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Mark Shorter
Chop Dig Chanty | 2017
Chop Dig Chanty. @ Paul’s Paddock
Chop Dig Chanty is a performance work that seeks to compose a chanty (work song) through the labour of chopping and digging. Over the course of three days, Catts and Shorter will fell and chop up a tree, and dig a hole respectively. As the axe chips the wood and the shovel carves the soil, rhythms between the two actions will be found and employed to divide and organise the timber and to propel the excavation downward. Performance throughout the day
bio:
Mark Shorter is a lecturer in Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the Victorian College of the Arts. He studied at the National Art School, Sydney and the Sydney College of the Arts where he completed a PhD in Visual Arts. He has exhibited internationally and throughout Australia. Significant exhitibions include: Mapping La Mancha, The Physics Room, Christchurch 2015; The Groker, Plato’s Cave, EIDEA House, New York 2015; 50 Ways to Kill Renny Kodgers, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, 2014, presented as a part of the Dark MOFO festival; Acts of Exposure, a survey of his Schleimgurgeln performance and video work, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 2013; and Renny Kodgers LIVE with Pee Pee, presented as part of the Biennale of Sydney’s Superdeluxe@Artspace, 2010.
statement:
Shorter’s practice deploys performance as an aesthetic strategy to challenge established conventions and to open up new ground for exploration, particularly in relation to the artist’s body and its representation. Key to his work is an interest in how performance functions within the visual arts and broader contemporary culture. Shorter regularly enacts work in atypical, alternative venues to consider the function of art both inside and outside conventional modes of display.
Paul’s Paddock
bio:
Mark Shorter is Head of Sculpture at the Victorian College of Arts in the Faculty of Fine Art and Music, the University of Melbourne. He studied at the National Art School, Sydney and the Sydney College of the Arts where he completed a PhD in Visual Arts. Recent exhibitions and performances include Song for von Guérard, Carriageworks, as part of The National (2019), Hello Stranger, Campbelltown Art Centre (2018), The Lonesome Receiver Gertrude Glasshouse (2018), 6m of Plinth, Artspace, Sydney (2016); Mapping La Mancha, Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand (2015); 50 Ways to Kill Renny Kodgers, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart (2014); The Groker, Plato’s Cave, EIDEA House, New York (2015); and Acts of Exposure, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (2013). From 2010 to 2012 Shorter was the host of The Renny Kodgers Quiz Hour on Sydney radio station FBi 94.5FM.
statement:
Mark Shorter makes performances and installations that question dominant narratives around landscape, gender and the body by stretching and turning the ideologies that sit deep in their form to see what bends or breaks. While he often performs as himself he also makes art through a variety of guises such as the vaudeville cowboy, Renny Kodgers, the quixotic journeyman Tino La Bamba, and the time-travelling landscape painting critic Schleimgurgeln. These performance investigations express a contemporary grotesque and propose an art that is guttural, visceral and not beholden to the cerebral.
