Kit Wise

Moving Image South

2010-09-09T07:44:00.001+01:00

HMV Curzon Wimbledon, London

Media Facades Europe 2010

2010-09-05T11:03:00.005+01:00

Collegium Hugaricum, Berlin

Explosion

2010-09-01T11:01:00.003+01:00

Sarah Scout, Melbourne

Explosion

2010-09-01T02:55:00.012+01:00

Explosion

Installation view, Sarah Scout

Installation view, Sarah Scout

Installation view, Sarah Scout

Installation view, Sarah Scout

Installation view, Sarah Scout

Three digital videos, three digital photographs and a light box, using found video from open source internet archives and Getty Images.

Accompanying text by Tom Nicholson:

Flooding back

Kit Wise’s video Explosion (Operation Cue, 1955) is a strange nocturnal landscape in endless motion – part lunar landscape, part movie set, part night-vision military surveillance footage. A building explodes and disappears into its own cloud – enveloped by the detritus of its own obliteration – only to re-form itself into a different building, which in turn explodes, disappearing into another field of pulverized building. In this sequence of loop after loop, gravity seems to give way. The matter of the building dissolves into the matter of the picture, into a play between the scratched surface of the film and its digitized artefacts. The picture is flooded by itself.

Explosion (Operation Cue, 1955) has been created using short fragments from Operation Cue, a 1955 documentary (revised in 1964), which, like much of the found footage Wise has used in recent work, is available on open source web-based video archives. The original documentary was produced to educate the general population about the effects of nuclear blasts and shows a series of nuclear bomb test explosions in the Nevada desert. The buildings which endlessly appear and disappear before us in Explosion (Operation Cue, 1955) were constructed for the very purpose of their obliteration and for the filming of this obliteration. They express an important part of photography, its relationship to violence (photography’s relationship to military surveillance in which being photographed precedes and/or coincides with being bombed) and the fraught mutual co-dependence with ephemerality (photography’s conflicted centrality to performance art, or more generally, to our understanding of our own mortality). Explosion (Operation Cue, 1955) enacts photography’s ability to capture what time destroys, only in a violently accelerated cycle. And this enactment is repeated with the same frozen endlessness which, more than ever in the age of the digitized image, sets the temporal space of the image against the finiteness of our living.

All three of the video works in this exhibition are striking for their beauty. Acts of great violence are slowed and looped into spaces of strange reverie, a kind of hypnotic allure. What are we to make of this beauty? As I watched Explosion (Operation Cue, 1955) for the first time I found myself recalling Wise’s video installation at Linden in 2008, Natural disaster. This work consisted of footage (again taken from open source web-based video archives) shot by survivors of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. In these low res sequences, we saw the rush of water engulfing the surroundings of the person shooting the footage. Wise intensified the effect of this inundation by installing mirrors around his video projection, producing psychedelic mandala-like pixellated abstractions as the Tsunami swept through the image. The engulfing of the surroundings by the tsunami also became the engulfing of the figurative image, which dissolved into fields of moving pixels and artefact, a digitized surface patterning. Whereas this spectacle of ornamentation intensified the curious distance with which we regard these faraway disasters through its sheer beauty, the work’s sound – the voices of horrified bystanders watching the water sweeping away everything before them – grounded the work in the horror of that event. Importantly, these sounds made us engage this horror not through vision, but through listening, imagining. The video images dissolved figuration into a mobile, baroque field of pixellation. Sound reinstated the body, the physicality of that experience. The horror of Natural disasters was not just its literal content, but implicating us in a contemporary dysfunction of the senses, entwining pleasure (in looking) and the suffering of others (through listening). In a way that reminded me of the relationship between Michelangelo’s The Deluge (on the ceiling) and The Last Judgement (on the end wall) in the Sistine Chapel – in both images the illusionistic space of the fresco is engulfed by a monochrome ground, figuring the idea of the flood through the physical surface of the image – Natural disaster used a radically shallow pictorial space as a space of moral reckoning. And this reckoning, rather than metaphysical or teleological in nature, was focused on the image itself and its relationship to the real.

This relationship between the space of the image and our understanding of the real is what animates our encounter with Explosion, this exhibition of Wise’s new work. In Explosion (Project Dugout, 1960) – a short loop taken from Project Dugout, a film produced by the University of California in 1960 presenting research into the effects of underground explosions – a landscape ascends high into the sky then descends again. As we watch this video, the loop of this vertical movement accumulates in us as a pleasurable sensation of weightlessness, an aestheticizing of that event that also threatens to become an anaesthetizing to its violence. It is a vertical movement divested of any moral encoding. No Last Judgement in these comings and goings up and down the picture plane. Explosion (Geranium) intensifies this aestheticising, overlaying time-lapse footage (from Getty images) of a geranium blooming and documentary footage of a test explosion in the desert. The two processes intermingle visually, and also sexualise one another (in a way that is reminiscent of the visually euphemistic tradition of fireworks in cinema). Explosion, like the endless looping of Explosion (Operation Cue, 1955), draws us away from the reality of nuclear destruction and towards the surface of the image, the movement of this surface, its slow underwater-like grace. In all three videos, the image empties its subject.

Andy Warhol’s Car Crash paintings are great images of horror, not as realist paintings, but as emptied-out surfaces. They work upon the gulf between the image and its subject. Their horror is not that that they show something we do not know, but in opening our encounter to this gulf. As Hal Foster has eloquently argued, the real ‘returns’ through the surfaces of these paintings, through their screens, as a punctum. Wise’s show might be considered in relation to Warhol, a Youtube-age refiguring of Warhol’s peculiarly powerful way of mobilizing waning into a form of horror in itself. Wise’s aestheticising – or more precisely the very intense way that we find ourselves attending to the surface of his videos – creates a kind of screen for something which cannot be shown, which opens out behind the pleasure of these images. What that ‘something’ might be is a bleakness within this work, or at least a condition from which the work refuses to redeem us. But pleasure in these works is not just a pathway into bleakness. It flows in part from the beauty of that very simple act of finding things – in this case pieces of footage – and deploying them with the utmost economy, transforming them into art works, into forms of intense fascination that demand and reward the process of looking. It is the act of imagination which effects this transformation, an act of gentle creativity towards the world that is also a counterpoint to the violent enormity of these explosions.

Tom Nicholson, August 2010

Tom Nicholson is an artist who lives in Melbourne. He is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery and is a Lecturer in Drawing at the Faculty of Art and Design, where he is also a colleague of Kit Wise. www.tomn.net

The Politics of Art

2010-05-14T01:50:00.004+01:00

Fire (Kuwait, 1992), 2010
Digital video, 11’21”, acrylic sheet, 2.4 x 2.4m

Digital projection of found open source archival video footage, depicting a ‘nightshot’ view from an airplane of the burning oilfields in Kuwait in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War 1990 -1991, commonly known as Desert Storm. Commissioned by Linden Centre for Contemporary Art for the group exhibition 'The Politics of Art'.

Xanadu

2010-02-12T16:14:00.002Z

Xanadu, 2010, HD single channel video, 5'50"

Digital animation, incorporating digital video and photography collected by the artist in Japan and Italy, found digital images and digital video from Getty Images.

Xanadu was an Experimenta Commission.

Experimenta Utopia Now: International Biennial of Media Art

2010-02-01T10:56:00.004Z

Arts Centre, Melbourne [national touring show]

Summertime

2009-12-10T16:14:00.000Z

1.

2.

1-2 Single channel digital video, 8 monitors, dimensions variable

Screen-based digital animations using footage sourced from Getty Images to depict idyllic beaches and coastal locations. Supported by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

Summertime

2009-12-01T10:59:00.003Z

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, ACCA @ Mirka, Melbourne

2009 Asian Art Biennial

2009-11-01T10:50:00.003Z

National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan

International Film Festival, Rotterdam

2009-01-20T18:00:00.000Z

Group screening as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Natural Disaster

2008-10-01T18:26:00.002+01:00

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

All the video footage presented in this work is open source archive material freely available on the internet. The sequences were filmed by onlookers of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami disaster in Koh Lanta, Phuket and Penang, Thailand, and in Sri Lanka.

The work aims to explore our complicated relationship with the natural world and the way both nature and disaster are represented in contemporary culture. In an age of increasingly impending environmental disaster and attendant media attention, nature is both paradise and nightmare, source of desire and fear, ideal and horror. These conditions of nature – as well as disaster – are constructed as ‘spectacle’ through the visual media of our current time; such that they are more often comprehended as events that are constructed through advertising, the media, film and television, than as realities. The consequences of operating only at this level of synthesised nature and disaster, which avoids engagement with their actuality, could have a potentially severe impact on both our understanding of the environment and our responses to humanitarian crises.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Natural Disaster, 2008
Mirrored acrylic, MDF, timber, digital projection (8’06”)

John Young: Naïve and Sentimental Paintings - Anna Schwarz Gallery, Melbourne

2008-06-02T19:40:00.001+01:00

Frieze, Issue 114, exhibition review, June 2008

These assured, sumptuous new works by John Young seemed designed to trip you up. The title for the show was suspicious: surely these works by Young, acknowledged as one of Australia’s foremost painters since the early 1990s, were not ‘dumb as a painter’ (‘bête comme un peintre’) as Duchamp famously analogised, beguilingly innocent and self-indulgent?

Young’s works have for many years involved multiple images, often presented as series, in sequence as a smorgasbord-like dish, from which we could pick and mix our readings. These recent works, largely from the ongoing ‘Naïve and Sentimental’ series but also including new, composite figurative paintings, fold that horizontal array into a zero-degree of synthetic depth, clearly derived from a Photoshop-informed sensibility. Young is well versed in and actively engaged with the theoretical framework this approach entails (for example, he wrote an essay in Art & Text on Jean Baudrillard the year Simulacra and Simulation (1981) was published). Images are not collaged upon each other (as in the classic artistic device of the twentieth century) as much as merged within a shared ground, made synchronous, borrowing from the wonders of digital morphosis (perhaps the defining metier of the early twenty-first century).

