CVAC Broadsheet 41.1

contemporary visual ar t+culture b r o a d s h e e T

VOLUME 41.1 MARCH 2012

CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

GREENAWAY ART GALLERY : ADELAIDE

WWW.GREENAWAY.com.Au

anne & Gordon samstag Museum of art University of south australia

20 april – 1 June 2012

Triumph: Richard Grayson and steven Wigg sidney nolan: the Gallipoli series open Tue – Fri 11–5pm, sat – sun 2–5pm unisa.edu.au/samstagmuseum

Triumph is a samstag Museum of art exhibition. Sidney Nolan: the Gallipoli series is an australian War Memorial travelling exhibition. The exhibition is supported by Visions of australia, an australian Government Program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of australian cultural material across australia.

Image: Richard GRayson & steven WIGG, Triumph (installation view), 1996, wet unfiltered terracotta clay on wooden armature, 4.5 x 4.5 x 1.7 m, University of south australia art Museum

RESTLESS: ADELAIDE INTERNATIONAL 2012 1 MARCH—1 APrIL

Image: Jinoos Taghizadeh, Rock, Paper, Scissors, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist

Featuring 18 international contemporary artists located across four galleries in Adelaide Curated by Victoria Lynn for the Adelaide Festival 2012 Visual Arts Program

Jinoos Taghizadeh (Iran) | Rabih MroUé (Lebanon) | Chosil Kil (Korea) CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET PARKSIDE SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063 Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 www.cacsa.org.au

the contemporary art centre of sa is assisted by the commonwealth government through the australia council, it arts funding and advisory body, and the south australian government through arts sa and health promotions sa. the contemporary art centre of sa is supported by the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments

21 March – 29 april 2012

Adam Geczy Beautiful cities Khaled Sabsabi Mush 9 May – 17 June 2012

The Other’s Other newell harry raafat ishak Dinh Q lê Sangeeta Sandrasegar Jun yang curator: Mark Feary

43–51 cowper Wharf road Woolloomooloo nSW 2011 Sydney australia www.artspace.org.au

T +61 2 9356 0555 artspace@artspace.org.au Office 10am–6pm, Mon–Fri Gallery 11am–5pm, Tues–Sun

image: Jun Yang, Paris Syndrome, 2008, still from hD video, courtesy of the artist and Vitamin creative Space, Guangzhou; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; and Shugoarts, Tokyo

arTSpace is supported by the Visual arts and craft Strategy, an initiative of the australian, State and Territory Governments.

arTSpace is assisted by the new South Wales Government through arts nSW and by the australian Government through the australia council, its principal arts funding body.

arTSpace is a member of caOs (contemporary art Organisations australia) and res artis (international association of residential art centres).

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART pRESENTS

Narelle Jubelin: Vision in Motion 24 ApRIl - 7 JUlY 2012 GUEST CURATORS: ANN STEpHEN ANd lUkE pARkER

Narelle Jubelin: Vision in Motion has been developed by the University Art Gallery, The University of Sydney; in association with Monash University Museum of Art; and the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia.

This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Narelle Jubelin with Carla Duarte Key Notes 2009 installation detail of Jubelin transcribing, Sullivan Galleries, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, photo: Carla Duarte

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART pRESENTS

Mish Meijers and Tricky Walsh The Collector 7: The Processor of circumstance 24 ApRIl - 7 JUlY 2012 CURATOR: FRANCIS E. pARkER

Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

Mish Meijers & Tricky Walsh The Collector Project 6: Schema installation view, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, 2010

Exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco

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42 VIEW ST BENDIGO VICTORIA 3550 BENDIGOART GALLERY.COM.AU

Exhibition Supporters A participant of the 2012 L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program

A fresh look at the Australian Collection OPEN WEEKEND 12 & 13 MAY 2012 Join us as we unveil our newly refurbished Australian galleries with a weekend of free performances, films and talks by visiting artists and curators

ART GALLERY RD DOMAIN SYDNEY artgallery.nsw.gov.au

SOOZIE COUMBE JANE FARRAH, NIOMI SANDS STEPHEN GARRETT 04/01 – 12/02 HEATHER SHIMMEN RUTH JOHNSTONE JOSEPHINE KUPERHOLZ 15/02 – 25/03 SYLVIA GRIFFIN LUCAS DAVIDSON RHONDA PRYOR PARISH STAPLETON 28/03 – 6/05 JUAN FORD 10/05 – 17/06 MICHAEL NEEDHAM 20/06 – 29/07 JEREMY KIBEL 1/08 – 9/09 ANDREW GOODMAN RIKI-METISSE MARLOW ERIN MANNING, KENT WILSON LAURA WOODWARD 12/09 – 21/10 SHAUN O’CONNOR 24/10 – 2/12 HONOURS EXHIBITION 5/12 – 20/12 La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street Bendigo, VIC, 3550 +61 3 5441 8724 latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre 121 View Street, Bendigo, VIC, 3550 T: 03 5441 8724

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre

Image: Goodman, Andrew. Flibbertigibbet (2006). Linden Innovators program, Linden, St Kilda. Variable dimensions.

Fabric, wire, vinyl tape, lights, electronic components, movement sensors.

121 View Street E: vac@latrobe.edu.au Bendigo, VIC, 3550 W: latrobe.edu.au/vac +61 3 5441 8724 Gallery hours: Tue - Fri 10am-5pm, Sat - Sun 12pm-5pm latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

VCA SCHOOL OF ART

Art: Live it The School of Art at the VCA offers undergraduate, graduate coursework and research higher degrees in Drawing, Printmaking, Painting, Photography and Sculpture and Spatial Practice.

As a student you will be guided by some of Australia’s most progressive art educators and respected artists within a creative learning environment.

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Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) honours Graduate Certificate in Visual Art Master of Contemporary Art Master of Fine Arts Visual Art (by Research)

For more information on our courses visit: Pip Ryan, Master of Fine Art (Research), Happy Orang, 2011. Photograph by Drew Echberg

CRICOS: 00116K

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Your creative journey starts here…

Associate Degree of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) Adelaide Central School of Art offers intensive training for students looking to develop a career as a practicing artist. We provide accredited tertiary degree programs in addition to a range of short courses, workshops and masterclasses, suitable for beginners through to experienced artists. Our programs focus on intensive training with an emphasis on structured learning, building practical skills and intellectual processes.

Small classes and one-on-one interaction with our talented lecturers, who are all leading practitioners in the field in which they teach, contributes to an environment where creativity excels.

The Pro Hart Scholarship is awarded to talented Year 12 students, and FEE-HELP is available to eligible Australian citizens to cover tuition fees.

In the Gallery March – May 2012 Adelaide Fringe Festival Exhibition 25 February – 24 March 2 X 2: Virginia Coventry, Jan King, Paul Selwood and Aida Tomescu Curated by Terence Maloon, former Senior Curator of Special Exhibitions, AGNSW

Cats and Dogs 31 March – 21 April An opportunity to purchase affordable works by prominent and emerging artists supporting the School’s fundraising initiative

A Reflection of Us All 28 April – 2 June Featuring Graduates and Associates of the School image Adelaide Central School of Art Graduate, Morgan Allender Sentinel (detail) 2007, oil on linen, 145 x 180 cm Morgan Allender is represented by Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne

45 Osmond Terrace, Norwood SA 5067

T 08 8364 5075 info@acsa.sa.edu.au www.acsa.sa.edu.au

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FUTUREGEN 2012 20 MARCH – 11 MAY 2012 JOHN CURTIN GALLERY Open Monday to Friday 11am - 5pm & Sunday 1pm - 4pm.

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this is an ambitious new project under the direction of FotoFreo’s Festival Director Bob Hewitt.

For more information phone (08) 9266 4155, email gallery@curtin.edu.au or visit johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Kent Street, Bentley, Western Australia.

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Image: Chloe Langford, Shell Art, 2011, Found shell, Pink modelling clay.

FEBRUARY FELTspace @ SUPERMARKET ART FAIR, SWEDEN www. FELTspace.org & supermarketartfair.com for more info.

MARCH An ARI Exchange ProjectBOXCOPY ARI (QLD) @ FELTspace (SA) www.boxcopy.org APRIL TOM SQUIRES & CHLOE LANGFORD MAY 2012 LOGAN MACDONALD & FELTspace (SA) @ Boxcopy (QLD) FELTspace GOLD available for order/purchase from our website

Open Hours Wednesday - Saturday: 1-5PM Or by appointment (0400 010 930) 12 Compton Street Adelaide, 5000 SA feltspace@gmail.com www.feltspace.org

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shaun tan: suburban odyssey

19 may–15 july 2012

shaun tan, endgame (detail), 1998 120cm x 120cm, oil and plaster on plywood courtesy and © the artist

Image: Nasim Nasr, What do do (video still), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist

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Contributors Amelia Barikin: Melbourne-based curator and writer; Assistant Curator, Australian Centre for the Moving Image 2008-09; curator of Bus Projects 2009-10; tutor contemporary art history and curatorship University of Melbourne 2005-09; founding coeditor of emaj: electronic melbourne art journal; member of un Magazine editorial committee; currently art history lecturer and ARC Research Fellow, School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne; upcoming book Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe to be published by MIT Press in 2012 Tony Birch: Melbourne-based writer; his books include Shadowboxing (2006), Father’s Day (2009), and recently published novel, Blood (2011); he occasionally works as a curator and collaborator with artists; teaches in the School of Culture and Communication, Melbourne University Brad Buckley: Sydney-bsed artist, urbanist and Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture, and Associate Dean (Research), Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; educated at St Martin’s School of Art, London, and the Rhode Island School of Design; editor, with John Conomos, of Republics of Ideas (2001) and Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy (2009). Buckley has also developed and chaired (with Conomos) a number of conference sessions for the College Art Association, including ‘America: The Divine Empire’ (Atlanta 2005), ‘The Contemporary Collaborator in an Interdisciplinary World’ (Dallas 2008) and ‘The Erasure of Contemporary Memory’ (New York 2011) Natasha Bullock: Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; selected exhibitions include: Erased (toured to Thailand, Singapore and National Art School, Sydney) 2009-10; Anne Landa Award 2006 and artist projects with David Griggs, Phillip Brophy, Scott Redford, Gail Hastings.; guest editor of Photofile: Shifting Ground and co-editor of Zones of Contact: A critical reader (with Reuben Keehan); contributes regularly to a number of journals including Column, Art & Australia and Photofile Paul Carter: Historian, writer, philosopher and artist; currently Chair in Creative Place Research at Deakin University, Director of Deakin Creative and Deputy Director of the Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention, Melbourne; has authored a number of books mainly concerned with Australian history, places and their identity, including The Road to Botany Bay (1987), The Lie of the Land (1996), Repressed Places (2002) and most recently Ground Truthing (2010) John Conomos: Associate Professor, Sydney College of the Arts; artist, critic and theorist who exhibits extensively both locally and internationally. His art practice cuts across a variety of artforms–video, new media, installation, photo-performance and radiophonic art–and deals with autobiography, identity, language, memory, post-colonialism and the ‘in-between’ links between cinema, literature and the visual arts; a prolific contributor to local and overseas art, film and media journals and a frequent keynote speaker and participant in conferences, forums and seminars.

Barbara Creed: Professor of Screen Studies, Head of School of Culture & Communication, University of Melbourne; her acclaimed monograph, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993) has been republished five times; her areas of research include feminist and psychoanalytic theory, the cinema of human rights, and human/animal studies; recently published Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny (MUP, 2005) and Darwin’s Screens: evolutionary aesthetics, time and sexual display in the cinema (MUP, 2009); currently co-recipient of two Australian Research Council grants: ‘Empathy, Ethics and the Cultural Representation of Animals’ and ‘The Global Self: The Cinema of Human Rights’ Duygu Demir: Programmer for SALT Research & Programs, Istanbul; worked on the inaugural SALT Beyoglu retrospective of Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin (2011), and editor of accompanying publication; co-curator I Decided not to Save the World, Tate Modern Level 2 Gallery; worked on Istanbul Eindhoven SALT VanAbbe: Post ‘89; contributes to magazines and online platforms including Art Asia Pacific, Articulus, Art Unlimited, Eyeball and Ibraaz, and previously acted as managing editor for RES Art World/World Art Rhana Devenport: Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand; previous positions include with Artspace, Auckland, the 15th Biennale of Sydney; played a formative role in the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery 1994-2004; curatorial and publishing projects include Slow Rushes, CAC, Lithuania, Nam June Paik at Art Gallery NSW, Sydney and Judith Wright: Conversations at UAM, Brisbane; projects at Govett-Brewster include Lisa Reihana: Digital Marae, Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time, Lee Mingwei: Uncommon Senses, China in Four Seasons: Jin Jiangbo, Guo Fengyi, Zhang Peili, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, Alex Monteith: Accelerated Geographies and Stealing the Senses Adam Geczy: Sydney-based artist and writer; Senior Lecturer in Sculpture and Art Theory at Sydney College of the Arts; his most recent exhibitions have been Decapitated at the Museum of Art, Györ, Hungary, and Beautiful Cities, Artspace Sydney; upcoming projects include Bomb in collaboration with Adam Hill at the AAMU in Utrecht, Holland.; author of several books including (with Michael Carter) Reframing Art (Berg, 2005) and Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions (Berg, 2008); latest book is co-edited with Vicki Karaminas, Fashion and Art (Berg/Bloomsbury, 2012) Alexie Glass-Kantor: Director, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; international curatorial projects include Project 35, Independent Curators International (ICI), New York; City Within the City, Art Sonje Centre, Seoul 2011, No Name Station, Iberia Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing 2010: Dying in Spite of the Miraculous, Gertrude Contemporary and MIAF, Melbourne 2010, Still Vast Reserves, Magazzino D’Arte Moderna, Rome 2010; recently keynote presenter at the CHASS National Cultural Policy Symposium; contributes to a number of journals including Art & Australia and Mousse Hou Hanru: Director of Exhibitions and Public Program and Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies San Francisco Art Institute; has curated numerous exhibitions including Cities On The Move (1997–2000), Shanghai Biennale (2000), Gwangju Biennial (2002), Venice Biennale (French Pavilion, 1999, Zone Of Urgency, 2003, Chinese Pavilion, 2007), 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005), 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007) and 10th Lyon Biennale (2009); curator of the forthcoming 2013 Auckland Triennial, New Zealand Wes Hill: Brisbane-based art writer, artist, curator, from Hamburg, Germany; PhD in Art History, University of Queensland; regular contributor to Frieze, Frieze d/e, Artforum and Eyeline; exhibited Ethnic Pizza as Wilkins Hill (with Wendy Wilkins) at Hinterconti, Hamburg, 2011; curatorial projects include This is what I do, 2012, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart Maria Kunda: Associate Lecturer in Art and Design History and Theory, School of Art, Hobart, University of Tasmania; current primary research area is surrealism, specifically the ‘renegade surrealists’ Georges Bataille et al; her broad research interests are European avant-garde movements; representations of women; theories of embodied subjectivity; contemporary Australian art, and contemporary criticism Margot Osborne: Adelaide-based freelance curator, art critic and PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide; her text in this issue is an edited excerpt from her Master of Arts (Art History) dissertation, Progressives and provincialism: the role of art criticism in advocacy of modern art in Adelaide, which is being adapted for publication later 2012 Nikos Papastergiadis: Professor, Cultural Studies and Media & Communications, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne; recent books include Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (Rivers Oram Press, 2006) Metaphor+Tension: On Collaboration and its Discontents (Artspace Publications, 2004), The Turbulence of Migration (Polity Press, 2000), Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity (Rivers Oram Press, 1998); co-editor Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, with Scott McQuire (Melbourne University Press, 2005)

c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b ro a d s h e e T Editor Assistant Editor Advertising Manager Publisher Design

Alan Cruickshank Wendy Walker Fiona Scott Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc. Alan Cruickshank, Nasim Nasr

ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2012, Broadsheet, the authors and artists.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.

Broadsheet is published quarterly by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA Inc. print post approved PP53 1629/00022 The Contemporary Art Centre of SA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments Editorial inquiries, advertising and subscriptions may be sent to the Editorial Office: Broadsheet 14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063 Tel +61 [08] 8272 2682 Fax +61 [08] 8373 4286 Email: editor@cacsa.org.au www.cacsa.org.au Subscriptions: Contact the Administrator, Contemporary Art Centre of SA—admin@cacsa.org.au The views and/or opinions expressed in Broadsheet are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, staff or Board of the CACSA

Editorial Advisory Board International:

RICHARD GRAYSON UK Artist, lecturer and writer, London BORIS KREMER UK Curator, translator and writer, London ASTRID MANIA Germany Editor, writer and curator, Berlin CHRISTOPHER MOORE Czech Republic Writer, Prague; Editor-in-Chief, Randian online VASIF KORTUN Turkey Director SALT, Istanbul JULIE UPMEYER Turkey Artist, Initiator, Caravansarai, Istanbul RANJIT HOSKOTE India Curator, writer, Mumbai COLIN CHINNERY China Artist, writer and curator, Beijing BILJANA CIRIC China Independent curator, Shanghai JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Curator, art critic, writer PATRICK FLORES Philippines Professor Dept Art Studies University of Philippines, Manila SUE HAJDU Vietnam Artist, writer, Ho Chi Minh City RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Kuala Lumpur LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic, Director of Projects, Osage Art Foundation EUGENE TAN Singapore Director Special Projects, Singapore Economic Development Board TONY GODFREY Singapore Director of Research, Sotheby’s Institute, Singapore GOENAWAN MOHAMAD Indonesia Essayist, journalist, poet and cultural critic, Jakarta NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki, Auckland

Australia:

ROBERT COOK Perth Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia RUSSELL STORER Brisbane Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery REX BUTLER Brisbane Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland

Jack Persekian: Jerusalem-based curator and producer; founder and director of Anadiel Gallery and the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem; Head Curator Sharjah Biennial (2004-07), Artistic Director Sharjah Biennial (2007-11) and Director Sharjah Art Foundation (2009-11); recent curated exhibitions include: Disorientation II, Manaret Saadiyat, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi (2009), Never-Part, Bozar, Brussels (2008), Dubai Next, co-curated with Rem Koolhaas, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany (2008), The Jerusalem Show, Al-Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem (2007- to date); Reconsidering Palestinian Art, Cuenca, Spain (2006); Disorientation – Contemporary Arab Artists from the Middle East, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003); recently appointed, Visiting Professor, Royal College of Art, London, UK.

BLAIR FRENCH Sydney Curator, writer, editor and Executive Director, Artspace

Lisa Slade: Project Curator, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; lectures in the postgraduate art history program, University of Adelaide; curated the travelling exhibition Ben Quilty Live!, University of Queensland Art Museum, 2009 and Curious Colony: A Twenty First Century Wunderkammer, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, 2010; managing curator, 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Parallel Collisions, Art Gallery of SA

IAN NORTH Adelaide Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor, School of Art, University of South Australia

Jan Verwoert: Berlin-based art critic; contributing editor to Frieze magazine; writes regularly about contemporary art for Afterall, Metropolis M, Camera Austria and Springerin; editor of Die Ich-Ressource, Zur Kultur der Selfst-Verwertung, Volk Verlag (2003); author of Wolfgang Tilmans, Phaidon (2002); and Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, MIT Press (2006); recent essays appeared in art books and catalogues such as Cerith Wyn Evans, Lukas & Sternberg Inc/Kunstverein Frankfurth (2004); Experience, Memory, Re-enactment, PZI/Revolver (2005); Black Friday, PZI/Revolver (2005); Bik Van der Pol: With Love From the Kitchen, NAi (2005); Works by Annika Eriksson, Revolver (2005); and Sean Snyder, Walter Koenig Verlag (2006)

volume 41.1 March 2012

ADAM GECZY Sydney Artist, lecturer and writer CHARLES GREEN Melbourne Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne

c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b ro a d s h e e T

volume 41.1 March 2012

COVER: Top: Shaun Gladwell, Pataphysical Man (detail, production still), 2005 Photo courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney Bottom: Marco Fusinato, Mass Black Implosion (Free Music No 1, Percy Grainger) (detail), 2009 Photo courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

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SPORADICAL ENCOUNTERS AND SPHERICAL THINKING: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS AND PAUL CARTER

22

CERITH WYN EVANS: UNDER THE SIGN AND IN THE SPIRIT OF A STOA Jan Verwoert

24

THE POWER OF DOUBT Hou Hanru

30

MONSTROUS FEMININE: STEREOTYPING AGAINST THE GRAIN Barbara Creed 24

32

LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN CAST THE FIRST STONE Jack Persekian

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PARALLEL COLLISIONS: 2012 ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART CURATORS ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR AND NATASHA BULLOCK

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IS THERE SUCH A THING AS GLOBAL CURATING? Adam Geczy

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THE DELINQUENT CURATOR: OR HOW CURATORS SHAFTED AUSTRALIAN ART Brad Buckley / John Conomos

52

I COULD HAVE BEEN ENTIRELY FICTIONAL… IF CATHERINE HAD NOT SHOUTED OUT MY NAME TWICE. RABIH! RABIH! Duygu Demir

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LISA REIHANA’S PELT Rhana Devenport

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in tom nicholson’s shadow Tony Birch

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CRYSTAL VOYAGER Lisa Slade

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WHERE IDEAS AND IMAGES COLLIDE Maria Kunda

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ON POST-CRITICAL ART Wes Hill

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progressives and provincialism: art criticism and modernism in adelaide Margot Osborne

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Socratis Socratous, Architectural Strategy, 2011; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Omikron Gallery, Cyprus

17 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012

into cosmos

SPORADICAL ENCOUNTERS AND SPHERICAL THINKING: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS AND PAUL CARTER

With this issue CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+CULTURE Broadsheet again partners the 2012 Adelaide Festival Visual Arts Progam—Artists’ Week, Adelaide International and the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Into Cosmos: Artists’ Week symposium 1–5 March 2012, is co-convened by Victoria Lynn and Nikos Papastergiadis, who take the broad themes of the 2012 Adelaide Festival—faith, emotion, mystery, and universe—as the starting points for reflection upon how art is engaged in the making of cosmology. Artists’ Week continues to provide a forum for an exchange between international and national perspectives on the key issues that shape contemporary art. The following texts by Artists’ Week presenters Jan Verwoert, Hou Hanru, Barbara Creed and Jack Persekian, and this conversation between Nikos Papastergiadis and Paul Carter, connect the theme of ‘Into Cosmos’ to the realm of imaginary possibilities and the systems by which we make sense of our place in the world.

Restless: Adelaide International 2012, with works from eighteen international artists, curated by Victoria Lynn, explores the restlessness of our times.

The artists seek out threshold experiences and create works that convey an ongoing transition from one condition to another. By exploring physical force fields, or by negotiating complex cultural sites, the artists create the sensation of being catapulted into the spaces between the extremities of the living ‘heavens’ and ‘hells’ in our contemporary era.

The 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Parallel Collisions, co-curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor and Natsha Bullock, is an experiential proposition inspired by art, cinema and literature, exploring the ways in which ideas emerge, converge and re-form through time. Parallel Collisions, in considering the temporality of the present as it parallels and collides with the past, presents twenty-one commissioned works by some of Australia’s leading artists, forming a connective tissue that attempts to understand our subjective experience of time.

Nikos Papastergiadis: Most people would know your essays in Australian history.

Your book The Road to Botany Bay is a classic. Others might know your artistic interventions into the urban fabric. No doubt millions have walked on and some may have even pondered over your visuals texts in Federation Square. Is there a recurring thematic in your work? Is there a point to which your work always returns? Or a mark towards which it always heads but never quite reaches?

Paul Carter: The motivation of the argument of The Road to Botany Bay is to encourage hope of further change. The importance attributed to acts of placenaming stems from the constructive value attributed to analogies. Figurative thinking makes it possible to produce new theatres of cultural, economic and social operation. The bête noire in this scenario was a tradition of nationalist historiography that narrated Australian history as if it were already settled and past. In contrast, I spoke from what might broadly be characterised as a migrant position, one of constitutional transition or becoming. Now, turning to public art, there is certainly a continuity of attitude. Just as past patterns are incomplete, so future ones remain to be traced and interpreted. In works like Nearamnew the composition and design of the texts is designed to stage the experience of change or transformation. They are foundational texts that remain to some extent cryptic. They encourage discourse, almost in the etymological sense of demanding a running hither and thither to make them out. The ground patterns and the arrangement of inscriptions found in works like Golden Grove or Relay put into practice the act of placemaking that is historically represented by place-naming.

They translate into a performative engagement with a site comparable creative principles. As the cryptic writings are critical of nationalist mythography, trying to reinstate forgotten histories and site associations, the reader/treader who engages with these works is also describing a critical journey in relation to received definitions of Australian identity and destiny. Certainly, both the essays and the art works attempt to delineate an unfinished project; however, it is a moot point whether arrival lies in the future or within the act of engagement itself. I have recently written about the dynamics of the meeting place. The meeting place, which is also a site of confrontation with the past, weaves together many personal and historical trajectories. It is constitutionally complex but simplification of its themes is no way out of it.

Nikos Papastergiadis: Is a key word in all this the word “encounter”?

Paul Carter: In the recent work I referred to a distinction is made between meeting and encounter. I understand that in Italian the distinction cannot be made, at least lexically, so there is evidently a question mark over the distinction.

In broad terms the difference I discern between these terms is analogous to the difference between passage and arrival, pre-settlement and settlement. Here, encounter applies to the dynamics of human contact where the parties lack shared interests, and even, perhaps, the desire to meet. To give an example—a recent invitation to work with Alice Springs communities to design a ‘meeting place’ was predicated on the assumption of a primary desire for sociability.

However, it quickly became apparent that Arrernte meeting protocols were

primarily designed to maintain regimes of non-meeting—meeting rituals aimed at avoiding unexpected encounter. Presumably, an encounter would in this context indicate the breakdown of a culture of social and environmental stewardship, a breach of social propriety. However, such separatism is obviously untenable in an environment of globalised tourism and transnational access to natural resources.

The best that can be done is to introduce its principles into the meeting place of secularised and commodified exchange, where it manifests itself in the form of practices of respect for ecological and cultural diversity. These ‘principles’ are the practices of encounter that keep alive the reality (and desirability) of non-meeting.

The recognition of the value of such practices depends on reconfiguring encounter as an end in itself. In accounts of colonisation, the archetypal (and mythical) scene of ‘first contact’ is always a preliminary to invasion. It is for this reason that the behavior associated with mimicry of all kinds is considered retrospectively as comic. The improvised dances, the echoing of each other’s words, the gift rites make, in the context of unequal access to fire-power, no difference. Encounter in the colonialist scenario always gives way to a meeting, an enforced sociability that can be for those forced into it like an open wound, unhealed for centuries.

In a contrasting scenario, one that recognises the ‘social labour’ of encounter, the meaning of the mimetic behavior is not sought outside the performance.

Its value emerges when it is recognised as a kind of rehearsed behavior performed for the first time. Then it recovers its historicity because things might go wrong, just as they do in everyday encounters. Encounter is differentiated from meeting because it retains the chance of something unprescribed emerging. Mimicry is the choreography of analogy; so the poetic logic of encounter is itself analogous to other acts of poetic innovation, placemaking, say, or the orchestration of discourse.

Nikos Papastergiadis: This approach seems to go against the Enlightenment mode of defining through negative opposition, and its attending sense that the autonomous subject must stand apart from the object of investigation.

You suggest that there’s a sort of tremulousness and inventiveness but also a radical uncertainty in every encounter and on the other hand in terms of your approach and discourse you’re not looking for the moment where one has arrived, either in or above a place or a group, but rather the constant process of becoming in a group.

Paul Carter: In Dark Writing a distinction is made between two connotations of drawing. One practice of drawing aims to draw a line under an experience or concept; the other attempts to draw it out. In the first, the line is dematerialised and operates to enforce a metaphysics of stability and separation. In the second, the person who draws is implicated in the subject they describe: they are aligned with it. The first connotation corresponds to a theory of knowledge based on “negative opposition”; the second tries to account for the role that identification plays in the emergence of new understandings. I don’t think this distinction necessarily discounts what observational sciences can produce. Enlightenment rationalisations of matter produce representations that can be grasped and manipulated. The products of identificatory or performative relationships with

19 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 the outside world are much harder to fix and exchange. The tremulousness and inventiveness you describe is associated with a particular interpretation of interpretation—and therefore of the interpreter’s role and stance. The prestige of the Humanities and Social Sciences depends on defining interpretation as the art of producing representations. However, in an older or alternative tradition of hermeneutical enquiry, the interpretation of the received cultural text depends on an identification with its interests and goals. In this view interpretation occurs through a “concomitant mode of production”. In ancient Greece the rhapsode was valued for an ability to channel the ancient poetic literature and to make it come alive through an inventiveness that integrated recollection and innovation.

In contemporary terms, an approach to the interpretation of our collective myths that is rhapsodic probably addresses itself to different aspects of the received text. For example, it is interested in the material circumstances in which the received text was developed, and seeks to recreate the uncertainty, the sense of creative chance that informed the original formulation. In this sense the encounter with the text is characterised by a willingness to renew its radical uncertainty.

Nikos Papastergiadis: Would you call this form of engagement one of participatory poetics in the sense of the rhapsodists and their capacity to pick up the tune, the vibe that’s already there and then recast it in a way that creates a conditionality of recognition and elaboration and therefore extension? So in that sense it’s both a fact (it picks up the vibe, that is there), but it’s also a work of fiction that projects something that’s come from the group but is also something else.

Paul Carter: In a possibly perverse way writing and making begin from a sense of something gone missing. First, a text is reconnected to its discursive environment.

Second, the choreography of that discursive production is mapped. When the relationship between the different voices is factored into the description, the formerly continuous social script is seen to be composed of speech fragments, each of which is the trace of a different speaking position. In works for radio like The Calling to Come (where the conditions and preconditions of cross-cultural encounter form the drama) the script is built up from this initial deconstructive turn: characters emerge as the historical sources (the facts) are progressively torn apart and their internal collisions of register or stylistic inconsistencies shown to preserve the trace of different voices. Ungluing the parts of the text produces an archipelago of fragments out of which a new polyvocal fiction is composed. However, the new “fiction” is not simply a different representation of the historical facts: it is a creative/critical discovery of the fiction at the heart of that appearance of facticity. In that sense the new distribution of voices, the revelation of heterogeneous understandings of place (and of the meaning of the encounter), is also a work of historical recovery. Perhaps this institution of a better fiction can be compared to Roland Barthes’ suggestion that the role of the cultural critic is not simply to dismantle media myths but to replace them with better ‘artificial’ myths.

Nikos Papastergiadis: Isn’t this practice of mythopoesis also a form of placemaking in the sense that it transforms the abstract notion of space into a more engaged livable if not already lived kind of place?

Paul Carter: If so, it is because place is redefined. The dominant definition of place, or at least the definition that mobilises public planning, remains that of the empty container. Planning cultures and the architectural professions that interpret them, identify the place with what can be circumscribed, delimited and isolated.

A place emerges when a line is drawn under and round it. In contrast, places made after their stories, to borrow a phrase of Geoffrey Bardon, originate discursively.

They are composed of people inclined to one another, talking, listening, walking and resting. In contrast with the straight line of the orthodox place the line of the place informed by its stories is an unfinished arabesque, or a set of these.

The contrast in drawing technique not only corresponds to the difference between empty places and those filled with the sounds of sociability but is equivalent to the difference between the place as a locus of social control and the place conceived as a meeting place. Places that incubate sociability—the production of new narratives of self—do not over-regulate the everyday performances that constitute the potential of civility. The nationalist tradition of historiography criticised in The Road to Botany Bay was characterised there as “theatrical”, in the sense that it imagines Australia as a theatre, an empty space onto which the historical characters stalk. It is the same conception that informs governmentauspiced public space design. By contrast, a place brought into being through the discovery of common ground, through the cultivation of interests, would write its own script.

Nikos Papastergiadis: So you are talking about a demotic production of space, the way in which the people create their own space—and you say that your function, therefore, is at first to track that fluid space and then to reflect on the patterning that’s formed through those interactions?

Paul Carter: It’s dramaturgical in a way, a drawing out of what is implicit in the social text and its communication to the realm of representation; and to do this in such a way that the dynamics of encounter are not rendered stiff and unoriginal. The contemporary dramaturg is like a conductor off the leash.

I suppose that when talented soloists (pianists, say) renounce the keyboard in order to conduct the orchestra, they do so because they perceive a larger movement form in the musical composition that they cannot command from one instrument.

At the same time their artistry remains limited by the internal logic of the work.

The dramaturg works more loosely, freely mingling formal elements with the random encounters with the outside world. In the context of placemaking this dialogue between coded and uncoded elements is not entirely arbitrary as movement forms are potential in the self-organisation of the crowd. For this reason some contemporary theatre groups see no need to preserve the separation of the theatral space and the place of community. In an Australian context, the imagined mise en scene is not necessarily the European piazza. It might be the Centralian network of places and passages whose relationship or choreography is governed mythopoetically. Here “place” feathers out again into the production of space, an exfoliation or reinstatement of the culture of complexity that in another context would be called baroque.

Nikos Papastergiadis: At the other end of the spectrum of the baroque is your interest with Geoffrey Bardon and his relationship with the Papunya Tula art movement. You have described his relationship with the elder painters of that community, through the image of the conductor, and you stressed the dynamic of mimesis and the key role of musical humming as a means of bringing the image of place into existence. I was wondering how you see yourself in the place-making process, where do you see yourself in the interpretation of that place? Do you observe in an ethnographic way, as someone who literally follows the crowd, or looks at people? Do you study particular texts and look for symbols? Do you respond to different visual plans? Do you look at the relationship between architecture and the open space? What is the particular way that you enter into this environment, and what are the tools you use for tracking and then punctuating that environment?

Paul Carter: Different situations produce different relationships; and vice versa. Institutional expectations, community understandings and interests, the internal working relationships of the commissioned artists and so forth: there is no question that the place design that emerges is in some sense indexically related to the dynamics of the process but it is the responsibility of the ‘place-maker’ to ensure that the ‘process’ is deepened so that the new meeting place is different from what was previously predicted. In terms of method perhaps two devices are important. The first is an ability to channel the diverse testimonies (written and spoken) into a story that is felt to incorporate and harmonise the different individual elements. Improvised at the conclusion of the initial discussions, the story has as its theme (and its compositional mode) the potential of stories to bring into being new places. In devising the story, my role is a variation on that of the ancient rhapsode. The story thus improvised shows, or performs, the potential of stories to produce new mental places. The second qualification, if you like, is a capacity for visualising the emerging story in terms of a three- or four-dimensional pattern. The conviction that stories and places are different manifestations of social practices that are fundamentally choreographic makes this transition from the conceptual to the visual intuitive. These place-making practices are poetic. They depend on noticing analogies and enunciating a third in-between figure or trope that blends them into something new. So, too, with the lines that I draw out: they seek to inscribe shared incentives, motivations or energy paths.

Their object is not to designate or document a jigsaw of operationally distinct zones but to capture certain qualities of sociability: verticality, errancy, approach, orientation, timing, spacing, propinquity and avoidance. Perhaps this description fails to answer your question. In a way I imagine myself as a member of a team playing a game whose rules have yet to be fixed.

Nikos Papastergiadis: In your proposed lecture for the Artists’ Week symposium of the Adelaide Festival, you have stated that you will explore the work of certain mystics like Swedenborg and Blake. What is the status of their work for you today, and are there any contemporaries approximating to those kinds of figures in our current environment?

Paul Carter: Two features of William Blake’s life and work may explain my interest in him. First, he was an engraver as well as a poet. Second, he ascribed creative significance to the figure of the vortex. It is impossible to say whether his prophetic poems are commentaries on imagined reorganisations of the physical world or whether his visual iconography is mainly a set of arabesques designed as a guide to the spiritual world. Either way the challenge he set himself was to describe the principles informing a universe of immanence and change, principles that he compared to the double impulse of the vortex, to gather together and to expel and dissipate. Like Shelley, Blake perceived the unraveling of the material universe from the spiritual one and dedicated himself to creating a poetic blueprint for their reintegration. Part of Swedenborg’s appeal to Blake lay in the boldness of

21 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 Swedenborg’s claim to have been lifted up into the after world and to have held conversations with angels. Blake was too much of a poet to take Swedenborg’s allegory literally but he respected the idea that the Bible, which Swedenborg reinterpreted as a key to the future, was a prophetic text, one that his generation inherited and whose meaning remained to be interpreted. In the context of the Festival theme, “Heaven and Hell”, and the role of artists in mediating change, Blake is evidently an important figure.

Shelley, too, speaks to present preoccupations. All my life the production of meaning has been framed by scenarios of the apocalypse. In a sense we were born after the end, after the limit to human limits to self-destruction were passed.

We live posthumously, and yet continue to occupy the old geography of political, social and environmental relations. The question is: what would the new world look like, the one that could convene new communities of hopefulness? It’s a question that I am trying to answer through work I refer to as the “Archipelago”.

In that enquiry Shelley is both a prophet and a guide. In his poem ‘Epipsychidion’ he has his imagined lovers sail to a group of islands selected more, I suspect, for their evocative name than their progressive politics. The Sporades of his poem, geographically located in the Aegean, capture what may be an important feature of a future world community, that its sociability is sporadic, that is, a matter of timing and spacing, and not the result of building world governance structures that are centralising and unified according to shared principles of well being.

The Sporades are a geographical metaphor for a world where relationship are broken off and renewed, where different creative communities spring up around different interests. It is the geography of the future or, perhaps, of the horizon.

Nikos Papastergiadis: This image of the sporadic, this image of global governance combined with the mystical understanding of the soul, the Greek term for the latter “pneuma” is also the same word as the materiality of the breath. What is the right place for the study of the world soul? Given your tangential and material connections to the University, is this institution capable of responding to the kinds of interconnections and spherical modes of thinking that you are suggesting are the necessary means for grasping the relationship between parts and whole?

Paul Carter: It is an interesting question, one that might also be addressed to the Festival and its institutional sponsors. Perhaps our universities are guilty of flat-Earthism. Certainly, there is little patience for the out-of-sight. Invisibility remains a disqualification unless it generates quantifiable data. The rhetoric of public research is largely tautological: outcomes that are unpredictable fail to attract support. In another register there is a schizophrenic attitude towards creativity. The anxiety our research cultures experience when asked to recognise the role uncertainty, contingency and emergence play in the reconfiguration of the world is striking. I suppose that—to continue the geographical metaphor —the inhibition to inhabiting the world as a whole not only reflects flat-Earthism but an anti-oceanic bias. Our teaching and research institutions remain tied to the plotting of (largely predestined) destinations rather than to the evaluation of the voyage itself. Take “complexity” for example, a term regularly invoked as essential in the improved communication of the challenges to human wellbeing represented by systemic changes occurring in the environment. Complexity is the attribute of dynamic matter that Leonardo discerned coiled up in the vortex —the same vortex that artists, philosophers and scientists continue to invoke, although unable to represent it. In a current project called Turbulence, in which the production of a climate-change monitor called “maelstrom” is foreshadowed, research in the environmental sciences, the mathematical sciences, as well as in the fields of cultural heritage and cultural production, is brought together to give back to public space its role of incubating stories of change that change.

Here the part and the whole elide through the act of making something. It remains to be seen where this work will be located institutionally. Perhaps it provides the agenda for one of those sporadic communities I mentioned.

Nikos Papastergiadis: Thank you very much Paul. It seems like we’ve come to the point of imagining little global, cultural public spheres.

Paul Carter is a Keynote Speaker at this year’s Adelaide Festival Visual Arts Program.

Referred to in this interview are his books The Road to Botany Bay (1987, 2010), Dark Writing (2008) and his public art works and designs Nearamnew (Federation Square, Melbourne, with Lab architecture studio, 2002), Golden Grove (University of Sydney, with Taylor, Cullity, Lethlean, 2007-2009) and Relay (Sydney Olympics with Ruark Lewis, 2000). His sound installation, The Calling to Come, is in the Entry Cube, Museum of Sydney.

Opposite: Danae Stratou,The Globalising Wall (video still), 2011; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artist

CERITH WYN EVANS under the sign AND IN THE SPIRIT OF A STOa

Jan Verwoert Where can we meet? Not just to talk, or to look at something and be entertained.

But rather, to find out what happened and what life is going to be like. But we can’t do that in public, or at your place, or at mine. It makes as little sense at the market as it does at home. Agora and oikos are both equally unsuitable. In the former the voices are too loud, in the latter too soft. We won’t be able to say very much to each other anyway, because in either place conventions control what things mean. At the market and in the household what constitutes meaning and value is understood. But the constitution of meaning and value is exactly what we want to understand—and contest. So there’s no point in having a conversation there. We would have to find someplace else so that our meeting can take a different turn. There’s a place like that in Greek philosophy. It’s the stoa.1 It lies between agora and oikos. It’s a park or a portico in front of a house (or a grove before the city), a zone that is neither inside a house nor directly in the city.

It is neither private like a household nor public like a market. It is neither the one nor the other and yet, it is both at once. And as such, it’s a place where there is no legal protocol for dealing with meanings and values, so that you are free to think and speak about them at will. The direction our conversations may take is not predetermined. Those who meet here stroll about in the stoa, in open circles, peripatetically, in conversation or in silence. This is the movement of free thinking and feeling. It owes its potential to the topological unlawfulness of a stoa.

Cerith Wyn Evans creates the potential of a stoa in his works.

He establishes situations in which the laws of regulated communication no longer apply and the clear distinction between spaces of discourse has been suspended.

It would therefore even be somewhat misleading to refer to ‘works’ when talking about the art of Wyn Evans. Obviously there are concrete installations. And they are composed with precision. But they do not primarily have the character of statements (of the kind we are referring to when we say a work makes a statement). Instead, they tangibly formulate states, the states which we are in when we think or feel in the manner of a stoa, when ideas do not coalesce into statements because they are held in motion through the free interplay of forces. Encountering an installation by Wyn Evans is like returning to a particular perceptual attitude, an emotional state, a world. The experience is comparable to coming back to a book we have started reading and, on reentering the world of the novel, being surrounded by its characters and following the further development of their relationships.

Wyn Evans’ approach to the composition of these states is conceptual in form. In this case, conceptual means that in order to prevent his art from necessarily being art and art alone, it seeks the company of cinema, for instance, without ever becoming cinema, because the cinema it deals with has more to do with literature, without actually being literary. Wyn Evans thus engages in a peripatetic motion between art, cinema, and literature without ever submitting entirely to the laws of one particular domain. In contrast to artists, who now simply treat Conceptual art as a historically established genre and a source of exploitable quotations, his peripatetic motion actualises the original idea of conceptual practice: to create a free space, namely, a stoa, which lies between all media, genres, and disciplines, remaining open to all of them without submitting to the dominion of their rules and regulations.

TIX3 (1992) is exemplary in this respect. It is a neon sign, a mirror image

of the word “EXIT”. This sign would show me the way out—if it weren’t backwards.

So the exit must already lie behind me. What I see in front of me is the mirror image of the sign that indicates where I am. It’s like in Cocteau’s Orphée (1949): I look out of the mirror back into the room that I must have just left by stepping through the mirror. TIX3 is the way in to the way out of an outside-inside space.

Writing about Wyn Evans, Mark Cousins describes the topological unlawfulness of this way-in-way-out-outside-inside space in a wonderfully agrammatical turn of phrase as a “room into which one would like to exit had one not already just entered from it”.2 What is this way-in-way-out-outside-inside space? It is the space of mirroring, of reflection; it is literally the space of thinking. I cannot simply enter it at will. Instead I tend to stray into it by getting lost in thought or slipping into reverie. To contemplate thoughts in this state means to experience

them in their externality (their sheer materiality), in terms of the way in which they literally—letter by letter—interlock, invert, and twist around to form ever new constellations. This is the philosophical state. This is what the topological unlawfulness of the stoa feels like: like the way in to the way out of regulated discourse, and a passage into a region where the grammars of discourses shift and overlap like tectonic plates, creating air pockets for thinking in between them.

The story that Wyn Evans tells concerning the way in which the neon sign came about involves such an in-between space.3 He and Leigh Bowery had gone to a matinee in a big movie theatre on Leicester Square in London to see a blockbuster movie. Wyn Evans walked out in the middle of the film and accidentally chose an emergency exit that was blocked off, so that after the door closed behind him, he could neither go back into the theatre, nor get out of the building. The exit sign was mirrored in the outer glass door. Both the sounds of the film inside the theatre and the noises from the Square outside must have been audible there. That is a fantastic parable for what conceptual practice can be, when it renders the potential of a stoa: the experience of a state in which the sounds from a house of culture meld with the noises of the marketplace (material life and politics), resonating in a special way because they mix in a place that lies outside both realms. This ‘outside’, however, is not of the kind invoked by the romantic ideology of transgression. It is not on the fringes of society but right in the middle of it, in the way-in-way-out-outside-inside spaces located on the threshold between different social spheres.

What kind of activity is generated by peripatetic movement between different spheres? The Situationists spoke about détournement. This concept is often used as a synonym for “appropriation”. Yet there is more to the term.

It contains the word “detour”, as well as the notion of deviating from a given path or being led astray. The notion of de-viation in turn corresponds to the dynamic of a peripatetic straying away from existing paths. Wyn Evans’ appropriation of the cinema actualises this dimension of détournement in the form of acts that lead the cinema astray. The object of his fascination with cinema is not, as one would expect, the moving image, but rather the phenomenon of projection: the play of light. Led astray, as a play of light, the cinema then undergoes a series of détournements or transmutations in his installations. In Has The Film Already Started? (2000), a film is projected onto a white helium balloon, tied to a cobblestone and suspended among indoor palm trees. Like Gil J. Wolman’s movie L’Anticoncept (1952), the film is practically imageless. It only shows a bright circle in a dark outline that looks like a spotlight. From time to time, the light vanishes but instantly reappears. As the circle of light is a little bit bigger than the balloon, it produces a halo on the wall behind the balloon, like that of a solar eclipse. Wolman created a cinema, not of images but of words. In the voiceover to L’Anticoncept he is heard reciting an agrammatically (de)composed text on the state of poetic experience. In Wyn Evans’ version, the soundtrack consists only of static. Maurice Lemaître similarly used objects as surfaces of projection instead of, or in front of, a screen. Like Wolman, he was associated with the Lettrists and sought to dissolve the cinema into an event in space. One of these para-cinematic works went by the title Le film est déjà commencé? (1951), which Wyn Evans reinvokes here.

These references are not quotations. The above-named Lettrists are characters in a world fleshed out by Wyn Evans. This world is in a particular state, in which the basic sentiment of the Lettrist attitude prevails. It articulates the spirit of Lettrism: the elegant anarchistic gesture of dismantling and amalgamating cinema and literature. The mode in which Wyn Evans relates to the Lettrist principle is thus not so much a form of reference but of reverence.

Instead of displaying knowledge, he invests passion in the invocation of a spirit. He communicates the fascination inherent to a certain manner of freely dealing with cinema and literature. And he does so by dealing with his sources just as freely.

Hence, Marcel Broodthaers is invited to join the circle of spirits that he invokes.

The indoor palm trees indicate his presence. Whether or not he was officially a Lettrist doesn’t matter. What counts is the spiritual affinity. It is through a gesture of reverence, therefore, that Wyn Evans creates proximity between characters

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and evokes the spirit of their collective subjectivity. Crucially, though, a certain quality of irreverence is present in this gesture of reverence. The care with which Wyn Evans summons the spirits goes hand-in-hand with a certain carefree manner of picking material props for the ceremony of their invocation. Cobblestone, balloon, indoor palm trees, and an almost imageless film: together they form a simple, concise gesture that does not seem overly reverent; nor does it erect a temple. It creates a stoa. A temple would not suit the spirit of the Lettrists. Only a suitably irreverent gesture does.

This element of irreverence makes all the difference in terms of the attitude towards power and the law, manifested in the way characters from the past are being invoked. As a rule, in disciplinary discourses, reference to respected historical figures is inseparable from a strategic interest in gaining legitimation.

They are cited as authorities to validate one’s assumptions. It is what the law of academia demands. Psychoanalytically speaking, summoning such father figures is profoundly Oedipal. As manifestations of free peripatetic motion, Wyn Evans’ gestures of lovingly irreverent détournement fundamentally reject this Oedipal logic. They show no respect for the authority of a law. Instead, they thrive on a passion to create an affinity to a spirit. This spirit does not legitimise anyone’s claim to power. It promises pleasure: the pleasure of anti-Oedipal thinking beyond the law.

Look At That Picture... How Does it Appear to You Now? Does it Seem to be Persisting? (2003) is another site of invocation dedicated to the spirit of this form of thinking. Five chandeliers of varying provenance are installed in one room. They are each linked to a computer that converts a selected text into Morse Code in real time. The lights of the chandeliers brighten and fade to the rhythm of the coded signals relayed by the computer. Five simple monitors mounted on the walls display the sentences and signals as they are being processed.

The texts include passages from John Cage’s diary, Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson’s memories of a spirit medium who later worked for the CIA, a scathing critique of modern spiritism by Adorno, an essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick against a paranoid culture of reading and a love story collectively written by the salon of Madame Lafayette. In terms of the implications of its form, the détournement of the cinema here leads to yet another interpretation of projection as a play of light.

In Has the Film Already Started?, the film projection became a twinkling spotlight.

The blinking light of the chandeliers continues this series of transmutations.

Literature is likewise led astray. Text becomes code becomes signal. Morse Code emerges as a language between all media. It can be visual, textual, or aural: light, cipher, or sound. A language that is many languages at once; what an exceptional means for attempting another form of communication on the threshold between media!

But at the same time, Morse Code is a non-language—it is not really in use anymore. And the number of those who can read it fluently is probably limited.

The mode of invocation therefore has a special character in this case. On one hand it addresses anyone, who walks into the room and sees the chandeliers. On the other hand, it only speaks to an unknown someone, capable of decoding the signals, which may possibly be no one, given the unlikely chance of such a visitor appearing. So the signals potentially address anyone and no one at the same time.

Their mode of address is split from within. This has immediate implications for the form of the community summoned by the signals (if we consider all those, who will ever see the chandeliers, as a group, which could be a community). Potentially it consists of someone, someone special or possibly no one at all. This community does not share a common name by which it could here be addressed. Nor is there one doctrine or sacred script by which its members could swear, because a multiplicity of (at times) contradictory texts is being projected. This community remains ununited.

Moreover, the very manner in which they are convoked already says a great deal about the spirit in which they gather. Ordinarily, the sign under which a community comes together is immediately evident. Not in this case. Wyn Evans’ ceremony of convocation seems to be both clandestine and open at once. On one hand its procedure resembles a séance, not least due to the spectral aura of the blinking chandeliers. They come to life as they brighten and fade, as if they were breathing. The congregation of summoned spirits seems perfectly plausible, and yet questionable as well. Can this room be haunted? Its atmosphere is anything but spooky. It is well lit. You can see the computers at work. There is no secret about the way anything functions. Wyn Evans’ conceptual gesture therefore marks a threshold between enlightened and occult practice. On one hand he creates transparence: everything is illuminated. Texts by critical writers are being spelled out. Slowly. Letter by letter. It is like a seminar on the hermeneutic technique of close reading. Except that the reading here is also an act of encrypting, which

obliterates the direct legibility of the texts but invokes their spirit, cryptically, through coded signs: a hermetic practice. In what spirit is this seminar séance then being conducted, in the spirit of a way of thinking that exists on the threshold between two schools of interpretation and belongs to neither; in the spirit of a stoa?

Besides, you never know with spirits. There is no guarantee that they’ll come when called. They appear when they want to. So séances are a tricky technique for dealing with creatures from the past. In the case of citations, the one who cites seeks to take possession of what is cited. Things work differently in a séance. With spirits you must negotiate. And if you lose the upper hand in this process you might end up being the one possessed. Power relations are not predetermined; they are subject to negotiation. In contrast to the act of citation, the ceremony of convocation remains perilously performative and open ended.

It cannot coerce a community (among and with spirits) to come into being. This lack of coercion characterises Wyn Evans’ gesture. It does not feel forced. And it forces neither guests nor spirits to give our potential community the shape of a group with a fixed identity. Not even the persistence of the community is ensured. There are no binding contracts, only a gesture of invitation. That, however, persists.

The computers and chandeliers repeat the invitation incessantly. Although its existence cannot be confirmed, this community exists in the perilous state of a continued invocation of its potential.

Most importantly, however, Wyn Evans never separates the spirit from the sign under which the community is invoked. On one hand he treats signs literally as mounted letters, encoded ciphers, projected light signals.

In which case communicating literally means giving signs. On the other hand, the literalist dimension of this act of giving signs can never be viewed apart from the spirit in which Wyn Evans practises it, namely, a certain irreverence, a lack of coercion and a rejection of false awe. Wyn Evans’ collaboration with Florian Hecker on the abstract opera No Night No Day (2009) has this quality.

So far (as the collaboration is not yet finished) it has led to an almost imageless film with nearly toneless music. The projected material shows spots and shadows.

Some appear only briefly. Others move, grow, shrink, and wander, first in black on white, and then in colour. Accompanied by sounds that could be noises or tones, sequenced signals or unsequenced acoustic material. One thing that this simultaneous détournement of cinema and music articulates is a spirit of dissent: it owes nothing to a cinema that clings to the moving image, and a music that assumes it would have to be an orderly concatenation of notes. Yet at the same time, the détournement testifies to a love of avant-gardistic form: to a mode of dealing freely with cinema and music, of Lettrist or other provenance. A gesture of reverence, yes, but performed irreverently, nonetheless, because it shuns the manifestos and translates avant-gardistic form into an audiovisual cipher that could be a universal or secret language, or no language at all: only a transmission of sounds and play of light. No Night No Day walks a peripatetic path along an historical threshold to the avant-garde, leading its language astray and thus pulling it back into the steady motion of thinking a stoa.

We give signs hoping for a response. When the signal is sent, we wait for a reply. So the crux is: how to answer the transmission. Which language of gestures and signals would be suitable? In the name, sign and spirit of which potential community are we to answer, given that this community is what our answer will establish? It could be a language developed in the spirit of someone who, on one hand, would hermeneutically trace the signals back to where they were sent from and, through reading the reference in the (ir)reverence, testify to the particular moment in history we are referring to. On the other hand, not to betray the spirit of this moment would mean not to expose, but rather share its secret through responding hermetically with words that are like signals: like waving flags, batting your eyelids winking, or tapping out rhythms on the keys of transmission devices.

This exchange cannot end; it can only be continued through ongoing peripatetic detours and agrammatical deviations that make you stray through the way-in-wayout back into the inside-outside space of a stoa that you enter as you exit.

This is a revised/translated version by Jan Voerwert of his original text that appeared in Parkett 87, 2010 (original translation: Catherine Schelbert) Notes: 1 The following interpretation of the stoa is indebted to an unpublished paper by Nikos Papastergiadis, the contents of which were communicated to me by Cuauhtémoc Medina 2

Mark Cousins, ‘Moderato Cantabile’, Afterall 4, Autumn/Winter 2001: 100-101

3

Cerith Wyn Evans, ‘Innocence and Experience’, Frieze 71, November-December 2002: 76-81, 79

THE POWER OF DOUBT Hou Hanru I Art is an imaginative but equally realistic way to approach and question the world. Making artwork, while mobilising all our faculties of imagination, is to a great extent a process of creatively and critically demonstrating how we perceive reality by means of representation, in images, texts and other media. It involves inevitably doubts, questioning, investigations and interrogations facing the real world, which, in turn, is in permanent change. By definition, the artwork in general results from doubting the real—not only the appearance of reality but also, more importantly, the substance of its existence, or, ‘the truth’. This is a process full of contradictions, an infinite adventure into the realm of the impossible, since truth is by no mean unique and certain. Instead, it’s always unstable, uncertain and multiplied.

The invention of photography also implies a contradiction: it was devised to be the most immediate and loyal reflection of the real world, hence its reality, or truth. At the same time, however, it immediately raises the question of the reliability of the real-ness of the images that it reproduces due to the variants involved in the process, such as the material and technical limits of the equipment as well as environmental conditions. Hence, photography shows the reality of the world in images that are shockingly different from our retinal perception, while the intervention of the subjective approach of the photographer can radically complicate and alter the representativity of the image.

The representational function of photography is thus turned into an eternal problem. Instead of solving the problem in any finite way, it continuously sheds light (and shadow) on the very tension between the necessity of questioning the real world, its relationship with our existence, and the impossibility of answering the question. There are infinite doubts here. In our time, while multimedia —including moving images in various material supports such as film and video, as well as computer generated images—are introduced to substitute for conventional photography, the production of image, and art production in general, is also a process of producing our impression, perception and conception of the real itself.

Therefore, they, through what Arjun Appadurai may call the work of imagination, are producing a world, or more precisely, different worlds, to our life that are more real than the material one—the one that is out there. And the expressive power of the image depends on how much it can evoke our doubts vis-à-vis the real. It incarnates the power of doubt as the core of our reflection on ‘the truth’.

It is this power of doubt that renders photography and, by extension, multimedia, into the very substance of being a form of art, one that perfectly embodies the intervention of modernity in the making of our reality and continues to impact upon contemporaneity.

II Our era is one determined and shaped by digital technologies. Our existences and identities are continuously transformed and redefined by interfaces in the form of flux of digitalised information—images and texts. These interfaces are oscillating between facts and fictions. They constitute the contemporary substance of reality and truth. But they are inevitably fantastic and hallucinating.

Art and artists today, like the world itself, are largely globalised.

Digital media—from still and moving images to the internet—are both the resources and materials for artistic production. Artists continue to confront, embrace, investigate and interrogate the nature of reality, truth and dreams.

But the processes are unprecedentedly fluid, uncertain and precarious, while the outcomes are generating more suspense, doubts and critiques than conclusions and resolutions. The power of their thoughts and expressions lies exactly on this course of doubting.

This is articulated in some specific contexts—locations experiencing social transformation more intensely than elsewhere. Societies are forced to negotiate transition from historically traumatised conditions towards a seemingly open and liberated globalised world that, in turn, violently imposes fictions of happiness and peace that compress every human activity into an act of communication of a single truth. Behind the ‘freedom’ of expression and communication provided by Google, Facebook and iPhone, etc., we have only one option—to survive the liberal capitalist system. In the meantime, we are incited

politically to embrace the hegemony of a kind of democracy dictated by the logic of global imperialism. Individuals, collectives and societies are increasingly reduced to instruments serving the realisation of this hegemony, while ironically, we are ‘informed’ that we have gained considerably more freedom than ever.

Herein lies the fundamental paradox of our time. This tension is particularly visible and drastically expressed among those who have been striving to emancipate themselves from older traumas of colonialism, communism and ‘backwardness’, and who are now facing the challenge of a viable emancipation from the globalised world of capitalism and neo-imperialism. Artists, as possibly the most sensitive and imaginative of individuals, continue to lead the struggle for such an emancipation, similar to that carried out by the underground avant-garde during the Cold War. They can perfectly incarnate the power of doubt.

III Illustrating this, for Photoespaña 2011, I presented the exhibition The Power of Doubt in the Museo Colecciones ICO, in Madrid. It superimposed site-specific installations and works—in various new and old media and somehow rooted in photography as a model of perception—that embodied the necessity of doubting the mainstream way of seeing, recording and communicating the real world which oscillates between spectacular truths and dramatic fictions. Most of the artists were from China and Eastern Europe—that have experienced drastic changes from communism to capitalism—as well as South Asia and Africa, where people continue to negotiate possibilities of life between colonial legacy and current geopolitical conflict. With diversified interests in artistic and intellectual pursuits, these artists were proclaiming the collective doubts and desires of their societies, responding to some of their most urgent issues and obsessive pursuits of truth.

We are currently living in a time of global war—a state of exception replacing normality, perpetuated by the “power of the global Empire”, as pointed out by scholars Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. In our everyday life and imagination, we are living with, and often within, a state of war. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Chechnya and Somalia, regularly headline global media, while other regional and international conflicts, such as those between Palestine and Israel, India and Pakistan, are similarly ubiquitous. Correspondingly, memories of past wars in Vietnam and Lebanon still haunt our consciousness and memory. They inescapably constitute a crucial element of the issues to be dealt with by contemporary artists, especially for those whose personal experiences are intimately related to these events.

Shaun Gladwell is from Australia, an American ally, which has sent its soldiers to “maintain” peace in Afghanistan. Gladwell visited a military base near Tarin Kowt, a southern Afghan town that has purportedly been omitted from Google Map. He invited a couple of Australian soldiers to film each other with video cameras against the background of the quasi-‘invisible’ camp. Instead of showing the violent aspects of war, Gladwell chose to expose a more subtle dimension of the war—considering his work as way of ‘leaking’ the secret of the location and its human activities, attempting to demonstrate a war in limbo.1 In the current climate, one might easily relate such an action to those of Wikileaks, a website founded by compatriot Australian Julian Assange. Inspired by Dan Graham’s famous experiments in Helix/Spiral (1973) of video cameras merging with bodies-as-tools to explore the relationship between perception, body and public space, Gladwell’s resulting double channel video installation forms a total environment whereby the audience experiences a sense of participation—the war is not something happening ‘out there’—it takes place here, where we are now all standing.

Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê, who fled his country at the age of eight at the end of the Vietnam War, grew up in California and then returned to Ho Chi Minh City in the late 1990s, has been obsessively exploring the memory of that war and its impacts upon contemporary life. This painful memory is not simply personal. Instead, it’s a common source for several generations’ imagination.

Ironically, this still resonant collective memory of a difficult historical period has become an imaginative and economic resource for mainstream media—especially the Hollywood film industry—in the imposition of certain ideological and political conceptions of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Multiple images of ‘reality’, or multiple

2 5 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012

‘truths’ of war experiences have been superimposed, fused and confused.

How to expose and resist such a perverse exploration of pain and memory has become the central concern in his artistic and ethical struggle. Doubting and challenging the Hollywoodised ‘truth’ has hence become his preoccupation. In his photocollage series From Vietnam to Hollywood (2002), he demonstrated the entangling and intriguing limbo of memory by weaving real and fictional images together.

In his more recent animation video South China Sea Pishkun (2009), Lê presents his interpretation of the last helicopters escaping from South Vietnam in 1975 crashing into the South China Sea.

Shaun Gladwell’s and Dinh Q. Lê’s half-critical and half-playful reappropriations of war experiences are echoed in Shahzia Sikander’s film Bending the Barrels (2008). Originally from Pakistan and living in New York, Sikander has been creating complex, poetic works of painting, calligraphy and video to explore the tension between cultural hybridity and geopolitical conflict as the driving force, in the formation of a nation’s imaginary and self-identification. In Bending the Barrels, she revisits the history and current situation of Pakistan, of instability, uncertainty and recurring violence—in an endless negotiation, or power bargain, between politicians and the military; the voices of the civil society having been largely silenced. Documenting the pageantry of a military band, in a mixture of colonial and traditional styles, along with authoritative military pronouncements, the artist intends to reflect on “the paradox of authority” and demonstrate “a sense of uneasiness and pending crisis”.2

Contemporary geopolitical conflict—confrontations between the global imperialist powers and civil rebellion (eg., the current ‘Arabic Spring’ popular revolts against authoritarian leaderships supported by the West)—are intrinsically rooted in the unresolved heritage of postcolonial struggle across the globe.

The globalisation of media culture, with the intervention of media powers such as CNN Live news broadcasts and Hollywood-style clichés and iconography, intensifies such a conflictive process, substituting factual reality with propagandist imagery.

This further raises suspicions about ‘the truth’ of history, especially the real nature of transition from colonial past to contemporary globalisation, and its impact on perception, imagination and conception. This also, ironically, opens up a territory in which artists can critically probe and reinterpret those issues of historicity and truth. New media, such as photography, video and digital imaging are hence endowed with a new function as sites of ‘reality’-production.

Wong Hoy Cheong, a Kuala Lumpur based artist, scholar and political activist, has researched and explored the rich, complicated and often challenging history of Malaysia, from its colonial past to contemporary reality, in his multimedia work of drawings, performances, installations and videos. His black and white photographic series Chronicle of Crime (2006) ventures into this terrain from a particularly accurate and efficient angle, by re-enacting the notorious roles of some legendary Malaysian criminals, to expose “slipperiness between the real and imagined, the lived trauma and aestheticised re-enactments”, and “the momentarily silences, pauses and tensions that exist between the moments of before and after, before and after the crime, before and after death; the moments of moral decisions and accomplishment”.3 The tension, or in-betweenness, provokes a suspension of reality, one deeply entangled in its unsolvable negotiations with postcolonial conditions and globalisation. Behind the uncannily playful appearances of the film-noir, Bollywood cool look of the ‘criminals’, one can decipher a kind of existential anxiety, an ontological void.

The New York-based Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu expresses these mixed sentiments of anxiety and suspicion even more directly and dramatically by adding a feminist dimension with her eccentrically complex, agonising, but exuberantly beautiful magazine photo-collages. Oscillating between the sublime and absurd, sarcasm and pain, sensual joy and sexual abuse, these works are portraits of black women—(the artist being one of them)—whose existence has been deformed or reduced to impersonalised stereotypes of race and sex in fashion and porn magazines. They are the media age version of the violated subjects of colonial power and geopolitical exploitation, of a falsified reality hidden behind the mask of the official truth of colonialism and transnational capitalism. In parallel, Thierry Fontaine from the French overseas territory La Réunion, equally resorts to the format of portraiture, or specifically, self-portraiture, to express such a violently emptied form of existence, or “de-subjectisation”. More importantly, he also renders an expressive form of his desire to resist and revolt against such a condition of silencing and oppression. Thierry Fontaine’s life, like his skin colour, is a kind of métissage, and ultimately, intimately rooted in the soil of the colonyisland, where the question of belonging, identity and dignity, like the muddy colour of the earth itself, has been forever suspended. The only way for him to show his face to the public gaze is to mask himself with mud. And his voice can only be audible behind the muteness of the earth. His large-scale photos of selfportraits—named Les Cris (Screams), and Echo—are the ultimate outcry of such an impossible existence.

Similarly echoing an outcry at the impasse of the human condition, Hong Kong-based Tsang Kin-Wah, a young witness of the transition of the last British colony to ‘motherland’ China, comes up with poetic, sophisticated, but sarcastic words—spelled out in multimedia installations—in a mixture of floral forms, religious and political texts and swear words, found in the media. The Seven Seal

series (2009–), referring to Christian eschatology, announces an end of the world, and the arrival of the ‘Last Judgement’, in a subtle, poetical, but profoundly ambivalent form. Utilising the most advanced technology of computer programs and video projection further enforces such a contradiction and hence renders the very nature of doubt of his work even more strikingly. The electronically animated eschatological messages invade the space and seize one’s soul, like ghosts.

The contemporary human condition, in an age of globalisation and triumph, of a certain dominant model of modernity (namely that of the West that has defined and ruled the the power relationships of the world for previous centuries), is now facing some fundamental distrusts and challenges. Artists living in trans-national and trans-cultural situations, such as exile, migration and constant displacement are amongst those most sensitive in this respect. They are rising up to contest the taken-for-granted order of things. Adel Abdessemed, a French artist of Algerian origin, is one of the most radical adventurists in this movement of contestation with his particularly pungent strategy of attacking the established taboos of civilisation and boundary. His photographic works—including Sept Frère, Séparation, Zéro Tolérance (all 2006) and Jumps a Jolt (2007)—feature animals like wild boars, snakes, lions and donkeys loitering in a Parisian street, with the artist ‘playing with them’ like a brother. In other series such as My Mother Nafissa (2006), the artist’s mother, wife and children are invited to act in the same setting with the artist and animals, or even skeletons, to enact the most unlikely street theatre. The artist claims that the street is his atelier. Here, not only the boundary between art and everyday life is broken down. The separations between man and nature, life and death, which are so fundamentally crucial for the existence of the Western idea of humanity, are also blurred. The title of the work in which the artist’s wife poses as the bride of a gorilla tells us all—quoting a Crittercam advertisement and inspired by Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, (2007)—Anything Can Happen When An Animal Is Your Cameraman (2008).

Abdessemed’s provocation evokes a critical question of our existence: how to live with the Other—human vs. animal, city vs. nature? This is a most urgent but eternally unsolvable question. In our age of acceleration of human displacement, migration, encounter and negotiation, this question is prfoundly pertinent. Coexistence of differences—racial, religious, cultural and political—is now the most real form of life. Every individual has to learn how to deal with a stranger as their closest neighbour. The premise for such an openness towards and merging with the Other is to put one’s self in question. This may lead us to the paradise of human common destiny. However, how much can one really cast doubt on and suspend one’s own identity and embrace the Other? The Pakistani artist Hamra Abbas, now living in the USA, has made an elegant proposition in her new work, performing a massage on a white female body with her own coloured hands in an Orientalist hammam, entitled Paradise Bath (2009). Using Photoshop, she has also erased minarets from mosques, the most iconic visual signature of Islam and exotic signifier for tourist consumption. At a time of Western insecurity over the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and jihad, and the rejection of Turkey’s membership in the European Community, can this erasure become a friendly compromise, in spite of the absurdity of the act itself?

The expansion of the European Community can be a turning point for the global future. But where and how are the most problematic concerns. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the Cold War, as well as the subsequent ‘triumph’ of neoliberal capitalism were the dynamics behind such an ambitious but highly ambivalent future. In the process of that collapse, uncertainty and fear were aroused, the most confusion experienced by those populations of the former Communist countries —having to ‘transit’ themselves in ‘surrendering’ to the West and accepting the ‘virtues’ of capitalism and democracy. This “transition” is now being carried out in a most ambivalent manner—material life seems to have improved for some, while populations became divided into rich and poor. Individuals are gaining apparent freedom, while at the same time being thrown into a spiral of solitude and insecurity, their survival mechanism to convince themselves that life was simply a drama of self-mockery, hope, memory, nostalgia and aspiration. And artists have seemingly survived it the best: Dan Perjovschi, a Romanian artist (who was a leader of an underground art movement during the Communist years), has developed a personal language (in simple chalk and marker drawings) to satirically reinterpret media stories —from propaganda to commercial advertisements via all kinds of news headlines, celebrity and art world gossip—to demonstrate the inherent paradox and absurdity of media-imposed ‘truth’ as a powerful force in the transition towards the ‘dream’ of democracy. Perjovschi’s gestures appear to be light and easy, while subverting established values. His recent research led him to a new experiment: for the exhibition entitled, Looking around: one random drawing and some snapshots, he created a site-specific work of drawings and snapshot photos that recollect traces of small ‘accidentally’ ignored and forgotten fragments of city objects, signs and scenes that most intimately memorise the impact of social transition upon the everyday environment. They are like Hitchcock’s MacGuffins: quasi-invisible but haunting deeply in our unconsciousness. The now internationally acclaimed Bulgarian Nedko Solakov, another leader of the underground scene in the Soviet Bloc, also intervenes in a similar process of retracing the memory of the past and wrestling with the present. Resorting to the narrative model of the fairytale, he has produced a huge number of drawings with texts that demonstrate the paradox

27 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 of the official ‘truth’ and the helplessness of individuals facing absurdity of reality.

They have often been conceived and shown site-specifically as installations with other media. He decided to make a significant shift towards the new generation, understanding the way in which the transition of social models is affecting youth, and his role as a father. For Power of Doubt, he worked with his teenage photographer son Dimitar who has documented the underground life of his friends, with a father and son dialogue, in a mutual commentary that takes the form of a photo textbook—a testimony of the new complications arising between two generations (in terms of understanding) facing such social transition. Is revolution an infinite endeavour to be inherited by all coming generations, or is it simply an empty promise?

This transition, or transformation, from a former age of ideological division to a kind of global consensus to embrace the ‘promised land’ of neoliberal capitalism has its most spectacular marks, urban expansion and commoditisation of everything in life, including human relations. Such transformation is apparent in the economically booming Asia Pacific region, especially in China, the new Far West for all global capitalist adventurists. Chinese cities are the new battlefields for such adventure—urban spaces experiencing unprecedented expansion, with the real estate market acting as the main engine driving techonomic growth.

Such urbanisation and gentrification are pushing the poor and native people out of their urban centres and causing further social division and conflict.

This paradoxical development is now seeing its limit with its rise of human drama —corruption, violence and environmental crises. The government, hand-in-hand with those that hold capital power, is tightening social and cultural controls to maintain an apparent stability, at the price of basic human rights and freedoms.

Facing this oppressive power, the general public, both urban and rural, is mounting protest campaigns and resistance actions, while intellectuals and legal professionals are increasingly becoming aware of their new responsibility as agents of challenging the ‘reality and ‘truth’ imposed by the authorities. Many artists are also utilising their creativity in the tasks of testifying to and exposing social conflict by producing art that documents, denounces and criticises this overall dire situation. Irony, humour, poetry and even playfulness have become the most potent and effective expressions to confront social, political and individual conflict. This is also a time when collective desire for growth has become totally frenetic, while ultimately every individual is feeling deeply isolated and lonely, doubtful. Everyone is hoping for a way-out, facing a reality turning somewhat surrealistic. Jiang Zhi’s photographic series such as, Things would turn unbelievable once they happened and Things would turn illusive once they happened (both 2006) are among the most extraordinarily poetic and pungent works produced in the Chinese art scene. They are highly personal and poetic reflections of the uncanny sentiment of being at once alienated and yet still aspiring to transcend such a dreadful world. Eventually, it is by grasping such tension and transforming it into a kind of surrealistic illumination that Jiang Zhi’s work gains immense power.

By shedding a kind of angelic light on the famous Wu’s “nail family house” in Chongqing—a symbol of lower class urban inhabitants’ resistance to gentrification widely mediated in the press and inciting great social and political debates across the country—Jiang Zhi’s Things would turn nails once they happened turns such a human drama into a glorious moment of the tragic sublime and comic hope.4 Exuberant and excessive urban expansion is the order of the globalised world today. From Shanghai to Dubai, Mumbai to Mexico City, governments and corporations are celebrating this new opportunity for development and selfempowerment. They ‘paint’ it with most spectacular imagery. With forests of highrise buildings and congested highways, they create dreamlands beyond human imagination. Utopia returns eternally: this is a new promised heaven, where people are going to happily live together and forever. Once again, Chinese cities are the avant-garde sites of such an historical ‘achievement’. However, as we have seen above, reality always unfolds itself into an opposite direction. Utopia is no more than dystopia—behind the shining glass walls of new skyscrapers, prosperity is always accompanied by chaos and even disaster. The urbanscape series Super Towers (2010) by Du Zhenjun, a Paris-based artist of Shanghai origin, demonstrates this perfectly. Turning the new Chinese cities into new towers of Babel, instead of showing a “primitive communist paradise”, he presents a contemporary version of the apocalypse: hardly have the new towers been built—symbols of newly gained wealth and superpower—when they are already on fire and the surrounding earth flooded. The ceremony of inauguration is orchestrated with earthquake and war. Du’s catastrophic scenarios obviously recall Jérôme Bosch’s infernal scenes.

However, none of these images is fictional or surrealistic, but of real events collected by the artist from news reports on the internet. The internet is the new interface of our reality today. This digitally pixelated reality has become a pool of readymades that substitutes for ‘the truth’.

Page 25: Socratis Socratous, Architectural Strategy, Untitled I, 2011; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Omikron Gallery, Cyprus Pages 28-29: NS Harsha, Creation of Gods, 2009; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

This is how we recount our reality today, and probably how we will write our history in the future. Is history simply a collage of accidental events in the course of a human being’s endless search for utopia? Does this search always cease falling into the opposite side of our aspiration—dystopia? This has been the core obsession of our existence. It is something more significant for those who have been living through historical transition, devoting their lives to emancipating themselves from oppression, in order to achieve the dream of freedom and well-being. Sun Xun is a Beijing-based artist who has grown up in the post-Revolution era when China has fervently embraced the contradictory alliance of neo-liberal capitalism and social control. Indeed, this alliance is the most reasonable and efficient one, since both camps are in reality the ultimate incarnations of the bio-political manipulation over our way of living by the powerful. Sun Xun has been concentrating his endeavours on revisiting, inquiring and subverting the official version of history, especially the established narration of the making of the nation-State, much propagated by the authorities. Different from the previous generation of artists who have committed their lives to confrontation with and quasi-physical battles against the central authority’s control, censorship and repression, Sun Xun opts to pursue his interrogation in an impassionate, distant, enduring and metaphysical manner, while resorting only to traditional handmade techniques—site-specific installations that blend drawing, painting and animated films—in order to express his mistrust of History. He has invented an alter ego of History, incarnated in the personage of the Magician, haunting all scenes of his amazing animated films. The Magician is a professional at forging falsehood to replace reality. “Magicians are the authority!

A lie is the truth! And it’s cheap!”5 Calling his recent film 21 KE—a summary of his decade-long investigation and imagination—he set up a stage on which the soul (supposedly weighting 21 grams, or ke in Chinese) flies away from one’s body.

This soulless body, following the conjuring stick of The Magician, is plunged into a black hole of History: “History is a circle, irregular but relatively standard round.

It is full of regrets, and pi is not a true formula anymore; any revolution is a lame compass, keeps turning ungratefully, and ends up with nothing.”6

Therefore, reality and fiction, lies and truth, are all turned into a meaningless chaos, a “huntun” in the Chinese ontological term. Amusingly, the famous Chinese dumpling wonton earns its name from this messy but somehow poetic picture of the cosmos! Our perception of the world has completely lost its reliability. We are no longer able to gauge the world through our senses. Hence, doubting the credibility of our perception is simply useless. We can see the world without using our eyes! Pak Sheung-Chuen, a Hong Kong-based artist, who considers tricks to detour and distort his everyday art experiences—including eating wonton as a daily food—invites us to participate in a game: how to see the world without using one’s eyes. In his project A Travel Without Visual Experience (2009), he joined a tourist group to Malaysia with his eyes blindfolded, taking photos of the tourist sites without being able to see them himself. He then installed the photos in a dark room decorated with typical Malaysian domestic wallpaper and broadcast ambient sounds recorded during the trip. The audience is invited to enter this dark room with a small camera and take photos themselves with a flash. This becomes the only moment when the viewer can actually ‘see’ the installed images—ie., the actual people, landscapes and objects that the artist was not able to see. In the darkness we can ask, what have we really seen? Does this experience show us how the world is really is?

IV It is in the total darkness, situated in the very centre of the exhibition The Power of Doubt, that we, brought together by the imaginary of the artist, are able to ask the real question about truth. Or, more precisely, we are able to doubt together.

It is in sharing such a doubt that we might feel our existence. Stimulated by the accidental and vivid moments of enlightening, we continue to strive to live together, while at the same time, to doubt everything. This is how life appears meaningful to us, and making art still worthy.

This text accompanied the exhibition catalogue The Power of Doubt (El poder de la duda), Photoespaña 2011, Museo Colecciones ICO, Madrid, June-September, 2011.

Notes 1 Shaun Gladwell, notes on Double Field; email 20 August, 2010 2

Shahzia Sikander, statement on Bending the Barrels, 2009

3

Wang Hoy Cheong’s statement on Chronicles of Crime

4

Ref. Hou Hanru, ‘Living With(in) the Urban Fiction (notes on Urbanization and Art in Post-Olympic China)’, Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, May-June, 2009 5

Sun Xun, Statement on 21 KE, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010

6

ibid.

2 9 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012

THE MONSTROUS FEMININE: STEREOTYPING AGAINST THE GRAIN

Barbara Creed Historically, almost all human societies have constructed images of monsters, male and female, designed to shock and horrify. Male monsters include the Cyclops, Minotaur, Centaur and Wolfman: the Medusa, Siren, Lorelei, Chimera, Witch and Sheela-na-Gig represent some of the more popular female monsters.

How do male and female monsters differ? How prevalent are female monsters?

All human societies have a conception of what it is about femininity that is repulsive, horrifying, abject.1 All have constructed monstrous images of women in their art and visual culture. Although the representation of the monstrousfeminine has differed historically from culture to culture, one concept that appears to have united many of these disparate representations is the abject nature of female sexuality. When women are categorised as monstrous, the nature of their abjection is almost always tied to definitions of what constitutes the proper sexual and reproductive roles for women. Hence the monstrous-feminine can assume the face of archaic mother, menstrual monster, womb monster and femme castratrice.2 The same is not true of the male monster, whose terrifying and repulsive characteristics are not necessarily tied to his sexual/reproductive functions. The stereotype of all monsters, however, is often merged with that of the animal to create an even more abject image.

