Why ‘uneasy’? Exhibition curator Timothy Morrell explained, ‘No Australian city seems as uncomfortable in its own skin as Adelaide’. He may be right. Adelaide, if not always producing art of the unease, is a veteran, certainly since the 1970s, of hosting and dealing with it. A number of Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (ABAA) exhibitions, notably Christopher Chapman’s 1996 ABAA with its overriding themes of fin de siècle anxiety and neurosis, and the 1994 ABAA Adelaide Installations which included Aleks Danko’s HIDING IN THE LIGHT (a light vision), a brutally dark rendition of Adelaide as a garden shed from which emanated murderous verse (Robert Wallace) describing Adelaide as unraveling like a festering Dadaist nightmare, picked at the scabs.
‘Uneasy’s hang ensured an immediate response with Annette Bezor’s prominently positioned Blush, an almost three by five metre painting of a front-on, legs-apart, female nude, delivering the mixed message of, as Morrell put it, ‘the private indulgence of an erotic fantasy’ translated ‘into a public encounter’. The experience of having one’s public ogling at overt nudity misinterpreted as prurience, predisposed a sequence of responses with nearby works, but, curiously, not with Daryl Austin’s candid, male nudes which defied easy interpretation. Then again viewers’ incipient voyeurism may have been cooled by the presence of Austin’s trademark nail-studded fetish objects. John Barbour’s diaphanous lengths of fabric pressed the issue of private pleasure versus public discomfort, through staining and half-finished, embroidered words (akin to stammerings and mutterings) contaminating the communion-white surfaces.
Text as a vehicle or mask for inner anxieties and awkward truths also played a central role in works by Aldo Iacobelli and Hossein Valamanesh. The presence of one of Iacobelli’s more enigmatic