New voices, other aesthetics
Douglas Leonard
“MAAP is a concept and a vision, not a place or a
time,” according to Kim Machan, speaking indefatigably as director/curator
of Excess, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Festival 2001. This vision
over 4 festivals has seen major partnerships developed between regional
new media organisations in China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the
Philippines and Australia. Making her stand on behalf of the immediate
cultural exchange of artistic voices, Machan warns that the developing
economic rationalist rhetoric in Australia seeks to divide the arts and
cultural community into those who make money and those who don’t,
stigmatising the latter as ‘elite’ and out of touch. The media here is the
internet. Lack of infrastructure becomes a strength that allows
MAAP to be whatever it wants—international, cross-cultural,
transportable.
MAAP 2001
installations were as varied in form as in their conceptual concerns,
sometimes savagely sardonic or wittily confronting. Ruark Lewis’ video
installation, Untitled 1, deconstructed the written word (Helen
Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper, a notoriously fake
historical reconstruction) by physically ripping up the book. Golden
Time, by Japanese artists’ collective Candy Factory, projected repeats
of a televised aerobics class from Australia to an empty wheelchair
located directly beneath a glitzy, suspended noose made from display cable
lighting (“we move domestic boredom into different media, to show exactly
the same program people are bored with…”). Korean artist Oh Sang Gil’s
comment on excess and waste seemingly dripped blood into a toilet bowl
until the flushing revealed it as the formalised “minimal aesthetic of an
everyday motion.”
My point of entry began at
the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Art where, meditating upon
(being meditated upon by) Gong Xin Wang’s triple-screened My Sun
(see RT45 p22) coloured and toned subsequent encounters: the fallen
jacaranda blossoms while walking to the Powerhouse, experienced as
psychedelic tessellations; the pure Zen task of ‘sitting’ in the AO:
Audio Only sound art gallery curated by Andrew Kettle. Yan Zhenzong’s
I Will Die 2001 completed this trio of contemplative exercises.
Zhenzong’s work relentlessly
and fascinatingly presented ordinary people, young and old facing the
camera, speaking the words of the title in their own languages. Sometimes
with embarrassment or evident disbelief, sometimes with authentic
solemnity—inducing a cumulative effect of stilling the mind from asking
Western style, cooler aesthetic questions.
Viewing the Excess
Chinese video program curated by Wu Meichun and Machan, I particularly
liked Yang Fudong’s Backyard: Hey the Sun is Rising! which
decontextualised traditional Eastern martial arts into an absurd
choreography with, at times, a Buster Keaton-like wistfulness for a more
innocent version of masculinity. It was also a privilege to see an earlier
work of Wang’s Myth Power (1990), which, in a ‘worked’
anthropological documentary style, demonstrated his ongoing investigation
into belief systems and post-Communist tensions between individualism and
the masses. With an underlying sense of loss of community, the sun here is
sometimes shown in negative (the black sun alchemists took to symbolise
the unconscious in its base, ‘unworked’, state prior to individuation).
Wang’s new work for MAAP, Prayer, continues this line:
visuals pan from a pair of hands praying before an altar, continue up
through the temple architecture to the sky and descend again into a
‘cityscape’ of uniformly replicated stone plinths. Antennae of wires open
and close in systolic fashion to an invisible sun, duplicating the praying
hands. The suggestion is that even the endeavours of modernity are
supplications.
By introducing the notion of
‘sublimity’ in her essay on Wang, and with the Blakean intimations of
Excess, Machan reveals an extant neo-Romanticism. Certainly there
are more than echoes of 70s ‘happenings’ in Post Sensibility: SPREE
2001—documentation of a wild underground event held in Beijing. Machan
considers that Chinese artists have been digesting the whole of Western
art history in the past 3 or 4 years (installation art was still banned in
China 4 years ago), and are pushing limits, searching for individual
expression. This new wave of Protestantism in the arts invites comparison
with our own, relatively staid, practices.
But it was Sydney-based
Melinda Rackham’s interactive, computer-generated cosmos, empyrean,
that chimed on a different front, particularly with Wang’s preoccupation
with the human desire for transcendence and ambivalences about traversing
a non-referential universe. At once ‘charming’ (like the quark), and
terrifying.
And there was so much more…
MAAP01, director Kim Machan, Brisbane
Powerhouse
Centre for the Live Arts, Oct 12-14
*copyright RealTime; www.realtimearts.net*