More Interstate Dullness at PICA

Style obsessed Melbourne has always been the Australian city most prone to cultural delusions, prone to look at the blurb, the alibi, the excuse for a work rather than to take a hard nosed perspective on the exact events within the work, the quality of this particular performance. It can get tough when artists step out of their cosy Flinders street cocoon on the assumption that they will be successful on the same terms elsewhere, say Perth, where  the natives are obviously too dumb  to get with programme anyway so we can just tell them its good. 

Ian Haigh's attempt to construct a bio-tech myth from already much over represented Pamela Anderson is badly conceived and even more badly presented with a degree of lax indifference that exceeds almost anything ever seen here even in PICA. What you see is a clumsy set of pink paddle pools and pumps with throbbing bubbles and an old fashioned web page projected on the wall alongside some badly written slogans all in a low sexy glow. The web page concerns the possibility that Anderson is slowly being turned into an aquatic creature by changes to lungs, ribs etc.

This interesting fantasy is at least 5000 years old, remember the mermaid and her fatal love for a land creature.  But why pick Anderson?

She looks like this  

No sign of gills or fins in fact a completely different kind of development for completely different reasons.  Plainly Haig is just lazy or lacks the confidence or competence to work through the conception of his work.  Instead he has grabbed for the nearest prop which happens to be Anderson’s long time involvement in the TV series Baywatch - you get it big water, big tits, sunshine, spectacle.  Then he intro-jected this breezy sex fantasy into his very own highly degraded version of a powerful ancient myth via an out dated version of web art. This sloppy misprision of popular cultures is a Melbourne speciality it dates back at least as far as Paul Taylor and the heyday of Art and Text but may have begun with the Angry Penguins. The problem with using popular culture like this is that you must make your stuff more interesting than it is and make art with it.

This is part of Anderson's ‘true’ story  - far more interesting and original than Haig’s cheap pretentious piece.  Maybe he should have read it.

Pamela was discovered while watching a CFL game in Vancouver, where the cameras panned on her and stopped on the Labatt's Beer T-shirt wearing babe. The crowd went wild (perhaps helped by the Labatt's itself!), and soon after Labatt's hired Anderson to appear in commercials. After that success, a move to Hollywood and a role in Baywatch propelled her to instant superstar. What followed were roles in Married with Children, Home Improvement , and several nude appearances in Playboy (the most covers of any woman in the history of the magazine with 9).

As far as Pamela's sex life, its been torrid and well captured on video tape. In fact, the two biggest selling porno tapes in history are of her and Tommy Lee and Brett Michaels respectively. Other's lucky enough to get naked in the sack with Pammy include Dean Cain (Superman TV series), Sylvester Stallone, Scott Baio, and undoubtedly more. After watching the video with Tommy Lee, there is little doubt the main reason they are still together... uhh, ahem. Her reputation has also caused one of her Baywatch co-stars Donna D'Errico to say of her in a recent metal-sludge.com interview "if she had as many d**** sticking out of her as she's had sticking in her, she'd look like a porcupine!" (damn! that perhaps is the worst slamabstracts.net has ever heard.. no doubt the messy breakup of Motley Crew is heavily related with this shocking rift, as D'Errico is married to Nikki Sixx). Before Pamela saw Tommy's 'unit', she was initially repulsed by him, but changed her attitude real quick. Even with Tommy's control live behavior and sexual addiction and spousal abuse, Pamela had stood by her man, but has finally had enough. The marriage has already had three divorces, two reconciliations, and jail time by the once big time rocker. She apparently took revenge on the rocker by turning him in for a probation violation that she herself lured him into, a champagne New Years which she decided to report five months later, causing Tommy to serve five days in jail. Her latest man appears to be the only male supermodel, Marcus Schenkenberg, whom she met in Monaco. She had been seeing Kelly Slater and rumours had it that they were to be married until Pamela met Marcus.

Nowadays, Pamela has her own syndicated action drama VIP, which is much in the same mold as the A-Team. Full of violence, but nobody dies. Her acting career on the big screen appears short lived with the mega bomb Barbed Wire. Pamela is still a huge hit on the web though, being only eclipsed by Britney Spears in popularity, for human searches any ways.

Haig’s piece is just down right boring, an insult to his audience He claims that his work is some sort of satire on computer nerds. Well the bad news for him is that the CD rom knobs and buttons conception of digital art is dead as a dodo. Nerds have moved some have turned their sites on Pamela Anderson as below

 This piece of pseudo science/pseudo economics is telling us much more culture than the assemblage of trivia at PICA. They even get into environmental issues.

If Haig cannot make art then at least he should have tried to be as entertaining and thoughtful as these pieces taken straight from popular culture.

There remains the big question Why? There is an awful lot of this stuff from Piccinini on Why is it so easily accepted  as interesting when it is so obviously terminally dull?  Perhaps the values Haig works with and represents are so imbedded in the careers and power structure of our current art bureaucrats that withdrawal would be terminal and they have decided to go down with the ship. PICA should take a good look at itself.