Seen and heard: ‘Monster Theatres’ at AGSA
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At the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, the pre-lockdown media preview for ‘Monster Theatres’ was conducted in the midst of Karla Dickens’s A Dickensian Country Show (2020). A play on the artist’s name, and an apposite link with the Victorian-era chronicler/critic of the class system and advocate for social reform, the work conjures the atmosphere and itinerant nature of circus and carnival culture to give a piercing commentary on politics, gender and race. It is one of the stand-out works in this 2020 iteration of the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, for which curator Leigh Robb has invited 24 artists and collectives to make present the monsters of our time.
Megan Cope’s interactive and intricately constructed sonic installation Untitled (Death Song) (2020), for instance, offers a critique of ecological mismanagement through the mournful note of the bush stone-curlew, endangered by loss of habitat. Issues of intolerance and abuses of power, of forced migration and the refugee crisis are addressed by Aldo Iacobelli, who references the work of contemporary writers such as Italian poet Erri De Luca (‘the voyage on foot is a trail of backs’). And at the Adelaide Botanic Garden, Yhonnie Scarce’s glass installation In the Dead House (2020) makes visible the gruesome history of the nineteenth-century mortuary building as a site for the illicit collection of Aboriginal remains.
A serpentine mass of richly purple ‘suckered’ tentacles, Julia Robinson’s sculptural installation at the Museum of Economic Botany is a hybrid representation of the monstrous Scylla of Homer’s Odyssey and Beatrice, the beautiful but cursed protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 gothic short story. From Medusa to the terrifying Xenomorph in the Alien film series, the dangerous female – an historically disruptive force in literature, art and cinema – almost invariably meets a grisly end. In a David Lynchian amalgam of the domestic and the abject, Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari’s 15-minute film Dark Water (2019) disturbs comfortable notions of the home (and by extension the nation) as a place of sanctuary and stability. Their meticulous recreation of a 1950s Australian domestic interior rapidly descends into an aquatic and startlingly visceral sci-fi horror film, recalling classics of the genre such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).
With the reality of a global pandemic, works such as Abdul Abdullah’s almost deserted theatre, Brent Harris’s ‘Grotesquerie’ series (2001–09) and, in particular, Mikala Dwyer’s biohazard banners and discomfiting sick bays, have acquired a more loaded resonance. Her beaked and hooded hospital gowns (a reference to the protective attire worn by medieval plague doctors) strike an especially ominous note.
Critic Andy Butler identified the Wiradjuri words for ‘hear’ and ‘listen’ on the interior of a megaphone-like form in Dickens’s installation. Indeed, in accordance with Robb’s admonition to ‘listen to our monsters, and attend to their cautions, as we move into … a precarious and uncertain future’, sound and/or performance works – by APHIDS, Mike Bianco, Cope, Julian Day, Mike Parr and Stelarc – constitute a significant component of this biennial. Here and elsewhere, Robb allows for the possibility of a redemptive counter narrative to be heard and made manifest.
Wendy Walker, Adelaide
The Art Gallery of South Australia and satellite venues at the Adelaide Botanic Garden reopened on 5 June for an extended run of ‘Monster Theatres’ until 2 August.
