Local Art Local Art - Issue 1 March 2003
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LOCAL ART LOCAL ART - ISSUE 1 MARCH 2003 FRESH CUT: Paul Adair / Cameron Anderson / tendency to steal time”, for me it is precisely the Nick Batchelor / Timothy Kendall Edser / Kirstan mesmerising monotony of these works that are so Flannery / Danny Ford / Tracy Grant / Jane Hudson affecting. Your move, with its dispassionate voiceover Matt Malone / Deborah Mansfield / Luisa Rossitto and droning soundtrack, perfectly captures the sense of Grant Stevens / Wilkins Hill / guest curator Alison futility felt by Travis Bickle in the film Taxi Driver. These Kubler works function less as appropriations than as re- enactments. Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 6 February - 9 March 2003 In Timothy Kendall Edser’s ongoing series Ride ‘em, the construction of masculine identity is critiqued through Chris Handran the use of cowboy imagery. Surrender is a wooden cut- out of a cowboy, hands raised in surrender. This figure seems to have either fallen onto the floor face first, or Fresh Cut is the Institute of Modern Art’s annual look at slipped into the gallery between floor and wall. Nearby, the work of selected graduates from Queensland College Stroke ‘em features a scratch video style appropriation of Art (Brisbane and Gold Coast campuses), QUT of a classic Hollywood Western. The video features a Creative Industries and the University of Southern male protagonist stroking his face with a gun, in what Queensland. Fresh Cut exhibitions, with their implied appears to be a state of both remorse and ecstasy. promise of ‘fresh meat’ on offer, are prone to the rhetoric Slowed down and looped, this simple action becomes of the now and this year’s exhibition is no exception. compelling. Also included is a work from Edser’s ongoing Using such phrases as “post September 11 syndrome” performance series Tension. In progress since 2000, and “the new ‘terror’ Zeitgeist”, the works are categorised this series has included a number of confronting and as a collective response to the threat of global warfare. very successful performances. The inclusion here of Under the rubric of ‘boys and girls come out to play’, video documentation, removed from context, seemed to curator Alison Kubler classifies the works using the broad me something of a compromise. division of “chicks and blokes”. The proximity of Edser’s Surrender to floor pieces by As a result, the exhibition includes work by a number of Danny Ford also created something of an obstacle course male artists whose works reference military imagery. for viewers. Ford’s Tracer comprised a mass of second The assemblages of Cameron Anderson feature found hand tennis rackets, each with a single letter printed on materials and painted/drawn imagery of soldiers and its face, scattered around the floor. A group of these helicopters, and are thus linked to a “new popular culture” leaned up against the wall, spelling out the phrase a of terrorism. Had this work been made two years ago, practiced swagger. In the exhibition catalogue, Ford’s however, its imagery would have seemed almost work is said to play with a “post-painting practice” that nostalgic. The thing that makes such imagery frightening is also “post-punk in origin”. Perhaps this is a post-match is not its newness, but precisely its predictable repetition practiced swagger, a volley of post pun wordplay. throughout history. Speaking of post-punk puns, in What the hay? Wilkins Hill reworked a public art piece for the gallery. This work Nick Batchelor’s Toy soldier could be described as DIY is reminiscent of the Ad Rheinhardt cartoon in which an military/hardware. Made from expanding gap filler and abstract painting retorts to a bemused viewer: “what do cardboard, this awkward, almost abject figure features YOU represent?” Anticipating confusion or bemusement a heavily hand-made aesthetic. In a related video piece, at the sight of dog kennels and bales of hay in the gallery, similar soldier figures are dropped from buildings, attacked the work responds with bemusement at the presence of with branches and sticks, decapitated and blown up. viewers, calling out “what the hell is that?” as they pass. These spectacles of masculinity come across as deadpan From the doghouse to the house of God, Kirstan versions of Jackass, or Australia’s Funniest Home Video Flannery’s The Holy People of God physically resembles Show. In contrast to this aesthetic of ‘dumb fun’ are the readymade sculptures of Wilkins Hill, but is altogether Batchelor’s photographs, which combine the slickness different in tone. The solid weight of this Church-like of product advertising with the simple subversions of low object sits leaden, stolid and silent on the gallery floor. budget horror. Its bare timber and blocky construction make it