Vivid is happening in Sydney at the moment. "What is Vivid?" you ask. Vivid is a means by which the NSW state government makes it more difficult for me to get home from work. Normally when I leave my office I join the tide of besuited lemmings pouring down towards Circular Quay railway station in relentless pursuit of home. Sure there's some jostling, a little light hearted trampling of the laggards under foot but essentially we are all on the same side each seeking escape from the city for another twelve hours or so.
When Vivid afflicts our city this all changes. The human tide intent on home pours towards the station to slam straight into another vast crowd of humanity standing just outside the station watching coloured lights on a building wall. The irresistible force has met the immovable object and progress is a painful, brutal exercise in scratching and clawing ones way through the crowd kicking aside children and the elderly and ganging up to overwhelm the able bodied. This nightly scene of carnage is illuminated in a kaleidoscope of jangling colours guaranteed to induce epilepsy in any survivors while in the background the opera house looks like someone has vomited on it from a great height.
Vivid is considered to be terribly successful in as much as it has persuaded people to come into the city during the week in the cold and dark of Winter. Which leads me to question. If you are successful in achieving something nobody in their right mind would want are you a genius or an imbecile. Should you be applauded for your success? Or should you be pilloried for trying in the first place? Still the lights are pretty and I suppose that justifies the crowds and the inconvenience for soulless reptiles such as myself who see the city not so much as a backdrop for art as a place to leave as swiftly and conveniently as possible once the wage slaving is done for the day.
Still it could have been worse, or possibly better. According to my colleague and part time garlic herder who also doubles as this blog's roving cultural reporter they have a similar festival in Hobart only without the light. It's call Dark Mofo or the people attending it are called mofos in the dark or something like that and it's basically a way of utilising decaying pieces of urban failure without having to go to the expense of lighting them. Either that or the Basslink cable's gone down again and Tasmania is back on candle power. It actually sounds way more fun than Vivid with belching gas jets (or possibly burst gas mains, its a little difficult to tell in Hobart) and fires semi illuminating various artisticish type things.
My favourite was the artist who created a piece consisting of seventy five translucent panels each plastered with the words "Your Work is Shit" which he then set up around the school of art which commissioned the work in the first place. Outraged comments from the students got it moved. Let me be clear, if he had set the work up anywhere else I would have full sympathy with the occupants of the building involved. However since the occupants of the building were essentially training to be the sort of whiny, petulant self absorbed pissants who might think that creating seventy five translucent panels saying "Your Work is Shit" is a valid use of anyone's time I personally think that each and every one who complained should automatically fail their course and be expelled. Go and get jobs as bank tellers guys, you're obviously not up to the rigours of "art".
The next day there was a nude swim because, of course there was.
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