BURCHILL/MCCAMLEY
Pre Paradise Sorry Now (neon), 2001
neon, waferweld board, electrical cable and transformer
35 x 180 x 112 cm

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA- Two of Australia's best-known contemporary artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley are set to exhibit one of their latest collaborative works using neon lights and sculpture. An essentially 20th-century phenomenon, neon is largely associated with advertising and the glitter of big-city retail. It's also a medium Burchill and McCamley have used together extensively in the past and they are well aware of its visual impact, particularly in Sydney.For this exhibition Burchill and McCamley are proposing to exhibit a new neon sculpture built around a 'found' sentence. Yet in contrast to the pop, bold lights of Sydney's cityscape, the artists aim to create a fragile site sensitive experience, which communicates the visual power of language. Perhaps there is something uncanny about glass tubes flooded with a poisonous inert gas, contorted into odd shapes, shuddering with electric current.Language and the language of art have often been central to their work. Their neon sculptures constitute part of an ongoing series and a major new strand of their collaborative activities. The language that comprises the neon is 'found', with most phrases coming from literature or film. The titles, however, do not relate to the content of the film but are chosen for their poetic attitude and ability to condense many ideas into something succinct.About their choice of title and process, Burchill and McCamley have said: While there is often an element of homage in the choices, the pieces aren't primarily meant to invoke the original work. Titles are chosen because of the tenor and sentiment that they evoke and, in a way, our selection constitutes a new type of genealogy of art. The titles we choose have a hard poetic tenor, a tenor which is carried through in the materiality of the artworks. We aim to make our works highly condensed, both materially and conceptually.

Pre-Paradise Sorry Now

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the most brilliant exponent of the German New Wave Cinema, also made a startling contribution to the theatre scene with his Antitheatre. Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, one of his most disturbing and nightmarish theatre works, is an exploration of human brutality. The central plot material has to do with an actual case: the famous English "Moors Murders," committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Fassbinder uses the murderers and their demented longing for a neo-fascist "paradise" to ridicule notions of man's higher nature. He surrounds them with a black-comedy circus of thugs, whores, transvestites and exploiters who enact repetitive cycles of violence that force us to examine the society we have made and the principles upon which it functions. Perversely entertaining, deeply serious, it is a chilling journey that takes us into the dark heart of human behavior and challenges us to change it.