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| All
this and heaven too Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 1998 Jonathan Nichols |
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Colin
Duncan, Sleeplessness, |
All this
The 1998 Telstra Adelaide Festival Visual Arts Program was huge, but maybe too hot and cold to be really comprehensible. Perhaps this even comes across in the title for the 1998 Biennial, "All This And Heaven Too". It was exasperated, even slightly weary. The well known 'big guns' - Jenny Holzer, Hal Foster, Joseph Kosuth, Susan Hiller, Douglas Crimp - were able to steal the popular show and thereby set the points of interest for most of the audience. Nevertheless, there were a range of other interesting components in Juliana Engberg and Ewen McDonald's massive curatorial assemblage which could account for the exasperation at ground level. A pathological desire to control and reconstitute one's encounters in the life-world is fundamental to curatorship. Curators are closest to artists in this sense. Their's is essentially a procedure of recognising and recounting complex creative experiences; experiences of artists' work and their contexts. But there is a need to press one's own language too; for curators to introduce the vantage points from which they weave things together. Their task is to properly propose each artist's work forthrightly, while at the same time laying down more entire networks of interrelationship. Implicit in curatorial behaviour is this responsibility that discloses itself in the exposure of one thing to another, in the sharing of thoughts and different languages. It is a task of recognising what is special and irreplaceable and attending to this amid the awareness that such a task is inevitably contingent. The exchange between these elements accounts for an exhibition's force as an event. Interrelationships may well fracture and expose unforseen connections and exegeses, as well as anticipate new pathways in ways which display the event's force (or failure). As a writer, trying to find a vernacular to articulate the event is also a test of its force. Millennialism On the cover of the 1998 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (Art Gallery of South Australia) catalogue is a photograph of a ginger-haired child dressed in jodhpurs staring intently over dusty fields into the distance. At first glance it is reminiscent of a 19th century romantic image; a lone figure standing at the edge of a stormy sea or bluff landscape, something to get lost in. It's quite funny really, this hokey kid standing with arms held carefully behind the back, intent on a distant scrub line and the further horizon. The image's washed-out lab colour and its likely origin in a family album hold it to the daggy quality of contemporary aesthetics, which surveys the past with the trepidation of a child. This image links many of the references explored in this 1998 exhibition: Anxiety about the present, doubts about the survival of the art object itself and the formal structures of 20th century culture. The Biennial's actual installation reinforced these anxieties. Space acted as a straightjacket. Some works were unnecessarily pushed up against walls or into little compartments, and most works were constrained by more-or-less visible grids, ensuring that the audience wouldn't get tangled. The exhibition had a creepy aura, as though decisions in the installation were an unconscious effect; a hangover from a history we don't remember too well. And in this respect, a form of repression seemed to be built into the exhibition's framework. The spatial effects acted to suppress the artwork and even the invisible bodies of the artists. These unconscious loadings encouraged a broody sense of foreboding, as in a horror movie. They also reinforced artworks like Margaret Morgan's Out of Order which stood at both sides of the entrance as though it were gates to a mausoleum. Morgan's was an elaborate installation of plumbing pipes which flow-charted the history of modernism as an alimentary tract. A Gothic demon haunted Susan Norrie's installed video movies too, with their skeletal, pre-stressed mix of the elevated and the bizarre, grotesque or horrible. Norrie's point is that if modernism is about beauty and the ideal, then it is automatically about the frightful flip side too. Memory and theory Many of the catalogue essays touched on the composition of memory, the effects of amnesia and its subliminal force - processes of forgetfulness and emptying - and the structures of ethical behaviour inherent in cultural representation. These are interesting issues in contemporary art, but the articulation of these 'concepts' often drew back to 1970s moments of conceptualism, with arguments as to its historical detail and the repercussions with which it leaves us. This could be seen as a collateral move that inadvertently illustrated Terry Smith's thesis (Artists' Week) that conceptual art was, in part, an institutionalisation of conceptualism itself. A proposition left un-posed in this regression back to conceptual idealists (and their children), is that perhaps now the perspective has changed somewhat, even reversed maybe. To conceptualise was once to be completely concerned with the logic of art's own problems and the need for new problems. Conversely, an interest in perceptual/retinal logic implied an unacceptable return to pre-existing aesthetic and political order, which avoided all problems. Perhaps now, though, the new generation of artists are not just trying to wriggle in and out of conceptual straightjackets, but are rather trying to connect with the motivating experiences of their life-worlds. These experiences function as a support which cannot be constantly kept in view and fully illuminated by theory. In this scheme of things, art is not just an image of concept formation or simply a search for an aesthetic ground zero. Instead, we have something which is closer to the basics of Hal Foster's 'reading' of Robert Gober. In his Artists' Week lecture, Foster suggested that art might be trusted to offer patterns and models of recognition for testing the world and producing theories. Back in the real time of the exhibition spaces, the danger and risk of conceptual teleology is that it just might be jamming the senses. The scepticism of earlier generations toward visualisation strategies was still a defining position. The artists assembled by the curators often demonstrated an interest in the opportunities of cynical investigation, approaching critical endpoint in processes of appropriating, sorting and archiving. And the conditions for resisting the 'visual' seemed to be haptic, interactive economies and conditionally anti-spectorial aesthetics. Irreplaceable lives Some artists could be interpreted in this way, but there was also reliable seepage. Individual artists managed to slip through the conceptual net. It was these individual artists who offered what was particular and irreplaceable. Joy Hardman built a video work called Scrying, without props or arty armature. The video played on a TV monitor and showed the artist singing songs and melodies learnt in her childhood:
Hardman's work gives back something from the past, but not only as nostalgia or a logical metaphor for childhood. The singsong mood contacts the dreams of primary school days; feelings of joy and delight and even hopeless, honest, love; maybe the swooning love you had for a parent or the feeling of being 'crushed' by a favourite teacher. This is a fragile place for an adult, a space of uncertain psychological morphology which I don't quite understand. Is it something known as a child but necessarily forgotten? In the accompanying text Hardman tells us that the title Scrying refers to a traditional practice of gazing into the future; a practice as arcane as crystal ball gazing. Ricky Swallow is another whose work is completely fragile in the present economy and crumples the teleology of art history. Andrew McQualter tells us cleverly that Swallow's blanket-covered sharks are from the non-hierarchical, horizontal world of creativity, which is beautifully at odds with verticality, moral order and science. Accompanying his upholstered sharks (Hammerhead, Greynurse and Port Jackson), Swallow's blanket-covered turtle shields are plopped down in the middle of the gallery with a certain disregard for spatial confinement (unless he interprets the gallery space as a goldfish bowl). Paranoid Sheen was a specially commissioned event by Patricia Piccinini and Drome (the alias of Peter Hennessy), built into the foyer of the Adelaide Festival Centre. The work pursued velodrome racer motifs which are more readily associated with the Melbourne artist David Noonan (and before that Matthew Barney). Sheen consisted of five full-colour photographic prints cut from digital programs, which blurred an animated velodrome scene with a speed racer. Interactive devices kick-start the same animation sequence at adjustable speeds inside a giant fibreglass helmet, using the same downhill racer software programs found in video arcades. The surface effects of Sheen are in many ways identical to Noonan's earlier work, but there are differences which illuminate the disposition of the whole Visual Arts Program. Noonan's own predilections are toward more singular metaphysical problems, which work visual forms of seduction and illusion without evoking the pre-stressed discourse of advertising or marketing images. While Piccinini and Drome evoke similar forms to Noonan, they frame their purpose within the easily recognisable armature of 'new media': interactivity, multimedia, and arcade game vernacular. Perhaps, for the curators, this framing device gave Sheen the kind of self-consciousness that passes for critical practice in the viewfinder of conceptualism. Surface effects One of the lesser-known international artists in the Program was Hans Peter Khun, a German who has been part of Berlin's post Cold War rebuilding program. His permanent 300 metre long sound and light installation played to huge audiences each night along the banks of the River Torrens. Khun works with little sound bytes and light sources: fragments of a dog barking, a telephone ringing, building noises, construction cranes, the flickering of television screens and constructed light sources. These particles of light and sound are cut up and remixed to form new things entirely. For instance, he once constructed a powerful 30,000 watt lightbox and then covered it with a blue gel screen to allow only a tiny portion (0.3%) of the most dense blue light to penetrate through, producing what he calls a 'screaming colour'. Khun's interest is in little units or singularities. He is not interested in where the sounds or lights are coming from, but only their surface effects and formal force. So, in 'all this', issues did weave and turn. Right or wrong, contextual issues and theories did get muddled. Other priorities were visible too: the popular needs of galleries and event production and the attempt to survey the field and recognise new artists. And it was okay for the audience to say 'I think you've got dust in the rails of your train track' (although this attitude tends to negate an artist's right to nevertheless be dissatisfied). There was also a separate place for major, individually interesting work such as Robert MacPherson's A Pollywaffle for G: Mayfair, 130 Paintings, 130 Signs and Peter Tyndal's dream drawings. Pointing to the necessary generosity of their task, the curators also spoke of 'slow release time', where 'there is always joy' in the collision of work by curators and artists. Exit And so how do we get lost in such a determined pattern of exchange? Danius Kesminas and Ben Morieson suggest that we should never underestimate the juvenile act. But their specially commissioned project, Logos, was a piro-technical fizzer straight from the resistance text book. Technically, it simply didn't 'go off' and yet this was of no concern to the artists, proving that nothing can go wrong and nothing does. If these guys are artists then the rest of us are dog meat. Alternatively, Colin Duncan suggests that "sleeplessness" offers the answer to a profoundly pre-millennial psychosis: just don't go to sleep. Perhaps these were instinctive parts to Juliana Engberg's response in seeking 'heaven' in 'all this': An assembly of artists, unfinished concepts, imperfection and the inevitably of bad choices (to paraphrase Engberg). It's that funny place between Dr Freud's determined unconscious and Mr Satre's better convictions for freedom. Surely it's a matter of how we manage our own obscurity. Or as Engberg says, 'We are all alone in our private irrationality. And this is a God-send.' Jonathan Nichols © The artists and |
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 Robert MacPherson, "A
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 Jenny
Holzer, Lustmord, |
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 Christopher Langton, Also see |
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 Installation View: Ricky See also Ricky Swallow |
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 Christine Morrow, Hygiene, |
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