Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

August 2003

A forum in the series hosted by RealTime and Performance Space held at Performance Space on Monday 18 August 2003 chaired by Blair French (Performance Space) and Alexie Glass (Australian Centre for the Moving Image).

Blair French
Welcome everybody. Great to have such a big turnout. Our guest and co-chair for this forum is Alexie Glass from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. As curators we're both working in the area of video at the moment but neither of us is by any means a specialist in this field.

Alexie is taking part in a larger curatorium between ACMI and the National Gallery of Victoria working on a show next year, a survey of Australian practices called 2004: New Visual Culture. She's working on the video section of that larger project. She's also co-curating a show which has the most fantastic title: I thought I knew but I was wrong: New Video Art in Australia. In collaboration with Asialink it's touring a number of venues across Asia soon.

So, in a sense, Alexie and I work in very different institutions but both find ourselves working with very similar practices. Of course, ACMI is working with video art in a broader film and screen culture context and in quite a large institutional situation doing very interesting things with the mapping of the histories and trajectories of video practices. Here at Performance Space we're looking to present video work within our core focus which is hybrid performance and experimental new media and time-based art–working on a much smaller scale, but no less ambitious, to think through what's happening in video art in Australia at the moment and offer certain opportunities to artists like those of you here tonight to talk about what they're up to.

Both of us have worked with other media. And that's one of the things that I find particularly interesting–knowing some of the limitations of my perspective, but being quite fascinated by what video has become in recent years in a visual arts context–is really where I come from. For a number of years I worked specifically with photography with a particular interest in the relationships, correlations and challenges to the visual arts offered by photography and media practice over the last 20 years. You can see similar things happening in video at the moment which is one of the reasons I find it so interesting.

Tonight we're looking for a colloquial discussion. Points of confluence, points of divergence in what we all think of and experience as video art at the moment. We've come up with 4 potential areas for discussion and we've invited some people to come along and offer some starting points.

First up are the issues of presentation and production and contextualisation of video art across creative spheres. And we've asked the following artists to comment. Merilyn Fairskye has worked across a range of media for a number of years but also using a range of video forms. Brent Grayburn whose work is currently exhibited here in Video Spell and who was co-curator of Future Perfect program for dLux Media Arts at the 2003 Sydney Film Festival. Sam James is an artist who works in video within collaborative situations often with performance makers.

Then we hope to move on to issues relating to the audience's experience of work and different modes of spectatorship that video practice suggests as it moves from screen to cinematic situation to installation and immersive situations–what audiences might bring out of those experiences, what languages might emerge to deal with that experience and the kind of implications this has for practice as makers and curators of work.

We'll ask Rachel Kent and Russell Storer from Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) to make a few comments and the video artist and sometime curator Emil Goh.

Hopefully at some time we'll get time to think about the formation of the critical languages around video and finally some specifics pertaining to what we might think of an Australian video art if there is such a thing.

We also invited Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, 2 of the most interesting and articulate artists working in the area, but they've unfortunately both come down with flu and can't be here.

Here are some questions Alexie and I have asked ourselves as curators faced with the type of work we see before us.

How is current video practice drawing from, sometimes referencing, sometimes negotiating multiple histories of video, even multiple identities? I'm thinking about its identity as a distinct medium and what you might trace through a history of experimental film for example–a sort of screen culture genealogy. Its identity as a representational form emerged in recent culture of commercial forms, in television, in advertising; its visual culture genealogy. Then there's its existence as one element in multi-media events, a kind of performance history. A mode of practice interlaced with so many others in what's become a sort of post-media notion of installation art or contemporary art and also digital culture. How does it draw from all those things? How do all those things come into the mix and how do we make sense of them? That's the first big frightening question. And then, what are the implications of our answers to these questions for ways of engaging with the work? How do we develop appropriate levels of spectatorship?

Merilyn Fairskye
There's no doubt that the work we see around us is very different from the early video experiments of the 80s which had much more direct relationship to television and its mechanisms. For the most part, what we're seeing now is something that if we were to think of visual traditions–apart from the obvious one of cinema in all its manifestations and, if you like, spectacle TV, there's also the history of conceptual art in contemporary video practice–this idea of an art that's not based on materiality but on ideas and an art that comes together because of the participation or the visitation if you like of people within the space. Also installation art–it's quite clear that's a really important tradition here. And performance. And also, certainly in my own case, the traditions of painting, the way an image is there in front of us, how it looks. They're considerations that are quite important to me.

So, all of these are part of my approach to my work, not necessarily in a conscious way but when I look at it these are the influences and traditions that I see. I describe myself as a cross-media artist, not a video or photo-media artist. I suppose I work with ideas that demand certain forms. I work with the form that I think is best for a particular set of ideas and sometimes that might involve 3 or 4 different media. But a lot of my work is time-based rather than video-based (although video is always a component) and it's certainly different but not unrelated to my still photographic work or my installations in public spaces or in other art gallery contexts.

The video works are either narrative and/or durational. Some have been created from the outset with this idea of both gallery and theatre-type presentations. So right from the beginning with some of this work I'm not necessarily thinking of one ideal mode of presentation but rather I think…some works are expandable, they're scalable and I can give them legs and find different audiences by having different versions. Margaret Morse has said that whenever an installation isn't installed, it ceases to exist. I think in the case of some works that's absolutely true–the original concept and understanding of how the work is to be presented is really crucial to the viewer actively completing the work and finding the meaning of it. But in other cases–and I think we've had lots of recent examples of this in Sydney recently at the MCA and at the AGNSW–and I'm thinking in particular of say, the work of the German artist Mariel Neudecker (Another Day) which was in the Liquid Sea exhibition. It's a 2-channel projection on both sides of a hanging screen suspended in the middle of the space of the sun rising on one side of the earth and setting on the other. Apart from my immediate response to it and the way it spatially engaged me, I was really fascinated to see in the catalogue, which was obviously put together before the exhibition took place, that this work which was made in 2000 had also been exhibited in another context and perhaps another gallery where the screens were side by side. Now, while my experience of the work was of walking around the screens to see it, there was this other version where you encountered it almost like paintings on a wall. So the first one could have been a composited single screen version of a 2-channel work viewed in a theatre setting, for instance.

There are lots of examples like that. A work that contradicts that is Doug Aitken's New Ocean where you go into a space and encounter 4 loops projected on, I think, 7 screens offering a 360-degree panoramic view. You couldn't possibly imagine that artwork crossing into another form. But there are numerous other examples where rather than sort of dying with that transition, a work just gets another sort of life. And in my own case, sometimes I do actually produce different versions of work whether it's going from a single screen to multi-screen, or the other way round to be included in a film festival or whatever if it's appropriate for the work, short versions, long versions. Initially, this comes out of a pragmatism or opportunism if you like because this work is expensive to produce and organisations like the AFC, for instance, like the work to end up at least theoretically in a film festival somewhere. But I don't see this as a limitation because in my other non-moving image work I often revisit the same material over and over, tease it out in different media, stick with an idea for years on end. It's just part of my modus operandi.

Brent Grayburn
I've come from a formal sculptural practice. I've basically had a strong dialogue across an undercurrent of practice over the past 6 or 7 years. I remember when the tools of my sculpture were removed from me and video suddenly became the new tool that I could use to express myself and my individual ideas and then still present in a way that was aesthetically defined by my conceptual principles. So I'm a video artist and recently I curated a festival.

As a video artist I'm not that prolific. I spend a lot of time working on small projects that take a lot of time to crystallise and articulate. For me, video is the most potent form of modern art practice at the moment because of its ability to transform real time situations…. I'm really trying to displace this notion of reality, how reality flows through a time code process and the ways that can be compressed and extended. I play around with distortions of temporality, of us and time and space.

I was raised in a new media environment. I had a video player at home when I was 8 and I guess that's probably the case for a lot of people here. I don't really have a problem with the tools and technologies that surround us. MTV style video is part of the culture I was raised in. I don't really see it as being specific to the way I address my work. I can see the potentiality of video much more than I can in other forms.

My understanding of video art has only really developed experientially–moving it into gallery spaces and seeing how work comes alive. I don't really work specifically for the spectator so much as I do for my own subjective needs and desires, I guess. Video for me is a highly dynamic tool.

Sam James
I have a multi-artform background. I trained as an architect really and started getting work in theatre just building sets. About 8 or 9 years ago, I realised that a lot of what was going on in physical spaces just seemed really limited. So I started using projections to try to expand that. I felt bored to be stuck in the theatre. Mainly what I was doing and still do to some extent is theatre design. I use it as a tool to get a release from the physical space. I do actually work quite a bit with dancers. Sometimes we're making dance films and sometimes my work is set up in a physical space.

Thinking about video art in the context of performance–it's so diverse, I can't imagine how you can categorise it. A few examples of what I've done in the last few months:

1. I accompanied the dancer Julie-Anne Long on a residency to the country town of Hill End (scene of Jeffrey Smart's iconic Australian painting The Nuns' Picnic). Julie-Anne was mostly dressing up as a nun and running around, trying to improvise in this old gold mining town. She invited the photographer Heidrun Löhr and myself to go there with her, almost with no preconceptions at all, just to work as artists. Here I felt most like a filmmaker, following a performer around to various locations. In a way it's documentation but partly setting up situations that might happen and recording them. That work will have 2 outcomes. One is transferring the video to 16mm film and projecting it in the community hall in Hill End for the locals to see. The other is the actual film that possibly gets screened in the Dance on Screen festival (Reeldance).

2. Just recently at Performance Space I did a video installation with Gail Priest called Sonic Salon. That was a completely different experience–a non-physical performance, more about performative presence. A lot of the video I was making for that was just purely abstract graphic imagery to relate to a 5.1 surround sound installation. I also built various screens which a one-person audience could sit within and have an immersive experience.

3. I went to Perth with Deborah Pollard a few weeks ago to develop a work. She wants to mount a really large production which is basically a realistic camping ground set up inside a theatre with performance happening in and outside it. The main projections there will be on Super 8 and a lot of it is sort of “surrealist” film projections in relation to the events that are happening in the camping ground.

4. Probably one of the most interesting projects happened here at Performance Space a month or 2 ago. In Head Space there were lots of different artists in residence–Paul Gazzola, Julie Vulcan, mik la vage and Layla Vardo and myself and Victoria Spence. We all set up different video/performance installations and it was really good to see how different economies of working with video and performance existed within those 4 contexts. Our work on Victoria's Communication/Failure turned into an interaction with suspended monitors. I didn't shoot any of the footage. My role was to operate and to create a sort of a sympathetic consciousness based on Victoria's autobiographical video material which she filmed herself.

Alexie Glass
Just to fill you in a bit, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) is next door to the National Gallery of Victoria and we come out of a tradition of collecting films, the State Film Centre of 1955. In the late 80s an idea was floated to get the state film centre to come to terms in some way with this collection of 49,000 films–international films, experimental cinema, archives of animation … We interface with all aspects of new media and screen culture. And part of this evolution was the question of how to present screen culture when in Australia institutions often don't have the resources or technology to present the multifarious manifestations of screen culture.

We fused with Film Victoria in the late 1990s to form Cinemedia which was dissolved after Film Victoria and the State Film Centre decided that, in fact, we didn't do the same things. Film Victoria funds film development. We work with a whole range of screen cultures. We opened in Federation Square in November last year and have had 3 exhibitions so far. Deep Space curated by Victoria Lynn, our current director which most of you might have seen at the Art Gallery of NSW [as Space Odyssey] and Remembrance, Part 1 and 2 curated by former ACMI creative director Ross Gibson.

We have various ways of showing screen culture. Most of my colleagues at ACMI don't come from gallery or museum cultures. Most come from film, documentary, games or new media culture, or writing. It's very interesting to talk about video art in that context. People who come from experimental film primarily will say, “Put it in screenings in the cinema. Put it in film festivals, in screen lunches. Put it somewhere else. Not in the gallery. It's single channel.” So you have to argue for it.

We have a gallery at ACMI which is 2 converted train platforms. It's 110 x 20 x 10 metres. 1000 square metres of floor space which makes it the world's largest dedicated exhibition space for moving image work. And we are heading towards our first national survey show of Australian works. So we're looking at video. We also have screen lounges where 2-5 people can sit and watch screens by themselves or with friends just for the price of a movie ticket. They can watch single channel works which are often short films curated into 1-hour programs. There's often a lot of discussion about whether video art should be placed in the screen lounges. Should it be moved out of the gallery? Should it be placed into these short film contexts? How do you sit down with, how do you read video art? How does time-based work actually work? And does it work differently if you play loops in screen lounges?

We have 2 state-of-the art cinemas which have digital projectors able to handle any film format. We do a lot of VJ-ing, a lot of performance in these spaces. So these are the issues I deal with on a daily basis and they mostly have to do with different contexts for the moving image and how we speak to audiences.

Russell Storer
The MCA covers the whole range of contemporary practice and obviously a lot of contemporary artists are working in video and it can be presented in any number of ways. Our audiences are also very broad because of where we are and range from specialists or people who have a strong interest in contemporary art to people who are just walking in off Circular Quay. We take that into account in terms of our public programming, our didactic panels, our exhibition catalogues. There are concentric circles of information provided to audiences about how to deal with video work. It's never really presented as something separate or with a discrete language. It's presented in the broader context of contemporary art.

The most recent multimedia exhibition I've worked on is the Ugo Rondinone exhibition. That's quite an interesting case in that Ugo is very specific about the way he presents his work. It's very carefully arranged and he does see it as a very specific medium. He wanted one space to be the video room. Then there was the sculpture room, the painting room, the photo room and they were all inter-related. There was the blue installation with very large screens and on each screen there were 2 film loops. He takes samples from film history and re-presents them, re-contextualises them, slows them down and then intersperses them with video. That video work has actually been presented in different contexts, reconfigured for the architecture of different spaces.

Then there's the clown videos–a series of 6 monitors placed on the floor. Very static, very modest compared with the larger more immersive installation of the large screen video. This demands much more of the viewer in a way. You're expected to walk around and interact with it in a more active way.

Video art practice is so broad, so diverse and there are so many ways of presenting it that galleries really do need to take it case by case and some artists are much more specific than others. Certainly with the Farrell and Parkin videos we showed in the Meridian exhibition, we took into account the architecture of the space. They'd never done video before and we saw it very much in relation to their photographic works with which people are more familiar. So we presented them in relation to a series of photographs and hung them in a space next to the stairs so they became almost architectural, hanging from the ceiling.

Alexie Glass
We have an architect as part of our installation team because of the technology that we're working with. You need an architect to work the space and to actually navigate the design of the installation and the sound. The conversations you have with artists in the development of this work are interesting. Do you find these are different from the discussions you have with artists working in more traditional media?

Russell Storer Video brings something into an exhibition that objects don't. It's a paradoxical thing. In some ways it's ephemeral because the screen is flat and doesn't have any materiality but it also requires a lot of space. It also introduces this temporal quality to the show because it refers to something outside the space, something that, I guess, is beyond the gallery. It also requires a certain time spent by the viewers. In a way it slows down the process of looking. This is an opportunity for curators, something you can use. The conversations change all the time.

Brent Grayburn
Do you have any figures on audiences for exhibitions involving primarily video art?

Russell Storer
Certainly the Ugo Rondinone exhibition has been popular and people have come back to it again and again. The Isaac Julien show was all screen-based. But the most popular shows tend to be photography. It's still the artform that people are most comfortable with. A lot of people are still not sure how to interact with video art.

Alexie Glass
The first show at ACMI was very body-interactive. People could understand that navigation. But the Remembrance Part 1 exhibition was much more screen-based. At first, when people came in they were treating it like television. They wanted to surf through the exhibitions. It's been fascinating watching that navigation so it's interesting to hear you talk about people visiting Ugo Rondinone. There are a lot of sculptures that break up the screen experience there a bit.

Video installation, because it isn't usually narrative driven, doesn't require a specific amount of time. You don't have to see it from beginning to end. It just keeps going over and over so you can dip into it at any point and you're still experiencing it as you should. I think that idea of spectatorship in relation to video art–when you enter it half way through and decide if you want to see it through as if you were watching film in a cinema–is still something people are getting used to. That installation sidelines the issue, or subverts it in some way, by just using the loop as a particular device.

I was in the Susan Norrie show at MCA today. It was interesting to watch audiences there walking in and going straight down the back, coming back into the side room. Then they came into the back room again and would mix with the 5 screens. I kept watching people move through it in circles. It became like this fluid, performative space. That often happens in ACMI now that we get repeat visitors. Rather than flicking through or surfing the space, they move around it in different ways and do re-visits. There's a different kind of movement that's required of video. Kate Murphy who's here tonight has a work in the current show, Remembrance. It involves 5 screens in a room and people have to go in there and sit down. People move into the room, then they go to something else. But they do come back. You get a lot of re-visitation with exhibitions.

Rachel Kent
Several decades ago now Nam-Jun Paik talked about video becoming just like a paintbrush, an extension or part of the artist's wider repertoire. One of the things that I like about, say, Susan Norrie's exhibition is that she incorporates it within a wider context of sound, sculptural elements, video. A lot of the work we show at the MCA that incorporates video is often very spatial. A lot of the time it's made in response to the architecture of the building which involves a lot of detailed and pretty protracted negotiations with the artist about how they want it presented.

I'm interested in the spatial elements of video work and the way it plays with time. In the exhibition, Liquid Sea, there were a number of works that were quite demanding on people's time. Tacita Dean's films, for instance, 16mm film loops, very experiential. You see the equipment on display in front of you on a base, you hear the whirring and clicking of the machine, see the fuzziness of the screen home movies. It's not digital or high tech. And the pieces are linear narratives of 6 minutes or 9 minutes. A lot of the time people watch the whole thing. Some found them completely mesmerising. Others loathed them. I remember one of the discussion points and, to my surprise, criticisms of the 2001 Venice Biennale was that it was–oh my god, it's top heavy on video! It requires so much TIME. All these hot-shot international curators were zooming through for the opening, saying “I've only got 2 days.” People were literally going room to room, popping their noses in for a minute. It was crazy.

Blair French
There's also the issue of drawing meaning from this work. Liquid Sea I found interesting. I don't know whether this was deliberate or not but as you moved through the show, at the level of screen culture, you went from a set of very short snippet historical works on a monitor. You watched television. You moved into a slightly cinematic situation in the room with various quasi-documentary, poetical pieces where you were amongst a cinema audience. Then you had the single channel works upstairs with the jellyfish–immersive as much large spectacle scale projection pieces can be. Very non-narrative. Then you moved into the Neudecker piece that Merilyn was talking about that introduced a kind of sculptural element. Then you had the Tacita Dean work. Then you went into the Doug Aitken and had this complete immersive experience. And in between were other types of work. I actually found it perceptually, even optically, very difficult to move through that show in one go. I found that I was doing one of 2 things. I was kind of working with the screen stuff but couldn't look at all the objects and paintings in between. I was looking, but not looking. Something was going on about light. I couldn't adjust to then look at very subtle photo light boxes that looked like paintings.

How do I draw meaning from this? You set yourself up in a certain way to be looking, experiencing in one mode. And then suddenly, even in the realm of video, you go into the next room and you're in another mode. I think that convention of flitting, I wonder how much that is about subconsciously the difficulty of adjusting.

Audience Member
Why were you puzzled by these different modes of creation?

Blair French
I actually find it difficult to adjust to a particular way of looking, particularly when I'm dealing with something that's optically very absorbing, dominating in fact. So you move from the large screen projection which has a set of literally optical plays, then a very detailed sculptural piece in another room. I have quite good eyesight but that issue of focus, changing and registering vision…Anyone who's worked in abstract painting for example knows there are optical plays that can take time for the eye to adjust to. Video blows that up for spectators. It's not so much a problem. It's an interesting situation.

Merilyn Fairskye
I also saw Liquid Sea 5 or 6 times and it's precisely the thing you've identified as a problem that I found really exciting. I could've been in a giant museum anywhere looking at a range of artworks. It just so happened most of them made use of light and images that move. The forms were as different as moving from one room to another in a museum where different types of works are presented. Yet the threads were there for you to make connections between forms. I found it really interesting to see so many individual ways of working with that form and–apart from the thematic connection which at times was a bit stretched–there were unexpected connections. I found it really stimulating.

Mari Velonaki
It's an ideological question. What kind of approach do you develop with the screen–any screen be it film or installation, or video? Is it ethnological or more subconscious…psychoanalytic?. How do I change spaces? How do I build the world I see? And it's like everyone is divided, I guess.

Brent Grayburn
I think the psychology of spaces is one of the major issues when you're dealing with gallery environments, cinema and maybe even works where you can pick a tape and go home and watch. Take the remote control, pause it, get a beer and a cigarette. You can interact in a certain way within your own fully privatised viewing space. The cinema demands a particular attention span that's endemic to that space. In the recent screenings at the Sydney Film Festival, we demanded so much of people that they got up and left. One of the programs actually managed to clear the cinema out.

Keith Gallasch
This raises a problem I think with the d'Art screenings or future perfect or the Transmediale screenings recently. It reminds me of when we were kids in the 50s and looked forward to the Saturday afternoon matinee with the 20 cartoons as the pinnacle of the year only to discover that we were bored shitless half way through. There's that strange feeling when you're sitting through these showings, where you're watching–and as Blair suggested, to be sympathetic to the work, you're constantly changing–and you think, no I shouldn't be in a cinema watching this. I should be somewhere else. I should have the freedom to turn this off, to browse or leave and come back. I think this raises an interesting challenge for dLux. I think they should seriously re-think their engagement with Sydney Film Festival.

Brent Grayburn
As part of my curatorial process, I tried to open that viewing platform up to more interaction by the public and more private individuals by having screens running through the city. I would suggest that 4-5 minutes is about the maximum you can demand of a viewer in a gallery environment. But 1 and a half hours is demanding too much of an individual.

Keith Gallasch
And of the work.

Lucas Ihlein
I found the screenings difficult for those fatigue reasons but also sometimes because of the specific content of the works that were being shown…We're all sitting in this room and for 2 hours we passively receive title after title after title. Nobody stands up and says, “Okay now, I found this next film when we were travelling through Germany and discovered this really interesting artist working there…” All of a sudden we become a group of people in a room interested in watching a bunch of stuff rather than a room full of bodies gradually sinking down into vinyl chairs, peeling ourself off them at the end of the night, all stiff. It's an experience, an event, a performance. We become more interactive. We shout or we applaud if we love it or we boo if we hate it. Without those things, you go like so what did you think? And you say yeah, great, but you feel kind of distant.

Brent Grayburn
To defend or explain the dLux process a little…It's actually very rare to get a whole body of work put together whose platform is the screen, that does look at artists specific to a particular form or practice. And it's all there, reeled through. And you can make the choices between the works you like and don't like. Rather than it being specific to a gallery environment where you select a small number of works and place them selectively into an environment. d'Art is more about showing a lot of stuff and putting it together to see what comes out of it in the way of discussion. The future perfect screening, the last one, the killer that drove everybody out, simply extended into a long program because 2 works turned up and because of the political content we had to put them in. There was no politicisation with the whole process. The program was developed with more entertainment or conceptual processes in mind. When these 2 works turned up, they had to be included. And we had to argue with the festival to get them in.

One was made by a Palestinian refugee about his eviction from his homeland. The other, Stalker 3, was also on the topic of war. It's 55 minutes long. That alone was worth a screening on its own. So I was arguing more for politicisation of video practice which you don't see so much. There's an area of discussion in that.

Audience
There's a crossover happening between documentary and filmmaking practices and experimental and independent film-making practices and visual art.

Audience
But some of the other smaller pieces could have been in a gallery.

Rachel Kent
It so rare that you get to sit down and watch a whole lot of different people's work at one time. I appreciated the opportunity to put a certain block of time aside to see this line-up of works that I would otherwise not get to see.

Alexie Glass
I just went to SALA, the SA Living Artists festival and in that they have a totally democratic submission policy for their moving image content. You can just submit any kind of experimental video work (no longer than 10 minutes though) up until the day before the screenings. And people sit through 3 evenings consecutively of these fantastic 10 minute, 3 minute works over 3 hours. It's intense but…

Brent Grayburn
Think about the cinema of 15 years ago where you'd go along and there'd always be a short before the feature screening or (elsewhere) there'd be the option of hearing up-and-coming video makers having their work aired in a public forum. And you'd go along and get a 5 or 10 minute short and then the feature. I sometimes wish, in terms of the larger gallery spaces, that there was an opportunity for video artists to have a room like that, off to the side, that could be used by local projects, that could be incorporated into the general screening program that you would curate but which was always running.

Rachel Kent
We've been discussing this and an informal video lounge is something that we would ideally like to address at some point in the future if we were to look at reconfiguring the space in some way. Like the DIA in New York, they have a fantastic program going of whichever artist's videos they've selected for that week or month and you can drop in and watch in a relaxed environment.

Alexie Glass
ACMI has screen lounges. I think it's good, that separation. That passivity that Lucas was talking about before, watching that work in cinemas, is something that troubles me.

Edward Scheer
We've lost the other dimension which is the live dimension. And if we take another genealogy apart from the cinematic one to come to time-based art practice where it is now, you find that in fact people don't want to be sitting in the dark watching things. They want to have an interaction. The televisual model is a live model. It's predicated on interactivity. Cinema is not. In a sense, if we take a different genealogy we need a different place in which to experience it. We need that liveness recognised whether it's in the form of an MC as was suggested, I don't know how you address it. This is a question for the curatorium, but I think there's a challenge there to re-think the debate about physical presence in relation to the presentation of this work. I think it's key.

Danielle Coonan
At Phatspace we're collecting a library of works by video artists so people can watch them at their leisure. And every 6 weeks we're inviting video artists to curate an evening of their own work plus the work of moving image and other artists who inspire them. Initially I thought when we started these 2 projects that the video library would be interesting to people but I actually find the video nights fascinating. Shaun Gladwell did one a couple weeks ago and didn't show any of his own work. He showed purely the stuff that's inspired him. It's really nice to get inside an artist's head and see what makes him tick. People are responding to those really enthusiastically.

Russell Storer
One of the main reasons that artists like to show their video works in galleries rather than cinemas or theatres is that element of interactivity that requires movement in the space, coming in and out at their discretion, that aspect of spectatorship which is still unfolding…

Rachel Kent
And there is obviously a lot of work that is completely unsuitable for media viewing. Just looking at something like Susan Norrie's installation, Passenger, you'd just never go into a cinema and sit there and watch it. Impossible.

Louise Curham
That's her decision as an artist. But as a general concept, the cinema space doesn't need to be a dead space. I think it's a big ask for an audience to actually go into a gallery space and treat it as a pseudo-cinema space. It's uncomfortable. And you're asked to give the kind of concentration to a work that is being asked in a cinema. For me the future perfect screenings were a good example of how much better it is as an audience member to take on the material when you're in an environment where you can focus–if that's what you're being asked to do. That's not what Susan Norrie is about. But when it is what it's about, it's frustrating to compromise the content focus by attempting to place them in a pseudo-cinema space.

Blair French
Emil, you curated a show at Gallery 4A a while back using the video library model. You walked in and there was a set of videos with titles on the spines on a shelf and a sofa and a video machine and you were asked to make your own program. Also as an artist you have a particular interest in very specific modes of presentation for specific models of works.

Emil Goh
Let's tie some issues together. We've talked about the different works in Liquid Sea and how you couldn't look at some pieces and the short pieces and long pieces in the futurescreen screenings. It's all a question of pace. It ties in directly to the mother and father of video art–television and film, mainly television. And the question of pace relates to channel surfing. So you walking out on Tacita Dean's very slow videos and into Painlevé's octopus or you're seeing very fast work. You're changing channels and you choose one that suits your pace. You see what you're ready to see. One of the difficulties of programming video in a linear way is exactly that. People go into cinemas because they expect something short and snappy and kind of narrative-driven. They want to be entertained. So if you're going to show them a 50-minute piece you've got to be warned. We're not talking quality of work. We're talking about warning people to expect something before they go into it. Expecting to see short snappy pieces or entertaining pieces that remind me of the stuff I'm used to in film and TV is one thing and then to go in and see something like Baraka is another thing. Different sorts of works. Your expectations are not met. A lot of it has to do with education. Video is the hardest thing to educate the punters about. Every day they're watching TV, listening to radio and then they come upon this work that mostly has no narrative. So what's the point? There's no point! Then it's uncomfortable to watch videos sometimes. If you're going to present people with a difficult piece, especially a durational piece, I think you should try to make people as comfortable as possible. There's a reason that cinema seats are so comfortable. It's so you don't notice them and so you're totally immersed in what you're watching. So why not make those so-called “pseudo-cinematic” spaces more comfortable, so once you're in there you're totally focussed on the work?

Once you're inside the gallery, you shouldn't be looking at the architecture. You might think, ooh nice building. No, maybe not. Certainly when you're in the gallery you shouldn't be looking at anything but the work. Your walls should be clean. Video is a space hungry medium. You shouldn't notice the lights. Nothing but the video work. What annoys me sometimes is when you go to exhibitions, you're jostling with 6 other people to see the work and there's one bench behind you. I haven't been to many galleries that have solved this. The Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane had an interesting model–a video hut. One of the big problems for a certain generation of people is that for many reasons, they don't want to walk into a dark room. The great thing with the APT hut was that it was dark enough to watch the video. Also, video is so dependent on high quality equipment. This hut had a really good projector. It was spatially fantastic because it was large and light.

Video shouldn't be presented on equipment that resembles domestic equipment. It looks too much like television. Do whatever you have to do.

So the video hut was great because there were all these windows and doorways punctured into the wall. You could dip your head in and out to see the work. There was a great list of things telling you exactly how long each work was. That's another annoying thing. When you walk into a work that's 20 minutes long, 3 minutes along. When you walk into the middle of a work, that's really annoying. If it's a non-loop work, you think oh, shit! I missed the beautiful beginning. Tell you what, it's really hard to make work. It's like writing a song–or a book. You really think about the beginning and the end. And to have someone walk in on the middle, you think Ah! you've missed the best part or whatever! One thing I'd love to see is someone inventing, for God's sake, a video-specific label that tells you the countdown or showing the DVD showing “X minutes remaining of this work.”

Alexie Glass
In Remembrance, the curator Ross Gibson made a decision not to include the duration of any work on any of the didactic panels or any of the labelling. There's no indication…There are works that are linear, there are loops, work by Sadie Benning, Mona Hartoum, Ivan Sen, Kate Murphy. Interactive works. Nothing has durations at all. You don't know. It could be Bill Seaman…

Emil Goh
Why?

Alexie Glass
Ross actually decided that because there was so much screen-based work in Remembrance and it was a show about montage and layering, he wanted people to make a decision to stay or not stay. I don't know what my decision is on that. But he made a conscious decision to do that.

Emil Goh
See, I would have a problem with that. I think it's a bit indulgent. You know, you go in and you want to spend a certain amount of time and you don't want to miss anything…it's about choice. I believe in giving people as much choice as possible. So to get back to the video hut, there was a nice big screen (fantastic!) and several modes of seating–quite large. So again, people had a choice of how they absorbed the work. You're not forcing them to stand up or sit down on the carpet, especially a certain generation, you know, older people don't want to stand up for 4 minutes. That's a long time. If you didn't want to see these works in linear form, you could watch them on large monitors with headphones next to the video hut. There were 10 videos in the video hut and 10 monitors outside.

Brent Grayburn
As an artist, Emil, do you design for the spectator?

Emil Goh
First, I go for content. Then I ask myself, how is it best shown? Some work has to be big because it has so much detail. You need to see it. Some have to be small because it's intimate or it's about scale or it has to be between films. I don't do it for the spectator or for me–just for the work itself.

One of the things about coming from screen culture, I think, is the fact that video can be shown in all the various screen cultures–whether it's film or TV or the web, whether it's mobile phones, PDA's–it's hard to make any generalisations. You have to look at each specific work and be fair to your audience. And work hard at education. I often hear people saying, I hate video art. I say, why? That's like saying, I hate cheese. Have you tried it with wine? That's like a journalist saying I hate art photography. It's about education and about trying to expose the very wide…all the greys of video between the black and white.

Mari Velonaki
You said you want video art to be presented in an environment that is as comfortable as a cinema…

Emil Goh
Some works. If that's the way you want it to be seen. If you want people to just look at the work. I'm not suggesting you should move in 6 rows of seats…

Mari Velonaki
It's probably over the last 10 years or so that we've been massively bombarded by Hollywood films. For me, as a spectator, some of the most painful artistic experiences of my life have been in cinema. Watching films of 8 and 1/2 hours duration…And that wasn't the 60s. This was the beginning of the 80s. When Brent talks about 2 hours being too long for an audience, that's okay. Maybe the audience is going to walk out after 1 hour…They still have a choice. And someone else talked about getting sore. Well, this is part of the experience!

Brent Grayburn
Punish the audience!

Mari Velonaki
I felt punished after 8 and 1/2 hours, of course, but there were some interesting moments in there. Ten years ago there were lots of screenings from around the world. There were late screening of 3 hours duration, 4 hours long or trilogies where you'd see part one in the morning, part 2 in the afternoon. You know Charlie's Angels and popcorn is fun and I don't mind that occasionally but cinema is not comfortable. We haven't found solutions for art cinema. We don't have solutions for video art either. Many things can happen. Many things cannot happen. It depends on the work and the audience and the mood of the audience. We can't control it. It doesn't matter what we try to do. And I think that applies to everything that employs projected imagery, regardless of whether it's interactive work or video projection or even film in a more traditional narrative sense if you wish.

Emil Goh
All I was saying is that with anything you produce, make sure it can be seen in the way you want it to be seen.

Mari Velonaki
Absolutely. Because if we make a work we don't make it for the audience, but we want them to see it because without them…well, it's a bit difficult.

Edward Scheer
You don't always need the audience.

Mari Velonaki
Oh? Oh, no!

Edward Scheer
The cinema doesn't need the audience. Guy Debord said the spectacle itself is blind. It doesn't see anything. The cinema is happy without people there.

Brent Grayburn
Does the gallery require an audience?

Edward Scheer
Clearly it does. It's very different space, different experience.

Brent Grayburn
Why?

Edward Scheer
Well, I think the cinema can keep churning itself out quite happily without having viewing positions taken into considerations, without having the subjective experience of the audience in any sense relevant to the production of the image.

Louise Curham
Are you talking about the industry or about the film event? Because I don't think the cinematic event can take place mindlessly without an audience. They're part of the contract in the cinematic event. That's what's interesting about what Sam James does. He's directly working with people from a performance position whereas so many film-makers are not directly in contact with that sense of the immediacy, of the performative. I think that's what Lucas (Ihlein) was referring to earlier, about trying to contextualise the whole process of the collage of the screening. There's a distinction there.

Audience
Someone mentioned education. And, in a sense we're so used to watching films of 90-100 minutes. That's at this point in the history of cinema but it hasn't always been that way…As the cinema evolved at the start of the 20th century films were of different lengths. But we've reached this point where 90 minutes seems to be a very marketable length of time to sit through a narrative sequence which reaches an end. It doesn't have to be that way. It's just something we've become accustomed to and we can change. It's just a shame, especially in this city. I went to Melbourne recently and visited ACMI and it seemed like lots of interesting screen culture stuff was going on. But in Sydney we now host Fox Studios which is Hollywood's newest sweatshop and our biggest event is Tropfest…A lot of us here are video makers and if you tell people, they say Tropfest! That's our paradigmatic video event and they get 800 entries. I don't know if there's anyone here involved in education but I'm wondering how is it that we have 800 people trying to enter Tropfest every year? Short films, conventional, narrative, snappy endings. How does that relate to what's going on in our tertiary education sector I wonder?

Audience
It used to be independent bands. I think it's independent films now.

Audience
I don't think it just has to do with tertiary education. It has a lot more to do with popular culture. A lot of what we're talking about here, like cinema not needing an audience per se, that just has to do with lumping popular culture into one big…That's over there and we're in a different spot. We don't have to be separate from it. We can bring them together. Having recently been through the tertiary education system in 2 different universities in Sydney dealing with cinematic culture, the whole Tropfest thing is frowned upon. They think, we're above that. In an institution that's a dangerous point of view as well. I don't think it's an institutionalised education we need. We need education across a broad range of culture.

Audience
I didn't mean that education necessarily had to be just about institutions but it's also about the amount of exposure you get to … if you've watched 20 videos, you can say those 3 were interesting and those 17 were not. Whereas if you only get access to 3, it's a lot harder to educate yourself.

John Gillies
There's a problem with time in educational institutions and people being able to see a lot of work. University courses have less and less time. When I was a student we watched feature films for several hours each week. If you go to some of the great film schools of the world, the first year they watch hundred and hundreds of hours of cinema. That's a big question I think.

Louise Curham
I come from a filmmaking position but I just recently crossed over and made my first piece of video art. John and I have talked about Chantal Ackerman's films and how Sydney Film Festival won't show them any more because they're too hard for the audience. I'm sure everyone here could name a filmmaker they love who's persona non grata because their work is seen as too difficult. I think that rate of slowness, of that kind of imagery, without professing to have a great grasp on the history of video art, I think there are so many great examples of pieces of cinema that have had a really profound influence on video art practice. Some of these foundations of screen culture, some of these places of crossing over and conjoining, we're all losing track of it. And maybe that's what's happening in tertiary institutions. Because there's not the time, people are not able to build up this sense of inter-relationship. So when it comes to actually seeing the work, they don't have any kind of context at all. That leaves people feeling unsure and disconcerted. Then they're asked to treat spaces that should be spaces for duration and content-oriented viewing, where you forget where you are and you focus on the content, you're being asked to deal with that kind of information as sound byte. And they're also being asked to do the reverse–to treat material that's being shown to them as fast paced, about the materiality of the image and not the content. And they're being asked to watch that in an environment where they don't have the opportunity to get up and leave or to mediate that in any way. I think it's a lot about looking at and looking through and something about our failure to negotiate that that leaves some people alienated by video art.

Audience
One of the things I hear from a lot of people who view video art in galleries is that too often there's a fault with the equipment. Again and again. And to be frank, it pisses me off. There's a responsibility there that as an artist you make your work functional and it doesn't break down. People are so quick to judge and be critical. So often I've gone into a space and it's just fuzz–and not deliberate fuzz.

Audience
How do you know it's not! (Laughter)

Brent Grayburn
I work heavily with technology both in a real-time context and just with my practice put onto VHS tape or DVD. And ironically in the age we live in, technology is still really expensive and still quite fragile. The likelihood of galleries going out and buying $15,000 worth of technology when they might be able to get a video projector from here and a DVD from there, it doesn't necessarily mean there's always compatibility and video is problematic. It's high data rate and it demands a lot of the equipment sometimes. VHS tape is quite stable but it's crap and who wants to use it anyway? There's always gaps in any process. Video should have an in-built patience factor.

Emil Goh
It's no different from walking into a gallery and seeing a reflection you don't want to see in a framed photograph. Or looking at a sculpture in a park and the light's wrong. It's no different. One must look at the big picture. In a way, video art is no different from any other art form. It suffers its own brilliant moments and its own range of disadvantages.

Audience
When people are viewing video art as they might do cinema or television, it frustrates them…

Emil Goh
…which is understandable because you're relating to a situation in real life that is nearly always perfect but these video monitors are on 8 hours a day, day in day out and the bulbs blow and after 1000 hours the bulb goes darker, the colours go funny and your video has quite a different look to it.

Audience
And I quite like the way that influences the work.

Emil Goh
I'm glad you do!

Audience
Do you disguise it or do you include that technology in your work?

Brent Grayburn
You have to acknowledge it.

Audience
In some works it pays for these things to be acknowledged. In other works it's a distraction.

Rachel Kent
It's the responsibility of galleries and museums too. A lot of the time they take works on without investigating properly what the requirements are.

Audience
Just a question. What happens if there's a collaborative performance and one side of the technology goes down. I'm thinking of the Ross Gibson/Necks piece at the Studio this year. It had live music and 2 screens. One screen went dark and the producer came in and shut the whole performance down. The audience booed her and the musicians (The Necks) were furious. It was an improvised performance and they were at a peak.

Audience
That element of the-show-must-go-on applies to video artists just as much as it applies to other theatre.

Merilyn Fairskye
On the issue of equipment, in the last few years, I've noticed projectors seem to have done a quantum leap forward but nonetheless it's still possible to see one too many very grey and dull installations when you know it isn't what the artist intended. And I think too that things are projected too large a lot of the time. People want the video projector to be a 35 mm projector and it's not and sometimes filling the wall or going large as possible isn't the best thing for the work and yet there's this sense that somehow because the work's in a gallery, if it's not on a monitor or some independent screening structure, that you have to fill a whole wall or a whole room. Sometimes the work is visually stretched. I dread going into galleries with filmmaker friends when there's video on because I know in advance what they're going to say. But it's partly because the experience isn't rich enough visually because of things like equipment that could be fixed or the scale isn't right.

Rachel Kent
For galleries and museums, keeping pace with equipment is a nightmare. It's like constantly upgrading and then finding that nobody wants to work with video, they want DVD or domestic equipment…

Keith Gallasch
Despite the slightly depressive tone the conversation has taken, if you'd said to me a few years ago that video was going to have a boom I would have raised a question mark. The fact is that there are so many of you here and there have been some interesting sales of video work recently, that it's ubiquitous in many respects, that it's been taken up substantially by ACMI, and the new Queensland Art Gallery cinemathéque directed by Katherine Weir will be a major space for video. These are all very good signs and raise interesting questions about why it's happening. And also about the diversity of practice which we've discussed this evening. I just thought I'd inject a bit of happiness into the discussion.

Blair French
Absolutely. It's interesting that we're kind of at the end of a discussion of video and we're turning back to our horrors of technology.

END

Points of Entry sets out to challenge the well-worn expectations of interactive art and upend ideas about freedom of choice and technology. Co-curated by Nina Czegledy, Deborah Lawler-Dormer and Robin Petterd, the exhibition resulted from a groundbreaking collaboration between Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Tightly woven, Points of Entry rewards the curious with an engaging selection of digital and new media work. Viewers are not only lured into “touching” the work, but so subtly enticed that they hardly know they’ve been seduced until it’s too late. A lesson in exploring the periphery, and the ideological centre of space, place and object, Points of Entry coaxes us to step beyond our aesthetically distant comfort zone to see and experience more.

Presented simultaneously in 2 galleries, much of the work is object based; few rely on the performative complexities of intricate technological gadgetry. Three dimensional sculptures, screen projections and sound works successfully combine with hauntingly elegant moving images and suggestive conceptual installations.

True to the show’s title, which alludes to the numerous possibilities of interaction between the viewer and the work, each piece in Points of Entry prompts a different instance of exchange: listening, touching, sitting, seeing, imagining.

Nestled into rectangular cavities above the hip-height wooden box that is Canadians Simone Jones and Hope Thompson’s Studies in Compulsive Movement: Anxiety Box No 1 are 2 small flipbooks featuring sketches of a human figure laboriously getting on and off a chair. Removing these books sets off the suspenseful jerks and high-pitched lilts of a Hitchcock-style soundtrack, occasionally broken by a woman fearfully whining, “something’s wrong.” An accessible work that requires your full physical involvement to come alive, Anxiety Box pushes the boundaries of the artwork’s uneasy intimate space.

Contrasting in size to the compact Anxiety Box, Yuk King Tan’s (NZ) mixed media work, The New Siteseer, contains 3 elements, each representing a journey. The launch, flight and descent of 100 camera-mounted rockets, erotically charged in cornflower blue and playfully jaunty in their expectation of flight, is documented in video projection, sculpture and photography. Delicate in their hues and random composition, the photographs exude a quiet grace compared to the sharp force of the determined rockets fizzing into the sky on screen. A work that captures the spirit of aesthetic play and the scientific and conceptual significance of the rocket as object and explorative machine, The New Siteseer celebrates the rapturous act of flight and the beauty of imminent descent.

In their empty solidarity, 2 marble-like benches welcome the viewer to sit and observe Canadian Jon Baturin’s arresting installation, Doukhoubor Communal Bath, Age 5. Tied with thin black rope to the spindly spokes of an oversized umbrella are several images of naked men, photographed from the neck down. On the reverse, their faces, wide-eyed and staring, screwed up in anguish or serenely soft in repose, look larger than life. Interspersed between these are pictures of plastinated human flesh, dissected and dismembered, exposing the membranes of amputated limbs, cross-sectioned torsos and skinless genitals. Converging in the centre of the umbrella, the black ropes stretch to the floor to cage a teddy bear rotating on a small platform: a poignant symbol of innocence incarcerated. The voyeurism of watching the images gently turn from face to naked body to flesh ripped open, subtly pulls the viewer in to feel more like a participant; vulnerable, exposed and watched.

Intriguingly, Points of Entry removes itself from the digitally abstract to merge new media with a heavily conceptual ideal. Currently touring Australia, the exhibition poses the question: how comfortable are we in our own space, and is it really ours?

Points of Entry, CAST, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart, June 6-29;

Artspace, Sydney, July 18-August 14; other venues TBA.

RealTime issue #56 Aug-Sept 2003 pg. 28

There are times, I suspect, when we’ve all felt a serendipitous synchronicity, when everything we encounter seems somehow oddly connected in ways we’d never anticipate. My participation in this year’s Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) conference was one such moment. And the point of coalescence, surprisingly, centred on ‘the game.’ Everywhere I look at the moment people are making or playing or talking about gaming.

I say ‘surprisingly’ because gaming has registered only a minor blip on my cultural radar. Aside from a spell of pub time-wasting playing Galaga and Space Invaders in the 80s, a minor obsession with Super Nintendo platform games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros and the occasional family game of Scrabble or Monopoly, the obsession with games has passed me by.

Computer games are, of course, a multi-billion dollar business. According to the Financial Review (May 20, 2003) sales of games hardware and software in Australia leapt by 31% last year to $825 million. This report predicts that online gaming will grow nearly 50% each year for the next few years, with US revenue climbing to $US 1.8 billion in 2005 from $US 210 million last year and UK research firm, In-Stat/MDR believes the market will be worth $US 2.8 billion worldwide by 2006. There is no question that the gaming industry is having an impact on the financial sector. The impact on academics and cultural critics appears somewhat more muted.

Many presenters at Melbourne DAC, however, were very interested in the effect that gaming is having on digital arts and culture. The conference theme, “Streaming Worlds”, was intended to attract participation from a broadly cultural palette, yet more than half the papers reflected in some way on games and gaming.

In particular, the Scandinavian conference delegates seem to spend an inordinate amount of time immersed in the world of Everquest, a game that allows for the simultaneous participation of 500,000 players. Their interest in gaming is not surprising given that Scandinavian, Espen Aarseth, the keynote speaker at this year’s event, was the first chair of the Digital Arts and Culture conference series. Aarseth also runs the recently established Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University in Copenhagen.

In his keynote address, “Playing Research: Methodological approaches to game analysis”, Aarseth was quick to indicate that computer games research, as a nascent field of inquiry, is somewhat underdeveloped and under-theorised. This was evident from many papers presented on the topic, which bordered on description rather than analysis. It was often difficult to see how research into computer games was substantially different from well established sociological and psychological approaches to gaming of all kinds, not just those on computers.

The conference format contributed to the paucity of detailed analysis. All papers were made available to conference participants (and are still available at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/ – no longer online) to be read before attending the sessions. Presenters were then only allowed 15 minutes to talk to their papers. Both audience and speakers struggled with these constraints. Conferences, however, are far more important for allowing people to socialise and this was the real strength of DAC which provided plenty of opportunities for delegates to network.

There’s also a tradition within DAC of bringing together artists and theorists to encourage and support the development and discussion of creative digital art. +playengines+, held at Experimedia in the State Library of Victoria and supported by the Digital Arts and Culture conference, was curated by Antoanetta Ivanova of Novamedia Arts. The exhibition featured 24 Australian and international works, opening in tandem with DAC.

This was the first exhibition of its kind in the new Experimedia Project space, an extraordinary area fashioned from the former exterior of the old Museum of Victoria. The original bluestone of the old museum forms one feature wall and the space is dominated by a large wall-mounted plasma screen and a specially commissioned sculpture by local media artists Martine Corompt and Ian Haig.

Most works featured in the exhibition have already exhibited elsewhere: notably Troy Innocent’s Semiomorph, the Lycette Bros’ Not my Type IV, Mark Amerika’s Filmtext, Kate Richards and Ross Gibson’s Life After Wartime, Stuart Moultrop’s Pax, Mez Breeze’s [ad]dressed in a skin code_, and Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson and Marie-Louise Xavier’s Juvenate. However, the proximity of the exhibition to the public spaces of the library meant many audience members were exposed to this kind of work for the first time.

Here lies the greatest strength of the exhibition and, more generally, Experimedia. Rather than attempting to attract a sometimes bemused public to a gallery to view new media art, Experimedia and +playengines+ placed the works in the path of a public who may not ordinarily visit other gallery spaces, therefore attracting a new audience. Elderly people wandered over, taking a break from their genealogical research; students tired of studying; families passing through and itinerant readers and writers of all varieties mixed with conference delegates and artists. This gave the exhibition and the space a real sense of vibrancy, adding to an already successful conference.

Melbourne DAC, 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, RMIT, Melbourne, May 19-23; +playengines+, Experimedia, curator Antoanetta Ivanova, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, May 19-June 23

RealTime issue #56 Aug-Sept 2003 pg. 27

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, PoliceState

“I’ve been playing this for hours and I’m the winner” said a little voice from the terminal beside me. This was Max, an 8-year old Dutch boy who spoke perfect English, and had decided to show me how to play Blast Theory’s Can You See me Now, an online and on-the-street chaser game at The Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF).

“Please, can we stop now and come in for a cup of tea?” came a crackled plea from one of the walkie talkie transmissions. “No, keep playing”, typed Max. “Okay, okay 10 more minutes, but that’s it Max,” said the shivering Blast Theory crewmember from outside.

A winter’s evening in Rotterdam can be extremely cold, so spare a thought for Blast Theory, who for art’s sake had spent 8 hours a day, for the last 5 days running around the Kop Van Zuid (the Rotterdam docklands) in less than zero temperatures. Can You See me Now is a game for up to 10 online players who use the arrow keys on their keyboards to move a simple avatar around a maze of virtual streets while chatting to other players by typing messages. Outside on the real streets 3 ‘runners’ from Blast Theory use walkie talkies to communicate while trying to track down the online players, whose virtual positions are relayed via satellite and the Global Positioning System (GPS) to wireless networked palmtops they all carry. If a runner manages to come within 5 metres of an online player’s location then that player is ‘seen’ and out of the game.

Computer games tend to stress me out and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing when “Hey, nice ass!” appeared in my chat text box. I turned around; it was just Max and I playing. “Was that you”? He just smiled cheekily and kept typing. “Yep, and look out that runner is going to see you!”

And that was it; I was out of the game. After a few more attempts, and a personal best of 10 minutes, I was left wanting more. I wandered out of virtual Rotterdam and onto the ‘mixed reality’ streets. I wanted the palmtop; I wanted to be running around like a maniac chasing phantoms in the freezing cold! It seems like I might not have long to wait because Blast Theory’s latest project Uncle Roy All Around You allows the public to do exactly that (updates can be found on their website at www.blasttheory.co.uk).

After trying to console Max, who couldn’t believe that the game he loved so much was really over, I began thinking that there was something about the DEAF03 exhibition that reminded me of a futuristic playground. This is not to suggest that the works were immature in content, but rather that many works at DEAF were simply a lot of fun and as I observed many times throughout the festival, very appealing to younger people. Sometimes these playful interfaces were the colourful wrappings of a darker, more political core and in others the simple act of engaging with these works became the core itself.

Interacting with Zgodlocator, Herwig Weiser’s magnetised sculptures of crushed and granulated computer hardware, was like playing with a big musical toy. Lying in semi-darkness on a soft, carpeted surface, visitors could peer down through perspex covered holes to strange alien-like surfaces, while low vibrations rumbled up through their bodies. Adults and children alike seemed hypnotised as metallic landscapes pulsated and mutated to the rhythm of electromagnetic signals that they were sending using various midi controllers in the space. Particularly satisfying was the feeling of shared interaction, as 5 or 6 people could ‘play’ Zgodlocator at once and generate patterns and sounds only possible through their cooperation. Web of Life by Australian Jeffrey Shaw provoked similar squeals of delight as people donned those silly looking 3D glasses to interact and explore this colourful and highly immersive, networked 3-dimensional space. When entering Web of Life a visitor can place their hand through a simple metal relief onto a screen, which then scans their palm. This process extracted a series of ‘unique’ lines from each hand and then, to the obvious enjoyment of everyone (including myself), these same lines would suddenly appear to be floating in front of you and then magically fuse with the other lines already hovering in space, becoming part of the Web of Life network.

This installation was one of many linked elements to a project that exists at up to 5 different locations at once and also includes a book and a website. A somewhat darker work was PoliceState by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, which at first glance consisted of 20 toy police cars driving around a playpen in chaotic patterns. In fact this was a motorised visualisation of data traffic using ‘Carnivore PE’, a public access version of the FBI’s software used to pick up on ‘terrorist threats.’ Whenever someone typed a word on the FBI ‘blacklist’ (which seemed to occur every few seconds) PoliceState used the ‘CarnivorePE’ software to convert this information into a corresponding police code that triggered the radio-controlled cars to drive around in choreographed patterns, while a loudspeaker announced each new threat. Although undeniably cute at first, PoliceState was a disturbing visualisation of our increasingly surveillance-obsessed society. As little malfunctions caused the cars to breakdown or crash into one another throughout the festival I was reminded again of the many failings and consequences of this kind of institutionalised paranoia.

In another room a keyboard on a pedestal was happily clicking away as if being used by an invisible typist. If you approached, the typing faltered, then stopped. If you typed something, the Poetry Machine_1.5 by David Link, activated a corresponding stream of associations from your words, projected live on a screen above. If the program didn’t recognise any of your words, it sent out ‘bots’ (autonomous internet seaching devices) to find corresponding texts on the internet where this word occurs. This process could be seen on a plasma screen which beautifully visualised the intricate patterns and linkages that were constantly occuring. By the end of the festival the Poetry Machine’s language had deteriorated into repetitive babble, seeming to have regressed to the vocabulary of a young child, which may have said something more about the audience’s input than the Poetry Machine itself.

DEAF03, Dutch Electronic Art Festival. Data Knitting, organised by V2-Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Feb 25-Mar 9

RealTime issue #56 Aug-Sept 2003 pg. 30

Living in Australia in 2003 is an everyday cross-cultural experience, but as a nation we’re forgetful. Crisis induces racism. Scarcity provokes cultures of exclusion. Hence the importance of regularly reminding ourselves just who we are in, among other things, celebrations of cultural diversity. For Jorge Menidis, director of this year’s Carnivale, multiculturalism in Australia is a “given” and, to be effective, he believes the festival needs to reach the broad population.

I can think of no better experience of cultural shape-shifting than a night out at THE LIVING MUSEUM: of fetish-ized identities. I saw Part 1 of this extraordinary work at Performance Space 2 years ago and it’s back in a new incarnation for Carnivale 2003. Created by San Francisco-based Chicano performance artist collaborating with a group of Australian artists, the Museum offers a wildly immersive experience of living, sometimes grotesquely mutating human exhibits. The audience cruises this array of ethnographic dioramas and is at turns seduced—intellectually or actually—to take part. Should you decide on the latter, there’s even an empty exhibit with costumes and a camera to record your spontaneous creation. This is playful, sexy, sometimes risky performance. “Like partying your way through the Apocalypse,” says the publicity. And they’re right.

A number of the performers from the first Museum had no hesitation in signing up for this one. Born in the Philippines and with a theatre background, actor Valerie Berry came to understand that in this work “your body is the artwork, you are the story.” Each of the performers works on a manifestation of his/her own identity and then on a version of themselves based on their beliefs about the interpretations of others.

Beyond individual identity, The Museum confronts the ways dominant cultures reflect on minorities. Borders, hybridity and the future are the subjects of Gómez-Peña’s enquiry and his skill, says another of the participants, Samoan-Australian Brian Fuata, is in making powerful political statements without necessarily using words. Working on Mk 1 was “an experience of totality…of fluidity and timelessness” as the warm-up, physical training and the talk that seemed inconsequential all became part of the emerging performance.

For Chilean-born Rolando Ramos “the whole experience was liberating…We saw in different ways from our different cultural/artistic experiences… It was a great space to be. And in that space a different language emerged.” THE LIVING MUSEUM is rich, visceral performance territory where performers and audience become participants in a ritual. The new version can’t help but take in recent world events (The Tampa election, September 11, 2 wars) that have thrown up a whole new collection of fetishized identities.

If the LIVING MUSEUM gives you a taste for border crossings, Carnivale offers plenty more. On the dance front Little Asia Dance Project presents a series of solos by 5 independent choreographers—Abby Chan (Hong Kong), Motoko Hirayama (Tokyo), Chan Yu-Chun (Taipei), Ju-Hyun Jo (Seoul), and Kay Armstrong (Sydney). Niels “Storm” Robitzky is a teacher and guru to German and French hip-hoppers. He and Karl “Kane-Wüng” Libanus from France are bringing their blend of hip-hop acrobatics and video projection to Carnivale’s headquarters at the Seymour Centre. In Flamenco Rocks, Flamenco meets not only rock music but jazz and a DJ, losing no authenticity in the translation, according to Richard Tedesco, leader of Melbourne’s Arte Kanela. Gerard Veltre presents Remember Me, a dance/physical theatre performance using hip hop and projections.

Bollywood on Bondi was the site for one of Sydney’s best dance parties at last year’s Carnivale. This year Bollywood Off Broadway reprises the event with a program of films curated by Safina Uberoi (My Mother India) and another big dance party, this time at the Seymour Centre. Carnivale’s film program also incorporates the Francophone Film Festival; 10 to 1, a season of short films and rarely seen first works by some notable Australian filmmakers; and Enter the Dragon in which filmmakers from Sydney’s southern suburbs document their stories.

The complexities of cross-over are given a serious seeing-to in the visual arts program, and especially in Artspace’s The Mask, curated by Nicholas Tsoutas, in which contemporary social prejudices are “inverted and ultimately debased.” At the same venue, in The Island Adrift artists explore “relationships and obligations inherent in living on an island adrift in a sea littered with impediments.” At Gallery 4A Aaron Seeto curates Jia, an exhibition documenting the experiences of Asian-Australian artists in “the lucky country.” In Sound of Missing Object at Performance Space Gallery, Panos Couros, Ilaria Viani, Jonathan Jones (recipient of last year’s Ministry for the Arts Indigenous Artist Award) and others turn an everyday wooden cabinet into an experience of sight and sound.

Among the big ticket items are China’s National Peking Opera Company on their first visit to Australia presenting one of the classics of the repertoire, The Legend of White Snake. The Mikis Theodorakis Popular Orchestra is coming. Guitar virtuoso Slava Grigoryan teams up with Bobby Singh on tabla and Joseph Tawadros on oud.

The theatre program features some intriguing scenarios. In a play from Turkish-Australian playwright Gorkem Acaroglu “the original Romeo & Juliet (Leyla & Majnun) meet Shakepeare’s characters in a performance that takes place across artistic media, spiritual planes and states of existence.” King of Laughter from South Africa “tells the story of an elderly TV technician who prepares laugh tracks on his last days on the job, having just met the young Vietnamese boy who’s replacing him.” Lest we forget, there’s also an Irish play, Gigli directed by John O’Hare.

Last year, Sidetrack pulled a rabbit out of the hat with their production, The Book Keeper, based on the work of Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal’s most prolific writers and as strange as Kafka and Borges. It’s great to see Carnivale re-mounting this magical production for the wider audience it deserves. Also from Sidetrack comes The Paragon, a new work by the soulful Adam Hatzimanolis about his life as an almost-famous person—“the one he would have been had he actually managed to burn down his father’s fish and chip shop…or had his almost-opportunity to bed Nicole Kidman resulted in a long and steady relationship.”

Among other performance works are Sivan Gabrielovich’s The Cool Room directed by Deborah Leiser-Moore (a controversial hit at La Mama last year) and Sydney artist Karen Therese in Sleeplessness—“part mystery, part documentary and part revelation” based on the life and death of her Hungarian grandmother. Some works in development airing as part of Carnivale’s Rough, Raw and Read project are Lina Kastoumis’ Fat Sex, Kirina Stammell’s Preserving the Apple, Dono Kim’s The Bell of Korea and Prodigal Jack by Con Nats.

Classical Indian music and dance meet cyber Mother India in india@oz.sangam created by Western Sydney’s Indian community with Urban Theatre Projects at Parramatta Riverside Theatre. If only half of the publicity promises are true it’ll be worth a visit. Think “Parramatta River exploding with the sound and light of a Bollywood film shoot…Diwali lamps, saris on Hills Hoists and fusion dance bringing Mumbai to Western Sydney…live links to India in the foyer…and a Bhangra dance party erupting in the courtyard.”

As well as concerts at the Seymour Centre, substantial sections of the music/sound program will be presented in collaboration with The Studio, Sydney Opera House. There’s a new episode of the enormously successful Audiotheque, “a cinema of sound”; a tribute to Vasilis Tsitsanis and Greek Rebetiko music by Melbourne’s Rebetiki; Slava Grigoryan teams up this time with electronica’s acclaimed Eric Chapus aka Endorphin and Dancetracks goes global in a blend of live performances and drummers beat-matching DJ sets.

There are workshops and forums and a comedy debate to really get your teeth into (Is Mama’s Cooking Better than Sex?) and the Carpet Lounge, the essential festival club with performances and films and space for artists and audiences to meet—one of the most important functions of a festival.

Expressing the everyday experience of multicultural Australia requires a diversity of forms and these days the hybrid arts offer some of the most potent possibilities. Both serious and celebratory, the Carnivale 2003 program includes many such works that take us across cultures, media and artforms.

Contemporary dance-making in Australia comprises a robust yet personal set of approaches to the process of making and performing work. There are probably as many ways of working as there are choreographers. Consequently responses from choreographers, artistic directors and programmers to questions about recent graduates were distinct. What follows is a snapshot of some areas of agreement, and some diverging opinions. There are clearly 2 different directions that graduates are following—the path to company member, as a dancer in one of a small number of funded companies, or participation in the independent dance scene, principally as a dance-maker/performer.

All choreographers agreed that a strong physical training was the bare minimum required from graduating students and most felt that institutions were providing that to some degree. However opinions were divided on what sort of physical training is offered and how it’s taught—suggesting perhaps the very different approaches to dance-making by the choreographers themselves.

Obviously what each choreographer is looking for in potential dancers will depend on a number of factors. These may include: the physical skills and experience needed for executing the work; the process that the choreographers use to make work and the level of input they require from their dancers in that process, necessitating an ability to think, respond and compose; and the emotional resilience required for participating in the process.

Garry Stewart, artistic director of ADT (Australian Dance Theatre, South Australia), is the only choreographer I interviewed who consistently takes newly graduating students into a company. He finds most of them through a national audition process and looks for dancers who demonstrate strength, dexterity, confidence and a physical understanding of the body and how to use it. They also have to be willing to undertake further specialist training in order to perform his work. Stewart talks of the importance of tumbling, a high level of yoga and contact improvisation as the sorts of training that are imperative for the execution of his work. Most of these would not be part of a mainstream dance training program on a daily basis. Stewart sees that part of ADT’s role is to extend training into areas that underpin the very nature of the work, which is highly physicalised, often high risk, sometimes aerial.

Gideon Obarzanek (Artistic Director, Chunky Move, Victoria) on the other hand, does not regularly audition, as he doesn’t find it relevant or useful. He mainly finds dancers by attending performances or hearing from colleagues teaching at the colleges who alert him to promising students. Obarzanek works with a small core group of dancers, adding company members on a project basis.

As Chunky Move is not set up to train but to make new work and perform existing repertoire, Obarzanek finds that he is mostly attracted to graduates a couple of years after they complete their studies. By this time they have working experience outside an institution, which requires a level of maturity and understanding. Obarzanek’s dance-making requires a high level of contribution from the dancers, which puts a lot of responsibility on each individual. And he finds there are 2 different skills required: performance of existing repertoire and making new work. Both require “an open mind, strong rigour about picking things up. At Chunky Move you are asked to do many things very quickly.” Sometimes Obarzanek will employ a dancer to learn a role from repertoire for a tour before asking them to participate in making new work. Through this process their appropriateness for continuing with the company can be assessed.

