When we were kids we had a routine when we visited the big city. After catching the train in from the ‘burbs, and after lunch from a fast food restaurant du jour, we’d pay a visit to the Art Gallery of NSW to take a walk around the old section and admire the large paintings of ancient Egyptians. We’d then walk across to the Domain Parking Station and ride the very long motorised walkway that went from one end to the other. Our final destination would be a long stroll around the Australian Museum to take in the skeleton room, the mummies, dinosaurs, ancient man exhibitions and, finally, the pinnacle of any trip to Town, the exhibition hall filled with scale dinosaur dioramas illustrating various ages such as the Jurassic, Triassic and so on.
The routine combined everything we liked when we were 12 – the AGNSW had art that you could understand and looked a lot like movies; the motorised walkway was the closest thing you could find in Sydney to the Hilton Space Station in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Australian Museum had everything, a little bit of art, a lot of movies (dinosaurs, ape men, erupting volcanoes) and tons of space for our imaginations. As we travelled home on the train, we felt strangely satiated by our experience.
It wasn’t until a lot later that we began to understand the difference between an art gallery and a museum of natural history. Of course, they share a lot of the same techniques for exhibiting their wares and the objects on display have an abundance of aesthetic beauty. Both places also share an educational role, but where a museum sets out to explain an idea through an object, an art gallery uses an object to illustrate an idea. The museum object isn’t about a thing so much as it is the thing. If you were to place a bicycle wheel on a stool in a museum you’d be talking about the properties of locomotion – how the wheel interacts with the stool. In an art gallery you’d be talking about the idea behind the act of placing a bicycle wheel on a stool in the first place. Both the art gallery and the museum have heavily codified ways of delivering their messages and there’s a lot of cross over between one and the other (and that’s as far as we’re prepared to go into the phenomenology of objects) but you can almost feel it as you slip into a different kind of receptive mind set when you step through the doors of one cultural institution or the other.
The idea of considering a museum of natural history either as a place to put art or as a work of art in itself is something we quite like. (We well remember a review by Terence Maloon in the Sydney Morning Herald where, for lack of something else to write, he reviewed the dinosaur dioramas…) Since the late 70s at least, non-art cultural institutions have attempted to reach out to different parts of the community and so you’ll find the CSIRO has an artist in residence program or some jobbing artist has claimed a stuffed koala as part of their practice. By definition, these cultural incursions are one way only – you don’t find scientist-in-residence programs where blokes in white lab coats stalk around an art gallery reordering paintings by their frequencies of reflected light (if only it were so!) and the results of artist-in-residence have been decidedly mixed. But we’re not against the idea per se, and when we read about an art exhibition at the Australian Museum called The Butterfly Effect we were interested.
Curated by Michael Goldberg, The Butterfly Effect has 11 artists installing their work throughout the museum. At the front desk you must ask for a map to the show because the artist have secreted their works within existing displays and the sprawling museum with its truncated exhibition halls, blind alleys and topsy-turvy spaces is a maze to get lost in. The man at the desk was very nice to us and after we paid our $10 in, he advised that we should set off to Level 2 and make our way downstairs.
The first problem with the show was that the map was a shambles. Although you got a schematic diagram of the museum galleries with numbers floating above where the art works were supposed to be, the works themselves weren’t numbered, and from what we could work out, we were either in the wrong place or the map was back to front. How about just a simple overhead map next time? The only way you could orient yourself was by the (very) subtle tags attached to glass cabinets or walls that clue you into the fact there is an art work nearby. Some, like those by Nigel Helyer and Louise Weaver, were easy to find because they’re big and brightly coloured, while ther works like those by Joan Grounds and Jackie Dunn posed their own problems – Grounds ready made sculptures are so subtle it was hard to tell what you were looking at (art or science?) or were so small you needed a magnifying glass to make them out.
The most interesting art works were the ones that broke down the whole gallery/museum dichotomy or played with it. Louise Weaver did a series of knitted creatures and inanimate objects such as a skunk who we found hanging out with a Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo down in the bird section. Weaver’s knitted rocks, crocheted sticks, bright green bandicoot and faux owl gently parodied the objects around them while making a curious point about the sentimentalisation of nature through their plush doppelgangers. In a similar fashion Jackie Dunn placed miniature figures on polished agates and yellow phantom calcite, in one tiny golfers teed off, in another workmen unloaded boxes from a truck and in a third two lovers enjoyed the view over malachite, wulfenite and erythrite. (We later discovered there were several more pieces hidden in the room but we couldn’t find them).
Nigel Helyer’s sculptures were more heroically obvious art works – laser cut Perspex and illuminated sculptures that looked like alien sea creatures from The Abyss and emitted an electronic tone which we think may have been a sine wave. The work, called Caliban’s Children, went into battle with an exhibition of wildlife photography in the same space which had a new age soundtrack of babbling water and suspended minor chords played on a keyboard. Combined with the sine wave it all became very relaxing and we thought of stretching out on the floor for awhile.
In a similar spirit of conspicuous visibility, Tom Arthur’s work Some Numbers Expressed As Words, Pages 3 & 4 used a life like mannequin of a woman breastfeeding a baby surrounded by quolls and possum skins. Since the materials used for the piece were all ready mades taken from the museum collection, you really had to look twice to realise that breast feeding ladies aren’t normally menaced by wildlife – except if it’s Tasmania where quolls run out onto the road, expose their arses at you and then run off again. In a hall dedicated to dinosaurs and megafauna, the play between the odd moment of motherhood meets nature was oddly affecting. Then, again we were let down by our map, as we never did find Some Numbers Expressed As Words, Pages 1 & 2 and we walked right past Michael Goldberg’s video installation as we just assumed the scrolling text taken from the Bible was some obscure exhibition piece, not an art work.
Other art works didn’t fare very well either. Leon Cmielewski and Joesphine Starr‘s Pathfinder computer/video installation was tucked away behind some stairs and when we did stumble across it, we couldn’t work out what it was. Some school kids were having a great time stabbing at the screen but quickly lost interest when it wasn’t clear what the maps were all about and so did we. Michele Barker and Anna Munster had a video/installation work in the Skeleton Gallery about the Museum’s plans to clone a Tasmanian Tiger and integrated a video into an old diorama of Terns from Lord Howe Island. Their video was styled to look like a silent era film of the Tiger with period footage but the inclusion of recent material was confusing. In a moment similar to our experience with Pathfinder, a child standing next to us asked her father what the video was and after a moment of confusion he said “it must be broken.”
David Haines and Joyce Hinterding had a video playing in the lecture theatre called Hollow Earth Theory (Revived). For some reason the video is only screened between 3pm and 5pm and thus we couldn’t see it. We sat in the atrium area instead and read the artist’s tetchy notes about their work looking for clues:
“In our contact with the inner workings of the Australian Museum what impressed us most was the dedicated hard science that is being done behind the scenes. Our preference is for things to be taken seriously. Much in the natural world is truly fantastic and museums like this one, both here in Australia and overseas are clearly a testament to that. One might ask, do we really need anything more to be added to the rich treasures housed within this building, particularly things that come from the outside so to speak, like works of contemporary art? We are not sure. The best thing we can do is to stick with what we know how to do. Our work does not consciously attempt to make a bridge between Art and Science, nor create a hybrid of disciplines, but one thing we might be able to do is bring back some of the complications that were once common in the past and now lay firmly out on the fringes.”
Perhaps embodying that desire to bring back complications, the artists work was impossible to see, stuck in a room that was locked and in that sense seemed more in keeping with the true nature of the museum than any of the other art works. Closed to the public!
Walking around the museum trying to find the works in The Butterfly Effect was a strangely schizophrenic experience – the switches in your brain that click over from science to art to science to art back and forth, back and forth is disorienting to say the least. Is that a work of art? Is that a piece of science? We couldn’t rightly say.
The piece that summarised that sense of confusion was a work by Joan Grounds called Untitled. In a glass case was a large black and white photograph of a man wearing a pork pie hat and a long coat carrying a black brief case, sort of 60s spy movie style. The man is in a field at a fence and on the other side is an American Buffalo. In front of the photograph is a black brief case just like the one the man is carrying. Cracked open slightly you can see inside the case are some dead Rainbow Lorikeets and Galahs. The mind literally boggles as you try to decipher the narrative that might have created this collision of objects.
