STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: WACKY STUFF EN MASSE
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, May 14, 2010.
A new project brings together artist run initiatives from across the Asia-Pacific region to create international expo of the weird and wonderful, writes Dan Rule.
Remote control smash-up derbies may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of a contemporary art fair, but then again, Hobart’s Six_a Artist Run Initiative don’t purport to perpetuate the norm.
“It’s going to be kind of noisy, kind of irritating and definitely fun,” offers Six-a’s Trick Walsh, giggling as way of punctuation. “It’s competitive, but in a fun way.”
Dubbed Super Charger, the collective’s “pavilion” as part of the Next Wave Festival’s monumental Structural Integrity event at North Melbourne’s Arts House – which commissioned 11 artist run initiatives (ARIs) from across the Australia and Asia to build structures that somehow represent their space and practice – comprises a vast cardboard and plywood “stadium of destruction” replete with a littering of abstract obstacles and a cache of hilariously modified “remote control monster truck thingies” with which audience members will be encouraged to smash and bash.
There is, however, something of an allegory amid the madness. “We just hope that people engage, basically, and that’s what we do with our gallery,” says Amanda Shone, also of Six_a. “It’s architecturally diverse and people come and they interact and it’s not so passive.”
Conceived as a response to World’s Fairs, international art biennales and other official, nationally sanctioned representations of culture and art, Structural Integrity sees independent ARIs consider their own practice and place within the international geo-cultural landscape.
“We were thinking a lot about the grand, world expositions of the 19th Century and of the Venice Biennale,” says Next Wave Artistic Program Manager Ulanda Blair, who co—curated the event with Artistic Director Jeff Khan, “which are just these grand statements coming from a very official and mainstream perspective.”
“We thought it would be fascinating to hand the idea over to grassroots artists and give them the opportunity to envisage and speak about their cultural and geographic context.”
Stretching throughout Arts House’s historic Meat Market venue, the project features works from six Australian spaces (including Melbourne’s West Space and Y3K, Adelaide’s FELTspace and Brisbane’s Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space) and five Asian ARIs (including Manilla’s Tutok, Guangzhou, China’s Vitamin Creative Space and Singapore’s Post-Museum) and spana various unconventional mediums.
House of Natural Fibre, a fluid new media collective from Jogjarkarta in Indonesia, for example, will combine audiovisual and botanical works in their installation, using ultra-violet light to grow plants and sensors to measure and harness the energy created by their growth. Sydney’s Locksmith Project Space, meanwhile, are building a travelling carnival tent on the back of a trailer they towed down the Hume to Melbourne.
While symbolic of their trek down to Melbourne for Next Wave, the tent also works to evoke the duality between Locksmith’s public and domestic qualities. “Our space has also been home to three of the four directors,” says co-director Yasmin Smith. “So I suppose it’s a reflection the idea of the public and the private. It’s an enclosed carnival tent, so the audience wont be able to enter it but there will be a kind of warm light emanating from inside.”
In an adjoining space, Masahiro Wada of Tokyo ARI Art Centre Ongoing has built a mineshaft-like structure out of materials gathered on trips around the Victoria goldfields and coastline. The work references both tradition Japanese ceremonial practices and, as Wada puts it, “the hidden materialities of the Australian landscape”.
This interface between grassroots Australian and different Asian artistic practice is one of the event’s major focuses, both on an artistic and practical level.
“We really wanted to learn a bit more about the contexts in which emerging artists from Asia are practicing, and kind of appreciate how difficult it can be for artists from some of these places, like Manilla and Jogjakarta in particular.”
Indeed, a theme that resonates throughout the clutch of ARIs involved in the project is one of resourcefulness and flexibility in the face of struggles such as meagre funding, rent hikes and censorship.
Brisbane’s Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, for example, have used timber, bricks, flooring and turf to create an “improvised building” that interlocks with an architecturally challenging back corner of the Meat Market
“It kind of reflects the nature of an ARI in many ways,” says Boxcopy co-director Raymonde Rajkowski, of the slightly wonky structure. “You can’t really escape your limitations. You have to be practical, you have to scale down ideas and just make things work.”
Phip Murray, who fronts Melbourne institution West Space – whose pavilion includes a giant smoke ring machine created by artist Scott Mitchell along with students from Brunswick Secondary College – puts it in slightly more triumphant terms.
“The project seems like a kind of great metaphor for an ARI,” she smiles. “Everyone’s getting together and kind of heroically doing all this stuff and it’s kind of dinky, kind of a bit crazy and very much against the odds.”
Structural Integrity runs at Arts House, Meat Market, 5 Blackwood Street, North Melbourne, until May 29. Entry is free.
nextwave.org.au
