Referential Juxtapocombinations

Soda_Jerk

Astro Black: A History of Hip Hop (Episode 1), 2007

Digital video

Courtesy the artists

After The Artswipe's regional tour of Orange Juice County (see previous post) I have been compelled to return to my urban roots and examine what’s hot in the neighbourhood. There's so much on - such great stuff I've seen - but the focus of this review will be this year's Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was curated by Hannah Matthews. Usually this little love-in of work by Australian artists under the age of 35 is a hit and miss affair. But this year it shone, if only for the inclusion of the Sydney contingent made up of two artist "entities" for want of a better term: Soda_Jerk (previously reviewed at The Artswipe here) and Ms & Mr (previously reviewed at The Artswipe here).

Soda_Jerk (AKA Dan & Dominique Angeloro) presented episodes 0-2 of their remix readymade video series – Astro Black: A History of Hip Hop. Soda_Jerk shine because they expertly and unpretentiously mine z-grade movie archives looking for samples that will form new-fangled narratives when reassembled in always inspired juxtapocombinations - I coined this word in dedication to Soda_Jerk. Using the audio language of remix, but supplanting it in both audio and visual terms, Soda_Jerk snub new media convergence rubbish for a good old fashioned VHS love-in. I just hope Soda_Jerk are on good terms with the manager at their local Blockbuster, because surely it is here where they are most at home, indeed it must be the temple at which they worship. You can hear their squabbles: "Dan! How the fuck did we wrack up $237 in late fees?" "Dom, I've told you once, I've told you a million times: REWIND!"

Unlike Soda_Jerk, who are a sister combo, Ms & Mr are a husband and wife team (Richard & Stephanie nova Milne). Soda_Jerk never reference their real selves in their work because, well they haven’t been in movies that could be sampled (unless they are hiding this from us). In contrast Ms & Mr are child actors, who performed ad-nauseum for their own family home movies. They either had a very patient family or totally controlling stage mothers who would make them perform... OR ELSE! As adults Ms & Mr decided the best way to pursue an art practice was to turn these little home movies into spooky sci-fi video installations that explore the idea that Ms & Mr have always been together, forever and always and in every time zone, including daylight savings. If not for their goosebumply - I coined this word in dedication to Ms & Mr – Primavera installation, another reason to like Ms & Mr is because unlike almost everyone I know in the artworld (and I know everyone), they are totally married. I thought no one got married into that heteropatriarchalnormative framework anymore. Wonder what will happen when they have a kid – will they become Ms & Mr & Jr?

Soda_Jerk quote movies. Ms & Mr quote themselves. Melbourne artist Danielle Freakley quotes, well everything because she's obviously greedy. True to her surname, Freakley performs "freak-like" as The Quote Generator – a woman with dark frizzy hair (it may be her own) and who only speaks in pop culture quotes. Unless you fact-check everything she says (and frankly, who has the time) you have to accept that she's not making this shit up. And really, having a conversation with her must be the equivalent of stabbing yourself in the eye. But good for her, there is a real art to annoying the hell out of people. Speaking personally, I believe Freakley has stolen my thunder because The Artswipe has always seen the world in quotation marks. I’m a very rigorous referencer. If I could fuck a footnote I would. Certainly, Freakley’s work has great potential – it is an endurance performance par excellence, excuse the French, but really it has no visuality to speak of, rendering it a limp, ill-considered and visually boring installation encountered upon entering the MCA’s main entrance.

That’s all I have to say about the 2008 Primavera because - I hate to admit it - I never made it to level 2. Recently I developed a rare allergy to stairs.

Group Mentality

The Kingpins
Sydney Infinity, 2005
Courtesy the artists and Kaliman Gallery

Solo shows have become group affairs! Artistic collaboration is no new thing, but why is it such a hot thing in the Australian art scene right now to accelerate your profile by forming an artist duo or group? It seems you get instant attention if you actually bear more resemblance to some kind of parallel universe Australian Idol act bearing a really ironic name and doing the circus clown routine absolutely everywhere including the gallery space. The Kingpins, soda_jerk, Ms & Mr, Gossip Pop, the Motel Sisters, Wild Boys, and probably others I've forgotten about, all comprise the phenomenal proliferation of artist groups in the contemporary Australian art scene. And while she is a solo act, Danielle Freakley's project Artist Running Space (where she pretends to be a human gallery by exhibiting other artists' work on her white-cube-for-a-head) may as well be a group act because there's always her performance adorned by someone else's images. Actually that's given me an idea: maybe artist Simon Barney should become his mobile Briefcase space, and to view the art he would open up like that McDonalds advert where children hatch out of their parents Babooshka Doll style in search of the perfect Meal Deal.

I'll admit, these bright young group things make great work for the most part and shake up the often staid state of the arts. But my cynical side often wonders if art today needs this kind of glossy hook in order to make an impact, or at the very least, get some crowd-pleasing attention. I'm all for the dismantling of the high/low binary which once claimed art as elite and pop culture as its inbred cousin. Art today is another form of pop culture, even if it is unremarkable for a mostly disinterested mass audience. Certainly, the engineering of the art star is testament to such celebrity-invested phenomena that sees art as 'the new entertainment.' What bothers me is that while this trend of the artist group has produced some interesting and/or entertaining artwork I fear that critical art culture has suffered a bit of a dumbing down. Just because a catalogue essay might herald the work in Baudrillardian or McLuhanesque terms doesn't mean the work's gonna be that hot next year. And while postmodern culture is specifically manufactured around its very impermanence, I don't really think the current crop of performative art groups popping up have thought too hard about when, where or how their deaths will be staged. Rather, their deaths may happen the hard way: through failed comebacks, where their work may one day forlornly line the bargain bins of the commercial galleries that once clamoured to represent them.

→ ↑ → perform at George Patton Gallery, Melbourne, 1980.
Photo by Judy Annear and sourced from Darren Tofts' Fibreculture essay

For all the fun to be had by this new wave of art/pop or pop/art stars, we must never forget that → ↑ → (pronounced 'tsk tsk tsk') was probably the best art pop group to have emerged in Australia. → ↑ → paved the way for the kinds of experimental, performative and ‘hybrid’ multimedia works featured ad nauseum in galleries and museums today. Thankfully the Kingpins know to honour their 'artcestors.' In the recent issue of Photofile (77, Autumn 2006) the Kingpins interview Philip Brophy, the Melbourne artist who formed → ↑ → in the late 1970s and who has since carved out an impressive body of work as a solo artist making film, video, sound, design and scholarly commentary. The article is illustrated with a glossy production still where Brophy and the Kingpins pose pirate-style in a pop combo called 30 BMP. Inspired inter-generational post-pop art perhaps?

Whatever it is, we shouldn't forget that Brophy, in an earlier issue of Photofile (74 Winter 2005) claimed: "An artist using a pop song in video art is like anyone either enrolling in a DJ course or wearing an iPod in public: TRAGIC."

Funny that, because without pop songs some of the Kingpins' videos just wouldn't work. And as for Brophy's Evaporated Music – well it is entirely based on deconstructing the sonic elements of a few TRAGIC pop music videos! If we took the pop songs out of a lot of recent art all that would remain is some weird kind of out-take or blooper reel found in the Special Features section of a DVD that doesn't exist but is called Untitled (Very Cindy Sherman).