Exhibition: NEW09, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

I was innocently contemplating footage projected onto the ceiling at NEW09, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s annual exposé of new young talent, when I got a fright.

I won’t say what caused it because that would spoil the surprise.

The work that made me jump suddenly was one example of the adventurous way the artists in this exhibition engage with the gallery space. There’s not one piece that doesn’t in some way use the space to frame and extend its own meanings.

These works set out to challenge our expectations and move us out of our comfort zones. Some of them question the very gallery system that's instantiated them, as well as the functionalism of our Western lifestyle.

But such commonalities reveal themselves gradually. New technologies and the complexities of contemporary life have spawned a huge, disparate range of practices among our younger artists. In an information-soaked world the word original seems hopelessly inappropriate, but these artists are bold, brave and not afraid to experiment with materials, modes and technologies.

The first work to confront the viewer is Justine Khamara’s ‘Dilated concentrations (Simon) (me)’. Two photographic faces, one of the artist herself and one of her brother, have been rendered as huge sculptures, blown up to many times normal size and extending out from two perpendicular walls.

These sculptures of laser-cut stainless steel appear from a distance to be startlingly lifelike but are always creatures of technology. One has its eyes squeezed tight as if comically refusing the stare of the viewer; the other’s eyes are open but seem to stare past, oblivious.

Khamara has ironically taken a two-dimensional photographic image of a three-dimensional face and rendered it three-dimensional once more. The removal of the rest of the body from these ‘portraits’ renders them other and what one critic has called ‘monstrous’. The results playfully exploit our fascination with the human face while subverting conventional expectations of the face in portraiture. Although we’re drawn to these huge faces, it’s impossible to identify with them.

In a room next to this a completely different dynamic is in play. Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s ‘Untitled from the series The doing and undoing of things’ is an installation dominated by a sculpture, suspended from the ceiling, that consists of industrialised aluminium frames. These could reference window frames or any industrialised structure or building material. Some of the frames include glass panes and some of these panes are broken.

Entrance to this room from the gallery's front entrance is blocked by two clumsily placed benches and a clear screen; meanwhile the room is also visible but inaccessible from an adjoining gallery space. I was discombobulated by this arrangement: what was I supposed to do? Was I ‘allowed’ to enter the space from the front entrance or not?

This work literally turns functionality on its side: once in the room, we look up through the frames to the ceiling and can’t help but contemplate how the industrialised built environment frames whatever we see within it. As one critic has pointed out, the status of this ‘site’ is deliberately uncertain – is it in the process of being finished, or is it already detritus? The work, it’s said, becomes a site of mourning for a more humanistic architecture and lifestyle. If so, there is an unworldly beauty here – stripped of its use function, the mass produced almost transcends its limitations.

A very different kind of challenge is enacted by Matthew Griffin’s ‘Common sense’. On three video screens arranged in a semicircle on the floor, the same interview, between the artist and the philosopher Peter Singer, is shown simultaneously (there are also interviews with other high profile figures, not seen by this reviewer).

Singer is a moral philosopher who has questioned the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s decision to buy a $45 000 000 renaissance painting while millions starve. Griffin’s work seems a straightforward attempt to deploy a public gallery in a useful way – to question the morality of spending money on art when human suffering is enormous.

But is it that straightforward? The process of following the video is uncomfortable: you have to crouch down and listen carefully above the surrounding din, while trying to watch the same interview on the three screens is at first confusing.

This disorientation has its advantages: the three screens give you different views of the same process. You become a privileged spectator, honing in on small details and expressions, reading the changing body language. You start to ponder the relation between Griffin and Singer: the artist is doing most of the talking – is he nervous? What is Singer really thinking?

It’s not so much that Griffin is downplaying the problems Singer highlights, but more that he doesn’t want his work to be mere propaganda, and he doesn’t want us, as viewers, to give up our role in the exchange between artist and viewer. He forces us to ‘work’ at experiencing the artwork apart from receiving its obvious message.

The most organic work in this exhibition – perhaps ‘fluid’ is too cliched a word – is Benjamin Armstrong’s ‘Hold everything dear I’ and ‘Hold everything dear II’, sinuous sculptures of blown glass, wax and wood. Pale, wax-covered branch shapes twine around organic glass forms, some with sexual connotations, one resembling a brain.

