CURATED BY MELISSA KEYS
This is a poem Buxton Contemporary University of Melbourne 9 July – 7 November 2021 Exhibition and performance/ spoken word program curated by Melissa Keys Poetry and First Nations cultural advisor Jeanine Leane Poetry advisor Justin Clemens Artists & Poets Evelyn Araluen Hany Armanious Pat Brassington Kevin Brophy Janet Burchill Mitch Cairns Mutlu Çerkez Justin Clemens Aleks Danko Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser Fayen d’Evie & Benjamin Hancock Emily Floyd Rosalie Gascoigne Sam George & Lisa Radford Simryn Gill Mira Gojak Lisa Gorton Newell Harry Lou Hubbard David Jolly Jeanine Leane Bella Li Brad Aaron Modlin Tracey Moffatt Michelle Nikou John Nixon Rose Nolan Raquel Ormella Sandra Parker Mike Parr Stuart Ringholt Alex Selenitsch Sandra Selig & Leighton Craig Peter Tyndall Louise Weaver
Project Team Associate Director, Art Museums; Director, Buxton Contemporary Simon Maidment Senior Curator Melissa Keys Senior Collection and Exhibition Manager Katarina Paseta
Title This is a poem Essay Authors Justin Clemens Melissa Keys Jeanine Leane ISBN 978-0-6482584-8-3 Editor Melissa Keys
Senior Academic Programs Curator Kyla McFarlane
Copyediting and proofreading Clare Williamson
Technical Coordinator Jack Farley
Installation photography Christian Capurro
Exhibition Preparator James Needham
Design Studio Round, Melbourne
Installation Technicians Carly Fischer Clare McLean Matlok Griffiths Simone Tops
Publication and signage design Tristan Main
Carpenter/Builder Brian Scales Lighting Designer Adam Meredith Audience and Visitor Services Officer Ashlee Baldwin Gallery Supervisors Olga Bennett Anthea Kemp Gallery Attendants Lucas Andreatta Genevieve Elliot Marcela Gómez Escudero Rosie Leverton Clara Murphy Ashley Perry Gail Smith
Printing Print Graphics Stocks: Sovereign Silk 350 gsm, Knight Digital Smooth 140 gsm Edition: 600 Essay Authors — Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in Literary Studies, School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne
Cover image Mitch Cairns, Study for This is a poem 1 2021, Letraset on A4 paper (detail), courtesy of the artist This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be directed to the publisher.
4 6–73
This is a poem — Melissa Keys
8–9 Michelle Nikou / Hany Armanious 10–11 Lou Hubbard / Janet Burchill 12–15 Justin Clemens / Mike Parr 16–19 Alex Selenitsch / John Nixon 20–25 Bella Li / Sandra Selig & Leighton Craig 26–29 Jeanine Leane / Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser 30–33 & 35 Aleks Danko / Hany Armanious 34 & 36 Sandra Parker / Pat Brassington 37–39 Fayen d’Evie & Benjamin Hancock / Emily Floyd 40–41 Bella Li / David Jolly 44–47 Kevin Brophy / Louise Weaver 48–49 Evelyn Araluen / Simryn Gill 50–51 Mitch Cairns / Peter Tyndall 52–55 Newell Harry / John Nixon, Rosalie Gascoigne 56–59 Rose Nolan / John Nixon 60–63 Lisa Gorton / Mira Gojak 64–69 Simryn Gill / Raquel Ormella 70–71 & 87 Sam George & Lisa Radford / Mutlu Çerkez, Stuart Ringholt 72–75 Brad Aaron Modlin / Tracey Moffatt
© Copyright 2021 Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, the artists and authors The views expressed in this publication are those of the contributing authors and not necessarily those of the publisher. Buxton Contemporary respectfully acknowledges the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, on whose land this book was produced. We acknowledge their ancestors and Elders, who are part of the longest continuing culture in the world. Buxton Contemporary Corner Southbank Boulevard and Dodds Street Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia www.buxtoncontemporary.com
— Melissa Keys, Senior Curator, Art Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne until 9 July 2021; currently Senior Curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art — Jeanine Leane, Associate Professor in Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne
Director’s foreword — Simon Maidment
76–79
What is a poem? — Jeanine Leane
80–82
this is / not / a poem — Justin Clemens
84–86
List of works
88
Spoken word & performance program
Director’s foreword — Simon Maidment
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The Greek term ‘ekphrasis’ refers to the ability to vividly describe a scene, or, more commonly today, a work of art; it is a rhetorical device that is employed to seduce and embroil the reader. The group exhibition This is a poem at Buxton Contemporary takes ekphrastic poetry as its point of departure to cast works of art in new light and to introduce new modes of engagement with them. I am delighted to introduce this volume, which accompanies an appropriately experiential and polyphonic exhibition. As well as a celebration of the multivalent nature of visual art, this project has also served to bring together a community of practitioners across creative disciplines, in a fulsome and generous way. It does this against the backdrop of the splintered and isolated context we currently find ourselves in, and is a wonderful reminder of the redemptive power of interpretation, description, articulation and embodiment. I would like to extend my utmost appreciation to all the artists, poets, performers and collaborators who are featured within this expansive project. In particular I acknowledge Evelyn Araluen, Kevin Brophy, Mitch Cairns, Justin Clemens, Aleks Danko, Fayen d’Evie & Benjamin Hancock, Simryn Gill, Lisa Gorton, Newell Harry, Lou Hubbard, Jeanine Leane, Bella Li, Brad Aaron Modlin, Michelle Nikou, Rose Nolan, Sandra Parker, Lisa Radford & Sam George, and Alex Selenitsch, who feature alongside artists from the Buxton collection, Hany Armanious, Pat Brassington, Janet Burchill, Mutlu Çerkez, Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser, Emily Floyd, Rosalie Gascoigne, Mira Gojak, David Jolly, Tracey Moffatt, John Nixon, Raquel Ormella, Mike Parr, Stuart Ringholt, Sandra Selig & Leighton Craig, Peter Tyndall and Louise Weaver. Amongst this storied group I would like to take the opportunity to especially thank Jeanine Leane, Associate Professor in Creative Writing, and Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in Literary Studies, both colleagues here at the University of Melbourne, who participated as poets, poetry advisors and contributors to this volume, with Jeanine also performing the role of First Nations cultural advisor. On behalf of the Buxton Contemporary Advisory Board, and its co-chairs Professor Su Baker and Michael Buxton AM, I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the exhibition, associated programming and this publication. In particular we acknowledge This is a poem curator, Melissa Keys, for the nuanced and sophisticated approach she has brought not only to this exhibition, but to all the exhibitions she has curated at Buxton Contemporary as inaugural Senior Curator. This is a poem marks the last project of her tenure, and her contribution has been immense and formative for the museum. Also making significant contributions, we thank Katarina Paseta for her exceptional exhibition and collection management and Ashlee Baldwin for her very capable management of the visitor services team and the public engagement aspects of the project. Thanks also to Dr James Jiang, associate researcher in the School of Culture and Communication, for opening the exhibition with exceptional insight and aplomb, and Rinske Ginsberg, Lecturer in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, for bringing together a group of highly talented students to perform Lisa Radford and Sam George’s polyphonic vocal work The dugong sublime.
Director’s foreword
This is a poem — Melissa Keys This is a poem is a multidisciplinary project that brings contemporary art and poetry into dialogue, encompassing new commissions in a diverse mix of media and forms, live performances, a publication and an exhibition. The project draws notable artists and poets into creative discourse, blurring genres and disrupting perceived boundaries between artworks, artists and ideas. Each participant has been invited to write, perform, read or present in visual form an original work of poetry in response to an artwork held in the University’s Buxton Contemporary collection. Conceived to creatively animate the collection, This is a poem brings art, artists and poetry into orbit with audiences through an experimental and experiential exhibition that explores the longstanding tradition of ekphrastic poetry. An ekphrastic poem can be defined as a vivid description or response to a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating or reflecting on an artwork, a poet may amplify and expand its meaning.
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The rich array of poetry created in response to this invitation is variously poignant, heart-rending, playful, humorous, critical and absurd. It spans a broad range of topical themes, from the impact of colonisation, human mortality and the nature of compassion through to the very act of breathing itself. The project offers an expansive sample of poetry in multiple and often surprising forms, including concrete and visual poetry, poetry in spoken and written word, dance and movement-based expression, sound, colour poetry, found poetry and poetry as physical form and assemblage. While poetry often appears in other modes of art and is incorporated into exhibitions and within broader museum programming, a presentation of this scale and depth is uncommon. This is a poem seeks to make a meaningful contribution to an expanded expression and definition of ekphrasis – the imaginative and magical correspondence between poetry and art. This publication aims to capture, as best it can, dialogues between participating artists and poets as they are presented and performed within the museum gallery spaces, while also observing the importance of the published form and the dynamic way that art and poetry as intertwined expressions read, register and appear both on and beyond the printed page.
This is a poem
Hany Armanious
Effigy of an effigy with mirage 2010
Flat earth 2017
Michelle Nikou
Fever 103° 2021
Space sailor 2021
The world is flat (fucking me down) 2021
Woven into a large rug, an aerial view of centre pivot irrigation circles presents as both a landscape and a series of teary eyes – a compression of land, body, sorrow and sight. A headstone inscribed with a memorable line from a Sylvia Plath poem (Fever 103°, written in 1962) speaks of a high fever, a late-night delirium and the flickering intermediary states between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, knowing and not knowing. Embellished with and weighed down by cast bronze Mars bars, a jacket appears to have fallen to earth, no longer inhabited by the body that it once clothed. Rich in ambiguity and pathos, Nikou’s sculptural assemblage alludes to common human experiences of pain and loss, to a poetry of presences and absences and to the unbearable heaviness of grief. Images p. 5 Installation view, This is a poem, with Mitch Cairns, Study for This is a poem 1 2021 p. 7 Installation view, This is a poem, with Sandra Selig & Leighton Craig, Special mechanism for universal uncertainty 2010 (detail) p. 8 Installation views, This is a poem. Top (left to right): Hany Armanious, Effigy of an effigy with mirage 2010; Flat earth 2017; Michelle Nikou, Space sailor 2021; The world is flat (fucking me down) 2021; Fever 103° 2021. Lower left: Michelle Nikou, Space sailor 2021. Lower right: Michelle Nikou, Fever 103° 2021
Melissa Keys
9
Responding to Hany Armanious’s sculptural forms Flat earth and Effigy of an effigy with mirage, Michelle Nikou’s arrangement of enigmatic elements oscillates between symbolism and materiality, suggestively and elusively alluding to complex layers of possibility.
Janet Burchill
Room with my soul left out 2000
Lou Hubbard
Uneasy body 2010–21
Room with my soul left out is a painting from a series of works titled Crossbar, made by artist Janet Burchill from 1998 onwards. These paintings appropriate titles from existing artworks, presenting them as ready-made texts. The title Room with my soul left out is borrowed from a work created in 1984 by American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman. Nauman’s work exists as both a maquette (a model and form of proposition for a work) and as a large-scale installation.
There is a pleasing visual, spatial relationship and interplay between Room with my soul left out and Uneasy body. In pairing these artworks, Hubbard sets in motion a series of poetic exchanges and puzzling contemplations. For instance, one might ask, where is the location, or boundary, of ‘the room’, or what are we to make of the absent soul and the uneasy body? For Hubbard, the soul in question is not absent; rather, it’s been left out for us to receive. Hubbard’s is a perplexing art/poetry work – an absurdist offering and an enigmatic gift. Images p. 10 Installation view, This is a poem, with (front to back) Lou Hubbard, Uneasy body 2010–21; Janet Burchill, Room with my soul left out 2000 p. 12 Installation view, This is a poem, with (clockwise from left) Mike Parr, 100 breaths from (ALPHABET/ HAEMORRHAGE) black box of 100 self portrait etchings 1995–96 (detail); Hold your breath for as long as possible / Light a candle. Hold your finger in the flame for as long as possible 1972 (still); 100 breaths 2003 (still); Justin Clemens, Death Breath Chef 2021 (poster stack and spoken word audio) p. 15 Installation view, This is a poem, with (front to back) Justin Clemens, Death Breath Chef 2021; Mike Parr, 100 breaths 2003 (still)
Melissa Keys
11
As a response to, and playful further conceptual extension of, Burchill’s ‘readymade’ approach, artist Lou Hubbard presents her work Uneasy body, a pre-existing, or ‘already-made’, work from 2010. Initially conceived for an exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary, when presented in its original iteration Hubbard’s work was met with a form of trespass; a component of another artist’s work, in the form of a bottle filled with water, was positioned on the gallery floor within the spatial field of the installation. Deciding to embrace this impromptu element, Hubbard took the bottle in as an incidental happening or some sort of serendipitous ‘offering’ and now presents it here formally as part of the sculptural arrangement.
Justin Clemens, Death Breath Chef
Mike Parr Hold your breath for as long as possible / Light a candle. Hold your finger in the flame for as long as possible 1972 (from Third body program 1973, DVD compilation of 12 works, edition 2/4) 100 breaths from (ALPHABET/HAEMORRHAGE) black box of 100 self portrait etchings 1995–96
100 breaths 2003
Justin Clemens
Death Breath Chef 2021
After : Mike Parr, 100 Breaths and Hold Your Breath For As Long As Possible 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
This is a poem
50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.
in/out spurt spasm air/lessness art cancels the binary : apneic suspension of life’s autonomy breathturn :: breathstop :: breathlock so dance i to breathneed dyspnoea is air hunger bananas with greed hold an image of your face to your face with breath alone parrhasios of the true veil does not flutter in the wind of breath his face takes his breath away the years to come seemed waste of breath a waste of breath the years behind barely daring to breath or achoo every twitch of the lip the navel of a dream live death with lung wedge oor-aa-parr-haa-aah-si residue of a cut umbilicus your unbreath seek breathless fluid of the womb get art instead Mike on Mike with mike art blocks breath mama turned death M-C-M', M' > M — symbolic circulation of money in capitalism i-a-i', i' > i — imaginary escalation of objects in narcissism p-b-p', p' > p — real pollution of air in breathing hoe too doo twinks wif such a shit show a face can’t do do On my last day… I want to be able to say that I have smelled the infinite flesh of the world and that I have fully breathed its breath insult of the autonomy of breath in balance with this this this death there is an object lodged in the body how do we find it Parr he seared seer & serried parry partied shard hard like a pared pard for ward making art by choking on his art how do we find it how do we find it pariah sea of art a dunk tank of squeaking unbreath I like breathing better than working in out in out in out in out out out cucked by a suckling pucker the snuffling lunge sucks the truffle like a stuffed pug the utter Parr, he’s I a there is an object lodged in the body : how do we find it? Parr he seer he see her he sure here he sire hire he’s his hiss yes yeah there sans air how do we find it how do we find it pariah, see! one arm bandit one mouth artist the unbound badinage of a blocked mouth every breath is doing you damage he plunged his face in his lung with a chunk of his tongue eeeiooupAH the sculpted interior void of the palate and lips and throat and lungs slow, shallow, rasping, easy, free, constrained, deep breathclouds stilled through will that wills itself to tableau vivant nature morte the lack of an air of despair ruffling his hair The effort in question is, in truth, marvellous in its hopelessness daddaddaaadddaadddaaadddadaadddaaadddaaaddaaaadddaaaddddaaaddadddadda In the pathogenic air conditions of agitated and subjugated publics, inhabitants are constantly re-inhaling their own exhalate ungungggngngngoourupbluuurlblluuurlblluuuurlaaarghaaaarghaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrr i’m against nature and so should you smother the other retching the lines etched on the face by untimed breath one breathes the other don’t the atmosphobia of interiors the thanatospeleology of art how can you be inspired when you don’t breathe
57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.
if you can’t hold your lip then sew it up breathe the cool stale air of an artificial cave like the odd underman down there we’re all [ ] suprematists now ontopneumatological anoxia breathless breathtaking breathlessness tusked in your own trap to asphyxiate silent mike holey mike all is pain all unquiet stillstand standstill taking a breather a voiceless expiration of air medulla oblongata cone shaped neuronal mass master of autonomia lowest part of the brain lowest part of the stem the unbreathed breath of art halts the lowest functions without which nothing art stop life stop art stop stop who is this dusty pharaoh in the medullary pyramids the unbreathing immortal buried organless and bound within It was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breath subtracting breath to reveal the absent voice for where is there any bound or limit set if you take away this limit, that men that have no interest but the interest of breathing shall have no voice in elections? a fair rhesus snatched away its loss is there something beyond art, beyond this art? — the choking of equality by the murderous racial and epidemiological politics of our millennial world — the /lessness of cut breaths when you stop breathing do you not not-cry if you ever stop not breathing breath’s return’s terror the continuous bifurcation of airways like the negative space of fractalized life uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh to be addicted to the organs’ independence the navel withered trace of a life never breathed the pulsing of temple blood in the crush of air’s lack Just as a cirrus travels on the wind & we have truly realised that we share the same breath in the realm of the lungs air passes like clouds potential transmission of disease through the eyes and ears wending through the vacant maze of the capillaries hollowed inside Imagine a society in which the individual has to pay for the air they breath (air meters; imprisonment and rarefied air, in case of non-payment simple asphyxiation if necessary (cut off the air)). the unsubstantial air we need appears nowhere on any screen can you hold your breath to the point of death? only the others can do that for you and sometimes they do they do hey do each encrypted lipogram of exhalate is deciphered in its worldly devastations winds of the troposphere / radiance of the alethosphere OFF THE AIR in the dark of the hold crackling bronchioli are squeezed to their hair breadth ends. Now thou art an O without a figure if the artist draws breath the work is done when art draws breath it’s death
The following lines are quotations from : 4. Emmy Hemmings ; 9. W. B. Yeats ; 10. Sylvia Plath ; 21. Achille Mbembe ; 24. (and variants) Mike Parr ; 29. Marcel Duchamp ; 47. Jacques Lacan ; 49. Peter Sloterdijk ; 72. Frantz Fanon ; 74. Oliver Cromwell ; 85. Behrouz Boochani ; 89. Duchamp (again) ; 98. William Shakespeare
John Nixon
Untitled_8 2014
Alex Selenitsch monotone_8 2020 Alex Selenitsch explains monotone_8: The numbers 8, 4, 2 and 1 generate this homage to John Nixon. monotone_8 is inspired by Nixon’s work Untitled_8 of 2014. Nixon’s construction has an unfolded carpenter’s ruler placed over a surface, suggesting measurement, division and unity. Its title is blatantly neutral but has, for me, an iconic number as a suffix. I also feel a correspondence between J.N. working a flat rectangle over and over and my own behaviour with the word ‘monotone’. There are 8 letters in the word monotone; therefore, there are 8 typed works.
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Each work stretches the word monotone letter by letter across a base of four quarters. There are 4 of these and each spells out a word relating to a language action: SING, TALK, SIGN, TYPE. Each language word is repeated, giving 4 pairs, each pair a different colour. Of course, it’s all just one work – one work – and this gives the number 1.
narrative + 2020
Alex Selenitsch explains narrative +: A line goes across a territory; a story goes across its subject. Four pairs of territory (area, page, plot, zone) have a total of eight kinds of story folded out over them. The four pairs consist of quadrants of typed blocks, one letter per quarter. The lines over them (the words for the eight kinds of story) change letter by letter as they move from quadrant to quadrant. The poems confuse language, picture plane and page.
This is a poem
Melissa Keys
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n n n n n n n n n n n n o gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg o n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggo n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggt t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t
ekkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkktoTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTM e k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k kk k k k k k k t k T o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTT T T T T oT T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT o T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T M e kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk t 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ggggggggggggggggggggggggg ggggggggggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggnggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g gg g n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggn n n n nn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggn n n n n nn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt ggggggg ggggggggggggggggggggggt t gggggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n ggggggg gggggggggggggggggggggggt t ggggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggttgggggnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggt t ggggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggt t gggn n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggt t gg n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggttgnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggttnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiio SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiS o SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiSSo SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiSSS o SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiSSSSoSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiSSSSS o SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiSSSSSS o SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiSSSSSSS o SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiSSSSSSSSoSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 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Sandra Selig & Leighton Craig
Special mechanism for universal uncertainty 2010
Bella Li
The Tower 2020–21
Engaging Sandra Selig’s Special mechanism for universal uncertainty, with musical compositions by Brisbane musician Leighton Craig, poet Bella Li presents The Tower, a multi-part poem comprising text, found imagery, a suite of prints and a moving image projection of fields of colour. Li orchestrates an elaborate and ethereal interplay of elements that include text, colour, shape, sound and imagery guided by principles drawn from systems of mathematics, cosmology and astronomy and found in literature and cinema.
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The title, The Tower, alludes to a number of historical, mythological and literary towers. These include the Tower of London in Shakespeare’s Richard III; those found in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine; Cheomseongdae (the earliest known astronomical observatory tower in Asia); and the biblical Tower of Babel. The series of colour fields, both printed and moving image, comprise visual scores for the ‘musical ranges’ of the six planets known at the time of 17th-century German astronomer, mathematician and astrologer Johannes Kepler (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury). Kepler’s notations for these ranges, in Harmonicus mundi (1619), were translated into ‘colour notes’ via John MacDonald’s system of correspondences, described in The Analogy of Sound and Colour (1869). In the prints, the colour notes sounded by each planet at three key points of its orbit of the Sun – aphelion, perihelion and the midpoint of orbit – are blended to form a gradient. In the video projection, the musical ranges are represented in full, with each colour note blending into the next to mimic the constant motion of the planets. The black rectangles at the centres of the fields of colour can be read in various ways, including as a reference to the mysterious monoliths in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Images p. 17 Installation view, This is a poem, with (front, left to right) Alex Selenitsch, narrative + 2020 (detail) and monotone_8 2020 (detail); (wall) John Nixon, Untitled_8 2014 pp. 18–19 Alex Selenitsch, monotone_8 2020 p. 21 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Sandra Selig & Leighton Craig, Special mechanism for universal uncertainty 2010 (detail); Bella Li, Planet Score 2021 (still) pp. 22–23 Installation view, This is a poem, with Bella Li, The Tower 2020–21 pp. 24–25 Bella Li, The Tower, 2020–21 (detail)
This is a poem
As though surfacing from the ocean, prismatic surface held and then. Nothing, sudden rain. A sheet of ions spread and misting thinly I have been late, I have appeared late in the day, in inauspicious circumstances. I have been gone, sheet drawn over the head, face turned and repeated — through the lens a grid of suns, counting formation or collapse. At Cheomseongdae there was a spring shower, thin mist against the glass. Through the lens I saw a coloured object, a thousand kilometres in diameter, drift in the path of the lonely star.
One scene of drowning — deep in the channel, the tides — a dreadful dream, as of something stealing. Hard and brief spell of weather: the scene multiples, as all do. In the tower leading on and up, having suffered the visions that crept upon me by day, in the light that pressed through the open window. A kind of a miracle, that dream. Realised with a certain and familial patience, casting about. The miracle, I remembered, at last, arriving on the stairs, clawed and crept its way, stood upright on its spindly legs and, blinking, drew back the sash.
An absence had wandered in from the landing. Had wandered in and crossed the landing and vanished into the interior. With the eye of the instrument set at an angle of thirty degrees, through the prism refracted and apprehended: the missing centre, its edges blackly glowing. In the dying of the day I leered over the edge of a dim vertiginous well and down and saw a speck — eye of a star staring back (knew I could see it too), figures advancing armies a brilliant verge crossed and overcome time recovered and dropped into the depths as a coin. Match in the dark — I held close to the walls and said yes, this is the change I tell, remember me, remember the spell.
Entering the forest an echo of an echo, ghost of the hour, and spoke: There is no star that does not pass its life in agony, that does not die a beautiful death, unintended — more matter merely matter, in the depths of space we know exists but cannot prove. Here I am, he said, holding out his vanished wrist — There is no Babel, in this or any age, towards which to reach. Grasped the lever in one trembling hand and with the other threw the switch.
Several disappearances, twice death a feeble ray the old constellations spinning fixed, I had remained where I was, by the window’s edge, the aperture separating me precipitously from the moonlit shore, and the clouds now drifting, now and now again, across the pallid face of the moon — while across from me Time, before the tide came again along the shore in the moonlight, the apparition its face set in the direction, feet on the gravel path that soundlessly it stepped across on its way into the keep.
Though we never returned. That there was an interval for which — futurity, certainty — we never did. Late in the day and going up into the hills. I had remained, later than intended. Now dawn, black wing casting: the night begins. On the plain stochastic a city and a tower, hewn into its rough bed. That through variations in the set divides Itself into the air.
Destiny Deacon
Jeanine Leane
Forced into images 2001
Forced into Images 2021
Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser Forced into images 2001
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Forced into Images Jeanine Leane
invader vocabulary where colonial fractions cut our land, scar our bodies. Half. Quarter. One eighth. One sixteenth.
Body is water is body. This is not a metaphor. Body and water are not unlike. They are one – same body. Together. This knowing comes from before me. The body is a river of movement.
If you were not here I would not drink from a glass. The River would wash over my hand. I will bend to its shape. If you were not here I would walk to the River of my body. It would be clean and cleanse me. If you were not here I would not have to answer your questions about the colour of my skin.
Blak bodies are contested space. Invaded before they are conceived. A battleground of images. Your journey begins long before you hit the road. Skin is everyone’s business. Blak bodies are public consumption. Food for white thought. Chewed up. Shat out. Re-consumed.
We can’t breathe with your knees on our throats. We can’t breathe with your palms on our chests. We can’t breathe with fists down our necks. We can’t breathe through cell doors. In the back of your vans. Under the weight of your words. Under the force of your images.
Blak bodies are for theorists – linguists, anthropologists, historians, ethnographers, white scientists. We make data, statistical reports, policy fodder, textbooks, portraits, postcards, tourist brochures – the stuff of images.
Images pp. 26–27 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Emily Floyd, Temple of The Female Eunuch 2008 (detail); Destiny Deacon, Forced into images 2001; Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser, Forced into images 2001 (still); Jeanine Leane, Forced into Images 2021 (spoken word audio)
Alice Walker wrote, I see our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, captured and forced into images, doing hard time for all of us. Forced into images not of our own devising. Prisoners of the mind.
pp. 32–33 Installation view, This is a poem, with Aleks Danko, corner > cornered > cornerwise > 2021 (detail) pp. 34–35 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Sandra Parker, LOOMING 2021 (still); Pat Brassington, Neck 1999 (exhibition print 2021); Aleks Danko, corner > cornered > cornerwise > 2021 (detail)
Australia is my myth. A land of grids and gradients. Of maths and science that cannot read a body that it might be made of water and sand and soil. Things that have more names than I could write on this page if I could ever know them.
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In Australian minds these images become the stuff of myth and folklore or magical realism – Australia prefers a noble savage, or a witch doctor, or a cannibal, over an urban Blakfella. What threatens white people is dismissed as myth. I have never been true in Australia. Or real.
A river is a body of water. It has an arm, an elbow, a mouth. It bends. Turns. Chortles. Sings. Rages. It runs. Lies in a bed. Gives life. Destroys. Remembers everything. Toni Morrison says, All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. When they cut up and dam and straighten-out and pollute our River bodies we feel it. Damming, mining, dredging, draining, fouling. In this country rivers run inland like veins and arteries to a heart. What happens when these are cut, broken, poisoned, severed, savaged? When a River floods it is remembering its former self before it was forced into an image of no-longer-self. I am counting all that you took. Can it be put back together again – mended – sewn up with thread leaving only a memory of rough seam backstitching over time? This nation forces its image over our Countries. The Right believe that they have conquered an empty land. The Left want to restore the environment to a pristine wilderness of a peopleless space. Either way we are erased in these images. When you ask is the glass half full or is it half empty? I think either way water is forced into shape. Poured into a container. Half is a word I understand in an
This is a poem
Overleaf: Aleks Danko
corner > cornered > cornerwise > 2021
(made in response to Hany Armanious, Flat earth 2017)
Melissa Keys
opaque / oblique / & obtuse … Oh, my! What a tiring day! … HA HA – ANY HARMONY? (Im)Materiality … how long will I remember this work? On the matter of art … how long will other people remember it? The medium … is it better than works that are similarly styled? And the message … is it better than the blank white wall upon which it hangs? The dematerialisation of art … do I love this work, and, if so, how long would I love it? Living in the age of ‘post’ … how much will I think about it? Lost matter … how much would I miss it? Absolute concept … how often does this work surprise me? Concrete Universalism … how many words can I write about it? Thinking objects … how much should I pay for it? Conclusion … how much should I sell it for? Notes … what would I trade it for? References … how deep is its historical reference? Quality … and, what does it mean, and does that meaning matter? ‘Sorry for having to make you suffer’ … (after Dave Hickey, Some Things Are Better Than Others)
and, then … corner > cornered > cornerwise > opaque: 1.a. Impenetrable by light; neither transparent nor translucent. b. Not reflecting light; having no lustre: an opaque finish. 2. Impenetrable by a form of radiant energy other than visible light: a chemical solution opaque to x-rays. 3.a. So obscure as to be unintelligible: “opaque, elusive, minimal meanings” (John Simon). b. Obtuse of mind; dense. See Synonyms at dark. (dark, dim, murky, obscure, opaque, shady, shadowy; the word can also refer to something that seems to lack substance and is mysterious and possibly sinister.) – opaque n. Something that is opaque, especially an opaque pigment used to darken parts of a photographic print or negative. oblique: 1.a. Having a slanting or sloping direction, course, or position; inclined. b. Mathematics. Designating geometric lines or planes that are neither parallel nor perpendicular. 2. Botany. Having sides of unequal length or form: an oblique leaf. 3. Anatomy. Situated in a slanting position; not transverse or longitudinal: oblique muscles or ligaments. 4.a. Indirect or evasive: oblique political manoeuvres. b. Devious, misleading, or dishonest: gave oblique answers to the questions. 5. Not direct in descent; collateral. obtuse: 1. Lacking quickness of perception or intellect. See synonyms at stupid. (stupid, slow, dumb, dull, obtuse, dense.) 2.a. Not sharp, pointed, or acute in form; blunt. b. Botany. Having a blunt or rounded tip: an obtuse leaf. oh: 1. Used to express strong emotion, such as surprise, fear, anger or pain. 2. Used in direct address: Oh, sir! You forgot your keys. 3. Used to indicate understanding or acknowledgement of a statement. my: The possessive form of I. 1. Used as a modifier before a noun: my boots; my accomplishments. 2. Used preceding various forms of polite, affectionate, or familiar address: My friend, you are so right. 3. Used in various interjectional phrases: My word! My goodness! Used as an exclamation of surprise, pleasure, or dismay: Oh, my! What a tiring day! Aleks Danko, 2021
(sourced from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York 1992)
Pat Brassington
Emily Floyd
Sandra Parker
Fayen d’Evie & Benjamin Hancock
LOOMING 2021
H(e)R {~~~} ... , ... ; x 2021
Choreographer Sandra Parker’s LOOMING comprises a series of expressive actions and micro-movements performed by contemporary dancer Chloe Arnott in response to Pat Brassington’s surreal and mysterious photographic montage Neck.
