From most recent:
Jan Bryant
Hesitation text, Bus Projects 2014
Hesitation… Picture a space, a break … an ellipsis, a pause / what falls into the chasm of this faltering juncture, this momentary slice into thought or action to which we designate the word ‘hesitation’? The artists in this show, Alex Achtem, Catherine Connolly, Stephen Palmer, Fiona Williams, have formed a communion in hesitation. As both a method and an ethics of making, the artists are at their most ‘honest’ when they are struggling to find the certainty of next the ‘action’. To be in the grip of ‘hesitation’ is to be carried by hesitation’s own sense of time… This feeling of timelessness is without the measure of certainty… And yet, uncertainty, by its very nature, is inevitably harnessed to its dialectical other…
For the artist must give up, must yield, must surrender, without hesitation, to the certainty of the next move.
And thus, as with hesitation, (un)certainty may live for only a millisecond, before being synthesised (momentarily) into its opposite…
Or, at other times, more rare, less precious, certainty may sustain the hubris of the finished work, in the way that Atlas held up the celestial spheres…
Picture the poet who thinks “the mind
need not rush in to fill a void … In the broken thing, moreover, human agency
is oddly implied: breakage, whatever its cause, is the dark complement to the
act of making; the one implies the other. The thing that is broken has
particular authority over the act of change.”
[Louise Glück, 1993]
Picture the gambler the moment before
the dice are tossed in the air, poised with dice in hand—she
shakes…hesitates…shakes again. This pause, this stretching of time, this deeply
inhaled breath is a pause just before chance takes over, and in that breath is
the concentration of both the greatest expectation and the greatest
uncertainty.
Picture the metaphysician who proposes;
“to
begin for good is to begin in the inalienable possession of oneself. It is then
to be unable to turn back; it is to set sail and cut the moorings. From then on
one has to run through the adventure to its end. To interrupt what was really
begun is to end it in a failure, and not to abolish the beginning. The failure
is part of the adventure. What was interrupted does not sink into nothingness like
a game. This means that an action is an inscription in being. And indolence, as
a recoil before action, is a hesitation before existence, an indolence about
existing.”
[Emmanuel Levinas, 1947]
Picture the novelist who writes… these
revolving, confused evocations never lasted for more than a few seconds; often,
in my brief uncertainty about were I was, I did not distinguish the various
suppositions of which it was composed any better than we isolate, when we see a
horse run, the successive positions shown to us by a kinetoscope.
[Marcel Proust, 1914]
Picture the editor of Nietzsche’s notes who
must negotiate after the philosopher’s death the abyss of difference that falls
between the writer’s intent and the reader’s reading, and who finally decides
that “suspension points … do not indicate an omission [but] are Nietzsche’s
‘hesitation’ points.”
[Kate Sturg, 2003]
Picture the artist Catherine Connolly
who treats hesitancy as a formal quality of the work, as well as an ethical
approach to practice. Her work is formed in negotiation with the materials and
their possible arrangement in space, a process of extemporisation that is charged
with diffidence and hesitancy. There is a point of possible collapse between the
thing, as a finite thing, and a thing subject to change over the life of the
exhibition, for the materials will persist through time, beyond the will of the
artist. Slight and faulting, the work’s affect will be found in the remains of
small gestures and modifications … and it is with such self-effacement that the
work and the artist enter the world.
Picture the artist Stephen Palmer who
intensifies the experience of hesitation by literalising it. In uttering the
‘um’ of hesitation, he has stretched the time of its being. And by shining his bright light on the
timelessness of the ‘um’, he turns hesitation into both the method and the content
of his work. Thrusting the um of hesitation into the infinite space of
self-referentiality, the dialectic comes to a stop, and the end of history engulfs
us in the timelessness of a single gesture...
Picture the artist Fiona Williams. Uncertainty
unfolds as a process of questioning tested against how the work might be constituted
once it enters ‘the world’—how to make the lightest of interventions, the
smallest of touches, and how to capture atmospheres that are as light as the
airiest of abstractions. Fiona’s dusty, light-drenched, starlight drawings and cyanotypes struggle
to ‘represent’ that which can’t be represented (an ethical approach that actively
delays the violence of representation)—the transparency of air is ‘captured’
through a range of mediating agents… illumination, camera-less image capture,
the drawings of the artist…
Picture the artist Alex Achtem whose
silence is a hollow, voiceless scream from afar, so that the absence of her
communication is hesitation itself, a black hole of silence, where the depth of
silence is so silent it is silence itself (for the sake of analogy, it is so
quiet here it feels as though my loyal electronic partners and their
persistent, high-pitched humming have all left me, and I am all alone with the
silence of books which now have only small peep holes into their souls)…
The poet, the gambler, the metaphysician, the editor,
the novelist, the artists, in the
midst of this moment of confused/confusing, blurriness, which is both nothing
and everything to thinking and practice, each discovers that they are now
without the communion of others, for as with Rousseau; “I am now alone on
earth, no longer having any brother, neighbour, friend, or society other than
myself.”
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1776–78]
And yet, there is the critic, and the critic of the critic who each imagines “this halt
is only a halting, a hesitation, a pause in the progress, which will be driven
inexorably on-by tradition, by history, by the restless energy of the
imagination. For it is the job of the critic to disrupt the fluency of the
viewer.”
[Michael Sprinker on Geoffrey H. Hartman, 1980]
[Works cited]
Rüdiger Bittner (ed.), Friedrich
Nietzsche, Writings from the Late
Notebooks, (trans.) Kate Sturg
Louisa Glück, “Disruption,
Hesitation, Silence”, The American Poetry
Review,
1993
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Exitents, (trans.)
Alphonso Lingis, 1978
Marcel Proust, Swanns Way, 1914, (trans.)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker,
1776–78
Michael Sprinker, “Hermeneutic
Hesitation: The Stuttering Text”, Boundary, 1980
Catherine Connolly
Ain't that a kick to the head
Curators text for Mess Between
Humour
is a funny thing; it unites as much as it divides, it confuses meaning and
language only to reinstate them with deeper understanding and it simultaneously
creates both pleasure and complication. Much like art. Mess Between gathers some of these commonalities
in a collection of performative and material gestures from a selection of contemporary
artists interested in engaging humour in their practice.
Though humour may not be the sole
focus of the artists here, the works presented share the desire to look at similarities
between the two roles of art and joke making, and their shared potential for
disrupting social understandings and the production of meaning. They are united
in their use of a certain deliberate clumsiness as an artistic strategy for
unsettling logic, and mix a degree of humour with interests in pranks and
rituals , the language of materials and ideas about how meaning is made or
confounded. Freud posited that we laugh when
the flow of language and meaning is interrupted, at the temporary release from
structure and reason, and the act of laughing itself is the physical relief of
having meaning reinstated after this conflation.1
Here we see four artists for whom this conflation is the Trojan horse issuing forth further, wider concerns in their practice.
Several of the works in this
show utilise material processes that re-create representational modes of existing
objects, with their transition from original object to simulacra skewing
meanings. Kel Glaister takes a mortuary headrest and a mould of her finger,
ties it to a rotating mechanical device at, right about, eye height if the
headrest is in use and proceeds to run the mechanics on a painfully slow
rotation. The perverse slowness of the visceral but disembodied finger is disconcerting
and the loaded erotic and psychoanalytical possibilities are not ignored, but even
so you can’t miss the black ‘punch line’: that even when your dead someone (or
thing) is still going to poke you in the eye. Ain’t that a kick to the head. The
organisation of this work invites not just the imagined corpse but the live
one- namely you, the audience. In which case is the work, and indeed art and
humour, really just setting us up for a poke in the eye? Live or dead, is the
hunt and attempted capture of meaning such a slippery pursuit that we remain,
always, at the end of the poking finger of the disembodied artist?
This potential touching however
is not available in Stephen Palmer’s ‘Untitled (Cinder block)’. Placed unreachable
on the roof, Palmer has let lose a slow (non) moving confoundment: a cinder
block inverted on the gallery ceiling. While it does not have the drama and cartoonish
violence of the speeding ACME anvil (usually associated with the Roadrunner),
it is rather a very real disruption in expectation, placement and logic. This intervention
acts like a pun- a double take that is not a play on words but a play on
expectations and reason as it defies gravity, structure and order. The simultaneous
awareness and doubt about its illusion or reality conflates our belief in this
object- it is safe to laugh (right?) despite its implied potential for violence
and calamity.
For Breikers’ materiality
itself, its prosaic nature, is part of the joke. The
humour lies partly in economy and clumsiness of form, by the simple
combination of found objects, movement and dialogue. The idea of taking an
inanimate object and giving it an illusion of life resonates with Henri
Bergson’s idea of the humourous being that which lends subjecthood to objects.2 Here Breikers’ prankish, lo-fi aesthetic reenacts the oldest of gags: the
sock + hand = talking puppet. But there is a layering of gags at play in ‘Acoustic and Luminous Effects’. The
first gag, the sock character, is partaking in another classic joke- the crank
call. Further complication ensues as we realise the sock puppet is both making
and receiving the crank call. He is in effect the subject and object of his
prank in an endless, inescapable cycle of perpetration and persecution.
