Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 2004

MAAP04 was an engrossing event, informative, rich in networking and, in its choice of works for exhibition, revealing about the state of new media arts in the region and the curatorial impulse for the event. The exhibitions were spread around the island state of Singapore, making for a sense of inclusion and integrating educational institutions and their galleries into the new media arts picture. Many Singaporeans told me that MAAP's main exhibition, GRAVITY, had played an important role in introducing the Singapore Art Museum to the installation of new media work and achieving it at a high standard. The regional reach of MAAP04 included China, Thailand, Myanmar, Philippines, Korea, Japan and Australia. The presence of Hong Kong's impressive Asia Art Archive with librarian Angela Seng in-residence at Singapore's contemporary artspace, The Substation (see “Archiving history face to face”), indicated a commitment to documenting contemporary art as it happens right across Asia, and including Australian engagements with Asian culture. The new media art in MAAP comprised video, installation, CD-ROM, sound art and a small number of interactive works, accompanied by a conference, a symposium, a party (with video creations by local artists and a live link to QUT) and a end-of-event twilight cruise on a junk on Singapore harbour, lo-tech but high bonding. What became clear across the week were the many different meanings that new media has for artists, curators, educators and activists. For some it is a socio-political tool for change, if a problematic one because it is relatively expensive and inaccessible in parts of Asia. For these people it is just one tool among others. As Fatima Lasay from Manila, who has been teaching CD-ROM and web design in Myanmar, argues, you make art from the technology that is available (see” The body between: an interview/review”). Some artists see themselves as conduits: using new media to allow the public to express themselves (see “Every available space”). Yukiko Shikata's inspiring account of works shown in Japan suggested the possibility of co-developing personal artistic endeavour and sizeable public works. A problematic issue, as Gail Priest argues in “Conceptual leaps”, is the way in which new media art can sometimes be reduced to a category of the visual arts. In a discussion with the RealTime editors, MAAP director Kim Machan eloquently declared that the art-science field, bio-art and other wings of new media had staked their claims and secured their niches but that new media art needed to claim its rightful position in the history of art and in the gallery. It's not surprising then that Yves Klein is the spiritual mentor of MAAP 2004. The desire to anchor new media art to an artist, a movement, a tradition (whether in the histories of technology, art, film, literature, media) escalates by the year with multitudinous prefigurings. These serve the academy well and make investment in new media art more institutionally justifiable. What they have to say about the art is another matter. Given the uneven and early stages of development of new media arts across much of the region, it is not surprising that there are few people writing about it, and those who do tend to come from a visual arts background. These include Ho Tzu Nyen and Michael Lee Hong Hwee (“The Inevitable Body”) whom we welcome to our pages for our MAAP coverage, while writers from Manila and Bangkok will be found in future editions. There's a willingness to write about video, but not new media art. Beyond a small group of committed writers the situation is not that much better in Australia, hence the RealTime-BEAP New Media Arts Writing Workshop last September. A comparison of MAAP with BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth) is inevitable, especially given these are the 2 key Australian new media arts event alongside ACMI's ongoing program, Electrofringe, SOOB (Straight Out of Brisbane) and events presented by dLux media arts and ANAT. BEAP, with its UK and American connections, its core support from the university sector and its explorations in 2004 of the frontiers of bio-art, distribution, perception and interactivity make it substantially different from MAAP with its expanding Asia Pacific network, its promotion of work by Asian and Australia artists and its visual arts rationale. There is of course an overlap of interests (including the socio-political), of artists and exhibiting issues (BEAP04 involved some 7 gallery spaces), not to mention a shared sense of experiment and exploration. Both festivals excel at the collaborative and incorporative model, drawing in participation and support from diverse sources. Both are international in scope and offer Australian artists (though few figured in either event in 2004) opportunities to link to networks and to promote their works in new markets. Congratulations to the mercurial and indefatigable MAAP director Kim Machan, her tiny team and her generous and very able young Singaporean volunteers for a memorable event. Thanks too to the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council for making possible our trip to Singapore, it certainly has expanded RealTime's horizons enabling us to reach a wider audience and initiate what we hope will be a long-term exchange of writing and ideas. KG

RealTime issue #64 Dec-Jan 2004 pg.

RealTime 10th Birthday Party,
Keith, Virginia, Gail and Martin del Amo

photo Heidrun Löhr

RealTime 10th Birthday Party,
Keith, Virginia, Gail and Martin del Amo

RealTime 10th Birthday Party, Morganics

photo Heidrun Löhr

RealTime 10th Birthday Party, Morganics

Gifts came in the form of well-wishes from around the country and, at the packed party at Performance Space on June 12, in 3 minutes each of real-time performance from Martin del Amo, Nalina Wait, Emma Saunders and Lizzie Thomson, Julie-Anne Long, Chris Abrahams, Michael Hooper, Frumpus, Morganics, Version 1.0, Louise Curham and Stasis Duo. Nigel Kellaway favoured us with 30 seconds from each of his oPera Project works (in full costume) to be set upon in the 31st second by an audience wielding plastic baseball bats. The editors (Keith, Virginia and Gail) hosted the event from Pierre Thibaudeau’s boomerang table, their vocal/sound score backed by Sam James’ verité video capturing an uneventful hour (if you don’t count violent disagreements over punctuation) in the life of the RealTime office featuring OnScreen editor Dan Edwards and our proofreading team. There were wise and witty words from Open City Chair, Tony MacGregor, Performance Space’s Fiona Winning, Karilyn Brown and Andrew Donovan from the Australia Council, AFC’s Sabina Wynn and NSW Government’s Deputy Director-General of Arts, Jennifer Lindsay. Heidrun Löhr constructed a wild video poem to the magazine as well as shooting the images on this page from the front row. Adrian Ward and the team from Pulse fed the multitudes with sublime Persian & Ayurvedic-inspired dishes and Nikki Heywood rounded off the evening spelling out in 10 letters made from rolled-up copies of RealTime the words:

T H E S E B O N E S.

RealTime 10th Birthday Party, Nigel Kellaway

photo Heidrun Löhr

RealTime 10th Birthday Party, Nigel Kellaway

RealTime 10th Birthday Party, Michael Hooper

photo Heidrun Löhr

RealTime 10th Birthday Party, Michael Hooper

RealTime thanks everyone who has contributed to the life of the magazine and to Australia’s innovative arts over this past decade.
<img src="http://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/art/8/880_party4.jpg" alt="RealTime 10th Birthday Party,
Keith, Virginia, Gail “>

RealTime 10th Birthday Party,
Keith, Virginia, Gail

photo Heidrun Löhr

RealTime 10th Birthday Party,
Keith, Virginia, Gail

RealTime issue #63 Oct-Nov 2004 pg. 37

MAAP not only locates Australia’s new media art firmly in the Asia-Pacific, as it first did from its Brisbane base, but now as a unique off-shore event (Beijing 2003, Singapore 2004 and Seoul next) it makes its meetings and collaborations between artists a truly regional exchange. MAAP defies the conventional gravity of place. In fact ‘gravity’ is the event’s 2004 theme and is manifest in many ways, lo-tech and high, as conceptual and new media art, and in a plethora of images—aural and visual—of bodies floating, leaping and being transmitted.

For 2004 Yves Klein’s le peintre de l’espace se jette dans le vide, (‘leap into the void’, 1960) has been adopted as a visual thematic, reflecting not only MAAP’s daring and mobility but also Klein’s influence in “the shift from ‘object based’ to ‘system based’ art making” (MAAP press release). Klein’s visual sleight of hand is also in tune with new media art’s great capacity for illusion.

MAAP’s key exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum is titled Gravity and “seeks to consider the explorations of artists working through the conceptual weight of their expression and the paradox of weightless digital code.” Curated by MAAP director Kim Machan, Gravity (Oct 1-Nov 28) features works by Yves Klein (France), of course, and artists working inventively on many new media fronts: Candy Factory (Japan) and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (Seoul); Shu Lea Cheang (New York); Marcus Lyall (Melbourne); Ji-Hoon Byun (Seoul); Kim Kichul (Seoul/Seattle); Tsunamii.net (Singapore); Paul Lincoln (Singapore); Tim Plaisted (Brisbane); Paul Bai (Brisbane); Tan Teck Weng (Perth) and Xing Dan Wen (Beijing).

The associated Zero Gravity Party on October 29 will feature a live broadband link between the museum and the Creative Industries Precinct, QUT, Brisbane, directed by Tien Woon of Tsuanmii.net. The DJ/VJ culture jam will celebrate the link’s providing of a site for intensive cross-artform dialogue.

In Scan (Oct 27-Nov 13), Singapore’s experimental arts hub, The Substation, will house Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archives (AAA) as it gathers new media data for its collection—putting the archivist on show. Artists are invited to drop in and contribute material. Substation will also show a Videotage program from Hong Kong and screen some eagerly anticipated Korean video art.

Ear Lu Gallery (LA SALLE SIA College of Fine Arts) will show -+- negative plus negative (Oct 2-31). It’s compiled by Gridthiya Gaweewong, co-director and curator of Project 304, a homeless art organisation founded in Bangkok in 1996. He is also a guest curator at Chiangmai University Art Museum, Chiangmai, and Art Center, Jim Thompson House Museum, Bangkok. This relatively lo-tech, conceptual show includes artists working in installation, performance, digital video and sound, exploring the law of gravity aesthetically, socially and politically—and there are not a few images of suspension. Kamol Phaosavasdi, Sakarin Krue-on and Wit Pimkarnchanapong are from Thailand and Anthony Gross and Jim Prevett & McArthur from the UK.

Australian video art is featured in the touring exhibition I thought I knew but I was wrong at The Gallery, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Oct 22-Nov 17). Curated by Sarah Tutton (Asialink) and Alexie Glass (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) the impressive collection includes works by Guy Benfield, Phillip Brophy, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, Daniel Crooks, DAMP, Destiny Deacon, Virginia Fraser, Shaun Gladwell, Lyndal Jones, The Kingpins, Marcus Lyall, James Lynch, Tracey Moffatt, TV Moore, Patricia Piccinini, David Rosetsky, Ivan Sen, Monika Tichacek and Craig Walsh.

Brisbane-based sound artist Lawrence English is curating The Gravities of Sound (Oct 11-28) in the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay pedestrian tunnel that links to the vast underground arcades and rail network of central Singapore. Sound equipment will be installed in the ceiling to provide an immersive audio experience for pedestrians as they pass through the 80 metre tunnel, a space where listening is usually not a priority. The artists include Kim Kichul (Korea), who will explore natural sounds in unnatural settings, and Candy Factory (Japan), Melatonin (an international compilation of works selected by English), Bruce Mowson (Australia) and Khin Zaw Latt (Myanmar). In Gravity Extended, curated by Kim Machan and Experimenta, an exhibition space at the end of the audio tunnel will visually extend the gravity theme with a work by Bruce Mowson, and Annie Wilson’s Fight or Flight digital video of streaming bodies falling through a void (Oct 11-Nov 31).

Another exhibition with sound at its centre brings Filipino and Myanmar artists with backgrounds in music, sound art, experimental video and digital imaging together to investigate “the corporeal and incorporeal qualities of sound, the body and force elements of sound.” Katawán, Satti (Body [Filipino], Force [Myanmar]) at The Gallery, National Institute of Education (Oct 27-Nov 28) is curated by Filipino artist, curator and digital media educator Fatima Lasay. It features Tad Ermitaño, Jing Garcia, Alfredo Manrique from the Philipines and Than Htike Aung and Khin Zaw Latt from Myanmar. The exhibition asks, “How do we learn to hear and understand each other across the differences of the spaces and the forces that we have built within and without our bodies? And when does the body ever really begin to feel comfort in foreign space?” The projected images and sounds in Katawán, Satti are presented “as ‘suspensions’—like bodies floating in space.”

For the latest word on new media art there are 2 key events: the 2004 MAAP conference, titled “New Media Art, Technology & Education” (Nanyang Technological University, Oct 27-28) and a symposium titled “Gravity” with speakers Fatima Lasay, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Kim Machan, Lee Weng Choy, Lawrence English and visiting artists (Singapore Art Museum, Oct 30).

Extending the reach of MAAP 2004 well beyond Singapore and the Asia-Pacific is an online and public video wall installation, People’s Portrait by Zhang Ga: “a global portrait of people rendered in real time and displayed instantly and simultaneously on various cultural websites and grand video walls.” The work will appear in Singapore, Brisbane (Creative Industries Precinct), New York (Reuters, Time Square), Linz (Ars Electronica Museum) and Rotterdam (DEAF Festival) from October 27. People’s Portrait has been produced in partnership with the dynamic, large scale SENI contemporary visual art event of which MAAP is a part.

RealTime will be at MAAP 04 in Singapore working with local and visiting writers, responding to exhibitions and conferences daily online. Keep track of MAAP with us as it unfolds. Defy gravity—join us at www.realtimearts.net/features

MAAP 2004 in Singapore, www.maap.org.au; SENI: Art and the Contemporary; Oct 1-Nov 28

RealTime issue #63 Oct-Nov 2004 pg. 36

Since partying in June, we’ve discovered that RealTime is not alone in celebrating a significant birthday this year. Our congratulations go to the Australian Centre for Photography (30), Goethe Insitut Sydney (30), Performance Space (21), parallelo (20), STEPS Youth Dance (15), Ranters (10), Aphids (10) and NYID (10).

Aphids

Aphids, the distinctive and quite unpredictable Melbourne-based multimedia performance company, celebrates its 10th year with A Quarreling Pair, a triptych of miniature puppet plays for adults in the Melbourne International Arts Festival. The plays, by the American avant garde writer Jane Bowles (1917-1973) and Melbourne’s Lally Katz and Cynthia Troup, are directed by Margaret Cameron and performed by Caroline Lee and puppeteer Sarah Kriegler. Lee will also sing the wonderful, rarely-performed art songs by Paul Bowles (1910-1999).

2004 has also been a year for creative travelling for the company. In March David Young, composer and artistic director of Aphids, commenced a 3-month Asialink residency in Java, Bali and Sumatra working with Rendra, Indonesia’s foremost poet and playwright. In July, Aphids went to Europe to develop a new work, Scale, with MUSiCLAB at Les Bains::Connective, a socio-artistic laboratory based in a disused art-deco indoor swimming pool, located in the Moroccan quarter of Brussels. This is another of Aphid’s international collaborations: in 2001 a joint production, Maps, with Copenhagen’s Kokon took them to Denmark after the Australian premiere in 2000.

The multimedia Skin Quartet (RT58, pp. 5-6) premiered at the Anna Schwarz Gallery in the 2003 Melbourne Festival and now lives again on DVD and CD. These are very busy and very constructive aphids! The company celebrates its tenth birthday at North Melbourne’s Lithuanian Club, 44 Errol Street, with a free party on the evening of October 21, featuring a retrospective of performances and installations. David Young writes: “Aphids began with a composer, a fashion designer and a visual artist exploring ways of working together. Since then we have collaborated with literally hundreds of artists from nearly every artform, creating work that has continued to surprise and intrigue us.”

Aphids, A Quarreling Pair, Melbourne International Arts Festival, La Mama, October 13-17, www.aphids.net

NYID

A very busy NYID (Not Yet It’s Difficult) artistic director David Pledger zennishly quipped “to be 10 is to be not yet 11” when asked for a word or 2 on his feelings about the company reaching 10 years of age. Presumably the “difficult” bit is as tough as ever, especially with Pledger having directed the performances in the Jeffrey Shaw new media installation Eavesdrop, currently directing the David Chesworth-Tony MacGregor Cosmonaut for Chamber Made (see p. 47) and preparing for a brand new NYID work in November.

Like Aphids, NYID manifests in a number of exciting ways. Alternatives: debating theatre culture in the age of con-fusion (PIE Peter Lang, Belgium, 2004) is an invaluable collection of essays edited by NYID’s dramaturg Peter Eckersall and academic Moriyama Naoto. It was inspired by the intercultural performance collaboration between NYID and Japan’s Gekidan Kaitaisha (Journey To Confusion, 1999-2002). At last we have a much needed account of the significant cultural exchange between Australian and Japanese performance since the early 1980s, one that has shaped much of the contemporary performance scene in this country.

For the Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney Festivals, David Pledger has been working with interactive cinema pioneer Jeffrey Shaw on Eavesdrop. On a 360 degree screen, 10 people repeat 9 minutes of their lives, driven by a member of the audience searching out the meanings in their stories. Eavesdrop seems logical terrain for Pledger after creating the surveillance nightmare of K for the 2002 Melbourne Festival.

NYID’s much anticipated new work for 2004, Blowback, is a further exploration of the implications of social control in an inter-disciplinary work gleefully described by the company as “a kind of gestural, agit-prop, horror movie; part science fiction, part documentary, part absurdist metaphor.” Now that sounds celebratory!

Eavesdrop, ACMI Screen Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Oct 7- Nov 7; Blowback, Melbourne, Nov 26 – Dec 5; www.notyet.com.au

ACP

Under the vigorous and adroit directorship of Alasdair Foster the Australian Centre for Photography has embraced contemporary photomedia with a passion (to the despair of ‘human condition’ hardliners), mixed local and international talents in a series of provocative, themed exhibitions and, through a revamped Photofile, has furthered the reach of Australian photography around the world. Foster knows how to party and no more effectively and generously than with the 30 events celebrating the organisation’s 30 years this September.

The wide-ranging program included panel discussions on photojournalism (Rex Dupain, Jon Lewis, Robyn Stacey), documentary practice, publishing, pornography vs art (Scott Redford), Indigenous photomedia (Djon Mundine, Merv Bishop, Christian Thompson, Gary Lee) and popular culture. There were films on Bill Henson (Tony Wyzenbeek), David Moore and Wolfgang Sievers (David Perry); a Brendan Lee compilation of 30 years of Australian video; a celebration of the work of Carol Jerrems and a new performance work by William Yang. The ACP celebrated not only its own birthday but the history and not a little of the present and future of an expanded vision of Australian photography.

parallelo

parallelo is 20. Once it was Doppio Teatro, then Doppio Parallelo and now para//elo, a name emblematic of its integrative vision of distinct cultures linked through art and new communication systems. In July the Adelaide-based company celebrated its birthday with a retrospective exhibition titled 20 years on… and still gorgeous at the Pepper St Art Gallery, Magill. Doppio Teatro, formed in 1984, had a distinguished history as Australia’s first professional bi-cultural theatre company. In 1997 the company expanded its charter under the parallelo banner to enable it to work on a cross cultural platform, “drawing [on our] Italian heritage as needed and as one of many ingredients in a contemporary global perspective.” The company creates multimedia performances, installations, online cultural exchanges and through its Open Platform performance project supports and presents the work of independent artists.

Works in the ongoing Distance Project include Tarantella Project (contributing artists Antonino Gorgone, Anthony Leppa, Claudio Pompili) and Lontano Blu Project (Australia: Teresa Crea, Peter Heydrich, Claudio Pompili, Tony Mitchell; Argentina: Marta Martinez, Alejandro Romanutti).

STEPS Youth Dance Company

In May this year STEPS celebrated its 15 years with the retrospective season, FIFTEEN, with previous artistic directors Ruth Osborne, Claudia Alessi and Felicity Bott, and general manager Michelle Saunders presenting excerpts from their favourite works. STEP’s new show, Powdermonkey is part of this year’s Urban Edge Festival (Oct 22 – 23). It examines child subjectivity with a cast of children and professional artists. “Nine days before the first performance the cast of 18 children aged 9-12 years of age will enter an installation, commencing a journey of collaboration and exploration into the issues that concern them, both serious and light-hearted, from the funny rumblings of their guts to feelings of ownership and power over their adult collaborators.”

STEPS Youth Dance Company, Powdermonkey, director Felicity Bott. Midland Town Hall, WA, Oct 22-23, tel 08 9226 2133

Goethe-Institut Sydney

Cultural exchange has played a visibly key role in the evolution of the arts in Australia in recent years. In fact it has a long history nowhere better exemplified than in Goethe Institut Sydney’s encouragement of artists not only to travel to Germany or to meet visiting German artists but also to enter into joint projects and collaborations across the whole range of the arts. Former director Wolfgang Meisner and the current incumbent Dr Roland Goll have played pivotal roles in developing adventurous relationships in contemporary arts practices. The 30th birthday edition of Kultur (Edition #9, Sept), the Goethe-Institut-Australia magazine, is packed with admiring testimonials from musicians, writers, visual artists, composers and the directors of galleries, theatre companies and arts organisations. As one writer puts it, the relationship with Goethe-Institut Sydney “has never been a one-way process”, the Institut has helped Australian artists take their work to Germany. This 2-way process is evident in the Goethe-Institut’s support for the programming of new German plays directed by Benedict Andrews for the Sydney Theatre Company giving this city some its most disturbing and insightful theatre. The Institut then assisted Andrews on his way to the Schaubühne, Berlin where he will soon direct again (see p12). A model of cultural exchange, long may the Goethe-Institut Sydney keep Germans and Australians in creative partnership.

Performance Space

What can we say? Performance Space has been a vital part of Sydney cultural life (and well beyond) for all its 21 years, providing a focal point for hybrid arts and critical discussion. Best of all, from its earliest years Performance Space has generated a sense of community among some of the state’s most idiosyncratic artists supported and encouraged by the distinctive visions of founder Mike Mullins and subsequent directors, Nicholas Tsoutas, Alan Vizents, Noelle Janaczewska, Sarah Miller, Angharad Wynne Jones, Zane Trow and current director Fiona Winning. Performance Space has always played a national role through visiting artists, conferences and events and is now an integral part of significant national initiatives, Mobile States and Time_Place_Space (see p43). And it’s preparing for relocation to a new home at the former Eveleigh St railway yards. Celebrations will be held at the beginning of November with performances, exhibitions, a conference and the party of parties. We’ll be there. More in RealTime 64.

RealTime issue #63 Oct-Nov 2004 pg. 38

There is a certain confidence in ReelDance’s focus on “everyday movement” in its selections for the Dance on Screen festival this year. The confidence comes out of ReelDance’s own success in the last 4 years, as well as the incredible energy pouring forth nationally and internationally in dance film. The digital video revolution is letting choreographers think into and move onto the screen, creating ideas about the art of moving images that go beyond the limitations of live dance. Dancemakers and ReelDance have left the tired old debate about whether dance film is “really dance” so far behind that they can focus on finding dance in the real.

In fact, at its best moments, the dance on screen in ReelDance was more “real” than live dancing. In Gold (director Rachel Davies, choreographer Hanna Gillgren), a British film in the first program of international shorts, the slam of shots and edits have the kinesthetic impact of what back flips really feel like, not just what they look like on a distant stage. This film uses devices of cinema with breathtaking ease. The brilliant editor and cinematographer formed a partnership with the bodies in motion that made one forget that cinema-dance might be a hybrid. They collaborated with time, finessed the overlapping rhythms of falling and flying, and made space contain stillness and struggle in the one frame.

In the same program, Snow (David Hinton, choreographer Rosemary Lee) also made a dance of moving images, using editing as the basis of its choreographic art. In the first ‘movement’ of this little symphony, tightly edited archival shots of people skating and sliding in a frozen city make lithe, slyly choreographed patterns. In the second half, sleet flings people brutally through storms so extreme that their bodies flail and collide, and the dance is made by the collaboration of the cool handed editor and the whiplash physicality of winter. We feel our own bodies pummelled even in the safety of our warm Southern Hemisphere seats.

In contrast to this choreography by montage, On a Wednesday Night in Tokyo (Jan Verbeek, Germany) made dance with almost no edits. A locked off camera in front of the doors of a commuter train persistently observed the polite, inexpressive faces of people stepping in backwards and shoving hard to make room for themselves. As in the best slapstick comedies, the culture of pressing and positioning while appearing to stay upright and uninvolved is full of both pathos and absurdity.

Sprue (director/choreographer The Five Andrews, UK) achieved comedy through brevity and singularity of focus. Men with red hats imitated time-lapse nature photography by performing a stop-frame animation of flowers blooming. At under one minute it works and is gone. A Function at the Junction (Patrick Newton, choreographer Robert Tannion, UK) spent most of its budget on production design, realising to perfection the faux wood and faux hair of the 1970s. But the low budget faux 70s music was a disappointment, as was the not quite remembered feel of the 70s dancing. In Crazy Beat (John Hardwick, choreographer Carol Brown, UK), 4 tapping teen dominatrixes in blond wigs and knee socks seem to be trying for an ‘Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker meets Quentin Tarantino’ effect. They have the beat but not the bite. Dance Floor (Daniel Mulloy, choreographer Irven Lewis, UK) lovingly integrates life and dance, juxtaposing the complex thoughts and telling images of a female washroom attendant with the complex rhythms of a tap dancer set loose in the adjacent art deco men’s room.

While the opening night program was dominated by Britain and the USA, the following afternoon’s program of international shorts represented the European with productions from the Netherlands, Germany and France. Uzès Quintet (Catherine Maximoff, various choreographers, France) is a montage of 5 works that had been performed separately, and certain aspects of it are thrilling. Each of the choreographers involved represents a different aesthetic strand of French contemporary dance. Playful and passionate dance theatre images are juxtaposed with determinedly formal post-Cunningham dancers, quasi-mystical homoerotic whirling, and a body transformed into a wiry arachnoid. Cutting these dance languages together put them in a conversation about the larger project of contemporary dance. However, the producer’s hand is also visible in this construction: 26 minutes is all the rage in Europe now, being the standard ‘half hour’ for broadcast. But it’s about twice as long as this potential gem needed to be.

Length was an issue in the other 2 ‘shorts’ on this program too. Clara van Gool, whose brilliant productions have featured in both of the previous ReelDance festivals, sets the standard for cinematic dance films that seamlessly mix dance and unspoken drama; real emotion expressed in motion. However, in Lucky (choreographer Jordi Cortès Molina, The Netherlands), the film’s distended setup dissipates the impact of the dizzying kinesthetic and emotional vortexes created by some later sequences.

(Left) Between Us (director Luc Dunberry, various choreographers, Germany) looses cinematic time and energy in sticky sequences that obfuscate some strong images. Luis Buñuel would probably never have thought that he could make a dance without learning technique, just because he had a body. So why would dancers make a “surreal” film about getting stuck in social and communicative conventions without appreciating the work of Buñuel? This is the flip side of the confidence engendered by the DV revolution—the naivety of choreographers who move onto the screen without exposure to cinematic history or ideas.

By the last night of ReelDance, when the finalists for best Australian/New Zealand dance film are screened, it is tempting to look at the dance films on display and start drawing conclusions about national dance film cultures. The British have in common their sometimes cute, sometimes poignant obsession with their lower middle class and its kitsch or inner beauty. The Europeans are preoccupied with mood and saturated images. What of the Australians? In this batch of 10, relationships and loneliness dominated.

Sue Healey’s take on relationships in the prize-winning Fine Line is coolly detached. People caress but not tenderly, they prod but don’t provoke, they dance around each other and the lines that define their dark space. Toy Boy by Fiona Cameron is a stylishly daggy take on relationships: a couch frames the absurd dancing of hungry, feral, and clumsy lust in a singles bar and a blanket in a park makes fairy wings for a fantasy sequence. Cameron’s Sink (co-director Rohan Jones) looks at loneliness or the breakdown of a woman alone, a theme shared by When You’re Alone by Anton and Vacillating by Cameron and Louise Taube. Sink, the third-prize winner, exploits image, colour saturation, framing and editing to create rhythms and ideas. The 3 other works that actively integrated cinematic techniques were Graphic and Rhythmic Study (directors/choreographers Louise Taube and Sue Healey), which is just what it says, but is also pretty wry and stylish; Together (director Madeleine Hetherton, choreographer Rowan Marchingo), which I won’t comment on because my company, Physical TV, co-wrote and executive produced it, and Narelle Benjamin’s second-place winning On a Wing and a Prayer. This succinct and sexy bon bon puts movement inside a simple story structure that allows the performance to mean much more than it seems. On a Wing is sure to do well on the international festival circuit and shows Benjamin’s filmmaking, which could perhaps use a little more focus on space and rhythm, growing in skill and confidence.

I hope ReelDance’s confidence is not diminished by low attendance at its documentary sessions in Sydney. Dance as an art form struggles with a lack of access to its history and cultural context. ReelDance offers a cinematic antidote with dance films that traverse countries and times. It’s a shame for our art form that so few took up the offer.

In Dancing Under the Swastika (director Annette von Wangenheim, Germany) we hear stories that have undoubtedly had an impact on the development of dance in Australia, and experience images of dance escaping tyrannies far more dire than those of distance. The film didn’t just reveal alarming collaborations between the development of our art and the Nazis, but subtextually confronted us with questions about why we dance, and who we dance for.

Even more immediately urgent for the development of dance in our region is the story in Haunting Douglas (director Leanne Pooley, NZ). Douglas Wright returned home to the Antipodes from a substantial international career to find his subsequent work quietly falling off the world map. Sound familiar? Haunting Douglas finds the poetic in this journey and resuscitates the dance before it is lost. Wright’s recalcitrant compliance with the personal interview process is a bittersweet contrast to the emotional daring and physical vividness of his dancing and the graceful generosity of the quotes from his autobiography. He calls his recounting of his personal life, the “pound of flesh” he has to give in order to get his work more widely seen. Together, this ‘blood money’ and his dancing give a rare insight into the harrowing, unsettling, confusing, riveting, searing, satisfying and strange experience of being an artist.

At one point Wright quotes Martha Graham, who said that “a dancer dies twice, once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.” Wright may have been reluctant to be interviewed, but he did it because he is wise to the gift that dance film, through festivals like ReelDance, gives to dance: life after death.

ReelDance international dance on screen festival 2004, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth, Newcastle, Auckland; July 30-Oct 9

In the 1970s and 80s, theorists such as Jean Baudrillard identified a “crisis of reality”: the death of real authorship, real individual subjectivity, real art, real criticism and real politics. One could no longer reach out and touch the world in a truly meaningful way. Some artists responded by attempting to rekindle reality and affect by searching for some-thing primal, timeless and hard, probing in detail physical sensations and sexual taboos. Others, in the vein of Andy Warhol, revelled in this deathly situation, renouncing “reality” altogether, proclaiming it to be a “fiction” consisting of recurrent motifs, codes and parodic references.

Phillip Adams’ choreography replays these cultural tensions. He has produced intense, cerebral-spiritual works such as Amplification (1999), in which bodies entwined, went splat, were undressed and revealed, before crawling over each other in a coolly extended meditation on the automobile’s terminal eroticism. He has also produced less conceptually deep yet more extravagant performative studies, forged from wondrously random, surreal associations, inspired by props, fabrics and design (Upholster, 2001; Endling, 2002).

Adams’ latest piece, Fiction, represents an attempt to blend these approaches, producing a curious coldness within an ostensibly lightweight parody of Orientalist filmic fantasies. The performers mouth phrases from a bad British comedy of manners before dropping to all fours and arching their backs, evoking a fraught passage across the hot sands of exotic Arabia. The movement itself seesaws between Adams’ typically sharp, bone-crunching and highly interweaving choreography, versus faux Hanya-Holme-esque jazz ballet inspired by Hollywood Orientalist musicals such as Kismet (1944, 1955).

This contrast between Adams’ characteristically visceral physical vocabulary and the cheerful superficiality of the parody is arresting, but Fiction ultimately lacks the crucial element of both Orientalist fiction and Warholesque parody—namely excess: the Technicolor glow of musicals, the extravagantly large casts of Spartacus (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and the cinema of Cecil B de Mille. To lose oneself in depthless superficiality and derivative art, one requires the orgasmic excess of Warhol’s favourite subject, Marilyn Monroe; an almost sickening profusion of external, sensorial qualities like flesh, colour, lips, pout and voluptuousness. With 6 dancers, no costume changes and subdued, largely front-on lighting, Fiction lacked this overripe gorgeousness.

Frances d’Ath’s extermination was characterised by a comparable stylistic duplicity, featuring violent, ritualistic posing inspired by Baudrillard’s Symbolism, Exchange and Death (1976), set amongst an indiscriminate bricolage of classy design elements and crass cultural references. The piece consisted of various distinct sequences or acts between which performers casually moved. The combination of increasingly extreme imagery with a nonchalant, stop/start execution produced a discomforting sense of both deep, primal violation and unconcerned superficiality. The sexed, fleshy, pulsating, whacking and finally decaying body served as the work’s focus, with these slight female forms being repeatedly adorned, stripped, attacked, defiled and discarded.

The show began with a cool version of a male wet dream—5 lithe, bikini-clad women jumping on the spot—before a phonograph needle was dropped, heavy metal music intruded, and an almost deliberately slapdash, frenetic daisy-chain of crashing torsos ensued. In the first of many such acts, the women undressed and carefully placed their underwear in neat piles at the front of the brightly wallpapered space. Bodies were adorned with 19th century aristocratic costume (including gloves and feathered headpieces) and placed within a rough, semi-improvised, melodramatic tableau of mutual murder. They killed one of their own, stripped her, and harshly probed and tugged at the elasticity of flesh, skin, buttock and mouth, covered her with dirt, and then excavated the scene to produce more forensic castoffs for the forestage (swabs, hair samples, nail clippings, heavy dresses, underwear, spotted bikinis and weapons). Iron spades pushed at teeth before the blood-dripping corpse reanimated itself, standing before the other performers. These murderers are naked from the waist up, wearing long, black dresses, with red stains running from their chins to their waists as testimony to a previous ritual at the ornately carved wooden table at the rear of the space, where bowls of blood were slowly upturned before the mouths of each.

Parallels for d’Ath’s dark, primeval religiosity lie in Hermann Nitsch’s ritualistic body art, while the garish, poppy juxtapositions of these motifs recalled Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) or Melbourne’s Chapel of Change. Indeed, d’Ath’s invocation of Baudrillard’s now 28 year old manifesto on the need for a grotesque, taboo-breaking language allied to death as a strategy for the subversion of all taboos, hierarchies and domination, brought d’Ath’s dramaturgy close to Nitsch’s dated melange of psychoanalysis, Catholic practice and myths of an ancient Dionysian cult. D’Ath’s offhand evocation of these concepts, however, encased within Hamish Bartle’s gorgeous set, ensured that the choreographer’s aesthetic most resembled Jan Fabre’s recent I Am Blood (Melbourne Festival, 2003). Both d’Ath and Fabre alternate between obsessing over bodies and their qualities, and a mystifying inability to hold this concentration before moving on, and then returning to them again.

extermination‘s weakness lay not in referencing the history of performance art, but rather in d’Ath’s ignoring of the gender implications of a work created by a young man sadomasochistically manipulating 5 young, athletic and largely nude women. Rebecca Hilton’s Non-Fiction—which was presented with Adams’ Fiction—can therefore be seen as a riposte to both d’Ath and Adams. Hilton engaged with surfaces in the sense that Non-Fiction revolved around various common cultural tropes of gendered relations and living in close proximity to each other. Fractures of generic physical gestures and commonplace theatrical sequences were repeated, hinting at suburban life. There were sexualised, choreographed couplings, across-the-fence flirtations, and moments of isolated, physical self-withdrawal, both with and without a porn magazine as a prop. This effected a sense of complicated, hothouse melodrama and family romance. Yet by merely sketching these dramas using readily identifiable nuances (rather than by directly parodying them, as Adams did), Hilton created an uncertainty about whether Non-Fiction represented a Chekhovian world of deep, existential longings, or something closer to a montage of populist cinesonic soap operas such as Big Brother or American Beauty.

At one point, Hilton split the dancers on either side of an orange picket fence. On the left, Joanne White sequentially collapsed her body into the venue’s tangerine rear wall. Her robotic execution and the stretched underwear which flashed from beneath her dress recalled the damaged ‘girl-childs’ choreographed by Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek and Adams too. Carlee Mellow also performed this phraseology beside White, but Mellow’s more emotionally-present, intentional execution suggested that her character was engaged in a cynical game with others’ expectations of her, rather than being programmatically overwhelmed by her own, internalised sexual corruption. This pairing of dancers thus provided an implicit critique of Melbourne choreographic trends. Hilton’s Non-Fiction lacked d’Ath’s dense theoretical underpinnings, yet her deft measuring of banalities, space and movement effected a subtle political message.

balletlab, Fiction, choreographer Phillip Adams; Non-Fiction, choreographer Rebecca Hilton; Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, Aug 19-29; extermination, choreographer Frances d’Ath; Dancehouse, Melbourne, Aug 5-15

The scene is tan, oatmeal and fawn, the dancers wear cream, their flesh a pale beige against the sepia floor. There is a sense that we are not in the present. The atmosphere is 1950s, its colours evoke John Brack’s signature work, Collins St, 5pm (1955). Benny Goodman’s music and Serge Gainsbourg’s songs are redolent of the past. Minimal furniture—a line of outdoor chairs—suggests a lawn descending towards a windswept beach. A woman sits on one of the chairs, a girl periodically cycles across the stage.

Two young women enter the space. They mirror each other’s moves. It is possible that they are 2 halves of the one self. When they look at each other, it is not clear who or what they see. They may be as one. Eventually a third element breaks up this duet or solo times two. A young man joins the dance and a series of 3-way interactions ensues.

A great deal of their movement consists of gestures, found movements which are formed then discarded. There is a fairly consistent tempo to their performance, almost staccato. Not in a mechanical sense. It is as if their original import has been lost: they are literally going through the motions. These gestures are emptied of meaning, suggesting also that once they were fulsome actions of the sort that might be found in everyday life. This gestural palette does not appear to be the result of kinaesthetic investigation but indicates a reworking of ordinary life into dance.

There is an element of theatre about this work. Not the tanztheater of Pina Bausch perhaps, but it is nevertheless about something. It represents a human drama. Its mode of representation is partly naturalistic (chairs, bicycle, girl, woman) and partly abstract, in the manner of silent movement. If it is a drama, it is also pared down. The subtitle of The Point Hotel identifies a “fleeting world of human connection.” So far as there is human connection in this world, it is momentary. The human interaction which occurs is somehow not sustained. It does not penetrate the subjectivity of its participants. Approaches are rejected, dependencies are intimated through limbs, hands, arms, the distal regions of corporeal being. Weight does not pass from one centre through the core of another.

This is not to say that there isn’t a good deal of activity, particularly among and between the trio. It is just that no-one appears to be genuinely ‘touched’ by the other. This is both a physical and emotional observation; that bodily boundaries are maintained leaving subjects intact, emotions held close. This would seem to be one of the statements of the work. The Point Hotel depicts an order of human relationships which is highly individualised.

The atomism of The Point Hotel is reflected in Dianne Butterworth’s presence throughout the work. She enters, and sits on a chair behind the danced action. She is not a participant in the action but rather oversees it. Is this her life? Is the girl on the bicycle her former self? We don’t really know. She is not the site of the action herself. We are not drawn to watch her for what is happening in the now. Her connection to the activity of the work may be through memory. If she does signify a temporal perspective, her feelings are enigmatic. It is not clear how she feels about the past. Any emotional import has to be found within the dancing figures. And they too are enigmatic. For all their sound and fury, they offer a canvas of exterior selves. This is why the ambience of The Point Hotel is, as the program note suggests, “dislocated.” The woman who sits as the action occurs, the young woman who wheels her bicycle, the 3 dancing figures and the audience are all dislocated with respect to one another. Is this dislocation an emotional lack of connection, or is it a lack of coherence over time, a split within the self over a lifetime?

The Point Hotel is a restrained piece. Its use of gesture is something of a hallmark of Sandra Parker’s work. As a work of memory, and in terms of its impact as memory, it is highly visual. Its colours, the minimal but evocative props, including its use of Butterworth as a human prop, leave one with a picture of a human landscape, one whose terms strive to connect but ultimately leave each other intact.

Dance Works, The Point Hotel, choreographor Sandra Parker; performers Deanne Butterworth, Katy MacDonald, Phoebe Robinson, Nick Somerville, Diana Pjenke; Space 28, VCA Drama Studio, Melbourne, July 15-24

1. Slept in a strange bed where time had shifted.
2. Dreamt of a place where the inmates broke out.
3. Shouting, banging and honking filled the twilight space of the dawn.
4. Sometime in the night the Greeks won the Cup.Oh, it’s all starting to become clear.
5. A shark silently circled the bay.
6. A switch was flicked, a butterfly effect.
7. In an apartment somewhere in downtown Adelaide I breakfasted in the company of another artist I didn’t know but who was strangely familiar.
8. 19 other artists awoke to have similar, slightly dislocated experiences.
9. Entered a large, modern building situated on the perimeter of a wide, open square. It was bright and stainless steel shiny.
10 Realised I had entered Art Boot Camp and this was just the beginning. “And now I would like you to list 10 things that happened when you woke up,” directs a confident, cajoling Clare Grant as she steers her writing workshop.

This was Time_Place_Space 3 at Adelaide AIT Arts, July 2004. Twenty diverse, ‘hybrid’ artists, 6 facilitators (4 Australian, 2 international), 3 curators, 2 technicians, 1 superwoman project manager together with numerous volunteers, gathered for an intense 2 weeks of provocation, challenge, inspiration and community.

In 2002, I was one of the artists chosen to attend the first Time_Place_Space at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga (RT53 p. 32), an event still rippling through my life, personally and collaboratively ever-present. Now in 2004, I find myself re-visiting this space, though in a different place, drawn by a desire to dig beneath the surface that had been scratched 2 years ago, in a process about to become an excavation, a rigorous, internal archaeology.

Our first day begins. The facilitators can’t wait to set the first task. Ready, Set, Go! You have a day to create for presentation a 5-minute solo work. Here are your starting points, choose one, choose all 3. “Be conscious of your process and your intention,” says Marianne Weems (Director of New York’s The Builders’ Association). “Write the frame, delineate the space, look at what is really there,” advises video artist John Gillies. “Dislocate a niche, what is its passage?” asks John Cleater (designer from The Builders’ Association). “At your service,” booms technician Simon Wise. “Now, go!”

We don’t question. We’re too hyped. Everyone is excited but a little scared. We have to do this well, get it right. This is what we’re here for. Now, go!

Day 2. Some are quietly confident, others procrastinate. All are feeling tentative. This is our first revelation of who we are to the group and it’s intimidating. How will we be judged? The visual artist Lyndal Jones is at the helm. She has an agenda and will not be moved. This is serious! There’s no way out.

Presentations are made in groups after which each work is discussed. We adopt the soon to be familiar talking circle in which everyone has a say. “I am not interested in what you liked. How did what you like make you feel?” Lyndal is conciliatory but firm. She is sharp and there are no lukewarm responses allowed. “What did you see?” This is not about cold, analytical dissections or non-committal responses. This is about creating a language for viewer and maker. It’s about giving the artist a new space to work. It’s about being conscious.

This long day established a firm springboard for the rest of the laboratory. There was a sigh of relief and a renewed energy as new possibilities were entertained. Nobody felt like a stranger any more. A sense of solidarity prevailed. We were on course.

We are in Week 2. Water under the bridge. Collaborations have been made and not quite made. We have followed our intentions carefully. We have kept track of the content, grasped the floating thread, found the map and followed the compass. We have made the balance unstable, sought to illuminate and then, just as we were thinking we had reached the pinnacle, we threw it all away. Why? Because we had discovered how to “Kill our darlings.” No this is not some postmodern garage band but a dramaturgical device to rid you of that favourite thing you’ve been holding on to, that which is holding you back. Oh, what fun to be had. How many darlings can you kill? The game takes on a sinister edge. Kill the Darling! Kill the Darling! Where’s Piggy?

Time is running out. There’s been so much work made. 40 performances in 2 weeks, and yet we want more. Not only have we created but we have discussed, analysed, dissected, proposed, engaged, shared—“riffed” (the word of the laboratory, declares John Gillies on the last day) in the various forums and workshops on the nature of dramaturgy, collaborative practice, new media, sustainability, models of practice, future directions. There have been smaller, more intimate salons to tease out even more of the fundamentals. There have been salons with red wine in the Apothecary bar, salons in the Kava Hut, salons in the strip joint down the road, the karaoke joint, the gym. There have been progressive late night salons in apartments. There’s no stopping, no end to the discussion being generated, documented, laid down, laid bare.

It’s interesting to compare the forum on sustainability with the one held at T_P_S 1. In 2002, the angle was very much from a practical, pragmatic point of view—how do artists sustain themselves, what strategies can be put in place to acquire space, time and money to create work, to function as an artist? At T_P_S 3, although these practicalities were touched on, there was a lot more discussion about how artists might sustain their practice on a purely intrinsic level. First there is a quintessential need to create work and then there is the support of the artistic community and peers that buoys the individual. This community and generosity of peers, along with a sense of being part of a history or lineage within arts practice is what gives us a place, which is sustaining both physically and metaphysically.

T_P_S offers the time to find our place within a broader community of artists who are working, playing with, analysing, discovering and creating new frontiers of a hybrid nature. It is this action, this bringing together that allows threads to be woven, bonds to be tied, practice to be supported, artistic rejuvenation and passion to be sustained.

“You have 10 minutes to write down what you want to say, starting now.” It’s Clare Grant again. I write: “I want to say, I want to know what finding a place means and whether it means ‘to belong, to be part of’ or ‘to be apart’. I want to say that we are all trying to find our place and sometimes that place is uncomfortable and sometimes it is very comfortable. I want to say that sometimes to find our place we have to let others into our place. I want to say that the other is sometimes where we want to be but cannot…”

T_P_S 3 has been intense. A laboratory is intensive by nature. There has been little room for anything else. It has been a luxury. It should be a necessity.

Time_Place_Space_3, PICA, Performance Space, ANAT; AIT Arts, Adelaide, July 4-17

Productions such as The Pearler are rare. Evocative and sensual, it had the strong basis of a well researched story, steeped in anecdote, memories and lives lived and lost. Set in the 1940s and using stories, historical references and photographic imagery, The Pearler explores the lucrative pearling industry that linked Darwin with neighbouring Asian cities such as Singapore, Kupang, Dili and Manila. Scenes playfully establish the cut and thrust of life on pearling luggers, the colourful onshore shenanigans and the danger and loneliness of the ocean’s depths. Gradually the lives of 3 characters—an Anglo Saxon woman and 2 pearlers, one Japanese and the other Aboriginal—become inextricably entwined.

As the show unfolds it reveals a little known episode in Australian history, depicting the internment of Japanese-Australian pearlers in southern camps during World War II. This experience shattered the lives of those involved and destroyed the racial tolerance of cities such as Darwin during that era. Juxtaposing the drama with historical photographic montages and eerie, wailing sirens, the tension and despair of the bombing of Darwin and detainment of the pearlers is strongly and poignantly conveyed.

The Pearler’s numerous whimsical scenes are founded on an engaging interplay of heightened physical characterisation, nuanced gesture and bold, oversized facial masks. Performers Nicky Fearn, Samantha Chalmers and Ben Tyler adeptly convey an array of emotions through physical characterisation and gesture. Exceptionally well crafted puppets enact ships in storms, birds in flight and underwater scenes conveying the other-worldliness of the ocean’s depths.

Tina Parker’s production design is striking: large cloth sails are manoeuvered to create a range of architectural forms while incidental design elements are sparingly employed, complementing the grandeur of the sail cloths and reinforcing the story’s historical setting. Kim Baston’s atmospheric, original musical score and an audio-visual montage by Elka Kerkoffs added substance to the tale as it unfolded.

Sarah Cathcart’s direction seamlessly harnessed all the elements of story, physical performance, design, music and montage to create a sophisticated production which adeptly revealed personal and social aspects of north Australia’s rich racial and labour history. Congratulations to Darwin’s independent production house Business Unusual Theatre for bringing this highly theatrical and socially relevant production to fruition.

Business Unusual Theatre, The Pearler, concept Nicky Fearn, director Sarah Cathcart; Brown’s Mart Theatre, Darwin, July 6-17

On one level, Circa’s A Man in a Room, Juggling is just that. For over an hour, the extraordinary David Sampford juggles in the Cremorne Theatre. The audacity of the idea surprises and delights. But on another level this performance is far from ‘just that.’ Sampford is accompanied by the equally extraordinary composer-pianist, Erik Griswold, and together they are supported by lighting designer Jason Organ, who provides texture for this intimate and remarkable spectacle of a body in cahoots with an ensemble of squishy balls. While the impressive skill and bold experimentation of Yaron Lifschitz’s direction are to be expected, the wry comedy, finesse and striking improvisational integrity of sound and body make this show quite special. Unlike Circa’s earlier full-company work, A Love Supreme (RT61, p. 8), A Man in a Room, Juggling pares back the busyness to enable a magnified reflection on the complexity of this all too familiar but most bewitching of circus arts.

The 3 part performance begins with the sound of bouncing balls in darkness, underscoring the perception of juggling as a solitary art. Yet as we tune into the aural elements of the performance, it is clear that Sampford is not the only one juggling. Throughout the piece Griswold’s deft handling of, among other things, a grand piano keyboard, rubber hose, miniature toy piano and squeezy bath-time dolphin, has the effect of chasing, leading and articulating the mood of Sampford’s work in a kind of musical juggle of its own.

The first extended improvisation is a funny and self-deprecating look at the juggling craft. Each “Short Reflection on Juggling” provides opportunities to marvel at both the serious skill and the silliness of throwing and catching things in midair. A series of demonstrations of cascade and column juggling becomes an inspiring study of body position and movement. These transform into poetic ruminations on the physics of speed and gravity, and on the ability to be alert and always looking. Sampford loosens up and enjoys himself here, playing up potentially awkward errors, using them as opportunities for new tangents, comic release and the merging of different patterns and tricks.

The second part, “A Routine to Music by Satie”, is more measured, taking the juggling patterns into a clearly choreographed relationship with the music. Griswold’s eclectic instrumental devices still surprise, but are well-suited to evoking the moodiness of Satie. At times, Sampford choreographs the balls to bounce, lift and drop in synch with the music. At others, he rolls a single ball up his arm, squashes it within his elbow, performing an abstracted narrative about the lone soul on an intimate exploration. As Sampford’s experiments get playfully more expansive (soon including a large red construction ladder), the voice-over instructor gently details the unique solitude of “a man in his room, juggling”, with no companions, no ceiling fans, no lamp shades and no gaps under the bed.

But it is in the third section of this performance that Sampford and Griswold hit their stride. The improvisational chemistry between these 2 wizards of juggling—one physical, one musical—enables a beautiful insight into the art of being alone with others. Backed by video footage of pigeons and pedestrians, Sampford enters into a mesmerising solo ball-play, picking up and dropping balls from the hundred or so which he has placed randomly on the stage floor. Simultaneously, Griswold immerses himself in a feat of multi-tasking, his “hands describing patterns in sound.” And together, through a kind of spirited jamming, they achieve a brilliant integration of sound and movement—and a most fitting climax to a mind-expanding show.

Circa Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus Ensemble, A Man in a Room, Juggling, concept/director Yaron Lifschitz, choreographer/juggler David Sampford, music Erik Griswold, lighting design Jason Organ; Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Cremorne Theatre, July 14-24

Heavy doors swing open and a rhythmic procession enters the cavernous Boiler Shop at Newcastle’s Honeysuckle Rail Yards. The performers are lit by fire poi; balls on strings swung in patterns around the body. Their movements are accompanied by blazing electric guitar. Moving with the percussive sounds of drums, vocalisations, hand clapping and ‘pants slapping’, these exotic others suggest a ritual from somewhere in south east Asia and seem curiously at odds with the icy blast they have brought with them, as though the night wind has blown them in across Newcastle harbour. As they take the performance area—a little circle of sand inside a huge yawning space—2 hooded singers invite us to listen to The Ballad of Boldenblee, director Indija Mahjoeddin’s latest production in her ongoing investigation into the cross-cultural transference of Randai-based performance to Australia.

A popular folk theatre form from West Sumatra, Randai has maintained elements of the martial art Silat as an essential component of its movement repertoire, while evolving into a composite theatre form which embraces storytelling, acting, dance, music and song. The narratives of Randai are in the mythic vein of “hero on an epic quest of good versus bad”, and so it is with Boldenblee, a brave and ambitious Lara Croft-style heroine who sets out to release her brother and town from the clutches of the evil property developer, Munnysuckle. Multiple obstacles line her path, some mental, some spiritual and some physical, such as the elemental figures who engage in an exciting aerial ballet battle for supremacy over the heads of the audience.

The hooded balladeers of the show’s title delivered the bulk of the narrative in songs which shifted across an eclectic range of music idioms, from hip hop beats to rap and blues. It was the live soundtrack of musician Mike Burns (harp and guitars), by turns haunting and strident, which provided a cohesiveness to the storytelling which otherwise became tangled and lacked clarity as it moved to its conclusion.

As with Mahjoeddin’s previous Randai projects, Boldenblee was a community project which drew upon the skills and enthusiasm of its young performers. The outcome was an ensemble work from creation through to performance. The story, the words of the songs and episodic vignettes, and their integration with contemporary verbal styles such as rap, were generated from within the group and helped to shape the piece as much as the physicality of the Randai folk form at its base.

It is the ‘container like’ nature of Randai and its ability to renew and adapt which Mahjoeddin is making use of in her investigation into the cross-fertilisation of this form with contemporary Western music and forms of physical play. References were made to mask, Hapkido and Capoeira. However, I came away feeling that in this production the form had been overloaded, the company undertaking too difficult a task in its allotted preparation time, despite the work’s engaging physicality and visual excitement.

Musik Kabau, The Ballad of Boldenblee, director Indija Mahjoeddin, original songs developed by John Papanis and arranged by Mike Burns; The Boiler Shop at Honeysuckle, Newcastle, Aug 6-14

‘Down’, ‘slow’ and ‘cold’ and their kin, ‘low’, ‘sluggish’ and ‘chill’ are not, for the most part, words with positive connotations. Our semantics traditionally incline to things warming up, looking up and moving on. There are ample exceptions of course. But we live in a time when slow is becoming a virtue, when cool is ubiquitous and down is on the up and up. There are books on the life-saving merits of slowness in the age of speed. There’s the slow food movement and the therapeutic activities of our downtime—yoga, meditation and tai chi, not to mention the wildly proliferating spa resort. ‘Cool’ is also big—the return of a key attitudinal term from the Beat Generation but now universally applied: you like it, it’s cool. More recently, ‘chill-out’ has passed through dance club doors into general use. ‘Down’ meanwhile is getting a new lease of life in downshifting (paradoxically a luxury for those who have the reserves with which to live on less) but still looks bad in downsizing and that popular phenomenon embodied in everything from the mass media to a US President—dumbing down.

However ‘down’ doesn’t get any better than when “chilled out tracks take you on a downtempo journey” as in One World Music’s Zen Connection 3, a 2-CD “global beats” compilation of 27 tracks of highly integrated musical diversity. This is music to slow you down, a carefully orchestrated invitation to relax and reflect from a former DJ with a penchant for World Music and an ear for a market where, curiously, it’s the enveloping interplay of tracks and not the individual artists who stimulate the purchasing urge. It’s the DJ thing on another plane and in another market. Or a market in the making.

Leigh Wood is the General Manager of Sydney-based One World Music and he’s very conscious that he is responding to a need while creating a market. Wood’s background is in the London music scene. He says he stopped DJ-ing only recently to focus on the time-consuming job of managing One World. Wood arrived in Australia about 10 years ago and worked for Pulse, part of SBA Music who produce videos and DVDs. “I helped set up the CD side of things, putting compilations together on a monthly basis—Top 40 and one of Australia’s first dance compilations produced on a regular basis. I used to get music from all the major companies and independents, quite a nice little job to have…a huge job actually—a pile of 200 CDs on the desk. You soon get an ear for choosing in a split second. I fine-tuned my hearing for what might work in the mass market. One of the early compilations I did was a chill-out CD called The Cool Room, about the time Café del Mar started. It never became mainstream because it was sold directly to the entertainment sector. But it made me realise that there was a huge market where people just liked music as a sort of background or to help them work, something to tune in and out to—energy in the background. It was spawned from the dance club era when it was winding down.”

What’s the association with Zen in the labelling of the CD series? “It’s a holistic element, a lifestyle thing. When I use the Zen notion it’s just about the music and how it reacts with you, how you use it. How does it make you feel? Do you realise that these vibrations can have a positive effect in your life? Do you realise that when you’re in a bad mood and you put that thrash track on it’s going to make you even more aggressive? I don’t think people think about this in Western culture.”

Wood discovered that people liked the music he was compiling but “didn’t know where to go to find it, because it’s probably not so much about the artists but about the music. From my perspective I’ve built One World on a certain sound rather than specific artists.” He sees this as fitting with the widespread principle of branding. But artists are still very important, most obviously in having a key name or 2 on a compilation along with lesser known but high calibre musicians from around the world. UK world music artist Nitin Sawhney, a guest of the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival, appears on Zen Connection 1 and 3. Wood sees this as important if the compilation happens to go into a store: “the name might be just enough to encourage people to have a listen.”

Supporting local talent is also important. Two Australian groups, Amanaska and Small Defence, have individual CDs out through One World and they appear on Zen Connection. Bamboo Soup is a CD collaboration between Small Defence (Kristian Hill and Robert Staines) and shakuhachi master Riley Lee (a collaborator with the Taikoz drumming ensemble and a recording artist for New World); “a fun exercise for Riley to try something new with some beats, a nice blend with electronica.” Panorama by Amanaska (Simon Lewis and Stephen Joyce) is blessed with quite upbeat ‘global beats’, very distinctive cross-cultural guest voices (but no translations) and very classy instrumental playing. The over-arching ambience of One World Music CDs evokes reflection and invites relaxation, especially on Zen Connection, but the ‘slow’ effect is often gently counterpointed with layers of brisk beats electronically or acoustically realised.

Market and branding acumen aside, Wood sees his compilation skills as rooted in the love of music and an intuitive feel for where music is going. That involves a lot of listening. But passion has to be balanced with the need to generate new markets. Wood says “we’re moving into another area with the Elysian Vibes compilation, downtempo music for the growing spa market”, specifically “the spa resorts for getting away from a world that is getting faster and faster. There’s a sense in which people can use the music within their treatment environments. We’re finding that a lot of spa resorts are buying our music, which is really healthy for us!”

These niche markets are critical for One World Music: “We’re not a major record company in the traditional sense, so record shops can’t be so important to us. We’re major in what we do but it’s very much outside the norm. We need to find alternative markets.”

The project came about when Wood “got together with New World Music which had been going some 20 odd years in Australia and around the world. They had a huge market with a very traditional base—I mean by that music for relaxation and music that is non-electronic. Some of the music was dated or tagged with the new age label. How many times can you reinvent pan pipes? New World Music started in 1982 and has been hugely successful. But my aim was to put the music first, take the best from the past and bring it up to date and appeal to the younger market as well as the existing one. One World Music is more progressive in its sound, though that might not be the right term to use, but certainly more original…and I won’t go where certain music has been over-used.”

Although Wood does not invest directly in the production costs of tracks—the operation is royalty-based—he does seek out musicians. As the label’s reputation grows, artists send Wood their music and he’s begun to move in the direction of commissioning tracks. This approach has been made much easier by the development of cheaper, computer-based recording techniques. Recalling the over investment in the synthesizer sound in the 80s, Wood’s only wariness is of tracks that are totally electronic: “they date too quickly. The computer is an instrument and not the only one. The whole dance music thing is sometimes so disposable.” Wood is after the analogue-digital, acoustic-electronic mix, with “computer-based artists adding musicians to give their music an organic flavour that appeals to a broader market.”

Although niche markets are vital to One World, Wood still has his eye on the big picture. Where were those 25,000 copies of Zen Connection sold? Wood explains, “They were originally distributed through New World. We immediately sold 8-9,000 copies in Australia, 5,000 in the US and the rest to Europe, including some major store chains. We have been knocking on the doors of major retailers here; Sanity has a selection of our stuff .” Web sales are also important, as are lifestyle (formerly new age or health food) stores.

“Individual CD sales are developing nicely”, says Wood, “but the compilations are the key thing, very cost effective and allow me to channel money back to artists.” He sees himself as providing left of field quality music, as being open to new developments and “not putting up any barriers.” As the compilations get better known he finds himself coralling better sounds, “the pool of sounds is opening up.” Compilations used to be a by-product of the music industry— “now they can come first, introducing music and artists people have never heard before. It’s a part of global connectivity.” And Wood sees it as very much a matter of how he puts compilations together, the DJ mentality, he says with a smile, of “taking you on a journey where you haven’t been before. People can easily make their own compilations these days but I offer the integrity of my selection.” And it’s downtempo, chill-out cool and good-for-you slow.

