35 1 Art & War | March 2015

Issue 35:1 | March 2015 AUS $15 | NZ $16.50

Art & War

Contemporary art of Australia and Asia-Pacific

BADLANDS

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“Creativity takes courage”

Henri Matisse

Be courageous and join us as we take you on your creative journey In the Gallery With a spring in my step 24 Feb - 20 Mar 2015 New works from six recent graduates, including: Lily Ahlefeldt, Cassie Broad, Nicholas Hanisch, Monika Morgenstern, Jess Taylor and Ash Tower.

PP/VT 31 Mar - 1 May 2015 Moving Image exhibition presented by the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, curated by Dr Anne Marsh and Nicholas Tsoutas.

Adelaide Central School of Art is an independent, not-for-profit, accredited Higher Education Provider that offers intensive training for students looking to develop careers as practising artists. All lecturers teaching in the School’s Degree Program are leading practitioners in the field in which they teach.

Launching the Atelier Academy A full semester program of specialist, non-degree courses for artists and students looking to extend their skills in a particular discipline. Courses focus on the art of visual representation, using traditional methods to support contemporary practice.

Participants will benefit from small class sizes and one-on-one interaction with senior artists/lecturers in a creative and collegiate studio atmosphere. The Atelier Academy will offer three 12 week courses commencing 16 March.

Anatomy Drawing | Rob Gutteridge Light, Colour and Form | Louise Feneley Materials and Techniques of the Masters | Daryl Austin Term 2 2015 Short Course Program Commencing Saturday 11 April 2015 Offering the best in short course education our Term 2 Program caters for complete beginners through to practising artists.

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Images: top left | Rob Gutteridge, Double Max (detail), 2007, charcoal on paper, 150cm x 150cm; bottom left | Daryl Austin, Los Angeles 1936 (detail), 2014 oil on panel, 25cm x 20cm; right images | Louise Feneley, Lumen III (detail), 2009, oil on Belgian linen, 80cm x 120 cm; Louise Feneley, The Committee for Global & Social Warming (detail), 2011, oil on Belgian linen, 13 canvasses, approx. 90cm x 175cm

Glenside Cultural Precinct | 7 Mulberry Road Glenside SA 5065 T 08 8299 7300 info@acsa.sa.edu.au www.acsa.sa.edu.au

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(IN)VISIBLE : THE FIRST PEOPLES AND WAR DEVELOPED BY LAKE MACQUARIE CITY ART GALLERY CURATED BY YHONNIE SCARCE AND MERYL RYAN IN CONSULTATION WITH THE ABORIGINAL REFERENCE GROUP FEATURING TONY ALBERT, JULIE GOUGH, AMALA GROOM, ANNA LIEBZEIT, ARCHIE MOORE, JUDY WATSON, JASON WING AND BULLETS FROM BABANA MEN’S GROUP FUNDRAISER (BY VERNON AH KEE, MEGAN COPE, JENNIFER HERD, ALAIR PAMBEGAN, JUDY WATSON) 27 MARCH – 24 MAY 2015 LAKE MACQUARIE CITY ART GALLERY FIRST STREET BOORAGUL NSW 2284 BOX 1906 HUNTER REGION MAIL CENTRE NSW 2310 T: +61 (0)2 4965 8260 E: ARTGALLERY@LAKEMAC.NSW.GOV.AU W: ARTGALLERY.LAKEMAC.COM.AU

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CASULA POWERHOUSE ARTS CENTRE PRESENTS

GUARDING THE HOME FRONT 20 March – 17 May 2015 ARTISTS TONY ALBERT PENNY BYRNE SAM CRANSTOUN JODI DALEY EX DE MEDICI BONITA ELY PHILLIP GEORGE GEORGE GITTOES LUCY GRIGGS FIONA HALL FREYA JOBBINS BADEN PAILTHORPE MICHAEL PECK BENJAMIN TANKARD GUAN WEI FROM THE AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL GEORGE BENSON STELLA BOWEN PENLEIGH BOYD SYBIL CRAIG WILL DYSON JOHN GOODCHILD GEORGE LAMBERT HORACE MOORE-JONES KATY MUTTON SIDNEY NOLAN

CASULA POWERHOUSE ARTS CENTRE 1 Powerhouse Road, Casula NSW 2170 (Enter via Shepherd Street, Liverpool) e. reception@casulapowerhouse.com t. 02 9824 1121 6 w. casulapowerhouse.com

Penny Byrne, War on Terror Waltz, 2009.

Courtesy of Deakin University Art Collection, purchased 2010. Photograph by Jeremy Dillon.

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connect On-line professional development short courses by experts who will help you build your career.

COURSES BEGIN 27 APRIL 2015 Beyond the Battlefield looks at women artists’ unique portrayal of war at the front lines, as well as their documentation of everyday life on the home front.

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Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

2 0 1 5

$25,000 major prize

entries open

Cecile Williams

1 ma rch – 29 may

Gallery Central, Perth 18 May to 11 June Supported by the City of Perth

For more inFo

countr yar ts.org.au 8444 0425

A r t a s a Ve r b 14 February – 26 April 2015 Developed by Monash University Museum of Art in association with Flinders University Art Museum

Myall Creek, 2014

Two Fields

F l i n d e r s U n i v e r s i ty C i ty G a l l e r y State Library of South Australia Nor th Terrace, Adelaide Tue - Fri 11 - 4, Sat & Sun 12 - 4

Glenn Campbell

A photographic journey through two of the most mythological periods of Australia

4 April to 2 May 2015 Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Vimy Lane, Parap flinders.edu.au/ar tmuseum | facebook.com/flindersar t

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nccart.com.au

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Marina Strocchi

A survey exhibition 1992 – 2014 Opening on February 27, 2015 at Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs

A book launch for Marina Strocchi - A survey 1992 – 2014 will be held at the opening. It includes essays by Sasha Grishin, Sioux Garside and Georges Petitjean and over 100 color plates.

This exhibition casts an eye back to Strocchi’s first paintings and traces her work to the present day.

The early works are tentative homages to the dramatic central desert landscape that has been her home for 22 years; Strocchi developed her unique visual narratives over this time. This collection of works is selected from both public and private collections.

Drawn from 26 solo exhibitions these works are a visual diary of life in the Northern Territory.

Publication enquiries marinastrocchi@bigpond.com Yellow Sun III 2009 acrylic on linen 80 x 62 cm

www.unisa.edu.au/sasa-gallery

Image: David Archer, Skull of truth, 2014 From the upcoming SASA Gallery exhibition, Uncomfortably Numb

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Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Artlink Australia PO Box 182 Fullarton SA 5063 Phone: +61 (0)8 8271 6228 info@artlink.com.au www.artlink.com.au Artlink is a quarterly themed magazine covering contemporary art and ideas from Australia and the Asia-Pacific. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.

ISSN no. 0727-1239 © No part of this publication may be reprinted or electronically reproduced without permission.

Artlink Australia is a non-profit company limited by guarantee.

ABN 490 632 261 39 Executive Editor Eve Sullivan Previews & Reviews Editor Stephanie Radok Publication Manager Helen Davies Art Director Richard Browning Sales & Marketing Lisa Mortimore Website development Isaac Foreman, Triplezero Artlink Board Lisa Slade (Chair) Marc Bowyer Stephanie Britton Bill Morrow Jackie Wurm Distribution Newsagents: AC Circulation through Gordon & Gotch Phone: + 61 (0)3 9720 9898.

Bookshops and galleries: manager@artlink.com.au

Art & War BADLANDS Issue 35:1 | March 2015

12 Recalling history to duty: 100 years of Australian war art Ryan Johnston on the evolving role for art and artists under Australia’s official war art scheme 19 Trench art: Sappers and shrapnel Lisa Slade on Trench art and material culture in contemporary art 24 The Aboriginal Memorial to Australia’s forgotten war Djon Mundine on memory, mnemonics and the genesis of one of Australia’s most important works of art 32 Traumascapes revisited Maria Tumarkin on encounters with physical sites of trauma in recent Australian film and art 38 Meditations on loss: Hilda Rix Nicholas’s war Catherine Speck 42 Otto Dix: Der Krieg Joanna Mendelssohn

Advertising & Sales Phone: + 61 (0) 8271 6228 manager@artlink.com.au

46 Laurence Aberhart: ANZAC Shaune Lakin

Printing & Prepress Newstyle Printing, Adelaide

50 Bronia Iwanczak: The flower forays Eve Sullivan

Editorial contributions Artlink welcomes proposals from writers. Proposals should reflect our planned themes for forthcoming issues. See www.artlink.com.au/ issues/future.

54 Tom Nicholson: The activation of the artwork John Mateer

Supporters Artlink Australia is generously supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, the Government of South Australia through Arts SA and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

58 Khaled Sabsabi: Peacefender Andrew Yip 62 Harun Farocki: Serious games Denise Robinson 66 True fairytales of violence: Art and the Holocaust in Hungary Adam Geczy on art, history and identity politics

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70 Reviews 84 Books 86 Previews

SUBSCRIBE to Artlink and receive a FREE back issue* Cover image: Ben Quilty Transparent Might After Afghanistan (detail), 2011, oil on found print. Courtesy of the artist, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Digital subscriptions and single copies available from the App store for your smartphone and tablet.

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EDITORIAL Ben Quilty Transparent Might After Afghanistan, 2011, oil on found print. Courtesy of the artist, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

keepsakes

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This period of reflection on the Anzac Centenary (1914–2014) involves many of us in a fraught relationship to histories of war and remembrance. Indeed, it would be hard to think of a subject that has polarised Australian society more relentlessly than attitudes to both official and unofficial involvement in armed conflict. Anzac Day looms as large in the nation’s much-discussed psyche as does our national day, Australia Day. But its agenda of honouring only official Australian armed services and not the impact of war on civilian populations (the role of Remembrance Day) along with the broader humanitarian consequences of global conflict remains an anomaly. For many Australians, with alternative histories and experiences of war, migration and displacement, as for Indigenous peoples whose lives were so drastically impacted by frontier conflict with European settlers (a conflict that many say should be given the status of a war), a broader view of the human landscape would go some way to creating a more inclusive agenda.

This issue of Artlink (my second as editor) marks the Anzac Centenary with an attempt to put together just such a larger narrative and diverse range of viewpoints. Supporting this, I am grateful to official war artist Ben Quilty for allowing us to reproduce on the cover a detail as focused view from his Transparent Might After Afghanistan, 2011. This provocative work of appropriation from his remarkable touring exhibition After Afghanistan (reviewed in Artlink 33#3) encapsulates the idea, appropriate to this issue, that war creates ‘badlands’ around us and within us. In the creation of this work, Quilty has cleverly fused a vision of the mountains of Afghanistan with a ‘found’ painting by Arthur Streeton, Hawkesbury River from 1896, painted the same year Streeton made The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might.

Streeton’s title, taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples’ provided an

australians and the great war

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

EDITORIAL

appropriately emotional response to the landscape. It is not hard to see the parallel between Australia’s arid geography and still rugged landscape, with the impenetrable mountains of Afghanistan. Quilty, who grew up on the Hawkesbury, and wandered its banks in the 1990s to locate this particular view of the meandering river, was notably inspired by the mandate of Streeton (also a former war artist) to paint local and familiar subjects that capture the spirit of Australia (most notably its heat and light). These violet hues, as much as they sum up a romantic image of hills in the distance also inspire reflection on Australia as a frontier and site of conflict – our own bloodlands.

Such historicising views and re-enactments are appropriate to introduce an issue that looks broadly at art history, as it informs contemporary cultural experience. As a further example of this, it remains a fact that the single-biggest wave of public art commissions, driven by communities across Australia, are the 13,400 or so memorials erected to honour those who died fighting in the First World War. The subject of photographer Laurence Aberhart’s remarkable ANZAC series (profiled in this issue by Shaune Lakin), these portraits capture the long shadow such monuments cast over public life and shifting attitudes to mourning. Once neglected, more recently restored and resurrected, they are joined by other memorials that add to the roll call in the build up to the Anzac Centenary.

In this issue, there are many interesting accounts that take a long view of our short war history, supported by examples of art’s vital role as mediator. For this I am grateful to all the contributors for their considered and complex reflections on a topic of such consequence to our endurance, intelligence and maturity as a peaceful nation.

Laurence Aberhart War Memorial, Westbrook, Queensland, 23 July 2013, 2013, silver gelatin, gold and selenium-toned photograph. Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Eve Sullivan is Executive Editor of Artlink.

EXPLORING SCIENCE 7–17 March 2015 & ART Opening Saturday 7 March, 2–4pm

Hazelhurst Community Gallery 782 The Kingsway, Gymea, NSW 2777

Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger

COLLIDING WORLDS Gallery open 7 days 9 am – 5 pm

Curated by Lisa Sharkey

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

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RECALLING HISTORY TO DUTY 100 years of Australian war art Ryan Johnston on the evolving role for art and artists under Australia’s official war art scheme The centenary of the First World War also marks the centenary of Australia’s official war art scheme, founded in 1917 and managed by the Australian War Memorial. Since the scheme’s inauguration more than seventy artists have been deployed to conflict and peacekeeping zones, making it one of Australia’s most significant art commissioning programs. Yet despite this, the scheme occupies a marginal position within the historiography of Australian art. There are many reasons for this: including, the assumed elevation of historical veracity and realism over aesthetic experiment and avant-garde inclination; political suspicion of a stateendorsed program for the depiction of war; and a belief that embedding artists with the military is both compromising and increasingly anachronistic when the proliferation of digital information means that unmediated and even leaked classified footage of war can now readily be found on mainstream websites.

To be clear, I am not attempting to validate the avantgarde credentials of Australia’s official war art. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a less pressing or interesting art historical concern. Nor is there scope here to attempt to unpick official war art’s complex social and political status, although this is a worthy and long overdue object of enquiry that I will briefly return to in my conclusion. Instead, on the eve of the centenary of this most unusual and persistent of commissioning projects, I will return to its origins to look,

first of all, at three artists whose idiosyncratic approach to the genre produced historiographical insight resonant with the contemporary commemorative context. Following this, I will plot a potted history of the scheme, and some of its more salient turns, into the present.

The official war art scheme began unofficially in December 1916 when the Australian illustrator and artist Will Dyson arrived on the Western Front in France. Based in London, where he worked as a cartoonist for the socialist Daily Herald newspaper, Dyson had been among several expatriate artists (including Arthur Streeton) agitating for Australia to initiate an official war art scheme like those introduced by both Canada and Britain earlier that year. Australia’s hesitation to do so, along with the slow, bureaucratic and ultimately negative response to Dyson’s requests, prompted him to bypass official channels by simply volunteering with the Australian Imperial Force and going to the Western Front without pay or support. He arrived just in time to experience one of the most unfathomably violent winters in European history.

The work Dyson produced in response was not traditional war art, which tended either towards the genre of history painting or highly detailed panoramas that depicted battles over time. Instead, Dyson focused on the everyday lives and experiences of Australians on the front, and developed a series of empathic drawings. As Dyson’s initial work began to be disseminated (with the assistance of Charles Bean, Australia’s war correspondent and later founder of the Australian War Memorial), its significance was quickly appreciated and in May 1917 he was appointed Australia’s first official war artist. Thus, despite its name, the official war art scheme was born not of officialdom, but of the wilful circumvention of officialdom by an artist.

Dyson’s most significant work on the First World War was completed only after his commission and the First World War itself had concluded. On 13 May 1919, he published a cartoon in response to the Treaty of Versailles in which he predicted the negotiated terms would lead to another world war. While his guess that it would begin in 1940 was one year off the mark, his insight nonetheless pre-empted the economist John Maynard Keynes’ far better known public assertion of the same by almost six months.1 Exactly one year after Dyson was appointed, Arthur Streeton became an official war artist, having recently declined an offer from the Canadian government which had adopted an unusually internationalist approach to its

Will Dyson Peace and Future Cannon Fodder, published in the British Daily Herald, 13 May 1919 14

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Arthur Streeton Amiens, the key of the west 1918, oil on canvas Collection: Australian War Memorial, purchased in 1936

commissioning program. Streeton spent approximately four months on the Western Front, mostly at the Somme, where he completed studies and sketches for a large body of paintings to be completed in London. One of the most significant of these, Amiens – the key of the west (1918), depicts this crucial administrative centre and its Gothic cathedral in the far distance. As in much of Streeton’s war work, the fighting is here kept largely to the periphery of the composition, as if to suggest that the extremity of the violence could never be entirely contained or conveyed within the perspectival logic of the painting itself.

This work is also notable for depicting the landscape as far more densely foliated than it was at the time of Streeton’s visit, a conceit that allowed him to combine French with Australian flora (what appear to be Australian blackwoods are clearly visible throughout). The other striking aspect of this painting is the view. Whereas war painting more commonly provided a view to the front or of the battle itself (i.e. the soldiers’ point of view), this particular scene is a view back from German lines to the allied stronghold.

While it is often remarked how Streeton used shadows to symbolise the German advance, what is important here is

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that the viewer has been located within these shadows that extend out into the painting from the foreground. Painted during the bloody climax of the war in France, Streeton’s hybridised transnational landscape, which cannot convey the violence that is its ostensible subject, is nonetheless viewed standing shoulder to shoulder with the enemy. As such, it is a surprisingly cosmopolitan gesture.

The third artist worth mentioning in this context is George Lambert who, due in part to his willingness to attend to historical detail, received the highest profile commissions of the First World War. Lambert’s large-scale works, like ANZAC, the landing 1915 (1920–22) were often fairly traditional history paintings, depicting major events with a combination of mythic emotion, epic scale and historical accuracy. Yet the dozens of small oil studies he completed while in Palestine and the Sinai suggest a more fragmented approach to his self-proclaimed role as ‘artist historian’.

Always small, often unfinished, quiet and largely devoid of fighting, they are in many ways antithetical to his major commissioned works. Yet one possible trajectory between these two aspects of his war art emerges in the 1920 painting The Charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba, 1917.

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George Lambert The Charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba, 1917, oil on canvas. Collection: Australian War Memorial, acquired under the official war art scheme in 1920.

Following his commission to depict the famous Australian Light Horse victory, a turning point in the Palestine campaign, Lambert researched this major work meticulously: he collected first-hand accounts of the battle, re-rode its course, and explored the extant trenches. Yet despite this empirical approach, the painting itself is a compositional oddity in which spatial and psychological relationships remain consistent only within small sections. To the left a group of Turkish soldiers sit casually, seemingly oblivious to the fighting at close quarters, while to the right a horse rears from immediately behind a group of Australian and Turkish troops, but without eliciting a response. In the centre of the composition an Australian soldier with awkward un-foreshortened hands (conspicuous given Lambert’s experience as a portraitist) lurches unconvincingly at nothing in particular with a bayonet. It is as if all of these various groups occupy alien but nonetheless transparent dimensions.

The Battle of Beersheba is not a single coherent image; instead, presented as multiple compositions, it presents a fractured spatial and psychological environment. It is a

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series of small works that don’t quite add up to a history painting; a series of inter-related events that even Lambert, the consummate ‘artist historian’, couldn’t reconcile into anything so coherent as a singular perspective.

Following the First World War, the Australian War Memorial’s art commissioning program was dominated by the construction of the now famously elaborate diorama cycle. But the official war art scheme resumed during the Second World War in significantly expanded form. In retrospect, it is perhaps just as notable for those who did not receive commissions as for those who did; with Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker just two of the most conspicuous to be passed over. Those selected ranged from well-known conservative artists like William Dargie, through to then virtually unknown artists who were already enlisted in the military. Among the latter was Allan Moore, whose images of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are among the most significant to emerge from that conflict by any artist. It was also during the Second World War that women were first admitted to the scheme, with Stella Bowen,

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Nora Heysen and Sybil Craig receiving commissions.2 The scheme was again re-activated, albeit at greatly reduced capacity, during the Korean War, when Frank Norton and Ivor Hele were deployed, with Hele becoming the only artist to receive commissions to two different conflicts. But it was in Vietnam that the scheme faltered outright. Unlike previous or subsequent wars, any official artist deployed to Vietnam was required to undertake full jungle warfare training, and fight if and as required.

This shifting of the war artists’ role from observer to active participant, requiring lengthy periods of training, and experiencing the deep unpopularity of the war more broadly, all combined to stymie the scheme. Of the two artists eventually deployed in this conflict, Bruce Fletcher produced a series of atmospheric if conventional scenes of jungle combat, while the artistic output of Ken McFadyen, who was accidentally shot in the leg shortly after arrival, was largely limited to interior views of the hospital in which he recovered.

The official war art scheme remained dormant throughout the First Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, for reasons that

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remain to be fully understood. The scheme was revised and expanded in 1999 by the AWM’s then Head of Art, Lola Wilkins, and Director, Major General Stephen Gower.

Their changes were significant. The scope of the scheme was broadened to include a range of military operations, not just wars, while the artists were given considerably greater freedom than before. First and Second World War commissions had frequently stipulated subject matter and insisted on various degrees of historical and factual fidelity, even if the artists often didn’t obediently follow directions.

Under the contemporary scheme, the remit became an echo of the mission of the Australian War Memorial itself, with the succinct brief requiring each artist to record and interpret Australian military experience and activity. How they did so was left to their discretion.

At first, the new scheme focused on peacekeeping activities, with both Rick Amor and Wendy Sharpe deployed to East Timor in 1999, Sharpe becoming just the fourth female war artist. In February 2002 Peter Churcher was appointed official artist to the so-called ‘war against terrorism’, an appointment notable for both its remarkable speed (just months after allied troops entered Afghanistan) and nomenclature. Twelve months later, Lewis Miller was also deployed to the Persian Gulf.

If these initial appointments suggested a renewed interest in the documentary potential of war art, this shifted with the appointment of well-known artists and influential art historians Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. Brown and Green’s response to the commission was a series of quiet and oddly still, realist paintings and photographs of war’s infrastructure: vast bases, military technology, armoured vehicles and night patrols. It was, as the artists noted at the time, ‘a portrait of force, of the hard edge of globalisation’.3 While the realism of these works may initially appear consistent with the documentary qualities of previous commissions, this is something of a red herring. As Amelia Douglas has subtly and brilliantly argued, the serial nature of their format and display combines with the still, nonnarrative and vignette-like compositions to arrest and fracture contemporary history as it unfolds, revealing ‘the profound resonance between war, entropy and history’.4 The second point of departure in these works is the selfconscious filtering of their images through art historical tropes: market scenes echo the Orientalist painting of JeanLéon Gérôme, images of sand-covered shipping containers evoke Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woolshed (1970), and a view of Saddam Hussein’s former palace converted into the American military headquarters in Baghdad appears only darkly, as if through a Claude glass. Rather than aestheticise conflict, this insistent, almost pathological shape-shifting through the history of representation immobilises any pretence to an art of witnessing, just as it obliquely entrenches their subject matter in multiple, complex histories.5 Brown and Green’s appointment also marked two further new tendencies within the revived scheme. The first was

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Lyndell Brown and Charles Green American HQ (Presidential Palace), Camp Victory, Baghdad 2007, oil on linen. Collection: Australian War Memorial, acquired under the official war art scheme in 2008

a shift to the consistent engagement of artists with a high profile in the contemporary Australian art world. The second was a shift to a more curatorial model for the scheme, in which a relatively wider diversity of practices and media were consciously sought. Jon Cattapan was thus sent to East Timor the following year, while eX de Medici visited the Solomon Islands in 2009. Shaun Gladwell was deployed to Afghanistan just months after representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2009, while Ben Quilty became the last artist to visit Afghanistan in 2011. Most recently, Tony Albert was the first Indigenous Australian artist to be officially commissioned, and was deployed to the North West Mobile Force in 2012 where he observed the unit’s unique training program combining traditional military skills with Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices.

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Each of these commissions focused on quite different aspects of the operations in question via a range of aesthetic strategies. Cattapan produced a series of painted scenes, extrapolated from digital photographs, almost totally obscured by data layers and the green light of night vision goggles. eX de Medici, on the other hand, painted elaborate, deceptively decorative watercolours and drawings that sought to locate the regional assistance mission she observed within the complex colonial legacies to which it responded.

In the dual-channel digital film POV mirror sequence (Tarin Kowt) (2009–10), Gladwell portrayed the digital mediation of contemporary warfare as a representational mise en abyme, while Quilty’s large, expressionist and near abstract portraits exploring the psychological impact of war harked back to the scheme’s origins with Will Dyson. Albert, on the other

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ex de Medici Vilu Military Museum, watercolour on paper, Collection: Australian War Memorial, acquired under the official war art scheme in 2010

hand, produced (among other work) a series of small and delicate watercolour silhouettes of the young Indigenous recruits he met, their names writ large beneath their image to simultaneously register and correct the absence of Indigenous Australians from Australian military history.

Writing in the context of the centenary of the First World War, at one of those national moments when history is recalled to duty and reshaped as public memory by a variety of actors with a variety of purposes, it strikes me that one of the unique values of the official war art scheme is its status as an archive of contemporary, creative historiography over time. Of course, how the production of these histories may or may not have been mediated by the institutional frameworks from which they emerged is a key question to address, as it is of any artwork analysed historically. But it is precisely this close attention to the institutional framework and details of the official war art scheme that is notably absent in most previous accounts of it.6 Any attempt to properly historicise a scheme of this nature must involve close attention to things like contractual details, institutional aims and processes, the personnel involved, artists’ own accounts, and the reception of the work both by the commissioning body and its stakeholders (including the Australian public). Approached

in this way, the war art archive can provide unique insight into the relationship between historical events, their subsequent historicisation and the conditions under which they later emerge, often contentiously, as public memory.

1 Keynes’ argument was famously presented in his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written following his attendance at the Paris peace conference as a British treasury delegate. 2 For a more detailed account of official (and non-official) Australian art of the Second World War than is possible here see: Warwick Heywood, Reality in Flames: Modern Australian Art and the Second World War, Australian War Memorial/NewSouth Books, Canberra, 2013. 3 See the artists statement by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, published to coincide with the AWM travelling exhibition of their work: <https://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/framing/statement.asp>.

4 Amelia Douglas, ‘The Viewfinder and the View’, Broadsheet, 38.3, 2009.

5 Brown and Green’s interest in the representation of conflict and its aftermath initiated by this commission has been extensively pursued in subsequent work, particularly in their collaboration with another former war artist, Jon Cattapan. On this see: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green and Jon Cattapan, Framing Conflict: Contemporary Art and Aftermath, Melbourne: Macmillan, 2014. 6 See, for example, the critical absence of such attention to detail in Fayen d’Evie’s trenchant and speculative account of the official war art scheme: ‘Let's All Go to Iraq’, un Magazine, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008. Despite this absence, d’Evie does raise important questions in regards which and whose experiences of war are historically privileged.

Ryan Johnston is Head of Art at the Australian War Memorial.

Jon Cattapan Night patrols (Around Maliana), 2009, oil on Belgian linen. Collection: Australian War Memorial, acquired under the official war art scheme in 2009

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Tony Albert Green Skins (Guyula, Manakgu, Flowers, Warrior, Wunungmurra, Cooper, Evans, Langdon, Wilton, Yunupingu, Hodgson, Gunamalmal, Ladd, Satour, James, Kris, Wanambi, McPhee, Manmurulu, Martin), 2012â&#x20AC;&#x201C;13, acrylic wash and pencil on paper. Collection: Australian War Memorial

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TRENCH ART Sappers and shrapnel

Lisa Slade on trench art and material culture in contemporary art

TOP: Sapper Stanley Keith Pearl Trench art map of Tasmania, 1917, wood, aluminium, brass, silver, ceramic.

Collection of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra ABOVE: Unknown WWI soldier Turkish Prisoner of War beadwork snake, 1918, cotton, glass. Collection of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra

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In the vast literature on war art, trench art barely rates a mention. In fact, few people have even heard of the term.

Coined during the First World War, trench art (derived from artisanat-de-tranchées) describes a heterogenous body of objects crafted from war-related material by servicemen and women, prisoners of war and even civilians. According to trench art scholar Nicholas J. Saunders, central to this loose definition is the spatial or temporal connection with armed conflict or its consequences.1 Trench art from the early twentieth century is contemporaneous with the material vanguard of modernism: the readymade, the found object and collage. It, too, espouses a material modernism, grounded in folk and artisanal practices, which in its battlefield origin, is largely at odds with the anti-war messages of the Dadaists. Saunders acknowledges the connection between these material manifestations of modernity, quoting Fernand Léger’s declaration that ‘it was in the trenches that I really seized the reality of objects’.2 The trench art objects made by Australian Sapper, Stanley Keith Pearl, provide some of the most illuminating biographies of the First World War and a window into the industry and ingenuity of these everyday artisans.

Crafted from the detritus of war – from shells, shell cases, shrapnel, badges, buttons and purloined enemy artillery – Pearl’s oeuvre signals a resilience, resourcefulness and an inventiveness that strikes a chord, not only with modernist artists working at the time, but with contemporary art and artists working one hundred years later.

From the Tasmanian town of Ulverstone, Pearl enlisted in November 1915, embarked from Sydney in March 1916 and arrived at Alexandria the following month, before being sent to France where he served as a sapper with the Australian Fifth Field Company Engineers from August 2016 until the end of the war. A sapper’s tasks included general engineering duties aimed at impeding the enemy, along with trench construction and repair (the root of the word sapper is the archaic French word sap meaning spade). In Pearl we find the quintessential trench artist with his cleverly crafted objects frequently made from the enemy’s resources.

During his long service, Pearl made numerous trench art objects that are now held in the collection of the Australian War Memorial, where Pearl subsequently worked as a carpenter. Amongst his panoply of transformed militaria is a wall plaque in the shape of Tasmania. Even more remarkable, perhaps, than the objects themselves are Pearl’s careful and eloquently written notes documenting when, where and how the objects were made, underscoring the

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Sera Waters The beginning, 2014, cotton embroidery, found wooden frame.

Collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia (D.B. Baker Bequest Fund 2014).

Image courtesy of the artist and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Tony Albert Universal Soldier, (detail) 2014, assemblage made up of reworked objects, fabric and twine. Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney

transformation of the enemy’s military resources into a type of personal heraldry, one that also reveals a biography of the enemy: ‘This plaque, in the form of a map of Tasmania, was constructed at Armentières in 1917. The elm was from furniture taken from a German dugout at Vaulx-Vraucourt; the facings from the equipment of a German officer, captain of the 152nd Regiment, shot while on patrol near Houplines, and shows the hole in the belt buckle made by the bullet that killed him. The signal wire insulator and button are from the Butte de Warlencourt.’ 3 What, then, is the contemporary relevance of these objects, crafted one hundred years ago from the detritus of war?

And what does trench art have in common with art made today? Trench art is an expression of an intrinsic human need to make art for survival, rejecting its status as a luxury commodity. Whether intended as trophies of war, souvenirs for those at home, or talismans for the battle ahead, trench art reminds us of art’s inalienable power and necessity. Such a reminder is useful right now.

A century on from Sapper Pearl’s arrival in Europe, he has a ‘brother’ in artist Tony Albert. Albert’s perspective on war is also a personal one: his grandfather and seven of his grandfather’s eight children served in the Australian armed forces. Albert’s figures are larger than life – imitating the monumentalising role of memorials the world over – in a physical aggrandisement that amounts to hagiography in the status we accord to all soldiers. That is, until recently, with the notable exception of Aboriginal soldiers, whose war efforts have been largely ignored. By carrying the title Universal Soldier, the figures become representative of every soldier and every war, every win and every loss. The title also references Buffy Sainte-Marie’s 1964 song by the same name. But in Albert’s version of the story, Aboriginal soldiers gave their bodies as ‘weapons of the war’ without due acknowledgement.

Cast in silhouette, the face of the wounded soldier is made from a spoon rack in the shape of Australia. This familiar contour that recurs in trench art is a popular motif, also found in sweetheart jewellery, identity bracelets, picture frames and other souvenirs of war. The map of Australia recurs throughout Albert’s oeuvre, positioned always as a question rather than a statement of fact. Albert’s maps remind us that it is Aboriginal people, the first Australians, who have been the last to be considered Australian, despite fighting for the nation. The two figures are comprised of kitsch Australiana, some of which can be classified in Albert’s nomenclature as Aboriginalia – souvenirs depicting Aboriginal people that were produced in abundance mid-last century. These souvenirs found their way into homes the world over at a time when Aboriginal people became homeless, carried off country into assimilation and incarceration. Such romanticised and ultimately elegiac depictions of Aboriginal people, applied using repoussé on copper panel, oil paint on black velvet or pokerwork onto timber, recall the craft and folk art processes at work in the trenches where spent brass artillery shells frequently became embossed vases. By choosing to use camouflage (another word that gained currency during the First World War) to unify the found objects, Albert signals the colonisation of the natural world that also occurs during times of war.

Albert’s Universal Soldier (2014) recalls and responds to the type of trench art objects made one hundred years ago. Like Albert, artist Sera Waters has long harboured a fascination for the handmade and the relic. In The beginning (2014) a found timber frame in the shape of Australia carries a proclamation in needlework: YOU ARE HERE. We are reminded through the coloured petit-point evocation of David Horton’s map of Aboriginal languages that, in this Australia, we are on Aboriginal land. As an unsettled settler, Waters troubles nationalism, using the found and the forged-

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Tony Albert Universal Soldier, 2014, assemblage made up of reworked objects, fabric and twine. Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney

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by-hand as a mnemonic and a tool of resistance: ‘I live here, in South Australia, as have some of my ancestors for nearly 180 years. Like them, I am not a homemaker but a settler. I build and stitch makeshift ‘homes’ atop this ancient land, whose inner workings remain mystifying and to which I have no historical ties (bar the humble lineage of settlers who have similarly sought resting places). I associate ‘home’ here, particularly in my darker moments, with uneasy foundations and an enduring obliviousness to what lies beneath and before.’ 4 Waters’ practice and its expression of alienation and dis-ease resonates with the dislocation experienced by servicemen and women and the role of the handmade in providing solace and amelioration.

In the Australian War Memorial’s collection of trench art there are also beaded objects made by anonymous Turkish prisoners of war, many of whom (due to the breadth of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century) would have included Greek, Arab or Eastern European prisoners. Woven on small looms or made using crochet, the beaded artefacts are most commonly in the form of snakes. As symbols of good luck, these snakes perform an apotropaic function by protecting their wearers from further misfortune. These anonymously created objects collected by Australian soldiers offer cultural rather than specifically personal connections to provide a window onto a world where craft processes were not only a labour of love, a way of killing time, but also imbued with talismanic associations.

Arguably, the contemporary Australian artist best known for beaded work is Fiona Hall; for decades, she has used glass beads as the currency of trade and colonisation to remind us of our history and mortality. Comparisons with trench art can be readily drawn in Hall’s work created in collaboration with the Tjanpi Desert Weavers for exhibition in Whisper in My Mask, the 2014 TarraWarra Biennial curated by Natalie King and Djon Mundine. Substituting the glass beads for camouflage sourced from authentic military garments, found objects and desert grasses (used for millennia to sustain Aboriginal people), Hall and her Anangu collaborators from way out bush near Wingellina (Irrunytju) have created Kuka Irititja (translated from Pitjantjatjara as animals from other times) in reference to the native animals that have been endangered and displaced by introduced species in an ongoing war of environmental attrition. The direct reference to militaria through the deployment of camouflage and the appearance of war craft including helicopters is particularly redolent for those Anangu artists displaced by testing at Woomera and Maralinga last century. One hundred years on, this new work revives the proclamation of Dadaist Hugo Ball that ‘art is not an end in itself … but it is an opportunity for true perception and criticism of the times we live in’.5 In his extensive research, Nicholas J. Saunders has described the classificatory limbo wherein trench art resides.

As awkward museum objects – as curios and souvenirs – trench art bedevils traditional categories, resonating with meanings that are personal, patriotic, political and often apotropaic. Contemporary art relishes the awkward, the

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curious and the liminal, with the best of it springing from the fissures of life where artists as modern-day sappers transform the shrapnel of the everyday.

1 Nicholas J. Saunders, ‘Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory: “Trench Art”, and the Great War Re-cycled’, Journal of Material Culture 5:43, 2000. Saunders points out that while the term had its origin in the First World War, the phenomenon of trench art has accompanied conflict since at least the fifth century. 2 Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War, Oxford: Berg, 2003. 3 From the online catalogue at, <http://www.awm. gov.au/collection/RELAWM14152/> 4 From <http://serawaters.com.au/e/ ghostscapes>. 5 Hugo Ball, A Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (edited with an introduction by John Elderfield), University of California Press, 1996, p. 58.

Lisa Slade is Project Curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She is currently working on a trench art project drawing on the collection of the Australian War Memorial and featuring the art of contemporary artists Tony Albert, Olga Cironis, Nicholas Folland, Brett Graham, Richard Lewer, Alasdair McLuckie, Ben Quilty and Sera Waters. The Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund have funded the first stage of this project.

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Roma Butler, Yangi Yangi Fox, Rene Kulitja, Niningka Lewis, Stacia Lewis, Molly Miller, Angkaliya Nelson, Rene Nelson, Mary Pan, Sandra Peterman, Tjawina Roberts, Nyanu Watson and Fiona Hall. Tjukurrpa Kumpilitja (Hidden Stories) - Kuka Irititja (Animals from other times), 2014, minarri grass, acrylic wool, raffia, found wire netting, wire, camouflage military garments, linen thread, buttons, ininti seed, emu feathers, turkey feathers, aluminium, glass, metal, found tins and cooking pots. Commissioned by TarraWarra Museum of Art for the TarraWarra Biennial 2014. Courtesy the artists, Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Council, NPY Lands, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Š Roma Butler and Niningka Lewis/Licensed by Viscopy 2015. Fiona Hall is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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Ramingining artists The Aboriginal Memorial, 1987â&#x20AC;&#x201C;88, natural earth pigments on wood. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, purchased with the assistance of funds from the National Gallery of Australia admission charges in 1987

There are places around Australia where the evil of murder, massacre, rape and other brutalities seem to have leached into the very soil.

John Huxley, reviewing Ross Gibsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Seven Versions of An Australian Badland for the Sydney Morning Herald, 26 November 2002

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THE ABORIGINAL MEMORIAL to Australia’s forgotten war Djon Mundine on memory, mnemonics and the genesis of one of Australia’s most important works of art Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

In Ross Gibson’s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002), an exploration of serial murders along the ‘Horror Stretch’ between Rockhampton and Mackay, he bumped into the bigger question of large-scale massacres and the attempted annihilation of the Aboriginal race that occurred in this part of the Central Queensland hinterland, as elsewhere across Australia. Gibson’s account doesn’t shy away from the spectre exposed, acknowledging that there are indeed places in Australia that breathe evil, as historic sites of violence. From my viewpoint, as an Aboriginal person, it is intriguing to watch regular reprisals of a more general ‘National Performance’ that would seek to overturn such a valid comprehension of place through the persistent denial that many still hold regarding the colonial massacres of Aboriginal people, and the pretence that Australia is a ‘white’ nation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, conservatives of all shades in politics turned against what they perceived to be immoral and untrue academic and artistic texts pursuing themes of ‘revisionism’ in our national history – a legacy of the 1960s generation of the left. Chief among these issues for debate was the role and place of Australia’s Aboriginal population. Although conflict between Aboriginal and European colonists occurred right from the beginning of the colony, it was not recognised at the time and in subsequent official histories as a ‘war’ in the legal sense: that is, a war was never officially declared at any time over the last 200 years. Through this and other semantic tropes, some would press that the nation was not tainted by illegalities or major crimes in an historical or international sense. The left view of Australian history, implicating present-day Australians for the near annihilation of the Aboriginal people, as the ‘black armband’ version, was severely criticised for the diminution of respect shown towards European settlers in the ‘great’ colonial era of exploration: a period of survival and expansion, discovering and taming the land and environment, during which the settlers fought and acquitted themselves in other people’s colonial wars. These were the things to be proud of!

In the mid 1980s, within this environment of denial, the idea for an Aboriginal Memorial was conceived. At this time, I was working as the coordinator of the arts and crafts co-operative in the community of Ramingining in Central Arnhem Land. What follows is my personal account of the development of the memorial from a series of projects, which would involve all sections of the local art community, to the genesis of an idea for a memorial, and the process of its realisation in the form it takes today.

In the early 1980s fellow arts adviser Peter Cooke, who was based at the neighbouring Maningrida community, had a system of setting up research projects to develop audiences for Aboriginal art and to create a local museum collection, following a successful model set up as a resource for social, scientific and historical instruction at Milingimbi Methodist mission in the 1960s and 70s. The aim was to constitute a permanent physical art history within the

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Fiona Foley Dispersed, 2008, charred laminated wood, polished aluminium, blank bullets. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2008. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane, and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne. © Fiona Foley

community, supplementing strong oral traditions, so that future generations needn’t travel to Washington, Amsterdam or London to see the artwork of their forebears. These enterprises were in addition to the daily grind of selling ‘bread and butter’ items to keep the cooperative afloat. At Ramingining, during the same period, I proposed a number of art collections and projects which involved diverse groups within the community to record a broad history of styles and forms, spreading the benefits across the population.

Around the end of 1985 to early 1986 I was contacted by the planning committee engaged in the construction of ‘new Parliament House’ scheduled for completion in Canberra in 1988. They were looking for inspirational, nationally significant artwork to fit out the building, including Aboriginal art. For this I proposed eight ‘concept’ projects, among which was a forest of dupun (hollow log/ bone coffins) and, specifically for ‘new’ Parliament House, an Aboriginal visual arts cultural landscape referencing the Australian bi-cameral parliamentary system. Unfortunately, they were looking for larger permanent public art pieces, almost architectural elements for the building, such as the Michael Nelson Tjakamarra Possum and Wallaby Dreaming mosaic now in place in the forecourt, and declined all of the projects I presented.

In the course of setting up the art centre’s exhibition program we came in contact with Fran Considine who had just started working at the new Centre Gallery of the Gold Coast City Council at Surfers Paradise. A survey show, The Art of Ramingining, in 1987 was accompanied by a mural project led by Ramingining artist David Malangi,

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Queensland artists Arone Raymond Meeks and Avril Quail, and Kombumirri woman Ysola Best. The mural, a representation of the Yathalamarra waterhole on Malangi’s mother’s land, had to be painted indoors due to seasonal rain. On a number of fibro panels, Meeks and Malangi laid down the central large reed-fringed black circle and composite sections outlining the various spirit and natural species creatures associated with the site. While we were there, we met members of the Kombumirri community who explained how they were waiting for the return of the human remains of about two hundred people from the Anthropology Museum of the University of Queensland where they had been cared for since being accidentally dug up in a Gold Coast property development project. A block of land had been granted to the community as a burial site.

Malangi discussed the possibility of performing a type of Hollow Log Bone Coffin ceremony at the reburial. Upon our return to Ramingining we continued our conversations about how to complete the two hundred poles, one for each person represented in the collection of Kombumirri remains.

Since 1788 (at least) hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people have died at the hands of white invaders. In 1987, a sensational ‘discovery’ was made by a University of Sydney team, led by Australia’s most celebrated pre-historian, Professor D. J. Mulvaney. They reported that the Australian population in 1788 was 750,000 (three times the previous estimate), concluding that more than 600,000 people had died as result of white settlement. Murdered in many incidents over these years, unsung and without any other ritual, their bodies were frequently burnt to hide the evidence or

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simply cast into dry creek beds or unmarked graves. It is for these unnamed, unrecognised, peaceful, normal, average Aboriginal victims – men women and children – and not just warriors, that this memorial was created. Whatever it has meant to ‘white Australians’ my inspiration was for the lost souls of Aboriginal people and the benefit of their present-day descendants.

A hollow tree lying on the beach More recent research by Dhuwa Djambarrpuyngu Robert Orsted-Jensen has Land-ways Song Cycle reinforced the fact that the deaths from colonial An initiated man can read these murder were more [poles] like a book . . . This river, on likely around 80,000 in the bank you see different dupun Queensland alone. [hollow log coffins]; Dhuwa and Some time ago, an elder Yirritja … an initiated man can read, artist in Ramingining just like a book. Our ancestors gave us (now deceased) brought this law, and today it’s still living; like me several videotapes this river – strong. belonging to his dead son.

David Gulpilil, in Here Is My Hand The son and the artist were very close to me. The tapes were battered and dust-ridden. I hesitated to run them through my machine but our relationship and my curiosity made me play them. His son was a very sophisticated person.

He had been a member of the Northern Land Council Executive, and, in the course of his work contacts had been given some more ‘political’ videotapes as background briefing for himself and the community. One of these was The Secret Country (1985) by award-winning journalist John Pilger. In the opening précis of the program he talked of the decimation of a tribal group who owned land on the Hawkesbury River, near Sydney in New South Wales, and who died ‘to the last man, woman, and child defending their country’. He continued that, throughout the land in every country town, there was an obelisk to those who had fallen in this war or that, but nowhere was there a memorial to those first Australians, the Aboriginal people, who died defending their country. ... although they have no monuments, Other historians, such as they have occasionally religious or Henry Reynolds a decade commemorating corroberries [sic], later, have made similar when are introduced devices, painted statements. Do we make on large sheets of bark, representing room for the Aboriginal dead what has occasioned the corroberry, or on our memorials, cenotaphs, commemorating some tradition. boards of honour and even William Thomas, Guardian of the in the pantheon of national Aborigines, Victoria, 1858– 59 heroes? If they did not die for Australia, they fell defending their homelands, their sacred sites, their way of life.

In the course of my work as art adviser, the major role was to make the ‘outside‘ world more aware and appreciative of Aboriginal art and culture. Some works of art are visually accessible to ‘white-eyes’, but others are more difficult to place. The Hollow Log Bone Coffin was one of these. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Aboriginal art was really ‘discovered’, installations of so-called ‘totem poles’ were

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popular if controversial. The gradual growth in Aboriginal art appreciation from the 1970s was led by the Western Desert ‘dot and circle’ paintings. Sculpture, generally referring to bird and animal life pieces, was also sought after.

But works as uncompromising as the Bone Coffins were still hard to place. The problem was to change people’s perception of Aboriginal sculpture and art in general.

During the day-to-day business of the art and crafts centres in Aboriginal communities, regular exhibitions are staged. Art is a communication medium that often transcends language barriers. The aim is that themes, concepts and ideas of Aboriginal culture are carried within each exhibition. During the Bicentennial year, Aboriginal organisations (and many white ones) were boycotting the celebrations. Many white Australian artists had withdrawn their works from Bicentennial shows. As a commercial enterprise set up to ensure returns to artists, any boycott decisions have strong economic consequences. The problem was to present Aboriginal culture without celebrating the Bicentennial. Historically, all Aboriginal art expression is personal and political in nature, as well as event oriented.

The white Australian 1988 Bicentenary celebrations presented just such an opportunity.

Before European settlement the forested area of the Australian continent was about 700 million hectares (around 10% of the total land) but forests are now less than 5%.

Between 320 to 400 million hectares have been lost in just over 200 years of colonisation. The greatest loss in terms of area has occurred in Queensland, where practically half of the Australia-wide loss occurred. In northeastern Arnhem Land present-day Aboriginal people carry on many ageold ceremonies and rituals. One of these is the Hollow Log or Bone Coffin ceremony. When a person dies, the body is washed, painted with relevant totemic designs, sung over and mourned. Some time later the bones of the deceased are recovered and distributed to relatives in a special ceremony.

After a period, which may be years, the relatives hand over the bones to ceremonial leaders for them to hold a Hollow Log ceremony. A log hollowed out naturally by termites is found, cleaned and painted with relevant clan designs (like a body) amidst singing and dancing in a special camp for those completing the ritual. The bones are cleaned, painted with red ochre, and placed in the log with special dances. When a set series of songs and dances has been completed, the log is carried and danced into the main public camp and stood upright. It is then left.

Full-size versions without the bones are made and sold today as sculptures. These are art objects in their own right.

Originally living trees, the installation is like a forest – an Aboriginal artistic vision of the forest and landscape. In the original ceremony each pole would contain the bones of deceased people, embodying the soul. Each tree in this new forest would (symbolically) contain the spirit of a deceased person. The forest as the environment is us, we are the environment. Each Hollow Log is ceremonially a Bone Coffin so the forest represents a large cemetery of dead Aboriginal

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people – a war cemetery and a war memorial to all those Aboriginals who died defending their country. Two hundred poles were commissioned to represent the two hundred years of white contact and black agony.

Within a year of the arrival of the first convict fleet, Aboriginal deaths from smallpox in great numbers occurred around the harbour. Death came so swiftly that there was no one to bury the dead. In fact, it has recently been speculated, that the plague may have been deliberately created by the British colonial authorities. It has now been proved that the colonists had brought with them bottled pus and scabs of smallpox and that members of the military guard for the convicts had previously served in America against the revolutionary war of 1776. During these campaigns the British had in several places used bacteriological warfare against Native Americans and others by distributing infected blankets as a tactical weapon to exterminate their opposition.

In southeast Australia there were many well-documented massacres of Aboriginal people that have occurred since 1788. Many of these were covered up and forgotten. These incidents are of course the subject of the David Irving-style, white cult of denial still raging today. In northern Australia, a present-day distortion of history continues. It is widely touted that Aboriginals there are treated differently and did

not suffer as other Aboriginals did from white contact: that these ‘real’, ‘more authentic’ Aboriginals have no reason to feel betrayed, deprived and angry as those southern blacks and Queensland Aboriginals are perceived to be. Although many benevolent acts were carried out by missionaries, massacres were occurring, as ethnic cleansing, in Arnhem Land at least from around the end of the 1800s, the time of similar incidents in other parts of Australia. This is still ‘secret history’ for most of Australia.

Passing through Sydney in the middle of 1987, it was suggested to me by the curator Bernice Murphy that I contact Nick Waterlow who, I was told, had just been appointed as the Director of the Bicentenary Biennale of Sydney. We met for lunch. As I explained the form of the project as an installation and the philosophy of the memorial as a forest, Waterlow gazed into the middle distance and in a very poignant moment asked if I had ever been to the First World War battlefields in Flanders? He went onto to explain his remembrance of endless rows of crosses, covering rolling hills of the landscape as far as you could see. A landscape covered by the dead. The memorial was accepted into the Biennale.

At this time, Aboriginal political activist Gary Foley and Charles ‘Chicka’ Dixon, who had recently been appointed as Director and Chair respectively of the Aboriginal Arts Board

Robert Campbell Jnr Map of the massacres of blacks on the Macleay Valley, 1991, synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased 1994 . Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. © Estate of Robert Campbell

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E. Cotton Aborigines attacking Milton Farm, drawn at Swansea Town, 1828, to record the events as dictated by John Allen, 1828, pencil on paper.

Collection: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart

of the Australia Council, arranged for me to address the board. There was unqualified support for the project and I had little trouble convincing them to contribute monies towards the transportation from the remote tropical north to the southern metropolis of Sydney.

At the beginning of 1988 there were plenty of poles but little financial investment when printmaker Chips Mackinolty, then working as a journalist with the Northern Land Council, proposed that I should approach the Director of the National Gallery of Australia, James Mollison, to support the project. Mollison was extremely excited by the proposed art installation. The NGA was looking for inspirational Australian art to match in iconic status works like Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock and Brancusi’s Bird in Space. He agreed to fund the project by in effect commissioning the artwork.

When the time came in the middle of April 1988 to wrap and ship the poles, the floors of our small tin shed serving as an art centre threatened to collapse under the weight. NGA

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Oscar of Cooktown Drawing no. 26, ‘Dispersing usual way, some good shooting’ from Oscar’s Sketchbook c. 1899. Collection: National Museum of Australia, Canberra 31

curators Wally Caruana and Gary Lee came north to check our progress and assist with the packing. After a mammoth effort over several days, with the help of local artists Roy Burrnyila, Charlie Djota, Lawrence Leslie and Barry Djarryang, the bulk were wrapped. Later they were loaded onto the town tip truck to be driven to the coast where a barge took them to Darwin. From there, the Biennale had arranged that they be back-loaded in the luggage compartments and trailers of tourist buses to get them to Sydney.

After installing the work at the Bond Stores venue of the Biennale of Sydney, with the assistance of young artists including Fiona Foley and Gavin Duncan, artists David Malangi, his son Johnny Dhurrikayu, Paddy Lilipiyana and Paddy Waynbarrnga sang to consecrate the space on the opening night. Director Nick Waterlow described the work in his catalogue essay as ‘The single most important piece in the exhibition’.

The work was seen as important to Aboriginal people too. The National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) named the contributing Ramingining artists as Aboriginal Artists of the Year. After the Biennale, the memorial was erected for permanent display at the National Gallery of Australia. David Malangi traveled again to receive the Award in Brisbane with fellow contributors Ganalbingu artists George Milpurrurru and Roy Burrnyila.

They then went on to Canberra where he sang a second time for the public opening. National Gallery Director, James Mollison said in his opening speech that it was ‘Probably one of the greatest works of art ever to have been made in this country.’

Since its first appearance in the 1988 Biennale of Sydney a debate has taken place about the final resting place of The Aboriginal Memorial. Some argued that the poles should be placed outdoors in a relevant public place and allowed to decompose from natural weathering as happens in the actual ritual. I argued against this as it would be too convenient for ‘white Australia’ to forget its existence (and the crimes it refers to). It was also argued that because of its message, the correct place for such a work of art was the Australian War Memorial, not the National Gallery of Australia. I discounted this argument because of the lack of vision and knowledge of the real history of Australia, including at that time any mention of Aboriginal people, in the AWM. The governing board did move post 1988 to having a small wall exhibition of images of Aboriginal servicemen and women. This was a result of the debate about The Aboriginal Memorial and from the action by a private non-Aboriginal ex-serviceman citizen. In a city of mountains of ‘red tape’, without waiting for permission or for bureaucratic permission, he unofficially mounted a small metal plaque to a rock on the slopes of Mount Majura behind the AWM. The plaque reads: ‘Remembering the Aboriginal People Who Served in the Australian Services’. The site remains (to me) as a muchvisited, simple moving shrine and a strong statement by a private citizen of good conscience. Both moves seriously fall short in that they fail to make the conceptual leap beyond the idea of ‘terra nullius’ and recognition of the thousands killed

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in the ‘black wars’ of Australia’s colonisation.

A speech given by the then Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, at Redfern Park in Sydney on 10 December 1992 for the Australian Launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, did much to acknowledge this need for recognition: ‘It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol.

We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.’

During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s various Australian historians had heeded the words of Australian anthropologist Bill Stanner about ‘the Great Australian Silence’ concerning the exclusion of an Aboriginal presence that prevailed in the telling of official Australian history. The most publicly prominent of these, Henry Reynolds, presented his research on Aboriginal massacres through a series of books. Reynold’s publications have probably had the biggest impact on public opinion and raised the ire of conservative racists within Australia.

A campaign, largely led by amateur historian Keith Windshuttle and funded by various right wing ‘think tanks’, used the schoolboy debating tactic of focusing on the minor details and then working these up to question the complete argument. The ‘history’ or ‘culture’ wars continue unabated for those who insist, like former Prime Minister Howard, on holding on to this ‘positive view of the past’ in relations between Aboriginal and other Australians.

In 2000, to mark the end of the official Reconciliation process, the Howard Government initiated a competition to create a public artwork for what was called Reconciliation Place. The Howard Government’s record in Aboriginal Affairs included sabotaging the Native Title process, refusing to apologise for the ‘stolen generation’, encouraging an atmosphere of racism within the electorate, and generally dismantling the mandate for Reconciliation. The art project was tragically symptomatic of this racist attitude. Here, the only images of Aboriginal people are those in Australian Army uniform (and children playing cricket) on one of the shards with the very un-Aboriginal neo-fascist slogans: Strength, Service, Sacrifice.

In 2001 an official government television campaign for the Celebration of the Centenary of Federation made the claim that the formation of the nation of Australia had been peaceful ‘without war or revolution’, completely ignoring the black wars against the original inhabitants throughout the colonisation process since 1788. The new Australian constitution of 1901 did not give Aboriginal people the special status they deserved and in fact only mentioned them

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FAR LEFT: Michael Aird Vincent Brady leads a protest march, Brisbane, 9 December 1987. Photograph courtesy the artist LEFT: Mervyn Bishop Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into hand of traditional landowner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory, 1975, direct positive colour photograph.

Collection: National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1994

twice, clearly stating that they were not to be included in the nation’s population figures, that they would be denied the right to vote in federal elections or claim the same right to ownership of land and property as other citizens.

Jimmy Governor who went on a rampage against his racist treatment at the hands of white people in eastern New South Wales was caught by authorities at the end of 1900 and hung in January 1901, the month of the national proclamation of independence. Later that year, the two elder ‘squattocracy’ patriarchs of the Durack family were both shot in the head as they slept by Aboriginal people with whom they had argued earlier in the day. In fact, the ‘black war’ is the longest continuous running war in Australia’s history and many Aboriginal people believe it continues in various forms today.

In 2005 Aboriginal filmmaker and artist Richard Franklin wrote to Prime Minister Howard urging him to move the council of the Australian War Memorial to include reference to those Aboriginal victims and heroes of the ‘black wars’ in its structure and programs as an important step towards real reconciliation between ‘black’ and ‘white’ Australia.

‘The conflict between the British and Aborigines must be recognised and given the same attention that other wars involving Australian soldiers were given’, Franklin wrote.

This was positively supported by an editorial in The Age newspaper on Monday 21 June. On 24 June, The Age reported the Australian War Memorial response. Acknowledging that the issue had been brought up intermittently by the public, AWM Director Steve Gower said that successive war memorial councils had decided the memorial should honour ‘men and women who died defending Australia’s national interest in external conflicts’. Further, ‘this closely reflected the concepts of the memorial’s founder, Dr. C. E. W. Bean,

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Australia’s official historian in WWI. The National Museum would be a more appropriate place for recognition of those killed in the “first wars”’.

I conceived and assembled The Aboriginal Memorial in 1988, the bicentenary of the setting up of a penal colony by the British Crown that became Australia the nation. In 2015, Australia marks the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign that is so revered as defining the nation we are told. Unspoken is the memory of the centenary of the Armenian Holocaust that began almost to the day of 25 April 1915, where around one to two million Armenians were robbed, raped and murdered on the Turkish side. The Australian side of course already had its untold holocaust story – the near extermination of the Aboriginal race.

Throughout my own life as an Aboriginal person, it appears to me that around every generation Australians approach a ‘real’, ‘adult’ confession and absolution in regard to the nation’s crimes against Aboriginal people. Yet, on each occasion, as they approach the historic and moral moment, inexplicably, they fall back and recoil almost in terror at the implication that they could be held responsible.

An Australian term is the ‘never never’. And so the denial continues and Australians wonder why, in many parts of the world, they are considered racist, unintelligent, uncaring and inhuman brutes. A simple but powerful step is to make the conceptual leap, so clearly outlined in the speech of Paul Keating in 1992, to be honest about the past.

Djon Mundine OAM is an independent Bandjalung curator, writer, and Phd candidate at UNSW Art & Design. He is co-editor with Daniel Browning of Artlink INDIGENOUS Global to be published in June 2015.

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TRAUMASCAPES REVISITED

Maria Tumarkin on impossible-to-forget encounters with physical sites of trauma in recent Australian film and art There is a haunting moment in Sophia Turkiewicz’s film Once My Mother, when her mother says ‘I’d like to know how my mother was looked. I didn’t have photo. No pictures. I’d be giving anything when I see my mother. When I just see her face.’ There is something almost unbearable in her face, and the way that she says it – with such longing. This old woman, born in Poland, who on most days does not recognise her own daughter, is bleeding from the wound she’s had since she was a baby and her mother died, leaving her with no memories of ever being safe or loved.

We hear Helen’s voice and we see her daughter, Sophia, in the rural part of western Ukraine that once belonged to Poland, in a one-room house that once belonged to their family. Inside it is dark, desolate, stained by undisguisable poverty; the daughter is looking around, hard and slow, waiting for something. An epiphany, a sign of her mother’s belongingness – here?

Turkiewicz addresses her mother directly this way – as ‘you’ – all through the documentary. It does not feel false or forced. It is a voice of a daughter still trying to reach her mother. She is in a hurry: Turkiewicz began making the film without funding, backing or professional equipment in

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Scenes from (Dir. Sophia Turkiewicz) Once My Mother, 2014. OPPOSITE: Helen Turkiewicz. TOP LEFT: Refugee camp, Northern Rhodesia. BELOW: Sophia, Goodwood Orphanage. TOP RIGHT: Screen shot, Once My Mother RIGHT: Helen and Sophia, Adelaide. Courtesy Sophia Turkiewicz. © Change Focus Media 2014

response to her mother’s descent into dementia. She’d tried, and dumped, the idea once before, 35 years ago.

The chasm between Sophia and Helen has not shrunk in the years since. If there is time to do something about it, that time, the daughter knows, is now.

That the mother doesn’t remember her own mother and does not remember – or has ever known – herself as her mother’s daughter is central to the story Turkiewicz tells, even though she makes little of it explicitly. The breakdown of memory, just like the breakdown of familial love, and the disfiguring effects of these two kinds of breakdown across generations as well as the shock of their deep interconnectedness – what else is this film about if not about that?

Oh, yes, it is also about places all across the world we turn and re-turn to in search of a way back into our history, back into our family. Turkiewicz says of her first trip to her mother’s village in Ukraine in 2007: ‘Before then, my sense of who I was occurred somehow in a vacuum. … Now here I was in the village, tramping through the fields and along dirt tracks that my relations had also walked along. They suddenly became real. I could imagine them … For the first time I understood what it feels like to have a generational past.’

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In place of surviving relatives, documents, photographs and letters are places as sites of Helen’s pre-Australia life.

The house where we see Sophia trying to imagine the motherlessness of her own mother. The village where she walks around beside strays dogs, wild turkeys, chickens (chickens always look the happiest) and old toothless women bent evenly in half. That whole hard, torn part of the world.

Turkiewicz’s quest to anchor her mother’s story in time and place is the quest to understand her mother in a way she could not be understood from Australia. Except, the places in Helen’s life have been radically transformed by history. The Polish village of Oleszow is now the Ukrainian village of Oleshiv. Everything is not how it once was. ‘If you came back now’, the narrator tells her mother, ‘you’d be a stranger like me.’ We can argue that all places are essentially unrecognisable over time, that they only seem unchanged to those who choose not to look hard enough, except – one more ‘except’! – in the first few decades of her life, Helen was uprooted against her will again and again, thrown out of cities and countries, made to walk thousands of kilometres from one godforsaken location to another.

Turkiewicz travels from place to place looking for traces

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of her mother’s life. She cannot find any. Not in Oleshiv, where Helen lived with her uncle after her father died; not in Stanislawów (Ivano-Frankivsk now) where, aged nine or ten, she went searching for food and shelter after her uncle threw her out on the streets; not in Lwow (the Ukrainian Lviv) where she wound up alone when the war started and this part of Poland was given to Stalin. Yes, what a life. And she is not yet sixteen. By sixteen she is in a Siberian gulag, like nearly two million of her compatriots, cutting down trees and building roads in arctic winter temperatures while her hands turn into ‘raw meat’. And then she is in Persia. And then, finally – how is it she is still alive? – in a Polish refugee camp in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia. The first place that feels like home. The place where Sophia is born.

Turkiewicz maps the trails of her mother’s forced dislocations. These places across Europe, Middle East, Africa – both brutalising and brutalised – may not yield visible traces of Helen’s past, but they hold knowledge, not accessible elsewhere, about her life.

Physical sites of trauma (I have been calling them ‘traumascapes’ in my work) matter deeply and singularly because trauma is contained not in an event as such, but in the way this event is experienced and re-experienced over time, frequently across generations. Cathy Caruth has famously taken this idea further, arguing that the ‘historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all’. Traumascapes can both trigger and anchor the re-experiencing and re-remembering of traumatic pasts.

Through these places, the parts of our pasts that memory cannot fully absorb, and language cannot fully contain, continue to inhabit and refashion the present.

Portals of a sort? Yes, they are.

This is what Turkiewicz is looking for – for the pasts alive at these sites of her mother’s early life to tear through the present, to come looking for her. Yet the two places that frame Once My Mother are Australian locations: Adelaide’s Goodwood Orphanage, where Helen left young Sophia for two years (with weekly visits on Sundays) while she looked for some way to make a life and home in Australia; and the John Paul II Aged Care Village, also in Adelaide, where Sophia put elderly Helen when it became unsafe for her to live on her own. Two places of abandonment. Two homes that are the opposite of home.

Another haunting moment – conversation between Helen and Sophia, – as the camera rolls.

Sophia: You put me in the orphanage. Then when I …

Helen (finishing Sophia’s sentence): Then … when you grew up, you put me in an orphanage.

The invisible made visible, the yet-to-be-manifest made palpable, the ghostly made visceral, human body revealed to be both an archive of feelings and a tuning fork – we could hardly be surprised that documentary and feature films have proved particularly adept at capturing the affective power of traumascapes as we encounter them first-hand or through

acts of secondary witnessing, as inheritors of traumatic histories inscribed in them or as strangers passing through on our way somewhere else. Historian Esther Faye writes that what got to her most about Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), the nine-hour-plus Holocaust documentary, ‘was the sight of “his” camera restlessly scanning an unbelievably tranquil Polish countryside, quite obviously in search of something. What, I wondered, was missing for his camera?

What was it in search of?’ Perhaps, Faye mused, it was some memory not yet made flesh, not yet articulated or articulable, its emerging forms to be gleaned only ‘in the very landscape itself’?

For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, another recent Australian feature film, takes us deep inside an encounter with a traumascape; only this time there are no daughters looking for their mothers’ ghosts, just the raw forcefield of a place marked, and transformed, by human suffering. Co-written

by Australian performer and playwright Kym Vercoe and directed by Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanic, For Those Who Can Tell No Tales is based on Vercoe’s real-life experiences, which she first turned into a play.

In 2008, Kym Vercoe travelled to Bosnia for a holiday. She went to Sarajevo first, loved it, and then decided to visit the famous bridge in eastern Bosnia immortalised in Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge over Drina (Andrić, the only Nobel prize winner from the region, is well-known and read in the West) ending up in a town called Višegrad on the BosnianSerbian border. An arts festival was on and hotels in town were full, so Vercoe booked a room in a spa hotel on the town’s outskirts. The hotel called Vilina Vlas was warmly recommended in Tim Clancy’s travel guide for its ‘pleasant natural surroundings’ and romantic possibilities, if you were after that kind of thing. Vercoe was not, she was traveling alone, but the place sounded just fine.

European summer. Višegrad is all charm and history. The Ottoman-period bridge, an UNESCO world heritage site, is, as you’d expect, pretty spectacular. There is more-thanpassable live music, courtesy of the arts festival. What’s not to like? But then it’s time to go back to the Vilina Vlas hotel.

In the movie we see Vercoe in her room, unable to sleep, tossing and turning. Now she is sitting on the toilet, naked, head between her legs. The place, it’s clear, is getting to her.

She doesn’t know why. Something is pushing down on her body. The air seems unfit for breathing. The silence feels dirty.

Vercoe doesn’t know that she is in a place of immense, unhealable, unacknowledged trauma – there are no plaques anywhere, no memorials, no mentions of anything in her trusty tourist guide – but her body does. Her body is refusing to rest, to be appeased. It’s lashing out. Wriggling out of the tourist banality of her visit. Demanding something, some kind of reckoning. Making Vercoe get behind her computer on her return to Australia and start googling.

Višegrad, Vercoe discovers, was a site of wholesale ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s. Here is what happened there: children, women and the elderly were locked inside houses and set alight; thousands were thrown OPPOSITE and OVER PAGE: Scenes from (Dir. Jasmila Žbanić) For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, 2013. Courtesy DEBLOKADA/MPM Film

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off the bridge, killed in daylight; corpses crowded the famous river; hundreds of women were first raped, then killed.

Whoever survived – Bosnian Muslims had been a majority when ethnic cleansing started – was driven out. The town was made part of Republika Srpska in the Dayton Peace Accords. A returning war criminal was welcomed back a hero. The only monument to the victims of ethnic cleansing, erected decades later, had the word ‘genocide’ removed by order of the authorities. Since then, twelve million Euro have been invested in Emir Kusturica’s new ‘art city’, Andrićgrad, which fetishises the imagined (and fabricated) world of Ivo Andrić’s Bosnia and turns its back cynically, openly, on the legacy of the war.

As to Hotel Vilina Vlas, it was a rape camp where two hundred Bosnian Muslim women were detained, repeatedly raped and killed. Their bodies were never found. Their names were never made public.

Vercoe experiences the absence of any acknowledgement as a violation. Of course she knows about what happened in Bosnia in the 1990s, but she just assumed – wouldn’t you? – that places like Hotel Vilina Vlas would be either destroyed or turned into memorials; certainly not reintegrated back into people’s daily lives as places of recreation, certainly not written up in tourist guides. ‘I didn’t know’, she says, ‘that you could just clean up the room and pretend it never happened.’ Back in Australia months go by, yet she cannot forget that she slept in that room. Same furniture. Probably same sheets. And no one has been charged with anything.

The guy who ran the place still lives in town. She probably bumped into him on the street.

No, she cannot let it go. She writes to Tim Clancy. How is it that you omitted to mention that this hotel you warmly recommended was a site of mass rape, that the bridge you poetically extolled was a place of many open massacres?

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In the movie when she finally confronts Clancy on her return trip to Bosnia six months later (it’s winter now, snow everywhere), he tells her that blacklisting the whole community is not the answer. Paranoia and isolation are bad for Bosnia. Tourists need to come here and the country needs to move forward. This argument may sound slight, morally indefensible, but it is frequently evoked by those who seek to justify the distressing dearth of public forms of reckoning and remembrance, even as they do not deny the war crimes committed here (there are plenty of those who do; Vercoe meets some of them in Višegrad).

That one night at Hotel Vilina Vlas changes Vercoe’s life.

In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Vercoe returns to the hotel on her second trip, despite being repeatedly threatened by the authorities. She is determined to commemorate the nameless women for whom it was the site of their protracted, anguished death. I won’t reveal what she does and how – watch the movie. I watched it and remembered Anna Akhmatova’s poem ‘Requiem’ about the nameless, forgotten victims of Stalin’s terror: I’d like to name you all by name, but the list Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.

So, I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble words I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always, I will never forget one single thing.

Hotel Vilina Vlas is the only remaining material link to what happened to the two hundred women there. It is a sacred site, a crucial historical document, a weapon against the officially sanctioned forgetting and revisionism. It is also repulsive; the cars of holidaymakers parked in front of it are a slap, a spit in the face.

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Jane Korman I Will Survive, video still from the project Dancing Auschwitz, 2010.

Peformers: (from left to right) Yasmin Korman-Vinkler, Adolek Kohn, Gil Korman, Sunny Korman-Inbal and Jane Korman. Courtesy the artist

Jane Korman Survivor, video still from the project Dancing Auschwitz, 2010.

Peformers: (from left to right) Gil Korman, Jane Korman, Justine Peleg, Adolek Kohn, Yasmin Korman-Vinkler, Sunny Korman-Inbal and Coby Korman. Courtesy the artist

For director Jasmila Žbanic, the film itself is a memorial ‘for those who can tell no tales’ (the title is a quote from Ivo Andrić), bringing into public consciousness the war’s twentieth anniversary. It is also more than a memorial. We see an unmarked, unmemorialised site of trauma create a shock of recognition capable of putting those in its orbit into direct contact with something – a traumatic legacy, or legacies – they did not know about or did not know they knew. We see that shock of recognition lead to the kind of difficult, necessary witnessing that is inseparable from mourning.

We come to understand that the affect generated by a traumascape is transmittable, even when the public memory of it is not.

Dancing Auschwitz, the work of Melbourne artist Jane Korman is a further take on the question of how to engage with sites of trauma in terms beyond those of conventional memorialisation or trauma tourism. Korman’s work consists of a photograph and three video pieces, to be played simultaneously. One is an old home movie. Jane – a grandmother now – is a young girl in the video, dancing with abandon in a forest somewhere in Australia alongside her parents and their friends, who are all Holocaust survivors. Korman tells me she grew up with her parents and their friends dancing. All the time. Dance was central to how they chose to commemorate, to keep viscerally alive, the fact of their survival.

In another video Jane’s father, Adolek Kohn, is dancing with Jane, her kids and a niece at Holocaust memorial sites across Europe, including Auschwitz, Dachau and Theresienstadt concentration camps. They dance to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. The moves are goofy and awkward, the video has a home-movie feel, it’s intimate, amateurish.

Adolek is clear about what he is doing. In the final video, which documents the trip, he says: ‘If someone would tell me here, then, that I would come 60-something years later with my grandchildren, I’d say ‘What you talking about? What you talking about?’ So here you are. This is really a historic moment.’

In 2010 Korman put the ‘I Will Survive’ video piece on YouTube. Then: bedlam. Every newspaper and radio station in every country, just about, wanted to interview her.

She was condemned (desecration of memory, dancing on graves, trivialisation of genocide) and praised (celebration of survival, brave act of affirmation, returning humanity to the dead and recasting the survivors as more than victims) in equal measure. Korman has since attempted to respond to every letter and email, including the hate mail from neoNazi groups and messages from outraged members of the Jewish community. For her, this extended aftermath, the hard conversations made possible, is part of the work.

In a piece deceptively artless but in fact dense with meaning and thought, and in the space of a few minutes, Korman has found a way to show what is most powerful about traumascapes. They do not merely reinforce the moral responses we already have (or know we should have). They demand that we grapple with our individual responsibility to remember, mourn and make meaning of traumatic histories.

It is the kind of responsibility that cannot be outsourced to memorial sites, testimonial texts, cultural institutions, or socially approved rituals. As Kym Vercoe discovered.

As Sophia Turkiewicz discovered. As Jane Korman’s father always knew.

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Maria Tumarkin is a cultural historian and the author of Traumascapes (2005), Courage (2007) and Otherland (2010).

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MEDITATIONS ON LOSS Hilda Rix Nicholas's war Catherine Speck

Images of women: wives, mothers and lovers who lost loved ones in the First World War tend to be cast in wraps of patriotism and stoicism. Such was the hold of maternal citizenship then, but one Australian war widow and artist Hilda Rix Nicholas (1884–1961) broke that mould. Melbourne born, Hilda Rix had been based in Paris as an expatriate artist since 1907. Her post-impressionist paintings typifying the Belle Époque such as La Robe chinoise (c. 1913) and The pink scarf (1913), and of people and places in Tangier which she visited in 1912 and 1914 including Two women in the market place (1912–14), were well received; and her North African work was shown to much acclaim in the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français in 1914. At the time of the announcement of the war Hilda Rix, her mother and her sister Elsie were in Étaples where Hilda took a studio each summer when the ateliers in Paris closed. Étaples was host to a vibrant artists’ colony populated by American, Australian, British and European artists.

With France on a war footing, foreigners of all nations were urged to evacuate and head for England. The boats were crowded, and on crossing the English Channel both Hilda’s mother and sister Elsie contracted dysentery. Elsie subsequently died in September 1914, and her mother in early 1916, and Hilda found herself alone. By October 1916, her life seemed to be turning around when she met, and married, shortly after, fellow Australian Major George Matson Nicholas, a Distinguished Service Officer. He had been based in the Étaples Army Camp, and having seen the paintings Hilda Rix left behind in her studio, tracked her down in England, and a romance ensued. Following the wedding, Matson Nicholas returned to France, but five weeks later he died too. His death was unusual and almost freakish: he had seen his men going ‘over the top’, and was returning to the trenches when a stray shell hit him.

This was the tipping point for Hilda Rix Nicholas; she had lost not only her immediate family, but was also now a war widow. She had been apprehensive about her husband’s safety when he returned to France, and in letter she wrote to Matson Nicholas on 15 November 1916, which he never received, and just before she received the news of his death she said: ‘Oh God guard and keep you safe, Matson. Your letter with news that you have gone back to the Battalion has come – and frightens me – oh dear dear lover – it’s terrible – you are in danger – and I am far away – oh this ghastly war.

Dear husband, be brave and splendid and always your best – but don’t be wreckless. I need you and love you utterly. Your wife Hilda.’1

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Grief-stricken and traumatised, she turned to art, and her paintings and drawings became an essential part in her process of mourning. Hers is a very different kind of war art. It is not based on observation, which was the principle underpinning much official and commissioned war art, but on her emotional or affective response to the loss of Matson Nicholas. She was informed of his death via a telegram and then a letter, but like all who lost loved ones in that war, she couldn’t view her husband’s body. He was buried at a distance, in a battlefield at Flers in France; so she did what an artist would do, she visualised him as having died. She took the unusual step of portraying him along with another soldier lying deceased and alone on the rough terrain of a battlefield in a delicate drawing Study for ... And those who gave ... I (1917). She reworked this into the painting, These gave the world away (1917), to show two soldiers lying in a remote and cold moonlit landscape, out of human reach. In another painting, she even depicted her own husband at the very moment of being shot, grievously hit and about to fall to the ground with arms outstretched in cruciform shape.