In
this show while the performing body is perhaps largely absent, in all its
humiliating or emphatic potential, it is always implied; in the disembodied
finger, the imagined eye, assumed hand and in the implicated body of the
audience. Then enter David Capra. Clad in white, strutting, dancing, waving his
props, his face as lively as his moves: his exuberance totally sacrificing
his
dignity. In his practice Capra acts an as an intercessory, between
living and the departed forces. In Intercession
(Memphis Goal cell) he is
cleansing the depicted space with his body, act and handmade props. He takes
this role seriously, sincerely and yet performs with such rigour and animation
that it draws attention to the absurdity of ritual. This is not a pompous,
righteous act, nor one of celebrated ‘quiet dignity’ but one that utilises
every absurd, compromised element of his own bodily materiality. In a sense he
is doing it for us- acting on our behalf. Somewhat like a comedian he is
prepared to sacrifice his dignity for our sake. And in lots of ways being an
artist is like a being a comedian- both drawn to putting oneself and
potentially ones poise and ego on the line for an audience due to our own
specific, conscious and unconscious drives, or sometimes, as in Capra’s case, in
a generous act for an idea of a greater good.
1 Sigmund Freud, ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, (1905). The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud ed. James Starchey, vol. VIII (London:
The Hogarth Press and the Instituted of Psychoanalysis) 9
2 Henri Berson, ‘Le rire. Essai sur la signifcation du comique’ (Paris, 1900);
trans. Cloudesley Brereton & Fred Rothwell, ‘Laughter: An essay on the
Meaning of the Comic’ (London: Macmillan & Co., 1911)
Bec Dean
For Each Action Equal
Laugh? I almost cried.
The title of Each Action Equal borrows from the familiarity of Newton’s first law of physics: That for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But in this title the singularity of the action is abandoned, implying something a little more unanticipated, unquantifiable. The exhibition is after all comprised of a multitude of actions recorded by female Australian artists, who make solo and collaborative performance works both live and for the camera. As I am writing this, I look over images in which figures of women intersect with painted monoliths, geometric objects large and small, high chroma and monochrome backdrops and the background of everyday life. The video stills (extracted as they are from the timecode of the works, and their respective audio tracks) may contrive to tell a particular story centred on the visual. They speak to the hard, bright edges of modernism, against which they sometimes rub uncomfortably or suggestively. But what is missing from these images are the actions in time and space, which the exhibition reanimates. The grunting, dancing, sweating, slapping and laughing. The mess. The dissonance of humour juxtaposed by a sophisticated aesthetic economy.
Brown Council’s Big Show (2010) is the pared-back installation version of their performance A Comedy, which has been presented in various iterations from an hour-long show, to a durational four-hour work. In these videos the artists characterise themselves as a troupe of almost gender-neutral performers, each with a special talent: Kate eats banana after banana as a disappearing act; Di and Fran slap one another, hard; Kelly is hog-tied with ropes and struggles vainly towards a Houdini-like escape, which is never achieved. In a separate video, the four artists laugh for an hour, providing a ‘canned’ sonic backdrop to Big Show that reminds us (while we occasionally chuckle along with them at a gag-reflex and the flinching reddening of flesh) that we are watching acts of violence perpetrated on and by women. Big Show and Hour Long Laugh (2010) ruminate as much on our habits as consumers of images – that we could even contemplate watching an hour of forced laughter – as it does on the status of women and the proliferation of violence as a form of entertainment. Brown Council engage with the historical lineage of performance art from conceptualism as a series of ordeals to be endured, both by the artists and their audiences. But in Big Show these performative acts are presented through the lens of the popular and ‘low’ form of the variety act.
Laresa Kosloff’s Dizzy Pupil (2006) is part of a sequence of videos made by the artist of herself and her friends performing inside (and more recently outside) the sharp geometries of modernist abstraction. In this work, a lone performer with only her legs exposed to hint at her gender dances akimbo, with her body encased inside a diamond monolith. She rotates increasingly dizzily over time so that the black form wobbles drunkenly off-centre from the white background of the set. Kosloff invokes a duality of meaning in this work, as the focal point and subject of her video drifts, so do the eyes of its viewers. As a ‘pupil’ historically referencing the work of her forebears, she represents herself simultaneously as inadequate to the task and through humour, as an agent actively challenging its assertive and dominant presence. In Kosloff’s work though, there is no cathartic release of the artist’s burden – this is not a fantasy narrative – there is only repetition as the video loops.
