A Next Wave wrap up: Perhaps we’ll see how little we see

So I went to Melbourne for nine days.

I saw much more art than I ever expected too. I wrote much less that I planned. Scribbles in notebooks don’t count. I did go on the radio, though.

I saw thirteen Next Wave visual art and/or sound exhibitions/works over twenty-two different locations; seven with some kind of performance element. I saw eighteen Next Wave performance/dance/theatre works. The lines between types of works are almost all blurred, and I’ve no doubt you would count differently than me.

I saw two visual art exhibitions and two theatre works which weren’t connected to Next Wave – I could have chosen from dozens more. I only found the time to listen to two of the five audio plays from the Living Cities Tours. I don’t think you could say I even scraped the surface of the Emerging Writers Festival.

I went to Breakfast Club nine times for nine days. Some days I was more present than others. I spent four nights dancing to DJs at Wake Up. I went to one official feminist dinner and one official feminist breakfast. I went to Bone Library four times, and then found myself shackled with fear of responsibility and couldn’t take one home. I went to one closing night party, two after parties, and then got straight on a plane back home.

I acted in a TV cop show; I had my first manicure; I paddled a boat across the Yarra, I hugged one stranger, and I had my photograph taken with another; I got married in what is still revealing itself to be one of the most emotionally complex works I have ever been a part of; I went into space twice; I wore headphones a lot.

I saw work which I am still struggling to unpack, to understand, to find the vocabulary for, to explain. I saw how little I see.

I met and re-met some of the most inspiring staff, interns, volunteers, artists, residents, and audience members. I really did feel embedded in the culture. I hope you all stay in touch.

Given the choice between seeing work and writing about work, I chose the former. Back home, it’s time to choose the latter. I’ll be writing about the festival for RealTime, so the balance between writing for the publication and writing for the blog will take some time to reveal itself to me as I begin to type. Expect much more from me, though.

Thanks to everyone involved.

It was truly remarkable.

I am overjoyed.

Next Wave: Thinking about effect

Thoughts on day two of the festival being published on day five. Festivalling from 8am to 11pm doesn’t leave the most time for writing. Perhaps just another note, I’m seeing more work then I’m currently writing about. I hope to be able to touch on it all at some stage.

Breakfast provocation: can art be both beautiful and effective?

To begin: what do any of these words mean? What makes something beautiful, what does it mean to say something is effective, what is art? To me, the answer to the provocation was a clear yes, an of course. When I heard the provocation, I think I was perhaps thinking of affecting: I think beauty of art often lies in its evocation of emotion, and I would say these moments of art affecting you builds up into ways of effecting the ways you live your life.

The fact that this is the festival we have chosen to engage with says a lot about our aesthetics, the work which excites us and interests us. We probably find something beautiful new and young and different and experimentation. This doesn’t mean audiences which are seeing small works in Next Wave aren’t interested in the beauty which comes with flashy musicals, only they search for that beauty which is perhaps as yet unexplained or undefined.

Speakers at breakfast seemed to concentrate on a type of work in which the process is paramount: their work, it seemed, was focused on a process to search for a work with “effect”, rather than to create a work with a final aesthetic “beauty.” It was these thoughts of beauty, effect, and “art” which I carried through the day.

Joseph L Griffiths‘ Shelters are three wooden sculptures in Melbourne’s Docklands, an area plagued by the method of development. On the waterfront, it seems like it should be a primary focal point of any city. Instead, it is known as a dead area. My Day Pass guide explained to me the connections between the woes of the Docklands and the commentary on that in Griffiths’ work. While it was interesting to view the work through that lens, without being explained the connection, I doubt I would have made one. Knowing the connection affected how I view the work and the space: effect, maybe, through surrounding knowledge rather than the work itself.

The next visual arts piece of the day, Hull by Laura Delaney and Danae Valenzia is a series of displays and installations at Mission to Seafarers, an institution which provides support and a home-away-from-home for the seafarers who dock in Port Melbourne. Delaney spoke at breakfast on how she wondered into the building one day and felt compelled to respond. This draw of the building, the history, and the unseen, unacknowledged connection of the seafarers on our lives, perhaps means Delaney and Valenzia’s work is somewhat overshadowed. 90% of the world trade happens on our ocean; the effectiveness of Hull lies in drawing attention to this.

I finished the day with Food for Thought, a feminist dinner hosted by Brisbane visual artists and curators LEVEL. Perhaps the first question here is: is the dinner art? If the answer is yes, is this because it is hosted by artists, or because it is in an art gallery, or because it is in an arts festival? On to effect: can there be an effect of a small dinner with a small group of women who share much of the same politics? Is it “preaching to the converted”, or do we need these small moments of discussion for clarification or re-enthusiasm to go out into lives which can have effects?

At the beginning of the day, my answer to the question was yes. After spending that day mulling it over, I only feel confused. Yes, still, art can be both beautiful and effective; art can be beautiful or effective; art can be neither beautiful nor effective. It’s a many varied beast; to confine it to any one goal or definition is not only harmful, it is also fruitless.

Next Wave: Thinking about space

This isn’t a movement, it’s a moment.

The rough writing plan for the week: take in the ideas presented in Next Wave’s Breakfast Club, and view that day’s work through that lens. Day one spoke about international occupy movements. What does it mean when people come together and claim physical spaces?

At post-breakfast brunch, festival resident and fellow Adelaidian Ianto Ware and I discussed the perspective he can, or perhaps is expected to, bring to the festival. To me it seemed obvious: his work is all about spaces. Renew Adelaide, I said, is about looking at the way we treat spaces and asking if there is a way we can do it differently, or do it better. Rather than looking at an empty commercial property and thinking this can only be filled with a commercial entity, it takes the idea that the use of space for small cultural enterprises is better for the community, and for the building, than it sitting empty. Similarity, many of the artists in Next Wave are placing their work in unexpected places or unexpected situations and, whether intentional or not, this brings with it questions on the inherent use of space.

Over the past few months I’ve found myself interested in architecture criticism. Not from any great interest in architecture, but in the concept of a criticism of a (typically) large, functional, and at least somewhat public space. The world I write about is so transient, so intangible, that the idea of writing about the opposite captures me. Put a show in the Adelaide Festival Centre most people won’t know. Build the Adelaide Festival Centre and it’s going to be noticed.

We perceive buildings as having set roles or set capacities. An office building is for offices; a shop is for selling things; a basement is for storage. These prescribed notions give an order to our lives. By another notion, we perceive places as placing on us a specific set or rules or circumstances. We know how to behave on a tram or in a crowd or in a theatre, because it’s always to be the same set of rules.

So what happens when we break these rules? At Breakfast Club, Next Wave artist Liesel Zink, choreographer of fifteen, spoke about how her dance work in Flagstaff Train Station has subtly started to influence the behavior of the commuters traveling through the station every day during peak hour. While she says you can’t notice the work unless you are an audience member listening to the music on headphones, through rehearsal of the work in the public space the artists have been engaging with pedestrians who don’t normally interact with the artistic process. At first, she said, people shut off, but now they are starting to get used to it, and a more congenital atmosphere runs through the space. The rules of interaction have subtlety shifted. But if it is this gentle shift, she wondered, can it be sustained?

Breaking the rules of space in another way is dance work In Pursuit of Repetition (Fame and Squalor) by Alison Currie and Kel Mocilink under Federation Square. This basement space – almost empty, concrete walls, metal railings and fences, and exposed piping – seems to be just a hull in the building; a thoroughfare from one space to another. It’s certainly not a space intended for performing, let alone living, as Currie and Mocilink are doing through the festival.

And yet, as an audience member, I was struck at how we all continued to obey the rules of performance space. We were quiet; we sat where we were told to sit; we stood and walked where we were supposed to stand. And while, in some ways, it’s nice that these behaviours so intrinsically linked to professional performance space exist in a space outside of these traditional boundaries, in other ways I felt off ease with treating a non-performance space in this way. As Currie and Mocilink had a private conversation, I felt that I perhaps would like to have a private conversation. Instead, we stood, silent. Even the concept of a “fame” vs “squalor” ticket at first seems weird; and then we remember the idea of “Premium” and “D Reserve” at the ballet.

It’s an interesting concept, then. When you change the purpose of the space, of course you change the space. But do we just change it to having the same rules of other existing spaces? Can we create new spaces with new rules in old places? How much is art influenced by the space it occupies – how is work in a gallery different to street art different to in your lounge room. Is it different? Can theatre be a response to a space without being in that space? Can theatre be in a space without responding to that space?

When people in the occupy movement claim a public space as their public space, is this changing the space – or is it using it exactly as it should be used? When art is placed in a public space, is this changing the space, is this changing the art – and is it changing it in exactly the way it should be changed?