An arty weekend

Had a very cultured weekend- oh, and before I get started, a big thanks to Vlad & Dmitri for holding the fort for a couple of days.

I spotted this in the paper on Saturday:
Felt Is The Past Tense Of Feel.

Artist Catherine Bell sucks the ink from 40 squid, then spits it onto her dead father's suit, in a torrid video work of violence, grief, and the purging of emotion.

Well, how could anyone resist that? And it was literally around the corner, at Linden. So on Sunday, after cleaning the frog tank we tore ourselves away from the Sci Fi Channel , and went to have a look, and it was as gross and fantastic as it sounds. On two separate screens this lady is in differing stages of the process- in the early part the suit is still white, then later it's black. As are her face, hands, arms, hair...the suit in question is hanging in the corner of the gallery space, and it absolutely reeks. She gets right into it on the video, ripping squid apart with her fingers, squeezing, sucking & spitting ink all over herself. The pile of dead squid she's sitting in gets bigger & bigger. But what does it signify? No idea, I'm afraid, but I'm glad I saw it.
Note: if this isn't enough, you can go to her website and see pictures of her swimming in a pool full of live eels while dressed in a plastic fetish suit, in a prior performance piece called Head Over Eels.

Then we went into the city to do some shopping and have a drink. There are a few Christmas decorations up in the streets, but what I liked was the view from up in Chloe's Bar- all the banner-sized pictures of Nick Cave (from the Howard Arkley exhibition at Fed Square), the posters of Astro Boy (from the Tezuka exhibition at the NGV) and the huge Sidney Nolan Ned Kellys on the facade of Flinders Street Station(from an exhibition at Heide )
An interesting choice of seasonal decorations, and a very spiritual trio- I'd pick Ned as the Father, Astroboy as the Son, and Nick as the Holy Ghost.