Being
There
catalogue essay for Dominic Refern's BEING THERE @ 200 Gertrude
St., Melbourne, 2000
reprinted in A SHORT RIDE IN A FAST MACHINE, edited by Charlotte
Day, Gertrude St. Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, 2005
In David Cronenberg's Videodrome many a visceral
moment is lodged uncomfortably in the viewer's mind. Entrails,
organs and colonic convulsions abound - yet surely the most
septic is the television set itself. Not a 'monitor' or
any other such neutral construct, but a family-size wood
grain behemoth that sits in the loungeroom like an obese
family member. Part radiophonic hearth, part gelatinous
info-orb, it glows surrealistically like a baroque carved
mantelpiece while dispersing electronically beamed information.
The
TV set - like every utilitarian tool to aid the act of consumption
- is a morphological mutant of industrial design. Any Myers
sale catalogue overflows with penile toothbrushes coloured
like baby pacifiers, wombic foot massagers textured like
dentists' gas-masks, and chairs that replicate the feeling
of placing your anal ring firmly on your aunt's cellulite
while rubbing palms on your brother's bony elbows. In fact,
the domestic environment - design-wise - is a hysterically
mute terrain of the polysexual tactility which embalms one
in that most horrifying thing: your family. Walk into any
family loungeroom and you can smell anger, sex, death, pleasure.
Those family snap shots and the TV playing Sale Of The
Century (with the sound turned down) do little to quell
the sensation.
Dominic
Redfern's video work is the phosphorescent glow of that
domain.
It
is the skin of the televisual eye that cakes the domestic
abode like the sickly sleep which gathers at your cornea
over night. No electronic village globalism here for any
stray media teachers to subject their secondary school class
to. Nor any retardo diaristic portraiture for those who
yearn for personal contact in their art. Dominic's 'imagery'
is the granular spread of televisual moments and incidents
which coat a space in the same way beige tends to colour-cast
the loungeroom. It's not the sexy neon-lime of Hong Kong
cinema, nor the distastefully-hip palette of yet more op
shop art installations. It is the saturated chlorophyllous
density of RGB activity: recognized, regurgitated, ritualized
and rendered in a digital display which refuses to avoid
the innate ugliness of all digital art.
Bert
Newton, colour bars, smoking public servants, TV snow, people
in the Bourke St. Mall - all swirl in the digitized mush
that Dominic abstracts from their episodic details. It's
a tradition that owes more to Rauschenberg's screen prints
than any neo-neo abstract revivalism, because the presence
of content is always figured as a decaying and degraded
memory of that which was communicated. All mass media imagery
is a compacted stool of digested data; it does not project
but rather inverts itself in a display of repression, subterfuge
and disinformation. It swallows its own smell. Dominic employs
digital operations not to create a tacky techno perfume,
but to recode the pheromonal activity which signifies the
operations of closure that define the media apparatus.
What's
on TV is not the question. The only thing to be asked is
if the TV is on. Dominic's TV is always on. His solo and
collaborative videographic corpus - and especially the aptly
titled and referenced Being There - recalls that uniquely
pregnant space in front of the glowing hissing TV set. Like
the girl in Poltergeist who stares somnambulistically
into the deafening TV snow and is reconstituted as a biomorphic
receiver for its projection, the viewer/auditor in Dominic's
work can bathe in the video aura. Its milky reflection is
cast on your retinal skin; its compressed high frequencies
tickle the furry canals of your ear. I feel at home - and
surely that's the most uncomfortable feeling to have in
any public space.
