Neighbourhood Earth

ICC

Sydney, Australia

November 21, 2021

A veritable nightmare for flat earthers and after an award decorated run in the US, the interactive and multi-sensory space extravaganza that is Neighbourhood Earth finally found its way down under to incarnate and to prove an immersive experience for anyone fascinated with space and with the infinite realm of “where few man have gone before.” 

Cue William Shatner who recently was able to back up the intro of Star Trek by scoring a lift with Jeff Bezos on New Shepard and thereby on the back of Virgin Blue’s missions created the ideal backdrop for Neighbourhood Watch to eventuate.

Cinematic and majestic in scale, the space environment that is Neighbourhood Earth has been created in collaboration with NASA and its Space & Rocket Center to ideate the evolution of an exhibition that strikes the right balance to create a family-friendly experience, being both educational and entertaining.

Based on a digital and holographic reconstruction of our solar system, visitors are enabled to not only visually travel through the galaxy to visit recreations of life-like interplanetary missions  but also closely examine astronaut suits and replica of spacecraft as well as other interactive installations aimed at gaining a hands-on understanding of the environment in space.

Employing the merits of high-impact multimedia projection technology combined with data, stories and artefacts from subject matter experts, Neighbourhood Watch is a fun experience. 

The Formative Years

Slime 

When it comes to quintessential German punk bands, no list would be complete without Slime from Hamburg.

Founded in 1979, they evolved from playing rudimentarily structured and simplistic songs modelled after late-seventies British punk rock a la Clash and The Damned to a band that carved their own lane centred around dedicated more complex song structures with layered, less one-dimensional and politically relevant lyrical content with a deeply embedded anti-fascist message at its core. 

Slime’s oeuvre not only left a massive imprint on the Deutschpunk scene at large for generations to come but also created an idiosyncratic range of emblematic “call to action” anti-authoritarian  sloganeering that not only has become integral part of the vocabulary of the German leftist autonomist scene. but also resulted in tangible actions at protests and rallies.

As a teenager, the fact that quite a few of Slime's early and controversial songs were censored and the band subject to being prosecuted by the official censoring body in Germany, i.e. Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors, exerted a magnetic pull and set me on a mission to secure the original releases, learn the lyrics by heart and let them infuse the shaping of my worldview.

During the early days of the punk movement where messaging and positioning was still very diffuse and vague, Slime was one of the pivotal politically radical bands that grew from simple riffing, punk anthems and stereotypical clichéd content to rising above the sea of their epigones by evolving to writing more musically demanding and complex songs and the inclusion of more sophisticated metaphorical  lyrics courtesy of Slime’s drummer, i.e. Stephan Maler, dealing with governmental repression, xenophobia and anti-war sentiments. 

The first three albums remain timeless classics and cement Slime’s legacy:

Arthur Jafa - MAGNUMB

Louisiana Publications

Arthur Jafa has made a name for himself as an American video artist with themes like Black American culture, slavery and the opposition Black Americans face to this very day being at centre of his artistic explorations.

The release of the book MAGNUMB followed an Arthur Jafa exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which is not only known in terms of modern Danish architecture for its synthesisizing landscape, architecture and art but also for harbouring an extensive permanent collection of modern art spanning the last hundred years along with its comprehensive programme of special exhibitions. 

Given the aforementioned, it is not for nothing included in Patricia Schultz’s book “One thousand Places to See Before You Die”, ranking within the first one hundred in the realm of art museums.

Louisisana’s book on Jafa accompanied and contextualised his exhibition with an overview of his often confronting video depictions of Black American life, which are informed by his lifelong fascination with imagery, photographs and cinematography and which have been catapulted to the forefront once Black Lives Matter became a global movement that found its way into prime-time media, thereby entering every facet of mainstream culture.

It is interesting to see Jafa’s cinematography within an art context, as it conveys both the beauty and power as well as the alienation the broad scope of Black culture has been experiencing. What I like about Jafa’s approach is that tackles American realities from different angles and thereby conveys a comprehensive multi-dimensional prism, through which the recipient is enabled to actively participate with his own interpretations.

The narrative of Jafa’s work is guided by stark contrasts, juxtapositions and an ubiquitous ambivalent openness, which invites to think beyond simple dichotomies of good and evil.

