On the 20th of December 2010
All the Cunning Stunts
celebrated the launch of our publication
SO GAY!

Held at The Russian Frost Farmers gallery in Wellington the night featured performances by Stef Animal, Jetsam Isles, stunning cut-outs, and home brew goodness. The event was a whole bunch of good times and the sucessfull SO GAY! launching saw an impressive number of copies scooped up by the crowd.

SO GAY! is a fresh, magazine-style art publication by All the Cunning Stunts (artists Liz Allan, Rachel O'Neill, Clare Noonan, and Marnie Slater) that documents their recent self-titled public light box exhibition. All the Cunning Stunts launched the cultural wing of the 2nd AsiaPacific Outgames and audiences viewed the eye catching, street savvy and laugh-out-loud works in Wellington's Courtenay Place Park from December 2010 – April 2011. SO GAY! critically extends the conversation around the themes of the work and features documentation of the project's development and its in-situ public presentation. 

In addition to catalyzing and expanding on the possibilities of All the Cunning Stunts, SO GAY! further facilitates a conversation around contemporary queer practices. Colour-filled highlights inside the modesty shield-cum-publication-cover include a centrefold of audience favourite “k8y perry dmpd me 4 a str8 grrl”; a lively Q&A with the artists and effingdykes blog queen Krista Burton; a personal essay by curator Mary-Jane Duffy on her motivations for taking homosexuality to fresh contemporary heights, and a specially commissioned poem by Alan Felsenthal. It's a back stage pass + More + $$$$ (bang for your buck) – Oh, and did we mention that there's a splash of double trouble from the Topp Twins?

Published with the generous support of The Wellington City Creative Communities Scheme, and The Armstrong & Arthur Charitable Trust for Lesbians.

SO GAY!
Edited by All the Cunning Stunts
Designed by The International Office
Available 20th December 2011
ISBN: 978-0-473-20293-4
Full colour, softcover
Publication size: US Letter (215.9 mm x 279.4 mm)
Insert size: A5 (148 mm x 210 mm)
Page Numbers: 48, including cover
Insert Page Numbers: 24, including cover

Recommended Retail Price: NZD$30

SO GAY! is currently available for purchase from Parsons Bookstore in Auckland, Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington or by contacting All the Cunning Stunts at allthecunningstunts@gmail.com.

For more information, please visit our facebook page.

I can't believe our team of dedicated researchers missed this one...

k8y got BLOGG'D

hey, we know it's spammy to coerce you to click through - but spare the three seconds; art reactions have never been so well illustrated!!!!

In conclusion...

BREAKING NEWS

The Stunts have left the building... or are now back inside the building. Reports are divided.

BUT

DO

NOT

FEAR

Sources have released a series of jazzy paparazzi glitterati images of their debut in Cun... ehm, Courtenay Place. The anonymous, yousendit jpegs were accompanied by the following statement:

Thanks

So Gay [née happy] literary scholars are busy interpreting this doozie, we will keep you updated.

Meanwhile...

All images by Neil Price. Click here to see more, more, more!

In other news, keep your peepers peeled for the upcoming issue of Hue & Cry, and a special All the Cunning Stunts Courtenay Place Light Box publication to be released later this year. It will have some colour pages and smell like fresh printing. We promise. Also, this is awsome. And this. Oh, and also this.

Politics and Pleasure Forever

more more more

LAST CHANCE TO GAZE upon All the Cunning Stunts!!

>>>>>>HEY Y'ALL ! ! !OK, so whats happening next Stunts…?

Dearest Queers and Straights alike,

there is now but a small window of time left (gasp!) to take in the 16-panelled monolithic homage to Contemporary Homosexuality standing proud in Courtenay Place before they disappear!oh no!

SO(go on!) make a space in your diaries before the 31^st OF MARCH to step out and take in/revisit the sophistication of our street-savvy image & text extravaganza.

Laugh(HA!!), nod knowingly(you know what I mean..), feel represented(WoW that was a weird feeling..), find relative connections(cross-genre group hug!!), disagree(oh come on - no WAY you'll disagree), join the conversation(talk amongst and across ourselves AND we can be blogged YO!)…

We really can’t stress enough how much more amazing your experience of the work will be “in the flesh”. And, with the almost non-existence of queer public imagery locally, it’s unlikely you’ll get another opportunity like this any time soon!!

(*******Dearest Topp Twins, BTW we’re still expectantly waiting on your appearance xxxx)

!!!PROMISE YOU WILL/'CAUSE/WE PROMISE:

ITS WORTH IT!!!

Yours in Art,

All the Cunning Stunts: Rachel O'Neill, Clare Noonan, Marnie Slater and Liz Allan

The street interacts

Bus performs Cunning Stunt in Courtney Place

On the bus
one of
us.

Laughing Seriously

But the most general articulation of the problem of the relation of women to the law has been set out by Luce Irigaray. In Irigaray's view, women start in an impossible position. "Women are in a position of exclusion... Man's discourse, inasmuch as it sets forth the law... [knows] what there is to know about that exclusion." The exclusion of women is "internal to an order from which nothing escapes: the order of (man's) discourse." it is futile to imagine that, from a pocket within man's discourse -- for instance, from within the legal system -- women can substitute feminine power for masculine power: while seeming to be a reversal, this "phallic 'seizure of power" would leave women still "caught up in the economy of the same." "There is no simple manageable way to leap to the outside of phallogocentrism, nor any possible way to situate oneself there [on the outside], that would result from the simple fact of being a woman." Man's discourse can be taken over only via the path of "mimicry." Unless the woman's utterances are to remain "unintelligible" according to the code in force," they must be "borrowed from a model that leaves [her] sex aside."

All of which does not mean, however, that the law, as part of the discourse of the masculine imaginary, has to remain a closed and forbidden book. On the contrary, once a women has reconnoitered it and demarcated its "outside," she can situate herself with respect to it as a woman, "implicated in it and at the same time exceeding its limits." But her implication in it cannot be taken with unequivocal seriousness. To inhabit the male imaginary seriously is to commit herself to a simple reversal of power, to fall back into "the economy of the same."

To Irigaray, feminism and jurisprudence are thus not incompatible. But a feminist jurisprudence that is not ludic, that in return for access to the law concedes the claim of the law to its dignity and respects that dignity, by that concession gives up its independence. "Isn't laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn't the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning?" "To escape from a pure and simple reversal of the masculine position means... not to forget to laugh."

Quoted from: J.M Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) pp. 27 - 8.

All quotes and references from: Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Caroline Burke (Ithaca, N.Y. Cornell University Press, 1985).

Keeping abreast

Although done sporadically, there are a few things we like to bring to our own, and your, attention (aka FYI):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/21/gay-rights-row-un-resolution

hmmmnmn

...special understandings of commonness...

off-the-cuff translation...

the translation of specialness and commonness... 

the words in the diagrams above here have been extracted from the racing section of a recent pamphlet...

...my poppa would say, 'I've won some money on the gee gees' and then we would go second-hand book shopping...

the etymology of gee harks back to the command 'go!'...it is a word for horse found in the midst of childhood...

...from whence are we translating and to where are we etymologically racing, fixing the odds, financing, persuading, walking, leisurely inviting the wreath to be lowered to miss the neck or coil there magnetically...?

