trouble 146
MEDIA RELEASE JUNE 2017
CyberRunner Josh Van Zuylen
CyberRunner was inspired by the incredible works of Mike Pondsmith, Syd Mead and David Snyder. The ultimate goal, says Josh Van Zuylen was to stand alongside these high-profile legends, who helped to create and develop the instantly recognisable dystopian science fiction culture of Cyberpunk. “I was obsessed with the theme, I couldn’t get it out of my head and it kept growing bigger and better”, says Josh. Josh primarily used a Wacom Intuos Pro pen tablet to make a number of assets including concept modelling, UV, baking, texturing, engine implementation, all the way down to shader creation. After the initial burst of inspiration, Josh set out by creating several visualisation sketches in 3D, a process called white boxing. In this first stage, Josh looked at the main layouts, large shapes and forms as well as primitive lighting. Once he was happy with the white box, Josh moved into a stage called proxy modelling. This stage is where Josh fleshed out the scope and visual theme for the world. He then took a simple asset that would be represented by a cube in a white box and started to model shapes that formed silhouettes. This helps the assets to start looking like the end result without spending a large amount of development time, thus enabling them to be revised faster. This is a great way of working when you have no concept art. Once Josh created the proxy models and had a clear direction of where the project was headed, he moved into production. The process of designing high-resolution, artdeco style architecture models and their realtime counterparts was aided by the use of the Wacom Intuos Pro along with Photoshop, Quixel, Substance and Unreal Engine 4. The monstrous project demanded a total of six months solid work in production. Josh details the project as “huge in scale, especially as a solo personal assignment. It was an iterative process that included set dressing, developing several lighting scenarios, shader and weather systems, animation and cinematography. At one point, rebuilding the entire environment as the scene hierarchy was not working”. View the CyberRunner video and gallery - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JBbzR For further information about Wacom visit - buywacom.com.au
CONTENTS CYBERRUNNER
Josh Van Zuylen ......................................................................................
COMICS FACE
Ive Sorocuk .............................................................................................
JOHN WOLSELEY Studio Visit .............................................................................................
FITZROYALTY
Steve Proposch & Avatar Polymorph .....................................................
JUNE SALON
Just Saying ..............................................................................................
FINDING THE ART IN PHUKET: THE ART OF THE MOMENT
Anthony S. Cameron ..............................................................................
02 15 16 18 36
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COVER: Nicole Breedon, Cut the Air With a Knife (detail) 2016. Looped video. Courtesy of the Artist. Hoods, ANCA Gallery, 1 Rosevear Place Dickson (ACT), 7 – 25 June 2017 anca.net.au Issue 146 JUNE 2017 trouble is an independent monthly mag for promotion of arts and culture Published by Trouble Magazine Pty Ltd. ISSN 1449-3926 EDITOR Steve Proposch CONTRIBUTORS Ive Sorocuk, Josh Van Zuylen, Melissa Proposch, Avatar Polymorph, Anthony S. Cameron, love. GET from AppStore FOLLOW on issuu & twitter SUBSCRIBE at troublemag.com READER ADVICE: Trouble magazine contains artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and the names, images or artworks of deceased Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. Treat Trouble intelligently, as you expect to be treated by others. Collect or dispose of thoughtfully. DIS IS DE DISCLAIMER! The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication. The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions. All content in this publication is copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior permission of the publisher. Trouble is distributed online from the first of every month of publication but accepts no responsibility for any inconvenience or financial loss in the event of delays. Phew!
This comic first appeared in Trouble June 2012
John Wolseley: studio visit Thanks to Castlemaine Press we experience a delightful visit with John Wolseley in his studio as he talks about carving printing plates from 2,000+ year old wooden slabs.
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Brunswick Street : Art & Revolution
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Steve Proposch
During the 1950s and 60s the Australian working class became the aspirational middle class and moved in great number to the suburbs. These were mainly prewar babies who, now in their twenties, were getting hitched and raising young families. They wanted more than the dirty lanes and run down terrace houses of the inner city for their own children. They dreamed of quarter acres with proper backyards and new, clean garages for their FB Holdens and Ford Fairlanes to live in. They wanted lawns to mow and driveways and carports and new schools and shops, not broken incinerators in matchbox courtyards, the tired and smelly old schools they used to go to, dark and grumpy milk bars and parking on the street. They were supported in such endeavours by well-paid work in shopping ‘malls’ and freshly built factories, plentiful new planned housing with affordable mortgages and the promise of excellent returns on their investments. With their loss the inner cities became shadows of their former selves, where only grandparents and deros still lived, and all the struggling businesses and industries finally went under, leaving their burnt out, worthless shells gaping wide to the elements. The deros thought this was sweet and became squatters. The criminals, drug dealers and ne’er do wells were similarly chuffed with fewer people around to witness their dirty work. Inner city house prices slumped and it seemed they might never recover. Inner city rents were cheap as chips. In Melbourne this left places like Fitzroy, Collingwood, Richmond, North Melbourne and even Carlton virtually gutted. Flemington, Kensington and Footscray fared not much better with larger and stronger industrial infrastructure close at hand, but on the North East side the times were economically dire indeed. Of course, nothing lasts forever. What happened next occurred first in Carlton, to a small degree, and caught fire in Fitzroy. It is a well-documented social phenomenon that occurs over and again, all around the world, in a fairly similar pattern every
Fitzroyalty / Brunswick Street : Art & Resvolution
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time such conditions occur. It is a phenomenon that is spearheaded by artists, writers, actors, potters and creative weirdos of all kinds, who move in to take advantage of low rents and large, industrial spaces that nobody wants or cares about and where they remain free to live as they choose, make what they choose and earn what they choose in the way they choose to earn it, where fewer if any people care enough to try telling them how to live. But as surely as this movement begins it tolls its own death knell, known as Gentrification, which occurs without fail about ten to twenty years later, when all of a sudden the suburban mass begins to hanker for culture, and realises that the inner city is alive with it. Artists are thick on the ground in there. Thus, no sooner has their creativity brightened and enlightened the joint, and society besides, than the artists who have caused such positive change are forced out by skyrocketing rents and an influx of people who want what those scummy artists have got but have no ability or desire to improve or add to it. Before too long all the people who started the movement are forced to move on, either due to the jacked up rents and property prices, or the loss of peace and quiet prosperity replaced with high demand, demand, demand. In Fitzroy the phenomenon centred around Brunswick street, which is the subject of a new book by Black Pepper publishing, Brunswick Street: Art & Revolution. The book is filled with the stories of artists and creatives who lived a beautiful life in Fitzroy in the 70s and early 80s, a life full of community and fresh, brave culture, in a place where they could – all too briefly – almost believe they were free. Brunswick Street, Art & Revolution is the story of a street that became a culture. Written by Anne Rittman and Maz Wilson, it consists of a series of interviews and colour photographs with and of the people who brought about that transformation. It teems with characters: baristas, hair-cutters, potters, comedians, painters, singers, poets, restaurateurs and more. It evokes iconic places: the Black Cat, Pigtale Pottery, The Flying Trapeze, T F Much Ballroom, Bakers, Circus Oz , Scully & Trombone and the list goes on. It bursts with visual impact: performances, artworks, architecture and the Waiters’ Race for example. Here it is in its true form as a cultural, social and political history. Published by Black Pepper, 2017 - blackpepperpublishing.com Fitzroyalty / Brunswick Street : Art & Resvolution
Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, 5 January 2015 Photo by Marcus Bichel Lindegaard
Avatar Polymorph
The process of gentrification has now entirely swamped inner Melbourne. Though a handful of good music venues remain, the last teenage locals, who lived in their parents’ buildings, have left. Once the centre of group houses, illegal warehouses, artist studios, industrial ruins, underground theatres, pirate radio, performance art, and youthful sub-cultures like hippies, punks, goths, ravers, ferals, and not to forget students, with the most educated unemployed people in the land (50% had tertiary degrees), now even the most traditional bohemians can no longer afford to live in the old inner city. Once they lived gloriously amidst the last fragments of the old 20th century Irish Catholic working class slum culture. Today they are forced to the edge of the tram zone, halfway to the mega-city’s edge. Without cars they are now being pressured towards the scattered disc of Melbourne’s outermost zone. If lucky they live near a train station. Their physical social circles in the world outside Facebook shrink month by month. The last major independent Art School was amalgamated into Melbourne University kicking and screaming as diversity died. Student-only matchbox dorms are built with security guards at their entrances all night. Yuppies don’t socialize publicly at night and the streets are empty despite the extra people in the many new apartments. Tiny bedroom flats cost $420 a week, often paid to overseas landlords. Rent control is an unknown American concept. The tiny numbers of group houses left have lawyers living in them, not artists. San Francisco has gone the same way except for Tenderloin and the Mission where rent control allows the final few bohemians and poor to live, while Silicon Valley buses more and more of its workers in and out of Frisco for free in huge tinted-window vehicles paid for by Google and Facebook and other techs. The suburban media doesn’t even see what’s happened in Melbourne, which has suffered Sydney’s fate.
