double take anne landa award for video and new media …archive.artgallery.nsw.gov.au › __data ›...

EDUCATION NOTESINVESTIGATING KEY ARTWORKS IN THE GALLERYwww.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/education

Double Take ANNE LANdA AwArd fOr vidEO ANd NEw MEdiA ArTS 09

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 �

‘This exhibition considers the ways in which we can articulate both the self and an ‘other’ simultaneously through the digital and electronic media; both a self and an out-of-body, split self. What is lost and what is gained in such double visions? What happens to communication, intimacy, fantasy, belief and illusion, when the relationship to the other is explored through these new means of representation? What is the boundary between the imagined and the realised? The artists in this exhibition consider what it means to re-stage, re-enact, reconsider, re-read and re-create. They sustain the split between the original and the fantasy. There is both a sense of fulfilment and of discomfort in this – a double take.’Victoria Lynn, curatorexhibition catalogue, p 19

What is the Anne Landa Award?

The Anne Landa Award was the first biennial exhibition in Australia for moving image and new media work with an acquisitive award of $�5,000. it was established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSw who died in �00�. The first two exhibitions (in �004 and �006) were selected by a panel comprising an Art Gallery of NSw curator (who compiled an initial shortlist of Australian artists), an independent curator and the director of the Gallery. in both instances, the exhibitions were entitled Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts.

This third exhibition, 7 May – 19 July �009, adopts a different format. An independent curator, Victoria Lynn, has curated an exhibition with a unique title and theme, ‘double take’, which includes both Australian and international artists: Phil Collins (UK), Cao Fei (People’s republic of China), Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano (Australia), TV Moore (Australia), Lisa Reihana (New Zealand) and Mari Velonaki (Australia). The acquisitive part of the award applies to Australian resident artists only.

victoria Lynn is an independent curator and writer based in Melbourne. She has recently been appointed visual art curator for the �010 Adelaide festival. Previously she was director, creative development, at the Australian Centre for the Moving image in Melbourne and senior curator, contemporary art, at the Art Gallery of NSw.

dOUBLE TAKE

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 �

PHIL COLLINSborn England 1970, lives in Glasgow and Berlin

DuNIA TAk AkAN MENDENGAR 2007

from the series THE WORLD WON’T LISTEN 2004–07

colour video projection with soundapprox 60 min durationcourtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

produced by Phil Collins and Clarissa Adinegoro; production co-ordinators: Indra Ameng and Detty Wulandari; camera: Anggun Priambodo; camera assistants: Carita Chandra and Angela A Rikarastu Rainy; sound: Adam Joshwara; set: Iis Rajab (Jakarta), Team Sound (Bandung); lights: Ary Sendy; filmed at Déjà Vu (Jakarta), Gedung Merdeka (Bandung), March 2007

original recording: The Smiths, The world won’t listen © 1986 Warner Music UK Ltd; lyrics: Morrissey; music: Marr, except ‘Golden lights’ by Twinkle; adapted by Alejandro Gomezcaceres; guitars, keyboards, synthesisers and programming: Alejandro Gomezcaceres; bass guitar: Alfonso Robledo; drums and tambourines: Mauricio Montenegro; backing vocals: Andrea Piñeros and Ana Maria Gonzales guitars, bass guitar, keyboards, synthesisers and programming recorded and engineered: Alejandro Gomezcaceres at Casa en el Aire, Bogotá; drums, tambourines and backing vocals recorded and engineered, and mixing and mastering: Toño Castillo at Voces e Imagen, Bogotá; Logic and Pro Tools assistance: Andrés Otoya; producer: Alejandro Gomezcaceres karaoke machine graphics: María Margarita Jiménez, Roberto Herrara and Felipe Soler; post-production: Creativemedia AV

Phil Collins’ video trilogy the world won’t listen �004–07 was based on a 1986 compilation album of the same name by UK band The Smiths. The first video was filmed in Bogotá, Colombia, where Phil Collins worked with local musicians to painstakingly produce a fully functioning karaoke machine; the second video was filmed in istanbul, Turkey; and the third – the one in the show – was filmed in Jakarta and Bandung, indonesia. The artist spent extensive periods of time in each place, inviting Smiths fans to be filmed performing karaoke to the band’s music.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 4 PHIL COLLINS

