When we leave the room unsupervised: Claudia Damichi's Domestic Fantastic

CLAUDIA DAMICHI 'Domestic Fantastic' AUGUST 24 - SEPTEMBER 10, 2011 at Ryan Renshaw

 

Claudia Damichi's exhibition in the main space at Ryan Renshaw consists of six acrylic paintings featuring furniture and wall coverings from the 1960s and 1970s. Called Domestic Fantastic, the domestic setting is more than implied - but what fantasies are being explored?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="655" caption="Claudia Damichi 'On the Upside' (2011)"][/caption]

With vivid colours and an alarmingly flat perspective[ref]The flat meeting of wallpapered surface meeting the floor reminds this writer of a high-brow Josh Agle.[/ref] the six paintings display furniture from another time in decidedly unusual formations. The colours and patterns most certainly evoke the essence of the circus, with furniture playing out acrobatic stunts, ottomans appearing as bull tubs. But there is also an almost sexual quality to the work, with laps and legs touching in subversive ways. While Damichi's chairs may be unterman and uberman in a living room perch act, the visual links to an era of politicized sexual expression give that dominance and submission a second reading.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="697" caption="Claudia Damichi 'Funny Business' (2011)"][/caption]

While popularised in children's films like Toy Story and The Brave Little Toaster, the idea that inanimate objects might be secretly sentient is not a modern invention. According to theTsukumogami-emaki, a pair of 16th century Japanese scrolls in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum, when a tool or item of furniture reaches the age of one hundred years, it becomes alive, mobile and lingual (a thought that would mortify Billy Bob Thornton): "陰陽雑記云器物百年を経て化して精霊を得てよく人を訛かす是を付喪神と号といへり According to the Onmyō Zakki, vessels pass their hundredth year, transform, obtain a soul, often bewitch humans, and are called tsukumogami."[ref]http://www.obakemono.com/obake/tsukumogami/[/ref]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="558" caption="Tsukumogami-emaki scrolls (16C)"][/caption]

In the case of the retro decor in Domestic Fantastic, it seems that susuharai has come early. The exhibition continues until September 10.

The Tree of Life, Sleepaway Camp and a Note on Spoilers

***SPOILER ALERT***: As an illustration of the concept of 'spoilers' the following will include revealing plot information and images of two very different films: Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, released this year, and Robert Hiltzik's 1983 slasher film Sleepaway Camp. Sections of what follows will be redacted to protect those who have not seen The Tree of Life and would like their first experience of the 'unspoiled'. The opening image and subsequent discussion of the film Sleepaway Camp will most certainly reveal plot details and points of interest, unredacted. Note also due to the content of one film and the spirit of the other, this entry is not suitable for younger readers.

When Hitchcock's Psycho was being advertised in newspapers at it's time of release, a memorable line in the copy was: By the way, after you see the film, please do not give away the ending. It's the only one we have.  For your consideration:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="348" caption="Sleepaway Camp, 1983"][/caption]

The image above is of a thirteen year old Felissa Rose playing the character of Angela in the 1983 slasher film Sleepaway Camp. At the time of writing this the image above is the first result of a Google Image Search for the terms 'sleepaway+camp'[ref]http://www.google.com.au/search?q=sleepaway%2Bcamp&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1680&bih=949[/ref].

This shot comes at the close of the film, in fact it is the penultimate shot, right before the image turns sickly green. So, then, is this image, especially for someone researching the film for the first time, a kind of spoiler? In it's defense, the image does not give any real indication of what has been considered one of the most surprising endings in the slasher genre, if not film at large. The shy Angela, adopted after a family tragedy by her Aunt Martha, is exposed to torment and attempted molestation by her colleagues and the staff at Camp Arawak. As many a film studies thesis will attest, such ill doings do not go unpunished, and they are punished in this film in great style, in varying and innovative ways[ref]Note that if you have not seen the film, and you intend to see it following this description, then it is probable you are interested in 'classic' slasher gore, rather than plots in general - if so, I suggest not only Sleepaway Camp but it's three sequels (with one rumoured to be released this year).[/ref]. And so as the Sturm und Drang of Sleepaway plays itself out in evermore gory cycles, the ending brings an uncomfortable close to it all: Angela, pronouncing gutteral sounds from her wide open mouth, drops the severed head of Paul[ref]Paul attempted to kiss Angela after wrongly assuming a romance was budding, an action which would trigger dangerous psycho-sexual memories in his partner's mind.[/ref], and stands before two survivors naked. As a final shock - the slow reveal - Angela is biologically male.

