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PART TWO
Here's a somewhat vague travelogue of my trip to Brisbane, and the three days during which I met Positronbob, Felicity, Yahtzee and Rhubarb Celestial. Click on the pictures for bigger ones.
DAY ONE (Sunday, continued)
Having wandered aimlessly through the entirety of the poorly organised Brisbane Museum, we headed next door, to the Brisbane Art Gallery. Their official website is here, and it's actually fairly informative.
After surrendering our bags to the cloakroom nazis, and receiving a lecture on proper camera usage within the gallery, we moved on. The entranceway consists of a staircase leading down to a white boardwalk surrounding a pool of somewhat greenish water with several squillion silver balls floating in it.
Silver balls. Consume less iodide.
Now, this is an art gallery, so any interpretation of purpose is to be taken with a grain of salt. HOWEVER. I think the idea here is that the balls are "powered" by the fact that people cannot resist swooshing and tossing them about, so they kind of swill in a vague spiralling motion about their pond. Closer examination revealed several points in said pond where the balls would form eddies, suggesting pumps beneath the surface were egging the spheres on. To be honest, I don't really care. It's art.
"I dare you to toss a ball!", whispered I.
"Eh, okay." grunted Rhubarb. Ball ahoy.
The next room comprised a white passageway with a large square pillar amid, projected onto which was a large anatomical animation of a woman being dissected by a CT scan. We stared at it, giggled at her breasts and moved on.
Around the corner we were ambushed by a museum staff person armed with an array of battery operated cats.
Yahtzee gets friendly with a digital feline.
I had hopes that the cats were going to be of similar quality to the AIBO dogs from Sony that I'd seen a few years prior at Fox Studios in Sydney (I have a photo of me with an AIBO somewhere), but they appeared to have been purchased at K-Mart. We attempted to get two cats to mate.
Oo-er.
Unfortunately, the cats "switch off" whenever their noses touch something, so not much went on. I discovered that repeatedly stabbing at the button on the tip of the cats' noses causes them to meow in an increasingly angry fashion.
Behind the "Battery Cattery" (insert colonpipe here) we found a series of fairly inane exhibits armed with telephones, which provided audio cues to the artwork. One exhibit, which appeared to be a piece of pipe plucked out of an air conditioner, featured a soundbyte of someone belching loudly into a microphone. Genius, thought we.
PoochCam.
In further extension of the household pets theme, we found this small cinema behind a wall at the back of the hall. Six screens at odd angles had onto them projected footage that appeared to alternate between a camera strapped to a dog's head, and a car hurtling down a road in the snow.
The rest of the gallery was fairly lacklustre, comedic-entertainment-wise. I'd like to know how one goes about getting the job of being one of the people who wanders about the museum shouting "DON'T TOUCH THAT" whenever someone gets closer than fifteen yards to a sculpture. The item in question was a massive chunk of welded metal that appeared to consist of former typewriter parts. It's welded, for fuck's sake. The best one could hope to do is to push it off its pedestal and perhaps break the floor. But anyhow.
Along one of the walls, in an innocuous looking darkened doorway, we found a small cinema, onto the wall of which was projected a film. At first, we had no clue what it was, apart from a small placard outside which read "One Minute Sculptures". I really have neither the want nor the need to further describe this phenomenon, as anything I add will only pale in comparison to Yahtzee's essay on the subject. Needless to say, our lives will never be the same again.
Here's a colonpipe.com exclusive still from Erwin Wurm's masterpiece:
Yahtzee attempts to fondle Erwin's bottom.
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