Laresa Kosloff, St Kilda Rd, 2010, Melbourne, film
Summary
Laresa Kosloff has a keen interest in performance, the human body and the body’s capacity for agency, particularly as an intervention into social spaces and activities. Super 8 film and video are two favoured media through which she considers the various representational strategies for figuring the body.
The three Super 8 works held in the Art and Heritage Collection – ‘St Kilda Road, ‘Stock Exchange’ and ‘Fountain’ – record social interactions in public places, documenting very specific human activities against the built fabric of the city. Super 8 works against the familiar spatial and temporal anchoring of the moving image, its flat, grainy, monochromatic character encouraging us to consider the imagery more conceptually as exercises in thought and analysis than as narrative representations. The distanciation the medium creates also, perhaps, prompts us to reflect on our own role and processes in the act of looking.
‘St Kilda Road’, a silent 1:56-minute looped work, is shot in the grassy space between the Victorian Art Centre and National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road. A group of young adult participants is engaged in low-impact exercises, mainly performed while sitting, moving in some semblance of synchronicity. A few young men appear to be instructing them, though this is no sure thing. They walk among the group, wearing either a black tee-shirt or white, with ‘reach’ emblazoned on the front of each tee-shirt and ‘escape’ on the back. Inscribing this cultural precinct as a public exercise space, the performing bodies seem to mimic the obedience of mass tai chi or calisthenics. Yet the camera, which restlessly pans, rests and moves once more, just as our spectorial gaze would, is captivated by a child playing on an outdoor sculpture. The camera is distracted by this disruption of bodily order, and the child’s play works against the corporeal geometry of the mass performance.
