What Happens Now?

I spent each Saturday between the ages of 12 and 18 at the Vic Market. It was here that I discovered food pretty much, formed an idea of the person I might be when I grew up observing other shoppers while I waited with a second hand copy of a James Balwin novel in my hand, boxes of fruit and vegetables at my feet, for my parents to return with the car. 

For this very personal reason I'd been following the development of the City of Melbourne public art commission event, What Happens Now? closely.

In June the organisers were hosting a 10 day "lab" with the shortlisted 14 artists who had been whittled down from 150. The warehouse location at the edge of the Queen Victoria Market site was facilitated by a team spearheaded by Lab curator Natalie King, UK Public Art champion Claire Doherty and ideas man David Cross along with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, historian Robyn Annear and artist Veronica Kent. This approach, designed to challenge existing approaches to commissioning public art, focused on engaging the artists in the stories, histories, materials and sounds of the Queen Victoria Market site by way of 'Triggers and Provocateurs'. If that sounds worrying, the artists I heard interviewed on RN's Books and Arts were surprisingly exhilarated. They obviously didn't mind having to dance for their supper.

Curators and arts bureaucrats like to talk about public art as 'activating' spaces, arguing that that artists and artwork contribute to creating new understandings and new ways of seeing. Those not familiar with the Vic Market might not appreciate how 'activated' it is by its everyday economic activity and exchange.  It is a vast sprawling collection of sheds, halls, stalls, stuff, smells and noise where produce, product and sellers exchange goods for money with the public. This is a place with a lot going on. Just ambling along, even without a shopping list, can be intense. What happens when you come across art in this context? I was curious to find out.

What Happens Now? largely features works by artists engaged in a practice that is participatory. Immediately this makes sense. Of course, it's a market.  

Hiromi Tango's textile work titled Wrapped that combines ideas about brain health and yarn into performance workshops that on the final day included musician Dylan Martorell and dancer Benjamin Hancock (on the day that I visited the work rested like a sleeping dragon on trestle tables), Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine's stop-motion animation screening amongst metal storage boxes while the artists recreate and sell market wares in miniature along side. And at Over Obelisk, a response to the John Batman monument by SIBLING, the duo have created a complex mobile hoarding that encases and frames the original monument in a variety of ways to 'reveal its contested histories'. 

I didn't get to everything. There was a wait for viewing and participating in the biennials most intriguing work, A Centre for Everything by Gabrielle de Vietri and Will Foster. This hands-on guided tour took the hand gestures and cultural codes used by stall holders to communicate with each other as its starting point. I was immediately drawn to the sight of drawings of hands pinned to a makeshift partition. It reminded me of the cartoon portraitists that plied their trade in the halls.

A bit tuckered out I passed Field Theory, a fruit box clad van broadcasting non-stop radio for 9000 minutes. No one was going home there. They were bunkered in for the duration of the biennial. Like kids on school camp they were pretty lively. By mimicking the colour and matching the noise level of its surroundings Field Theory worked on the principle of amplification. And it worked. I literally felt my mood lift.

Back in my car, I was glad to be out of the wind. I felt glad to have visited. I hadn't known it two hours earlier but quite possibly I was parked on an unmarked indigenous grave, a disturbing discovery thanks to Steven Rhall's subtle, formally complex work in M Shed. Why didn't I know that? It's easy to feel sceptical of the rhetoric of contemporary art and yet events like this can produce moments and insights like that. 

Image: Anna Zagala and Katrina Raymond viewing the sweet, sad Out In The Open by Isobel Knwles and Van Sowerwine. Photo by Bryony Jackson.

What Happens Now?
Public Art Melbourne Biennial Lab
17-23 October 2016
Queen Victoria Market

Michelle Nikou: aeiou

How is it that some exhibitions disarm you from the outset? Michelle Nikou’s survey exhibition, a e i o u, had this beguiling effect. Not familiar with the artist or her work, it was an encounter without preconceptions. Nikou’s unabashed curiosity for the world of objects, internal psychological states, alchemy and transformation was matched by my own. I wanted to know about her cultural background, age, life experience which is to say the work and exhibition intrigues, even possessing a surprising and unexpected quality.

No doubt this had something to do with the gallery space itself. The celebrated former home of John and Sunday Reed is a modern architectural masterpiece. As a repurposed gallery space it retains the structural qualities of a mid 20th century house: a combination of small rooms with garden outlooks, tight little corridors finishing in cul de sac spaces and an austere but light filled living room. Viewing artwork in this space is a different proposition to the model of the white cube space located next door and elsewhere. For a start it’s not possible to scan the room and get the exhibition’s measure. The experience is more like a series of close encounters. And while the building is not home-y by any stretch it’s nevertheless unmistakably domestic.

This seems important somehow since Nikou’s work draws on the inanimate objects from everyday life, though in Nikou’s multidisciplinary art practice the detritus of domestic life – food, food trays, laundry baskets, clothes, tissue boxes, spoons, buttons, and handkerchiefs – have been either literally recast or repurposed in ways that imbue them with a uncanny quality. 

Take three steps and you are literally upon a cabinet in which 13 spoons Spoons (2000) are arranged like crusty museum relics. Recast in lead they contain the shape of food stuffs, or is it cotton wool? Regardless, their arrangement possess a neat seriality totally at odds with their feralness.

Nearby a row of five cast cubed shapes reveal themselves, on close inspection, to be a series of propped up cast bronze tissue boxes Untitled (2001). The boxes perforated lids are similarly recast and appear framed like matching puzzle pieces.

This work, like many others in the exhibition, engages in juxtaposition: domestic and industrial idioms say, in which a laundry basket is interwoven with neon, or the material, reimagining something disposable such as a cardboard tissue box as a durable metal object. The juxtaposition contains a tremulous emotion, grief, sadness, melancholy. 

Pop art and its interest in popular and consumer culture, as well as Surrealism, the avant-garde movement which sought to uncover the irrational and unconscious mind, hover at the edges of Nikou’s work. But its seriocomic quality, its oftentimes pared back monochromatic palette, and its existential longing – seems very rooted in a middle-European tradition.

Objects, letter forms and faces, appear and reappear in Nikou’s practice in a kind of personal symbology that imbues them with a unsettling psychology. Eggs, for instance, appear in different iterations: cracked and dripping as sculptures mounted to the wall and whole as an photographic element in an etching elsewhere. While it’s tempting to read into them metaphoric meaning – say about the origins of life for instance – the prevalence of food (and food containers) situates the work, on the one hand, in a more prosaic realm and on the other hand in a broader discourse around consumption, issues of sustainability and humanity’s capacity for survival. None of this struck me until much later.

Last week in Heide II I was simply wowed by Nikou’s technical and conceptual flair and strangely enthralled by her capacity to convey feeling through materials, and the artworks ability to capture – though how I’m not even certain – some essential quality of time, the expanding and contracting duration of life, no less.

Michelle Nikou - aeiou
23 April - 28 August 2016
Heide Museum of Modern Art,  7 Templestowe Rd, Victoria 3105 

Image: Christian Capurro. Read an edited version on the Artlink website.