MCA’s Telling Tales: Kerry Tribe; Emily Floyd; Angelica Mesiti

An exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art brings together various works that deal with telling stories.

Kerry Tribe’s There Will Be ..... (2012), part of Telling Tales at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The human mind loves stories: anyone who has ever lectured to students will have noticed that while some of them may have trouble with the theoretical content, they always remember the anecdotes. This is why Christ chose to convey some of his most important moral lessons in parables rather than in moral preaching: abstract principles can be bland but no one forgets a tale.

The capacity to tell stories is one of the things that distinguishes the human from the animal mind. Higher animals can play, which represents the first glimmer of the capacity to imagine counterfactual or alternative realities, but they cannot tell stories. At the same time, storytelling is one of the earliest and most primitive activities of the human mind, no doubt following soon after the emergence of language itself.

Long before the development of rational thought — and ever since as well — humans have used narrative as a way of making sense of the world, not through conceptual reasoning but by rearranging the elements of everyday experience into a shape that expresses a satisfactory pattern or meaning. Myths, the earliest stories, seek to explain the shape of the cosmos, the order of nature and the origin of human laws and customs.

In the process, cultures seek to define their collective sense of identity and purpose, to unite their members in a shared narrative. Individuals too tell themselves stories to give their lives a sense of purpose, to disculpate themselves of wrongdoing, or to assuage their fears. Sometimes these stories can be tendentious or dishonest, and all too often the assertion of individual or collective identity or the vindication of self-interest entail opposition to some other conceived as antagonist.

This is bad enough when the story is one of triumph over a vanquished enemy, but it is even worse when the story is about defeat and humiliation; inevitably the storytelling nurtures resentment, bitterness and blame, if not dreams of revenge. There is nothing more poisonous to the mind, whether in an individual who has undergone some trauma or a group that has suffered dispossession or injustice, than to rehearse narratives of victimhood. This is why the stories of serious art and literature typically suspend sectarianism and ideology, and entertain ambiguity.

The exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney brings together various works of contemporary art that deal with the telling of stories, of which the first is an impressive film by Kerry Tribe that reflects on the practice of filmmaking, and is set in a building long connected with Hollywood production.

Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills was built in 1928 and in the following year was the site of an apparent murder-suicide in which the heir to an oil fortune, Ned Doheny, died with his secretary Hugh Plunkett, who may also have been his lover. The family was in a state of crisis at the time because Ned’s father was being investigated for a notorious act of bribery in which his son had acted as courier.

After the deaths of the two men, Ned’s widow continued to live in the house with their children until the 1950s. Even during this time, but especially afterwards, Greystone became a popular film set. Almost 70 movies or television episodes have been partly set there, from David Lynch’s Eraserhead to the Spider-Man series, The Dirty Dozen and Indecent Proposal.

Tribe’s film looks at first sight like any other professionally produced and acted period drama set in 1929, with principal actors and a supporting cast of servants. In structure, however, it comprises a series of episodes that offer alternative interpretations of the events on the night of the deaths. They include different configurations in the relationship between Ned and Hugh and the impact of the corruption charges, and one version in which Ned’s wife Lucy catches them in a compromising position and murders both of them.

But the really remarkable thing about the film is that the script is composed of a patchwork of phrases and sentences lifted from films shot in the same location. The exhibition includes some sheets of paper on which Tribe has noted disjointed bits of dialogue from individual films with an eye to using them in her own script. A copy of the full screenplay is also included, annotated with the sources for even the slightest and most incidental phrases.

Knowing this, it is significant that the resulting dialogue does not feel implausibly disjointed or heterogeneous. And what this in turn makes us see is the way that films largely recycle the same material, the same events, motifs, even turns of phrase. This is particularly true of films made within a given cultural milieu such as Hollywood. It might have been harder to come up with the necessary dialogue elements if one searched for them in, say, Italian, Japanese or Persian language films.

Imagine trying to tell this story with dialogue fragments lifted from the films of Kurosawa, for example. But what in fact do you do after a work like this, impressive as it is? It is essentially a unique object, and one cannot imagine merely repeating the formula. Perhaps the logical future for an artist like this, after such a reflection on the history and limits of the art form, is within cinema itself.

More than any other period in art history, 20th-century modernism was made up of brilliant episodes that were nonetheless dead ends. Cubism, for example, could not be extended or reinvented, but only repeated, imitated and turned into a neo-academic or even decorative style. More recently, institutional conditions have encouraged work whose idiosyncrasy stands out in the short term but does not always allow for development or extension.

This seems the case with Emily Floyd, whose work presents piles of alphabetic letters, carved in wood, with some of them standing up in rows composing words. It looks rather like an idea that one might have had while playing with a child and a set of alphabetic blocks, but it is quite effective at first sight. Two installations of different years have been assembled together in the centre of the space, one alluding to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment — we see the name Raskolnikov and the words “I have murdered” — and one based on Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.

The first of these uses the Latin alphabet, the second the Cyrillic, and we can make out the Russian title of Solzhenitsyn’s book. The strings of words that grow from the piles of letters lead us to see in these heaps the latency of narrative — a chaos full of the potential for meaning. But the large and decorative onion domes above, while suggesting Russia, also hint that the letters alone do not quite satisfy us as a work of art.

The domes supplement, but simultaneously undermine, the work, and when we turn to find a third piece, based on Camus but also including domes of now more dubious relevance, we are confronted with the rapidly diminishing returns of self-repetition. This is why contemporary art of this kind finds its natural home in large group exhibitions, where the emphasis is on achieving a distinctive brand and where only one piece is generally shown.

Among other works in the show, Angelica Mesiti’s film work on three screens is thoughtful and meditative. After her recent work for the ACMI moving image commission, based on the whistling languages used around the Mediterranean, this work turns to silence. There are three different films, shown one at a time and each on its own screen opposite a little viewing bench: one of these is a choir singing in sign language, another a pair of elderly, seated ballet dancers performing, or rather marking, part of Swan Lake.

Jumaadi’s work with the Javanese shadow puppet — wayang kulit — tradition is also ­absorbing in its slightly crazy outpouring of creative energy. The artist’s version of the puppets, cut from buffalo hide, is at once traditional in technique and surreal in subjects and motifs — but that surreal quality is rooted in the animistic sense of the life of nature and the interconnection of human, animal and plant worlds inherent in the folk traditions he invokes.

There are several Aboriginal works of which the most impressive is a series of 72 pictures of food plants from the Kimberley area with their names in Latin, English and the local Gija language, although whether this is a narrative work is questionable.

Also included are a number of works made by asylum-seeker artists, some of which are evocative and moving. Several pieces complain about conditions in Australian detention centres: this is understandable, but one might have expected their stories to deal rather more with the intolerable events that led them to leave in the first place. And it is hardly credible, as one piece does, to equate life in an Australian processing camp with the brutality of the Taliban.

Another work with a refugee theme is a series of video projections with hands drawing the itinerary of their travels on a map; the image of travel in harsh conditions and dealing with thugs and corrupt officials naturally evokes our sympathy. But in the first one I encountered the individual concerned, having escaped from Somalia and been kindly received in Italy, now wanted to leave Bari for England or Norway; clearly by now less a matter of survival than of economic opportunity.

The Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei has a series of three booths in which you are invited to write a message expressing love or asking forgiveness: there are desks of different heights and the installation seemed very popular with children. Unsealed messages may be read by visitors; I opened one whose envelope was inscribed with an invitation to do so: inside, the letter read “I forgive you for opening this letter”.

Perhaps most memorable, however, is the installation by Jitish Kallat, Covering Letter, in which visitors enter a darkened room to encounter a text projected on to a fine mist of water vapour. The text is legible when the vapour is undisturbed, but visitors may walk through it to the other side. The words are those of a short letter addressed by Gandhi to Hitler in the last weeks before the outbreak of World War II: they float in the mist, insubstantial and hopelessly ineffective against a dictator bent on war, and yet still resonant long after his disappearance.

The work invites us to contemplate both the fragility and the resonance of Gandhi’s message, and to experience it physically as we are touched by its silent breath. And it is at the same time a reminder that the meanings of art are essentially embodied and inseparable from their material form: as Kallat says, “images form in the making of the work, they don’t form in the conception”.

Telling Tales

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Until October 9.