Australian born artist Anthony Lister is showing at the Lyons Wier Gallery in New York City from March 19 through to April 19.

A lot of my favorite artists are painters that never really give up using the pencil (line). Painterly paintings are good but so are paintings that look like drawings. I guess I like painterly drawings or linear paintings. I like painterly paintings and linear drawings too

Anthony Lister – Terms of Engagement, 2010
Mixed media on canvas, 39.5 x 39.5 inches

Anthony Lister – BET, 2010
mixed media on paper, 6.5 x 9.5 inches

Anthony Lister Super Girl 1, 2010
Mixed media on canvas, 14 x 11 inches

From the Lyons Wier Gallery blog here..
“Known in the Low Brow movement for his intriguing, playful hybrid of street art, expressionism, and cubism all manifested in non-traditional media such as spray paint; Lister’s new body of work shows the tongue-in-cheek frivolity of his earlier pieces developing (or decaying) into a more mature and disturbing direction. The deformities and un-done aesthetic resolve of Lister’s work provides viewers with a concretization of contemporary societies’ psyche – or, as the artist himself states, “making the obvious more, well, obvious”.”

OPENING: Fri. March 19th, 2010 6-9pm
DATES: March 19th – April 19th, 2010
See more Anthony Lister works from the exhibition here or see the artist’s website here.

I’m really good at making lists. I’m a list person. Without lists I watch too much tv, surf the web, or read too much.

I create lists that are too ambitious as I rarely ever complete the jobs on them. Which in some ways shows the masochist in me as I know I’m setting myself up to fail, but in other ways it gets me off my fanny (I have always wanted to use the word “fanny” in a sentence as it makes me laugh. In Australia the fanny is different to what a fanny is in the US).

Here’s my To Do List for Art News Blog this year. I figured if I published the list it would make me more likely to do it.

• Create or pay for a new blog design. Art News Blog has a pretty ordinary design and it hasn’t changed much in more than 5 years. I might even get a designer to create a new logo. I might even add a little color to the design.
• Move the blog to another blogging platform. Blogger is making some hosting changes so I figured now might be a good time to jump ship. Not because I don’t like Blogger but because I just want change.
• Post at least 5 times each week.
• Allow more guest posts by other bloggers and artists.
• Monetize the blog. I currently make about $0,000.00 on the blog so it shouldn’t be too difficult to increase that amount. I’m thinking, offer advertising spaces to artists, which might be a challenge as artists are TIGHT, like duck’s ass tight when it comes to spending money on marketing themselves. So I might look at approaching some art supply companies, galleries, art publications or just go the affiliate route.
• Post reviews on more products. Encourage companies to send products to me (I love receiving gifts in the post) and mention them. It could be win/win/win if done right. I get a surprise in the mail, the company gets exposure, and you learn about a wonderful new product! Competitions could be an option too, where I just tell the company to send the products to a reader of the blog.
• Respond to emails and comments!! Argh, sorry if I haven’t replied to you! Don’t take it personally, I suck. I do read everything, I just haven’t been replying to much lately.
• Keep up to date with what is happening and write about it! Pretty straight forward this one, I just have to look at my domain name to remind me; artnewsblog.com.
• Do more artist profiles. If I find an interesting artist online, I should do a post on them.

Anyone know of reasonably affordable blog designer that can make me a spiffy new blog and tranfer Art News Blog from Blogger to.. umm.. Wordpress or that other blogging platform that I can’t think of right now? Perhaps I should see a logo designer first.

Fischli and Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), video, 30′, 1987

Honda Ad, 2003

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass, 2009

I remember the choreographer João Fiadeiro once showing Fischli & Weiss’s work during some seminar or workshop and talking about what in his mind made it so impressive: necessity. Although it might seem like anything can happen, what happens is exactly what needs to happen. A tautology that evolves in time? But isn’t any proof precisely that – a dynamic tautology?
So is it because it’s a proof that it’s so appealing?
A proof of what?
Of how things go, we are tempted to say.
Which, of course, is just silly talk. It’s precisely because things don’t go this way that we enjoy it so much. It’s because the unexpected becomes necessary.

What about this “evolution”? The work of art turned into a commercial turned into a music video. Don’t expect any moral judgement on that. Actually, I enjoyed all three videos.
We could discuss the question of authorship. But we won’t. (Fischli & Weiss threatened to sue Honda).
Here’s what I’ve been pondering on: what exactly are the differences?
Because, once you’ve accepted that they’re all in the same category (actually, this type of inventions is called either Heath Robinson contraptions (UK), or (more commonly) Rube Goldberg Machines (US) and have been in popular culture at least since the beginning of the 20th century), you can see into how very different they are.
So what makes it an art project, a commercial, a music video?
If we turn the volume off, what changes?
If we put music, or switch it from one video to another?
The timing, the materials, the way things go and pass.
What sort of universe appears in each of them?
Yes, that’s precious: they each have their own universe. They are entities. You can easily find yourself around them, with their texture, their dynamics, their smell…
One more thing: aren’t they each hiding in their specific ways this very basic urge for things to make sense?
If that is so, it’s beyond necessity or discovery. It’s the comfort of order. The sense that somewhere beyond the frame, things are just waiting to come into action, to move into view. And their potential is already in perfect harmony with the moment when they will become what they are meant to be. The best of possible worlds.
It shouldn’t come as a surprize that these delicately balancing certainties remind us of childhood.

Spencer Tunick has encouraged 5000 Australians to get naked and pose on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

That’s not my white bum on the bottom left of the image as I chose not to scare the locals. I’m not much of a morning person either.

From the Sydney Morning Herald.. “The official name of Tunick’s installation was The Base. Yet after waiting two hours for the sun to come up, it became apparent that Blue Poles might be an appropriate title as a brisk wind hit the Opera House steps.”