Playtime
14 December–8 March 201414 Dec–8 Mar 2014
Playtime explores the infantile and juvenile. Many of our ideas about art stem from the notion of innocent childish creativity—the Picasso thing. However, Playtime is more overtly rude, anarchic, and occasionally scatological. It comes out of the unlikely thought of juxtaposing Brisbane artist Jenny Watson’s sweet, childish paintings (including her self-portrait as a young girl with her horse) with a nasty film of a regressive performance by Viennese actionist Otto Muehl. The show also includes art-school Associate Professor Peter Robinson’s rude graffitos lamenting university life and his suggestive sculpture Das Es, dummy-spitting neo-dada artist Justene Williams channeling her inner hillbilly, ‘lurker’ artist Steve Carr’s videos of himself in a bedroom pillowfight with little girls and trashing a panel van with little boys, and Brits Jake and Dinos Chapman’s amateurish reconstructions of art tragedies using rubber-glove puppets. Plus, we introduce emerging artist, Thomas Semple.