Elvis Has Left The Building at PICA. curated by Boris Kremer

First Generation X, now there is Generation Gap, the generation of artists whose work exists in the gap "between irony and belief" to quote a recent press release from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. An artistic investigation of urban myths and legends as attempted in Elvis Has Left the Building, a Perth Festival show at PICA looked like their ideal vehicle— It takes committed belief to follow the reports of the fat rocker's post mortem gigs, for others the mere existence of this belief is profoundly ironic – the irony of a deep need, working itself out ruthlessly, in wilful, dumb ignorance.

Irony is always leveraged from a unified point of view. It refers to particular creative and class perspectives, the suckers believe, the wise guys don't. Elvis appears in the back blocks, the ironists live up town. Given this it is difficult to credit Generation Gap with any serious affiliation with popular culture or to take the evasive anti-elitism they tout so frequently seriously other than as a way of staying in the gap, of avoiding responsibility for their work and its social destiny by pointing to fixed irresolution and ambivalence as the only criteria for success.

We may not like it but Generation Gap could be telling it as they find it, like it is, as tedious as it gets. Their irresolution may mirror an emergent universal condition – a room full of press cuttings about Robert Hughes' car crash, a wooden house wall in raw pine 20% smaller than the real thing or photos of a couple as aliens in disguise are all incomplete, specimens of life on hold, in the gap, waiting for a non existent punch line. For various complex reasons the zero sum social game of the nineties offered little to excite a rising generation of ambitious artists. They have reflected on this and chosen to do field work, to collect specimens and invite their audience to contemplate them, to some considerable effect. Art, however, can longer pretend to be a mere mirror. Nor can it take up the optimistic option of the sixties, popular culture long ago returned to tyranny and exploitation. The contradiction, confusion and lack of critical distance in this show opens its artists to a charge of predatory cynicism on the symbolic order.

Expatriate art critic 'Bob' Hughes is a familiar, worthy, Australian monster. No doubt his disgraceful recent conduct and comments in WA invite pungent response and satire. However Melbourne artist Danius Kesminas' investigation of "Robert Hughes’ reckless driving case that made the headlines in 1999 " is no more than an exercise in specimen collection, as told by PICA.

So what? It was almost impossible to read the newspapers on display. One is left with a residual media blur, no doubt the desired effect of irresolution. More to the point. Hughes has long been the prominent international defender of the ethical possibilities of art practice, of the 'truth' in late avant-garde art. There are ironic echoes of this in the crushed oblong of his car and the Time articles on the wing mirrors [not the originals] but they slid past each other in the blur and the distractions of the "authentic" material remains Kesminas never confronted Hughes manipulative cynicism. He naturalized and amplified it with his own 'creative' cynicism. This is pointless, the days are long over when sticking a urinal or anything else in a gallery was enough to link art to life.

Irony remains a useful modus operandi for the cynic especially the cynical artists. It is always a good cover for bad motives. Moreover 'we' have all been trained up in a reflexive complacent 'Pavlovian' response to irony, in advertising, education and yes, even personal relationships which are now to be conducted under the sign of the double negative. Cynical irony has been the markets' Trojan horse into our culture, psyche, even the depths of our symbolic order so irony in art is a familiar trip. A pornographic image shown in public by feminists is justified as ironic. The identical image shown simply as sign of the times is a vicious attack on women. Something's wrong somewhere. Urban legends themselves live their zombie like lives in the shadow of the market, an absurd index of the power of capital – every time Elvis reappears he sells more magazines or, conversely, he reappears every time they publish an article, like Satan in a pentagram. Was Hughes produced like this ? – 'We' will never know!

The Gap [between irony and belief] is also the gap between a fugitive Australian contemporary scene and the cocaine covered peaks of the international art world. Generation Gap operates in this gap. Hence the ultra literality, the lack of critical reflection or locality, in the PICA show. The putative international art world now exerts the same top down "market discipline" on local contemporary art as the newly deregulated international capital market on everyday life here. How much longer will we have to listen to professional greedies telling us our wage rates are not competitive? – [another urban myth not covered by this show].

Australian artists looking to 'compete', to rise through the international hierarchy, must choose their modes and models with conservative care. They must never, ever, break the agenda, to deal directly with the substance of experience, here or anywhere else. Only Louise Paramor addresses one of the many active Australian myths in her Outback Heat a large carpet depicting a big breasted sun baker twice life size. Even she is very careful to frame the work in an international context – art carpets were big news a few years ago.

As PICA puts it

This is true as far as it goes but it remains specimen collecting, with no effort to move on to the experiential origins of the specimens or their social roles. The absence of any reference to the central political role of urban [and rural] myth in Australia, dingoes and babies, racism in general and more specifically criminal Afghan 'illegals' who throw their children in the sea or sew their lips together is a damning omission. We now know that the worst political gang ever to rule Australia were re-elected last year through their ability to work on the fears and prejudices these blatant lies represented. Australian urban mythology is essentially vicious, oppressive and inescapable, but you would never know it from this show. There is no evidence that a artist had considered the socio cultural structures which nourishes our urban myth. They were content to pick at its edges. Ironically American Jim Shaw's "twisted panorama of collective paranoia", black and white photographs dating back to 1978 "involving alien spacecraft, body snatching Martians and the U.S. Federal Government" succeeds where Australians fail. The UFO Series: How We See Them and How They Really Are, 1978-1992 and his retouched still frames from the Zapruder film of the JFK shooting link politics power and psychosis through openly manipulation. Shaw's work is the most succesful in the show.

This goes a long way to explain the boredom and irrelevance that Elvis Has Left The Building radiates to so many young, old, rich and poor alike. Its anti elitist chic has nothing to do with opening art up to a wider public. Nor has its bogus take on popular culture anything in common with what goes on in Midland or our even groovier eastern suburbs. Opening night saw the people put where Generation Gap thinks they should be. 2,500 of them crowded round the pay bar in the middle of the gallery, most desperate for a ticket for a free drink. No one could see the artwork. It didn't matter, the artists and curator Boris Kremer were looking elsewhere—overseas. Since then I have seen no more than four or five people in the gallery at any time.

Kremer defended this situation as a consequence of PICA policy and as the necessary foil for a convention of look alikes organised by Paris artist Matthieu Laurette – You can see their pictures on the PICA website. Versions of the lives of the stars tailored down to moron level circulate endlessly through Australian tv and magazines. Imitations of Elvis pull in good crowds in pubs. But, once again, what purpose did this exercise have except to amplify the existing state of cynicism through an ironic collection of specimens – victims of someone else's fame . George Christen the Luxembourg strongman who performed in a Kalgoorlie pub for Antoine Prum was his own specimen, sent out blindly to invoke a popular culture that had no need of him. Nothing emerged from this spectacle about the power relations, the exploitation, through which such events are mediated.

Andy Warhol, a New York urban myth himself, was arguably the most successful artist ever in this area. Bremer confessed that he would have had a Warhol in the show if he could have found one but also made the point that Warhol as a pioneer had it easy. Nowadays there were 20,000 artists where once he stood alone. The efficiency of international art leached away every possible strategy, beyond staying in the gap, avoiding anger and outrage. I am certain he spoke for his artists. I am equally certain they are wrong International assimilation is no way to develop a creative strategy. How long will our contemporary artists behave like a cage of stray dogs, begging every international visitor to take them home before they are put down? Their stated creative attitudes demand work beyond the gap, fundamentally resistant, obdurate and truly alien, work that will achieve its presence by being irreducible to terms other than its own. They should start to make it.