Sarah Coggrave and Bronwyn Platten, Untitled (The Party), 2011—a short film conceived and performed by co-collaborators Sarah Coggrave and Bronwyn Platten for Mouths and Meaning. Filmed and edited by Insa Langhorst with still photography by Huw Wahl |
Untitled (The Party) (2012) was projected large, to wall-filling size in a room to itself. Its soundtrack—intermittent and with long stretches of silence, but regularly bursting out into a goony, boisterous frivolity—filled the gallery, advertising the film’s presence if you had just entered, reminding of its story and content once seen.
Running for just a little under 20 minutes, it offers itself as both narrative and documentary and as a child’s story. A young woman turns up to a door, knocks and enters to meet an older woman and there they have a party: cakes and fizzy drinks. Platten’s collaborator, artist Sarah Coggrave, is the shy, uncertain visitor—addressing the door tentatively, entering slowly, filmed from behind and below. Her red balloon lingers briefly, caught outside the door before following her in. Inside, Platten sits at a table repeating to herself, “Mum, mum, mum, Mum; mummy, mum-mum mum”—writing the words as she speaks. So, mother(s). We are quietly shown the room with its arrayed feast of sugared and creamy fare. Some plain black shoes are filled with whipped cream and feet are plunged into them, the cream squelches luxuriantly as the foot enters, and again as the laces are pulled tight. A moment for both glee and revulsion. Hilarity begins, and the ‘comic’ music. The two don conical party hats, stomp about and attack the food, blow paper trumpets etc. An exorcism.
The film’s longueurs are calming. If exorcism—or facing-down—is the point, it seems a simple exercise: the pace is leisurely, the actions few. The pay-off is a kind of capaciousness that allows the viewer to entertain as many of the various thoughts, the various attitudes about these matters, as might suggest themselves. The Party holds them in suspension, or in slow revolution.
Bronwyn Platten, For more and more love hours (R.I.P. Mike Kelley 1954-2012), 1973-2013, hand-stitched marimeko quilt, found soft toys, oats, liquorice, treacle photo Alex Lofting |
Bronwyn Platten, body to brain and back again, 2013, still of filmed performance photo Huw Wahl |
Titled body to brain and back again (2013), the film, on permanent, crazy rotation, renders the words and the kind of definitions we might imagine for them suddenly literal, ‘embodied,’ all vague nuance banished: as if ideas—abstract, nebulous—are just so many wisps-of-nothing, each one dispatched. At its regular beginning Platten stands, ready—ready for the roll-call of words to begin, her mouth tightens then opens slightly and we see that she is breathing like an athlete readying for a test, her chest rising and falling. Heroic. Then the action begins.
Bronwyn Platten, Mouths and Meaning, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Feb 1-March 2
Ken Bolton lives in Adelaide and writes poetry and art criticism, the latter being freely available at http://aeaf.org.au/events/critical-writing.html as The Dark Horsey Form Guide, Archive and Punter’s Companion. A selection of his criticism was published by CACSA as Art Writing in 2009.
RealTime issue #114 April-May 2013 pg. 53
© Ken Bolton; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]