- Liang Luscombe

un Magazine 6.2
ISSN 1449-6747 (print)
ISSN 1449-955X (online)
Distribution
un Magazine is available online at:
www.unmagazine.org
Published by un Projects Inc.
Printed copies available from:
un Projects
PO Box 24085, Melbourne, VIC 3001
info@unmagazine.org
www.unmagazine.org
Melbourne
Centre for Contemporary Photography, Craft Victoria,
Gertrude Contemporary, Kings ARI, Monash University
Museum of Art, Paradise Hills, RMIT School of Art
Gallery, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, West Space
Editor (issues 6.1 & 6.2)
Lisa Radford
Sub-editor (issues 6.1 & 6.2)
Liang Luscombe
Administrator
Victoria Bennett
Magazine Coordinator
Melody Ellis
Designer
Brad Haylock (Monash University)
Printing
BPA Print Group
Paper
Sovereign Offset 250gsm (cover)
Maine Recycled – Silk 100gsm &
Sovereign Offset 100gsm (text)
Magazine Advisory Committee
Ulanda Blair, Amelia Barikin, Tessa Dwyer,
Rosemary Forde, Brad Haylock, Phip Murray,
Lisa Radford, Patrice Sharkey and Zara Stanhope
Mentors
Ulanda Blair, Nick Croggon, Tessa Dwyer,
Helen Hughes, Patrice Sharkey, Zara Stanhope
and Jasmine Stephens
Board
Annabel Allen (Treasurer), Paul Davis,
Rosemary Forde, Bill Gillies, Brad Haylock,
Phip Murray and Zara Stanhope (Chair)
© Copyright 2012 un Magazine and the authors, artists,
designers, photographers and other contributors. No part
of this publication may be reproduced without permission
from the editor and publisher. The opinions expressed
in un Magazine are those of the contributing authors and
not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.
un Magazine is assisted by the Victorian Government
through Arts Victoria, and by the Australian Government
through the Australia Council, its arts funding and
advisory body.
Sydney
Alaska, Artspace, Firstdraft, ICAN, MOP Projects,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space
Adelaide
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Hobart
Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Inflight
Brisbane
Boxcopy, Gallery of Modern Art Bookstore,
Institute of Modern Art
Perth
Perth Institute of Contemporary Art,
Fremantle Arts Centre
Canberra
Canberra Contemporary Art Space
Darwin
24hr Art
International
mzin (Leipzig), Para/Site (Hong Kong), The Physics
Room (Christchurch), Printed Matter (New York),
ProQM (Berlin), Raid Projects (Los Angeles),
Section 7 Books (Paris)
Lisa and Liang thank the un Magazine 6.2 contributors
for their responses to the issue’s editorial focus.
We extend our appreciation to the many people who
commit significant time, energy and hard work to
un Magazine: the advisory committee; un Projects
administrator Victoria Bennett and magazine coordinator
Melody Ellis; the mentors; and the un Projects board,
whose ongoing commitment to the magazine is inspiring.
We are grateful to the board for the opportunity to edit
volume 6.
Many thanks to Melanie Irwin, David Kipp and Phip
Murray for proofreading. We are most appreciative of
BPA Print Group’s quality printing, and extend thanks
to K.W. Doggett Fine Paper for their generous support
and excellent paper. Finally, thank you to Lisa Young and
the Alderman, and to Alaska Projects, for hosting the
launches.
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
!"
Editorial
ARTICLES
!#
Teacher, Teacher, Teacher —
Spiros Panigirakis
%"
Game on Mole: Inter-class sexual
practice and playing classical music to
the African diaspora — Jarrod Rawlins
%#
Materialism —
Geoff Lowe & Jacqueline Riva
%'
(e Scaffolded Artist: Professionalisation
in the supported studio — Hugh Nichols
)#
Interview with Christopher L G Hill —
Brad Haylock
#"
It seems like everyone knows
everyone already so let’s get to work —
Helen Johnson
#*
Immaterial Transformations —
Hamish Win
+#
Sketching: Bodies in motion —
Helen Hughes
*"
Jean Rouch: Trance memory —
Giles Simon Fielke
**
In Pursuit of Philanthropy —
Amelia Wallin
,%
Notes on Art Strikes, Part - —
Amelia Sully
CONTENTS
,*
(e Moskulls — Scott McCulloch
ON AN ARTIST
'"
(e Artist Doesn’t Get His Hands Dirty:
Visible Solutions and other
impossible histories — Beth Rose Caird
'*
(e Future is Without You:
Redefining Sarah Rodigari — Susan Gibb
.%
Maths, Flight and the Devil:
Two exhibitions by Michael Stevenson —
Anna Parlane
.'
(e Work of Art in the Age of
Neoliberal Acculturation: Reflections
on a correspondence with Karmelo
Bermejo — Sumugan Sivanesan
!"#
What’s in a Name: Catherine or Kate;
or Catherine Sagin; or Fiona Mail? —
Rachel Haynes
REVIEWS
!!"
John Nixon: Anti-whatever whatever —
David Homewood
!!#
Vivienne Binns: Art and Life —
Andrew McQualter
!!'
Everything Falls Apart — Pedro de Almeida
!%%
Tony Garifalakis & Tully Moore’s
Denimism — Ace Wagstaff
!%#
Pretty Air and Useful !ings —
Alexandra Johnson
1
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
!%*
Parallel Universes: "#$%–"#&' —
Amy Clare McCarthy
!)"
Jacob Ogden Smith’s Hovea Pottery Ale —
Andrew Purvis
!)%
Louise Menzies’ Local Edition —
Chloe Geoghegan
!)#
Crisis Complex — Janis Ferberg
!)*
Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body —
Jane Howard
!#"
Michelle Sakaris’ Monument to the
&-Hour Day — Chris Williams-Wyn
!#%
David M (omas’ Party Disguised
as Work or Work Disguised as
a Party — Claire Hielscher
!##
Jake Walker’s Paintings and
Relief & Painting and Relief —
George Egerton-Warburton
!#*
Steven Rendall’s Television Project —
Kyle Weise
!#'
Max Creasy’s Making Marks —
Miri Hirschfeld
!+"
Kosuke Ikeda’s Melbourne
Art-Power Plant — Olivia Poloni
!+%
Katherine Riley’s Panpsychic Household
Solutions — Alanna Lorenzon
!+#
Uncommon Room — Daniel Stephen Miller
2
ARTISTS’ PAGES INDEX
Ash Kilmartin
Perpetual planner /0-/
Courtesy the artist
-01–-02
Kati Rule
In situ with LCR /0-/
In situ with ZA /0-/
Courtesy the artist
30–3Kenny Pittock
Petrol Station in )*' words /0--–-/
text and -/ of 456 digital images
Courtesy the artist
56
Kiron Robinson
Not all elves have meaning /0-/
Courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout
16
Lou Hubbard
Angle of incidence /0-/
Courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout
-/2
Marcin Wojcik
blue blue blue /0-/
collage
Courtesy the artist
20–2Nat Thomas
I am an artist and crap curator /0-/
performance
Courtesy the artist
-41
Cover image:
Lane Cormick
Untitled /0-/
sawdust, acrylic paint and ink on plywood
53.6 × 50 cm
Image credit: Craig Burgess
Courtesy Daine Singer, Melbourne
-000 copies of this issue were produced with dust jackets
for special release at the launch events
Dust jacket outside:
Lane Cormick
Club (detail) /0-/
sawdust, acrylic paint and ink on plywood
Image credit: Craig Burgess
Courtesy Daine Singer, Melbourne
Dust jacket inside:
Brown Council
Performance Fee /0-/
video, installation and performance
Gift of Brown Council through the
Queensland Art Gallery Foundation /0-/
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Installation view, Contemporary Australia: Women,
Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, /0-/
Image credit: Mark Sherwood
Nikos Pantazopolous
Ongoing monument to indecent activities (+,, –) /0-/
Courtesy the artist
-42
Oliver van der Lugt
/: /0-/
Photograph by Elliott Lauren
Courtesy the artist
23
Rohan Schwartz
Life Correct Correct Life /0-/
Courtesy the artist
44
Sam George
at the end and the behining /0-/
Courtesy the artist
42
Sharon Goodwin
every other day /0-/
gouache on paper
Courtesy the artist
inside back cover
Tim Coster
Suggestions to authors (excerpt) /0-/
Courtesy the artist
1–2
3
MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
emily floyd
This place will always be open
Inaugural Annual Sculpture Commission
Ian potter sculpture court and Helen Macpherson Smith Education Space
October 2012 - May 2013
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
muma@monash.edu
Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm
Emily Floyd, This place will always be
open 2012
Monash University Collection
commissioned 2012
Photo: John Brash
A curious
nature—
the landscape as theatre in
contemporary photography
and new media
Geelong
Gallery
Little Malop Street
Geelong VIC 3220
Free entry
Open daily 10am – 5pm
Guided tours of the
permanent collection
Saturday from 2pm
T +61 3 5229 3645
geelonggallery.org.au
until 10 February 2013
An exhibition of still and moving images
in which the landscape is the setting for
performative actions, often of a peculiar
or absurdist nature. Includes works by
Kate Bernauer, Siri Hayes, Gabriella Mangano
& Silvana Mangano, Polixeni Papapetrou,
Jacqui Stockdale and Christian Thompson.
Siri Hayes
Plein Air Explorers 2008
type C print
107.0 x 142.0 cm
Purchased 2008
Monash University Collection
Courtesy of the artist and
Monash University Museum
of Art, Melbourne
the
golden age of
colour prints.
ukiyo-e from the museum of fine arts boston.
7 march – 2 june 2013.
sheppartonartmuseum.com.au
Wakaura and Wakana
of the Wakanaya, from
the series Courtesans of
the Pleasure Quarters in
Double Mirrors
Kitagawa Utamaro I
(Japanese, (?)–1806)
Publisher: Yamadaya
Sanshirô, Nellie Parney
Carter Collection 34.255
Actor Ichikawa Omezô
as the Manservant Ippei,
Tôshûsai Sharaku
(Japanese, active 1794 –
1795) Publisher: Tsûtaya
Juûzaburô (Kôshodô)
William Sturgis Bigelow
Collection 11.14672
9
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
EDITORIAL:
Are we in a cone of silence?:
A letter between two artists,
who are editors (for now)
Hi Liang,
Let’s make the most of this letter-as-tropefor-talking thing that we started.
(roughout this year, you continually
referred to the ‘monster’. (e big ‘Other’
in this case being the labour involved
in reading, speculating, text-messaging,
googling, discussing, editing, meeting and
emailing during the process of making
our uns. I can’t help but contextualise
this work we have done within a spectre
of desire and the questions — why did we
do it? What did we want to find out?
(e irony of pitching an issue on
work and unprofessionalism hasn’t been
lost on us, especially considering that
we ambitiously wanted more content,
we wanted to know what others thought
and if there was something actually to be
said. (is is why desire is important to
consider, because, really, the money just
ain’t that good!
As usual, not everything goes to plan…
In Hal Hartley’s much hated film
!e Girl from Monday /006, set in an over
monopolized, global dystopic future, a
girl from another planet arrives on Earth
as the film’s main character pitches an
10
idea that sees people, as active consumers, register their sexual encounters
with the government in the form of a
mutually agreeable economic transaction.
Spontaneous sexual intercourse is illegal.
(is somewhat handy-cam and minimally
acted film attempts to present a satirical
account of an apathetic-everythingcommodified future. Described by some
as a profoundly unnecessary film, I am le8
wondering why the hell this film seems
to have resonated and stayed with me
all these months since my first viewing.
It’s not, in the film at least, that sexual
intercourse has become a credit rating,
nor that teaching in a high school is a
mode of punishment enforced by the state.
Consumerism is law. Rather, it was that
the exchange needed to be agreed upon
as mutually beneficial so as to count. (e
room for error was marginal: you can’t
take a risk, you can’t change your mind,
desire for place and the other, sublimated.
Charlie Brooker’s first episode of
the satirical sci-fi television series Black
Mirror trilogy is also set in the near
future. A ransom note is sent to the Prime
Minister of Britain demanding he fuck a
EDITORIAL
pig live on TV before a global audience,
in exchange for the safe return of the
recently kidnapped princess. While the
populace is fixated on the tube, waiting for
the ‘act’, the princess is released early and
the kidnapper is revealed as the recent
winner of the Turner Prize, artist Carlton
Bloom. (e Prime Minister is praised for
his act of sacrifice, his credit rating rises
while the public is kept unaware that the
princess was released early — meanwhile
Bloom commits suicide (perhaps the
only unmediated choice le8?). In Black
Mirror, the slippage between keeping-upappearances, the ultimate artistic act and
the desire to retain power are called into
question. (e spectacle and the lie both
win, while the artist dies.
Brooker and Hartley’s visions of the
future feel like now. Paul McCarthy’s
excessive-decadent and motorised sculpture of (the?) two George Bush’s fucking
pigs Train, Mechanical /002 may or may
not have been sold for a sum that we can’t
imagine, but this hauntingly hilarious
a8er-image of a president some still hope
will be taken to task, remains. Sue Dodd
has recently made a series of videos titled
Significant Others /0-/ that animate the
busts of the last twenty-seven Australian
prime ministers. Each slowly mouths the
name of his respective wife, as if in the
act of cumming. A kind of vocal ‘human
centipede’ with Dodd voicing the audio
— (erese, Janette, Anita, Hazel, et al. Jules’
bust, which is yet to be made, has a standin modeled from clay, spray-painted gold
and covered in shoe polish. Unbronzed
like her lover, 9m is the only male inferred
to by name rather than in monument and
is also the only lover not ‘legitimised’ by
the apparent state sanctity of marriage
— a simple shi8 of power, pleasure and
representation through name. With the
recent return to off-shore processing and
the even more recent defeat of Penny
Wong in the Senate, I am le8 with the
question: will it take another twenty-six
prime ministers before there is a change in
the simplicity of how we are represented?
Recently, artist Lane Cormick and I
have been talking about the importance of
doubt in an artwork. A8er the -100 or so
emails, with approximately sixty writers
and thirty odd artists mentioned in order
to meander through content leading to
stupid 4- -text-message puns, more
questions and few dead ends, I am le8
thinking doubt is our modus operandi.
If Freud was around today, would he
speculate that perhaps obsessional
neurotics self-medicate with doubt? Doubt
is proactive — with no conclusion from
the two, perhaps three of four conflicting
thoughts, we’ve gotta keep looking, don’t
we? I kind of hope our two editions of the
magazine have tried to look towards, and
into, this space.
(ere is a work by the artist James
Lynch that I o8en think about. Doubleday
/001 was presented in Charlotte Day’s
TarraWarra Biennale /001, Lost and
Found: An Archeology of the Present. (e
installation appeared as an aestheticised
ad-hoc post-house-party on a stage,
complete with plastic chairs and fairy
lights. It is accompanied by a projection
onto an upturned table of a short, fourminute-looped, hand-drawn animation
of TarraWarra’s in-house cleaner, silently
going about his daily duties accompanied
by a soundtrack composed by Evelyn
Morris. A collaboration in multiple parts,
the work of the artist is inextricably
linked to the work of its participants — the
cleaner, the probably-mass-produced-inChina plastic chair, the museum and the
viewer — the labour of the world.
In a recent essay on oil, climate change
and the French refinery blockades, the
anarchist-anthropologist David Graeber
deliberates on the problems of precarity
and the demobilisation of labour:
there’s no better way to ensure people
are not thinking about alternative
ways to organize society, or fighting to
bring them about, than to keep them
working all the time. As a result, we
are le8 in the bizarre situation where
almost no one believes that capitalism
is really a viable system any more, but
neither can they even begin to imagine
a different one. (e war against the
11
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
imagination is the only one the capitalists seem to have definitively won.1
If we consider the Guy Fawke-maskwearing -%, the city of Bristol launching
its own currency in September, the march
of 40,000 people down Sydney Road, our
own Prime Minister’s globally recognised
speech, not to mention the number of
applications we received to write for this
edition, it feels less like a death, and a little
more like a whole lotta thought.
Editing this magazine has made
visible the desire for the possibility to
explore, share, and continue to engage
in, open discussions about materiality
and its relationship to the world. (ese
discussions are always, and must be,
opposing, contradictory and at arms
with each other (managing a war without
weapons?). It is this that is inherently
political within art — that it bothers to
negotiate an anarchic terrain, inclusive of
multiple voices, institutions and capital.
My persistent optimism, however annoying, injected with that healthy dose of
cynicism means I hope, even if there isn’t
any, that the artist doesn’t have to die.
Now, tell me about your show!
With love, Lisa x
PS: I just received this text from my
film-making friend musing about a recent
Masters colloquium she participated in:
(e best thing on Friday was this
odd eccentric genius who was into
interpreting what possums say; he
suggested that if you want a different
perspective, ask a goth, because
no one ever asks them for answers.
12
Dear Lisa,
It is -/:4-  and I can’t sleep, as I need
to write my letter to you — at this time of
night I fear Liam Gillick was right when he
wrote:
(e accusation is that artists are at
best the ultimate freelance knowledge
workers and at worst barely capable
of distinguishing themselves from the
consuming desire to work at all times,
neurotic people who deploy series of
practices that coincide quite neatly
with the requirements of neo-liberal,
predatory, continually mutating
capitalism of the every moment.2
When I first read this text, I felt like
Gillick was writing directly to me — being
a workaholic probably doesn’t help me
here. Whilst not emphatically suggesting
that all aspects of artistic practice have
been completely subsumed by capitalism,
this text does capture a tension within the
arts which has then been perpetuated in a
number of recent texts on the subject, as
seen in e-flux, Sternberg Press and Frieze.
Beyond the relevance of these publications, I think our reasons for pursuing
the subject of ‘work’ is deeply embedded
in our own experience of labour within
the arts.
Whilst working towards the publication of this issue of un, Patrice Sharkey
and I curated the exhibition No reasonable
offer refused at West Space, Melbourne.3
(e exhibition hoped to interrogate acts
of commerce and circled a number of
ideas similar to this edition of un. Yet as
the exhibition drew closer, Patrice and
I came to the realisation that by asking
artists to re-imagine acts of commerce,
we had perhaps created an impossible
challenge — when writing the catalogue
essay and speaking with the artists I had
great difficulty in the articulation of these
aims. Was this because we just couldn’t
imagine ways to nudge our current
capitalist system? My gut feeling is no, but
it seemed that our inability to articulate
the workings of these systems and this
negotiation in relation to the art object
had became the crux of the exhibition.
EDITORIAL
Agatha Gothe-Snape addressed this beautifully with her work for the exhibition
Emotional Wall /0-/, in which she paid
Dan Moynihan to build a wall that blocked
out the space in which a viewer would
commonly view an artwork. By negating
this material exchange between viewer
and art object, Gothe-Snape instead
highlighted the workings of this symbolic
exchange and the anxiety (and possible
aversion) toward putting an art object out
into the world.
I remember when we first tossed
about ideas for this issue; the subject of
‘work’ was key, but, more specifically, we
were interested in artists’ other practices
— the aspect of their practice that gets
sidelined because it is less cohesive to
include multiple forms of production
when characterising an artist’s work. (e
work of Vivienne Binns and Dale Frank
comes to mind. Beyond their painting
practices, Binns held numerous cra8
workshops in rural NSW in the -230s and
Dale Frank facilitated a number of discos
and performances in the -210s and -220s.
One such work, Bowie -22@, saw five David
Bowie CDs played continuously from
speakers installed in the outside entrance
of the National Gallery of Australia. By the
time I went to art school in Canberra, that
work must have been removed — what
a difference Bowie would have made to
my 2 ’s, waiting in the cold, outside
the NGA for my art theory classes! Being
a fan of both these artists’ paintings, I’m
interested in how their paintings have
been informed by their ‘social’ forms of
production. Immediately, one can see the
cheeky pop culture connections between
the lush, wet pours of varnish that make
up Frank’s paintings titled Ryan Gosling
/001 or Daniel Radcliffe /001 and the
intrusion of Bowie’s pop hits upon the
brutalist building of the NGA. As a painter
1
2
NOTES
David Graeber, ‘Against Kamikaze Capitalism:
Oil, Climate Change and the French Refinery
Blockades’, Shift, November 2010, http://shiftmag.
co.uk/?p=389, accessed 20 October 2012.
Liam Gillick, Why Work?, Art Space, Auckland,
2010, p. 3.
myself, I feel a bit guilty for producing
paintings — alone in the studio, painting
is an unsociable activity (see Helen
Johnson’s ‘It seems like everyone knows
everyone already so let’s get to work’) and
I think this is why I attempt to make my
practice more sociable (the production of
magazines is an inherently social structure). I wonder if Binns and Frank have a
similar feeling?
lxl.
3
Agatha Gothe-Snape, George Egerton-Warburton,
Kelly Doley, Christopher Sciuto and Juilet Rowe,
No reasonable offer refused, West Space,
21 September – 13 October 2012.
13
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLE:
WORDS:
ARTICLES
Teacher,
Teacher,
Teacher
Spiros Panigirakis
Whilst taking part in an MFA seminar
discussion regarding Jacques Rancière’s
!e Ignorant Schoolmaster and using it
as a model to understand an audience’s
reception and production of an art
experience — my thoughts became very
literal.1 Could I have admitted to my
/00/ Year-Eight metalwork class that I
lacked oxy-acetylene welding experience
and that created an opportunity for the
class to engage our mutual ignorance
productively? (is tangential line of
thought continued as the seminar group
diligently discussed how art — like the
schoolmaster Joseph Jacotot’s use of the
Télémaque book — could be understood as
a social encounter between two unknowing parties. Regardless of its allegorical
use by the art field, I speculated as to why
this interest in the sociology of pedagogy
had arisen now? From my own experience
of high school teaching I was wary of
some segments of the art-school sector
regarding the coalface of education with
a degree of suspicion or well-meaning
but simplistic platitudes. On the flip side,
maybe this use of Rancière in this and
other MFA courses, could be regarded
as an initial deployment of a productive
interdisciplinary dialogue between
different dynamics of power. (is reflexive
approach to teaching and learning would
be refreshing if it were being used to look
at actual art-school teaching and not just
the pedagogical content, methodology
and interpretative framework of art in the
public realm.
(ere is currently an educational turn
in contemporary art discourse: a growing
formal and material interest in art as
lecture, reading group, whiteboard or
awkward show-and-tell, which illustrates
that education is a pervasive influence on
artistic production, while also o8en being
14
ignored and undervalued. It’s curious that
whilst we’re getting dizzy at the prospect
that a gallery might look like a classroom,
we’re not stopping to look at our own
complicity in the convergence of artistic
production and education — not stopping
to attend to the specifities of the actual
educational environment in which artists
are increasingly involved.2 Apart from
the aforementioned education-turnedstylistic-turn, critical networks disengage
with the actual pedagogical models of art
schools as if it were not consequential
that most exhibiting artists at some point
attended tertiary institutions. (ere
are of course two obvious exceptions
where education matters. (e first is the
graduate show — a debutante rite where
notions of pedigree and influence derived
from educators acquires a fresh lustre. (e
ritualistic harvesting of young fresh talent
at graduate shows is the acceptable face of
teaching within contemporary art cultures.
(e debutantes are embraced for their
own precocious promise and for faithfully
reflecting and affirming existing constellations of stars. (e second example is
the increasing emphasis on postgraduate
education. (is academicisation of art has
been colonised relatively recently by the
language of the hosting university. Artists
now quantify and qualify their experimentation via the notion of academically
sanctioned research rather than industrybased CVs. (e prolonged university stint
presents artists with an opportunity to
not only frame their own practice as a
rigorous form of knowledge creation, but
to also create pathways and publication
opportunities in allied creative industries
that can financially support (inevitably)
loss-making art practices.
(e discursive emphasis that grounds
tertiary research and coursework is
TEACHER, TEACHER, TEACHER
SPIROS PANIGIRAKIS
not new or unpredictable. It is not a
coincidence that the proliferation of
MFA programs occurred in sync with the
dematerialisation of the art object and
the increase in artists’ writings in the
-250s–-230s.3 Artists have also joined
the credential inflation that is endemic
across all professions where potential
candidates outnumber employment
opportunities.4 (e question that is yet to
be fully answered, however, is: how will
the artist’s discursive framing be valued
against the dominant contextualisation
offered by curatorial, historical or commercial institutional voices? What can
an artist bring to a public conversation
about art that goes beyond the calculus
of a commercial imperative, public
relations or methodological convenience
that privileges cohesion and stability?
(e amplified place of education within
the field of art creates an opportunity to
take stock of how as artists we use peer
review, collaborate with other fields of
knowledge and hopefully question some
of the arbitrary markers of industry
experience and expertise that are o8en
le8 unsubstantiated.
(e altruism associated with pedagogy
does not make it immune to an economic
dynamic. Whilst art schools might
once have held some distance from the
university industry, funding, research and
recognition are now tied into bridging
some of the incongruent teaching, learning and research practices once found in
art schools. (is standardisation makes
certain social and economic barriers more
apparent, while also enabling artists to
work and exhibit in a site context that
invariably shi8s the discursive potential
of a practice. (e shi8 in the structural
identity of the art school is only the
continuation of art’s place in a secondary school context, where individual
expression is framed within a neo-liberal
economy of discipline, community wellbeing and student testing that is linked
to teacher performance and teacher pay.
(is is only made more complex when you
consider the art school’s role in training
autonomous entrepreneurial practitioners
who must negotiate their own fraught
exchanges of cultural and social capital.5
It is no surprise that when the art market
is down the art industry transits smoothly
to the relative security of the university.
(e aspirant in me would claim fair game
but the undisputable statistics in regards
to the socio-economic backgrounds of art
school students leans to various types of
privilege dominating. (is access to arts
education is in the process of becoming
more inequitable in Victoria as the Liberal
state government slashes  funding.
(e role that Visual Art  courses
play in compensating for some of the
inequitable distribution of access and
recourses in the secondary sector can’t be
overstated.6
(e ‘educational turn’ is not sited
within educational institutions so much as
made reference to within curatorial programs, social art projects, stylistic tropes,
community pedagogical projects and the
outreach agendas of cultural institutions.7
Another perspective on education as art
project identifies how private enterprise
covers up (perhaps inadvertently) the
shortcomings of a public education
system. Museums and galleries acquire
government funding that is tied to
agendas much broader than aesthetic
enterprise. While the artist’s role has
always had a relation to sociability, is this
social process a pedagogical stopgap
for inadequate social policy? (is allows
and reinforces the continuation of the
inadequate funding faced by the higher
education sector. In the last fi8een years
art schools’ studio programs have been
under pressure to reduce the contact
hours held by teaching staff. Projects
that incorporate pedagogy as an artistic
enterprise boost the reputations of host
institutions — accommodating ruthless
budgetary cuts with a progressive artistic
veneer of volunteerism.8 (is is occurring
in the a8ermath of the debates surrounding the co-option of social enterprise by
art contexts and the subsequent questioning of their critical quality and the challenge they pose to autonomous aesthetic
paradigms. (e various threads of this
15
TEACHER, TEACHER, TEACHER
SPIROS PANIGIRAKIS
discourse interrogated the social role
— integrating experimental pedagogical
the artist played within the communityand social contexts to the production
context-turned-art-project and looked
of art objects. (e work of Joseph Beuys
carefully at the power dynamic between
offers a precedent for shi8ing the
the artist and participants/collaborators.9
ideological centre of pedagogy into an
What emerged was the inadequacy of
artwork, but also for non-object based
the aesthetic lenses used to judge and
outcomes.12 What I’m barracking for here
produce socially driven art projects. (is
is not a particular modality or site context
is where reflexive sociology, pedagogical
of art teaching but an open attitude to
theory and political assessment of what
the proliferation of creative conceptual
constitutes the aesthetic seemed more
art education. (ese programmes don’t
useful than naïve obfuscation of the poten- need to be thrown into the fray of gallery
tial for power play between artists and
presentation; their worth lies in their
participants.10 (is reflexive methodology
educational value to students. Grappling
is the core competency of both education
with the power relations that emerge
theory and actual practice in the field
out of teacher–student collaboration
— classroom teaching.
and the sanctimony of the facilitator are
(e question then might be who gains
issues that should be addressed within
when the ‘classroom’ is coveted by the
the projects. (is is the ethical realm of
artistic frame? (is question is at the heart pedagogy. (e question is not whether
of the conventional journalised narrative
there is an inequitable distribution of
of 9m Rollins and his Kids Of Survival
power between teacher and student; the
practice. It is testament to the fickle
more pertinent question is: how will this
nature of the art industry’s co-option of
dynamic help foster a type of growth? (e
education within its process and presenta- rhetorical claim that creativity in all fields
tion. In this case an artistic intervention
is equally valuable is not always accepted
to help disenfranchised kids rode a
by the arts community. We can too easily
critical wave in the -210s, was acquired
presume that if it’s not presented on a wall
by Saatchi, dumped by Saatchi and then
or trestle table then it’s not worth doing.
persisted as a type of laudable artist-inAn artist’s autonomy was a muchschools measure, that went unregarded
vaunted quality of Modernism. It is not
by any arts community until very recently
surprising that our art schools once
when truffle-nosed connoisseurs salvaged
played by their own rules regarding
it as a link to art’s pedagogical past.11
assessment, industrial relations, learning
Rollins’ dripping wet, paternalistic literacy and teaching methodologies. We are now
program via over-determined facilitation
in a period where these same institutions
of young teenagers’ collaborative artwork, are fitting (or having difficulty fitting) into
has little to do with a progressive eduuniversity contexts.13 (is reform process
cational ethos, as it privileges a singular
has benefits and pitfalls, and it has been
visual response to the group’s collective
met with some resistance. Some of this
understanding of a canonical text. (e
resistance is worth maintaining but the
project by its very name frames the pedaclaim that art schools will be robbed of
gogue/artist in relation to his assistance
their inherent experimental and progres(or rescue) of unnamed students who
sive qualities cannot be substantiated by
are doing it tough. Now literacy, creative
the evidence on the ground. Across all
expression and collaborative communities universities’ art schools, medium-specific
are important — educationalists know this, silos are preserved for no clear conceptual
and pedagogues working with cultural
or methodological purpose apart from
production have known this. (e Bauhaus convenience and location of equipment
school and Soviet Constructivism are
and resources; assessment procedures
obvious historical precedents that chaldo not adequately address the arbitrarilenged many disciplinary boundaries
ness of taste and are maintained due to
17
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
university policy and progression into
postgraduate study; some employment
relations (on both sides of the worker–
manager divide) would make the high
school industrial relations environment
seem contentious — which it isn’t. (ere
are certainly marked differences between
governmental policy and its implementation in the secondary school classroom
context. However, on paper at least, there
is a capacity for reflexivity in relation to
both education and broader social and
aesthetic terrains. (is is a space where
interdisciplinary relations between
departments are not only expected but
required; collaborative methodologies are
always a work in progress; transparent
and detailed assessment criteria are used
to substantiate the contentious judgment
of cultural production; and surprisingly
complex theoretical frameworks are being
used to read art.14
While I am flinging mud at art schools,
it is important to note that within a
local Australian context, pedagogical art
environments are fostering a number of
interesting projects. (ese projects kick
goals in regards to experimental teaching
and consider it within a critical dimension
of an art practice. (is exchange is a
familiar recurrence in artist-in-schools
programs too. (eir publication to a
broader audience, like the activities
conducted by Joseph Beuys and 9m
Rollins andro KOS, occurs in exceptional
circumstances. , the Pedagogical
Vehicle Project, Evergreen Terrace, Sandra
Bridie’s composite projects, ’s
interdisciplinary Murrumbeena Exchange,
Melbourne Free School and Lucas Ihlein’s
Tending: a Garden Experiment are relevant
examples.15 While some, like , cut
the chord tying the pedagogue (Geoff
Lowe) to the students-now-establishedartists many years ago, many remain a
testament to intervening in the status
quo of arts education. What makes these
projects interesting is that they resist
the atelier system of tuition that still
dominates art schools in Melbourne.
(ey represent an open and experimental
attitude to creative conceptual art education. (ese programs do not need to be
thrown into the fray of gallery presentation as their worth lies in their educational
value to students as students. (ey involve
a new and challenging understanding of
what a class could be.
NOTES
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, translated by
Gregory Elliott, Verso, London, 2009.
2. At the same time as Irit Rogoff pertinently asks to
‘what extent the hardening of a “turn” into a series
of generic or stylistic tropes can be seen as capable
of resolving the urgencies that underwrote it in the
first place’, she also advocates for the spaces of the
museum and curatorial practice to ‘actualise’ the
challenges faced by education. Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’,
e-flux, Vol. 0, November 2008, http://www.e-flux.
com/journal/turning/, accessed 26 October 2012.
3. Kosuth notes that ‘conceptual art annexes the
1.
18
Spiros Panigirakis is an artist and lecturer in the Faculty
of Art Design & Architecture at Monash University.
function of the critic… [it] makes the middle-man
unnecessary’, in Joseph Kosuth, ‘Introductory
Note to Art-Language by the American Editor’ in
Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings,
1966–1990, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 39.
Blake Stimson echoes this position regarding
the relationship between conceptualism and
writing practices. He notes ‘in favour of academic
philosophical, literary, and scientific associations,
was to aggressively usurp the authority to interpret
and evaluate art assumed to be the privileged
domain of scholarly critics and historians’, in
Blake Stimson, ‘The Promise of Conceptual Art’
TEACHER, TEACHER, TEACHER
in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds)
Conceptual Art: A critical anthology, MIT Press,
Cambridge, 1999, p. xii. Daniel Buren dogmatically
notes ‘so I felt the need to take the floor, trying to
reclaim it from the critics who had been shamelessly
usurping it for ages, knowing in advance what
possible havoc their prose could provoke, especially
for new work, and a havoc from which some work
never recovers, especially if the prose that swamps
it is eulogy. So, the necessity of trying, by means
of my own texts, to escape that discourse so as
not to be its object and consequently the victim of
its rhetoric’, in Daniel Buren, ‘Why Write?’ in Art
Journal, Vol. 42, no. 2, Summer, 1982, p. 109.
4. Laura Pappano, ‘The Master’s as the New
Bachelor’s’, The New York Times, 22 July 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/
edlife/edl-24masters-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0,
accessed 26 October 2012.
5. Pierre Bourdieu understands a field as a site
of struggle for (cultural, social, symbolic and
economic) capital between agents (or players).
For Bourdieu a cultural field reproduces it values
via the notion of habitus. Habitus is the ‘embodied’
values agents possess that make the struggle
for the distribution of capital on the field worth
playing. Therefore within both of these sociological
contexts we might consider the institution of art
as a cultural field represented by artist, curators,
dealers, collectors, theorists and historians
that ‘create the creator’. A detailed account of
Bourdieu’s account of capital can be found in Pierre
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 229–231; Pierre
Bourdieu, Randal Johnson (ed) The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 37.
6. The National Association for the Visual Arts
reported ‘the NSW Government announced today
that it would no longer continue to fund fine arts
courses in TAFE from January 1, 2013 as there
are no job prospects for art students and there are
skill shortages in other areas.’ This is certainly the
predicament many are predicting for the Victorian
TAFE sector. NAVA, ‘NSW Government to no longer
fund TAFE fine arts courses’, http://www.visualarts.
net.au/newsdesk/2012/09/tafe-fine-arts-coursesdefunded, accessed 26 October 2012.
7. Locally these enterprises range from: Christopher
L G Hill’s self-governed thesis, all art is problematic,
Never werk, Clouds/Evergreen publication, 2009;
Emily Floyd, How to Make a Manifesto Grow in
the exhibition Optimism: Children’s Arts Centre
Project, GoMA, Brisbane, 2008; Olafur Elliason,
The cubic structural evolution project at National
Gallery of Victoria, 2004; Free University,
http://melbournefreeuniversity.org; and, with an
aesthetic inflection, the Melbourne Free School
2010 initiative of Liv Barrett, Nick Mangan and
Jarrod Rawlins, http://melbournefreeschool.
blogspot.com.au.
8. Claire Bishop notes that governments ‘use a rhetoric
almost identical to that of socially engaged art to
SPIROS PANIGIRAKIS
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
steer culture towards policies of social inclusion.
Reducing art to statistical information about
target audiences and “performance indicators”,
the government prioritises social effect over the
consideration of artistic quality’. Claire Bishop,
‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’,
Artforum, February 2006, p. 181.
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics,
translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza
Woods, Les presses du reel, Dijion, 2002; Claire
Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’,
October, no. 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51–79; Grant
Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and
Communication in Modern Art, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 2004.
Stewart Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’,
Third Text, Vol. 21, no. 4, July 2007.
Tim Rollins and KOS have recently gained
commercial representation from Maureen Paley,
London.
Joseph Beuys notes, ‘to be a teacher is my greatest
work of art. The rest is the waste product, a
demonstration… Objects are not very important
for me any more… I am trying to reaffirm the
concept of art and creativity in the face of Marxist
doctrine… For me the formation of the thought is
already sculpture.’ Beuys quoted in Lucy Lippard,
‘Escape Attempts’, Six Years: The Dematerialization
of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. xvii.
Boris Groys maintains that the primacy of
expression and its resistance to professionalisation
that is held as a virtue by some gallery contexts
and is at odds with the administrating of university
pedagogy is derived by ‘the conviction that the
artist rejects schools to become sincere’ and to
‘manifest… an authentic creation in opposition’
is based on traces (or myths) left behind by the
historical avant garde. Boris Groys, ‘Education by
Infection’ in Steven Henry Madoff (ed), Art school:
Propositions for the 21st century, MIT Press,
Cambridge, 2009, p. 29.
Assessment criteria in VCE Art Units 3 and 4
engage students to explicitly interpret artworks
through feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial and
political frameworks, http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/
Documents/exams/art/art_assessrep_07.pdf; http://
www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/exams/art/art_writ_
ex.pdf, accessed 26 October 2012.
Stuart Koop explores both DAMP and the
Pedagogical Vehicle Project (facilitated by
Callum Morton and Danius Kesminas) in Stuart
Koop, ‘The Importance of Failing’, Broadsheet,
Vol. 32, No. 2, 2003; Stuart Koop, ‘Concern’,
Broadsheet Vol. 33, No. 3, 2003; Sandra Bridie,
The Artist as Composite, VCA Margaret Lawrence
Gallery, 2009; Evergreen Terrace in Unsheltered
Workshops, VCA Margartet Lawrence Gallery,
2008, curator Jeff Khan. Lucas Ihlein & Diego
Bonetto, Tending: a Garden Experiment, Sydney
College of the Arts, http://www.tending.net.au/;
Alana Hunt, ‘A Garden Experiment’ in Real Time,
Vol. 103, June – July 2011.
19
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
Sue Dodd
Significant Others (production still) /0-/
single-channel video
portrait orientation
Image courtesy the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery
20
GAME ON MOLE
ARTICLE
WORDS:
JARROD RAWLINS
Game on Mole:
Inter-class sexual practice
and playing classical music
to the African diaspora
Jarrod Rawlins
explaining a thing such as classlessness.
What is an uncommon occurrence in
our recent classless history is seeing a
female prime minister attack a male
opposition leader on the grounds of being
a misogynist, thereby providing us all
with a reason to reconsider the meaning
of feminism and misogyny in our country
Just as I was considering it possible that
and what relationship these two things
the existence of the three-tiered class
have to ideas of class structure and
system I was taught as a kid had been
ideology. I am thankful to Prime Minister
made redundant a8er feminism, Prime
Gillard for providing me with the means
Minister Julia Gillard makes an impressive to test some undeveloped ideas and to
and impacting speech against the ideology quote US-based feminist blog Jezabel
of the white Christian Right, who are
— ‘Australia’s prime minister Julia Gillard
currently represented by public figures
is one badass motherfucker’.1
such as Tony Abbott and Alan Jones, thus
To propose that the rise of feminism
providing me with the evidence I require
resulted in a three-tiered class system
to see that my argument is, at least,
becoming redundant is born of the
empirical.
understanding that before feminism it
(e idea that Australia is a classless
was uncommon for a man to have sexual
society, or devoid of a traditional class
relations with a woman of his own class or
structure, is not a recent idea. Nor is it
from above it. And that inter-class sex was
uncommon for us to attempt to account
restricted to men of the upper and middle
for our classlessness by constructing
classes having unmarried or premarital
memes and metonyms as a way of
sex with women of working or lower class
Social class (or simply ‘class’) is a set
of concepts in the social sciences and
political theory centred on models of
social stratification in which people are
grouped into a set of hierarchical social
categories.
— Jimmy Wales
21
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
ranks. (at this phenomenon is in fact
true to the point of being regarded as
the most accurate historical account of
inter-class sexual conduct is beyond the
scope of research of this article (save for
another day). However, for the sake of the
argument let’s take for granted that the
social practices of the Australian white
Christian right male baby boomer, and his
father, since colonisation, have followed
this practice and, if not, have at least
ensured that it appeared to their wives
and mothers that this was world’s best
practice.
Assuming the above is plausible, which
is to agree that the traditional three-tiered
class system was not actually formulated
simply on the idea that groups of humans
of the same race are easily classified
by locating differences in cash assets,
genetics and geographies, this traditional
class system can be understood as being
influenced by the psychosexual aspects of
sex outside of marriage during the -230s
and -210s. If we understand the class
system of these decades to be informed in
this way, then it seems plausible that key
social changes in respect to socio-sexual
behaviours forced by the emergence of
the women’s liberation movement — such
as availability of contraception and
legalised abortion — had an impact on
our ability to construct an argument for
Australia as a classless society today.
(e origin of this classlessness, beginning in the -230s with the emergence
of feminism and the women’s liberation
movement, is at the least plausible, but
one cannot simply isolate shi8s in sociosexual behaviours at around this time as
being the single force that created the
classless condition. (riving immigration
into Australia in the -230s becomes
equally as important to my argument.
If Australian men and women had developed rampant inter-class sexual practices
during the -230s it wasn’t simply as a
result of political and ideological shi8s:
cultural shi8s and the growing multicultural society must also be credited for this.
I guess I am suggesting that if primarily
Anglo peoples of an ageing English-based
three-tiered class system were all of a
sudden socially and culturally permitted
to widely and comfortably cross-fuck, or
inter-fuck, (your choice of neologism) it
would, at a glance, seem that the growth
of a raging (pun intended) Mediterranean
population would play a huge part is this
social shi8.
(e school directly across the street
from my house (Debney Meadows
Primary, School Number 6056) has a large
enrolment of students from Northeast
Africa, in particular Somalia and other
Horn of Africa nations, in addition to a
large number of students of non-white
Australian backgrounds. You could say
that the school is the epitome of the
ideology of a multicultural Australia.
Each morning and lunch time as the
multicultural throng rush and ramble
around the school grounds, ‘great’ pieces
from the canon of Western classical
music (from what can only be ‘Great
Pieces of Classical Music to listen to while
Gardening Vol. -’) are pumped into the
grounds via a very loud PA system. As
Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo in Forma di Sonatina —
Andante Non Troppe — Allegro Moderato by
(e Sinfonia of London (and conducted
by Alexander Faris) blares away, at what
seems like an unnecessarily high level of
volume, the children of the Ethio-Semitic
and Omotic peoples of Northeast Africa
are sharing snacks, swinging, planning
and plotting, all only metres away from
the confines of the Holland Court Housing
Commission Estate where a large number
of the students live.
Exactly what music should these
students be subjected to, you ask?
(e music of Wedi Tukul, or Bereket
Mengisteab, or Bangs? Why do I take
issue with playing classical music, unsolicited, to children of non-Western cultural
heritage? Is Mengisteab’s Zew Zew or
Bangs’ My Life is Hard more appropriate,
or am I being culturally over-sensitive
because of my inherited privileged-whiteAustralian paranoias? I don’t know, and
this essay is not going to attempt to
find out. But, because I am an irritating
privileged-white-contrarian, I have taken
22
GAME ON MOLE
JARROD RAWLINS
on the daily clamour of Mozart and co.
generation, the public housing is not an
(and the lack of Mengisteab) as one of my
orphanage, this is not an action that would
new issues to get intellectually irritated
seem to stem from a classless society.
about. Which brings me to the question of
Stuart Hall suggests that by constructclass structures and ideology.
ing this sense of classlessness I am emphaIf the northeast African diaspora of my
sising my working class origins because
inner-Melbourne street traditionally live
‘where the subjective factors determining
under a caste system rather than a class
“class consciousness” alter radically, a
system like the one proposed to me as a
working class can develop a false sense
child, then how are they now classified in
of “classlessness”.’ 2 On the same hand,
Melbourne? Are they lower class because
Hall reiterates that simply by writing
they live in public housing and attend
this article and sending it to the editor
poorly resourced schools? Or, are they
for publication I am reinforcing the very
middle class because they live in public
existence of the three-tiered class system
housing, attend poorly resourced schools,
I have been arguing against. ‘(e working
and drive Mercedes Benz cars? My guess
class boy must find his way through a
is that because of the public housing and
maze of strange signals. For example, the
poorly resourced schools, even the pres“scholarship boy”, who retains some sense
ence of Mercedes Benz cars still excludes
of allegiance to his family and community,
this diaspora from being classified as
has constantly to draw the distinction
upper class. So what is blaringly obvious
within himself between the just motive
here is that our traditional white-Australia
of self-improvement (which took him to
class system — the one based on the
university in the first place) and the false
systematisation into three tiers of personal motive of self-advancement (“room at
wealth, genes, geographies, architecture,
the top”).’ 3
job placement and tennis — is no longer
So if the three-tiered class system
applicable, therefore redundant.
I grew up with has indeed become
And, without getting overly semiotic
redundant because my parents were
here, if the consumption of classical music free to fuck people from Toorak and as a
has traditionally been used as a sign of
result Prime Minister Gillard is free to tell
culturedness, social positioning, etc., in
Tony Abbott he is a misogynist, and loud
Australia then the playing of classical
unsolicited classical music being forced
music to the northeast African diaspora
upon children of the northeast African
can be read as a class-based action. (is is
diaspora means that we also live in an
not to suggest that there is a transformaanachronistic triple-tiered class system
tion at work here, or even a colonial
(replete with sub-classes of course), and
attempt at transformation, more so an
by the mere act of even considering these
action brought about by the death throes
ideas I am reinforcing my own position
of a class system becoming redundant,
in a class system I thought didn’t exist
or shi8ing definitions. It feels to me that
— if all of these things are true, then I am as
the classical music playing, because it
confused as I was when I began this article.
is so deliberate and culturally awkward,
Jarrod Rawlins is a Melbourne-based writer.
is a white middle class anachronism:
these children are not part of the stolen
1.
NOTES
Tracie Egan Morrissey, ‘Best Thing You’ll See
All Day: Australia’s Female Prime Minister Rips
Misogynist a New One in Epic Speech on Sexism’,
Jezebel, http://jezebel.com/5950163/best-thingyoull-see-all-day-australias-female-prime-ministerrips-misogynist-a-new-one-in-epic-speech-onsexism?tag=juliagillard, accessed 9 October 2012.
2. Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Universities
& Left Review, No. 5, Autumn 1958, p. 30.
3. Ibid. p. 29.
23
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
Jon Campbell
Are You Fucking Kidding Me? /0-/
enamel and acrylic on canvas
-0/.6 × 5-.6 cm
Image courtesy KalimanRawlins, Melbourne
24
MATERIALISM
ARTICLE:
WORDS:
GEOFF LOWE & JACQUELINE RIVA
Materialism
Geoff Lowe & Jacqueline Riva
(ere’s materialism and there’s materialism. Some documents.1
It’s as though this writer is speaking
to and on behalf of a public that thinks
not-knowing about Adorno, St John of the
Cross, Derrida or Lacan is a responsible
ignorance. As though to know that double
messages could displace and even replace
an image or thing is a kind of lack of
respect for what-we-all-know as a unified
public.2
We have reached a kind of upperclass populism, it’s at the crossroads of
neo-liberalism and our colonial heritage.
It’s a question of access rather than class,
like some people have more access to a
$-4m payout or bonus than others. Being
greedy, as always, requires duplicitous
and disingenuous acts. We are complicit
in ignorance and innocence because
they both generate rewards. University
students from the best suburbs grow up
over a generation impersonating lower
class accents. I can’t help but think of
my Auntie Joan from Glenroy who said
‘kiddies’, ‘luv’ and ‘yairs’, just what are
they saying about her? I’m kind of pissed
off on Joan’s behalf: she was provided
with a limited repertoire and did quite a
lot with it; those with access to the most
our society can offer make a living out
of making fun of those who didn’t have
access to resources. We love to watch
those who have-it-all take the piss. Culture
has been a social space that is best to
rubbish or avoid — somehow it never
quite represents our Australian way of life,
unless it’s Kath and Kim or Edna.
What can’t we say in our country?
Watch the mainstream movie !e Falcon
and the Snowman from -216 (directed by
John Schlesinger), it’s all about how the
CIA deposed the Whitlam government but
we choose to see otherwise. What can’t
we say in our country? Pauline Hanson
was demonised by the educated classes
as a racist, yet Gary Foley, as a Marxist,
invoked that he identified more with her
(who he calls Pauline) than those who
villfied her, as though in preference to the
relentless liberalism that o8en guides us
against each other.
Not saying about what you know
or have learned is rewarded in trumps.
It’s like a8er the interregnum in England
between the monarchs (-5@2--550), it
seems once the sovereign was restored,
the whole country chose not to mention
the period of revolution and democracy.
What can’t-be-said begins to be
25
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
more valued and lauded than what can
be uttered. I think I’m repeating myself,
I’ve said all this before. Where does
what-we-can’t-say lie?
(e eternal, the unspeakable and
unsayable are well expressed in Joseph
Beuys’ documented performance from
-256, How to explain pictures to a dead
hare. Beuys incants without saying, a long,
silent discourse around a kind of holy
26
ARTICLES
purpose of art. He could be a shameful
shaman?
(ere are better and more able
people than me to give you, the reader
of this text, a definition of Materialism,
to-tell-you-what-it-is. Schopenhauer wrote
that ‘materialism is the philosophy of the
subject who forgets to take account of
himself’. Let’s call that herself. For this
reason it could also be useful to consider
recent efforts in feminist studies to link
what has been seen as utterly unsayable,
in most periods of history, to materialism. See Samantha Frost’s topological
jaunt through (omas Hobbes’ ideas of
sovereignty where she seems to be saying
that people (subjects) use fear as means of
getting autonomy from those whole rule
over them.3 (e public are strategically
disingenuous as a means of getting-whatthey-want or feel they deserve. It seems
the constituents understand well those
who publicly preach water while secretly
drinking wine. (ey pretend to be more
racist, sexist and traditional than what
their actual and private actions attest to.
A common ‘object of fear’ can certainly
increase the sovereignty overall, yet this
insincerity and even deceit of different
publics also increases the terrain of waysof-saying and begins to put an end to the
idealised, uncomplex behaviours that
we are meant to be living in. Or, as John
Howard would have it, the behaviours and
ideals that were seen to be so good in the
past, that we need to get back to now. (is
is the scandal of modernity and its relation
to the unsayable that allowed the Catholic
church to rape so many children in the
twentieth century.
We rely on and take refuge in the
unspeakable rather than accepting that
nearly everything is difficult to express
or document and we rarely know what is
actually going on either individually or collectively. One thing is for sure, it’s possible
to use a word like materialism without
knowing what it means.
(e state-of-nature that (omas
Hobbes so o8en cautions and warns us
about as the ultimate object of fear could
in fact be a litany and corollary of all our
MATERIALISM
dense and complex needs, desires and
behaviours.
Jon Campbell is ingenious and
disingenuous in making ignorance or
innocence material. Whitlam spawned
a lot of Culture: (e Whitlams, (e
Post_Goughists and more. You think
that’s a bad leap? Well that’s what I’m
looking for. Gough Whitlam was actually
in that second Barry McKenzie film,
I think he makes Edna a Dame in it.
(e irony is that people in the art
world, corporations and governments,
govern to govern. By being sincere we
make ourselves visible to reify and repeat
what-we-already-know, to restate the
same tawdry constrictions that more or
less prevent us from speaking and saying
the unutterable. But let’s get back to
irony… Jon Campbell in his earlier works
bemoans cover versions, presumably
through a desire for something authentic.
In what juvenile way could a symbol be
actually connected to reality in the first
place? (at could only be a trick. (is
could be bad for the market.
Somehow instead of talking about
duplicitous, contradictory and ironic signifiers in theory and philosophy, the critic
will generally bet with the possibility that
no-one-will-understand such complexity
and return to and insist on the bonding
unity of sincerity. We do have the universities, the resources and globalisation to
think otherwise.
I’m in Hong Kong. Every time I go
out I see these red busses with ‘sincerity’
and ‘eternity’ written on the back. What
am I meant to think? Maybe rather than
sincerity being a resistance to alterity, it
could be the willingness to attempt to
absorb all the possibilities and still have
something to say.
1
NOTES
Robert Nelson, ‘Figuring out sincerity without the
irony’, The Age, 15 August 2012, http://www.theage.
com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/figuringout-sincerity-without-irony-20120814-246l7.html
accessed on 15 October 2012.
GEOFF LOWE & JACQUELINE RIVA
A Constructed World (Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe)
have been working together since 1993 in a multi-model
practice, producing performances, publications,
paintings and video works.
2
3
Ibid.
Samantha Frost, Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy
in New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics,
Duke University Press, 2010. p. 158.
27
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
John Demos
Creation /0-/
Image courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Josie Cavallaro
28
THE SCAFFOLDED ARTIST
ARTICLE:
WORDS:
HUGH NICHOLS
The Scaffolded Artist:
Professionalisation in
the supported studio
Hugh Nichols
Few artists are independent. Almost all
rely on or seek support of some kind.
(ere are, however, certain artists that
require particular types of support. In
/0-0 I became involved in a project called
the Supported Studios Network (SSN).
(e working group that maintains the
project consists mostly of artists who work
within visual arts studios that support the
professional development of differentlyabled artists. (ese institutions are called,
unsurprisingly, ‘supported studios’. (e
SSN has numerous aims and objectives,
all of which pivot around the belief that
‘supported artists’ are able to contribute
meaningfully to cultural production
in Australia and therefore should have
access to development opportunities in all
aspects of professionalised art making.
they are included in the dubious category
of ‘outsider art’, whereby they become
fetishised as practitioners allegedly
operating beyond the despoiling influence
of commercial or professional concerns.
In Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives,
Colin Rhodes describes the outsider artist
in such terms as to place them beyond the
reach of professionalisation:
!e False Economy of Outsider Art
Efforts to professionalise the supported
artist are necessary to counter the historical positioning of differently-abled artists
within non-professional contexts. Such
artists are o8en seen as practicing within
a psychological or health framework — art
therapy — in which art making is a method
rather than a cultural form. Alternatively
Outsider art is an outdated method
for framing non-normative cultural
production. (e implication of Rhodes’
use of past tense in his description of
the outsider archetype suggests such
designations are relevant to art history,
but not contemporary practice. Despite
this, supported studios o8en promote
their artists as outsiders, either because
(e desire to make images and to communicate something of the otherwise
unsayable is innate in all of us… A few
people become professional makers
of images or spectacle, that is artists in
the modern western sense. But there is
also a rich and varied group of creators
who did not fit into the official category
of the professional artist, however it is
defined.1
29
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
curators and other artists have suggested
this term for their artists, or to access a
market through which to sell work and
continue supporting their artists. It takes
only a cursory survey of the outsider art
market in Australia to realise that this
is shortsighted and delusional, not least
because the market is small and unlikely
to grow, but also because the concept
of a professionalised outsider artist is a
contradiction in terms.
Within the theoretical confines of
outsider art there is no room for an artist’s
participation in any non-art-making activities associated with a professionalised
practice, such as formal training, networking, discussion, promotion and association
with artistic networks. To apply the label
of outsider to an artist on their behalf is
to ghettoise them within a narrow and
unbending market not equipped to
sustain professional practices.
!e Apparitional Mainstream
Even when studios eschew outsider art as
a mechanism to professionally develop
their artists, what o8en remains as a
rallying point is a common and highly
developed awareness of these artists’
perceived marginalisation from the
so-called ‘mainstream’ art world.
Studio , a northern Sydney
studio, recently held a panel discussion
on this topic at Sydney College of the
Arts as part of a symposium focused on
supported studios, assisted by a grant
from the National Association for the
Visual Arts (). One panel member
representing a Sydney artist-run initiative
made it clear that, while he would normally object to being cast as representing
the ‘mainstream’, in the context of the
panel he would make an exception. (e
participant’s willingness to sublimate his
discomfort with the term ‘mainstream’
is emblematic of current tendencies
surrounding work to professionalise
supported artists. To some degree it has
become the norm to describe this work
as being primarily the act of integrating
the supported artist with an apparitional
mainstream, while simultaneously
30
ARTICLES
pushing aside concerns about the equivocality of that term.
Adam Geczy describes the art world
as it exists within contemporaneity as a
‘system of fluid and constantly redefining
demarcations’ and argues that ‘there have
always been outsides to art, and these
outsides are multiple and exist according
to many categories’.2 Geczy’s view is
paralleled by Rhodes, who describes
this world as a ‘complex set of dynamic
relationships’ amongst artists and institutions, and furthered by Hans Belting,
who, in equating contemporary art with
the concept of ‘global’ art, elucidates a
model most readily defined by its lack of
definition:
Art on a global scale does not imply an
inherent aesthetic quality which could
be identified as such, nor a global concept of what is to be regarded as art…
it indicates a loss of context or focus
and includes its own contradiction by
implying the counter movement of
regionalism and tribalisation.3
(is view seemingly destabilises
sector-based projects, such as the SSN,
by suggesting that there is, theoretically,
no definable supported studio sector
for them to represent. Simultaneously,
it illuminates professionalisation —
supported or not — as being a subjective
and highly individualised process with
no common beginning, pathway or end.
Such a process is not a strategic project or
industry trend but rather an endless series
of projects undertaken on an artist-byartist basis within the detribalised and
interwoven network of individual artists
and institutions that Belting, Rhodes and
Geczy describe.
How this plays out in real terms can
be demonstrated by the recent Studio
 project, Studio  Collaborate.
(rough this project a number of supported artists were paired with practicing
professional artists relevant within their
discipline. For example, supported artist
Robert Smith was paired with installation
artist Alison Clouston. Smith produces
work prolifically, predominately by
THE SCAFFOLDED ARTIST
HUGH NICHOLS
drawing masses of small portraits on any
paper he can access. On a material level
his practice is basic; however its simplicity obscures the complex emotional
processes and layers of meaning that his
process represents. Clouston’s role in
the project was not to advise Smith on
technical matters, but to assist him in
refining the complexities of his process
into something communicable through
installation and video work. Meanwhile,
Matthew Calandra was mentored by
Michael Kempson, artist and director of
Cicada Press at the College of Fine Arts.
Unlike Clouston, Kempson’s role was
not to assist in the development of the
conceptual basis for Calandra’s work, but
to expose him to new and more complex
production techniques than he had
experienced in the supported studio, as
well as a network of like-minded artists.
A key factor in the project’s success
was its facilitation by studio staff possessing in-depth understanding of each artist’s
individual practice, the multiplicity of
artistic networks operating within Sydney
and, most importantly, which of these
networks offered the best professional
opportunities to the artists.
It is o8en the case that supported
artists do not discuss their work with
other artists, collectors, curators, writers
or dealers. (is may be because they are
unable to access opportunities to do so,
because they are not interested in doing
so or, in some cases, because they are
simply unable to do so. Networking and
integration into any community can be
difficult for the supported artist, but this
is especially true of contemporary art
communities, as they are mostly based
in the inner city, while supported studios
are o8en (though not always) located
in suburban or regional areas. (ese
include: Project Insideout in the northern
Sydney suburb of North Ryde, NSW,
or Art Unlimited in Geelong, Victoria.
Where studios are located in more central
locations, such as Arts Project Australia
in Northcote, Victoria, or Roomies in
Marrickville, NSW, they tend to enjoy a
noticeably higher profile among contemporary art networks.
If the supported artist is unable or
unwilling to talk about their work or that
of others at a theoretical level, and be
seen as doing so, does this immediately
disqualify them from opportunities to
professionalise their practice? Is it possible or acceptable for an artist to develop
a professional practice by allowing others
to apply critical distance to the work on
their behalf? Can the support of a studio
extend this far?
Critical Distance and
the Art of Talking
What other non-art-making skills are
required of a professionalised artist?
Rhodes repeatedly argues that, in order
to operate professionally within the cut
and thrust of the art world, however it is
defined, an artist is ‘not least expected
to talk: to other artists, to dealers, critics,
curators, and to collectors, about art’ and
to be seen as doing so.4 Besides simply
supporting the expansion of professional
networks, this act of speaking allows an
artist to communicate a rationale for their
presence within the networks they seek
to operate within. (ere are innumerable ideas, critical theories or points
of view available to the artist for this
purpose, however none can be deployed
convincingly without evident application
of critical distance, a process requiring
engagement with art at a theoretical level.
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré:
!e Scaffolded International Artist
Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré has
been prolifically producing work since
the -230s. His work explores a number of
ideas including the documentation of his
own visions, which began in -2@1, and the
modest task of drawing together all the
knowledge of the world in a single work.
Bouabré’s professional career as an
artist began with his inclusion in the
landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre
(Magicians of the Earth), curated by
Jean-Hubert Martin and displayed at the
Pompidou Centre, Paris, in -212. Since
that exhibition, Bouabré has gone on to
31
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
participate in solo and group exhibitions
at reputable galleries in the UK, Spain,
France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Japan
and Sweden, and in Australia as part of
the Gallery of Modern Art’s @"st Century:
Art in the First Decade.
In a review of a Bouabré retrospective
at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery in /003,
critic Richard Dorment justifies Bouabré’s
practice for him by applying critical analysis to the work and stating unequivocally
that it is derived from a professionalised
practice.
the very least, according to the guidelines
set out by ,6 can be considered
professional artists. John Demos is a
supported artist whose work explores
complex systems such as science, mathematics and language. He has received
formal training, exhibits regularly, offers
work for sale, has received grants and
undertakes residencies, and he has done
all of these things with support and guidance from the coordinator of the Project
Insideout studio at Macquarie Hospital.
If the fluidity of visual arts networks
can accommodate artists such as Demos
and Bouabré, and it is acceptable for
them to professionalise with the support
of a third party, then theoretically all that
remains is to ensure that the structure that
supports them is able to do so over the
course of a career. (is cannot be achieved
without significant long-term funding.
When considered with this intimidating
long-term view, it becomes apparent that
the appropriate function of a group such
as the Supported Studios Network is not
to professionalise the supported artist, but
to assist the supported studio in identifying sustainable income streams and
methods for providing continual support
to their artists. In other words, it is our job
to do what all other representative bodies
seek to do: build a better, stronger scaffold
capable of providing safety and structure
to professionals working in an uncertain
industry.
Bouabré more than holds his own.
I can’t say this exhibition transforms
him into a major artist, but then I’m
sure Bouabré doesn’t give much
consideration to those kinds of labels.
What is important is that a8er seeing
this show you could never categorise
his work as either folk art or outsider
art, as I had feared.5
As far as I am aware Bouabré does not
work out of a supported studio, but neither is he visibly active as a professional
artist beyond the production of his work.
(ere is no evidence of him engaging with
art (either his own or that of other artists)
at a theoretical level, actively promoting
himself as an artist or desiring formal
training. Yet, somehow he has managed
to develop and maintain a high-profile
international practice as a professional
artist, including exhibiting his work at the
Bilbao Guggenheim and the Tate Modern.
!e Intimidating Long-view
(ere are many supported artists who, at
1
2
3
4
NOTES
Colin Rhodes, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000, p. 7.
Adam Geczy, ‘The Solid Fraud of Outsider Art’,
Broadsheet, Adelaide, Volume 39.1, 2010, p. 66.
Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art as Global Art:
A Critical Estimate’ in Hans Belting & Andrea
Buddensieg (eds.) The Global Art World, Global
Art and the Museum, Ostfildern, 2009, n.p.,
available at http://globalartmuseum.de/media/
file/476716148442.pdf.
Colin Rhodes, ‘An Other Academy’, The International
Journal of the Arts in Society, Volume 3, Issue 1,
2008, pp. 129–134.
32
Hugh Nichols is a Sydney-based arts, culture and
music writer.
5
6
Richard Dormet, ‘Frédéric Bruly Bouabré:
A childlike world of goodness and colour’ in
The Telegraph, 4 September 2007, available at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3667687/
Frederic-Bruly-Bouabre-A-childlike-worldof-goodness-and-colour.html, accessed
20 September 2012.
National Association for the Visual Arts, ‘What is
a Professional Artist?’, http://www.visualarts.net.
au/advicecentre/definitions/professional-artist,
accessed 19 September 2012.
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
34
ARTICLES
CHRISTOPHER L G HILL
INTERVIEW WITH:
WORDS:
BRAD HAYLOCK
Christopher L G Hill
Brad Haylock
Alex Vivian & Christopher L G Hill
EVENT HORIZON (very preliminary stages) tier two /0-/
installation view
Conical, Melbourne
Photo credit: Christo Crocker
B R A D So, Chris, let’s talk about anarchy.
Or, more precisely: I was wondering if
you could tell me about the ways in which
anarchist or syndicalist principles inform
your practice?
C H R I STO P H E R I’m not approaching
it from a hard-line political position,
but anarcho-syndicalism is definitely
something I align my work with. I’m not
a big reader of anarchist theory, but I’m
interested in ideas of anarchy as a lived
politics that don’t necessarily need to be
enveloped in political theory.
B And this idea of anarchy is
expressed in your relationship to and use
of language also?
C Yes, definitely, but, more specifically, I’m interested in its expression in
the interaction of objects and people
and language. I’m interested in a lived
form of anarcho-syndicalism, and the
work attempts to operate as that kind of
structure, to varying degrees. A formal
example would be the way that language
operates in problem poem. (ere are
sentence structures within that show: the
objects are like freestanding words, but
they live together without punctuation,
which reflects some kind of antigovernment position. (ere are natural
systems of reciprocation in place, which
mean that if you give someone something,
they’ll probably give you something
in return, but these are not presumed
relationships. Words and sentences can
work in that way too, and this is how I see
the idea of anarchy relating not only to
the writing, but also to the installations
and the collaborative and activity-based
aspects of my practice. In problem poem,
there are some made objects, some found
objects, some objects made by other
people, and they all interact in some form
of conversation that is systematic, but it’s
not a defined system, and so it’s in this
way that the work perhaps fits into an
anarchist model. An anarcho-syndicalist
society or an anarcho-feudalist society or
a commune is a direct form of living, and
that’s something I’ve tried to do in my
practice.
B So organising the open conversation,
the swap meet and the other events as
a part of Event Horizon is an expression
of this?
C Yes, within the contemporary art
industry, those things would normally
be formalized, in the form of a festival or
a symposium, but I prefer a more direct
approach to these kinds of activity, so that
they can just be what they are. (ere will
be overlap, and there will be some bits
that work and bits that don’t work.
B So the failures are OK?
C Yes. But, well, there is very little
room for failure when you don’t have a
lot of expectations, or when you don’t
have a complete outline of what you want
something to be.
B And do anarchist ideas inform your
approach to authorship, and your use
of others’ objects and practices within
your work?
C I’m interested in a view of practice
that is open. An author is necessarily
authoritative — having an author governs
the channels between practice.
B Can I ask, then, how you negotiate
the problem of your own authorship of
these events?
C It’s something that’s problematic,
but I think I have tactics to avoid this
problem. I try to treat these events as
social situations, so they’re about relationships and conversations, rather than being
a finished point. I think that that in some
35
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
Alex Vivian & Christopher L G Hill
EVENT HORIZON (very preliminary stages) tier two /0-/
installation view
Conical, Melbourne
Photo credit: Christo Crocker
ways negates the problem of my role as
author: the work is something that’s in
flux, and which is constantly developing.
One other tactic lies with the fact that
none of my work is ever for sale. (ere
are records of work, such as publications,
which have been for sale, but the physical
works are not for sale. (e fact that it’s
not about commodities helps it avoid the
problem of authorship.
B (e work can be reduced to an
object by the institution, but you don’t
participate in its commercialisation?
C Yes, I try to make sure that my practice is not dictatorial or overly ‘authored’
— and I hope that this is apparent through
its overlap with other people’s practices,
through its non-fixed nature, and through
its use of other people’s objects, things
that obviously haven’t been cra8ed by me.
I think that these details help to negate
the problems of authorship, to a certain
extent, but it’s impossible to completely
escape these problems.
B To my mind, problem poem
36
represents one pole of your practice, in the
sense that it was concerned with objects
that embody relationships and personal
histories, while the swap meet and the
discussion day, as a part of Event Horizon,
were all about the actualisation of those
relationships. And the iterative exhibitions
that were the three stages of Event Horizon
were somewhere in-between, because they
were partly concerned with interpersonal
relationships in a manifest form, and
partly about the objects themselves.
C It’s the paradox of a personal
politics: obviously, a personal politics
involves other people, it’s not solely
personal. I think that’s why I have those
different aspects of the practice. And
there’s room for overlap, but I try not to
force these things. A show that I did at
Gertrude Street in /005, which had performances in it, and which had an installation
that included other people’s work, was
a catalyst for a lot of the shows I’ve done
since then. It didn’t necessarily feel like a
major show at the time, because it wasn’t
CHRISTOPHER L G HILL
BRAD HAYLOCK
necessarily successful in a lot of ways, but
that show and Event Horizon, as well as
Y)K and a show that I did at Enjoy with
James [Deutsher], are important because
there are many layers of actual events and
object relationships.
B So Y)K, as a project, in its entirety,
might be understood as an extension of
your practice?
C Yes, but it’s a part of a broader
praxis. Obviously, I was not solely
responsible for it: James and I were both
responsible for it, as were the artists who
showed there and had studios there. But I
definitely viewed it as an extension of that
side of my practice that is concerned with
facilitation.
B I was going to say ‘communitybuilding’, but ‘facilitation’ is a better word.
C I think community-building is
part of what I do, but there are a lot of
institutional forms of community-building
that I don’t relate to, so I don’t see it as a
community-focused practice in a sociopolitical sense. I don’t give myself over
completely to supporting others’ practices
— I retain my own conceptual and aesthetic
frameworks, and material responses — but
collaborations and others’ involvement is
important, so it’s a balance between these
things, and hopefully this is reflected in
the work. Having these different layers
of collaboration and involvement leads
to some good experiences and some
bad experiences, but I always have an
optimistic approach to it.
B I like this idea of openness and
optimism that runs through the various
expressions of your practice, but that it’s
also strongly against a dogmatic utopianism, or against dogma entirely…
C Well, I intend it to be, but there’s a
masochism to it as well, in that if you have
a bunch of objects on the floor, you’re
inviting people to step on you, in a sense.
I approach it with an optimism, with the
hope that people are going to respect
the objects, but that doesn’t always turn
out to be the case, so maybe it’s a blind
optimism.
B Is it, then, a testing of the social?
We were talking at the opening of problem
poem about the small robots on the floor,
and the fact of them being stepped on or
knocked over.
C I don’t know if it is a process of
testing or not. I assume that people are
going to treat the work with respect and
not step on things or knock them over, but
I’m learning, or, rather, I’m trying to get to
a point where I’m not disappointed when
that kind of thing happens. I can’t remember what it was in, but somewhere I talked
about it as ‘psychological betterment’, and
I do try to strive for that through my work.
It is an evolving thing, it is something that
develops and, in that way, it is socially
active. (at’s something that interests me
about art: a lot of the time, it’s an exhibition of fixed objects in a space, and they
may interact in a lot of intellectual ways,
and in physical ways, but they’re fixed.
I don’t want to make something kinetic,
but it is very important for me that over
the course of the practice it does develop
and change. And I guess that relates to the
anarchic politics of it as well, the idea that
it is in flux.
B Is there an intention toward
deliberate disruption in the work? I’m
thinking specifically of your self-governed
thesis: it was self-governed, but it was
nevertheless a thesis, and so it replicates
or reproduces an institutional form, and,
in so doing, it also interrogates that form.
C It’s a rupture, I don’t think it’s
necessarily a disruption. It’s not meant to
be an aggressive action. Maybe it’s better
understood as a parallel — it’s not necessarily against those institutional forms, but
perhaps it’s disrupting a formula.
B Are there narratives built into the
combinations of objects, or is it something
that happens organically?
C It does happen organically, but
there are continuing narratives. I guess
it’s similar to the some of the writing I’ve
done, including the thesis, where things
are repeated, where things accumulate a
narrative, but it’s not something that’s
necessarily prescribed to them. For
instance, in Event Horizon, there is the
narrative of the interactions between
Josh [Petherick] and I, or Alex [Vivian]
37
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
and I, and our friendships, but I think
the narratives form in-between the works,
rather than in the works.
B So the objects are embodiments of
human relationships?
C I think the relationships between
objects are the embodiments of human
relationships, rather than the actual
objects. Because I think that once you
take an object out of there and put it in a
different context, most of the meanings
aren’t carried over.
B (e isolation of the objects in the
gallery space is important?
C Yes, the formal nature of that
relationship is important, it’s like a
snapshot within the dialogue of my
practice, and of those objects and their
histories, and of the friendships between
the people involved. In a sense, the gallery
context is really important, but it is just a
moment, because the objects will go on to
have other lives.
B As art or as not-art.
C Yes, absolutely. But in problem
poem, and in some other projects that I’ve
worked on since, some of the things are
bought objects, o8en from eBay or etsy,
so they’re secondhand objects that have
unknown histories that have nothing to
do with my practice. And that’s something
I appreciate. In a way, it’s a retrograde
view, and there’s a romantic sense to
that, but my practice is not opposed to
engaging with romance and failure. (ere
is meaning in these objects: whether
they’re bought or found objects, they’re
loaded with meaning. On the one hand,
there is a negation of that meaning, in that
they gain a completely different meaning
in the context of the artwork, but, on
the other, they also still embody their
original meanings. I guess it’s similar to
Haim Steinbach: he has these objects that
are o8en very loaded, but they take on a
completely different meaning in his work,
and I guess I share that approach.
B (e mention of Steinbach relates
to something else I was going to ask.
You evoke with some skepticism the
concept of relational aesthetics in your
thesis, but Bourriaud has also written on
Steinbach, specifically in Postproduction.
(is is a roundabout way of asking: how
much does your work engage with theory,
either with classical political theory, like
Proudhon, who you also evoke in your
thesis, or with contemporary theory, like
Bourriaud?
C I hope the work does engage with
those theories, but it’s not something
that’s direct. (e thesis was an exercise
in engaging with that material, but I’ve
opted for a less defined approach to
art practice since writing that, and I
don’t feel a need to connect it to those
theories. For example, I appreciate the
theory of relational aesthetics, but I don’t
see my work fitting into the practice of
relational aesthetics, in that a lot of that
work has aims and community outcomes
that I don’t relate to. My problem with
relational aesthetics probably lies with the
forced social interaction that it suggests.
My work could be seen as a practice of
this type, because it is inclusive in a lot
of ways, but this is not necessarily its
positioning. I do believe, though, that
small communities or smaller groups of
people tend to work better.
B Your work avoids forced inclusivity?
C Yes, exactly, it isn’t anti-inclusive,
but it’s against forced inclusivity. Does
that answer your question regarding
Bourriaud?
B Yes, I think so. And with this
mention of small communities, we’ve
also come full circle, we’ve come back
to my original question about the place
of anarcho-syndicalist thought in your
practice. However, are there any last
comments you’d like to add?
C Yes, as an overview, I think it’s worth
mentioning that my practice operates as
multiple things as once, and that there’s
not an overarching theme. So we can talk
about it in relation to anarcho-syndicalism,
and every aspect of it somehow relates to
that, but we could also have a conversation
about microbes, or misanthropy, and I’m
sure that that would be relevant as well.
38
Brad Haylock is an artist, a designer and a lecturer at
Monash Art Design & Architecture.
to stop
here
and to
think
that
maybe
it’s
ok
IT SEEMS LIKE
ARTICLE:
WORDS:
HELEN JOHNSON
It seems like everyone
knows everyone already
so let’s get to work
Helen Johnson
Aubrey Mayer
Christopher Wool and Charline Von Heyl /0-0
Image courtesy the artist
#
It is in the social that painting finds
criticality. Painting’s particular set of
constraints, its two-dimensionality, its
‘faciality’, its frontal, pictorial flatness, do
not detract from this function. Painting
by its nature sits apart. In this way it is
predisposed to make comment. At the
recent Paul Taylor symposium,1 someone
— I think it was Adrian Martin — talked
about how Paul, in his general approach to
life, chose to take on the character of the
person who comes to the dinner party and
manages to offend everybody at the table.
Perhaps this can also be a model for painting — painting frustrates sculptors with its
insistent two-dimensionality, with its own
idea of temporality, whilst still making
use of narrative. It can be illustrative,
decorative. Dirty words, frowned upon for
being too saleable, in spite of this being
an outmoded criticism considered in light
of the public commission, the editioned
video, the artist in general as a funnel
for institutional spending, and so forth.
So painting gets to keep its stigma and be
the emblem of everything that’s wrong
with art.
$
Paintings, in the more traditional sense,
are not by their material nature participatory. You stand back from them, you are
not supposed to touch their surface, or
even get too close. (e painter in the
studio at times advancing to work on the
surface, then retreating a few steps to see
how it will read from a point of removal.
Coding distance into the painting’s
materiality.
%
As an object to be judged critically, painting, like any form, can function as a site
for the emergence of subjective universality, arising from aesthetic reflection. (e
viewer pits her judgement against an array
of possible opinions distributed across an
imagined society. (is abstracted perception of society is one in which the viewer
has a personal stake, and is responsible
for, arising as it does in her own mind.
Inclusivity as a strategy sits in opposition
to this, taking its place on the other side,
along with ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’
in its approach to consensus. Why is the
Internet such a hostile ground for opinion,
so much of the time? Partly, I would
argue, because it acts to erode subjective
universality in favour of a different kind
of consensus, producing a universal
community in which a sense of personal
responsibility towards the whole is not
inbuilt. When it comes to the question
of the virtual universal, we seem to find
ourselves in the realm of neoliberalism,
the open market and personal productivity. (e sense of responsibility towards a
notion of society is replaced with responsibility for the cra8ing of one’s own virtual
presence, and the virtual representation of
real-world communities — subjectivity and
universality are separated out from one
another.
&
(e question of what can actually be
termed ‘the social’ now. (e social is in
a state of flux, shi8ing from subjective
universality to abstract individualism,
from Kant’s idea of society to Hegel’s.
41
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
'
A woman at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales thumbs her iPhone, absorbed, as
her small daughter runs her sticky fingers
across the bottom of a Nolan. We laugh.
(
Painting, actually making a painting, is in
my experience, from the outset, a deeply
antisocial practice. When I am painting,
the studio functions as an extension of my
mind, and I am not keen to have anyone in
there while it is functioning in this mode.
Radio National spills out information,
this week about permeate in milk, le8ist
Russian billionaires from the seventies,
the horrors of the Australian meat industry and the latest political gaffes.
)
When stretching a canvas, you make
friends with it, you owe it something, and
it owes you. A crowd of them, hanging
around the studio, having visual conversations. At times I stick memos on them to
remind me of turning points, elements of
content that might come later. (e white
knight. An  machine. Old school
chums. Centrelink.
*
Sitting at dinner listening to 9m Johnson
talking about how his little twin boys are
afraid of UFOs. Telling stories of UFO
sightings, and ghost stories. Really scary
ones. Local ones. Stories from the desert
in America, and from the desert here. 9m,
up in the desert, finding a huge painting
folded and stuffed behind a washing
machine. (is story keeps folding out.
+
(e best discussion I saw at this year’s
AAANZ Conference: Una Rey and
Ian McLean talking about Michael
Jagamara Nelson’s collaborations with
9m Johnson. (e difficulty, the awkwardness they both felt, and the way that for
a long time they both protected their
territory within a given painting, but over
time found ways to make it work more as
a collaboration. (e difficulty of navigating
42
ARTICLES
this approach in a space between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures
in Australia.
#,
Kerstin Brätsch talks about the flexibility
and interchangeability of her paintings as
though this imbues them with criticality.
To my mind the modularity makes them
more a marriage of post-conceptual
painting with modernist furniture, or with
the pop-up store. Apparently Brätsch ‘puts
notions of artistic genius and authenticity
to the test.’ 2 In her view, circulation and
flexibility are posited against commercialisation as though they can be a form of
resistance to it, which is something akin
to positing the oar against the boat. In the
Summer /0-- issue of Mousse magazine,
Brätsch and Amy Sillman interview one
another about their respective painting
practices. Both are women producing
huge, bold paintings. (ey seem to dislike
each other, the interview is passiveaggressive in tone. (ey undercut one
another’s positions throughout, a bit like
politicians. Still, in this context, it is better
than mutual backslapping.
K E R ST I N B R ÄT S C H : … I’m just saying
when painting, there is an awareness of
how things have been used and maybe
an attempt to find a new usage of the
tools in ‘painting’ and ‘the painter’.
(e painter, the figure ‘Brätsch’, how
I use the painter in quotes within the
way I work and the scale I’m using, it’s
definitely a reference to the history of
German painting.
A M Y S I L L M A N : Yes it’s true, I enjoy
occupying this territory where I feel
like I’m an imposter, and I’m also kind
of proud of using a ‘male’ scale, so to
speak. It’s a form of drag for me.
K E R ST I N B R ÄT S C H : O -la-la! 3
##
In the same issue of Mousse, Lucy
McKenzie and Marc Camille Chaimowicz
hold a lengthy conversation, with Michael
Bracewell as facilitator. McKenzie and
Chaimowicz are more on the backslapping
IT SEEMS LIKE
side of things but they are so erudite and
assured that the reading is entertaining.
M I C H A E L B R AC E W E L L : At the Tate a
few years ago you showed this really
confrontational painting. Can you tell
me about that painting and how you
came to make it?
L U C Y M C K E N Z I E : (at painting was
inspired by the experience of being
in an institution called the 
Foundation in Athens. I traveled as
a friend of some artists who were
showing in the city and we were all
invited for a fancy dinner there. (e
dining room was decorated with the
Jeff Koons Made in Heaven series, so we
had to sit and eat under these images.
Over the years I’ve been in several
places like that, with Araki photographs or whatever hanging. I wanted
to make a painting that expressed
the banal fatigue I feel when this kind
of art is used as décor, when we’re
expected to just accept pornography
as a scenic prop in the art world.4
Bracewell goes on to declare that the
painting McKenzie made in response
is ‘infinitely more shocking work than
anything Koons has come up with’.5 I have
always thought it quite a nice painting.
It shows a woman, bored, chin in hand
at a dining room table in an opulently
decorated room. Above her hangs a
painting of a woman kneeling, ‘ass north’
as Lil Wayne would say, fingering herself
as she holds a terse conversation with her
girlfriend. I had interpreted this scene as
suggesting that the woman at the table
was bored of her meal, ‘meat and three
veg’, and that the masturbation fantasy
was the space she would prefer to inhabit.
I don’t find it shocking. Is the subtext of
the conversation that painting can still be
more shocking than photography, or is it
more about Bracewell wanting to flatter
McKenzie?
#$
One of Richard Bell’s paintings was
hanging at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales a couple of months ago, downstairs
HELEN JOHNSON
to your le8 as you came down the escalator. (e painting says in big white letters
‘Pay the Rent’. (ey were holding some
kind of members’ event in front of it.
Ladies who lunch, nibbling on pastries in
a cordoned off area, just the ladies and the
painting inside.
#%
A8er an opening one night in /001,
Richard and I pashed, and everyone else
split the scene. We didn’t care. (e week
prior, I pashed Kate Smith in the back of
a taxi. (ose were the days.
#&
An image of Charline von Heyl and
Christopher Wool, taken by Aubrey Mayer.
Two painters, husband and wife. She is
at the forefront of the new abstract mode.
He the post-conceptualist, moving beyond
theoretical readings. Von Heyl is in the
foreground, eyes so8er than usual and a
small cock in one eyebrow. He, slightly
behind, peering at the lens from beneath
his woolly brows. A suggestion of a grin.
Both a little lopsided. Is it the lens, or
have they both had broken noses? He has
shades of Picasso. She is aging with grace.
#'
I’ve painted a lot of people I know. I did
a lot of paintings of a previous boyfriend
when we were together, which was a
period of about eight years. We haven’t
spoken much since we broke up. One of
these paintings went up for auction earlier
this year. Some people I know bought
it, and now they have a painting of my
ex-boyfriend that hangs next to their bed.
(e storing of memories in other people’s
houses. People laugh, speculating that this
stuff will be written into the history later.
Social underpinnings — this doesn’t really
get spoken about as part of the work, at
the time of its making, and it is not always
even evident until things change. I bet the
artists who lived at Heide never imagined
how many future wall didactics in the
place would offer tidbits about the grimy
social milieu within which their painting
practices nestled. It’s not to suggest that
43
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
Juan Davila
Untitled – Fig '* /0-/
ink on paper
63.0 × 33.0 cm
Image courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art
44
IT SEEMS LIKE
people weren’t aware of this as an aspect
of art production, but perhaps our ability
to speculate on it reflects the post-Fordist
context in which everything is up for
grabs in the service of the commodity,
the tacit agreement not to air one’s dirty
laundry is not such an easy fit with the
logic of the market.
#(
Jutta Koether stalking and gesturing
around her sketchy remake of Poussin’s
Pyramus and !isbe -56-. (e painting
is rendered in sore-looking reds and
purples. It is lit with a huge spot salvaged
from (e Saint, a famous gay nightclub in
New York that closed in the late eighties.6
Anachronism on anachronism. Koether,
dressed from head to toe in red velvet, in
clompy red heels, lies down as she says:
‘a woman whose goal it is not to be walking
on the red carpet, but to initiate to become
a red carpet’.7 (e painting is hung on a
free-standing wall with one foot in and
one foot out of the gallery, as though it is
trying to sneak away.
HELEN JOHNSON
morning, then has lunch, he rides his
horses, and/or goes for a swim. His paintings dry quickly in the heat, so he comes
back and does a bit more on them in the
late a8ernoon.’ 8
#*
Juan Davila’s exhibition at Ormond Hall
in August /0-/ contained a small painting, ink on paper, one of many. Loosely
painted, it showed a person gazing out
to sea, holding a small branch. An olive
branch? Eucalyptus? (e person is naked.
A woman or a man? It is unclear. What
is their nationality? Also unclear. (ere
is a boat on the horizon. It might be a
boatload of asylum seekers, or it might
be a tall ship with its sails furled. Masts or
aerials. In red across the scene is written
‘yes’ in classroom cursive. An image
constituted of ambiguities. (e situation
is so very fraught. Imagine if an image like
this were to take up the front page of an
Australian newspaper one day? It might
incite meaningful debate.
Helen Johnson is an artist and a writer.
#)
Julia Gorman’s blog. She is going through
and scanning slides of a lot of old work,
and talking about what she was thinking
and feeling about the work when she
made it, and what she thinks and feels
about it now. Reading it makes me want
to hotfoot it to the studio and paint. It is
friendly, sardonic and funny. In the post
‘Paintings -223’, she writes ‘Ideally I’d be
like Brice Marden, with a summer studio
in the Greek Islands. He paints in the
1
2
3
4
NOTES
‘Impresario: Paul Taylor | Art & Text | POPISM’,
convened by Dr Janine Burke and Associate
Professor Adrian Martin, Monash University 2012
From a group email sent out by Texte zur Kunst to
announce that Brätsch, who has produced an artist’s
edition for the journal, has been nominated for the
Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst 2013.
Email sent 21 September 2012.
‘Kerstin Brätsch and Amy Sillman: Chromophilia’,
Mousse, Issue 29, Summer 2001, p. 29.
‘Lucy McKenzie and Marc Camille Chaimowicz:
Adventures close to Home’, Mousse, Issue 29,
Summer 2001, p. 58.
5
6
7
8
Ibid., p. 58.
David Joselit, ‘Painting Beside Itself’, October, 130,
Fall 2009, pp. 125–134.
Jutta Koether, The Staging of Restricted Means in
the Landscape Redefines the Terms of Pleasure of
Painting…, video documentation of performance
posted on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=RRt0xMTHcTc, accessed 2 October 2012.
Side projects etc by Julia Gorman, http://
sideprojectsetc.blogspot.com.au/ accessed 30
September 2012.
45
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46
ARTICLES
IMMATERIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
ARTICLE:
WORDS:
HAMISH WIN
Immaterial Transformations
Hamish Win
Fiona Connor
Notes on half the page /002–-installation view
City Gallery Wellington, Wellington
Image courtesy the artist and Hopkinson Cundy
It is o8en said that we live in an era of
post-production, of just-in-time labour
practices in which the raw materialism
of an industrial era is superseded by the
immaterial and affiliative labours of the
entrepreneur and the consumer. We need
only turn to the concurrent worlds of a
multinational corporation’s sweatshops,
like Apple’s subsidiary Foxconn, to
realise that the entrepreneurially inclined
innovations of companies who no longer
just sell products but entire philosophies
rely, just as capitalist enterprises always
have, on modes of expansion that readily
exploit actual objects and all-too-real
human labour practices.1
(is same raw material reality similarly
returns when we consider the role of the
consumer in the era of post-production
which, if we take our cue from Hardt and
Negri, is heralded by America’s New Deal,
which turned the suburban home into a
repository of consumer artefacts, of actual
objects, a condition just as pervasive today,
only it is no longer the private home that
functions as this convenient husk but
instead our very selves, even our souls as
Franco Beradi suggests.2 (us, this arousal
of immaterial labour, especially in connection to the designed product, witnesses
not just the marginalisation of a Taylorist
factory but the central importance of the
consumer whose total immersion and
saturation within affiliative networks of
consumption increasingly substantiates
us as mercurially shaped objects. As a
way of further expanding such conjecture,
I examine in this essay the transformative
role of cultural knowledge, arguing that
this collective sphere can be conceived
of as a constitutive force that shapes the
material objects through which it so o8en
passes, whether these are desks, magazine
racks, private homes, iPhones, or even our
own humanist assumptions of individual
autonomy. I begin, though, with Fiona
Connor’s Notes on half the page /002–--,
an assemblage of barren newspaper and
magazine racks recently back on display
at City Gallery Wellington’s /0-- Prospect.3
Like the offices packed with surplus
chairs and desks in the downsizing of
firms in the film Up in the Air,4 Conner’s
assemblage of the mechanisms of newspaper and magazine distribution functions
as a melancholic relic of real-world
societal change. Perhaps, then, we should
call her assemblage an eleventh hour
vigil, not just to the marginalised status
of physical newsprint but also to the
apparatuses through which newspapers
are merchandised, displaced as they are
by their evolutionary brethren, the digital
mediums through which information
is now more than casually dispersed.
Nevermind then that what Notes on half
the page best highlights is what’s not there.
(at is, the magazines and newspapers
normally hosted by this accumulation of
racks become conspicuous through their
absence. Hence, Connor’s accumulation of
these structures heralds less the marginalised status of the physical newspaper
or magazine, but rather the constitutive
power of cultural content. (us, these
devices, be they the huge metal shelves of
47
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
a subway magazine stand or the humble
stools upon which morning newspapers
are stacked, are retained precisely because
of this redundancy, this abandonment to a
mercurially inclined informatic flow. (is
is something openly acknowledged by
the melancholic tone of the work’s title,
‘notes on half the page’, which points to an
unfinished conversation, to the idea that
these mechanisms of dispersal are not
dormant but entirely defunct. In doing so,
what Connor’s work really exposes is the
constituent and transformative power of
knowledge itself. (at is, these abandoned
apparatuses pose information’s ability
to not just inhabit actual objects but
also, and more importantly, to radically
transform them, to give them life.
If Connor’s preoccupation with
abandoned newspaper and magazine
racks exposes the constitutive force of
information, then Francis 9ll’s /0-/ show
Light Industry at Auckland gallery Gloria
Knight hinted at a future in which the
immaterial transmission of such content
might inflect even the most ordinary of
surfaces. No wonder he chose to enlarge
the cultish form of Apple’s iPhone @,
hanging it from the wall as the reverential
tablet of the current era. However, in a
de8 touch, 9ll inlaid the bodies of these
devices with two metallic mesh grids,
allowing the interplay of light passing
through the surfaces to create a substantiating moiré effect that gave a physicality
to the immaterial field through which the
transmission of information now passes.
(is chimed perfectly with 9ll’s commission of a technician to carry out meter
readings to determine the strength of the
cell phone networks running within the
gallery, lending such transubstantiation a
matriculated if only theoretically induced
presence. Moreover, 9ll’s accompanying
works, antennae-like sculptures, each
titled a8er these readings, further
triangulated this invisible field, literally
plotting out its ghostly realism as a suffuse
low-level, microscopic form. Too bad
then that none of 9ll’s sculptures could
actually render the immaterial content
of this technological field. But then, like
Conner’s Notes on half the page, what we
as viewers witness is less a preoccupation
with content than the medium through
which it travels.
9ll’s sculptures hint at the dispersal
and transmission of information and produces near alchemical effects on even the
most mundane of objects, whilst Connor’s
Notes on half the page signal the ability
for the absence of constitutive content
to marginalise actual objects, making
once functionary devices melancholic
relics. It should be noted that there exists
a simultaneous need for such immaterial
content to actually appear from time to
time in physical mediums. (is was made
evident during recent celebrations for
Shortland Street’s twentieth year on New
Zealand television, when it was revealed
that the soap opera was the nation’s
second largest consumer of office paper
products (only the combined consumption of New Zealand governmental
departments is greater). (at is, all this
very material paper came to underwrite
what is today a cultural product dispersed
through digital transmission. Such logic
is entirely relevant to Martyn Reynolds’
A Longtime Online /0-0, a small, fragile,
freestanding aluminium and wood desk,
whose crookedly splayed legs betray
the physical and material effects of an
overexposure to the virtual domain of
an Internet-enabled sociality. More so
because the desk’s lumpen, pockmarked
surface enacts a stubbornly real-world
vitality that resists entirely its seamless
induction into the virtual reality that the
work’s title, A Longtime Online, and its
freakishly reflective surface might suggest.
Reynolds’ buckled table was not just a
fragile object but instead a stubbornly
residual artefact, holding its own against
the seductive lure of the virtual terrain
of an immaterial life, echoing, in many
ways, the corrupt physical world of Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a novel that
heralds the arrival of a compensatory
virtual network and its surplus material
reality.5 In this sense, we can think of
Reynolds’ desk not as a contorted object
but as a stationary index, which, like
48
IMMATERIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
HAMISH WIN
Francis Till
Light Industry /0-/
installation view
Gloria Knight, Auckland
Image courtesy the artist and Gloria Knight
49
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ARTICLES
Martyn Reynolds
A Longtime Online /0-0
cast aluminium, chrome and wood
Image courtesy the artist and Sue Crockford Gallery
Photo credit: Veronica Crockford-Pound
50
IMMATERIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
HAMISH WIN
Shortland Street’s omnivorous appetite
for raw paper, momentarily imprints the
constituting force of knowledge systems
that are constantly on the move.
If Reynolds’ table acts as a stubborn
index then perhaps the real story of
Shortland Street’s use of paper is not that
it exposes what we already know — that
real labour and real objects are used to
create digital productions — but that all
this paper is used to consolidate and index
a different kind of labour, that of another
constituent and yet equally immaterial
flow, that of the social labour of our
desires. And yet, such logic has never
really been hidden: not if we are to believe
the genesis stories of Shortland Street in
that its appeal and long-standing tenure
is directly related to its ability to tell the
social story of New Zealanders. Is it any
wonder, then, that, during the last twenty
years, New Zealanders have been able
to hear their voices, their accents, to see
their cultural dynamics at play on their
local television, and that we have equally
seen a commodification of precisely this
social labour? From the Colin McCahon
fonts that market our fruit juice, to the
new nationalisms surrounding variously
inflected forms of cultural enunciation,
whether it’s the nostalgic kiwiana of
the celebrity chef Richard 9ll or the
exuberant localism of street wear brands
like Huffer or Federation, New Zealand
has witnessed over the last twenty years
a pervasive commodification of the social
vernaculars and cultural cohesion that
Shortland Street brought to our attention.
Perhaps, then, we could call this process
not just the commodification of New
Zealand, but also, following Hardt and
Negri an ‘expropriation of the common’.6
9ll’s enlarged iPhones and Martyn
Reynolds’ desk provide a tactile materiality capable of imagining the real-world
inflexions of the virtual domain. Similarly
Shortland Street’s use of paper also poses
a tangible deduction of the constitutive
power generated through the immaterial
transmission of collective cultural knowledge. Surely then this transmission, from
the collective customs of a population to
its re-assemblage as a cultural commodity,
is in some ways accounted for, if not
anticipated by, its tabulation in sheer
paper consumption. If so, then similar
conceits are also apparent in Luke Willis
(ompson’s inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam
/0-/, a work in which he exhibited the
emptied gallery space of Auckland’s
Hopkinson Cundy, whilst providing a
free taxi service in order to transport
the viewer to an undisclosed location in
the inner-city suburb of Mt Eden. (at
this location quickly turned out to be
the cluttered environs of a private home,
saturated so unreservedly with affiliative
and socially resonate objects, acts much
like the quantities of paper that underwrite Shortland Street. Moreover, because
such physical details are rendered entirely
incongruous by (ompson’s contrast of
them to the emptied gallery, a formative
space, which, as Bernadette Corporation
suggests, is analogous to the bathroom,
in that both of these domains are the key
arenas in which the contemporary ‘subject
works on its own image’.7 No wonder,
then, that the voyeuristic experience of
this private home, which is so unapologetically cluttered with familial artefacts
(photos and books) of one kind a8er
another, brought to light the compulsive
and yet tactile fervour of our own private
life-worlds saturated as they are with a
similar profusion of physical objects that
express the affiliative and immaterial
routes our own social constitution takes.
(ank heavens then for the presence of
the cab which offered not just the prospect
of a soothingly easy escape route, but
also a transitory space of refuge in which
this objectified life could be momentarily
disavowed.
(ompson’s repackaging of the private
home as ethno-tourism made of this locus
a type of occasion upon which to pose
the constant merchandising of the social
sphere as an accumulative and acculturating presence in the quotidian languor of
our daily lives. Moreover, (ompson’s
contrast between an empty gallery and the
sheer compulsive scene of a private home
saturated with affiliative objects made
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Luke Willis Thompson
inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam /0-/
documentation across two sites:
Hopkinson Cundy and Claude Road, Auckland
Images courtesy the artist and Hopkinson Cundy
52
IMMATERIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
HAMISH WIN
such habits seem entirely redundant,
gathered as they were in contrast to the
emptied gallery where our material selves
were not just absolved but also recomposed in the light of our confrontation
with the material life of another. As such,
(ompson’s shuttling between the barren
gallery and the physicality of our private
spheres was a timely reminder that the
affiliative labours of our composite identities are entirely reliant on the immaterial
connections that arise from both material
objects and all too real social spheres
(whether virtual or not). Hence, just as
Connor’s accumulation of abandoned
structures hypothetically restage the very
thing absent from them, (ompson’s
empty gallery similarly conjured the
remaindered objects through which our
own private lives communicate with a
world constantly inflected and shaped by
the decisions of others. (us, (ompson’s
show also acts as pertinent rejoinder,
reminding us how recent claims to the
constituent power of immaterial labour as
a consolidating social class needs to heed
this economy of actual objects.8 Perhaps
then, it is enough to say that what these
works by Connor, Reynolds, 9ll and
(ompson all share in common is the
idea that it is no longer merely enough
to equip ourselves as acquisitive subjects
but, rather, to realise the ways in which
we are shaped and reshaped, and overlaid
as we are in actual objects, momentarily
manifesting ourselves in cabs, galleries,
the homes of others, and in the virtual
terrains of our social networks. If so,
then what these artists are really doing
is alerting us to the real labour of our
era: that of our own social constitution
as transformative objects constantly and
perhaps mercilessly in states of becoming
over which we too o8en neglect to exert
control.
1
2
3
4
NOTES
On Foxconn’s labour practices, see Andrew Ross,
The Exorcist and the Machines, Hatje-Cantz,
Berlin, 2012.
For Hardt and Negri’s claim that a post-industrial
capitalism emerges from America’s New Deal
policies, see Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt,
Empire, Harvard University Press, London &
Cambridge, 2000, pp. 241–249. On the suburban
home becoming a repository for consumer
goods, see Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth,
Columbia Press, New York, 1960, p. 74. For
Beradi’s colonisation of the soul, see Franco Beradi,
The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy,
Semiotexte, Los Angeles, 2009, pp. 115–116.
First shown at Gambia Castle in 2009, Notes on
half the page was reassembled in a new format for
City Gallery Wellington’s 2011 Prospect. Now is not
the place to speculate on the difference between its
compact and almost claustrophobic presentation
at Gambia Castle and its sprawling and leisurely
generative expanse during Prospect.
Note also the similarity of these scenes from Jason
Reitman’s Up in the Air 2009 and Notes on half the
page with Simon Denny’s Decommissioned Trading
Table / Workstation 2011, in which he recycled an
abandoned office desk from a bankrupt German
corporation, disassembling it and hanging it piece
by piece from the wall, not only to resemble ‘a
depressed financial graph’ as Mathieu Malouf
Hamish Win lives and works in Wellington and
Christchurch, New Zealand.
5
6
7
8
suggests, but also to register the complete
redundancy of this object as a functional apparatus.
See Mathieu Malouf, ‘A Painting is a TV that Doesn’t
Work’, Texte Zur Kunst, issue 85, March, 2012,
pp. 180–182.
For instance, Stephenson’s main protagonist is
content to live in a ‘shithole’ because ‘Hiro’s not
actually here at all. He’s in a computer generated
universe that his computer is drawing onto his
goggles and pumping into his earphones’, Neal
Stephenson, Snow Crash, Penguin Books, London
& New York, 1993, pp. 63, 23.
Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Multitude, Penguin
Books, London & New York, 2004, p. 188.
See the press release at http://www.
contemporaryartdaily.com/2010/09/
bernadette-corporation-at-galerie-neu/,
accessed 20 August 2012.
I’m thinking primarily here of Andrew Ross’
Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labour in
Precarious Times, New York University Press,
New York, 2009, though a timely reminder that
collective affinities across immaterial production
need to cross considerable lines of difference is
provided by Keti Churkhrov’s ‘Towards the Space
of the General: On Labour Beyond Materiality
and Immateriality’, Are You Working Too Much?,
Sternberg, Berlin, 2011, p. 103.
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ARTICLES
Sketching: Bodies in motion
Helen Hughes
Laresa Kosloff
Agility drill /0-HD video
Image courtesy the artist
Scanning the landscape of local contemporary art practices, the body in motion
presents itself in a variety of different
guises. As a doing-body that negotiates
space in Bianca Hester’s constructed
environments; a choreographed dancer’s
body in Sriwhana Spong’s videos and
collages; and a medium — literally,
54
a communication vessel — in Adelle Mills’
short, edited films. Consider also Shaun
Gladwell’s balletic figures performing routines in isolated urban environments; or
Daniel Crooks’ stretched, cubistic, video
studies of human movement. (e body in
motion becomes a mode of measurement
in Laresa Kosloff’s photographs; an
SKETCHING
HELEN HUGHES
automatic drawing support in Gabriella
practice (in Australia). In the exhibition
Mangano and Silvana Mangano’s
catalogue under the heading of ‘Embodied
collaborative performances; and a site
Acts: Live and Alive’, Bree Richards
of endurance, flexibility and adaptation
suggests that ‘live and performative art
in Alicia Frankovich’s. In Nathan Gray’s
forms’ are experiencing a resurgence
score-based installations, bodies become
— particularly amongst early-career and
kinetic sculptures created by the viewers’
experimental women artists.1 Richards
improvised movement through the
suggests that while many younger women
space. Likewise, Agatha Gothe-Snape’s
artists seek to distance their work from
sculptural–conceptual compositions are
feminist interpretative discourses, it is
entirely contingent on moving bodies:
in their references to the body that they
they are incomplete without physical
either directly or indirectly invoke feminist
activation by the spectator.
art histories, and that is a priori significant.
(ough widely varied in intention and
Alexie Glass-Kantor (née Glass) has
meaning, in many of these instances the
formulated a much more discerning
body in motion becomes the driver of the
take. In a /002 article for Art & Australia
artwork. Movement — delicately attuned
titled ‘Extimacy: A new generation
to the architecture of the body — becomes
of feminism’, Glass-Kantor flagged a
the artwork’s language or media, its
feminist re-focussing on the body via new
primary means of expression. (at said,
technologies in visual reproduction. Here,
these physical gestures are performed to
Glass-Kantor explores the multivalent
very different material or physical ends.
texture of feminism in contemporary
Sometimes they are live and public (many Australian art in relation to new visual
of Frankovich’s actions are performed in
media, making reference to the video
front of gallery audiences), while other
work of Gabriella and Silvana Mangano,
times they are private: filmed in a studio
Alex Martinis Roe, Anastasia Klose and
then edited to exist later only as moving
several others. Speaking of this new
images (such as with Gabriella and
generation, ‘born under the omnipresent
Silvana Mangano’s durational drawings),
lens of myriad media formats’, Glassor as photographs (consider Kosloff’s
Kantor suggests that these female artists’
formal tableaus). Sometimes they are
canny manipulation of the gaze has ‘led
collages constructed from found stills
to evolved tactical ways to articulate and
(Spong’s use of photographs of dancers
disseminate their own representation’.2
sourced from old books and magazines),
As such, Glass-Kantor — echoing the
and sometimes they are collages made
auto-curatorial logic of Boris Groys
from recent choreographed happenings
in his famous essays ‘(e Obligation
(Hester’s photo-collages composed of
to Self-Design’ and ‘Self-Design and
documentation from live performances
Aesthetic Responsibility’ 3 — argues that
that then form material for her artist
contemporary Australian women artists
books). Surveying this small curatorial
are making art that actively negotiates the
constellation, it becomes apparent that a
conditions of their self-representation via
large number of the artists making work
new visual technologies, and that they do
that strongly figures the body in motion
so in a manner that is radically advanced
are women.
from previous generations of feminism
Efforts to articulate this trend have
and feminist art. ‘(is generation’, Glassbeen made. (e curators of the recent
Kantor writes, has ‘unprecedented control
exhibition Contemporary Australia:
as the director, author, performer and
Women at , Brisbane, acknowledge
distributor’; they are ‘auteurs of their own
something of this shi8 in suitably tentative representation’ — and that is significant.4
terms — that is, for an exhibition whose
(e focus of the present essay, however,
only curatorial premise was to celebrate
is on the capacity of the body to not
the plurality of contemporary women’s art only articulate and disseminate its own
55
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ARTICLES
representation, but to generate the very
terms of this representation: to produce
its own language, syntax and grammar,
and its own criteria of measurement. (is
ability is located neither in the ‘embodied
act’ nor its technological reproduction,
but is rather suspended somewhere
in between. It is located in the body’s
motion or movement, that which cannot
be discreetly contained by the body, nor
captured through the lens of a camera.5
It may seem nauseatingly dead-whitemale oriented to turn to Duchamp to
help conceptualise a formal trend in local
contemporary women’s art. However,
there is something in David Joselit’s
analysis of Duchamp’s interest in gender
that is worth extracting for our purpose:
that is, elucidating a link between contemporary women artists and the depiction
of the body in motion. In his -221 monograph on Duchamp, titled Infinite Regress,
Joselit refracts a number of the artist’s
early works through the prism of gender.
Bypassing his more explicit engagements
with the theme, such as his cross-dressing
as Rros Sélavy, Joselit focuses instead on
Duchamp’s early paintings: Dulcinea -2--,
Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters
-2--, Network of Stoppages -2-@, and, of
course, the apex of these explorations in
!e Large Glass/ !e Bride Stripped Bare by
her Bachelors even -2-6–/4. Here, Joselit
argues that Duchamp is concerned with
a ‘gendered opposition between mensurability and immensurability’, which
he associates with the masculine (the
machinic bachelor) and the feminine (the
amorphous, gaseous cloud of the bride),
respectively.6
Joselit looks to Duchamp’s interest
in the chronophotography of ÉtienneJules Marey to further investigate the
artist’s preoccupation with the gendered
body and the dialectical interplay of its
mensur-/immensurability. Specifically,
Joselit focuses on Duchamp’s studies
into Marey’s attempts to understand the
body as a ‘graphic system’, one that is
able to produce its own raw data — its
own writing — simply through the process
of recording its movement. Joselit notes
that Marey o8en dressed his subjects in
black outfits with white dots affixed to the
key points of bodily movement. (at way,
Marey could literally connect the dots
and form a line-graph clearly articulating
a notation of the body in motion when he
lined-up the reams of photographs in a
row or grid. (Remember the famous links
made between Marey’s gesture and the
dotted semi-circles swarming around the
hips of the figure in Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. @ -2-/.) Joselit explains that
Marey’s objective here was ‘literally to
extract a language of the body’,7 linking
this desire to a conviction that Marey was
‘deeply distrustful of linguistic signs’ and
sought in his chronophotography to form
a language that somehow eluded semiotic
and economic coding.8 Marey claimed the
immediacy of his chronophotographic
method created a ‘language of phenomena themselves’, and in this way was
‘superior to all other modes of expression’.9
Ever one to enjoy both folding and
poking holes in the fabric of language,
Duchamp, posits Joselit, in turn echoed
Marey’s scepticism and actively sought
out alternative, more esoteric methodologies for measurement apropos the body.
‘What [Duchamp] saw in [Marey’s] work’,
Joselit writes, ‘was not merely a mode
of capturing movement but a way of
representing the body through a graphic
system immanent to it.’ 10 Contrasting
Duchamp’s artistic treatment of the body
to Picasso’s (for which Joselit relies on
the authority of Krauss’ semiotic reading
of Picasso’s ungraspable, ‘carnal’, female
body),11 Joselit suggests that ‘Duchamp
did not disperse the figure into a graphic
script but rather disciplined the medium
of the body itself into a proto-language’.12
Duchamp’s somewhat futurist painting
Dulcinea -2--, for example, depicts a nude
female body moving through a diagonally
striated and spatially ambiguous pictorial
plane. Duchamp’s attempt to convey
movement in Dulcinea thus represents
for Joselit an effort to ‘develop a graphic
script from the body itself ’,13 and to then
use that script as an artistic method for
transposing (or, we might say, for dealing
56
SKETCHING
HELEN HUGHES
- & /:
Sriwhana Spong
Beach Study /0-/
-5mm film transferred to HD
Images courtesy the artist and Michael Lett
@ & 6:
Sriwhana Spong
Actions and Remains /0-/
steel, paint, fabric, stone, concrete, choreography and volley ball
choreography by Yahna Fookes
Image courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett
4:
Alicia Frankovich
Abolition of Gestural Restraint; an Anthology of $ Stills /0-HD video
Image courtesy of the artist
5 & 3:
Adelle Mills
G%& Theatre /0-three-channel HD video
Images courtesy the artist
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ARTICLES
with the art historical legacy of) the nude.
the number of male artists making work
As opposed to Picasso’s ‘liquidation’
along these lines today too: under the sign
of the nude into an ‘arbitrary economy of
of contemporaneity, it is less interesting
graphic signifiers composed of elements
to isolate the body as an object, and more
alien or external to it’,14 demonstrated
interesting to analyse the way it operates,
most famously during his synthetic cubist
the way it moves — socially and spatially
period, it could be said that Marey and
— through different environments.
Duchamp’s method functions to divert
(e social and spatial aspect of the
the body from its social fate as a site of
bodies in motion that populate much
externally imposed inscription — whether
work made by the artists referenced in
linguistic (semiotic) or economic (socially
this essay cannot be overlooked. For many,
coded in terms of an exchange value:
including Gabriella and Silvana Mangano,
the nude as wife, as model/muse, or as
Frankovich, Mills, and — not least
prostitute).
— Hester, it is the intersection between
(is articulation of the body’s capacity
the specific site and the movement of
to generate its own graphic notation
the body performed within that site that
— or to itself be a graphic system — can
conditions the work. It is of the utmost
be conceived of in terms of a resistance,
significance, for instance, that the bodily
even a type of withdrawal. (is, we might
gestures transmitted via video hook-up
extrapolate, is the value of Joselit’s arguand recycled through the three figures in
ment to a feminist interpretation of the
Mills’ G%& !eatre /0-- are firmly situated
recent trend in women’s art that takes as
within the pedagogical context of a lecture
its subject the body in motion. In Marey’s
theatre at Melbourne University: the work
chronophotographs, Duchamp’s early
analyses how gestures travel through
paintings, and — I suggest — many works
social and pedagogical space, how
by the artists I have noted above, the body movement is learned. A similar reference
in motion not only articulates and disto feedback loops, interpretation and
seminates its own representation through
learning — this time in the flat space
a language system that is immanent to it
of the Internet — informs the gestures
— movement — but also generates the very
of Frankovich in Abolition of Gestural
terms of this representation, and thus
Restraint; an Anthology of $ Stills /0-- too.
creates a rupture in the broader field of
What connects each of these highly
representation itself. Within this field, the
variegated practices is a decision made
body in motion asserts itself as somehow
at some point to represent the body in
unassimilable, as partially unknowable.
motion in some way. In doing this, these
With this in mind, the trope of the
artists submit these bodies in motion to
body returns not as an art historical
the realm of art and thus of images. In
icon, but rather as a type of medium — or
his beautiful book Confronting Images,
perhaps its support (the technical support the French image theorist Georges
of movement). In this way, the almost
Didi-Huberman sketches a paradox
automatic invocation of the legacy of the
pertaining to the representation of
female body as iconic — of the traditional
movement specific to the medium
nude model in Western painting, or
of photography that is useful here in
the live body of more recent feminist
conclusion. He describes the paradox in
performance art practices from the -250s
roughly the following terms: say you want
onwards — is sidestepped in lieu of a meth- to photograph a moving object, you have
odological approach to form. (at is to
two options: one is to capture the object
say, the body (in motion) here is partially
truthfully in motion through a still or a
abandoned as an image and is instead
series of stills (Marey’s chronophotograrepurposed as an operational strategy.
phy); the other is to leave the shutter open
(is shi8 from image to operation, then,
and capture the movement itself truthfully:
is possibly what is also interesting about
in the blurred, ghostly sweep of a long
58
SKETCHING
exposure. Both methods have claims to
truth (the first to the object, the second
to its motion), yet both alternatives
ultimately ‘entail loss’, and thus entail for
Didi-Huberman also ‘an alienation’.15 (is
aporia in the visualisation of movement
is transposed onto other media too: while
the temporal aspect that is compromised
by still photography is repatriated in
the moving image of film, space is lost
— and so on.
(is paradox reveals an irreducible
quality in movement that renders it, even
for Marey, somehow untranslatable into
the realm of images.16 (is untranslatability, however, need not be considered
a weakness. Rather, it can be understood
as a tactic. With regard to contemporary
art made by women depicting the
body in motion, perhaps we could then
extrapolate that it points to an impulse to
present the body as locked in a dialectical
state: of producing and disseminating
its own representation on the one
hand, and as something intrinsically
1
3
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
NOTES
Thank you to Vivian Ziherl.
Bree Richards, ‘Embodied Acts: Live and alive — an
email roundtable’, Contemporary Australia: Women,
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art,
Brisbane, 2012, p. 173.
Alexie Glass, ‘Extimacy: A new generation of
feminism’, Art & Australia, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring
2009, p. 135.
See Boris Groys, ‘The Obligation to Self-Design’,
e-flux, No. 11, 2008; and Boris Groys, ‘Self-Design
and Aesthetic Responsibility’, e-flux, No. 7, 2009.
Glass, ‘Extimacy’, 2009, p. 139.
A brief caveat: this essay, which is a provisional
sketch at best, encompasses but does not
specifically deal with the prevalent trope of
choreography and the body — as opposed to
movement more generally — in contemporary art.
It leaves this much more refined task to the excellent
and already extant studies on this topic. See, for
instance, Sarah Hopkinson’s beautiful essay on
Spong’s work from 2010: Sarah Hopkinson, ‘Palms
Facing Skyward’, Nijinsky: Sriwhana Spong, Clouds,
Auckland, 2010, pp. 23–31.
David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp
1910–1941, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1998, p. 28.
Ibid. p. 54.
Ibid. p. 54.
Étienne-Jules Marey in David Joselit, Infinite
Regress, 1998, p. 54.
HELEN HUGHES
unknowable or immensurable on the
other. In thinking about the decision to
depict the body in motion, a gesture that
necessarily and knowingly entails a loss,
‘an alienation’, perhaps we inch closer to
an understanding of the meaningfulness
of its increasing presence in the landscape
of contemporary women’s art.
Helen Hughes is a PhD candidate in art history at the
University of Melbourne, co-editor of Discipline, and an
editor of emaj, the Electronic Melbourne Art Journal.
10 David Joselit, Infinite Regress, 1998, p. 55.
11 David Joselit cites Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Motivation
of the Sign’, in William Rubin (ed.) Picasso and
Braque: A Symposium, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1992.
12 David Joselit, Infinite Regress, 1998, p. 50.
13 Ibid. p. 50. Original italics.
14 Ibid. p. 60.
15 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images:
Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of
Art, 1990, translated by John Goodman, The
Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania,
2005, pp. 32–33.
16 In his 2002 book Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation, Brian Massumi
locates a similar paradox in attempts to see oneself
as one is seen by others (i.e., in the mirror — or
in mirror-vision). He writes: ‘Mirror-vision is by
definition partial. There is a single axis of sight. You
see yourself from one angle at a time and never
effectively in movement … if you try to move your
body and your head together in an attempt to catch
yourself in motion, you only succeed in jumping from
one frozen pose to another. The movement between
is a blur, barely glimpsed … Change is excluded.
Change is movement. It is rendered invisible.’ See:
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, Durham,
2002, p. 48.
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WORDS:
ARTICLES
Jean Rouch: Trance memory
Giles Simon Fielke
Jean Rouch
Les Maîtres Fous -266
Les Films de la Pléiade
Image courtesy Les Films du Jeudi
© -2/2–/0-/
60
JEAN ROUCH
What are these films, what outlandish
name distinguishes them from the
rest? Do they exist? I have no idea
as yet, but I do know that there are
certain very rare occasions when,
without the aide of a single subtitle,
the spectator suddenly understands an
unknown tongue, takes part in strange
ceremonies, wanders in towns or
through landscapes he has never seen
but which he recognises perfectly…1
— Jean Rouch
Writing on an experience in Paris in the
early -210s, Coco Fusco describes an
unwanted sexual advance made towards
her by an unnamed ethnographic filmmaker. Fusco recounts being coerced
into his car and taken to the filmmaker’s
childhood home, a rural plot in an abandoned area, where he commences to mow
the lawn in his underwear asking her to
collect nuts and berries. At the time, Fusco
was an aspiring film graduate meeting
to discuss the possibility of work on an
upcoming project; she was understandably perturbed by his actions. ‘Deeply
immersed in his own fantasy world’, Fusco
describes the projection of the man’s
imaginary as an excessive incursion
into their shared reality with a summary
GILES SIMON FIELKE
feeling of subjective erasure: ‘What I
thought I was, how I saw myself — that
was irrelevant.’ 2 Synoptically, the hazy
and indistinct nature of the encounter
suggested the fragmentary reality of their
initial purpose — cinema.
For Jean Rouch (-2-3–/00@) the
correspondence between reality and the
cinema was complex. In Rouch’s film
Moir, un Noir -261, set in the Ivory Coast,
Oumarou Ganda overdubs a dialogue of
detachment from city life in Treichville,
a workers’ commune on the outskirts of
the colonial capital Abidjan. Along with
Eddie Constantine, aka Lemmy Caution,
US Federal Agent, Tarzan and Dorothy
Lamour, the cut between documentary
and myth occurs seamlessly across
disparate topologies, collapsing around
the arrival of a group of young people at
the shores of industrial modernity. Calling
himself Edward G Robinson, Ganda
narrates: ‘I’m going to dream that one day
I’ll be like other men. Like everyone else,
like the rich people. I want a wife and a
house and a car, like them.’ 3 As an ethnofiction, Rouch immediately creates a
subjective tension, engendering Robinson
on screen while deliberately confusing
the boundaries between narrative fiction,
reality and performance. ‘(e film became
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a mirror’, Rouch says, introducing Ganda/
Robinson, ‘in which he discovered who he
was … he is the hero of the film; it is time
for me to let him speak.’4 Rouch’s cinema
began as a more specifically ethnographic
documentation, working from -2@6 at the
Musée de l’Homme in Paris throughout an
era of de-colonisation in many French
West African territories. Rouch’s earlier
training in anthropology produced
questions of ethnographic documentation
and cultural disappearance under the
colonial gaze, which was swi8ly replaced
by his obsession with the transformative
potential of the camera. Rouch innately
understood the paradox of ethnography,
revealed by the scientific attempt at isolating cultural authenticity and lamented
by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski
from the outset: ‘the very moment when
it begins to put its workshop in order, to
forge its proper tools, to start ready for
work on its appointed task, the material
of its study melts away with hopeless
rapidity’.5
(e abstract documentation of cultural
construction was an impossible task,
one Rouch learned quickly to eschew in
favour of negotiation, lending his earlier
fieldwork — with the Dogon in Mali and
the Sorko for In the Land of the Black
Magi -2@5–@3 — a sense of mythologised
witnessing across cultures as opposed to
detached rational objectivity.6 Rouch narrated in his own words what he perceived
first-hand and assembled this into cinema.
