Human Action as Performance, as Human Behaviour
‘Perfection: Human Action as Performance, as Human Behaviour’ was an exhibition of six emerging Brisbane artists who explored the divergent nature of performed action in contemporary art. The venue, Metro Arts, can be difficult to work in as the space tends to dominate the work. The contributing artists, however, are the prime movers behind the artist-run initiative Boxcopy Gallery, and this experience no doubt helped them to design ‘Perfection’ with a simple directness that gave each work a strong presence and sense of autonomy.
In Perfection each artist’s conception of ‘performance’ and ‘perfection’ was influenced by, or derived from popular entertainment media, where even celebrities’ private lives serve the media’s insatiable appetite for generating seductive public images. The artists juxtaposed the unavoidable imperfection of being human against the seamless imagery of the performed ‘life’ as published in the mass media.
Marianne Templeton, Channon Goodwin, and Joseph Breikers undertook this task with dry humour, adolescent fantasies, and kitsch musical tastes, exploring the relationship between humour, entertainment and contemporary art practices. It was this satirical exploration of humour that offset the occasional lapse into a laboured rendition of the performative concept in the curatorial thematic.
Marianne Templeton’s drawing series Loose Leaf (2008) explores the vocabularies of popular culture in a series of diaristic and mostly comical sketches on A4 pages. The drawings offer a fragmented documentation of the consumption of screen culture, which includes animation, current affairs programs and soap operas. Isolated and reconstructed from individual pages into a structured wall installation, there was a critical and ambivalent tenor to the drawings which were also entertaining. Drawing is a performed process and each of Templeton’s lines activates the paper to reflect the