Artist Fayen d’Evie and choreographer and dancer Benjamin Hancock’s collaborative movement piece titled H(e)R {~~~} ... , ... ; x, recorded and presented live, engages with Emily Floyd’s 2008 work Temple of The Female Eunuch.
Engaging with the ambiguous, haunting and strange qualities of Brassington’s image, the dancer intuitively and analytically responds to the work through a series of movements and gestures that are performed both within and outside the video frame.
Selecting the following line from Germaine Greer’s influential feminist book, which is inscribed on one component of Floyd’s installation – ‘A woman seeking alternative modes of life is no longer morally bound to pay her debt to nature’ – Hancock performs this text as an embodied typography: a sequence of fluid gestures that physically articulate each of the letters that comprise the citation.
Brassington’s Neck, says Parker, ‘reminds us of the presence of things that lurk in the shadows, out of our line of sight, things that are felt but unseen, always there’. Images p. 36 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Sandra Parker, LOOMING 2021 (still); Pat Brassington, Neck 1999 (exhibition print 2021)
36
Temple of The Female Eunuch 2008
p. 37 Installation view, This is a poem, with (front to back) Emily Floyd, Temple of The Female Eunuch 2008; Fayen d’Evie & Benjamin Hancock, H(e)R {~~~} ... , ... ; x 2021 (still)
Performed in drag, the piece embodies the shifts in gender expression that have transpired over time. Hancock’s costume echoes and re-imagines the curvaceous form that appeared on the iconic cover of the first paperback edition of The Female Eunuch, which also informed Floyd’s shapely sculpted timber figures. d’Evie and Hancock’s performance project gestures towards the shifting nature of language and the fluidity and multifaceted nature of identity, gender and self.
pp. 38–39 Installation view, This is a poem, with (front to back) Emily Floyd, Temple of The Female Eunuch 2008; Fayen d’Evie & Benjamin Hancock, H(e)R {~~~} ... , ... ; x 2021 (still)
This is a poem
Melissa Keys
37
Neck 1999
David Jolly
Hotel part of Liquid Nature 2006
Office part of Liquid Nature 2006
Beaches 2021
When We Were Young 2021
Beaches Bella Li
When We Were Young Bella Li
Barb considered herself the Barbara Hershey character in Beaches, for obvious reasons. But also because she had bangs and looked a class act in shoulder pads. Sharon would have liked to be the Bette Midler character, but wasn’t. Once, in the lunchroom, Sharon said, ‘Barb, don’t move’. And Barb obediently froze, forkful of tuna salad in mid-air. Sharon reached over and plucked something small and papery from her bangs. It turned out to be a love letter from Marty in accounts, which Barb put in the recycling bin because she was concerned about the environment. At the Christmas party, Sharon got drunk on vodka punch and disappeared partway through Richard’s slurred rendition of ‘My Heart Will Go On’. Barb went looking for Sharon, who was supposed to be shielding her from Marty, and found her in the stationery cupboard locking faces with the temp. Barb was reminded of the scene in Beaches where Barbara Hershey’s character barricades herself in an aeroplane toilet after a fight with Bette Midler’s character. Prior to this, they had been in a fancy department store, ostensibly shopping but mostly fighting: something about the fundamental incompatibility of careers and reproduction. In the stationery cupboard there was a tearful confrontation, during which the temp curled up and fell asleep. Down the hall Richard, now joined by Paula, was doing surprisingly well with the Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton duet ‘Islands in the Stream’. Sharon apologised and Barb readjusted her shoulder pads; they went back to the party. Two months later, Sharon was transferred to the inventory department on level five. They didn’t see much of each other after that.
Before the days of the long grass. Lounging in the lobby, finding love in all the wrong places.
(after David Jolly, Office part of Liquid Nature 2006)
(after David Jolly, Hotel part of Liquid Nature 2006)
This is a poem
In the afternoons there was a slow bleed of traffic — Along the street — On the facades of the tall buildings. In the dining room the waiter fumbling the plates, forgetting his lines. And the tables slightly askew, mutton in the sugar bowl. She had turned her gaze toward the fire escape, thin gaps in the walls, through which the hyacinths could be seen. Outside, the mild summer air, faint sky, fading out. Washes of colour At this hour On this day. In the room, with its view; that stubborn agility of youth — fair head turning on its stalk. Damp walls, the open door Overcome by salt dunes. And time looming in from the highway, sinking in great waves. Out on the street — only the wind and the grass, bending in the shadow of the closed hotel — and only these things were young.
Melissa Keys
41
40
Bella Li
Hiding in plain sight (Witch grass nest) 2011–12
Kevin Brophy
The Soldier’s Dream: Hiding in Plain Sight 2021
THE SOLDIER’S DREAM: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT Kevin Brophy Summer grasses — All that remains Of the soldier’s dream Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694)
Soldiers lie in long grasses hoping to hide long enough to kill and then kill again. Beyond their war another world might be made of rosin and linen thread, calico, glue, cane and felt, raffia, polystyrene, plastic, and artisan washi paper pressed from the bark of mulberry trees. If you dampen a sheet of washi paper and stretch it across a small idea, it will dry and shrink into the shape of that idea. You can put a light inside and give it the thinnest of bamboo cane legs or hang it from a hook by a thread—then your idea will live by your bed, glowing gently all night with hindsight. Last night in the street my neighbour’s white van was graffitied again. Someone’s painted ‘Rufus’ across one side and squiggled white lines on its tyres and bumpers and lights until it looks like a van a child might have sketched then scribbled all over. The owner will wash it back to its gleaming duco today, then tonight the moon’s bony old fingers of light will reach down to it and a possum-eyed vandal will draw it and score it as if it’s no more than its image on paper and our future the endless work of erasure. The graffitied van has become a rough paraphrase of itself, one that can’t be spoken, only witnessed. It’s as if, under the moon’s indifference, someone’s scribbled all over the world without knowing how to spell or even how to write. If our world could be made of rosin and linen thread, calico, glue, cane and felt, raffia, polystyrene, plastic, and artisan washi paper pressed from the bark of dear mulberry trees, we would shape it into rustling, glowing nests and we would flit, restless as Gouldian finches among our suspended scrawlygrass homes.
Melissa Keys
45
Louise Weaver
In this world a mulberry tree can live about as long as a human without saying one word,
All the while grasses breathe the one faint word that drifts among them. It might be death, death, death, death if we could hear it.
the heart of a possum can beat three hundred times every minute,
One far soldier whose eyes are as brittle as twin slicks of ice, lies in the grass wondering about reports from astronauts that space smells of gunpowder.
and a finch, brightest and shyest of birds, can weigh less than one cherry. Their nests might be made of dried mud, dreams, and the various grasses that go by the names of hairy panic, creeping bent-grass, kikuyu, rough-beard, rye, sickle and silky, drooping fescue, buffalo, witch, blue-grass, cup-grass, bamboo, wild oats and onion, twitch and spinifex, stink-grass, innocent weed, kerosene, spear and spike, spiny, lemon, canary, rat’s-tail, crab and needle-grass, meadow, fairy, feather, finger and fog-grass, weeping love-grass,
46
naked arm-grass, knotted, quaking, wallaby-grass, dog’s-tail, bristle, twirl and tuft, water-grass, swamp-grass, wire and brush.
She has one regret she could speak of if it’s needed when death asks its question: Though I know both languages, she would say, I can’t read poetry in English or Chinese without feeling bewildered. Under the moon’s indifference some creature’s soft night-paws have left shallow dents in the grass here. You know something alive’s been through here. How many could live inside a new world made of finches and soldiers, possums and paint, grasses and poems, tin foil, calico, glue, polystyrene, plastic, and artisan washi paper pressed from the gnarly bark of old pollen-heavy mulberry trees? When you dream this world it might thicken into fibres of light.
Note: Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) was a Nigerian-born UK novelist. (after Louise Weaver, Hiding in plain sight (Witch grass nest) 2011–12)
Soldiers everywhere lie in long grasses hoping to hide long enough to kill and then kill again.
Images p. 41 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) David Jolly, Hotel part of Liquid Nature and Office part of Liquid Nature both 2006
Buchi Emecheta wrote on smooth white paper of her country’s wars:
pp. 42–43 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Simryn Gill, Throwback 2007; Louise Weaver, Hiding in plain sight (Witch grass nest) 2011–12; Kevin Brophy, The Soldier’s Dream: Hiding in Plain Sight 2021; Evelyn Araluen, Throwback Inventory 2021
There are two elephants involved in this war and all around them is the grass. The grass is the one that is taking the beating.
p. 44 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Louise Weaver, Hiding in plain sight (Witch grass nest) 2011–12; Kevin Brophy, The Soldier’s Dream: Hiding in Plain Sight 2021
Later she wrote: They gave the women long grasses tied together for sweeping.
p. 48 Simryn Gill, Throwback 2007 (detail) p. 50
Sweet panic grass whispers of its wind-tangled life spent chasing rains across continents. Yellowed with age you can weave the grass stems and bind them on fingers and spindles or on twigs into baskets that mould to your hip or lie on a branch, a table, a bench, open-mouthed as nests. The lying-low soldiers succumb to unceasing headaches that attack with noiseless stealth and just before the pain arrives the soldiers see strips of tinfoil bright as finches
Label
Title detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something…
LOGOS/HA HA
Medium A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something… CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION
Date –1984-2008–
Artist
Peter Tyndall
p. 50 Installation view, This is a poem, with (right) Mitch Cairns, Figure/ground for Buxton Contemporary 2021
fly off from the edges of their sight.
