Everything and Peter Alwast

I meant to mention Peter Alwast after seeing his work a while ago. But you know what happens. I got caught up with other artists I saw there. Mari Velonaki came on my radio show a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got an interview with Eugene Carchesio in the next issue of Cyclic Defrost. I mentioned his work here too.

But I’m yet to say anything about Peter Alwast.

That’s a still from Alwast’s piece (via Gallery Barry Keldoulis). But he won the Queensland new media prize and a still is not new media, even if it is on a canvas. Oh and I hear it’s not ‘new media’ anymore by the way, it’s ‘media’, as in ‘media art’.

Greg Hooper described the prize winning piece, Everything, in Real Time:

The winning piece, Everything (see cover image), by Peter Alwast (it’s an acquisitive award so into the GOMA collection it goes) uses three large projections of what seem to be cut and spliced together clichés of digi-art animation. Shiny pipes, translucent shapes, clouds, mountains, CAD style building frames, lickable butterscotch cars, reflections into shiny domes to show off some projective geometry/linear algebra. Over the top runs a soundtrack that also seems to recycle the standards of collaged and cut-up sound, even down to the slightly manic sounding street preacher. (Subpsychotic street person rant = gritty urban equivalent of salt-of-the-earth charming peasant folk wisdom?) Overall, there’s an aura of slick and meaningless process, an empty consumption of surfaces that gets a bit creepy.

I just don’t agree at all.

It’s time-enabled painting. That’s three-dimensions – time plus the flat film on wall from three film projectors. A surreal mesh of images, in the three film frames, only heighten the sense of 3D. In the gallery notes, Alwast refers to shifting his gaze from PC monitor to window to phone to TV, and so on. And you get that in the film, the perspective seems to shift internally, so different subjects within the film move independently of one another.

It makes sense. We’re overloading on information. At the moment, for me, it’s Twitter, The Australian and the SMH, the New Yorker, Feedly, abstracts for a conference I’m heading to next week, a Christos Tsiolkas novel and the latest Quarterly Essay (on climate change and coal mining). There’s radio and TV, downloaded HBO series, DVDs, YouTube stars. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t go more than half an hour without checking my phone.

In a way, Alwast’s piece makes some sense of that mess of images. And while media artists are obsessed with technical challenges. Who can do this very macho bout of programming or gear tech or whatever, Alwast’s gone and observed something quite real and quite powerful. It’s a way of seeing the world. Art, I guess.