Rosalind Crisp (dancer-choreographer, Director, Omeo Dance, New South Wales) mostly becomes acquainted with potential dancers through residencies at dance colleges or from those that seek her out by attending her classes at Omeo Studio in Sydney. She has seen a cross-section of graduates from around Australia and is concerned about the lack of inquiry that many of them have on graduation. What she looks for is a sense of curiosity, an interest in making work, an understanding of release and contact improvisation, and an open-mindedness about engaging with something new. These are not always areas of training or experience that students are encouraged to follow during institutional training, and she muses that many graduate without realising that this is just the end of the first step in their dance training. Crisp is concerned by what seems to be a lack of interest and adaptability to different ways of working. Some colleges, she suspects, are training the dancers for jobs, rather than educating them as intelligent artists—with a sense of what they can do with their training.

Both Obarzanek and Crisp are interested in dance-makers rather than dancers. Obarzanek looks for “a natural thirst and passion for composition”, while Crisp says she would much rather work with dance-makers, “they make more interesting dancers, they are part of the process…[which leads to a] greater longevity.”

Maggie Sietsma’s Expressions Dance Company (Queensland) has a dance and education arm, which is generally the first step for graduating dancers joining her company. This is a very small ensemble that performs repertory suitable for primary and secondary school students across the state. Sietsma looks for graduates with a strong and solid technique and a determination to maintain it under very difficult circumstances—on tour and with only a handful of others. “They need to come with a creative excitement but with the ability for me to imprint my own style (on their bodies)”. Because of the grueling touring schedule (up to 8 weeks at a time) and difficult conditions—different sorts of performing spaces, different levels of support from the schools—these dancers either have or develop an emotional resilience and maturity to make it through.

Precision and consistency in the performance of repertoire are of utmost importance to Sietsma’s work and she laments the loss of emphasis on this in current training. She sees this particularly when placing dancers into an ensemble where reproducing movement the same way each time it’s performed is paramount. She wonders if this is a result of so few existing dance ensembles and the imperative for the institutions to prepare dancers for work as part of the independent dance scene where ensemble work is not so important.

Dancer and choreographer Marilyn Miller, the newly appointed general manager of NAISDA (National Aboriginal & Islander Skills Development Association, based in Sydney), expects that their graduates will leave with an ability to adapt to many different ways of working. Their physical training incorporates a range of western dance forms as well as working with cultural tutors who share traditional cultural practices. NAISDA training reinforces a cultural identity and an understanding of traditional cultural practices, even if they are not specifically the student’s own. This encourages students to explore particular relationships with their own regions. She believes that graduates are well equipped for a range of outcomes including joining dance companies, particularly small to medium-sized companies as well as initiating community cultural dance projects.

Melbourne is perceived to have the most active independent dance community and attracts dance graduates from around the country. Helen Herbertson’s experience as director of Dancehouse, has shown that these graduates know how to show their independence. “They are used to working on their own, or inside their own teams. Dancehouse tries to respond to the needs of these graduates [with programs] that fill the gaps…help people step up.” Herbertson believes that the professional development courses now being offered as part of students’ studies have helped to give a realistic understanding of what is needed for planning and implementing a successful independent event.

Herbertson thinks that the first couple of years after graduation are the biggest test for independent dancer/choreographers. Away from the structure provided by an institution, the graduate must be able to manage their own body maintenance as well as furthering their work. Sarah Miller, Director of PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, home to the dance event Dancers Are Space Eaters), describes the positive aspects of STRUT, which supports emerging dance artists with administrative and marketing support, providing opportunities for making and performing short works several times a year. Set up by Sue Peacock and Gabrielle Sullivan and AusdanceWA, “it creates a supportive community who are constantly making work,” says Miller.

Flexibility and adaptability to different ways of working were the elements most often discussed by the choreographers. The challenge for the institutions is to provide a training that turns out educated or “intelligent” dancers. What complicates this is understanding the sorts of intelligence choreographers are looking for. Although all choreographers stress a strong technical background as a base, for some the purely physical aspects are the most important, for others the intellectual input and others require a level of life experience and maturity. Most probably it will be a combination that provides the dancers with the skills and experience they need.

Then there is the ephemeral element—something more difficult to define. All the choreographers talked about looking for what Obarzanek calls “charisma”, Sietsma “excitement”, Stewart “panache.” It’s the element that draws you to watching someone. Is that something that can be trained, or will those who have it be obvious whatever the circumstances?

The Victorian College of the Arts’ dance course has long supplied local choreographers with some of the finest performers (marginally surpassing those graduates from Deakin University). The annual Dancescape productions display the divergent and impressive choreographic talents that VCA students are exposed to. In 2003, works by Neil Adams, Brett Daffy, Leigh Warren, Phillip Adams (balletlab) and Sandra Parker were showcased. Warren’s pleasing, simple series of duets and tango-esque ballroom dances (Let’s Do It) were performed to a great collection of Cole Porter hits sung by Ella Fitzgerald. Eschewing depth, Warren’s choreography revelled in old-style Broadway playfulness.

Phillip Adams meanwhile, directed another of his schizophrenically alogical associations of props, bodies wrapped in fabrics (somewhat clumsy, puffy sleeping bags here) and aggressively tortuous physical manipulations. In a typically bizarre program note, Adams cited the Thredbo landslide as having inspired this piece of dead-pan stupidity—in the sense that Warhol’s art was self-consciously ‘stupid’—but it was nevertheless hard to see either much Pop criticism or postmodern distance here. As Homer Simpson said: “There is no moral to the story. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happens!” Even so, Adams’ Greta Im Filz was worth watching just for the moment of inspired hilarity when a tacky, remote-controlled toy zeppelin suddenly, and for no reason Adams could propose, meandered noisily above the performance. In the words of gonzo reportage: “Bad craziness.”

Amid all of this purposeful silliness (or just plain silliness, in the case of Brett Daffy’s indiscriminate vomiting of media images and sounds with his SWARS), it was little wonder that Sandra Parker’s nasty, sexy little study Yard took on even more stark power than its tremendous minimalism and cultivated disinterest suggested.

For some time Parker has been moving into a more ‘theatrical’ or pseudo-narrative realm; her last piece Fraught drew mixed responses largely because of this. A hovering between elements of Expressionism and the blank-faced performance of much postmodernist dance perhaps characterises most contemporary dance since the 1990s, but the articulation of quite what this space might be remains various and distinctive. Adams’ main response is to populate his works with objects, which often take on personalities or choreographic functions in and of themselves. This, combined with a wicked sense of humour and a truly unique sense of Surrealist associations, characterises his often installation-like pieces. Parker, by contrast, is still developing her novel aesthetic. The lyric nature of her early choreography has not disappeared, but the harsh manipulations and potent sexual charge her work shares with peers like Adams are an increasing feature.

Parker’s current theatrical interest is on struggles for power and domination. Her choreography therefore constitutes a dramatisation of what is implicitly at stake when one dancer puts a hand on another. There is more than an element of sadomasochism here, but this is indirectly alluded to through the oppressive atmosphere that enfolds both the performance and the work overall.

The most striking feature of Yard compared with Fraught was the lethargic ennui of every pose and movement. There was something even more wilfully mean about these interactions—none of the characters seemed particularly interested in them, content to play schoolyard victim one moment, oppressor the next. A girl’s body lay prone, watching with boredom, her feet swinging idly behind her back. A third, long, naked leg scissored between the limbs of the lying figure and quickly flicked out the legs of the first, roughly abusing her autonomy. A wonderful selection of lowercase glitch and hiss recordings created a sense of spatial placelessness, emotional indifference and irregular temporal rhythms, echoed by the sharp, staccato actions that scattered under each blot of light, or away from the wall on which the dancers languidly leaned.

Yard was partly a continuation of Parker’s work from Fraught and no doubt previews her upcoming production Murray-Anderson Road. Most choreographers reuse ideas from previous shows in their VCA commissions. Adams has worked with cloth and folding in Amplification and Upholster and model flying machines or nutty connections in Ei Fallen and Endling, while Leigh Warren has built on Broadway styles and popular tango before. Interestingly the younger VCA dancers gave a fleshy, ‘soft-body’ nuance to the often tautly muscular choreography of Parker and Adams and their peers. In short, VCA Dancescape provided both choreographers and dancers a chance to workshop ideas, while still producing often startling results.

Dancescape 2003, choreographers Sandra Parker, Philip Adams, Leigh Warren, Neil Adams; dancers 2nd & 3rd year VCA students, VCA School of Dance, Gasworks, Melbourne, June 5-14

be/leaving past/present by John Utans, is quite terrific. Take 20 minutes off it and it would be outstanding—tight and engrossing. Solos are not necessary, for example—it’s more ‘electronica’ than jazz as a form. And that is its beauty.

The grammar of the dance is familiar; everyone lined up against the side walls, waiting, on show, actors. I still like this, it means your eyes are peeled and you must skim across the overall surface from time to time. You have to take in the ‘scene.’ And here it means projections, an intriguing and eclectic soundtrack, lighting that is part of the performance, ‘the set’ of old-fashioned ‘school slide-screens’, and the combinations (and narratives) of the dancers (a group of richly differing shapes; only 2 males among the cast of 18, and they and one woman took off their clothes and offered their bodies generously).

The work is about leaving. Yet for me it was about ‘arriving’—as leaving can only come about from arriving. And arrivals were occurring over and over; everyone seemed always to want to arrive.

Throughout the performance there is imagery projected: artworks and artists; especially, for me, Picasso, Warhol and Duchamp (heady references; and ones I didn’t care for in the context—was it catering to another sensibility—I don’t care, these are serious touchstones), as well as other iconic historical (renaissance) works. A scene from an interview with Warhol is featured, he’s sitting in front of the Elvis work. The whole piece begins with a voiceover about a ‘concert’ that’s about to begin of John Cage’s (perhaps with David Tudor); Utan’s references are wonderfully present though, like bones. They don’t condemn the work, they infiltrate it in their own way becoming part of the (new) work —as if they, in the case of Cage, are existing sound, and in the case of Duchamp, are ready-mades, and in the case of Picasso, are all fractured and seen-at-once.

The work is like a moving visual art installation, it has this quality, which is impossible in the gallery. I-did-not-like: the quotes from Matisse and others (too overstated). I-did-like: the text, not from the ‘masters’, that appeared on the back wall: “rain falls/ and at night/ he whispers to me/ all is lost/ by the sea/ they danced into the night/ the rain falls…”

I had a sudden flash with the text and the dancers’ despair (as if children) of Doris Lessing’s Memoirs Of A Survivor. It’s the small things: “There came a day when Emily walked across the street and added herself to the crowd there, as if it were quite easy for her to do this” (Lessing, Picador, 1980). She arrives, somewhere.

There is the hope and feverish work of being young, and of coming suddenly into the light, as one ‘character’ does; she sensuously works her way along a wall, never moving out of the light, until she walks off, leaving the light behind. But she had arrived first, she plays in the light, she is ‘become’ by the light. She’s not innocent. Throughout there is this lack of innocence.

You cannot use these iconic art references, this assured lighting, this soundscape, without already knowing the horror of being awake. And there lies the strangeness of the work. It takes a while to ‘awake’ to it, but it comes like a storm: this is delicate dance. The dancers’ bare feet touch the ground in a strange way. It is not hesitance, it’s as if they ‘care’ about, or worry for, something. This causes a slight imprecision, but also a kind of mercy or humaneness. They are not machines, they do not do perfect. But their feet are my concern here, something about their feet, their just behind-the-beatness. A degree of fear. A sense that arrival and departure is tentative—and fleeting and final.

I suppose I haven’t created a ‘mental-picture’ of this work. It’s a student-performed work, but it functions outside this category. It’s a bit like the projected Warhol interview—it’s a sophisticated innocence, but in this case the innocence is of another order—genuine and life-full. It’s a complex work—almost like watching a movie—it assumes a lot about its audience in terms of art history (but that’s a good thing, and that’s why I disliked the didactic quotes); its form (dance-theatre-visual art-movie-sound) is a wonderful one; a multi-textural work that worked (in the best sense of ‘worked’—a work of art).

be/leaving past/present, John Utans, performers, Adelaide Institute of TAFE, July 2

Shaun Gladwell, Storm Sequence, 2000, digital video still courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

Ten—even 5 years ago—photography seemed to dominate contemporary art, not just in the presence of its multifarious image forms (which remain pervasive today) but also in the fervent discussions about its status within and as contemporary art. Now it’s video’s turn. Everybody’s making it, everybody’s showing it, everybody’s got an opinion about its place within the sphere of art.

Locally there are several signs of video’s ubiquitous presence across gallery spaces, from major art museums to artist-run ventures. In Melbourne, Susan Norrie’s massive, multi-screen Undertow opened at ACCA, while at Federation Square the first new contemporary project at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia was a new video, photography and object-based installation, Sandman, by Patricia Piccinini. Next door at ACMI is Ross Gibson’s 2-part Remembrance, a film/video installation event. In Sydney, the major institutions have embraced video in its grandest projection forms (Doug Aitkin and others in Liquid Sea and Ugo Rondinone at the MCA; Denis Del Favero and Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky at the Art Gallery of NSW). One of the country’s premier commercial spaces, Sherman Galleries, recently showcased 2 extraordinary performative videos by young Sydney artist Shaun Gladwell. (Others, such as Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, have been committed to video work since the 1980s, while Scott Donovan Gallery presented several video programs during its incarnation in Liverpool Street.) Video has become the stock-in-trade of contemporary art spaces, with recent Artspace showings in Sydney. The Shangrilla Collective, organised by Maria Cruz, featured music performance videos by about 30 female artists and Emil Goh’s recent Remake triptych featured 3 versions of the same iconic cinematic narrative.

Of course, some of the most innovative initiatives have come from artist-initiated activities—the Serial 7s and Projekt video catalogues from Sydney and Melbourne respectively, or the Emil Goh-curated international video show at Gallery 4A of 2001 (where the audience programmed the screenings themselves from a shelf of tapes). And there’s Chewing the Phat, video screening and discussion nights at Phatspace, Sydney and the new video-configured The Kings Gallery in Melbourne (co-founded by Brendan Lee of the Projekt video catalogue series).

So video, with photography, has become a new default setting for contemporary art and associated criticism. But as with photography, this hardly makes ‘video art’ an easily definable, even recognisable field of practice. For every parallel between the 2 forms, there are significant representational and historical differences between them. In considering the once contested condition of photography within contemporary art, can we identify some of the forces behind, and likely trajectories beyond video’s current status?

As with photography, there’s a distinct branching in video’s history as an art practice. We can trace one genealogical strand back through the history of experimental film within modernity—a media-specific set of practices laden with particular formal and conceptual concerns and languages. But more recently, video has become inextricably intertwined with the dispersed frameworks of conceptual art: primarily as a mode of record and documentation—a means of accessing and presencing the everyday, exploiting its link to real time documentation.

And so there’s a tension between contemporary video work as a distinct, self-contained practice and representational language, and the form’s centrality to contemporary art as a trans- or post-media specific activity. But this tension is perhaps not as overt as that which recently surrounded Australian photography. A modernist model of photography as a discrete art form predicated on illusionary notions of social and representational truth competed with ‘postmodern’ conceptions of photomedia or photo-based contemporary art to produce a tension between art photography (and photographers) and photo-based art (and artists).

There are a couple of other historical branches that must be acknowledged. One traces video’s development through its function within ‘multi-media’ structures of experimental performance, theatre and dance. The other wraps tendril-like through everything: in modernity, high and low culture is collapsed in the ‘new’ forms of mechanistic analogue (and now computational digital) representation. Video is now central to the commodification of contemporary life outside the art world, ranging from everyday personal home video to digital television, video phones, reality TV, the public architecture of video advertising, commercial cinema and so on. Video as art supposedly offers access to these representational registers, but also envelops these worlds in the critical discourse of contemporary practice.

Video, like photography, has been profoundly impacted on by (and been influential within) the postmodern pastiche and appropriation associated particularly with 80s art, as well as current conceptions of digital or new media art. Both have reached a moment within which a form of ‘low-rent’ performance documentation style coexists (sometimes even in the same work), with extraordinary high-end technological developments in the form. And this is just one tension that has raised questions among practitioners, curators, critics etc and in public fora such as those organised by CCP/ 200 Gertrude St in Melbourne and this year at Sydney’s MCA.

Is there a video art distinct from the incorporation of video in post-media art practices? What forms of critical languages are needed to adequately encompass the range of practices and tensions in video art? Do they need to be cross-media, societal in epistemology, cross-cultural? Is there a language that can encompass both primarily visual/spatial and narrative practices? How as viewers can we move between narrative-based (filmic) screenings and immersive, more overtly multi-sensory experiences? (Particularly when both are encompassed within the framework of a single exhibition such as Remembrance?) Can individual works survive such translations in presentation structures across theatre screenings and gallery exhibitions? (Where in the former the relationship between work and viewers is fixed and primarily visual, and in the latter fluid and spatial; where in the former the relationship between multiple works is primarily temporal, and in the latter spatial; where in the former an ‘audience’ contracts to a fixed viewing time, whereas in the latter they may flow in and out of the timespan of the work.) As video becomes a more dominant form of visual art, these questions are thrown into relief by the difficulties involved in trying to view an exhibition such as Remembrance which encompasses both multiple time-based narratives and screening programs (where the viewer sits, inert), such as d>Art and Future Perfect organised recently by dLux media arts at the Sydney Film Festival.

Issues of presentation (along with those of distribution and sale) have therefore become central to both artistic and curatorial practice as the range of options between fixed, immersive installations, mix and match ‘interactive’ programs, screenings, projection or monitor formats etc increase exponentially. So too have issues of production value. How possible or important is it for video ‘art’ to match the production values of commercial video (advertising, television, cinema), or to mimic its narrative structures? Does this simply risk its willing absorption into contemporary spectacle culture as another form of visual product? What are video’s points of critical resistance to its commercial overlords? What does video ultimately offer art and artists? And vice versa?

I offer no answers here, nor more than a handful of some of the more crucial questions. Many others—artists, curators, institutions writers etc—are asking them with greater acuity as we experience an accentuated, slow-motion collapse of fictional and actual world performance into an entirely screen-based conception of the real. The questioning is crucial, as is an awareness of the histories being drawn on here, for these may point to the potential impact of all this video on the future condition of art itself.

The RealTime-Performance Space free forum, Video + Art Equals…?, is on August 18, 6.30pm at Performance Space. (See transcript here)

“The generation going through tertiary education now is going to live through a period of more rapid technological change than [any] other in the history of the species. If you believe some reports they may, by the time they are in mid-life, already be post-human.”
Alasdair Foster, Director, Australian Centre for Photography.

How are current teaching practices dealing with these rapid technological changes and other challenges facing today’s photomedia students? I asked curators and teachers from around the country about the quality of photomedia schools and their perception of recent graduate work.

Alasdair Foster says, “It’s no longer enough to teach current skills and assume that occasional retraining will suffice to keep the individual up to speed. I believe strongly that education has to be more about learning how to change and adapt than learning specific information or skills.”

While many curators and teachers note a shift from teaching traditional ‘wet’ photographic processes to new technologies such as DVD, net art and video, some suggest the importance of teaching more traditional skills.

Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) till 1999, Timothy Morrell suspects, “…the craft of photography is not taught so thoroughly now as it was in the middle of the last century. Many of the photographic processes currently used by artists are visually seductive because of advances in technology. Camera and darkroom skills are becoming quaint and outdated ideals. It may be that the demand for greater technical training that painting students began to make roughly a decade ago will be repeated by photography students.”

Martyn Jolly, Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University’s School of Art says this technical training is already occurring at ANU where the school has “…made a massive re-investment in [its] darkrooms.” While ANU students are taught digital photography, video installation, animation and the web, Jolly says, “…chemical processes, particularly in the areas of the ‘fine print’ and the contact printed alternative technique have a big future, particularly within the studio-based teaching ethos of the ANU School of Art. We have begun research into digitally producing ‘lith negatives’ to be chemically printed in the darkroom.”

Curator of the Northern Territory University Art Gallery and lecturer in photography at NTU, Judith Ahern believes the ideal teaching model is “a learning environment where the student has access to traditional modes of creating photographic images along with knowledge of the new processes…Most institutions are working in this kind of space at the moment, and attempting to work with both and understand the differences and potentials in both modes of production.”

Timothy Morrell believes the art schools “have responded properly to the changes in contemporary culture brought about principally by photography and the electronic media. Since the 1980s the theoretical basis of the teaching in art schools, for all students, not just photographers, has been strongly informed by the mass-media, in which photography plays a major part.” However he warns that the sheer range of relatively new photographic processes “and the expanded notion of what constitutes a photographic practice, has allowed students an almost bewildering freedom.” The resulting difficulty of “making so many choices quickly sorts out the determined and motivated students from the less focussed ones, who lose their way.”

Outgoing Director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, Tessa Dwyer sees, a “shift towards multimedia practice in photography and photomedia courses. Where once students might have mixed digital and analogue techniques in the production of still images, they are now moving into a variety of other screen and digitally-based mediums such as video, DVD, CD-ROM, net.art and sound art. The change in an institution like the Victorian College of the Arts is quite noticeable. These days, students have access to a wide range of mid-career and established practitioners working in a variety of mediums.”

While students will often seek out particular teachers in determining where they choose to study, Foster wonders “if artists always make the best educators. To be an artist is, to some extent, to be self-absorbed, to be focussed on your work, to have a heightened engagement with a particular set of perspectives. That’s a very necessary thing. The best art grows from a sort of obsession. This does not always sit well with giving time to helping to encourage nascent ideas of the student.” The best education for emerging artists balances “exposure to practitioners, contact with educators whose aim is to facilitate and guide the idiosyncrasies of the individual’s vision and, perhaps most important of all, peer interaction…,” Foster says.

Most concur that the main difficulty for students is being able to afford to produce the kind of work they’d like to. Morrell says “…most schools are, like the students, strapped for cash. Students live in and are influenced by a media culture that is based on massive corporate funding (advertising, movies, music video). They can’t hope to have the resources to work at the same level as the practitioners who for many are their principal influences.” This means that students may base their choice of where to study on the range and quality of facilities offered by particular schools.

Jolly says, “Of course the cost burdens of such a technologically based medium are a real problem….[I]nevitably costs will be transferred to students. Students will need to have budgeting skills and earning capacities as never before.”

Despite these constraints and challenges, the curators I surveyed are generally impressed with the work emerging from institutions like NTU, Sydney’s College of Fine Arts (CoFA), the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and the Queensland College of Art (QCA) to name a few. Many see a relationship between certain schools and the work emerging from them.

Morrell thinks that “the connection between art photography and cinema is strong at the moment, probably influenced by Tracey Moffatt and possibly Patricia Piccinini…A really important influence on students now is an awareness (I think produced by their education) of the social significance of photography in such areas as security surveillance, journalism and science (especially anthropology). The ability of photography to create its own version of the truth is even more significant in an age when manipulating information has become so sophisticated. Good art schools make the students think about this, not just how to get a fine print.”

As a teacher and curator Judith Ahern sees a range of graduate work from around the country and is always impressed by “…the strength of concept and the way that is reflected in the work…” She sees evidence of their training in the work of some Northern Territory graduates. Examples include, “Karen Neville, whose Type C portrait series RDH documented patients and visitors at the Royal Darwin Hospital. A strong documentary emphasis is part of the teaching practice in the photography department at NTU. Jo Gerke is producing colour images based on her experiences in the Territory. Cherie Kummer is producing landscape-based work in colour and black and white that has a lovely lyrical angle on landscape photography. Peter Eve produced a very powerful documentary essay based on the life of the ‘long-grass’ people called Long Grass, short life.”

Thinking about QCA graduates over the past 5 years, Morrell says, “it’s good to see that sensitivity to traditional values such as composition, mood and light is still fostered in a photographer like Annie Hogan. An interest in the constructed narratives of movies is evident in Paul Adair’s work.”

Dwyer finds it hard to “pinpoint specific artists and their influences” but sees “strong work” from Media Arts and Interactive Media Departments at RMIT and VCA. “Recent graduates such as Paul Batt (VCA), Madelaine Griffiths (RMIT), Rebecca Ann Hobbs (VCA), Paul Knight (VCA), Philip Murray (RMIT), Selina Ou (VCA), Sanja Pahoki (VCA), Koky Saly (VCA) and Van Sowerine (RMIT) are some examples.”

Curator of Sydney’s Phototechnica Gallery, Karra Rees says, “At a time when everyone seems to be a photographer, photomedia artists need to work at discovering new ways to look at things. Often, at student exhibitions there are similar works on popular themes or current trends…the works attempting to create something different usually interest me. She regularly attends art school photomedia shows to keep up with work from emerging artists. “Although the quality and appeal of [this] work can vary, I have generally found these exhibitions to be refreshing and innovative,” she says.

Rees cites impressive work from CoFA’s 2002 graduation show: “Charles Gordon’s exhibition series White Suite 2002 is part of a larger body of work entitled The Dream House Project. This work explores the intricate connections between migration, dislocation and memory…You couldn’t miss Lisa Anne’s series Home, they are huge, colourful and seemingly unreal.” She also mentions Georgia Walker’s Transfiguration series. Rees says these “creepy, soft digital images of her sculptures made out of stockings, hair, and what appears to be golf balls, as well as other assorted items in mute tones…really stood out in the [CoFA] exhibition, not only as remarkably different in style, but also in process and concept.”

When asked what needs improving in the current approach to education for photomedia artists, it seems a thorough understanding of the history of the form is vital to offset an obsession with the ‘now.’ “…[S]tudents need to be encouraged to remain critical of fashions and trends, while not denying their importance…to keep asking questions, challenging assumptions and retaining their personal vision,” says Tessa Dwyer.

For Judith Ahern it’s vital students are “aware always of the extraordinary history of photography and the way it has shaped and continues to shape contemporary ideas and art practice” and that their teachers should “keep teaching the traditional modes of making photographic images, [and] to look back as well as at ‘alternative’ processes as offering new ways to approach old ways of making images with light.”

Martyn Jolly says, “It is an interesting phenomenon that photography has become the prime concern of many other art school departments: painters paint ‘the photograph’, printmakers also deal with digital reproductive technologies, everybody is making videos. [ANU has] encouraged a renewed exploration of documentary traditions in photography, with a critical underpinning and by engaging with new technologies.” This approach “has been very successful, it is a way of getting the students off campus, and getting them engaged with local communities and related institutions.”

This community interaction is essential Alasdair Foster believes, because “…broader relevance is a difficult thing to achieve when a ‘market forces driven’ educational system is under pressure to deliver discrete paper qualifications in highly defined disciplines in order to succeed financially…Art as much as science desperately needs its pure research and its exploration of ideas for their own sake. Otherwise we will find ourselves forever behind the 8-ball.

“Art cannot afford to be left to the art world. We need to find ways to educate that ensure a breadth of understanding of many aspects of life…If we do not, we are in danger of evolving an art language with less and less relevance to the wider community.”

The work of Dadang Christanto reaches beyond specific references and personal suffering to reflect on the universal. In Count Project, begun in 1999 and triggered by millennium celebrations, Christanto appeals to his audience for a more honest assessment of the past 1000 years.

Christanto, formerly from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, has lived in Darwin for 5 years since becoming a Lecturer at the Art School of the Northern Territory University. Count Project opened in early May at the NTU Gallery with a collaborative performance by local cellist Rebecca Harris. The exhibition featured large-scale works on paper with drawn, painterly and calligraphic marks in ink. These are new materials for the artist; a significant shift that he attributes to his passage from East to West in moving to Australia, experiencing an increased awareness of Orientalism and a new sense of his own identity. “Here I am Asian,” he says.

In Australia the principle theme of his work has been counting the victims. His work is testimony to systematic violence and challenges the enforced silence of all those who have been victimised throughout the 20th century. For Christanto, whose family lost a patriarch as a result of government orchestrated brutality, the rationale is intensely personal. There’s a sense of urgency in his mark-making, bolstered by a skilled play of positive and negative space. Everywhere gestures seem to scratch against the page and outline the heads of numerous victims. How many wounded humans in the 20th century are there to count—not the victims of plague or natural disaster or famine but those who’ve died because of systemic violence?

The artist’s process is evident everywhere in this exhibition. In part the work appears as a record of a performative, cathartic event. The heads of victims are rendered as if through semi-automated unconscious drawing. Christanto maintains control in the creative act in a deliberate attempt to distance the process and work from simplistic documentation or reproduction of violent acts. Intriguingly the marks are reminiscent of the energy of expert batik making, said to be a meditative act. Like many Javanese women of her background, Christanto’s mother traded cloth. As a young boy, his first awareness of art was in the batik textiles she sold.

Every work calls on a dynamic aesthetic that utilizes a limited palette of red, black and brown. A red or black line marks the head, the site of the body where memories are kept—Christanto refers to the memory of his father’s abduction as a darkness that he must carry in his head. In 1965 and 1966 countless suspected members and sympathizers of the PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia) were abducted and massacred in purges driven by the military. Their stories and those of their grieving families have been systematically silenced, and people connected with them strategically stigmatised as enemies of society. Increasingly Christanto’s artwork is driven by this historical event of which very few photographs exist.

Click, click, click. The sound of the military boot on hard ground holds a very particular resonance. It is the sound that comes before the abduction. In the Christanto family home the sound still creates a wave of anguish. In the artwork the military boot stamps dominant in the central field of the image. The boot carries with it a sea of disembodied heads. Images like these have become devices for preserving shared memories and honouring a collective history that lies beyond the scope of words. Christanto’s work is driven by a confidence that visual art can heal social and personal wounds.

Dadang Christanto’s work is showing at the School of Art Gallery, ANU, August 7-31; performance at The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, August 8. His major work, They Give Evidence (1996-97) recently acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, will be the key exhibit in their new Asian Galleries opening October 25.

Count Project, Dadang Christanto, Northern Territory University Gallery May 6-16

You know when you’re approaching Pine Gap, the American defence facility 30 kilometres south of Alice Springs, says a friend from the Northern Territory. Before you catch sight of the huge silver radomes at one of the world’s largest satellite stations, you notice their effect—suddenly you have impressively crisp mobile phone reception.

Despite facilitating communication, Pine Gap has a more ominous place in the public imagination because of its role in intelligence gathering. To John Pilger, Pine Gap is an American spy base, a “‘giant vacuum cleaner’ which can pick up communications from almost anywhere”, and a nuclear target (A Secret Country, Jonathan Cape, London, 1989). The official line? It’s a joint Australian-American operation supplying the West with information about missile developments in what George Bush hokily terms “rogue states.” What no-one refutes is Pine Gap’s ability to intercept a host of signals from ships and submarines to private telephone conversations.

Merilyn Fairskye illustrates the eerier aspects of this global interception in her recent exhibition, Connected, at Stills Gallery in Sydney. Fairskye’s 11 photographs on rectangular, translucent surfaces, suspended at a short distance from the wall, depict life-sized figures hurrying from view. In this very contemporary version of street photography, Fairskye’s subjects rush toward their futures; they’re faceless, yet each has a distinctive ‘character’ in their gait, clothing and shape. Shot from behind, each person appears to be talking on a mobile phone, and though connected, they appear oddly disengaged from the busy urban environments in which they’re pictured. Connected suggests the paradoxical isolation that occurs despite telecommunication. The photographs, with their sharply defined or shadowy forms, avoid didacticism, but Fairskye prompts us to consider the unintended ramifications of our contemporary state of hyper-connectivity with her accompanying film on Pine Gap. Because you can hear the DVD’s surround sound while looking at the photos, the images accumulate more sinister dimensions. This sense of ‘overhearing’ something occurring in another room is a neatly reflexive (though perhaps unintended) design feature that comments on the exhibition’s themes of secrecy, gossip and intrigue.