Significantly, he has also achieved particular success in the Asia-Pacific region, frequently holding solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, Sydney and Melbourne (as well as Berlin, Tel-Aviv and Nanjing); and was the President of the Asian Australian Artists’ Association, 1997-1998. For as well as the hyperreal, the hyper-cultural reach of his practice should not be overlooked. Young has consistently drawn Western and Eastern art-historical traditions into alignment in his work, a reflection perhaps of his cultural identity (he was born in Hong Kong in 1956) as was explored in the major survey show Orient / Occident: John Young, A survey of works 1979 – 2005 held at TarraWarra Museum of Art in 2005. But unlike the deliberate appropriational strategies prevalent in the 80s and 90s of which he was a critically acclaimed exponent, cultural slippage is now often near impossible to detect in the seamless poetic, digital felicity of his imagery.

Macau II, Winter (2007), for example, seems to present a scene from a nineteenth-century European bourgeois parlour; with a quasi-Surreal intrusion of white blossom (perhaps coral) into the pictorial field. Yet Macua is significant in this context as it was the last European colony in Asia (China assumed sovereignty in 1999, following 329 years of Portuguese governance). The ornate parlour on closer inspection is itself a synthesis of Oriental and European design influences; the blossom intervention into the picture plane, both a Colonists’ exotic artefact and a culturally specific decorative device. What weds the juxtaposed pictorial elements are a shared textural variety, a lattice-like structure and an off-white tonal range – ‘sentimental’ formal qualities that elide difference; and which consequently have the curious effect of infusing – rather than simply adding – the exotic into the viewer’s reading of the scene.
Young’s studio process in generating these combinations is specific and considered. Thousands of found images – including stock images, landscapes and nudes ¬– are fed into a computer, which applies pre-determined Photoshop filters through batch-processing. The ‘automatic’ composites that result are then assessed and selections made: ‘The choice of an image to paint, out of thousands blindly transformed by the computer… relies on a certain sentiment’. This emotive variable, the resonance that catches the artist’s eye, is according to Young intended to deliver “abstracted works for an age that prides itself in forgetfulness”.

Here, we are not far from the ‘canned chance’ of Duchamp, or the automatic generative Minimalism of Sol Lewitt and John Cage. Indeed, as Daniel Palmer identifies in the catalogue essay for the exhibition, the work is inspired by ‘minimalist composers such as Jon Adams, from whose Naïve and Sentimental Music (1997-8) the title is borrowed (itself derived from Friedrich von Schiller’s 1795 essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry)’. Young adds a further borrowing to this passage of emotively driven likenesses and harmonies, in which the mechanical overtones of his pursuit should not be seen as lessening the degree of feeling.

While the sheer speed and anonymity of information-flow is the hallmark of digital media, Young exploits the ‘forgetfulness’ that this generates by allowing the haunting absence of the signified to be compensated by an over-fullness of signification, a kind of distillation of sentiment. We revel in the luxury of the Morris-Louis/Gerhard Richter influenced abstract work Kulu V, Winter (2007) as we might at the Kulu Bay Resort in Fiji on which it is possibly (but not significantly) based; we can read Botticelli, Elizabeth Peyton and Virginia Woolf into The Triumph of Clarity Over Anger, Autumn (2007) but are not beholden to these points of reference. In Young’s approach, paint is celebrated as the bastard medium par excellence, here enhanced through technology, employed in the evincing of that ‘certain sentiment’ we long for. Or more exactly: Young draws our attention to the code-shifting, mix-making procedures that were culturally always already around us, but that now find increased opportunity in the digital age; that make manifest but forget the origin of an imprecise, ambient but compelling emotion.

Future spaces in contemporary Australian art: Overexposure and the City

2008-06-01T16:40:00.001+01:00

Conference paper, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia National Conference, Kalgoorlie 2008

Contemporary popular culture is strewn with visions of the urban spaces of the alternative today / near tomorrow. In cinema, the rise of graphic-novel derived films set in alternative or futuristic cities, such as the Gotham of Batman, or Bregna of Aeon Flux, as well as invasion/disaster movies such as The Day after Tomorrow, I am Legend and Independence Day, nudge popular imaginings towards ‘new’ urban forms and narratives. Similarly computer gaming, perhaps the preeminent pop-cultural force of today, frequently depict virtual realities based on varying degrees of fiction, such as the Halo and Grand Theft Auto, which featured the semi-fictional metropolises of Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City. Contemporary artists share this visual cultural territory and attempt to navigate within its terrain – but to what end? How is the future city represented in contemporary Australian art?

This paper will draw upon Paul Virilio’s notion of the ‘overexposed city’, in order to investigate the current cultural imagining of the ‘future spaces’ of the city, as found in contemporary Australian art. In one sense updating the cliché that a painting offers a ‘window on the world’, this paper substitutes recent art works by Australian artists for Virilio’s ‘door without a city’. In researching this paper, the following artists were considered: Stephen Haley; Darren Wardle; Jon Cattapan; Arlo Mountford; Simon Terrill; Daniel Crooks; David Rosetzky; Shaun Gladwell; Philip Brophy; Callum Morton and myself. Reference will be made to some of these artists in addressing points raised by Virilio’s text.

The Overexposed City was first published in 1984 in L’espace critique in Paris, just prior to Virilio’s seminal War and Cinema (also 1984). It was republished in 1986 as the first article in Zone , a short-lived journal based in New York, edited by Jonathan Carary, Michel Feher, Hal Foster and Stanford Kwinter, that addressed the relationship of architecture to new forms of spatial practice and analysis. In this resonant, prophetic text, Virilio first described what he was to later refer to as a ‘law of proximity’ in his understanding of constructed (urban) space, where ‘the city of the future is the pleasure of the interval’.

To provide a context for this observation, the phrase was actually borrowed by Virilio from an interview with the late Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara, published in D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory in 1991. One of the leading visionaries in the rebuilding of post-war Tokyo, Shinohara is perhaps most famous for the Centennial Hall of Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he also taught. For the purposes of this essay and in the context of this conference, it is worth noting that via Shinohara, and like Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, Virilio’s paradigm of the contemporary city has its genesis in the futuristic cityscape of post-war Tokyo – described as the embodiment of ‘the future’s future’ by William Gibson.

Virilio’s text is eerily prescient. He foresees the global epidemic of terrorism and its effect on the social psyche in his account of the increased security protocols and surveillance of airports in the 1970s; describes global information and mapping systems before the advent of the internet and Google Earth; and even presages the current global financial collapse. In the tradition of the best science-fiction writers however, some imaginings remain unrealised (the ‘future’s future’) such as his discussion of the massive de-population of the metropoli of developed countries and cities in orbit – at least for now.

To return to Virilio’s statement, ‘the city of the future is the pleasure of the interval’: Virlio’s notion of the city’s ‘interval’ equates to the unit of time, as increasingly measured through systems of light, rather than the unit of space: such that the desire-driven temporal sequencing of spaces through visual systems such as film, television and the internet come to replace our usual topological understanding of space, in a what he describes as an ‘aesthetics of the disappearance’:

From the aesthetics of the appearance of stable images, present precisely because of their static nature, to the aesthetics of the disappearance of unstable images, present because of their motion (cinematic, cinemagraphic), a transmutation of representations has taken place.

Over the course of his essay, Virilio evolves a family of light or lense-based allegories that together chart such transmutations. In the same order as they occur in the essay, and with some simplification, these are:

• the city-gate;
• the interface or boundary-surface;
• the screen;
• the microscope;
• the movie-camera.

These motifs are carefully deployed as he explores the condition of the contemporary city, unified by the concept of ‘overexposure’, understood by Virlio as a condition that compresses or superseeds optical phenomena, from which we interpret topological space. What is significant is the strategy apparent in this analysis of light as the structuring device of the city. The sequencing of the motifs he identifies - gate-surface-screen-camera - corresponds to an increasing density or dimensionality of luminosity: from a void, to a permeable surface or semi-void, to a solid surface, to a lense or ‘surface-less’ solid (embodied light), to a lense-in-time. The term ‘overexposure’ that he chooses as the nomenclature for his text similarly suggests a super-visibility, rather than an in-visibility: such that matter is not negated, but rather, is made ‘light’. Light itself becomes a four-dimensional medium; rather than space-time being dissolved into its absence as light.

This distinction, between a materiality of light, and an immateriality of matter, is crucial in understanding the trajectory of his argument in relation to contemporary art practice. For example, the ‘super-visible’ or overexposure of material as light can be identified in the work of Stephen Haley. Inspired by residencies undertaken in Toyko and Los Angeles, Haley depicts the city as a hyperreal event. Digital media such as CAD programs, vector-based animations (akin to Virlio’s ‘vectors of a momentary and instantaneous expression’) and data projections are used to model cities in light – both literally and figuratively – where the graphic languages of web-building, game-playing and surveillance culture are prioritized over the perceptual and the phenomenological.

In these realms, the vector-based digital imaging tools of ‘wallpaper’, ‘clone’ and ‘wireframe’ come to supplant the analogue-derived, haptic ‘rasta’ digital modes of ‘cut & paste’, ‘crop’ and ‘blur’. Haley uses a formal language that is infinitely, seamlessly reproducible, predicated on the mirror as the defining paradigm for the Western construction of space (as first found in Brunelleschi’s investigations of perspective using a mirror/lense to depict the Baptistry in Florence) such that the perfect, luminous field represented in the (now computer-generated) mirror of reality, has come to supplant that reality itself. Significantly for this paper, Haley’s adoption of the mirror modality to describe the hyperreal encapsulates Virilio’s notion of the ‘overexposed city’ as embodied light: in that, for the viewer, the mirror image is precisely a material space that has been ‘constructed’ as light.

