It’s been 37 years since Gilbert & George made their astonishing debut at the Art Gallery of NSW as The Singing Sculpture, singing “Underneath the Arches” on a tabletop for five hours at a time.

To celebrate the exhibition 40 years: Kaldor Public Art Projects exhibition, Gilbert & George are returning to Sydney – on Valentine’s Day.

From 1.30–2.30pm they will be signing limited edition Valentine’s Day cards for the public, and from 2.30–3.15pm they will be interviewed by gallery director Edmund Capon.

Here they are with their “favourite dancing song”, ‘Bend It’. Wouldn’t you care to join them in bending it?

Art & About starts in Sydney today. In its seventh year it has become a fully fledged festival in its own right although, as is Sydney’s confusing habit these days, it’s also under the umbrella of the Crave festival, a label cooked up by tourism marketers to cover all the events in October.

The program is hefty, incorporating sub-festivals around Oxford Street, Kings Cross and Danks Street, Waterloo. It runs from today until 25 October, and the entire program is available online, here.

The festival opens tonight with a celebration in Hyde Park North that includes an Aboriginal smoking ceremony at 6.15pm.

In this post I’ll run through the three events which are the core of Art & About in the Sydney CBD. They’re all free and you can see them 24 hours a day for the duration festival.

The annual display of artworks reproduced as flags throughout the city, called Open Gallery, consists this year entirely of new work by Aboriginal artists living in NSW. The works were curated by Djon Mundine, formerly of the Museum of Contemporary Art and now Aboriginal Curator, Contemporary Art at the Campbelltown Arts Centre.

The flags are in the city, as well as William St, Redfern St, Taylor Square, Erskineville Rd and Glebe Point Rd.

The original artworks the flags were drawn from are being exhibited in the foyer of the AMP Building, 33 Alfred St, Circular Quay, until 25 October.

The outdoor exhibition of large-scale photos hung between the trees in Hyde Park, Sydney Life, is now one of the most hotly contended competitions in the country. This year there were 585 entries and 22 finalists are on show. One will win the Sydney Life Prize, worth $10,000, and you can vote for the People’s Choice Award – the winner will get $3,000 and one voter will win a digital camera.

There’s a talk at the Beauchamp Hotel (cnr Oxford and South Dowling Sts, Darlinghurst) with participating photographers and judges Julie Rrap, Sandy Edwards and Malcolm Smith on Saturday 3 October from 2–3.30pm.

If you want to see the exhibition and make a night of it, the Sydney International Food Festival Night Noodle Markets run from 12–23 October just north of the Archibald Fountain.

Although it’d be nice to find a small bar in each of them, eight of the city’s laneways are hosting  temporary art projects that combine installation, music, architecture, sculpture, technology and more. Laneways: By George, as it’s called, is new to Art & About this year and runs from today right through until the end of the Sydney Festival. The lanes all run off George Street between Martin Place and Circular Quay.

Some are subtle, like the “skin” and heartbeat in Bridge Lane, while other will interrupt the space with large-scale furniture, plantings and lighting. Some are hi-tech marvels while others are lo-fi enhancements. The project pictured above is for Angel Place, with birdsong and birdcages livening up the lane. The project has its own website, here, where you’ll find a map and details of events.

Image details, from top:

Andrew Goldie, Sydney is dawning on me.

Open Gallery works, left to right:

Aunty May Hinch, Untitled.

Roy Kennedy, I’m Never Alone.

Adam Hill, U…R…an’ I ummmm … we are AFAILINGLAND.

Graham Davis King, Bat Kinship.

Warwick Keen, PROUD.

Gordon Syronm, Meeting Place: Spirits of the Past and Present.

Sydney Life works, in slideshow:

Gregory McBean, Beating the Heat.

Kasia Werstak, Applause.

Dean Tirkot, Self Portrait.

Alina Gozin’a, Holroyd High School.

Garry Trinh, Mr Fixit.

Janie Barrett, Bodybuilder at Coogee Beach.

Roslyn Sharp, Theresa outside her Darlinghurst home.

Diego Emilio Ibanez, A Night in the Life.

The two monumental bronze sculptures outside the Art Gallery of NSW just got new homes. Gilbert Bayes’ The Offerings of War and The Offerings of Peace (1923) haven’t moved; instead, the homes have come to them.

Japanese conceptual artist Tatzu Nishi has enclosed the statues in temporary structures. Inside are a couple of ordinary rooms – a living room and a bedroom – which seem completely unremarkable except for the surreal presence of the sculptures protruding into the space. The new work is called War and peace and in between. It’s part installation, part magic trick and a deceptively brilliant piece of engineering.

Tatzu Nishi has been building domestic spaces around public monuments, artworks and streetlights for over a decade. He incorporates these familiar, pre-existing structures into temporary, intimate domains, forcing us to reconsider the public/private divide and changing their heroic message. Previous works have taken him to Tokyo, Dublin, Berlin, Basel, Seville, Los Angeles. You can see past projects at his website, here.

In 2002, Tatzu built a functioning five-star hotel around a statue of Queen Victoria for the Liverpool Biennial in the UK. Visitors were invited to “spend the night with Queen Victoria” in the Villa Victoria.

The Sydney project was commissioned to coincide with the opening of 40 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects: 1969 – 2009. There have now been 19 public art projects, including Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping 2.5 kilometres of Little Bay’s coastline in fabric in 1969, Gilbert & George’s The Singing Sculpture in 1973, Jeff Koons’ Puppy in 1995, Gregor Schneider’s cells on Bondi Beach in 2007 and Bill Viola’s video installations in a Redfern church last year.

Tatzu Nishi will present an artist’s talk on Friday 2 October, 1–2.30pm in the Centenary Auditorium (free but seating will be limited, so get there early). War and peace and in between and 40 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects: 1969 – 2009 opens on 2 October and will run at the Art Gallery of NSW until 14 February 2010.

It didn’t come as a surprise to me to learn that Rammey Ramsey was a friend of the late Paddy Bedford. The similarities in the visual languages of both senior Gija men are clear. Both paint in what’s become known as the Kimberley style, made famous by Rover Thomas: sparse, flat and with minimal dotting. Bedford was one of the founders of Jirrawun Arts which Ramsey, now 74, began painting for in 2000. According to traditional Gija genealogy, Ramsey is Bedford’s son.

An exhibition of Ramsey’s new works on paper just opened at Grantpirrie, in Sydney.

Ramsey paints the country of his birth and family, mostly the gorge country northwest of Halls Creek, Western Australia, in an area surrounding Elgee Cliffs. [map]

These works distill the features of the landscape into lines, for rivers or roads, rectangles, for hills and stockyards (Ramsey, Bedford and Thomas all worked as stockmen), and circles, for water-holes, camping places or caves.

Rammey Ramsey, New Works on Paper, runs until 24 October 2009. Grantpirrie is at 86 George St, Redfern. [map]

Images details, all works:
Rammey Ramsey, Untitled 2008. Gouache on art board. 51 x 76cm.

“I settled on the spaces we occupy,” he says. “Interiors, dwellings, shelters and homes.”

Here are five highlights of the line-up co-curated by Sheehy and Simon Maidment.

Callum Morton, 'Valhalla'

Valhalla

Originally presented at the Venice Biennale, Callum Morton’s Valhalla is being seen for the first time in Australia, and in the city where its story began. A three-quarter scale reproduction of the Modernist concrete-slab home built by Morton’s architect father 35 years ago, the work seems like an anti-monument: gutted, torched, vandalised, smoking and pitted with holes. Inside, however, is a disjointed, almost magical reality, a pristine marble corporate lobby where the sound of lifts can be heard whirring away into oblivion and a single attendant, mop at the ready, to clean away any traces of the vision of hell just outside the door.

9–24 October, 11am–8pm, the Arts Centre forecourt. Free.

Simryn Gill, from 'Power station'

Inland

A complete survey of Simryn Gill’s photographs of interiors, inside both natural and built environments, from Forest (1996-98) to new work produced as an artist’s book, Train to the West (2009), about travelling to Sydney’s Western suburbs. The core of the exhibition is new work commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Inland. Gill visited remote communities across Australia, from mining towns to tourist centres, photographing interiors of the homes of the people she met. Video works Vessel (2004) and From A Lecture by Simryn Gill will also be on show.

9 October–13 December, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George St, Fitzroy. Free.

David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, 'House 2: The Great Artesian Basin, Pennsylvania, USA'

The Dwelling

“Haunted houses” is the easiest way to sum up this group show, with the works exploring surreal happenings, apparent hauntings and other spookiness. Artists included in the survey include filmmaker Chantal Akerman, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s evocation of women with psychosis, two sound installations by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, the surreal videos of David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, and Sofia Hultén’s family, cooking up ways to frighten each other. Callum Morton is also here with his reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and a soundtrack that begins with a tinkling cocktail party and ends with gunshots and screams.

9 October–29 November, Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank. Free.

Designed and built by Kichizou Kawasaki with Takaya Fujii

Shelter: On Kindness

The writings of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor in On Kindness (Penguin, 2009) are at the heart of this exhibition, which brings together artists, architects, writers and thinkers to reflect on the nature of physical and metaphorical shelter. How does a roof over our head, however simple, affect us? Australian participants include Charles Anderson, Nigel Bertram, Robert Bridgewater, Gregory Burgess, Rodney Eggleston, Pip Stokes, Dr Stephen Haley, Prof Peter Corrigan and Prof Paul Memmott. International guests include Prof Terunobu Fujimori, Prof Murdo MacDonald and Anne-Laure Cavigneaux.

25 September–25 October, RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne. Free.

Gordon Matta-Clark, from 'Program Two' 1971–72, and from 'Program Six' 1974–76

Open House

Gordon Matta-Clark is today considered an artist ahead of his time. He became well known in the early 1970s for his work that combines a kind of performative architecture, removing entire sections of abandoned buildings or altering them in striking ways, with what we recognise today as installation art and concepts of sustainability and social engagement. He died in 1978, aged 35. Open House is an exhibition of his film work.

9 October–25 October, 9am–late, Gallery 1, The Arts Centre, 100 St Kilda Road, Melbourne.

Image details, from top:

Callum Morton, Valhalla, 2007, exterior and interior installation views. Steel, polystyrene, epoxy resin, silicon, marble, glass, wood, acrylic paint, lights, sound, motor. 465 x 1475 x 850cm. Images courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Simryn Gill, from Power station, 2004. Type C photograph and gelatin silver photograph, one in a series of 13 pairs. 19 x 42cm.

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, from House II: The Great Artesian Basin, Pennsylvania, USA, 2003. Video still.

Designed and built by Kichizou Kawasaki with Takaya Fujii, 2004.

Gordon Matta-Clark, from Program Two, 1971-72 and Program Six, 1974-76. Film stills. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

T-shirt design

Els, who’s 20, is currently studying graphic design at the Gold Coast Institute of TAFE, and says he’s been drawing since he was two years old.

Family Tree, snowboard artwork

His next stop: the board design industry – “skate, snow or wake,” he says.  I say that’s if a savvy streetwear label doesn’t offer him a deal first. Or both.

Icy POP! snowboard designs

Illustration talent scouts, get in now while you can still afford him. Make contact with Brandon (whose name lends itself conveniently to the label Brand1) here.

