(2018)
CURATORIAL PROJECT
ESSAY BY ANGELA GODDARD
Commissioned for Festival 2018, Gold Coast Commonwealth Games
Supported by City of Gold Coast, Screen Queensland, Griffith University Art Museum, Queensland State Government and Circa
THE WALLS ART SPACE AND OFFSITE AT BROADBEACH, ON THE BEACH AT SURF LIFE SAVER TOWER #30
Taking its name from a famous 16th century Rembrandt painting, The Night Watch is a modern rekindling of the much-loved Gold Coast tradition of the Sunday night beachside gathering. The project explores the act of ‘night watching’ by translating and reinterpreting the Golden Age themes of Rembrandt’s civic guard scene into a portrait of life, Gold Coast style, through a curated program of contemporary screen-based works.
ESSAY
THE NIGHT WATCH
Rembrandt van Rijn would have loved video art. His most acclaimed work, The Night Watch 1642, is of a cinematic scale before the invention of cinema; it measures 363 × 437cm. Notable not just for its size, the work’s dramatic use of light, shadow, energy and movement distinguish it from other stiffly formal civic guard portraits of the era; the company is captured in a tangle of gestures and expressions just as they are about to march. In contrast to the later-appended title, the scene is actually set in daylight, with the sun streaming down from the top left, but the effect of the time-darkened varnish which causes the figures to emerge from inky gloom only adds to the dramatic composition.
Some of the most compelling artworks of the last thirty years employ moving image and sound. The technologies associated with capturing, exhibiting, and documenting these ephemeral media are inherently fast moving and mutable. ‘Video art’ has become a catch-all term for moving image works, which are now pervasive presences within galleries, aligning with the ubiquity of the medium in our daily lives. Within the realm of contemporary art, the increase in production values in recent years is apparent. Artists are embracing VR technology and the spatial possibilities of moving images just as quickly as commercial interests looking for new advertising outlets.
The exhibition The Night Watch features 18 video works by 18 artists and collectives across two venues. All works have been made in the last four years, and are each less than two minutes. Rekindling a much-loved Gold Coast tradition of Sunday night beachside gatherings, the project also captures some of the integral aspects of a Gold Coast visitor’s experience: nightlife and promenading: watching others and being watched.
The artists included in The Night Watch are distinctive for their diverse approaches to the visual language of the video art medium. These works by this purposefully disparate but distilled group of practitioners give a sense of this time and place; they are snapshots of a scene. In a period where we are all able to access technology to record and edit video through our smartphones, the democratic nature of the medium is pervasive.
The Night Watch is a roll call of some of the most talented and innovative artists working in the medium. Most of the works feature the coastline or the local environment of the Gold Coast in some way, yet others remain abstractly indistinct. From the solarised beachscapes featuring two young women in Hannah Bronte’s Nomi n Nali 2018, to the playful irony of Weekend Immendorff [Suzanne Howard + David M Thomas]’s Human Experience 2017 documenting earnest individuals running and riding past the frame, these works depict complex world views, synthesizing biography within ever-evolving contexts, unencumbered by a limiting definition of what might constitute or need to reflect a local sensibility or specificity.
There are works that convey a profound sense of place and integral connection to country, such as Libby Harward Yabruma 2015, and those which address the aesthetic pleasures of natural conditions such as Michelle Xen’s Submerge 2017, to the impressionist capture of a fragmentary moment as seen in Alex Chomicz’s Pump 2018, and the grittier realism of Ying Ang & Ling Ang’s Gold Coast 2014 as well as the montaged retro-Gold Coast footage used in Byron Coathup’s All Work No Play (Miami/Miami Remix) 2018.
Performance art and video have shared a long relationship, first as a means to document live events, then later through the creation of events specifically for the medium, as seen in Chris Bennie’s posing figures, the awkward, semi-slapstick interpretive dance of Lowana Davies’s Home Ground 2017 and Chantal Fraser’s veiled figures refusing the gaze.
With the release of the Sony Portapak video camera in 1967, video became inexpensive and portable, democratising a medium which, to that point, was monopolised by the commercial interests of broadcast television. The medium has only continued its trajectory to a radical accessibility. Here on the Gold Coast, the Night Watch project’s projection into public space fulfills these early aims. While the belief that artistic agency can lead to social change has lost some of the euphoric edge of the counter-culture era, video remains a valuable tool for artists dealing with political issues as we move deeper into the twenty-first century.
This compendium of works provides a unique window into a current moment of the visual arts in Australia during a period of vitality and experimentation. The Night Watch surveys the scene, and enables us to view a richness of perspective, invention and possibility by some of the most exciting artists working in the medium today.
— Angela Goddard
Director, Griffith University Art Museum
