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| Photo: Iakovos Amperidis |
Self-replicating collapse
Iakovos Amperidis was scheduled to show at 55 Sydenham Rd in October.
Several incidents occurred in the immediate lead-up. Amperidis deinstalled a
large rectangle of the gallery’s lighting track and collapsed the wall that
divided the space into two rooms. A photo from the artist appeared on social
media of the result, a disorientating perspective where the white wall lay
intact on the grey floor and the lighting track, switched on, illuminated the
wall it rested against. The separation of wall, floor and ceiling, all
momentarily called into question.
A few days later, Amperidis published a video of a near-completion
20-speaker sound sculpture in the gallery space. Described by Amperidis as a
spambot/alien head, it emitted audio resembling a scramble of metal and voices,
razors and static. News shortly followed from the gallery of the complete disappearance
of 55’s website archive. The cause was unknown. Distorted image files from
previous 55 exhibitions were posted online. Amperidis’ upcoming exhibition
opening was postponed. Subscribers to 55’s mail-out then received an email of
corrupted code from the website, as if an infecting virus had disseminated
itself. On closer examination it was evident that between the links to scrambled
files of 55’s exhibition history, were extracts from Wikipedia on a number of
feedback systems: strange loops, self-replicating programs and cascading
failures. Embedded in the email were two gifs: the first was the photograph of
the toppled gallery wall; and the other an interior of 55 Sydenham Rd in a former
incarnation as a factory office. Both images start erasing at the same time
they appear. This was the exhibition. It happened; it didn’t happen.
A room inside a room
(KNULP: Act Normal) It’s like a partition
wall in KNULP has bypassed its formal restraints and tidily collapsed, folding
over itself. The gyprock sheeting and supporting framing constitute a second
interior that the viewer needs to crouch to enter. Inside is a sharply-angled,
claustrophobic room.
Two Sony Trinitron monitors, relics from the early days of video art, are installed
on the ceiling in the furthest, cramped corner. The hand-sized screens face a slanting,
carpeted wall from which a plastic stool juts out at the viewer. The footage on
the screens is upside down. It is apparent that, in a perceptual up-ending, the
room has been spun. The floor on which the audience stands is the ceiling. Or
maybe a wall. It is an extensive and detailed construction with a rough finish:
the paint doesn’t make it to the edges of the sheeting, the inner panels don’t all
meet up.
On the dual monitors is a two-channel montage of found film,
intermittently punctuated by blank screens and a mix of synched and unsynched
audio. A brief summary of the narrative elements: a man beats a wall with a brick;
a bird descends in a death spiral; a tracking shot closes in on a door and a surveillance
screen; a faceless pulp monster bumbles around. Then, an audio sequence of orgasmic
moans, a woman’s arse gesticulates onscreen, and an unseen auctioneer solicits
bids for a property. Cut to rotating black and white spirals, and the edit, set
to a cacophonous beat pulse, starts over.
Amperidis’ video is pulled from YouTube: from art-house film; social media
performance art; Osama Tezuka’s sci-fi series Space Giants; infotainment news; advertising for the Sydney
Contemporary art fair; a toddler’s tantrum, ‘I don’t want to go!’; George
Digweed, commercial pigeon shooter in action; and the revolving optical discs of
Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema. The audio
also includes glossolaliac newsreaders, an apocalyptic religious film
soundtrack, a cast of midlife crisis and mental health sufferers detailing
their symptoms, and a compilation of amateur-porn cumshots. Crude, funny, loud,
camp. If there is a common link it is to the breaching borders of the everyday abject
body: inanely striving, exceeding and abandoning itself. The cascading,
self-replicating, failures and programs of daily life. Just acting normal.
A screen inside a screen
Several segments of video are from Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating
Angel. The film’s plot: a group of wealthy dinner guests find themselves
inexplicably unable to leave the room in which they have congregated. Food and water run dry and the guests turn on
each other in the struggle to cross the threshold and escape their predicament.
It is a narrative with multiple double ups: the guests arrive twice, the host
duplicates his welcome toast, identical dialogue is spoken by different
characters. It’s only by retracting their steps and repeating their speech that
the characters are freed from their ensnarement. As the film ends it becomes clear
that it has only been a short reprieve – the guests are ensconced in a new
location but once again appear unable to exit. It is a strange loop: a circular
paradox that returns a scenario to the same point it began. The extracts Amperidis uses in Act Normal are all instances of the disturbed
boundaries that reoccur throughout the film: the dinner guests recline together
in sleep and death; an interior wall is forcefully penetrated to draw water
from the plumbing; a bear roams freely in the newly-created wilderness of the house
outside the room.
Another core excerpt is the opening scene of Michael Snow’s *Corpus Callosum. A strange loop is at
work here as well. This one is self-reflexive. A small screen is mounted next
to a door at the end of a hallway. On view is security vision of the same scene.
Snow’s camera slowly pans down the hallway and focuses in on the screen to
arrive back exactly where it started. It’s a mise en abyme: every screen contains a smaller version of itself.
Amperidis broadcasts this clip on both his monitors but interrupts the existing
recursion by inserting other footage into Snow’s video screens and starting up
his own. On one monitor, underwear-clad, Spanish performance artist, Amalia
Ulman, (famous for a strange loop Instagram account in which she faked a quest
for fame), mimes the cleaning of a floor on her hands and knees. On the other
monitor the Japanese-pulp creature gambols through a series of outdoor locations:
liberated from the need to be monstrous by the absence of spectators. Both
Ulman and the beast are caught up in mirrored loops where self-referentiality
is the cause as well as the result of surveillance. It’s a different type of demarcated
space than Buñuel’s bourgeois drawing room, but it’s equally
concerned with the feedback mechanisms of confinement and release.
