Published June 2009
A Knife’s Edge
Once, I got off a night train at the wrong stop. In the middle of the night a knock came at my cabin door and a lady spoke in Spanish that the next stop was my stop. Half asleep I jumped out of the tiny cabin bed, rushed and stuffed my bag, made hurried goodbyes to my compartment companions and ran to the train door, the train was starting to slowly pull away from the station, I gulped the Spanish night air and jumped from the moving train onto the station. As I watched the train speed away I was well pleased with my hard arsed moving train jumping skills that is reminiscent of many American movies where it is essential at some point in your life to jump from a moving train. I had done it. Well done I thought. Lucky I didn’t miss my stop I thought, until I realised it was not the bustling Valencia station I had swashbuckled onto, instead it was a deserted country station situated in the middle of a shipping yard. Giant rectangular containers piled up around me and finally I realised I had made a big mistake. The following few hours (waiting for the station to open at 6) I spent sitting in the empty stairwell clutching a butter knife surveying the empty station for threats. I tightly held that knife with its meek yet sufficient perforated edge in front of my face, never letting my guard down lest some supernatural or natural danger should wander out of the empty shipping containers. This was my first experience of knifes and living on a (butter) knife’s edge.
A Knife’s Edge is a place where art exists and thrives like barnacles on the underbelly of a moored boat. Contemporary art especially is constantly cracking open new boundaries in terms of being ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘cross pollinated’ and ‘genre busting’. While these might be buzz words they do reflect a mirror of truths for contemporary art. The world of dance, textiles and costume, all sorts of design, craft revolutions and new forms of curating are making the world of emerging artists an exciting, poetic and at times political breeding ground. My experience of the Helen Lemprieie Travelling Art Scholarship at ArtSpace last month and this months Primvera at MCA confirm these suspicions that contemporary art is existing more and more with overlapping genres, identities and forms within each project with great success.
A Knife’s Edge is also a state of being. It is a frozen yet dangerous circumstance to find oneself in. A cliff between ideas and actions. Contemporary art often lives in a place of danger. From studying performance, one of the most important rules I learnt was that for a performance to be successful, you the performer must risk something. When you risk something, truly for yourself, you give the audience a chance to care. Risk can be achieved by walking a tightrope above a pit of hungry pandas or allowing a local to throw a pie in the face of an artist (as in Spat+Loogie’s Pie Off in Primavera) or in the re-interpretation of a classic novel like Great Expectations into erotic S&M pieces (Sarah Contos) or an experimentation into democratic web based curating (Ivan Muñiz Reed) or the cultural reinterpretation that is offered in a new Chinese contemporary gallery in Sydney. The artists and curators on the following pages are living on a silver dagger, drawing moody teenager’s tattoos, participating in multidisciplinary art practices, surviving the WFC and hating on poor Robin Williams (well just Raquel Welsh is for now.)
These artists move beyond the proclaimed frameworks and historical genres of art and mash everything up like a dropped trifle at Christmas.
—Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris