Tak­ing a bat to Mar­co Fusina­to’s sound-struck installation

At Car­riage­works for the Bien­nale of Syd­ney, Fusina­to has set a one-strike lim­it. Will the bat sur­vive the native aggres­sion of Syd­neysiders? I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing how dec­i­mat­ed one side of the wall ends up,” he said.

The sound wall is one of the more inter­ac­tive art­works to be show­cased in the Syd­ney Bien­nale which opens across sev­en venues on Fri­day, March 16. Fusina­to is one of 15 Aus­tralian artists invit­ed to par­tic­i­pate. Chi­nese artist and activist Ai Wei­wei heads an impres­sive inter­na­tion­al line-up of 55 practitioners.

On Wednes­day NSW res­i­dents have been invit­ed to an advance pre­view of the bien­nale’s 21^st show, titled SUPER­PO­SI­TION: Equi­lib­ri­um & Engage­ment curat­ed by artis­tic direc­tor Mami Katao­ka who had a prac­tice swing of the bat on Friday.

Fusina­to’s work Con­stel­la­tions refers to the mul­ti­tude of star-like dents that result from the strikes on the plas­ter wall.

It demon­strates Fusina­to’s con­tin­u­ing inter­est in rever­ber­a­tive noise and its capac­i­ty to struc­ture phys­i­cal space. But it is also an exper­i­ment in audi­ence behaviour.

“One expects to hear the splin­ter of wood against plas­ter­board but it is over­tak­en by the impact of the ampli­fied sound,” Fusina­to said. ​“So it is quite a phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence for the audi­ence. They recoil from their own action.”

The idea, says Fusina­to, came out of think­ing about filmic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of vio­lence. The base­ball and chain has turned up in episodes of The Sopra­nos and The Simp­sons.

But it also is a com­men­tary on the chang­ing face and func­tion of muse­um and gal­leries. Fusina­to says these insti­tu­tions have become like ​“shop­ping malls”, need­ing to attract large num­bers of vis­i­tors to jus­ti­fy gov­ern­ment sup­port and cor­po­rate sponsorship.

“Muse­ums have changed from being a place of con­tem­pla­tion into one of enter­tain­ment and I’m inter­est­ed in that shift and how we deal with that and [play­ing with] audi­ences’ expec­ta­tions also,” he said.

“This piece cer­tain­ly plays on those ten­sions and con­tra­dic­tions. Noise ver­sus silence. One side is pas­sive, the oth­er side aggres­sive. Cer­tain­ly there is a lot of dif­fer­ent ten­sions in the piece.”

Con­stel­la­tions, ²⁰¹⁵⁄₂₀₁₈ will be on dis­play 10am-6pm dai­ly at Car­riage­works for the dura­tion of the Bien­nale of Syd­ney Fri­day, March 16-Mon­day, June 11.

Pho­to: Steven Siewert

Arti­cle link: here