A Rear-end Salute To Departed Us Forces

The Age

Wednesday July 23, 2008

Robert Nelson, Reviewer

RESONANT VISIONS: CONTEMPORARY VIDEO FROM LATIN AMERICA NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road, until August 17 ngv.vic.gov.au

SILENT RUPTURES

Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), 404 George Street, Fitzroy, until August 30 ccp.org.au

A MUSCULAR young man rides around a deserted island on a low-powered motorbike. He traverses the scenic terrain effortlessly and with a sense of comfort. But there's something unusual about his bike. It has a trumpet jammed up the exhaust pipe.

This amazing image comes from a video by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Returning a sound, from 2004, currently at the NGV International. For almost six minutes, you watch, spellbound, as this bizarre musical contraption moves lyrically over the gorgeous island while shrieking and whining with varied pitch up hills and around corners. No language is spoken, but the sequence begins and ends with a word painted on a wall, "Vieques", the name of an island off Puerto Rico that until recently was occupied by the US military.

As with most brass instruments, the note on a trumpet is produced by blurting into the mouthpiece. It was ingenious to think that the blurting normally applied by a skilful gob could be made - more or less - by the exhaust pipe of a feeble motor bike.

It's a great image because it involves two interlocking paradoxes. First, the gasses emitted by the machine arise from petrochemical combustion, staggered by the rhythm of the cylinders to yield a kind of blurting. There's a strange analogy to the energetic human body, where the breath that we expel - including when we blow into a wind instrument - is the waste, the exhaust after consuming the oxygen.

But there's a difference between machine and organism, because even breath is somewhat pure, whereas the exhaust from a motor is filth. The muffler of a vehicle is the rear end, not the mouth; it cannot be confused with intake but is dedicated to refuse.

Second, the trumpet is a major historical symbol. More than the loudest instrument in the symphony orchestra, the trumpet stands out as a solo voice in the field of battle, the call to arms, the clarion that heralds war or leads the charge. We still hear its mournful mortal reveille on Anzac Day, where it remains utterly chilling in a peaceful society.

The wall notes at the NGV explain that Vieques was until recently occupied by the US military, which has the loudest trumpet in the world. So perhaps now that the US has withdrawn, the army's brass can be appropriated, in a sense shafted by the powerless Third World bike. It's buggered the bugle.

If so, this gesture nevertheless cuts both ways, remembering the trumpet is also a strong and beloved presence in Latino music. The desecration of the beautiful shiny instrument by the tar and poison of this sacrilegious journey is a form of purgation, a sacramental ritual for the shedding of military taint, as the wee little bike howls all over the vacated base to clean the air.

Allora and Calzadilla's Returning a sound blasts its somewhat depressing company in Resonant Visions: Contemporary Video from Latin America at the NGV.

If this video reveals a noise that derides an empty place, Silent Ruptures at the Centre for Contemporary Photography reveals empty places that eradicate sound. The photographs of Yoshiro Masuda, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond and Kristian Haggblom are beautiful and slick, but they all have an eerie quiet about them. Curated by Haggblom, the exhibition explores landscapes and cityscapes in which you feel an urge to add narrative information or find a more natural state for either the land or the buildings or the people within them.

Masuda photographs urban centres but strips away the signs and logos that make a city distinctive. Simply by deleting the graphics, the resulting building stock becomes horrifically homogenised.

Haggblom finds outdoor locations of uncanny disquiet. Either the terrain seems inhospitable or the machines and people within it seem anomalous. Bernard-Reymond tackles the metropolis in mostly ordinary vistas, but they all seem mysterious and inconclusive, as if their newness is already overtaken by "an accelerated contemporary world".

robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au