Megacities

Commissioned response to the work by NGV Magazine, Issue 45, March-April 2024.

You can always tell a tourist: they’re the ones looking up. Jamming the sidewalk with their stumbling, gawking bodies; all their attention concentrated in their eyes. Look, look. Posing, smiling, freezing themselves before the camera shutter can do it. Proof of existence, of presence. Here I am, far from home. Look!

There’s a theme, this Triennial, of excess. Not just of scale, but of content: canvas exploding from the ceiling, overlapping frames, felt and yarn and text, clamouring for attention. That’s what it feels like to be a human now: too much. Partly, it’s politics. The avalanche of pain in the world. Partly, it’s our still-shocking emergence from the pandemic, overstimulated, blinking in the sun. And, naturally, it’s the internet. The coursing, heaving data flooding past us, passing through us, infecting us with half-determined ideas and fast-degrading snapshots.

It is excess that first arrests us, entering Megacities. Screens everywhere, like some deranged futuristic Times Square. We’re surrounded by billboards, each demanding attention, impossible to attend to. Even when the screens are showing the same content, it’s still moving, panning, zooming. To enter this space feels like being a sighthound in a field full of rabbits. Look! This is the exhibition itself as unfamiliar locale: novel, strange, overfull. We look the way children look, hungrily, naively. Everything is present and nothing is erased. It takes time to learn how to see the paths, the relationships. Takes time to develop habits.

You can tell who’s been here for a while. The newcomers huddle in the entryway, take a few hesitant photographs. Their heads swivel, mouths half-open. Those who’ve settled in just choose a screen and stay with it, loose and easy. They’ve become citizens of this space. They’re learning to focus their attention. The bodies in the room start to mimic the images on the screens. Portraits of love, or care, or boredom. Some never quite acclimatise. I watch a white-haired man sitting with his hands clasped hard together in his lap, knuckles pale. He only moves his eyes, but they dart from screen to screen over the top of his glasses. He looks hunted.

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Full piece in NGV Magazine, Issue 45, print and online.