These are complex works that deliberately resist interpretation, and the fact that they’re aesthetically pleasing doesn’t lessen their complexity: you need time to drink them in. The delicate-looking wax forms are redolent of coral shapes and bones as well as branches, while one of the glass forms resembles a condom – another, possibly the rounded abdomen of pregnancy. Life and its origins intertwined with death perhaps, with life and death embracing each other, both part of the same process?

Marco Fusinato tries to steal the show with his huge, imposing structure, ‘Aetheric plexus’. In the tradition of artworks influenced by the movements of those viewing them, it reacts to the proximity of viewers with the effect I mentioned earlier.

Fusinato has strung up diagonal rows of spotlights on a support structure of beams in a way that references the lighting for a concert or theatrical event. But these lights demand to be the main attraction rather than playing the supporting role they normally would. They impress with an ephemeral show of strength that somehow diminishes the viewer, momentarily scaring us into a submissive stance.

Brodie Ellis’s ‘Noosphere’ features film footage projected onto the ceiling in a darkened room with an accompanying, soporific soundtrack. Shot in Burketown on the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland’s Far North, the footage features the beautiful Morning Glory cloud, an atmospheric phenomenon that takes place in the transition from the dry season to the wet season. The constantly shifting cloud formations are mesmerising and otherworldly.

Some of this exhibition doesn’t even stay in one place: be warned that Simon Yates has created two life-sized, animated robots, one male and one female, that roam freely around the gallery.

NEW09 is the latest of an annual exhibition series that ACCA holds to showcase new artists, with ACCA providing the resources for the selected artists to create and exhibit new work. It’s a great idea because it shows us what the younger generation – not always well represented by commercial galleries – is up to, and offers more adventurous and unexpected experiences than these galleries can sometimes provide.

Go along to this exhibition by all means – but perhaps leave younger kids at home!

NEW09 is on at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street Southbank, until 17 May.

Photograph: ‘Hold everything dear I’ and ‘Hold everything dear II’ by Benjamin Armstrong

Book review: Dog Boy by Eva Hornung (Text Publishing)

Books exploring the unique interactions between dogs and humans are flying off bookstore shelves – one of the most popular, Marley and Me, has become a Hollywood film starring a couple of A-listers. If aerobics was the craze of the eighties, renovating and celebrity cooking the obsessions of the nineties, then dog owning and loving would have to be the social trend of the noughties.

But most accounts focus on the ways in which dogs are little heroes who support our own struggles and help us to understand better our human selves and world. Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy is a whole other beast. While its central theme is the mutual dependence of human and dog, it explores this more profoundly than most books in the genre by asking the question: what if a human were to adapt to the world of dogs and not the other way around?

And it does so in a strong, suspense-filled narrative of many dimensions, one that creates touchable, smellable, visceral worlds that we explore through the eyes of both child and beast.

Four-year-old Romochka waits for his family in a condemned apartment in Moscow at the beginning of winter. Starving and cold, he finally leaves and walks the shabby indifferent streets. In the nick of time he meets the gentle, wise Mamochka, who leads him to her lair and adopts him into her clan.

In the gloomy, filthy basement of a ruined church he becomes one of her puppies, suckling at her teats and learning to speak an intricate language based on visual, aural and sensory cues. But even as he learns to track and mark trails and bemoans his tiny teeth and immobile ears, the human world of the nearby shanty town exerts on him an increasing fascination.

One of Hornung’s strengths here is the ease with which she blends narrative and theme. Romochka aches for some aspects of the human civilisation he has lost, but in some ways is closer to his own humanity as a member of a canine family.

Forced to live in survival mode, his human instincts and dexterity develop to a preternatural degree. And knowledge of the seasons is central to that survival: nature is never a site for contemplation but a beautiful landscape whose constant shifts must be endlessly renegotiated, and from whom Romochka is never detached:

Romochka stood in the empty lane in front of their lair and held his hands up to the white spring sky, pointing his fingers the way first leaves sprout from the buds.

Hornung shows us how human civilisation mutes our instincts. In doing this she makes a strong plea for our animal selves, as well as for the dignity and intrinsic worth of so-called animals. The novel aims to avoid sentimentalising Momochka and her family, and to sharpen our awareness of the animal world and its complex cultures: the dogs are clearly individuals with their own highly developed personalities. Hornung has said that when the human elements of the story come into play she wants them to jar – and they do.

The book is in many ways a clear-eyed account of appalling social injustice, posing an uncomfortable critique of that civilisation. In Hornung’s Moscow obscene poverty and homelessness are so institutionalised that the ‘bomzhi’ are abjected, regularly hauled off like so much rubbish by the compassion-free militzia, their shanty towns destroyed, to keep the streets ‘clean’.

The contemptuous attitudes of officials to both homeless adults and what is a lost generation of children might in other hands read like didacticism, and Hornung has actively protested the plight of refugees in Australia, as well as dealt with the theme in her work. But here she is a recording angel, refusing to condemn. However, it’s impossible not to contrast this social disintegration with the unstinting love of Mamochka, who rules her lair with an iron paw in a hairy glove, and at a crucial time provides a priceless gift for her adopted son.

Another of Hornung’s strengths is the deftness with which she handles the fantasy elements of the novel. Hornung has said that the initial idea came from a true story of a boy in Moscow living with dogs for two years, and she has also drawn on the myth of Romulus and Remus. For this reader at least, traces of other fairytales waft lightly through the narrative.

But these elements rarely take over its trenchant realism; instead, Hornung deepens our understanding of reality by asking us to incorporate the mythic and fantastic into it. Her two scientist characters, Natalya and Dmitry, while well-meaning, are stymied by their scientific training in their attempts to understand Romochka.

Indeed the book’s realism has been acclaimed by critics, and rightly so. Hornung’s Moscow is vividly realised, a place where the metro system’s vast underground caverns are stashed with the city's multitudes, where ruthless begging rings impose their own hierarchies and feral children fiercely guard their territories. Hornung learned Russian and visited Moscow in order to fully enter the world she was creating, and this intimate knowledge is evident in the grittiness of the writing.

The book is also packed with narrative drive, all the more dexterous given that there is very little dialogue in the first half. Hornung skillfully describes the intricacies of wordless communication, and the regimented, precarious, ever-changing nature of life as a clan dog in the city. Romochka has countless adventures and misadventures that provide insights into the underground social structures of a post-communist megalopolis.

The novel is solidly grounded in research on dog and human behaviour, but Hornung ably demonstrates how important imagination is in reaching another kind of truth. The interactions she imagines between Romochka and his adopted family are always beautifully embodied, earthed in Romochka’s need for warmth, food and love:

After a while his hands warmed up and he reached for her damp belly and stroked her with his fingers as he drank … She sighed and laid down her head.

And indeed, if were to use our imaginations more, wouldn’t we feel greater compassion for both humans and animals?

The questions Hornung asks in this novel are not meant to comfort but to prod. Does our abjection of animals enable our oppression of other humans? Are we really more savage than the beasts? What have we lost in forming our identities against our conceptions of the animal world? And how might the world change if we chose to engage in that liminal space that so fascinates Hornung, ‘the hour between dog and wolf’?

Exhibition: Sweet Spot

Elizabeth Pulie
Untitled (2 Massive flowers) 2008
synthetic polymer paint, oil stick on canvas
120 x 100 cm
© Courtesy the artist

To go to an exhibition of modern art is to inevitably encounter works that comment about art and its purposes. It's also a commonplace that artists these days talk to other artists rather than to a broader audience. But these trends are not a bad thing at all if the conversation is interesting enough to eavesdrop on.

Sweet Spot, an exhibition currently at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Parkville, reveals the work of six artists concerned with the meanings and aesthestics of ornamentation. All the artists are interested in how art looks and feels, enabling the viewer to experience their work on different levels.

Elizabeth Pulie uses ornamentation to confound the distinctions between the abstract and the figurative, the 'real' and the imagined. The shapes and patterns in her work are hugely vibrant yet they draw on motifs recognisable from the domestic world of sewing and embroidery, as well as patterns of dots sometimes reminiscent of Indigenous art. Her works provide a sensory experience that is above all enjoyable.

The fluid, sometimes floral shapes are often not recognisable as 'nature' yet they pulse with life and movement. The works play with shape and perspective, and the use of colour is adventurous, in pleasing combinations that hint at 'vintage' colour schemes.

