Malice
There can be an ironic continuity and consistency in disposability (that most indispensable quality). It can be achieved by activities as diverse as projecting images onto buildings or pasting up the awkward ephemera of wallpaper, the unifier in each case being not only a temporary quality which celebrates the margins of "art", but also the thin tissue of a continuity which we can only really read about through criticism reifying such practices. Lehan Ramsay's work has shown us this, and more. Malice relates to her photographic series shown in 1987 at John Mills National and which is now on display in the Griffith University Art Collection. The pedagogic/neighbourly mix of that black and white sequence – reminiscent of '30s and '40s heat and tension Hollywood cinematography – has given way here to a plenitude of simulacra, where representations of representations of representations cubed (still to video to still etc.) are filtered through a film bleu approach that brings us from Depression Brisbane/Key Largo to '80s Gangland/Doc Marten.
The wallpapered outcome – the final textual operation that can be performed before a new inhabitant arrives with redecorating ideas – is nonrepeatable, non-transferable, non-marketable. Its riskiness encourages a search for critical certainty but problematises any such pomp with its puncturing and bewildering panoply of narrative and texture. What we have here is an event: a series of small stories. Each of them has a beginning, a middle and an end, but in an order that is for us to select and then mend.
How do you review "Malice"? Under Australian law, a case for defamation can be argued by maintaining that a critic did not honestly believe in what he/she wrote but