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The writing on the wall outside my window declares these are the days of the Last Survivors. Sometimes I look onto this tableau, spraypainted by local Maori kids, and wonder, Bondi or Babylon? Beyond the wall is the beach, with its encroaching neon-gentry and toxic fish. I'm working here now so my unborn child can have a future somewhere else. But is there a somewhere else? And what are the options? Beg for mercy? Frozen indignation? Ground Zero, Dennis Mizzi's latest exhibition at the Tin Sheds, Sydney, suggests another: become like the calm before the gathering storm.
Ground Zero has become my metaphor for the early '90s. I think of it whenever I get word of the latest on the ozone-layer or about seagulls with encephalitis – it proposes a breathing space. Zero: a round egg laid on the ground, and zero, the hair burnt back to the scalp. Zero, the fading of the subject, and zero, the coming to light, an arising.
The time of zero, wrote Dick Hebdige while dealing with a personal crisis, is neither good nor bad, but is above all, difficult, difficult to live through.
This view is hard won, and Mizzi's work offers no facile consolations. Denis Mizzi, 40 this year, has dealt with endgame situations since the early '70s. (His first solo exhibition was entitled Endgame at Mori Gallery, 1980). His early work crossed conceptual art with an intense sense of closed existential horizons; art forms (concrete poetry, photography, mail art, video) threatened by the tragedy made possible by ideals. I recall a closed set of themes, a vocabulary of shadows, clouds, lines. The form of the work leant itself more often to... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline