Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: The 4th Auckland triennial 2010
Curated by Natasha Conland
Catalogue essay: Andy Thomson

Laresa Kosloff’s films witness active social events and the geometries of the built environment staged through the frame of the lens. The medium of Super 8 film allows Kosloff a direct process for recording motion that is inflected by its properties as miniature format film stock. It is Super 8’s capacity for articulating a particular pace and movement in monochrome that produces a remove from the specificity of time and place in her films. By confounding our ability to analyse the work’s temporal and spatial index, she creates a foil to unthinking apprehension. Instead, she helps us instead to encounter the actions of filming and watching, and the activity taking on place on the screen, as something of uncertain but evident value.
In her film Stock Exchange, 1998, selected for the Triennial, she presents us with a carefully framed simple panning shot of the exterior horizontal and vertical planes of the stock exchange building in Melbourne. Freed from our grounded bodies and the orienting tasks of vision, the lens facilitates the roaming of our mind and eyes in a new appraisal of all that is moving in front of us. The camera’s fluid mobility slows apprehension and our bodies are let loose from that measured perspective that grounds or elevates our vision in strict relationship with known space. Though we might surmise that the camera is in a lift, it does not disrupt the pleasure of our new mobility, nor diminish the fascination created by our ability to watch the various social exchanges taking place on screen, ‘in camera’.

In Trapeze, 2009, and St. Kilda Road, 2010, the culture of the city’s spectacle is caught and occasioned by the act of filming. Kosloff captures short clips of urban gymnasts. In these city contexts, we watch via the agency of her filming a select social unfolding. The people that move in and out of the frame appear somnambulant, as if performing their collective action in a preserve of space outside of real time. For over ten years, Kosloff has filmed these incidental sporting events, performances and spaces. Transferring the fragile celluloid images to video, she has formed a singular archive of urban social activity where collective memory and imagination is restored and made real.

Kosloff is dedicated to inducing in us a thoughtful onlooking, of how it is that we watch, in the common spaces of the public realm. As documents of the trained and untrained body in situated action, Kosloff’s films demonstrate risk-taking as a sporting, work or leisure activity and describe the body and its movement in urban space as the subject of her focus. Yet, the question remains – who is the work for? Standing in front of her films, we are made acutely aware of our watching and the stillness and separation of our viewing. Could these carefully distanced works with their studied casualness mask a future intent? Perhaps they reveal a critical yet empathetic awareness of our equally performing selves to an audience in a temporal zone other than our own.

BACK TO TOP

Art #1
Wangaratta Exhibitions Gallery, Victoria 2010
Curated by Hannah Mathews
Catalogue essay: Olivia Barrett

Laresa Kosloff’s videos occur at the collision-point of human bodies and formal objects. If Modernism regularly sought to express this oppositional dynamic, Kosloff attempts to collapse it. The videos are revisionist narratives, where there is space for humour, imprecision and female flesh. Bodies and objects encounter each other in space, coalescing into a shared form and imitating the other’s shapes and trajectories. Through these processes, Kosloff offers a kinetic dialogue about what bodies and objects share, exchange and transmit to the other. The social and material impress upon the other, rather than compete for domination.

A human body grasping at its limit of potentiality is typically understood within the domain/dialectic of sport. To excel athletically, a body must suspend its tendency to be slippery, chaotic and imprecise. It is a technical challenge that sporting excellence is usually framed by both the amplification and the reduction of ways a body may move through space. New Diagonal borrows movements from the physical expressions of athletics, platform diving, aerial skiing and yoga. Kosloff quotes their shapes and motions and binds them together within her own continually moving form. She isolates these motions from their typically competitive outcomes and repositions them in physical relation to a white triangular sculpture. Animating the formal obsessions that determine judgements of art and sport, her body becomes a conduit for a dialogue between the material and the social.

In Deep & Shallow, Kosloff wraps the upper bodies of performers in garbage bags, tied above the head. The absence of faces invites a reading of each person as a unit rather than an individual. In group formation, these figures appear like currency, each equivalent to the same in value. They move through the space with the kind of collectiveness of a cluster of brine shrimp, constantly participating in an insubstantial rearranging of the group and spatial distribution of its members.

