NOW SHOWİNG: Richard Phillips 'Lindsay Lohan' at IMA

[ref]This is presented for consideration into the level of consent given by celebrity in the creation of parody-, pastiche- or reference-based works, values-neutral as they might appear.[/ref]

A hackneyed phrase: to dot your is and cross your ts. The cross is a cross-stroke, the dot is a tittle. In the Latin Alphabet, the capital letter I has no tittle. The Turkish alphabet features dotted and undotted i's, both upper and lowercase. While the distinction between the two characters is important to Turkish pronunciation, the appearance of İ in Richard Phillips' Lindsay Lohan, now screening at IMA, is an entirely aesthetic decision.

The artist's name, the name of his subject and the artist's gallerist all get the dotted-I treatment[ref]It is almost a bizarre instruction that a typical New Zealander's pronunciation of the names is verboten[/ref]. Taylor Steele co-directed the production, but is not credited in the film's 90 seconds (you could facetiously suggest this is because he doesn't have an I in his name to tittle). Steele's background is in surfing films, and the shots of Lohan against an panoramic seascape are very well composed. In other moments the actress stares into the middle distance, meeting and then avoiding the camera's gaze. In these moments the work most closely resembles Phillips' paintings, close-up portraits which he has been exhibiting since the mid-nineties.



A shot that has received significant attention in the art press is one in which Lohan considers her own image. Johnathan Jones writes in the Guardian that the actress is

contemplating her own outsized image. The image is bigger than she is: the real Lindsay Lohan is dwarfed by the colossus of her fame – but this art film is not rejecting the myths of celebrity, it is fascinated and enraptured by those myths.[ref]Jones, J. (2011, May 30). A love letter to Lindsay Lohan - and the moving image. Retrieved from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/may/30/richard-phillips-lindsay-lohan[/ref]

This is an easy reading to come to, especially with this image being in such close proximity to a powerful shot in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998) of the reality TV mastermind Christof (Ed Harris) touching the oversized image of his sleeping star.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1280" caption="Peter Weir 'The Truman Show' (1998)"][/caption]

However this writer thinks the decision-making surrounding this shot might be closer to self-portrait than social critique - considering the size and facial focus of Phillips' paintings, examining oversized faces in close quarters is the artist's bread and butter. Appearances on SNL (and other comedy platforms, to be discussed later), interviews and commercials notwithstanding, this is the first film Lohan has appeared in as herself - in this shot however, she could well be playing Phillips, or at the very least giving a performance that asks us to consider Phillips' embodied experience of painting[ref]Whether by design, coincidence, or this writers overattentiveness to Phillips' typographic anomaly (or a strange amalgam of the three) the eye sitting above Lohan's almost vertical forearm also takes on the appearance of a dot hanging over an i.[/ref].

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Richard Phillips working on 'Der Bodensee' (2008)"][/caption]

The soundtrack is compelling, but ultimately misleading - shoegaze is a genre that needs an expansive duration to grow and decay, the composition by Tamaryn and Rex John Shelverton feels cramped in the film's 90 seconds[ref]Consider the musicians' unabridged work:

[/ref]. Overall the soundtrack lends the work a complex dynamic. The heavily distorted guitar has an edge of anxiety to it while the tambourine associates the images onscreen with a new-age, psychedelic aesthetic.

The premise of the work is exciting - applying the highly-developed, highly-budgeted techniques of commercial advertising to thin air - but the closing credits complicate the work in unhelpful ways. While graphology is both inapplicable to type and a deeply junk science, it is telling that the letter I when enhanced in scale can mean an overactive ego; when enhanced with embellishments the letter can show immaturity and a desire for attention. After making this film, Phillips went on to work with Sasha Grey in a similarly composed video work. While both actresses are talented and highly photogenic, it would be concerning to this writer if Phillips made a habit of working with women conservative commentators see as needing some kind of 'redemption'. After Rebecca Black was, in some cases viciously, mocked in early 2011, she collaborated with the website Funny or Die in April to lampoon her public image herself (currently the singer Lana Del Ray seems to be caught by a public keen to flex those muscles again, but appears unlikely to have her image be similarly co-opted). Lohan herself worked with Funny or Die in a series of faux dating commercials following her split from Samantha Ronson in 2009. When introducing a news piece on her appearance on the site ABC anchorman Robin Roberts said, "It's not just getting laughs, it may get her career back on track."[ref]Adams, G. (2009, April 20). Lindsay Lohan and the irresistible rise of 'mockumentary'.Retrieved from The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/lindsay-lohan-and-the-irresistible-rise-of-mockumentary-1671340.html[/ref] In an eerie echo of this, Linda Yablonsky wrote for the New York Times that "thanks to the painter Richard Phillips, pop culture’s current tragic heroine is making a cogent leap from the tabloids to the art world"[ref]Yablonsky, L. (2011, May 26). Lindsay Lohan, Art Star. Retrieved from T Magazine: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/artifacts-lindsay-lohan-art-star/[/ref](in the same article the film is labelled a "psychological portrait", but it is also noted that the artist and the actress had never met before the shoot).

Ultimately archetypes of jezabel and saviour aren't helpful to a reading of the work, simply to the press and markets that promote it. A serious question in response to Yablonsky's article is who should be "thanking" who?[ref]Especially given Lindsay Lohan is Phillips' first experience making film, claiming that before the production he had not even shot a video with his iPhone[/ref] Both actresses have given Phillips something many of his paintings' subjects have not: consent. While his technique of appropriating press photos and other images in creating work is one respected by this writer, when given this kind of access to a performers name, image and complicity, much more should be achievable than is actually realised by Phillips' current output.

Richard Phillips
Lindsay Lohan

Institute of Modern Art
18 February — 14 April

The Rookie Device: 'Test Pattern: New Art by New Queensland Artists' at Ryan Renshaw

When a movie or tv show screenwriter wants to speed up exposition, particularly when introducing characters at the start of a series, a well-worn device is the introduction of 'the rookie'. In reality, a group of people in an already established team have no reason to spend time with each other re-introducing themselves and describing their background - by introducing a character new to the environment, the audience get a rollerskate tour of the major players and their origin stories. Popular in sci-fi, school-based dramadies, heist films and police procedurals the device is not always strong writing, but is not always weak; compare Scrubs to Toy Story, or The Devil Wears Prada to Platoon (the device is also not by any means necessary[ref]A really great example of unhampered environmental exposition is The Wire. Whatever David Simon's hypothesis turned out to be, it was clear that his laboratory and materials were institutions, and people. While in later seasons the show would introduce characters and situations very close to the rookie trope, Simon deftly handled McNulty's gargantuan reputation with dialogue, and Kima's "then he dropped the bracelets" anectode is a simple-yet effective twenty seconds.[/ref] nor does it rely exclusively rely on age or hierarchal position[ref][/ref]).

The device's popularity can be attributed to its effectiveness; as an audience we want the bigger picture, but we don't have all day. So when a survey exhibition of recent graduates of Queensland's art schools is billed as "New Art by New Queensland Artists", the two uses of the word 'new' have different applications - this is fresh work to both artist and audience, and the artists are "shinies" (Star Wars), "nuggets" (Battlestar Galactica), "fresh meat for the grinder" (Starship Troopers). As an audience we get to experience this kind of show on this and many more levels - the art should, always, be experienced at face value, but we also get to step outside our own place in the art network and, like a Hollywood audience, be comfortably introduced to the environment as if for the first time, learning the same lessons as the rookie as they are inducted.

Like the fresh-faced rookies of screen narrative, these artists are identifiably eager to present themselves in the very best light, and as a show the works are individually strong and high-impact as a whole. Perhaps due to the intensity of research required by their study programs some of these artists wear their influences on their sleeve. If Lucian Freud's legacy is evident in the reclining life studies of Dana Laurie, his grandad's is positively unavoidable in the photographs of Yavuz Erkan. Tightly composed and neatly presented, the series Unorthodox Aphorisms presents surreal interactions with domestic objects, the volume is turned all the way up on the psychosexual allusions already apparent in gloves, milk, vessels and balloons. Sex and gender are placed in uncertain locations with simple blocking - in one the male subject uncannily evokes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring with the simple application of a bath towel. Erkan's palette contributes equally to the calm seduction of the series and its uncomfortably sexual reading, the fleshy pink and tan tones punctuated with a sole inclusion of a striking orange.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Yavuz Erkan 'Towel' 2011"][/caption]

The audience member's body is implicated in the works of Hannah Piper and Caitlin Franzmann, the former creating a post-pop installation which also serves as a framing device for the lion's share of the show. The latter depends on the viewers body for the work to be complete, the audience member becoming part of a screen-based tableau vivant. The sculptural blocking in Franzmann's work seems like an extension of her work outside the gallery, particularly her music video for McKisco's Silence Slowly[ref][/ref]. In both cases the artists consider the role of embodiment in the experience of art after Warhol et al (CAVEAT: on this writer's first viewing of the show neither work was installed to completion, a return visit will see this post revised).

In 2008 in the United States the financial services firm Lehmann Brothers collapsed, Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac were subject to a federal takeover and Bear Stearns was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in a fire sale. In concert these events would effectively trigger the tipping point of the GFC. Meanwhile, Vampire Weekend seemed to give the holiday aesthetic of the well-educated, well-heeled class responsible for brokering these deals and the problems that pre-empted them a high dose of cool, with popped collars, cardigans and boat shoes featuring in promotional shots and music videos and Louie Vuitton lyrical name-checks. Jared Worthington contributes objects from The Waverly Collection with prints from the series Chuck Greenleaf to Test Pattern, all brightly coloured and slightly caricaturistic[ref]Somewhere between a Wes Anderson good-guy and an early Adam Sandler bad-guy[/ref]. Like Michael Haneke's charismatic/sadistic Peter and Paul in Funny Games (1997, remade 2008) Worthington's simulated narrative interrogates the audience's complicity in the mass appeal of the accoutrements of the 'one percent'.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Jared Worthington - Scarf (2011)"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="733" caption="Dord Burroughs - Summer Fruits"][/caption]

Dord Burrough's works fit neatly into an emerging trend in the output of some young Brisbane artists that seems to blend 'two great tastes that taste great together' - slapstick and threat. That is not to say that Burrough doesn't have her own strong voice: the series of paintings contributed to Test Pattern are relentlessly individual in style and are for this writer a source of real excitement in an already compelling show.

If the rookie device is at play in the audiences reading of this exhibition, it is a mainly positive relationship: the artists want to be considered in the context of wider traditions and audiences want to have their understanding of those traditions stretched. As these six recruits join the ranks of the already active field agents of painting, drawing, sculpture and photography the viewer is present at the first briefing. But it should not be forgotten that the stakes are high - while the rookie narrative often charts the ascendancy of the freshman to hero, sometimes the screen is not so kind. Holly Gribbs, played ably by Chandra West, was introduced in the pilot episode of the immensley successful CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in October of 2000. The character fulfilled all of the rookie device's duties, exposing the audience quickly to a the complex array of characters, professional contexts and emotional and moral themes the show would rely on for at least the next twelve years. The audience connected with the 'CSI Level 1' inductee's uneasy charm and her uncertainty which prompted this attempt at inspiration:



Gribbs, and by extension West, proved to be a disposable lever, applied then summarily discarded - less than twenty screen minutes after this rallying pep talk, the character would be dead, shot by the suspect returning to the scene of the crime. Having fulfilled the duties of the rookie device in the first episode, neither Gribbs or West would continue to be a part of the most watched drama in the world. This writer is glad that the artists in this show will have a good deal more agency in their future visibility.

TEST PATTERN 2012
New Art by New Queensland Artists
Ryan Renshaw
FEBRUARY 17 - MARCH 3, 2012

The Moody Blues, Strange Times: Rebecca Baumann's Automated Monochrome at IMA@Ksubi

Rebecca Baumann: Automated Monochrome

5 February - 18 March, IMA@Ksubi

 

The Pomodoro Technique, developed in the late 1980's by Francesco Cirillo, is a productivity method based on time management. As friends of this writer will attest it has been a topic of impassioned discussion at certain dinner parties[ref]Admittedly this is not the only productivity technique known to have invoked cult- or pyramid scheme-like fanaticism in its users, this writer included[/ref] as the Technique has seen a marked increase in this writer's output [ref]And being part of this very posts writing[/ref]. Named for the Italian word for tomato, or more specifically the kitschy plastic kitchen timers design in the tomato's image, the Technique is basically a commitment to working in uninterrupted blocks of twenty-five minutes.


Pomodoro Kitchen Timer, Wikipedia Commons, 2008

In the extensive manual produced to support the concept Cirillo promotes a lofi approach - the equipment suggested for it use is a mechanical timer, a pencil and a piece of paper. Despite this, some, if not most of the Techniques users (including this writer) employ software installed on their computers or mobile phones. Despite the introduction of the digital, these apps are almost exclusively what J. David Bolter would call 'remediations', each featuring satisfyingly mechanical sound effects of ticking and ringing. These digital simulations of hidden gears and bells are worth attention - what is the appeal of the sounds of analogue clocks, watches and timers?

The Perth-based artist Rebecca Baumann has installed Automated Monochrome(2011), a large installation of 96 modified flip-clocks in IMA's satellite space in Ksubi Store in Fortitude Valley. Distinct from her work Automated Colour Field(also 2011), which features bright colours from across the spectrum, this work sees the devices flip through paper in rich tones of blue, and was created for last year’s Primavera exhibition.

Rebecca Baumann, Automated Monochrome, 2011

The aforementioned manual for the Pomodoro Technique is considered, accessible and idiosyncratic, meshing technical instruction, philosophical inquiry and personal anecdotes. Cirillo's project is founded in an understanding of time as the passing of events, and the less concrete idea of becoming. He sees the former as a cause of much discomfort:

Of these two aspects, it is becoming that generates anxiety – it is, by nature, elusive, indefinite, infinite: time passes, slips away, moves toward the future. If we try to measure ourselves against the passage of time, we feel inadequate, oppressed, enslaved, defeated, more and more with every second that goes by.[ref]Cirillo, Francesco. "The Pomodoro Technique" 2006: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/resources/ThePomodoroTechnique_v1-3.pdf[/ref]

If Cirillo's Pomodoro Technique is a method to combat these feelings, Baumann's work is most certainly its equal. While the Pomodoro Technique is designed to promote practical and attentive effort,Automated Monochrome is instinctively calming. It contributes a more casually relaxed line of inquiry to Baumann's compelling and often celebration-based body of work. The artist spent her time in residency in 2010 in Berlin focusing on the relationships between colour and emotion. The work's genesis in the home of the immense Weltzeituhr at Alexanderplatz and Dieter Binninger's unique Berlin Clock may not be a coincidence.

The plastic kitchen timer, as an object, has strange properties - a mechanical object in a natural, organic guise. Automated Monochrome is analogous: it is likely some viewers will read it as a landscape, specifically the constantly shifting blue tones of the ocean.

While unlikely to be the artist's intention, there is an interesting element to staging a work, in which the passing of time is marked by changing colours, above a fashion retail outlet. Socially-conscious critics and economically-conscious supporters have noted the fashion industry's uncanny skill in employing 'planned obsolescence' in its market model - while fashion writers announce a 'new black' for each season, Automated Monochrome announces an untold number of 'new blues' with each mechanical flip[ref]The work is also a sizable backdrop for the well-dressed and easily-photographed - Facebook users might recognise it following this afternoon's opening in the background of profile pictures of Brisbane attendees.[/ref].

Simultaneously painting, kinetic sculpture and sound event, Baumann's work at IMA@Ksubi is equally charming and exciting. Opening with an artist talk on the 5th of February, the exhibit continues until the 18th of March.

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Nicholas Folland's Domestic Distractions

Nicholas Folland is based in South Australia, and has been recently announced as participating in the 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Sourcing chandeliers, crystal ware and antiques from garage sales, op shops and online auctions Folland stages complicated arrangements of found items, and in his exhibition Domestic Distractions employs light and movement to strong effect.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="565" caption="Nicholas Folland: Tools (2010)"][/caption]

Folland’s attention to detail is worthy of attention, the brass hanging system of Tools giving what could be an intimidating installation a clinical, passive appearance, like a coleopterist’s drawer. The knives themselves are remarkably unique, some malformed by repeated sharpening. The names crudely engraved into the handles are sobriquets, including ‘Baz’ and ‘Andy’. This both softens the threatening nature of the knives by lending them an informal personality and serves as a conceptual twist – the owner’s proper names have been ‘cut’ – David becomes Dave, Deborah has become Debby.

There are interesting contradictions that link works in the show. In the work Goodnight Sweetheart the artist renders half of symmetrical crystal structures unable to carry out their luxurious light-reflection by wrapping them in cinefoil. In Untitled (Home Renovation) a doily sits on the table as if to protect its surface from the crystal ware, which hovers millimetres above. The tables is elsewhere irreparably cut, two circular holes have been sawn through which the remaining two crystal elements hang. Doilies reappear in Stuart Crystal Decanter and Two Matching Glasses, and Large Stuart Crystal Comport and Two Dessert Bowls, again seemingly protecting the surface of two unlikely tables, shelves supported by finely lacquered branches found in the artist’s neighbourhood. On the doilies sit the recombined materials of the works’ titles, melted down and recast into elemental, almost cartoonish representations of natural crystal. Folland reveals the fallacy behind crystal ware – while having the appearance of cut glass, crystal ware is made by setting melted liquid stone in moulds with deep grooves. Folland’s moulds lack the deep patterns that allow the illusion of cut glass, and his process mars the clarity of the material. In fact the reflections of light on the gallery wall behind the work are of the shelves’ lacquered veneer, the recast items' matt surface absorbing the light.

While the tableware in the Stuart works has been recast literally, the tableware throughout the exhibition has been re-cast figuratively. The collections of crystal ware, once symbols of economic strength and domestic refinement in good homes, have presumably been donated to thrift stores by their original owners, deeming them too good to throw away, but not valuable enough to keep. Although perhaps an over-popular source of exhibition material, particularly in Australia’s art schools, op shop ephemera occupies an actually quite complicated economic site, one which Folland encourages us to consider.



Untitled from Ryan Renshaw on Vimeo.

Twelve years ago M.A. Greenstien described Folland’s objects as ‘bratty’, and his style ‘hip’, in her essay for the 1999 Samstag catalogue. Those descriptions have no real relationship to the work in Domestic Distractions, which is characterised by a considered, even sombre tone.

 
DOMESTIC DISTRACTIONS

Nicholas Folland

Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane

November 16 – December 10, 2011

Quarantine Domestic - Grit Theatre's POND

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="720" caption="Grit Theatre: POND, 2011"][/caption]

As a part of the Melbourne Fringe program, Grit Theatre's POND sees a man and a woman engaged in slow, deliberate co-habitation, and can be seen as a reflection on technology's role in shared space and time.



The set the two performers share is essentially sparse, the illusion of a ceiling provided by netting and plantlife built over the couple's bed. Framed by approximations of an office and a kitchen, the bed is the site of much of the performance's action. Any remaining space on the stage seems filled with electronic detritus - computer monitors, leads, devices and cardboard boxes are stacked at least as tall as the performers themselves. The set, devised by Madeleine Worthington, can be seen as an application of the same themes and strategies as the paintings of Dane Lovett - a kind of contemporary vanitas composed of flora and superseded technology.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Dane Lovett: Double Feature, 2010, Acrylic on aluminium composite panel"][/caption]

The sound design leaves very little space for reflection, as does much of the physical action. Most interesting for this writer were the moments where the dialogue took on layered potential - could the woman's skin condition reveal something about the motives for the couples' isolation, or the state of the world outside? Is the wheat grass an emergency salve, or a fashionable dietary supplement? This kind of friction between readings was, for this writer, far more engaging than the physical action toward the end of the performance, which seemed to be an acting out of a crisis which already seemed understood.

This duality, however, proved to be paper-thin. The woman and man call for supplies, listing numbers over the phone. The numbers could mean anything - vitamins, chemicals - and at times for this writer evoked the pallid future proposed by Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island. However the illusion quickly vanishes when the man appends his order with "two serves of naan bread," planting the performance firmly in the domestic rather than fantastic.

If POND sites itself in the domestic space, it makes startlingly few proposals for how that space can be shared. At one point in the action, seemingly as an illustration of the schism between the two, competing soundtracks are played - it would seem that the man is listening to Elliot Smith while the woman listens to Earth, Wind and Fire's System of Survival. The significance of these individually is unclear - The 'System' proposed by Earth, Wind and Fire is dancing as an emotional outlet, and the shared domestic space is the ground where Smith lost his final battle. As an illustration of a closed system POND sees the partnership expending as little energy as possible, storing entropy to maximum efficiency. Consuming energy drinks and a boiled egg, it seems that the taxonomy of needs for this couple has been shortened to include only the most pragmatic. Unfortunately the arrow of time lands sharply at the end of POND - the success or failure of these strategies is rendered moot as the performance accelerates toward apocalypse.

 

POND

Devised by: Thomas Browne, Laura Hughes and Clare Phillips

Performed by: Thomas Browne and Laura Hughes

Set design:Madeleine Worthington

Lighting design:Liam O’Keefe

Sound design: Playwrite

23 September - 8 October | The Warehouse @ Fringe Hub, North Melbourne Town Hall

grittheatre.com

 

The Company of Men: The Black Lung Theatre's I Feel Awful

As a part of the Studio Season for 2011 I Feel Awful is a completely new text commissioned by the Queensland Theatre Company at the behest of outgoing director Michael Gow; as they say: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="960" caption="The Black Lung Theatre 2011, Sean Young"][/caption]

The five members of The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm that have spent the last months developing I Feel Awful have some pretty strong feelings about theatre and theatre's communicative functions, and they want these feelings to be witnessed. In the Bille Brown studio, director and writer Thomas M Wright has found a forum to air his grievances about an industry he finds lacking (an industry that Gow, the QTC and ultimately The Black Lung themselves are ultimately immersed in). Soon after the coldest of cold opens, the young performers from Brisbane acting schools that join the production (called at times "the teens") demonstrate a gamut of rapid-fire dramatic skills, pre-empting the rollerskate tour of genres and intentions of theatre that Wright turns his critical eye to.

