March, 1987
Mike Parr recently described Australia as the land of the great collective amnesia. He was commenting on the critical forgetfulness of his "threshold" performances of the mid-70s. Instead of a continuity of collective memory, there was a series of frozen stratifications of aesthetic time.
Cathartic performances of this type have rarely been presented in this country and Jose Macalino's work certainly may be so categorized. It aimed to extend the socio-political and the personal into a continuum of memory, tying in very closely with the installation of photographs, videos and Mara's poetry.
The full evening's performances, counterpointing intensity with deliberated spaces of contemplation, made peculiar demands on the audience to open a receptive space of unusually long duration. Such temporal suspension was the hallmark of 70s performance. To survive at all, the audience had to enter into an empathy with the performer.
The conservative formalism of the 80s has once more fissured the space between performer and audience. Earlier performance inten- Jose Macallno. Synthetic Memoreez. 1987 ded to annihilate this closure. The emphasis now seems to fall on the analysable and verbalizable; on the clinically "interesting".
Since the performances of the Futurists and the Dadaists, the presence of the physical form of the artist in the work was an element of the anarchistic and the outrageous introduced in order to intervene in the buyer - seller dialectic of the art-object (for instance, in the 70s, in the work of Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris and feminist performers, such as Rebecca Horn). Jose Macalino's work most literally restored the physical form to centre stage.
Specifically his work is that of a street artist. Western Europe, America and Japan, committed to