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Nocturnal Animals

anna zagalaComment

Tom Ford’s second feature, the wonderfully named Nocturnal Animals, confirms him as a filmmaker interested in exploring interiority by paying close attention to the surface of things. Though I haven't revisited Ford's debut A Single Man since it screened seven years ago, I recall being struck by the beauty of its costumes (no surprise there), interiors and cinematography and Colin Firth's moving performance as a British widower in the grips of depression and suicidal ideation. The film's pedantic attention to mis-en-scene articulated not only a aesthetic sensitivity but also a compelling sense of interiority that deftly shifted between on the one hand a crushing melancholy and on the other, a kind of wonder.

In Nocturnal Animals, also an adaptation of a novel, Ford shifts his attention to a haunted American; in this film the tone is considerably darker. Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a successful but fragile gallery owner whose marriage to an emotionally unavailable alpha male is in difficulty. She receives a package in the mail from her first husband, the 'sensitive' Edward (Jake Gyllenhall), who Susan left in her mid-twenties because he could not fulfil her material ambitions. 

The arrival of the package, which contains a proof of his soon to be published novel, provokes a crisis in Susan. The film unfolds in noir fashion, as a film within a film, cutting between the present, the world of the novel and the past. 

The novel casts Susan and Edward as parents to a teenaged daughter on a road rip that ends in a run-in with a car load of hoons in the dead of night on stretch of lonely Texas road. I found viewing this sequence harrowing, not simply because it draws out the victimisation of its female characters but for the film's preoccupation with Edward's inability to protect his wife and daughter. In short, it calls into question his masculinity. When he is taunted by his adversary, he is called a vagina. The fictional scenario imagined by Edward is a masochistic reimagining of Susan's rejection of him. This is not a film in which anyone moves on, so to speak. Instead it seems to be in the thrall of the agony of loss, and where that leads. Nowhere healthy, is the short answer. Given the constraining ideas that the film exhibits in relation to gender – how it is felt, lived and performed by men and women – Nocturnal Animals makes an argument that the injured ego retreats to the symbolic. In its preoccupation of what it means to be a man, and by association a woman it feels strangely rigid and inflexible.  

At its most engaging Nocturnal Animals arranges the events of the novel, Susan's memories of the past and the demands of her present life to intersect in a fragmented reverie. But it's not without its oddities. Ford is a Romantic; he is very invested in Susan and Edward's first marriage and very hard on Susan for not believing more in Edward's promise. But is it cause for revenge? I had a hard time buying it. 

 

 

What Happens Now?

anna zagala1 Comment

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

 

 

Jason Bourne

anna zagala1 Comment

The mixed reviews had reached me before I had a chance to commando roll into the cinema for the latest instalment of the Jason Bourne films tidily titled, Jason Bourne. But with a sizeable wait, seven long years, for director Paul Seagrass to be reunited with Matt Damon as ‘everyone’s favourite assassin’[Amazon] I was more than willing to open myself up to the risk of disappointment. 

My feelings for Bourne Identity (2002) and Bourne Supremacy (2004) run deep. Deep enough for me to forgive the off piste Bourne Ultimatum. After all this was the series that through its verite-style camera work, rapid editing and melancholy European sensibility had single-handedly revitalised the action spy genre.

Time has wearied Jason Bourne. Played by a now middle aged Damon his youthful sinewy body has given way to the physique of a stocky boxer: barrel chested, thick necked, a tough ruin of a human being surviving on the margins in the Balkan states. He is the definition of isolation: alone, stateless, at the mercy of intrusive traumatic memories that literally stop him in his tracks.

Revisiting the franchise Seagrass has said that the world would need to have changed sufficiently to warrant reprising the character. Social media and data hacking whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange have furnished the film with techie atmos and context though the film is preoccupied with one story, uncovering Bourne’s true identity and the origin of his transformation from civilian to killing machine.

An hour in to the film, in the nanoseconds I wasn’t in a state of high excitement or high tension, I silently congratulated the creative and logistics team for the thrilling ride: an aerial tour of Iceland, Greece, Germany, England, the USA, a vertiginous number of chase sequences and teams of grey and navy suited analysts chasing Bourne down while they tap at keyboards.

They are overseen by Tommy Lee Jones’ as the sinister CIA boss whose deeply etched and craggy face is offset by his protogee (Alicia Vikander) a gorgeous smooth skinned Princeton graduate with a hard to place accent and a deep commanding voice fulfilling the CIA’s directive to “bring Bourne in” while off-the-books operative Vincent Casel is taking a different set of orders.

There is less self examination in this instalment, fewer pieces of puzzle for Bourne to assemble and reassemble, less ‘down time’ for Bourne to tend to his wounds, no moments of tenderness or affection. If Bourne is compelled by anything it’s the forward momentum of revenge, the only course of action left available to him.

