Mun-dirra

 

At the cavernous entrance to the monolith is a one-finger salute. The hand atop its big bluestone plinth sends an unambiguous message to the gallery. On the one hand, it could be a jaunty thumbs-up of the sort emulated by groups of schoolboys in front of it, being photographed. On the other hand, the thumb is shaped like a tall finger, with phallic connotations that don’t take long for those with a mind for such suggestion. Walking with the schoolboys and their teachers through the cavern and its weeping wall, we have all day to test our powers of ambiguity on roomfuls of postmodernity. Or as one wag describes it, entering an AI area, The Try-any-old Thing. Two figures tall as David, though one reads her iphone, the other stares hands in pockets, stand in the atrium somehow aware of their Goliath. Women come and go, talking of not-Michelangelo. Ambiguities mount, or perhaps dismount, depending on how visitors see them. Robotic dogs draw with forepaws on walls mindless abstractions undeserving of reviews. Hieronymus Bosch goes mad again on hard-drives. Neck-bending screens depict unstoppable megacities of the world until the neck hurts. Materiality made over in every material, positioned to mock and mimic the old masters. A loose thread of try-anythings straggles through another portal and with nothing else to do either, I follow. We walk into a space where handiwork unfolds, curves, caresses, balances and bobs, reads tides and holds fast. Where ambiguity is put aside, if it ever had a place. Maningrida fish net fences wiggle into the distance, made of dried pandanus spiralis and “natural dyes”, anythings are told on tidy captions and through audible earplugs. The low-level frenzy of technological change is replaced by the original elements of grass, sunshine, flowing water, dextrous digitality where time is read by shadows on the sand. Fingers and thumbs interweave for hours, gestures practised year by year since youth, every inch and row pressed firmly into place, particularly. The appearance of perfect straight lines is corrected at close quarters, each rush and bind leaving its own variations on the retina. Blessedly free of tour guides and their high-level phraseology, we peer quietly through the nets into passageways of other nets, orange and yellow, black and brown, riding undulant the length and out of sight. We could be, for a brief moment, barramundi reading the signs, gliding towards a detour; giant groper dreaming where salt and fresh commingle, part company. Instead we take photographs, trace a weave with our eye to where all traces leave off. Someone jokes about this being a real immersion experience and, true, it is a moment the abstract by-product of sheer necessity catches our otherwise distracted attention in its charming coils and curves. Later there will be time to read about Mun-dirra, its unambiguous purpose, the ends for which the fences were woven, the contradictions their presence possess inside a monolith. But for now, the physical now, I bide my time thinking about Arnhem Land.

Hicks

 

This is a super large serve of ice cream scoops. There’s mint choc chip at the pinnacle, then rum and raisin scoops, blueberry gelato, honeycomb crunch, lime pistachio. The mind adjusts to the sight of so much ice cream beginning to melt and sag. Or else it’s bean bags. In muted pastel colours, it will be observed, not the classic bean bag hot pink or bright orange leather. Visitors could choose their own bag for the day, except signs say do not touch. Then again, the scoops could be boulders and actually the wall caption says they’re boulders. The gallery is clear that the sculptor Sheila Hicks (American, born 1934, though like half of them lives most of the time in Paris) says they’re boulders. Rather too comfortable saggy boulders, it could be said, with soft shoulders. The caption, black print on a white rectangle just below eye level, talks art talk suitable for art talkers. Such things as Hicks being unconventional and someone who understands gestural form and painterly reference. And it’s true. The boulders resemble the close attention to form achieved by Pierre Bonnard as he dobs tiniest blobs of teensiest hairbrush finesse to make a vase or dog in one of his panoramic works, of the kind seen in the very same gallery space only last year. It reminds me of the Bendigo wool shop, the one at the Woollen Mill, with its bargain room of chunky twist and lengthy merino and alpaca balls by the scoopful up to the ceiling. Oddly, no one entering the gallery space looks at the pinnacle of woolly clouds ascending on high. I watch as they glance quickly then skirt it, refuse to eyeball, walk around the fact, going quickly over instead to inspect the Indigenous ink paintings on the facing walls. I conclude that the pinnacle spectacle is hard to engage with. Perhaps they have a guilty conscience about so much unused wool in one place. Or panic attack memories of knitting bees in youth. I don’t ask. Then again, it could be airport luggage left in the rain, in the days before they invented carousels. Or else it really is the mountain of purgatory, is my next thought. How much ice cream have you eaten in your life? And was it enough? Or much too much? Who told you to write outside the margins? And what really happened at the knitting bee, anyway? Perhaps purgatory is an acrylic thick ply wool profiterole mountain. Does it have a purpose? It’s a purgatory almost impossible to scale. Sheila Hicks, for reasons best known to herself, calls the boulders ‘Nowhere to Go’, but they could well be called ‘Nowhere to Sleep’. So soft, but so steep. The kids’ caption talks of thinking about wool, when what they would want to do is jump head first into a hundred bean bags at once. That would be a Happening, mayhem at ground level, but the mountain refuses such rest and recreation, with conventional signs instructing everyone do not touch the exhibit.