I still have the unused ticket to Morrissey’s cancelled tour of Perth, Western Australia tucked inside the liner notes of my Viva Hate CD. I’ve never quite forgiven him for that. I recalled this long-reigning disappointment (viva hate, indeed) while coveting both the effortless vibrato and the long-burning cigarette held between the fingers of a young Indonesian man in Phil Collins’ durational video dunia tak akan mendengar 2007. Collins’ work can be found brooding sweetly at the back of the humble space allocated for the 2009 Anne Landa Award on the first level of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Phil Collins
dunia tak akan mendengar 2007
colour video projection with sound
duration approx 60 min
courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

In interview, Collins, a British artist, has discussed the ‘fluid’ nature of popular culture in relation to his practice.’¹ This work – a karaoke video version of a compilation album, The World Won’t Listen by The Smiths - was recorded with the participation of musicians from indie subcultures in Jakarta, Bandung and other Indonesian cities. Finding enclaves of fandom around the world (including Turkey and Colombia for this trilogy), Collins has remade and recorded new, offshore iterations of performances by a quintessentially British band. Rather than exercises in ironic juxtaposition or rupture played for laughs, Collins’ video - projected on a larger than life screen with cinematic sound - investigates forms of performance and embodiment as social practice, revealing as much about personal freedom and sentiment as they reflect on the culture of the copy. In the darkness, after experiencing sixteen intimate portraits of Indonesian singers framed against incongruous scenic wallpaper (European forests, fields and alpine mountains), I realised that I have equal stamina for watching karaoke as I do for singing it myself - which is to say, a whole lot.

In its third biennial presentation, the parameters of the Anne Landa Award have shifted radically. The exhibition is now curated, whereas in previous years artists have been selected and invited by committee. The exhibition is now international, when it was established as an award for Australian video and new media art. With this in mind, I wouldn’t contend that previous fiscal or spatial allocations by the state gallery for the Award have enabled a significant survey or representation of Australian video or new media to take place. Each year, six artists have been invited to participate and, in this regard, only the exhibition’s expression of gender parity has changed.² What has evolved in the commissioning of a curator though, is a deepening of the discourses that oscillate between the selected works and their attendant or fundamental technologies. In Double Take curator Victoria Lynn explores the transformation of the fantasy self - the doppelganger, the mirror-image - through the portal of an extant (rather than expansive or speculative) technological moment, situating the six works that comprise the exhibition as fissures or refractions within the fabric of the everyday.

Cao Fei
My Future is Not a Dream 01-08, 2006
digital c-print
120 x 150 cm
courtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects

Chinese artist Cao Fei’s compelling single-channel video Whose Utopia? 2006 is filled with thousands of tiny reflections of a daily reality, filmed as it is in a light bulb factory. Fei contrasts the mesmerising monotony of working in a mostly automated environment with the fantasy lives of some of its employees. The video’s quiet documentation of the production line, the careful process of assembling minute components with the fragile globes and cylinders set against a gentle soundtrack, is followed by a series of portraits of workers standing still amidst the flow of product. In its final chapter, the video tracks the movement of workers who slip into unlikely performance modalities: ballerina, tai-chi master and guitarist, while a folk singer croons: ‘You have waned for years and years. But to whom do you beautifully belong?’

Walk from this resounding, lonely question into Mari Velonaki’s interactive installation Circle D: Fragile Balances 2008 and some answers - in the form of written expressions of love - are revealed. These are passed wirelessly between two hardwood-encased robots, completing a loop of discourse around automata and emotion at the entrance of Double Take that flows through the rest of the installation.

Gabriella Mangano & Silvana Mangano
Absence of Evidence 2008
DVD 8 mins 42 sec
courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne & Sydney

In an eight-minute video sketch by Australian twin artists Gabriella and Silvana Mangano, the women move through a seated choreography where one passes a length of paper over a wall to the other. The artists behave as slightly misaligned reflections of one another. Some of their gestures are synchronised, as if the twins operate through a shared consciousness, while others are individually responsive to the external phenomena of wind blowing against the paper.

What is presented as a simple sketch by the Mangano sisters is exploded in TV Moore’s rambling video, sound and object-based installation that dominates this exhibition of largely single-channel video work. Altered consciousness, psychotropic states, telepathy, hypnotism and even a kind of transubstantiation are inferred through video, and made object in the form of cymbals, a mirror ball and the construction of a Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities at the centre of his space. In this hackneyed form, Moore has assembled something of a checklist of tired contemporary art tropes including a skull, a scary Halloween mask, a chrome mag wheel, a silver-painted eruption of clay, a backward-playing video of a kid riding a BMX (while wearing the same scary mask) and a slow-motion capture of a Stallone impersonator impersonating Rambo. Other components of his work, more worthy of attention, including a projection of the artist in an otherworldly, smoke-filled space, whisper-singing the lyrics of a Nina Simone tune and a chilling video of a middle-aged woman with blackened eyes performing Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (installed in such a way that the viewer appears to be locked-in to a private and frightening exchange), are overshadowed and underplayed.

Lisa Reihana
Maui, from the Digital Marae series, 2007
digital photograph
200 x 120 cm
courtesy the artist

While Moore’s work was hard to ignore, I walked past Lisa Reihana’s Digital Marae 2001 & 2007 twice, only later discovering that the work - comprising mostly of photographs - was relegated to the foyer. In the catalogue for the exhibition, Reihana’s ambitious series of digitally enhanced portraits, assembled over almost a decade, is documented as a dark, immersive environment in which the viewer is surrounded by life-sized representations of Mäori ancestors, gods and demi-gods, with a video animation flanking a central figure like an altarpiece. In Double Take, the power of this work is diminished by its placement. The animation is installed to the side of the vertically-orientated photographs and instead of creating a physical relationship with the viewer in space, only a selection of these portraits are installed, conventionally on white walls. Viewed as separate two-dimensional images - the Marae, or community courtyard that Reihana has visualised, is flattened out.

Beyond the installation of Digital Marae the main criticism that I have of Double Take and the transformation of the Anne Landa Award is that it remains an award. Questions that I carried with me throughout the exhibition about the selection of work and the equal spatial representation of the artists were informed by its competition structure rather than Victoria Lynn’s strong and engaging curatorial thesis. The prize winner, TV Moore, was the only artist whose work appeared to be made especially for this exhibition and, while this kind of speculation is unfair to the artist, I wondered whether Gabriella and Silvana Mangano’s collaboration might have seriously contended for the prize had the artists, like Moore, shown the expansive and complex nature of their shared practice across drawing, performance and film? What if Lisa Reihana’s work had been installed complete, within the gallery environment, and so on?

These remain perhaps unfounded and personal disappointments within my encounter of a fluid, thoughtful and thematically coherent exhibition. Lynn’s curation of the Anne Landa Award this year, while not privileging the experimental in new media practice, is reflective of a contemporary moment - introducing discourses around communication, community, consciousness and intelligence that are informed by the intersection of technology and human experience, to a wide gallery-going public.

¹ Phil Collins and Victoria Lynn interviewed by Amanda Smith on ABC Radio National, Artworks, 24 May 2009.
² In 2005 and 2007, the committee invited five male and a single female artist to participate.

Double Take: Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts 2009
Curated by Victoria Lynn
7 May – 19 July 2009
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney