Many of those included were unsentimental and unexpected, with Maguire’s nomination of Mohammed Ali’s “me – we” as an expression of universal love and the possibility of community connection, making the point that quality love poems are not sugar coated. The inclusion of poetry, historical and contemporary, showed the changing nature of love across the centuries.

A shift in the contemporary approach to love and the associated social mores also speaks to Jay Younger’s exhibition, shown last year at Logan Art Gallery. Her Logan Hypno Grind set out to explore the contemporary understanding of love and marriage with interviews from both the local Logan demographic and her Queensland College of Art colleagues and friends. These were juxtaposed with romantic depictions from old movies, seductive in their fantastic elements, overhyped musical tracks and rose tinted light.[i]

Younger’s installations often incorporate unusual elements – regular props are concrete mixers and sugar. This time the mixers are coated in and mix sugar, are suspended from the ceiling and vibrate, with an uncomfortably loud grind dominating the darkened space.

Screens inside the mixers’ open, vulnerable mouths played Younger’s interviews over a sea of moving sugar. One screened stories from individuals who had either proposed marriage or been proposed to. The other related stories from those who had had neither of these experiences. The solidity and functionality of concrete contrasted with the intrinsically fragile nature of relationships and marriage.

The old movies played on a loop on the back wall. Younger put together a composite video of dated classics like Gone With the Wind, From Here to Eternity and Moonlight Bay, and within them vignettes of high drama selected for the climactic clinch and kiss and marriage proposal moments, powerfully evoking the smoke and mirrors intrinsic to old-style romance.  The formality and choreographed drama of these historical depictions of relationships provided a marked contrast to the casual informality of the contemporary discussion being screened in the mixers.

The flux of sugar under the image of the faces was mesmerizing, as was the subject matter from Younger’s interviews. Romance is hard-wired into humanity yet the unsentimental dispassion which many of the ‘never proposed to or proposed’ individuals evoked conveyed a harrowing sense of the alienation possible in modern society. Others clearly wanted to believe. The intense interest shown, in broader society, in the fairytale marriage of William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge provided a subtext.

Also expressed in the contemporary material was a strong resistance to ceremony, an interest in having a relationship without traditional strictures, and their divergent hopes and realities, with ‘idealised’ romance in the old movies seen variously with horror and envy. An economy of approach to life expressed the big wedding as gross overconsumption.

Watching people speak about intimate matters transformed the viewer into voyeur, a sense heightened by the darkened room, pink lighting and the strong shadows from the light outside the door. The positioning of the mixers meant the viewer’s back was to the entry – the noise meant it was impossible to hear others enter the room, adding to the illicit nature of listening in to these private matters.

From climactic violins to the grating of the mixer, Younger challenged the traditions and contemporary realities of relationships within this installation as a gritty manifestation of modern love. Tightly expressed and pithy in its construction, it treated the stories offered with care, injecting reality into fantasy with an effective capture of the slippery nature of the real amidst the prosaic nature of reality. http://jayyounger.com/?portfolio=logan-hypno-grind“>

Jay Younger: Logan Hypno Grind, Logan Art Gallery,

10 August to 17 September 2011.

This detail reflects, on the shiny two-pack surface of the artwork, the traffic and busyness outside in Cleveland's Bloomfield Street

“Signs of Life: Text-based Artworks by Alan James” includes the artwork pictured above, which sums up many of the early lessons delivered by 2012. Called “Mindfulness 101″ it features the archetypal wayfinding words “You are here” in the small text in the centre. Although part of an exhibition at Redland Art Gallery, it is hung in an area of the gallery adjoining Redland Council’s customer service area. This positioning is masterful, and reinforces “Mindfulness 101′s” reminder of the transitory nature of existence, the artificiality of the human construct, and nudges strenuously at our sense of the here and now. As far as public artworks go, this one is up there and out there to engage its audience.
Till Sunday 29 January 2012, Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland.www.more2redlands.com.au/ArtGallery.
For more about Alan James and his “Signs of Life: Text-based artworks”, www.signs-of-life.com.au.

http://www.indesignlive.com/articles/in-review/Green-Nation-at-Artisan-Gallery#axzz1dASP38rd

Ruben Guthrie for La Boite Theatre, Brisbane

http://www.laboite.com.au/01_cms/details.asp?ID=553

Brendan Cowell’s play Ruben Guthrie is La Boite’s most recent offering, and in the usual spirit of this edgy theatre company who do so much with their intimate theatre in the round, the play leaves you in an uncomfortable place. The subject is addiction, and it deals with Australia’s relationship with alcohol – its tight embrace and ubiquity in our society, and our widespread head-in-the-sand ignorance of its risks. It reminded me of Liam O’Brien’s new art video, subject (in part) of a recent catalogue essay I wrote for the Queensland Centre for Photography’s October 29 exhibition suite. O’Brien’s video is called I’m Too Drunk to Tell You.

Liam O'Brien, "I'm Too Drunk to Tell You", 2011, at QCP, 29 October to 27 November 2011.

Both the play and the video shine a torch into the dark underbelly of our problematic interaction with alcohol, to reveal the self-harm in this, usually glamorously portrayed, relationship. As protagonist Ruben Guthrie asks toward the end of Brendan Cowell’s play, “Why?” I don’t know either, but as both these works acknowledge, alcohol may be almost impossible to resist.

