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| PreMillennial:
Signs of the soon coming storm Ronnie van Hout & Mike Stevenson Australian Centre of Contemporary Art 11 July - 17 August, 1997 Melbourne |
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 Mike Stevenson, from |
Contact with aliens is not what it used
to be. Sightings of flying saucers in the 1950s reflected
a Cold War culture. Tall blonde Venusians stepped out of
their spaceships to preach anti-nuclear messages of
universal brotherhood to American farmers. Despite their
pseudo-religious warnings, the aliens were generally
friendly and often invited contactees to ride in their
spaceships for tours of Mars or Venus. However, by the
1980s friendly alien encounters were increasingly
replaced by unexplained abductions, medical examinations,
rapes and tortures by evil-looking silver creatures with
bulbous heads. Such accounts have entered popular consciousness while t.v. series like the X-Files have helped cement a fascination in deep dark secrets and conspiracy theories. Mike Stevenson and Ronnie van Hout's "PreMillennial - Signs of the Soon Coming Storm" opened up a contemporary world in ruins, with evil empires and aliens behind every facade. For this exhibition, Stevenson took as his source material blown-up pages from journals such as Artforum, Art+Text and Time featuring the work of Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Daniel Buren and others. Each was lit by an ultra-violet light, revealing hidden slogans within the work: "All that glitters is gold", "The established order of ages looks favorably on our endeavors", and "666". Stevenson's avant-garde is presented as a facade behind which lurks a right-wing power; subversive but with ultimately sinister intent. He "uncovers" the repressed truth about contemporary art and reveals it to be a vehicle for evil empires plotting to take over the world. Stevenson plays on the anxieties of an artworld that distrusts appearances. There is widespread belief in the general public that viewing art is a form of decoding in which various levels of meaning are only available to initiates. For many people "out there", most contemporary art could well have been created by aliens (after all, they did build the pyramids). Disrupting the hermeneutics of suspicion (the tradition of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche), Stevenson playfully uncovers the hidden truths behind the surface. If, following poststructuralism, there are no "true essences", Stevenson indicates that reading art is about the mastery of meanings. It's a question of who does the defining. In the next room, Ronnie van Hout presented a series of UFO drawings juxtaposed with photocopies of his unemployment documentation from the New Zealand Labour Department. Scattered around the room on plinths were painted plastic models, tiny dioramas depicting the debris of war. These latter fragments constituted a virtual world that was never whole. Always coming before the Millennial, art is always already in ruins, already "failed". Van Hout's unemployment documentation suggest the role of the contemporary artist; essentially unemployable, not "useful" or productive but a creator of ruins. Western consciousness continues to fear the unknown, which is always the unknowable. With the apocalypse always just around the corner, van Hout and Stevenson analyse contemporary paranoid fantasies of the unknown. The capitalist artworld of Mike Stevenson preys on people's insecurities, creating anxiety and paranoia. Van Hout's mini dioramas remain frozen moments in a ruptured world in which God has died and the aliens have landed. "PreMillennial" presents a paranoid circuitry of desire in which the dark logic of the mind produces suspicion and anxiety within the ruins of modernity. D J Huppatz © The artists and |
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 Ronnie van Hour, |
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