SHIFTS OF PRIDE AND PERSPECTIVE ROBERT NELSON 21/09/2005 The Age Section: Metro Page: 18 VISUAL ARTS REVIEW: NEUE ROMANTICS MARS (Melbourne Art Rooms), 418 Bay Street, Port Melbourne, until October 2; TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED ACCA, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank, until September 25 A BATHTUB filled with milky water receives a random drip, causing ripples to radiate across its surface. You don't see the water falling and something is odd about the sensation. As you peer into the bathwater, you notice that it's pixellated. The little splash and waves are not made within water: it's an illusion, cast by a digital projector with footage of dripping water. This fine piece, Fluid Connection, by Briele Hansen at MARS Gallery uses the opaque bathwater as a screen. The drips have been filmed and the recorded rings are now returned to their element. At first, you think that the ceiling has sprung a leak and you can't believe that the horizontal surface in the bath is a kind of cinema. Once the virtual drips have been restored to water, they seem curiously absorbed by it, as if the real water reclaims the virtual water. The film of the water is engulfed by the watery screen. The work has an uncanny link to a brilliant piece by Dorothy Cross at ACCA. A video shows a fine, ornamental china cup. Upon the surface of the tea, stressful and scary scenes are montaged: a rowing boat driven by frantic oar-strokes pitches in turbulent waters. The work could be seen as a joke (a storm in a teacup), but, also, like Hansen's work, an extrapolation of liquid movement in a tame and tranquil vessel. Sea and tea have a fateful link. Grandma's teacups came from across the ocean and played host to tea from across the ocean; indeed the teacup is a colonial trophy, whose settled authority belies extensive trauma on sea and brutal conquest. The violence is now repatriated to the victorious cabinet and the china swells with struggle. The exhibition Truth Universally Acknowledged at ACCA has plenty in common with Neue Romantics at MARS. Many of the works are dark and sinister; and both exhibitions explore the symbolism of shifting viewpoints. At MARS, for example, Saffron Newey's paintings resemble a filmic moment when you peer between openings to see a light patch indistinctly and await the camera's movement to see more. And Louiseann Zahra's monumental work My Name is Death causes you to walk around enormous pools of looping lights, pickled snakes, tall glass sentinels, lustful chains of nightwear embroidered with skeletons, all convulsively linked with ornament. At ACCA, the shifting viewpoint is seen most seductively in Laresa Kosloff's Stock Exchange, in which you take a glass lift up and down the vertiginous shaft, so that the stable grid of the corporate architecture plunges in and out of perspective at each floor level. You seem to feel the phallic character of the tall building gratifying itself in the rhythmic slipping of the interior space, up and down, structured, boastful and euphoric. Rosemary Trockel's video of a woman and artist by the sea is moody and sleazy; the woman is often naked and talks on the phone, while the man rearranges the masterpieces. They don't communicate and you feel that they're missing the best of the tropical experience. Missing out on love and psychological reinforcement is the powerful theme of Catherine Bell's Rain Cheque. It's a large group of cheques printed with idyllic landscapes. On each, however, the space for writing the cash amount in words is filled in with poisonous family sentiments, a ghastly record of failed affection between unspecified people in a castrating relationship. The phrases are either written with a reproachful voice - recording the spleen of the aggressor - or the melancholy voice of the victim, reflecting on the untreatable loneliness and hurt in the union. Thus, the spry utopian scenes, all proudly stamped with "American security", are a log of anger, a seething diary of rancour in stifling language. Disillusion matches the title of the exhibition, which quotes Jane Austen's introduction to Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Fear and disappointment are indeed universal; but the truth behind them varies according to perspective. The two exhibitions might have been subtitled "Pride and perspective", as you're never sure if the ephemeral is monumentalised or the grand is demoted, as with the old sock or paper bag wrought in ceramic by Katie Jacobs at MARS. The great medium handles trash and the smelly junk is extolled in the vitrine. robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au