Exhibition Venue!

Very pleased to be offered two months for the Splinters Exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) beginning late September 2013, by its Director Mr Shayne Breynard. It’s ideal for the purpose as it includes a Theatre for screening of video of Splinters material and the planned documentary. CMAG is of course right next to the plaza which was the site of landmark work Guardians of the Concourse in 1993. We will also be approaching the Canberra Theatre Centre, site of a Splinters poster exhibition in 1994 and site of the season Mysteries in 1996, to host some work.

Guardians of the Concourse 1993, photo by Katherine Pepper

Canberra Museum and Gallery

Remembering David Branson

A wonderful tribute afternoon last Sunday at The Street Theatre to the sadly missed David Branson, co-founder of Splinters, my dear friend and a creative dynamo whose energy and passion inspired so many. Lovely to see so many colleagues and friends from those days, enjoy a few drinks, moving speeches and music by many including Mikelangelo and Black Sea Gentlemen. Thanks to the Branson family, especially Pip, for organising it. A lot of good contacts remade and information shared for the archive project as well. A link here to a terrific photo set from the afternoon by Konrad Lenz.

DB in rehearsal as Baal in 1998, photo by 'pling

Poster Page added

Today added a Page for the company’s posters (tab along the menu, above). The production posters were a distinctive feature of the company with their own unique language: mostly by key Splinters members Stuart Vaskess, Lindsay Dunbar and Clint Hurrell, all of whom trained the the School of Art at the Australian National University and have exhibited in their own right.

“The Sequence” teaser video

Carl Looper, who filmed a lot of latter period Splinters work, is remastering the video The Sequence, which he co-produced, shot and edited. Not a Splinters work per se, but co-produced, directed by and starring David Branson along with Patrick Troy and Anne-Marie Sinclair, all key Splinters members. The script is by Grahame Henderson.

PASIG Conference

Attended my first meeting/conference today of the Museums Australia Performing Arts Special Interest Group (PASIG) held at Gorman House in Canberra – one of the great things about having all these national institutions is they have lots of conferences here! Antoinette Buchanan gave a great presentation on the performing arts collection at the ACT Heritage Library: it makes up about 20% of the whole Library collection and aside from Splinters it has the papers and memorabilia of Ralph Wilson, Human Veins, Bill Hoffman, Philo and Rep to name just a few.

Terrific to meet some of the key players in the field such as Jenny Fewster from AusStage and Margaret Marshall from The Performing Arts Collection in Melbourne, which currently has a must-see exhibition on Reg Livermore. I’ll be giving a paper on the Splinters project at PASIG next year in Adelaide as part of the Museums Australia National Conference.

David Branson biography planning

From Joel Swadling over at the Splinters Facebook page:

The project I am proposing will take the form of a book-length literary biography of David Branson, dealing prominently with his impact on arts in the ACT and Melbourne (and, to a lesser extent, his rural and international touring)…

The structure I plan to use is to tell David’s inspiring story from a number of different angles at once, running concurrently throughout the work the stories of people who knew David over long periods of time, interspersed with vignettes of people who may only have known him for brief, isolated periods. Parts of the text will be presented in oral-biography format (with interviewees’ names preceding paragraph-length quotes); I may also use quotations from the papers and clippings in the archives. I would like to have a photo-essay running throughout; Margaret Hunt, David’s mother, has reminded me that the photographer ‘pling has a lot of material, though obviously the work of others is welcome.

Splinters Exhibition planning

As the end of 2011 approaches and the seminars are out the way, it’s time get stuck into the proposal for an exhibition of art and artists associated with Splinters to be curated by José Robertson, planned for the Centenary of Canberra in 2013. Amazing visual elements were of course a trademark with a number of key members having trained at the Canberra School of Art including Stuart Vaskess, Clint Hurrell, Lindsay Dunbar and Ross Cameron. Video artworks by Luhsun Tan were an integral part of many performances and the superb photography of Katherine Pepper and ‘pling remains a major source of inspiration for this project.

We’re hoping to use a venue with some historical association with Splinters, which has scope to show some of the larger works such as Clint’s Light Crystals (seen at left in this photo by ‘pling from in Utopia/Dystopia, 1995, Springbank Island), as well as a suitable space to show the documentary film being planned. If anyone has works by Splinters artists they would like to put forward for inclusion, let us know.

Utopia/Dystopia, Springbank Island 1995, photo by 'pling

Gavin gets (ex)cited

Comrade scholar Gerald Keaney has published a fascinating piece in an international peer reviewed journal, which references Splinters and the articles in RealTime. In his own words:

People may b interested in a shrt article i wrote 4 the latest issue of Brit/US journal “Rethinking Marxism” on DIY and the avant-garde. F.n. 12 mentions Gav’s articles and also Splinters as an on-the-ground e.g. of the stuff i’m talking about. U can email me if u wnt the PDF: geraldkeaney@hotmail.com. Here’s the ref.

Gerald Keaney (2011): A New Avant-Garde?, Rethinking Marxism, 23:4, 556-564.

But we will make it easy and provide the PDF right here: New_AG Keaney.

Aktion Surreal

Gerry Keaney has published an excellent critical overview of Aktion Surreal, a Canberra performance group which has been described as Splinters’ mutant sister. The two groups shared several members and collaborated on key works such as Flowers of Gold/Bezerkii Carnival (1992), pictured in this blog’s header above (photo by Katherine Pepper).

Here Be Dragons

Here be Dragons is an article on Splinters and its milieu published in RealTime, Australia’s critical guide to international contemporary arts, #93 Oct-Nov 2009. This is the article that sparked the research project.

A followup article Where to now? in RT94 explores Canberra theatre and performance since the Splinters period.

Robyn Archer penned New Seeding in response to the above for RT95. At this point I contacted Robyn, who had just been appointed Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra, and put it to her how wonderful it would be to have Splinters and the many other amazing artists who have left Canberra come back for the celebration. Robyn had already had the same idea! What you see here is a direct result of that dialogue.