Adrift in Melbourne: The Trans-Tasman Challenge - VinRyan
Art New Zealand Magazine Conical Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, August 2001

Australian artist and writer Charles Green once described his experiences as a travelling artist as follows: "I actually lost track of who I was. We've all had the experience of getting lost, most of us as children, and then trying as if in a dream to remember not only where we are but also, since our identity is tied to place, who we are supposed to be." 1. An exhibition title that uses terms such as adrift or nomadic suggests to me a similar dreamlike quality. To be adrift is to float somewhere out beyond the rational. To be nomadic in an Australian context immediately evokes in me notions of Aboriginal dreaming, or at least, an indistinct blurring of time and space. On the opening night of this exhibition though, it became apparent to me immediately that the kind of dream like quality that I'd envisaged was completely absent. In its place were several hundred people and… a boxing ring. What followed was a match between New Zealand artist Richard Lewer, and Australian artist Luke Sinclair. Both had trained for nine months in preparation for the fight. A professional announcer and referee were enlisted and a regulation-sized ring was built. This was New Zealand versus Australia. I thought (inevitably) of Trevor Chapell's notorious last ball underarm delivery to defeat New Zealand, an event that most Australians have conveniently forgotten, but quite a few New Zealanders seem to remember! Was this payback time? Certainly Lewer had the better of things right from the start. There were plenty of people in the crowd barracking for him. Most though, like the girl in front of me, transformed from a state of confused indifference to agitation and concern. At one stage she started yelling at Sinclair to keep his gloves up. Everybody, it seems, loves an underdog. Several people that I spoke to after the fight questioned the validity of the whole exercise. How did the match relate to the rest of the show? Could you call a boxing match 'art'? My own response to the second question was - "who cares whether it's art or not." If nothing else, the fight was worth staging because it was exciting! Here was the opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of art being represented as a contest. The notion of contest also links Lewer's piece with the rest of the show. This exhibition could be seen as a series of contests or conflicts. Conflicts between the artists and their Australian audience, conflicts between the work and the gallery space, but most of all, conflicts between the art works themselves. Caroline Rothwell's "Banner. 1." fought a losing battle with the events of the opening night. Instead, it functioned as a kind of accidental prop for the fight. I wondered whether the artist felt shortchanged by this. Then again, the curators of 'Adrift' don't seem to have offered favours to any of the artists in the show. To be adrift, they seemed to be saying, is to fend for yourself in a competitive environment. Briele Hanson's video and sound installation "here" is another example. A subtle and unobtrusive installation was never going to compete with a boxing match. Even after a second visit though, I could easily have missed her work altogether. This was due in part to the location of the work, the stairwell between the street and the gallery. Those viewers who were attentive saw first some small white text on the railing of the stairs. The text consisted of a kind of broken down, dictionary definition of the word 'where'. If you didn't allow yourself to be distracted halfway up the stairs by the gallery space you could follow the text up to the top of the stairwell. Once there, you could see the text masked out on the windows spelling out the word 'here'. I thought of McCahon's preoccupation with the notion that identity occupies a physical space. In Hanson's work the space was emphasised with the words 'here' and 'where' but the space was deliberately transitory. I wondered whether the references being made by Hanson were a little too deliberate. The work may have occupied a three dimensional space but conceptually I found it a little one-dimensional. Even so, there was something nice about being reminded about the transitory nature of space before entering the four walls of a gallery. Not that Conical Contemporary Art Space is an invariable space, far from it. There's street noise to contend with, and an odd combination of natural and artificial light. Then there's the walls, half of which are white whilst the others are a kind of distressed green brick. One wonders how John Pule's lithographs or Mark Braunias' paintings would have survived against a green brick wall. As it was, I found myself having to block out the noise of Gabriel White's video installation in order to read the works. The snippets of White's quirky, matter of fact comments that I couldn't block out made Pule's references to 'the poet' seem excessively romantic and serious. This was unfair on Pule, but in keeping with the spirit of the show. To a much lesser degree, Braunias' work was also difficult to read next to White's work. I found myself just enjoying them as funny, colourful, bizarre snap shots of people on the move. I knew there were specific cultural references being made, but I was too agitated to investigate in any detail. To greater or lesser degrees, White's work had an influence on all the work in the room. Such was the boyish, David Attenborough-like enthusiasm for his subject that you couldn't help being drawn in. His work consisted of two video monitors placed at opposite ends of the space. On one monitor, we'd see an image of Melbourne, perhaps a street or a football oval or a building. From the speaker, you'd hear White's voice narrating a story or an observation about that place. Before you could become too attached to that story, the screen would switch off and another image and story would appear on the other screen. This created a physical space between one idea and another. White, like Hanson, required the viewer to walk through a physical space in order to read the work. Anoushka Akel and Patrick Pound made use of the nature of the gallery space itself to articulate their ideas. Akel uses the bricks in the wall as a kind of metaphor for what curator Emily Cormack describes as "the shocking flatness of Melbourne." Melbourne is certainly unlike any city in New Zealand. There are virtually no hills within a 20km radius of the city and a near perfect grid extends from the city all the way to the outer suburbs. I also thought of the brick as a kind of metaphor for the cold indifference that one culture places on another, less populous culture. Akel cemented individual bricks to the wall at various parts of the gallery. Some were painted. Others had grass or moss grafted onto them and shaped into tiny volcanoes. The volcanoes became a kind of symbol of difference between the two countries. These were Akel's whimsical attempts at transforming her newly adopted environment. Patrick Pound's "The little desk" consisted of a chair and desk placed in the corner of the room. Various historical curios and artifacts were placed in the drawers and a sheet of glass denied access to the objects in the bottom drawer. This created a sense that what I was looking at was a display. On the walls various book illustrations, images of shipwrecks, personal notes and old newspaper clippings were attached in the form of a surreal visual essay. A picture of a crying boy standing on a rock in the middle of a river caught my eye. Underneath the image was the word 'stranded'. I thought of it as a reference to a colonial fear of being left behind by mother England. Perhaps also a more general fear of being consumed by provincialism. Pound seemed to be representing the idea of culture/the artist at work as a museum piece. Conversely, old knowledge is represented as a work in progress. In a sense, this whole exhibition is a work in progress. The curators have wisely chosen not to present a comprehensive or linear representation of contemporary New Zealand art. By representing the artist as traveler, they are able to represent the search for cultural identity as a physical and intellectual journey. This allowed an Australian audience to make part of the journey with them. 1. Charles Green, "The art of travel: recent Australian painting," Tension Magazine No. 18, Oct 98, pp. 19- 21.