Fairskye’s 25-minute film deftly illustrates Pine Gap’s place in the public imagination and in the local cultural and social life of the Territory. Snippets of rumour, electric currents of intrigue, inventions, myths, anecdotes and speculations about the mystery and possible functions of the facility are voiced in this work. The flows and circuits of local, everyday intelligence gathering are beautifully contrasted with the arguably ‘factual’ and ‘official’ information snared and processed at Pine Gap. From the soundtrack, between the hiss and crackle of line static, I caught grabs of chat about September 11; an Aboriginal man saying “this is my land”; someone commenting “it was clear he had no idea what his father does”; talk of a “Pine Gap Husband” and rumours of radiotechnicians diagnosed with cancer. The soundtrack is juxtaposed with abstracted footage, shot using a “Pine Gap modus operandi.” Fairskye films “from the air and from the ground—Anzac hill; the airport; the Pine Gap exit; Ormiston Gorge; Hermannsburg Mission; Kata Tjuta—to create a sense of a town and a landscape inhabited by shadows, mirages and secrets” say the room notes. Shadows move across the parched earth of the Aranda people, above stretch dramatic cloud-streaked skies, figures walk backward through a street and aerial shots render the landscape painterly. All reinforce the sense of a place in which connections and information have become disembodied; a space where, says a voice in the film, “actions and stories and events disappear into the landscape…like dust.”

These competing discourses on communications prompt questions that the photographs alone might not: do the advances in technology that ‘enhance’ communication give us greater freedom, or does the flipside of this—spying and phone tapping for example—actually erode our liberty? Do modern technologies increase our connectedness or supersede and therefore diminish our ability to interpret the intangible codes and signs of actual human contact? With the spectre of Pine Gap looming over the exhibition, Fairskye suggests the tenuous divide between the private and the public, and hints at potentially apocalyptic scenarios that might result from listening-in.

Despite their contemporary, cool feeling, the smudgy, primary colours of city signs, neon lights, and the energetic, harried feeling in the stills, each figure has a poignant solitude. Moody and translucent, the first 2 subjects are dark shapes in which you can see your own reflection. Another shot is blurred to the point of abstraction, more painterly than photographic. In appearing both rushed and stalled, these exposures are more like fast grabs from a moving image than artfully contrived portraits. And though the settings are recognisably urban, there is little to tell us exactly where these telecommuners are located, which is, cleverly, the point. Telstra spends a fortune pushing the fantasy that once we’re connected, geographic and physical boundaries dissolve, the world opens up; that we can be in more than one place at one time. But this requires a necessary disconnection from our immediate surroundings.

Fairskye’s photographs eloquently chart this dislocation: her prints seem detached, they hover on the walls; the figures are accompanied only by their shadows, dark pools on the polished concrete gallery floor.

“If all the music institutions closed tomorrow, music would still continue.”
Raffaele Marcellino, composer & educator

It might not be a very positive way to begin an investigation into the state of music education, but Raffaele Marcellino’s sentiment recurs when discussing formal institutions. Among dedicated contemporary practitioners—curators, producers, composers and performers—there is an all-pervasive sense that music institutions cannot, or will not, do enough for the cutting edge performer.

There is, it seems, a fundamental problem with teaching contemporary music which can be chased back to the realisation that it doesn’t fit traditional models of learning. It’s not a problem unique to music: dance, theatre and visual arts have all grappled with how to deal with creativity in an academic or pedagogic environment. However, it seems particularly acute in the field of music, perhaps because there are some deeply entrenched models which do fit, and can take up most or all of the existing institutions’ energies, if allowed to do so.

The magnificent canon of classical music, for instance, keeps musicologists busy for at least 3 years, probably without venturing far out of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. And “getting your chops” aka acquiring a rock-solid technique to master this repertoire to a standard where one could perform professionally can swallow up, say, 6 hours a day on an ongoing basis, for one’s entire undergrad and postgrad study. So much to do, so little time…

Asking contemporary practitioners their views on what the music colleges offer seems to touch a raw nerve and spark a torrent of philosophising about what could and should be done. However, educational philosophies aside, there are some specific and practical conclusions to be drawn.

First, the universities. These are, surprisingly, given fairly short shrift by most new music advocates. While loath to make direct attacks, most find the academic framework of a university system incompatible with creative challenge. There is a sense that music performance and creation does not fit into a humanities model of study because it relies on subjective as well as objective assessment, a state-of-play which universities, it is suggested, find profoundly unsettling. So where are the good new musicians coming from? Given the existence of a strong traditional offering from the flagship schools such as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (the Con) and Queensland Conservatorium of Music (QCM), it is less surprising that most practitioners nominate other institutions. Says Marcellino, “…Places like the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Victorian College of Arts (VCA), and the University of Western Sydney (UWS) are starting to grapple with what it means to deal with creativity. The established places still tend to work from your classic composer/performer divisions, whereas the others see a blurred line.”

Saxophonist and composer Timothy O’Dwyer agrees. Of the Victorian options, VCA is the most obviously flexible course, he says, and also cites the work of Thomas Reiner at Monash University and Philip Samartzis at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). “[T]he students coming out of there have a really good sense of relevance and there’s a thriving kind of scene happening.” However he says that these centres of activity tend to be based around electronic, rather than acoustic music. In Western Australia, Tos Mahoney, producer of the Totally Huge Music Festival, sees some interesting artists emerging from the West Australian Academy for the Performing Arts (WAAPA). “[Composer] Lindsay Vickery is there and is dedicated to new music.” He also observes that as a multi-disciplinary establishment there is much healthy cross-fertilisation between new music, art and dance. He mentions in particular the head of visual arts, Domenico de Clario, who has set up an off-campus exhibition space called Spectrum which hosts regular events and exhibitions. However, he cautions “…it is not secure, in the sense that it is reliant on one or 2 people.”

Performers also point out that the music schools are still an important resource—they are a haven for students undergoing that intense period of training where they learn instrumental technique and musicianship. As O’Dwyer says, “…they’re doing an OK job. You gotta give people the fundamentals.” However, he is not alone in lamenting that the conservatoriums tend to lack the time, money or inclination to go beyond the basics. “If [students have] only got the fundamental skills,” he continues, “the sound world is smaller, the palette is smaller. For composers to awrite challenging music becomes more and more difficult.” He concludes, “it would be great if there was another year at uni….”

Most practitioners seem to have mixed feelings about the musical hothouses in the capital cities, which have been dubbed “orchestral sausage factories.” Alison Johnston, who runs the Sydney-based contemporary vocal ensemble, Cantillation, says, “…the trouble with going to an opera school is you will spend a lot of time developing the skills to be a principal, which means, almost by definition, you’re not developing ensemble skills.” While it is rare for her to recruit singers who are untrained, Johnston needs qualities that are not emphasised in formal vocal studies. “They need really good voices, [and must be] very, very fast readers. They need to be excellent musicians as well…and an ensemble voice as opposed to a solo voice…The best training institution I know is Sydney Children’s Choir, because Lyn [Williams, artistic director] is amazing at creating confidence and an incredibly high level of skill. If they then take that forward into singing lessons they stand a better chance than anyone else of having the right kind of skills.”

This alternative route, via non-institutionalised, pre-tertiary or complementary courses, attracts much praise. The Australian Composers’ Orchestral Forum, the Australian Youth Orchestra’s New Voices program (QLD, with Elision) and the Club Zho project (WA) are singled out by musicians as inspiring, although sadly isolated, examples of contemporary practice development.

The Sydney Conservatorium’s answer to these types of activity is its composer/performer workshop program. Con graduate Damien Ricketson, now composer and artistic director of Ensemble Offspring (which is made up almost entirely of Con graduates) says, “…despite being an inherently difficult subject to manage, the composer performer workshop is quite a unique program. It provides the best possible feedback for composer and performer.” Beyond this however, Ricketson acknowledges a certain frustration that arises from occupying the periphery of an institution’s primary activities: “It is a challenging proposition to convert the loose enthusiasm of individuals who cross paths in an academic environment into tangible policy initiatives.”

Perhaps, in the end, loose enthusiasm and crossing paths is what it is all about. For what seems to unite contemporary practitioners far more than where they went, or who they studied with, is their own personal attributes. Elision’s Daryl Buckley, says, “What’s needed is a high degree of enthusiasm, and a preparedness to commit yourself to working out really quite difficult things. …[W]ithin contemporary practice there’s a large amount of ephemeral activity which doesn’t necessarily require traditional music training. A lot of performance may occur with destroyed keyboards, electronic toys, antennae, midi triggers…a lot emerges from people who have lived in a culture of experimenting with gadgets. It’s not something that can be catered for comfortably in an institution. If it can be, the institution is often behind the times—it can only be reactive, not proactive.”

Buckley says, “For a lot of contemporary practice it is important that it’s not located within an institution. Traditional music-making is fundamentally aware of its own practice, has a sense of its own tradition, a canon. It is constantly referenced, recorded and re-recorded. There are ways of evaluating and measuring performance…there are also courses, such as those offered by the Institut of Sonology in Den Haag that historicise and deal comprehensively in developments with sound art and electronica…But it is important to recognise that a lot of recent contemporary practice is still, of necessity, ephemeral. It occurs in small scenes, 10 or 20 people in a lounge room who do not find it important to be connected with an institution. There is a sense of play; maybe it is brought on by 15 minutes of glory, or maybe by being sexy to some friends. Institutions find it inherently difficult to relate to that kind of activity.”

So what does make a contemporary practitioner? Buckley has the last word: “Ultimately, it’s self-generated. Whether it is a composer or a performer of some kind, using any kind of technology, whether a violin, sampler or self-made pedal, you have to have that obsessional ability to block out most of the world and pursue your own thing to the nth degree.” With Marcellino and many other colleagues, he concludes on a not entirely negative note: “[Music education] institutions are a relatively recent development. Debussy hated them and thought nothing good would come of them. …To some degree [the work] will happen in spite of them.”

The first time I encountered Christine Johnston (accompanied by Trent Arkley-Smith on cello) she was wordlessly vocalising the shape and texture of random hairstyles among the audience of The Crab Room, a short-lived but legendary artists’ space in Brisbane in the 90s. Wearing her high-necked, Edwardian cape-gown and exaggerated but immaculate nest of hair, Johnston’s handsome, slightly melancholic, straight-faced and straight-backed clown was as mesmerising to watch as to listen to: she could sing—really sing—and unlike most clowns, she was terribly funny.

That same evening at The Crab Room we’d all been thoroughly spooked by performer Lisa O’Neill whose porcelain persona and minimalist movement could fix time and space head-on with the ferocity of a strobe. Later, a taciturn fellow patiently arranged and set off dozens of noisy tea-bag jiggling devices he’d ingeniously fashioned from found mechanical objects and, as we sipped hot tea deep into the night, a couple of story-telling hombres turned up and baked (180 degrees for 45 mins) and served up an array of cakes. These were very same cakes, they explained, which had silently featured during tête-a-têtes, grievings, seductions, unholy confessions and domestic farces with which they now regaled us—using Daisy Buchanan dropped voices to make you lean forward, cake and cup in hand, to overhear the marvellously scandalous codas. I’d been living in Brisbane only a short while and I remember thinking how relieving was the artfulness of strangers in the face of suburban exile.

Soon after, Wesley Enoch invited Johnston to create a soundscape for his Queensland Theatre Company production of Louis Nowra’s Radiance with Deborah Mailman. The sense of place and dramatic colour of Johnston’s off-stage vocal evocation of birds, frogs, insects and the mud-gurgle of tidal mangrove was simply staggering. Never just a mimic, Johnston makes theatre in her throat.

With creative consultant, Lisa O’Neill and dramaturg Louise Gough, in Decent Spinster, Johnston re-works some of her familiar cabaret style vignettes and conceives the journey of the Spinster into a full length show joined by a trio of fine musicians (Trent Arkley-Smith, Peter Nelson and Owen Newcomb), as easily at home with Schubert as with Black Sabbath or Dead Can Dance. With a simple set comprising screen and curtain (and an assemblage of adapted home appliances), Johnston invites us first into her Super-8 childhood where she is a trike-riding gatherer of chooks, insects and detritus. She is alone, wordlessly befriending and exchanging secrets with the feathered, the taxidermed and the inanimate and, haunting her birthday party even then, the ghostly band who escort her with flashlights into the playing space.

In this surreal biopic, the Spinster obsessively reads, documents and sounds the world back at itself with absurdist detachment and unsettling if comic curiosity. She is in the world and out of it and employs a host of narrative devices to keep the audience engaged—she is a consummately generous performer—but also at bay. With projections of simple but witty snaps that supernaturally glide her from foregound to middle ground, from voyeur to unlikely participant, we track the Spinster’s journey from the semi-rural suburbs of Brisbane into the traffic dominated inner city—roller bladers, cyclists, scooter riders, skate-boarders and hot rod racers—regularly cadging a lift in the process. We know she loves contraptions and it is the machine not the person that she seduces. Later, there are scenes where the Spinster pleasures herself with the belt of a weight loss machine; a guitar descends from heaven (those ghostly musicians pulling strings again?) and the Spinster lets loose; while her musical duet with the ‘man-sized’ saw (no-one touches Johnston when it comes to saw playing!) is completely riveting.

Not simply the ingenue, she also insists on lecturing us with her soundings—the singing of graphs and charts, interpreting for us through the dead language of song, Latin, the bleating bumper stickers of suburban tribalism. Yet these are also some of the funniest moments of the piece, eg Comedo Magi Bubbum—“Cops Are Tops.” And Johnstone knows just when to move on. Decent Spinster reminds me of Martin Amis’ Martianism, where to be an observer is to be imbued with what is observed, but never to leave yourself free of escape. In the spaces between we can only be grateful for the artfulness of strangers—the Spinster sings: Stella Porni.

Interest in things sonic has dramatically increased across the arts. While there has always been a certain level of activity, often sporadic, the last few years have seen a development of what could be described as scenes, particularly in the electro-improvisational area, growing out of regular events and gatherings. In Melbourne there is Liquid Architecture, an annual festival of sound-related arts and Anthony Pateras’ Articulating Space along with a range of gallery and installation-based activities encouraged by the likes of WestSpace. Brisbane has Lawrence English’s Fabrique and Small Black Box set up by Andrew Kettle, Scott Sinclair and Greg Jenkins. In Sydney there’s the what is music festival (including a Melbourne component) created by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim, and caleb~k’s impermanent.audio. These have recently been joined by 2 monthly Sydney events, Shannon O’Neill’s Disorientation and Jules Ambrosine and Aaron Hull’s 1/4 inch.

So where is all this sound coming from? And are universities and institutions playing a role by responding to the current cultural trend? During the recent tour of Liquid Architecture to the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, I caught up with English and Mowson, and later in Sydney spoke with caleb~k about the kind of education that makes a sound artist.

But is it music?

The debate in music circles on the status of sound art as distinct from music grinds on with borders blurring and lines and, occasionally, swords crossing. However while the gatekeepers dismiss whole avenues of audio art as bad music, or refuse to acknowledge the form at all, the opportunity exists to define this beast as a different species, related yet feeding on different aesthetic grounds. While a large proportion of artists within the sound area, may well be musicians they are not primarily trained as such. Mowson says of the artists in Liquid Architecture, “we just don’t seem to get people from that [traditional music training] background simply because they just don’t seem savvy enough about the culture. That kind of repertoire-based learning doesn’t seem to serve them in the context of reflecting on contemporary issues.” English concurs, “most of the music courses are geared towards people being competent players not necessarily conceptual thinkers, or exploring their craft in less conventional manners…”

caleb~k believes that certain leading music institutions still have difficulties aligning with and incorporating movements like Fluxus and artists such as Alvin Lucier into their theoretical training, so there’s very little to encourage sound art practice as a viable form. For English, it depends very much on the people teaching at the institution—“not necessarily the universities themselves saying hang on a minute let’s turn out sound artists, but more a group of staff members interested in that area, and recognising that there is a potential within students to be interested and it generally snowballs from there.”

Aesthetics and/or technique

When asked about what he looks for when curating his program caleb~k says “self awareness is quite important…people who do the most interesting things have an overall concept of their project or approach…[and] focus and direction both in terms of total output and in terms of a piece.” Mowson says “the people who are coming to us and contributing really good material may have gone to university or not, but they’ve got a professional outlook—good material and high standards seem to go with having a strong critical faculty, reflecting an engagement with what’s going on.”

So is this something that universities and training institutions are providing? caleb~k believes that it can be encouraged and developed, but it takes more than a year or even 3 “…which is why schools have honours years. By 4th year students start to do their own work as opposed to development.” Mowson believes that a strong focus of tertiary education “is to widen people’s knowledge base. Most people have an area of music that they’re passionately into…but what’s interesting is when people fill that out [and] develop a broad frame of reference. Then they’re not constantly coming up with stuff someone’s already done better—not that they should necessarily change but rather learn from this.”

Many of the artists working in the area presently have no formal training in music or sound. However, caleb~k suggests that “in an art school or university there’s a conversation…you have more reason to develop because you’ve got people to talk to, technicians and peers.” Mowson concurs that one of the really important things that comes from study is finding a peer group and people with whom you continue to work and develop.

So where does technical training fit in? It appears to be taken as a matter of course. I suggested that perhaps universities offer facilities that young artists may not otherwise have access to, but all 3 are sceptical, suggesting that as technology becomes cheaper, more accessible and more ‘intuitive’, this is less of a lure. However Mowson believes that good recording facilities and audio visual synched editing is still a drawcard. caleb~k thinks that “obviously it’s going to be much quicker to create work at a school…you’re going to find better ways of doing things…but more important is learning aesthetics, history, conceptual approaches and critical engagement.”

The attractions of education

There are now schools addressing sound (RMIT, UWS, CoFA, QUT) either through specific media-based courses in universities and elsewhere, strands within art schools or more expansive programs within some music departments. There are more and more practising artists and curators working in these courses (all 3 interviewees have lectured in universities), strengthening the connection between development and practice. Can we expect a plethora of young sound artists? caleb~k believes that it’s a bit too early to tell, as most of these courses are still in their first few years and hitting their stride, though he is seeing some increase in the number of artists in 3rd and honours years producing interesting work. There are also artists who have been practising for a while and choosing to go back to study now that there is more of a conducive environment. As English describes it, “they’re returning to get a better understanding of how different artforms work, how to amplify their ideas.” But all 3 agree that in the end, the quality and success of the sound artist comes down to conceptual rigour and, as Mowson concludes, “that seems to come from individuals. Courses may be able to facilitate that but not create it.”

Gail Priest is a Sydney based sound artist and is co-director of Electrofringe 03.

impermanent.audio opened as an experimental music venue in Sydney in 2000 and lately releases material by local electronic artists. The label’s output seems largely informed by the Japanese Onkyo scene (the no-input sampler/mixer work of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura for example) and lower case sounds of practitioners like Bernard Günter, Francisco Lopez and Steve Roden. Contemporary sound art practices are reflected through a focus on sound’s inner workings. The sonic minutiae of texture, frequency and rhythm are highlighted, performance is shifted from physicality, instrumentality and theatricality and reduced to austere, small gestures and low-volume sounds.

Live performances of various combinations of the impermanent roster were held recently in Melbourne. The Make it up Club hosted the first night and the Stasis Duo (Matthew Earl and Adam Sussmann on no-input samplers and guitar) began the tour proper with locals Will Guthrie and Arek Gulbenkoglu. Their set started gently with a simple oscillating tone at a barely perceptible volume. Intricacies in the fabric of the sound, which might normally be overwhelmed by volume or density, were allowed space and time to develop and dissipate. The interplay between the duo samplers, with Guthrie’s percussive and textural embellishments and Gulbenkoglu’s prepared guitar, was restrained and quiet, slowly and gently unfolding in a languid, linear arc.

Peter Blamey and Daniel Whiting followed, using mixer feedback, delay and rhythm devices. Their set built incrementally from pulsing feedback, sibilant hiss and simple permutations of delay, to sheets of white noise and wave-like surging drones. Just when they seemed to reach critical mass, the set abruptly ended. A pity, as this rhythmic and textural density had many levels of complexity that could have been pursued further.

Feedback is an inherently unstable system and to use it in live performance is to flirt with chaos. Tiny adjustments and parameter tweaks can have totally disproportionate results, causing cascading, systemic effects, which can end in extreme noise or total loss of signal. Performing this way is as risky as more traditional musical improvisation, perhaps more so. Peter Blamey’s performance at RMIT’s Kaleide Theatre was a good example of this. His set of no-input mixer feedback started with an insistent rhythmic pattern building in density and then ending suddenly when he lost the feedback loop. In silence, Blamey worked the desk to restore the signal, slowly gathering momentum and volume as he continued his performance. Although the audience couldn’t see much action on stage, it was a volatile and engaging set.

Stasis Duo and Philip Samartzis’ performance in the same venue was so quiet that the tapping of keys and buttons was often audible over the music. Samartzis played prepared CDs and an ancient Moog synthesiser, while the duo relied again on emptied samplers and tone generator. Many of the same sonic signatures were present: delicate sine tones, insectile chirruping and muted bass teased at the edges of audibility. Although they hadn’t played together before, the trio’s considered use of silence, space and timbre was well-matched.

Joel Stern ended the RMIT session with a solo laptop performance using contact-miked cowbell and other objects. Combining these sounds with gestures, Stern offered a physicality and interaction often absent from laptop performances. Using a palette of harsh metallic sounds, crunchy scrapings and busily panning cross-rhythms, he segued into a droning gentle ambience to finish the night.

A final evening at the Westspace Gallery featured further pairings of impermanent. audio performers. The improvisational approach of all 3 nights focused on tiny gesture, subtle dynamics and contemplative performance. Whether this was a reaction against more traditional modes of improvisation or our everyday sonic overload, this self-effacement left little for the audience to observe as “performance.” Attention was diverted from watching to zeroing in on the inner workings of sounds, their placement and relationship: plenty of worthwhile opportunities for focused listening.

Make it Impermanent, Make it up Club, May 20; Impermanent Records and ((tRansMIT)), Kaleide Theatre, RMIT, May 23; impermanent.audio, Westspace Gallery, Melbourne, May 24

impermanent.audio’s caleb~k will be presenting the i.audio festival featuring reknowned vocalist Ami Yoshida, (winner of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2003), and Taku Sugimoto guitarist and improvisor along with Australian artists. The Sydney end of the festival will also include h.phone, a selection of soundworks by artists for headphones and Variable Resistance: 10 Hours of Sound from Australia curated by Phillip Samartzis, Sept 12 & 13, exhibition Sept 12-20 Performance Space, Sydney; concerts Sept 17-18, Footscray community Arts Centre, Melbourne.

Ros Bandt, Silo Stories

National sound art festival, Liquid Architecture, has just completed its 4th incarnation at several Melbourne venues. Under the direction of Nat Bates and Bruce Mowson, the event featured 30 Australian and international artists, including French musique concrete/acousmatic pioneer, Bernard Parmegiani and San Francisco noise merchants, Scott Arford and Randy Hy Yau. Parmegiani’s presence was a real coup, bringing into sharp focus the rich heritage of sonic art. But could the festival deliver on its claim that we would “hear the world through a different set of ears”?

Randy Hy Yau

RMIT’s underground car park was the venue for performances from Arford and Yau, with Australian sound artists Phil Samartzis, Laurence English and Mowson. The night began with a set by Machina aux Rock—Philip Brophy on drums and Bates on electronics—a loose, percussive attack reminiscent of Krautrock legends Ash Ra Tempel. Amusingly, a couple began to dance at the back of the car park, only to be stung into submission by the segue into Yau’s solo performance. Yau played the “MegaMouth”, a battery-powered children’s toy “rewired for maximum overdriven output.” In this altered state, the toy became a potent conduit for scorching feedback, transforming simple vibrations and movement into fierce electronic overdrive, a banshee wail that seemed to erupt from Yau himself. His performance was intensely physical as he caressed the MegaMouth against speakers, against his mouth, against the concrete floor. With each twist and turn of the device a different, dissonant timbre emerged, seemingly catching the artist by surprise, jerking his body into spastic contortions; if a man could willingly subject himself to high-powered electrocution, it would look and sound like this. But even so, Yau’s effort was surprisingly musical, with some melodious moments among the throbbing squall.

During all performances, the car park’s sonic signature came into its own as frequencies bounced crazily off the rear walls—punters up the back were turning their heads, as if unseen speakers were propelling startling, unearthly tones in and out of the mix.

Bernard Parmegiani

Parmegiani’s vast, elegant body of work was presented in various forms over the festival weekend. First up was a wide-ranging discussion, including an overview of his acousmatic (“listening without seeing”) theories and his work with Pierre Schaeffer in the 1960s. When asked about his earliest sonic influences, Parmegiani needed clarification: did his interrogator mean after birth, or before, he wondered. Listening to his mother’s body in the womb, he stressed, was his earliest sonic influence.

Of the 3 GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales) film shorts scored by Parmegiani and presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the pick was L’Ecran Transparent (The Transparent Screen), a bizarre 19-minute work from 1973, also directed by Parmegiani. With a set design resembling 70s sci-fi films like THX 1138, it featured an earnest, bearded intellectual dressed in black and offering McLuhanesque theories on the “electronic human, who lives faster because he is forced to see and hear everything at once.” Then, as the film dispensed with the increasingly shell-shocked narrator, it spiraled into an extended synaesthetic exploration, with flaring video effects and heavily warped sound design amplifying the film’s central tenet: “The eye can see what the ear cannot regard. At the point where the senses meet, there is a kind of no-sense.”

On Sunday night, Parmegiani presided over a “Multispeaker Diffusion” presentation at RMIT Storey Hall. Playing his impeccably prerecorded works from CD, Parmegiani flung soundscapes all about the hall, using mixers and a battery of strategically placed speakers. Sounds “ticked” and “scrunched”, some “flipped”, some “scribbled” and some “cracked”; all edged in and out of consciousness. There’s no adequate vocabulary to describe how Parmegiani psychologically sculpts the sonic qualities of everyday objects—never has a rolling ping pong ball sounded so terrifying. The performance capped off a memorable weekend and Parmegiani was deservedly rewarded with a standing ovation.

360º: Women in Sound

A series of installations created by female sound artists, took place at first site and Westspace galleries, curated by Arnya Tehira and Sianna Lee who see gender focus as necessary to highlight the under-representation of women in sound art.

Ros Bandt’s Silo Stories was my pick. Recorded snatches of conversation echoed around and inside windy rural wheat silos. As an “audible mapping of a changing culture”, the work offered an evocative reminder of a diminishing lifestyle; stylishly presented, the installation was accompanied by barrels of overflowing wheat and mysterious photographs of silos adorned the gallery walls.

Another standout was Thembi Soddell’s Intimacy, using surround-sound speakers in a curtained-off space. For the gallery-goer sitting on the low stool within the pitch-dark enclosure, the effect of Soddell’s layered, peak-and-trough waves of sound was absolutely cathartic. Other installations featured minimal visuals and “computer chip” music and there were enigmatic, immersive quadraphonic presentations using found sounds and ritualised street textures.

And so it went that as I emerged from the first site gallery the sounds of the street became enhanced, super-real: creaking doors took on an extra dimension, as did the flushing of a public toilet, the snippets of conversation stolen from passers-by and the groan of a tram as it rounded a corner. All seemed slaves to a system of weird harmony, confirmation of some uncanny, grand design; I wandered the city centre for a good 2 hours, listening to my no-longer familiar world with a “new set of ears”— just as Liquid Architecture promised I would.

For our annual survey of arts education this year we’re taking a bold new approach. Instead of asking university departments and training schools what they’re doing, we’ve asked our writers to approach established and often innovative theatre, performance and music directors, choreographers, curators and programmers what they think of the calibre of graduating students over the last 3 to 5 years. How skilled are these graduates, how inventive, how flexible, how collaborative, how in touch with the world and with the markets they are becoming part of? There are all kinds of interesting responses to be found in these pages. Of course, they’re bound to be impressionistic, but they’re professional opinions and no more or less subjective than a teacher’s claims as to the effectiveness of their methodology.

Overall, it seems that the relationship between training institutions and the arts industry is a mutually supportive and sometimes uneasy one. There’s plenty of praise for graduates in all fields and, occasionally, specific institutions. There are specific criticisms, for example Robyn Nevin, Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company is frustrated at graduates’ poor grasp of language: “[they] have little understanding of the fundamentals of grammar and sentence structure, and almost none of the rhythm and music of language.” She is also concerned, as is director Wesley Enoch, about vocal skills. Enoch feels that the focus on ‘internal’ states has reduced the young performer’s ability to reach out to their audience, “to pass the story.” Like Ryk Goddard, Artistic Director of Tasmania’s is theatre ltd, in our survey of contemporary performance training, Enoch laments the lack of an apprenticeship as part of the training of the performer. Enoch also wants graduates to be able to say why they are performers: “The question ‘why’ isn’t asked enough.” New media artist and curator Ross Gibson wants graduates to ask of their creations, ‘why?’ and David Pledger, Artistic Director of NYID, and Alasdair Foster, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography, both look for an ethical and political responsiveness.

In contemporary performance and sound art the issue of training is complex. Key practitioners like Tess De Quincey have developed their practice well outside and ahead of the universities over recent decades. There has been significant ‘catch up’, with a small number of courses evolving here and there across the country. However, these are rarely in the position to offer full-time 3-year courses with the focus on “embodiment” and technical skills and with the resources and skilled teachers that experienced practitioners would like to see.

What is most evident from the responses gathered here is that once your tertiary education is complete your training as an artist is just beginning. RT

It is a frequently overlooked truism that the primary elements that performance shapes are time and space. Like the watery realm evoked in the protagonist’s dream, The Inhabited Woman represents a floating world, a disconnected place in which both audience and on-stage figures drift into dreamy, atemporal states, before one suddenly catches one’s breath and lightly steps forward into the next, deliberately artificial, theatrical realm.

Richard Murphet is primarily responsible for the text of this production. He claims that the piece depicts “the space that a woman makes and fills” and asks “how can that space exist as a core of its own from which the other aspects radiate?” This confusion about where and how feminine identity is centred is rendered dramaturgically by Ryan Russell’s stage design, a giant framework cube bordered by Mondrian-like, discontinuous squares and light mesh screens, fixed on a central pivot. Early in the production there is a key transition from the completely timeless, disconnected, almost fog-like experience of the protagonist’s dream, to a point where she emerges from her bedroom to find her domestic space already scripted for her. Like Kim Novak in Vertigo finding James Stewart marking out her new identity, or Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman finding identity and memory suddenly opaque and difficult to determine in Spellbound. At the moment of this crucial thematic change, the entire set rotates, lights and all, morphing into yet another gilded cage of slight signs and slants of light that define this new world. In each of these places, the protagonist is disturbed, off-balance, ill at ease. She cannot find a firm centre in her own spatiotemporal existence akin to the one that the literal performer (Leisa Shelton) keeps crossing over within Russell’s stage design.

The spatiotemporal plasticity of this work makes it disconcerting for the audience as well. There is no central organising rhythm to the piece, no primary dramaturgical style (installation, projection, physical performance, poetry) to fix your attention. No sooner do you find a wisp of ‘narrative’ to follow, than the box rotates and Shelton moves from speaking, to building a cairn from river stones and flowers on a table.

Like tide lapping at a shore, the production beckons and captures the audience before releasing its grip to leave us resting again on the soft surface of a dramaturgical shoreline. In the finale, the journey of the work is revealed. The protagonist has not been seeking her true self, but rather her double, her shadow, her alternate life, led in sordid 1950s style motel rooms and on the crest of a great, ocean wave. As Katie Symes’ beautiful, immersive 4-way sound design coalesces into a heightened field-recording of a cataclysmic crashing of salty waters and its blue-green visual textures pour over Shelton’s inhaling body, the character reaches a consummation that seems to evoke both death and a contented, centred return to life. A female Christ or Buddha perhaps, who had to gaze into a watery film screen to find her centred state.

The Inhabited Woman, performance/concept Leisa Shelton, text Richard Murphet, projection Ryan Russell & Elspeth Tremblay, sound Katie Symes, Jethro Woodward, stage design Ryan Russell, lighting Matt Britten, North Melbourne Town Hall, June 27-July 19

Genevieve Lacey’s ambitious and seductive Melbourne Autumn Music Festival offers genuine surprises while retaining its familiar focus on early music. The event’s original incarnation, the International Festival of Organ and Harpsichord, was established in 1970 and celebrated the deep repertoire and often outstanding virtuosity of early music performance in the familiar context of the concert series. Lacey’s festival builds on this tradition of repertoire and technical excellence while revealing her concern for exposing, questioning and proposing how we listen (and perform) in the moment.

Lacey’s early music program, which is occasionally presented through radical interpretation, is loaded with works from the 15th to 19th centuries, but, experienced alongside recent and contemporary works, has the effect of collapsing time. Or, perhaps more accurately, of creating time by connecting us to the heart of the matter: the experience of creation and the creation of experience, whether inhaled by our ears or exhaled through our playing bodies and instruments.

Two central events in this festival were Astra Choir and Aelfguyv, a new performance work by Jane Woollard and Stevie Wishart. The Astra Choir (directed by John McCaughey), presented a generous, complex and immediately penetrating concert, Scenes and Epigrams, based around Carl Loewe’s intimate Passion Oratorio (1847) and intercut with recent and contemporary works by Paul Dessau, Hanns Eisler, Helen Gifford, Martin Friedel and Elliot Carter. As a form, the Passion traditionally collides musical styles from previous periods in a self-conscious reflection on time and experience. McCaughey’s extension of this idea and the themes of personal suffering and revelation through further collisions of text, sound and performance was extremely effective and profiled the substantial talents of the choir, its performers and instrumentalists.

Most memorably, Dessau’s richly eclectic settings of Brecht’s War Prime (a poem cycle in response to wartime photographs) brilliantly shadowed Loewe’s concern with the malleability of humanity and the individual stories that are central to any epic, as well as Brecht’s great dramaturgical contribution-”each scene for itself”-played out in McCaughey’s program. Arnold Schonberg’s stunningly conceived and beautifully performed Peace on Earth, tolling for peace, was a highlight, as were Gifford’s dramatic Catharsis and Carter’s March for Four Timpani.

Like all commissioned military histories-before and since 1066 AD-the Bayeaux Tapestry is a remarkable propagandist artefact. It is also intensely and immediately beautiful, and the inspiration for Woollard and Wishart’s Aelfguyva. Embroidered onto easily rolled and transported cloth 20 inches high and unfurling to well over 200 feet, the tapestry’s colourful, cartoon-like scenes with occasional Latin text depict William of Normandy’s conquest of Harold, the Anglo Saxon claimant to the English throne following the death of King Edward.

Writer and director, Woollard, in collaboration with Wishart, take as their muse the mysterious figure of Aelfgyva (performed by Margaret Mills), one of only 4 women who appear in the tapestry-and the only one named. She appears hovering above the ground between 2 ornate columns and is being struck, or admonished, or entreated, by “a certain Cleric”, given the name Aelfwine by Woollard (performed by Colin James). Aelfgyva’s actual existence can only be speculated but she is charged by many scholars as having whored the succession in a previous generation and her story is certainly notorious enough to require no explanation for the creators of tapestry. Woollard’s Aelfguyv is not an attempt to argue a biography, rather Aelfgyva is a haunted meditation, a purgatorial figure coursing through Wishart’s time-collapsing soundscape, forever freeing and weaving herself into Amanda Johnson’s imaginative tableaux set.

Woollard’s not always clear narrative surrounds Aelfgyva’s passionate seduction of Aelfwine who first succumbs and then abandons her and the material world for God. At the sound of the foreign hooves Aelfwine enlists in the war and is quickly killed on the battlefield. Aelfgyva’s land and culture are violated and in the face of vanishing certainties she descends into the earth to retrieve Aelfwine’s body. Time and culture collapse and ultimately the only thing we know in spite of the tricks of time and culture is that we know nothing.

Woollard’s strangely neutral idiom of flattened period English often thuds with cliché, as though Aelfguyva and Aelfwine are stock characters in a medieval melodrama and the effect is distinctly distancing. Aelfguyv is not in the mould of a mystery play but nor does it seem to explore a language dynamic enough for a dream in which the seams of history might be joined. Notwithstanding the undoubted strength of the music in finding these seams, in a work where action and intent substantially depend on the spoken word, a more anachronistic (or genuinely archaic) approach might have been more effective.

The constant references to embroidery and use of a physical performance language based on the gestures, attitudes and stance of figures in the Bayeaux Tapestry also tended to dull rather than energise Aelfguyv’s mysteries. The extreme style of the embroidered figures creates a dramatic, image-based tableau in the tapestry, but it is untranslatable in performance-the decision to effect a series of poses in quick succession (several times) almost risked comedy as the performers’ bodies jerked themselves from one pose to the next like a stop-start martial arts lesson. Incorporating this gestural language was possibly an inspired idea but demands extended physical rehearsal to finesse into something performative and effective. Notwithstanding these production mannerisms, Margaret Mills is a dexterous performer who gave much to the role of Aelfgyva.

The Narrator, a neatly conceived role sung by the charismatic Carolyn Connors with accompaniment by harpist Natalia Mann (also an occasional and effective chorus), is cleverly neither in the story nor apart from it but provided energy and connection between the themes and action. Connors addresses, comments and contextualises as though permanently revisiting a disaster scene with all the prescience and exasperation of a Cassandra-a role strongly supported by Wishart’s vocal score which seemed to resonate and test our familiarity with medieval sound drawing us into another, more eternal and sensual memory place.

Throughout the work, Wishart literally layers her live and pre-recorded sound in a sustained meeting of flesh and mechanics deftly engineered by Michael Hewes. Wishart’s collaborative achievement is to create an aural dimension which, like the “hairy star” (Halley’s Comet) dominating Johnson’s backdrop, strikingly reminds us of our bodily and mythical connection to the communities of 1066 AD; the experienced and the remembered; the mortal and the immortalised; the living and the dead.

Five hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, Mary, the imprisoned Queen of Scotts, worked her needlepoint in an interminable present of loneliness recounting her own history to herself and making gifts for friends she was forbidden to see. Over time, she evolved subtle variations in motif and technique and used these coded messages to secretly communicate, fatally as it happened, with her Catholic defenders. It is argued that while the Bayeaux Tapestry was probably designed by just one male Norman, it took the hands of many Anglo Saxon women to execute it. Subtle variations in needlepoint technique, figurative representation and scenic composition suggest that the embroiderers practised their art knowing that their scenes might be discernible within a censored collaboration. It is also possible that these idiosyncrasies are communicating private messages hidden from our understanding but nonetheless present. While perhaps still a work-in-progress, Jane Woollard and Stevie Wishart’s Aelfguyva is an imaginative affirmation that what is hidden from us is usually right before our eyes and already resonating somewhere in our ears.

Michael Kutschbach, strawberry ut's (trudy's turn), animation still, 2003 Greenaway Gallery

Michael Kutschbach’s friendly anthropomorphs have come out to play again, in the form of stanley, beatrice and friends. In multiple guises, they appear as shapes cut out of laminated MDF, plaster and acrylic globules, adhesive vinyl outlines and computer-animated figures. Pastel-pretty, stanley et al colonise the smooth cold concrete space of the gallery, swarming across the floor like the chalk scrawls of children’s games and clustered on the walls in chewing-gum gobs.

A large projection on a far wall animates the figures in a complex and continuous state of permutation. Like an oversized, mesmerising screen saver, we see one shape morphing into another, colours constantly changing, new nodes swelling as new divisions appear. This projection integrates the separate figures ranging across the space, binding them via their infusion with the vitality of the projected image. The space is colonised and made wholly their own, XY’s accompanying sound installation—a kind of scratchy static punctuated occasionally by annunciatory notes—functions as a soundtrack to their implicit lives.

Pretty colours, soft folds, and a focus on detail-free and impenetrable surfaces will always raise the suspicion that mere attractiveness is all that’s on offer. Yet the works’ high finish demonstrates deliberate and careful methods of production. Kutschbach’s investigations could conceivably be validated by the methodical exploratory processes of their meticulous realisation, though whether such a grounding is acceptable or (conceptually) unsatisfying depends on one’s viewpoint. Or perhaps these modes of production are merely secondary.

Kutschbach has obviously become fascinated with this shape, discovered accidentally while painting, and in bringing it to 3D realisation. The characters have been continually reinvented, toyed with, drawn out in different forms. Do we realise now, as essayist Jim Strickland suggests, that Kutschbach “has been nurturing a wonderfully eccentric personality within his blob”? This must count for something: personality is, after all, what matters in the art world. Enough personality to stand alone? Well, no, but they don’t have to, given that their very substance draws on their inherent relationship to all things shiny and pretty and consumable, that is, their embodiment of the qualities valued within our society. Enough personality to stand ‘the test of time’? Let’s just not mention inbuilt obsolescence.

stanley, beatrice and friends, Michael Kutschbach, Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide, June 25-July 27

Among the clutter of a media infested world, grief is found breathing at Sydney’s Performance Space. I remember 1948 is an exhibit of time-based and mixed media works by Arab artists. In this journey into silence and memory, artworks narrate continual acts of erasure. Although the state of Palestine has long been associated with a killing field, its culture remains alive, and its people are constantly searching for truth and a home in which to nurture it.

Many Palestinians still carry around their necks the keys to their homes in Palestine, which they were forced to leave and cannot return to. Al Nakba or “The Catastrophe” is what Palestinians call May 15, 1948 and refers to the day 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, forced to live in refugee camps or massacred. Al Nakba remains in the Palestinian consciousness as the time when their freedom ceased and it’s yet to be returned.

Many works in I Remember 1948 represent processes of dispossession and disembodiment. The absence of questions in contemporary discourse about the place of the Palestinians is well deliberated by the artists. Walking through the exhibition, I recognised that art was one of the few spaces left for a suppressed but alert and proud people to express themselves. Destiny Deacon's archival footage of her mother's life in Postcards from Mummy at Roslyn Oxley9 fused themselves in my mind to Alexandra Handal's ongoing installation, RememberOnce. In this piece, Handal retells personal stories of early and first wave Palestinian war victims by writing them over Israeli tourist guides. Patrick Abboud's olive-filled map of Palestine resonated with Fiona Foley's chili filled floor piece recently shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Aboud’s installation consisted of a floor map of Palestine covered with olives, with small lights marking the old cities. Above, video projections on muslin of olive trees and branches offered the viewer a channel for hope and peace. The soundscape–of Palestinian voices reciting names and street addresses signaled the role of memory in the healing process.

The scope of media used by various artists signified the disparate roads they came from to reach I remember 1948. A Flash animation by Fadi, of Nazareth, gave the viewer a subtle invitation to “think” while the animation was loading. His use of the tedium of waiting, so often encountered with computer-based work, projected Fadi’s political stance into the conceptual. With the mesmerising blinking of the word “Think”–a rare act in a consumer-based society–Fadi gently asked us to question our assumptions.

The mixed media wall work of Fatima Killeen used segments of corrugated iron from the walls of refugee housing in Palestinian camps. At its centre, a perfected plaster key contrasted with the rusted and misshapen iron. The immediacy of these materials created a tension between time and distance, as if prompting the viewer to anticipate and wait for the key to become a useful/used object instead of one of hope.

Poetry glazed onto canvas by Wadee Al-Zaidi ushered in the importance of the written word and the textural. Well-known poet Nizar Al-Kabani’s poem, Please forgive us was an affirmation of solidarity and the empathetic experience of pain. Soraya Asmar’s installation of fluoro drawings mapped out a journey accentuated with boots, houses and more keys. This symbolism merged with narratives which flowed along the highly visual and sensitized road of alienation. Asmar’s installation comprised of images constructed by a hand-manipulated thin wire glowing under black light. The visual text was accompanied by a soundscape of hooves, personal histories and traditional songs. The darkened room, in which erupting images shimmered in the dark, ushered in a dreamscape of memory and yearning.

Other pieces also told stories of alienation and displacement and, like Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett's Watch Tower piece in the Isle of Refuge exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, they offered hope. Here kinship might help avert a future that, left unchecked, will continue to erase the histories of a people’s dispossession and of the confiscation of their homes.

Anxiety about the impact of a free trade agreement with the USA on our culture, especially on film, television, music and literature is escalating. Government agencies, like the Australian Film Commission, and peak organisations such as the Australian Society of Authors and the Music Council of Australia, along with leading artists have made clear their hostility to an agreement that puts culture on the negotiating table.

Geoffrey Atherden, acclaimed writer of Mother and Son and Grass Roots, delivered the following talk at the Small screen BIG PICTURE Conference in Perth, May 9, 2003.

Here’s a photograph of my family. This is my grandmother and grandfather with 4 of my uncles and my mother and it was taken in the year of my mother’s birth, 1915. And this photograph was taken not far from here, in Fremantle.

There’s something pretty interesting about my family. My grandfather was born in Adelaide. My grandmother was born in Launceston. And no one in the family has any idea how a young builder from South Australia and an orphan girl from Tasmania—she was raised in a convent when her parents died and no one else in the family would look after her—managed to meet, get married and wind up over here in Western Australia.

It’s a long time since we’ve had a family saga on Australian television and I don’t see why I can’t use my family as a starting point. At least I know who’s likely to be upset.

I’m going to step slightly sideways though. In a recent survey, 86% of people said that if entering a free trade agreement with America meant giving up our pharmaceutical benefits scheme, they’d rather not have free trade agreement (Hawker Britton UMR Poll Results of telephone survey conducted by UMR Research of 1000 Australians over 18 years of age).

…As a result of this kind of survey, the government has taken the pharmaceutical benefits scheme off the table, despite it being something the American drug companies were very keen to get, not just to get a bigger piece of the Australian market, but because our PBS scheme is being copied in other countries.

How interesting that I should have come to the Small screen Big Picture conference to talk about medical drug policy.

Here’s another piece of interesting information. In the same survey, people were asked if they’d still want to be in a free trade agreement with America if it meant less Australian content on television and 71% of people said no. It seems that 71% is not enough, because at the moment, the regulation of Australian television is still on the table.

And we understand that the Americans are very keen that we agree to deregulate our television. They want it on the table. They want us to give up our content quotas, they want us to give up rules relating to cross media ownership and foreign ownership, and they want us to leave e-commerce free of regulation so that the use of the internet as a part of broadcasting remains unregulated.

I need to make an absolute declaration here. I’m going to be saying a lot about America, and even about some Americans, but this is not an attack on America. Like most people, I love American films and television programs. How could you not? It’s a very seductive culture and no wonder some people in some parts of the world are afraid of it. And with Six Feet Under and West Wing and The Sopranos and for me, one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time, Punch Drunk Love, I love American culture. But I feel even more passionate about Australian culture and Australian television and Australian films and I don’t want to trade our ability to tell our stories to our own audience and to audiences around the world on a promise that we might sell more lamb or leather to the United States.

We’re very fortunate to have, lying not far from our eastern coast, a brave little country, New Zealand, which for some time led the world in applying the principles of free market economics by deregulating just about everything. Finance ministers from New Zealand were able to puff their chests out at international trade meetings and boast about how far they were in front of the rest of the world.

One of the effects was that a lot of New Zealanders were very unhappy as their social services collapsed about them and their economy didn’t boom. And they noticed that New Zealanders and New Zealand stories disappeared from their television screens.

When their current Prime Minister, Helen Clarke was running for office, one of the things she promised was to restore regulation to New Zealand television. That proved to be very popular and was probably one of the things that got the last government thrown out and Clarke’s government voted in. Now that she is in office, she’s finding that fulfilling this election promise isn’t easy. The problem is that once you deregulate, reregulating seems to be against international trade law. And the only way you’re allowed to introduce what are seen as new barriers to trade, in order to pacify anyone who might think that you’re being unfair to them, is to offer to liberalise something else in compensation. This is a problem if you’ve basically liberalised everything.

Mexico is also worth looking at. Before Mexico entered NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico had a thriving film industry. They had chains of local cinemas and they made about a hundred films a year, Mexican stories about Mexico and Mexicans, for their own people. Only a few years after entering NAFTA the production in Mexico dropped to about 8 films a year. Why? Because, using the liberalised laws on cinema and production ownership, the American chains moved in and bought up all the Mexican cinemas and used them to show American movies. In other words, what they did was to absorb Mexico into the North American market and increase the audiences for the films Hollywood was already making.

In January this year, the Mexican government introduced a 1-peso levy on cinema tickets. The levy was part of an initiative to boost local film production and the cash raised would be channelled directly into production. The levy was hailed by local producers and directors but met a wave of heated reactions in the US. Mexico is a country that represents in volume and earnings the 4th best market for US films worldwide.

The President of the MPA, Jack Valenti, wrote to the Mexican President, Vincente Fox, and told him that, “the adoption of such a measure without previously consulting the MPA could force us to cancel our backing for the Mexican Film industry…this also would cause difficulties to our mutual relations” (ScreenDaily.com, “Valenti’s Mexican Standoff”).

In late January, Steve Solot, the MPAA senior vice president, met the Mexican Minister of Culture, Sari Bermudez, and told her, “Every peso that that does not enter at the box office is a peso lost for a US film,” (ScreenDaily.com, “Valenti’s Mexican Standoff”). Some years before NAFTA, the French Canadians in Quebec had tried to bring in a similar system—a small tax on cinema tickets to finance support for a French language film industry. This is modelled on the system in France, which has been successful in underwriting a considerable amount of film production in that country. But when the Americans heard about the Quebec plan, they sent in their tough guy—Valenti, and with support from the American government they threatened the Quebecois out of it. They threatened that if the French Canadians put any kind of tax on cinema tickets they would cease to supply Quebec with American films. They would get nothing. And since, in Quebec as everywhere in North America and much of the rest of the world, Hollywood films are a major part of box office, the local cinemas in Quebec couldn’t afford the boycott and so the government dropped its surcharge plan.

It was probably with this as background, that when the Canadians negotiated their way in to the North American Free Trade Agreement, with the background of the nationalism of the French Canadians and the caution of the Anglo Canadians, they took culture off the table. They wanted to protect Canadian film and television production, and in particular, to protect Canadian local content rules. I think most people know that film and television production is pretty big in Canada, even though most of what we see from Canada is made for the US market and looks, sounds, smells like US product.

In fact, there’s a great story which I think kind of sums up the Canadian US relationship. The Toronto Globe and Mail ran a competition a while ago. Everyone knows the phrase, as American as apple pie, but how would you complete the sentence “As Canadian as…”?

There were many entries, but the winner was, “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” Canadians feel the presence of the US, even more than we do. After all, something like 80% of the Canadian population lives within 80 kilometres of the US border.

I do just want to pause here and say again, I am not anti-American. And here is one of the reasons. While the American negotiators are pushing us in the Australia US Free Trade negotiations, and almost everyone else through the GATT and GATS and the WTO to deregulate, the opposite is happening inside America. There is a very strong push for regulation of broadcasting.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is the largest body of professional screenwriters in the world. It calls on the American government to increase the regulation of television because, it argues, the free market has failed. In the February edition of the WGA (West) Magazine, their president, Chuck Slocum writes:

“TV is not something we want to produce at the lowest cost—the stories we tell ourselves are more important than that. Economics is not the best social mechanism to govern everything.”

The WGA is a member of CCC, the Centre for the Creative Community, which aims to “safeguard and enrich the vitality and diversity of our nation’s culture.”

Here is part of a submission to the US Federal Communications Commission made by the CCC. “Rapid consolidation of network and cable television ownership in the hands of a few corporate conglomerates has significantly harmed free expression, quality, and creativity in television.”

And “When 5 companies: AOL/Time Warner, Viacom/CBS/UPN, GE/NBC, Disney/ABC, Fox/News Corp both produce and distribute the programming seen by the vast majority of Americans on broadcast and cable, Americans ultimately hear only the ‘voices’ of those 5 corporate leviathans, no matter how many channels they receive.”

Unfortunately, in June this year, the US Federal Communications Commission decided not to listen to those arguments and further deregulated broadcasting in the US.

The Australian Writers’ Guild has a strong position on this. The AWG has stated that it believes firmly that cultural policy measures can co-exist with a commitment to free trade. However, given the dominance of countries such as the United States in cultural services sectors such as the audiovisual industry, cultural diversity cannot co-exist with a commitment to a completely free and open market economy. This is because the American Film and Television industries are not just big, they’re gigantic. They combine to be one of the biggest industries in the world.

The creative industries in America, that is film, television, home video, DVDs, business and entertainment software, books, music and sound recordings, contribute more to the US economy than any other single manufacturing sector.

In 2001, the copyright industries, as they’re called, contributed US $531 billion to the US economy, and achieved US $88.97 in foreign sales and exports. Here are those figures again, translated into Australian dollars—A $850 billion contribution to the US economy and A $141 billion of exports.

By comparison, in 1999/2000, our copyright industries were worth A $19.2 billion to our economy and brought in A $1.2 billion in export sales. In the same year, we spent A $3.4 billion on our imports of foreign copyright goods and services, almost 3 times as much as we export.

The American population is roughly 15 times bigger than ours. So you’d expect a bit of a difference between the size of our industries and the size of theirs. But their copyright industries are more than 40 times bigger than ours and their exports are almost 120 times bigger than ours.

The argument here is not just about free trade. It’s about fair trade. When they are so much bigger than we are, is it reasonable to expect that free trade can ever be fair? Would we ever send a little Aussie wrestler, weighing in at 19.2 kilos, and put him in the ring with an American who weighed 850 kilos and expect it to be a fair contest? I don’t think so.

The support mechanisms we have in place are no barrier to trade, because our market is one of the most open in the world. The amount we allocate to Australian content when it comes to drama and comedy, children’s programs and documentaries, is only a very small part of our total broadcast time.

The local content rules require each commercial television network to broadcast about 2 or 3 hours of first release Australian drama in prime time. That works out to somewhere between 6-10% of our prime time viewing. When you look at our commercial television stations, they all have a lot of American dramas and comedies. How much more do they want?

In 2000/2001, almost 60% of new television programs were from foreign sources. This compares to about 8% of foreign programs in the United States. You see, it’s not about free trade. Americans just don’t watch foreign programs. They just don’t. Never have, never will. So by allowing the Americans to grab that last 6 to 10% of our prime time programming, we stand to gain nil in access to US markets. As a further comparison, in the UK, foreign sourced programs count for about 10% of the total. As I said, Australia is already an open market.

In film, the picture is just as dramatic. Every year in Australia about 250 new films are released. About 10% are Australian. About 70% are American. The rest are from the UK, Europe and Asia. But with the muscle of the giant US distributors behind them, the Americans are able to turn their 70% of film releases into 83% of the Australian gross box office. How much more do they want?

The argument is that measures such as Australian content rules for free to air commercial and pay television, direct government investment in production through the FFC, the AFC and so on, indirect government investment through tax concessions, the regulation of entry of foreign entertainers, the regulation of foreign ownership and investment and cross media ownership rules are all inhibitors of free trade and should be eliminated or reduced by Australia.

The Americans are very serious about this. They’ve told our trade negotiators that without considerable concessions in the audiovisual sector, there won’t be any concessions on their side on lamb and steel and beef. According to the MPAA, “The negotiation of a Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Australia offers unparalleled opportunities for the American filmed entertainment industry” (Screendaily.com).

This is Valenti again. He is a very powerful man because he heads a very powerful organisation. The MPAA is a trade organisation representing the interests of 7 of the largest producers and distributors of filmed entertainment: Buena Vista International, Columbia Tristar, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros. It represents one of the biggest industries in America and is a very powerful and effective lobby in Washington. On its website, the MPAA states that it is “often referred to now as a ‘little State Department’.”

Should we be worried? After all, several of our government ministers have made strong statements declaring an intention to retain all the current mechanisms that support our film and television industries.

In July 2001, Peter McGauran, assisting the Minister for the Arts, said during a debate on the SBS Insight program, “…it’s a cabinet declaration that cultural identity and national interest will be prevalent and in fact dominant in any trade negotiations. …[Trade Minister] Mark Vaile is not putting culture on the table…. And it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine when or where this government would trade it off.”

Last year, in November at the SPAA conference in Melbourne, Senator Kemp, who by that time had replaced McGauran, told the audience, and I was there to hear him, “Last year, my predecessor, Peter McGauran, gave you an assurance that cultural support mechanisms such as local content rules would not be traded away. Let me repeat his assurance here today.”

He got a good round of applause for that. It was very reassuring. But culture is on the table. And in a recent interview with Maxine McKew, reported in The Bulletin, Vaile said, “We’ve got it on the table. We’ve left it there because we want to argue the case.”

The Bulletin article also reports that when Geoff Brown, president of the Screen Producers Association of Australia met the American negotiators, they put forward an interesting proposition. Would SPAA agree to dump local content rules in exchange for increased funding for the ABC?

And when Vaille was asked by McKew whether the trade negotiations might affect our public broadcasters, or whether public broadcasting was non-negotiable, he answered, “I can’t say it’s non-negotiable.” So why not take it off the table now? He answered, “It’s tactical.”

What is the worst that could happen? Suppose our government decides that, despite its assurances in the past, given in good faith at the moment when they were given, trade in agriculture is more important than local content rules.

This is certainly the view of The Australian, expressed in an editorial on March 17 this year. It said, “Of course the US negotiators will demand a trade off in terms of improved access to the Australian market for their manufacturing, services and entertainment industries.”

The editorial went on, “Mostly it will be in our interest to concede on these areas, notwithstanding the predictable protest from the… ‘cultural’ protectionists.”

And in another edition, the date of which I’ve lost, columnist Mark Day accused us of being wimps, of not being able to see the wonderful opportunity we would have by being forced to give up our government subsidies, improve our product and make something the Americans would want to see for a change.

If we do lose our content rules and funding support and other mechanisms, what will happen? I don’t think there’ll be a cliff that the industry will fall off and in a short time, it will all be over. It’s more likely to be a long and slippery slope, but a downward slope, and after some years, the amount of Australian drama and comedy on our television screens and in our cinemas will be much less.

Existing programs which are attracting good audiences won’t be axed, at least not straight away. But new dramas and especially new comedies will be harder and harder to get up. They’re always a risk. There’s always a failure rate. And it’s much safer to buy a road tested product from America, and, more importantly, it’s a lot cheaper. This is not just a whinge about job security. We all know that in the modern world, no one has job security.

Many [of you] will have heard many of these arguments before. Some of you are already engaged in arguing the case for culture to be taken off the table in our discussion on a free trade agreement with the US.

What I would like to make is a plea for more people, for everyone to do something, even one small thing to send a message to government. We do not want our culture traded away.

We can see what can happen by looking at New Zealand. They lost their voice in their mass media. And they didn’t like it. They took it out on their government. And if we find that Australian faces disappear from our screens, and with them, Australian voices speaking in Australian accents, then we will lose something vitally important of ourselves. We lose a large part of our identity. Our children will grow up with is the idea that there are no Australian heroes. That exciting things happen to people in other countries, but not here. That we have no place in the world. And with that, we’ll lose our knowledge of ourselves.

I don’t know whether there’s a story in my family or not. But I do know that there are stories out there about other families, Australian families with ties that go back through generations, Indigenous families, immigrant families, refugee families, and all of that creates a mosaic which adds up to us.

We’re a small country in a big world. It would be very easy for us to become invisible. In many parts of the world, we are already. Try finding something, anything about Australia in the Miami Herald. But the worst thing would be if we became invisible to ourselves.

Playwright Ben Ellis’ latest biliously nasty satire reads like a manifesto on what relationships theatre can realistically and effectively have with the world. Since Tampa and September 11 critics have been crying: “Where are the plays on these subjects?” It’s like the ongoing call for The Great Australian Musical, or the now thankfully past calls for The Great Australian Play. Far from suggesting an effective response to contemporary politics, such demands stem from an attempt to enclose these events, to place them within a ‘Great’ fiction like All Quiet on the Western Front, and so enable us to move on, happy in having given them literary voice. Such an approach however, is inimical to theatre. The theatrical worldview is one in which things remain in a state of flux, in which change is continuous and final victory is elusive—or even illusory.

It is no coincidence that Bertolt Brecht worked in theatre, because a truly theatrical response to reality is necessarily systematic. Even the heroes of classical tragedy do not act alone. Their actions are dictated by a thousand forces embedded within the cosmic dramaturgy. The ‘Refugee Crisis’, important though it is, will not be ‘solved’ without addressing the myriad broader issues which brought us to this pass, from the inequities of international global capital to the changes in the nature of individual political engagement.

Judged in this context, Ellis’ work is a tour de force. His imagination is so profligate that he refuses to close off any of the wild exchanges that bubble away in this theatrical world. The depression of rural Australian society; a degree of self-interest and implicit fascism that makes even Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros seem kind; disease as a blight on human compassion such as makes The Plague seem humanistic; a denunciation of the innocence of children which surpasses Lord of the Flies; all of these worlds career madly together in a Swiftian comedy that combines the pessimism of 1984 with the violent, comedic lyricism of Brave New World. In short, both the weakness and the strength of Ellis’ world is its incredible richness, the many plays that collide within it. Like Terry Gilliam in Brazil, Ellis is unsure even how to conclude this work, offering at least 3 possible endings. The dark excesses of his writing represents a more realistic response to contemporary events, reflecting deep, structural changes in emotional life which have no single cause and which leave nothing untainted. Rather than The Empire Strikes Back, this is Alien, where the lack of genuine altruism among the victims makes them as guilty of their own fates as those explicitly in power. The disenfranchised of rural Australia fervidly mouth the doctrines of right wing economic determinism as they desperately fuck to the tune of the destruction of the world; a futile attempt to emulate their masters.

The dramaturgy of Falling Petals is as tautly ugly as Ellis’ dialogue. A world of graffiti and torn cardboard, the stage resembles a nasty, run-down backwater from the start. Aural bleed-through and fine grit compositions rise underneath the performance until the final heart of darkness emerges—which, as even Kurtz knew, was always to be found at home. Hanson country as a self-destructive, right wing Congo for our own times.

Falling Petals, writer Ben Ellis, director Tom Healey, lighting Daniel Zika, set & costume design Anna Borghesi, sound David Franzke, performers Paul Reichstein, Caroline Craig, Melia Naughton, James Wardlaw, Melita Jurisic, Playbox, Malthouse, Melbourne, June 27-July 19

Wearing a frock and stilettos, a woman is upturned. Over time, and to the discordant strains of a melodica, she rights herself and totters spasmodically across the space. It’s a disturbing image and an uncomfortable adjunct to the onscreen vision of a nocturnal bridge, silent headlights gliding along its embedded carriageway. Uneasy relations between iron and flesh, motorcar and mind, industry and humanity.

Bonemap’s Bridge Song aims to explore “the interrelationships of environment and moment within the precinct of [Brisbane’s] Story Bridge” and further attempts to extrapolate these to our wider understandings of being in the world. With an impressive array of collaborations and residencies to its name—including the first interdisciplinary Asialink residency in Singapore—Bonemap seeks to investigate interconnectedness through live art, installation and new media. Northern Queensland-based Bonemap’s creators, production designer/director Russell Milledge and choreographer/performer Rebecca Youdell, often work closely with other artists to produce “creative intermedia” with an ecological sensibility at the core. In Bridge Song, Milledge and Youdell partner with musicians Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson of Clocked Out Duo to create a series of “out-of-awareness” perceptions of time and place in a hybrid investigation of “daily life, flesh, earth and weather” using Brisbane’s Story Bridge as a focus.

The Story Bridge is an interesting choice. It is an urban icon linking South and North, attracting the tourist gaze, and sheltering a pretty good pub. While serviceable to pedestrians, it certainly hasn’t the popular foot traffic of bridges that link the CBD to South Bank, nor does it have the political capital of the William Jolly along which many a protester has marched en route to Musgrave Park. But in Bridge Song, the Story Bridge never looked so aesthetically intriguing, even if the wider metaphor of the importance of bridges in our fragile global ecology didn’t quite achieve the intended impact in this preview performance.

The work comprises 11 titled ‘responses’ to the bridge in which meaning is constructed and communicated through “a synthesis of mediated signs and sonic events.” In some episodes, this synthesis is achieved with creative clarity. In “Bridging the Gap”, 2 ropes tied at each end to drumsticks played by Griswold and Tomlinson on opposite sides of the stage provide a percussive literalisation of sound waves. As the drum rumblings evoke the splendid thunder of a Brisbane storm, the moving rope simultaneously creates an ephemeral canvas for the projected images of the river in flash flood. Equally evocative is the bird song created by the rubbing of Chinese ceramic bowls filled with water in “Edge of the Abyss.” In an inspired fusion of sound, image and movement Youdell inches her way across the space, tautly en pointe, while Milledge’s accompanying projection is meditative, animated with birds in time-lapse flight moving across the bridge’s webbed span. Episodes such as these provide a seamless merging of projected, corporeal and sound media, achieving the kind of synthesis Bonemap clearly aims for.

In the effort to transplant broader metaphorical resonances into these responses, Bridge Song sometimes loses its allure. For instance, the screen footage of a bridge warping and waving in an earthquake provides a stunning mirroring of built form with the natural kinaesthetic of flowing water. But as Youdell throws herself into a maelstrom of balletic movements in light of these astounding images, the synergy of body/projection loses impact. As she halts and exaggeratedly gasps for breath, it feels curiously disengaging. Then again, how can one begin to engage with the scale of such a powerful force? Later, in “Humanity”, the dancing body speaks for the first time: “I believe that the planet and humanity is unsustainable. …Now… now… now”. The statement is central to Bonemap’s philosophy yet, in this scene, fails to find a tension to equal its urgency. This section will undoubtedly become tighter in subsequent performances but, in terms of “extending the potential layers of audience empathy and engagement”, these broader parameters don’t quite arrest attention.

Many moments teeter on the edge of humour. At one point Tomlinson unexpectedly grabs Youdell’s leg in a flurry of percussion. And, as a static cartoon-like image, “Globe head” is intriguing with its social comment (a naked body sits contemplatively with a bleeding world globe substituting as an oversized head). But, for such a striking pose, it lacks a little of the irony or perhaps self-reflexivity needed to draw together this show’s ambitious amalgamation of the spatial, social, aesthetic and ecological.

In its first public outing, Bridge Song effectively spirited an interconnectedness between “moment and environment” with the specific iconography of the Story Bridge. And while the work’s conceptual global/personal divide is yet to be ‘bridged’ as seamlessly as its excellent production values, audiences can look forward to this work’s sustainable life.

Bridge Song, Bonemap in association with The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, production design Russell Milledge, performer Rebecca Youdell, music Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson, Brisbane, June 12-14

Ever since Australia’s greying enfant terrible Barrie Kosky moved to Vienna, the Austrian capital has become a haven for his compatriots. Cabaret artist Paul Capsis, actor Melita Jurisic, architect-designer Peter Corrigan and expatriate puppeteer Neville Tranter have all passed through his company.

Together with Airan Berg, Kosky is co-artistic director of the Wiener Schauspielhaus. Kosky was in Berlin directing a production of Ligetti’s Le grand macabre when I was in town, but Berg warmly welcomed me in his absence. Kosky’s penchant for music theatre led some Australians to mistakenly assume that there was a period when founding artistic director Hans Gratzer staged classic Baroque operas. Berg insists: “This is a theatre company. Schauspielhaus means playhouse. We’re not a sprektheatre, nor a musiktheatre, nor a tanztheatre. Both Kosky’s and my definition of theatre comes from the original. Theatre is a unity of different forms. Theatron means ‘to watch’, so you have to see. My work and Barrie’s and that of the people we invite here has music, speech, dance, puppets, projections, whatever. We are in this sense a unique haus for Vienna.”

The vision that Berg and Kosky have for the company is that it acts as a staging ground for the interaction of different cultural and social elements, whatever these may be. This is not restricted to Kosky’s Jewish-themed music theatre and cabaret which he has continued to produce since leaving Australia, or Berg’s politically themed, imagistic work with strong use of video projection. Schauspielhaus productions also feature the on-stage collision and interaction of multiple spoken languages. Berg observes, “For Barrie and myself, international exchange, multi-linguicity and multi-ethnicity is everyday. We say we’re not multicultural; we’re normal.” The Schauspielhaus constitutes an overt, public staging of that which is often buried under the accretions of this former imperial city—that Vienna has been and remains a crossroads of states, nationalities, races and cultures.

The Schauspielhaus production I saw provided a fine example of this aesthetic. The Continuum: Beyond the killing fields was a fostered work, produced with TheatreWorks from Singapore. Even at the pragmatic level of programming, the Schauspielhaus is about the interaction of multiple forms, ideas, institutions and individuals. Continuum was part of the Myths of Memory season, focussing on ethnic cleansing and related atrocities. Throughout the season, behind the seating within the plain Schauspielhaus theatre, sat The Library of Ethnic Cleansing, a collection of video stations featuring films, interviews and documentary materials focussing on the wars of the nearby Yugoslav peninsula. Audiences could peruse these materials before, between and after the live performances.

The Continuum is heir to a tradition of ‘documentary theatre’ which flourished in Eastern Europe following the break-up of Communism. However, director Ong Keng Sen’s production dealt with 5 dancers of the Khmer Court style, 3 of whom were survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s Killing Fields of 1975-9. The piece was remarkable for the depth, layering and intensity sustained by its minimalist mise en scène. The performers came forward on an unadorned stage, knelt before the audience and plainly retold their stories in their own language. The house lights remained at a low level throughout and audiences were provided with printed scripts in German or English. Through this simple aesthetic, Sen produced, with far less fanfare, Brecht’s theatre of strong emotional engagement (provided by the honesty of the performers and the nature of the material), vitally combined with critical distance (achieved by forcing Viennese audiences to recognise that interpretation of this work required effort on their behalf).

This strongly affective defamiliarisation of forms, ideas and experiences was also visible in the staging of the dance and shadow puppetry. Musician Yutaka Fukuoka sat under gentle lighting at the side of the stage, visible to the audience—just as in traditional Khmer Court performances. However his costume was black and his instrument was a MIDI with a highly expressive, console-like interface. The dancers restaged traditional choreography in Khmer dress, but both the lighting and the music was ‘modern.’ Continuity and change; the recapturing of an all-but-wiped-out tradition with the full force of modern electroacoustic playfulness behind it; all played out on stage. Using this basic dramaturgical framing, Sen rendered ‘traditional’ dance eminently ‘contemporary’—or rather newly exciting and surprising, while retaining the poignancy of historical depth. Through such works, as well as Kosky’s own Yiddish, German and English amalgams, the Wiener Schauspielhaus acts, in Berg’s words, “like a window onto the rest of the world which Vienna otherwise lacks.”

Benedict Anderson calls nations “imagined communities”: arbitrary associations of individuals, places and symbols collectively willed into cultural reality (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Verso, London, 1983). After a week at the 2003 Vienna Festival, I find this idea of Austria as a form of communal imagining irresistible. For all of the city’s apparent historical fixity, there has never been a time when Viennese cultural identity was self-evident. The Wiener Festwochen 2003 and Viennese cultural life in general are deeply immured in attempts to resolve this.

My overall impressions were summed up by seeing K, staged by Melbourne company Not Yet It’s Difficult. This re-imagining of the issues raised in Kafka’s The Trial of Joseph K constituted a self-conscious musing on the subversion of democratic freedoms during the 21st century. It began with the performers guiding and interrogating spectators as we wound our way through a “security system” (RealTime 52, p7). Director David Pledger’s text mixed alternating, rapid-fire political diatribes with audiovisual sophistications and menacing playfulness. The highly attentive Viennese audiences were polarised in their responses, one silver-haired man loudly booing as 3 younger spectators tried to drown him out with post-show applause. A mixture of cultural sophistication and intolerance; the almost suffocating weight of conventional history versus traditions of radicalism—Vienna is characterised by all of these.

Austria is one of the few EU members not part of NATO—neutrality is written into the country’s constitution. In 100 years, Vienna has changed from being the heart of the wealthy but repressive Hapsburg Empire, which collapsed during World War I, spawning fascism in the form of the Führer (the director of the Natural History Museum quipped to me that Austrians are brilliant because they convinced the world that Hitler was German, and Beethoven Austrian), endured Allied occupation and are now attempting to claw back cultural prominence. This is the weft of Austrian cultural memory. Even the trees bordering Alfred Hrdlicka’s memorial to the victims of war and fascism were reputedly planted by Kurt Waldheim to mask the deliberate slight of this sculpture being erected opposite his rooms. Viennese therefore resist any suggestion by artists like NYID that they do not know the hard lessons of repression and democracy.

Viennese cultural life reflects an ongoing conflict between the comparatively liberal municipal government and the more conservative national coalition (the latter having included Haider’s far right party). The 2003 opening of the Wiener Festwochen coincided with the Austrian government’s announcement that it would suspend its funding, though the festival can still depend on substantial financial support from the municipal government. Over 70% of the audience comes from within the city. While efforts are afoot to tap international audiences, the programming remains indifferent to the needs of non-German speakers, with English-language and dance performances sparsely scattered throughout. Who this Festival benefits—Viennese, Austrians, Europeans—remains a vexed question.

Reflecting these tensions, the opening spectacle Station Europa was a mix of masterful multi-screen projections, high art references (Chopin’s Nocturnes as a meditation on the Holocaust), and at times kitsch amalgams of popular and classical forms (an un-ironic, live-choral version of Kraftwerk’s TransEurope Express). The opening was constructed partly in opposition to tendencies within Austrian national cultural life, as a restatement of the interconnectedness of the city to other European metropoles. Images of Sarajevo, Budapest, Kiev among others, travelled across the screens; text below these elegaic visuals signalled each ‘station’ in a voyage through the pathos and vivacity of ‘old Europe’. This provided an audiovisual counterpart to official speeches stressing Vienna’s status as one of the great European stations, deeply imbued with the liberal multiculturalism this implied. Within such rhetoric, Vienna is a place of ongoing cultural sophistication and pilgrimage. The first week’s schedule of a Baroque opera and Peter Handke’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus in Colonos at Vienna’s monumental bastion of text-based, German-language theatre, the Burgtheatre, emphasised the continuity of traditional, classical high art within the festival.

As a witness to the self-conscious infusion of capital into “Great Culture” by former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, I felt a sense of déjà vu. The more local politicians crow about Kultural excellence, the more one feels that this cultural realm is sustained only by its endless restatement by political elites. The need for such figures to remind the people of this former centre of an Empire which stretched from the steppes of Hungary to the borders of Turkey that the city remains multicultural, the more one gets the impression that it’s not in fact the case. The director of the festival’s performing arts program Marie Zimmerman shared with me the grim joke that some Viennese behave as if the Emperor is only away on holiday. For all of its immense—one might say oppressive—history, Austria is in fact a younger nation than Australia, its current borders dating from 1950.

The continuous negotiation of national identities is epitomised in the way Vienna is addressing the greatest shame of Austrian cultural memory: the Holocaust. During the fin de siècle, Vienna was one of the great European Jewish cities. By 1900, the Viennese Jewry had become an important and apparently well-integrated facet of cultural life. With a speed inversely proportional to the centuries over which Jews had accumulated cultural respectability, this population was then wiped out. The city of Vienna is now going to great efforts to reinstate, or at least acknowledge, this past.

One of the festival highlights was the Jewish Museum exhibition Quasi una Fantasia, chronicling the ambivalent position occupied by the many prominent Jewish musicians from the mid-19th century until 1938. Although best known as modernist or avant-garde composers (Mahler, Schönberg etc), Vienna’s Jews were heavily represented within every musical genre, from Yiddish music theatre to popular Austro-German film. A sparse exhibition style coupled with a rich audio guide permitted a simultaneous survey not only of the history of Viennese Jewish culture, but also of the histories of Austrian music, anti-Semitism and Austrian cultural modernity generally (a wonderful art nouveau salon designed after Josef Hoffman was featured, for example). Like many of the simple yet text-reliant Viennese museums (Schönberg Museum, Freud Museum), Quasi una Fantasia did not so much inform patrons as encourage them to consider the often contradictory connections between different aspects of cultural life. The recent arrival within the city of Australian director Barrie Kosky, with his anarcho-Yiddish dramaturgy, is timely in light of such developments (see page 8).

Vienna is therefore a city of omnipresent, German-language high art, underpinned by less evident, subversive counter traditions. Although Wiener Festwochen focuses upon the former, the latter are also present. During the 1960s, Vienna was a centre for performance or “direct” art: works painted onto the body with blood, paint, dust, clay and slaughtered animals. This “anti-tradition” largely imploded under its own shocking excesses, but allied practices linger on in such institutions as Tanztheatre Wien. Within the Festival itself, the shrill madness of Heidi Hoh 3 was informed by such concepts. Though I was uninspired by the 3 female performers sitting on grotesque 1970s retro furniture while screaming at each other until their neck veins throbbed, director René Pollesch’s insistently untheatrical, almost tangible, aesthetic was intriguing.

The most striking work I saw was a rehearsal of composer Wolfgang Mitterer’s opera Massacre. To a shattering, not quite atonal score of dense percussive chaos, electroacoustic grind and isolated, discordant orchestral flourishes, director Joachim Schlömer offered a lesson in the staging of abjection and humiliation, meted out by one charismatic performer on another. Characters wandered about the stage, stripped, painted and blindfolded as the next symphony of arbitrary violence erupted. Though adapted from Christopher Marlowe’s play about the 1572 St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre, Schlömer’s production drew a direct line between this event and the arbitrary nature of contemporary identity. Unlike so many of Vienna’s cultural artefacts, Massacre invited one to see Western civilisation as a form of wishful imagining.

Station Europa, director Roland Loibi, Townhall Square, Vienna, May 9; Quasi una Fantasia: Jews and the music metropolis Vienna, concept/implementation Werner Hanak, design Christian Prasser, Judische Museum Wien, May 14-Sept 21; Oedipus in Colonos, by Sophocles, translation Peter Handke, Oedipus Bruno Ganz, director Klaus Michael Grüber, Burgtheatre, Vienna, May 11-June 9; Heidi Hoh 3: The interests of the company cannot be those of Heidi Hoh, Künstlerhaus, Vienna, May 10-12; Massacre, composer/librettist Wolfgang Mitterer, director/choreographer Joachim Schlömer, Ronacher, Vienna, May 19-24; Wiener Festwochen 2003, Vienna, Austria, May 8-July 16. Further details (in English & German)

In a self-consciously self-referential performance, Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus’ anyway i’m not alone employs the metaphors evoked by the stuff of circus. The tricks you do, the applause you crave, the daggers that get thrown at your door, the stuff you drop and the things you keep doing over and over again until you get them right.

Exploring the ways people encounter each other and how connections are made, the performance presents the audience with moments that are carefully built and then quickly abandoned. The opening sequence introduces the 4 performers and exploits the discomfort of circus performers seeking applause for every trick. It is an opening with some memorable moments. Perhaps the most psychological features a man juggling while a woman clings to his body. Rockie Stone’s act of balancing 4 chairs while simultaneously narrating each moment is compelling for a different reason, its self-referentiality celebrates the live act performed in real time.

The highlight of the performance is Andrew Bright’s beautiful trapeze work. Slow and precise, with the ghostly figures of the other performers moving through the space beneath him, it is an exquisite composition. Even the crying baby in the audience seemed a perfectly orchestrated component of the mise-en-scène. It is later revisited with the addition of Chelsea McGuffin. Here the formerly clinging woman is allowed to fly and the piece successfully recasts its spell.

In design and structure the work refuses any unified or clearly articulated world. According to the program notes “nothing can mean anything very much” unless “we discover what Freud called ‘afterwardness’—the way some things acquire meaning after they have happened.” This cannot substantiate a certain aimlessness (as opposed to randomness) that characterises this performance. For example, the sequence featuring McGuffin and her hulahoops and David Sampford juggling in the nude is either undercut or overwhelmed by Stone’s monologue about verbs, but even ‘afterwardness’ fails to illuminate it. And yet ‘afterwardness’ does its job in the following piece, where Sampford’s determination to juggle 6 balls takes the audience so far beyond their patience that they end up on the other side, rooting for him.

The final long sequence is performed to an aural and visual soundtrack that evokes travel and the passing of time. In it we are carried away via a series of disparate images, the highlight of which is McGuffin walking a tightrope en pointe. Her final monologue starts as a tirade upholding the virtues of partnership on the domestic front and quickly moves into a celebration of the possibilities created through teamwork, everything that we have just witnessed. Maybe we don’t need the monologue to tell us what we’ve just seen in the flesh. Maybe the “sheer fact of someone doing something,” as the program suggests, is not quite enough to ensure that the audience and the performance intersect. Just when you’re trying to decide, the show finishes as it began—in the discomfort of them staring at us and us staring at them.

anyway i’m not alone, Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, director Yaron Lifschitz, composer Steve Reich, musical director Zane Trow, performers Andrew Bright, Chelsea McGuffin, David Sampford, Rockie Stone, costumes Anna Illic, lighting Jason Organ, Richard Clarke Brisbane Powerhouse, June 27-July 5

Singapore is known as the Lion City. But in our new-millennial, post-colonial, post-postmodern world, perhaps it is more of a chimera: the head may be that of a lion, but the rest of the beast is a composite of opposites.

Singapore is an island, a city and a country; an ever-changing landscape of new skylines and landfill-expanding coastline; a Chinese/Indian/Malay multiculture with a strong identity in the Sino-world; an international centre that strongly promotes its “Asian Values”; a vigorous arts/performance scene that draws extensively on its traditional cultural forms while embracing exposure to contemporary practice and influence. And since 2001, it has been the home of the Theatre Training and Research Programme (TTRP)—a 3-year actor training course drawing students from around the world and offering a chimerical blend of contemporary practice and traditional Asian performance styles.

TTRP’s premises are a warren of labyrinthal corridors and brutal modernist rooms in the midst of an international business park renowned for its advances in computer technology, most famously the invention of the Soundblaster. Its establishment was the logical next step for Practice Performing Arts School (PPAS), founded in 1965 by choreographer/dancer Goh Lay Kuan and Kuo Pao Kun. Poignantly it has become the culmination of Kun’s vision and also his memorial, following his tragic death from cancer in 2002. The shock and mourning for his passing is still deeply felt within the Singaporean arts community, by staff and students at TTRP, and also in its ramifications for the school’s future directions.

Playwright, director and theatremaker, Kun is respectfully and warmly acknowledged as the “father of Singaporean theatre.” There is scarcely a theatre company or organisation with which he did not have a direct association, whether in its foundation—as with The Substation, or through his nurturing and support of young artists—such as Theatreworks director Ong Keng Sen and the late director William Teo. He also enjoyed a close association with Australia, beginning when he was a NIDA student in the early 1960s.

Over the past 38 years, PPAS has introduced many new ideas and methodologies to Singaporean theatre and dance, has generated and inspired significant groups and venues, and been the training ground for many of Singapore’s leading directors, choreographers, playwrights, actors and dancers.

TTRP was the logical next step for PPAS—a training school for professional actors, where an international staff nurtures students from around the world through contemporary methodologies and traditional techniques. Why in Singapore? Because the contemporary methodologies reference global influences, and the traditional techniques are grounded in significant Asian theatre forms.

Thus, in their first 2 years of study, students receive training in the standard foundations for the global actor (Western-influenced movement, voice, acting technique, improvisation etc) as well as concentrated physical and vocal training in 4 Asian classical theatre systems—Chinese Beijing Opera, Indonesian Wayang Wong, Indian Bharatanatyam and Japanese Noh theatre (one form per semester).

Concurrently, in classes such as Improvisation and self-devised Individual Projects, the students draw on their training from the traditional classes, applying them as their creative vocabulary for contemporary performance practices. In their third year, students further apply this training through public performances of established Western or Asian texts, as well as devised work.

This is the vision—and the experiment which is currently being rigorously analysed and assessed as the first intake of students undertake their third and final year. Of course, after one intensive semester in each form, TTRP is not training pure classical performers. Rather, the aim is to embed in the body/mind/spirit of each student a vocabulary of aesthetic sensibilities, techniques, philosophies and performance repertoires experienced within the selected classical Asian theatre systems, which the performer then draws on to create new and dynamic means of expression throughout their own creative life.

TTRP’s distinguished international consultants include Ong Keng Sen, Rustom Bharucha and Richard Schechner—all of whom through their own work remind us that cross/multi/inter-cultural training and creative product are well-established within contemporary performance. It is not unusual for the West to draw upon Asian traditions for its training methods—whether it’s Indian yoga or Suzuki stomping. Indeed, in the supposed equal weighting of the sharing of such techniques in the exploration of hybrid forms, questions of appropriation and Eurocentricity have often arisen. Intrinsic to the TTRP experiment, therefore, is the strategy to celebrate the traditional forms by positioning the training back in an Asian geographical context.

And as with all attempts at cultural hybridity, while the vision may be exciting, the practicalities throw up interesting challenges.

Any time allocated for actor training will always seem too short, because of the many differences between individual students. With TTRP, this is intensified because of the differences in spoken language and cultural variations in body language and expression. So too, each teacher must be constantly aware of his or her own cultural assumptions and subjectivities, and how these may impact upon a class.

Performance is intrinsically concerned with communication, and a core challenge for TTRP is language—teacher to student, student to student and teacher to teacher. Though predominantly Asian (but not from a single linguistic group) the teaching staff is drawn from around the world—including Australia’s Robert Draffin. The current student body is predominantly from the Sino-world, but also includes Japanese, Philippino and Polish (the 2003 intake is yet to be announced, but auditionees included several Australians).

The need for the student to work in his or her own language is acknowledged and encouraged, but English is the official medium for instruction and administration (or Chinese where the linguistic profile of the class allows it). Students, however, have varied fluency in English.

Robert Draffin has changing strategies for dealing with this linguistic difference. In his first teaching semester he spoke English very-slow-ly-and-care-full-y…only to find the rhythm and momentum of the studio learning was suffering. Next, he experimented with speaking passionate gibberish supported by expressive and precise body language, to very positive effect with the students. Now, he teaches in English with expressive body language, but within his classes the students are encouraged to train, improvise and explore in the language with which they are most comfortable. However, it is undeniable that when the eventual public performance is in English, there are further challenges to overcome for those students for whom English is not their first language.

But at this early stage of its development there is a far greater challenge facing the school—how to manifest the original grand vision within the pragmatic compromises of budget, time and personnel.

The boldness of Kuo Pao Kun’s vision for the school, coupled with his ability to inspire those around him, means that while TTRP is in more than capable hands, his absence has come at a crucial moment in the school’s development. There are interesting times ahead as the world watches how the grand vision is realised and the cultural, linguistic and creative challenges of that vision are resolved. TTRP is, in all aspects, a chimera. Its experiment is still in its early stages, and providing its own synergies and dilemmas. Time will tell if it is indeed a “fabulous beast.”

Professional recognition can be both advantageous and restrictive. Levinas once wrote of the “guardedness” of recognition: “To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on watch for recognition. It is complete, not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him.”

In January this year, CREATE (Culture Research Education and Training Enterprise) Australia, released its first “Scoping Study of the Performing Arts” to invigorate discussion about the development of a national training package leading to nationally recognised qualifications.

The study, carried out during 2002, had 4 objectives: to determine the application and scope of an Industry Training Package for the performing arts industry; to identify the vocational education and training opportunities available to performing arts professionals and ways that education and training might help standardise skill and knowledge levels and improve employment and career options; to identify new and emerging employment opportunities, career and training pathways for performing arts professionals and the competencies that will assist them to take advantage of those opportunities or create new ones; to identify a qualifications framework for the sector which will provide flexible pathways for new entrants into the sector.

CREATE, the national industry training advisory body for the cultural industries funded by the Australian National Training Authority, specifically develops and coordinates cultural industries training across Australia. Its training packages apply only to the vocational education and training sector which cover the many occupations not covered by university training. The study identified certain vocational concerns that emerged during State and territory based consultations and a national focus group (consisting of representatives from NICA, Ausdance, Accessible Arts, MEAA, NSW Ministry for the Arts, NIDA, Arts Queensland, Fuel4arts, Actors College of Theatre and Television, Sydney Theatre Company, NAISDA, ATQ, and Terrapin).

Vocational concerns emerging from the study included the growth of casualisation, short-term employment and project-based arrangements, as well as significant changes, both nationally and internationally, in information and knowledge technologies, globalisation, popular culture and the “need to balance commercial and artistic imperatives.” In its recommendations, the study advocated the design and implementation of a National Training Package, particularly to prioritise Indigenous participation, the articulation of the creative process, and “the relationship between artform, genres and techniques.”

It should be acknowledged that, in any form of “curriculum” modelling or workplace context, certain identities, forms of knowledge and professional workers are privileged over others. It may be just more clearly delineated with competency-based training (CBT). Dr Pauline James (University of Melbourne) in an article, The Double Edge of Competency Training: contradictory discourses and lived experience cautions that despite the extensive use of CBT little empirical research has been undertaken in Australia on the consequences for the many stakeholders involved. She notes:

“While CBT seems to be meeting the requirements of its many stakeholders very effectively, there is a shadow side…in the ways in which certain enterprises, workers, worker identities and forms of knowledge appear to be privileged over others. Some of these processes of marginalisation, while apparently helpful to enterprises in the short term, may be detrimental to their long-term interests.”

There is already a privileging of certain ‘categories’ of performance in the various definitions of ‘performing arts’ elicited from stakeholders in the study who commented, “In a general sense, the performing arts is an industry centred around the communication of ideas, with a focus on human performance and interaction with an audience. This clearly distinguishes it from object-based artforms such as the visual arts.”

According to the report, “Performing arts [occurs] when skilled and crafted artists present various forms and fusions of creative expression in a performance to fee paying individuals as audience, spectators or onlookers. Performance [is] a three dimensional representation whereby artists/entertainers seek to engage and stimulate the audience, spectators or onlookers by evoking emotions through use of multiplicity of sensory and cognitive provocations…”

Such attempts to define the performing arts may ‘misrecognise’ that as Bourdieu puts it “…the definition of the writer (or artist, etc) is an issue at stake in struggles in every literary (or artistic, etc) field.” Thus, in spite of appearing to be a unified field, the performing arts ‘industry’ is really a site of struggle over who determines the dominant understanding of necessary activities, abilities and aptitudes.

The study also acknowledged an important debate concerning the suitability of CBT for “‘creative’ performing arts vocations.” While competency standards might be developed for ‘hard’ skills, such as production and technical work, it would be difficult to establish standards for the teaching and assessment of ‘vision’ and creativity. Furthermore, there are characteristics of a performer that are intrinsic and therefore cannot easily be learnt or assessed. Some believed that certain “building block skills could be taught and assessed and that these would assist the development of other ‘more elusive skills’.” In the national forums, researchers argued that judgements on aesthetic performance were always based on criteria whether implicit or explicit, while forum facilitators suggested that standards could assist in describing these more explicitly. Even within the rubric of a competency-based market-response model of training, a kind of ‘excess’ or ‘intangible’ experience or encounter was acknowledged as part of what contributed to valued performance.

Teachers of performance, artistic directors and agents are constantly looking to recognise explicit or implicit ‘signs’ of this intangibility. In the Western Australian submission, stakeholders agreed that,“…there is an element of being a performer that cannot be described and that is the talent or the ‘unknown’ which makes a performer a good performer. Whether you can then describe a performer who doesn’t have this ‘je ne sais quoi’ as competent is debatable as this is what makes a performer able to satisfy audience requirements.”

This illustrates another potential “misrecognition.” ‘Talent’ is predominantly understood as the ‘givenness’ of the performer rather than as experience of something unique ‘generated’ through encounter between performers and audiences. The difficulty is that these experiences and apparent skills are elusive to discuss. There is a sense of everyone making intuitive choices and ambiguous judgements. However, there is a moment when all this is rendered concrete and very real. For example, when ‘acting’ bodies perform for other ‘expectant’ bodies. The actor and audience ‘resolve’ all this ‘in the moment’, through a massive, synthetic, forgetful embodiment. Moreover, this is not simply a matter of an isolated agent ‘solving’ an acting problem, etc. Rather, such artistic practice is fundamentally and irreducibly, inter-actional. It operates across and between people, or more explicitly, between bodies, rather than residing in or emanating exclusively from only one stakeholder, such as the actor.

Opportunities are needed to discuss such misrecognitions. James concludes in her study of CBT that, “locating spaces within the workplace to incorporate and encourage alternative discourses, meanings, knowledges and perspectives on training, in the long-term, as well as the short-term interests of the many stakeholders involved, is important professional work.”

“The Performing Arts Scoping Study” is worthy of much critical reflection and dialogue between practitioners, employers and educators, as CREATE awaits responses to the study from the performing arts communities. The study can be downloaded from the Reports menu on CREATE’s website, www.createaust.com.au

Surely there can’t be much more to say about the life of the modern pig. As Beatrix Potter wrote, “they lead prosperous uneventful lives and their end is bacon.” Yet the pig occupies an interesting position in our culture. We cannot simply embrace the pig for what it is. It is almost as if its base and irrefutable pigginess makes it a prime candidate for a little bit of cultural cooking.

We make symbols of grown pigs, give them allegorical significance, make of them moral tales. And of course, we sentimentalise them. The juvenile pig, the piglet, is not easily digested. We are programmed to adore cubs, kittens, and cute little pink things. In order to allay the dreadful knowledge that piglets (and by extension our children) will grow up and die, we write anxious stories about pigs. We change the endings: think of all those stories about little pigs that manage to escape (what they escape is usually vague and non-specific, as it should be). If that doesn’t make us feel better, we banish time and the spectre of endings altogether. We bring on the Über-Babe, the misunderstood and overlooked little Piglet, whose good deeds so often go unremarked and who will no doubt struggle on in endless Disney sequels for centuries to come, always in the shadows of silly Pooh and grumpy Rabbit.

In Raymond Cousse’s well-known monologue Strategy for Two Hams, a confined Pig endures the regulated rigours of fattening up, quite aware of how the story ends. In this excellent Deckchair Theatre production, Kelton Pell is sublime as the Pig. He snorts, spits, scratches, reclines, struts and preens, forcing between the contracting bookends of his life a suitably eloquent and poignant justification for his own death. Despite the glorious babble, fear is never far away. Time marches on. The story must finish. Death lurks in the stainless steel pen, the cold fluorescent lights, in the regulated dispensing of mush at meal times, in the complex self-justifications, the irony of getting one over the keeper.

Even an eloquent Ham is still a pig, and he struggles with his obvious singularity and his undeniable generality. Off-stage, other pigs squeal as if they are having their throats cut (which they no doubt are). The physicality of Pell’s performance butts the body right up against the mouth. Wonderful ideas emerge from that mouth, but so does regurgitated vomit and slop. There is no mind-body split. This is no disembodied intellect on stage; rather, the intellect is stitched back into the body where it truly resides, struggling to fill the final days, hours, minutes with eloquent words addressed to an other.

The Pig gobbles up more slop. One or 2 people walk out. Someone else gets the giggles. But I can’t take my eyes off Pell. He is elegant, funny, and narcissistic. Neither he nor I can help but be seduced by the sight of his own fat, juicy hams. And then it’s over.

Afterwards, there is not much to say. It is closing night. There will be no more Pig. My friend and I know that we have had the privilege of seeing an extraordinary performance. We are so full of the poor Pig we have no need for conversation. Outside it is freezing cold, and raining cats and dogs.

Strategy for Two Hams, by Raymond Cousse, director Mark Howett, performer Kelton Pell, Deckchair Theatre, May 24-June14

As was revealed in “A wild space” (RT 50, p37), our 2002 survey of university departments that teach performance, artists mostly find their way into performance after they complete their degree and often regardless of the discipline they studied at university. It’s not unlikely however that some will return to post-graduate work in performance. There are few courses in Australia focused on training for performance. These can be found at Victoria University, University of Western Sydney and the Victorian College of the Arts where performance-making can be pursued in practice and theory to a greater or lesser degree. Sydney University’s Department of Performance Studies and the Theatre, Film & Dance Department, University of New South Wales offer opportunities to study the field. Doubtless NICA (National Institute of Circus Arts) will fuel the performance scene sooner or later.

We emailed a small group of established artists working in performance seeking their attitudes to recent graduates, what role the university has to play in this complex interdisciplinary field, and what sustains performance practice. It quickly became clear that they saw the university as only one step in the process of making the artist and as not always in touch with performance’s interdisciplinary character. Key words like ‘community’, ‘ensemble’ and ‘apprenticeship’ recur, with a strong emphasis on physical rigour and embodiment. It’s interesting that most of these artists also teach through workshops, training young artists to work with them. Opportunities are few, but where they exist they are vital for the continued development of a field that provides the most innovative work coming out of Australia.

David Pledger

For David Pledger, Artistic Director of Melbourne’s NYID, “the bone of contention is the real distance between curriculum and contemporary arts practice.” He thinks the educational adherence to discrete artform practice constitutes a failure to understand what it means to develop an interdisciplinary, intermedia approach. He sees this as a refusal to acknowledge that the contemporary world is intertextual. It is time, he says, that mission statements for training in tertiary education should commit to interdisciplinary practice. Pledger suspects that the university is not the best model for teaching performance. He’s impressed by the Giessen School of Arts, Germany “with its fantastic combination of theory and practice, a balance thrashed out in the creating of the work. Its graduates move out into arts centres across Europe.”

Training is not about skills alone. Pledger describes contemporary culture as “elusive and less and less prescriptive. Artists have to learn the dramaturgy of the ephemeral—how to meet and read the world on a daily basis and how to incorporate that into the way they work. In pre-rehearsal meetings we talk about the politics of the everyday…the landscape is articulated, made known and added to by everybody and parts of the work are then made on the floor.”

NYID runs its own training programs in the form of an annual workshop which attracts performers, videomakers, choreographers and dancers. The focus is on working with the body and voice “as well as developing a vocabulary through discussion for mediating performance.” Does the prior education of workshop participants inhibit their response? Not at all, says Pledger, “they know our work, they’ve made the commitment to come and they’re curious.”

As for the future of performance, Pledger is not anxious about any shortage of graduates eager to engage with performance. He is critical of the focus on the growing ‘star’ system in the major schools but is nonetheless impressed with WAAPA (West Australian Academy of Performing Arts) graduates. “They seek you out and want to know how things get done…they want to make art and they believe there are many ways of expressing themselves, not just one way, which is almost impossible to unpack.”

Tess de Quincey

Performer and choreographer Tess de Quincey also focuses on the value of the training that happens outside the university, although she sees the academy as having a vital supporting role to play, if, sadly, a declining one. She reflects, “When I look back over my own practice and its development, I realise that I’ve absorbed knowledge and experience and been brought up by a series of families via a system of apprenticeship. Like anyone’s, it’s a wonky history filled with crooked turns, winding paths and strange niches. I have no tertiary education qualifications or certificates and have learned instead in the field within a variety of schools of discipline (dance, visual arts, theatre, music and martial arts) and, after a crisis of belief, found myself becoming more ensconced in eastern performance practices.” Min Tanaka’s Body Weather training in Japan gave De Quincey “the depth of philosophical cohesion and lucidity which has provided for me the pivotal base with which to act, with which to embrace instability, allowing an exploration of multiplicities and of exchange.” Like David Pledger, De Quincey sees a role for performance in dealing with contemporary ephemerality.

Detecting a change in attitude towards creativity in Australia, De Quincey writes, “In 1988 when I first came to work in Australia there seemed to be a flourishing environment, a lively bank of quirky suspects investigating arts practices…through a mixture of both institutionalised learning [and] a wide range of workshops and other methods of exchange. There’s been a drastic shift since then. From my position, I see a dominant, sanitised and politically correct march of institutionalisation…” There are havens of support. De Quincey is full of praise for Sydney University’s Department of Performance Studies for many years—“I couldn’t have done it without them.” She says of Performance Space that “against all odds, this amazing and vibrant community is continuing to provide a home and a framework for new generations…I was embraced [by that community]. That was the pivotal point that enabled me to develop a practice.”

Ira Hal Seidenstein & Frank Theatre

Performer and director Ira Hal Seidenstein, who is writing a PhD thesis on “creativity’s impact on professional learning in acting” responded to our survey with Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs of Frank Productions, a Brisbane company inspired by the methodology of Suzuki Tadashi. They acknowledge that graduating students are often skilled, but question, “What is beyond and underneath the skills?…Perhaps the learner/actor in a university course…is not focused on the phenomenon of what they are actually doing, in real time, in their body, in physical action including vocal action, which is also a physical phenomenon. If the actor, novice or experienced, is not fully physically engaged in body, voice and mind then the possibility of ‘ensemble’ is ethereal and not grounded in technique and shared training, and therefore not a realistic goal.”

They write, “…it is rare to see a commitment in curriculum or teaching that addresses embodied acting, in an embodied way. The university education lacks training. That is, specific, daily, learning of one or several techniques over three-years of study.” They suggest that most courses are samplers rather than focused training. The Suzuki Actor Training Method is their ideal because “it supersedes the liminal gap between teaching and embodiment.”

Ryk Goddard

Goddard, Artistic Director of Hobart’s is theatre ltd, recalls a time in Tasmania when “performers used to be developed through regular employment—this is increasingly rare.” As well he feels that, “The relationship between (arts training) schools and the field seems exceptionally weak. Where students of technical theatre spend their last year in secondments, forging relationships and experiencing a range of workplaces, performance courses tend to actively discourage people learning or making work outside of their institutional framework.” University courses, Goddard thinks, are good for helping with career choices and theoretical underpinning. “They are ‘jumping off’ places but do not provide depth or practice.”

In Tasmania training and performance opportunities, says Goddard, are few, and they are dependent on a handful of companies like IHOS Opera, Terrapin and is theatre ltd who run their own training programs. “Consequently, when we make work, we have access to experienced, practising local artists to draw on. If you want to do any kind of show here, you have to be the trainer as well as the producer. The people developed through these processes are now making their own work for festivals and fringes and returning value to the community which developed them.” Goddard says of these process that “they are more like apprenticeships than tertiary trainings.”

Nikki Heywood

Performance director Nikki Heywood discussed a range of graduates including Benjamin Winspear and James Brennan, describing them as “extraordinary artists who would stand out” in any teaching institution. Winspear, ex-NIDA, is directing for the Sydney Theatre Company’s Blueprints program and performed impressively in Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer and Kate Champion’s Same, same But Different. Brennan, ex-VCA, is the creator of the award-winning Piglet and The Glass Garden (see page 45). Heywood says of these artists that they have “unique talent”, “wild imaginations.”

James Brennan wrote to Heywood after he saw her Burn Sonata and let her know he was graduating. Now she’s working with him and with Agatha Goethe-Snape on a new show, and as dramaturg with Karen Therese (VCA) and Karina Stammell (UNSW) who both have works in this year’s Carnivale. In the past, she’s worked with David Williams (UWS) and Matthew Whittet (NIDA). All of them, she says, have a “proactive attitude” and most have approached her to work with them. Heywood is also impressed by their flexibility and openness and the way they can switch performance styles on demand. She’s not sure how they manage it and knows that some have found it challenging. She thinks that the VCA’s Animateuring course has shown some interesting results. “I also can’t speak highly enough of companies like PACT Youth Theatre and the great start they give with the training they offer. Costa Latsos who’s currently at UNSW I first met there.” Also, the expertise of teachers with backgrounds in contemporary performance like Clare Grant (UNSW) and Yana Taylor (UWS) is invaluable.

Heywood’s main gripe is that in general tertiary education courses “lack the rigorous physical training that gives people tools to make new works.” She has also encountered a lack of passion in students and is surprised that they don’t get out and see what’s happening in the artworld they aspire to. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell why they’re studying contemporary performance.” Others, she senses, are eagerly looking around for methodologies they can work with. She points out, however, that experienced artists can sometimes be reluctant to share too freely the skills that are their bread and butter. There are exceptions, for example, she notes the “incredible generosity” of Margaret Cameron in her workshops with writers.

The relationship between universities and performance will continue to be a challenging one when it comes to the issue of training. The kind of commitment to rigorous physical programs sought by the artists in this survey would not fit easily into current curricula. However, there is no doubt that the growth of performance studies has been invaluable, not only for the theoretical support it has provided and, sometimes, the practical space, documentation and room for experiment offered.

“Documentary is a constant stylistic, conceptual and referencing point for me,” says Glendyn Ivin who won the 2003 Palme D’or for Cracker Bag. “Everything I have done has, at some point, been affected by my interest in documentary…Cracker Bag has been described as a ‘documentary after the fact’, which I quite like.” Ivin is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts documentary course, one of the many tertiary courses available in Australia since 1996. Where are these courses? What are they like? And what difference have they made?

The ‘elite’ schools

Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in Melbourne and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in Sydney are Australia’s best known and well-funded film schools. The choice of school depends on the style of documentary a student wishes to make.

Set up by Peter Tammer (Journey to the End of the Night), the VCA course has a history of specialising in observational documentary. Graduate Carmela Baranowska (Scenes From an Occupation, 1999) says of studying there: “We were pushed all the time to think, feel and film our own documentaries. We were taught that observational documentaries were what we should all aspire to; and that they were the most difficult, complex and aesthetically amazing achievements in the documentary canon. When I arrived in East Timor in March 1999 I had received the best possible training to film the last 6 months of the Indonesian occupation.”

The AFTRS course, set up by Trevor Graham (Aeroplane Dance) has a history of specialising in more produced and scripted documentaries. AFTRS and UTS documentary graduate Melissa K Lee (A True Story About Love 2001) says of studying there, “I learnt a lot about myself as a filmmaker—what kinds of films I want to make and how I want to make them. I see AFTRS as a significant part of my film training journey, but not a beginning nor an end. I don’t ever want to stop ‘learning’ about filmmaking.”

There is a myth that obtaining a place in one of these schools is as hard as winning Tattslotto. For the documentary strand this is untrue. It’s no secret that both AFTRS and UTS (University of Technology Sydney) are actively seeking more applicants for their documentary courses. In the end not enough people apply. The crisis for Australia’s top documentary schools is that they can’t be as choosy and ‘elite’ as they would like.

Brisbane: the contender

There is a vibrant and active documentary community in Brisbane, financially maintained, in part, by the Gold Coast studios and the prevalence of reality television. State bodies fund both QPIX and the documentary group QDOX. Not even Melbourne and Sydney have a funded QDOX equivalent. But, as yet, there is no dedicated documentary film course with the reputation of VCA or AFTRS.

Brisbane needs to think seriously about establishing a well-funded top of the range documentary postgraduate course. The federal and state governments should both contribute funding. Top quality documentary schools burn a lot of cash to train a student. Producer Melissa Fox says of her undergraduate film course at Queensland University of Technology, “I would have liked the opportunity to specialise in documentary in a deeper way, a lot sooner. I knew right from the start that I wanted to study documentary, yet the structure of the course forced me to take a lot of general media subjects and drama production courses. When I got to the final year documentary production subject, I was really disappointed at the lack of commitment and enthusiasm from those students whose passion lay in drama.”

With the 2004 merger of Queensland College of the Arts and Griffith University film departments, perhaps this new documentary school will become a possibility. Both departments have a record of promoting documentary, for instance, Peter Hegedus produced his multi award winning film Grandfathers and Revolutions (2000) as an honours project at QCA, and Griffith has similar success stories.

The bad news

If you are a budding documentary maker in Adelaide, Hobart or Darwin, leave now. If you’re planning to attend a documentary course, go to Brisbane, or failing that, Perth. Despite organisations such as the excellent Media Resource Centre (Adelaide) and the fact that some documentarians of international repute live there, these cities continue to exist outside the current debates in documentary.

Flinders University is Adelaide’s main film school and it’s linked to a drama department. Alison Wotherspoon, a lecturer in the film school, says despite the fact that a student may specialise in documentary at honours level (it’s also taught in 3rd year at the undergraduate level) no one in recent memory has made a documentary film as their honours project. Because students receive funding to make their final film, she says, they make more expensive short dramas. Money isn’t the only issue; student choice reflects the environment created by their teachers and it appears to be more conducive to drama.

In the smaller cities there is less opportunity to discuss the documentary form. Flinder’s graduate Alex Frayne (The Longing, 2002) described the Adelaide film industry as “sole traders who all want to make Citizen Kane.” There is no documentary group in this city. And according to Philip Elms from MRC, current documentaries by emerging documentarians revolve around the refugee issue. These are made by self-taught documentarians who have emerged from the activist community, such as Anne Glamuzina.

Westward ho!

Producer Sanchia Robertson describes camaraderie in the Perth documentary community, partly generated by its isolation from the rest of Australia. Perth has also made a decision to focus on TV and this is good for documentaries, which are primarily shown on the small screen.

However, ScreenWest workers had trouble naming young people who specialised in making documentary. It’s evident that the local film schools at Edith Cowan, Curtin etc had not developed a strong relationship between their documentary students and the local industry funders. Funding industry people in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne are on the whole aware of who their graduates are and where they studied. Robertson said that a top documentary course would help to stop the flow of students “to the East” and therefore help keep filmmakers and create documentaries in WA. At present the WA industry talks about the success of a course in terms of its ability to be a feeder school to AFTRS, not necessarily a bad thing.

Alternatives

There are a few shorter courses and mentoring schemes around Australia aimed at specific groups in which documentary is a big part of the scheme, for example Warlpiri Media (Bush Mechanics CD-Rom) which works with Yuendumu Aboriginal community in Northern Territory, and the remarkable BIG hART (Hurt) which works with disadvantaged young people. These groups often employ documentary graduates as tutors or mentors.

Industry heavies such as Film Victoria’s Steve Warne and Open Channel’s Liz Burke are among many who are very interested in what Victoria’s secondary college, Footscray TAFE, is doing. Amiel Courtin-Wilson (Chasing Buddha, 1999) studied there and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Courtin-Wilson’s comments on the growing number of documentary courses reflect a different problem facing the industry. “Documentary training at film school has led to an increase in documentary makers and that in itself isn’t a bad thing—the only problem is that there aren’t enough broadcasters to sustain a rapidly increasing community of documentarians.”

Broadcasters & commissioning editors

Marie Thomas, from the UK, is the Melbourne-based commissioning editor for SBS Independent. At a recent conference in Perth she said, “I have been here for a year and so far I have not received many pitches that are exciting.” Her comment raises 2 important issues. While most film schools invite industry people to guest lecture and for seminars, except at AFTRS the art of pitching is rarely an assessed part of the course. This important skill is underdeveloped in Australia. Lee’s A True Story About Love deals in part with the ability of US documentary makers to discuss their work in a gripping way that’s far more developed than that of their Australian equivalents.

The flipside is that the skills and brilliance of Australia’s commissioning editors on the whole leave a lot to be desired. In the publishing industry, commissioning editors are trained, they have studied at ‘elite’ editing courses at institutions such as RMIT. Australia needs more well trained career filmocrats who have a highly developed sense of where they are taking the industry and how to do this in conjunction with the filmmakers. Surely spending at least a year of intensive post-grad training in thinking, discussing and understanding what that job really means can only improve Australia’s documentary industry?

Round-up

Amiel Courtin-Wilson says, “At best, documentaries can be complex, beautiful works of art that resonate with audiences far longer than many narrative films. Unfort-unately I don’t find many television documentaries that inspire me as a filmmaker—their subject matter may inspire me as a human being but the actual filmmaking is at times underwhelming.” It’s encouraging that graduates are tackling issues of how to make profound documentaries with difficult subject matter. Without a doubt, the documentary schools are responsible for the improved filmmaking skills and higher production values of graduates like Courtin-Wilson.

What makes an actor? What are the ingredients for a flexible performer who is able to cope with the secret business of directors and their methods of rehearsal? Some prolific directors offer their perspectives on working with graduates of actor training courses in the past 5 years.

“Over 5 years I’ve observed quite a number of graduates from training schools,” says Robyn Nevin, Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company. “The STC employs quite large numbers from acting schools, predominantly graduates from NIDA, WAAPA, VCA. My great concern…is in the area of voice and text. It is very often a teaching situation in the rehearsal room since recent graduates have little understanding of the fundamentals of grammar and sentence structure, and almost none of the rhythm and music of language.”

This deficiency, says Nevin, stems from, “a different emphasis in the fundamental education [of] Australian children…I am such a dinosaur because when I was at school we did a lot of poetry and written and verbal expression. We learnt grammar, sentence structure, the way in which language is put together and why. Nevin believes that actor training courses fail to compensate for this lack of basic training in the uses and structure of language in the schools system. She also passionately believes, “If you can do the classic texts you can do anything. They stretch you emotionally, intellectually, vocally, and physically. There should be a greater emphasis on this aspect of the actor’s training, because at the receiving end you just wish they had that grounding.”

Michael Gow, Artistic Director of Queensland Theatre Company works with a training ensemble—4 actors “whose work has come to our attention through fringe theatre” have become staff members for a year. He stresses that the ensemble tends to be made up of actors who are not “straight from school.” Gow is interested in the graduates who have a mix of disciplines and approaches in their work. He observes, “people up here are susceptible to fads…they have to grab all these complex methods rather than simple things.” Gow notes that the Suzuki method is popular in Queensland at the moment, and that it is “great for a particular kind of performance, but it leads people to being incredibly self-conscious physically.” He prefers the “old fashioned conservatory course” such as the one at the University of Southern Queensland where students are given some basic skills and an indication of their strengths as performers “rather than playing with their heads.”

Wesley Enoch, a freelance director based in Melbourne, is disappointed that there are “so few Indigenous graduates from the main institutions [and] few graduates from non-Anglo backgrounds.” He feels there is a “house style” for each of the actor training courses. He doubts that “a 3-year course for teenagers will ever ‘create’ a good performer, but it can give a good introduction and grounding so that after a person graduates they can learn their craft in the field, observing, engaging with, working alongside more experienced performers.” Enoch criticises the “in-house” nature of training for actors and believes that “students should be exposed to many working methods” since the drama school house style “isn’t always applicable to every process.” Gow also refers to the fluidity of the process of making theatre, “I’d hate to be in a rehearsal room where everyone works in the same way. My job is to ‘sus out’ the differences between each performer and then create the structure, so we can just start working. At the outset I do make it clear that the way I work, we’ll go up an awful lot of blind alleys.”

Ros Horin, who recently retired as Artistic Director of Griffin Theatre after 12 years, feels that recent graduates are “usually brave and adventurous physically” but weak in voice training. However the graduates she has worked with “have all been great. I usually select very carefully graduate actors who are quirky and very individual. Horin believes that graduates don’t come out of drama school knowing how to use their skills in a range of styles. “I think they struggle with something that’s not naturalistic and with finding the truth in it, but…that ability comes with experience when you have worked across a range of styles.” Horin sometimes finds students are “so keen to impress and do the right thing that they try to do it on their own. They are so focussed on what they are doing and their actions that they don’t allow it to be free and relaxed between [themselves] and the other actors.”

Wesley Enoch also observes that “the practical application of skills is the hard thing [for young actors] and it takes time to discard [certain] things and to learn new things on their own terms—that is, to remove their teachers from the equation.” He also has reservations about the vocal skills of recent graduates, “…some vocal training focuses too much on the psychological blocks when good old capacity, vocal range and dexterity is what is needed.” Like Gow, Enoch wishes for more training on the traditional aspects of the actor’s craft. “Sometimes I don’t care about what an actor is going through to achieve a performance—instead I want them to focus on what an audience is getting from their performance and delivery. This can be difficult [for some graduates] when some training approaches require a strong internal life for a character but don’t provide the actor with skills to pass the story through feeling, text or physicality, on to an audience. There can be a level of self-justification and lack of respect for the needs of an audience.”

Gow says the training at some acting schools “turn[s] graduates in on themselves, rather than teaching them to listen and play as part of an ensemble.” He cites the graduates who have asked in a rehearsal process, “I haven’t cried yet, so is it valid work?” He believes that acting is about “reacting truthfully, rather than knowing what you are feeling.” As a director he is “not a puppet master—I like to know what people are thinking and where they are at.” A shift in attitude from “so you want me to do this here?” to “this is what I think” can take some time in a rehearsal process, he says.

How students of the various actor training courses survive once they have graduated comes down to a ‘nature or nurture’ argument. Nevin says she is “often reminded of how the passing of 3 or 4 years can bring about great changes in graduates. They audition, and 4 years later they come back and look completely different…unrecognisable. All sorts of things contribute to the maturation but…it depends on the individual, how they cope with the real world—the difficult world of being an actor is damaging to some and can be invigorating for others.”

Despite her reservations about voice and text training, Nevin enjoys working with recent graduates. “[M]any of the graduates I’ve worked with I find to be hungry and open to learning more. Then I get some reports from others that some are less open, in conflict with the director, and late. Often graduates grow out of these rebellious tendencies after a couple of years.”

Enoch thinks that if “a talented, politicised and switched-on person goes into one of these institutions more often than not they emerge talented, politicised and switched on with some more skills—but I can’t see how the institution has inspired them.” It troubles him that “graduates don’t know what companies are doing what! People make ill-informed decisions about which institution and working method would work for them, what companies and directors they’d be interested in working with, and what skills they’d like to develop. The institutions don’t articulate that they offer a house style, nor do they inform the students of their options.” Gow believes, “in an ideal world the training would include some sense of the world.”

Enoch says, “older artists are under-utilised as potential resources in the training of other artists.” He identifies the apprenticeship model as perhaps the most effective way to train an actor, but admits that the ‘how and where’ of this idea is vexed. “The major companies no longer use understudies, there are no repertory or company ensembles, and we as a culture still haven’t found a place for our elders.” He is most disappointed by “the inability [of graduates] to articulate their motivation” for being actors. However, he sees this as “a concern for the whole arts community. The question ‘why?’ isn’t asked enough.”

The annual Message Sticks Indigenous arts festival at the Sydney Opera House provides Sydneysiders with a fascinating cross section of contemporary visual arts, performance, music and film by Aboriginal artists from around the country. The New Blak Films night comprised 2 13-minute shorts: Turn Around and Shit Skin, directed by Samantha Saunders and Nicholas Boseley respectively, and a 45-minute mini-feature, Cold Turkey, directed by Steven McGregor.

There is no doubt that the most challenging local cinema in recent years has either come from Indigenous Australian filmmakers or dealt with Indigenous stories. The painfully slow lancing of the wound created by Australia’s repressed history of race relations seems the only topic that can provoke even the mildest form of political engagement or formal experimentation in Australian filmmakers.

With this in mind, it was interesting to hear director Saunders introduce the evening’s first film, Turn Around, claiming she doesn’t think of her work as “Indigenous film” but rather as “girl fantasy.” This seemed a little disingenuous, given the context in which the film was being presented, but after viewing Turn Around her comment made more sense. While it is, of course, important that Indigenous films tell the big, representative stories about Aboriginal experience, Indigenous directors also need to be as free as anyone else to put prosaic tales of everyday life on screen. Although primarily a simple love story, Saunders’ film pointed the way towards an Indigenous cinema of the everyday, in which cultural identity forms part of the story’s milieu, rather than its thematic focus.

In contrast, Shit Skin was firmly in the ‘big picture’ vein, exploring how the traumatic experiences of the stolen generations continue to reverberate for Indigenous people in the present. The weight of historical narrative at the heart of the film’s drama seemed a little overwhelming for Shit Skin’s 13 minutes, and left little room for the development of the characters’ emotional journeys. In the Q and A session following the screening, director Boseley was asked if a story about a member of the stolen generation finding his or her family had ever been considered for a feature film. The question reflected my feeling that only a feature-length work could really do justice to the historical, political and emotional complexity of the subject matter.

Following a discussion with the directors of the 2 shorts, McGregor’s Cold Turkey provided the centrepiece of the evening. McGregor hails from Darwin, and has been involved in film production for 15 years, 10 of which he has spent with the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) in Alice Springs. He has directed several documentaries, including Marn Grook, the first by an Aboriginal director to be sold to a commercial television station. Although Cold Turkey is his first drama, McGregor’s film production experience was evident in his assured handling of the film’s fragmented narrative structure and the complex relationship between the 2 main characters.

Cold Turkey focuses on 2 brothers living in Alice Springs who embark on a final night of drunken revelry before the youngest, Robby, leaves for a job in Coober Pedy. Robby wakes the next morning in a police cell and the body of the film focuses on his attempts to reconstruct the night’s events through shards of hazy memory distorted by alcohol and his brother’s mind games. Although Cold Turkey effectively depicts a set of social problems that beset many Aboriginal communities, the emotional heart of the film is the complicated relationship between the brothers and the way that familial love can sometimes play out in the most twisted, hurtful way imaginable. It will be fascinating to see if McGregor can sustain his flair for formally challenging storytelling across a feature-length film. Hopefully he will be get to flex his talent in this way in the near future.

Events such as the New Blak Films night are important in giving exposure to what is still a nascent Indigenous filmmaking culture in Australia. It is also important, however, that these films are not side-lined or marginalised from the rest of Australia’s filmmaking culture. All 3 directors on the night stressed that they think of themselves as filmmakers first and foremost, and hoped their future output would not be forcibly limited by expectations of what Indigenous filmmakers can or should produce. The films screened deftly illustrated the range of possibilities being explored by young Aboriginal directors, and further reinforced the impression that Indigenous stories are currently providing the cinematic narratives that engage most powerfully with the faultlines running through Australian life.

Message Sticks ’03: New Blak Films, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 27

“The white man can’t tell our stories about our people, we’ve got to get out there and do it ourselves.” Bonita Mabo

“A gathering to celebrate Indigenous screen culture” was staged in Brisbane’s South Bank Piazza by Uniikup Productions/ Murriimage throughout NAIDOC Week. Unlike the current 12th Brisbane International Film Festival, which this year has no Aboriginal films, the relatively small-scale Colourised Film Festival actively engaged audiences through art, dance, song and filmmaking. Even more distinctively, public admission to the festival was free.

‘Murri-style’ screen culture has little to do with the Tinseltown image of Queensland’s film industry. Community-focused, family-oriented and above all personal, the Colourised Film Festival showcased Indigenous filmmaking in several genres while fostering non-indigenous people’s understanding of ‘Aboriginality’ in all its forms.

Providing about 30 hours of continuous screenings over 3 days, with a production seminar and screen forum; student video workshop; a special tribute to the late, respected journalist and activist, John Newfong and a closing night awards presentation, the autonomy, scale and quality of the free community event was impressive and instructive.

Loss and recovery of identity and relationship was a common theme in many of the short dramas and comedies screened in the circular, multi-purpose South Bank Piazza on the large daylight screen. Ivan Sen’s stylish, black and white noir piece, Warm Strangers, opened the festival. Its tense treatment of the last desperate minutes in a young Aboriginal man’s life set the tone. Sen’s other early films-Wind, Tears and Shifting Shelter 2 were also shown throughout the week. Sen’s achingly beautiful first feature, Beneath Clouds, was given the honour of closing the festival on Friday night. Black Man Down (Sam Watson) and Round Up (Rima Tamou) added to the range of perspectives in the non-documentary section. However, Wayne Blair took the honours in the 2003 Indigenous Film Awards for his hilarious Kathy, a clever spoof about a lovable but nutty middle-aged woman who thinks she’s Cathy Freeman. Also directed by Blair, Jubulj (which means fair-haired Aboriginal woman) effortlessly narrates a complex, psychological story of a young woman whose Aboriginality suddenly ‘wakes up’ inside her. Black Talk, by the same director, was also screened.

Selected mainstream documentaries included 2 films by Danielle MacLean, Bonita Mabo: For Who I Am, and Turning Tides of the Brisbane River, Leah Purcell’s Black Chicks Talking and the Human Rights Commission’s Bringing Them Home.

“Mirror, Mirror…How do images of Aboriginal people impact on society?” was the title of a forum facilitated by well-known local Murri academic and activist, Mary Graham Kombumerri. A panel consisting of Colleen Lavelle, Douglas Watkin and Jeannette Fabrila, discussed ‘the image’ as a process of both mystification and demystification of Aboriginality. Some key distinctions between Indigenous and non-indigenous production styles and audiovisual priorities emerged, demonstrating the potential and need for further public discussion.

The closing night ceremony included a multi-layered music-video of the recent Sorry Day March across the river from City Hall to Musgrave Park in South Brisbane, produced as part of 4AAA Murri Radio’s Video Workshop by young Indigenous media trainees. Founder and director of 4AAA, Tiga Bayles, underlined the need for “positive images of Aboriginal people” and confirmed that “we’re very much committed to next year’s festival, and the year after that, and the year after that.” Representing the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, whose Myer Family Indigenous Scholarship has assisted the careers of Sen, Blair, Perkins and other award-winning Indigenous film makers, Alex Daw was equally optimistic about the future of the event. Similarly, Zane Trow, Artistic Director of South Bank’s Public Art Program, was “happy to be working with Chris Peacock, having been involved since the early stages of the project.” He hopes the festival “will grow and mature over the next 3-5 years to become a significant national event.”

The cultural success of the Colourised Film Festival was primarily due the fact that it has established the basis of a working organisational formula and a positive, cross-cultural public presence on which to build.

Colourised Film Festival 2003, Screen Change, South Bank, Brisbane, July 8, 10, 11

Avant-garde filmmaking rarely involves looking back. The emphasis is on being at the cutting edge, on leading us kicking and screaming into the new historical moment. But paradoxically, avant-garde works often need historical contextualisation to explain how their textual forms arise in response to contemporary ideas and practices. Thus the value of The Plastic Pulse season, curated by Jon Dale for the Media Resournce Centre in Adelaide.

Avant-garde cinema may have enjoyed its first flowering in France and Germany in the 1920s, but the next focus of sustained creativity came in the United States between the early 1940s and the 1960s. The Plastic Pulse provided a rare opportunity to see works from influential figures such as Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow and Maya Deren and to consider their links to the present.

The most anticipated event of the season was an evening concentrating on the works of New York composer/filmmaker Phil Niblock. Niblock’s The Magic City abstracted a performance by Sun Ra’s Arkestra, exploring the possibilities of synaesthesia between abstract imagery and dissonant jazz composition. With his new work Guitar Too, For Four, Niblock has shifted to foregrounding the dialectical relation between music and image.

This was a classic piece of minimalism counterposing a split-screened video of an ethnographic documentary with a composition played live consisting of electric guitar feedback moderated by synthesisers. Small shifts in the music arise both from the feeding back of ambient sound (the pick-up of each guitar ‘hears’ the other guitars as well as its own output) and tonal shifts made by the performers, who were led by Oren Ambarchi, one of the forces behind SBS’s Subsonics program. Harmonic tones and overtones emerge, until they are overtaken by other developments.

The listener shifts attention between these voices—the emergent harmonics and the primary sounds—and then from aural to visual cues. The image is referential, repeatable and discontinuous in contrast to the continuous, improvised change within the music, which responds only to its own abstract structuring.

Music theoretician Stephen Whittington took up the connection between film and music when he introduced a collection from the recently-deceased Brakhage, emphasising the films as “continuity arts” in which patterns of succession were central. Whittington also stressed Brakhage’s concentration on seeing differently, a point borne out by the different parts of Dog Star Man (1963-64) in which we are invited to see both film and flesh differently by an emphasis on their textures, and by The Wonder Ring (1955), in which a train journey offers the raw material for a visual abstraction of reflection and refraction, of shade and framing.

Brakhage’s famous Mothlight (1963), made by pasting moths’ wings on to transparent stock, points to the adventure of process as much as product and to the ways that representation can emerge momentarily out of abstraction. Theo Angell’s Jackie-O Forestry Centre (2001) works similar territory, delving into the frenzied complexity of the video image and nature. You might not be able see the forest for the trees, but this is only a starting point when you’re interested in looking within the tree.

The avant-garde typically leaves its dead by the side of the road, but Dale gave us a valuable opportunity to see films known for earlier, braver transgressions. Sexual and formal transgression is at the heart of Ken Jacobs’ Blond Cobra (1959-63). The film confronts us with the multiple scandals of Jack Smith’s improvised narration consistently veering off into pornographic fantasy, associated with a blank screen, randomly staged and assembled shots of Smith and assorted comrades in drag, and even the random interpolation of whatever’s on the radio at that moment. There is a sense of freedom in imagining that anything might get sucked into the mix.

Smith’s own magnum opus Flaming Creatures (1963) is a whacked-out appropriation of popular genres such as the musical, the orientalist melodrama, and the horror movie, which allows the perverse and violent sexuality at the heart of these genres to bubble to the surface. John Waters suddenly seems to be only stating the obvious.

Other old favourites included Deren, the Lara Croft of Jungian terrains, and her Girl’s Own Adventures in the unconscious, and Sidney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes (1949), a delirious mixture of Dada, stoned jazz, women in nighties and men in diving suits.

Sheldon Rochlin’s Vali: The Witch of Positano (1965) provided a local perspective. In this documentary Vali Myers, who died recently in Melbourne, works through the possibilities for a Sydney girl in the 1960s to reinvent herself (and Australia in the process) in line with old-style new-age witchiness. If one theme of the contemporary avant-garde is the nature of technological materials with which we live, Vali addressed herself and her own fantasy life as among the most enduring forms of material.

Plastic Pulse, curator Jon Dale, Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, May 28, June 11, 18, 25

Having been shielded during the bad old days from the filth thrust upon them by Joyce, DH Lawrence, Pasolini and Michelangelo, Australians are once again experiencing an eruption of banning from Attorneys-General across the country. The most recent is the Federal Attorney General’s refusal to allow the screening of Larry Clark’s Ken Park at the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals. In this Daryl Williams was supported by the Office of Film and Literature Classification and a board of appeal consisting of 3 people known neither for their knowledge of cinema nor their expertise in matters of censorship. It must be said in defence of the Government that Australians have a history of censoring themselves. Our sheep-pen, xenophobic conservatism makes many Third World and authoritarian countries look like Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme.

Ken Park has already been sold to Singapore, Hong Kong and Brazil. It is a serious study of a pressing problem, beautifully performed, precisely edited and responsibly directed by Clark and Edward Lachman. The 5 Californian skateboarders whose lives it highlights at crisis point might come hurtling over the hill at Bankstown, St Kilda or Fremantle. All are over 18 and any child pornography exists only in the minds of fundamentalists. I find car advertisements more offensive and films which feature nothing but explosions and racist hatred more deserving of X, Y and Z classification.

So I’ve seen Ken Park? Yes, along with thousands of others before it passed to its next venue. No longer are we stultified by the reverence of Empire on the one hand or the insularity of the Jindyworobaks on the other. We are part of a global, sophisticated society. If the bans on Lawrence and the seizure of Michelangelo etchings now seem laughable, the last gasps of conformist bigotry, so is the ban on Ken Park already unworkable. This is due to many aspects of our changed society. The first is networking. Those who have traveled to festivals in Telluride or Toronto know how easy it is to screen a film in a barn or media centre at a day’s notice and by word of mouth. Prints can be couriered thousands of miles easily for critics’ previews.

The second change is the Internet. DVDs are available on E-bay, VHS copies from Amazon.com. There are even sites from which you can download the entire movie, a snap if you have broadband. Since one of these involves piracy, I won’t give the URL. The present Act of Classification doesn’t work on the Net, though I wish it did, since the hate sites are as psychotic as violent video games, which are deplorable. Here we are talking about film, an art that has become the major representative form of this century. Those who love it are outraged that the classification system evolved to guide adult consumers is being misused. The excuse, as usual, is the possible psychological harm to children. Can you see an 8-year-old fronting up at the box office being admitted to an R rated film? It’s easy, however, to imagine the same kid hacking away unsupervised at some Ninja webpage from hell. That’s something to explore.

I repeat: we are concerned with film. As adults we have the right to see, hear and read what we wish. We need a drastic revision of the act, and the presence of film professionals on boards of classification. The ‘Free Cinema’ group has been set up by members associated with the initial appeal. They include television critic Margaret Pomeranz, ABC Radio National’s Julie Rigg, directors Albie Thoms and Tom Zubrycki and writer Frank Moorhouse. In Adelaide, Scott Hicks, Rolf de Heer, Craig Monahan and Adelaide 2005 International Film Festival Director Katrina Sedgwick have lent their instant support. So have the city’s top academics and critics. As the current holder of the Pascall Prize, my formal citation is “to help the greatest number of Australians experience aspects of their culture with increased knowledge and perception.” In circumstances like these it becomes not just a description but a patriotic duty and damn any government that tries to stop us taking our place in the world. The movement will grow. The film will be seen.

At this year’s Sydney Film Festival, FTO (NSW Film and Television Office) showcased short films funded through the Young Filmmakers Fund. Specifically targeting emerging filmmakers aged between 18 and 35, the fund has provided over $1.6 million to 71 film productions since its creation in 1995.

One of the stand out shorts in the showcase was Avoca, written and directed by Nerida Moore. The film focuses on the director’s experiences growing up in Avoca after her parents moved to the beach-side suburb to pursue the Australian suburban dream. Drawing on her family’s Super 8 archive and ironic recreations of post-war newsreels espousing the virtues of suburban living, Avoca is an intriguing meditation on the role filmic images play in forming and refracting our memories. As the voiceover delves into Moore’s fractured family history, Avoca also effectively conveys the parochial narrow-mindedness that formed the darker side of the sunny post-war suburban dream. The film concludes with Moore returning to contemporary Avoca with a video camera. Ironically, she’s given the same kind of wary reception that her parents received several decades earlier.

Avoca stood out from the other YFF films screened at the Festival for its formal and thematic sophistication, and reflexive rumination on the relationship between personal memory and filmic representations of time and place. The film earned Nerida Moore the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2002 Melbourne International Film Festival.

Avoca, director Nerida Moore, Young Filmmakers Fund Screenings, 50th Sydney Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays, June 13

In 2000, the Australian Film Commission released a study into the problems faced by Australian films during development. One weakness identified in particular was the lack of investment in this phase, and the resulting tendency for Australian films to be pushed through script development and into production before the scripts are ready.

In an effort to improve this, the AFC and the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) designed a program for script development partially modelled on the well-established formats used by Sundance in the USA, eQinoxe in France and Moonstone in the UK.

Called SPARK, the program involves a selection process (to identify 8 film projects with high probabilities of success) followed by a week-long workshop retreat for the writers, working over the stories with a team of internationally respected advisers, including producers, directors, writers and creativity coaches. Halfway through the week, the directors and producers for each project join the process. At the end of the retreat, each team is given a 4-month funded period to complete another draft, which is then looked at by members of the advisory team. In the final stage, the projects are given some assistance to develop a strategic financial plan.

The last edition of OnScreen (RT 55) carried a report from Blake Ayshford on his experiences as a participant at a similar program run by the NSW Film and Television Office. In this issue, OnScreen speaks with the writers, directors and producers for 2 of the projects selected for SPARK. The projects are: Unlocked (writer Christine Rodgers, writer/director Jo Kennedy, producer Clare Sawyer); and Untitled (writer Tania Lacey, writer/director Steve Kearney and producer John Brousek).

Steve Kearney Well, AFC funding is hard to get. There was an advertised workshop component too, which was extra, and therefore we might have expected more interest. I suppose that everybody submitting hoped that nobody else knew about it.

Christine Rodgers I don’t think so, but I’ve been writing for a long time. Certainly getting so many people’s input in quite a concentrated form was really helpful for a particular piece of work.

Jo Kennedy You don’t actually write while you’re there, it’s about ripping things apart and putting them back together. So in a sense it was just like what we do every week, done in a larger context and it was fantastic and invigorating because we’d been going over the material in our script for a couple of years. Just to have that input at that level, with people who’d done a lot of work, was incredibly exciting.

Christine Rodgers Our script was up to the 3rd draft, and we really needed to be kicked up the bum. Although we were really rigorous, we just needed a fresh eye, which was fantastic, because I think you can get to 3rd draft and you’ve got a lot of great ideas, but something’s still not quite working. And I think in Australia a lot of scripts are funded at that stage, where you think they’re just not quite there. We knew that about our piece and it was the perfect time to have a spotlight shone at it.

Getting someone to read your script is quite a big ask. It’s half a day to a whole day just to give proper feedback, and we’re all working trying to make a living. So that was the wonderful thing about SPARK. Those people were paid to give feedback.

Steve Kearney I worked in the US and over there I knew I could always take a script to a studio or pass it around the writing community…it keeps you going.

Christine Rodgers It seems like over there everybody’s looking for a good idea, and I don’t get that feeling here. They say “oh no, not another script.”

Steve Kearney The whole grants industry here is geared towards independent people with money. I have to get 5 grants a year—at least-—just to pay the bills. In the US my friends spend a year doodling around with their spec script because they’ve just got $500,000 for the last one. And that’s how they can develop their scripts for so long, and so intensely.

Jo Kennedy And you need that time-—it just takes time. It needs all those periods of pain, and leaving it and agonising and going back to it. That’s all part of the process and you need to be paid to do it, otherwise you can’t do it.

As writers, how well do you feel able to remain in the driving seat while all these high-profile experts are pushing and pulling at it?

Jo Kennedy There were moments when I felt daunted, when someone would tell you that your idea won’t work. Then I thought “Bugger that, I can do this scene like this if I want.” And I found I liked being put in the position of having to defend my ideas.

Clare Sawyer It was a brilliant way of getting the ideas to incubate over a substantial and focused period. Getting that range of opinions was fantastic—there was a sense that every possible tangent could be explored.

Jo Kennedy Yeah, it wasn’t like you only had the one adviser, who might not empathise or have any affinity with your kind of work. Before we went to SPARK, Christine and I sent the script to someone in the States who said basically “what a load of crap” and told us to change the whole thing. If we hadn’t had some good feedback at that point we would have been very despondent for maybe 3 to 6 months [Laughter].

Christine Rodgers And I think we might have taken it in a [direction] that could have been really bad for the work.

Jo Kennedy Ours didn’t change so much as distil. It would have taken us a year to do what we’ve done in 4 weeks. It was that valuable.

Now that you’re coming to the end of this process, and you’re about to hand in your completed drafts for final comments, do you feel that it puts a stamp on your individual projects and that it gives potential funders—beyond the AFC—a greater confidence to know that a team of heavyweights has gone over it with a bat?

Clare Sawyer We have had interest here and there from people who know about the project. I reckon this highlights our film; something that makes it stand out at least a bit and creates a buzz.

John Brousek In those terms, the success of this program is something none of us will really know for another couple of years at least. It’ll take that long before the current crop of films can get out there to be judged. If it works, then audiences, and funders, will take notice.

Rolf De Heer’s Alexandra’s Project opens in beguiling style. Gliding effortlessly through the calm of leafy suburban streets, we finally come to a halt outside the innocuous, red brick wall of a contemporary townhouse complex. The morning sun strikes the brick wall in that pure, unadulterated way only early light can. This is arguably the only moment of equanimity in De Heer’s 10th feature film.

As with the opening scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the benign suburban setting in Alexandra’s Project belies the nightmarish scenario that unfolds. Though clearly in more of a realist than surrealist register, De Heer’s potent mixture of thriller and family psychodrama is, in many respects, no less disturbing than Lynch’s 1986 film.

Alexandra’s ‘project’ is to disabuse her overbearing husband of his complacent belief that their marriage is satisfactory. On his birthday, Alexandra (Helen Buday) presents Steve (Gary Sweet) with a home video, a singular work that redefines the ‘home movie’ genre. Unwittingly made a prisoner in his own home, Steve is forced to watch. A gauche striptease, by way of birthday greetings, is followed by Alexandra’s increasingly acrimonious litany of complaints. Her final revenge comes in the form of a meticulously planned and devastatingly effective act of schadenfreude.

It has become something of a truism to observe that Rolf De Heer has a predilection for characters who are in some way marginalised. His films have explored the plight of individuals who are isolated by social circumstance (The Quiet Room, Bad Boy Bubby, The Old Man Who Read Stories), disability (Dance Me to My Song), race (The Tracker) and even intergalactic adversity (Epsilon). Many of De Heer’s protagonists, unable or unwilling to lead conventional lives, are nevertheless extraordinary characters.

In this context, Alexandra’s Project is less typical of the director’s oeuvre. Steve and Alexandra have 2 children and the standard trappings of middle-class life. It is their very ordinariness that marks them as anomalous De Heer characters. However, the central premise in Alexandra’s Project—individuals at emotional and psychological cross-purposes—is a theme that has fundamentally defined the director’s work on screen.

De Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication.

The pre-linguistic manchild in Bad Boy Bubby negotiates the terrifying world outside his home by mimicking the speech of others. As a form of communication, Bubby’s mimicry has a peculiarly refractory and tellingly ironic effect. In Epsilon, an intergalactic traveler falls to earth. Her uncompromisingly literal understanding of English leads to a series of exchanges with an earthling marked by misapprehensions and misunderstandings. The Tracker is characterised by minimal, often oblique exchanges between the central characters. Action, gesture, the expressive power of music and the still, painted image prevail as the most forceful means of communication.

While Alexandra’s Project is conspicuously dialogue-driven, it is nevertheless concerned with a relationship crisis precipitated by the fundamental failure to communicate. After decades of unhappy marriage, it is telling that Buday’s Alexandra is only able to talk frankly to Steve via the mediated forum of videotape. As Alexandra’s invective gathers momentum, Steve, by contrast, is rendered increasingly and uncharacteristically mute. Made literally speechless by the events unfolding on screen, his only recourse to action is the remote control.

Where numerous De Heer films have foregrounded communication problems and the shortcomings of language, most nevertheless close on an optimistic note. One of the most moving scenes in all of De Heer’s films comes in the final moments of Dance Me to My Song. Julia’s ecstatic wheelchair dance when reunited with Eddie is a pure and poignant expression of that optimism. By contrast, the unremittingly bleak denouement in Alexandra’s Project makes this arguably the most fatalistic of the director’s recent work.

Alexandra’s Project equally represents the director’s elucidation of space. With some exceptions—most prominently Epsilon and The Tracker—the mise-en-scène in De Heer’s films has been dominated by oppressive, urban interiors. And the archetypal De Heer interior is the family home. Protective and potentially threatening, the home in De Heer’s films sometimes affords shelter, but is more likely to be the setting for traumatic events. In everything from The Quiet Room to Dance Me to My Song it becomes a profoundly ambivalent space.

The most extreme representations of this are found in Bad Boy Bubby and Alexandra’s Project. While Bubby is incarcerated in a filthy, claustrophobic space that is more hell than home, it is a location from which he eventually frees himself. In De Heer’s latest film, the family residence, with its state-of-the-art security system, becomes an inescapable fortress. The bland, beige interiors of Steve and Alexandra’s contemporary townhouse are transformed into a dark and sinister space. A captive audience of one watching in horrified fascination, Steve is thrown into noirish relief by the dim, penumbral light from the television screen.

The grim mise-en-scene of married life in Alexandra’s Project extends the dystopic representation of the family found in other De Heer films. Unlike The Quiet Room and Bad Boy Bubby, Alexandra’s Project is presented from a surprisingly blunt feminist perspective. In its unadorned style and sentiment, the film recalls classic feminist films including A Question of Silence (1982), the work of Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris. As with that film, De Heer makes clear that Alexandra’s ‘project’ is, to invoke a time-honoured catchcry, both personal and political.

The feminist polemic in Alexandra’s Project conforms with what could be described as the director’s broadly politicised approach to his characters. As writer or co-writer of all but one of his feature films, De Heer engages with diverse genres and situations. What informs all of the director’s work, from the pro-environment discourse of Epsilon to the reconciliatory agenda of The Tracker, is an unequivocally humanist point of view. While Alexandra’s Project borders on the didactic at times, De Heer’s genuinely humanist perspective ensures that character doesn’t degenerate into caricature, or opinion into Fatal Attraction-style hyperbole.

As such, Alexandra’s Project not only makes an interesting addition to recent, more considered examples of the ‘woman’s revenge film’ (Shame, Mortal Thoughts and Thelma and Louise) but is a worthy contribution to the burgeoning body of mature Australian psychodramas, including The Boys and Lantana, released recently.

Alexandra’s Project, director Rold De Heer, distributor Fandango Australia/Palace Films.

New media art education—are curators happy with it? I emailed several of them with questions about regional and institutional differences, the use of various media forms, the re-use of media and attitudes to collaboration and experimentation. Replies were quite varied, sometimes contradictory, sometimes convergent, and ranged from the very specific critique of local scenes and issues to more expansive overviews. The following responses come from curator/producer and RMIT lecturer Keely Macarow; former Creative Director of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) and now Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS (University of Technology Sydney), Ross Gibson; ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology) Director and 2003 Primavera curator (MCA, Sydney),Julianne Pierce; curator of the e-Media space at Melbourne’s CCP (Contemporary Centre for Photography), Daniel Palmer; and Director of PICA (Perth institute of Contemporary Arts), Sarah Miller.

Difference

Do you feel it is possible to speak of differences in terms of regions, cities, or even at the level of various art institutions? And what of ‘media’ institutions as opposed to more traditional art schools?

Keely Macarow I feel more confident and indeed more interested in the work by students coming out of tertiary departments that are dedicated to an organic and interdisciplinary media arts education. Art schools that are steeped in Victorian ideals that compartmentalise (and therefore thwart interdisciplinary media) arts practice seem to continually push out students who have little real grounding in media arts culture and history. This maxim leads to the production of work that can be somewhat vacuous and lazy on conceptual and theoretical levels. I am not suggesting that all traditional art schools are like this, but I do find myself drawn to the work that is discursive and aware of its place in media arts culture. Similarly, artists who obsess with technology at the expense of ideas quite often also produce problematic and naive work. And to be honest I’d be wary of anything that pushes the catch-cry ‘new media.’

Julianne Pierce I think that there are very distinct differences emerging regionally. In many respects it depends on what resources are available to students. Art schools and other institutions that are well-resourced are producing some very interesting new media artists. Some of the stronger works are coming out of other sorts of disciplines and institutions, for example, institutes of technology, design, and computer programming courses. The benefit of art schools is that students have access to artist-lecturers and theory—this is perhaps where the most interesting works are being generated. Unfortunately, some art schools are struggling to offer resources for new media practice, and I think that this is having an impact regionally.

Ross Gibson I reckon people are just doing whatever they can with whatever they can get their hands on, wherever there is a cache of hardware and software. In this way it’s not such a different situation from independent film and video scenes of previous decades.

Sarah Miller While there are a number of more mature artists [in Perth] working with technology and distinct initiatives such as SymbioticA, BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth), pvi collective and so on, I don’t know that emerging artists in WA are really engaging with new media in a very substantial way. It may be that they’re nervous about approaching PICA…but we do a lot of proactive work with the art schools getting graduating students into shows and studio residencies so it’s not just that. The other issue is that the [new media] courses are very young—2 to 3 years old at the most—which means that it will probably be a while before we see the impact of those courses/graduates in the broader community. I’d also note that in WA these courses haven’t developed in the way that they did in say Melbourne or Sydney—out of a history of installation, performance art and consequently film/video and photo media…Nor do we see a lot of work coming from graduates of ‘media’ institutions. I would suggest that this is because they are more vocationally driven and there tends to be an emphasis on computer sciences.

Trends

What trends do you see emerging in the work of younger/emerging artists, what kinds of mediums and how novel are their approaches?

KM The most important thing in my mind is that people keep experimenting with content and the sonic and visual properties of media art…I have seen some amazing video and sound works recently that completely overhaul our expectations of ‘new’ media art. I am talking about works that are glitchy, messy and raw, and quite unlike the derivative cyberish gloss that plagued much late 90s digital art.

JP Video and sound are very strong areas at the moment. These are technologies which artists can have in their studios or at home. Access to production facilities is quite crucial, and these sorts of ‘portable’ mediums are proving to be very popular. I’m noticing less interest in interactive works; definitely CD-ROM production is declining, as is the use of authoring tools such as Director. Younger artists seem to be more interested in using video and manipulating images in After Effects or customised animation tools. I’m surprised that the web isn’t being used more for creating art—once again the strongest use of the web is in sound. Perhaps the art fraternity sees the web as too lowbrow…realistically however, it is difficult to exhibit web-based works, and I see a shift away from monitor/terminal works to projection and sound pieces. Performance is also a strong area at the moment, especially amongst younger female artists who are working with performance and video installations. Gaming is having a huge impact, and we are seeing artists using game engines and game style graphics to generate video works. Once again, hardly any of these are interactive—I think that there is generally a decline in interactive media, unless you are associated with a university or research institute who can support the ongoing development of interactive media.

Daniel Palmer At CCP we regularly show Australian and international artists working in digital screen-based forms. Most regularly, although also modestly, the e-Media Gallery shows an ongoing program of monitor-based work…This was established in 1997 as a dedicated space for the display of CD-ROMs, and has evolved to include net art and DVDs. For a variety of reasons (not least being scarce resources for curating), we tend to work on a proposal basis. But to be honest I have been a little surprised at the small number of e-Media proposals I have received from Australian artists. My sense is that most have bigger ambitions than the single screen display, but it may also be that students are not trained to get their work ‘out there.’

I have been impressed recently with artists using archival and stock lens-based ‘footage’, artists using gaming models and also the growing use of interactive video. It seems that most of the best artists using new media are aware that for work to be really engaging in a ‘gallery’ context, it usually needs a sculptural/installation element.

SM …[I] certainly don’t see much interest in gaming, internet art or interactive writing although Murdoch University runs a hypertext course within their creative writing department and I believe that there is a lot of activity around that.

RG People are working in multi-channel ways—several screens, complex soundtracks, often with algorithms or complex rule-systems underlying the ‘synthesis’ of the visual, textual and audio materials that comprise the ‘display’ at any particular moment…In the context of education, I find that the best work is coming from graduates who have been encouraged not to obsess about technical wizardry…. Younger artists tend to want to show off their technical chops, but the well-advised ones learn to go past that, to the much more difficult and rewarding issue of conjuring and communicating ‘worlds’ of emotions and ideas…These are transcendent of normality somehow—you go through alteration as you encounter them. Your received beliefs change. This idea that technology is a system of devices for transcending the limits of one’s received, quotidian ability and comprehension…that’s about the only thing that’s compelling, per se, about technologies, regardless of whether they’re new or old.

Making the market

What notions of ‘professionalism’ and levels of sophistication are apparent about the art world/art market? What kinds of ambitions? Do graduates seek institutional verification or are they mainly involved in artist run initiatives?

JP The younger artists I am familiar with, who are working with new media, are really a bit detached from the art world. They generally don’t pursue a gallery to represent them; they spend their time focusing on international new media festivals and residencies, and the occasional exhibition in Australia with a new media focus. However, there is a high level of professionalism amongst them. They are often well traveled and familiar with international trends in media. They organise events and participate in organisations such as dLux, Experimenta and ANAT—generally they are quite motivated and active.

Regionally, the highest level of professionalism, in regard to the process of curating would be in Sydney and Melbourne. There is an awareness in these cities of how to present to a curator, they have business cards and give you packages of their work when you go to the studios. This of course occurs in other cities, but not at the same level. I think living in a competitive city creates competitive practices—and this is important to a curator. When you get home with your list of potential artists, the package makes a real difference, it enables you to make considered choices.

How experimental?

Within these differences, if any, is there more or less ‘experimental’ work?

RG There is some work that professes to be ‘experimental’ because it is ‘about’ the new technology, so much so that the user generally can’t engage with issues other than the medium-specificity of the technology. This kind of work is experimental inasmuch as it tests the limits of the tools, but it’s not especially deep or groundbreaking, and it’s rapidly exhausted in terms of intrigue and ‘something to say.’ Technology-focused [work] doesn’t tend to test the limits of the relationships between the tools and the mentalities that always emerge from and outreach the dictates of the tools. Merely testing the limits of the tools is the easiest and most easily exhausted procedure in all art practice. It needs to be a component of all art practice, but I would invite an artist to pause and re-consider if they are finding that the limits of the tools have become the subject of the work.

Working with curators

From my own experience as an independent curator (an endangered species in Australia, few can live in such precarious circumstances and on miniscule project budgets) I would certainly agree with Julianne Pierce’s observation that in Sydney and Melbourne young artists have the most ‘professional’ approach. There are all sorts of criticisms one can make of this understanding of the art system as a treadmill, but it does make it easier for the often under-resourced curator. I would suggest that young artists actively seek out curators and keep them informed of their latest works—that they develop a relationship with curators, and not just those in the large institutions. For example, whenever Emile Zile from Melbourne sends me a tape he has just made, he also sends more bits and pieces—flyers, posters and the like—that set the scene for his work and that of other Melbourne artists. Lastly I would urge emerging artists to creatively use email lists and the internet, not only as a tool for information dissemination, but as a global site for ideas to come to life.

Linda Wallace is a Queensland based artist, curator and director of the media arts company, machine hunger www.machinehunger.com.au

Encountering the Brisbane art group Arterial’s TRACK installation is like stepping suddenly into a collective dream. As you approach the alcove, random sounds and images emerge unbidden, mutate, and disappear. Even from a distance, the artwork’s mysteriously illogical idle state flickerings evoke the evanescent imagery of the mind’s ‘dream screen.’ A triumph of non-linearity, this complex fusion of historiography and site-specific art is permeated with a pervasive sense of reverie.

A fabulously industrial interface—chunky metal levers and thick, buttons housed in a metal case and set into the building’s infamous distressed concrete—summons multiple audio and video tracks telling histories that are at once shared but unknown, or at least (until now) undocumented. The console enables the participant—for there are no mere ‘viewers’ here—to navigate some 40 video and several thousand audio tracks investigating the history of the venue. The iconic Brisbane Powerhouse is both matrix and nexus for this ambitious project, which, in contrast to the frequently unmet promises of much new media art, succeeds demonstrably.

Projected diagonally on the wall of the alcove, 3 distinct video tracks dramatise the history of the space, charting its trajectory from pre-European invasion, through its industrial phase, to post-industrial live performance space. These spatio-temporal histories interweave and refer to each other via well-planned associational links, which produce a hoop-like sense of time, a collapsing of past, present and future; the eternally present moment. Sound, ranging from quotes to recovered conversations to music, is embedded in a few video works, permitting virtually endless permutations of sounds and images. Many of the heterogeneous video works, particularly the totemic and songlines pieces, are rich in hypnogogic imagery; the experience of these enhances the sensation of dreaming while awake. The simultaneous, non-linear remembrance of histories is significant: no one narrative is privileged, and history is construed as contingent, deeply interrelated and ongoing.

This ‘drifting’ has sometimes been criticised as insubstantial skimming or browsing, but in TRACK’s case, the hypermediated journey develops an organic, accreted understanding of the space. The effect for the user, of this intentional wandering through vestiges of the Powerhouse, is an art experience that mimics the associative processes of the unconscious and dream ‘logic.’

The product of a 3-year artistic inquiry, TRACK is, in many senses, a community artwork. It converses with other successful new media projects hosted at the Powerhouse including its Arterial precursor Elektrosonic Interference and the recent Temporal Intervals. It draws together the work of numerous video and sound artists, documentary makers, editors, actors, performers and information technology specialists in a complexly interrelated, communally-authored whole that sublates the twin art myths of both the singular creative genius, and the difficulties of reconciling multiple and divergent artistic talents. Most significantly perhaps, TRACK hinges on community involvement.

Though its idle state fascinates—the sudden eruptions of random soundscapes have surprised a few passers by—it is in the interaction with the machine that the artwork is made meaningful. By delivering the documents to the viewer via self-directed use of the console, the contemplation of the artwork is no longer abstract, but a material experience. The result is that, by means of the proficiently computerised interface, the staging of multiple writings is largely determined by the user, who thus acquires a more prominent status. Though in new media practice, this kind of co-authorship is sometimes more interesting than successful., in TRACK, the relations between artists, community and artwork produce a powerful fusion.

The interactivity in successful new media installations such as this one both entails and impels direct action on the part of the user. These actions are both physical—touching, pressing and cranking—and intellectual, with the invitation to make sense of it by self-directed exploration of the various representations and associations of narrative nuclei.

TRACK takes the stories of the place and transforms them into both an aesthetic and pedagogical experience. A tribute (not only, but particularly) to producer/director Therese Nolan Brown’s ability to cohere a project of such scale; to Andrew Kettle’s time-travelling soundscapes; to Chris Davey’s exceptional programming skills, and to the Powerhouse, a protean place in the city’s consciousness, TRACK is a visionary experience.

A brief history of publishing…In 1476 the English bookmaker William Caxton returned to England to start his own press, having mastered the new techniques of printing in Germany and Flanders. Jump cut to the mid 1960s. Maverick thinker, Ted Nelson, conceives a radical publishing model of electronic distribution, of screens and something called hypertext. Wipe to early 90s digiculture. Alt-X network begins publishing digital books online, texts specifically designed for new electronic reading interfaces such as Ebook and Palm Pilot. The network’s founder and contributing author, Mark Amerika, is lauded by Time magazine as an innovator, a visionary taking the world into the 21st century: a thinker for the digital age, giving us a glimpse, a snapshot of what the future of publishing will look like.

Fade to Kailua beach, Hawaii, 2003. Here we find the digital thoughtographer himself, strolling on the beach, pondering Borges, books of sand and the Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There . Scanning his shadow he reflects on its outline, the way it traces him, leaves his mark on the sand, like writing. This trace, he reflects, this “not me”, is nonetheless an insinuation of himself, “an alien life form whose shadow Other is always on the verge of disappearing.” I manage to catch his attention, or at least his trace, before it vanishes.

Remarkable. As with all things virtual and continuously refuted by time, it feels elusive yet enduring. As Borges reminds us, “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Alt-X has been called the “publishing model of the future.” How would you evaluate its success as a new distribution paradigm?

When I first started the site a decade ago as a gopher site, before the world wide web was even graphical, it began as a kind of conceptual art project, where an internationally distributed network of like-minded artists, fiction writers, and theorists could build a niche audience of “interactive-others” who would see what we were doing and, if they felt at home, begin participating in the project themselves. When the Mosaic GUI-browser came out, we had to shift gears and evolve a more visually provocative and hypertextually-inclined publishing model, which was a great challenge and one we took on with pure pleasure (and here I should thank the then teenaged Knut Mork, whose father came from Ork, and who found us on the web from his terminal in Oslo, Norway).

For a while, we were inventing this new “network publishing model” and updating our content and design on a weekly if not daily basis. In some ways the mainstream media must have been right referring to us as the “publishing model of the future” because soon after we began gaining notoriety in the web culture, I’d say from 1995 and after, lots of other network publishing ventures began developing their own projects in cyberspace—and a lot of their content and strategies looked quite a bit like ours. Now, I’m not suggesting that Alt-X was one of the early models of dot.com hyperbole—in fact, we were constantly manipulating the vibe that came from that side of the commercial culture—but it’s funny, because that “future” that we apparently modeled became grossly perverted by the speculative market of the late 90s and so we had to once again adjust accordingly.

We could have gone one of 2 ways: either accept venture capital and become something that we were not, or blow off all offers and further problematise the discourse network. Of course, we chose the latter and soon began challenging the concepts of “online publishing” and “writing” themselves, no longer content using the web as just a visually appealing hypertext delivery system for content that reflected book culture, but that viewed the medium more as an exhibition or network installation model that expanded the concept of writing to include streaming media, experimental artist ebooks, net art, mp3 concept albums, “invisible” theory, and electro-poetics.

In this context, Alt-X does have a reputation as a niche publisher for the digerati. But it does have the potential to be a modifier of culture, as well as a distributor of culture. Do you see a role for yourself as a latter day Gutenberg, contributing to the dissemination of a digital literacy?

Sometimes I feel more like a latter day Cervantes, or Quixote as the case may be, and the windmills I keep chasing are really avatars of the tortoise. No matter how fast I go, I can never catch up with that ‘other’ thing that seems to slowly lead me toward the finish line and that somehow always keeps its distance from me. But I will get there one day, Darren, mark my words!

I really like Alt-X’s tag as a distribution platform for “unclassifiable writing.” Given the critical zeal of new media theorists to name and categorise new writing—ergodic, hyperfiction, cybertext, interfiction etc—how can Alt-X retain its edge as a purveyor of the inscrutable?

We don’t seek to publish or exhibit work that would fit into the mold of an easily digestible academic theory. True, our popular Electronic Book Review new media forum is a place to debate all of these terms, contexts, sub-contexts, and historical plays. The actors who participate in the “edified conversation” at ebr—not the least of which is the executive editor Joe Tabbi—are some of the most provocative thinkers in new media culture. But we still believe it’s socially more responsible for all of our writers, whether breakthrough fictioneers, biomedia net artists, or politically-incorrect critical theorists, to experiment with the form and content of actual creative practice, to use what Matthew Fuller once termed “word bombs”—that is, an interventionist phraseology—to hack into reality by way of a Burroughsian strategy of “storming the reality studio.” In fact, a new Alt-X tag for the next decade should be something like “real sites, fictitious media.”

Alt-X is clearly still going strong. What do you have planned for its future?

A huge 10-year anniversary party. Announcement will be in your email box sometime in the early Fall. No need to RSVP; just bring your body and a desire to work it all out.

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