Arts Diary: Tastefully spruiking around the outside of a rich, boggy garden

Published on Wednesday 3 March 2010 18:33

THE Adelaide Fringe is, by all accounts, booming. It went from biennial to annual in 2007 (the main festival is now following suit) and claims 36 per cent more events this year than last, just over 700, about a third of Edinburgh's.

Competition for punters is more civilised here. Adelaidians are actually seen to laugh or stare at performers in wacky costumes rather than walk past. Leafleting teams are thin on the ground and even flyposterers seem to refrain from plastering over rivals' ads.

The Australian term for an artist pitching his show is spruiking, which sounds like a cross between speaking and sprucing. Web definitions of "spruik" say it means to promote by speaking in public.

Famously there's also bogan, Australian for ned, though bogans are typically leaner, blonder and freer with their money. The Garden of Unearthly Delights, the central garden venue with popular tent shows and pricey beer, is said to be chocker with "cashed-in bogans".

Flowing visions

FILLING one room at the Art Gallery of South Australia this week, Sydney artist Mikala Dwyer was showing work inspired by a clairvoyant. Her installation, The Additions and Subtractions, was a circular set of head-high objects of all descriptions.

They ran from a giant copper kettle with a kind of umbilical tube curling out of it, to mysteriously murky glass domes, brilliant blue ceramic peacocks, curled papers of writing from a sance session, and finally a pointy white pyramid.

"She could see some tall, sheer white pointy things which I've tried making," Dwyer said of the clairvoyant. "It's really hard to interpret these flowing things and turn them into clunky matter."

Aboriginal excellence

THERE were 22 artists showing in Before & After Science, part of the 2010 Adelaide Festival, a showcase of some of the best of contemporary Australian art. The gallery stays open until 10pm every night for ten days. Other memorable pieces included 30 glow-in-the-dark resin shapes, luminescent in a darkened room, by Adelaide artist Michelle Nikou. But the stand-out was a breathtaking canvas filling an entire wall, Women's Ceremonies at Marrapinti 2009, painted by 12 Aboriginal women, that showed a white salt pan from above, surrounded by vegetation and pink rock, with motion achieved by circle and line patterns. The women are said to have sat down and painted it on a vast piece of linen on the ground, to raise money when their community centre was threatened with closure.

Jim-jams flim-flam

GUY Masterson has lost his pyjamas in Adelaide. The classically old-fashioned men's flannel pyjamas he uses to do all the parts in his hit theatre show Under Milk Wood, that is. He put out an appeal, which somehow found its way into the local press. Knowing publicity men suggest that Masterson loses his pyjamas with almost the same regularity that the Bangkok Ladyboys lose their falsies at the start of every Edinburgh Fringe… and must quickly tell all the newspapers.

Cockburn's treat

IN THE Ciba Caf and Gallery on Rundle Street, Adelaide Fringe director Christie Anthoney is craning her head to show her favourite picture in an exhibition of prints by photographer Gary Cockburn. It shows the shadowy figure of a Fringe performer setting up a venue in the corner of a disused multistorey car park.

The exhibition, Into the Fringe, comes after Cockburn spent a month taking 15,000 photographs of the Adelaide Fringe in front and behind the scenes. Anthoney, who is about to move to a new job as the head of Adelaide's art school, believes he's caught the flavour exactly right.

Cockburn is looking for someone to show his work in Edinburgh this summer as he works on a similar project capturing our Fringe. Any suggestions on spaces to [e-mail] for passing on, please.