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Larissa Kosloff's plaster cast is now off, as reported at the ACCA Venice Biennale blog.
Cast off your ...
... and be ( your wish here ) !
The ACCA blog references certain works by 20th century European and U.S. artists :
Manzoni whose signature assigned status to human forms and scatology; the history (legacy…ok sorry, we are done now) of sculpture which marries to the cast from Duchamp to Nauman and beyond
"Laresa Kosloff lives and works in Melbourne, Australia."
as described at her website.
There are local, Melbourne references that might also be invoked. It was Barry Humphries' dadaist acts in early-1950s Melbourne that first came to mind, hearing of Laresa's Venice project.
Clive James :
Still a schoolboy in Sydney, I heard about these daring adventures only later, but everybody in Australia got to hear about them eventually. Apparently there was a progressive breakfast, in which Humphries, riding towards Melbourne University on a train, was handed a new course through the carriage window at each station by an accomplice. He particularly favoured public transport because of the captive audience. Having had his right leg specially immobilised in a large white plaster cast (the immense trouble he will take to get an effect has been a trademark throughout his career), he would sit in a crowded railway carriage with the glaringly encased leg sticking out into the aisle until everyone on board was aware of nothing else. Then an accomplice would come along and jump on it.
from Approximately in the Vicinity of Barry Humphries
at CliveJames.com
Throughout his career, the Melbourne artist John Brack appears to have been deeply interested in act and action. (To be and to do). In mere movement, including stillness and the point-0f-collapse, and in grand movements. As a genre formalist, the genre varieties of still life (flowers, various objects including implements and instruments, nudes, portraits, meta-arrangements) through (running children, horse racing, The Car, dancers, gymnasts) to the great History Painting The Battle (1981-83) and beyond. From the conformist linearity of Collins St, 5p.m. (1955) to the later (1980s-90s) complex, questioning, confrontational, flows and organisations of pens and pencils.
These comments arise out a long admiration of Brack's work, and seeing it, his world view there again in yesterday's ACCA photo of Larissa Kosloff. In a cast, on crutches, in panto, inside and outside the coming and going of Art World Venice, 5.pm.
John Brack
Still life with Artificial Leg
1963
Theatre of the Actors of Regard (1998)
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA