“The Elaboratorium” – Art and Science

“The Elaboratorium” by the Scale Free Network at the Counihan Gallery is an exhibition that attempts to unite art and science. To the puzzlement of many a science student, atheists and cultural commentators we don’t see enough art about science. (Except in the areas of scientific imaging – scientific imaging has become so much better and is producing amazing and beautiful images. There was a very brief time in the 19^th century when painters were the best people to recreate ancient temples or prehistoric animals but now we don’t have to recreate the images, so where does this leave the artists?) The problem with art and science collaborations is that it often produces sterile mules; a fertile collaboration that will generate the next generation of artistic and scientific collaboration is difficult to produce.

The Scale Free Network (SFN) is a collaborative group of artists and scientists (a “scale free network” is a scientific way of say social network). “Combining the interdisciplinary skills of artist Briony Barr, microbiologist Dr Gregory Crocetti and art teacher Jacqueline Smith, SFN works with creative combinations of science and art to design participatory experiences for children and adults.” The strength and weakness of the exhibition is really aimed at all ages.  I’d seen that kind of thing before as a child; as the son of a zoologist I went to see many science exhibitions and it did leave me with a strong impression about the quality of work in these exhibitions.

“The Elaboratorium” takes its name from a 17th century term to describe where chemical substances were made and ‘elaborated’ upon. The best parts of the exhibition are the digital projections they are impressive compared to the average art gallery video installation. Digital projections of water-life recorded at 100 -400x magnification along with the shadows cast by the lab equipment and the “suspended circles” of rotating drum skins. Accompanied with classical music looked like a theatrical version of science.

Some of the works like the “Particle Chamber”, a vitrine with polystyrene balls and a fan, failed to show anything exciting; you get that with science experiments – there is the real possibility of failure.

The viewing station parts of the exhibition are interactive but I can’t imagine that many people, except for children, who haven’t seen such images before. In keeping with the gallery setting there are samples of gallery dust and Ben Sheppard’s drawings from the exhibition in the next gallery space. There are other local elements to examine under the stereo-microscopes – I spent some time looking at the micro-cosmos of some local moss.

Bored @ Blindside

On Thursday morning on the 7^th floor of the Nicolas Building a small group of high school kids were waiting outside Blindside for the gallery to be opened. When the gallery attendant arrived about 10 minutes late and unlocked the door the school kids then lined up in the gallery along the path taped on the floor marked “End Zone”. They waited for the video and sound to be turned on and then took one look at Blaine Cooper’s installation “End Zone (Always do the Bad Thang)” and then left.

I was also waiting and watching the jeweler at work, a floor down across the light well at the Nicholas Building. I was hoping to the school kids would engage with the installation; jogging on the treadmill or playing the guitar as Blaine Cooper suggested in his notes on the exhibition. But the video montage of movie explosions and the rock music were not that inspiring or motivating rather they are too familiar and mundane. And neither the Marshal amp nor the treadmill had been turned on yet.

The gallery attendant told me that later that day at the exhibition opening Blaine Cooper would be running on the treadmill with guitarist, Nicholas Lam of The Vaudeville Smash, cranking up the amp.

I don’t know if I want to put that much effort into making some piece of contemporary art work and this not an isolated incident. Too much contemporary art is like a lame performance where audience participation is a demand rather than an option. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, not that the demand for participation encourages me to feel generous in my mood. Demanding that an audience participate is a sure way to annoy those who are feeling uncommitted and undecided. An audience may be willing to participate when the artist has already won the audience’s interest, sympathy, respect…

I’m bored now – I’m leaving.

Shaun Gladwell – Physical Graffiti

I could get cosmic about the Gladwell’s art and write about the spinning fat god that is the turning universe. I could art historical and refer to Gladwell’s references to Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. Or examine his cinematic references to Mad Max and Ozploitation films. Instead, due to my interest in street art, I saw something else in Gladwell’s art a kind of physical graffiti.

