Velocity: Sasha Grishin review of exhibition at ANU

Merilyn Fairsky, Stati d'Animo 2006.

It was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists who defiantly declared: "We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

That was back in 1909. Now, more than a century later, speed in the urban environment has not only transformed our physical world, but also our metaphysical state of being and the way we operate and survive in this environment.

The Russian Supremacists argued that speed of locomotion defined the way we saw the world and the way we depicted it in art. When a person could not move faster than a speeding horse, there was a holistic understanding of the world, which resulted in realism. With steam trains, the world became fragmented to the eye and Futurism and Cubism were the resulting styles. With the speed and complexity of urban life and the advent of aerial photography, this fragmentation lead to abstraction.

Gilbert Bel-Bachir, Untitled Sydney 2010.

Velocity is quite an outstanding and challenging exhibition, one of the best which I have seen at the Drill Hall Gallery for a very long time. Terence Maloon, in a lucid catalogue essay, discusses the ideas of Paul Virilio, the French cultural theorist who has published extensively on speed, technology and the urban environment.

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In a famous pronouncement, Virilio wrote "The virtual city is the city of all cities. It is each important city (Singapore, Rotterdam, Paris, Milan, etc.) becoming the borough of a hyper city, while ordinary cities become in some sense suburbs.This metropolisation of cities leads us to conceive of a hyper-centre, a real-time city, and thousands of cities left to their own devices. If I am correct, this would lead to a pauperisation, not of continents but of cities, in all regions of the world."

This exhibition to some extent is about the "pauperisation" of cities around the world with the sense of anonymity, alienation and a disconnect between what it means to be human and to inhabit a space which destroys the sense of being human. The idea is not a new one, what is new about the exhibition is the selection of artists which Maloon has assembled through which to explore this concept.

Jon Cattapan, Imagine a raft (hard rubbish no. 1)

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Velocity: Sasha Grishin review of exhibition at ANU