'Show', for example, rendered in gouache and pencil, includes eye motifs that remind the viewer of buttons and lace patterns, but the overall image suggests a kaleidoscopic view that is constantly shifting.

'Signature painting' is reminiscent of a sophisticated, avant-garde patchwork quilt. Shapes with floral patterns could be pieces of material while other markings reference stitching. The floral shapes are marked out by curved lines, one of them with markings that suggest a tape measure. The pale colour scheme is soothing and the overall effect one of aesthetic pleasure.

In a very different way, Canberra artist Marie Hegarty's work also plays with the border between the abstract and the figurative. Her large canvases are dominated by huge, cartoon-like forms that loosely suggest body parts and are defined with bold fields of flat colour, particularly black, shades of red and pastel colours. These organic forms also create the illusion that the work is three dimensional. They're visually very striking, suggesting that they are still becoming, yet to fully define themselves.

The work of the late Neil Roberts offers unadulterated pleasure. In a series of five sculptures that could be seen as a nod to Art Nouveau, he uses leadlight to uncover an unexpected grace and beauty in the movements of two competing boxers devoid of faces, the movement of their bodies marking out an ever-changing space between them.

The leadlight's black against the gallery's white wall creates a lacelike delicacy and beauty. This contrasts with the subject and the pugilistic titles of these works, for example 'Crossguard to the left', 'A foul pivot' and 'Left hand blow for the head'.

Opulence, excess and sexual desire are all evoked in the oversized jewellery sculptures of Melbourne artist Kevin Maritz. Giant necklaces made from aluminium, timber and steel hang from 'hooks' made of, in one case, decorative bowls that resemble breasts and in others coils that suggest genitalia, evoking the bodies that jewellery such as this is supposed to adorn. The seductiveness of these pieces hints at the way in which human sexuality festishises objects -- the association between the object and the body may seem contingent, yet it's nevertheless evident in the languid luxuriousness of these 'necklaces'.

Peter Kennedy's gumtrees, using watercolour, gouache, charcoal and pastel on paper, take the tree out of art history and into the present, removing it from its expected context and rendering it astonishing. Each of the works features one tree in black and white that suggests a photographic negative. The trees are surrounded by wild brushstrokes in unexpected colours, further defamiliarising them. This technique highlights the inherent beauty of their twisted limbs and their individual differences.

The works of Adrienne Gaha, a Sydney artist who lives in London, are the only in the exhibition that directly eschew beauty. Gaha comments on the Rococo tradition by superimposing figures from modern popular culture on images from the work of Francois Boucher, a celebrated Rococo artist whose works present idyllic, highly idealised scenes that have been described as superficial.

I didn't warm to these works but perhaps I wasn't supposed to. The disruption of 'high art' beauty by 'low art' popular culture questions the greater worth attributed to the former -- perhaps the sometimes ugly modern images are psychologically more cognisant of the range of human emotions and motivations than is the limited elegance of Boucher's work. Gaha suggests that some forms of aestheticism may come at a cost!

In a less overtly disruptive way, Tony Clark re-imagines classical and renaissance figuration, rendering it painterly and deliberately widening the gap between representation and 'reality'.

His 'Putto night' and 'Putto day' feature renaissance putti (decorative images of young children) from the Medici chapel, while 'Standing 2008' shows a naked male figure from the the Portland Vase, a 1st century Roman glass vase made famous in the 18th century.

The unusual and dramatic colourations and deliberate sense of the works being 'unfinished' (broad brushstrokes and visible drips of paint) undercut the traditions the original figures evoke. They force us to see the figures as a function of the act of painting rather than as being in any way lifelike. But it is difficult to generalise about the effects of this practice -- the putti seem less lifelike, the standing male figure more alive and dynamic, reminding me of the 1954 oil painting of Frank O'Hara by Larry Rivers, in which the poet strikes a quasi-classical pose.

Sweet Spot is at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 800 Swanston St (between Faraday and Elgin streets) Parkville, until 24 May.

Book review: Addition by Toni Jordan

It’s not easy reviewing a fiction work, from a first-time author, that has received more hype than this year’s Booker winner. There are two main fears: that the temptation to pan the book will be overwhelming; and that it will be impossible to find anything original to say about it. Luckily, Tori Jordan’s Addition elicited neither response.

Jordan, a Melburnian who has science qualifications and is a veteran of RMIT’s Professional Editing and Writing course, has seemingly burst onto the literary scene out of the blue, with a short story her only previously published fiction. She’s penned a novel that is funny, deft, assured and has a believable, likeable heroine with a complex inner life. There are weaknesses in the novel, but it’s still a scintillating, emotionally intelligent read.


Addition has been hugely successful: at least 10 other countries, including the USA and the UK, are publishing it or have already. ‘Literary sensation’ is probably no exaggeration, and you can almost hear the weary sighs of a thousand unpublished writers as they read of Jordan’s success and send out yet another unsolicited manuscript.

The book is structured by a love story and this, as well as its original, ironic wit, which stems from Grace’s individuality, means that a few critics have placed it in the ‘chick lit’ genre. Indeed, it cleverly slots into the genre while effortlessly moving beyond its normal limits and into the realm of literary fiction – it’s published in Australia by Text, after all. (I hate the term ‘chick lit’ because I abhor the word ‘chick’ as a description of women, but there’s no other word for this type of book.)

Grace Vandenburg, the novel’s narrator, is a 30-something former teacher who lives in a leafy Melbourne suburb and has an unusual form of obsessive compulsive disorder. Her reclusive life revolves around counting. Everything in her confined world must be calibrated or it will descend into chaos: the steps she takes from bed to bathroom in the mornings, the brushstrokes it takes to brush her teeth, the beans she buys each week at the supermarket, the bites it takes to eat the orange cake she buys from the same café every day.

She’s constructed a rigid routine that enables her to function in a limited way and keeps her shielded from the world. A lover of numbers and the order they reveal, she revels in her obsession and channels her emotional frustration into an adoration of a brilliant, long-dead inventor.

And then she meets Seamus, a football-loving Irishman with blond hair and a charming smile, and her secure little world is soon under threat. As the love story unfolds, we gradually learn the facts of Grace’s past, both recent and otherwise.

Grace is a beautifully realised character, and her ironic take on life means that on almost every page there’s some witticism, vivid image or detail that often is also wise: ‘If someone can be unexpected using words imagine how thrilling they could be using their mouth. Or their tongue. Or their teeth.’ ‘How could I have a wart on my foot? Do they come in the mail?’ ‘Stillness races through my veins instead of blood.’ ‘The numbers scattered from my fingertips and ran across the floor.’

The novel is also filled with interesting and sometimes amusing facts about numbers. And Jordan writes a mean sex scene, managing to combine earthiness with intense eroticism.

It’s a truism of literary fiction that a successful writer makes us believe in the world they have created. Grace herself is eminently believable and her world is rich with back story. Indeed, one of the novel's main strengths is that it humanises mental illness so beautifully, yet refuses to completely separate the individual from the disorder in the way that modern psychiatry seeks to do. Grace's love of counting is bound up with who she is

On the minus side, the character of Seamus sometimes seems a tad unfilled-in. I also found some of the set-up of the love story unlikely, while perfectly suited to a ‘chick lit’ novel – the one instance where the competing genres collide with rather than complement each other, although the very unlikelihood of the set-up is probably also a drawcard in this particular market.

The one aspect of the novel I had significant argument with was its portrayal of the mental health system. I think the problem here is that this section of the novel is played for laughs.

There’s a therapy group whose chirpy facilitator seems underqualified to say the least, participants who come across as sets of symptoms rather than people, and a psychiatrist whose skill or otherwise beyond the prescribing of medication is never explored. And credibility is stretched when we read about the extreme effects of Grace’s medication – why doesn’t the psychiatrist simply adjust it when she brings the issue up with him? Jordan may well have researched this area but if so her conclusions felt superficial to me.

But to its credit the main point of the story is to destroy the dichotomy between mental health and sanity. Seamus and Grace – and the reader – learn a lesson about the preciousness of individual quirks. As much as anything, the book is a protest against normalisation and a hymn to the perfection of imperfection, the uniqueness and brilliance of each human being. Jordan’s skill is that she manages to make this point without minimising the pain that Grace’s obsession sometimes causes her. The journey towards the book’s conclusion is therefore mostly a poignant, gripping ride.

Verdict: funny, vivid, absorbing