The religious connotation of his death for a greater cause is overt. The actual setting of Matson’s Nicholas’s death is not accurate – he was behind the parapet when hit by a stray shell, not in the open battlefield – but that seems like an unnecessary detail. This image was the central panel of a triptych, Pro Humanitate (1917), which was destroyed in a house fire in 1930.

We know from a 1919 press report in the Sydney Morning Herald that the panels on either side represented their life before his death, and the family life and home he would no longer have: ‘[In the first panel] The lovers stand in the foreground, gazing in united happiness at the plain widestretching at their feet beneath azure skies. The whole idea of pulsating life, freedom, and strong wind blowing, is wonderfully conveyed ...

The third, remarkable for the dexterity of the technique in the treatment of sunlight and the suggestions of the impalpable, shows the bereaved girl, face down, prostrate on a couch in a luxurious modern interior. The shade of the lost one gazes pitifully upon her. ‘ In yet another drawing, Rix Nicholas placed herself in the battlefield where she imagined her husband of five weeks had been buried, surrounded by the graves of other recently deceased soldiers. Since she couldn’t ever witness where Matson Nicholas was buried immediately after his death, she connected in the only visceral way she knew when in Study for the painting Desolation (c. 1917) she shows her late

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Hilda Rix Nicholas Pro Humanitate, 1917, central panel, original destroyed 1930. Photo: Rix Nicholas Archive

Hilda Rix Nicholas Study for ... And those who gave ... I, c. 1917, charcoal on paper. Collection: Art Gallery of South Australia Š Bronwyn Wright

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Hilda Rix Nicholas Desolation, c. 1917, original destroyed 1930. Photo: Rix Wright collection

husband’s hand protruding from the earth, trying to reach her. At the time of completing the painting Desolation, which was also destroyed in the 1930 fire at her home, she said: ‘I would have died had I been allowed – I was so near. I wanted to go’.2 A surviving photograph of that painting shows her as totally alone, well on the way to giving up the will to live, with her long bony feet, and eye sockets verging on being skeletal. The black hooded coat she is wearing is the one she wore in the days soon after hearing of his death.

Another wartime painting, A mother of France (1914), shows an aged neighbour and widow in Étaples who had lost her husband in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and then her sons in the First World War. Hilda Rix Nicholas may have started this painting in Étaples before she left, then finished it in England as a widow herself, and thus infused some of her own suffering into that of her subject who so overtly projects feelings of grief. Interestingly, when the painting was purchased by the Australian War Memorial in 1920 she asked that a plaque be placed under the image, citing that the artist was a widow of the late Major G. M. Nicholas DSO of the 24th Battalion: a gesture affirming the authenticity of the emotions conveyed.

Painting was Rix Nicholas’s performative means of coming

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to terms with her shocking loss and, as she said at the time, ‘I who was so alone painted out my heart in these big canvases’.3 Such an affective response melds a past event, a death, with its future consequence of becoming a war widow in a manner that Brian Massumi describes as taking on a different temporal structure in which the ‘past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present’.4 When Rix Nicholas returned to Australia in May 1918 and exhibited these paintings, along with others done in Europe in Sydney in 1919, Grace Cossington Smith saw them on show at Horderns, and was very taken by them. Cossington Smith is better known for her iconic renditions of maternal patriotism such as The sock knitter (1915) but she too explored the more private and affective side of living through wartime. Paintings like Cavalry in a squall of rain (c. 1917) show soldiers on horseback, the very soldiers she and other women encouraged to enlist, being cut down by symbolic gunfire in the form of rain and merging with the earth below. Such were the schizoid thoughts that filled the minds of many women at home.

The imagery in Rix Nicholas’s wartime paintings stayed with Cossington Smith, who described them in the following way to her friend Mary Cunningham: ‘Five of them were

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Hilda Rix Nicholas A mother of France, 1914, oil on canvas.

Collection: Australian War Memorial

quite different from the others, about the war … all the others were gay, happy, spontaneous things, and these five were different – big things. The one who painted all this had to paint just as the feeling was – I suppose it could be called emotional painting – the painter was not left untouched by the war, and being so had to paint what was the biggest and most real thing in these five, all in fact. The tragedy of the war … The strange part is all this was painted by “only a woman” … Of course, really, only a woman could paint like that, a mere man not being capable of feeling things in the least like that – he may paint better, but not feel better’.5 These almost private images also made ‘the imperceptible felt’.6 Paintings like Desolation were indeed quite different because the emotion of ‘affect’ had kicked in. Rix Nicholas was understandably so traumatised that she, in effect, bypassed normal rational thought processes to work according to her unconscious response to real world events.

But before proceeding, what exactly is affect? It is a complex entity, best described as ‘the active discharge of emotion’, and differing from feelings which Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion’. Affects, they write, ‘are projectiles, just like weapons, feelings are introspective like tools’.7 Others speak of affect ‘as a form of thinking, often indirect and non-reflective, but thinking all the same […] and as thought in action’.8 Yet the immediate nature of Rix Nicholas’s affective response to the death of a loved one seems more than just ‘an

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active discharge of emotion’ although; it has the quality of what Brian Massumi calls a ‘shock to thought’. He explains the process thus: ‘if the expressive momentum hits the body with its full ontogenetic force, it produces a compression shock. To convey the expressive potential “faithfully” … the body must transmit the reality of that shock.9 He describes how in the process ‘thought strikes like lightning, with sheer ontogenetic force. It is felt. The highest operation of thought is not to choose, but to harbour and convey that felt force, repotentialised’.10 This process seems to equate with the affect underpinning the production of this suite of Rix Nicholas’s wartime work based on the expression of extreme emotion.

Although, this affective intensity dissipates postwar, much of her work turned to honouring her lost husband. Paintings like A man (1921) while showing a vulnerable soldier protected only by a tin helmet and standing in an open and threatening landscape, are also painted with much love.

It is as if each paint stroke completes the fabrication of the soldier’s clothing – his shirt, the pockets on his shirt and so on: she could be ‘dressing’ her lost husband, who is holding a most phallic gun. But that aside, this is also a deeply national painting conveying that the death of Matson Nicholas and the other 59,000 Australian men was for a greater cause.

These are post-affect, considered paintings, produced at a time when much of her post-war output was national.

She had put aside her pre-war international lifestyle and cosmopolitan agenda, and even though she made another highly successful trip to France in 1924, and reconnected with her pre-war life, held successful exhibitions in Paris and London, was elected an Associate of the Société National des Beaux-Arts and her painting In Australia (1923) was purchased by the French government; nevertheless, her focus became much more national. Her new subjects included men and women on the land, sheep shearers, jillaroos, and the rural landscape. The ‘shock to thought’ she had endured changed her world and her art.

1 Hilda Rix Nicholas to George Matson Nicholas, 15 November 1916, Papers of Hilda Rix Nicholas 1885–1971, MS 9817 National Library of Australia. 2 Hilda Rix Nicholas, ‘Written in Melbourne during the period of my exhibition of pictures at the Guild Hall, 1919’, Papers of Hilda Rix Nicholas. 3 Ibid. 4 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 31. 5 Perseus (Grace Cossington Smith) to Madame Medusa (Mary Cunningham), 10 August 1919, Cunningham Family Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 6749. 6 Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, p, 18. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London: The Althone Press, 1988, p. 273. 8 Nigel Thrift, ‘Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect’, Human Geography, vol. 86, no. 1, 2004, p. 60. 9 Brian Massumi, ‘Introduction: like a thought’, in Massumi, B. ed. Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, London: Routledge, 2002, p. xxxi. Also see Jill Bennett, Emphatic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, California: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 11. 10 Brian Massumi, ‘Introduction: like a thought’, p. xxxi.

Catherine Speck is Professor of Art History, and Coordinator of postgraduate programs in Art History and Curatorial & Museum Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her books include Beyond the Battlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars,published by Reaktion Books, 2014.

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OTTO DIX: Der Krieg Joanna Mendelssohn

The First World War, the Great War, saw hundreds of thousands of men killed – and millions of people delivered to a lifetime of madness and misery. Its consequences of economic and emotional devastation led directly to a second great war to destroy another generation. In a very real sense the world is still working through the long-term consequences of the failed negotiating skills of the great powers of 1914.

The official ‘celebrations’ of Australia’s involvement in this ‘war to end all wars’ will draw attention to the many war memorials that stand in capital cities and small towns.

Invariably, these monuments base their design on the visual language of classical Greece and Rome. It is easy to think there is some kind of universal solace in the aesthetics of the Golden Section and polished granite with bronze. Those less involved in the ceremonial nature of the commemorations may see a direct link between the sanitised solemnity of events recording the number of dead and the jingoism that sent them to their death.

Australia’s first official war artist, Will Dyson, was on the side of the common soldier. But because he wanted to honour the soldiers he, too, reverted to classical stereotypes, giving them the proportions of Greek gods and heroes. The Australian War Memorial has an extensive collection of the work of this war artist who shared some of the dangers of the men in the trenches.

On the other side of Lake Burley Griffin, the National Gallery of Australia holds the greatest riposte to any idealisation of war and its soldiers. Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (The War), a suite of 51 etchings, is an enduring visual record of the real and human consequences of modern warfare.

Appropriately enough its purchase was funded by the Poynton Bequest. During the Second World War Dr Orde Poynton was at Changi, a prisoner of the Japanese.

Der Krieg is a direct descendent of Goya’s great commentary on the Napoleonic years, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War). Etching, especially in the hands of a master, is a brilliant medium to convey moral truths to a wider audience. The immediacy of the drawn line works with the depth of the bite of acid to add layers of emotion, while aquatint gives the tonal delicacy of blood.

Because intaglio prints are multiples they are not confined to one space and so the images resonate around the world.

Der Krieg is both particular in its harsh detail of the worst that the killing fields can do to men, and universal in that its lessons cross all cultures. This is such a widely known suite of etchings that it is a shock to realise that when Der Krieg was first published by Karl Nierendorf in Berlin, and then toured throughout Germany as part of a pacifist exhibition, only one full suite was sold. But in 1924 the last

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thing Germans wanted to see was a visual reminder of the events that had precipitated their desperate poverty and total disillusionment. Der Krieg remains like a bad conscience – once seen it is never forgotten but keeps gnawing away at the mind, reminding of crimes committed, pain inflicted, of suffering beyond human endurance.

When the stars misaligned in 1914 and politicians of all kinds unleashed the dogs of war, tens of thousands of young men around the world believed the lies of patriotism. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) gives a sense of the naive idealism of those early volunteers from Germany as they rushed to mobilise against the French and British as well as the raw colonials of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. At the beginning of the war they had enlisted believing Horace’s dictum Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and right to die for your country) but by the time they realised it was a lie, it was too late. Otto Dix was among those first volunteers, and his bravery as a machine gunner saw him awarded the Iron Cross. He later said that he originally enlisted because he wanted to experience the complete reality of war. The power of Der Krieg is that he has given the knowledge of his experience to generations. He places himself as the dispassionate observer of the angst of the ordinary soldiers who understand the folly of their misplaced patriotic faith, but see the necessity of continuing to play their part as doomed elements of the military machine.

A series of small gouaches in the collection of Chemnitz’s Museum Gunzenhauser is the first record of what Dix saw in the trenches. These are heartbreaking in their immediacy, presented as the record of a young man overwhelmed by the sight of skeletons and rotting flesh. Here, the skeleton of a French soldier, identified by fragments of his blue uniform, lies exposed in the field, embedded in the flowers fertilised by his rotting flesh. In Nächtliche Szene (Nocturnal scene), the madness and violence of no-man’s land explodes in dark confusion.

The memories of the trenches never left Dix. When Maria Wetzel interviewed him in his old age, he recalled how he ‘kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through’.1 In 1923 Dix painted Die Trench (destroyed during the Second World War), a work that directly relates to Nächtliche Szene. The rising Nazi forces were furious at its stark reality and condemned Dix for making art that ‘weakens the necessary inner war-readiness of the people’. The orchestrated hostility that greeted Dix’s first great visceral response to trench warfare may have been a factor in the creation of Der Krieg which was completed the following year. This suite of etchings is similar in scale to the little

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Otto Dix Nächtliche Szene (Night scene), 1915/18, gouache on paper. Collection: Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz – Museum Gunzenhauser. © Otto Dix/Bild-Kunst. Licensed by Viscopy, 2015

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Otto Dix Grab eines Franzosen (Champagne) [Grave of a Frenchman (Champagne)],1915, gouache over pencil on paper. Collection: Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz – Museum Gunzenhauser. © Otto Dix/Bild-Kunst. Licensed by Viscopy, 2015

gouaches he had made at the Western Front, but in both composition and execution they are significantly more complex, revealing him as a master of observation and memory.

Der Krieg was first exhibited in Berlin at Ernst Friedrich’s Anti-War Museum, which also collected uncensored photographs of the war. Dix certainly saw these photographs, but the form and intensity of Der Krieg relate directly to Dix’s own experiences, both on the front and away from it. Dix saw himself as being a part of a trajectory of the artist as master craftsman in the same way as his most admired Renaissance masters – Dürer, Cranach and Grünewald. It is worth noting that these artists were from the first generation of Protestants and used the metaphysical language of art to paint and draw moral truths in a conflicted world. In both his paintings and his etchings, Dix understood the importance of technical perfection. In Mahlzeit in der Sappe (Lorettohohe) (Mealtime in the trenches – The Loretto Hills) the skeleton of the Frenchman he first painted as a gouache is transformed into an ethereal aquatinted ghost, grinning at the tough crosshatched lines of the animal-like soldier as he wolfs his food.

Behind the squat figure of the diner, the muddy peaks of no-man’s land appear to be about to engulf him. The skeleton serves to give both the context of the soldier’s life and to predict his future.

It may be that the soldier will end screaming in agony as in Zerschossene (Shot to pieces), a work that shows the full contradictory power of Dix’s achievement. Technically there is a lightness and fluidity of line and tone. The graceful ease of the line, the intensity of the blacks, the carefully modulated tonality of the aquatint should make this beautiful – if it were purely abstract. Instead the viewer sees the subject’s head with his jaw shot away. The dark gouges

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reveal blood and guts spilling from the dying soldier’s body as he writhes in agony. Dix does not spare the viewer. There is no sanitised comfort of a swift brave death in a noble cause for this poor wretch. Instead, Dix gives an alternative for those who lose their minds after seeing their friends die in such a manner. Nächtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen (Night-time encounter with a madman) is a portrait of one of the many lost souls who staggered through the blasted towns of France and Belgium before the war’s end and in the years that followed. The subject’s destroyed mind is shown in a circular confusion of deep etched lines, with the empty grinning face coming through their depths. The ruined town, where nature and architecture have been blasted into disconnected fragments, is pale and ghost-like against the night sky. Tellingly, Dix does not identify this lost soldier’s nationality. He belongs to all armies, and to none.

Der Krieg and his other great paintings of war are more than arguments for peace; at their heart, they are a consideration of the nature of humanity. In his old age Dix consciously linked his approach to the attitudes of his admired old masters: ‘You have to be able to witness martyrdom without dissolving into pity’.3 When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Dix could have followed many of his liberal countrymen, and fled in exile.

Instead, he chose to endure, to share the fate of those lessfortunate citizens who remained. When he was forbidden to exhibit his ‘degenerate’ art, Dix undertook what he described as an ‘internal exile’ in the countryside at Lake Constance near the Swiss border. The paintings of these years are dominated by strange disturbed landscapes, works that were so realistic that they could not be interpreted by the authorities as degenerate or disloyal but nevertheless indicate a sense of dystopia. The uncanny colouring makes it look as though he is painting another world. He also turned to allegorical religious subjects.

The way that Dix made art and lived his life gives a different model of patriotism to that promoted by most ideologies. He was, as a young man, a soldier and made art so that the world would know the realities of what war does to men. In 1945, as Germany was losing the war, the 54-year-old artist was conscripted into the army, captured by the French and spent some time in a prisoner of war camp.

He then returned home to Germany, to paint. Throughout his oeuvre there is this quality of self. Otto Dix once said that all of his art was ‘the search for truth’. Looked at in that light, Der Krieg is about exposing the truth; the mature reflection of a man who discovered, through experience, the consequences of war.

1 See <http://Spartacus-educational.com/ARTdix.htm>. 2 Walter Schmits of the Kölnische Zeitung cited in Dennis Crockett, ‘The Most Famous Painting of the “Golden Twenties”? Otto Dix and the Trench Affair”’, Art Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 72–80. 3 Quoted in Fritz Löffler (trans.

R. J. Hollingdale) Otto Dix, New York, 1982 p. 118.

Joanna Mendelssohn is an Associate Professor at UNSW Art & Design. She is the lead researcher in Australian Art Exhibitions 1968–2009: a generation of cultural transformation.

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ABOVE LEFT: Otto Dix Mahlzeit in der Sappe (Lorettohohe), Mealtime in the trenches (The Loretto Hills) plate 13 from Der Krieg, 1924, intaglio print: etching, aquatint. Berlin: Verlag Karl Nierendorf. Poynton Bequest, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Otto Dix. Licensed by Viscopy ABOVE: Otto Dix Nächtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen (Night-time encounter with a madman), plate 22 from Der Krieg, 1924, intaglio print: etching, aquatint, drypoint. Berlin: Verlag Karl Nierendorf. Poynton Bequest, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Otto Dix. Licensed by Viscopy LEFT: Otto Dix Zerschossene (Shot to pieces), plate 38 from Der Krieg, 1924, intaglio print: etching, aquatint, drypoint. Berlin: Verlag Karl Nierendorf. Poynton Bequest, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Otto Dix. Licensed by Viscopy

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Laurence Aberhart War Memorial, Westbrook, Queensland, 23 July 1997, 1997, silver gelatin and selenium-toned photograph. Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Laurence Aberhart ANZAC Shaune Lakin

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ANZAC is New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart’s contribution to the grand international commemorative project that is the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. This publication and exhibition of platinum prints first presented by Dunedin Public Art Gallery in mid2014, comprises 73 images of First World War memorials from Australia and New Zealand, drawn from the artist’s extensive archive of photographs of artefacts, processes and places that mark two of photography’s key motifs: death and remembrance. The project gave one of our region’s most significant contemporary photographers the opportunity to consider defining aspects of the social landscape and experience of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand.

Aberhart’s sequence engages two quite distinct histories: the point of origin for the memorials, and their biographical trajectories across the century.

The book reproduces pictures of 67 memorials from Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria alongside monuments from New Zealand’s North and South islands, all photographed between 1980 and 2013. While it has the

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Laurence Aberhart War Memorial, Lithgow, 6 August 1997, 1997, silver gelatin and selenium-toned photograph. Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

appearance of a typology, the sequence engages a range of points of view that indicate some of the ways that memorials were incorporated into the experience of landscape or place by those who built them: monuments look out over settlements from high; form part of public parks, botanical gardens and roadside environments; sit alongside graves and headstones in public cemeteries; and were placed on the main streets of towns and settlements. The enormous representational and emotional investment made of memorials by the communities that established them is recalled in the chapter names which organise the pictures: ‘Lest we forget’, ‘The glorious dead’, ‘Their name liveth’ …

Indeed, the cultural and social significance of these memorials has certainly shifted since they were first erected by communities during and after the war. While memorials and rolls of honour are a common feature of postwar landscapes, the scale and nature of commemoration of the First World War in Australia and New Zealand was considerable: reflecting the impact of the conflict on communities, many of the 13,400 memorials in Australia

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and 900 memorials in New Zealand remember the names of those who died.1 Of the 100,444 New Zealanders who served during the war, 16,697 did not return home; 61,516 Australians died. In today’s terms, this would be comparable to 300,000 Australians and 75,000 New Zealanders dying in a four-year conflict. The psychological, social and economic impact of death at this scale – men, generally in their twenties and thirties – remains unimaginable.

As well as indicating the scale of loss, the pervasiveness of memorials in Australia and New Zealand also reflects the fact that communities were so far removed from the event.

Little of the actual experience of the ANZACs was accessible to families at home, the ultimate manifestation of which was the fact that the bodies of dead soldiers did not come home. As Ken Inglis observes, families and communities in Australia and New Zealand were denied the cultural and social conventions of mourning and commemoration.2 So, as well as inviting remembrance of traumatic events that took place on the other side of the world, memorials reflected a community’s inability to mourn. The archetypal, solitary

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Laurence Aberhart War Memorial, Tikitiki, East Coast, 30 June, 2013, 2013, silver gelatin, gold and selenium toned photograph. Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

soldiers shown in a range of poses in Aberhart’s photographs represent not only those named on the memorial, but all who served during the war.

We can no longer remember this context – or experience the memory of this loss or its effects – ‘from the inside’.3 The memory networks which created, supported and elaborated the significance of these memorials have passed. Aberhart’s photographs, which represent an archive of sorts, register the presence of these networks and the memories they preserve.

There are rarely people in Aberhart’s photographs, and the absence of people in the memorial photographs (with the exception of two images) surely logs their disappearance. I am not suggesting that Aberhart’s photographs are informed by either sentimentalism or nostalgia, as so much of the ‘international commemorative project’ seems to be. Instead, I feel that the sequence assumes the ‘responsibility of remembering’ – not simply the memorials’ points of origin (death and absence), but also the social and cultural response to that trauma.

Aberhart’s sequence also registers another history – the effects of, and the anxieties that followed, the disappearance of those memory networks. Indeed, the timing of the

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project mirrors the process of the memorials’ complete abstraction. The earliest pictures were taken at a time of public ambivalence towards the commemoration of military history that followed the Vietnam War, and which effectively rendered war memorials as public blind spots.

The photographs taken since the mid-1990s reflect the spate of government-funded restoration projects which sought to restate the national significance of commemoration,4 while the 31 pictures taken since 2012 each refer to a period of substantially increased popular interest in the ANZAC story, itself no doubt fuelled by political and media-driven anticipation of the centenary. No longer public sites of memory where grieving communities gather to remember, they have become historical sites registering dates and forgotten names: as Aberhart’s photographs show, these are no longer memory objects but the historical traces of them, also sites of repression.

The memorial at Westbrook, Queensland, for example, was covered in black grime when Aberhart photographed it in 1997; reflecting the reinvigorated place of Anzac history and mythology that was consolidated under the prime ministership of John Howard, the monument had been

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Laurence Aberhart War Memorial, Tikitiki, East Coast, 30 June, 2013, 2013, silver gelatin, gold and selenium toned photograph.

Courtesy the artist, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

sandblasted clean when Aberhart returned to photograph it in 2013. Similarly, in 1980, in the once-thriving agricultural area around Katea, Otago, Aberhart photographed a concrete war memorial that had become overgrown and appeared in a state of significant disrepair. Aberhart’s picture (and he later returned to photograph the monument from different aspects) now assumes historical significance as, around 2008, the Katea memorial was torn down and replaced with a monolithic black marble odalisque as part of a districtwide memorial restoration project.5 The demise of memory networks is also seen in traces of social and economic change that have taken place in regional and rural communities.

Rongahere, Otago, 2010 and Mataura Island, Southland, 2010, where scrub and tall grass encroach on the monuments, both refer to communities like Katea, which have over the last few decades experienced significant decline, as agricultural and regional economies have seen increased centralisation and corporatisation.

Again, rather than signs of nostalgia or sentiment, Aberhart’s documentation of these sites reflects a social and historical motivation that is concerned with the material circumstances of memory as it shifts from interior experience

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to exterior trace. Aberhart has spoken about his motivation to record or document what exists in his world ‘in case, ultimately [it is] no longer there’.6 This same historical function underlines the ANZAC pictures. The photographs and the sequence itself mark both the disappearance of traditional memory and the networks and practices that activated each memorial, and their emergence as historical sources that are, in their own ways, engaged as participants in the grand project that is ‘remembering’ the Great War. 1 Details derived from <http://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/conflict; http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/map/memorials-register-map>. 2 Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 1998, p. 97. 3 Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les mieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26, Spring 1989, p. 13. 4 See Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 412–22. 5 See ‘War memorial, Katea, near Owaka Southland, 19 April 1999’, in Laurence Aberhart, Where Shadows Dream of Light, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2000. 6 ‘Laurence Aberhart in conversation with Rhana Devenport’, in Laurence Aberhart: Recent Taranaki Photographs, New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2012, p. 61.

ANZAC: Photographs by Laurence Aberhart was published by Victoria University Press and Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2014.

Shaune Lakin is the recently appointed Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia.

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BRONIA IWANCZAK The flower forays Eve Sullivan

Bronia Iwanczak Thoughtforms 3 from the series Apocalypse Now: The thought forms, 2012. Courtesy the artist

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Bronia Iwanczak No. 9 from the series Apocalypse Now: The thought forms, chromogenic print on archival waterpaper, 2012. Courtesy the artist

Channelling the legacy of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, theosophical thought forms and a residency at the Bundanon Trust, this series of photographic works by Bronia Iwanczak takes the still life as memento mori to a new pitch of aesthetic entanglement.

The Bundanon Homestead, built in the 1860s, part of Arthur Boyd’s former estate and now a creative retreat, draws on very particular associations with nature and the environment as the subject for art. Set amidst the pastoral lands and pockets of native bush that line the hills and gorges leading down to the Shoalhaven River, this is a landscape already encoded by the colonising vision of the white male artist as creator figure. Added to this, as anyone who has spent time on the property knows, the idyllic space of contemplation can at a moment’s notice be overwhelmed by the manoeuvres of the Australian Army helicopters flying overhead from the nearby Jervis Bay Military Base. Prompted by the associations of this display of military might with the dominant subject of the landscape as vista, Iwanczak turned inwards to the feminine space of the English-style heritage garden for inspiration. Here, she found herself following in

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the footsteps of previous generations of Bundanon ladies who practised the arts of watercolour painting and flower arrangement to create poetry and beauty as a tenacious hold on place. For these gardens (like pale European skins) life is a struggle, a battle to resist the vicissitudes of the Australian sun. Under her creative ministrations, the flowers, prematurely faded, dried and desiccated are given an artificial boost through the injection of an excess of water and colour, pooling as the mire of substance to create form.

Fixed as fluid, these arrangements also treat the landscape as an event: after the fire and the flood, disaster and destruction is made palpable through the stains and scorch marks left for residual effect. The wash of colourant and of life torn asunder, dismembered and defiled, also suggests a peculiarly feminine form of madness. Like the remnants of Miss Havisham’s ravaged bridal bouquet, the cut flowers are presented in wanton abandonment and disarray. Yet, for all their savagery, there is still a trace of beauty in the tortured face presented to the world.

The floral bouquet as tribute, left in a public place, is all too common a sight now as we so readily memorialise death and

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disaster in public displays of grief. Marking this, Iwanczak takes us beyond the inertia of the feminine to reflect the heightened physical and psychological trauma of life in a conflict zone, through reference (the helicopters) to Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s compelling restaging of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the Vietnam War, supported by the pyrotechnics and coloured smoke effects of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, is a vision of the mayhem and psychedelia of this monsoonal, testosterone-fuelled alternative reality.

Drawing on the cinematic and synaesthetic dimension, to invoke the aura of the bodily human presence and of decomposition like ‘the smell of napalm in the morning’, Iwanczak’s watery florilegium as flower forays represent ‘the insidious evil of war, its destruction of beauty and effect towards moral and spiritual disintegration’.

As inspired by theosophists Charles W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, through a reading of their 1901 treatise, Thought Forms, Iwanczak attempts to document the aesthetics of ‘Paranoia’, ‘Revenge’, ‘Deep Regret for the Suffering Caused’ or the more war-specific scenarios of ‘Brute force’ and ‘Combat stress’ among the examples provided. The point of theosophy is, after all, a striving for wholeness and spiritual attainment through the interpretation of auras and of colour–form polemics. The contributions of the anonymous hands of participating ‘Bundanon ladies’ invites us to decode the results. Yet these colours, as an amorphous fluidity of washed-out blues, tainted yellows, muddy lilacs and madders, amongst the real-world vegetable matter, are no match for the theosophist aspirational soul, based on the hierarchy of bright, clear colours.

The heroism of the early twentieth century that inspired artists such as Wassily Kandinsky to view the path to abstraction with a messianic, almost militant zeal, carries the theosophists’ mantra to its logical conclusion.

Notwithstanding, the development in the latter half of the twentieth century of a more material view of art and everyday life, Iwanczak’s expressions as participants in the flat bed approach to painting stripped of its transcendental status ride a similar wave of historical reassessment and re-enactment, tracing the well-worn path of abstract expressionism and art informel, that is tachiste in effect.

In particular, I am thinking, of the recent reappraisal of the French painter Jean Fautrier by Yve-Alain Bois, who discusses the loaded brush turning in on itself through the impurity of separation (in his case, of colour and texture) and the horrors that cannot be represented (the screams Fautrier overheard of the victims of Nazi torture in the forests of Châtenay-Malabry) that led to his Otages (Hostages) series.1 Bois, quoting art critic Francis Ponge, linked Fautrier to Georges Bataille’s tainted view of the Marquis de Sade ‘who had the most beautiful roses brought to him only to pluck off their petals and toss them into a ditch filled with liquid manure’.2 Such is the richness of accumulated association that it is not the perfect composition of blooms that attracts us, but those which in their very debasement register loss, love and bereavement.

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1 Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Fautrier’s Natures Mortes’ in Curtis L. Carter (ed), Jean Fautrier, 1898–1964, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 2 Quoted from Yves Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (eds), Formless: A User’s Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997, p. 121.

Eve Sullivan is Executive Editor of Artlink.

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Bronia Iwanczak No. 12 from the series Apocalypse Now: The thought forms, chromogenic print on archival waterpaper, 2012. Courtesy the artist

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TOM NICHOLSON The activation of the artwork

John Mateer

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In the decade since I first wrote about Melbourne artist Tom Nicholson his work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, Chile, Palestine and China, often in major exhibitions, and he has intensified his observation of histories local and global.1 Bearing in mind the subjects of his early work – the portrait image in a mediatised, transnational culture, the act of political demonstration, and the historical document – the widespread interest in his work could seem inevitable; certainly, since the GFC, curators in Europe have been more concerned with economics and politics. In Australia Nicholson’s work remains exceptional in its attention to the relation between methods of political and historical representation and the notion of the social self.

The first manifestation of these investigations was to be found in his banner portraits, in the various iterations of the banner marching project. Then there were those portrait flags which flew atop Trades Hall in inner-city Melbourne.2 In parallel with a focus on the dynamic between the individual and his or her politics, Nicholson’s early work also indicated a willingness to be engaged, to call into question actual politics and histories.

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ABOVE and LEFT: Tom Nicholson Flags for a trades hall council, 2005. Public installation of four flags on the rooftop flag poles of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, and a simultaneous installation at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, as part of the exhibition, The Body. The Ruin, curated by Bridget Crone, 5 November 2005 – 22 January 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Indicative of this motivation, After action for another library (1999) was in response to the Indonesian military’s ransacking and razing of much of East Timor following the population’s vote in favour of independence. For this project, Nicholson presented photographs of the title pages of the 5,000 books that had been collected as donations in Melbourne – books intended to replace those lost in the wilful destruction of Timor’s libraries. A perusal of the artist book containing a selection of the images reveals, among the many left-orientated texts, the inclusion of volumes such as Descartes: Philosophical Writings and Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of his Writings. Even in the corrective of donation there may be an unintended imperialism.

One of the first presentations of After action for another library was at the library of the law faculty of Berlin’s Humboldt University, a building overlooking Bebelplatz, where in 1933 the Nazis' infamous book-burning took place.

Configurations of this work have been shown in the 15th Biennale of Sydney, in the exhibitions Systems Error: War is the Force that Gives us Meaning in Sienna, Italy, The Art of War at the CEPA, in upstate New York, and in To the Arts, Citizen!

(2010), curated by Óscar Faria and João Fernandes, at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, where it accompanied Indefinite distribution, a project commissioned for this exhibition. The Porto version of After action … consisted of a stack of 4000 copies of Nicholson’s artist-book which could be taken away by members of the audience in exchange for a Portuguese-language book which would eventually join the

other English language books gathered a decade before in the collection of the nascent Library of the University of East Timor in Dili.

Just as this After action ... was intended to achieve a linguistic symmetry, counterbalancing the global language of the English books with those of Portuguese, Timor’s colonial language, the new work accompanying it differently articulated the precariousness of East Timor within a deeper, modern geopolitical context, prompting reflection on the overlapping histories of Timor, Portugal, Australia and imperial Japan.

In keeping with much of Nicholson’s practice, Indefinite distribution – while presented as a configuration of video, text and wall-drawing – represented, in his words, ‘traces of a public action on 15 November 2010 with two aeroplanes and two aeroplane texts, and the distribution of 30,000 leaflets by 60 volunteer participants in and around the centre of Porto.’ The leaflets were facsimiles of an Australian wartime pamphlet as key to the entire project, the pamphlet’s photograph was the subject of the large wall-drawing. Every aspect of the project was orientated by this pamphlet that had been dropped over Timor in 1944, when the principally Australian Allied Sparrow Force, who had been defending the island against the invading Japanese, was forced to withdraw. Nicholson has remarked, during a public conversation at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2013, part of In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art 3, an exhibition I curated, that this pamphlet, with its title which reads – in Portuguese – ‘Your Friends will not Forget You’, was well-known among activists of the Free East Timor Movement in the 1980s and 1990s; its bitter irony then still painful, considering Australia’s tacit approval of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion and the subsequent 25-year low-intensity war.

For the citizens of Porto, witnessing Nicholson’s contribution to the exhibition coinciding with the hundredyear anniversary of the establishment of the Portuguese Republic, either receiving one of these facsimile pamphlets in hand or looking up to see the two aeroplanes flying

Tom Nicholson After action for another library, 1999–2001/2010, offset-printed artists book, published by Surpllus. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

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by, one bearing the first, and the other the last, lines of the document’s text, must have been an eerie, temporally dislocating experience. Nicholson’s evocation of belatedness, both in these actions being long after the end of the Second World War and ten years after the emancipation of East Timor, is the suggestion that there might be a parallel, phantasmal history, a history in which the Australian promise to not forget the Timorese could have been kept – an idealistic history.

Nicholson’s paralleling of Australia’s twice betrayal of the Timorese people with the singular betrayal of Portuguese inaction while the Japanese were invading the island is clearly a provocation. Considering that, as estimated, during the conflict and after the departure of the Allies, there were only 450 Allied casualties, while there were at least 40,000 Timorese and Portuguese deaths. In response to Nicholson’s suggestion, it could be objected that the invasion of Timor by Japan, the later invasion by Indonesia, as well as Australia’s abandonment of the island on both occasions, were distinct, unrelated events; but, even so, these events are fraught with geopolitical implications.

Nicholson’s work, in drawing this parallel, is not aiming to rewrite that moment in history; but, rather, it seeks to produce a strange ambiguity, an aporia, in which historical

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and geopolitical presumptions may be rethought. Instead of being seen as a work of purely historical critique, Indefinite distribution queries the material that circulates as evidence of the action (or otherwise) of politics, such material typically being the basis for later, historical analysis. The banners trailing the two aeroplanes, the 30,000 pamphlets, the walldrawing like a gigantic, haunting team-photograph of the Allied force with the Timorese troops, the framed texts which contain the false promise to return in Portuguese, English, Tetum and Japanese, and the high-definition photographs of the volunteers handing out the leaflets in the Portuguese streets, each in their own way deconstruct the public actions of Australian propaganda.

When Nicholson installed the work as part of In Confidence I was impressed by how elusive the political significance of the work became in viewing it. Nicholson’s attention to the material transactions in (to use his term) the ‘action’ caused the viewer to be aware of the ambiguity of the politicised moment, and its historicity. In Indefinite distribution, in keeping with the logic of Nicholson’s other work, the actions are politicised and anachronistic. As anyone who has taken part in demonstrations knows, the significance of a protest is seldom in the moment; but, rather, in its delayed effect.

Not being a re-enactment as a form of mere current

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LEFT and ABOVE: Tom Nicholson Indefinite distribution, 2010. Public action on 15 November 2010 with two aeroplanes and aeroplane texts, and the distribution of 30,000 leaflets by 60 volunteer participants, in and around the centre of Porto, Portugal. Commissioned and supported by the Serralves Museum for the exhibition To the Arts, Citizens!, curated by Óscar Faria and João Fernandes, 20 November 2010 – 13 March 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

affairs, these ‘actions’, whether in Santiago, Berlin or rural Australia, which constitute Nicholson’s work, are always more than what he presents as their ‘traces’ in galleries. The actions are a kind of un-acting, as opposed to an enacting.

They are an undoing of the singularity of events to enable the reinterpretation of their nature as historical facts. Their effect is well encapsulated by Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, which he described as ‘an organisation of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness on all ....

This is what a process of political subjectification consists in: in the action of uncounted capacities that crack open under the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the visible.’ 4 Unlike most of his peers, Nicholson’s work, well exemplified by After action ... and Indefinite distribution, attends to the methods of grassroots politics – marches,

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banners, pamphlets and documents – within the questionable, global circulation of art. Hence, his regular insistence on an ethical exchange, also in the display, by providing his audience with free traces of the works in the form of his artist-books, booklets or posters, even if, on occasion, they are required to provide a possession of their own – notably, a book – in exchange. In this, and in the aesthetic of presentation of the evidence of his actions in galleries, Nicholson seems less to be following Western art historical examples than those of its vast, largely unappreciated alternative, namely, of art produced in what was called ‘the Eastern Bloc’.

Seldom directly addressing the subject of war, yet always addressing its effects, Nicolson’s work is evocative, in ambition, method and presentation, of the practice of artists like Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (Soviet Union), or of the collectives Irwin/NSK (Slovenia) and subREAL (Romania). Inevitably, the question that must arise from acknowledging this ‘socialised aesthetic’ in the work is the extent to which the Cold War’s effect on past international artistic production, its division between a privitising art market in the West and a socialised, variously politicised set of practices in the East, might activate an articulation of our present political circumstances, by providing the current, younger generation of Australian artists with a vocabulary for effective critique.

When, in discussions with a number of people during the preparation of my exhibition, which included Nicholson’s Indefinite distribution, I brought up its implications, it was clear that the political nature of the work, even though it was referring to events more than half a century ago, was capable of generating disquiet. Yet, it seemed that few in the audience had a clear understanding of the geopolitical dilemmas East Timor presented to Australia both during the Second World War and at the time of the Indonesian invasion, when the island was caught up in the East–West power play of the Cold War, and so they didn’t really have grounds for their anxiety. Simply that it was ‘political’ seemed discomforting enough.

It is there, between those two affective states, between the guilt of an uninformed audience and its prospective, confident, informed appreciation of historical realities, that Nicholson’s projects act as more than cultural interventions: his ambition is the political activation of the artwork.

1 See my extended essay ‘The Gap of the Border: Tom Nicholson’s Banner Marching project/. HEAT, no. 11, 2005. No. 11, pp. 171–88. 2 This project, ‘Flags for a trades hall council’, coincided with the exhibition The Body, The Ruin, curated by Bridget Crone for the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne (5 November 2005 – 22 January 2006). 3 In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 31 August –13 October 2013, Iincluded artists from Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, with Australian artists whose work engaged with life in Bali, Iran, Timor, Madagascar and Java. 4 Jacques Rancière (trans. Gregory Eliot), The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2011, pp. 48–49.

John Mateer is a writer and curator. His current project with the Cocos-Malay community, The Quiet Slave: a history in eight episodes, is currently on show as part of Spaced 2: Future Recall, at the Western Australian Museum, until 29 March.

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KHALED SABSABI Peacefender Andrew Yip

On his return to Lebanon in 2003 for the first time since escaping the civil war with his family in 1978, Khaled Sabsabi was struck by déjà vu. Along the route from Beirut airport to Tripoli he saw the familiar roadside murals of the Maronite Phalangists competing against propaganda from Islamist parties. ‘It was like I never left’, he recalls, ‘I actually remembered that mural that was on the wall. It was still there, the same thing as we escaped out of the place. Nothing was changed’.1 But while his own childhood memory had been rekindled, in Lebanon he found ‘a country and a region that was living in amnesia. Its senses and its ability had been bashed to numbness’.

Sabsabi’s return to Lebanon was also a form of escape – a reprieve from a Western Sydney Muslim community deeply scarred by virulent anti-Islamic sentiment in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. These journeys (he has since returned five times) from one landscape of trauma to another bring into focus the porousness of national borders and cultural identities in the 21st century.2 The discovery of a propaganda magazine in Tripoli, written in French but produced in China, led him to explore the complex geopolitics of contemporary war. He has continued to pursue these ideas in his art practice that interweaves documentary with his own deeply personal responses.

In Guerrilla (2007), for example, Sabsabi adopts a documentary-style approach, giving three former guerrilla fighters a chance to voice their experiences of the civil war.

He revisited the work in 2014, subtitling it in English and exhibiting it alongside a collection of 33 photos – some of which were cut into the original video – that had been over-painted and partially destroyed. He took these photos in 2006, documenting the destruction of Beirut during the 33-day war against Israel. They were not originally conceived as works of art, but were the result of a personal process of reconciliation. ‘I had this idea that if you destroy the image, the image will die’, he recalls, ‘the essence of the image, the

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Khaled Sabsabi Wonderland (video still), 2014, dual-channel HD video. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

OPPOSITE LEFT: Khaled Sabsabi Guerrilla, 2007, 3-channel video installation created between Australia and Lebanon. Courtesy Khaled Sabsabi and Milani Gallery, Brisbane OPPOSITE RIGHT: Khaled Sabsabi Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement, 2011, 3-channel video installation exhibited as part of Edge of Elsewhere, 2011, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Campbelltown Arts Centre for the Sydney Festival; the 2011 Blake Prize, National Art School, Sydney; Volume One: MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2012.

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core of the image, what the image represents, not the physical picture, but that image of violence and hate, then it will die’.

Sabsabi does not aestheticise war, nor does he take sides, but at the core of his diverse artistic practice (which encompasses hip hop, theatre, new media installations and community projects) lies a commitment to social justice. His art reflects both his background as an immigrant Australian as well as his professional work with youth communities in Western Sydney, in which he often deals with issues of violence, racism and discrimination.

It is difficult not to read Sabsabi’s deeply-empathetic artistic practice as a manifestation of his community work; indeed the power of his art often comes through a disquieting confrontation with the communal. In Oversite (2007) for example (produced in collaboration with Salah Saouli), visitors walk over a room full of discarded shoes, symbolic of the social trauma of war in general but perhaps in particular the deaths of Lebanese civilians during the 2006 war.3 It is through this form of empathetic suggestion that Sabsabi challenges Australian audiences to reconsider the social responsibilities of a country whose national mythology has been constructed around a century of wartime conflict in the Middle East.

1 All quotes from the artist are from an interview with the author, 17 November 2014. 2 This was a theme that Sabsabi and co-curators David McNeill and Phillip George addressed in a 2008 exhibition by Lebanese– Australian artists, The Resilient Landscape, for the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, UNSW College of Fine Arts. 3 See Uros Cvoro, ‘Oversite: walk with me’, Oversite: Khaled Sabsabi and Salah Saouli, Sydney: Casula Powerhouse, 2007, pp. 10–21.

ABOVE: Khaled Sabsabi 70,000 Veils, 2014. Installation view, Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Exhibited in 2014 Marrakech Biennale.

RIGHT: Khaled Sabsabi Syria, 2012, created between Australia and Syria, dual-channel video installation exhibited as part of the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Reactivation, Sydney Pavilion, China.

Andrew Yip is iGLAM Research Fellow at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Institute for Experimental Arts. His research focuses on the politics of contemporary art and war.

Khaled Sabsabi Tawla, 2012, single-channel video installation created between Australia and Lebanon, exhibited at Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide and the Basil Sellers Art Prize in 2014

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HARUN FAROCKI Serious games Denise Robinson The cinema must leave the quarters where it is and go to those where it isn’t.

Jean-Luc Godard

ABOVE: Screens from Harun Farocki Parallele II, 2014.

Courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion. © Harun Farocki 2014

Harun Farocki’s unexpected death in 2014 leaves a profoundly affective body of work. He produced over 100 films and installations, including some of the most influential film essays and experiments with screening formats over the past forty years – a body of work that is also a touchstone for the ongoing developments and dissemblance in film, television and surveillance in the context of a control society and the inscriptions of war.

His work incorporates discarded military surveillance tapes, archived television footage, films from industry monitoring processes, the systems that structure computer games and any number of visual and auditory processes of production and simulation. What matters for Farocki is that it is not ‘content’. As Thomas Elsaesser notes ‘he [Farocki] takes up a subject when it can be presented as a “Verbund”, a system, when the dynamics of feedback, self-referencing and self monitoring are put into circulation’.1 Farocki’s 2014–15 exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof 2 included an early, important and well-known work from 1969, Inextinguishable Fire, and a more recent work in three parts, Serious Games (2009–10), a trilogy that takes up the systems inherent within virtual spaces and automated vision machines through a dispositive of two or more images. Serious Games I: Watson is Down is a military training device. One screen shows what is being produced on the second screen: four soldiers at consoles, each controlling their avatars in battle, follow strict military protocols. In Serious Games II: Three Dead a simulation of military helicopters descending on a training camp shifts to the scenes of an actual, built facility strikingly similar to computer-generated imagery. Serious Games III: Immersion is a filmed demonstration to sell ‘therapeutic software’ to the US military for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorders. The soldiers shown role-playing their response appear fraught and extremely distressed, prompted by explicit, violent images and sounds through virtual reality headsets: it is total immersion through witnessing the death of friends in battle. This role-play is in the thrall of virtual horror, quickly resolved when the headset is removed. That soldiers are trained to go to war through computer gaming technology is not new to us; that the trauma of this war can be ‘resolved’ through the same technology is an even greater illusion given that trauma is a result of what cannot be assimilated.

OPPOSITE: Various scenes from Harun Farocki Serious Games III: Immersion.

Courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion. © Harun Farocki 2009

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Harun Farocki Inextinguishable Fire (Nicht Löschbares Feuer), 1969. Stills courtesy Harun Farocki Filmproduktion

In his early film from 1969, Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki sits at a desk, looks up and reads a statement from a Vietnamese man describing the effects of napalm burns, Farocki’s gaze is straight to camera as he says, ‘we can only give you a hint of how napalm burns’. And, while burning his own arm with a cigarette, describes the temperature of a cigarette burning at 400°C compared to napalm, which burns at 3,000°C. His interest in agitprop is present in an appeal to the spectator to take responsibility, ‘How can we show napalm in action?

How can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? … If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you will close your eyes, then you will close your eyes to memory, then to the context’. Farocki’s filming of a scenario with actors as scientists at Dow Chemical suspends any reality effect through their dissimulation when confronted with the implications of the industry’s production of chemical weapons – it’s a continuation of his return of the gaze straight to camera by other means. Later, Farocki worked to establish ‘another structure, a double coding’ where the people being filmed are playing themselves’.3 There’s a kinetic energy of image and word flows in Farocki’s works largely generated by the editing process. In his 1995 film Interface the editing desk is the means by which he breaches the difference between manual and intellectual labour. Each operation, each click and whir, is ramped up: the sounds are sharp, present and not incidental, like the sounds of the keyboard commands in the building of scenes for computer systems and all the mechanical sounds of production and destruction that infiltrate his other works.

Farocki has also spoken of editing as metaphor and as having the same function as musical composition.

The opening titles in War at a Distance (2003) are underscored by a heightened level of sound, like a drum beat

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for the end of the world. In fact, it’s the sound of the rolling mills in a steel factory used for producing armaments, the footage of which comes from the company’s own monitoring cameras. An off-screen narrator delivers Farocki’s words, ‘an image from rolling mills is information not an image … these may possess a beauty; it is not a beauty which has been intended and calculated; industry robots use the hand as a mould but quickly leave the mould behind’. The role of this off-screen narrator has all the qualities of the acousmatic voice: its source cannot be located, it’s a voice in search of an origin.4 Farocki’s approach is a kind of mimicry of modernity’s operating principles from within. In relation to the television coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, he incorporated industrial footage of a wave machine through the narration of an unexpected thesis on vision and surveillance. Moving from the machinic age to the electronic age, guided missiles containing built-in cameras produced the, then new, virtual war for television broadcast. Farocki’s view was, ‘better to quote something already existing and create a new documentary quality’.5 In Respite, from 2007 (made with Antje Ehmann) he uses film rushes from 1944 of Westerbork camp. What had once been a Dutch refugee camp for Jews fleeing the Nazis became a transit camp run by the SS. Unedited and without sound it is the most well-known footage, or rushes, of the camps left by the SS documenting the methods of processing and deporting Jews (and others considered racially impure) to Auschwitz. These were filmed by Rudolf Breslauer, a camp inmate later to be murdered in Auschwitz, and Commander Gemmeker. Farocki repeats the film with no additional sound to narrate it, but in this loose gathering of rushes he inserts intertitles. Signalling a different approach in its relation to memory and time, duration takes on

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extraordinary significance in Farocki’s version. These rushes were not all found at the same time and have circulated as fragments, the most well-known instance being the incorporation by Alain Resnais of a segment in his 1955 Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog Notably, the entire footage is included in Respite for the first time. The deception, promulgated by the SS, of filming people because they will die is seen in the context of a film in which the appearance overall is of productivity and industry in the camp and of inexplicable calm as they board the trains for Auschwitz. The prisoners who ran the camp were, unknowingly, in their last place of refuge before being transported to Auschwitz. The often-referenced image of a close-up of a girl’s face between the doors of the transport, just before they close, as the sole image of terror was recently discovered to be a Sinti. Until her identity was known, this image was used as a symbol for the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust. There are no further close-ups and, as Deleuze would argue, when it comes to film this means no more faces. Farocki works with these gaps and misalignments.

His last work, Parallel I–IV (made with Matthias Rajmann), was exhibited at the Berlin Documentary Forum in 2014. In this work, Farocki continues his engagement with computergenerated imagery and virtual reality. In this instance, reviewing thirty years of computer gaming, the focus is on building systems: when building a game, you build a system. Sequences are combined on several screens spread amongst the seating of the theatre space, the spectator moving between listening posts. Here, the seamless images of a finished game are not the subject. Farocki shows game builders, and the sounds of their keyboards: when a skateboarder runs out of ground there is a method to show him counter-intuitively falling out of the virtual world. There is an extraordinary riff on the regimes of visuality back to antiquity – in contrast to the compressed time of modernity – embodied in these gaming systems. As articulated in the offscreen narration by Cynthia Beatt, ‘… Computer images try to achieve the effect of cinema, to surpass it, leave it behind.

The creation of computer images should be populated by images of their own design. Reality will soon cease to be the standard by which to judge the imperfect image. Instead the virtual image will become the standard by which to measure the imperfections of reality’.

1 Thomas Elsaesser in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds), Harun Farocki.

Against What? Against Whom? London: Koenig Books, London. 2 Harun Farocki; Serious Games, curated by Henriette Huldisch, was on exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 6 February 2014 – 18 January 2015. 3 Interview with Harun Farocki, ‘Harun Farocki: talking art’, 14 November 2009, Tate Modern <http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/harun-farockitalking-art-0 November 2009>. 4 From Mladen Dolar A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, p. 68. 5 Quoted in ‘A to Z of HF or: 26 Introductions to HF’ in Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (eds), Harun Farocki, Against What? Against Whom?, London: Koenig Books, 2009, p. 208.

Denise Robinson is an independent curator, writer and editor, based in London.

She was director of the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (1985–91), Head of Artistic Programs at the Arnolfini, Bristol (1998), and curator of the Cyprus pavilion, for the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.

Harun Farocki Respite (Aufschub), 2007. Stills courtesy of Harun Farocki Filmproduktion. © Harun Farocki, 2007 Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

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TRUE FAIRYTALES OF VIOLENCE Art and the Holocaust in Hungary Adam Geczy on art, history and identity politics

It is an unfortunate, perhaps ironic, consequence of the legacy of political correctness in art that one can actually be at an advantage when one is disadvantaged. This is a predicament in which the solution is bound to the problem: the culture industries are so conscious of presenting a balanced perspective, and of not denying a diversity of perspectives, that the intention tends to eclipse the content.

Just as the existence of memorials paradoxically enables people to forget, so identity politics forged in response to racism and segregation becomes shrouded in revisionist guilt, resulting in an industry of compensation that is as voyeuristic as it is coy and craven.

But if one is truly burdened with a dark history, how could this revelation benefit the culture industry? How might the exposure encourage a greater sense of engagement through the expressions of trauma in art as a more generous, ethical process of admission? What follows is my own artistic rehearsal, as an historical exploration of trauma in art. It is a venture that has also prompted the questions posed above.

This is not a confession, but rather a first-hand exploration of the complex interrelationship between family identity, historical trauma, aestheticisation and covert censorship.

To write the conclusion in advance: sometimes art can be dangerous and making sense of the fact of suppression is a truly enabling gesture.

This memoir has to do with a series of exhibitions that occurred in Berlin and Budapest in 2000–01 when I undertook an Australia Council residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The Künstlerhaus, then housed in a former hospital which had been an infirmary for influenza epidemics since the late-nineteenth century, had its own dour history, providing an appropriate backdrop. My work about my Hungarian grandfather’s involvement in the Holocaust had enjoyed considerable success in Australia, but (for all but a few) the harsh socio-political content of the work was treated in a highly abstract way, which is a more delicate way of saying it was treated with the typical apathy underlying Australian politics at large. But the controversial nature of this work was, presumably, a factor in steering the selection committee in Berlin to select me from the shortlist.

Only a year before I had secured a stipend from the GoetheInstitut to improve my German, on the basis of the work. In

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Germany, dealing with the responsibilities of the wartime past psychologically, politically, and artistically, is known as Anerkennung, a word that embraces both ‘recognition’ and ‘acknowledgement’. I had the singular ‘advantage’ of a grisly history to exploit, and could therefore call myself an Anerkennungskünstler.

In this period, around 2000, Berlin was undergoing massive redevelopment and was grooming itself to be the cultural city that it undeniably is today. In the process it was going through demographic shifts as well as dramatic architectural ones to paper over the past, most noticeably in erasing the many telltale shrapnel grooves left by the Soviet troops in the last year of the war. Within this complex dynamic of memorialising and effacement that was occurring in equal measure, German art could generally be split into two: that which was escapist – supporting artists deemed exotic and foreign like the hyperpop artist Jeff Koons – or political-historical: the one ‘happy happy’; the other deeply psychological and serious. The period of Anerkennung which began in the 1970s, as the period of rebuilding, affected Germany in way that is hard to imagine by those who had not experienced it firsthand. Heinrich Böll, who won the Nobel Prize in 1972, was a strong voice at this time, although several key works, including Der Engel Schwieg (The Silent Angel), were not published at the time.1 The suicide of Paul Celan in Paris in 1970 also weighed heavily upon German culture. Celan’s hold over German historical self-reflection was so strong that when he decamped to Barjac in France in 1992, many Germans saw this as a betrayal. In the 1970s, Anselm Kiefer emerged as perhaps the most important artist working in this genre, and he drew from Celan.

At the turn of the millennium, there was derisive discussion in Germany about artists from the outside who greedily excavated their family’s past to find some connection with the Holocaust. The incentive to join the club of artists bound by their melancholy, and their contrition on behalf of the departed, was the demonstration of a serious political commitment. Such attitudes of political correctness were the template for what is rife today. For the desire to dredge the past, and even to finesse some historical connection in order to get cultural credibility is, frankly, pornographic. Germany and Berlin in particular provide an important backdrop to the debates about cultural inheritance and belonging that are active in Australia.

It began anecdotally for me when my father and his brother were poring over a large family photograph, which included extended family and servants. They were trying to identify everyone and at one point stopped at one figure and mumbled that they were not particularly proud of that man.

A teenager at the time, I was immediately piqued by the possibility of a juicy tale, but was casually rebuffed. Many years after, at an entirely random moment, I asked my father about this figure and he told me a series of stories about this man whose name was Laszlo Endre (or Endre Laszlo since Hungarian follows the ‘oriental’ tradition of starting with the surname). And so I learnt that Endre, one of the founders

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of the Hungarian fascist movement, the Arrow Cross Party, became the minister of Jewish Affairs in the last years of the war, and was subsequently hanged with two others deemed most responsible for carrying out the Holocaust in Hungary, one of the most expeditious and massive human exterminations in human history of over four hundred thousand people in around four months.

Another family photograph, this time of my grandparents’ wedding, made the relationship decisive, as the same man stood behind my grandfather, as his best man. It was he who

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Adam Geczy From the series, The Terror of Art, 1997, type C photograph. Courtesy the artist

had helped to elevate my grandfather to county secretary of Budapest, one of the highest administrative positions in the region. The pre-eminent historian of the Hungarian Holocaust, Randolph Braham, cites him in name as signing the decree commanding the ghettoisation of the town of Rákosszentmihály on the outskirts of Budapest.2 Meanwhile, his superior Endre, minister of the Interior, who was responsible for undertaking the extermination, was deemed by the then figurehead dictator, Miklós Horthy, as fanatical and crazy. Endre is cited three times in Hannah Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial Eichmann in Jerusalem, which I read upon my arrival in Berlin in 2000.

A little later, someone alerted my father to the allegation about his own father’s culpability, and had given him the web address. My father’s reply was indignant and stiff: ‘He was a very good man.’ There are many layers to this reaction; the first has to do with the necessary psychological denial of those who had experienced horrors firsthand. My father remembers his father’s return as an emaciated British POW, while the family was still in refuge in a Bavarian village. It is widely reported that it is the children of such people who

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learn to grapple with the complexities of the circumstances, and often wear the trauma, more explicitly at least, than those who experienced it directly. And, indeed, if I know my father, as I did his mother, his father’s wife, I have no doubt my grandfather, who predeceased me, was ‘a good man’.

His predicament was central to the complications of blame: if he didn’t sign the decree, which he most probably did (pace my father’s disavowal), his family would face certain ostracism, and someone else would have signed it. The counterargument is that this mass acquiescence was what maintained the Holocaust’s momentum.

My exhibition in Budapest, Fairytales from the Last Century at the cultural centre, Trafó, dealt with the subtle and interminable fold between fable and truth, especially when related to histories of privation and violence. Curated

by Barnabás Bencsik, who is now director of the Ludwig Museum, the centre for contemporary art, in Budapest, the exhibition received significant attention, including a full page spread in the Saturday edition of the main national newspaper. In this show I included a suite of large prints of myself aping Hitler’s gestures from his rousing speeches

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in Nuremberg. I was faking a fake: Hitler’s gestures, which were meant to emanate the deepest, most authentic passions, were essentially all one big theatrical game. Another group of works mixed up family photographs with other images, such as a brooding view of Lichtenstein castle obtained from a 1960s encyclopedia. By the time of the exhibition, the images of my own stagings were, so to speak, everywhere: in ‘what’s on’ columns and magazines. The exhibition also received several reviews.

Held concurrently with and supported by the Budapest Goethe-Institut, there was a symposium held in the gallery, at which this was proclaimed the first exhibition in Hungary of its kind – the first example of Anerkennungskunst. I had never received such a palpable and serious response to this work in Australia. In the symposium I made a point of the paradox I noted earlier, namely that of having the ‘advantage’ of this unfortunate past that facilitated the auspicious set of events at hand. This reflexive attitude is and continues to be extremely important, and is arguably not taken enough into account by artists working in this mode. For there is a big ethical divide between simply enjoying being a historical vampire and noting, sceptically, that you are one.

I produced several other related sets of work after this, but none received the same attention or fanfare. At the time I was keen to put the project to rest, as I was aware of the tendency for artists who milk their identity to engage in a form of self-aggrandisement that overshadows politics and ethics. I sought out other opportunities in Budapest, pitching different work. I had naively – very naively it appears now – expected further opportunities to follow. A year after my return, in 2002, Imre Kertész, an Auschwitz survivor whose writing can be compared with Jean Améry and Primo Levi, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Exploring his work, I learned inter alia that many Hungarians felt a disappointment that their first Nobel Laureate should be Jewish. Interestingly, it was his German publisher that put him up for nomination.

Since this time, I have noticed that fascist sympathies and virulent anti-Semitism are on the rise, particularly in Hungary. I was sent further information by the mother of one of my oldest, closest friends (who is Jewish) about this.

This included the revelation that Endre, the man who had elevated my grandfather to a senior civil servant, had ejected this woman’s uncle from his mill and thrown him in the ghetto. The present-day statistics are chilling and more so the volume of placards and posters expounding anti-Semitic content. Perhaps it is time for me to return to the themes of those earlier bodies of work, as the grisly fairytales of the past are now again stark reality, supported by a new generation recklessly pursuing their own sad delusions.

Adam Geczy Installation view of Fairy Tales from the Last Century, 2001, Trafó, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Budapest. Photo courtesy Adam Geczy

1 I am grateful to Ulrika Çelik for this detail. 2 See ‘A Village: Rákosszentmihály’, on the DEGOB website for recollections on the Holocaust: <http://degob.org>.

Adam Geczy is a Sydney-based artist, writer and lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, Univerity of Sydney.

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INDEX

71 10th Shanghai Biennale: Social Factory Shanghai Power Station of Art By Rebecca Catching 72 Matthew Barney: The River of Fundament Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) By Eve Sullivan

expressions of interest The Lorne Sculpture Biennale has grown to be a significant event within the Australian sculptural scene.

The exhibition is presented within the beautiful coastal town of Lorne, nestled along the Great Ocean Road, Victoria with its unspoilt bush, pristine surf beach and grand coastal vistas.

Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2016 will showcase the expanded definition of what contemporary sculpture is, and can be. Proposals are sought from artists who work within the contemporary sculptural realm.

Curator: Julie Collins

SCULPTURE TRAIL & MAQUETTE EXHIBITION

73 A Kitten Drowing in A Well: Tribute Exhibition to Mike Kelley (1954–2012) 55 Sydenham Road, Marrickville By Craig Judd 74 Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art RMIT Gallery By Ben Byrne 74 Simon Denny: The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Wellington By Thomasin Sleigh 75 Hito Steyerl: Too Much World Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

By Kate Woodcroft 76 David Rosetzky: Gaps Australian Centre for the Moving Image

By Jared Davis 76 Working Water: Making Home Queenstown Heritage and Arts Festival, Tasmania By Jane Deeth 77 Resonant Actions | Subjectify Me Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia | Felts By Serena Wong

• Non-acquisitive award of $25,000 • People’s Choice Award $3,000 • MARS Gallery Award

MAJOR PROJECT COMMISSIONS • $10,000 Commission fee

78 Tracey Moffatt: Spirited Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

By Louise Martin-Chew 78 James Turrell: A Retrospective National Gallery of Australia, Canberra By Sarah Scott

PERFORMANCE ART COMMISSIONS

79 One Place after Another: AC4CA Perth Institute of Contemporary Art By Paola Anselmi

• $3,000 Commission

SCULPTURSCAPE • Non-acquisitive award of $5,000

80 Performance Now Queensland University of Technology Art Museum By Ellie Buttrose

SMALL SCULPTURE AWARD • Non-acquisitive award of $3,000

80 Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano: Visible Structures Dunedin Public Art Gallery, NZ By Darren Jorgensen

SCARLETT AWARD • Award for writing on contemporary sculpture $3,000 Expressions of Interest close 31st March 2015

81 Same River Twice Murray Bridge Regional Gallery/Australian Experimental Art Foundation By Stephanie Radok 82 Warlpiri Drawings: Remembering the Future National Museum of Australia By Christine Watson

email juliecollins@lornesculpture.com for EOI documents or download from

83 Christian Thompson | Dear Sylvia Australian Centre for Photography By Jo Higgins

www.lornesculpture.com

83 Horizon: Explaining the West Coast with The Clipperton Project Fremantle Arts Centre By Susan Starcken

EOI AD Artlink.indd 1

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10th Shanghai Biennale: Social Factory

Shanghai Power Station of Art 22 November 2014 – 31 March 2015 The Shanghai Biennale is something of a strange hybrid as an exhibition with international aspirations, yet one backed by a conservative and subtly xenophobic state. As such, the first couple of biennales were a process of testing the boundaries as China was beginning to open up to the outside world and contemporary art was and still is regarded with great suspicion as something potentially threatening to both political power and the moral sensibilities of ‘the people’.

2014 seems to represent a break from this tradition with a curatorial team composed of respected art professionals from greater China (Cosmin Costinas from Para Site in Hong Kong, Freya Chou from Taiwan) and other curators from Berlin, Tel Aviv and China. The result is a tightly-curated exhibition, around a truly challenging theme Social Factory, which not only touches on some politically sensitive topics but taps into the zeitgeist of China by exploring how the social is produced – an interesting approach in a country no stranger to social engineering projects and where the private is inherently public because of the dominance of friend and family networks in the lives of individuals.

In his catalogue essay the chief curator Anselm Franke defines the scope of the biennale as not merely what happens on the factory floor but ‘the myriad ways in which actions, habits, and language produce effects, including effects on subjectivity, ways of perceiving, understanding, and relating to the world’. While this definition does not really offer a terribly clear goal, further reading of the essay highlights a number of key points which draw inspiration from Chinese history: the hegemony of scientific rationalism and the adage ‘seek truth from fact’ (a phrase employed strategically by Mao and Deng Xiaoping); the questioning of subjectivity (in relation to the Chinese woodcut movement); the resilience of certain traditional structures in the face of rapid change; the oneness

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Yu Cheng-ta Practicing LIVE 2014, video and performance

of the cosmos put forth by Confucian thought and the moral wildness which Franke has transformed into a metaphor about ‘wild waters’ (though the works which visually reference water seem like a bit of a stretch); the instinct of humans to impose order on nature; and finally the transition of a society based on kinship into a society based on bureaucratic structures of collecting data and creating a concept of the social.

Franke has set forth an incredibly complex array of problems and, as such, the themes often speak louder than the individual works. That said, there were many pieces that both addressed a theme and were compelling in and of themselves. For instance Yu Cheng-ta’s Practicing LIVE (2014), a fascinating exploration of truth and fiction – a video and performance work in which Yu employed gallerists, curators, artists and collectors to play roles in a play about a family of art professionals. The humorous script is intercut by interviews with the actors about the experience of creating the play thus forcing the viewer to jump between various constructed realities.

Taking the construction of reality in a different direction, Susan Schüppli’s documentary-like Can the Sun Lie which talks of how Canada’s Inuit people have noticed that the sun is setting further west than in the past and posited the theory that the earth has rotated on its axis. The video goes on to examine how photography as a medium is now in the service of scientific rationalism – thus we see the state backed up by

the scientific order colluding to shout down other voices. Edgar Arcenaux looks at the failure of the state – the end-game to our capitalist economy in The Algorithm Doesn’t Love You a multi-part installation which features his Gods of Detroit drawings of deformed human/alien hybrids juxtaposed with the words BKANS, PUILBC SIVEERS, EDCAITUON – a metaphor for how the pillars of society have become alien and misshapen.

Hou Chun-Ming’s Asian Fathers series is part of a number of works that addresses societal pillars, in this case ‘The Asian Father’, and the way that in Taiwan’s post-martial law era ‘patriarchal fascism’ is on the decline but patriarchal structures underpinned by deep Confucian values still exist. Hou solicited memories in pictorial form via a questionnaire, created images from these sketches and then asked the participants to respond to them.

The 2014 Shanghai Biennale will be remembered as one which did not give up her secrets easily. There is little eyecandy for the crowds that now flock to the Power Station of Art (the foot traffic has brought vendors selling sweet potatoes and stinky tofu). But, also taking in the extensive film program, it’s a biennale that slowly draws out an engagement with profound ideas.

Rebecca Catching is a curator at the Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum and a founder of the online magazine Randian.

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Norman Mailer’s own wake (following the author’s death in 2007). Remarkably, this takes place in Mailer’s Brooklyn Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), apartment reconstructed on a barge that Hobart proceeds for the duration of the film 22 November – 13 April 2014 down New York City’s East River.

Making sense of the scenes of oratorical The opportunity to present this exhibition and bodily excess, also in reference to the

by Matthew Barney, only the second Egyptian mythology based on the Book of showing after Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the Dead requires some dedication to the is a major coup for MONA. You can see program notes.

So, too, acknowledgment the provocative mind of David Walsh and is required of the cast of hundreds, who Co. at work here (in liberal ways publicly perform as soloists, chorus and attendant funded institutions shy away from) in workforce for the actions that take place mounting an exhibition, derived from a in the dramatic riverside, industrial five-hour filmed performance, based on settings of Los Angeles, Detroit and New a novel by Norman Mailer in which the titular theme, River of Fundament, refers to York. Structured around the seven stages of the soul’s departure from the body as the fluid passage of human waste.

Doubling the ‘crude thoughts and fierce it passes from death to rebirth, and the triple reincarnation of the main character forces’ of Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient of the novel, the narrative is fantastically Evenings, as a convoluted meditation on interspersed with the ritualistic the death, serial rebirth and resurrection destruction of the great American car as of its ancient Egyptian protagonist, this stand-in for its human subject. Variously re-staging by Matthew Barney (with incarnated as the 1967 Chrysler Crown composer Jonathan Bepler) imposes a Imperial from Cremaster 3, a grand 1979 further narrative in the reenactment of Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and a 2001 Ford Crown police car (dramatically hoisted out of the river by crime scene investigators).

While at times unbearable to watch (also for the sheer endurance required of one sitting), this is Barney’s most redemptive work to date. In comparison with many of his previous film projects, which can seem like artworld porn, there is a magnificence in the grand narrative and pyrotechnics as scenes of spectacle, and a sense of empowerment experienced through the diverse cast stepping up Matthew Barney Canopic Chest (detail), 2009–11, cast to enact the role of the gods. Without bronze. Photo: Rémi Chauvin/MONA. Courtesy of the artist necessarily understanding all the details, and Gladstone Gallery this is one long funeral march for a culture in its patriarchal and industrial death throes, seen out with majesty and absurdity.

The film (screening as part of Cinemona) is mandatory viewing to understand the work on show. As an exhibition, it is more problematic. The objects from the performance are in this sense given a secondary role as the ‘ashes’ of the art (to quote Yves Klein). Making use of MONA’s collection of Egyptian funereal relics (arranged by the artist as part of the new display), adds a totemic,

Matthew Barney: River of Fundament

real-world value to the presentation, not to mention the significance of incorporating genuine human and animal remains. The venue, with its subterranean tomb-like vaults, indeed casts the viewer in the role of archaeologist or tomb robber. Following this logic, in the first room (like the entry chamber), the presentations of ephemera, script and production notes as storyboards in vitrines are given supplementary gravitas by the accompanying friezes and small objects. Proceeding further into the central galleries, we encounter the real bodies and more curious juxtapositions of ancient Egyptian relics and Barney’s own objets d’art, good to go for the afterlife. If their provenance and general existence as museum objects wasn’t already a somewhat questionable accompaniment to contemporary art, these dead Egyptians and their accoutrements are curiously aligned with Barney’s controversial but undeniably fecund vision.

Moving on, what really steals the show are not the human but the car bodies. Reinforcing the central role of the performance are the monumental works of sculpture formed from the radical acts of salvage, wreckage, melting, casting and compaction. Among these, Canopic Chest (2009–11), is a bronze casting of the front-end wreckage (like the organs in the jar) of the Chrysler Imperial. In reverse, as the absent figures of the mould form, Rouge Battery (2014), named after Detroit’s famously toxic river, laced with metals and pollutants, is a bed of gleaming copper and iron that represents the absent hollows of the vehicular body.

These are the literal bodies without organs of the industrial era returned to their origins as base metal.

Next to these works the limitations of the theatrical object are perhaps most elegantly revealed in Boat of Ra (2014), made up of the vestiges of Norman Mailer’s attic from the film set. This rooftop frame structure of the mobile apartment, scoured back as fine wood remnants with added bronze ropes and regalia, is like the damaged chariot in Tutankhamen’s tomb, a mere stage prop that is clearly not going anywhere.

Eve Sullivan is Executive Editor of Artlink.

Matthew Barney Boat of Ra, 2014, wood, resin-bonded sand, steel, furniture, cast bronze and gold-plated bronze. Photo: Rémi Chauvin/MONA. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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Matthew Hopkins and Hany Armanious.

It was Jesse Hogan’s flat art (painting) that actually ‘got’ Kelley. Install – Pre Imagined Monument to the Death of Self depicted two spaces, one real – a darkened cavelike domestic environment with a blow-up/foam mattress draped with colourful crochet throws. In the rafters above slightly out of scale was a stash box and two jars of KY Vaseline. The other meticulously created image depicted an art gallery with a hallucinogenic multi-coloured glittering and dripping environment overloaded with objects, images and textures. There is a carnivalesque disruption of meaning in the juxtaposition of the images and the activities (public and private) suggested by these spaces.

I am surprised, given the stature and influence of Mike Kelley, that there has not been a more sustained examination of his practice in Australia since his death.

So this is a timely, intriguing exhibition.

But apart from the video program there was an overwhelming sense of inertia – not anger or frustration, nor sensory overload. There were no clear references to the worlds outside art. Perhaps the bleak terrain of Kelley’s vision is just too difficult … he absolutely detested popular culture, he said he wanted ‘to flay it’.

Craig Judd is a curator and writer based in Sydney.

Carla Cescon Policy for Inclusive Social Situations 2014

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where one places an image of the self or loved one on a social networking site and invites the general public to download the image, to masturbate over it, ideally drenching it in bodily fluids.

55 Sydenham Road, Marrickville, Sydney 21 November – 14 December 2014 Once this act is complete, the idea is to re-photograph ‘the work’ then repost or I can easily imagine that Mike Kelley upload the ‘value added’ or defiled image would have enjoyed the entropic ironies (take your pick) to the site for everyone’s implicit in the title of the group show delectation, and for the more enthusiastic A Kitten Drowning in a Well: Tribute to make contact with the person who Exhibition to Mike Kelley (1954–2012). originally made or uploaded the image Curated by Iakovos Amperidis, works to swap and exchange similar images/ by nine Sydney based artists plus a traces/works. Grotesque, perverse, substantial video program by Kelley were adolescent (again, very Kelley-esque). appropriately crammed into the artist run Strangely, in the light of this and many space 55 Sydenham Road Marrickville. other socio-cultural phenomena, most Mike Kelley was born in Detroit deep exhibitors chose a more worthy road. in the USA industrial heartland infused Kitten was a studied even chaste homage with the great dreams of modernism, to the tenor and targets of Mike Kelley’s a world made whole, more perfect, oeuvre. Ronnie Van Hout presented with technology, with progress. Kelley the mildly amusing Mike and Ray, an was also part of the first generation to awkwardly proportioned, coarsely experience the decay of that dream when finished sculptural tableau of youthful in the late 1970s this type of progress interpenetration and scatological desire. was deemed economically unviable and An impressive complex chronology and then obsolete. All that now remains of coagulation of traces of the faux pacifist it is the Rust Belt – an ecological and group Quinto Sesto, perhaps formed by social disaster zone. It is not insignificant the charismatic Robert Santo and Warren that Kelley’s first punk rock band was Mitchell, Jennie Morcombe and ‘Head called Destroy All Monsters. A Michigan Girl’, belaboured the notion of the fictions refugee, Kelley escaped to study at inherent in the writing and reception of CalArts in Los Angeles County and history. Carla Cescon’s Policy for Inclusive formed another band called Poetics (see Social Solutions was a canvas teepee-like Aristotle). Notions of the performative form with apertures that became on (and catharsis) were vital elements in closer inspection Kelley’s work. He collaborated with a call for audience artists such as Erika Beckman, Tony participation. If so Oursler, Jim Shaw and Paul McCarthy. moved you could But it was the experience of living in the place your hands matrix of another more insidious dream in the apertures – the Hollywood movie and television to activate limp machine – that provided constant content. limbs. Cescon also In the 1980s and 90s Kelley developed an provided diagrams aesthetic that was a focussed anarchic with arrows and firebomb to explode traditional notions empty buzz-words of taste and value. He particularly and slogans Plan– enjoyed confounding male subjectivity Do–Check–Act. and the systems of power that sustain A knowing masculinity – language, law, religion and play with the the family. slightly abject Returning to the title, the first one-liner attracted bit – A Kitten Drowning in a Well – is Ruth McConchie, simultaneously pathos or bathos, very Raquel Caballero, Kelley-esque. And, as for the descriptor, Ned Jaric, in current cyber culture a Tribute is

A Kitten Drowning in a Well: Tribute Exhibition to Mike Kelley (1954–2012)

REVIEWS

Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art

Simon Denny: The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom

Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Wellington 4 October – 19 December 2014

RMIT Gallery, Melbourne 28 November 2014 – 28 February 2015

Experimenta Recharge scans the world of media art today, characterising it as increasingly transnational and postdigital in nature. Examining the role of the digital as a pervasive mediator of global culture, the show demonstrates the now commonplace blurring and traversing of boundaries between analogue and digital, actual and virtual.

