Hire Me Out,

CalArts, Los Angeles, California, 1999-2000.

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Biography

Australian Contemporary Art

Christopher Howlett has over ten years experience in the Creative Industries as a contemporary artist and over five years as an interactive designer. He has participated in the inaugural Arc Biennial: Art, Design and Craft exhibition in Brisbane, shown work in the 12th Inter-Society of Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, participated in the Los Angeles Freewaves 9th Festival of Film, Video and New Media and was a committee member at an artist run space in Melbourne called Blindside Artist Run Space Inc. where he curated Debut III and also exhibited his solo show called INOUT in 2006. He now works and lives in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Christopher Howlett was born 1974, in Papua New Guinea. Upon graduating from Brisbane Grammar School, Howlett worked in a variety of jobs which included kitchen hand work, laboring, and telemarketing. In 1997 he exhibited at Whitebox gallery and then traveled throughout Germany before returning to Brisbane, Australia where in 1998 was awarded an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Travelling Art Scholarship from the South Australian School of Art.

Howlett’s early work included installation experiments with soft, kinetic sculptures made out of stained bedroom fabrics, kinetic drawing machines and biodegradable materials cut into abstract, phallic shapes and sewn onto canvas.

An important shift in Howlett’s approach came in 1999 at the California Institute of the Arts, when he created a work called Hire Me Out. The project took place in Los Angeles and ran from the start of 1999 till the end of 2000. Hire Me Out was a time based conceptual art performance project that used a situational approach to examine the artist "labor" as a form of "artwork" and brought into question the role of the artist as Author.

Howlett hired himself out to other artists in the Los Angeles contemporary art scene in order to create their work for them. There were a number of elements to the project which included a negotiable artist fee, a verbal contract and recorded video documentation of the event.

His final MFA exhibition was his enlarged business card hand painted onto the gallery wall and a video archive of his labour reduced to hours worked, money paid and the task performed which the viewer could watch and fast forward through on a small television monitor.

This was his first body of work which challenged traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object, authorship and institutional forms of display.

Upon returning to Australia in 2001 Howlett’s conceptual art practice initiated a project called Weapons on the Wall whereby he used traditional modes of artistic production (drawing, sculpture, painting, etc) to create an overall effect of negative-transcendance by turning an object filled gallery into a quasi-museum junk yard for negation and a site where political resistance is possible.

The installation used discarded protest cardboard signs, historical propaganda poster jamming techniques, manipulated amateur Australian landscape paintings hung in a salon style, a sculpture garden made out of second-hand household goods, found tree branches, indigenous artefacts and souvenirs, home gardening tools crafted into weapons, hand crafted watercolour political slogans, helium inflated balloons, inkjet photographs including internet porn, Nazi regalia, cave exploration, and Halloween rubber presidential masks, as well as fashion posters and magazines, war books piled up on the floor, stacked truck tyres, computer games, sculpted KKK pillow masks, sci-fi computer games, Iraqi beheading videos and fascist icons mixed in with the sporting nationalistic colours of Australia. Howlett’s varied approach ranges from minimal conceptual gestures which question and provoke critical reflection in the viewer, to full-blown production scale installations which overload and attack the senses.

In Melbourne, 2005 he began Christopher Howlett Enterprise: this is not art, but design. This critical, time-based performance work comes out of French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud's relational art aesthetics of the 90's where "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space"; and problematises, critical designs position that this form of design is "affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo" and as a result is not critical.

Christopher Howlett Enterprise: this is not art, but design. questioned the role of the artist and studio, examine the theoretical links between relational and critical design aesthetics and participated in a Centrelink approved study for the long term unemployed called NEIS (New Enterprise Incentive Scheme). The purpose of this government approved course is to turn the long-term unemployed into small business operators who can remove themselves from the welfare system.

He currently lives and works in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.