an ocean and a return

still from Ocean Without a Shore Venica Biennale installation

image credit www.billviola.com

Midway thorough writing my thesis, before the self-imposed blog hiatus, I started composing a post about my trip to see the National Gallery of Victoria's installation of Bill Viola's Ocean Without a Shore. I didn't really know much about Viola beforehand, but the Age's writeup described the work as "epic, religious, devastating personal, poetic." This was something I needed to see for myself. 

image credit: designboom

Ocean Without a Shore was first exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where it was installed inside the tiny fifteenth century church of San Gallo. The work explores the tentative threshold between dead and living, or as Viola himself puts it, "the presence of the dead in our lives." The installation consisted of three large video screens superimposed over the altars of San Gallo. Shadowy figures walk towards the viewer, becoming increasingly clear, until they break through a wall of water, imperceptible until the moment of contact. The violently cascading wall of water serves as a representation of the threshold between life and death: the intangible yet ever-powerful 'veil' separating the living from loved ones who have died. Once on the other side of the water wall, the figures appear in full colour, their gazes confronting and emotional. After a short time, each turns and passes back through the veil of water. The figure gradually fades to obscurity, and is replaced by another, approaching one of the other two screens.

 image credit: designboom

The National Gallery of Australia's installation of Ocean Without a Shore uses a small, darkened room to evoke the intimacy of the work's initial showing. Even without the church setting, the overall effect is overwhelming and emotive. Viola reminds his viewers of the extent to which humans are obsessed with death by powerfully conveying the desire to 'see' loved ones who have died. Regardless of one's stance towards religion and the afterlife, the sense of loss as each figure disappears through the veil is palpable. All this, for video projections of strangers. Why? Because Ocean Without a Shore addresses our relationship with death as a universal experience. Death, and its implications, are something everyone must grapple with, and one person is as powerless as another to thwart it.

image source: designboom

(last image is of the Venetian church, San Gallo)

I had the idea that Viola was using the universal human experience as a means to evoke an emotional response but it didn't really crystallise until I saw another of his works, The Raft. Based on Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, The Raft  is a short film, which shows a group of strangers (seemingly waiting for a bus?). They stand together, but apart, each studiously avoiding contact with the others. This continues for some time, with slow motion capture used to highlight the minutiae of the group's gestures. Then, just as excruciatingly slowly, a giant wave of water begins to appear from the left of the frame, crashing over and inundating the crowd of people. They are washed - no, battered - by a solid wall of water for what seems like an eternity. Finally, the water recedes, leaving this once nonchalant crowd completely bowled over, clinging to each other for comfort and security. Here the universal theme that Viola is dealing with is suffering. more specifically the unifying effect of collective suffering.

image credit: University of California Humanities Research Institute

Suffering also comes up in yet another Viola piece that I saw recently, this time at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Unspoken features the faces of a man and a woman, projected onto panels of beaten metal - silver and gold, respectively. Both faces show signs of intense grief and anguish, which, as in The Raft, is further emphasised by Viola's use of slow motion. The panels glow in the darkened room in a way reminiscent of religious icons, an analogy which is borne out by their powerful emotive, almost mystical effect.

image credit: me! 

miraculously managing not to shake

[Edit: after a bit of further research into The Passions, the series of works which Unspoken belongs, it transpires that Viola was studying late Medieval devotional images at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. This is also a good point to mention the wealth of information on Viola's work that can be found on both the National Gallery of Australia and the Getty Institute's websites, from a 2003 exhibition of The Passions. The Getty's site has clips from Viola's videos, and notes the connections between them and historical paintings, as well as providing excerpts from Viola's notebooks and explanations of his processes. Well worth a visit.]

With Unspoken, as with Ocean Without a Shore, I felt like I could spend hour upon hour simply staring at the work. As a general rule, I tend to dislike video art - I find most examples of the medium to be repetitive, smug, and detached to the point that they induce boredom. Viola's work is none of these things. It is immersive and direct, and above all, it is moving. This, for me, is the masterstroke. And given that this is quite possible my most text-heavy post yet, I'll leave it at that.

Ah Xian

I first saw Ah Xian's beautiful and intricate busts at the National Gallery of Victoria for 2006's Contemporary Commonwealth exhibition. But, fool that I am, I promptly forgot all about them. Fast forward to 2009, and Ah Xian has won the Clemenger Contemporary art prize, and I feel vindicated for falling so madly in love with the busts I saw way back when, and eternally foolish for forgetting about something so striking. Usually Xian works in traditional Chinese materials such as jade, or shiny white porcelian painted with archetypal willow pattern designs. The series of sculpted busts featured in the Clemenger exhibition present a break with these traditional materials -- they are cast from concrete, which gives them a pale, matte finish. Despite the heaviness of the material, they retain an aura of delicacy, not least because each cast has been 'texturised,' so to speak, with inprints of leaves and flowers. Each bust is different, both in regards to the original head it has been cast from, and in regards to the design element, yet they are united by the ghostly beige of the concrete. As such, the installation continues a theme prevalent in Xian's earlier work -- that of cultural identity -- whilst also incorporating themes of alienation and dislocation. A worthy winner indeed.

Killing time until Ricky Swallow

Ok, so I did enjoy my trip to see ol' mister Dali, despite my apprehensions. But ever since, I have been feeling a little bored by the prospects at the NGV. Enter, stage left, contemporary Australian artist Ricky Swallow. Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. Things are looking up.

Swallow creates intricately detailed sculptures of seemingly insignificant objects, everyday objects which have been rendered arbitrary through familiarity and regular usage. Pop culture objects which we all hold dear, yet don't think about in detail due to a cloud of nostaligia. Well, detail is Ricky Swallow's middle name, and his sculptures reinvent these forgotten objects, making them eternal rather than transient, and infusing value through both his choice of material and through the laborious process of hand carving. Did I mention, wow?

The NGV has subtitled the exhibition "The Bricoleur," which leaves itself open for several interpretations. The word itself is a little ambiguous, given that it has been borrowed into English from French, and translation is a slippery game at the best of times. Even I can't concretely say what I think it means. Having sifted through several definitions, the common understanding is that bricolage involves assembling art from disparate materials, making something from the bits and bobs you find around you. I find this a bit odd when used to describe Ricky Swallow, because despite various media featuring throughout his oeuvre, each sculpture is made from one carefully selected medium. The whole sculpture. And they are sculptures, too, not assemblages. That said, and this is where the issue of translation comes into play,bricoleur can also mean "to tinker," or "to fiddle," and the fiddly, painstaking detail on Swallow's sculptures makes such a term ideal for him.

The NGV explains its use of the term 'bricoleur' thus:

Like the bricoleur put into popular usage by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in his seminal book The Savage Mind, Ricky Swallow creates works of art often based on objects from his immediate surroundings. His method, however, is more of a second order bricolage: his sculptures are not assemblages of found objects, but rather elegantly crafted things.

I would argue that there is a distinct difference between sculpture and/or art MADE FROM one's everyday surroundings, and art BASED ON objects from the everyday. The fact that Swallow's sculptures are carved from high quality timber works to create an ironic contrast with their subject matter. Form and medium have a complex and shifting interrelationship. Furthermore, the term bricolage carries associations of a hasty, roughly constructed item, which does not fit with the laborious, painstaking nature of Swallow's sculptures. Maybe I am reading too much into this, then again maybe I am just exited to have something new to talk about rather than Freudian dreams and anamorphic land masses. Bricoleur or no, I say bring on Ricky Swallow!

[Images of Swallow with Killing Time from here, here and here. Detail of Killing Time from the artist's website.]

A bit of Dali and a bit of a break

Corinne has told me she wants my thoughts on Dali. And after seeing the exhibition on Friday I can say I have many thoughts on the subject indeed. Some good, some bad, but in essence, my response to Dali : Liquid Desire is that whilst some aspects were every bit as cliched and heavy handed as I'd expected, other, unexpected aspects were pleasantly surprising; exciting and impressive even. I maintain my position with regards to Dali's surrealist, biomorphic works -- melting clocks and cliffs that resemble vagina's just aren't my taste -- but his lesser work is truly fantastic, and technically, he is superlative. I was just about to list a whole bunch of superlatives, so I think the word itself works nicely.

One of my favourite things included in the exhibition was an animated collaboration between Dali and Disney, Destino, a short film which incorporates Dali's most well known motifs, and his beloved catalan landscape. Storyboarded by Disney and Dali during the 40s, Destino was judged to be commercially nonviable, and it wasn't brought to life until more recently, when Disney's nephew Roy took it on. The film was released in 2003, and consists mainly of traditional animation, with a few instances of computer animation.



Somehow, the transfer from painting to animation means the overwrought psychosexual connotations which put me off much of Dali's work, simply aren't present. Instead, the storytelling is light hearted, delicate, and the focus moves to the luminous quality of the light and landscape. Simply fantastic.

Lastly, I am heading to NZ for a wee holiday. I have a few exhibitions I want to see, but am not sure what my internet access will be while I'm there, so it may be a while until I post again. I can promise to head back to Melbourne with many a photo in tow.

"La Bravitude"

After my initial disappointment that the NGV had chosen an artist as blatantly populist as Salvador Dali, I gradually began to feel guilty for being so snobbish, and had even reached the point where I was looking forward to discovering some of Dali's lesser known works. But then I read this quote re an exhibition of Spanish devotional sculpture at Britain's National Gallery..and my reasons for feeling that the NGV needed a serious dose of curatorial bravery became all too clear once again. Of the exhibition, the Gallery's director, Nicholas Penny, says:

"There is an element of risk, but it would be a really terrible thing if people were putting on exhibitions that tried to avoid any sort of risk...You're saying there's no real curiosity in the world – that all people want to see is what they've seen before." (1)

Yes, the National Gallery of Victoria is for all Victorians, not just niche market art nerds like me. But that said, I want my national gallery to take risks, to push boundaries, and to challenge the way people look at art. Will a Salvador Dali retrospective allow any such challenging, or is this sort of curatorship something I can only hope to see if I make the pilgrimage all the way to the National Gallery? I guess I can only wait and see.

NB: for an explanation of the post title, see here.

1: guardian.co.uk online art coverage

A long awaited update

It has been a fair while since I last posted here. Too long, in fact. The absence is justified though: I have been grinding out the last two assesments for my Rome subject. The past few weeks have been consumed by this:

And this:

Respectively, an experiential analysis of Michelangelo's Campidoglio, which the more I write about, the more I love; and a comparison of the patronage programs of two Counter Reformation orders: the Jesuits and the Oratorians, which I loved to start with, but now never want to think about again. Suffice to say, I am pleased to be finished. Now to fill my newfound freedom with all things creative rather than just crashing on the couch after work. Ah yes, that is the challenge.

Oh, and by the by, yes I was snowed under, but not so snowed under that I couldn't find time to go to the NGV. This time we investigated a part of the gallery I have spent relatively little time in: the asian collection. The NGV has on at the moment an exhibition of the robes of Imperial China. Fasinating, visual overload, a techinical feast, need I say more. Well there was more: the whole sociocultural angle of how the roles of members of court helped shape the clothing styles they wore. It was fantastic. My little camera struggled to cope with the low lighting, but the red of the walls showed up beautifully, so not all is lost on the photo front.

In closing, I guess I can only promise to be more diligent with posting, what with having no excuse not to! I will do my best.

Brack is back

Also at the NGV...