Alex Danko, Songs of Australia,
Vol. 2, Death of
the Spirit of Freedom,
Installation view, 1997

"LGM the experience" is by turns fascinating, frustrating, and more than a little disappointing. As an event it comprises several discrete parts: a catalogue with a slew of literary contributions by a diverse bunch of known and lesser known figures, including, alongside Grayson and Walker themselves, Steve Wigg, Mike Ladd, Angus Trumble, Scott Redford, Aleks Danko, Cath Kenneally, Sarah Thomas, Suzanne Treister, Mehmet Adil, David Broker, and the eponymous "Anonymous"; an innovative hookup with the Art Gallery of South Australia highlighting particular works in the gallery's collection, such as Breughel's The Tax Collector; a Website, more or less up and running and an exhibition at the EAF. The exhibition component itself is in three installments and features works by Aleks Danko, Sally Mannall, Harry Wedge, John Reid, Scott Redford, Destiny Deacon, Mike Stevenson, Rebecca Cummings, Andrew Petrusevics, Patricia Piccinini, and Laurens Tan.

If all that sounds complex, it is. Lawyers, Guns & Money is a Ben Hur epic. The project is even larger in scale than the 600, 000 Hours: Mortality project Walker and Grayson curated in 1994. 600, 000 Hours was concerned with death, or less banally, with death as cultural phenomenon and was highly successful due to the interest aroused through an accompanying conference. It too involved an exhibition in several installments and an expansive two-volume catalogue. However, in LGM this format has been considerably expanded into an episodic and open-ended form and a web of complex relations between art, artist, institution, social milieu and art writing. LGM is an imbrication of law, power, violence, sex and capital.

With all this, what more could one want? Frankly, I wanted the art to be more "artistic" although artistic is hardly the word. LGM ultimately comes off best when seen as an disjointed, diffuse and intentionally digressive experiment in curatorial form. Which is not say there has (to date) been no good art or writing. Its just for all the first-person accounts of being harassed by the cops on the way home as a teenager, of being conned by a grifter, of being beat up by a bunch of bikers, it feels a bit bloodless. As writers, Scott Redford and Catherine Kenneally do well. Kenneally's account of her murderous ex, and Redford's splenetic characterisation of the Australian art scene manage to hit a raw nerve, but generally there's barely a hint of passion. Redford's exhibition also stands out. His purposefully abstruse symbolic logic is perfectly suited to the prevailing mood of attenuated anarchy, metaphorising a sense of emotional and psychological short circuiting. Yet overall, LGM has a sense of obeisance before the departed ghost of transgression. Hamlet not, indeed.

Scott Redford, Colour-field
painting (food for
the afterlife) from Hamlet
machine (not), 1997

Sally Mannall, at
traffic lights near
fire station,
from For lack of
evidence, 1997