By Elizabeth Barsham
It's the longest night of the year – and Hobart was ablaze with light. The program for Dark MoFo, our Winter Arts Festival, invites us to "Celebrate the Dark through large-scale public art, food, music, light and noise." Indeed! Well, they're right about the large-scale public art. It doesn't come much larger than a fifteen-kilometre high column of light generated by forty nine specially-made searchlights aimed at the zenith, with interactive soundtrack to match.
It's the longest night of the year – and Hobart was ablaze with light. The program for Dark MoFo, our Winter Arts Festival, invites us to "Celebrate the Dark through large-scale public art, food, music, light and noise." Indeed! Well, they're right about the large-scale public art. It doesn't come much larger than a fifteen-kilometre high column of light generated by forty nine specially-made searchlights aimed at the zenith, with interactive soundtrack to match.
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| Spectra from the photographer's backyard this is my contribution to the genre |
Ryoji Ikeda's Spectra
[Tasmania] must be the most
visible and the most thoroughly photographed work of art ever to
appear in Tasmania. Here are some of the favourite viewpoints:
On Friday night Spectra was joined by Patricia Piccinini's controversial Skywhale.
I
have never been a fan of Piccinini's work, but Skywhale,
despite the jokes and adverse comments, turns out to be strangely
moving.
Skywhale
is a hot-air balloon in the shape of – well – sort of a whale,
adorned with enormous, pendulous breasts and a fan-shaped tail that
could well be claws. After dark it seems to flicker in and out of
existence as the burners are turned on and off. They served only to
keep it inflated tonight; it was firmly tethered on the Regatta
Ground, giving photographers the opportunity to include it, and a
gibbous moon, in their photographs of Spectra.
I
did not take a camera; some experiences are too vast to be captured
by a small machine, and Skywhale
is certainly big; standing directly beneath it you realise just how
big it is. And how ungainly.
Seen
as an assembly of organic curves rather than representing some
imaginary beast it becomes a reasonably pleasing pattern of shapes,
in particular when you stand beneath the "tail". Such bulbous forms, however, never suggest that this thing was meant to fly. Huge,
incongruous breasts weigh it down, the exaggeratedly mammalian body
anchoring any higher aspirations firmly to the ground. The
contradiction between its visual and its actual weight is extremely
disturbing; the great, sad eye and vaguely comic-book features
express a deep sense of melancholy, the despair of a creature doomed
to failure.
As
I watched, the burners turned off and the beast slowly deflated until
it was no more than a pile of limp, pink fabric. A premonition of the
fate of all large mammals? Or just a playful piece of art? I don't
know. So I went off to celebrate the Solstice at the Winter Feast at
Princes Wharf and had a jolly good evening.
The
ABC took some excellent photographs, which you can see here.
