.
Early works in Super 8 and video such as 4 Girls [1984] and A Story So Far [1985] melded together autobiographical narrative elements with visual layering and juxtapositions that produced a poetic yet structured essay form that allowed space for the viewer to reflect on the content, with an almost leisurely pace that set Wallace’s work apart from the more agitated visual approach of her peers. Initial works in video, such as in what new language will I meet with you [1991] adapted this approach into a single hypnotic sequence of a tunnel from which ribbons of text emerge, while a voice over ruminates on the relationships between men and women and their status as “information” in an “information age”.
From 1993 until 2001 Wallace, via her company machinehunger, curated and produced international exhibitions of Australian new media work in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Germany, the UK, China, the Netherlands and New Zealand. In 1999, PROBE in Beijing was the first exhibition of international new media work ever held in China.
In this Brisbane-specific memory post Linda recalls making a radio sound art music collaboration titled : Queensland in Quarantine…..
Brisbane born Senior Digital Artist Linda Dement and well renowned Cyber Chick speaks to artist Paul Andrew about ISEA 2013, feminism, photography, the archival impulse and the power of digital collaborations….
Artist Linda Dement chats about Cyber Chicks & Catching Light – ISEA 2013
Academic Graham Coulter-Smith remember working on Eyeline Magazine, his work as an educator at Queensland College of Art and the important work achieved while serving on the IMA board of management…
“A Drawing Made Without Thinking” | Academic Graham Coulter-Smith: A brief reflection
Artist Geoffrey Schmidt launches his new website…
Artist Geoffrey Schmidt soft launches new artist web site | https://www.gsart.org
The May Day March was once a regular fixture in Brisbane’s radical past when art and working life was an important focus in a broader political and cultural discussion….and special thanks for Anne Jones and many colleagues for kindly sharing this important social justice and cultural justice documentary resource…..
Art and Working Life- Art Works: A May Day Project (Brisbane, Qld) – 1989 Documentary
Issue # 3 of a new zine and poster zine project titled EXTRA Zine with artists and designers Joanna Kambourian and Paul Andrew was launched online in November as s small memorial tribute to artist, poet, writer, curator and researcher Peter Anderson.
This July 2017 informal interview with Peter Anderson was a starting point for a proposed ARI Remix podcast series. Sadly Peter passed away before this project could eventuate. Here, and in a particularly reflective mood a year after curating a highly collaborative exhibition about Brisbane artist-run spaces in operation in the 1980s Peter speaks about some of the joys, challenges and limitations of doing the Ephemeral Traces exhibition. He touches on the important Here Not There IMA exhibition curated by Hiram To and Nicholas Tsoutas which provided an important counter-perspective to the APT which arguably still holds currency today…
Brisbane Meeanjin is well-known for staging a diversity of festive and celebratory cultural activities which are often ephemeral in orientation. In this memory post artist and curator Jay Younger recalls the Oblivion Festival staged as a vibrant one-nighter event and fundraiser for the Queensland Artworker’s Alliance staged in November 1989, everything from The Hibiscus Sisters to Super Eight, Sound Art and Performance Art interventions…
Making newsletters is often a reflective process. In the article by Nick I mention at the outset if this newsletter he concludes with this observation about 1990’s art and technologies;
As the American composer Philip Glass remarks, contemporary technology permits innumerable multi-media effects that ‘we couldn’t have produced … five years ago’. The technological innovations of the nineties will doubtless introduce further aesthetic innovations in live performance, radio art, and ‘post-radiophonic’ performances and installations, as these new genres ‘go beyond the contrast’ between their specific potential, and ‘find the higher laws of an alliance’, within the new creativity that Moholy-Nagy might now annunciate as:
a literature of phonograph records, recording-tape and samplers; of radio, film, television, video and computers; of live and partially pre-recorded multi-media performances and installations – not yet accepted but in the making.
Today working on this living archives work about artist-run culture and re-presenting its distinctive cultural heritage, pausing, reflecting on Nick’s observation, I also wonder what Moholy-Nagy might observe today in the current Web 2.0 environment….
ARI Remix [2011-2021] is an archival art initiative. As a collaborative passion project with over ten thousand hours of enthusiasm and volunteerism involved to make it happen and to stay preserved and “living” in the current online environment we need your help. Thanks to everyone who is kindly helping with this year’s crowdfunding campaign we are edging much closer now to the $7,500.00 goal for January 2022 to help offset the ongoing $300 monthly digital infrastructure, web hosting, software plug ins updates and IT fees. We are extremely grateful for your generosity, kindness and thoughtfulness so far, please help if you can and let your friends and colleagues know too…
https://ariremix.com.au/help-preserve-ari-remix-community-archives-project-2
Image [Header] : Courier Mail newspaper clipping 1986, written by long term supporter arts journalist and art critic Phyllis Woolcock.
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The ARI Remix collective acknowledges and respects the traditional and ongoing custodians of the lands where we live, make and work. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. We support the Uluru statement from the heart.
ARI Remix is an archival art initiative, in a ‘living archives’ form; LGBTQIA+, cis, non-binary, trans and BIPOC inclusive, and involves active participation and collaborative collecting engagement by artists, art workers, co-creatives, peers and artist groups. It is an enthusiast-led, community-based, non-profit and art ephemera study resource and Web 2.0 internet art work [net art] #ariremix. It is made entirely possible through immense kindness, generosity, volunteerism and collaborative collecting efforts of over 300 Australian artists and significant arts philanthropy;
PROJECT ONE – Stages One & Two
of this project are supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and have been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Stage Three of this project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and other First Nations people are advised that this archival art initiative contains names, recordings and images of deceased people and other content that may be culturally sensitive. Please also be aware that you may see certain words or descriptions in this catalogue which reflect the author’s attitude or that of the period in which the item was created and may now be considered offensive.