Language dominates the planet, but even though “the ears have no ear-lids” (as Murray Schafer puts it) they are deaf to the language of data. Our ears listen for someone approaching, to the car pulling into the driveway, to that special silence between the child getting hurt and the child crying, but we don’t listen to data—we look at it. We see what we mean in pie-charts, bar graphs, scatter plots, box plots, histograms, fly-throughs, diagrams, schematics, blueprints, head maps, x-rays and brain scans.

Bringing data to our ears was the theme of Sonif(y), a day-long public forum of talks and panel discussions held as part of ICAD 2004 (International Conference on Auditory Display), a conference exploring “the art, science and design of audible information.” The forum was followed by Listening to the Mind Listening, a concert of sonifications (data turned into sound) in the Opera House Studio. Cards on the table—I have to declare my participation in both the concert and the composers’ panel discussion.

There were 2 keynote speeches, one by sonification pioneer Gregory Kramer, and another by sound artist Ros Bandt. Both Kramer and Bandt spoke of the need to bring aesthetics into auditory design. Kramer spoke on how the aesthetics of the sounds we make influence our perceptions, emotions and decision making. In his view we are still a long way from understanding how to usefully sound out information about the world.

Bandt’s approach to auditory design builds on her considerable experience as a sound artist and her work on the history of Australian sound design. For Bandt, Australia is a “sung country”, and this has profound ethical consequences for those practicing sound design. She asked that we question our right to add sound into the landscape, only doing so with care and concern and showing “good manners.”

The ethics of auditory design also featured in a panel discussion on the art/science mix of “Data Aesthetics”. There was a divide on the existence or otherwise of aesthetic universals—the old nature/nurture debate that sounds a bit pre-biological nowadays. However, most of the speakers agreed that auditory designs shouldn’t swamp the data, that the data should be allowed to speak for itself and find an objective expression in sound. Can’t see it myself. To be heard, data has to be mapped onto sound and that mapping has to be chosen in what is, at least in part, a cultural act. What’s a good mapping? One that appeals to the people you’re appealing to I guess.

Mapping stock market data to natural sounds was the focus of Brad Mauney’s presentation of some experimental work. The idea was to present changes in share prices as an ambient soundscape of nature sounds that would sit out on the periphery, waiting for some action in the data stream. More thunder meant the market was moving down, birds singing meant salad days were here again. The stockmarket traders who checked it out thought there could be a place for this sort of ambient soundscape in the hurly burly of striving for squillions.

Thilo Hinterberger spoke of using auditory feedback and a brain/computer interface to help people with paralysis communicate. For someone who can’t even shift focus or gaze, auditory feedback provides a mechanism for learning to control brain activity and pick out letters and yes/no-type answers on a computer. Blind and visually impaired people also use sound for environmental feedback. The standard story is that going blind is like a magic potion that gives you super hearing. Unfortunately that’s not true, and a group of researchers spoke of the extensive training needed to give a blind or visually impaired person the skills to navigate something as commonplace as a busy intersection.

The forum finished, people wandered out and waited for the evening and Listening to the Mind Listening, a concert of music based directly on the brain activity (EEG) of someone listening to a piece of music. The recording was taken from 26 electrodes spaced across the head, so the music for the concert was designed to be heard spatially, as if you were inside the head and listening to what was going on at all those electrodes. There were also some restrictions on how the music could be composed. Firstly, the pieces had to be in time with the activity of the brain, so each piece was 5 minutes long just like the brain recording. The pieces also had to be based directly and moment by moment on the data, such that changes in the music represented changes in the brain’s activity.

The concert was packed out. People wandered among the speakers, listening to what the brain was up to on this or that side of the head. EEG data is not that regular or simple—often in the neuro literature EEG is described as noise, so most pieces had a semi-random quality to their rhythms. Almost all of the work could be classified as ‘difficult listening’. The biggest surprise for me was a piece that sounded like a small jazz ensemble. Mostly though, the sounds were synthetic drones and washes, overlaid with various chirps and blips. Some pieces had recognisable sections, others were much the same throughout. Each piece was surprisingly different given that every composer used the same data. The audience response varied from puzzled tolerance to almost reverential eyes-closed contemplation. Some people moved around a lot, others sat still. Some left early.

How did the music operate as a window onto the brain? Hard to tell from just one listen, but for me it was great and the audience were as enthusiastic as I’ve heard for a concert of electronica. A great example of public engagement with research.

Sonif(y) and Listening to the Mind Listening, composers Guillame Potard, Greg Schiemer, Gordon Monroe, Hans Van Raaij, Tim Barrass, John A Dribus, David Payling, Roger Dean, Greg White, David Worrall, John Sanderson, Tom Heuzenroeder, Thomas Hermann, Gerold Baier, Markus Muller, Greg Hooper; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, July 8

Opera and music theatre works often endure the longest of gestations in the arts, let alone extended agonies of birth and often the shortest of lives. The on-off history of composer David Chesworth and librettist Tony MacGregor’s Cosmonaut (commissioned and workshopped but not taken up by OzOpera) entails waves of inspiration, excitement and frustration, radical editing of the libretto (determined by the scale of the forces available at various times), and finally realisation at the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival. I spoke to Tony MacGregor, writer and Executive Producer of Radio National’s Radio Eye and The Night Air about his sources for Cosmonaut.

MacGregor is a great admirer of the writer Elias Canetti (see Janice Muller, “In the space between words”, p. 8), particularly his seminal Crowds and Power. In the mid 1990s MacGregor had wanted to write something about the People Power of the 1980s in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Philippines. David Chesworth called to say there was a commission in the offing. One of the stories MacGregor put to the composer was about the cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev. When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Krikalev was left stranded for 6 months in the space station Mir, “circling the world and immersed in media reports while his fellow Russians took history into their hands.” The librettist sees Krikalev’s situation “as a metaphor for ourselves. We know a lot about what’s happening in the world, but we are largely isolated from it.”

The Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) was another inspiration. A mathematician and “President of the Planet Earth and King of Time”, Khlebnikov believed that “with the right formula you could get inside light and see history.” The “magical sci-fi” possibility of being able to unpick history in a world where “we are saturated by media rays” excited MacGregor. The scenario he invented has a cosmonaut, Viktor, circling the earth but with no likelihood of rescue. In her Melbourne home, Angela, possibly autistic, perhaps schizophrenic, and gifted with mathematical brilliance, accidently tunes her radio to the cosmonaut’s wavelength and communicates with him. With the prospect of him falling into the earth’s atmosphere and burning up “Angela divines the right numbers that will translate Vladimir into light.”

A radio documentary from Poland was another important source for MacGregor’s texturing of his libretto. Constructed from the diaries of cosmonauts, it detailed the banalities of life in outer space, the physical decay and the endless exercise cycling, as if pedalling around the planet. Visions were not uncommon—reports that they had seen Gagarin’s capsule float past, or they’d heard him whistling. There was a sense of the cosmonauts being “simultaneously in the past and the present…travelling through electronic waves of media, through Gaston Bachelard’s ‘logosphere’.” Consequently MacGregor’s proposals for the sound design of Cosmonaut suggested not only the sounds of the historical moment of Viktor’s plight in 1991 but also the crowds of 1989 in Berlin and earlier in Prague, Belgrade and elsewhere. The opening ‘aria’, he says, is a setting of Monica Attard’s report for the ABC of crowds pulling down statues of Lenin and Stalin in Red Square.

MacGregor is resolute that his “magical sci-fi” libretto is not a love story: Angela and the cosmonaut are 2 very different people. Vladimir would prefer to be on the street, in the crowd; while radio contact is probably the only kind that Angela can sustain. But they do connect, far away from the power of crowds and the motion of history, and are transformed, perhaps flowing into history itself. As MacGregor says, if you want to tell this kind of story, how else but through opera. Curiously this Australian work with its Russian sources makes one mindful of the long line of Russian fantasists—including the Futurists, Bulgakov, the Strugatsky Brothers, Pelevin—and the Poles Bruno Schulz and cyberneticist Stanislav Lem (just the kind of writer who might turn out a story like MacGregor’s). The absence of their kind of magic in much writing here suggests that Cosmonaut offers new promise for Australian opera.

Among the hotly anticipated acts at this year’s Liquid Architecture annual feast of sound art was France’s Pierre Bastien, whose unique mechanical metier has guaranteed him a special place in the canon of experimental music makers. Nearly 20 years ago, he constructed his ‘Meccanium’ orchestra, musical automatons constructed from Meccano parts, activated by electro-motors, and designed to play a range of acoustic instruments.

At Liquid Architecture 5 (LA5) Bastien showcased a number of inventions honed over his years as a prominent sound artist. One of these self-playing instruments was a home jukebox set-up with an arm modified to drop at regular intervals to produce short, tactile loops. Another resembled a pianola: a rotating cylinder with specially moulded fingers which, on each revolution, struck the keyboard to melodic effect. Video cameras and projectors relayed the actions of the instruments to the audience, a necessary intervention to explain and mediate the performance.

Bastien’s mech-orchestra produced some beautiful sounds—scratchy, light-industrial Meccano clicks, melodic tinkling from the tiny piano and tactile wheezes from the record player. When coupled with his nonchalantly played pocket trumpet, the proceedings took on a distinctly acid-jazz tone. However, despite the imaginative construction of the orchestra and the beauty of the individual sounds, when listened to with closed eyes the end result resembled the unremarkable fare dished up in cool cafés around the world: polished, smooth and studiously inoffensive. There is also the critical question of length. The works seemed overlong; the execution reminding, again and again, of Stravinsky’s famous comment: “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”

More substantial, theoretically exploratory music making occurred at the hands of the German duo Reinhold Friedl and Michael Vorfeld. In a haptic collision of improvisation and composition, the duo exploited body mechanics to create a series of soundscapes challenging conventional notions of rhythm and performance. The usual listing of Vorfeld on drums and Friedl on piano occludes one of the most significant aspects of their art: their practice of playing instruments in unconventional ways. Vorfeld’s highly sensual stroking motions are delivered in an extremely physical performance that involves leaping, crouching and generally spasmodic movements. In the world of sound art, where anti-spectacular effacement is usually the order of the day, Vorfeld’s agonised facial expressions, physical contortions and dapper appearance in a red satin shirt are especially memorable. Friedl’s interest in playing instruments in unconventional ways was manifested in his use of the inside of the grand piano where he played the strings with a long violin bow. Unexpectedly beautiful sounds emerged from this recontextualisation of a familiar instrument that doesn’t feature significantly in the work of current Australian experimental music. For Friedl, “the invention of new technics is a normal thing for an instrumentalist.”

The duo’s performance opened with quiet, precise introspection, moving through a variety of sounds to a very dense, highly intense noise palette. Vorfeld’s hyper-kinetic movements were counterbalanced by the image of the intensely concentrating Friedl, whose every move was reflected in the brilliant veneer of the piano lid. Both rigorously formal and utterly sensual, the performance built up tremendous power. After Bastien’s mechanised complexity, their radical reductionism resulted in a minimalistic sound experience that was, at times, still overwhelming.

As fascinating as the Germans’ project was, the real thrill of the night was in the first performance by Tim Catlin and Rod Cooper. Catlin played a guitar laid flat on a table with a series of vibrating objects, producing a range of unusual clanging and twanging sounds. Melbourne sculptor Cooper has been building instruments for the past few years and showcased the ‘Frogmouth’ at LA5, an intriguing instrument named after the birds around his home and designed for portability. A reworked hurdy-gurdy design with a metal body, this eye-catching concoction bristled with springs, rods and adapted household items. Pieces of metal doweling cut to tuned lengths produced an extraordinarily hypnotic sound when plucked, as did the bowing effect created by turning the fishing wheel. Cooper’s fondness for found objects shows up in the use of scrap items sourced at the performance location, and in the captivatingly aleatory nature of the sounds created. On the darkened stage, minimally lit with reds, and complemented by Catlin’s sensitive playing, these unearthly, exquisite sounds acquired a devotional edge. Cooper’s intelligent, inventive inquiry into acoustic music served as a necessary reminder that the auratic greatness of celebrities shouldn’t be allowed to overpower the true sui generis when it emerges.

Liquid Architecture 5, Tim Catlin and Rod Cooper; Reinhold Friedel and Michael Vorfeld; Pierre Bastien; Brisbane Powerhouse, July 23

Marshall McGuire has been appointed as The Seymour Group’s new artistic director, and on July 23 the ensemble performed a repertoire representing past, present and future directions. As one might expect from a group with over 27 years of history, the performance incorporated a diverse range of styles.

The majority of the concert lingered in the past with works by Pierre Boulez, Harrison Birtwistle, Barry Conyngham, Eliot Carter, and Michael Smetanin—the kind of repertoire I would have expected from The Seymour Group in the mid-1980s. One of Luciano Berio’s final compositions, Cello Sequenza, represented the present, while the future rested squarely on the shoulders of Cyrus Meurant with the premiere of Transience. Assuming that The Seymour Group is not dedicated to retrospectives, what remained unclear was the direction in which McGuire might take the ensemble. Though the switch from the group’s recent collaborative projects might suggest one path.

Boulez’s Dérive 1 made a splendid opening to the concert. The difficulties of producing a warm, vibrant sound with perfect dynamic balance were easily accounted for. The result was beautiful, calm and urbane. Guest conductor Simon Hewett (best known for his work with Brisbane’s Elision) proved a great asset in achieving this end. I hope that his clear and careful manner will be utilised by an increasing number of Sydney’s new music ensembles.

Unfortunately, the juxtaposition with the second work on the program, Birtwistle’s Tombeau in memoriam Igor Stravinsky, was jarring. This is a small work of only a few minutes’ duration written in 1971 and scored for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet. Its inclusion in this program seems to have been based on the fact that it fitted the available players rather than artistic criteria. Nonetheless it was well performed, its simple repeated-verse structure recalling Stravinsky’s own penchant for repetition.

Like Boulez, Barry Conyngham is a composer who understands combinations of colour. Streams, for flute (Christine Draeger), viola (Benedict Hames) and harp (Marshall McGuire), treats the voices as a single multi-faceted unit, with gestures moving fluidly between the players. But this is also a work of contrasts. Gorgeously clear harmonics juxtapose harsh articulations. Legato lines are interrupted by a violently rattling harp. The writing for harp is particularly subtle with some notes quietly inflected koto-style and pedal positions altered mid-resonance. All 3 performers were in fine form; guest artist Hames will be missed with his impending departure for Germany.

The highlight of the concert was Carter’s Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux, written for Boulez’s 60th birthday and representing the music of North America. This is a wonderful piece dramatically performed by Draeger and Margery Smith (clarinet). Each instrument had a distinct personality, enabling a real dialogue between flute and clarinet. The speech metaphor is not entirely extraneous considering the composition’s attention to different types of breath: rude (rough) and doux (smooth).

For the Australian première of Berio’s Sequenza XIV for solo cello and as a homage to the composer, the cellist Adrian Wallis was backed with green, white and red. For a composer so concerned with the folk traditions of his homeland it was a nice idea, though it obscured the lower half of the instrument, which meant, sadly, that the visual aspect of this exciting performance was lost. The opening gestures are performed without the bow, the left hand activating the strings, and the right hand intricately striking the body of the instrument. Like the best of Berio’s sequenzas, the separation of hands immediately revealed the noisiness of cello technique. Thankfully, Wallis embodies the noisier of the 2 traditions. This is a thoroughly eccentric composition—one moment percussive, the next lyrical.

Meurant’s Transience was the evening’s sole new work and, like the pieces earlier in the night, was interesting for its application of colour. However, in 20 years time I doubt Transience will be regarded as the composer’s finest work. The same could be said of the following piece, Smetanin’s Lichtpunt.

In his closing remarks Marshall McGuire hinted at some exciting projects for next year. Hopefully these will come to fruition, especially if it helps attract a younger audience for the ensemble.

The Seymour Group, conductor Marshall McGuire, guest conductor Simon Hewett; Sydney Conservatorium of Music, July 23

One of the great delights for a composer, and indeed any music lover, is to hear a great work of art live, having previously only heard it on CD. Ensemble Offspring’s fine Australian premiere performances of Phillip Glass’ early work at their concert at The Studio are a case in point. To hear the sheer beauty of these sounds live is an exhilarating experience. Imagine electric keyboard, vibes, flutes, clarinets, soprano saxophone, viola and marimba all played with enormous drive and precision to create a great whirlwind of pulsing, organic energy.

Roland Peelman did a masterful job in putting the ensemble members through their paces, himself playing electric keyboards and nodding the group through the many repetitions. Music in Fifths (1969) for electric organ, soprano saxophone, viola and 2 vibraphones created the unique sound world of repeating parallel fifths. This process is derived from 2 melodic lines moving at the musical interval of a fifth. The aural result is somewhat like a very fast Gregorian chant and creates an open, abstract, contemplative quality. Here the musicians listened, felt together and worked like the best Olympic team. One slip and you’ve lost your place in this process. This kind of physical playing reminded me of the best modern jazz from the same era as the composition; John Coltranes’ famous Quartet and the Miles Davis band of the late 1960s come to mind.

Piece in the Shape of a Square (1968) for 2 flutes worked like a kind of installation piece. Musicians Kathleen Gallagher and Michael Sitsky walked slowly around a square made from erected music stands, slowly following each other and ending where they had begun, all the time reading and playing the many musical patterns that make up the piece. The work had the whimsy of the best of Erik Satie’s work, but lacked the precision and drive of the other 2 Glass compositions performed on the night.

Music in Similar Motion (1969) for electric organ, 2 flutes, soprano saxophone, clarinet, viola and marimba was the piece de resistance. One has to give oneself to this music to get something in return. Here the rewards are many: an incredible sense of life and affirming power, drive and energy, all in the service of a greater logic.

Like Music in Fifths, the music is based primarily on repeated, added and subtracted melodic patterns in parallel motion. The musicians gave of themselves to create a wonderful throbbing engine, motoring to a sudden stop at the end. Having Roland Peelman on keyboard out front to nod in the pattern changes created a concentration that only intensified the groove.

This Ensemble Offspring Concert was a tribute to the foresight of the director/programmer in choosing these highly influential early minimalist works. It is hard to listen to these compositions in 2004 and not be reminded of Brian Eno, David Bowie, Robert Fripp and other composers who caught this bug from 1970 onwards and made it their own, helping to build a whole genre of creative, accessible new music that we now take for granted.

To complement the 3 Glass pieces, in the first half of the concert, we were treated to glass playing of a different kind. Sydney composer Damien Ricketson’s A Line Has Two for soprano, aulos, 2 clarinets, 2 percussion and electronics, also included the exquisite sound of bowed wine glasses. A Line Has Two explored the beauty and very sensual nature of created sounds. Watching this performance reminded me of wonderful nights in the theatre seeing the plays of the French absurdist writer Eugene Ionesco, where actors move chairs around from place to place, much like the musicians moved around in shoeless feet, bowing wine glasses and vibraphones. The work had a very static quality and many sounds seemed to hover in the air before they landed exquisitely in one’s ear. Of particular richness here was the voice of soprano Alison Morgan and the sound of the aulos, a nasal sounding reed instrument that created a sense of erotic longing, blending with the more contemporary metal vibes, wine glasses and electronics.

Written in collaboration with the Australian poet Christopher Wallace-Crabbe and based on the poem The Alignments, A Line Has Two created a spaciousness and an ever-elusive sense of resolution. This work is like a wooden box of very small compartments full of delicious treats for the ears and eyes.

It’s dark, the room lights are off. On stage there’s a semi-circular battery of large speakers. Stolid and flat, each speaker has a tiny green light saying “I’m on, just don’t expect a conversation.” Sounds start to come out, scratchy end-of-record noises, fade-ins and outs, bird hoots and budgie rants. The occasional chord pops in as a reminder of music for hands and fingers all working together. Cymbals run backwards, drainpipes gurgle; the piece finishes with some plinky drip sounds that exploit the spatial array of the speakers more than most of the previous material.

There’s always been a problem with the live presentation of ‘device’ music compared to ‘motor action’ music. Whether it’s a cassette player, reel-to-reel, CD player or a computer up on stage, it’s tricky. Just the machines? Or maybe some visuals as an accompaniment? Tonight, Lloyd Barrett comes in and sits behind the speakers. I can glimpse his legs through the metal of the speaker stands. Every so often his hand reaches down for the plastic water bottle. I’d like to think that he’s had a good night up there on stage, behind those speakers.

After the interval comes Trigger Mortis. COMPOST, the composition team of Damian Barbeler, Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste, Freeman McGrath and Toby Wren have joined up with drummer Grant Collins to write “drumless drum music.” For tonight’s performance Collins plays rubber pads plugged into a computer. The computer is programmed to pump out different sounds according to things like “which of 8 levels of hardness has Grant hit pad A this time”, or “it’s beat 173, time for the little pad on the left to have a completely different function.” This collaboration of performer and composers produces music for the sensibility and skill set that a virtuoso drummer like Collins possesses, as against music that might just as well be played on a keyboard.

Cowboys in Pain, by Julian Day, starts the show. It’s conceptually tight. Corny snaps of sound are structured in a simple rise and fall. Filters open and close, delay times are cramped to distortion, vocals peek out. Damian Barbeler is next up with There’s a snare in there—music for a world run by high functioning autists and obsessive compulsives. Plinky wood blocks and watery rushes make for a candy floss world-music that even gets a bit funky. Collins stops and chats to the audience about having to work against the clock and keep up with the computer changes so that the sounds come out right.

Freeman McGrath (Momentus Torque) then supplies the Collins virtuoso machine with samples from the profiteering worthies and victims of the asylum seeker/border protection hysteria. There’s lots of great rhythm playing—we can hear the drumsticks hitting the rubber pads over the top of the programmed sound, but we don’t hear the rhythms in the music itself. In this piece it’s as if a simple triggering system would have worked just as well as drums, and the compositional goals don’t seem as tightly linked to the means of production.

Toby Wren’s 2 pieces use samples of his own guitar playing as the sound material. The first piece returns us to the classics of compositional technique, guitar sounding like guitar, guitar sounding like zither. Collins then alerts us to the fact that there is tricky playing ahead. He now has to play ratios of 3, 4, 5 and 7 beats into each pulse, requiring a different speed for each leg and arm. He says he has to have “the limbs enter at different rates”, like his head is calling out to a body that hangs down from his neck: “I choose to activate the right lower limb now. Ready, set, go!”, and Collins becomes 4 human tape loops. You could use this guy’s playing to calibrate a physics experiment. Elephant bass, kazoo trumpet: the music sounds like some hideous machine learning how to strangle.

Jaaniste brings up the rear. His first piece comes on like a rapid-fire remix of the William Tell Overture. It’s actually samples of Swan Lake ordered into a martial disco music where snatches of melody thump and grind, inspiring the troops to put on the polyester and dance out to war.

Program ends. Applause is huge. Encore with another Jaaniste piece, this time sounding like a toyshop monkey playing the calliope. Program ends again. Applause is huge again.

Two recent artist-initiated exhibitions in Adelaide pay careful attention to the operations of language. The point where language fails is the place where art (sometimes) takes chances and risks failure. Both Manifesto and Interval: proximity are concerned with relationships, action and the possibility of generating something unexpected, or even new, from the most intimate familial relations to wider social agendas.

Queens Theatre provides a chance for installation artists to consider the dimensions of spatial atmospherics offered by a building that appears ruined. The artists are there to greet visitors, offering tea, coffee, biscuits and a floor plan. The hospitality is a great idea and provides a perfect entrance. Video/DVD projection, though ubiquitous in the last few years, is used here to good effect by Julie Henderson and Lisa Harms. Tucked around the first corner is Harms’ circle-work_keep, a DVD projection and soundscape footnoted with assembled objects barely lit by flashlights. Upturned preserving jars and a goldfish bowl recall experiments in the measurement of sensation. The primary image is projected as a circle. I get a sense of movement, of hair perhaps. The soundscape is low, of the body, at a distance yet close. The text moves from left to right, a simple loop, eloquent fragments from the middle of things: “Story number two: I keep/ I keep the wolf from the door with velvet strip/ & gossamer thread I keep/ a bare & approximate distance.” Line breaks become intervals, the font is Nuptial Script. Designed by Edwin W Shaar in about 1952, Nuptial was developed especially for wedding invitations. Here it signifies the baroque: excess, loss and hope.

The click, click, click from Henderson’s video work in the next room resonates in this one, calling me in. he drinks only when thirsty uses the intransitive verb—a verb with no object. And there he is, the naked man, running. We see him from behind as he runs away from the camera down the centre of 2 tyre tracks that mark a green field. Via jump cuts and fades he moves backwards, forwards and runs on the spot. It’s as though he is always trying to catch up with himself. The image appears large on the wall, and twice more on a television and video camera monitor. These are assembled inside a large packing crate along with the rest of the technology used in the work. Everything is bound roughly with rope, as if all at sea.

Around the corner of the same space is Anna Hughes’ installation Drawing on the particular. The choice of materials is deliberate and sure: “Steamed European Beech” is used to make the frame for an image of an old woman’s hands, palms opened toward the one who watches. “One thousand metres” of thread punctures the image (a “digital print on trace”), a precise stitching that hangs like hair between the arthritic fingers of the old woman, marking the simultaneous distance and proximity of death—death as a passage. The frame is made heavier by the addition of coffin screws and the whole is suspended from a small circular sieve-like object at the back of the room. Or is it a drum? The object, in turn, is held tight by the structure of the building.

Together these works operate like a refrain. They suggest stories—of sadness, of aging or death, of puberty and fear, of melancholy and love. There are aleatory resonances between sound and image from one work to another. The alliance here is both intimate and distant. (A daughter, a lover, a grandmother.) “This distance is never covered, always to be passed through, and even to be started anew” (Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, Continuum, London, 2002).

Manifesto operates around the impossibility of the declarative statement as an effective political agent. As a group show it is a good example of the kinds of work and questions the new Downtown gallery, Adelaide’s only artist-run space at the moment, is attracting and generating. Curator Bridget Currie wrote in an email: “Downtown Art Space is really the only forum for such an exhibition in Adelaide. Manifesto was a bit of a wild unpredictable beast of an exhibition, too broad and spontaneous for the CAOS [Contemporary Art Organisations of Australia] galleries. An artist-run space is the ideal venue for trying out ideas, without the surety of a ‘result.’ Artist-run initiatives have an important role in making artists’ voices heard. Downtown provided an informal and supportive space to air some (one’s) opinions.”

The exhibition grew from Currie’s fascination with the crazy manifestos of the Futurists, written when a ‘statement’ carried the strength of demand and action: a possible future. I asked Currie about the impetus for the show: “Well I think that the easy road as an artist is to avoid making statements (other than the ubiquitous grant application). This protects you in a way. Political art with a capital P has been frowned on in recent years and I wanted to explore ways in which diverse artists could approach this area. It was important to me to curate artists who didn’t necessarily use text or were overtly political in their practice. In developing this show I was interested in eliciting a response that went deeper than art practice, that was about seeing something underlying—what would you say if you needed to declare something to the world? Because the manifesto is a declamatory form. In a modernist sense this can mean a didactic, propagandist mode, but now I feel people have a much warier relationship with grand statements.

“The works in this show ended up being so varied, from a real world protest manifesto (Sydney Art Seen) to tongue in cheek (Marcin Kobelecki) to personal and poetic (Louise Flaherty). Also, as an artist who makes work that has been described as obscure, I wanted to challenge myself to let other people into my brain a little more. The works were incredibly idiosyncratic in approach and very generous in the end. Looking at the show was for me like being lost in many little worlds (or world views), stories with different narrators. Perhaps it was slightly confronting for some viewers; as you interacted with most works like they were short books—texts in a way. I noticed that some viewers looked at the text as though it was just an aesthetic visual thing, not engaging with its content at all. Glancing briefly at a page of typewritten text, what could they hope to understand?”

Bridget is currently collating all the works into a book and downloadable PDF file which will foreground the “reading” aspect of the works and also serve as a reference.

Lisa Harms, Julie Henderson, Anna Hughes, Interval: proximity, Queens Theatre, Adelaide, August 21-22; Manifesto, curator Bridget Currie, various artists, Downtown Art Space, July 14-24

Margaret Roberts’ Red check closed the old Tin Sheds Gallery with a final, moving exhibition. Roberts’ practice focuses on the less than obvious aspects of architectural environments, and makes building/site and visitor movement/ interactivity integral to her artwork. Tin Sheds Director Jan Fieldsend writes that Roberts’ process is one of recognition and remembering. While the new space was being prepared, Roberts was simultaneously undoing the old gallery: re-touching surfaces, removing 40 spotlights, tracking and skylight covers, demolishing exhibition walls, returning the space to an earlier state. This unseen activity represented a dismantling of elements and meanings, a delving into perception that lies at the core of Roberts’ concerns. Here achieving an astute political sublime, she keeps a reactionary era in mind while returning the building to itself, removing the contrivances of trite gallery-ness, allowing something else to hover in that space between floor and roof.

From the seesaw to the swings that Roberts suspended from the rafters, and coat hooks installed along both walls, there was an eerie sense of absence suggestive of possibly sinister events. (In a schoolyard? The Old Darlington School lies just behind, a relic of a vanished local community.) Swinging and seesawing through such history, her trademark pigment powders marked out large red iron oxide squares over a grey painted floor. A throw of this mystic powder causes a through-the-looking-glass picnic cloth, a flag, a semaphore, a non-sense distortion to settle over the former garage floor. People who enter may or may not take up the invitation to swing, but still have no option but to leave evidence: footprints, scrapes, smears, as the oxide spread and it was no longer clear whether the floor underneath was red or grey.

Roberts says: “Opening night visitors went berserk, disintegrating the checks—red went walking out of the building like the long-past left wing politics of the 1960s and 70s: shifting red sentiment to red sediment.” A comment on the passing on of a tradition at the Tin Sheds, Roberts speaks of loss, death, disappearance. “The red of the checks is like blood or tears. It’s an invitation to the public to jump in and make a commitment.” She reflects: “How do you document site-specific art, where the main thing deleted is the site itself?” Here, where the erasure of site will be doubly final, she provided cameras as a means for the public to record traces of their visit.

