Barbara Campbell: Heart with boss-head, retort clamp and rod, 2003
Heart made by Les Gamel, Chemistry Department Workshop, University of Melbourne
Photograph Barbara Campbell
Image courtesy Ian Potter Museum of Art

Behind every aluminium gauze screen lies a forgotten fact, a remnant of past commercial glories or traces of a great man. Such is suggested in the current exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. The Grimwade Effect is the culmination of an extensive exploration into the fabric of the University of Melbourne by performance artist Barbara Campbell.

As a Macgeorge Fellow in 2002 Campbell was required under the guidelines of the bequest to undertake an activity that would be of benefit to students of the Faculty of Arts. The end result is a challenging exhibition that, rather than confirming the sanctity of the Faculty of Arts, in fact endeavours to dissolve the stringent lines that divide the university disciplines. As with previous residencies, such as her work at the University of Sydney and ABC Radio, Campbell approached the site in which she was to work as an intricate network of physical and cultural complexities. It seems her aim, to which she was wholly successful, was to trace a single thread through the diverse facets of the university site to show the joins and overall pattern of the institutional fabric.

The exhibition itself consists of artefacts that Campbell encountered and acted upon during her exploration. Each object seems to have been a catalyst from which dialogue sprouted and further routes for her archival dig were exposed. The primary subject of the exhibition is the namesake of the exhibition title, namely the bequested collection by Melbourne businessman and part-time inventor Russell Grimwade.

On face value objects from this collection stand in poignant juxtaposition to the remnants of Campbell's performance. On one wall, encased in medical jars, sit five exquisite Czechoslovakian glass paper weights each resting above branches of eucalyptus that have been crafted into replicas of household furniture legs from the Miegunyah collection. Slightly divorced from this shelf sit two miniature crutches, crafted by Russell Grimwade, again contained in a glass medical jar and resting upon a fine wooden shelf. A wooden bench, supported by crutch shaped legs, acts as the dividing line between the crafted beauty of the artefacts and the sterility and confrontational nature of the two display cabinets on the adjacent wall. One cabinet contains the tools from Campbell's performance, a bloodied bandage smock, leech 'jewellery', which consists of a pair of forceps and a scoop, and an inkjet print of two leeches sucking the artist's leg. Next to this, supported as though it is a medical test tube, is a glass heart, made for the artist by a member of the Chemistry Department workshop. The heart was an integral part of the performance piece, through which the beat of the artist's heart was supposed to resonate. Now that its performative role is over, it instead stands still, unbeating and cold.

Campbell's performance, which took place on 8 November, seems to be the focal point to which all of the artefacts and themes respond. Campbell uses her body, and thus the physicality of being female, as a site on which disparate strands of medical, scientific and artistic knowledge can be acted out and recorded in a new way so that the act of documentation is forever in flux. Campbell introduces the other performance artist in the exhibition, the leech. It is through her interaction with the leeches, namely the placing of the leeches on her bare thigh, as well as the procuring, handling and disposing of them, that a foreign relationship to the role they play in the medical world or their natural environment is revealed.

Campbell has full control over their performance and thus has the ability to change the way they are preserved historically. In her hands they are neither a medical phenomenon nor a commercial enterprise, as they were for Russell Grimwade. What's more, they also fail in their natural role as Campbell has intricately created a false world in which they exist, either in the hand made glass aquarium or in the hands of the performance artist. Through Campbell's intervention the leeches' actions are recorded and documented in the name of art, their legacy is the bloody stain on the bandage smock worn by Campbell. In the performance Campbell seems to manipulate the boundaries of traditional knowledge by drawing pieces of information from disparate sources that correspond to her interaction with the leeches. In the act of 'bleeding' Campbell confronts the worlds of medicine, commerce and art and draws the thread between them.

Unfortunately, many of the themes of the exhibition may be lost on the viewer if they did not witness the performance piece. However, there are enough remnants of the performance displayed to allude to the issues Campbell is endeavouring to reveal.

Every artefact in the exhibition is deliberately chosen from the masses of archival material that make up the university structure. Upon every artefact an act has occurred to alter slightly the historical record of that object. This act by either Campbell or one of the other many contributors to Campbell's archival 'dig' merely adds to the continuous historical archive of the university. In Campbell's art practice there are no defining lines, there is no infallible knowledge, and history is never static. As a 'performance artist' Campbell too has transgressed the boundaries of her former practice and left behind yet more for the university archive. Her art form is no longer ephemeral it is now a moment in history, documented and recorded and safe, preserved within a glass canister as she too has done with her muse's glass paperweights.

The Grimwade Effect is a heady and intelligent exhibition, and Campbell has artfully avoided alienating her viewers. Rather, one can expect to be confronted with surprises and snippets of information that will leave you pondering the exhibition for days.