Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
December 1995 - March 1996

Andrew Wright-Smith, White Goods,1994-95, (left) Fall, 1994, (right)

Amanda Ahmed and Deborah Ostrow borrow statistically from Mondrian's oeuvre, turning the motif of utopian modernism back upon itself. Amanda Ahmed's construction, Lots A' Blocks, resembles Mondrian's Pier and Ocean paintings and is made from brightly coloured kitchen scourers, Deborah Ostrow's video depicts her grandmother going through the motions of eating and sleeping in her first week in a home for the aged. The symbolic representation of a perfectly ordered and equal society is re-presented by these two emerging artists translated into the domestic or institutional environments in which utopian painters, designers and architects imagined that their project would be realised. Both works present the everyday enacted with a gridded and regular environment and reveal the repetition and paucity of an existence within it.

Another aspiration of high modernism - a movement away from the mundane towards the sublime - is explored in works by Lauren Berkowitz and Sione Francis. Berkowitz's tiered shelves of Vessels are glass jars collected and cleaned by the artist, the work leads us to a contemplation of obsessive cleaning and recycling, the wonder of the overlooked and the artwork's relationship to Donald Judd's seminal shelf pieces from the nineteen sixties. Sione Francis employs the skills of a carpenter and an upholsterer to create eerilly ethereal works. Andrew Wright-Smith shares Berkowitz's connection to Judd in his succession of cast plaster sinks alludes the ultimate assumption of the artwork into museum heaven - being a glass display case which houses a plaster cast of a frontloader washing machine. Chris Fortesque takes up the theme of the uncanny, the discovery of the extraordinary in the realm of the mundane, in his installation which features a large photograph of a small cut in the palm of the artist's hand.

Williamson's interest in everyday objects is in their ability to take on a role as signifiers of aspects of our existence which remain human, physical and shared. In the context of Williamson's curation, the most successful works are those which share the curator's humanistic intent. Anne Zahalka's photographs of friends and acquaintances in their homes, Jason Hartcup's exploration of obsolescence in The Ringing Rocks and The Petrified Hoovers, and Fiona Hall's installation of flashing tupperware containers and photographs of mundane objects fashioned from aluminium cans display a genuine concern for the state of human existence in troubled and changing times.

As Natalie King notes in her review of this same exhibition (Real Time, February-March 1996), The Object of Existence coincides with fundraiser and easy access shows at other public and artist run venues in Melbourne over the Christmas and summer season. On first take, the show could be read as a critique of the rampant consumerism experienced by us all during the festive season. The rooms at ACCA are packed full, resembling a supermarket or the home of a person who has bought too much, too impulsively during the Christmas sales. The overall effect is one of confusion and vertigo bought on by the white noise generated by endless displays of competing consumer items at any shopping mall near you at this time of year. It's not a question of quantity verses quality but one of a lack of discernment on the part of the curator. The overload of information on display in The Object of Existence tends to generalise the diversity of the work shown and may cause the viewer to overlook the subtleties of works by Terence Hogan, Rodney Spooner, Callum Morton and Bill Lane.

Ever since it appeared, the commodity has provided the artwork with a means of reflexive identification; either through a self conscious identification with the commodity, or by constituting itself as a defence against it by evoking the qualities of authorship, craft and originality. Given the artwork's symbiotic relationship with the commodity, what is to be made of a curatorial exercise which pre-empts its disappearance?

Williamson's interest in the artists she represents is in their practice being a kind of ontological investigation of the everyday, an everyday world which is facing enormous change due to the advances of technology. This ontology is ghosted by an eschatology and a nostalgia - the immanent disappearance of the commodity as we know it and, by implication, the artwork's loss of its means of self-identification.

Williamson notes that our relationships with everyday objects are "tending towards the nostalgic," as "experience is becoming more virtual or simulated and data the greatest commodity." Robert Nelson replies, in his review of the show ( The Age, December 17, 1995 ), that there is "no virtual alternative to the vacuum cleaner," and that kitchens will be somewhat the same when Anne Zahalka photographs them in the next millennia. However there are, already, virtual galleries. With, more or less, virtual art - as always our interest is focused on the novel and the new, the latest technology. As a curator Williamson reveals an unconscious anxiety about he future of art objects that remain "physical, have a human scale, and can often connect us as members of the same species at a time of growing awareness of personal, cultural and sexual difference."

Williamson seems to be developing her skills as a curator, and whilst her concerns tend to overwhelm the artists she represents in The Object of Existence, her interest in the telling of experience and personal narrative through the medium of visual art may ultimately prove to be her strength in an increasingly un-human world.

Andrew McQualter
1996

Margaret Morgan, (I'm having a) Coockie Cutter Reaction: detail, 1993

Terence Hogan, Domestic Interior (Bathroom Set 1), 1992