seem like the product of a home handyman or a model maker’s The text-based videos of Grant Stevens present some obsession. of the hallmarks of Hollywood action films, emptied of emotion and spectacle. One-liners enact the most routine This sense of earnestness continued in Tracy Grant’s of action scenes (in PoliceChasePolice) and the opening Soliloquy. Created during bedside vigils in hospital, this credits become the main feature (Can you do that Dad?). work features a number of baby’s bonnets woven using While Kubler argues that these works “avoid [video’s] copper wire. It is the harshness of this material that is LOCAL ART - ISSUE 1 MARCH 2003 PAGE 1 Danny Ford, Tracer 2002, Photo: Don Hildred Image courtesy of the artist and the Institute of Modern Art unsettling. This is accentuated when the copper wire is fashion photography – a discipline founded on fabrication juxtaposed with soft material, as in Neuron Nidification and ‘the look’. Perhaps this is The Perfect Crime not 1, which features medical illustrations of the brain because the male protagonist is not caught in the act, embroidered into fabric. The red of the copper wire but because he manages to strike a pose for the camera. seems at times to stain the fabric, arcing out in tendrils, These actions poses and gestures fill the image with an taking root like a cancer. intentionally empty and ambiguous narrative. In a familiar refrain, Jane Hudson’s I never promised Luisa Rossitto’s 52 Flourishes offers a more complex you a rose garden attempts to find something poetic and confusion of narrative. The drawn image is repeated and evocative within the detritus of everyday life. Fragments used as a matrix for the painted one; elements and of plastic shopping bags are linked together to form what images from one image ‘fill in’ space within another, as looks like a daisy chain, or a curtain of feathers. This images are recomposed, repeated and rearranged. With brought to mind the work of Lauren Berkowitz, but their saturated watercolour hues and ornamental Hudson’s gentle streams of plastic did not attempt to fill patterning, Rossitto’s work becomes a play of forms, the space in the same manner. Instead, the ephemeral colours and design. These contrast with the referential feel and delicate nature of this piece would have been plays in the work of Matt Malone. Owing much to the better served in a less open space. work of John Nixon, these paintings take the form of a simple play with symbols. Paint is sprayed onto small In attempting to mimic wallpaper, the photographs of perspex panels and adhesive vinyl is placed upon this Deborah Mansfield did attempt to fill space, or at least surface in the form of a cross; a discarded U.S. Mail bag to become part of the space. In the Port it is a small, is stretched to form a readymade canvas; a never-ending abstract image that is repeated. Depicting what appears game of computer ping-pong is superimposed over to be reeds or grass reflected in water, the photographic footage of Marcel Duchamp playing chess. Taking prints are block mounted and lacquered so as to take references seemingly at random, these works evidence on the appearance of tiles. Some of these prints jut out the sort of endgames that they would otherwise seem while others seem to recede, creating a curious effect to critique. more related to the corner reliefs of Tatlin than to domestic decoration. Imitating (and exaggerating) the classic While an attempt was made to link the works in Fresh 1950s decorative ducks in flight, 400 photograms of Cut 2003, the broadness of this thematic seemed to ducks scale the walls in Mansfield’s Untitled. These return many to the grad show atmosphere from which prints, hand-cut into ovals, have a certain softness about they emerged. As Alison Kubler reminds us, such shows them, as if they could have been hand-drawn. are “by their very nature, […] disparate in theme, medium, and attitude”. Perhaps it is too much to expect that Fresh While Mansfield’s works mimic decoration, Paul Adair’s Cut exhibitions can ever be more than this, despite the photographs suggest that the photograph is the perfect promises and expectation that only the choicest and crime. While seeking to unsettle our assumed faith in freshest cuts will be on display. the truth of photography, this work resembles quirky PAGE 2 LOCAL ART - ISSUE 1 MARCH 2003 WHERE DO WE BEGIN TO TALK ABOUT but was paradoxically refigured. The problem became “AUSTRALIAN” ART? the solution. The disease part of the cure. Sally Brand Provincialism was pushed to its limits. Artists became shameless imitators, proud of their second-handness and wholly complicit in their dependence upon external We could begin here. Within our locality, as local writers, styles. The artist Imants Tillers was an exemplar of this as local artists, as locals down at the local.