Melbourne Now by Giles Fielke

• Giles Fielke

Why doesn’t the NGV have a FUCKING cinema?! Of course, it’s often said that ACMI is just next door and that film (and the “moving image”) is their domain—but seriously? The two institutions are in the same building, separated only by the atrium at Federation Square. Alternatively, why doesn’t ACMI move to somewhere more “Australian”? This is Melbourne, after all! It’s Melbourne NOW, a city (and not a National Gallery…well, for now). More significantly, the 2023 edition of the decennial survey exhibition is chock-a-block with digital video work. From Kiron Robinson’s factory-like boxes with screens installed in the Brown Collection on level two, titled If you want my mind, you can take my pain as well (2019–present), to Layla Vardo’s Orders of Magnitude (2021) succinctly displayed in its own gallery setting and consisting solely of sharp intakes of breath by none other than an unwitting Sir David Attenborough. Perhaps Robinson’s “crawling man” is trying to tell me something. Get out? The impossibility of escape? The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living?

Amalia Lindo’s staggering showing of a circular ring of vertically installed screens displaying 1820 subcontracted worker submissions, Telltale: Economies of Time (2022–23) is as impressive and serious as Nick Mangan’s Core Coralations (2023), a monumental (video) work about coral bleaching and bioluminescence on that massive metonym for our exhausted environment, the Great Barrier Reef. Both are considerable commissions for the NGV. As is Ruth Höflich’s collaborative film installation Two Suns (2023). But above the commissioned works lies the “project” groupings for Melbourne Now, the most surprising of these—at least to my mind—being the NGV x recess: Artist Film Program. Twenty-one moving image works (films!) make up this project component with the programming largely presented as the work of guest curator Olivia Koh, co-founder of the online artist film and writing platform recess (along with Kate Meakin and Nina Gilbert). Each work in this program plays every day between 3:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., for one week of the exhibition, in the Community Hall on the ground level of the NGV Australia.

Koh, an artist working in moving-image production, provides the NGV curatorium with a level of competence that the State’s premier art institution has never claimed to possess; the NGV does not employ a film curator. It has never even attempted to collect (experimental or artist) films in any systematic way (that’s ACMI’s job), therefore Koh’s presence also serves to legitimise a program that the NGV knows nothing about (nor really cares to). Until Now. The first iteration of Melbourne Now, in 2013, did include official events run by members of Melbourne’s Artist Film Workshop. At the time, Koh was a member (so was I). Nevertheless, it seems that a large part of the current program—and hence its lack of thematic agenda or apparent coherence—reflects the imposition of selections by the NGV’s curators and hence its director (that is, as an NGV x recess billing for the program). What is a “brilliantly meandering conversation,” and do I want to have one?

The result is a long-coming admission by the NGV, which in Koh’s words beautifully articulates the significance of artist filmmaking as “a specific area of inquiry rarely undertaken by Australian galleries.” Yet it is also one that is severely limited by the painful setting of the community sans-community that the Community Hall event space has become for the next twenty-one weeks of the exhibition. As the location for the screenings, it sucks. In fact, there is so much information and content in this one project alone that it could have been a standalone program—perhaps it could have been shown at ACMI? (Why not?!)

I sit in the well-lit, brightly-coloured bleachers that form the Community Hall, pointed at a corner of the gallery in front of which hangs the screen, to watch the first film in the program, Nikki Lam’s short the unshakable destiny_2101 (2021). As I take a seat, I notice that I am joined by participating artist Rosie Isaac and ACMI curator Laura Castagnini. Coincidentally we are all here to ask the same questions: film, at the NGV? What does this mean? ART+FILM at ACMI is a program that in particular seems to intersect with what is happening here, as Castagnini confirms: Koh is working with Hyphenated Projects,run by Nikki Lam and Phuong Ngo, to present new work at ACMI later this year. Lam’s lush, elegiac work touches on settler-identity in Australia and has been remediated from 16 mm to the digital LED display installed in the Community Hall. It is, unfortunately, lost in the goings-on from the surrounds—NGV staff are still packing down from the previous event and setting up technical gear for the next and light is everywhere. I need darkness, isolation (not community!) to sit and appreciate this work. It seems beautiful from a distance. I watch it five times, but it feels like I still haven’t seen it (or listened) when I leave.

So, while you may keep it locked with ASSA ABLOY and the Lockwood products designed by Studio Periscope, or consider the practice of Kirsten Thompson Architects alongside Rel Pham’s speculative aug-architecture installation, TEMPLE (2023) the pervasive sense of what to do with all of the video-content (and the melange of sound echoing around the galleries), which distends temporally the amount of work able to be shown physically within the spatial parameters of the NGV Australia, is one of meta-exhaustion. Were you to attempt to take in all that is on offer, you’d most probably develop some kind of psychosocial, OHS-related injury—again, the NGV wants you to move on. Look at all this art (and design and fashion and architecture and stuff), but don’t look too hard! It’s not labour, it’s entertainment.

This suggests to me one reason why the NGV eschews the black box, comfortable seats, and long-stays (instead of being shuffled along by the architecture and design of its galleries, let alone the security, which has become a trademark of the NGV’s administration). It is a fear of what might emerge if we were to dwell in the presence of the half-light. What monsters might appear? What deviant activities may spontaneously arise? What questions would we ask? Can we have a cinema please?