Manifesto for the exhibition WOOM

WOOM was a multi-sensory and participatory environmental happening created by Vivienne Binns, Roger Foley-Fogg (aka Ellis D. Fogg) and others at the Watters Gallery in Sydney in 1971, with financial assistance from the Australia Council. As its title suggested, it played on notions about the inter-uterine experience. To a sound-track of an amplified drum mimicking a heartbeat and digestive gurgles, visitors removed their shoes and crawled through a foam-lined tunnel into a room of flashing lights behind Perspex, which they could alter themselves if the wished. A final room was painted and lit with strobe lighting. Donald Brook reviewing the show thought it ‘an aesthetically deteriorated game suitable for romping children’. Whereas James Gleeson wrote that the artists had created ‘a work of considerable imaginative power. To traverse its dim and twisting passages and to pause in its mysterious and many-splendoured caves is to become aware of flights and echoes. It is the womb, the beginning of time, of sensation, of experience, of being.’