This is a poem
Melissa Keys
47
our moon can be drifting away from us, caught by its attraction for some impossibly distant destination,
Simryn Gill
Throwback 2007 Throwback Inventory
Evelyn Araluen
hair, shells, bodhi leaves and lalang grass, baring river clay, cylinder kapok fibre what was given to the earth to replace what was taken areca nut casings pooling at the feet
Throwback Inventory 2021
and the slow
laterite, gelatine glue, the peel of mangosteen return of carbon to carbon
the key concern is that every carcass, no matter how ragged is an index of survivorship bias: both metal and metaphors rust language shrugs responsibilities seared on flesh words excise worlds some oceans choose to spit out their dead tell it twice, three times, tell it ancestral throw it in the back of the truck and ride it to the sea
48
describe the dusk of dammar gum over oil paintings the warning sound for monsoons air folding sticky with the scent of bougainvillea, clinging to the walls of architecture built for light summer breezes windows open to winds that do not compromise to wars then describe coconut bark, termite mound soil, seaglass and banana skin fragrance bursting with the tide metaphors rust rolling down roads woven with scooters and carts rust at roadsides for the old languages to learn new mechanisms rust at the base of a kingfisher’s nest and never learn how to swim no story is ever told once bone, milk no story is ever finished at first the tangled limbs of conquests unravelling from the spine tender salted skull gentle corrosion at the joints leave it for river, lagoon, ocean or storm build it strongest where left intact a mausoleum left open to a storm will let bones rot as they were meant to rot
This is a poem
Label Title
detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something…
LOGOS/HA HA
Medium
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something… CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION
Date –1984-2008–
Artist
Peter Tyndall
From inside my mother’s small apartment, like a ring of well-wedged hats, we sit around a table in the only corner hopeful of hosting a family gathering. It is said that biographical details create the illusion of being closer to a chosen subject; in this instance my subject is not so much my family’s coming together but rather the meal we will soon share in. As we chat among ourselves, I can hear my mother’s movements from behind the thin sleeve that separates us from the kitchenette in which she is preparing.
Mitch Cairns
Figure/ground for Buxton Contemporary 2021
Prone to escape, I look out through the window and watch as a flotilla of yachts cast off onto the bay, with more eager to enter on the slipway. In the shallows, a fisherman wades forcefully towards the skeletal remains of his boat’s trailer; his image is not lost on me. Here I am reminded of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique forms of continuity in space. To be clear, I am thinking: One large leg stretching out from the next Wet Like a fish. A recent catch Against the stream. In two dimensions. Keyword: Trophy I stay with my thoughts as serviettes are dispersed.
Newell Harry
The black saint and the sinner lady: part I 1975–2012 Untitled: white / conundrum 2021
Through this combination and complex interplay of imagery and elements, Harry creates a nuanced dialogue that engages with notions of distance – between places and people, value and meaning – and with ideas of exclusion and omission. Describing his project, Harry said in selecting Gascoigne’s and Nixon’s works,
James ‘Jimmy’ Green
Untitled (Sydney Harbour) 1972
Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Green
Table Mountain, Cape Town (from memory) c. 1980s
John Nixon
Untitled white 2011
I am interested in the formal similarities between the pieces, but also very distinct differences and it’s that tension I feel I’m responding to. Gascoigne to me is ‘local’ and Nixon the ‘international’ avant-gardist rooted in the European modernist tradition. In some sense, the schism between the ‘local’ and ‘international’ runs through much Australian art, reflecting a conundrum of where and how we place ourselves. I guess it’s also a generational thing, having never felt the desire to spend extended amounts of time in Europe or the US as past generations of Australian artists did, or indeed the ‘unknown’ photographer. As a first generation African-Australian I’ve always felt more at ‘home’ with the art and culture of the region we inhabit over the northern hemisphere. Anyway, these are some thoughts I’ve grappled with responding to these works, both of which I admire greatly for different reasons. (Newell Harry, email to Melissa Keys, 19 April 2021)
53
52
Rosalie Gascoigne Conundrum 1990
Newell Harry takes Rosalie Gascoigne’s Conundrum and John Nixon’s Untitled white as his reference points, titling his project as a confluence of theirs: Untitled: white / conundrum. Drawing Gascoigne’s and Nixon’s works into dialogue, Harry then presents them alongside an array of found, modified and recontextualised elements. Eight new photographs with colour bars have been paired with dictation tests (found online) from the era of the White Australia policy, which have been grammatically altered by the artist but otherwise remain unchanged. A slide show of 80 found Kodachromes taken between the 1950s and the 1970s (possibly by a dentist named John Sheedy) of travels throughout Europe and across Australia captures scenes of what Harry refers to as the photographer’s ‘grand tours’. Two watercolours, one painted by Harry’s late grandfather James ‘Jimmy’ Green, an amateur artist who enjoyed painting seascapes and scenes of Sydney Harbour, and the other by his grandmother Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Green, are presented alongside a work by Harry titled The black saint and the sinner lady: part I, which comprises a text banner paired with a photograph of the artist’s mother and aunt at the wedding of an interracial couple in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1975.
This is a poem
Melissa Keys
John Nixon
Colour – rhythm, film composition 1 2006 Colour – rhythm, film composition 2 2006 Colour – rhythm, film composition 3 2006 Colour – rhythm, film composition 4 2006 Colour – rhythm, film composition 5 2006
Rose Nolan
Flat flower work 2021
58
Presenting her multi-part installation piece Flat flower work alongside John Nixon’s Colour – rhythm, film composition 1–5, Rose Nolan observes the deep creative kinship that she shared with the late John Nixon for more than 30 years. Bound by similar interests in experimental painting and the legacies of constructivism and minimalism, the artists met while Nolan was a student at the Victorian College of the Arts. Nolan visited Nixon regularly at Art Projects, the first of several exhibition spaces that Nixon established throughout the course of his life. He became a mentor to Nolan, including her work in numerous artistic, curatorial and publishing ventures, as well as exhibiting alongside her as a peer. Nolan and Nixon regularly discussed ideas and exchanged artworks, and on these occasions Nixon always requested one of Nolan’s flat flower works. For this exhibition, Nolan presents a Flat flower work, created especially for Nixon, as a love poem (from one artist to another), a commemoration of their enduring connection and in memory of Nixon’s singular and irreplaceable contribution to artistic practice and community in Melbourne. Images p. 53 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) John Nixon, Untitled white 2011; Rosalie Gascoigne, Conundrum 1990; Simryn Gill, 6 Ivanhoe Street, Marrickville (Maria’s garden) 2021 (detail) pp. 54–55 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) James ‘Jimmy’ Green, Untitled (Sydney Harbour) 1972; Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Green, Table Mountain, Cape Town (from memory) c. 1980s; Newell Harry, The black saint and the sinner lady: part I 1975–2012; Untitled: white / conundrum 2021; John Nixon, Untitled white 2011; Rosalie Gascoigne, Conundrum 1990 pp. 56–57 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) John Nixon, Colour – rhythm, film composition 1–5 2006; Rose Nolan, Flat flower work 2021 p. 59 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Mira Gojak, Floating eclipse 2013–14 and Prop for instabilities 2 2012; Lisa Gorton, PROP 2021; John Nixon, Colour – rhythm, film composition 1–5 2006; Rose Nolan, Flat flower work 2021 (detail) p. 60 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Mira Gojak, Prop for instabilities 2 2012; Lisa Gorton, PROP 2021 pp. 62–63 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Mira Gojak, Floating eclipse 2013–14 and Prop for instabilities 2 2012; Lisa Gorton, PROP 2021
This is a poem
Mira Gojak
Prop for instabilities 2 2012 Floating eclipse 2013–14
Lisa Gorton
60
PROP 2021
PROP
‘The first drawing
is the outline of a shadow the sun cast on a wall’—
Stone
Stone headland by the sea—its
Two
Two pines, arrow-branched, invent
Distance
Distance there where its lines
Touch
Touch—a sea, or wall of pine-
Branch
Branch shadows, arrowing—
A
A line is a signpost—In
Its
Its distance, between sun
And
And wall, two pines interpose—
Out
Out there their shadows raise
About
About them that neutral field
In
In which each word lives in
Its
Its own landscape as though at
Home
Home—The first drawing is
The
The outline of a shadow—
A
A hand-drawn line along its
Long
Long edge is, above it, sky—
In
In sky its arrowed round is
Fixed
Fixed in vertex—Its mother
Wears
Wears an arrow—Her arms grow
From
From its sides—The first drawing
Wobbles
Wobbles about its line—is
Thingy
Thingy, hindered, makes a cloud
Now
Now drawing out of itself
In
In one continuous wave—
A
A line is a thread of wire—
The
The road to the headland is
Separated
Separated from the sea
By
By iron railings—Its sea,
Untransposable
Untransposable, massing
Alongside
Alongside, invokes these
Arrowed
Arrowed shadows it confines—
—Lisa Gorton
Note. The epigraph, loosely translated, is from the Trattato della Pittura de Leonardo da Vinci (Gaetano Milanesi and Marco Tabarrini, Rome, 1890) p. 58.
Raquel Ormella
130 Davey Street, Hobart (1/3) 2004–05 130 Davey Street, Hobart (2/3) 2004–05 130 Davey Street, Hobart (3/3) 2004–05
Simryn Gill
6 Ivanhoe Street, Marrickville (Maria’s garden) 2021
Drawn in permanent marker pen on a selection of office whiteboards, Ormella’s work depicts the Wilderness Society’s Hobart Campaign Centre as it appeared one day in the early 2000s. These skilfully executed images, created using office equipment and stationery (rather than art supplies), reveal a cluttered NGO workplace focused on utility, campaign administration and planning. The unremarkable appearance of the office space contrasts with the magnificence of the natural environments that the society has campaigned to preserve throughout its almost 50-year history. As a response to Ormella’s series of whiteboard drawings, Gill’s Maria’s garden is a drawing of a place made using its own substance: direct prints from plants, a process also known as ‘nature printing’. As a result of the pressure of the frottage, many of the plants left smears and traces of their sap and juices on the paper. Pinned through the print-drawings are typewritten magic incantations spoken by Trobriand Islanders over their yam gardens at various stages of planting, growth and harvest, collected and transliterated into English by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his two-volume study, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, first published in 1935. Images p. 64 Installation view, This is a poem, with Raquel Ormella, 130 Davey Street, Hobart (1/3, 2/3, 3/3) 2004–05 pp. 66–67 Installation view, This is a poem, with (left to right) Raquel Ormella, 130 Davey Street, Hobart (1/3, 2/3, 3/3) 2004–05; Simryn Gill, 6 Ivanhoe Street, Marrickville (Maria’s garden) 2021; Lisa Gorton, PROP 2021 (detail) pp. 68–69 Installation view, This is a poem, with Simryn Gill, 6 Ivanhoe Street, Marrickville (Maria’s garden) 2021 (detail)
Melissa Keys
65
Simryn Gill’s new work 6 Ivanhoe Street, Marrickville (Maria’s garden) is made in response to Raquel Ormella’s 130 Davey Street, Hobart and consists of impressions taken from inked plants, and parts of plants, by an action of frottage – in this instance, by rubbing with a hard tool onto sheets of paper pressed over the inked material. The work, taken together, is a record of a garden planted by Gill’s neighbour, Maria, who lived most of her adult life at the address in the title. Maria’s garden held numerous fruit trees and vines, with some productive shrubs, a few flowering plants and succulents, reminiscent of gardens in Italy, her familial homeland. At the time when this work was made, in the period after Maria died and before the property was demolished for development, it also included a crop of exotic weeds.
