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Experimenta: House of Tomorrow Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre, until 27 March  Reinforcing the emergence of the Festival Centre's 'Artspace' as one of the more significant and cutting edge contemporary art venues in Adelaide, Experimenta: House of Tomorrow is looking like it will be the pick of the visual arts events during this festival. I doubt that even the Biennial will draw such enthusiastic responses as those that we are hearing from the audiences who are flocking to Experimenta. Funny that for the 2002 Biennial of Australian Art, the Art Gallery of SA tried to make a crowd pulling 'art and technology' show. Its Investigator Science Centre style of installations were mostly broken down and for other reasons the whole thing turned out pretty crap. But these artists - supported by the Australian experimental film and media company 'Experimenta' - have really started to get the 'art and technology' combination, with its associated catch cry of 'interactive', to work as art. The loose curatorial point of House of Tomorrow is to suggest some of the gadgets that may be part of our future homes. We are already well versed in many of these visions of the future. They range from the obvious: Mimesia by Richard Brown is a landscape painting that you can move through as a kind of virtual space, simply by changing where your head points. Move your head to the left and you pan across the landscape to the left. It is harsh to call this obvious because it has been done really well and is more fun than it sounds. Paranoia about technological advances is reflected in a couple of pieces about surveillance. In Panopticon by Tan Teck Weng we shake a box to try to make a screen image of chairs and a table (which appear to be situated in a kind of prison cell), sit upright. The connection to controlling an environment like a kind of megalomaniac was pretty slight for me, but the game was fun. A high-tech version of those travel games where you push a rubber button to make water squirt around inside a sealed plastic aquarium and the aim is try to make hoops land on a dolphin's nose. More disturbing was Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine's Expecting. The installation consisted of a doll's house with a screen in it, and a sign saying something like 'if Charlotte looks lonely squeeze her doll gently'. Sqeezing her doll makes the animated child figure of 'Charlotte' grow a baby in her tummy and give birth to it. The child soon leaves her alone and looking forlorn again.  The other side of visions for the future are the Utopian ones. Virsual - the digital rocking horse is a rocking horse we can sit on and ride through a heavenly garden of rainbows and apples. Not dissimilar to riding some sega motorbike arcade game, but it's cute and rocking on the horse gets you relaxed and takes your mind off stuff. Indeed it almost has an existential blankness to it, but it is not really philosophical blankness, just care free blankness. Nor is the piece Utopian in the modernist sense of transcending the grotty realities of modern life. It is Utopian because it completely ignores them, regressing towards a childhood innocence. Because I am not innocent, this is an approach to art practice that I find hard to cope with. I am not entirely comfortable with its lack of criticality. I guess I want art to be more than entertainment. I want it to be bigger. I had the opportunity to interview Marcus Lyall - a guy who produces projection shows for rock concerts, including such megastars as the Rolling Stones. He also directs music videos and television commercials. I imagine they are very cool ads. And he has a lovely piece in Experimenta where he has gotten hold of this ultra high-speed camera which until now has only been used in the mining and defence industries for analysing explosive detonations. Marcus used the camera to film people's faces as they had buckets of food chucked at them - custard, green pea soup, dry flour, two minute noodles, you name it - and slowed the footage right down. Shapely volumes of food move across the screen, the sitter begins to flinch, and then it hits them full in the face making these incredible splashing patterns that you couldn't see with your naked eye. Anyway, I went in to the interview trying to start up a deep discussion about art because I believe I am not innocent but critically aware. I wanted to see the work in relation to major currents within video art - like the tradition where video has been used to capture some fidelity or documentary truth. (We see this for instance in the emphasis on 'realtime' in video of the early 1970s, where artists refused to edit or apply any post-production so they wouldn't interfere with the reality of what was shot. This is personified in some of the art films of Andy Warhol, where leaving the camera rolling as people went about ordinary activities like having haircuts or talking on the phone revealed something about how we are all putting on phoney acts all of the time.) So I asked Marcus if the combination of the camera technology, throwing the food and then slowing it all down allows us to observe some material truth about involuntary reactions or something. 'Well there are a couple of very pragmatic reasons why I chose the combination... essentially it was because liquid and human expressions are two things that look fantastic in slow motion.' Perhaps detecting my inflated anxieties about the meaning of art, he explains, 'the way I started doing stuff was doing projection shows for clubs and concerts and really the early acid house parties. That was my kind of intro into video [art].' He eventually says, 'look this is fun - I mean it's not trying to confront serious social issues or anything like that, it's something that was very pleasurable and enjoyable and not necessarily a terribly socially responsible thing to do.' It's the kind of statement that you can't really argue with. It made me feel like a pretentious git. It always does in fact. Undeniably Marcus's work is technically accomplished and aesthetically refined. So it is good art. Like most of the works in this show, it is effective and engaging but not necessarily thought provoking. But then it isn't pretending to provoke thought either. This show is mostly about enjoyable art. Andy Warhol said that 'pop art is liking things', creating an approach to art that required nothing more serious than enjoying it. Similarly, Marcus' work, and many other pieces in this exhibition, just get you to say, 'yeh gee, cool' in a very Warholian fashion. There doesn't seem to be any incredibly pertinent thinkers amongst these artists. Once we wanted artists to be great thinkers, provoke amazing change, be geniuses. Andy's camp superficiality was an antidote to the macho, exclusive genius tradition of art. But ironically, to think of Andy in this way is a bit like thinking of him as a genius. So we didn't quite get over the cult of the artist. What I want to suggest is that the way none of these artists really try to express deep and individual thought reflects a true cultural change: the doing away with individual genius as a tenet in visual art. And instead of artists, the show is really made up of the work of creative professionals. Industrial designers, computer programmers, television and film directors. All skilled, motivated, being experimental, but essentially professionals benefiting from the critical timing that has meant a company like Experimenta has picked them up and promoted their art. Marcus Lyall sums up the extent to which this paradigm of professionalism is replacing previous approaches to art practice - such as, say, public funding for individuals affiliated with contemporary art institutions: 'I am in a very lucky position - I was able to pull a lot of favours because of the other work I do... I think that I might have run into a few problems if I put on a grant application form that I was going to get a high-speed camera and chuck food at my friends.'  |
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