Circle of Friends
Robert Cook

[…]

The typically invisible mental aspect of community and friendship is the focus of Rosetzky’s other work in ‘Circle of friends’, No fear (2008). It is a sound piece based on a monologue composed from an array of ‘self-help’ clichés and narratives. The monologue is heard through headphones as the audience sits on a shared bench in a room the walls of which are covered by a subdued Op-art pattern composed of hundreds of painted MDF triangles. As they listen to the monologue they see, and are seen by, others who are listening to the same words. This intimate track, spoken by its co-writer Margaret Cameron, starts to feel like a voice inside your own head that seeks to open you out, cajole and understand you. Given that there is no time to give answers and that it feels like a voice in our own heads, it becomes as relentless as the Freudian super-ego – implicitly critical and impossible to please. Listeners tend to feel increasingly on edge, under review, forced to ponder everything about their psychological make-up and how this impacts on their relationships. The fact that this occurs in a group environment is disturbing; we feel exposed in front of others. The logic of Nothing like this (and in a way most of Rosetzky’s other work) is reversed in this process. Instead of the differences between people being revealed in the voiceovers, they are felt by the audience inside themselves, located in the specific ways they resist and respond to the voices reaching into their ears.

[…]

Robert Cook is Curator of Contemporary Art and Photography at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

This text has been excerpted from the article ‘Circle of Friends’, originally published in the exhibition catalogue of the same title, by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2008. Reproduced with permission.