Shaun Gladwell is most famous for his video “Storm Sequence” (2000) (it is not in the ACMI exhibition) but how did he come to this? I vaguely remember some of his early paintings.  Joanna Mendelssohn reviewing Shaun Gladwell’s exhibition at Sherman Galleries in Sydney has clearer memories of these paintings. Mendelssohn notes that Gladwell started painting giant copies of Penguin paperback classics. (Artlink Vol 23 no.3 2003) There is nothing of this early phase in Gladwell’s art in the ACMI exhibition. There are still a couple of minor works on paper scattered through out ACMI’s exhibition but they are largely incidental. One drawing, “Untitled” (2011) does provide a key to Gladwell’s art showing a diagram of train surfing yoga positions.

When Gladwell stopped focusing on painting and drawing and turned to video he was able to better integrate his art and his own life. Videos of Gladwell’s street movement; skateboard riding in “Storm Sequence” or hanging from the handrails of a Sydney train in “Tangara” (2003) became the foundation for his video art. Using BMX riders, break dancers, graffiti artists, skateboarders, pole dancers for his videos – this is physical graffiti.

Contemporary movement defines space in a creative, interactive way: what can be done with this space, what orders can be found, explored, used and created. Movement and perspective are not determined by the space but by the person using the space. This is body art as an urban intervention, captured in the locations and the momentum in Gladwell’s videos. In his photographs of the rollerblading police at the Louvre Gladwell is documenting changes in contemporary movement. “Planet & Stars Sequence: Bondi” (2011) looks at the movements of an aerosol art busker routine.

“Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences” in the large Gallery 1 space at ACMI is the first in what ACMI promises to be a series of commissioned new works by ”leading Australian and international contemporary artists.” The horizontal tracking and the walk through “Parallel Forces” (2011) curiously reminded me that the long Gallery 1, deep under ACMI, was once a platforms at Flinders Street Station. It is an engaging exhibition and I hope that has an influence on Melbourne’s street art scene.

RMIT Variety

I saw exhibitions in the various galleries at RMIT in May.

Sharon West, who also has work in the exhibition, curates “Girt by Sea” at RMIT School of Art Gallery. (See my reviews of Sharon West’s earlier exhibitions – just enter her name in the search box on the top of the right column). “Girt by Sea” is in observation of Reconciliation Week 2011 and combines the art of indigenous and non-indigenous artists. Maritime themes are not usual for Australian contemporary or indigenous art even though Australia is surrounded by oceans. The most popular work of the exhibition is Kirsten Lyttle’s “Kuki”, the three Hawaiian shirts with images of a dead Captain Cook. They are cool, self-referential (as Captain Cook was killed in Hawaii) and graphically appealing. The variety of art, from Simon Rose’s video work to the folk art paintings of Aunty Gewen Garoni and Aunty Frances Gallagher, in the exhibition is fun and engaging.

First Site had 3 photography-based exhibitions looking at the human subject: subjectively, objectively and “transpersonally”. The 3 photographers were working in different directions looking at the body or thinking about the self as a subject with memories as in Stephanie Peters “I Know You’re Stalking Me”. This installation using video, photographs and online interactions deals with idea of identity, truth is distorted and rearranged, who are you dealing with – I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Kawita Vatanajyankur takes an external view of bodies as beautiful objects, combining still and video photography, water or sand and the body. In Luciana Vasques “Transpersonal Photography” personal exploration finds new meaning in the interaction between people, objects and photography. Vasques makes excellent use of the space in First Site, a cluster of peep viewers attached to ribbons flutter in front of the air vent and a convex mirror. None of these photography exhibitions are great but they are not bad, there are some good parts and there is nothing wrong with the directions that these photographers are exploring.

Things were not working for me at RMIT Gallery. In Chelle Macnaughtan “Spatial Listening” I tried to listening to “Listening through Stillness” 2011 but my black Dunlop Volleys made no sound on the etched aluminum plates – there was some irritating electric whine going on somewhere in the gallery. I twice became trapped in dead end parts of Ainslie Murray’s “Intangible Architecture”. I didn’t have any problems with Malte Wagenfeld’s “Aesthetics of Air” even though there were warning signs about the lazars. Aside from the warning signs the “Aesthetics of Air” was like a disco without the music or the mirror ball but with the smoke machines and lazars. The aesthetics of air is lightweight.

