Monday, May 31, 2010

Responce to Arts Hub article

http://www.artshub.com.au/au/news-article/opinions/performing-arts/shining-a-light-on-vivid-sydney-181351

Thanks for your critique on Vivid Festival, it’s the reason I started the light hearted satirical stab at Vivid’s hype through Gloom Festival. Really what I was getting out besides the hypocrisy of the hype was trying to address the need for some degree of equity and the need to meaningfully engage with local artists.
However I am completely reconsidering the whole Gloom thing in light of recent events: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/mates-race-45m-deal-snares-mp-20100528-wldb.html
At least events NSW is spending $8m on arts instead of $45m on V8 super cars!
Even though Vivid is not ideal, I just realized how much worse it could be!
Cheers
Gloom Sydney

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Dropping Gloom

I am thinking of dropping my whole Gloom
campain against Vivid fest cause things can and are SO MUCH WORSE.Sir
Lunchalot McDonald is up to his old tricks, spending NSW dollar$ giving
to his mates and bringing such great events as V8 super cars to
Sydney.Compared to V8s, Vivid is positively brilliant. Oh the state of the
state is despicable.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/mates-race-45m-deal-snares-mp-20100528-wldb.html

Monday, May 17, 2010

MACQUARIE’S BRASS PLATE

Dates: 27 May - 20 June 2010

Discover our City as you’ve never thought of it, as you venture along the theatrically lit Macquarie Street and surrounding historic buildings.
Discover the sites of massacres and mayhem, of rum filled rape and defilement. From St Mary’s Cathedral and Hyde Park Barracks to Parliament House, the State Library and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, these Grandes tarts of Sydney architecture are rendered with extraordinary Darkness.

GLOOM Sydney strives to uncover the dark secrets in the shadows of history and revels in all its insidious debauchery. This on-foot nocturnal adventure starts with the horrid light spectacle at St Mary’s Cathedral. Stones of the Cathedral will appear to literally rise out of the ground as the story of “zombies defiling the Nation” unfold. Gloom exhumes the ghosts of our history and forces them to fess up, on all the dirt. Follow the dark trail along Macquarie Street with historical and contemporary themes revealed in the shadows.

Taking approximately one hour join the free public walk will be a storytelling journey using iconic Macquarie era buildings and Royal Botanic Gardens as the backdrop, on the way to Sydney Opera House and Circular Quay,
Happy Gloomers will don their breast-plates and shout out the stories of death, plague, rape and massacre.

Vivid’s Macquarie Visions celebrates the 200th anniversary of Australian visionaries Governor Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie – Gloom derides the Macquarie’s as ultimate Sydney wowsers they were and brings to light the darkness inherit in our history.

Gloom Sydney asks people to don a brass plate (as the above photo), as Macquarie asked Aboriginal leaders to do (Well the one’s he assigned as leaders), he did this so he could identify them, apparently they all looked the same. He was not content in building monuments to himself and naming them all after himself, he asked Aboriginals to bear their name embossed in brass on their breast plate, and add their own dark stories to this horrid site.

Monday, May 3, 2010

IGNITING THE SAILS

Gloom Sydney once again highlights the architectural vandalism of
Vivid’s Lighting the Sails, which features the spectacularly horrible
illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. Not since they changed the lighting on the bridge in the 90s has an aesthetic defacing been so horrible, this is state sponsored vandalism!

Gloom Sydney will play on this willful defacement of public property and seek to publicly highlight not only aesthetic crime but the willful
waste of money this vandalism costs. Energy Australia is sponsoring
Vivid Sydney to waste enormous amounts of electricity on this venture.

After all the good will and energy saved during EARTH HOUR the NSW Govt. thought it a good idea to use all that energy. How much does this cost?
And how many Sydney artists are being kept in the DARK by lack of
resources?!

Igniting the Sails- Seeks to address the thought that “Architecture can only be appreciated in a building that is burning”. While we would never invite a literal interpretation of this, we do seek visual analogies that best exemplify the above statement.

With this in mind we are calling non-permanent graffiti artists to
overlay the Opera House Projection or any Sydney building already
projected on and defaced by Vivid Sydney,
ideas could be:
Video projection, light projection, laser projection, invisible ink,
chalk…..

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Why all the GLOOM?

Why all the GLOOM?
The NSW government through Events NSW is producing a new Festival- Vivid Sydney. This Festival is hypocritical in that the NSW Government through Events NSW is celebrating how wonderfully creative Sydney is and at the same time the NSW Government through Arts NSW is increasingly not supporting the Arts, especially the small to medium independent sector and that sector is really struggling.
The small to medium independent sector is vital to the arts culture of Sydney. It breeds innovation and is the cultural undergrowth that sustains and nourishes the arts sector as a whole. How can you celebrate something you don't support at a grassroots level? The marketeers and the spin-doctors at Event NSW can talk up how wonderfully creative Sydney is but their rhetoric is clearly transparent hype; that arts prosper despite not because of the NSW government.
The NSW Government has summarily lumped the arts in with design, fashion, advertising, architecture, television, film and publishing and branded it “creative industries”. This cannot deflect from the Government’s responsibilities towards each of these individual industries or hide, in this convenient amalgam, its failures in the arts sector behind successes in other more commercial industries.
The labelling of all these industries as “creative” diminishes the word creative beyond its’ meaning and so renders it banal. That is not to say practices in these other industries do not involve creativity, they do. There is a long tradition of philosophical discussion on the definition and distinction, of what is the difference between art and other utilitarian industries? That is to say that some of the above industries do involve some degree of art and some art practices do involve commercialisation. My answer cannot be complete within the small confines of this article. However to me, within the arts there is a greater imperative that transcends the everyday and the utilitarian, beyond any economic rationality.
There is always a tension between the respectable legitimisation of the artist and artist keeping their sense of irresponsible illegitimacy. The basis of this tension is economic. Artists have to survive economically in a society that it often critiques. How much can artists bite the hand that feeds it? But the artist’s role is often seen as saboteur of society. Artist’s aim is often alienation of its audiences; an act of defiance that at once marks their individual freedom and announces the limits of societies capacities of inclusion, acceptance and understanding.
This underlies a greater cultural problem in the arts in Australia, of the overly paternalistic attitude towards artists. Artists cannot be trusted: to self manage, to self-assess, make their own decisions, to run their own spaces and create their own festivals. This has created an overly top-headed arts cultural beast, where funding is centered on the top - in management, or over-management, and little trickles down. By the time funding reaches the artists there is not much left. Artists generally don't get paid in NSW. Artists are relegated to 'hobbyists' in NSW.
Diverse cultural experiences that originate locally, beyond what is piped from elsewhere is also important in encouraging a sense of community and identity in Australia, it also allows young people here to make their own culture rather than be merely passive consumers. This is a privilege available to young people in most countries and one that Australian governments must provide its citizens. This is a democratic dividend- people as makers of culture not just consumers.
This distinct lack of imagination and creativity in Sydney is due to State Government back sliding on arts agendas, its’ distinct lack of vision. Why can’t we provide Sydney and its children vibrant cultural experiences and opportunities to build a new 21st century arts industry, get skills to participate and gets jobs in the arts and be competitive on the world stage?

GLOOM Sydney 2010 is Happy!

GLOOM Sydney 2010 is Happy!
27 May - 20 June 2010
The main theme for GLOOM 2010, besides the overjoyed happiness of being an artist in NSW, is the introduction of a new way of being an artist in NSW.
This new way is called PARA_SITE art,
A PARA-SITE artist is a positivist.
That artist assumes s/he has been invited, assumes s/he has been included.
It is the naïve assumption that we would never be excluded, that ALL are included.
There is no exclusion in PARA_SITE art. Everyone is part of the art.
There are no invitations to GLOOM 2010, everything that has been programmed in VIVID Sydney has been programmed expressly for GLOOM Sydney, programmed for YOU!
VIVID and GLOOM are symbiotically linked.
Happy GLOOM Sydney is the PARA_SITE of VIVID Sydney 2010.
If you do not appear on the VIVID program this has been an OVER_SITE
You just need to claim that space and join in,
WARNING: A good PARA_SITE does not halt or stop its host, this would harm not only the HOST but also the PARA_SITE.
So treat lightly and gently and take your place.
This is NOT a protest, it is an art movement of inclusion and you are ALL invited to join!
For every Vivid Sydney event, Gloom Sydney happily joins in to take its place.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The New Gloom Festival- Sydney Happy Gloom Festival 2010

The New Gloom Festival- Sydney Happy Gloom Festival 2010

Like the New Tories in Britain with their oxymoronic “Conservative Progressives” Sydney Gloom Festival has taken the advice of many and sort to re-brand itself in a brighter light. It is now for 2010:
The Sydney Happy Gloom Festival.
The Sydney Gloom Festival is spending (like Sydney University) millions of dollars re-branding itself. We have gotten rid of our Latin insignia of “Ab absurdo”, (which loosely translates life is shit and then you die).
We are currently engaging the services of international marketing firm Lickman, Hernia and Shmelnick to totally re-conceptualise the market positioning of the festival, to really open it up, especially to young people, who found the old festival too negative.
We are currently doing extensive community consultation, engaging with the Creative Community of Sydney to get a grass-roots appraisal of the feeling “on the street”.
As one Creative Sydneysider noted:
“ Creative people want happy, positive works that showcases the talents of young artists and brings communities together”
Debra Whitegoods, Cleo Magazine

Be a white sheep! And join our community

Stay tuned for News on the New Happy Gloom Festival...