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MuCam

BRAD

This was posted on Facebook: a character I spontaneously created with a spare wig while mucking around during The Adelaide Arts Festival in 2012.
The results are a testament of how Social Media can assist in the creation of work through the collaboration of others, wherever they maybe. And it must be said that on that day I was extremely lucky getting such good people on-board.
I took the pic (above) on my phone and the post opened like this:
G’day This Brad from ANZ BASIC HOME LOANS  and guess what – awesome – it’s casual Fridays!

John-Paul Hussey © 2012

A big thanks to SAM HOFFMANN, living in the Northern Territory at the time, for kick starting this dialogue.

Soviet Boyfriend – Elevator Bitch Flip

The Come Down

Image

The Touring Pantry – Still Life

SOVIET BOYFRIEND

 

BUTTONS

GREEN DOOR

A few pics I took of friends at a party in Adelaide during the festival.

PICS early 2012

BLACK & WHITE

This is the Black & White performance with John-Paul Hussey in White & Daniel Mounsey in Black. It was first done in early 2011 in the cosmetic departments of Myer and David Jones in Melbourne. On that occasion we wandered around behaving like any other customer looking for a make-over. There are pictures of that particular performance on this website on the General page.

These images though are from December 2011-12 during the Xmas & New Year shopping period, also in Melbourne. We ventured out, walking down a variety of streets and public locations. This time we directly interacted with the general public. Whenever we passed all kinds of camera phones and digital cameras came out of bags and back pockets.

People seem to carry around these devices like they are a cross between an hand gun and a dear-diary. They just whip them out and bang, snap, document, snap, document, show your friends, they show their friends and on and on it goes, and it’s happening a billion times over, 24-7 all over the world.

One could wonder if there will come a point when there are more images documenting reality, than reality itself. It wont happen of course, because reality is constantly unfurling.

Never before have we documented what is around us so madly. Mind you, just because there’s a predilection for documentation, it doesn’t necessarily make everyone good at it. And these days everyone seems to be a photographer and most professionals would say photography is the poorer for it. But that’s another subject entirely.

Either or, they took them out and snapped away. We decided for this performance to ask for a donation, accompanied by a small spiel that we were performance artists and we should ideally be paid for our efforts, and “…that not all images are free.”

Most understood this request and we’re happy to hand over a few coins, but there were still a great many who refused, walked away or snapped regardless and thought us arrogant or foolish, even greedy and that really, since we were parading in public, we were therefore within the public domain and as an image we essentially belonged to them.

Needless to say, if you know me, I gave those shirkers my mind. Often on the spot or we would pursue them for a short while, politely asking for a modest remuneration for that image they were storing of us in their phone or camera. They hated that, and although we may not have achieved that ‘remuneration for an image we created’, we hoped it might make them think next time of what all the mindless snapping up of images is about.

The people who seem to react most positively to this performance, are Asians: Japanese and Indians in particular, both on a religious and/or a purely aesthetic level. They seemed genuinely pleased to see us and asked no questions about who or what we were doing that day.

Others though asked those inevitable questions, of what the performance meant, thinking we might be part of some commercial promotion or advertising an event. Or we were already employed  by the city, since we weren’t like typical street performers or buskers who remain stationary in one spot.

There was one unfortunate incident where we were stopped by a security guard in Federation Square. Fed Square is like an open air piazza, surrounded by numerous galleries, cafes and specialist cinemas. The security guard said we couldn’t pass though, because Daniel Mounsey’s costume ( in Black) was a problem for security, mainly because they couldn’t see his face. I told him that September 11 was 10 years ago and that perhaps he should be a little less paranoid. The immediate and most typical of interpretations of this situation, is would he have stopped a woman in a full burqa?

He didn’t see the logic of that, but that’s hardly surprising when you’re dealing with an idiot-bully in a uniform who holds a walky-talky like a microphone  and has far too much time on his hands.

On the whole everyone seemed to have enjoyed seeing such a striking image pass through an otherwise everyday landscape…and that, regardless of the symbolism of black and white, was our a primary intention. To take the Art out of the galleries and theatres and bring it to people who would not necessarily go to these institutions.

Pics by Mark Burban aka pixelwhip.

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