Ian Burns “And then…”

The exhibition was so good that I had to turn around and go back into the gallery and look at it again. I don’t write this blog to gush about exhibitions but I feel compelled to write that this was the best exhibition that I’ve seen all year. I went back to Anna Schwartz Gallery the next day and saw it again. It is that good.

Why is it so fantastic? It has the charming aesthetics of bricolage combined with slightly banal illusions to a glamorous jet-setting life. Ian Burns combines video installation, sculptural assemblage and kinetic art. It moves. There is sound. It is a whole lot of fun. There are illusions and the magic behind the illusions is revealed. The three dimensional nature of these sculptural assemblages provides different information as you walk around them. On one side you see the video monitor with them image and on the other side you can see the image being created.

The way that they image is created is such a disappointment and so exciting at the same time. It is disappointing to realize that the images have been made so cheaply and exciting to see the effective ingenuity of how it was done. Simple camera and theatrical special effects have been employed.

The video illusions that Burns creates are comments on the superficial illusions of everyday life. Watching the sunset on a beach of golden sand while the waves gently roll in might look like paradise but the image is created from tiny video camera placed amongst a length of clear PVC pipe, a lightbulb and a mannequin holding a boogie-board posed like Botticelli Venus. Burns art asks if the image lives up to the bricolage of electronics, furniture, toys and other objects used to create it.

Burns combines his academic degrees in engineering and art. His use of materials is paradoxically both elegant in the solution and inelegant in the odd collection of ordinary household materials that his assemblages are made from.

Out of all Marcel Duchamp’s art that has been repeated and regurgitated by contemporary art, his very last posthumous work, has been not often been emulated. “Given: 1) the waterfall and 2) the illuminating gas” is a curious work. People hardly knew what to make of it, a diorama scene with a few illusions (the curators are surprised that the primitive motor driving the waterfall mechanism still works). To Duchamp’s “Given: 1) the waterfall and 2) the illuminating gas” Ian Burns adds “And then…”

Curators & Current Exhibitions

Some current exhibitions that I’ve seen in Melbourne made me think about the curators. In reviewing exhibitions in this blog I have endeavoured to give credit to the curators but it also time to give them some critical attention.

Bernhard Sachs and Brad Haylock curate the current exhibition at West Space. I don’t know why they bothered. The title of the show is a beautiful work of art in itself: “The Office of Utopic Procedures Presents: The Aesthetics of Joy – The Infinite International of Poetics” but the exhibition doesn’t support it. Both curators are also exhibiting in the show along with a more or less random selection of artists. Was the exhibition about the aesthetics of joy or was the title so vague that anything could be included? The works in the exhibition are diverse in every sense and there is little cohesion, even the hanging on deep blue walls didn’t create a unity. The exhibition contains the usual contemporary curator’s mix of video art, installation and wall painting. I expect something more from a curators than this exhibition with its pretentious title.

The curators do hit the jackpot with a work by Kellie Wells, a video installation with wall painting that actually appears to be on the exhibition’s theme. Kellie Wells is jumping for joy amongst horizontal strips of elastic. These horizontal strips appear in the minimalist wall painting. It was like the children’s game except played by an adult. The ominous rumbling soundtrack to the installation is the only discordant note in the work.

At Michael Koro Gallery I saw a simpler exhibition. It is simply titled with the names of the participating artists: Ash Keating. Andrew Hutson, Daniel Du Bern and Marcin Wojcik. No curator credited but the hanging was elegantly simple. Ash Keating likes to separate rubbish – it is the environmentally responsible thing to do. And Ash Keating takes rubbish separation to an art – a black pile of plastic waste and white pile of plastic waste. Andrew Hutson is exhibiting three sculptural scenes made of painted paper-mache. They have a whimsical mood, a simple direct style and clear ideas. Daniel Du Bern is showing 10 oil ink prints of strange handmade weapons, perhaps handed in during a police amnesty, as suggested by the series title: Amnesty. These crude but deadly weapons are depicted in a cool, neutral and grey style as artefacts. In the laneway next to Michael Koro Gallery Marcin Wojcik has made small sailing ship made of sticky tape over a wooden frame.

I also saw the Shilo Project at the Ian Potter Museum of Art is curator by Dr Chris McAuliffe. In the exhibition pop music album covers, and dot to dots, meet contemporary art. It is a curatorial dream of an exhibition to include so many artists with a theme exhibition with iconic pop status. The 100 works of art looked coherent because they were all on 100 copies of Neil Diamond’s Shilo album with its dot to dot drawing cover art. There are no breathtakingly great art in this exhibition but the installation of the exhibition is a curatorial work of art incorporating the record store style, a record player and even imitation record store bins full of Neil Diamond records. CDs, with their smaller format, killed the art of the album cover – this exhibition does not attempt to revive it but to redirect it.

Survey @ the Counihan

Surveying the Field at the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick is a survey exhibition from artists living or working in Moreland. There are a lot of artists living or working in the Moreland area and the exhibition. Moreland City has long been the residence of many artists and the location of many artists’ studios attracted by cheap rent and proximity to the city. (Those are the reasons why I moved here.) The Moreland Leader has recently reported that the area was becoming too expensive for artists; it has also reported that there were more professional musicians living in Brunswick than anywhere else in Melbourne (and I don’t feel qualified to comment on such demographics).

Surveying the Field is an emergency exhibition, not an exhaustive survey of Moreland’s artists. The cancellation of Robert Smith’s exhibition due to illness meant that the curator Edwina Bartlem assembled the exhibition at short notice. So no great conclusions about the state of Moreland’s artists are warranted. The quality of the artists that Bartlem managed to assemble in a short time is impressive as is the variety: sculpture, painting, photography, video installation and prints.

Dan Wollmering’s wooden sculptures have a formal character to them that combines a natural chaos to its form. In a completely different aesthetic direction the hyper-realist sculptures of Sam Jinks are like the British artist Ron Muerk. In Floral a hyper-realist face appears tattooed, or shadowed, with floral patterns. The larger than life sized male and female faces are intimately and perfectly detailed to every pore and eyelash.

Sam Leach’s paintings with their dark chiaroscuro neo-baroque style are full of half-forgotten symbolism. His large painting, Peacock observes Sputnik combines ancient and modern mythologies of the heavens. His small paintings of dead and alive birds are equally symbolic and are covered with a glossy layer of epoxy resin.

Continuing the survey the aesthetic variety of Moreland artists Wilma Tobacco’s op-art paintings on shaped canvases are cool and beautiful.

Photographer Alison Bennett exhibits a series of panoramic images of caves. These evocative and symbolic womb-like spaces are seen from the inside, the bright light of the cave’s entrance is visible. Humans have modified some of the caves photographed by Bennett; graffiti covers the walls of one and in others dry stonewalls have been constructed at the mouth.

Owen Leong’s Milk Ring is a dual screen video installation, it is engaging and strange science-fiction scenario that loops endlessly. An alien tries to work a hardware-wetware interface in an exhausting and futile attempt to escape the repetition. The dual screens different views create endless choices for the viewers attention as well as expanding the scenario.

My lack of Italian is one reason that I can’t get into the hand-painted linocut prints of Angela Cavalieri’s text based art. However, many people in Moreland are fluent in Italian, so I’m sure that there will be more receptive viewers.

As usual for the Counihan Gallery there were excellent cheese/fruit platters and wine at the opening; a good way of getting value from your rates dollars. It is also a good opportunity to meet the artists and other local people interested in the arts. I met Sam Leach at the gallery, for the first time after exchanging emails with him. The speeches by curator, Edwina Bartlem and Moreland Mayor, Lambros Tapinos were short and efficient.