The catalogue essay for the QCP exhibitions 29 October to 29 November 2011 is available here QCP catalogue Oct 2011, and photography by Rebecca Dagnall, Christopher Köller, Zev Jonas, Dara Kretschmer and Hannah Millerick accompany the video by Liam O’Brien.

• This article is a review of two exhibitions of work by Gordon Shepherdson, Brisbane, in 1997. 1997 “Introspective images for an audience of one”, The Australian, Friday, June 6.
• Bill Robinson’s vision is grounded in his backyard . 2000 “Emotion laid bare in landscape”, Weekend Australian, September 20-21.
• Images from the Indochina war are made more harrowing by the knowledge that some of these were the photographer’s final frames. 2003 “Shot in the heat of war”, The Australian, June 12, p.13.

• 

  Making and collecting artists' books is an underground activity within the visual arts and, as such, it attracts enthusiasts and obsessives.

The stillness of the air makes my chest tighten immediately – not the dark, enclosed space. It doesn’t feel particularly sacred at first – except for the ancient quality of the air: “Take photo!” my guide urges. It’s maybe ten metres underground, over uneven rocky ground, carved in stone, by hand. With fingers, nails, according to the legend. I imagine soft human flesh tearing at this unforgiving surface, bleeding, bone and sinew exposed to erode away unyielding stone, a millimeter at a time, eking out this larger space, over months, years, decades.

The cave itself is also about ten metres long, perpendicular to the narrow walkway in from the heat, sun and air outside. I breathe in sharply. But the air is stale, fetid, thick. The light is low, the tunnel from the outside the only source of natural light, muted by the distance in. There are candlelit shrines at either end, bare light bulbs hooked on the ceiling. But it is still dark, internal, a tomb. It’s called “Forest”, forest for the jungle, but also for/rest.

There are niches carved at regular intervals, torn with human sacrifice, from the wall. It would be a climb up to get in, the bases a little below my waist. I lean in, and put my finger into thick black dust on a horizontal surface – it is cloying, sooty, and looks granular, like pigment. But when I rub it between my fingers it softens immediately, smooth, powdering, treacherous in its increasingly tiny particles. I imagine it, suspended in the air, constricting, clogging the bronchiole in my lungs. I breathe, sucking air into my nostrils. I think about the holy men sitting in these niches, under this low ceiling, their bodies contained tightly in this ancient space. There is enough room for their seated body, with a little space around it, coffin-like in its spatial allowance. I think about how it might be to tune out from the sun, the world outside, stilling the mind, to meditate in this space. More sacrifice. Leaving only to take the holy water from the remaining six of the original seven Hindu gods outside.

            It is a fountain of youth the guide assured us. “Sprinkle this on your face, ‘Aussi’”, he calls me, “on your hat, and you will look young forever”.

The other occupants of the cave have gone now. I step carefully toward the elephant god, Ganesha, with his four trunks. But I prefer the simplicity of the story of the three elements that drive the Balinese – the water that lines the streets under the broken pavement in Ubud, runs behind the houses, feeds the rice, and is audible outside with the rushing of the elephant river – elephant not due to the presence of the animal but for elephantine – big, loud, shallow, its surface lean, creased like the face of an old brown woman.  Then there is fire, the sparking, live, life force that wouldn’t die in the fire dance, its neon tendrils irrepressible, resonating heat and light and elemental energy. And wind, the moving air that relieves heat and humidity, and holds hundreds of kites hundreds of metres in the sky, pilotless, day after day in this place.

The black shiny phallic protruberances at the other end of the cave are clothed, as is Balinese custom, with faded sarongs, “for respect”. This is a shrine to fertility – but not for individuals our guide is keen to emphasise – more for fecundity in this world, and the next. I’m impressed by his desire to communicate the nuance of this place, day after day, to ‘Aussi’ after ‘Aussi’.

            It’s time to leave the cave, and with each cautious footfall on the rocky ground toward the glittering sunlight outside, my chest lightens, relieved by air, moving, particle-free. Outside, the green moss that grows like grass here is scraped back from the faces of the monkeys whose features pucker up from the rocky cliff-face like a kiss from the 9^th century. There are fresh fingermarks in the moss, delineating their crevasses, crevices, creases, traced by recent human efforts to keep the past from slipping back under the layers of fecund nature that suffocated them for centuries.

29 June 2011.

© Louise Martin-Chew

Stephen Hart at Gold Coast City Gallery, photo by Alex Chomicz

Today I’m creating a website. It’s very pleasant sitting at my friend Roz MacAllan’s house with the October breeze filtering through open doors, working out the best way to proceed. It’s all new skills for me and I’m lucky to be mentored by someone who is so passionate and interested in utilising new media possibilities.

This week I’m working on the promotion of a beautiful new book for Stephen Hart. While I am a contributor to the book itself, my favourite aspect of the package is a very beautiful film made by Alex Chomicz that is included in the back cover of the book. It explores Stephen’s motivations and practice in a very seductive way. There’s a link here to Stephen’s film http://www.michaelreid.com.au/art_tube-cat?cid=3 and the book is available from the GOMA bookshop (if you’re in Brisbane), and art bookshops interstate.

If you’d like more information a media release is available here.media SH2