The animated video Feeling for You comes from an earlier stage of Kosloff’s investigation into tracing movements. A commercially successful dance track plays while a drawing representing the artist performs ambitious dance moves. Drawing is both restrictive and expansive in this instance, enabling Kosloff to perform beyond her physical limitations, while preventing any real movement at all.

BACK TO TOP

Relative straightness

Neon Parc gallery, Melbourne, 2008
Press release: Laresa Kosloff

In the famous film Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) Jacques Tati plays Monsieur Hulot, a slightly clumsy but well-meaning character on holiday at a French seaside resort. Hulot manages to inadvertently upset the peaceful atmosphere in most scenes. In one scene, he has arranged to go horse riding with a woman he has recently met. As he waits for her to come downstairs, he notices that one of the paintings in the living room is crooked. He can’t resist straightening it, and as he does so the riding crop wedged underneath his armpit tilts the painting behind him. He steps back to examine the realignment, and notices that the painting behind him is also crooked. This sets off a chaotic chain of events, and Monsieur Hulot finally regains composure from this complicated situation only seconds before his date arrives.

Over the years this scene has appealed to me and repeatedly held my attention, in fact the whole cinematic slapstick genre has informed and progressively influenced my practice. I am interested in how scenes mentioned above reveal the absurdity of formal, social, and spatial constraints, and the humorous potential of the sometimes tense situations arising from these conventions.

Slapstick films often play with alignment, timing, and the misapprehension of space. The lead character is usually a social outsider, awkwardly positioned in the world. The comic potential of causality is carefully staged, revealing an individual’s lack of autonomy and control. Perhaps our laughter during these moments acknowledges the complexity of selfhood, and our relationship to differing levels of and perceptions of reality?

This body of work is not concerned with narrative, or comic characterizations. However it refers to some of the less obvious communicative techniques in slapstick, such as physical mimesis, literalism, and jokes about flatness and representation. The work also carries a number of other referents for example: sport, instructional films, early representations of movement in photography, painterly abstraction, gesture, animation, classical poses, and the culture of the ‘trained’ body.

Elements are combined to reveal aesthetic and conceptual overlaps within culture. The usual categories and distinctions no longer apply; in the tradition of Monsieur Hulot these paintings could literally poke your eye out!

Solidarity for a metaphysic

A.C.C.A @ Mirka
Curated by Juliana Engberg, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2008
Didactic: Sary Zananiri

Laresa Kosloff¹s Solidarity for a Metaphysic explores the formal and conceptual dynamics of sport and abstraction. Continuing her interest in gesture and movement, Kosloff shows the transformation of the human body through sport. Undertaking various tasks in custom-made tracksuits, the figures play out a game, the rules of which are unclear to the viewer. The gestures and movements appear to have specific meanings, transforming the body into a set of codified positions.

Filmed within the trompe l’oeil exercise yard of a high school, Solidarity for a Metaphysic, overlays the hard edged painted background with a 3D performance filmed as a three-channel video. Against this background, the 3D body gestures become scrutinised from three different angles. They become complicating and ritualised. Relationships are drawn between the bodies, acting in conjunction with, as well as against one another. Highlighting this are the sports uniforms, which at once homogenise the wearers, whilst at the same time delineating them. The one-legged pants hint at the strangeness of this environment. Participants blend and melt together, their jumble of limbs making a visually combined sense through the design of the uniforms, which then break apart again.

The visual complexity of the abstracted playground surround become a simulation of the world and its conundrums. The dynamic between the sporty participants are more than simple movements. Their negotiation of the space is underpinned by a scrutiny of their performance from three perspectives in a space that already highlights them in a simulated, ultra-real world.

NEW06

Curated by Juliana Engberg, A.C.C.A, Melbourne, Australia, 2006
Catalogue essay: Liza Vasiliou

For NEW06, Laresa Kosloff directs, performs and hand-makes a series of abstract objects and costumes that communicate feelings about deep and shallow space with references to modern theatrical performance and design. In Spirit & Muscle, 2006, she executes nine short gestures that intentionally blur the distinctions between modern dance, gymnastics and yoga: movements representative of the balance between strength and vulnerability, poise and awkwardness, masterful control and uncertainty. Her face is masked by a changing display of Suprematist forms and shapes, simplifying the figure into geometric blocks of colour. Her bare legs remain exposed and appear disembodied, throwing the physical symmetry off balance. Throughout her performance, Kosloff’s movements are shaky, even clumsy, contradicting the logical formal structures and the innate expressiveness of the paintings she wears.

