Video Defines The Studio Star

The Age

Tuesday August 15, 2006

Megan Backhouse

Daniel von Sturmer shows why he is headed for the Venice Biennale, writes Megan Backhouse.

OF THE three artists Australia is sending to the Venice Biennale next year, Daniel von Sturmer is the youngest (34) and the least known. He's quiet in demeanour too, with a penchant for objects that are slightly on the edge of mysteriousness.

Not that kitchen sponges, string, weighted golf balls and the other such ephemera he casts in his videos immediately create a frisson of suspense. Von Sturmer's version of mystery is more to do with looking afresh at the relatively pedestrian odds and ends he buys at $2 shops and office supply chains.

Lots of his purchases - shredded paper, coloured blocks, drinking straws - can be spotted in his Northcote studio which, despite the profusion of stuff, seems inordinately clean. He painted the wooden floor grey when he moved in about three years ago and - quite a rarity when it comes to artists' studios - washes it regularly.

The hygiene factor is largely to do with the fact that he's filming in here and, as everyone who has seen his work will attest, his videos are rigorously clean and pared back. Tellingly, he was picked up by Anna Schwartz Gallery a couple of years back and von Sturmer is now on his fifth show at the experimentally inclined Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Where his previous ACCA offerings (in 1998, 2000, 2003 and 2004) were slotted into group exhibitions, this time around he has the main space to himself. The Field Equation, as the new show is called, is his most ambitious work to date and stems from his being the recipient of the Helen Macpherson Smith Commission, worth about $90,000. With this can-do budget, he has arranged some 60 plinths of various heights around the gallery and, while some are topped with video works, others have objects (a piece of wood set at an angle, maybe, or a small orange block on a spinning disc) placed upon them.

Seven new video works are projected onto screens he has designed himself, and, with their delicate white frames and supporting beams at the back, they are patently screens. "The thing I like about that," he says, "is it turns it into a three-dimensional thing. The video takes on a sculptural quality at the same time as being two-dimensional."

The contents of the videos also have a sculptural quality. Balls bounce and roll, string unravels, paint pours, in a way that is playful while also adhering to the physical properties of the material at hand.

"You might have a preconceived idea of what you want the materials to do but they have their own language and you can't be responsible for that," he says. He shoots hours of footage then edits them down into much tighter segments, sometimes with sound.

"I like to think about the objects as propositions about the way we experience things. We have knowledge of them by their uses and functions - we know what to do with string or we can invent something else to do with it, and it's that inventive moment which I think is interesting," he says.

"And it does seem to be something children do on a much more rigorous basis because they need to find out about the world. As you go along, it makes sense that you stop thinking about the potential of objects or the potential of experience and just accept what's given to you without any further questions."

Von Sturmer was born and raised in New Zealand. Both his parents were psychologists and he remembers watching his father (who is also a painter and, quite uncannily, once wrote a thesis on time) do perceptual experiments at Auckland University.

He left school at 16, worked for a couple of years then, "with a very romantic idea of what an artist was", took a year out to paint. Wanting to both travel and study, he decided to combine the two by enrolling in art school in Melbourne.

He studied painting at RMIT but half-way through his course he started doing "collage extensions" out of the wall and, while he continues to use paint, it is no longer on canvas. He still makes use of painted objects' though, and makes much of the act of pouring paint.

He likes the way paint "articulates form" and also its "contradictory capacity" - "how you can read it totally flat but there's always that rounded edge". As for what appeals to him about pouring, it is the way it takes the hand right out of the equation.

Von Sturmer doesn't like anything too bodily in his work. He avoids the colour red in his videos, for instance, because invariably it becomes blood. He likes orange though, with its modernist associations, and is also rather partial to blue.

In his studio is a solidified mass of expanding foam that has erupted out of its can, which von Sturmer has decided is "slightly too bodily" to use. "It just takes on a different meaning," he says. "There's a kind of anthropomorphism of the materials anyway in the video and, when it becomes as though they are somehow literally related to the body, then it invokes a different history." What is to his liking is the "social aspect" of the masses of white polystyrene balls he has rolling down the table in one of the videos and how they play on scale. In another video, he wants the viewer to never be quite sure whether the weighted golf ball should be rolling or not. When you reduce an image down to its bare elements, he says, viewers are left with their own projection.

"I think when that happens it's a platform to think about other things, there's a completeness to it but it also lets you spring forth."

As for von Sturmer, he's now preparing for next year's Venice Biennale (along with Callum Morton and Susan Norrie, who will also represent Australia). With this show up and running, he has a trip planned soon to examine the Australian pavilion in Venice, a much smaller space than ACCA, which he says will present its own challenges.

The Field Equation runs until September 24 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank.

© 2006 The Age

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