Pixellated: Lyndall Jones' Digitised Sentiment at the Lawrence Wilson

Long, long ago in the 1960's, painters took up Mallarmé's demand for a single work that could include the whole world big time. They wanted everything, all at once. Work got bigger and bigger then very big. The psychology of scale became all-important. Whether it was Rosenquist's mural of the F111 and its social milieu or Barnett Newman's cinemascope monochromes with a single stripe; scale made 60's painting credible. Not that absolute size is necessary to engage this experience. Magritte painted apples that fit neatly between bedroom floor and ceiling. His work tapped the same desire to see the world folded infinitely into itself, as it is in memory, the universe in a grain of sand so to speak.

As far as the 60's went though, size was the thing, refreshing, confident, the best comfort for the Cold War, when intercontinental doom was only five minutes away. 60's painting presented inclusiveness in terms of a familiar romantic binary - either everything is available to be seen — you could make love to a fifty foot woman then drown in her cup of coffee, or everything collapses into a single sensation — you could search acres of same sex sensual texture to melt away in pink emptiness. Both halves of this sublime daily double describe an identical universe, infinitely folded.

I was reminded of this, wandering, confused, but not quite directionless, round War and Peace, Lyndal Jones' presentation at the Lawrence Wilson. It consists entirely of digital imagery large medium and small, mainly large. A wall glowing with three or four, floor to ceiling, synchronised digital projections shifting from a complex side view of a Sydney ferry to the light filled surfaces of rippling water in Venice Lagoon looks just like the end of point of the Rosenquist/Newman binary. At times the crusty over painted textures of the ferry 's metal hull project as pure painting, the waves shift constantly between surface and illusion. Jones has managed to close down the 60's dualism into one shifting image.

Now that we have reliable, high definition, large scale, digital video projection with computer control, many of the half realised ambitions of 60's painters and, beyond that, the entire poetic dimension of modernity might be consummated for the first time, merely by virtue of its scale and inclusiveness.(i) Although this is a pretty average, maybe slightly dodgy exhibition, it is probably the only opportunity Perth audiences will have for a long time to see a multiple DVD video projection environment in action. This is the most potent development in visual art since the 60's, everyone should see it at work. Then we should have a vague idea of what we are missing.

Digital technology certainly re-awakens an overwhelming desire for the sublime, yet again. Like a semi slumbering giant, it thrashes around all over the place, even in Sydney. The time is ripe for a severe warning that, in itself, the sublime has always been a soft option, an easy way out for artists who must thrust ill digested obsessions on an all too innocent audience. As Derrida once pointed out the sublime has no boundaries, because it is simply excessive, it exceeds comprehension – This always strikes me as really good excuse for bad art. The artist can say to her audience "This thing is bigger than both of us" and we are all rendered speechless by indifference.

This is more or less the effect Lyndall Jones aims to produce. Her work is about as ho hum as a soggy postcard of the Alps. "Its not even Everest" you say as you drop it straight in the wheely bin of your mind. Jones' work bypasses the central point about scale that the sixties longed to realise. Even so its succulent formal delights re-emerge willy-nilly through her work, despite everything she can do to lard them thick with sentiment and feminine tales of passion, of a banality so complete it would disgrace Mills and Boon.

Both installations rely on female dialogue/monologue in relation to the digital projection. In Spitfire Fire1-2-3 headphones whisper of loop—the—loop wet dream sex while the projection[s] show the cockpit view over the engine cowl of a Spitfire on the contemporary English countryside [no motorways in 1940 I'm afraid] memory and image are intended to effect a sublime synaesthesia. It doesn’t work. It has never, ever worked in any installation or performance. Jones should give it away for good or stop taking the tax payers' money.

The other installation Aqua Profunda reeks of sentimental opportunism and what I call the Australia Council spin doctor/band wagon factor. It is a set of video images shot in Sydney Harbour and the Venice Grand Canal, segued into pseudo art – a tempting proposition for an Australia Council, which believes that contemporary art is, somehow, a minor element in the tourist industry; the perfect vehicle to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale

The work is a congeries of inauthentic esthetism, an opportunist digital delay, a mere pretext, sullied further by pretension to sublime passion. Spare me the post war immigration, multi- culturalism and all the rest of the tedious politically ok nonsense [damn I forgot the self indulgent pseudo feminism again]. This bad dream can never think. The large scale rhetoric, the sentimental sublimity of Aqua Profunda. invite the viewer to commit an act of profound bad faith — quick!, before they can be found out. This is shallow work, designed to ensure that no one ever really gets out of their depth while they get their cheap thrills.

Most likely Jones is unaware of the ways in which memory and experience fold everything together in a complex poetic whole. Her use of scale flattens everything, reduces it to the dumb equivalences of soft option sublime. Aqua Profunda can be summed up convincingly in cheap and nasty coffee bar patois, such as

Yes 'blends', this is the familiar territory of coffee roasting, wine making, cookery - anywhere but the sharp edged necessity of contemporary art. The video image of the interlocutor in Aqua Profundis appears in a flat vertical frame, a box, like a streamlined Madonna,an altarpiece by Bellini or perhaps, when she cries, Carpaccio. A clever trick, but Jones can never resist the souped up Ancient Mariner effect, the woman's incoherent multilingual 'collage' stops every one on the way into the installation, traps them with her babble, so that the great installation imagery fails completely.

Consider the multi screen image of the Sydney Ferry, a mural in which people walk and board with a flattened indifference to the viewer that could have led straight to the infinite infolded poetry of the everyday. Its amazing how much detail the eyes pick up even in a quick glance. Remember the wide screen Cold War movies when New York or some other city was one minute from vaporisation, we saw shoppers, traffic, children, all unaware that they are about to be incinerated way back to their basic molecules. They assumed an extraordinary tragic dignity. With the full potential of digital projection, Jones could have opened up her images of the Ferry to the same mythic dimensions. Instead she 'blends' them and attaches a verbal collage that shackles the entire work to a shabby routine sentimentality –yes, another one, just like the other one.

I visited the show with a friend. He compared Aqua Profunda, with contempt, to Monet's large waterlilies which, as he pointed out, really do unfold an infinite universe in deep water from paint alone. This is a great pity. I long to see the world in pixels of fire but I don't think Jones will ever do it. She is looking in the wrong place. She wants to hide behind the well worn rhetoric of the sublime, not the infinite precisely folded reality of the new technologies.(iii)

Notes

ⁱ There were many experiments with multi screen cinema in the sixties from Chelsea Girls to Michael Snow's panoramic scenarios but they were all tied to a cinematic process that was ultimately linear, temporal and unable to escape the constrictions of a point of view when projected DVD projection changes all that. The new transposition of scale space time and memory relates much mores closely to Anita Ekberg's well known descent from a bilboard in Fellini's 8 1/2. in that it forms a immediate sensual gate to the whole universe

ⁱⁱ Lawrence Wilson Gallery press release

ⁱⁱⁱ In an episode about as edifying as two rats wrestling in a tub of sewage the 'critic'! of the Worst Australian failed to grasp Jones work while the director of PUCA rushed to declare that art could be just an idea !!. This pointless exchange of irrelevant cliches demonstrates to perfection how how foolishness thrives without losing weight. Jones blended her work for just such occasions. The two antedeluvian 'opinions' exactly mirror the unresolved binary of sixties painting discussed above.