Mike Parr recently described Australia as the land of the great collective amnesia. He was commenting on the critical forgetfulness of his "threshold" performances of the mid-70s. Instead of a continuity of collective memory, there was a series of frozen stratifications of aesthetic time.

Cathartic performances of this type have rarely been presented in this country and Jose Macalino's work certainly may be so categorized. It aimed to extend the socio-political and the personal into a continuum of memory, tying in very closely with the installation of photographs, videos and Mara's poetry.

The full evening's performances, counterpointing intensity with deliberated spaces of contemplation, made peculiar demands on the audience to open a receptive space of unusually long duration. Such temporal suspension was the hallmark of 70s performance. To survive at all, the audience had to enter into an empathy with the performer.

The conservative formalism of the 80s has once more fissured the space between performer and audience. Earlier performance inten- Jose Macallno. Synthetic Memoreez. 1987 ded to annihilate this closure. The emphasis now seems to fall on the analysable and verbalizable; on the clinically "interesting".

Since the performances of the Futurists and the Dadaists, the presence of the physical form of the artist in the work was an element of the anarchistic and the outrageous introduced in order to intervene in the buyer - seller dialectic of the art-object (for instance, in the 70s, in the work of Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris and feminist performers, such as Rebecca Horn). Jose Macalino's work most literally restored the physical form to centre stage.

Specifically his work is that of a street artist. Western Europe, America and Japan, committed to certain forms of capitalistic industrialization, have produced shifting densities of labour and bureaucracy and street sub-cultures of a kind unfamiliar to Australia. The artist in question worked in such a context in Japan especially. It is useless to present a strict construction in street art since the transient nature of the audience demands a work which allows entry at irregular points of intensity, which draw in dynamically and allow periods of release.

Three local experimental musicians, who themselves also have strong contacts with a popular audience, participated integrally in the work: Eugene Carchesio and Steven Grainger of The Closest Thing and Glowing Dark and Judith Hunter of Too Green for Summer.

They blended usually very distinctive styles, ranging from jazz to modernistic dissonances to madrigal-like counterpoints and phraseology into a single chord formation, richly resonant and punctuated, which acted as the sole kinetic force in spaces of the action, especially in the cosmological scene created out of phosphorescent candles (a time to ponder the active kinesis of memory).

The first two works were the most constructed: the most closely referent to a technological and socio-political text. To the sound of a popular Filippino song, a blood-donation scene took place against a background of distorted, powerful images in slides taken in the mountains of the Philippines involving chained figures.

Such references continued in a work with a video of a street performance in Manilla, reconstructed in the gallery space, including a most moving scene of a beggar. The most accessible moment was a scene in which the artist sought to pull the images off the screen by means of elastic bands. The acting was expressed through a paced, measured movement of a non-Western type.

Slower scenes followed: Mara painted her face in a video letter, reciting her poetry, to which the artist responded with barely discernible actions with hand-tools, so as not to break the atmosphere. The last scenes, songs as a tribute to the earth, restored serenity and universality among the simplicity of bird-song and stars.

In its season of performance, John Mills National is creditably encouraging an art-form which was prematurely killed in the late 70s. It is hoped that short-cut definitions of a still unexplored art will not interfere with the future development of performance.