Accurate Fictions of Self: Glimpses of Photographer J.L.Buckland

Coming Through the Rye, c. 1897. (Akaroa Museum)

Jessie Buckland at the window of her Akoroa studio. c.1907. (Macmillan Brown Library)

Jessie Buckland (1878-1939) is notable as one of the few solo and recognised woman photographers of her time in New Zealand. Taught by her aunt Bessie Hocken, she learnt photography alongside her siblings in Dunedin. Buckland continued her practice winning acclaim for her photographs in competitions in Australasia and had a successful professional studio in Akaroa for 30 years after moving there in 1902. From reading one of the few texts about her life and work, Vickie Hearnshaw locates Buckland as a feminist and an individualist within the male-dominated feild of photography. Reading between the lines of this text, I got a sense of closeted conjecture about Buckland's sexual orientation. Buckland never married, but whether she was a lesbian is a purely anecdotal speculation on my behalf. That aside, for me the most compelling aspect of Buckland's work is the strength of the gendered, humorous tongue-in-cheek content visually articulated in some of Buckland's early non-commercial photographic work (perhaps amongst her best) within the context of a male-dominated field at the turn of the century.

Jessie Buckland follows the recognised pattern of early women photographers. She was self taught, working initially in comparative isolation, in association with her family. In her choice of subject matter, she relied almost exclusively on her immediate surroundings and its people: first, the Strath Taieri region in Otago, and after 1902, Banks Peninsula in Canterbury. (p.42)

In 'Coming through the Rye' Jessie, as the man, and Ina Burnett, her friend and neighbour, as the woman, pause momentarily in a field of sun-ripened grain, before the craggy peaks. The activity of 'picture making' as opposed to 'picture taking' was an important part of the whole process, with much time spent in the planning stages of each photograph. An idea had to be thought up, then suitable costumes organised and poses rehearsed with all the camaraderie of an amateur theatrical performance. For the successful outcome, Jessie was reliant on the co-operation of her family for technical assistance. In many cases, after setting up the scene, Jessie would have a 'helper', another member of the family, to release the button, as in 'Coming through the Rye' where Jessie was also a protagonist in the scene. (p.45)

In a carefully composed study of Buckland dating from this period, we glimpse her standing at the open window of her studio, a hand some woman, one who commands our attention. She holds a wooden plate bolder in her right hand as an attribute of her chosen profession. In her dress she reveals her preference was for the less restrictive code adopted by the progressive woman of the period. Older Akaroa residents' most frequent memory of Buckland is of her cycling to and from her borne to the studio, an image consistent with the 'new woman' of the turn of the century. (p.51)

Above excerpts and images from Vickie Hearnshaw 'A Study in Black and White: The Life and Work of Photographer Jessie Buckland'. Women's Studies Journal vol. 13. no. 1 Autumn (1997). Apologies these bad photocopied images sadly don't do her work justice. The Hocken and Akaroa museums hold much of her work but McMillian Brown does have some images for viewing online here.

Rachel, despite the slight difference in age/era from what I can tell, perhaps Buckland is a little like Beatrice? Behind and in-front of the camera at the same time?

In light of Barthes, Hito, Maljkovic, Beatrice, Buckland's collaborative procedures, and our current paradigm of working collaboratively on this project, what does it take to make a picture? create an image? stage a set?

Four Stages of Construction of the Eiffel Tower. Henry Guttmann/Getty.

Clare Noonan, Portrait Card (2009)

You're invited...light boxes that lite up...Courtenay Place Park

An oddly affectionate gesture

A rundown of the provenance of the painting

Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters

on the Louvre website:

The candid gesture may be an allusion to Gabrielle's pregnancy and the birth in 1594 of César de Vendôme, the illegitimate son of Henry IV.

	Description

Italian influence

Although very much in the style of the second school of Fontainebleau, this work remains anonymous. It shows the influence of Italian Renaissance art in the sensual contours of the bodies of the two young women, but also contains references to Flemish art, such as the intimacy of the background scene.

The trompe-l'oeil technique

The artist has made skillful use of the trompe-l'oeil technique, using an imitative, realistic style for on the sheet in the bath and the two curtains framing the scene. The trompe-l'oeil effect is accentuated by the view of what is taking place in the background room. Richly colored, unsettling in its presentation of two women in their bath, and mysterious in its use of symbol - the ring being shown by Gabrielle d'Estrées, for example - the sensuality of the painting made it a popular success. Sensuous yet marvelously delicate, the contours of the two naked bodies are highlighted by the lighting of the two women from the left and the contrast with the shadowy background.

An oddly affectionate gesture

The models have been identified as Gabrielle d'Estrées (1571-99), the favorite of Henry IV (1553-1610), and one of her sisters: the Duchess de Villars or Madame de Balagny. The oddly affectionate way in which the sister is pinching Gabrielle d'Estrées' right breast has often been taken as symbolizing the latter's pregnancy with the illegitimate child of Henry IV. This interpretation would seem to be confirmed by the scene of the young woman sewing - perhaps preparing a layette for the coming child - in the background. The picture was acquired by the Louvre in 1937.

School of Fontainebleau

Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters

c. 1594

Oil on panel

H. 0.96 m; W. 1.25 m

Purchased 1937

R.F. 1937-1

Paintings

And that term for the picture within a picture that Mel introduced to me:

mise en abyme

Mise-en-abyme: Literally, "placement en abyme," where "en abîme" itself refers to the habit of representing a small shield inside a larger one in traditional heralds and coats-of-arms. This device is often part of the text's self-reflexivity. By extension, most any "story-within-a-story" situations can be called an example of mise-en-abyme. The device is especially common in modern literature, television and films, but it occasionally appears in art.

http://theliterarylink.com/definitions.html, retrieved on 8 December 2010

mise en scène |ˌmēz ˌä n ˈsen|
noun [usu. in sing. ]
the arrangement of scenery and stage properties in a play.
• the setting or surroundings of an event or action.
ORIGIN French, literally ‘putting on stage.’

Putting on stage...behind the scenes...to infinity...

possible rib-on solution

ok Homos, it's starting to heat up and sweat down here in the cold summer of Wellington.

I have some opening celebration light-box adornment specs for you:

At a very reasonable $$$$ of 55 NZD per 300 m rolls (2x rolls reqd) we, All the Cunning Stunts could have our very own GAY SHROUD safety-as tape to enclose our boxes of light!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (spray paint of yellow (+labour) provided - some pink but more is xtra purchase)

APPLAUSE????????

other options include: (reqd=50m)

xmas tinsel at $2-4 per m depending on size

feather boa in gawdy colours at $3 m

or

acrylic lining at $8 m split in four and re-sewed for a 50 m length

SO all approx coming in @ 100+ dollars

Eve is searching for spare safety tape around WCC, but we need to move on this asap as if we go the first option safety shop need to order the tape in, 2 working days delivery

All other ideas WELCOME ASxxxx

Slightly divergent but: artist intellectual media duke it out

Rach, thought this had some bearing on our park bench pow-wow today, and generally an entertaining watch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA5DKtiNcgI

Hui Takatāpui

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150332708925321

Ruby-Rose-sets-lesbian-precedent

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/4428316/Ruby-Rose-sets-lesbian-precedent

emancipation in four dimensions

Female same-sex experience is a powerful lens through which to seek out the parameters of contemporary emancipation.

How might the practice of making art enable individuals and groups to seek out, understand or catalyse contemporary modes of emancipation? Each light box in All the Cunning Stunts is a working through and an instance of this question as art practice.

When my friend [ ] saw light box pair [14/15] she said ‘there’s a safari in Courtenay Place and I’m invited.’

A street-level safari involves hunting, hiding, looking, wearing camouflage, distracting and being distracted by the extraordinary, or something that stands out, or just the strangeness of the ordinary – the things we take for granted, that we want, or need to own, buy, sell, hold, touch, and believe in.

In these works emancipation resides in a resolve to find alternatives to all-purpose philosophies, behaviours, voices, despotic sub-clauses, even colourful and persuasive bureaucracies that substitute their own Modus operandi in place of emancipation, while still working in its name.

In fact, objects and images in these light boxes work as depots in which voices jostle for attention, sometimes in alignment, in altercation, in curiosity and more often than not in rigorous party-mode.

The traces and out-loud splashes of everyday hedonism reveal emancipation to be always up ahead, in effect celebrating without us. We can’t possibly shake emancipation’s hand, congratulate it on a good year or, as advertising would have us believe, bask in its ‘Out now’ status.

All the Cunning Stunts validates a second look at hedonism because the works readily acknowledge that emancipation is not a place, just as Courtenay Place is not strictly a safari, it merely prompts the conditions of life to make an appearance, to dance, to reveal spectacular fallibility and unbelievable nuance.

The 16 light boxes can further be read as one undulating work. All the Cunning Stunts uses the knowledge and practice of four individuals to track what it is like to ride in the wake of an emancipation that can’t be seen, or even accurately imagined, translated or put to trial, but that is a condition for the perception, declaration and artful practice of everyday extraordinary communal, if not common, life.

What can be said of All the Cunning Stunts is that emancipation is very much something that we are able to play ball with through the practice of art.

Apple Approves/Removes Antigay app

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/11/25/Apple_Approves_Antigay_App/

and more here

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/24/apple-manhattan-declaration-app_n_788075.html

Stunts

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/09/100917_documentary_marching_into_history.shtml

skype recap

Hi Liz,

Just a quick recap on what we covered in the rest of the skype sesh - your feedback sought:

Labels: All our names featured on each label

And instead of individual titles for each lightbox work we would just say 'All the cunning stunts' on each label/light box Overall there didn't seem to be any compelling reason, or need from past discussions to title the works individually. We did think titles could emerge from blog posts and yet the blog postings/headings are not exactly collaborative in the same way as the works. It also felt like (unnecessary hard work coming up with titles when we didn't really want them...what do you think?)

The ministry for silly options had the following suggestions before we settled on All the cunning stunts x 16:

Each light box work could be described as:

• 'A+' 'B-' 'F+' etc
• A 100 footer, a 20 footer, a 0.5 footer etc

After this we talked through some of the images and possible workings, and Clare's already posted some new reworkings that elaborate on what we thought might work.

Clare and I talked about liaising with DPOD and that in terms of clear lines of communication with them Clare will be main contact for delivery of files, title and label info etc. After this I will be contact, so that you and I can be called on for any easy fixes regarding proofing/colour correction etc, while if it's in the too-hard basket they can contact Clare if they really need to.

Lastly we talked about the media promotional event and that it would be great for it to open out to a wider community, and to have a similar quality/ emancipatory hedonism as a snog mob event, maybe even as simple a gesture as holding hands, a kind of coming out day...and as you can see from my recent post I dallied with the idea of a girlfriend dance like a screensaver day event...

The gates are open and the horse is out...

The Cunning Stunt: 15th December 12 noon or 16th December just prior to launch

Wellington International Girlfriend Dance Like a Screensaver Day!

An event open to the community we have been imagining and prompting in regards to emancipatory hedonism...

Invitation goes out to all our networks!!

1/2 hour of dancing like a screensaver, spot prizes (?), holding hands (!).

hard or soft bright or broken brave or nonchalant out and three times a lady in two's or by fours - anything's possible...

All the cunning stunts...like a medal winning (screensaver, er, I mean) swim team!!!

Technocolour

Here's the latest

(I'll pay special attention to getting the bear more fierce! when I do the next version).
Also put a fade on Tina, so see what you think about that. In the meantime, send me an email or reply via comments with any suggestions.

Hmm, maybe I'll re-look at the angle of the rainbow on the facing lightbox???










And the latest park layout...






















And some drafts (not quite finished but you get the idea) of the last boxes on the park facing side, and still to reshoot/substitute hi res images for the stage set images)

spectrum

filling a few gaps of the current layout...?

out soon

http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/connect/events/2010/dec/77879-artsville-in-bed-with-anika-moa

The Artsville series returns with an intimate and frank documentary In Bed With Anika Moa in which the much-loved songwriter bares her soul about going it alone in the music industry, coming out as a lesbian, and her marriage to a female burlesque performer.