Lucky dips

THE Shaun Gladwell show at Sydney's newly revitalised Artspace is a tap on the shoulder for the directors of this country's state and national galleries. Gladwell is one of our most acclaimed young artists. He was chosen by Robert Storr, American director of this year's Venice Biennale, to exhibit two works in the most important section of that event, the Italian Pavilion. On the strength of that showing, he was picked out by Richard Dorment, chief critic for The Daily Telegraph in London, as probably "the single young artist in this biennale destined for future greatness".

This praise was no bolt from the blue.

Gladwell has been invited to exhibit in a dizzying array of biennales and survey shows across the globe during the past five years. Managing his career has required his dealer to dedicate a staff member to the task almost full time. Last month, a copy of his best known video work, Storm Sequence, sold at auction for $84,000. In other words, he's hot. His work, which incorporates skateboarding, breakdancing and guerilla-style urban high jinks, is enormously popular with young people.

So why is a little known, if increasingly ambitious, alternative art venue giving Gladwell his first decent-sized survey show, and publishing the first serious book on him, instead of one of our state galleries?

The answer is simple. Our leading galleries lack the guts, even on a safe bet such as this: an artist guaranteed to bring in huge numbers of young people and sure to generate critical attention. Bill Henson was given his first solo show at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975 when he was 19. He is now Australia's most celebrated artist internationally.

These days our big galleries simply don't take such risks (if that is what they are). The only way young artists appear in our state galleries is via the decidedly dodgy avenue of prizes or, often worse, group shows curated around a theme. Both are hopeless ways to get to know contemporary art. The shows that ensue are the equivalent of lucky dips. They allow for no possibility of deeper understanding, no sense of development or revelation, just an overwhelming sense of tokenism and a characteristic emphasis on the prerogatives of curators over the inventions of artists.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne try to fill the gap. But the level four space at the MCA dedicated to solo shows is less than satisfactory and ACCA's galleries are better suited to one-off installations than survey shows.

So good on Artspace for being nimble and gutsy enough to act where the bigger museums were not. (It's perfectly apt since Artspace also gave Gladwell his first solo show back in 2000.)

The real question, of course, is whether Gladwell is good enough to warrant all this attention. Is he as good as they say? Or is he simply a peddler of cool who happens to have struck it lucky?

My feeling is that Gladwell is superb when he is on song: provocative, poetic, surprising. But, and here is the bitter twist, this show fails to prove it. It is missing many of Gladwell's best videos, including both pieces (Storm Sequence and a brilliant recent video filmed from a motorbike in central Australia) showing in Venice. And it is rounded out with works that feel slight. Don't get me wrong; it's still a show worth seeing. But where it could have looked taut and visually stunning, it looks misbegotten, amateurish.

Gladwell's videos are displayed in various ways: on big screens and tiny portable ones; on walls and on floors. But they all have a particular look. Storm Sequence, the piece that brought him to prominence, was breathtakingly simple: a skateboarder (Gladwell) is shown performing simple but graceful moves in slow motion against the backdrop of an incoming storm at Bondi beach. The footage is in slow motion. This gives it a hypnotic beauty and a sense of suspension from real time. But the location, a public place, is clearly real.

In his subsequent work, Gladwell hasn't added much to these basic ingredients. Generally, he shows skateboarders, bike riders, martial artists and dancers performing moves in public spaces: a train carriage, a pedestrian tunnel, a service station. He usually shows the moments before, after and between the executed moves. And he almost always films in slow motion. But if you see a selection of his best work, you will be amazed at how much poetry and meaning he extracts from these limited means.

The Artspace show is called In a Station of the Metro, after Ezra Pound's great two-line poem of the same name:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The title piece, a split-screen video, is the strongest. Two performers, one male, the other female, take up a difficult pose on the floor of a metro station in Tokyo. With their hands supporting them, their heads touch the floor while their legs are suspended in midair. The busy crowds walk past and around them, avoiding them but otherwise paying no notice. The performers hold their poses for several minutes, then, more or less in unison, they roll on to their backs, pause, get up and walk away.

