Adelaide is a beautiful town. Straight clean roads, wide boulevards, and happy looking people. For our three days there last week as guests of Artist’s Week at the Adelaide Festival, the weather was cool and dry and there were blue skies everyday. With our half-price drink vouchers we were in heaven. In fact, as we found ourselves walking around the city from one event to the next, we began to think of it as kind of notional city, as though we were inside someone’s idea of what a city should be, or more precisely, how you mentally map out a place. You do it by thinking of places that you know and then picture going from one to the other, blacking out the bits you’re not interested in. So there’s your house, your favourite café and restaurant, a movie theatre, a couple of galleries, a pub, a friend’s house and then home again, a spotlight of concentration moving through the darkness of the rest of the world. Adelaide is the physical embodiment of that concept – it has a major public art gallery, a commercial gallery, two alternative funded galleries, and an artist run space. It’s all you need. Leaving Adelaide for Sydney or Melbourne for the first time must be like waking up from The Matrix and discovering an entirely different reality moving around behind the one that seems most real.
The Adelaide Arts Festival runs over sixteen days, the weeks being designated Writers Week and then Artists Week. For reasons to do with schedules and availability, Artists Week needed to be first in 2006, but Writers Week, being the bastion of the Adelaide Establishment, refused to move. So when we arrived in Adelaide we discovered that the first week was both Writers and Artists Weeks with no “week” for week two, just a regular week. There was still theatre and music and dance events to see in week two, it just wasn’t named. We found this lack of signification disturbing, speculating that we might take it over ourselves and unilaterally proclaim Art Life Week. The big draws at Writers Week were Michael Cunningham, Vikram Seth and Margaret Drabble [who pulled out at the last minute due to swollen ankles] while over at Artist’s Week it was David Byrne, Astrid Mania and Chris Kraus.
We missed David Byrne’s I [heart] PowerPoint lecture, where the freakishly voiced former pop star gave a talk about all the fun stuff that is done with the ubiquitous presentation program. Two years ago Mark Titmarsh claimed that PowerPoint was the “new Super 8” but we never gave it a second thought. How foolish – had we been a bit more on the ball we could be touring the world now and not just Adelaide. Astrid Mania is a German curator and writer and was on hand to launch the latest issue of Broadsheet. We can’t think of a more appropriately named curator who is German – Astrid Mania – tall, blonde and dressed entirely in black with gold ear rings, bracelets and silver framed eye glasses – she spoke English as though it were German and we did not understand a thing she said. We thought of describing her as ‘haughty’ but someone said she was equine, like a beautifully presented show jumper, and that was perfect. We saw her again over the next couple of days, striding around purposefully in the company of Alan Cruickshank who made her look even taller.
Artist’s Week comes with its own program notes and contained photographs of the key note speakers. Chris Krause’s photo showed a willowy woman with short hair, her head slightly to one side, a little thoughtful, a little provocative. In our imaginations, we expected someone of the stature of Mania to tower over the stage of Elder Hall as she gave a lecture on ‘video art’ but in reality she was a small woman with shoulder length hair and hearing so bad she needed to hold a foldback speaker to her ear to hear questions from the floor. Her voice was intense – a hard, nasal Chicago accent softened somewhat by her years on the West Coast. Her talk – a flowing, literary style of writing rich in academic detail and pop culture references – discussed the idea that avant garde marketing has taken the place that radical art once occupied in our culture. It was an interesting idea and Krause got everyone’s attention by starting her paper with a reading of a scene from a novel in which a woman lounges against a plasma screen TV [that shows images of a penis being sucked] while the woman languidly asks “is there no escape from the image?”
Kraus described video art as being a branded product that, in terms of its position within international art, is no different from any other product in or outside the art world She compared the oft-mentioned Bernadette Corporation – an anonymous artist project parodying corporate America – with the company American Apparel – a real corporation that rides the latest trend of Vice Magazine style porno-chic while appropriating the look and feel of art. Although there’s no philosophical reason to assume that one is more valuable than the other, Kraus harkened back to an era – sometime in the 70s, probably – when art’s role was defined as one of opposition, rather than one of collaboration.
Krause’s paper was dense with detail and was clearly better suited to being read than listened to, but it was a provocative and interesting take on the status of globalised art at the mercy of commerce. We had thought to ask in the question session following her paper whether she had considered that, although art does lose out to most things these days in terms of immediate appeal, if it is working properly then it has a much longer shelf life than a t-shirt company’s ads? We never got to ask that question as the two people who did get up completely blew our minds with their take on what we had just heard. A woman with a barely controlled emotional tremble asked if Kraus endorsed American Apparel’s use of pseudo-porn with its fetid aroma of S&M? The next person up – a guy wearing a vintage 60s Rabbitoh’s jersey – began a question by stating “Er… TV’s are best used as shoes for elephants, if you know what I mean… And I’ve only had one TV epiphany – John Coltrane and the blue screen, which is a digital effect.”
