MONUMENTS OF BUNBURY: THINGS IN SPACE

Molly Werner

When entering a gallery space, one tends to choose a direction to walk in. Oftentimes the direction of walking is specifically designed by a curator, or an architect. Aware of this coercion, we might subversively decide to walk our own way. Occasionally, something indescribable will pull us in a different direction.

The day that I encountered Perdita Phillips’ contribution to the Bunbury Biennale: A Cultural Ecology, an unsettling, meditative audio-visual projection, and object-based piece titled wheatbelt anticipatory archive I (2023), something more-thanhuman was guiding me towards it. This “something,” labelled variously with terms such as spirit or flow state, is what Jane Bennett would call thing-power.

As a concept, thing-power raises the status of the more-than-human and emphasises a total sense of kin – that all entities are, “enmeshed in a dense network of relations.”2 While Bennett is speaking of things in terms of their self-organizing creativity, it is useful to think of artworks holding thing-power. As I sat in front of Phillips’ durational work, I allowed its thing-power to pull me in. While the slideshow-like series of images flicked by, selected from a found photographic archive of a WA wheatbelt land survey, I found myself thinking about humans and land-use – the way we cultivate and categorise land – as well as scale and embeddedness. I was reminded of the experience some of us have in planes, how being that high up in the sky reminds us of our smallness in the landscape, and our strange reaction to that feeling that sees large-scale construction (and destruction) fill up the available space. Simultaneously, I was listening to a handful of pigeons outside of the door to the chapel balcony, flapping their wings inside the trap that has been placed there for them and stretching themselves out in the space that they have found themselves in. There is something curious about space and beings in space. How we must co-exist. How sometimes we cannot.

Spreading ourselves out in space, and retreating, leaves things behind. Think of a campsite littered with the detritus of past campers. These sites allude to the presence of things (humans) that are no longer there. Robert Smithson’s “monuments”3 are sites like this. Walking through the New Jersey industrial town of Passaic, Smithson photographed what he called monuments to entropy. Entropy being the continuous state of flux in a closed system, where no new things are added but change their material form(s). In Smithson’s photographs, the left-behind things become kin with the landscape.

Can left-behind-things become kin with the landscape? What follows is a series of snapshots in time taken from various walks around Bunbury. They are potential demonstrations of things becoming kin with their landscape. Their thingpower gives them a sense of being both out of place, and somehow in exactly the right place.

1. See Judith Barry, “Damaged Goods,” Thinking About Exhibitions ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (Verso: 1996), 46-48.

2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press: 2010).

3. Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic.” Artforum 6, no.4 (December, 1967).

Clockwise from Top Left

Molly Werner

Temporary Monument, Big Swamp, 16:43 5 August 2022

Molly Werner Monument, 1 Wellington Street Staircase to Nowhere, 12:43 2 November 2022

Molly Werner Monument, William Street Drain, 18:45 2 November 2022

Molly Werner Monument, Hayward St Drain, 15:37 15 March 2022

Molly Werner Monument, Maiden’s Park Reserve, 16:48 24 March 2023