Contemporary Australia: Women

162 Cosmic Armature (production stills) 2012 12-channel video from 6 DVD video sources, variable durations, CRT televisions, wooden pallets, DVD players Installed dimensions variable Opposite Your boat my scenic personality of space (production still) 2012 Multi-screen video installation Installed dimensions variable Thus, the contemporary medium of video allows Williams to revisit this still-painful conundrum: how to make art in a time of excess and instant communication? How can one make a mark that even hits the mark? Justene Williams does this by returning to first principles: she makes things that are like paintings. Look at the colours — light, bright greens and oranges, flashes of purple and red, almost luminous and unrepentantly over-the-top. Yet the palette is controlled and deliberate. The emphatically messy act of painting celebrated here signifies the irreducibly handmade, and Williams’s brilliant colours sing with delight, sitting in a bright white installation space that recalls the white-grounded canvases painters have used ever since the French impressionists. Like them, Williams looks to everyday life to salvage joy and celebration. In a world beset by sorrow, Justene Williams insists on making art that is redemptive. Julie Ewington contemporary. It’s early twentieth-century avant-garde entertainments, such as Dadaists Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball in Zurich’s celebrated Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, or Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dance theatre of the 1920s: Williams is besotted by these antic experiments. The furious pace of her videos owes much to written accounts of the chaotic energies of Dada cabaret, and to a few photographs and film records; often she salvages these histories as much as she raids today’s rubbish. 3 Like the early modernist performers who were obsessed by machines, the actions of Williams’s performers are often curiously automatic, yet evidently directed by the artist: on the one hand, the jerky actions recall the playful legs, plates and saucepan lids in Fernand Leger’s 1923/4 experimental film La Ballet mécanique , a painter’s tribute to the speed and energy of modernity. On the other, the unpredictable actions of the performers are a great part of the works’ charm. One never knows what will happen next. I said before that Williams is making a ‘simultaneous homage and critique’, but this interrogation might be of simultaneity itself: the central apprehension of modernity, and of Modernism, that everything is happening all at the same time, and that no single static object, such as a painting or sculpture, can adequately account for the maelstrom of modern life. This caused a crisis in early twentieth‑century art and Leger’s film, as much as Schwitters’s walk-in constructions or the Dada evenings, attempted to capture this new reality. As Williams wrote in 2010: Futurism’s films, costumes, sound works and performances remain a source of inspiration . . . an artist can emulate aesthetics used by the futurists of 1913, utilising digital post-production techniques, mashed with direct quotation from animation series Futurama, to create multiple levels of reference and meaning. 4