The 1992 film Stay Tuned, directed by Peter Hyams, featured the lazy Roy and under-appreciated Helen who are trapped by an undercover envoy from Hell. Their prison is an alternate "TV" reality - across the 90 or so minutes of the movie's duration the pair have to negotiate darkly satirical representations of popular shows (Fresh Prince of Darkness, Autopsies of the Rich and Famous). The overarching message is TV is dangerous - the Devil himself wants to welcome 'TV Junkies' into his fold in the most gruesome way possible.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="580" caption="Stay Tuned (1992)"][/caption]

Reflecting on Stay Tuned it now seems foolhardy to stage a critique of screen-based media on the screen - luckily I Feel Awful is more than just disgruntled. However cheesy, where Stay Tuned has the jump on Wright is the the ease at which scenes can transition - at the point of critical action, or more likely when the already laboured gags have stretched themselves too thin, someone clicks a remote and the scenery change. Changing scenes in front of a live audience is obviously a more physical affair, and it's an effort the audience are forced to observe more than once.

The second challenge of live-action theatre as multimodal as Wright has developed is establishing an evenness of the component elements. I Feel Awful at times appears shaky but never topples, although at times this writer questioned the necessity of the application of dance.

Costuming is of obvious importance to I Feel Awful. Clothing is judged, employed at the level of metaphor, soiled and discarded. By this writer's count at least five outfits appear for each of the fourteen performers on stage. The Black Lung wear variations on a a traditional staid business theme. This seems to be a trope all of its own: the professional thieves in Reservoir Dogs, Joaquin Phoenix in his efforts to establish himself as a hip hop artist, the live performances of Nick Cave - far from the office, the business suit seems to be the outfit of choice for violent, desperate work.



At times the Whalers appear outside of business suits: two such moments feature Gareth Davies in a WWE dressing gown and Liam Barton wearing a Wu-Tang jersey. In contrast to the timeless business suits these items are anachronistic - the dressing gown is obviously sized for a child, and due to a market flooded with bootleg copies and Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G, Wu Wear has substantially fallen out of popular favour. Anachronisms aside, combining World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. with The Clan in Da Front results in a very effective analogy for The Black Lung - rambunctious, charismatic, physical and very, very male.

If this analogy rings true, it is in no small part due to Thomas M Wright, director of The Black Lung, who is very much a hybrid of Vince McMahon and RZA - confident, calculating and perpetually promoting as he performs. From start to finish, Aaron Orzech's performance makes the most hay out of the business of theatre - it's often him with the bullhorn, the clipboard or the academic reference. While those around him careen out of control, he remains the most engaging on stage for this writer by staying true to small action. It is almost impossible to assess the performances of the younger cast - if they appear over-earnest, is it by design? - but it has to be said that Finn Gilfedder is a comic standout and Charlie Schache imprints himself on the production powerfully. Overall the supporting cast acquit themselves well under complex circumstances - if they seem to lack cohesion this writer would be inclined to think that the script has left very little room for it - this is a group that has had to be divided to be conquered.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="650" caption="Gareth Davies in I Feel Awful"][/caption]

While exceedingly engaging, there is a lingering concern for this writer - with so much focus on gender and sexual politics, it's hard to reconcile the fact that the narrative, which concerns itself with the ways the young women can be compromised on and off the stage, has been written, developed and presented by a group of men. Having Queensland's experience of theatre critiqued by a troupe from Melboure is also a bitter pill. Speaking to Marie-Christine Sourris at the Courier Mail[ref]http://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/play-it-once-more-with-feeling/story-fn6ck8la-1226123457398[/ref] Wright has indicated a move toward more personal content, and this writer anticipates this as a strong direction.

I Feel Awful lives up to expectations: Sex and Death are foregrounded as promised, but in an abstract, synthesised form. While the 'burn-down-the-academy' attitude to creative production isn't entirely for everybody, what The Black Lung have created for QTC is genuinely surprising, very funny and intellectually astute.

I Feel Awful: Bille Brown Studio, South Brisbane. September 2-10.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=120662311361989

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.