[artbooks] Cross Art Projects invitation - Police Charges & Censorship, Saturday 6 October, 3pm

Dear Art

The Cross Art Projects invites you to 
 
Cross Conversation: Saturday 6 October, 3-5PM
Political & Institutional Censorship, the Artist & Writer:
Innovation, critique, sedition and the political cycle: looking back,
looking forward 
Panel:Elizabeth Gertsakis artist, writer and curator
David Bernie, vice-president, Council for Civil Liberties NSW
Nick Tsoutas, senior curator, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre

With the Exhibition: The Wording of Police Charges
Mehmet Adil, Elizabeth Gertsakis & Michael Jones (Sedition)
Exhibition Dates: 14 September to 13 October 2007

Where: The Cross Art Projects, 33 Roslyn Street, Kings Cross 
Information: Jo Holder 0406 537933

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Exhibition: THE WORDING OF POLICE CHARGES
Many find the suppression of freedom of expression under the government's
Terror Laws unacceptable. But the suppression is spreading. The government
is utilizing its legislative armory in more and more mainstream ways.

Artists Mehmet Adil, Elizabeth Gertsakis and Michael Jones consider how
restrictions to freedom of expression have quickly spread from remote
legislative meeting rooms into civic and private realms.

The circle of Œsuspects¹ now includes journalists, scholars, students,
lawyers, unionists and Aboriginal communities who disagree with
authoritarian intervention legislation. Post-APEC, suspects include
jay-walking accountants and accredited press photographers.

The exhibition title The Wording of Police Charges is one of fifty book
covers adopted by the American artist RB Kitaj for his print series In Our
Time (1979). Police Charges was a bestseller of its day.

The installation by Elizabeth Gertsakis is based on a censored newspaper
Police News (or The Citizen), produced over three years from 1875. Her new
prints take up the crude graphic style of Police News and poetically
reinterpret the newspapers¹ burlesque and pathos. Each is accompanied by a
newspaper-style interpretative poem.

The popularity of Police News threatened the sales of Melboune¹s Age and
Argus newspapers. Richard Egan-Lee, a radical writer and agitator, devised
the paper and drew on the political tradition of William Cobbett¹s Political
Register, to advocate radical, social and parliamentary reform. Egan-Lee¹s
weekly diet of illustrated voyeurism focused on local criminality and
corruption as a form of social and political criticism. 

Egan-Lee¹s success in producing an illustrated weekly for the masses led to
the Age and Argus pressing charges on grounds of obscenity. This resulted in
changes to censorship legislation, creating a legacy of strict control
lasting into the 1970s.

In contrast to public advocacy, Mehmet Adil¹s installation, ŒEnvy of the
Visible-Invisible¹, captures fragile moments in an intimate process of
thinking and writing. His images and objects act as connectors between a
transitory thought and the recording of it. Here, thinking and writing are
in transition toward a more crystallized form of a concept. 

In a more pragmatic sense, the artist responds to a rhetorical question
regarding art and its place in a broader social and cultural context. Any
given answer is contingent on the cultural, social and political variables
of its own time and space.

Michael Jones has cut words from the banner headlines of our daily
newspapers, a daily diet of illustrated voyeurism and terrorist criminality,
for his series of Apostasy collages. Like Egan-Lee before him, these images
have a furious political intent.

We have seen the sort of society politicians will tolerate to gain their own
ends: a society that on a daily basis, accepts people being held without
charge, and in court, evidence heard in camera, the use of pseudonyms and
the suppression of evidence from publication (and its selective release by
the government). Increasingly, it is the Attorney General who tells us what
we can read and know.

Where: The Cross Art Projects
33 Roslyn Street, Kings Cross, Sydney (opposite St Luke¹s Hospital gates)
Hours: Wed to Sat, 11 to 6PM 

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The Cross Art Projects
A space for independent art & curatorial studies 
Director: Jo Holder
33 Roslyn Street Kings Cross Sydney 2011
Wednesday to Saturday, 11 to 6
T: + 61 (02)  9357-2058; 0406 537933  
E: info at crossart.com.au  
W: www.crossart.com.au

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