Kosloff’s video performances are grounded in both the modern movement and Bauhaus tradition, and express her fascination with shifting contradictions inherent in modernism. Spirit & Muscle is developed from a combination of many sources, including Pablo Picasso’s early Cubist experiments in costume and theatre design and Oskar Schlemmer’s inventive dance performances developed for the Bauhaus stage. Schlemmer devised a ‘workshop’ of experimentation premised on a set of intellectual and philosophical approaches towards the challenges and problems of avant-garde dance creation. Many of Schlemmer’s Bauhaus performances explored the relationship between the human figure and space, and used geometric costumes to transform natural movement into standardised, artificial gestures.

The articulation of Kosloff’s limbs is angular and all lines of direction and composition playfully parody the regularity of the human body’s motion in space. Her naked legs animate the inanimate abstract forms of her costumes representing a play of contradictions between imperfection and precision, individualism and standardization, organic and machine, chance and exactitude. Her performances arise from working through drawings rather than rehearsals, a storyboard of gestures and graphic representations of problems that have not yet been solved, despite accurate preparation. There is nothing definite or ‘absolute’ here; only amusing and inventive contrasts of form, colour and movement and intuitive improvisation and experimentation.

Spirit & Muscle also responds to modernist divisions and gender distinction. As observed by Whitney Chadwick ‘…modernism celebrates masculine authority, constructed categories predicated on binary oppositions, where women have occupied the negative relation to creativity and high culture.’ Kosloff paints her own series of modernist artworks and uses her body as a canvas, literally inserting herself into the modernist canon. Her ‘presence’ rather than ‘absence’ within the oppressive forms of high culture challenges the distance modernism espoused between itself and that which it objectified and mastered. Kosloff contrasts masculine, geometric forms and areas of pure colour with fleshy tones and curvy shapes of the female body emphasising the tactile properties of the works. Her gestures are expressions of female physical power, blurring distinctions between conventional representations of the female ‘passive’ body – the pose – and the ‘active’, masculine body, absorbed in the display of physical perfection.

Kosloff’s strong interest in comedic actors of the silent film era is also evident here, particularly Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and more recently Jacques Tati. Through Spirit & Muscle, Kosloff uses her non-objective painted costumes as ‘characters’ to reference real figures; for example, her monochromatic white diamond with the black top hat plays homage to Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s playful stylisations, namely his role as the ‘tramp’, altered our perception of ordinary people through costumes and gestures, rendering naturalistic representation of actors as ‘unreal’.

Kosloff’s use of comedy alludes to contradictions intrinsic to modern utopias and utilitarianism. Her work’s playful component draws from the comic configurations employed by Jacques Tati and his struggles with the modern city. In Mon Uncle, 1958, each scenario demonstrates Tati’s inability to adjust to his ultra-modernistic, technology driven surroundings. Comedy and chaos converge and firmly established utopias are undermined by incompetence and awkward, comedic gestures. This crisis can be traced to the modernist myth of progress and mastery. Mon Uncle oscillates between utopian ideas of mobility, liberation and order and emotions of disillusionment and failure. Like Tati, Kosloff adopts humour and play to destabilise these conventions, contrasting modernity’s ‘cool’ qualities with dissymmetry and disharmony, evoking a desire for connection and meaning that seems destined for failure.

Kosloff also draws from Buster Keaton’s use of clownery and his pragmatic narrative structure. Keaton’s humorous storytelling acts out playful subversions of the connections that hold the facts of the world together, illustrating the incongruity of quest and resolution, will and action. Likewise, Spirit & Muscle displays disunity between task and completion. The weight of each costume appears to comically influence the choreography. Kosloff responds to problems in a pragmatic way, attempting to balance abstract concepts with emotional impulses and the physical with the psychological.

Kosloff also alludes to the cinematic inventions of space played out in the antics of Keaton. As David Cairns observes in The Gag Reflex, ‘By accustoming us to see the world as flat planes, Keaton has prepared us for a joke in which a character is surprised by the presence of depth in a world that appears to him as well as us, as purely two-dimensional.’2 Kosloff wants us to acknowledge how a sense of self is defined by how we navigate both real and fictive space, a literal and metaphoric collision between states of interiority and exteriority.

As distinct from Spirit & muscle, which utilises the studio as her backdrop, Dizzy pupil favours a black, formalist setting where Kosloff inhabits an open, unlimited area and wanders aimlessly. Spinning, rotating and limping produce wobbly and unpredictable movements. Like Keaton, she stands in abstract space and appears shocked and disoriented at the discovery of occupying three-dimensional environment. She is confronted by her own solitude and appears to struggle with form, space and meaning, being surrounded by nothing but emptiness and a black void.

Here, Kosloff uses Kasimir Malevich as a referent, constructing her costume and theatrical design according to his Suprematist paintings; ‘Malevich pioneered the black square on the white field as one of the first forms in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed. For Malevich the black square denotes feeling, while the white field expressed the void beyond this feeling.’3 Malevich’s negation of tradition, in favour of the ‘representation of the unpresentable’, was at the core of his practice.4 His paintings suggest a feeling of nothingness and infinity, elusive qualities that are played out in Kosloff’s performance through disorientating effects, addressing the nature of subjectivity as she struggles to position herself in relation to the world.

Modernism espoused a ‘utopian dream of a space beyond representation.’5 Like Malevich, Kosloff seeks refuge in the ‘square’ form. Throughout modern art, the square has provided a visual aid to an existentialist quest. It has provided a metaphorical means to transcend reality and produce a portal into another realm: a doorway to nowhere or the threshold to another world. The square has enabled artists to conceptualise and create new realities in an endeavour to find a ‘meaningful connection, identification and signification for the inexplicable mysteries of the universe.’6 Kosloff inhabits simple cubic structures that provide an opportunity to search for a formal solution to her own existential problems, whilst allowing the spectator experience the same kind of introverted, self-examination.

Both Spirit & Muscle and Dizzy pupil investigate aspects of modernism, exploring the relationship of opposites that upset ideas of ‘stability’, ‘mastery’ and ‘absolutes’. It seems that no single narrative can sufficiently account for all aspects of human experience. Kosloff’s work disputes modernism’s claim for autonomy and the separateness of the aesthetic from the rest of human life.

Making a knob of oneself...Assorted thoughts on the work of Laresa Kosloff

by Lily Hibberd, 2004
Published in un Magazine issue #2

On Friday 9 July this year Laresa Kosloff opened her studio at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces for a one-night presentation of her recent video work Deep & Shallow, 2004. Projected on a large screen at the far end of the space the footage comprises five minutes of physical performance sequences carried out by a group of six women in an empty, white studio space. Each performer wears a black garbage bag tied in a knot over her head at the top and tucked into a pair of bloomers at the hip. While ordinarily the upper half of the body seems proportionally longer than the lower parts, here the obliteration of the head and torso shifts the focus to the legs and they look bigger as a result. The loss of identifying human features in the upper realms also instigates an appearance of truncation, even decapitation of the figure. Other than variations of height the legs remain the only individualising feature for the six bag-wearers, however these lone appendages are strangely similar. Not only do they have distinctly female anatomies, those small feet, narrow ankles and chicken-like inner thighs, they share the same proportions of these features. On the flyer produced for the exhibition Kosloff states that she chose them “because their legs looked similar to mine”. This is an odd prerequisite on which to select your actors and most women would consider that having the shape of one’s legs publicly analysed under fluorescent lighting borders on the lunatic. Adding to the folly is the rustling the garbage bags made with every movement, which is the video’s only accompanying soundtrack.

In the company of Kosloff’s previous works Deep & Shallow is not alone in its offbeat approach. Many of her pieces are quirky, often funny and sometimes even disturbing. Looking over a series of works Kosloff’s practice is difficult to define. She uses Super 8 video, stop animation, found footage and video recordings of live choreographed performances. Shifting between various structures, subjects, mediums and presentations, it becomes apparent that to apply any concrete parameters to Kosloff’s work would be pointless. The prominent media in the more recent works however are video and performance, and similarly for these genres the issue of clear definition is an ongoing dilemma: both are distinctly interdisciplinary practices that relish such shifting boundaries. If only to appease the archivists among us, one could categorise Deep & Shallow as video art, primarily because the work has no intention to present itself live to an audience at any time. The other distinction here is that video eliminates one thing that is essential to performance: risk. The potential of failure in live works and the now commonplace crossing of the barrier between the audience and the performer (thespians call this ‘the fourth wall’) elicits an anxiety in the audience that is becoming a consistently less popular sensation in the forums of popular culture. This is concurrent with the rise in media that further encourage the suspension of disbelief through virtual realities and immersive environments. Performance art stands apart from these mainstream sensibilities and that’s probably why it is making a strenuous comeback.

Accordingly, even though we are presented with video, the premise of Deep & Shallow is performance. Surveying the history of the genre Kosloff’s piece is not merely about performance art, it shares many of the concerns explored in various stages of its evolution: the body, human gesture, ritual, the absurd, a social canvas, political discourse, feminism and symbolism.

In Deep & Shallow the most evident pattern of behavior is ritualistic. This applies directly to body art as “...a particular genre of performance art, exhibited by the body of the artist and performed actions on that body... Some insisted on the ritual aspects associated with such acts (a modern ‘primitivism’) others claimed to be analysing social rites and stereotypes. The division between private and public was tested and traversed as artists performed private rituals in public spaces, everyday life events became art, and artists became objects”. As the garbage bag women shuffle around in circles, they might well be acting out a tribal ceremonial dance. Even the garbag bag costumes are significant, for there is a long history of “... art as magic, as ritual, as disposable object, as body-adornment...” For instance, in researching this article I discovered a photo of a tribal penis hat. Need I say more?

Superficially, the appearance and actions of the performers in Deep & Shallow is ludicrous, and yet these foolish patterns of group behaviour possess features of consequence. In this, the suspension of meaning of every movement is due to their isolation from their explicit contexts, a little like the apparent absurdity (at least to the uninitiated) of contemporary dance movements. The action of this slow, shuffling around in circles is like those poor people sent on workplace group therapy exercises; a ritual that DAMP (a Melbourne-based collaborative artists group) have used extensively to explore the limits of the team spirit.

The restricted movements and endless repetition of Deep & Shallow are definitely in the spirit of the oppressed; whether they are the prisoners of war or military cadets, the pointless repetition and aimless exercises are mind numbing and even soul destroying. So many human endeavours feature rigorous physical training without purpose or meaning, none more than in sport, which Kosloff has made palpable in the ‘Nike’ sequence of Deep & Shallow. In this footage, a lone garbage bag character makes every effort to diagonally cross the space, however her crudely painted ‘Nike’ shoebox shoes unexpectedly decelerate her motion across the floor. This is an intentionally ironic moment and contains a sly reference for fans of British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. In another sequence the entire group of characters are arranged in various supermodel-type poses, changing position every few seconds, with a rustle of plastic. Each is wearing a pair of shoebox footware painted with national flags, representing countries such as Japan, Australia, America, Britain and Germany. In this presentation the precocious endeavour of beauty modelling is completely ridiculed. The piece points us to the work of Vanessa Beecroft, a contemporary American performance artist who presents hundreds of nude women in big galleries slowly acting out modelling poses. Beecroft’s performances are highly crafted and clever yet somewhat pretentious, the feminist undertones lost in the excess of brazilian-waxed beavers.

A little bit of humour goes a long way and Kosloff articulates this well with her use of ridiculous movements and props. The shoes and the garbage bags are not employed purely for their appearances, it’s the movements and characterisations of the (amateur) actors that imbues them with (non)sense. This goes right back to the 1920s where an apparition of performance art can be identified in the formation of a physical, non-verbal theatre as envisaged by Antonin Artaud, whose scripts were not properly realised until after World War Two by protagonists of the ‘Poor Theatre’ such as Jerzy Grotowsky. In this latter movement the notion of the performer being freed from naturalistic representations was paramount. The actor is transformative, not reliant on conventional period costumes or props. This notion of appropriated objects being at once symbolic and bizarre was also a crucial component of the Dada movement, exemplified by the work (and life) of Marcel Duchamp, a movement which is defined as, “... a deliberate courting of the anti-rational, negative gesture; and a commitment to social or political action”.

Deep & Shallow has a resolute political message too. Take for instance the shoeboxes with the painted flags. In this context they are arbitrary but in their preposterous employment we read them more truthfully. Flags are emblems, a way of identifying an allegiance and a symbol of patriotism. Recounting a recent trip to the USA Kosloff says that she was overwhelmed by the sense of nationhood and power of the country and this gave rise to the flags as a feature in Deep & Shallow. There is a sense that a few other themes were incited by Kosloff’s encounter with this global super power. The appearance of a large black frame in the video acts as a metaphor. As the circling characters step through the black frame they are engaging with alternate dimensions. The frame exists as a virtual plane in Laresa’s plan drawings and as a reference to the constructs of Cartesian geometry, which represents a high (or low) point in Western thinking as pure rationality. The frame also creates division and difference as each figure is either included or excluded from its space. This speaks of segregation and distinction. This returns to refuse in the disengagement from society that is the emotional world of the derelict. Once again, on her recent visit to New York, Laresa was astonished by a homeless man who “wore layers of garbage bags to keep warm. He had a big garbage bag nest and garbage bag hat, and he liked reading the newspaper. It was in the middle of Soho... and in three months I never got used to seeing him there”.

The Velodrome Project

Laresa Kosloff & Alicia Frankovich, 2006
Catalogue essay: Alex Martinis Roe

CUT

Think of a sporting event crossed with a sculpture park and you get Alicia Frankovich and Laresa Kosloff’s idea of a spectacle. Presenting a one-day event at the Brunswick Velodrome, these two artists have straddled the divide between public and performance art. The Velodrome Project occupies community space and acknowledges it as a context for art. However, this idea of ‘public’ is prevented from sedimenting into absolutist permanence by the use of time-based performances. In limiting the life of their large-scale sculptures to one day, Kosloff and Frankovich celebrate a lack of authority in their works that is usually present in public art forms.

CIRCLES

Frankovich and Kosloff employ the aesthetics of geometric abstraction in the production of their sculptures as a way to discuss the ideology of transcendental escapism. The Velodrome has a surreal architecture, which already feels like an immersive sculpture. Its circular spatial organization is functional, yet it is easy to focus on its geometry. The artists focus on the uncanny relationship between its formal qualities and its use value. Engaging this logic, black paint has been used to cover a large circular area of grass on the field. Clearly understood as a large, black HORIZONTAL circle when viewed from above, it immediately recalls floating geometric shapes in so many modernist paintings. This reading at once collides with the materiality of its media: ‘painting-on-the-grass’, which is recognisable as a method of advertising at sporting events. This intervention is a sculpture: it uses the ground and its spatial dimensionality as a key to its relevance. However, its status as an object is nullified as it works illusionistically as a void. Conversely, its status as a painting is what brings us back to its objectivity. This complex dynamic effectively links ‘the void’ to abstraction. The painted circle playfully intimates that abstract painting makes a void. This problematises the term ‘abstraction’ by asking: how can abstract painting be differentiated from ‘representation’ when it is depicting a void? Kosloff and Frankovich show the aesthetics of transcendence as representational. By hollowing out the black circle’s profundity it is returned to an advertising trick: just paint on the grass.

LOOP

The circularity of the Velodrome and the painting on the grass are conceptually extended by inclusion of cyclical elements as the temporal dimension of the circular. The loop can be thought of as another dimension of the circle. This physical relationship is clear at the Velodrome: to enable a smooth continuous movement in a limited area, the circular movement of bicycle wheels requires a circular structure. The sloping concrete walls utilise the centripetal force generated by the cyclist’s speed on the circular structure. Therefore in order to use the static circular architecture, the cyclist must expend energy and time. Significantly, the cyclists break the focus on the Velodrome’s seductive geometric design. This assists in recognising the artworks’ critical interruptions of the aesthetics of ‘abstraction’.

Every hour, on the hour the artists repeat two performances which themselves involve elements of repetition. This recalls video editing and the prevalence of looped video in art exhibitions. It also makes a connection between the live and televised experience of a sporting event and the distinct culture of spectatorship, which bridges the two.

FLIP

The first performance is organised like an event in a gymnastics competition. Kosloff and Frankovich raise their arms in a kind of salute, run straight toward a circular mini tramp, jump onto it and then flip their bodies VERTICALLY in the air and land on a crash pad. The artists make several points of difference from the gymnastics model in order to rework our understanding of gestural signification. A gymnastics salute is usually made to competition judges, but at the Velodrome Project it is made facing away from the stadium seating. In addition, the crash pad is made of hand sewn PVC and has a faux industrial company logo (derived from the name of a Russian gymnast) sewn onto it. Perhaps the most important difference is the landing position of the artists. In gymnastics, success is often determined by the stability of the final, standing pose after a trick. Instead, Kosloff and Frankovich intentionally land on their backs, immediately undercutting rhetoric that posits VERTICALITY as a demonstration of control. This performance presents a safe, HORIZONTAL landing as the desired outcome of this action. Lying on their backs is not presented as a submission or failure, nor is it a description of a ‘natural’ outcome. As a gesture, it has more relationship to slapstick than to gymnastics. These two languages of movement form an important amalgam, describing both as choreography. Charlie Chaplain was Bertolt Brecht’s favourite performer because his movements were so obviously a set of perfected gestures that responded literally and predictably to events. Thus his character was presented as a reduced set of symbols, removing any sort of illusion of inherent connection between Chaplain’s body and the performed character. Evidence of a character’s gestural construction does not reduce the pleasure in slapstick performance, it encourages a more discerning response to naturalistic portrayals of gesture. Kosloff and Frankovich’s performance of gymnastics does not place value in its ‘failure’, instead it seeks to foreground all our movements as part of an oppositional discourse of success or failure to meet normative gestural habits.

CURVES

The performance uses slapstick to illuminate gymnastics’ hierarchical value system that privileges stability and VERTICALITY in achieving certain gestures. This logic is extended to sexual politics by the appearance of the artists not as gymnast bodies, but as ‘normal, female’ bodies. By making it clear that gymnast bodies are constructed according to an ideal and are valued according to their approximation of that ideal, it becomes evident that to achieve a ‘normal’ and/or ‘female’ body, their must be some similar process. Thus, by using gestural systems that are more easily understood as constructed, Kosloff and Frankovich achieve an illumination of the latent discourse of the natural in the ‘normal female body’. It is the repetition of everyday gestures which lull us into believing they are natural. Further, they become normative as a result of that repetition.

The act of flipping the ‘normal, female’ body has an unprecedented affect on the performer. We witness a kind of freedom when their body is in the air. Stripped of the framing devices which control the action in sport or gymnastics, the airborne body speaks of sublime experience. We are presented with a corporeal model of transcendence, which seems different from abstract painting’s transcendental ideology. Perhaps in that moment of freefall, the female artist is achieving pleasure from her own physical experience regardless of the ‘male gaze’: usually so prevalent in displays of the female body.

FLAP

Dance and sport privilege certain aesthetics of bodily control, which relate heavily to value in geometric order. To extend this observation to a more general discussion of how cultural practices strive to approximate simplified norms, Kosloff and Frankovich attempt to realise the potential of a parachute to form a semi-sphere in another performance. The parachute can also be seen as a kind of drawing material to respond to the onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Church behind the Velodrome. This action operates as a critique of that attempt to reach geometric harmony, because it is evident that its success is entirely dependent on the weather. The parachute is not really in the control of the artists, which works as an analogy for lack of authorial control over intertextual meanings. The artists show that this control is affected by the context of the attempt. The wind may blow hard constantly which would result in the achievement of a semi-sphere, or it may (which is more likely) blow in intermittent gusts in different directions. In that case all you get is a lot of flapping. This performance resembles Joan Jonas’s early video SongDelay, where the artist and a group of friends used geometrically organised bodily movements in conjunction with chalk and sticks to draw their relationship to the nature reserve where they were performing. This kind of drawing practice is developed by Kosloff and Frankovich’s use of the parachute. Deliberately referring to these 70’s performance-based drawing methodologies and acknowledging them as an established language, the parachute drawing highlights the mimetic failure of these technologies as a valuable tool. In extrapolating the parameters of the drawing so extensively (collaboration, physical strength, environmental unpredictability) the performance points to the vulnerability of all the elements of The Velodrome Project. Striving to approximate a norm is heralded as reductive practice. Instead, The Velodrome Project starts with simplified signs and refers outward to a multiplicity of meanings.

SQUARE

A huge blue square sits VERTICALLY in the field facing the stadium seating. The square is a simplified field, which is simultaneously a representation of a ‘window to the beyond’; a ‘blue screen’; a billboard and even a piece of sky. For geometric abstractionists a square form could bring about a transcendental experience. This is remarkably similar to the logic of cinema and the idea of a screen as an immersive location for the mind. ‘Blue screening’ technologies allow a film set’s blue backdrop to be digitally transformed into anywhere. In sporting arenas a large screen is a method of watching live footage of the current event. It is as if Frankovich and Kosloff’s screen is televising the Velodrome Project! The big blue square’s transcendental references are all brought back to reality(?) via evidence of its material construction. The fabric sags on its frame and flaps in the wind, imitating the flapping of the parachute. In this way the rhetoric of geometric order becomes a crumbling illusion: at best a mathematic language for understanding a world that is much more messy.

MATRIX

A massive model of a piece of Luna Park’s roller coaster made of white wood sits on the Velodrome green. This structure operates as a kind of vantage point within the ‘sculpture park’. As a parallel to the stadium seating and similar to the framework for a building, the structure refers to the potential of architectural beginnings. Drawing the two together, Frankovich and Kosloff describe the architecture of public leisure from which we are denied access: it is under construction. As symbolic of the desire to have fun: it stops when you get what you want. Wanting it is more fun than getting it. This comments on the fairly new apartment complex behind the Velodrome. Developers sell display homes as a kind of fantasy removed from any context. Unfortunately, community life in these developments is often different to the daydream. Further the structure seems a ghosting of the future. Will the Velodrome be developed into something else? The structure also puts forth hope: adorning the structure are two circular pieces of wood with star motifs on them. These seem like a glimpse of the potential that could develop from the beginning of any structure. This matrix of wood decisively complicates modes of spectatorship by presenting a model of public space that is about participation (Luna Park) but also private ownership (you have to pay to get in). Here the artists have placed it in the centre of a field as a set of dynamics to be observed from a distance. A discourse on the state of community life is presented in relation to art practice and its use of public space.

SAUSAGE

Inviting audiences to come and view the project, rather than participate, The Velodrome Project, is staged as a spectacle rather than a community fete. The audience viewing from above looks down on the circular field in the centre of the Velodrome as if it were a HORIZONTAL screen displaying a montage of static and moving elements. This simultaneously analyses the differences and similarities between the sporting event and its televised broadcast. The recorded event becomes a two-dimensional, linear narrative. Yet from the vantage point above the sporting ground, the only departure from this dynamic is the energy of the crowd. Similarly at the Velodrome Project, the tradition of the BBQ serves as social interaction in the collective experience of spectatorship. However, the food isn’t figured as part of the art. The art is defined as a spectacle and the viewer is not participating. This is a clear dynamic that utilises the spatial dynamics dictating the viewing position to parallel and contrast other forms of community contact, in such a way that it induces critically honed modes of spectatorship. Kosloff and Frankovich present us with a challenging and unusual kind of art spectacle: The Velodrome Project.

PASTE

The ideas that inhabit this format are extrapolated within each element of their spectacle. Each sculpture/performance interrogates normative models of order and exposes their geometric, cohesive and transcendental presentation as ideological. Using forms that are considered apolitical and abstract to refer to a larger range of specific cultural practices, Kosloff and Frankovich exert a play between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in such a way as to collapse their distance. In so doing they reverse normalising representational strategies that take multiplicity and reduce them into generic signs. They have developed a series of temporary tactics for starting with reductive signs and pushing their intertextuality to the forefront of their viewers’ spectatorship.