Adelaide Art Commentary 1995

Otis Rush #11

UK Wit + Excess - various artists - Contemporary Art Centre, March 10 - April 9; Stripped Bare - Nicole Ellis - Greenaway Art Gallery, March 22 - April 16; The Royal Suite - Gary Shead - and Potato Head - Malcolm McKinnon - Greenaway Art Gallery, April 19 - May 14; flight/FLIGHT - Alex Rizkalla - Experimental Art Foundation, April 27 - May 28; "New thinking is rare" - Aldo Iacobelli - Greenaway Art Gallery, May 17 - June 11; Old Dust & Medical Gas - Shaun Kirby - Sym Choon Gallery, May 19 - June 12; Sculptures - Michelle Nikou - Greenaway Art Gallery, June 14 - July 9; 'Received' - Richard Grayson - Greenaway Art Gallery, July 12 - August 6; Short Sharp Shock 2 - various artists - Experimental Art Foundation, July 27 - September 10; Simone Hockley - Contemporary Art Centre, July 28 - August 27; Paintings - Paul Hoban and Paintings - Ian Abdulla - Greenaway Art Gallery September 6 - October 1; Birds Have Fled - Angela Valamanesh - University of SA Art Museum, September 7 - October 7; trophy - Michele Luke - Sym Choon Gallery, September 15 - October 16; "Aire de la Noche" (the Night Air) - Bronwyn Platten - Contemporary Art Centre, October 6th - November 5.

UK Wit + Excess showed nine UK women artists - hey, Nine UK Women Artists would have made a good title: "excess" always promises too much, that it can rarely deliver, & "wit", well, who strives to make witless art? Curated by Adelaide artist L.E. Young, Wit + Excess opened here & visited Melbourne, Sydney & Brisbane. Young & the CAC are to be congratulated. The exhibition didn't pretend to be what it couldn't hope to be: an extensive survey or a closely argued thematic exhibition. But all the artists, I think, are in early mid-career, & at least a few are known internationally. The prospect was almost inherently interesting & the reality was, well, not a disappointment.

A striking piece was Helen Chadwick's Glossolalia, a circular area formed of fur pelts surging as if yelping to converge at the circle's centre where they formed a small tower of ullulating (cast copper) tongues. The wit in this case was purely though powerfully formal, wittily freezing the appearance of rippling, fluid, panicked motion & yoking together fur & tongues. Of couse the word "purely" functions here merely as a modifier of degree - the point of enjambing fur & tongues (inside & outside), the attraction of immobilized sculptural treatment of violent motion, all depend on our responses, socialized, learned, & more basic - but the work's effect does, on the way, pretty much eliminate the verbal.

Or not. The catalogue read the work much more closely, to find it - dare I say "predictably"? - subversive of gendered implications & the ideologies of recent sculptural practices. Via irony apparently. I guess you can read it as a furry (= surreal?) sexy feminine erection & then award points for "not allowed", "contradiction", "erection" = sculpture = "sisters are (see?) doing it for themselves".

Glossolalia pictured, neatly, 'excess' & its compression was 'witty'. Its strong suit is that it was memorable & striking. As analysis, as description (of what?) "it was nowhere, man", but it's there, available to stand in should any established image - of greed, Desire, instinct, pack mentality, the market, witch hunt etc - grow too tired or familiar. A signifier for any number of big signifieds. In some ways the stand-out piece, tho we'd been getting along well enough without it.

Chadwick also showed a diptych, ovals in fur with the words "adore" & "abhor" on them - one on each, as if one were the other's mirrored image. And therein lies its thesis? Not a lot of mileage in it - tho it was witty in the way its form seemed to keep insisting, whenever one saw it, on the validity of its hypothesis: the words look a bit the same so it must be true: who can (or wants to) argue with a slogan? This deliberately annoying quality was actually pretty funny if not witty exactly - but who's complaining, funny's great.

Laura Godfrey-Isaacs & Hermione Wiltshire made interesting use of scale, finish & of opposing sorts of materiality. Godfrey-Isaacs' Alien Blobs resembled nipples &, not inappropriately, recalled a kind of baby food apple-sauce texture. These didn't look particularly disturbing to me - more 'intriguing', really. I imagine they were meant also to recall spills of formless gunk & maybe even (as the catalogue suggests) disease as much as the erotic or sensual or babyish well being. Godfrey-Isaac's works were finally the exhibition's most intense as an experience. None of the show was real strong as argument.

Wiltshire presented, under lens-like glass dome & from polished wooden surround, an eye-like orifice (anus, or head of penis - the catalogue essays differed as to which). Boo. A bit of an obvious shock given the Victorian monocle-ish housing of the little varomint.

Jemima Stehli's & Elizabeth Wright's works, too, were each intriguing, though Stehli's point was not clear to me & Wright's intended point was obvious enough (modernism 'cut down to size' by being reproduced on a literally smaller cale) but not really made with much discursive force. Blowing a raspbery has to be its own justification I guess.

Both Stehli's domestic props & utensils & Wright's Bauhaus furnishings looked approachably cheerful & bright, that approachability becoming itself the interest in Stehli's cases - as in, What, precisely, was their valency or attraction? Rolling pins, vases, tumblers & bottles made generic, antiseptic, yet innocently nostalgic. With the Corbusier chair it was part of the rendering non-heroic. Rather than damning with faint praise, Wright's affection killed with kindness the furniture's aura of heralding the future. Maybe it was a killing sarcasm.

Also in the show were Kate Davis, Anya Gallaccio, Emma Rushton & Suzanne Treister. Their work, tho not negligible, impressed me less.

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At Greenaway Gallery Sydney artist Nicole Ellis (long ago of Adelaide) showed a suite of unusual, painting-like objects, of powerful if limited effect and of an odd ontological status. Ellis here uses a technique whereby a canvas may be prepared so as to take an impression or image from a surface such as a floor - floor of a former factory, studio, schoolroom in these cases. The image so derived is akin to a rubbing but is far more real - has far more 'diegetic effect' if you like.

Ghostly, even a little ghoulish, they are very immediate. These could be the real thing, actual floors, removed and hung: four or five rectangular canvases with the pigmentation and markings - probably given slightly increased, more hyper-real definition and contrast - of the floors from which the canvases leached their information. Scratches, spills, indentations, wood grain, and the lines of the floorboards with patchings and repairs showing, all are present and vivid, as well as actual splinters and bits of original paint and varnish and dirt.

Each piece had the planks of the floorboards running exactly vertically. So they reinforced a connection with the neutrality and order of 'the grid' in (much) abstract art. (This show should go to Melbourne!)

But do they 'connive' at accommodation as paintings? Wrongly? Is it inevitable (unavoidable?) that while they are neither enormous (& thereby 'boundless') nor (say) irregularly shaped - they can not defeat this assimilation?

One piece, 'Foreunner to a psychology of Architecture with apologies to Wofflin 1886', was laid out on the gallery floor, and included the presence of two small chairs standing upon it. Of all the works shown this insisted most forcefully on its actuality and carried the strongest effects of uncanny presence and an atmosphere of Time, of times spent with or on that floor, in whatever room it once was. For myself the associations attaching to the Wofflin piece were mostly of unpleasant (and old) schoolrooms, a kind of cold cheerlessness.

Preferable was Site Work 3 (#4), which - as with the remaining works - was mounted on the wall and in this case was apparently the product of a second and/or briefer 'impression'. Its details were of the same kind but its hue was not the dark brown of the others, being instead a pleasantly creamy yellow across which marks, spills, grain etc danced a lot more merely graphically - or sat, or cavorted, as formal constellations - while having the power to read also as evocative of literal floordom. (The latter power was here kept on a back-burner.)

But perhaps this enjoyment of them (as abstract paintings rather than as paintings 'of' floorboards) is a little irrelevant - and foolish: like seeing a sunset 'as' an abstract painting.

The works had something of the status of 'facts' or 'findings', as being artless - in their facture if not in the logic of their presentation. Alternatively they might seem - if taken as depiction/representation (which one guesses might run counter to their intention) - rather Tussaudy and philosophically pedestrian.

Yet what what is their status? They seem not - as, say, were the photographs of gallery floorboards laid down over those exact same boards, that Victor Burgin showed in a Whitechapel The New Art exhibition some twenty five years ago - to be designed to raise this issue. They stand in for spaces elsewhere, their 'time' even is elsewhere.

While much more fully evocative of the spaces they clone (or of our experience of similar spaces) than are, say, Rachel Whitread's casts of interiors - they are more straightforwardly and unmysterously so. As well, two-dimensional representation, where it is non-autographic, is mechanically produced and quasi-photographic, seems to 'read' too easily and to too easily tap reverie - where Whitread's work (which I don't much like) has one attend longer and more continuously to the experience in hand: as if making sightlessness visible. The Ellis works have one immediately amongst one's thoughts - their convincing illusionism leads to one's own imagining. Maybe the two are different experiences merely. Or are merely my own.

They were striking pieces. Probably a sideline to Ellis's main career as a painter, but a dramatic bi-product. As actuality, as literalism, they seem unproblematic - but neither are they 'news'; as depiction they seem corny; as abstraction they don't seem like art (though they compare well with a lot of it).

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Gary Shead's royal family portraits ('The Royal Suite', at Greenaway Gallery, April 19 - May 14) - all of 'the' boring Royal Family - were rather down from the heights reached in his Lawrence-&-Frieda-at-Thirroul works. The latter had far greater narrative possibility, plus the figures historically stood for a number of interesting attitudes, values & ideas (about sex, nation, modernity, Nature, Englishness). What do the Royal Family stand for? What do they 'do'? (Standing for things, we know, is their supposed function.)

Here Shead was restricted to portrait formats, the regular joke being the dressings-up drag the subjects must wear for portraits of themselves as themselves and the 'variance' this put them at with the Australian rural settings. (Note the corny binaries the paintings inherit for their humour: 'Australia' is colonial & therefore rural & rustic, 'Royalty' is euro & Opera-boofo. Naturally there were plenty of semi-heraldic roos & koalas standing in for our 'dignitaries'. There is a little political/symbolic charge left in the situation: Queen and subjects shows the Queen in Drysdale/Dobell setting with three seated aboriginal figures; The Presentation has Queen meet proud koala dignitary; The Knighthoods shows roos being knighted, arise-sir-knight style.) In many pictures two small royal toddlers accompany their mother and the vague (&, for hieratic reasons, slightly stature-disadvantaged) consort, fleshing the group out to resemble, a little, a family. A bit of poignancy or pathos is managed hereby.

The Royal Visit, for example, is pretty good painting. But it's just not great subject matter. The basic premise - which links it to the Lawrence & Frieda series - is that visitors to, or anything happening in Australia is funny or faintly absurd. How depressing. Maybe this is so for Shead. But the Queen is absurd and kitsch anywhere. Whereas between Lawrence and Australia, as notions, and indeed between Lawrence as a quotidian person and Lawrence as notion, there is some interesting critical give-and-take. Royalty spoils even the colour scheme, restricting it rather too much towards, or 'around,' the gloom of blue serge, with highlights of red and white. A few pics yearned for the effects of the Goyaesque, but strainedly.

Malcolm McKinnon's Potato Head paintings showed a range of development, the earliest works being merely jokey and rather primitive, cartoonish. The later pieces, while still not offering painting as their strong suit, were less uncouthly blunt about their inadequacies and made less blunt, or at any rate, better jokes, too. Less programmatically 'dark' than - but resembling - the works of Stewart McFarlane (though less narrative) and maybe also Reg Mombassa, the style's simplicities gave something of an hallucinatory and metaphysical quality to some of the pictures.

The Potato Head works are a little extra-arty for me - sort of afraid to be ambitious or to look as if they might take themselves, or art, seriously. At the same time many are seriously dependent upon their status as art for their humour - where the talking point is, Fancy a painting like this! A proportion of the show, however, has jokes that stand up in their own right and are, secondarily, okay pictures, too - such as Poorly executed encounter on the road to Orroroo. Other successes, like Place and Bethlehem, anchor their strangeness well within the painting. In Mr Potato Head thinks fondly of home Potato-head in his inner-city loungeroom paints a small easel painting of a farm scene. One of McKinnon's signature alien street-fluoros lights a strange moose-like figure at an empty late night crossroads in Strange Pastures. The same light, even more chilling, buzzes quietly in the night above a lone, kit-built rural shed, the terminally null visual event in the landscape Bethlehem. These latter pictures seem more seriously about Australia than merely weird.

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One of the more successful of the installation works that have been the focus of the Experimental Art Foundation's program for some time now was that of Alex Rizkalla, flight/FLIGHT (April 27 - May 28). The abject seems to attend so closely upon all installation whether intended or not, mostly as a consequence of the works' not adequately possessing or inflecting the gallery space. A properly collusive installation shot in a magazine - typically of some desultory arrangement in a corner - inevitably suggests much more than was actually there. And posterity perhaps has the wool pulled over its trusting eyes. But if you were there, you knew.

Though not, at its inception, designed for the EAF, Rizkalla's flight/FLIGHT was worth being there for.

The exhibition consisted of two halves, both involving projection in the darkened gallery. On entering one met two side panels flanking a much larger recessed wall in the gallery centre. Across all three surfaces a dozen slide projectors (automatically turned on & off at rapid intervals) projected what had the appearance of ancient film footage. The scene depicted - over & over again - showed three naked women being forced to run a gauntlet of stares from German soldiers at some concentration camp. The women were presumably Jewish.

The process by which this filmic effect was achieved meant that light reflections from each of the projectors chased themselves irregularly about the ceiling & walls of the gallery space to the accompaniment of constant not quite regular brief whirring of their fans. The arhythmic lighting tended to dissolve the gallery space, its angles & lines. In consequence one was left a little less surely orientated in the dark, very much alone with the imagery.

The image was of course disturbing, bringing to mind as it did the Holocaust - & secondarily Muybridge, beauty pageants, The Judgement of Paris, pornography - & inescapably the cruel discomfort of these particular women over & over forced to run across the walls to meet in the centre.

Grainy & flickering, the black-&-white images had the documentary quality that suggested both 'reality', & the figures' having long since ceased. The repetition and the mechanical grinding out of the show by the noisy projectors ran the imagery by in a cruelly & sadly repetitive manner - creating their shame once again or, alternately, insulating them from our gaze & suggesting the continuation of like crimes today.

The viewer feels a wish to disown the imagery: clearly it existed as a snapshot taken for private delectation (there were crease marks where the original photo had been folded): one did not wish to endorse even the fascination of the larger moment in history or to mime the individual soldier's once pornographic gaze. The other available emotions were guilt that one was looking (as had the photographer, as were the military) and sympathy for the women, empathy with them. I imagine the experience of the show differed for men & women.

The invocation of Muybridge, which most viewers seemed to make, showed that flight/FLIGHT derived some energy from notions of the (male) gaze, & power.

On the reverse of the large central panel a group of projectors, all standing together but at different heights on tall thin pedestals, & operated by a similar 'chaser' system, flared up & died down in a baffling sequence, to project a different kind of 'footage'. This showed a distinctly Muybridge-derived sequence of shots - of pigeons in flight. Again, documentation, science, the gaze and the literal meaning of "flight". Though both sets of imagery - women & birds - suggested the word's figurative senses of panic & fleeing. These latter associations were augmented by the rushing, beating sound of the projectors' engines & fans, & also by the flickering shadows they cast. The pigeons in flight (wartime carrier pigeons?) were projected onto a wall that was itelf covered with men's vests in white. The vests made a pattern of positive & negative shapes that suggested Escher's depictions of animals (fish? lizards?) gradually transforming, from left to right, into birds. (Flight as evolutionary.) They suggested also, shooters' vests.

flight/FLIGHT provided a fairly dense & powerful experience, though one could not be sure that the experience was directed very much. Was sufficient made of the Jewish women's situation to warrant its use? That is, was the iconography too heavy in its own right, in its own implications? Does justice require commensurately important use be made of it? May be.

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Aldo Iacobelli showed a group of pictures that, while they did not significantly add to the shape or range of his oeuvre to date, contained amongst it some definite new hits. But as to this no-new-territory observation - well, what are we, avant-gardists? And the exhibition might in many ways have been designed simply as a casual farewell before Iacobelli's more long-term departure for Europe. In any case, check the show's title ("New thinking is rare") - we had been warned.

The 'new thoughts' were all paintings, mostly large or very, & jokily, small. Nearly all utilized the oleaginous, raked-garden texture Iacobelli first used some many years ago - chiefly, as I remember it, in some white paintings that aped, in monochrome, their full-colour 'originals' (figurative paintings), & later again in some terrific paintings of - or paintings as - records.

In these last the ridged, 'combed' oil simulated & summarized the look of black vinyl, & in the middle were appropriately decorative coloured (but unmarked) 'labels'. These pictures attained a heightened 'thing' status, an I yam what I yam! dumbness - & a (happily) punning likeness to formerly significant art like that of Noland & Stella. A sort of extra, chic joke they carried with them, like a sight-gag that (like good actors) they didn't allude to or acknowledge.) They were both droll & intensely sentimental!

The earlier pieces had used the lined, furrowed surfaces to describe details of fairly complex still-life representations while at the same time constituting creamy, interstingly woven, abstract monochromes. The technique got an airing again - or was it earlier? - in the Stations of the Cross series.

Among the works on view at this Greenaway show was one showing an enormous red-pink water bottle on a blue ground, the title piece of the show: "New thinking is rare". It hilariously reprises as a winning variation, the earlier paintings of records. The ribbed rubber of the hot-water bottle is mimicked exactly if broadly and the painting's colour scheme gives the whole a sort of cheeringly tacky feel that comes of combining Pop & Op art - sort of Bridget Riley meets Jim Dine (& they agree to be more like Claes Oldenburg).

Tough Blue, a more unambiguously non-figurative number, was another great piece - seductive and pleasurable, one could almost feel oneself about to fall in to it, the deep blue centre had such centripetal pull. It adds to the late 80s series of abstracts.

About much of the show as a whole, however, is a suggestion of the gimmicky, one-size-fits-all, product-identification attitude of the paintings-preserved-in-oil of Iacobelli's prior Greenaway show. It was a great succès de scandal at the time. The manner - or technique merely? - seems often employed more as a signature look. To this punter it seems a tired, sub-Duchampian cynicism, dependent on its recognizability as gesture, the clear recognizability outweighing, as an effect, the gesture's criticality. People love the suggestion of something naughty: that this was held to be that was pretty depressing.

But that's some shows back! A few other paintings in "New thinking is rare" were also pretty good in their way. I think primarily of the large painting of myriad Australias, scattered but interlocking, Sue Gower-style, painted in mostly camouflage colours & which carried on Iacobelli's flag/insignia works of recent years. This seemed better than its cognates even - in joking more subtly about Australian identity ("forged" in the "crucible" of two wars, etc etc) and about the parallel anxiety of national invisibility. The tiny, lone, Tasmania, affixed to the larger canvas at bottom right, said it all 'in small' as it were. Camouflage shared the rest of the series' graphic, ad-agency glibness, but was sufficiently visually enlivening not to abandon one to this disappointment. It was always good to look at. On the other hand, Down under, the big black & white Australia - did you guess it? - was 'about' the White Australia policy (I gather). Visually pretty null.

Iacobelli's work has been interesting &, in the Adelaide context, distinctive. But it seems to me possible that his popular coups have not always been or included his best work. No matter, I guess, in the long run. To my mind the post-Warholian work has seemed born of disenchantment with art or with the difficulty of making it. Out of this futility (which perhaps audiences share - they're modern, too, aren't they?) have come some out-flanking trump cards - the records, as I've said, I really enjoyed - but the better works seem isolated from these series. Or they are a series of their own wherein iconic imagery & genuine theme are tested against, pitted against, means that are traditional & therefore hardpressed to achieve adequacy - yet in Aldo Iacobelli's hands they have often done so. Occasionally the means fall short - but the failures seem to have risked more than the calculated strategies that have spawned whole job lots of feckless work. The possibility of a successful Io speriamo che me la cavo (a lesser painting of 1992) is to me more interesting than the more lacklustre logo-style critiques or the owlish & ineffectual attacks on art as institution or commodity. Less than an attack on the commodification of painting it commodified the form of an old & tired tactic. How much longer, I wonder (rhetorically), will this gesture count as critical? (Or is the correct answer to this, Ken, Ken - it's only Art, as delivered by one of Richard Prince's cartoon characters?)

Admittedly this is not the popular critical view of Iacobelli. (Check the catalogue for examples.) And it can be fruitless to speculate as to the inner workings of an artist's thinking & development or about the possible internal relations between different parts of an oeuvre. I don't do it with especial confidence that I am right in this regard. In fact Iacobelli might be moving forward in just this manner (Thank God, the avant-garde in me pants), lurching Douglas Bader style from one leg to the other: Painting, Pop, Painting, Pop, Painting, Pop, etcetera.

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One of the chief constants of Shaun Kirby's work (Old Dust & Medical Gas, May 19 - June 12, Sym Choon Gallery) has been a strong material presence which seems to hide, almost as a secret sorrow, its causes or meanings. In this it mimics psychological baffles, blocks & neuroses & (in the Freudian sense of the term) screen memories - a protective or obscuring metonymical grab at what is not quite the point but which stands in some approximation to it & is less painful to behold. (He went that-a-way.) The work - generally now installation or sculpture - manifests a poverty of appearance that is rather classic & austere - though occasionally a piece will seem, in a Joycean (or Trevor Winkfieldian) ludic manner, to be a somehow transposed rebus punningly derived from a tantalisingly unguessable verbal formula. Humorously, such works snuffle quietly to themselves, shoulders hunched, backs to the viewer, hiding their secret - a secret being only fun to have if you won't tell but it may be guessed, right? Not "may" be guessed as in "easily", but "may" as in "might possibly". Though - as with much of the show in question, as opposed to previous solo outings - some Kirby inventions here had recognisable intellectual or symbolic silhouettes. Their detail might invite & resist close interpretation (which lends them a kind of psychological quiddity) & refuse detailed legibility, yet the overall envelope was plain enough.

Old Dust & Medical Gas, through its titling, in fact made one small, playful preliminary gesture of obfuscation, perhaps before leading us to work which an otherwise evident thematic might too quickly order. Six pieces were shown & six titles were supplied on the gallery sheet - but none were affixed to the works. Ho, ho, ho, one has to say. And really the exhibition had a fairly lighthearted air to it - as though we were all old enough to see the joke in 'serious problems', or to not see the joke always & yet still not feel too crestfallen.

A theme the show seemed to explore, in common with much of Kirby's work, was that of memory & a kind of psychic history. One senses these things rather than knows them to be operative as a rule - but Old D & MG was more openly Oedipal & psychoanalytic than other Kirby shows.

The viewer could guess at titles or, more bullishly, apportion & distribute them. But three at least, enacted these themes: The Horse Father, The Snake Carriage and (I'm less certain of the correctness of the title, though it was the gallery director's best guess) German Tailor's Scissors.

Other pieces seemed (to me) simply to recall 'states'. Or to be designed to re-induce them, recall them for re-experience rather than mere safe recognition. So, one piece (maybe Elapsed Time?) was a long four-sided cylinder protruding from the wall. Covered in marbled kitchen-floor linoleum, it brought a child's imaginative world (back) up to the height of our noses: a long drag track raceway for the monstrosity at its end - a small, silver, Mad Magazine-style hybrid model hotrod-dragster in chromed plastic. Wide wheels, long chassis & 'donk' (a little like a bootleg distillery) & a crazed witch-figure inhabiting the cabin (which seemed a converted backyard dunny). Staring eyeballs, wide mouth, tongue lolling, skinny arm on the outdoor gearshift, wheels at the front already lifting as the accelerator is floored. Takes you back, huh?

An extraordinarily melancholy picture of metal train, or tram, or steam-roller wheels, as if stored & abandoned in an ancient warehouse was another piece, The Kundmangasse House. The wheels, probably thru distortion of the original (old) photograph, wobbled & bent - as if seen thru water or 'faulty' glass. It evoked sad memory, but also the mind's poeticising & heightening of memory through acts of selection, compression & distortion. It was a striking and very affecting image.

The more obviously psychoanalytic works also referred more to states (of pre-linguistic awareness & powerlessness). The Horse Father (Ten Hands High) showed what I read as a horse jump. Suspended, as in a falling motion, is the image of a coat. A three-quarter length coat, it falls 'head' first, and appears of elegant cut (if a little worn & old) & to suggest rank: it has something of a dashing, military cut. The work consists of sheets of clear plastic suspended, tent-like, between the two uprights of the jump. The coat is printed, in a slightly faded or transparent manner on one of the plastic sheets. I found it rather dreamy - suggesting both slow motion & oft-recalled memory. The plastic has a slightly blue coloration, a liquid appearance. As a scene it would be one of a reversal of paternal authority, or impregnability. The figure is 'headless'. It suggests height &, in so doing, momentarily suggests the viewer's own, childlike, lack of it.

German Tailors' Scissors, if I'm identifying it correctly, was a rather hilarious piece. A small child's cotton or terry-towelling gro-suit, pink, hangs from a projecting beam, above the stairwell. The shadow it cast on the wall slightly below it resembled a hanged man, a gallows image. On the back of the little suit, in white copperplate lettering is embroidered

I'm not a charlatan

He's a charlatan

He hates me.

It is an emblen of tiny rage & frustration, the rebellion-towards-independence of the powerless son. It is also the artist's (not Kirby's particularly) self-doubt & aggression towards the critic, or critic-viewer. The child cannot speak out - cannot in fact speak. Similarly the artist cannot (given the proprieties) speak: the artist shows the work, the critic speaks. The sense of rage & injustice were pretty funny.

The Snake Carriage presented, in a crib-like glass-topped case, a number of cigars, or a number of walking canes made of cigar. They were fractured & broken. The obvious readings apply - because obvious: cigars as phallic, as symbols of male authority & its rewards, as oral gratification (& therefore quasi infantile), as props, or crutches, of male (Paternal?) mystique, even as suggestive of the Viennese & of Freud himself. In the bottom of a decanter sat what looked like port, tho on inspection, from its smell, one could identify it as vanilla, the baby smell. The conceptual mustiness of the 'elderly male' associations were accentuated by the case's resemblance to a museum specimens' display box.

There was more, though these were the pieces that worked for me. The work seemed rather stoically detached - as opposed to dramatically sad in feel. Clear-eyed. And rather lightly offered, though the themes have their own weight. Not so much an installation as a sequence of sculptural pieces, but as such perfectly suited to Sym Choon's long, narrow, episodic space.

Kirby is an interesting artist, even where his shows do not engage one to proper effect. It is possible that, as with any good artist, subsequent shows redeem earlier, less well understood phases of work. As exhibition after exhibition lays down the themes, vocabulary & typology of Kirby-esque moves - a kind of repertoire - the work (reticent, cool, economical, cryptic shading to opaque & obscure, moods ranging from dark to a kind of mordant sunny) might grow to be understood. Um, understood "almost symphonically?" How 'over the top'. Like Beckett? Stop kidding. But it is good to think of Kirby as a popular success, in the future gradually developing a larger & larger following. "Trevor Winkfield" as part of the equation, is maybe privileged information - ditto Roussel, Joyce & Beckett. (And Winkfield can only closely resemble Kirby's paintings - which are of a phase now quite distant in the artist's public career.) But gradually these things become common knowledge. Shaun Kirby may become one of a growing circle's acquired taste & favourite secret.

Old Gas was an uncharacteristically 'relaxed' show. Sym Choon's space - which on a good opening night, resembles a party in a hallway (my favourite kind of party) - disallows the spacial coherence necessary to a real installation show. Consequently Old Gas was a sequence of pieces loosely linked by theme, with a gesture towards visual unification via the potatoes spaced at regular intervals in the gallery's submerged, indirect floor lighting (a kind of bright gutter that ran along the foot of the walls). The potatoes were to germinate slowly in the heat of the lights.

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I will state my reservations about Michelle Nikou's work (Greenaway Gallery, June 14 - July 9th) since a) some others will have similar reservations and b) because in any case the work defeats them. Well, it doesn't so much defeat them, or neutralize them, as it disperses them so that they shrink away, in the face of the work's effect & aura, only to gather muttering quietly on some distant perimeter - as if on a reservation of reservations, drums drumming. They gather force & loom again, on reflection, & the critic worries, becomes jaundiced, & writes this sort of review.

The reservations are that the techniques used, the imagery, the forms, are those of a by now very long-standardized Surrealism & of quite identifiable formulae for the uncanny. It seems conservative art-making, a shock designed to be recognizable as 'Art'. Postmodernist agendas & dispenations have complicated things admittedly, but my instinctive critical reaction is to shrink from this work as being to just that degree not serious art: that what most resembles art in its look is kitsch & craft. Real art moves beyond - beyond at least the need to look like art: it does, or will, look like it, incidentally, or out of allegiance to a tradition, a lineage, or to a medium - or it will not. But it will neither resemble art nor fail to as a principal motive. ((Immediately one has reservations - qualifications to make, seeming exceptions to allow or to immediately legislate for as a matter of urgency. Legislating for exceptions that are in fact one's favourite art - or favourite test cases in the quasi-epistemological history of ideas that is the art in your mind. (Well, in mine.) And reservations that the whole tone sounds out of date, in fact anachronistic - a mixture of late 60s Artforum-speak & an unable-to-lighten-up-in-the-90s hopelessness. So I bob, duck, weave - but my feet are nailed to the floor, in that position.))

Nikou showed nine pieces. About half were a series of small beds. One, of brass, had two pillows neatly on top of each other two thirds of the way down the bed - as if placed there by a nurse or maid interrupted while fixing the bed. From under the bed, growing out one side, a tuberous flower shape extends on its stem - a flower or perhaps a horn or mouth. It is the voice, the power, the continued presence, of the otherworldly, the night-world of sleep & dream. It does look pretty eerie: blindly reaching at, triffidly seeking, or alarmingly breaking-into, cartesian, daylight space - perhaps to goose it, or give a good fright.

Its length was about10 inches. A small, all brass, single bed, of a kind of pre-50s but post-1900 vintage. Almost executive desk-furniture size. But homely as an object & rather featureless, almost institutional, as a bed.

Another (they are all Untitled) is a folding camper bed - frame & springs elaborately made - &, beside it, the thin, lumpy mattress, complete with cursive slogan or phrase (something portentous) stitched or appliqued upon it. Their miniaturization is part of their hallucinatory (& hence, yes, 'surreal') presence. And it certainly makes them memorable & - on craft grounds - worthy-of-inspection. It is even the right scale for voodoo fetish resemblance. Would I like them better at one & a half times life scale? May be. Why?

A third bed was covered in a cloth printed with two scenes from instructional or pedagogic diagrams that showed the atmospheric pressure changes around the end of a gun barrel as a bullet is discharged - on the bedhead the same material & colours show fire, flames. So true, eh?

I am caught midway between a number of responses. Nikou's objects don't seem like jokes 'on' the genre - unless it is the weakest one, that the genre is funny in itself. But that is not their point, though for some viewers it may be enough. And it is not critique of the genre or of 'the Surreal'. And does not focus on some one aspect of it. Nikou - in these works - would seem to believe in the work as (straightforwardly) Surreal, uncanny, potent, whatever. (Convulsive?)

I find their statement of, say, the uncanny, strong. I find this particular suggestiveness, this uncanny, too assimilable, conventional. It is not shocking, or 'disturbing' but it is, as conventionally described, of course "shocking", "disturbing", "dark" etc. But perhaps herein lies some of Nikou's wit. Formally (as it were) they have a kind of forthrightness & tact.

I am conscious that other pieces I have liked lately have shared (or could have shared) partially similar descriptions. Shaun Kirby's small child's jumpsuit, Louise Haselton's feathered cushion with the word "Spent" on it (a recent group show at Sym Choon's - Frank Thing). Their work 1) seemed part of the real world, contemporary, & to speak to one's present (bunch of) concerns & sensibility. Though close - and about to break through perhaps - Nikou's objects speak to our memory or to a learned response to the art of the past. That is, they have a novelty appeal: they're cute, they're neat-o, their charmingly nutty; and they're like art: sort of Merret Oppenheimy, sort of Delvaux-Magritte-ish, etc etc. Their succint quality, though, speaks in their favour, they have economy & confidence and don't rattle on.

Other pieces in the show were more 'funky' & hybrid: some underpants in jet beading with, in silver, the shape of a fork running between the legs. A second pair of undies had long hair attached all over, a dark mane.

There were also some irregular, intestinal, turdy looking shapes (snapped up by the Art Gallery of S.A.) that suggested - as well as sausage - lint. And, finally, a five-headed fork.

Nikou's works here were beguiling pieces but my reservations won out: the work doesn't seem serious - or seriously fun. Genteel good taste for the viewer - & dexterous invention from the artist, but applied as yet to no strongly vital theme. Of course Surrealism is not yet quite "genteel good taste" - and one does want to like these objects (can hardly help it in fact), & perhaps one should. For all my talk of "conventional", for example, it's plain Nikou is rather original & like nothing else exactly in the Adelaide context. And for her it's 'early days yet'. Clearly my objections are in abeyance again.

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Richard Grayson's '95 show ('Received', July 12 - August 6, Greenaway Gallery) is very much a follow up to his 1993 Greenaway exhibition & is of a piece with work he has been showing/installing/'doing' for some time - chiselled directly into the walls of Post-West & Artspace, in group shows like Jemmy last Festival, & created out of flowers in public art projects around sylvan Adelaide. That is, they continue his presentation of isolated fragments of text. The paintings reproduce bits of handwritten communication - from friends, from others' friends or relatives, from casual notes, & doodles & jottings from ink-blotters, & in one case from a startling found doctor's prescription of some urgency - all are fragmentary & most give only pieces of their original sense. Others give almost none.

Some have their own pathos: but a general, 'philosophic' pathos attaches maybe to them all - as instances of the limitations of communication: as necessarily inadequate to the sentiments they must bear, as vulnerable (to illegibility, to misspelling, or to the loss or theft that the paintings represent, an indignity). And this sense of them stands in some varying but distinct relation to the paintings' countervailing status as visual artefacts - as compositions (how arbitrary exactly? how 'right', formally? how fairly used?) & as sums of colour & paint quality & expressive, abstract mark & gesture. Sometimes the pictures seem antithetical to the source message, callously distanced from it, & never identified or 'empathetic' - blithely about their own, painterly, formalistic business. It is as though the pictures had two equal but unconnected agendas. They are interestingly ambivalent - as are we, their viewers.

All of which makes these paintings a heady experience & not at all soulless. I have not yet said that as painting - a distinction they invite us to make, or trap one into - they are mostly pretty terrific. (Perhaps they 'trap' one into settling with this formulation - a given (the formal structure) around which, in elliptical orbit, the other sense (of the painting's, of the words', content, of its likely source context) circles, reappearing to haunt it, & us, then moving off. THEN REAPPEARING TO FRIGHTEN US AGAIN! How harrowing!

Visually the most interesting, I think, are Still Love (received 1978), From Blotter Pad (found 1993), Glancing (received 1979) & Remember Us (from Mehmet Adil's mother, received 1994). Others were rather more affectless and cool-ly handsome (Malade & the misspelled Beligerent, for examples) - at first seeming confined to a Fluxus-like flip/hip rejection of the empathetic.

Wildest is the larger Blotter Pad painting, in suggesting the most optical depth & most contradictory & complex spatial relationships & in suggesting too (if faintly) its reflection of an order or orientation outside & 'beyond' the picture frame - and not the viewer's. A little 'alien', one has a kind of 'close encounter' with this one. The painting's relatively busy lines are vastly magnified from their original & don't at all read as orthographic. Its coloration: the scheme is basically red on pale purple - but on closer inspection every colour is in there: red lines & scribbled circles for example that modulate from muddy dark to fleshy pinks, even yellows, that accelerate & stop, or slow to establish fleeting distinctions & orders of spatial priority within a very shallow though much contested pictorial depth. It's exhilaratingly zesty and ambivalent.

The remaining pictures were far more reined-in in their exhibition of painterly-stops-pulled-out, more impassive. Where the larger Blotter painting might remind of Sigmar Polke others reminded of Gerhard Richter'sŠ well, 'impassive', rather direct, literalist reproduction of magazine photographs that was done via a veiling, blurring, evenly applied mechanical pointillist distortion.

Glancing is a case in point: the script runs evenly across the painting area, a horizontal organization (of a picture wider than it is tall), while a vertical - radiating heat, merely warmly or maybe balefully - inhabits the painting's centre. Hotly metallic, it has an ominous (or at least impersonal) feel to it. It can read as behind the text or as a surface carrying the text within the paintin's depth, red at the middle but darkening on either side of its warm red centre.

Still Love (received 1978) was luscious, the writing large & legible (matched only by Two Copies Please in these last respects) yet managing to have more abstract or optical effects bend the words to the painting's formalist agenda. The use of glitter in parts of this painting is something of a problem, though a little like the problem of light reflected off any painting's surface: you can move. Still Love looked best when one found a position from which the twinkling glitter was almost invisible. (Finding such a position was not hard to do.) Yet it looked great in the knowledge of its more abundant presence.

Remember Us invited our sensitivity to the writing as communication & was simpler than those so far mentioned - basically lettering (blue-green grey) on a yellow ground, neither ground nor the figuring letters being much modulated from any one point to the next: surface & line fairly evenly painted. But at this magnification the spindly lettering had a curious wobbling in the thickness of its line that was subtle yet enlivened the whole of the picture surface. At the 'same time' this expressivity chimed in with any attribution of pathos, sentiment or whatever. If you wished to make it.

I guess a question that might be raised is that of the degree to which the human mark or script &, by a kind of metonymic extension, maybe human representation(s) are here had stand in (humanistically) for the good old Human Subject. (Are you saying this is just Rodin again, in 'another guise'? Are you? Well take that back!) Not a question I am burning to urge & not one I'd answer except by saying Well, not too dumbly at any rate - & perhaps it is a factor in the paintings, an effect they produce controlledly, along with all the others.

I hadn't seen better paintings in quite a while.

The previous Greenaway Grayson differed in temper. It was more conceptual: a la Warhol - somehow the pictures were (more than here) 'acts'; a la Indiana & Dine - many had the lettering larger & the phrases, too, occasionally had a 'pop', hook-like succinctness. (Though I remember at this distance only Some Kinds Of Love as an instance, and this most recent show, too, has at least one similar - Two Copies Please, which is the extent of its text.)

The works from the current show are all - I think - markedly larger, more & better finished (yes, by opening night they were dry - but they are as well generally more sumptuous), & they instance - quote? demonstrate? exhibit? - more complex painterly satisfactions. (To employ an oily word.)

This show, 'Received', was immediate in the sense that it seemed urgent & actual - not a collection of pale chimeras, their agendas visible before all else, as baggage, as alibis vouching for the work's earnestness. Sensibility was, by a shade, dominant. The paintings' thinking (our thinking) was to be teased out from interaction with the material, the sensuous, the stylish: sort of wanton, sort of slick; sort of perfunctory, sort of beautiful; sort of carefully labored, sort of accidentally graceful. Which reminds me of John Tranter's "Head first into the beautiful accident" - (so long since I have been able to use that quote) - i.e., deliberately captivating, stupid, & "harshly modern" - where these effects are purely a trope & second degree? - i.e., 'genuinely false'. Like our modern emotions, huh?

But this is to fix on one aspect (of only some of these pictures) & a viewer might prefer to remember the ravishing paint quality of works that recall, locally, Dale Frank or (to look to the stratosphere) some of Polke's more lyrical work. One engages the painting most when withdrawing - to, probably, something like the artist's point of view - uncertain of which reading to entertain, & unbothered. A difficult suspension of the thrall of enunciating, or of being 'enunciated by', the available experience.

Though of course, remember the harrowing. More readably deapan were a series of 'paintings of facts': a series of texts printed on cheap paper with potato, each reporting a 'fact'. Supposedly these were a response to Giles Auty's complaint that art no longer dealt in any. Some were facts 'of import', others less rivetting. ("All bulls are colorblind" for example.) No distinctions were made betwen these simple assertions, which one read with some pleasurable difficulty, enjambed as they were without hyphenation or punctuation, not even spacing between words. Amusing in their own right, these tethered the larger part of the show to the (There I've said it!) post-conceptualist position from which Grayson operates.

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Will installation, please, go away for a while? Forgetting for the moment Adelaide Installations' torture-simulating piece by Denis Del Favero & others, the best of the last few years in Adelaide - & installation had 'gone away', remember, before that, at least to the extent that one didn't dread its inevitable appearance at every next new show - the best has harkened back to Minimalism, though rarely rivalling it. Think of the Artschwager/Steimbach/McCollum-ish drolleries of David O'Halloran, the emphatic, plonked-down quality of Johnny Dady's hired-object installations, Mehmet Adil's flour, Simryn Gill's scatter of fragments, Hewson/Walker's (more theatrical & more conceptualist) achievements of the late 80s. This connection to Minimalism - or to Beuysian arte povera - allowed the retention of some sculptural presence & an ability to impose upon or alter somehow the space occupied.

The general run of the more hybrid media installation has seemed depressingly inarticulate - in need of way too much forgiveness & straight out help. The art punter kneels beside the work's head, cradling it, to coax a few whispered, disconnected last words from those insensate lips. Work has lacked presence, its vaunted materiality has been evanescent, translating immediately to a would-be semiotic status it can barely achieve: one is to applaud Š not even the intention, but the topic area, the congeries of concerns in whose ken the work can be, tediously, estimated to be at play.

Against this it might be argued that the works are not so much propositional as they are experiential fields set up to simulate/transport-us-to/or distil the nub of some problematic crossroads of relevent incommensurables. I don't buy it. The typifying air of code, of wishing to be read, charades-style, argues against this assertion of immediacy. It remains artschool-dutiful & 'fond', well-intentioned, but with the currently de rigeur obscurity of scrambling that the mode enacts. The few that have risen above the style's no-win gravitational tug have - partly thru contrast - seemed breaths of fresh air.

Short Sharp Shock series 2 has for the most part continued the E.A.F.'s dedication over the last year or so to installation. As intended & as did the first series in 1994, Short Sharp Shock showed newer, mostly younger artists, in groupings of two to six or so, over three consecutive exhibition periods. The purpose is to allow promising newer artists access to real gallery exposure minus the demands of solo exhibition.

The payoff for gallery & viewer is that one is seeing very new work: where large solo shows necessarily (need or strive to) reprise a theme or themes, show some development, demonstrate some sweep, possess weight - Short Sharp Shock typically has the 'latest'/'best' preoccupation or hunch of a rapidly developing artist approaching or attaining early strength. Short Sharp Shock pretty successfully delivered this sense of currency. Uneven, but not disastrously - & it can be allowed that the seemingly lesser pieces may in many cases simply have been the more reticent. The benefit of this doubt might have it that extended to whole solo shows these more muted effects might have accrued definition. Mayhap, as Plugger Lockett might say.

The dominant tendency in recent younger art in Adelaide has been an attraction to sculptural installation focusing on curiously echt materials or materiality. One could cast back to Lyn Barwick & Simone Hockley's pieces of a Samstag or two ago.

This exercises some of the previous artistic generation too. Shaun Kirby on occasion, & Bronwyn Platten are cases in point. Kirby tends to focus on some few & specific, often secretively 'unvouschafed' associations that a material or property has. It is thereby made over into Kirby's (characteristic) artistic language.

Bronywn Platten's attraction to certain of such substances & materials seems understandable as pertaining to a particular & particularly psychologistic constellation of problems & associations (& discursive taboos & compulsions) - an understandable, & understandably narrowed, field.

In contrast the newer artists - of this last year - seem drawn to a wider range of kitschy, abject, ephemeral (& less 'corporeal') materials. There is much less latex sexiness or near-sexy rubbery-untouchiness. Basically the stuff shown has been (as in these instances) less substantial & less manifestly sculptural - &, as it was lighter, & airier & thinner - less physical - tending not to much volume. Instead it was draped, strung between points, did not occupy space so much as indicate or demarcate it. It approached much less to matter but - as consisting of more fully processed & manufactured, value-added things (bits of chains of pins, gold-flaked tinsel & glitter) - more to products. Less than the body (directly) these 'materials', as things (or numbers of a thing) evoked the consumer world of falsely sold or promised enhancement (of the body? of the ego?). That is, failing symbols of well-being.

It was often treacly or fanciful. (The delicious/icky binary nodded & grinned, Yep, I'm here.) And it was operative less as corporeal, or as proxy for bodies, than it signified consumerist indices of self-image - all of it gendered female. It's 'a female thing' & it's slightly allegorical, slightly metonymic in the manner in which it designates 'female' - because why (or how else) the nail polish concern in an artworld where hardly any girl wears the stuff? why the interest in the glittery when people are either all dressed down in the black/sombre range, or tastefully up, or are as often happy to be sartorially 'nowhere'? Does it suggest, then, the abject female & teen? (A problem others have? A problem designating the female via other females, not us here?) Is it publicly appalling indulgence? play with a kind of quasi-histrionic failing & anxiety? Is it a local development of the L.A. 'Just Pathetic' movement? but less graphic, less autobiographical, more 'gender studies'?

(I may not have a handle on it, obviously. It seems to me that it has been mostly younger women artists who are doing this - & producing its successes, & its most characteristic failures.)

This thread ran through Short Sharp Shock 2 & linked some of its artists, for me at any rate, with the concurrent Simone Hockley exhibition at the C.A.C. Occupying a large space to herself, Hockley's show was more extended than the Short Sharp Shock outings, though it abandoned most of the space to hug, in mock, or mimed abjection, the skirting boards of the four walls.

Hockley's work here seemed less hermetically strong aesthetically than some of her earlier work. One simply feels before it that one doesn't have the code & is not being made to care enough by the work's look & presence to twig to it. Not that earlier work was to any marked degree clearer: one looked at it harder. I get the sense that, decoded, the works propose some truism within a currently endorsed area of Š concern? Š operation? professional provenance?

Sonja Porcaro, Terri Hoskin & Katie Moore, in different parts of Short Sharp Shock 2, might be ascribed to this same sensibility. Here they gave good accounts of themselves. (Further exhibition will likely show their differences.)

Porcaro's work was rather lyrical yet at the same time deliberately, casually, flat-footed. It occupied a corner area: a powder ran along a skirting board & contained a sentence written in it with a finger. A skein of goldish pins in thin black ribbon arced down from high above at one corner towards another point of the work's triangular area. And there was not much more - a faint line on one wall & lighting. (The sentence, once the pairs of double negatives were translated out of it, said something unremarkable - of the order of "No one loves to be arrested".) The work somehow scaled a height while giving every appearance of playing with the net down. The miraculous thread was plainly quotidian & the quotidian grey-white powder was somehow by turns poignantly moody & 'real'.

Katie Moore showed puffed & paint-spattered black garbage bags, some cast solid, in a hectic scatter. Again, I didn't get them - beyond enjoying their sense of energy.

Teri Hoskin adumbrated tenuous representations of bodily functions - a kind of atomising of anatomy, it being taken on trust that the Body was here a site, as they say, of great psychological valency. Can I deny it? I felt that way too as I looked at them. They suggested abstracted systems. At the same time they had the sensitive, easily spooked presence of mobiles.

Other parts of Short Sharp Shock that stood out for me were Geoffrey Parslow's & Kelly Milton's installations (which partook less of the aesthetic I've been detailing), Anne Robertson's imposing photocopy frieze & Sunday Hopkins' short, talking-head movie. This last featured June Lennon on Aboriginal/mainstream Australian reconciliation issues as illuminated by the question of Maralinga & the Australian government endorsed British nuclear testing there. The film works as film but in the gallery was centred as part of a dramaticly transforming installation: a cyclone wire fence enclosing red earth on which was situated the large video screen & the looped movie. Tape provided additional soundtrack. The strength of the film, I guess, is the display of endless patience & persistent reasonableness Lennon (& much of the rest of the Aboriginal community) has brought to bear on what they could legitimately regard as 'the white problem' if they chose.

Larissa Hjorth installed an elegant conceit (I guess) on Brancusi - an 'Endless Tower' of room-freshener/toilet-freshener mushrooms & some modishly Brancusi-deco kidney dishes that, as photographed, suggested Kertesz's Eccentric Nude on a Sofa & (I suppose), since the catalogue notes said so, Brancusi's Princess X &, generally, Mme Pogany & the head/egg shapes. Cleanliness is next to (aspires to) godliness? Who knows? It seemed good humoured, or I would say Who cares? - but one wants to know Š but not burningly.

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Angela Valamanesh has an established background as a ceramicist. Birds Have Fled is probably her first major showing as artist rather than craftsperson. Given this background the nature of her success was something of a surprise. The work consists of three or four focal points in an installation that has these spare elements totally dominate a gallery space that regularly defeats even group shows and which, while it permits success, could never be said to aid it.

The gallery is lit to a softened gloom by the light of the spot-lit elements. These make a more or less cross-bow axis division of the space. To the right is a slightly ajar door, in the middle a large bluely glowing screen wall, a black light-box silhouetted in front of it throws the blue neon light. To the left are a pile of rubble casts and a few feet further to the left a pair of feet, soles outward, just out from the wall's surface . The lightbox, when one moves to it, carries a Colette text, some lines describing a dream, in which the subject approaches a door that is opened by her identical, younger self. Hence the door some many metres away (right), coolly teasing or foreboding. And the pile in the corner at left turn out to be casts of feet - just the upper forefoot & shin: the part of our own feet we see & know. Once-possible selves, paths not taken. The two soles adjacent indicate a real subject (modelled in beeswax they are finely detailed, with signs of wear, age etcetera), but the surface we cannot so intimately know. We get to know it well in this instance: they're head height &, in beeswax, intricately delicate. Also a little morgue-like. The gallery's vast distances are effectively suborned to the interests of the installation, making each element 'far-away' from the perspective of any other, diminished in scale - yet the lighting has these distances seem psychic, dream-like, not literal.

The constellation of ideas the work seems to represent are not all that striking, have maybe the feel of rather nineteenth century symbolist cliché. But their expression here is impressively firm. While the themes are not new: Birds Have Fled is impressive in its achieved authority and resonance.

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Showing at Greenaway Paul Hoban's works are paintings, abstracts built up of collage, their surfaces much scratched & inscribed. They've attracted a good deal of favourable attention by word of mouth among artists. Many of them are 'skins', not mounted on a stretched backing, and these in addition have a blistered, wizened, weathered look, a sort of seaweed-&-pizza surface. One group are diptychs that play a vertical monochrome off against a matching, busier equivalent. Rothko meets Basquiat, but less solemn than the one, woolier than the other. Others employ a square format & evoke - as well as the weathering - maps & aeriel views. In doing so they are maybe assimilable to a sequence of Australian artists that would feature Fred Williams & John Olsen.

Hoban's surfaces have a deal of warmth, a loveable lint-ridden, down-at-heel shaggyness that is visually pretty lively, not very graphic - and which seems able to absorb & reflect the viewer's emotional investment: a kind of empathy. They do not, on the other hand, seem very urgently of the present. I like them, but they might have happened quite some time ago & not drawn any particular notice. They make no remark on the present. And I wonder can the present make much remark upon them.

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Also at Greenaway was a new Ian Abdulla show, his characteristic, naive style narrative paintings. I like them immensely: they're charitable, grim, dead pan & the depiction of trees, sky & subtly varying if uneventful grass that witnesses the daily life on the Gerard Mission is terrific. This series seemed to concentrate a little more on later teenage years and less on the celebratory big occasions than other works. Though as I think about it it is just that these things have featured among the other shows. In this exhibition there were few equivalent events to the Nighttime Boxing or Xmas Concert of earlier shows, say. Instead they are a little more private - either to do with individuation or attaining adulthood: teenagers (boys & girlfriends) camping out, pairing off to build houses in the sand together at night; looking at the stars with his girlfriend; being frightened at thinking one has seen a ghost; a favourite dog's 'boss' comes for it & takes it away, to Abdulla's unspoken regret.

They seem, too, to be a bit more about smoking smokes & drinking drinks and a growing disenchantment with life on the Mission & a decision to move away. Their small, enclosed world seems less a haven now than an enclosure - the horizon line is regularly also a kind of boundary & curls down at the left & right of the picture - to suggest a small round world (innocently the world), or a compound. The pictures, though, remain beautiful, if maybe imparting their consciousness of the untenability of a merely sweet view. Their humanity & humour remain too. Pictures that sigh tenderly at the world they recall. Or smile - one picture shows the guys, small figures, standing at night around a fire in a 44 gallon drum, their hands in front warming themselves: in each mouth is a cigarette with a tiny vertical flame coming from each, echoing the fire in the drum.

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Michele Luke, in trophy at the Sym Choon Gallery, states her theme fairly unambiguously: most of the works are trophies of a sort - tokens or mementos, all small or miniature, many of them broken, but mounted in wondrously beautiful presentation displays (on silk cushions, framed by fanned lace & other materials, under special glass domes etc). Featuring brides & horses, & lace doilies, they suggest idealized fantasy, dreams, sentimental expectations dashed or poignantly abandoned, girlhood/femininityŠ false promises, really. But while the thematic or topic-area is unmistakeable, the works' ability to speak clearly about it is minimal. The objects are evocative but the artist can hardly work on those evocations. Our responses (beyond delight at the evident craft beauty) are pretty much prior & available to the objects: they are neither modified by them nor illuminated by them.

Fey, pretty, funny, tragic, they're to be - conventionally - exclaimed over. The few paintings in the show mark a technical advance on Luke's previous paintings. The Big Boast is nice, a picture of a vessel-like object - that functions here as a pendant, but full of mellow, sad romanticism.

trophy begs comparison with the work of Simryn Gill & Jenny Watson. Gill's ranging of (similarly mute, often discarded & ephemeral) objects brings together a greater & more interacting range of perspectives - usually to do with Global Culture, post-colonialism, race & history, etymology & more. The insights they force & the discoveries we make are more surprising. Watson is suggested by the similar Romantic/Anti-romantic theme & the mask/persona of girlhood.

And Watson, too, comes off, instructively, the better. Her heroines, painted on canvas in a childlike, graphic manner (that, in its knowing chic, is complicit in having them viewed both sadsistically and empathetically, or at any rate humorously) link the work to Luke's. The difference is that Luke's objects are style-less, except in a design sense. They are not depicted, they are presented. The room for style would here come in the strategy, the (evident or sensed) thinking & wit behind the presentation - as with Gill or much conceptual art. Most of the meanings that attach to the trophies presented come automatically and as one pretty much unified bundle, a group of binaries of the bitter/sweet variety & we are invited to share them again. Making intellectual or imaginative headway was not part of the itinerary - except to the extent that the show continues Luke's mythologizing of herself as survivor/sufferer. This latter motive seemed to lurk behind the works, though further behind than in previous showings.

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Bronwyn Platten's C.A.C. show Aire de la Noche (The Night Air) surprised this punter, though pleasantly enough. Her work has lately objectified a kind of struggle with inarticulacy, as though, on the one hand, it would have the physical speak. And, on the other, the mind is made to eyeball the obdurately physical so closely that it cannot speak, its vocabulary caught out in a disabling loyalty to logocentrism whereby language is immediately able only to terminate one's attention. (I'm exaggerating.)

In Aire de la Noche Platten orchestrates a much lighter, airier ensemble of work. It's a lighter show, too, in the sense of 'light on'. One was wrong to expect a large show with themes nailed down and worked out. This seemed maybe a preliminary sketching of ideas to be worked with more fully later, or an aside to her work to date. I'm not complaining.

Gone was the insistently corporeal feel of previous shows: no tongues, no 'physical' materials - tactile & tacky, repellent & familiar, no 'representations' of the body. None, that is, unless the Body was present notionally as the frail & delicate vessel in which we set sail, lightly, on an evanescent life, the sails of spirit blown on instinct. Astrologically, Aire de la Noche was under the sign of air & fire rather than earth: it dealt with magic, with life courses, with erotic life as an adventure. In this it was a lot more fictive in feel, & poetic - it proposed tropes, after all, and rather fanciful & romantic ones. All of which were part of the pleasure of the show, together with its own overall lightness of touch.

The initial room, um, initiated one to something like this above reading. At one end a photo, possibly pre WW1, of a girl in magical fairy gear, with wand, bowing towards one, smirking amusedly, as if pretending to cast a spell. At the other end an anthropological photo of an elderly person (Mexican Indian) - a woman, though this was not apparent - who blows smoke into the face of a calmly receptive younger native woman: a believed-in magic, submitted to. On the wall to the left of this axis is depicted a skull, drawn to have only one tooth. Above her is a seeming halo of dark stitching that is also a wig. Spindly thin plaits descend from it to the floor. As well as magic, rites of passage or conventional Ages of Man (Ages, in this case, of Woman) are suggested - the child/girl; the young woman - receiving any of wisdon, power, cure, protection, blessing from an elder; & age/death. The single-toothed skull suggests humour of a kind (as does the young girl), humorous folk wisdoms about Life & Death - and suggests directly the older figure who blows the smoke: the knowledge we are initiated to.

Hence, I think, the curiously magical, whispering effect of the silver pillow balloons one encounters in the subsequent room. The CAC's rooms are domestically scaled, and have polished parquetry floors. There follows a trip down the hall to the final, emptier, room: where expectation is defeated/challenged by the presence of, majorly, a 4 or 5 foot long & 2 or 3 foot hight 'paper' boat (or hat), covered in newsprint, sailing across the room. On one wall a small painted plate, with a scene depicting a windblown & forlornly twisted tree by the sea, two trees actually, a larger one embracing a small, thin tree. The plate provides the suggestion of wind and is itself a quoted metaphor for (eternal) love & security in the domestic. (Untitled, the plate is 'for' Emma Bovary.) The boat seems bravely, blithely adventuresome and optimistic - as a metaphor, both for guise & for setting out. It is entitled Enlarged copy of an object found at the Museum of Modren Art, New York, December 6th, 1994 and the object is a discarded 'boat' made of a retrospective programme of films by Marlon Riggs, a black US filmmaker recently dead of AIDS. As an object it seems rather flatly symbolic (or do I mean flat in its symbolism?). (A gouache in the hall just as one entered this room was a kind of handpainted colour-chart, of green shades, called new knowledge of green.)

To return to the second room. At each of its four, squared, corners is a single helium filled silver mylar cushion/balloon, tethered head-high, and carrying the messages: "Come to your house!", "Come!", "Don't go anywhere else!", "Come directly to your house!". There are suggestions of Party, of surprise, & erotic ambush. Low in the centre of the polished floor is a rectangular dais or box, glossily shiny & black, looking like japanned woodwork (though in fact it is painted plaster). The dais has nothing on it - & is 'tethered' to the wall, tethered lightly - nothing on it but the negative indentations of four hooves. It suggests the sexily pagan, golden calves etc, the bestial. "Loco miroir", from which the title derives, is a voodoo phrase, suggesting, if I've got it right, that the gods inhabit mirrors, someone in there just to one side of our own image.

These responses are my own, as specific as anybody else's, tighter than the work itself specifies, though neither would it disallow them. The thing about the show was the light & yet firm manner in which these classes of response are called forth, or activated, and tensed against each other. Aire de la Noche (The Night Air) seemed to me to alert us to possibilities rather than establishing them as unequivocally present. But that something should be 'in the air', insubstantial but, like the gods in the mirror, potentially present & potentially potent, was appropriate to Aire de la Noche.

Ken Bolton

1) I can likewise imagine such beds as depicted by the Linda Marinon or Shark Le Wit of the 80s, or by Ken Searle or Frank Littler - and approving. Irony & scepticism making the difference.

-------------------------------------

from Art Commentary - Adelaide, 1990

Otis Rush #6/7

€ 'Circa 69 AD' - C.A.C., September 7th - 30th, 1990; € 'Inhibodress' - E.A.F., April 5th - May 6th, 1990; € 'Fluxus' - E.A.F., September 21st - Oct 14th, 1990; € 'Black€Bud' - Bullring Gallery at the Jam Factory, November 4th - 25th, 1990; € 'South Australian Contemporary Drawing' - Anima Gallery, September 14th - October 10th, 1990; € 'Questions of Belief' - C.A.C., May 2nd - 27th, 1990; € 'Fragmentation & Fabrication' - A.G.S.A., November 30th - February 10th, 1991.

Some reviewers of art, when they tire of the art they must review, resort to other topics - Robert Rooney on his book collection for example - or, when in a bad temper - and most are guilty of this - they attack the catalogue essay.

Most are in a bad temper? or most attack the catalogue essay when in a bad temper? Is that 'imprecision'? Well, & everyone is guilty of that too. But imprecision is one of the targets I have before me. Not that I intend to review exhibitions simply on the basis that they afforded weak or confused propositions in their catalogues, or drew weak-minded reviews or appreciations.

These things, though, have been a feature of 1990s art in Adelaide and are a reflection, perhaps, on the lack of coherent direction in art at the moment. One might wish (nostalgically) for, or wish (courageously) against, a coherent and visible 'direction', of course, but I think the confused proposals and encomiums, as it happens, do reflect some lack in the art shown, too. A lack of certainty or confidence in the work's procedures, in the work's status.

Curatorially, many exhibitions have seemed not to have had faith in the works artistically but wished to argue for them, perhaps understandably, on interpretative grounds - usually by claiming for them an (ideologically correct) effect the works often didn't seem to me to achieve. Much was art that derived neither full flight nor full coherence from its own propositional energies - through doubting this source, while at the same time remaining subservient to it: content reduced here to a shakey alibi.

As common of course, though not much reviewed here, was work with so negligible propositional impetus that it is plainly formalist decoration with little pressure of meaning brought to bear on its technique.

An illustrative example of confusion and imprecision is the Circa 69 AD exhibition (September 7 - 30, 1990 at the C.A.C). To quote from curator John Stringer's catalogue essay:

"The year 1969 marks the flowering of a local aesthetic which continued to bloom into the early seventies. This phenomenon in essence has two chief aspects. Certain artists adhere to the general reductive principles of Minimalism, while others attempted to reconcile the severity of minimal art with descriptive imagery."

Stringer's confusion is apt to the subject. How could a phenomenon, an aesthetic, have as its "essence" two aspects, one being adherence "to the general reductive principles of Minimalism" and the other being a concern with the non-reductivist, non-minimalist reconciliation of "severity" with descriptive imagery? Well so much for the logic of the catalogue. For the artists of the time (in this show Syd Ball, Tony Bishop, Ian Chandler, David and John Dallwitz, Barrie Goddard, Cecil Hardy, Nigel Lendon, and Margaret Worth) an important (and undermining) problem was, What was the reason for the hard-edge severity, why take it on board, if you had no commitment to "reduction"?

Plainly the phenomenon was not one aesthetic but two or more, only one of which was Minimalist. One direction, reductivism, had a direction and logic by which it could develop (some would say to a bad end). The other(s) foundered, as nothing compelling had set their problems in the first place: if you're a reductivist in 1969 why describe something figuratively, except as a pun - stars, flags say; if you're into figuration, why the need to use reductive forms?

As an exhibition Circa 69 AD demonstrated this divide. Works by Margaret Worth and Syd Ball, for example, did seem to evince some common principles and to do so in the characteristic 60s literalist, ostensive manner. There was nothing but what you saw (to paraphrase Frank Stella). Like demonstrations their pieces stated frankly that they were problems (of design / composition) solved - and the terms were clearly those of post-painterly abstraction. This gave some of Worth's and Ball's works a visual zing and authority they possess still.

For many of the other pieces in the exhibition this was not the case - their time and context past, these works manage to suggest little of it now. These were weakly eclectic, not sprung from any aesthetic necessity or problem. They hung about the C.A.C. like curiosities from a long past age . . . as suggested - though how deliberately? - by the title Circa 69 AD.

Much of the 70s (critically) cut its teeth attacking this sort of art as an American-derived 'mainstream' epiphenomenon. Works like these were charged with being the results of Cultural Imperialism, as colonisation: here were some slavish followers, and some who had not even understood the rules - of an art derived from elsewhere.

(Stringer's remark, tying it all to the 60s - via an equation of Minimalism : Classicism : humanism - is truly ahistorical! Another elision this time of distinct and opposed terms. Ask the Stella or Judd of 1968 about their classicism. Better still, ask about their 'humanism' and duck!)

How much the situation has changed has been a constant Australian preoccupation. So constant one is bored by it. Still, Circa 69 brought home the need for the question.

*

The C.A.C.'s roots go back to a modernist past of some antiquity - but Circa 69 reflected something of the antecedents to some of the proclivities of the present director: Minimalism, post-painterly abstraction, as sources of and benchmark achievements against which to judge and understand current neo geo abstraction. Circa 69 could be read as historical background to part of the current curatorial direction of the C.A.C.

The E.A.F.'s Inhibodress exhibition (Mike Parr, Peter Kennedy and Tim Johnson - April 5th - May 6th; curated from Queensland's I.C.A.) might be seen to relate to the E.A.F's own beginnings: instead of late 60s reductivist formalism, the E.A.F. presented its then rival, early 70s conceptualism - which art was championed by Donald Brook in Sydney and found a home here in Adelaide with the founding of the E.A.F.

The post-object, ephemeral and (missing) performance aspect of the work gave it rather a Toussaud, recreated air: it looked like the avant-garde as I experienced it as a student - grainy magazine photos of empty spaces, with the odd speaker, radio, or microphone; and tangled skeins, or punctiliously straight lines of electrical wire, in bare rooms; perhaps words or writing out of focus affixed to the walls. An unspoken importance given to the air of equipment being present rather than turps, oil, wood and canvas. Science! Seriousness! On the other hand, and unlike most of the art shown today, the work (Parr's and Johnson's at least) seemed very precisely situated vis a vis concepts of art. For much new art today, given the fall of Modernism as privileged 'narrative', their is no need for self consciousness in this area. (1)

Inhibodress evoked all that, and could seem emptily ghostly in this respect. Some pieces on the other hand were able to be recreated mentally and to suggest something of their excitement at the time and their meaning for the time: some of Parr's typing pieces filling the wall - beginning with a definition of "wall", and thence of all the words in that first definition, and so on and so on - something physical obliterated, denied, by an unstoppable and engulfing conceptual system. Parr's presence, typing the pieces, and pasting them up as they were done - this we missed.

In many respects the exhibition was now a museum piece requiring greater documentation and explication than the Inhibodress exhibition provided. The show functioned somewhat as an aide-mémoire. If you weren't there for the original - "pity to have missed it."

The E.A.F. had two further 'retrospective' shows - an exhibition of documentation of Jill Orr's performance pieces, and later in the year the Fluxus exhibition (September 21st - Oct 14th) - and finally the Quotations project - wildly popular, but in many ways a return of the past and to very little point.

*

It was very much the airline food version of Fluxus - reduced in all sorts of ways, but giving some sense of the aesthetic as long as one was aware of the breadth of the range that had been so reduced - the missing sound, performance and 3-D aspects, its propensity towards unravelling edges.

*

Black€Bud (November 4 - 25, 1990, at the The Jam Factory's Bullring Gallery) showed one work by each of Craige Andrae, Annette Bezor, Kate Brennan, Anton Hart, Aldo Iacobelli, Bronia Inwanczak, Shaun Kirby and Bronwyn Platten.

The catalogue essay concludes -

"Most of the works . . . deal in various ways with the void created by fascination with surface rather than content."

If one asks "In what ways?" the answer might be, "By exampling it, simulating it, and by insinuating, smugly, a sly wisdom about it." We assume - the catalogue 'text' does - that they criticize it (though some might be Americans - why not? - and celebrate it).

But if this art is critique it is hardly analytical - it is too mimetic. And if it is condemnation it amounts to tut-tutting as ritualistic as the Pope's attacks on the enemies of the faith.

Timothy Morrell, whose text would seem itself to exemplify a preoccupation with "packaging over product" (as he put it), seems closer to the mark earlier in the essay where in the second paragraph he makes his second stab at definition: black has "connotations of the sinister and sardonic." Something can arguably be sinister - but it can only be sardonic about something - and again that "about" must bear a lot of weight. Many of the works seemed less sardonic than bleakly wry. 2)

"Every home should have a black painting." This manifesto, a package of art, revolution and salesmanship, was the starting point and the original working title for the exhibition. But . . . [the title became] Black€Bud, which is more secretive, gives less away and may be hiding something.

So not all the works were literally black, or even dark. Many of them were secretive seeming, and to that end gave little away, but were they hiding anything?

Craige Andrae's piece was, for that artist, unusually mute and simple as a gesture. Indeed it seemed at attention, as if it had made its gesture just before one entered the room. However the text explains what the gesture had been: the presentation of the intersection of meanings in the imagery of an old logo - the meanings (must one say it - surprise, surprise!) were "trade and consumption". The artist's method was magnification, a way of saying "look at this."

Bronia Iwanczak's The Rape Of The Lock "dealt with" (alright, it's hard not to use the phrase) "the nature of highly refined advertising graphics". The object was very slickly made - a piece of custom jetsam, from a disco somewhere in the Milky Way, and was rather hard to pay attention to, despite the text's insistence on the truism that high gloss is "seductive" and "psychologically manipulative". I feel I would like not to hear the word seductive for the rest of this decade. Especially if the word is to be 'relished'.

Annette Bezor's painting seemed to fit the theme - in the sense of ruin or stunting that the words "black bud" suggest. A Victorian-looking girl, naked, surrounded by the presences (disembodied heads) of famous hard cases - the Virgin Mary, Marie Antoinette (whom I didn't recognise - though they all had a tragic diva look to them), Marilyn Monroe (again), and Maria Callas. The picture seemed itself quite seduced (!) by the sweetly lachrymose quality of these icons (and to be pruriently interested in the oddly draughted girl-woman's 'pudenda' - I think that word conveys the flavour of the interest). The ill-fated stars which can guide a girl, I guess. Too true? Literature in the bad sense: at the conscious level the picture's thematic procedure was straightforward, the theme and its argument well-worn, and the response was more or less designated for the viewer, together with a s'il vous pla"t.

Aldo Iacobelli showed a large monochrome black painting of a section of a record - the bas-relief of the texture distinguishing vinyl record grooves from the rest. It seemed effectively ambivalent: just a pic? overpowering? depressing? cheerful? More than most works in the exhibition it kept its ambiguities buoyant - its mystery retained allure - where other pictures by sad contrast kept a secret that this viewer at any rate did not feel moved to ponder at any length. And the picture's ambiguities did not resolve themselves as being, on balance and irremediably, weighted one way rather than the other.

I blanch at the thought of a whole room of these giant black records.

Such a show is on the cards of course - sardonic about fun? I guess that is the message?

Bronwyn Platten's diptych Echo was my favourite in the exhibition - a panel of tiny and identical falling (or floating) women - the effect was of panic and dream. The figures fell, evenly spaced - a small rhetorical 19th century image evoking Hardyesque and romantic pathos. This, on the left, was contrasted against another panel of fabric on which a restful landscape scene was commercially printed. Over this scene was superimposed, in an outline made up of small plastic highly coloured buttons, the representation of a cheerfully and hopefully spurting fountain. A formal, public symbol of the ideal of the Happy, Assured and Bountiful against the (private or public) gesture and reality of Despair - or, at least, insecurity. The catalogue text provides us with the information that the picture does not (and which it does not strictly need), that the repeated female figure is from a 19th century engraving of a suicide.

"What counts in a group exhibition, especially one in which each artist is represented by a single piece, is not so much the particular works - it will always be the case that some objects will seem more representative of an artist's oeuvre than others - but the overarching idea that brings them all together." (To quote Donald Kuspit, though it's an unexceptionable remark.) Well, nothing happening here, folks. Typically Adelaide group exhibitions are 'cutratorialy unambitious'.

Black€Bud generated considerable interest - an artist-curated group show, made up of some of the newly established and some of the up and coming most-likely new artists, showing together in the curatorially neutral space of the Bull Ring - a venue with no particular program of its own. The art though was none of the artists' best, not generally provocative, interestingly critical or much able to hold one's attention. Its only coherence was an overall stylishness. Admittedly this high finish was almost something in itself given the unambitious look of many of 1990's local exhibitions. The high finish seemed to proclaim "Professionalism". On entering one thought, Wow, why isn't this in Melbourne? Perhaps this was the "overarching idea"?

€

South Australian Contemporary Drawing (Anima Gallery, September 14 - October 10) drew some criticism for its failure to be the survey show its title promised. Nobody was actually disappointed on those grounds: Anima was a tiny gallery, and the invitation listed the artists - clearly for the most part the Anima stable of 'New New' artists, supplemented with five or six others.

As an exhibition it bore comparison with Black€Bud. Black€Bud had some New New young veterans (Iacobelli, Kirby, Platten), some older names (Bezor and Hart) and some of more recent celebrity (Andrae and Iwanczak). Black€Bud was distinctively 80s going on 90s, right down to the usual affinity with the 60s. The Drawing show was much more recognisably of one core group - the New New crowd - plus extras, and had an 80s going on 70s feel, much of it. It definitely reflected the deskilling of artists and the downgrading of drawing that had taken place (in Australian art schools) in the 70s. The drawings were mostly very casual. Most of Black€Bud was technically rather accomplished, or at the very least glossy - which signalled an aspiration in that direction.

The high point of South Australian Contemporary Drawing - though there were pleasing works by both Michele Luke and Alan Lukey - were three from artists associated with the Adelaide Central School of Art, drawings by Anna Platten, Rod Taylor and Chris Orchard. These were the show's exceptions. They possessed a high level of technical finish and traditional skill - figurative, detailed, charcoal drawings. Interestingly, their concerns seemed more au courant than those of the rest of the exhibition, viz: subjectivity, with a big 'S', mystery, and a formally dramatic composition. While these particular themes often seem to me pumped up, melodramatic, a little operatic, and relishing a little too much the reintroduction of the 'High' in Art and the reintroduction of its Baroque high stakes, much of the rest of the exhibition used 'drawing' as an excuse to duck all seriousness: exercises in - rather than explorations of - casualness and off-hand grace. Some of it was much less, in fact.

€

Ominously titled, Questions Of Belief (May 2 - 27, 1990, C.A.C.) was intended as a brief survey of current interesting directions - or of some of them - from mostly younger or newer artists - and given that the artists were chosen from various parts of the country, not just South Australia (a commendable feature), the exhibition received considerable attention. Perhaps it might be a pointer to future C.A.C. directions under director David O'Halloran. There were lots of reasons to be there. The exhibition showed work by Janet Burchill, Eugene Carchesio, Tony Clark, Melanie Howard, Shaun Kirby, and Linda Marrinon.

Linda Marrinon showed three pieces. One, an older, and much reproduced piece - using the trademark wristless black line on a monochrome background - had seemed better in reproduction. The others were more recent and technically less minimal but still maintaining an untrained look. One reproduced Ingres' famous bather with a dark shape beside her that read, I thought, as both a dark key-hole and as a club or baseball bat. It balanced the figure, sitting, vulnerably, with her back to us. Voyeurism and violence. Which made it look pretty, and funny, at the same time. The other picture was of a "bloke" - looking, as I remember him, remarkably thoughtless.

Linda Marrinon's jokes are political (we're to think). Comedians generally don't tell jokes against a hostile audience. Just so, Marrinon's work 'is' funny because the ground has been (long) prepared for it. They're painted truisms. I love them - but that's not a judgement. They attack a power structure (an attack the curator's text ceaselessly and too easily finds in the works that make up Questions of Belief), a power structure that is already demystified to me and to 'the art audience'. Is this stuff actually 'dangerous'? (Do they attack it as a whole - maybe through metonymy? Or do they attack just a part of it?)

The economy and wit of the attack are delightful. The assault on ideas is a pretty small thing. So the Romantic Personality is solipsistic, laughably self-centred and sustained, paradoxically, by myths of agency and autonomy! So "blokes" (in an age where these myths still have popular currency if not unquestioned dominance) can be seen as amusingly unromantic, un-special, and socially determined and to be oddly packaged vessels for any romantically subjective self! As ideas these have had quite a bit of attacking. And here they are presented in their most exaggerated, caricatured form. We laugh. But it is not the form in which they continue to have power over any of us that we laugh at.

More nuttily pleasant than sharply witty or droll was Tony Clark's extendable panorama of 15th century-looking landscape elements. This attacked the idea of Arcadia. It's dead, Tony, leave it alone! Though in fact it would seem to refer more to the conventions of the Picturesque than Arcadia. So I guess Ok Tony, you can keep your gun: It still stinks - it hasn't been buried yet then. ("Ugh. It is Un-dead. I shoot it with my classical gun.")

Janet Burchill was abstractly severe - the degree of severity being equated by some with the supposed degree of seriousness. Nurse Diesel as the paradigm for serious negativity.

Such a confusion is a little to C.A.C. taste (or thought) : tellingly it is held that we (the viewers) will hold the work of Melanie Howard and Eugene Carchesio to be less cool and restrained than that of Burchill and Kirby, because there is more brush-work, some rubbed-out line, some vague, 'suggestive' looking passages. As if you couldn't be dumb coolly or have an idée fixe or a 'secret' or, equivalently, pretend to the ineffable! Anyway, if you were dumb enough, then this show was going to disabuse you of that crippling delusion.

Shaun Kirby's work The Rose was a cruciform wooden shape at the enlarged centre of which was a thorny foliation - a representation, ambivalent because, as with previous Kirby pieces, the illustration is a magnified detail of a Medieval, Renaissance or 17th century wood cut - flower-like, centripetal and sexual. I think one is to be amazed at catching oneself coming to the conclusion - let's not beat about the bush: jumping to the conclusion - that this is the traditional confluence of themes rose / genitalia / love / sex / pleasure / pain / aesthetics of beauty and pain / Christianity. Scarifying? Or does one simply like sticking one's finger in the wound of an old doubt?

Part of the motivation for the exhibition - at least in Juliana Engberg's catalogue essay - is an attempt to counter the vogue for the Mystical Sublime (febrile or Wesleyan), especially the dreaded Abstract brand. Alright. I hate it too - though Engberg wages a foolish fight for possession of 'geometry' for her side - to wrest it away from the Mystiquers - as though it were inherently cool, cerebral. Engberg even mounts a Search For Origins: did you know "the original purpose of geometrics was of course to make plausible or describe in a physical way notional or abstract concepts"? As if these concepts hadn't been idealist and "metaphysical". Postmodernism doesn't need allies like this.

Engberg wrote from New York. (I don't know what this by-line added to the worth of her thought. Perhaps actually it was to remove her from blame for seeming not to know what she was talking about: Engberg appeared to be placing her faith in a feminist post modernism, preferably of a geometric sort - I love it when people describe "the great but absent art of our age" - and there wasn't any in this show.)

(I'd say we're depending on Feminist art, and on feminism in postmodernism, and if it can be geometric . . . well - I don't care! The desired thing, though, was not a strong presence in Questions of Belief. Janet Burchill's work, for example, could itself arguably owe its attraction to the appeal of a punitively Protestant sublime. It is unfailingly praised in terms of negatives. - As the masochist says to Nurse Diesel approvingly, "You're so Severe!")

€

Fragmentation & Fabrication (November 30th - February 10th, A.G.S.A.) showed a range of "recent Australian photography", to quote from its subtitle, and a number of the works became the Gallery's via the Maude Vizard - Wholohan Art Prize Purchase Awards. Probably a sizeable injection to the Gallery's purchasing funds in that area has been effected by diminution of the prize and its spread over the asking price of a number of pictures - further supplemented by the Wholohan monies. Sad for someone not to win the prize but less invidious and perhaps more useful.

The pictures were all from the last half of the 80s. Most, in fact, were from 88, 89 and 1990 - so that the exhibition was very contemporary. An effect of this weighting was to give the impression of a markedly limited number of themes or concerns. An interest, for example, in Narrative and particular narrative codes (Hewson/Walker, Jay Younger, Stacey, Del Favero); an interest in emblematic presentation (Moffatt, Ferran, Stacey, Zahalka).

So much of the work was so immediately familiar that I was at first disappointed - much had been seen in the last few years via the E.A.F., the C.A.C., the College Gallery. As well, many of the works appeared to be so unable to deal with, to be about, to be able to critique or remark upon their subject - again the weakness of the copula connecting art with the world - that the fixation on narrative would seem at first merely a fad (as though it had swept through art schools in 87/88 as the new guarantor of engagement with the . . . well, with the earnest. As well, a large proportion were very high-finish re-presentations of images already passed through one media - most often the self-professedly fictive: narrative film or TV, film stills; or they showed 'patently' (for irony and distance) staged tableaux - so that an initial impression, for me quite a lasting one, was of meretricious, high-impact drama. I was wrong. Many of the works were more interesting than the impression given by their numbers as a whole. Which is reasonable for a survey show. I will discuss some that struck me.

Hewson/Walker's giant piece Arena (a detail of the installation), an enormous blow-up of details that look floral but might not be - a corsage? - coupled with a narrow panel of text the same height at the visual panel, creates between the two elements a moment of extreme concentration and anxiety, mostly around narrative expectations of "and what next?" yet out of a rather non-linear and atmospheric textual build-up.

The picture's magnification becomes a correlative of the intense interrogation it is thereby subject to as evidence / support / augury. Irony inheres - that is, a foregrounding of the effect-creating procedures - in the hyperbole and breathlessness, the overdetermining stylization. As though the two parts, text and picture, smile at the job they have done, at the dependability of artifice.

In the same room were two panels from Ann Ferran's I Am The Rehearsal Master. As I have given considerable attention to this exhibition (Otis Rush #5) I shan't go into detail here, except to say that, along with Elizabeth Gertsakis's sequence, I thought it the best work in the exhibition. I Am The Rehearsal Master presents re-stagings of the 19th century's own stagings of Hysteria as put on by the patients of Charcot, so that, as with much of the rest of Fragmentation and Fabrication, it dealt with representational rhetorics and discursive modes and with a particular discourse of power / confession / expression, of femininity, of psychology etc., and dealt with these as fictional, as propositional and as convention-forming and convention-dependent.

Helen Grace's Landscape 2 : Order was very comparable: a gridded syphoning-off of expressive power and naturalistic presence from a scene - I think I remember - of frenzied faces in heavy selling at the stock exchange. The residue is the rhetorical forms of expressed passion. Here it is passion in the service of the Market Mechanism, of Society - defined as the interests of capital, property and power.

Bill Henson's pictures looked (hey!) seductive and beautiful and quietly arresting. This though may be largely a matter of taste, of their playing on, or corresponding to, the taste of our time. Their own cynicism is not, probably, their subject. It might be unfair to call them cynical. If they are not, then they are sentimental and if they can make that part of their focus rather than the sole mechanism of their logic, they might remain interesting. The 'logic' is of the mystery and sado-masochistic pathos of the nexus of pain and pleasure, beauty and consumption, innocence and corruption, perfection and mutability - a nexus that is a cliché in which there might not be much left for 'discovery'. Most now treat it at some distance, via genre - the poems of John Tranter, the movies of David Lynch. It might be less "at the heart of human nature" than a defence against it. Anyway - arresting pictures.

Tracy Moffatt's pieces were also arresting. That which struck me showed - in the manner of a set-piece for a film still, but with the visual drama one associates with title frames that typically introduce the story of a violent comic book - a view between the fuel tank of a motorcycle and the jodhpurred legs of a cop. The view there framed and supervised was of a black woman on her knees and 'subjugated'. The conventions of the story implied, or allowed for, rape, humiliation and rebellion - plus racism, casual, systematic state violence - a whole scenario. And it was recognisable as modern Western colonial society. As Australian as a good Juan Davila painting. On the bike's tank were the letters AJS - and, though an old friend used to ride those bikes, what leapt to mind were the words Australian Judicial System.

Jay Younger's sequence of pictures, Between Delusions, was also arresting and seemed to be focussed on the sort of intensity and suspense that the burning fuse represented in Mission Impossible - narration as the contiguity and causality of events. Well, I liked it. Almost certainly it was intended to have more value than that. Pax! My appreciation stopped there.

Anne Zahalka had three pieces on show. Two were from her Berlin Remembrance series - restagings of 16th and 17th century paintings - a German Painter (boring), and a version of the Arnolfini Wedding, which escapes being jokes-against-a-cliché (à la Mona Lisa takeoffs) and seems to capture the gulf between our values and those of the painting's time at the same time as formally concentrating on resemblances. I guess a difference, the one focussed on here, is that our popular culture's Romantic individualist rhetoric does not allow us to acknowledge the common reality of people's lives except as betrayal and failure (of an ideal). It's a steely sort of picture and pretty good. The German Painter does not get much purchase on any world.

Zahalka's picture of tourism, The Tourists, is pretty amusing. A Japanese couple have themselves photographed on the sand at Bondi, with a painted backdrop behind them: beach, breakers and sky - a backdrop which almost certainly blocks out the real breakers and sky. But is there any reason to suspect that the tourists don't see the joke too? It's not really much of a comment on hyperreality, surely. But good as "a photo of a funny thing".

Elizabeth Gertsakis's two pictures-with-texts, from her exhibition Innocent Reading for Origin, were the standout works of the exhibition. Many viewers will be familiar with them - 40s family pictures of poor, soon-to-be-emigrant people - the artist's own family. The scenes are of rites of passage - marriages, formal family photos, the family posed at a child's birthday. They are presented as clues to Gertsakis's background - for Gertsakis herself. The text interrogates the picture, its objects and appearance, to understand. Gertsakis makes bald factual observations (in simple, short sentences) - and asks simple questions, expresses simple wishes (out of partial empathy and frustration with the picture). The figures above have shadows. The curtains look nice but the floor looks wrong. The girl's dress is too short. The other bodies are hugging her, to keep her warm. The observations actually help us, too, to see better, to read the human meaning of the postures taken up by sitters and subjects - both conscious meanings or motives and less conscious expressions of affection, nervousness etc. And many of both variety, the conscious and unconscious, seem socially formed - the personalities being available expressions, or responses, to economic and social pressures. Economics, gender, nation, all speak through individuals who try to speak themselves. The experience is generalizable - firstly to the general migrant experience, secondly probably to anyone living in a Western, non-traditional society - relatively atomised families, and rituals and the resonance of certain experiences changing from generation to generation, rendering one generation opaque to the next.

Curator Julie Robinson, in her catalogue essay, is able to assert of almost all the pieces that they question something (closure, our 'notions' of reality, conventions - of narrative, of representation, etc) but is not able to demonstrate what the question ever is, how a notion is made less tenable, is destabilised by the picture's attack or question.

Even more tired is the reliance (the artists', I guess, as much as the curator's) on these notions having sufficient currency among people to require this radical 'questioning'. Hasn't the damage been done, haven't these ideas taken the count long ago? at least in the arena of art and philosophy? That they are still operative in TV, advertising and elsewhere - pervasively - suggests that there is where they should be resisted - in the media where they continue to hold sway.

Perhaps this art is so powerless that it requires the suspension of previous thought so as to appear to be again delivering 'The News'. But Fragmentation and Fabrication, the essay, would have it that the viewer walks about saying How very true! How Disquieting (shudder), and apt, too! and Oh, my cherished notions! Few of the pictures were able to give to any of these notions - that, not unchallenged, do dominate our shared daily world - an operative, fleshed and effective presence or to bring them, for me, into a destabilisation by which I was to gain or lose anything. "You photograph with all your ideology," says photographer Sebastiao Salgado. 3) Fractured Fairytales dealt with Ideology as nobody believed it, except statistically - mean, average, and abstract.

On the other hand most gallery-goers shouldn't have had too much trouble touring the exhibition and ticking the correct boxes (had they been provided 4)), from among such as a) narrative disquiet, b) glaring irony, c) toughly anti-romantic, d) allegory on social/gender roles and their economic base.

In fact that's all the sympathetic viewer could do. Not many a Friend of the Gallery staggered to the Gallery coffee shop with their ideology dismantled, their episteme in tatters. Nor were the artists, I'd say, much shaken by the rigours of their own daring transgressions.

I'm sympathetic with it politically, but much of the art seemed contributions to an arsenal for an assault that can never be mounted - or not in such a form as to use them. Like an army practising drilled marching. (Or do they still use that?) I guess one nods to it sadly and says, Well done, knowing that one has been imprecise.

Ken Bolton

1) John Nixon's exhibitions would be one of the exceptions, here, among 1990's exhibitions. Though I think the case Nixon's work makes to be tenuous and to render his work to a very high degree dependent on histories that are not guarranteed permance. Though what is? And perhaps re-activating some particular histories (or historicisms) is its project, its work: the tenuousness and its poignancy become our work.

2) If you can be wry - just "be wry" and not about anything - I guess you can be similarly sardonic - which reflects art, and in its train criticism, preferring to discuss the qualitative nature of its stance rather than the leverage or effect of that stance.

Though I would hate to be "wry"; and being sardomic is to have your friends tell you to 'shut up'. Better to smoulder - like Raquel Torres, . . . Linda Darnell, . . . or Randy Quaid!

3) As quoted in "The Lyric Documentarian" by Frec Ritchin, in Sebastiao Salgado

4) In a sense the catalogue provided them

Ken Bolton