▲▲Evergreen Terrace▲▲

AXIS BOLD AS LOVE
Axis Bold As Love will be showing at Le CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux from 3 October to 7 December 2008.
A Constructed World

Melbourne program curated by Evergreen Terrace
James Deutsher and Liv Barrett

BOLD AS AN AXIS OF LOVE
Love is a narrative, love is cultural. Like a language, it gathers (and abandons) details and affirms itself through reverberations of understanding. In the novel Confessions of a Yakuza, the story is narrated by Eiji. The author is a doctor who got to know the fleshed-out shape of Eiji’s life over a long period of consultations and he wrote a book from what he’d heard. There are layers of details about the seasons, industrial areas in Tokyo, rapturous cold at the threshold of Russia, friendships with men and the deciduous shavings of ‘knowledge’ that make it easy to mistake misogyny for culture. But the failure of the book is the author treats love as something as defined as the colour of a layer of paint slapped on the façade of a geisha house. He goes inside the head of Eiji, but never invests his imagination into his subject’s heart. Love, in this book, is a series of sudden affairs recalled in the first-person like someone explaining the plot of a film; it’s runaway whores and possessive mothers with white-out faces hoisted to the ceiling above knife-blades, it’s a side-story to catching and eating fleshy grasshoppers when the war has left nothing else, but it never comes across as a developed language. In life, love builds its own language over time like sulphur crusts on stone Renaissance heads that look out from the edges of hot springs.

James and I shared the front seat of a flatbed truck, making its way through city streets while I almost disappeared into the fluff of a dressing gown that smelt like years of Chanel No. 5. James was wearing a purpose-bought slim black suit and had a stereo on his long lap. A Constructed World were trailing the truck, following the banner of Increase Your Uncertainty in gothic type across the bridge over the Yarra River and to four points where we stopped and danced. A Constructed World had asked us to do this; a dance spawned from filing themselves dancing and a pair of professionals dancing in an apartment in Paris; this, converged with AC/DC’s film-clip showing the band playing the song on the back of a flatbed truck travelling down Swanston St.

Over a semi-broken Skype connection, the pixels sometimes broke away from Geoff’s face and scattered around the background. I like how they prefer to chat and aren’t just happy to send emails, how a connection with technical imperfections is better than a scripted block of text. We were talking and ACW explained that they were putting together 3 videos for a video salon at a French contemporary art space, the space had an acronym and for a month James always misplaced the C and the P.
They proposed that we collate a video reel; and had asked an artist group in Bordeaux and Guangzhou to do the same. They would be shown within the third part of their year-long project at Le CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Saisons Increase. ACW had been doing projects there since February 2008 that extend to the end of the year, divided by the split of the natural seasons.

Video, it’s essential to our construction of reality. It’s why Matt Hinkley and we wanted to place an image of the film La Haine on the poster for this video program, because it was a film that conflated personal narrative and political/social conditions to produce something that resonated with what was ‘real’ more than either one of those things on its own. Our personal narrative ties itself endlessly with projected narratives, video and text narratives, as if everything sits within wide-open spaces so that there’s room for endless continuation. France is a long way away from Melbourne and BBC news reports of burning cars in Clichy-sous-bois are not enough to deliver a sense of how these happenings exist in the context of people’s lives. Getting access to one possible narrative in this film is enough to break through the glass walls of news reports.
Reaching out across the world, video has a strong current. Putting together this program of video works that we feel addresses certain conditions of living in Melbourne and making contact outside of institutional demands, we thought about ease of movement, furious communication and the rhapsodies of extending to other people in other places. Place is something that is radically dispersed everyday; living in a heavily integrated commodity exchange that can feel fluid and rootless. Narrative seems to plait everything together, and yet narrative is driven by the production of images. Masha Tupitsyn writes about this in Beauty Talk and Monsters when her Hollywood-lusting lonely friend makes out with a poster of Tom Cruise as Maverick in Top Gun. Now there’s an election campaign going on in America and all the emphasis is on the scripting-of-things, and a candidate who calls himself Maverick and a candidate who calls himself Change.
Images travel more easily than people, so we end up with so many more ‘impressions of the world’ than a sense of lived or resolved experiences. But all of this is blown away by the intense power of film to produce reality; we come to know ourselves through movies and videos so that as well as concentrating on living we’re also orchestrating our life-narratives.
Axis Bold As Love was an invitation from ACW. We accepted it with a social spirit, the kind of spirit that made me tell a half-lie when someone was under the impression I was a professional dancer and asked me if I’d be interested in dancing on the back of a truck for them in Melbourne last year. I just thought we should do it anyway; we just wanted to be involved. Since then, they have been away from Melbourne but Skype lets us maintain late night conversations while they have just eaten lunch. A steady stream of them asking us to be involved in things and us asking them to be involved things has made the oceans between us an interesting space.

It’s coming into spring and all I want to do is waste my time in botanic gardens and parks, trying to squeeze into an image I’ve carefully formed of a smokey clarity and a shared quietude near birds and under trees. The first video on the reel was made by DAMP, an endlessly interesting project remarkable because of its combination of solidity and transience. It’s slippery and loose in its make-up but the works defy the convolution that usually comes with ‘many cooks’ and the approximately 10 often-changing members always seem to make work with a focused kind of energy. Topsy was filmed in Carlton Gardens, one of Melbourne’s lungs, a sweet place to kick or swoosh a ball. DAMP wrapped a DV camera in some padding, taped it and treated it like a ball, catching a dizzying and schizoid viewpoint. In imitating a ball, the camera imitates an object that is often used to generate an interaction when spoken language isn’t strong enough or fails us. Sport is such an organised process of shifting language, so is sex, beyond words because they can articulate better without them.
American International Group Inc. (AIG) has accepted $85 billion from the U.S Government through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Sport is powerful and currently American citizens are each paying a tiny amount to sponsor the shirts of Manchester United. If you stretch it you could say they were paying for Cristiano Ronaldo’s tan. He spent the summer recuperating an ankle injury in LA, doing slippery laps in the pool at Chateau Marmont trying to talk to girls in bikinis who think that football is played using your hands. Like Chateau Marmont’s website says, Hotels are the stuff of stories… a world unto themselves – we leave our lives behind and become who we want to be.
Hao Guo wants to resist being a machine and he sets himself into these repetitive zones of representing his body and his face in 3D animation. He looks like a trapped doll. There’s a complex reclamation going on in Hao’s work, as if he is trying to pre-empt the inevitability of becoming ‘generated’ by rendering himself as a replicant. The kind of philosophy behind Balderick in Black Adder carving his name into a bullet, because you know how they say that somewhere out there, there's a bullet with your name on it, I thought if I owned thee bullet with my name on it I'd be safe, because I'll never shoot myself... Hao’s digital depictions of himself are always smooth, with details of form but the absence of life, engaged in the mindlessness of physical perpetuality. Fall is Hao on a spinning axis, where motion is misconstrued as momentum. Where the only way to prevent the slippage from human to machine is to predict it.
Not as immediately confronting as Hao’s ‘first-person’ spinning trap, Nick Selenitsch’s spinning tops encase the duality of that kind of endless motion. The ‘games we play’ form an arch over Nick’s work. He reveals the joy that comes with futility and repetition and the potential for transcendence in repetitive and exhaustive physical activity. But there is always the potential to get caught in the trap of transfixion. The spinning tops refer to the worrying kind of movement that is constant, that denies the opportunity to stop and question. And while they may move, their very nature moves against the concept of tangible progress. Line drawings of Kevin Rudd’s face begin to obscure into a colourful blur once the top starts to spin, and clarity or communication give way to frenzied movement. As Nick spins the tops, he’s demonstrating how the message that we’re meant to ‘get’ just fades into the indiscernible mash of message-saturation. The same can be applied to art that thinks its addressing ‘issues’, when mostly its just amplifying its own noise. Like a stoned socialist watching television on the couch, the object is not really a progression towards a conceived ideal, it’s passing the time in a way that engages the outer layers of the mind.

