MeMOdrome: O’Blivion’s Ratio
Free to Forget, First Person Shooter, Guzzler Peace Frog,
Day 250 has passed. Once “the world’s most liveable city”, we now reluctantly embrace the new tagline of “the world’s most locked-down city”. Still, the humble house-show perseveres. Bound by indoor stasis, animated only by the flow of content across screens, the Lonely Planet exhibitions surveyed in this review are predictably tormented by the paranoiac consciousness cultivated by the giant hallucination machine that is the internet.
The twentieth anniversary of September 11 inspired rrealartt’s Free to Forget. The exhibition saw the remodelling of their mainstay plinth into two twin towers, which was posted intermittently on their Instagram over two days from September 11. As is rrealartt praxis, the show is entirely Instagram-based. In addition to a one-off screening of the attacks, projected onto the newly split plinths, the exhibition culminated in a digital exhibition of the US$10 million worth of art that was lost in the September 11 attacks—“Corporate America’s lost treasures”, says the exhibition text, also hosted on Instagram. It continues: “suburban living rooms enter the warzone via live television broadcast. We’ll never know whether it was news media that became Videodrome, or whether Videodrome became the news”. It is a welcome cue for me to play with dynamite.
Audrey Schmidt is a writer and Melbourne Personality.
