Julian Schnabel A BUTTERFLY IN A DIVING BELL

Over the last decade, Schnabel has directed three feature films, Basquiat (1996); Before Night Falls (1999); and Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (2007); as well as a feature-length documentary, Berlin (2007). However he began his artistic career as a painter with his first solo painting exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery New York in 1979 receiving critical acclaim and propelling him to the forefront of the 1970’s art scene. He participated at the Venice Biennale in 1980, and by the mid-1980s had become a major figure in the Neo-expressionist movement

Though he is perhaps better known for his films, Schnabel considers himself first and foremost a painter “Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie” (Conversations with Julian Schnabel: 2008)



Of his painting, it has been said “Schnabel's mythic, often controversial career is rooted in his ability to morph and change using a vast alchemy of sources and materials composed and distributed across surface and support in defiance of the very notions of moderation, rationality, and order. His baroque attitude is embodied in audaciously scaled paintings that, over the course of time, have combined oil painting and collage techniques; classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art and neo-expressionist features; abstraction and figuration” (reference)

Following this, looking at his career as an artist proves most important in examining his career as a film maker in that the two seem inextricably linked. The imaginative promiscuity in Schnabel’s paintings and the irrational bricolage of not only materials but also themes and ideas have found a context in film to which they are perfectly suited.

MASCULINE MASHUP

Despite the fondness of Channel 10’s Big Brother programmers for choosing hideously gorgeous extroverted clones of one another, there are two housemates who couldn’t be more different in this year’s series. Their opposition comes from the way in which they represent the two extremes of performative masculinity. Zoran: brawny, blokey, alpha-male. Yet to be seen wearing anything on his torso but a black wifebeater. Zach: camp as camp can be, a friendly, bitchy string bean. Entered the house wearing a corset.

No one could call you anything ending in ‘-ist’ for putting your money on Zoran in any test of physical strength. Except perhaps waxing.

Sigur Rós : the unsuspecting soundtrack of our lives.

As with any band that has generated so much hype and seemingly unfaltering reverence, I have always approached Sigur Rós with cynical trepidation. In the equivalent of loving a band until everyone else starts to love it too, I stood my firm ground as the Sigur Rós bandwagon came crusading (or more fittingly; gliding, meandering or floating on a silk sheet carried by elves) past and waited for a moment when I could try to begin to understand them away from the cloak of popular sensation.

That moment came recently when I was cooking dinner in my humble kitchen/lounge room/living room/study. I dropped a chicken thigh into the pan as my housemate dropped a Sigur Rós DVD into the player. The DVD was ‘Heima’, a visual documentation of the series of free concerts that Sigur Rós played in deserted fish factories, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves and deteriorating churches in a bid to offer their own representation of their homeland - a retaliation to a ‘journalistic cliché’ that constantly links their music to the land in which they were forged.

As we watched ‘Heima’ (Icelandic for "at home" or "homeland") in our own home, carrying on conversation and half heartedly contributing to the construction of a 1000 piece puzzle of a smiling Marlene Dietrich, the music infiltrated our speech and our movements until it seemed as if we were swimming in the same psychedelic syrup that was pouring from the screen. We became undoubtedly more languid as the music became more melodic and minimalist. In the rare moments that the xylophone player would increase his pace, we too found ourselves caught in the rising expectations and the subsequent denouements.

It could be suggested that by having ‘Heima’ playing in the background, we were, in essence, appointing it – or at least allowing it- to fill up the space that is the background music to our lives. A track on the soundtrack that is the accumulation of music we choose to play everyday, the music that as Frith so likes to reassert, becomes a key player in the construction of our continually evolving identity.

Yet Frith also mourns the self appointed fact that “the study of popular music has been limited by the assumption that the sounds must somehow ‘reflect’ or ‘represent’ the people [who consume it]” and it is this idea that brings to light the irony in suggesting that the act of listening to and viewing images of Sigur Rós, the epitome of the exotic and unconventional, in the familiar solace of our own inner city home has some significant role to play in the grand scheme of social and personal identification.

It seems significant that my housemate has chosen to watch a documentary of the band, rather than simply listen to the CD in order to understand them in a visual sense rather than a purely aural one. As with anyone who follows their favourite artists on screen or who watches Rage until 3am on a Sunday morning there is a sense that perhaps if we can see them strum their guitars, hit their xylophone and whisper their syrupy sweet (yet indecipherable) words into the microphone then we will be closer to the band, have a better understanding of the music. Yet ‘Heima’ avoids offering us the visual stimulations that we crave. Save for a few intense close ups, the band is primarily situated behind great white sheets, while a light behind them projecting dauntingly large shadows onto their curtain.

At one moment someone suggests that the events unfolding on stage; the sheets, the marching band, the still frames of the audience and the picturesque music venues, could be considered less a concert and more a piece of ‘installation art’. This comment seems to be a reflection of a wine sipping world where everything is art and art is everything, yet I can see the truth in her statement. One can wonder if these seeming cinematic techniques that detract from the band itself and place the audience’s focus on the landscape and iconography of Iceland serve a much more important purpose in representing the very themes that Sigur Rós is aiming to communicate with their music.

The question of the way Sigur Rós’ music relates to, and is influenced by, their environment has long been creatively capitalised on by music theorists, reviewers and bloggers alike. Music writers are given something to grab onto with ‘Heima’ which seems to reassure that the band are inextricably linked to their homeland, that the music and the landscape go hand in hand. However, this idea need not lead to the placing of SR into John Street’s all too clichéd basket of categorical discourses. Rather, ‘Heima’ helps us understand that their music is less a result of their locality but more a reflection of a landscape that seems impossible to justify with words. It becomes an alternative primer for Iceland, which is revealed as less stag destination-du-jour and more desolate and exotic place of mystical qualities where human activity seems to only disrupt.

The ghost towns, outsider art shrines, national parks, small community halls and the absolute middle-of-nowhere-ness of the highland wilderness make up the aesthetically stimulating landscape, yet throughout the DVD these can often play second fiddle to the iconic images and symbolic (or do we just assume?) objects that we are given privy to in lingering close-ups. Brightly coloured dolls, unusual instruments, small white houses against stunning green fields and religious paraphernalia regularly steal our attention and each seem comparable to a kitsch artwork hanging in the Louvre. These additions could be considered as nothing more but artistic accompaniments, yet when listening to a band where we can’t understand what they are saying, we are given little to grasp onto, and thus can be forced to construe meaning from the insignificant, or miss intention where it was offered. We can only assume that the Icelandic foursome are taking advantage of the ‘great marriage between the representational art of the screen and the generally non representational art if music’ in order to help us feel and understand.

SO JEWTASTIC!

When we think of Judaism today, things that probably spring to mind are delis, the holocaust, little Kippah hats and the poor kids in kindergarten that had to go away when we made crepe paper Christmas trees. How did one of the first recorded monotheistic faiths, the great religion that profoundly influenced Christianity and Islam, become the subject of music channels VH1’s program called ‘So Jewtastic!’. ‘So Jewtastic!’ desperately attempts to show us that Judaism is the cool new religion of the minute, because celebrities like Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller no longer hang Jewish their heads in shame.

And if that doesn’t convince you to convert immediately, wait for this: Did you know all three stoggees were Jewish?!!!! And the band Kiss too?!! I think the point is no we didn’t know, because nobody told us, because Kiss didn’t really want to be known as Jewtastic! As one critic puts it, ‘it’s not like they were wearing yamakas along with the spandex and lipstick’.

The message of the program seems to be: ‘hey kids, unbelievable but true, these people are cool DESPITE their Jewishness!’ Ultimately it is not about whether or not Judaism is cooler than Scientology, but the journey of the religion, how it has been changed and shaped by history, how history has changed and shaped it, and who Jews believe is to blame for all the changing and shaping: God or themselves?

