Janine Randerson's Albedo of Clouds

 Janine Randerson's Albedo of Clouds at Screen Space is a work that evokes the nature of subjectivity. There are two round screens in the space, one up in a high corner at the back of the space and one down low at the front. On these round, planet-looking, screens we see images of clouds projected. We see the human perspectives of experiencing them from the ground and from satellites recording them from space. As we turn our heads to watch the two screens showing clouds we also hear a conversation between two cloud watchers. Each voice is played out of speakers on different sides of the room, which gives a sense that the cloud watchers are in different locations but are trying to see if they can see the same clouds. This gives a sense of following this conversation while being in the privileged position of being  able to see both perspectives. The talking is often followed by reverberating sounds that create a soft tension. 

The cloud watchers describe the clouds as things they might look like. One looks like a map of North America, a submarine, "Can you see the head?", one asks. The viewer also sinks into the cloud gazing activity—I can see North America once it has been said but I initially thought it looked like a camel. In some cases they just can't see the same thing. When one describes a cloud as looking like a submarine, the other can't seem to see it. They wonder if it is the interpretation they can't see or if they are just not looking at the same clouds. The clouds on each screen look very different. This opens up an interesting idea about whether what we see or understand of the world is experienced in the same way by other people. We can never know if others see and feel the same way as we do.

 The cloud, like the Rorschach inkblot, has been used as a way of mapping responses to find out about the psychological preoccupations and motivations of individuals. We can only interpret the abstract shapes of the clouds through a language of associations. Associations that we draw on when we meet a shape again. In art we are presented by an artist with a series of forms or objects. While these objects may have distinct associations particular to the experience of the artist, the viewer will always bring in their subjective projections.

 In E. H. Gombrich's chapter The Image in the Clouds he argues for art that exercises the public's imagination rather than just a polished depiction of reality. He says: 'it is an art in which the painter's skill in suggesting must be matched by the public's skill in taking hints'. Randerson's work suggests that the public are very adept in using their imagination to make abstract shapes into forms that communicate. The viewer brings their knowledge, associations and history to make a work understandable. This game of representation has been practised on clouds, rock faces, constellations and birthmarks throughout history. The interesting part of the game in discussing art is, of course, the variety of interpretations. Viewers search through their personal references to understand the abstract ideas that artists have found a way to visualise.

Randerson also presents images of clouds from the view of satellites. The contrast between the perspective of the people on the ground and the satellites seems to initially compare the subjectivity of the cloud watchers with the objectivity of a recording machine. However, in the tense hum of the audio, we continue to turn our head from screen to screen. This motion evokes the sense that this data will too be analysed, categorised and interpreted by people who will again bring their knowledge, their history and their projections to the forms and shapes they see. Randerson's work offers an interesting reflection on how we imagine, learn and interpret the world around us.

Rob Miller's Odysseus and the Sirens

The foyer of 101 Collins Street has ionic columns for their beauty rather than their engineering. It has marble spirals on the floor, sculpture alcoves, phases of the moon above the reception desk and 23 caret gold leaf walls. It has a temple like grandeur and stature. Rob Miller’s sculptures currently on display in the water features in front of these golden walls are interpretations of classical Greek myth. One is Odysseus. The shimmering backdrop and the enclosed space of the water feature gives the sculptures and the space an aedicula like quality. With this association in mind, there is sense of the work relaying a parable that through narrative can circle around abstract desires. 

In Miller's Odysseus and the Sirens there is a man with a round head wearing long robe leaning starboard on a boat. In the myth, the sirens sing such a seductive song that it lures sailors to their death. Odysseus ties himself to the mast of his ship to avoid crashing to his death. Miller's sculpture incorporates the mast and the man in one vertical line. The sculpture embodies the nature of the tragic hero; the solid and strong carved figure leans precariously towards temptation. This Odysseus, in this gilded foyer, seems a reminder of the perils of hubris. 

There is a focus on the breasts and buttock of the sirens in these sculptures. This creates an ogling element to Odysseus lean that also makes him a little less noble in his clever self-will and restraint. The form of the sirens evokes the little Venus of Hohle Fels, a sculpture from the Stone Age carved from a wooly mammoth's tusk. This reference to Venus and ancient fertility goddesses denote a simultaneous admiration, fear and objectification of female sexuality. Fertility has also been customarily synonymous with wealth and prosperity. In the opulence of this space these exaggerated body parts can be read as embodying a certian bountiful plenty.   We can again suggest that the desire and temptation Odysseus leans towards may have many faces and it’s left to the individual viewer to imagine what song would drive them off course.

