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| Various
Artists Lost in Music |
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 Lost on Music, 1996 |
We're
lost in music We're lost in music The future has arrived and it's wearing a nylon playboy leisure suit. It seems David Rosetzky (curator) and the artists at First Floor have quit the nine to five of art to step out into the world where television, music, film clips, furniture, art, writing and fashion are lost in the international stylistic nebula of Retro. Lost in Music exhibits work by Lyndal Walker, Jacinta Schreuder, a film clip of the Australian Art Rock band Brown Anchor by Michael Delaney and Ben Ford, retro furniture by Plasma and Mooks shop fittings. Like the alien private eye who leads the forensic investigation of planet Earth in her fiction, Lyndal Walker's Banal le nouveau chic excavates the detritus of slacker lifestyle. The photographs (polaroids, instamatics and colour photocopies) are tacked on the gallery wall like pinups in a student loungeroom. The images (including Dr Seuss illustrations, an Addidas cardigan, mangled toy bunnies in lurid colours and fake wood veneer) exhibit fragmentation of a lifestyle in which decades and styles mingle to create an exotic but intensely familiar mannerism. If you're queasy about Walker's use of the (now out of fashion) grungey toy work, then you're missing the point.Within her interest in fashion, Walker's most important and recurrent theme is time. The pressure to be up to or groovily out of date. The precision timing of sartorial correctness. The urgency of the sale. These days, people are measuring time by style - that song/art/word/posture/concept/dance/crystal cylinders t-shirt is so '81. Within Retro sensibility, style is implicit to memory. The rounded edges of instamatic photographs give a sensation of memory, even when (in the case of this work) they were taken last week. Other retro technologies such as the super 8 (used in her other works) and dymo labeling play with their resonance as both private memory and international fashion. A slick counter to Walker's grubby slacker aesthetic is Jacinta Schreuder's acrylic painting in a 60s Pop style, Born to run. Like the pop song that names the show, Born to run gives an underlying sense of urgency with light, ambiguous content. The image is lifted from a 70s girl romance magazine and is of a woman running from a man in an urban scape. And next to it is a painting of a phone (an Optus 1996 model). The text "must have one" makes on think . . . must have a lover, must have a phone . . . and how it can be imperative that both come in the right style - a supplement identity. Schreuder is also playing on the way the telephone has featured in pop songs as the conduit for so many romances. In a cool, seamless style that belies its sophistication, a style that seems to be a pure emulation but is in fact incisive and self conscious, Schrueder's Born to run embodies the fusion of style and desire, of nostalgia and contemporary consciousness within the Retro sensibility. Ben Ford and Michael Delaney's parodic homage to Fleetwood Mac, the film clip of Man's Bracelet by by Brown Anchor was shot on a Melbourne roof top in a defeated gesture towards the monumental football stadium in which Tusk was shot in 1979. Brown Anchor, self described Australian Rock Art band, are a version of the Aussie pub band with the cerebral bent of Emmerson, Lake and Palmer. Here, failure (this Melbourne band doing covers of 70s Fleetwood Mac are as big as they're ever going to get) becomes a strategy by which to create a style which substitutes the thrill of something totally new, with the satisfaction of guessing the source of that flute solo, a pleasure in nostalgia and the stylishness of quotation. Throughout the gallery, furniture by Plasma opens up these works the the persuasiveness of retro style. The furniture dates from 1952 to 1983 and yet it all looks contemporary. A 1956 chair by Eero Saarinen picks out the clean lines and milky retro-orange of Schrueder's Born to run. The Round-up storage system by Anna Castelli - Ferrieri of 1969 is obviously the predecessor of the Mooks corporate style, here represented by a sales unit, modular light box and t-shirts sealed in plastic. So whether you think that retro is a complex relationship between time, style and identity, a morphing of private memory and corporate strategy, or just a sartorial crisis on the Friday night of art history, Lost in Music taps into one of the most significant aesthetic trends of the fin de siecle. Lara Travis © The artist,
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