Rear View

Essay in 'The Theatre is Lying' exhibition catalogue. Exhibition was held 15 December 2018 - 24 March 2019 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. What would you get if you crossed Christian Marclay's twenty-four-hour film compilation work The Clock with the seventeen-hour SBS documentary of the Ghan tracking across the red centre from Darwin to Adelaide? If the lovechild of this encounter was kidnapped by Thelma and Louise, fostered out to Priscilla and sent to finishing school in the gallery? It would be a kind of slow cinema, to be sure, one where time stretches out and promises a mesmerising experience to the tenacious viewer who stays the distance. It would rifle through the archive of Australian and Hollywood cinema to produce a script spliced together entirely from citations. It would be a journey inflected by the heritage of the road movie, with a queer feminist sensibility and an emphasis on performance, and of course it would start in Broken Hill. It would break out of the constraints of earlier video art, engaging with the legacy of the cinematic, but how would it address the exhibition context of the gallery? For scriptwriter/director Anna Breckon and performer Nat Randall, performance is the key to adapting these aesthetic antecedents to the gallery. The director-artists say that, in Rear view 2018, they are exploring what video and film mean to them in a gallery context and seeking a new performance style at the intersection between film, video, theatre and the gallery. In this work, they have rethought their practice as it unfolded in their earlier theatrical performance work, The Second Woman 2015, in which, in a feat of endurance, Randall performed the same scene one hundred times with one hundred different men over a twenty-four-hour period. In this earlier work, structuring the performer's commitment to duration around repetition gave the audience a way into the work, building familiarity, attunement and intimacy with the dynamics of improvisation, theme and variation.