Never Mind the Moon - Part 2
thoughts on our beautiful, difficult and strange world
The title of this piece (and the last one, which was a month ago now!) comes from a video by the artist Tacita Dean, who had a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier in the year. The MCA’s website describes Dean’s artwork as capturing her ‘investigations into themes of chance, memory, entropy, history and time.’
I had a stress hangover the day of my gallery visit. The night before my car had flipped out.(see part 1) and I’d spent the morning organising to get my car towed. This didn’t set me up for watching the slow thoughtful video artworks that comprised a large part of the show. This says more about me than the artworks. I was also with two friends who, while they enjoyed the show, were also very excited about the glass of wine that would follow.
If you’re not the right person, or you’re not in the right mood, video art can range from excruciating to hilarious. I remember going to see a huge exhibition called The Passions by video and sound installation artist Bill Viola at the National Gallery of Australia. If I had wanted to be reverent, I went with the wrong person.
The NGA website says, “Since the 1970s Bill Viola’s videotapes and installations have dealt with themes of perception, memory and self-awareness. Emotions are the subject of The Passions, an ongoing series begun in 2000. In these works Viola grapples with one of the oldest problems in art: how to convey the power and complexity of emotion by depicting the faces and bodies of models – specifically, in his works, of performers.”
The videos, as I remember them, are dramatic, slow moving, larger than life depictions of people experiencing big emotions. I watched one called Observance alongside my companion. It featured a group of people approaching a camera (the audience) seeing something they didn’t want to, emoting, then turning away.
My companion leant over and whispered to me that the video should be re-named, The dog’s done a poo on the carpet. That’s all I could see from then on.
Back to Tacita in Sydney. I was having trouble sitting still enough, and stilling my mind enough, to engage with the videos. I came across one though, that has stayed with me.
One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting is a double portrait of two artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu. The film features them speaking to each other about painting, motherhood, nature/ecology and more.
The elder woman, Venezuelan painter Luchita Hurtado talks about watching astronauts travel to the moon, as a young woman. What struck her the most wasn’t the moon, it was the sight of the earth seen from space. She thought to herself,
Never mind the moon.
Luchita was best-known for her I am series of paintings, which were self-portraits of her naked body from her viewpoint, looking down. And in the MCA film, here she was again, looking down, shifting the focus.
Her comment made me think about how, when you venture beyond your everyday, often what you end up discovering is not the thing that is beyond: what you end up learning about (or seeing anew) is the place you came from, the thing that was always there.
When Anny and I travelled all the way to Spain we stayed in a house overlooking a valley. At night we’d sit on the balcony and watch the moon. We’d never seen it so clearly. We’d never thought about it so much. We had new questions.
Anny went inside and googled the moon.
