When Franco Belgiorno-Nettis led a group of explorers to the top of what is now Potts Point, he stretched out his tiny hands, taking in the whole valley below, and declared in a loud and steady voice “One day there will be an art space here!” His companions could see only bush and probably thought him half mad, but the plucky Italian entrepreneur knew that in the future people would want an alternative art space where people might exhibit their art far from the old world oppressions of commercial gallery dealers and the “the market”. Over 100 years later such a place exists and it is called Artspace. In the foyer of the gallery is bronze bust of Belgiorno-Nettis that celebrates his visionary ideals and the work inside is the embodiment of that dream.
Lyndall Jones has a new work on at Artspace (until February 26) called Crying Man 4 from a series entitled Tears For What Was Done. According to the catalogue blurb the three screen installation incorporates “live mixing of text and images to be responsive to viewer presence.” As we came around the corner and into the room the first thing we saw was the face of man we took to be George W. Bush, but then we thought it was Tim Matheson, the guy who played VP John Hoynes in The West Wing. Then we thought that maybe it was a morph of both faces – perhaps Jones and her technical person Kate Richards were behind the scenes playing with our minds via live mixing but either way it seemed we had just missed a shot of a man crying.
We felt disappointed that we hadn’t seen it but the next screen had a bloke who looked like some sort of corporate type with tears running down his cheeks and a bit of snot under his nose saying something incomprehensible while blubbing, and the third screen was another guy with watery eyes and a nasty five o’clock shadow. There were plenty of tears. How did we feel, looking at these faces on screens raked backwards in the darkness? Well… we felt sad. Yes, sad that these guys were crying, but not very sure why they were crying, and somewhat uncomfortable. You might assume that that sense of unease was prompted by the artist’s use of enforced voyeurism but you’d be wrong. We were becoming distressed by how blatantly obvious the whole gambit was and the longer we stayed, the closer to tears we were.
In the middle room is an installation by Sadie Chandler called Nirvana Office and is described by the artist as an “exhibition for a summer’s day”. Anyone who remembers her paintings from a few years back of Witchy babes on broomsticks or her work from the 1994 Primavera will know the aesthetic right away – cute, cartoony, ironic. For Nirvana Office Chandler has arranged a fleet of TVs on bright green lily-pad shaped tables showing images of frogs and princesses on lily pads. Hung around the room are white hand-made bird cages containing small sculptural fragments of interior spaces – bits of rooms, staircases. The overall effect is very pleasant, certainly for a summer’s day, but in the low ceilinged and heavily colonnaded Artspace, the installation seems cluttered.
Next door, however, clutter takes over. Domenico De Clario has a performance/installation piece called The Universe as Mirror , a title taken from the work of Italo Calvino. We might say a quiet prayer of thanks that this is not another art work based on the work of Jorge Luis Borges but Calvino is pretty close. (We don’t have a problem with Calvino being an influence on an artist’s work per se, but we know we’d sure like to see some other author getting a guernsey every once in awhile – maybe Dan Brown?)
Anyway, De Clario has created a massive installation of very artfully placed stuff – boxes, coloured fluoro lights, telescopes, light globes, an illuminated chandelier in a cardboard box, a piano, birdcages, an esky, fans and miles and miles of extension cables among many other bits and pieces places just so. There’s also a slide show of images of industrial buildings and a beaten up Honda GL Hatchback, Victorian rego until November 05 and 760 kms on the clock. You can tell that that counter has been around a few times and judging by all the crap inside (including an illuminated globe) we think the artist may have driven the thing to the Sun and back. The installation extends into an alcove and with an open door you can see around the back of the installation.
De Clario’s work is about extended metaphors – objects standing in for experience and memory, little universes of association. Like many artists toiling through their careers using actual objects in their work it becomes increasingly difficult for Joe and Betty Blow to make heads or tails of what’s going on. It looks like a mess, and it is a mess, and if you can be arsed to wade through the associations, what seems like a room full of junk is a cavalcade of possibilities. On the other hand, what makes De Clario’s pile of junk that much more interesting than say Jason Rhoade ’s junk or Tomoko Takahashi’s junk or any of the other dozens of Australian artists doing this kind of thing? It’s all in the arrangement and since De Clario has a nice literary reference to underwrite the work, all the better. In one sense, every show at Artspace is sculptural in that the unforgiving space has to be mastered before the art has a chance to make it. De Clario has gone the mob route and swamped the place and it works very well. We may be missed something as we’ve not seen the performances that have gone on in the space but De Clairo is going out with a bang and doing an extended endurance performance on February 26 and 27, so you know, get down there and tell us what it’s all about.