By entering Amperidis’ gallery inside a gallery, and watching his video of
screens within screens, we viewers have been entangled in a strange loop of the
artist’s design. With each iteration of the loop, onscreen and off, there is a multiplication
and a division of perspective. The rooms expand into more rooms, the screens
into more screens, then retract back, spiralling in and out like Duchamp’s comically
hypnotic rotoreliefs.
55: twinned narratives
55 Sydenham Rd recently promoted an upcoming event on Facebook. Audience Undevelopment was scheduled to
take place in March, Sydney’s annual ‘Art Month’. Exactly nothing at all was
planned, and that is what 55’s audience was invited to participate in. Audience Undevelopment regretted the
accelerating proliferation of art events (and the accompanying instructions of
how and when to consume culture), the social media boosterism, the assimilation
of funding imperatives, the sham collectivity and the illusory promises of
sustenance, and art careers, for all.
Amperidis is the founder and director of 55 Sydenham Rd, a resolutely,
non-commercial, artist-run gallery with an outspoken character voice, capable
of usurping and inhabiting multiple identities, including Amperidis’ own.
National and international politicians, art celebrities and collectors, local
real estate agents and motivational speakers, have been remixed, dubbed,
misquoted or raised from the dead to critique the machinations of contemporary
art, undercut its brokers, and recommend 55 on its social media feed.
Initially 55 Sydenham Rd attempted to operate anonymously. Artists agreed
to show work without their names attached and Amperidis, as director, intended
to remain unidentified. This was soon abandoned when it became obvious that
this was not drawing attention to the art but away from it, into the well-worn
game of gatekeeping as a means of accruing publicity and privilege. The paradoxes
of contemporary art have long appeared inescapable: the futile battles by
artists to retain autonomy and agency in the relentless cycle of co-option and
subjugation: the likely impossibility of even criticising the financial and
institutional systems we are enmeshed in without reinforcing them. 55 responds
by reversing the power relations: commandeering dominant voices to its own end,
stuffing hierarchical expectations and complicities alike into a paradoxical room
of its own making.
55 Sydenham Rd was launched with a narrative. Spy services, former MPs,
psychokinetic mediums and spectral hosts were all assigned a role in a founding
myth invoking cold war politics, residual hauntings and architectural retention.
In this account the previous occupants and their exertions remain imbued in the
building. The infrastructure of 55 Sydenham Rd is porous and unstable: its
voice trespasses other voices, its rooms harbour other rooms. 55 wields paradox,
sometimes in attack, mostly in defence.
Subtitled architecture,
parallel plots
Amperidis has a seeming preoccupation with interior architecture, with
walls as material and as conceptual substrate. This has previously led him to
build an accurate replica of the hallway and secret entrance in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby; to fence off a gallery space
with a wall and a locked door; to make Rorschach blots from white wall-paint
samples cadged from Sydney galleries; to axe a hole into a gallery wall and disappear
inside. Architecture deals in the division of space, and the shifting borders
of subjectivity: inside, outside, here, there, mine, not mine, segregation, emancipation,
monitored, unmonitored. Amperidis’ work is often engaged with negating, modifying
and reconstructing these parameters. It’s architecture as physical and
psychological analogy, as code, stage and horizon.
Amperidis similarly treats found narratives as malleable structures, and
as propositions warranting a response. Film is a frequent source. He has referenced
Buñuel’s film in previous works, twice discarding the image and the audio to make
use of the subtitles alone. In a 2013 work at ICAN gallery, (the same space now
occupied by KNULP), lines from the film were programmed and sent as texts
between two iPhones: ‘Exterminating’ and ‘Angel’. A later video work, Subtitle/soundtrack (study), also extracted
dialogue from The Exterminating Angel, and
intercut it with lines from Samuel Beckett’s novel, How it is, and a fleeting strip of light and music from Cassavetes’
Love Streams. The white text was
projected directly onto a white wall at 55. It was a periodic, slow-paced projection,
appearing and erasing. The gallery walls played an integral part in the work’s
visibility and meaning, taking the place of the disconnected frameworks:
becoming the interior of Buñuel’s room; the mud through which Beckett’s antihero
crawls; and Cassavetes’ briefly blinded lens, radiant in a zone of domestic and
psychological entrapment. It is another recursive loop of course. The audience
and the gallery are symbolically enclosed inside the source texts. Reading the
subtitles is an act of internalising the characters’ thoughts; the gallery
walls are the mirrors inside the mirror, the frames within the frame.
The key driver to the strange loop which connects 55 Sydenham Rd, the
exhibition that did or didn’t happen, and Act
Normal, is Amperidis’ insistence on paradox: at once a working method, a
principle of engagement and an acid test. Amperidis repeatedly encloses
himself, and his audience, in the rooms and galleries of contemporary art to
play out his strange and self-referential loops. If we follow Bunuel’s logic,
it’s an attempt to retrace his steps and utterances. To rewind the narrative,
jam the circuit, and make his way out.
Lynne Barwick, May 2016
55 Sydenham Rd, Sydenham, Sydney, October 2015 & KNULP, Camperdown, Sydney, April 2016
