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Spectacle Exhibition Program Essay.

An audience becomes the artwork when the artist provides the space.

This simple shift enables an abstract appreciation of identity, culture, and the nature of art. The area between audience and art can be awkward ground when considering intellectual respect. The danger is in treating the audience as superficial. A work that excites the mind, subtly strengthens the awareness and eventually releases a full meaning by contemplation and exploration is highly successful. The installation is in fact the most deceptive art form of all, it questions the simplest interaction that of sight and violates the boundary of art that insists on purity from touch.

We talk about interaction, as though the artist subjects the audience to a trial or reduces the artwork to a ‘display’. Being aware of the relationship that exists between the artists and audience is the ‘spectacle’. What does the audience think of the artist? What did the artist consider the audience to be in producing the work? The mechanical ability expressed. All the artists, in different ways, encourage the viewer to be more. Though questioning their roles in the production and consumption of art the roles are widened.

By openly considering the audience the artists use whatever devices are required to produce the work. The exhibition showcase ‘cutting edge’ works dealing with issues of contemporary practice relating to perception and the role of the audience. In encouraging new ways of exchange, the general public will experience artwork appealing in a playful way while intellectually stimulating the viewer.

Modern technology has put to death the image of the life of an artist as an eccentric recluse of social history. The amount of electronic collaboration possible today introduces a certain honesty to the art community. The collaborative process awakens the spectrum of relationships that artists enjoy between other artists and curators. For this exhibition the curatorial collaboration, Three Monkeys bring together established and emerging artists from urban and regional areas of Queensland.

Sebastian Di Mauro’s work provides the viewer an opportunity to decode his work. The paintings celebrate the common imagery of the human body. The photographs are of Di Mauro’s body printed on Belgium linen and layered with drawings and text. The multiply depths of the material world play with the viewer inviting them to investigate the human potential for multi-morphosis.

‘Tabloid Sculptures’ by Deborah Beaumont employs rolled up newspaper as a unit of media construction and investigates the mass-produced medium that saturate our lives of ‘popular’ culture . By playing with the headline and newspaper article we also play with the meaning and moral judgement embodied in the code. A comfortable familiarity with text and the juxtaposition of the unrelated signage we encounter considers how our lives are lived. The rolled newspaper, as baton, assaults our vision demanding instant recognition and cognition.

Kathleen Condon challenges the audience to shift the cubes or fragments of information in order to decode their experience. Condon’s recent projects focus on the continuum of shifting codes and dissected pieces of information in an ever changing society. The work rely on an element of play whereby the viewer becomes a participant in shifting and changing the work which consists of 72 resin coated cubes featuring six separate digital images.

Brisbane sound artist, Andrew Kettle, creates a ‘sound’ installation that immediately appears silent. The audience must complete the work by exploring the plinth with a separate modified radio component. The work elaborates the context of sound as installation and the spectrum in which a sound artist creates. As a relatively new art-form, sound has been approached inventively by Kettle. Whilst a work of sculpture the primary consideration has been given to the ‘sounds’. The work has a sinister element by exposing the listener to the reality of radiation in which we live our daily lives.

Frequently about the power relations involved in the act of looking, Gergina Berkman’s work complicates the usual relationship between artwork and viewer, so that the viewer becomes both the object and the subject of the gaze. Her work consists of an untitled performance transforming into a costume installation. Mirrors are set up to show the dress and to catch the spectator in the act of looking. The work plays with the conventional ideas of how the viewer inspects the body and presents a dress with peculiar bodily patterns that capture the eye. The dress incorporates its own gaze so that the viewer is made more aware of his or her engagement in looking.

Anna Jackson’s recent residency in Japan is reflected with an interesting incorporation; a fascination with the cult of the ‘Hello Kitty’ product range and a local shrine dedicated to the ‘Cat God’ frequented by students. Combining the two ‘cats’ mediates the reflections of modern culture.

A conveyor belt with condoms and baby teats is an interactive work by Pauline Gallagher. Considering the imposed boundaries of sexuality Gallagher celebrates the new borderless state of the androgyne in the 21st Century and it’s implications for our culture. Fetishizing the restrictive condom for the phallus and the uninhibited teat for the breast it is a quest for wholeness and understanding.

Keith Mitchell endeavours to draw the viewer not only to the art itself, but to a connection within themselves. To engage the viewer in a sense of wonder, to create something of beauty, sculpting with colour and light. Art will be produced while there is a need or desire to create from within.

Performance artist, Alan Tulloch explores the codes of masculinity and play through “Bound”. Selected materials that happen to “fall off the back of trucks” are signataries for mens’ work. Pieces of road rope form a connection with the need to carry goods as a means for survival. In conjunction with this work, Tulloch has developed a theory of the Gonadic that develops creative space affirming masculine and feminine qualities.

‘Looking-glass’ by Janette Schultz addresses the perception of how we see a subjective distortion of reality. This subjective version of reality is our perception of reality. Altering the usage of a familiar objects, drinking glasses, changes our perception of that object. The glasses themselves remain intact but our experience of them is extended. The glasses cease to be drinking vessels and become ‘black light’ diffusers.

Suspended Christmas puddings numbered to refer to the years from birth to present for Janice Gleeson considers how many contemporary artists use time and measurement as themes. All our ideas about identity, context and reality are based within a system of variations. We locate and define ourselves using ‘true’ reference points that are relevant to us. We automatically and constantly measure our relative position within known parameters individually and collectively.

Works by Laura Bechley and Jan Hynes are also included in this exhibition.

It is the year 2001. It is Queensland Arts Week. It is the Centenary of Federation. It is the exhibition at the Arts Gallery, University of Southern Queensland entitled ‘Spectacle’.

Andrew Kettle.