The following of the Ten Commandments that Moses received on MT Sinai is what defines Judaism. And there seems to be an almost karmic element to the covenant between God and Jews of ‘serve me well and I will provide for you’, however it departs from the basic you scratch my back and ill scratch yours in that whilst god gives ten easy steps in how to scratch his back perfectly, when it comes his turn to scratch ours, his fulfilment of his part of the bargain my seem more like a stab, a slap or a tickle.

So to logically sum up the belief of Jews, as well as other followers of the Hebrew bible, religious practise is like eating your broccoli because your mother tells you to. And if you don’t, maybe you’ll get sent to your room or maybe the world will flood for forty days and forty nights. In the Bible it seems that crime and punishment are clearly linked, disobeyers of god are shown the results of their disobedience. Does this mean Jews would interpret the holocaust as punishment for their own actions?

I don’t know the answer to this question and neither does Google. Holocaust theology is also interesting in raising issues of how god sees and categorises his people. Was the holocaust a punishment for the Jews specifically, or punishment for collective human sin? Perhaps it was a delayed manifestation of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil that the world was forced to comprehend its racist, cruel, and torturous potential.

Most interesting to me is how beliefs and practises link with psychological human needs. Woody Allen says ‘between air conditioning and the pope, I choose air conditioning.’ As a Jew his point was probably one entirely different to mine, but he illustrates religion as, like air conditioning, serving a purpose to make life more comfortable.

The concept of a messiah is one that has developed to be key to Judaism. In the readings, Segal tells us ‘the messiah would exemplify God’s sovereign control of events and reward the piety of the faithful who had trusted in God’. There are important implications to messianism. Is God not enough? Isn’t heaven where the faithful are rewarded and hell where the wicked are punished?

Maybe the constant hope for a worldly messiah is a product of the need of the human psyche to avoid depression, to have things make sense, and an indication of our concern for our grandchildren and the future world, but I can’t see how the idea of a messiah is compatible with God’s omnipotence and omni benevolence, as it seems to show Jews as dissatisfied with their position and contradicting the idea that God has things how they are meant to be. You can even vote in an online poll: Do you think redemption is soon to come. 62% say yes, 38% say no. I wonder what KISS says?

The Madman's Muse

Charcoal outlines the curves of a woman’s body, drawn with the hand of someone who is no stranger to its depths. The willing subject lays blissfully naked on a lounge, or perhaps it is the floor? It doesn’t really matter in this painting, there are no boundaries, the floors become the walls and the walls blend into one. A blue ambience penetrates the room, smothering the space and the curvy woman seemingly surrenders to the shade. The walls further bear homage to the naked figure, as preliminary sketches – equally as sensual – hang haphazardly from its corners.

The woman in the picture is Wendy Whiteley, the man behind the easel is Brett Whitely and if we are to take anything from the lines sprawled so freely but with such accurate interpretation on the page, it is that they are, what we modern romantics like to call, in love. Or perhaps more perceptibly, he is in love with her. This here is a wild passionate kind of love that spawns from the depths of sexual desire, intellectual attraction, spiralling addiction and a certain dependency on each other in a world where, for these two, nothing is reliable.

It seems, as each brushstroke would have it, that she was the even greater woman behind the great man.

“They were crazy about each other. They were hot for each other. There was a huge sexual vibe around them all the time. She was beautiful and she knew a lot about art and she was street-wise, and I think that she was, right from the age of being about 15 or 16, very much his teacher in a lot of ways. She was the love of his life. I mean, he never...I don't think that Brett ever loved anyone - anyone - the way he loved Wendy.” (FRANNIE HOPKIRK – BRETT WHITELEY’S SISTER, The Australian Story 2004)

It was ten years before this scene was created that Wendy Julius met Brett Whiteley in what many have described as a perfect storybook scenario, a scene from an updated forties film. In other words, as two aspiring artists, they got it right. In her black stockings and big dresses, Wendy was as conspicuous as Brett around the coffee shops, wine bars and jazz cellars in the heart of the 1957 city– though she was then only fifteen. She was the daughter of Daphnie May McKenzie and George Julius, the ‘black sheep’ son of the distinguished Sir George Julius, inventor and founder of the CSIRO. At the impressionable age of six, her parents divorced, leaving Wendy to cultivate an air of distrust and discontentment, put in place to ensure difficulties for her future relationships.

