Artist’s Syllabus: Cats Like Plain Crisps
Blindside Gallery, Nicholas Building, 7/37 Swanston St
With the artists, we will discuss two texts by Carolee Schneemann: ‘Of Cats, Dream and Interior Knowledge’ (1989) and ‘From More than Meat Joy’ (excerpts published in Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen Sandford, 1995).
Artists’ Syllabus invites local artists and designers to select and share a text that has been influential to their practice. By sharing selected passages, the artist will give unique insight into the significance of the text from their perspective. Through this exploration we will seek to discover the direct, tangential or unexpected ways the text has had an impact on the artists’ chosen discipline/s, creative process, and approach to presenting completed works. In group discussion, we will untangle the themes explored in the text and bring attention to those formative passages which sparked an ‘ah-ha moment’ or cemented in the mind. More broadly, we will get together to exchange our ideas (and our reading lists).
Supported by City of Melbourne Arts Grants and Michael Robertson.
Image: Supplied by the artists.
Cats Like Plain Crisps
Carolee Schneemann’s Cats is the inaugural exhibition of the international collective Cats Like Plain Crisps—whose members’ practices include visual art, sound art, filmmaking, performance, and writing—and explores the potential of the feral lurking within the domestic. Borrowed from an old piece of graffiti, the group’s name encapsulates some of their concerns: public art, fieldwork, objets trouvés, and text/writing. It also speaks to a posthuman and ecofeminist orientation as well as a playful, inclusive creative approach.
Members include Yang Yeung, Hong Kong; Shauna Laurel Jones US/Iceland/UK; Viv Corringham, UK/US; Roseanne Bartley, NZ/Australia: Johanna Hällsten Sweden/UK; Iris Garrelfs, Germany/UK and Cath Clover, UK/Australia.