Over the centuries, many of these images of female monstrosity have come to constitute a stereotype, that is, a one-dimensional or simplified characterisation—an image that readily defines social groups and individuals who are Others or Outsiders. This is particularly effective where the stereotype has been employed in order to oppress individuals and groups.3 Historically stereotypes have been used to represent female sexuality as monstrous in order to justify the oppression of women—as happens with other groups such as blacks, Jews, gays and lesbians. Today however, women artists, film directors, writers and performers have re-created these stereotypes to enhance female power.

Today such images are found in contemporary literature, art, film, rock music, video games and modern myths. Since the second wave of feminism, women have questioned the belief that they are more likely to be victims than monsters—some have taken great pleasure in seeing themselves as monsters with the power to terrify. The image of the monstrous-feminine in its many guises has become a central figure in contemporary art and cultural discourse. To what extent do such images empower women? To what degree do they enforce misogynistic stereotypes? ‘The Monstrous-Feminine: Stereotyping Against the Grain’ explores these questions in relation to contemporary art, film and cultural practice.

Another traditional female monster is, of course, the witch—probably the most enduring of all such creatures. The witch is almost always represented as an ugly, old woman with a long pointed nose, spiky fingers and a hump. Feminists have argued that the witch is woman represented as post-menopausal hag, whose reproductive functions have left her dry and barren.4 She was considered an ‘indigestible’ element in society—a factor that justified her persecution.5 During the European Inquisition, witches were accused of terrible crimes such as murder, cannibalism and castration for which they were tortured and burnt at the stake.

Like the Sirens, female vampires have often been represented as beautiful, alluring creatures that seduce their victims before sucking their lifeblood from their veins.

Although an ancient monster, the term “vampire” did not come into popular usage until the early eighteenth-century. With the publication of John Polidori’s fictional work, The Vampyre (1819) the stereotype of the vampire became that of a mysterious and alluring creature. Although vampires can be male or female, the popular image of the classic male vampire is of a seductive, but feminised monster of sleek appearance with long pointed features, who wears a flowing black cape lined with red silk. The femme fatale of late-Victorian literature is also depicted as an exotic beauty who first seduces her victim before destroying him.6 A French term for “fatal woman”, the femme fatale is often associated with the black widow spider that devours its mate during copulation. Such are her powers of seduction, she can drive the male mad with desire until he loses all reason.

Portrayed as a sexual vampire, the femme fatale is central to many operas such as Bizet’s Carmen, Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah and Berg’s Lulu.

Medusa, siren, sheela-na-gig, witch, vampire, and femme fatale—these images of female monstrosity have evolved into stereotypes. Originally a printing term, “stereotype” referred to a plate designed to increase the number of copies that could be produced, eventually coming to mean a fixed, unchanging image.

In the literary, theatrical and visual arts, stereotypes enable the reader or spectator to easily identify a character in terms of type. In the cinema, for instance, female stars can therefore often be reduced to a stereotype whose origins go back into earlier periods—femme fatale, sex goddess, witch and vampire—which indicates that the stereotype also has the power to persist over time, and even centuries.

Although stereotypes do represent types, their meaning can also change. Similar to myths, stereotypes give the impression that they are universal and constant but, of course, like all cultural representations they are produced in specific social, cultural and political contexts and hence subject to change and variation.

The history of female monstrosity Various images of female monstrosity are found in classical mythology. One of the most famous, the Medusa and her two sisters, were reported to be so horrifying that any man, who happened to look upon their faces was turned immediately to stone. He was literally ‘rooted’ to the spot. These mythological creatures possessed huge heads, a sea of writhing serpents for hair, and boars’ tusks for teeth. They also sported huge golden wings which enabled them to fly through the air like giant birds. The Sirens were deadly to the male sex. Described as enormous birds with the heads of women, the Sirens were able to sing beautiful haunting songs which they used to lure unwary sailors to shore, where submerged reefs tore apart their ships. These fatal creatures then devoured their prey. In twelfth-century Christian Ireland and England, churches, castles and other buildings displayed figurative carvings known as Sheela-na-Gigs on their facades and over doorways.

These depicted images of women holding their labia apart to reveal their vaginas as an opening into a dark, terrifying place. The term “sheela-na-gig” is said to refer to a hag or old woman and that ‘gig’ signifies a woman’s genitals. There is controversy surrounding the meaning of the Sheela-na-Gigs: some scholars claim they were intended to signify female lust and to point to its sinful nature; others argue that they represent a female fertility goddess once central to the religions of the Celtic Great Goddess from the Neolithic period.

Popular contemporary manifestations Various contemporary visual artists, rock stars and film stars have been drawn to these ancient images of female monstrosity as a source of their own creativity.

For instance, Annie Lennox named one of her most famous albums Medusa; the Bristol jazz-folk band took their name “Sheelanagig” from its original source; exotic Hollywood film stars were called “sirens” in the 1920s and 1930s; the femme fatale is central to film noir—the lesbian vampire film is one of the most popular of horror genres; the film The Wizard of Oz made Glinda the Good Witch a household name; and the 1987 cult comedy The Witches of Eastwick, based on the John Updike novel, went completely against the grain in its depiction of the medieval female monster. The three ‘innocent’ witches, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher and Susan Sarandon find themselves at the mercy of the ‘evil’ Daryl Van Horn played by Jack Nicholson. At one point, Nicholson even takes the time to inform the female trio that in the past witches were unjustifiably persecuted by men who wanted to bolster male power.

As Richard Dyer argues in his discussion of gays and stereotyping, the crucial factor is not the meaning of the stereotype itself but rather the way in which different groups define and control the meaning and circulation of stereotypes in order to preserve their own interests. In fact, stereotypes often perform the necessary function of ordering a mass of complex details in the actual world.

31 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 This activity of ordering, including the use of stereotypes, has to be acknowledged as a necessary, indeed inescapable part of the way in which societies make sense of themselves, and hence actually make and reproduce themselves. (The fact that all such orderings are by definition, partial and limited does not mean they are untrue—partial knowledge is not false knowledge, it is simply not absolute knowledge).6 As Dyer points out, two problems that arise from this activity are the human tendency to regard the stereotype and what it signifies as fixed and absolute, and the tendency to ignore or deny the way in which groups can use stereotypes to consolidate their own power, while oppressing others. In this context, many societies have used the image of the monstrous-feminine to validate the proper role for woman—a role that bolsters male power. Proper women do not seek to usurp the male role, create unrest, undermine femininity, reject motherhood, terrify, castrate or kill. Proper women should avoid the labels of man-hater, witch, Amazon, whore, lesbian or castrator. But the concept of the acceptable woman of course also gives rise to other sets of female stereotypes such as the virgin, sweetheart, mother and angel.

A key function of the stereotype is to maintain a distinct boundary between those who are acceptable to a given society and those who are not.

However the image of the female monster presents problems for those who might wish to use the stereotype to control female behaviour. Female monsters can also be empowering—particularly in popular films, where audiences are encouraged to identify with their evil transgressions and bad behaviour. Consider the immense popularity of the female monster in The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976), Ginger Snaps (2000), Femme Fatale (2002) and Teeth (2007). The heroines who enact revenge in rape-revenge films such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Violated (1985), and Ms 45 (1981) are simultaneously monstrous and sympathetic figures. European cinema also features a range of sympathetic female monsters in films such as Daughters of Darkness (1971) and Baise Moi (2000). Furthermore, although these heroines can all be stereotyped as monsters, each one is also a distinct individual with quite specific ways of appearing, thinking, behaving and being. Stereotypes can function at the level of the obvious and the complex.7 To determine the extent to which a stereotype might empower the viewer/reader/spectator, it is crucial to first examine the stereotype itself—whether simple or complex, ironic or satirical.

‘Creating against the grain’ One of the key strategies feminist film theorists adopted in the 1970s and 1980s was to ‘read against the grain’, that is, to locate gaps and contradictions in the way in which films represented the dominant values and mores of the culture.

They wanted to find alternative readings or interpretations and find a space in which woman could be seen to speak in her own voice.8 This approach was based on the view that ideology itself is not a total, sealed system without internal contradictions and inconsistencies. It is also possible to read some stereotypes against the dominant meaning assigned by the culture to the stereotype in question.

During this period, feminist artists working in film and visual media took great pleasure in creating against the grain, that is, in producing confronting works of art that have the power to unsettle and shock. Hélène Cixous draws attention to the power of this artistic strategy in her influential essay entitled ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’9. From ancient times to the present, women’s genitalia and procreative functions continue to provide a plentiful source of such imagery.

In Christian art, hell was sometimes represented as a putrid womb and place of torture. In the 1970s, Judy Chicago set out to restore the reputation of the uterus with her multi-media Dinner Party installation (1974-79), depicting place settings that represented thirty-nine women—real and mythical. Several of these settings were in the shape of a flower-like vagina. Many loved The Dinner Party, but just as many found it vulgar—even obscene—reducing female sexuality to a stereotype of the sexual woman.

The cinema has also drawn on female genital imagery to shock and horrify. The most horrific scene in The Brood (1979) is reserved for the moment when the demented mother, who is giving birth from a sac hanging from the outside of her stomach, bends over to lick away the blood and afterbirth—just like a female animal in the wild. It was this scene, rather than those of bloody murder, that the censors chose to cut. Yet a close study reveals that this scene encourages audiences to think about the way in which society attempts to deny similarities between human and animal, and to associate not man but woman with the animal world. More recently spectators have screamed in delight at the black comedy Teeth (2007), in which the heroine—unaware that she possesses a mythical vagina dentata—innocently castrates her persistent male suitors.

This stereotype relates to myths of the vagina dentata, or toothed vagina.

This tongue-in-cheek comedy draws on an ancient stereotype of the monstrousfeminine, while also encouraging audiences to critically assess male violence against women. Primitive cultures believed that a woman’s monthly blood flow was caused by the spirit of a biting animal, frequently associated with a snake, which lived inside her vagina. A menstruating woman was taboo and men forbidden to have sex with her, for fear of being castrated. Hence, even as late as medieval times, the lord of the manor (not the young immature

bridegroom) deflowered a virgin on her wedding night in a practice referred to as jus primae noctis (law of the first night). The concept of the devouring female genitals persists in the modern world in phrases such as “castrating bitch” and descriptions of the vagina as a “man trap”, “snapper” and “bottomless pit”. Some religions still place a taboo on sex with a menstruating woman.

The Australian artist Julie Rrap draws on stereotypes of female monstrosity to undercut popular expectations. A sculpture entitled Bust(ed) (2008) offers a powerful example of Rrap’s interest in deconstructing stereotyped notions of woman as creatures tied to their bodies, unable to speak their minds.

The sculpture is of a crouching woman who has been inserted headfirst into a block of granite so that the viewer is confronted with a portrait of the woman’s arse instead of a face—complete with a plait of hair lining the crack between the buttocks. Although the woman has been rendered mute, her body speaks volumes.

By using the female body to parody the conventions of polite femininity, Bust(ed) presents what many might regard as a monstrous image of female sexuality.

Rrap challenges the viewer by opening up, rather than closing down, questions about the nature and function of the artwork in the contemporary world.

Rrap’s digital image, Overstepping (2001) plays brilliantly with the stereotype of the sexually dangerous woman. The image is of a woman’s legs framed from the feet to just below the knees. Everything about the image is normal except for her heels, which have evolved to form monstrous fleshy stilettos. In other words, her feet have become high heels, thus obviating the need to wear such shoes. Overstepping implies that this woman lives in a future age in which women’s feet have assumed a new form, one that is most likely to attract the male. The image plays ironically with Darwinian ideas about evolution and sexual selection and feminist politics. Do her high-heeled feet signify regression or transformation and progress? Rrap also plays humorously with Freud’s theory of fetishism. This newly evolved woman is a fetishist’s delight in that the high heel, a substitute for her supposedly missing phallus, has literally become a part of her anatomy. In another work from 2000, Camouflage #2 (Raquel) Rrap depicts a woman wearing a loincloth and covered in body hair. Is she human or animal?

The image plays on the stereotype of woman-as-animal in order to ask the question—why do women (and some men) feel compelled to shave their body hair?

Is not the human species also animal?

Another Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini, has employed her talent to explore questions of genetic engineering, and to examine the ways in which we are able to act ethically, when faced with the power to create new forms of life.

To achieve this end, she has created a modern bestiary of genetic engineering, creatures that defy classification. The Young Family (2002-03) constructed from silicone, polyurethane, leather and human hair, reveals a human-animal hybrid—a lactating mother with a human body, and a porcine face and long drooping ears.

The mother is lying on her side feeding three of her babies, while a fourth rolls on its back, looking at its mother with love. The young family, which has been genetically engineered so that humans may harvest the body parts, is grotesque in the extreme, yet also elicits a deeply sympathetic response from the spectator.

It draws on stereotypical pictures of proper motherhood to create a monstrous double. Piccinini asks important questions about humanity’s moral responsibility for the creatures it creates to ensure its own survival. Such images challenge the spectator to think deeply about the ethics of scientific research. If art is to inspire us to bring about change, to empower us ethically, it must challenge the spectator.

One effective strategy adopted by women artists is to cut against the grain of the stereotype. The line between female disempowerment and empowerment might be thin at times but it is definitely worth treading.

Notes 1 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 2

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1993, 2007

3

Richard Dyer, ‘Stereotyping’, in Gays and Film, Richard Dyer (ed.), London: British Film Institute, 1977: 27-39

4

Germaine Greer, The Change: Women, Ageing and Menopause, Melbourne: Penguin, 1993

5

Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Malificarum, New York: Dover, 1971

6

H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998, [1887]

7

Richard Dyer, ‘The Role of Stereotypes’, in Media Studies: A Reader, Paul Marris and Sue Thornham eds, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999: 245-251

8

Walter Lippman, Public Opinion, New York: Macmillan, 1956

9

Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, Melbourne: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982

10

Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs 1 No. 4, 1976: 875-893

LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN CAST THE FIRST STONE

Jack Persekian The recent expansive Wikileaks disclosures inspired these reflections on intimate thoughts I shared with a small circle of people I trust. In narrating these instances I hope to expose and betray the weaknesses and precarity that frame trial and confrontation. The moments described also shed light on the paradoxes of subjectivity. They are confessions of one who occupies—at once and interchangeably as the situation demands—multiple categories: the Palestinian, the Armenian, the American and the Arab. I like to think that the switching between identities is not duplicitous. It is the travel in the unchartered and turbulent terrain between and across borders and territories, a journey that sadly requires compromise and deviation.

These reflections are both interpretation and disclosure. In investigating the forgotten detail I explore the interstices within a polarised experience.

By consigning these stories to the public domain—in a way akin to the viral videos of al-Mabhouh’s assassins1—I introduce evidence that can be used against me.

I am my own turncoat. It is not clear to whom this evidence is addressed, but the prospect of indictment is certain. “But I would not feel so all alone. Everybody must get stoned.”2 Neighbours As I look onto the horizon from the porch, I glimpse a pickup truck pulling over at the entrance gate across the street, which demarcates the zoned and un-zoned areas of this place at the edge of Jerusalem. A man begins unloading junk and debris he has clearly gathered from a nearby construction site. I venture towards the gate and express my objection—this is not a garbage dump! You are making my neighbourhood an eyesore, polluting it, creating a health and safety hazard, not to mention the undaunted transgression of my rights and property. Wearing Above: Jack Persekian presentation of Nablus Soap, with sound performance artist Tarek Atoui, Emirates Palace Auditorium, Abu Dhabi, 7 November 2010 Photo courtesy the artists and Abu Dhabi Art

a solid black shirt and weighing two hundred fifteen and three-quarter pounds, and donning a southern accent, he encircles the truck and hovers over me—this is a dump and you’re garbage. Knockout. I retreat, I have not noticed, you are right, may God give you strength and good health. I went inside and pretended to my family there was nothing of concern to us outside. But to this day, deep down I regret not offering him some money to dump his garbage in front of the neighbours!

The Mall |mōl| I asked the man in the information booth to direct me to the nearest musical instruments shop. Seeking respite from a lulling routine, he told me of his desire to learn to play the organ. He had recently bought a Yamaha keyboard, but had little time to practice, I am going to buy a guitar, but have no time for practice either. The guitar was in fact a Christmas present for my son, Amir. I omitted this detail for fear it would kill the conversation and the would-be organ player’s ephemeral enthusiasm to narrate his life and aspirations as a musician. I wanted to insinuate that I live alone, away from my family. Learning to play an instrument takes time! Do you have a wife? If there is a wife at home that’s a full-time occupation I thought. Candidly, he whispered that he was single and had all the time in the world. I responded compassionately with a nod, I know, we are in the same boat. It is in fact, like living on a boat, or more accurately, an oilrig.

He’s here to make some money and move on. Not a living and not a life. I yearned for our conversation to continue. I wanted to tell him that even though I am not stuck in that booth on the top floor of the shopping centre for nine hours every day, I still look out every morning from my fourteenth floor balcony and wonder, if the ship will ever dock. What I imagined would be a hit-and-run job has become a protracted deferral of the pain of longing. Longing and belonging sail adrift on a raft far-flung from reach. I look down onto the pavement just shy of fifty metres below me and see the body of an Emirates’ frequent flyer next to a howling dog named Sisi. Excuse me! Where is the Galeries Lafayette?

3 3 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 Uncovered When was the first time you came to Beirut?

1999.

What was the reason for your visit?

I came to meet Madame Fairouz.

How did you get in touch with Fairouz? On the Internet?

No, Mahmoud Darwish made the connection.

The poet Mahmoud Darwish?

Yes, the late poet Darwish.

And what was the reason for that meeting?

To invite Madame Fairouz to come to Bethlehem and pray with us at the millennial Christmas midnight mass.

And did she come?

No she didn’t! (you moron) Where did you meet her?

At her house.

Where is her house?

In Rabieh.

Why did you think she could go to Bethlehem?

We had worked out an arrangement with King Hussein; she would fly in Arafat’s helicopter from Amman directly to Bethlehem, without passing through any Israeli border.

Very interesting!

Unfortunately I couldn’t convince her.

He stepped out of the room and entered the next one over. I glimpsed the CCTV camera in the top right-hand corner and speculated on its inventory of my motion over the last hour and a half. What if he found out that in 1999 I lied about where I was coming from? He must know by now that I had tried, temporarily, to cut my umbilical link to Jerusalem, to Palestine. At the time, I had left every connecting trace (my Israeli ID card, my credit card, health insurance, Al-Ma’mal Foundation business cards) in Amman. The whole plan risked collapse abruptly when I realised that my passport had two visas issued in Tel Aviv. But I was determined. I only had a day layover to somehow conceal whom I really was. I called Robert who obliged quickly. We drove around in search of that single Christian open for business on an otherwise pleasantly quiet weekend before Friday prayer. I was hoping to create my own rubber stamp, one that would look similar to the visa but hide “Tel Aviv.”

I spent considerable time smudging the stamp to give it a layering effect. A decade later as I sat in that desolate room, vulnerable and completely exposed, my schemes and plots uncovered, I wondered what right had I wronged?

I had no choice I stood facing the Animals in War monument on Park Lane, an amazing tribute to all the animals that served, suffered and died alongside the British, Commonwealth, and Allied forces in the wars and conflicts of the twentieth-century. I wondered how many of these animals died for Palestine? I paid a visit to the Imperial War Museum, London in search for an answer. Perusing some documents, I discovered the number of animals that had died in the last fifty-two years of clashes closely approximated the human toll in Palestine as of the year 2000. I asked the director if the numbers also accounted for those animals that the Palestinians and Israelis had sacrificed in their wars and confrontations. No, we are only concerned with British subjects. Dissatisfied, I contacted the Animal Rights League hoping they would have more comprehensive figures. I explained who I was and what I hoped to achieve, and was directed to their Middle East Desk. Unable to speak to anyone there, I sent an email. To my shock and utter dismay, they wrote back that indeed such records did exist and that I was to go to the Tel Aviv field office immediately for interrogation. I was accused of masterminding the massacre of two thousand pigeons during the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration. I do confess that I used pigeons instead of doves. And there were, in fact, two thousand of them. The number was meant as a message of peace from Bethlehem to the whole world as we all marked the year 2000. But I never intended to shoot them down with fireworks.

It was a fateful night. There were fifty security personnel dispatched on the roof of the old municipal building facing the Peace Centre on Manger Square. The Press contingent had already wired the roof of the Peace Centre three days prior. Each soldier was entrusted two containers holding twenty pigeons.

They were ordered to dispatch forty pigeons in forty-five seconds. The timing was based on the results of trial runs that measured the conduct of the pigeons in relation to the amount of light in Manger Square. I stood on the rooftop imagining the synchronous music and fireworks, observing with reserved excitement.

Thinking back with regret, I should have intercepted the selection of music, but one cannot foresee disaster. The music began with the countdown at 23:59:45.

I gave the order on the two-way radio to the captain; he immediately mobilised his platoon to release the pigeons. Fifteen seconds later a barrage of fireworks hit the sky above Manger Square. The pigeons retaliated by sending their entire company, now suspended in mid-air, to the source of the barrage. There were numerous casualties. The children roaming the Square snatched the fallen; I later learned that it was a week’s supply of dinner.

But it was all an Israeli ploy. They were the ones supplying fireworks, installed and fired them. They were the authority on the ground. I explained all of this to the woman at the Animal Rights League Tel Aviv field office, who was investigating the New Year’s Eve genocide. I denied categorically any wrongdoing. It was, after all, the Israelis who installed the fireworks far too close to Manger Square. The British television crew was also implicit because they pressured me to broadcast the climax of our millennium celebrations to a global audience during a fifteen second slot before the strike of midnight and a thirty second slot after. So how on earth can one fly two thousand doves (or pigeons in our case) at midnight, shoot fireworks all together in one tiny square in the span of forty-five seconds?

It had to be a conspiracy. In retrospect, it was clearly an Israeli-British plot.

That very same British television crew questioned me a month before the event on the plausibility of doves flying at night. I had assured them that a specialist in Hebron was training the doves. In any case it was, after all, one of our favourite national sports. They asked me sardonically if they could interview the specialist in Hebron. I very much welcomed the idea and gave them his number. As the TV crew left the office I rushed to call the specialist and warn him that the British were on their way to interrogate him, and that he should not make any mistake when they ask about the “doves” of peace. Despite the considerable erosion of trust between the Animal Rights League and myself, I nevertheless submitted through the good offices of the Bethlehem Peace Centre a letter acquiescing to the resumption of negotiations from the point that they were halted, i.e. from the point where I categorically denied any wrongdoing.

Desperate people commit desperate acts The most recent batch of relentless Wikileaks disclosures proposes a theory on the Tunisian government’s 2007 revocation of Suha Arafat’s Tunisian citizenship—the explanation goes as follows: Leila Ben Ali (wife of ousted Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali) at that time had been scheming to marry off an 18 year-old niece to UAE Prime Minister and Dubai Ruler Sheik Mohamed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, one of whose wives is the half-sister of King Abdulla II of Jordan. According to this rumor, Suha Arafat warned Jordanian Queen Rania about Leila Ben Ali’s plans. Word of Suha Arafat’s intervention got back to the Tunisian First Lady, who turned against Arafat and soon forced her out of Tunisia.3 About a decade prior to this annulment, I met Suha Arafat for the first and only time in Gaza. Those were her heydays. I was seeking funding for the official Palestinian participation in the twenty-third Bienal de São Paulo. The good offices of the French diplomatic mission facilitated the meeting. I believe I made a good impression. Immediately after my rendition, Mrs. Arafat placed a call to Abu AlJanazeer, the senior accountant (I think) of the Al Bahar Construction Company (whose manager, at that time, Khaled Salam was President Arafat’s economic advisor). She asked him to help me. On returning to Jerusalem I faxed Mr. Abu Al-Janazeer a formal request for funding to the amount of $20,000. Following Mrs. Arafat’s kind directives I chased him down for a few days on the phone. Shortly thereafter and to my great surprise and delight a man by the name of Monsieur Mouton, working for Alcatel, the French telecommunication company, called and offered to sponsor our São Paulo participation with a $10,000 grant. I knew that Alcatel was seeking to land the contract for the Palestinian telecommunications network. I also knew that such a deal would happen only when greased with choice kickbacks. What I never imagined was the personal privilege to find myself a part of such manoeuvres. Being a novice in this game I asked Monsieur Mouton for Alcatel’s logo and their preference for acknowledgement in our exhibition publications and correspondence. He replied politely that the amount, being rather humble for a company so large, would be a somewhat complicated process for their busy communications department to deal with. The intricacies of corporate decisionmaking amount to little ultimate benefit for such a hassle. Monsieur Mouton concluded our phone conversation briskly. It’s easier for everybody, don’t mention it. I hung up, briefly pondered Alcatel’s gracious generosity and quickly proceeded to forget about the matter.

In retrospect I wonder if a $10,000 grant was a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” contribution, what did Alcatel’s significant kickbacks to Palestine’s officials and projects look like? In a twist of fate or an act of divine justice, the second intifada and its aftermath rung the death knell for many of these fixed projects and shady companies. And this present “Jasmin” intifada, one can only hope, will sound an even louder and more ominous signal to those broader circles, in which I was a brief and insignificant interloper, of corrupt regimes and dictatorships.

Notes 1 Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, co-founder of the military wing of Hamas, was assassinated in a Dubai hotel room 19 January, 2010, allegedly by Mossad agents with fake European and Australian passports 2

Bob Dylan, ‘Rainy Day Women’, Blonde on Blonde, 1966

3

http://marcovilla.instablogs.com/entry/suha-arafat-why-did-she-loose-her-tunisian-citizenship/

PARALLEL COLLISIONS 2012 ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART CURATORS ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR AND NATASHA BULLOCK

AMELIA BARIKIN: This is the first time you have collaborated as co-curators on an exhibition. How did this partnership come about, and how would you characterise the parallels in your curatorial thinking?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: This partnership started as a friendship and the collaboration has evolved from conversations we’ve been having for over ten years. Natasha is originally from Melbourne, but lives in Sydney and Alexie is from Sydney, but lives in Melbourne. We have never actually resided in the same city at the same time. We became aware of each other in 2000 and over the years through correspondence and sharing some very long nights, it became apparent that we had certain commonalities, starting with our interest in the relations between photography, film, literature, and art history. These subjects form the curatorial crux of our respective interests. We both prefer to privilege the artist as the starting point in exhibition making. We would rather look or listen to the work itself, than research backwards from a thematic stance, using art or artists to illustrate a secondary point. We both like work environments that are characterised by a spirit of generosity, food on the table and bottles of wine, sharing ideas and arguments with artists and peers. From our position as curators, we think it is important to not only state that you believe in equality and discursive thoughts, but to also welcome radical thinking at your own table.

And we have laughed at ourselves during this process, often when we try to find a shared position or consensus we are reminded that we ourselves also form a parallel collision!

