Contemporary Australia: Women

161 Justene Williams Australia b.1970 Your boat my scenic personality of space (production stills) 2012 Multi-screen video installation Installed dimensions variable Justene Williams is a machine for creating and destroying paintings. Originally a photographer, but since 2005 the maker of multi-channel video installations, her subject is painting, or perhaps painterliness, or maybe even being inside the act of painting. This is not to be indecisive but to emphasise the radical provisionality of Williams’s enterprise: more than anything else, her work addresses the experience of the creative act. It’s as if she is striving to put her finger on what is already under her hand but cannot be actually grasped. Williams shows two works in dialogue: Your boat my scenic personality of space 2012 is a single-channel video edited from a single hour-long shoot, projected on two enormous screens; Cosmic Armature 2012 directs six edited fragments from another, shorter shoot to 12 TV monitors mounted on painted wooden pallets. These multiple edits and different display mechanisms, like the pallets borrowed from warehousing equipment, underscore the propositional character of Williams’s reworking of her footage: she fragments it, splits it up, multiplies it, redoubles it, works it back and forward and mashes it up so completely that in the end, in the space, the visitor is befuddled by constant movement and gorgeous colour. Unable to see the beginning or end of the work, she is entirely immersed in it. It’s like being caught in a web of colour and light. It’s dazzling. Moreover, the performers are always on the move: they act out farcical inexplicable charades at such a frenetic pace that one is at a loss to understand exactly what is happening at any time. In Your boat my scenic personality of space, for instance, two performers dance around each other: a woman dressed as a man in oversize clown pants, and the other, so tall that he is clearly a man in fabulous drag, complete with a long‑haired wig. These cross-dressing push-pulling personae, caught in what Williams calls a ‘lovers’ discourse’, 1 are accompanied by a seated figure, sometimes playing on a modified electric guitar, sometimes tootling on a whistle. The work has four distinct episodes — it’s more complex than Williams’s previous works — that show, in turn, the lovers pulling on ropes and literally tying themselves up in knots; aluminium ‘boats’, like Venetian gondolas, traversing the Grand Canal of the set; then the little clown appears to extract bunting from its bum, a reverse reference to Carolee Schneemann’s notorious 1975 performance Interior scroll ; and a final riotous water-pistol battle. But, as the title tells us, the entire work asserts that the persona and personality of the artist are always embedded in a particular setting. This time it’s a boat, and we’re all in it together. In Cosmic Armature 2012 the action is simpler, though the sets and costumes are just as elaborate — criss‑crossing poles and strings acting out the title in crazed constellations. Williams is the sole performer, wearing trademark costumes confected from paper and scraps of magazine pages, covered with so much reworked detritus that she’s a moving collage. The inescapable reference to Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, his walk-in collage constructions of the 1920s and 1930s, situates the work in a lineage that reworks excess products from everyday consumerist culture, in simultaneous homage and critique (though the precise inspiration here was Eric Duvivier’s 1967 surrealist film La Femme 100 Têtes ( The 100-Headed Woman/The Headless Woman), seen at the Gallery of Modern Art. 2 To underscore her sources in popular culture, Williams always includes recognisable images from magazines: look closely to see images of standard glamour-pusses peering back from the melee. These egregiously handmade sets and costumes are deliberately and lovingly hokey — fragments of painted cardboard held together more by luck and prayer than carpentry. That Williams always gets materials from donations from familiar sources speaks to the central importance of making, and the psychical investments of the artist in it. All this construction is thoughtful and arduous. But so, equally, is the eventual destruction of the sets and costumes during the performance video. The two actions are complementary. Clearly this is a cabaret of a sort, and Williams did have a short-lived career as a cabaret dancer before becoming an artist, but the cabaret she has in mind is not Justene Williams Justene Williams Inside painting

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