The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

It is in the proposals that truth is stranger than fiction, and that 'History Is Fable Agreed Upon', that artist Luke Roberts has found the material for his investigations. Based in subtropical Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, Roberts has, in the 1990s, reinvented the Wunderkammer. 'THE VOYAGE WITHIN THE WONDERFUL CONTINUES .. .' is an ongoing 'banner' for these vast displays which replicate the magic of the 'cabinets of curiosities' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the exotic splendour of the Victorian museum (with its implication of Empire and conquest), any number of provincial, specialist or amateur museums, and even the secondhand market or jumble sale. His collection and its display embrace surreal chance encounters of the strange and the commonplace ('of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table'). 1 Free-standing or presented in vitrines, objects are showcased as in the museum. Roberts's Wunderkammern document specimens from the natural world and the artificial-'high' and 'low', exotic and kitsch, memorabilia from the Old and NewWorlds (and outer space), from antiquity to the next millennium, all that is genuine, fake or in between. Each artefact is identified, with labels weighted toward the extraordinary and loaded with wit, as in the case of a 'Toad mortally wounded by Metamorphosis'. Word-play underscored Wunderkammer/ Kunstkamera, the title for Roberts's major installation at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1994-95. Ancient and modern are linked: the Greek kamara, Latin for vault, camera, chamber (in camera), camera obscura, on camera. Kunstkamera is a variation on Kunstkammer, those collections contemporary to the Wunderkammer which prioritised 'art' and the artificial (Kunst is German for 'art'). The title gives focus to the museum and the camera, and their repertoire of images. Roberts's task to re-establish the 'irrational cabinet' and to catalogue the world in all its natural and artificial wonder is sanctioned by none less than the mythical Pope Alice, a performance persona unveiled by Roberts in the 1970s. Pope Alice, The World's Greatest Living Curiosity, fell to Earth from the Doomed Planet Metalluna during prehistory, had a nineteenth-century engagement with the Barnum and Bailey Circus as The Oldest Person Alive, and is now striding towards the frontiers of cyberspace. Moreover, many thousands of years ago Pope Alice was ordained the Pontiff of Mu, a great lost continent once located in the Pacific. Also named Lemuria, the legend of Mu has parallels with Gondwanaland, one of the ancient supercontinents, connecting the landmasses of Australia, Africa, South America and Antarctica with the Asian subcontinent. Pope Alice is by no means the Occidental tourist. Wunderkammerl Kunstkamera 1994-95 Installation at the Queensland Art Gallery, 1994-95 This antipodean (anti)pope plays the Trickster God or Heyeohkah, utilising the attributes of the fool or clown to go beyond that which is sacred. Roberts's notorious photographic series depicting 'Pope Alice and Archangel' suggests the eroticism and anti– clericism of surrealism, even Marcel Duchamp as the cross-dressing Rrose Selavy. Standing against repressive moral values, wit and bad taste are the ultimate tools of this collector of the marvellous. Pope Alice provides custody for all outcasts (including the inanimate) and all that which is not officially sanctioned. Stephen Bann has described the 'cabinet' of the seventeenth century as 'a recuperation, or an act of mourning for what is lost'. 2 The devotion we pay to the objects in Roberts's Wunderkammern places the viewer as pilgrim to the shrine of Pope Alice. We may pay homage, for instance, to Her Pekinese dog which departed this life in the 1920s. Similarly, we may marvel at the Skeletal Remains of a Barbie Doll, and may spiritually genuflect before the aura surrounding Objects from the Tomb of Andy Warhol. Warhol's 'Cookie Jars' are presented in sets of four, much as the Canopic jars which accompanied the Egyptian mummy, containing the viscera of the dead, with stoppers in the form of a man, hawk, jackal and dog-headed ape (Horus' four sons). Warhol's 'Jars' are instead topped with figures from American mythology (courtesy of Disneyland and made in Japan). We may suspend disbelief (were these Warhol's?), but we delight in the possibility. Through the Wunderkammer, a picture of the world is constructed from the perspective of Pope Alice, and it is a world most wonderful. Michele Heimrich, PhD Student, Department of Art History, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia 1 Le Comte de Lautr~amont (Isidore Ducasse). quoted in Dawn Ades, 'Surrealism as Art', Surrealism: Revolution byNight [exhibition catalogue], National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1993, p50. 2 Stephen Bann, 'Shrines, Curiosities, and the Rhetoric of Display', in Visual Display: Culture BeyondAppearances, eds. L. Cooke and P. Wollen, Bay Press, Seattle, 1995, p25.While not following aperiod of iconoclasm as such, Roberts's project does react against Greenbergian formalism and could be seen in these terms as presenting a'restitution and recuperation' of the iconic image. See Bann,p.22 A RT I s T s : PA c I FI c I 121