Still from Belle Bassin's video It's Easier to Look At Your Skin, 2013. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
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VISUAL ARTS
DANCING UMBRELLAS: AN EXHIBITION OF MOVEMENT AND LIGHT
Heide Museum of Modern Art
Until June 5
When people behave oddly in the street, it's so reassuring to see a camera filming the act. Knowing that they're making an artwork, you neither have to confront the excitement nor cross the road to avoid it. The camera dispels your fears of a prickly encounter and invokes your faith in fiction.
Our Steps Will Always Rhyme, 2014, by Minna Gilligan. Photo: Supplied
Belle Bassin must have excited moments of apprehensiveness in the Paris Metro when she clambered up and down stairs and escalators with an armful of umbrellas, so numerous and dense that you cannot see the artist except for her lower legs.
As viewers of her video, called It's easier to see your skin, we never witness the instant of comfort experienced by the public when they recognise the camera. In the video, we are that camera – because we only take in the scene through its lens – but we never get to reassure the perplexed onlookers.
The underground sinuses of any rail network are corridors of haste and anxiety, where people fly down tight declivities, racing through the rush routes without any expectation to contend with an unseen performer behind a barrage of brollies.
We sigh on their behalf: it's only art; there are greater embarrassments. It isn't a crazy lady but an artist looking like a crazy lady, brandishing her bouquet of brollies, a prolific posy of parapluies, to ward off the shower of ennui in daily life.
In an adjacent video at Heide, the brollies escape from their custodian and flirt with the breeze of the boulevard. They do their own performance, liberated from the artist in the same way that the artist is detached from the tedium and stress of commuting in the underground.
Bassin's strangely metaphysical brollies plod and skip around in an exhibition at Heide called Dancing Umbrellas. Umbrellas are not the keynote, however, which is given in the subtitle An exhibition of movement and light.
The best works have a hypnotic quality, where movement within the artwork paradoxically slows you down. Leslie Eastman's conceptual suspended tableau is a beautiful example, consisting of a plate of reflective metal, cut into concentric squares, except for a small shaft of continuity at the top and bottom where they all connect.
Each of the 22 planes has been progressively twisted by about 4 degrees, so that they fan out successively until the last sits at right angles to the centre. For such a serene and contemplative work, your perception of the geometry is dislocated, because all the surfaces mirror one another, reflecting nearby works and your own image.
For the time being recalls the kinetic tradition from the 1920s and also optical works by Jesus Rafael Soto and Yaacov Agam. Similarly historical and also visually spellbinding is a work by Damiano Bertoli in his ongoing project called Continuous Moment, where a revolving disc has a combination of concentric and eccentric circles that give the illusion of rolling around within one another's orbit.
Another work of great wit and technical prowess is Taree Mackenzie's Slinky live feed. Three video cameras film three toy springs against beds of blue, green and red respectively. The image that they see is one of the RGB colours intercepted by the springs, which move upon simple armatures. The pulsing projections from each camera are finally overlaid on a single screen to yield scintillating patterns.
The electrical work of Giles Ryder is similarly animated, at times hard to look at for long but full of clever circuits. For many decades, our commercial streets have been ablaze with flashing lights; but now movement and light dance in more intimate circumstances through social media.
As if referring to the flashing new promiscuity of images on Snapchat, Minna Gilligan responds to the rapid movements and quaint narcissism of suggestive moments in a vlog.
There are 10 other artists or groups in the show, which is well-curated by Sue Cramer. They don't all have the hypnotic grandeur of Eastman nor the humour of Bassin, including works with potential, such as the performance of Gabriella Mangano & Silvana Mangano where the artists poke and toss around a flimsy bright cover without a compelling poetic rationale.
