Odyssey: Luke Roberts & Suzanne Triester
Curated by David Broker
Institute of Modern Art, 1999

It was sometime ago. I recall reading in the now defunct science and culture magazine, 21C about Jack Sarfatti's notion of postmodern physics where the cause-effect relationship is reversed. In this scheme of things, effects are anterior to their causes, the future produces the past. Perusing the work of Suzanne Treister and Luke Roberts at the IMA exhibition, Odyssey, I was searching for signs of other times. Their respective avatars, Rosalind Brodsky and Her Divine Holiness Pope Alice, Spiritual Leader of the Lost Continent of Mu, represent places and trajectories whose temporalities are distant. For a moment, their journeys converged on the IMA and they arrived bearing offerings. Both artists have recently launched publications. Last year, the IMA published the latest in its series of monographs, Vanitas: Pope Alice presents Luke Roberts and in London, Treister launched her cd-rom and book, No Other Symptoms - Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky.

Curated by David Broker, Odyssey was the IMA's last show of the millennium, the last show in the last week at the end of time. Brodsky is a time traveller and Pope Alice inadvertently travelled across time when she fell over the boundary of a black hole into our present. Ever optimistic, the show re-opened in January with Brodsky and the Pope presiding over the new dawn. Someone, somewhere is having the last laugh! Clearly, these works are about time and the exhibition's timing is like a pun, a play on words, myth and temporality. At the other end of time, the classical root of Western knowledge, there was Homer's Odyssey.

Odyssey occupied three of the IMA's galleries. On the wall facing the entrance of the first room were two insignia - Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality and Pope Alice Corporation - suggesting that there are other forces at work in the manifestation of these apparitions. Brodsky believes that she is undertaking research about time travel at the IMATI. Even though a video plays interviews with those who have sighted Brodsky across time, we face the prospect that Brodsky might be delusional about her exploits. Like Elvis or Our Lady sightings, such testimonies can evoke both fervour and cynicism. In the IMA's Red Room, Treister's interactive cd-rom is projected on the wall and Brodsky's story unfolds further through her diary, research and other belongings. Dying in 2058, we unravel the mysteries of her life posthumously. She claims to have travelled through time seeking psychoanalysis with Freud, Jung, Lacan and Kristeva, and has their clinical notes to prove it. I am left to answer the question in accordance with subjective predelictions: has she or hasn't she? How I want to believe!

Before the powder pink beehive emblem of the Pope Alice Corporation, a monitor screens an interview with Quentin Crisp, humble and bereaved homage, as well as the video, Her Devine Holiness: Pope Alice of Mu. During the construction of riverside apartment towers in Brisbane, the word 'Devine' (as in Devine Homes), was illuminated from atop a crane nightly for all the city to exalt. Extraterrestrial visitor, Pope Alice is 'devinely homeless'. As she walks the Valley streets, her beautiful white robes fluttering and shimmering around her, she is a vision. Cast out from the heavens, slipped through that black hole, searching for shelter in the city's sin precinct.

An installation occupied the adjacent gallery, a giant crossword drawn on the floor is roped off. A human-size, ornate Chinese urn is situated in one of the squares. The only clues to this puzzle are the numbers on the squares and the location of the urn. However, rather than arithmetical order, the squares are inscribed with figures of numerological significance to Pope Alice. For all I know, this is the sacred black and white geometry of the universe, the formulae of postmodern physics, the riddle of the meaning of life answered, a map charting the Pope's journey through time and space, or the secret wormhole portal that transports her back to Mu. Perhaps I am writing in circles, like a snake poised to swallow its tail, or rather, itself.

Time travellers are warned not to meddle with the past because the future will be irrevocably altered. However, considering Sarfatti's postmodern physics, I also wonder what future brought Brodsky and the Pope here, now. What of our present is an effect of their future? In his explanatory note for Odyssey, Broker signs off as a 'believer'. A medieval maxim, credo quia absurdum translates as 'I believe because it is irrational.' And this, I believe, is integral to the art of Treister and Roberts. It's just so unreal, irrational and fantastic that I can believe. This irrationality is a refuge for art in a sceptical time which makes derogatory remarks about 'what passes for art these days.' Those naysayers don't believe in the possibility that art adds virtuality to our lives or extends our world, or that causes could be anterior to their effects. They just don't believe that Pope Alice loves them to life.