Type strike

Matilda “Tilly” Devine’s mugshots, 1927

Roaming the streets of Darlinghurst on a desperate search for after-hours booze sounds like something we all might have done at some stage. This time around, however, you’ll be getting some help from infamous characters from the 1920s via a video GPS device.

Razorhurst is a live, interactive game that immerses players in the seedy underworld of the Sydney of almost a century ago. It takes about an hour to play, is free, and you come away with some real insights into a notorious time in the city’s history.

You pick up your GPS device at the East Village Hotel in Palmer St, a place that itself was a den of iniquity called the Tradesman’s Arms. Its patrons were the local prostitutes and pimps, SP bookies, drug dealers, and assorted pickpockets, muggers and con men. In the heart of the red-light district, it was also across the road from the headquarters of Tilly Devine, madam-in-chief of the largest network of brothels the city has ever seen.

Your mission is to collect sly grog, supplies of liquor for the illegal after-hours bars when all of Sydney’s pubs shut at six o’clock. The GPS device will track your movements, offer clues, video and sound information, maps and archival photos.

Group of criminals, Central Police Station, 1921

It’s not just a tour, however. There’s always the threat of gangsters – the notorious razor gangs – catching up with you and, instead of ending the game at the pub you could find yourself paying a visit to the hospital.

Razorhurst runs Sunday-Thursday nights from 5 to 13 September. You can start the game anytime between 5.30 and 8.30pm at the East Village Hotel, 243 Palmer St, Darlinghurst. It’s free, and you can book online here.

Razorhurst was designed and developed by Richard Fox, and is project of dLux/MediaArts. The September season is being presented as part of NSW History Week 2009.

Image details, from top:

Matilda Devine, criminal record number 659LB, 27 May 1925. State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW. NSW Dept. of Prisons/Justice & Police Museum.

Mug shot inscribed “Group of Criminals Central 1921″, c.1921. Central Police Station, Sydney. NSW Police Department/Justice & Police Museum.

New Australian snowboard brand Koast Kollektive (how could Kollektor resist them?) is unveiling a series of illustrated boards at the Saatchi & Saatchi Gallery, Sydney, this Thursday 3 September.

Kollektor knows nothing about snowboards (the tech specs for Koast’s are here) but the illustrations on these are light years away from the graphics you normally see on sports equipment – and that even includes the Chanel surfboards. Roxy this is not.

Koast snowboards are handmade to order and customers can choose from a great range of illustration and graphics styles from both established and emerging artists from Australia and around the world.

Board illustrations and other artwork will be shown by Jeremy Geddes, Paul White and Justin Lee Williams from Melbourne, Emily Hasselhoff, Chris Healey, Sonia Hruszycky, Heesco and Reyel from Sydney, Dan B and French from the UK, Halska Masash from Poland, Nico from Namibia and BOB from Montreal.

The Saatchi & Saatchi Gallery is at 70 George St, Sydney [map].

The exhibition opens on Thursday 3 September from 6pm to 9pm, with music from DJ Normz and DJ Halfcut. It runs until Thursday 10 September and is open weekdays from 9am to 5pm.

He had his Black Period, his Crosses Period, his Silver Period, his Orange Period and now, at 60, John Nixon has moved on to colours. It’s like Moscow, 1915, all over again.

Nixon started painting the EPW: Polychrome (the EPW stands for “Experimental Painting Workshop”) works in 2006, and in 2007 showed more than 100 of them at the TarraWarra Museum of Art in Healesville, Victoria. He calls them Colour-Rhythm paintings, classified into groups, each with its own colour system.

The Colour-Group E (Random) paintings incorporate nine colours: three primary and three secondary colours, and black, white and silver. The order is random; each painting is, according to Nixon, another experiment within a decades long – in his words, “never-ending” – project of pure painting.

My interest is not so much in returning to history as developing that history. I see my work as a continuation of the radical Modern project.