The crucial detail is that the two pieces of footage have been turned on their side, 180 degrees in opposite directions, thus the performers' cheeks, pressed to the floor, seem almost to touch each other. Projected into a right-angled corner, these almost-twinned images resemble a butterfly or Rorschach ink blot. If it sounds contrived, it's unexpectedly absorbing. What we see seems absurd and inexplicable. But it also has a quietude, a sense of fragility and resilience about it.

Pound's influence on Gladwell seems more important the more you think about it. We know Pound was a bit of a dandy (Oscar Wilde and James Whistler were his role models in the 1890s). Gladwell, too, likes dandyism (he is very self-conscious about dress) as well as Baudelaire's related notion of the flaneur, the stroller of city streets whose observations are fleeting, alienated, poetic, intense. We know, too, that Pound was profoundly influenced by Chinese calligraphy. No surprise, then, that one of Gladwell's videos shows a man performing balancing tricks on a bike against the backdrop of four scrolls of calligraphy in a gallery.

For Pound, Chinese ideograms influenced his whole poetic approach, an approach that was extremely concentrated and sharply focused on moment-to-moment experience. Gladwell, too, tries to keep the objects of his attention and his visual style as pared back as possible.

Pound became the leader of a small band of young cosmopolitans trying to revive poetry through the new aesthetic philosophy of imagism. Inevitably, an extreme tension arose between their exquisitely delicate approach -- "petals on a black bough" indeed -- and the steamrolling forces of modern mass society.

It was always clear who was going to win. But Gladwell, in his way, is saying that this tension is still felt intensely today. Moreover, it's overshadowed by a similar sense of doom, since poetry can scarcely compete with the juggernauts of science, organised power, mechanisation, commodification and militarism, not to mention the death of political idealism and the dilution of individual agency.

The particular sensitivity of young people to this predicament can be seen in their favoured forms of self-expression. Skateboarding, for instance, although it is the ideal mode of transport for flaneurs (ostentatious but efficient), is also about repeated failure. Skateboarders turn falling, losing one's balance and humiliating oneself into a kind of noble poetry. (Watching them, I always think of Samuel Beckett's exhortation: "Fail. Fail again. Fail better.")

Gladwell uses slow-motion and the peculiar visual elasticity of video to enhance this poetry. But of course, if that were all he did, he would be no different from the makers of Jackass.

The thing he is most alive to -- visually, sculpturally, psychologically -- is the way bodies move and express themselves in certain kinds of space. These spaces -- a train carriage, a supermarket aisle, a pedestrian mall -- are always public and very often commercialised. They are set aside for purposes, in other words, that Gladwell's performers flagrantly ignore. Hence their movements operate as a kind of poetic disruption. An act of resistance? Maybe. But the impulse feels fundamentally poetic to me and it is always a mistake to claim too much for poetry. (A bomb, a strike, a blockade: these would be acts of resistance.)

Watching these mini-performances, we also observe the reactions of the people who are going about their ordinary lives at the same time, using these spaces as they were intended. They come in and out of the frame like Pound's apparitions. Taking it all in, we register a profound dissonance, but also a sense of secret growth, of something beguiling but doomed to oblivion unfolding beautifully in time.

Gladwell is sensitive to the psychological effect of certain times of day and night (though he could be more so). And he is impressively conscious of form and framing, both in space and in time. Emphasising the moments before and after each performance, for instance -- with a gradual shift from black and white to colour or the sound of exhausted breathing -- makes us keenly aware of their transience. More than once, watching the moves, I was put in mind of fish flipping around out of water.

A lot more has been claimed for Gladwell's work than I have outlined here. That's because it's extremely suggestive. But it's also true that a lot of the claims are over-the-top and unconvincing. This could be damaging for Gladwell because people in the art world here seem to resent individual success; they will pounce on any perception that he is falling short of the inflated claims made for him.

Unfortunately, some weaknesses are real. I got the impression from this show not just that the selection was poor but that Gladwell has been seduced into overproduction. Every now and then, someone needs to tell him: "This isn't good enough. Start again. Take your time."