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 5

CAO FEIborn Guangzhou, China 1978, lives in Beijing

WHOSE uTOPIA 2006

high-definition single-channel colour video with sound20 min durationcourtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York

Cao fei’s video Whose utopia �006 is the result of a collaborative action the artist created in the Siemens OSrAM factory in foshan, China. She encouraged the factory workers to express their dreams, fantasies and desires in the form of dance, song and performance. She gave them licence to express a ‘second life’, a utopian set of ideals, in the context of factory life.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 6 CAO FEI


GAbRIELLA MANGANOSILVANA MANGANOborn Queensland 1972, live in Melbourne

AbSENCE OF EVIDENCE 2008

high-definition colour video with soundDVD edition: 8approx 8 min duration

sound: Elizabeth Downey; recording: Dan Hawkins courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Absence of evidence �008 shows two identical figures – twins Gabriella and Silvana Mangano – divided by a wall. The sisters are presented as ‘doubles’ of one another, raising the question of whether their representation here is that of two halves of one whole, two of the same, or, indeed, two different entities. This is the double take of the video, and one that they clearly enjoy playing. A play on seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing, Absence of evidence considers the accidental ways in which space is formed and negotiated, and knowledge is intuited.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 8 GAbRIELLA MANGANO & SILVANO MANGANO


TV MOOREborn Australia 1974, lives in Sydney and the USA

CAbINET OF IDEAS AND FuTuRE VISIONS (CASH CONVERTERS) 2009

mixed mediadimensions variablecourtesy the artist; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco

SELF PORTRAIT ON ACID 2009

photogravure on Japanese paper with perforation8 x 10 cmcourtesy the artist; Kellie Sutherland; Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

NERVOuS SLEEP 2009

mirrored perspex, black perspex, vinyl, motor, disco ball, enamel paint, concretedimensions variablecourtesy the artist; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco

NINA, ME AND RICky JAy 2009

VHS and HDV transferred to DVD courtesy the artist; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco

SyMbOLCyMbALS & THE NExT WAVE 2009

mixed mediadimensions variablecourtesy the artist and Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco

STATLER AND WALDORF: FROM THE bALCONy OF THE uNCONSCIOuS MIND 2009

HDV transferred to DVDcourtesy the artist; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco

Tv Moore’s video and sculptural installations are abstract narratives, consisting of several components that fuse reality and fiction. He often plays the characters himself, writes his own music and performs on video. Like Cao fei, his context is the global condition of market forces that have crept into virtually all aspects of life, even escapism. Moore himself is a stand-in, a body double, in these works; but he also explores the larger question of what it means to take a flight of fancy into altered states.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 10 TV MOORE

CABINET OF IDEAS AND FUTURE VISIONS (CASH CONVERTERS) 2009

NERVOUS SLEEP 2009 SYMBOLCYMBALS & THE NExT WAVE 2009

NINA, ME AMD RICKY JAY 2009SYMBOLCYMBALS & THE NExT WAVE 2009 STATLER AND WALDORF: FROM THE BALCONY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND 2009

NERVOUS SLEEP 2009


LISA REIHANAborn Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand) 1964, lives in Auckland

MAuI 2007RANGINuI 2007DANDy 2007 uRbAN WARRIOR 2007

from the series DIGITAL MARAE 2001 & 2007

digital photographs, 200 x 120 cm eachassistant: James Pinker; photography and digital retouching: Mark McLean; costume: Robert Buck and Steven Ball; make-up and hair: Kelly Mitchell; featuring: Victor Biddle (Dandy), Charles Koroneho (Maui), Lawrence Makoare (Urban warrior), Tony Waerea (Ranginui)

TukuTuku: TERRAIN 2009

DVD24 min duration

supported by Te Waka Toi and CNZcourtesy the artist

Lisa reihana’s most recent body of work, Digital marae �001 & �007, refers to the ancestral home for Ma-ori people – a meeting space and a site for exchange. reihana transforms the idea of this ancestral home into a digital version by creating contemporary representations of the male deities (atua) that appear in Ma-ori creation stories and genealogy (whakapapa). Her work challenges the boundaries of identity and also engages with the relationship between indigenous identity and colonial history, offering an additional challenge to the way we conceive cultural survival.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 1� LISA REIHANA

RANGINUI 2007(top)URBAN WARRIOR 2007

DANDY 2007 (top)MAUI 2007

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 1�

MARI VELONAkIborn Greece 1968, lives in Sydney

CIRCLE D: FRAGILE bALANCES 2008

base 28 x 60 x 96.5 cm2 cubes, 12.1 x 12.1 cm eachinteractive installation: black bean timber, LCD screens, 3140 aircraft-grade steel tube, custom-made micro-computers (3 per cube), power supplies, sensors and amplifiersin collaboration with David Rye (mechatronic design) and Steve Scheding (systems architecture)

detail mechanical design of cubes, machining and assembly: Iain Brown; electronics development: Mark Calleija; steel fabrication and precision component machining: Bruce Crundwell; ‘handwriting’ trajectory generation: Andrew Hill; machining and assembly: Bang Nguyen; electronics design and development: Craig Rodgers; prototype cube design and programming: David Silvera; timber milling and base construction: Geoff Tonkin

CIRCLE E: FRAGILE bALANCES 2009

base 28 x 60 x 96.5 cminteractive installation: black bean timber, rotating brass cylinder 17 x 17 cm (d x l), servomotor, mechanical and electronic components, power supply, notepaper and pencilsin collaboration with David Rye (mechatronic design)

fabrication and machining: Bruce Crundwell and Bang Nguyen; electronics design and development: Adrian Head and Ritesh Lal; design consultation and management: Craig Rodgers; timber milling and base construction: Geoff Tonkin

sponsored by Centre for Social Robotics, Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydneycourtesy the artist and CSR/ACFR

in the hands of Mari velonaki, the contemporary avatar can be understood as a kind of trickster. Circle D: Fragile Balances �008 consists of two small, luminous cubes, each with four crystal screens on which messages emerge. These messages appear to be continuously written by an absent hand, as they scroll around the four sides of each cube. Comprising fragments of personal letters donated by peers and friends, along with verse by Anna Akhmatova, the text is effectively a sequence of loving notations between two virtual characters invented by the artist: fish and Bird.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Education notes 2009 ANNE LANDA AWARD 09 14 MARI VELONAkI

CIRCLE D: FRAGILE BALANCES 2008

CIRCLE E: FRAGILE BALANCES 2009


A MONTAGE OF POSSIbLE IDENTITIES

ExHIBITION THEMES: IMAGINED IDENTITIES, IMPOSSIBLE RELATIONSHIPS, SEEING AND NOT SEEING, AVATARS AND ALTERNATE SELVES, INTIMACY AND COMMUNICATION

Each of the works in this exhibition articulates a double take by considering what it means to transform the self into another persona – as a doppelgänger, a karaoke performer, an avatar, a robot, or as a fantasy alter-ego...

[The] exhibition juxtaposes a diverse group of artists and works that not only provide insight into recent trends in video and new media, but also look at the broad question of how we can imagine another identity in a world that is increasingly globalised, urbanised, and dominated by universal standards of representation. The exhibition is an amalgam of fragments, a montage of possible identities [… a montage] inherited from the traditions of cinema and art.

Victoria Lynn, curatorexhibition catalogue, pp 9, 12

who am i? who is who when everybody is somebody else? How do we experience our selves these days? is it getting harder to know who one is? Notions of ‘here’ and ‘there’ also seem to be blurring as sensations.

Technology has always reflected our images and understanding of ourselves, not to mention the larger social and political forces that inform subjectivity. digital technology determines how we experience life and ourselves today, how reality discloses itself to us. it seems to be setting the agenda, from how we bank to how we court each other. As we immerse ourselves in the internet, on the phone, and in Tv, games and cinema, we become scuba-divers in a virtual world. More and more, reality comes to us not directly via the senses, but via the screen, to the point that the interfaces themselves have become a significant portion of the reality. There’s this general anxiety about the vanishing line between the real and everything else, with ancient contours disappearing.1 High-resolution scenarios and digital sound make real life seem blanched by comparison.

we find ourselves living with a more multitasking, scattered, data-rich and high-velocity mind. Technological developments point to a future where mind can manifest itself in matter with greater and greater ease, which means values too are up for grabs. The possibilities of artificial life and machine-consciousness also stir up all sorts of fears, fantasies and projections, as we are seduced into anthropomorphising our increasingly animated machines.

we really are becoming ‘post-human’, and the turbulence of this moment forces us to ask fundamental questions about what we are here for in the first place. A collection of images offers perhaps the best way of travelling back and discovering what we have done to ourselves.

Let’s pretend

Persona means mask in Latin, and a person is, literally, something which sound (-son) passes through (per-).

The child’s game of ‘let’s pretend’ provides a hotline to under-standing the dynamics of many cultural operations, and the way we play – mimicry, competition, chance – is often more revealing than how we work. Play makes visible what is often hidden. Characters offer us forms of being; they help structure little false fronts with the intention of communicating, of entering into a psychodrama with the observer. All over the world, across cultures, actors conceal themselves when they appear. They wear masks, paint their faces, wear fantastic costumes, and speak in funny voices. They are required to be one thing for one person and another for another. from Shakespeare plays to Billy wilder’s 1959 film Some like it hot, men play women, women men. They are confused with twins and doubles. we laugh because we seem to stand on the brink of seeing the natural order (indeed, the logical order) overthrown.


The paradigm of all play and drama is the Punch and Judy show, and its essential characteristic is to hide the puppeteer’s face behind a curtain, while he/she sides with the audience, and with normal social conventions, against outrages spoken or committed by the dummies. Novelists, too, keep their faces hidden behind a kind of curtain, though sometimes they seem more like ventriloquists.

in Double take the artists find cunning ways to muffle, skew and screen out their inescapable selfhood. The goal is to bring some recent new media art together to illuminate shared aesthetic, psychological and philosophical issues. These include subject and object, illusion and reality, public and private, and mind and body in relation to space and time.

Artists and technology

Over the last century or so, human beings have taken flight, projected their voices and images across space and time, and done a whole host of other things that earlier humans would have found (in the words of science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke) ‘indistinguishable from magic’. Modern technology realises dreams first imagined by earlier generations of magicians.�

Artists have long played fast and loose with available technology. They are experimenters, playing unofficially with the ‘official’ programs of techno-culture (the great renaissance painters used mathematics, Georges Seurat played with optical theory, Andy warhol with acrylic and silk-screen). All artists are thus tricksters: moving along the seam between two different worldviews, they confuse communication, reveal the ambiguity of knowledge, and toy with perspective. Tricksters either tend to be associated with animal spirits or are Promethean figures, archetypal humans who interact with and upset the world of the gods. Also, from the point of view of the jester or prankster, the profane is frequently sacred because it punctures the pomposity that gets attached to sacredness.

So do exhibitions such as Double take challenge the concept of who the artist is? is it increasingly the mind of the electrician/tech-head that drives the work? There has been a re-configuration of the role of artist over the last 50 years, externalised much more by the nature of new media, but the collaborative process is definitely a factor here, while the artist ‘patents’ the design-value of the work. Certainly, the role of ‘genius’ and ‘masterpiece’ may be superannuated.

Video art in the museum

Altogether the works in Double take suggest the broad capacity new media art has for simultaneously reflecting its own inner workings and the world around it. However, video art presents some difficulties for art-museum visitors.

video demands a shift in usual viewing patterns. Unlike painting or sculpture, it is a time-based medium. The all-encompassing glance at a fixed image or object doesn’t work for video art, which often asks you, the viewer, to be stationary (though less so for multiple-monitor installations and video projections).

The video format has also had to clarify its autonomous nature: is it film or is it Tv? The video monitor’s physical resemblance to the household Tv set, whether as a solo box or as part of an installation, tends to perplex the viewer, as if it were merely some educational tool or a domestic appliance suitable for low culture but antithetical to fine arts. Since the 1990s, video projection has replaced the monitor as the central means of public display, but, despite technological advances rendering most negative comparisons invalid (lack of clarity in sound and image, for example), video is still regarded as film’s poor relation.

Compared to the great moments in film, we don’t often think of video as haunting the mind or leaving after-images in the same way. So if video has no memory, it’s not going to have much impact, is it? (Mind you, the french poet Baudelaire said the same about photography when it first came out: that it would be art’s mortal enemy because it took over as a dominant form of recollection.)

Yet in its early years (the 1960s and ’70s), video was part of conceptual art and the related practices of performance art and process art, and it used its limitations – black-and-white picture, crude editing and finish – as a badge of cutting-edge radicalism. in 1969 in the US, Michael Shamberg co-founded a video collective called Raindance Corporation (later TvTv or Top value Television), which believed new communication technologies could effect social change. Shamberg preferred the term ‘guerrilla television’ (the title of his 1971 book), seeing it as a means to break through the barriers imposed by broadcast television, which he called beast television.

in the 1980s Nam June Paik began using video projection with lasers and sculptural forms to push the medium forward. By the late 1980s, improvements in the technology gave it the edge over monitors, and a new generation of artists welcomed the high-production values of cinema, often using film and video in combination. Shirin Neshat, Doug Aitken and William kentridge, for example, shoot on 16mm film and then transfer to video, while Bill viola has used special high-speed �5mm film cameras to make his slow-motion video installations. They have broken out of the box of the monitor and effectively compete with other media for the attention of viewers and collectors.


So is this video art, with its darkened rooms and time-based moving images, just cinema without seats? As it happens, distinct visual languages have grown up: not just formal and technical (how they record and display information, how they frame time and space) but historical. Just as early video (eg Vito Acconci, bruce Nauman) made a point of highlighting the viewer’s identity (as opposed to the tranced complacency of the commercially-driven boob-tube), cinema has challenged the conditions of its spectatorship. in the �1st century we’ve witnessed a vast migration of images from movie projection houses towards exhibition spaces, all made easier by the digital revolution. Cinema has been redefined within these new parameters: outside traditional film history and within the larger orbit of art history.� Cinema – through darkness and narrative – transports you to its fictional realm, while video installations make you more aware of yourself as outside the imagery, more aware of how you are observing, perceiving, spectating. Cinema requires a stationary viewer, while in video installations you can take a more active role in the surrounding space.

George Alexander Coordinator, contemporary art programs

Notes1 See, for example, the 1998 feature films The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, and Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross2 Although digital media is celebrated as ‘new’, it actually plugs into older forms of art as well – from cave painting to dioramas and panoramic photography to theatre and the idea of total environment discussed in the 1930s3 Chris Marker’s La jetée 1962 is a science-fiction story composed out of still photographs, except for a few seconds when one still – of a young woman – slipped into silent, breathing life. Had she smiled? It was miraculous, as if one was seeing and feeling in an instant the revolution by which still pictures became cinema

Australian

• Mike Parr• Monica Tikachek (�006 Anne Landa Award winner)• david rosetzky (�004 Anne Landa Award winner)• Tv Moore (�009 Anne Landa Award winner)• Shaun Gladwell• daniel Crooks• daniel von Sturmer• Susan Norrie

International

• Marina Abramovic • Svetlana and igor Kopystiansky • william Kentridge • Paul McCarthy • Alia Syed• film documents of: _ vito Acconci _ Carolee Schneemann _ valie Export _ Bruce Naumann _ Joseph Beuys

Art Gallery of NSw collection search by artist:www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection

COLLECTION CONNECTIONS

A SELECTION OF NEW MEDIA AND VIDEO ARTISTS IN THE ART GALLERY OF NSW’S COLLECTION


Lynn, victoria. Double take: Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts 2009, exh cat, Art Gallery of NSw, Sydney �009

video and new media arts

Conomos, John. Mutant media: essays in cinema, video art and the new media, Artspace/Power Publication, Sydney 2007

Cubitt, Sean. Videography: video media as art and culture, St Martin’s Press, NewYork 1993

Elwes, Catherine. Video art: a guided tour, IB Tauris, London/New York 2005

Cao fei

Albertini, Claudia. Avatars and antiheroes: a guide to contemporary Chinese artists, Kodansha International, Tokyo 2008

Cao Fei, www.caofei.com

Cao Fei & Hu Fang (eds). Cao Fei/China Tracy: RMB City catalogue, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou 2008

Cao Fei’s RMB City, Second Life, http://slurl.com/secondlife/RMB%20City%201/153/32/126

Heartney, Eleanor. ‘Like life’, Art in America, May 2008, pp 164–65

Hou Hanru. ‘Cao Fei: a cosplayer recounts alternative histories’, ARTiT: Art in Japan and Asia-Pacific, no 15, spring/summer 2007, pp 59–62

Lombard-Freid Projects, www.lombard-freid.com

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. ‘First take: Cao Fei’, Artforum, Jan 2006, pp 180–81

Thorel, Benjamin. ‘Cao Fei: the adventure of the self’, Art Press, no 343, Mar 2008, pp 40–43

2006 Biennale of Sydney, exh cat, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney 2006

Vitamin Creative Space, www.vitamincreativespace.com

Yap, Chin-Chin. ‘The virtual muse and her taxman,’ Art Asia Pacific, no 57, Mar–Apr 2008, p 87

Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano

McInnes, Vikki & Maidment, Simon. ‘Silvana Mangano and Gabriella Mangano – If... so... then..., 2006’, essay for Moves on Asia 2007

Simon Maidment website, www.simon-maidment.com/pdfs/silvana_gabriella_mangano.pdf

Nelson, Robert. ‘Shadow play is a circular affair’, Age, 31 Jan 2007, Metro, p 16

Nelson, Robert. ‘Visceral, organic vision makes waves’, Age, 16 Apr 2008, p 17

Webb, Penny. ‘Visual arts’, Sunday Age, 4 Feb 2007, p 35

Tv Moore

Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, www.baerridgway.com

High tide: new currents in art from Australia and New Zealand, exh cat

Jensen, Eric. ‘We’ve got vagrants, we’ve got explorers, we’ve got magic’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Aug 2007, p 4

Keehan, Reuben. ‘TV Moore interview’, Photofile: Contemporary Photomedia and Ideas, Aug 2005, pp 16–21

MCA collection: new acquisitions in context, exh cat, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2005

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, www.roslynoxley9.com.au

Storer, Russell. ‘Video in the expanded field: three recent examples of Australian video installation’, Art & Australia, vol 42, no 4, winter 2005, pp 588–95

T1: The Pantagruel Syndrome, exh cat

Lisa reihana

Jerram, Sophie. ‘Historical drama: fiction and artifice in the work of Lisa Reihana’, Art Asia Pacific, no 41, summer 2004

Latitudes 2005, exh cat, Hotel de Ville, Paris 2005

McQuire, Scott & Papastergiadis, Nikos (eds). Empires, ruins + networks: the transcultural agenda in art, MUP, Melbourne 2005

Raymond, Rosanna & Salmond, Amiria. Pasifika styles: artists inside the museum, University of Cambridge / Otago University Press, Cambridge 2008

Smith, Huhana (ed). Taia-whio: conversations with contemporary Ma-ori artists, Te Papa Press, Wellington 2002

Mari velonaki

Britton, Stephanie. ‘Fish-Bird Circle B – Movement B’, Artlink, vol 24, no 4, 2004, p 59

Conomos, John. ‘Fish-Bird: Autonomous interactions in a contemporary arts setting’, Filter, no 56, Mar–Jun 2004, pp 2–3

Creagh, Sunanda. ‘Wheel love takes a poetic turn’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Aug 2004, p 19

Gallasch, Keith. ‘Living dolls and sentient wheelchairs’, RealTime, no 70, Dec 2005 – Jan 2006, p 55

Leggett, Mike. ‘The science and art synapse’, RealTime, Jun–Jul 2004, p 38

Mari Velonaki Studio, http://mvstudio.org/

Muller, Lizzie. ‘Art and the innovated human’, RealTime, no 67, Jun–Jul 2005, p 24

Nowak, Rachel. ‘And they call it robot love’, New Scientist, no 2534, 14 Jan 2006, pp 48–49

double take online

Video interviews, information and programs related to Double take

www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/current/double_take

Peer2peer: student video interview with Mari Velonaki www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/ed/712/peer2peer

Double take on Twitter http://twitter.com/Double_Take

Double take on Facebook www.facebook.com/pages/Sydney-Australia/Double-Take-Anne-Landa-Award-for-Video-and-New-Media-Arts-2009/38831152223

SOuRCES AND FuRTHER READING


• Consider the elements used by the artists in creating each work in this exhibition. Make an inventory. Are all these ‘materials’ physically present in the gallery space or presented or represented by some other means?

• Speculate on the step-by-step process of how each artwork was made and then installed in the Gallery. discuss how an exhibition of this nature differs from that of ‘traditional’ media such as painting and sculpture. investigate the technical, curatorial and audience challenges Double take would have posed for the Gallery in presenting it.

• research whether each artist collaborated with other people to realise their final artwork. focus on one artwork and outline examples. were they technical, cross-discipline, outside the artworld? did they involve the subject of the artwork, performers or interaction with the audience? How have these collaborations enhanced the outcome of the artwork? discuss why they were necessary in the material and/or conceptual resolution of the artwork.

• Time is the fourth and defining element of 4d artworks such as video and new media arts. for each work in Double take, assess, define and analyse time as an element of:

_ the artist’s experience of making the work_ the audience’s experience of viewing the work_ the artwork’s subject _ the artwork itself, as a tool or ‘material’

• An historical, stereotypical view of people’s interactions with technology is of a negative, isolating, solitary activity – one often characterised as de-humanising. discuss your perception and use of technology in the �1st century. Propose how online technologies such as web �.0 and social media platforms such as facebook and Twitter have shifted the way we interact with technology and each other.

• investigate curator victoria Lynn’s position on technology in contemporary society, particularly through the choice of ‘double take’ as the theme of the exhibition. does her selection of artists and artworks reinforce and communicate this position to an audience convincingly? write a critical review outlining your opinion, citing examples of artists, artworks and the exhibition’s design, layout and associated material such as the catalogue, text panels and vodcasts.

• investigate the presence and role of people within each of the artworks. define who these people are and their relationship to the artist. what does each of them do within the work? Are they simply being themselves or are they symbols of the artist’s ideas? Propose which vision of the ‘human experience’ is most prominently conveyed within the exhibition. is it positive, negative, fun, serious? debate if this vision is obvious and clear or deliberately and strategically ambiguous.

• Observe audiences in double take. would you characterise their experience as isolating or social? describe the way people react. does it differ for different types of audiences (young children, high school students, families, seniors) and with different artworks? Outline what you discover and propose why this is the case.

• define identity. is identity fixed or can we assume different identities depending on our situation, context or the people we interact with? Consider who you are and how you are perceived at school, at home, in your sports team or hanging out with friends. Outline how the internet has amplified issues around identity. identify the dialogue each artist in the exhibition is initiating about identity, both individually and as a group. Suggest how each artist’s choice of media contributes to their particular investigation of identity.

• The Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts is not just an exhibition; it is also an award. The winner receives prize money and their artwork is acquired for the Art Gallery of NSw collection. You have been asked to sit on the judging panel with the curator and the director of the Gallery. You must convince them that your choice is the correct one. Present your selection and the reasons why. in your presentation outline:

_ the importance of the artist_ the material and conceptual merits of the work_ how it meets the brief of the exhibition and the award_ how audiences have responded to it now and may do in the future_ what it would add to the Gallery’s contemporary and wider collection_ the installation and storage requirements

ISSuES FOR CONSIDERATION

ACKNOwLEdGEMENTS

Coordinated and written by George Alexander and Tristan Sharp, Public Programs Department, Art Gallery of NSWDesign Analiese CairisEditor Kirsten Tilgals

Installation photographs pp 3–8: Diana Pannucio, Art Gallery of NSW

Descriptions of artworks pp 3–8 are based on Victoria Lynn’s essay, ‘Double take’ in the exhibition catalogue

Cover: production still from Phil Collins dunia tak akan mendengar 2007 (detail)

All works © the artist unless otherwise indicated

Published to coincide with the exhibition: Double take: Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts 2009Art Gallery of New South Wales 7 May – 19 July �009

Produced by the Public Programs departmentArt Gallery of NSw, Art Gallery road, The domain, Sydney �000 [email protected]

© �009 Art Gallery of NSwwww.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

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