Inventively dealing with the limitations
of early field recording — short film stock,
the camera’s weight and size, no synchronisation — his work became a fantastic
montage of alterity. (e African tribespeople Rouch filmed are mediated by the
camera, which became for Rouch his own
cultic artefact. To engage with the rituals
and ceremonial practices he encountered
Rouch developed his own. (e camera
became the producer of memory images
that were then reactivated in the cinema,
offering an abject chance to vision outside
of a rationalised and scientistic order.
Back within the conurbation of the central
Western metropolis, Rouch effected an
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ARTICLES
inversion that disrupted the safe distance
the cinema o8en represented, revealing
persistent superstitions and dislodging
the comfortable binary of otherness.
A strange dialogue takes place in
which the film’s ‘truth’ rejoins
its mythic representation.7
‘(e aesthetic quality of the visuals’,
Rouch wrote, ‘were of little importance’,
and his tenacious style of cinema vérité,
following the pioneering techniques
of Dziga Vertov’s cine-eye, produced
images that haunted the subjects of his
films and manipulated the trajectories
of their realities through the technical
imposition of the camera.8 In many ways
Rouch’s feedback method of recording
and re-filming the subjects reacting to
their on-screen personas revealed the
performance of life on film, blurring the
distinctions between the everyday and
the act of cinema. (e camera was for
Rouch a magical apparatus that could
induce trance-state inebriations and carry
clandestine images between disparate
communities. In the forgetting of one’s
persona, the disorienting reproduction
of the image becomes ‘the “film-trance”
(ciné-transe) of the one filming the “real
trance” of the other’.9
Photographic reproduction, science’s
analogical pursuit of reality, has a specific
characteristic that informs the gesture of
those under the camera’s gaze without
specific coercion. (e authority in question is the temporal index of the gesture
that becomes an evolutionary language
within a documented historical origin.
German scholar Aby Warburg similarly
eschewed what he called ‘aesthetisising
art history’, the reductive discipline of ‘the
formal contemplation of images’ in favour
of a cultural methodology that posed an
ontological theory of the image in motion
concurrently with its technical deployment by the camera.10 Warburg’s ‘Memory
Atlas of Images’ (Bilderatlas Mnemosyne)
approached the reproduction of gesture
through the concept of pathetic formulas
(Pathosformeln) that revealed a cultural
crystalisation in moments of empathic
JEAN ROUCH
GILES SIMON FIELKE
rhetorical transmission. (e orientation of
a culture through the reproduction of its
images depended on what Warburg called
an ‘oscillation of causation’, as the images
became signs.11 (is technical procedure
of memorial transmissions was revealed
to Warburg not by studying Western
epistemology but through particularly
fertile encounters with cultural difference.
Among the Hopi Indians in the late
nineteenth century Warburg connected
the images of a culture to movement
in a way that can only begin to be suggested by the cinema’s capitalisation of
perceptual illusion. (e still image moves,
crystallised by memory, through an active
encounter with its cultural value. Rouch’s
ciné-transe, as an activating technique
that approaches the image through the
camera, is revealed in Warburg’s proposal
of movement interrupting the linear
flow of time sequentially reconstructed
by the film frame. (is oscillation is
exposed through a distance that positions
orientation from the horizon of perception
as a set of cultural constructions that
Rouch could exploit when he turned the
camera back on the blind-spot of vision,
the fictional subject at the centre of the
cinema apparatus.
were also taken by Rouch’s ability to
interrupt the everyday, producing a slice
of dialectical tension utilising the camera’s
montage incursions.14 A8er providing
‘walking’ sequences of the public traffic
with Parisians answering the question
posed: ‘Are you happy?’ Rouch provokes a
climactic encounter between two AfricanFrench émigrés and a French holocaust
survivor whose tattooed arm carries no
meaning to the men. (e registering of
shock and the trauma of this revelation
exceeds the playful structure of the film
to the observer, much like the images of
possessed Hauka mimicking their oppressors and frothing from the mouth in
Rouch’s earlier, and most scandalous film
Le Maîtres Fous (!e Mad Masters) -266.15
When the camera is manoeuvred into a
space for imagistic conflict, the empathic
effect of these gestures register on the
viewer, embedded within the transfer of
the image. As a technical apparatus the
cinema does not only reproduce, but also
produces, these images outside of their
contingent historical collaboration.
Gilles Deleuze, writing on Rouch,
concluded: ‘As a general rule, third world
cinema has this aim: through trance or
crisis, to constitute an assemblage which
brings real parties together, in order to
make them produce collective utterances
as the prefiguration of the people who
are missing.’ 16 (e third world here
is the imaginary, the world of images,
a perceptual imperative that effaces
constructed differences and suggests the
gestural potential for communication.
Rouch’s resistance to the structuralist
milieu produces a cinema where ‘experiences of every kind and condition which,
more or less at the mercy of indefinable
circumstances, may become films running
twenty minutes or five hours, which may
or may not reach the screen’, and may no
longer require the presence of a camera.17
Rouch’s cinema suggests a theatricality of
the gesture that opens the entire world to
experience.
By participating, the observer betrays
the filmmaker’s own experience of the
film, an intermediation which, maintaining
Images do not exist in nature,
they exist only in the mind’s
eye and in memory.12
For Edgar Morin, Rouch’s collaborator on
Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer)
-250, and an anthropologist whose adherence to the cultural value of images cannot
be overstated, cinema ‘allows us to see the
process of the penetration of man in the
world and the inseparable process of the
penetration of the world in man’.13 (is
collision exposes the Parisian streets to a
renewed image of its internal mechanisms
as it interrupts the flow of the modern city,
imposing itself in the routinised spaces
it produces. (e externalisation of the
memory’s image through the technical
apparatus of the camera suggests for
the question of orientation that had so
concerned Warburg earlier in the century.
(e auteurs of the French New Wave
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UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
the internal prerogative of the imagination,
orients the film in a particular relationship
to the image. (e question of the camera’s
role within this practice (Rouch worked
closely with the development of the
film-camera throughout his life) suggests
a particular collaboration between labour
and memory, reproduction and the image.
Filmmakers today who share this concern
produce films that use the cinema not
so much to remove the spectator from
reality, as to re-orient them through the
projection of the cinema’s figures from
outside of their historical temporalities.
What Rouch discovered was an affinity
between the technical and the human, as
it concerned memory. By introducing an
anti-subjective adhesion that attempted to
erase constructed colonial boundaries in
order to reach for a simpler sense of being,
Rouch constantly provoked the fictions of
reality — even those revealed in the simple
act of cutting the grass.
NOTES
Rouch cited in Jean-Andre Fieschi, ‘Slippages of
Fiction: Some notes on the cinema of Jean Rouch’
in Mick Eaton (ed.), Anthropology, Reality, Cinema:
the films of Jean Rouch, The British Film Institute,
London, 1979, p. 70.
2 Coco Fusco, ‘The Other History of Intercultural
Performance’, English Is Broken Here: Notes On
Cultural Fusion in the Americas, New Press, New
York, 1995, pp. 58-59.
3 Jean Rouch, Moi, un Noir (Me, a Black), 16mm,
colour, 73', Films de la Pléiade, 1958.
4 Ibid.
5 Bronislaw Malinowksi, Argonauts of the Western
Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and
Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New
Guinea, 1922, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York,
1987, p. xv.
6 Jean Rouch, Au pays des mages noirs (In the land
of the Black Magi), 16mm, B&W, 12', Actualités
Françaises, 1947. This is Rouch’s earliest extant film.
7 Jean Rouch, ‘On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The
Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer,
the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer’, Steven Feld
(ed.) Ciné-Ethnography, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 2003, p. 88.
8 Rouch cited in Mick Eaton, ‘The Production of
Cinematic Reality’, Eaton (ed.) Anthropology,
Reality, Cinema, op. cit. p. 42.
9 Jean Rouch, ‘On the Vicissitudes of the Self’, p. 99.
10 Aby Warburg cited in Philippe-Alain Michaud,
‘Memories of a Journey Through The Pueblo
Region’, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, Zone
Books, New York, 2007, p. 301.
11 Warburg cited in Matthew Rampley, The
Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg
and Walter Benjamin, Harrassowitz Verlag,
Wiesbaden, 2007, p. 118n.
12 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture,
Medium, Body, translated by Thomas Dunlap,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2011, p. 47.
1
64
Giles Fielke is a writer interested in thinkable gaps and
thematising failures, particularly between the image and
language.
13 Edgar Morin, ‘The Cinema’, in The Cinema, or The
Imaginary Man, translated by Lorraine Mortimer,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005,
p. 204. Jean Rouch, Chronique d’un été (Chronicle
of a Summer) with Edgar Morin, 16mm, B&W, 85',
Argos Films / A. Dauman, 1960.
14 In 1968, Jacques Rivette exclaimed in an interview:
‘Rouch is the force behind all French cinema of the
past ten years, although few people realise it. JeanLuc Godard came from Rouch. In a way, Rouch
is more important than Godard in the evolution
of the French cinema…’ Jacques Rivette ‘Time
Overflowing: Rivette in interview with Jacques
Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni,
Sylvie Pierre’ (extracts) (‘Le temps déborde:
entretien avec Jacques Rivette’ in Jim Hillier (ed)
Cahiers du Cinéma: Volume 2, 1960–1968: New
Wave, New Cinema, Re-Evaluating Hollywood, An
Anthology from Cahiers du Cinéma nos. 103–207,
January 1960 – December 1968, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, 1986, p. 320.
15 Brian Winston writes: ‘Rouch had been approached
by the cultists to film the ceremony; and his
commentary sought to show the ceremony as
nothing but a response to the irrationality and
alienation of colonialism because the cultists in
trance become white authority figures. Yet these
factors did not serve to defend him or the film from
attack.’ Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The
Grierson Documentary and its Legitimations, The
British Film Institute, London, 1995, p. 181. Les
Maîtres Fous (The Mad Masters), 16/35mm, colour,
36', Films de la Pléiade, 1955.
16 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image,
translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta,
Athlone Press, London, 1989, p. 224.
17 Jean-André Fieschi, ‘Slippages of Fiction: Some
notes on the cinema of Jean Rouch’ in Mick Eaton
(ed.) Anthropology, Reality, Cinema, British Film
Institute, London 1979, p. 77.
ARTIST’S PAGE
KENNY PITTOCK
PETROL STATION in 365 words
In 2011, I photographed my petrol station every day,
For about two months I was sick. Once I didn’t get out
from January 1st to December 31st. Every photo was
of bed until 9pm, the only thing I did that day was take
taken with a Nikon D90 DSLR using an 18-55mm lens, the photo.
standing in the same spot.
In November, I thought I had appendicitis, I spent the
The petrol station is a 5-minute drive from my house,
night in the Emergency Room and all I could think was
and an hour away from Melbourne city and the
that if I needed surgery I’d miss my photo.
university I attend full time.
In June my camera needed repairing so I had to keep
When approached I would say I was a commerce
re-borrowing the schools every day, anxiously hoping
student documenting the petrol prices for uni.
no-one else wanted it. This was the time of Japan’s
radiation problem and that’s where the parts come from
I had to stop buying my petrol there.
so the repairing took weeks. The exact thing happened
again with my lens.
My friends became mad with me for missing so many
parties.
ing a camera at people. Some ducked, some waved,
I had to cut short hot dates and once devastatingly
turned down a free holiday with my girlfriend. It was
funny for a while but eventually gave the impression
I’d never prioritise her over my art, which is a truly
Taking these photos was a stressful and punishing
burden on my life. I once saw a Dilbert calendar that
took the photo at 5am. Taking that photo meant that the I’m proud I did it.
night before I couldn’t sleep closer to the airport with
the people I was going with. It also meant I could only
stay in Tasmania for one night.
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ARTICLES
In Pursuit of Philanthropy
Amelia Wallin
Agatha Gothe-Snape
all works from the series Powerpoints /001–/0-/ (ongoing)
jpegs extracted from Microsoft PowerPoint files
unlimited edition in hand-made box
Images courtesy the artist and The Commercial
Two years ago, the word ‘philanthropy’
would have meant very little to many
artists, particularly to those with emergent
or experimental practices, however the
way that we now think and talk about
philanthropy has shi8ed. A combination
of the recent rise of online crowdfunding
platforms, high-profile philanthropic
donations to public art institutions, such
as the Museum of Contemporary Art, and
changes in government funding models,
has seen philanthropy entering the
artist’s vernacular. Arts philanthropy has
also entered into the conversations with
government: for the first time in twenty
years, the Australian government is
developing a National Cultural Policy and
66
has identified the need for more support
of the arts and culture, particularly from
the private sector. As a precursor to this
policy, a major review into private sector
support for the arts was completed by
Harold Mitchell in October of /0--.1 (e
objective of this review was to put forward
recommendations to strengthen philanthropic donations to the arts in Australia,
and to plan more effective ways for the
arts, philanthropic and private sectors to
work together.2
(e recommendations detailed in
the Mitchell Review will change the arts
relationship to the private sector, and
could signify a move towards stateorganised private philanthropy with our
IN PURSUIT OF PHILANTHROPY
AMELIA WALLIN
government taking a more active role in
administrating and overseeing private
sector giving. It is the aim of this article to
consider the place of the individual artist
and Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) in light
of the changing relationship between the
arts and the private sector, and to consider
the role of crowdfunding and in-kind
philanthropy in relation to state-governed
private philanthropy.
ARIs, not-for-profits and artists have
been engaging in philanthropic exchanges
for decades: the Australian art scene is
built on in-kind support and the unpaid
services of artists and arts workers, and
private sector support such as volunteer
board members and corporate sponsorship. Recently, the extensive media coverage of headline-grabbing donations has
shi8ed the public focus of philanthropy
to personal giving. Many are familiar with
Simon Mordant’s notable public donation
of $-6 million to the redevelopment of the
Museum of Contemporary Art in /0-0.
In America, an ‘exclusive club’ of multibillionaires, who began to meet in /002,
have pledged to not only give 22% of their
income to charity, but also to publicly
‘out’ fellow billionaires who don’t give.3
(is ‘name and shame’ culture has lead to
more wealthy people deciding to give in
their lifetime, and more of them favoring
donating to the arts for the networks and
social benefits it can bring.4 Philanthropy
has become more personal, and there is
an increased awareness of the social and
moral responsibility of the wealthy to give.
In recognition of this responsibility,
the Mitchell Report recommends
simplifying the processes of giving by
implementing tax benefits and reducing
‘red tape’ in cultural gi8ing programs.
An increase in government support for
private philanthropy indicates a shi8 in
the responsibility of funding of the arts.
Is this push for private philanthropy a
signifier of reduced government funding
for the arts sector? Currently, the majority
of our national and state funding goes to
the performing arts and major cultural
institutions; the same organisations and
art forms that attract the largest personal
donations. In an essay on Australian funding bodies, Marcus Westbury, founder of
Renew Newcastle and Renew Australia,
states his concern with government
funding schemes that mainly support
the performing arts and large cultural
institutions: ‘cultural production that does
not fit this model is largely unfunded and,
more importantly, struggles to register in
policy debates’.5 If government support
and private philanthropy continues to flow
to larger organisations, the emerging arts
sector will be significantly disadvantaged.
Currently individual artists receive only a
small fraction of funding; the Australian
Business Arts Fund (AbaF) reported that
art galleries accounted for the largest
share of private sector support, receiving
$6- million, while multi-arts and visual
arts, cra8 and design received $- million
and $/ million respectively.6 It is of
concern if funding for the arts is bypassing the artist and going directly to the
cultural institution.
In an interview with Phillip Keir,
founder of the Keir Foundation — a grantmaking foundation that supports emerging artists across art forms, Keir declared
his belief that there ‘is considerable
interest in giving donations to artists with
emergent and experimental practices’, but
that this is o8en surpassed by large art
organisations with extensive development
departments and specially trained staff
skilled in raising philanthropic donations.7
Individual artists cannot compete with the
larger arts organisations and their options
for pursuing philanthropic funding have
a number of drawbacks. Firstly, donations
to individual artists are not tax deductible,
and many ARIs are without deductible
gi8 recipient status (DGR) — a major
deterrent to prevent both from receiving
philanthropic donations. According to
the Mitchell Report, artists and ARIs are
at a further disadvantage, in that donors
are more likely to give to organisations
that are already supported by government
funding.8 (is double handling demonstrates the urgent need for private donors
to be introduced to different models of
cultural production, rather than relying
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ARTICLES
on the government’s ‘seal of approval’ of
an organisation to fund. If ARIs are able
to overcome these setbacks and gain
philanthropic donations, it must not
impact the work created and presented by
these initiatives. (e interest and understanding of this type of work is growing;
private support for these initiatives should
reflect a shared interest in emergent and
experimental practises.
AbaF’s Cultural Fund is an important
initiative that aims to realign the disadvantages between arts organisations
and individual artists. (is fund uses
their unique DGR status to administer
philanthropic donations to individual
artists and ARIs in the form of grants,
allowing donors to retain the benefits
of tax offsets whilst delivering financial
support to those without the official DGR
status. Initiatives such as this demonstrate
forward thinking and recognition of
the dynamic and essential work being
produced and presented outside of
the major art galleries, museums and
performing arts venues. Of the -41 artists
seeking private support, very few could
be classified as having an experimental
practice, with the majority coming from a
music background.9 Conversely, the AbaF
assumes responsibility regarding which
artists or opportunities receive funding,
as it takes the donor’s ‘preference into
consideration when making grants’.10
(e responsibility of an organisation
such as AbaF to distribute philanthropic
funding is problematic. If the donor’s
freedom of choice is restricted, the
personal element of private giving is
lost and the same system retains the
power to decide who to give funds to.
A move towards state-organised private
philanthropy could be disadvantageous
to artists and ARIs unless the government
recognises the value of art in a way
that doesn’t simplly cater to large-scale
museum, gallery or stage models.
For individual artists and ARIs,
crowdfunding is currently sustaining the
funding void that the private sector is
failing to fill. Better suited to emergent
practices, crowdfunding, as Keir states,
‘by its nature works with innovation and
so is in tune with new and emerging
practices’.11 (ough it is an innovative use
of online media, crowdfunding platforms
build hype and engagement into the
fundraising campaign — they are as much
about marketing and social engagement as they are about raising funds.
Crowdfunding platforms, such as Pozible,
operate as a business: they generally
take -0% of the total funds raised. (is
means that although the relationship
between artist and donor is mediated by
a third party, it introduces individuals to a
network of prospective donors and artists.
(e relationship created by these digital
platforms is ongoing; donors to Pozible
create a profile that enables them to track
and support multiple projects. (e success
of crowdfunding is that it introduces
people to philanthropic giving and donors
to new works that are seeking funding,
resulting in the creation of networked
relationships that sustain a community
of support.
(is entrepreneurial element of
crowdfunding is demonstrative of artists’
relationship to the current funding culture.
Whether the funding source is government or philanthropic, artists make a
‘pitch’ for funding that considers the audience and the context, and they manage
the funding and the making of the work
with considerable risk. Artists are engaging in philanthropic and entrepreneurial
culture in a very broad sense — Keir cites
the example of Agatha Gothe-Snape’s
Powerpoints /001–-/ (ongoing).12 (is
series of unlimited edition digital works
is ‘purchased as an entire series [which is]
updateable with new works as the artist
produces them, similar to a subscription’.13
Keir suggests that the nature of this
work, being an unlimited edition that
is purchased as a ‘virtual subscription’,
engages in social philanthropy:
68
One could argue that there is a
philanthropic impulse on the part
of the purchaser in buying into the
subscription of the work, as there is
philanthropic social intent in the way
the artist approaches their audience.14
IN PURSUIT OF PHILANTHROPY
(e marketing and sales approach to
the Powerpoint series demonstrates an
entrepreneurial approach that connects
the sale of the work with philanthropic
commitment. It marks a move to arts
philanthropy that is self-sufficient, and
not state-governed, and one that is
particularly suited to experimental works
that have a social dimension.
Marcus Westbury stresses that if we
are going to review the philanthropic
system, it must shi8 in favor of individual
artists, not just arts organisations.15
‘(e Mitchell review must recognise
that the momentum and the most
interesting work is taking place away
from the major arts companies.’ 16 What
is needed is a reassessment of how we
measure philanthropy in Australian
culture. It is important to remember that
volunteer and in-kind support share
equal importance with large donations
in order to present a realistic figure of
philanthropic worth generated by artists
and ARIs that is competitive with those
of established arts organisations. In light
of the development of a new National
Cultural Policy, the government needs
to realign the philanthropic strategies
that validate only certain kinds of art
through private-sector support. We need
1
2
3
4
5
6
NOTES
Harold Mitchell (chair), Building Support: Report of
the Review of Private Sector Support for the Arts in
Australia, October, 2011, available at http://arts.gov.
au/sites/default/files/pdfs/Report_of_the_Review_of_
Private_Sector_Support_for_the_Arts.pdf, accessed
3 September 2012.
The Australian government currently funds two
initiatives that aim to implement this: ArtSupport
and Australian Business Arts Foundation (AbaF).
Carol J. Loomis, ‘The $600 Billion Challenge’,
Fortune, June, 2010, available at http://features.
blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/16/gatesbuffett-600-billion-dollar-philanthropy-challenge/,
accessed 28 August 2012.
Catherine Keenan, ‘Creative Accounting’, Sydney
Morning Herald, 7 August 2010.
Marcus Westbury, ‘Evolution and Creation:
Australia’s Funding Bodies’, Meanjin, Vol. 68,
no. 2 2009. http://meanjin.com.au/editions/
volume-68-number-2-2009/article/evolution-andcreation-australia-s-funding-bodies/, accessed
12 September 2012.
‘Measuring private sector support for the arts in
AMELIA WALLIN
to reconceive philanthropy as being
about democratic giving, not simply large
monetary donations to major arts organisations. In this vein, artists and ARIs need
continued support for small-scale and
artist-led projects that might otherwise
fail to register with funding bodies or
private philanthropy, due to the strength
of competition for the philanthropic dollar.
State-administered philanthropy would
be disadvantageous to some individual
artists and ARIs as the systems currently
in place do not effectively support private
giving to individual artists. (e Mitchell
review identified numerous strategies
to ‘maximise support from the private
sector to drive the government dollar
further’,17 and it is important to ensure
that the dollar reaches artists and ARIs
and not just institutions. Our National
Cultural Policy needs to acknowledge the
dynamic and important work being made
in ARIs and by artists in order to diversify
the landscape of private and government
funding.
Amelia Wallin is a curator and writer, and co-director of
Firstdraft, Sydney.
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
2009–10’, Australian Business Arts Foundation,
June, 2011, p. 10.
Email interview between Phillip Keir and the author,
9 October 2012.
Harold Mitchell, op. cit., p. 24.
Artist Projects, http://www.abaf.org.au/business/
workplace-giving/artists-projects.html, accessed
21 October 2012
Australia Cultural Fund, http://www.abaf.org.au/
arts/connect-with-donors/australia-cultural-fund.
html, accessed 27 September 2012.
Keir, op. cit.
Ibid.
Agatha Gothe-Snape, Powerpoints 2008–ongoing
2008–2012.
Ibid.
Phone conversation between Marcus Westbury and
the author, 3 October 2012.
Marcus Westbury, Philanthropy: Forest and Trees,
May 2011, available at http://www.marcuswestbury.
net/2011/05/27/philanthropy-forests-and-trees/,
accessed 29 September 2012.
Harold Mitchell, op. cit., p. 5.
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Robert Morris
Untitled -230
felt
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, -23@
©Robert Morris/ARS
Licensed by Viscopy, /0-/
72
NOTES ON ART STRIKES
ARTICLE:
WORDS:
AMELIA SULLY
Notes on Art Strikes, Part 1
Amelia Sully
In ‘(e Artistic Mode of Revolution:
From Gentrification to Occupation’, an
article published in the March edition of
e-flux journal about the relation between
‘creatives’ — artists, art writers, curators,
artisanal brewers, bakers, and baristas
(who have the social capital in Melbourne
that philosophers have in France) — and
the protests of the Occupy movement,
Martha Rosler writes: ‘(e artistic imagination continues to dream of historical
agency.’1 Rosler’s article is a critique of
Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ thesis, in
which young, educated, underemployed
and economically marginal ‘creatives’,
who rejuvenate low-rent neighbourhoods
with creative enterprise, are a ‘remedy
for urban desuetude’.2 Rosler writes that
in Florida’s thesis, artists are not agents
of social transformation outside this
process of gentrification.3 Simultaneously,
Rosler critiques forms of social practice in
contemporary art:
Schools have gradually become the
managers and shapers of artistic
development; on the one hand, they
prepare artists to enter the art market,
and on the other, through departments
of ‘public practice’ and ‘social practice’,
they mould the disciplinary restrictions of an art that might be regarded
as a minor government apparatus.4
Artists are without agency in Florida’s
thesis, and artists engaged in social practice are not the agents of emancipation
they envisage themselves to be. To this
impasse, Rosler would exhort ‘Occupy’.
Writing of artistic engagement with the
Occupy movement’s protests against the
precarisation of work in late capitalism
as an incarnation of the historical agency
of artists, art writers and curators, Rosler
suggests that ‘creatives’ infuse the Occupy
protests with not only a training in design
and branding, and o8en a knowledge of
historical agitprop and street performance,
but also the ability to work with technological tools in researching, strategising,
and implementing actions in virtual, as
well as physical spaces.5
Rosler envisages the historical agency
of artists, art writers and curators to be in
the instrumentalisation of their labour: in
political action, and not in creating works
of art. Elsewhere, she asserts the opposite.
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In the -250s and -230s, Rosler created
a series of photomontages, Bringing the
War Home: House Beautiful "#*$–"#$@,
which critiqued the Vietnam War.6
In /0-/, the political efficacy of artistic
work in a critique of late capitalism that
Rosler elucidates in ‘(e Artistic Mode
of Revolution’ evokes Robert Morris’
critique of ‘repression, war [the Vietnam
War] and racism’ in his art strike of -230.7
In May -230 in the United States,
suffused with news of the expansion of the
US invasion of Vietnam into Cambodia,
the shooting and killing of protesting
students by the National Guard at Kent
State and Jackson State, labour strikes,
and antiwar and student protests, Morris
dismantled his solo exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art two
weeks early.8 Morris’ art strike presents us
with a contradiction: the works he created
for the exhibition were politicised, but
their political efficacy was then negated
through his action of dismantling of
the exhibition. Morris created six new
works for the exhibition: four steel-plated
sculptures and two site-specific installations. Julia Bryan-Wilson writes of the sitespecific work in the exhibition Untitled
[Concrete, Ambers, Steel] -230 — a work
created with concrete blocks, steel rods
and rows of timber — and reflects on their
unstable and contingent form in reference
to their political significance. As support,
Bryan-Wilson refers to Morris’ -253 essay
‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 4’, in which
Morris writes: ‘Openness, extendability,
accessibility, publicness, repeatability,
equanimity, directness, and immediacy …
have a few social implications, and none
of them are negative.’ 9 As Bryan-Wilson
suggests, this essay is a written program
for Morris’ process works of the late -250s,
such as Untitled [Concrete, Ambers, Steel]
and the felt work Untitled -230, which is
in the collection of the National Gallery
of Victoria and currently installed in the
exhibition Less is More: Minimal and PostMinimal Art in Australia at Heide Museum
of Modern Art.
Untitled -230 consists of a rectangle
of grey industrial felt into which five
horizontal lines are cut; bolted to the
gallery wall, the ribbons of felt created by
the cuts droop to the floor and, as such,
the drape of the felt and thus the form
of the work are contingent on gravity
and the inimitability of its installation at
Heide.10 Morris writes in the essay ‘Some
Notes on the Phenomenology of Making’,
that the infusion of chance and gravity
into the work of art, such as in Untitled
-230, displaces the work of art as ‘all
made by hand’.11 (is makes evident, as
Bryan-Wilson has also noted, that the
artist has stepped aside for more of the
world to enter into the art and that this
relinquishing of control in Morris’ process
works express a desire to have the works
take place in an arena of social and
political relevance.
However, this political efficacy of the
work of art is negated by Morris’ action of
shutting the exhibition down. In a statement to the Whitney, Morris wrote:
74
(is act of closing … a cultural institution is intended to underscore the need
I and others feel to shi8 priorities at
this time from art making and viewing
to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions
of repression, war and racism in this
country.12
In this statement, Morris differentiates
between the production and viewing
of works of art from political action
as if the creation and viewing of art
were not themselves actions that could
be emancipatory. On Frank Stella’s
dismantling of his retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art one week early on
// May -230, a week a8er Morris, Mark
Godfrey commented that ‘the only way
to make painting’s activity critical was to
shut down an exhibition’.13 Morris’ strike
makes evident that, at least to Morris,
the political efficacy of art is not in art as
a specialised activity, but in the work of
art as an instrument. (is is evocative
of a famous ‘rumour’ in the history of
art where, during the Dresden uprising
of May -2@2, Mikhail Bakunin advised
the revolutionary government to take
NOTES ON ART STRIKES
AMELIA SULLY
Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and works by
Murillo out of the museum and hang them
on the barricades, for the reason that the
advancing Prussians were ‘too cultured to
dare to fire on a Raphael’.14 In Bakunin’s
military strategy, and Morris’ art strike,
the work of art is transformed into an
instrument.15
In contrast to the instrumentalisation
of artistic labour that Rosler writes about
in ‘(e Artistic Mode of Revolution’ and
Morris’ transformation of the work of art
into an instrument during his art strike at
the Whitney, Jacques Rancière writes of
radical workers in France in the -1@0s who
read and wrote ‘high’ literature. Rancière
suggests that the worker who had never
learned to read and write and yet tried
to compose verse to suit the taste of his
times was perhaps more of a danger to the
prevailing ideological order than a worker
who performed revolutionary songs.16
In reading and writing ‘high’ literature,
these ‘worker poets’ ‘[refuse] to be contained by the confines of what a worker
is, or is supposed to be, do, or say’.17
As Kristin Ross writes, emancipation is the
‘right to occupy the terrain the bourgeoisie
had carefully preserved for itself: the
terrain of aesthetic pleasure’, and not the
occupation of the workplace.18 (e workers of whom Rancière writes evince the
political efficacy of the ‘terrain of aesthetic
pleasure’, of art as a specialised activity.
(is contrasts with Morris’ opposition
between art making and viewing, and
action, in his statement to the Whitney.
Questions about the historical agency
of artistic work elicited by Rosler’s article
and Morris’ strike are essential when the
present precarity of that work under late
capitalism demands, as Rosler herself says,
critique.19 Morris may have negated his
works of art and their political efficacy in
striking, but the art historical imagination
of this writer continues to dream of the
historical agency of art as a specialised
activity (what this specialised activity is,
is an interminable question).
1
2
3
4
5
6
NOTES
Martha Rosler, ‘The Artistic Mode of Revolution:
From Gentrification to Occupation’, e-flux,
33, 2012, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/theartistic-mode-of-revolution-from-gentrification-tooccupation/, accessed 3 October 2012.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Rosler writes, ‘The mode of production, we
remember, includes the forces of production but
also their relations, and when these two come into
conflict, a crisis is born. If the creative-class thesis
can be seen as something of a hymn to the harmony
between the creative forces of production and the
urban social relations that would use them to the
benefit of cities bereft of industrial capital, perhaps
the current grass-roots occupations can be seen
as the inevitable arrival of the conflict between the
creatives and the city that uses them', ibid.
Tom Wilson, ‘Paper Walls: Political Posters in
an Age of Mass Media’ in Elissa Auther and
Adam Lerner (eds.), West of Centre: Art and the
Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1997,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012,
pp. 170–172.
Amelia Sully is an Honours student in art history at
The University of Melbourne.
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Robert Morris cit. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers:
Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, University
of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London, 2009, p. 113.
Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., pp. 83–125.
Morris cit. ibid., p. 92.
Untitled wall text, Less is More: Minimal and PostMinimal Art in Australia, Heide Museum of Modern
Art, Melbourne, 3 August – 4 November 2012.
Morris cit. Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., p. 92.
Morris cit. ibid., p. 113.
Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, Yale
University Press, London 2007, pp. 80–82.
Asger Jorn cit. Tom McDonough, The Beautiful
Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language
of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968,
MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 114.
Ibid., pp. 99–134. Jorn cit. ibid., p. 114.
Rancière cit. Kristin Ross, ‘On Jacques Rancière’,
Artforum, 45, no. 7, 2007, p. 254.
Ross, op. cit., p. 254.
Ibid.
Rosler, op. cit.
75
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
Moskulls #) /0-/
video still
Image courtesy the writer
Mum, Gang Boys /0-/
video still
Image courtesy the writer
76
THE MOSKULLS
ARTICLE:
WORDS:
SCOTT MCCULLOCH
The Moskulls
Scott McCulloch
#
(e cult of the dead was not alien to
them, nor a certain respect for those
who were absent. It seemed these
people with their Slavic faces, fresh
and cruel, slept in a photographer’s
prayer-room.1
I’m where the light is black-orange.
(e city is known for its lack of Soviet
infrastructure and staunch and hardened
nationalism. Morning comes as a pearly
corona wraps its bloodless arms around
the sun. Gothic and jangly architecture
stands tall, and between it — swastikas
and white pride slogans are spray-painted
onto a few of the walls.
In the very centre of the city stands a
high empty hill. I meet Vadim — the guy
I’ve been staying with here. He likes IT
and salsa dancing. A rough path twirls
around the hill scattered with dead leaves.
Snow gently falls. Covered in moss and
dead leaves, a sniper’s bunker juts out the
side of the hill and faces the city streets.
We go further up, more snow; the streets
disappear out of view. I feel well out of the
city now as the leafless branches entangle
and rip the face of the sky like a cle8 palate.
We reach a ledge in the hill. A concentration camp stands with bullet-holes in its
sides, completely abandoned. Vadim tells
me of a notorious lunatic who squats there
and is supposedly building an archive of
local military history. (e brick walls are
decrepit and battered — all tangled meat.
Trenches fi8een to twenty feet deep surround the camp, banking up to tall fences,
rusted and crowned with razor wire.
We circle the camp. We yell out. Vadim
throws rocks. We stand and look at the
monolithic structure for a while. An old
face with one tooth and matted carpet hair
rears out from the slightly ajar doorway.
Vadim asks if the man can open the gate
and let us in — he tells us to fuck off.
We move deeper up the hill. It’s getting
colder. (e forest is caked in cloud.
A tree falls down a little further up,
it’s like a throat being pulled out of a
neck. It opens to a hollow. Small green
fires burn in snow. Silence, stillness.
(e tips of the hill are covered in smoke
and mist. Young built men with shaved
heads — buzz cut bleached white — in
camouflage gear and bomber jackets bust
up the fallen trunks with hatchets. (ey
have rifles slung over their shoulders.
Vadim turns and proceeds to walk back
down the hill. I lock eyes with one of the
skinheads. I smell of fear. I follow Vadim.
(e skinheads shout out and proceed to
advance on us coming down the hill. (ey
turn in front of us and block the path
down. I can only make out vague traces
of the language — they’re asking repeatedly if we’re Russian, pushing us in the
shoulders, their rifles still slung over their
shoulders. ‘Ni, ni’, we express profusely.
Vadim speaks to them at length. Many of
them have slits carved into their eyebrows.
We’re pulled into their hollow. Fires limply
burn. (ey talk to Vadim awhile — I pick
up scraps of the conversation. It calms.
Vadim says we’re leaving. Descending,
he tells me that they’re an anti-Russian,
bordering on white supremacist, nationalist gang called (e Moskulls — a straightarrowed pun on the capital of the former
USSR. He tells me that there is another
abandoned concentration camp further
up and that the gang are preparing for a
WWII re-enactment that is to take place
there tomorrow. He tells me that we’ve
both been invited. Unabashedly excited,
I ask if he’s going? He says no, and that
they’re fucking idiots.
We catch a bus to Vadim’s flat. (e
woman in the apartment downstairs is
a prostitute. She digs her toes into the
stairwell carpet and smokes cigarettes as
we pass her, between customers. I trawl
through the net at Vadim’s place, trying
to find anything on (e Moskulls, to no
avail. Vadim bucks his arms and shoulders
across his chest as he practices for his
77
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ARTICLES
salsa class. In the hallway the sound of
television static and porn moans move up
and down the stairs.
earth shivers with a deep thudding blast
… the concentration camp is engulfed in
smoke — snuffed … a full-size tank has
rolled in from the side — it hammers
forth another blank projectile. Unknown
soldiers spill out of the concentration
camp through the smoke and pretend to
be mowed down by the onslaught of blank
bullets. From the hill here, the seething
mass of pretend corpses resembles some
kind of crazy map — strewn about like
islands … (ey pile up and scatter … (e
smell of gunpowder and sweat … Victor
and vanquished move into new positions
and await the narrator’s story and
instructions. Crossfire erupts on the sides
of the camp … Ropes pull Gatling guns,
countless shots bang — all the Russian
troops are executed. (e killers keep
shooting at the heaving corpses, walk over
to them and pierce the hearts of the dead
with retractable bayonets. Most of the
skinheads I met yesterday are not here.
I spot one, maybe two. I make out that
every battle is based on a real historical
battle, and that every one of these battles
that they re-enact sees them conquer.
(ey’re winning battles they lost in the
past. It seems simple — a clear subversion
and subsequent reclamation of history;
the oppressed killing their oppressors. Yet
there is a more erratic narrative bubbling
underneath … the whole prospect of skins
in a city where the Nazis hit hard. And the
event is so heightened and glamorous that
it’s almost sensual. Where do the men fit?
Are they nationalists? Patriots? Resistance
soldiers? Carnivalesque protestors?
Performers? Artists? Actionists? Activists?
Ghosts? (e crowd watch entranced as
they’re twisted on a carousel of mangled
histories — rolling timelines collide and
lacerate and become withdrawn in the
face of themselves. (e concentration
camp today is a fort of the enemy — the
Moskulls seize it.
(e battles conclude and it’s time
for photos. (e soldiers sling the rifles
over the shoulders of dream-faced boys
and girls who smile, pretend to load the
weapons and put their eyes down the
scopes. Women and children pose with
$
(e battle hasn’t killed us, but at calm
air in the quiet room we kill ourselves.2
I wake up, put my clothes on, pack my
video camera and make instant coffee.
Vadim walks through the front door with
the woman from downstairs. I tell him that
I’m going to the re-enactment. He nods
his head expressionlessly and puts his
mouth into the coffee cup.
I careen around and up the hill, losing
track of the way. Snow hits down and
blurs the path. I ascend fast, frantic that
I’ll miss it. I start to hear the staccato of
voices in the distance.
(e stage has been set around the
concentration camp, sectioned off with
long strips of yellow police tape. Marching
band music with robust strings plays
through tinny speakers in the trees. A man
bent on one knee has a circuit board with
a set of triggers for explosives before him.
(e national flag is half-mast atop the concentration camp. (e set is complete with
all original attire and weaponry from the
times — trench coats, boots, hats, helmets,
badges, Gatling guns, rifles with bayonets,
tommy guns, blank bullets. Behind the
yellow tape, the crowd is waxed in energy.
Close to @00 people have arrived — largely
made up of families, women rocking
babies against breasts. (e people fall
silent as a man pulls up to the microphone
and begins to speak over the horns of war.
(e teeth of my vision is thrown around as
the spectacle begins … Gun shots crack
hard and shrill, ringing our ears into this
mélange of history … Soldiers crawl on the
ground through the dead leaves, others
form troupes and run at other men … they
shoot each other … half of the men fall and
play dead on the ground … (e narration
continues and the fallen soldiers stand
… More yelling as grenades are hurled
about — the man works his fingers about
the explosive circuit board like a piano
tuner … He works the board again — the
78
THE MOSKULLS
SCOTT MCCULLOCH
their heroes as their husbands and fathers
take photos. Kids hands si8 through dead
leaves and collect empty shells. A group
of teenagers have a rifle. (ey laugh and
take turns holding the gun and pointing
it at each other. One teen bends to his
knees and folds his fingers at the back of
his skull — his friend puts the gun to his
forehead and pulls the trigger.
All the soldiers stand before the
camp. (e flag is raised full. Many of
them have band-aids over one eyebrow.
(e soldiers call in unison: Slava Ukraina!
Slava Ukraina!
However — just as useless as the Moskulls’
racist and stupid views — it’s also pointless
attaching an art-as-activism/activismas-art framework to this event because
the event has already been aestheticised
before we decide if it is or not:
Art can in fact enter the political sphere
and, indeed, art already has entered it
many times in the twentieth century.
(e problem is not art’s incapacity to
become truly political. (e problem
is that today’s political sphere has
already become aestheticised. When
art becomes political, it is forced to
make the unpleasant discovery that
politics has already become art — that
politics has already situated itself in
the aesthetic field.3
%
Monday, Vadim’s place … I write obsessively of the event … (is masquerade of
history is as demented as it is complex
— does it rectify the bewilderment of
(e performance of the day is a dissolupost-independent identity? A fractured
tion of art into life, whether we agree
event of a fractured people … Can we
with it or not. Layering this theoretical
look at it from the intersection of art and
hodgepodge of a skin over the top is effete.
politics? (e gang’s re-enactment lives
Vadim comes home with the woman
up to the art world’s confused definitions
from downstairs. (ey’re speaking
of Carnival, although they operate from
Russian. (ey dance salsa in the kitchen.
the darker, more insidious end of the
I tell them about the event and how
spectrum. (e concatenation of art and
deranged it was and what I’ve been
politics is too o8en confused with the pos- drawing from it. He asks what it has to do
sibility of this combination being a good
with him? I take it as rude for a second
thing. (is cocktail is written and spoken
— what’s he got to say when he intrinsically
about so dazzlingly and romantically in
supports the country’s extreme sex trade?
contemporary art circles, that we forget
I think for a while, until I see myself
about how it can also be moronic. If this
slipping into the conundrum of making
event employed more conceptualised,
grand ideas of a culture — how it really
convoluted and pompous trickeries of
just rectifies and breeds a new bunch of
subversion, and was also self-designed
stereotypes of ‘the white poor’.
as a revolutionary means of escape, then
Vadim and his lover talk in Russian
this event would be heralded as some
to each other. (ey look out the window
kind of grand artwork-in-disguise. Instead, as the sun hangs in the vaguely remote
the Moskulls are too ugly — they equate
horizon. He turns around and asks how
nationalism (in a country that was ravaged long I intend to stay for.
by the Nazis) with neo-Nazism and white
Scott McCulloch is a Melbourne-based writer,
supremacy. It’s messy — and these curious documentarian
and literary studies teacher.
distillations are even more transgressive,
violent and complex than they seem.
1
2
NTOES
Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, Notting Hill
Editions, London, 1930, p. 58.
Bertolt Brecht, Downfall of the Egotist Johann
Fatzer, Surhkamp, Frankfurt, 1930.
3
Boris Groys, ‘Self-Design and Aesthetic
Responsibility’, e-flux, issue 7, vol. 6, 2009,
available at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/selfdesign-and-aesthetic-responsibility/
79
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
O N A N A R T I S T:
WORDS:
ON AN ARTIST
The Artist Doesn’t
Get His Hands Dirty:
Visible Solutions and other
impossible histories
Beth Rose Caird
Visible Solutions
(In)dependence /0-0
life raft, video, text on lightbox
Image courtesy of Visible Solutions LLC
‘(ere is no such thing as society’ 1
— Margaret (atcher
As I begin ticking the boxes on the ‘fax
transaction’ of Estonian-based entrepreneurial collective Visible Solutions, the
deadpan sincerity of this Limited Liability
Company’s contact form seems deliberately reminiscent of any stock-standard
interaction with a capitalist liberal state
authority. Such impersonal and dogmatic
interactions were adopted by the collective in /0-0 when its three members
— Taaniel Raudsepp, Karel Koplimets and
Sigrid Viir — completed their Masters of
Fine Art in Photography at the Estonian
Academy of Arts.
80
Visible Solutions was established with
the aim of investigating and infiltrating
the Estonian Ministry of Culture’s
‘Creative Industries Initiatives’. Following
research into this state-created body,
Visible Solutions concluded that visual
culture was becoming less of a priority
in contemporary Estonian culture in
contrast to the common capitalist agenda
of propelling creative industries founded
in the idea that economic growth depends
and feeds on the creation and expansion
of new creative sectors.
As a speculative solution, the artists
undertook an exercise in economic policy
with a clear mission: to launch a capitalist
company in a neoliberal climate, make
VISIBLE SOLUTIONS
BETH ROSE CAIRD
art products, and earn profit.2 Worst case
scenario, they would provide the world
with a ‘secondhand ideological critique’.3
(e sanctimonious, didactic and dictatorial tone of the material Visible Solutions
publishes from their office headquarters in
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, constitutes
their dogmatic modus operandi. (eir
commitment to the evolution of the
company’s professional practice is
absolute. (is is their language, and we
are forced to play by their rules. (e
actions of the artists sit strikingly against
the tumultuous political and economic
backdrop of the last thirty years during
which Estonia claimed full independence
from the USSR during the August -22coup. Visible Solution’s work is striking in
its unflinching dedication to critiquing the
(relatively) new economic environment
that de-values its own workers. With
the foundation and independence of
Estonia came the eventual deregulation
of the country’s market, which has since
forced contemporary artists to become
drastically marginalised by their own
government. (is marginalisation, of
which Creative Industries Initiatives
contributes, means that the artists’ focus
on profit and saleable products goes
beyond the historical commodified
expectations of the free market. Visible
Solutions propose an idea of art that is a
‘speculative, reflective and free individual
activity’ where an ‘outmoded socialist
luxury has been replaced by the surge
of production in immaterial goods and
services sluiced through the “flexible job
structure”’, turning ‘young “Bohemians”
into a reserve army of unemployed
freelancers’.4 (e result? An entire culture
that values more and more the rules and
implications of the economic direction, at
the mercy of the commercialisation of the
cultural field.
Visible Solutions reject battling
the social and economic barriers
contemporary ‘freelancers’ face, as well
as opposing what Isabell Lorey describes
as ‘former alternative living and working
techniques [that] will become socially
hegemonic’.5 (e collective identifies with
what it describes as the ‘creativariat: the
new intellectual class at the service of the
schizophrenic capitalist freedom,6 which
consists of absolute submission to market
forces’.7
As peculiar and spectacular as the
economy of art in the twenty-first century
is, Visible Solutions’ commitment to
‘schizophrenic capitalism’ a violent turning
away from the road blocks that young
creatives have experienced in the last
thirty years. Deregulated capitalism has
dominated the global economy resulting
in vast masses of the modern western
population finding themselves an under,
or better put, unemployed surplus
that exceeds the grandest outdated
political ideal of a reserve army of labor.
Over-qualified postgraduates living in
inner cities are forced into professional
work to survive. (is is not necessary to
the efficacy of functioning capital. It is a
hangover of the deregulated economy.
Visible Solutions completely embrace
enterprise culture (they propose that
creative industries propagate the
commodification of emerging artistic
pursuits), which forces an idiosyncratic
and bizarre kind of creativity bleeding
across all fields of the free market.
Workers (who are artists who are workers)
no longer find themselves with the illusion
of a state-backed welfare scheme to support themselves. Instead, they are forever
retraining, re-applying, up-skilling and
cross-checking their own commodities
and skills at their own expense (and most
commonly, their own significant debt).8
With this constant frenzy to up-skill and
sell oneself comes the pressure to be
constantly ‘thinking outside the box’ as a
creative person, bringing the traditional
view of the ‘artist’ as a solitary, studiobound genius to business in a performative and collaborative capacity for the
feeding of what Visible Solutions would
deem ‘schizophrenia’ in our enterprise
culture as seen in the work International
Sales Campaign /0-- which saw the
artists turn a gallery space into their own
traditional corporate office workplace.
It is schizophrenic in the urgent and
81
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
Visible Solutions
Visible Solutions LLC at Hobusepea, Tallinn /0-0
exterior view
Image courtesy of Visible Solutions LLC
82
VISIBLE SOLUTIONS
BETH ROSE CAIRD
involuntary demand for artists to be
needed for the flag to exist as an artwork.
constantly elevating modes of art making
(is self-reflexive analysis of a machine
into frantic commodified skill sets ready at devouring Visible Solutions became a
any moment of the day or night to begin a
crucial performance-based transaction for
labour transaction.
the company. Visible Solutions received
(e spread of information technologies a response from Gerhard Richter, who
continues to propel the urgency placed
painted one of their artwork-products; the
on the copying, printing, distributing,
installation titled Adam Smith’s Invisible
uploading, seeding, making and sharing
Hand In A Cage /0-0 was then traded
of images and information which has
— Ritcher’s painting for their product.
become almost everyone’s privilege, and
Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand In A Cage
to others, a social responsibility.9 (is is
Manufacturers code: BCCD-:/, has a
warranty of two years and its tongue-inperhaps the key to understanding the
cheek selling points are led by a promise
available-at-all-times labour transactions
that it was spawned from the ‘symbiosis
and the proposed non-position of the
of entrepreneurship and creativity’.
contemporary artist. It is a vice that is
(e somewhat holy conception of the
unique and specific to the cultural and
artwork-product is its relationship with
economic epoch of our lifetime. Workers
the collective genius. Visible Solutions
desperately working forever onwards.10
promote their artwork-products by
In /0--, Visible Solutions LLC
pontificating about the powers of creative
launched an international sales campaign
mystique. (e installation consists of
from its new sales office in Monumentaal
one large wooden cage on wheels, a TV
Gallery, Tartu, and offered forty-nine of
set, one fluorescent lamp, one exercise
(what the company subjectively deduced
wheel, one thermal imaging camera, and
through non-disclosed criteria) the most
a medium-sized invisible hand. Adam
important people working in the fields of
Smith’s Invisible Hand is one of the most
art and commerce the chance to acquire
widely discussed metaphors in socioone artwork-product through an artwork
logical and economic theory. Millions of
transaction. (is transaction took the
faceless workers who keep the free market
form of artwork swaps where the use of
money as currency was disallowed. Visible churning along, and the Greek Goddess
Fortuna’s wheel of fortune spinning, (this
Solutions would not package and send
wheel is kept spinning by the Estonian
their artwork-product until the complying
Ministry of Culture’s initiatives and
party’s artwork had arrived safely to
incentives) onwards. Its clearly legible
them. Sales were strictly by invitation
metaphor speaks to the masses — the TV
only, and included the likes of Charles
monitor shows a video of a hand walking
Saatchi, Damien Hirst, Gerhard Richter,
in Fortuna’s wheel, the ‘everything’ or
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jenny Holzer, Laurie
contemporary enterprise, as it does the
Anderson, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert
emptiness, or futile joke critiquing the
Murdoch, Noam Chomsky, Michael
system. (is emptiness comes back to
Moore and Richard Branson. Visible
the instability of the position of the artists
Solutions see any ‘creative industries’
who made this work; their employment
initiatives as enterprises to be critiqued:
and opportunities are unstable, and, in the
the company designed a Company Flag
literal sense, as in the artwork, the hand
/0-0, containing the symbol of a hand, to
must be imagined to be seen. Jan Verwoert
hoist as they conquered new exhibiting
in his lecture !oughts on trauma and
frontiers. (e symbol of the hand refertransference pinpoints the sinister creepences the workers whose hands work
ing metaphor of the hand over time by
for and against, and in tandem with and
considering, ‘the hands and the eyes are
against, the Creative Industries machine.
the medium of empathy and corruption.
Its historical and symbolic weight adds
It’s all about what we do with our hands
to the dramatic and irreverent cynicism
83
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
when our eyes wander. When the gaze
travels and is returned in strange ways.
And what we do with our hands, how the
hands play between different bodies, as
things, demons, spirits, power, sex and
money becomes exchanged above the
table and under the table.’ 12 (ese sleights
of hands between bodies, a focal point
in the work, are demonstrative of where
Visible Solutions’ actions become violent
in their simplicity. In the work, the stalking, pouncing, viral hand lurches forward
in monotonous and invincible consistency.
(e hand lives only in the imagination
of the viewer, the willing participant, the
giving witness.
A8er I check the box that I am writing
to the company in relation to offering
‘money, labor, ideas, time, investment’,
I write in the ‘proposal’ box, ‘How has
your relationship with work and labour
changed in the last twenty years?’ I hit
send and listen to my fax grind its way
to the Visible Solutions Limited Liability
Headquarters for processing and a
potential response. All of this corporate
rhetoric seems to be visual trickery
drowning out what cannot be ignored:
the presence of a vast zone of cultural
enterprise and economic initiatives that
lead to a non-position of emerging artists.
Emerging artists who possess formidable
creative power. It is perhaps with this
re-programming that we can view Visible
Solutions as social, economical, theoretical, phenomenological and political
entrepreneurs as well. It is their power
that employs the hand to open up creative
industries for critique. And for that, we are
thankful.
1
2
3
4
5
6
NOTES
This is part of a slightly larger quote from an
extensive interview done for Women’s Own
magazine, however the tone of the individualist
liberal message is relevant decades later.
This term ‘profit’ is used loosely, or as the artists
themselves phrase it, ‘self-defined cultural practices
operate by providing material and symbolic rewards,
generating real and imagined revenue’. From the
collective’s catalogue, with an opening letter written
from the perspective of the company. LLC, Visible
Solutions. Visible Solutions exhibition catalogue,
Tallinn, 2010 p. 42–43.
See head curator of Manifesta9 Cuauhtemoc
Medina’s short introductory article on Visible
Solutions. Cuauhtémoc Medina, Manifesta9, the
Deep of the Modern: A Subcyclopaedia. Genk,
Limburg, 2012
Ibid.
Isabell Lorey, ‘Governmentality and SelfPrecarization: On the Normalization of Cultural
Producers’, Simon Sheikh (ed.), Capital (It Fails Us
Now), b-books, Berlin, 2006.
It is important to clarify the use of the word
‘schizophrenic’, as often it’s use is conjoined
with a misconception that schizophrenia causes
the individual to exist in a perpetual state of flux
— drifting in and out of psychotic states with
seemingly random, paranoid or violent actions an
accepted consequence. While often the reality of
those afflicted with schizophrenia is a far more
managed life. It seems Visible Solutions are using
84
Beth Rose Caird is an emerging artist and writer living
in Melbourne.
the word in correlation to its indiscriminate features,
that the presentation and episodic nature of the
illness can also been seen in the indiscriminate
and unpredictable neoliberal agenda, in which
fluctuations in free markets or government
intervention in creative industries are seemingly
sporadic. Paul D. Steinhauer, Quentin Rae-Grant,
Psychological Problems of the Child in the Family,
Vol. 2, Macmillan, Canada, 1977.
7 Cuauhtémoc Medina, op. cit., p. 279.
8 Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in
the Age of Enterprise Culture, Pluto Press, London,
2011, p. 7.
9 Ibid., p. 7.
10 Visible Solutions have an ethos of constantly being
‘open for business’. If you are willing to part with
your commodity, they will part with their artwork.
11 Choose from the following business book titles: Rob
Austin & Lee Devin, Artful Making: What Managers
Need To Know About How Artists Work, FT Press,
New Jersey, 2003, and Robert Sawyer, Group
Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Basic
Books, New York, 2008. This small sample of
quotes and titles demonstrates the clear examples
of the expansion of neoliberal demand in these
sectors.
12 Jan Verwoert, ‘Breaking the Chain: Thoughts on
Trauma and Transference’, Monash University
Museum of Art Boiler Room Lecture Series,
6 March 2012.
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
O N A N A R T I S T:
WORDS:
ON AN ARTIST
The Future is Without You:
Redefining Sarah Rodigari
Susan Gibb
On Saturday @ June /0--, Sarah Rodigari
introduction,4 and the other, an extended
departed Melbourne for Sydney on foot.
dissertation on her work. Within these
9tled Strategies for Leaving and Returning
presentations Rodigari poignantly
Home /0--, the walk served multiple
expressed that she now struggled with
purposes: Rodigari relocating back to the
the idea that art should be anymore useful
city she had le8 ten years earlier; as relief
than it already was.5 She even went so far
from growing fatigue with the polemics
as to suggest that her walk was more akin
of her own art practice (in other words,
to ‘a painting’ — due to its greater concern
her internal debate about the definition
with ‘concept, aesthetics and affect’ over
of participation and social engagement
‘effect’ — and that perhaps participatory
when applied to art); and as a key project
and socially engaged practice didn’t
in Performance Space’s  season
really need ‘other people’ to be so
(a series of projects that sought to provide obviously involved. Her reasoning: that
artists with opportunities to engage new
art was already participatory, invested
sites and audiences).1 She departed with
with a capacity to change and perform.
a tent, a sleeping bag, four days supply
A Tasmanian colleague in attendance later
of food and an open invitation for people
recounted, ‘You could feel the room turn
to join her at any stage of the walk. She
against her.’ In another talk, this time for
planned to cover twenty kilometres a day
the /GBB symposium at Critical Path,
Rodigari expanded on these sentiments,
for a two-month period, to blog about
stating:
it when she could, and to give in to the
rest along the way.2 In her wake was an
A8er my arrival, I wasn’t sure if I
accumulation of possessions sold on eBay
should show slides of my travels,
for the procurement of outdoor wear
in which potentially, the journey,
and an indefinite hiatus from Panther
conversations and people are reduced
— the collaborative performance duo she
to a humorous travel story. Or if I
established with Madeleine Hodge in /00-,
should say thuat this was a ‘conceptual
and in which she had spent her formative
work’ and nothing more could be
years as an artist exploring the potential of
said of it … (e truth however exists
participation.
somewhere in-between; the walk needs
In subsequent talks reflecting on
to be talked about in order for it to be
the walk, Rodigari made some key
imagined.6
observations that suggested that, while
It was clear, Sarah Rodigari’s practice
the walk did not provide her with answers
was in crisis. Slowly but surely she was
to questions about her practice, it had
undermining a rhetoric of social practice
brought them into clearer articulation.
that she had once championed, by
At Touchy Feely, a symposium on sentiquestioning the roles, agendas and power
mentality in relational and social practice,
dynamics between artist, audience and
curated by Amy Spiers and Pip Stafford at
artwork.
InFlight ARI Hobart,3 Rodigari delivered
Having arrived in Sydney, Rodigari
two talks — one a Pecha Kucha-style
86
SARAH RODIGARI
SUSAN GIBB
Sarah Rodigari
A Filibuster of Dreams /0-/
production still
Image courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Jess Olivieri
Sarah Rodigari
Empty Gesture /0-/
installation view
Alaska Projects, Sydney
Image courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Jess Olivieri
87
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
took up residence in Minto as part of
SiteLab, an offsite research and development laboratory conceived by Rosie
Dennis, artist and, at the time, Live Art
Curator at Campbelltown Arts Centre.
A suburb in the process of immense
change, Dennis’ project provided selected
artists with a shop in the dwindling business district of Minto Mall, continuing the
in-depth relationship with the community
that she had established over a two-year
period, and a commitment to community
engagement pioneered by Campbelltown
Arts Centre since its opening in /006. In
Minto, Rodigari decided to use her shop
for an evolving installation that would
respond directly to the conversations and
advice given to her by the local people that
dropped by. Originally she planned to call
the work ‘Welcome to Boredism’, a suggestion offered up by a visiting teenager,
and one that resonated with Rodigari’s
interpretation of it as a transcendent
state of nothingness.7 She, however, later
revised the title to __ (meaning ‘You Rainbow Me’). (e title change
was evidence of a crisis of conscious
brought on by Rodigari’s growing feeling
that positive social change was at the heart
of Dennis’ intentions and the political
frameworks supporting Campbelltown
Arts Centre. A number of questions
remained: who was the work really for?
What was the artist’s role within the
context of the project? Rodigari continued
to search for ‘communal boredism’ by
offering group meditations within the
space. Following limited attendances,
consisting mostly of supportive friends,
Rodigari admitted the idea wasn’t working
because no one other than herself really
wanted to participate. Instead, she was
le8 meditating on the question: ‘Why are
social practitioners so hell-bent on projecting art onto people who never really ask
for it in the first place?’ 8 In the end, at
an audience member’s request, Rodigari
agreed to organise a one-hour appearance
by Santa.
Rodigari continued to probe questions
about what defines social practice in
Empty Gesture, a project presented at
the car park turned white cube — Alaska
Projects, Kings Cross. Here, Rodigari
engaged six artists — Brian Fuata, Paul
Gazzola, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Madeline
Hodge, Joshua Sofaer and Malcolm
Whittaker — to each participate in a
forty-eight hour exchange with her that
considered the idea of ‘participation
as gesture’. From these encounters a
work would be formed and exhibited.
(e selected artists shared interests in
characteristics of participatory and/or
social practice — process, conversation
and collaboration — though these artists
did not define themselves within the
terminology of ‘social practitioners’.
On opening night Rodigari performed
one of the resulting works, !ere’s no such
thing as any empty gesture /0-/ — a reading
of a Skype conversation with UK-based
Joshua Sofaer discussing the project and
Rodigari’s concerns. In the exchange,
Sofaer asked Rodigari to tell him what she
imagined the outcome of the project to be.
One response was ‘a room of mist — that
is the mist of gesture’.9 Asked to describe
the mist, Rodigari furthered, ‘the mist is
full of mystery’, and that ‘just before the
mist is the rest of the world … the mist is
man-made’. (e exchange concluded with
a request from Sofaer:
88
By 2am Joshua asked me for an empty
gesture. He asked me to try and make
it full. He asked me to influence his
dreams. We said goodnight. He slept
and I went about my day. I dedicated
my day to him. For the next six hours
I chanted voodoo in the name of
Joshua. At 5pm he woke and I Skyped
him again.10
Here Rodigari’s offering was enough.
On /0 July /0-/, Rodigari delivered
four hours of empty gestures to the largely
sleeping populace of Sydney. A Filibuster
of Dreams /0-/ was a project developed
for Serial Space’s Ame Machine, which
saw Rodigari take up the microphone at
community radio station FBi 2@.6 during the graveyard shi8. Beginning at the
letter ‘A’, Rodigari systematically worked
her way through the White Pages, making
SARAH RODIGARI
toast a8er toast to those listed, occasionally diverting from the task when a request
from a caller came through. When asked
about performing to an audience that may
or may not be there, she said empathetically, ‘I am the one that projected this onto
the world, nobody else had asked for it,
so I just had to do it.’ 11 (e toast ‘To hard
work, may it always come easy to you’,
resonated deeply — the labour of the artist
made evident and primary.
Having removed the need for the audience to participate directly in the work
A Filibuster of Dreams for it to still manifest,
a week later, Rodigari took a further leap.
In the performance installation Reach
Out Touch Faith /0-/ — presented at the
Audi Artbar, Museum of Contemporary
Art, Sydney — Rodigari removed her
own body from the performance casting
her totemic animal, a goat, in her place.
Selected by Rodigari as the most suitable
‘spiritual animal’ for her — due to the
animal’s relationship with mountainous
terrain, and her familial connection to the
mountainous region between Italy and
Macedonia — the goat perched on a bed of
hay between two stage lights surrounded
by a steady stream of mist (this being the
‘mist of gesture’) and was protected by
the minding eye of an attendant trained
in animal husbandry. (e audience was
invited to spend time with the goat, and to
reach out and make a connection if they
wished. As a body double for both the
artist and the art object, the presence of
the goat playfully acknowledged the belief
1
2
3
4
5
6
NOTES
Sarah Rodigari, ‘Can Provocation Feel Good
or When I Touch You Here Does It Hurt’, http://
sarahrodigari.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/canprovocation-feel-good-or-when-i.html, accessed
29 September 2012.
Sarah Rodigari, longestwaytoleave.wordpress.com.
25–29 January 2012.
Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology in
which twenty slides are shown for twenty seconds
each, so the presentation totals six minutes and 40
seconds.
Rodigari, op. cit.
Sarah Rodigari, http://sarahrodigari.blogspot.com.
au/2012/01/strategies-for-leaving-and-arrvinghome.html, accessed 29 September 2012.
SUSAN GIBB
and desire of the audience to enact the
work’s potential for meaning.
In the press release for Empty Gesture,
Rodigari poignantly quoted Giorgio
Agamben:
An Age that has lost its gestures, is
for this reason, obsessed by them. For
human beings who have lost every
sense of naturalness, each single
gesture becomes a destiny. And the
more gestures lose their ease under the
action of invisible powers, the more life
becomes indecipherable.12
(e recent practice of Sarah Rodigari
can be seen as a questioning of the call
to participate and the saturation of
performance in culture. Her recent work
asks was art not already participatory, and
were people not already participating in
it? It also speaks to the crisis of representation, asking how we can transcend and
represent life within a culture cynical of
expression? Rodigari’s projects recognise
the limits and boundaries of sociallyengaged practice and the delicate levels of
power between the multiple, and varied,
invested parties.
When I most recently caught up
with Rodigari, I found her reading a
book by Sophie Hope. It was aptly
titled Participating in the Wrong Way.
Rodigari is not turning her back on the
audience. Rather, she is just redefining her
relationship.
Susan Gibb is a curator based in Sydney.
7
Sarah Rodigari, conversation with the author,
24 September 2012.
8 Sarah Rodigari, http://sarahrodigari.blogspot.com.
au/2012/01/can-provocation-feel-good-or-when-i.
html, accessed 29 September 2012.
9 Joshua Sofaer with Sarah Rodigari, There’s no
such thing as an empty gesture, performance,
Alaska Projects, Sydney, 10 May 2012.
10 Sofaer and Rodigari, op. cit.
11 Sarah Rodigari, conversation with the author,
24 September 2012.
12 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on
Politics, MIT Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 53.
89
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
Michael Stevenson
A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness /0-/
daylight, large-scale paper aircraft model,
mirror, lens, buttermilk on plexiglas
installation at Portikus
Image courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Helena Schlichting
92
MICHAEL STEVENSON
O N A N A R T I S T:
WORDS:
ANNA PARLANE
Maths, Flight and the Devil:
Two exhibitions by
Michael Stevenson
Anna Parlane
Michael Stevenson
Nueva Matemática
Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo,
Mexico City
/5 August – -1 November /0-/
A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness
Portikus, Frankfurt am Main
/2 September – / December /0-/
Flying into Mexico City’s Benito Juarez
While I am following Stevenson
airport, the city is resplendent in its
around the world, first Mexico, then
massive, sprawling entirety. It resembles
Germany, he’s tracking someone else
nothing more than a tide, a swollen flood
— an extraordinary man, no longer
of architecture, surging through every
alive. José de Jesús Martínez (-2/2–2-),
available crevice and lapping at the necks
Nicaraguan by birth but Panamanian
of the mountains that contain it. From my
by choice, was universally known in his
omniscient plane’s-eye view, I can read,
adopted country as ‘Chuchú’. A man of
map-like, the landmarks that are already
many and various talents, Chuchú was a
familiar from my Internet research half
mathematician, philosopher, soldier, poet,
a world away. Bosque de Chapultepec,
playwright and a keen aviator who owned
the huge central city park, is easy to spot,
and flew several light aircra8. He held
and I think I can see the Museo Tamayo
doctorates from universities in Paris
among the trees at the park’s eastern end.
and Madrid, taught abstract algebra and
I’m here to see an exhibition by the
mathematical logic at the Universidad de
Berlin-based New Zealand artist Michael
Panamá, and worked as bodyguard and
Stevenson. (e project was commissioned aide to General Omar Torrijos, Panama’s
by Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
military leader -251–1-. Chuchú’s love
as part of a six-exhibition suite to celelife was complex enough for him to never
brate its reopening a8er year-long renova- be able to remember how many children
tions. Stevenson’s exhibition in Mexico,
he had, but he suspected it to be ‘about
Nueva Matemática, is the first of two that I
twelve’.1 During the Sandinista uprising in
will see on this trip — he is also staging an
Nicaragua in the -230s, Chuchú regularly
exhibition titled A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, risked his life, flying weapons and food to
and Blindness at Portikus, in Frankfurt am
the revolutionaries’ guerrilla camps in the
Main, Germany. Two chapters of the same mountains, and transporting Nicaraguan
investigation, the exhibitions link two very refugees back into Panama. In the
different locations.
words of the Argentine journalist Stella
93
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
Calloni: ‘He was dark and luminous at the
Shah of Iran and his family who, fleeing
same time.’ 2
the revolution in Iran, having been turned
(e Museo Tamayo is made up of a
away by Mexico, accepted the General’s
series of roughcast concrete slabs that
invitation of asylum; and Patty Hearst,
intersect to create a complex, light and
newspaper heiress, kidnap victim and onespacious interior; however, as I descend
time terrorist, who was on her honeymoon.
into the depths of the building, it feels
Seen through the eyes of Chuchú
increasingly cave-like. (e subterranean
— soldier-poet, philosopher-mathematician
gloom of Stevenson’s Nueva Matemática in and present in his role as the General’s
the lower-ground galleries is eerie: a series bodyguard — the strategic jockeying of
of freestanding doors held in massive,
international politics plays out as a game
industrially welded steel frames loom
of chance. (e cards are dealt; players
from the shadows. (e doors are marked
take their positions. Fate and mathematiby generations of institutional use, greasy
cal probability coincide in a game where
from the thousands of hands that have
lives and futures are at stake.
yanked and pushed at them. One labeled
Stevenson’s return to Central
‘Departamento de Matemática’ displays a
America, four years a8er the completion
no-smoking sign and posters advertising
of Introducción… has occasioned a
two mathematics conferences held at the
return to Chuchú, and a chance to delve
Universidad de Panamá last year.
further into the contradictions of his
A childhood spent reading science
inimitable personal philosophy. Visiting
fiction novels, in which a freestanding
the Universidad de Panamá, Stevenson
door is invariably a dangerous and
spoke to Chuchú’s former students and
alluring portal to another world, renders
colleagues in the mathematics department.
these doors ominous, despite their banal
Here, he heard an intriguing story that has
signage. As if to justify my apprehension,
also been related by the novelist Graham
they are difficult to open. A tentative
Greene, who befriended Chuchú in the
push won’t do it: they are awkward and
late -230s. Describing his friend’s reliresistant, creaking loudly when forced.
gious beliefs, Greene noted that he didn’t
(ere is a persistent mechanical hum in
believe in the Christian God: ‘though
the room, the sort of omnipresent sound
he believed in the Devil. “Haven’t you
that only becomes noticeable once it stops. noticed,” he said, “when you try to open a
It gradually intensifies, resolving into
swing door, you always begin by pushing
the drone of a distant aircra8, heard as if
it the wrong way? (at’s the Devil.”’3
banking and climbing in the sky above.
Could a man generally regarded as a
(e only light in the room spills over
brilliant mathematician truly believe that,
a dividing wall from a small neighbourwhile God does not exist, the Devil resides
ing gallery where Stevenson’s film
in the hinges of a swing door? Is it posIntroducción a la Teoría de la Probabilidad
sible to live knowing that even the small
/001 is playing. Originally shown at the
act of opening a door entails a struggle
1th Panama Biennial, this film is permewith a diabolical force? (e answer,
ated by themes of passage and blockage,
according to Stevenson, lies in aviation.
asylum and imprisonment, ambition and
Like a pert Monopoly house with its
fate, which resonate with the complex
pitched roof and tidy silhouette, Portikus
avenue of doors I have just negotiated.
stands on an island in Frankfurt’s River
Visually simple, the film shows cards being Main that isn’t much larger than the buildshuffled, dealt and played, accompanied
ing itself. Access is via a narrow boardwalk
by a narrative voice-over that recounts
which branches off a bridge spanning
events that occurred on a small island off
the river. For his exhibition here, A Life of
the coast of Panama in -232. (e unlikely
Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, Stevenson
cast of characters includes General Omar
has transformed the entire gallery into a
Torrijos, military leader of Panama; the
camera obscura. A near-life size model of a
94
MICHAEL STEVENSON
small plane — Chuchú’s plane — is wedged
in the attic. It is only directly visible from
outside the gallery, looking back from the
far bank of the river through the sloping
attic windows. Inside, light flooding in
through these windows transports an
image of the plane through a series of
apertures, lenses and mirrors, and down
a purpose-built light sha8 which has been
gra8ed onto the side of the building. It
travels a total of eighteen metres to arrive
as a ghostly apparition in the darkened
gallery two floors below. Floating in the
otherwise empty exhibition hall like a
mirage, the image disappears every time
someone opens the door, reappearing
when darkness is restored to the gallery.
(e effort of its travels has made it blur
and warp. For a photographic image it is
surprisingly painterly, with rich colours
and a dynamic compositional sweep — but
it is also fragile, somehow. Tenuous. Like
the memory of a dream. Like the attempt
to understand a man who died more than
two decades ago, or an artist who lives
-5,000 kilometres away.
Chuchú owned and flew several light
aircra8. And in a gesture that neatly
intersects mathematics, philosophy and
poetry, he named them a8er numbers in
the aleph sequence. Established by the
pioneering nineteenth century mathematician Georg Cantor, aleph numbers refer
to the relative sizes of infinite sets. (e
entirely counter-intuitive fact that an
infinitely large group of things, in itself
boundless, can be larger or smaller than
another infinitely large group of things
was mathematically proven by Cantor,
who famously said of his discovery: ‘I see it
but I don’t believe it.’4 Pure mathematics,
rubbing shoulders with philosophy, veers
away from the reasonable and spirals
out into a poetic kind of abstraction. As
Stevenson has observed, it is a beautiful
image: a small plane, named for the
mathematical description of infinity,
a speck in an endless sky.5
A crucial link between Stevenson’s
two exhibitions is a slim booklet printed
on airmail paper, which was jointly
produced by Museo Tamayo and Portikus.
ANNA PARLANE
It contains a text that Chuchú authored
in -232: Teoria del Vuelo [!eory of Flight].
(is feather-light missive is a meditation
on the sensation of flight, and the pilot’s
miraculous ability to coax his own body
and the mechanical bulk of his plane into
a state of weightless suspension. In flight,
the pilot attains the ultimate sensitivity.
Alert and responsive in body and mind,
he is a ‘living antenna’ ready to make the
slightest adjustment:
All of a pilot’s movements must
be done with utmost smoothness.
Because of that, his body and even his
soul take on a gentleness both natural
and completely virile. It is a fragile
universe. Nothing is pushed. Nothing
is pulled. (ere is only a faint pressure.6
Away from the ground, the pilot is
temporarily released from the weight and
struggle of daily life. In Chuchú’s words,
which Stevenson borrows for the title of
his exhibition, this is ‘a life of crudity, and
vulgarity, and blindness’.7 (e senseless
exertions, the pushing and pulling at
doors (satanically possessed or otherwise),
the frustrations and compromises of a
gravity-weighted passage through existence, are cancelled by the pilot’s finesse
and agility.
For both Chuchú and Stevenson,
such transcendence — however fleeting,
however hard-won — occurs not through
the rejection of matter but the mastery
of it. (e artist, like the pilot, carries his
knowledge in his hands, and it is in this
way that Stevenson makes Chuchú’s
plane take flight. At Portikus, the image
of Chuchu’s plane flies, quite literally, out
of an existing window in the end wall
of the attic, and re-enters the building
through double doors in the exhibition
hall. Defined by the structure of the
building, the image exists as a confluence of architectural elements and the
waxing and waning intensity of daylight.
Harnessed, Portikus’ architecture
becomes a mechanism that is elegant in
its analogue simplicity. Mechanically and
continuously, it captures light to create a
live photograph that is perhaps more film
95
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
than photograph, a film with a frame rate
of infinity that exists only in the moment
it is witnessed.8 And so, Chuchú’s plane,
Aleph--, is transformed into light.
In Mexico, Stevenson told me
a strange and beautiful story about
Chuchú. Teaching at the Universidad de
Panamá, Chuchú was partway through
an entry-level mathematics lecture when
— mid-sentence — he abruptly le8 the
room. Bemused, his students waited for
the remaining time of their scheduled
class before making their own way
outside, where they were surprised to see
a small plane circling above them. (ey
immediately realised that this was their
teacher: ‘the professor, poet, mathematician, philosopher, now aviator in the sky.
He was just arriving, from nowhere he
came, a pilot at 4,000 feet dancing above
their classroom.’ 9 Perhaps the ultimate
pedagogical performance, Chuchú’s
unconventional teaching style seems to
underline the importance of marrying
abstract knowledge with practice:
ON AN ARTIST
below me I can only see the lights of the
airport, streets and cars. My investigation
has taken me a great distance, across
geographic borders. Pursuing a ghost
with a lopsided theology, Stevenson has
reached back through time. Invoking
Chuchú’s asymmetrical faith in a perfectly
balanced binary pair of exhibitions,
Stevenson has achieved a resolution of
considerable poetic delicacy. Both Nueva
Matemática and A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity,
and Blindness are haunted by an absent
aeroplane. Its distant drone reverberates
in Museo Tamayo’s foundations, and
its image magically appears in Portikus’
empty exhibition hall. (ere is a certain
melancholy in this, but a kind of liberation
too. In its absence, Chuchú’s plane can
become many things: a sound, an image,
an idea. A gesture towards infinity.
Anna Parlane is a graduate research student in the
University of Melbourne’s art history programme.
Her thesis focuses on the work of Michael Stevenson.
What could all the wisdom of a
theologian or a metaphysicist who
never has to pay for his mistakes or
profit from his successes possibly be
worth next to a pilot’s knowledge of
the relationship between temperature
and oil pressure, on which life itself
depends from departure to arrival? …
(is is how I’d like to know whether or
not God exists. (is is how I’d like to
know that two plus two equals four.10
It’s night when my flight departs
Frankfurt, and as the land recedes
1
2
3
4
5
NOTES
Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General,
Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1986, p. 83.
William Grigsby Vado, ‘Nicaragua: Passionate
Memories from Times of Solidarity’, in Envío
no. 276, 2004. Published electronically at
http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/2213, accessed
11 October 2012.
Greene, op. cit., p. 43.
Quoted in David Foster Wallace, Everything and
More: A Compact History of Infinity, W. W. Norton &
Company, New York, 2003, p. 259.
Michael Stevenson, in conversation with the author,
August 2012.
96
6
José de Jesús Martínez, Teoria del Vuelo, translated
by Michelle Suderman, Verlag de Buchlandlung
Walther König, 2012, p. 32.
7 Ibid., p. 31.
8 Michael Stevenson, in conversation with the author,
October 2012.
9 Michael Stevenson, ‘On the Teaching Style of Prof.
José de Jesús Martínez (Chuchú)’, unpublished
notes, Carpeta Curatorial, Museo Tamayo Arte
Contemporáneo, 2012.
10 Martínez, op. cit., p. 39–40.
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
Karmelo Bermejo
Internal Component of the Vacuum Cleaner of an Art Centre Director
Replaced by a Solid Gold Replica with the Funds of the Centre
He Directs: The Vacuum Cleaner at the Director’s House /0-0
-1-carat gold, undisclosed dimensions
The vacuum cleaner at all times remains the
property of the Art Centre Director.
Image courtesy the artist
98
KARMELO BERMEJO
O N A N A R T I S T:
WORDS:
The Work of Art in
the Age of Neoliberal
Acculturation: Reflections
on a correspondence
with Karmelo Bermejo
Sumugan Sivanesan
I came across Karmelo Bermejo’s work
through an oXand photograph of a
scuffed Nilfisk vacuum cleaner in an
otherwise slick art magazine, captioned:
Internal Component of the Vacuum Cleaner
of an Art Centre Director Replaced by a Solid
Gold Replica with the Funds of the Centre He
Directs /0-0.
Intrigued, I sent Karmelo an email that
led to correspondence and eventually a
meeting at Documenta -4, where in suitably cosmopolitan surrounds, we mapped
common friends and divulged plans. A8er
some time, Karmelo announced he would
like to present me with a gi8, flipping
open his wallet, producing a crisp, green
Y-00 bill.
‘Take it.’
Labour
With your series
Contribution of Labour Free of Charge to…
/006–/003 you subvert assumptions
about work, value and exchange by
voluntarily cleaning the windows, displays
and tables of multinational corporations.
How did these businesses react to your
gi8s of labour — were there confrontations
with management or security?
K A R M E LO B E R M E J O Yes, there were
always confrontations with management,
security and with the police too.
S S Were you ever physically removed?
K B Yes, every time.
S S Is it a crime to volunteer
unrequested labour to a profit-making
enterprise?
K B I did not volunteer my labour, I just
executed it.
S S When you contribute free labour
S U M U G A N S I VA N E S A N
SUMUGAN SIVANESAN
to Burger King, the Deutsche Bank
and Gucci, you do the work of a cheap,
exploitable workforce, consistent with
the profitable functioning of business,
but for Contribution of Fuel to the Costa
da Morte /006 you re-perform a major oil
spill, a costly accident that was the result
of incompetence. Was this a parody or a
memorial to the ecological disaster?
K B Neither.
S S Or something of both, like a
memorial to incompetence?
K B I do not run my own pedagogy
department. (e answer is no to all of
the above. Since it is the spectator who
finishes the work, no work of art in this
world is ever finished.
S S (e pre-modern practice of
‘potlatch’ — a lavish expenditure offered
‘with the goal of humiliating, defying
and obligating the rival’ — has been
posed as the precursor to contemporary
forms of economic exchange.1 Do your
gi8s of labour seek to humiliate these
corporations?
