July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
The moving, jumping, scratching image.
By Andrew Mackenzie
The current exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is a bold one, both in and of itself, but also for what it says about ACMI’s growing and well-deserved sense of self-confidence. The solo exhibition by American multi-media artist Christian Marclay is the first time ACMI has dedicated the whole screen gallery to one contemporary artist. Since it first opened five years ago the exhibition programme has consisted entirely of themed exhibitions and group shows of one sort or another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Pixar and Stanley Kubrick and I too (like 800,000 other visitors in its first 8 months) was transfixed by the inaugural programme curated by Ross Gibson, ruminating on the nature of the moving image and remembrance.
These exhibitions represented the very best in what one could describe as, without the slightest disingenuousness, crowd pleasers. But as much as ACMI’s role must be to communicate the assessable pleasures of contemporary moving image, it must also embrace the rich experimental territory of contemporary art’s more adventurous explorers. This it does with the current exhibition Replay Marclay.
This solo exhibition, along with other recent initiatives, represents a far cry from the early days when John Smithies was CEO and ACMI was running into financial troubled waters. Though not all Smithies fault, clearly the Centre was dogged for much of its early life by under-funding, a dearth of sponsors, internal wrangling and a degree of identity crisis. When Tony Sweeney took on the tough job of rebuilding ACMI’s damaged reputation in 2004, many were surprised that he had left the considerably more stable environment of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in England. But now, three years later, the results speak for themselves. Not only have the crowds stayed beyond the honeymoon launch period, but sponsorship has grown, international links have been strengthened, the programme has matured and recently, new funds have been announced to completely revision the Centre’s ground floor.
Nearly $8million has been allocated for the work, to be completed in 2008, and local architects Denton Corker Marshall have teamed up with the respected UK exhibition designer Ab Rogers, to transform the ground floor into a permanent exhibition dedicated to the history and future of the moving image. Frankly, it’s about time this space has been addressed. The approach to ACMI from Flinders Street has never worked well. It has been uninviting, underwhelming, and once across the threshold, downright disorientating. This is all due to change and at last the hapless cultural tourist will not need a GPS to navigate their way to the downstairs screen gallery. And remember all that talk about online video consoles, media pods and interactive environments? After years of a bit of this and a bit of that, it seems this major new makeover may make good all those years of promise.
Meanwhile, back to the exhibition programme and the current exhibition Replay Marclay. It is indeed an interesting exhibition with which to choose to break ACMI’s theme exhibition tradition. Coming off the back of the wildly successful Pixar exhibition (is there a single child in Victoria that did not beg, plead and bribe their way into this exhibition?)
Marclay represents the classic old school crazy artist – the clashing of discordant notes, the low-fi VHS cut and paste grunge quality, the sound of smashing glass, the wilful scratching and destruction of records… this exhibition is an assault on craft and traditional notions or artistry. Indeed Marclay once played in a ‘band’ called The Bachelor, even, in deference to the 20th century iconoclast and craft slayer Marcel Duchamp, who’s most celebrated artwork The Large Glass was titled The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. And why not?
Christian Marclay, Gestures,
4 synchronised video projection, 9 mins, 1999
Marclay, largely known for his vinyl fetish (the DJ equivalent of Jimi Hendrix, twisting soun d from any number of 60’s ‘Dancette’ record players) revels in the repurposing of found sound and moving image. Some of his softer work I have seen in the past has skirted close to the poetic and even bucolic, but here the work is relentlessly in your face and, despite its plundering of movie fiction, strangely real. One piece called Cross-fire features four screens forming a square of projection. Each screen shows an assembled sequence of scenes from movies with guns and gun shots. The four screens start slow, unpacking, clipping together, cleaning, loading, checking, aiming, rehearsing, then it moves straight into a barrage of explosive shooting, dozens of shooters, from Quentin Tarrantino to Beat Takashi aiming right at YOU, in the middle of the four screens.
However for me the masterpiece was Video Quartet. A line of four screens side by side twelve metres long. The invigilator pointing me to the entry in the dark advised me that, though half way through its 14 minute cycle, the projection was ‘non-linear’ so didn’t matter where I joined in. I beg to differ. Video Quartet is a carefully constructed composition, which, through disjunctive and full of multi-channel complexity, has a definite structure. Hundreds of film clips are used. The lamenting voice of Ingrid Bergman, Louis Armstrong blowing, Sinatra rollin’ the snares, someone’s tap-dancing, a fight breaks out, singers, players, dancers and actors all jump cut in a world of not so random simultaneity – a life of movie watching exploding in a moving mural of memories – in a post-modern era it feels strangely like watching your life flash before your eyes.
What makes this artist’s work so unusual and brilliant for today is that Marclay’s work could not be farther from the seamless virtual forms of contemporary digital animation. Unlike conventional computer fantasy, Marclay uses film clips as if they were chunks of real material for use on his clunky moving sculptures. Contrary to our prevailing fascination with the capacity of the moving image to hide its own manufacture, Marclay’s work ceaselessly and explicitly points to the artifice of film and the laboured manufacture of its images. I’d call it analogue realism.
I know this kind of solo show might not be to everyone’s taste, but for those of us willing to do without the blockbuster shows for a few months, Replay Marclay suggests a new dimension to the ACMI programme. One I’d like to see more of.
Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor-in-Chief (Inside) Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.
