TV Moore

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

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

In my humble opinion the best show in Sydney just now is TV Moore’s The Neddy Project at Artspace in Woolloomooloo. It runs for another eight days and I urge you to see it if you can. My own personal passion is for paint on canvas and such is its pulling power that I usually go back several times to see painting exhibitions that excite me. The Neddy Project is one of the few video installations that has had the same effect on me. I had to go back and see it again.
Later, I caught up with TV Moore at a Darling Street café at roughly the point where boutique Balmain chocolate shops morph in to Rozelle thrift stores. This was appropriate, as TV trained at Sydney College of the Arts a mere croissant throw from where we were sitting.
‘A few years ago I used to work in an Antiquarian bookshop in Paddington,’ he told me, ordering a soy latte and lighting up the first of many Peter Stuyvesants. ‘Peter Carey would drop in every six months or so and buy anything we had on Ned Kelly. I’d try and read them all before he picked them up because I’d been working on a Ned Kelly project for several years. Eventually I began to link the Ned Kelly myth to the contemporary story of Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith – who is still in jail - and that was the start of The Neddy Project. I don’t know if you are aware of the ‘Neddy’ Smith story,’ he explains generously,‘but basically the Sydney police gave him a green light to do anything he wanted and the proceeds were divided up later. He’s in jail for life.’
TV’s installation at Artspace is a ten channel video cycle in which the images of Ned and Neddy are often doubled through trick photography, like a weird Australian Rorscharch test. To his credit, TV can take clichéd techniques like this and somehow turn them in to something fresh. We see Ned Kelly singing into a microphone. The voice is TV’s and the microphone, in reality, is a dime store torch. We see Neddy in his cell at Longbay attempting to build cuckoo clocks (which he apparently does) and failing miserably as his hands tremble with the Parkinson’s disease from which he now suffers. And in one of the most poignant scenes, reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s great film Even Dwarves Started Small we see a never-ending handshake between two key characters, one of whom TV hired from an actor’s agency that specialised in dwarves. These days a well thumbed copy of Yellow Pages is probably of more use to an artist than an easel and palette. So who is TV Moore and what does he do?
Undoubtedly, he exists somewhere in the gap between Ugo Rondinone and Mathew Barney, yet he is his own man. His work is tantalisingly multi-layered. Like most artists who use new media – ‘I hate that term,’ he tells me, sucking a new Styveysant in to life, ‘just like I hate the word immersive’ – it exists as a thin film of light on the gallery walls. But here is the brilliant part of it. All the props are made of cardboard. The police arresting Ned Kelly all wear cardboard beards. Neddy’s prison cell is pure cardboard, as are the dysfunctional cuckoo clocks, the prancing pantomime horses, the police cars and the iconic Kelly helmet. Even the beer bottles are made of painted cardboard.
This stand-alone art work took several years to make. Over forty people were involved in every aspect of production and delivery. It was done on a budget that would make shoe strings appear expensive and oily rags aromatic. And yet this young Sydney artist, about to leave for a new life in New York, laughs at all the problems he faced. So long did the whole project take that several of his volunteer cast and crew became well known artists in their own right before it appeared. They include the illustrious names of Shaun Gladwell, Tony Schwensin, and Andrew Hurle.
‘I really love Sid Nolan’s Kelly paintings,’ he enthuses. ‘I grew up in Canberra and I used to go along to the gallery and just soak up the imagery.’
In The Neddy Project we are dealing with fragmented narrative and the spectator has to keep moving to assimilate the plot. Comprehension pivots on the turn of a heel as you swing round to take in a double burning camp fire, a confrontation in an airport car park, the famous shoot out, and the dawn ride. What’s with the dawn ride, I ask?
‘As far as I’ve been able to find out, Ned Kelly’s brother used to dress up as a woman and act as postman for the gang, delivering all the letters they wrote to the post office. They were all great letter writers and they felt they had a case they wanted to put across.’
In the Australian art world there is one prize that is valued above all others and that is a Samstag Scholarship pegged to the US dollar. So rigorous is the selection for one of the five or six offered every year that I’ve always maintained that if you wanted to build a really cutting edge collection of contemporary Australian art the best way would be to buy one art work by every successful Samstag applicant. All the hard work and research has been done for you by the dedicated team in Adelaide who disburse these awards. You just have to write the cheque for the painting, photograph, or video. Collectively ‘Samstaggers’ as they have become collectively known have studied at all the world’s great art schools from Goldsmiths in London to Glasgow School of Art and CALARTS in Los Angeles. It’s the best thing to have happened to contemporary art in Australia. TV Moore is about to leave for Columbia University on a Samstag scholarship. Like many recipients he has been out of art school for several years but he is quite correctly going to use the opportunity to create a base in the US.
‘I did a residency in Finland a few years ago and that was really important to the development of my work. Then I came home to Australia. I’ll do the same with the Samstag. Australia will always be my home, but you’ve got to travel too.’