MAN ABOUT TOWN

Six exhibitions and one cabaret show in five days - it must be festival time! The 20th annual Midsumma Festival hasn't even officially kicked off yet, and already things are hotting up. Admittedly two of the exhibitions I saw on Sunday had nothing to do with Midsumma, but still... Thanks to the social joys of Facebook, on Sunday I trouped off to the NGV Ian Potter Centre with a fine group of folk to catch the final day of the Gordon Bennett exhibition. A major retrospective of this important Australian artist's career, it was a dazzling exploration of his themes of appropriation, identity and history over the three decades of his career. Some of Bennett's work I'd seen before, such as The Apotheosis of Captain Cook , as it's part of the NGV's permanent collection; but much of the work, such as his Notes to Basquiat paintings were new to me. Fascinating stuff; particularly his most recent, minimal work, which displays remarkable vigour within its non-represent...

I was, I confess, initially a bit dubious about the latest exhibition to open at the National Gallery of Victoria's St Kilda Road complex, Modern Britain 1900-1960 , when I first heard about it. In retrospect, I think I was perhaps subconciously expecting a collection of bland landscapes and terribly prim portraits; a visual reflection of the "ordinary decent" Britain whose citizens and standards Joe Orton so delighted in shocking. Instead, it's a fascinating and focussed exploration of the impact of modernist art movements such as Post-Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism and more, and how they first assailed and ultimately swept aside the stultifying hangover of Victorian values in British art. In many ways, Modern Britain is a companion piece to last year's NGV exhibition, British Art and the 60s from Tate Britain , which was a detailed survey of art created in the decade when the world's eye swung away from the USA and back to the Britain of David Hockney,...

As a consequence of having a relatively quiet night last night, I bounced out of bed at 8:30am and set about doing things - which for me on a Sunday is highly unusual, let me tell you. It was a day of simple pleasures, but also a highly enjoyable day. I enjoyed the sunlight, the sense of vigor that comes with not being hungover in the morning, and a general sense of joie de vive . I also: Read the paper over breakfast; Tidied up, wiped down benches, etc; Put out the recycling; Sorted through a huge stack of mail and media releases, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and started planning my radio show for the next couple of weeks; And listened to about 10 promo CDs I've been sent, which barely makes a dint in the stack of CDs on the coffee table, but at least its a start. Then, just after midday, I set off to - finally - see the new Irish film Once , which I've been meaning to check out for the last couple of weeks. And oh, what an utter delight it was. In all my years of movie...

It's been a busy week, and one that's been both exciting and totally draining. As well as the by-now standard stress of putting out a new issue of MCV - this week with a fabulous cover by Dole Diary - and my weekly radio show on 3RRR , I've also been focussed on the closing night of Q + A (queer + alternative) which took place on Thursday night. Before that, however, there were a couple of arts events I had to attend first... On Wednesday I attended both the media launch and the official opening of Pixar: 20 years of animation exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Why both? Well the media launch was a much better time to actually view the work, while the evening's formal affairs was an opportunity for free booze, nibbles and networking (amongst other dignitaries, I had a chat with Richard Moore, the new director of the Melbourne International Film Festival - so hopefully he remembers me come red carpet time when I'm trying to score a quick i...

Last Wednesday witnessed the official opening of the latest exhibition in the subterranean screen gallery at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Centre Pompidou Video Art 1965 – 2005 . Drawn from the Musée national d'art moderne Collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris , the exhibition traces the evolution of the video image in contemporary art, and presents the aesthetic realisations of artists who have utilised video as a creative medium. From early, small-scale works to more recent and ambitious pieces, it’s a remarkably intimate exhibition, featuring numerous small monitors, equipped with multiple sets of headphones, that facilitate an individual appreciation of the various works rather than being dominated by larger, more cinematic displays. That said, more elaborate full and split screen works are also on display, including UK artist and film-maker Isaac Julien ’s Baltimore (a homage to 1970s blacksploitation films such as Shaft and Cleopatra Jones , b...

Given that I'm interviewing the curator of The World's Most Photographed , an exhibition currently displayed at the Bendigo Art Gallery on SmartArts in a few weeks' time, I thought I'd take the opportunity of a quiet weekend to head up to Bendigo to see the show. It was a quick trip, as while there I convinced myself that I absolutely, positively had to rush back to Melbourne in order to get to the Victoria Police Museum before it closed, in order to buy a copy of a a local history of the wallopers (it's a research thing). Of course, once back in Melbourne, I found out that the museum isn't open on weekends... Doh! A little known fact about the train trip to Bendigo: some genius built the city just far enough away from Melbourne that the duration of the roughly two-hour train journey is the perfect period of time required to read The Saturday Age properly, rather than my traditional time-poor skim through its pages. How lovely. Arriving at the gallery, the f...