Tactical /ntcrvcntion Strategies (TIS) is a city-wide exhibition
which includes nineteen different works, projects, and
events mounted in various sites throughout Perth The thir1y
plus artists involved in the exhibition include a collective of
artists from Switzerland, some Perth expats based in
Sydney and a freshly picked bushel of tasty local talent.
Loosely defined, intervention may be described as being 10
interfere with intent (divine +/or other-wise). How the intent
is applied (and to what/ where/ whom} is where tactical
maneuvers and strategic play enters the big picture.
As a tool used by artists, the concept of intervention has a
rich history of association with various key movements of
the later part of the 20th century including the Situationists,
land Art, 705 happenings, Fluxus, feminist revisionists,
Guerilla An Action Group. Punk…to wag the finger at but a
few. This long legacy of wor1l is largely linked by a desire to
challenge, subvert, and promote re-negotiation of received and accepted meanings
ideologies, structures and form - both within the white-cube reality of the ar1-world and out
past the door-step and into the real-wor1d
Continuing in this tradition, the works included in the TIS exhibition include a truly eclectic array
of contemporary interventions into a variety or spaces, both concrete and conceptual.
Covering the gamet of response mechanisms from disturbing to playful, profane to profound,
sublime to subterfugal the over-riding flavour of the show is a taste of deadly serious light-
heartedness. Many of the works involve an engagement with spaces outside the gallery
and/or a renegotiation of the space inside the gallery, through the invitation to interact with
artworks in ways that you might not have tried before.
A work that is truly interactive (beyond move the cursor around the screen) is airstreams, a
work created by the AIRLINE collective from Switzerland. The airstreams are made from
enormous truck~tyre inner.tubes covered in a smooth white leather with a soft futon mattress
centre. These are suspended in a huge web of ropes at about seven metres off the floor,
People are invited to climb up rope ladders and spend lime together floating in the air,
Or you could choose to put your money where your mouth is and buy one of a range of
offensive T -Shirts which have national stereotype slogans printed on them. T-Shirt
interventions have previously been staged at tourist hot-spots such as the Sydney Opera
House during the Olympics, and now its Perths turn.
Video works include Everybody Needs, a work which takes selected moments from retro
episodes of Neighbours (Jason Donovan when he was still considered the type of boy you
could bring home to your mullet) and placing them in obsessively repetitive sequences to
create a form of structural video epilepsy. Follow and Watching Brief - A guide to CCTV,
deal with Surveillance in the City, and will assist you in acquiring best dress codes and
behavioural patterns to ensure that you are noticed by your friendly neighbourhood
surveillance technician.
Billboards as medium and site of intervention are
utilised in a number of works. The centrepiece of the BEFORE/ AFTER series features the heads of
Gorbachev and Stormin Normin Schworzkopf - Masters of World Business and Global Interventionist Politics while Paper over / to pulp by nature’ transforms the crude material of crass billboard advertising, and left-over packaging detritus, into a landscape of tropical idealism, open skies, and crystal blue seas.
Repetition has emerged as a formal theme in the
show, and the animated stencil graffiti of the Extinct
project, the multiple security guards involved in
(in)security (one night only at the opening), and the
episodic insertion of the Wagner Ring Cycle of operas
into the personals and classifieds of various
newspapers all deal with sequencing and seriality in
one way or another.
Some of the off-site works to look out for include the transformation of escalators throughout
the city into momentary ping-pong waterfalls, whilst Culture Gut uses materials of a heavier
note to make its public art statement - a caravan and an industrial bin.
At the other end of town, corridor sees the transformation of a corridor leading off Murray
Street to the soup kitchen in Tram by Hall, run by the Wesley Mission. Jenn Lowe applies her
special brand of hyper-optic design, showcased in the latest edition of Home Beautiful, onto
a site trafficked by the homeless. Open from 6am - 2 pm every weekday, a visit to the site
of corridor; 283 Murray Street will allow viewers to bodily move through and engage with
the work, and also enjoy a free cup of tea or soup. Viewing corridor after hours is possible
through the security grille.
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