Platform 2025, ex.cat. (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2026).
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As a kid, one of my first records was Diamond Dogs (1974). On the cover, David Bowie reclines, naked, androgynous, gaunt: a sideshow odalisque with a come-hither, fuck-off look. When I turned the cover, I discovered he was a hound dog below the waist. Repellent and alluring, his look was more transspecies than transgender. I was never quite the same.

Diamond Dogs was a concept album, based on Nineteen Eighty-Four, but where Orwell’s tale was a warning, Bowie’s rock opera relished the dystopian. His torch-song trilogy ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing Reprise’ introduced me to the allure of anonymous, predatory, transactional gay encounters: ‘It’s safe in the city, to love in a doorway, to wrangle some screams from the dawn. And isn’t it me, putting pain in a stranger? Like a portrait in flesh, trails on a leash.’ He added, vainly: ‘I’m glad that you’re older than me, makes me feel important and free.’ Bowie describes his happy hunting ground: ‘My set is amazing, it even smells like a street. There’s a bar at the end where I can meet you and your friends. Something scrawled on the wall …’

The lyrics came flooding back to me when I stepped into Jarrod van der Ryken’s installation That Night They Went Out Painting at the Institute of Modern Art for Platform 2025. His set was amazing. It even smelled like a street. And stuff was scrawled on the wall.

In recent years, Van der Ryken has created ambitious video installations as odes to cottaging and cruising. To present them, he’s favoured grungy spaces, whose givens do half the work, already suggesting neglected, out-of-the-way spots where guys might share a moment. He used the rough-and-ready warehouse space of Wreckers Artspace for Could It Be Found in Gardens of Dust? in 2022 and the graffitied, unclad Besser-block bunker of Milani Carpark for The Buds on the Trees and the Night Were Still in 2024. Into these spaces, he introduced slow videos, his footage combining poetic quotidian details interrupted with occasional sex scenes in counterpoint. 

But making this project in the Institute of Modern Art,Van der Ryken had a problem: a neutral space, with little to riff off. His solution was to construct a set, importing the beat aesthetic he had found elsewhere into the white cube. He lured his audience into this little labyrinth, like a trap, before they were exposed to his videos—and himself.

The gallery walls were painted black; lighting was low, moody. (Van der Ryken would have preferred no lights at all, suggesting people could use the torches in their phones to navigate his darkness.) He enlisted local graffiti artists to tag the gallery walls with shiny black spray paint. (An early plan was to scatter spray cans throughout the gallery so visitors could add their own tags to the walls.)

Van der Ryken built two floor-to-ceiling wall fragments. The first, rendered in concrete, had a graffiti-covered door in the centre, which you could open and walk through. The other was clad in corrugated steel on one side, gibbed on the other, with a framed photo hanging on it. In places, framing was exposed and cladding torn, like the walls had been partly demolished. Between the walls, freestanding metal-mesh building-site barriers were covered in scrim, also bearing layers of graffiti. It all had a demolition-site nocturne vibe. 

Two large flatscreens hung on the barriers, and a third on one of the walls. Two kinds of footage were intercut across all three screens. There were close-ups of luminous flowers in the artist’s swampy New Farm backyard at night. And there were equally lingering shots, apparently made within the installation earlier, showing crime-scene details (including a forlorn, spent spray can) and the artist himself, pallid, semi-naked, not moving, lurking. In one shot, he wears a respirator, presumably to protect him from spray-paint fumes, but making him look creepy and menacing. All the images were filmed under flickering fairy lights and synced up, so they pulsed as one. 

Van der Ryken was anxious that his installation might feel fake, contrived, a work of theatrical set-dressing. He brought in the local graffiti artists to guarantee authenticity. However, I liked the idea that it felt artificial, constructed, duplicitous, as if you could be stepping into a carefully contrived trap. For me, the artifice was crucial.

Three details provided keys.

First. The door in the wall was the first thing viewers would likely encounter, inviting them, double daring them, to open it and walk through, to cross the threshold. But if they felt timid or cautious, they could just as easily walk around the wall. Like the door in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Van Der Ryken’s door created anxiety and uncertainty, symbolising both access and exclusion. 

Second. A full-length framed mirror leaned casually against a gallery wall. Its decaying silver backing was further compromised with an ejaculation of spray paint on its face. It seemed perverse, to offer us a mirror we couldn’t see ourselves in. Perhaps someone had already gotten off while watching themself in it, desecrating it. (On the gallery walls, Van der Ryken had also created several ‘flowers’, by disgorging the contents of a spray can at a single point, until the fine spray became liquid dribble.)

Third. That framed photo. It showed the cover of a magazine, The Exhibitionist, featuring a black-and-white reproduction of Michelangelo’s David pinned to, I’m told, a Berlin apartment wall. It was an in-joke. It suggested a niche wank mag, but The Exhibitionist is actually a benign art-curators trade journal, boring as batshit. Its risqué effect here, its innuendo, turned on misrecognition.

Van der Ryken’s installation was a walk on the wild side, linking tagging and dogging. But while it suggested danger, it dwelt lovingly, gently, on the details. The space was dank, but also womblike. The flowers were potentially toxic, but beautiful. The dark ambient soundtrack, by Van der Ryken’s partner Hayden Potter, went from chilling to lulling, once you tuned in to it. Van der Ryken found a perverse poetry in ruin and squalor, balancing romantic and raw, safe and unsafe, enticing and repellent.

I debated with Van der Ryken about what he was doing with this work. He described it in conceptual and political terms, perhaps assuming I was conceptual and political. He said it was based on his recent experiences squatting in a dilapidated neighbourhood in Berlin, where pro-Palestinian graffiti was illuminated by the pulsing lights of police cars. He said it was about graffiti as righteous protest, the voice of the underclass. But, to me, that seemed beside the point—the graffiti felt like mere wallpaper. In our conversations, I always thought the artist misdirected me, misdirection being his art. 

What I got from the work was less thoughts, more feelings. For me, Van der Ryken is less a conceptual artist, more a master of mood and atmosphere. If the work was about anything, it was about narcissism. Pallid, lithe, fashionably dissipated, his body in the video reminded me of Bowie’s on the Diamond Dogs cover, and of another narcissist, the early American pictorialist photographer F. Holland Day, who starved away so he could play the crucified Christ in his soft-focus photos. 

While Van der Ryken’s work suggested a space of risky encounter, we didn’t see any encounters. Instead, we encountered him in his lair, engaged in solitary, masturbatory, perhaps exhibitionist activities—though we never quite knew what we were seeing. His camera—and us with it—lingered on his body. But our relation to him was unclear, obscured like that mirror. Was he predator or prey? Had we unwittingly discovered him in his masturbatorium or was he posing for our delectation? Where was the power, the agency?

Van der Ryken’s set funnelled us into this dilemma. I recalled Marcel Duchamp’s last work, Étant Donnés, where, through a peephole, viewers spy on an obscenely splayed and clammy nude, yet the scene was contrived in advance, looking like a hand-coloured postcard. Similarly, Van der Ryken set us up, made voyeurs of us. But was this for his pleasure or ours? Or was the feeling mutual? He describes himself and his work as queer, but I wonder: Who was this work made for? Was it addressed to fellow queers or to straights, as a nod in solidarity to insiders or to titillate and torment the tourists? Could Van der Ryken himself be some kind of tourist, indulging his own fantasies of otherness? Who was getting off, and who was along for the ride?