Duetto

At medieval feasts there was a particular class of dish called subtleties. Tricksy dishes, they were made for effect, (marzipan castles, birds in a pie) they were all about illusion and its dissolution. Collaborations between maker and audience they depended on the audience’s willingness to risk entering into the unknown and the illusionists creative skill. In return for their belief they were rewarded with the surprise and delight of the illusion and its revelation.

Pip and Pop’s 3 I love that you love what I love, 2010
Australian Experimental Art Foundation AEAF
Duetto, Old Queens Theatre, Adelaide
Image © Pip & Pop

Balancing risk with delight, belief and revelation, this tacit contract lies too within collaborative partnerships. As collaborators are twinned and doubled so risk and delight are intimately allied with each other. No light thing, delight is shadowed by loss and for the delight of what is given and created, collaborators continually risk this.

It’s not such a long way then from marzipan castles to Pip and Pop’s fantastical sugar landscapes, Farrell and Parkin’s gleeful animation or the joy of two poets talking on a bright cold day, for delight runs deep through Duetto’s rich offerings.

Twinned exhibitions with film and performance elements, the AEAF’s exploration of the nature of collaborative partnerships, Duetto ranges over a broad variety of collaborative forms and expressions. What emerges most strongly from this multiplicity is a sense of sustenance. Of sustaining and being sustained by these ineffable and often alchemical relationships. While these may, as director Domenico de Clario writes ‘resist any kind of articulation’ their scaffolds are there to be sensed in the rhythms, synergies and patterns of the work.

Delight is immediate with Pip and Pop’s 3 minutes happiness (2010) their grand hugely detailed landscape composed wholly of coloured sugar, origami follies and giant craggy mountains. Its wealth of things (birds, lights, horses, rainbows) technicolour palette, scale and idiosyncratic sensibility fascinate. Yet its not simply whimsy with the landscape forms and arrangements owing as much to Japanese gardens, with their raked patterns and symbolism as much as to the sensibilities of kawai culture. In the same way that Japanese landscapes draw the viewer into contemplation, 3 minutes… absolute superabundance provokes wonder drawing the eye in and through revealing something gentler and deeper.

Here collaboration emerges as an ethics. Greg Burgess and Pip Stokes write of their relationship, ‘as a form of healing care of the self and other’ and their term ‘the architecture of kindness’ seems an apt and expressive one for the structures of nurturing partnership and for the persistence of care that abounds in these works. D&K’s performance The stranger and his friend (2010) involved the two men almost naked, hooded in black, slowly swinging and singing hymns under naked single light bulbs. Haunting, it was also a work of great and unexpected tenderness.

Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez Jonas’ two screen video work Migration (1999) shows one endlessly stepping into the only just made footsteps of the other. Quoting Octavio Paz on the experience of love, ‘we are the theatre of the embrace of opposites and their dissolution’, the continuous production of the self, other and the collaborative third is embodied in this endless loop of making and dissolving footsteps .