Ken Unsworth at Boutwell Draper Gallery 2004 for Art & Australia
 
Walking into the gallery from George Street is like stepping through the back of a wardrobe into a fantastic world.   The ground floor Gallery is transformed into a surreal kinetic tableau.  Several large round tables covered in long white tablecloths spin around like Whirling Dervishes while in their centres forked candelabras turn in the opposite direction complete with burning candles.  These tables suggest some surreal mechanical experiment they are like gears and cogs spinning at different rates as if in a demonstration of celestial harmonies.  The husky voice of Marlene Dietrich surrounds us in another powerful evocation of other times and places.  This dinner has been set in the heady atmosphere of Weimar Germany or somewhere in old Europe.  On the floor by each table lies a life size figure each intermittently blowing on a penny whistle that is stuck in its mouth.   The tablecloths sweep over the figures like the skirts of dancing women.  The figures are like bloated model men from a train set or perhaps they have escaped from a Magritte painting.  In either case they are somehow tragically abject yet at the same time humorous.

Unsworth recently put on a Dance performance at the art Gallery of New South Wales in collaboration with the ADA dance group.  There was a seamless merging of sculpture and dancers� bodies without any of the usual awkwardness or affected gesture.   This event was also choreographed around a dinner setting.  It is a scene that begins with elegant formality and branches out into the absurd.  It was a rare privilege to witness this extraordinary collaboration which seemed to me to capture all the preposterous magic of Lugn� Poe�s theatre de l�Oeuvre in the late 19th century or what I imagine it might have been like to witness Cunningham and Cage with Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College in the 1950s.   This installation was created while Unsworth was working with the dancers in his studio and there seems to be considerable cross over.

There is always a strand of performance in Unsworth�s installations and even in the more formal sculptures where propped and balanced slabs of steel or river stones seem to somehow be actors in a silent drama.  There is also a strand of tragedy as the Heath-Robinson devices struggle to maintain their rickety courses.   In the back room of this gallery sadly not on show there is a marvellous machine designed by the artist where a steel rack supports little pistons that rotate according to a somewhat random timing.  It is a marvellous piece of absurdity in its own right and yet it is a perfectly functional device to open and shut the valves that release compressed air to blow the gentlemen�s whistles.

Unsworth often takes us back to moments of European history, I think of his liking for Maeterlinck and Mahler for example.  In many ways his work as a whole seems to evoke the strange world of Kafka and Viennese cafes and yet he has also been deeply engaged with Fluxus and continues to correspond with Henning Christiansen who is his living link to his hero Joseph Beuys.  In the upstairs gallery there are homages to Christensen and Cage.  There is an old HMV wind up turntable with two those monstrous old pick ups   attached to the deck.  When both are engaged simultaneously you get a double track concert 180 degrees out of synch.  It is a process or systems work that relates to Cage and to fluxus apparatus.       

Another small scale installation involves a record being played by a small model of Joseph Beuys� campervan, the one that spewed forth all those sledges with rolls of felt in Edinburgh.  The van drives round and round on the disk acting in place of the pick up arm scratchily playing the sound track.    The pi�ce de resistance in this room is a grand piano that stands jauntily on one leg but the leg is coming out of the mouth of a human figure.  The figure is intermittently slapping the platform with a school cane.  It is a crazy and impossible scenario and when you realise it is a full scale and fully functional grand it seems totally improbable that it could possibly stand like a performing seal on point!  But there is more, the piano has been covered in pig skin and the skin has been tattooed all over with typical street tattoo images.     

It does not seem right to interpret all these works too prescriptively, they are multifaceted and by their nature harness personal and dreamlike experiences for each individual viewer.  By simply describing them and recording some subjective responses I hope to capture the memory of this installation for myself.  At the opening it occurred to me that contemporary art has always been supposed to take risks and yet how often does this actually happen today as we troop around biennales?   Although I have described Unsworth as an historical figure I realised that if risk taking is contemporary then he is one of the most contemporary artists I have seen for some time.