I wonder what its like to be a rain maker 
I wonder what its like to know I made the rain
The creation of You Tube was an explosion – the real social importance of this resource was that suddenly, the kinds of videos and moving images the internet-enabled world had access to was blown right open. Before You Tube, video accessibility relied on distribution, professional people making the decision that something was worth watching before it got sent to theatres, cinemas, VHS, DVD. Now that has been stripped away and there are hundreds of clips of girls dutty-winin’ in their bedrooms with crackling dancehall playing through a stereo, girls from Trenchtown to Thomastown, unedited and unapproved. One of the streams of content on You Tube that is utterly unique to this search-based video archive include videos like More than SEXY TEEN PORN xxx wq2rx HOT HOT and sexy latina gets done real good 911 hot porn tit no plane. The thumbnails for these clips are wide-open girls, legs, mouth and willingness laid bare, and the titles are confusing collages of provocative male-hetero language. They sound like clips that got lost on their way to X Tube, but the content is montages pulling together the media-generated conspiracy of 9/11, or how the towers wouldn’t have collapsed just because they had airliners sticking out of them. One starts with a subliminal image from a horror film, I can’t remember which one, of a boy climbing a bell-tower in crisp white suit that a child would only wear if he was being buried. Another points to the skewed perspective on all the footage that the global media spewed out at that time, which they take to mean that the images were computer generated, yet they never say why or indicate what this means or how something that so many people saw with their eyes before they saw it mediated by millions of monitor pixels could have been so convincing, believable. The text in this clip is jumpy and anxious and only readable if it’s rewound, paused. 9/11 was some sort of technicolour movie straight out of Andy Warhol’s colour palette, it proclaims.

James Deutsher and Christopher LG Hill share a space in World Food, a studio on the corner of two busy streets in Melbourne. On the ground floor of the building is a shop-front that has rotated occupants with every lease cycle since World Food has been there – it’s usually a non-specific retail space with the kind of residual product lines that Guthy-Renker couldn’t quite sell out of. One day the inter-tenant newspaper came down and Roo-Boots appeared with a promotional video played on loop to sell the product. It looks like it was shot in America, but so do most generic things that pop up on screens. A guy is wearing the boots and throwing himself over SUVs; he becomes a projectile, a human catapult, shot forcefully by that strange union that happens between people and products, where the capacity of a product becomes the ambition for a person to fulfil. A few Roo-Boot bounces away from the shopfront is a camera store helping to sell its products with a goggly-eyed clown gyrating its hips and holding a spinning umbrella. There are no clues about the position of this clown or how it relates to anything. Probably a diminutive black swan.
The day that Chris and James went to shoot the footage of these mechanical in-store objects, the Roo-Boot video and the clown, the fast-paced lease turnover meant the Roo-Boots weren’t there, but the clown was still circling its hips and its umbrella intently. Knowing that just about everything is almost always available in intangible or digital forms, they found a promotional video of the Roo-Boots on You Tube and laid the footage of the tractable clown over the top. The genius though, was in discovery-by-accident – the soundtrack over the Roo-Boots clip was a soft commercial rock song that sings I wonder what its like to be a rain maker, I wonder what its like to know I made the rain. The wondrous face of a clown holding an umbrella imagining what its like to be the one who makes the rain; dreaming of being the one who forms the tiny drops of water from moisture in the clouds.

“I think the sky here is like the sky in Martha,” he said. Big. Maybe blue and sprawling filled with wet white clouds, but what are the other skies like? In Beijing we looked through a flat dense threshold that soaked up grey- some days the grey would reflect and others it would absorb up all the light offered below. At night it became a moody substance that clung to streetlamps.
Between each video is the sky – gentle pans of a photograph taken from a car as James and I drove along looking to fill up on hot noodles and MSG. The sky is a stretched-out arch, a reminder that we all lie under the same roof. Maybe the only leveller left between the splinters of the human beings. Video spreads itself much more easily now, and can live up to its claims to transmitting one side of the world to the other (except the ‘side’ of the world that lives without entertainment-luxuries). I hate those SBS ads that talk about 6 billion stories and counting. What a blanket way to dull down the richness of lived lives, untold narratives. The most interesting stories usually haven’t been transmitted through radio, video or literature, but all these things help us to build up a sense of how people want a story to be told. And looking into narrative seems to reinforce that our lives our narratives, that we must think of the outcome of the script as well as its present context. The future always threatens to unstick the present with its fear and responsibility. A slick housewife on a reality TV show says she wishes she was 23 again because she didn’t have any worries, but I’m 23 and preoccupied with worries about making sure this is a time that I want to look back on and my future is one that I sit comfortably in. I blame the vicious refractions between present self and future self that you see on TV and in movies, the way that people look back on time like it’s a collapsed cardboard box that holds nothing but its own structural debris.

