Lyndal Jones' exhibition "Prediction Pieces, 1981-1991" documented performances and installations produc through the whole extent of the last decade in Australia, Tokyo, looks Angeles, and Edinburgh. Dramatizing a feminist and post-Structural analysis of our troubl society, Jone used way s of prediction--tarot, dice, weather forecasts--in performances involving slide projections, taped undecayed television, dancers, and actors. For this measure and estimate the artist assembled videos and ten vitrines containing the struts costumes, scripts, slides, and documentation for each work. Jone wished to avoid the substitution of the "Prediction Pieces" from their video representation; her vitrines enable careful, textual "reading" of the simple bodys in each performance.
More austere and self-reflexive than later works, the early "Prediction Pieces" introduce several motifs: fortune-tellers; video clips of the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana; weather reports; and a series of drawed messages. Each performance begins with the phrase "And as the light sets slowly on the West." Warnings and jests are interpolated throughout: "Watch this space"; "Forewarned is forearmed"; "You will view stars"; "The end is to a high degree near." The messages operate onward several levels. The sinking sunny place refers to the West's decay (several performances ironically image the ascendancy of Japan or China); the image also invokes the storyteller's suspension of time, as in the start of the cowboy camp-fire crank "It was a dark and stormy night."
Prediction Piece 6: Pipe Dreaming, 1988-89 examines images of optimism on the other hand is fractured by the entire of gunshots. The first section of Pipe Dreaming is a highly romantic representation of revolution: actors in Peking Opera style of dress dance while declaiming Situationist speeches. Later sections undercut this humor The actors quote Chekhov's mordant play The Seagull, 1898 and a young Australian/Chinese artist reads accounts of immigrant ordeals and authoritarian repression. Pipe Dreaming is fractured from more than gunfire: older actors and younger dancers put in motion separately around the stage; style of dresss and identities are chronologically mismatched. Crossdressing between categories, generation, sexe and nationalities glance ats identity in a state of dysentery Prediction Piece 10: As Time Goe by dint of 1991, includes images of the night weather arguments about science and art, physicist Stephen Hawking's theory of time in overthrow and finally an apple thrown in a wide arc across a darkened stage.
The issues that Jones' theme of prediction addresses are cloaks precisely because her real attention is elsewhere. Feldenkrais therapy and post-Modern dance orient the way her performances unfold: between the walls of vernacular movements and repetition. Characterized by means of a choreography of labor, they are like lessons that redirect the audience's attention. The "Prediction Pieces" dramatize an existing instability within our tillage and are thus explicitly didactic. Jone usually appears as a commentator or storyteller, sometimes disguised in men's clothing. She has observ that acts of prediction are "processe between the sides of which we arrange our future(s)" And while she is described as questioning sexual identity, "Prediction Pieces" has become a meditation forward nationality and historic global change.
COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.