Cocktail Hour, Gregory and Watts

Abstract

For Art Month Gregory and Watts have created a series of videos and paintings unpacking the complexity of the simple cocktail. As the cocktail sees a slow revival thanks to Mad Men and Hipsters they ask what’s so important about a cocktail? The performance of making and drinking cocktails is one of the many rituals of class, in fact that functions all the more through the contemporary mask of irony. This knowledge functions even through denial (“I don’t know how to make a Manhattan”) particularly in art where artists are still expected to pretend their field isn’t elitist. Gregory and Watts make and drink a series of cocktails to unmask the myth of their own position as well as the myths/history/ideology of the sites in which they make them. For example Cosmopolitan The Block situates the making and the drinking of the Sex and the City “girls favourite drink” in the newly gentrified Redfern area. The Block, once was an area of Aboriginal managed housing but it has recently been sold off. What are the complicated interests and histories running through the site that can lead to two artists, surrounded by “alcohol is prohibited” signs, to make a Cosmopolitan?