Elsewhere, Virilio asks: ‘Where does the city without gates begin? [...] Where is the door without a city located?’ The system gate-surface-screen-camera demonstrates a possible answer to this question, representing the ever more accessible, permeable or transparent, ‘super-luminous’ ontology of the evolving city. To turn to my own work: the cityscpace images are often constructed at a quasi-architectural scale, such as large format free-standing screens or modular wall-mounted light boxes. Engulfing or circumnavigating the gallery walls, the work creates panoramic vistas of synthesised cityscapes that seem to ‘replace’ the space or vista of the gallery. By dissembling the viewer’s perceptual encounter with the space of the gallery (reminiscent of the great trompe-l’oeil and accelerated perspective quadratura systems of the Baroque, as typified by the work of Andrea Pozzo and Gianbattista Tiepolo) the work evinces an optical ‘door without a city’: a visual portal-lense-screen that negates the space of its site.

Incorporating frontal video projection, rear illumination and, like Haley, mirrored sections, the art works are a composite representational system that formally bring together the individual elements of the ‘gate-surface-screen-camera’ genealogy Virilio identifies, all at once. The work is not purely cinematic, but draws upon the many ‘degrees’ of cinematism that Virlio articulates. As a consequence, instead of representing the culmination of Virilio’s vision of a homogenous virtuality where light is medium, the work suggests a heterogenous, lumpy, variable opacity as at least the current condition of the overexposed city.

In addition, Virlio’s first uses the term ‘overexposure’ in the context: ‘replacing the old distinction between public and private and “habitation” and “circulation” is an overexposure in which the gap between “near” and “far” ceases to exist.’ My studio work has a comparable interest in the uncertain experience or parameters of location in contemporary culture. The work draws upon theories of appropriation and ‘mashup’ digital practices to present composite scenes. A combination of photographs taken by myself, tourists, amateur photographers and municipality commissioned publicity shots, the components of the cityscape images are predominantly downloaded from the internet, bringing together international urban centres with the local and parochial and condensing them into a whole. The seamless flow of public to private, corporate to communal, concrete to virtual and ordered to intuitive spaces can be compared to Virlio’s ‘overexposure in which the gap between “near” and “far” ceases to exist.’

However this representation of the transcultural ‘ideal’ city is problematic, as it remains predicated upon Colonialism as well as increasingly influenced by Globalization. In my work, the ‘ideal city’ is used as a motif to explore such cityscapes as found in contemporary visual culture, often associated with paradise. These models of utopia represent the matrix of desire for the exotic Other. Virlio’s account of the collapse of ‘near and far’ does not provide an account of the residue of colonialism in the popular imagination; akin to the continued commodification of the Other that, as Homi Bhaba points out, continues to be ‘one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power’.

Virilio is careful to define his notion of the material becoming ‘virtual’:
Two procedures confront each other here: one is material, made up of physical elements, precisely situated walls, thresholds and levels; the other is immaterial, its representations, images and messages possessing neither locale nor stability, since they exist only as vectors of a momentary and instantaneous expression, with all the misinterpretations and manipulations of meanings that this implies. [Emphasis added]

Importantly, Virilio does not see the opposition as a simple, physical / metaphysical binary system. He suggests that the opposition is one of semiotic value, as well as material value – precision versus misinterpretation – deliberately engaging a Structuralist reading, where the ‘super-visible’ city of light is also a city of Saussurian parole or un-tethered utterances: language itself is also ‘overexposed’. While a detailed Structuralist analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, the collapse of language as an aspect of the ‘aesthetics of the disappearance’ identified by Virilio can be considered through the work of Shaun Gladwell.

As Daniel Palmer observes, Gladwell’s now famous imagery (he was selected by Robert Storr for inclusion in the Italian Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale and most recently by Tracey Emin for presentation at the Royal Academy) depicts ‘various subcultural stylings and street stunts such as skateboarding, BMX biking, break-dancing and other anti-gravitational manoeuvres.’ Most feature simple forms of inversion of subversion of the image: slowing the footage of a skateboarder to balletic proportions; reversing the image so that figures appear to float in space; or constructing mirrored scenes of approximate-symmetry. Each poetic, detached gesture is contextualized in an anonymous, generic urban space. These simple inversions of familiar filmic events ‘detach’ the subject matter from their usual alignments: the images could be said to be mis-quoted, displaced or inflected by one degree of difference from the norm. As such, they correlate almost exactly to Virlio’s ‘images and messages possessing neither locale nor stability, since they exist only as vectors of a momentary and instantaneous expression’: fleeting repositionings of urban phenomena.

In attempting to discern the status of urban architecture in relation to the confrontation between the material and the immaterial, Virilio identifies ‘a transmutation of representation’ that he discusses near the end of his essay specifically in terms of film: ‘Here, more than anywhere, advanced technologies have converged to create a synthetic space-time… [where] the living and the living dead merge to the point of delirium.’ Elsewhere, ‘cinematism’ is the term he uses to describe the ‘last appearance or urbanism’; and his text is scattered with references to the evolution of and possibilities of cinema and the cinematic (often in parallel to references to the development of mankind’s capacity to fly - also a process whereby matter becomes ‘weightlessly’ immaterial). Film – also the conclusion of the gate-surface-screen-camera system – is both the proof and modus operandi of Virlio’s notion of overexposure.

However, as Daniel Crooks indicates, the current condition of film as a digital event complicates Virilio’s cinematism as the ‘last appearance or urbanism’. As Emma Macrae describes: ‘Crooks creates polyocular visions of the world in which perspective vanishes and we watch objects as though through the laser-point vision of multiple eyes.’ Eschewing the conventional, monocular perspective systems of the traditional movie-camera (already deemedproblematic, as we know that mathematicians are unable to devise a formula for a perfect 360-degree perspectival model), Crooks works with layered slices or samples of time to re-visualise urban spaces. An Edward Muybridge of the digital age, his images represent the use of light (as digital image) to re-structure time; creating multiple ‘intervals’ at will. Crooks’ most famous work, Time Slice, uses the potential of digital video in particular to isolate and re-choreograph temporal sequences that unlock the usual figure-ground-viewer relationship. Extending Virio’s idea of cinematism, time is more than the horizontally-sequenced montage of conventional cinematic narrative, contained within the frame. Crooks suggests an instability of the moment itself, over and above the flexible sequencing of moments that cinema has traditionally presented through the jump-cut, flash-back and sub-plot.

Terrill investigates time in almost the reverse of this process. His ongoing Crowd Theory series involve coordinating large groups of people in their local community settings, in what Urszula Dawkins describes as ‘hour-long moments… an exploration of the physical space… and a kind of documentary fiction based around the responses of participants to the location.’ Like Crooks, the figure-ground relationship, here between the individual, the metropolitan crowd and the city is significant; but unlike Crooks, this is explored by dwelling upon the transient correlation of these three things. Instances are prolonged, extended rather then dissected. Terrill often uses the so-called ‘golden hour’ just prior to sunset, beloved of photographers and film-makers and itself a liminal zone between day and night. This, as well as the carefully managed theatrical lighting, creates an uncertain duration of time, at an ambiguous point in the day: our temporal perceptions are folded upon themselves and made plastic. The subtle blurring of movement of parts of the crowd creates a curious ghosting effect; suggesting that zombie-like state that Virilio sees as when ‘the living and the living dead’, the present and the past, ‘merge in delirium’. Terril’s haunting work draws out the fantastical, super-natural aspect of Virlio’s strongly worded observation, that goes unremarked in his essay.

It is important to acknowledge that for Virilio, the ‘delirium’ of film or cinematism is both spatial and temporal (‘a synthetic space-time’): the representation of both space and time is questioned by cinematic media. As a specific example of this, the destabilization of time as history is addressed near the end of his essay, where Lyotard’s critique of the crisis of modernity and the collapse of its ‘grand narratives’ is discussed. This is prefigured earlier in the text, when Virilio states that ‘the debate surrounding the notion of modernity seems to belong to a phenomenon of “derealization” which at once affects means of expression, modes of representation and information’. In both instances, Virlio argues that the essentially humanist trajectories of modernism cannot be furthered, due to the failure (‘derealization’) of language itself, rather than a lack of engagement with the debates in question. At this point, Virilio equates the collapse of time and historic narrative, with the collapse of language. His implicit assertion is that the rise of the ‘immaterial… with all the misinterpretations and manipulations of meanings that this implies’ coincides with the rise of the city of infinite, unfixed semiosis.

Rosetzky acts out a comparable derealisation upon the grammar of film, as well as photography, in his work. Drawing upon received notions of identity, especially happiness as structured through advertising and the media, his work approximates a visualization of the lifestlye values of Generation Y. Like flicking through a copy of Vogue or watching a health-food advert, his arresting images of young, beautiful people doing young, beautiful things are somehow askew, off-key. Perhaps most obviously in his use of cropped forms, literally cardboard cut-outs, Rosetzky distills signifiers of aspirational contemporary life and represents them with subtle inflection in modulated relations. In a manner perhaps more dexterous and less romantic that Gladwell, Rosetzky reconfigures the grammar of the contemporary urban imaginary in a semiotic investigation of style; gently amplifying ‘the misinterpretations and manipulations of meanings’ that Virlio sees in the rise of the immaterial, derealised languages of the city. However Rosetzky is acutely aware of the political dimension of this manipulation: where the spectacle of pleasure that he re-articulates is understood, after Debord, as the language of capitalism – a synecdoche for the machinations of consumerism and the perpetuation of societies’ systems of power.

To summarise: Virilio’s discussion of the overexposed city brings us to a point where ‘the crisis of the dimension thus appears as the crisis of the whole’. Three aspects or degrees of crisis are identified, extrapolated from the quantification of the city – where ‘the city of the future is the pleasure of the interval’ – to describe a similarly pleasure-structured condition of time as a plastic, cinematic event; and to the comparable immateriality or ‘derealization’ of language.

These three facets could be described as:

1. Super-visible: the overexposure of material/space ‘as’ light
2. Temporal plasticity: the cinematic collapse of time
3. Linguistic derealisation: the collapse of language (and consequently also modernism)

A comparable ‘transmutation’ in the representation of the city, can be found in contemporary Australian art. However, the artists identified in this paper extend and refine Virilio’s notion of overexposure – principally:

• by raising the issues of the post-Colonial condition in relation to the collapse of near and far;
• by acknowledging the essentially capitalist systems that continue to structure the supposed ‘derealistion’ of language in contemporary culture
• by drawing attention to the further ambiguity of time apparent in digital film, characterized by an instability and even metaphysicality greater than that evidenced by Virlio’s implicit understanding of cinema as an analogue medium,
• and by questioning the quality of ‘overexposure’ that Virlio identifies, suggesting that it is more complex, opaque and heterogenous than he describes

In conclusion: Scott Bukatman refers to Virlio in his essay ‘There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience’ . ‘Paul Virilio, confronted with the hypercinematic experience of Omnimax, notes that "we can no longer separate film from auditorium."’ The artists identified in this paper adopt primarily filmic or otherwise lense-based strategies to create similarly uncertain relationships between their work and the world in which it is located. These are deliberate, and serve to question that world – here, specified as an urban environment – recognizing in it the overexposed field Virlio identifies: but one that is both more materially fantastic, and more politically imperfect, then he imagines. As such, it is clear that the overexposed city is not an impossible utopia of the future: but rather, the clearly flawed, if ever more fabulous space of today.

Kathy Temin: Indoor Gardens - Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

2008-04-01T19:45:00.001+01:00

Frieze, Issue 113, exhibition review, April 2008

We are warned, by Amanda Rowell in the accompanying text to the exhibition of Kathy Temin’s latest works, that here: ‘the animal qualities show themselves…Minimalism is combined with sentimentalism.’ Temin’s most recent solo show was indeed a strange, synthetic pleasure garden, a ‘cosy nook’ where Modernism slipped off its shoes and went walking on the grass – or at least, shag-pile carpet – a plastic paradise of fake fur and pebble-dash décor, where the straightjacket of formalism was replaced by a flower in your hair. Or so it would seem.

Temin has become widely acknowledged, both within Australia and beyond, for her critically rigorous yet materially awkward works that are often interpreted as a post-feminist appropriation of various paradigms sighted in Modernist art history. One of the most significant Australian artists of her generation, her DIY, almost drag take on Malevich, Stella, Judd, Oldenburgh, Duchamp; as well as Wittgenstein and Benjamin, is a powerful attack on the monumentalising, heroic and often chauvinistic rhetoric of Modern art past, and a cautionary tale for the present. Often involving cheap, overtly man-made materials, her works have the appearance of something roughly cobbled together or misshapen, deliberately under-cutting any idealism associated with the art-object and positing instead something far more anxious and awkward.

This clumpy, drag slippage makes their Modernist credentials suspect, at best a flawed echo or cheap imitation. Such rough fashioning should not be confused with poor craftsmanship – Temin’s works are sturdy in the extreme, sometimes adopting a belt-and-braces approach in their lumpen making, where seams are over-sown and more than enough glue used to bind things together. This unevenness seems to grow out of an excess of the homespun, a material oddness that quickly becomes familiar as a human, rather than Übermensch, trait.

Indoor Gardens included the work Camouflage Cactus (2006), one of a trio of cacti forms displayed in a separate space to the main exhibition. Unlike the even green colouring of the other two, it was made up of military camouflage synthetic fur, its silhouette like a cartoon-drawing of a cactus, with two stubby arms protruding either side. Was this cactus over-compensating, borrowing the perceptual device (partially developed by Cubist artists) that imitates the appearance of nature, to represent itself as a natural form? Undeniably figurative, it quickly dissembled into pathos and our heart went out to it.

Similar feelings were hard to avoid when the principle works were encountered, where camouflage was replaced by a sea of white fur – redolent of Meret Oppenheim, Mona Hatoum – in an incredibly seductive gesture, that corrupted the Classical/Modernist ideal of white-on-white into a kind of hairy-Suprematism. A huge white fluffy cube, White Cube: Fur Garden (2007) sat squatly off-centre in the gallery like one of Plato’s ideal forms gone feral, with a soft fuzzy landscapes of trees behind. Cute and comforting, the toy-like objects were also conspicuously out of place, and/or off-scale. The largest, human-sized green stuffed trees, Family Garden (2007) slumped under their own weight. Most disturbing was the mute impassivity of the forms, like a layer of foundation make-up without mascara and lipstick. This play upon sensuous (if tacky) surface in contrast to subtly menacing form was found throughout the exhibition: perhaps most emphatically in Mantle Garden (2006-7), where the white-fur trimmed upper ‘mantle’ had as a counterpart a low-level, seemingly boarded-up cat-flap or Kauffman-esque doorway, leading to an unknowable but presumably abject internal space.
Details such as this doorway suggested that the objects were somehow inhabited; or, at a larger scale, to be used in daily living. Suave yet kitsch, works like Mantle Garden and Sideboard Garden (2006-7) were both Pop furniture and shrine-like sculpture; domestic space and rural idyll. ‘Sideboard Garden’ especially spoke of a sub-urban, domestic attempt at an eighteenth-century landscape folly: Ludwig II of Bavaria meets Blue Peter. Like props from the hide-out of the eponymous Goldfinger of the 1964 Bond movie, Temin’s objects are flawed stand-ins for superdesigned artefacts; heightened simulations of luxury commodities.

What characterised these works most significantly however is their relationship to nature and its anthropomorphism. This operated at various levels, from the direct imitation of tree shapes, to the Scandinavian design-influenced ‘nature forms’ of decorative stucco pebble-shapes; and most obviously in the titles. As Rowell suggests, ‘abstract protuberances become soft cheeks, bosomy trees…. Botanical soft furnishings’. Temin makes a segue from the formalism of both Modernist and design practices, to the form-less, haptic domain of the natural world, where sentiment – or animal feeling, as opposed to human intellect – guides her practice. This upturns the hierarchy of Modernist thinking whilst simultaneously borrowing its terms; co-opting our biological empathy with nature into a critique of didactic stylistics. Finally turning from the massive flur-clad central cube, I was suddenly facing the equally dramatic, sheer face of a sandstone cliff shrouded with fern, just a few metres outside the double-story window of the gallery. Temin’s animal cunning had me cornered.

Kelley Glaister: In flagrante delicto’

2008-03-05T19:43:00.002Z

Catalogue essay for These Endless Days, Blindside, Melbourne, March 2008

In flagrante delicto

Thank you for the days, those endless days
Those sacred days you gave me

Days I remember all my life
Days when you can’t see wrong from right
You took my life
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me
But it’s alright
Now I’m not frightened of this world believe me

Encountering the title of this installation by Kelly Glaister, it is hard not to think of the somewhat sinister love-song Endless Days by The Kinks. Glaister’s suspicious figures seem to have taken the litany to heart: wrapped in rugs, they suggest the traditional way of transporting a ‘stiff’ in film-noir mob lore, and we presume such a fate has befallen them. The two supposed corpses ‘aren’t frightened of this world’ anymore because they are dead; but also, because they clearly have more pressing concerns: getting it on.

In flagrante delicto would seem the mot juste here:

In flagrante delicto or sometimes simply in flagrante (Latin: "while [the crime] is blazing") is a legal term used to indicate that a criminal has been caught in the act of committing an offense (compare corpus delicti). The colloquial "caught red-handed" or "caught in the act" are English equivalents. The Latin term has come to be used far more often as a euphemism for a couple being caught in the act of sexual intercourse; in modern usage the intercourse need not be adulterous or illicit.

In both senses, whether body arousal or disposal, we are the shocked witnesses of the event. As both Freud and the Kinks suggest, such a scene may be precisely one where ‘you can’t see wrong from right’. Intense sexual desire thrives upon taboo, the blurring of licit boundaries that allows transgression to incite the darker drives that lurk within lust. From innocent bedroom role-play, this can extend to the full gamut of Sadeian sado-maschistic activity, where being bad is the whole point. Georges Bataille explored the correlation between sex and death in his seminal work Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957), arguing that eroticism is ‘a psychological quest not alien to death.’ Contemporary practitioners such as Paul McCarthy and John Bock add to the long genealogy of artists interested in la petite mort – including Marcel Duchamp, Hans Bellmer and Hans Haacke. Glaister is well aware of the company she is keeping.

But to move from the corporeal back to the intellectual, and Glaister’s play upon the twin meanings of in flagrante. We are offered the unusual situation where both definitions of the term are employed at once – a sort of double-underlining of the phrase. However, this strong emphasis results in a form that is impossible: dead bodies do not copulate (at least, outside the extremes of B-grade zombie flicks and Bataille’s fevered imagination). Indeed, these bodies seemingly cannot undertake coitus, as we are lead to believe that they are wrapped in the rugs and therefore no skin contact is possible. Rather than increasing meaning, Glaister’s extreme articulation of the signifying event in flagrante instead results in the complete collapse of the signified.

Yet isn’t this always the case with allegory? Allegory can be defined as: ‘a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another’ We should be clear that this is the mode of language Glaister is investigating: itself taken as an allegory of language-production and signification as a whole – the arch-paradigm of most art-making.
An allegory is the most lucid and self-conscious example of a signifying chain; yet it is also the most flawed. Paul Carter explores the role of allegory in ‘Other Speak: The Writing of Poetic Difference’. He quotes J. Hillis Miller’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin: ‘In allegory naked matter shines through. It shines through as the failure of the ideas to transform nature or thought. In this sense allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.’ Carter goes on:

Allegory operates without a ‘common horizon’. As a poetic device that foregrounds experiences of finitude, it nevertheless has to construct a meaning that is, culturally speaking, horizonless. In Kafka, as in Beckett, the horizonless experience is, in effect, the crisis of reference itself, the existential intuition that nothing makes sense, that the symbols, absorbed into the discourse of authority, have ceased to have nay metaphysical meaning beyond their power to confine our freedom.

Here we are perhaps closest to Glaister’s point of departure for this work. Allegory makes us acutely aware of the inherent failure of signification – and this is surely the fundamental issue for any artist, in the attempt to construct work that is meaningful. What option is left to them? One is to collapse such systems under their own weight, as Glaister’s double-emphasis succeeds in doing, as an attempt to open up new horizons of possibility. For beyond the short-circuiting of meaning that allegory in particular lays bare, after the ‘dumbfuck’ condition of all language has been acknowledged, we artists/animals are still driven to (pro)create as a seemingly biological necessity.

When Duchamp was asked by Pierre Cabanne about the role of the erotic in his highly allegorical work The Large Glass (1915-1923) ¬– often sited as the most influential art work of the twentieth century – he replied: ‘”enormous… it’s the basis of everything, and no-one talks about it. Eroticism was a theme, even an ‘ism’, which was the basis of everything I was doing”” . Glaister revisits this origine du monde with a knowing, heavy tread – leading us irresistibly to right where she wants us; and where we want to be.

Notes

The Kinks, Endless Days, 1968
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_flagrante_delicto
George Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans, Mary Dalwood, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/allegory
Paul Carter, ‘Other Speak: The Writing of Poetic Difference’ in Scott Mcquire & Nikos Papastergiadis (eds), Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005, p.225

Philip Brophy: VOX - Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne

2008-03-01T19:42:00.001Z

Frieze, Issue 112, exhibition review, March 2008

This was no ordinary love-song. Philip Brophy’s twin screen animation and soundscape, Vox (2007) was presented in a cavernous black space as a joint project of Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. The usually light, pine-floored room was inverted into a boite de nuit, minus glitterball and disco beats, but with the same scent of heavy petting and spectacular performative encounter.

Brophy has practiced since the mid 1970s as a musician, composer, sound designer, filmmaker, writer, graphic designer, curator and artist. He is also an acknowledged expert in Japanese popular culture; and so perhaps the dark upper stories of Akihabara’s Electric Town in Tokyo is the specific mise en scène of his work. In Vox, the sweet, kawaii Pop sensibility of Japanese anime was pushed towards its darker incarnations, as found in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1994) by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, or the 1970s Black Jack and Eulogy for Kirihito graphic novel creations of Tezuka Osamu. Indeed, Brophy curated the legendary Japanese manga artist’s work for the exhibition Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in 2006. This was the first major show of Tezuka’s work seen in the West, and it subsequently travelled to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.

Brophy seems preternaturally able to articulate the nuance of digital animation and cinematic sound, and has lectured on the history of both. Vox started simply enough, with two vector-based portraits of a guy and a girl facing each other, vaguely reminiscent of Marina Abramović and Ulay. As a cranking, Aphex Twin-like sound effect started to gradually wind up, one of the figure’s faces begins to contort and morph, until a slow flowering or spewing of gonad-like structures radiates forth from mouth, throat and forehead, nearly penetrating the face of the other figure. Climax over, the noise (described by Brophy as being ‘like an opera soprano singing a single high note, yet it contorts into alien, cyborg noise – yet all the while retaining a screaming human quality’) subsided back to the original starting point; whereupon the other figure began its own blossoming in reply.

Helpfully, to explain the incredible anatomies that emerge, Brophy described the example of the female protagonist’s utterance as: ‘she sings a mutated biosonic-vagina’. I was reminded of the very graphic imagery of early Renaissance medicine, when the body consisted of four vital fluids or ‘humours’ and the uterus was thought to be shaped like the horned head of the devil; when evil spirits were thought to take over the bodies of witches and heretics, to be plucked from their mouths by holy men, the forerunners of Father Karras in The Exorcist (1971). Clearly the body for Brophy is a troubled place; as he explained in his 1996 paper The Body Internal given at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne: ‘The colonic figure and its moebius spawn populate our everyday culture.’ Drawing upon the same horrors of the abject, usurped body represented by the possessing demons of the fifteenth-century Catholic church, as well as the famous demise of John Hurt in Alien (1979), Vox was perhaps the summation of this proposition, turning the forms and function of social discourse into the currency of orogenital exchange.

Brophy pulls no punches in his aesthetic and conceptual predilections, and some may find his work either too blunt or trite, but I was swayed by the exchange of the curious Cronenberg-esque orchids and his play upon the mechanics of desire and the limits of language. He is careful to point out the kaleidoscopic range of popular and art references in his work, and direct acknowledgement was made in his catalogue notes to West Side Story (1961), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) (he is scathing about the Rom Com category of film, which he sees as ‘the essence of cinematic factiousness’) and the porn movie Assploitations (2003) directed by and featuring Aurora Snow; as well as to the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s extraordinary work Turbulent (1998) in which notions of gender, the feminine and desire within Arabic cultures is explored. Yet unlike Neshat, Brophy’s is a hyperreal exotic, dislocated from the reality – or rather, as real as the fantasies of Japanese cosplay and otaku sub-cultures, which have received world-wide (and some would say over-) exposure since the 1990s in the work and writings of Takashi Murakami, most notably in his famous Superflat manifesto (2001).

Through this mix-master approach, Brophy managed to co-opt or perhaps corrupt an otaku sense of pathos (‘I am alone but not lonely’) into gender politics, suturing ‘60s musicals with contemporary pornography. Somewhere between Cixous and De Sade, Hans Bellmer and Batman, Brophy posits his visual narratives of contemporary love: or at least, what he describes as ‘the dimensional warp between the dick flick and the chick flick’. Who said romance was dead.

Platform

2007-10-01T20:10:00.000+01:00

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Natural Wonder, 2007
Digital print on acrylic, lightbox
318 x 110cm

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Natural Wonder - installation view, 2007
Digital print on acrylic, lightbox
318 x 110cm

Presencing Nature

2007-09-01T19:46:00.001+01:00

Catalogue essay for ‘Sighting & Stillness’, NETS Touring Exhibition, September 2007

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 1971

Borders and boundaries are perhaps too often in the world news. Whether the subject of contested ownership, the site of protected entry, the disappearing limit of a slowly submerging continent, or the division between the Australian and the un-Australian, notions of edge and limit are highly charged in our current time. A profoundly human invention, boundaries tend to divide and isolate, order and regiment, and are based upon a need for control. They are perhaps most useful when they are designed to protect and preserve, as is the case with the area of natural wilderness within which these eight artists undertook this project, the Great South West Walk. Significantly though, whilst the preservation of pockets of untouched land as national parks is crucial, the ultimate aim of many nature preservation organisations is to move beyond such islands of preserved landscape, to a network of interconnected wilderness zones. Rather than a patchwork of small parks, perhaps analogous to the cramped enclosures of a nineteenth-century zoo, the hope is that it will be possible to establish areas or regions of continuous, protected natural space where borders are remote and infrequent.

The artists presented in this exhibition set out to investigate the relationship of boundaries to the experience of landscape. Rather than following in the footsteps of the first colonial scientists, measuring and mapping the landscape through words and numbers, the artists instead chose to explore the moods and sensations of their surroundings. The artists followed the landscape, rather than a road or boundary, and experienced a sense of immersion and stillness – of being ‘inside’ the landscape.

Sustained walking – or perhaps more accurately, roaming – can often induce a sense of stillness and meditation, as certain orders of Buddhist monks recognise. They believe that each footstep they take contributes to the continuous turning of the Earth, helping to move it on its way, and so spend their lives mindfully walking. Significantly, this conception of the act of walking makes them of the planet – they contribute to its momentum, are part of its system - rather than merely walking across it, as a separate element. Another way to consider this merging of those walking and the landscape walked upon is in terms of the dissolving of the difference between the figure of a painting and its background: found periodically throughout the history of Western art.

Through an open-ended, collaborative engagement with the landscape, the artists in this exhibition sought new means of describing this particular condition of being with nature. Methods of recording but not reducing nature are clearly a common theme of their works; and the sensuous, ambiguous qualities of colour, tone, mark and material, rather than the rigid inscription of line, metre, structure and form, became the prime components of their creative languages. By placing themselves within nature, rather than outside and looking in, the artists were able to emphasise the evocation rather than the description of this unique landscape - exploring the ‘presencing’ of nature.

This exhibition brings together the fine, applied and multimedia arts in an exciting, cross-disciplinary approach. The boundaries between the individual artists’ practices, as well as those historically used to divide the various fields of the visual arts, were therefore also questioned, as specific collaborations developed between a number of the artists. For example Ilka White and Nicky Hepburn chose to collaborate on works that synthesised their sensitivity to texture and the minutiae of nature. Their intimate works draw our attention to those still moments of reverie that occur when we encounter a particularly beautiful fragment of nature, and are emphatically reminded we are in the world. Both artists also present works made independently: Hepburn references the prospects and microenvironments of coast and forest through objects cast in precious metal that appear to have been borrowed from a cabinet of curiosities; in her sewn, woven and spun pieces, White uses a range of materials that include sea bird feathers and fish scales to explore the more fantastical aspects of the natural world encountered during the walk, such as the worm castings of Discovery Bay.

Brian Lawrence and Peter Corbett have previously collaborated on audio-visual works, and here present distinct but aligned meditations on the temporal and phenomenological experience of walking in this remote region. A resident of Portland, Corbett focuses upon his home environment. He uses a still filmic image where the movement is generated by changing natural rhythms, allowing the landscape to draw viewers into the experience of walking in this region. Lawrence’s soundscape explores the unique acoustic environments encountered along the three phases of the walk - the Cobboboonee Forest, Glenelg River and Discovery Bay - and presents the beguiling intensity of this experience. Vicki Couzens also uses a sonogram based on Brian Lawrence’s sound recordings taken during the walk as the basis of one of her series of prints. Couzens’ dry-point etchings explore the notion of loss and the unseen, in particular of the various species that have disappeared as a consequence of colonisation. Walking the Great South West Walk is a uniquely meaningful event for Couzens as an indigenous artist, as this region is part of the traditional homeland of her ancestors, the Dharwud Wurrong – Gunditjmara peoples. Her work explores what is visible above and obscured below the surface, creating works that, like a palimpsest, represent over-written meanings and layered languages.

In addition to these textile, jewellery, film and sound-based practitioners, contemporary painting, drawing and sculpture are represented in this exhibition by John Wolseley, Jan Learmonth and Carmel Wallace. Wolseley aspires to make work that questions, amongst other concerns, the lines of demarcation of private and state boundaries, borrowing from the history of botanical illustration as well as gestural painting and process-based art to develop a pictorial language that is at once scientific and poetic, indexical and metaphysical. In his large scale work on paper The Sound of the Forest - Cobboboonee Sonograms, 2006-2007, he explores the epic nature of landscape, both in terms of its attempted representation in the Western landscape tradition, and in the sheer physicality of his encounter with the wilderness. His work suggests an inhabited, immersive space without a clear horizon, using rubbings from burnt trees encountered on the walk as well as spilling watercolour pigments on to paper on the ground to incorporate organic systems directly into his images.
Jan Learmonth’s sculptural forms are like vessels for exploring or perhaps being explored by the natural world, read as being equally afloat and submerged in nature. In a deliberate fusion of organic and man-made references Learmonth addresses the often fraught, and sometimes uplifting relationship between people and land. The work in this exhibition refers closely to the Glenelg River and Gorge sections of the walk, and Learmonth’s work captures both the outward delight of discovery and the journey on the water, as well as the inward wonder at the textures, forms and patterns of nature: in a sense, the twin experiences of marking and being marked by the landscape. Finally, Carmel Wallace investigates the massing of signifiers from the walk, using flotsam from the shore of Discovery Bay, such as found cray pot pieces and cargo wedges as well as wayfaring markers, in abstract compositions that explore the materiality, density and rhythm of nature under the influence of time. Also a resident of Portland, Wallace’s work can be interpreted as the unfolding or revealing of nature through human attention, whether through the cold stare of science, the rough handling of the everyday, or the tender engagement of the artist.

Another important aspect of the project was an exchange between the artists and experts from other disciplines and professions. Local specialists in various fields – including an Aboriginal spokesperson, a botanist, an historian and field naturalists - were invited to join the group from time to time to share their particular expertise with the artists. These interdisciplinary exchanges allowed new approaches, perspectives and meanings to enliven the creative process of the artists; and also broadened the possible applications of experts’ knowledge. This two-way exchange is sympathetic to the model for contemporary art practice described by relational aesthetics, whereby Nicolas Bourriaud suggests that artists might re-position themselves within rather than removed from socio-political networks. Opportunities such as this walk seem to play an increasingly important role in defining the purpose and value of the creative arts in the wider arena of contemporary society.

Other boundaries or divisions that were brought into question included the old paradigm of nature versus culture.
Our tendency to measure the value of a particular place according to the sheer beauty of the landscape – its aesthetic value – often eclipses its social significance. Such complex meanings and memories embodied by landscape can only be measured in the terms of sentiment, familiarity or personal history and these are flexible and imprecise qualities that science, academia and policy makers often have difficulty acknowledging.

Professor Ken Taylor of Canberra University, suggests that for the indigenous peoples, ‘nature’ is a cultural artefact: an embodiment of subjective memories, histories and shared activities, rather than an objectively beautiful, static visual experience. Significantly, the indigenous people of the region visited by the artists during this project, the Gunditjmara, gave the artists a traditional smoking ceremony at the beginning of their walk. The project therefore began by explicitly emphasising the cultural (rather than visual) significance of their land: and the works presented in this exhibition, whilst also beautiful, may be considered as demonstrating a model of nature as culture.

By exploring domains or regions of shared experience rather than their borders, in engaging with the landscape as an unfolding, cultural progression rather than as linear, aesthetic site, these artists describe exciting new ways of understanding simultaneously both the natural and social worlds. In this exhibition, landscape is defined as a spatial plane or temporal zone that, rather like memory, is indistinct and porous, open to engagement and use, negotiation and flux. Rather than a static delineation of inscribed value, a dynamic field of shared values is evident.

In contemplating the cultural palimpsest that is the Australian natural environment, these artists walk bravely ahead, showing us the way. To return to Bourriaud, they engage with the social significance and context of making art, here defining the Australian landscape as a social medium. Mindful of the living histories embodied in spaces such as the Great South West Walk, at this critical point in the wider environmental history of our planet, we must hope that their ruin is not around the next corner.

Notes

Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ from Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1975), p. 154
See: Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (Paris: Editions Denoël, 2002)
See: Ken Taylor, ‘Reconciling Aesthetic Value and Social Value: Dilemas of Interpretation and Application’ in APT Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 1, Landscape Preservation Comes of Age. (1999)
See: Ken Taylor, ‘Reconciling Aesthetic Value and Social Value: Dilemas of Interpretation and Application’ in APT Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 1, Landscape Preservation Comes of Age. (1999)

Rhapsodia

2007-07-11T18:38:00.000+01:00

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Rhapsodia is a site-specific installation comprising illuminated digital imagery and animation. The work addresses the representation in popular culture of the desired, transcultural and increasingly virtual ideal city, often defined in an ambiguous relationship to nature. This motif is used to explore the landscapes associated with civilisation and paradise.

This work was initiated during an Australia Council Tokyo studio residency in 2006, and supported with an Australia Council New Work grant in 2007. Tokyo was taken as a case study for global trends in the increasingly plastic experience of geographical, historical, social and cultural space.

In this exhibition, the ideal city is identified as the site or matrix of desire for the exotic Other. The work draws upon mashup digital practices to present a composite, fantastical hyperreal scene. Borrowing from sources including Western Medieval narrative painting, traditional Japanese ukiyo-e landscapes and science fiction cinema, the installation presents a hallucinogenic yet lyrical utopia.

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      Rhapsodia, 2007
      Digital print on acrylic, lightbox, mirrored acrylic, sound
      390 x 310 x 90cm

Ann Holt: Deep waters

2007-04-05T19:59:00.000+01:00

Catalogue essay for A Bend in the River: Paintings from New South Wales Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, April 2007

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun …
… with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours

John Keats (1795-1821), To Autumn (1819)

To Autumn was supposedly composed whilst walking through the water meadows behind Winchester Cathedral. Close to the South Downs, this convoluted system of narrow waterways is an enclosed, verdant landscape where the sound of running water is one of the visitor’s only guides to orientation. As William Fitzgerald suggests, in this famous poem ‘Keats surrounds himself with the mists that dissolve contours and edges like the extended fruitfulness of Autumn itself.’ In part an acknowledgement of mortality, Keats evokes a still moment, both transition and fullness, redolent of that luxurious satiety associated with languor, sleep and ultimately death.

Ann Holt’s landscapes are similarly suffused. The title of this exhibition, Bend in the River, was deliberately chosen to convey both the fluid passing of time and the unknown. We cannot see around the corner of a meandering river, do not know what the future has in store, but continue into that pregnant void with a mixture of excitement and anxiety, comparable to Keats’ sensation of melancholic abundance. This ‘blind’ river-passage through the landscape is counterbalanced in Holt’s work by aerial views of mountains, lakes and bush, inspired by a low-altitude flight in a light aircraft from Melbourne to Canberra. While presented as an open perspective, this terrain is still comparatively ‘unknown’ to Holt, who is more familiar with the Tasmanian environment in which she has spent many years of her professional career. There is an eerie quality of immense silence in these works. The still waters below appear both weighty and translucent; while the vast spaces depicted between clouds and mountains become ‘full’ with light, a curious massing of luminosity. Similarly to the water-level viewpoint of other works, Holt portrays a seemingly boundless landscape that is both open and closed, solid and transparent, coherent but mysterious.

Holt is comfortable with this, indeed braver than most, refusing to describe the sensation as one of awe: ‘it is creepy, dangerous and scary to be in the bush totally on your own – but also absolutely liberating.’ These works draw upon childhood memories of holidays in the bush around Lake Victoria, the Darling and Murray Rivers, as well as recent experiences as a resident at the Bundanon Artists Centre founded by Arthur Boyd. Holt acknowledges that the triggering of instincts such as fear that accompanies being immersed in nature is part of the particular notion of beauty investigated in her work. As Edmund Burke describes: ‘…whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime’.
Holt’s work is rich in understanding as well as association. Direct influences include the Tasmanian landscape artist W.C. Piguenit and Margaret Preston as well as various European and Australian painters. We are as aware of the history of painting as of the physicality of the landscape in Holt’s work. The complex alignment of temporal, spatial and political aspects of landscape painting has been an acute concern throughout the Australian tradition, with which Holt strongly identifies and actively engages. This investigation of the location of memory is perhaps the core of Holt’s practice, as recollection, meaning and sensation enter into a dynamic interplay, where imagination interacts with observation and comprehension. Rather like the formation of storm clouds under the influence of opposing pressure changes and the condensation of moist air, Holt’s paintings give shape to the tumultuous forces of landscapes – those that physically surround us, as well as those of our memories and histories. Or, like the twilight beloved of the Romantics as a liminal, transitional state where orthodoxies dissolve and day becomes night, Holt’s work arrests us in that space of fascination where the unfolding drama around us causes us in turn to be still.

Notes

William Fitzgerald, ‘Articulating the Unarticulated: Form, Death and Other in Keats and Rilke’ MLN, Vol. 100, No. 5, Comparative Literature. (Dec., 1985), p. 951.
Artist in conversation with the author
See: Edmund Burke, Sect. VII. ‘Of the Sublime’ in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 2nd edition (1759).

Jordan Baseman: Human Behaviour

2007-02-01T20:00:00.000Z

Catalogue essay for ‘Tape 1 Tape 2’, Faculty Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne

Finding a means to describe the human would seem to have been the raison d’étre for art. Whether the Lascaux caves, Plato’s famous allegory of shadows on a wall , or the legend of the Corinthian maid, who traced her lover’s profile before he left for war, stories of the origin of what we might loosely call image-making have been predicated upon the human portrait. What is striking in all these accounts is the impulse to find or locate knowledge (here, of the figure) through a simultaneously indexical and empirical method: to found understanding upon an absence of comprehension; instead, the assurance of immediate and commonplace experience.

In seeking knowledge from direct observation of those around us, and the construction of an analytic language for this, artists can be placed alongside philosophers and scientists as humanity’s primary investigators of humanity. It is no surprise then that their methodologies may at times converge: and in the exhibition Tape 1 Tape 2, Jordan Baseman carefully positions himself in this shared territory, inquiring into the discoverers and their own, very human concerns (himself tacitly included), as well as their startling discoveries about the nature of being.

