Talking to our prejudices

By Rhonda Dredge

Kate Just has just emerged from a lecture and she’s in a hurry. Her lecture notes are flapping and she’s still carrying a glass of water. She’s late for her next teaching session.

The life of an academic is not all peaceful pondering over big theoretical questions.

If you’re a lecturer in visual arts you have to keep your name out there.

In a knowledge-based industry such as higher ed, communication skills may be as important as technical ones. Students respond well to academics who can get their message across.

Dr Kate Just is undeniably a good communicator. When she finished her talk at Federation Hall last month, she invited hecklers to have their say. No-one took up her offer even though the hall was packed.

The only person to offer a critical comment was a quiet little mouse of a bloke who came up to the podium after and expressed his admiration for the structure.

Dr Just was quite surprised. Even though she is disarming with her cheeky confidence and command of feminist rhetoric, she said: “Thank god that’s over.” She wasn’t talking about the pressure of speaking to several hundred people but to the written form of her lecture. “I have trouble with text,” she said.

Dr Just teaches art at the Victorian College of the Arts, is a knitter and is the curator of the latest show at Buxton Contemporary where her commitment to both activism and satire are on display. Yet, is there something about academia that still puts off artists?

There’s a formality about academic writing that can turn the particular and the anecdotal into pre-agreed generic terms such as “people of colour” or “marginalised minorities”. Dr Just obviously prefers the cut and thrust and generosity of people coming face-to-face.

She defended social media in an aside in her talk because it connected “people without a voice in institutions” but she expressed concern for “the “hostility in space” and the way the lack of context makes it spiral. “It becomes an automated habit. The habitual is not as critical or deep.”

Dr Just is a great fan of real dialogue. “When you’re in a room together you can talk it out,” she said.

This is the clue to the success of National Anthem as an exhibition. The works she has selected from the Buxton collection and sources from outside the institution talk to our prejudices. That’s why they’re so funny.

Tracey Moffat is a mistress of self-parody. In Useless, 1974, under a photograph of a teenage girl pondering her situation while washing a sedan, is the caption: Her father’s nickname for her was “useless”.

“There is a thin line between tragic and comic,” writes Moffat and this photograph, part of the Scarred for Life series from 1994, is a springboard for works in this exhibition which looks at the way those in power have projected their own issues onto others.

Hoda Ashfar satirically westernises women wearing chadors in Westoxicated by constructing photographs of herself that explore this gaze with visual jokes and pop culture references.

In the first she turns herself into a seamstress, in the second a maternal object of desire with a bare breast and a suckling child. Then she is a Minnie Mouse complete with plastic ears, a femme fatale and even a distraught consumer sucking out of a can of Coke.

The exhibition enjoys a good neologism like Westoxicated and has fun with puns and phonetics. In Huong Tran Nguyen’s Like a Version, visitors are invited to sing along to a karaoke song with a similar name while watching fragments of Neighbours.

Language plays a big part in satire, none more amusing than the Chinese version of the national anthem printed phonetically, but so do visual gags such as the reenactment of the Aboriginal tent embassy outside Parliament by Richard Bell complete with white plastic deck chairs and astroturf and the photograph of an outback souvenir shop by Callum Morton.

Australian nationalism and jingoism are revealed to be covers for a host of projected values, most of them kitsch. In Tony Albert’s sublime Clash, what he calls a collage of Aboriginalia, hundred of ashtrays depicting Aborigines are stuck to the letters S and H.

The national identity of Australia emerges from this exhibition as a land occupied by knockers of all ethnic description. The indigenous contingent is pretty strong and one can only hope that we’ll all eventually be as adept at self-deprecating humour.