Wendy had attended Lindfield Public School where she was considered a “difficult” student but following the trend of many a difficult student, she was regarded as extremely gifted. She won art awards and a David Jones Drawing Prize, which helped offset the costs of East Sydney Technical College where she studies drawing. She left home, shared a flat with friends in Kirribilli, worked as a waitress and a sales girl and continued attending east Sydney Tafe in bare feet and homemade furnishing fabric smocks. When the lights went out and the kids came out to play, her look collaged tight denim, big hair, heavy makeup and a beatnik bravado. Fifteen year-olds weren’t what they are now, and this lady had it together. ‘Look at that’, Brett is supposed to have marvelled when he spotted Wendy at Jericho’s, a basement coffee shop in Rowe street noted for its strong coffees and thick soups, ‘I’d never be able to score a woman like that’. But score Brett did, and it was in this bohemian ambience that Brett and Wendy commenced what she later called their ‘inevitable’ association.

The next four years were a tumultuous ride for Wendy as Brett channelled his combustible energy, uncontrollable lust and inner musings through a paintbrush and various other materials. Wendy stayed at home while Brett travelled through Europe after winning the Italian Travelling Scholarship; however she worked double time waiting on tables eighteen hours a day to get the money together to join him. Tony McGillick recalled Wendy as the beautiful young girl of Whiteley’s mythology, always gliding about in the background, keeping an eye on things. She would attempt to keep the framework in which Brett operated under some kind of control. ‘She invented him’ said Lenore Nicklin, ‘the his-and-hers costumes, the fancy dress, the style. He went from being a correctly dressed crew cut lad to this exotic creature who wafted about in kaftans’.

In the summer of 1961, after several months of touring the continent, Brett and Wendy stepped off a train at London’s Paddington Station. Brett was twenty-two, completely unknown and entirely clueless as to how to crack the London art scene, and Wendy at only twenty was the woman who would stick blindly by his side no matter what station he chose to disembark. Biographer Graham Blundell reflects that they seemed to be instinctively drawn to wherever it was happening: in this case, Paddington – the cheapest area of London known to accommodate wandering Australians. They rented studio at 129 Ladbroke Grove, just up the road from Notting Hill, where the ‘brothers’ played the best jazz, ska and blue beat – and smoked the best dope.

Thus began the wild and passionate demise into the heart of the art culture- and in due turn, the drug and alcohol culture- that would define and enslave Wendy as she worked to keep up with her wayward lover.

“There was no serious intention to become addicts. But in the usual way, you think you can go on with having a little bit more. One day you wake up and find you're very ill when you haven’t got it. But in order to actually live that life, you've got to crawl out of bed, you've got to find the hideous - usually hideous - dealer, and you've got to butter yourself up to them, or sit in a room somewhere for hours, you know, with absolutely tedious, ghastly people.” (WENDY WHITELEY, September 2004)

At the peak of his success, the young artist and his blue-eyed muse were married on the 27th March 1962, at the Chelsea Registry office. The groom in a haircut and suit and the bride in turquoise wool with a wide brimmed hat lined in brown. They honeymooned at Sigean on the south coast of France, a little town with peasant houses painted blue and pines punctuating the otherwise flat expansive countryside. They lived for three months in an isolated workers cottage in the middle of the vine-covered fields. Wendy remembered this as the closest she had had to having a home in the sixties.

In November 1967- after returning to Australia, tiring of that landscape, and once again setting abroad- the family headed back to New York. Shortly after their arrival Wendy had the desire to create The Put On, an antique fur boutique with her friend Liz Sheridan. Sandra McGrath, a close friend to both Wendy and Brett, speculates that ‘the women realised that running their own business was the only way they could guarantee their financial independence, security and personal freedom’.