Maitha Demithan’s Aiyal, Sanawat and To The Moon document members of her family using digital knits of flatbed scans of sections of their bodies. The results are otherworldly portraits, radiant in their colour and stillness. Alongside them was Cake Industries’ Simulacrum consisting of miniature busts of fifteen subjects, whose portraits the artists took using 3D printing technology. Nearby, Svenja Kratz’s Contamination of Alice: Instance #8 features a mask of a girl’s face grown from cells containing the DNA of Alice, a girl who died in 1973 and donated her body to science. All these works raise questions around the nature of humanity and its relation to the presence and representation of the human body, particularly when we are faced with the possibilities of being scanned, mapped and encoded.

Shown side-by-side, Acknowledged by Raymond Zada and Cannibal Story by Yunkarra Billy Atkins and Sohna Ariel Hayes are powerful examples of ways in which indigenous Australian culture and history can be advocated and presented using digital animation. Zada’s work animates Adelaide’s street signs, flying them over the city’s statue of Queen Victoria, positioned in Tarntanyangga/ Victoria Square, one of the only places in the city to bear a Kaurna name. Cannibal Story, meanwhile, opens an ancient story from Martu elder Atkins to younger generations by presenting it with Hayes’ arresting animation.

Tele Visions Afterlude, a program of video works produced by Emma Ramsay and Alex White, surveys the cultural

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Cake Industries Simulacrum, 2014 (detail), 3D printed portraits, frame, LED lights, motors. Image © the Artist, courtesy Experimenta Media Arts and RMIT Gallery.

Photo: Mark Ashkanasy

significance of TV following the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting.

Most interesting are the works that demonstrate and critique the medium’s sociality, such as Emile Zile’s Larry Emdur’s Suit, produced from footage of the artist appearing on The Price Is Right, and Ivan Lisyak’s In The End There Is Nothing Left To Say, an episode of Neighbours with all the dialogue removed.

Hidden in its own room Ei Wada’s Toki Ori Ori Nasu: Falling Records provides the exhibition with a monolithic centrepiece.

Four computer controlled reel-to-reel tape recorders positioned atop towering plinths gently unspool tape into display cases, the tape flowing over itself and sporadically bedding down to form sedimentary layers of time below.

Yawning groans of bass fill the room until, suddenly, the recorders shut off one by one. A peaceful pause follows, the magnitude of which is only felt when abruptly the recorders shunt into rewind and the tape flies back up, accompanied by a warped and speeding rendition of Strauss’ The Blue Danube.

Experimenta Recharge is not concerned purely with technical and formal matters.

Rather, it presents an image of media art as engaged with contemporary social, historical, political and environmental issues. It imparts, above all, a sense of the entanglement of the world, mediated by technology and played out in the passing of time.

On 20 January 2012, on the request of the FBI, New Zealand police raided the Auckland mansion of Kim Dotcom, founder of file-sharing websites Megaupload and Megavideo, who stands accused by US authorities of copyright infringement, amongst other charges.

The fulcrum of the exhibition The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom is the list of items taken in this raid, which is pinned to the gallery wall. Here are 110 items: including bank accounts, luxury cars, artworks, TVs, computer servers, video cameras, and domain names. Each of these items is represented as an A0 digital print, produced by Simon Denny in collaboration with designer David Bennewith. The gallery is also filled with 3D representations of the items: toy versions of the luxury cars, wooden sculptures of the TVs, real TVs, copies of the seized artworks, and similar versions of the jet ski and motorbike.

Much of Denny’s recent work has circled around the evolving rhetoric and culture of the technology industry. The very title and focus of the exhibition, based on the fact that Denny simply downloaded the list of items off the Internet and Dotcom’s enthusiastic collusion with the media, highlights the

Ben Byrne is a scholar, curator and artist dedicated to sonic arts, media and culture.

Simon Denny The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom 2014, installation view at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington. © Simon Denny. Photo: Shaun Waugh Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Hito Steyerl: Too Much World Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 13 December 2014 – 22 March 2015

Too Much World is a selective survey of Berlin-based Hito Steyerl’s major works from the last decade. The exhibition emphasises exploratory attempts to blend her (mostly) text and screen-based practice into the physical space of the gallery. On this level, the exhibition’s success is fairly tepid, but as a proposition on the changes that technology and digitisation have made to life and art practice, it has a lot to offer.

The show opens softly in the foyer with Red Alert (2007), a triptych of oldissue widescreen Mac monitors mounted vertically and playing the colour red.

The now-aged viewing angle technology, exacerbated by the natural light and shallow angle of the wall all caused me to be unsure of the screens’ content. Is it video or image? Is it all the same red or is it graded? By positing an experience in which our embodied perspective clouds the possible ‘truth’ of the work Steyerl exposes how naturalised and invisible the representational power of the screen has become.

The idea of viewing angles apparent in Red Alert is nicely picked up in Guards (2012), a floor-to-ceiling projection of a film shot at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Against a backdrop of well-known artworks (some furnished in postproduction) the guards demonstrate and instruct the viewer in their military approach to museum security, while touching on stories of violence in their own community. There are some captivating dolly shots of one particular guard, Ron Hicks, as he ‘runs the walls’,

clearing each gallery for possible threats.

Guards is a good example of Steryerl’s ability to pinpoint concrete intersections between art and the personal and political realms it seeks to tackle.

The next two galleries house newer works: Liquidity Inc. (2014) and HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (2013). This section of the show effectively mirrors the content-fatigue and ‘too-much-world’ feeling characteristic of browsing the internet. The screen content is disparate, highly layered, multi-modal and sometimes quite playful. In HOW NOT TO BE SEEN one of the instructions is to ‘become a single pixel’. This is demonstrated by a number of figures dancing foolishly with pixel-shaped head coverings. These absurd moments are relieving antidotes to works that really are ‘Fucking Didactic’ at times.

The closing argument is Adorno’s Grey (2012). The film depicts several conservators attempting to forensically discover the specific shade of grey that Adorno is said to have requested for his classroom. We also hear a critical discussion of the philosophical implications of the colour grey and of a protest, staged in 1969 in which three women interrupted one of Adorno’s lectures by dancing topless. In ways that are too detailed to be properly reflected in this review, these stories elegantly unveil the false polarities of the virtual and the real. All together Too Much World errs much more on the side of argument than affect but I think Steryerl’s research is perceptive and unique enough to elicit a close reading.

Kate Woodcroft hails from the suburb of Ashgrove in Brisbane and works with Catherine Sagin as ‘Catherine or Kate’.

Hito Steyerl HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational, 2013, still image, single screen from .MOV File

Thomasin Sleigh is an art writer and novelist based in Wellington, NZ.

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issues as stake. The Personal Effects mines the Dotcom narrative for its morphing relationship between the physical and digital, and the increasing tendency of digital technologies to erode the borders of an original ‘thing’ as well as the concept of ownership.

Predominant on the list of seized items are bank accounts from numerous countries and a series of domain names: Megastuff.co, Megaworld.com, Megaclicks.co etc. Denny flips these amorphous, digital, non-geo-located services into robust prints on ‘Premium Artist Canvas Polycotton’, anchoring them in space and time and on the most conventional of artists’ mediums.

Yet, as an exhibition project, The Personal Effects is politically mute. In public and media events Denny has been quick to distance himself from any opinion on Dotcom, its business case, and recent foray into New Zealand politics.

This is particularly marked given the timing of the exhibition, when many await the outcomes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, a multilateral agreement which appears likely to extend New Zealand’s copyright term (life plus fifty years) and introduce stringent laws, serving the interests of multinational corporations, which will restrict the way citizens of the participating countries can use the Internet. Whilst Denny’s work exists in the increasingly contested space between original and copy, it maintains remarkably silent on the politics of policing intellectual property in the digital age.

In 2015 Denny will represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale with Secret Power, a show that will address ‘the intersection of knowledge and geography in the postSnowden world’. It will be intriguing to see how he neutralises or otherwise contends with another overtly politicised topic.

REVIEWS

David Rosetzky: Gaps

Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne 5 August 2014 – 8 February 2015 David Rosetzky’s Gaps is a sleek, stylised video piece, following four young Australian dancers of different racial backgrounds. The video slips between what seems to be part discussion and part affected performance, set in two dance rehearsal spaces. The dancers’ dialogues vary from awkward personal reflections, to passages read out loud and shared between the performers (some of which are also quite jarring), to more natural and honest discussions on the dancers’ own subjective experiences (most notably about race).

Gaps is explicitly concerned with difference in identity, and an unraveling of the young performers’ subjectivities.

Though this is confused by the way in which the video marries this underlying theme with an aestheticised use of dance gestures, movement and the delivery of spoken word. A consideration of language – both verbal and gestural – as well as differences in the reception of meaning is a key interest of Gaps.

At times, to the backing of a somewhat ambiguous musical score, the dancers perform choreographed movements and gestures to articulate the textual passages with a form of sign language that signifies nothing. This adds a degree of linguistic confusion and abstraction for the viewer, and creates a layer of noise in the attempt to make sense of the

protagonists’ narratives and personalities.

As verbal phrases recounted by the dancers repeat and are punctuated by less ambiguous passages, the video gradually delivers satisfaction when the characters’ identities begin to take shape.

After a while, the internal logic of the work’s language games starts to form meaning.

Beyond the semantic plays of the video, and the affected chic of its particular contemporary dance aesthetic, Gaps is at its strongest in one of the performer’s discussion of her experience as an Asian Australian. The piece depicts a seemingly natural and un-performed moment, with the performer in discussion with a white male dancer about his Chinese zodiac sign of the dragon. A conflict of meaning, interpretation and position arises with his immediate assumption that the sign of the dragon is favourable or ‘good’.

This creates some tension, as the female dancer notes that hierarchical value judgements such as his do not apply in the Chinese zodiac. The male dancer then relates his zodiac sign of the dragon to the HBO series Game of Thrones, creating a further difference in position when the female dancer points to the series’ problematic racial casting.

This moment is perhaps the work’s most complex and poignant exploration of language, meaning, identity and racial privilege, revealing the ‘gaps in experience’ that the entire work seeks to interrogate.

Jared Davis is a writer and curator from Melbourne.

Working Water: Making Home

Queenstown Heritage & Arts Festival 2014 Tasmania 11–12 September 2014 For the third Queenstown Heritage & Arts Festival, Constance ARI’s Jude Abell curated Working Water: Making Home, commissioning contemporary sitespecific artworks from six Tasmanian artists for the Lake Margaret Power Station precinct. The row of modest corrugated iron houses in the rain forest that look out onto the pipeline was home to the Hydro workers from 1914 when the station was commissioned. Increasing automation, more efficient transport and changes in lifestyle expectations brought the demise of the village in the 1970s.

The overwhelming focus of the artworks is on remembering a close-knit community and nostalgia for a joyful golden past. This experience begins with Amanda Shone’s playground overlooking the station and the village, a swing oscillating back and forth in silent meditation on the interrelation between past and future, while catching glimpses of the sky in mirrored puddles.

Raef Sawford’s video unfolds the story of a bunch of children from a time when childhood meant whole days exploring with mates.

Sow by Dean Chatwin plays homage to the act of growing in this inhospitable climate by re-establishing the abundant veggie patch. In his accompanying work, Radiate, the found shells of thousands of refuge-seeking ladybirds retrace the form of a sun or turbine on the floor of a deserted house. In their retreat from the cold to the comparative safety of these empty houses the old nursery rhyme is conjured to uncanny effect. Sara Maher and Nigel Farley’s delicate soundaugmented installation, Where The Shadow Falls, marks the intervening years with the effect of the damp conditions on the fabric of the old houses – the shadows literally flaking, dissolving, falling – accentuating the unrelenting and yet strangely beautiful process of decay.

In Queenstown’s main street viewers are treated to Tara Badcock’s magical

David Rosetzky Gaps, 2014, courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne 78

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia 31 October – 19 December 2014

Subjectify Me

FELTspace, Adelaide 3 December – 19 December 2014

Two recent exhibitions in South Australia solidify the recent resurgence of performative art forms in Australia, particularly among early career and Dean Chatwin Radiate. Photo: Kim Eijdenberg experimental women practitioners.

In Resonant Actions Kate Murphy’s mystery box of embroidered postcards work Cry Me a Future (Dublin) (2006) and and memorabilia of dances, train rides Dear Kate … A Probable Portrait (2011), and rowing on the lake. The construction examines non-traditional portraiture of the work reinforces the importance of through the moving image. Addressing family and community – the artist, her one of our most basic human fears, Dear mother, father and partner each playing Kate … features a statistician’s calm voice, pivotal roles. systematically allocating mathematical In some ways this series of installations sums to the objective probability of dying are outsider’s views constructing a alone. During this soundtrack, Murray romantic past. But this perspective performs handstands while her outline is is affirmed by the ex-residents, who traced, parodying Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian returned to visit their homes. This is a Man’, undermining statistical likelihood place where time has stopped and we get with subjective experience. a chance to stop, reflect and recalibrate.

In the same exhibition, Camay Is My Through the haze of nostalgia and loss Beauty Product (2014) and No Pain, No that permeates the artworks, I take this Gain (2014) by Ray Harris, takes beauty moment to see the work in the broader rituals to the extreme. In the two-channel context of the Queenstown Festival work, No Pain, No Gain, one screen shows and the enthusiasm that this weekend Harris systematically eating bars of of cultural experience has generated. I soap, chewing, not swallowing, until find a sense of renewal – a community the soap is consumed and her mouth is reconfiguring itself, transforming from distended. The second screen features the old singular short-term economy of Harris performing, or enduring, a series mineral extraction and environmental of distorted beauty routines. The singledegradation to a more complex, multiminded focus of Harris, while completing dimensional and sustainable cultural each task, reveals these actions are more space – a revival stimulated by art. than just a superficial fix, emphasising a Tasmania’s west is perhaps the ultimate troubling internal dialogue of beauty and ‘other’– a place beyond the beyond. And self-worth. yet it heralds the future, for the Lake Physical endurance is also a common Margaret Power Station is still working theme in Subjectify Me (curated by Ray after a hundred years, and as a clean and Harris), particularly noticeable in the green hydro generator has the capacity work by Faye Mullen. On Hearing is to successfully make the transition to a 30-minute performance by Mullen, the new sustainable economy without where she repeatedly drowns and missing a beat. Marking this place rescues herself, over and over again, in through art applies a salve to heal old a Sisyphean task expressing the duality paradigms and lay down a path to a new inherent in the continual decay of our future. bodies and the denial we enact in order to continue our lives. In Brown Council’s Jane Deeth is an independent curator, writer, and work One Hour Laugh (2009), the artists educator, who runs New Audiences for Art.

force themselves to laugh for an hour non-stop. A work of endurance, it crosses from tedium to hilarity (and back again), calling attention to the ongoing tension inherent in documentation of performance and the artifice of the spectacle.

Subjectify Me also deals with the idea of transgressive acts in unexpected places, in the work of Hannah Raisin and Madison Bycroft. In Raisin’s work Milking (2008), the artist, in a clear raincoat and undies, stands on the footpath in front of a theatre and pours milk over her head, to the surprise and shock of bystanders.

Milking exposes our entrenched responses to acts that infringe on social order, addressing our unconscious reactions to unsanctioned behaviour.

Kate Mitchell, whose work is in both Resonant Actions and Subjectify Me, uses absurdity and humour to underpin her performances. In Resonant Actions Mitchell’s work Fall Stack (2012) eschews documentary style footage in favour of elaborately built sets. This five-channel video work, stacked like a totem, shows the artist continually falling through the awning of cartoonish looking shopfronts, in homage to the endless endurance and labour in our daily lives.

In both these shows the artists use their bodies to perform and articulate ongoing concerns with female subjectivity, celebrating the physicality, endurance and humour in women’s art making.

Serena Wong is an emerging curator, and co-director of FELTspace since January 2015.

Faye Mullen On Hearing, 2011, single-channel video of 30 minute performance

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Resonant Actions

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like CCTV footage, and we watch (like voyeurs) as individuals come and go.

Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane These moments are imbued with the 25 October 2014 – 8 February 2015 transitory nature of people, situations, locations – a contemporary memoir that Spirited marks Tracey Moffatt’s return speaks to the serial moments in urban life. to Australia (and a reclamation of her Spirited explores the skittish nature of Queensland roots). After twelve years in reconnection. Interspersed in the hang New York, one of few Australian artists are thirteen works Moffatt has chosen who have successfully made their mark from the Queensland Art Gallery/ internationally, with a stellar marketplace Gallery of Modern Art collection, many and curatorial reputation, Moffatt has of which, like William Robinson’s Dark returned to live in Sydney, largely Tide, Bogangar (1994), conjure the spiritual because: ‘I missed nature – Central Park connections others have to place and is not nature’. She describes her Spirit look over the shoulder of Moffatt’s Spirit Landscapes as responses ‘to places and Landscapes. landscapes meaningful to me’.

The most significant departure from Yet this exhibition, which unveils Moffatt’s previous work is Art Calls, a new work made in Australia since her spoofy series of interviews featuring ‘TV return, feels like a difficult landing. The Tracey’. Against the background of a full new photographic series, all under the moon and drifts of smoke, Tracey looks title of Spirit Landscapes (2013), express and sounds like an enthusiastic medium some of the discomfort inherent in or seer (on steroids). Made for the the reconnection of old histories. They exhibition but also pitched as a pilot for acknowledge spiritual connections, family a TV series, Art Calls narrates everything links to Cherbourg in Queensland, and draw you ever wanted to know (possibly more) on her youthful and bittersweet memories of about a range of ‘creative’ celebrities, all growing up in suburban Brisbane. ‘channelled’ via Skype to their homes and Moffatt’s Picturesque Cherbourg studios. It is playful, tongue-in-cheek, landscapes, the Night Spirits series and often gushy (on TV Tracey’s part). Yet, her Suburban Landscapes are characterised its most execrable moments (her ‘Quick by her method of ‘getting in and out’.

Call’ segment to Abdul Abdullah, in This sensibility is encapsulated in a which she suggests that ‘all the girls are small-scale video work called In & Out, mad for you’) are more than made up for which explores Moffatt’s aesthetic interest in the insights shared with the likes of in transitions. The moving image is fixed designer Jenny Kee and architect John on a doorway, pixelated and grainy Mainwaring, both under-exposed yet visionary talents.

This exhibition is a lively summation of Moffatt’s recent work and approach, with its associated elements of memoir, dislocation and rebellion.

The QAG|GOMA collection works make valuable and pertinent aesthetic and conceptual connections, with the pairing of South Korean Yoo Seung-Ho’s traditional ink paintings with Moffatt’s spooky Night Spirits a particularly strong example. The images portray a directed excavation and re-inscription of memories, which in their patent Tracey Moffatt Picturesque Cherbourg no. 3 from the discomfort make for a powerful Picturesque Cherbourg series within the Spirit Landscapes exhibition. series 2013, digital print collage on handmade paper. Gift

Tracey Moffatt: Spirited

of Dr Michael and Eva Slancar through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2014. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.

Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

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Louise Martin-Chew is a freelance writer and author.

James Turrell: A Retrospective

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 13 December 2014 – 8 June 2015 At the press launch, James Turrell declared this show to be ‘the most beautifully made of all my exhibitions’.

A daunting project for the National Gallery of Australia, Director Gerard Vaughan declared ‘its scale and scope is unlike anything in our history’. The room construction and installation of the lighting required meticulous precision.

But the NGA pulled off the challenge and it is a truly ‘phenomenal’ exhibition charting Turrell’s 50-year investigation of the ways in which light is perceived and experienced.

‘Light’, Turrell explains, ’is an elixir … Physically it’s a food. It also has an emotional effect’. The artist sees himself as part of a tradition that includes Turner, Constable, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rothko and Reinhardt. A work such as Joecar (Red) (1968) recalls both hard edge abstraction and the work of Rothko.

Consisting of a projected red stripe against the corner of two white walls, it flickers between appearing like a corner and a three-dimensional oblong.

A similar shimmering optical illusion is present in Afrum (White) (1966), a projected white shape against two white walls that moves between corner and cube. These optical illusions are also the basis for an exquisitely executed series of aquatints entitled First Light (1989–90). Other works on paper include documentation of Turrell’s monumental Roden Crater project. But in a classic earthworks dilemma, the hologram, photographs, prints, drawings and maps can only hint at the actual scale and experience of the site work.

The works on paper are, also, easily overshadowed by the sheer spectacular nature of the light works in installation.

These range from experiments with TV cathode rays utilizing 1960s technology in Bullwinkle (2001), to Bindu Shards (2010), a perceptual cell which uses the latest lighting and computer technology to take each individual viewer on an intense, immersive light and sound journey that

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 15 November – 21 December 2014

In One Place After Another the Australian Centre for Concrete Art (AC4CA) – twelve Australian and international artists – have responded to the PICA upper gallery spaces with site-specific paintings. Each artwork allows plenty of room for interpretation and analysis if you choose to dig beyond the surface but the efficacy of the paintings lies in their apparent simplicity, energy and reductive intensity.

Since its conception in WA in 2002, AC4CA has been leading a global conversation with artists across James Turrell After Green, 1993 Wedgework: fluorescent, LED and fibre-optic lights. generations. Underpinning the Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra philosophy of the group are the ideals © James Turrell . Photo © Florian Holzherr of De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg who coined the term Concrete Art in the early part of the 20th century. As Julian transports you to another space entirely.

Goddard, the group’s founder, writes The mysterious qualities of light mean that, like the effect of music, it is difficult in the catalogue essay, this is painting loaded with the ‘silence of intention’, to describe the immersive experience rejecting the need to explain itself, of Turrell’s works. The highlight of ‘relying on only its presence to produce the exhibition is the massive Ganzfeld experience’. It is what it is, and that’s all. installation, Virtually Squared (2014).

While the paintings do not have a On entering this space, one’s depth message they are far from impassive, of perceptions became blurred, and detached or void of content. Not reliant sensations shift as the lights change on storytelling or interpreting the world, colour from the most intense reds to each is contingent on its relationship the subtlest grey-whites as part of a to the physical space it occupies. The 50-minute colour cycle. The sloping floors same work in a different space might and curved walls all reflect the light, look similar but its proportions and causing you to feel almost weightless as if perspective would be necessarily altered floating within clouds. Viewing Virtually by the site thus no replicas will ever be Squared is like being inside a Rothko exactly alike. painting, only brighter and lighter.

Whether by curatorial intent or The NGA now possesses an impressive program scheduling, the installation of ‘vertical vintage’ of Turrell’s works, the exhibition on the first floor meant adding to the skyspace in the sculpture initially catching only glimpses of four garden, Within Without 2010, and paintings.

These fleeting and partial numerous works on paper, the purchase of five works from this exhibition, including Joecar (Red) (1968), After Green (1993) and Bindu Shards (2010). This extraordinary retrospective amounts to experiencing the depth of James Turrell’s remarkable oeuvre across half a century.

glimpses drew me back to the large-scale open-air wall paintings for which AC4CA is renowned. I respected the way each work explored space, remained true to each artist’s aesthetic and studio practice as well as being perfectly conceived for its scale and position.

The combination of these four paintings by Helen Smith, Alex Spremberg, John Nixon and Jan van der Ploeg on the first floor over the central void acted successfully like a summary of intent. The marked differences between them created clashes of form and colours and yet I sympathised with their sense of common propriety and democratic equality, as each equally contributed to the an overall sense of visual balance and strength. This experience permeated throughout the exhibition with the yellow OK paintings by Jurek Wybraniec, Daniel Göttin’s measured gridded work, Julianne Clifford’s encoded bitmap wall, Guillaume Boulley’s ethereal response to the PICA windows, Zora Kreuzer’s intense shafts of colour in a black room, Darryn Ansted’s spatial explorations, David Tremlett’s earthy cube and Jeremy Kirwan-Ward’s red and blue optical work on the exterior of the building wrapped on the base of the clock tower and into the main foyer.

The success of the exhibition was contingent on the ability of each artist to work within the confined setting of a gallery and still retain the strength and energy of their large-scale urban interventions. The choice of gallery spaces in Perth at the moment is, to be kind, somewhat limited but the relationship between the spatial proportions of the PICA spaces and the AC4CA showed no compromise. It worked beautifully.

Paola Anselmi is a curator, arts writer and public art co-ordinator in WA.

Sarah Scott is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Theory, Australian National University.

Julianne Clifford, John Nixon One Place After Another: AC4CA, exhibition view, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2014. Photo: Robert Frith/Acorn Photo Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

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One Place after Another: AC4CA

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Performance Now

Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane 6 December 2014 – 1 March 2015

Recent QUT graduates Clark Beaumont find themselves again in the company of international superstars Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Santiago Sierra and Marina Abramović in Performance Now, curated by RoseLee Goldberg. The rockface prop on which their opening night performance Reenactment of The Time Nicole Saved Sarah (2014) took place greets visitors in the museum foyer.

The other work in the exhibition that extends beyond the screen is Christian Jankowski’s Rooftop Routine (2008), featuring 20 hula hoops scattered in front of a projection of a young woman demonstrating hula hooping techniques to participants on adjacent rooftops. The didactic for Performance Now notes the importance of objects and installations

Allora & Calzadilla Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy, No.1, 2008, modified Bechstein piano, installation view: Gladstone Gallery, New York. Photo: David Regen © Allora & Calzadilla Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

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to contemporary performance, so it is surprising that the exhibition has so little physical presence beyond the video and projection screen.

Appealing to the realism of performance over the fantasy of theatre, the staging of these contemporary performance works tends to be quite minimal. Jérôme Bel captures the French ballerina Veronique Doisneau reflecting upon her career on an empty stage and in Stealing Beauty (2007) Guy Ben-Ner discusses with his family the historical relationship between private property and familial bonds within the showroom domestic settings of IKEA. The majority of videos in the exhibition employ the most basic camera techniques to record live performances, as in Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano No.2 (2008) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; or simple acts, such as Jesper Just’s No Man is an Island (2002) where in slow motion an awkward but enthusiastic middle-aged man dances in a square – to the amusement of onlookers – while a young man watches him and weeps.

