Maura Edmond reviews Time Lapse

Next Wave was thrilled to read Maura Edmond’s review of Next Wave Time Lapse in the latest edition of un Magazine recently. un Magazine is a free independent art publication published bi-annually by un Projects Inc., out of Melbourne.

Below, with generous permission from un Magazine, we re-publish the complete review.

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Next Wave Time Lapse
A review by Maura Edmond
First published in un Magazine Volume 3.2, in November 2009.

Federation Square is a conflicted site. For much of the time it is a commercial event space, but it is also a place to linger for free in a CBD almost entirely devoid of open spaces and where people gather to protest and to participate collectively in special occasions (like the broadcast of Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations). The large screens that dominate the square are just as problematic. They display a lot of advertising, a lot of commercial television and a lot of sport, but increasingly they are also exhibiting contemporary art and media.

In June 2009 Next Wave launched Time Lapse, a year-long program of newly commissioned, site-specific works by twelve young Australian artists which takes advantage of Federation Square’s various multimedia spaces but primarily its urban screens. For curator Ulanda Blair and many of the artists involved, the importance of screening contemporary art at Federation Square is twofold. It is both a means to introduce young contemporary artists to a very large audience who might not ordinarily come into contact with contemporary Australian art (and vice versa), and to take critical aim at some of the difficulties, shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of Federation Square as a public space. Says Blair, ‘it’s about giving young artists a platform for far more exposure than they would usually be given … but also thinking about the use of the space, how the public engages with that space normally, and referencing and subverting that’.

Two artworks that comment explicitly on Federation Square’s role as a public space, albeit in very different ways, are Queensland artist Eric Bridgeman’s bombastic Gayer Than All the Rest which opened Time Lapse, and Straight to the Art by Victorian artist group X:MACHINE (Olivia Crang and Jarrod Factor) which will screen in November.

Gayer Than All the Rest is a grotesque performance video in which Bridgeman and his cohorts perform as camp and deformed caricatures of Australian popular culture. In particular, he satirises the clichés of sporty masculinity, playing on the inherent queerness of men groping each other in tiny rugby shorts to Tina Turner anthems. Bridgeman does not typically see his work offering a specific social commentary, stating: ‘I’m not really trying to comment or “say” anything. It’s more about a presentation of visual ideas’. Gayer Than All The Rest belongs to a body of work that he has been developing for several years, but in the move from a conventional gallery setting to Federation Square it took on new and somewhat unpredictable qualities. Although essentially a single channel video work, exhibited in a highly public and hybrid space Gayer Than All the Rest inevitably became situational, shifting and changing according to audiences and contexts (in particular, resonating with the allegations of violence and drug abuse levelled at a number of football players just prior to the exhibition). This loss of hermeneutic control seemed appropriate for Bridgeman’s chaotic romp.

X:MACHINE’s Straight to the Art will be an interactive video that utilises Federation Square’s SMS TV technology. The work’s video interface will feature a cyborg who will respond to ‘status update’ messages that the public are invited to SMS to the screen. It will look like it’s an automated imitation of human emotions but, as Crang explains, ‘It’s not actually an artificial intelligence that is taking key words from the text messages and aligning those with visual responses. The artists will be doing that … it’s the old Wizard of Oz, man behind the curtain’. Straight to the Art is an exploration of the relationship between performance and technology — contrasting ‘new’ media technologies with an old-fashioned ‘smoke and mirrors’ magic trick. It is also an ironic commentary on the public nature of Federation Square, drawing attention to the more genuinely public virtual space of the Internet and online social networking sites.

Federation Square’s three urban screens are huge and costly pieces of infrastructure that were built with seemingly little thought at the time as to how they might be used in the long term, or at least with little ongoing funding set aside for serious programming. As a result they have become pieces of elaborate audiovisual equipment for events and, outside of the events, advertising billboards. Partnering with arts and cultural organisations like Next Wave is a necessity, in part because it provides Federation Square with access to artists and curatorial concepts it is not sufficiently resourced to research and program itself. More importantly, it gives artists access to a high profile and important piece of public infrastructure that can and should have the same level of access and openness as other public facilities like parks, libraries, broadband, streets and swimming pools. In doing so it reminds audiences and artists alike of the public-ness of Federation Square, a point sometimes forgotten amid the sponsorship logos and commercial TV.

Maura Edmond is an arts writer and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication. All quotes are from interviews conducted by the author in July and August 2009.

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