Monsters of Energy
The Tennant Creek Brio’s art isn’t a legible script, a tidy lineage, or an easy metaphor—it’s a rupture, a refusal, a site of resurgence. This story sends us somewhere else, reaching for something that came before or after, looking for what’s out back, round the back of the house, the shed, the art centre, the “outback.”
Everything about him was red. His red snout, the morning red, he dreams red, the red wind, and the land is scraped stiff red by the hooves of his cattle. At dawn red. In this part of Country, the dried-out beauty is red dirt and when its heart beats — our hearts, which are mostly water, beat, because they too are coloured red. For millions of years there were no hooves, no dynamite, no excavators to scrape this land stiff. But they came and there was a red wire that splintered across the sky casting its shadow on the dirt. The world was split in two — our hearts permanently cloven.
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A little over a decade after Brenda Ann Spencer’s 1979 school shooting at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, Karen Kilimnik used the crime as the premise for an artwork.
Tim Burns’s art blurs fiction and reality, often staging disasters before they happen. His 1972 Ghost Train redesign eerily foreshadowed the 1979 Luna Park fire, just as his 1977 film Why Cars? uncannily prefigured 9/11. Through rupture, collision, and shock, Burns’s work remains less prophetic than provocatively attuned to history’s unfolding disasters.
