Wilkins Hill : on the cusp of meaning

If contemporary artworks are often considered to be puzzles or riddles, then Wilkins Hill take this to a new level. Their recent exhibition Windows impersonating other windows, confronts viewers with an extremely ludic configuration: a spa bath full of almonds, towel racks placed before photos of Martin Heidegger distorted in neat grids, a video of a water tower in a Hamburg park, wooden cut-out speech bubbles and monitors that continuously play interviews with the artists themselves. What does it all mean?

Kiss

In an age of mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter and online dating, interactions in mediated environments often outnumber face to face encounters. Kiss is an interactive light artwork by artists Priscilla Bracks & Gavin Sade. Kiss reacts to people standing in front of the artwork looking at each other - the moment before kissing. Without interaction the work generates a seductive, ambient, red lighting display, that creates the restful sense of staring into a fire. A fleeting response of white light – like sparks flying in the air – occurs the moment before two faces touch. These sparks are visible in peripheral vision, but fade when the kissing couple turns to look at the work. This moment - as two people look at each other - is a primal moment when two people recognise each other. Face to face encounters with another person are a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's presence and proximity are strongly felt. Kiss does not respond to every instance of a kiss or a look. Its recognition algorithms are fussy, selecting some faces and not others. As in life it’s difficult to tell why sparks fly with some people but not with others. For some this will be felt as a glitch. “This machine should be part of my social life!” But it does promote trial and error, asking viewers to be intimate in public and look at each other for longer than otherwise socially normal. 10 minutes continuous eye contact is said in most cases to arouse sexual feelings in both parties. But even if we don’t look that long, a short time may be all that is needed to explore the face of the person we are looking at. We see that they are human like us. We experience beauty, difference, discomfort, perhaps even nervous laughing, before turning to a more intimate moment of recognition.

Particle wave

“Particle Wave” is comprised of six lenticular panels hung in an even, horizontal sequence. Each panel alternates between two solid colour fields as you move past it. There are six colours in total, with each colour represented twice in the spectrum. From left to right, the panels move through yellow, orange, magenta, violet, blue, green and back to yellow. The work’s title refers to the two competing theories of light, which can be understood as either paradoxical or complementary. Like these theories, the experience of viewing the work catches us in a double bind. While we can orient ourselves to see solid colour fields one by one, we are never able to fully capture them all at once. In fact, it is only through our continual movement, and the subsequent transitioning of visible colours that we register the complete spectrum. Through this viewing experience, “Particle Wave” actively engages with our peripheral vision and the transitory nature of perception. It plays with the fundamental pleasures of colour and vision, and the uneasy seduction of being unable to grasp multiple phenomena simultaneously.

Hankering

As a man and woman take turns reciting their favourite simple pleasures, text fades in and out on screen. The visible words, which float against a starscape, are approximations and variations of those being spoken. As the video progresses, the voices and the correlating texts start to overlap slightly. What at first seems to be a testiment to small, saccharine satisfactions starts to become a passive-aggressive race for modest contentment. Rubbing the fine line between sweet and sour, “Hankering” plays with the indirect messages that float through our desires, relationships and the languages we use to communicate them.

Auric Variations

A female voice softly recites physical and psychological associations of aura colours. On screen, individual words fade in and out rhythmically amid a field of swirling and morphing colours. The animated words correlate with the words being spoken, but not every word is displayed, therefore enabling an alternative range of verbal associations to emerge. “Auric Variations” plays with the mix of affirmation and anxiety that can underscore contemporary subjective experiences and the new age techniques we sometimes used to understand them.

Mingling

In this video, white words and phrases fade quickly in and out amongst small bursting dots of colour. Set to an energetic, synthesised soundtrack, the animated text combines, and sometimes confuses, an internal monologue with dialogue and overheard conversations. The unfolding narrative follows an unnamed narrator through a crowded social event. By visually and textually mixing self-conscious reflections with polite conversations, “Mingling” explores the social niceties and nervous behaviours that often inform our interpersonal experiences. Through its fast-paced and disjointed rendering of verbal communication, the work playfully draws out the sometimes-awkward and uncomfortable dialogues that exist between personal and social, internal and external, imagined and actual. This work was commission by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia (Sydney), to celebrate the organisation’s major redevelopment and acknowledge the generosity of individuals and organisations who supported the capital project.

Outlook

This wall-mounted sculpture features eight photographic prints displayed on a computer monitor mounting system. The eight panels each swivel and articulate separately. Together, they combine to create an abstract landscape based on a desktop background image of an idyllic tropical setting. Recalling the workstation of a futures trader, logistics manager, or design guru, the screen armature draws out the simultaneously romantic and vacuous characteristics of the imagery. By combining the visual languages of both physical and on-screen desktop environments with the pictorial traditions of landscape and abstraction, this work questions how and where we deploy nature, desire and wonderment in our increasingly technologised lives.

Threshold

In this video, the words of a translated poem fade in and out above an abstract, moving horizon line. The animated words are set to an emotive stock music track. This work examines processes of signification. It emphasizes abstraction and disconnection as fundamental and generative operations in making meaning. Extending on post-structural and deconstructionist ideas, this work questions the signifying processes of translation and metaphor. By emphasizing the abstract qualities of a translated love poem, it questions the sites and mechanisms of signification.

Volume

In this video, words describing socially awkward conversations float around an animated cloud of gas. A cosmic stock music track accompanies the words. This work examines processes of signification. It emphasizes multiplicity and disconnection as fundamental and generative operations in making meaning. By playing with the simultaneity of internal monologues and external conversations, it draws attention to the seams, gaps and slippages that occur in signifying acts.

Outcrop

In this wall-mounted sculpture, speakers are mounted into a timber-veneered cabinet. The speakers play a dark, searching soundtrack. Also mounted on the cabinet is a photographic image of a rocky gully in the American desert. This work examines how we construct, represent and deploy notions of nature in our contemporary lives. It mixes the languages of furniture design, landscape photography and sculpture. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work questions how and where we find space for contemplation and reflection in a contemporary context increasingly defined by temporary social bonds and consumer choices.

Swell

In this video, an abstract kaleidoscopic pattern slowly morphs and changes colour. It is accompanied by a male voice performing a word association or stream-of-consciousness activity. This work examines the nature of consciousness and identity in a contemporary context. It mixes the languages of meditation, new age philosophy and pop-psychology. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work questions how and where we find space for contemplation in a contemporary context increasingly defined by temporary social bonds, consumer choices and private anxieties.

The rest flies down the wind : complexities of late style in the work of Christina Stead

Examining the late style of a writer is like skirting around quicksand. End-of-career reflection can subvert long standing critical accounts; revisionist publishing histories or newly minted archival work can do likewise. And, as Nancy J. Troy suggests, an artist’s last thoughts are rarely planned as such (15). In the case of Christina Stead any consideration of late style is made more difficult because, chronologically speaking, her ‘late’ works were written some 20 years before her death in 1983. Thus chronology can be deceptive, as Nicholas Delbanco points out in Lastingness: The Art of Old Age. Stead’s last novel, I’m Dying Laughing The Humourist, was completed, at least in rough draft form in 1966, when Stead was 64, but friends and readers suggested many changes. The book was published posthumously in 1986. Stead’s work is receiving increasing critical attention so a discussion of her ‘late style’ is important, particularly given that her fiction seems to refuse so many attempts at category-making. This perspective reveals two interesting aspects of her late work: first her consistent engagement with the problems of age for women, and in particular women writers, and second, the consequence of a life-long attention to the representation of dialogic sound in her novels, a preoccupation that results in what can be termed an aural signature. My discussion refers to Edward Said’s and Nicholas Delbanco’s ideas about late style by way of a focus on selective biographical issues and Stead’s engagement with radical politics before moving to an examination of what can be called an aural signature in several novels. Her fiction demonstrates one of the agreed markers of late style: she was constantly looking forward and looking back through innovation in form and content.

(Dia)logics of difference disability, performance and spectatorship in Liz Crow's Resistance on the Plinth

In this article I examine how artists with disabilities use public-space performance to encourage passersby to reflect on the construction of public discourses about disability – and, therefore, the construction of publics that are potentially inclusive of people with disabilities. I concentrate on British storyteller, artist, filmmaker and activist Liz Crow's Resistance on the Plinth, one of four pieces Crow has produced over the past three years as part of the Resistance series, an examination of the Nazi regime's Aktion T4 programme, which resulted in the mass murder of a quarter of a million people with disabilities. Created in August 2009 as part of Antony Gormley's One & Other public art project, the piece featured Crow dressed in a Nazi uniform and seated in a wheelchair on the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. For Crow – who creates work in a British context where public debate about the eugenics of genetic testing, euthanasia and assisted suicide is prevalent in the media – the Nazi atrocity is still rich in confronting imagery, resonant and relevant in a contemporary context. In this article, I consider the challenges that Gormley's extremely public One & Other presented for professional artists like Crow, who are committed to intervening in public perceptions of identity, community and culture. I describe the structural choices Crow made to provoke debate about the cultural logics embodied in the image she presented, and analyse some of the spectatorial responses from online forums such as the One & Other website, Facebook and Twitter immediately following the event.

Creating successful cultural Brokers : the pros and cons of a community of practice approach in arts management education

Arts managers play a critical role in creating a strong, sustainable arts and cultural sector. They operate as brokers, creating programs, and, more critically, coordinating the relationships between artists, audiences, communities, governments and sponsors required to make these programs a success. Based on study of model developed for a subject in the Master of Creative Industries (Creative Production & Arts Management) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), this paper examines the pros and cons of a “community of practice” approach in training arts management students to act as cultural brokers. It provides data on the effectiveness of a range of activities – including Position Papers, Case Studies, Masterclasses, and offline and online conversations – that can be used facilitate the peer-to-peer engagement by which students work together to build their cultural brokering skills in a community of practice. The data demonstrates that, whilst students appreciate this approach, educators must provide enough access to voices of authority – that is, to arts professionals – to establish a well-functioning community of practice, and ensure that more expert students do not become frustrated when they are unwittingly and unwillingly thrust into this role by less expert classmates. This is especially important in arts management, where classes are always diverse, due to the fact that most dedicated programs in Australia, as in the US, UK and Europe, are taught via small-scale programs at graduate level which accept applicants from a wide variety of arts and non-arts backgrounds.

Review of "Christoph Schlingensief : art without borders" edited by Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer

Christoph Schlingensief: Art Without Borders, edited by Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer, is the first English-language collection of essays about this extraordinary German artist. As Forrest and Scheer suggest in their introduction, ‘access to Schlingensief’s highly challenging productions has been hampered by the fact that very little has been published on his oeuvre in the English-speaking world’. This collection aims to introduce English-speaking artists, scholars and academics to Schlingensief’s extensive, experimental, and at times highly controversial body of work across film, theatre, television, live art and activism...