Apart from the political component, Jafa’s virtuosic technical skills enable him to masterfully compose new realities by creating a patchwork of nuances, the sum of which create a significant and visually coherent powerful whole that is much more than the mere sum of its components would have one think, with pain and suffering being a recurring motif and common denominator.

It is interesting to see Arthur Jafa incarnate at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art as the aestheticization of the traumas of white violence against Black people would have most likely been viewed by an exclusively privileged audience, thereby subversively raising deeper going questions about Denmark’s widely suppressed colonial history.

In essence, an ode in book form to an essential artist whose oeuvre engages the recipient in questioning the status quo and the role one plays in the maintenance of it.

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image from publisher website

The Formative Years

The Accüsed

Founded in 1981, The Accüsed instanenously became a pioneering underground band in that they merged the best bits of thrash metal, hardcore punk and grindcore to create their very own mélange, i.e. what they referred to as splattercore, and thereby helped to give birth to what ultimately became known as crossover trash.

With the first three years being spent on refining their sound and experimenting with different line-ups, 1984 saw the vocalist of The Fartz (Duff McKagan’s first band) join the band and added his idiosyncratic choking-sound vocal delivery to their hybrid equation, which musically had evolved to constitute the musical equivalent to a splatter movie courtesy of a tight unit with metallic buzz-saw guitars and rapid-fire drumming. 

Add a mascot with striking features and recurring b-movie themed lyrical content revolving around Martha Splatterhead and you got a band that was bound to create their own lane.

Having fallen in love with their debut The Return of Martha Splatterhead, I could not wait to see them incarnate in a live environment and what I experienced in the early 1990s blew my mind as the maniacal music was matched by the band’s infectious on-stage demeanour with Blaine leaping around the stage like a man possessed. They were exactly as frantic, chaotic and furious as I hoped for, set the bar high and established themselves as one of my favourite live bands.

A band that defined crossover by merging thrash a la early Slayer, mixed it with crust and early hardcore punk and thereby created fertile ground for a myriad of bands to blossom and bloom, including the more prominent ones still riding the recent wave of the resurgence of thrash.

If you like bands like Municipal Waste, do yourself a favour and treat yourself to the masterpiece that is The Accüsed’s debut full-length:

Doug Aitken: New Era

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Exhibition: 20 October 2021 – 06 February 2022

Occupying prime real estate at Circular Quay vis-à-vis from the Opera House, Sydney’s home of contemporary art has after a profound overhaul in 2011 redefined itself not only via an aesthetically and architecturally pleasing exterior, which marries the original sandstone building with contemporary features, but as a haven championing new age and forward-thinking art with its circulation system based gallery, a formidable rooftop café, sculpture terrace, high-tech education centre, and a 120-seat lecture theatrette.

Given the implications of the recent pandemic induced lockdowns on terra australis, it was fantastic to see after many delays the American artist Doug Aitken incarnate with his first major solo exhibition in the Southern hemisphere, comprised of key works of his oeuvre spanning close to three decades.

Heralded for his idiosyncratic approach to channelling installations, sculptures, photographs and constantly shifting multi-screen environments into an immersive, mesmerising and prismatic other world that culminates in a conceptually fluid display of moving imagery and sound, the exhibition invites one to become actively involved and get lost in Aitken’s multi-sensory ambience. 

My personal highlight of the exhibition is the large-scale poetic sound installation Sonic Fountain II: Built into a bouldered wasteland-esque lunar scenery, drops of water are unleashed from a suspended multi-valve apparatus into a milky pond, with the sound being amplified by an algorithm which ebbs and flows the recordings captured by microphones within and outside the pond, resulting in sounds pieces reminiscent of John Cage.

Inspired by mobile phone technology and its impact on our social behaviours, the exhibit NEW ERA not only informed the title of the exhibition but conveys the marriage of seemingly antagonistic concepts of union and dislocation through a mirrored fragmented structure that serves as a gate to a screen filled tunnel that viewers are invited to wander through and being wrapped up by.

The way the exhibition has been designed and orchestrated is devoid of an imposed narrative – au contraire, the viewer is enabled to author and determine an individual perspective through the carving of their own lens with Aitken providing food-for-though via real and imagined landscapes of ideas, using mirrors to reel the viewer into his cosmos and place him at the centre.

The result is a carefully calibrated and boundary-pushing composition of ideas for which the MCA becomes the conduit to a ruminative and multi-directional wider world – one that is transitional, dynamic and hidden in plain sight.

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image courtesy of MCA