Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

April 2004

Hypersense

Across 4 Friday nights in February, if you shot down to Acton Peninsula, site of the National Museum on Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin, you’d be among some of the funkiest new media worlds in The Garden of Australian Dreams. Sky Lounge 2004 was the third in a series of February multimedia mini-festivals. After heat-wave late summer days edged with gold-rimmed mountain lines, you could sit back beneath luminous skies, chill out, eat, drink and get into the slow-lane groove. Alternative, surfy, homie, artsy, under-age, over-age; in the lights we’re all green, all red and we all get along. There’s nothing to really compare.

Listen to electronic artists and DJs making music. Experience visual and music installations in The Tunnel. Watch animated flicks from the hill, plopped on beanbags (if you’re lucky), in between dingo, cyclone and backyard fences. Short films curated by Malcolm Turner (Animation Posse), projected onto a white box known as The House of Australian Dreams, framed by palm tree fronds in the middle of the garden. Or make little sorties to K-Space, featuring the best of interactive and linear new media. The open-air acoustics were surprisingly good and everyone could talk as well. Your own pace was the right pace.

The highlights of the two final nights? Hard to pick, but here goes. Green Night: the HyperSense Complex in The Tunnel, an intoxicating mix of predetermined, programmed music and finger-puppet, gestural movement (or not), an experience of art-as-it-happens, with random events including people unintentionally wandering into the generated space. Hallucinatory choreography on the go. And a couple of animations: Grey Avenue (Eugene Foo, Australia), in which buildings morph into creatures (you want to take them home), and Ward 13 (Peter Cornwell, Australia), an hilarious projection of all-out hospital fear with a faux ‘wheelchair’ chase par excellence.

Red Night: watch Red Thread (Jo Lawrence, England) a can-opener ties up a woman with red string. Then an animation closer to home: It’s Like That (Southern Ladies Animations Group, Australia) features the voices of children in immigration detention camps, showing us their world. The animations come to an end and we’re told to move back so we’re not skipped on…

Ladiez of the Jump Rope are hop-hop hip-hop with smiles, clever rhymes, sexy legs. Juxtaposing rhyme, dance, singing, skipping, hopping and break-dancing, the Ladiez play out a fight between ‘Asians’ and ‘Whities’ at a school camp, concluding with a skip-out battle. Pony M of the Ladiez says: “We don’t take ourselves too seriously.” This attitude shines in their playful rhymes and sing-song taunts. The Ladiez are innovative hip-hoppers, dealing with contemporary themes with an ease and confidence that charms the audience.

Somebody whispers: “You light up a dark room.” And we smile. Time to go home.

Sky Lounge: the future friday 2004, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, Feb 6, 13, 20, 27

RealTime issue #60 April-May 2004 pg. 43

Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire, Pan Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003 ISBN 1 876832 78 9.

Those 19th century photographs in which the dearly departed seem to hover translucent and spectral beside the living are wonderful examples of the link between photography, desire and performance. While the living sought to souvenir one final glimpse of their dead, the spirit photographers who ‘staged’ such portraits profited from the huge popularity of an industry featuring “death and its accoutrements.” The popularity of Victorian funeral and spirit photography was part of a widespread “reaction against a rational modernity,” writes Anne Marsh in her new book The Darkroom.

Photography, Marsh writes, “is a performative representational practice that has aspects in common with theatre.” This approach is at the centre of her discussion of a range of historical and contemporary photographs and re-readings of some key critiques of photography. A senior lecturer in Visual Culture at Monash University, Melbourne, Marsh’s approach is heavily theoretical and most engaging and lively when specific photographs are used to bear out the critical concepts with which she is concerned. In a chapter on spirit photography, she describes how theatrical techniques, ritual and artifice are used in particular images which often mobilised dramatic swathes of light and darkness to symbolise the movement from one world to the next. While it’s not hard to detect the theatrical in the ethereal poses and framing of Julia Margaret Cameron’s otherworldly portraits, in the composite spirit shots of William Mumler or the dramatic snaps of mediums oozing white ectoplasmic emissions mid-séance, Marsh is also interested in teasing out the complex operations of desire in “the operator, the subject being photographed and the viewer looking on.”

While Muybridge and Marey’s movement studies were perhaps the first form of performance documentation, Marsh traces the performative aspects of photography back to the camera obscura and other 18th century optical devices which staged an experience like a private theatre. She writes:

One imagines the eighteenth century viewer, alone or in a small party, standing about in his or her darkened room trying to see the picture from nature in much the same way as people gathered at shop windows displaying the latest three dimensional computer enhanced puzzle picture in the late twentieth century. People move back and forth, trying to adjust their eyes, trying to get the best optical location…Then, as now, the body is the flexible seeing apparatus, the thing that moves about and alters the image, enhancing the body’s experience.

Theatrical effects are also evident in the supposedly factual realm of early documentary photography. Marsh details how American photographer Jacob Riis manufactured dramas to intensify the action in his 19th century New York slum photographs. In establishing photography’s essentially performative nature, Marsh writes, we can “acknowledge that the subject/object of the photograph can perform as a way of un-forming or de-forming the would be truth and objectivity of the photographic process.”

The Darkroom is primarily concerned with this issue of ‘staging’ in both contemporary and historical photographs and in the key critical discourses produced around photography from Benjamin and Barthes to Foucault and Lacan. Marsh argues against a reductive reading of Foucault’s theory of the panopticon that has at times produced a “paranoid discourse” on power relations and ignores the complex interrelationship between desire, seduction, fantasy and performance involved in the taking, posing for and viewing of a photograph. Arguing against a structuralist approach to photography, she maintains that the practice is not “exclusively the tool of any given dominant ideology” but ultimately democratic.

This mode of inquiry allows for a greater scope, depth and breadth in interpreting the photograph, and effectively avoids the kind of limiting moral positioning that occurred for example in Susan Sontag’s famous critique of Diane Arbus’ ‘freaks’ series. Instead of reading photography as an act of violence on its unwitting subjects, Marsh suggests we “focus on the subject or the photograph, rather than the violent action”; thus photography could also be considered a fetishistic activity. Her readings of a range of photographs (by Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin and Australians Linda Sproul, Anne Ferran, Deborah Pauwe, Pat Brassington and others) offer multiple positions and interpretations that do not privilege one perspective over another, yet Marsh also avoids an eternal relativism by commenting on the vicissitudes of certain photographers’ approaches. When looking at Australian Polixeni Papapetrou’s restaging of Lewis Carroll’s famous child portraits using her young daughter as subject (Olympia from the Lewis Carroll Series, 2002) Marsh notes the series’ liberating possibilities in providing both the photographer and her subject “opportunities for…childish play acting.” Yet, while Papapetrou is not unaware of the criticisms of Carroll’s work and debates about representing the child in photography, there remains a potentially problematic imbalance in power relations between mother and daughter in her work. Olympia “is still a child and her knowledge of the way in which her own image fits into the history of photography would be limited,” Marsh writes.

Perhaps of particular interest to RealTime readers, The Darkroom includes a substantial section on “Body art and Performative Photography” focusing on the role of masochism, narcissism and fetishism in performance work. In this section Marsh describes Mike Parr’s “obsessive and compulsive investigations of pain and endurance” and the role of autobiography and self therapy in his performances. Like Parr, performer Jill Orr “sustained a relationship with her self-image through photographic and video representations” and both artists mobilised the camera as a “critical or conceptual tool” within their performances, thus consolidating “the relationship between performative art and photography.”

In the final section Marsh examines the photographs of postcolonial Australian artists which engage with “the text of the racial body.” She explores the crucial role of photography in identity politics, where the camera is used to document the fragmentation of identities and “embraced by artists as a critical weapon that could foreclose on authenticity and essentialist representations”; thus the camera is used “as part of an assault on humanism.” Included here are Tracey Moffatt, Leah King-Smith and Gordon Bennett whose Mirrorama (1993), a “psychoanalytic interpretation of aboriginality seen in the context of Australian history” stages a fractured subjectivity. For these artists “[t]he camera becomes a weapon in [the] scheme of misrecognition and dis-identity…[a] tool that can fracture and deconstruct subjecthood…creating a multi-dimensional view.”

By becoming a “performative machine” and an “instrument of destabilisation”, the camera, Marsh shows us, has operated as a “virus within modernism”, a tool for deconstructing those master narratives that privilege certain ways of seeing the world, while simultaneously negating others. Marsh’s work deftly shows how the camera can function as a “prosthesis for the operator”, as well as an instrument of fantasy, enabling the artist to extend the limits of his or her work in real space and in psychological terms. The Darkroom provides a rich history of how photography’s theatrical roots have remained evident in international and Australian work and how considering the complex functions of desire might broaden the ways we have previously read such work.

Anne Marsh is the author of Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992.

RealTime issue #60 April-May 2004 pg. 32

Mimi Kelly in Bianca Barling's Slasher Slutz

Mimi Kelly in Bianca Barling’s Slasher Slutz

photo Bianca Barling

Mimi Kelly in Bianca Barling’s Slasher Slutz

Destination: the budget motel. Transitory spaces filled with unfamiliar comforts, motels signify an arrival, a break in a journey. A motel offers temporary sanctuary; a place for respite, sex, sleep and shifting restlessness. With these ingredients of road movie consciousness in mind, 9 Adelaide artists invaded Motel 277 in Glenunga to stage No Vacancy, an exhibition of site-specific installation and performance art.

In Map Reference 201 D6, curator Honor Freeman delicately stitched beads around the perimeters of stains on bath towels, permanently and beautifully containing the area where each mark resides. Casually hung over a bathroom door and across the floor, the work sat harmoniously with Steven Carson’s I Know You’re In There. Brightly coloured buttons were methodically arranged, stacked and dispersed, growing like mould across the tiles, infesting the shower recess.

The wood veneer paneling and patterned textiles in Room 50 resonated with the luscious, tactile surface qualities of Sarah CrowEST’s 3 ‘objects.’ Ominously sitting in and around the bed, her comical blobs—oversized cakes or edible cushions—greeted the astonished visitor. In the next room, Tiffany Parbs’ carefully placed pools of transparent resin, disguised as water and urine, lay in the sink and on the floor as the trace of departed guests.

Bianca Barling approached American motel fiction with filmic humour and excess. Her Slasher Slutz was a combination of performance, installation and digital imagery, conveying the spectacle of messy death. Peering in through the window as if onto a stage, viewers saw 2 young female victims lying on a bloodied bed in their blood-soaked slips. Next door, in Room 49, Greg Fullerton’s Blue and White created a police crime scene, the unmade bed cordoned off, an abandoned cup of coffee on the kitchen bench, sugar scattered as if someone had left in a hurry. Part of Fullerton’s Bloodlines series, photographs of the participating artists, blood oozing theatrically from their faces, were placed along the breakfast bar in a line-up of likely suspects.

Transforming private, unseen acts, illicit relations and anonymous violent crime into a public acts, No Vacancy was a spectacle of intimacy, staged melodrama and lighthearted conspiracy. And perhaps a parody of those temporary habitations frequented by Adelaide Festival visitors.

No Vacancy, Bianca Barling, Steven Carson, Sarah CrowEST, Bridget Currie, Rachel McElwee, Honor Freeman, Greg Fullerton, Mimi Kelly, Tiffany Parbs, Motel 277, Glenunga, SA, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 22-24

RealTime issue #60 April-May 2004 pg. 35

Ben Howard, Jena Woodburn, [site-works], 2004

At a time of year when Adelaide is filled with all things artistic shouting for attention, something very quiet is going on in the Hughes Plaza at Adelaide University. Jena Woodburn and Ben Howard’s video projection [site-works], occupies a smallish window of the Barr-Smith Library. The window forms the screen for the projector inside, the projection blending with the architectural environment. At first glance it could almost be an advertisement or poster.

We all know well the immersive sensation of being lost in a library, a world of information without time and physical space. The Barr-Smith is an august institution filled with level after level of narrow mission brown stacks. As a building it is hermetic in the extreme, much of it shut off from natural light and containing many levels of labyrinthine stairwells and corridors. It is the home of the book, the first virtual space.

In this building there is a window, a space for dreaming, for escaping. It can act as a porthole for physical and mental worlds to meet—the outside and the inside, the cerebral world of books and the world we physically negotiate.

window breaches the stronghold of the library’s body
usually it holds tight to its knowledge-store, only allowing out book-sized chunks
we’ve pierced it
inside pours out (is visible)
window is/was empty, transparent.

[site-works] is a skilful computer animation, travelling along trajectories of corridors and planes that can be read like walls, often dense with imagery. Leaves, rock strata, earth, shadows of trees in the wind, textures of the subjects of books and perhaps samplings of actual places. The Dewey Decimal System, a way of categorising all knowledge, of sorting the world into numbers, features as part of the animation, a self-contained system of numbers reducing information to code, not unlike that used in computers. The work contains both the internal logic of its making and the external logic of architecture. Sitting on the garden bed watching the work, the windows are not open but, strangely, you can smell the library.

[site-works], Jena Woodburn and Ben Howard, Barr-Smith Library, Adelaide University, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 25-March 13

RealTime issue #60 April-May 2004 pg. 35

Three years ago, French artist Laurent Mulot took a train to Cook on the Nullarbor Plain. During a rest stop, he and the other passengers were drawn into the abandoned ‘ghost town’ experience maintained by Great Southern Railways and the town managers, Ivor and Janet Holberton. They explored deserted buildings, the abandoned shop and hospital, the golf course and a school where Mulot found some children’s drawings illustrating the habits of local fauna and, underneath, the sentence, “They come out at night” which he has used as the title for his multimedia installation exhibited as part of this year’s Adelaide Fringe.

Inspired by the strange initial experience, Mulot returned to Cook in 2003 for a 10 day visit. Using still photographs, video and sound, he documented the visitors who arrive by train and explore the small isolated town during the 90 minute stopover as well as the few remaining locals who receive them.

The central focus of the installation is a large-scale projection of the train’s visit accompanied by a soundtrack in which Mulot musically arranges the various comments on the town that he’s collected. While the name of the town is repeated rhythmically to echo the sound of the train, someone says that in Cook; “there’s no life, there’s no laughter.” Meanwhile, across 10 monitors to the side of the projection, we are shown Mulot’s images of Cook, revealing a certain beauty in their geometric composition. These are repeated in the form of photocopies strewn across the floor. Striking as some of these images are, this presentation does them no justice. The audience is left to step around them while being careful to avoid the dead trees suspended from the ceiling. These ‘found objects’ overstate the point and would probably have been best left in the ground.

The various components of the installation struggle to come together in a resolved manner and seem clumsy when viewed as a whole. The ‘ghost portraits’ (double-images of the tourists) that line the wall upon entry are interesting and the video is strangely engaging. In slow motion and other manipulations it captures the anticipation of the train’s arrival and the stillness once it’s departed, conveying Mulot’s theme in one frame, without distractions.

They Come Out At Night, Step One is a work-in-progress. Step Two will be exhibited at Fremantle Arts Centre, Steps Three and Four in Lyon and Paris. To watch the work unfold go to www.theycomeoutatnight.org.

Laurent Mulot, They Come Out at Night, Step One, Light Square Gallery, Adelaide, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 18-March 24, Fremantle Arts Centre, May 22-June 20

Tasmanian Indigenous artist Lola Greeno is making her mark on the Australian art world, acclaimed for her tradition-based, finely crafted shell necklaces and bracelets, as well as the splendid fibre water containers and other objects that she makes from bull kelp. This large brown seaweed is found washed up on coastal Tasmania’s beaches at certain times of the year. The fibrous material has been collected on a seasonal basis by Indigenous Tasmanians for a very long time and is well suited to making objects of both utilitarian and artistic significance.

Born in 1946, Lola acknowledges her mother, the late Val MacSween, as teaching her the closely guarded secret methods and relevant cultural knowledge of the Tasmanian Indigenous people associated with making these gracile necklaces and bracelets. There are strict rules associated with this pre-contact Tasmanian artistic practice and Greeno is observant of these, while at the same time showing a willingness to innovate within the parameters permitted: “Families usually design the shell necklaces and one must closely follow these [designs]. In my case, I re-create my mother’s patterns. Today I am developing new designs to tell a story…for instance I have just finished a shell necklace that relates to the Cape Barren Goose, an original bird from my birth island. The water carriers have been a revival that I learned from a cultural workshop on the East Coast of Tasmania with a large group of women.”

Today, Lola Greeno actively mentors the younger generation to ensure the continuation of this demanding artistic practice, where preparation of materials and fastidious attention to detail is paramount. Greeno’s approach to her artistic practice is both visionary and generous. With characteristic altruism and humility, she sees herself as predominantly “…a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman interested in developing contemporary Aboriginal arts in Tasmania and providing opportunities for emerging artists to advance their skills and talent to assist them to another level or to be recognised nationally so they can become involved with Indigenous brothers and sisters across the land…I am also highly focussed on my cultural relaying of stories of importance to my daughter and grand children so that my heritage is recorded.”

Part and parcel of Lola Greeno’s approach is her emphasis on promoting greater awareness in the wider community about Indigenous intellectual and artistic copyright issues “…mainly to prevent people from making the shell necklaces who are not entitled to do so.”

From her beautiful island home, Lola Greeno creates luminous shell necklaces in much the same way her ancestors did. The very names of these shells, the raw materials of Greeno’s art, are immensely seductive and suggestive of an under-watery world of voluptuous otherness: stripey buttons, cats’ teeth, toothies, rice shells and maireeners—little bluish-green pearl-like shells that are of great cultural significance for Aboriginal Tasmanians.

In all, Greeno makes use of 11 types of shell in her work. She says, “…the labour is all in the preparation. The maireener shells take up to 8 weeks preparation prior to threading. The few makers return to the islands at least once a year to collect maireeners. This takes a good 2 to 4 weeks, although some people can only go for a few days. You may need to spend 2 to 3 hours just collecting one type of shell…”

Citing her career mentors as Gail Greenwood, Glenda King, Doreen Mellor, Brenda Croft and Julie Gough, Lola Greeno also acknowledges the inspiration of her mother, Judy Watson, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Brenda Croft, Julie Gough and Greg Leong.

Fellow Tasmanian Julie Gough, an admirer of Greeno’s work, writes: “…Lola’s shell necklaces are intricate responses to place. They reflect where, when and with whom shells are collected. They are often made in memory of her mother and of other co-inhabitants of her island homelands, such as the Cape Barren Goose. These relationships are reflected in the patterning of the strung shell lengths.”

Lola Greeno’s work constitutes a unique historically and aesthetically important form of cultural expression that is increasingly and deservedly achieving significance in the art market. Greeno makes stunning contemporary jewellery. At the same time she brings real cultural and historical depth to her work, contributing to an authentically Tasmanian cultural future.

Lola Greeno is showing with other contemporary Tasmanian artists in Design Island: Contemporary Design from Tasmania, Sydney Opera House, March 23-May 16

Once upon a time Tony Bennett coined the term ‘exhibitionary complex’ to characterise the institutional shift of objects and bodies from the purview of the sovereign prince or lord into the public gaze. According to Bennett (following Foucault), the emergent 18th and 19th century museums and galleries performed the function of allowing people, “en masse, rather than individually, to know rather than be known; to be the subjects rather than the object of power; interiorising its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance, hence self-regulation.” One of the things we learn from our galleries, museums and zoos is nothing less than the order of things, ourselves included.

Don’t get depressed. Things can change. Take zoos: nowadays we construct simulated rain forests for the gorillas, a savanna for the African beasts, rocky pools for the turtles. We ask that our zoos in some way resemble the imaginary origins of our captive species (never mind most have never seen these far-away first homes). We tolerate enclosure as long as the frame is obscured, blended, masked by fake boulders and clumping bamboo. We continue to travel through gates and doors to see our wild things, but we can no longer ignore the subjectivity of our objects; hence, we tolerate the odd glimpse of the meerkat and suppress our frustration at animal-centred timetables (What? The tiger is sleeping again?).

But what about the gallery? Is it still a concrete cage for art and its objects?

Such questions arose as I traversed the exemplary space of the Lawrence Wilson Gallery in search of Lisa Roet’s exhibition Pri-mates, fantasising, like a latter-day Jane Goodall or Dianne Fossey, an encounter. Is there anything more tremulous, poignant, more poetic and dramatic, more beloved of Hollywood anthropology? It appears that our imagination—damp domesticated cliché that it is—still requires pockets of virgin forest and impenetrable wilderness, where we can meet the unseen and the unknown. The essence of ‘the encounter’ is that it be unexpected and in many ways unrepeatable. Though increasingly rare (I hesitate to say endangered) art can be such an encounter, as when, at a young age I saw the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia: you mean, that’s what art looks like?

When it comes to encounters with the Other, we try to be alert to the fluidity of boundaries, the violent history of frontiers, and we prefer to use words like dialogue and exchange. And if we are not yet vegetarian, we are definitely thinking about it.

At the doors of Lawrence Wilson I am greeted by a video monitor showing an image of a human hand reaching through a cage bar towards an ape’s hand (or is it a monkey?). The reference is obvious. I am annoyed. I want an encounter, not an art-historical moment; I want a disturbance at the edge of the frame, a fracas, a disordering of subject and object, not an easy key to reading the work.

I pick up a sheet at the desk and read; “Pri-mates deals with investigations into the genetic similarities that exist between humans and primates, issues of language and communication and the point at which humankind is both alienated from and joined to the animal kingdom.”

Roet is fascinated by primates. Fascination is dialogic; to ‘fascinate’ is to ‘cast a spell over by a look.’ Her process is exemplary; residencies in zoos, visits to Borneo, long periods of study, interaction and engagement.

I linger at the works on paper—the feet and hands of chimpanzees. There is an essay here: on monkeys, mimicry, finger-puppets mark-making, creativity, but I am not equipped to write it. Perhaps Roet’s attraction to charcoal lies in the fantasy of recuperating primal creative drives (the child learning to grasp and strike the paper, the history of mark-making in art.) The huge drawings of fingers/toes are at once grotesque and beautiful. They conjure the whole history of things; the bleak scientific study of the fragmented ‘primitive body’, the anthropological and scientific scalpel cutting and bottling and labelling, the gaze of the student studying classical form (the hand of David). I move on. The bronze casts of chimpanzee’s heads recall photographic studies of babies attempting verbal communication. These works fascinate me. They are profoundly ambivalent; at once a study of a nameless other whose individual subjectivity has been subsumed in the name of genus and species, and an indictment of the anthropocentric limits of post-human portraiture.

In Kate McMillan’s Disaster Narratives there is no fantasy of mutual recognition. Vision is not privileged in this exhibition, because on one level there is nothing to see. Superficially epic and classical in its aesthetic, Disaster Narratives draws attention to the ways we have encountered the art frame, and the potential emptiness of that encounter if the surface image or content is the organising or dominating principle. The huge central photographic image conjures a particular painting (Dejeuner sur l’herbe), but it also references the enormous history paintings found in some museums. The shell wedged high up in the wall exemplifies the exotica illuminated in a table case in a natural history exhibit. Yet the huge photographic image is also wallpaper—a billboard, and the single shell excised from taxonomic security is surely a private mnemonic, a reminder that outside of the cage, the images roam free. Hence the small static video image is both avant-garde and banal; on the one hand a refusal to reward the viewer with a ‘feed’, on the other an invocation of the endless tedium of domestic television. The ominous interiority of the large video projections of tunnels belongs just as well to a contemporary art space as to a late-night offering of Hollywood gothic-horror.

So what is the real story here? Who would know? A local viewer might confirm that the distant island in the video is Rottnest, formerly a prison for Aborigines, now a holiday destination. A well-travelled member of the audience might recognize the photographic wallpaper as Rubble Hill, a park built upon the destruction of Berlin. Someone else might know that Mao secretly built tunnels beneath Beijing, just in case of an emergency. In its very inability to narrate, this work enacts ‘the disaster’, which in Blanchot’s writings is that which is outside of the human, that which by being outside cannot be represented.

Meaning here lies beneath the surface, but it cannot be exhumed. Postmodernism eschews depth, yet this work is not about mere juxtaposition. It is not playing with us. The tone is serious. Mournful. Disaster Narratives reads like a very private, very formal essay on grief and mourning written through the formal hieroglyphics of art history. A disaster takes the subject to the edge of experience and abandons them there. Rather than being wilfully obscure, ironic, or “leaflet-dependent”, as one reviewer put it, I think of this work as leading the animal right to the door of the cage and opening it. Where, upon looking out, the terrified animal realises it is incapable of crossing the threshold.

Perth International Arts Festival: Lisa Roet, Pri-mates, Lawrence Wilson Gallery, University of Western Australia, Feb 13-April 20; Kate McMillan, Disaster Narratives, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Feb 12-March 21

Fresh Cut is the Institute of Modern Art’s (IMA) annual exhibition of South-East Queensland’s recent art school graduates. Rather than selecting works according to a ‘best of’ criteria, Fresh Cut is a curated exhibition. This presents a challenge, since the art school is an environment where art making is compulsory and diversity accentuated. Attempting to find and articulate any prevailing theme for an exhibition under such conditions is fraught with problems, and the quality of work in any graduating year can never be assured. Too often over the last 8 years, Fresh Cut curators have presented us with a group of highly disparate works strung together by a tenuous rationale.

This year’s exhibition, curated by Chris Handran, was not entirely exempt from these problems though it did offer a slightly different curatorial approach. Rather than searching for a grand link between all 12 artists, Handran selected works which provoked a personal response. The result was a diverse collection featuring video, ceramics, interactive technologies, paintings and installation.

In his catalogue essay Handran noted, “No single theme or style characterises these works, though a number of affinities have come to light.” Wonderlands, private rooms, untold tales and natural selection are the terms through which Handran spoke of such affinities. The dividing of the exhibition into separate rooms under each term created a focus on linking clusters of works rather than a singular overarching rationale.

In gallery 1 visitors were welcomed by an infestation of curious creatures in David Spooner’s Mantle. Reminiscent of a domestic interior, yet given over to fabric fancies and plastic excess, Spooner’s work was appropriately lit by warm artificial and natural light. Accompanying this work was Kate Dickson’s Wallflower series, a suite of large-scale documentary photographs of posters which Dickson had installed across Brisbane’s cityscape. The posters took the form of a female figure, depicted in a cartoon style, usually close to life size and wearing colourful, fashionable clothing.

In gallery 2, the lighting was more subdued, and this darkening trend continued in galleries 3 and 4. Catherine Chui’s standout work, Betweeness, is composed of walking sticks recast from various media including noodles, newspaper, maps, dictionaries, coins, beer caps and koala fur. Hung like ladders and bridges across one corner and consuming almost a quarter of the room, the soft shadows of walking sticks cast against the walls was quietly arresting. Chui’s work lends itself to reflective moments, as it references the artist’s personal relationship with her walking stick, which both frees her from immobility and signifies her disability. The media Chui selects also references her journey from Hong Kong to Australia and her continual crossing between cultures.

Gallery 3 is the largest and is often an awkward space. Handran overcame any difficulties by installing works using very little light. Except for spots on oil paintings by Sonya G Peters, the only light in this gallery was emitted by the works themselves. Ben Murrell’s luminous architectural sculptures were beautifully placed, their fluorescent light enveloping the viewer. Adjacent to these shining installations was the glow of Alice Lang’s video projection and fabric installation. Avoiding a conventional square frame, Lang projected her video at an acute angle to the wall so that the frame became a morphed elongated quadrilateral. This suited the monster-like imagery from sessions recorded in cheap hotel rooms, in which Lang moves in and out of frame wrapped in satin sewed into bulbous and irregular shapes. Beyond Lang’s projection, 3 monitors sat on low pedestals replaying surveillance camera footage of Katherine Taube’s opening night performance, depicting her dressing and undressing in an interior lit box.

The increasingly dark journey continued in gallery 4, with a display of Julia Dowe’s slowly evolving video work and Svenja Kratz’s installation using interactive technologies.

This year’s Fresh Cut did not completely do away with the curatorial challenge but rather pared it back to the achievable and consumable. The exhibition is driven by the desire to provide positive outcomes for local emerging artists, but as Timothy Morrell stated at the end of his 1999 catalogue, Fresh Cut is also “a snapshot of a slightly shaking moment that makes focusing difficult. What matters is what happens next.”

Fresh Cut, curated by Chris Handran, artists Megan Bennett, Catherine Chui, Kate Dickson, Julia Dowe, Joshua Feros, Krystal Ingle, Svenja Kratz, Alice Lang, Ben Murrell, Sonya G Peters, David Spooner, Katherine Taube, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Feb 6-March 13

Like much new German writing, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Night resembles a prose poem or instruction text more than a conventional playscript. Actions are related to the audience by characters who perform them, as are settings and scenographic details. This serves Schimmelpfennig and director Chris Bendall well in creating a dreamlike atmosphere as the characters go about their lives in distracted fashion, imbuing everything with the sense that this might be a seductive, poetic illusion.

This also presents Bendall with the challenge of animating what is essentially a series of inter-cutting monologues. Director and performers skirt such performative tautologies as having the actor begin to run while saying: “I began to run.” Performance is rather gently embodied through minimal movement, easy posture and well supported voice.

The relationship between design, vocal work, Kelly Ryall’s lovely soundscape and the performance is slight, but on fortyfivedownstairs’ intimate stage, this matters little. Bendall is most adept at manipulating space and rhythm. The movement is shaped according to 2 main patterns. The first is a whorl about the iron post that permanently occupies the centre in this venue, becoming both a resting place and a pivot about which the increasingly disorientated characters spin. The second is a series of left/right corridors parallel to the seating, which turn the characters’ musings and personal journeys into something akin to slats glancing off each other on a venetian blind.

Although exquisite to experience, the dominant motifs of Schimmelpfennig’s script are not especially sophisticated or novel. The tale is set, for example, within a block of flats, constructed as a village unto itself or a microcosmic city, with its inhabitants coming close to each other but never really touching. As in the films of Altman and Tarantino (as well as much contemporary fiction), the play draws a web of connections between disparate figures, with the overlap of their lives producing an inter-woven narrative. This becomes the poetic motif in Schimmelpfennig’s work, as the surreal link between these characters is eventually revealed to be their having fallen into the dreams of the central protagonist, Francizka (Josephine Keen). She is cursed to forget her life nightly as she falls into slumber and to bring misfortune to all who kiss her.

Schimmelpfennig also employs the motif of the long, hot night as a catalyst for change and unusual behaviour, an idea which recurs in many plays, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the 2002 fortyfivedownstairs production Sailing on a Sea of Tears (also set in a European apartment block). Schimmelpfennig skilfully uses this familiar concept to introduce a metaphoric interplay between desert and river dreamscapes. The water supply has stopped on Francizka’s floor, where the building attendant and others alternately experience dry, sandy winds or the frightening yet euphoric sensation of water coursing through the walls.

Arabian Night is a highly evocative production which, despite initial appearances, relies upon its performative realisation to render this beautiful if somewhat derivative text as something more distinctive than a mere theatrical sketch. In this sense, Theatre@Risk’s staging represents a triumph for Bendall and the actors, particularly Josephine Keen as Francizka and stalwart Robert Meldrum as the attendant.

Theatre@Risk, Arabian Night, writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, translation David Tushingham, director Chris Bendall, performers Josephine Keen, Robert Meldrum, David Michel, Odette Joannidis, Joshua Hewitt, sound Kelly Ryall, lighting Marco Respondeck, design Danielle Harrison; fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Feb 10-22

What are the emotional and social effects of naming? What is closed off and what is revealed or liberated? The latest project from Alison Halit and Ross Mueller is an attempt to coax out of the darkness of depression and introversion a representation of post-natal depression (PND). Speaking that which resists being spoken is central to both the creation of Sensitive to Noise and its performance. Within scenarios collaboratively devised by choreographer Halit and playwright Mueller, the characters struggle to speak, communicate and find peace. The very structure of the work emphasises the power of naming, with the characters’ confusion being (partially?) resolved by a penultimate scene in which a clinical diagnosis of PND is literally spoken on stage.

The use of the term PND brought legitimacy, validation and relief to women (and men) previously ignored as simply “down” or “oversensitive”, making sense of confusing behaviours and mood swings. One should not forget the negative effects of naming however. The kaleidoscopic vignettes and monologues of Sensitive to Noise superbly depict a spiral into intra-familial dysfunction. The partner becomes an enemy or irritant whom one nevertheless depends upon and the house a claustrophobic jumble of domestic detritus (beautifully rendered by designer Kathryn Sproul through literal and symbolic objects). The relationship between the couple becomes a theatre in which the sins of their parents are replayed as they neurotically reflect the discontent of their own childhoods. But is this PND? Or more significantly, if this typically occurs with PND, does it mean that every domestic drama involving these elements is also a representation of PND? And if PND is such a protean, wide-ranging collection of symptoms, what, precisely, is achieved by naming and depicting it on stage?

In a sense, one of the most compelling yet ambiguous aspects of this production is the way it replays the very contradictions it is designed to make sense of. The doubling of text with movement, of physical action reinforcing and adding an unbearable texture to mental disassociation, renders the show itself as an extended stutter. Scenes heave one to another, as an armchair wheels about to catch characters fleeing one scenario, before vomiting them up into another equally disorientating situation. As in the symptomatology of PND, the show repeatedly asks: “How did we get here?”

Perhaps the most ambivalent element of the production is the unresolved gendering of the work. It is no accident that the most potent symbol is the increasingly mute dancer, Trudy Radburn, looking out wide-eyed at an environment that seems unfamiliar, dreamlike and daunting. Despite the introduction of men’s stories, the asymmetry between the depth of dance experience embodied by the unspeaking Radburn and the men’s greater reliance upon spoken performance replays the model of PND as women’s business (which it surely is) and a disorder in which an unreasoning female body replaces the reasoning mind. The shadow of hysteria and the awkward histories of medicine, gender and science fall heavily across the performance.

Sensitive to Noise is most impressive for its final paradoxical sleight of hand. This is the closing dance sequence involving Radburn and the tragically adorable Adrian Nunes, in which PND is reinscribed as that which forever eludes full representation in all its chameleon-like social manifestations.

Sensitive to Noise, devisors/directors Alison Halit, Ross Mueller, performers Fiona Macleod, Scott Gooding, Trudy Radburn, Adrian Nunes, design Kathryn Sproul, sound David Franzke, lighting Jen Hector, North Melbourne Town Hall, Feb 18-29, Geelong Performing Arts Centre, March 6

Entering a Frumpus performance is like pushing through to some much-needed Buffy dimension where the demons are actually you, in disguise, in some nightmarish cinematic loop, but with matching red tracksuits and sinister grins. Crazed is a new work by this dedicated ensemble of shape-shifters and Adelaide seems like the perfect place to unleash it, especially as a late night horror feature in the biennial Fringe Festival. In fact, their venue choice was only a matter of metres from dark, historical Adelaide-terror central: the Torrens River. Bodies dragged, bodies dumped.

Crazed is a manic composition, variations on a theme of slasher/horror genre (filmic references aplenty, some recognised, others not, me being the squeamish type who always looks away when the guts are spilled, the head cut from the body, the limbs severed…). Crazed takes me anywhere from the Chainsaw Massacre-type hopeless chase in the woods (there’s no escape! you’ll never get away this time!); to the Blair-Witchefied surrounds of the sleeping-bag-cum-tent with a camera shoved in your face, tears streaming; to the Hanging Rock zombie drawn to the abyss of pan-piped hell; to the begging for water, to drink (not even a sip!); to the petite rituals of mad fireside needlework in some Victorian gothic, storm-ravished mansion, disturbed by the incessant ringing of a telephone (dare not answer for fear of the terrifying voice of a Telstra answering service); to the abandoned country house with only the killer for company; to Cronenbergesque mutations, visceral, oozing. Sigourney Weaver would fall so deeply in love with the alien glove puppets whose seedy obsession with porn, sauna orgies, car hoonin’ and chain smokin’ would endear anyone’s tender (soon to be torn open) stomachs for a spot of sci-fi bio-tech co-habitation. Not even your washing basket is safe from bad planet creature invasion.

Framed in a polystyrene horror house with filmic windows, flames mediated via projected image, Frumpus bodies dressed in Super-8 screams and psychotic struggles for help, help, the performance space is a kind of eternal movie set silhouette, a malleable site in which to enact the inevitable death scenes, the sort that seem to just fill with blood until the next big baddie moves in for the kill. These demons have taken the form of some other Frumpus frightener: scary nurse-vamps with cigarette holes for mouths. Red worms from the planet Camp. An action flick duo who punch-glove martial art their way to the knife point of death. Did I mention Buffy?

Enter a Twin Peaks procession of bloodied feet wigged-out morphed heads who will take the applause anyhow. Cos they’ve walked so far. In heels, no less. Probably across some desolate bridges. Their deaths and lynchings were staged over at least 20-odd takes. It’s about getting that right expression. That perfect look of fear.

Crazed is an audio-bite cut-up live show of blood-curdling screams, breathless voices pleading to the insane one to please stop knocking, even though we all know what’s gonna happen next…but Frumpus has gotta run, over the moors, into the dark night.

Frumpus, Crazed, director Cheryle Moore, performers/devisors Janine Garrier, Lauri Kilfoyle, Lenny Ann Low, Cheryle Moore, Julie Vulcan; video & video Samuel James, sound, Gail Priest & Cheryle Moore; presented by Vitalsatistix Theatre Company, Adelaide University, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 21-March 7

If visibility and inclusion are a measure of success, Strut’s dance program Two Way—featuring new works from Jo Pollitt and Sue Peacock—in the Perth International Arts Festival was an occasion for celebration. Since its inception, Strut Inc. has provided a site for dialogue and development of contemporary dance.

Room is choreographed and performed by Jo Pollitt, its 3 sections directed by Paige Gordon, Felicity Bott and Bill Handley in turn, signalling that dialogue and collaboration were important to the works, if leaving the audience mystified as to the role of the director in relation to the choreography. In conceptualising her works around the idea of 3 rooms—’inside’, ‘outside’ and ‘waiting’— Pollitt underlined her intention to explore relationships of exclusion, inclusion, and adjacency. However, the works failed to resonate with each other, either stylistically or conceptually.

If the opening image of an elongated and elevated Pollit set upon some kind of hidden plinth, adorned in a swathe of white was intended to strike the audience, it missed its target. As a study of minimalist articulation—of arms, back, neck, head—Room 1-Inside had difficulty projecting its subtleties within the space of the Playhouse. More troubling was its failure to acknowledge its kinship with living statues that function well on the street, sustaining the glance, the stare, the gathering of a small crowd that assembles briefly only to break up—but not the seated paying audience. Drawing upon a vocabulary of slapstick and mime, Room 3-Outside amused without truly engaging. What was missing was the very idea of being outside.

Room 2-Waiting, directed by Bill Handley, was the most successful section. Largely autobiographical, its tone was tragicomic, the narrative qualities enhanced by Pollitt’s spoken text. Here was a piece that acknowledged the breadth of the festival audience, that was generous and open in its revelations, and which touched me in its delicate handling of personal tragedy. Here Pollitt as performer was able to tell us of death in the family, of car accidents, of the loss of opportunity, and in the very telling of that story through the body enact an overcoming.

Sue Peacock is an accomplished choreographer and performer, most recently seen in the finesse and precision of her marvellous solo Swallow in PICA’s Dancers Are Space Eaters. Give up the Ghost was a shambolic affair. It begged for dramaturgical input, particularly since this was a piece for 7 performers negotiating shifting relationships across at least an hour of dance time. All of the dancers are fabulous performers, yet they were terribly let down by the basic concept and its failure to develop. Is there no other subject for an ensemble of men and women than ‘relationships’? Not that there is anything wrong with relationships but the problem is the focus on the cliché of ‘relationships’ at the expense of a particular relationship.

An insurmountable problem for me was the staging of the piece within a squat/inner city/loft adrift with bare mattresses and graffiti—all very New York/Lower East Side circa 1989, except that in real life slumming is not a style but an absence of choice. There was none of desperation, the poverty, the tragedy of real life. Yes, I know it was dance, that it was a representation, and where is my sense of humour?

Well I didn’t find it funny, but pompous and self-important, and at times plain tedious. Couples coupled, fought, made up, made love, fought again, found themselves, lost themselves and occasionally were allowed to demonstrate the inventive exuberance that audiences love—only to have the music cut off their legs. There were plenty of moments that were almost marvellous—and then the music changed and the dance stopped. Peacock drew upon a marvellous set of extant music, and the projections were great, but the unrelenting and unmotivated disc-changing came to dominate and determine the movement, adding to the sense that the work was conceived on the run. A sense of breathlessness and desperation dominated Ghost, evident in the inability of the choreography to settle upon a phrase and explore it, in the unmotivated shifts in mood and music, in the lack of thought given to audience response. (And why was the text in French—is there something inherently urbane and ghetto-chic about French?)

No doubt there is another story here, of lack of resources and lack of time but not of lack of talent. Perth choreographers have demonstrated their talent over and over. But a full program in a festival requires more than potential. Choreographers must rise to the event, or I fear that the event will not again arise for them.

Two Way: Room, concept, choreography, performer Jo Pollitt; Give up the Ghost, choreography, direction Sue Peacock; Strut Dance, UWA Perth International Arts Festival 2004, Playhouse Theatre, Feb 11-28

The Dance Card mixed bill premiered in 2003, featuring musicians and lighting designers improvising with a changing selection of dancers over a 3 week period. Solos from the first 2 weeks returned for the final week to be re-scored and re-lit. The diversity of styles and relationships sketched through music, illumination and physique meant that one’s reaction to a particular designer or dancer was beside the point: the program was about audiences and artists evaluating each formulation of elements. This year, however, Monique Aucher lit all 3 weeks while Tamil Rogeon was composer for both weeks 1 and 2. This made Dance Card 2004 less invigorating, but it still contained many moments of quicksilver magic.

Aucher’s design consisted of a selection of warm colours: bare, yellowing globes and pinkish-red lights contrasted with blues and greens. These washes were complemented by central highlights and bright white axial corridors. The mixing was beautiful, echoing John Ford’s highly diffuse, colour-based design for Dance Card 2003. However, Aucher’s use of these options was less assured, employing flashes and chases that were not only distracting but often highlighted areas where nothing was happening. I had similar quibbles with Rogeon’s coordination of virtuosic violin highlights, lingering extended playing, dance music-like chordal beats and glitchie or static-like atmospheres. Although seductively insubstantial, the wafting music was often hard to hold onto, or too musically didactic to support the improvisation. Nevertheless, Rogeon’s use of a deliberately circumscribed musical palette established a pleasing sonic cohesion to each night, even if the nature of the solos didn’t altogether merit such consistency.

David Franzke re-scored the solos in week 3 and mastered best the challenges of the program. While some of his sci-fi, low-key soundscapes derived from materials similar to Rogeon’s, Franzke skilfully suggested particular readings. Rogeon’s scoring relied primarily on a paralleling or guiding of tempo, rhythm and texture in performance, carrying elements across the solos. Franzke’s contributions functioned according to an essentially dramaturgical logic, while enhancing the interpretative dissonance and uniqueness of each dance piece by allowing only hints or slight layers to be reworked sequence to sequence.

This difference was exemplified in Kristine Nilsen Oma’s performance. Unlike the other dancers, Nilsen Oma’s movement was predetermined right down to the text she recited and the point at which this was offered to the audience. The movement was essentially Graham-based, consisting of forceful, jerky variations on melodramatic Expressionist tropes, such as an emotional pushing through the chest with the back and head arching behind, or a weaving of arms into and out of the body to represent emotional pain and release. In week 2, Rogeon followed tradition by providing her with emotionally laden strings, enhancing the performance’s neo-Romantic ambience and power. In the last week however, Franzke replaced this with a series of musical cut-ups, including recorded text, music and radio fragments coming in over each other in an electric pastiche. Rather than the cliched model of the angst-ridden artist offering us her suffering, Franzke’s provocative style recontextualised Nilsen Oma’s body as one racked by the infection of multiple languages, sound bytes and cultural references. Instead of the classic, modernist dancing body, Franzke repositioned Nilsen Oma within a postmodernist framework. Even so, he was sensitive enough to drop his contribution to nothing to allow Nilsen Oma’s voice to come out for the scripted finale. Franzke’s work thus combined modesty with highly active musical interactions.

Those dancers working from formal or emotional concerns had largely devised in advance their basic poses and choreographic palette. It was the sequencing of these elements and their nuanced execution which was developed live in performance. It was therefore amongst the jesters that the principles of improvisation were most fully embraced; every element was generated in the moment with typically uneven results. Dianne Reid and Shaun McLeod were superb, employing a soft, elegant take on improvised comedic text and performative pathos. It was their seesawing between unaffected, dancerly turns of beautiful fluidity and more pedestrian movements and banal scenarios which made their nightly performances so affecting.

On the other hand, Michaela Pegum and Siobhan Murphy presented essentially formalistic, semi-choreographed studies given a seductive lilt through touches of emotional execution. With a highly mannered use of self-caresses and a kilt, Nick Sommerville danced a great solo echoing some of Phillip Adams’ concerns in balancing moments of muscularity and energetic bounce with an interesting play of gender.

Pegum’s was the most technical and austere solo, sharply danced in a plain, white costume and energised through particularly measured, often geometric shifts of movement and exchanges of momentum. Her right forearm carved out lines on the floor as her body crouched above, before the obtuse angle of the left leg was echoed and its shape erased by lifting the entire body up and out in a diagonal line, via a transition which was led and articulated through the point of the elbow. Responding to the rising beat of Rogeon’s music or Franzke’s open, charged static, Pegum increased the extent of these movements, while allowing the transitions between them and the falls of the body to linger longer and longer, imparting a palpable sense of sexuality and ecstasy into her open-mouthed performance.

In contrast, Murphy danced from a more impressive, physically subtle space, beginning with irregular crossings of legs and feet, before these absent-minded jumps in concentration and velocity progressed into hands and arms, finally causing the body itself to whirl or half-fold irregularly upon itself. Between these frequent yet essentially discontinuous spikes of activity, the dancer’s eyes flickered and mouth trembled, as hands moved across, in, and above each other, in small, retreating jabs, as though trying to feel out a gesture or a cognitive phrase which would make sense of these impulses. This constant searching for and locating places in movement and expression resembled a fractal version of the thinking body dramatised within the more precise choreography of Rosalind Crisp.

Alongside these promising explorations from relative newcomers sat Deanne Butterworth’s wonderful, effortlessly massive performance. Frequently featured in projects from Dance Works and Shelley Lasica, Butterworth is a master of seductive lyricism. For all the elegant beauty of the choreographic palette she has enjoyed, there is nevertheless a danger that she might simply echo that highly attractive, sparse lyricism in her own work. By dressing herself in what appeared to be a gorilla suit without a head, Butterworth undercut expectations. Floppy ripples of black fur drew attention to the dance’s focus on unforced manipulations of weight through the hips. The fur also highlighted the lethargic beauty of Butterworth’s softly moving form, as she gently released into the ground and then lightly returned to stand using only a few well-chosen, yet unassuming movements. It was the gentle undulation of hairy cloth and inertia that gave this work its ambiguous drama.

Dance Card may have already run its course as an innovative way of dramatising the exchanges generated in theatrically-framed dance, but the plethora of fantastic relationships contained in its 2 year run has been well worthwhile.

Dance Card 2004, curator Helen Herbertson, various performers and sound artists, Dancehouse, Feb 11-28

A new work by Tess de Quincey is always a red letter event in the performance year and already there’s a buzz about De Quincey Co’s …an immodest green, the first in a series entitled Embrace inspired by the company’s 3-month residency in India last year to be presented at Performance Space in May.

Tess de Quincey has a longstanding connection with the sub-continent dating back to her meeting in the 80s with dance ethnologist Ranjita Karleka and, later, documentary filmmaker JoJo Karlekar. Ranjita introduced her to The Natyashastra, a fundamental text in Indian artistic tradition. Meeting up with these two in Kolkata last year, De Quincey was interested to explore further the text’s parallels with the Body Weather discipline which informs her company’s work. At the same time she began to conceive an intercultural performance exchange which would bring together Indian and Australian artists in a series of workshops and performances culminating in 2005/06 in an all-night installation event reminiscent of some of the ancient Kathakali performances that mark the passage of time from dusk to dawn.

When asked by Erin Brannigan what we might expect of Embrace in Sydney, De Quincey replied from Kolkata where she was about to embark on a 10-day workshop with Indian participants at the School of Music, “Well, given that … every day is an intense onslaught of colour and texture and smell amidst a wild anarchic bustle and passionate thriving humour in a deeply black, polluted city, we’re running constantly on the spot just to keep up. It’s the magnificent discordance and defiant skirmishing which imbue every level of life here that are soliciting and formatting our bodies and our thoughts.” (Read the full interview in Ausdance’s Dance NSW, Jan-Feb 2004)

The irrepressibly energetic and adroit programmer Virginia Hyam is running her 5th 6-monthly season for The Studio at the Sydney Opera House. Hyam has carved out a space for idiosyncratic, often cutting edge entertainments from around Australia and created new audiences to match them. As just one dimension of the Sydney Opera House’s expanded vision of the art it presents and the audiences it needs to develop, The Studio is a key player.

The 24 shows in the program to July are indicative of Hyam’s eclectic taste as well as that of her largely young audiences. Not surprisingly then music in one form or another is to be found throughout a program which includes Pianissimo from the wonderfully eccentric and innovative talents of Brisbane artists Christine Johnson and Lisa O’Neill; hip hop comedy in Inna Thigh by dynamic rappers Sista She; virtuoso percussionist Ben Walsh in his one man, many drums show First Sound; the Ennio Morricone Experience’s instrumental extravaganza of spaghetti western music; Morgan Lewis in the see it-and-DIY hip hop theatre show, Crouching B-Boy Hidden Dragon (RT 54, p38); and there are dance works from leading choreographers Russell Dumas and Sue Healey. Other shows and events in the program—the recent Global Beats mini-music festival, the Message Sticks Indigenous arts celebration, a smattering of comics, The Song Company doing a not-to-be-missed reading of The Song of Songs, new media screenings, exhibits and performances in Scope (as part of the Sydney Film Festival) and, for something completely different in an already headspinning lineup, the popular Scratch Nights. The first of these is Embalmer! The Musical, the second the immersive and interactive Sprocket from Sydney’s new media outfit, Tesseract Research Laboratories. I asked Hyam if her approach to programming had changed over the last 3 years.

I think it’s coming from the same basis, the core being that there’s no particular formula as to what shape it should take. It’s not all theatre, not all dance, and has a completely eclectic feel. It’s responsive to what contemporary work is out there, around Australia and what is in the process of creation, so that we’re involved in the making of new performances. It’s about supporting emerging artists and established artists involved in small scale work and talking to both niche and broader public audiences. Balancing all of these is what I’m still trying to do with the program.

At your launch for the first program for 2004 there were very few of the usual arts suspects, and you said proudly, there’s probably quite a few hairdressers here.

What we’re really on about is trying to attract people to come to the theatre who otherwise wouldn’t. I know everyone talks about developing new audiences but I think The Studio program is an avenue where we can. Purposefully it’s been made accessible both price-wise and with a lot of the content. I think [the British show] Duckie was a good example, attracting a queer audience from across Sydney who might be clubbers who wouldn’t necessarily think of coming to live performance. I’m hoping that they’ll be intrigued to want to come back and see something else.

Certainly over the last few years we’ve noticed there are crowds that regularly come back. When we do our data collection to send out the program, there are very large numbers of people who’ll come and see 3 and 4 shows across the year. It’s not a subscription series because we don’t want subscribers to then be dictating what the program will be. Every year I set out to cater for certain groups and their tastes. People pick up the program and see 2 or 3 things in a 6 month program of particular interest to them. Consequently we talk to a whole range of audiences.

The average season is 2 weeks or one, or one nighters. I’ve tried longer seasons but, to be quite honest, some of the work we bring in attracts only a certain number of people and if you spread it over 3 weeks, you’re only diluting the size of your audience. Often we’re introducing new artists into Sydney and I tend to reintroduce them back into The Studio once they’ve developed a name here. Christine Johnson from Brisbane is a good example. She’ll be coming back this year with Pianissimo, her show with Lisa O’Neill, The audience for Johnson’s Decent Spinster last year built up well over the 10 performances of a 2 week season. And we offer a broad range of choice. You’ll see the same sort of fields repeated across the program. It’s a bit like a festival. If you miss one thing you know there’ll be something else interesting coming up.

The program reflects the changing nature of the arts field in your hook up with Sydney Film Festival and various new media arts organisations.

The film festival came to us, seeing The Studio as a good venue to present their new media work because of the sort of audiences we have already been attracting. I saw it as a really positive relationship. The other element that came into it was the Ennio Morricone Experience doing spaghetti western film music. I asked the festival if they wanted to have them as an umbrella event. It’s a perfect partnership. Those sorts of relationships are crucial.

Your program, as ever, looks very entertaining, full of laughs, campery and satire. That’s not to say that it’s not serious fun, as in the work of hip hop artist Morgan Lewis.

I think I like politics presented that way. And you’re right, there’s a lot of that throughout the program and that’s the contrast I’m trying to find with other work that’s already happening around Sydney. I know people want to profile their work at the Opera House but not everything can be or is necessarily appropriate or indeed best shown here.

Everything that goes into The Studio has to be supported. And that’s what I love about the program. I love building it and it’s always done in collaboration with independent artists who are all coming from the same place of being under-funded or unfunded and working out ways that we can make it work between the two of us. When I started there was a certain contract you’d have with the artists and now we have many versions of that contract. You’re thinking there can’t possibly be another kind of relationship and then it’s oh, I think I’ve just come up with another one! The core factor is that it’s a shared relationship. It’s very rare that The Studio is just paying out the money, putting the show on and going forward. More often, we’re all working together to ensure the success of shows. That’s what’s exciting about it.

Exactly. There are not a lot of commissions in the first part of 2004. We’re developing some new work in the second part of the year. Certainly, it depends what’s on the table and what’s already out there and who’s coming to me. It’s fluid but every 6 months there’s money going towards development of something. And it’s often on a smaller scale. In the next 6 months we’re developing a relationship with the independent radio station, FBI, doing plays that will go live to air from The Studio. We can do small things which can have quite a vast effect on the people involved. I’m really interested in commissioning emerging artists and bringing them into the venue working within a different framework. The Dance Tracks program has been a great model for that and an opportunity for commissioning artists to do short works.

We’re looking at establishing a jazz festival working with Jazz Groove and SIMA [Sydney Improvised Music Association]. What’s going on in Sydney is constantly changing…our program has no fixed formula. It has to be fluid, it needs to remain current.

The Boxed Set

Hinting at residues of human cargo and mysterious ocean traffic, a converted shipping container worked as provocative metaphor and sculptural performance space for the diverse sequence of works that comprised Live Bait festival’s Boxed Set program (RT58, p36). At once an ominous capsule incinerating its freight, a house of feminist horrors, a monster’s home and a satirically-sweet motherly dwelling, the container became an expression of the theatrical imaginative, prompting explorations of the invisible cultural and political boxes that we covet, ignore, repress and escape.

First to emerge amidst the buzz of Bondi’s open amphitheatre are 5 destitute figures, landed from some other dreadful place in time or history. Their faces are stretched in torment, their bodies harrowed and gaunt. One tows a large, heavy tabernacle. One pulls a barrow heaped with crumpled suit jackets. One stalks ahead and purposefully—urgently—climbs a ladder and begins clanging it, and his bucketed-head, violently against a brick wall. This is Gravity Feed, and from the moment their presence is felt in the arena, frivolous evening becomes ritualised chaos, secure crowds become scattered, immaterial bodies.

The Gravity of the Situation works to generate unfamiliar zones, to desensitise the audience to the calm balminess of a summer’s night and surround them with harbingers of…death, nightmare, apocalypse, underworld? Propelled by the sonic thuds and gurglings of a world aching to split open, the performers band and discharge, carry fire, throw coats, grip to the edges of walls in shafts of light. People are pushed into corners or the centre of the courtyard, made to assume and surrender territories or dodge spinning cardboard flanks.

This movement plays out a kind of compulsive nihilism, a frustrated and repeated logic of anarchy clamouring to access a blip or glitch in the seamless running of things and push any moment to its inevitable point of rupture. And the thrill of this perforation is compounded by the fact that the audience not only witnesses, but completes the experiential exchange. It suddenly becomes part of something bigger than itself—a frightening yet scarily enticing modality that is part ritual, part performance, part yearning for something other than what we know and have.

Notions of feminine fear, gothic horror and female representation (depicted as its own type of horror story) are all given a comic bite in Frumpus’ Ripper 2004 (director Cheryle Moore, video Sam James). Transforming Gravity Feed’s smoking tabernacle into a house of horrors, Frumpus emerge ridiculously red-tracksuited with torchlights and begin running (and dropping) pac-man style in a pantomime of fear and dodgem’ bullets. In front of a projected sequence of blonde women (again) running (presumably excerpts from various slasher films), enter the Frumpus women newly dressed in the archetypal white nighties and blonde wigs requisite of any truly gruesome horror flick. They “want water” they tell us, “water to drink”, in a peculiar moment of mimicry and satire that mirrors their thirst-crazed ‘feminine’ counterparts on screen. And then they are running again, this time their nighties becoming those in the projection, whilst a miniature ‘evil’ Frumpus doll is bloodily birthed from a backpack serving as a prosthetic womb.

Frumpus are masters at clinching just the right edge between comic artistry and ridiculous silliness. Ripper 2004 explores connections between mythologies of fear (especially a ‘feminine’ fear) of unknown territory and of femininity replayed on the omnipotent boxes of popular visual culture. Hence, later in the piece they construct a curious juxtaposition of sleeping Red Riding Hoods set against a video of buxom naked women teaching Tai Chi. At times these textual collisions can be oblique or alternately too obvious, but the skit-like quality and general buffoonery Frumpus employs suggest that not only are they running from the horror of their own representation, they are running because they just do it so well.
Julie-Anne Long, Boxing Baby Jane

Womanhood is given a different telling in Julie-Anne Long’s subtly satirical meditation on motherhood, Boxing Baby Jane. In collaboration with video artist Samuel James, Long constructs a “duet for live mother and projected child” in which the figure of saintly mother is placed against footage of a very sickly-sweet disembodied girl child. In a series of projected sequences, Long interacts with the ‘fictitious’ child through a combination of abstract and literal choreographies, building a progressive antagonism that stems as much from the implied mother/daughter relationship as from the compositional difference their live and filmic bodies erect.

James’ video montage merges realtime footage, still shots, film intertexts and animated sequences to form a suspended limbo of part-image, part-performance that creates a skewed multi-dimensionality, particularly in moments where mother and daughter ‘enter’ excerpts from 1960s psychological thrillers that recall haunted suburbia and sinister veneers of smiles and propriety. Yet it seems that these canonical films and James’ playful interventions are intended to work more suggestively than literally. As the house of their pas de deux erupts into flames, both mother and daughter remain caught in past ideals of role and gender, living the frustrations and complexities of an obsessive relationship that has its cinematic boxing incinerate around them.

The past is met again with the entry of the 3 Patricias. Poised at the edge of the theatre space, they move in slow motion: a glance aside, a wave into the distance. Their faces are stiff with genteel smiles. As they begin to work slowly repeated choreographies of dainty running, anxious searching and signals afar, their focus carries us into the historical mise-en-scène of Dear Pat and compels us to attempt to make sense of their world.

The oddity and charge of Dear Pat stems from its orchestration of disparate elements. Calculated, choreographed bodies skilfully enact and lightly satirise mannerisms and ladylike gestures, while the sound design oscillates between the suggestive evocation of historical place, operatic lament, and the repetition of a mysterious love letter. And finally the enormous and otherworldly many-teeted puppet that explodes from within the box proper.

Holding these elements together is the steady tension of the performance company My Darling Patricia (Bridget Dolan, Clare Britton, Halcyon Macleod, Katrina Gill) whose collective force charts a trajectory towards the implied narrative of the box and builds with the promise of its climatic revelation. As we witness these wartime women being slowly swallowed by the inflatable monstrosity held inside the container’s jaws, and as we attempt to draw connections between hinted at moments of arrival and farewell, love affairs and train stations, it rather seems as if they are confronting, and submitting to, the monstrosity of imagination itself.

Threaded through the diversity of The Boxed Set performances were Theatre Kantanka’s jaw-wobbling, leg-tottering sheep (director Michael Cohen). Dressed luxuriously in faux sheepskin coats and black suspenders, the sheep canoodled and schmoozed their way through the evening, merging the potent ideas and summer frivolity the works offered to make for an event that both tackled monsters and ended with laughs. They entered on kiddie bikes, cooked their fellow animals as snags on a Weber, got caught in a moment of Frumpus horror, lapped themselves into a martini stupor and taught the audience to munch ovine style on grass. The delightful blankness and stupidity with which they undertook their humanoid tasks made for a drollness perfectly pitched to counter some of the more obscure artistry on show. Their play with the audience was particularly deviant, as in the cheeky cabaret number sung by one slinky ewe who plonked herself rudely on numerous gentlemen’s laps. In a titillating grand finale, they treated us all to a raunchy striptease complete with opportunistic mating and the flashing of their fleecy ‘bits’ to close.
Better than a Blow-Up Doll

Installations

Two installation works in the Live Bait Pavilion also made use of the box motif, inviting spectators to physically interact with the configuration of the contained space and the very different worlds that each space generated.

Nik Wishart and Miles van Dorssen’s sound installation Cell definitely arrested the sonic equilibrium of the Live Bait open arena, conjuring a mad construction site pounding away on an early Sunday morning. Like a factory pissing steam and guttural engine-hammer, or like a rapid-fire army of machine guns pelleting out spray, Cell is an industrial orchestra, housed and outfitted in a 6m shipping container, and not accidentally making use of the voluminous acoustic boom such a metal structure can generate. Comprising bells, horns, xylophones and other less conventional percussive objects (I was sure there must be a jackhammer in there somewhere), Cell operates as a self-generating symphony that converts programmed data into spontaneous rhythmic sequences; at times an accelerated rat-a-tat spatter of body shuddering thuds, at others a dissonant chorus of tinny jangling chimes.

Painted with motifs of clouds and sky, the box is closed off by prison bars running across its front, a frustrating prohibition between bodies and the thunderous noise-machine. As loud as Cell is at its peak, there is something about the quality of this loudness that presses you to want to get right inside of it, so its rhythms can really vibrate your bones. There is a comic element to Cell too in the unexpected shifts and clashes of tempo, in the way it becomes an organism with its own pulsing personality, oscillating curiously between mechanical steelworks and shantytown one-man band—minus the one man.

While Cell resonates its industrial discord into the surrounding atmosphere, the spectators/clientele of Shagging Julie’s Better than a Blow-Up Doll! are invited to step inside the sealed confines of a protective caravan and experience imaginings of an outside post-apocalyptic world. Shagging Julie are the buff and spritely representatives of the Apoca Lifestyle Corporation, posted to give us a tour-cum-salespitch of what should be expected of life and lifestyle after the imminent nuclear holocaust has hit. Lined with tins of powdered orange drink, aluminium recycling signs and remnants galore, the Apoca Lifestyle Capsule creates an intimate performance space in which a handful of audience members are given expert instruction on how to comfortably and affordably “ride out Armageddon” in a pod that comes complete in a “range of fashion exteriors.”

The opening ramble is dry and tongue-in-cheek, taking on the language and tone of gameshows and cheesy mobile home racketeers. The performers aptly suggest we try a roleplay package that enables us to keep feeling useful as an ‘officeworker’ even though there is no work to be done. Or we might try the simulated cold-calling device from their ‘Sanity Guard System’ that makes us feel part of a larger world, when one doesn’t exist. Or, in moments of anxiety, we might try pressing one of the coloured alert buttons fitted inside the capsule to release tension. Of course, no emergency crews exist to be contacted. Shagging Julie’s attire is inspired by 1950s future-chic, with a one-piece wide-legged suit and convincing ‘spaceage’ hair design suggesting that the version of the future we are being given has been strangely exhumed from the past. The imagination behind the doomful product being sold, however, is painfully striking in the context of current world events, and in the face of an American superpower whose sentiments are sadly too archaic to bear contemplation.

The Boxed Set, curators Michael Cohen (Live Bait), Fiona Winning (Performance Space), Bondi Pavilion Amphitheatre, January 16-21;Cell, Miles van Dorssen, Nik Wishart, Bondi Pavilion, Jan 24-31; Better than a Blow-Up Doll! Shagging Julie, January 15-31, Bondi Pavilion; Live Bait Festival, Jan 14-31

In the shape of the innovative sensor-based Diem Dance System, technology is at the forefront of contemporary dance performance in The Obcell. Created at the Danish Institute of Electro-acoustic Music, the system has been designed to give the dancer optimal movement range and creative control with two sensors/cameras being worn on the body. The apparatus is hidden in athlete’s strapping, suggesting injury or restraints.

This work integrates the capabilities and limitations of the cable-free camera/sound system, informing the performance’s concept and physical content. For example the 0.42 second delay between a movement trigger and the sensor response alters the performer’s natural body timing while tripping the audience’s perception of the real and the imagined. The tightly woven interplay between subject matter, choreography and technological device invites the audience to keenly observe the initiating source, making us both voyeurs and laboratory assistants.

