Anachronism of visual art

Children's Crusade by Markus Schinwald is part of the Ghosts
of Self and State exhibition.

Children's Crusade by Markus Schinwald is part of the Ghosts of Self and State exhibition.
Photo: Supplied

May 27, 2006

Installation exhibitions are more than a visual experience, they are a delight for sensory perception, writes Robert Nelson.

IF THE VISUAL ARTS WERE all visual, life around the galleries would be simple. Artists and critics would find it easier to agree with one another. Most of the talk would be about how good-looking a work of art is. You might have a different opinion to some other boffin on how harmonious a given picture or sculpture might be; but on the whole, the agenda would be shared. Visual purity would unify us.

Conservative critics still seek this purity.

They invoke the word beauty and push a cliche of quality, which is usually some kind of formalism. They become frustrated with an international art scene that has moved on. For almost a century, from the time Picasso and Braque added found objects to their paintings - and certainly by the time Duchamp exhibited his urinal and Bicycle Wheel (circa 1915) - artists have been treating their audience to experiences that aren't pre-eminently visual.

Duchamp's urinal isn't visually rich and doesn't distinguish itself by its looks. The main feature about the ceramic form is that it immediately lets you identify it as a urinal. The work operates in the mind as a concept, a lot like the word "urinal". In fact, another word applies to the object through the title and dominates the visual encounter: the work isn't called "urinal" (because the object already says that) but Fountain (which the object doesn't say but accepts as a joke).

In previous centuries, art was even less visually pure, less limited to the visual and more tied up with ritual and function. A painting on a vase, no matter how beautiful in its own right, is still a part of a vase, an object with a function that you handle, literally.

It seems to me no accident that there's a "hand" in the word handsome, which is one of the great synonyms for the visually beautiful, meaning something that's great to fondle. You might initially apprehend the beauty with your eyes; but this recognition aspires to the thrill of the touch. With anything handsome, eyesight anticipates physical contact.

In earlier times, art was also often a part of a large architectural scheme that you experience with your feet and maybe your ears, too, as the spaces that you enter have a special acoustic. You don't explore it with your eyes alone but your whole body.

Today more than ever, artists use media that go beyond the visual. Media, such as film, involve sound and time. Time is not experienced visually but with the breath, the heartbeat and memory for the moment.



Check out the gorgeous tapestries of Michelle Hamer at Craft Victoria, depicting road signs, where the woven mesh strangely coincides with the matrix of pixels in the illuminated traffic directions. It's a form of picture-making that is clearly not for the eyes alone; otherwise the artist could have used a camera with much greater economy.

But the most popular multiple-sense medium among contemporary artists is video or animation. Filmic media are both audiovisual and time-based; and the eyes are needed no more than the ears. I'm often amazed at how much you can understand a film without the picture, as when you hear a movie on TV in the next room.

Of course, you still have to "see" the film, which is the verb that we tellingly use to describe the experience. You never go out of the house to "hear" a film, as you might a trumpet concerto.

Old linguistic habits die hard but eventually we move on. Films used to be described as "the pictures", but no one would say that now.

We still use the term "moving image" (as at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) but this also won't last. The term doesn't acknowledge half the experience.

Films differ on how much they're visually oriented. Two video installations in an exhibition at Monash Museum of Art suggest two ends of the spectrum. One, by the Austrian artist Markus Schinwald, has a beautiful and compelling soundtrack; but the film would be incomprehensible without viewing it. The other, by the Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr, has a raucous and disruptive soundtrack; yet up to a point, you could get the gist of the narrative without seeing the moving images.

Schinwald's video shows a procession of children following a wooden marionette, a tall, wide and imposing figure with square shoulders and stiff neck. His face contains a window with hinging panel, flipping from open eyes to closed eyes. This monstrous doll is borne aloft upon strings, suspended from an invisible mobile gantry and operated by unseen hands.

This manipulated freak is at once fearsome and pathetic. The children are dressed in old-fashioned clothing and follow the hollow adult through the deserted streets of Vienna near the Moelkerbastei.

The soundtrack is a children's choir singing Benjamin Britten's Opus 82, whose libretto by Bertold Brecht relates the story of the children's crusade (Kinderkreuzzug), a misadventure in which children from Cologne and Vendme set off to liberate the Holy Land from the Saracen. Futile and doomed, the young people have the limpid singing induced upon their baleful purpose, drawn on by a spook, a Goyesque phantom, a social and psychological figment, which is both empty and inflexible.

It's a melancholy parade, in which the natural optimism of children is seduced by a bizarre institution of the middle ages, an irrational political and religious spectre that will turn each child into a sacrifice. With the hauntingly beautiful voices, this macabre work "inescapably causes emotions", as the artist says.

The video installation by Nasr consists of two screens running simultaneously; and this, admittedly, you have to see.

One of them is a film by Yousseff Chahine, which is based on a novel The Earth, by Abdel Rahman El Sharkawi. The protagonist Abou Swelem delivers a rousing speech in a village house, where those in attendance are exhorted to stand up and fight. The struggle is against colonial power.

The same monologue is captured in the neighbouring screen, this time rehearsed by a contemporary female, Chirine El Ansary. She spontaneously performs the famous lines in a coffee shop in Cairo. Like the male prototype, she paces, shouts, leaves pauses in which no one dares interject; she rhetorically asks questions that belittle the silenced company with demonstrative body language; she regales them again, browbeating the passive audience with belligerent exhortations.

All in a good cause, perhaps, but precisely the kind of emotional fury that might have inspired the parents 800 years ago to send their children off to campaign in the Holy Land. I'm not sure that celebrating this kind of propaganda is the purpose of the video; but I found the call to action, repeated in today's circumstances, a bit off-putting.

There's a whole genre of chastising and motivational militant reveille from antiquity onward; consider the verb of impeccable Homeric origins "to hector", to intimidate with bluster and scolding. It's rather repugnant, as morally hollow as it is bullying.

Nasr's work allows you make this evaluation amid many ambiguities. But with this great pressure of content, the visual element hardly goes beyond the two-screen concept (diptych), juxtaposing the old speech and the new one.

The purpose of the exhibition, Ghosts of Self and State, is not to compare different kinds of visual language so much as different relations between the individual and authority. Curated by Geraldine Barlow, the exhibition includes an excellent catalogue with learned essays.

The show also contains a third artist, the Australian Tom Nicholson. His work has no physical sound but plenty of text, which, of course, makes a sound in your head as you read it; so it isn't pure visual language either.

Curiously, though, with all the words and ideology, Nicholson's work is the most obscure in its communicative agenda.

Ghosts of Self and State is at the Monash Museum of Art, Clayton campus, Monash University, until 10 June.


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