Housed within Buxton Contemporary, The same crowd never gathers twice is an exhibition with a curious title. It initially provoked me to think of moments when I found myself situated within crowds, organised or not, such as the dinner table, the food court or a tram stop. And how fleeting the configurations of crowds are, ever-changing, never still. Curated by Annika Aitken, The same crowd never gathers twice constructs an arena that strings together thematic elements in works by Yona Lee, Laresa Kolsoff, Taryn Simon, Cate Consandine, Raina Head-Touissant and Angela Goh to examine diverse modes of relation to and within.
The process of entering a gallery space is usually associated with a public affair, a passing through of the gateway that separates the ‘real’ from the imaginary. Instead, the works that form The same crowd never gathers twice examine the real or the everyday with artistic intensity, elucidating the spheres of our private and public life embedded with codes of socially and culturally accepted behaviours. By inserting objects and sensory experiences usually reserved to private, intimate moments, the exhibition creates conditions for active participation and moments of conditioned passivity, inviting an acute inquisition into the specific conditions of the work.
The divide between the public and private is arguably becoming more blurred with the oversaturation of ‘flexible’ and ‘hybrid’ work rhetoric, dissolving dedicated spaces for labour and rest, giving way to ongoing and insidious capitalist production. Surveillance or its fervent perception alters our behaviour within this space from other gallery visitors, the gallery staff, the perceived sense of being watched and watching others.Though in the gallery, each artwork is widely dispersed, allowing a space for respite away from the public gaze, creating ample room for intimate engagement with the works.
Yoni Lee’s Upper-floor composition introduces and exposes the innards of the gallery space. The work is comprised of metal tendrils, leading to and from familiar objects associated with private spaces including a sofa, bed and bathtub. The metal poles possess a soft and malleable quality, dripping, flowing through windows, up to the gallery structural supports and downwards to greet various familiar objects. The rail playfully passes through a window and intertwines with a frangipani tree outside.
The work initially draws attention upwards to the winding silver poles clutching onto the heritage infrastructure of the space, in a tangle of what is foreign and what is embedded within the space. The poles connect objects that are emblematic of containments of deep thought and introspection. Here, they are exposed, highlighting what would otherwise remain private. Evidenced by the inclusion of a bathtub with three shower heads sonically fills the space, a series of pumps draw the water upwards to eventually shower into the tub once again.
Lee, who trained as a cellist, appears privy to a discipline where structure and improvisation coexist, the sentiments of which reverberate throughout the installation. The contrasting signals of access and the environment which denies it, is revealed in the fabric of the gallery space itself, which could be easily overlooked. Here, Lee employs objects easily accessed in our personal lives, like handrails, table and chairs, and renders them impractical. The sense of intimacy invokes a strange sense of tactile familiarity, questioning what would be an ‘appropriate’ relation to these objects.
Through a set of sliding doors, Laresa Kolsoff’s video installation beckons. Within the darkened space is a set of three screens, each projecting the black and white video works Fountain, Office Skate, Jogathon, St Kilda Road and Trapeze that show moments within built environments in Melbourne, USA and Japan. The scenes span close-up and panoramic views of parks, office buildings, fairs and even dancing childhood mascots SpongeBob and Dora the Explora. Two screens are suspended from the ceiling while the other is affixed to the wall. What isn’t apparent until walking amongst the screens is that the suspended screens impose videos from either side, creating a viewership that surrounds the space.
In this installation, Kolsoff provides a glimpse into private moments within public spaces and infrastructure. The hazy videos, filmed on a Super 8 camera, evoke the nostalgia of the end of century home recordings and a sense of privacy shattering spectatorship. One screen cannot be viewed without another creeping its way into the periphery. Thia installation of the work, with screens in dialogue and opposition to each other, invites meditative immersion in the disassociated characters on the screen.
Taryn Simon’s Assembled Audiences is displayed behind the closed doors of the next room, which the viewers could enter after being warned by the gallery attendant of the darkness in the room. Once through the threshold, the room’s scale and size are undiscernible and the darkness is unnerving. The sound of recorded applause loudens with each step, inducing a mild sense of anxiety for anyone not used to such accolades. The experience promptly evolves into a sense of self-validation, a mirroring of the ego and a recognition of one’s deep-seated desire for such overt sense of public approval.
Emerging once again into the light and following the rounds of applause, the details of the recordings can be found listed on the far adjacent wall. Rows of names, dates and places reveal a smorgasbord of different tastes and interests. The recordings were taken between September 2017 to January 2018 across various stadiums in the United States at Nationwide Arena, Jerome Schottenstein Arena, and Greater Columbus Convention Center. The recorded events spanned conferences, sport, religious events and music, amongst which were a Katy Perry concert, Disney on ice or a basketball game meshed with the lesser-known Transportation Engineering Conference. It would be impossible to assign the event to the sounds - what received a standing ovation or rowdy applause remains completely unknown. Simon describes the weight of applause and its potential to the sway of the masses despite sprinklings of individual opposition. The wave of the majority trumping the opposition inauspiciously arises in daily life from a pop concert to political movements.
The upper level is occupied by Cate Consandine’s RINGER and Raina Head-Touissant Animate Loading: 1.
At the very far end of the room on the right is Consandine’s three-channel video installation RINGER. The space is expanded through the large-scale projection and the reflections of the blue light off the ceiling and the polished concrete floors. Crossing of the length of the room to the work becomes a traverse from an observer to a participant, from a gallery space into the roller derby arena.
The three channels are projected on three separate screens supported by industrial-like metal poles, which echo Lee’s other work exhibited downstairs at Buxton. The screens curve to form a circular structure, such that the audience becomes enshrined in the work. Choreographic swirls of female bodies enwrap and clash across the screens and the blue wash of the film strips it of any warmth. The close-ups of the roller derby skaters fill the screens, creating an almost dizzying impact on the viewer. The work prompts an experiential reading with the viewer implicated and ameliorated by the large-scale projection. The audio softens the brash and speedy choreographic movement – a hypnotic song composed of voice, viola, union chapel organ, cymbal and field recordings. The tension in the work is described by Consandine as offering a critique on the publicly perceived gender stereotypes in sport.
Contained within a smaller room on the left is Raina Head-Touissant’s video work Animate Loading: 1. Projected to cover the far wall from floor to ceiling, Animate Loading: 1 is a recording of a site-responsive performance that takes place on the rooftop of a car park located on unceded Dharug Land in Parramatta, Sydney. The recording, which captures the course of the day from morning until night, shows seven performers moving interactively across the industrial space in a self-determined way. At times, they enter into a dialogue with one another through movement or skilfully pass a basketball around a pole with their feet. Generally, they move freely and precisely in their bodies. The work consists of two identical videos played twice, with only one of them narrated to facilitate a ‘form of witnessing the movement, derived from disability culture – an alternate use of language that distils the previously unseen into the seen and heard’.[1]
Head-Touissant describes this work as a ‘call to action’ to ‘change our relationship within and around so-called public space.’[2] Animate Loading: 1 prompts us to consider who we perceive as belonging to this ‘public’ within different forms of urban architecture by exposing their ‘hidden’ restrictions.[3] Public spaces continue to remain private for others. Not just private, but surveilled. The footage possesses a grainy quality as if shot on a security camera, drone or a GoPro. And in the gallery space, I can’t help but notice the security camera in the top left corner.
Angela Goh’s work Body Loss was performed several times across the duration of the exhibition. Although, I was not witness to it at Buxton Contemporary, I saw one of its iterations at the Art Gallery of NSW. Body Loss is a work that intricately considers the space it is performed in, ‘traversing and scaling the space, extruding and mutating the boundaries of both her body and the site.’[4] Goh enacts contorted bodily forms, crawling up walls, hanging on support beams while the sonically projected ‘o’ siren maps the gallery’s innards, revealing its limitations and possibilities.
So, what does it mean for the gallery to be an arena? A representative microcosm of the broader and intersecting arenas we find ourselves in. Both in public and private, or somewhere in the sticky threshold between the two. I find comfort in knowing the codes of the behaviour within this contained space and I wonder about the spaces that I do not know of. Is there something more sinister in that comfort? The same crowd never gathers twice reveals and urges the remodelling of our behaviour within different environments, where social conditioning and modes of behaviour are deeply engrained. The exhibition prompts us to investigate the interaction between our bodies in spaces, and the social stratification that they enact.
Supported by Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and City of Yarra and Creative Australia. Edited by Sofia Sid Akhmed (Skobeleva) as part of our un Extended Editor-in-Residence program.
- [1] Firstdraft, Artist Page: Raina Head-Touissant https://firstdraft.org.au/conductive-site-artist-pages/animate-loading-1.
- [2] Wall text for Raina Head-Touissant, Animate Loading: 1, 2022, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, The same crowd never gathers twice, May 10 – October 13, 2024.
- [3] Wall text for Raina Head-Touissant, Animate Loading: 1, 2022, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, The same crowd never gathers twice, May 10 – October 13, 2024.
- [4] Caitlin Dear, Tethering the ephemeral: Angela Goh's Body Loss as precedent for the acquisition of dance (17 July 2024) https://unprojects.org.au/article/tethering-the-ephemeral-gohs-body-loss-as-precedent-for-the-acquisition-of-dance/