MIMOSIS - 2009
“Your work escapes all logical categories, including such stable categories as body/mind, reason/madness, normal/abnormal, nature/culture, pleasure/need, female/male. It caresses jouissance; a bliss without clear outlines, an orgasm without a body; it laughs at reason and makes fun of its prudent categories. I am a poet and I rely upon words, but your work leaves me tongue-tied, jumping up and down gesturing hysterically. Your work has no need of words, it simply shows and does not tell; it highlights a place beyond the Symbolic and its fascist structures. It shows another place woven in lace. Your work makes nonsense of structuralism and its obsessive search to reduce everything to deciphered structures and symbolic transactions. It puts under suspicion philosophy's grand claim to be a master discourse, a universal meta-discourse, that tells the undeniable story of Reason to all times and all people. Your work tiptoes around such skiting hierarchies, and is a concrete flight from representation, that subverts, disturbs the categories, and the perceptual and moral "certainties" that rely upon it."...............john najjarr, poet

I WAS HAMLET - 1994
A 73' documentary about the life and works of Heiner Muller, featuring extracts from a number of the plays, an indepth interview, and readings by Muller of his previously unpublished poetry. This film was made in collaboration with Dominik Barbier, and produced by the Centre Pierre Scaeffer CICV, Arcanal, and the Academie des Theatres Experimentales, Champs Elysee. It was screened at Muller's request when he received his life-time achievement award, shortly before his death.

NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON - 1999
This 3-hour live-to-air broadcast was part of a one-year series on "any theme an artist might wasnt to associate with the full moon". Each full moon in 1999, one artist in Paris, and one in Berlin would stage an event at a live venue, and these would be broadcast in alternation from midnight to 3am.

As the Parisian September artist, I chose the theme of LUNACY. My venue was the nightclub La Fleche d'Or, originally a railway station of La Petite Ceinture; a line no longer in service since the 1930's.

My aim was not to describe lunacy, but to evoke it. Into a crowd of 600 people, both inside and down on the railway tracks, I place 30 "crazy clowns", one transvestite MC, myself, 3 "Chippendales", live music and dance, and 9 large-screen projections of my quirky imagery...

"A sensitive portrait by Cathy Vogan of the dancer Ernest Berk at over eighty years of age. His body, his wrinkles, his views on old-age and sexuality, his zest for life link up with a reflection on time from both a biographical and a scientific viewpoint. Experience and wisdom has gathered in the wrinkles of the skin just as in the warped bark of ancient trees. The recent death of Ernest Berk makes this approach to him as "Methuselah," the magician of life, a final poetic document of the times."

Median Kunst Archive 2003

NO WAY BUSTER - 1989
This story is an auto-biographical one for the artists Cathy Vogan and Dominik Barbier - about love, separation and the splendour of the electronic. It involved a promenade for the spectator, through 600 m2 of decor, with 30 screens, and 6 synchronized audiovisual sources. The final viewpoint was an "observatory", created in a theatre which had been comletely flooded with water, and branded with the meridians of the earth.

One imagines in the distance, a dream-lover, in a distant continent. Nothing but a flickering Transmitter, the Three Perils of communication, and an unstable, perverse Network to convey the dreamer's messages of undying love and passion.

Is intercontinental passion proportional to the square of the distance that separates us? Is dream in fact born of distance? And if separation from the image of oneself is at the origin of the idea of death, is separation from the Other at the origin of the idea of Passion?

"No Way Buster" was premiered at the Theatre de la Comedie in Herouville St Clair in 1989, and later toured France and Brazil. The type of venue for Buster would vary dramatically: l'Aeronef in Lille, usually reserved for rock concerts; Bob Benamou's Gallery du Sous Sol in Paris; and the Museum of Sound and Image in Sao Paulo.

CATHY VOGAN - aka CaTV - singer/performer/composer/ - digital media artist – designer/producer - lecturer - writer.

BIOGRAPHY

Cathy Vogan is a multi-award winning Irish-Franco-Australian artist, living in Sydney - off and on - since the 70’s. She has shown her work throughout the world, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, the USA and Australia, and for the last 12 years, maintains a high profile online, through her numerous websites. Her current artist site: VOGANIA.COM receives up to 40000 visitors per month, and her French ARCHIVES site, created in 1997, has been cited in Google’s Top 40 Arts Alternative.

