Contemporary Australia: Women

174 female heroes. The work is an extension of the statue of Joan of Arc by Emmanuel Frémiet, situated at Place des Pyramides in Paris, 1874. It is one of only very few statues showing a female figure atop a horse. There are thousands of statues of men in a similar stance with swords or flags, two which I pass every day on the way to my studio. Jess Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies (PfL): We use performance to consider how people reconfigure the social, geographical or political nature of architectural space. The performances we are creating for Embodied Acts are made in response to the architectural site of the GOMA foyer in collaboration with staff — the people who inhabit this site. For this exhibition, we have created the live and ongoing performance Canon 2012, the video Canon detail 2012, and the one-off performance Mass ornament 2012. These works engage gallery staff to create the work — they become the Parachutes for Ladies, a framework we use to credit our large groups of collaborators. The works make visible the institution’s human architecture. As artist Andrea Fraser suggests, ‘The institution of art is internalised, embodied and performed by individuals.’ 2 Mass ornament has its origins in our project I thought a musical was being made 2010, which marked the beginning of our interest in crowd behaviour. As a conceptual starting point, the work considered the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death as 38 people watched on from their apartments. The title, Mass ornament , is taken from Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal 1927 essay ‘Das Ornament der Masse’, in which he argues that, through the rise of industrialisation, the ornament has moved away from materiality to be found, instead, in the collective gathering of large groups of people — in this case, GOMA staff. The work considers Kracauer’s argument around the construction of a human architecture — ephemeral performance as opposed to a material ornament — within a building designed to house material objects. Mass ornament will take place in the GOMA foyer. You might catch a glimpse of this performance on the opening weekend, when formations begin to evolve out of the crowd — think Busby Berkeley choreography from 1940s musicals. Disappearing act (production still) 2011 Single-channel HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, 6:27 mins, ed. 1/5 Appearing act (production still) 2011 Single-channel HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, 6:12 mins, ed. 1/5 and the performance of the self and/or multiple selves; interrogating what it means to be a woman and what it means to be an artist living and working in a supposedly ‘post-Feminist’ era. This particular line of thinking has led us to challenge preconceived notions of feminine identity and reconsider the representation of women from both the past and present, as well as exploring the meaning and relevance of Feminism today. One of the key ways we explore these ideas is through humour and parody, challenging the notion that women — especially Feminists — don’t have a sense of humour. We like to combine the very serious with the ridiculous, fusing a range of performative genres such as endurance performance and body art practice with stand-up comedy, pantomime and street performance, which is evident in the works presented in Embodied Acts. The two single-channel video works displayed together for ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, Appearing act 2011 and Disappearing act 2011, combine the aesthetics and traditions of performance art documentation, vaudeville spectacle and cheap magic trickery to explore modes of representation and relationships between the ‘live’ and recorded image. The figures of the ‘magician’ and artist merge in a simple act of ‘disappearance’ and ‘appearance’, facilitated by the instrument of the video camera — the ultimate magic maker. In the live work, Performance fee 2012, performance and installation are combined with references to vaudevillian sideshow and street performance. For two hours, the four members sit blindfolded in the Gallery, offering kisses for two dollars. In this line-up, the artist is on display, as Brown Council literally plays out the cliché of the starving artist. Lauren Brincat (LB): My work for Embodied Acts, High horse 2012, is a continuation of my performative practice — there are similar endurance aspects as well as environmental links to other works. High horse is a challenge for me physically. Although not obvious, the task at hand is not familiar or easy and provides its own difficulties. Most of the works are not born out of performance intentions, but out of concepts or ideas that are the driving concern of the work. Here the concerns are with representations of feminine strength and