Art after hours art AGNSW

I’m tired, a little damp and dirty at the edges after traipsing through the city in the aftermath of a summer storm with lightening, thunder and torrential rain. But it was warm and not unpleasant to sit, as we did tonight, on the edge of the harbour looking out at the weather from the open but sheltered terrace of the café at the Art Gallery of NSW. A four-piece band played to the patrons inside, the sounds of the accordion, double bass, acoustic guitar and fiddle waxing and waning with the opening and closing of the automated glass doors between the busy inside world and the sparsely inhabited exterior. We ate penne with ricotta and spinach, a pea, lentil and haloumi salad then cake … crumble for me and an orange blueberry slice for Spike.

Fruit bats flitted across the sky seemingly undisturbed by the storm around and above us and them. Maybe you have few choices when you’re a fruit bat. Maybe you don’t care. Darkness falls, it’s time to fly, to forage then eat. If it rains, it rains and if lightening splits the night, so be it … you’re a fruit bat. The humans, who may have seen too many Hammer horror movies, probably think that bats, thunder and lightening are meant to meet on any night you care to mention.

The gallery was packed for a ‘fashion show’ of contemporary sari by a local designer. The cat walk parade was linked to the big exhibition on Indian art that fills a large part of the gallery at the moment. I can’t recall seeing a larger crowd at any previous late night event. Once it got started though the parade was something of an anti-climax. We watched the same clothes paraded up and down the stage maybe three or four times by ten or so delightful models, one assumes amateurs but none the less intent on strutting their stuff for our enjoyment. They appeared first as single demonstrators – once from the left then once from the right; then in pairs; followed by trios until the climax … eight young women and two young men up on the platform before us, weaving carefully around one another like carefully orchestrated iridescent lorikeets in azure, gold, scarlet, emerald, deep purple, bronze, silver and just about every shade in the colour wheel. Jewellery weighed down wrists, jangled and crashed in discordant resistance to the poorly co-ordinated music on the PA. Gold and silver stilettos flashed into view beneath the gorgeous fabrics and it seemed only by virtue of their will to succeed that the whole troupe avoided the most colourful pile-up one could ever imagine.

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