I meant to mention Peter Alwast after seeing his work a while ago. But you know what happens. I got caught up with other artists I saw there. Mari Velonaki came on my radio show a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got an interview with Eugene Carchesio in the next issue of Cyclic Defrost. I mentioned his work here too.

But I’m yet to say anything about Peter Alwast.

That’s a still from Alwast’s piece (via Gallery Barry Keldoulis). But he won the Queensland new media prize and a still is not new media, even if it is on a canvas. Oh and I hear it’s not ‘new media’ anymore by the way, it’s ‘media’, as in ‘media art’.

Greg Hooper described the prize winning piece, Everything, in Real Time:

The winning piece, Everything (see cover image), by Peter Alwast (it’s an acquisitive award so into the GOMA collection it goes) uses three large projections of what seem to be cut and spliced together clichés of digi-art animation. Shiny pipes, translucent shapes, clouds, mountains, CAD style building frames, lickable butterscotch cars, reflections into shiny domes to show off some projective geometry/linear algebra. Over the top runs a soundtrack that also seems to recycle the standards of collaged and cut-up sound, even down to the slightly manic sounding street preacher. (Subpsychotic street person rant = gritty urban equivalent of salt-of-the-earth charming peasant folk wisdom?) Overall, there’s an aura of slick and meaningless process, an empty consumption of surfaces that gets a bit creepy.

I just don’t agree at all.

It’s time-enabled painting. That’s three-dimensions – time plus the flat film on wall from three film projectors. A surreal mesh of images, in the three film frames, only heighten the sense of 3D. In the gallery notes, Alwast refers to shifting his gaze from PC monitor to window to phone to TV, and so on. And you get that in the film, the perspective seems to shift internally, so different subjects within the film move independently of one another.

It makes sense. We’re overloading on information. At the moment, for me, it’s Twitter, The Australian and the SMH, the New Yorker, Feedly, abstracts for a conference I’m heading to next week, a Christos Tsiolkas novel and the latest Quarterly Essay (on climate change and coal mining). There’s radio and TV, downloaded HBO series, DVDs, YouTube stars. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t go more than half an hour without checking my phone.

In a way, Alwast’s piece makes some sense of that mess of images. And while media artists are obsessed with technical challenges. Who can do this very macho bout of programming or gear tech or whatever, Alwast’s gone and observed something quite real and quite powerful. It’s a way of seeing the world. Art, I guess.

I have a show on Sydney radio station FBI 94.5 and every week they ask a presenter to come up with a short list of things to check. This week, it’s me.

LISTENING to D.N.E.

I love Eugene Carchesio’s take on this world. In Someone’s Universe, his show at the Brisbane gallery of modern art Queensland Art Gallery, Carchesio filled a room with matchbox sculptures that catch the light just so, and wonderful miniature paintings and sketches. Someone’s world indeed, I was sad to leave. But if the likes of Young Marble Giants or Vincent Over The Sink get you excited, you should try Carchesio through his reissued classic (as D.N.E.), 47 Songs Humans Shouldn’t Sing.

EATING Gelato

Summer days are all about the cold treats. But if Mr Whippy soft serve doesn’t cut it, don’t fret. The Italian version is what you’re after. Gelato Messina (241 Victoria Street, Darlinghurst) constantly experiments with flavours: I recommend Sicilian trifle, choc-mint or pistachio. Don’t sleep on this one, get it while it’s hot.

READING Won Magazine #4

Won Magazine stands out from the milling crowd of do-it-yourself publishers. The tabloid style quarterly art mag might get ink on your fingers. But big pages and ace layout give breathing room to the beautiful images and long Q & A interviews with painters and photographers and writers and disco icons and fashion designers – people who’ve got things to say. Not always easy to find on the street, but worth the effort.

TALKING ABOUT Leonard Cohen

Can a 75-year-old Canadian with a line in mystical religion, poetry and pop really rock the stage as much as everyone’s been saying? More sax solos than Kenny G. Spontaneous standing ovation before he even started. It was cheesy and hilarious as hell, poignant too. All the hits – ‘Chelsea Hotel,’ ‘Hallelujah,’ ‘Everybody Knows’ – quite unlike any other show, and as great as I could have hoped.