Curator: Mary Lou Pavlovic
Follow me, comrade aviators! Swim into the abyss .. . I have overcome the lining of the coloured sky, torn it down ... infinity is before you.1
With this heady exhortation, Kasemir Malevich identified art as revolutionary action. In his case it was less to serve a political imperative, narrowly defined, than to command a kind of sweeping sensory violence. Yet what he surveyed as he leapt into the void of his allwhite canvas was not a deathly abyss but a plane of pure potential on which to reconfigure 'the entire architecture of earthly things'.2
On September 11 , the spectacular destruction of the World Trade Centre Towers seemed at first to signal that the architecture of earthly things really had been turned on its head. That it had been was one of the propositions interrogated by the exhibition Fallout. For only one week thirty-seven artists exhibited works across a wide range of media in response to the attack; a response which also ranged over related issues such as globalisation and the refugee crisis. Works were made either within weeks of the attack, or else produced earlier but with meanings which were immediately and unavoidably made over in its wake. Mary Lou Pavlovic's action in setting in motion a response that was at once expeditious, extensive and highly discomforting, was to distil some of the energy of the attack itself-suddenly generated, far reaching and raw-as a counter to its predictable syphoning by a supposedly reassuring discourse of revenge.
Some of the works made pre-September 11 were prescient without being overtly political, such as Rowan Douglas's Plane Film (June, 2001). His video shows a small model plane, visibly attached to a