...after almost two years somebody has finally rinsed off that partially vandalised horse/boot drawing from the window of the Moray Place back entrance (of sorts) to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery... Douglas Rex Kelaher's rocks-as-you-walk-by, mechanical-egg-on-incubator plinth sculpture was laid the same day as an article in The Midweeker about the first new-born egg at the Tairoa Albatross Colony... or something... interesting coincidence - neither have emerged yet, although there was a 10-speed propped against that window this morning... the toast of the art school was also busy-busy straightening out the Blue Oyster Gallery (High Street, opp. Arc Café) for the second instalment of his Future-Proof series work Waiting Room... missed the opening G&Ts but had already caught the new sensation at Christchurch's High Street Project earlier in the year (thumbs up - HSP Show of the Year)... the banana lounger is set, it is said, to transform itself into a Ben Webb painting in the very near future... nice... word on the street, however, is that the show didn't go down well with Channel 9's Rosemary Entwisle - her "to hell with the work, let's focus on the artist statement" approach sounded, well, just boring... nevermind - probably better she didn't like it... Channel 9's student-tomfoolery show McLiquor C.O.W. has recently kicked off repeats. the '99's season finale featured the best stupidity from a year full of shows... personal favourites would have to include the one where they fill up the water pistol from a public dunny and hose Dunedin's finest parking meter wardens, and of course the show's much trotted trademark, The Walk-of-Shame - an interview segment questioning "seedy cats" crawling home hungover Sunday morn' about whether they scored and if she was "a bit of alright."... call Channel 9 to syndicate it in your town... the actual location of a website is always a dubious affair but two recent Dunedin peeps worthy of mention are the Radio One site and Slack™'s signature site... the Toshi Endo flash-fuelled Radio One masterpiece reeled in this from Sam at the multi-talented the knitting factory, Bronx, NYC - "fuck me man - seen a lot of radio sites but nothing like www.r1.co.nz. congrats to tiny, tiny Dunedin"... props and all that... everybody employ the guy - he's in Wellington... www.fink.net.nz/slack/ is currently down but I'm promised it will be a kick-ass affair - nothing like their recent series of extra relaxed Slack™ house evenings... self-described as retro-futuristic, they couldn't be anything but arty affairs with guest stylists and "all mod-cons" (thematic video rental and 14 inch tellys)... understated and positively gentle they seemed to lack the tears of regular house nights and expose the ever-absent humour of dance promotion... mitsubishis essential... many were also left smiling with eyes squinting after opening speaker Peter McLeavey's wisdom at the Public's opening of Bill Hammond and Grunt Machine: better late than never... along similar lines to those recent Art NZ adverts, the DPAG address opened minds to surreal journeys into future youth watching rugby in hotel rooms, discmans on buses, concrete jungles and rather special art galleries - truly lifting for the human spirit... and without mentioning the "well-hung" painting pun (along with anything to do with Hammond organs) - nice shows too... behold the secret raver...

Undo fuc misery Georganne Dean Oil and collage on linen Private Collection, Santa Monica, 1998

I forgot about the opening of Georganne Deen's show 15 Psychic Orgasms at the Public Gallery - a visitor from LA on the Otago Polytechnic's Artists at Work artist-in-residence programme... apparently accompanied at the opening by a dashing filmstar who jetted in for the occasion... wonderful, wonderful show in the BNZ Gallery - socially haunting yet beautiful... strangely familiar, when compared with some-time resident Adam Cullen's Amateur Exorcist and Bill Hammond's 23 Big Pictures upstairs... even stranger surrounding a bunch of Vanity Walk school-girls, assembled catwalk-ready for the Otago Polytechnic end-of-year fashion show... (yes, I was one of the models)... nothing like some 16mm two-dollar experimental German films to escape a sunny Saturday afternoon - I attended the first programme screened recently at the DPAG... two animations, some very German hallucinations (Gothic architecture, black blood, underwater angst)... and yes, some Nazi tank footage... the fabulous Ah Pook is Here stood out as being distinctly un-German with its W. S. Burroughs texts and mangled chickens... stereotypes are thankful things sometimes... the Temple Gallery's Peter Duncan managed to break his sternum and a couple of ribs in a recent inner-city gap-jumping accident... after several weeks in hospital, and who knows what sort of drugs, he emerged to promptly whitewash all the gallery walls... I dunno, maybe he saw the tunnel?... watch for the old guard in a white Christmas show there before Christmas... the Ho'dogs played their last gig a month or so ago now (Tim is now an aborigine in Australia) - excellent gig and kinda sad as well... apparently (I stood on the seats down the back) Tim was completely pants-around-his-knees-naked on two occasions... and pashing rumoured new frontman Gerald Stewart... it was nice to see the whole thing reach its natural conclusion... ie. Tim's pants finally came off (for all those eager girls who attended every gig) AND the somewhat blatant homoeroticism finally came out... down with the talk of them just getting a new singer - new name and disguises for all I say... it's worthwhile mentioning here also that the Ho'dogs played their first gig at the Honeymoon Suite's upstairs space some years ago... and that the green gallery-owners were dumbfounded when, five minutes before the show, a dishevelled, lost-it-all-on-the-casino businessman (Matt Middleton) arrived with a vehicle hub cap and four inch nail and proceeded to hammer his artwork up on one of the concrete walls... he later tried to set fire to the gallery floor but that was far from the most eventful episode of the evening... what is up with the homoeroticism on all those Radio One ads - did Subway actually agree to all those Diggler references? Who is behind these ads? Were they somehow related to the naming of the Blue Oyster gallery?... all were ladies at Emma Kitson's Obsolete Oyster opening - a crate of Waitemata and Schweppes Lemonade could only mean one thing - shandies... that, and the return of this ever popular New Zealand kids' drink to the kiwi opening scene... the refreshments went down nicely with Kitsons' colonial mix of NZ native plant-decorated screens and not-quite kiwiana... heavy-weights Julian Daspher and LawrenceAberhardt rolled into town for dual (not duel) shows at the Public last week... after attending the opening soiree uninvited, I'm pleased to announce that the stand-outs (apart from Julian's star belt-buckle) were a broad range of '70s ties, including one with matching '70s suit - you know the ones with the very roundy bottoms - and a very authentic-looking orthodox outfit... also present - Sydney's leather-clad Darren Knight and collector-entourage fresh from an afternoon spree at the Hocken... plenty of widescreen band practice, pastel target drum skins and a mix of older work from the DPAG vault, but no sign of any Auckland Warriors logos (or even colours for that matter) as reported by the ODdiTy on the day of the opening... Daspher did manage to slip a good quote under their door though, claiming that the sponsorship "...helps to debunk this whole idea that Joe Public doesn't understand art." In retaliation the ODdiTy cited Daspher as a modernist (among other things) in a review the following week...when was that Gombrich book published again? Shay Launder's a boy had a mouthful of glitter still survives after something like five years amongst the rubble on the former Century Theatre site... apparently a reference to an early Tiso Ross work and just the beginning of a sentence that would have been longer if she had not been interrupted by the new owner in his black limousine... alongside, also, are probably some of the best examples of Jacob Leaf's Vipers stencil graffiti and the site for the as-yet undeveloped Tyre Shop the site was cleared for in 199?... he graduates this year... and for those of the class of '96 - weep in your oils over this one: http://membres.lycos.fr/antomoro/art/lieux/ventre/narbey.html

Warren Olds
Summer 2000