Further reflections on Melbourne Now.
The love/hate affair contemporary artists have with art museums has seen many mood swings. In the agitprop 70s museums were either cast as white cubes in which all kinds of transgressive games could be played without intrusion or distraction from the outside world. The term ‘hermetically sealed’ comes to mind. Others may think of hot houses. Then there was the museum-as-citadel model to be attacked by any social-activist artist worth his/her salt. As an agent of capitalist/political hegemony, look no further.
Nowadays it’s harder to hate art museums because they are so friendly. Look at the public programming associated with the exhibition project Melbourne Now. Walk into the NGV International foyer and there’s a table tennis game in action. Children are strutting their stuff on the McBride Charles Ryan Community Hall installation. This long list of participatory options includes pimp my shoe and you too can be a jeweller activities.
What is of particular interest with how this shift in thinking about the museum as site of engagement is redefining modes of art practice centered on the art museum as a thing in itself rather than a neutral space which ’houses’ art. Two works; Clare Rae’s Untitled, 2013, stop-motion animation video and the Helen Grogan/Shelley Lasica/Anne-Marie May video choreograph video INSIDE VIANNE AGAIN, 2013 directly engage with the NGV as a physical and imaginative space. Both employ mind games and reward close attention by sensitising the viewer to the possibilities of things. Rae’s performer, clambering around on tour guide stools and pullout painting racks like a tremulous parkour wannabe is an open-ended metaphor for anxieties and frustrations which perhaps only those in the belly of the museum beast can know.
I really liked the deftness with which INSIDE VIANNE AGAIN takes the viewer through time, but remains grounded within a very specific, physical space within the gallery. Impinging is a word that comes to mind. And both works celebrate movement and dance, another kind of dynamic which informs much of the MN project.
A different kind of engagement, maybe interrogation, can be found in Stephen Bram’s installation Level 3 E29, NGV, 2013. It’s a Kurt Schwitters Merzbau-like cluster of angled shapes which invites viewers to step into another world; except all angles reference the building’s own morphology. It’s an idea which has been around since Don Judd but it’s still cool. Like stepping into a conceptual ice cave. Raafat Ishak’s works take graphic depictions of the NGV’s interior spaces as starting points then extrapolates into abstracted designs which take their compass bearings from Malevich’s 1915 Black square and other sources.
A different kind of dialogue with site is evident in Patrick Pound’s The gallery of air, 2013 and The Telepathy Project (Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples) Dreaming the collection, 2013. Both require the viewer to consider the taxonomies and display of collections. Pound pushes the pursuit of the ideal category to an absurd inconclusion. The Telepathy Project’s installation is informed by an art practice centered on the act of dreaming as a shared consciousness. On this basis these Dreaming the collection works (from the NGV’s collection) will never be seen in each other’s company again. What a dreamy way to envisage the endless possibilities of the museum hang. No wonder Clare Rae’s anxious museum professional is finding it hard to settle.
Melbourne Now continues at NGV International and NGV Australia until March 23.
Images:
1. Stephen BRAM born Australia 1961 Level 3, E29, NGV 2013 painted plasterboard, steel, pine, lights 480.0 x 750.0 x 450.0 cm Courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney The commission for Melbourne Now is supported by the Michael and Andrew Buxton Foundation
2. McBride Charles Ryan Community Hall 2013 Supported by Higgins Coatings © McBride Charles Ryan Architects: photo Peter Bennetts
