time, place & long life milk
Milk. Cascading down faces, eddying around noses and flowing into neck creases, seeping into spectacles, saturating chests and streaming through hair and beards. Dripping, dribbling and drenching, spraying, snorting and splashing, gulping and gasping; thirty-three people count down from ten to one in various languages, before immersing their heads in bowls of milk. These actions were repeated exhaustively over fifteen minutes and videoed to create the latest collaborative work by Japanese artist, Tatsuo Miyajima, Counter Voice in Milk.
In undertaking a series of Counter Voice performance projects across cities such as Rome, Tokyo and London since 1996, Miyajima has worked with legions of volunteers, using water, wine and, in Japan, milk. When invited by the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) to undertake the most recent of this performance series in Adelaide, his preferred liquid was, again, milk. The irony of this choice was not lost on those acquainted with Adelaide’s public ‘face’ of mild and moral earnestness, despite the state’s more recent and sophisticated image as the grape-growing capital of Australia.
Miyajima’s large-scale performance nevertheless transcended local politics to bring together a culturally, ideologically and stylistically diverse range of practitioners, students and technicians in a collaboration between CACSA, Helpmann Academy institutions (South Australian School of Art, Adelaide Centre for the Arts, Central School of Art) and the University of South Australia. The artist’s residency had an extraordinary impact on the local scene as Miyajima re-cast conventional relations between internationally renowned artists and acquiescent local communities who provide the artist’s requirements. The focus here centred not on the artist-facilitator but on the private/public ordeals experienced by each individual performing this task; ten video monitors revealed this to be