Seagrass’ talent for staging large action sequences with a cast of thousands is in evidence. A chase sequence set against the backdrop of an austerity march that has erupted into violence in Athens is a tour de force. By Las Vegas 90 minutes later, I was tuckered out. What defined the Bourne Ultimatum and Supremacy films and held so perfectly in balance by them – the thrill of the chase, surprising and brutal one-on-one combat in domestic environments, moments of vulnerable reflection – felt somewhat out of balance in this instalment. 

When Cassel and Damon confront one another in the poorly lit sewers of Las Vegas at Jason Bourne’s end I was feeling nostalgic for something more ordinary, a suburban Berlin townhouse or an elegant apartment in Paris perhaps. Bourne was so young and hopeful once. There’s no denying his will to survive in 2016. The question is, what for?

Can We Talk About Poland?

anna zagalaComment
Lindsay Goldberg, David S from Tales of Renewal, Poznan, Gdansk, Wroclaw, Krakow, Warsaw, 2013–15. Collection: Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne

Lindsay Goldberg, David S from Tales of Renewal, Poznan, Gdansk, Wroclaw, Krakow, Warsaw, 2013–15. Collection: Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne

The fraught relationship between Poles and Polish Jews is the subject of a major exhibition by the Jewish Museum of AustraliaCan We Talk About Poland? features the work of two Melbourne-based artists, author and photographer Arnold Zable and photographer Lindsay Goldberg. A period of two decades separates their encounters with Poland; Zable undertook his first journey in 1986 in his early forties; Goldberg made several trips between 2013 and 2015 while in her late teens and early 20s. The photographs bring together two historical periods capturing the internal dynamics of the different life stages of the photographers in a penetrating reflection on identity and place.

Zable travelled to Poland in 1986 by way of the Trans-Siberian railway on what he describes as a “personal quest” arriving in the Eastern border town of Bialystok; the town is the birthplace of his parents, grandparents and forefathers. Over the course of several months he visited the surrounding area and explored the cities of Krawkow and Warsaw where he met, amongst others, four of the last pre-war Jews living in Bialystok, young Poles rebuilding the Tykocin synagogue and activists in the Solidarity movement.

Zableʼs colour photographs document the countryʼs rural life – both its bucolic landscapes and material deprivations – as well as the vestiges of Jewish monuments and decaying Communist infrastructure. Using a SLR camera and shooting in colour, Zable's analogue images have a blown-out quality that infuses them with a woozy softness.

For Zable visiting the country for the first time was a personally transformative experience, one that he subsequently shaped into narrative for his award-winning memoir Jewels and Ashes, published in 1991. At the time of the bookʼs release some 25 years ago now, I attended an emotional book reading and signing by Zable held by the Australian Institute of Polish Affairs (also cultural partner of the exhibition). It was one of the first meetings organised by the organisation, who were part of a broader global movement seeking to create dialogue and engender understanding between Poles and Polish Jews. The relationship, centuries old, was ruptured in the wake of the invasion of Poland by the Germans in 1939, the subsequent establishment of death camps and murder of 6.1 million Jews (3.5 million of them Polish Jews) on Polish soil. For many Holocaust survivors and their children – and for Poles themselves – it was still the recent, unspeakably painful and traumatic past.

The complex nature of the relationship is reflected in the exhibition itself and the care with which it has been curated, the excellent didactic panels that go to great pains to offer a fair appraisal of history and it extends to viewing the exhibition. The title of the exhibition, itself an open question, contains the recognition that for some Poland will never be a safe subject. It re-examines the relationship that many have with a country that is both “home” and a place of horror. For some, like Zable and Goldberg, and Polish Jews returning to the country of their forebears, developing a relationship with the country has been an enriching experience and brought about a closeness to both Polish and Yiddish culture. For others – captured in excellent filmed interviews on several screens throughout the exhibition – the return has been traumatic and confirmed their worst fears.

The invitation to take part in a dialogue – to converse, discuss, explore – is at the very heart of the exhibition. It is reflected in the organisation of the space; the photographs form the middle section framed at the entry by a textual component detailing the thousand-year history of Jews in Poland, including a section devoted to the present situation in Poland. Visitors are also encouraged to leave reflective comments about the exhibition and their own return journeys. The public programs, over two dozen events scheduled over the duration of the exhibition, have been a critical part of extending the conversation.

The importance of dialogue underscores Goldbergʼs photographs. Her black and white work focuses on portraits, with a particular emphasis on environment. She uses the form of the diptych, usually a person alongside a photograph of their home, school or town. Traversing the country, she has documented young Poles and Polish Jews, labelling the photos according to the first name of its subjects “Hanna”, “Estera”, “Eliza”, “David” and adding the location such as Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Poznan, Wroclaw, followed by the date. Goldberg invites her subjects to write something in Yiddish or Polish about themselves and their experiences. Their handwriting digitally transposed onto the image adds a diaristic overlay. By allowing her subjects to speak and incorporating their words directly into the works, Goldbergʼs photographs are a powerful expression of young people exploring their Jewish roots and culture. Her works embody the importance of language to not only give shape to the past but also to create a future.

