PatriciaPiccinini

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Writing on a yellow ‘sticky’, the small pad framed by the sleeves of her blue denim jacket, Patricia Piccinini gives me a preview of how her installation at this year’s Venice Biennale is going to look.
“You come in the door here,” she says, drawing an arrow, then a rectangle, “and the first thing you see will be a shelf of distorted motorcycle helmets, a little like the car ‘nuggets’ that are on show here in Melbourne.” We are sitting in the upstairs offices of the new Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, one of the weirdest pieces of brand new architecture on the planet, rusted steel and no windows it looks like a cross between an alien spacecraft and a Richard Serra sculpture. The works Piccinini is referring to are part of her exhibition Retrospectology which includes her videos, sculptures, large format photography, sound art and unforgettable vibrating floorboards. The nuggets have the form but not the function of sleek car body parts decorated with surfie imagery. The colours and surface decoration make me think of a chance meeting between Poppy King cosmetics and a Fendor Stratocaster guitar. I ask her about the imagery she will put on the deliberately distorted forms of the helmets
“The idea of the skull is fundamental to this type of decoration, as is facing death and driving at speed. On top of that is added the image of the Amazon Woman. All the panel vans that you see in Australia ripped off the work of a fantasy painter who lived in Lima. I wanted to make a homage to his work so I found a female model on the internet and got her in to the studio to do a shoot. And all this isn’t about low culture, it’s about growing up in the Australian suburbs, which again fits with the domestic house that I will be creating in Venice.”
And it’s also about the way artists operate in the first years of the new millennium. You don’t need a studio but it is absolutely essential to have an uptodate copy of the Yellow Pages. “Even more so than the internet,” she tells me. “I find I get to what I want much quicker when I can talk to someone on the phone and ask questions and get a human response.” But do you have a studio, I ask?
“My studio is my car because I actually spend a lot of time in the car. And I spend a lot of time thinking while I’m driving or stuck in traffic. Especially if I’m on the highway for thirty minutes at a stretch. But I do spend a lot of time in a physical studio as well. I do rough edits in the studio with my video work. The other stuff comes back to the studio from fabrication elsewhere.” Her most recent work arrived only a few days before this substantial retrospective opened. It is called The Young Family and she is still excited by its physicality, by its open expression of love, and by its speculative weirdness. It depicts an ageing sow-like creature suckling its young. There are all the by-now-familiar signs of Piccinini’s plays on genetic manipulation that constantly win her comparisons to Mary Shelley and Dr Frankenstien’s Monster. This can be a little over-obvious and misleading. I prefer curator Juliana Engberg’s links in the substantial catalogue to the English painter Joseph Wright of Derby “who used the drama of the natural environment and the theatre of science to inspire awe, terror, and education in his audience,” and goes on to speak of “his eighteenth century art that reflects the contemporary attributes of high enlightenment – microscopic attention to detail, clinical precision, as well as the menace underlying man’s ascendancy over God – Piccinini also uses her art to reveal the attributes of our new forensic age of DNA microscopia, with all its wonder and dread.” So how will all this experimental work with its sublime associations fit into the much criticised Australian Pavilion at Venice?
“I really like the Australian Pavilion,” she enthuses. “It’s got that domestic, beach house feel to it which fits exactly with the mood I want to create. My exhibition is going to be called We Are Family’”
And family is important to 37-year old Patricia Piccinini. On two counts. When we walked around the show earlier she spoke with genuine affection about her various creations, almost as if they were children or aged relatives. Love, nurture, sustenance…breathing, especially breathing that most crucial form of life, kept recurring throughout my guided tour. Then there is her real family. She was born in Sierra Leone to an Italian father and English mother. They moved to Melbourne in the early ‘70s. Her husband, Peter Hennessey, is a major collaborator on all her projects and she is always quick to credit him and others for their input.
Our conversation returns to Venice where she will be representing Australia and following Lyndel Jones in 2001 and Howard Arkley in 1999.
“I’m going to remove all the blinds in the pavilion and flood it with natural light,” she says. “What you will see immediately beyond the helmets is the little girl playing with the strange creatures. These have potentially been grown from stem cells, and I have been working closely with scientists at Monash University to create these fictions” This work was exhibited in last year’s Biennale of Sydney and was so lifelike in its self-absorption that most visitors had a double then a triple take. “Like a lot of my work it comments on cloning. But for me what is important is the girl’s gaze. I’ve talked to a few people in the advertising industry about this piece, and they’ve all said that if it was a photo-shoot the little girl would be looking up at the camera. I’ve done the opposite. Her head is down, totally transfixed by the little creatures.”
We take a few imaginary steps through the hot Venetian air.
“So you keep walking along and you come across The Young Family. And I hope at this stage people start asking questions. What species do these creatures belong to? Are they part human or part pig? And what is the relationship between us and them? Will they be love objects that we nurture and care for? Or are we going to rear them like we rear chickens for food?”
Cue Douglas Adams’ delighted-to-be-eaten bovine waiter in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: “Good evening. I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?” I was reminded of this quote in an article in Prospect magazine in which Julia Lovell considers “clones, Frankenfood, animal-human transplants” in an article called Genetically Modified Fiction. Piccinini is far from alone in drawing on the scary,but speculatively exhilarating, brave new world of science. Lovell cites Tim Pears Wake Up and Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex as works of fiction obsessed with new science and introduces their work by saying that “Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised suggests that there is something in biotechnology which specifically suits the novelist’s imagination.”
Before I met Piccinini I was beginning to think it was something in Melbourne’s water supply. How else do you explain fellow Melbournians Ron Meuck, now showing at Sydney’s MCA with his super-real sculptures of Dead Dads and midget grannies, and Ricky Swallow who also pursues models, giants, and sci-fi mutations with self-obsessed zeal? Before I can ask, Piccinini gently teleports me half way around the world and six months into the future, back to the Australian Pavilion.
“The young family will be beyond the girl on the carpet in what I call ‘the bedroom space.’ From here you can see over the balcony into a lower level where I will show a video work. It’s actually a room that Lyndell Jones had built last time to house all her technology. This work will be along the lines of the breathing room that I am showing at ACCA and it will be about the idea of growth and maturity in the same way that the idea of the breathing room is about panic – familiar but not known. And then when you walk down the stairs the two boys will be there – Game Boys Advanced.”
These two lads are frighteningly life like, leaning against a wall playing with a real Game Boy which is turned on and making blip-blip sounds. It was the artist and myself who made with the double take as we walked past. Suddenly there was a third boy in the group, motionlessly leaning against the wall with his own K-Mart leisure clothes and Game Boy. He grinned at us and ran off to play shadow puppets with the video projector. Soon we saw his silhouette, like a Balinese shadow puppet, superimposed over Piccinini’s computer generated ocean swell which rises and falls across three suspended screens. “I love it when kids do that,” she laughs. We are down to two Game Boys who on close inspection have aged. Their old men’s turkey skin sprouting fine hairs.
“This piece is really about Dolly the sheep. She was cloned from an adult sheep and she is ageing prematurely, just like the boys. They are called Ollie and Solly and are the same age as Dolly. But I want to present them as having integrity, not as being pathetic. There will also be another work which at the moment I am calling Lounge Room. It’s not been made yet and I am still working on ideas for it. I’ve got three months to make it which is good, it’s nice to have some spontaneity. The Australia Council liked the idea that some of the work would be new and showcased in Venice and some would be already made.”