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| In many ways, serious art in European Australia begins
with work that revolves around a pole constructed between tourism and
the sublime. The work of Eugene von Guerard takes the fabric of a newly
'discovered' continent and wraps it over an existing, sublime landscape
drawn from European romanticism. For European audiences, his images were
of a land that was both profoundly alien and yet also clearly recognisable.
For the painter/explorer as tourist, the impulse to recast the profound
difference of the 'new country' in terms of the acceptable sublime of
European Arcadia must have been both obvious and irresistible; in that
it simultaneously expresses the tourist's awe and bewilderment, while
making sense of the unknown by rendering it visible.
Psychotourism and Psychogeography owe much to von Guerard, reconfiguring his sublime Europeanised-Australia into a majestic yet generic world of computer-simulated landscape. In these images, LUMP and her protector, both indigenous to the media-landscape, explore their 'natural' habitat, the always recognisable, but never actually visited world of the simulated landscape. This is the L.A. or Stockholm of 'Mission Impossible', the TV series shot entirely on location at 'Movie World: Hollywood on the Gold Coast'. For me, what is most disturbing about computer-generated landscapes are not how convincing or not they are, but rather how familiar they feel. Patricia Piccinini 1996 |
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