This Saturday, 1st November, Mark Harvey will perform Jim Allen's News at the gallery starting at 1pm.
The exhibition featuring a recent documentation of Jim Allen performing the work continues until 22 November.
Michael Lett is pleased to present Jim Allen's News, first performed at The Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide in
1976. The work plays on the ritualistic activity of engaging with 'the news', highlighting the expendability of a
newspaper and its content and the frustration at its inevitable sensationalism and tragedy. Some thirty years since its
initial presentation the reading, both literally and figuratively, of the work becomes more pertinent given our
increasingly fleeting and facile consumption of information.
Jim Allen (b. 1922, Wellington) has been developing his artistic practice since the 1950s and was at the forefront of
the development of post-object and performance-based art in Australasia. He was among the early exhibitors at the
Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, South Australia and Founding Head of the Art School at Sydney College of the Arts
(which later became Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney). Since 2000 Allen has re-staged a number of early
works, such as the two-part installation O-AR (1974) and the early performances Contact (1974), Poetry for Chainsaws
(1976), News(1976) and On Planting a Native (1976) in Adelaide, Sydney, Auckland, New Plymouth and Wellington. His video
works have been shown widely in America, Germany and the Netherlands.
ends