Melanie Jame Wolf
Berlin and Melbourne
2019
Displayed 2019 at Carriageworks
Melanie Jame Wolf
Born 1975, Launceston, Tasmania. Lives and works Berlin and Melbourne
Melanie Jame Wolf makes work about economies. Sometimes solo, sometimes with friends. Always exploring systems of value and exchange, particularly as they occur in the murky field of immaterial capital – the social, the cultural, the affective. She investigates these flows as they are produced through ideas of ghosts, gender, pop, myth, morality, sensuality, class. Her practice is based in text, choreography, video and performance. She is primarily interested in ideas and questions of persona and their staging, and in how senses of liveness work for and through the lens when video is approached as an expanded choreographic practice.
Artist text
by Kelly Fliedner
Oh yeah tonight. Oh in revelation; oh, a gasp of pain; oh to discovery, interjection, realisation; oh, alarm. Oh, dismay. Oh! Independent, strong, definitive. Oh baby, oh- so, oh boy in quiet proclitic forward motion. Oh yeah? Yeah. A vernacular drawling yes. A plain affirmation. A simple pleasure. A blatant gesture. Repeat, repurpose, recomposition. Yeah right. Oh, yeah. Words and tones stretch to fill space and give rhythm. But what of tonight? Yes, tonight for anticipation, for play, for promise. Tonight for redemption, for transformation. Tonight, for imminence, for desire. Tonight for ancient kairos – the right, the critical, the opportune – the magic moment.
From the lexicon of popular music, OH YEAH TONIGHT (2019) presents its audience with these three little lyrics. Over and over, Melanie Jame Wolf sounds them out through intricately crafted performance. Both playful and serious, OH YEAH TONIGHT upsets, displaces and manoeuvres. Beginning with pop’s trope of repetition, tones and sounds intertwine in continuous rotation and push beyond into abstraction. They seek out a limit or moment of fatigue and create something dark, something sinister. Oh yeah tonight.
Rhapsodised through shifting personas, Wolf evokes questions of subjectivity and moves in queer liminality. The repeated theatrical interruption and reprise uncover what is at stake in the naming and stimulative practice of pop music’s always shifting, always heterogeneous audience. Simple and ambiguous, the words oh yeah tonight reveal how pop gestures towards popularly shared themes and claims private moments; how it evokes commonalities and flattens difference; how pop interprets an ‘ordinary public’ then attempts to speak to it and for it. Oh yeah tonight.
But OH YEAH TONIGHT re-centres alterity by manipulating the dramaturgical template of pop. Approaching the edit as a choreographic practice, and persona as a becoming rather than a construction, Wolf engages with the viewer through the lens, seeking a sense of liveness. OH YEAH TONIGHT creates feminist listening and performative narratives that reinscribe work from the pop idiom. Through persona, Wolf simultaneously re-creates the imaginaries of the pop music market built around the fantasy of self-authorisation, of self-naming, of self-writing, while acknowledging the collective project of pop music’s language. It centres the individual and the voice of the artist while dispersing and breaking them down for the inhabitation of many. Oh yeah tonight.
OH YEAH TONIGHT is a work that thinks beyond the binaries of self versus collective and explores possibilities that are not completely recuperated in the dominant formation of popular culture. Using the frame of pop music and interrogating the popular as an object of analysis, Wolf examines how these three words, oh yeah tonight, create economies of desire in earnest; how they create an engine of contemporary myth-making; how they imprint on our bodies and install themselves amid our memories; how they craft our ambitions; how they both express and subvert normative culture; how they generate a space to rehearse possibilities and subjectivities. Oh yeah tonight, to wait for, to live for, to be tonight.