I only just caught the last day of these shows having
spent a month in London where there were masses of shows on but hardly anything
great (Londoners agree) unlike Adelaide where there are far fewer shows on but
usually several gems. These two at the CAC were pretty gem-like; humour and technology
go well together. Women seem to be getting a lot funnier than men nowadays.
Both of these artists are obviously totally turned on by their new Macintoshes
which gives a zappy, buzzy energy to the look of their work. But while Patricia
Piccinini's design-your-own-baby machine is overtly techno self-referential in
its playing/flirting with the possibility of a technology driven future, Alison
Main's works are happy to take advantage of what the computer does well and quickly
(ie. scanning, cut + paste with image and text) to seemingly more visually conventional
ends.
But, of course, the thing about these computer collages is that, unlike the surrealist
collages of Max Ernst and others, one can no longer be sure where the cutting
and pasting took place. This has been discussed extensively in relation to the
'authenticity' of (documentary) photography since the advent of Photoshop. But
there are obviously other quiet areas lurking where authenticity becomes a problematised
and potentially challenging area for the viewer. The superimposed text becomes
similarly confronting. Stylistically, it appears to come from the same period
as Victorian engravings, kind of in the manner of Glen Baxter, but on closer inspection
it's obviously been flown in from Vienna, via Paris, via a shredder machine and
a canny eye - calmly dripping with innuendo, taunting you to rush for your compendium
of psychoanalytic theory and trash books on dream interpretation to see what they
all had to say about 'hoops' for example.
The images of children with overlaid, psychologically complex, storyboard textual
commentary function in a similar way to the adult scale sculptures of children
by Charles Ray, psychologically dislocating the adult viewer in time and space.
Alison Main's Road Movie takes us on a journey of disturbingly rewritten
histories.
Getting back to a previous point: self-referenciality for its own sake is now
tedious and boring - please can painters make paintings now that don't have to
say, "I know I'm a painting but..."; It is likewise with computer work.
On the bright side, Patricia Piccinini's CD ROM escapes this torrid fate and becomes
a light-hearted, entertaining and creative adventure for all of us: males and
females of all sexual persuasions, young, old, middle aged, physically and/or
mentally handicapped, those who can and who can't, do or don't have their own
children.
The power of the work's mildly gothic-horror undertones depends very much on where
you're coming from. I'm not quite sure how an amputee or a thalidomide would feel
about it, but then the babies one can 'make' are so artificially cute and toy-like
that the full-on scary horror-realism effect is minimised. In a sense this produces
a trivialising insensitivity in the work but maybe that is where its strength
lies.
That both of these artists, in radically different ways, are using technology
to humorously and satirically poke around at our hopes and fetishisms, fears and
memories denotes a loosening up and exciting move forward in the art and technology
field, moving interestingly away from both the hollow emptiness of the swirling
ball syndrome and from the often dull hardline criticality of much recent work
by women in the area.
© Suzanne Triester, 1996
MESH film/video/multimedia/art #10,MESH is published by Experimenta Media
Arts