PETER ALWAST @ IMA - llewellyn

 Peter Alwast : Future Perfect

Installation photograph of first room of Future Perfect 12/09

20 August – 15 October 2011

IMA 

Future Perfect, the title of Peter Alwast’s current show at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, refers to the grammatical verb form which is used to describe something that will happen in the future before another event, placing the action that is certain to occur relative only to a future reference point. Alwast reminds us here of the nature of language as a description of reality, whereby looking at a future event through the position of a successive future event flattens ideas of future and past.

It is this conception of ‘combining systems of representation that never reconcile, that never create a stitched up view of reality’¹ which drives the work of Peter Alwast in Future Perfect. The show is split up into two rooms, the first a dark cavernous space, its walls lined with groups of large format digital projections, the second, a thin, warmly lit room leading the viewer to a comparatively intimate flat screen television set in installation against an angular, reflective Perspex cloud on its opposite wall, and lying on the floor in front of the video two blankets of slightly crumpled mural prints of an ocean horizon. In this installation, the single video work presented on the television draws in the viewer, depicting a computer animated urban night sky, where white circle symbols of snow softly fall and create water ripples on the flat surface of the image. A text based narrative appears at the bottom of the screen as if through subtitled translations of a silent language, reciting a story of the arrest and murder of Alwast’s great grandfather in Stalinist Russia for making a joke about Stalin’s then child bride.

The computer generation of this romantic imagery is confronting and challenging for me. As a medium and fitting within an aesthetic system and history, computer generated imagery and representation through 3D modelling, like that which makes up the majority of Alwast’s new media work, is undeniably bound to the narrative element existing within computer games. Consequently, Alwast’s new media work conjures up an immediate response of kitsch, the mundane and façade representation of the real by computer generated symbols such as the “water ripple” or the “falling snowflake” signifying a shallow simulacrum of the real. I cannot help but perceive this video work, although placed firmly inside the context of intellectual and philosophical depth and engagement that comes with its presentation as a contemporary art installation inside the IMA, as an introductory loading screen narrative to a mid nineties role playing computer game, preparing the gamer for their suspension of disbelief as they are placed within a simulated reality to shoot guns or perform great and powerful tasks. I almost suspect that the next screen shot will reveal an avatar of Alwast that one can direct to take revenge on the communist foot soldiers of his grandfather’s generation.

This reading is so drastically separated from the intent and content of Future Perfect that it may appear flippant and facetious, but the underlying tension between the medium and aesthetic context of Alwast’s work, and the substantial intellectual engagement that is required to access the rewarding aspects of the work is in my opinion to great a leap to expect from a viewer of my cultural standpoint. It is my view that the kitsch accessibility and mythology that is so ingrained within this medium could possibly be irreconcilable with Alwast’s attempted investigation of psychoanalysis, philosophical temporality, and their relationship to language and systems of representation. 

1: Alwast, P. 2011, Catalouge for Future Perfect, IMA