The perils of hearing the song of the sirens has been retold in many ways. We know from Hollywood alone the monstrous destruction that the seduction of the femme fatale can bring. Think of Glen Close or Sharon Stone in those thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. The female gaze has been mythologised as frightening, aggressive and a threat to society. Homer writes: 'Whoever draws too close, off guard, and catches the Sirens' voices in the air—no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him, no happy children beaming up at their father's face'. Though Miller’s siren sculptures have no heads or arms they seem to still be able to frighten by their gaze. However their missing limbs (wings) and heads also imply a breaking or restraint of any real power a siren may represent. These sculptures become a pure fantasy. 

 

The fetishised focus on the sirens’ bodies suggests Odysseus’ is both a victim and a voyeur. He lives to tell the tale of the women who could have devoured him. The siren’s song is a death song. It brings momentary bliss and unknowable pain and death. That Odysseus hears this song without being dragged in gives him a knowledge that he can cannot express in language. He never recounts the actual song. It is like the unquantifiable object that attracts us to one another. The focus on the torso in these sculptures suggests a mysterious disembodiment is at play in attraction and desire. These sirens have no mouths. There is no music in the air. The only way that the song is rendered by Miller is in Odysseus' posture. His desire is captured in his totally physical response, his slant and motion. Miller captures that the nature of the sirens' voice is Odysseus's own desire that leads him to potential destruction. However, since he momentarily cheats this fate, he is destined to enjoy this satisfaction by unspeakable proxy.   

In Franz Kafka’s essay The Silence of the Sirens he reinterprets the story to say that Odysseus blocked his ears as well as tied himself to the mast. However, the sirens admire his "innocent elation" , that they spare him. Whatever Odysseus heard was internal. Kafka writes: 'now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.' The song has become a way of projecting  his own self congratulatory and self destructive desires onto the sirens. The headless sirens of Miller’s work correlates well with Kafka's approach to the myth. There is a sense that this Odysseus will create the heads of his own nightmares and fantasies and that they may be far more frightening and exciting than any external metaphysical beast.

These dark and elegant silhouettes compliment the opulence of the space. Yet these headless and armless sirens are not without melancholy undertones. In this space where giant phallic columns just decorate and the luna cycles are safely under the control of the reception staff, these fierce creatures of the sea have become quite tame. They are beautiful and elegant but are without their song or their gaze to decide who to seduce next. As though this myth can be enjoyed in this space but the scary bits cannot be eluded to too specifically.

Tom Polo Gestures and Mistakes (Trust Me)

Paintings/Props/Personas
2011-2012
Acrylic on canvas, wood.

Tom Polo's work at Gertrude Contemporary alludes to the way the self-help industry now mitigates the language we use to try and express our deepest and most complex emotions. This industry tries to make our internal chaos more logical and controllable. It offers feel good maxims to feed aspirations and "twelve-step-solutions" to complex problems. It also offers easy catch phrase diagnostics. Polo’s work is a funny and cynical play on our obsession with ourselves, our need to "talk about it" and the self-conscious element of all self expression. 

Self Sabbotage (as you leave)
2012
Acrylic on linen.

Self-help allows people to identify, for themselves and the rest of the world, a reason behind the inexplicable emotions they have been feeling. Maybe they have low self-esteem, midlife crisis, self sabotage, dysfunctional family or anger management issues or all of the above. These are terms that everyone now understands and nobody needs any more details about when they are dropped into a conversation. "He quit his job and left his wife." "Why?" "Midlife crises." "Oh ok." Self-help language has also become a useful way to discuss our emotions without actually getting emotional.  Tom Polo has identified the way we are talking loudly about our personal feelings everywhere from Oprah's couch to the back of the tram. He conjures the idea of us somehow becoming these emotional activists who march around  protesting our feelings for the world to see. He does this by combining the language of self- help on hand written signs together with expressive portraits on placards. The slogans of self-help enable the activists to protest their messy emotions while still keeping it together and tidy for the cafe. 

Gestures and Mistakes
2012
Time based wall drawing.

In the front space at Gertrude Contemporary the walls of have been painted a vivid blue. Even the front window has been covered over with a light blue wall. It is enclosed and dramatic. These internal colours evoke the intensity and saturation of emotions that colour our perception of the external world. The placards leaning up against the walls have definite shapes like squares or circles. The portraits on the placards have been painted in similar bright primary colours as the walls. The simple shapes of the placards suggests a desire to control and organise the colours of the walls.

The portraits are painted in a naive style that is comic and playful. It suggests painting sessions at school or in art therapy where we are asked to paint how we feel. There is a pink fleshy face with an unhappy blue smile, a cloudy grey melancholy one, one with orange hair and a squiggly orange nose, and another way up high on the wall with triangle nose that starts in his eye. One of them has a man with a brown gravy tray nose. We can imagine these placards at a personal crises rally where people go to demand that someone stop this internal chaos. Polo has created placards that express the squelching nausea of anxiety and uncertainty. At the same time, their simplicity makes them unheroic. A placard usually presents a catch phrase that sums up the activist's position and demands in a few words. But these placards are far more ambiguous and communicate abstract feelings that are difficult to express in language. 

Paintings/Props/Personas (Balls)
2011-2012
Acrylic on canvas board, wood.

 We are reminded of the idea of art as being able to communicate something pure and honest. It has been thought that painting, in particular, can show emotions that cannot be expressed in any other way. However, Polo's emotional and expressive paintings on placards suggests that any form of self expression will always have an element of presenting oneself to the world in a way that can never be free of self-consciousness. Their messiness seems like a joyful and colourful romp in artistic frustration. 

Paintings/Props (Flag)
2011-2012
Acrylic on canvas, wood.

The self-help slogans in the space are painted in a thick home-made, garage-sale- today sign style. They are not written out in their conventional form. The spaceless Try Harder to Try Less could allude to the sort of cryptic advice often offered to people who should 'focus on the now' while trying to 'set goals'. This work gives us a sense of how self-help language is used as a sign to explain and clarify this internal world. However, within this intense and emotional world their meaning appears as confused, disordered and as inarticulate as the emotions it tries to organise. It is the sort of catch phrase shared in both the language of the rally, shouted through the megaphone, and the language of self-help, posted on the wall of the gym.

Placards are commonly used in big rallies where like-minded people meet in the streets to bring about change and express discontent. Perhaps the language of self-help, like the political rally, enables people to come together and feels connected to a wider community that share the same problems. This installation seems to grapple with the actual difficulty of trying to incorporate the public ideas of self-help into the turbulent internal world of the individual. The language of self-help can be experienced as our own imaginary angry activist. They scream out their slogans and demand change of ourselves. 

TRYHARDERTO TRYLESS (SINCE 2009)
2012
Wall drawing.

Self-help has made an industry that profits from people's insecurities  and encourages them to repress negative emotions and focus on self-improvement. The use of terms like “heal” or “move forward” to turn sadness or anger into some form of illness that can be treated by following these clear procedures. By turning it into an illness, self-help seems to alleviate the guilt and sense of personal responsibility associated with feeling emotionally terrible. However, by providing easy solutions it also puts the onus back on the individual to change the way they feel. They are obviously not trying hard enough or following the steps properly because if they were they would be successful and have everything they ever wanted and feel great about themselves. So while there is much more public discussion about our feelings and “where we are at” emotionally; there is an implicit pressure to be progressing up some sort of happiness ladder. This is what is so clever and funny about Tom Polo’s work. His placards show an awareness of the absurdity of demanding more happiness of ourselves and the world.

Palace of Tears

We enter Hermione Merry and Henriette Kassay-Schuster’s Palace of Tears through a dark confined corridor that feels like a secret doorway. We see two projections on a double sided screen, back to back, that make like a wall that we walk around. The two images refract through the screen and appear on the opposite walls. The two sides of the screen have similar images. The image on each side is a different woman in a blue dress in the internal doorway of a brick building. The doorway dramatically frames them like a proscenium arch. Everything seems the same in both images except for the different blue dressed women. They are waving, sometimes with eyes opened and sometimes closed. They seem to rotate around and around so when one is facing you the other has their back to you. Above the screen wall are jugs of leaking water, below a tilted mirror and under that, on the floor, is dry concrete mix. The water in the buckets leaks down through the screens, onto the mirror and then drips onto the dry concrete mix below. Melancholy music seems to drip down over the artwork at the pace of the tears that the water seems to represent. 

This artwork is highly contextual. The images were filmed in Berlin. The building represents the “Palace of Tears”, which was a customs house on the Berlin Wall. The people of East and West Berlin were divided from 1961 to 1989 by a wall given names like “Wall of Shame”. The work evokes the sadness of the city divided. The dripping water gives a sense of the individual tears shed in a customs house where people were turned back around and waved muted goodbyes.  Now that the wall has been pulled down, ghosts inhabit this architecture of division. The artwork seems to question how we capture moments in time and how they are passed on. Is there a notion of history where events, like the demolition of the Berlin Wall, close chapters in time? Or are there, rather, multiple projections that constantly permeate and change within the present? This is suggested by the contrast between the translucent paper screen and the tears which damage it as they fall to solidify into concrete.   

The two women seem to mirror one another much like the two-heads of the Roman god Janus—the god of beginnings, transitions, gates and doorways. As the god of these passages he is simultaneously looking at the future and the past while stepping through the present. The circular movement of the women around the doorway is not unlike a clock that measures the present, on an eternal threshold to the next minute. When the projection stops and turns to black it is more than a blink, it is like sleep or pause before we are conscious again of time circling. So we are presented with both an objective and subjective understanding of the passage of time as something that we continually objectively move through and yet are always subjectively in the one threshold of every moment.

In Palace of Tears the tears shed in suffering drip down but are not dissolved, absorbed and wiped away. The notion of a palace evokes a sense of excess. These tears are beading, brimming, dripping down to wet the concrete mix. The work itself seems to represent a solidification of suffering, suggesting other walls being built. Tears come at an emotional threshold; they tell us something about an internal spilling over that cannot be contained. The blue dressed women tell us how tears flow and repeat. They tell us that past pains and future fears are ultimately always in the passage way of the present—looking forward or back. 

Anna Newbold and Tim Alves 
at Seventh Gallery

Souvenir/Memory : Strange Pillows by Wolfie Mayr

Strange Pillows by Wolfie Mayr exhibits an archive of old slides of travel photos which have been stored for up to half a lifetime. These images can only but evoke the theme of memory. What is distinctive about these artworks is that often the actual slides onto which these moments were frozen are as much the subject of these images as the conventional views, landscapes or people shown. In this sense, this adds an interesting and self reflexive twist to travel photography. While travelling we are more inclined to notice details; to expose our film to banal moments as if they are somehow transcendental. Indeed, in our travels, away from home, they are. Exotic subjects always seem more worthy. 

There is a well known theory of the event of watching a film that suggests that we go to the cinema to input virtual memories into our experiences. Often these virtual memories are beyond everyday experiences—among these are the experiences of the exotic and travel. The cinematic theatre’s darkened space, the larger than life image and the spectators’ comfortable passive state all contribute to focus sensory perception on fantastic but realistic virtual memories. The slide (or 35mm transparency) was the most cinematic of all still photography in that its conventional mode of viewing is the slide show in the darkened room. The slide presentation, commonly associated with travel snaps, was accompanied by a story of the trip as the slides clunk into a projector. This medium is also a reminder of actual travel—it is a souvenir. 

In the past before the slide, however, the same darkened room was used to capture a memory or a souvenir of travelling to a destination. The 18^th century Venetian painter Giovanni Canaletto made artworks for British travellers on the grand tour to take home. He used a camera obscura to produce his work. In other words, he worked inside a darkened room with a lens on one wall and painted his paintings from the likeness projected upside-down on the opposite wall. Visitor, Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA 1998 is taken in the dark museum without a flash. A bald head obscures the sky of the painting View of the Grand Canal and the Dogana by Bernardo Bellotto—Canaletto’s nephew. Bellotto was himself a traveller. He was invited around various courts of central Europe and painted views of the cities. In fact, his detailed views of Warsaw were used to assist the rebuilding of the city after World War II. The space in the Getty, vignetted in darkness, seems not only reminiscent of the conventional presentation of the slide photograph but the optics used by Canaletto and Bellotto, the cinema and also a conceptual visualisation of memory. 

Strange looking patterns of mould damage on the emulsion of the film form abstract references to time and memory. The nature of photograph image, which freezes the world’s visual likeness, is undermined by the slides material deterioration. The image continues to change in time.  However, the freezing of time is re-enacted with the transfer of the image, damage and all, onto the pristine reproduction colour print. Time’s index, material deterioration, is aestheticised. The colours of slides enlarged in this way also seem less naturalistic, more saturated, chromatically distorted or stained by an unnatural colour. Framed two-dimensional artworks are displayed against windows. This creates an unexpected effect like an inversion of the conventional slide projection; the image is darker than the background of daylight filled glass. This inversion poetically renders the absence of the old slides. This all can be likened to Sigmund Freud’s analysis of his analysand’s memories where distorted colours in remembered situations give clues to an intrusion of the present into past events which have been subjectivity coloured. 