In 2009, Nixon is a radical Modernist like couture cobbler Christian Louboutin is a radical Modernist, except that Louboutin is making something new. Nixon reiterates bits of old strategies from the early history of abstract painting, almost a century after the fact: Suprematism, Constructivism and, with this latest batch of work, the interest in colour rhythm of the Italian Futurists.

In April this year Nixon showed “Applied Paintings” from Colour Group E (Random), including designs for theatre sets, wall-paintings and stage curtains – classic Productivism; all that was missing were costume designs for the Ballets Russe – at the Anna Schwartz Gallery. This latest exhibition, at the Sarah Cottier Gallery, is an installation of a small group of colour stripe paintings.

Two Colour Fracture (Colour Group A) paintings are also included. These are more interesting works, a proto-Cubist variation on the stripes that move outside the strict geometry of the entire series and, indeed, the vast bulk of Nixon’s work. A moving line is a rare thing in a Nixon painting. If he keeps this up he could find himself in the Milan of the 1920s any day now.

John Nixon, EPW: Polychrome is at the Sarah Cottier Gallery, 3 Neild Ave, Paddington [map] until 19 September 2009.

Image details, from top:

John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Random) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 180cm.

Slides:

1. Installation view, Sarah Cottier Gallery.

2. John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Spectrum) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 90cm.

3. John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Random) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 90cm.

4. John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Random) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 90cm.

5. John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Random) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 180cm.

6. John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Random) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 90cm.

7. John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Random) 2008, installation view. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 180cm and 60 x 360cm.

8. John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Group E (Random) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 120cm.

John Nixon, Untitled – Colour Fracture (Colour Group A) 2008. Enamel on MDF, 60 x 90cm.

Cullen, whose best known work is his 2000 Archibald Prize–winning Portrait of David Wenham, is having a boutique hotel named after him that will house more that 450 pieces of his art in its 115 rooms.

Not bad for someone who famously kicked off a career as an artist with a performance piece that involved dragging around a rotting pig’s head chained to his leg while still at school.

The Cullen Hotel is on Commercial Road in Prahan opposite the Markets in the heart of the southside gay entertainment strip. It is already an unmissable landmark now that its lime green facade has been completed. As the fitout continues towards a late-October opening date, Cullen is putting the finishing touches to the work that will greet guests in the foyer: two life-sized fibreglass cows.

Original Cullen paintings and sculpture will be displayed throughout the hotel, with fine-art prints in all of the rooms.

When art in hotel rooms is usually innocuous to the point of being anodyne, Cullen’s work is an surprising choice. He was often labelled the “bad boy” of Australian art early in his career as a result of his aggressively painted pictures of dead cats and kangaroos, punks and headless women, drunks and bushrangers. But of all the artists of his generation, he’s also the most Australian; his work is a reflection of a particularly dark version of Australia, seen through a broken mirror.

Adam Cullen, 'Auto Portrait'

Now in his 40s, Cullen is neither bad nor a boy. His portraits of famous men, especially, including the Wenham portrait, AGNSW director Edmund Capon and comedian Mikey Robbins, have brought him a new level of notoriety. So has the continuous harping of critics who dismiss his technique as careless and haphazard.

I think part of Cullen’s importance is his preservation of the aesthetics of punk: stripped down and raw, free from the constraints of sentimentality and virtuosity. He can also be very funny, which is often overlooked, and he’s a superb colourist.

The Cullen Hotel is the first of a planned six “Art Series Hotels” being built in Melbourne by Asian Pacific Building Corporation between now and 2011. The others are being named after John Olsen (Chapel Street, South Yarra), Charles Blackman (St Kilda Road), David Larwill (High Street, Prahran), Michael Knight (Glenferrie Road), and Brett Whitely (Daly Street, South Yarra). The company created The Storrier (after Tim Storrier) in Sydney in 2007, which it sold to the Quest serviced apartments group in 2008.

Painting details
Adam Cullen, Auto Portrait 2007. Ink, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on canvas, 183 x 182.5cm.