K B A potlatch happens without
compromising or revealing its objectives;
this is to say, without considering itself
a ‘potlatch’. Revealing the objective of a
work of art compromises the objective of
the work.
S S To me this series suggests an
excess of labour that in advanced economies flows into the (anti-) production of
art as an indicator of cultural prestige.
K B Exactly.
!e Readymade Artist
According to curator Lorenzo Fusi, the
Contribution… series ‘empowers those
99
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
who normally perform these duties for
little money and reveals the truth of their
exploitation’.2 What then do these gi8s
of labour reveal about the exploitation of
artists?
(e vanguard assertion of an autonomous sphere of art, from which one may
consider and critique the conditions of
life, is currently manifest as the art world
— a globalised constellation of galleries,
museums, schools, studios, publications,
fairs and international events animated
by a circulation of curators, collectors,
critics, theorists, historians, educators,
administrators, installers, production
assistants, personal assistants and other
skilled and unskilled labour forces — the
expanded field of art. Across this rarefied
terrain, artists undertake paid and unpaid
work to compete for grants, residencies,
institutional endorsements, gallery representation, critical favour and recognition,
in a contest synced with an art market
intent on commodifying the experiences
of an intensified cultural existence.
In this late-capitalist mise-en-scéne,
artists have evolved into a semi-professional ‘creative class’ who exploit their
networks, skills, work and leisure time
to facilitate an art scene — a giddy socialpolitical milieu, the financialisation of
which benefits corporate-civic brands and
private investors.3 Artists conditioned in
the thin air of social competition no longer
critique the status quo, but instead aspire
to become it, a deeply conformist twist on
the vanguardist demand to collapse art
into life.4 Are artists themselves now the
ultimate readymade? 5
disruptions in business-as-usual, enabling
a critical re-evaluation of ‘work’. With
Internal Component… only the director/
owner of this work can access the gold
component, enriching him not only in
material wealth, but also with a ‘secret
knowledge’, in an arrangement that
seems to distill the wealth, class and social
inequalities inherent in global capitalism.
How is it that you now come to be effectively gi8ing power without recourse?
K B In chess, there is a move called
‘pawn for pawn’, it takes place a priori
since both parts agree it will be beneficial
for them. Certain moves are good for
both, even if adversaries are irreconcilable
in the game. (e commonly agreed
aim is to go forth until the end of the
game, towards the defeat of one of the
adversaries. Waiving the fees was an
insistence on the gi8 — a bruit secret — that
is why my activity as an artist mustn’t be
remunerated.6 If I were to reveal that the
gi8 had a defined goal, it would deactivate
the notion of the gi8. So, I offered my
service of deviating institutional funds to
the director for free. (e director becomes
the proprietor of exclusive information he
alone knows. If anyone should believe this
to be a lie, they can demand their money
back. Public money, that is, or are public
art institutions mechanisms for lying?
S S Where is the vacuum cleaner now?
Is it for sale on the secondary market?
If so, for what price?
K B I don’t know. Ask the owner:
Ferran Barenblit.
A Bruit Secret
Internal Component of the Vacuum
Cleaner of an Art Centre Director Replaced
by a Solid Gold Replica with the Funds
of the Centre He Directs /0-0 redirects
public funds into the private sphere. (is
publically funded artwork becomes the
property of the director, which he can then
sell for personal profit. You also refuse
your artist fee, effectively gi8ing him the
work. With the Contribution… series you
are also gi8ing power, but as a series of
SS
100
!e Use-value of Life
Chicago School economist Gary S Becker
proposes that people as commodified
agents can add use-value to their ‘human
capital’ by improving their competitiveness in the market according to its desires:
undertaking education and training,
caring for their health and so on.
In a neoliberal scenario an artist’s
value is determined less by the commodities they produce than how they are
perceived by the market and their ability
to generate a satisfying return on investment. (is profile might be determined
KARMELO BERMEJO
SUMUGAN SIVANESAN
by factors such as museum and private
collection holdings, the receipt of prizes
and awards, one’s exhibition history, the
opinions of critics and speculators and an
artist’s notoriety, all of which contribute to
their cultural capital.
the board of the Museum. (e Ministry in
its display of labyrinthine finance, framed
and hung the piece in a context far more
important than paying for it. However, the
piece was also funded by them. Not only
does Spain pay traitors, it also erects their
statues.
S S − "%,%%% /0-- consists of Y-0,000
from the Fundación Botín, buried in the
grounds of the museum and marked by
a bronze plaque. (e money, taken out
of circulation and hermetically sealed,
is unable to be put to work or even
generate interest. What is the purpose of
removing this money from circulation and
production?
K B I am not yet in a position to talk
about this piece on those terms. I’ll
give you another example: in the piece
Ap /003, a fine was paid with public
money that came from a State grant;
furthermore, the fine-collector was given
a -0% tip over the price of the sanction.
A year later, the application requirements
for that grant featured a new clause
specifying the existence of a new infraction — paying fines with grant money.
Ap would have made room for prohibition,
which is great, but it would have also
contributed to positive case law, not only
in a merely legal sense, but also regarding
art. (e valuable aspect is art.
!e Anti-production of Art
(e piece < /0-/ is a solid gold nugget
coated in imitation gold. (e Spanish
Conquistadors melted down much of the
gold artefacts they pillaged into bullion,
reducing the cultural or occult worth of
these objects to that of their base material.
K B Exactly. However, gold painted in
fake gold is more expensive than gold
itself.
S S % /0-- is the documentation of a
grant you received for Y/000 to produce
an artwork that you then refused to make,
which you later reimburse. Can you reveal
what you refused to make?
K B No.
S S + % /0-- is the documentation of
the interest accrued on this grant a8er you
delayed the repayment for a year. Was this
amount also gi8ed back to the funding
body?
K B Yes, hence the + %, which is the
symbolic value I granted to that money,
the legal credit of the money intended to
keep the amount from devaluating in the
process of delinquency. (e internal logic
of this piece answered exclusively to a
one-sided decision: my own. Not counting
the museum, it was I who developed the
piece, gave back the money and paid the
interest. I weighed the possibility of the
Museum financing the additional expense
entailed in the payment of the interest of
the money, so that the completed piece
would remain enclosed in an algorithm
equal to 0, however this idea was discarded so that the activity of the Museum
on the piece went exclusively in another
direction. (is is because the Museum was
unconsciously turning into a more elegant
accomplice by financing the framing
of the piece and giving it the status of
a trophy according to my instructions.
(e Ministry of Culture, co-author due to
financing, is also one of the members of
SS
Matters of Life and Debt
‘Are you satisfied it is real?’
I snap the note between my fingers
to test its tensility, holding it up to the
light to inspect its watermark and signs of
integrity.
‘Do you want to go to a bank and have
them prove it?’
I am surprised by his unexpected gi8,
but cautious. What’s the catch? Karmelo
reaches into his pocket and retrieves a
cheap plastic lighter.
‘Now burn it.’
Cash and coins are fetish items of
fortunes-yet-to-come and triggers for
misplaced desires. So what is it to burn
money — or, more precisely, to be gi8ed
the opportunity to burn money, free from
any notion of guilt or personal financial
101
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
Karmelo Bermejo
−x /0-/
bank notes and glue
An undisclosed sum of false counterfeit banknotes, acquired with
public money and moulded by hand by the Director of the Art
Centre into a ball, which was later auctioned in order to be burnt by
the highest bidder at a secret meeting later in the Director’s office.
Image courtesy the artist
Karmelo Bermejo
Tip /003
fine plus a -0% gratuity, black and white photograph
@0.0 × @0.0 cm
The inspector of the Hamburg line U-Bahn paid with
public money the amount corresponding to the fine imposed
for travelling without a ticket, plus a -0% gratuity.
Image courtesy the artist
102
KARMELO BERMEJO
consequence? What is money’s use-value
in this occult form of expenditure? Does
desire itself mutate as such uncommonsensical gi8s erupt from marketdetermined life? What is the force of debt
that such a gi8 bestows?
!e Secret Value of Art Work
In June /0-/, Karmelo produced a work
at Casa Del Lago, Mexico City entitled − x.
It follows a mathematical logic to rationalise the financialised personal relations
between the artist, museum director and
collector and their deliberately misleading
acts in the service of art. (e institution’s
funds were used to acquire an undisclosed
amount of ‘false’ counterfeit bank notes
— real bills which were glued together
with the same face on either side. (e
director hand-moulded these ‘false false’
bills into a very tight ball, which was then
auctioned off to the highest bidder for
an undisclosed sum, ‘x’. Framed within
the functions of an esteemed cultural
institution, such actions produce weird
oscillations that disturb the worth of the
raw material bank notes, their ability as
counterfeits to devalue a currency, and
their indeterminate value as symbolic
objects, both as money and as art. When
we met, Karmelo revealed to me documentation, from behind the closed doors
of the director’s office, of the collector
burning the actual money he had paid,
hence its title − x and the secret function
of the work.
1
2
3
4
NOTES
Translations by Andrea Quiñones Armería and
invaluable editing assistance from Tessa Zettel.
Georges Bataille, ‘The Notions of Expenditure’,
1933, in Allan Stoekl (ed., trans.) Visions of
Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008, p. 121.
Lorenzo Fusi, ‘2010. Re:thinking Trade’ in Lewis
Biggs, Paul Domela, Sacha Waldron, Andrew Kirk
(eds.) Touched – The Book, Liverpool Biennial of
Contemporary Art Ltd, 2010, p. 30.
Pascal Gielen, ‘The Art Scene. A Clever Working
Model for Economic Exploitation?’, Open 17: A
Precarious Existence, Vulnerability in the Public
Domain, SKOR, 2009, http://classic.skor.nl/article4176-en.html, accessed 29 September 2012.
Nicholas Brown, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its
Real Subsumption under Capitalism’, nonesite.org,
SUMUGAN SIVANESAN
With these acts Bermejo appears to
alter assumptions about professionalised
artmaking as ‘selling out’ into a series
of strangely emancipatory tasks that
subvert the commodification of relations
between people — the market capture of
life. (e irrational desires that produce
such art unveil a systemic error inherent
in the logic of capitalism at work in both
public and private spheres, effecting an
apocalyptic recouping of life from the
market.
‘Next I will send you a certificate of
authenticity.’ 7
Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist.
5
6
7
Emory College of Art and Sciences,
http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-work-of-art-inthe-age-of-its-real-subsumption-under-capital,
accessed 25 September 2012.
Claire Fontaine, Ready-Made Artist and Human
Strike: A few Clarifications, 2005, http://www.
clairefontaine.ws/pdf/readymade_eng.pdf, accessed
25 September 2012.
Marcel Duchamp, À bruit secret 1916, a ball of twine
between two brass plates joined by four long screws
that contains a small unknown object added by the
art collector Walter Arensberg.
Bermejo’s gifts of burning money are part of
an edition entitled – x that refers to the value
exchanged for the amount being burned. It follows
the logic that money is finite, whereas the edition
piece is infinite.
103
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
Catherine or Kate
Survey /0-performance documentation
Photo credit: unknown service station attendant
Image courtesy the artists
Catherine or Kate
Survey /0-performance documentation
Photo credit: Catherine or Kate
Image courtesy the artists
104
CATHERINE OR KATE
O N A N A R T I S T:
WORDS:
RACHEL HAYNES
What’s in a Name:
Catherine or Kate;
or Catherine Sagin;
or Fiona Mail?
Rachel Haynes
Catherine or Kate is a double act comprising Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcro8.
(e duo define their artworks in terms of
winning and losing, and play out the division of labour in an artistic practice that
employs video, performance, photography
and sculpture. Catherine or Kate utilise
combative and comparative processes,
which challenge notions of artistic
collaboration and highlight the inherent
tensions and competitive nature of working together. (is relationship becomes
the fodder and fuel to their practice as
they stage a fencing duel or survey service
attendants about which of the artists they
consider the most physically attractive.
Catherine or Kate is the current
moniker of the duo, however the artists
began working together under the nom
de plume ‘Fiona Mail’ in /001 while
studying. (ey describe the sense of relief
and freedom they experienced when
relinquishing their individual naming
rights by constructing a phantom-self to
represent the face of the practice.1 (is
pseudonym also functioned to name a
‘third space’ for the collaboration, distinct
from their solo practices, which Catherine
and Kate were still maintaining at that
time. Perhaps ironically, then, the artists
manifested as themselves in the live
performance work credited to Fiona Mail,
I’ll be honest with you ok. I just need a body
next to me. !at’s all I need, you need it as
much as I do /002. Employing endurance
tactics where the body remains as static
as possible, Catherine and Kate stood face
to face in a street-front display window,
each locked into /0kg ball-and-chains,
listening to the audio from Vito Acconci’s
video work !eme Song -234 for periods
of ninety minutes. (e artists’ bodies here
function as both a stand-in for subjectivity
and as a semiotic sign,2 operating in
relation to the histories of conceptual
art and performance. With comparable
physiques, and dressed similarly in black
T-shirts and jeans, the performance enacts
both a mirroring of Catherine and Kate’s
subjective positions and the intersubjective space between them. Although
standing face to face, it is the duo’s
non-engagement, the muteness of their
bodies on display and their position of
subjection, which become the key themes
here. A subtle humour is evident, stuck
listening to Acconci for hours on end, the
artists endure the weight of conceptual
art’s history while also enacting its
enduring legacy.
In a similar way, We are always trying
not to repeat ourselves /002 directly
appropriates a video interview with
UK collaborative artists Paul Harrison
and John Wood and functions as both
homage and parody.3 In the original
video, Harrison and Wood utilise the
body as a formal prop that initiates
humour, largely created by the disparity
between the artists’ physical appearances.
Restaging the video by placing themselves
in the positions of Harrison and Wood,
Catherine and Kate appear as young
and gauche. In a somewhat pathetic and
humourous way, they re-enact the work,
highlighting the translation from famous
105
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
ON AN ARTIST
to obscure, established to novice, international to provincial and also male to
female artists. Catherine and Kate discuss
this work in relation to their ‘desire for
success and a fascination with … Paul and
John’s work’.4 As such, they are interested
in the discursive and social contexts of
art and the unforeseen outcomes of such
exchanges — this work eventually leading
to the artists undertaking a mentorship
with Harrison and Wood.5
In /0-0, watched by hundreds of
spectators, Catherine and Kate performed
a live duel as Fiona Mail at Brisbane’s
Institute of Modern Art. (e prize — won
by Sagin — was naming rights of the
collaboration for a period of one year.
Each of the artists engaged in this mock
play in all seriousness, as if her artistic
career depended on the outcome. In the
video Duel /0-0 we see the artists engaged
in a ten-minute fencing bout. Sparring,
the jarring rhythms of thrust and parry
replay the tension between the artists as
they stake out their nom de guerre. Leading
up to the bout, the pair undertook formal
lessons and investigated the history of
fencing as both a competitive sport and
as staged conflict in theatrical settings.6
(e artists engaged in the spectacle of
the performance and the associations of
masculinity, violence, play and romance
inherit in the medium of fencing. (e
staging of this conflict within the context
of Fresh Cut, the foremost emerging artist
exhibition in Queensland, is significant
— the work playfully enacts the potential
parry and thrust of the ‘emerging artist
industry’ where careers are sometimes
staked out in competitive rather than
collegial terms. Furthermore, the expectation of ‘putting on a good show’ for the
punters is ironically and deliberately
performed by the artists. (e relationship
between the duo, our sympathy for the
loser and congratulations to the winner,
are elaborated on in the social setting
of the local art scene — are you on team
Catherine or team Kate? (e collaboration
became a relationship ‘story’ followed
by the public, rife with speculations
about tension between the artists and
potential break-ups. (e naming rights
of ‘Catherine Sagin’ expired in September
/0--; henceforth, the duo took up their
current moniker of Catherine or Kate,
playfully mimicking a (royal) romance
that was under media scrutiny at the time.
It is the sharing of a first name from
birth, one a formal and the other more
familiar form, coupled with a synchronicity of experiences and interests, which
brings the two artists together. In this
way, two become one; similarly, the
collaborative practice has replaced the
solo endeavours of the artists. (e notion
of a shared identity that is formed by
collaborations such as Catherine or Kate,
is one that sometimes complicates the
business of making work; while many
hands may make light work, too many
names may complicate matters when
it comes to institutional protocols. (is
becomes apparent in contractual agreements, the payment of artist fees, the
billing of exhibitions, not to mention the
logistics of undertaking formal academic
study collaboratively. In speaking of,
or to, the artists, one o8en falls into
semantic no man’s land. In Catherine
or Kate, the ‘or’ describes an interstitial
space, a process of replacement, as if
one is as good as, or designates the same
subjectivity as, the other. It also describes
the competitive and comparative strategies utilised by the duo to undercut the
homogeneity of the proper name and to
challenge conventions of collaboration.
In Survey /0--, made during a residency
in Iceland, the artists drove the northern
route from SeyõisZörõur to Reykjavik,
stopping at twenty service stations along
the way and asking the attendants at each
one which of the artists they considered
better looking. In works such as these,
Catherine or Kate extend this dynamic of
the either/or, for-or-against.
Collaboration is o8en described as an
enterprise ruled by threes, with the space
between partners taking on a presence
of its own, whether hand, mind or body.
Marina Abramovic and Ulay describe this
as a ‘third force’,7 while Charles Green
defines the ‘third hand’ as ‘an artistic
106
CATHERINE OR KATE
RACHEL HAYNES
identity superimposed over and exceeding
the individual artists’.8 Brion Gysin and
William Burroughs describe the ‘third
mind’ as:
in much the same way as the ‘heroic,
original, individual’ artist). (e continual
transformation of the collaboration and its
moniker by Catherine and Kate, serves to
both perform and undercut the accumulated capital and artistic investment within
this ‘proper’ name of the artist. (e many
manifestations of Catherine Sagin and
Kate Woodcro8 perform the changeability of name and persona, which can be
slipped on or off, depending on the mood
or circumstance. Constructed as a fictional
double act, Catherine or Kate role-play
the social and conceptual position of the
‘artist’, whose primary function is to ‘make
art’. (is claiming of a proper name and,
subsequently, artistic identity, reveals artmaking as a competition where the winner
and loser take their place. However this
positioning is only ever provisional, and
Catherine or Kate, as did Catherine Sagin
or Fiona Mail before them, continue to
disrupt the distinctions between individual and shared performative identity.
the complete fusion in a praxis of
two subjectivities, two subjectivities
that metamorphose into a third; it is
from this collusion that a new author
emerges, an absent third person,
invisible and beyond grasp, decoding
the silence.9
For Burroughs and Gysin, such a strategy
operates as a negation of the all-powerful
author,10 creating a tertiary space, which
opens up alternative means of production
and allows new possibilities to emerge.
Catherine or Kate’s consistent use of
competition and comparison as performative strategies acts to problematise and
critique this notion of the collaborative
third hand as a fusion of subjectivities.
Competitors in a ‘three-legged race’ is
perhaps a more apt descriptor of such a
strategy — the duo is tied together, and
in struggling to find the optimum speed
forward, they fall over, laughing, and then
pick each other up.
Today, visual art institutions continue
to privilege the individual artist and trade
on the currencies of ‘originality’ and
artistic persona, despite the challenges
that these tropes have undergone. One
could argue that when it comes to artist
collaborations, the exchange value of the
artist’s signature is not broken down but
rather replaced by the significant ciphers
of ‘difference’, ‘dialogue’, ‘teamwork’,
even ‘mate-ship’, which collaboration
denotes (and which are commodified
1
2
3
4
NOTES
Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft, interview with
the artists, 14 October 2012.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of
Performance, Routledge, New York and London,
1993, p. 146.
Tate Shots, Issue 12: Harrison and Wood, 2008,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS50mYKCL_M,
accessed 14 October 2012.
Kate Woodcroft, The Tertiary Spaces of
Collaboration, Performance and Humour in
Contemporary Art, Masters Thesis, Queensland
University of Technology, 2012, p. 21.
Rachael Haynes is a Brisbane-based visual artist and
arts writer.
5
6
7
Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcoft, op. cit.
Kate Woodcroft, op. cit.
Charles Green, ‘The Third Hand: Collaboration in
Contemporary Art’, Exit No. 7, 2002, p. 115.
8 Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration from
Conceptualism to Post-Modernism, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001, p. 179.
9 William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind,
Viking Press, New York, 1978, p. 18.
10 Ibid.
107
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
John Nixon:
Anti-whatever whatever
David Homewood
John Nixon
White cross -212
acrylic on hessian
55.0 × 66.0 cm
Image courtesy KalimanRawlins
110
JOHN NIXON
DAVID HOMEWOOD
John Nixon
John Nixon: Paintings and Drawings
"#$#–"##)
KalimanRawlins
3–/1 July /0-/
John Nixon: Paintings and Drawings
in the enclosing dates of the retrospec"#$#–"##), held in July at Kalimantive, this moment of substantial artistic
Rawlins gallery in South Yarra, provided
reorientation. (is minor criticism might,
an important opportunity for many
however, seem somewhat unjustified in
— especially the younger generation of
light of the fact that Nixon’s selection
artists, curators and critics for whom
of works was limited to those that were
Nixon is something of a cult figure in
available in his storeroom, for in this
the Melbourne scene — to view en masse
respect the curatorial criteria were entirely
the artist’s work from the fi8een years
in keeping with the spirit of ad hoc
addressed in the exhibition. (is was in
pragmatism in which the works had
no sense, however, a sweeping overview of initially been produced.
Nixon’s work from the period in question.
(e majority of the paintings included
Indeed, the exhibition was striking for its
in the retrospective derived from the
total refusal of the historicising function
compositional templates of the Cross, the
common to (or constitutive of) the genre
Square or the Monochrome; variations
of the retrospective, in which individual
between works of the same template
artworks serve to illustrate a narrative of
derived principally from alterations in size,
individual artistic development. Instead,
colour, and materials. As is always the case
the evenly spaced hanging of the fi8ywith Nixon, the paintings were exempted
eight paintings and the serial distribution
from the task of illusionism, conforming
of the forty-eight works on paper signalled, instead to what might be described in
first of all, a complete disregard for
terms of a logic of self-manifestation, in
the works’ provenance, and secondly,
which the material resources out of which
a reluctance to confer significance onto
each was constructed were called upon to
individual works over others.
show themselves in a state of nakedness.
If the rationale governing the exhibi(is logic motivated the series of acute
tion design was more or less self-evident,
textural contrasts within separate works:
the reason behind the chronological
for example, in Purple monochrome -220
framing of the retrospective was somebetween the stack of thick warped cardwhat less clear. Granted, -232 marks the
board, visible only from a side angle, and
year Nixon founded Art Projects in the
the smooth layer of purple enamel paint
Melbourne CBD, the artist-run space that
on its front. In Yellow monochrome -213, it
would operate for the following five and
governed the scattering of the straw stalks
a half years as the headquarters for the
across the cleanly painted surface of the
local experimental visual arts community.
rectangular Masonite support. (e beauty
But it was in "#$&, shortly a8er his return
of these stark formal economies derived
from a six-month stay in London, when
in part from their rendering foreign to
Nixon finally abandoned the analytic
perception materials that are both easily
conceptualism he had practised since
identifiable and commonly available.
-230 and resumed the production of visual
While the paring back of composition
art. (at the artist himself retroactively
was harnessed towards the disclosure of
designates -231 as the origin of his
raw materiality, it also served the related
ongoing Experimental Painting Workshop function — equally important to Nixon
(EPW) is evidence of the importance he
— of declaring the labour of the artist in
too attaches to this year. Out of a sense of
the finished artwork. (is declaration
historical completeness, then, it perhaps
of ‘worked-on-ness’ echoed throughout
would have been appropriate to reflect,
the retrospective, and it was arguably
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UN MAGAZINE 6.2
REVIEWS
exaggerated in those paintings to which
various implements (including a drill,
mallets, rulers, and saws) employed in the
production process had been attached.
It found an exemplarily crisp and
understated expression, by contrast, in
White cross -212. Unlike the eleven other
Cross works included in the retrospective,
the figure and ground of White cross were
rendered in the same white acrylic paint,
which meant that their identity as such
was articulated only through the relation
set up between the even coating of the
Cross, on the one hand, and the scuffed
patchiness of its background, on the
other. And within the Cross itself, a further
partitioning could be observed in the
direction and layering of the brushstrokes,
which indicated that the vertical bar
had been completed prior to the slightly
bowed horizontal. Nixon’s assortment
of paint application techniques also
served to accentuate the roughness and
inconsistency of the loosely woven hessian
canvas support, whose outermost threads
caught more paint than those more tightly
knotted into its structure. In this way,
the sculptural prominence of the picture
support in White cross came to quietly
oppose the primacy of the figure-ground
relation.
As noted above, recurrent throughout
the exhibition were the forms of the
Cross, the Square, and the Monochrome.
(ese forms are, of course, emblematic
of Russian Suprematism. Due to his
tendency to wear his influences on his
sleeve, it is understandable that Nixon’s
critics, advocates as well as detractors,
have o8en questioned the nature of his
debt to his predecessors. On this topic,
avant-gardist critics argue that while
Malevich understood his Black Square -2-6
as a ‘zero-point of form’, an expression of
pure feeling constitutive of a leap beyond
the shackles of history, it is impossible to
view its reprisal in Nixon’s Black square
-232, over sixty years later, outside the
long shadow cast by the original. (e
argument runs that there is a fundamental
contradiction in Nixon’s claiming
inheritance to a tradition premised on
the abolition of all forms of inheritance,
and that therefore his practice is at best
a monumentalising gesture, and at worst
a tokenistic revival of a formal device
purged of its original emancipatory intent.
(e postmodernist critic understands the
same tokenistic revival instead in terms of
a self-conscious meditation on the death
of the avant-garde, and thus as a redeeming critical aspect of his practice. Nixon
is aligned, from this perspective, with
the host of painters working in the late
-230s and early -210s (including in the
Australian context Arkley, Clark, Davila,
9llers, and Watson) who conceived of the
strategies of appropriation and quotation
as central to the operation of their artwork.
Both of these accounts efface, in
various ways, the specificity of Nixon’s
work. In seeking the recuperation of this
specificity, it is perhaps necessary to turn
to an apostolic modernist critic. Clement
Greenberg understood modernism as a
broad tendency towards self-criticism that
unfolded laterally across the fine arts. Its
effects could only be discerned, however,
separately within each art, since it was the
irreducible essence of each — i.e., their
specificity — which modernist practices
sought to reveal. So modernist painting
took as its primary subject matter the
conventions of painting — not to destroy
itself, but rather to critique itself in order
to entrench itself more firmly in its own
arena of competence. Now, it is clear that
the prominently sculptural dimension of
Nixon’s painting, as well as (more blasphemously) his attaching of readymade
objects to the picture support, show him
to reject the strictures of Greenberg’s twopronged positivist definition of painting
as flatness and the delimitation of flatness.
Nevertheless, as a systematic production
intended to expand the definition of nonobjective painting, Nixon’s EPW proposes
a model of self-critique not unrelated to
that championed by Greenberg.
But Greenberg’s valuation of mediumspecificity was framed by his understanding of its historical contingency. It was
a survival mechanism for the fine arts
born out of a crisis in the mid-nineteenth
112
JOHN NIXON
DAVID HOMEWOOD
John Nixon
Paintings & Drawings "#$#– "##) /0-/
installation view
KalimanRawlins, Melbourne
Image courtesy KalimanRawlins
century, which he characterised in terms
of the rise of kitsch, on the one hand, and
rampant academicism on the other. It is
clear by now that the historical conditions
that permitted Greenberg to more or less
equate medium-specificity with artistic
quality have all but dissipated. For, as the
Belgian art critic and historian (ierry de
Duve has argued, the constitutive condition — or non-condition — of art since the
-250s has been ‘do whatever’. For de Duve,
the ‘whatever’ finds its paradigmatic
expression in the Readymade, which
demonstrated that an artwork could be
reduced to the mere act of its nomination
as such, a game of nonsensical naming.
Under the reign of the ‘whatever’, art is not
obliged to offer its services to the revolution, nor does it find itself impelled to obey
the dictates of medium-specificity, nor
anything else. Instead, it severs itself from
the obligation to serve anything at all.
(e claim that a practice informed
by the modernist principle of mediumspecificity necessarily fails to respond
to the post-Duchamp ‘whatever’ is for
de Duve premised on a fundamental
misunderstanding. (is is because such
a claim implicitly prescribes the contours
of the ‘whatever’ in order to deliver a
verdict on a given artwork in advance of
its trial: it constitutes a refusal to judge.
(e a priori dismissal of any artwork,
whether by Nixon or another artist, on
the grounds that it explicitly engages
with the constraints of the fine art tradition to which it belongs, is considered
illegitimate. For according to de Duve,
there is no reason why a work of this
kind cannot potentially assume a force
equal to a Byzantine icon, or a Warlpiri
cave painting, or an event orchestrated
by Santiago Sierra, or a mural from
Vitebsk. So paradoxically, at the heart of
de Duve’s depiction of contemporary art,
there appears an apparent ahistoricity.
For if anything whatever conforms to
the ‘whatever’, then it seems that one
cannot help but produce art that is ‘of its
time’. (e mark of the contemporary, in
this sense, becomes a non-mark, and any
interrogation of an artwork’s historical
exigency is necessarily subordinated to
the purposiveness without purpose of
the aesthetic judgement. Under these
conditions, is it possible to view Nixon’s
fidelity to medium-specificity, the regime
of artistic production conventionally
understood to precede the ‘whatever’, as
somehow throwing into relief the anomic
character of ‘whatever-ness’?
David Homewood is a Melbourne-based writer
and curator.
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REVIEWS
Vivienne Binns: Art and Life
Andrew McQualter
Vivienne Binns & Merryn Gates
Vivienne Binns & Merryn Gates -215//00/
Acrylic on canvas
5/.6 × -00 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Vivienne Binns
Vivienne Binns: Art and Life
Curated by Dr Penny Peckham
Latrobe University Museum of Art,
Melbourne
/ July – /@ August /0-/
Some exhibitions allow you to realise
(is is a smallish exhibition presenting
that there are gaps in the discourse we
some twenty-one works. Major projects
conduct about contemporary art. In the
from Binns’ practice are represented:
introduction to the catalogue published to the feminist-influenced Experiments
accompany the exhibition Vivienne Binns:
in Vitreous Enamel -235; paintings and
Art & Life at , Dr Vincent Alessi
mixed media works employing Tapa
acknowledges Binns’ position at the forepatterns from Polynesia, and an ongoing
front of several movements in Australian
series of paintings referencing patterns
contemporary art, including feminism and sourced from borrowed, found and gi8ed
community arts. Given our recent focus
items. Significantly, Binns’ early paintings
in Australia on relational, politically or
— including those from her first solo
community orientated arts practice, on
exhibition in -253 and her more recent
the legacy of conceptualism and feminism, collaborations with other artists — are
it’s curious that the practice of an artist
not included in this exhibition, nor are
like Binns is not more prominent in the
her community projects, collaborations
conversation.
with former pupils Geoff Newton and
114
VIVIENNE BINNS
ANDREW MCQUALTER
Derek O’Connor, or works from the -210s.
Despite the modest scale of the exhibition,
curator Dr Penny Peckham succeeds in
providing an introduction to the breadth
and depth of Binns’ oeuvre and an insight
into the ongoing development of her
practice.
Vincent Alessi points out that Binns
has ‘welcomed collaboration as much as
she has purposely mediated a singular
practice’,1 and that the exhibition shows
the artist addressing the question of
self and place whilst ‘navigating the art
historical canon, not only trying to find a
place within it but questioning its modes
of operation and construction’.2 If we are
to consider why Binns’ work is apparently
in the background when we think about
Australian art, the key concept is her
eschewal of singularity in favour or the
multiple, the various and the many.
Many artists working with feminist
concerns during the -230s produced
personal or biographical works emphasising the multiple roles played by women in
society, contesting the idea that significant
lives chart a singular trajectory. (e earliest works in the exhibition are enamelled
works from the exhibition Experiments in
Vitreous Enamel: Silk screened portraits of
women -235. (is exhibition was produced
by Binns working in collaboration with
three other artists — Marie McMahon,
Toni Robertson and Francis Budden. Each
artist used images sourced from their
family’s photo albums to create images
of mothers, sisters, female relatives and
friends in a more nuanced way: ‘as people’,
rather than just mothers or sisters. At the
time, the artists’ choice to work collaboratively, and to use media and processes
associated with ‘applied’ rather than ‘fine’
arts, mark this project as one approached
using a conscious feminist strategy.
See !at My Grave’s Kept Green -235
juxtaposes an image of a female relative
seated next to a piano — a typical image
of a middle- or working-class woman from
the nineteenth century — with an image
of Binns singing during a performance at
Watter’s Gallery, -23/. (e act of making
music — a creative act as well as a cosily
social one — links the mother and the
artist; in placing these images together on
the same plane, Binns created an image
that opposes orthodox views of culture
and value, consciously projecting an
image of herself into the world as both
an artist and a daughter in the lineage of
cultural production.
Repro Vag Dens -236–35 re-presents an
image of the collaborative ‘environment’
Woom (with Roger Folley) -23/ framed by
a version of the Vag dens (vagina dentata)
image famous from Binns’ first solo
exhibition in -253. Much is made of the
critical response to Binns’ paintings from
that exhibition and of Binns’ subsequent
discovery that ‘she could no longer
paint’. (e imagery for the paintings was
developed through a process of automatic
drawing, enabling Binns to arrive at
images that confronted contemporary
aesthetic and social values, particularly
in the explicitly sexual imagery of works
like Vag Dens. (e experience of working
in isolation with such psychically intense
processes was exhausting in itself, but
my feeling is that Binns found playing
the traditional role of the artist difficult to
reconcile with her own expectations for
her practice. Like so many of the works
produced by Binns from the mid -230s
onwards, Repro Vag Dens layers images
from different sources to create complex
narratives. Literally, the progressive,
avant-gardist installation emerges from
the ‘womb-like’ space of Vag Dens; the
work may also be interpreted as Binns
reincorporating an abandoned element
of her practice within her then-current
exploration of creativity and sel\ood.
Binns’ early experiments with
automatic drawing have their legacy in the
artist’s trust for her intuition and process.
Binns’ self-reliance led her away from a
conventional artistic career toward an
engagement with cra8 and feminist art.
(is movement away from the aesthetic
orientation of the avant-garde tradition
was toward an art that aimed for an
active engagement with the world and
the creation of cultural change. Feminist
praxis equipped Binns with skills in
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UN MAGAZINE 6.2
REVIEWS
collaboration, organisation and research
that allowed her to sustain a practice
(and income) as a community artist for
several years, creating several universally
acknowledged community projects. (is
shi8 in orientation is something Binns’
practice shares with conceptualism, an
art that asks the question about what
art is: perceiving art to be a series of
connections, contexts and relationships.
From one point of view (the view from
the academy or the auction house or the
museum), the first fi8een years of Binns’
activity as an artist are a series of disparate
experiments. From the vantage point of
this exhibition, Binns’ early career is a
series of sallies at the question conceptual
art asks.
One of the ways Binns has approached
the question of what art is is to reformulate
it continuously throughout her career.
Binns approaches the question from
different directions: from the point of view
of feminism, or as a cra8sperson, or by
positioning herself at various peripheries
of cultural activity. (e amateur is one
such position — as in the works appropriating photographs taken by her father
whilst stationed in Papua New Guinea
during World War II, a series represented
in this exhibition by the work !e vibrant
canvas: Unknown NG, phot NAR Binns,
NX "#&&& -223. Another way to pose the
question is ‘why are some things called
art and others not?’ 3 (is has obvious
relevance to Binns’ appropriation of
images from family photo albums, and
to her later ongoing series of paintings
based on a variety of patterns from found,
gi8ed or appropriated items (In Memory
of the Unknown Artist). (e materials
used in works that explore Australia’s
Pacific context are sourced from archival
material related to Cook’s explorations
of the Pacific, her own snapshots of the
ocean surface, and the patterned Tapa
cloth from Tonga and surrounding
Polynesian islands. Strictly speaking,
the marks that adorn Tapa cloth are not
solely decoration or pattern but a way of
codifying a community’s stories; the cloth
itself is traditionally used as currency.4
For Binns, the grid-like patterning used
in Tapa evokes the grids that structure
the surfaces of much modernist painting,
becoming a point of surface contact
between Pacific and European-Australian
culture. Binns’ attention to the resonances
between instances of cultural activity — as
currency, ‘work’, ‘research’, information,
utopian speculation — marks her practice
as a form of poetic enquiry, one that seeks
to embody not only the specific intention
of the artist but the cultural conditions
that presided over the work’s production.
Penny Peckham’s curatorial premise
was the perception that Binn’s practice
is motivated by the desire to see art as a
necessary function of being. (e exhibition demonstrates that being human is
a state of having culture, connected to
the world via a web of social, cultural and
political relationships. (e role of art is
to make these connections material. (is
philosophic approach to the production
of art is most compellingly expressed in
works by Binns’ former students, in Geoff
Newton’s paintings or in Kate Smith’s
relentless examination of aesthetics and
politics. Binns depicts being as a complex
of shi8ing layers — as in the tracing of
Tapa patterns over images of the ocean
at Brisbane Waters or in the interplay of
designs in a collaborative work produced
with Merryn Gates. (e material act of
painting is a means to achieving something like the examined life.
1
2
3
NOTES
Vincent Alessi, ‘Introduction’ in Vivienne Binns;
Art and Life, exhibition catalogue Latrobe University
Museum of Art, 2012, p. 5.
Ibid.
Penny Peckham, Vivienne Binns: Art and Life,
116
Andrew McQualter is a Melbourne-based artist.
4
exhibition catalogue, Latrobe University Museum of
Art, 2012, p. 7.
Deborah Clark, ‘The Painting of Vivienne Binns’ in
Vivienne Binns, exhibition catalogue, Tasmanian
Museum and Art Gallery, 2006, p. 10.
Vivienne Binns
Repo Vag Dens -236–35
vitreous enamel on steel
@0.3 × 40.6 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
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REVIEWS
Everything Falls Apart
Pedro de Almeida
Everything Falls Apart
Part I: Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck &
Media Farzin, Jem Cohen, Phil Collins,
Sarah Goffman, Sarah Morris
Part II: Vernon Ah Kee, Zanny Begg
& Oliver Ressler, Jem Cohen,
Tony Garifalakis, Merata Mita
Curated by Blair French and Mark Feary
Artspace, Sydney
Part I: /3 June – 6 August /0-/
Part II: -0 August – -5 September /0-/
Tony Garifalakis
Untitled /0-/
installation view
Artspace, Sydney
Image courtesy Artspace
Photo credit: silversalt photography
118
EVERYTHING FALLS APART
PEDRO DE ALMEIDA
A8er a partnership of almost two decades
historical and contemporary reflections
it was a surprise to see that Sydney’s
on the pressuring forces of social and
Artspace would not be a presentation
political upheaval, as Ka]a memorably
partner for the -1th Biennale of Sydney.
put it, ‘every revolution evaporates and
Despite the Biennale’s theme of all our
leaves behind only the slime of a new
relations, the relationship between the
bureaucracy’. It is perhaps an inflexible
two organisations was placed on hiatus as
frame through which most of us view
punters flocked instead to the post-indusour place in the political paradigm today
trial playground of Cockatoo Island in
— being, as we are, largely disassociated
record numbers. (is allowed Artspace’s
from the decisions of the powerful, who
Executive Director, Blair French and
themselves seem ruled by abstracted,
Curator, Mark Feary to take advantage of
inhuman bodies of authority, such as the
the opportunity to place their programcorporation. Such a frame might explain
ming in inevitable, if not intentional,
how one views Phil Collins’ masterful
comparison across concurrent exhibition
double-header films, marxism today
dates. Conceived and presented as a
(prologue) /0-0 and use! value! exchange!
two-part exhibition model, Everything
/0-0 with a misplaced sentimental
Falls Apart provided a thorny counterpoint pensiveness for the German Democratic
to the Biennale’s apparent distaste for
Republic’s foundational myths. Pulling up
separation, negativity and disruption as
a small, chipped wooden chair at a desk,
intellectual and emotional prisms from
as if settling into class, I sat mesmerised
which to view the state of the world today
by a teacher who, with impressive clarity
— itself a hugely imprecise subject of study, and verve, elucidates Marx’s principle of
for which everyone and no-one knows
surplus value to a class of undergraduate
something about. Significantly, it did this
students in Berlin. Marx’s dictum ‘all that
not by means of literalist opposition to the is solid melts into air’ is deliciously evoked
premise of universal solidarity, but instead as one becomes engrossed in Collins’
by effectively proposing that the problem
poetic document of the personal stories
may in fact be the very constituent of our
of former teachers of Marxism–Leninism,
relationships: the cocooning, confining
whose profession became irrevocably and
and confounding spaces of diplomacy.
spiritually bankrupt following the turning
When forced to make concessions, accom- tides of history once state socialism colmodate unfamiliar faces or simply get
lapsed in East Germany. (is is juxtaposed
squeezed—and hard!—the brave jump up
with archival footage from the -250s and
and shout. (is reaction to the python grip set to a hypnotic soundtrack. Considered
of provocation separates the individual
in relation to the screening of fellow UK
from the huddle. Taking its title from the
artist Sarah Morris’ "#$@ /001, a journey
-214 song and album by American punk
into one mind’s ruminations over the
band Hüsker Dü, Everything Falls Apart
implications of the terrorist massacre of
probed contradictory desires of rejecting
Israeli nationals during the -23/ Munich
and accepting the status quo, explicit in
Olympic Games, the emphasis on the
punk rock’s ethos, by offering works that
psychogeography of the German experiplaced dispute and confrontation as an
ence in the twentieth century remains
a priori structural determinant of human
a significant thread with contemporary
interaction—if one person is splendid
resonances.
isolation, then two is a dispute waiting
Of less powerful authorial vision
to happen.
was Berlin-based Venezuelan artist
Part I foregrounded the curators’
Alessandro Balteo’s collaboration with
proposition of examining the actual,
New York-based curator Media Farzin,
imagined and desired collapse of ideologi- Chronoscope, "#'", ""pm /002–--, which
cal and political systems by presenting a
under utilises recordings of a CBS news
suite of works that conceptually conjoined program in the early years of television.
119
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
REVIEWS
(e qualitative level of their method of
appropriation of original sources—a cut
and paste of conversations between a
cast of political commentators—seems
inadequate given the inherent interest and
significance of meaning in historical documents whose raw power trumps the artists’
didactic use of the material. Watching this
work to come away with an impression
that, yes indeed, the UK and USA intervened in Iran in -264 to guarantee their
exploitation of her sovereign oil is to recall
Susan Sontag’s supposition that ‘photography transforms reality into a tautology:
when Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he
shows that there are people in China,
and that they are Chinese’. In this sense,
the artists offer answers to questions
hardly worth asking due, surely, to their
self-evidence. Of some disappointment,
too, was Sydney artist Sarah Goffman’s
Occupy Sydney /0--–-/, more than one
hundred, wall-mounted black marker on
cardboard placards that can reasonably
be interpreted as either an exercise in the
process by which museums deaden the
raw demands of the streets or, conversely,
as a sardonic paean to the pie-in-the-sky
idealism of protestors. Either way, the
work’s drab aesthetic presence worked
against any desire for further intellectual
engagement.
In Everything Falls Apart: Part II the
emphasis was on the particularities of
conflict in cause, context and consequence, which was rather apt to think
about given my visit to the gallery took
place the day a8er the recent violent
Muslim protests in downtown Sydney.
Vernon Ah Kee’s installation Tall Man
/0-0 utilises video footage from community and CCTV sources documenting
the social upheaval on Palm Island in
/00@. (e artist’s confronting stop/start
edits between viewpoints and moments
of reason and violence successfully places
the viewer in the unsettling position of
having to negotiate with the unfolding of
uncertainty, and the spring-coiled tension,
that can exist within all of us, between
passionate involvement and detached
observation. Conversely, in What Would
it Mean to Win? /001, Zanny Begg and
Oliver Ressler present scenes of protest
and blockade at the G1 Summit held in
Heiligendamm, Germany, interspersed
with vox pops with the protestors, who
seem too accustomed to asking nicely for
things — conflict vs. manners. ‘Resistance
is also something that is joyful, that people
can come together and celebrate’ chirps
one of the protestors, sounding a lot like
someone who can afford to wait their turn.
Tony Garifalakis’ series of Affirmations
/0-/, poster-sized stock images of
American law enforcement targets
overlaid with the positive affirmations of
the motivational therapist, were strangely
foreign to my eyes. (is was not because
our culture lacks violence but because,
thankfully, it’s one that doesn’t include
guns in the firsthand experience of most
people. While visually arresting, the work
lacked a convincing anchoring point
in lived experience when viewed in an
Australian context. (e standout work
in Part II was Jem Cohen’s Little Flags
-22/–/000, which was significantly more
inspiring than the inclusion of his Gravity
Hill Newsreels /0--–-/ in Part I, the latter
depicting goings-on around the fringes of
the central sites of the recent Occupy Wall
Street protests. In Part II, a haunting short
monochromatic film places us within
the eye of a tornado of celebration and
patriotic fervour in downtown Manhattan
during the ticker-tape reception of troops
returning from the -22/ Gulf War. Little
Flags displays a brilliant visual eloquence,
sharpened by the shock of 2/-- — an event
unforeseen at the time — that drives home
a valuable lesson of history that is perhaps
also a parable of artistic creation: victory
is never wholly victorious, defeat is rarely
defeating.
120
Pedro de Almeida is Program Manager at 4A Centre
for Contemporary Asian Art and a regular contributor
to Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australia and other
publications.
EVERYTHING FALLS APART
PEDRO DE ALMEIDA
Jem Cohen
Little Flags -22/–/000
installation views (details)
Artspace, Sydney
Image courtesy Artspace
Photo credit: silversalt photography
121
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Tony Garifalakis &
Tully Moore’s Denimism
Ace Wagstaff
Tony Garifalakis and Tully Moore
Denimism
West Space, Melbourne
/3 July – -1 August /0-/
Tully Moore & Tony Garifalakis
Denimism /0-/
installation view
West Space, Melbourne
Image courtesy the artists, John Buckley Gallery and
Hugo Michel Gallery
Photo credit: West Space
122
TONY GARIFALAKIS & TULLY MOORE
ACE WAGSTAFF
(ese days anyone can resist, but, in a
world of global capital, it’s very difficult
not to be unintentionally hypocritical: you
sign a petition online, whilst buying shoes
made by children in sweatshops, while
Occupy protestors fight back against the
one per cent of wealth owners, at the same
time as utilising social media platforms
worth over -00 billion to organise
themselves.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive
to be better (changes happen everyday,
brought about by the people), but it is
the aforementioned irony of rebellion in
the so-called First World that interests
Garifalakis and Moore in their exhibition
Denimism. (e duo have each made five
denim wall hangings that drape in a
military-style rank, akin to a picket line,
on the wall of West Space’s Gallery One.
(ese banners uniformly share denim
as their foundation, which in turn also
instantly links in solidarity with historical
cultural underdogs (labourers, rebels,
motorcyclists, gangs, outlaws) also associated with the hardwearing fabric.
Using this façade of protest, the duo
have consolidated a range of counterculture tropes, and related aesthetics, to
create works adorned with imagery that
highlights the potential hostility of niche
groups against outsiders: the mascots and
insignias of sports teams in Moore’s work
Welcome to the Jungle /0-/, and spelling
out ‘haters’ in the iconic Star Wars font
found in Garifalakis’ Haters /0-/. (e
borrowing of mixed-media references and
its related trappings (rivets, large stitching,
studs, chains) point to the broad band of
cultural underdogs also associated with
denim (bikers and gang members).
Many rebels, revolutionaries and
general anti-heroes end up as commercial
poster-babes of general defiance (or, at the
very least, spread the feel-good message
of believing in yourself) in order to sell
T-shirts, Disney films, even websites (see
Che Guevara, -2/1–-253; Hua Mulan,
Northern Wei dynasty, 415–64@; John
Lennon, -2@0–-210; Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly,
-166–-110; Guy Fawkes, -630–-505;
Julian Assange, -23-–) and unfortunately
become inert and fictionalised through
saleable dramatisation and the fuzzy
distortion of history.
(e materials used in the exhibition
(which are only imitated by Moore
in his clever charade of representing
materials through tromp l’oeil painting,
and Garifalakis’ use of mixed media)
also go through a similar process of
having their power divested: a Crips gang
coloured bandana hangs flaccidly on a
length of chain, the loyalty-laden motifs
of embroidered patches are reduced to
ghostly-flattened painted fakes, metal
studs point out from the wall harmlessly in
the safe, controlled and stark environment
of the gallery. Even the violence alluded
to in Garifalakis’ texts (i.e., ‘Rob ’em,
Fuck ’em, Kill ’em’) is so8ened by their
skilfully stitched and clean presentation,
all which nullifies the dangerous gravitas
of the messages.
It becomes apparent very quickly that
the banners are devoid of any actual cause
and merely show off the dressings and
visual language of defiance associated
with the counter-cultures of the past,
essentially posers adopting a readily available styling. (e authority surrounding
these stylistic devices has dissipated over
time; they are just husks of their former
selves. Garifalakis and Moore recognise
that these objects and the visual language
within them is in many ways (if not
entirely) functionally obsolete (outside
of ironic use) and simply combine them
in different ways to present them as a
stylisticly themed palette without any
allegiances. (ese days anyone can resist,
or at least channel an aesthetic simulation.
Ace Wagstaff is a Melbourne-based artist and writer.
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REVIEWS
Pretty Air and Useful Things
Alexandra Johnson
Sanné Mestrom
Pretty Air and Useful Things /0-/
installation view
Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne
Image courtesy of the artist and Monash University Museum of Art
Photo credit: John Brash
In the changing consideration of the
artistic ‘object’ beyond it’s physicality
alone, many artists and critics have sought
to contemporise the practice of sculpture
by emphasising its broader social context
as being indispensible to new modes of
postmodern critical engagement. As far
back as -232, Rosalind Krauss noted that
sculpture, as we know it, had become
‘infinitely malleable’.1 Pretty Air and Useful
!ings reflected this malleability in a
number of ways, the most profound of
which lay in the curatorial focus of spatial
experiences and the social contexts of
124
Pretty Air and Useful !ings
Dan Bell, Sanné Mestrom, Alex Vivian
Curated by Rosemary Forde
Monash University Museum of Art,
Melbourne
-2 July – // September /0-/
artistic objects. In attempting to reconcile
conceptual concerns raised by sculpture’s
expanded field with a minimalist formal
language, curator Rosemary Forde suggested a unique framework for considering the sculptural; the heart of which lies
in our ability to critically engage with
artistic objects and their shared space.
Making reference to the space around
the object, ’s tiny Project Space
gallery immediately implicated the viewer
in the relationship that the sculptural
objects shared with their environment,
becoming essential to what Forde
PRETTY AIR AND USEFUL THINGS
ALEXANDRA JOHNSON
described as the ‘breathing space between semi-circles undermines the traditional
subject and object’.2 Pretty Air forged a
functionality of the design through its
new brand of social capital whereby the
awkward height and bronze castings.
freedom of the desiring subject is manifest. (e title, with its reference to two giants of
Indeed, this transference between objects
modern art theory, questioned the value
and their surroundings constituted a large we associate with historical hierarchies.
part of the shared visual language of Dan
Yet this nod to an earlier moment in art
Bell, Sanné Mestrom and Alex Vivian.
history did not deny the strength of the
Alex Vivian’s denim wall rubbing
lineage of modern art, but rather carved
People were here (again)… presence, etc.
a critical consideration of contemporary
Can you smell them? /0-/, embodied this
sculpture beyond its physical integrity.
idea quite literally, replicating the scuffs
Rather than using materials that we
and scrapes le8 behind by gallery-goers
have come to associate with the great
as they pass through the space. Vivian’s
masters of modern art and design, Dan
piece monopolised an entire gallery wall,
Bell works with found objects to reveal
emulating the transference between body,
ways in which we value the physicality of
space and object. (e suggestion of the
sculpture. A velvet rope and an elegant
bodily within the gallery insists that artisdress scarf were hung on the wall below
tic objects do not exist within a vacuum.
the traditional eye-level gallery hang; the
Rather it is their social context and what
title "%%% off /0-/ further undermined
we as social beings bring to the gallery
notions of established taste, with "%%% off
— our hierarchies of value and taste — that
being made entirely from found and
activate them. It is through this rupturing
stolen items. By excluding himself from
of the hermetic preserve of the white cube
traditional modes of monetary exchange,
that we’re reminded that the gallery is not
yet utilising a visual language of style
sanctimonious, nor is it sterilised against
and elegance, Bell’s Duchampian venture
the outside world. Our pervasive presence undermined the modernist imperative
does not disrupt the space. It is in fact
for each medium to be defined in relation
activated in a way that positions our gaze
to the materials through which it was
as active and constructive, rather than
expressed.
passive and consumptive.
Far from sculpture being a dusty relic
In many ways, these three artists’
of modernism, Pretty Air and Useful !ings
works ironically found a harmony in their
presented a vastly expanded account
conceptual disjuncture: the works both
of contemporary sculptural practice
depended on and undermined the value
that encouraged artistic objects to be
established by modernism and its sculpconsidered as part of a broader social
tural undertakings. Sanné Mestrom’s
context. In using modernist resistance
commitment to a dialogue between the
to the anthropomorphising of sculpture
established and the experimental took
as its critical counterpoint, the works of
shape in her use of quintessentially
Vivian, Bell and Mestrom seek to rectify
modernist sculptural materials such as
the shortcomings of modernism’s genealmarble, timber and bronze in Muse "
ogy of flatness, paving new roads to the
/0-/, Muse @ /0-/ and Grosenberg /0-/.
contemporary.
Grosenberg in particular presented a
Alexandra Johnson is studying a Bachelor of Arts
nuanced dialogued between traditional
(Art History) at the University of Melbourne.
materials and modern design. In this work,
a low table made from two misaligned
1
2
NOTES
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’
in October, vol. 8, Spring, 1979, p. 30.
Rosemary Forde, Pretty Air and Useful Things,
Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne,
2012, p. 6.
125
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R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Parallel Universes:
1970–1985
Amy Clare McCarthy
Dara Birnbaum
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman -231–32
video still
Image courtesy the artist and Video Data Bank
126
Joan Jonas
Vertical Roll -23/
video still
Image courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix
PARALLEL UNIVERSES
AMY CLARE MCCARTHY
Parallel Universes: "#$%–"#&'
Mike Parr, Bruce Nauman,
Keigo Yamamoto, Norio Imai,
Joan Jonas, David Perry, Stephen Jones,
Bush Video, Nam June Paik,
Akira Kurosaki, Shinsuke Ina,
Peter Kennedy, John Hughes,
Gary Hill, Peter Callas, Bill Viola,
Randelli Nobuhiro, Dara Birnbaum,
Ko Nakajima
Curated by Matthew Perkins,
Dr Mark Pennings, Lubi (omas and
Rachael Parsons
(e Block, QUT Creative Industries
Precinct, Brisbane
/@ July – @ August /0-/
Walking into the exhibition space of
Parallel Universes felt like entering a
video art treasure trove. Shining in the
darkness were the works of video art
heavyweights: Nam June Paik’s Global
Groove -234, Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/
Transformation: Wonder Woman -231, and
Bruce Nauman’s Lip Sync -252 to name
a few. (e exhibition featured seminal
video works from the -230s and -210s by
artists from Australia, Japan, Britain and
the United States and demonstrated that,
while these artists were geographically
distanced and, in some cases, would have
been largely unaware of the work of their
contemporaries, they were indeed working in parallel.
Parallel Universes, expertly curated
by Matthew Perkins, with his team Mark
Pennings, Lubi (omas, and Rachel
Parsons, followed three major thematic
threads: ‘performance, identity and video’,
‘media is the message’ and the ‘politics of
narrative’. (e Block, a large warehouselike space, designed and built specifically
for the exhibition of new media and digital
works, was curtained into three large
chambers to reflect the themes. 9ght
clusters of screens within these spaces
allowed the relationships between the
works to be more prevalent, and it was
particularly interesting to see the way in
which Australian video art was recognised
within an international historical context.
Parallel Universes gave thoughtful
consideration to these connections,
but there was a distinct absence in
the exhibition — the presence of older
analogue technology. (e display of these
historically rooted works was largely on
digital screens, begging the consideration:
what is lost when works are transferred
from old formats and displayed on new
technology?
References within the works to the
specific formal qualities of the analogue
medium were rendered mute in this
presentation. (is was particularly
problematic for the works that considered
‘performance, identity and medium’,
including Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll -23/, in
which Jonas employs the rolling vertical
lines that occur when the television signal
is interrupted as a formal device. Within
the work, the constant rolls disrupt her
representation of her body and the female
form. Vertical rolls obviously don’t occur
on digital screens, and the reflexivity to
the medium became awkward in this
display — there was something about
watching vertical lines rolling past on a
Mac screen that didn’t quite fit. Other
works suffered similarly: Norio Imai winding magnetic tapes around an old television set in Digest of Video Performances
("#$&–"#&)) -231–-214, which considers
the physicality and ephemeral nature
of the video, would have had a stronger
127
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
referential element on an analogue set,
likewise with Keigo Yamamoto’s Hand
No. @ -235, where the artist films his
hand interacting with a pre-recorded
counterpart that is played back on an old
television set. Both would have effectively
linked the medium to the content, had
they been played on monitors that more
closely resembled those of the era in
which they were made.
Moving through the exhibition to the
‘media is the message’ and the ‘politics
of narrative’ sections, this lack of old
technology was less jarring but still
apparent. Some of these works dealt with
the ideological power of the television set
through the use of reconstructed footage
to alter the messages originally broadcast,
such as in Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/
Transformation: Wonder Woman -231–32,
which presents edited footage from the
television show Wonder Woman. (e
isolated and repeated moment of the
ordinary woman’s transformation to
superhero unveils the construction of
gender in the program. Analogue televisions could be seen as a symbol of the
power of the mass media over the public
— as viewers consume content transmitted to them, but cannot change it. (is
separation in power between producers
and consumers is what makes Birnbaum’s
deconstruction of Wonder Woman with its
own re-appropriated content so powerful.
Digital screens imply the opposite: power
to form one’s own content; access via the
Internet making it possible to find your
own sources of information and entertainment, as well as actively create it. (irty
years on from Technology/ Transformation:
Wonder Woman, through the internet
and simple video editing technology,
many consumers have the power to
re-appropriate and redistribute content as
they wish.
(e artist collectives Duvet Brothers
and Gorilla Tapes, both from Britain
and active during the -210s, reassemble
cut-up found video footage into new
political narratives, opposing the message
constructed by the mainstream media
of the time which largely supported the
128
REVIEWS
(atcher government. Death Valley Days
-21@, Gorilla Tapes presents montaged
news footage hinting at a love story
between Margaret (atcher and Ronald
Reagan. Similar techniques were used
by Australian artists, Peter Kennedy and
John Hughes in their work November
Eleven -232–1-, which looks at the events
of the Whitlam dismissal of -236. Shown
on Mac screens these works figured more
like YouTube videos, where re-purposing
found footage is common, though o8en
employed more for humour than for
political purposes. In this instance, newer
screens enabled these works to be read as
a beginning point of the common practice
of consumers re-mixing and repurposing
footage as they wish.
Having said all this, the zealous
pursuit of analogue is not the answer.
(e importance of transferring video
works from superseded formats is
paramount to ensure they are not lost
completely and trapped forever on inaccessible black magnetic tape. However,
in an exhibition such as this, displaying
these works on the formats they were
created for benefits the viewer by providing visual context, whilst also attempting
to maintain the integrity of the original
works. Digital screens lack the heavy
presence of an old box shaped, analogue
set and the associations that come with
it. (ese problems in exhibition will only
be amplified in the coming years, with the
analogue switch off due for completion
across all of Australia by the end of /0-4,
making analogue televisions pointless to
own and impossible to buy. Perhaps now
is the time for institutions to invest more
seriously in the collection of older formats
of technology for the exhibition of historical material, to ensure that works from
this period of time can be remembered
as they were.
Amy-Clare McCarthy has recently returned from working
at MoMA PS1 and e-flux, New York. She currently works
at the State Library of Queensland and is a co-director
of arts collective Current Projects.
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Jacob Ogden Smith’s
Hovea Pottery Ale
Andrew Purvis
Jacob Ogden Smith
Hovea Pottery Ale: quite a few bottles,
some large pots and a video
OK Gallery, Perth
/ August – / September /0-/
Jacob Ogden Smith
Hovea Pottert Ale: Quite a few bottles,
some large pots and a video /0-/
installation view
OK Gallery, Perth
Image courtesy the artist and OK Gallery
130
JACOB OGDEN SMITH
ANDREW PURVIS
Jacob Ogden Smith’s brew is a fruity dark
ale, robust but with a subtle complexity of
flavour that reveals itself slowly over the
course of sustained consumption. Its faint
floral notes are underscored by an almost
citrus bitterness and rich malt tones, making
it an ideal accompaniment to a ploughman’s
lunch of sharp cheddar and piquant, vinegary
gherkins. Be warned though, it packs a
wallop and might not be the ideal tipple for a
Sunday session.
between cottage industry aesthetic and a
survivalist-style ethos of self-sufficiency.
Included in Here and Now at the
Lawrence Wilson Gallery, a recent survey
exhibition of young Western Australian
artists, Jacob Ogden Smith’s practice is
dedicated to reconnecting the ceramic
form with the specific cultural contexts
that it developed out of. He does not shy
away from the functional, nor does he fear
that any acknowledgement of utilitarian
purpose will invalidate the object’s claim
as a work of art. Alongside this explicit
awareness of the discipline’s history,
Smith also seeks to weave ceramics into a
conversation about contemporary popular
culture. !is Is How We Do It is scored
by an instrumental version of Montell
Jordan’s song of the same name, its tempo
transforming the traditional, repetitive
processes of pottery and brewing into
something akin to an aerobics video.
In last year’s group exhibition
Wilderness Years, also at OK Gallery, Smith
contributed America’s Cup /0--, a wonkily
precise rendering of the famous trophy in
lusterware ceramic. It was accompanied
by a ‘purple drank’ version of Icehouse’s
‘Great Southern Land’ and a similarly
cough-syrup-slow video of Australia II
winning the yacht race off the coast of
Fremantle. (is droning soundtrack
imbued the piece of pottery with a sense
of sinister nostalgia, like a laurel wreath
turned to rotten vegetable matter from
being too long rested upon.
Like scoring a period film with a trendy
modern soundtrack, Smith’s practice
simultaneously salutes ceramic’s practical,
cra8y origins while invigorating it with a
distinctly contemporary flavour. (e tried
and true Bacchanalian combo of booze,
tunes and pottery is set reeling to a new
rhythm.
Staff writer positions for the glossy
lifestyle li8-outs of our weekend papers
are jealously guarded and I had begun
to fear that my insightful ruminations
on booze were destined to be wasted
on a succession of glassy-eyed dining
companions, whose ability to feign
interest was inexpert at best. Fortunately,
Jacob Ogden Smith’s exhibition Hovea
Pottery Ale at OK Gallery has afforded
me the opportunity to flex my atrophied
beer-reviewing muscle. For this exhibition,
the artist cra8ed a range of hand-turned,
ceramic beer bottles and filled them with
his own artisanal homebrew. Each bottle
is unique: some resemble an engorged
stubby, while others, with their tapered
necks and bulging shoulders, are like a
miniature, cartoon amphora. Sealed with
beeswax and arranged haphazardly on
a central table, these vessels formed the
centrepiece of the exhibition. A refrigerated keg offered punters a free sample
and some gaudily glazed hand-coiled pots
were kept on hand to catch the dregs.
Aware that opening night crowds
gather as much for the complimentary
refreshments as they do for the unveiling
of a new body of work, Smith has turned
the customary free beer into the work
itself. But this is no glib joke; an accompanying video, !is is How We Do It /0-/,
details the laborious processes involved
in putting such a show together. (e artist,
with his hand in each and every stage of
the work’s creation — from the harvesting
of the wild yeast needed to kick-start the
fermentation process, to building the kilns
in which the bottles are fired — presents us
with a strange yet harmonious marriage
Andrew Purvis is Perth-based a writer, artist and
academic.
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REVIEWS
Louise Menzies’ Local Edition
Chloe Geoghegan
Louise Menzies
Local Edition @'.%$."@
Published by DDMMYY and
(e Physics Room, Christchurch
Produced and designed by Kelvin Soh
with Sam Wieck
Louise Menzies
Local Edition /0-/
exterior view
The Physics Room, Christchurch
Image courtesy the artist and The Physics Room
Photo credit: Paul Johns
For a long time, the newspaper has been
an icon of mass culture, a patriotic symbol
of the mighty modern world and what it is
capable of achieving. Today, that is the job
of the Internet. Where does this leave the
humble local edition? What can be seen
today on the cover of my own local edition,
!e Press Christchurch, is a series of improvised headlines attending to both politics
and commerce, which create a tiresome
broadsheet of infotainment. !e Press,
132
like most newspapers of the world, is one
small part of a multi-national conglomerate that has taken ownership of almost all
New Zealand newspapers and magazines,
seeking to commodify information
through a ‘more market’ approach.1 In a
small country like New Zealand this has
led to competitive corporate control over
short-term sales and ratings figures that
ultimately threaten the ideal ‘trickle down’
of global information, contributing to a
LOUISE MENZIES
CHLOE GEOGHEGAN
potential localised dumbing down.2 With
this in mind, the latest DDMMYY project,
Local Edition by Louise Menzies at (e
Physics Room, revealed the converse side
of news culture, where information is no
longer the focus, allowing perhaps the
original ideals of having a local edition to
surface.
Clipped up on either side of two
hired fencing panels are sixteen empty
broadsheets of varying sizes, each simply
displaying one unique masthead derived
from familiar papers such as !e Ames,
!e Age and !e Press, as well as a selection
from further afield including la Repubblica,
Hamshahri, Radikal, Die Welt and Fakt.
Resembling an enlarged, temporary
newsstand, the installation was situated
within the street-facing window of (e
Physics Room. Local Edition displayed
these news icons as artefact: reducing
and abstracting their existing presence
by presenting small symbols of our shared
culture and history. Newspaper content
has always functioned within the context
of its own broadsheet; content is led by its
masthead and shape, locating a definitive
identity and o8en, viewpoint.
When viewing Local Edition from the
outside in, these mastheads contextualise
Christchurch as a dystopian backdrop
for a wider discussion of what was here
before the earthquake, within the fabric of
the city. Memories of this locale featured
various unobtrusive newsstands that
populated quiet arcades in the centre of
town, selling news from elsewhere. Today,
the CBD is the centre of a different kind
of public address in the form of notices
and warnings tacked and pasted upon a
multitude of surfaces. In this way, Menzies’
fenced mastheads gesture towards the
idea that Christchurch has subconsciously
become an insular wash of news and
information, forgetting the rest of the
world because, perhaps, it seems like
the rest of the world has forgotten about
Christchurch.
Much like only reading the front
page of the newspaper, this is simply one
perspective from the outside looking in.
It is the secondary, inside out approach
to Menzies’ installation that presents
an enticing investigation into various
collective histories through the use of a
conceptualised design practice. Within a
gallery context, the format of this exhibition is a designed presentation, guiding
the artist’s narrative through a complex
survey of how news culture can affect
the way a city is seen through the very
information it produces.
(ough the installation tends to place
an emphasis upon spatial, political and
even sculptural relationships between
newspapers and their place in society,
Menzies’ accompanying Local Edition
publication — consisting of the same
sixteen broadsheets stacked inside a
cling-wrapped backing board — presents
a concisely formatted, complementary
interpretation of how the larger displayed
version could perhaps become a commodity in itself when seen on or within
an exhibited format.3 Menzies offers the
viewer a chance to take the installation
away, perhaps landing on walls or kitchen
tables in the same way an ordinary local
edition or piece of signage would. (is
concept, combined with the idea that the
objects displayed in fact represent real,
profitable yet expendable items, neatly
stitches up context with perspective
in terms of how newspapers today are
neutrally viewed as entirely consumable,
yet culturally significant social-historical
artefacts.
1
NOTES
Roger Horrocks, ‘A Short History of “The New
Zealand Intellectual”’ in Laurence Simmons (ed.),
Speaking Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals Rethink
New Zealand, Auckland University Press, Auckland,
2007, p. 40.
Chloe Geoghegan is the co-founder of Dog Park Art
Project Space in Christchurch, New Zealand.
2
3
Ibid., p. 41.
Boris Groys, ‘The Politics of Display’, in e-flux, #2,
January, 2009, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/
politics-of-installation/, accessed 6 October 2012.
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Crisis Complex
Janis Ferberg
Tony Garifalakis
The Filthy Few series /0-0–-/
mixed media on denim and leather vests
Image courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Lucy Parakhina
Against a backdrop of economic
downturn, political misfeasance, natural
disaster, climate change and mass networked protest, Crisis Complex explores
the redefinition of crisis as a pathological
state inspired and confounded by the
awareness that things must and cannot
change. Curators Laura McLean and
Sumugan Sivanesan posit that ‘crisis’ has
become a subject of fascination within
the collective conscious, breeding and
perpetuating the tides of uncertainty that
serve to re-establish, rather than fracture,
the status quo.
With the gravitas of anti-neoliberal
critique, the curatorial statement presents
us with a spectrum of hopelessness. (e
works in the exhibition, however, reflect
neither this political angst nor despondency. Although we are provided with a
disclaimer asserting art’s autonomy in the
134
face of this crisis it describes, the unease
emerging from such disconnect cannot
avoid reopening the long-debated problem of the role of art in political critique.
Experiencing this uneasiness, however,
paradoxically serves to facilitate an
understanding at the crux of the crisis
— the confoundedness of critiquing a
system to which we are so inextricably
tied, a conundrum of complicity from
which art is not exempt but which it has
the capacity to bridge. Crisis Complex,
through relationships between concept
and object, explores a crisis in meaning
with the works in the exhibition providing
entry points into the multifarious temperament borne out of this conflicted position.
(rough the interplay of wry humor
and aloofness, an emergent mistrust
of ideology is exemplified by many of
the works in the exhibition. Sin Atulo
CRISIS COMPLEX
JANIS FERBERG
Crisis Complex
Heidi Axelsen & Hugo Moline,
Ella Barclay, Carla Cescon,
Edgar Cobián, Tony Garifalakis,
Francesca Heinz,
Lise Hovesen & Javier Rodriguez,
Adam Norton, Joaquin Segura,
Takayuki Yamamoto,
theweathergroup_U
Curated by Laura McLean &
Sumugan Sivanesan
9n Sheds Gallery,
(e University of Sydney
September -@ – October -4, /0-/
(Untitled ) /0-0, four drawings by Edgar
Cobián, creates a patchwork flag for our
times, comprising of political and pop
symbols which by contrast are emptied
of their individual power. In !e Filthy
Few (), (E.U.), (United Nations)
/0-0–-/, Garifilakas draws on a similar
cynical humor, with three customised
biker ‘patches’ that hang with hubris
as if awaiting a banded call to action
— emanating an internal tension that
complicates the question: who amongst
them is friend or foe?
Based on the belief that established
models have failed us, we are offered
alternative strategies for facing uncertainty. Ella Barclay interrupts reality with
Ebb /0-/, a sculptural video installation
suspended in space like a portal. Guarded
by hypnotic apparitions that emerge and
dissolve in a liminal mist of dry ice, it
beckons our entry into the void. Adam
North’s installation Generic Escape Capsule
/006 provides respite from both domestic
and external crises through a re-purposed
wardrobe, kitted out to sustain survival
for up to two weeks. Carla Cecson’s Panic
Button /0-/ looms like a post-apocalyptic
fete stall. Foregrounding a wall text
proclaiming ‘(e End’, the stall is reassuringly supplied with show bags containing
contracts drawn up on behalf of Satan and
his affiliates.
While many of the objects in the
exhibition feature irony and operate
deconstructively, there is also a selection
of projects that, in contrast, earnestly
engage in optimism and positive social
exchange. In Telling Your Future /0--,
Takayuki Yamamoto invites primary
school children to write our destiny as
they create personalised fortune-telling
booths based on aleatoric games. Made
of cardboard, paint, stickers and toys, the
booths sit unmanned while a demonstrative video detailing each game plays in
the background. In Signs of Survival /0-/,
Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline engage
local residents from the Marrickville
area to share their stories of struggle
and survival over a cup of wild fennel
tea. We are given access to these sites of
social interaction via wooden apparatuses
resembling bird feeders that act more like
telescopes, allowing us to peer into other
universes where micro-cosmic exchanges
are signposted with text excerpted from
these narratives. Reading as an accumulative account of all the conversations,
a text piece on the wall made of fennel
seeds strung together reminds us that
‘everything passes’.
Rather than dealing explicitly with the
notion of crisis, or political realities, the
works in the exhibition are representative
of the epiphenomenon of ‘the crisis
complex’, provoking consideration of
contradictory issues tied to the conditions
of our present day.
Janis Ferberg is a Sydney-based artist and independent
curator.
135
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body
Jane Howard
Atlanta Eke
Monster Body
Dancehouse as part of the
Next Wave Festival, Melbourne
/- May – /3 May /0-/
Atlanta Eke
Monster Body /0-/
performance documentation
Image courtesy Next Wave
Photo credit: Sam Ackroyd
136
ATLANTA EKE
JANE HOWARD
Before entering the theatre at Dancehouse
for Monster Body, the Next Wave audience
is given a caution: this show contains
nudity and is not suitable for people under
eighteen years.
Walking in, we are immediately confronted by choreographer and performer
Atlanta Eke, hula-hooping naked on a
mirrored platform. Looking out from
behind a hard-moulded monster mask,
Eke silently watches as the audience walks
past her, measuring up how much they
should look up at the performer and how
much they should avert her eyes.
In the seats, the audience has no
reprieve from Eke’s gaze. House lights
harshly light the audience through most of
the production: there is nowhere to hide.
Monster Body is an o8en violent, ferocious piece sitting somewhere between
contemporary dance and performance
art. Largely a solo performance, the
non-narrative work moves through scenes
forcing the audience to question and
actually see the representation of women
— and women’s bodies — in our world and
in performance.
(ere is a sense of discomfort amongst
the audience; sitting slightly on edge,
the lights force us to constantly check
our response to the work, all the while
knowing Eke is watching us watch her.
Monster Body moves from incongruous
pairings to the simply incongruous. Eke
moves across the stage performing grand
battements: refusing the mantra to make
dance seem effortless, she yells and grunts
on every kick and movement; indeed,
her imposed soundtrack gives her every
move a humorous gravity. She consumes
a bright red drink, liquid falls down her
torso; a man encased in a biohazard suit
cleans her, before they tenderly kiss.
(e sound of car horns blaring in
the background, Eke puts on a nude
bodysuit and fills her new skin with pink
water balloons, appearing to disfigure
her body as she rolls across the stage.
Britney Spears’ ‘I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a
Woman’ plays while Eke, standing naked
centre stage, looks so8ly and vulnerably
at the audience. Her body on display,
Eke urinates, before dropping to the
floor and rolling around in sexualised
configurations you might expect to see in
a music video.
On the mirrored platform, Eke uses
scissors to trim her head and pubic hair.
Fully-dressed women caress her body with
plastic hands on the ends of long sticks.
Standing somewhat apart from the
rest of the work, a ‘five-minute interval’
sees Eke joined by four women, naked
except for their heads shrouded in black
bags. (ey perform a repetitive and simple
dance, choreographed to Beyoncé’s
‘Run (e World (Girls)’; the women
are reduced to their state of nakedness.
While still behind the monster mask, Eke
seemed to carry some sort of autonomy;
here, without faces and only their bodies
on show, autonomy is uncomfortably
stripped away.
Monster Body throws a lot at its
audience. (rough the performance, many
of the situations leave Eke vulnerable.
Yet Eke takes absolute ownership of these
situations through her use and claim of
the stage space. (e use of her body in the
performance creates a work invigoratingly
invested in feminist principles.
Eke holds her audience on edge: paradoxically uncomfortable, disassociated,
but completely implicated in her actions.
(e work is fast in pace, o8en shocking,
and not easy to digest or define. Monster
Body is not a show fully appreciated,
or even fully understood, on curtain call.
(e lack of distance given to the audience
during the production itself demands
space to be analysed and absorbed, with
the force of the work not visible until days
a8er leaving the theatre.
Jane Howard is a freelance performing arts writer,
critic and researcher based in Adelaide. She attended
Next Wave through their emerging writers’ program,
Text Camp.
137
Ongoing monument to indecent activities (399BC–)
Van Sant My own private Idaho (1991) Greg Araki Totally Fucked up
Rainer Werner Fassbinder Querelle (1982) George Michael Outside
(1993) Touko Laaksonen Tom of Finland
Portraits
(1998) Online Hook Ups Manhunt (2001) Carlos Motta We who feel
of Life and Death
Spartacus Lounge (1999) Julian
differently (2011) Felix Gonzalez-Torres Ross Laycock (1991) Oscar
Schnabel Before Night Falls (2000) Act Up Silence = Death
Wilde Hard Labour (1895) John Cage 4'33" (1952) Aristotle eronemos
I-phone App Grindr (2009) Mary Jordan Jack Smith and the Destruction
(322 BC) Isaac Julian Looking for Langston (1989) Molly Houses
of Atlantis (2006) Pier Paolo Pasolini Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
London (1699) Vito Acconci Pier 18
Zappeion (2001) Pedro Almodovar Volver (2006) Chasers
Soccer Field (2010) Christos Tsolkas Looaded (1995) VCA Photography
Ecstasy (1991) Antonio Canova Hercules and Lichas (1815) Edward
Public Toilets (2006) Al Pacino Cruising
Muybridge Wrestlers
Hercules and Diomedes
(1980) Amsterdam Segregated Pissholes (1880) Deleuze & Guattari
(1550) Baccio Bandinelli Hercules and Cacus (1534) Marcantonio
Privatisation of the Anus
Treasury Gardens
Raimondo The Virtue as Dominator Fortunae (1510) Gustave Courbet
Photographs (1998) Marcel Duchamp Fountain
Distinguished Air (1930) Australia Civil Union (2009) Adriaen Spoor and The Wrestlers (1853) Hendrik Goltzius Farnese Hercules (1592) Walter
Van Beirendonck Underwear – Paris Fashion Show (2010) Christopher
Pieter Engels Dutch merchant vessel Zeewijk
Gay and
Ciccone In bed with Madonna (1991) Edmund White The Farewell
Lesbian Mardi Gras
Flag
Symphony
The Bathers (1894) Herb Ritts Fashion
Monument to Internet Hook ups (1990) Serbia Protestors at Pride March
Photographer (2006) Homer Iliad and the Odyssey (850 BC) Porn Star
(2001) Alan Turning Suicide (1954) Alain Berliner Ma Vie En Rose
Jack Radcliff (1989) Jean Cocteau Le Livre Blanc
KKK (2012) Tasmania Hendrick Witnalder
Untitled Merchandise (Lovers & Dealers)
Homer’s
(1863) Enrico David Ultra Paste
XXL (2000) Henrik
Phobia
Jason
Olesen Sex (In Public) (2006) Flinders street station public toilets (1909)
Ball (2012) Fritz Haeg Sundown schoolhouse of queer home economics
Spencer Street Station platform 11 (1960) Gilbert Proesch Gilbert &
(2012) Sandridge Beach car park (2011) Mark Raidpere 10 Men (2003)
George (1943) George Passmore Gilbert & George (1942) Pablo Leon
Pub (2003) Streatham Chariots (2002) Istanbul Taksim
De La Barra The centre of the aesthetic revolution
Square (2011) Douglas Crimp AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural
City Baths Change Rooms, spa & sauna (1860) Sauna Steamworks
Activism (1988) The white cubical a monument to toilets; an exhibition
Bear (1993) Julie Ault Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Club
(2006) Group Material AIDS Timeline and Democracy (1988–9) Peter De and procession (2010) Sauna Wet on Wellington
80 (1980) Historian Herodotus (425 BC) Elia Beach Mykonos (2001)
Waal
(2006) Stoke Newington Cemetery Cottaging
Cologne Cox (2005) Brunswick Dohertys Gymnasium
(2001) Greg Bordowitz Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) Michael Foucault
Limanakia (2001) Adelphi Hotel Level 10 (1996) Plato eronemos/erastes
The History of Sexuality (1984) Juan Davila Sentimental History of
Public Toilets (1985) Armstead Maupin Tales
Australian Art
Loaded (1958) Shahryar Nashat
of the city
Oxford Street (1991) Crete Pederasty (650
Plaque (slab)
Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965)
BC) The Laird Hotel Men Only Pub
Stonewall
San Francisco The Hanky Code
Princess X
Riots (1969) 1st December World AIDS day (1988) Greece STAR Cinema
(1916) John Waters Pink Flamingos
Untitled
(2001) Wolfgang Tillmans Turner Prize (2000) Platform Contemporary
(one day this kid…) (1990) Robert Mapplethorpe man in polyester suit
Scruff (2010) British Isles
Gunther Kaufmann (1982) Andy Warhol Blow Job (1964) Art Space Gentlemen
Labouchere Amendment (1885)
Tom Hanks & Denzel Washington Philadelphia (1993) Bruce Weber
Being Boring (1990) Nayland Blake Gorge (1998) Jennie Livingstone
Paris is burning (1990) Alan Ginsberg Howl (1955) Socrates erastes
(399 BC) Nan Goldin The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Michelle Sakaris’
Monument to the 8-Hour Day
Chris Williams-Wyn
Michelle Sakaris
Monument to the &-hour day
Screen Space, Melbourne
/5 July – -- August /0-/
Michelle Sakaris
Monument to the &-Hour Day /0-/ (details)
video projection, timber, plywood, sandbags
400.0 × -26.0 × 23.0 cm
Images courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Kyle Weise
In her latest video work, Monument to the
&-Hour Day /0-/, Michelle Sakaris muses
on the place of time in contemporary
society. Her eponymous subject was the
Eight Hour Movement Monument in
Melbourne, which commemorates the
introduction of the eight-hour working
day. To create her Monument, Sakaris
140
sat at the base of this public monument
for eight consecutive hours, filming the
entirety of her anti-performance. Rather
than re-present this video in the standard
rectangular format, Sakaris enjoined
the virtual image and the real object.
To achieve this merger, she projected
the video onto a wooden silhouette of
MICHELLE SAKARIS
CHRIS WILLIAMS-WYN
the Monument, aligning the edge of the
Monument’s image with the edge of the
timber construction. As the eight-hour
video plays in real-time in the gallery
space, her only companion, an office clock,
dutifully records the regimented passage
of time. By focusing on this delimitation
of time and its relationship to labour,
Monument investigates the link between
work and non-work, while also questioning notions of unproductive time.
Despite the anti-performance moniker,
her recording and re-representation of
these eight hours question the ability of
art to produce meaningful work, yet also
interrogate social attitudes towards time
and the compartmentalisation of the day.
(e inclusion of the office clock reminds
us of this temporal partitioning, while also
questioning whose interests are served by
the rational division of the day. Although
originally a call by workers for fair
conditions, the very credo the Monument
announces places labour before rest and
recreation.1 Sakaris’ restraint and calm
demeanour suggest resignation and
dismay at the rigid order of the day. For its
part, Monument seems to mourn the loss
of such clear divisions, yet the danger is in
becoming nostalgic about their historical
existence.
Beyond these historical concerns,
Monument also investigates what has
become of time in contemporary society.
For the contemporary viewer, the notion of
an eight-hour day may appear somewhat
anachronistic, given the increasingly
frayed divisions between temporal
allotments of time to work and rest. In the
interstitial zone between them, a ‘wasted’
or surplus time may seem apparent. Boris
Groys has suggested that time-based art
provides the best means of exploring the
nature of non-productive time.2 9me, he
argues, has ‘problems when it is perceived
as unproductive, wasted, meaningless’
because it is excluded from historical
narratives,3 becoming lost and ultimately
excess. By marking out the passage of
time, and inviting the viewer to assume a
place alongside her, both Sakaris and the
viewer intervene in the process, allowing
for the contemplation of whether time
is truly wasted or rather affords the
opportunity for reflection. (e admission
of such a potential use of time, it would
seem, celebrates ‘wasted’ time.
Ultimately, Monument to the &-Hour
Day works to reveal the containment of
time within chronology, rather than its
liberation within a formless flow. Literally
embodying this control, the clock’s
inclusion could imply that the work
acquiesces to the temporal structure it
questions. However, the durational aspect
of Sakaris’ piece invites the viewer to
contemplate the complexity of contemporary society’s temporal experience.
Forgoing utopian tendencies, Sakaris
suggests that our iron cage of work lies
less with bureaucracy and rationalisation,4
than with our (ab)use of time. In our
contemporary conditions, time, even
within art, does not flow, it ticks.
1
2
NOTES
Victorian Heritage Database, Eight Hour Monument,
Victorian Heritage Register Number H2084, http://
vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/#detail_places;13841,
accessed 30 July 2012.
Boris Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’, in Julieta Aranda,
Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidoke (eds.) What is
contemporary art? Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2010,
p. 28.
Chris Williams-Wynn is an art history student at the
University of Melbourne.
3
4
Ibid., p. 32.
The ‘iron cage’ describes a constricting and
highly ordered form of social organisation. See
Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons,
Routledge Classics, London and New York, 2001,
pp. 123–124.
141
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
David M Thomas’
Party Disguised as Work or
Work Disguised as a Party
Claire Hielscher
David M !omas
Party Disguised as Work or
Work Disguised as a Party
Boxcopy, Brisbane
3–/1 July /0-/
David M Thomas
Party Disguised as Work or Work Disguised as a Party /0-/
mixed media
Image courtesy the artist
Photo credit: David M Thomas
David M (omas’ recent exhibition Party
Disguised as Work or Work Disguised as a
Party at Boxcopy in Brisbane presented
an exhibition where art is neither all work
nor all play. As an artist who works with
a variety of media and materials, (omas’
most recent installation, Party, follows this
multi-faceted trend. By offering a space
where the sitter could filter and choose
from a variety of influences and symbolic
orders, ranging from (omas’ history
of movie watching, music listening and
manner of artistic practice, the installation
constituted a sitter’s experience as one
that was individually directed and voluntarily extensive.
Crouching underneath a false floor
that horizontally split the gallery space
in half, the viewer was forced to move
between two distinct spaces. (e room
above was almost empty except for the
declarative red LED signage that yelled
‘I AM the SHIT’, and was more closely
reminiscent of the ‘white cube’ notion of
gallery spaces. (omas’ false floor made
this gallery arena accessible only by small
man-holes. By moving the circular manholes aside, the viewer could only inhabit
142
this space in partiality, with the head
alone. Under this false floor, which also
acted as a ceiling, (omas’ installation
merged into a darkened space, heavy with
the scent of hessian and the sounds and
images of a lifetime of collected audio and
visual material. For (omas, by allowing
the sitter the choice of what to watch and
listen to, combined with the cubby-holeesque gallery-to-studio feel of the space,
the emphasis of the installation became
the subject’s active response to the artist’s
delegated space. (e essentially creative,
playful process involved in navigating the
potential mental, physical and sensorial
states offered in this space became an
experiment of choice, and a collaboration
between the artist’s past and the viewer’s
present.
Within the combined gallery and
studio space that (omas presents, the
sense of connection and collaboration
stems from choices made in agreement
with the viewer: the different sources
of audio and visual material, the stance
adapted so as to move around the
height-restricted space, and the choice
to use the selected manholes leading
DAVID M THOMAS
CLAIRE HIELSCHER
out of the cave to a space laden with
potential. By presenting the audience with
an area of comfort and residency — an
area comprised of elements assembled
by the artist but le8 for manipulation by
the viewer — one willingly opts into this
space, conducting a layered occupation
that takes on a meaning of its own making.
Simultaneously, the integration of the
nearby empty space above reminds the
audience of the artist’s presence that, by
its very nature, is intended for curation,
viewing and critiquing. (e artist’s
presence is unobtrusive in its purposeful
absence, yet there is still an acknowledgement of this creative space as one where
the artist lingers as director and instigator.
In this case, the death of the author (or
the removal of the artist) does not mean
that their influence is absent from the
openings of contemplation they leave
behind; rather, it provides the means for
expression without enforcing a definitive
conclusion.
(e history of art carries along with it
an obsession with the creative spaces of
the artist and the search for absolute clarity behind the act of creativity plagues this.
(omas’ work takes the viewer into the
heart of this normally private experience,
transgressing spaces of private work and
public exhibition. For the sitter, engaging
with such an exhibition space, a space
focused on amalgamating different places
alongside different social and creative
outcomes, the overall experience is one
imbued with purposefully varying emotive
responses: namely, curiosity derived from
the freedom to manipulate the space,
coupled with apprehension as to how
to begin this process. (omas’ work is
conscious of its own distinctly complex
nature. Just as Roland Barthes noted the
importance of acknowledging the ebbing
presence of the author to give life to new
meanings in a text, so too does (omas
allow the sitter to improvise within this
space, working within a creative playground drawn from innumerable centres
and fringes of culture.
Claire Hielscher is a Brisbane-based freelance art writer
and reviewer.
143
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
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REVIEWS
Jake Walker’s
Paintings and Relief &
Painting and Relief
George Egerton-Warburton
Jake Walker
Paintings and Relief
Studio -/,
Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne
-4 July – -1 August /0-/
Painting and Relief
Utopian Slumps, Melbourne
-1 July – -1 August /0-/
Jake Walker
Paintings and Relief /0-/
installation view
Utopian Slumps, Melbourne
Image courtesy the artist and Utopian Slumps
Photo credit: Jake Walker
(e titles of Jake Walker’s two solo
exhibitions in July this year were
homonymic descriptions. Paintings and
Relief at Utopian Slumps presented a suite
of nine paintings and an assortment of
ceramic pieces resembling chimneys and
camera lenses set on a low stage. Painting
and Relief in Studio -/ at Gertrude
Contemporary consisted of a floor-based
tableau assembled from the debris of
painting and the studio that formed an
almost perfect rectangular perimeter but
for the sculpture of a laptop assembled
from palettes and boards that was tucked
in the corner. Resembling a jerky threedimensional topography of what you
might expect to see in a Walker painting
(Athfieldesque modernist architecture set
in damp, rural landscapes), it’s heartening
to see Walker use Studio -/ as the projectspace it is intended to be. While relief
described the sculptural form in both
exhibitions, it is in the Studio -/ exhibition where we find objects and paintings
assembled, rather than built. Processes
preceding the display are made perceivable in the tableau, suggesting a relief
offered by an engagement with materials
144
usually interstitial in Walker’s practice
combined to form a singular work.
Abandoning the fantastical abstractfigurative style that Walker has used to
transform found paintings since /005,
Painting and Relief (Utopian Slumps), in
its seriousness, looks like a coming-of-age
show. (ree of the nine paintings are set
in low-sheen glazed ceramic frames the
shape and size of rustic baking dishes
which, if viewed on a screen, could
look about the size of a Julian Schnabel
painting — the heavy oil gesture of
Walker’s work illusively belonging to
something much larger in size. Walker’s
decision to forgo the figuration seen in
his previous work has allowed him to gi8
his full attention to the painting’s surface,
and the image subsequent to it (imagine
if houses didn’t have to house us: it would
be just the skills of the builder and the
materials’ resistance to gravity). Flanking
these small brutes are two paintings that
have been painted over varying degrees
of white, the rutty strokes both concealing
and extending the surface in accordance
with Walker’s shi8 from figuration.
(e smallest painting in the show is
JAKE WALKER
completely white, except for an earthy,
mouse-tail-sized sliver descending from
the top edge.
To grasp the full integrity of these
works, one’s view has to be adjusted to
consider the way in which the works were
created — that of the builder as opposed to
the architect. Masquerading as the overly
sober accumulation of a ravenous work
ethic, these wall-based things are built,
rather than designed, of layers of paint
applied by an experienced hand and eye.
Once the tacit rules and framing devices
that anchor the reception make way, it
is possible to enjoy a quiet melancholic
moment with these turbulent little
paintings.
In Painting and Relief, I was initially
struck by the strangeness of the marks on
the found and assisted materials, which
were then made palpable by Walker’s
typical subject matter of deformed
landscapes and eccentric modernist
incinerators and houses. A canvas
lying inverted in the middle of the floor
resembles a swimming pool; a ceramic
chimney morphs into a camera lens.
It felt humorous standing above this map
GEORGE EGERTON-WARBURTON
made from residue; the sculpture of the
laptop, watching from the corner — one
enveloping the other. It will be interesting
to see how this horizontal installation
of peripheral materials will continue to
inform Walker’s practice or even become
vertical in later exhibitions.
And what does it mean to paint
monochromes and engage with sculptural
abstract expressionism in /0-/? Could it
be a yearning for the titans of yesteryear,
or a prediction of the inevitable? (e
single unpainted linen work in the show
aligns with Michael Sanchez’s term
‘screen povera’ attributed to painters
offering rustic surfaces and foxed linens
as respite to eyes tired from backlighting
and the information glut. In an earlier
and more literal prediction of this, Walker
painted directly onto the screens of
laptops that had been sourced free or
cheaply — an emphasis on how quickly
things become historical.
George Egerton-Warburton is a Melbourne-based artist.
145
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
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REVIEWS
Steven Rendall’s
Television Project
Kyle Weise
Steven Rendall
Study for Shifts and Discontinuities /0-/
acrylic on canvas, eyelets
4/0.0 × 6-0.0 cm
Image courtesy John Buckley Gallery
An enormous painting of a retail television
showroom formed the physical and
conceptual centre of Television Project,
Stephen Rendall’s recent exhibition at
(e Substation. (e painting was initially
sketched with blank white spaces on each
of the represented television screens.
An image of this partial painting was
then circulated via email and websites
inviting people to submit jpeg images to
be painted by Rendall onto the screens.1
(e final painting, Study for ShiKs and
Discontinuities /0-/, incorporated over
forty such crowd-sourced images, some
of which contained further image frames.
Emphasising the centrality of this process
to the exhibition, adjacent gallery spaces
displayed prints of the selection of
146
Steven Rendall
Television Project
(e Substation, Newport
/5 July – -2 August /0-/
submitted jpegs, as well as a preliminary
sculptural scale model of the exhibition
design. Crucial here are circuits of
process and production, rather than the
self-contained coherence of the painting’s
physical frame.
Rendall’s work shares a lineage
with artists and painters such as Robert
Rauschenberg and David Salle, whose use
of repeated images and divided pictorial
planes o8en referenced recognisable televisual events. (e canvas was a conduit for
an amalgamation of the broadcast images
of consumer culture, critiqued and filtered
through the hand of the artist.2 Updating
such work, Rendall’s painting presents
an array of images, some taken from
broadcast media, but most reflecting the
STEVEN RENDALL
KYLE WEISE
atomisation of mass media in a networked
media environment where production
and reception are increasingly collapsed.
Here, the screen no longer represents the
reception of mass culture but is, instead,
a platform for idiosyncratic cultural
interests. As such, there are no repetitions
of the same image in Study for ShiKs and
Discontinuities, and the images vary wildly
in content and style. Various pictures of
pets and personal photographs point to
the niche and narcissism of social media,
while the prominent inclusion of images of
protest suggests optimism for the political
capacity of the form.3
(e work continues Rendall’s interest
in producing a painterly representation
of television screens, evident in previous
exhibitions such as Fear and Desire
Regarding Something Doubtful at John
Buckley Gallery in /0--, in which he
encloses the frame of the screen within
the frame of a painted canvas. Here,
though, Rendall’s painting intersects with
participatory media and the Internet as a
collaborative medium. (e work remediates these other media via a strategy of
hypermediacy, which overtly combines
and juxtaposes painting, television and
the Internet in order to draw attention to
the surfaces and material frames of each.4
(e painting uses its representations of
television screens as pictorial motivation
for fracturing the surface into manifold
planes and images, formally invoking the
multiple-window style of the computer
screen.5 Close observation reveals little
pictorial detail or information: the abstract
strokes and expansive site-specific
dimensions suggest the painting is to
be read from a distance, as panorama or
landscape. At the centre of the painting
is a camera on a tripod: replacing the
easel in a landscape is the camera in a
mediascape, where the accumulation
and proliferation of images supplant the
singular vision of the individual observer.
(e dispersed planes and gestural
brushwork of Rendall’s painting further
emphasises processes of reproduction and
transmission, with the detail of each image
secondary to the flows and energies of the
media networks in which they are circulated. (e monumentality of the painting’s
own physical presence is dissipated by the
provisional, almost ramshackle, approach
to its hanging and the accumulation of
research materials in the adjoining rooms.
Painting is not a saviour of the image, but
is entangled within the same context.
Just as the technology of electrical
distribution has transformed, leaving
(e Substation to find new uses for its
architectural remnants, the technologies
of image distribution and reception powered by these networks have evolved and
mutated. (e impending obsolescence of
mass media, and particularly broadcast
television, leaves the architecture of the
screen in flux, increasingly disjointed and
unpredictable. Television Project explores,
and revels in, this cultural moment.
1
2
3
NOTES
A post on The Substation Facebook page reads:
‘Do you want your artwork to be part of a larger
artwork by Steven Rendall?’ http://www.facebook.
com/TheSubstationNewport, posted 2 April 2012.
This was literalised in Rauschenberg’s combine
painting, Broadcast 1959, which actually contained
three radios. For a relevant and incisive discussion
of Rauschenberg and television in this context see
Brendan W. Joseph, ‘“A Duplication Containing
Duplications”: Robert Rauschenberg’s Split Screens’
in October, issue 95, 2001, pp. 3–27.
Notably an image of a Jabiluka protest sign is
present: recalling earlier (pre-‘Facebook’) uses
and formations of the Internet and their role
Kyle Weise is a PhD candidate at the University of
Melbourne, and is co-director of Beam Contemporary
and Screen Space galleries.
4
5
in organising and sustaining this protest in the
late 1990s.
The terms ‘remediation’ and ‘hypermediacy’ are
taken from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin,
Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press,
Cambridge, 2000.
After the dominance of the singular and sequential,
the visual logic of the multiple and simultaneous
increasingly defines the frames and screens of the
digital era. See Lev Manovich, The Language of
New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001, and
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to
Microsoft, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006.
147
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Max Creasy’s Making Marks
Miri Hirschfeld
Max Creasy
Making Marks
West Space
/@ August – -6 September /0-/
Max Creasy
Pen #%@ /0-/
C-type print
-2.0 × /5.0 cm
Image courtesy the artist and James Dorahy Project Space
Looking at Max Creasy’s photographs
at West Space, I am confused. (e room
sheet tells me that they are C-type photographs, but my eye suggests something
else. (e subjects of the images — highlighters, markers, pencils and pens — are
depicted in a manner that is sketchy and
smudgy, their shadows are irregular; the
148
brush and pen marks that describe them
are too apparent.
(e objects in Creasy’s photographs
bear a physical resemblance to functional
pens and other mark-making tools, but
are in fact cast from silicon moulds, then
painted: they are replicas rather than
functional objects.1 Framed within a plain
MAX CREASY
MIRI HIRSCHFELD
white background, each photograph
the implements used to create an illusion
depicts a single item from a bird’s-eye
— to produce shadows, highlights and a
view. (e use of a more traditional artform fictional light source. Both series highlight
— casting — contrasts with the more
the labour-intensive work involved in
modern practice of photography, and the
producing a film or a picture.3
process renders useless the seemingly
(e ease with which Creasy navigates
mundane objects that populate the
between different techniques and
images, items more commonly found in an technologies reveals a clear interest
office drawer or stationery cupboard.
in process and his proficiency across
(e resulting photographic images
multiple mediums. His method brings to
recall taxonomy — the scientific endeavour mind work by Emma White and (omas
of classifying objects according to type.
Demand, both of whom also use sculptural
(e titles Artliner #%@ /0-/, Highlighter #%@ replicas in their practice. Like White’s
/0-/, etc., and the arrangement of pictures Artefact /0-0, a polymer clay sculpture of
into colour groups, seem to support
a pencil sharpener and shavings, Creasy’s
this interpretation. However, Creasy’s
use of office tools references work and
colour palette — cerise, inky indigo,
production — both tools of the corporate
slate grey — denies any claim that the
professional and also the artist. As with
photographs are a naturalistic depiction
Creasy’s, White’s more realistic replicas
and shi8s away from Creasy’s previous
leave hints about their making, traces
series Paintings /0--, in which models of
such as fingerprints, that distinguish them
yoghurt containers, Stanley knives and
from their originals, albeit more subtly.4
other items were painted in colours more
In contrast, Demand’s sculptural replicas
faithful to the objects they were cast from.
show no obvious trace of their making and
(e obvious hatching and irregularities of
are therefore more convincing, while no
Making Marks reveals the artist’s hand and less removed from the reality they depict.5
expose the process of production more
Creasy’s images defy easy categorthan these earlier works.
isation, fusing casting, painting and
It seems that production, fiction and
photography. His intervention upon
artifice have long interested Creasy. In a
precise plaster casts disrupts the indexical
previous series, Flats /00-, shot on the film relationship between facsimile and
set of !e Bank,2 Creasy photographed
original. His use of photography adds
backstage scenes rather than on-camera
another layer to the simulation, revealing
action. His images captured aspects of
a slippage between representation and
the film set — rigging, lighting, tangles
reality.
of camera cables, temporary walls and
Miri Hirschfeld works at the Australian Centre for the
PR photographs of the actors — the tools
Moving Image, Melbourne (ACMI).
used to produce the fictional space of
the film. (e Making Marks photographs
achieve a similar result: their subjects are
1
2
3
NOTES
The pens, pencils, highlighters and markers are
coloured using the same implements. For example,
the pen is painted with ink extracted from the pen
in Pen #01, 2012, from the artliner in Artliner #01,
2012, the highlighter in Highlighter #01, 2012 and
so on.
The Bank was directed by Robert Connolly. Flats
was published in Helen Frajman (ed.), The Bank
Book, M:33, Melbourne, 2001.
This would not have been so evident had Creasy
photographed actual pens and pencils.
4
5
Marni Williams, ‘Art & Australia / Credit Suisse
Private Banking Contemporary Art Award: Emma
White’ in Art & Australia, Vol. 48, No. 3, Autumn
2011, www.artandaustralia.com.au/article.
asp?issue_id=194&article_id=306, accessed 14
October 2012.
Demand often begins with an image of a site loaded
with political significance, reconstructs the scene in
paper, and then photographs the paper model.
149
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Kosuke Ikeda’s
Melbourne Art-Power Plant
Olivia Poloni
Kosuke Ikeda
Melbourne Art-Power Plant
RMIT Project Space
/0 July – -5 August /0-/
Kosuke Ikeda
Melbourne Art-Power Plant /0-/
installation view
RMIT Project Space, Melbourne
Image courtesy RMIT Project Space
Photo credit: Andrew Barcham
150
KOSUKE IKEDA
Although at first glance Kosuke Ikeda’s
Melbourne Art Power Plant may have
looked like a room filled with boys’ toys,
it was more like an alternate space for
evoking a quiet revolution in the way we
think about dirty energy. (e exhibition
was a grouping of hand-made constructions that dealt with the relationship
between the man-made and our natural
environment, which engaged a total
sensorial experience. (e hand-made
power installations created from found
materials established a dichotomy
between the simplicity of sustainability
and our complex relationship with energy
and nature. (e exhibition absorbed the
viewer into a multi-sensory experience by
involving sound, site and touch.
(e devastation caused by Japan’s /0-earthquakes and their ongoing impact on
the local and international community has
informed Ikeda’s recent practice, which is
currently concerned with an investigation
into alternate micro power generation
and the exploration of the interchange
between the human and the ecological.
In Melbourne on a three-month residency
program hosted by Tokyo Wonder Site,
Asialink and RMIT’s International Artist
in Residency program, Ikeda worked
with local artists and engineers in order
to continue his research into new visions
of energy. He developed works based
around propositions of experimental
power generation and water circulation.
In this case, his exhibition considered
our interaction with and dependence on
electrical power grids.
Looking more like a garage workshop
than an exhibition space, Ikeda investigated how the smallest gesture or change
in environmental ideology can result
into a much more telling story. As Ikeda
explained:
OLIVIA POLONI
to amplify the sound [of that water
drop] and you can feel some kind of
vibration.1
Forming one part of the installation was
an upside-down, disbanded bicycle that
leached gadgets and wires; these were
attached to a record player that was
mounted to the wall. Demanding human
power, the rotation of the pedals powered
the record player that played a Kra8werk
album. On the adjacent wall were solar
panels that had a group of gallery lights
beaming on them. On closer investigation,
it became evident that the energy created
from the lights directed onto the solar
panel powered one light globe in the gallery manager’s office. Upon realising the
effort it took to generate enough power
for only one light globe, and taking into
consideration the rest of the installation,
it became apparent that, as Dr Kristen
Sharp states in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Ikeda wished to explore
‘the “invisible” production, consumption
and environmental impact of human
activity’.2
Kosuke Ikeda’s installation dealt with
hard truths and telling realities of the
environmental impact of human activity
in a poignant and also entertaining way.
(e message, although serious, was told
through some pretty quirky devices and
made for an engaging, cross-cultural and
multi-disciplinary experience.
Olivia Poloni is a freelance writer and curator who has
recently relocated back to Melbourne after two years
living in Cologne.
I’m dealing with very tiny natural
phenomena, like the fall of water drops.
But at the same time I’m here I try
1
NOTES
Kosuke Ikeda, Melbourne Art-Power Plant, vimeo.
com, July 2012.
2
Dr Kristen Sharp, ‘Ecology and art after 3.11’,
exhibition essay, RMIT Project Space, July 2012.
151
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Katherine Riley’s
Panpsychic Household
Solutions
Alanna Lorenzon
Katherine Riley
Panpsychic Household Solutions
Residential locations
throughout Melbourne
Katherine Riley
Alanna’s carpet near fireplace /0-/
performance documentation
Image courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Katherine Riley
Panpsychic Household Solutions is a project
by Melbourne artist Katherine Riley,
where her services as a ‘house cleaner’ are
offered free of charge to willing participants. (is offer, initially made in emails
to friends, family and acquaintances and
later publicised through social media and
!e !ousands, became so popular that she
eventually had to turn away the growing
list of potential ‘clients’. (is project sees
the artist becoming a labourer on her own
terms, creating a temporal, process-based
artwork between artist and participant
which is later archived on the project’s
website.1
152
(is is Riley’s first participatory
project, whose practice (which includes
drawing, collage and sound installation)
is primarily concerned with ontology and
perception. Panpsychic Household Solutions
was devised as a way for Riley to manage
her experience of psychosis (manifested
as both aural and visual hallucinations,
which grant a sentience to objects that
most of us do not see or hear). (e process
of cleaning is thus a therapeutic way for
her to engage with her surroundings.
As Riley explains, ‘I don’t clean in order
to have a clean house anymore. I clean
because the process of cleaning is the
KATHERINE RILEY
ALANNA LORENZON
process of relation between me and the
things that surround me’.2
When cleaning my house, Riley spent
her time in the lounge room wiping a
small section of wall in the corner of the
room, then collecting residual debris
from the carpet. As she asked to be le8
alone during the cleaning, our exchange
consisted of me showing her through the
house and then relocating to my bedroom.
Although she described her actions to me
before she le8, it was only later on when
viewing her post ‘Alanna’s House’ on the
project’s website, that I had access to a
deeper understanding of what the artist
was engaging with during her performance and what her modest gestures
might have meant:
expectations of commerce to create an
imaginative or aesthetic transfer, rather
than a monetary one. By attributing to her
hallucinations a reality, then offering this
experience to the participant or viewer
of the website, she does not offer us an
effective house cleaning service but rather
gives us intimate access to her psychology.
(e project is reminiscent of some of
Stuart Ringholt’s projects, an artist who
also explores the therapeutic potential of
an artwork through interaction. Whilst
the intimacy of Ringholt’s work can, at
times, bring the audience to awkward and
revealing places, Riley’s project maintains
a polite distance between herself and her
audience. Interestingly, this intensely
personal work does not become an
exercise of catharsis, but rather a record
of the relationship between the artist and
her surroundings, a relationship that is
detailed and which is offered back to the
audience in the form of ‘cleaning tips’ on
her website.4
It could be argued that Riley’s desire
to expand her relationships with objects
is disingenuous, perhaps the tentative
engagement with humans that results
from the cleaning process is also one of
the artist’s unstated motivations. Indeed,
the work gives Riley an opportunity to
share her perspective with others and, in
order to fully engage with the project, the
audience must contemplate this perspective as a possible reality. In this way, the
artist’s engagement with the everyday
surroundings of others acts as a catalyst
to expand our own comprehension of the
spaces within which we live.
When I was cleaning Alanna’s living
room, I realised that my involvement in
the room and the room’s involvement
with me caused the creation of one
further person. Room-person-humanperson person. Now whenever I am
anywhere at all I find myself thinking
about what kind of person is created
by my actions in that place.3
For those who do not experience such
hypersensitivity to their surroundings,
the artist’s hidden-from-view performance
and gestures risk leaving the participant
with the feeling that nothing of importance has taken place. (e online documentation thus plays the important role of
documenting and presenting the tangible
result of her actions. It is here that Riley
describes her impressions of the world in
a confident and compelling manner.
By engaging with the roles of worker
and client, Riley playfully subverts the
1
2
3
4
NOTES
http://panpsychichouseholdsolutions.com
Katherine Riley, ‘How Mental Illness Can Improve
Your Life’, http://panpsychichouseholdsolutions.
com/how-mental-illness-can-improve-your-life/,
accessed 15 September 2012.
Katherine Riley, ‘Alanna’s House’, http://
panpsychichouseholdsolutions.com/2012/07/16/
alannas-house/, accessed 9 September 2012.
These ‘tips’ use the aesthetic nature of our
surroundings as a starting point for a deeper
Alanna Lorenzon is a Melbourne-based artist and writer.
examination of our individual place in it: ‘Notice the
aesthetic properties of the room or object you are
cleaning. If you are cleaning a floor, notice the way
the light falls across it, notice its texture. Touch the
floor, run your hands along it. What does the way
the floor looks and feels say to you? You don’t have
to put this into words.’ Katherine Riley, ‘Cleaning
Tips’, http://panpsychichouseholdsolutions.com/
cleaning-tips/, accessed 15 September 2012.
153
UN MAGAZINE 6.2
R E V I E W:
WORDS:
REVIEWS
Uncommon Room
Daniel Stephen Miller
Uncommon Room
Jessie Bullivant, Heidi Holmes,
Isabelle Sully and Isadora Vaughan
Curated by Isabelle Sully
Rear View, Melbourne
6–/6 May /0-/*
Daniel Stephen Miller
Sketch for Barre Work /0-/
Photoshop brush tool on JPEG collage
-600 × -000 pixels
Image courtesy the artist
(ese artists have made the job of a
reviewer pretty easy. I can think of no better metaphor for their outsized ambitions
and inflated egos than the two giant beach
balls that dominate the front space at Rear
View. I mean no disrespect by this, since
these are both qualities necessary for a
successful artistic career.
If I were a life coach for artists, I would
add a third trait to this list: a masochistic
urge to work. Despite their scale, the
artworks in this exhibition reflect ambivalently on that imperative, o8en flirting
with the idea of play as a more profound
— or at least more enjoyable — action.
It’s a fitting tease, then, that the
aforementioned beach balls are too
large to throw around at your next pool
party. Having been inflated until they are
squeezed between the gallery’s floor and
ceiling, they — somewhat heavy-handedly
— invert the prevailing demand of what
certain people in Melbourne call spatial
practice. By pushing back and denying
their potential size, it is the space that
responds to the work.
(e result of collaboration between
Heidi Holmes and Isadora Vaughan, the
154
hand-sewn PVC spheres obviously extend
Vaughan’s interest in the expressive limits
of particular materials.1 (e jauntiness of
the spheres is undermined, however, by
their unsettling colour scheme. Rather
than offering a taste of the Skittles
rainbow, the balls are painted only in the
generically corporate red and blue of the
Officeworks logo.
A clue comes from the work’s title:
How much Isadora thinks Heidi contributed
to this artwork / How much Heidi thinks
Heidi contributed to this artwork /0-/.
(e room sheet helpfully notes that red
represents Heidi’s contribution. One of
the balls is split fi8y-fi8y, and the other
features a small crescent of red on a
waxing blue moon.
If, as I am told, these proportions
are based on transcriptions of recordings made secretly by Holmes, any
interpretation of their results is potentially
disturbing.2 (is is undoubtedly the
intention of Holmes, whose obsession
with performance — not the art kind, think
of the ‘P’ in ‘KPI’ — takes the banality of
self-as-subject to a whole new level.
By using their own — presumably
UNCOMMON ROOM
DANIEL STEPHEN MILLER
dysfunctional — collaboration as material,
Holmes and Vaughan transform the
absurdly playful into the bureaucratically
sinister. Still, installed at Rear View
M is mischievously assertive. In a delightful paradox,
the work seems to have arisen out of a
clear and unified vision.
A8er wending your way through the
massive balls you might be surprised
to find yourself face to face with Ame
Magazine’s Person of the Year /005. Yes,
that’s right. You. (e mirror covering the
gallery’s rear wall has a transformative
effect, not just on the visible number of
beach balls, but on the purpose of the
space itself: expertly mounted in front of
the glass is a full-length ballet barre.
(is collaborative work by Jessie
Bullivant and Isabelle Sully appears slick
and serious, but on closer inspection
betrays the artists’ more playful impulses.
Bullivant, in particular, is o8en concerned
with revealing — or contriving, if necessary — the inadvertently poetic tassels of
economic transactions. Here, cute visual
clues testify to the artists’ outsourcing of
labour.3
Cuter still is the fact that the ballet
barres are made not of industry-standard
Victorian Ash, but of broom handles.4
It might be drawing a long bow to suggest
that this calls to mind Joseph Kosuth’s
One and !ree Brooms -256, except
that there are exactly three brooms
here. I think I can safely attribute this
almost-too-clever wink-and-nod to Sully,
who is insistent in her determination to
hold a conversation in art.
(e installation is (of course) called
Barre Work, a8er the exercise routine
dancers perform throughout their careers.
(is makes explicit what should be
obvious at the sight of the broom handles:
this artwork is about art and work. While
the allusion to ballet implies a lifelong
Brâncuși-esque honing of skills, the title’s
double entendre suggests the reality of life
for many young artists: pulling beers.
Sully herself does just that at the aptly
named Workers Club, about one kilometre from Rear View.5 But if the artists are
serving drinks at the Workers Club, who’s
serving drinks at the Artists’ Club? (e
answer is (of course) more artists, as we
work to make these uncommon rooms
we inhabit for three weeks at a time as
common as possible.
Although Mars, Inc. suggests we
should rest as well, I don’t believe there’s
much more to life than work and play.
From a variety of nuanced perspectives,
the works in Uncommon Room interrogate
that recognisable but ineffable nexus
between the two. In the same explorative
spirit, we should earnestly open the
doors. (e gallery is the Artists’ Club, and
everyone’s invited.
*
1
2
3
NOTES
The artworks discussed in this review are entirely
fictional. Any resemblance to the exhibition Common
Room, which took place in the real world around the
same time, is not necessarily coincidental.
According to Vaughan, the work was partly inspired
by a visit to a hardware store where the bored clerks
had painstakingly made a rubber-band ball ‘as big
as it could possibly be’. She declined their offer to
sell it to her for $100.
If the sliver represents Holmes’ perception of things,
she’s either delusionally self-critical or an incredibly
passive artist. In either case, this would make
Vaughan an insistent diplomat. Alternatively, if the
sliver is Vaughan’s, I don’t even want to guess at the
source of such collaborative calamity.
Tucked in the bottom right-hand corner of the
Daniel Stephen Miller works and plays in Melbourne.
4
5
mirrored wall is a neat rectangular sticker with
rounded corners: ‘Installed by A.A.A. Northcote
Glass & Mirrors. Phone 9419 1989.’ Despite its
name, the company is located on Keale Street,
around the corner from the gallery.
Not just any broom handles, either. As their
prominent labels show, they are from Oates’
‘Duratuff’ range of lacquered composite bamboo
and timber.
Knowing this, and having seen the mirror-and-barre
installation, it’s almost synaptically impossible not
to be picturing Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
right now. Or, coming full circle, Jeff Wall’s Picture
for Women, which looks dead set like it was made in
a ballet studio.
155
My job, is to make myself redundant. The plan is to dissolve the
need for my position. The aim is to help my colleagues get rid
of me, or the person I am, here. This sounds kinda poetic and for
sure, it is a funny dance I do - capacity building.
Where I sleep is less than twenty meters from the water, looking
out my window there is nothing but sublime beauty.
Photographs create a fantasyland; the reality is polarized.
My house is made out of timber, cut and sawn in the bush behind
the camp and the walls are made by weaving bamboo.
Because my place was built for me by a number of different
people from diferent villages it incorperates quite a mash of woJust up the coast is Manam island, still smoking from its recent
rumblings, to the south is Karkar, another volcano, rising almost ven patterns. The outcome of this is very unusual as each design
illustrates a story and represents a place of origin.
two thousand meters strait out of the sea.
I am interested in this effect and what happens when these
The recent events of cannibalism happened less than an hour up
patterns overlap and evolve due to an unusual circumstance.
the road and earthquakes occur often.
This place is all of my dreams and all of my nightmares. In cultu- Normally you know where the man of the house is from by the
design of the bamboo cladding.
ral and geographic terms, we are on the edge.
I live and work in a small village on Uligan Bay, in Papua New
Life here is simple, this is the best and worst part. I see a logic to
the way things work, although this logic is different to my own.
It often feels like nothing works, learning how to keep pushing or
asking in another way is critical to any task.
There is magic within the simplicity, I am learning to be more
present - now - is vital. When there is no winter, time changes
shape.
My current art project, Conversations in: is an attempt to use this
experience and new found information. My ambition is to push
through instead of extracting out from the cultural trade that is
part of my life here.
Nicki Wynnychuk is an independent volunteer working with
Tupira Surf Camp, Madang PNG.
SHOWS
SHOWS
October
24
October
Experimental
Curators Show #2
31
Curated By
Mish Grigor
Alex Pye
Marc Etherington
Amy Thornett
Michelle Helene
November
21
2012
2012
2012
November
Janurary
Janurary
28
Camille Serisier
Valentina Shulte
Adam John Cullen
Lucas Abela
9
2013
30
Curated By
‘N’
Bonita Bub
Fiona Williams
Nina Ross
2013
PRINT
PRINT EDITION
EDITION
2012
2012
Clare Thackway &
Greg Hodge
Belem Lett
Experimental
Curators Show #3
BY TOM POLO
People/Personas 2012
Offset print, Edition of 30
Printed by BIG FAG Press
$250 unframed.
bigfagpress.org | tompoloart.blogspot.com.au
facebook.com/fdgalleryfd
Firstdraft Gallery
Firstdraft Depot
116 – 118 Chalmers Street
Surry Hills NSW 2010
Phone (02) 9698 3665
13 – 17 Riley Street
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Phone (02) 8970 2999
fremantle arts centre
we don’t need a map
a martu experience of the western desert
17 nov – 20 jan
6E84G<I8<A7<:8ABHFC4EGA8EF;<C
6E84G<I8<A7<:8ABHFC4EGA8EF;<C
CE<A6<C4?C4EGA8E
CE<A6<C4?C4EGA8E
Cathy Blanchflower, cover image left
Ry Haskings, below
Mishka Borowski, right
Edited by Jane O’Neill
156 pages, 66 colour images
From art & design bookshops
www.emblembooks.com
Austral Avenue: An Experiment in Living with Art documents the life span of an
experimental project space operated by Jane O’Neill from the front room of a home
in Brunswick, Melbourne. For each of the 21 exhibitions by artists from Melbourne,
Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland and Frankfurt, an essay was written that incorporated
the experience of living with the artworks for the show’s duration.
Black Casino
WADE MARYNOWSKY
16 JANUARY - 3 FEBRUARY 2013
A partnership between MONA and CAST as
part of MONA FOMA 2013
Image courtesy the artist 2012
971 horses and 4 zebras
9 FEBRUARY - 10 MARCH 2013
Yu Araki, Jordan Baseman, Geraint Evans, Katie Goodwin, Inger Lise Hansen, James Lowne,
Nathaniel Mellors, David O’Reilly, Emily Richardson, Lois Rowe, Chris Shepherd, Tadasu Takamine,
David Theobald, Kit Wise. Curated by Jordan Baseman, Gary Thomas.
2013 Artistic Program (20-Year Anniversary)
Alex Gawronski
Amanda Marburg
Andie Tham
Andy Hutson
Arlo Mountford
Ben Sheppard
Brad Haylock
Bronia Iwanczak
Camilla Hannan
Christina Hayes
West Space
Level l
225 Bourke Street
Melbourne
westspace.org.au
Christo Crocker
Fiona McMonagle
Grant Nimmo
Jessie Bullivant
Jonas Ropponen
Kristen Turner
Lily Hibberd
Mark Brown
Matthew Greaves
Michael Georgetti
Nat Thomas
Nick Selenitsch
Nigel Helyer
Oscar Perry
Philipa Veitch
Ryszard Dabek
Sanné Mestrom
Scott Mitchell
Sean Peoples
Sean Rafferty
Shannon Smiley
Simon Zoric
Stephen Giblett
The OK Collective
Tim Bruniges
Tim McMonagle
Tim Woodward
Vivian Cooper Smith
+more
killer radio
03 9388 1027
rrr.org.au