“Brett never liked me working, which he explained quite carefully to being about his mother leaving as soon as she got her finances together and she got the independence. He threatened me with divorce when I first was gonna open the shop in New York, and I just said, "Oh, well."

The power play between Brett and Wendy in their personal and sexual lives continued unabated when they moved back to Sydney in 1969 to rent an old style Victorian house in Lavender Bay. Filmmaker Jan Sharp had many opportunities to observe the process. ‘Brett was mining Wendy,’ she said. ‘He hated the fact that he loved her so much, the way she survived whatever he did to her. Brett constantly seduced new girls and Wendy had to win him back. “He ran away with a woman called Constance Abernathy for a few weeks’. Recalls Wendy in an Interview for The Australian Story in September 2004. ‘She thought Brett was terrific stuff, very entertaining, very marvellous, so she carefully explained to me we should share his genius. And he was intrigued and had a good time. Then she fell down an elevator shaft and started complaining and he arrived home, abandoning her, I might add, poor thing, with no teeth’. You just know that Wendy is laughing smugly on the inside. In time their relationship became peculiarly Euripidean, a battle to the death. ‘’We watched it unfold like a brutal apache dance. You always felt it must have been great to be Brett but not so good to be Wendy”. Wendy didn’t sit back and take the mental abuse lightly, and responded to her husband’s neglect by becoming wilful, domineering and turning her attentions elsewhere. Michael O’Driscoll became a friend of the Whiteleys around 1970 and by the time he entered their lives Brett and Wendy were fighting with true flair.

“[Brett] was going to the studio more and more often and he was mucking up a bit. A few little, you know, nymphettes going around there after the genius and stuff that he'd get involved with briefly. I'd go round there bad-tempered and mad and I got a lover. I'm not quite sure why. I was feeling pretty low and he was a gorgeous person. I mean, he was an amazing person. Unfortunately, another rather self-destructive person in the end, but I thought I was in love - I thought I was in love. Michael Driscoll was a romantic figure. This was a bard, a poet, a singer.”

The battle between Brett and Driscoll for Wendy was a creative one, both deriving great energy from it and putting that towards creative purpose, however the affair was ultimately superseded by their worsening addiction to drugs. Wendy’s indecision led Brett to the realisation that if ‘Wendy wasn’t there as a muse, it was all pointless’, and with a world of wealth up his sleeve, sealed himself in an endless supply of heroin. Wendy was inevitably pulled into the routine with him and she slowly started to loose touch with the world outside their Lavender Bay apartment. While her husband had painting and the accolades that came with it, Wendy had nothing but the drug. On April 2nd 1977, Wendy was arrested and charged with possessing heroin and attempting to take thousands of dollars in cash out of the country. She pleaded guilty to drug and currency charges in Midland Court, Perth and was quickly placed in a treatment program to rid herself of the addiction. It was decided that London was the best place for a detox and so off she went to stay, leaving her husband and his paper dreams behind.

The divorce was imminent. Wendy returned from England having broken with heroin and in her absence Brett had found another woman to occupy his thoughts and his bed. ‘I'd gone in another direction and I wasn't prepared to go back into - as much as I was still very attracted to Brett and loved him - I wasn't going back in there. It was too dangerous for me’. A little more than ten years later her husband would be found, encapsulating the ultimate tortured artist cliché, dead in a hotel room with a needle in his arm.

Ultimately, it becomes increasingly difficult to write on Wendy Whiteley without unfairly overshadowing her life with the all-encompassing ball of eclectic energy that is her far more famous husband. After all, there have been 6 biographies written on Brett with only a handful of paragraphs in total mentioning Wendy. She remains a shadow, not even important enough to earn her own page on wikipedia. Was it that she didn’t have enough of an impact on the art scene or on Brett Whiteley’s life and therefore not considered worthy enough for mention? I don’t think so- his paintings tell us that much. What we can see however is that the intensity of their relationship was such that Wendy sublimated her own creative life to Brett.

