Fremantle Arts Centre

Cardboard,

I have wandered, through the heat and flies of James Street lonely as a hippo in a goldfish pond, past the ultra depressing offerings at this year’s Perth Festival – PICA’s Elvis Has Lost (sorry Left) The Building, past Tim Burn’s grotty recruiting caravan, a host of putrefying pizza boxes and lord knows what other rubbish. This was IT. I would never bother again unless they paid me – A LOT –!

(see the forthcoming 8Ball review)

Then I trained down to the Fremantle Arts Centre and found Cardboard the most delightful, eccentric and well though out exhibition to open this January. I wrote the catalogue essay for it, (also available on this site) but, despite the princely sum they paid, I still got that sinking feeling –" Oh No! Another smart arse theme exhibition - brought on by grant money."

In fact Cardboard is an elegant demonstration of the range and resources of WA artists who have taken on the medium in every possible way from pure social symbol to problematic medium. It puts the Festival to shame for its lack of interest in local artists. This is an obsessive, sexy, community aware, decorative, all intents and purposes show, as varied as the contents of every cardboard box.

For obsessive try the Lisa Wolfgram’s cardboard panels. She of the shot silk canvases built from wave after wave of delicate brush strokes has turned to large panels of corrugated packing board. She has attached small flat rectangles of thincardboard to the crests of each wavelike corrugation to form weirdly regular geometric reticulations. Powerful patterns, optic and geometric, float before the eyes, with the same delicacy as her paintings, veiled seven times seven in luscious pastel glazes. This is wrist-cracking work, painfully precise. Cardboard, the inescapable symbol of all labour and desire, makes this clear in way that paint with its inbuilt capacity to transform all our labour and vision into a sensual afterglow cannot. Simultaneously these panels with the colours and the faint scent of dried dung have an extraordinary formal presence.

Su e Flavell’s large floor piece Pigs is also obsessive, but its really, seriously sexy – very, very sexy She has used long thin strips cardboard joined to make up nets that describe the volumes of two huge hands. Interesting enough as a feat but their novel feature is that one hand mount the other in monstrous act of copulation, undeniable thrusting passion, haunches de flagrante To say - What to say? What to do? Well there’s masturbation of course – Mrs Palm and her five daughters done up in cardboard, as a very large joke, but this is barely the beginning. Flavell’s ability to embody humanity in this way is astonishing. One might like to see piece preserved in bronze, fibreglass or other suitable substance but nothing but cardboard could give it that nano, ultra quiver that well sprung pre-coital potential. Its huge enough for a slight quiver to be disturbing.

Strangely the high tech offerings, the ones that left the other building with Elvis perhaps, are less effective. They use the medium as a symbol as in a house is not a home it’s a cardboard box with a televison camera therein. Sam Collins, Model for Sustaining a Small Presence, for instance, a cardboard box which may well duplicate his room in the Cité Internationale in Paris that also conveys images and sound through the attached cables failed because it was too small to achieve the presence needed to impress the viewer. The project is admirable as concept – shades of Big Brother and so on, but it failed to mediate between two worlds, two ways of being there.

Jonathan Wilson’s, Spooning, a set of motorised boxes looking for love "an orgy in a packing shed," also failed but because the batteries were flat and the notched rectangles were incomprensible as dead remnants, lust’s driving power gone for ever. Again this seemed to be a matter of scale. Larger boxes would have demanded awareness, contemplation of their presence and its mysteries. Spooning, and works like it, are, of course, descendants of the static scatter pieces and related random installations of Carl Andre and other conceptualists of the sixties. Tom Gibbons found piece – a large nut and bolt in brown cardboard placed reverently in a glass case, - lays down a challenge to the hi-tech guys in the presence stakes. Richie Kuhaupt carries it through with a full size pregnant female figure.

Several artists take a more conventional route to mystery For Lesley Duxbury the mere embossing of words on pale grey cardboard, the exploitation of its sensuous variations to put longing for the landscape and the weather as much at the touch of a finger tip, as in the passionate gleam of an eye. Andrea Williams a Nyoongar artist uses copies of images her family photo album to conjure the past for the present. Do memories on thin cardboard live differently for different lives, can gestures frozen in silver, man woman child be made clear to all. This is dangerous , a difficult task.

There’s a lot more to the show – absolutely worth seeing.