TALKING THROUGH YOUR ARTS – UNDER THE UNDERBELLY
There were belts and boughs, objects bought with baubles, echoes amid the ebb and flow of movement where futurity hangs. The embedded history in the rehabilitating Cockatoo Island is complex, yet also squalid, sinister and sentimental. It was in the late 1830s as a penal establishment the red gum forest was flattened and the sulphur-crested cockatoos took flight never to return.
The image of the everyday life is complex, it’s a hotbed of political and social disturbance with blunt warnings of an impending apocalypse, whether by invasion, rising waters, tsunamis, germ warfare or the domination of artificial intelligence – moreover a case of, “I, feel robotic“, than “I, Robot”.
Six years ago a group of artists brought about what they define as being a “social experiment”, NOT a sitcom nor the ferried TV series of the same name. Underbelly is neither good nor bad. The construction and reconfiguration of modern subjects in a public domain has now become an arena for artistic empowerment and anticipated confusion.
Underbelly, is by definition the lower abdomen, the lower surface, a dark and often hidden area. It’s in the two-day unfolding or the peeling back of underlings that we get to see that which art positions above the nether regions, above the belt or rather at your waist notch. At its centre is a periphery assumed, however, at the centre is a point of gathering, an area of discovery, its belly.
The naval gazing takes in 30 projects and will feature over 100 artists. The audience will position here and there or over yonder, while the lab residents transform the elements into a visual experience. From playwright Anna Barnes through to Perth based artist Abdul Abdullah, the experimental festival will showcase a wilderness of conceptual artistic ideas and widening manifestations.
Much of the significance of the island lies in its spatial qualities, it still reminds us of its previous inhabitants. The place and space offers an insight into the ideas, beliefs, and convictions that motivate and influence artists. Although I’m personally over ‘under-things’, the diversity of art and the opportunities for trying new work is seminal. The complexities of evocations that artificial nature produces, has its own tensions, allusions to historical accounts boat us towards the voyaging frontier. (AS)
Underbelly Lab, Jul 24-31, Cockatoo Island, Free tour daily; Underbelly Festival, Aug 3-4, Cockatoo Island, $20-40, underbellyarts.com.au
BY ANGELA STRETCH
