Text Camp Reader - Next Wave Festival 2010 - No Risk Too Great

When a festival such as Next Wave takes place, Melbourne feels more cinematic to me. Wandering around town, from one show to the next, I encounter different objects and artworks which, within the everyday environment of my home, have an ethereal quality. Trying to attend as many shows as possible, storming around the city and surrounds like a tornado, works whirl into my consciousness so that stepping out into the evening is akin to a film-like dream: alley walls move with shadowy images unable to be grasped (Doomsday Vanitas), cul-de-sacs lead me on time travelling adventures to boundless imagined destinations (The Infinity Tube) and performances in museums about museums take me on obsessive tours through film history (Some Film Museums I Have Known). Amongst the many works that blew into Melbourne for the biennale contributing to this cinematic atmosphere, one resonated most. Projected on a wall at the back of Kings ARI was a video work that at once transported me through time, whispered to me of film history known and unknown, and poignantly seeped into my memory. For these reasons, After the Rainbow from Sydney duo Soda_Jerk (Dan and Dominique Angeloro) was my festival standout.

Compiled from numerous copyrighted cultural sources, After the Rainbow is a single-channel audio-visual remix that runs for approximately six minutes but exists as a perfect infinite loop. Like a cyclical video-prophecy of doom, the video presents a multilayered narrative where the late Judy Garland chases herself through time. Beginning with an early sequence from The Wizard of Oz (1939), Soda_Jerk reconfigure, reassemble and reimagine Garland’s profound and (in)famous life and career. Garland, as gingham-clad girl-icon Dorothy Gale, takes her legendary tumble through the twister, however, rather than landing in Oz, Dorothy spins through time. Haunted by clips of herself from classics Easter Parade (1948) and Meet Me in St Louis (1944), Dorothy eventually lands face-to-face with her future saddened self performing on the TV special Once in a Lifetime: Judy, Frank and Dean (1962).

Commissioned as part of Next Wave Time Lapse, After the Rainbow was to screen at Federation Square earlier this year. According to the artists, the remix was thus informed by the “idea of cinema not only in terms of its scale but also the public nature of this site.”¹ A month out from its launch date however, After the Rainbow was withdrawn from the schedule due to the work’s explicit and deliberate copyright infringement. Working within the realm of remix, this was not an unlikely or shocking scenario, and eventually After the Rainbow managed to land a willing home at Kings ARI and a perfect slot in the 2010 Next Wave program (aptly themed No Risk Too Great).

Like numerous others who sample from copyrighted materials — artists as varied as Philip Brophy, Candice Brietz or Tracy Moffatt — Soda_Jerk are aware of the inherent risk associated with the legalities of using found footage. Champions of the shared culture movement, Soda_Jerk believe that in this (post)digital age sampling is ethical and defend “the right for everyone to be able to participate in the creative construction of culture”.² Accordingly, Soda_Jerk celebrate the power of using such found footage because “it plugs into existing networks of investment and affect that circulate in shared culture — it provides a concrete way of drawing together associations, memories and experiences into new constellations.”³

It is fitting then, that upon encountering After the Rainbow, I was instantly reminded of a quote from writer Lesley Stern, who stated that when viewing a film and deciphering meaning, “remembering and forgetting stalk one another, circling, lying in wait.”⁴ While After the Rainbow shows Judy Garland’s deeply melancholic “remembering and forgetting” quite blatantly stalking one another “even before the first images, we are remembering” too.⁵ While this is true to film and art spectatorship generally, in sample culture it becomes more apparent.

Concept, content and context collide vividly in After the Rainbow, the second of Soda_Jerk’s ‘The Dark Matter Cycle’ series. Like their first instalment, The Phoenix Portal, which saw the late River Phoenix revisit his earlier self as he teleported through his film career, After the Rainbow is an experiment, exploration and exploitation of time-travel through media, a framework that is inherently reliant on a viewer’s memory. Whether Garland or Phoenix, Soda_Jerk believes that the child star is “a portal through which the viewer can access temporally distant versions of themselves” because a child star is, after all, “an unavoidable measure of time passed”.⁶ Through the use of tragic child star figures whose bizarre lives and untimely deaths played out before our very eyes, Soda_Jerk amplify nostalgic attachment and tap into the greater human psyche.

As a remix hatched from the debris of Garland’s broken world — a much-publicised world contaminated with self-doubt, pharmaceuticals, spotlights and breakdowns — After the Rainbow induces extreme melancholy. Here, layer upon layer, the alchemy of sampling allows Garland’s ghost(s) to conjure an endless emotional matrix. Strongly generating affect through the neatly edited composition, her face, voice and actions become a sentimental spectre that visually and aurally haunts the piece; in each incarnation, Garland is at once an extremely sympathetic and fragile figure as well as an anxiety-inducing filmic marker of our own mortality.

As Dorothy — a character so mythologically entwined and inextricably linked with Garland’s persona — she is all wide-eyed innocence and piggy tails, so that when Dorothy awakens and enters the darkened room where her future awaits, the contrast is extreme and immediate. Passing through a doorway that serves as a portal between youth and future, Dorothy encounters her 1960s senior self performing a vocal mash-up of ‘The Man That Got Away’. As the door opened onto a darker, bloated, affected Garland in a red room, I instinctively recalled David Lynch’s sinister oeuvre. Crooning about tragedy where “the dreams you’ve dreamed have all gone astray”, elder grainy Garland contrasts with technicoloured teary-eyed Dorothy — the sepia-stained celluloid footage from Kansas used prior is left behind. When the song ends and Garland eerily walks away from Dorothy and the spotlight, a harsh reality grasps at the heart of human fears about life and death. Later, when I was researching After the Rainbow, I was not surprised, rather intrigued, to discover that in this sequence Soda_Jerk sample audio from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). Subliminally infiltrating my mind, the use of this material obviously helped contribute to the nightmarish aesthetic that sent shivers down my spine.

As Dorothy exits her nightmare, destined to enter it over-and-over again, overlapping fears collided for me. Personally, I recalled my childhood fear experienced during early viewings of The Wizard of Oz. When I was younger, I was incredibly afraid for Dorothy as she was lifted into another world through nature’s fury — an anxiety that seemed surprisingly fresh when I watched in my current future form. Here, this anxiety was at once teleported through Garland as child-star-portal, but was also underscored by Soda_Jerk’s use of the musical theme from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), one of my favourite films. Used as the sound of the tornado, this aural association triggered thoughts of life lost and innocence destroyed by misery; as I watched After the Rainbow, the narrative worlds of Vertigo and The Wizard of Oz combined, dancing to a ghostlike tune of melancholy in my mind. In this moment, I was left feeling as if I was enduring a dream sequence not unlike those encountered by both Dorothy and Scottie, and the effect was strong.

As Soda_Jerk noted, while remaining a highly cinematic work, encountering After the Rainbow in the space of Kings ARI allowed for “a more personal relationship with the work”. Of all the time-travelling, filmic adventures that I experienced during the Next Wave Festival — artworks and performances alike — After the Rainbow affected me most. Soda_Jerk’s intense layering and reworking of history and cultural debris allowed it to cross worlds real and imagined, while heavily relying on an emotional response from the viewer. Before my eyes and in my mind, After the Rainbow transported me, morphing memories and meanings in an unending dream remix. Like Dorothy who is doomed to follow herself through time, each memory links to another in an unending cycle and, as a consequence I could write about After the Rainbow forever. However, like all things, I must cease, but I take solace in the fact that like Garland’s wonderful work and melancholy life, which came to an untimely end, the memories will live on.

1. Dan and Dominique Angeloro aka Soda_Jerk, in email correspondence with the author, 8 June 2010
2. Dan and Dominique Angeloro aka Soda_Jerk, in email correspondence with the author, 8 June 2010
3. Dan and Dominique Angeloro aka Soda_Jerk, in email correspondence with the author, 8 June 2010
4. Lesley Stern, “Life is a Dream (Mémoire des apparences)”, FRN 1986. Available online: rouge.com.au/2/life.html
5. Lesley Stern, “The Scorsese Connection” p.166
6. Dan and Dominique Angeloro aka Soda_Jerk, “A Brief Guide to the Quantum Physics of Child Stars”. Available online: sodajerk.com.au/sj/briefguide.html

my admiration for you
(a halo of light bleeding pure and true)
rises like a serpent in the depths of a pit
and moves across a jaded dance floor
on its knees

i trace the geography of a heart‘s open hive
hanging like hurt on a steep gorge of sleeve
deaf to the sound of something agile breaking

like paint i peel from the planks of a spine
the feelings revived by a brother‘s tight grin
the way we used laughter to distance ourselves

each time your flat chest expands like a mast
a rough stubble of air is huffed from your chin
the scar tissue thickens around the torn muscle

afraid of dark being strangled by dawn
the strength of a frame built to keep
the seams in
i fall asleep with your whispers against me

You’re a man now, brother. You’ve the beard to prove it.

I see.

I’m a man, brother. Watch me.

I do.

See how I stand?

I see.

Stand as I do, brother.

Could I embrace you?

We don’t embrace.

I embrace you.

We don’t touch, brother.

We don’t touch?

We don’t touch!

We don’t touch.

See how I love you, yet keep you at arms length?

I see.

But this is allowed.
(he punches his brother in the arm)

That is touching, brother!

See how I love you, yet pretend to touch you with hate?

I see.

But I’ll laugh all the while, brother, so you know it’s not hate.

Sometimes it still hurts.

Sometimes things hurt.

Sometimes things hurt…

But we don’t talk about them, brother.

We don’t talk about them?

We don’t talk about them!

We don’t talk about them.

No, we laugh. We drink and we laugh.

We drink and we laugh.

Drink and laugh.

And after that?

After that, nothing.

You’re doing nothing?

Watch me.

I see you’ve leaned away.

I lean away?

You lean away.

Yes. We lean away.

What if I were to move away?

To lean away?

No, to go away.

For how long?

A year and a half.

Well, I would miss you, brother.

And when I come back?

I would not have to miss you.

Could I embrace you then?

If you went away for a year and a half?

If I went away for a year and a half.

Would I embrace you?

I would embrace you!

Then I should too, brother,

You would embrace me?

Else it might be awkward.

Like this?
(he embraces his brother)

Yes. Awkward.

Awkward?

If you were to embrace me and I not you.

Embrace me brother!

We don’t embrace, brother.

We do! We are!

We don’t embrace!

We don’t embrace.
(he lets go of his brother)

You must learn, brother.

Yes.

You watch me?

I watch you.

We don’t watch, brother.

We don’t watch?

We don’t watch!

We don’t watch.

See how I love you, yet I’m looking past you?

I see.
But I can’t look past you, my brother.

I approached the dance work Bromance with some trepidation. ‘Bromance’ sounds like a term coined by Ralph or Zoo magazines to describe the zenith of relationships in their masculine-centric universe. It invoked true-blue mateship, inherent in the tired ANZAC mythology and one of those entrenched ‘Australian values’. Yet, I was struck by the number of works in the 2010 Next Wave program that broached the topic of masculinity.¹ While the works mentioned are not exactly tantamount to a conspiracy of masculine dominance, I had the cheek to ask festival director Jeff Khan whether Next Wave was about boys. He responded earnestly that there are many women in the program and several projects that dealt specifically with feminist concerns.²

Bromance arose from a fascination with the process of becoming a man. Alisdair Macindoe and Adam Synnott were responsible for the project from this project’s conceptualisation, including direction, choreography, and sound and lighting design. They were accompanied in the performance of Bromance by emerging dancers Lee Serle and Jay Robinson. Unlike the more overt critique of fellow Next Wave works HIGH VIS DANDY or Big League Balls, this project's critique of the social constraints and stereotypes of brotherhood and masculinity emerged as a subtext to the personal subject matter that dominated the piece. I saw Bromance a second time at Performance Space in Sydney and, in the Q&A session that followed, Synnott and Macindoe revealed that the material was developed from their own experiences as younger brothers. Personal experience and anecdotes from the four male dancers involved were used to generate the physical material. This process provided the building blocks for the show, under the insightful but non-interfering guidance of mentor Lucy Guerin and producers Lucy Guerin Inc.

A perceived aversion amongst men to communicate and talk about relationships is hinted at in the focus on sport and video games that mediated the dancers’ interactions. The opening sequence involved Serle and Robinson performing sporty and everyday movements in tandem. Legs stretched, noses scratched, passing each other as they ran across the space. The ordinary becomes prodigious, transformed in a very specific choreography, with no soundtrack to assist. Two became four and star-jumps transformed into a dance-off. The impression of jamming established an exciting tension between competition and creative collaboration.

The promise of this opening was never quite realised as the show unravelled as a string of somewhat disparate sequences, some working better than others. In a sequence that straddled the abstract and naturalistic, the four dancers created hyper-realistic tableaux depicting clichés of masculinity (or brotherhood). They were framed in tight spotlights that popped up over the capacious Meat Market space, a blackout between each. This fairly traditional theatrical technique felt dated. In this instance, the artists tried to mimic the film-editing technique of montage. It came across as people moving around in the dark to get to their next position, pretending they didn’t. As the scenes progressed, Serle stepped out and performed what one would refer to as an expressive dance as the angsty little brother, the kid that got bullied by the other boys. It seemed that his brief was to comment on the scenarios using dance. It became a literal translation of commentary to movement in which the investment of the dancer’s body in the subject matter was lost.

Later, we saw again the potential for a ‘realness’ and charm in this work, as two performers, front stage, recite in unison both sides of a conversation that could perhaps be heard between two mates or brothers on a train. It rolled out as a game of association, splattered with in-jokes, both rhythmic and singsong. They then performed the most elaborate and ridiculous secret handshake I’ve ever seen, pushing the ritual to excess beyond the imagination, especially for us ‘non-dancers’. This was Bromance at its most ingenious, using humour to mock the constraints of male-male interactions, moving away from a heavy-handed focus on violence, bullying and the pack mentality.

My impression of Bromance was as much about the risk of opening up a discourse on love between brothers as it was about the risks of two emerging dancers establishing a style to call their own. Synnott and Macindoe took interesting steps in their exploration of factors that established personal identity — indeed, the personal is a good place from which to approach the political — however, Bromance is clouded by an inability to reflect the conceptual framework into any coherent stylistic conceit. For me, the most effective element, arguably at times propping up this work, was Macindoe’s sound design, an accomplished synthesis of electronically created and manipulated sounds that achieved a coherence and consistency that the ‘dance’ of Bromance lacked.

1. Among them, performance, installation and sewing workshop HIGH VIS DANDY critiqued the dominance of ‘masculine’ values in trade-based work places through the appropriation of a symbol of this masculinity — high visibility work wear. Eric Bridgeman’s Big League Balls was a series of photographs, drawings and performance video that ‘interrogate and denounce fundamental mechanics of gender, race and sexuality prevalent in Australian football culture.’ (ericbridgeman.com/bigleagueballs.html). Heterodoxia, a country themed ‘man-fest’ replete with mechanical bull, and several pieces in the Sports Club project, had professional sport and masculinity playing hand-in-hand.
2. Indeed, Hannah Raisin’s Sugar Coated was part homage, part revision of the 1970s feminist performance aesthetic. In The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, curators Victoria Bennet and Clare Rae asked artists to respond to themes of ‘post’ feminist femininity. Zoë Coombs Marr’s And That Was the Summer That Changed My Life was a gentle and funny presentation on growing up, coming out and being outside hetero-normativity. A review of the issues of gender that played out between the ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ works identified is beyond the scope of this review, but it is clear that young artists consider gender a worthy theme, as something that shapes our identity, necessitating continued questioning and exploration.

I remember converting a Wendy house (among the remnants of the family-with-young-children who owned our house before us) into a chicken coop with my dad. The slats of the dismantled cubby had tongue and groove joints, so it was pretty easy to construct by clipping the slats back together and fastening them into place on the new frame. We added a corrugated roof with roofing nails, and hinged doors and an egg flap. That year I won an award in Design and Technology at school for my robot gumball machine and I remember feeling like I could build anything. We went to a laying farm in Helensburgh to adopt some ex-battery chickens. As you might expect, the stink inside a laying barn is pretty thick, and there was a relentless squawking din, but what most shocked my tender young self was the apparent suffering of the chickens in that place. Three or four stuffed into a cage narrower than their wingspan, their beaks broken and all with varying degrees of feather baldness. In the aisles between rows of these cages, dead chickens were left lying. I remember asking the worker who was with us why he didn’t pick up the dead chickens. ‘It’s not my job,’ he said. We bought four ex-battery chickens for $2 each. They gradually grew their feathers back in our care and we christened them ‘the Liberty Chickens’. Years later, on the eve of Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea, for which I had volunteered to bake cupcakes, I traipsed around petrol stations, and convenience and corner stores all over Redfern refusing to give up my search for free-range eggs. But even those are not a patch on eggs fresh from the chicken’s, ahem, vent.

As part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival, George Egerton-Warburton devised The Chicken Stampede: a visual art exhibition at Lamington Drive, an artist’s book and an ‘improbable proposal’. He wanted to muster 500 chickens down Smith Street, Collingwood, in a chicken ‘stampede’ culminating at Festival director Jeff Khan’s backyard where the beasts would feast upon food scraps donated by local restaurants, ‘fertilise’ the garden for the upcoming planting season, and be taken home by members of the public to start new lives as pets and givers of eggy sustenance. According to Egerton-Warburton this was a ‘completely reasonable and very necessary’ action in the move towards self-sufficiency and a challenge to the ‘sterility’ of Australia’s cultural landscape. The RSPCA disagreed, threatening to prosecute if the stampede went ahead. Apparently there are some risks too great.

You may remember, back in 2008, chain emails, Facebook groups and YouTube clips asking you to join in the condemnation of an artist who had tied up a street dog in a gallery exhibition in Nicaragua. ‘Help STOP Guillermo Vargas. Animal ABUSE not art.’ Whatever ideas Vargas was working with, his work, Exposición N° 1, became representative of the haste with which people will jump to condemn perceived animal cruelty in art and, by the same token, the hypocrisy in societies that permit cruelty of an incomparable scale every day in their farming industries.

The use of real animals must be one of the few remaining taboos in art, up there with naked children. Also courting controversy in this year’s Next Wave program was Dachshund U.N., in which Bennett Miller built a scale model of a United Nations meeting room and had 47 (real) dachshunds stand in for delegates for one hour, three Saturdays in a row. Miller received a dressing-down in an Age article: ‘Animals lose their dignity in art that’s gone to the dogs’. In a quick jump to outrage, writer Debbie Lustig claimed the work violated RSPCA directives for the humane treatment of animals and denounced it as ‘misguided and exploitative’. Dachshund U.N. was a spectacle certainly, arguably a little perverse, but my impression was of a good day out for dogs and dog lovers alike.

I am kind of glad that the chicken stampede didn’t go ahead. I’m not sure how chickens, not being as sociable and trainable as, say, dachshunds, would have coped being herded down the street and across a busy road. Egerton-Warburton organised The Fucken Chicken (Sound) Stampede instead. It was now people’s turn to stand in for animals as they paraded, clucking their hardest and competing with megaphones and sound systems to make a raucous din that demanded attention, the only cruelty perhaps to bystander’s ears.

At least there was no chance of the issues in the work being overshadowed by outrage and condemnation, as in the Guillermo Vargas case. In The Chicken Stampede, it was the intervention of the RSPCA that shaped the eventual manifestation of the project. Egerton-Warburton offered a gesture providing an alternative to the mass farming of eggs and the RSPCA presented a ban. In the process of negotiation and eventual concession, this work still succeeded in highlighting the plight of farm animals and revealed the authority that protects them as a somewhat contradictory one. I’m hoping too that it managed to convince some people to adopt some chickens into their lives.

Even Deborah Kelly’s best works dash their hearts on rocks. Some of her very best even dash their hearts on The Rocks. Where I’m from though, the boat never usually makes it this far. There are other people in the water who understand this type of journey. Boat People we could call them. Their dreams and aspirations are made of materials not that dissimilar to my own wooden sinking boat, yet their plight is more desperate. Concerned and appalled by the plight of refugees and their inhumane treatment by the government, artist Deborah Kelly helped found boat-people.org.¹

On 10 October 2001, the Liberal government, lead by Prime Minister John Howard, knowingly manipulated photographs and the media to attempt to win votes. The cropped photographs were of people aboard a wooden boat, The Olong, purportedly throwing their children into the water as a way of blackmailing the HMAS Adelaide to escort them to Australian shores where they could claim asylum. This was the watery baptism the government would have you believe, ‘children overboard’.² What the images failed to convey was the boat was actually sinking and the people in the water were scared, terrified by the warning shots from the HMAS Adelaide and by their predicament. Some, like boat-people.org, understood this terror and joined the refugees in a gesture of camaraderie, camaraderie for those who were seeking refuge on our shores, but also camaraderie for those that never left them. Like a safety flare that signals danger in the water, the actions of boat-people.org helped bring the plight of the refugees into the public conscience.

