Colette

Colette says everything with the utmost elegance and precision. In Cheri and The Last of Cheri, written towards the end of her career, Colette is consistently drop-dead funny in a social comedy kind of way, but her comedy is shaped into the most heart-rending, psychological depiction of the inevitabilities of estrangement, sadness, distance, age. Colette is Proust within a champagne bubble. The courtesans decorate their boudoirs in pink silk, read the financial trades, deal behind each other's backs in rubber futures. Colette, like the filmmaker Almodovar, loves and recognizes women as only a drag queen can.

Approaching 50, Lea, Cheri's heroine, is like a grown-up Claudine. Like Claudine in her adolescent omnipotence, Lea knows everything but, unable to keep her 25 year old lover from pursuing his own future, what good does knowledge do? With caustic grace, Lea becomes an earthy wise-cracking old woman, a parody of Colette's 19th century predecessor, George Sand. But each of Colette's scenes is perfect in its incandescence, and even more miraculous when read as parts of the whole: exquisitely positioned pieces of a larger narrative, cumulative and whole.

Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Colette is the muse de jour of all the local dykes. I sit on the bed in my one bedroom secretary condo reading her, when it's too hot to go outdoors.
Chris Kraus

see Lowe's comment about this image, Colette 'Real Dream (Sleeping Performance)' 1975

Kain Picken and Pat Foster

'As is' Clubs Project Inc
211 Gertrude Street Fitzroy Melbourne, July 2005

Kain Picken and Pat Foster made a show out of partially stolen IKEA products. There is an ‘As is’ section at IKEA which has broken, marked, scratched or remaindered goods. In the 'As is' section, prices are written on the item with a black felt tip marker. The artists took their own markers to IKEA, they said, 'We discovered that we could nominate our own prices'. Before the show opened though, they got caught. Kain Picken describes the situation, 'We’d been getting more ambitious about what we were getting, more expensive items, and we’d been going a couple of times a week. This one day we were kinda being blasé about it and getting a lot of stuff, and we aroused suspicion. We came back two days later and this big security guard guy came up to us and said, ‘Are you here to shop?’ and I said ‘Well of course I’m here to shop’. He said, ‘I’m not accusing you of anything, but you have to leave the store’.'

An exercise in how the artist might start to negotiate as the customer. As art and design interact with an expanded form of writing, it reveals a way for the consumer to speak through the object.
Rob McKenzie

see Lowe's comment related to these images

see Morton's comment related to this image

Kate Fulton

'Panic Bolt' Studio 12
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces Melbourne, July 2005

Walking into Kate Fulton’s work made the floor crack underfoot; it consisted of sheet-glass that had been installed over a singular electrical cord that ran the length of the work. The 4-or-so-mm of space opened up by the girth of the cord produced a little layer of space between the actual floor and the newly articulated glass surface, rendering it a horizontal zone engaged in a perpetual process of breakage with every foot of weight. Fulton’s work harnesses little energies and coagulates them together into something visceral. This particular work activates the ‘body’, staging it as a site for the co-mingling of energies. The body gets enveloped by and (almost erotically) involved with the greater force of the work. The work becomes a world that choreographs and registers the body, while in turn being inscribed by it.

On leaving, my clunky backpack came in close contact with one of the walls and they shuddered. I saw that these weren’t the walls that I’d already assumed them to be, but paper screens standing in as walls, waiting to be shredded to bits. This is the kind of work I love; it's always more, different, multiple; an event much greater than the will to know it.
Bianca Hester

see Kate Just's comment