Andrew Best-Beta Churns the Caribbean/Bastards of Paradise exhibition
Greenaway Art Gallery 2006
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BASTARDS OF PARADISE
Greenaway Art Gallery 2006
Beta Churns the Caribbean
I once remember hearing a story about an editor of Adelaide’s biggest newspaper, and his secret life. Apparently, in between getting to print the twice-daily editions, he had started to covertly design his editorial pieces, so as to secretly encode messages. If you were initiated enough to read downwards, taking the first letter of each line, you could unravel them. Sure enough, when I flicked to that day's editorial, there lay hidden E-L-V-I-S L-I-V-E-S.
Of course, you needed no great excuse to enjoy the fact that crank conspiracy theories had infiltrated the mainstream media. But this short-lived avant-garde practice1 did manage to epitomize an embryonic artistic impulse. Artistically, it suggested that all sorts of interventions were possible, even to systems one otherwise might consider ‘fixed’ or unassailable. It was an awareness we see fully developed in the work of Australian artist James Geurts. In Geurts' practice, we find images and videos that draw power through their consistent, rigorous inquiry into the processes and potentiality of visual production.
One of Geurts' key video techniques involves the use of cameras devoid of their protective covers, so that their exposed circuitry can be manually squeezed or shorted, to produce freak-out effects (CLH5, 2006). In his two-dimensional works, environmental elements are allowed to infect undeveloped celluloid film, giving a Robert Capa, D-Day effect to otherwise Kodak-perfect, sunlit Australian photographic scenes. In works such as Vente, and Bastards of Paradise I and II (all works 2006), such an integral approach to materiality, applied across different continents, calls into question our conceiving of a wider world of images and events. Geurts has developed an organic means of framing his subjects, which reveals and critiques the constructed nature of documentary reporting. These methods often destroy 'perfect' potential images, and irreparably damage hi-tech gear, making sacrificial, shamanic devices to bring a much needed "anti-truth" into existence.
During the height of European exploration, a key piece of military technology was the methods of botanical watercolour illustration. As well as tactics for sea warfare or the treatment of gangrene, naval officers would learn the laying down of even tones of watercolour wash, and to draw their specimens from strictly aerial or profile views. Particularly in relation to Australia, this rigid, formal approach to such variables as scale and perspective (and its subsequent application to subjects as broad as wallabies, Banksia seedpods or strategic harbours) proved to be ruthlessly effective. The system served as a unified, shared language for different levels of government to plan conquest, down to the finest detail, and from as far away as offices in Capetown or London.
GPS devices, high resolution digital photography, and infra red night vision might serve today as framing devices for military power. Geurts' practice shows that these systems are no less susceptible to intervention than any earlier technologies. Indeed, such a response can be seen as a necessary and human one. Depicting an external object results in a viewer not only fixing the subject, but also themselves. Artistic rebellion can therefore be cast as a potential means of personal or cultural liberation. In Geurts’ work, we encounter a space where there lies no less a potential than other ways of being.
Andrew Best, 2006
1Much later I heard that the editor was sacked for his attempts to add lipographic touches to his little corner of the Murdoch universe.
