Speed Bump Systems: Visual Tools for Locating the Viewer
There were many keys available to decode the installation of painted constructions, artworks, floor markings, wall signs and readymade objects drawn together under Speed Bump Systems, not the least of which was its title. But Dirk Yates’s exhibition resonated most strongly for me once the entire space had been circumnavigated (according to his direction) to arrive in its central space. Markings underfoot suggested the viewer had been paced, located and decoyed, choreographed in a way akin to movement through a sports ground or shopping centre car park. Social mores too were suggested by these floor markings, reminders of spaces where the line between public and private is fine and easily transgressed.
In this space a mirror work faced off against an outline of the Australian flag—for Yates a country is the ultimate collection of people in a conceptual or artificial organism. The opposing mirror, heavily gridded, included a text, almost invisible, which read ‘the infreedom of the whole’.
At the time of writing, some two months later, the work seems prescient in many ways, although in the sense of predicting xenophobia it is equally instructive to look to the past. The citizenship test introduced on 1 October for new Australians seeks the imposition of common knowledge over the conceptual organism that is any country.
While this, like much of the other work in the show, required the viewer to move across and within it to fully see its text or meaning, this space was the most developed and fully resolved in its interest in capturing and interacting with the observer. It also, as the final work in the exhibition, built on the collective experience.
An artist, Yates is now