Over the last few years Damiano Bertoli has created some playful sculptures, abstracting recognizable objects into monumental neo-minimalist forms. Among these are The Diamond Age (2001), a giant paper chandelier shown in the group exhibition Papercuts at Monash University, and Continuous Moment (2003-04), a large sculpture of an iceberg seemingly made of discarded building material. This last work references a picture by 19th century Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, and was one of the few eye-catching works shown in Australian Culture Now, the contemporary survey exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria last year.

As well as being a drawing teacher at Victorian College of the Arts, Bertoli belongs to an artist co-operative that exhibits at Ocular Lab Inc. in West Brunswick. Although 'ocular' refers to visual sight, the kind of art shown here is likely to be more appealing to the mind that to the eye. Yet it is clearly a 'laboratory' in that its artists share an attitude of conceptual 'research' toward the process of making art.

Bertoli's current exhibition is part of an ongoing project he has titled Continuous Moment. In this show it is not 19th Century Romanticism under scrutiny, but another more recent period of Romanticism, the late sixties. Bertoli has chosen 1969, the year he was born, as a focal point for an eclectic ensemble of seven small works that mix popular culture and late-modernist kitsch stylings.

The show's sub-title Hot August Knife makes a pun on Neil Diamond's album Hot August Night and also refers to the murderer Charles Manson, who Bertoli has presented in a small blood-red portrait on canvas, half-composed of crazy psychedelic swirls. A companion piece to Manson is the brooding singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who Bertoli shows in an amateurishly painted copy of her 1969 self-portrait from the album Clouds. This is an oversized diptych on wood hinged like a gatefold album cover, sitting on the gallery floor. Joni and Charles glare across the room from opposite angles, suggesting all manner of contrasts and connections.

The third piece in the show which references popular culture is an installation of objects. Standing vertically in a perspex slipcase is the cover of The Who's album Tommy, showing a large silver pinball. This is sandwiched between a small globe on a stand and a perspex paperweight-type object featuring pictures of someone's bald head. We are doubtless being encouraged to associate these round smooth shapes in some way. These objects are on two adjacent plinths, one mirrored and the other containing a black modular frame. We are free to make more associations here about reflecting surfaces and underlying structure. Essentially Bertoli is presenting a minimalist shrine, supporting and encasing a popular culture relic.

The other pieces in the show also throw up a range of associations to do with vision and transparency. Near the entrance, next to the Manson portrait, is a small tubular glass-topped coffee table on which sits a pitiful-looking mound of broken glass and carefully scrunched purple plastic wrap. On the wall opposite is a large (scuffed) sheet of reflective silver plastic like a fun-fair mirror, framed behind perspex. Leaning on the wall next to this is a large circle of wood showing an eye's iris and pupil, painted in greens and browns. Finally, on the far wall opposite the entrance is a small black and white photographic collage framed in perspex showing a view of buildings next to a man's abstracted profile.

As the lengthy catalogue essay by Justin Clemens explains, Bertoli's project is partly a response to the work of Superstudio, a Florentine group of avant-garde architects and designers active from 1966 to 1978. Their own Continuous Monument project, initiated in 1969, envisaged an endless black and white grid covering the surface of the earth, as a critique of modernist urban planning. Bertoli has appropriated their grid, which he has previously used in a number of conceptual 'drawings', and the grid is also reproduced on the catalogue cover of the current show.

In the catalogue essay Bertoli's work is seen as a critique of the utopian pretensions of Superstudio. Bertoli's own project is described as an "intervention... to dredge up the stinking garbage" hidden beneath the surface of this sixties avant-garde group. In the work he presents at Ocular Lab Bertoli seems to indicate that sixties utopianism was defeated by the inherent morbidity of popular culture (Manson's murders, Mitchell's melancholy) and by an avant-garde that critiqued modernism by unwittingly turning it into kitsch and interior decoration (the universal grid of Superstudio which, according to the catalogue essay, simply turned the world into a "gigantic tiled bathroom").

There is some irony in the fact that for Bertoli the sixties conceptual avant-garde has become a target for critique. In a sense he is biting the hand that feeds him. Still, the idea of a 'continuous moment' as an alternative to an evolutionary history of art could be a truly liberating one, and even has overtones of a kind of Buddhist enlightenment. Unfortunately Bertoli's project is presented as a backward looking one. It is unclear what position a contemporary viewer is meant to take vis-a-vis this work, other than a nostalgic view of the past, tainted by a slight sense of superiority. Bertoli's project is perhaps unable to escape the consciousness of history that it attempts to critique.

Jason Beale 2005

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