Catastrophic undercurrent

By ANDREW CLIFFORD


Among the ominous, apocalyptic visions projected into Australian artist Susan Norrie's Undertow installation is a pink-toned image of a child held aloft on an adult's shoulders among the spring blossoms of Tokyo.

Norrie describes this element of her six-screen exhibition as a redemptive counterpoint to the other catastrophic videos in the show, but also points out she was only able to capture the scene while in Japan because, as a result of global warming, the blossoms arrived three weeks early.

Elsewhere in the room, grainy archive footage shows a bird being rescued from an oil slick, oil-fires and polluted oceans.

A powerful work, Undertow has been exhibited in numerous galleries around the world and was included in the Govett Brewster's Bloom exhibition last year.

The installation was commissioned in 2002 for the opening of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, and the central image, projected several storeys high, is the murky cityscape of an enormous dust storm that engulfed Melbourne in 1983.

There is also a shot of a steaming Rotorua mud pool spurting and bubbling away. This may not be the result of planetary devastation but Norrie says there is still a common theme, which continues from her previous work. "It came through from a previous work I was doing called Thermostat, which was dealing with issues around global warming," she says.

"Even though it's in that manifestation, it looks rather supernatural and slightly monstrous in some ways. It also has a duality to it, which I think is interesting. In this instance it works on a number of levels. It's just an element that is reminding us of the forces beneath the surface of things as well as the potential of that to be alternative energy."

Norrie, who also paints, sees the formlessness of the mud as a reference to this aspect of her practice. Other parts of the show echo the sublime, romantic paintings of Casper David Friedrich or the apocalyptic visions of Hieronymus Bosch, and Norrie sees the fiery images as having a biblical Armageddon reference.

From a more contemporary perspective, the slow shots of dim, sooty streets and cloud-covered buildings, which resemble scenarios from vintage B-grade disaster films, are scary and mesmerising.

"I think there is always this sci-fi genre, which is something I've played with in the work. In fact, I'm actually doing a series of paintings again, which are based on Godzilla. That felt like a logical progression and how I was going to re-enter doing a body of paintings again."

Despite the cinematic references, Norrie presents the ideas with a sober, documentary-style approach, which she sees as a way for art to reconnect with important issues facing the world.

"It's interesting, the whole idea of the documentary and artists playing with that or taking on that role. I suppose, as a quasi-documentary film-maker, it is like using one's eye, but also dealing with issues that need to be thought about again.

"I think the art world has to always consider re-inventing itself and seeing how relevant it can be. I just don't think it can be simply self-referential all the time."

With its monochromatic tones, Undertow is also imbued with a noir-ish feel of classic cinema, reinforced by one small monitor screening an excerpt from Orson Welles' film of Kafka's The Trial.

"It operates like a footnote in an essay and that is why I included it," explains Norrie. "At the time, [The Trial] was dealing with the ideas of bureaucracies, human error and also guilt. It's all about the idea of big brother. You have to remember it was also coming out of the Cold War and there are all those issues surrounding and impacting on film-makers at the time. His amazing radio piece [The War of the Worlds], in terms of the idea of the end of the world, plagued him as well."

Norrie, who was born in the 1950s, is fascinated with the contradictions of this era and she mentions it several times while discussing Undertow.

"Even though I was terribly young, one actually looks back on that time and it was a kind of utopian moment. It was a natural reaction to what had happened in World War II but also it was a kind of a honeymoon period between the 1940s and 1960s. Things actually seemed to progressively go awry.

"I suspect, too, it was when a lot of deals were being made and a lot of big business was happening and people were all over the world shoring up things, imagining they were doing the right thing but in fact incomprehensible acts were happening."

The underlying power struggles of this post-war period are also referenced in Norrie's contribution to this year's Sydney Biennale, Enola. Named after the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, it depicts Tobu World Square, a Disney-like Japanese theme park with large-scale models of famous buildings such as the Eiffel Tower or the World Trade Center.

"I thought at the time I was doing something a bit more upbeat but by the time I finished it it was probably even more bleak than anything I've ever done," she says.

"When I look at something like Undertow there are elements, because of the catastrophes, which are beyond our control. Then you're looking at places like Tobu World Square where I think people feel they can control something again, where they're actually in a space where they may feel safe or they can view the world without anything really going wrong.

"I think that is what is so terrifying about the loss of control.

"It is almost like we don't take on responsibility and so things become quite monstrous very quickly if you're not careful."

Exhibition

* What: Undertow, by Susan Norrie

* Where and when: Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland St, to Nov 13