The Australian Screen program – the program of films and videos by established artists – was organised by D-Lux and curated by Claude Gonzalez, a man later described at the screening of his documentary called Sydney At War in the main festival program as a kind of artistic odd jobber, a researcher, curator, film maker, phone answerer at the Festival office, who had turned his hand at selecting work for the D>art.04 program. Both the Emerging Australian and Australian Screen programs were put together from a call for entries, so the quality of the submissions was bound to be highly variable. It would be a brave man who would then attempt to yoke the whole unruly gang together under some sort of theme. Luckily, Gonzalez was up to the job. Before the screening he summarised his approach by saying he selected the works as statements about where we are as a nation…
It’s also worth noting that Gonzalez is a deft essayist, penning this introduction to the screening in the official D>art.04 catalogue/program:
“When we look toward the images that flash across our screens, it feels as if we are rarely surprised anymore. What we see and hear has become the same, and to find anything that challenges or questions we must look elsewhere. In mainstream Australian cinema, we hardly, if ever, see any experimentation or polemic within the stories we are told. The idea of form and content at odds with each other spells box office poison, and films of political dissent are but a distant agit prop memory. It’s even harder still to recall the last time we saw a collection of images that followed us into our dreams. Maybe it’s the radiance of ideas that we miss, that elusive spark that reaches out from the darkness.”
Big words and hard ones to live up to if you’re just some rube with a video camera. The screening got of the a great start with the best piece of the program, a work by Denis Beaubois called Fall From Matavai which featured footage shot by a video camera thrown from the top of one of the residential towers in Redfern. And that was it – simple, fascinating, a complete and satisfying narrative.
Unfortunately it was pretty much downhill all the way to the end of the screening. Janet Merewether, who can be relied on to make at least a decent film, didn’t disappoint with her witty Palermo – ‘history’ standing still, a film that took a series of repetitive images shot in Palermo and used them to create a setting in time labeled ‘1909’. By adding a few more shots and setting the next section of the film in a time period ten years later, the film worked its way up to 1999 by using almost exactly the same visual vocabulary. Those shots at the beginning of movies that set a place and time are completely arbitrary and could be almost any time period depending entirely on the next shot. Unfortunately, her second film in the screening called Short Before The Movie was not nearly as successful, a collage of home movie footage set against a cheesy voice over like the ones that used to be featured in county cinemas and in drive ins – and, as an act of willful irony, it was deeply irritating.
Also of note was the a film by Hobart Hughes called The Wind Calls Your Name which was essentially a music video featuring some nifty animation that mobilized the faces in peeling photographs (stuck to walls of an abandoned factory in the desert) to sing the lyrics of the song. You might be able to catch it on Rage at some point.
So what else was in the screening? Floating jelly fish set to new age music, a horrible endurance test called I Don’t Feel Ok, tests of boredom called Anaethesia and China Lake and a naked bloke fucking the ground who turns to the camera and says “sorry” – in a film called Sorry (in 35mm widescreen!). Like the videos in the Emerging Screen, the soundtracks tended to feature low rumbling whooooooorrrrrs and glitch hop beats and horrible bursts of white noise. That’s video art folks!
After the screenings we discussed among ourselves the thought that maybe we only had ourselves to blame – after all, it was video art – what did The Art Life team expect? To be honest, we expected things would have changed – people have the technology now and making work has never been easier. The big difference between contemporary art galleries and the film/video scene is that there is almost nowhere for film and video makers to screen their work regularly. The contemporary art scene at a grass roots level is impoverished but a sense of community exists there that’s missing from ‘screen culture’ events. Artist run galleries provide a focus for activity and polemic, parties and controversy, discussion and debate. A scene is created by an act of will and while D-Lux’s screenings are welcome, they seem to do little to create such a community and communication. For an organzation that is dedicated to new media, they still haven’t even got a proper web site happening – so what chance to do annual screenings have at creating a thriving scene?
If, as Gonzalez proposes, “what we see and hear has become the same, and to find anything that challenges or questions we must look elsewhere” the place to look certainly isn’t at the annual D-Art screenings. The films and videos tended to either repeat well worn ‘experimental’ clichés or attempt to engage with narrative form in music video or short film – and then not very convincingly. The works that succeeded on both their own terms and engaged the audience were the ones that had an understanding of the form – the performance documentations and the documentaries easily hit the mark because they knew what they were doing – but also becaus they had grown out of the contemporary art community and not the film/video/new media scene. What we saw was a group of works created by isolated individuals with little contact with each other or developments elsewhere – and what a shame.
