a review for Art and Australia.
Chinese whispers is often a good metaphor for the process of promoting an exhibition, but less commonly for curatorial methodology. In Someone shows Something to Someone, however, curators Hislop and Bailey are experimenting with precisely that as a form of self-described "anti-curation". The method runs thus: successive invited artists are asked to select a work of their own based on the last submitted piece, and to recommend a peer to invite in turn. Not for nothing does this resemble the inviting people to a house party - the opening night seethes with a fair portion of the 56 exhibiting artists and many many punters, and is ebullient to the point that the gallery has to sweep the semiconscious artists into drunken heaps by the front door at closing time.
Questioning the show's coherence misses the point. It is proudly incoherent in a carnival vein, as works jostle for attention with sideshow busyness. What themes there might be we are invited to construct for ourselves as evidence of emergent zeitgeist in the unruly mob.
It's lurid, playful, indulgent, funny. As such, Jemima Wyman is inevitably present, with the crowd-favoured work - a single channel video piece reprising the over-scale Whak'emall show that takes the overblown beachball aesthetic to a more overtly dark level than usual, having her masked figures in hibiscus-print body-suits intone an indecipherable testimony to some train of dark and abusive events - an inmate or guard confessing goings-on at a day-glo Abu Ghraib child care centre.
There's rather more works reprising shows elsewhere than is wholly healthy - nearly as prominent is John Harris's blood'n'nurses performance piece Scopophilifetishisticoedipaloverdocious, whose cheesy gore-splattered video work welcomes punters into the gallery. Or at any rate, that they _see_ as they enter the gallery.
Many of the artists are not so much playing to the crowd as to each other, resurrecting running gags from a not-so-distant shared art school history, because, perhaps, out here in the semi-regional suburban gallery they can get away with it. David Simpkin's 'Still Alive With Oranges' is such an in-group gag, a unperformative performance portrait of an unresponsive artist looking mildly perturbed by a procession of oranges rolling onto his head. It stands out for an understated sardonic feel in a show that otherwise tends to riotous. There are pieces more understated still, but they vanish below the plimsoll line of exuberance, or are indiscernible in the overall colour scheme: sugared fruit cereal garish.
Weirdly, it works. Insofar as it is as much of a celebration as an exhibition, if this show is a piss-take of the seriously curated show, we punters aren't the butt of the gag, but co-conspirators blowing raspberries in the general direction of the arts establishment. And why not? They are far enough away not to catch us at it.
Someone shows something to someone
Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House, Canberra
13th October - 18th November
Curated by Mark Hislop and Toni Bailey