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The contemporary art program of the Brisbane Festival, Volt, aimed to present critical and challenging work to as wide as possible an audience. Programmed around the theme of 'new visions new performance', Volt ambitiously straddled artforms and genres, to generate a diverse and diffused program of interdisciplinary work from local, interstate and international artists. As the promotional material stated, Volt included 'intellectually rigorous, cutting edge practitioners often in friction with the world '. These works rubbed against the stasis of the status quo, tensions disturbed the somnolence of Brisbane in spring. Through the glitzy veneer of 'festival spirit', a prickling sensation disconcertingly and uncomfortably crept through various events. There was a rumble of pain here, a tenuous or jarring sense of place: of people struggling with their circumstances and struggling to make art out of them.
Despite the celebratory urge, this was not a party. For this reason, I cannot follow a cool critical path with this writing. To do so seems to divest this handful of events of the impulses which drove them: body, power, space, power, desire, power, pleasure, power, pain, power, crisis, panic, panic. Panic! Immersed in a panic culture, we learn to live with and within the hyper-intensities of postmodernity. As Arthur Kroker and David Cook argue, 'postmodernism ... [is] not the beginning of anything new or the end of anything old, but the catastrophic, because fun, implosion of contemporary culture into a whole series of panic scenes and the fin-de-millennium .. .'1
Repeat: this was not a party!
Caught in this realisation, pondering the revolutionary and radical moments of artistic practice, acknowledging, as Sadie Plant argues, that notions of change have changed, I... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline