The Greater Than One Exhibition at Monash University Art and Design Faculty Gallery Caufield Campus was curated by Alicia Renew.
PoPoCaTePTL and ROARAWAR FEARTATA as a collective CCC Inc. worked with the measurement guideline of “greater than one metre”. We explored the possibilities of restrictive space measurements via performance and the sculptural installation genre whilst questioning the necessity of such exhibition briefs. Responding to the desires of art gallery curators, measured concepts or notions of measurement, our whimsical performative provocations addressed thematics oscillating around ‘conceptual voids’, the ephemeral and the subject as an autonomous Being.
When is a measurement a gift?
MEDIUM Mixed media found objects. (Pine wood pine, cardboard cladding, black curtained material, fluorescent light, mirror, charcoal. lubricant and dust) with performances.
DIMENSIONS 1m x 1m x 2m
The object's immersive and claustrophobic signifierness references the cave (Lascaux or Plato), monolithic structures, cardboard architecture and cubby-houses, the ubiquitous cardboard box in art, light art, life or Being's existence as dust, the universe as a god's cum-rag (no thing is to be explicitly offensive), the enigmatic mystery of art itself, the package, parcel and the gift of all these things amongst other things.
Cultivated within an aesthetic antagonism, our ideational gestations contemplated the implementation of a literal surveying of the ‘nature of contemporary culture’ at Monash University Art and Design Faculty’s Caufield Campus in relation to a broad, general scope. Plinths and functionality or utilitarian sculptural means were also tropes we considered.
Others were Invited to interact or engage in intimate enactments. A couple of people cried tears. Some gag or pose. Photo. Image. Self as cultural spectacle. Others emphatically deny i am there. Was i? Aversion. Averting my existence. Monash University Art Design Faculty Caufield campus security concern themselves with some others as to the state of my well-being. Cop call. And i explain. Barely clad in nothing more. Stained "female" underwear -assumed to be "y-fronts" - and my mouth froths foamy white viscous and sticky lubricant with saliva spittle, salty sweat and dehydration. Wearing high-heel pumps.
Playing with risk and failure, pathos and bathos, we desire an ascent in an approach towards the Sublime and then freefall, descending into the ridiculous, reflexively contemplating the mediations of our respective mediums all the while wondering and questioning why bother doing what we are doing, and for what purpose and what it is and what is it all for. What is this thing, conceptually – art – its notions of what it was, is, has become, is becoming and, or will be.
...THE PROBLEM WAS HOW TO GIVE "JOYOUS REPULSION"...DISGUST PEOPLE JOYOUSLY IN AN AFFIRMATIVE WAY...provocatively...not offensively...LIFE-AFFIRMING AND JOYOUS ABJECTION...PLAYING WITH GENDERED IDENTITIES, (IM)PURE SEXUALITY AND INTIMACY...INSTANT INTIMATE MOMENTS WITHIN A RECIPROCITY OF THE GAZE AND SELF AS SPECTACLE...THE BODY AS MEDIUM...CORPOREALITY IS INSTRUMENTAL...THE ABSURDITY OF fARTAUD...AND HOW OTHERS BELIEVE THAT WHAT THEY DO HAS MEANING FOR OTHERS...
