WARNING: EXTENDED READING AHEAD
Platform, the artist run initiative situated underneath Flinders Street Station, is a gallery that lives in the subconscious — most people know that there’s something there, they just don’t acknowledge it. In this state it lingers, updating its work regularly, but never really becoming a place to go to. It is a transitory and temporal space. Accordingly, any review of a show at Platform requires a discussion of its location and format. This is not a typical gallery — it was part of Melbourne’s public transport hub long before it was an art space, and is primarily an easy way for commuters to travel from Flinders Street Station to the rest of the city. It is also a small shopping arcade, comprised of small boutiques for
fashion, music,
zines and, oddly, a barber; only after passing through the sterility of the train station and the underground shops that you reach the gallery itself. While most galleries remove themselves from the public space, Platform is different. What occurs here is a breakdown of the
traditional gallery format, a challenge to conventional curatorship and common ways of viewing art.
The exposure for artists exhibiting here is theoretically enormous, with thousands of people ‘visiting’ the gallery each week. However, those who visit Platform are not necessarily there to view art — many are on their way to work, and, on my observation, spend an average of 30 seconds traversing the entire space. Roughly half of those passing through look at the art directly, and only a few of those will stop to examine at a particular piece. The success or failure of exhibitions at Platform therefore rests on their ability to break through the joint barriers of a challenging space and the blasé attitude of the modern metropolis. This attitude is an inherent part of the metropolitan environment — writing at the turn of the last century, sociologist
Georg Simmel argued that the metropolis has created an environment which forces the individual to become immune to “the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli.”
1Simmel, Georg; 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' in The Sociology of Georg Simmel(Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1950), p. 414 While it could be argued that all art has to overcome this reflexive attitude, Platform’s peculiar location makes it all the more likely to be ignored — for art to be noticed here it must force itself, almost violently, upon the viewer.
Additionally, the method of display at the gallery places yet another hurdle in the way of successful art — each piece is displayed in a window, much as an expensive item would be displayed in a gift shop. These cabinets not only limit the scale of the works that can be shown, they change the nature of those works. The most successful pieces have become installations that engage with not only the odd gallery space, but the window in which they are placed as well. With all these limitations, one would expect that art displayed at Platform is doomed to failure, and yet nothing could be further from the truth — these oddities create a space that is intriguing and unique amongst Melbourne’s galleries. The soft pink walls and dingy concrete floor at first seem lack lustre and inappropriate, but soon become quite charming, counter balancing the contemporary nature of the work with a run down art-deco aesthetic. This collision of styles lends weight to the idea that Platform is an intrinsically post-modern gallery — it is not just the work that “uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges.”
2Hutcheon, Linda; Theorising The Postmodern Towards A Poetics, in Jencks, Charles (editor) The Post-Modern Reader (Academy Editions, London, 1992) p. 76 Here the gallery appropriates the surrounding architecture and uses it for its own gain, relying on the public transport network to supply visitors, while at the same time it separates itself from and critiques the system that creates such a network. Most work on display is heavily context driven, and, as with the latest iteration of Matt Shaw’s semi-permanent installation
Underground Garden III,
3Shaw, Matt; The Underground Garden III (2009), installation of plants (grevillia), soil, rocks, burnt logs; it often functions as a comment on the commercial and metropolitan environment that surrounds it. In this case, the gallery becomes a host to a tiny garden, “a slice of forest recently burned in the Black Saturday bushfires.”
4Shaw, Matt; The Underground Garden III (2009), didactic panel That the garden is contained by the window that surrounds it highlights the way in which the city’s suburban fringe, now readily accessible via public transport, has grown and impacted heavily on the environment around it.
Matt Shaw — Underground Garden III
A similar notion is explored in Claire Gallagher’s
Absence Of The Inner 5Gallagher, Claire; Absence Of The Inner (2009), installation of glass tank, potted plants, taxidermy birds, taxidermy fox, animal bones, wire, string, fluorescent tubes, dirt; 200 cm x 90 cm & various sizes installation for Sample, a cabinet at Platform dedicated to showing the work of artists under the age of 25. In this piece life flows around the man-made glass tank, a constant struggle between order and chaos. While the piece attempts to illustrate the human desire to control our environment,
6Gallagher, Claire; Absence Of The Inner (2009), didactic panel Gallagher’s assemblage of living plants and dead animals is, due partially to their taxidermic state, a simulacrum. It becomes monument to the destruction of an ecosystem that not only never existed in Australia, it never truly existed anywhere in the world. To quote Derrida, it is “the copy of a copy. With the exception that there is no longer any model, and hence no copy.”
7Derrida, Jacques; Dissemination (1972), quoted in Ulmer, Gregory; The Object of Post-Criticism, in Foster, Hal (editor) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (The New Press, New York, 1998), p. 104 This idea is explored further in
The Myth by Dominic Kavanagh, an installation of a supposed fossil uncovered in the Morrocan desert that points to an extinct race of giant wooden bipeds.
8Kavanagh, Dominic; The Myth (2009) installation of acrylic paint, wood, sticks, sand, mdf board, rope, plants, curtains; 400 cm x 150 cm Here Kavanagh plays with the concept of the simulacrum, creating a fake history for ‘Perkin’s Leg’ and the professor behind its discovery — it attempts to question the way in which we view museum pieces as exact and true histories, and reinforces post-modernist ideas about truth and narratives. While
The Myth is visually stunning, it also offers a scathing epistemological attack on the museum — it reminds the viewer that “should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but ‘bric-a-brac,’ a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves … for their representations.”
9Donato, Eugenio; The Museum’s Furnace: Notes Towards a Contextual Reading of ‘Bouvard and Pécuchet’ (1979), quoted in Crimp, Douglas; On the Museum’s Ruins, in Foster, Hal (editor) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (The New Press, New York, 1998), p. 57 In other words, the objects in museums are nothing without the histories ascribed to them, and that these histories which we rely on are little more than short fictions.
Dominic Kavanagh — The Myth
There is a strong sense of anachronism present throughout the entirety of
The August Shows, and is particularly apparent in
Repeat Repeat, a group show which examines the ideas of repetition and lack of originality. “Everywhere simulation builds upon simulation, everything we do has been done before. Leaving a mark and making ourselves visible takes on slightly humorous tones in amidst the sheer amount of stuff. Any attempt is bound to be futile, redundant and perverse.”
10Cruickshank, Adam, et al; Repeat Repeat (Platform, 2009), didactic panel This harshness of this nihilistic approach to art is lessened through the way in which this group of artists approach their work — each piece is a testament to the near obsessive process of each artist in this show, and, while the style of their responses varies wildly, there is a strong sense of cohesion between the works. Rachel Hooper’s
One Ham Sandwich ,
11Hooper, Rachel; One Ham Sandwich (2009) twelve panels, acrylic on canvas; complete set 220 cm x 90 cm and its placement opposite Hooper’s own
One Landscape,
12Hooper, Rachel; One Landscape (2009) twelve panels, acrylic on canvas; complete set 220 cm x 90 cm recalls the work of
Gustave Courbet — specifically
The Trout 13Courbet, Gustave; The Trout (1873) oil on canvas; 87 cm x 54 cm — in its glorification of the everyday. Not content with merely reiterating what has gone before, Hooper breaks up the image into smaller panels, and, in doing so, she not only shows off her process (each panel would have to be painted individually) but also hints at the way in which each image is a simulation and repetition of another. This reduction continues in Annika Koops’s
Mixed Mythologies 14Koops, Annika; Mixed Mythologies (2009) acrylic on canvas, sgraffito with black acrylic on board; various sizes partially a re-imagining of traditional religious icons through a wireframe aesthetic, partially a transformation of videogame items into traditional, academic paintings. According to Koops “there is an inherent paradox to these images, a cyclical redundancy”,
15Koops, Annika; Mixed Mythologies (2009) didactic panel whereby meaning is constantly stripped away, and the imagery quickly loses its religious overtones, reducing itself to surface.
Anna Koops — Mixed Mythologies
With names like “Triple Power Push Pop” and “New Year Resolutions (To The Death)”, Adam Cruikshank's
Enhanced Awareness Campaign 16Cruikshank, Adam; Enhanced Awareness Campaign (2009) discarded trophy pieces and assorted consumer detritus; various sizes is an eclectic celebratory offering to the lords of consumer-capitalism. By using the discarded objects of mass-production, Cruikshank attempts to critique the society of consumption that brought about the latest recession — in one, the dismembered corpses of the figures that traditionally adorn such trophies (the trophy proletariat?) lie scattered about, covered in fake blood, tossed aside and forgotten. While these objects are captivating, one cannot help but escape the feeling that they have seen all of this before. These trophies, then, are emblematic of the problems that face a show like Repeat Repeat — when the subject of your work is an examination of the lack of originality in art, the overwhelming impression is that you are merely another artist who has “maneuvered themselves into this particular position of paradox — where they are condemned to repeating, as if by compulsion, the logically fraudulent original.”
17Krauss, Rosalind; The Originality Of The Avant-Garde in Wallis, Brian; Art After Modernism (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1984) p. 21 The artists in
Repeat Repeat appear to have struck on a way around this — their ironic brand of humour is directed not just against the traditional bogeymen of the art world, but at themselves and their process. While this is apparent in all of the works presented in the show, it is perhaps best shown in the work of Carly Fischer.
You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth 18Fischer, Carly; You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth (2009) paper, foamcore and adhesives; various sizes is a whirlwind of perfect built destruction, a papercraft homage to the commodification of dysfunction. Here, even cigarette butts and maple leaves, in all their bent and burnt glory, are painstakingly recreated out of paper — the work becomes schizophrenic, in one moment accepting mass-produced culture and its icons, in the other rejecting it.
Carly Fischer — You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth
This dual identity is what makes Repeat Repeat such a suitable show for Platform to host — both are caught between a need to accept the dominant social order and a desire to reject it wholeheartedly. As mentioned earlier, the most successful pieces at this gallery are those which integrate strongly with their environment. As is the case with Repeat Repeat, this integration is more than a simple physical melding of work and space — it forges is a psychical link with gallery, accepting its philosophy and its limitations, and works with them to great effect.
Labels: art, essay, gallery, Platform, review
