Thirty Seconds of Fame:
The Personal Ads Project (1989)

Personal Ads, a media project produced by Marie Craven (formerly Anne-Marie Crawford) and Chris Windmill, appeared on the commercial Perth (Western Australia) television station Channel 9 between midnight and dawn, 4 to 13 October 1989. It was staged as part of the art event ARX [Australia and Regions Exchange/Artists’ Regional Exchange] 1989: Metro Mania.

Six filmmakers (one of them a collective) were represented, apart from Craven and Windmill: Dirk de Bruyn, Stephen Cummins [1960-1994], Anthony Foot, Maj Green, The Marine Biologists, and Bill Mousoulis. All of them have been associated with various movements and moments within Australian Super-8 practice (in Melbourne and Sydney) of the 1980s, subsequently branching into the slightly wider worlds of experimental and independent cinema.

The plan was cheap and opportunistic – in the best senses. Australian Film Commission [now Screen Australia] funding allowed a regal sum of around 160 Aussie dollars for each artist to produce exactly 30 seconds of work. Most of the pieces were shot on Super-8 and then carefully transferred by Windmill (who worked, at the time, within the TV industry) to broadcast standard video. TV advertising ‘down time’ – which is surprisingly cheap – was then purchased to screen it. They were not shown together as a group; rather, each one appeared simply as an ad among the regular ads.

Channel 9 was not asked to sponsor the project – or even to understand it – in any beneficent way whatsoever; only to to treat it like any other advertising product, i.e., indifferently. (Oddly enough, several days into the screening schedule, rival commercial station Channel 7 rang the producers to offer them a cheaper advertising rate!) However, Cummins’ proudly Warholian vignette, Taste the Difference (the close-up of two gay men kissing), was denied on-air approval by Channel 9’s station manager (Western Australia was, in 1989, just at the point of decriminalising homosexuality). It, alongside the entire Personal Ads batch, subsequently appeared during the following month on SBS’ progressive, late-night, video/music program, Eat Carpet.

A certain, surrealist sense of strangeness animated the affair. As someone who stayed up several nights in Perth to monitor the late-night televisual flow of it, I was repeatedly struck by the shock of this or that raw image, hyperreal sound, jolting edit; this or that material, textual quality of stillness, or nervousness, or naturalness, or madness.

We assume too quickly, these days, that Global TV has colonised and absorbed every imaginable effect and affect – that there are no more margins to be worked at, no further surprises to be had. In its own essentially anonymous, incalculable way – for how will we ever know who else saw these Personal Ads in the dead of night, and what on earth they made of the coincidence? – Craven & Windmill’s project serves to remind us that the thrill of difference and otherness is still possible, and palpable, in this mass medium.

Getting more of that thrill is our next problem.

Note: For an account of the 12-year history (1987-1999) of ARX events, see here.

© Adrian Martin January 1990