Notes of Substance

In the gallery, in a darkened room a t the NGV, lying on what is an interactive, rendered body of water.   Watching the people and my boots in silhouette, feeling the floor beneath me, swipes and swirls moving, watching the waves. Get up off the floor! the gallery attendant demands. Get up! Then, Get up, please! She moves around the vortex and we comply, lifting ourselves back upright, to stand rather than lie in the pull.  Artist Toshiyuki Inoko and his collaborators at Team Lab explore the pull of currents, the dissolving of ‘ the borders between the individual human body and the forces of nature’  in this installation as part of NGV's Triennal. Why is lying down forbidden in the vortex? Is it the risk of being pulled under? Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement, Team Lab, 2017 Swirls of the vortex move around and underfoot, light moving through and over. The waves move to our human shape, interact with our force, adapt to move away and envelop us.

Jesus wept, the saying goes, and there he was, on his crucifix, laid out on the unceremonious bench, cast rigid into a plaster block, laid to waste on the Swanston Street spine.  The heat is searing, baking, under the transparent shell of the tram stop awning.   Six minutes til my tram. I don't want to sit on the bench with Jesus. I observe the form with suspicion. But I dare to touch the crucifix, lift its weight, to test it, from the metal slats. Only just, do I dare. INRI at the top of the cross: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum: “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews" (John 19:19) etched above the figure, carved into the wood of the cross, or in this case, dug out of metal. But these two? These two travellers snarling at the edge of the stingy shade? They are their own little kingdom, with rules and overseers. His body, coiled, the stringy neck of an unwell bird, head shaved. On her lower leg, a square within a square, locked away, inked into her ankle, just abov