A moveable feast: the art of Bill Sampson

He wants you to think about your aesthetic. Why do you like that colour rather than this one? That painting, more than this? Is it because of what you learned as a child, or have you developed predilections of your own?
Wearing a jaunty bowler hat over a frizz of long grey hair, the Castlemaine artist bemused a room of mostly young people with his thoughts about his own artwork, currently displayed at the La Trobe University's VAC Gallery on View Street.
His little amorphous creatures on tall metal plinths, his crushed aluminium panels marbled with paint and the marble plinth, on which a marble plinth sits upside down, on which a perspex mould of a plinth sits - all these exhibits in his show, Longer Little Deaths, were open to not just discussion among the onlookers, but also to their manipulation.
Sampson is very conscious that where an artwork sits in a room is part of how you experience it, he told his audience, so it was up to them to tell him how best to display these new works.
Interestingly, it worked. These rather cold objects began to accrete meanings and potentials as people talked about them. If you arranged the room in this way, did it invite a narrative? And if so, was that what the artist wanted? He didn't, but if that's what the room wanted, then so be it.
In the end, his fragile moulds, which most people perceived as like eggs, with creatures inside, were huddled in a corner, while the plinths stood empty. 
The marbled slabs of crushed aluminium were clustered in another corner, and the big plinth was isolated, immoveable.
With the artist in the room, the show breathed, slowing us down so we could enjoy the serious whimsy of these pieces. 
He enjoys and admires, he says, the aleatory, and embeds within his creation an ambiguity which works against the instant and shallow gratification of a screen-based culture.
What his friendly but gently demanding presentation proved is that we are in need of more of this kind of discussion about how art works, and what our responses are to the experience of viewing it in a real space, not on a screen. It has the salutary effect of clearing a space among all the buzz for a moment of pure thought.
The whole point of art.
Bill Sampson's Longer Little Deaths is at the VAC Gallery, View Street, Bendigo, until June 12.

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