2006 Contemporary Commonwealth. Presented by Australian Centre for the Moving Image and National Gallery of Victoria.

Welcome Introduction Catalogue Credits

Mike Stubbs
Australian Centre for the Moving Image

The Commonwealth Games is identified by the phrase 'United by the Moment'. This reflects the shared joy between sports audience and athlete when a record is broken. Humanity, destiny and equality, the values officially enshrined by the Commonwealth Games, simultaneously express a desire for a shared communal vision while advertising an emotive storyline for the televisual consumption of sporting endeavour.

Since the newsreel capture of Roger Bannister's four-minute mile in 1954, the interdependencies of sports promoters with broadcasters has led to ever larger economies of scale for the mass enjoyment of sport.

Over ninety per cent of Australians will watch at least some of the Games on TV. The technologies of multiple camera angles, action replay and enhanced interactivity for cable viewers have all become integral to our experience of sport, changing the nature of the game and how we construct and perceive the world as a whole.

We share more moments more quickly as part of the benefits of a globalised condition. Yet, despite the increased volume of information, we still struggle to share knowledge, perceptions and feelings.

Artists make this process their profession, and historically have been at the vanguard of cultural exchange. Artists make and transmit new connections to the edges of a mediated global environment.

2006 Contemporary Commonwealth ( CC06 ) at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image provides a place for us to consider some of these relationships through the contemporary moving-image practice of twelve artists exploring complex aspects of cultural identity, migration and environment. It is an investigation into perceptions of history, landscape, country and the relationships that divide and unite, brought together in the one gallery space.

We might ask whether the Commonwealth represents an optimistic global network or a continuation of tradition and the hegemonies of empire. As Kenyan critic and activist Jimmy Ogonga has often stated, multiculturalism and 'globality' are too often expressions of the governmental need for an alternative paradigm, a recognition of the 'other' that is often isolated and detached from the mainstream's networks.

The tension between clinging to and defending cultural identity while wanting to be part of a greater world, makes the idea of citizenship within a world community complicated if not impossible. Like art, it is as much about the process. Occasionally we take stock and compare notes.

 

Edited extract from the catalogue essay 'The most liveable city: 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.'

Charles Green
National Gallery of Victoria

2006 Contemporary Commonwealth ( CC06 ) was always going to reflect the dramatically new forms of art that emerged since the last great international gathering in Melbourne , the 1956 Olympics, for which a far more limited visual art program was presented.

In a quaint division of media not completely abandoned by today's institutions, Paintings and Drawings were presented at the National Gallery of Victoria in its old premises on Swanston Street ; Architecture and Sculpture appeared at Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne ; and Aboriginal Art at the Museum, in the same building as the NGV.

The art on display was almost exclusively Australian and only hesitantly modern. It is fair to say that culture was associated with the Games as a medium for celebration and the projection of a progressive image of the Australian nation.

Though similar decent and humanitarian motives have propelled exhibitions such as CC06 , there are differences that must be spelt out if the art is to be understood. Contemporary artists' many criticisms of society are more likely now to be embraced rather than rejected by large art museums, and the embrace of contemporary art is now normative for major public museums of art.

Major art museums have changed as much as the Commonwealth has over recent decades. They have been altered by the politicisation of artists as much as by ordinary citizens, by the inescapable environmental shifts of global warming and ecological change, by terror and outrage at the terrible forces of fundamentalism and racism, by the often highly controversial developments of globalisation with its pressure on regional or racial differences and exacerbations of class, and by the newer roles and status of women, reflected in the number of women included in this exhibition.

Just as the present exhibition deliberately reflects the newer and more critical understandings of geography and culture, at the same time it has been inspired by the avowed charter of the Commonwealth Games — to foster humanity and equality between people.

Underpinning the art selected for CC06 is an image-making of cultural and social connection. The artists replay and remix the past, remodelling history. If the common past consists of membership of an Empire, as it does here, then this empire itself has been radically re-imagined and revised over the last two decades by artists and historians alike. It is almost unimaginable now to think of the Commonwealth's authority deriving from the United Kingdom so much as from a network of equals — like a cluster of jewels released from their temporary setting on a crown.

 

Edited extract from the catalogue essay 'Common connecting vision: 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth at the National Gallery of Victoria.'

 

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