A triptych relationship between the live body and 2 video mirror images acting as observational agents draws our eye to detail that would otherwise go unnoticed. A dialogue evolves between the body as subject and the camera as ‘tester’, representing the interdependent narrative of man and technology. We observe the physical and psychological journey of performer Ninian Donald as he grapples with solitary confinement and electric shocks unrelentingly administered to modify his behavior. He is reduced to a raw animal physicality of strained sinews, body arching in electrically-fired neural synaptic pain. He regresses into childlike states with repetitious pacing and body inversions as he attempts to deal with the inhumanity of his sterile environment. Escapist behavior emerges as creativity in the face of deprivation. These flights into altered states of consciousness invite retribution, testing his endurance. A night vision camera duplicates his presence 10 fold. Multiple images stare back at us. Uncomfortably we recognise the paradoxical question: who is watching who?

Ambiguity purposefully surrounds the location of The Obcell, suggesting a place of deleted identity, somewhere between penitentiary and psychiatric ward. The test is dubiously positioned between punishment and treatment. As witnesses we begin to feel complicit, due to our internalised discomfort and obedience to the authority of performance. Does anyone ask for it to stop? The performance reminds me of Stanley Milgrim’s 1963 psychological experiment which studied the human tendency to obey authority. A test subject was asked to administer electric shocks to another person (unbeknownst to the subject the shocks were not real): 65% of the subjects obeyed.

Informed by research conducted by director Fiona Malone at Long Bay Jail, this interactive multi-media dance work addresses multiple issues. Although choreographically thin in places, its depth may be fully realised with finer tuning or as a longer work. What makes The Obcell so unnerving is that the hypothesis for the experiment is never revealed. The calculated persecution so powerfully embodied by Ninian Donald is theatrically converted and refracted through projected real time images. He has no choice and we do not set him free. The immersive theatrical environment neither discloses his identity or the reason for his incarceration. This in turn creates a strange lack of empathy for the subject, bringing sharply into focus current issues surrounding all forms of detainment.

The Obcell, director-choreographer Fiona Malone, performer Ninian Donald, State Theatre Rehearsal Room, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Feb 19-28

We’re stuck on the twelfth floor, somewhere, nobody knows. What’s going on? Does it matter? From the second the lights go down, as sound score and movement begin, we are caught, arrested, transfixed. Choreographer, Tanja Liedtke, doesn’t let us go until she decides to. Soft-footed, funny, athletic, delicate, violent in places, and violating, Liedtke knows how to pull us every which way: and it works, although we hold our breath, suck in air, so close does the performance come to very nearly imploding, with us, the audience, as co-conspirators.

There is so much to say about this 50 minute dance work. This is a choreography about loss (being lost) and being found (finding); about desire and wanting (not wanting), not having; about fear (those shakes, that scream) and joy (yes, laughter); about togetherness, being together, and the anguish that accompanies a crashing alone-ness.

We watch every move, we want to watch (are watched): it fascinates, repulses, evokes. Liedtke knows how to make good use of bodies, the size and physicality of them (and not just the small), to take us from excruciatingly funny sequences of bouncing in and out of doors, playing Follow the Leader (the space itself comes alive); to a character squealing like a pig that chills. From a crude sexual ‘game’ with a figure drawn on a wall that turns terrifyingly into a simulated (real?) gang rape; to a flight of escape and possible redemption.

The choreography is character driven; and the 5 performers work beautifully alone and as a tight ensemble.

Take a most poignant sequence when ‘the big boy’ (Joshua Tyler) draws all over the walls (painted green and black as chalkboards) the words ‘sleep’, ‘dark’, ‘hole’, ‘her skin felt’, sometimes back-to-front, then draws/writes in chalk all over the girl in the yellow dress (Kristina Chan). This is a deft use of bodies as writing spaces: how we write ourselves (our bodies; our walls); how we are written up by others, by society—by us. Later, the boy follows the girl from chalk-footprint to chalk-footprint, carries her almost as though she is weightless—like a bird—a dance for just the 2 of them. He is fascinated by the movement of her body, its physicality; we are seduced.

Timing is impeccable; voice and sound (newly composed for Twelfth Floor by DJTr!p) just so; light folds back to reveal, or hide.

The denouement is worth the terrible weight of what goes on just before, to see the same girl dance her way to escape, drawing as she goes in red chalk, in a language that becomes gobbledygook, a mad scribble, emblematic of the emotion felt, inside out; to the point of departure. There: her face at the window, her drawing of a little chalk girl, in red. STOP IT STOP IT folds into CRY LIKE A BIRD into W E E P. And I think we do.

But is it enough? Aren’t we stuck in this mess? And why 12? In Twelfth Floor things aren’t always as they appear, or as we desire.

Twelfth Floor, The Australian Choreographic Centre, choreographer/ director Tanja Liedtke, performers Anton, Sascha Budimski, Kristina Chan, Amelia McQueen , Joshua Tyler, creative coordinator Solon Ulbrich, sound design and composition DJTr!p; Australian Choreographic Centre Performing Space, Canberra, March 16-20

(From top left) Sohlange Casimiro-Gil, Vanessa Gordon, Monique Moffat, Katherine Whitfield, Helen Whitfield, Cherrelle Chan, Vavine

Long ago the temptress Vavine tricked the mighty hunter Alule into revealing all his dances and abandoning all his costumes to her. From these dances sprang the rich culture of the Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea.

The Pacific Island performance group Sunameke created a contemporary dance, Vavine, around this narrative and performed it recently to packed houses at Browns Mart Theatre in Darwin. Sunameke’s director and principal choreographer, Julia Gray, used the production to explore how cultures shift and change over time. How these changes have played out in her own life and the lives of others caught “between 2 shores”, is one of the major narrative strands of this multi-faceted production.

For some of the dancers in Sunameke this was their first performance in a theatre. Others have much wider experience. Together they produced a performance that resonated strongly with the multicultural Darwin audience. For many in Darwin, especially those from the South Pacific and Asia Pacific regions, dance is a key cultural activity practiced with respect for each dance’s particular essence and reason for existence.

In this performance a hypnotic voice-over narration echoed and re-iterated fragments of the Vavine story, interwoven with contemporary text from the distinguished Pacific poet Teresia Teaiwa. Drama and melancholy were added through a soundtrack comprising mostly traditional island guitar and ukulele music, but also including some original tracks from Airileke Ingram of the Drum Drum group. The narrator’s voice added a heightened significance to the dance and immersed the audience in the power that emanates from myth.

The dramatic tension was alleviated by more light-hearted episodes such as a group of young girls sweeping the stage with straw brooms and competing to grate coconut for the prize of a Cherry Ripe. There was humour too in the raw energy of Teaiwa’s text: “This is just the husk of the coconut, baby—wait till you reach the shell!”

Darwin has as many as 50 cultural dance groups who maintain their culture and traditions through performance. The particular significance of Vavine has been the creation of a contemporary performance based on traditional dance movement. This process both questions and reaffirms the relevance of dance traditions in the changing post-colonial space “between 2 shores.”

Sunameke, Vavine, director Julia Gray, performers Yola Gray, Richard Broughton, Darrin McNally, Julia Quinn, text written and spoken by Teresia Teaiwa, choreographers Julia Gray, Yola Gray, Pamela Cameron, Richard Broughton, Vanessa Gordon, lighting and design Elka Kerkhofs, Neil McKnight, Browns Mart Theatre, Darwin, Feb13-14

Kate Neal’s production house for new music, Dead Horse, premiered with a recital counter-posing neo-Dadaist/Fluxus event-style work with Neal’s own textural, jazz-influenced compositions. Action-based works were performed by Dutch musician Mayke Nas, while David Young screened graphic notation in a digital projection positioned between audience and performer.

The easy, visible logic and sense of fun in Nas’ performances made them crowd pleasers. First was an amusing study adapted from the writings of Peter Handke. The performers wrote on 4 chalkboards hanging in a row, each word making up an ironic phrase of a misdeed or failure (“I found complexity in artists / I found banality in artists / etc”). Substitutions transformed sentences until each performer was left alone, scrawling their own list. An equally engaging seesawing between comic game-play and po-faced seriousness saw Nas and William Poskitt at a piano, swinging from side to side, playing heavy, open-handed strikes, interposing knee-slaps and handclaps, finally crossing each other’s arms to slap the other’s upright palms as in a schoolyard round, producing a tightly scored version of child’s play. The best work in this tradition though was composer Thierry de Mey’s Table Music, in which Nas and 2 others sat at tables sharply isolated from the gloom by crisp squares of overhead light. They executed double-handed finger rubs across the surface of a smoothly planed wooden resonating box, as well as bony finger flicks, stabs of the fingers which kept the hands and arms elevated, flat hand slaps across the undressed top and horizontal flip-flops of the palms. These pieces from Nas and de Mey focused on rhythm and were not especially musically complex, but Table Music was so tightly choreographed, executed and framed that it resembled dance. The performance was also lent a palpable sensuality by the aural materiality of the amplified sound of flesh and bone on softwood.

Young’s Val Camonica series used materials derived from transcriptions of prehistoric rock art in Italy’s Camonica Valley. Though exhibiting a spiky, aggressive timbre typical of Young’s work, the latest composition had a seductiveness which was hard to isolate, but was nevertheless firmly embedded within its open gaps, extended one note gestures (signified in the projected score by a lengthy downward arc) and juxtapositions of small masses of noisy atonalism. Young’s graphic notation directed jagged, highly textural playing, which included using crushed, dried leaves as percussion instruments. Nevertheless, only parts of the more aggressive interpretation offered by pianist Michael Kieran-Harvey touched upon the ambience of atonalist fury or abstruse serialism. Moreover, the invitation for the audience to join in the game of reading the quite precise, coloured pictographs and lines from the score rendered Roccia an accessible yet satisfyingly abstract contemporary composition.

If Nas and de Mey provided the performative highlight of the evening, Neal’s were the most musically satisfying works. Two related suites concluded the recital, separated by a pleasant if somewhat unnecessary projection of a night time drive through Canberra. Little Fury constantly rested on the edges of things, falling into small motifs and resemblances which only lasted for short periods. It opened with thick, sustained notes and chords across the whole ensemble, which were then passed around without leading to a distinct lead instrument or ensemble section. Materials ebbed, flowed and peaked with fragility, without actually decaying in depth or evolving into a strong focus on any single instrument or rhythmic line. From within this crackling mass emerged jazzy accents, moments of Steve Reich-like throb, and almost Baroque or Nyman-esque ascents and descents over the staves. The overall effect was one of dense shimmering, of internal transfers within a thick musical system.

With Rabid Bay, however, the jazz-like intonations of the preceding work emerged as the dominant theme. In an ensemble rearranged to feature brass instruments supporting Kieran-Harvey on piano, Neal’s music took on a propulsive urban modernity recalling the marriage in US cinema of post-1960s jazz and atonal music, as in Bernard Herrmann’s scores. This gave Rabid Bay a satisfying sense of musical aggression and drama.

Such a varied program could never satisfy on all levels, and some of the simple or naive video fared poorly in comparison with the accompanying music. However, the program established Dead Horse as an exciting vehicle not only for Neal, but a wide range of new music.

New Music Works From Australian, Belgian and Dutch Composers, Dead Horse Productions, World Wide Warehouse, Feb 13

Not all those attending The opera Project’s The Audience and Other Psychopaths get to realise the promise of the production’s title, but one of their number does get to play murderer. This act is perpetrated in an upside down world where the theatre becomes frantic film set, the audience transformed into extras, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train is invoked in drag and some murky sub-romantic business transpires between a manic Italian female film director and an off-stage diva. It all ends badly with only the audience member (cast as the film’s lead) surviving the climactic off-stage mayhem.

This aesthetic mix and moral carnage is further complicated by a beautiful score from composer Stephen Adams, setting Amanda Stewart’s wild grab-the-world-by-the-throat text for the diva, and instant cinema-scale images of the live performance from video-maker Peter Oldham. The work’s furious dynamic means that on occasion the score is drowned by stage action, the soprano’s delivery of the sung text sometimes less than intelligible (surtitles, please) and some apparently key moments make little sense. As well, Nigel Kellaway’s chainsmoking, tottering blonde is out to have Kellaway the performer (seen on screen) murdered. For those who know the artist’s ouevre, this doubling took them back to his acclaimed durational work, This Most Wicked Body (1994). For everyone else there was little time to reflect on reflexivity as the show fairly belted along and moments of opacity were tolerated and soon forgotten as hysteria mounted.

The Audience and Other Psychopaths is primarily and wildly comic. Kellaway is at his funniest in the recorded scene in which, looming against the Sydney Opera House, he catches the ferry and then clumsily pedals a bicycle to the Lane Cove murder site. Elsewhere he has the right kind of droll obtuseness that echoes Robert Walker’s villain in the Hitchcock film, both funny and frightening. The moment when he cracks with a shriek is chilling, pushing past melodrama. Katia Molina is the whirlwind director, issuing orders in a flood of Italian and English, performing mourning, outrage and death in her own film in an endless rush of hilarious and inexplicable costume changes, and quarrelling via mobile phone with the diva—Kellaway muttering derisive asides about “lesbos-ism.”

The Audience and Other Psychopaths is a wild ride, a little uneven (the off-stage diva device never quite gels despite fine singing, hauntingly layered and textured in the recording) but endearingly lunatic, a fantasia of inversions, reversals and, as always with The opera Project, assaults on the artforms and genres we love but must not let rest. The play of light (designer Simon Wise) and projected image is particularly potent here, cutting across forms to yield a convincing cinematic theatricality with some eerie, memorable images conjured with the flick of a cigarette lighter or the alternation of screen and scrim. And it is striking how an audience member projected onto a huge screen is given unexpected presence, when the slightest movement of lip or eye is magnified to suggest meaning.

The opera Project, The Audience and Other Psychopaths, performers Nigel Kellaway, Katia Molino, soprano Karen Cummings, director Nigel Kellaway, composer Stephen Adams, co-writer Amanda Stewart, video artist Peter Oldham, lighting Simon Wise; Performance Space, Feb 10-21

Kathleen Ferrier: A Time of Kings and Queens is a concert performance built around a recital of songs mostly from the repertoire of the great British lyric contralto. Annette Tesoriero (an integral part of Sydney’s performance scene and co-founder of The opera Project with Nigel Kellaway) stays clear of mimickry; there is sufficient affinity in her dark, chocolatey lower register and the capacity to soar to make the connection. As if sharing morning and then afternoon tea with us, Tesoriero and accompanist Heinz Schweers chat about Ferrier’s life and sadly short career with a blend of introductions, anecodotes, gossipy banter and readings with dashes of witty theatricality. The focus is largely on adapted folk songs and art songs often influenced by folk, alongside an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo e Euridice and a superb rendition of Britten’s remarkable cabaret song, O Tell me the truth about love. In braving Brahms’ Sapphische Ode and Der Tod das ist die Kuhle Nacht , Tesoriero captured something of Ferrier’s capacity for the transcendent, dark notes of the soul soaring high into the world of the spirit. Ferrier’s gay associations, her pleasure in the occasional ‘trouser role’, an unconsummated marriage and the intimacy of her relationship with her female carer provide the substance for a theme of generalised queerness if not of lesbianism. Surprisingly though, the performers omitted Ferrier’s well-documented delight in dirty jokes, limericks and crude drawings. At times the show seemed a touch twee for Ferrier’s earthiness and un-diva-ish homeliness, elsewhere it was spot on. A similar unevenness was felt in the telling of the life, a more thorough through-writing is needed, particularly in the second half where some songs went curiously unintroduced and too many years of Ferrier’s career were neglected. Significant encounters with conductors Barbirolli, Klemperer and Walter and opera performances, including, early on, the premiere of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, could have provided a more significant sketch of the artist without dampening the performers’ playfulness. Perhaps, too, there were too many songs after interval, fascinating as it was to be introduced to 4 songs by Roger Quilter (another tragic figure who died in 1953, the same year as Ferrier) whose reputation is enjoying a quiet revival. I hope that Tesoriero and Schweers keep Kathleen Ferrier: A Time of Kings and Queens in repertoire: it’s an intriguing and engaging fusion of recital and theatre and would make ideal festival fare. KG

Kathleen Ferrier: A Time of Kings and Queens, directed and performed by Annette Tesoriero and Heinz Schweers, Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Seymour Centre, Feb 27

An early gig and packed out. Three performances on the one bill, all of them involving improvisation with a more or less traditional instrument used as a noise source–outside conventional playing technique. Performance danger, music at the threshold of organisation and perception.

Opening the show is Clayton Thomas, a double bass player working in Sydney who co-runs the NOW now improvisation festival. He comes on stage very down home, says ‘this is the first time I’ve ever entered to applause’–this really is a surprisingly large and enthusiastic audience. On the floor stage front is a double bass lying on its side, bubble wrap stuck under the strings. There’s a few bits and pieces on a mat, a bell, paper clips etc, a couple of bows: normal size and chubby. Thomas whips out the chubby bow and starts playing the leg of the bass, slowly builds up to a rhythm and drone. There’s some new sounds for old, quiet bits and loud bits, but no particular structure emerges. Every so often I hear something that I wish was played by an ensemble in a more organised arrangement. Some good textural moments, but the general effect is of a Foley artist picking up and putting down the quirky tools of the trade, setting up for the next effect.

Annette Krebs and Andrea Neumann enter next to the sound of mains hum–techs confer for about 10 minutes but the hum remains, disconcerting to performers who move subtle textures in and out of silence. Krebs performs sitting down, her flat down guitar scraped, squeezed, coaxed and fanned with various preparations. Neumann stands to play a purpose built ‘inside piano’–dump the walnut case, just use the strings, resonance board and metal frame. Together they use mixer feedback, contact mics and amplification to extract the tiniest of sounds and draw out sympathetic resonances–flabby strings cry out for some of the other guy’s action. Noises crawl in with no physical analog, but sounding as if they should. Krebs and Neumann spatialise the sound across 4 speakers, but I don’t notice it that much.

Werner Dafeldecker studied double bass at the Konservatorium in Vienna. He comes to the front of the stage and gently bows the bass. Scratchy harmonics, ultra quiet, working in, out, and against the CD backing track. Dafeldecker has an assured technique, confident and musical. His restrained set of gestures creates a delicate music for intensely personal, focussed listening. But I’ve never known a concert for so many creaking bumshifts and people stomping about. Perhaps next time they could announce “Please turn off all mobiles. If you haven’t been to the toilet please go now.”

After the concert Michael Graeve, a sound/visual artist from Melbourne, set up an installation in the middle of the Powerhouse’s open concrete performance platform. Working mainly with old record players and speakers — veneer on chipboard, sunrooms circa 1970–Graeve likes to plonk his machines down so they work their sounds in space and volume. Tonight they are in a circle with Graeve in the middle, adjusting things. No records, just the players playing themselves, a bit of rubber matting, an aluminium platter. Microphonic feedback from the needle being stuck close to the speakers and the gain shoved up high. Most people stand back, give the guy some room, but some wander in pretty close to see as well as hear. Working this way is a bit unpredictable–within the general boundaries of bump and grind noise music — but one can overstate the possibilities for novelty: harmonic progressions aren’t going to suddenly dominate proceedings.

Noise/experimental/microsound improvisation has a long enough history to have developed its own clichés. Crackles, hisses, sub-sub groans, picking things up and putting them down. Soft and slow, loud and busy: the formal structures to organise the sound stream are still in short supply. Sometimes it’s a bit like the one-man-band thing: tootling that whistle, plinking that banjo, crashing those cymbals, pumping the footpedal for a bass drum thump. Except nowdays it’s shaving a whale in a cardboard box and every time you hit the footpedal it vomits. Not everything works, exploration is not yet exhausted. The most successful performances, Dafeldecker in particular, bring the audience into the sound like a lens and listening is transformed into a series of exclusive moments where sounds fill perception with detail and meaning.

What is Music?, Michael Graeve, Clayton Thomas, Werner Dafeldecker, Annette Krebs and Andrea Neumann, Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 6

Both wearing black and conjuring chimerical presences in their mesmeric sound performances at the What is Music? festival at Brisbane’s Powerhouse in February, Keiji Haino and Masami Akita affirmed their joint status as icons of the Japanese noise underground. Beyond the spectral noise merchant image, however, lie differences of ideology and approach embodied in their performances.

Haino took the stage first, billed under his band name Fushitsusha (“The Unlost”), despite the fact this was a solo performance (bassist Yasushi Ozawa was ill). Though Haino apparently loathes the categorisation of their style as ‘improvised’, his performances with Fushitsusha (often labelled “the heaviest rock band on planet earth”) have come to signify a critical peak for free rock.

Without the other members, though, Haino was reduced to playing with a drum machine and loops created from his own guitar and a theremin-like device. Despite this, the solo performance was still an extraordinary event. Cutting a numinous figure in his trademark black leather pants, billowing black shirt and dark sunglasses, surrounded by a thin haze of incense smoke, Haino unleashed an unearthly aural assault that ranged from tiny jagged echoes to an almost overwhelming electric cacophony of guitar wails, potent feedback and roaring distortion.

During the performance Haino’s face, framed by long black hair and a thick fringe, was a picture of intensity. Hurling his body, dervish-like, across the stage, he assailed both guitar and microphone with ferocity, producing a turbulent, driving din. At one point his body was propelled backwards into the speakers, recoiling from the force of his attack on his visibly scarred guitar. Later he lurched dangerously close to the edge of the stage. Haino’s convulsive thrashing lead to a trail of dropped picks across the stage, patches of abrupt silence (filled with cheers and applause) as he became unplugged and, by the end, a guitar bereft of most of its strings.

In between violent guitar flagellation and anguished screams came small moments of quiet, as Haino whispered, hissed and gagged on agonised lyrics. It’s this mix of ear-splitting tone and volume with soft, textured sounds for which Fushitsusha is famous and which demonstrates Haino’s incredible noise-making range.

In contrast to the maniacal, ostentatious sensuality of Haino’s performance, Masami Akita (Merzbow) presented a more introverted, almost wraithlike image. His method revolved around the meticulous addition and layering of sounds. Where Haino screamed, stalked the stage and stamped on pedals, Merzbow barely moved. Framed behind a pair of laptop screens casting a ghostly blue glow on his pale face and glasses, the only movement was the occasional twitch of an index finger on the mouse or mixer and his eyes flicking between screens.

Layer on layer, Merzbow created a soundscape that began with faint twittering and fluttering and rain-like static, joined by a swelling bassline and samples of chains and other metallic scrapings. The sounds accreted over time, swirling and shifting, pulsing louder and softer. Harsh, grinding crunches were counterpointed with delicate tinkles, until the final buffeting climax. An oceanic mix of soaring and dipping sounds, the performance was notably quieter than some of his more violent pieces, but no less complex.

The differences between the 2 performers embody the cleavage between rock, with its emphasis on liveness and authenticity, and the related but very different sound-art world, which usually eschews drama and staging in favour of restrained, anti-spectacular delivery. These discursive differences in performance are deeply imbricated with the production of the music itself. Haino’s demented energy, frenzied strumming and throat-tearing howls perfectly enact rock’s myth of authenticity. His spasmodic convulsions are the result of total surrender to the power of the unmediated, pure, raw sound. In contrast, Merzbow’s rejection of ‘performance’ and careful accretions typify sound art’s minimalist syncretic-assemblage approach.

Romanticism emphatically informs Haino’s performance, where the music offers immediate, unmediated access to the artist’s genius-soul, while Merzbow’s approach is rooted in Surrealism. Taking his name from a Kurt Schwitters painting (The Cathedral of Erotic Misery), his music-making and artistic persona is constructed around Surrealism’s obsession with the unconscious. Merzbow sees his sonic collages, with their approximation of the dream state, as a form of automatic writing.

Coming together for What is Music?, these performers’ differences synthesized into a deafening, caterwauling crescendo. The resulting industrial collage of electronic noises, distortions and unearthly vocals provided a fitting end to 2 consummate performances from exemplars of interlocking but distinct modes of experimental music making.

What is Music? Haino Keiji (as Fushitsusha) and Masami Akita (as Merzbow), Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 7

Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life, MIT Press, Mass, 2004 ISBN 0-262-23234-0

Mitchell Whitelaw has produced a detailed and wide ranging review of artificial life (a-life) in art. Clear descriptions and analyses are presented of many major works in the field, which are divided into “breeders”, “cybernatures” (where “breeder” programs are placed in a more complex ecology), hardware (which overlaps considerably with conventional robotics) and abstract machines or cellular automata. These make interesting and contestable groupings in themselves.

Both “breeder” and “cybernature” programs often draw on evolutionary theory and language. Attempts are made to produce “small worlds” where a-life breeds and competes for resources, but all too often the basic algorithm is that of conventional Darwinian selection. As humans inevitably select interactively or provide the program’s simple rules for selection, these pressures are far less complex and subtle than those found in true ecosystems. When copies of life’s rules are written in, is it any surprise that life-like work results? The predictable outcome is all too often a trivial attempt to make pale, albeit aesthetically pleasing, imitations of the real world.

The major omission in Metacreation is any real coverage of biological works, with Jeremijenko’s One Trees one of the few examples described. In contrast, while little attempt is made to integrate artistic a-life work with the larger fields of biological science, computer engineering and gaming, Whitelaw does acknowledge the overlap. As a biologist I felt the relationship to current debates in evolutionary theory could have been better explored. Much of the artistic a-life work which produces aesthetic outcomes involves little critical evaluation of the science on which its theory is founded.

There has been an odd transposition occurring in the last few decades, with science leading debate while art avoids or ignores the wider implications of a-life work. Is it time for art to regain its creative and pioneering leadership rather than shrinking from confrontation? It would have been interesting to compare a-life art with the politically loaded and controversial work of a biologist like Richard Dawkins, who has also dabbled in the production of a-life.

As Whitelaw notes, “a-life art is under theorised”, a criticism often aimed at many branches of emerging ‘sci-art’, but one that many traditional art practices might pray for! This left me frustrated as I read account after account of works described in isolation, often with no analysis beyond that of the artists themselves. However it is worth the wait as the deeper analysis of works in 2 chapters towards the end of the book covers the relationships between a-life art and society, science and other art practices.

Whitelaw really gets into his stride when discussing the artistic context of a-life. He addresses the essential tension between those who see a-life as rich with creative potential and those who see it as a “value laden technoscientific practice” embedded in conventional scientific and information technology practice. Why is there a need in these artificial worlds to stick to a conventional view of competition based on the macho struggle to breed, kill or be killed? Whitelaw describes the gender issues involved in a-life creation, including womb envy and virgin birth. Does the competitive nature of these artificial worlds have any relationship to the fact that computer programming and robotic engineering are still bastions of male dominance in research and artistic practice?

In his final chapter Whitelaw tackles the issue of ‘emergence’ as related to a-life, asking whether such art works can actually produce effects unforeseen by the author and not determined directly by the computer code. All too often a-life works seem little more than toys; are the “breeders” actually as complex or socially interactive as Tamagotchi? Do the hardware “robots” truly have any emergent properties? Can a-life really be the “life of the future” when so much of it simply mimics the living world? I have to declare a vested interest but I do think a comparison with the cyborgs of Fish and Chips or MEART (www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au/) would have been worthwhile, since in these works biological material not under complete human control has a major effect on the output. Works where humans interact with living organisms, such as Eduardo Kac’s Genesis, or where tissues are left to their own “creative-semi-living” devices, such as the Worry Dolls of the Tissue Culture and Art group, are serious omissions from Whitelaw’s review.
Kenneth Rinaldo, Autopoiesis, 2000, Ars Electronica-Cyberarts

Kenneth Rinaldo, Autopoiesis, 2000, Ars Electronica-Cyberarts

When Ken Rinaldo says he is waiting for the day when one of his art pieces greets him with a spontaneous “hello!”, is he talking about robotics rather than art? Are these works just an extension of the programmer and engineer’s skill? If the creators are more interested in results and discovery than creation, are they more engineers than artists? Whitelaw worries that in many cases a-life may be nothing more than a fancy spirograph reflecting, as suggested by Cariani, the skills and rules introduced by the programmer.

While Whitelaw describes Adrian Thompson’s production by artificial evolution of mysterious, incomprehensible, functional electronic circuits, he does not describe similar work in neural network studies, where due to the almost infinite possibilities, the way the final program operates may be impossible to predict.

Can these works of a-life truly show us “life as it could be”, given that many employ complex culturally and biologically contextualised algorithms? With the exception of bio-art, Mitchell Whitelaw has provided an excellent review of attempts at a-life, enabling the interested reader to decide for themselves.

Although documentary film is increasing in popularity, it’s still fairly rare to see it on the big screen. More feature length documentaries are achieving commercial release; Spellbound, Capturing the Friedmans and The Fog of War, all American, are currently screening in Australia. However, the scale of the field is vast (see Tom Zubrycki’s account of The International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam on page 15), and we encounter little of it here. Thankfully, REAL: Life on Film documentary festival is touring 5 Australian cities this year, giving audiences around the country a substantial experience of the latest in local and international documentary film in a cinema setting.

REAL: Life on Film aims to stimulate, celebrate and educate through the documentary form. This year’s festival has a strong focus on the political, religious and social divisions running through Australian society and the broader global community. All the Ladies (director Mary Quinsacara) looks at the burgeoning culture of female hip hop MCs in Australia, while Trevor Graham’s Lonely Boy Richard (RT58, p17) tells the wrenching tale of Richard Wanambi from north east Arnhem Land, who spends most of his life drinking alone and then imprisoned to escape the trauma of a community torn apart by violence and alcohol. Australian refugee policy is the focus of the opening-night short It’s Like That (Southern Ladies Animation Group), while Pip Starr’s short Through the Wire provides a revealing view of the Woomera break-out.

Many international titles will have their Australian premiere at the festival, including the opening-night feature Angels of Brooklyn (Camilla Hjelm, Martin Zandvliet). Against a sultry jazz score, Angels is an intimate portrait of 3 Puerto Rican girls living in one of New York’s most impoverished areas. Tokyo Noise (Kristian Petri, Jan Roed and Johan Soderberg) looks at life in the ultra-modern Japanese metropolis, while in contrast, Riles: Life on the Tracks (Ditsi Carolino) take us into the distinctly un-modern slums of Manila.

The festival’s wide selection of shorts and features will also include filmmaker, writer and curator Ross Gibson presenting a very different approach to documentary, the interactive work Life After Wartime (Gibson, Kate Richards), comprising an intriguing mix of crime scene photographs from 1945 to 1950, haiku-like text and a haunting soundtrack.

REAL: Life on Film provides a big screen window on the world through documentaries that are investigative, poetic and innovative, many of which we will never encounter on our television screens. RT

REAL: Life on Film , Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, April 29-May 5, other states to follow; details at www.acmi.net.au/reallifeonfilm.jsp

Simon Penny’s major new work Fugitive II engages participants through an elaborate interactive system. A circular room features a 360 degree screen. As you enter, a number of sensors read and respond to your movements and gestures, triggering images on screen. This creates an uncanny sense of being ‘read’ by the room.

At any one time, only a small section of the 360 degree screen is in use. The rules of the interaction are disappointingly straightforward: move closer to the screen and the footage zooms in, walk around the room and the image follows you, get too close and it disappears, only to reappear behind you. Thus, while you and your movements are inextricably linked to the location and contents of the picture, the installation also works to keep participant and image at a distance, rendering the work’s interface something of an impenetrable surface. Windows seen in the film are zoomed in on as you approach them, but remain opaque and vanish if you get too close. A title screen announcing the name of the work appears seemingly at random, amplifying the disjointed feel of the interaction. The footage itself is of various suburban, industrial and recreational landscapes, devoid of human presence or signs of life. This emptiness deepens the sense of dislocation established by the image’s elusive movements.

The focus on the disembodying, elusive aspects of technology seems a curious choice considering the mode of close interactivity Simon Penny has developed for the installation. The simultaneous complicity and distance between participant and screen provides some interesting food for thought vis-a-vis technology’s “user-friendly” aspirations and the associated connotations of complicity and mutual understanding between human and machine. The experience of the work, however, is ultimately unsatisfying, a feeling enhanced by the jerky pans and zooms triggered by the more fluid movements of the participating body. The focus on the technology itself, both as a material and conceptual focal point of the work, ultimately makes for a limited and rather dry participatory experience.

Perhaps this dissatisfaction is heightened by the presence of Char Davies’ monumental Osmose and Ephèmére downstairs in the screen gallery as part of Transfigure (RT58; RT59). Despite the somewhat cumbersome equipment involved in their interactive systems, Davies’ works transcend their technology while using it to create a powerful connection between the participant’s physical presence, the moving imagery (also generated in response to the viewer’s movements) and a transformed sense of space. This anchor in lived, embodied experience, existing outside the mechanical framework of the work itself, provides a sense of engagement and discovery lacking in Fugitive II.

Limitations aside, Fugitive II is an interesting component in what has been a diverse program of work at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image exploring the multifarious applications and possibilities of interactive technology. It is especially encouraging, in the face of recent criticism and close scrutiny of ACMI as an institution, that the organisation continues to deliver a balanced and diverse program which intrigues, inspires and creates new possibilities for the viewing experience.