Like Brown Council, Kel Glaister’s most recent work considers the human cost of comedy through a series of well-trodden sight-gags and pratfalls exhibited as evidence. The splatter of a cream cake against a black curtain and chair emphasises the void left by the victim. For Each Action Equal with its focus on the performance practices of women, Glaister exhibits Sitting on a power sander (2008), a simple plank of blonde timber with a circular indentation worn into it. Like All comedy is someone in trouble (2011) described above, the focus of this sculptural work is the absence of the performer, or the consequences of the performer’s actions, implied through a series of recognisable signs. As viewers we are forced to consider masturbatory origins for the deep timber circle, and its broader pejorative suggestion regarding large-scale and process oriented sculptural practice, which is predominantly a male domain.
In Catherine Connolly’s video, a series of banal comedic gestures are repeated and looped. The artist faces the camera, ducks beneath its frame and reappears wearing a false nose and glasses. She ducks again and reappears as her unadorned self. In a second sequence this costume is exchanged for a red clown’s nose. The humour in this work is not to be found in the obvious application of novelty noses, but in the intervening frames where the artist tries to perform a composed state for the camera. Increasingly her long hair sticks in her eyes and eventually covers her face completely. Connolly’s work for this exhibition is a short video sketch drawn from a practice investigating representation, from cinematic constructs to the fabrication of her own identity.
In Each Action Equal, the reactive variable missing from the title is the viewer, bringing with them a range of experiences which may resonate with modernism or feminism, or neither. Laughter is an expression of mirth and also of communicating a level of understanding with another. Do we get the joke? Do we laugh together? Do we laugh something else in order to damage it? These works in their variance share both the meshing of high art with life and with popular cultural forms, and the potential for humour as a tool for disturbing the status quo. For shaking us into action.
Rebecca Adams, Thresholds
For Niether Beginning Nor Ending at Firstdraft Gallery
“And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?”[1]
Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart
Connolly’s horror is of Gothic sensibility, however the terrors it negotiates are of the subtle, psychological kind. Alluding to unwelcome sinister presences without making them explicit, her interminable video loops arouse psychological unease and invoke the uncanny. The uncanny can be described as a peculiar kind of fear, situated between real terror and faint anxiety[2]. Etymologically, the uncanny or unheimlich (unhomely), is tied to architecture and the domestic. The uncanny finds its ‘home’ “first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror”.[3] As such, it encounters problems concerning the self and the other, corporeal and absent bodies.[4] Such concerns are conceptual constants in Connolly’s art practice, and this latest body of work draws upon cinematic language in a formalist exploration of the idea of the domestic uncanny.
Regularly appropriating footage from classic Hollywood films, Connolly seizes narrative fragments and re-presents them, removed and often unrecognizable from their original context. Concerned with a deconstruction of cinematic language and the politics of representation, Connolly isolates the feminine subject in short sequences, slows her down and traps her in an anxious gestural cycle. Cinematic and performative language is exaggerated and concentrated, caught in a complicated relationship between their critique and re-enforcement. These video loops offer no release for the female subject, just as she cannot escape the cinematic structures that construct her. Looking within, looking out, opening then throwing the door closed endlessly, Connolly’s latest protagonist is trapped in an uncanny limbo of a classic horror paradox. The front door becomes the threshold of fear, desire, and the unheimlich; domestic space becomes a site of un-nameable terror, however the outside holds equally frightening prospects.
Problematising the relationship between the viewer and the screen, Connolly’s spatial and cinematic interventions disrupt and subvert expected modes of viewing. Gloss black enamel is a recurring formal element in Connolly’s practice, functioning as screen, portal and void, and referencing the material concerns of film: reflection and absorption, plays of light and shadows. The employment of surface complicates both viewing pleasure and the experience of the cinematic void’s absorbing darkness, as through mirror-like effects the viewer is reminded of their physical presence. Extending cinematic space into the gallery in a minimalist trompe l’oeil of black and white checkered vinyl, her brief horror film intrudes into viewing space. A strange blob enters the screen from somewhere outside the frame, undulating underneath the simulated floor, and receding as quickly as it appeared.
Constantly undermining intimate connections, the starkness of Connolly’s black and white formalist minimalism lends an eerie coldness to the cinematic encounter of domestic space. This chilling encounter, reproduced spatially in sparse installation, produces the viewing body as alien within the uncanny cinematic representation of the domestic. Connolly’s New Work cannily locates itself within “the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread.”[5]
[1] Edgar Allan Poe, A Collection of Stories, Aerie Books Ltd, USA 1988, p. 158
[2] Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press Cambridge, 1992, p. xi
[3] ibid, p. 11
[4] ibid, p. x
[5] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Penguin Books, London 2003, p. 123
-------------------
Stephanie Van Schilt
For Niether Beginning Nor Ending at Firstdraft Gallery
Stephanie Van Schilt
Untitled (Cooper and doorway) at Bus Projects
-------------------
Stephanie Van Schilt
For Niether Beginning Nor Ending at Firstdraft Gallery
Roman Polanski’s Repulsion
is scary. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper before it, Polanski’s film is an anxiety-riddled portrait of one woman’s mental deterioration
within the bounds of her living space. From it’s opening sequence that focuses on
protagonist Carol’s (Cather Deneuve) delicate eye (eerily recalling Bunuel’s
infamous eye-slicing sequence in Un chien
Andalou), the audience are made aware of the particular importance of
visual perception and emotional reaction to this film.
Through the use of optical illusions, claustrophobic
composition and visual trickery, Polanski plays with paranoia - both the
viewer’s and his character’s – to intensify an emotional response in Repulsion. Polanski at once displays Carol’s
fragile beauty and evokes the beast within her, and as the tension increases,
fear and dread are induced from all around. Walls literally and metaphorically
close in on Carol, and the audience are made aware of the importance of both
seeing and feeling to film
spectatorship.
It is therefore apt that Catherine Connolly uses a moment
from Repulsion in her looped video
installation. Evoking and expanding upon the fear-filled mood of the movie
itself, Connolly’s video loops Carol’s sister as she hesitates to open a door
to their apartment, briefly peering out of a peephole before returning to her
hesitation to start the cycle once more.
By extrapolating the moment from the film’s narrative and
reappropriating it outside of a cinematic context, through repetition and
space, Connolly emphasises the importance of emotional response to film.
As Carol’s sister hovers upon this threshold, external
forces potentially threaten their existence – external forces that, much like
the eerie unknown blob presence crawling beneath the floor of Connolly’s
installation, are already inside waiting to surface. In an otherwise overlooked
moment of the film, the monomaniacal melodrama created through Connolly’s
slowing down of the visual allows the viewer to focus solely on the raven
haired beauty, to feel her struggle with the unseen. Is she trying to escape?
What is she trying to escape? Here the hyperbole of repetition only intensifies
the notion of horror and claustrophobia; the unseen threat that permeates
Polanski’s original. The more times this loop is experienced, the more uncanny
and iconic it becomes as the character remains forever trapped in a cycle of
uncertainty and instability. Try as she may, there is no escape from the evil
lurking within – within the bounds of the apartment as well as her sister’s
mind.
Stephanie Van Schilt
Untitled (Cooper and doorway) at Bus Projects
Passing
through the entrance of Bus Projects, I am incredibly conscious of each step I
take as
I ascend the
stairs into the exhibition space. On this steamy summer afternoon, I feel slow
and
laborious.
It is fitting then that the first work I encounter is Untitled (Cooper and
Doorway),
a looped
video by Melbourne artist Catherine Connolly featuring Gary Cooper in a
particular
piece of
undramatic footage from the classic Western High Noon (Fred Zinnemann,
1952).
Like myself,
Cooper’s movements have been slowed to an exaggerated speed. Aptly
projected
above the stairwell entrance/exit, I was transfixed by Connolly’s looped
footage of
Cooper;
merely an average moment of no high drama, through pace and repetition, it
inspired
contemplation.
Film scholar
Andrew Klevan argues the importance of the “everyday”, “apparently banal or
mundane”
moments in narrative cinema which are often overlooked owing to their
“obviousness”1. In our digital age, we
take the power of film for granted – we do not gasp at
images of
workers leaving a factory, flee at the projection of a moving train or marvel
at trees
fluttering
in a visible wind. We are ignorant to the haunting presence before us, the
pieces of
our reality
that are “transposed, transformed into another world”. 2 Yet, herein lays the
beauty
of this
artform; as Gilberto Perez describes, it is “the material ghost”. 3 Consequently, in order
to see the
power of these everyday moments, Klevan suggests we need distance ourselves
from their
“obviousness”, while paradoxically drawing ourselves closer to the text to make
their
meaning apparent.4
Isolating a
particular movie moment gives otherwise ignored filmic property life by
contemplating
how it contributes to our greater understanding of the film’s meaning. “(L)ike
the
Surrealist game of irrational enlargement”5 drawing on memory, impulse and emotion,
monomaniacal
fixation on a mundane moment is a creative-critical approach that is embraced
by
film-critics and video artists alike.6 Connolly is in good company as film moments have
been
sampled, distorted, extended, slowed, collaged and fragmented to create
video-works by
the likes of
Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordon, Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg.7 Each of
these works
allow the viewer to marvel at the power of the moving image by zooming in on
film
moments—literally and figuratively—which incites deeper critical contemplation
and
reflective
emotional reaction. All the while, the artists have created artworks in
themselves.
We all walk
up stairs, pass through entrances and exits, however focusing on such an
instance—like
in Untitled (Cooper and Doorway)—draws out the power and potency of the
quotidian to
a film’s meaning. As the archetypal male hero, dominantly dressed in his black
hat and
waistcoat at the centre of screen, Cooper is perpetually staring out a vacant
doorway
with his
back to the viewer. In this one-minute looped video, Connolly allows for
endless
contemplation
about this rugged character, while commenting on the framing of the hero in a
Western film
more generally – are they really so gruff and generic, or is there much more to
these
masculine creatures? Untitled (Cooper and Doorway) shows the hero
forever hesitant,
perpetually
facing a threshold he will never pass through so that the viewer can peel back
the
multitudinous
layers of meaning and marvel at the everyday magic on screen above their exit.
1 Klevan, Disclosure of
the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film
(Trowbridge:
Flick Books, 2000) 4.
2 Gilberto Perez, The
Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University
Press, 1998) 28.
3 Gilberto Perez, The
Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University
Press, 1998) 28.
4 Klevan, Disclosure ,
4-5
5 Adrian Martin, “Film
& Video Cain & Abel,” MESH film/video/media/art (Spring,1993)
June 1993
6 For example: David
Thomson, V.F. Perkins, Stanley Cavell
7 For example: Candice
Breitz’s Silioquy Trilogy or Him + Her; Douglas Gordon’s 24
Hour Psycho; Tracey Moffat’s Artist her
collaboration
with Gary Hillberg Doomed
Tamsin Green
A Kiss Before Dying
Something doesn’t make sense in the Snow White story. There is a lack of any real hero in this tale; the prince seems completely useless. As the story is generally told it is only the result of an accident that Snow White lives. When she has been poisoned by the apple all hope is lost and it is only due to the clumsiness of the dwarves that she is revived.[1] So the fact is, the prince doesn’t save the girl at all. He’s just standing around admiring her corpse.[2]
How can we have a cultural myth that is so flaccid and sparse in its heroism?
There must be another version. It would make sense, based on the evidence of the text, if the only hero is Snow White herself. If she has the strength to flee the castle, then surely she has the strength to cough up, or suck up, or spit out one small piece of fruit.
What is the point of the prince?
He is an afterthought. He comes along at the end to provide the ‘forever’… the ever after of the romantic narrative that is rarely elucidated within the story. Rebecca Adams’ work chafes at the bit of this mythologised narrative of romance, and the ‘forever’ marketing ploy of the everlasting prince.[3] This work swallows up all the tempting mythologies of apples, and digests them via pop culture, to an abject effect.
This critique of the narrative arc of romance is reflected in Catherine Connolly’s work. ’A Kiss Before Dying’ puts the void before the romance.[4] But there is a great deal of hesitation in Connolly’s work, there’s a pause before the void. There’s the death void, and there’s the sex void. Both these voids are reflections of the other, and they are both reflected in this work. You have to bow down to get it. The void is almost inviting, for a moment the word ‘closer’ echoes and pulls you in, but then it fades. This could be a demand, but it is one that denies itself.
In the filmic work the beautiful heroine loops endlessly. She casts her glance downwards, and then away from where her hand is tempted to slide. Just how close can you get?
There’s just a little death.[5]
[1] The prince spies Snow White in her glass coffin, and demands that she be taken to his palace, when the dwarves stumble the apple is loosened.
[2] As with all fairy tales there are a number of versions of this story, in some the prince wakes Snow White with his kiss, thereby taking on a more active role. These versions, however, are the more contemporary ones.
[3] A marketing strategy shared by ‘colourstay ultimate’™ lipstick.
[4] The thrilling trash novel from which the title of the show is taken follows the exploits of a anti-prince charming as he attempts to murder his way to the top. Ira Levin, A Kiss Before Dying (London, Pan books, 1970).
[5] Or, Le petit mort.
