Notes from the Castle

A crumbling shambles of a massive stone edifice, imposing in mock grandeur, and even a little threatening when viewed by the townsfolk below, comes to mind in this reference to Kafka's great novel. The illusion of the mighty edifice is a front for the absurdist tangle of power and bureaucracy that constitutes the reality of the castle of Prague. Up close, Kafka's castle is a shabby collection of mismatched parts, rather than the coherent illusion it projects.

Liz Day's installation, Notes from the Castle , replies to Kafka with an installation of powerful forms, which sweeps the viewer into a similar mix of emotion. Like Kafka's castle, hers too is a front, an elaborate cardboard hoax, but one which is constructed on such a scale of massive volume - the dimensions replicating the oppressive size of sandstone blocks - that your body still registers the shock of incarceration's shrunken spaces.  

Europe's architectural metaphor for power and domination has been transported. The castle, the seat of power, flickers through a slide show on one wall, in an interchangeable series of roles. The dungeon and the tower confound punishment with learning and the law in a series of shots which mixes many of Europe's most enduring images of castles - Westminster, Harlech's faded Welsh glory - with local castles of the University of Sydney, the National Art School, and further afield, infamous Pentridge Gaol and Port Arthur.

The gargoyles and lawns, decorative relief and exercise yards, are literally a turf or a surface layer thick. Scrape it back, as in the images of one of the Port Arthur digs - or in the freshly cut turf Day has included in the installation - and the message is there in the dirt.   Lawn, like stone cutting, is a foreign system, literally exported and displaced from one land to another. And, as if to underscore this point, by way of fortuitous accident, the gallery's slit windows, already castle-like, despite their modernist style, look onto Victoria Park, and the indigenous tent city, recently permitted under the progressive policies of Clover Moore. European settlement and its culture, with its system of a micropolitics of segmentation, begins to sit lightly, in particular its last medieval 800 years, which has been steadily smothering itself in its representative trails of paper.  

Inside Day's full-scale panopticon, you get to live out the idea of Foucault's Discipline and Punish at the bodily level, as well as internalising the notion of being under surveillance - and she gives you the chance to play the roles of both watcher and watched. A replica of Port Arthur's tightly spaced exercise yards radiates out from each of the windows, while, in another register, the cardboard and the paper stack up to reference a more subtle regimentation of power. Day has documentation pile up as solidly and as rigidly as walls.  

10 August 2004
Ann Finnigan