Sudden gestures or noises

Ed Atkins
Sean Grattan
Charlie Sofo

Curated by Caterina Riva

Sudden gestures or noises brought together the work of three artists in an investigation of the 'gestural' possibilities of contemporary art.

New Zealand-born, LA-based video artist Sean Grattan's Carmen San Diego: Out Of Work And On The Run (2011) subverts filmic conventions and the notion of goal-based behaviour, creating an essentially gestural production that is activated by its imperfection. Questions of success and failure, and of subjectivity and objectivity, lie at the heart of the work, which engages with its viewers' expectations whilst simultaneously resisting them.

Sean Grattan’s video superficially resembles a typical American film; it features distinct, identifiable actors engaging in a decontextualised yet familiar exchange. This scenario is derived from the relatively stable forms of mainstream genre films, but the expected filmic gestures are substituted for unsettling alternatives—the result may be described as “an action movie [that] sounds like a lecture”, earnest while at the same time trying to distance itself from cinematic convention and the typical machinations of logic that allow viewers to effortlessly navigate the grammar of mainstream film.

UK artist Ed Atkins' Death Mask III, too, toys with the semiotic structure of cinema. Seemingly disparate audiovisual elements are enmeshed in a way that is both familiar yet highly unstable. Sudden shifts in tone and subject deny the possibility of a narrative interpretation; Atkins ensures that the gestural movements of the film remain the focus.

Ed Atkins rejects the subtlety of Grattan’s work in favour of a hyper-active, synaesthetic reinterpretation of filmic grammar. Making use of refined digital editing and composition techniques, Atkins’ Death Mask III (2011) does away with macro-narratives and explores the productive potential of confronting viewers’ expectations with something entirely outside traditional logic. The most elementary relationships between audiovisual components are challenged and rethought; he emphasises that the video is a construct, and turns to the poetic potential of the medium to offer enjoyment.

In addition to these works, Australian artist Charlie Sofo produced a body of work that responded both to the physical space of the Artspace gallery and to the strategic possibilities of the gestural in terms of the production of art.

Gesture is a productive force; it is separate to language, but provides the structural field in which language is able to operate. It also exists outside of the binary means/ends logic of linguistics. As such, artists may pay close attention to the operation of gesture within familiar situations—as Charlie Sofo does—to prompt us to reconsider how these processes are designed, what hidden priorities cause them to be designed in that way, and what possibilities are offered by resisting them.