These works were developed during a residency at the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University in 2005; and as part of the project ‘Nature’s Great Experiment ’ in 2006, supported by the UK Arts Humanities Research Council as well as the Wellcome Trust. Baseman worked with psychiatrists involved in the TEDS project, the ‘Twins Early Development Study’, an investigation involving 15,000 families with twins in the UK. The project addresses the three most common psychological problems encountered in childhood: communication disorders, mild mental impairment and behaviour problems.

In the introduction to the video work Tape 1 Tape 2 (referring to the separate tapes for each twin, used to record parents’ comments about their behaviour; and from which the exhibition takes its name), Baseman explains that ‘TEDS uses a large sample in order to study abnormal development in the context of normal development’. The question of what constitutes normal therefore becomes part of – if not the focus of - the investigation: and throughout this exhibition, we are left wondering at the incredible profundity of what we think of as normality. In the words of Terrie Moffitt, (Professor of Social Behaviour and Development, Department of Social Genetic and Developmental Psychology, King’s College London), whose interview responses about the TEDS project form the commentary to Laws of Variation:

‘The most valuable thing any of us can have is an appreciation of how wildly different we are, the huge amount of variation in the human world. The tendency is to arrange our life to be with people that are like ourselves, which is more comfortable; but this is also false...Trying to break out of this, to appreciate how different people can be behaviourally, has got to be enriching.’

Fascinated by the extremes of human behaviour on display, Baseman’s work places us simultaneously as the operator and specimen of a microscope; in a sense, both director and actor for the video camera. We are drawn into considering our own experiences of such events, both as performer and observer; and further, to reflect upon that act of observation, the subjective reading of an infinite complexity, that we usually defer to the realm of science but which is also our continuous, if unacknowledged, experience of daily life.

Such deferment takes place as Moffitt suggests, in order to remain ‘comfortable’; and this is perhaps why science is used as a repository for that which is uncomfortable, the difficult and the challenging. Baseman seems acutely aware of this; and instead shares with Moffitt a concern for ‘truth’, however extreme. Laws of Variation presents footage from a 1957 film ‘Management of Twins in Pregnancy and Labour’ from the Wellcome Trust Library, alongside Moffitt’s narration. A professional training documentary of a medical technique, we witness the very bloody birth of two sets of twins and the associated procedures then employed by surgeon and midwife. Any shock experienced is in direct proportion to the degree of ‘comfort’ usual for the viewer; this event is clearly one of great joy as well as great trauma. Baseman’s role is simply to draw our attention – to pull focus - back to the wonder and awe of the rough, intimate texture of life.

Horror is of course the sibling of such fascination, and can be found in the interstices of every moment, as Levinas acknowledges in his investigation of ‘the sheer fact of being’ (es gibt or ‘there is’): ‘The rustling of the there is… is horror’) . Similarly, monstrosity is found in the mother’s mundane, off hand but chillingly revealing account of the personalities of her four year-old twins described in Tape 1 Tape 2; and its corollary, the deprivation Moffitt and her researchers too frequently found in meeting with the 15,000 families of twins in the UK. Here, Baseman again holds our gaze, as we are reminded that the incredible can so quickly run full circle and be folded back into normality:

‘We have observed a great deal of violence to children through our study: often neglect of their basic physical needs… Incredible to me that so many people in affluent worlds such as the UK or New Zealand where the studies are taking place are living a day to day life of quiet desperation. It is so commonplace, that they are not shy in talking about it; have lived with it for so long, it has become normal… They have lived with violence for so long, it is not something to be escaped; is how life is .’
Like horror, violence can also be understood as an intensity of feeling or expression; an extreme or uncontrollable force, generally of a destructive nature. Works such as Don’t Stop ‘till You Get Enough describe the play of such ‘violence’ upon the human psyche, here through the influence of Michael Jackson upon a group of Melbourne-based Jackson impersonators. What is remarkable is that this is effectively a self-violence; perhaps more usually interpreted as love. Many of the recorded interviews, based on questions such as ‘Do you ever dream of Michael Jackson?’, describe what it is to aspire to be Michael in quasi-spiritual dimensions: ‘When he says he is the instrument of God, I really, really believe him’; ‘He is the most famous man that ever lived’; ‘I live my life according to messages he sends in his songs’. The accompanying sequence of fans’ hand-drawn portraits of Jackson, found on the internet, form a testimony to his ‘infinite guises’, while each individual drawing’s calligraphy hints at discreet identities striving for dissolution in unity. This absolute love of the Other approaches an idea also described by Levinas, of an awesome and therefore annihilating passion before the ‘face’ of God - perhaps the ultimate portrait.

A subtext of the exhibition is the condition of the child in contemporary society and the machinations of power that operate upon them, for better or for worse – from the ‘childhood dreams that seem to dissolve as adulthood approaches’ as one Jackson impersonator describes; to the child-Jagger of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, a split screen presentation of two takes of an eleven year-old Tasmanian child’s awkward but compelling impersonation of the love-rock-god, performed at the request of his mother; one of the least mediated but most unsettling works presented.

Much of Baseman’s material is already on the public record; and it should be noted that the appropriate ethical procedures were completed before engaging with this project to ensure the consent of the authorities, those he films directly, or, as with the contested but finally successful defence of the legendary documentary film maker Frederick Wiseman, the consent of those charged with their legal custody . In an approach that borrows from Wiseman and cinéma vérité in its combination of naturalism and narrative structure (as well as perhaps Big Brother and the Discovery Channel) we are drawn wide-eyed into engagement with a delineation of the already real.

President Truman, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Ghandi are all attributed as saying that society is ‘judged by how it treats its weakest members’. Baseman reminds us of that charge; but the knife-edge of this work is the degree to which it judges, patronises or manipulates those it documents. However, importantly, this is the question Baseman ultimately redirects to us, by engaging the viewer in the act of consciously measuring both the scenes presented and our responses. As with the scientist collating data, the surgeon discussing an X-ray, or the film-makers of Italian Neorealism, we alongside Baseman witness the extraordinary but true occurrences of daily life; and, with full knowledge of the procedural, empirical limitations employed in recording them, including our own prejudices and suppositions, attempt to make meaning.

Notes

See: The Republic, (360 BC) Plato, Book VII
See: www.naturesgreatexperiment.com
Emmanuel Levinas, ‘There is: Existence without existents’, trans. Alphonso Lingis in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989, p.31, 32.
Professor Tracie Moffitt, in conversation with Jordan Baseman, ‘Laws of Variation’, Jordan Baseman, 2006.
‘The face ‘signifies’ beyond, neither as an index nor as a symbol, but precisely and irreducibly as a face that summons me. It signifies to-God (à Dieu), not as sign, but as the questioning of myself, as if I were summoned or called, that is to say, awakened or cited as myself.’ Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Beyond Internationality’, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin in Alan Montefiore (ed.) Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 112.
See: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, 1967; a controversial documentary film based on life in a 1960s State Prison for the Criminally Insane, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Banned (outside of educational showings) until 1992 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, that ruled it was an invasion of the privacy of the inmates, despite the prison authorities having granted Wiseman approval. See also: www.subcin.com/titcut; and, Thomas W. Benson, ‘Documentary Dilemas: Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”’, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

Cate Consadine: Suspended Proposition

2006-11-01T17:31:00.001Z

Catalogue essay for ‘Candy Cane’, Gertrude Contemporary Arts Spaces, Melbourne

Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne , perhaps the paradigm of Baroque sculpture, depicts the moment when the fingertips of Apollo first brush the skin of the woodland nymph he is chasing. Simultaneously, Daphne’s own fingers burst into bloom: she is transformed into a tree, to escape the insult Apollo is determined to inflict.

Cate Consandine somehow places us moments before this impact. A thick musk of desire permeates the space of the gallery, pheromones linking the works, levelling the space into a landscape pf pursuit. As Ugo Rondinone suggests: “it is a matter of not being able to distinguish between that, which we remember and that, which we long for ”. Desire (for the exotic ) is configured through the imprint of past experience; and the object of desire is reduced and controlled within this romanticising tendency.

In Consandine’s work, however, the relationship between memory and longing is re-directed, even unleashed. For example, casting is a semi-mechanical sculptural procedure that elucidates exactly a memory of a form: it is an absolute absence, a perfect lack. Consandine plays with this delay of form in her cast logs, further extended by the masking of cartoon-bright paint, such that the memory of what is veiled by colour and process is all the more acutely evoked. At the same time, our primal recollections of woods, forest and all the dark deeds that take place therein remain remarkably strong, automatic responses. Biological memory, the Darwinian imprint of nature upon our psyche, conjures Pan -like imagery from these natural motifs. Consandine interleaves nature and nurture in our conscious and subconscious readings, to dramatic effect.

Few artists practising today would risk the negative connotations of engaging with an art form such as ballet, replete with connotations of elitism and irrelevance. Yet Consandine specifically incorporates a Manneristic lower limb of a male ballerina (also an echo of the massive tree limbs) into the construction of a table; as well as a digital video portrait of a professional dancer performing a pirouette, often the climax of a sequence of movements in classical ballet (and perhaps redolent of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs). Her rough-handling of extreme modes or degrees of art suggest that nothing is taboo for the artist; or more exactly, that the erotic potential of rupturing these hierarchies is, as for Bataille , precisely her intention.

For Consadine seems drawn to these dangerous, erogenous zones of our imagination, achieved through heightened (although ambiguous) moments of theatre. The ‘wilful suspension of disbelief’ required in this is made explicit: a log appears to levitate before our eyes - until we recognise the slumberous grace of its arc, indicating a point of suspension. Illusion is then interrupted by an awareness of artifice (as with the gradual recognition of the glutinous quality of heavy mascara); but this engineering is also itself fabulous. Why is the table supported by hovering against the wall when one leg is so emphatic? Does the beam of the tree relate to the structure of the gallery, such as the vertical column with which it seems to interact? Function as much as fiction is interrupted: mechanics broken, dismembered from purpose, to be instead dispersed in works of latent tumescence.
Linda Nochlin points out in her seminal text ‘Women, Art, and Power’ (1988): ‘The image of the cut-off leg offers an easily grasped, non-transferable synecdoche of sexual power relations…[and, in regard to a 1939 photograph by Andre Kertesz of a ballerina’s legs] it inevitably refers to the implied sexual attractiveness of the invisible model, presented as a passive object ’. With Duchamp again brought to mind (specifically ‘Etant donnés… ’), the potential of this displaced and unrequited ‘gaze’ is also found in Blanchot’s essay ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’ . Orpheus is allowed to lead Persephone out of the underworld in which she is captive, on condition that he does not look back. At the last moment, Orpheus cannot resist, and this ‘illegal’ look causes Persephone to slip from his grasp. Blanchot posits this desiring gaze that fails, as the condition of art making.

Perhaps this thickened, mute, absent figure of the desired Other is also the subject of Consandine’s practice. For beyond the candy-coating of make-up and glam, Consandine’s works are finally remote and inaccessible, within suspended desire. To borrow again from Kertesz and another of his photographs, Satiric Dancer (1926): ‘Decorum is untrussed, as all four limbs are skewed in contrapuntal directions. There is no simple availability here: the codes of recumbency are electrified by over-action ’. Consadine similarly cuts loose.

Notes

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25. Collection of the Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Ugo Rondinone, Art Now Vol. 2, ed. Uta Grosenick, Taschen, London, 2005 p.450.
This romanticised, commodified and ambivalent notion of the Other is, as Homi Bhaba points out ‘one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power’. See: Homi K. Bhaba, ‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’, from The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, London & New York, 1992.
The word ‘panic’ derives from the Greek panikon meaning ‘pertaining to Pan’. Pan was a mischievous, carnal wood-deity found in the mythology of Classical Antiquity. See: www.etymonline.com
See: George Bataille, ‘Eroticism’, London & New York, Marion Boyars, 1962 (1957).
Linda Nochlin, ‘Women, Art, and Power’ from Visual Theory, eds. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly & Keith Moxley, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991, p.25.. Nochlin is adamant that reversing the gender of the figure (as Consandine does) results in the legs instead being ‘signifiers of energy and power ’: but this assumes a male viewer. In the same volume, Ludmilla Jordanova is critical of Nochlin’s use of the term ‘women’ and suggests instead ‘gender’, as masculinity is itself an equally contested.
Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall/2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-1966.
See: Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’ in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1982 (1955).
John C. Welchman, ‘New Bodies: The Medical Venus and the Techno-grotesque’ from Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s, G+B Arts International, Singapore, 2001 p.117.

Euan Heng: Conjured Constructions

2006-09-22T17:38:00.000+01:00

Catalogue essay, Sixth Drawing Biennale, Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

Reading these drawings by Euan Heng is to give oneself over to the frisson of our paradoxical age. In responding with uncanny sensitivity to the formless continuum of critical painting practice and popular graphics, art-historical academia and contemporary theory, Heng is master-craftsman, gymnast and magician rolled into one. Most important in this conjuring, however, is the delicately preserved sense of a charge, sometimes erotic, sometimes tragic, generated between these various perspectives. As Heng explains: ‘It is not my intention to express thoughts… but [to] incite thought’. Heng’s drawings present mechanisms for excited imagining, or ‘advanced juggling’, to borrow the title of a recent work, in which the influences of Patrick Caulfield and Juan Gris sit alongside Hokusai and Hergé.

Despite an exquisite sense of touch, it does not seem inappropriate to describe these drawings as machine-like. Heng has developed a respect for line to the point where drawing templates such as French curves and protractors are used to create his images. Like Piero della Francesca, Heng constructs subtle formal rhythm in his narrative scenes, establishing an abstract order of narrative that underpins and often directs the pictorial story-telling. We are reminded that Western mathematics was founded upon drawing, as first geometry and subsequently algebra arose from the investigation of volume, shape, fields of relation and points of intersection. Similar foci bristle within Heng’s drawings, mapping visible and invisible coordinates of correlation.

Importantly, however, these mathematical strategies are tempered by lapses and slips; perhaps better considered as melody in relation to the rhythms alluded to above. Modelled tonal passages contrast with the rigid authority of line; brilliant pinks, yellows, turquoise flash within small pockets of black-ringed space; occasional free-hand gestures wobble and pulsate with tremolo. Also an amateur banjo-player, the musicality of Heng’s work is akin to Django Reinhardt rather than Bach. His terrain is the pizzicato of simply patterned ballads: variations on families of closely related chord sequences, given nuance through the improvisational techniques of left-handed chord shaping; deft accompaniments to the telling of love stories, comedies, legends and tragedies.

Narrative is of primary importance to his practice. While aware that his work is closely related to modernism in this regard, he is quick to qualify his approach as:

imbued by a desire (or conceit?) to retrieve the image and to harness it with an individual vision and experience of the world, somewhere between what is seen and the imagination and hopefully – a poetic dimension.

This interest in poetry and the poetic has characterised Heng’s career; and suggests a distinction between the conditions of narrative in poetry and prose in relation to Heng’s work. The fluid ‘poetic’ narrative of Ovid, Pope, Kafka or Borges, characterised by crystalline forms describing riddle and paradox (highly influential on theorists such as Kristeva, Baudrillard and Barthes) is perhaps the mode closest to Heng’s. This approach is also comparable to the game-playing of contemporary post-modern writers such as Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami (as well as the filmic devices of Charlie Kauffman, The Simpsons and, arguably, Walt Disney), wherein the author, the reader, as well as the novel form itself are incorporated into the conceptual parameters of the work. Heng does not (or very rarely) labour over grand rhetoric or political commentary (‘I have always felt a strong allegiance to and admiration for work with a certain stillness/silence’), associated in the distant past with genre such as history painting and more recently with the resurgence of narrative-driven figuration; but rather, the more supple, intimate, epistolary world of personal events and enigmatic anecdotes, expressed in a manner comparable to Borges’ ‘voluntary dream which is artistic creation ’.
This poetic rather than prosaic approach allows for extraordinary flexibility in the conceptualisation and visualisation of Heng’s motifs; a quality also found in the sculptural approach taken in constructing these works. It is often possible to trace the cut edge of sections of his drawings, where images are cropped and altered, insertions made and forms re-composed, sometimes late in the working process. These almost invisible traces (Heng has developed a technique where the insertion is near-perfect, like marquetry) witness, on the one hand, a modernist confidence in the painting as object (indeed, his barely modelled drawings flirt with a flatness and a-pictorialism redolent of modernist abstraction) as well as an engagement with the condition of his images within ‘the real’. His drawings approximate objects through their ontology, rather than the imaginary. This is perhaps most apparent in regard to how Heng has developed this latest series. An initial drawing was taped to a glass wall of his studio. This was overlayed with additional motifs, while the original drawing could still be seen against the light, through the semi-translucent paper. Subsequent alterations were made by moving these elements in space in a process close to installation; located somewhere between collage and film-cell production, drawing strategies that perhaps most closely approximate real-time and real-space.

Heng acknowledges that, since art school, he has never kept a sketch-book: preferring this loose-leaf approach to drawing, each image existing in isolation rather than a bound format, however peremptory. This distrust or ‘deconstruction’ of the authority of a journal, even of the most personal kind, again points to Heng’s innate tendency towards critical, broken or ‘poetic’ narrative methodologies. These poised fragments emphasise the space and silence of the page, so important to Heng; voids that also echo Chinese and Japanese landscape traditions, as well as Indian Mughal and Kalighat painting, in which empty space was considered the most difficult and most important part of painting: a dynamic absence, a site of potential. Heng eloquently draws upon this pregnant field of the blank page; at the same time as the lucid authority of the diagram as schema. In this, as with all of his ‘games of adjustment’, we are left spell-bound by the sleight-of-hand.

Notes

Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. D.A Yates and J.E. Irby, Penguin Books, London,1970, p.220.

Sherrie Knipe: Tongue twister

2006-08-22T17:56:00.000+01:00

Catalogue essay for ‘From Little Things…’, Sullivan & Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney

Do not be deceived. While much of Sherrie Knipe’s practice revolves around the familiar and the domestic, involving artisan techniques seemingly from folk or craft origins, Knipe’s works are redolent of the extreme domesticity of the trompe l’oeil still-life – wherein, as Baudrillard suggests, accepting the calm simplicity of the scene represented means fundamentally revaluating the world beyond the image. Which is ‘true’?

The familiar becomes strange, ‘unheimlich’ or (literally) un-homely, as Knipe’s practice softens, abrades and re-models the mute minutiae of daily life – forms such as a button, teacup, plughole – developing a permeability of both the object and its signification. Rather like a tongue twister, where a familiar verbal form is repeated through rhyme and alliteration until it becomes plastic, malleable and subject to unexpected meaning, Knipe’s objects slip towards a helter-skelter condition, in which word play accelerates into a labyrinthine logic of its own. The subtle vibration of this Freudian ‘Uncanny’ reverberates within her mobile forms; a swarming sensation, found for example in the school of fish of China Sea (2004) as well as the clustered cutlery of Vanity Van (2006).

This ‘permeability’ is, as suggested, also a formal concern. While acutely aware of sculptural notions of mass and density, these traditional values are inverted or short-circuited in Knipe’s practice. As just one example: in Cold Comfort (2004) bronze hot-water bottles, here both materially and connotatively heavy, have their familiar ribbed surface constructed as a grill, rendering them weightless as well as useless through a single conceptual intervention (also possible to interpret as an extension of the logic of the form, akin to the acceleration suggested above: the recessed strips recessed further to a void). Even the plinths used for display, a sculptural device grounded in notions of invulnerability, clarity and solidity, are here hypothetical, transparent, made of glass and a thin frame.
Perhaps it is inevitable, then, that this careful, Derridean deconstruction of signification and also sculptural form causes us to read Knipe’s work as finally a pictorial event; we are without stable foundations elsewhere. Returning us to Baudrillard: Knipe’s work questions the material and symbolic value of objects to the point at which the space of the real itself becomes (or is recognised as) a fabrication - we ‘make’ the world as we engage with it. The pre or post-narrative scenes of Knipe’s –scape series (2005) suggest that the material culture she draws our attention to is exactly that: the site of (or ‘S-scape’ into) the imaginary, found in the interstices of the real.