I Hate Australia
Adam Geczy
Canberra Contemporary Art Space
Until June 4
<http://www.ccas.com.au>
REVIEW BY MICHAEL ASCROFT
In I Hate Australia's exhibition essay, Geczy gives his justifications for delivering such a deliberately inflammatory statement, listing how the government regularly lies to us, is crushing education, is steeped in "us and them" rhetoric, continues the long-term imprisonment of refugees and won't say "sorry" to our Indigenous populations. But the exhibition itself is a combination of more subtle effects.
On the large central wall of the gallery is a 16.5 by two-metre bold, orange painted slogan "I Hate Australia". On an adjacent wall a video projection depicts a single shot of a swimming pool, a send-up of minimalist film-making, wherein nothing happens for a 25-minute loop. The soundtrack comprises distinctly suburban sounds and includes a lawnmower, a plane passing overhead and the voice of a boy calling out "John! ... John!"
In front of the projection is a barbeque complete with seven cooked sausages — five large to symbolise the states, two small for the territories. On the opposite wall is an inverted Australian flag, accompanied by the halting whistling of Advance Australia Fair. A black wall covered in handwritten lines in white chalk reading "I must learn to love my country" mimics the primary school punishment. The "Sorry wall", invites the public to write "sorry", in red, black or yellow pen.
Geczy uses the same cliched symbols of nationhood that PM John Howard does. Yet in an absurd "minimalist" context, it reads like an attack on the same audience the artist is trying to communicate with. You might also question the relevance of relating the fate of an institutional, esoteric art movement to the aspirations of "middlebrow Australian life".
What remains undeniable is the power of I Hate Australia as an open attack on patriotic nationalism. This insidious concept, where a sense of self is inextricably bound to a sense of nationhood, has become powerful currency in this era of Australian politics. The Howard government has been exploiting what is "un-Australian", successfully using fear to mobilise racism, justifying detention of refugees and the war in Iraq. At the very least, I Hate Australia forces us to question what "Australia" stands for, what "I" make of it. Geczy says in his essay that "artists can be active dissenters". We can have hope that not all art has to be mainstream and reactionary.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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