A sense of the artist’s motivations, which differ at various times in his life, come to the fore. Although abstract, different times and stages of creating images with different moods render shifting interests and an ever emerging personality. The viewer is made aware that these images were always intended as art yet this outcome had been disavowed till only now. The artist who emerges within the traveller continues work on this personal art project. The strangely photogenic material deterioration is compulsive. Time is the traveller-artist’s invisible hand. It could be said that material degradation of the film causes aberration in a similar way to how forgetting stains memory. However, in Mayr’s work the beauty of aberration evokes a clear present time. The present seems to wash over these images, and overwhelm their resemblance to the past. 

Tim Alves

at Tinning Street

Yellow

Natasha Johns-Messenger’s installation Yellow in Power to the People at ACCA makes the audience integral to a work. It addresses how the emotional reactions that the public brings to any work of art reveal something of themselves. When Ron Robertson-Swann’s minimalist public sculpture came into the world it was name-less and hated. The public and the press gave it a name of their own that reflected both their fear and loathing “Yellow Peril”. The people felt it had cost too much and said too little. Why can’t we have just a nice fountain some asked? It’s like "an old blonde girlfriend pouting at you" said others. Even the Queen was said to ask if it couldn’t be painted “a more agreeable colour”. Towards the end of its one year in the city square, before it was moved to an obscure public pastures it was officially titled Vault.

In light of Johns-Messenger’s work Yellow, we start to understand how on many layers the title Vault was an apt description of a work that the people of Melbourne locked out. As we enter the first corridor of John-Messenger’s work, there is a little peep-hole to our right and a large round window to our left. Through the peep hole we see Vault which has now found a respectful home at the ACCA site. The peep-hole in Yellow emulates how Vault must have been viewed in the seventies and eighties. Peeping from behind the closed door, a fish eye distortion makes it at once bigger and smaller. Vault was a big foreign otherness that was tapping at the parochial door of a blue singlet wearing xanthophobic. Melbourne felt a little bit safer that they shut it out.

In the Yellow installation we see ourselves again and again. Through a big round window in the wall we see a reflection of ourselves looking at ourselves from a side view. Johns-Messenger leads us down corridors that have mirrors on 45° angles that reflect light around 90° corners. You see other people or yourself in unexpected places. With its sharp angles and geometric complexity people can imagine getting inside that feared Vault sculpture. However, Yellow’s big round window in the entrance invites us in to this angular world. One initially feels like there could be many routes or paths to take around this actually quite simple hairpin shaped corridor. Shades of yellow light descend into darkness just as they do in the inner chambers of Vault—suggesting something deeper or more internal. There is an element of Alice’s experience through the looking glass as we start to question what is reflection space and what is real space. Similar to the way any sort of self-examination enables you to be aware of yourself. You think god that woman’s vain look at her pouting at herself in the mirror, oh now she thinks someone’s watching her so she’s trying to act all casual, now she’s looking around to see if anyone saw...oh yeah it’s me..I saw...me. There is a performative element of at once being and becoming. 

Yellow is a playful work that invites us to play a narcissistic hide and seek game with ourselves. The audience is central to the work. Vault was something that seemed to come from an impression of an elitist art world—people felt excluded. Its closed sloping forms, as well as its name, announced something locked or insular. In Yellow we are allowed entry into the secret tunnels of this world and discover in its interior, not a dreaded Yellow Peril Minotaur waiting to devour us; but rather, infinite views of ourselves—which maybe even more frightening. A warning at the entrance asks you enter this space with caution. You never see your double front on in this work but are aware of it like a shadow catching up with you. It is like the sort of claustrophobic madness we might imagine happens in rockets or on submarines, where the one thing you want to escape most is yourself. 

Yellow shows us that sometimes the most unnerving experience can be watching ourselves watching ourselves. It is much easier to stand outside a work and criticise its aesthetic merits (as Melbournians did with Vault) rather then ask ourselves to critique our own values and attitudes. Ironically, the controversy sparked by Vault inspired discussions about identity, art, cultural significance and aesthetics. Johns-Messenger shows us that however we enter into an artwork, with hate, love, fear or indifference; we do so to look at ourselves. Works that inspire the most hate because of their intangibility can become icons of public debate and reveal collective fears. The adventurous maze like quality of Johns-Messenger Yellow also reveals how simultaneously exciting and unsettling this can be.