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Ugo Rondinone, Shadow of
falling stars, wooden wall,
speakers, sound, coloured
plexiglass, 266 x 1222 cm, 1999
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Ugo Rondinone installation in the
exhibition Signs of Life was like being in a
strange, existential movie. Made up of two works, you
entered a semi-darkened room in which four video
monitors, displayed high like surveillance equipment,
showed film footage of a figure walking and a girl
dancing in slow motion. Opposite the entrance was a wall
of roughly finished timber planks, painted dark green and
in the centre, a pink window overlooking the city.
Combined with a soundtrack of the artist repeating a
languid dirge, the intimacy of the video work coupled
with the pink-tinged city view seemed happy and
infinitely sad, melancholic and whimsical. Rondinone was one of the fifty-six
International and Australian artists featured in Signs
Of Life the core exhibition of the 1999 Melbourne
International Biennial. The exhibition was located in the
heart of Melbourne in a run-down office tower, a former
post office and telephone exchange. As an exhibition
space it was a building that came with no institutional
baggage and exuded no apparent story of its own. The
scale of Signs Of Life was in itself an event
defiantly requiring more than one visit to view. The
multiple floors allowed for a real sense of exploration
and discovery; the levels differing dramatically in
character; some open and flooded with natural light
others a labyrinth of dark corridors and rooms.
The exhibition included a
large number of video works all of which had their
screening environments adapted to their particular needs.
These included the domestic scaled interiors of Andrea
Lange and Gitte Villesen, the very conventional
theatrical settings of Deimantas Narkevicius and Joćo
Penalva and the more deliberately sculptural spaces of
Aernout Mik and Smith/Stewart. These architectural
environments encouraged differing viewing regimes; the
couches in Lange and Villesen's domestic suites fostering
an intimacy that reflected the works subjects and
encouraged conversation and reflection amongst their
casually seated audience. Narkevicius and Penalva's
conservative cinematic presentation emphasised the works
engagement with film; Narkevicius deconstructing the role
the cinema has in propaganda and Penalava's work
addressing the gap between the audiences assumptions for
viewing created by this frame and the actual demands of
his work. Not all the video works were isolated within
discreet environments. Susan Phillipsz Susan,
Barbara, Joan & Sarah: A Song Apart drew the
audience across the large open space to a hidden corner
where the Phillipsz sisters sung harmonies on four
separate videos. The work addressed, amongst other
things, the notion of erasing distance through the shared
communication of music.
Most of the work in Signs
of Life capitalised precisely on the potential of the
architecture, exploiting the opportunity to change the
actual building, the buildings vistas and its
spaces in a manner uncommon in a usual gallery context.
Like Rondinone's work, Ricky Swallow's series of kinetic
tableaus were displayed with the city grid laid out
below, exploiting the given panorama offered by the
building. The work utilises the shells of old portable
record players into which the tiny futuristic tableaux
are built. The archaic mechanics of the turntable enables
Swallow to include one repetitive animated action in each
model. In Model of Surveillance a figure seated at
a giant observation panel circled slowly. In Model for
Chimpanzees with Guns a gun toting ape faced
terrorist (or resistance fighter) turns cautiously
holding a circle of figures at bay on the roof of a grey
office tower. The repetitive mechanical action of the
models combined with the scientific precision of
Swallow's miniatures, added to this understanding of
science as a form of oppression and control. Surveillance
is a major theme in Swallows dioramas, made most
apparent in his panopticon and laboratory scenes but also
in his voyeuristic scenes of urban terrorism as in Incident
at the Dinosaur Park. Viewed through Swallow's
paranoid constructions the city below, miniaturised like
the tableaux, becomes a site of hidden and sinister
activities.
Not all works have
benefited from their environment. Terri Bird's Fashioning
a Future and Other Fictions of Being didnt
survive beyond the frame of the gallerys generous
potions and sat forlornly in no-space like a piece of
partition that the wreckers missed. The drama of Dan
Shipsides climbing wall (The Penguin on Newcastle
Beach A migratory Tale) was also undermined by
the rawness of the building and the decidedly unheroic
sound of a tinny radio playing in the background. This
simple sign served to locate his actions no longer within
the noble and conquering performance of the mountaineer
mapping the unknown, but the everyday bravery and problem
solving of the tradesman suspended on a building site.
Conversely the building's context revived works that may
have seemed tired and familiar in a gallery. On the upper
floor of a city tower the experience of standing in
Nikolaj Recke's Untitled clover field of sweet
smelling grass looking down at the busy street below
offered a charming sense of lost arcadianism.
Recke's work touched on
the theme of longing that was manifest in much of the
exhibition but perhaps most evident in Robert
Gobers Untitled 1995-97. This work featured
an open suitcase inside of which a drainage grate showed
an underground chamber where clear water flowed in a rock
pool. Just glimpsed are the legs of a man and child.
While arguably the work exploited the romantic childhood
fantasy of escape and adventure from the everyday, the
curator, Juliana Enberg, finds in it "baptism, hope
and the feminised man".
The fairytale qualities
apparent in Gober's work are also evident in Mariele
Neudecker's tableau I don't know how I resisted the
urge to run. Darker in its imaginings, Neudecker's
miniature forest elicited responses "midway between
panic and enchantment". Displayed in claustrophobic
conditions and lit by a single light in the darkness, the
work seemed secretive, hidden away in a tiny room of its
own. Easy to miss, its dark and cramped space enabled
only a few people access at a time.
Monica Bonvicini's A
violent, tropical, cyclonic piece of art having wind
speeds of or in excess of 75Mph! was equally moody
but more violent, and used the existing architectural
space and machinery. In a small room Boncicini installed
two giant fans that noisily buffeted anyone standing
between them, making it difficult to remain in the space.
There was a certain irony in this work as the wind, one
of the elements of nature that architecture strives to
protect us from, was turned inwards, serving to make the
viewer acutely aware of the environment.
John Frankland's
installation also dealt with architecture of the building
with a more contemplative and sophisticated take on the
minimalist aesthetic. The Telephone Exchange was a shell
with only the most rudimentary fitout and Frankland's
work offered the only fully finished surface, a gunmetal
plastic skin stretched tautly over the structure sealing
it with hermitic precision. In the neglected building,
the effect was not the architectural trompe
loeil, which worked so cleverly with his faux
lift lobby at the Pictura Brittanica at MCA a few
years back. Instead, there was a sense of unease between
the work distinguishing itself as simultaneously having
the only suitable level of finish and having a most
decidedly unreal level of finish.
Perhaps the most curious
of the exhibitions resonances, was the future of
the building itself. Marked for renovation into
apartments after the close of the exhibition, the most
surreal moments were perhaps when agents took potential
buyers to view the site while work was still on show.
Collapsing any distinction between real estate value and
visual culture, wannabe investors were forced to glean
what life of luxury might be lived post-Biennial, through
the lens of the ruptured architecture space of Aernout
Mik's video/installation depicting buildings and
catastrophes.
Helen Stuckey
1999
© The artists and
Courtesy of MIB &
the artists.
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Robert Gober, untitled,
leather, wood, forged iron,
cast plastics, bronze, silk,
steel, wax, human hair, brick,
fibreglass, urethane, paint, lead,
motors, water, 361.25 x 263
x 110.5 cm, 1997
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