Don’t Look Away!
A prolific hyperproduction and sense of take-over lifted the Brio’s head out of the fray.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my writings about contemporary artworks that were perhaps overly steeped in the heaviness of historical and ongoing trauma without fully grappling with other deregulating energies — scrappiness, coolness, abundance, tall tales, and piss-takes. These entanglements not only provide moments of levity within traumatic storying, as well as sometimes profound relief and jibing political critique. They also can refuse demands for certain cultural and personal stories while offering an unflinching picturing of the whole tangled mess of settler-colonial Australia.
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The Tennant Creek Brio transform mining maps, dead TVs, and frontier wreckage into new cultural claims—rejecting imposed “otherness” and forcing the settler gaze into confrontation. If their art is a shock, who’s really being unsettled?
KIRAC’s gonzo filmmaking shatters art world niceties, but their entanglement with Michel Houellebecq—novelist, provocateur, reluctant porn star—turns chaotic. As lawsuits fly and reputations fray, the real spectacle isn’t the film itself but the battle over who gets to tell the story.
Narrowing the collective to its relation with art institutions and “artworld systems” posits the latter as ultimate signifiers.