Simon Gregg
TREPIDATION: I Report a Concern
There once was a man who mistook his wife for a hat. It’s an old story, told by the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, for whom the man – ‘Dr P’ – was his patient. Dr P, while being able to see with perfect clarity, possessed the strange and unique inability to comprehend physical characteristics as complete objects. Instead of seeing a person’s whole face, he would see a nose, a mouth, an eye, etc. During a session Dr Sacks presented Dr P with a simple test:
‘What is this?’ I asked, holding up a glove.
‘May I examine it?’ he asked, and, taking it from me, he proceeded to examine it.
‘A continuous surface,’ he announced at last, ‘infolding on itself. It appears to have’ – he hesitated – ‘five outpouchings, if this is the word.’
‘Yes,’ I said cautiously. ‘You have given me a description. Now tell me what it is.’
As the session later drew to a close, Dr P started to look around for his hat. ‘He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she was used to such things’.
Dr P’s trepidation for the world was perfectly rational. His unusual brain dysfunction led him to take a cautionary approach to people and objects he encountered. There is a little of Dr P in all of us. We might try to bury it and suppress it, pretend it isn’t there. It’s that dirty brown streak that runs through us all: timidity, uncertainty and anxiety. We might put on a brave face but in the end, our fear of the world holds us back, makes us question, makes us cautious, and prevents us from being all that we could have been.
Dwelling willingly in this land of uncertainty are six artists: Catherine Conolly, Kel Glaister, Tamsin Green, Yvette King, Dave Short and Kieran Stewart. Instead of inspiring us to new heights and filling us with hope and aspiration, they reveal our inner weaknesses, our inner turmoils. Trepidation: I Report a Concern takes the view that leaps of faith are best to be avoided.
There is a subversive plot driving these assaults on our Platonic solids. The script calls for cracks in the foundations, ruptures in perception, faults in the familiar, and all six artists gleefully mine this interstice of uncertainty. The delineation between real and unreal is massaged and moulded into a thing of beauty. It is captured with sparkling clarity but longer resembles anything that we recognise. The result is a poignant foray into collective entropy.
Kieran Stewart presents us with fragments of some larger whole, which we are no longer able to intuit. His mechanical pieces seems helpless, useless, now devoid of function. Stripped of their requirement to engage, the artefacts exist now as aesthetic specimens extracted from man’s unstoppable yearning for industry. Similarly Yvette King infects the relationship between object and function with a twist of chaos. Previous works such as Confetti Machine, Lead Vampire Teeth and Toffee Glass are exquisite exercises in failed utility. Her practice imbues futility with a new level of meaning, framed by hapless wonder and spectacle.
Kel Glaister is the harbinger of discontent. The Sylvia Plath of installation art, she is the ship of disillusionment wrecked upon the shores of optimism. A fearless preoccupation with fear drives her practice, in which objects such as gravestones, upturned sections of earth and swinging sections of masonry announce the pointlessness of it all. Likewise Dave Short bends our conventional view of the world into unlikely and unsettling new ways. Revelling in the vulnerability of form, Short exhibits an alluring propensity for cutting objects in half. The thrill of destruction is tempered by a cool detachment from his domestic motifs, as he casually carves into sections the very wholes that provide certainty in our lives.
Catherine Connolly reports on our questionable adoration of pop culture luminaries. Empty stages and energetic stripes reflect the emptiness of unreciprocated infatuation, where the spaces between desire and annihilation are rendered in a blitzkrieg of television static. Fatal Attraction, for instance, reveals a fatalistic lust for oblivion: the narcissistic kick drum seemingly poised to destroy its own image. A similar iconoclastic cause infiltrates the work of Tamsin Green, in which cultures of image taking and image making become suspect and prone. As for Dr P before her, Green approaches vision with reluctant trepidation. The mantra of ‘what you see is what you get’ becomes inverted, and we must piece the world together from fragments and fleeting insights.
While afflicted and variously crippled with trepidation the six mould the condition into charming and sometimes humorous effects. The triumph is theirs: in reporting this concern they harness the ephemeral, celebrate the uncertain and deliver us a singular slap across our collective faces. Reality is not what it seems, and their incursions into unconvention guide our own appeasement with perplexity.
Excerpts from Oliver Sacks, The man who mistook his wife for a hat, London: Gerald Buckworth & Co., 1985
Simon Gregg is curator of the Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
Tamsin Green
Fatal Attraction
Fatal Attraction
Medium Depth
We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain.
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”
Welcome to a room full of urges.