Mutlu Çerkez
Paired with the footage of the sea floor are scenes of Gregory Peck’s character in On the Beach, Commander Dwight Lionel Towers, seen peering through a submarine periscope looking for signs of humanity. It is a sequence that ironically underscores the artists’ and their collaborators’ open-ended exploration and search, with its multiple diversions and ellipses and no particular destination in mind but, instead, a series of natural phenomena, fragments of histories, and ideas alive with possibility.
Untitled: 17 April 2023 2004
Stuart Ringholt
Everything I own 2002
Sam George & Lisa Radford
The dugong sublime 2021
70
Sam George and Lisa Radford’s The dugong sublime is an epic absurdist poem with multiple interconnecting and intertwined cultural and historical references, narratives and ideas. George and Radford’s episodic project began with the selection of two self-portraits: a painted self-portrait by Mutlu Çerkez, Untitled: 17 April 2023 and Stuart Ringholt’s Everything I own, a bound book containing an inventory of everything that the artist owned in the year 2002. While discussing the approach that they would take in creating their ekphrastic poem as part of this exhibition, George posed the question to Radford, ‘What is the purpose of poetry?’; however, a slip of the tongue turned this question into ‘What is the porpoise of poetry?’, at which point their investigation took an oceanic turn. Responding to their selected artworks through processes of association, intuition, emotion and sensation, the artists soon replaced the porpoise with the dugong, a gentle, highly social sea creature that is of significance in numerous cultures and vulnerable to over-exploitation – vulnerability and social care being qualities that George and Radford identify in Çerkez’s and Ringholt’s approaches to art practice. Felicity Mangan’s score for The dugong sublime is, in part, based on the echosounding language of chirps, whistles and barks that dugongs use underwater in order to communicate. The artists made numerous attempts to swim with a dugong, an experience they had anticipated would be an encounter with the sublime. However, each attempt was thwarted by rolling travel restrictions, and they turned their attention locally to Port Phillip Bay – to look for a dugong in a place where they knew the animals cannot be found. While undertaking an artist’s residency at the Quarantine Station, Police Point, in the Point Nepean National Park, George recorded video footage of the sea floor. This recording conveys an absence as much as it documents the marine environment. During one of their stays in Point Nepean, the artists came upon a number of old film reels held in the Queenscliff Maritime Museum, each of which was shot in the area. Among the reels are a copy of the post-apocalyptic science fiction film On the Beach (1959) and the film version of the well-known play Hotel Sorrento (1995) by Hannie Rayson, which engages with Australia’s place in the world and the enduring impact of cultural cringe.
This is a poem
Melissa Keys
Birth certificate, 1962 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Charm alone, 1965 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Doll birth, 1972 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Heart attack, 1970 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Job hunt, 1976 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Mother’s Day, 1975 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Telecam guys, 1977 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 The Wizard of Oz, 1956 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Useless, 1974 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 Always the sheep, 1987 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Brother was mother, 1983 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Door dash, 1979 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Homemade hand-knit, 1958 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Mother’s reply, 1976 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Pantyhose arrest, 1973 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Piss bags, 1978 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Responsible but dreaming, 1984 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Scissor cut, 1980 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 Suicide threat, 1982 from the series Scarred for life II 1999
72
Brad Aaron Modlin
Compassion 2020 Images p. 71 Installation view, This is a poem, with (front to back) Mutlu Çerkez, Untitled: 17 April 2023 2004; Stuart Ringholt, Everything I own 2002; Sam George & Lisa Radford, The dugong sublime 2021 (detail) pp. 74–75 Installation view, This is a poem, with Tracey Moffatt, Scarred for life I 1994 and Scarred for life II 1999 (details); Brad Aaron Modlin, Compassion 2020 (spoken word audio)
This is a poem
Compassion Brad Aaron Modlin
Because compassion means “suffering with,” you must learn it. What you depended on must crumple up like newspaper in a bonfire. You must look into the liar’s smile and say, honestly, “I trust you.” The window will break into your hand. An authority will laugh at you without so much as covering his mouth. You must lose your grandmother’s watch in the move, or you must never meet her at all. The cut must leave a mark everyone can gawk at. You must watch as the church where you finally believed burns on TV. You must sense people like you are not supposed to be in this room, and you must force yourself to stay seated, to clutch that metal chair until it cuts into your palms. You must wonder if your father actually likes you, if your parents thought they made a mistake. You have to be picked last, and then picked last again. You must find the first cupboard empty, the final airplane full, the funeral too early. You must have your secret stolen and passed around the jungle gym, or a veterinarian must tell you, “I’m sorry.” The lightning of just-a-statistic must strike the soft spot of your head, the spot that used to give off that indescribable baby smell. I’m speaking to that baby now, and to that adult. I’m speaking to me until I believe it. I’m speaking to the part of you that lived through the very worst day of your life and kept living the next day too: Every sorrow, no matter how impossible or small, is preparation, is a gift to the next person who will need you.
Melissa Keys
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Tracey Moffatt
What is a poem? — Jeanine Leane
These words cry out and I hear them—learn to mould and shape them like clay. There should have been a time for such words. for this word—‘Nginha Nyiang’ And a word for such time Guwayu
What is a poem? the speak of my heart flowing through my hand to words on pages
First Nations Mojave poet Natalie Diaz wrote,
My first texts are hills – thickly timbered, worn into rugged ravines and rising slopes; rocks – jagged sentinels of granite that grow out of the ground like altars; thick-trunked trees – old, ringed and scarred; and fresh water – yanggu. You can hear it. Water singing through Country. Words come later. And can be a poor substitute for what the eye can behold, and the heart can feel. Gunhinurrung – my Grandmother – said paper is the new god. What is written is sacred – worshipped and revered.
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So, I read. Derrida said every text remains in mourning until it is translated.1 To believe this is to accept that a text then has a before and after life. That all words lie somewhere in a limbo until they are written or spoken for interpretation. Perhaps this is a poem. A text in mourning waiting to be heard. First Nations Waianae Hawaiian scholar Poka Laenui (aka Hayden F. Burgess) wrote of mourning as an integral phase in the colonial and decolonial process. Laenui described the mourning phase as a time where feelings of anger and injustice need time for expression in order for the healing to begin.2 I think about mourning. I think about grief as a catalyst and a space for poetry when I think about myself as a First Nations poet. First Nations Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen wrote, … it was written for me to be born in this land and to die in this land long before I became a poet myself.3 It was written for me too. Written long before there was paper. It was written in me, that I was born, belong to, and will die on stolen lands, never ceded. Is this poetry? Texts beyond words that mourn for translation. Things waiting for words. Words searching for things.
What is a poem?
When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping, is how you might translate it. Or, a river of grief.4 Diaz speaks to the limits rather than the capacity of words in the translation from one language that is not written to another that demands to be permanently marked or inscribed in and through writing. Is this what I mourn? The confinement of English words. Diaz goes on to say, But who is this translation for? And will they come to my language’s four-night funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation? When they have drunk dry my river will they join the mourning procession across our bleached desert? 5 Who is the translation for? The transforming of one word to another that is not the same but is a substitute. Something that is close to one language that seeks/ demands to understand another that already is. When I say Murrumbidya, I don’t just mean ‘river’. There is only one Murrumbidya. ‘River’ is a poor substitute. How does ‘Australia’ translate for me? I think about Derrida. I think about the situatedness of Western knowledge. Derrida said in attempting to speak the other’s language without renouncing their own, the language of colonised poets will most likely slip into the terrain of representation already fossicked by the coloniser.6 The sentiment is Derrida’s, the italics are mine. What if I changed the semantics? What if I took back or at least reclaimed some of the power to label myself rather than be labelled? What if I called myself a First Nations poet – first? To call myself a First Nations poet first is to acknowledge that I belong to a culture before and beyond colonialism. To call myself a First Nations poet is to acknowledge that I am more than a product of colonialism. I think about the situatedness of me. What do I mourn? I mourn that I can learn to read Derrida, or Proust or Marx in three years while my own language still eludes me. I can barely speak Wiradjuri.
Jeanine Leane
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We all write within a cultural context – a realm and worldview that forms and informs. Mine is Wiradjuri. Mine is not a world of books. It is a world of words and elements, seasons and cycles. I don’t learn to read words first. I learn to read things.
If empires are written, they can be unwritten. If the myths of nation are built on literature, they can also be deconstructed by it. Bit by bit. Araluen writes, It is hard to unlearn a language: to unspeak the empire, to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape, a topographic intonation.7 Sometimes the dent of one poem is so slight it is not obvious to the naked eye. But each poem that writes against the grain of empire and mythscape of nation weighs down on the existing fissure, pushing deeper and deeper until there is a gaping hole in the story of empire that becomes a space of decolonial writing.
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Araluen also writes, I am relearning these hills and saltwaters and all the places wrapped around this room we both have dagahral here lovers/fathers/friends/conquerors/ ghosts. … We are relearning this place through poetry:
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The collective ‘we’ is strong. We are unlearning. We are relearning. This is poetry. The words that can fill the space between unlearning and relearning. When I read the words of fellow First Nations poets here and across the Tasman and Atlantic, and when I read the words of Blak poets, poets of colour, I don’t feel like I am collapsing in Derrida’s terrain. I feel like I’m walking on a bridge across it and above it. My Blak Aunties who raised me said, You gotta learn to write like a whitefella, learn how they think! Not to be like ’em. So you can talk back to ’em … tell a different story.
allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.9 Writing is one of the principal instruments in the colonial tool kit. The Aunties and Audre Lorde were right – the master’s tools in the hands of more white men and women will not dismantle colonial privilege and injustice. But the master’s tools in the hands of Blak women, First Nations women is a powerful thing. This is poetry. This is a poem. It’s been too long since I sat on granite in my Country and thought Listened for the sounds of her words that say ‘Balandha—dhuraay Bumal-ayi-nya Wumbay abuny (yaboing)’—History does not have the first claim. Nor the last word. Nghindhi yarra dhalanbul ngiyanhi gin gu ‘You can speak us now!’ This is a poem.
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Does a river, a tree, a mountain mourn to be translated? Or is it me who aches to write it? Is this then poetry? The ache for me to name and say things before and beyond colonialism? Is a poem a fix for my craving?
Notes (1) Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, Routledge, London, 1992. (2) Poka Laenui (Hayden F. Burgess), ‘Processes of decolonization’, in Marie Battiste (ed.), Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, UBC Press, Vancouver, BC, 2000, pp. 150–60. (3) Evelyn Araluen, ‘The Ghost Gum Sequence’, in Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2021, p. 6. (4) Natalie Diaz, ‘The first water is the body’, cited in Layli Long Soldier, ‘Women and Standing Rock’, Orion Magazine, https://orionmagazine.org/article/women-standing-rock/; accessed 8 July 2021. (5) Ibid. (6) Jacques Derrida, cited in Vijay Mishra, ‘Aboriginal representations in Australian texts’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 1987, https://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/readingroom/2.1/Mishra.html; accessed 8 July 2021. (7) Evelyn Araluen, ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal’, in Araluen, Dropbear, p. 8. (8) Ibid., p. 9. (9) Audre Lorde, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, in Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, Berkeley, CA, 1984, p. 112.
Audre Lorde wrote, … survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may
What is a poem?
Jeanine Leane
It seems, in principle, that there is no subject – or object – excluded from art. Art can, de facto and de jure, take on any subject it desires, even if, as is invariably the case, it can be criticised or censored for doing so. Sometimes art even takes itself as its own subject or object. Such a route might tend to formalism, abstraction or hermeticism: to formalism, insofar as art thereby focuses its attentions on its own processes of focusing its attention; to abstraction, insofar as art engages in a second-order process of reflection; to hermeticism, because with all this formalism and abstraction going on, the art that emerges will likely encrypt non-representational passages. One of the great poems of European modernism – notorious for its experimentation with all sorts of elements, not least the abyssal reflexivity of its images and its outrageous rupture of lineation – is Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (A throw of dice) (1897), which rachets up such tendencies to an unprecedented extremity:
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An insinuation simple in the silence enrolled with irony or the mystery 1 Mallarmé’s poem is (perhaps) a poem about what it means to be a poem, a singularity that speaks about (its own) singularity in such a way that the very distinction between showing and speaking becomes fraught and obscure. The struggle between form and formlessness, meaning and meaninglessness, art and its absence, is paramount. Yet the apparent contrary can also be the case. What could be more ordinary than – even as straightforward as – a description of a painting in words, a painting of a sculpture, a model of a building? In these cases, one artwork represents another, just as an artwork can represent a face or a building or a landscape; that is, without any flagrant spiralling into an insinuating enigma. Take another famous late-modernist classic, W.H. Auden’s The Shield of Achilles (1952):
She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead.2
You get the situation immediately: a woman is looking over a maker’s shoulder at the image that the latter has inscribed upon a shield. We are witnesses to a very tangible scene – one, it quickly turns out, of high expectations dashed by menacing disappointments. Auden’s title, moreover, directs us to the most famous depiction of a shield in ancient literature, that found in Book XVIII of Homer’s Iliad. So Auden’s verses about a shield are also about Homer’s verses
this is / not / a poem
about a shield. Achilles’ mother, the silver-footed nymph Thetis, has approached Hephaestus, the crippled smith of the Olympian gods, to make her son a set of new armour to replace the one he lost when Patroclus, his best friend, was killed by the Trojan Hector. The shield Hephaestus makes is not just any shield: it is a cosmic work of art, created by a god. It doesn’t just protect its bearer; it also overwhelms with its composition, its materials, its splendour. Both poems, therefore, reflect on images and on poetry, on the poetry of images and the poetry of the poetry of images, on earth and sky, divinities and mortals, on the aesthetics of war and the wars of aesthetics, on universal order and disorder. So if art about art can be evasive and abstruse, it can also be concrete and direct – and sometimes all at once. These divisions, these tensions, are evidently a crucial part of the point. One of the ancient rhetorical terms that tried to name this tension within and between art and the arts, art and non-art, is ‘ekphrasis’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word entered English in the early 17th century, partly as a borrowing from Latin, partly from Greek. In ancient Greek it had meant primarily ‘to recount’ and later acquired the supplementary meaning ‘to describe’. In this sense, ekphrasis denominates the attempt to represent, in as intense and lively a form as possible, a scene or event at which the viewer or auditor or reader had not been present. Yet ekphrasis quickly took on an apparently very different significance: that of ‘a literary device in which a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described in detail’.3 In this case, the question or problem concerns not only what ‘art’ is or does – but what it might mean to state that the ‘arts’ are themselves irreducibly multiple. There’s dance, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, theatre, cinema (to name only a few), and each uses different materials in different ways in different spaces to different ends. Or do they? For they can also combine with each other, refuse each other, comment on each other. No art is homogeneous: each contains multitudes. Nor are the arts static: part of the power of the arts is the power to become other than they are. Yet are all arts equally as ‘arty’ as each other? Do they all share the same relation to what is ‘not art’ as each other? Do they all have a fundamental affinity or even a rivalry with each other? Does the very multiplicity of the arts put into question the unity, even the concept, of ‘art’ itself? These are the sorts of issues that ekphrasis throws up. In any poem that takes another artwork or another kind of artwork as its subject or object, a particularly intensive form of questioning is at stake. It’s even – in the full sense of the word – existential. And this aspect of ekphrasis is particularly intense and fraught today, in a world in which all the arts are in a state of extreme self-questioning, fracturing, division, resynthesising and so on. As Bhisham Bherwani writes: Contemporary visual artists habitually challenge the boundaries of conventional painting and sculpture, of collage and illustration, of architecture and engineering. Their modes of representation conspicuously different from those of literature, they nonetheless share, as makers, their creative impulses with poets. In our mechanized and technologized age, ekphrastic poetry, too, can embrace more than traditional, predictable genres.4
Justin Clemens
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this is / not / a poem — Justin Clemens
Bherwani’s demand for non-traditional experiments in poetic ekphrasis is answered by This is a poem. If the inventiveness of all the works in the show, whether ‘art’ or ‘poetry’, speaks for itself – ‘speaking for’ in this context self-evidently being a flagrant and questionable metaphor – let us just cite one, Bella Li’s The Tower (2020–21). Comprised of monochrome collages of found images, digital colour prints, written poems and a video piece, the work sets itself a literally cosmic destiny. The title alludes to the Tower of Babel, the great Biblical image of scattering and discord, of mutually incommensurable languages, but also to the towers of ancient observatories such as Cheomseongdae in South Korea, as well as the notorious monoliths of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The Tower responds to Sandra Selig’s Special mechanism for universal uncertainty (2010), with its accompanying musical compositions provided by Leighton Craig. A new kind of ekphrasis, The Tower is itself a constellation of word and image, sound and silence, the found and the made, a whirling and shattering of the light of the stars and the music of the spheres, at once ancient, hypermodern, disparate, convergent, cosmic and cosmetic, composed of and invoking various arts and multitudinous natures. Perhaps even Mallarmé is in there too, numbering:
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on some vacant and superior surface the successive shock in the way of stars of a total account in the making.5 Such is surely one ekphrastic dream of art and the arts: to recreate in its own way the greatest of all poems, the cosmos itself.
Notes (1) Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems, trans. with commentary H. Weinfield, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994, p. 134. (2) W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, p. 294. (3) ‘ekphrasis, n.’, OED Online: Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/Entry/59412; accessed 29 June 2021. (4) Bhisham Bherwani, ‘The state of the art: thoughts on ekphrastic poetry’, American Poetry Review, vol. 45, no. 4, July/August 2016, p. 37. (5) Mallarmé, p. 144.
Image p. 83 Mitch Cairns, Study for This is a poem 2 2021 p. 87 Installation view, This is a poem, with Sam George & Lisa Radford, The dugong sublime 2021 (detail)
this is / not / a poem
Evelyn Araluen Throwback Inventory 2021 poem Courtesy of the artist
Hany Armanious Effigy of an effigy with mirage 2010 cast polyurethane resin, fibreglass and pewter with pigment 132 × 104.8 × 83.8 cm
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Flat earth 2017 pigmented polyurethane resin 25.2 × 30 × 2 cm edition of 2 + 1 AP The Michael Buxton Collection
Pat Brassington Neck 1999 (exhibition print 2021) pigment print edition of 3 72 × 54 cm
Kevin Brophy The Soldier’s Dream: Hiding in Plain Sight 2021 poem video by Oskar Weimar sound by Josh Peters 8:39 minutes Courtesy of the artist
Janet Burchill Room with my soul left out 2000 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 167 × 182 cm
Mitch Cairns
Fayen d’Evie & Benjamin Hancock
Simryn Gill
Mira Gojak
Lou Hubbard
Tracey Moffatt
Figure/ground for Buxton Contemporary 2021 archival digital prints, paper serviette, magnets 3 parts, installation dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial, Sydney
H(e)R {~~~} ... , ... ; x 2021 performance poem and video video, colour, sound 6:23 minutes Courtesy of the artists
Throwback 2007 interior parts of a 1980s Tata truck cast in termite mound soils, river clay, laterite, seashells, fruit skins (banana, mango, mangosteen), leaves (bodhi, sea almond, durian), coconut bark and fibre, areca nut casings, kapok, lalang grass, banana trunk, bougainvillea flowers, gelatin glue, damar resin, milk 82 parts, installation dimensions variable
Prop for instabilities 2 2012 wire, steel rod, copper tubing, aluminium strapping, wood, masking tape 250 × 130 × 100 cm
Uneasy body 2010–21 shower screens, door panels, tray table, towel rack, lino, floor lamp, bottle, water, cotton 40 × 280 × 280 cm Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne
Birth certificate, 1962 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 19/50 80 × 60 cm
Emily Floyd
Untitled: 17 April 2023 2004 oil on canvas 40.5 × 30 cm
Temple of The Female Eunuch 2008 vinyl, polyurethane and pokerwork on wood 100 parts, installation dimensions variable
Justin Clemens
Rosalie Gascoigne
Death Breath Chef 2021 poem Courtesy of the artist
Conundrum 1990 sawn retro-reflective road signs on wood 183 × 152.5 cm
Mutlu Çerkez
Aleks Danko corner > cornered > cornerwise > 2021 mixed-media installation comprising timber, plywood, laser prints, acrylic paint, pencil, synthetic/plastic rug Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Destiny Deacon Forced into images 2001 series of 10 lightjet prints from Polaroid originals edition 17/20 4 prints, each 77 × 95 cm; 6 prints, each 95 × 77 cm
Sam George & Lisa Radford The dugong sublime 2021 two-channel video installation and accompanying performance with Veronica Franco v Instagram bronze nipples; sound by Felicity Mangan; performance development with Evelyn Pohl and Yundi Wang; video adaptation of On the Beach, 1959 (director Stanley Kramer); script adaptation from Hotel Sorrento, 1990 (playwright Hannie Rayson) 3:58 minutes Courtesy of the artists
Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fraser Forced into images 2001 super 8 transferred to video, colour, silent edition 4/20 9 minutes
6 Ivanhoe Street, Marrickville (Maria’s garden) 2021 etching ink, pencil on kozo paper; direct prints of plants from Maria’s garden—fruit trees: an orange, a mandarin, two lemon trees, a loquat, a black mulberry, a white mulberry, a peach tree, a persimmon tree, a pomegranate, an avocado, a chestnut, a fig, a flowering plum; smaller fruiting plants: two grape vines, prickly pear, cassava (this may have come under the fence from the neighbour’s garden), a small knot of banana trees, fennel, a stand of flowering ginger, two dense strelitzias (also known as bird of paradise); various roses: white and pink bushes, and a very wild (and thorny) pale yellow rambler; smaller flowering plants: dahlias, geraniums, hydrangeas, mirabilis or 4 o’clock flower; some bulbs: red amaryllis, orange crocosmia, arum lilies; succulents: two kinds of jade plant, large leafed and small leafed, a large spiky aloe vera, unknown succulent with scalloped leaves; indoor plants that appear to have escaped: ponytail palm with a large bulbous base, mother-in-law’s tongue, arrowhead philodendron, a variegated dracaena that has grown as tall as a tree; in the empty vegetable beds: self-seeded brassicas (kale?), oregano, dandelions, fleabane, couch grass, pink oxalis, various tall grasses; morning glory vine over most of the garden; typed Trobriand Islands magic formulae for growing yams, from Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1965, on recycled bond paper; pins; framed diagram Assisted by Marcus Dyer-Harrison with Dane Macintosh and Hana Shimada Courtesy of the artist and Utopia Art Sydney
Floating eclipse 2013–14 gouache, acrylic, fibre-tipped pen on paper 3 parts, each 150 × 100 cm
Lisa Gorton PROP 2021 poem Courtesy of the artist
Newell Harry The black saint and the sinner lady: part I 1975–2012 two parts: banner ink screenprint on Tongan ngatu, unique, sheet 232 × 80 cm, framed 245 × 92 cm; framed Lambda print on Kodak lustre, unique, image 55 × 79 cm, framed 63 × 86.5 cm Untitled: white / conundrum 2021 two-part mixed media installation part one: archival inkjet prints on Kodak lustre paper of 8 restored photographs from found archive of 35 mm Kodachrome slides, found text, artist’s stamp images each 20 × 45 cm; framed each 43 × 63 cm; part two: 80 selected Kodachrome slides, slide projector, wood projection block, steel and acrylic table table 76 × 78 × 92 cm; projection block 18 × 25 × 9.5 cm
David Jolly Hotel part of Liquid Nature 2006 watercolour on paper 50.5 × 69.5 cm Office part of Liquid Nature 2006 watercolour on paper 50.5 × 69.5 cm
Jeanine Leane Forced into Images 2021 poem Courtesy of the artist
Bella Li The Tower 2020–21 digital prints 10 parts, each 28.5 × 19 cm Beaches 2021 poem Planet Score 2021 colour poem projection When We Were Young 2021 poem Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Brad Aaron Modlin
James ‘Jimmy’ Green
Compassion 2020 poem Courtesy of the artist
Untitled (Sydney Harbour) 1972 watercolour on paper sheet 23 × 29.2 cm (irreg.); framed 43 × 63 cm
Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Green Table Mountain, Cape Town (from memory) c. 1980s gouache on paper sheet 18 × 27 cm; framed 63 × 43 cm
Charm alone, 1965 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm Doll birth, 1972 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm Heart attack, 1970 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm Job hunt, 1976 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm Mother’s Day, 1975 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm Telecam guys, 1977 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm The Wizard of Oz, 1956 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm Useless, 1974 from the series Scarred for life I 1994 photolithograph edition 23/50 80 × 60 cm Always the sheep, 1987 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Brother was mother, 1983 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm
Collection of Newell Harry
This is a poem
Melissa Keys
Door dash, 1979 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Homemade hand-knit, 1958 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Mother’s reply, 1976 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Pantyhose arrest, 1973 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Piss bags, 1978 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Responsible but dreaming, 1984 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Scissor cut, 1980 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm Suicide threat, 1982 from the series Scarred for life II 1999 photolithograph edition 35/60 80 × 60 cm
Michelle Nikou Fever 103° 2021 granite 18 × 47.5 × 38 cm Space sailor 2021 black cotton jacket, bronze casting 6 × 86 × 79 cm The world is flat (fucking me down) 2021 hand-knotted pure new wool 215 × 315 cm Courtesy of the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
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Unless otherwise stated, all works are from: The University of Melbourne Art Collection Michael Buxton Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Michael and Janet Buxton 2018–19
John Nixon
Sandra Parker
Colour – rhythm, film composition 1 2006 enamel on board 45 × 60 cm
LOOMING 2021 dancer: Chloe Arnott videographer: Cobie Orger lighting: Jennifer Hector costume: Emily Collett two-channel video, colour, sound 14:47 minutes Courtesy of the artist
Colour – rhythm, film composition 2 2006 enamel on board 45 × 60 cm Colour – rhythm, film composition 3 2006 enamel on board 45 × 60 cm Colour – rhythm, film composition 4 2006 enamel on canvas 45 × 60 cm Colour – rhythm, film composition 5 2006 enamel on board 45 × 60 cm Untitled white 2011 enamel on canvas and wood 62 × 76 × 4 cm
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Untitled_8 2014 enamel and wooden ruler on canvas 20 × 37 cm The Michael Buxton Collection
Label
Hold your breath for as long as possible / Light a candle. Hold your finger in the flame for as long as possible 1972 (from Third body program 1973, DVD compilation of 12 works, edition 2/4) video, black and white, silent 3:28 minutes 100 breaths from (ALPHABET/ HAEMORRHAGE) black box of 100 self portrait etchings 1995–96 100 unique state prints: etching, drypoint and foul-bite on Hahnemühle 350 gsm paper, wood and black enamel box each print 27 × 24 cm; box 27.6 × 31.5 × 7 cm
Raquel Ormella 130 Davey Street, Hobart (1/3) 2004–05 whiteboard, permanent and whiteboard markers, telephone book, cibachrome 188 × 131 × 57 cm 130 Davey Street, Hobart (2/3) 2004–05 whiteboard, permanent and whiteboard markers, masking tape 120.5 × 180.5 cm 130 Davey Street, Hobart (3/3) 2004–05 whiteboard, permanent and whiteboard markers, masking tape 61 × 91 × 6 cm
Medium A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something… CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION
Artist
Peter Tyndall
Louise Weaver Hiding in plain sight (Witch grass nest) 2011–12 polystyrene, epoxy resin, linen, calico, felt, raffia, linen thread, deconstructed and repurposed cane lasts from Akari light sculpture designed by Isamu Noguchi, shells, plastic, room fragrance 200 × 125 × 125 cm
100 breaths 2003 video, colour, sound edition of 1 + 2 APs 7:23 minutes
Rose Nolan Flat flower work 2021 synthetic polymer paint on cardboard and found boxes 109 parts, installation dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
LOGOS/HA HA
Date –1984-2008–
Mike Parr
Title detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something…
Stuart Ringholt Everything I own 2002 artist book edition 5/10 22 × 14.5 × 1 cm
Alex Selenitsch monotone_8 2020 typepoems on Canson Rag Photographique 310gsm 8 parts, each 29.7 × 21 cm narrative + 2020 typepoems on Canson Rag Photographique 310gsm 8 parts, each 29.7 × 21 cm Courtesy of the artist and grahame galleries + editions, Brisbane
Sandra Selig & Leighton Craig Special mechanism for universal uncertainty 2010 book pages, acrylic frames, sound 9 parts, each 32 × 22 cm
This is a poem
This is a poem Spoken word & performance program 9 July – 7 November 2021 All events are scheduled to take place at Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne.
HOW TO READ A POEM – Book launch Author: Thomas H. Ford Speakers: Thomas H. Ford, Joe Hughes, Marion J. Campbell, Philip Mead and Bella Li How to Read a Poem is an introduction to creative reading, the art of coming up with something to say about a text. It presents a new method for learning and teaching the skills of poetic interpretation, providing its readers with practical steps they can use to construct perceptive, inventive readings of any poem they might read.
THE DUGONG SUBLIME (HOTEL SORRENTO) Lisa Radford and Sam George To be performed multiple times throughout the exhibition
NEW CONSTELLATIONS Curated by Justin Clemens New Constellations is a spoken word poetry event curated by Justin Clemens. A live program of readings, New Constellations brings together six accomplished poets: Justin Clemens, Bella Li, Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Jon Roffe, Alex Selenitsch and Lucy Van.
KEVIN BROPHY: NEW WORK Poetry readings by Kevin Brophy
H(e)R {~~~} ... , ... ; x Fayen d’Evie and Benjamin Hancock Live movement poem Three performances Jacqui Shelton will live describe one of the performances.
POETRY READING Jeanine Leane and Evelyn Araluen – selected works Closing event
LOOMING Sandra Parker Live movement poem Performed by dancer Chloe Arnott Two performances
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The dugong sublime (Hotel Sorrento) is a polyphonic vocal performance based on extracts from Hannie Rayson’s script for Hotel Sorrento (1990). Performed by Freyja Black, Ivy Crago, Sophia Derkenne, Vitoria Hronopoulos, Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta, Veronica Pena Negrette and Iris Simpson Student liaison: Rinske Ginsberg, Lecturer in Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
Due to rapidly changing circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, dates for the performance and spoken word program cannot be confirmed at the time of printing. For correct dates, please refer to Buxton Contemporary’s website.