Catherine Bell, Semâ Bekirovic, Olga Chernysheva, Domenico De Clario, Miranda July, Sarah Lewis, Jan Nelson, Kate Swinson, Anne Wilson
A lazy Google search for the origins of the phrase ‘on the line’ yields a typically motley range of interpretations and uses. Is it from gambling: to literally lay your money on the line, such as when shooting craps? Or commerce: from an origin meaning readily available funds (hence forthright or honest), or the current foreboding of ‘your job is on the line’. One web user insists his ‘academic proffesor of gender studies’ (sic) said it referred to the measuring of penis sizes in taverns in medieval times. Such connotations of (often sexual) frankness lead directly to the body and the usage ‘putting your body on the line’. Googling this last phrase returns hits on ‘the question of violence, victims and the legacies of second-generation feminism’. Blogs written from occupied Palestine, as well as commentary on the footy (AFL) are also highly ranked, suggesting just two more ways bodies are constructed and contested, deployed and destroyed.
I am interested in these results as, in their competing claims and confusion, they reveal the scope and the stakes that ‘On the Line’ curator, Anne Wilson, could claim in this hugely ambitious exhibition that brought together the work of nine Australian and international artists, whose processes, according to an accompanying statement, involve ‘risk or who use their immediate environment to explore universal themes’. That is a broad church: the little ‘or’ in that sentence was made to work hard, as far reaching links were sought between apparently disparate works. The show’s curatorial premise was most obvious in works such as Jan Nelson’s excellent Vertical Composition/Vertical Collapse, documentation of a performance of her mounting then falling from a precarious stack of office chairs