From original sketches and hand-coloured cells to printed publications and animation, The Dark Woods brings together works from emerging and established comic artists from around Australia. These have been hand-picked by curators Sarah Howell and Leigh Rigozzi from the recent Supernova comics convention, the National Young Writers’ Festival and the Braddock Coalition’s City Lights show.

As its fairytale title suggests, The Dark Woods is a foray into relatively uncharted territory. While there have been a number of notable exhibitions showcasing comic art over the last decade (ACE Australian Comic Exhibition, Cut’n’Paste and Comic Book Lifestyle), exhibitions in contemporary art spaces are few and far between. In an effort to expose this artform to new audiences and exploit the versatility of the medium, the curators chose the sleek space of Hobart’s Carnegie Gallery. “As a comics creator, preaching to the converted didn’t feel so challenging”, Howell admits. And as Rigozzi asserts: “comics are conceptually interesting enough to hold their own in a contemporary visual art context.” Rejecting the common misconception of comics as strictly “pulpy kiddy fare”, Howell and Rigozzi have chosen artists who explore emotionally challenging themes. Alienation, depression and economic disadvantage form the exhibition’s core. Most works reflect the journey of the loner and each pictorial narrative, be it autobiographical or fictional, is fleshed out with extra detail in the accompanying catalogue. With an essay on the zine scene by Edward Colless, this newsprint style publication is an essential addition to the exhibition and an inspiration for any comics fan.

The youthful audacity of The Dark Woods lends the show an intoxicating energy. Simon James’ Country Flux (2003) tucks its strange, blotchy tale of mutated sexual desire into a snug corner next to a series of water colour panels by Michael Hawkins whose double chinned, long-necked waifs go through their lonely existence in the midst of a world that looks as though it might melt away at any second.

In comics, place can become a major character. Painstaking effort can be put into reproducing the exact slogan on a poster hanging in the doorway of an obscure shop in order to make a certain street easily recognisable. Mandy Ord embraces this technique with skill. Printed to an impressive billboard size is a panel from one of the best works in the exhibition, the strikingly individual Undergrowth (2003). Ord’s thick black lines echo the contrasting surfaces of a woodcut. The images follow the meanderings of a Cyclopean protagonist literally entering dark woods. Undergrowth is a unique portrayal of the urban jungle and isolation in the midst of a crowd. Thematically similar are Ord’s equally intriguing animated shorts Suit Yourself (2002) and Perfectly Alright (2002).

Breaking up the empty floor space are several cases displaying self-published comics. Tim Danko’s print-making is easily spotted in the diminutively sized Francois (2002). The delicately rendered pages of his books are enticing in their patterned complexity. It is a shame we can’t get a closer look, although the artist does have a large-scale printed work on the wall and a smaller edition in the catalogue.

Some of the more ambitious artists made the most of the white washed walls and spread their images like Vegemite on toast from ceiling to floor. Kieran Mangan painted his Restoration directly onto the gallery wall: a balding man deep in thought is oblivious to the chunky beetle whirring above him. This abstract vision forms the foundation of Mangan’s nightmarish and overtly surreal plot. Here past, present and future exist on the same layout. Time as we know it has dissolved.

Comics are a poignant blend of literature and fine art and can be hard hitting. The power of comics and their weightier siblings, graphic novels, is steadily growing as is their place in contemporary art. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a haunting account of his father’s imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and is still highly regarded in literary circles. The acclaimed movies Ghostworld (Terry Zwigoff, 2000) and American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) were originally presented in comic book form by Daniel Clowes and Harvey Pekar respectively. Comics theoretician and guru Scott McCloud sees the art form continuing to build on its notoriety: “If comics’ spectacularly varied past is any indication, comics’ future will be virtually impossible to predict using the standards of the present.” (Understanding Comics, HarperPerennial, New York, 1994).

The Dark Woods is a worthy, if small, affirmation of the Australian comics scene. It is not hard to believe Edward Colless’ claim that comics “may well be part of an exciting new mutation of literacy.”

The Dark Woods, various artists, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Feb 12-March 14; Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Boorugal, May 28-July 11; Port Pirie Regional Art Gallery, Port Pirie, Aug 8-Sept 19; New Land Gallery, Port Adelaide, Sept 29-Nov 14; Fountain Gallery, Port Augusta, Nov 18-Dec 19; Millicent Art Gallery, Millicent, Jan 3-Feb 6, 2005

An eternal present, an absence of memory and a dissociation of words, symbols and images from meaning: these are the symptoms of the ‘schizophrenic’ social condition diagnosed by Frederic Jameson in his 1983 essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (Hal Foster ed, The Anti-Aesthetic, Bay Press, Seattle, 1983). Twenty years on Jameson’s diagnosis has even more credence, so it is no surprise to find 2 recent installations at the Art Gallery of New South Wales responding to this aspect of contemporary experience, albeit in very different ways.

Sound artist, filmmaker and writer Philip Brophy pays homage to the androgynous theatricality of early 70s glam rock with Fluorescent, comprising a circle of 5 speakers in front of 3 simultaneous video projections. Ever-changing lines of colour play across the screens, bringing to mind the video clip for Plastic Bertrand’s 1978 pop classic Ca plane pour moi. Brophy periodically appears out of this swirling matrix sporting spiked hair, thigh-high shiny vinyl boots and a ball-hugging leotard. He mouths a few risque lines before disappearing, until the backing band kicks in on his fourth appearance and he performs a specially-penned glam rock anthem.

The various tracks that comprise the song are separated across the ring of 5 highly directional speakers, which means the song sounds quite different depending on where you stand in the circle. The extreme separation between the sonic components of the soundtrack highlights the self-consciously manufactured nature of Brophy’s “Fluorescent” persona. The overall effect is of loud, vulgar, theatrical fun, and many viewers burst into spontaneous laughter at the sight of Brophy’s gyrating, larger than life form.

Glam was always about celebrating the brash disposability of pop culture and the performative aspects of identity. In this sense, Brophy’s work doesn’t do anything that glam itself didn’t do in the early 70s. But he takes familiar iconography and places it in a gallery setting, creating resonances beyond the world of popular music. Glam here is no longer a knowing reconfiguration of existing images from the realm of popular culture, but rather a trope unto itself that has entered the infinite matrix of images comprising contemporary experience. Brophy’s joyful performance celebrates the arbitrary recycling of the past and the freedom of employing symbols and icons divorced from their original context and meaning.

Across the gallery, an installation by Mike Parr and Adam Geczy takes a darker look at this culture of free-floating signifiers. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay comprises 2 screens at right angles to each other. Loud guitar chords pound out of one speaker, a cacophony of incomprehensible voices from the other. Against the opposite wall is an immense pile of newspapers. On one screen we see Parr projected upside down, sitting limply holding an Australian flag, his face criss-crossed with thread sewn into his flesh. On the other screen we see footage of the sewing itself in lurid red close up. Fear passes over Parr’s features as the needle approaches and blood splatters onto his shirt as it punctures his flesh. The footage is from Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi (Democratic Torture), a performance from May 2003 at Sydney’s Performance Space.

Like Brophy’s piece, the work references popular music, this time through the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah sub-title taken from Walt Disney’s Song of the South: “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay / My, oh my, what a wonderful day/ Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way…

The inane sentiments of the 1940s pop song provide a stark contrast with the installation’s graphic imagery. The dissonance reflects the nature of a country that likes to think of itself as happy-go-lucky while coolly perpetrating state-sanctioned violence on some of the planet’s most vulnerable people. The Mass Psychology of Fascism is a confronting intervention in the deadening profusion of mediated images and obfuscating political discourse that has helped create an Australian electorate who not only willingly accept the subjugation of others, but willingly embrace their own subjugation before the Howard government’s constant re-writing of the recent and distant past.

Fluorescent and The Mass Psychology of Fascism are 2 sides of the postmodern coin. Brophy’s work celebrates the notion of self as nothing but the endless recycling of symbols and styles already in circulation. In contrast, Geczy and Parr’s visceral installation highlights the fact that in such a media-saturated environment it has never been easier for ideologically-driven politicians to dictate the words, images and symbols through which the contemporary subject makes meaning.

Fluorescent, Philip Brophy, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Feb 15-April 18, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay, Mike Parr and Adam Geczy, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Feb 8-March 7

Symposium On Drawing
Louis Laybourne-Smith School Of Architecture and Design
University of South Australia, March 2 & 5

… read or listen to this paper sitting at one of many cafes scattered along the Zattere waterfront in Venice, during a pleasantly warm mid-summer night enjoying a few multicoloured Popsicles and listening to a CD playing Luigi Nono’s A Carlo

Marco Frascari was invited to Australia to be the guest speaker at the Adelaide Festival Artists’ Week day-long Architecture Symposium (on relationships between architecture and gastronomy), curated by Rachel Hurst.

Frascari is an architect, theorist and Professor of Architecture at the Polytechnic and State University, Virginia, USA. His well-known essay The Tell-The-Tale Detail continues to be influential. The work and teaching of the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa is the touchstone for much of Frascari’s own teaching and research.

As well as his role in Artists’ Week, he also participated in the Symposium On Drawing, giving lectures and leading workshops on drawing and humour.

Frascari is a story-teller, and what his stories tell (in being spun from the intrigues of architecture’s cultural and social webs) is that the making-process is one of knowing stories, working over stories, relaying stories. In other words, putting one’s ears, eyes and hands to the gritty ground. He says that drawing is both a thinking and a telling and that these are matters of deliberately gathering (like a scavenger) ideas and ‘affects’ from all possible sources—times, disciplines, places, persons—and that this ‘mix’ is potentially funny, mad, strange, sad, political, mischievous, awkward and impossible. Architecture needs this complex composing of a continuous unfolding/unwinding attention to the extraordinary ordinary wonder of the world-at-hand. This is then transformed by slow (and by ‘slow’ he means a kind of practice more attuned to daily dedicated work, like playing music or rehearsing dance or ‘writing 20 lines a day’) pleasure, a sort of action which is ‘caring.’

This idea of care—toward the appearance of the world (in architecture’s context, the literal surface of the earth)—is of the same ilk as that evoked by such philosophers as Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz. Grosz in her work on the ‘virtual’ of the past, which is a caring for memory, writes: “The virtual is the realm of productivity, of functioning otherwise than its plan or blueprint, functioning in excess of design or intention (Cynthia C Davidson ed. “The Future of Space, Towards an Architecture of Invention”, Anyhow, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1998). This relation of drawing (which is a movement of virtuality) to care (which is activated by a love of the virtuality of memory) is crucial (and potent) to/for practices of design, and underpins Frascari’s teachings. ‘Lightness’, for example, isn’t the opposite of ‘heavy’, and is a form of light-heartedness (with the heart-fullness of care). “Lightness becomes a real condition in architectural construction, which then becomes a poetic dimension of any human endeavour. These thoughts/objects echo along the path of affinities and resemblances, connecting the expression of contemporary experience with the past of the world, and demonstrating that intellectual edification takes place in the act of dwelling in building” (“A Light, Six-Sided, Paradoxical Fight”, Nexus Network Journal, http://www.nexusjournal.com/Frascari_v4n2.html).

Perhaps the greatest gift of Frascari’s visit was his advocacy of a light, humorous, ‘gravitas’ approach to the design of/thinking toward architecture. This welcome and nourishing attitude demonstrates perfectly, and obliquely, his motif/message: that architecture, this multifaceted, polymorphous, persuasive/pervasive, giving and taking of space, is an intensely human and tale-driven negotiation with physical/emotional/psychological surfaces—and precisely, relentlessly, because of this engages all the dimensions of being human, from seeing the minutest mark to hearing the bleakest sound, to imagining fantastic creatures. And drawing is the initialising/generating machine; a delicate line and a tentative word can begin a process, indeterminate and provisional, that may lead to the becoming of something else (music, garden, house, novel, city).

Frascari though is ‘drawing’ into drawing a complicating and vibrational view of process which, far from unifying a practice of ‘drafting’ for architectural ‘communication’, advocates a synesthetic methodology—a multimedia perceiving of the world; a story-telling/making working style which is attuned to ‘all’ the sensory events which move us as living beings—dispersing the privilege of sight that subordinates other fleeting, virtual, imperceptible, transitory, transformational qualities known by taste, smell, hearing, touch. One of Scarpa’s instructions to students was: “make architectural ideas visible, tainted with non-visible phenomena and tinted with meanings” (Frascari, “Architectural Synaesthesia”). And it is this methodology that Frascari put into practice in the forum of lectures/workshops by using the cartoons of Saul Steinberg as explications of slowness, of accretion, of how being ‘attuned’ can manifest (lightly and critically).

And, in a Steinbergian way Frascari was present within a particular Adelaidean atmosphere where he was surrounded by artists, musicians, writers, and performers from around the world who were in their own way providing the exact (albeit concentrated and limited) chances for a rich gathering of bits-and-pieces of the just-out-there (and yet sophisticated, experimental and diverse forms and materials)—an exaggerated ambience of the more modest sense of Frascari’s “weaving of thoughts into images.” If a mapping was made of/between events, objects, sightings, disasters, disagreements and so on within this context it would yield an incredibly dense drawing of tonalities, intensities and tensions. A drawing that could show a momentary synesthetic (personal) city. Frascari ‘happened’ amidst an infinity of ‘happenings’, each of which could be seen as ‘drawings’ in themselves; for example, passing the side gate of Government House on Sunday morning heading for the talk by Dave Hickey and seeing dotted on the green lawn dozens of white plastic chairs and a woman in a pale crinoline pushing what looked like a shopping trolley. And afterwards watching/not watching Mike Parr having his face stitched-up on video (a drawing through the flesh of thread, pulling the face into a terrifying contortion of pain and policy); then passing the side gate again where the chairs had been arranged in small groups under the shade of the trees and a game of croquet was underway (crinolines galore). Then later seeing the brown cardboard models (story-boards) of Roy Ananda and Julia Robinson’s exhibition Thousand Fold, in an unused shop on Hindley Street and noting the title of the accompanying essay: “magical architecture” (Heather Butterworth, exhibition essay) and that night watching the dance performance by the Emio Greco/PC Company, Conjunto di Nero, where bodies present themselves as living/dying compositions immersed in scores of light and sound, ‘drawn’ irrevocably by the ‘fact’ of their own mingling flesh.

Positioning Marco Frascari within the realm just beyond the university, momentarily, sort of hints at his ‘becoming synesthetic’ (“joining the information received by one sense to a perception in another sense”). In Frascari’s terms ‘wonder’ might be wonderfully restless and restful, sensuous and brutal, accidental and interfering, tactful and tactless, in isolation or all at once. Linda Marie Walker

Unless otherwise indicated, Marco Frascari quotations are from, “Architectural Synaesthesia: a hypothesis on the makeup of Scarpa’s modernist architectural drawings”, http://art3idea.psu.edu

The Museum of Australia’s currently touring Indigenous exhibition, Stories from Australia, was never supposed to be seen in this country. Dawn Casey was insistent on this point when the exhibition was created especially for the Guangzhou Museum of Art as part of the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and China. Guangzhou initiated the exhibition: they wanted a great show to outshine Beijing. Local businessmen had seen Aboriginal culture in Australia and saw it as a vehicle to promote tourism and educational links with our country, and they were prepared to pay much of the cost. But what they and the Museum wanted didn’t necessarily coincide with the former NMA Director’s agenda. She told me at the time that she didn’t want to reinforce stereotypes about a “past beautiful” culture.

But a diverse and dynamic picture of the Dreaming is emerging at the Adelaide Festival, and that’s as true of Stories from Australia as any other part of the event. Despite his efforts to play down the Indigenous core of the festival, Stephen Page has created a fascinatingly non-prescriptive mix. His only agenda seems to be to make an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence seem entirely normal in a major south-eastern city festival. It’s already pretty normal in the west.

The module system designed for Stories from Australia produces a fairly episodic picture, with only bare links between the various components. It also seems that Tandanya could only fit parts of the show in, so we’re missing a module dear to the NMA: film of the Wik people dancing in 1962 when they created an important set of Flying Fox and Bonefish sculptures for the Museum. When they eventually saw their work 40 years later, after all the exigencies that delayed the NMA’s opening, the result was an explosion of ceremony and sculpting on Cape York.

And that’s exactly what Stories is trying to reveal: cultural renewal. So there’s Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji’s Kurirr Kurirr Ceremony, dreamed in 1974, which is an inspiration in the Kimberly (though I’ve never heard of Rover “composing” it before—a very Western concept!).

There’s also the Yirrkala’s 300 year long relationship with the Macassans, collecting trepang (sea cucumbers) for the insatiable Chinese market. This story was presumably chosen specially for the exhibition’s original Chinese audience. The relationship appears in barks and photographs, but the captions reveal that the Macassans had a deep impact on the Arnhemlander’s psyche, changing burial rituals and being awarded rock formations, the ultimate acceptance into country. This surely suggests an openness and flexibility to which a more sensitive white invasion force could have responded.

Interestingly, that astute elder from Yirrkala, Munduwuy Yunupingu (of Yothu Yindi fame) is planning a Garma Festival project which will bring songmen together from all over north east Arhemland to compare their reportage of the Macassans. Yunupingu spoke at the Adelaide Festival’s Sacred Symposium, a broad-church gathering of the Aboriginal clans in which they talked about the sacred in their particular lives. There was also an exhibition exploring the Christian in Aboriginal art, entitled Holy, Holy, Holy. Not much great art—where was George Mung Mung’s gorgeous Mary of Warmun?—but certainly an interesting diversity to the works.

Stories similarly dealt with Christianity in the Torres Strait, displaying costumes and photos of the Coming of the Light ceremony on Saibai Island, which annually celebrates the arrival of the missionaries. There was also a riposte from contemporary artist Kathryn Norris. In a surprisingly McCahonesque way, she portrays a chained Islander against images of a troubled Paradise. I wonder what the Chinese made of this inconsistency, especially as the Sabai dancers appeared live in Guangzhou.

But down the road at Yarrabah, North Queensland, the exhibition’s captions focus on cultural renewal in the community where the Reverend Ernest Gribble tried so hard to overcome the rainforest battle culture. The Queensland Art Gallery’s Cape York show last year revealed powerful new shields and spears emerging in the area, although nothing in Stories post-dates 1970! Mind you, possibly the stand-out piece of the entire exhibition is an exquisite bicornual basket from 1900.

Then there’s Papunya, surely the best publicised site of cultural renewal in the country. But it’s represented only by beads, batik and pokerwork-marked animal sculptures. Meanwhile a gorgeous canvas by Uta Uta Jangala hangs elsewhere, not related back to the Papunya module.

Dawn Casey’s philosophical doubts might have been justified with the module on the Ngarrindjeri, the Murray River’s proud guardians. While Ian Abdulla’s naïve paintings of his childhood by the river are about cultural renewal in the present, the unregenerate past is also there in the form of George Angus’ Painting of the Natives from 1844. Captions explain that the old images have helped contemporary Ngarrindjeri learn the design and deployment of their weaponry. Not a problem in Yarrabah! But as Aden Ridgeway pointed out in the Sacred Symposium, the painstaking rediscovery of the old ways (in his case the language of his North Coast people) is bound to be easier in country. But 70% of Aborigines now live out of country in Australian cities.

Will Stories from Australia travel on? It remains to be seen what the new NMA management will think. But it has found a generous context here at the Adelaide Festival, which may be un-reproduceable elsewhere, even in Canberra. Not that our southern cities don’t need regular exposure to the full range of Indigenous culture. And that has to include the likes of Djakapurra Munyurryin’s brilliant dancers from Yirrkala in the festival, who were all dust, intensity and just enough explanation to be able to read the public levels of their dynamic Dreaming.

In the contemporary art world the relationship between art and science is a hot topic of conversation, arousing the passion and innuendo of something resembling a sex scandal. If an artist has managed to notch up some time in a molecular biologist’s laboratory or found a technician willing to share the secrets of electron scanning microscopy, they will be jealously eyed off by others unable to make the right contacts.

Hot too because with their separate cultures, approaches and practices, the capacity of art and science to really intersect and talk to each other is vehemently contested by scientists, artists and cultural critics alike. On the one hand, some molecular biologists and geneticists use the rhetoric of aesthetics, declaring DNA to be a kind of ‘clay’ and the artificial creation of in-vitro organisms ‘creative practice.’ On the other hand, anecdotes from artists working in actual collaborations often suggest a more tenuous connection. In a public talk at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2001, Irish artist Dorothy Cross, who was collaborating with marine biologists on a piece about Great Barrier Reef jellyfish, recalled the bemused looks on the scientists’ faces when she asked them a question of interest to her as an artist. Why had they discarded imperfect jellyfish specimens when collecting material for their study? It seemed to her that getting the questions right required enormous intellectual labour before collaboration even got off the ground.

In a lecture originally given in 1959, CP Snow famously commented on the gulf between the cultures of art and science and the “mutual incomprehension…sometimes… hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding” (CP Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993). According to Snow, the arts and humanities were steeped in tradition while the sciences were turned towards the future. If he were to cast his gaze around artistic ventures today his eyes would probably pop out of their sockets! Art is increasingly turned towards the technological futures presented and imagined by medicine and the life and physical sciences. The scales have tipped and now scientists such as renowned physicist David Bohm claim that science and art might converge by sharing common paradigms for understanding and approaching the world.

But a lot of grandiose statements are made about the commonalities between art and science: that they are symmetrical currents of human thought; that they spurt forth from the same wellspring of creativity; that they are equally concerned with innovation. What is overlooked is that neither art nor science is an homogenous field. Each has areas of specialisation with their own conceptual underpinnings, methodologies and—of particular relevance now—financial support and constraint. All these parameters affect the ability and willingness of artists and scientists to collaborate. We don’t hear a huge amount about artistic collaborations in palaeontology, for example, but we do see a lot of artists courting and being courted by the life sciences. Art and science are no longer disciplines existing within the rarefied atmosphere of the academy, but are increasingly engaged with and situated in relation to corporate capital. Sometimes it is these corporate interests that pull the 2 cultures into converging streams, as artist Natalie Jeremijenko notes in reference to the willingness of biotech corporations to support art celebrating advances in genetics: “What is it that the artists have that these corporate interests are interested in? It is not the art, it is the access to the public imagination” (N Jeremijenko, “Invest Now!”, 2000.

Artists participating in the Biotech Art Workshop,<BR /> Extracting DNA Molecules from a Pea,produced by EAF Adelaide, 2004″></p>
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Artists participating in the Biotech Art Workshop,
Extracting DNA Molecules from a Pea,produced by EAF Adelaide, 2004

Recently there have been a number of art-science initiatives displaying a more constrained and respectful attitude towards the limits of collaboration. At a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Art of The Biotech Era at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, the scientific director of SymbioticA, Stuart Bunt, addressed the differences between the fields. Bunt is well versed in the topic, having established SymbioticA within the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. Both Bunt and SymbioticA’s artistic director Oron Catts are clear about the collaborative nature of this laboratory. Science is there to be critically appraised and explored but the work carried out under SymbioticA’s aegis is artistic, not scientific. Although this may seem like policing disciplinary boundaries, it is more just a realistic appraisal of what collaboration between art and science is likely to achieve. By working from a position of mutual respect for their differences and armed with scepticism balanced by thorough background research into each other’s respective fields, art and science can come together in modest ways on specific projects.

The most exciting contemporary art-science collaborations are fuelled by artists who take a critical stance on the instrumentalist ethos of technophilic culture. Sometimes this means criticising the very technologies used in making the artwork. Artists find themselves in an ambiguous position, steeped in the techniques of a scientific practice in order to comment upon the cultural scenarios which that very practice may be leading us towards. This is particularly the case with much bioart, foregrounded by work such as Extra Ear and other tissue-engineering pieces by The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TCA). This “semi-living” object—a tissue-sculptured quarter-scale ear modelled on Stelarc’s actual ear—exists due to the artists’ perfection of tissue culturing and engineering techniques. Although these are now standard procedures in biotech laboratories and industries, their arrival in the gallery space conjures fears of a society’s science gone mad. The important point is that Extra Ear retains rather than resolves the ambiguities involved in its own production. So rather than adopting an oppositional attitude towards biotechnology or using the gallery space to aestheticise science, Extra Ear operates on the border of instrumentalisation and care. Recently on display in the Art of the Biotech Era, the tiny, fragile ear nestles in a sea of nutrient solution enclosed by a large incubator behind a glass wall. The audience can look but not touch. The scene is familiar and distant, linking us to the experiences of birth and death obsessively technologised by our culture.

These kinds of collaborations derive from an artistic base in spite of the deep understanding required of the techniques involved in their production. Other modes of engagement with science are also surfacing, some involving the use of artefacts produced by medicine and science. Justine Cooper’s works deploy medical and scientific imaging techniques like MRI, electron microscopy and ultrasound to focus on embodied and experiential responses to disease, medicalisation and death, are one example (RT55, p4; RT45, p13, and RT26, p27).

There are also more speculative engagements and here the science can be stranger than the art. In the various projects of Belgian new media collective FOAM, also exhibiting in Art of The Biotech Era, the art is itself an interface and demonstration of what might be possible between the 2 cultures. In many of its projects, FOAM engages with dynamic evolutionary theories to create unstable and creative ecologies involving humans, machines and plants. These theories are themselves disputed among scientists, many of whom adopt more conservative and deterministic Neo-Darwinian approaches. To take them up in an artistic context injects them with new possibilities. In one project, groWorld, the artists will create localised, site specific ‘gardens’ implanted with bio-sensors from which they will gather data to map correlative and changing virtual spaces. This data will merge with cultural and sociological material gathered at the site from local inhabitants and ethnobotanical research. A groWorld is currently in the making in Adelaide. Here the hard and soft sciences cross-pollinate and co-evolve to produce a new kind of aesthetic object that is really concerned with the creative and speculative possibilities of the more maverick sciences.

As many scientists will readily agree, the contemporary practice of science is bound to industry and its demands for problem-solving and profit-making. Perhaps then ‘making art’ is one of the few opportunities science now has to become speculative again. Science is increasingly engaged in various forms of life management, from what we put into our bodies to how they appear and behave. If art in a sense has always been concerned with life, from the everyday to the unimaginable, then it cannot afford to ignore the permeation of science through the minutiae of everyday living. Science becomes the arena in which art can best comment on what it means and feels like to be alive at this moment in time.

Art of the Biotech Era, Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre, Adelaide, Feb 27-April 3

Paul Virilio, culture theorist, architect, claustrophobe and asthmatic, sits high on the ridge, communing with the supernatural and looking down on the herd below. He sniffs the wind, scouts the boundaries, stares into a wide open sky that’s blue as the eyes of the white-boy Jesus.

“They don’t know what’s a-coming”, he thinks, looking down on the brutes below. “There’s poison up ahead”

His brow furrows. There’s been poison all along, and some of it has got into the herd.

“They don’t understand the danger”, he thinks. “I’ll have to shout louder.”

So what is Virilio so upset about that he has to put pen to paper in Art and Fear and Crepuscular Dawn. Who and what is causing le boeuf de Virilio? Well, it’s those pesky artists up to their no good tricks again. Not just any artist–Charlie Chaplin is good and Bob Dylan sets the toes a tapping in a wholesome sort of way, but Stelarc, Christian Boltanski, Meg Stuart, and even Rothko have been way too negative and transgressive for the old architect from Paris. Virilio senses that the absence of the body in Abstraction leads to the absence of the living body through suicide, and the distorted images of the body in Expressionism encourage the torturer to distort the body of the victim. It’s the slippery slope argument, and for Virilio that slope leads art down into suicide, torture and genocide, so that “The slogan of the First Futurist Manifesto…led directly to the shower block of Auschwitz-Birkenau.” If he is right and art after Impressionism is responsible for all these things one wonders what the causes of suicide, torture, and genocide were during the long years before the twentieth century and in populations completely isolated from European art history.

But it is probably unfair to subject Virilio’s writing to the light of evidence and the scrutiny of reason. Like a shock jock, Virilio is pissed off and he’s not going let the facts stop him telling us who is to blame for his fear and anger. In a sense Virilio is the last of the medieval men, a pre-Baconite who is quite happy to appeal to authority rather than evidence; to not talk about the world as an independent external, but the world as it makes him feel.

Enough of art for the phenomenologist, what about art for the scientist? The problem there is that art has no obvious function yet appears to be universal so the hunt is on for why people spend an awful lot of time and energy doing something that apparently confers no benefit. Steven Pinker, cognitive neuroscientist (once MIT, now Harvard), has devoted a chapter of The Blank Slate to write about art as one of the adaptive strategies of an ape on the make. He’s not dogmatic about it, he knows we don’t know the adaptive value of art-making, but he’s willing to toss his hat in the ring and give it a try. For Pinker art is a by-product of the hunger for high status as indicated by doing things that have no overt value. The reasoning goes that if you can waste time in gratuitous displays of consumption or effort then you must be rich. And riches make for are an attractive mate. Creating and owning art, that item of gratuitous display, is therefore an indicator of high social status and high social status gets you a better class of root. More often and with more partners as well.

Pinker also likes Ramachandran’s idea that there is an aesthetic pleasure in experiencing adaptive objects and environments–art tunes you into the best bits of the environment and lets you know that your cognitive perceptual apparatus is working. It does seem that people prefer some images over others and that this may relate to ancestral environments and health. Komar and Melamid surveyed the art preference market worldwide and found strong commonalities across all the groups surveyed — people like pictures of comfy landscapes. Science-wise the same thing turns up: pictures of the savannah are good and if the time of the day is sunset then people like the picture to show somewhere safe to shelter for the night as well. As far as images of people go, it’s healthy over sick – and happy over sad – every time. Usual limitations of experiments though: average responses, very constrained experimental conditions. In other contexts representations of all sorts of things–eg warnings — are important and valued as well.

Pinker’s use of behavioural genetics and evolutionary psychology to shed light onto the existence and function of art production and consumption is pretty interesting. But then Pinker goes too far and claims it all went horribly wrong with modernism and post modernism. Artists stopped pandering to the evolutionary limits of perception and cognition. They stopped going for realism, started painting outside the lines, that jazz don’t swing no more and who can find a tune worth whistling. Besides, art theory is for wankers and nobody listens to the critics anyway.

As is common in arguments touting the ‘Once was an age of gold but now is in an age of mud’ theme, there is a whole lot of edited highlights of history going on. Pinker has found a bunch of art that doesn’t communicate to him and then generalised that to elite art doesn’t communicate to anyone worth knowing because elite artists flout evolutionary constraints on communication. He has oozed over from science to taste without noticing the transition. (Pinker here differs from Virilio who thinks that a similar set of artworks do communicate but the result of this communication is profoundly negative). Well, using 10 or so individuals to represent the activities of millions people over hundreds (or thousands) of years doesn’t make for a very compelling critique. Rather than think of art as a set of objects or practices in some edited highlights package–Constable is in and good, Stelarc is in and bad, Mum’s not in even though she paints all the time–art practice can be seen within the broader context of the production and exchange of representations. That is, art can be discussed within the framework of cognitive neuroscience without rejecting modernism, post-modernism, or any other -ism.

We are the animal that represents. Our social lives are built upon representations and our brains are hard-wired to make them. On the left hand side of your head and a tad inside the skull from the temple are the mirror neurons–the part of the brain responsible for imitation of biological motion. It’s still early days in understanding mirror neuron function but it seems that if you watch someone move the mirror neurons in your brain will light up just as if you were making that motion yourself. More abstractly just the trace of a movement, or its sound, will trigger the same reaction from the brain. So mirror neurons provide evidence of a neural mechanism for exchanging representations via sight and sound. Feel the passion in those brush strokes, hear the emotion as that voice catches. Meaning, at least in part, comes by mapping the trace of someone else’s motor behaviour onto a memory of your own internal states when you made similar movements.

Art practice can be seen as a component within the exchange of representations. The dominant social practice is to transmit core representations–representations that are read immediately by many–and most art has this function. However art also has an exploratory function within the space of all possible representations – from an evolutionary perspective it is adaptive for the group to have a representation space available that allows for understanding the present environment whilst also being able to represent possible environments. Such a system makes the group robust in the face of environmental change. Innovative art practice can then be interpreted as a claim for the necessity to foreground new representational parameters, such as chance events, abstract forms, and biological systems, or as a claim that areas of the existing representation space are under-explored or under-represented within the core. It is inevitable that most explorations will end in failure–if the world is changing in unexpected ways then some artworks will get the future right and others will not. And artworks that were once radical explorations can become core if the changed circumstances they represent lock in over time.

Pinker, and to a lesser extent Virilio, confuse art that deals with core representations as indicative or prescriptive of art as a whole. It is inevitable that many of the modernist and post modernist works they dislike will fade into obscurity along with most of the works of any period. However that does not mean that the enterprise of modernism and postmodernism is a failure. It may be that the space of representations coming out of a collaborative research group like SymbioticA, or being explored by artists like Stelarc, Meg Stuart and Orlan does not prove fruitful. In science that is known as a negative finding— showing what doesn’t work. Whilst a negative finding is not as exciting as a positive one, it does have value—like finding that a particular supermarket is crap so you never have to go there again. However, these or other artists will almost inevitably provide positive findings—representations whose ability to trigger meaning generalises out to a larger population.

Catherine Lumby & Elspeth Probyn eds, Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003 ISBN 1 86508 926 5

Remote Control ends with John Safran’s comment that: “it’s pretty hard for satire to change things, but overall it helps add to a liberal kind of culture.” Safran thinks alternative culture is doing it a little tough at present: “If you’re working on your own little alternative cartoon, how do you make it more subversive than this thing [The Simpsons] that’s put out by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox?” This observation reflects the complex ground that technology, increased competition and global capital and information flows have created for contemporary media makers.

Safran is the subject of one of 7 interviews that supplement the 13 short essays in this book on the “ethical dilemmas thrown up by the contemporary media.” Like Safran, editors Lumby and Probyn and most of the contributors are modest about what they want and think they can do. Remote Control is not an attempt to create a new charter of ethical principles for a new media age. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It is sceptical about such universal standards. It’s primarily a plea for ethical reflection, which acknowledges and celebrates the likelihood that different producers and consumers will choose different standards.

As the editors argue, there is an urgent demand for greater consideration of “how emerging genres and technologies are re-shaping our public sphere, and how this might in turn cause us to rethink the assumptions grounding our ethical norms.” Lumby writes about Reality TV, Probyn about food journalism, Michael Moller about the campaign to save the South Sydney Rabbitohs and Kath Albury about internet porn and the contrast between the ethics of the commercial industry and ‘amateur’ producers.

Each of these is an example of media ethics not as “a specialised domain to be deliberated upon by experts”, but as a “politics of everyday life.” Reality TV “might be said to humanise ethical dilemmas”, food media might provide “fodder for rethinking ethics” and the proliferation of online sexual imagery that transcends conventionally desirable porn stereotypes might offer “a perfect example of internet porn’s ethical sensibility.” The Souths’ fans struggle shows “responsibility, opportunity and respect for the emotional commitments of others communicated through the consumption of media products”, through the audience’s resistance to Foxtel and the dumping of Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph in favour of Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald.

This exploration of particular ethical challenges and opportunities is welcome, but the case against ‘universal’ ethical standards seems to be oversold. The principles embedded in media codes already often express less than slavish adherence to “universally desirable…goals and ideals.” The best of them are drafted precisely to allow the kind of difficult weighing of competing interests—privacy versus public interest, disclosure of sources versus confidentiality—that is the bread and butter of ethically reflective journalism.

Beyond mainstream journalism, new genres raise familiar as well as novel ethical issues. Probyn’s case for food journalism is a particular case in point. “Detachment and distance are at odds with the passionate, subjective and close relationship of food journalists to their topics and ultimately to their readers” she writes, but this could also be a description of film reviewers, sports writers and the Press Gallery. The internet didn’t invent subjectivity and most journalists live with a daily awareness of the impact of stories on the commercial health of particular enterprises, the reputation of individuals and the durability of personal relationships.

There is, however, much evidence of ‘universal values’ in many of the contributions. Duncan Ivison wants individual freedom, self-rule and distributive justice, which seems close to Ghassan Hage’s desire to sustain each other’s “viability as human beings.” He uses an everyday Lebanese exclamation—‘Hey! Include me in your dreams!’—to guide journalists choosing ethnic identifiers, a practice that turns them into participants in “people’s struggles to construct viable fantasies of themselves.” Graeme Turner draws a universal line in the sand before ‘cash for comment’, which Probyn seems to agree with. She suggests that “the dodgy practices of ‘comps’, the collusion with restaurants or any perception of nepotism needs to be closely regulated. In fact, perhaps more than any other genre, food journalism needs to be strictly scrutinised.”

Finding words for these positions need not turn “the politics of everyday life” into ethical stone or blind us to the specifics of future practical dilemmas. It just enables us to remember how we resolved the problem last time, what we learned and what should happen in the future. The words can change as new things are learned, but not just because they become uncomfortable or inconvenient. Margo Kingston’s chapter provides a fascinating description of the invention and modification of a code of practice for her WebDiary that borrowed from, but adapted in crucial ways, the Media Alliance’s code for journalists. Cherry Ripe similarly articulates wise, hard-won lessons and principles from long experience in food writing.

Duncan Ivison argues that “our philosophical orientation should be less towards consensus and more towards how we can live with the disagreements we have with each other.” He is, however, reluctant to concede that there is no point talking about common values. As he reminds us: “States can declare war. In some places, they can execute people. Decisions have to be made about the allocation of scarce resources…in liberal democracies at least, a public view has to be formed about these things.” Some liberal democracies, even the World’s Best Practice ones, still go to war without popular mandates, on the basis of inaccurate information and then argue that the ends justify the means.

It is pretty hard to change these things. “A liberal kind of culture” helps and Remote Control provides a great snapshot of the lively, contested ways that culture is evolving in Australia. An ethics that does not engage with the shifting everyday realities of people’s lives is not an ethics at all. But neither is one which is not constantly reaching beyond itself and its specifics to the often frighteningly large issues which shape the ground on which lives are lived.

Barbara Creed, Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003 ISBN 1 86508 926 5

Barbara Creed’s Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality centres primarily on sex and representations of the self in various contemporary media. These include online and virtual forms, New York comedies like Sex and the City, women’s romance novels and erotic/pornographic films by female directors. She also examines the breakdown of public and private domains through ‘Reality TV’ and ‘crisis TV’ (such as coverage of the September 11 attacks) and the effect of this breakdown on perceptions of sex and violence. Alongside this Creed discusses the concept of a ‘global self’ and the potential of the internet to effect social change, a nice counterbalance to the usual focus on the web as a sordid generator of evil intent.

Given the time involved in book publishing it’s inevitable that parts of Media Matrix already seem dated. Creed’s discussion of Reality TV and shows like Big Brother unfortunately comes at a time when people appear to be tuning out in droves from shows like The Resort and My Restaurant Rules. This rather undermines her claim that: “Given the postmodern disrespect for traditional forms and values, Reality TV promises to offer ever more explicit and dramatic glimpses into areas once considered taboo.” Instead, Reality TV seems to be offering increasingly banal and mind-numbing glimpses into personalities and scenarios no-one is interested in watching after a few episodes. Creed uses the word ‘taboo’ a lot, but I think she is stretching the definition. Sure, if a Hot House contestant slept with a donkey or a Resort player was filmed showing everyone her vagina (as in an Annie Sprinkle performance mentioned later in the book) the description might be more appropriate.

Media Matrix’s chapters read like discrete essays. As variations on the same themes this is not a problem if you are just dipping in and out (as many readers probably will), but it means the book as a whole doesn’t quite gel. However, there are some strong offerings, notably Creed’s analysis of the female reader, the cyberworld and the erotic/pornographic. “Mills and Boon dot com: The beast in the bedroom” is a terrific update on that much-venerated cultural studies topic, the woman’s romance novel. Creed entertains with her comparisons between romances from the 80s and those from the aptly described noughties, revealing that the genre has certainly turned a new leaf and become soft porn for women: “What the Mills and Boon text is doing, then, is endorsing perverse forms of sensual and sexual pleasure for women.” This also helps explain the phenomenon of recent best-seller The Bride Stripped Bare: it’s Mills and Boon masquerading as ‘good’ fiction, or soft porn between decent covers. And it’s a lot more stimulating than The Resort.

Creed’s analysis of cybersex provides the most energised writing in the book. She examines the usual areas of readily available pornography, online dating and the creation of personae in online spaces like MUDs (multi-user domains) to express sexuality in creative ways. But what really interested me was the concept of virtual sex, or ‘teledildonics’:

…virtual sex will evolve in two quite distinct, but related, directions. The first, which is possible now, involves sex with a machine or a virtual body; the second, which is predicted to be at least 30 years away, involves sex with people who are not present.

At the moment it is apparently possible to don a helmet and have virtual sex with a celebrity. Can you imagine it? It’s revolutionary! Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron. Or both! A post-Oscar party in your own bedroom. People will never leave their homes. All their desires will be catered for. People will no longer be able to tear themselves away from George or Cameron or Lassie to go to work. While having sex with someone ‘not present’ is nothing new, the future possibilities for expressions of sexuality are pretty mind—or body-blowing. By wearing “special glasses and a sensory vibratory suit” a couple can dial into each other from different parts of the globe and actually feel what the other’s ‘virtual’ hands are doing. While disembodied, this experience offers up new worlds of fantasy, quite different from pornography, which is primarily visual.

Media Matrix is geared to a tuned-in audience and I like the fact that Creed self-consciously writes for people who are playing with the possibilities of the web, who love and are inspired by cinema and who are willing to take risks with what they imbibe. I also like her suspended judgement; she is displaying the wares for us to appreciate and question, without the censorious tone often found in academic texts. At times I find her use of history a bit enervating, but this might be because I did cultural studies 10 years ago and don’t want to go back to the same textbooks. The book is at its best when Creed writes passionately and poetically about current developments and the future; here her writing has the power to project you into fantasies about what’s to come and consider ideas not often mooted. After reading Media Matrix I have only one question: where do I get a virtual helmet? De Niro is waiting…

Ian Maxwell, Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes: Hip Hop Down Under Comin’ Upper, Wesleyan University Press, Conneticut, 2003 ISBN 0 8195 6638 1

The publication of Ian Maxwell’s Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes coincides with a boom in Sydney hip hop. Local bands are making a serious impact on national touring circuits previously dominated by rock and the record sales of some independent labels are breaking into 5 figures. Even major labels are getting in on the action with Warners commissioning a compilation of strictly independent local hip hop entitled Straight From The Art. Event promoters and touring companies are falling over themselves to tour hip hop artists and the dance scene is once again crossing over into hip hop territory through multi-stage events. Local hip hop periodical Stealth Magazine continues to grow and is now available in regular newsagents nationwide, as well as being exported overseas. Triple J has a dedicated hip hop show for the first time since Tim Ritchie introduced many to the sounds of electro and early hip hop in the mid-80s, while support from community stations like 2SER and FBI remains strong. There is now a hip hop film festival (RT 59, p44), a plethora of online forums and websites, and various conferences for producers, writers and MCs. It wasn’t always this way.

Maxwell’s book covers the formative period of Sydney hip hop from 1992 to 1994, a few years after the notorious moral panic surrounding the ‘Reebok bandits’ hanging around Hoyts on Sydney’s George Street. The book focuses on 3 main characters. The first is Miguel D’Souza, whose Mothership Connection radio show on 2SER was one of the seminal hip hop listening experiences for much of the 90s. Miguel was more a facilitator than presenter, with the bulk of his program dedicated to live-to-air freestyle sessions and guest DJs. The book’s second character is Blaze, editor of Vapours, a bedroom-produced fanzine and the most important document of early Sydney hip hop. Blaze was also an important part of The Lounge Room, the first incarnation of what is now Next Level, the prime independent Sydney record store for local and international independent hip hop. Blaze is also a DJ, radio presenter and record producer and remains a key figure today. The book’s final character is Ser Reck, MC and key player in Def Wish Cast and more recently Celsius. Def Wish Cast are best known for their debut Knights Of The Underground Table, which sold well locally and in Europe, making it possibly the first Australian hip hop record to earn such international respect.

Phat Beats is largely ethnographic in approach. There is an engaging dissection of particular freestyles on Miguel’s radio show and at The Lounge Room and a discussion of how the local hip hop scene has been created through the production of myth and identity. The book also dissects elements of Blaze’s writing style in Vapours and the production of Knights Of The Underground Table, which is evaluated against Sound Unlimited Posse (anyone remember them?). Maxwell reads these subcultural texts/events like an insider (although he is at pains to point out that he doesn’t consider himself a participant observer) and it is clear he has earned the trust of those involved in the scene. He excels at unpicking the internal politics and underlying tensions of style, subcultural capital and place in those early years. He also turns a spotlight on the serious academic thought within the scene through Blaze’s writing for Vapours and Miguel’s radio show and column in 3D World.

Interestingly, many of the same tensions and myths described in the book continue to play out in the Sydney hip hop scene today. Shortly after the period the book covers, one of the featured freestyle protagonists, JU (who also appears on the cover), became a member of Easybass. This group were part of a mid-90s crossover between the hip hop and the inner city/Eastern Suburbs house and rare groove scenes. Along with Metabass ‘n’ Breath, whose roots lay in performance art, theatrics and poetry, Easybass brought hip hop to a largely middle class inner city audience. So while hip hop boomed in the inner city, ‘real’ crews struggled to find an audience in the ‘authentic’ western suburbs, largely due to a lack of venues and the cultural impact of low density suburban planning. As every crew that made the leap from cipher to stage quickly discovered, subcultural authenticity doesn’t guarantee a good crowd. The same scene politics were played out a few years ago with the rise of ‘felafel rappers’, a disparaging term used to describe “leftie inner city vegan rappers.”

Where Phat Beats falls a little short is in its sometimes uneven incorporation of theory into the flow of the text. It is here that the book’s roots as a doctoral thesis and the concessions made to an intended overseas academic audience are most apparent. This is a minor annoyance however. Phat Beats digs deep inside subcultural politics, media and expression and gives proper definition to the formation of a distinctive local scene. Given the focus on subcultural music, it would have been nice if the book had also come with a CD.

Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald eds, Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage, Rouge Press in conjunction with the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2004 ISBN 0 97518 690 6

There is a challenge to film criticism in Ruiz’s work—especially to mise en scène criticism, which would have to transform itself utterly in order to cope with what is going on here, picking up the road it very rarely took when modernist filmmakers began radically reshaping mise en scène in the 60s.
Adrian Martin

The films of Raúl Ruiz are complex, compelling, lyrical, enigmatic, ambiguous and poetic. They have both delighted and bewildered serious film-goers, yet English language essays on Ruiz’s work have been infrequent. Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage attempts to redress this by bringing together a number of quite different writings that invite us to think in new ways about Ruiz’s cinema. The book also engages, through its selection of material, with questions about the practice of film criticism, in particular the problem of thinking and writing about films that challenge our ideas about what cinema can be.

Raúl Ruiz is the first book published by Rouge Press, the publishing arm of the online journal Rouge (www.rouge.com.au). It was produced in conjunction with the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival to coincide with the festival’s featured program “Raúl Ruiz: An Eternal Wanderer.” In their second issue Rouge also produced an online annotated filmography of Ruiz’s oeuvre of over 80 films. Along with the book, the annotated filmography is part of an extensive and ongoing database.

While the filmography presents a chronology of Ruiz’s prolific career, the book follows a less linear structure. Curiously, there is no introduction or editorial that explains the book’s organisation or the editors’ intentions. However, the book does contain a genuinely varied range of material, from analytical essays, to interviews and reminiscences, as well as 3 pieces by Ruiz himself. It also makes important writings on Ruiz available in English for the first time. There is a comprehensive filmography of Ruiz’s short films, features, incomplete works and television productions from 1960 to 2004 and a select bibliography of publications and pertinent web resources.

At the centre of the book are 2 excellent analytical essays. Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s “The Baroque Eye of the Camera (Part 1)” is an excerpt from a book-length study of Ruiz that explores connections between the history of the baroque, the thought of Gilles Deleuze and the images of Ruiz. Her project is ambitious and creative and her writing mirrors the complexity of Ruiz’s work:

…in this gigantic combustion of forms, the cinema can only be a baroque palimpsest, a theatre of shadows and memory. For if a baroque implies a ‘cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent’, to use a distinction made by Gilles Deleuze, Ruiz’s cinema would be a sort of second degree baroque—a baroque of the baroque.

The second central essay, “Displacements” by Adrian Martin, is written specifically for this book and inspiringly interrogates the way images function in Ruiz’s cinema. Disputing the claim that Ruiz is a montage director, Martin proposes that the director works with a “holistic conception of mise-en-scène” and it is therefore more productive to engage with multiple films rather than single texts. The essay also makes some interesting connections between Ruiz’s dream-like films and Freud’s essay “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Both essays not only offer unique frames of interpretation for thinking about Ruiz, but are impressive works of film criticism in their own right.

Ruiz’s own reflections are delightfully eloquent and perfectly complement the other essays in the book. In a lengthy 1986 interview with Benoit Peeters, he discusses the motivations behind his work and makes some telling remarks about the dominant American model of storytelling and its paradigm of conflict:

I refused this technique. I criticised it for leaving out a character’s internal logic, and what I called the archipelago structures of reality—which create great, silent spaces and zones of concentrated energy…Above all, I criticised it for harming the valorisation of the image, and replacing it by the valorisation of what it pretends to make the film’s centre: characters.

In terms of Ruiz’s writings, there are fragments from a screenplay of a film entitled The Comedy of Shadows that is still in post-production and an Eisensteinian exegesis titled “The Six Functions of the Shot” in which Ruiz elaborates, practically and poetically, on the “centripetal” and the “centrifugal.” The book also contains intriguing mini-narratives that Ruiz writes and presents to his actors several weeks before shooting begins. He describes them as “time bombs” because they are meant to “replace any rational analysis of the characters.”

Tributes, reminiscences, memoirs and interviews provide additional insights from those who have met or worked with Ruiz. The poet Waldo Rojas paints a picture of the avant-garde culture that he and Ruiz were part of in Santiago, Chile during the 1960s. The artist Jean Miotte, who was the subject of Ruiz’s film Miotte by Ruiz describes Ruiz’s methodology:

He associates facts from his unique knowledge of the rarest subjects in a completely unusual and unexpected way. There is also the ingeniousness and the creative impulse evident in his choice of scenes to shoot…And also his arrangements of transparent objects: glass tables, vases, reflections in water after a stone is thrown into a pond—all of that gives a surprising effect of both the lived and the illusory. That is how he leads us into his dream.

Marie-Luce Bonfanti, who worked as an assistant and actor on Professor Taranne says: “he is someone who censors nothing. He allows everything—and that’s precisely the gift he hands to his actors.”

My favourite recollection comes from Bérènice Reynaud, who relays a story from a colleague at Cahiers du Cinéma. Ruiz had mistakenly arranged to meet 2 people for lunch at the same time. Instead of cancelling one of the meetings, he rescheduled so that he could run from one restaurant to the other through a back door, each time excusing himself by saying he had to make a phone call. He ended up having 2 lunches and 2 conversations at the same time rather than disappoint anyone. And so the doubling, the repetitions, the parallels and mirror-like reflections that create so much of the fabric of Ruiz’s cinema are also echoed in his daily life.

There is a small black and white image reproduced in the lower right corner of every double page spread in this book—the imprint of a frozen moment from Ruiz’s Shattered Image. As you read the book you are aware of this small and constantly shifting image and the visual context it gives to the writing. But if you flick through the pages, the images suddenly become animated and a scene from the film is replayed. Readers move from thoughts grounded in still images to watching a scene in motion pictures. This is just one more example of the way this thoughtfully composed book invites us to reflect on the many layers in the remarkable cinema of Raúl Ruiz.

Helen Vnuk, Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia, Random House, Australia, 2003 ISBN 1 740 51088 7

Helen Vnuk’s Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia is a high impact, detailed exposé of Australia’s appallingly quiet censorship of sexual content in entertainment media. Some of the material in this book is so shocking that as an ex-pat New Zealander, I wondered just what kind of sick and bizarre society I had relocated to 6 years ago.

Most people would know that the sale of X-rated videos is illegal in all Australian states. But why are women’s magazines forced to hide female anatomy in sexual health articles? Why does the Australian state think it can single-handedly ban porn from the internet? And how is any of this consistent with the first principle of the National Classification Code, which states that “adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want”? Helen Vnuk has interviewed key politicians, government censors and porn industry personnel to find out how, over the course of 2 decades, we have ended up with a censorship regime in which “facts, majority views and basic civil liberties have been overridden.”

Vnuk takes a swipe at the classic anti-porn campaigners: conservative ‘morals’ crusaders and Andrea Dworkin-style feminists. In Australia, this alliance has enabled religious lobby groups and right-wing politicians to adopt pseudo-feminist rhetoric to legitimise their stance. Ultra-conservative Senator Brian Harradine, for example, argues that Australian-produced X-rated material “degrades” the image of Australian women. Vnuk reiterates the view of the opposing camp of feminists who believe that far from advancing the rights of women, censorship silences us:

Despite the disapproval of the moral minority, despite the disapproval of anti-porn feminists, many women are discovering that they enjoy watching porn films. Restricting the availability of these films restricts the social freedom of the women who want to watch them.

She challenges the view that pornography is a male domain with some interesting data about the readership of adult magazines. 23% of People’s readership is female for example. She also cites films, websites and magazines created by women, for women, which are frequently attacked by Australian censors. Vnuk is the former editor of one of these publications, Australian Women’s Forum. She lays a large part of the blame for the magazine’s demise on the rising costs of meeting unclear classification requirements and the alienation of readers due to the forced gradual toning-down of content.

Already riled over the sinking of her magazine, there was one final incident that incensed Vnuk enough to write Snatched. This was the foiling of an attempt to show her readership what women’s genitals are supposed to look like, in order to reassure women who are running off to get plastic surgery because they’ve somehow acquired a distorted view of female genitalia. The fact that Australian magazines since the mid-90s have had to Photoshop the genital “detail” from photographs of naked women as a result of the classification guidelines undoubtedly has something to do with this trend. “When a guy goes down on a woman, he’s going ‘What’s all this stuff?’” Graham Brown of Penthouse told Vnuk. Interestingly, men’s sexual organs aren’t considered offensive enough under the guidelines to warrant similar treatment.

From protecting women to protecting children, Vnuk also interrogates one of the legislation’s fundamental principles of censorship in relation to sexual content: that “minors should be protected from material likely to harm or disturb them.” She’s not the only one to take issue with a system of censorship based on “the belief that sex is a bad thing” and that effectively criminalises “sexual activity among 16 and 17 year olds.”

I heard Gunnel Arrback, Head of the Swedish National Film Classification Board, speak on this topic at the International Ratings Conference in Sydney last year. She gave an example of a complaint from a mother alarmed that her 7 year-old daughter asked awkward questions after watching explicit sex scenes in a G-rated movie. Arrback’s response was simple: “If you haven’t told your daughter the facts of life by now that’s hardly our fault, now is it?”

Unfortunately for teenage boys looking for sexual excitement (or should I say “minors looking to be harmed or disturbed”), they’re better off having a perve at their sister’s copy of Cosmo or their mum’s Mills and Boon than a Penthouse. This is because of the inconsistencies and double standards in the regulation of sexual content between media. Erotic literature in book form remains untouched while “unwarranted” or “highly detailed” descriptions must be cut from the text of porn magazines, zines and comics to avoid restriction. It should be added that video games endure the harshest treatment of all media when it comes to sexual content. Perhaps the most powerful and controversial point this book makes is about cultural snobbery and the double standards at play in the classification debate.

Vnuk points to the subjectivity of such a nebulous concept as ‘artistic merit’, a phrase in the classification guidelines that allowed the Classification Review Board to lift the ban on the film Romance in 2000. The Board concluded that the depictions of actual sex and sexual violence were allowable, given the ‘sophisticated’ nature of the film’s likely audience, thereby implying that a different set of rules should apply to ‘unsophisticated’ people who don’t appreciate French arthouse movies.

She chastises the “letter-to-the-editor civil libertarians” (perhaps some of the people who read and write for RealTime?) for their tendency to fight censorship on the grounds that exceptions should be made for certain material because “it’s art.” Vnuk asserts that these arguments serve to bolster the notion inherent in the guidelines that sex viewed for entertainment is somehow not legitimate.

So, who or what should we blame and what changes should we argue for? Vnuk criticises the structure of the OFLC board, the vagueness of the guidelines and the ability of minority groups to exert undue influence through a community consultation process based on submissions rather than statistically representative surveys. She also cites surveys that show the guidelines are out of step with current community attitudes towards the availability of X-rated material.

Given the reactionary political climate of the last few years, it seems likely that it will take more than a simple change to classification processes to alter the current censorious environment. Freedom of sexual expression will have to be fought for in the broader context of attacks on free speech through “anti-terrorism” laws and the ‘family values’ agenda pushed by both major political parties. From the denial of the rights of lesbian couples to IVF treatment, to the continued illegality of abortion and the contracting-out of social services to religious organisations, the censorship regime described in Snatched is only the tip of a much broader reactionary trend.

According to Paul Virilio, the invention of the highway was the invention of 300 cars colliding in 5 minutes. Perhaps the invention of the imaginary car of all those glamorous car advertisements designed to appeal to male fantasies accounts for the appearance of Amplification, a new book by Melbourne photographer Jeff Busby featuring 21 eerie images of car wrecks.

In vivid colour printed full-bleed on mirror gloss paper, Busby’s camera lingers on the crushed folds of metal, the rust-stained dings and dangling diffs, the wild patterns of smashed windscreens against blue sky. Turning each slippery page takes you from outside the car, inside past torn upholstery and deflated airbags and out again, and never a word—nothing to distract your eyes from their smooth if unnerving ride.

Jeff Busby is a Melbourne-based photographer with 20 years experience and particular interests in arts and entertainment, architecture, landscape and designer-based work. He is best known for his impressive performance photography.

Amplification is the latest title from 3 Deep Publishing, a company specialising in the work of emerging and established artists. “Each title is considered and detailed, its form and production values, serving to extend and highlight the artist’s/designer’s conceptual premises and approach to their work.” Bird, by young Melbourne designer Kat McLeod, replicated her original hand-embroidered pages and has since won several national awards for design, publishing and illustration. 3 Deep has recently procured distribution rights from international publishers Lucas & Sternberg (NY), Richter Verlag and Quart Verlag (Germany).

Jeff Busby, Amplification, 48pp, hardcover, 210 x 310mm, 3 Deep Publishing, Melbourne, 2004 ISBN 0-9580508-2-1, $85

Unlike some of its visionary predecessors of the 1990s, the 2004 Adelaide Festival was small, quiet and thematically restrained. Nonetheless, director Stephen Page included some striking choices in his broad programming mix. I took in the second week of the festival, primarily an opportunity to see the British performance group Forced Entertainment, who proved to be among the greats of the Adelaide Festival’s remarkable history. Gulpilil provided a truly unique experience and New York’s Absolute Ensemble played 2 superb concerts, offering, as Chris Reid suggests (p27) new possibilities for new music. The Indigenous content of the festival was strongly felt, aided by an eminently wise decision to collaborate with the Adelaide Fringe to present a joint program. As Jeremy Eccles comments, “Despite his efforts to play down the Indigenous core of the festival, Stephen Page has created a fascinatingly non-prescriptive mix. His only agenda seems to be to make an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander presence seem normal…” (p29).

Canstage’s movement work The Overcoat (inspired by Gogol and Shostakovich; Canada) was over by the time I arrived and appeared to have sharply divided its audiences, while the dance work Conjunto di Nero from choreographer Emio Greco and PC Company (Netherlands) won the hearts of RealTime readers and associates. In her piece on Marco Frascari, one of the guests of the festival’s Architecture Symposium, Linda Marie Walker writes that Conjunto di Nero was a “dance performance where bodies present themselves as living/dying compositions immersed in scores of light and sound, ‘drawn’ irrevocably by the ‘fact’ of their own mingling flesh” (p30). I did see La Carniceria Teatro’s (Spain) I Bought a Spade at Ikea to Dig My Own Grave but, though nicely performed, its ragbag of performance art cliches added up to little. It was interesting to see 2 of the performers stuff food up their naked arses and the audience not take exception. Forced Entertainment’s verbal assault on its audience had a much more palpable effect. Here then are responses to a selection of performances and events RealTime encountered in the 2004 Adelaide Festival. At the end of the report there are links to Adelaide Fringe shows also reviewed in this edition.

Story-telling in various manifestations emerged here and there as a rich festival theme, whether in the musings of architect Marco Frascari (p30), the marvellous 6 hour reverie of interrupted tales from Forced Entertainment (p27) or in various works presented by Indigenous artists including Gulpilil, performed and co-written (with Reg Cribb) by David Gulpilil and directed by Neil Armfield. Apparently Gulpilil, who doesn’t read English, told stories from his life to Cribb and Armfield. These were arranged into a script and told back to Gulpilil who then performed them. The result is a performance enriched by its improvisational qualities with a tone that is both remarkably relaxed but also curiously volatile.

Gulpilil appears both at ease and restless on the large stage, thinking his way into stories, dropping into silences, regarding us as listeners with the necessary time on our hands— his time. He is not an actor who assumes an automatic contract between performer and audience: addressing us directly, he wants to make that contract, remind us of it, hold us to it with a gentle but firm cajoling. It’s as if in the cavernous space of the Playhouse he has to make sure we’re there. We have to forget our theatre manners and let him know we’re ready to go croc hunting with him, read English for him, recognise his films and share the recollection of his AFI Award speech (“I deserve this”). He wants to hear us. We want to hear him, and see him, a man who always moves like a dancer, long-limbed, graceful, sudden, a hunter sharing with us his respect for the totem of his mother’s clan: the crocodile. His is the dance of the hunter with the tools of his role (spear, woomera, twine) and a crocodile skull he addresses affectionately and playfully.
David Gulpilil, Gulpilil

With Gulpilil we forever fall into 2 worlds. He describes himself as “David Gulpilil born with 2 legs in 2 different countries,” whether in his parents’ respective moieties, or uneasily astride the schism between the safety of his Arnhem Land community and the traps of the white film industry. This is epitomised by the slippery slope introduced to the young film actor by “that mad bugger” Dennis Hopper and John Mellion during the making of Mad Dog Morgan. Gulpilil “joins in the corroboree” of these whitefellas and in the long term the result is gaol for 6 months for drunken driving. “The bad spirit in your country tapped me on the shoulder.” In prison, he says, he becomes an expert and committed dish washer. Just as he inhabits multiple worlds so does he address the world in 2 ways resonant with the dynamic of the overall performance; with self-deprecating frankness and consummate pride. There is no middle ground. Similarly his stories oscillate between the yarn, where truth is a variable (he tells a string of stories about a missing finger all predicated with “It’s the truth”), and clear-eyed straight talk that speaks regret, disappointment and bitterness. The same white culture that has given him the fame of which he is so very proud has in many ways reneged on its promise and made that fame dangerous and unrewarded.

Gulpilil is a work rich in detail and observation. There are recollections of the making of Walkabout, of a boy appearing in a lap lap at Buckingham Palace and taking snaps at Cannes (the camera caused a bomb scare). There are personalities and political wit—he ‘phones’ Philip Ruddock at one point suggesting refugees be shown his tin ‘humpy’: “they’ll see how hard it is and they’ll row home.” Gulpilil bemoans the lives of “kids full of white ideas…boredom and kava.” What can he do? Teach and pass on his culture, he tells us. This is all framed in an easy-going theatricality of a broadly chronological telling with a patterning of themes and film excerpts, and simple staging; a chair, table, possessions and a fire against a huge backcloth. The arrival of The Wet, replete with thunder track, lightning and real water in a fine glasshouse spray, is one of the few moments of theatrical excess.

Gulpilil is a big one-man show, at least 2 hours plus an interval. The life may well warrant the duration and the performance our admiration, but, once the work settles, an uninterrupted 90 minute version might be more comfortable for the performer and more focused. Not that audiences thought so: standing ovations were the order of the day and there was the sense that audience and performer were at one. Gulpilil held us to our contract with charisma, skill and stories the like of which we’ve rarely heard.

In the Adelaide Festival’s long history of programming remarkable and often provocative works taking on the challenges of form and the politics of performance, Forced Entertainment is in there with the best.

This is nightmare theatre. It realises the worst fears of performers (and audience) on the stage of a first night performance. Wracking nervousness, hestitancy, forgetting, being abandoned and going too far all fester and erupt amidst perverse versions of formulaic routines that have long lost their meaning. Performer fear and hostility is masked for the 2 hour duration with faces perpetually locked into steely grins and voices into rigid good manneredness regardless of the anger and anxiety issuing from between clenched teeth. From this taut physical framework, an appalling state of being, Forced Entertainment wrench a world of meaning. And it’s a peculiarly British world with its thin veneer of obligatory good behaviour and its evocation of an exhausted theatre tradition of music hall and beachside entertainment (appropriately presented in Adelaide’s tacky old Royalty Theatre), suggesting the limits this culture has reached. British television comedies and detective dramas display some of the same astonishing hostility and paranoia, but not at this surreal level and are nowhere near as testing of their audience.

The performers reassure us that all is well, that we will not be disturbed, that there will be no smells, no blood, no erections…and the list goes on and on escalating with possibilities alarming and banal until you feel like you’ve actually been submitted to all these horrors or, fascinatingly, that you encounter very few of them on your average night out at the theatre. You also realise pretty soon that you are trapped in a litany-based show and that every very long list will be followed by another or a set of repeated actions that will initially interest and then bore and then become curiously fascinating as you sink into the reverie groove and the sheer poetry of bitterness, fear and loathing acquires a patina of unseemly beauty.

The reassurances are empty gestures. The blindfolded company point into the audience, uttering horrifying predictions of car crashes, cancers and ruined relationships: “I’m getting something….she doesn’t blame you entirely.” The routines are bland (a woman perfunctorily explodes the balloons she is dressed in with a cigarette), surreal (an utterly unslick card trick routine has performers brutally stuffing cards into mouths and down trousers) and panicky to the point of existential crisis. Not only can the comic not recall punch-lines, he can’t even get the set-up right and lurches from one faulty joke scenario to ever more appalling and obscene ones, as if having no belief in what he does or tells, flailing about with a saw in his hand (as if from some other routine he’s forgotten), until he cries out for his fellow performers to save him. “I’m scared now. I’m dead now.” The upshot is that a female performer immediately apologises for the comic’s “indulgent” performance. True to the evening’s form, she overdoes it and has to be hauled off stage, kicking and screaming, shaking off her captors behind a curtain, crawling back on stage, ever repeating her histrionic apologies to be dragged off again in a rancorous dance of frustration.

As the night unfolds routines return with added intensity. Early reassurances are replaced with requests to “try to forget about cars, cigarettes…sperm, blood, shit on the sheets…really good blow jobs…refugees in shipping containers…” and more and more. The blindfolded seers return assigning horrible fates (including “refugees in your living room”), eliminating many of the audience as they point wildly around the theatre and we squirm in our seats.

The pressure on the audience increases painfully with a barrage of thank yous along with “you were super” and “give yourselves a round of applause,” escalating into telling us we were “politically spotless”, “not racist”, “not the kind of men in suits who go home and beat up their wives” and, greeted with applause and laughter: “You stayed.” However, the mood changes alarmingly, initiated by the female performers. We are told we stink, that we are losers and worse. The men are embarassed and apologetic but their interjections are greeted with the bluntest statement of the night, a loud and repeated “Shut up!”, abrasive, shocking even in these horrendous circumstances.

The comic with the saw enters blindfolded, flailing about, asking us, begging us to forget all about this night. Elsewhere on stage the ‘dummy’ from a comic duo has been tucked into a plastic carry bag by his partner, zipped up and left onstage, only his head in view. Fearing the saw, the man in the bag inches agonisingly away, tips, landing on his forehead, rests there, falls sideways, struggles up…For a moment it looks like something very real and very ugly might happen. But it’s only theatre.

First Night is one of the most thorough demolitions of the theatre-going experience I’ve witnessed, a satisfying totality, rigorously framed and performed with a courageous and brutal consistency. Without any of the usual character mechanisms the performers create a believable team of theatrical delinquents and misfits, bizarrely puppet-like with their fixed demeanours , limited gestures and list-speak. Without a plot they still induce pity, fear and even, for some, catharsis. This is wonderful ensemble playing borne of a 20-year company history, pushing to the limit even the most affectionate fans of contemporary performance, testing the contract between performer and audience and giving pause for reflection on what the theatre gives us and what it neglects, fears and avoids.

Two unusual and immensely powerful concerts by the Absolute Ensemble demonstrate the capacity for development and innovation still remaining in contemporary music.

The late Frank Zappa is an under-appreciated composer. In the 1960s and 1970s his work was generally pigeon-holed with rock, albeit of the progressive variety. However, his was an eclectic mix of diverse influences, blended with great subtlety, and, above all, fully cognisant of the wide variety of classical and contemporary idioms that musical history has thrown up. It was self-conscious music—Zappa was a satirist and parodist, and he made the listener think about his musical sources and their meanings. His work is characterised by multiple voicings and frequent shifts of metre, rhythm, tempi and dynamics, so that, while the music is often foot-tapping, it keeps the listener on edge, waiting for the next shift.

The Absolute Ensemble has taken Zappa’s work to another level. Modern electronic instrumentation allows further developments beyond those Zappa pioneered, and the Ensemble’s arrangements of his work fully brought out its mesmerising structures, motifs and rhythms. Absolute’s visionary conductor, Kristjan Järvi, controlled the event wonderfully, using a computer to cue electronic elements and also using his own keyboard while conducting.

In the hands of Absolute, Zappa’s work resembles concert band music, but played with extraordinary flair and energy. Some of the 19 Zappa pieces in the concert were almost beyond human playability, recalling Conlon Nancarrow’s gymnastic compositions for pianola. A multitude of different instruments might carry Zappa’s lyric melodies: marimba, piano, synthesiser, violin, guitar, flute, saxophone, clarinet, even bassoon and contrabassoon. Sometimes 2 contrasting instruments pair in a melodic line; flute and bassoon, for example, creating a wonderfully dense texture. But the key to Zappa’s music is his use of competing metres and sudden metric shifts, say from 3/8 to 7/8, while 4/4 or 2/4 continues in the background. Thus the ensemble must divide and aggregate instantaneously into various component sub-groups, a drummer taking one rhythmic line to support a soloist’s melody and synthesised percussion taking another rhythmic line with other soloists. Zappa also rapidly shifts keys and uses chromatic elements, connecting passages with cascades of notes. The music is intense not only because of its energy and striking melodies but also because of its disjunctions and contrasts.

On top of this, Zappa uses parody and pastiche, introducing musical forms as diverse as klezmer, pop, country ballad, blues and rap, all built on a foundation of rock and jazz forms. Overall the music is frenetic and while it has a satirical edge, it is ultimately joyous, even cathartic. Keeping the whole thing together is a great feat, and Absolute do it wonderfully.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 9 movement Blood on the Floor (1996) starkly contrasts with Zappa’s musical style, yet the 2 concerts, on consecutive nights, formed a delicious whole—a re-energising of contemporary music. Blood on the Floor might best be described as a jazz suite of symphonic proportions for jazz ensemble and orchestra. The work could also be used as a ballet score or augmented by dancers, such are its dramatic and rhythmic properties. Though partly a tribute to the composer’s brother who died from drug addiction, it is far from sentimental. Its opening self-titled movement is dramatic, dissonant and raucous, setting the tone for the suite. Short solo themes build and are then broken by brief intervals; a longer pause near the movement’s end precedes its cacophonous resolution. Here are the sounds of the city and of the anguished mind.

The dreamy second movement, Junior Addict, retains the intensity of the first, perhaps suggesting the addict’s entrapment. Bruce Arnold’s enchanting guitar solo emerges as a long, introspective thought. The third movement, Shout, returns to the clamour and blare of the first, with a machine-like intensity built on strong playing from the brass section. Sweet and Decay begins with a bass drum roll, a motif that returns to haunt the movement. While Turnage evidently did not write the work expressly for his brother, Sweet and Decay evokes death’s inevitably.

Needle is a series of unconducted solos, including one for bass clarinet. The slow, cool Elegy for Andy follows, its soprano saxophone evoking the wailing human voice. The last 3 movements continue the extraordinary writing and orchestration, shifting through jazz, funk and blues, variously suggesting filmic narrative, cries in the night and howls of mourning. The finale to the work requires 2 trumpets, one at times suffocatingly muted, culminating in a return to the suite’s characteristic blare. Turnage theatrically ends the work with a single, heavy bass drum note.

That jazz idioms could be used to sustain such an extended, complex and evocative work reminds us of jazz’s richness and fertility. Blood on the Floor naturally recalls Gershwin and, contrastingly, Miles Davis’s film score for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold) as examples of longer works in the genre. The performers sustained a controlled energy throughout the performance and Absolute’s arrangement and instrumentation created unworldly textures with great dramatic effect. Blood on the Floor showcases the performers’ interpretive ability and capacity to combine notated elements with engaging improvisation. Both composer and ensemble have mastered a musical language in a way that revitalises and opens it for further experimentation. There is wide scope for virtuosity, but Blood on the Floor is not merely a vehicle for dazzling solos. Turnage’s music takes precedence, and the audience sits as it would for a Mahler or Shostakovitch symphony. The Absolute players blended smoothly with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra players—there was a clear understanding of the work as a concept and how it might unfold in performance.

These extraordinary and well attended concerts remind us of the considerable developmental possibilities still remaining in music. Why is there not more like this? Turnage explores both classical and jazz traditions, but his work is unique-neo-modern rather than postmodern. Zappa’s music too has an essential integrity and Absolute’s arrangements retain and extend its character and resolution. Both composers have drawn on the mythology a well as the musical idioms of contemporary society to make reflective, powerful work.

ADT’s Held is about dance and photography and, inevitability, dance photography, a sub-genre of performance photography in general. Some photographers, like Sydney’s Heidrun Löhr and Melbourne’s Jeff Busby (see p13) have the capacity to suggest more than classical fly-in-amber photographic documentation, conveying a sense of moment and movement in real time. In dance, mirror-gazing narcissism has long been reflected in a kind of unruffled portraiture, all stillness, form and beauty, but for many years now there have been excellent exceptions, opening the lens to the realities and rawness of the body and the rush and blur of movement. Most popular has been an anti-gravitational fetish, drawing on one significant aspect of the appeal of dance (logically extended into Meryl Tankard’s aerial dances for the previous incarnation of ADT). Images of dancers flying, backgrounds erased, have become a cliché, a Freudian fantasy of arousal lift-off. But the leaps of the Sydney Dance Company, for example, are just not the same as those of a new generation inspired, say, by La La Human Steps or Wim Vandeykebus or hip-hoppers. I’m thinking of in-the-air horizontal rolls, for example, which I watched casually performed by a couple of teenagers practising Capoeira in Victoria Square one festival afternoon. These people can also leap from zero—no run-up, there’s no lift, no wire, no flyman. It’s magical, especially when almost instantaneously captured on screen as a still image by a photographer standing centre stage between audience and dancers in the Australian Dance Theatre’s Held..

The primary power of Held is not just the moment caught, but specifically the moment of suspension, gravity defied. It’s a camera moment, one that our eye only just registers, when the dancer is mid-air, ascending or falling. It’s in the eye, the eye of the photographer, the prosthetic eye of the camera but also caught in the eye of the dancer—in one scene in Held I was transfixed by eyes of dancers enlarged on the screen and the alignment of look and movement.

Held is a sustained photo-shoot. American dance photographer Lois Greenfield is on stage when we arrive, already at work on informal portraits of the dancers. A big bank of lights and a reflective screen behind amplifying the flash confirm the sense of studio and session. From then on the theme of photographer and dancers at work together is subjected to numerous variations, interpolated with scenes without Greenfield which are nonetheless photographic in essence, such as a deep red darkroom reverie. In each variation, Held plays with our perceptions. After the ease of association between dancer and image in the pre-show gambit, the company erupts into its trademark power dancing and Greenfield and choreographer Garry Stewart suddenly stretch the duration between the live moment and its projection. The effect is disorienting as our eyes switch from bodies to screen and back, registering flickers of recall or seeing shapes and movements barely remembered. The dancers engage in dynamic tussles, fights but not-fights that allow them with martial arts moves to propel each other through space. The next scene allows the eye to adjust a little more, narrowing the time gap between action and image. Against a wall of sombre, cool green light the magic begins as individual dancers roll though the air, one falling as another rises, the relationship between action and image now and then correlating, the mind muttering “That was a good one…and that one…but not that one” as if flicking through a pile of photographs.

In the next shoot the dancers occupy a small space. Alone and in clusters they leap directly up from the floor, Greenfield’s photographs projected almost instantaneously, confirming and more intricately revealing the dancers’ capacity to fly from zero, to tuck legs beneath them and curl feet in the same second they are airborne. At last, movement and photograph become almost one perceptual field.

Between these sessions, Stewart sustains his play with the phenomenology of perception with shadow (an important part of the pre-history of photography), dancing in the dark (we see and hear the bodies and then glimpse them in flashes of light), darkroom scenes (in one, the collective body of dancers as a wonderful still life with tiny flickers of almost robotic movement, developing into something) and video which alerts us to the substantial difference between moving and fixed images. It is in some of these scenes that Darrin Verhagen’s sound score comes into its own, ranging from delicate piano to solo guitar against musique concrete textures.

Stewart and his designer Geoff Cobham also work the screen as a theme. The dancers move two huge vertical light boxes around the stage at various angles, creating coloured backdrops, shadow surfaces, the all important projection screens and spaces from which dancers emerge. These transform the space architecturally, moving beyond the studio to suggest, as so much work in new media art proposes, other projection possibilities to do with mobility, transparency and the interplay between real and virtual selves. A video of the dancers slowly falling and another of them leaping, in effect, from one screen to another have a peculiar cinematic beauty that confirms the very different feel of the still and the moving image. It also made me mindful that the most potent still images in Held were those of flight (solo or group) rather than the powerful interplay of bodies that threads through the show. Although memorable in its choreography, it does not figure strongly in my recollection of Greenfield’s photography.

Towards the very end, Held loses its grip as if the team has exhausted the repertoire of photographic possibilities. A slow solo against lime green screens and, finally, a series of polished coloured stills of the dancers from Greenfield against an overwrought soundtrack fail to take the dynamic that Stewart has so carefully and rigorously conceived any further. We know these photographs almost too well by now and the absence of the dancers from the stage seems misjudged, sentimental even, giving way to the photography’s recollection of them. That aside, Held is a richly considered and innovative essay in dance photography and visual perception. It also suits a company that deals in speed: the sheer pace and expertise demanded by Garry Stewart means that Held indeed holds moments for us that we would otherwise forget or generalise, yielding brilliant synaptic flashes, extending our appreciation of the virtuosic ADT dancers and Greenfield’s astonishing quickfire intuition.

Inspired by Ian Abdulla’s autobiographical Murray River country paintings, Windmill Performing Arts’ play for young people, RiverlanD (director Wesley Enoch, writer Scott Rankin, design Richard Roberts) begins with a high quotient of wit and magic. On a sand-filled stage rising to a riverbank and the deep blue of an Abdulla sky, a bunch of pelicans gather around a campfire. joking about their artist creator as if he is God—he who created everything from a tube of paint in 6 days and on the 7th had a cup of tea and a lie down and and that’s how they got the Dreaming. After a bit more postmodern larking with the audience and a litany of Murray floods (the biggest being in 1956) the play settles into a more conventional framework. The rich and idiosyncratic suggestiveness of Abdulla’s naïve paintings inspired by childhood recollections gives way to contemporary sophistication and social complexities.

Headlights blaze through the night as an urban Indigenous family arrive in search of their country: Nanna Gracie (Lillian Crombie) knows this land, her bureaucrat daughter Gail (Pauline Whyman) doesn’t (beyond her report on the sustainability of Indigenous culture in the Riverland), and her children, Luke (Luke Carroll) and Milly (Ursula Yovich), are already missing city comforts. The comedy of camping out is broad: Gail has her laptop open in minutes and does Tai Chi in the morning, Nanna has her portable TV, so she won’t miss The Simpsons (“that poor whitefella needs our help”) and the children sleep in the car when Nanna’s farts rock and billow their tent. The tone is comic but the dislocations are serious. There are 2 generation gaps here, complicated by the absence of the children’s father and Nanna’s mysterious refusal to share her culture with her daughter. And there are spirits about, warning children not to come down to the river at dusk. But they do, entering another time, a time of flood, where the ghostly Paulie (Rod Smith), somehow connected with Nanna’s silence, introduces Luke to male independence and he risks all on a lone canoe ride on the mighty river.

As in all plays predicated on secrets, the truth will out, and here it comes in an ungainly, complex rush of danger, guilt and forgiveness. Had such a short play been opened out a bit and had it stuck with the breadth of concerns it opened with it might have been more magical and less melodramatic and convoluted. Poor Gail and Milly get less and less attention as the play increasingly swerves into a male rite-of-passage drama coupled with an abrupt revelation of Nanna’s tragic past. By now the play’s humour has long gone. Nevertheless, RiverlandD keeps the audience fascinated with engaging performances, cut-out puppets of birds and river skiers in the Abdullah style, spooky apparitions and immersive lighting. Children from the Kaurna Plains School ably wield the pelican and river life cutouts and play spirits but their presence is oddly subdued, suggesting a need for greater integration in subsequent productions. With a bit of work, RiverlandD deserves a long and successful stage life, as long as its initial success does not blind its creators to the work’s flaws.

It’s wonderful that a play for young people should have a prime place in an international arts festival. The only pity was that the audiences were largely adult. Windmill CEO Cate Fowler quipped, “For future Windmill festival shows all adults will have to be accompanied by a child.”

One of our most popular editions in 2003 was titled Book-ish. Here it is again as Meta-Crash, reviews of new books about the art-science nexus, artificial life (a-life), media ethics, censorship, youth culture, and sex and the media. We open with an essay from Anna Munster about one of the major issues of the moment, art’s new complicity with science and what’s in it for both. Greg Hooper reviews a backlash against the art of the 20th century that includes Stephen Pinker’s assertion, on genetic grounds, of the unnaturalness of avant garde art. Revealing more complexities in the science-art venture, Stuart Bunt, scientific head of Perth’s SymbioticA art-science project, reviews Mitchell Whitelaw’s new book, Metacreation, on artificial life forms created by artists. The other crashes we are constantly witness to, and which are the subject of books reviewed in Meta-Crash, cluster around the forces of government and corporate media as they hit sex and truth head on. KG

Meeting the documentary challenge

The Australian documentary scene appears healthy: locally-produced films screen regularly on SBS and ABC TV, the REAL:life festival attracts eager audiences, Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak is enjoying a theatrical release and documentaries like Scott Millwood’s AFI Award-winning Wildness are superior to many recent local dramas. Nevertheless Zubrycki and fellow documentarist Carmela Baranowska, reporting from the Australian International Documentary Conference in Fremantle, paint a grim picture in the pages of OnScreen. They argue that a chronic shortage of funds has bred an increasingly conservative funding culture. A resolute market focus at this year’s AIDC reinforces this.

I heard grimly humorous tales from Scott Millwood (p17) about his efforts to raise funds for a Chris Marker-inspired essayistic film several years ago. Broadcasters and funding bodies were not only horrified by the thought of experimentation, Millwood claims they often didn’t understand what he was talking about.

The political control and financial strangulation of cultural institutions is only part of the Howard government’s ongoing war on culture. The recent refusal to screen Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak in the National Parliament illustrates the pressures faced by directors who manage to actually get a film made. In her new book, Snatched (reviewed, p11), Helen Vnuk shows how the manipulation of Australia’s deeply flawed classification system has allowed a wave of censorship in recent years to go largely unnoticed by the Australian public.

OnScreen’s documentary feature depicts a sector under financial, commercial and governmental pressure. It also reveals a community of filmmakers fighting to have their voices heard. What needs to be done? Improved funding would assist, not least to cover the costs of blowing up film for theatrical release, but more important is the need for a serious review of funding criteria and processes (cf Peter Sainsbury on feature film funding, RT53-54) and a detailed strategic report on market possibilities for documentaries on free-to-air TV, cable, the internet, in cinemas and documentary markets. Tom Zubrycki cites European models that are worth looking at. Not least, the AIDC should commit itself to discussion of form and vision as an integral part of its market forum. DE

ABC: the pressure’s on

Pressure on the ABC to justify its arts policies is building with a number of public forums being held in Sydney and Melbourne in April and beyond. Contradictions between charter obligations and programming practice must be addressed. The recent changes to ABC radio and Classic FM radio must be challenged. The calibre of new entertainments hosted by comedians on ABC TV must be queried. One of the first forums is Art by Stealth? The ABC and the Arts, a half day seminar presented by UTS’ Transforming Cultures Centre and Currency House. Speakers included Liz Jacka, Professor Communications Studies, UTS, who has prepared a report on the issues for the ABC staff union; Tamara Winikoff, Executive Director, NAVA; Terry Cutler, Principal, Cutler & Company, Jonathan Mills; ex-Director, Melbourne International Arts Festival; and RealTime’s Keith Gallasch. ABC executives overseeing arts and entertainment will also speak. Currency House, rear 201 Cleveland St, Redfern, Sydney, 2-6pm April 4.

To put the ABC crisis in a larger perspective, we suggest you visit Artshub and read Senator John Faulkner’s “From Blue Poles to Red Fans” (March 22), the 2004 Whitlam Oration. Faulkner details the Federal Government’s systematic attack on arts institutions and corrects the notion that Howard is not interested in art and culture, but to what end? KG

And on the Thousandth Night was a radically different experience from First Night. The company appear in cardboard crowns, red gowns with ordinary clothes beneath and bare feet. An upstage table holds food and drink supplies which they work through over the 6 hours, saving the beer to the last hour. The performers are affable, address us directly in a conversational tone from a row of chairs across the front of the stage and come and go taking the chairs with them. Every utterance begins, “Once upon a time there was…” and over the 6 hours a feast of tales is told but none completed: someone will interrupt with another tale, either picking up on the one just told, or another from earlier, or it’s something apparently brand new. Sometimes the interruption is infuriating, often it doesn’t matter, we know the tale or we know where it’s going: if it was any longer it wouldn’t be funny or significant. Occasionally a tale-teller is left helpless, no one interrupts and they have to string out their story until rescued. The result is a wealth of tales familiar, deviant, magical and banal, a kind of living structuralist encyclopoedia of story-telling. From the well of a few deep structure formulae come an astonishing plethora of stories.

Series and subsets of tales emerge drawing on classic fairytales, myths, famous plots (recurrent stories about a father and three daughters kick off with a version of King Lear), popular culture (The Fly and The Hulk find their way into the weave) and Kylie (“Once there was a perfect little princess with a pert little bott”), and, not least, jokes. Classic tales are given a modern edge—of the Gingerbread Boy bullies say, “that little baked kid, we’ll eat him”—and others are told quite laterally—7 un-unionised miners replace the 7 dwarfs. One teller’s version of Hansel and Gretel is usurped by another: “Once upon a time there was a housing inspector who came upon a dodgy house made of chocolate and sweets…” One performer particularly committed to incisive brevity began: “Once upon a time there was a country where people were made out of meat…” Later and more surreally, “…there was city where there were no people, only juice.” From the same speaker in the unfolding of a series on sex madness, a story about a man in bed with 4 women: “and as often is the case, the man was crap. He had a big erection but was not generous with it.” Sex mad scenes take place in schools, delicatessens, old folks’ homes and the theatre, sucking the Lear tale into the vortex as The Royal Blow Job. A later series darkens the mood in longer tales about parents, children and computer pornography. A small nation-big nation love story could equally be about Australia and the USA as about Blair and Bush: “a special relationship, but only kind of one way.”

Improvisation and the informality of the performance meant that we witnessed and shared the performers’ surprise at others’ inventiveness, the irritation at interruption, moments of desperation and plenty of solo and collective smiling, laughter and corpsing (a sure cue to be interrupted). An ah-hah gasp from the auditorium mid-story immediately prompted an interruption: “Once upon a time there was a woman in a theatre who was surprised to hear her own story.”

Recurrence of themes and story types led to a kind of collective hysteria over the 6 hours. You could leave the show at any time for food, rest or another show, but the longer you were away the further out of the loop you felt and the more technical the appreciation became when you returned, as opposed to shared delirium as waves of stories broke over each other. In the last hour there’s a return to fairy tales, a string of love stories (about 2 words, 2 turds, 2 birds), bizzare versions of creation myths (“concentrated nothing”, “the world is a snow dome”) and an increasing conflation of stories feeding off themselves and each other as thieves sell second hand stories and an evocation of the theatre we shared (“a very dark room, breathing, creaking…alive and dead”) and, finally (from a prepared text apparently), “a mouth that wouldn’t stop talking…and a pulse that wouldn’t stop beating.”

In this memorable show there were many amazing stories, regardless of their incomplete nature, and they were being recalled and told again as the audience wandered from the theatre and gathered in the street and for days after.

The solo work of Mugiyono Kasido in Triple Bill is an exemplar of the mimetic/dance form. Possessing a commanding presence, Kasido’s powerful movements literally hang in space. Draping limbs suspend in silence interjected with bird calls which emanate from the depths of an ever alert body. Kasido wears a simple white t-shirt which is used effectively, signifying a type of magician’s coat or sheath, through which his body transforms between abstract and still life shapes. Martha Graham’s Lamentations comes to mind, but more humorously used, with the stretching of fabric creating images: a bird, a yogi, a shell, the body as a vehicle for rumours. The political and sociological is revealed through the stance of gun-wielding bravado, quickly reversing to the victim’s fearful, cringing. Things are not what they seem. Sculptural order comes from disorder returning to upside down uncertainty, Rodin in stretched cotton. This work exercises the functional body in a constant display of balance and imbalance. The struggle to stay harmonious rests in brief moments of indigenous Indonesian stances reminding us of a mature culture subsisting under duress. The body as battle zone, the seat of self expression as well as the location for harmony.

Francis Rings’ Unaipon is based on the fissures and marriage between science, religion and Indigenous culture as exemplified by the life of David Unaipon, a Ngarrindjeri man of the Warrawaldi clan born in 1972 at Point McLeay Mission in South Australia. His life traversed 2 cultures entering the realms of complexity in his roles as inventor, philosopher, writer and storyteller.

A scrim projected with a cosmography interlayed with the image of the Australian $50 note absorbs the eye. An optical illusion excites our desire to trace a milky, astrological cartography of songlines intermingled with a familiar effigy. These images are not divisive, alluding to the influences of both Indigenous and European cultures on Unaipon’s vision of a universal force that can go by any number of names.

This work reflects elements of the bush with dusty winds and ochre coloured fibre coverings under which 6 dancers roll in unison like animated banksia bushes. The work weaves 2 worlds together with simple compositions, overlaying modern and Indigenous dance. Unaipon is a work rich in thematics and visual imagery, however the sections attempting juxtapostion and fusion of dance styles are choreographically thin. The strongest sections of the work are those that embody the raw, highly expressive physicality of regional Indigenous dances. References to celestial beings and prayer herald a ritual return to water, a life coming full circle.

Stephen Page’s Rush leaps out of Triple Bill with a startling shift in style. Superbly acted and danced it uses a dance theatre genre to take us on a journey through religion, confinement, substance abuse and the plight of the Stolen Generation. Woven through the stories is the presence of a spirit woman reminding us of a spiritual path which is ever present, guiding and calling us to return to our roots. The strength of Rush lies in its choreographic language which embraces contemporary culture whilst being deeply rooted in ancient myths. The stunning set designed by Peter England provides the final focal point with rivulets of flowing charcoal water, a symbol of hope but also a call not to forget a dark past.

There has always been a tradition of screening new documentaries at the National Parliament in Canberra. So it came as a surprise when Joint House leader Bob Wedgwood, acting on the advice of the Speaker Neil Andrew, refused a screening of my new film Molly and Mobarak.

Wedgwood’s letter (leaked to the Canberra Times) stated several reasons for the refusal, including the claim that “this film promotes the theme of widespread opposition to government policy and might cause offence to a significant part of the Australian community.” The outrageous ban was subsequently overturned in 48 hours after pressure from my local Labor member Tanya Plibersek. The publicity ensured that Canberrans responded and we had a full cinema.

I’ve been asking myself what significance should be read into this petty attempt at censorship? Part of the reason for the ban is possibly bound up with the difference between documentary and current affairs. While current affairs is essentially an investigation driven by a reporter, documentary is more an exploration of the contemporary/ historical through the personal. Perhaps the film struck a raw nerve because it actually humanises refugees.

I believe the ban is also a sign that documentaries are starting to be noticed and taken seriously in the general community. Some claim this is because documentaries are appropriating the devices of dramatic story telling and bringing emotional power to the form. However, good documentaries have always done this. I think it’s more to do with a real hunger to find meaning in the post-September 11 world and a public craving for ‘authenticity’.

Last year I attended The International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), the largest festival of its type in the world. 230 films were shown and 110,000 tickets were sold—a 17% leap in audience numbers over the previous year. IDFA is a celebration of the art of documentary and the styles ranged from observational narratives to extremely personal essay films.

The resurgence of documentary is a phenomenon few could have predicted, given its steady marginalisation on television. Since the mid-90s documentary has been separating into 2 totally different streams: ‘reality-based’ TV series and factual infotainment versus the traditional longer form social documentary, which has been pushed back to ever later time-slots. This has been a world-wide trend: in Britain social documentaries have been all but relegated to a new digital channel.

Finding reasons is not difficult. There’s always been an uneasy relationship between television and documentary. Television, by its very nature, constructs audiences as consumers. It tends to be prescriptive and concerned with ratings, creating a focus on diversion and entertainment. In contrast, documentary forces you to engage with the content and think for yourself. As well as complexity and depth, documentary films also generally have a strong and personal point of view.

Despite some important new prime-time slots, such as SBS’s Storyline Australia, long-form documentaries on television are at risk of becoming an endangered species. Certainly I would be the first to admit that without public broadcasters we wouldn’t have a documentary industry, but my concern is that we are losing the art of documentary. This year’s Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) in February highlighted this very problem. The conference was essentially oriented around the business of buying and selling films, with the DocuMart being the core of the event. While I don’t disagree this should have been the main focus, where were the sessions about form, the discussions with filmmakers, the screenings? Only one documentary was shown at the festival, an appalling oversight by the organisers. No wonder many younger filmmakers were completely alienated by the event and saw it as a club for established practitioners. This is a poor way of fostering growth in the industry, especially in light of a shocking AFC statistic that 64% of first time documentary filmmakers never get to make another film.

The difficulties faced by the current ‘entry-level’ generation in getting a foothold in the industry account for an absence, I believe, of a variety of styles and ideas. People censor themselves, believing certain subjects are too ‘provocative’ for broadcasters to commission and elect instead to make safer films believed to have a better chance of getting funded. Broadcasters are also less inclined to take risks with first time filmmakers.

Meanwhile a crisis also exists at the other end of the spectrum. Around the world the feature documentary is being revitalised, but here in Australia we are being left behind. Just look at the long list of feature documentaries slated for our screens in the next few months. All are American. Not one is a local film!

Maybe it’s time to start thinking outside the box. In the US feature projects usually start without any broadcaster involvement. That comes later. Unlike America we don’t have private foundations to kick-start these projects. We do however have government agencies: the AFC fully invests in one feature documentary a year, the new Adelaide International Film Festival is investing $100,000 in a project for next year’s event, while the Film Finance Corporation has the capacity to invest in one feature documentary per year. Occasionally SBS allows one-hour documentaries, such as Fahimeh’s Story, to grow into features. It’s a start but there’s no guarantee these documentaries will ever hit cinema screens (or even be shown at film festivals) and that’s because broadcasters increasingly believe they will lose publicity, and therefore ratings, if they don’t insist on first run. Recently Ronin Films wanted to secure a theatrical window for The President versus David Hicks but because of its topicality SBS wanted the film to open its new Storyline Australia program instead. The film rated very well but Director Curtis Levy insists he will still press for a theatrical release later this year.

In America it’s a different picture entirely. The US cable network Home Box Office (HBO) has visibly stepped up its involvement in the cinema release of feature documentaries. Two recent examples are Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans. Cinema exposure guarantees that reviewers and critics give these documentaries the attention they deserve, thus helping their eventual television release. At IDFA, HBO CEO Sheila Nevins noted that: “If a film doesn’t succeed theatrically it doesn’t hurt television broadcast, and if it succeeds it helps.”

Part of the problem with releasing feature documentaries here in Australia is the high cost of a 35mm blow-up. At AIDC Andrew Pike from Ronin Films referred to the box office success of Safina Uberoi’s My Mother India. The film ran for 6 months in Sydney, but barely returned its blow-up costs of around $60,000. Digital projection in Australia makes perfect financial sense, but venues for digital projection are strictly limited, which means feature documentaries finished on tape seldom attract mainstream distributors. In the case of Molly and Mobarak I was very lucky that Hopscotch got behind the film, but the release still wouldn’t have happened without a marketing loan from the AFC.

One of the resolutions passed at AIDC calls on the AFC to conduct a feasibility study into Docuzone, a European initiative started 3 years ago by the Netherlands Film Fund which could be the answer to cinema release of documentaries. Digital projectors were purchased and lodged in cinemas across the Netherlands on the condition that they screen independent documentary and drama at least 2 nights a week. The scheme was a huge success. This year Docuzone will link 175 screens across Europe via a digital network and a slate of 12 films to be simultaneously released from a central server. Kees Ryninks, who initiated the project, said at IDFA: “We need to carve out a separate space for specialist film and to protect and promote European culture.” Sound familiar? Australian documentary makers have been saying the same thing in a local context for years!

Television may be the saviour of documentary and may also be its curse. Whatever happens, documentary urgently needs to reclaim its proper place as an art form. Documentary filmmakers have an incredible ability to tell stories from the inside, exploring the contemporary through the personal using a rich variety of styles and approaches. While Reality TV has come and (almost) gone, documentaries are here to stay.

“We make dull documentaries. We make dull feature films. We have an unsustainable structure that’s rapidly crumbling”, declared Brian Rosen, CEO of the Film Finance Corporation, to a muted plenary session at the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC). The audience’s silence reminded me of the opening minutes of The Graduate (1967), Mike Nichol’s brilliant dissection of the generation gap. Ben (Dustin Hoffman) attends a party celebrating his return home from college. One of the guests pulls him aside and says: “I just wanted to say one word to you…plastics…there’s a great future in plastics.” Are our documentaries just another ‘product’ to be selected from the supermarket shelf of Australian television? Is this why we make documentaries?

Ben’s reply echoed through many of the discussions I had with filmmakers who have recently graduated from documentary and media courses: “I’m just worried about my future…I want it to be…different.”

There was an air of gloom, depression and desperation at AIDC 2004, although this type of emotional response has come to characterise the conference in recent years. Every session seemed to be dominated by the broadcasters, the funding agencies or a highly selective pool of filmmakers (there were no independent directors under 40 for example). It was the usual elevation of the bureaucrat to the position of auteur, a weird psycho-pathology which now dominates documentary discussions. We were told that we “had to make films that the audience wanted to see”, although only the more cynical of us recalled that it had been Rupert Murdoch who first coined this phrase when talking about the delights of the page 3 girl in The Sun.

Dennis O’Rourke was in top form, a mixture of brazen outrage and quotable quotes. He refused to sit meekly on the sidelines and bravely confronted everything in his path. The broadcasters’ representatives, their hands shielding the bright conference lighting, referred to him as “the voice of god.” O’Rourke was particularly incensed that the Australian Broadcasting Authority’s definition of documentary, which excludes infotainment and light entertainment, was being used by SBS TV to justify the funding of the series Desperately Seeking Sheila, which they see as tackling “a serious social problem in rural Western Australia—the shortage of bush brides.” [This SBSi and Carlton TV (UK) co-production will see 5 rural men from WA choose 3 women each from a list of 25. Each will then take one woman back to the farm to live the life of a farmer’s wife. Ed]

ABC TV, in an adroit move, announced that its own exceptionally strong ratings at the beginning of 2004 were due to the public’s move away from Reality TV and the station’s insistence on the “documentary.” Two days before the conference began Channel 7 had released its ratings. Reality TV had bombed and there was a desperate dash to reorganise the schedule. But O’Rourke’s beef was more specific. He argued that comparing documentary to Reality TV was like comparing love-making to rape. Documentary evolves through practice and not from bureaucrats more interested in the “technocratic imperative.” He argued that TV was “electronic wallpaper” and “contaminated the possibility of transforming cinema into art.”

All this was discussed with great fervour at the networking events: the $70 Welcome Cocktail Party and for the financially solvent the $120 Boat Cruise. Money, it seems, was on everyone’s mind. The first question after the one and only documentary screened at the conference, Fahimeh’s Story (Faramarz K-Rahber) was “what was the budget?” Was this a conference or a market? It was still the AIDC (not the AIDM-arket) although realists argued that the change from a bi-annual to annual event meant that this year the focus should be on the market.

How international was the conference? Julian Burnside came all the way from Melbourne and spoke about refugees but there were no filmmakers from the areas most refugees are fleeing, such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there were certainly no films from these places. Astoundingly, there was not one Indigenous speaker. The conclusions are chilling. Even in the so-called ‘enlightened’ documentary community we are insular, isolated and yes, racist. We are Australia.

Yet despite all this I returned from Fremantle feeling up-beat. In his discussion session, Brian Rosen argued that we “needed to create excitement again.” One of his suggestions was to set aside 1 or 2 million dollars from the FFC documentary pool to inject into 10 or 20 documentaries funded at $100,000 each, without a broadcaster attached. Funding bodies and filmmakers then need to think about alternative modes of distribution.

Many documentary filmmakers are outside the broadcaster loop. The reasons are many and usually ignored by AIDC. We are not baby boomers, we do not live in Sydney and we may tackle difficult, political or—heaven forbid—personal documentaries, whose meanings are only felt by audiences over long periods of time and in many different contexts. If a broadcaster is not attached to a project the doors of funding bodies are routinely slammed shut. For those of us who have been working for years on long-term projects, Rosen’s comments provoked much passionate discussion and—dare I say it—relief. It is hardly utopian to argue for a mixed film economy which includes television, cinema and cross-platform distribution opportunities.

There are innovative ideas afoot to deal with the crisis in documentary, but these were severely under represented at AIDC. Even before the conference began discussions among informal networks had been pondering what should be done to move beyond the current impasse. AIDC consolidated some of these relationships, especially along interstate lines. One of the very few conference sessions that actually featured a filmmaker highlighted the extraordinary work in progress that is kNOT @ Home, a project relating stories from Australian families who are not at home because of a ‘knot’ at home. Phillip Crawford cited this series, involving 500 young people from 22 towns and 22 new directors, as an example of an initiative that bucks the status quo. And Melbourne independent media team Spinach7 are creating an online digital channel for the distribution of a variety of content including documentary films. If change is going to come, perhaps it will come from outside the traditional film funding channels. Watch this space.

Australian International Documentary Conference 2004, Fremantle, Western Australia, Feb 26-28

It’s rare to find an Australian filmmaker willing to discuss cinema in terms of art, let alone poetry. But at the Documentary Masterclass at this year’s Flickerfest Short Film Festival in Sydney, Tasmanian documentary maker Scott Millwood declared: “I want to talk about epic poetry. I know that’s probably a strange thing to talk about at a doco masterclass, but most of the work I’ve made has been influenced a lot by poetry.”

A casual glance at Millwood’s career would suggest that despite his literary rhetoric, he has made a spectacularly successful leap into the documentary elite with just 2 films. His debut Proximity (1999) did the rounds of film festivals and earned him some recognition as an ‘experimental’ filmmaker, while Wildness (2003) has screened twice on ABC television and earned him accolades, including the AFI award for Best Documentary last year. A more detailed account of Millwood’s filmmaking trajectory, however, offers a sobering account of how difficult it is for Australian documentary filmmakers to bring their vision to the screen and exactly how far they may deviate from accepted forms.

Proximity was shot over a 14 month period in 1996, when Scott Millwood was 23. He had left Australia, feeling “his life here was broken”, and travelled with a camera to Calcutta on a one-way ticket to see, rather masochistically, if the sub-continent could break him. From India he journeyed to Vietnam and China, through former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan, on to Russia, down into Iran and Turkey and finally back to India, where he spent time with a Western woman caring for people with leprosy.

Proximity is part travelogue, part social and political commentary and part philosophical musing, but for all its geographical scope, its concerns are essentially personal and almost defiantly myopic. The film is a collection of images born of a desire to find “beauty in the streets”, with a self-consciously poetic voice-over based on Millwood’s travel diary, making sense of these images in relation to the filmmaker’s inner journey as he moves across the globe. As Millwood himself puts it: “Proximity was me learning about myself.”

For all its occasionally portentous tone, Proximity is quite an extraordinary work from a young filmmaker coming out of a culture generally resistant to exploring the poetics of the documentary image. It clearly bears the influence of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and similarly comprises a flow of images loosely connected by a voice-over that doesn’t strive for literal sense, but rather aims to trigger thoughts, memories and resonances in the viewer. Proximity is a film to dream by.

Australian broadcasters and funding bodies are not known for embracing flagrant experimentation and Millwood’s attempts to pursue and essayistic style of documentary filmmaking meant that he endured several years of unfinished projects before finally completing the more conventional Wildness in 2003. The first of these unfinished films was another Marker-influenced work set in Palestine, composed of stills and telling of a man standing at the end of time during the last days of the 20th century. Although Millwood lived in Israel and Palestine for a year and was able to make the film’s opening 5 minutes, as well as a book of the entire story, his talk of a film essay and epic poetry “scared the shit out of broadcasters” and he was unable to find backing to complete the project. As Millwood now wryly observes: “I was trying to make a European film in the wrong country.” A second project based on portraits shot at Melbourne street protests similarly failed to materialise as a film, but later formed the basis of an installation at Melbourne’s Federation Square.

Millwood’s second completed work, Wildness, has been something of a literal and metaphorical homecoming for the director: the film even opens with an aerial shot sweeping over the ocean, across a deserted sandy shoreline and into Tasmania’s wilderness. Wildness tells the story of 2 photographers, Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, who came to Tasmania from Eastern Europe as refugees in the aftermath of World War II. Truchanas arrived in Australia as a young man, and was soon exploring and photographing the relatively unknown south west corner of Tasmania. Dombrovskis was a small child when he arrived in Tasmania, and was later mentored by Truchanas in photography and surviving the conditions in the state’s south west. Truchanas’ images played a key role in the ultimately doomed fight to save Lake Pedder from inundation by Tasmania’s Hydro Electric Commission in the early 1970s, while Dombrovskis’ image Rock Island Bend was central in the successful campaign to stop the damming of the Franklin River in the early 1980s. Both photographers died in the wilderness they spent their lives documenting.

It’s easy to see why the story of Truchanas and Dombrovskis appealed to Millwood. It has all the elements of an epic poem, including rebirth in a new land, life, death and struggle on a grand scale, all contained in the deeply moving story of 2 talented men whose lives are inextricably linked with Australian art and politics. More specifically, like Millwood, these 2 photographers didn’t just utilise a documentary medium to record the world around them. Through their photographs they sought to interact with and understand their environment, bringing the clarity of personal vision to wild scenes of physical reality.

One of the most effective passages in Wildness clearly illustrates this application of vision. While a voice-over relates entries from Dombrovskis’ diary of trip he took down the Franklin in 1979, a split screen shows contemporary footage of the river on the left, while Dombrovskis’ photographs of the same scenes are displayed on the right. The twin images not only illustrate the river’s enduring grandeur (the scenes have barely changed in 25 years), but also illustrate Dombrovskis’ skill at freezing the pulsating life of the river in images that not only capture the Franklin’s majestic beauty, but actually enhance it.

It is in such subtle manipulation of form for lyrical effect that we see Millwood’s talent for bringing innovation and a poetic sensibility to the documentary form. The best documentaries create connections between different peoples, places and times, but Millwood’s films do more than this. His work allows us to experience something of other people’s lives and sensibilities by exploring how they have opened their eyes and their hearts to their surrounds.

Scott Millwood’s Wildness is available on video from Film Australia. Orders can be made via the Film Australia website and a study guide is available for free download. Contact Film Australia Sales, 02 9413 8634, sales@filmaust.com.au, www.filmaust.com.au

Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004 ISBN 0 262 03312 7

It’s been some time since a tome came our way which combines diverse theoretical paradigms to forge a fresh analysis of film history and the place of cinema in contemporary culture. Sean Cubitt’s The Cinema Effect doesn’t ask ‘what is cinema?’, but rather what does cinema do, or what is its effect? The analysis concentrates on a handful of films and employs a combination of semiotics, Marxist theory, ontological philosophy, and ambivalent applications of phenomenological and psychoanalytic writings.

A section on ‘Pioneer Cinema’ starts the book, with a rich analysis of cinema’s social, political and philosophical effect in its formative years. Predictably, Lumiére and Méliès feature, but Cubitt adds another rarely covered early figure, the Indian pioneer and Méliès imitator DG Dundiraj ‘Dadasaheb’ Phalke. Cinema is regarded here as embodying the dialectics of modernity from the start, as played out in Europe’s secularised public sphere at the end of the 19th century and in what the writer calls the “counter-modernity” of Phalke’s anti-colonial fables employing religious mythology.

The next section, ‘Normative Cinema’, addresses films of the 1930s. Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) is treated as “an apogee of rhetorical filmmaking”, exemplifying what Cubitt calls “total film” in which the audience is forced to passively consume a mythology. This is contrasted with the active viewer demanded by Eisenstein’s dialectically-informed work of the 1920s. Cubitt argues that like classical Hollywood, total cinema seeks to remove itself from history, allowing Nevsky to be set in a past entirely constructed to feed the ideology of the present.

In contrast Rules of the Game (1939) is celebrated for confronting the viewer with “the autonomy of the signifier”, as Renoir’s detached camera style brings us “face to face with the film as other.” The film’s poetic realism encourages us to rain upon the world “a forgiveness tinged with the tragic realisation that it is necessary to love this world because it is the only one.”

While both realist and total cinema aim for symbolic depth, Cubitt sees classical Hollywood as constructing a “brilliant but depth-less surface.” With Hollywood we simply don’t want reality: to see Astaire “mount” Rogers in one of their classic RKO musicals would be unthinkable.

The third section, ‘Postcinema’, comprises half the book and focuses on contemporary films. Thirty years are ommitted from Cubitt’s account of cinema’s important moments, leaving out Italian neorealism and post-war European modernism, ignoring the work of such filmmakers as Antonioni, Resnais, Godard, Fellini, Bergman and Fassbinder. While he makes no claim to present an exhaustive history of cinema, this particular blank spot is familiar. So many established academics continue a reactionary rebellion against the heavy diet of demanding European cinema they were force-fed in their undergraduate years.

Cubitt argues that post-war modernism’s primary thematic of negativity is anachronistic from a 21st century perspective. He summarises Adorno’s argument—that after the Holocaust a clearly dysfunctional and ethically debased modernity needs to be negated by art and philosophy—as unnecessary today because simulation plays the same function. Though lamenting the loss of cinema’s ability to critically reflect upon society, Cubitt seriously over-invests in the possibilities of critique offered by simulation. Simulacra’s divorce of words and symbols from meaning and reality is exactly the kind of phenomenon Adorno argued needed to be negated and overcome. In the context of Cubitt’s argument, the correct assertion that no technique is inherently “progressive or subversive” implies both an inevitable surrender to the hegemonic aesthetics of spectacle and a glib dismissal of any critical potential in modernist textuality.

The closest Cubitt gets to acknowledging the potential of texts to act as critiques is in the familiar discussion of classicism’s autopsy in Sam Peckinpah’s “postclassical” Westerns. He posits Peckinpah’s corrective West as Hispanic, European and Indian, or the myth of origin rewritten as “a legend of cultural mixing, not racial purity.” This attempt at gleaning critique from the text quickly runs out of steam, and he ends up admitting The Wild Bunch often continues to blindly affirm what it is usually claimed to subvert.

The remaining chapters address contemporary cinema in a sophisticated way, based on a familiar postmodern tenet that is both egalitarian and elitist. Cubitt says big-budget Hollywood enacts a distinct doubling: as unsullied entertainment for those who “succumb” to the spectacle and something else for those who are able to “appreciate” its layered reflexivity. This doubling is heavily paradoxical, as he points out, with the hero often seeking to puncture what the viewer has actually come to see: the computer database, the virtual reality matrix, the spectacle itself. While realism aims to engage us as “arbiters”, Cubitt claims the “Hollywood neobaroque” of The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) “recruits us as collaborators.” A “mistiness” of doubt shrouds everything in these films, except for a naïve investment in the basic forces of eternal love, home, nature and truth.

Cubitt notes that in rendering these dystopic worlds, the image becomes dematerialised, turning into an opaque curtain hiding a truth we cannot see but in which we are asked to invest. The hero lives on faith that there is a purer reality beyond the grimy visible world. But as Cubitt points out, even the image of this ‘reality’ is ultimately questionable: when we finally reach the perfect beach at the end of The Thirteenth Floor “we meet it not as actuality but as depiction”, gazing out at a clearly CGI-conjured image that serves as a dreamscape for the protagonist.

Despite his quite convincing political critique of globalised cinema, Sean Cubitt is determined to ultimately assert contemporary film as a positive event. A “commodity cinema” can possibly “regenerate” its audience he argues, concluding: “this possibility…is the utopian in film that has always made it so fascinating.” Cinema might not be fully manifesting its hopeful role, but Cubitt suggests it at least offers a starting point.

For all its robust theoretical discussion, The Cinema Effect ends on a naïve hopefulness in cinema’s empowering potential. This amounts to a wishful metaphysics of becoming that is not necessarily any less idealist or problematic than the ontological discourses Cubitt wishes to transcend. His impressive and rich response to cinema’s theoretical challenge deals with crucial questions we must continue to ask, just as his argument plays out familiar historical blind spots and prescriptive philosophical understandings of this still elusive artform.

Many of the most memorably absurd moments in recent Australian films have occurred in the crime comedy genre. In Gregor Jordan’s Two Hands (1999), a clueless, Stubbie-clad hit man loads rusty bullets into his ‘piece’ turning the murder weapon into a popgun and the murder attempt into a farce. Johnny Spiteri (David Wenham) has government fraud investigators in knots, and the audience in stitches, with his inadvertent obfuscations in Gettin’ Square (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2003). When Dale (Guy Pearce) robs the cashed-up Melbourne Cup bookies in The Hard Word (Scott Roberts, 2003), he addresses the crowd in the manner of a droll, Ned Kelly-inspired MC: “Can I have your attention: stick ‘em up. No need to be afraid, we’ve done this many times before.”

In the last 5 years, crime comedies have featured consistently on Australian screens, with varying degrees of critical and commercial success. Two Hands, The Hard Word and Dirty Deeds (David Caesar, 2002) achieved respectable box office returns, while last year Gettin’ Square won critical acclaim, a swag of awards and moderate commercial success. Other less prominent examples of the genre include Muggers (Dean Murphy, 2000), The Nugget (Bill Bennett, 2002), Horseplay (Stavros Kazantzidis, 2003) and Bad Eggs (Tony Martin, 2003). While these films tackle the crime comedy format in different ways, they are all genre films with explicit links to the American crime comedy tradition and the caper sub-genre in particular.

The genre film has had a problematic history in Australia ever since the mid-70s revival of the local film industry. The first decade was dominated by period dramas explicitly influenced by a European art house narrative tradition and aesthetic. Government funding through the Australian Film Commission actively supported the production of films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979) and Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981), giving rise to the pejorative tag ‘AFC genre’. These films were the product of a funding strategy that discouraged films modeled on mainstream Hollywood genres.

There were sound financial reasons for not competing with Hollywood in the production of big budget genre pictures, but the motivation for funding so-called ‘quality’ films had more to do with an entrenched cultural, rather than mercantile, rationale. Graham Turner has argued that following the revival of the industry film became the dominant mode of cultural representation (Graham Turner, “The Genres are American: Australian Narrative, Australian film, and the Problem of Genre”, Film Literature Quarterly, Volume XXI, no. 2, April 1993). Feature films were required to articulate pressing issues of nationhood and national identity, hence the preponderance of narratives dealing with aspects of Australian cultural, social and political history. This necessarily limited the generic diversity of the feature film industry.

While the hegemony of the ‘AFC genre’ gradually gave way to an industry that could accommodate Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986) alongside High Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987), the genre film has generally continued to be regarded as fundamentally ‘un-Australian’. However, the current spate of Australian crime comedies arguably reflects an increased willingness on the part of filmmakers to tackle genre-based projects. Given that the 4 main examples cited earlier received substantial government funding and yielded reasonable box office returns, there also seems to be a corresponding willingness on the part of Australian film funding bodies and local audiences to support such films.

But the success of the local crime comedy does not necessarily attest to the industry’s overwhelming embrace of the genre film, but rather the appeal of a specific genre. Unlike the Western or horror film, the codes and conventions of the crime comedy—particularly the caper film—seem peculiarly suited to the collective temperament of Australian audiences.

A sub-genre of the American gangster film, the caper film typically features a group of professional crooks planning an elaborate robbery. Due to the personal foibles of individual characters and/or disagreements within the group, the plan often goes wrong. Think The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) or Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992). In both the dramatic and comic versions of the genre, the caper film is underpinned by a fundamentally anti-authoritarian and egalitarian imperative. Whether the target is a bank or a racetrack, much of the pleasure in these films derives from the social transgression represented by attacks on institutions. Equally, the emphasis on criminal camaraderie and group loyalty is paramount. Given the ingrained anti-authoritarian streak in the Australian national character, our history of venerating rogues and outlaws and our equally celebrated ethic of ‘mateship’, it is not hard to see why the caper film might have singular appeal.

In The Hard Word and Gettin’ Square, early scenes in jail establish the crucial criminal partnerships. In the former, it is the fraternal triumvirate of the Twentyman brothers, and in the latter, the unlikely alliance between Barry Worth (Sam Worthington) and Johnny Spiteri. In both films, the criminals are generally depicted as amusingly flawed characters who are more lovable louts than hardened mobsters. And while an audacious crime is central to the plot of both films, it is the nexus of corrupt law enforcement figures that constitutes the most pernicious manifestation of ‘organised crime.’

Much of the humour in both films arises not only from the planned assault on the bookies and banks, but also on the crooked cops and bent lawyers who are the real villains of the piece. It is also significant that, in contrast to the American tradition, crime in recent Australian caper films pays very well. Things do not go precisely to plan, but the criminals in The Hard Word and Gettin’ Square get more than square.

While these 2 films draw on the American caper tradition, it could also be argued that their appeal, and the appeal of other films like Two Hands and Dirty Deeds, derives largely from their distinctively Australian rendering of the crime comedy genre. All 4 films are memorable for their idiosyncratic incarnations of laconic, casually dressed, foul-mouthed crims who are capable of juggling home duties with hard crime. In Two Hands, for example, Pando (Bryan Brown) patiently instructs his son in origami techniques while simultaneously organising a hit.

Group dynamics in these films are characterised by a wonderfully expressive local vernacular. Dialogue is liberally peppered with rhyming slang and good old-fashioned Australian colloquialisms. Given the aggressively masculine milieu of the genre, the scripts have a humorous, unequivocally blokey tenor. In Dirty Deeds and Gettin’ Square, the presence of American and British characters respectively also highlights the peculiarities of the local lingo by comically foregrounding cultural differences in language and behaviour.

The presence of outsiders also represents an explicit acknowledgement of the way Australian crime comedy has actively engaged with the generic traditions of both British and American cinemas. Rather than being immutable, the genre film is a dynamic form that can be endlessly modified and reinvented in different national and cultural contexts. Three decades ago, the Australian film industry deliberately defined itself in opposition to a Hollywood, genre-inspired model of filmmaking. In addition to other genre projects, the moderate to strong success of recent crime films suggests that Australian filmmakers and audiences are gettin’ square with the genre film.

Although the annual Mardi Gras Film Festival is the largest lesbian and gay film festival in Australia, like most community arts organisations, Queer Screen (which runs the festival) has gone through its share of crises and transformations over the last decade. Queer Screen’s landmark 10th anniversary celebration last year coincided with the birth of the ‘New’ Mardi Gras, which saw the event returning to its protest roots after massive financial problems. Spending cutbacks have meant that since last year Queer Screen has operated without the substantial financial support it once received from Mardi Gras. Enthusiasm for the festival was not dampened, however, with several sell-out sessions and ticket sales up from last year.

The theme of this year’s festival was ‘Fresh’, reflecting the wider changes in Mardi Gras and in community expectations regarding the organisation. Using the cross-section of a watermelon as its logo, festival publicity offered “12 Juicy Days of Sex, Seduction, Comedy, Thrills, Tears, Tantrums and Drama.” Despite commercial imperatives accounting for some fairly conservative (ie ‘crowd-pleasing’) films in the program, there were several welcome new initiatives rejuvenating the festival this year. For the first time, a series of youth sessions were programmed, which were a great success. The festival also displayed a greater commitment to Australian film than ever before, in an attempt to reach out to the local queer community. Another refreshing innovation was Queer_pixels, an initiative by board member Debs McCann, which showcased short works by digital media artists prior to the feature films. These ‘byte-sized’ offerings were funny, quirky and often politically engaged

A centerpiece of the festival was a 2-part retrospective from the ScreenSound archives, “Imagining Queer: Historical Views on Australian Film and Television”, curated by Barry McKay and Marilyn Dooley. The first part covered the period 1910-1950, prior to the arrival of television in Australia. Part 2 covered 1950 to 1980 and was dominated by clips from 1970s Australian television. It also included a specially-created selection of scenes from Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971), in which the protagonist’s decline into drinking, gambling and the culture of homoerotic mateship was edited into a remarkable sequence just a few minutes long. Dooley, in introducing both sessions, reminded audiences to watch the clips with a “camp sensibility” (as if this were necessary!). While this ‘sensibility’ was sometimes stretched to the limit (many of the clips were more about vague issues of gender than sexuality), the retrospectives were engaging and also held interest for those outside the queer community. Programmer David Pearce noted that the 4 bio-pics featured in the festival—The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti, Phooey Rosa (on Rosa Von Praunheim), A World of Love (on Pier Paolo Pasolini) and The Legend of Leigh Bowery—were also interesting to a wider audience.

In terms of Australian features, we were also treated to a screening of The Set (Frank Brittain, 1969), arguably the first gay movie made in Australia. The film was introduced by one of the film’s writers, Roger Ward, and 2 of the stars, Hazel Phillips and Ken “Kandy” Johnson. One of the pleasures of attending the screenings of Australian films was the Q & A’s with casts and crews. Also of note among the Australian features was Max: A Cautionary Tale (2003), an allegorical coming out tale by young director Nicholas Verso, who was also present at the festival. Described by Verso as “The Breakfast Club meets Carrie,” Max tells the story of teenager Damien Wilson. After moving house with his family, the boy comes to believe there is something lurking at the end of the corridor in their new home. Considering the film was shot in 12 days on a budget of $3000, it was quite an achievement.

Four sessions curated by programmer Megan Carrigy tackled issues aimed specifically at younger audiences, aged 15 and over. A youth program was certainly overdue (the Melbourne Queer Film Festival has had such a program for several years now), and this initiative in particular demonstrated that the festival is truly committed to meeting the diverse needs of the gay and lesbian community.

The stand-out film of the youth program and indeed the whole festival was Straight Out: Stories from Iceland, a documentary about queer youth that claims to be the first queer film to come out of Iceland. The films’ interviewees were honest and articulate in discussing issues such as first love, drugs, suicide attempts and coming out. The emotions expressed in the film were very direct and reduced some in the audience to tears.

Also well received was Pink Sheep, a collaboration between the youth at Twenty10 (a support organisation for young gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders) and Channel Free at MetroScreen. The youth sessions were well supported by audiences of diverse ages, but Carrigy stressed the importance of working to reach a youth audience from outside metropolitan Sydney and finding ways of making the festival more accessible to them. Carrigy put on an impressive program in her first year in this newly created position. It was wonderful to see queer youth having some control over the festival and enjoying a dedicated space where they were able to see themselves represented on screen.

Overall, the film festival had an optimistic vibe this year. Hearing queer youth cheer their own sessions, seeing lines of boys queue up outside the Academy Twin on Oxford Street and experiencing a truly collective viewing experience with a theatre full of vocal women at the sold-out session of the lesbian erotic film Madam and Eve, it was clear that the festival is doing its job of catering for the diverse queer audience. In ‘going local’, giving a voice to its youth and showing a commitment to embracing and promoting alternative screen cultures, Queer Screen proved that it is moving with the times. Hopefully this momentum will see the organisation sustain itself in coming years and retain the support of its growing audience.

11th Mardi Gras Film Festival, Academy Twin and Dendy Newtown, Sydney, February 11-22

Not since the halcyon days of the Weimar Republic has the German film industry been so active or enjoyed such popular success inside Germany. Goodbye Lenin, which opened last year’s Festival of German Cinema, was hugely popular. This year’s festival similarly opens with a box office hit that revisits Germany’s past.

The Miracle of Bern (director Sönke Wortmann) is a melodrama charting the restoration of the Germany’s self-respect through the story of a family reunited after the War. Their story coincides with Germany’s sporting triumph of winning the World Cup in 1954. Aptly described as the kind of film critics hate and audiences love, this vision of post-war Germany is at times bleak, but the overall tone is amiable and up-beat.

Like The Miracle of Bern, Swabian Children comes from a well established prize winning director, Jo Baier. His film deals with a little known chapter of German history as compelling as it is shocking: the child slave trade at the turn of the last century.

The Stratosphere Girl comes direct from the Berlin International Film Festival. The dark futuristic vision of this heavily stylised action mystery owes much to Japanese Anime and Blade Runner. Nightsongs also premiered at the Berlinale. A sinister and unnerving psychodrama, the film portrays the nuclear family as a repository of resentment and seething contempt.

One of the most curious features of the festival stars Franke Potente, the heroine of cult film Run Lola Run. In Blueprint Potente plays a double-role: a world famous concert pianist and composer and her clone daughter. Although the theme is topical and provocative, for historical-ideological reasons the cloning experiment takes place outside of Germany in Canada, where much of the movie was shot.

Two films screening at the festival deal with asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Germany. Gate to Heaven is an airport romance between an Indian woman and a Russian man that includes Bollywood-style musical interludes. A Little Bit of Freedom is much more sombre in tone and is among the most remarkably vibrant films in the festival. It revolves around 2 teenagers struggling to survive in Hamburg’s red light district, bound by their experiences as illegal immigrants. Their mutual loyalty is their only solace in a harsh underworld of betrayal and deceit.

Film buffs will be delighted to see the 60 minute documentary Fassbinder in Hollywood (director Robert Fischer), which includes rarely seen footage and valuable insights into the famous director’s career.

The New Directions program, a selection of extraordinarily accomplished German film school shorts, will also be screening again this year. A range of innovative animations will be featured, including the breathtakingly lyrical Medea and My Parents, an uproarious satire about sexuality in the suburbs.

The greatest treats of the festival are the smaller, distinctive comedies, like Play it Loud, Learning to Lie and Gun Shy. The director of Play it Loud, Benjamin Quabeck, will be a guest of the festival. His film takes a satirical but affectionate look at the explosion of New Wave music and fashion in the provincial backwater of Schwabing. Paul, the irrepressible protagonist, is a trainee bank clerk, obsessed with staging a huge concert featuring his friends. All of the ridiculous solemnity of New Wave music and fashion are impeccably captured in this film: the haircuts, flamboyant clothes, nihilistic lyrics, robotic dancing and clubs. Gun Shy is a quirky black comedy, focusing on the idiosyncrasies and eccentric events in the life of Lukas, a loner who delivers “meals on wheels” to old people. His is a world populated by misfits and the film is a beguiling and unruly flight of fantasy.

The Festival of German Cinema provides audiences in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne with a rare opportunity to see a cross-section of films from one of Europe’s most vibrant and active filmmaking cultures.

3rd Festival of German Cinema, Chauvel and Valhalla Cinemas, Sydney, April 15-25; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, April 16-25; Southbank Cinemas, Brisbane, April 21-24

The history of video art is closely allied to developments in performance and as an art form in itself video has made a strong investment in performativity. Visual artists turned away from canvas to their own bodies in the 60s through performance art, cross artform collaborations and other means to regain a sense of integrity outside the marketplace: video was to become one such tool observing everyday performance, performance artists and dancers, and video artists themselves in the frame.

John Gillies is a mainstay of and inspiration to the Sydney experimental arts scene as video-maker, sound artist, musician and teacher (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) with a long association with Performance Space where a retrospective of his video works is about to be held (April 16-May 13). His new work, the deeply engaging and politically suggestive Divide will premiere later this year.

Youth theatre in Queensland, says Gillies, kindled his interest in performance. At Darling Downs College of Advanced Education from 1978 to 1980 he studied film and video with David Perry of UBU fame. As well as creating sculptures and installations he also worked as a musician and sound designer, composing for theatre productions of plays by Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht. He also studied Balinese and experimental music.

Little projects, some of them performance-based videos which turned into the first works I showed in Sydney in the early 1980s. One involves me with a microphone feeding back, looking for resonant frequencies in a room. They’re formalist experiments in the style of 70s performance video.

I came to Sydney in 1980 because I had a show at Watters Gallery. It was quite an exciting time. There was a performance scene and artists like Mike Parr and a lot of music. I got involved with alternative spaces and people like [sound artist] Rik Rue and started doing tape cut-up works and live sound and releasing audio compilation cut ups—the whole cassette boom. By then I was also a student at Sydney College of the Arts making performances and some video work: still very much formalist performance art works, often looking at found gestures, and also making formalist, experimental sound works.

What about the synthesis of sound and video which is characteristic of your work?

In the early work the sound piece came first, then the video. In editing and constructing videos you’re actually playing with musical form. All that shaping and flow and repetition that I use a lot always echo musical structure.

Once you’d settled in Sydney, how long before you started sending videos out?

The Film-makers Co-op, the Super-8 Film Group and art-based video-makers like myself, Jill Scott, Peter Callas, Kathy Vogan (who’s just returned to Australia. She’s been living in France for the last 20 years). And Roslyn Oxley was showing art video in her gallery. Video seemed a thing you could possibly do.

Both. It’s allowed me to keep working. And remember technology was much more expensive then. The only way to access it was through institutions. It’s allowed me to really research and develop my ideas through the process of supervising and teaching. I get a lot from my students as well.

You’re still teaching though you’ve had 2 years out with a New Media Arts Fellowship.

I’ve had bits of time out all over the place but I’m still a full-time lecturer.

You’ve weathered the storms of change in the tertiary education system and to your 4D Studies Department.

In the early 90s it was particularly strong. There are still interesting people coming out of it all the time. It’s still potentially fantastic, the intersection between fine art practice and time-based forms that no one else is really doing on that scale. I think it was really important historically in terms of what happened with the creation of the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council. There was a bit of synchronicity there. A lot of the graduates got grants to create works right away. There’s a lot more university pressure now to produce more “packaged” work and to be more commercial…But I’m not pessimistic at all because I still see fantastic work from students.

That’s one of the reasons I live in Sydney. There continues to be a fantastically interesting performance scene here. People work and co-operate with each other, see and build on each other’s work. And I don’t know if this really happens in the music or in visual arts in the same way.

What is it about those performers? In your work they often appear to be in a state of being which is transcendent or trance-like. At other times they look like they might have been clipped from an Eisenstein film.

There are echoes of Eisenstein’s imagery. There’s lots of references. I see it all the time. I don’t even know that I’m necessarily doing it.

Your video works have a cinematic quality although they’re from a very different tradition.

I’m interested in cinema, in building a cinema. You can build it on texts and plays and books as in a narrative, naturalistic kind of cinema which seems problematic in Australia. But then there is another tradition here. My project is to build some kind of cinema based on that milieu. There’s a cinema language that can be explored a bit more. In the film Techno Dumb Show with the Sydney Front, there’s the idea of silent cinema—there are still possibilities within that form.

That comes from music. The editing there is mixing. It’s me physically switching between visual sources or, as in the last section with Nigel Kellaway of Techno Dumb Show, I’m literally playing the image of Kellaway on the keyboard of a tape-recorder. What you see is like take number 20.

That’s one of my favourite sequences, a gestural dance. Even though the sequencing of repeated and rewound gestures has since become a familiar device it’s still very powerful in your work. Initially it looks like Kellaway’s conducting, then like he’s gradually going off the air and, at the end, he’s thinking “where have I been?”

In that piece I tried to “flip-flop” all the way through. There’s pathos, there’s comedy. You’re watching the process of backwards-and-forwards. There’s no certainty. Nothing is pinned down.

Other bits look quite cinematic—the reverse field shots of Clare Grant at the phone—and others have a stranger sense of artifice: the performers running on the spot.

It’s actually a shot from a train, going in reverse. So it’s a contradiction again. They’re running in the opposite direction. It’s an impossibility. They’re trapped in this state. So yes, I use bits of cinematic shot construction. And that’s probably what makes my video art a bit different.

It’s video art with highly integrated cinematic referencing which is not there just for its own sake…

It’s another language.

From various Sydney Front shows. It was conceived as a catalogue, a couple of pages, a list of gestures. So it had no other structure. There were various takes so the performers could see themselves, look at the takes. It’s one of the great things about video. Or I’d suggest things, or heighten it a bit more so that they were performing for the camera rather than for a live audience…I’m really interested in the translation between mediums. I don’t want the work to be a representation of performance. I want it to be performative on the screen and some sort of essence of what the artists’ work is about.

In the enigmatic De Quincey Tapes there’s an opening rustling in bushes and in the next sequence some kind of tussle going on, until Tess De Quincey emerges in an intense whirling and eventually evaporates into the dark.

Yes, it’s Tess wrestling with herself. That’s a purely improvisatory work. We went to a studio for a number of nights over a month and I’d suggest things, she’d bring things along. It’s like a give and take, a kind of play between us. That’s something you learn from music, the ability to play with other people, listening and watching each other, picking up on each other.

A moving painting. That’s very much an installation. It’s not something you would sit in a cinema and watch. I tried to have no performers, but a sense of people absent, perhaps of ghosts. That was the starting point for the work that came after, of people not as complete, more as ciphers, holders of character but shifting and unstable. My new work explores that a lot.

Armada is full of iconic imagery and sounds. On the one hand, you have black and white footage of Armada ships vis a vis the intended Spanish invasion of England in the late 16th century. But on the other hand you have overlaid rotating and counter-rotating images of a Union Jack and of a 19th century train wheel alternating with pages from the Old Testament flicking backwards with a terrible tearing sound. How does that tally with this notion of absence you’re talking about?

I’m throwing all those images up as a painter might, even though I’m working with time. The images are pregnant with possibility rather than having any literal meaning. I’m trying to touch on something about Australian history and British colonialism.

With the Old Testament text is there a sense of prophecy and predestination?

When I showed it in Brazil it evoked connections with British colonialism which was very strong there in the 19th century. The imagery in my work is like ink-blot tests, sometimes indistinct and may be degraded in some of the really early work. That allows a space for a kind of reading from the audience which is more open. I hope the work is evocative.

No. It’s all done in video post-production. Everything in that video is appropriated imagery, even the boats. They’re models. Miniatures. It’s compositing. And all that work starts off in drawing. The work comes out of that. That’s quite important.

Speaking of place, I’ve been watching The Mary Stuart Tapes with Clare Grant as Mary Stuart wandering the city streets at night, a 16th century figure in a post-colonial site.

You can’t look at the history of Australia in isolation. The history of contemporary Australia goes back 60,000 years here. But it also goes back to other places.

(Laughs) Which is part of the body of Australia in a way. I was interested in the idea that she’s a possibility that could be buried inside the state of Australia. What if Australia was a Catholic state rather than the pseudo-Anglican state which it’s attempting to be at the moment?

Divide

Divide, your new 30 minute video work, is the most cinematic of your output in terms of the framing, shooting and narrative construction, even though it remains quite unpredictable. Did you storyboard it?

Sections are storyboarded. It started off as a list. Then cards and then juggling them around. Then I wrote a treatment, like a film scenario. That’s like a work in itself. Then I set about trying to realise it. Then shooting it was a matter of trying to reproduce that treatment which, of course, had to be different. Even though I say I storyboarded parts of it—and I’ve storyboarded stuff before—I wanted to shoot in an open kind of way, open to chance, to accident, to improvisation, to being in a location and having that seep in to the performers and the action. It would be crazy to go to a location, to have it all planned out and then actually miss the best things that were possibly there.

In a way, video is a process, a way of doing. If I had to shoot with film it would have been a very different thing and not as good. That goes for all the video work. That’s one reason I’m using video.

Just DV (digital video), but I did a lot of post-production all the way through. All the imagery in my work going back 20 years is highly processed. I was originally interested in painting but by using analogue and digital techniques I can explore ideas of surface and image and I can manipulate the image. Cinematographers talk about painting with light. It’s the same kind of thing.

As in the traditions of filmmakers like Kurosawa or others shooting in nature you give us time—

To see nature, to be part of the density of the trees, to see the light coming down. And some of the darkest shots are the most beautiful.

A lot of it was shot after the sun had gone down which is usually a real no-no with video.

The strangest thing about it—and this comes back to the idea of pulse—people don’t seem to be quite moving in real time. There’s that slightly pixilated feel.

You’re already dealing with performers Ari Ehrlich, Denis Beaubois, Lee Wilson, Shu Fengshan who are very good conveying that sense of otherness.

The central problem with making any kind of work is actually finding a sense of movement in the centre of the work. That goes for any kind of time-based work. It could be a piece of animation or even a straight drama. How do the people move? How does the movement work throughout the piece, not just the people but how the sense of movement flows through the whole work. When you’ve got that, you’ve kind of got the work…

Although we hear the sounds of movement of horses and people and water running and stones chipping beneath hooves, this is essentially a silent film, I mean it’s without dialogue, as if witnessed by a silent observer.

Every sound is post-produced. So with each piece I do there’s a technical as well as a conceptual experiment. It makes the process very slow but then I see the whole work, even though it appears to be naturalistic, as being like a concrete sound piece.

There’s a prevalent third person point of view but there are also quite a few subjective moments like the surprise encounter in the bush with a Peking Opera artist, where you feel you’re either with these men or looking over their shoulders. There’s a kind of in and out in the visual pulse.

I didn’t want the audience to be too close to these characters. And I didn’t want to use the classic techniques for suturing the viewer into the narrative. I still wanted them to be distanced from it, which could be alienating. Who are these men they are watching, what are they?

Most of the incidents in the work are in a sense historically accurate. These are 1840s sheep in an Australian forest—the first European animals here. And the forest’s not the right place for them. So it’s a different image from the one we have of sheep and their landscape now.

It’s ambiguous. I want it to be open to some kind of reading about the present as well.

You have a young voice narrating the story of Abraham. Are you drawing an analogy between the Israelites’ destruction of the Canaanites…

That’s very literal…

…vis a vis the current plight of the Palestinians, vis a vis European arrival in this landscape and the destruction of Aboriginal culture, even though the Aboriginal presence is not visible in the video? Is the child reader Indigenous?

But because of the way you begin with the Abraham story, repeat it and enlarge it, it must play a potent symbolic role. Then there’s the parallel image of the pages from the Bible being torn out and thrown away, beautifully shot and wafting through the air and in water. Is that manipulated post-production?

Nothing is slowed down in the whole thing. We spent a day throwing bits of paper around.

I think back to Armada and the sense of the colonialist belief in predestination which we so totally doubt now.

It’s there. It’s buried and it keeps coming back. And we’ve seen that so strongly in the last 5 years here. I tear my hair out. And it’s particularly the Bible, especially the Old Testament, which is obsessed with who’s worthy, who’s unworthy, who’s saved and who’s not, who belongs to the land and who doesn’t. All these dualities are set out in that text and it’s obviously the basis for Islam and Judaism—who God will bless and not bless. So it’s not like he’ll bless everyone. It’s the chosen. And it’s interesting to think about Australia in that paradigm and the forming of nations and the idea of the chosen nation.

By the end the imagery becomes stranger and richer, there’s a lamb and a burning tree—even more suggestive and more complex.

It can be anything. By the end of the piece the men are in cleared land. They’ve passed a threshold. After the credits it’s land which has no vegetation at all. And after the closing shot of the sheep, it’s just cracked ground. It’s the most literal thing I’ve done.

There’s a density of iconic imagery but it doesn’t feel forced because the rhythms are so easy.

It should feel natural. It belongs, it is of the place and it’s not a representation. I’m trying to tap threads or undercurrents.

Partly by putting the performers in that space, living in it and chasing after sheep up and down hillsides and rebuilding fences, and blocking off the rest of the world totally.

When we see the encounter with the Peking Opera performer it’s as if these European herdsmen arrive and find that Australia’s part of Asia.

People tell me stories about how something like that could have happened, or did. Someone told me about a burning tree. I’m trying to dredge up things that people will be able to add their stories to. It’s like a sub-current.

Symbolism can be heavy-handed and some of these images are very literal but others are ambiguous, like tearing up the Bible. Are the men tearing it up to plant it like seeds all the way through the landscape?

The work is inspired by the performers. This is an important point. I see them doing things and that sparks an idea. The Mary Stuart Tapes, it’s Clare Grant that sparked that idea. And Divide was sparked very much from Denis Beaubois and Ari Ehrlich.

But they didn’t have any conceptual input initially. It’s your response to who you could work with.

The images float around in my head and because their performance is open and the images they create are open, you can see them in all kinds of contexts or tailored in a particular way. I find that really interesting.

I’ll be submitting it to video and film festivals. There’s an installation version as well which has 2 screens. On one screen is the video as you’ve seen it. On the other are sheep watching it. And the audience is in the middle.

John Gillies is one of the facilitators for the hybrid arts laboratory Time_Place_Space 3 in Adelaide, July.

There is hope. There is no hope. Transmediale 04 ‘s theme “Fly Utopia” reverberates with the tug-o-war between idealism and cynicism. With the whole 21st century before us and the shattered illusions of the last in a pile at our feet, how do we actively construct our future realities? And what roles do art and technology play within those futures? Do we still believe that art can be wielded as a weapon, or is its role merely as an escape plan for collective imaginings?

Transmediale is an annual 5-day media art festival based at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It consists of a conference, a lecture series, exhibition, workspace and screening program. The majority of the content is selected via an international competition which divides work into the categories of Software, Interaction and Image. In 2003, over 1000 entries were submitted.

The festival started out 17 years ago under the name Videofest, so it’s not surprising that the Screening section makes up a large proportion of the event with 8 curated programs drawn from the Image entries. These are screened at specific times but also run as video-on-demand in a dedicated lounge area. Of particular interest is the re-emergence of narrative within the experimental video genre. The Tropfest-style short has made narrative a dirty word in the Australian digital art scene, but something different is happening here. The program Subtext Slides revelled in the trend, offering some fine examples such as Chubby Buddy by Erika Yeomans (US) in which a New York publisher in the midst of a mid-life crisis catches trains to the suburbs to steal stuffed toys (chubby buddies) from family houses; or 1.1 Acre Flat Screen in which a European family buys an acre of land in New Mexico on eBay and then attempts to recreate the cowboy existence. These narratives sound simple enough, however their gradual exposition and excessive attention to detail—a fetishisation of the mundane—shifts them into the surreal. Fashion Town 2: Race for Oblivion by Ivan Hürzler (US) is a 2-channel work shown as split-screen. One screen shows a progression of stills, the other short video segments set on the fictional Planet Los Angeles which is at war with the utopian state of Fashion Town. The literal ‘hit’ of the festival was a piece by Canadian Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay called I am a Boyband in which the artist plays all the members of a generic pop group singing a souped-up version of the Elizabethan song “Come Again, Sweet Love”, with joyous choreography. This work would sit perfectly alongside the pop culture parodies of our own Kingpins and Kate Murphy’s Britney Love.

As well as the competition programs there were also a number of invited features. Mark Boswell’s (US) The Subversion Agency questions ideas of control and the invisible powers that wield it through a stunning “Situationist satire.” Nine years in the making, the fictional footage actually makes up only 30 minutes of the 72 minute film which is sliced and mashed between propaganda and archival footage, creating a visually enthralling piece of parody and paranoia that would make William Burroughs proud. Other invited compilations included an Electrofringe program Alterna Terra Zones of work by emerging Australian video artists (including Anto Skene, Tania Doropoulos, Sumugan Sivansen, Tim Parish and Scott Morrison). An inspiring inclusion was Utopia Travel in which David Rych and Emmanuel Danesch (Austria) travelled from Cairo to Vienna in an old taxi, collecting video works which were screened along the way, creating a very immediate cultural exchange. The selected videos document a disturbing propensity for war and violence.

One of the more accessible pieces at the festival was Bioland—a virtual department store of the future catering for all human needs. Under the guidance of Fiona Raby and Gerald O’Carroll, students from the Architecture Department of the Royal College of Art in London developed design concepts for bio-products of the future such as Bio Trace which allows you to inject your DNA into a tree that will live on after you; or Utility Pets, your own pet pig infused with your DNA to make the bond more meaningful and subvert the desire to eat it; and engagement rings grown and spliced from the lovers’ own bone (now that’s what I call commitment). Beyond the heavy irony, these exercises in imagining, represented in the exhibition by a bricolage of items in Bioland shopping bags, were disturbingly insightful, raising many questions about collusions between science, technology and perhaps society’s greatest weakness—consumerism.

The exhibition comprised mostly competition entries along with curated video works. Of particular interest was Daniel Alina Plewe’s General News (www.generalnews.de), a meta-browser that rewrites any html website, substituting words drawn from a university database. The visitor can choose the levels of substitution from directly synonymous through to abstract. Plewe is interested in the challenges for meaning and language that such a tool opens up.

In the plethora of works hidden in computers and viewed on screens, Shilpa Gupta’s installation Your Kidney Supermarket offered a welcome engagement with the physical environment. Bags of brightly coloured kidneys decorated the walls around the appropriately kidney-shaped lounge where you could watch a sales video featuring William Shatner. A computer at the ready provided an online shopping experience—choose your own replacement organ. Gupta’s work won the Interaction award with the disclaimer that even though the work could exist free from the digital domain, “its meaning relies heavily on the social and economic culture of digital systems.” In 2003 no Interaction award was given and in 2004, although receiving 200 works, the jury was disappointed in the level of work. This perhaps has resulted from a narrowness in the definition of interactivity. Until now, the Interaction category has not considered the development of expert user interfaces, ie performer to technology inter-relations, as viable entries. The jury also complained that it had received a lot of non-interactive sound and installation works. As acknowledged by the jury, this would suggest aspects of practice are not being addressed by the present categorisations in Transmediale.

Sound, electronic music and audiovisual performance are the territory of Club Transmediale. Mostly this work is presented within the club environment (unfortunately meaning that the level of discussion is not as rigorous), however 2 events involved roving the streets of Berlin by bus. Unfortunately, I missed the Xplo bus, a journey driven by GPS audio programming, however the De-Place/Re-Place bus tour with sound performances was more than satisfying. The audience was taken to 4 different locations and treated to site-based works. Kaffe Matthews’ piece in the cellar of an old brewery was truly sublime. The escalating carnivorous nature of her sampling and resampling process caused every particle within the cavernous space to vibrate. The highlight of the night (and the festival for me) was the installation by Christina Kubisch which took place in the Research Institute for Water and Naval Engineering. The audience was invited to don gumboots and electromagnetic headphones and wade into an indoor channel of ankle deep water. At the other end was a beautiful loom of red wires that fanned out and into the water. As you walked along you began to pick up various hums and distant voices: each wire was transmitting a text around shipping and navigation. You could mix your own sonic experience by zigzagging across the wires, changing proximity to the loom for intensity. It was a stunning work in its sonic, visual, and physical elements.

Transmediale 04 in some ways was a perplexing event, not just in the thematic ground it was exploring but in its shaping of events. The conference provided some interesting discussion, however in the sessions I attended, the talk was often disconnected from the practice of art-making. Coupled with the limited space given to installation and performance work, it often felt like a head that had forgotten it had (or could not locate) a body. For instance, in one of the most interesting discussions, Andreas Broegger presented a paper on the Software exhibition in New York in 1970, equating the written instructions of the performance art works of Vito Acconci and associates with software. What never seemed to come up in the ensuing discussion was the agency and very real presence of the body within these works. At the same time the festival was challenging and enlightening as many of the works presented actively pushed, pulled and expanded form and technologies, illustrating that there are still subversive uses to be discovered, while also offering alternative visions and ideals.

Transmediale has secured funding from the Federal Culture Foundation, ensuring its continued existence 2005-2009. Perhaps this will allow an expansion and reintegration of some of the more physical aspects of media art. I live in hope.

Transmediale 04: Fly Utopia, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Jan 31 – Feb 4, www.transmediale.de

The music video is a sorely undervalued form that is finally gaining broader recognition through dedicated festivals, DVDs and the rising profile of many music video directors. With its potential for wide exhibition and emphasis on innovative style, the video clip poses an exciting challenge for short filmmakers and is increasingly an area in which digital filmmakers cut their teeth. Twelve clips were produced in South Australia last year under the 4 Minute Wonders initiative, to accompany tracks selected in Triple J’s Unearthed competition. These works screened alongside international clips produced under similar schemes at this year’s Adelaide Fringe.

The 4 Minute Wonders were funded by the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) and the ABC, largely thanks to the efforts of SAFC Project Officer Heather Croall. Observing the success of the original scheme in Scotland, Croall created 4 Minute Wonders in Australia to encourage digital filmmaking in the music video format.

The project criteria were a strong narrative, the use of digital media and collaboration between professional and emerging animators and filmmakers. The emphasis on digital and new media extended throughout the process, from development (the music tracks were downloaded and treatments submitted online) through production (digital production techniques were requisite) to multi-platform exhibition. The clips were released on DVD, screened on ABC TV and at festivals such as the Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Film Festival, but were primarily intended for showcasing online at www.abc.net.au/4minutewonders.

Daryl Watson and I applied successfully to make a video for the hip hop track Beats is a Drug by Adelaide Unearthed winners Snap 2 Zero. This song is a dark, choppy and evocative piece. We pitched a noir/horror/sci-fi/romance story in which ‘the beats’ are literally a drug, in the form of a glowing red mini-disc designed by a beautiful woman for her cyber-junkie lover. In order to ingest this drug, her lover undertakes extensive surgery to transform his tongue and jaw into a monstrous manga-inspired arachnid mini-disc player.

The mutating jaw was the major digital component of our video. Given the budget and time constraints, our approach was to concentrate the majority of our resources on this effect, with most of the remaining clip directed as live action. Thanks largely to the combined talents of seasoned cinematographer Ian Jones A.C.S. (The Tracker) and emerging local animation house PRA (People’s Republic of Animation), this 3D jaw effect is near seamless. As a director of drama my primary concern is telling stories entertainingly, without succumbing to the siren call of spectacle. It is gratifying, however, to hear a whole cinema gasp in unison at the sight of a man’s mouth doing what it shouldn’t do!

As a ‘traditional’ filmmaker with little experience in the fashionable but ill-defined world of ‘new media’, I was drawn to the 4 Minute Wonders initiative by a desire to expand my digital horizons. My problems with the specious categorisation of media aside, I am always keen to equip myself with new knowledge and tools that will help me tell screen stories to greater effect.

4 Minute Wonders provided many other emerging creative teams with the opportunity to express themselves digitally. The Bumblebeez’ Step Back was transformed into a Spike Jonze-style video in which a tacky cult leader and his 1980s-style brethren hole up in a Waco-esque retreat to await the coming of a UFO. Matt Bate and Martin Potter’s use of grainy verite-style footage shot on a single chip mini-DV camera works well with the lo-fi production of the Bumblebeez’ song.

Another clip which takes its cue from the 80s is Red Rocket, Amy Gebhardt and Jain Moralee’s clip for the group Fast Trains. Here, teenage fad culture is epitomised in the attire of a gang of kids wearing 80s costumes. In this clip and Liz and Kath Dooley’s Sunshine for Amber Suite, an outsider liberates himself from conformity through his colourful imaginings. Gebhardt’s protagonist brightens his world with Flash-animated animals, whereas the Dooleys’ drag-queen office worker transforms his parents’ house into a 2D aeroplane that flies through Dali and Magritte-inspired clouds.

Other clips of note include PRA’s The Bomb for The Fuzz, which cleverly uses ‘2 and-a-half-D’ animation to render Betty Boop-style strippers bursting open to reveal giant killer bugs that eat male patrons. Luke Gibbs’ You Are Expendable for Yunyu features a teddy bear violently destroyed by his fickle mistress, rendered in Waking Life-style sketchy animation. Both clips play upon male fear of the Other.

Credit must go to the SAFC and the ABC for investing in digital music video production. A liberated former film snob, I’m now itching for the chance to utilise my knowledge of digital techniques on my next production.

4 Minute Wonders, various filmmakers, FringeHUB, Adelaide Fringe 2004, March 1-3

Trying to analyse Matthew Barney’s 5 film, 7 hour Cremaster Cycle is a messy, thankless task not unlike the solipsistic rituals regularly carried out by Barney’s characters: scaling the lift-shaft of a skyscraper, smearing fuel-caps with cement and throwing Vaseline against a wall. As a mediocre artist but an undeniably gifted hustler, Barney’s basic strategy is to assemble freakishly elaborate objects which announce themselves as sui generis, leaving baffled critics to cast around for relevant terms of evaluation. By design, there’s no way to label the Cycle as cinema or sculpture, narrative or non-narrative. Still less are viewers seriously expected to decode the nebulous allegory that binds the whole saga together, which according to the website is something to do with “the process of sexual differentiation.”

Trained as a sculptor, Barney approaches cinema from the perspective of a galaxy far, far away. He isn’t really interested in storytelling, but he’s equally distant from the traditions of the medium’s avant-garde. Outside the gallery, his nearest relatives are purveyors of arthouse weirdness like Peter Greenaway and David Lynch (at his worst), fellow specialists in overripe calendar imagery punctuated by gross-out effects. Some typical scenes here involve celebrity model Aimee Mullins lounging next to a huge mound of grubby potatoes, gelatinous slugs oozing from the shiny uniforms of racing car drivers and Barney himself, as a character called the Entered Apprentice, being kidnapped, stripped and sexually assaulted by a group of gangsters. Though Jonathan Bepler’s modernist music supplies an atmosphere of sorts, Barney carefully avoids realising the comic or dramatic potential of these lurid scenarios. Like a fashion photographer, he fixes his mute performers in static poses which the camera circles or, more typically, zooms away from: a conjuror’s flourish cueing the audience to gape at each newly revealed ‘jaw-dropping’ image.

Beyond a desire to dazzle and baffle the viewer, what is the Cremaster Cycle really about? My short answer would be not much, but if the allegorical machinery underlying the films is too blatantly piecemeal to function as a resonant personal myth, nor is it simply an arbitrary system of aesthetic constraints. No doubt specific esoteric principles have been used to determine the disparate elements brought together in each installment: Masonic rituals, the life stories of Gary Gilmore and Harry Houdini, red-haired giants stomping around the Isle of Man. But in practice the forced connections between these elements serve less to generate unexpected meanings than to sharpen the impression of incongruity. The central tableau of Cremaster 1 supplies a paradigmatic example: crouched under a white tablecloth, a creature identified in the credits as Goodyear (Marti Domination) arranges grapes in patterns that diagram the choreography of a Busby Berkeley dance sequence, which in turn “delineates the contours of a still androgynous gonadal structure” (to quote the website again).

Without underestimating Barney’s capacity for humorless pretension, it seems likely that up to a point these proliferating, arbitrary correspondences are meant to be parodies of significance. Similarly, it’s likely that the grandiose scale of the Cycle parodies claims of monumentality in general, placing the notion of ‘masterpiece’ in ironic quotes. Appearing in various guises in 4 of the 5 films, Barney himself seems to be enacting a mocking, reductive version of the myth of the heroic artist. Like a postmodern Buster Keaton, he’s obliged to perform a series of impossible tasks that develop into ostentatious Freudian fantasy scenarios, such as plunging into water and crawling though cramped uterine tunnels in part 4, or slaying his artistic ‘father’ (sculptor Richard Serra) in combat near the end of part 3. Yet far from having been retrieved from the depths of the unconscious, Barney’s images and ideas are self-conscious to the point of suffocation. They are rarely seriously disturbing or erotic. In this regard, he’s very different from David Lynch, who despite some accidentally fashionable traits is ultimately a ‘naïve’ artist in the noblest sense.

Still, for all its archness, the Cycle can’t be called a spoof or a hoax: again, there’s a strategic indeterminacy in play. Barney’s exaggerated concern with literal masculinity is presumably satiric on some level, and his predictable obsessions with androgyny and prosthetic devices paraphrase a standard post-feminist view of gender and sexuality as constructed rather than natural. However, our understanding of all this has to change slightly once it’s recognised that the Cycle is above all a self-reflexive work, concerned with dramatising its own processes of articulation and gradual evolution towards the possibility of ‘significance’. In other words, Barney presents himself, through his onscreen avatars, as engaged in a quest for a hegemonic masculinity that’s also a quest for aesthetic success. This equation is not ironic at all, or at least is no obstacle to the kind of epic self-aggrandisement required to consolidate a reputation as a Major Artist Of Our Time. Then again, given the futility of Barney’s fictional labours, maybe the real point is art’s impossibility except as a cynical shell game, where the counters are fictitious but the prizes of wealth, fame and kudos are very real.

Or maybe the paradox is illusory. Just as beauty and ugliness co-exist and change places in Barney’s universe, he’s well aware that art is not just a matter of disciplined erections, so to speak, but also of decadence and waste. I suspect the real secret of the Cremaster Cycle’s relative popular success is simply the thrill of irresponsibility; the chance to marvel at the time, effort and resources squandered on this vaguely kinky nonsense. Admittedly, the budget for the whole seven hours probably wouldn’t cover catering on one of the Matrix sequels, but then the Wachowski Brothers are also obliged to entertain (whether they succeed is another question). Barney, on the other hand, has the advantage of an audience who are quite willing to be bored out of their skulls, provided he manages to flatter both their feelings of superiority and impotence. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

The Cremaster Cycle, director Matthew Barney, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, February 8-22, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, March 6-20

It’s 2pm. I’m late. The summer sun is burning my skin and millions of little clocks around the city are eating up the few minutes I have to locate the rendezvous point for uninitiated players in the WP Workroom. I’m having strange feelings of paranoia and self doubt. Who’s in on this game? Have the vendors at the FringeTix office already notified my game-hosts that I’ve arrived? Will it matter that I’m somewhat challenged in the spatial skills department? That I’m not a hard-core gamer? If only I’d played more SimCity, taken up orienteering, or knew how to use a Palm Pilot.

Several minutes and a few micro pep-talks later, I stumble into the waiting room for I Like Frank in Adelaide, a game connecting online participants and players on the street. This remarkable interactive performance event has been developed in the lead up to Adelaide Fringe 2004 by visiting UK artists’ collective Blast Theory, in collaboration with Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Lab (MRL). Matt Adams, Ju Farr and Nick Tandavanitj are Blast Theory’s core members. They’re in Adelaide as part of the “Adelaide Thinkers in Residence” program, along with Professor Steve Benford, Martin Flintham, Jan Humble and Ian Taylor from the MRL.

Sitting in the waiting room is like sitting in a reality airlock that quarantines uninitiated gamers from the trappings and distractions of the outside world. The familiar face of a woman dressed in prison-warden-cum- street-ware garb emerges from the game’s ‘briefing room’ with a clip-board: “Please place your name here.” Smiling enigmatically, she takes our signatures and returns to the darkened room. Living in Adelaide, you tend to know just about everybody, so of course I know this woman. I decide to remain silent, lest I shatter the fragile beginnings of an altered experience.

Chatting pleasantly with a curator from Yogjakarta, Indonesia and an arts-worker visiting from Darwin, I became curious about what micro-mythologies may have been established about the game. There’s lots of talk about experimental mobile networks and references to Mission: Impossible but no dirt on our target, Frank.

I notice a single hydrangea has been plucked and left on a small corner table. A clue? I know where they grow around the University and the Botanic Gardens and make a mental file of this visual cryptogram for future reference.

“Follow me please.” Following my guide into the small dark room, I was given game instructions in a friendly yet officious manner and asked to hand over all my belongings except water, sunscreen and medication. In return I was handed a 3G mobile phone. By ritualistically handing over personal belongings that define us as material entities, players are given the opportunity to connect within a much broader network of identities.

Heading down to the SA Museum on North Terrace, I receive a poetic text message, presumably from Frank. I’m not sure whether we are supposed to be old friends or lovers. Perhaps Frank is a ghost who needs me to remember him in order to be released from haunting the coded labyrinths of these city streets.: “…Remember when I pushed you into the fountain and you gave chase…”

No, I don’t remember that Frank, but I can imagine it. Having an idea of the fountain Frank might be reminiscing about, I go there and punch in my coordinates. Upon doing so I receive instructions to walk south into the city.

I became confused at times, trying to decide whether the messages I was receiving were coming from Frank, online players, or the game’s hosts, whom I imagined must be exasperated with my cloddishness.

Okay. I’m going to pick one of those options. I see a familiar sticker on the bicycle seat and retrieve a postcard from a small bag beneath it. On it is a man walking towards his friend or lover on a snow-cleared path in a park full of conifers, behind a block of apartments. Printed on the back are the words: “Who are you responsible for?”

The interface on my phone rattles with a hubbub of text: “No! Over here, over here!”

Arrrggghh!!! Yes I’ve got the postcard! What do I do with it?! I’m a bit exasperated, but I am having fun.

Having participated as an online player, I now realise that it’s a good idea to develop a rapport with your street-player early in the piece. Each online player is assigned a task or series of tasks that will bring that player closer to Frank. To do this an online player needs to team up with someone on the street, a mutually beneficial relationship for both parties. Some street-players may need to pick up a postcard for their online companions, or walk into a pool hall on Rundle Street with a handwritten message, or perhaps stride into a pub and yell out “I Like Frank” to the bar staff. As an online player, I tried to guide a street-player into a bar on Rundle Street, realising as I did so that more than one of my online companions was giving this poor street-runner different instructions.

Over the course of an hour I chased the elusive Frank down backstreets sprayed with stencil art. I pretended not to notice the shoes stepping behind a phone-box and out of my line of sight when I phoned in for technical assistance. I waited for Frank in a cinema foyer and was stood up by him at our favourite bar.

Finally the phone rang. It was nice to hear a voice again. My telephonic siren safely navigated me across a busy road and through a subterranean car park, from which I emerged into an intimate sunlit courtyard. I sat on a bench, listening to the measured and friendly human on the other end of the line.

“Congratulations, you’ve finished the game. Do you feel any closer to the people on the street around you?”

Truthfully, I had felt frantic and somewhat disconnected until the moment he asked the question. It was then that a transcendent affection for the people in this city gently drifted back into view. I quickly penned an answer on the back of the postcard I had collected and moved to return the handset to base.

My short walk back to the university grounds was unhurried and contemplative. I didn’t find Frank in any kind of embodied sense, but his trace encouraged me to be a tourist in my own city and to keep seeking out those individual and uncommon details that struggle for recognition within the everyday experience of public life.