HR #2

Documenta 11 - Platform 5 Kassel -Nicole Katz
June 8 - September 15

Documenta, the exhibition, is the fifth in a series of discourses (or platforms) exploring the spaces inhabited by culture in our global society. From March 2001 to September 2002, in Vienna, New Delhi and elsewhere, the following worthy subjects were debated: Platform 1: Democracy Unrealized; Platform 2: Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice & the Processes of Truth & Reconciliation; Platform 3: Creolite & Creolization (an exploration of global cultural miscegenation) and Platform 4: Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. Kassel, the last of the platforms, is in the words of the Artistic Director, Okwui Enwezor, said to give concrete form to all of Documenta 11.

Janet Cardiff, The Missing Voice (Case Study B
Whitechapel Library, London Ongoing

Take the tube to Aldgate East. Come out on Whitechapel High Street. To the left is the Whitechapel Library (to the right is the Whitechapel Gallery), go in and ask for the Janet Cardiff piece. You'll be given a discman. Press play and follow the instructions. "I want you to walk with me," she whispers insistently, "there are some things I need to show you." Do everything she says. You'll want to, for her voice is as hypnotic as it is intimate.

The Missing Voice was commissioned by Artangel in 1999 and continues to live quietly and intensely in the Whitechapel Library. For over a decade now Canadian artist Janet Cardiff has been creating site-specific audio walks all over the world. This one takes place in east London, which has the greatest concentration of contemporary art spaces in all of Europe. (When you're done with The Missing Voice, grab a map from the gallery next door and keep walking.)

Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor Bowing Fences
George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre Melbourne Festival 18 October - 3 November.

When thinking about the rustic Australian fence, and then considering that the world's longest fence is the so-called Dingo Fence and Rabbit Proof Fence I might have been expecting rather spatial and long gradual transformations of sound overlapping amongst terrestial currents as I entered the Victorian Arts Centre. But even as I crossed St. Kilda Road I could hear the drama of deep pulsations, rhythms ricocheting through the architecture to spin off into celestial harmonics.

Ken Villa Players and Pushers, Pushers and Players
Brenda May Gallery, Sydney
for The Gay Games
Oct-Nov 2002

“Whose God?’ K. Villa asks, ‘Is it you? Is it the American flag? Is it terror as commodity?’

This exhibition demands that we as viewers look at the cut of our ideological straitjackets, the suite of assumptions and beliefs we often carry unquestioningly, as though they were ‘truths’ to live by. He demands that we reflect on how we assist, and perhaps not resist the production of meaning in an age where fear is manufactured in lieu of hope.

American born Australian artist Ken Villa’s new media installation, Players and Pushers, Pushers and Players, is a meditation on an American mass media production of meaning and terror in our lives post September 11th. As the curator Brenda May says of Villa’s work, ‘Fear and ignorance have always been extremely successful tools of manipulation, particularly when the agenda is hidden and the purpose unclear, Ken creates a stage of meanings, one where the consumer is both a player and a pusher’.