To view the published review please visit the Artlink website here.

Can We Talk About Poland?
6 March - 31 July 2016
Jewish Museum of Australia,
26 Alma Road, St Kilda, Vic 3182


 

Holding on/#cockfest

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Glenn D. Lowry, Director, MoMA, The Hon. Premier Daniel Andrews and Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV with Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1931). Photo: Scott Rudd


I'm no physicist but even I'm wondering when the heck the NGV will catch on to a cultural tipping point (to refresh: the point at which an object is displaced from a state of stable equilibrium into a new equilibrium state qualitatively dissimilar from the first).

The gallery recently announced it had secured 150 master modern and contemporary works from New York's MoMA for its Masterpiece exhibition slot in 2018. You would think this would be cause for celebration, right?

The MoMA collection holds a special place in my heart and history.  It was at MoMA in a small room devoted to the works of the Russian Constructivists that I had a lightening bolt style epiphany that changed the course of my life and led me to train as a graphic designer. 

But even this piece of 90s nostalgia did not temper my physical recoil at the news. I am not exaggerating. Actual recoil. I might have noted, though only subconsciously, that the long list of greats - other than Lyubov Popova - was made up of men.

But it was the photo of the power elite – establishment heavy hitters Tony Elwood, MoMA's Glenn Lowry and State Premier Daniel Andrews –  standing in front of the Mark Rothko that did it. Most likely they were celebrating. For the rest of us, the men and women dreaming of a different world, one where women's work and achievements are celebrated and where women are visible, and participate – maybe even take the lead – in decision making, it was a moment of despair. 

The sheer fact the NGV released the photos for press, without embarrassment or reserve, is a revealing admission on the part of this state institution which is happy to parade and promote white male privilege. Go on, broadcast your values and organisational culture. Though it's frankly nothing to celebrate. Nothing. 

 

 

 

Michelle Nikou: aeiou

anna zagala4 Comments

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gorman, social media and feeling supply chain pain

anna zagala6 Comments

Baptist World Aid recently published their fashion report assessing the state of offshore production in the industry for 2016 grading companies according to Policies, Knowing Your Suppliers, Auditing and Supplier Relationships and Worker Empowerment. Factory X that owns Gorman (along with Dangerfield and a stable of other brands) got a big fat F. That sickening grade was for non-compliance in the report rather than a reflection of their production and supply chain practices. Gorman fans – that legion of inner city creatives, office workers, students and their mums, myself included – anticipate each collection and brand collaboration with a keen sense of interest and wear the brightly patterned, wah wah printed clothes with a sense of sisterhood (in fact that's the Gorman Masai print pant from Summer 2014 that I'm wearing on the homepage). Sure we swap stories about the garments poor and, in fact, worsening quality that is mystifyingly proportionate to its increased cost. And yes, we are irritated that the brand has gone too wide diminishing its social cache. In short, just first world problems.

But actually they are not only first world problems but those of the developing world where almost all of our clothes are made because we wear these clothes and we share the world with those that make our Winter16 threads. We in fact wonder all the time who makes makes our clothes, what conditions they work in, and what kind kind of wage Liao (see above) takes home. We have WTF moments trying to make sense of Kmart selling a t-shirt made in the Republic of China for $5 while Gorman is selling a t-shirt for $99. Take away the lobster print and are they so very different?  And while we are on the topic of overseas manufacturing, why does every other local brand broadcast that it is "Proudly Designed in Melbourne, Australia" all the while burying manufacturing details in the FAQ section: Hobes, Sack Me etc like offshore manufacturing is something to be ashamed of?  

What happens if you 'own it'? Gorman found out this week with its first social post #whomademyclothes, a unmitigated public relations disaster (only 697 mostly negative comments and counting). It's hard to know where to start on this misstep. The timing was inauspicious though this was not the only problem. Without getting too Roland Barthes about it this was an image with ambiguous "signifiers". Forget for a moment the fluro lighting and industrial setting (our worst fears confirmed workers toiling away without access to natural light). It's difficult not to associate the image with a hostage made to hold up a sign by his captors. Not even in Mandarin. Not by his own hand. It just reads wrong.

Still, I don't want to lay all the blame and shame at Gorman's pretty feet. Is not the shame ours to share? Is the reluctance to state the country of production of our garments and homewares only a reflection of our own discomfort – not about the loss of a manufacturing base in Australia, that ship has long sailed – but about the human cost of our insatiable material consumption. Oh it's a wide, wide gap between Gorman's slick art directed campaigns, that cheery fun vibe in my local Fitzroy store and the factories of mainland China.