In the same month as the ‘children overboard’ scandal, boat-people.org turned the Sydney Opera House into a fifteen-metre-high billboard, projecting an image of a First Fleet ship onto the sails of the Opera House. Passersby rallied to support the Boat People’s actions when security guards demanded a shutdown. The Pritzker Prize-winning Opera House ‘boat’ is an architectural display of colonial wealth and luxury, designed to evoke sentiments of national identity, ‘an image of great beauty that has become known throughout the world — a symbol for not only a city, but a whole country and continent’.³ The projection by boat-people.org offered a sharp critique of these sentiments as engendered in pre-colonial and post-colonial narratives.

By March 2002, boat-people.org stiffened their beings and bent their paper bodies into sharp creases, contorting themselves into ‘subversive’ boat-like origami shapes. Approximately five hundred people came down to the Department of Immigration’s offices in The Rocks in Sydney on Good Friday to help fold 3,301 paper boats — one for every person (at that time) held in detention due to Australia’s policies on people arriving here without papers.

The plight of the SIEV-X was to a be a more pronounced display of public grief when 353 asylum seekers drowned en route to Australia, showing how dangerous the circumstances of refugees could be. In October 2002, a projection was created to commemorate the first anniversary of the sinking of the SIEV-X. In collaboration with relatives of some of the children who drowned, a human screen of bodies was formed on the banks of the Yarra River, with names, ages and faces of the deceased projected onto this screen.

Kelly’s own practice is not that dissimilar to her collaborative work with boat-people.org. Her pieces function to democratise everyday life and are always fully embedded in the social. In her piece Tank Man Tango, created for the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, we are able to participate in a choreographed public memorial based on the moves a man famously made to block army tanks after the protest was crushed: ‘Legs together, look ahead, swing your bag, fall back. Stand and stare, stare them down’.⁴

In other pieces such as Hey Hetero!,⁵ a public art collaboration between Kelly and Tina Fiveash, the power of the clear and singular western cultural identity often expressed as being white, heterosexual and ‘normative’ was undermined. Common advertising media such as billboards and bus shelters were used to display images and slogans stating ‘Hey, hetero! Get married — because you can’, and ‘Hey, hetero! Bashers target straights… in 0.05% of sexually motivated attacks’. The pop veneer of the images drew attention to the artificiality of this subject position as it is constructed and portrayed in the media. Kelly’s and Fiveash’s critique allowed for an alternative dialogue founded on diversity in sexuality, gender and ethnicity.

I looked up above me to a beacon of hope amidst so much tumult on the water. As I looked closer at the bright projection emanating from the Museum of Contemporary Art, my eyes focussed to take in Kelly’s lighthouse message, Beware of the God. This sounded like my kind of God. Maybe it isn’t God I need to beware of but be aware of. Beware of universal truth and sameness, be aware of relativist subject positions and difference (or is that différance?) is what Beware of the God seemed to be saying. Thank goodness for Kelly and her collaborators who are intent on making us aware of border policies that estrange and separate us from other people, even ourselves. The next wave lapped against my boat as the wind picked up in my sails, with Kelly’s beacon guiding me into the safety of the Quay. I let down my bower and it plunged deep into the water to anchor.

1. boat-people.org is Safdar Ahmed, Zehra Ahmed, Stephanie Carrick, Dave Gravina, Katie Hepworth, Deborah Kelly, Enda Murray, Pip Shea, Sumugan Sivanesan and Jamil Yamani.
2. For an excellent analysis of ‘children overboard’ and tabloid statements regarding Indigenous communities (the offensive claim that Aboriginal mothers ‘don’t love their children as we love ours’, ‘what, like the “love” of the dark-skinned asylum seekers on The Olong for their dark-skinned kids?’, p.31), see Niall Lucy, ‘Tabloid Deconstruction’, in Pomo Oz, Fremantle Press, 2010, p.26-31.
3. Jørn Utzon, Sydney Opera House, from http://jornutzon.sydneyoperahouse.com/home.htm, retrieved 27 June 2010.
4. Deborah Kelly, Tank Man Tango, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLFmet0pbvw, retrieved 21 June 2010.
5. Deborah Kelly & Tina Fiveash, Hey Hetero!, from http://tinafiveash.com.au/hey_hetero.html, retrieved 21 June 2010.

Melbourne-born artist Matthew Kneale took some time out from managing a furniture warehouse to talk about HIGH VIS DANDY, a performance that posed the question, are we what we wear? This satirical look at Australian fashion was staged three times daily at 8.30am, 12.30pm and 4.30pm on Collins Street, 17–21 May.

Anna Zammit: In this site-specific work in collaboration with Jessica Daly, Daniel Koerner and Zoe Meagher, you took on the Paris end of Collins Street to offer audiences a fashionable alternative to work wear. Can you describe the different stages of the performance?

Matthew Kneale: The work had three sections. Approaching the high-fashion end of Collins Street, near the Prada store, there was a road traffic management plan, with bollards and road signs reading ‘fashion hazard ahead’ and ‘sartorial detour’. Four performers in protective orange helmets and tailored high-vis wear emerged out of a dual cab ute parked on the roadside, dressed in a Lady Gaga shoulder-padded jacket embellished with flashing lights, fluoro-orange military work uniforms, English-schoolboy velvet and high-vis short shorts and a tailored grey suit with reflective accents. From the back of the ute a workman’s bench, or catwalk, protruded, a checker plate toolbox and industrial sewing machine.

During the preparation stage we sharpened our scissors, the generator kicked in and cock rock blared from the radio. I marched out with a folded piece of orange fabric, we unfolded it like a military flag and sewed it directly onto our costumes. The live costume-making stage continued with hand stitching to the outfit of an injured comrade. The site workers then posed in The Beatles’ HELP formation to create a distress signal. Posing for paparazzi, we drank Big M chocolate milk on our smoko. Standing in a line we turned on the audience for the final stage as judges of a street-side fashion runway, commenting through selective applause. Packing everything away we return to the ute and then repeat the performance three times within each hour block three times daily for the week.

AZ: The audience reaction ranged from ignorance to disappointment during the runway segment. Some older women seemed bitter about not getting your approval. How was this choreographed?

MK: Jess led the applause, I didn’t always agree, but if a man in high vis walked by we would clap the loudest for him.

AZ: You subject your bodies to a lot of repetition and there’s a sense of concentration and seriousness to what is otherwise tongue-in-cheek humour. Is the collaborative tight knit?

MK: After some of us worked together on a work about OH&S called Kids Can Get Lost for Next Wave in 2008 we made a work for the Tiny Stadiums Festival in Sydney. HIGH VIS DANDY came about from workshops that we ran for the festival volunteers to make their own high-vis uniforms. The guys in the workshops enjoyed the opportunity to sew and this sparked our interest to further investigate representations of masculinity and what it means to be a man. We are interested in sewing — historically it has been open to both men and women, with tailors, but in contemporary culture it’s seen as women’s work.

AZ: How was the cock rock radio soundtrack constructed?

MK: Zoe designed the sound to tune in and out of samples of cock rock and classical music against a drum beat mixed with announcements of ‘le meat pie’, ‘jark hammer’ and ‘kung gee’ in a dead pan French accent.

AZ: Are you interested in proposing a new masculinity?

MK: Not really, instead we’d like to offer up many masculinities in a fun and playful way. We aren’t criticising the traditional Aussie worker bloke.

AZ: The work is multi-platform, taking in aspects of craft, theatre and visual art. What was the inspiration for this body of work and will it continue?

MK: After graduating from the VCA with a BA in Dramatic Art and Production, I worked as a courier driver in Melbourne’s CBD. I was issued with an oversized polo shirt to distribute mail to law firms. The shoulder seams came half way down my arm, making me look like a junky in high vis. I altered the shirt and tailored the pants to look like hipster jeans. Being that they were made of work-wear fabric the pants didn’t stretch and I couldn’t actually bend down to pick anything up!

Right now I’m working in a furniture warehouse. It’s a relaxed environment and we listen to podcasts. I’ve been looking at a great YouTube video with pallet-jack drifting called Workplace Shenanigans. I’d like to incorporate this into a new performance for the Jump Mentorship that I received this year. In preparation, I am making a muscle suit for protection and taking out personal accident insurance.

‘Where are we going?’
‘To Magic Mountain.’
‘Do you mean Crystal Mountain?’
‘Yeah.’
—From an untitled video work by Tahi Moore shown by Y3K at Structural Integrity, 2010.

‘I feel like there are Post-it notes stuck everywhere!’
—Gallery assistant at Structural Integrity, Arts House, Meat Market, 2010.

On the first day, they weren’t open yet. On the second day, I drank wine out of a wonky, handmade teacup. There was supposed to be tea, but the kettle was broken. I put on a cardboard hat that I couldn’t make fit, turned right at a little woollen hill (it might also have been some sort of creature, like a soft, faceless hedgehog) and climbed through a birth-canal, made out of pink fabric and cardboard.

This was the exhibition [please give: it a moment] at TCB. Artists Elizabeth Dunn and Jessie Hall had turned the gallery’s few dark rooms into a sort of makeshift, cardboard labyrinth, an adventure playground for children. Except of course, none of us were children anymore. We bumbled through it, trying not to wreck things with our oversized bodies. Strange noises were coming from somewhere: a truck reversing, a distressed cat sound, an ominous rumbling. I couldn’t tell which belonged to the street outside and which were coming from the head-sized bundles of brown paper in the corners of the cardboard room. Someone was recounting their anxieties and laughing nervously.

The journey — so to speak — ended in a little cubby-house made out of cheap wood and plastic. I crawled inside. A couple of black felt pens hung from the roof by strings, encouraging me to add something to the few sentences and drawings which previous visitors had obligingly scrawled on the thin plastic walls. There was a sketch of a man someone had made. I drew some thought-bubbles above his head. But then I couldn’t think, for the life of me, what I wanted to say.

On the third day, after getting lost in North Melbourne, I finally made it to the Meat Market for one of the Festival’s Keynote Projects, Structural Integrity, a huge, ensemble exhibition featuring work from eleven artist-run initiatives (ARIs) in the Asia-Pacific Region. My initial reaction was of overwhelming confusion, since the cavernous Meat Market space had been not so much transformed as stuffed to spilling point. Structural Integrity was nothing if not a discombobulating experience, the premise being a sort of biennale-slash-world-fair type of gathering where each gallery constructed, or demarcated, its own pavilion. Yet these borders remained porous, even arbitrary at times, with works leaking over into one another, both physically and aurally, calling into question those notions of fixed, differentiated identities or geographic integrity upon which such exhibition models are based.

Indeed it was difficult for the most part to tell where one work ended and the next began, a feature that, perhaps inadvertently, bestowed a degree of unanimity on the show. Most of the works, and the ‘worlds’ which they inhabited, had been constructed simply, cheaply and clumsily. A deliberately democratic, un-monumental aesthetic prevailed — a handmade quality, which privileged the ad-hoc, the loosely assembled, the precarious, the slightly pathetic and the insignificant.

Perhaps the most ambitious of these so-called ‘pavilions’ was a large cardboard race-track or collision course, called Supercharger (2010), courtesy of Tasmanian initiative Six_a INC, around which one could (theoretically) manoeuvre large remote-control toy cars. Except that, when I was there, it wasn’t working.

Nearby, Melbourne ARI West Space had commissioned a ragged assortment of works, united under a ceiling of colourful plastic flags, the type you might find in a used car yard or a school fete. Greeting visitors near the entrance to the gallery, and extending the theme of an impromptu, childlike party, was a giant, rainbow shaped candle, tbc (2009), by the artist group Greatest Hits. It was a joyous beginning to an exhibition, and yet within this playfulness lurked the spectre of defeat, since the pathetic, anti-climactic purpose of a candle is to burn out, to exist and, by existing, to destroy itself.

Beneath these same flags the Science-Art Club — a collaboration between the students and staff from Brunswick Secondary College and visual artist Scott Mitchell — had constructed a strange machine, which sat ominously near a wall, like a large, wooden cannon. This machine, built during numerous lunchtime meetings apparently, was rumoured to be the largest smoke ring generator in the southern hemisphere. It was a wonderful, comic monument that celebrated the unrecognised art of disobedience — that illicit rebellion enacted by school kids who blow smoke-rings behind the toilet blocks at lunchtime. The huge plume floated out for a few magnificent seconds, like a ship into the air, only to be wrecked upon the plastic flags, where it fell into incoherence.

In another corner of the Meat Market, a bunch of old, eighties-era office chairs were strewn around haphazardly, as if an emergency had just swept through some sort of Third World office. On the walls were a number of badly framed documents, a map of Africa and an imagined corporate logo for an imagined bank in Burkina Faso. The documents were typed letters replicating those ubiquitous junk emails that people send from Africa (apparently) and which attempt to convince the recipient of a ridiculous multi-million dollar inheritance. This deeply pathetic scene, created for the Philippine initiative Tutok by artist Mark Salvatus, invited the audience to construct its own narrative. The spam letters, which spoke of plane accidents and dictatorial governments — those invented tragedies designed to veil the real tragedies of gross inequality and desperation — were revealed as both mysterious and melancholy. But the work went little further than this, failing to interrogate or extend these notions, content merely to reinforce, in a vaguely racist way, the idea of Africa as a decrepit, pseudo-Western scam. ‘Crossing between geo-political and geo-cultural issues,’ as the project claimed to do, surely involves more than simply reproducing clichés.

In the strangely blank spaces that constituted Y3K’s structure-within-a-structure, one could sit at a sad little table, or wander around looking at the cloth-covered walls. It was almost impossible to figure who had made what, or what anything actually was. This is all, no doubt, how they intended it to be. It was also a fitting zone in which to admire Tahi Moore’s seemingly untitled, un-credited and listless video, in which unnamed characters travelled across unnamed cities, discussing their own un-reality. Their meandering, subtitled conversations matched the placelessness of their surroundings, as they moved without any narrative logic from country to country, from highway to man-made beach to real beach to park bench, looking for something that always remained just out of reach:

‘Where are we going?’
‘To Magic Mountain.’
‘Do you mean Crystal Mountain?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s a crystal shop.’
‘We’re going to a mountain.’
‘How do we find it?’
‘There’s a sign.’
‘Why do you want to go to Crystal Mountain?’
‘I want to see where the sign goes.’
‘Will we recognise it?’
‘We’re going to have to make it up.’¹

To my mind, the artist whose work most eloquently expressed this general mood of failure and futility was Nicholas Waddell. At Structural Integrity, Waddell had built a giant sporting trophy the size of a public monument, entitled One Hundred and Ten Percent (2009). It was constructed imperfectly from boxes, faux-wood veneer and an explosion of small, ‘golden,’ ‘real’ trophies near its top. Near its base, Waddell had fixed little plastic religious containers, a cheap version of the sort used to hold holy water in churches. The work stood as an anti-monument, a parody of achievement as laughable as a giant cheque, but sadder too — more desperate.

Waddell’s work, which coupled a dark irreverence with a fine eye for a visual pun, was essentially about human insignificance, and the ways in which we attempt and fail to overcome it. At Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces (GCAS), in a corresponding exhibition called Mercy Street, Waddell had installed a number of similarly sad and comic anti-monuments or Shrines to Inadequacy, made from reclaimed waste materials and cheap religious icons. In one such work, The Reclining of Christ (2009) — hung near the ceiling of the room as if above an altar — a little medallion of the crucified Christ had been made to appear as if he was simply resting on a huge bed of old foam, the sort which falls out of discarded couches on the street. Above Christ’s head, precariously balanced, was a slab of cactus, with huge protruding thorns — a comically oversized crown. In another work, What Became of Mr A. Certo (2010), a small urn, supposedly containing someone’s ashes, sat beside a second, identical urn containing the contents of the same person’s vacuum cleaner. For all of Waddell’s bleak chuckling, these works manage to genuinely confront a certain spiritual complacency, exemplified by a culture of material wastefulness, and by doing so they reinvent the role of the icon or the monument for our own time, a simple ad-hoc and seemingly unholy kind of construction, but one nevertheless capable of recharging the mystery of our own smallness.

In a catalogue essay accompanying the 2006 Unmonumental exhibition at the New Museum in New York, curator Massimiliano Gioni wrote:

If we were to follow the signals that have accompanied the opening of this century, we might conclude that we have come to live in an age that defines itself by the disappearance of monuments and the erasure of symbols — a headless century… it should come as no surprise that this first decade of the 21st century produced a sculpture of fragments, a debased, precarious, trembling form that we have called unmonumental. ²

Much of the visual art at the 2010 Next Wave Festival continued this trend, a form of artistic practice that feeds on its own marginalisation and celebrates failure, that squats amongst the ruins and scavenges amongst the detritus which a gorged and wasteful civilisation produces ad infinitum. And yet, where much so-called ‘unmonumental’ art of the last ten or fifteen years seems desperate, exhausted, and violently outraged (I think of artists such as Sarah Lucas, Claire Fontaine and Urs Fischer), most of the work at Next Wave maintained a playful optimism by comparison, even in the face of defeat, even if, like that West Space rainbow, its own destruction was inevitable. At TCB, [please give: it a moment] celebrated a kind of fragile resistance to the world outside, inventing its own, paper-thin world as a sanctuary. At GCAS Nicholas Waddell’s work confronted insignificance: at the Meat Market the Science-Art Club celebrated it. In fact, everywhere I went at Next Wave, someone else seemed to have been there before me, with some cardboard and packing tape, making a new world which may or may not have been working.

At its worst this tendency can seem unambitious or cute. Too often things came across as simply amateurish. At their best though, these works exemplified a particular ‘precariousness’ which Nicolas Bourriaud recently identified as ‘the essential content of the political programme of contemporary art,’ a program that affirms the transitory, circumstantial and uncertain construction of the institutions and systems which comprise reality itself.³ Although these homemade worlds were susceptible, both literally and figuratively, to being blown over — although they often seemed to be on the verge of breaking down of their own accord into nothing, of disintegrating entirely — their own tentative natures suggested that they could be rebuilt or reassembled in some slightly altered form. Which is to say, that the ad-hoc, provisional, uncertain qualities that were fundamental to their nature, represented, in fact, a coherent form of resistance.

As the second decade of this new century dawns, we ask: what is it possible to believe? Whatever it is, as Tahi Moore’s dialogue suggests, ‘We’re going to have to make it up.’

1. Dialogue from an untitled video work by Tahi Moore, shown by Y3K at Structural Integrity, 2010 Next Wave Festival.
2. Massimiliano Gioni, ‘Ask the Dust’, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, Phaidon Press in association with the New Museum, New York, 2007.
3. Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Precarious Constructions: Answer to Jacques Rancière on Art and Politics’, 2009. Available online http://www.skor.nl/article-4416-nl.html?lang=en.

Dear Artists,

I’m writing to discuss some of the risks involved with your Next Wave performance, “I thought a musical was being made”. I am aware that all artists have to undergo risk assessment activities prior to their artworks being performed, and am sure that you have completed this process to the satisfaction of all authoritative parties, but I am writing to you now to discuss my experience with your artwork and your responsibility, and role, within that experience.

After seeing your work, I found myself suddenly plunged into a state of deep and disorientating paranoia. Although the performance was touching and light-hearted, the concept was underscored by a true and disturbing event (Kitty Genovese’s terrifying death). This, coupled with a state of super-heightened awareness from extended detailed observation of the city from above, left me walking through the streets of Melbourne with darting eyes and a spinning head.

I attended your art performance on my own due to limited ticketing. As such, I walked out of the door feeling self-conscious and alone, swallowed up by the city as if into a rip on a beach. I walked down some footpath aimlessly, trying to force myself back into my ‘normal’ way of perceiving the world.

Instead, I found myself monitoring movements, conversations, faces. I found myself looking into the eyes of strangers and trying to decipher whether they might help me if I were dying in an alleyway. And then looking into their eyes again and trying to decide whether I would help them if I saw them dying in an alleyway, whether I would rush to their aid and put my hand on their cheek, and what their cheek might feel like if I did, whether it would be cold or warm or wet or dry or rough or smooth or just like my own. And all of this as we stood at opposite corners of some traffic crossing.

I felt more lost in this chilly city than ever before. I was overwhelmed by sensory input — I found myself so distracted by the minute details of the world around me that I could barely navigate my footsteps into a straight line, let alone find my way to the next venue, or home. The experience of watching the performance recreated the disconnection and disassociation of intense panic attacks, leaving me numb and raw.

I remembered suddenly all the people in my life that I loved and had not cared enough for. I called two friends and asked them personal questions, requesting intimate details of their lives that I felt I had become disconnected from. I called my father. The sound of his voice down the line reminded me of home, the safety and comfort of home, the smell of home-washed bed linen, the warm feeling of home-grown habit. I felt like I feel when I am too ill to function, wishing for nothing more than to be in my old bedroom with my mother bringing me a cup of tea and toast.

I eventually found my way to the next place I had to be and curled up against a wall, waiting for the people I had arranged to meet. I found myself so willing to offer advice and comfort to strangers, driven by this new need in me to be good to others, to notice things when they are wrong, to be considerate, and helpful, and thoughtful and kind. I gave two people directions. I thanked people unnecessarily. I apologised openly and confidently, as if feeding soup to the poor.

But towards my friends I found myself oversensitive and fragile. I found myself suddenly expecting them to sense my unease, my nervousness, and to care for me. Strangers might not notice, but surely, surely a friend would? I quickly warmed to the first person who asked if I was feeling okay, drawn immediately to this friend who I felt would save me from being stabbed in an alleyway.

To another I was cold and suddenly angry — after telling him I was feeling fragile, I found him unconcerned, uncaring. His unwillingness to speak to me while I had plunged myself into this exaggerated victim complex was confusing and hurtful. I found my worldview falling to pieces. I imagined myself as Kitty Genovese, being stabbed in an alleyway, thirty-eight copies of his face looking down.

He left and I burst into tears. ‘How could he?’ I cried to my faithful friend, my saviour, and she held me for a while as we rationalised irrational things together over wine. On the tram home I tried to take up as little space as possible, to shrink into myself so as not to disturb others, and at the same time watched each face to make sure no-one was unduly distressed.

‘Have this seat,’ I felt like saying to bystanders, gesturing to seats. ‘Sit down. Are you alright? How has your night been? Where are you getting off? I’ll get off and walk with you. To your house. Do you smoke, would you like a cigarette? A tissue? Are your hands cold? I can hold them. And your bag. I can hold you. If you need me to. Or I’ll leave. If it’s too much. I just want to make sure you’re alright. Okay. Have a lovely night. And a lovely day tomorrow. Okay. Stay warm.’

Perhaps in your next artwork you might consider the consequences of involving others in concepts that can possibly have such extreme and extensive effects. It was due to your artwork that for days later I found I had become overattentive and hyperaware, as well as extremely sensitive to and suspicious of others, both friends and strangers. In the following week I became newly claustrophobic and a month on, wearing headphones in public prompts an unnecessary and involuntary hyperexamination of hand movements and footsteps that appear to coincidentally fall in time with the music I am listening to.

Echoes of the traumatic experience of your work are still lingering, and although I am not seeking compensation, I am writing to inform you so that perhaps for future works you may factor such reactions into the psychological design of your piece, or display appropriate warnings to patrons.

Sincerely,
Amelia Schmidt

Let me tell you about a girl. She was a normal girl. She liked books and words and going out with friends. Life was pleasant.

One day, after nothing in particular, the girl realised that she didn’t feel like going out with her friends, and she didn’t feel like reading her books. The enjoyment she had found in these things was gone (anhedonia). This continued for a time. The girl found that she was having difficulty sleeping, often lying awake for hours on end (insomnia), with troubling thoughts stuck in her head.

One day, the girl went into a book shop, to see if she could find a book to read that would distract her mind and make her feel cheerful again. She had not been out of the house for a while and found the open space of the book shop and the people within it terrifying (agoraphobia). She started to have difficulty breathing (hyperventilation) and stumbled into an aisle where there were no people. She rested her head against the bookshelf and waited until the feeling of terror (anxiety) passed. When she had recovered her breath she looked up and realised she had stumbled into the self-help aisle. This made the girl laugh, but then she could not stop laughing (hysteria). She laughed so much it made it hard to breath.

The girl went to see a doctor. The doctor asked her some questions. He asked if she felt angry or agitated for no reason (dysphoria), if she felt particularly tired (somnolence) or if she thought about death (suicidation).

He prescribed some medication to make her feel better (serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors) and some to help her sleep (nonbenzodiazepine hypnotics).

Things seemed to be getting better for the girl (convalescence). Some days she felt quite alright (euthymia).

But some days she would feel like a bubble about to burst. She would get an overwhelming feeling of well-being (euphoria), she’d flit about and fidget (psychomotor agitation) and had no time to rest. If anyone asked, she would tell them how well she was feeling (hyperthymia).

Soon the people around her began to realise that the girl was not as well as she claimed (relapse). She would swing wildly (oscillate) between feeling life was a joyous wonder and a crushing burden.

A few months of taking the medication (serotonin and noradrenalin reuptake inhibitors) made the wild mood swings worsen (exacerbated). Some days she would be capable of extraordinary feats (hypomania), requiring little sleep (hypersomnia) only to find that the next day (rapid cycling) she felt physically weak (asthenia) and wanted to sleep all day (hypersomnia).

This went on for some years (chronic). She went to see her doctor again (review), he gave her more medication (tricyclic antidepressants). For a few weeks she felt better (placebo) but the few weeks passed and she went back (relapse) to the unpredictable (volatile) pattern of thoughts (cognition) and moods.

In public, she felt she couldn’t breathe (dyspnoea), she’d stumble (ataxia) through crowds, her heart beating (palpitations) wildly, embarrassed (erythema), copying the way people spoke (echolalia) and acted (echotaxia) so she could feel normal, all the time, trying (attempting) to breathe (respiratory function).

She saw her doctor (medical practitioner) again (review) in hope he could tell her (diagnose) why she felt so shit (coprolalia). She thought (cognition) that she was being punished (psychosis), that she was going to die (delusions) and that other people were trying to hurt her (paranoia).

The doctor (general practitioner) sent (referred) her to another doctor (psychiatrist) who gave (prescribed) her more (increased dosage) medication. Some (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) to help (assist) her (patient) up (antidepressants), some (benzodiazepines) to help (assist) her (patient) down (sedatives), some (azapirones) to stop (cease) her (patient) panicking (anxiolytics), some (sodium volproate) to keep (maintain) her (patient) even (mood stabilisers) and some (risperidone) to keep (maintain) her (patient) safe (antipsychotics). She (patient) didn’t (negative) feel happy (hyperthymic) or sad (dysthymic) anymore, she (patient) didn’t (negative) feel anything (hypoesthesia). She (patient) wasn’t (negative) part (function) of anything (depersonalisation). She (patient) didn’t (negative) know (cognize) what (conjunction) she (patient) looked like (body dysmorphic disorder). She (patient) felt (proprioception) she (patient) was being (hallucinations) erased (eradicated). And she had lost all her words.

Q: What do you think of The Infinity Tube?

Steve Johnson, 22, student: ‘Yeah, it’s great! Um, yeah, me and my girlfriend spent ages looking for it and then it turns out we were on the wrong street on the other side of Bourke and, yeah, but we found it. Yeah, no, no, it’s really cool. Sort of hypnotising. You just want to stand there and stare at it, hey?’

Vivian Hamer, 25, barista: ‘Yeah, it’s kinda cool. Um, I think I’ve seen better stuff at the festival though, but I dunno maybe it’s just not my thing.’

Hannah Sutherland, 17, student: ‘It’s awesome, really awesome. Yeah, just…awesome. I like it. Um, did you make it? It’s awesome.’

Roger O’Donnell, 55, shopkeeper: ‘Ah, what is it, some art thing? Nah, don’t like it. It’s silly. Art shouldn’t be something just sitting there getting grubby. It’s just silly.’

Sarah Delahunty, 20, unemployed: ‘The infinity tube? Oh, that thing? Yeah, it’s pretty cool, I guess.’

Joy Zhang, 22, student: ‘It’s very good. I was very surprised to see it here. Is it a science experiment?’

Peter McLeod, 21, data entry clerk: ‘It’s cool. Um, I don’t know what else to say! Um, maybe it’s like…a comment on mortality? Like, the infinity, like, you think everything will last forever and you reckon you can go into some other world when you die, like, it’s all the light at the end of the tunnel, right? But when you look at it closer, or, like from the other side, you see that it just ends. …Huh, I just, I just thought of that just then. Not bad, eh?’

Greg Packer, 47, maintenance worker: ‘You know what? I’m not usually into this kind of arty stuff, but it really is something else. Never seen anything like it back in the States.’

Ernest Huxtable, 22, artist: ‘Oh, I love it. It’s totally…hyperreal. Like, Baudrillard? Like, eh, simulacra and simulation and all of that. The spectacle. Dare I say, a postmodern interrogation of futurist, trans-human, utopian grand narratives. Truly remarkable.’

Matthew Fountain-Smith, 31, management consultant: ‘The what? Sorry mate, I’m running late.’

Diana Sheehan, 65, retired: ‘It’s very nice, yes. Is this for the radio or…? No? Well, I don’t know what to say, but um, yes, it’s very nice, very good.’

Roger Kane, 41, professor: ‘Hmm, very interesting. And wonderfully crafted. If I were to offer an interpretation, perhaps it’s a critique of the patriarchy or patriarchal status quo, with the hole symbolising the feminine, and the artwork’s appearance of endlessness being a figurative comment on the illusory and constructed maternal gender role that must be constantly maintained in order to uphold the hegemonic discourse. Mm, it’s fascinating.’

Nick Foster, 21, student: ‘Wooahhh! That’s sick as! Hey, Johnno! Johnno! Come take a picture with me on this thing! Johnno! Where are you going? Mate, you’re not piking on us are you? Mate, come have another drink!’

Susan Carpenter, 23, acrobat: ‘It’s really interesting, I really like it. It spun me out seeing it here, just in the middle of the alley. Makes me wish I could, like, put my hand in and go inside and see where it goes and…it makes you sort of imagine that, you know?’

Jonathan Connor, 25, undisclosed: ‘Well, it depends on who’s using it. If this were to fall into the wrong hands then the consequences would be… catastrophic. Here, take this. It’s loaded. I’m gonna stay here and make sure no-one tries to come through. No-one…or no thing. Run. Just run. Don’t worry, I’ll find you. Now go. Go!’

Andrew Meade, 20, plumber’s apprentice: ‘Heaps mad. It’s like something from a video game, or, you know, Stargate or Doctor Who or something. Yeah, mad as.’

Isaac Hale, 22, bar worker: ‘I dunno. All my mates are, like, raving about it, but I dunno, it’s kind of…crap. I mean, sorry, I mean, it’s just like these things I saw at, at Questacon in Canberra? It’s just, like, mirrors and plastic and some lights and stuff and…it’s okay I guess. I mean, yeah, nothing amazing. Yeah. …Hey, guys, can we go now?’

Jonathan Connor, 27, undisclosed: ‘You’re still here? What year is it? … Then there’s still time!’

Sam Sulemenovski, 44, garbage collector: ‘I’m just here to empty the bins, mate, sorry.’

Max Ellis, 29, musician: ‘Freaking me out. I was here looking at it the other night, and I touched it and then I sort of blacked out and then I wake up down the road and it’s morning and all this crazy stuff starts happening like on the telly I see these dogs instead of people at the, the United Nations, and then these, these people just start dancing while I’m walking down the street and I just keep hearing stuff and seeing stuff that I know isn’t real, like, like, on the walls and that, and nobody notices or is listening to me. They just tell me to piss off and think I’m crazy or somethin’. So if I like, if I like touch it again, everything might change back and… I think it’s, it’s, a, a gateway. Yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna touch it and I’m gonna go back.’

