It felt like a particularly icy November night to be standing around outdoors in Paris but I stayed firmly planted in the unmoving queue, guarding my position, at last count, 50 people down from the closed doors to the Opéra Bastille. That night I stood in line for one hour out of the two and half that three friends and I had divided up amongst ourselves to secure standing room seats to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. I shouldn’t have been surprised then to find that every other individual in the queue ahead of me, in fact, represented the interests of a larger group and so when I finally made it to the automated ticketing machine, it was marked COMPLET in bright red lights. We had waited with running noses and chapping lips in the cold, wind and rain for nothing.
Wagner’s opera itself was not what had motivated our perseverance but the fascinating prospect of viewing the mise-en-scene by acclaimed artist Bill Viola. The possibility of where Viola would take the medieval tragic tale of the two lovers seemed immense and we didn’t want to miss out on seeing what we thought would be one of the most significant works by this amazing artist.
You cannot imagine then, my surprise when I found that here in Redfern, from 6.30 to 10.30 every night we are able to walk into the beautiful St. Saviour’s church and experience a part of this epic project. In the beautiful Romanesque revival building, two parts of Viola’s The Tristan Project are presented as large, video installations. Shown in conjunction with another work presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this installation has been brought to Sydney by Kaldor Art Projects, who were also responsible for the enormous undertaking of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet in Little Bay, 1969.
For people not in the area, The Tristan Project is well worth the evening pilgrimage. Its spiritual setting gives the work an aura that is quite unlike the rarefied confines of an art gallery and the massive scale of the vertical projection is a deceptively simple device that effectively dispels the sense of watching another ‘video’. It is an exciting and significant project that has the ability to be both profoundly moving and engaging on many levels.
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