Born in Ireland into a musical family, and raised there until adolescence, Cathy Vogan - aka CaTV - was a professional singer in the theatre and cabaret from the age of 3-11 years, and won two major British talent awards before she was 10. She gave up the stage ”forever”, at the age of 14… but “somehow got lured back there” in her twenties. After a brilliant school, but restless four-year university education in English, Foreign Languages, Psychology, Mathematics and Philosophy, Ms Vogan opted for full-time, IBM-based trouble-shooting + two more years as a student at the Ensemble Theatre, under the tutelage of Zika Nester and Hayes Gordon.

In 1982 she was accepted as a student at Sydney College of the Arts to study audiovisual sculpture with David Ahern, Peter Callas and Nigel Helyer, and in her third year, collaborated in several performance art projects with Mike Parr. Vogan was a founding member of two experimental music / performance art groups in the 80’s. One was “The Unconscious Collective”, who performed regularly at Art Unit, Art Bunker, Art Space (when The Gunnery), and live-to-air or onstage for 2SER. The other was the enigmatic Rehumm, a mobile, abreactive, Acapella outfit, who would choose “any nice public acoustic space” as their venue, and invariably draw attention. On occasions, she also collaborated with Nick Tsoutas’ troupe: The All-Out Ensemble, at the Performance Space and elsewhere.

Vogan won one of Australia’s first Video Art awards at the 1986 Australian Video Festival with her student film ‘Dear Me’, and represented Australia in the same festival, one year later, at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery, with her much-noticed video installation: ‘Australia Is…’. She received offers, and went to live in Paris for 16 years, where she made numerous films, installations, and live events; and where she co-founded, with French artist Dominik Barbier, an art-and-broadcast post-production house called Fearless Studios.

Within the context of her years at Fearless, Vogan produced and collaborated with many other artists, writers, filmmakers, composers and choreographers; such as Alain Renais, Pierre Schaeffer, Moebius, Julia Kristeva, Terry Gilliam, Robert Longo and Orlan. In 1992, Vogan and Barbier began a 3-year collaboration with the German playwright, Heiner Muller, for the making of the film ‘I was Hamlet’ (1993); and subsequently, for a large-scale stage production of Muller’s play: ‘HAMLET MACHINE’, where Muller was to direct the actors. The 13-screen event, with 4 stages and a mostly live musical score, took 7 years to create, and was performed - posthumously for Muller - in Amsterdam, Lyon and Marseille over 2002 and 2003.

Vogan began her academic career in 1989, tutoring at the University of Paris VIII, and was a lecturer at the European School of Visual Arts for 5 years prior to returning to Australia in 2003. Other institutions that have welcomed her teaching include the Ecole du Frenois in Lille, and the Kunsthochschule in Cologne.

Among Vogan’s numerous awards to date: the 1993 Berlin Videofest award for the film ‘Methuselah’. For ‘The Synchronizer’, she won both the Video Leggere Grand Prix of Palermo, and the Videokunstpreis in 1997. Her most recent has been the Amnesty International Freedom Art Award (Critic’s Choice) in 2006, for the work ‘Menu, Title, Return’.

Since returning to Australia, Cathy Vogan has taught at AFTRS for 4 years, and lectured in digital media at the UNSW COFA for 2 years. She also stopped teaching, intermittently, to increase her knowledgebase; studying 3D animation full-time for 3 months at AFTRS in 2005. She has also done courses in Shake Compositing, and Logic Studio (audio engineering), to assist in the driving of her “one-woman-team”. Her teaching style is very much of the hands-on variety, and she has the Apple Certified Trainer certification, to affirm the highly professional aspect of her practice. Apple Australia were happy to have Cathy Vogan as a ‘Support Partner’ in 2007 and 2008, where she performed the role of creative trainer to the ABC Nationwide and Disney Pictures. As a industry designer-author, Vogan has brought home a number of significant products, such as “First Australians” 7-box DVD edition (educational version) for SBS.

In 2007, Vogan decided to revive, produce and join the renowned industrial music group <SPK>: with one of its original members: Tone Generator (aka Dominik Guerin). K.Osmosis, the writer and performance artist, joined them for the band’s first release in 25 years: ‘DESPAIR’; a partly new, and partly archival DVD with web-links to the new SPK’s ever expanding “work-in-flux”. The site also contains a wealth of previously unseen relics, including William S. Burrough’s type written notes for The Final Academy; and ‘100 Years of Cruelty’ (Cathy Vogan 1997); an in-depth discussion with Julia Kristeva, on Antonin Artaud and The Theatre of Cruelty. "100 years of Cruelty" is soon to be released by Transflux Films on DVD, as a bonus item to their latest Artaud edition.

The ‘DESPAIR’ DVD is Tesco Records top-seller for the last 19 months. CaTV (Cathy Vogan) has engaged to continue producing material for a new release in 2010.