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Primavera

Mark Hilton, Champion (2006)

In the foyer of the MCA in Sydney sits a glistening pink puddle. Like a giant pile of viscera or a very unlucky icecream, it slowly loses form on the gallery floor. It’s all that remains of Marcus Canning’s Pink Wienie (2008), an inflatable version of Sleeping Beauty’s castle injection-moulded from hot pink silicon. ‘Wienie’ is a term invented by Walt Disney to describe the visual magnet that draws visitors in to the heart of a theme-park. The word on the street is that Canning’s wienie was structurally unsound and collapsed before the opening of the show. It took some convincing to persuade me that the rupture was accidental, as it seemed rather the point. Art galleries are very much theme-parks for the middle classes, and so there’s no better place to set a moral parable about a society that has amused itself to death.

Hannah Matthews, curator of this years ‘Primavera’, assured me that she had nothing so tendentious in mind. This year’s ‘Primavera’ is unthemed, although the central tenet of the show, presenting work by Australian artists under the age of 35, remains unchanged. That’s probably theme enough: in the past two decades, ‘Primavera’ has been at least partly responsible for launching the careers of internationally successful artists such Shaun Gladwell and Mikala Dwyer, and, as a consequence, attracts a kind of judicious sporting appraisal on the part of the Sydney art punters, who enjoy it the way Bertolt Brecht enjoyed a boxing match, laying muttered bets on who’s going to make and who’s going to break.

Soda_Jerk, Astro Black: A History of Hip-hop (2007)

This year’s front-runners are ambitious Sydney duos Soda_Jerk (Dom and Dan Angelino) and Ms & Mr (Stephanie and Richard Nova Milne). Both couples enjoy a homeground advantage and they use it well. Soda_Jerk are remix artists, who splice together footage in order to make the films they’d actually like to see. This year, it’s Astro Black: A History of Hip-hop (2007), in which they rework Sun Ra’s 1974 sci-fi Space is the Place, culminating with a sequence in which Flavor Flav returns to earth on the giant UFO from Independence Day (1996). Equally invested in the uncanny, Ms & Mr make works celebrating their happy marriage. That would be nauseatingly saccharine if it wasn’t for the intentionally creepy way in which they do it, retrospectively adding their adult selves to Super-8 family videos and childhood drawings. By interpolating themselves into each other’s histories, they turn ‘I’ll always be there’ into ‘I was always already there’, which is a hair-raising proposition when you stop to think about it.

Mark Hilton is a respected member of the Melbourne arts scene, well known for his work with local artist-run initiatives. His beautifully produced light-boxes present various bloody gangland events in the style of an ethnographic artifact, a parody of the ideologically driven cliché that cultural diversity brings cultural riches. The light-box Champion (2006) is painted in the style of a Persian court painting, in which time and space are conflated to provide a God’s eye view. Except in this case, the historical events depicted are a particularly loathsome and notorious gang rape committed in Sydney eight years ago. The biggest surprise here is that the city press, normally beside itself with joy at any opportunity to be outraged by contemporary art, seems to have noticed nothing amiss. As Hilton says, ‘my work rewards closer inspection.’

Danielle Freakley’s project, The Quote Generator (2008), includes footage of dozens of conversations in which she attempts to navigate through everyday interactions speaking only in fragments taken from movies and books. It’s cringe-inducingly awkward, and there seems to be a fair amount of evidence in her film footage that people find this sort of thing extremely annoying in real life, but, watching her persist, one can’t help but feel there is something heroic in her stubborn commitment to her quest. Somehow Freakley oscillates between being a victim of her own artifice, and, because she’s chosen her own mode of torture, somehow compellingly free.

Also to be seen are works by Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Ariel Hassan, Paul Knight, Moya McKenna and Gemma Smith.

Adam Jasper