Jon Campbell is not someone I associate with solemnity – James and I agree that he’s the kind of person that makes you happy that that kind of person exists. Yet Freight Train Blues is a tear-swelling video that leaves you wondering why it sucked you in and left you sad. Maybe it’s his directness; that he doesn’t shy away from the things he loves or the things that shape him that can be painted in text on tabloid-size boards. He came to mind instantly when ACW proposed the project as a response to something to do with Melbourne and what it means to live here. Jon’s an artist who has articulated his personal and familial experiences of living in Melbourne and the shared cultural signifiers of the place with paintings, neon lights, text, music, bags and sculptures. Olivia Dowling’s edit of Freight Train Blues helps to deliver the torpid tones of affection and melancholy, the reaching-out and brave articulation of the text cards and Jon’s constant stare.
Matthew Griffin plays in the band Gloss Enamel with Jon, and together they slide between the questions of what music means to art and what art means to music. And how performance binds them into one indiscernible knot. In his video Construction (making a dude trap), Matt takes on the role of copycat Unabomber, but his Unabomber seems more like the Italian Unabomber Elvo Zornitta than the American Theodore Kaczynski. Where Kaczynski outlined specific targets, individuals involved in the technological progressions that Kaczynski saw as undermining the spirit of the human race, Zornitta’s bombs were more like randomised booby-traps, welcome to anyone to activate the small explosions hidden in objects like pens and food containers. Matthew wears a long fake penis and aviator glasses, he strolls back and forth between his workshop and the woods, creating this ‘dude trap’ that never finds express articulation in its purpose or where it might go once its finished. It’s a self-obsessed game that has no parameters outside of its own creation.
Bianca Hester’s practice is largely a process-based exploration of construction – but the narrative in her work lies in our interactions with structures; how shapes can shape us, and how objects can move beyond an objectified realm. Small interventions into objects are revealed to be quite large philosophical interventions into the way we relate to the physical world. Bianca’s contribution to this video program shows her in Victoria Park in London, swinging a rope above her head, the sound of its slices building up a steady rhythm. Bianca plays in the band Paeces and In Victoria Park feels like some kind of pared back merging of her material intrigue and sonic intuition. I’ve never gotten any clarification but I’m sure Bianca is the reason that the Sculpture department at the Victorian College of the Arts became the Sculpture and Spatial Practice department!

Mikala Dwyer isn’t from Melbourne, but her presence in the city and the influence she’s had on artists here has sent out strong creative reverberations. We are a little overwhelmed being in close contact with Mikala’s work- she’s an artist who helped James and me to love art, to understand its potential to defy the dull and generic systems that subsume almost everything. I first saw one of her Hanging Gardens in the flesh at a 2005 show at Clubs Project inc. curated by Lizzie Newman, when they hung alongside text by Hu Fang, so this really was a collection of works that shook the ground I was standing on. This year, many more Hanging Gardens have been hanging in Melbourne, most recently in Common Space Private Space, an exhibition at VCA’s Margaret Lawrence Gallery curated by Rebecca Coates. Here they hang in between fluid structures that break up the space without having any fixed boundaries, only enclaves and crevices to foster close and intuitive encounters, like the ones between the audience and the clairvoyant or palm-reader that have sat underneath the draping targets and lofty plants. The video Mikala gave us for this project, Swamp Geometry was filmed at the opening of her exhibition of same name in Melbourne, that opened in July 2008; the wobbly, wailing soundtrack and swampish costumes hedge the usual social logic of the exhibition opening that sits somewhat vapidly behind these other-worldly sensations. The costumes move between the plastic vessels that hold soil and succulents; jagged horizons and evolved combinations of industrial materials and natural specimens are poetic manifestations that describe how objects are most suited to disclosing the dynamic relationship between other-worldy, neo-spiritual, psychological, human and material substances. Mikala’s work extends space, so that even when the familiar gallery context provides a backdrop to this video, we can still feel celestial shifts.
When performance in the context of art became a pretty wide-spread mode of expression, it seemed to be embedded in its own impetus to stay assertive, to be serious in the face of audiences that didn’t always know where to look. Guy Benfield’s filmed performances slip into a state of trance and lead the audience to follow. Time is slowed down to whatever consistency the action demands – the ultimate objective is so unclear and you get lost in his focus, even if it’s not really clear what you’re focusing on. Institutional Critique Boutique feels as soothing and confused as morphine – set in a public space in Shanghai with string music, the whole thing is a familiar cultural package, interrupted and enhanced by a beguiling painting performance. Guy mellifluously strokes paint from his fake beard onto the barrel, as an audience watches from a comfortable distance (in the background an Ameircan voice proclaims “It’s art!”). Not always sure where his videos are heading, the small tremors dispersed between intense stretches of concentration are a kind of performance that finds the best place in video; the editing, the decisive point where these performances begin and end, mean the whole thing remains illusive, intangible and perfectly strange.

Transportive and collaborative projects that seek solutions to the convoluted ways we live – Mick Douglas is an artist and architect of community-based social change.
Pedal Powered Vehicles Workshop documents the participatory workshops that sought to modify bicycles to make them more effective in carrying greater bulk and heavier weights, generally extending the circumstances in which we can choose to ride a bike over other methods of transport. The video is divided up into the stages of the bicycle workshop’s evolution, and with most parts of the video sped up with a soundtrack of successive popular songs laid over the top. It melts somewhere in between slapstick comedy (that seems present in any footage with a raised tempo) and documentary, as the workshop developments are communicated through text and graphics on the screen. Pedal Powered Vehicles Workshop is an optimistic embrace of problem solving, happening under a collective banner; the power of sharing knowledge over sequestering, and the flexibility of an object like a bike, that requires the flexibility of our imaginations.

Evergreen Terrace is a project gripped by its own tension of improbability. Evergreen Terrace (James Deutsher and Liv Barrett) have been working together for a long time, but as soon as we gave it a name we seemed to be more cohesive, more propelled. Through writing and reading; making objects, clothes and videos; publishing, designing and curating, we build up a shared space that always looking to others, always wants to be occupied by more than two. Evergreen001 was the first issue of a magazine title that lets us play with the mechanisms of a curatorial practice, but with an emphasis on language the materiality of publishing. Turtle and Cat is a video of messed-up psychological interactions between the two species, we sourced them all from You Tube. Beyond the manipulative strategies of the cats or the placid persistence of the turtles, the videos in combination speak of the world as full of correlatives and multiples. You Tube can undermine our own satisfaction with uniqueness or spread round a collective feeling. When signifiers are scant, I try to imagine what countries these videos are filmed in. It’s just an insatiable curiosity that comes when a camera lens lets us briefly gaze into the house of a stranger.
Living in Amsterdam now, Josh is an artist who fictionalises language through illustration; he searches for the visual possibilities in the things we say. His video Wish You Were Here (Slowly) blew us away, with the hilarious presence of the Macintosh dots while the idyllic sun is setting on some kind of Tropicana beach, somewhere, maybe Venice maybe Maui – it feels like North America as the tangerine orb looks to be dropping slowly into a sea of tequila sunrise. Josh is far away right now but the schizoid interjection of roller-jazz-funk at the end made him feel pretty close, like when sometimes we’d be sitting in the studio, his music library on shuffle and suddenly some bombastic disco pops on. Sometimes Josh would turn it off, sometimes he’d let it play right through…

A Constructed World: It is possible to live in a country and really be somewhere else.
Deleuze: Cinema produces reality.

Able to reach across a world we’ll never know the size of, video is a bold gesture. Often its gravity, its grace, gets subsumed by its total-presence and accessibility. We forget how important it is in producing realities that stretch into so many realms just by looking through a screen. The ability to transcend the small spaces we occupy in the world – it’s as bold as anything, as bold as love.

Liv Barrett for Evergreen Terrace, September 2008

Axis Bold As Love will be showing at Le CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux from 3 October to 7 December 2008.