Roberts, a lap-swimmer, also modelled the installation on her local pool’s change-rooms: 13 white handtowels hanging on dowelling hooks (she notes one towel disappeared). Towels to wipe hands or feet, to clean walls, and disposable cameras to document the chaos. People’s soiled shoes carried imprints of the artwork and traces of the disappearing gallery out into the street beyond and on to the new space in the Wilkinson Building (School of Architecture, University of Sydney): a bloody analogy, murder or transfusion? Alongside the cameras the towels also gathered imprints, tiny shrouds, dry, blood-stained. To the side a small white storeroom was staffed by 3 attendants on the opening night, wearing aprons, wiping and removing pigment from visitors’ shoes, reverential, biblical, yet futile. These cloth traces remain, recent relics placed on shelves, a photo-archive.

The change-room was an analogy for social change, but not always for the best. Good intention and commitment are sometimes lost and defeated in the process of evolution. Margaret Roberts perhaps alludes to a slower world, but also to a grim past, to death camps and gas chambers, a final solution, giving up: “Take your clothes off, take a shower, swing and die.” Red check, as an action for and by the public, was ultimately a requiem, not a celebration: it put bodies, place and memory into the whirling mixing-bowl of history, and strewed the batter up City Road.

Margaret Roberts, Red check, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, June 11-July 3

Feathers float—so do clouds, and dreams. Three weeks ago, a dream didn’t die but certainly dimmed when Aboriginal filmmaker-photographer Michael Riley lost the fight against renal disease after a number of years. That he enjoyed life there is no doubt, as he had fought his affliction and the odds right to the end. It inspired me, and will inspire me into the future.

Michael Riley was born on the Talbragar mission but lived in Dubbo until he finished school. His mother was a Gamilleroi woman from Moree and his father a Wiradjuri man from the Dubbo area. By his mid-teens, he was already making and printing black and white photos using a developing kit from the local chemist. “I was interested in the process—I was inquisitive. I just knew there were images I wanted to do.”

A line of sophisticated Aboriginal people come from the Dubbo and Talbragar ‘mission’ area on the junction of the Talbrager and Macquarie Rivers. They fall between, in Michael’s words, “the Rad Ab and the Trad Ab”, between those politically active marchers of the streets and the spiritual people sought out by new-agers and visiting backpackers. It was these Aboriginal people that Michael strove to highlight. He would count himself among them. His male relatives and friends nicknamed him ‘Elvis’ because of his slicked-back hair and stylish dress. This was a worldly art practitioner and person. His quiet, seemingly aloof manner actually belied a deep-thinking person of extreme warmth, humour and generosity. There were periods of silence where he was present physically but also as a strong and positive spirit—a very masculine thing.

One of my fondest memories is of visiting him early in his illness, when he’d come home from hospital. He asked me to stay for dinner. Even though invalid and on crutches, 10 minutes of shuffles produced a beautiful risotto meal.

From Dubbo, he became a carpenter’s apprentice in outer Sydney and went on to a photography course run by Bruce Hart at the Tin Sheds at Sydney University in the early 1980s. He followed Hart to be his technical assistant at Sydney College of the Arts. At this time he appeared in the groundbreaking Koori 84 exhibition. Spending the next few years at Rapport Agency in Sydney, he produced the Portraits by a Window series of his friends who were part of the amazingly creative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists’ scene he moved in.

His work was first really exhibited in the Aboriginal and Islander Photographers Exhibition at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Sydney in 1986. These ‘urban’ Aboriginal artists who came to socialise and work together would go on to form the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Ko-operative, dispelling stereotypes of Aboriginal art as being only apolitical, spiritual narratives by old men living in the centre and north of Australia. All would go on to lead remarkable careers in the visual arts.

Michael’s first film, made in 1987 whilst he was completing a traineeship at Film Australia, was Boomalli: Five Koori Artists, an innovative exposé of a set of his co-members (Jeffrey Samuels, Arone Raymond Meeks, Tracey Moffatt, Bronwyn Bancroft and Fiona Foley). In 1987, he worked as a trainee on Tracey Moffatt’s first film, Nice Coloured Girls.

From here he took off with the photo-filmic essays Sacrifice (1993), Fly Blown (1998) and his evocative short film Empire (1997). All these films deal with the broad but brutal issues of ‘black armband’-white blindfold, true facts of Australian colonial history—a colonialism beginning with cursory sightings, then violent exchanges, wars and massacres, followed by the saving and assimilation of the survivors by Christian missionaries. It is a history of ‘clearing the land’, of wiping clean and re-writing, of Aboriginal people being murdered or forced from the land and onto missions and reserves. The gun or the crucifix. Crosses, prayers, stigmata, dark fish, Bibles, water, cracked earth. The death of the environment with Christian overtones. Biblical plagues—droughts, locusts—a poisoning of the water. As rural industry physically takes the land, Christian zeal takes the soul.

Once you get beyond the coastal belt, your vision is divided between a wide horizon that you’d swear actually curves, and a sky so big you think you’re going to fall into it. In most of Michael Riley’s later work he would return to his community and this landscape again and again. This is the same landscape that Ivan Sen of the next generation of Aboriginal filmmakers would explore. Although travelling the world, Michael had a strong sense of community, often working with relatives and friends as subjects and assistants. He was an Aboriginal man through and through and always thought of his art as Aboriginal art.

He kept his life in separate compartments: his time with his son, his time with his family, his time with his friends and time with the art world. The work that was to be his last, Clouds, appears to be more personal and free. A floating feather, a sweeping wing, a vigilant angel, the cows from ‘the mission’ farm, a single Australian plague locust in flight, a comforting Bible and a graceful emblematic returning boomerang. The boomerang is really the only overtly Aboriginal image in the set and the locust one of the few native animals left that is visible and cannot be swept aside. It persists.

It is still a fact in some Aboriginal communities that by the time the generations of sons have reached 30 they have no male role models to guide them, owing to their fathers dying. To lose someone so gifted is a loss for all of us who knew him, and a loss to all who appreciate art. It’s interesting that Michael chose to avoid the word ‘dream’ in naming the series, avoiding glib connections to ‘Dreamtime’. What we see and sense in his work is the culmination of self-examination, a series of poetic photographic texts, increasingly poignant because of events in his personal life; these are dreams of childhood memories of Dubbo, of floating—release.

Victoria Cattoni, Through the Kebaya,<BR /> video installation performance,<BR /> Bandung, Indonesia, 2003″></p>
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Victoria Cattoni, Through the Kebaya,
video installation performance,
Bandung, Indonesia, 2003

“We give meaning to the kebaya but the kebaya also gives meaning to us.”
Suryakusuma, JI, catalogue essay, Membaca Kebaya: Reading the Kebaya, Denpasar, Bali, 2003

The blouse-like Indonesian kebaya is a ‘doorway’ for Darwin-based artist Victoria Cattoni, an entry into the possibility and performance of a transcultural space. It is the paradoxical medium and message for her video performance-based Masters research project Through the Kebaya at Charles Darwin University. This project comprises a 5 year journey in which she mastered Bahasa Indonesian and developed a widespread program and network of collaborative performer communities. Though Cattoni explores the kebaya as a new media/installation artist, the project also makes for fascinating visual anthropology, supported by a methodology and interactive focus that would make any self-respecting anthropologist proud.

My first experience of Through the Kebaya was in Darwin in November 2002. Cattoni had returned from Denpasar, Bali, where she has spent most of the last 5 years. The wound of Bali’s ‘Black October’ bombings was still raw, with Darwin Hospital’s emergency unit working round-the-clock as the nearest port for ‘First World’ medical treatment. The gauze-like look of the kebaya evoked news footage of serious burn victims arriving at Darwin airport. Even aside from such macabre associations, the exhibition was highly charged given the temper of Indonesian-Australian and Muslim-West relations. The timing then, as now (post-Australian Embassy bombing), could not be more poignant for Cattoni’s deceptively simple vehicle for cultural affinity and critique.

Tamasya Kebaya, the initial Darwin exhibition at Charles Darwin University Gallery, established the video, performance and installation elements Cattoni later utilised in a range of workshop/exhibition venues throughout Bali and Java. According to Cattoni, these are the parts of Indonesia where the kebaya is most visible in daily life. Part of the national costume for Indonesian women (worn traditionally as the kain-kebaya, the kain being the unstitched cloth around the lower half of the body), the kebaya as a cultural phenomenon is rich in paradox. Despite its nationalist symbolism the kebaya is not pan-Indonesian. It was shaped from foreign origins, an amalgam of Arabic, Chinese and European influences dating from the 16th century. Balinese women adopted the kebaya as late as the 20th century (ostensibly under Dutch orders), but are now among its staunchest advocates, with some of the more modern, transparent Balinese variations adding to the garment’s paradoxical quality of concealment and revelation.

The revelation of Cattoni’s initial Darwin workshop and exhibition was in its discreet layering of still and moving imagery, text and performance. The workshop involved voluntary participants choosing a kebaya (or 2) from a well-stocked rack, to try on in front of a mirror, behind which was a camera. Cattoni, herself a participant-performer, was on hand to guide the process, as was a 2 minute video loop, Bali stills, which contextualised the kebaya in Balinese/Indonesian society. The edited footage of Darwinites (including Indonesians) (un)dressing and speaking to the mirror/camera was projected onto the gallery wall in the exhibition. Video stills, the video-loop and rack of kebayas completed the exhibition’s installation, with the attendance of workshop performers on opening night further magnifying the self-reflexive and multifaceted poetry of Cattoni’s project.

Each manifestation of Through the Kebaya throughout Bali and Java, and again in Darwin (2004), was a layer-building process in itself, particularly in the cumulative potency of varied workshops feeding into other workshops and exhibitions. Cattoni used the initial footage from Darwin, for example, as workshop material in Indonesia. The ‘action-based’ nature of the research, as outlined in her thesis, is fundamental to the project’s intuitive and discursive documentation, and to Cattoni’s artistic strategy. Describing herself as “an artist working outside the comfort zones of my own culture”, Cattoni’s personal readings of the kebaya matter little here. Wary of exoticising the garment, and the political climate surrounding her work, she maintains the utmost distance from the project’s ‘centre of meaning.’

It is the voices and gestures of a sizeable cast of mostly Indonesians and some Australians who give form and meaning to the kebaya—girls, women and men who share a transcultural and, to a certain degree, transgendered liminality. This is “more than an exchange of culture”, argues Cattoni; “this is culture making—it demonstrates in an emphatic way how it is we all add value, create meaning, construct identity.” The sense of ‘play’ in the process is apparent in other work by Cattoni, such as her award-winning entry in Darwin’s recent “Sculpture in the Park” exhibition, The art of buoyancy, a 2 minute film screened in a tourist shop window.

Through the Kebaya represents the first comprehensive exploration of a garment close to the heart of Indonesian femininity and sense of tradition, yet largely overlooked as a unique historical or cultural object. In the loaded realisation of her lace-brocade medium, the underlying paradox is Cattoni’s creative ‘absence.’

Victoria Cattoni, Through the Kebaya, a cross-cultural project; Indonesia and Australia (2002-2004)

A Place to Tremble is a site-specific installation which continues and expands the techniques, themes and philosophical preoccupations of Matt Warren’s ongoing practice. Warren is a reflective art-maker best known as a multimedia/new media artist. He is indisputably one of Tasmania’s most important young practitioners and has received numerous grants and awards, including many for international projects.

Warren’s work explores concepts such as spirituality, the soul and transcendence, ‘fragile’ topics for which there is little or no real evidence to support personal theories and opinions. A Place to Tremble works with memories and reports of experiences and encounters with the transcendental, the sublime and spiritual elation—in short, ecstasy.

As one enters the gallery space, there is a sensation of hypnotic calm. It is deceptively easy to apprehend the elements of the installation: 2 gauze ‘screens’ hang in diagonally opposite corners of the room and 2 projectors are placed so as to cast black and white handwritten and printed text onto the gauze, which billows slightly in the ambient air, somewhat distorting the script. A soft soundscape fills the gallery, consisting of snippets of different voices hardly intelligible over a rumbling buzz. The sound, Warren explains in his artist’s statement, can be seen as an attempt to induce the epiphany-like sensations of the spiritual: “a combination of well-being, melancholy, fear and elation; a strange, contradictory combination.” The text, shown overlapping, layered and backwards, is a mix of personal writing, quotes and interviews on the “otherworldly.”

The unknowability of the work’s subject matter is echoed in its presentation: minimalist installation style, the gallery obscured, the ambient sound difficult to pinpoint, the projected text mostly impossible to decipher. For this viewer, the work, with its ‘sensurround’ atmosphere, is not only entirely engaging but simultaneously complex and elegantly simple. The aesthetics of the work are masterful, the sheer, rippling fabric with its stark, white patterned text contrasting with the dark of the gallery space. The sound is both soothing and frustrating in its incomprehensibility. A Place to Tremble envelops the gallery-goer with its seductive allure.

Warren’s show was one of the many highlights of the recent, rather curiously titled Living Artists’ Week, a festival of open studios, exhibitions, demonstrations, talks and other special events. The major group exhibition [in]stall(s), in Hobart’s Long Gallery, featured another work by Matt Warren, which again used light, sound and ambient space (“a multi-CD installation”) to explore metaphysical considerations—this time the nature of truth and the fallibility of the mind. This talented artist does not shy away from the big questions, and the results are always intriguing.

The latest film from Alice Springs-based filmmaker David Vadiveloo may be a documentary about the Stolen Generations, but the director recounts a behind-the-scenes story that could easily be dismissed as contrived if included in a fiction film. Having self-funded the shooting of Beyond Sorry, he showed a rough-cut to a number of broadcasters in an attempt to obtain further financing. In a depressingly familiar scenario for Australian documentary makers, a local broadcaster offered a significant pre-sale deal on one, non-negotiable condition: the level of conflict between black and white Australia in the film had to be notched up.

Vadiveloo had no trouble walking away from the broadcaster’s offer, given that Beyond Sorry is a portrait of Zita Wallace, described by Vadiveloo as: “A living incarnation of the true nature of forgiveness and the true nature of reconciliation.” This is despite the fact that Wallace was removed from her family in the Arrente country of Central Australia at age 8. Assistance with finishing Beyond Sorry ultimately came, without strings attached, from the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). Vadiveloo acknowledges his good fortune at being given a free hand, noting: “Many young filmmakers in Australia seem to be hamstrung by what they think broadcasters want to see.”

Working both as a lawyer and a filmmaker, Vadiveloo’s career has been inextricably linked with Indigenous issues. At the Central Lands Council, he was involved in a successful Native Title claim incorporating Alice Springs. Since graduating from the documentary program at the Victorian College of the Arts, he has made a number of films depicting aspects of Aboriginal life, most notably the shorts Trespass (2001) and Bush Bikes (2002; RT59, p19), both of which have enjoyed considerable success on the festival circuit in Australia and overseas.

His new film is a study of the Stolen Generations from a fresh, non-sensational angle. Beyond Sorry treats the Howard Government’s inertia as irrelevant, looking instead, like Dhakiyarr vs The King (directors Tom Murray and Allan Collins, 2003, RT61, p22), at grassroots reconciliation. Indeed, the title suggests the need to move past the well-rehearsed arguments, buck-passing and entrenched positions of national politics by focusing on the micro level of interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Rather than looking at the dramatic moment of child snatching that haunts the popular imagination post-Rabbit Proof Fence, Vadiveloo says he “wanted to focus on the extent of the aftershock, the ripples that these policies caused through generation after generation.” He examines the decades after Zita’s removal from her family, including her upbringing in Catholic missions and her pragmatic decision to become a nun working in New Guinea, before she returned to education, married and raised a family. Bringing us up to the present, the film charts Zita’s decision to leave behind her suburban existence in Alice Springs to return to her grandfather’s country.

Two other voices also provide perspectives on Zita’s life. Aggie Abbott, like Zita branded a ‘half-caste’, escaped capture on that fateful day by following her mother’s advice to hide in the bush. As a witness to Zita’s former life, and now a respected Arrente elder, Aggie provides a counterpoint to Zita’s story. Zita’s non-indigenous husband Ron rounds out the portrait, testifying to the difficulties they have faced as a couple straddling the white and Aboriginal worlds.

There are no easy, happy endings in Beyond Sorry. Zita recalls how she was initially rejected when she returned to her family, a fate shared by many of the Stolen Generations. Having been told by nuns that the children were dead, Arrente culture prohibited the community from speaking about them. Unsurprisingly, her mother then found it difficult to accept her daughter was alive. It was only Zita’s persistence in pursuing her heritage that allowed them to eventually become close.

Praising Zita as a “voice without complaint”, Vadiveloo says she wanted people to understand that “there’s more to reconciliation than just saying sorry or scribbling in a book.” The film shows Zita as a living embodiment of the very real contradictions at work in contemporary Australia. She is a woman who will one minute quote John Laws in her pride at not “bludging off Australia” and the next rhapsodise about returning to her grandfather’s dreaming.

As well as examining complex questions of identity through the documentary form, David Vadiveloo has been central in putting together an ambitious new multi-platform project. UsMob, which began production in August, is set in Hidden Valley, the town camp outside Alice Springs where Aggie Abbott lives. It will include appearances by Aggie and other locals, but unlike Beyond Sorry, UsMob has received production funding under the AFC and ABC New Media and Digital Services Broadband Production Initiative. The SAFC, Telstra and Adelaide Film Festival have also invested. Spanning documentary, interactive new media and docudrama, it will centre on teenage characters in the Hidden Valley community.

An interactive series with multi-path storylines, UsMob includes plans for online, television and theatrical exhibition. Vadiveloo describes the project as “unique and logistically challenging…it attempts to focus on cross-platform delivery that encourages everybody to engage with the story, and in doing so, to engage with the culture.” He sees UsMob as setting a new benchmark in working with the local community. All the actors and storylines come from the town camps, and every single phase has been checked and approved by relevant elders, traditional owners and the peak Indigenous organisation, Tangentyere Council. All participants are paid and a percentage of any profit will go to town camp communities.

The interactive component of UsMob includes 2 games. The first is time- and skills-based, with echoes of Bush Bikes. It requires competitors to build a bike and move through terrain. The second game will test bush survival instincts through the acquisition and application of knowledge about the harsh outback environment.

For Vadiveloo the common strand linking the UsMob components is the aim of creating a non-didactic learning tool that avoids stereotypes about black and white lifestyles and allows participants to engage and become familiar with the environment of Hidden Valley. On the evidence of his film work thus far, David Vadiveloo’s future projects will no doubt make their own vital contribution to grass-roots reconciliation by furthering understanding between the frequently distant worlds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

This year's Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF) continued the event's interest in Argentinian cinema with a set of features and documentaries illustrating the extent to which the nation's turbulent political history has had an overwhelming impact on its filmmaking. This can be seen in both a recurring thematic backdrop of economic chaos and in the direct, murderous oppression of dissident filmmakers.

Billed as comedies, the feature films The Magic Gloves (director Martin Rejtman) and Buena Vida Delivery (Leonardo di Cesare) deal with escalating social situations resulting from chance encounters. In The Magic Gloves, taxi driver Alejandro endures a series of humiliations after being drawn by an entrepreneurial former school friend into an unwise investment. Buena Vida Delivery centres on the trials of Hernan: the family of his new housemate move their biscuit-making operation into his home and eventually have to be removed by force. In both these films, the backdrop of Argentina's successive economic disasters looms large. The famed Argentine magic realism is replaced by heavy-handed metaphor and screwball situation comedy as protagonists struggle with disappointment and betrayal by those in whom they place their trust.

Raymundo is more explicitly concerned with Argentina's history, detailing the life and work of political filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer. Using archival footage, extensive interviews, diary extracts, home Super 8 and Gleyzer's own films, this documentary builds a picture of a filmmaker whose commitment to the struggle for social and economic justice for the people of Latin America ultimately cost him his life. The filmmakers say they “don't intend to mystify Raymundo's figure, nor to enclose him in a time capsule, but to act as a bridge for others to continue the struggle. That's why this re-discovery is so important for the continuation of this kind of cinema.”

Raymundo charts Gleyzer's life against Argentina's continual political upheaval, starting with his emergence amidst the revolutionary spirit of the Free Cinema movement of the 1960s, through extensive work with idealistic documentary collectives, to his first, and last, dramatic film. Gleyzer's son, Diego, narrates much of the story, reading his father's diary extracts. Diego's image is revealed only late in the documentary, leaving the audience, by now familiar with Gleyzer's visage, to gasp at the incredible likeness-a tribute to the power of intelligent, thoughtful editing. By the time Gleyzer's inevitable capture and torture is revealed after the completion of his film The Traitors, a barely fictionalised account of treachery by union leaders, the documentary had gathered so much emotional momentum that there were few dry eyes in the cinema. From an overwhelming amount of material, makers Virna Molina and Ernesto Ardito have assembled an arresting masterwork.

After the documentary, a screening of The Traitors was made all the more poignant by learning that Raymundo Gleyzer toured the film in Australia shortly before his murder. Based on actual people and events, The Traitors traces the deterioration of a unionist's principles as he initially fights for workers' rights, is co-opted and bought by the system, and finally ends up one of those against whom he once fought. Twin narratives, 20 years apart, are intercut to contrast the story of the young idealist (the lover) and the cynical incumbent (the killer). The collocation of the screenings greatly enhanced the viewing of The Traitors and created a reflexive climate; the documentary establishes the film's tragic significance in Raymundo's oeuvre, and includes footage from the production process shot by Raymundo and the radical documentary group Grupo de Cine.

Further intensifying the retrospective's reflection on Argentine filmmaking was the inclusion of Fernando 'Pino' Solanas' latest film, Memoria de Saqueo, translated as A Social Genocide, though History of a Plundering is closer. The film takes the 2001 freezing of all bank accounts and subsequent popular revolt as the starting point for its investigation of Argentina's current situation. The pillaging of Argentina parallels that of many Latin American countries, exploited first by Spain and Europe and then by the USA and multinational business interests. It is against these ongoing forms of colonisation that Memoria de Saqueo remonstrates so forcefully. The documentary is an example of “Third Cinema”-neither Hollywood nor arthouse-which, in the famous manifesto, Solanas declared “a cinema of decolonisation.”

Solanas updates the metaphor and literary allusions of his incendiary 1969 experimental polemic La Hora De Los Hornos with a deeply cinematic video essay that places the blame for Argentina's continuing economic crises on the treachery of governments, banks and other institutions. Los Hornos' powerful intercutting between workers and slaughtered livestock is reworked in Memoria de Saqueo through sweeping tracking shots of gleaming mahogany boardrooms counterposed with graphic images of poverty, scavenging children and an unforgettable image of a starving baby. The film's nationalist agenda is central to Solanas' theory, as “Third Cinema is also aligned with national culture…that of the ensemble of the popular classes.”

Memoria de Saqueo, together with Raymundo and The Traitors, constitute a body of contemporary Third Cinema works galvanised by injustice and shot through with common themes of treachery and betrayal. At a time when political documentary filmmaking inhabits a position of public visibility, popularity and participation like never before, the power and beauty of the Argentine focus at BIFF is highly significant. Argentina's future remains uncertain and despite the inordinate difficulties and the penurious climate for filmmaking, agitational works remain as important as ever. In Raymundo Gleyzer's words: “Filmmakers who work towards a revolutionary cinema in South America must not limit themselves to denouncing, or to the appeal for reflection; it must be a summons for action. It must appeal to our people's capacity for tears and anger, enthusiasm and faith…We must therefore serve as the stone which breaks silence, or the bullet which starts the battle. Poetry is not a goal in itself. Among us, poetry is a tool to transform the world.”

Argentinian Spotlight, 13th Brisbane International Film Festival, Regent Cinemas, July 27-August 8

Ah, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, where blather about Heidegger justifies the screening of yet more porn movies and Uncle Goddam: The Amazing Redneck Torture Tape. Cheap shots aside, at least one strand of this year’s MUFF exemplified Australian film culture at its very best. The Melbourne Independent Filmmakers Retrospective, assembled by Bill Mousoulis under the MUFF banner, was well-served by its programmer’s encyclopaedic local knowledge, as well as his incisive and catholic personal taste (though MUFF’s habitual gender skew remained intact).

The first session alone segued from quasi-narrative city symphony (Forgotten Loneliness, Chris Löfvén, 1965) to free-associating mock-essay (In Search of The Japanese, Solrun Hoaas, 1980), abstract lyric (Light Play, Dirk de Bruyn, 1984), hard-edged conceptual documentary (Someone Looks At Something, Philip Tyndall, 1986) and sledgehammer spoof (Dance of Death, Dennis Tupicoff, 1982). There were just as many surprises at a second miscellaneous session, focused on the 1990s and beyond: one highlight was Jason Turley’s Dirty Work (2003), a half-hour slice of unforced video realism about an outer-suburban teenager who receives a surprising offer from the couple next door.

Watching these films, I began to suspect that for Mousoulis ‘independence’ is as much a spiritual category as a financial or formal one; this conviction was borne out in the 3 remaining sessions, each devoted to a single major filmmaker. Completed in 1976, Michael Lee’s Mystical Rose is unmistakably a document, both anguished and ecstatic, of ‘sexual liberation.’ The desire pent up by Catholicism breaks free in a barely controlled stream of images, as if the very principle of metaphor had been uncovered for the first time and seized upon as a key that might unlock the world. So stones become bread, or in an extraordinary sequence, a woman’s sexual organs are visualised as a steep and slippery mountain path. In his sensual re-envisioning of iconography—the Word made Flesh—Lee brings to mind Sergei Paradjanov, though his symbolism should be comparatively transparent to Australian viewers (when a man’s penis morphs into a serpent, which later becomes the infant Jesus, the meanings are startling but hardly esoteric). Marking Lee’s reconciliation with Christianity, A Contemplation of the Cross (1989) is less intense, but its images have the same bold immediacy, above all in the concluding vision of grace, with thousands of birds set free and flocking across the sky.

Chris Windmill, surely Australia’s most original comic filmmaker, is a visionary of a different order. Though comedy is often equated with playing to a crowd, Windmill plainly has no interest in trying to second-guess audience responses, or in anything that might impede his sober and absolute dedication to whimsy. Practical yet skittish women and good-looking, barely articulate young men abound in his universe, as do handwritten messages, ritualised housekeeping tasks, and maudlin surprise endings. In Mystery Love (1986), a woman falls in love with the Pope, who happens to live next door. Beards of Evil (1984) has a hero who winds up flying away on a pile of suitcases, but crash-lands and is sent to Hell, which turns out to be below St Kilda Beach. Later works are more opaque and have fewer identifiable gags, raising their daggy absurdity to a pitch that’s practically metaphysical, as in The Birds Do a Magnificent Tune (1996), the chronicle of an intimate relationship centred on ironing and Perry Mason re-runs, and his magnum opus to date.

John Cumming, in some ways the most sophisticated of these filmmakers, is also the hardest to characterise. Ranging from industrial Gothic (Obsession, 1985) to trippy allegory (Recognition, 1986), to observational satire (Sabotage, 1987), his films have few common denominators beyond their virtuosic editing and sound design, and their drive to undermine any single consistent reality, offering the fractured impression of a story rather than the story itself. As this suggests, Cumming is unusually aware of the political underpinnings of form; his comments at a subsequent question-and-answer session implicitly showed up the limits of current debates about the state of local filmmaking, which tend to focus unthinkingly on narrative aspects even when success isn’t crudely equated with profit. Indeed, now that avant-garde purism is dead, terms like ‘underground’ and ‘independent’ may have an unnecessary marginalising effect. Lee, Windmill, Cumming and others whose work screened at this retrospective deserve to rank high on any list of notable Australian filmmakers. And in the absence of independence—at least of a spiritual kind—is it really possible for art to exist at all?

Melbourne Independent Filmmakers: A Retrospective; curator Bill Mousoulis; The 5th Melbourne Underground Film Festival; July 8-18

As I sit at my laptop, a DVD by Dumb Type composer Ryoji Ikeda purchased in a Tokyo department store plays on another computer nearby, blinking out an austere visual language of precisely located, oscillating blue/white lines and planes, echoed by the sound of Ikeda’s clearly separated, high-pitched tones. It seems strangely ghostly, intangible, abstract and distant; cool yet powerful—like my memory of Japan. A sudden flash of digital readouts in the DVD recalls an LED installation of ones and zeroes which I saw within the awesome, grandly abstract space of the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, but much else of my recollection seems difficult to locate. I pour a coffee to break the monotony, and am reminded of the dearth of decent coffee in Japan. I converted to the cold green tea one finds in the omnipresent vending machines, gulping it down during intervals in various theatre foyers to cope with the unseasonably hot July weather.

No wonder I’m starting to get a headache every time I write about Japan. There are so many cliches about the nation. Japan as radically different from the West for instance—and yet it is so imbued with a long tradition of Western arts that one of the major translators of Shakespeare’s complete works, Professor Shoyo Tsubouchi, has become a figure of some veneration within Waseda University’s excellent theatre history museum (the lovely facade of which is a copy of Britain’s Elizabethan Fortune Theatre).

Outsiders are told that Japan is a land of paradoxes, as commentators contrast quiet temples nestled in Kyoto’s hills with the bustling, highly industrialised zones of cities like Osaka. But is this antithesis really any more distinctively Japanese than that between a nunnery in country Victoria and Melbourne’s main shopping drag the day before Christmas? The really significant contrasts of Japan are not to be found in these banal truisms, but rather in the cultural significance attached to such motifs.

From the inside out

In discussions with dance makers in Kyoto and Osaka (Kansai), as well as Tokyo, I found artists were especially keen to connect a model of Japanese contemporary performance and its forms—especially Butoh dance—to the concept of ‘spirit.’ As a central organising choreographic principle, spirit is scarcely unique to Japan, but while in Euro-American culture such inner values tend to be associated with either classic Expressionist choreography or such post-war ecstatic traditions as the Living Theatre, in Japan this idea of dancing from a profound psycho-emotional core outwards seems common to a wide variety of aesthetic modes, ranging from Noh to contemporary dance.

Butoh mutations

When Min Tanaka was in Melbourne in 2001, he told me that there is no clear definition of Butoh, and so the field was open for anyone to do whatever they liked and label it ‘Butoh.’ The members of Hanaarashi, for example, a Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe)-based female trio, describe their interpretation as being “about the adventure of the body and the fun of the body” rather than the “darkness” (Ankoku Butoh), which earlier groups like the Kyoto-based Byakko-sha had focussed upon. This is despite the fact that Hanaarashi’s work lacks most of the readily recognisable external features which would mark it as Butoh.

Similar ideas about spirit are espoused outside of Butoh as well. Shigemi Kitamura, for example, is an independent who choreographs for the relaxed, largely comic female ensemble Ca.Ballet. She too stressed that, for her, the actual movement vocabulary is a secondary concern compared to the playful, embodied emotional impulses which underlie both her aesthetic and that of Ca.Ballet.

Moreover, Naoto Moriyama of the Kyoto University of Art and Design reminded me that Japanese theatre and dance has recently experienced a “waning of the dictators”, in which the charismatic absolutists of the 1960s through to the 1980s (Tadashi Suzuki, Tatsumi Hijikata, Akaji Maro etc) have been succeeded by younger artists working within more diffuse ensembles. This has also opened up a greater space for independent female artists who are moving beyond what Hanaarashi’s Chikako Bando describes as Hijikata’s “shamanistic role for women.” For both Bando and Kitamura, this involves treating the body as an eccentric toy, producing in Kitamura’s case a mixture of bouncy, referential games and warm, geometric forms, versus Bando’s varied, somewhat improvised pallet of actorly pedestrianism and long, held moments.

Even so, ‘classic’ Butoh choreography has not disappeared. I saw a great solo by ex-Dai Rakuda Kan member Makiko Kamata which was very much in the style of her old company. All of the trademark signatures were present: various degrees of nakedness, white rice flour makeup, matted hair and wigs, fetishistic play with shoes, moments of daft humour (such as the finale where she upturned a bucket of water over her head and wore it), and suspended pseudo-religiosity. Perhaps most ironically, given Hijikata’s claim that Butoh was adapted for the supposedly squat Japanese body, this ‘classical’ Butoh performer was one of the most statuesque, tall dancers I saw in Japan, contrasting markedly with the short, wonderfully gamin and highly varied members of Ca.Ballet and Hanaarashi.

Kamata and Ca.Ballet performed at DanceBox in Osaka, an institution which acts as something of a centre around which Kansai arts revolves. Though the venue itself is another of the small, black box studios which act as the primary sites for much new performance in Japan, the organisation nevertheless regularly houses Australian guest artists like Phillip Adams, Kate Denborough and Kristine Nilsen Oma, as well as hosting the Asia Contemporary Dance Festival. Set in a shopping centre-cum-theme park, DanceBox is a model of metropolitan Japanese cool, with a tasteful bar at the front and a New York loft-style concrete space upstairs which houses local and international jazz and noise art. I saw US processed guitar guru Elliott Sharp improvising with a number of Kansai jazz musicians, including Yoshikazu Isaki, who stood up and grooved while he was drumming, nodding his head knowingly as if responding to some inner voice.

Other Japan

During Japan’s ‘bubble economy’ boom of the 1980s, Westerners speculated that Osaka represented the future of the world, and parts of Blade Runner were filmed there. Today however, Japan’s cities are visibly marked by the more banal failures of contemporary global capitalism rather than epitomising some kind of utopian (or Gothically dystopian) future. Around the corner from DanceBox one finds the spreading ghettoes of shacks and makeshift tents which crowd the quieter corners of many Japanese public spaces, like parks, riverbanks and railway lines. Here poor rural migrants, unable to find employment upon arrival, settle in the cities, creatively erecting dwellings sewn together from blue plastic sheeting, timber, umbrellas, old electrical equipment and other discarded items. While the polarisation of class and social space within Japan has its own particular national character, this proximity of impoverished homelessness to urban renewal is the same the world over.

For a nation known for its permeable architectural styles (thin screens which slide so as to open the interior to the exterior), there can be a strange sense of separation in which the almost hermetic interiors of both Japan’s tiny subterranean contemporary venues and its larger, monumental state institutions (such as the aptly named Bunka Arts Centre, Shinjuku), contrast with the vivacious social life of the streets and parks. In Hiroshima, I saw an amateur jazz ensemble lug mini-amplifiers and a full drum kit to the riverbank to rehearse in the languid, humid breeze.

Adam Broinowski

It was therefore a pleasant change to find within the work of Australian expatriate and Gekidan Kaitaisha member Adam Broinowski an element of street life. Vivisection Vision concluded with the near-naked, sweat-drenched Broinowski bashing on a tin can with a hammer, recalling those homeless who survive by recycling metal, as well as the street-front workshops of urban Japan. Following Gekidan Kaitaisha’s prevailing aesthetic, Broinowski crafted his solo from a dense weft of such socio-political resonances. In one particularly striking phrase, the artist stretched from his teeth a white plastic bag of water, which shuddered and crawled like an animal, a sequence he justified by noting that his own, equally out-of-place body is nothing more than a white bag of fluid. In the end though, Broinowski’s performance was the most profoundly spiritual piece I saw in Japan. The self flagellation, the striking of blows, the open-eyed collapses and the near orgiastic, back-arched poses, most resembling an ecstatic, almost religious transcendence made manifest both through, and in spite of, the focused performing body.

Street art

Perhaps therefore my dim, ghostly and indiscriminate recollections of Japan are best encapsulated in my encounter with a topless street performer beside Tokyo’s Shinjuku station. Dressed in shredded black pants and a g-string, with red and black makeup similar to that of a Kabuki demon, he leapt, rolled, thrust and jived like a man possessed, while behind him another man clattered a large cubic tin, a near-dead wok and a crushed aluminium tray. This was real guerilla noise art, much more striking than the somewhat pointless recreation of John Cage’s works which I attended at the Kyoto University of Art and Design’s Sangan Space. There are obvious flaws in the Kill Bill-model of Japanese cultural identity, in which Japan is seen as a hyper-fluid admixture of paradoxically contrasting cultural elements: samurai/punk, temple/city, geisha/genki, Zen restraint/manga excess. This way of viewing Japan nevertheless allows one to deconstruct and fragment many essentialist cliches about its national culture. Whatever spirit possessed this public performance artist, it was neither that of an ancient, inscrutable Japan, nor of the hyper-modern, coolly cynical poppy amalgam one finds in the cinema of Quentin Tarantino or Beat Takeshi. Japan is all of these things, and more—or less.

Hanaarashi, Hakoonna, director/performer Chikako Bando; Art Complex 1928, Kyoto, July 22-25; Ca.Ballet, choreographer Shigemi Kitamura; Art Theatre dB, Osaka, July 2-4; Makiko Kamata, part of Dance Independent, Art Theatre dB, Osaka, July 20-21; Elliott Sharp, Yoshikazu Isaki, Keizo Nobori, Yashuhiru Usui; The Bridge, DanceBox, Osaka, July 4; Adam Broinowski, Vivisection Vision; Gekidan Kaitaisha Canvas Studio, Tokyo, July 16-18

et al., serial_reform_713L (2003), installation view Govett-Brewster Art gallery, New Plymouth

Prime Ministers in Australia and New Zealand rarely have anything to say about the work of artists. Likewise parliamentary debate hardly ever focuses on contemporary art, let alone individual practices. The memorable exceptions to the rule are the furore surrounding the acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952) by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973, the purchase of David Hockney’s A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998) by the NGA in 1999, and the gift of Colin McCahon’s Victory Over Death II (1970) to the same institution by the New Zealand Government in 1978. The latter example sparked debate on both sides of the Tasman about McCahon and his work.

Recently, the selection of the artist collective et al. to represent New Zealand at its national pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale provoked a parliamentary and media debate. Despite the rule of “arm’s length funding governance” (common to Creative New Zealand and the Australia Council), in her joint role as Prime Minister of New Zealand and Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Helen Clark publicly criticised the selection.

Like Australia, New Zealand is in an election build-up, so any topic can quickly become controversial. And for a murky set of reasons et al. were made over as public enemy number one by a range of competing parties in politics and the media. The collective’s chief offence seemed to be that Joe journalist and Joe parliamentarian just didn’t get it. Clark, who claimed the arts portfolio on the strength of her love of opera and orchestral music even bowdlerised Ad Reinhardt’s ironical ruby: “I don’t know much about art, but I know I don’t like installation.”

Reading between the lines, what united the antagonists was a belief that any artist going to Venice needed to take on an ambassadorial role for the country’s art and to some extent, the nation. By extension the work in question should possess a healthy and identifiable degree of “representative-ness.” Yet et al. refuse interviews and make conceptual, not representational work. Herein lay the problem.

Et al. is a group of some 25 artists including minerva betts, lionel b., marlene cubewell, merit gröting and p mule. Best known to Australian audiences is contributing artist L budd, who presented work at the Bond Store in The readymade boomerang 1990 Biennale of Sydney. That exhibition concentrated on avant-garde movements and makers, with the focus on Dada and Fluxus providing a rich association for et al.’s practice and their emphasis on group production, installation and performativity. The catalogue entry was illustrated by a diagram that formed a target around a cluster of artists’ names. At the bullseye were listed: Tretchikoff, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. This page work, which listed, among others, Pro Hart, was a catalogue of kitsch, eliding L budd’s antecedents and producing dummies, not doppelgangers. And the accompanying essay was an extended textual elision, a poem not prose essay containing every bad-faith idea about art that could be crammed onto a catalogue page. We were none the wiser.

This tendency has continued in the 15 years since that Biennale. In 2003 the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery worked with the artists to present the major exhibition et al. abnormal mass delusions?, encapsulating 20 years of work. Rather than take the form of a survey show—that would be too easy—the artists gathered materials from collections, studios and stockrooms around the world to make an environmental installation encompassing the work and re-editing it in new and exciting ways.

To start with the entire museum was painted “budd grey”, a harsh institutional colour prepared especially for the collective, that hovers somewhere between battleship grey and what we might imagine the world of Kafka’s autocrats looks like. (A false floor was laid, and painted, so that the visual effect was totalising.) Restricted access was the first installation encountered when entering the museum. A hurricane fence marked off the gallery in which it was installed from the viewer, and objects were heaped in piles to form a gestalt: there was no easy way of individuating works. The dominating objects were a building site porta-loo, a suitcase turntable playing a symphony and a set of antique speakers blaring a braying donkey (the call sign of the artist p mule). It was disconcerting for viewers to say the least.

The heaping of works in Restricted access was a hegemonic disavowal reflective of the way the collective resists singular identification. As such, it was a perfect introduction to the world of et al. The collective’s work spread, virus like, throughout the building in a concatenation of wires, obsolete audio-visual machinery, computers, scrawled text, furniture, books and aural bombardment.

The exhibition culminated in the new work serial_reform 713L (2003), a chamber filled with rickety institutional office furniture, angry green glowing PCs, a projection of scrolling digits (part random maths, part master code) and panels emblazoned with psycho-babble. With wires trailing across the floor and the harshest and loudest soundtrack within the building, the work emanated a malignant aura. Its referent was the outer limits of Soviet psychiatry and mind control experiments: the stuff that fuelled McCarthy-ite paranoia and films like The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Its subject was (probably) the continuing drift of the telecommunications, computer and media industries, not to mention government, towards mass duping.

Judging from the outcry from politicians and journalists mentioned at the commencement of this article, the tough aesthetic and honed critique touched a nerve. The will towards reiteration and editing has continued since abnormal mass delusions?. The porta-loo had new life breathed into it as Rapture at the Wellington City Gallery in May-August 2004. This time it was a self-contained installation, the major element of which was a massive and subterranean rumbling soundtrack that made the loo and the gallery shake to the core. There was also a small effigy of a mule and a projection of a computer plotting a sine or sound wave. The soundtrack comprised underwater recordings of the 6 under-ground nuclear explosions conducted by the French government in 1996.

Rapture is a cogent reminder of a disaster waiting to happen on our doorstep, and the evil of military technology at a time when threat and fear have been banished to the Middle East. Venice will hopefully provide et al. with another rich vein of architecture and history to tap into, and an opportunity to reconceptualise their shifting practice in even more remarkable and unremitting ways.

et al., the fundamental practice, New Zealand Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Italy; June-Oct 2005

German composer and theatre director Heiner Goebbels is always good for a surprise. The first in his latest production, Eraritjaritjaka—Museum of Phrases, is the title. The piece premiered at Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in April and is based on texts by Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born German novelist, essayist, sociologist and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature. Eraritjaritjaka is an Indigenous Australian word from the Arunta language, defined by Canetti in The Agony of Flies (1992) as meaning “full of desire for something that has been lost.” Goebbels is clearly pleased with the title’s linguistic challenge: “I like to have a curious audience, not one who knows what to expect. With this title I can be sure of that, and as a nice side effect the audience can make a little musical rhythmical experience by learning to pronounce it.”

Once mastered, Eraritjaritjaka flows off the tongue with the complexity and lightness characteristic of Goebbels’ theatrical landscapes. As with the equally tongue-twisting Hashirigaki, which dazzled Sydney Festival audiences earlier this year, Goebbels delivers a riveting collage of text, music, sound, light and image by gathering what appear to be disparate elements and placing them side by side in a theatrical context: “I try to construct theatre using musical criteria. I hold myself back and respectfully allow the individual parts I use to keep their own identity and to develop.”

Eraritjaritjaka incorporates text from Crowds and Power (1960), Auto-da-fé (1935) and the many notebooks recorded during Canetti’s lifetime. Goebbels first encountered Crowds and Power while studying sociology in the 1970s. “Canetti’s political sense for balances and against hierarchies not only meets with mine”, says Goebbels “but also with my interest in avoiding these structures in the use of the medias of theatre.” However, it was only recently, at the suggestion of a colleague, he picked up the notebooks. “After a few words I knew immediately that here was something for me to work on, but also”, he laughs, “as usual, it took me 6 years to do so.” His favourite of the notebooks is The Human Province (1942-1975) for “its dense combination of perspectives on politics and privacy. It’s short, bitter and full of humour at the same time.”

Goebbels was attracted to the way Canetti uses words: “He observes the structure and architecture of language as much as he does the society as a whole. The language is reduced, not a word too much and he hates adjectives.” However, it was Canetti’s thoughts on the relationship between music and language that really made an impact: “The way he described the relationship between words and music was like a description of something I had been experimenting with already in my work…Most importantly, he leaves space between the words, which can be useful for music, to make the structure of the sentences transparent and powerful at the same time.”

Eraritjaritjaka features the music of 20th century composers Shostakovich, Mossolov, Scelsi, Oswald, Lobanov, Bryars and Crumb performed by Amsterdam’s Mondriaan String Quartet. “The decision to incorporate a string quartet was about the character of the music, which I considered to be on a metaphorical level comparable to Canetti’s texts”, says Goebbels. However, perhaps in keeping with the nostalgic mood of the title, Eraritjaritjaka ends with the only non-20th century piece to be included, Bach’s The Art of Fugue.

Also on stage is the extraordinary French actor André Wilms, who delivers Canetti’s broad ranging speculations on human behaviour, the nature of power, privacy, language, history, music and animals, savouring the words while never drawing attention away from their impact. “He is a superb actor” Goebbels enthuses, “with a great intelligent taste and huge musical abilities, without being a musician himself.” This is their third collaboration following Or the hapless landing (1993) and Max Black (1998), both also based on notes and notebooks. “We are very confident with each other… which is the most important condition to create something, when we both don’t know much about it in advance.”

Eraritjaritjaka begins with a string quartet, a bare stage, and Shostakovich’s moody quartet # 8. As the last note resounds, a white strip of light cuts the stage in half. The reverberating sound is stretched and amplified into scraping and tearing, while the light peels back the black floor, replacing it with a crisp white square. A blank page? A mirror? A suited man enters. He contemplates the nature of words and music, his gestures and movements part of the music, the music part of his thoughts and utterances.

Goebbels has worked with long term collaborators Klaus Grünberg (set and lights), Willi Bopp (sound) and Florence von Gerkan (costumes). The stage is initially an exquisite but recognisable landscape of clean geometry, black and white contrasts and arresting lighting. However, the overall effect of Eraritjaritjaka is one of peeling back layers, and it is at the halfway point that Goebbels delivers his major surprise. The actor puts on his hat and coat, steps from the stage and leaves the theatre. A cameraman follows. Suddenly we see projected, on the façade of the house that fills the stage, the actor crossing the theatre foyer and riding in a cab through the streets of Lausanne, all the while observing the world around him and listing possibilities for an imagined reality: “A society where people laugh instead of eating. A society in which people suddenly vanish, but no one knows they are dead, there is no death, there is no word for it, but they are content with that” (Elias Canetti, The Human Province).

Finally he stops to buy a newspaper and walks to a nearby apartment. When he steps inside, we are transported into the cluttered, private world of Canetti’s Auto-da-fé protagonist, sinology expert Professor Peter Stein, a character who can communicate in ancient languages but has difficulty with contemporary interactions. We see him alone with his private thoughts and tasks, haunted by unseen voices. We see him tear off the day’s date from a wall calendar, peruse his mail, prepare an omelet and listen to the evening news while folding his laundry. From the reality of the stage we have been transported into a film and our sense of reality has been disturbed. This is heightened, when in a remarkable moment, the string quartet is suddenly there in the apartment, playing Ravel, among the professor’s library.

Goebbels never forgets the logic of the stage and in incorporating the use of live video, he weaves the 2 realities of stage and film so that the mediums support and enhance one another. “I was very clear in advance that the use of video had to be a structural decision, which paid attention to the laws and priorities of the medium itself”, he explains. Shot by award winning Belgian film maker Bruno Deville, Goebbels sees the purpose of the live video as “providing 2 perspectives which are difficult to show in the theatre: the reality of the outside world on one hand and a very intimate, isolated private perspective on the other. We cannot pretend to be able to reconstruct something like these on a stage. We reach the limits of representative theatre when we try to achieve that.”

Early critical response to Eraritjaritjaka has been positive, describing it as “genius”, “where nothing is predictable but nevertheless, all entirely convincing.” Recently awarded the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival, the piece has tour dates until late 2005 and will appear next in Berlin, Zurich and The Hague in November. Audience response in particular has pleased Goebbels: “I didn’t know how our construction of the piece would work: the serious beginning, the 20th century string quartet music, the high importance of the live video and the absence of the main character in the second part. But it seems that especially the second part seems to draw audience attention more than I dared to hope. It’s nice to be able to surprise an audience.”

The Mondriaan Quartet, Eraritjaritjaka—Museum of Phrases, created by Heiner Goebbels with André Wilms; Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Switzerland; April 20

Pirnaischer Platz, an asphalt covered transportscape at the centre of what was once the Baroque city of Dresden, is not exactly the sort of place where a traveller would expect to find solace. Highways intersect around pedestrian islands accessible to each other only via subterranean tunnels. Slowly crumbling Baroque and Communist-era palaces stare down blindly on commuters below, their windows broken. The commuters are waiting despondently for public transport, their bodies puffed out to implausible dimensions by the multiple layers of clothing needed to protect them from the frigid, moist air. They avoid eye contact with each other in a way that evokes the anonymity of cities with much bigger populations than Dresden’s mere half million.

Nor is Dresden the sort of place that one would expect to feature in discussions of the Utopian. In so far as Utopia means “no-place”, Dresden is already Utopia. The city is deep enough in the former German Democratic Republic to feel uneasy with the West, unsettled about its past, insecure about its future. Almost bombed out of existence by the British, occupied by the Soviets, Dresden was not a hotbed of discussion and revolt before the fall of the Berlin Wall. That status is more often accorded to Berlin and Leipzig. If a city, as Freud once observed, can have mental pathologies in the same way as an individual, then Dresden is insecure and depressed, aware that ever since the rise of Prussia, it is a city that has had things done to it rather than doing things itself. Perhaps only sharpening the sense of having fallen, Dresden is also a repository of European high art. The enormous collections of the Alte Meister and Neue Meister galleries would be considered significant by any European capital. These 2 poles, defeatism and conservatism, make one very small movement in Dresden all the more extraordinary.

Standing over Pirnaischer Platz is a single dominant structure. The building is astonishing. An aggressively ugly piece of Stalinist architecture, managing to be both shabby and authoritarian at the same time, its ludicrous stern pebblecrete columns in classical proportions arrayed around a squat tower. Attached to the columns are iron hoops, rusted shut. They used to support flagpoles, dozens of them. In its previous incarnation, the building was a neanderthal bearer of bunting. It gives the impression of being wet and cold even in bright sunlight. Now, at about 8 o’clock in the evening, it seems almost camply sinister.

Our destination is at the top of this building, in the rooms behind the columns. It is here that one of the most interesting ongoing conversations among contemporary artists in Germany is being developed, extended and sometimes mocked. A jour fix is taking place, a regular meeting of artists, theorists, filmmakers and students. Every Friday at about this time people file into the foyer of the tower and ride the elevator up. The lift looks infernal. Either the sprinkler system has been disengaged, or it was never installed, because the air in the elevator compartment is blue with cigarette smoke. The 7th Floor is the only level occupied. In the main room, between 30 and 60 guests sit around a central table, on benches or chairs improvised from various objects. The way in which the furniture has been arranged and the rooms have been left undecorated emphasises the sense that this building has been squatted, and that its rooms are somehow being used without their consent. One half expects to see a picture of Erich Honecker’s disapproving visage on the wall, but he’s been taken down to make space for a video beamer.

There is an artful sense of spontaneity in the decorations here, an attempt to maintain the feeling of always being at a beginning. Nothing is established, nothing is traditional, there are no rituals or codes that cannot be said within a few seconds: everyone gathers around the Stammtisch, the table; someone speaks for an hour; everyone stays and gets drunk. The bar is made of a couple of planks of wood resting on a fridge and some empty beer crates. You have to pay, but beer is sold at one euro a bottle, little more than what it costs in the supermarket. Your opinion is as good as anyone else’s, but a well constructed argument will get more attention, and a new idea raised in the presentation will spark conversations that spin off and propagate themselves for hours.

The concept is unprepossessing, but the 7th Floor has managed to attract speakers and presenters from across the German speaking world, from Hamburg to Zurich and Cologne to Vienna. On the May 14, the Austrian architect Hannes Böck showed his video studies of postwar West German buildings. The videos comprised static shots, painterly composed, with the ambient sound included with the film. Very little happens. A bird sings, a pedestrian walks by, and a cloud scuds over the building, casting its facade in shadow for a few seconds. Böck’s idea is that film left to run captures the aura of a building far more effectively than a single photograph could. The aura is what he most wants to measure. The buildings he films have all been designed by Nazi architects, whose services were desperately needed in reconstructing postwar Germany. Their structures have a heavy authoritarianism about them that cannot be described by discussing their formal properties alone. Hence the need for film, the need to capture how monolithic the structures are in shifting light, and how they dwarf movements of humans, transforming walking into a sort of insectile scuttle. The films could have been seen as a sort of plein airpainting, as micro remakes of Andy Warhol’s film Empire, as architecture documentation, history, or even a form of sociological research. There is no reason to make a choice between these descriptions.

On the 6th of February, the Berlin artist Beatrice Jugert presented attendees with documentation of her rituals of political ceremony. Unlike Böck’s video installation, her event was compellingly interactive, complete with flag raising ceremonies and the singing of fanciful hymns. Beatrice Jugert has been actively investigating conceptions of Utopia in her art since the year 2000, and as part of her project created seven seperate nations and attempted to import them into reality, opening embassies, issuing visas, creating social rituals to allow the citizens of her fictive nations to identify with their new “mother country” or “father land”.

It is also noteworthy, considering the absence of funding for flights or hotels, that there has been a steady stream of international guests. Professor Mary Jo Bole from Columbus, Ohio, presented her sculptural work there on the 30th. The Estonian collective Mooste Külalis Stuudio arrived on the 10th to discuss exactly what it is to be a local art movement in a global world.

And why do you care? Why are you here, when you could be at opening number 4 zillion in Berlin, or at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, or anywhere with decent catering and an identifiable cloakroom? What the 7th Floor offers is the glimpse of a movement in its genesis. It barely matters if it wilts: it could give rise to a new Documenta, a new Fluxus, a new vocabulary in international contemporary art. It may well do so—all the prerequisites are here, including an indifference to failure. Or the 7th Floor could disappear without a trace. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What is significant is that the 7th Floor presents a non-institutional forum for art, a space without the imprimatur of an institution, sponsor or guardian. The core group behind the events consists of graduates and students of the Dresden Academy of Fine Art, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (HfBK). Their project is delegitimated art, the bastard child of state funded institutions that turn out generations of engaged, critical artists who cannot anticipate any support from the institutions and corporations who define the royal road. The 7th Floor is a statement of autonomy, the right to continue assembling, developing and extending ideas without permission or support, but also without ideological rigidity. The movement undermines the existing institutional order of art, not by denouncing it, but by ignoring it.

But if you want that cloakroom, the building that best embodies that institutional order is less than a kilometre away. The Oktogon, with its glass cupola graced by a golden angel, is the official gallery of the HfBK. Exhibitions here are opened by state ministers, and visited by the chief executives from the local AMD microchip factory, from the Volkswagen plant and from Philip Morris—all of them significant sponsors and collectors. No one ever pays for their drinks at an Oktogon opening; they are always brought, in the internationally recognised manner, by a liveried servant. There’s nothing to fear in being seen there, no rancour or enmity to be suffered from the artist run initiative up the road. Beatrice Jugert, for example, gave her presentation on Utopianism at the 7th Floor even as she prepared her exhibition, sponsored by Philip Morris, at the Oktogon down the road. It’s more an attitude of gentle condescension, a sense that the honoured guests at the Oktogon don’t, well, understand very much. A clever artist tells Philip Morris what they want to hear, but she tells her friends the truth. Speaking the truth to those in power is not always the best idea.

For those travelling through Germany, the 7th Floor publishes its program on the web (www.stock7.de), and welcomes potential contributors. Knowledge of German might make reading the website easier, but is not a prerequisite for contributing, and certainly not one for attending. Rudimentary accommodation is routinely offered to contributors. The organisers can be contacted at: post@stock7.de.

In its enquiring and provocative 2004 program the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts (MIAF) focuses on voice in performance. The apotheosis of this exploration is most likely embodied in Men in Tribulation—A Story of Artaud. Not only does the audience enter the mind of the defeated genius in his last hour (the work’s duration) but Men in Tribulation can lay claim to the realisation of an Artaud dream, a theatre of the voice, of sonic experimentation, with all the ‘cruel’ immediacy he dreamt of for the theatre. Composer and director of Men in Tribulation, Eric Sleichim, spoke to me by phone from Belgium about his creation for innovative opera and music theatre producers Muziektheater Transparant.

I asked Sleichim to what extent the audience enters the mind of Artaud in his production and what role sound and music play in it. Sleichim responded by describing most theatre as illusion, a place where music for example is not perceived directly, but as background, at a distance. For Sleichim, the audience entering the theatre must encounter a totally alien space—”they shouldn’t be able to recognise it, even if they know it.”

To this end the venue is filled with smoke (not recommended for claustrophobes or those with certain medical conditions, Sleichim says) with visibility of no more than 3 metres for the first 20 minutes of the show. “This is alienated space. Like Artaud you are locked up in an asylum; it feels very immediate, fragile and dangerous.” The audience moves about the space, “eyes and bodies adjusting, becoming aware that you are not alone. There are 200 others and you are beginning to feel acquainted with the space, finding the borders of the set, realising that the 5-sided space is theatrical [created by B-architecten, the innovative design studio of Evert Crols, Dirk Engelen and Sven Grooten]. But something strange and ritualistic is happening in the middle, people touching unrecognisable objects, which are in fact the parts of saxophones.” Sleichim is the founder-director of the innovative BL!NDMAN Saxophone Quartet (a name inspired by Marcel Duchamp ‘s 1917 publication expressing the Dadaist idea of a blind guide leading the public around an art exhibition) who perform as part of Men in Tribulation.

A key challenge for Sleichim has been how to deal with the musical instrument—he speaks of alienating, mutilating and manipulating the saxophone. “I have only added electronics in the last 3 or 4 years, but the sound still must come from the body of the instrument.” He sees this as, in part, paralleling Artaud’s desire to be rid of his body. However, the mutilated music of saxophone parts is juxtaposed with a counter tenor—the young Artaud—who sings only melodies.

In devising Men in Tribulation Sleichim drew on the 300 pages of Artaud’s letters to his psychiatrist about the Tarahumaras of Mexico. Sleichim says he’s been privileged to see ethnographic film of these people whom Artaud visited and whose peyote influenced, regenerative rituals had such a profound effect on his thinking. It is the sense of ritual, of the strangeness of objects and sounds, that Sleichim aims for in Men in Tribulation. The audience has to look hard to see; it has to listen, “discovering that all these sounds are created in real time from the parts of saxophones—nothing is sampled.” Very slowly, he says, the audience come to recognise distinct characters who might materialise right next to them and then disappear.

While working on artist/director Jan Fabre’s performance installation The Angel of Death, Sleichim discovered that Fabre had written a piece about Artaud 20 years ago and was keen write a new text. Fabre created a cycle of 7 “metamorphosen” which proved perfect, says Sleichim, for the obsessiveness and sense of ritual and danger that he was seeking.

True to Artaud, the figures in Men in Tribulation represent states of being, aspects of the visionary, projections rather than literal characters. There is an old Artaud (experimental vocalist Phil Minton) and a young Artaud (counter-tenor Hagen Matzeit). The BL!NDMAN Saxophone Quartet become shamans. Sleichim describes the great actress and singer Viviane De Muynck as “playing a Tarahumaras high priest, Artaud as theatre director, as the great actor he was and as opium addict, and Artaud’s mother.” The complexities of Artaud’s relationship with women, he says, is another conversation.

Sleichim describes the experience of the work as “a quite violent hour” shaped by Artaud’s great despair at the withdrawal of his radio work To Have Done with the Judgment of God from broadcast in 1947. He died 2 weeks later. Sleichim says that such is the intensity of the work To Have Done… he can never listen to the whole 40-minutes in one sitting.

I ask Sleichim if he thinks he has realised Artaud’s project. He thinks that some of his audience “arrive at Men in Tribulation with a wish”, their own vision of Artaud. A dramaturg said the show “didn’t meet her expectations of getting further into the literature of Artaud.” Sleichim had to retort that the writing in the production was Fabre’s, not Artaud’s. Fabre has created a text inspired by the visionary’s writing and set to music by the composer. For Sleichim, his own “big starting point” was the dynamic of, on the one hand, the mysterious messianic Artaud and, on the other, the day to day requests of man in an asylum for a warm shower once a week, a shave or some chocolate. But on the bigger issue of accomplishing something Artaud could only dream of, Sleichim says, “without any pretension, I think I have, a little. The actors are not playing characters but being them. It wasn’t until the 1950s that acting schools could understand this. In Men in Tribulation the audience are near the performers, they can smell the emotion. They are surrounded by the set, the action, the totality of the sound and light. Although you can stay in the middle or at a distance, and although you can get out (it’s a very loud work sometimes), you are never only looking.”

