Brown’s Cows’ 2007 Click Here happenings in Gosford, the Space Between and Buy Nothing, Get one Free, juxtaposed immateriality of poetry presented as ephemeral illuminated text (light) with the physicality of performed experience (the Body). With this in mind, the installation “Projections” by Jenny Holzer, currently at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, has particular resonance.
In this work text images of lines of poetry are projected from opposite ends of the gallery, flooding the space with poetic illumination. Giant beanbags on the floor anchor people to their physical presence and accentuate discrepancies in scale.
Following the last post on BP which posited Gosford ‘crater’ as a gallery to flood with the poetry of art actions and forms, Holzer’s installation provides a useful metaphor for a way that art might function in relation to the material world, constantly devising and refining a meta-text to succinctly clarify our contemporary “being, doing and becoming”. (As well as being an impressive work in itself).
Art seems to have amnesia for the immediate past and reinvents styles from twenty or so years previous, erasing the intervening forms and practices of artists as the industry pushes to champion "new emerging talent" in the market place. Urs Fisher’s work in the last post immediately recalls Gordon Matta Clark, Richard Long, Robert Smithson and others.
An installation Shibboleth 2007 at the Tate Modern by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo shares the same pedigree, and like Holzer and Fisher the artist has chosen the ‘Art’ space as referent context for meaning.
It might seem perverse, but the element of risk in the works is appealing. Is it a return to the Sublime or simply a reaction to our increasingly designed, controlled and sanitized environment and a desire for authenticity?
It could be argued that the current fad for art performances and installations that restage significant historical events, despite their essentially ironic positioning, also engage this desire.
An example of this form some of you might have seen was the reenactment at Artspace Sydney of Joseph Beuys’ “Coyote” (I like America and America Likes Me, 1974) by English artist Andre Stitt and a dingo.
Andre is interested in doing some work in Gosford with his group from Cardiff in 2009, so perhaps we can talk to him about it then.
Reenactments and projections from Click Here are scheduled for the tent in the Park in March.
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