TheVine talks to
The Safari Team...
TheVine: I'm all about art collaborations and co-ops. Community makes better art than ego. Who are your favourite art collaborators?
Safari Team: There are so many great collaborations and these are a few of our favorites, Gilbert & George, Jake & Dinos Chapman, The Icelandic Love Corporation, Chicks On Speed, Ant Farm, Damp, Soda_Jerk, The Discriminating Gentlemen's Club, David Lawery & Jaki Middleton, Spat + Loogie, Post, The Suitcase Royale, The Black Lung, and 1927.
TV: What's the secret to your success?
ST: Starting the day by sharing good dance moves, followed by loving and respecting the Safari Team brain. This brain is given all our separate ideas and is able to shuffle and jam them in such a way that they are spat back out as one much stronger idea that we have all helped with. Having three people, the magic number, resolves all conflict in a 2:1 basis.
TV: Top three most disliked things about the art word?
ST: The art world for us is a bit like the emerald city - we are not sure exactly where it is or who runs it, but suspect it is a little man with white hair behind a curtain wielding some kind of powerful leaver.
TV: What is your take on art versus craft?
ST: Art is the best thing in the world made by humans, apart from maybe space travel, and craft is a category of art. Craft is maybe a bit more inclusive, implies a specialized home-made aesthetic. We believe in “Art For All” which is why we called our open art exchange project last year - The Craft Exchange Salon.
TV: What are your best Melbourne secret places for second hand materials?
ST: For our art installations we search the streets on recycle day, second-hand wood and a box factory in the ‘burbs. Our collage material is generally supplied by op shops, garage sales and second hand bookstores all over the world, it is a never ending collection. Most of the Melbourne stores are all dried up, you need to go to the country for the juicy supplies.
TV: What are you hopes for the winter of our economic downturn?
ST: We will enter a new realm of cheap pie competitions, which we are all pretty excited about. But it was RZA who said "Cash rules everything around me" and we really believe that.
TV: What's happening at Seventh?
ST: Safari Team Dig to China Part II – a series of enormous circular collages based on our explorations so far. Some important questions that may be answered by coming and seeing the show: Can blood be replaced with lava? Does Moses rule the underground with his subterranean-sleaze-cloning-factory? Who will lie trapped in ice for eternity? Is Michael Hutchence the creator of the universe?
The show opens April 7 and runs until April 25 2009
Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne.
See www.seventhgallery.org or www.safariteam.org for more information.