Considering the amount of things that can be streamed online—i.e., entire lives—it's peculiar how art is a thing that supposedly doesn't happen on the internet. The reasons seem transparent; for some it's a kind of moralism, the belief that aesthetic transaction happens in the flesh, not the digital, or that something vital is lost in virtual spaces (even though many of the artworks I've felt to be profound were witnessed not in life, but in a more archaic form of reproduction: books). For others it's the nervous conviction that people will stop attending galleries and museums IRL, or, my more sinister suspicion, that non-commercial galleries and museums haven't yet figured out how to monetarise online space in the name of Art. The website is thus relegated to being the gallery's most essential promotional tool, and what makes the Naarm/Melbourne-based online publishing platform recess so valuable is how the website is the exhibition space.
Started in 2016, and co-organised by Nina Gilbert, Kate Meakin and Olivia Koh, recess is a site where you can stream moving image works. Each piece is given an exhibition date, and during this period is featured on the home page—after the 'show' is over the work moves to a side-bar, able to be streamed at any time. Extending the physical and temporal boundaries of the conventional gallery via an online publishing platform isn't necessarily a new idea, but for all its supposed obviousness, it's actually a rarity.
So far recess has shown 13 moving image works and, at the end of March this year, published 80 Ways by artist and filmmaker Ella Sowinska. It's an experimental take on personal documentary, where Sowinska films her mother—who writes online erotica under the pseudonym Sandy Mayflower—as she in turn films one of her self-published stories. The narrative is simple: it involves Claudia, who regularly travels internationally for her work on a water conservation project, and on each continent pursues a man for her sexual conquest. We get to witness flashes of this story, but our eyes are mostly directed toward Sowinska, Mayflower and the film crew, and we watch as they work with two actors to recreate the scenes of Mayflower's fantasies.
Amounting to a performed erotic space where the boundaries and power relationships between every person (actor, director, daughter, mother, lover) are continuously defined and re-defined, the central sexual encounter unfolds in every direction but sexy—desire and performance feel comic, excruciating and awkward, miraculously drifting between the utterly conscious and the completely unconscious. Two actors use their intuition to act out 'the deed', while Mayflower gives broad direction, enjoyably watching the pair. Meanwhile we look on as Sowinska watches her mother live out these fantasies, a view that reflects back onto the mother/daughter relationship and Sowinska herself. It's almost a therapy session, where the series of diegetic performances show each level performing stories and versions of reality, or articulations of desire, for another viewer. Yet the truly emotional and intimate moments of connection come when the performance fails or lapses.
If 80 Ways is broadly concerned with the circulation of unconscious desires, constructed situations and projections of fantasy, then it's perfectly placed in a space where such circulation is the modus operandi—a space where people are curiously determined to perform their best lives at every moment: the internet. There is an intensity to watching a short film on a device (laptop, phone, iPad) that's already carting around the huge anxieties and joys of performance, authenticity and desire—once you leave the film, you don't get any relief from the layered conflations of performance and intimacy; instead, it intensifies.
If 80 Ways had been shown in the neutral space of the gallery it would still be an extremely fulfilling work, but this intensity might not hold such gravity: the questions of performance and articulating desire wouldn't linger with similar urgency, or seem to connect so fluidly to lived experience. The importance of online context is relevant to encountering many of the works on recess. As well as widening publishing opportunities and critical accessibility, the greater triumph is how it provides moving image works a non-neutral and intensely loaded space, granting many of the videos more implicit and complex associations than what the white wall, or the darkened room, would be able to offer.
iarney Miekus is a Melbourne-based writer.
