News

The IMA is closed for the holidays, 11 December 2011–23 January 2012.

We've just opened our new satellite space, on the mezzanine floor of the new Ksubi store on James Street. First up, we're showing Robin Hungerford's Like a Hole in the Head. In these three videos, the young Sydney artist dons big papier-mache pinata heads, which he attacks with hammers, knives, electric drills, and hedge clippers, pulling out brains, blood, and viscera until nothing's left. Like a Hole in the Head is hysterical: simultaneously engaging us in its sadism and its pathos. Self-harm has never been so much fun. Hungerford is represented by Gallery 9, Sydney. In the new year, we unveil our second show, by Perth's Rebecca Baumann.

Photos from our debauched cocktail party from last weekend are now on our Social page. Check them out.

Were you at our party last night? Did you take glamorous (or embarrasing) photos? If you did, we'd love to see them. Perhaps we'll put them on our Social page. Email your photos to us (ima@ima.org.au).

Are you coming to our Annual Members Cocktail Party, Saturday week (3 December, 7–10pm). You'll need to be in receipt of one of our VIP invitations or be a paid-up IMA member. But it's easy to join. It's only $50, and you can do it online. On arrival, enjoy a slushy Sex-on-the-Beach (meaning the cocktail). And attempt to dance to Brisbane caveman-techno duo Wtem (Will Charlton and Rin Healy) with their spazmodic beat-based electronica—'a shambolic mash up of squeals and ear-pounding goodness'.

Yesterday, we closed our final show at our Gold Coast satelite space, IMA@Surfers. As planned, we were open for four months, during which we presented shows by Damiano Bertoli, Rodney Glick, Peter Madden, and Justene Williams. A stellar lineup, if we do say so ourselves. We would like to thank everyone who helped on this project, especially the artists, our gallery manager Rebecca Ross, and our partners Circle on Cavill and Griffith University on the Gold Coast (particularly Ashley Whamond and Bruce Reynolds). Not to forget the interns—Caitlyn Coupe, Chin Hoo Zhi, Jodie Wallace, John Forno, Larisa Lategan, and Phoebe Cook—who kept the doors open. We loved our time on the Gold Coast. It was great fun.

Congratulations to Hiromi Tango, the Queensland winner of this year's Qantas Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award. Every year Qantas make the awards (which include cash and airfares) to emerging artists from each state and territory. In her works, Tango resides temporarily in public in homemade dwellings which evolve organically over the course of their exhibition with the involvement of friends, community groups, other artists, and passersby. Earlier this year, Tango featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art's Primavera show. Previous Queensland winners of the Qantas Award are Jemima Wyman (2010), Laith McGregor (2009), and Vernon Ah Kee (2008).

Queensland Art Gallery and the IMA are joining forces to present this year's Art Teachers Day, on Friday 11 November. Art Teachers Day is a chance for Queensland's secondary-school art teachers to connect with developments in contemporary art, meet colleagues, and preview the IMA's and QAG's education programs. This year, Art Teachers Day starts at QAG, with star artists Craig Walsh and Mikala Dwyer talking about their work, Queensland Art Gallery curators previewing their blockbusters Matisse: Drawing Life and Yoyoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever. We'll have lunch at the IMA, in the Diana Thater and Tobias Zielony shows, followed by workshops on making art on your mobile phone (with artist Warren Armstrong) and on art writing (with Eyeline editor Sarah Follent, freelance writer Timothy Morrell, and emerging writer Rebecca Boyle), plus films selected by OtherFilm. What more could you want? (Teachers pay here by Visa or Mastercard.)

What are you doing on Wednesday night? Our friends at Space, on James Street, have organised a one-night presentation of projects by London architects Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau (aka CRAB). Their principal, Sir Peter Cook—a member of Archigram, the paper architects of the 1960s, whose sci-fi proposals included walking cities and capsule houses suspended from masts—will speak on the work. Space, 10 James Street, Fortitude Valley, Wednesday 26 October, 6.30–9pm. If you want to attend, RSVP here. Cook is in town working on a project with Bond University on the Gold Coast.

Los Angeles novelist and art critic Chris Kraus will be giving a lecture here, on Thursday 20 October at 6pm. Kraus is known for scrambling the modes of fiction and non-fiction, taking an experimental approach to writing art criticism and steeping her novels in references to her real life in the worlds of art, literature, and theory. Kraus achieved notoriety with her 1997 epistolary novel I Love Dick, which tells the story of a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, who falls in love with a well-known cultural theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling she wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America, away from her husband, and far beyond her original infatuation, into a discovery of the transformative power of first-person narrative. Kraus's exemplary 'lonely girl phenomenology' manages to address R.B. Kitaj's paintings, the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and Louise Colet, Jennifer Harbury's activism, and Felix Guattari's Chaosophy, while deconstructing the institution of marriage and the life of the mind

For many years, Kraus wrote Torpor, a column for Art and Text. These columns formed the basis for her 2004 collection Video Green, which focuses on the high-profile graduate programs that catapulted Los Angeles into the epicenter of the international art world in the 1990s. Her latest art book, Where Art Belongs, published this year, expands Video Green's argument that 'the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it'. Where Art Belongs examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. Moving from New York to Berlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus addresses such subjects as the ubiquity of video, the legacy of the 1960s Amsterdam underground newspaper Suck, and the activities of the New York art collective Bernadette Corporation. She examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatised prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix.

The 2007 recipient of the Frank Mather Award in Art Criticism and a 2010 Warhol Foundation Arts Writer's grant, Kraus has taught art writing in graduate programs at University of California, Irvine, Art Center College, San Francisco Art Institute, and European Graduate School. She has been brought to Australia by Monash University Museum of Art.