1. I enjoy the vibrant colours and mesmerising patterns which are evident in a lot of artwork and I’ve been totally missing out
2. This was a great indication that I don’t know Brisbane

With an adventure trip to the museum prior to my GOMA expedition; it seems I learnt a lot that day. The biggest lesson I learnt from GOMA was that apart from admiring art for its aesthetics, I don’t really get art in its ‘artsy’ form at all but this in itself brought great novelty when browsing through the artwork.

Let me tell you, even the walk towards GOMA is interesting and fun. The State Library (located next to GOMA) has a weird patch of grass that is the same colour of the building and looks a bit like moss, but I don’t think it is moss. There was discussion over this grass/moss for at least a minute. It was intense. The entrance to GOMA is pure glass and it was hard to spot what was window and what was door… This made it slightly hard for some to enter (I won’t say who). Enough about the building though. I want to talk about some of the art which I really enjoyed….

William Yang and his bendy text

As soon as you walk in you will see the start of ‘The China Project’: Part of it was a strange collection from a photographer named William Yang. This was one of the few collections I understood (or at least I think I do). It’s basically a few photographs and some text which tells you about his experience growing up as a Chinese kid in Australia. He battles as a minority with a Chinese background and later on reveals his homosexuality. The hardest part about reading this art was the fact that the text went all bendy and I found myself reading the same line over and over again. I thought… so far so good this art stuff is pretty easy.

 We walked on a little further and I was totally impressed and fixated on the giant post-its that covered a massive wall. They were huge pieces of paper overlapped and stuck on the wall like post-its. Seriously if you haven’t seen giant post-its on a wall, do yourself a favour and go have a look. It’s awesome. The writing on these giant post-its had either deliberate misspellings or the people who created them only knew Engrish but it had things like ‘D&G and Cucci’ instead of ‘Gucci’ and other weird stuff that made no sense (No photos, I guess you will have to go see for yourself).

A little further from the giant 2 story post-it wall and we found a city of all the famous buildings in the world made out of clay. Around the city were TV screens showing some clay animation. The best part about this piece of art was that the clay had a colour and texture which resembled Cadbury chocolate to uncanny levels. Unfortunately again I cannot find a photo of this to show.

We made our way up to level 2… Here I found art from a person that I found really intriguing. Spencer Finch is (in all respects) a mad man. Here is a man that is more fascinated by colours, lighting, shading and shadows than me. His art is all about trying to draw these things in hope to conceptualise our perception of sight (I think). His first display didn’t really impress me much. It was a bunch of Polaroid looking photos which just looked like grey gradients and they were cloned and pasted all over the wall (something I could do in photoshop quite easily). Then he got a little stranger… I walked into a dark room and I think I shouted “Holy shit balls!” in an art gallery. I’m still not sure if an Art Gallery follows the library etiquette where you have to keep quiet but I felt bad about it… Anyway I found myself looking at his TV setup which looked like something out of a hybrid movie sequel for the Poltergeist and The Ring:

Holy Shit Balls!

I still don’t know what the aforementioned piece is about and I don’t think I will ever understand it but if he was trying to express his creepiness and insanity; this piece is perfect. If you find yourself in the Art Gallery, take the time to read the descriptions of his art though, they may help you more than it did me. They also add to the art as some of the descriptions are amusing and bemusing.

My favourite piece of his has to be his triumphant feat in capturing rainbow legs with black and white photos. I had to think about it for a long time… and the more I thought about it… the more it didn’t make sense at all.

Left leg of the rainbow.... in black and white

The man claims to have chased down the left leg of a rainbow and taken a photo of it… If you can see it in this photo please point it out to me as I cannot see a rainbow in this black and white shot.

The right leg of the rainbow... black and white

Again, he has claimed to have chased the right leg of this rainbow. It reminds me of the following motivational poster:

I have the urge to create art like this

Spencer also has a great book available from the Gallery Store which has a blank piece of paper tarnished by wind caught from the backyard of Emily Dickinson’s house…..

Although Spencer won my heart that day, I was also impressed with some of the Aboriginal art displayed at GOMA. Some of the patterns really had me thinking that these were in fact magic eyes so I spent a few moments trying to cross my eyes (to no unearthing). Even this lovely couple felt like they had to try:

A couple having a go at Magic Eye

There was a strange painting on the wall which I thought I should mention just in case someone can actually explain it to me: It had a kangaroo with sunglasses on, standing in a crowd of white people with stockings over their faces… but one of the guys had a condom on his head instead of stockings. This came with no description as I’m sure even the artist himself had no idea what was going on here (needless to say I can’t find a picture of this to show).

I feel I have to mention the giant hole in the wall as well. At first I thought, wow is this a massive subwoofer? I bet it pumps out some bass. Then I thought… gee this better not be a representation of genitalia…. and then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to get inside this thing… and then I thought, what if they made the inside like a jumping castle… that would be awesome:

Anish Kapoor's gaping hole

A special mentioning of some artsy video clips and the tree and kangaroos covered in pieces of fine China (which had me totally mesmerised) needs to be made here. Even apart from that pretty much everything is worth looking at. If you haven’t been there before or even in a while, I suggest you go have a look right after a stop at the museum. The transition from giant things hanging from a ceiling to giant post-it notes stuck to a wall really makes for a great day.