"Shit: Vivienne Binns in collaboration with Derek O'Connor and Geoff Newton"
2003-11-14 until 2003-12-20
Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House
Braddon, AC, AU

Creativity has raw beginnings. Life has a messy, fluid start. Art, like life, includes all that we want to know about, all that we don’t know and all that we want to ignore. Vivienne Binns’ work emerged in 1967 with an explosion in her first exhibition at Watters Gallery, Sydney, described by a blustering critic as “a tenth rate phallic temple”. This was the first powerful contemporary moment in a career that has been driven by a need to understand the forces behind those creative insights which break through the conventions of social conditioning. As another more perceptive critic noted “This show will tear you apart and make you question every social value we live by”.

In this search Binns’ practice has taken up many positions – individual studio work, craft practice, community interaction and collaborative projects – and has explored media, process, form, aesthetics, pedagogy and relationship.

SHIT illustrates the messy process of locating such contemporary moments bringing us into the present through collaborations with Geoff Newton and Derek O’Connor.

In a potentially awkward collaborative negotiation Binns with O’Connor and Newton formulated a two-way challenge. Each artist had the initiating rites with a blank canvas then forwarded it to the artistic partner to complete. There was no interference with content, no overlaying of marks. Just two artists, and several single works that demonstrate mutual interest in anarchic modes of artistic production.

Catalogue available

Essays and commentry by Vivienne Binns, Merryn Gates and Lisa Byrne

IMAGE
Vivienne Binns/Derek O’Connor
Drawing on Parkinson’s Fish 2003
Acrylic on canvas
115.0 x 175.0 cm

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Australia

Other Important Exhibitions in Australia