Everything Falls Apart (Part II) at Artspace

Overview

It was the late Robert Hughes who asked: “What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?”

Following the downfall of the Soviet bloc more than twenty years ago, the question of changing the social contract fell out of the international conversation entirely. It wasn’t until the Global Financial Crisis and the Occupy movement that the other 'c' word (capitalism) returned to the collective vocabulary, and suddenly even Time magazine was asking whether Karl Marx was right after all.

These questions have finally trickled down to the art world, which is often concerned more with such incisive issues as the musical abilities of Laurie Anderson’s dog. Everything Falls Apart (Part II) is a curated exhibition about the collapse of political systems, and it arrives at a time when the social order seems more threatened by its own myriad internal contradictions than by outside dangers like terrorism or invasion.

As such, the show’s strength lies in its portrayal of an empire crumbling from the inside. Its weakness is that solutions and alternatives to capitalism’s crisis are only remotely alluded to, perhaps due to a fear of reinforcing the idea that political art is necessarily preachy, myopic and didactic. Vernon Ah Kee’s four channel video work Tall Man stands out as a confronting reminder that Australia’s colonial nature does not lie in some mythological, distant past, but continues into the present. The video is accompanied by two spectacular close-up large-scale portraits of an Aboriginal man whose steely and unashamed gaze is profoundly moving. It's a reminder that contemporary artists can talk about the things that should matter in a universal and human way that doesn't alienate audiences.

The show is accompanied by a symposium entitled 'Another World' on Friday August 17 (free, 10am-4.30pm) which discusses the role of art in a volatile society, and three free film screenings of New Zealand doco Patu! by Merata Mita (details here).

Image: Tall Man by Vernon Ah Kee, 2010