Erwin Jans has written that in his later years Artaud was looking for “a theatre of the voice, a theatre of the acoustic space. The theatre of cruelty contemplated by him at the time was a theatre of the word made flesh, the word returned to the voice, to the tongue and to the body. Words are brought back to corporeality and urges” (Holland Festival 2004 Program). Men in Tribulation might just be that theatre of word made flesh.

Muziektheater Transparant, Men in Tribulation, Oct 11-13, Melbourne International Festival of the Arts

On page 47, Tony MacGregor talks about his libretto for the opera Cosmonaut composed by David Chesworth, to be premiered at the 2004 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts.

In the middle of a 3 storey high dark wall, a room appears, sealed off by a pane of glass. A man in a suit enters the room from a concealed door, puts a coin in a slot, and another room next to him lights up. This room is almost identical to the first; a glass cage. In this room, a girl dances in her underwear. In the background a mechanical timer can be heard winding down. The man addresses the girl through the slot. He wants her to sit down. He wants her to show her face. He wants to tell her something. She sits down, she shows her face, but barely does he utter a word before the room snaps to black and he is alone.

The movements of the girl in the peepshow are slow and awkward. She is not exactly beautiful, and the enclosure in which she dances is a bare concrete box. The scene is obscene without being erotic. It is desolate. Depressing.

Depression of the clinical sort is marked by a loss of cathexis in the life of the sufferer, a general withdrawal of interest from the activities and pursuits that had once been diverting, a state known in medical literature as anhedonia. Symptomatic of this darkening of the outside world is a change in language. The depressed speak an atrophied, desiccated language, with words drained of meaning and colour. It is rare to see these words written down, even rarer to see them performed in the theatre. A little artistic melancholy, yes, but clinical depression? What sort of texts can we expect from those who experience no pleasure, from those who have made the gargantuan effort of writing to us at all?

This is the central problem of UK playwright Sarah Kane’s theatre. Shock and brutality made her work famous, but it would be an equally brutal misreading to see her plays as updated Elizabethan bloodbaths. Her work orbits around a question that already has a pedigree: what to do with words when they have no meaning? The language of Sarah Kane’s characters is singularly undramatic. Their speech slows, stumbles and repeats itself, becomes plaintive, begs, wheedles and orders, but rarely jokes. The signature expression is the flat imperative (“Take off your clothes”) or the naked question (“Aren’t we friends?”). The atrophied language of the depressed is absolute and instrumental. It doesn’t play.

It is fidelity to this aspect of Kane’s work that provided the foundation for Benedict Andrews’ staging of Cleansed at the Schaubühne in Berlin. Cleansed is the third of Sarah Kane’s theatre pieces in what became a closed cycle with her suicide at age 28. In contrast to earlier German language productions by Martin Kucej in Stuttgart or Peter Zadek in Berlin, Andrews does everything to take attention away from the blood and gore of the piece, with its multiple amputations and castrations. Instead, he returns the attention of the viewer to the language, to its cold, reified persistence, with words dropped and left like stones upon the floor of the stage.

The play opens with a doctor, Tinker, cooking up heroin for his patient Graham. The dose, injected through the eye, is fatal. Although dead, Graham remains on stage: as corpse, as memory and as interlocutor. He is present without being gruesome. Graham’s sister, Grace, comes to Tinker’s clinic in search of her lost brother. Not finding him, she asks at the very least for his clothes, an act of commitment that results in her taking his place as the chief object of Tinker’s care.

Grace and Graham are not the only inhabitants of the clinic. Alongside them are 3 others: Rod and Carl are lovers, Robin is alone. They form no community. Each character is limited, as if by invisible interdict, to communicating either with the one they love or with Tinker. There is no solidarity amongst those in the sanatorium: they don’t so much refuse to identify with each other as appear completely unaware of each other’s existence. A state that renders them all the more alienated and vulnerable, desperately starved of love and cannibalising each other in search of it.

Grace’s fatal act of love for Graham is mirrored by others, such as the unconditional declaration of love by Carl for Rod. None of these demonstrations goes unpunished, and just as Grace will be sacrificed, Carl will have his tongue and limbs removed by the good Doctor.

Tinker is not so much a character as the force of the world that punishes us for excessive closeness. His acts of violence are carried out without perceivable pleasure. This is crucial to Andrews’ staging because violence itself is always a stimulant, and if overdone it would destroy the precise monotony of the performance. As a result, even the blood that flows during the performance is black.

Tinker is not really a character. At least, no more a character than the set itself—a field of blank concrete, a wall beyond which there is nothing to escape to. In the centre of the stage a circular therapeutic pool is set. It serves as both baptismal font and slaughterhouse drain.

Three storeys above the stage, above the wall, in a mechanical heaven, a giant sprinkler system generates a fine mist that drifts down into the pool below. The set becomes reminiscent of Olafur Eliasson’s weather project in the Tate. The skin of the performers glistens with moisture. The mist becomes outright rain, and as it pours down on the actors below it suggests, perhaps, a path of redemption.

If there is a moral it’s that no one can be saved, but we can be erased. The black fluid that drains from the pool and the slow disappearance of the characters, accompanied by a loss of words, a shrinking vocabulary, leaves an emptiness that is perhaps what it is to be cleansed. It isn’t enough to wash away the filth; the carrier of the filth must be removed as well. The skin, then the flesh and everything underneath.

Cleansed, writer Sarah Kane, director Benedict Andrews; performers Matthias Matschke, Lars Eidinger, Jule Böwe, Christina Geisse, Mark Waschke, Felix Römer; Schaubühne, Berlin; May 28-June 4

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Suzanne Treister, Operation Swanlake,
Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality 2029

I’ve just returned from Incubation 3, the writing and internet symposium where there was much discussion about the difference between fact, fiction and plain lies. In literature these terms are commonly negotiated, but the visual arts does not have such convenient classifications. When Art in America described the researches of Rosalind Brodsky and the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) as “one of the most sustained fantasy trips of contemporary art”, they failed to acknowledge the implicit reality checks and the engaging and often seductive nature of this long-running narrative.

Brodsky has been travelling through time and space for almost 10 years now. Her latest research outcome Operation Swanlake has been on show at London’s prestigious Annely Juda Fine Art gallery. It consists of video, computer prints, photographs and drawings, and reveals a string of previously unsuspected relationships between retirement homes in Florida, black holes, Soviet battleship design, opera and much, much more.

Operation Swanlake took place between 2028 and 29 and used the energy of a black hole located in the constellation Cygnus to develop audio frequencies capable of communicating with the universe. The frequencies were initially developed using recordings of swans that were recovered from specific historical locations and periods. These were broadcast from the sonic missile Swanlake, made in part from a decommissioned Soviet Kirov class missile cruiser. It was at the Kirov Theatre (which was then called the Mariinsky Theatre) in St Petersburg that Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake was first performed in 1895. A recovered recording of this performance, along with one of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (The Swan Knight), were also utilised in the project. And so it goes…

By the end of the exhibition there’s a definite sense of overload together with a profound admiration for the research and synchronicity that enabled so many disparate strands to be woven together into a single theme. I’m reminded of Kurt Schwitters’ remark: “I am the meaning of the coincidence!”

It would be easy to consider Brodsky’s researches an entertaining fiction. Brodsky herself is the creation of Berlin and London-based artist Suzanne Treister. However, to my mind there seems little difference between Operation Swanlake and the episodes of James Burke’s Scientific American column and TV series Connections, where he linked science and technology across time and space via a relativity that often bordered on the absurd. An increasing number of scientists are now acknowledging the inherent irrationality of their ‘logical’ belief systems and the correspondences with theology. Is Operation Swanlake fact, fiction or just a lie? Can we ever know?

On the train to Incubation I sat next to some visitors from the USA. They were professional, literate, well educated folk. As we passed through fields of ripening wheat they were clearly disappointed not to see some crop circles. We all want to believe.

Operation Swanlake, artist Suzanne Treister; Annely Juda Fine Art, London; May 20-July 17

Walking is a physicalisation of desire. Like a pedestrian walking through a city, desire searches, tastes, feels and smells. Capricious and peripatetic, it changes direction and always moves.

A unique project by spell#7, an experimental performance and new media company based in Singapore, fuses the themes of desire and walking in an ‘audio-tour’ of Little India, one of Singapore’s ethnic enclaves. In Desire Paths, the sole audience member, armed with a CD player, walks through this rich setting of sensory delights, coaxed by the narrating “ghosts or lovers” who act as guides. They speak to the listener-pedestrian over a pastiche of recorded sounds invoking the atmosphere: temple bells, traffic, buffaloes, interviews with locals and tourists, churchgoers worshipping, the sound of hi-tech speed train doors closing, race course noises, market clamour and coffeeshop banter, as well as the sound of bombs falling. Local spices and vegetables are reconfigured as poetry at one point when recited in inspired succession. The stall-lined corridors, streets, shophouses and back alleys offer a random universe of household provisions, textiles, flower garlands etc. All at once, you smell incense, jasmine, curry powders and street debris.

Insinuating itself into the historical and guided tour, you discover, is a story of desire: between your tour guides Jack, a resident wanderer who “knows a bit about Little India”, and an unnamed female lover. The story grows; traces accumulate and you realise that you are in the very intersection where their love operates. The walker is part of the internal logic of their communication of shadows, traces, secrets, scraps and notes left to each other; the tour, designed by him to “lure her out.” With the sparsely lyrical original music by local musician Evan Tan providing a poignant throughline, you almost see their figures emerging in the traffic, hiding from and seeking each other out.

spell7 write: “Desire path is a term used to describe a route or pathway that has been created by the users, not by the street or town planners. Commonly, it is where grass has been torn away by footsteps to make a shortcut not previously anticipated. Jack shows us one along Race Course Road—a ‘mud track on the green patch where the grass has disappeared’” (publicity notes). The range of meanings in the work expands beyond romantic desire and nostalgia to addressing other desires—for space, for authenticity. Desire paths act as metaphors suggesting to us the possibility of creative autonomy in art and life.

Faithful to the logic of the desire path, a transformation by the walker of the environment, the tour encourages you to interact with your surroundings; to leave a mark on the space. Jack invites you to buy a pandan waffle, have your fortune told by a woman with a psychic parrot, buy an iced Milo at the coffee shop, have a curry at Komala’s, etc. You walk inside the temple, witness supplicants praying for the fulfilment of their desires, stand at a crossroads outside the coffee shop and lose yourself in the traffic of ordinary desires, just as Jack and the un-named woman imagine what people in the street are thinking while unfolding their story to you.

Desire Paths brings you to the ‘downtime’ of the city, to alleyways otherwise forgettable in the urban glass and steel sprawl that is Singapore, where urban practice is highly managed, even the bohemias and, though less so now, the average Singaporean’s everyday life. But the work reflects larger shifts in public consciousness and a change of direction in the local art scene towards participatory, non-final art. If you wanted, after all, you could switch the CD player off and get distracted, wander around and abandon the program for a bit. Feel the pulses and feed your curiosity. Forge your desire path.

You become the tourist of a neighbourhood where, as the narrator describes, an older way of life persists: “They say Little India is one part of Singapore that hasn’t changed so much… Something about the spirit of the place that won’t allow change to get in the way”; “here, they breathe that bit more… guess they like to feel the wind in their hair.”

At the end, you are gently thanked and know that the journey is over, leaving Jack to rest in his hotel room with a gin and tonic, while “she” professes an eternal waiting. Jack bids his farewell: “I’ve enjoyed your company. Come back again sometime and walk with me.” If you find yourself in Singapore, I recommend you do exactly that: for an experience that offers not so much the promises of tourist brochures but allows you to enjoy an alternative account of Singapore; contemplating its lower-tech, slower-paced possibilities via a sensitive and far-ranging piece of work.

spell#7, Desire Paths, an audio tour experience of Little India, text & voices Ben Slater, Kaylene Tan, sound Evan Tan; Tuesdays to Sundays, 10am-4.30pm; www.spell7.net/desirepaths

The 2004 Res Artis Conference Knowledge + Dialogue + Exchange: Remapping Cultural Globalisms from the South aimed to be a space for dialogue and engagement in the context of the exchange of art and cultural knowledge. Res Artis itself is a worldwide network of residential arts centres and programs. Taking a critical perspective of “South” and, I assume, Ross Gibson’s characterisation of Australia as “South of the West”, the strong Asian presence at the conference was a reminder that Australia is also “South of Asia” and therefore in a unique geographical position from which to question issues of postcolonialism and globalism.

Program A of the conference, Crisis and Cultural Collisions, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Prominent Asian-Australian cultural theorist Ien Ang opened with a paper entitled “Negotiating Fundamentalisms in a Dangerous World.” Taking as her point of departure Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, Ang’s paper was concerned with the state of emergency that has gripped the Western world post-September 11. She sought to formulate a more generalised notion of fundamentalism that, following Anthony Giddens, can be thought of as “a refusal of dialogue.” In this definition, George W Bush’s “you are either with us or against us” rhetoric simply posits another kind of fundamentalism against the Islamic version that the USA has been so keen to destroy. Ang argues that these contemporary fundamentalisms are reactionary responses to the cultural crises unleashed by globalisation, which involve defending one’s “identity” against external threats.

Ang’s corrective to this drift towards fundamentalism is to invoke that weary, catch-all rubric of cosmopolitanism, suggesting that a “cosmopolitan way of being in the world” can come by recognising not only the fundamentalisms of the “Other” but also the fundamentalisms within ourselves. We should all become more cosmopolitan, albeit reluctantly and imperfectly. There was no critique of the ‘imperfect’ bases to cosmopolitanism—in particular its elitist underpinnings—nor was there any sense of why we should indeed become more cosmopolitan, or how artistic practice might contribute to this. Given that the term “reluctant cosmopolitan” was used by Daniel Swetschinski to discuss the situation of Portuguese Jews in 17th Century Amsterdam, I was keen to hear more on the version of cosmopolitanism forming the basis of Ang’s political redress.

The second speaker, Lu Jie, delivered a passionate and articulate paper integrating theory with practice. Lu Jie is a founder of the Long March Foundation, an organisational platform and art program that undertook a 2 year, 6000 mile journey from southern to northern China retracing the route of the Long March with 20 site-specific works and exhibitions. Lu’s paper, “Localising the Chinese Context in Contemporary Chinese Art in China and Abroad”, began with the premise that the defining characteristic of Chinese art since the 1990s has been its hypervisibility on the international stage. According to Lu, this has become the most prominent, if not the only, framework for both theoretical debate and artistic creation in the context of contemporary Chinese art. How then is it possible to (re)interpret local context in the face of this internationalisation?

Chinese artists have been exhibited primarily in Biennales and in large group exhibitions. There are fewer Chinese artists benefiting from residency programs or working with communities (perhaps because they are too busy producing work for Biennales!). Contemporary Chinese artists have institutionalised themselves as an elite class, authorised to represent modern-day China. The fear is that art in China has left the (local) audience and that international consumption has come to dominate artistic practice.

Program B of the conference took place at the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Operative and was entitled “New Writing, Criticism and Theory.” In the opening paper, “The Real, the Potential, and the Political”, Sydney academic Ghassan Hage argued for a politics of “minor utopias.” Hage drew on the philosophical distinction between actuality and reality whereby reality is constituted not only by actuality (what is) but also what is about to be, what could be, and what ought to be (reality conceived in moral terms). Utopian thought, as manifested either in writing or in artistic practice, is that which can shift what could and ought to be into reality. Hage is arguing against a neo-conservative politics of “realism”, which seeks to prevent us from imagining new potentialities (by asking us to “get real” or to “look at things as they really are”). Instead, we must activate the “potential” as the space from which political change emerges. As with Ien Ang’s paper, I found the densely theoretical nature of Hage’s talk extremely seductive although ultimately unsatisfying, requiring some anchor in the contribution of artistic practice to the possibilities he evoked.

Lee Weng Choy, artistic co-director of the Substation (an independent arts centre in Singapore), gave a very advanced work-in-progress towards an essay in “3 registers”, addressing the epistemological, the practical and the imaginary in the context of regional and global art circuits. Lee is interested in how our knowledge about the art world has changed radically due to the historical eruption of contemporary art from Asia onto the global scene.

Lee discussed a symposium entitled “Comparative Contemporaries” held at the Substation in 2003, which workshopped the idea of producing an anthology of existing writing on contemporary south east Asian art over the last 15 years. At present this writing remains uncollated and poorly disseminated. To deal with the issue of comtemporaneity in the art of different south east Asian nations, Lee suggested using the paradigms of comparative literature (as practiced in America) to define and build dialogues.

What was particularly interesting to me was Lee’s discussion of the state of the contemporary arts in Singapore. The architect Rem Koolhaas argued several years ago that Singapore was characterised by modernisation without modernity; that is, a mechanistic rationality whereby only one temporality exists—that of being on the verge of elsewhere, a restless present always focussed on what’s next. Lee asks, if Singapore is only modernisation without modernity, why would the Singaporean State care about art? Lee suggested that it might be more accurate to characterise Singapore as modernism without modernity (in the sense of requiring historical self-reflexivity). It will be interesting to see how this preliminary dialogue progresses.

Residency programs are so important because of the various exchanges they foster: an international exchange becomes one that is also resolutely local, and the exchange always goes both ways. For example, it has been my great pleasure to get to know 2 artists-in-residence over the past few months: Tan Pin Pin, a filmmaker from Singapore (who was resident at the University of Technology, Sydney), and Tu Shih-hue, a performance artist and director from Taiwan, brought to Sydney through the Taipei Artists’ Village residency program. I welcome such continued dialogues and only wish I could have been in Melbourne to catch the second half of the conference.

Knowledge + Dialogue + Exchange: Remapping Cultural Globalisms from the South, convened by Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; 9th General Meeting of Res Artis, Sydney and Melbourne, August 10-16

The 6 day Res Artis conference saw delegates jetting into Australia from north America, Europe, Africa and north and south east Asia, and then shuttling internally between Sydney and Melbourne. The title of the Conference was “Knowledge + Dialogue + Exchange”, and the 2 city locations supposedly provided a mass moving metaphor for a conference “key objective”: that delegates be “exposed to the multidisciplinary infrastructure of Australian art and cultural organisations.”

Notwithstanding the extra eco-burden of vaporising all that jet and diesel fuel, as well as the reinforcing of a global/neoliberal way of life that sees resources as infinite—and notwithstanding the fact that this way of life further marginalises the masses of the South (if not its cultural and artistic select)—the conference represented fossil energy well burned. It actually explored some very pertinent questions about the age of increased mobility (for some) and how artist residencies and the institutions that coordinate them contribute to global cultural production. There was also exploration of the forms this culture takes through its political and ideological expressions.

Institutional exchange programs comprise a powerful element in the dissemination of art and ideas, its practice and theory. The disinterested observer might view many of these programs as a sort of limpid cross-fertilisation, the kind of stuff that academics have been getting away with for a long time, with selected artists now having their day in the sun or the snow (or torrential rain in the case of Melbourne). The same observer might note that, again at its most benign, this process leads to a nebulous global multiculturalism where we all understand and appreciate each other’s perspective, cultures and art. It’s the sort of harmless stuff, in other words, that can go on ad infinitum; a money and-travel-go-round where frequent flyer points accumulate and those jet vapour-trails criss-cross the skies.

However, institutions matter and residencies also matter; art matters, as they say. They help form the centre of gravity for the contemporary art scene in terms of its cutting edge and its future directions. Politics permeate, shape and form them, albeit at an unspoken ideological level. In-your-face political art still exists at certain levels in the hierarchy however. For example, John Berger wrote recently with reference to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that it should be “considered as a political act…an historical landmark.” Maybe. But where do we locate institutions in the nexus between art and politics in the age of neoliberal globalisation?

Nikos Papastergiadis considered this key issue in his talk at the Sidney Myer Centre, University of Melbourne. Contemporary art institutions, especially those that have come into being over the last 15 years or so, are very different creatures from “traditional” institutions. In the latter (which still exist everywhere), he argued, art is “housed” and “displayed” for public edification. And what was/is expected of them runs along fairly delineated lines. You go and see the display; or if you are an artist you show your work and participate in exchanges and residencies, all within the comfortable realm of “art and culture.” These are the old-style museums and state art galleries; publicly funded, with no surprises and no controversies.

Papastergiadis observed that with the ICT revolution during the 1980s and 90s, and the transforming free-market neoliberalism that accompanied it, new kinds of institutions mushroomed from the restructured ruin-scapes of the developed North. He listed 6 key institutions, including ACMI in Melbourne and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool (UK) as representing, he imagined at the time, exciting developments in the realm of new media art. Exciting new works and artistic exchanges were happening that seemed to be taking art into fresh realms of practice and representation.

The problem is that these institutions were flawed from the beginning. Backed by both public and private funding sources, these new media institutions were dropped into the partial vacuum created by the withdrawal of the state from its role as funder of public art institutions. Moreover, the expectations heaped upon these institutions were enormous. Essentially, public and private sponsors expected them to culturally and economically regenerate a cityscape brought low by 20 years of neglect.

The effect has been that the public respond to their heterogeneity with enthusiasm, but institutional “partners” (sponsors, governments) don’t know how to categorise and feel comfortable with them and their areas of success. Moreover, it became clear that they are not going to revive areas of neglect on their own. Artists’ colonies aren’t going to flock around them spreading positive waves of culturally-inspired entrepreneurialism.

We are left, as Papastergiadis implies, with vast social-cultural anachronisms housed in cutting-edge architecture. The public is swarming to institutions like ACMI, but their very success through new media art jeopardises their future, because it is taking art and the public relationship with art into unknown areas. The artist as producer and public as consumer and creator may begin to think and act politically and question the role and purpose of art, and how it can connect to larger questions and issues—and even influence events! This of course leaves institutional partners somewhat on the sidelines, perplexed about public participation and unplanned organic developments and directions. That this cannot be allowed to endure means that institutions and artists, exchanged or otherwise, thus enter into a deeply compromised logic: success is to be measured by safety and predictability or serious questions will be asked.

One came away from the conference contemplating the dilemma that new media art institutions have never been busier, and expectations of them have never been higher. But also realising they are conceived and born as part of a bigger business plan that has little to do with art and art practice, and a lot to do with being expected to fill the gaps in our cultural life and civil society left by state abandonment. On the global scale all new media art institutions are implicated in this neoliberal project. And of course these are doomed to fail; and the institutions, the artists and the public will be blamed for it.

There is a lot about Yuendumu that is secret business, despite its being the most studied place in Australia. How the town looks is secret—there are no pictures of it on the web. Keeping the appearance of the town under wraps is about changing the media’s portrayal of Aboriginal Australians from shantytown victims to a self-determined people.

Warlpiri Media have convinced the urban world that you need their imprimatur before photographing inside Yuendumu. The non-Aboriginal manager Rita Cattoni was born to the role of gatekeeper. Warlpiri Media’s bargaining power is that you need a permit to be there; a visa to visit Aboriginal Australia. For example, one cameraperson was asked to ‘please explain’ an article she wrote on her personal website about her time in Yuendumu. The accuracy of her account was never in question, but her portrayal of the town was exactly of the type that Warlpiri Media are attempting to censor in the public’s image of the place. The offending article was removed and filming continued.

If there is one thing documentary makers and journalists don’t like, it is censorship. Organisations like Warlpiri Media have enormous control. What is amazing is that conflicts between these organisations and the media are fairly minimal. At the heart of any conflict between information gathers (documentary makers) and those who possess the information (subjects or their collective) is control over the material. In the end, a lot of the tension between the subject and filmmaker comes down to 2 things: money and the question of whose story it is—the subject’s or the filmmaker’s?

It is also interesting to flip the coin (the 2 dollar coin with the Warlpiri man on its head side) and say that Warlpiri Media’s power is not, horror of horrors, well-intentioned censorship but an extension of copyright and permission. The 2 are very much intertwined. Let us leave the complex question of censorship open for further debate and move on to the issue of who owns the story.

Many thousands of kilometres away in France the intelligentsia are musing over this very issue. The patient and charming Georges Lopez from the documentary Etre Et Avoir (To Be and To Have, 2003) is suing the film’s makers for 250,000 Euros. “I’ve spent days in cinemas answering questions from the audience, in interviews, travelling abroad, and all they do is thank me nicely”, said Lopez on the BBC website. What he wants is money. His lawyers claim the filmmakers breached copyright and counterfeit laws. Did Mr Lopez give permission? Who owns the image of the teacher and his lessons, and the profits derived from their reproduction?

The issue would not have arisen if Etre had not done so well in the cinemas and made Lopez into a star. But it did. Increasingly, documentary cinema release is inspiring respectable box office returns and generating profit. The probable result of the suit will be an increase in the number of documentary subjects demanding rights to a share of the net income and requiring remuneration for touring with the film. Neither are new ideas to the industry, nor can they be seen as harmful to the filming of documentary. Nor will they pose any drastic dilemma as to who owns the story: profits are shared, creative control remains with the filmmaker or the investors.

Not so thinks the Belgian journalist and filmmaker Hugues Le Paige. He wrote about Mr Lopez’s suit in Dox (March 2004): “To make a documentary is to actually build up a rapport [between the subject and the filmmaker] that excludes any mercantile dealings by its very essence.” This statement is highly romantic. Despite DV technology, documentaries are still expensive to make and distribute. Money is always a part of the story.

One of the claims made in the debate generated by the lawsuit is that paying the subject will make a difference to the truthfulness of the story. It will change the meta-filmic relationship from filmmaker/subject to employer/employee. The subject will feel the need to perform, a need ‘to have’ the money rather than just ‘to be.’ This theory rests on the idea that financial transactions will somehow hide rather than expose the true character of the subject, and further, a fear that documentary makers may bribe their subjects.

The trouble is that in Anglo (and Franco) culture, dealing with Intellectual Property is so foreign to us that we need large contracts and expensive lawyers to nut it out. In contrast, in Warlpiri culture the legality is clear. Ownership of possessions like houses and cars is fluid. But ownership of stories is proscribed. Every retelling requires permission from the people who own that knowledge, and all knowledge is owned.

For instance, when recording the story of the 1928 Coniston Massacre it was necessary to find the people who owned the stories of the landscape in which it happened, as well as those who experienced it. Once access had been granted by Warlpiri Media the storytellers were paid and permission was given for use. On the censorship side, an eyewitness account of a tracker whose family still lives in the community had to be dropped in exchange for continued access to the rest of the story. In this case, sorry business was not resolved and was unlikely to be so. The tracker’s story was not for sale.

If Central Australia is any measure of the effect that money has on truth then it can be said that truthfulness is not lost when you pay the subject. The censorship in the Coniston story had nothing to do with money; it hinged on community cohesiveness and personalities. In Yuendumu the fees are very reasonable; the mercantile dealing is very simple. In 1990s jargon, stories are commodities and Warlpiri culture has recognised this and ‘unionised’ to set wages and conditions. The story remains the property of the teller, but permission is given to use it.

Maybe it is another case of the ‘Empire Writes Back.’ Aboriginal media organisations such as Warlpiri should be invited to European documentary conferences to discuss their model with the French.

Perhaps protesting too much, TS Eliot famously viewed Hamlet as a failure on the grounds that the play was “full of some stuff which the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” While the Melbourne artist and filmmaker James Clayden might well agree with this verdict, he has little or no interest in dragging anything to light. Rather, in his video fantasia Hamlet X, screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), he strives to add to the ambiguity of his source material on the horror-movie principle that nothing is more terrifying than the unknown. Traditional continuity editing is non-existent; individual shots tend to be shaky, shadowy or out-of-focus; Shakespeare’s lines are shuffled like a pack of cards with other cryptic texts. A larger narrative of mental breakdown is hinted at but never clarified, while glimpsed acts of violence threaten the distinction between a given fictional scenario and ‘real’ life.

Ultimately, the ghost haunting this infernal machine might be that of Shakespeare’s original play—or Shakespeare himself. Clayden may take his inspiration from Hamlet’s reflections on the chaos beneath consensus reality, yet his disjunctive techniques, however sophisticated, are in stark contrast to the amazing fluency of Elizabethan rhetoric. With many of the visual distortions arising directly out of the limitations of video as a medium, what’s both compelling and off-putting about Clayden’s enterprise is its wilfully ‘primitive’ aspect, transforming Hamlet from a noble hero into a mumbling autodidact with a psychotic streak.

Systematic to a fault, Hamlet X threatens to exhaust the most committed viewer’s patience with its monotonous editing rhythms and relentless visual and verbal repetitions over a 2 hour running time. The frisson of dread fades well before the halfway mark, leaving not much to ponder aside from the literal situation being documented—an obliging group of actors doing competent line readings in a warehouse space above the CBD. In putting this mundaneness on record, Clayden leaves it unclear whether he’s conducting a seance or aiming to expose an absence at the heart of the literary canon. Either way, Hamlet X is more impressive for its ambition than its achievement. As the Bard pointed out, it’s not difficult for anyone to call spirits from the deep: “But will they come when you do call for them?”

Clara Law’s Letters to Ali, premiered at this year’s MIFF, is a daylight work by comparison. In opposing the mandatory detention of asylum seekers in Australia, Law is acting more in her capacity as concerned citizen than as an art filmmaker, which is not to say she lacks a personal stake in the subject. Like the fiction features she’s made locally since immigrating from Hong Kong, this independently financed documentary visualises her adopted country as a land of accommodating open space, from “sweeping plains” to wide suburban streets where children can run and tease each other.

Yet for all its openness, the poignancy of Letters to Ali stems from the visual and human absence at its centre. In 2003, when the film was shot, the Afghan teenager known as “Ali” had been imprisoned in the Port Hedland detention centre for the best part of 2 years; for legal reasons, Law can reveal neither his face nor his real name. When he’s finally given temporary release, we see him happily mingling with his ‘adopted’ Australian family, the Kerbis—except that he’s kept permanently out-of-focus, like Robin Williams in Deconstructing Harry.

While it can’t be a total accident that Letters to Ali is getting its general release in the run-up to the federal election, Law’s outrage at the locking-up of children seems innocent of any larger political agenda. Indeed, the Kerbis themselves ought to warm the heart of the most diehard conservative: a very likeable Australian family (Mum, Dad and 4 kids) not visibly unusual except in their capacity for empathy. The more radically-minded might feel that the film relies too heavily on establishing the humanity of “Ali” through his association with these wholesome folk, as if his “normality” by Australian standards had any connection with his right to be treated decently. Certainly, from the pastel titlecards to the Paul Grabowsky score, there’s nothing here to undermine the prevailing belief that a social conscience is a middle-class luxury item. That said, Law deserves kudos for getting the film made, and it’s possible that her softly-softly approach might succeed in changing a few minds, at the ballot box and elsewhere.

Hamlet X, director James Clayden; Letters to Ali, director Clara Law; 53rd Melbourne International Film Festival, July 21-August 8

RealTime-BEAP Writers Workshop

RealTime’s 9-day gruelling-but-fun intensive workshop for 10 writers at BEAP 2004 yielded some 50 responses to new media artworks, exhibitions and conferences. A small sample of the writing and a glimpse of the epic event can be found in the centre pages of this edition, while the whole of the workshop’s output and a bigger picture of BEAP can be read at www.realtimearts.net/features/beap.

RealTime International

We’ve not trumpeted it but over the years RealTime has run a steady stream of reports on overseas arts events and significant artists. The writers are usually Australian artists or scholars travelling or in-residence and inspired by the work they’ve seen. In this edition we’re expanding our coverage of innovative art with reports from New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, the Baltics (ISEA), the UK and Germany. Our German coverage includes an interview with composer Heiner Goebbels about his latest work, a review of Australian theatre director Benedict Andrew’s debut at Berlin’s Schaubühne and a report on Dresden’s Level 7 gallery, focal point for new work and critical discussion in central Europe. Belgian composer Erich Sleichim talks about his experimental music theatre work on Antonin Artaud for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. We also look forward to MAAP (Multimedia Arts Asia-Pacific) in Singapore where a RealTime team will respond to the exhibitions and conferences online from October 25.

Congratulations

There are more artists to be congratulated than we have space for, but here’s a shortlist. Belated congratulations to Michael Kantor on his appointment as Artistic Director of Playbox: great news for Australian theatre. Kate Murphy (RT 61, p37) was awarded the $40,000, 2004 NSW Ministry for the Arts Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship for her video work Britney and her proposal to study at the Glasgow School of Art. Multimedia artist Justine Cooper has been granted a 2-year fellowship by the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council. Independent dancer and choreographer Kay Armstrong (RT 61, p48) has been awarded the 2004 NSW Ministry of the Arts’ Robert Helpman Dance Scholarship which will take her to the UK to work with choreographer Jonathan Burrows and Ruth Zapporrah in Italy. Australian avant garde composer, violinist and writer Jon Rose has been awarded the prestigious $AUS20,000 Karl Sczuka Prize for radio arts for Skeleton in the Museum, a homage to Percy Grainger (broadcast on ABC FM’s The Listening Room before its demise). Marshall Mcguire, virtuoso harpist and new artistic director of Sydney’s contemporary music ensemble, the Seymour Group, has been awarded a well-earned Churchill Fellowship.

Congratulations too to former RealTime Assistant Editor and novelist Mireille Juchau and her partner, screenwriter Blake Ayshford, on the birth of the lovely Evie Inès who made a welcome appearance at the recent launch by Ross Gibson of Michelle Moo’s wonderful, experimental novel about 70s sharpies, Glory This (Local Consumption). RT

Some of the most compelling films to screen at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival were the features, documentaries and shorts in the Homelands: The Middle East in Focus program. Within Homelands, the New Women Filmmakers (Emergence) sub-section focused on the work of a new generation of female directors through 4 documentaries and a feature film. Although uneven in quality and execution, these 5 films represented a trenchant examination of the social, political, religious, and in particular sexual, constraints to which many women in contemporary Middle Eastern communities remain subject.

Of the 5 filmmakers, Iranian Samira Makhmalbaf was the most prominent. Arguably no longer an ‘emerging’ director given her international profile and a filmography including 3 accomplished features, the selection of Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon (2003) was perhaps justified by the accompanying ‘making-of’ documentary Joy of Madness, which detailed the film’s casting process. The documentary was directed by Samira’s younger sister Hana.

Set in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, At Five in the Afternoon centres on Noqreh (Agheleh Rezaie) who, against her extremist father’s wishes, surreptitiously recommences her secondary school studies. Despite her firm convictions about the possibilities for female empowerment in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Noqreh’s nascent leadership ambitions are thwarted by her family’s dire circumstances.

The theme of female autonomy through education is a consistent one in Makhmalbaf’s small but impressive oeuvre, and in this film is expressed in a deliberately didactic form. Discarding the burqa and donning white high heeled shoes when safe from the punitive male gaze, Rezaie makes Noqreh a convincing and outspoken heroine for latter day Afghanistan. But while the feminist sentiments are admirable, Makhmalbaf’s film flags at times. The family’s flight into the desolate countryside feels protracted, depending too heavily on the director’s trademark startling imagery for emotional resonance.

What really invigorates the film is the intriguing insight provided by Joy of Madness. Although only 14 when she wrote and directed the film, Hana’s lively take on Samira’s directorial approach arguably sheds as much light on the state of Afghani society as her sister’s feature film. Shot on DV and frequently in extreme close-up, Hana focuses on several key sequences in her sister’s process of casting non-professional performers.

Samira, whose personal style borders on the tyrannical, is met with suspicion and mistrust. Women are particularly reluctant to participate in her film, still fearful of the social and political repercussions. At one point, the crew reassures a family that contrary to rumour, involvement in the project will not result in the death of their child. Key pieces of dialogue in Samira’s film, including a speech about the role of women in politics, appear in embryonic form during the auditioning seen in Joy of Madness. While the film’s hand-held style and episodic structure lacks finesse, Hana’s interrogation of the filmmaking process (following the venerable example of father Mohsen and other contemporary Iranian filmmakers), and frank depiction of the social, political and economic uncertainty in Afghanistan, made Joy of Madness a fascinating work.

A frank approach to the subject matter was also a hallmark of the other Iranian contribution to the Emergence section. Mitra Farahani’s Zohre and Manouchehr (2003) is a curious mix of poesy and talking heads. Farahani combines excerpts from a well-known 19th century Iranian love poem with comments from interviewees of all ages about the nature of love and sexuality in 21st century Iran. While the dramatic recreations of Iraj Mirza’s poem had a slightly clunky quality at times, the unashamedly erotic 19th century sentiments provided a powerful counter-point to the restriction on expressions of sexuality, particularly female, endured by contemporary Iranians.

Israeli filmmakers also addressed the topic of female sexuality in the remaining 2 documentaries comprising the Emergence section. In Purity (2002), writer-director Ana Zuria used the birth of her fifth child to examine the strict Jewish laws that regulate women’s bodies. Underpinned by a conviction that the female body is impure during menstruation and childbirth, these ancient laws require women to undergo elaborate monthly purification rituals. Zuria explores issues around such subordination, not only from her own position, but also from 2 other, radically opposed perspectives. Natalie has rejected the oppressiveness of the purification rituals and has thus renounced marriage. Happily married Katy struggles with an unfortunate combination of menstrual dysfunction and religious orthodoxy that ensures she is almost continually forbidden physical contact with her husband. The thoughtful and articulate statements from these 2 women, in addition to the insights from a ‘purification agent’ and her defiant daughter, made this film an absorbing and extremely moving work.

Almost There (directors Sigal Yehuda and Joelle Alexis, 2003), offers an equally personal and telling statement about female sexual identity. Unwilling to continue living in strife torn Tel Aviv as an openly gay couple, Yehuda and Alexis turn the camera on themselves, recording their attempt to find a place where they can live peacefully. A no frills travel diary that documents some sublimely beautiful Greek locations, Almost There is a touchingly honest, if occasionally self-indulgent, testament to the peripatetic couple’s devoted relationship.

Issues around female identity also formed the basis of other films in the Homelands program. The heartfelt, if didactic, multi-strand Iranian narrative Bemani (director Dariush Mehrjui, 2002) detailed 3 stories of female oppression. Mahnaz Afzali’s delightfully unstructured Iranian documentary The Ladies (2003), provided a telling portrait of a diverse community of women who patronise a Tehran toilet block. Other documentaries explored the courage and tragedy of individual women’s lives, including 2 genuinely devastating works. In Arna’s Children (2003), Juliano Mer Khamis documented his Israeli mother’s crusade to improve Palestinian children’s lives in the war torn Jenin refugee camp, while the short Maryam’s Sin (director Paris Shehandeh, 2004) dealt in graphic and disturbing detail with the honour killing of a young Iranian girl.

The Homelands program was both a sobering experience and a steep cinematic learning curve, offering a diverse range of films from directors committed to tackling the intractable problems that beset the region. What distinguished all of the films discussed, particularly those in the Emergence category, was the resolute way in which they addressed the complexities of lived female experience. Predominantly low-budget, sometimes stylistically rudimentary, these films constituted a compelling, collective call to arms reminiscent of the forceful feminist polemic of Western female filmmakers in the 1970s and 80s. Not intended as patronising, I mean with this comparison to acknowledge the courage of Middle-Eastern women filmmakers who only now have access, albeit limited, to the resources and freedom of expression enabling them to craft such powerful cinematic statements.

Homelands: The Middle East in Focus, 53rd Melbourne International Film Festival, July 21-August 8

It seems that every year we get wind of a new ‘breakthrough’ cinema from Asia. Thailand is this year’s South Korea—a regional cinema that has remade itself and been able to sustain a wide range of production from popular genre films to esoteric arthouse. The Thai Breakers season at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) dipped a toe in the waters of this diverse and uneven cinema.

Thailand has long had a relatively high volume industry concentrating on the domestic market. The international rise of Thai filmmaking is generally dated from 1997 with the overseas release of Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Fun Bar Karaoke and Nonzee Nimibutr’s Dang Birely and the Young Gangsters. New national cinemas are generally marketed around auteurs as a way of making the unfamiliar familiar, and MIFF’s season centred on Ratanaruang. His Last Life in the Universe has commanded attention on the international festival circuit this year. Shot by Christopher Doyle at his most restrained, the film is a beautifully precise reworking of Ratanaruang’s second feature 6ixtynin9. Asano Tadanobu plays a Japanese librarian continually contemplating suicide, not through any sense of despair, but rather as the ultimate extension of his need for order. His unintentional penchant for causing the deaths of others brings him into contact with Noi, a bar girl who lives in a constant state of domestic chaos. Their relationship is less a case of romantic opposites attracting than the complementary comfort of yin and yang.

The other major Thai filmmaker to emerge internationally is Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, a one-man avant-garde feature film industry. Last year, his Blissfully Yours was either loved or walked out on, and this year’s Tropical Malady similarly divided audiences. Those who appreciated the slow-building intensity of the film were treated to one of the highlights of the festival.

Weerasethakul’s films are fascinating because for all their apparent simplicity and anti-dramatic surface, they are constantly in the process of changing into something else. You can never be quite sure what the film is becoming and they puzzle you in the gentlest of ways. Tropical Malady essentially works in 2 halves. The first deals with a romantic pursuit and flirtatious evasion between 2 men. The second half converts this into an eerie metaphor: the pursuit of a tiger through the jungle. The journey takes you further and further into a stylisation from which there is no turning back. Finally we look into the throbbing darkness to see a tiger gazing back and are asked to contemplate this as an image of desire.

While Thai cinema might be new to us in the West, it has a long history of domestic genres and traditions based on florid melodramas and musicals. Given limited knowledge of these traditions, it’s often difficult to grasp the context the films are addressing. For example, Ratanaruang’s third film, Mon-Rak Transistor is a reworking of luk thung musicals, invoking a brand of Thai country and western music of the 1950s. The hero only wants to be with his true love but events conspire in unlikely ways to frustrate him.

There’s an edge of camp irony which underlies the relation of these new filmmakers to the historical traditions they want to claim as their own. The very ludicrousness of the melodrama can be read as a subversive gesture deriding simplistic moralism and calling into question the supposed certainties of realism and gender. A case in point: The Adventure of Iron Pussy, co-directed by Weerasethakul and the film’s star Michael Showanasai, looks not much more than an extended drag queen romp shot on video. The project has, however, grown out of a video and performance series in which the eponymous heroine functions as a nodal point of trans-gender celebration and satire on the excesses of Thai cinema.

As we inch our way toward the commercial mainstream of Thai filmmaking we come upon The Eye, by Oxide and Danny Pang, Bangkok-based filmmakers who frequently work in Hong Kong. Based on co-production possibilities, The Eye redresses a longstanding situation where south-east Asia has provided only consumers and exotic locations for Hong Kong cinema.

Since Bangkok Dangerous, the Pang Brothers have emerged at the cutting edge of finding new hi-tech ways of blowing holes in people. The Eye is squarely in the post-Sixth Sense/Ringu school of moody horror movie. The game is to keep the first half slow and unsettling, with the audience safe in the knowledge that hell itself will be unleashed in the final reel. This is a genre which has been extremely important in the forging of regional marketing and co-production throughout Asia. Teenagers are increasingly eager to be scared in movie theatres from Seoul to Mumbai as a sign of their cosmopolitan modernity.

With Ong-Bak we’re back to the meat and potatoes of the action film. Forget all this bourgeois Westernised crap that sees a CGI’ed Maggie Cheung moving elegantly through autumn leaves. This film knows the heart of martial arts is still the desire to see a bunch of sweaty guys whopping each other in startling ways. Tony Jaa represents a move back to the pure faith of athletic and senseless violence—and who can complain about that? My favourite moment in the film comes when a bad guy attacks our hero with a chair and is promptly dispatched. The second bad guy tries again with a table. The final villain, having watched and learned, picks up a refrigerator and hits him with that. That’s the kind of narrative logic I can get behind.

I suspect that we’ve seen the peaks of recent Thai cinema in this season, and that from here the standard falls into the abysses of schlock and horror. Even so, Australian audiences need to widen their sense of the production possibilities in Asian film industries. Thailand is yet another nation in the region with the industrial and aesthetic maturity to provide a wide range of answers to the question of what constitutes a national cinema.

Thai Breakers: New Cinema from Thailand, 53rd Melbourne International Film Festival, July 21-Aug 8

For a film culture to remain vibrant it needs figures who break the mould, push our buttons and challenge our unconscious ideas of what is and what should be. So it is heartening in these conservative times to see a group of local academics and filmmakers explicitly celebrating non-conformity as an ethical, aesthetic and political choice. The symposium, Documentary: The Non-Conformists, brought together a diverse, passionate group of thinkers and filmmakers to discuss, debate and interrogate the notion of non-conformity in the documentary realm.

In keeping with the theme, the symposium was structured around the work of 2 brazenly original documentary makers whose films are rarely seen in Australia. Britain’s Brian Hill is best known for films which startlingly combine song, music and poetry in their depiction of contemporary social milieux. The second international guest filmmaker was Kazuo Hara, whose small but highly provocative body of work has made him something of a cult figure in his home country of Japan and beyond.

The symposium opened with a screening of Hill’s Drinking for England, which set the tone for the weekend. His work is so original and so different from other documentary forms that it is difficult to describe. Hill’s methodology gives an indication: he selects a topic, such as Britain’s drinking culture, finds a small group of people on whom to focus and conducts a set of videotaped interviews. His collaborator, British poet Simon Armitage, then listens to the subjects’ speech patterns and phrasing, and composes verse that manages to both express and comment upon their views and way of life. After consultation and occasional rewrites, the subjects then perform Armitage’s words as verse or song in sequences that Hill skilfully inter-cuts with his interview material.

It’s an approach that sounds dubious and almost unworkable on paper, yet across 4 films Hill has managed to create an engrossing and stylistically challenging body of contemporary documentary work. Due to the TV-friendly one-hour length of most of his films, symposium attendees were able to see 4 of Hill’s documentary “musicals” and examine the evolution of his style from the relatively straight observational approach of 1996’s Saturday Night, to the confronting subject matter and highly performative story-telling of 2002’s Feltham Sings and last year’s Pornography—The Musical.

In contrast to Hill’s audacious mixing of styles, Hara’s work initially appears more conventional. Over the course of the 2 films screened at the symposium, however, it became apparent that his approach is a kind of cinema verité gone to hell and back. The filmmaker follows his subjects with such unrelenting intensity that the camera’s gaze itself begins to dissolve all notions of an identifiable line between representational truth and fiction, and reality.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1986) proved a fitting introduction to Hara’s style. The filmmaker followed former Private Okuzaki Kenzo as he tracked down and interrogated members of his old army unit which was left surrounded, abandoned and starving in what is now West Papua during the final months of the Second World War. Okuzaki is an infamous figure in Japan, having served 10 years in prison for hurling a set of pachinko balls at the Emperor during the leader’s New Year address to the nation in 1968. His raison d’être is to force the Emperor and former officers of Japan’s Imperial Army to take responsibility for what was done to private soldiers during the war.

However, Hara’s films are anything but journalistic investigations seeking to uncover the “truth” of the past. Rather, they interrogate the nature of memory, illustrating that all recollection is a discourse written in the mind of the individual. In The Emperor’s Naked Army Okuzaki’s haranguing of old soldiers produces a series of sickening accounts of the events that took place in West Papua, including allegations that Japanese privates were shot to provide food for their starving officers. But we have no way of substantiating the veracity of these stories as the former soldiers equivocate, shift blame, refuse to speak or recount events to which they themselves were not witness. Memories falter as they forget, lie and refuse to admit what they did and saw. When they do speak, it is only with the threat of violence from Okuzaki.

Just as the soldiers’ accounts are full of gaps and elisions, the documentary itself has many ellipses: at one point Hara and Okuzaki visit West Papua, but an intertitle explains the Indonesian authorities who now control the area confiscated all the filmmaker’s footage. Similarly, at the end of the film, Okuzaki takes it upon himself to attempt to murder the officer formally in charge of his unit. After Hara hesitates about filming such an act, Okuzaki goes ahead alone, providing a narrative climax the film is only able to sketch through newspaper headlines. In this way the form of The Emperor’s Naked Army embodies the thematic meditation on the mutability of recollection. At the heart of the film is the notion of absence: the absence of certain scenes, of the old soldiers’ unspoken knowledge and the details they have forgotten. And the entire work is haunted by the absence of Japan’s millions of war dead, evoked in shrines, graves and the sepia photographic portraits of deceased comrades that Okuzaki obsessively clutches throughout much of the film.

Hara’s A Dedicated Life (1994) similarly focuses on a subject to the point where all notions of a stable truth are destroyed. The film began as an account of the life of Japanese novelist Mitsuharu Inoue, but in the course of shooting the writer contracted cancer, physically deteriorated and passed away. We watch him reminisce about his early life as he begins to die, only to realise some two-thirds of the way into the film that the interviews with his childhood acquaintances contradict almost everything Inoue has said. Hara commented after the film that he had nearly finished shooting A Dedicated Life before he realised it was not about Inoue’s life story, but the reality of the fictional world in which the writer lived.

Although markedly different on the surface, the works of Hara and Hill share a crucial common element. For both filmmakers the process of investigating and exploring a subject constitutes the final work. They employ an open, porous process in which their interaction with the subject works its way into the film, not necessarily through overtly reflexive devices, but by guiding the very shape and direction of the work as it is made. During one of the weekend’s many panel discussions, local filmmaker Kriv Stenders described a similar approach in making his award-winning 1995 documentary Motherland.

Film for these directors is a medium through which they subjectively interact with the world, rather than a way of recording a pre-established dramatic or documentary “truth.” The approach is non-conformist to the extent that the filmmaker doesn’t know how the finished work will look, or even what it will ultimately be about.

In providing a forum which brought filmmakers and theorists together to debate questions of form, the organisers of The Non-Conformists symposium marked out a space that is sorely lacking in local film culture. All too often debates about the direction of our industry remain centred on funding structures and the market. Just as we need monetary structures to grease the mechanics of production, we need public forums in which we can ask questions and be surprised, intrigued and provoked by what film can do.

Department of Media, Macquarie University and the Centre for Screen Studies, AFTRS, Documentary: The Non-Conformists, Chauvel Cinema and AFTRS, Sydney; September 10-12

There’s an air of hopelessness and sad failure permeating the subject matter of this year’s AFI documentaries which, nonetheless, makes for some very good films. At the end of Helen’s War: Portrait of a Dissident (director Anna Broinowski), the war in Iraq is continuing and any sign of peace or imminent worldwide nuclear disarmament seems far-fetched; Lonely Boy Richard (director Trevor Graham) concludes with Richard Wanambi heading for a long stretch in prison (and, depressingly, looking forward to it); and the absent subject of The President Versus David Hicks (directors Bentley Dean and Curtis Levy) is still in limbo at Guantanamo Bay. Then there’s Mart Bakal and Vincent Lee in The Men Who Would Conquer China, (director Nick Torrens) representatives of a new wave of Sino-capitalists who confidently expect their latest venture in China to propel them towards billionairedom. It doesn’t seem fair somehow.

The Men Who Would Conquer China is the outsider in this year’s selection. It has no Australian content; Mart is a New York banker, Vincent is a Hong Kong financier and, by and large, that’s where we see them operating, apart from various excursions to Chinese provinces where they inspect businesses ripe for outside investment/plunder.

Both Mart and Vincent have their own motives for wanting to capitalise on China. Mart wants to make some serious money but he also has a startlingly naïve conviction that globalisation is good and that the world is a better place for being branded and homogenised in an American form. Vincent wants to be rich too, but he must also please his father and establish a position for himself in the upper echelons of the Chinese business and political system. To a degree then, their agendas differ and the film works well when it reveals their personal antagonisms and frustrations with each other.

Equally, it doesn’t seek to glamorise the business of capitalism, which mainly seems to consist of sitting around in boardrooms, on planes, at various dinners and banquets. There is obvious wealth here but it’s not the wealth of consumption. Rather, it’s a restless, blind impulse to find new formations, to buy and sell. Mart and Vincent are nominally in control of this process but are also beholden to it. Torrens’ film benefits from a familiarity with the protagonists but nevertheless maintains a low-key critical distance.

There’s a telling scene early in Helen’s War when Dr Helen Caldicott encounters dozens of copies of Mike Moore’s Stupid White Men in an American bookshop, but only 2 copies of her latest book tucked away on the shelf. The anti-war movement has a new voice, a media-savvy, multi-skilled populist. “We’re saying the same things,” exclaims Caldicott, “except he’s funny. Well, I’m funny too.” Except she’s not. Caldicott doesn’t do funny. She’s driven, passionate, uncompromising, fearless and deadly serious, because these are serious matters: the destruction of the planet, the end of life as we know it and the prospect that Melbourne will end up looking like it does in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, the book that started it all for Dr Caldicott way back when. She made a name for herself during the big anti-nuclear campaigns of the 1970s and 80s, but is anybody listening now? Does anybody care?

Broinowski’s film follows Caldicott as she tours the US trying to find an audience for her message, fighting for airtime and coverage, drumming up support. Caldicott’s views don’t change, she knows that she’s right and everything that happens is exactly as she predicted, but there are still shifts and new strategies. A book promo tour becomes an email campaign and a think-tank with some heavy-duty sponsors. Caldicott shows she can still cut it and there is poignancy in seeing her rage against the bomb, confronting a mortality that is both personal and global.

Lonely Boy Richard (RT58, p. 17) is a well-measured and considered piece about the impact of alcohol on remote Aboriginal towns in the Northern Territory. Without sensationalising or over-dramatising the subject, the film displays great empathy and patience, taking what could have been a throw-away news story and producing an insightful, albeit painful, portrait of a man, his family and a community.

Dean and Levy’s The President Versus David Hicks has been widely distributed and needs little introduction. It is a chronicle of the times that uses the absent David Hicks as a prism for examining how ordinary lives can be touched and transformed by worldwide events. While everybody is implicated in the conduct of states in the ‘Global War on Terror’, Hicks is at the pointy end where its impact is most stark and pitiless. His father, Terry Hicks, steps into his son’s awful void and the film is as much about his journey as it is about retracing David’s.

Caldicott, Wanambi, Hicks, Bakal and Lee—this year’s documentaries are all about contemporary life stories of personal struggle and endeavour. Its pertinence and pathos should win The President Versus David Hicks this year’s award. Despite their general gloominess, this year’s films see Australian documentary filmmakers intelligently and sometimes provocatively engaging with the key issues affecting all our lives on the planet today.

The nominees for best animation this year for the most part look good, healthily embracing a range of techniques with the computer as only one tool among others. Robert Stephenson’s Lucky for Some (11’10) is the conventional work in the cluster, a clay animation that looks pretty familiar if deftly done—no playing with the limits of clay here. Locations shift between beach, casino and police station as the principals are interrogated by police. So too our opinions of these seeming innocents transform dramatically as the convoluted plot about chance discoveries and murderous outcomes unfolds. Perhaps the selectors for the award were taken by the short story twist and the grim seriousness underlying comic appearances. I found it hard to locate the film’s tone and was more attracted to the other contenders who put narrative aside, as in Pia Borg’s Footnote, or kept it in its place in the interplay between moment and momentum as in Sejong Park’s Birthday Boy and It’s Like That (7’15) by the Southern Ladies Animation Group.

Birthday Boy (9’30) is, as Dan Edwards has described it in OnScreen (RT 62, p21), a simple tale resonating with many meanings. A child in a Korean village ruined by war and devoid of community himself plays at war, making military toys and wearing his father’s dog tags, unaware of the soldier’s death. In an early chilling moment the boy hurls a stone at and hits a distant cyclist. The film’s great strength is in its evocation of an innocent interiority, alternating the animation equivalents of long shots with extreme closeups that not only focus on what obsesses the boy but bring him face to face, almost full screen, with the viewer, a curious and affecting mirror experience. Birthday Boy is an intense and beautifully crafted film in the anime style, nuancing its anti-war premise with questions about innocence and learning. The film won the Yoram Gross Animation award at this year’s Dendy Awards for Short Films at the Sydney Film Festival; Siggraph Art Show, Best Animated short 2003, USA; and the Prix Ars Electronica 2004 Award of Distinction for Computer Animation/visual effects, Austria.

Pia Borg’s Footnote (6’00) is an eccentric modernist fantasia harking back in style and content to Max Ernst and the worlds conjured by the likes of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. But here the layering is mobile, rhythmically alternating between the levels of a house and also the codes of writing, musical notation and dance that propel and obsess its mechanistic characters. The animation reveals a contemporary virtuosity here and there by escaping the flatness of much collage with, for example, some striking depth of field as we are swept around the driven pianist. Antony Pateras’ score for piano both heightens and threatens to rupture the metronomic pulse of this alien world of constrained creativity. Footnote was one of the 20 student films from around the world to be shown in the CinÃ(c)fondation section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The mix of animation styles in It’s Like That (7’15) by the Southern Ladies Animation Group (SLAG) at first sight suggests ungainliness, but somehow it all hangs together and to powerful effect. The editing of sound and image and the almost documentary narrative structure (built around the recorded voices of child refugees in Australian detention centres) integrate the linear shifts between and occasional overlays of stop animation, flash and cell drawings. A horizontal line becomes a ship, it squiggles into fire and snakes out to become an outline of Australia —simple enough artistry but juxtaposed with a child’s voice it’s disturbing. Similarly the portrayal of the children as knitted bird puppets seems coy at first but the limited means and our attentive-ness to the voices keeps sentimentality well at bay. It’s Like That was invited to the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam in 2003.

Park and Borg are recent graduates of AFTRS and VCA respectively. Melbourne-based SLAG is a collaborative venture, a model freshly emergent in film here and there around the country. All 3 have already made successful forays into the international festival scene, justifying the AFI Awards selection and a sign yet again of the strengths of Australian animation. As for a winner, for me it’s a tie between Birthday Boy and It’s Like That, between a fully visually realised psychological acuity on the one hand and an agitprop deployment of the means to hand, but with great sensitivity, on the other.

Ten films? After perusing the entries of the 46th Australian Film Institute Awards, it becomes immediately apparent that the chief concern regarding domestic cinema is no longer the quality but the quantity of films. The sparse field (there were 20 entries in 2003 and 14 in 2002) is more in keeping with the glamour and scope of a greyhound race than a prestigious showcase of a national industry. Despite this significant problem, for the first time in some years there are positive signs when it comes to content. Against the backdrop of a severe production downturn, 2 trends are revealed: it appears that we have seen the last of misfiring conservative comedies, and a stronger art cinema presence means that we can face the future with cautious optimism rather than outright fear.

In the slew of attacks on recent Australian cinema, the critical knives have been most often brandished against the ocker comedies—not only because of their triteness, but because they fail to meet their ambitious box office targets. They are created as popular entertainment but, because of marketing resources and domineering international competitors, cannot be promoted as such. Critics and punters will sleep easier in the knowledge that the run is finally closing, with a small but ignoble class of 2004: the dismal The Honourable Wally Norman (director Ted Emery) lamely attempts to translate small screen talent to theatres; Thunderstruck (Darren Ashton) is an AC/DC film with no AC/DC music; and the ironically titled Under the Radar (Evan Clarry) completely avoided detection during its theatrical release. In the wake of the Film Finance Corporation establishing its new funding process, in which creative merit has become the chief criterion, the ‘popular’ comedy will surely become the most endangered species in our cinematic landscape.

Now to the glimmers of hope. Among the few films in contention for this year’s awards, there are some notable entries from both new players and old hands. Though Somersault (Cate Shortland, RT62, p. 19) is suffering from the syndrome of over-praise from quality-starved film reviewers, it is an impressive work with a style and subject matter which is assuring its success at European festivals: moody cinematography, sparse dialogue and a teenage girl’s sexual journey. Somersault, Shortland and lead Abbie Cornish (giving a memorable performance in a year otherwise bereft of important female roles) are all frontrunners in their respective categories.

Other members of this year’s art cinema contingent are a flawed yet interesting cache. Rolf De Heer’s annual offering will be remembered as a genuine curiosity of Australian cinema. The Old Man Who Read Love Stories was made 4 years ago with a Hollywood cast in Guyana as a French co-production, which meant it only just scraped into eligibility for the AFI Awards. It is one of the director’s most personal and sensitive works. In contrast to De Heer’s magic realism is The Finished People (Khoa Do, RT59, p. 16). This film’s digital grittiness is borne of a production, financing and development process ostracised by the industry, interestingly reflecting the alienated lives of the Cabramatta youths which the film depicts.

Similarly, Alkinos Tsilimidos is a graduate of the ‘shoot first, finance later’ film school, and his first fully-funded feature Tom White is another modest yet poetic look at the disenfranchised. Not all of the 2004 art house projects are as successfully realised. Beneath the meticulous production design of Love’s Brother (Jan Sardi) is a conservative, flimsy romantic comedy.

In the face of damning box office figures and vitriolic critical analysis, the immediate (and understandable) response of the marketplace has been to offer fewer products. Amongst this small collection, the more impressive projects are downsized, personal pieces about society’s fringe dwellers, aimed squarely at the middle-class art house market. This more boutique approach will perhaps raise the quality of the Australian slate, but it is worth noting the wider industrial effect: many freelance crewmembers and postproduction houses will become redundant, there will be shrinking professional and technological resources and attempts at other genre films will become more difficult. And there are further, even graver risks in this approach. In the current rationalist environment, if gross receipts do not significantly increase, it will take a hell of a lot of international awards to convince the wider public that Australia possesses a sustainable, worthy industry, and production opportunities will dwindle even further.

We are at a crucial junction where the next 2 years will dictate the further viability of cinematic expression in this country. It will be interesting to see whether filmmakers rise to the occasion, financers display vision, and audiences pay any attention at all.

While the range of feature films eligible for this year’s AFI Awards signals some potentially important new directions for Australian cinema, the short film nominees are a less inspiring, more predictable bunch. Judging by the shorts I’ve seen at festivals in the past 12 months, this is probably more indicative of a general malaise in Australian dramatic short filmmaking than a fault in the selection process.

Three of the 4 short nominees are ‘mini-features’, part of the wave of 50 minute films that have dominated the AFI selections since the AFC launched its ‘short feature’ initiative several years ago. As I noted in my piece on the program last year (RT57, p. 15), the potential offered by the form for experimentation without the financial risk of a feature has generally not been taken up. Two of the mini-features nominated this year are straight, naturalistic dramas, while the third is another in the long line of Australian crime films.

So Close To Home (director Jessica Hobbs) is an engaging tale of a young refugee (Arbenita Fejzullahu) adrift in Australia, who is taken under the wing of a young local professional named Maggie (Kerry Fox). The girl appears in Maggie’s train compartment in the dead of night as a silent, slightly unnerving presence. Especially in its early scenes, So Close To Home effectively conveys the alien nature of the refugee presence for most Australians living comfortably in the suburbs. As the story progresses, however, the air of mystery gradually dissipates and the narrative becomes a conventional tragic scenario climaxing in an appropriately weepy conclusion. So Close To Home is a heartfelt if unadventurous film, that nevertheless looks beyond the individual concerns of white, middle class Australians that often dominate our cinema.

Floodhouse (Miro Bilbrough) is a less successful mini-feature centring on Mara (Victoria Thaine), an adolescent dumped by her self-obsessed ‘artistic’ mother on her hippie father, who lives in a primitive shack in what appears to be northern NSW. The film offers an insight into the contemporary vestiges of Australia’s counter culture of the 1970s, a social milieu that receives scant attention on our screens. The portrayal of the suffering endured by many children whose parents have uncompromisingly pursued an ‘alternative’ lifestyle is also a subject rich in potential. While the sense of cultural and geographical isolation endured by these kids is well conveyed, the drama is badly undermined by a saccharine guitar soundtrack, intermittent doses of forced humour and a reliance on cliched dramatic devices. Having successfully evoked the dank semi-tropical environment and primitive conditions Mara and her father live in, Bilbrough falls back on the themes of alienation, loneliness and awkward sexual awakening that characterise countless coming-of-age films the world over. The story ends predictably with the young protagonist moving out into the world, all the wiser for having endured and transcended her restrictive childhood.

The one stylistic surprise in this year’s short nominees is Paul McDermott’s The Scree, a suitably grim fairytale about a group of travellers stranded on an island and being devoured, one-by-one, by the formless horror named in the title. The images are an imaginative mix of drawings on paper cut-outs and live actors. While it was refreshing to see an Australian short operating outside the conventions of psychological drama, The Scree is essentially an illustrated poem in which the images add little to the words delivered in voice-over. The poem itself is rather childish one-dimensional verse lacking any metaphorical or symbolic resonance. Despite the simplistic tone, the fates meted out to the travellers are genuinely gruesome, making it difficult to tell whether the The Scree is intended as a children’s film or an adult story in fairytale form.

The final nominee is Lennie Cahill Shoots Through (Charlie Doane), a sub-Blue Murder depiction of Sydney’s changing crime scene. Unlike Blue Murder, Lennie Cahill unashamedly romanticises Sydney’s criminal past. Although set in the present, the characters are left-overs from a time when the city was populated by grizzled, straight-talking cops and a gallery of lovable roguish villains. These crims may occasionally knock off an innocent bystander in the pursuit of an honest day’s crime, but they always feel bad about it afterwards. The film does effectively capture the few remaining physical traces of pre-Olympics inner-Sydney, and offers some wry comments on the contemporary shift from blue to white collar crime. But the style is marred by an uneasy combination of gritty realism and ill-conceived comedy which at times makes it feel like a group of aging Keystone Cops have stumbled into an episode of Wild Side.

The nominated short films reflect a broader bind facing the industry. We are too culturally timid and hamstrung by economic rationalist notions of creating a ‘sustainable industry’ to unequivocally embrace a cinema of adult themes and/or experimentation. As a result, our dramatic films, feature length, mini-feature or short, tend to fall into one of 2 categories: unprovocative, middle-of-the-road dramas that even with strong material pull their punches, or populist films that take on genres while sending up their conventions. Neither seems to resonate with committed cinema goers or the broader public.

Art exhibitions come and go. Some are remembered and achieve iconic status while others vanish into anonymity. The year 2004 will be memorable for the confluence of 2 blockbuster exhibitions that, in their own way, promised glimpses of what contemporary art is all about. The 2004 Biennale of Sydney and 2004: Australian Culture Now were virtually in sync and apparently in competition as well, each striving to outdo the other in terms of being ‘contemporary.’ The Biennale of Sydney presented the “best of contemporary international and Australian art”, art “about today… about everything that is happening and shaping our lives.” 2004 offered a “snapshot of the most exciting things happening in Australian art today”, “a spectacular survey of work at the edge of current artistic practice.” In drawing attention to the coincidence of these 2 exhibitions I want to highlight the priority that both invested in innovative artistic practice, and the perception that to be really contemporary is to be, in jazz argot, “something else”; spectacular, groundbreaking.

From the point of view of digital media arts, the Biennale of Sydney was a huge disappointment. If you went there specifically looking for the stuff you would have to conclude that it is no longer on the agenda. Apart from a number of interactive works by Mario Rizzi (The Sofa of Jung) and Catherine Richards (I was scared to death/I could have died of joy), the Biennale seems to have forgotten that media art is a focal index of the effect that digital technologies have in shaping our lives.

What of 2004: Australian Culture Now? The exhibition declared its innovative nature from the outset. For starters, it was an ambitious collaborative venture, 2 years in the making, between the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria. In contrast to the Biennale of Sydney, digital media was placed prominently on the exhibition’s map of emerging trends in Australian video, television, painting, networked media, sculpture, installation, photography, craft, design and fashion. Indeed, the spectacular Federation Square atrium that separates the Ian Potter Centre and ACMI could be regarded as a symbol of the complex and vibrant convergences taking place within contemporary Australian art. Senior NGV curator Charles Green drew specific attention to this in his catalogue essay, describing the fluency and openness of the boundaries between previously discrete forms such as cinema, architecture, painting and the internet. This convergence was also cannily reflected in the organisation of the exhibition around broad categories such as image, fashion, object and installation. Furthermore, the accompanying website cross-referenced different artists’ works across categories, reinforcing the blurring of formal boundaries so central to the entire exhibition. Screen-based media art and painting might not occupy the same physical space, but in 2004 they certainly occupy the same conceptual space, in conversation with, and informing, one another. Moreover, as Green astutely observes, ACMI’s foregrounding of interactive and time-based screen arts strategically heightens their curatorial place, in contrast to most art institutions where they are relegated to “the same peripheral spaces allocated during the 1970s to video.”

Although the role of digital media and its associated art forms was prioritised in the curatorial vision of 2004, the highlighting of convergence was not without contradictions and qualifications. There is a strong sense in the promotional literature produced by the NGV that while important conversations are clearly taking place between the visual arts and ‘new media’, we are also witnessing a resurgence of traditional forms. It is painting, not the moving image, that is “moving back towards centre stage”, situating itself “as a reference point for other media.”

One prominent didactic panel at the entrance to the NGV component of 2004 declared, somewhat sulkily, that as a result of “years of digitised technological change” art hasn’t been defined in recent times by its traditional, eponymous forms such as painting and sculpture. Consequently, traditional forms have had to re-define and re-invent themselves through overlaps with the likes of new cinema forms, games and web authoring. This sentiment seems to contradict the 2004 vision of generating a new kind of work that transcends the old divisions between digital and more traditional ‘analogue’ forms of art. Parochialism never dies. Perhaps the removal of Christopher Langton’s triumphal bubble arch, installed as a kind of unifying membrane in the atrium for the exhibition launch, is suggestive of an historical divide in the arts that even 2004 couldn’t hope to resolve. And the principal corporate sponsor had such high hopes for the exhibition: “It will change art…and everyone near the cutting-edge will be affected.” Pity if you don’t live near the cutting edge.

Not to conceal my own parochialism, it was in the ACMI component of 2004 that I encountered 2 works that stood out as innovative. Unfortunately neither Monika Tichacek’s The Shadowers (2004) nor Philip Brophy’s The Body Malleable (2002-2004) evidenced the intermedia “creolisation” celebrated in the catalogue, nor did they represent the coming into the world of a hybrid, as yet unnamed contemporary art form spawned from encounters between unlikely things. While it must be conceded that both these works attracted the carping kind of “your taxes paid for this” diatribe often meted out to contemporary art, neither could compete in the moral outrage stakes with Nat and Ali’s not only but also, honk for art (2004) installation at the NGV. This work of excessive scrapbook ephemera, which covered entire walls, was an extravagant exploration of what is and isn’t topical in contemporary art. However, it primarily received attention for its controversial and eventually censored slur on Ian Thorpe (from gay to gold icon with a single thumbtack).

Sydney-based artist Monika Tichacek’s multi-channel video work The Shadowers immediately caused a ruckus in terms of where it should go. Originally to be installed in the Screen Gallery with the rest of the ACMI component of 2004, it was eventually exhibited separately in the ACMI Studio and restricted to patrons over 18 years of age. The Shadowers is an overwhelming experience virtually impossible to describe. Situated within its tight triangular arrangement of screens, I felt completely enveloped. Tichacek inventively exploited the proximity of the 3 screens to create a claustrophobic, audio-visual space of immersion. The sense of entrapment was a weird corollary of the bizarre role-playing scenarios depicted on the screens, involving 3 ambiguous characters and surreal procedures of bondage and confinement. Far from being erotic or sexualised, it was the abstraction of their interactions that made this work so beguiling and riveting. In this sense the least shocking aspect of The Shadowers was the much-publicised tongue-nailing sequence. It was the meticulous, geometrical rigour with which elaborately artificial prosthetic connections of string, nails, jewels and saliva enmesh the protagonists that was totally engaging and disturbing: a dream logic worthy of Kafka on an absinthe binge. Loud, unnerving and visceral, yet strangely quiescent, The Shadowers brought to mind remarks made about David Lynch’s Eraserhead in 1977: “Ever have a dream while sleeping face down, with your mouth and nose buried in your pillow? In your discomfort you might have conjured up something that approximates Eraserhead.”

Philip Brophy’s The Body Malleable is the first work of media art to finally and emphatically tell it like it is: interacting with computers is a completely embodied experience. With its penetrative and very literal digital interface, The Body Malleable is an ironic and playful exploration of the human-computer interface that dares us to be squeamish (“The colon and its polysexual route to infinite Otherness beckons you”). The theme of the body malleable is a familiar one in Brophy’s work, only here the transformations of vaginal and penile forms and sounds are in the hand, or rather finger, of the beholder. The Body Malleable is the kind of work many people, including myself, have been waiting for at ACMI. It is striking and memorable, pushing the possibilities of interaction beyond the familiar point and click interface associated with computer-based works. It is welcome and important in that it extends ACMI’s curatorial history of presenting relatively safe and non-threatening work.

Whether we like it or not, we are required to physically relate to the work in a totally unprecedented, unfamiliar way: “You want to stick your finger in, but once you do, it gets messy.” The more rigorous your attack on the beautifully sculptural, yet organically ambiguous interface (is this a vagina or a colon I see before me?), the more suggestive and palpable the transformations on screen, and the more stimulated the surround sound becomes. But make no mistake, Brophy isn’t out to offend public taste, to shock or dramatically blot the contemporary arts map with a memorable success de scandale. It is the total indifference to either appeasing or transgressing aesthetic or moral codes that makes The Body Malleable stand out as an engaging and thoroughly worked over experience. When I went back to check it out prior to the closing of the show, that sphincter was well and truly spent. Another ruptured membrane in the 2004 experience. Spectacular.

2004: Australian Culture Now, Australian Centre for the Moving Image and National Gallery of Victoria, June 8-Sept 12; Biennale of Sydney, various venues, June 5-Aug 15

Darren Tofts’ essay on media arts at the Biennale of Sydney is published in Artspace’s Criticism+Engagement+ Thought, edited by Blair French, Adam Geczy and Nicholas Tsoutas. He is currently working on a book about Australian media arts to be published by Thames and Hudson.

There is a persistent trope of disembodiment that frames many investigations into the impact of new media technologies on culture. When we sit in chat rooms or immerse ourselves in virtual worlds, our bodies are supposed to lapse into redundancy—meat, as William Gibson called it. Despite the aching necks and backs and chronic RSI suffered by those who engage heavily with computing technologies, this trope persistently surfaces. So it was interesting to note that the body, in all its glorious corporeality, emerged as a loose theme binding the works exhibited as part of the ACMI Screen Gallery component of 2004: Australian Culture Now.

2004 was billed as “one of the most ambitious surveys of contemporary Australian art and culture in recent history.” The Screen Gallery component of the exhibition was made up of 9 works curated by Alexie Glass. There was, however, some overlap with the Networked component of the exhibition, curated by Melinda Rackham and featuring 22 works, ranging from Flash animations through to websites for online communities such as Empyre and Fibreculture.

Despite being a survey show, the works specifically curated for the Screen Gallery all manifest an interest in some part of the body or bodies. It’s hard to say whether this was a curatorial preference or a sign of some kind of emerging trend in new media arts. Nevertheless, gendered bodies, ephemeral bodies and malleable bodies all made their presence felt.

behind the mountain (2004) by Darren Dale, Jonathan Jones and David Page focuses on the colonisation of Indigenous bodies by early white settlers in Australia. Drawing its title from Truganini’s poignant plea to be buried behind the mountain rather than have her remains distributed to European museums, as happened to many of her people, the work serves as a reminder of the brutality that thousands of Indigenous Australians endured at the hands of colonial governments. Even after death, their bodies were forced to succumb to the rule of the European invaders, their graves robbed and their remains removed without permission so as to be bought and sold for exhibition and experimentation. The work consists of 6 short films projected into 6 cardboard boxes laid out on the gallery floor. Each film shows a body, shot so as to appear contained and constrained by the box. The bodies are naked, silent and vulnerable. It is a quiet, thoughtful work that eloquently evokes a sorry past.

While behind the mountain positions the viewer as a spectator of the captive body, Alex Davies’ Swarm (2003) captures spectators and incorporates them into the work. As viewers move into the installation space, their image is tracked, captured and projected back to them on the screen. The captured image data is stored in a database and re-emerges to create an evolving mediascape. Ghostly traces of past visitors join with viewers currently in the space, at times leading to swarms of activity. The visual activity is linked to a soundtrack which swells to fill the space or recedes to silence, depending on the activity on screen. Swarm reminds us of the public nature of our bodies in an age of surveillance.

Despite the work being contingent on the physical presence of participants, Swarm asks very little of that presence. Philip Brophy’s The Body Malleable, in contrast, demands that we use our bodies, or rather our fingers, in a far more active way. The interface consists of an orb about the size of a bowling bowl in front of a screen. Putting your fingers into the orifice of the orb produces changes in the animation on the screen in front of you. The faster you move your fingers in and out of the orifice, the greater the changes produced (there was a term for it when I was in high school but I won’t use it here). The animation itself is a playful commentary on the mutability of gender. Some finger thrusts produce a mutating penile form while others a similarly mobile vagina. In Brophy’s words, “The penile and the vaginal roll and flutter like a series of hot flushes but they are degendered by their incessant drive to become the other…The colon and its polysexual route to infinite Otherness beckons you. There is no turning back once the body becomes malleable.”

Malleable bodies also feature strongly in the work of Sydney-based collective the Kingpins. In Dark Side of the Mall (2004), they continue their exploration of performance-based interventions into public and popular spaces. The work, which taps into the aesthetics of the rock video, the shopping mall and drag, is made up of a series of videos projected onto 3 screens, set to The Angels’ tune Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again?. The screens force the viewer to move between disparate scenes featuring pirates in a car park (strangely reminiscent of West Side Story) and teenage beauty queens in a faux classical shopping mall. This amplifies the sense of disjuncture created within the scenes themselves. Given how little we’ve seen of the Kingpins in Melbourne, I think the inclusion of some of their earlier works may have helped provide a stronger context for this piece.

Other works included in the ACMI Screen Gallery were Troy Innocent’s lifeSigns (2004), which continues the artist’s always interesting probes into the nature of language and iconography; Symbiotica’s MEART: the semi-living artist (2001); Shaun Gladwell’s godspeed verticals (2004); David Rosetzky’s Maniac de Luxe (2004) and the much discussed work by Monika Tichacek, The Shadowers (2004). The only worrying aspect of the show was the absence of artists from outside Sydney or Melbourne, and the retreat into a strong emphasis on video/cinematic works after what I felt was a positive move by ACMI in last year’s Transfigure exhibition towards media art installations.

2004: Australian Culture Now, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, June 8-Sept 12

I am standing in the departure hall of the Helsinki ferry terminal. Long lines of new media artists, theorists, curators and funders queue alphabetically to check-in for the ISEA2004 (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) Baltic cruise. Among the passengers are many well-known names whose thoughts dominate the email discussion lists and websites that underpin the new media art community’s sense of identity. And here they all are in the flesh; the network embodied.

At 4 o’clock we set off. Outside it is pouring with rain. Those artists with work on the ‘sundeck’ look hassled and soggy; they’ve had 3 hours to install their complex artworks from scratch. Inside water is pouring in from the roof onto the DJs and slopping out of the hot tub over the floor. Surely it is not a good idea to mix so much electronic art with so much water. There is art everywhere; on the ferry’s television system, in the lifts, in the gym, even in the pool. But at this point it’s difficult to tell the difference between what is working, what has been broken by the rain, and what is still being set up.

The first artwork that makes an impact on me is Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski’s Floating Territories. Each passenger has received in their conference pack a small card with instructions. I’ve got “Petition: sway opinion towards your own position—buy an influential person a drink.” I compare with someone else nearby, who has: “Converge: meet on safe ground—invite someone to collaborate.” There is a computer component to the work that maps personal family migratory history, but it is the cards themselves that are most interesting in this context. In their self-referential irony our instructions expose the solipsism of the new media art world, in which the behaviours we value—networking, collaborating and theorising—have become a kind of tribal dogma and a recipe for isolation, rather than engagement with people outside our field (or boat). The work alludes to the “floating world” prints which celebrated the sensual and artistic pleasures of 19th century Tokyo during its period of isolation from the rest of the world. In our own floating world we are getting our fair share of sensual pleasures as the evening wears on.

On deck 10 at Club Stardust, artists have taken over the karaoke machine. By midnight everyone is dancing in the ballroom and people are diving in the hot-tubs; the passengers are partying like it’s 1999. As I watch the new media art world frolic I wonder what this surreal knees-up says about this community’s self-image right now. It has an air of grand folly that implies self-confidence and a sense of reaching a certain zenith in development. Has new media culture reached, as Tapio Makela, Program Chair, writes in his rationale for organising this big party: “a stage where it has the maturity to be both sensual, technically advanced and critically aware”?

The major theme of the event, “Histories of the new”, also indicates an arrival at a key evolutionary moment, a point from which we must look back and take stock. New media art is canonising its heroes, pointing to its past, claiming its hard fought right to be taken seriously. As if to prove this point, that evening at the performance of Séa.nce, by Norie Neumark, Maria Miranda and Greg Turner, we summon our collective laptop emotion to conjure up the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. “Who wants to ask Marshall a question?” asks Neumark. Someone types into the chat space: “Marshall, can the network save your life?”

On day 2, I begin to try and plan the speakers and events I would like to see. The event is enormously ambitious, over programmed and complex. Apart from the overarching history theme there are 7 others: “Wearable experience”, “Wireless experience”, “Networked experience”, “Interfacing sounds”, “Geopolitics of media”, “Critical interaction design” and “Open source and software as culture”. There are more than 300 presentations, picked from 1,300 entries by an international programming committee of 40. Once I have cross-referenced the theme I’m interested in against its timeslot and location, I begin to see the uselessness of planning in the face of such chaos. I decide to follow my nose and take my chances.

The networking, at least, has become more systematic. There are official times for African, Asian, French and New Zealand network meetings. My nose-following strategy proves successful, leading me to the interesting Asia-Pacific session which highlights the problems and tactics of networking within a massively disparate region where many governments are either indifferent, or hostile, to collaboration with their neighbours.

The discussion foregrounds the topic of the “Geopolitics of media”, which really comes into its own in Estonia. We arrive in Tallinn on day 3, partied out and sleep deprived. Program co-chair Mare Tralle welcomes us with a reminder of how Estonian access to media and technology has been affected by politics. She describes the “void of media” left in the wake of the Soviet era, followed by the “e-euphoria” of 1990s Estonia, which was mixed with the “ultra right-wing political turmoil of regained independence.” She hopes that ISEA2004 will engage the Estonian public and provide “international reference points for re-assessing our local situation.”

We have 2 days in Tallinn. The conference venues are a 30 minute walk from each other, with simultaneous programs, and there are 4 exhibitions around the city. This leg of the journey is more like a hit-and-run collision than a profound engagement with Estonian culture.

I steal an afternoon from conferencing to pay some attention to the major exhibition, which explores the “Geopolitics” theme. Many of the works create or expose undercurrents of social and political exchange, such as Sarai Media Lab’s Network of No_Des, an absorbing hypertext world of found material from the new media street culture of Delhi. The show is an interesting portrait of international practice, but all the texts are in English—none are in Estonian.

The last leg of our journey brings us back to Helsinki and the opening of the major “Wireless experience” exhibition at Kiasma. I am weary of this wanton mobility. I don’t feel wireless and networked—I have never felt so encumbered, leaden and difficult to transport. In spite of myself I am cheered up by the first piece I see: Rebecca Cummings and Paul Demarinis’ Light Rain. My umbrella, which has been an unhappily overused companion on this trip, becomes a delightfully imaginative interface, resonating with melodies transmitted by an artificial rain shower.

One piece in the show goes down particularly well with the audience. Bubl Space by Arthur Elsenaar and Taco Stolk is a “concept device” that blocks mobile phone signals for 3 metres around the user. People queue up to try making a call near the device and are delighted when they can’t. What a good idea: poor us, all we want is a little bit of personal, communication-free space in the urban landscape.

Day 6 dawns and the adventure is nearly over. I am looking for synthesis, a way to draw meaning from this chaotic experience. Of course, when you go looking for synthesis you usually find it, but a keynote speech from Sarai Media Lab’s Shuddhabrata Sengupta called “The remains of tomorrow’s past, speculations on the antiquity of new media practice in South Asia”, gives me something richer. He begins charmingly, self deprecatingly, by telling us that if you put an Indian behind a lectern he will tell you he invented the world. It is a timely reminder that any view of anything can be only partial. His talk offers “speculations about the possibility of constructing alternative, non-transatlantic histories of ‘new’ media practice.” He draws together the threads of history and geopolitics and puts his finger on the source of what has been worrying me since we set off on this journey, what he calls the “immature solipsism of the North American and European media scene” and the making of an historical grand narrative of new media art. He weaves a story of the development of a touch-based system of telegraph in 19th century India with the internet, giving them a common point of inspiration in the Buddhist texts of “Indra’s Net”, a legend of a net with a jewel on each intersection that creates an “infinite reflection process.” His point is not to suggest this is the origin of modern communication technologies, but rather, to show the viability of alternative stories to prove the opposite: “nothing comes from just one place.”

Sengupta offers a solution: the proliferation of stories and versions, “an open source alternative history.” A resistance to the synthesis I am seeking. Suddenly the chaos of the past few days seems a positive quality, and I don’t feel the need to search for answers or order any more. It has been a crossing of divergent paths that can be grasped only subjectively by each person present. I’m content to go home with my own story of what happened at ISEA 2004, to read the catalogue and marvel at the things I missed, to hear the stories of others who seemed to have gone to a completely different event.

In a keynote address at ISEA2004 (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts), French sociologist Michael Malfesoli argued that postmodern culture is in part defined by the play of experimentation, rather than rationalised technology. This tension between toys and tools provides an interesting context for two ISEA2004 exhibits for which games and play form an important background: Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs’ Floating Territories and Jason Davidson’s Aboriginal Imagination: Ngulliyangi.

ISEA2004 saw exhibitions and conferences in 3 locations: initially the Baltic Sea cruise ship The Opera, then Tallinn (Estonia) and finally Helsinki (Finland). For Floating Territories a game card was slipped in with each passenger’s ship boarding pass. The card could be swiped at a terminal on board to access a game or swapped with other passengers. And it provided a portal for players to map their own migratory histories.

In this and previous work such as Dream Kitchen, Cmielewski and Starrs engage with the cultural force of games as opposed to say, filmic forms. Games provide opportunities for immediate engagement. “Play is an important strategy so we use that. We want people to enjoy the work, to play with it but play is also a fantastic way to allow expression and disseminate meaning” says Starrs. In this instance they had a captive community of savvy ISEA participants sailing the Baltic Sea. There may never be a better group of boat people to test this research project.

Floating Territories is a response to recent migration debates in Australia: “We wanted to do something about territory, about immigration, and started to consider if we could work out a game. We didn’t want to have representations of people because once you start doing that you enter a minefield of stereotypes. So we went back to the Atari abstract games: we liked the aesthetic in those games and we could talk about movements of people in an abstract way.”

The work required a series of simple exercises, yet finally presented a powerful, complex message that visualised the previously invisible traces of migration. Each boarding pass card had a theme, such as “Defend”, “Colonise” and “Petition”, with ironic instructions (the “Petition” card suggested that you buy a drink for an important ISEA delegate). Players deployed their assigned strategy, or one they had chosen after swapping cards. After, the game players arrived at a site programmed in to the computer where they could map their migration history by drawing lines connecting their family’s migration, their own domicile and their current position. In Tallinn the artists projected an animated graphic of the results. It was a powerful experience to see the Mercator map disappearing behind a series of superimposed lines linking points across space, creating a new map of interconnections.

The ‘play’ of the work reflected the production processes employed by Cmielewski and Starrs. They collaborate without necessarily assigning specific roles, while programming tasks on this project were undertaken by Adam Hinshaw. Floating Territories itself was conducted as a form of research. The on-board installation gathered migratory data which was fed back to participants in the presentation.

The open nature of the research strategy meant the feedback raised new possibilities. Cmielewski noted that the mapping process prompted people to put in their own personal stories: “If you were standing next to them they’d start reflecting on their migration history and so a lot of suggestions have come from people who’d like to add more information and build up a network of stories.” Starrs added that the strategy of incorporating play and mapping had potential for spin-off modules for workshops and other festivals. But Cmielewski mused that a “demographically correct” mapping of the entire movements of people may take this work too far in an instrumental form.

The diagram may be a banal example of the instrumental tension in art, yet its mundanity belies its danger as a form of knowledge. These days a sketched map is enough to have you labelled a terrorist. The danger of diagrams prompted Jason Davidson’s contributions to ISEA2004, but his motivation was to release the play of Aboriginal knowledge into health education. His work was presented at the City Gallery in Tallinn.

Davidson was completing a Masters degree in cross cultural health communication when he was asked to view health promotion images for an Aboriginal program. He was appalled: “The pictures [showing the kidney filtering waste from the blood] were so simplified it was psychologically saying that you mob are too stupid to learn from anything harder than kindergarten drawings. So I decided to design a drawing of the kidney to prove that Aboriginal artists and culture can be used scientifically in health and in education to tell a proper story for how the kidney does its job.” This print was recently purchased by Janet Holmes a Court.

Davidson’s work travelled from health intervention to valued art through Aboriginal knowledge systems. He says he is applying existing knowledge in a new way so that “Indigenous people get recognised and supported to control things in this area [health education] for themselves and for their communities.” This socially engaged ‘art as information’ challenges instrumental health promotion. Davidson spent hours reading anatomy books, reworking their drawings and later testing his material back in his communities in Gurindji country in the Northern Territory.

His images are hand drawn with acid free felt tip pen, manipulated with Photoshop, and printed on canvas and etching paper. Davidson plays with Western images of the body by using an “x-ray style.” As well as the mounted images there is a similar multimedia animation, produced with After Effects, that unpacks a human body to demonstrate relations between organs and movements of forces and fluids.

Aboriginal Imagination also includes Davidson’s “hunting videos”: handheld digital video images of hunts and food preparation. The videos are a kind of reworked diagram, taking the viewer through each phase of the process from hunt to feast. They challenge the boundary between health, bodies and knowledge, by linking killing and feasting to health.

Despite being based in an educational institution, Davidson was unable to get access to a laptop for his field research. So he took A4 prints and video copies of the animation back with him to trial with communities. The multimedia includes a number of the original songs (written and performed by the Wildwater Band) that were recorded live as “lounge room and kitchen” voice-overs.

As well as attracting attention from art collectors, his work has caught the eye of business developers. Davidson had to fight for intellectual property rights when a company marketing health products appeared interested. This is reflected in a number of prints in the Tallinn exhibition which he has titled Fight for your rights.

Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs, Floating Territories, programming Adam Hinshaw; ISEA2004; The Opera cruise ship, Baltic Sea, August 15-17; Jason Davidson, Aboriginal Imagination: Ngulliyangi; ISEA2004; City Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia; August 17-19