First, the urge to explore, to go out into a field of white, uncluttered by the imagery of others. An urge for that time when you could just go, and be the first one, and when you could still just paint. A desire for what you can’t quite get at. The representation, however, begins to lose its dominance in these of works as the gloss enamel becomes sufficient in its charms. This is painting’s desire for itself, for the sensuousness of its own pure materiality. Its surface value sometimes seems all we need. You could drown in this gloss. But this lust for paint caused paintings first death.
Speeding across Sally Tape’s surface is more lustre. This work shares with Fifer’s a sense of something you can’t get at. This work is also a reaction to the clutter of the visual. The clutter of off-cuts, little bits of images left over by the industrial processes of photography. Together, they remind me of trying to piece together a view seen through a blind.
Not all desire leads to demise. Desire is a consumable as well as consuming, and the sly pop reference of the title of this exhibition gives us a wink in this direction. The stereotypes of desire are critiqued most clearly in Carl Scrase and Candice Cranmer’s works. In Cranmer’s work the basic instinct of breathing becomes material. The breath has sound, form and pressure. It is insistent, the breath struggles, but still takes the over the image. Both the breath and the gaze have been extracted from the stereotype of filmic desiring. The gaze anticipates the climax of exchange, however, this plot line has been rendered almost comical. Represented by colours and props more appropriate to playschool. The heavy breath we have come to expect just keeps going without end. The gaze is interrupted, but there is no last gasp.
What never manages to surprises me about pornography is its banality, you find yourself focusing on some retro scrunchy that reminds you of Seinfield, wondering if that look will ever make a come back, I guess that’s because the other bits are all the same. Carls Scrase has cut away at the pornographic body. These cuts pull the obscene back from the brink of banality, and restore visual please to the tired out bits. These bits could be any other bits, they have been made obscure, therefore new, and therefore delightful again. This works reminds us that there can be some delicacy to the body and its representation.
I am not sure if I am looking at a narcissistic pool, or a void. Then I listen to the reference, and it can be both: It’s narcissistic to assume that your love is more real, but that’s just the way it feels. There is such pleasure in despair. Like turning on the song and shutting your door this work invites you to slip into a shinny black pool of angst and dance around.
One work is all alone. Like all photos, this is frozen time. The figure seems to be caught of the emulsive surface of the image. Their feet, and the bottom of their legs, are fading into the milkiness of the ice-rink. The skater is stuck on the brink, teetering above their own shadow, not falling in, just hovering in a sentimental uncanny moment of lonesomeness.
There is a fatality to this attraction for material, the desire to have it stand as a proxy for your desire. There is desire within the material for itself, it sensorial experienced materiality. We remain pause on the brink. Art making is terminal, but material is nice.
Catherine Connolly: Exhibtion outline
‘We’ve got a Love like Electric Sound’ *
‘We’ve got a Love like Electric Sound’ is a emotively heartbreaking, visually heart racing pop, pop show that takes its content from the motivations, considerations and sentiment in the making of a mixed tape and its symbolic place in contemporary culture. The show consists of works exploring the transactions between contemporary art, popular culture and music in a shared cultural space. Evoking varied meanings and intentions, from wanting to make you dance to wanting to break your heart, the exhibiting artists are involved in reconfiguring popular culture concerns into contemporary visual art practices, borrowing the emotive preoccupations of pop/ rock music and popular culture (such as romance, thrills, emotion, desire, adulation, fame, nostalgia) and developing them into dynamic works exploring prevalent themes of contemporary art making (including memory, fandom, identity, performativity, architectural intervention and perception).
The collection of works mix together, in a type of pop salon featuring works that are derived from the conceptual and aesthetic languages of both the story of pop and the history of contemporary art. In a sense the exhibition making is correlated with the making of a mixed tape, with each individual work is selected for its own particular strength and interest, but also for its contribution to an overall sense of intention through out the exhibition. Like all great mixes there is a sensed change of pace between works, with installations that boost and strut with the their loud positioning, to playful departures from the history of architectural interventions, and paintings/ wall works that move with the visual velocity of a speeding rock song to dynamic reconfigurations of cultural material into nostalgic sculptures as well videos that induce a sombre intimacy and drawings that act as a quiet refrain.
From paintings into dance floor, candy into columns, bouncy balls configured into an atomic diagram of love/ history of connectivity this show reminds one to dance in their underwear in the bedroom, daydream about the electric future, nostalgias over the pastel past and break you own heart to the pop soundtrack of your choice in a visually exciting, sentimentally emotive and culturally audible display of the effect of music in our life’s and art.
*Title of exhibition taken from Suedes' 'Electricity'
