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As you all probably know by now I have a bit of a fetish for industrial signage. This was a fave of mine - hard to take as it was in a building that was in almost total darkness save for a film playing nearby:



I might stick this on my Christmas presents this year:



I liked this sign. It was to help you keep away from a dangerous artwork...but as you can see, there is in fact no blue line, only a yellow and black one.

Another hall:



This artwork may not look it but it was actually huge. You have to climb up a 3m high scaffold to look down into this enormous scale model arena. Big though it is, each individual seat is smaller than your little fingernail. Very painstaking work.



This is an odd photo that didn't quite work. It's a high dynamic range composite shot but I didn't overexpose enough for the inside of the building, giving a really odd effect when the shots were merged.

Here are some of the darker artworks. This was in a funny round concrete building that was a bit like a water tank. It was darker than you might guess from the photo:



Another gloomy one. Lots of nice gloomy rooms.



One of my fave rooms was this huge room which I think was an electrical turbine house. THere was an audio installation there but I just loved the room for itself. The cupboards you can see contained some mysterious large glass globes.

While on warning signs, has the signage on the Mike Parr installation stuff been updated to more accurately reflect the contents of the exhibits?

I don't know about "updated" - the exhibition only opened on Weds - but I did think the signage was seriously lacking.

I did want to write a bit about Mike Parr so this is a good lead-in.

Parr is an Australian artist who I don't particularly like. Most of his artwork is (intentionally) extremely confronting and involves body mutilation. There is quite a lot of Mike Parr's work at the Biennale but it is segregated in a building well away from anything else. The building is an old cadet barracks so is pretty warren-like. You climb the stairs and there is a long blurb painted on the wall. I tend to quickly skim all these things but many walk straight past it. The blurb talks about some of the stuff you will see in the exhibition, including people getting burnt with cigarettes and flames, vomiting, cutting themselves with scalpels and so on. It also mentions that Parr has deliberately left some of the rooms with fetid water on the floors, the bodies of birds, etc. Down the bottom it mentions, in print no distinct from anything else, that the work is unsuitable for under 18s. It also says at the very end that Mike Parr detests violence. However, I think there should have been a couple of very big, clear warning signs warning about the strong themes, and the no kids rule. There were a couple of Biennale staff wandering round with walkie talkies who might stop any kids but I didnt' think it was nearly clear enough.

The exhibition is certainly very confronting and as I have a great dislike of seeing people in significant pain I didn't really watch most of the videos. However the exhibition space is just perfect. The barracks are full of peeling paint, dim rooms, leaves, bird feathers etc. The videos are in little side rooms and sometimes you have to navigate quite a maze to find them. As you walk along the corridor you hear gasps, moans, grunts and screams filtering out from the various rooms. In the bathroom Parr has left six big pails full of urine. They stink to high heaven after less than a week - god knows what the place will be like when the exhibition finishes in September.

Don't let that put you off the rest of the show. I just post the above as a big warning. The Mike Parr building is INTENSE.

Edit: I wasn't going to post this pic as it's a crap photo but it does help demonstrate a bit about the Parr building. This room was pitch black except for the film being projected to the right of the camera. The floor is covered with stagnant water and broken pipes hang from the roof. The image is much lighter than the room as I've pushed up the levels - note all the noise. I couldn't see a thing through the viewfinder nor was there any chance of focusing so I just held the camera near the floor and took the shot. Walking through this place made you think of walking through Abu Ghraib prison or some such unsavoury torture house.



There has been a bit of crap going on about Mike Parr in the press. Some idiot phoned up the RSPCA and complained about an artist executing chickens on Cockatoo Island. Yes, one of Parr's videos features a chicken being decapitated. But it was taken about 30 years ago. In the meantime, thousands of chickens are executed every day in poultry farms.

Oh, and this is someone else's artwork. Some people might say it's a load of crap.

Twwig, it closes on June 28.

Friday's pic - will post something in the Vivid Sydney thread shortly.