[caption id="attachment_44" align="alignnone" width="530" caption="Edited screenshot, Sleepaway Camp, 1983."][/caption]

Three things make this clear - an overtly exaggerated flashback tells the first part of the tale: Angela, seemingly the survivor of a boating tragedy in which a young brother dies and a sister survives, is actually the surviving boy, raised by the utterly terrifying Aunt Martha as the daughter she strongly wanted. 'Angela'/Peter is suitably disordered. Then, to close the story, the camera zooms out to reveal first broad, masculine shoulders, then male genitalia (both fake[ref]An effect achieved through the employment of a full sized puppet[/ref]). Note that Angela's mouth remains agape throughout.

After a deep breath, let us return to the previously identified question: can Google's first result be considered a spoiler? Of the plot, it must be said the answer is no. The tone, the mood, the 'scare' of the film is in Angela's facial expression: the fact she is biologically male is not scary, merely shocking. The fact that a human animal can lose control of moral reasoning, can lose control of language to the extent of pre-lingual grunting, can even lose control of their own facial muscles, is beyond shocking - not to overstate the case but this writer can find very few comparisons to the power of that image[ref]This writer also knows that easy comparisons are his worst habit and most guilty pleasure[/ref]. It can be argued then that the image ruins the movie but not the plot.

Which brings us to a more contemporary experience: Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and the unlucky circumstance of another Google search, that, in the opinion of this writer, constituted a similar 'visual spoiler'.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="728" caption="Laramie Eppler, Jessica Chastain and Tye Sheridan in The Tree of Life, 2011"][/caption]

Malick's film takes a close look at a boy growing up (the topic that Sleepaway Camp conveniently avoids). The film is very much a modernist exercise, and concerns itself with the process of highly interrogative investigation.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="728" caption="Brad Pitt and Laramie Eppler in The Tree of Life, 2011"][/caption]

None of this should go to suggest that The Tree of Life has no plot – arguably plot is the very argument of the film. Detailed scientific theories are presented here in the guise of creation and crisis, and it is useful to remember that Oedipus syndrome is named after a myth, not a man. But it stands that the film’s story is hard to 'spoil'. Rumours of walkouts can be confirmed by this writer – a phenomenon that can be contributed to by the fact that this isn't a ‘nail-biter’ (who else sat through a film like Red Eye or 1408 to find out what happens at the end?). So follows, however, the crimes of a certain reviewer and the Google Search that brought victims to the scene of the crime:

[caption id="attachment_26" align="alignnone" width="529" caption="Screen shot of Google's Tree of Life Showtimes for Brisbane, http://www.google.com.au/movies?hl=en&near=Brisbane+QLD&sort=1&mid=7703a5cae50123c accessed 10 August"][/caption]

An unassuming screenshot, until you enlarge the image and read the snippet of the Nick Pinkerton review. In total the snippet reads, "[spoiler]Including glimpses of Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, the rings of Saturn, and a roadside Texan BBQ, Terrence Malick's Tree of Life bears...[/spoiler]"

Working backwards to the complaint:

Three: It should stand to reason that Malick sets a scene, one of [spoiler]racially charged understandings of difference[/spoiler], at a good ol' Texan barbeque, given that the film is set in Waco, Texas, as is clearly stated in a great deal of the promotional material for the film. For those entirely immune to promotion, it should come as no surprise that Malick chooses the Lone Star State[ref]In this writer's opinion the film's hypothesis can be narrowed down to those three words: Lone, Star and State.[/ref] as his stage, being that his 1978 film Days of Heaven fleshed out the lion's share of it's action there, and that many of his most poetic characters in The Thin Red Line speak in a Texan drawl, as if Malick spares his most dramatic text for the swagg'red drawl of South American English[ref]The word this writer most wants to use is monophthongization: [youtube]4cr1w9liUjE[/youtube][/ref]. Perhaps most obviously, being that Tree of Life has roundly been considered strongly autobiographical, Malick's residency in Austin, Texas should serve as an insistent hint.

Two: The appearance of Mars, or any celestial body, would not constitute a spoiler to any serious Malick follower. The mention of planets, meteors, even dinosaurs is not only forgivable in this instance, but expected over thirty years ago. In 1978 Malick was in the process of writing the notoriously and fatally ambitious Q, the un-filmed and un-filmable script featuring the same.

One: This is where the writer takes issue. The mention of [spoiler]Sleeping Beauty's coffin[/spoiler] sits so outside of Malick's oeuvre that it has to have been engineered as a surprise - a surprise ruined by an unfortunate appearance in a Google search for movie times. What complicates this is the fact that a screening time search on Google should not necessarily need a contextualising set of reviews: (a brief pause to consider Google’s complicity in this crime – I can imagine only one reason to marry reviews to screening times – to show off the volume of the ocean that Google’s tentacles can reach) movie times and movie reviews are two different research locations. I don’t read art reviews to get the opening times for the gallery, and I don’t consult a bus timetable for critique on the relative strengths, weaknesses, techniques and touchstones of the bus driver. That is to say: not cool, Google.

The film itself is on a mission to own the year, if not the decade; despite some mismanaged moping by Sean Penn as Jack, Tree of Life submits itself as a defining document of 2011. Equally challenging and comforting (at times in the worst definition of both) the film stops short of a universal argument, being both very male and very hetero-normative, but takes us places the average film will or can not.

To do this, Malick needs some cards up his sleeve, including, for example, [spoiler]the application of a fairy tale to a young boy's image of his mother[/spoiler]. It's moments like [spoiler]the compellingly slow zoom on the raven-haired Sleeping Beauty proxy[/spoiler] that take cinema to the closest it's been to hypnotherapy or stage magic, invoking similar emotional triggers to similar effect. To take this test to painful lengths, and perhaps promote  some discussion in the comments section, consider the following 'visual spoilers':

• My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done: [spoiler]"Razzle Dazzle" Coffee Mug[/spoiler].


• Moon: [spoiler]"Wake Me Up When It's Quitting Time" T-Shirt[/spoiler].


• The Departed: [spoiler]Two bottles of milk in the bag from the grocer's[/spoiler].

To put it in the simplest possible terms, Angela's penis is no more important than Jack's furrowed brow: both films are about impact - the alarming death scenes in Sleepaway and the poetic vignettes in Tree of Life share a strange cadence in the context of a slow, inevitable narrative.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="728" caption="Sean Penn in The Tree of Life, 2011"][/caption]

This message stands as not a critique of the many talented film writers that make contemporary debate around film the engaging environment that it is, rather it stands as the writer's recursive warning: do the right thing. At primary school this writer came across a method of vandalism most ignorant; in a library devoid of merit there were incidentally a large amount of 'Where's Wally?' books. These book were distinguishable by their size and popularity - they stood out, literally, from the bookshelf, but not for long. They would be the first to be grabbed by a young person keen to make public their disdain for reading.

It was at this time that this writer seemed to identify with being a "reader", whatever that might mean. No book could be this popular forever, and soon public interest at this small school waned. During the long tail of the decline of 'Were's Wally', this writer had opportunity to borrow one of the titles - each and every Wally, Wilma and Wizard Whitebeard had already been circles in pencil or biro, Woof being identified more often than not.

To close, at the end of a long entry,here is one for the "readers": the ending of Sleepaway Camp: [youtube]rIDM6wqUiuM[/youtube]

OUTSIDE: Two exhibitions at the IMA present different opportunities for thinking about landscape and silence.

With eight screens, Chinese artist Yang Fudong's No Snow on the Broken Bridge is not the first multiscreen composition to be screened at the IMA, but it’s installation in the cavernous Gallery Three is striking. With eight simultaneous sequences, the narrative is certainly more ambiguous than the artist's series Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, which shows in the IMA Screening Room, but the works are cut from the same cloth – twenty-somethings in suits and cheongsangs dispassionately negotiate a landscape at a deliberate and languid pace.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550" caption="Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006"][/caption]

In a text prepared for No Snow on the Broken Bridge [ref]Produced by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation: http://www.sherman-scaf.org.au/publications#/publications/yang_fudong_no_snow_on_the_broken_bridge1/[/ref], Claire Roberts posits that the key to Yang Fudong’s success is an appropriative relationship with his countries’ history, noting “the way in which he has been able (when he has wanted) to make connections with the visual and aesthetic cultures of China’s past and yet remain very much of the present.” The casting of the films, particularly No Snow on the Broken Bridge, seems to align with this statement. While reality tv programs like the US Colonial House and the Australian programs Outback House and The Colony set out on a predestined pattern to mock participants lack of skills when placed in a provincial environment, the cast of No Snow appear effortlessly cool in 1920's costuming, both Western and Chinese. This coolness can be attributed to the Yang's young, dispassionate cast, slowly and purposelessly investigating the riverscape, in this instance the West Lake of Hangzhou[ref]The 'Broken Bridge' in Hangzhou isn't broken. The Bridge takes it's name from the Duan family – another Chinese character with the same pronounciation means 'Broken'.[/ref].

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550" caption="Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006"][/caption]

Seasons have often been useful metaphors for age: spring is most commonly associated with new life. It seems to this writer that Yang reverses this association, the last days of winter paralleled with the last years of the cast's youth. The time to explore is running out, the 1920's garb seemingly indicating a China before Mao, but that strife of the Chairman's policies is on the horizon. Your twenties are a fun, confusing, complicated time, but they don't last forever – a different type of anxiety and strain is in the post.

In contrast, the twenty-five photographs that make up Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki’s body of work The Park show a markedly different approach to exploring landscapes, but there is much of the same spirit of ennui. If read left to right around the first room, the photographs repeat the same scene – different couples, clothed but obviously engaged in physical attention to each other, play out different versions of the same tableau. There are no apparent reasons to suspect the sex here is not mutually consensual, but there is no room for romance.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Kohei Yoshiyuki: Untitled, From the series The Park, 1971"][/caption]

It’s not until the eighth photograph in Gallery One that things get sketchy – instead of a sexual pairing we see two men peering through scrub at something out of frame: the viewer is now forced to reconsider the ‘innocence’ of the first images. These images are not of spontaneous expression – these trysts have been planned. Consider the newspaper spread on the ground by one couple. Consider the tennis racquet that lays next to another couple, considered by this writer to be a useful prop to explain one’s presence in the park[ref]Presumably in this case Yoyogi park, the Yoyogi National Stadium opened for public use after the 64 Olympics.[/ref].

In gallery two matters are complicated furthur – we see both hetrosexual and homosexual pairings, groupings, and many more voyeurs.While the show gets some of it’s frission from the overtly sexual content (the red and black sign at the front of the Judith Wright Centre promises “Photographs of people watching people having sex”) more angles emerge. Compositionally the closest touchstone for this writer is the work of Charles Peterson, whose images are regarded as the foremost photographic documents of the Grunge music era. The suface level similarities are obvious – full-frame and uncropped, the work of both photographers captures strangers in candidly strange shapes. Both photographers also capture people at the bleeding edge of the social contract, where there are unwritten rules of etiquette in the moshpit and in the park, where a certain level of invasion is acceptable, even encouraged.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Charles Peterson: Kurt Cobain, Vancouver, 1991"][/caption]

While the images are captivating (the formal arrangement of bodies is one that you don't see everyday, and has a messy, provocative appeal), the heavy lifting in the show has to be done by the viewer. Questions of consent and participation in the social contract have to be addressed by the viewer for any serious engagement in the work. At the 7/11 near the bookstore I’ve been working at there is a flatscreen tv rolling through countless and slightly grainy screen captures – bodies made instantly more guilty-looking by the forced perspective of the survaillance camera in the corner of the ceiling. These people (and not, presumably, those with black rectangles covering their faces) are known shoplifters – the television framed with the suggestion that any helpful information be given to Crimestoppers. There is a presumed consent to being filmed in the 7/11 – YOU WILL BE VIDEOTAPED, but Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs were taken with an infrared flash on infrared film – the only clue that your image may be captured might have been a muffled click in the darkness, or the winding of film.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="504" caption="Kohei Yoshiyuki: Untitled, From the series The Park, 1971"][/caption]

And, of course, as an audience your own primary function is looking also. In fact, if you stand in a certain part of gallery two, you can peer through the glass window and watch the volunteers greeting visitors and monitoring the space, a multi view security monitor on the front desk (printed on the glass door: “Galleries are under constant video surveillance”). To wit: you can watch people watching people looking at photographs of people watching people have sex.

Both Kohei Yohiyuki and Yang Fudong can be said to have created complicated spaces for pause. There is a silence to the works at IMA galleries, but it is an awkward one.