Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to decide what actually makes something art, and apply the position you have reached in viewing the bewildering variety of works currently featured in the Hatched ’06 National Graduate Show at PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts).  Sure, you’ve read art theory, but what do you actually accept as ‘gospel’.  It’s a job I recently tackled, and with the help of Cynthia Freedland’s Art Theory (Oxford University Press) and some recent lectures at Central TAFE by Louise Morrison Saunders, I found this show less daunting than it could have been for me.

Elements of theory come and go.  Beauty, good taste and Significant Form begin to blur like the effects of a Gerhard Richter painting when we consider Duchamp, Warhol, Serrano, Hirst, Tracy Emin and others, and stir in scholars such as Roland Barthes, Arthur Danto, George Dickie and Jean Baudrillard.  But for anyone who’s seriously interested in contemporary art, it’s essential to establish a personal ‘point of view’.  And I’m attracted to anthropologist Richard Anderson’s account of art as ‘culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium’ (whew!).  I want to apply Anderson’s notions to the works of three graduate artists in the PICA show, and while for some readers this review may ‘self-destruct’ (or be able to be ‘deconstructed’) in about 10 seconds, here goes ….

Kylie Ligertwood’s Flock is a sound installation that also manages powerful visual resonances for me.  Why?  Does it have culturally significant meaning?  How is it encoded?  And does it employ affective sensuous mediums?  The artist says she is aiming to use sounds to trigger memory in people who encounter this work which occupies a room, dimly lit by a single bare light bulb on the gallery’s upper level. Bird cages of various sizes made from cane hang at staggered levels in the room, casting surreal shadows on the walls.  Sounds of birds and office machines are apparently fed from a looped tape through speakers in the otherwise empty cages.  The ‘medium’ of sounds and shadows are eerily complementary and thought-provoking (sensuous).  Are we caged within our minds by our backgrounds and experiences?  Is the overload of disparate information generated by the sounds a metaphor for the repetitive routines of daily existence?  Well, only the viewer can provide these answers.  But this is by Anderson’s criteria a powerful piece of art.

Angela McHarrie encodes multiple levels of meaning in everyday materials precariously balanced in surprising configurations.  In her wall sculpture entitled Six Things Before Breakfast she references a quotation from Lewis Carroll’s 'Through the Looking Glass'.  Wooden blocks painted in primary colours are supports for, or supported by scissors, forks, spoons, can openers, funnels and various other kitchen odds and ends (I’m always amazed by the number of implements needed to accomplish even a basic fry-up in the kitchen).  But are the materials affecting and sensuous?  I’d say they are in the ways the artist uses them, because you’ll find yourself thinking about these simple objects in different ways.  McHarrie says she is challenging the ways we see and interact with our surroundings (hey, she’s succeeding!).  I guess she’s telling us that there’s danger in automatically accepting our assumptions about people and things.  If we were all able to have an open mind about the world around us, that world would surely be a better place (and I’d say that’s culturally significant).

Alison Baily’s work is nearby to Angela McHarrie’s piece in the main space on the gallery’s upper level, but arranged on the floor, rather than the walls.  It’s called Home Beautiful, and it features materials such as porcelain, copper and wood fashioned into uniformly-shaped houses.  Some of the wooden pieces have been charred by fire (do you have insurance?).  The materials are affecting and sensuous insofar as they speak about the stuff of ownership that we prize so much inside our houses, and our fears about losing things is hiding in there as well.  Baily is telling us that our ingrained notions about home ownership as an essential key to happiness are open to question.  A house will provide shelter, but can also become a prison.  Should we spend our lives in servicing our mortgages to eventually win the freedom to caravan around Australia?  Get me a backpack.  I’m outa here (I wish)!

Let me wrap this up by venturing that you’ll enjoy this show, and you’ll be challenged by the variety of approaches taken by the artists featured (yep, they’re mainly women, but there are some guys in the show as well).  Just one more thing in closing.  It’s that I think that Richard Anderson’s words about art needing to be skillfully encoded also means that it should be well made.  Anyway, I know what I like when I see it (who said that first?).