David Rosetzky
Australia Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia
Stills from David Rosetzky, How to Feel (2011)
David Rosetzky’s video How to Feel (2011) features a group of six distinctly middle-class Australians partaking in an apparently ritualistic activity – equal parts dance rehearsal, group therapy and gymnastics routine – in an inner-suburban warehouse. Staged in the absence of a leader or instructor, the characters’ frank exchanges and peculiar choreographed movements occur as though in an imaginary space, separate from the pressures of everyday life. At the same time, within this space appearances of the everyday – such as sitting quietly in a group, or shielding one’s face when embarrassed – become charged with a special significance.
Developed in collaboration with choreographer Stephanie Lake and writer and theatre director Margaret Cameron, the process of the work’s production mirrors its central theme of social exchange. To write the script, Rosetzky first conducted separate interviews with cast members then combined the transcripts into a pool of collective narrative information. This was continually refined during the rehearsal process, during which every performer learnt each of the six roles. The finished version of the work conveys a palpably humanistic message in which apparently personal problems, (‘I think I’m that sort of person…’, ‘I would like to be…’, ‘I don’t want…’, etc.) are depicted as universal dilemmas; individual experiences and memories dissolve into the film’s collective body.
Using the video’s structure, Rosetzky questions the relationship between subjective experience and self-representation. One of the artist’s most structurally complex works to date, How to Feelcomprises four sections, each containing approximately 14 scenes that are repeated in more or less the same order. Once the same point is reached in the following section, certain characters and texts are rotated; participants then deliver lines previously voiced by someone else in the group. This has the effect of eerily forming and re-forming the characters’ onscreen identities, of separating their visual appearance from the content of their speech.
But there is a further, more interesting disjunction located between the work’s portrayal of a neurotic, pathos-saturated inner world on the one hand, and on the other, the strangely anti-emotional tenor of the mildly boring viewing experience. It could be argued that, with its highly confessional tone, the video’s failure to elicit an equally impassioned response from the viewer undercuts its efforts to problematize the experience and concept of identity. Yet this possible weakness also stands as How to Feel’s ambiguous achievement. Drawing as it does from an eclectic range of moving image vocabularies, from indie cinema to melodrama, Rosetzky’s work is perhaps most indebted to televisual advertising strategies. And indeed, in its awkward attempt to foster a succession of fleeting intimacies between the viewer and its shape-shifting characters, it ultimately operates like a failed advertisement for social difference.
Yet despite its attractive cast, beautiful cinematography and gentle soundtrack by composer J. David Franke, the oneiric vision of cathartic communion presented in How to Feel remains deficiently seductive. The characters’ utter self-absorption – expressed through endlessly monotonous verbal exchanges – produces a fundamentally alienating effect, more dully repellent than remotely alluring. A high-gloss, fragmentary image of social togetherness, How to Feel succeeds in distilling an image of a mode of individualism that insists, above all else, on calling attention to itself in an overtly self-conscious fashion.
David Homewood
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