TALKING THROUGH YOUR ARTS: NOW READY TO OCCUPY
Image: Coexisting by Clark Beaumont, 2012
Instead of welcoming and enticing, some rooms don’t waste space with a real ‘entry’ and more or less dump visitors right into the living area, leaving them feeling awkward and unprepared.
The 27th Kaldor art project, 13 ROOMS is open for public viewing for 11 days, not 13. Like some kind of floating micro-nation, a foreign place where the creators prefer to focus on the differences of being human just for fun. The public bravely enter the head space of museum directors Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach’s collection of artists.
A good ‘entry’ tells that you’ve left the mad world behind for a private haven and invites the expectation of pleasures to come. Some of the domestic spaces and layouts that most affect us aren’t even rooms or sequences of them, but special micro environments. ‘Aedicula’ is the Latin word for miniature house or shrine. German based British artist Tino Sehgal constructs situations that are counterpoints between the fluid and improvised changeable aspects that say there’s something always ‘there’. His work This is New is the aedicula, or the 13th room that connects the other 12 rooms.
We like to think of ourselves as individuals, very much in charge of our own doings. However, we usually behave like customers at a shopping arcade, fans at the stadium, students in the classroom. We revert to standard operating procedure in such settings, not because these rooms make us do ‘this’ or ‘that’, rather of how we react to our habitual environment.
“If you walk into a room and you see a sculpture made out of marble or bronze you look at it one way. But if you walk into a room and see a human being who is performing an artwork you engage with it totally differently,” explains John Kaldor.
The movement of the body takes on the value of a language by which the artist communicates their message, in this case through the performers. In Marina Abramovic’s work, Luminosity, in which she herself first performed, she shifts over a space of 700 hours. An endurance work that explores spirituality, pain and the surrendering to the male. In 30 minute rotations, the nude female performers take turns at perching themselves on a monocycle seat. “It’s about the transcedental quality of the human being in general,” states Abramovic.
The idea that where you are influences who you are and what you’ll do sounds so simple that you have to go over it several times before it sinks in. What it means is that, thanks to the synergy between your accumulated experience and your environment cues, whether outgoing, aggressive or permissive you realise that your behaviour changes accordingly.
German-based artist Simon Fujiwara originally produced Future/Perfect in 2012. It features a man in a tanning bed practising the English language of business – saying familiar, but out of context phrases. “What time should I start work after lunch?” and; “Can I start a little later?” shortly followed by, “I’m having difficulty with one of my co-workers.” Escalating to, “I’m having trouble managing one of my subordinates.”
There is a creeping sense of play in some of the works including a room of toil and spin by Slovakian artist Roman Ondak, swap-performed on this occasion by Sydney actor Kirk Page. It is an improvised performative installation in which Page selects an object and anyone who enters the room has a one-time opportunity to swap an item of their own offering. Page entices bartering with those in the room for a plastic canary-coloured watch that glam rockers Twisted Sister would have been proud to sport. Plastic bank cards and a wrangling of a woman’s handbag didn’t prove to be a fair enough exchange and he didn’t ‘take it’.
“I think it’s a very new way of experiencing art, it’s the coming together of the visual and the performative but in a completely new way,” says John Kaldor.
Whether you’re a reactionary, a visionary, a prankster an egomaniac or conspiracy theorist there’s sure to be room enough here for you. (AS)
Until Apr 21, Pier 2/3 Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, free, kaldorartprojects.org.au
BY ANGELA STRETCH
