During the NZ Festival, City Gallery is aware that many people will be suffering from 'Art Anxiety', or what has come to be known as KUNST ANGST. We are offering refuge in the form of New Zealand-born, Melbourne artist Jason Maling's treatment sessions. Working at the coalface of contemporary anxiety, Maling will be at City Gallery providing assistance with a range of cultural maladies, including ‘Metaphobia’ and ‘Generalised Indifference Disorder’.  Maling will offer a unique one-on-one programme of personalised rituals for all ages aimed at clearing unwanted contemporary anxieties.

Jason Maling is a Melbourne based artist whose work explores individual and collective expressions of play through processes of public invitation, exchange and negotiation. Situated somewhere between comedy and critique, his projects happen where they need to and use what they must, combining people, live performance, graphic design, text, and object making. As a writer, educator and founding member of Live Art advocacy collective Field Theory he is an ardent supporter of work that crosses disciplines, shifts contexts and seeks new strategies for intervening in the public sphere.

Jason has guided people towards publically spanking each other on the original site of Lords Cricket Ground, encouraged people to crawl on their knees through the streets of the London and remapped cities in France with sharp sticks. He once generated an espionage ring in New Zealand and harnessed artists for public transport in Melbourne. Over the last few years he has been offering his services as a public enigma alongside running a Prismatic Auditing business. As If this wasn’t enough he recently developed a civic improvement league to curb inner city violence and started a post boy band called Self Help.

Jason’s recent forays into clinical practice are born of a fascination with the theatre of medicine - the myth of the artist and the things we are willing to do in-between. He claims to have absolutely no medical training beyond once practicing mouth to mouth on a latex dummy in standard 4 PE class and being able to apply a Band-Aid without letting the sticky bits touch each other.

*image (left)
Jason Maling,
Physician, 2012.  
Courtesy of the artist