MOVE: The Exhibition
Away from the crowds gathering to see the Ron Mueck exhibition at the GOMA in Brisbane is a little room with 12 videos playing. The twelve videos have all been produced by Australian artists to be included in this travelling exhibition.
The exhibition is the product of a Kaldor Public Art Project, MOVE: Video Art in Schools and forms a part of the syllabus for the majority of government schools in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. It’s also available to private schools for a small fee. It has been around for a few years now in the states mentioned, and is about to be introduced into Queensland where the Gallery of Modern At has begun conducting regional workshops.
Although video art has been established for half a century, it is yet to be fully understood by artists or the public. The project is then timely, as video art is increasingly prominent (a walk around Cockatoo Island during the Biennale of Sydney will verify this).
As it is a new medium it has its own language and concerns that a traditional art education will not give a viewer access to; video is often ignored because it takes too long or is seen as obscure.
This new language is the focus of many of the works included in MOVE. Each artist uses video with unique concerns that relate to their practices. Shaun Gladwell in his Blue & white linework composition (2008) traces road markings on a skateboard and mountain bike, exploring the formalist aspects of the medium through a study in experimental drawing, using the body as marker and the video as record for a canvas too large to be replicated by any other means.
Similarly John Tonkin in air, water part 2 (2007) embraces the digital world and chooses not to try and replicate our reality but rather creates a digital landscape almost entirely foreign, bar for the natural laws that the objects seem to obey, embracing a virtual reality entire possible, a shift from the imaginary worlds concealed in paintings.
No longer a passing movement, video is a medium that relates to how we perceive the world. The fear that enveloped society decades ago has been forgotten, and technology is now embraced whole-heartedly. Such is the commitment that much of our interaction with each other and the world is mediated through a monitor. If art is to truly fulfil its role in society, then video will remain a prominent medium, and having a society that is able to understand and communicate with the medium will become vital.
Thanks to Detached all secondary schools in Tasmania will be receiving MOVE, and in October the program will be launched in Western Australia to the government secondary schools. Perhaps if we’d had this a decade or so earlier the crowds would be in the little room with 12 videos instead of taking photos of the giant baby.