Art for Pretenders

In an increasingly critical art world, Julie Rrap cannot put a digitally manipulated foot wrong. Lets think about why Australians have so eagerly jumped aboard the Rrap bandwagon, and how her current exhibition, Body Double, is forcing its viewers to double take.

Walking into the current Julie Rrap exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Arts is a confronting experience, particularly for those who feel uncomfortable with viewing the naked body anywhere but the bedroom.Rrap forces us to leave our comfort zones at the door with Body Double, an unyielding and subversive retrospective encompassing twenty-five years of her practice. And while we argue internally with ourselves on whether to run cowardly back to the main lobby where we can dabble in the less challenging exhibition on the bottom floor or tediously post-modern exhibition on the next, or whether to bravely indulge in the damning social commentary and sexual confrontation that Rrap’s pieces have to offer, the photographs and installations wait.

Rrap has produced a body of work that is not only a surprisingly powerful and capturing experience for all, but also one that transcends the years and attitudes in which she has worked. As Rrap uses her body as a vehicle to express her creative ideals and social perceptions, curator Victoria Lynn uses the gallery space to enhance the journey and as they work in harmony, we critical gallery-goers realise that this is a terrain worth exploring.John Tagg likens every exhibition to a metaphorical map. This map “separates, defines and describes a certain terrain, marking its salient features and significant points, omitting and simplifying others, yet depicting the ground according to a method of projection: a set of conventions and rules under which the map is constructed” (Tagg: 1979, p70).

This metaphor becomes relevant when examining the way in which Body Double has been curated to define and enhance its audience’s experience and perceptions of the works. This idea of the ultimate construction is further supported by Bruce Ferguson who asserts ‘there is a plan to all exhibitions, a will or technological hierarchy of significance, which is its dynamic undercurrent” (1996, p175). So what was the plan, how does the undercurrent run?Lets first consider the name of the exhibition.

Body Double. As Tagg suggests, “the name of an exhibition helps to construct a position and a viewpoint from an inside that looks out…to title is to entitle”. Just as a map labelled “treasure map” alerts us to the fact that the document will steer its beholder towards an unknown treasure, we grasp at, and are intrigued by the clues in the title of Rrap’s exhibition. As one enters the Museum of Contemporary Arts, where the exhibition is displayed, one is met with the words Body Double and their accompanying image. It is an image that will be given greater context later on in its place on the wall amongst its contemporaries, however here it serves to intrigue and give light to the title of the exhibition. We may understand that concepts of sexuality, discontentment and popular culture will all come into play. Different aspects of the body as an experience, as a phenomenon, will be addressed.

So as we begin to explore our luscious artistic landscape, we are met with the first plot on the metaphorical map. Stepping out of the elevator we arrive face to face with a life size photograph of Julie Rrap. She stares at us with an expression that is a mixture of apathy and concentration. She is naked and seems uncomfortable, with parts of her body encased in plaster moulds. Another image of Rrap hangs next to this one on the wall. They are part of the Vital Statistics 1997 collection, which is completed by the plaster mould sculptures that are arranged in front of the photographs.Brian Ferguson discusses a theory that, in relation to the exhibition, the desire of a public is “to establish a proper distance from the art on display and to have a reasonable debate about it. To be too close would be to be blindly identified with the objects, the definitions of fetishism, a closeness which is uncomfortable” (1996, p182).

If this is in fact the case, then Rrap has called upon fetishism and decided discomfort from the get-go with Vital Statistics. We are encouraged to approach and examine these moulds up close, taking in every crevice, curve and acknowledging the imperfections. The moulds facilitate a sense of intimacy with the artist, one that continues as we follow the Body Double map.Taking a right turn, which seems the natural progression, one enters into a hallway so wide that it may be considered another room with only two walls.

On one of these walls we are given a treat. Overstepping, 2001-the image which has been prominent on catalogues, posters, and press releases advertising the exhibition as well as on the cover of contemporary art magazines- is hung here in its true form. It is striking in its rightful size (which isn’t all that large at 120 × 120cm) and relieving for its audience. No doubt, having shown interest in the work of Julie Rrap one would have come across this image of a woman’s feet bearing fleshy stiletto heels that appear like natural extensions of the feet. Finding it here, relatively near the beginning of one’s journey instigates an element of smug understanding. We have seen it before and we understand the joke. It tells us we can continue exploring because we deserve to be here.

The map leads us to an expansive space in our terrain. We find ourselves in a large room, in which the Soft Targets, 2004 and Fallout, 2006 collections share space. Large photographs, again digitally manipulated to form a series of confronting images, hang in a symmetrical manner. The images have not been frames and instead hang thinly, as if they have been precariously stuck on with bluetac. This has the valuable effect of creating a workshop or studio environment, drawing the audience closer into the photographs and inturn closer to the artist herself (Pearce: 1994).The sense of space in this room may be overwhelming if it not for the low sculptural installations placed seemingly unsystematically on the floor in front of us.

These installations function as sensual environments that consume the space. They are plaster moulds which show where Rrap has come and gone and invite the viewer to follow in her footsteps. They exude a sense of play that encourages the visitor to cross the threshold from observer to performer by actively engaging in Rrap’s work. The codes of “civilised and decorous behaviour” in the gallery that Tony Bennett discusses (1995, p165) are thrown out the window as hands and feet explore the artwork. Shoes are removed, bodies contorted. Television screens are positioned in front of these moulds so that the fearless participant can watch their every move. One can’t help but think that Rrap is touching upon and experimenting with the “relations of power”, which Ferguson believes “surge and course through the exhibition environment” (1996, p 184).

At the same time, we must not downplay Victoria Lynn’s role in establishing and determining our experience. We enter the next room on our voyage and find a series of nine small screens, each playing its own film. Each a mini-artwork in itself. It may be presumptuous to say that the collection Porous Bodies, 1999 would not be as effective displayed any other way than the way it has been here, however constricting these minor works into a frame and constraint that refelects their size and nature seems a logical and aethetically sound choice. Conituning along to another room we find Disclosures, 1982 a series of photographs of Rrap exploring different artistic and photographic mediums in her workshop. Somewhat resembling film stills, the images are numerous, yet effective in their numbers and individual discrepancies. Everything from the size, scale, blurred resolutions and disregard of logic denotes a kind of chaos, but at the same time, creates a strongly Romantic effect. By hanging the images from the roof by fishing wire, Lynn creates a regimented structure that counteracts such chaos and allows the audience to view the artworks at eye level.

They move through the room, following a set path, absorbing the photographs in the order that works best aesthetically and conceptually.Any subject for Rrap - whether it is the body, the portrait, gendered motifs or cultural references - invites the possibility of endless speculation. While the subjects are central, it is the response and individual experience of each viewer that makes Rrap’s work so powerful. Drawing upon the performative aspect of exhibiting (Ferguson: 1996) as well as Tagg’s concept of the exhibition as the map, Victoria Lynn has ensured that there‘s quite a journey to be had though this terrain of photography, video, sculpture and installation. It is a journey that takes the artist’s voice and projects it, encourages interaction, dialogue and conversation, stimulates debate and ensures that we, the happy gallery-goer, will leave no less uncomfortable than we were when we arrived.

Sweet As Candy

Candy is not the first Australian film to delve into the desolate realms of the heroin subculture. Many will suggest that it could act, in its subject, as a prequel to the Australian film ‘Little Fish’ (2005), despite differing significantly in both visual style and its narrative shape. It seems that while Candy completes itself with surreal moments of sophisticated cinematography and first class performances, we may add it to the collection of medium-budget Australian films whose salient feature is that their subject matter is, at its simplest level, strikingly grim.

It sticks closely to the blueprint that was laid down in Darren Aronofsky's 'Requiem For A Dream' (2000), where the highs of the users are shown in stark contrast nightmarish lows, and the intoxicating pleasure of love and lust gives way to a descent into inevitable degradation. However what does make the film stand out from its thematic counterparts is Armfield’s reluctance to take sides or sermonise as is the case in most films with drug abuse as a main point of contention. Rather the story is simply told as what it is, and the privileged audience are given a fly on the wall account of an inevitably devastating love triangle between a boy, a girl, and a drug.

Adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Luke Davies who co-wrote the screenplay with director Neil Armfield, Candy follows the descent into hell of two heroin junkies that are in love. Divided into three ominously titled chapters, 'Heaven', 'Hell' and 'Earth', the film begins with the lovers, the would-be poet Dan (Heath Ledger) and artist Candy (Abbie Cornish) boarding a fairground Gravitron ride. While we as an audience know nothing of Dan and Candy’s relationship at this point, the view that we are given from above is a telling one. We learn that the subsequent seduction of their sinister passion is spurred by a complete lack of responsibility, and the scene of exhilaration and regression to childhood thrills epitomises this. With an aerial shot our perspective is constructed from a view that is parallel to that of the encouraging parents as they look down at their children spinning carelessly, and this is a view that seemingly marks the audience’s relationship to the characters as the film goes on. We watch with an air of protectiveness - It’s hard to be judgemental towards characters when they are so naïve and likeable in their local realness.

This, so the chapter title tells us, is Heaven. We are given a taste of the two young lovers’ romantic bliss as they indulge in their intoxicated highs and their starry-eyed puppy love. As they paint and have sex and write poetry about it afterwards we are govened by the feeling that even the heroin they so casually flirt with is no more than an extension of the passionate world they inhabit. The cinematography in these early sequences maximises this bliss, creating a golden-hued glow as sunlight streams in from windows and illuminates the substandard house and further creates an aura of surreal gracefulness as it we see the bodies of Dan and Candy intertwine under water in a swimming pool. The underwater absence of sound gives further rise to this sense of bliss and creates a jolting sense of disruption when we, along with Candy and Dan emerge from the peace of the water.

As Armfield suggests “heroin induced ecstacy is hard to film as it's usually an experience most viewers are not familiar with”. Rather than use magic realism, as in Trainspotting or Requium for a Dream, the director externalises the users’ feelings by placing them at the centre of sensual, beautifully filmed episodes such as this reoccuring swimming pool scene. A scene at an automatic carwash, where Candy and Dan enter the fountain of water on a blissful high and exit minutes later near passed out, confused and dejected, exemplifyes the way in which the drug teases then betrays its victims. However during these moments when the addiction turns sour, Armfield's breezy visuals and music-video editing style remain. It seems that the desolution of the situation is intensifyed by the consistancy of the surreal filming style, as Armfild rejects what could easily be the graphically confronting cliches of drug culture cinema.

The low-key but emotional performances of Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish further lend sweetness to the otherwise sordid series of events. Ledger, in particular, exerts a sideways pull as the loving but lost boy who lures Candy away from her safe but stifling milieu. Cornish - the girl of the moment in Australian film – offers a classically restrained performance as a character that requires a sense of understated realness to be as entirely haunting as she manages to be. Noni Hazlehurst and Tony Martin are given the underrated roles of Candy's parents whose apparent function in the film is to bring the bliss back to reality, and to ultimately draw the love story into the realms of the real world where ones actions will have an invariable impact on those around them. It is Geoffrey Rush, in the supporting role of openly gay university chemist Caspar, and his foreseeable tragic demise that brings home the message to all – it’s all well and good until somebody gets hurt.

As the inevitable loss of paradise dawns both the lovers and the audience are brought to “earth”, and then “hell” Armfield creates an increasingly intimate environment. The harrowing process of Dan and Candy’s first serious attempt to give up their habit “cold turkey” gives a dispassionate, fly-on-the-wall depiction of their necessary suffering. The sparse and un-flashy setting adds to intensity of the situation and allows for the complete surrendering of every bitter emotion that Dan and Candy experience. As the lovers escape to the country side to escape the habit, the film's colour palette grows ever more desaturated and the audience will shake their head in detached prudence – having learnt full well from life and other drug classics that a change of scenery doesn’t not add up to a change in personal will.