Performances captured on camera include the street fighting demonstration video Situations (2011) by Claire Fontaine, and Nandipha Mntambo performing the choreography of a bullfighter in an empty arena for Ukungenisa (2008). Goldberg’s interests lie in ‘live performance’ and this is reflected not only in her choice of performances but also the way in which these performances are recorded.

Simple cinematography and little postproduction privileges the performer over the possibilities of the medium of video.

The exhibition covers a vast breadth of practice from the melodrama of Kalup Linzy and Ryan Trecartin to the politics of Yael Bartana and Regina Jose Galindo.

However, with the vast majority of artists in the exhibition residing in North America and Europe, I am left wondering whether this exhibition is – as it claims to be – representative of the ‘vast repository of new performance from around the world made since 2000’.

Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano: Visible Structures

Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand 29 November 2014 – 21 January 2015 There is no worse genre in contemporary art than the performance video, especially when it comes from Berlin.

A woman, dressed in black, eats a watermelon, while pretending it is a telephone. A man, dressed in black, shaves half of his hair off. Melbourne’s black-clad Mangano twins, Gabriella and Silvana, have long been in danger of falling into this awful genre, as they improvise movements that could at times be mistaken for contemporary dance.

What has saved them has been their capacity to push the intimate narcissism of this type of video art into extimacy, as their near-identical faces and bodies trace out visual ideas in relation to each other. Their doubled performances do not so much reproduce a private language, as we might expect them to, as they illuminate forms through their doubled image, ciphering the expressive and surreal.

In the southern New Zealand city of Dunedin, the sisters have installed the results of a six-week residency that extends their practice into the landscape. The bodies of the twins are hardly visible on five screens that lie at angles to each other around the gallery.

Movement is once again the subject of

Ellie Buttrose is Associate Curator of International Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano Visible Structures, 2014, installation view at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Darren Jorgensen lectures in art history at the University of Western Australia.

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Same River Twice

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their work, as shots from a car window are synchronised with still and slowly moving objects and structures, repeated shapes and reflections. The whole installation loops in a precisely timed series of symmetries that are written into footage of bridges, fences and rocks.

This immersive and thoughtful meditation on roadside trips into rural New Zealand turns outward from their bodies, finding ideographs in the landscape rather than in gestures and postures. The strategies they had used for video performances are now an expanded cinema of abstract proportions.

The sun shines through the same trees, but from different perspectives. White tape outlines farm gates, but in varying, oblong variations. A circular mirror reflects part-landscapes, reversed and juxtaposed onto grass, rock and bitumen.

In an era in which video art is ubiquitous, and performance a default, the Manganos have always been able to create enigmatic images without losing a sense of care and closeness. Here they extend their practice into a multiplicity of screens, and the subject of their work beyond the novelty of performing their identical appearance. Instead, the landscape assumes the place of their bodies, and the medium takes the place of performance, capturing the gaze with a multiplicity of angles, an assemblage of visual concepts.

Murray Bridge Regional Gallery Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide 5 December 2014 – 7 February 2015 Anyone who has ever looked after a garden knows that water is life. The much-abused Murray River somehow keeps going and flowing. though not without controversy and uncertainty.

The Same River Twice, curated by Melinda Rankin and Fulvia Mantelli over two sites – a country regional gallery and an inner-city experimental art space – refers to a saying by ancient pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus ‘no man steps in the same river twice because it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man’.

Stepping into both openings was to experience the ongoing heritage of the original inhabitants of Murray River country. We were smoked with eucalyptus bark outside both shows and formally greeted, while inside the gallery in the city a long professional dance and didgeridoo performance by Taikurtinna, led by Uncle Steve Gadlabardi Goldsmith and his son Jamie, brought home a few truths. The opening speaker at Murray Bridge, John Kean, brought in more recent art history by walking the gathering through a number of past exhibitions about the Murray River held at Swan Hill, Tandanya, the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia, among other places, over the last twenty years.

Making for a rich and detailed series of responses to the river, the exhibitions included commissioned and pre-existing art by Australian and Indigenous Australian artists: Ian Abdulla, Liz Butler, Nici Cumpston, Jonathan Jones, Heidi Kenyon, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, Pamela Kouwenhoven, Kay Lawrence, Fiona McGregor, Tom Nicholson and Ellen Trevorrow.

Among the best works were Kenyon’s constructed boxed installations of the literal fluid – Adelaide tap water in the country, Murray River water in the city – linked to very ordinary glass vessels and taps but also through the use of light and darkness, communicating the mystery, the living presence of water. This is what

Ian Abdulla Catching Fish, 1998, colour screenprint on paper. Image courtesy of the estate of Ian Abdulla and GAGPROJECTS/Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide

Tom Trevorrow, late husband of weaver Ellen Trevorrow whose Seven Sister baskets featured in a wall installation, also conveyed in his talk given in 2012, and reprinted in the catalogue, where he says ‘The land and waters is a living body’. Trevorrow’s words ‘a living body’ appear to be literally drawn onto the skin of the earth in Starrs and Cmielewski’s video showing an aerial view of the Coorong.

McGregor’s performance, shown in a video, also used the literal stream of Murray water dripping onto her naked body lying on a table of salt.

The performance was cut short by hypothermia and we actually see her shudder; this failure to proceed is somehow appropriate. Lawrence’s work also examines failure, in this case the disconnect between terms used in the English language to describe Australian places and the expectations they involve.

Lawrence used Jay Arthur’s 2003 book The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth Century Australia to find suitable phrases, and made field trips to paint en plein air along the Murray.

These painted phrases in a rubber-resist solution on small sheets of paper with careful stitch-like watercolour river scenes over them, that later came off to reveal the words, was a further act of symbolic erasure.

Overall, significant care and thought made Same River Twice memorable and an important part of a developing new phase of contemporary art where the city and the country work together.

Stephanie Radok is a writer, artist and editor.

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Warlpiri Drawings: Remembering the Future

National Museum of Australia, Canberra 15 August 2014 – 31 May 2015 This unassuming yet powerful exhibition curated by Melinda Hinkson marks the 50th anniversary of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) through a partnership between AIATSIS, the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia.

Warlpiri Drawings gives viewers a rare opportunity to see Aboriginal drawings on paper which are seldom exhibited due to their rarity and fragility.

It uses drawing as a lens through which to engage with the experience of the Warlpiri people of Lajamanu and Yuendumu from early years of contact with Europeans to 2011. Its starting point was 119 crayon drawings commissioned by anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt and his wife Joan in 1953–54 in Hooker Creek (now called Lajamanu) to document aspects of Warlpiri cosmology. Hinkson, whose PhD was on the engagement of the Warlpiri people with visual media, learned of the drawings and made them the subject of her postdoctoral research, at first in collaboration with AIATSIS staff member, Stephen Wild, then on her own.

This exhibition and its accompanying book published by Aboriginal Studies Press are the result.

Works from other collections of Warlpiri drawings that Hinkson uncovered are included, together with photographs, a film and material culture objects illuminating the works. The crayon drawings and ochre drawings on headbands collected by anthropologist Olive Pink in 1933–34, and drawings collected by manual arts teacher, David Tunley, at Yuendumu from 1967–70 are delightful. As part of the postdoctoral project, Wild and Hinkson took copies of the original Hooker Creek drawings back to contemporary Warlpiri people in 2011.

This repatriation sparked the production of over 200 drawings celebrating people’s reconnection with the early works and the relatives who had produced them, as well as remembering aspects both joyous and tragic of Warlpiri history.

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Christian Thompson – Mystic Renegade: The Promise of Return Dear Sylvia

Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney 31 January – 22 March 2015

Christian Thompson’s show at the Australian Centre for Photography, Mystic Renegade: The Promise of Return is a tightly realised and strikingly beautiful lament for lost cultures, and Abe Jangala ‘A landscape depicting hills in red, yellow and black in the desert, together with a waterhole (the languages. There’s a strange, quiet fury black circle), and a small tree’, Hooker Creek, 1953–54. to these carefully considered images. The Meggitt Collection, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and malevolent spirit figures in the triptych Torres Strait Islander Studies. Image courtesy NMA Trinity literally seethe smoke, and the haunting refrains of Thompson’s voice The Meggitt collection includes in the video work Refuge, singing in the work by men such as Larry Jungarrayi recently extinct Aboriginal language (Spencer) and Abe Jangala who went Bidjara, can be heard throughout the on to become leading artists; drawings space. It becomes an almost funereal, by women with whom Joan Meggitt otherworldly soundtrack to the whole worked, as well as drawings by younger viewing experience. men. These provide valuable art Thompson has long been interested historical insights into Warlpiri modes in cultural fragmentation and here of representation. The subject matter of he weaves mandala-like images of these drawings ranges from Dreamings; malevolent spirits; more secular views of Bidjara text in the series Eight Limbs country; to European Australian material with photographs from his Polari series.

These include the aforementioned Trinity culture and technology. portraits, with Thompson as mystic and The drawings collected by Tunley and model, and photographs of broken crystal those produced in 2011 by adults and pyres, their titles – Siren and Ariel – also children of Lajamanu and Yuendumu ripe with mythological references. extend the cross-cultural reach of An underground language, Polari the exhibition by their use of single emerged in Britain between the 1930s and point perspective representation and 1970s from the slang of travellers, thieves watercolour as well as traditional aerial and beggars. It was later appropriated perspective. The wonderful drawings of

by British gay sub-culture as a way to the 1969 American landing on the moon communicate safely in an era when are not to be missed.

Warlpiri Drawings and its accompanying homosexuality was a punishable crime.

As with all Thompson’s work, these titles book are rewarding at many levels. add a nuanced layer to our understanding Hinkson’s treatment of cross-cultural of what is being communicated here representation, of conflict and conflict resolution between Warlpiri and between and of the scale of things lost and misunderstood. Thompson breathes life Warlpiri and European Australians and spirit into these lost languages and in is both nuanced and courageous. The some strange, mystical sense, the works collaboration of Hinkson and Wild with seem to promise, or threaten even, a contemporary Warlpiri, and a range resurrection of sorts in the wake of their of other scholars, has enriched the loss. But, in the meantime, we’re just left interpretation of the historical drawings to mythologise them. and brought a valuable new collection of Also on show at ACP is a group drawings into being. photomedia exhibition, curated by Christine Watson is a freelance writer, curator and the Claire Monneraye. Dear Sylvia brings author of Piercing the Ground: Balgo Women’s Image together the work of nine international Making and Relationship to Country.

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

Susanna Castleden Grey Nomad Tracking (1:1 Passing Side), 2014, gesso on maps. Photo: Rebecca Mansell.

Image courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre

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she renders works that invite us to ponder a museological context for the nebulous ‘imagining’ of the past. On the other hand, approaching history from a more personal perspective, Vanessa Russ Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth 21 November 2014 – 29 January 2015 engages with the medium of drawing as a means of conveying her advocacy for The Clipperton Project is the name of home – her ‘heartland’. Following the the not-for-profit organisation begun Fitzroy River, she invites us to consider in 2010 that makes global investigative that, wherever we are, our ‘horizon’ seafaring voyages. Crewed by arts and Alma Haser Carrie, 2012, from Cosmic Surgery. moves with us. science practitioners, the group aspire to Courtesy and © the artist In an engaging juxtaposition of reinforce the notion that we are a global the prosaic and the monumental, citizenry with collective responsibilities. women artists whose subject matter is the Shown at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Susanna Castleden documents future representation of the female form as both Horizon: Exploring the West Coast with narratives of history and archives with literal subject and social construct. Sylvia The Clipperton Project is an exhibition of her life-sized frottage assemblage of is of course a reference to Sylvia Plath. a caravan travelling between Broome the work of seventeen artists, most from As a collection of work that includes WA, that demonstrates the extraordinary and Fremantle. Almost emblematic of documentary portraits, contemporary a generation, the phenomenon of the scope of this international initiative. Its photography and video, there is a total ‘grey nomad’ has come to occupy an title simultaneously connotes both a avoidance of cliché here as these women ambiguous identity within popular sweep of perception and an immensity intimately, unapologetically and often culture, and Castleden has devised a of possibility. It signifies the unknown humorously examine and author their fascinating methodology for manifesting countenance of ‘forever’ and the grand own understandings of women – their transient connections to place as well magnitude of the Western Australian bodies, their rituals, their politics and as the signification of a socio-economic coastline. their relationships. position.

Perdita Phillips posits an engaging Dutch photographer Marlous van de This is an exemplary show that lead-in to the scope of this show. Through Sloot, in her series Le Corps Vécu takes a interprets the WA coastline from a work that astutely aligns environmental visceral but slick look at ideas of sensory multitude of perspectives. What they issues with social change, she asks ‘what perception and corporeality. In Likjsje show is as diverse as it is resourceful – happens when an archive is for the future (2009) the sugary ice-creamy goodness of and not just the past’? This proposition from the poignant visual metaphors of the Paddle Pop is replaced with a sloppy Shane Pickett to the sea-faring coracles urges us to consider relics and residual tongue, while in Sarah (2012) the nipple

by Snapcat – the artists in Horizon exhort yet-to-be historical artifacts. What becomes a rubber pacifier. an acknowledgement of our place in the decisions are we making now that may Elsewhere, British photographer Polly potentially jinx our resolve in the future? world and present a clarion call to our Penrose in A Body of Work (2001–14) tries Informed by historical ephemera, Nien considered and responsive guardianship. wittily and doggedly to jam her body Schwarz has created a highly evocative Susan Starcken is an artist, curator, writer and lecturer in amid the hard edges and corners of work that deconstructs a cartographically in Perth. conference tables, stairwells and chairs. ‘factual’ world in order to fashion an Other highlights include Alma Hasser’s imaginary Utopian realm. A large scale Cosmic Surgery series, melding origami ‘map’ for a fictional place has been and portraiture to create disturbing rendered from standard issue charts from portraits that suggest a kaleidoscopic the 1940s, cut up and re-purposed. A state of mind, and Dina Litovsky’s patinated toy boat, folded from an empty Bachelorette series exploring the rites of powdered milk tin, sits alongside as a passage and social performances that quietly stated tribute to the human spirit exist in the public and private spaces of that makes do in hard times. Her artist women’s lives. statement furnishes a powerful adjunct to Reflecting on these two quite different a compelling work. exhibitions, the lasting impression Memory has its own evocative really is of ACP’s strong curatorial influence over history that seeks a programming. Both shows are worth coherent legitimacy in ambiguous experiencing. narrative. Jo Darbyshire plumbs artifacts and relics that reference a sense of Jo Higgins is an art writer and consultant, specialising in place and identity. Alluding to James education and digital content. She is currently working for Kaldor Public Art Projects.

Stirling’s settlement on Garden Island,

Horizon: Exploring the West Coast with The Clipperton Project

BOOKS

Battarbee and Namatjira

Martin Edmond Giramondo Publishing 2014, 341 pp.

Performance Ritual Document Anne Marsh Macmillan Art Publishing 2014, 272 pp.

Martin Edmond’s latest book is the product of a doctoral thesis undertaken in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. Fifty years ago, Albert Namatjira, the Arrernte man from Central Australia, was probably the only Indigenous artist known by name by non-Indigenous Australians and Rex Battarbee, commercial artist-cum-landscape painter from Warrnambool, was known hardly at all save perhaps as Namatjira’s teacher, certainly not as an artist in his own right.

Edmond tells a good story and, with the aid of Battarbee’s daughter Gayle, has restored something of the balance in relating the relationship of the two men, but there is one omission, more important than the lack of citations and the absence of an index – which is surely a sine qua non for any biography – there are no illustrations of the artworks of either Namatjira or Batterbee. Of the 24 images which are included, two stand out. First is Axel Poignant’s 1946 portrait of Namatjira and his wife Rubina in the MacDonnell Ranges.

The other is Rennie Ellis’ photograph of Rex taken shortly before his death in 1973.

There is absolutely no reason for the absence of Battarbee’s artwork; apart from watercolours in public collections there are those retained by the family. Edmond states that he was refused permission to reproduce any of Namatjira’s oeuvre and it is true that copyright passed to the Legend Press following its sale to John Brackenreg in 1983 by the Public Trustee of the Northern Territory for $8,500. As I have not heard of anyone before being without good reason refused permission to reproduce Namatjira’s work, I contacted Philip Brackenreg, son of John and current owner of the Legend Press. As so often in publishing, it was just a matter of money…

‘What is the use of a book’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations’. Edmond has provided the conversations but without the pictures the book can only be of limited use.

Performance art in Australia emerged in the 1970s and was supported through new organisations of the time such as the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide) and the Performance Space (Sydney).

Its legacy is a conceptual dematerialised practice that has brought a political potency to Australian art practice over the last forty years. Artists such as Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Monika Tichacek and many others have created performances that resonate with the audience long after the event.

Across six chapters, art historian Anne Marsh presents an overview of Australian performance art that commences with questions of the tension between live performance and its documentation. She refers to theorists such as Peggy Phelan who argue that ‘… being-there in real time as a member of a live audience is … the only [way] which guarantees an authentic experience of the event in time’.

While Marsh recognises the significance of ‘being-there’ she presents compelling arguments for the power of mediation, the anonymous spectator, and the ways the virtual and electronic can expand the experience of performance art.

A noticeable element throughout the book is the consistency of female artists working within Australian performance art practice. Chapters on ritual, shamanism and body art clearly articulate the powerful space that women artists occupy in using the body as a site to critique gender, politics and cultural identity.

A generous collection of evocative colour and black and white images is evidence in itself of the power of documentation. An intriguing and inherent parody throughout the book is the power of the word to evoke the power of a performance as Marsh’s descriptions of performances from Peter Kennedy to Brown Council to Stelarc chronicle the diversity and ingenuity of Australian performance art practice.

Vincent Megaw is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts and Archaeology at Flinders University, Adelaide. Together with his late wife Dr Ruth Megaw, he edited and curated the book and exhibition The Heritage of Namatjira in 1992.

Julianne Pierce is an independent producer and Chair Emerging and Experimental Arts Australia Council.

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Adrian Franklin Viking/Penguin 2014, 355 pp.

BOOKS

The Making of MONA

Place and Adornment: A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand

Kevin Murray and Damian Skinner Powerhouse Museum David Bateman Publishing 2014, 248 pp.

Adrian Franklin’s The Making of MONA collects anecdotes and images about the making of the Museum of Old and New Art. It dismantles the dismissive view of David Walsh as an eccentric millionaire-genius and of MONA as a representation of his weird mind.

The early chapters situate Walsh as collector and MONA as a private museum in larger historical contexts. The phenomenon of collecting is considered through the frame of modern consumerist society, while the history of the Western museum and concepts of museology such as the Wunderkammer and the white cube are used to explain MONA’s ideology.

Franklin emphasises the importance of collaboration at MONA. This is represented through the many voices that tell the stories of MONA: from the architects and designers, to curators and collectors, marketing managers, reviewers and of course Walsh himself. The tale of the ridding of wall labels in MONA is one example of this collaborative process, responding to Walsh’s distaste for labels at his earlier Moorilla Museum of Antiquities, leading to the creation of the O device.

The book builds a reading of MONA through the carnival trope. While this is at times stretched, it does allow Franklin to undermine the view of MONA as self-indulgent contemporary consumerism and present it as a place of generosity, tolerance and inclusiveness, traits that are too often overlooked.

The book looks sleek and hip, recalling Monanisms, the MONA museum catalogue now in its second edition. The colour scheme of hot pink on black is straight from ‘Brand MONA’, something Franklin discusses at length. Somewhat repetitive,, this is a good book to dip into rather than reading cover to cover, encouraged by the inclusion of many highquality images ranging across the collection of MONA, its architecture, construction and other miscellanea.

Place and Adornment: A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand explores over a century of jewellery practices in the Antipodes. Written by Kevin Murray (adjunct professor at RMIT and previous director of Craft Victoria) and Damien Skinner (NZ art historian, curator and previous editor of Art Jewellery Forum), the book offers an introduction to many of the shared influences within craft and artistic practices in Australia and New Zealand.

Delving into the political, as well as the personal, jewellery provides an alternative tangent through which to view Australian and New Zealand history. Beginning with the colonisation of these two countries, Murray and Skinner discuss the British tradition of gathering resources, including diamonds and precious metals, to be amassed within the Crown Jewels.

They go on to examine movements in jewellery practice through the decades from the influence of Modernism to the post-war landscape, which saw an influx of skilled craftspeople, through to contemporary practices. The role of materiality is key to their discussion, as they look at the ways that alternative and non-precious materials allowed Antipodean jewellers to break from tradition, and create a unique sense of place within their work.

Importantly, Indigenous practices of adornment are covered throughout the book, in both a historical and contemporary context. The authors discuss the contrasts between Maori and Aboriginal adornment practices, and also the impact of colonisation on Indigenous cultural practice. Their discussion of Tasmanian artist Lola Greeno is particularly relevant, with her retrospective Lola Greeno: Cultural Jewels currently touring Australia.

Within Place and Adornment jewellery is looked at through the lenses of trade, craft and art but most importantly it is examined for its role within culture as Murray and Skinner seek to define how jewellers have created a significant and independent culture of adornment in the Antipodes.

Kelli Rowe is a writer, musician and PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide.

Adelè Sliuzas is an emerging South Australian curator and writer.

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PREVIEWS

AUCKLAND

CANBERRA

Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki 14 March – 21 June 2015 www.aucklandartgallery.com

National Library of Australia 26 November 2014 – 19 July 2015 www.nla.gov.au

Billy Apple ®: The artist has to live like everybody else

Keepsakes: Australians and The Great War

Global, critical, investigative, and one of the first artists to use neon – this major retrospective spans 50 years of Apple’s pop, light, conceptual, performance, political and installation art.

Diaries, drawings, photographs, letters and mementos as well as graphic art from the First World War in the collection of the National Library.

Billy Apple Motion Picture Meets the Apple 1963 (detail), Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

LAKE MACQUARIE

(in)visible: The First Peoples and War Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery 27 March – 24 May 2015 www.artgallery.lakemac.com.au

Julie Gough Shadowland (Time Keepers), 2014, spears, fur, cushion, vellum, small video and player.

Courtesy the artist

Curated by Yhonnie Scarce and Meryl Ryan in consultation with the Aboriginal Reference Group, this exhibition considers war from an Aboriginal perspective, reflecting on frontier violence, military service and war experience.

Norman Lindsay German monster, c. 1918, poster issued by the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, Pictures Collection, National Library of Australia

MELBOURNE

The WWI Centenary Exhibition Melbourne Museum 18 April – 12 July 2015 www.museumvictoria.com.au/ melbournemuseum

Over 350 objects from the Imperial War Museum in London, including trench art and artefacts, audio-visual recordings and immersive installations on the experience of the First World War. Fragment of the plane of Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) made into a souvenir in 1918

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ADELAIDE

PP/VT (Performance Presence / Video Time)

Rebirth: Mariko Mori Art Gallery of Western Australia 8 February – 29 June 2015 www.artgallery.wa.gov.au

Australian Experimental Art Foundation 1 April – 16 May 2015 www.aeaf.org.au Curated by Anne Marsh and Nicholas Tsoutas the exhibition PP/VT brings together two generations of performance artists and the relationship between live actions and performance made for video.

PREVIEWS

PERTH

Mariko Mori began by investigating sexuality, technologies and urban life.

Her practice has expanded towards spiritual and environmental concerns.

Jill Orr Between somewhere and nowhere, 2011

Mariko Mori Kumano video still 1998, video installation, sound by Ken Ikeda. Collection of the artist

HEALESVILLE

John Marwurndjul and Gulumbu Yunupingu: Earth and Sky Shaun Gladwell BMX Channel, 2013, production still, performer: Matti Hemmings. Commissioned by De La Warr Pavilion. Courtesy the artist

SYDNEY

Shaun Gladwell

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation/ UNSW Galleries 6 March – 25 April 2015 www.sherman-scaf.org.au www.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/unsw-galleries

It’s fifteen years since Shaun Gladwell emerged with the slow mesmerising gyrations of Storm Sequence. Across two venues, the exhibition includes a major survey exhibition and a new commission, The Lacrima Chair.

BRISBANE

TarraWarra Museum of Art 28 March – 8 June 2015 www.twma.com.au

Bark paintings by John Mawurndjul concerned with the terrestrial and the body, and by Gulumbu Yunupingu drawing from traditional Yolngu stories about the Milky Way. John Mawurndjul Milmilngkan, 2006, natural earth pigments on bark. Courtesy of the artist and Annandale Galleries, Sydney © John Mawurndjul

David Lynch: Between Two Worlds GOMA 14 March – 7 June 2015 www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

David Lynch Arm of Sores, 2007, lithograph on Japanese Bunko-Shi paper. Courtesy David Lynch / © the artist Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015

David Lynch developed the Between Two Worlds exhibition of his work in collaboration with GOMA around three themes – Man and Machine, The Extraordinary, and Psychic Aches.

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FIONA HALL WRONG WAY TIME AUSTRALIAN PAVILION 56TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 9 MAY – 22 NOVEMBER 2015

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An immersive exhibition of photographs and moving image works by Magnum photographer Trent Parke; a meditation on life journeys, reflecting on the way in which the past infiltrates the present and in turn can influence the future.

See more at artgallery.sa.gov.au

A R T G A L L E R Y O F S O U T H A U S T R A L I A 14 M A R C H – 10 M A Y 2 0 15 image: Trent Parke, Australia, born 1971, Cockatoo, 2011, Newcastle, New South Wales, from the Black Rose Diaries, ©Trent Parke/Magnum Photos

PRESENTED BY

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EXHIBITION PARTNER

PHOTOGRAPHIC PARTNER

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

Artlink Issue 35:1 | March 2015