Gallery 2166 goes to Anthony Lister’s secret show “Bogan Paradise” through Gallery A.S
In an abandoned building on George St in Sydney’s CBD, Saha Jones discovered the dirty aesthetics of Australiana stereotypes.
Whether you’re out in far west Sydney or its eastern suburbs, Kings Cross, Vegas, Tokyo, Alice Springs, the Gold Coast, New York, Texas, anywhere you name the place but I’m beginning to think more and more that stereotypes are alive and well. Perhaps in order to crush them or be absolved of the limitations of feeling entrenched in a world of cliché we need to spend longer looking at the lifestyles and personalities that surround concepts of identity.
Maybe we need to do more than look, because looking seems only to end with judgment, and judgment seems only to end with more deeply entrenched stereotypes. What if we could instead create experiential type observation mechanisms that triggered deeper understanding of culture and human behavior? I think this is possible in numerous ways, but particularly through art. Being at Anthony Lister’s show last Friday made me think on such things, especially in relation to my own project setting up a gallery in a high school in Cabramatta; an area in Sydney that is easily pigeon-holed if you fail to look beyond demographic or Vietnamese cuisine. Lister’s Bogan Paradise can at very least be commended for taking audiences through an experience. With its sealed installation rooms I watched durational performance pieces through a peep hole, flickering bodies, television screens, shopping trolleys, strobe lighting, fluorescent paint, optical illusion, suspended faces in the dark, following stairs leading me upwards and upwards. It was like a horror movie slash choose your own adventure, set in a sex shop slash casino slash Thriller video clip. The accumulated memories of this building’s history gave Lister’s transformed space and artworks its primer. This aspect of his art I find most interesting, as the psychology of buildings is part of what marks the life in our cities and communities. What we do and make during our lives become printed in the spaces that we inhabit, in the energy that surrounds us.
To be submerged in darkness and suddenly appear in a more recognisably ‘gallery’ style room after climbing stairs that felt they might break under me made me realise as I watched the live tattooing amidst broken bottles and debris on the floor below, that perhaps this as a combination was the true art of the show and the success of each work weighed on that. It brought the ghosts of the past as well as Lister’s bogan heroes to the edge of reality. If I were to buy a work might I need the entire installation to get the full effect? Though each work is branded with a kind of memory burn related to this bogan paradise so I wouldn’t need the full installation - just a souvenir from it. There is a certain glory to Lister’s take on bogan culture though you can’t hate him for it because it is undeniably part of a culture that connects us all, especially in a through line of Australian glory from Terra Nullius to the invasion of Iraq or Julia Guillard addressing US congress or winning whatever arbitrary amount of gold medals in the Olympics or Farlap or Bradman or Australia’s Got Talent. With his submersion style ‘total’ environment way, Lister creates an architecture that takes audiences towards the subject as well as forcing this sense of closeness to subvert itself. In this situation I couldn’t help but think to myself, as audiences do we always participate through our inner voyeur?
The combination of the works as stand alone objects with how they’re exhibited outside of a ‘normal’ gallery situation as well as the obvious and unavoidable undertone of the Cult of the Artist made this show excitingly wearying and painful, hilariously ridiculous, scary, confronting, crude, yet intriguing and somehow I was transported beyond the ironies and wanted to keep looking – for more work and more rooms and hidden passages. For a nation that spends billions on sport, on gambling, on booze I’d hope this show teaches us all a lesson.
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