Fitzroyalty / Brunswick Street : Art & Resvolution
The death of a vibrant living culture spanning from 1965 and before to 2010 isn’t even reported, from the banning of vibrant street festivals to the extinction of smaller representative local councils and the absolute domination of developers politically. Homes for lease have huge expensive billboards; demand by the most affluent is so high. New one-bedroom flats rise in price in Fitzroy in 18 months from $320K to $430K. In this country, this is now as good as it gets. There is nowhere left for difference to live. The counter-cultures have been killed off as the rich have pushed them away to the outer limits of Melbourne and Sydney where they are dispersed into the physical isolation of widest suburbia and lose their community. Parties with fifteen youthful semi-bohemians who already know each other are the best that can be managed. In the universities management dismantles the student unions replacing them with privatized malls for the offspring of overseas elites. Suburban barbarians indifferently lick bespoke gelato on the streets before their kids in their thousand dollar prams while the local two dollar polyvalent drug user beggars from the final government tower blocks still not pulled down look on in a daze at a farcical remnant of what once was something akin to Paris in the 1920s. A crazy, wonderful world never fully documented, a world no one who ever lived within it thought would fade. I heard an 80 year old woman from Frisco tell me in 1997 outside the then Fitzroy Town Hall that the suburb was like her city, with all the human contact of a village but also the excitement of a big city. Now the inner city from St Kilda to Richmond to Collingwood and Fitzroy and Carlton is the ghetto of the very rich and the soul of diversity is lost. Melbourne still has alternative media and marvellous street art and some great live music but one can only hope that somewhere, somehow, self-sufficiency and technological empowerment could lead us to a world of three-D printed houses and nanotech-assembler products, powered by our own buildings with quantum dot solar tech and cheap hot or cold fusion. In the meantime most young Melbournians live in a monoculture of moveable nuclear families unable to breathe outside of the narrow confines of the workplace and family room, encroached on by the Murdoch media, and perhaps Facebook is the only friend the bohemian can see at an easy glance, and the Internet the only place left to walk in dreams. This article was originally submitted to Trouble in March 2014, but has remained unpublished until now. It is reproduced in unedited form here, dedicated to the memory of Avatar Polymorph who died from natural causes in September 2015. Avatar is featured in Brunswick Street: Art & Revolution. Photos ‘Are you afraid to make a new culture’ & ‘Living the dream’ by Avatar Polymorph.
Fitzroyalty / Brunswick Street : Art & Resvolution
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june salon
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june salon
1. Marlene Gilson, William Buckley meets the landing party, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 102, courtesy the artist. Badjur - Bagarook - Yorga - Woman, Manningham Gallery, Manningham City Square (MC²), 687 Doncaster Road, Doncaster (VIC), 24 May – 24 June 2017 - manningham.vic.gov.au/gallery 2. John Nixon, Untitled 2015, enamel on canvas, 75 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery. John Nixon: EPW, Castlemaine Art Museum, 14 Lyttleton Street Castlemaine (VIC), 19 March - 25 June 2017 - castlemainegallery.com 3. Sam Jinks, Medusa (Beloved) 2016, silicone, pigment, resin. La Trobe University Collection, Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. Revealing Identity: The Collections of La Trobe University. Bendigo Art Gallery, 42 View Street, Bendigo (VIC), 24 June–3 September. 4. Rona Green, Shitehawk vs Dirck ‘Foo-Foo’ De Cock 2015 & 5. Rona Green, McGoohan 2015, hand coloured linocuts. Courtesy of the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne. Rona Green: Champagne taste and lemonade pockets. Bendigo Art Gallery, 42 View Street, Bendigo (VIC), 24 June–3 September - bendigoartgallery.com.au 6. Brian Robinson, Land Sea Sky - Charting our place in the universe 2016, linocut printed on paper in black ink from one block. Winner of the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award 2017, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, 782 Kingsway, Gymea (NSW), 20 May until 16 July - hazelhurst.com.au 7. Jenny Orchard in her studio, 2017, portait by Greg Pier. Jenny Orchard features in the 2017 Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award (SMFACA), at Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), 70 Welsford St Shepparton (VIC). The winner will be honoured at the opening of the SMFACA exhibition on 17 June, which runs until 13 August 2017 sheppartonartmuseum.com.au 8. Clare Longley, The Eiffel Tower at Sunset From your Living Room 2017, detail, digital print on silk, tin, pine, clay. Image courtesy of the artist and Aaron Rees. Thanks For Having Me, BLINDSIDE, Level 7, Room 14, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St, Melbourne (VIC), 31 May – 17 June 2017 - blindside.org.au
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FINDING THE ART IN
Phuket The art of The Moment by Anthony S. Cameron
Photo by Steven Morrow - stevenmorrow.co.za - instagram.com/morrowsteven
Art is a slippery little beast at the best of times and I must admit, it is hard to get a good handhold, especially in the narcissistic paradise known as Phuket. Sure, there is plenty of stuff masquerading as art, and just as many atavistic animals masquerading as people. Even the elephants aren’t sure of their lines anymore, uncertain as to whether to tug at the chains that hold them or make music out of the dull clang of steel on concrete. Art here is an empty gesture most of the time, hanging on walls and sitting astride tables not knowing what to do, not knowing whether it is saying anything at all and not even sure if it cares. And that is why I try to stay as far away as possible from capital A Art, the stuff people surround themselves with to reassure themselves they have some culture, or worse, taste. A while back I had a short stint as an art installer in a fancy hotel that was being built for the Beckhams, Kardashians, and the like, to stay in. I was hanging three of Andy Warhol’s ‘Muhammad Ali’ prints next to a private boxing ring in a personal gym loaded with mirrors, and apart from being distracted by my own reflection repeated ad nauseam into eternity, I had cause to reflect on the way Art gets used by those who are wealthy enough to employ curators to tell them what to buy, what is a good investment and, most importantly, what the work says about them. The kind of people who could afford to buy Warhol’s work, I realised, were playing right into the artist’s large, pale hands. He was holding a mirror up to them and they didn’t even know it. And for the first time I became aware of Warhol’s particular genius. Suffice to say, the Art hung itself that day. The art of the everyday is what interests me, and to my eye, is far more poignant and beautiful, far more likely to arrest me with its intention, far more likely to make me want to smile. It can rush past you in a moment of pure brilliance as you try to avoid being sideswiped by the mad minivan drivers, themselves an everlasting moving sculpture fuelled by crystal meth and red bull. It can be slumped in a dirty corner of a forgotten slum at the end of a road topped with pool villas and take the form of children playing gleefully despite
Finding the Art in Phuket / Tony Cameron
ABOVE: Andy Warhol screenprints, Muhammad Ali, various (detail) 1978. Installation image by Tony Cameron.
their circumstances, their broken, recycled toys picked out of a foreigner’s rubbish bin and turned into a moment of pure joy. It can be in the mad dash into the jungle with all the other illegal workers when the immigration authorities turn up for their weekly kickback. Even though I had spent the day hanging great art, it turned out that the most poignant and sublime moment was to be found in this unexpected, shared camaraderie; in the dissolution of colour and race; in the smiles that transcended language and circumstance altogether. It was a mad, vaguely hilarious dash to save our skins, running from the same authorities that had brought most of them here in the first place. Now that’s what I call third world irony, in itself an art form here. Charles Bukowski once said that the difference between an intellectual and an artist is that an intellectual says a simple thing in a difficult way, whereas an artist says a difficult thing in a simple way. And that is where I think Art has lost its way. There’s too many well educated artists who are way too aware of their ‘process’, too aware of their audience, too aware of their own brilliance. What is wrong with letting your art speak for itself? Like needy children desperate for acknowledgment, we try to dazzle you with complex interpretations, attempt to impress upon you the significant context of our
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work, or the beguiling human emotions at play. Bollocks. Sometimes, sadly, the artist’s statement is the best work of art at the whole exhibition. The artists I love didn’t get a nice education. They didn’t have the luxury to ponder the significance of one brushstroke over another. They spray it on a wall and get the fuck outta there before they get busted. What they do is often political, and often falls on deaf ears, or at best catches the distracted eye of another commuter perpetually stupefied by the latest status update. The art I love might not exist for more than a few moments, but wow, what an amazing few moments that can be. One of the most powerful sculptures I have seen was at Afrikaburn 2016. It stood 20 metres tall against a fading desert sky and was set alight as the first stars made their presence felt, to an audience of over ten thousand people. The sculpture, called ‘Clan’, comprised of three wooden people dancing together, holding each other’s plywood hands and laughing in pure joy, their heads held high reflecting a rare moment of human ecstasy. The orange and blue flashes lit up the night sky as the flames engulfed the three dancing figures. Spontaneously people started stripping their clothes off and started running around its flaming perimeter as others, like myself, just stared up in wonder and felt the tears collecting in the corners of our eyes, giving a silent thanks for the small moments of beauty that were still available to us amongst the mayhem that was human existence in the 21st century. All we had to do was open our eyes, look away from the phones that were capturing the moment and reducing it to byte sized captions and heavily pixelated pale versions of something that didn’t ask for any of this shit. It just was, for its brief life, one of the few great messages sent out into the universe and it made me feel proud to be human, proud to be still screaming, proud to be fighting the good fight, one that doesn’t use weapons or corporations, one that doesn’t drag our humanity to its knees. One that just is, because that is all it has to be. A beacon of hope from another lost generation. > Watch Afrika Burn 2016 San Clan Burn on Youtube ANTHONY S. CAMERON is an Australian ex-pat living in Phuket, Thailand, and the author of two novels, Driftwood (2014) and Butterfly on Bangla (2015). Born in Melbourne, he escaped in his early twenties to central Victoria, where he designed and built a sustainable house, raised two sustainable children. His books are available on Amazon here.
Finding the Art in Phuket / Tony Cameron