Open Call for Manchurian Candidates: Gonkar Gyatso, Peter Roehr and Peter Alwast at IMA

Jimi Hendrix, famed for his innovation, has a chord named after him, the dominant 7♯9. The 'Jimi Hendrix' chord, also known as the 'Purple Haze' chord, has a unique dynamic, a raw, almost dissonant friction[ref]A good illustration of the chord's slightly more recent application is the opening of the Pixies' Here Comes Your Man.[/ref]. Gonkar Gyatso's Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, currently showing at IMA as a part of the exhibition Three Realms, can be said to not only appropriate the song's most quoted lyric, but the same angular, dissonant edge.

In a fat Futura Black, seven collages wrap the room in the work's title, embellished with stickers, cut out images and text. While Hendrix often defended the song Purple Haze as a love song, many of it's listeners interpret the lyrics as a treatise on the use of LSD. These woozy, psychedelic connotations are an uneasy location for Gyatso's explorations of Western media saturation and his own Tibetan background. As almost certainly a nod to Queensland as his host, Mister Fourex appears in the bottom right corner of the last work, like a punctuation mark (or possibly more accurately, a coda) to Jimi's polite request for pardon (this writer can confirm that on the day of installation, it was the last collage element applied to the work). It's a fitting addition - the mysterious 1924 mascot is totemic for many of the themes the artist seems to be concerned with - happiness, myth, commercial iconography - and suggests that Australia's most widely used recreational drug is a conductor for enlightenment; as if a tinnie of XXXX, rather than a tab of acid, is the pathway to meditative bliss, "the sky", or both.

In 1997 the Irish painter Stephen McKenna suggested that, "When Giorgio de Chirico wrote that the responsibility of the artist was to listen for and to understand the secret song of his time, he did not mean a catchy tune." In a lot of ways Gonkar Gyatso's work sits in opposition to this argument - his 108 Burning Questions are framed collages, each taking in to consideration news and debates very much of our time, and feature Eminem, Jay-Z, Wu Tang Clan and Amy Winehouse (who sadly found tragic new parallels with Jimi Hendrix only days before the exhibition's opening).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="452" caption="Panel from 108 Burning Questions (Equality)"][/caption]

Peter Roehr's Montage Films, showing in the Screening Room, also make use of the commercial images contemporary to the artist's time. Snippets of appropriated film repeat musical motifs or commercial copy, the consistent reiteration transforming them from media messages to mantras. Tragically passing in 1968 at the peak of his creative output, Roehr's works in the screening room are exclusively from 1965.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Peter Roehr, Harttrocknen x 13, 1965"][/caption]

A petrol station sign and a woman combing her hair are approached by Roehr with the same precise technique - seconds of footage lifted from commercials are repeated between ten and twenty times. Abstracted from context, to the contemporary audience the promotional devices are identifiably blunt - these could be splices of multiple prints from the cutting room floor of Sterling Cooper Draper Price. Several of the works are automotive in focus - the camera mounted on a car tracks its repeated motion toward tunnels and over bridges. One montage features a car plunging at speed off a cliff, cutting an arc toward the ground where it explodes. On first viewing the shot is exciting, by the third banal - further iterations drive home Roehr's stated goal that ‘the original function of the objects should be totally forgotten’.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="Peter Roehr, Brucke x13, 1965"][/caption]

Roehr explained his intentions in a “The story-line of my films is given in a simple sentence, e. g., ‘A Woman Dries Her Hair.’  Through repetition of this scene the initially perceived situation begins to dissolve and expand."[ref] Peter Roehr (Köln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1977) p. 80[/ref]

Like Roehr, Peter Alwast is deeply engaged with the technology of his time. The eight works that make up the exhibition Future Perfect present potential worlds, colonised at the floor of the uncanny valley. Often care has taken that these products of inorganic origin present themselves in the most organic form - soft shapes, slow movement. In some of the works a clinical environment is projected into the clinical environment, syntheses of the gallery within the gallery. In these pseudo-galleries animated loops challenge the laws of physics - pastel coffins fall from the sky, a phantom hand keeps a spinning top in endless upright motion.

Although this writer enjoys engaging with duration-based art, often it's hard to develop an exit strategy. While by no means crowded, the staging of multiple works in Gallery Three allows the viewer to channel-surf at will. The installation of Alwast's work in Gallery Four seems to take the most agency of the physical properties of the space - a flatscreen is adopted rather than a projector and two large-format prints create a lightly rippled tide on the ground. Both are reflected in a perspex form on the opposite wall. On first experience this reflective element creates a tangible event - we engage with the story of a man betrayed by a jealous colleague, outed as an enemy of Russia for an off-hand remark about the age of Stalin's young lover (the man is Alwast's great grandfather[ref]Revealed in a conversation with Grant Stevens: http://www.ima.org.au/pages/.exhibits/peter-alwast218.php[/ref]). When we feel we have had enough, we turn to leave, but a ghost of what we have just witnessed appears. In the words of the educator Bergen Evans[ref]Quoted by Philip Baker Hall's Jimmy Gator in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia[/ref], we may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.



In the August 2009 issue of The Wire, David Keenan first coined the term 'hynagogic pop'. Used to describe artists like Pocahaunted and The Skaters, hypnagogic pop is distinguished by its reliance on exaggerated tape his, drone and delay. Listeners can expect calming tonal layering, repetition and nostalgic references. Similarly, the IMA's current group of shows use the traditions of pop formalism to gesture toward the infinite - these three artists draw attention to the barriers to epiphany while using the techniques of a hypnotherapist that make epiphany seem so achievable.