Kelly Moody, 26, retailer: ‘What did you say? What did being thinner teach me? Piss off.’

Lisa Gilbert, 23, bookseller: ‘I reckon it’s awesome! Yeah, really like the exit sign on the back. And how it looks all out of place next to all the graffiti and rubbish and pipes and all that. It’s like a hidden portal in a random alley. Like, something special, a bit out of the ordinary, yeah. I really like it. Can’t stop looking at it from different angles and stuff. Moving my head. Yeah, wish I had a camera. Love it.’

Igor Vandeberk, 30, librarian: ‘Gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you: Nietzsche.’

Zac Angus, 29, actuary: ‘Well, I don’t get it. It just takes you through to the other side of the building. Looks nice and all, but I don’t see why I’d go all that way when you can just use the door.’

Clive Panagopolous, 47, fruiterer: ‘Pfft, it’s rubbish. Big waste of taxpayer money that just sits there and does nothing. Just like the dole bludger who probably got paid to do it. I think he should get a real job and I think they should chuck this thing in the skip. That’s what I reckon’

Oxana Medvedev, 22, graphic designer: ‘The what? What are you talking about? There’s nothing there. What, the graffiti or the door or? That’s just an empty alley. Is this, like, a prank? Umm, okay, thanks, bye.’

Amelia Porter, 25, doorwoman: ‘What do I think of The Infinity Tube? What do you think of it? Hm. Interesting. Hadn’t thought of it like that. Hey, look at this. There’s like a little switch hidden at the back, see? Whaddya reckon it does? Like, the lights or something? Dare me to?’

Comfort Zones: they’re not very comforting. They coddle you with a false sense of security. They make you believe that everything will be fine if you don’t do anything too different or drastic. Don’t rock the boat, they recommend, except change is like a tsunami — it will knock you out of that boat anyway.

Take performance, for instance. The idea of being on stage and exposing yourself to the world is out of most peoples’ comfort zones. For some people, myself included, being on stage is a lot more comfortable than being off stage. At least on stage you get to adopt any variety of personae, be in a world of make-believe and have some control about how people view you and think of you. You’re not as vulnerable as you would be out in the real world. Out there you’re not shielded by makeup, feather fans or a shared narrative.

So what happens when you put on a show that purports to take performers out of their comfort zone? The Last Tuesday Society hosted a series of cabaret nights for Next Wave at Witches in Britches Theatre Restaurant. They claimed that all their performers were doing something they’d never done before. A burlesque dancer doing mime! Hula-hooping by a poet! An MC being heckled! Well, that had happened to him before, but apparently it made him deeply uncomfortable, and now he was going to receive a lot of heckling on purpose.

Some aspects of Comfort Zones were very familiar to the Last Tuesday Society. The venue was already their regular haunt. The audience was mostly made up of regulars, the rest were largely other festival goers who were familiar with ideas of experimentation and comfort zones in art. The audience seemed to have a ‘hipster uniform’ in place, especially amongst the males: old-fashioned facial hair, pompadours, op-shop cardigans and khakis. I didn’t adopt any element of the hipster uniform: I was already feeling rather ‘un-hip’ after checking out a lot of Next Wave exhibits and wondered if there was some hidden meaning I wasn’t understanding.

I felt somewhat out of my comfort zone just being in the audience. Not being a Melbournite, nor having heard of the Last Tuesday Society before, I was not familiar with any of the acts and had no idea whether I should take their claims of discomfort at their word. Indeed, most of the acts were so brilliantly executed — I recognised the burlesquer’s deft mime skills from past clowning classes, and the hula-hooping poet didn’t drop one hoop — that I suspect that even if it wasn’t their usual forte, it was something they had at least some level of training in. Even the constant heckling of the MC became comforting background noise after a while. He would have known that none of the audience really meant what they said, and his responses (based on a wheel) became increasingly more and more robotic, rather than tending to ever-more uncomfortable honesty.

Possibly the only person that did seem uncomfortable was the winner of their ‘craffle’ (the Society’s ritual of a ‘crap raffle’). The girl won a three-course meal that she couldn’t eat due to dietary restrictions. Accompanied by the sounds of a violinist, she was mortified by the attention and bravely faced the audience as she ate what she could of her first course. When she declined the other two courses I relieved her of her misery and offered to finish the meal. Surely my eagerness to receive free food made me even less hip in the eyes of the audience. Hey, I was hungry, and it was a free dinner.

I did admire the efforts of the Dutch Courage Choir, a group of non-performers who got together and sang Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance on stage, aided by a shot of alcohol and MP3 players that were all out of time with each other. They went into it with gusto and the mistimings created an interesting and charming choir effect. The lines of one girl who was a verse behind everyone else made it hilarious! If they were uncomfortable or awkward, they managed to hide it well, embracing their (almost) atrocious singing with crazy dancing and dramatics. In clowning class we learnt about being ‘in the shit’ and having to trust what your vulnerability and body comes up with instead of forcing yourself to be funny. Their act was a perfect example of this.

What if the rest of the Last Tuesday Society took as big a risk as the craffle winner and the Dutch Courage Choir and performed in settings outside their comfort zones? You could take them out of Witches in Britches and put them on the streets in a suburb of Melbourne that isn’t full of people in hipster uniform. Heck, bring them out to Brisbane and get them to busk in the middle of Queen Street Mall or South Bank amongst the other regular buskers who don’t tend to have a lot of patience for hipster types. Or better yet, bring them to the outskirts of a country town where ‘art’ is something that your children make to put on your fridge, where ‘drama’ is a useless school subject, where ‘festival’ means carny games, ferris wheels and row upon row of pedigree cows, sheep and horses. It would be much like the Washington Post’s experiment with internationally renowned classical violinist Joshua Bell: would people appreciate you and your art if you were parked at a street corner, competing with the demands of the real world, without the assistance of familiar contexts like dress codes and festival programs to frame your work?

Just you, in the real world, performing.

While enjoying course two of my craffle meal (instant pasta) I thought about the idea of presenting one’s self. A photo concept came to me.

Presenting yourself, like a literal present, wrapped up in ribbon and twine. Wrapped up in ideas, perceptions, criticisms, compliments, stereotypes, depression, red tape, worries, despair and black lists.

You’d have to be nude, or mostly nude, at least. Now that’s something out of my comfort zone. I have been topless on stage before — it comes with the territory of doing burlesque for a year and a half — but I’ve never been so bare on camera. It’s not really due to shyness, I have been known to walk around the house naked with housemates around. I come from a traditional South Asian family that is one part ultra nosy and one part major worrywart. Some pin-up-style pictures I did for a project last year, where the most shocking photos were of myself attired in tasteful and conservative corsets, led to my parents phoning me every day for two months asking if it was true what their cousins were saying: that I was doing porn. It’s all out of concern for my safety and dignity, of course. Never mind that none of their nosy relatives ever bothered to ask me about it. What about a set of photos showing more flesh than normal?

Parent: ‘It’s not in our culture! You should remember your culture!’
Tiara: ‘But it’s OK here, people don’t make such a big deal about it.’
Parent: ‘But what if some strange guy takes your photos? And then what?’
Tiara: ‘And then…? I can’t control what people do with my pictures in private. People would do the same no matter how I was dressed. I was harassed in Kuala Lumpur every day just walking to work!’
Parent: ‘No! It’s all because of the clothes! If you covered up more, all your problems will be solved! You’d never be depressed again!’

The only depressing part about all this is the regular telephone ordeal I have to go through with parents who think they are telling me something new every time. After being brought up in traditional filial fashion, I can’t just tell them to shut up and go away. Not when I still rely on them for most of my income.

But the idea was too compelling. I was already convinced that it would be my response to the Next Wave Text Camp assignment, pointing out risks taken by taking a risk myself. Or, more fairly, putting my family at risk. Apparently I can lose my parents’ jobs by doing this: jobs that they were meant to retire from by now.

Besides, how bare can I really be when people are going to make assumptions based on what they see anyway? Bitch. Submissive. Attention-Seeker. Beautiful. Brave. Crazy. Disrespectful. Exotic. Insulting. Derogatory. Intriguing. Unique. Is it the clothes that cover you, or the context?

Finding the right photographer was a major task in itself. A couple of people on ModelMayhem responded, but I could not trust that they weren’t just guys with cameras. Then I asked around my collective of female artists — a project I just started up this year — and someone piped up saying she would like to get back into queer contemporary art. Great, sounds like a plan!

Then the night before our shoot she suddenly remembered she had a meeting. I was left without a photographer and a looming deadline.

A friend recommended a photographer known in the fetish scene. He hardly does any pro bono work but is willing to help with arty concepts. I made an enquiry and it turned out he’d be in town the next day. Should we start then?

I was a little nervous moments before our photo-shoot. Firstly, it’s in our apartment. I could not find a studio at the last second and I figured that I could control people better in my house. Secondly, we have had utterly dodgy visitors before, so my partner wasn’t very thrilled with the idea, but he trusted me enough to let it be. But would the guy flake out like the last photographer did? What if he never showed up?

Just as I was writing a worried status update, he and his companion showed up at the door, professional lighting in tow. Turns out he really is a professional. He spent close to twenty years in Hollywood, photographing bright new stars and growing legends, before packing up and moving to Australia. Personally, I was more thrilled that he’d shot Grace Jones and Snoop Dogg: it meant he’d know how to shoot darker skin without making me look ghastly.

His companion created a rope harness for me. I felt a surprising thrill run up my spine as she tied it on me. Rope, twine, ribbon, and yarn wrapped around me, splayed on the floor as I knelt and waited patiently for the camera. My already weak ankles were dying. The agony on my face was not of submission, but of pain. We moved on to a mermaid pose (ah, my ankles), and then me lying down. The photos of those are the most daring since more of me pops out, but they also prove to be more incredible and stunning.

They were released on a semi-private album, shared with selected friends and acquaintances on request. So far the response had been overwhelmingly positive (and not just because it’s a half-naked girl). Now a few will be published on a more open scale, finally releasing my bare, vulnerable self to the world (or at least the hipsters of Melbourne) for the first time. It is quite possible that they will also reach the eyes of nosy relatives. I wonder if they will recognise me?

Being pushed out of my comfort zone.
How comforting would that be?

A poet hula-hoops; a man shaves off his moustache; an art collective does a short reenactment of Jurassic Park; a comedian sings a song. Comfort Zones was powered by irony: the irony that the most uncomfortable people were — despite live snakes, bad jokes and drag costumes — the audience.

You could sense the irony the moment you walked in. We were clearly in a naff theatre restaurant surrounded by foam faux-rocks and fake cobwebs, but it may as well have been a hipster bar. In the future, I imagine some large-glasses-wearing skinny-jeaned twenty-something buying the place and drinking there with their pretty friends, discussing Lady Gaga, rolling cigarettes.

Risk - Irony

Let’s be clear, though: I couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable. I left my comfort zone in another city and swapped it for a mantra: ‘No risk too great.’ Leave your job for a few weeks for a festival in another city with two days’ notice. No current theory really explains why aeroplanes stay up in the air. Look down and watch cotton clouds float over your home, disappearing into the distance. Hand-luggage only. Pack light, but be ready for a cool wind to slip its fingers under your collar and run its nails down your back. Go to a festival in a city that’s not your own, not your home, and hope that you might find someone to talk to. Stay with someone you’ve been in conflict with for months and, if it goes wrong, no Plan B.

The thing about risk these days is that it comes packaged as a bonus with other things, like irony, or distance, or cynicism. Without these things, risk is just risk — it’s outside of your comfort zone. I don’t think I’ve seen much irony-free risk for a while.

I remember risk without irony as a child, when risk was just something that you stumbled into and out of. You only realise the risk years later. I was a gymnast when I was young — twelve I think. I back-flipped along a beam a metre or so above the ground and swung myself between parallel bars, climbed ropes tied to tall ceilings, flipped myself high into the air off trampolines. For children, risk is a game, and fear is so easily conquered.

It’s a joke now, though. Every serious artwork is written off with sarcastic criticism. Every life-threatening experience is turned into a Facebook status update. Every broken heart is sewn back together with flippancy.

Risk + Irony

I remember breaking up with my first boyfriend, who I had been so in love with that his sadness had started to tear me to pieces. I knew there was no good time to do it, so I did it on the night of his birthday, when we were about to go out to a party.

I’d never broken up with anyone before — never in any serious way. I had been talking to strangers about it for more than a week, finding anyone at any university table and asking them to listen. Telling them about how awful he was, how unhappy I was, how things were falling apart, while they politely sipped take-away coffees and listened for entertainment’s sake. ‘I’m going to break up with him,’ I’d proclaim, more to myself than to them.

The party was just around the corner from his apartment. When I went into his bedroom full of the words I was going to say, he had already put all my books and things in a pile. It was the saddest pile of books I’d ever seen. I cried when I told him that we couldn’t keep hurting each other, that I loved him and wanted to be his friend. We went to the party. I talked to people I didn’t know about nothing, and outside the city lights were shining on the water of the harbour in no particular way, in the same way they had been shining when we met six months before, just across the bay. His father told me how happy he was that I was in his son’s life, that I had made things better for them both.

Risk + Irony II

I had to tell my closest friend’s mother that her daughter had an eating disorder.

We had been living together for six months or so and it had become clear that our friendship of many years had been underscored by a quiet lie: that N didn’t have bulimia. I say ‘quiet’ lie because she’d learned to throw up without making noise. Into two-litre empty Coke bottles — in her bedroom. She would buy frozen Weight Watchers meals and eat them with layers of salt on top, and then retreat to her room to throw it up in the insomniac night.

N and I had been close since the start of high school. By the end of our time living together we weren’t speaking properly at all. I realised if no one else knew about the Coke bottles, things could get dangerous. I forced myself to drive to her mother’s work.

How do you tell a mother that her daughter is mentally ill? How do you tell her and not fill her with guilt and sadness and shame? How do you explain how you haven’t helped, changed, rearranged the situation? I didn’t know. I thought I might stutter and stumble into a panic attack, close up and sit there silently. No risk too great. No risk too great. It was OK in the end. N and I haven’t spoken since she left a few days later, but her mum is still my accountant.

Risk + Irony III

I wanted to laugh at the stupidity of it all: I wanted so desperately to go home from this disastrous trip but I waited a moment too long saying goodbye. I was stuck at the airport for eight hours after missing my flight by a matter of moments. Stuck there because I couldn’t face going back. I had stayed too long already and then, eight hours. I sat outside and cried, smoking cigarettes with a woman who was stuck there too.

I spent so long crying. Proper hysteria. Hyperventilating, furious, frustrated. People asked me if I was OK, if I needed help. I needed to go home. I wanted to tap my red shoes together three times. Four hours crying, I think. The rest of it I spent wandering around bookstores and sushi bars, cursing myself silently. I should never have risked that hesitation, I shouldn’t have waited. I wanted to see him before I left, to say goodbye properly, and he was late, and angry at himself, and we held each other and I cried because it had all been so awful, the whole time I had been there in that cold city. He kissed me on the forehead and put me on the shuttle bus. I missed him and my flight.

Risk - Irony II

When my grandmother looked at me — the oxygen no longer reaching her brain — and, delirious and confused, asked me — anyone — to call the police, I was aware that I didn’t know her at all anymore. In my memory, it is all hospital-teal and off-white, ugly paintings and the smell of disinfectant. It was a stupidly sunny day and I had come to visit her, because we all knew it was only decent to come and see her before we couldn’t anymore.

I was older then but suddenly a child again, with my mother and her sister, my aunt, three of us standing around the hospital bed after deciding to turn off life support. I was part of the decision, but I was a stranger to death, and I was my mother’s daughter; the daughter of her daughter. I was scared of this woman who I had never seen before, her hair no longer permed, stuck sweaty and thin to her wrinkled forehead, no makeup, not offering me a cup of tea or a biscuit, dressed only in a badly fitted hospital gown, shuddering and convulsing in and out of consciousness.

After she died, the rest of everything was harder to commit to memory. Her funeral is a cartoon, a film re-enactment in my mind. I see myself watching my father shovel a bit of dirt on to the top of a coffin. The headstone wasn’t ready yet; we walked away from a bare grave. I don’t think I cried.

Viewing Lauren Brincat’s work, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, involves being led down corridors, through security doors and into a lift that descends to the bowels of Federation Square. The mysteriously named Slot 9 (where are Slots 1-8 and what do they hold?) is a cavernous in-between space lined with pipes ferrying water, waste and utilities to and from the restaurants above. The rushing in the pipes and the rumbling of trains below reverberates in the darkness.

At the far end of this long, narrow void Brincat’s video is projected onto a large screen on stilts. The wide vista of a central Victorian landscape at sunset is an unexpected insertion of quietude and warmth in the coldness of its setting. Compositionally, the image, with a hill range and a line of pine trees receding to meet one another at the centre point, recalls the landscape tradition synonymous with Australian painting. Brincat plays wryly, yet not without fondness, with the romance of this association.

The work incorporates an act of gift giving as the artist attempts to share the sun’s warmth by reflecting it to the viewer. In the middle distance Brincat stands atop a cement water tank in a hot pink jumpsuit and, in a gesture of futile optimism, attempts to redirect the sunlight using a drum kit’s crash-cymbal held in front of her face. The power (or lack of) of the individual in the face of the landscape and by extension — in an Australian context — the environmental disasters of global warming and drought is enacted. But it is the call to the viewer that is most interesting. The performative failure in the vast majesty of the landscape both invests in, and derides the currency of mysticism.

‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ is the title of Pink Floyd’s famous 1975 tribute to former band member Syd Barrett. The original track is a nine part sonic epic in the trademark Pink Floyd psychedelic style. The hot pink flared jumpsuit Brincat wears in the video calls to mind the 1970s aesthetic associated with Pink Floyd and the psychedelic drug movement. Like the song, Brincat’s Shine On gestures at timeless mysticism while using the pop cultural vernacular of a specific era. The work’s title reminds us of the doomed optimism associated with that era and the willingness to give oneself to transcendental mysticism. Beaming radiant light on us from above, Shine On invites us to reinvest in that optimism but ultimately acknowledges the hopeless tragedy of our attempts to find transcendental harmony with the earth and its Universe.

The cymbal carries not only the aural but also semiotic inferences of the word ‘symbol’. The reoccurring circular motif of the cymbal and water tank quotes the out-of-frame sun. In Brincat’s reenactment of solar worship the glowing cymbal becomes loaded icon in a mimesis of religious or pagan ceremony.

A pseudo-ritualistic live performance presented on the closing night of the exhibition extended this symbolism into the space of Slot 9. Dressed in architectural black garments Brincat solemnly presented cymbals, one after another, to her collaborator Bree van Reyk who struck them with drumsticks. The noise was looped, effecting a sonorous soundscape. Slot 9 lends itself to such a dramatic happening and the surging sound was powerfully disquieting. In contrast to the layered tone of the video, with its animated dialogue between earnestness and theatricality, the performance carried a forced sincerity and betrayed the discomfort of the pair. This time the audience was not able to take the leap of faith for the work.

Like many contemporary artists exploring ‘New Mysticism’, Brincat is at once playacting and concurrently investing in the game, asking us too to suspend disbelief. But this balancing act lets us fall as the screen darkens between loops and the luminosity of the cymbal’s reflected light is exposed as an electric light shining through a hole in the projector screen. We are asked to reinvest in the relationship of gift giving and receiving with each new loop of the video. This liminal seam reveals the agility of the work in the negotiation of cynicism and our enduring hope for mystical insight.

‘Territory time’ was introduced in the curatorial text for the exhibition of the same name as an attitude towards life held by people living in the Northern Territory (NT) — ‘a philosophy for surviving difficult conditions’.¹ It was further explained as a response to a kind of enforced condition imposed upon NT residents by extreme weather conditions and geographic isolation; a slow, undulating pace that usurps energy, thick as molasses in the moist heat of the build up; an indeterminate period of waiting. The concepts of time passing and yielding to one’s environment were explored in the work of the five artists represented in Territory Time, all currently living and working in Darwin.

Rebecca Arbon’s installation 'Peregrination' (2010) used fly screens and copper wire to create an entanglement of anthropomorphic forms in the centre of the space. ‘Peregrination’ means to travel from place to place, sometimes in a roundabout route, and is an appropriate title for a work whose loosely grouped forms were evocative of jellyfish or lily pads, both common to NT environments, and appeared to float and lightly bob around their confines. Another sculptural installation, Reminiscence Act II (2010), by Catherine McAvoy, referenced the artist’s memories of her childhood. A synthetic web of doll dresses, interwoven and abstracted, cascaded like a waterfall from the wall and coalesced on the floor in a discarded pool. Both works engaged with time and space, evoking delicate physical environments.

Curator Siying Zhou wrote that Territory Time aimed to redefine artistic practice in the Territory, to subvert the ‘Dreaming Land’ mythology of the Aboriginal art market and the ‘Tropical Paradise’ rhetoric of the tourist trade. She asserted that non-Indigenous artists in the NT are at constant risk of disappearing into obscurity due to the internationally successful Aboriginal art market, and that if artists ‘do not fit into this Territory “Land of Dreaming” art market they risk their livelihoods…’ ² We were invited to view the exhibition in the context of this ‘dominant art culture’, and to re-assess our perceptions of art practice in the Territory. Far from the multitude of artist-run spaces in Melbourne, and perhaps overlooked in dominant arts funding streams, these Darwin artists are asserting their commitment to a contemporary art practice that demands a more complex engagement with art from Northern Australia; however, locality is often evident in their work, and relative isolation informs their practice.

It was interesting to consider this idea in relation to dominant categorical practices in contemporary Australian art. Aboriginal art, in particular, is still viewed by many as a separate entity to mainstream contemporary art practice. Individual Indigenous artists have responded variously to this seemingly entrenched tendency to define them along racial lines. One artist in Territory Time, Joshua Bonson, identified as an Aboriginal individual in his artist statement. He grew up in Darwin and has had considerable success as a finalist in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) in 2007 and 2008. His work, Skin (2009), was an interpretation of his natural environment, and of his family’s ties to their country, but did not utilise the traditional iconography many would expect of an Indigenous artist. It would appear that Territory Time attempted to diffuse the ‘us and them’ dichotomy that prevails in discussions about urban-based and remote Indigenous artists, and put forward a case for reconsidering contemporary art from the NT without making racial distinctions.

The artists in Territory Time evoked their experiences of time in very different ways. Ultimately, the works presented an alternative view of arts practice in the Northern Territory and introduced a wider audience to a group of artists who challenge the market’s perception of art from this region.

1. Siying Zhou, ‘Curatorial Statement’, Territory Time Exhibition Catalogue, May 2010, p.3.
2. Ibid, p.3.

The unlikely hero of Daine Singer's Australian Feminist Art Timeline is Wikipedia. Singer's project, part of The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, navigates the treacherous waters of creating a feminist canon.¹ The important task of recording the ongoing influence of feminist art in Australia is complicated by feminism's own aversion to metanarratives. Wikipedia provides Singer with an ingenious means of leaving her timeline open to ongoing adjustment from all; it is a nebulous knowledge that offers an alternative model for framing history.

This kind of open discussion in the public realm was the goal of curators Clare Rae and Victoria Bennett; their approach was one of inclusivity rather than advocacy for a particular feminism. The result was a congregation of thrillingly varied feminisms. In an interview with Phip Murray, published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Rae and Bennett speak about the influence of art historian Amelia Jones' 'para-feminism', a theory that describes the constant expansion, rather than definition, of feminism and involves the communing of second- and third-wave feminism, post-feminism, queer theory and gender politics. In line with this model, the forum held at West Space in conjunction with the exhibition was an exhilarating collision of perspectives. It was a genial conversation that nevertheless reinforced the fierce contradictions of opinion from within the group of nineteen participating artists and writers.

As Laura Castagnini demonstrates in her contribution to the excellent publication that accompanied the exhibition, feminism has had a wide-reaching influence on art practice and its contemporary trajectory.² It is an ongoing force of agitation, disruption and incision and, in both direct and subtle ways, it questions systems of communication, authority and meaning construction. It was therefore disappointing to see in The View From Here some emerging artists defaulting, without fresh interpretation or interrogation, to the means of previous feminist art making. Personal narrative, craft and costume made appearances in the work of Madeleine Donovan, Jessie Angwin and Jessie Scott, for instance. These means have been integral to feminist art making and as they carry the weight of that relationship, contemporary engagement with them might be augmented by investigating what it means to draw on them today, what they bring with them to contemporary work and how recent feminist and critical discourses frame them. There was a predominant lack of self-aware art making — the kind that when looking to the past does so with intentional referentiality: homage, critique or irony.

In contrast, Brown Council's compelling video Work in Progress: Dawn to Dusk does engage in this self-awareness. In an endurance piece of performative group work the four members of the collective take turns to hammer a wooden post into the ground with a mallet. Dressed in identical blue overalls and white tee-shirts the women continue their task silently in a paddock from 6am until 10pm. The tacit collaboration of the team and the calm endurance speaks of women's work, communality, physicality and dogged persistence. With tongue-in-cheek humour, Dawn to Dusk references performance art and its intertwined history with feminist art of the 1960s and 70s. The blunt symbolism of the phallic post is a humorous jest at the stereotyping of 'aggressive' feminisms.

With a similar sense of humour, Hannah Raisin's video projection on the ceiling placed the viewer below an anus pooing a strawberry. Here the abject takes a droll swipe at contemporary raunch culture and the framing of feminine sexuality. This wit, rather than corroding the complex relationship these artists established with the ongoing work of feminism, created resonance with a current generation of women who negotiate the history of feminism in the contemporary context.

Anybodys, a video work by Jess Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies, depicts four women performing choreographed movements in urban space. The finger-clicking and whistling that accompany the movements add to the calm self-confidence of the work; the women stare out at us with a clear and comfortable sense of themselves in public space. Anybodys looks us in the eye — a sentiment echoed by the exhibition as a whole. The prevalance of figurative video work foregrounded direct relationships between the viewer and the women (and in one case, the man) in the works.

Politics is often-urgent articulation and rhetoric, in the true sense of the word. Art, however, is a less enunciated form of communication and it hinges on a space, or a rupture, rather than an argumentative logic. The works in The View From Here made points about objectification, violence, sexual power and femininity, and necessarily so. The great challenge to contemporary artists is to examine these points without collapsing the space and friction that distinguishes art from dogmatism.

The great success of The View From Here was its determination to re-pose and elaborate questions around feminism in the context of local contemporary art. The dialogue created by the exibition, forum and publication reasserts that, as Jo Latham so aptly points out in her contribution to the publication, we benefit not in defining a solution but in opening out the questions.³

1. Contribute to the Australian Feminist Timeline at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Feminist_Art_Timeline
2. Castagnini’s essay ‘Why aren’t more men curated into contemporary art exhibitions?’ is a critique of the absence of male artists in The View From Here. Laura Castagnini, ‘Why aren’t more men curated into contemporary art exhibitions?’, The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, 2010, pp.31-33.
3. Jo Latham, ‘Becoming ftm: imagining feminist futures’, The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, 2010, p.23.

It’s fashionable to be fearful. You get a story to tell, one that gives you cause to move your arms, widen your eyes and make shapes with your hands. You get to be two ways at once — the victim of the story and the hero of the conversation.

I very almost didn’t come tonight.

We’re in the Meat Market. It’s a weekday, we are early and we’re drowning some time in wandering before Hole in the Wall begins. The passage to the street is open and the cool evening air moves slowly like a trained animal, down the slope of the stone floor into the market. The market is divided in two. Half holds the keynote exhibition Structural Integrity and half lays concealed behind a tall partition. The partition is bare but for an ordinary white door, alone at one end. The performance will take place in the darkness beyond this door.

We are early.

I walk on tiptoes in the faint light among the artworks of Structural Integrity. The feeling, it’s like being inside a department store after opening hours, hiding beneath quilts and then emerging into the soundless shopping floor, keeping watch for the security guard’s torchlight. The original meat hooks remain, now painted cream but otherwise still industrial and menacing, and I imagine someone stringing up every artwork on a hook while nobody is looking, as some vague comment. Each piece suspended above the floor, the stones ready to collect what gravity finds. A comment about what is raw in the contemporary city. What we do with our spaces. Or something. I can’t focus. I’m too preoccupied with thinking about being trapped inside a box tonight.

We are the cattle and they are going to trap us in a box.

I have this thing about going to performances that mess with the audience, ones that make you a part of the show or demand that you be right there, right under the lights. I guess you could say it’s fear. Yes, it’s fear, and it’s not like I haven’t felt this way before and overcome it. Plus, what are we if not collectors of stories, pushing ourselves to be in these situations so we can later glorify our part in them? But the way the guy is talking now, before we go in — all the warnings and instructions for how to flee if we need to — I get to looking at the other audience members, all taking off coats, scarves, beanies. I look at their faces, at their expressions, listen to the way they speak. I search for signs of what I am feeling.

I think I might embarrass myself in front of these strangers.

We’re split up into four groups of eight. One by one, each group is led through the white door, past an identical open door, a mirror image of doorways like an open book. Each group is led into a box. I watch two groups disappear before I walk through the doorway. The mirrored doors shut. We are inside a box with four walls and a ceiling, no floor. The walls are cloaked in aged floral wallpaper, the kind that only survives in neglected inner-city rentals. The box is a room. There is a door, a ceiling light, a closed window. The wall opposite the door is split vertically in the middle, on hinges.

The room is on wheels. It begins to move.

I want to get out. Fuck, doesn’t anyone else want to get out? They’re laughing. I’m laughing. It is funny. You know, that kind of funny like when you slip and fall in mud? You’ve hurt yourself and you wish it hadn’t happened but you’re laughing hysterically anyway. It is funny and I’ll be able to tell everyone about how we laughed, our hands up against the wall, steadying ourselves as we followed the room. Followed the room. That’s funny. I don’t want to get out. I can enjoy this and, in the story I’ll tell later, I’ll explain how I wanted to leave, wanted to knock on the door and be led back to safety on the other side of the partition. I wanted the way out but I began to laugh, we all laughed, and the laughter made the eight of us a community. I’ll tell the story. I’ll chart my conquest over my emotions to finally enjoy…

The room stops. A switch and we’re in darkness.

I can’t focus on the words. A man is talking. It’s a monologue, I know this much. He’s talking but I’m thinking of my feet, down there in the black below me. If they can only stay still, I can stay standing and I can listen. The man is talking about being in a grave. No, he’s talking about my grave. How dark it is in my grave. My chest feels tight, my stomach heavy. I know what they’re doing. I’m having a visceral response. They are using my emotions. They are using the elements of narrative to ride my body from my eyes and ears to my gut. And they are amplifying the effect by controlling my senses. The words are not real, the gut is real.

I know my gut.

The light is on. The wall opens. The four boxes open to make a home, rooms with doors on four sides. In the middle, a bed and a couple speaking. We are in their home. This is to be a love story. The home is not real, the words are not real, but it’s right there, it’s familiar and close. The couple are talking in their sleep. What they say, I’ve had some of those thoughts. The ones I haven’t, they surprise me. I want to know this story. The man rises and walks into one of the other boxes, past the eight audience members, and through their door. Our window opens. He is wearing pyjamas, jogs on the spot outside the home. We can see him through the window. The window closes. The wall closes. We’re being moved again.

I want to stay in this box.

The wall opens.