...mining for ounces of significance...

Upon entering the Churchie Emerging Art prize exhibition I was immediately confronted with an arcing series of photographs that one-by-one revealed a naked bottom. Joseph Breiker's “Phases of the Moon” is a great way to greet visitors if you were trying to convince them that the exhibition that they were about to enter was going to be full of empty puns and witticisms, palatable like dry toast. The puns were going to have to get a lot cheekier than that if I was going to raise more than an eyebrow to the simple humour masquerading as high Art.

Unfortunately, next to the bottoms, was a jumbled array of bad ink drawings executed in what can only be described as a 'nonchalant technique', with the words “be fearful of mediocrity” scrawled across one of them.

Don't worry, I said to the drawings, I'm fearful! Even the didactic admitted that such a variety of unrelated images made it “difficult to gauge intention”ⁱ.

Ok... maybe they were sneakily and cleverly thumbing their knowing noses at convention and putting the bad stuff in the entry... a magnificent ploy to coax the hesitant visitor into the bowels of the chimera.

Alas, after I walked under the pink sign that said “what do you want from me?” (to which I replied, “not that”), I continued passed a small area of art that I ignored because it looked boring, and walked straight up to a screen that was quite bewildering. Heath Franco's “Your Door” confronted me like a feverish dream, repetitive, illusory and hypnotic.

What was it?...

...A video of profound silliness that held me stricken in its headlights. “You wanna play?” the man in the mask and the blue underwear holding a toy saxophone repeated at me, before dissolving into another man repeating “come in, I'll get you a cuppa!”. The undulating variations in the way these phrases were repeated to me fell like a hammer blow to my sensibility, and I reeled away to be met by Nathan Corum's cast iron red curtain.

Were we still expressing the red communist flood of ideas that simmered all those years ago behind the iron curtain?

Apparently not, just an ode to cinema, which, after my initial thought, seemed droll.

From there I meandered passed the ice-cream cones that resembled a castle from a fairy tale, passed the Brown Council's video of the head of a woman saying something noiselessly in black and white, and on to Ray Harris's video of a woman making love to a pile of dough with her clothes on. The didactic spent a long time describing what was already apparent to me in the video, and then pivoted on the sentence that said the work was “a psychological space of unsatisfied symbiosis”ⁱⁱ. Was it a reflection of the human existential condition within a modern society so pluralised and material that even sensory contact becomes a lifeless embrace with plasticity? Probably not, but Ray Harris might have been gleefully charmed by such an erudite passage likening his confusing and awkward work to what we might lightly deride as people's traumatic personal post-post-modern derangements, of which this work may actually be the product of.

I toured the rest of the exhibition holding out hope that the significant work that I was looking for was going to emerge from amongst the crowded and chaotic display and nestle lovingly into my conscious understanding and speak eloquently and skillfully of the zeitgeist into which form the artist had slipped, however momentarily. But all I found was a revolving mass off globulated colour reflected convexly, a strange bondage contraption without application, and several other works that failed to stir my inner wish. I stopped briefly at the printed wordplay, “Rare bird lifts town high with mighty arm” it said on one of themⁱⁱⁱ. That's mildly interesting for five seconds because it is an absurd word puzzle, but what is its significance?

Is absurdity significant?

Does society require absurdity to be reflected in its art, unable to experience it elsewhere?

I found myself wondering, is this exhibition striving for significance, or just to show new types of art?

On my way out I stopped by Dominic Reidy's work “Plan for a Neon Victory” in which a stick holds up a picture of a big V with a masculine man in it. Reidy addresses what he sees “as a disconnection between concept and medium”^iv and I'm not sure if I'm getting it right, but I think that he managed to express that disconnection perfectly in his work.

Lost in thought I exited the exhibition, passing once again the pink sign “what do you want from me?” and the eclectic ink drawings that the didactic said were “mining for ounces of significance”^v.

Ounces?

And the bottoms mooned me as I left.

iMediocrity Clampdown, [Didactic] Churchie Emerging Art Prize, 2012 , Griffith University, QCA campus.

iiLet Me Go, [Didactic] Churchie Emerging Art Prize, 2012 , Griffith University, QCA campus.

iiiHeadliners, Gothe-Snape, Agatha, 2012 [Artwork] Churchie Emerging Art Prize, 2012 , Griffith University, QCA campus.

ivPlan for a Neon Vistory, [Didactic] Churchie Emerging Art Prize, 2012 , Griffith University, QCA campus.

vMediocrity Clampdown, [Didactic] Churchie Emerging Art Prize, 2012 , Griffith University, QCA campus.