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Installations
TRASH & JUNK CULTURE is comprised of 6 small mini-installations or ‘information sites’. Each info site highlights a particular cultural form and partially contributes to the end aim - to demonstrate that the social/cultural fabric is made up of many different modes of consumption (from the ironic to the sincere) and many different 'types' of consumers (from the obssessive to the disengaged).
The installations are as follows :
1. TOYS
140 slide images of 'Victim' toys (‘technically' banned since March 1988) from the exhaustive toy collection of Maria Kozic.2. MOVIES
Appproximately 240 key gore scenes from 'video nasties' (horror, terror, thriller, crime, fantasy, gore, etc.) edited across 4 monitors, each playing different scenes at the same time. Editing and compilation by Ian Haig.3. PORN MAGS
A selection of images from 'specialist' pornographic magazines which are totally removed from normal expectations as to what constitutes a ‘pornographic image'. The images are reproduced as transparent cibachromes fixed to a vertically-hung light box.4. TERMS
A single large painting (top and bottom lit by two black-light flourescents) on which is sign-written the following four words :
P 0 L Y A S E X U A L
H Y P E P S E N S E F U L
M E G A M 0 R P H I C
A G G R A C U L T U R E D
(These neologisms suggest certain things in a very oblique way, but their ‘meaning' is defined in the evening's lectures and in the accompanying catalogue.)5. SCHEMES
A large anatomical wall-chart of the human body over which is projected 4 separate transparencies (via an overhead projector) that use the human body as a symbol for how cultural production works in the fields of (i) art; (ii) music; (iii) cinema; and (iv) literature. (The diagrammatic analogies are based on what makes a healthy body and what are the germs and diseases which affect the body, and then extending that to what is desired of a 'healthy’ cultural form and what are the forces and symotonms which signal the form's decay.) The transparencies are laid out on a horizontally laid light-box, so that the viewer can pick each transparency and project it onto the wall chart.
6. ADS
70 slides of the most outrageous examples of cinema advertising and poster art.Exhibition Design
The arrangement of the 6 installations at both The Performance Space and at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is based on a symetrical eveness and overall balanceed proportion to how the installlations occupy the space.
The spatial design of the 6 installations is to be based on the rectangular dimensions made up from the 4 monitors (placed in their square configuration): approx. 2m width by 3m height. The slide images and overhead projections are projected to that size, and the painting and large light box have been constructed to that size. The idea is that each installation thus occupies a similarly sized space
The other interconnecting design principle in the installations is that they each project light and do not require lighting directed onto them (the reverse both of normal exhibitions and cultural analyses - thesse objects and artifacts are in a sense projected onto the viewer; the viewer is literally being 'exposed' to these objects and images; they are not ‘illuminated’ by the insight of a curator or critic).
Each installation would require apprximately 10 minutes for total viewer intake (ie. to see the full number of slides or video images in any one installation) making the maximum time needed to view the installations 1 hour.
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy