Luhsun Tan

Reverie Sans Frontiers

by Dina Mittas

Deep thought.dream.reverie. The only place we can escape to in order to re-imagine the world as it essentially is : a borderless country. In Luhsun Tan's poetical and pertinently political animation: 'Reverie Sans Frontiers', border security is a game of epic and apocalyptic proportions.

Adapted from the name: 'Medicins Sans Frontiers' (Doctors without borders), 'Reverie.' invites us to enter an abstract reality: a 'dream without borders'. Inspired by and instrumental in, the lone Manus Island refugee's fight for freedom over 10 months of last year -"Reverie." is a VCA graduate work of both technical/stylistic ingenuity, and creative/political integrity. As such, it seems to fulfil the "only maxim of contemporary art" in Badiou's terms: that art is not to be 'imperial' (by which he also means: 'democratic' - in the sense that democracy "implies conformity to the imperial idea of political liberty").

'Reverie.' is not a critique or manifesto, but rather, a symbolic journey. It uses its medium self-reflexively. In its use of 'hyperreal simulacra' and 'fantasy' it offers alternatives to perceived reality and the 'ways of seeing' which Hollywood and the commercial media have made commonplace. History has been about hiding things, but the information boom has created a demand in the public for their own histories. The poetic rather than didactic nature of 'Reverie.' opens up these ideas for discussion, by revealing things that are veiled from society's gaze - such as the prison or detention centre. The glaring absence of dialogue in the work, also seems to open up a space for the possibility of dialogue between spectators and the unseen, or unheard.

"Non-imperial art" Badiou goes on to say, "must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star". Three particular discursive strands in 'Reverie.', converge to create this: the dialectical use of space, the subversion of familiar icons, and the sublime aesthetic.

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We are so used, these days, to the land squared off, sliced and sequestered, that we seem to have forgotten that the world is round. 'Reverie.'s' dialectical use of the building block of man-made space - the 'square' - in raft, cell, plot of land, hills-hoist, swastika, and money pit - makes 'progress' look like the inane act of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Its vision of the Detention Centre is a metal/mental prison of quantum possibilities, darkly reminiscent of the sci-fi classic 'Cube', with all its ghost-in-the-machine implications. The perfect antithesis, it seems, to complacent urban myths that arose during Alladin Sisalem's detention, of his 'living it up in paradise'.

The politics of space; the nature and culture of 'space'; the ways it 'shapes' us, from the mirror to the panopticon; the city to the information highway - are continually reflected in the history of art and theory. 'Reverie.' contributes to this discourse, by investigating a warped, entropic time and space, and the dialectical landscape of cultural confinement.

Animation and 'hyper-space' open up exciting possibilities for counter-realities. Through the 'virtual' world we can enter into those liminal realms that exist at the corner of our institutionalised vision, such as the detention centre. Such spaces, as Foucault highlighted, rely on their existence in the 'real-world' by virtue of their being kept virtually in-visible to the public eye. 'Reverie.'s' carefully crafted hyper-space, delineates and defies the unfathomable dimension that defines detention. It also captures the 'irony' of space that a detainee inhabits in relation to the great Aussie outback - since the vastness of land they're situated in only serves to sever them from space altogether. The boon of space become a curse. It is within this discursive and physical, or meta-physical space, that guard and detainee, animator and spectator, negotiate the terms of their relationship.

Inside the perfectly squared 'Underworld' that we enter on the 'shadow' side of the hill, the walls are made of veils. With the guard's eyes, we see everything through 'gauze' (physical symbol of the way everything is 'filtered' through ideology), and through 'screens' displaying the morphing faces of 'terrorists'. 'Screen-vision' is the dominant eye-view in post-modernity, which turns the world and people into simulacra from the 'detached' viewer's perspective. 'Reverie..'s' prison interior is the perfect visual metaphor of how 'one-man' , 'one-race', 'one-eyed' vision/prison is created; of a racist, image-fascist, view that punishes token 'resemblance' to the criminal. Everyone who is interred behind these walls - man, woman, or child - the metaphor implies, is seen through the filter of the demonising screen. The irony is though, that if we look closely, we might recognise our own faces in the split-second variations. Their 'morphing' directs us both to the irony of one-eyed racist vision, and the reality of human oneness. Iconoclasm and voyuerism - particularly western brands of seeing - are cleverly intertwined here, to both familiarise and defamiliarise the viewer.

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To the swastika-shaped detention centre is added yet another dimension. When we look more closely, it is built out of a profane and profound icon: the back-yard "hills-hoist" - symbol of our land and liberty - (as opposed to the 'washing line', its counterpart in less spatious lands). This blend of contexts : horror/comic; canny/uncanny, creates the effect of crossing a Marilyn Manson video with a Leunig cartoon. The hills-hoists turn with knife-edge creaks and homely familiarity. They give the work a sense of post-modern 'absurdity' or a sense of the Bahktinian 'carnivalesque', dissolving boundaries by blurring identities. Here, what is symbolic of the 'aussie dream' also comprises its 'nightmare' potential. A complex dialectic is suggested, i.e., each claim to civil liberty is staked in the ground of 'others'' oppression, or each claim to land ownership is a symbolic investment in 'others'' dispossession.

Such reversals and 'surprises' abound in the 'Reverie.'s' non-sequential narrative, building in us as we watch a sense of 'being ambushed in the night'. When the detainee, for example, escapes the computer-game like maze, he finds himself not 'outside', or 'free', but falling into a chasm so vast it is uncontainable within the field of vision or intellect: an inconceivable money-pit built for his ironic benefit. The timeless metaphor of a money pit so vast it seems to reverse-swallow the world, is a wry reminder of our system's absurdity. Like a symbolic Jesus on his hills-hoist crucifix, here is where we left him ..on the edge.hanging on for dear life.

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Such 'surprise' elements build up to the sublime 'shock'. A moment which with the aid of cosmic iconography and panoramic eye-views, is literally "as elevated as a star". At the story's climax we experience what in Walter Benjamin's definition is the 'sublime moment': "the shock" or "constant assault on the senses" which also so much 'resembles modern life'. This moment of epiphany arises from the spark that sets alight the money pit, gorged as it is to almost planetoid size. With all the force of an 'exploding' star the moment imaginatively 'peaks'. The medium of hyper-reality allows us to experience the sublime effect, feeling ourselves swept up in a cubic tower of fire higher than any Babel. The sublime moment here is both indefinable and overwhelmingly visceral; we experience complete bodily immersion in it, even as we experience the inability to rationalise it. We are 'consumed' as spectators by art and by sensation - the semiotic associations of fire, tower and sublime 'terror', perhaps not accidental.

This added dimension of the sublime in the work builds subtle strands of meaning. The sublime conjures up what 'doesn't exist', or that which cannot be represented: the 'limitless' or 'boundless'. It reminds us that everything in its excess - even border-centrism, ironically - produces the effect of 'horror' or 'terror' so vast it is uncontainable; its over-generation, a dissolution of boundaries. In the sublime possibilities revealed through art, K.J. Schneider suggests: "we can know total surrender and total dominance. We can give in, diminish, merge; and we can assert, expand, engulf." In "Reverie..", these totalities are purposefully experienced and dissolved while we watch. "We are the guard, we are the prisoner", as the author suggests. We imagine this merging or exchange, which in reality is thwarted.

A year later, the 'freedom' flight which took Alladin Sisalem "from the bottom of the ocean to the high place in the sky" (in terms reminiscent of 'Reverie.'), has ended. The 'public's making the issue public'; exposure of the political absurdity and government complicity in this case; and artworks such as this raising awareness, led to Alladin's release as the 2004 election approached.

As we traverse new dimensions of inner and outer space in this age of hyperspace, we defend the value of a new freedom: that of not being 'stuck in any one space'. Even psychologically speaking we dread more than anything else being 'stuck in that space'. The Manus Island Detention centre, which costs $23,000 tax dollars per day to run, (money described to the Australian public by Amanda Vanstone as "well-spent") continues to chalk-up its daily tally.

NOTE ON THE AUTHOR:

Dina Mittas : B.A. (Hons.), B.Teach. (Hons.), Grad. Dip. Creative Arts, is currently completing a Postgraduate degree at the University of Melbourne in Visual Art. She is a practising artist/writer. Her interests lie in critical theory and political art.