To consciously launch oneself into the blackest of voids of post-modern negation is the eighties version of the old Dionysian purgation of soul, not through ecstasy but through a deliberate deadening of feeling. Alternatively, it is a recall of past mystical practices: non-belief which takes its order from the pattern of ancient austerities. This little-known group of local ar­tists have abandoned a positivistic spirituality in order to leap into an unstructured intellectual abyss. The "cloud of unknowing" did not creep up on them. Rather, they lassoed it and, in calmly enumerating its characteristics, they discovered its nature as the potential of sym­biosis with high technology. The formless indeed had form and was taking shape as a metaphysics no longer confined to the polarisa­tion of self and other on which all doctrine depends. 

The artists had operated on the perimeters of the main city art scene for a couple of years before producing the current work which is vir­tually a manifesto of their existence. They are a valuable addition to that fragile set of more ex­perienced artists whose presence in Brisbane is always endangered by the economic and cultural necessity of removal southwards. Their present work was initially encouraged by the former co-ordinator of the QCA gallery, Craig Douglas and former gallery assistant, Lindy Johnson, and, subsequently, by Keith Bradbury with Irene Girsch and John Stafford. Such valuable activities at the QCA are sadly neglected by the inner city. Due to its unfortunate in­accessibility, the gallery has not been able to play the dynamic role in local art which its often imaginative sponsorship should guarantee for it. 

Certainly, this kind of expensive and com­plicated work requires institutional support. Where else could the event have taken place at the present moment? The QCA was able to offset at least some of the artists' personal costs. 

The performers took the non-character of units in black robes with silver face masks and staffs which gave them the odd appeal of either Japanese martial artists or wandering Zen or Taoist monks. A local composer, Peter Rankine, produced a satisfying, rich, booming sound-work which created deep waves of rhythm under a track of a weary, blank voice sighing its way through a Hamlet-like monologue on the empty uselessness of all signs and actions. The end of the illusion, pur­poseless repetition. Four video screens were set in pairs, back to back, on each side of a partition across the gallery with a platform either side on which the performers enacted autistic circling motions at choreographed in­tervals. The actions on site and on the video screens were repeated on each side of the partition and minutely synchronised. 

On the video were looped sequences of sea­waves, fading into an image of a masked per­former in a square box in the sea, circling in reflection of the awkward axial motions of the real performers. Four performers stood guard at the right of each screen in the room as back and front reflections. A play ensued between the actual scene in the room and the scene on the videos, repeating in close-up and long-shot a video of a video of the video of the four static sentinel performers in the real space. Reality turned out always to be another video screen, another reflection of a reflected image. The se­quencing of shots and interchanges was rapid and produced an effect of continual surprise. The performers, on and off screen, finally removed masks and costumes and disap­peared into the audience renouncing, thus, responsibility for and connection with the illu­sion of the performance. (Darryl Rogers choreographed the drama, while Craig(ston) Hebbel and Daniel Harvey made the film.) 

The static art works had been reduced, with some amount of personal pain and sacrifice, from a variety of scale and materials (including oils, acrylics, graphics, wax and one sculpture which carried the concept of an oracular tripod) to type C prints of uniform size and texture mounted on black and unframed. The subject matter of the works had originally expressed a variety of spiritual experiences which the process of reproduction both nullified and, yet, enhanced (from Dariusz Jacewicz's beautifully toned existential graphics to Craig(ston) Heb­bel's sacred word-seals.) Mark O'Neill's tripod "hinged" the theme of sacrifice. The reproduc­tions urged some curiosity to discover the "look" of the originals on the part of the viewer, especially in the case of Kerry Allan's per­sonalised, diminutive collages. Other works, such as those by Philip Andrews (hand coloured paper negatives) and Roger Paine's oils seemed to bear poster-style reproduction with easy effect: the blurring qualities of reproduction not displacing the effects of the forms. Jeanne O'Neill's overt references to religious iconography registered as the most oddly misplaced, reading in their new format as if they really did belong somewhere else. 

The concepts of the work contradicted them­selves, as the artists would readily agree, in view of the complication of philosophies under­lying their reasons for negation of dogma: Marx, Baudrillard, Kierkegaard, etc. The ges­ture of black denial produced a finely-tuned structure whose regularity, along with that of the carefully hung works, created a beauty as­sociated with a serene Far Eastern metaphysic in its minimalism and austere lyricism. The beaming faces of the audience proved the total enjoyability of the performance: a response to an excitement generated in spite of the despair and sacrifice of the sacred. Somehow, the void was okay.