Beyond the Frame
The White Rabbit Collection, Sydney, Australia
Lu Nan, Prison Camps in N. Myanmar (No.55) (2006)
The White Rabbit Collection was started just over a decade ago by Judith Neilson and her husband Kerr (founder of Platinum Asset Management). It focuses on contemporary Chinese art produced this century and is made visible to the public via the Neilson’s converted warehouse in central Sydney. As well as four floors of exhibition space, White Rabbit, which is non-profit, consists of a small theatre, a library, a teahouse and a very cool glass elevator that forms a kind of spine at the rear of the building. The gallery opened in 2009 and has since hosted five exhibitions, which have revealed only a fraction of the collection. It’s difficult not to be positive about White Rabbit – the Neilsons’ enthusiasm for the project is infectious: ‘We wanted to share with Australians and the world the best of Chinese contemporary art since 2000 – a turning point that I think of as the Big Bang’, states Judith Neilson on the gallery website.
The title of their current exhibition, ‘Beyond the Frame’ – which includes the work of 20 or so artists – promises, or at least hints at, a slight departure from the type of art that to date White Rabbit has previously exhibited – which has tended to be object-based, often monumental, and, even when immersive in nature, has invariably had a well-defined edge or border. So it was with some anticipation that I approached the gallery for this show, hoping to experience something less containable, more discursive, ephemeral, participatory, perhaps extending beyond the confines of the gallery, or works that even challenge their own collectibility.
Shi Zhiying, High Seas (2008)
The ground floor of the gallery is dominated by Shi Zhiying’s colossal oceanscape painting, High Seas (2008). Painted with rudimentary brush strokes it looks surprisingly photographic until you get to within diving distance, where the paint reveals itself. For Shi , who’s informed by Buddhist theory, oceans are as boundless as the mind. This makes the work borderless in an Agnes Martin or colour-field kind of way rather than by breaking through Joseph Kosuth’s ‘first frame’ (that of painting and art tradition) or ‘second frame’ (the institutional frameworks which surround cultural activity).
Upstairs, a section of the gallery has been partitioned off and the walls painted green. The room houses a series of black and white photographs by Lu Nan of prisoners in a Burmese prison on the Chinese border, Prison Camps in N. Myanmar (No.55) (2006). Functioning like an autonomous solo show within the bigger exhibition, Lu Nan’s photographs document the lives of people at the edge of society: opium and amphetamine dealers and addicts who have challenged authority and been strong-armed back in line. The images give a sense of waste, resignation and a desperate loss of both freedom and hope.
One of the most intriguing works in the show was also, in the end, the most convoluted and bemusing. Calm (2009) is a neat rectangular pile of building rubble on the gallery floor. On closer inspection the debris slowly moves up and down as if inhaling and exhaling like a living organism. Originally presented by artist Xu Zhen as a work produced by an unnamed Middle Eastern artist, Xu Zhen now chooses to assign the work to his collective/company ‘Madeln’. By shifting the goal-posts in such a way, Xu Zhen highlights how prejudice can affect interpretation – ‘we often see the things we want to see’, he states – but I’m not entirely sure whether this strategy improves Calm or destroys it. On one level, it adds complexity to the work, on another level though, it undermines a conventional semiotic reading of the work, which is quite disarming for the viewer.
The press release for ‘Beyond the Frame’ (the curator, by the way, is unnamed) points to a loose interpretation of the show’s title stating that the works ‘transcend frames and frameworks of every kind: window and picture frames, national borders, the confines of tradition, conventions about tools and techniques, the line between photography and animation – even the distinction between visual art and comedy.’ It goes on to quote jazz musician Charlie Parker who once declared: ‘Man, there’s no boundary line in art.’ As a counter to this you could add Frank Zappa’s famous quote: ‘The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting, literally; for other arts: figuratively – because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?’ This latter quote highlights a limitation of sorts, because although artworks can break beyond certain frames, they can never be completely frameless.
Although ‘Beyond the Frame’ might make a relevant strap-line for the entire White Rabbit collection – and is in keeping with Judith Neilson’s Big Bang theory – the exhibition felt curatorially under-developed, lacking in both precision and experimentation. The selected works were so varied that they seemed completely disconnected from one another, and it was disappointing that an exhibition which promised to go ‘beyond the frame’ – implying new frontiers and a challenging experience – felt familiar. Rather than identifying any peculiarities within the collection, or a temporary departure from White Rabbit’s tried-and-tested exhibition format (autonomous art objects contained within a conventional gallery setting), ‘Beyond the Frame’ stays well and truly within its own comfort zone.
Ian Geraghty
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