AMELIA BARIKIN: As the last remaining major biennale dedicated solely to showcasing contemporary Australian art, the Adelaide Biennial is frequently expected to provide a ‘snapshot’ of contemporary Australian practice and offer an overview of the field. You have explicitly rejected characterising Parallel Collisions as a survey. How has the function of the Biennial changed?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: As Australia’s only standing biennial of national art we are humbled to be working on this exhibition project. From the inaugural Biennial in 1990 curated by Mary Eagle to Adelaide Installations incorporating the 1994 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art that featured commissioned work, and to the recent critical success of Before and After Science (2010), the Biennial plays an important role in presenting work by living artists.

Yet, the function of the Biennial has changed because the landscape in which it is being presented has changed. In the last decade biennials have helped to significantly alter the terrain of art. They used to be, and some still are, large-scale overviews of contemporary art practice uncovering the new and/or showcasing the existing. However, biennials are increasing taking stronger curatorial positions, which are as much a result of, or perhaps a reaction to, the changes and commercialisation of contemporary art as it is a result of the professionalisation of the curatorial industry. We would prefer to describe this Biennial as an impression and a speculation—we have consciously resisted an authorial or definitive stance.

We would prefer to not use the word survey because it implies a particular way of working. It implies a process of review or examination. We have explicitly placed the relationship with the artist and their ideas at the forefront of our curatorial practice. It is their ideas, developed by some of the artists after site-visits to the Art Gallery of South Australia that have created this exhibition. We provided a framework, a proposition from which the artists have responded but, in the end, this Biennial has been shaped by their respective concerns. We wanted to embrace an element of chance in our working process and give support to the unknown and the untested idea.

AMELIA BARIKIN: What can we expect from this iteration of the Adelaide Biennial?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: The 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art explores how ideas emerge, converge and reform over time and echo through history to reveal points of similarity (parallel), contact (collisions) and encounter (trespass). The title Parallel Collisions describes the architectural

and temporal devices at play in the exhibition’s structure. Presented across the AGSA’s Elder Wing of Australian Art and the temporary exhibitions galleries, this edition is transhistorical, bringing the past into dialogue with the present. Works variously collapse, hover, evolve, accumulate or splinter. At times the encounter is in parallel or collision with the historical Australian collection, highlighting the conditional and at times, complicit nature of the narratives on display.

AMELIA BARIKIN: Tell us about the Marco Fusinato work that the Biennial exhibition title is based on. Why this title, this work?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: We are interested in the contradictions raised by this title. What happens when a parallel and a collision are placed in dialogue, especially when their meaning may at first appear antithetical? At the heart of their concurrence is the complex and intangible nature of time. A parallel cleaves a path through time continuously. In descriptive terms, the parallel can refer to correspondences—a tendency or a similarity of parallel concern.

A collision, however, describes contact and feels like a rupture to the sequential nature of temporality, even though time persists beyond the expansion of that moment. Cars crash. Particles collide.

Marco Fusinato’s 2008 work Parallel Collisions is drawn from moments of conflict—the face of a terrorist, the images of an explosion—interpreted by musicians who introduce subjectivity to the piece in all its volatility. The image functions as a parallel collision, its transmission an act of indictment as much as incident; the sheaves of the score scatter like detritus and their dismissal allows for a reconfiguration to occur that is unique to each performance. Situated in the Elder Wing and surrounded by modernist paintings and sculptures, Fusinato’s work is a testament to past actions and an emboldened agitprop.

AMELIA BARIKIN: Unlike many past Adelaide Biennials, the majority of artists have been given the opportunity to create new works. What kind of curatorial guidance was offered in the development of these commissions, and what can we expect to see by way of these new creations?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: Including new work was important to us because this Biennial is, above all, an exhibition of living work. We presented the artists with a proposition anchored around four words: time, trespass, parallels, collisions. We have not worked with the artists as producers or sponsors.

We have approached each artist as an individual. Inevitably some artists’ projects require consistent input throughout their development whereas other projects are self-contained. We are fortunate to have wonderful support at the Art Gallery of South Australia with new director Nick Mitzevich and project curator Lisa Slade.

This support enabled us to commission many new works, which is a first in some time for the Adelaide Biennial. Given this support, we brought fourteen of the twenty-one artists/artist duos/artist collaborators to South Australia in early 2011.

It was not necessary to take every artist to Adelaide as some projects were more autonomous. The architect Jan van Schaik was also made available to each artist in the event they wanted to discuss specific spatial concerns. This trip offered the artists the opportunity to respond to the Gallery context/environment, or to further develop their ideas.

For example, there are major commissions by Richard Bell, Stephen Bram, Daniel Crooks, Marco Fusinato, Susan Jacobs and Tim Silver. Tim Silver has made a full body cast of himself lying in a foetal position wearing nothing but a hoodie. The cast is filled with wood putty and deep-frozen before being displayed in the gallery. Over the duration of the exhibition the frozen structure evaporates. It doesn’t melt. As the moisture leaves, the form collapses and ages, so in the timeline of the show the body is obliterated. The series of accompanying photographs reveals further erosion, bringing the form closer to death and to a husk devoid of moisture. The dramatic chiaroscuro, the foetal position and the head covering lends a classical and contemporary sensibility to the work.

The dense character of temporality and idea of transience, represented in Silver’s work, are concepts that run through many of the new commissions in this Biennial.

3 5 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 AMELIA BARIKIN: Australia has a very particular relationship to the past, coaxed from multiple strands of converging histories at varied levels of visibility. Within Australian art history parallel collisions are often kept out of alignment, running as separate threads within the same frame. How do the ‘Redux’, ‘Incursion’ and ‘Tracking Shot’ sections fit within or respond to this historiographic framework?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: Within the parallel structure, works have been named an ‘Incursion’, a ‘Redux’, or situated within the ‘Tracking Shot’ to reflect the artists’ concerns and the different temporalities of their work.

Sixteen artists’ works are included in the ‘Tracking Shot’; five appear only as ‘Incursions’ in the Elder Wing of Australian Art, while seven artist’s works are placed across both the Elder Wing and the temporary exhibition galleries to form a connective tissue, which we call the ‘Redux’.

Like water through stone, the Incursions in the Elder Wing respond directly to the ideas and narratives on display in the collection. These works simultaneously collide with their context (or at the very least are placed in contact) as much as they are in parallel with it; their meaning ultimately derived from a network of spatial, historical and contemporaneous associations. Nicholas Folland, for example, takes up the rich and associative environment of the Elder Wing through the creation of a levitating glass island. Comprised of more than 2000 cut-glass vessels, the work is an incandescent archipelago. It is as if Folland has emptied the drawing rooms and vitrines of South Australia’s middle classes to create a mythological psychogeography of refracted light. Inspired particularly by early stories of colonial exploration, discovery and failure, which are embedded in the collection works on display, Folland’s floating form embodies anxiety and splendour, a figurative “black swan of trespass on alien waters”.

To unravel further the arrow of time’s chronology, the Redux works are those that return or are brought back; they exist post-positively. As one instance of a Redux within the exhibition, Rosemary Laing’s photographs are evidence that an image may alter an established order. A work of art cannot be broken down into singular, reproducible elements and Laing’s images, when viewed in the Elder Wing in direct contact with the vernacular of colonial landscape painting, are not about juxtaposition or appropriation but rather about how photography has become as much a precursor for painting as the reverse. Laing disturbs the order of things by reshaping the symbolism embodied in the tradition of landscape painting in Australia, usurping the assumed narrative and not flinching from rendering even the most specious of introduced species. In Parallel Collisions, Laing’s photographs are situated in dialogue with John Glover’s 1835 painting A view of the artist’s house and garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land and Han Heysen’s Mystic Morn of 1904.

Like Laing’s series, many of the Redux works consider notions of recall, the repeat and at times, the elusive nature of memory. Selected from different periods of an artist’s practice, they not only signal a sustained engagement with specific ideas but also, in their physical locations across the galleries, point to the elastic and transformative nature of those same thoughts. These works proffer ways of thinking that shift from one parallel to the next and, in so doing, describe a doubling that evokes the temporal character of perception.

AMELIA BARIKIN: You mention photography as a point of parallel in your curatorial histories. Can you discuss the different types of photography in this Biennial?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: Representing the breadth and diversity of photomedia practices is important to us. From the prints of Rosemary Laing, Tim Silver, Shaun Gladwell and Pat Brassington to the incorporation of photomedia from Tom Nicholson and Robert Cook Vs Max Pam, the richness of the medium is underlined. The association of Laing’s prints with historical paintings, for instance, draws a complicated line between photography’s history and its relation to the contemporary.

AMELIA BARIKIN: The phrase “parallel collisions” is suggestive of relationships that are difficult to perceive, measure, or capture. To imagine multiple collision points on alternate courses that may never meet—to think of explosive or volatile moments that have no perceptible correlation—this is in direct opposition to modes of narrative storytelling that rely on chains of causes and effects. I ask firstly, what is the role of narrative in this exhibition? And secondly, does history need narratives in order to survive?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: As students from the heyday of postmodernism it is difficult for us to accept narrative in straightforward terms as simply a beginning, middle and end. At this time, in the 1980s and 1990s, our thinking was influenced by Lyotard’s ideas in The Postmodern Condition, the end of the grand narratives, and by Linda Hutcheon’s writings on parody. Having said this, we have felt in more recent times the shift to a personalised, reflective and localised sense of storytelling within literature, cinema and some aspects of contemporary art making. We don’t believe in history as a ‘blank slate’. Narratives are important and history relies on facts, however porous those facts might be to the passage of time and interpretation and the recollection of meaning and

intent. Many of the artists in this Biennial use narrative, looking back to events in history or forward to whims of fancy or fiction. Working in painting, drawing, and porcelain sculpture, Michelle Usher’s work exploits the pleasure of fictional narratives and the indulgent enjoyment of serendipity. Concurrent with making art, she writes short stories to bring together seemingly disparate ideas and references. The stories are conceptual models that inform the work as it is made.

The work in turn influences the stories, which are constantly re-adapted. In a related way, Usher’s multifaceted installation represents a space of doubling and illusion and provides a meditation on the impermanence of being. The face we see repeated in some of her images is an ambiguous figure inspired by the opera Don Giovanni. Obscured by translucent veils and turning away from us, this woman is a man, whose identity is in a state of flux.

Narrative takes another form in the collaborative book written by Robert Cook and illustrated by Max Pam. This is the first time this curator/writer and photographer have worked together. Documenting the vagaries of the internal realm as well as the experiences of the wanderer at large, Narcolepsy (a novella) (2011–12) is a hand-held fetish object, a giveaway zine that sits in the gallery free for the viewer to take away, enacting a gesture of trespass. Starting with the masculine wound and self-harm as an in-between state, images shimmer and occlude with repetitions in text often left hanging mid-sentence, partially erased and constantly jarring.

AMELIA BARIKIN: You have cited both Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark (2002), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia (1999) as inspirational in the development of this Biennial. I suspect this intersects with the idea of navigating or designing an exhibition like a moving image, and resonates particularly with the creation of moments where different forms of temporality collide. But the idea of the Sokurov-style tracking shot, as in a continuous single take with no edits, actually works against the notion of montage and can reinforce linearity. What is the appeal of the tracking shot as a model of spectatorship?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: Russian Ark is a film comprising a single continuous shot. Moments in history provide the visual language and are akin to punctuation points. Martin Scorsese also famously employed the long take in Goodfellas (1990). He did this to introduce each character of the story. Sokurov does the same but to different effect and purpose. For him, Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace is the vessel and the State Hermitage collection is a part of the mise-en-scène or the texture of film. Architecture provides a quasi-framework for Russian Ark by spatially articulating edits. Doorways become transitions. The snow of the landscape outside marks another shift. We employ the term tracking shot for its associative potential to describe the passage of the viewer through time and space. For Parallel Collisions we have used the architecture of the exhibition in the temporary galleries in a similar way. In collaboration with architect Jan van Schaik we have created a pathway through the exhibition, framing works in particular ways or in dialogue with other works. As spectators we encounter works in an experience that accumulates from beginning to end. Passageways become thresholds to another space. By creating a singular passage through the “parallel” downstairs we were interested in the ability of spatial perception to augment and truncate the spectator’s temporal experience.

AMELIA BARIKIN: In his book Chronology, Daniel Birnbaum remarked that, “it is no longer a question of pushing the linear model of time to the verge of collapse, but rather of suggesting more sophisticated and complex networks that allow for temporal heterogeneity in a multiplicity of non-synchronous connections, delays, and deferrals”.1 Your curatorial strategy is very much more on the side of speed (of slowness and acceleration) than it is on the side of measurable or ‘objective’ temporality. Are there other curators or exhibitions that you would cite as inspirational for this approach?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: We recognise the pioneering curators from the 1960s to the present day, who have produced radically different methodologies for working with art and artists: from Pontus Hultén and Harold Szeemann to Jean-Hubert Martin, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Massimiliano Gioni and WHW (What, How and for Whom). And in Australia we acknowledge the transhistorical exhibitions of Anthony Bond, Juliana Engberg, Ted Gott, Nick Waterlow and the creation of the Museum of Old & New Art (MONA).

Over the last decade a number of exhibitions and artworks have attempted to address the materiality of time and to bridge the (artificial) museological divide between past and present. Perhaps the most prescient example is Artempo: Where time becomes art (2007) at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Structured around the notion of temporality, Artempo tested the possibilities that emerge when historical objects are situated beside recently made artworks. Points of difference or similarity create a ricocheting effect for the viewer. A similar conceptual underpinning was explored in the Biennale of Sydney’s Revolutions–Forms That Turn (2008) where avant-garde practice was situated in relation to recent art making.

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In terms of individual practices, Daniel Buren sliced his high-end minimalism through the architectural heart of the Musée Picasso (2009) forging a physical path between Picasso’s brutal modernism and Buren’s playful austerity; and with more subtle effect, Mona Hautom wove webs between chairs from the collection of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, Italy (2009) in a work about and entitled Conversations. Closer to home in 2009, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery was transformed by Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures, with animals hanging between pictures and sleeping among didactic displays. This intervention illustrates how Piccinini’s ideas relate as much to evolution and science as they do to art and culture. These are just a few examples of how artists are using the matter of time and the historical as media, allowing for more imaginative engagement with collections and architecture beyond a typical narrative through time or a modernist white cube.

AMELIA BARIKIN: In many ways Parallel Collisions manifests as a site-specific project that has developed in dialogue with both the institution and the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Could you give us some examples of how the exhibition responds to or alters the existing conditions on site?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: The exhibition opens with an assertion. For the first time since the inauguration of the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1881, an artist will create a deliberate and decisive act of trespass in the vestibule behind the neo-classical columns framing the Gallery’s entrance.

Richard Bell’s installation Solidarity (2011–12) is the reclamation of a space that has long needed contesting. Moving to one side the white marble busts of colonial forebears, he draws on the voices of the civil rights movement. His painting Peter Norman A white hero for black Australia will be erased for subsequent re-hangings but his action will endure in the DNA of the gallery walls. As the artist says: “We will not be put in darkies’ corner”.

The transition between the collection spaces and the subterranean contemporary galleries is defined by an architectural incursion, activating both a horizontal and vertical axis. Foster & Berean’s newly commissioned work, Unity and fragments (how to be alone) (2012), slices through the temporary gallery’s entrance stairwell, amplifying the psychological threshold aspect of the space.

Using provisional materials, the formality of their elevated grid is ultimately articulated as a failed or aborted structure unable to wholly contain the objectives of the modernist project. This is complemented by the inclusion of the Zig-zag chair, designed by Gerrit Rietveld (c. 1934), which hangs precariously from the grid. Drawn from the AGSA collection, the chair is a feat of stripped back threedimensional virtuosity, the simple abstract form belying a complex structure.

Responding in a different way to the existing conditions of the site is Philip Samartzis’ Microphonics (2012). Samartzis re-deploys and configures sitespecific field recordings to create points of aural pressure that have no discernible origin or source. Recorded in the galleries of AGSA over the course of several visits, Samartzis’s soundscape permits the sound of one time to pass imperviously though the space and time of another.

AMELIA BARIKIN: Heraclitus famously quipped that it was impossible to step into the same river twice. It appears from some of the works you are interested in the image of the river as an historical analogy?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: You could be referring here to the works of Yvonne Koolmatrie, Jonathan Jones and Tom Nicholson. The Murray River, or Murrurundi as it is known to the Ngarrindjeri people, is a constant source of inspiration to Yvonne Koolmatrie. Her weaving is directly linked to the river and its health—when the river suffers, the sedge grass she uses is harder to find; when it flourishes, so do the rushes. The work commissioned for the exhibition, River Dreaming (2012), is a flat circular weave that sits against the wall and in its folds and curves speaks of the interconnectivity of the present and the past. It is not uncommon in colonial art for a fallen tree to provide a framing device at the foreground of a painting. In a new sculptural installation, Untitled (illuminated tree), Jonathan Jones literally brings a lifeless Murray River red gum into the gallery. In highlighting compositional conventions, the work alludes to the overly idealistic and romantic overtones of these early colonial views of the landscape.

The interweaving and wrapping of fluorescent light around and under the grooves and rivulets of the irregular surfaces enables an elegiac renewal of the displaced form.

Within the Elder Wing, Jones further shifts our perspective by intensifying subtle differences. An amalgamation of paintings and drawings of the Murray-Darling river system drawn from the AGSA collection reveals a multifaceted archive of a living entity, the river itself, neutralised and interpreted through ‘white eyes’. In reordering and assembling many views of a single subject, the differences become more apparent and entrenched. The Murray-Darling river system becomes the remembered river. In a further collaboration, Murray River gums are shaped into benches that refer to canoes, and in this reincarnation as bespoke furniture, they manipulate our vantage point and acutely alter our perception.

Tom Nicholson offers a collision with an alternative “river story”, and has selected the gallery’s most enduring picture and first acquisition, Evening shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia by H.J. Johnstone, as the central tenet of his project. Nicholson draws a parallel between the content of this painting and the politics of the Cummeragunja walk-off in 1939. In 1881, the year in which AGSA acquired the painting and the year the gallery itself was founded, the Cummeragunja Mission was established on the Murray River on the traditional lands of the Yorta Yorta and Bangerang peoples. Almost sixty years later, in 1939, Cummeragunja became the site of the first mass strike of Aborigines when one hundred and fifty people crossed the river border in protest at their abuse at the mission. Nicholson builds a type of monument to this action by presenting a mass hang of copies of the Evening Shadows painting in the Elder Wing, along with a stack of posters to be distributed in the homes and streets of Adelaide.

Downstairs he re-positions Johnstone’s original painting alongside a drawing and a powerful video showing a series of interviews with indigenous elders. Merging uncertain social, cultural and political circumstances, Nicholson’s work creates a rich tapestry of connections between past and present actions.

AMELIA BARIKIN: What role does the exhibition catalogue play in relation to the Biennial as a whole?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: Our view is that an exhibition catalogue is not simply a piece of marketing collateral, there is instead an opportunity to create a book that can outlive an exhibition by containing ideas in a way that evokes the texture and textuality of a project. It was important to us that the publication for Parallel Collisions could function as a venue for the exhibition in the same way that the galleries would provide a site to intuit ideas and encounter artworks. There is also a pragmatic acknowledgement embedded in this approach: audiences that may not see the Biennial can obtain the publication, and by curating this space you can extend the potential for the ideas of the exhibition to exist beyond the gallery.

In Australia, there is ample opportunity to work more closely with graphic designers in the articulation and development of exhibition publications and identities. From the beginning of this process we invited Fabio Ongarato Design (FOD) on board as collaborators and they have been involved in our discussions, tracking the evolution of the Biennial. Daniel Peterson, a designer from FOD travelled with us to Adelaide for the artists’ research trip, becoming complicit in the process rather than simply responsive to a publication brief. Consequently, the Biennial book proposes a graphic distillation of the exhibition’s central premise.

Creating transitional moments, a series of parallels and collisions—in the striking form of triangular shapes and diamonds in three fluorescent colours—propel the text and images through the framework of the book. With its shifts in stock and finish, the feel of the publication emulates the textural and experiential quality of the exhibition’s structure and installation.

More succinctly, the exhibition publication is conceived as an offering and while it mirrors the structure of the exhibition it is not designed as a true representation. By giving scope and breadth to reproductions and by dedicating pages to the creation of original artwork or ancillary research material, the publication was developed with the artists’ visual practices at the forefront.

The commissioning of original texts was a key strategy for allowing complexity, contradiction and discursive thought to emerge. We invited eleven writers from across disciplines and around the world including academics, a poet, an author, colleague curators and artists to write for the publication, offering our four key words—time, parallel, collision and trespass—as a proposition in much the same way as we approached the early discussions with the artists. We invited international writers because we believe Australian art is international art.

Anthony Gardner writes about the demand for locality in contemporary art practice, Philip Brophy establishes a parallax between the representation of the body in art history and the serial killer in cinema, Lily Hibberd writes a fictocritical text of wonder and imagination, Mami Kataoka discusses spirituality in the Asian world, Raimundus Malakalus writes a fictional text about slippages in time and perception, Jennifer McMahon charts a vivid passage through the works in the exhibition, Adrian Martin pumps up the volume on the body in art and cinema, Glenn Isegar-Pilkington discusses an indigenous aesthetic, Justin Clemens casts a retrospective gaze upon artists whose works mine the past, Johanna Featherstone pens a poem and Christos Tsiolkas writes a story that slides between fact and fiction.

AMELIA BARIKIN: Marked with descriptors such as “the mirror”, “the void”, “the descent” and “the oral”, the exhibition catalogue also presents the Biennial as a coalition of poetic fragments. Finally, can you talk a little about the naming of the sections, and more broadly to the significance of language in the development of the exhibition?

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR & NATASHA BULLOCK: A passion for language, words and literature certainly informs our work. We appreciate the physical shape of words or, for instance, the ‘sound’ that alliteration makes and how it can impart

3 9 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 meaning. In the development of Parallel Collisions we tried to conscientiously put aside personal bias, prejudice and persuasion to instead work together to curate an exhibition that neither one of us could conceive on our own. The descriptors attributed to each artist and their “action” in the show—which exists only within the publication—was initially motivated by a desire to work through the impressions created by the artist’s works; to siphon the vision of the exhibition into a quasi-cinematic story-board that would enable us to conceive of what the other was imagining.

By including these descriptors in the publication in the form of a conceptual map, we are able to introduce the reader to the exhibition’s cartography and more broadly to the relationships that have co-existed during the development of the project. At certain stages in our research and in the original conversations with many artists, we—of course—realised the myriad directions that an idea can take so we looked to the work, and the work only, in deciding on the tenor and timbre of this exhibition. In this way these descriptors underscore

the intimacy of our experience in curating this Biennial. To use Milan Kundera’s words, we seek in this exhibition to “penetrate to the essential”.2 We make use of this phrase because of its generous capacity, an emotive quality that implies movement and change. For, above all, we wanted to make an exhibition that has the capacity to move people.

Notes 1 Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005: 52 2

Milan Kundera, ‘The Painter’s Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon’, Encounter, United Kingdom: HarperCollins, 2010: 13

Pages 36-37: Rosemary Laing, Jim from the series leak, 2010; Parallel Collisions: 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Photo courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Page 39: Tim Silver, untitled (bust) (Selleys Woodfilling Putty) #2, 2011; Parallel Collisions: 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Photo courtesy the artist and Breenspace, Sydney

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS GLOBAL CURATING?

Adam Geczy In early 1916, while the First World War was still raging, Paul Wittgenstein, the elder brother of the famous philosopher, was about to give his first public concert as a one-armed pianist. He was to play an especially composed piece (the famous concerto by Ravel was to come some years later) and various well-known pieces that had been arranged for one hand.

As well as having made more than a passable debut as a conventional pianist before the War, Paul Wittgenstein was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Europe. His family knew most of the glittering personalities in Vienna and beyond, many of whom had been regular guests to their musical salons. Instead of cutting short Paul’s career, his traumatic wounding only strengthened his resolve to become a pianist of international renown. Ludwig on the other hand, who had always been critical of his brother’s playing, was feeling especially unnerved on the eve of the performance. Although the advertisements for the concert made no mention of his brother’s injury, everyone in Vienna knew of it. Ludwig had the nagging suspicion that its audience would be made of sympathisers and those curious, like visitors to a sideshow to see an oddball repeat his extraordinary feat over and over again. Years later, after Paul played the

famed Ravel concerto at the Proms, Ernest Newman writing in the Sunday Times courageously asserted that the performer was maybe trying to do what was impossible.1

This historical anecdote illustrates a handful of conditions that curating exhibitions in a global context faces; the first is the role of curiosity in attracting audiences to cultural events; the second is whether such curiosity is enough to sustain itself, whether a disabled Other can ever compete with the normative standards of production. To this we may ask other questions. One may be the present-day role and relevance of criticality in its Kantian moral sense, its evolution from the twentiethcentury avant-garde, and its commodified hardening within institutions.

Another is the critical direction of art within the ambit of class and racial relations. If art is sublimation, is art in the age of globalisation a cultural sublimation on a grand scale?—a way of watching the world’s woes that insulates from any need for action? And to what (extent do the central and undeprived socio-economic bodies—the “West”—celebrate its other all the better to absorb, or consume it? The “West” is given scare quotes here, not only because it is now a rather nebulous and overblown generalisation,

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but also because its dominance is all the more called into question in recent years, the economic dominance of the Europe and the USA stemmed by its own profligate arrogance. Nonetheless, Western working models for curating still pertain. They harken back to organisational principles of genre, prestige building, spectatorship and capital that were already well in place by the time of one of the first art critics, Denis Diderot, in the mideighteenth-century.

In his day, French painting had experienced over a century of refining its institutionalisation of art through the taxonomic grouping of what had begun over a century before. Painting was divided according to the levels of moral edification it could enshrine, from still life at the lowermost rung, to history painting at the uppermost. Today, while the organisation of genres is implicit in the language and reference internal to art’s history, it is but one component in the diffuse “post-medium condition”, to use Rosalind Krauss’ famous phrase. What I would like to posit is that a similar organisational spectrum is also present today, except that it has shifted globally into the realm of the organisation of culture.

Instead of categories internal to art that relate to its subject matter and its formal capabilities, the categories are external, and based on the various imaginaries of national identity. Just as we have global marketing and global fashion, we have global art.

This is articulated as something far more than art that has a broader reach than its own country or local vicinity. Rather, global art is a concept that extends far beyond the reach and agency of the artist. Global art is art subject to what can be understood according to a discernible grabbag of national attributes. Alternatively, national attributes are generated a posteriori, that is if an artist belongs to culture X, then the work is reflective of X-ness. Despite our age of indeterminate and frenetic flux, we are witness to a kind of cultural warfare in which countries vie for credibility and interest. Despite boundaries being more porous than they have ever been, physically and through the immaterial channels of the cybersphere, there is widespread enthusiasm for national branding.

Thus we have Chinese art ‘now’, Korean art ‘now’, contemporary art from Lebanon, Turkey and wherever else. Disregarding the historical fluidity of borders, not only now but since the dawn of civilisation (nations are mobile ideas not essentially determined), conveniently ignorant that States such as Slovenia or Latvia are, in terms of independent sovereignty, only decades old, each country is expected to account for itself in a way that reflects itself. Hence the morality that was once internal to the artwork’s content has shifted to a cultural morality in which the imperative is on the curator to choose art and artists that most appositely reflect a series of cultural conditions within a particular space at a certain time. It is expected that the art of a country represents the meaning of that country in a desublimated form; it diagnoses and discloses a cultural essence, to which the outside viewer is then privy.

The packaged and survey exhibitions where this takes place are a kind of tourism, but of the most mendacious kind. For whereas with traditional tourism the threat of descent into exploitation and kitsch is self-consciously present or at least imperfectly concealed, exhibitions packaging countries ride on the rhetoric of high culture, a rhetoric that is as silencing as it is baffling. Such exhibitions suggest that there are circumstantial qualities that can be raised to ideology, and that culture lies innocently reified in the art object. The recent exhibition of Korean and Australian art (at the National Art School, Sydney, under the auspices of the Museum of Contemporary Art), Tell me, Tell me: Australian & Korean Art 1976-2011 was one such case, and made to be more palatable because laced with “cross-cultural exchange”. (So who really curated it, the two curators or the Department of Foreign Affairs?)

Among the revisionist and postcolonialist debates about Orientalism and the colonial Other since the 1990s, there appear to be two salient points of emphasis. The first is to explore the nature of cultural exchange over that of cultural hegemony. The second states that the first position is only revisionist softening. The first re-reading emphasises that imperial dominance is not overriding, but riven with cracks of resistance (not only on the part of the colonised but amongst the colonised) and complicity (among the colonised). They emphasise the fluid nature of economic and aesthetic exchange, from textiles and jewellery to visual motifs and artistic styles. Dressing gowns, for instance, have a mixed provenance, haling first from Japan (the yukata), but subsequently manufactured since the seventeenth-century in India. The word used at this time, “banyan”, has

a suitably exotic ring—as in the banyan tree, an Indian fig—but it comes to us via the Portuguese, who modified it after the Sanskrit. Or take the famous Tree of Life design from China. This was transported by the British in the seventeenth-century to India. There the textile designers and embroiderers promptly took their own liberties, which when transported back to China, were greeted with delight. They responded by superadding their own original design, which in the interim had been modified elsewhere.

Such ‘exchanges’ are typical but easier to locate in design than in art where, for the last five hundred or so years, we are encouraged to stop quietly at the by-station of the artist’s own individual choice and agency. But these cases from four centuries past are what are occurring at a much higher rate and with incomparable speed in the cybersphere, the largest, fastest and most active site of exchanges—aesthetic, economic, personal, ideological —ever conceived.

Notwithstanding, the other postcolonial perspective, advanced by the likes of Spivak, insists that the equalisations of global economies are either superficial or non-existent, and all the more nefarious because they are silenced and concealed. The aesthetic, cultural equalisation —we all know about and maybe eat McDonalds, we all know about and maybe have an iPhone etc.—is incommensurate with the social inequities between the euphemistically named “developing countries”. Nike profits from sweatshops, and Apple from labour conditions so dire that they result in incidences of suicide.

The connotations of the term “globalisation” are highly misleading, since many of the Third World economies have not witnessed any substantial changes, and have been hotbeds of warfare for several decades. Africa continues to be the place where medicines are either scarce, exploited or tested; it is also home to numerous gang States, which live in a seemingly endless state of conflict and chaos. This is to the benefit of the capitalist markets, which can play off the individual groups rather than negotiate with a unified State that would then be able to concentrate on infrastructural development for higher production and stronger international negotiability. Sierra Leone, Namibia, Rwanda, or the former Belgian Congo are all examples that the New World Order is a farce. Another central thinker to this predicament is Slavoj Zizek, who has contributed greatly to illuminating the mendacity of Euro-American policy, which is the patina of political benevolence (financial and military aid etc.) made possible from the exploitation of mass-corporatisation.

The Congo is no longer an anomaly.

On the contrary, this ‘regression’ to a de facto pre- or sub-State is the very result of their integration into the global market and concomitant political struggles—suffice to recall cases like Congo or Afghanistan.

In other words, pre-modern sub-States are not atavistic remainders, but rather integral parts of the postmodern global constellation.2 Complaints such as these openly demonstrate that globalisation is less than a fixed concept. The strong implications of cohesion built into the word “globalisation” may speak to the markets for mass branding and for the Internet, but it belies a problem since, as a term, it devalues to the point of suppression, circumstances that have not changed at all. When featured, expressed or critiqued on the international art scene, it is a situation that both recognises this but in a context in which its truth, its urgency and its physicality is disavowed. Contemporary art is a contradictory site since its agency and political entitlements remain more diffuse than ever (than say, when history painting was the best thing for academics to test their mettle), and where ambiguity and metaphor, intrinsic to good art’s power, are convenient mechanisms for deflecting sticky questions. So the problem may seem to lie as much, if not more, in the places where art is shown, how it is chosen, how it is delivered and organised. The romantic notion of the individual artist, which in today’s terms is of the artist as ‘brand’, habitually obfuscates the fact that the production of art and its modes of organisation for display are in fact seamless.3

The biennale phenomenon that began in the 1990s was followed in the new millennium by the art fair. Venice held its first biennale in 1895, Sao Paolo in 1951. The Biennale of Sydney began as a small festival in the Opera House in 1973 with Anthony Winterbotham as the curator, but was not rigorously biennial until 1984. The Whitney Biennial also opened in 1973, but after annual exhibitions that had been mounted since 1932.

The Istanbul Biennale opened in 1987, the Gwangju Biennale in 1995, the Shanghai Biennale in 1996, Liverpool in 1998 and Singapore in 2006. As for art fairs, the first Art Basel was held in 1970, but more recently the Frieze

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Art Fair opened its doors in 2003. The fairs comprise a carefully timed circuit that includes the European Fine Art Fair that opens in Maastricht in March, Art Basel in June, the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporaine in Paris in October and Art Basel Miami in December. The latter is a graphic case of global branding in action, in which a city is literally transplanted as brand, idea and essence all in one, to another city across an ocean, and a city to which it bears no resemblance or affinity except for the transplantation itself. Finally, there is the birth of the hypermuseum with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York in 1959 and culminating Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997. Contemporary wisdom appears to suggest that the puff has begun to go out of the biennales, although the art fairs continue to boom because they are commercially driven. Perhaps the waning of the biennales’ ‘critical’ power is revealed in the Gehry phenomenon, Bilbao and its successors: it is not the ship’s contents that count, it is the ship itself.

Gehry’s building, which caused a rash of others like it, with all their stray, angular space-age amphibiousness, is, as a museum per se, a bit of failure. But then again, is it? For it caused a complete rethinking of art museums on more than one level. Through the ‘Bilbao effect’, Gehry’s building showed that a single building with the high-flown rhetoric of cultural cachet could revitalise a city into a place of interest and make it be taken seriously. While Duchamp had revealed the tacit systems that surround our acceptance and appreciation of an object as art, Gehry’s building and others like it seemingly reaffirmed this revolutionary principle in a counter-revolutionary way, since it returns the art object to the bosom of the institution, where the institution’s importance is no longer built on the quality on its content, but on its own superficial aesthetics: the label (the Guggenheim) and its look (the blue chip architectural design). Gehry’s Guggenheim ultimately inaugurates the museum as a phenomenon unto itself, and as a marketing exercise that exploits the objects within it. It is not a collection—like the Wallace, Sackler or Frick—which is a sum of its parts, it is museum whose parts are supplementary. Like the Libeskind Jewish History Museum unveiled just after it in 1999, the contents are incidental.

When people visit Bilbao, they go to visit the museum, not the collection.

Daniel Libeskind’s museum, another clattering, asymmetrical metal-clad wonder was in many ways a coming-to-truth or resolution, an entelechy, of the hypermuseum: for two years it remained open to paying visitors who marvelled over an empty building. Many Berliners subsequently lamented the fact that it was filled.

As we well know, such institutions share the majority of responsibility for how we consume and understand contemporary art, or rather Contemporary Art, in which what is good is of a piece with what is said to be good, a chain of immaterial approbations that become more forceful the more they become built on one another, no different from the stock market. They are phenomena that encompass roughly three tiers of artistic activity. Because the work is not ostensibly for sale, it welcomes more experimental and ephemeral practices; the fairs are vast department stores for the world’s most voracious art plutocracy, while the museums ratify into permanency the transient permanency and set them against recent historical relief of twentieth-century artists who are now the ‘modern masters’. These activities were all efforts of cultural ascendancy.

They were, and continue to be, public rituals of financial excess and phantasmagoria. In the 1990s biennales vaunted themselves as events that were a snapshot of a particular cultural zeitgeist, but this has now largely been discredited. Why? The first reason is that it was until recently only Europe and America that could afford to house their collections in edifices of hyperbolic grandeur. The second is the ideological contradictions within the curated art festival themselves, particularly the biennales, which sought to address the proverbial Other, whilst affirming the institutional frameworks of dominance, both intellectual and fiscal exchange.

The arbiters for the Fairs are the galleries, or biennales the curators.

The major galleries are like fashion houses within which other major designers work (as John Galliano once did for Dior), and biennale curators are like film directors; one talks of a Robert Storr biennale as one would a Spielberg film.

The incorporation of the Other in contemporary art into discourse is socio-economic (politically correct) and curatorial. Curating art of the Other usually begins with the expatriate Other (e.g. Jacir, Neshat, Hatoum, Ai Wei Wei), internal to whose practice is an existing constructive, speculative nexus between two cultures. The word “constructed” is used

intentionally here, because the nexus is not reasonable or ‘researched’, it is imagined, fabricated. (I will return to these notions at the end of this text.)

It is only once the instinctual demands of climatisation have been met that more adventurous steps can be made. The entry of contemporary Chinese art into the international circuit, beginning in New York, is the best example of this. Its platform and means of circulation is still, however, the ‘global’ paradigm of Western historical art making. The artwork is created and understood under terms inherited from the avant-garde such as critical and political, and from postmodernity, such as irony, banality and kitsch.

These cultural productions are supposed to be advanced enough to comply with the Western system—as opposed to the traditions of calligraphy which is exhibited, but more as commodified cultural artefacts rather than as an international ‘engagement’—while at the same time reaching deep into the heart of the country’s own difference. Chinese art is meant to smell and feel Chinese. Meanwhile works of art from the centres of New York and London need not bespeak a culture, since their responsibility is to benchmark The Contemporary for that year or that fashion season.

From Koons to Barney to Hirst—these provide the standards by which difference is gauged. They are also the talismanic centerpieces in the fairs, like the American dollar on the global financial market—with all the same spuriousness that lurks behind power that resides purely in perception and coercion—by which the Other(s) can be measured. The Other or the half-Other, the artist with a hyphenated identity, must remain thus if he or she is to remain marketable. Once they are purchased and displayed by grand institutions they are situated as points of contrast, and to vouch for the truly liberal, multi-cultural ambit of that institution. What is most cynical about this exercise is not the exercise itself, but the apparent lack of self-awareness of the curators who engage in it. In his review of Spivak’s major work, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Terry Eagleton with wry candour comments that: Gayatri Spivak remarks with some justification… that a good deal of US post-colonial theory is ‘bogus’, but this gesture is de rigueur when it comes to one post-colonial critic writing about the rest. Besides, for a ‘Third World’ theorist to break this news to her American colleagues is in one sense deeply unwelcome, and in another sense exactly what they want to hear. Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point to the inevitable bad faith of one’s position. It is the nearest a postmodernist can come to authenticity.4 Eagleton later affirms that her outsideness, as it were, is in fact nurtured and conceived on the inside, in the USA where she receives numerous accolades and honours. Beneath Eagleton’s grudging respect for Spivak lies a very clear point, that holds for artist or theorist or filmmaker, namely that the West—here the places that command and commission discourse —not only thrives but must enlist the voices that appear to rupture the structure. It is a categoric and commonly made error to think that places of power are coherent. Yet what is demanded of foreign artists, writers and so on is that they be highly literate in a packaged performance of attributes that appear under a certain cultural banner. Thus the coherence of the socalled West is its very incoherence and its systematic aesthetic absorption of cultures it exploits, denigrates and denies economically and politically.

Art on a global scale is the most manifest bungling of the old Left, and on the largest scale. The politics of curatorial inclusion much resembles a supermarket filled with exotic, rare ingredients.

What Eagleton ultimately locates is that discourse in its approval, if not its circulation, stays in the West. But, as I suggested above, this ‘West’ is now more of a regulating idea; the West as brand. While manufacture of Ralph Lauren, the highest grossing fashion and lifestyle company worth over four billion dollars, is carried out in China, Macau, Tunisia and Turkey, the brand remains in New York. The same can be said of myriad other brands which were once made in Italy—Diesel and Armani Jeans—and have moved their production offshore to China. Okwui Enwezor as an Igbo Nigerian can talk of his humble origins, but they are only heard through a Euro-American filter. His own label, we assume, is more authentic because it is tempered by hardship. It is more critical because it isn’t vitiated by the charmed life of a Westerner. The outsourcing of culture in terms of the value of the more authentic ‘primitive’ Other mirrors the economy of the developed countries themselves, which have moved production away

from the country of origin. The short-terms gains have been felt and the long-term effects are only now becoming apparent. Is this a harbinger of things to come in art as well?

If the first years of Libeskind’s Jewish History Museum marked an architectural coming to realisation of the museum as a museum without contents, then the Louvre Abu Dhabi is a climax of the museum as brand.5 Designed by Jean Nouvel and slated to be completed this year, the project has run against a chorus of protest, not just for conflating an historic site once residence of kings with a bequest—the Guggenheimisation of the Louvre if you will—but for the connection of high art to human rights abuses. For the labourers in Abu Dhabi, from Bangladesh, India and surrounding countries are working in dire conditions for wages that barely meet their own costs of living. This is well known (and not acted upon), but the Louvre case is a special collision of human rights abuse with high culture. Headed by the French art historian Didier Rykner, there have been over 4650 petitioners signing against the France-Emirati enterprise.

But the French Culture industry has been steadfast, the Minister for Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres proclaiming; “We’re not selling the French legacy and heritage. We want this culture to radiate to parts of the world that value it. We’re proud that Abu Dhabi wants to bring the Louvre here. We’re not here to transform culture into a consumer product.”6 Needless to say, in the denial is the confession. But that is not all that is remarkable about this statement. It also perpetuates the imperial civilising mission that began at around the same time as the beginnings of the French Salon at the start of the seventeenth-century. References to the sun king are there, whether conscious or not: France is ‘radiating’ its cultural might to willing consumers. This is the truer, more accurate definition of globalisation—preserving cultural capital through its immaterial dissemination.

The modern, proto-globalised cultural institution protects its contents on site, occasionally packaging a portion of its riches for tour. Now, like a sinister alien that can grow an extra appendage at will, the Louvre gives its essence, which is an idea. It transports its prestige, a prestige constructed out of a venerable and intricate history. Yet what makes the situation so fraught, and yet so lucidly revealing is that now we see the use of history to make an alias, but this history is now a hollowed out shell. Abu Dhabi, the city itself designed by Rem Koolhaas is the ultimate post-postmodern city. With the prospect of an institution such as this, if it gets off the ground, it outranks the Singapore or Shanghai Biennales.

Unlike these, it has taken more than the framework and the concept (the structure has a vast space intended to house a biennale); it has been able to buy its kudos rather than build it. Unlike Disneyland that traffics in representations, Abu Dhabi seeks to reground these representations within an active socio-political context.

And as to the gesture of protest: this rehearsing of French Left outrage ought not cloud the fact that the curators and other art workers who signed the petition were already engaging in a commensurate form of exploitation, albeit in a more immaterial and less bloody form. This is to say that from the point of view of cultural marketing, some cultures are more interesting than others. For instance, an Iranian-Australian will attract more curators than a German-Australian. To curate an artist with Iranian blood is to afford crucial cultural insights into a time of brutal slippage between the Christian and Muslim worlds, it is also to show that as a curator you are unsympathetic towards a politics of militant opposition, but can play a sort of quasi-Habermasian game of solution-solving discursive behavior.

As a German-Australian you are just a migrant. The singular advantage of curating minorities is that one can undertake a humanitarian project without having to get your hands dirty, and it potentially makes money, or at least carries cultural credit. In the 1980s curating had one imperative, which was to include women. Today it has three: women, minorities and indigenous people (Aborigines, First Nation etc.). The minorities are best from two groups: the Middle East to show a general global sympathy, and Asia, to acknowledge the rising superpowers of India and China.

Even though Chinese outnumber numerous other European, white and Christian minorities (Croats, Serbs, Czech) they are more migrant and minority than the latter.

In a recent lecture, Spivak has made a plea for something similar to ‘counter-globalisation’, a movement that seeks to safeguard local practices to maintain an energy resistant to corporatisation and violent simplifications of economic rationalisation. However, this is a nationalism that differs from the nineteenth-century kind in that it abjures an historical base. It is linguistic, imaginative and therefore inventive. These are generative mechanisms, which ensure that the invention on the so-called inside is not subordinated to sloganeering, or even the dominance of global language, namely English.7 But Spivak in no way suggests that we should decry English for being a, or the, Global language, rather that it not be the language that other languages are translated into, for in doing so stories and messages become corrupted. When a language is made untranslatable, by its nature or through the miracles of literature, then it is able to endure unto itself and keep itself alive. The problem that Spivak faces with this is that such resistance also deprives a voice of its audience, and its influence.

Her standpoint is an important turn away from a Saidian standpoint. In his examination of the migration and acceptance of theories, Said writes about the stages of understanding and application.

The fourth and final stage is when “the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place”8. This kind of alteration is certainly true of the passage of Chinese art to the mainstream via a protracted pitstop in New York. Said, like Spivak, is another academic who benefited greatly from being an outsider cum insider to the USA academic system who criticised the Western grasp of Middle Eastern society in the now

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seminal Orientalism (1979). But Spivak’s more recent deliberations depart from Said’s more dialectical approach toward a constructive localisation that maintains, it seems to me, an ironic stance, as opposed to indifference to outside interpretation, and therefore consumption. She poses a system that is resistant to consumption for being resistant to translation, and “a reluctance to cohere” to use the words of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

When transposed into artistic practice, Spivak’s formula becomes all the more problematic. Art thrives on, feasts on, processes that appear to be outside the mainstream system, similar to the way that multinational corporations pour large sums into diagnosing the latest subcultural movement, language or fashion only to reabsorb it into its marketing image. But it does have enormous relevance to Australia. Australian art, not including Aboriginal art, is perhaps already there, but for the reason that the international scene has proportionately little impulse to translate it or to absorb it. Aboriginal art is currently undergoing its own ad hoc review, especially since it has become increasingly conscious of itself as a look and a brand that is divorced from the real, lived circumstances of its making.

Before it is traduced and simplified, Aboriginal art is often produced by collaborative groups or is circulated amongst a small fraternity. But I will reserve the topic of curating Aboriginal art for a later discussion.

It would seem that one solution to the predicament of art both in the grips and globalisation and engendering our idea of globalisation sketched out here is to foster in artists a self-reflexive attitude to their identity, and to educate them and curators alike, as to the great extent to which identity is manipulated, rewritten, fabricated and imagined. This is not a taste of Lebanon, or of Cameroon, Namibia, Haiti, Cuba, or of Korea, but this is what he or she imagines it to be. This would mean that the kinds of collaborations and exchanges, those buzzwords again, can occur outside of the culture. The age of criticality is now passing, as the editor of Artforum, Tim Griffin has also begun to suggest.9 This does not mean that we are dealing with complicity of kitsch, it means that strategies of

resistance and complicity need to be reformulated yet again. Why can’t an Australian do Korean art, or Egyptian art? Koreans and Egyptians in Australia can after all do Australian art, why not stretch the membrane of immanence? It would test the grounds of political correctness. It would also make the consumption of false, falsified, or forced authenticity a lot harder.

Notes 1 Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, New York: Anchor Books, 2008: 106, 185 2

Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times, London and New York: Verso, 2010: 172

3

Although about literature, the most important contribution to this idea is by Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris: Seuil, 1992 4

Terry Eagleton, ‘Gayatri Spivak’, Figures of Dissent, London and New York: Verso, 2003: 158

5

See also Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009: 88-90

6 ‘Louvre to Build Branch in Abu Dhabi’, Associated Press 3/6/2007, msnbc.com. http://www.msnbc.msn. com/id/17482641/#.TwzQMM2BL9o 7

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination, London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2010: 27-31 and passim

8

Edward Said, The World, The Text and the Critic, London: Faber, 1983: 227

9

Tim Griffin, ‘Compression’, October 135: 3-20

Page 40: Anri Sala, Answer Me (video still), 2008; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Page 41 top and bottom: Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Gringo, Mexico (video stills), 2003; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photos courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York Opposite: Danae Stratou,The Globalising Wall (video stills), 2011; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photos courtesy the artist Below: Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Gringo, Mexico (video stills), 2003; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

THE DELINQUENT CURATOR OR HOW CURATORS SHAFTED AUSTRALIAN ART

BRAD BUCKLEY | JOHN CONOMOS The state of emergency is also always a state of emergency.

Homi Bhabha1 An introduction This is a speculative polemic that considers why in the Antipodes—and elsewhere in our post-industrial society—there is an emerging discourse about curators and what they do. If we accept the premise that our conceptualisation of the art critic has been well delineated since Baudelaire’s time, why is it that the curator’s role in the contemporary art world is fluid, vague and lacking a multifaceted cultural critique that adequately describes what takes place between the artist, the curator, and their publics? This is especially true of curators and curating outside the white-cube gallery or museum context, with the recent advent of digital curation.

As Henk Slager reminds us, “the paradigm of the public exhibition was formulated at the time of the French Revolution in the eighteenth-century”.2 The exhibition has since that time been expected to engage with broader social and cultural issues of the day. However, as has been noted by many commentators, contemporary art is caught between being entertainment for the general public and serving various masters, including the curator, corporate funders and other benefactors.

The question that stands head and shoulders above every other one is: how is art to be experienced directly by the spectator, in a society that is heavily laminated by cultural, museological and tertiary educational structures, agendas and self-interest groups all vying to produce normative ideas, contexts and values for the making, exhibiting and manifestation of art? Where in this miasma does the artist stand, and how is he or she to be understood as someone who is, hopefully, working in the individual and socio-cultural enterprise of, to borrow George Steiner’s useful expression, producing “grammars of creation”?3 In other words, how do artists and curators relate to each other in terms of being centre stage or in the wings (metaphorically speaking) of the art world and its audiences? Is the curator’s job to be low-key, or more high key, at the centre of things?

Despite the current proliferation of curatorial and museum courses, what is painfully evident is the ascendancy of a corporate managerialism in determining the curator’s modus operandi and raison d’être. This has had a pernicious influence on what artists produce, and on how they are curated, promoted and valued by all of us who give a fig for art that is not repetitively banal, decorative, and grossly depleted of critique, mystery and curiosity about our world and everything in it.

CURATING BY NUMBERS Little wonder then, that when the Swiss curator-critic-historian Hans-Ulrich Obrist asked the late Anne d’Harnoncourt, the former director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, what advice she would give to a young curator entering the gallery or museum world, she replied: I think my advice would probably not change very much; it is to look and look and look, and then to look again, because nothing replaces looking… I am not being in Duchamp’s words “only retinal”, I don’t mean that. I mean to be with art—I always thought that was a wonderful phrase of Gilbert & George’s, “to be with art is all we ask”.4

And yet who today, among our own curators, is looking, and is not strictly governed by a non-risk taking, self-congratulatory and self-perpetuating ethic of more of the same? After all, looking should be one of the cardinal points of our compass of artistic creation, exhibition and understanding.

Admittedly, looking is not so simple, as all of us are required to be critically informed about everything that calls itself art today: in and outside the traditional art museums, galleries, art fairs, biennales, artists’ studios and artist-run-initiatives and new media art. Sadly, what we have locally is a proliferation of curators who wish to be media circus stars and celebrities, and who are lost in the contemporary art scene’s aesthetic of razzamatazz and the spectacle.

WHY BOTHER DOING ANY RESEARCH WHEN YOU CAN SIMPLY PICK UP THE PHONE AND ORDER TAKEAWAY? We would argue that many of these curators hide behind the institutional blandness and predictability of selecting from the same shrinking songbook of artists—let us call them “the curators’ pets”—who are at ease with being led by their nose, and who create art that is increasingly empty, repetitive and cliché-ridden. The curator who stands in the limelight does a grave disservice to art in general, to younger aspiring artists in particular, and to any artist’s oeuvre (but of course not to their egos or bank accounts).

How many promising and talented artists have been left behind in such a narrow, canonical and museological curatorial context? Are these curators for art or against it? Does art, in fact, need mediation by a museum, gallery or a curator? If it does, as we are contending, what kind of curator will create this new curatorial pluralism, this new paradigm where art follows a fuller and more searching trajectory of possibilities?

We agree with Oscar Wilde’s statement that, “art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known”5: have our local amnesiac, critically uninformed and blinkered curators been fostering such an ethos? What role have these self-aggrandising careerist curators and bureaucrats played in sustaining the very questionable ‘art star’ economy of art exhibition, production and critical reception? In the growing clamour and stifling conformity of the smoke and mirrors mumbo jumbo of our art museum and gallery world (for both are terribly intertwined), gifted artists (both “emerging” and “mid-career”, to use the cultural or curatorial argot), who could not be bothered chasing white-cube recognition —primarily because of the brown-nosing energy that is required to be part of the ‘scene and herd’ crowd (to echo Artforum’s witticism)—are invisible from the public gaze.

This truth is evident to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the curatorial, funding and ideological complexities and biases of the art world, where to say that ‘the emperor is naked’ leads immediately to being categorised as “difficult”, a “trouble-maker”, “stirrer”, “pariah”, “ratbag”, someone who is rocking the boat. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa captures this in the following: “Often the most talented artists have no way of reaching an audience, whether because they refuse to be corrupted or because they are simply no good at doing battle in the dishonest jungle where artistic successes and failures are decided.”6

Of course it would be terribly unfair to blame only curators for this, as artists, critics, academics, bureaucrats, gallerists and spectators are, in their own ways and contexts, responsible for this situation. But in the main, it is curators who seek stardom at the expense of the artist (who, after all, is the vital base of the art world food chain) in the familiar and predictable confines of the art museum and galleries, who should shoulder most of the blame.

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Llosa, who knew Jean Baudrillard in the 1960s before he became a postmodern icon, is prepared to call a spade a spade, to acknowledge the ruinous hyperbole and charlatanry of our times, to say that artists themselves are also gridlocked in this tango of institutional whoredom.

Those among us who are young, cynical and opportunistic are particularly oblivious to the slow-burning, self-questioning necessity to adhere to one’s ideal as an artist or a curator—it takes time, knowledge, technique, passion, patience and a generosity of curiosity and spirit, and these are certainly not achieved overnight, despite what our reality television shows may say to the contrary. Who among us appreciates that in order to succeed as a curator or as an artist, one must accept and value the need for reciprocity between tradition and experimentation? As Llosa puts it (rather graphically), we who curate, create and promote art must surrender to ideals that contribute overall and (ideally) lasting terms to one’s professional career, who seek fame in obscene haste and are ignorant of the past and beyond ethics merely “dream of seizing glory any way they can, even if to reach it they must climb a mountain of pachydermatous shit”.7

Before we go any further, it is critical to note that what follows is not intended to be a ‘holier than thou’ sermon or an aimless rant; it is intended to help those who question the confused and pernicious agendas, empty-headed rhetoric, experimental cowardice and global cultural cringe that afflicts our art world. We approach this article with the key conviction that it is important to encourage criticism, debate, public scrutiny and new stimulating curatorial vistas. This means not kowtowing to our art, cultural and educational institutions and their mantras. On the contrary, we wish to speak plainly about how it is essential for us to constantly question ourselves, and to assert the fundamental value of reasoned critical and empirical judgement, thinking and policy action.

Furthermore, if our observations seem calculatedly provocative, it is with the aim of attempting to be just, to see things as they really are regarding the state of curating—programmatic, critically uninformed, passionless and extremely boring—here. We do not argue that all curators who work in a museological or gallery context are ipso facto responsible for this sad situation, of course, but we need to call it as we see it, and give voice to what is being said by the less privileged among us. Stefan Collini, in his recent lucid, insightful and fair, but tough-minded manifesto, “That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect”8 generated a timely and necessary debate, in which all of us who are concerned with the rethinking of what a curator is and what they actually do in the larger context of the aesthetic, cultural and moral ecology of their profession can participate. Please contribute to this debate treating others as you would have them treat you: as equals, with intellectual and ethical respect, engaged in reasoned argument and criticism that address compelling issues germane to our art, culture, institutions and values. Criticism, in the best sense of the term, is as envisioned by Matthew Arnold: “the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge… to see the object as in itself as it really is”9.

THE MUSEUM AS A ROYAL COURT Our critique aims to speak of the unsaid in the context of the flourishing corporatised museum culture that is in place throughout Australia, where art museums function like royal courts, in which curators produce a highly visible class of ‘indentured’ artists, who then act like courtiers, whose very lives and works are dependent upon these curators. This highly problematic situation not only leads to a small group of artists parading their predictably shoddy and pallid wares, time and again, around the same circuit of exhibition and critical reception; it also produces a crushingly boring spectacle of art as entertainment, art that is empty of the critical ideas, forms and contexts that ignite our imagination and make us question our own times and engage in a sincere, informed, reflective dialogue with the past in order to enrich our lives.

We have artists and curators, who are only interested in peddling their own particular symbiotic and narcissistic concerns, feeding at the trough of public funds and in the process foregoing their larger aesthetic, cultural and civic ideals. Tragically, these preferred artists, who are mostly ‘one-trick ponies’, reward their curator benefactors by being loyally silent on ideas, issues and things better not said in case they are too controversial and subversive. And as Brad Buckley has suggested in an interview from 2001: It is of some concern that much art which has been valorised during the past decade by corporatised museum culture proclaimed that it was

only about one idea, or even better, about no idea. Here the artist gives up the role of a citizen—becoming a stooge, dandy or flaneur—gives up public debate and criticism, and is thus rewarded for their loyalty and silence by the special interest group.10 In this appalling scenario, a small clique of favoured contemporary artists are transformed into court jesters or clowns—at best, they are ‘infotainment’ peddlers, who do nothing more than reflect the inanities of our culture of distraction, fragmentation and globalism. They are systematically rewarded by a funding and curatorial patronage system in which the younger you are, the more malleable you are seen to be as a producer of products (artwork) that are really only ‘sound-bite’ packages of slick, facile, derivative concerns.

And yet what else can these artworks be, considering that many of their confident makers are young—and not so young—driven professionals looking for their next ‘cool’ gig without actually bothering to live a little, dispense with their ‘textbook’ slogans, genres and models and become more subversively curious about art, culture, life, society and thought. For in this royal court museum ethos, it is not just these vacuous contemporary artists who are constantly mentioned in our press but certain curators, alas, fall into in this category as well. And after all, who is doing the selecting, year in and year out, from the same ‘telephone book’ of curatorial darlings?

Why are not more established (equally, if not more gifted) senior artists being funded and exhibited more? Why the pathetic ageism that cuts across our art world like an alternating current of critical neglect and embarrassment? Is it partly because a lot of our senior artists who work in the nebulous ‘contemporary art’ scene will not play the court jester, the shrill publicity-seeker role, and instead will only create art they want to create, and under their own terms? And what would be the consequences of allowing a far wider range of art to be on show, art that is not so repetitively shallow and predictable than is presently the case? Art that is not afraid of its own shadow and that is prepared to voice many more of the unsaid things about the human condition. If we continue down this road of curatorial patronage, what we will have is an unabated and shockingly dumbing-down of Australian art and culture.

A stark example of a senior figure working in Australia neglected by curators is Ken Unsworth. If we were in Germany, France or the United States, an artist who has contributed so much to the development of Australian contemporary art would surely have been the subject of a number of major retrospectives and scholarly catalogues on his eightieth birthday. Not here. Instead, Unsworth self-funded a new installation project on Cockatoo Island (2009).

One reason for this change, which is rarely discussed, has been the changing nature of patronage. For many artists and curators the funding source—the museum, international survey show or an important collection—is of little interest. They are not concerned with the moral or philosophical implications of where the support comes from. At the same time there is an ever-increasing conservatism in public funding, as is regularly demonstrated by the Australia Council. The push for contemporary art to find support from the globalised corporate sector, which is primarily concerned with its brand, is of course a perilous exercise. This push allows the possibility of repression, with artists and curators employing a type of self-censorship as they strive to be included in this corporatised art world. In this climate, art can easily be reduced to little more than a functionary of the trade or foreign policy of the ruling elite.

It is quite an irony that this deplorable situation is unfolding in our art museums, cultural bureaucracies and galleries, when the actual dictionary definition of curator is considered. The curatorial process is an authorial mode of interacting, a partnership between artists, galleries and museums, and publics. There are various models of curating, and the notion is contested, but the most essential aspect of all of the models is that a curator is someone who cares for a collection—for the Latin root curare, as Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook remind us, signifies to care.11 In England, for example, a curate is a person who assists a priest in the caring for a congregation. In contemporary art a curator does far more than this.

Curators not only select the artists and their artworks, and shape how these artworks are displayed in exhibitions; they also direct the affiliated interpretive materials, determine the contents of catalogues, and produce the media releases. Most importantly since the late 1960s and the emergence of the curator as creator, curators have become an integral element of the

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art star system—curators as artists’ touts, their mediators. What remain unexplored are the intricate (in)visible interconnections between curators, institutions and artists. That the curator’s hegemony in shaping the concerns and direction of much of today’s contemporary art is at least in part the result of the dramatic increase of exhibitions and permanent collections on show.

Even a cursory examination of curators and curating needs to point out that there has been more documentation of exhibitions available over the last two decades, and that curators themselves have contributed importantly to our perception of exhibitions and how most art has become known. Yet it is only recently that the various routes curators have taken in their professional shaping of our collective consciousness are becoming more obviously crucial. These routes have included being art museum or centre directors, art critics, art dealers, and independent scholars.

In Australia, what is becoming more apparent by the day is how many curators (regardless of their educational qualifications) lack the ability—or the desire—to question the received wisdom of their profession and the tediously familiar roll call of the institutional canon of artists. Also, and not surprisingly, these more problematic curators worship the pioneering names of their profession (Alfred Barr, Jean Leering or Franz Meyer) and are ignorant of the less well-known figures who have been equally significant in the study of the art of our times (Paul Wember, Jermayne MacAgy and A. James Speyer).12

What is at stake here is nothing less than the indispensable quality of being open to seeing art, artists, museums, galleries and funding agencies within the larger cultural framework. This means being a ‘jay-walker’ or a ‘loiterer’ as far as your discipline is concerned. It means being more in tune with an artist’s radical vision than with the ideological cultural logic and constraints of the institutional context one is working within. This may be something one aspires to through one’s whole lifetime, but it is worth doing, as Suzanne Page suggested to the indefatigable Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 1998: To a certain degree it is a question of learning to be vulnerable, of remaining open to the vision of the artist. I also like the idea of the curator or critic as a supplicant. It’s about forgetting everything you think that you know, and even allowing yourself to get lost.13 Modern curatorial practice—regardless of whether it is the ‘embedded’ institutional curator, the ‘adjunct’ curator who works freelance but in association with institutions, or the so-called independent curator who may be invited by institutions to be a guest curator—does not often afford its own conditions of negation and so has many significant dysfunctional features and shortcomings that do not allow a curator to maximise publicly the artist’s lifelong Socratic project of achieving “an uncorrupted consciousness”.14 Curators ought to be able to facilitate free dialogue between artists, institutions and their publics, and endeavour to show that there is the possibility of a world other than our present one of bureaucratic rationalism, panoptic globalism, and media-saturated simulacra. This means being critically aware of how blindly dependent we have become on a post-industrial society, whose very culture should be systematically questioned by our individual and institutional lives, particularly given the vast aesthetic, cultural and political effects that curators can have.

As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued in a recently published 1956 dialogue, which took place over three weeks, the mark of authentic thought is that which “negates the immediate presence of one’s own interests”.15 To do this one needs to bring out the utopian in a world which militates against the possibility of doing so. All of us, regardless of who we are and what we do, need to be able to recognise and value the huge contradictions, tensions and fault-lines within and between our occupational and private lives; to see the manifold benefits of not separating theory from practice, which equates to ideological delusion and conformity. Curating cannot be oblivious to itself.

THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL AND THE CULTURAL CRINGE In the middle of the perennially amnesiac, topsy-turvy ‘boom or bust’ art and cultural landscape we inhabit stands the Australia Council, with its charter of funding and fostering our visual and performing arts, literature, music and the media arts. By its very nature it has huge (publicly funded) responsibilities in terms of ensuring that we, as a national citizenry in a global context, have the best institutional support to articulate our creative and cultural aspirations. However, the Australia Council is frequently

missing the proverbial bus in establishing a much-needed identifiable and coherent art and cultural policy that is rooted in our own vernacular.

This means that this organisation is failing us as a people. Since Paul Keating’s time we have been bereft of any substantial art and cultural policy document.

This has been a pathetic state of affairs. For too long, as Robyn Archer rightly reminds us, artists have been ignored over their entire lifetimes, because what is funded and consumed by us as a nation is their artworks; neither our government nor the Australia Council itself has produced a sustainable art and cultural ecology that keeps them creatively alive.16

Furthermore, the Australia Council should be encouraging our curators to rethink what it is they do, and should stop subscribing to any kind of institutional cultural cringe—disappointingly, they have been doing so for the last two decades. What does it take to realise and implement an art and cultural policy? Executive leadership is required: recruited not from the usual business management sectors of our society but from those sectors, which are culturally familiar with the arts. It is better to have, at the helm of such an organisation, someone who has a lifetime’s working knowledge and experience of art and culture—an artist or an author or a composer or musician, say—a risk-taker, someone who believes that questions lead to other questions, not to answers, someone who can see the trees from the wood, rather than the predictable lawyer or boardroom executive.

Otherwise we will have today’s top-down institutional policy confusion, cowardice and stupidity for years to come, and we will still be searching for an art and cultural policy that makes aesthetic, cultural and existential sense to our artists and us as a nation. This does not signify a cultural jingoism of sorts. In these post-Fordist times, where some countries do have such a national art and cultural policy, and where artistic and cultural colonialism is institutionally frowned upon—such as France, Canada, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, for instance—why can’t Australia do the same? What makes us go weak at the knees when a cultural blow-in (academic, artist, writer, or whoever) flies down under from (usually) England? Why are such people always greeted by a craven welcoming party of Australian academics, bureaucrats, artists and curators, amongst many others, ready to transform into a ventriloquist’s dummy! “Of course, yes, yes, of course, why did we not think of it?

Who else will know the local arts and cultural landscape better than you?

So what if you have only been in this country for a few days. Why yes you are quite right, you do have a fresh view of things.” What we find surprising is that these cultural blown-ins haven’t got the message yet: we are not interested in old world ideas, or in a connoisseurship that is tethered to an English class system that should have been purged in the nineteenth-century but lingers until today.

The one opportunity for our curators on the global stage that does appear every two years is the Venice Biennale. It is a rare opportunity in that it is the only significantly funded curatorial project and context in which they can exercise their insights about our culture and changing society. What does the Australia Council do? For the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, Hany Armanious was chosen to represent Australia—a good choice—but the curator was Anne Ellegood, a senior curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The very expensive and handsome catalogue which accompanied the exhibition contained five essays, four of which were authored by Americans. The cultural cringe continues with the selection of Simryn Gill for the 2013 Venice Biennale, and curator Catherine de Zegher, who is not Australian. One wonders if any of the essays in the forthcoming catalogue will be written by other nonAustralians. These are missed opportunities for our curators and writers to operate on the global stage.

This institutionalised and entrenched cultural cringe continues with the recent appointment of another English person, Julie Lomax, as director of the Visual Arts Board. In the press release from the Australia Council, the Visual Arts Board chair, Ted Snell, said:

Opposite: Jinoos Taghizadeh, Rock, Paper, Scissors, 2009; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artist

She is keen to collaborate with colleagues within the Australia Council, and more broadly in the sector, to learn more and to understand the particular conditions of practice for the arts that have shaped the work of Australian artists and the structures that support them. This will be an exciting period in which we will all learn a great deal. Her arrival coincides with a challenging period for the sector where her fresh eyes, deep commitment and solid base of expertise will be invaluable.17 Of course it never occurred to the bureaucrats at the Australia Council that if they had appointed an Australian—that is someone who lives here and is committed to this country and society—then they would not need to spend time understanding the situation. By appointing another person from Britain the Australia Council has perpetuated the cultural cringe (A.A. Phillips) crippling our artistic, cultural and intellectual institutions and traditions, once again. Perhaps the best way to describe the current state of the Australia Council is an organisation, in which the ‘roos are loose in the top paddock. Minister Crean we hope you are listening.

BIENNALE OF SYDNEY, A FAILED MODEL OF ENTERTAINMENT The Biennale of Sydney is in its death throes. You can hear the death rattle all the way down the harbour as each new director, always imported from somewhere else of course, announces the latest exhibition title and premise. Each time they struggle to find an apparatus that will allow them to please and placate the sponsors, the funding bodies and general public.

Unfortunately, none of them seems cognisant that art no longer has that eighteenth-century sovereignty, so desired by curators, and when the Biennale fails to engage with its audience in critical terms, success is then measured in ‘bums on seats’, playing to the crowd, art as entertainment and lifestyle. Five hundred thousand people are suggested to have visited the Biennale in 2010, as though this is a measure of what should be taken seriously as art.

Curators, like anyone else, are obliged to frequently rethink their roles, and their curatorial beliefs and practices. Always the underlying quest is to reinvent ourselves with the accompanying complexities of

the democratisation of art and culture. According to Heidegger, curators play an indispensable role in shaping our perception of what art is in relation to its frame, its Ge-stell, in delimiting what is to be included or excluded in a work of art.18 One would be entirely naïve to think that we need our art institutions, curators, critics, but not our related mass-media communications. Curators matter in many ways and contexts: they play a huge part in shaping our experience of art, artists and culture, and yet many of them seem ignorant of their ethical responsibilities.

Whether we speak of Walter Benjamin’s aura, the thing that gives art its individuality and its authenticity, or Heidegger’s Ge-stell, or of Mario Perniola’s illuminating critique of contemporary art’s postmodern shadows, as constituting a critical sideways supplement to shaping a work of art and its “artistic-communicative operations”, the curator’s cultural and institutional role is of the utmost significance.19 It cannot be overlooked or swept under the carpet. To do so is wilful ideological ignorance.

This appalling situation is to be observed in many different curatorial situations. This is not news to anyone who is familiar with the exhausted biennale model of art curating and programming. Critic Daniel Birnbaum succinctly suggested, in recently discussing the unavoidable end of such a tired model of curating, citing novelist John Barth’s controversial 1968 essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, the compelling urgency of looking for a “new model”.20 Of course when someone speaks of the death of the novel or cinema or a particular art genre, you can bet your last bob that there is still some life left in whatever supposedly dead art form is being talked bout. What is required is for curators to think beyond the predictable, the safe, and find or develop new models, new forms and contexts. Obrist himself, in collaboration with Stephanie Moisdon, staged the Lyon Biennale of 2007, as if it was a kind of metaliterary game in the playfully subversive spirit of the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians, which included the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec.21

For many, Birnbaum opines, the art fair has replaced the biennale.

However, we are not arguing categorically that this means the end of the biennale model.22 What is needed are curatorial shifts in thinking; no one has a crystal ball to see what new forms of curating lie around the corner.

Just as notable curators like the late Harald Szeemann (who chose not to be a director of an art museum, but to instead work as an independent

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aussstellungsmacher) and Pontus Hultén (the founding director of the Pompidou Centre, who turned the site into a multi-disciplinary laboratory and production site) forged new ways of curating, Australian curators urgently need to seek new curatorial ideas and routes.

Finally, at the risk of contributing to the institutional sanctification of those who have been self-reflective, hard-working curators, conscious of their privileged cultural roles as indispensable ‘go-betweens’ with artists, institutions and the public, let us name a few such paradigm-shifting figures in Australian art and culture: Bernice Murphy (was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and then Chief Curator, and finally Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney); Judy Annear (is Senior Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales); Nicholas Tsoutas (was the Executive Director of Artspace and Artistic Director of Casula Powerhouse); Linda Michael (was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art and at Monash University Gallery, Melbourne); Blair French (currently Executive Director of Artspace); Tony Bond (is currently Assistant Director at the Art Gallery of New South Wales); and Daniel Thomas (was Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia).

These people have been attentive to new exhibitions, genres and contexts, listening and supporting artists of different aesthetic persuasions and, critically, ages. They are seekers of our collective artistic and cultural dreaming, never willing to play the more comfortable, careerist game of the norm. They curate so that we, in the Blakean sense, “feel the scales falling from our eyes”.23 Notes 1 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” in Remaking History, P. Mariani and Barbara Kruger eds, Seattle: Bay Press 1989: 134 2 3

5

Oscar Wilde, (ed.) Linda Dowling, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, London: Penguin Classics, 2001 [1891]: 142

6

Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Elephant Dung’, The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000: 170

7

ibid: 171

8

Stefan Collini, That’s Offensive Criticism! Identity, Respect, New York: Seagull Books, 2010

9

ibid: 28

10

Brad Buckley (ed.), Brad Buckley Monograph, Sydney, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 2001

11

See Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2010. For the Latin root definition of curare (to care), see: 10

12

Hans-Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, Zurich 2008: 5-9

13

See Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Artforum interview with Suzanne Page, quoted in Daniel Birnbaum, ‘The Archeology of Things to Come’, in Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, op cit: 234–39, 235

14

See W.H. Gass, ‘The Artist and Society’, Fiction and the Figures of Life, Boston: Nonpareil, 1970: 288

15

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, trans. Rodney Livingston, Towards A New Manifesto, London: Verso, 2011 [1956]: 71 16

Robyn Archer, Detritus, Perth, UWA Publishing, 2010

17

http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/news/items/news_features/julie_lomax_appointed_as_new_ director,_visual_arts (retrieved 23 January 2012) 18

Mario Perniola, Art and its Shadow, New York: Continuum, 2004. See Hugh J. Silverman’s introduction to Perniola’s thought on art and aesthetics in reference to Heidegger and Benjamin: vii-xiii

19

Perniola, Art and its Shadow, especially his introduction and passim

Henk Slager, The Pleasure of Research, Finnish Academy of Fine Art, 2012

20

Birnbaum, ‘The Archeology of Things to Come’, op cit: 235–36

See George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2001

21

ibid: 237

22

ibid: 237-38

23

Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards A New Manifesto, op cit: 55

4

Hans-Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, Zurich, JRP/Ringier, 2007. For the late Anne d’Harnoncourt’s quotation see Christophe Cherix’s preface: 4

Opposite and above: Saskia Olde Wolbers, Pareidolia (video stills), 2011; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photos courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

I COULD HAVE BEEN ENTIRELY FICTIONAL... IF CATHERINE HAD NOT SHOUTED OUT MY NAME TWICE, RABIH! RABIH!1

Duygu Demir “I am not telling in order to remember; on the contrary, I am doing so to make sure that I have forgotten. Or, at least, to make sure that I have forgotten some things, that they were erased from my memory. When I am certain that I have forgotten, I attempt to remember what it is that I have forgotten. And while attempting, I start guessing and saying: ‘Perhaps… Maybe, it is possible… I am not sure but, it seems that… Probably, etc.’ This way, I reinvent what I had forgotten, on the basis that I, in fact, remembered it. After an indefinite while, I retell it, not to remember it, no. But to make sure that I have forgotten it, or at least, parts of it, and so on, so forth. This operation might appear repetitive, but it is the contrary because it is a refusal to go back to the beginnings. And what know we of beginnings? This way, I keep oscillating between remembering and forgetting.

Remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting tilL death comes. I am betting on death, to make me rediscover everything anew.”

As the artist’s voiceover ruminates on remembering and forgetting, the image of the dust cloud from a building that has just fallen down is rewound a few seconds. Slowly, it plays forward, then rewinds again, than forward a little more, until it starts oscillating in flashes between different sections of a few seconds of the footage of the building as it turns into rubble. This is Old House, a 1:15

minute video Mroué made in 2006. Born in 1967 in Beirut, Mroué—like many other Lebanese artists of his generation—is motivated by the desire to communicate the experience of the Lebanese Civil War (between 1975-1990) through his works.

This impulse to document and unfold aspects of life during this period carries with it the challenge of continuously facing the question as to how one ever fully and truthfully conveys such an experience? Countering the tendency for amnesia and attempting to remember what it is that ‘we’ have forgotten, Mroué’s practice takes collective and individual memory, blurs fact and fiction, and presents stories that become meditations on war, identity, representation and artistic responsibility.

An actor, director and playwright as well as a visual artist, Rabih Mroué has been producing plays, performances and videos since the early 1990s. Engaged with the language of theatre and performance, his work almost always includes a meta-layer that is forever conscious of the shortcomings of representation, and the problematic nature of performance. Originally a 2000 collaborative performance with Elias Khoury, his project Three Posters focuses on the discovery that a leftist bomber’s video suicide letter, which is broadcast on Lebanese television, has two other versions, minimally different from the one that serves as the actual note. Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury’s performance consists of showing the actual

5 3 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 footage of the suicide bomber Jamal Sati through a monitor, followed by the repetition of the same testimony by Mroué. When Mroué finishes reading the letter, he reaches out to the door behind which he is live videotaping the event, to reveal a room where spectators are looking at the monitor. The performance represents a moment between fiction and truth, offering a voyeuristic view to the spectator, on one hand presenting a play and on the other a real suffering. After re-staging the performance in Lebanon as well as outside the country, Khoury and Mroué decided to end the performance, as they sensed the content was getting lost in translation, and that the media attention, which associated the performance with current political events, altered the initial intentions of the artists. This results in a work closely related to the performance; a seventeen-minute video titled On Three Posters (2004), with Mroué sitting in front of the camera, against a simple white background, recounting the performance and analysing the ethical questions that the artists faced before and after the performance, as well as reflecting on context, artistic methods, martyrdom and voyeurism. While Mroué talks about the non-place created by Jamal Sati’s postponing of death through three takes, it also seems that Mroué himself is postponing the death of his Three Posters performance (2006), within the white non-place he creates in his own video.

In addition to his interest in pushing performance to its limits, escaping disciplinary frameworks, implicating the viewer, and blending fact and fiction in his work, the artist blurs the lines between his own life and film. Rabih Mroué stars alongside Catherine Deneuve—both playing themselves—in Je veux voir (2010), a film by artist/filmmaker duo Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The film is a road movie set during the aftermath of Israel’s 2006 Second Lebanon War. Parallel to Mroué’s interests, the film oscillates between facts and real characters and the cinematic space and its personas. The title of this text refers to a short sequence in the film where Catherine Deneuve calls out “Rabih! Rabih!” Mroué complicates this further by using footage from the film in his mixed media installation of the same name. The film as well as the installation convey the impossibility of representation, as what the viewer sees and understands is always limited, and one dimensional. The image falls short of communicating conflict, cultural setting and experience. Mroué is aware of the shortcomings of the visual; and he continuously questions the validity of an image and himself as a producer of images.

The question seems simple enough: What images can artists produce and is it possible to confront these images that we receive every day with yet more images that we produce?

These are the questions that I pose in many of my works. And I agree with some intellectuals that maybe the role of artists and even intellectuals is not to produce images but to take iconic images and try to deconstruct them. To ‘de-sacrelise’ them… My work is trying not to produce new images but to find and take these images and deconstruct them through reflection and by re-reading them in a human, personalised manner.2 Using found material and images is a recurring artistic resort for Mroué, which also signifies a search for a relevant visual language and textual vocabulary for the Lebanese situation. Mroué’s work continuously deals with the inherent politics of narrative and representation. He claims that; “the narrative should be unfinished, open, and full of gaps that can be filled”.3 The single-channel video Noiseless (2008), which is being presented in the 2012 Adelaide International, starts with a photograph of the artist, superimposed over a newspaper clipping highlighting the announcement of Rabih Mroué as a missing person. This is followed by various other newspaper cuttings about missing persons, and as they appear one after the other, the image of the artist becomes a shadow, slowly melting into nothingness, as they do in the collective memory, with the State never accounting for them, their faces and stories erased from individual as well as collective memory. The video is accompanied by a hand-written component, in which the artist explains that he has been collecting his own photographs as a missing person for years, not knowing why. He innocently confesses that he is intrigued by one question: “Where could I disappear to, in a country like Lebanon, so small, where it is said everyone knows everyone else, and where the least said on its society is its being confessional, sectarian, communitarian, tribal and so on so forth”. Towards the end of the note, the tone becomes much more accusative, stating that it seems impossible to him that anything can be carried out without a single trace.

He continues: “It seems to me that in order to achieve our individuality as Lebanese citizens, there is a heavy price to pay, such as being kidnapped, disappearing, getting murdered, or becoming a martyr. And frankly, I’m not sure that all these are nearly enough.” The problem of Lebanon’s disappeared is thus acknowledged, documented, internalised and chiselled into the memory of the viewers, at least for a while. This is ‘forgetting’ in the artist’s sense of the word.

Another work that is closely related to Noiseless is a deeper investigation of a certain missing person titled Looking for a Missing Employee (2003). This is a performance investigating the case of a man who worked at Beirut’s Ministry of Finance in the 1990s. During this performance, the amateur detective Mroué,

sitting among the audience with the surface of his desk projected onto a screen for the audience to follow, goes through three notebooks’ worth of newspaper clippings related to the event. It’s a convoluted story and a confusing case, and the situation is worsened by the often corrupt officials investigating the matter.

There is another projection of Mroué’s face and yet another projection showing the live-feed drawing created to map the investigation graphically. The setup is almost as complicated as the case itself, but the viewers quickly realise that justice will not be served. While they experience the frustration of being subjected to the scrutiny of the print media’s scandalous agency and the unreliability of Lebanese bureaucracy, questions of truth, fate, and human nature are hinted at. There is a push and pull, not only between different sources that convey the story, but also an internal conflict for the viewer. This is an upsetting story, but also mischievously told, it makes you laugh and feel guilty for laughing at the same time.

In 2010, Rabih Mroué won the Spalding Gray Award, which paved the way for his new work, The Pixelated Revolution. This is a lecture performance that made its USA debut in January 2012, at the Baryshnikov Arts Centre’s Howard Gilman Performance Space in New York, as part of PS122’s COIL Festival. The new work juxtaposes Dogme 95, a filmmaking manifesto that originated in Denmark in the mid-1990s with the use of images recorded of the ongoing Syrian revolution by protestors. Mroué is interested in a selection of images uploaded to the internet through social media sites, and connects them with the dictates of protest aesthetics of the Danish manifesto. For example, in Dogme 95, it is instructed that you should not use a tripod. And for the Syrians, it’s not a choice—it is extremely difficult to use a tripod to record in this situation. It is the first time he has worked with a current event, and the issue of whether it is too soon has been raised. “Everything starts when we finish the performance, not when we start it.

It is when the people leave the theatre and the actors leave the stage that the work really starts.”4 About this work, Mroué says that his interest lies again in the production and use of these images. Here, through these images, he is able to analyse the construction of the image, its use, how this relates to the construction of a narrative from the very beginning of a political uprising, and perhaps later, he will be able to trace how this moment is historicised and even remembered in the future.

Is Rabih Mroué a storyteller? If he is, he chooses to use more camera angles than one, and stops telling the story mid-way to wink at you, to remind you that what you see is something that is being told, a construction. It is not yours or his, and it certainly is not the ‘truth.’

Notes: 1 Excerpt from Rabih Mroué’s Je Veux Voir, 2010 2

‘Lost in Narration: A conversation between Rabih Mroué and Anthony Downey’, Ibraaz, 5 January 2012; see http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/11

3

4

ibid. ibid.

Opposite: Rabih Mroué in front of his installation Grandfather, father, Son, My Leap into the Void, 2011 Above: from Three Posters, a performance by Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, Beirut 2000 Photos courtesy the artist

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LISA REIHANA'S PELT AND OTHER USTOPIAN FABLES

Rhana Devenport The lens-based art of Lisa Reihana casts characters in luminous fables that take place in uncanny otherworlds of her own crafting. Her practice coalesces poetic fiction and an analysis of colonisation, power and representation through an interrogation of beauty. Filmic languages, technologies, mythologies, and the artist’s own familial and Māori genealogy (Ngāi Tū, Ngāti Hine, Ngā Puhi) are explored in her work. Eschewing easy classification, her most recent photographic series, PELT (2011) features in Victoria Lynn’s Adelaide International 2012.

What may at first glance appear as a shift in her practice away from her culturally charged strategy, may also be understood as a clear continuation of her habit of forging strangely compelling, unchartered worlds.

The artist’s early training in the mid-1980s in Auckland was initially in sculpture, when she began experimenting with stop-frame animation.

Reihana then switched to time-based media arts through an influential course led by sound artist Phil Dadson. Reihana has since contributed in exceptional ways to the forming of cultural knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand through her work in performance, television documentaries, film and education. She is a pioneer in multi-media practice and digital photography in New Zealand and has a formidable international exhibition history.

Curator Megan Tamati-Quennell writes; “Drawn from eclectic sources including 1970s video art by Nam June Paik, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, black feminist theory, indigenous politics and aesthetics and popular culture, her works communicate complex ideas related to community, Māori identity, portability, hybridity, sexuality and gender.”1

Within Māori philosophy, history and future gazing are not uncommon bedfellows. There is a beautiful Māori conception of time, i nga wa o mua: one walks towards the past, guided by one’s ancestors, while behind, exists the future.

Reihana also quotes science fiction as an influence. In 2011 writer Margaret Atwood refuted Ursula Le Guin’s descriptor of science fiction in relation to Atwood’s own literary work. Science fiction encompasses things that could not possibly happen today, Atwood attests, and prefers “speculative fiction” to describe her tales where things could happen today, but just probably haven’t yet. Think Jules Verne rather than War of the Worlds she explains.2 I would describe Reihana’s work to varying degrees as “temporal fiction”: an imaginative conjuring of events of the past and possible futures, a fiction that re-imagines historical givens as much as it conceptualises new worlds, a fiction that whisks mythological or historical figures into a dubious contemporeanity, imbued with psychological and emotional allusions. In PELT, more than any of her previous series, Reihana configures an imagined space that is part utopia and part dystopia. Atwood has much to say on this realm of world-making which she terms “ustopia”.

Ustopia is a world I made up by combining utopia and dystopia —the imagined perfect society and its opposite—because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other. In addition to being, almost always, a mapped location, Ustopia is also a state of mind, as is every place in literature of whatever kind. As Mephistophilis tells us in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Hell is not only a physical space. “Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it”, he says. “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d/ In one self place; but where we are is hell,/And where hell is, there must we ever be.” Or, to cite a more positive version, from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “[T]hen wilt thou not be loth/To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess/A Paradise within thee, happier far.” In literature, every landscape is a state of mind, but every state of mind can also be portrayed by a landscape.

And so it is with Ustopia.3

World-making and invented realities also occupy artists such as Texas-born, Los Angeles-based artist/filmmaker Ryan Trecartin whose frenzied, bedazzling scenarios showcase the foibles of extremist, hyper-real, post-gaming, postYouTube characters. Reihana acknowledges AES+F’s audacious multi-screen, character-filled cinematic worlds as of interest, as she does the invented-worlds of “Isaac Julien, Matthew Barney, Miwa Yanagi, Yayoi Kusama and Tracey Moffatt; alongside Māori women Merata Mita and Ramai Hayward who have proven that a life in film is possible”.4. American psychologist Alison Gopnik, talks about the role of fiction, imagination and causation in the web of belief as abstractions and realities are extended through imaginative play. Alternatives are tested and explored in necessary ways, Gopnik notes; a safe place for unsafe ideas, some may say.

Tracing a rapid journey through Reihana’s alternative worlds reveals the scope of her experimentations. Hypergirls (1998) is a single-channel video coauthored with fellow Pacific Sister Ani O’Neill. It harnesses rapid-fire, jumpcut editing to mash-up cultural politics with day-glo colours, fashion cults and consumerist aesthetics infected with lashings of Polynesian and Māori design.

Usurping anthropological definitions of Pacifica and Māoridom, the artists cast themselves as constantly evolving global heroines in a drama of hot patterns and cool music.

Native Portraits n. 19897 (1997) was commissioned by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and was later shown in the 2000 Biennale of Sydney. This manifold time-based installation structurally incorporates a meeting house (waharoa) gateway comprising television monitors, as well as two museum cabinets housing smaller monitors. The imagery encompasses moving image vignettes and video portraits referencing the colonial gaze, representations of

57 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 indigenous peoples, Otherness, tourism, truth and its opposite. The work reflects Reihana’s fascination with representational technologies, time and its capture, the fabrication of histories and museum classification systems. Here Reihana draws on the remarkable photographic output of New Zealand’s British-born, nineteenthcentury studio and documentary photographers, the Burton Brothers.

Native Portraits n. 19897 hones in on emblematic photographic descriptors of various roles undertaken by Māori in colonial New Zealand society: the warrior, the translator, the dusky muse, the soldier and the nurse, alongside the colonial photographer himself. Photographic stills and more recently (in 2005) laser etchings on granite (literally writing in stone) are extensions of this body of work. Reihana fashions a sepia-toned world of the fabricated photographic studio and the crafted space of the daguerreotype, as she imagines the subtle and problematic relationships that unfold within this stage of power and representation.

In Reihana’s hands, a complex cast of players perform vulnerable approximations of histories in the making.

Through her Digital Marae photographic and video project (2001-07) (and ongoing), Reihana assembles a temporary darkness. The gods and ancestors who inhabit this mutable space configure and reconfigure, as their and other stories are told and retold in an endless narrative. These tales of creation, this cosmological pantheon, these parables and guiding forces, are inflected by stories from those who inhabit Reihana’s own matrix of friends and family. The forms are activated by a coalescence of sculptural, architectural and celluloid languages.

The polished digital surfaces of the Digital Marae photographs pay homage to the polish on Maori carvings that are connected inextricably to sacred architecture and traditionally undertaken only by men. Reihana assumes unexpected twists on the visual mood of the god-like protagonists, these atua of Māori folklore.

Her representation of the much maligned bird-woman Kurangaituku draws on writer Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s recent, more sympathetic take on the myth.

The artist introduces new figures to the pantheon, such as Takatāpui, the spiritually powerful third gender within traditional Māoridom. The darkness becomes another character for Reihana in this series, evoking nighttime in the whare moe (sleeping house). “Storytelling resonates best at night”, Reihana explains, “when the minds eye is free to conjure images of clarity and mystery adrift from daily routines”.

In PELT, Reihana is interested in creating an otherworldliness and is conscious of the almost heaven, almost hell-ness of the photographs. “Does PELT suggest another place altogether?” she asks. Her visual language of choice was purposely contrary to the richly hued and lavishly adorned images of Digital Marae. The characters in Digital Marae emerge from a cosmological nocturne, while the environment she forges in PELT consists of plateaux and escarpments of an unearthly white, as pale as her female protagonists’ skin. Rather than reenergising conceptions of atua as she undertook in Digital Marae, PELT features spectral creatures of her own making. The shadows on ice are consciously imperfect and become accompanying presences or celestial phantoms in themselves.

Scale and assumptions about locale are subverted, as the frosted landscape itself becomes a character in the intrigue. Reihana digitally manipulated the landscape from photographs she took in winter in New Zealand’s Volcanic Plateau, while the ‘tree’ in Camarillo and Sabino is a delicate fern from the Far North of New Zealand’s North Island. Traditionally associated with tangi (Māori funerals), the fern is used by the artist in remembrance of a lost relative.

Within this achromatic wilderness, the figures stand solitary and self-assured, their sex visible. “More mythological than erotic”, says Reihana. These singular players are embedded in landscapes that match Atwood’s description of ustopias; “not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere”.5 The frozen desolate tundra in PELT is reminiscent of Yang Fudong’s evocative and beautiful black-and-white film Yejiang/The nightman cometh (2011), in which a group of archetypical characters enact a pseudo-historic fable of battle and returning, love and longing with poignant restraint. A battle-weary warrior forms tableaux with ghost-like characters dressed in the mode of mid-lastcentury elegance. They enact an existential play on individual states of mind and emotion. Here too, as in PELT, animals and birds weigh heavily within the terrain and heighten the emotional mood. Reihana’s characters in PELT, however, have undergone a reverse anthropomorphism and non-human creatures are present as vestiges rather than as sentient beings. The figures in Camarillo and Sabino are both adorned in cascades of white ostrich plumes. Their names, respectively, derive from a pure white breed of horse, and a horse with a white spotted coat produced by an aberrant gene. The figures in Pilosus (a Latin word used frequently in the animal and plant worlds meaning covered in hair) and Aquila (Latin for eagle) have both metamorphosed to bear inky, feather-like fur-capes. Bird feathers often appear in Reihana’s work such as in her object-based work fluffy fings (1998).

She explains their role; “The artist Maureen Lander told me that Māori women would decorate carvings with feathers for special occasions. These adornments provided a mechanism for the ancestors to speak through, channeling the spiritual realm through vibration.”

Page 54: Lisa Reihana, PELT: Pilosus, 2010 Page55: Lisa Reihana, PELT: Camarillo, 2010 Opposite: Lisa Reihana, PELT: Sabino, 2010; all Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photos courtesy the artist

In Inuit mythology, the creature Pinga is the goddess of the hunt, fertility and medicine. She is also a psychopomp, bringing souls of the newly dead to the underworld. In various cultures psychopomps are often associated with equine and avian kingdoms, and hover between conscious and unconscious realms.

“Therianthropy” is the term used to describe metamorphosis of humans into other animals and describes the shapeshifting that appears in so many folkloric tales. “Skin-walkers”, accordingly to certain Native American legends, refer to individuals with the supernatural ability to transform themselves into any animal, to do so they must first wear a pelt of the animal. Perhaps the players in PELT are therianthropic tricksters, emblematic shamans for our Age of the Anthropocene, this so-called current epoch of geologic time (roughly since the Industrial Revolution) marked by the massive impact of human activity on the planet’s fragile ecosystems.

The uncanniness of the digitally produced, hybrid creatures in PELT may invoke a push/pull of familiarity and aberrance. The ‘uncanny valley’ is a robotics and 3D animation hypothesis coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe the shift from empathy to revulsion that humans feel when they observe an almost-but-not-quite-human android. The uncanny valley exists between the ‘barely human’ and the ‘fully human’. This push/pull between attraction and repulsion rests in the uncanniness of what is experienced and extends Ernst Jentsch’s original idea of the uncanny as published in his 1906 ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, and elaborated by Freud in 1919. While I am not suggesting that the inhabitants of PELT fall into some forsaken uncanny valley, the work certainly hovers alluringly near its edge.

The scope of Reihana’s imagination is testing new technical and conceptual thresholds through her current project, her most ambitious to date.

In Pursuit of Venus will be a vast, multi-screen, interactive environment that explores how ‘new’ technologies of two centuries ago gave form to idiosyncratic representations of the Pacific from the fabulist mind’s-eye of European colonialism. In nineteenth-century France and England, the Pacific became an imaginative entity of speculation, obsession and fascination, a vivid conflation of desire, arousal and fear.

Reihana’s upcoming project investigates the celebrated nineteenthcentury panoramic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, an historically significant work designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet and produced in France by entrepreneur Joseph Dufour during 1804-05. Informed by Rousseau’s notions of the “the noble savage”, this enterprise was a neoclassical depiction inspired by the tales of Captain Cook’s Pacific voyages. With its complex production of one thousand woodblocks to create a commercially-produced scenic wallpaper of twenty paper-drops, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique was admired for its technical sophistication and the innovations associated with early twenty-first century technologies. Reihana explains: “In pursuit of Venus reappraises the wallpaper’s original moment of making, thus providing a focus for post-colonial discussions amidst the experiential and visual language of the post-cinema encounter.” By telescoping the temporal and spatial in real time, intimacy is sought, alternate narratives are imagined, characters are rescued from exclusion zones, and possible truths are revealed. As Reihana continues: “In pursuit of Venus investigates the ruptures of visible truths and provides sideline glances that are absent from the original work, offering an indigenous inflection that rests heavily on the living traditions of performative gestures.” New subjectivities replace old in this panoptic exploration of representation through time as Reihana ruptures the rampant exoticisation embedded within the colonial gaze, and the encryption of ideology within fashionable taste.

Through conceiving and orchestrating otherworlds, Reihana articulates self-possessed environments inhabited by the exposition of myth, the legacy and distortions of history, and the personality of symbolic landscapes. The entwinement of human and hybrid beings within these narratives provide portals to enigmatic psychological states. Reihana continues to experiment with possibilities and tangible provocations that agitate fiction, truth and representation as she makes visible her own imaginative ustopias.

Notes 1 Megan Tamati-Quennell, Lisa Reihana/Digital Marae, Rhana Devenport (ed.), New Plymouth: GovettBrewster Art Gallery, 2009: 43 2 Margaret Atwood, quoted in http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-toustopia 3

ibid.

4

All quotes by Lisa Reihana are from conversations and emails with the author, 17 November 2007, and 9 and 21 January 2012

5

Atwood, op cit.

IN TOM NICHOLSON'S SHADOW Tony Birch If colonial history in Australia is not a fiction, it is at best a series of speculations posing as a progressive foundational history. In an effort to mask the deepseated anxiety of a society built on the sleight-of-hand of political and cultural terra nullius, the Australia nation has cluttered the landscape with monuments, memorials, plaques, cairns, street and city names, and frivolous exercises in gigantism, to ensure that a singular narrative—the pioneer conquest of a harsh and empty land—remains constant. Historically this public display was underpinned by the jewel in the colonial crown, the strategic dissemination of knowledge gained and projected from the colonial archive; paper, print, images, documents and objects that serve as evidence, as proof that the privileged story of White Australia is received with little question. In recent decades the foundations of this house of certainty have been shaken, by the ongoing political activism of Aboriginal people, supported by the intellectual, creative and artistic work of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal thinkers and practitioners.

Melbourne-based artist Tom Nicholson has been central to this tradition over the last decade. His work is predicated on a belief that for new stories to be told about Australia, the colonial project of auto-monumentalisation has to be dusted off, reshaped and forced to speak up for itself, rather than look down at the populace with the gaze of silent and unquestioned authority. He has no desire to destroy or desecrate the colonial memorial. Rather, he wants to get at the barely whispered and make it heard. For instance, while most people would walk by the imposing Burke and Wills memorial in Melbourne and regard both it and the ‘heroic but tragic’ story it represents as immovable and monolithic, Nicholson’s engagement with the object highlights a history of temporality, shifts, both physical and cultural, and a genuine tragedy, absent of the shallow rhetoric of heroics.

Nicholson is an archivist in the broadest sense, working with traditional and hierarchical ephemera such as documents, photographs, indexes and ordered and numbered boxes. As part of his practice, he also gathers together what may appear to the outsider, apparently random bits and pieces; fragments, traces, smudges and scratchings. When working with place (in particular) nothing is excluded. In his studio, whether at the computer, or resting against a chair sketching, working with ink and charcoal, he assembles a response to an existing narrative, fracturing it with a fresh voice. He is also an activist in the truest sense. In (perhaps) a post-postmodern world, where inaction is no longer a state of achievement but a banal reality, he believes that change is only possible by provoking and activating its potential. This would be an old-fashioned, even redundant position to hold were it not for the fact that his work continually challenges the ways we think and act. Social justice is a term that can also sound hackneyed. But Nicholson does not talk about social justice. His practice, which is tactile, organic and real, embodies it. When he first went to East Timor in the late1990s as a student activist, his sense of the relationship between his politics and art practice became clear, both to himself and his audience. When the Indonesian military ransacked libraries and burnt books (in totalitarian tradition) his response was not only to come home to Australia and assist in a subsequent book drive for the East Timorese people, but to address this atrocity on knowledge through his practice.

Over many hours in solitude, working and sculpting charcoal on paper, shifting and smudging black on white, he is essentially a collaborator, of the likeminded, the curious and the energetic, and by nature, the activist. He is driven by a commitment to inclusion. His work has the remarkable effect of drawing individuals into a communal space and experience that while formally temporal, has a residual and lasting impact. Many people have activated political and social connections after being introduced to his work.

Although I had previously met him and as a historian been influenced by his work, our first discussion about his practice and the potential of working together on mutual interests took place in Santiago, Chile, in 2006, where we were both presenting at a conference for the South Project. We talked about the status of Aboriginal people and the inability of White Australia to recognise both the devastating impact of colonisation and its eventual failure. He was already planning his own intervention into an often populist rhetoric that passed for debate over Australia’s colonial past and the marginalisation of Aboriginal people.

The work he subsequently created contained his trademark cocktail of quiet and creative determination laced with humour. His ingenious poster series, which visited the early nineteenth-century Port Phillip district of Victoria, included a

drawing of William Buckley, “the white blackfellow” and escaped convict who had lived amongst members of the Kulin nation for more than thirty years from 1802, having escaped the failed first attempt of settlement at Sullivan’s Cove.

The Buckley poster announced a forthcoming public meeting to take place in Melbourne on “6 July 1835”. The meeting was to be attended by both Kulin and European activists, and would give voice to issues of concern to the Aboriginal clans of the district. The poster was pasted across the inner city, in lanes, on factory walls and hoardings of building sites. The project was, in part, a commemoration of a past action that, within the cage of colonial empirical history could not have occurred because it had not been documented and given recognition in the public domain. The poster not only provided long-due recognition, it created a reaction and resonance in a contemporary place, where narratives of the past were excavated and collided with contemporary settler mythologies.

In Santiago, Nicholson and I also talked about a place of shared interest in Melbourne’s Royal Park, containing the Zoo, a youth detention centre and several hospitals. He was particularly interested in yet another Burke and Wills memorial, while I had previously written and researched one of the Park’s many ‘lost places’—the Camp Pell military base, which from 1946 to 1956 had been used as an emergency housing centre for Melbourne’s marginalised, homeless and poor. The housing centre was bulldozed immediately prior to the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games so that visitors to the city would not have to suffer its ugliness.

The outcome of our archeology of narrative traces was the Camp Pell Lectures, an exhibition presented at Artspace in Sydney, in January 2010. Nicholson’s interest in and energy for the project was motivated by a photograph he discovered in the State Library of Victoria archives, of a group of Aboriginal people who had been forced to present themselves as an oxymoronic, living but extinct exhibit at the Zoo, during a period when the colonial government of Victoria was not only attempting to contain Aborigines at a series of missions and reserves across the State, but also attempting to obliterate Aboriginal people via legislation that culminated in the infamous Victorian Half-Caste Act (1886). Nicholson critiqued the image and the ideological practice it represented with one of his fragmentary drawings. I was sure that once he had seen the photograph he would be driven to tell another story of a people and land that had been captured, and for a time, subordinated by the colonial lens.

His most recent work for the 2012 Adelaide Biennial, Evening Shadows, encompasses ideas central to his practice. This installation, which includes multiple copies of an original and allegorical colonial painting Evening shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia (1880) by H.J. Johnstone, draws attention to the certainty contained in the original work while simultaneously unsettling it.

Were the many copies of the original made to pay due respect to its unquestioned authority, or were they created in an attempt to stabilise its fragile hold on the past? It would be a mistake to suggest that Nicholson is simply mocking the original work. He is drawn to artwork and archival material that both privileges a singular narrative of Australia’s past and subsequently the material itself. He fully realises the power of the image, the word, or the object. The challenge he sets himself is to confront the power of the colonial narrative and agitate it. It is not surprising that he has chosen in this instance a painting of an Aboriginal woman about to cross the River Murray (an image he juxtaposes with the Cummeragunja Reserve Walk-Off of 1939). Colonial history expects us to believe that Aboriginal people were eventually contained, immobilised once confronted by a greater power.

His work is drawn to Aboriginal people in motion, not nomadically but engaged, with place and knowledge. There is a clear link here to his banner project of recent years.

There is one particular work of Tom Nicholson’s practice, more than any other, that has impacted upon my own thinking. In 2010 I worked with him on the exhibition Duetto at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, providing an accompanying text for his photograph Nardoo–Red Wedge, of the artist waving the ‘red wedge’ flag he designed in recognition of the authority of the Aboriginal groups that comprise the greater Kulin nation of Port Phillip, in Victoria. This artwork is, appropriately, an image of both movement and stasis.

Whenever I reflect upon Tom Nicholson’s Red Wedge I am drawn to its spirit, its energy and its generosity: [H]e came in a spark of light—The Ngamajet—a swirling apparition briefer and greater than time.1 Note 1 From my text titled ‘The Ngamajet–2010’, exhibited with Tom Nicholson’s Red Wedge, Duetto, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, May 2010

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Tom Nicholson, Nardoo flagwave (Red Wedge) (detail), 2010 Photo courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

CRYSTAL VOYAGER

LISA SLADE Seemingly suspended in mid air, Untitled (Jump up) by Adelaide-based artist Nicholas Folland is arguably the most arresting artwork in Parallel Collisions, the 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Two thousand cut glass vessels hang in a constellation, an archipelago that trespasses upon the architecture of the Elder Wing of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Many of the twentyone commissioned works in the Biennial perform a type of trespass—material, sensory, temporal, conceptual or ideological—upon the nineteenth-century art museum and its collection. Folland’s position however, within this litany of engagements is singular. Born in Adelaide, Folland’s familiarity with the building and the collection (he has at times been employed as a member of the Gallery’s installation team) invites a differentiated response. It is therefore unsurprising that his Elder Wing incursion ricochets across the collection, the architecture and the art histories composed therein.

The antipode I’ve spent so much time looking at maps; searching for something, myself, someone else… the past, the future.1 Often displayed in the first room of the European or Melrose Wing in the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Nuremberg Chronicle is a late fifteenth-century collision of cartography, historiography and religious proselytising. Published in 1493 and compiled by Renaissance scholar Hartmann Schedel, the chronicle consists of nearly two thousand woodcuts made by artists of the day. A young Albrecht Dürer, an artist well represented in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s extensive print collection, is believed to have contributed woodcuts to the chronicle. A Surrealist cartography to contemporary eyes, the margins of several of the maps printed within the chronicle are populated by curious and mythical creatures. These include the antipode, a figure with backward facing feet and the skiapod, whose large singular foot provides protection from the sun. Despite being an example of nascent publishing, the Nuremberg Chronicle builds upon an ancient language of cartographic representation. Long before it was physically encountered, the great southern land existed in the European imagination. From the fifth century BC, The Antipodes have referred to the distant underworld of the southern hemisphere, a counterpoint for the northern hemisphere. They are represented in some instances as a great southern land mass and in others as a constellation of small islands. This European mortgage on The Antipodes extends from the ancients to the present day—from the rebound to the classics made

manifest in the Nuremberg Chronicle’s marginalia (there be dragons), through the settler tropes of nineteenth-century Australia represented in the Elder Wing, to Folland’s twenty first-century incursion.

As a descendant of Charles and Charlotte Folland, who sailed into Holdfast Bay, South Australia on the HMS Resource on 23 January 1839, Nicholas Folland, like many of us, is part of this ancient lineage of first imagining, and then becoming, the Antipodean. Furthermore, the title of his Biennial work carries a translation of his European name. “Jump-up” is a term used to describe a small rise in an otherwise flat landscape and the name Folland translates from Norwegian (most probably of Viking origin) to mean a small hill. The topographical origin of his European name underscores the duplicity of being Antipodean. As Ross Gibson establishes in South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia, to be Antipodean is to be both Self and Other, known and unknown, fact and fiction.2 The synergy between Folland’s own European name and the title of the work also introduces the possibility that this incursion is inherently autobiographical.

Despite Folland’s personal entanglement in this history, he is largely disinterested in the conquests of empire. It is the imaginative speculations and the manifest uncertainties that excite him. Less territorial (of the earth) and more oceanic (nebulous), Folland’s Untitled (Jump-Up) is an exploratory underworld of forms. The work draws its inspiration from the trope of Atlantis, that mythical underwater paradise. The Antipodes and Atlantis have much in common—both are constructs of the European imagination, repositories of dreams, desires and anxieties. As Folland explains; My work is an abstraction of the Mediterranean island of Santorini, or Ancient Thera, one of many small islands scattered across the oceans that have been suggested as possible sites for ancient Atlantis. The chance that this is Atlantis is slim, and although it appears to have once been the location of an advanced and successful civilisation that has since vanished into the sea without trace, it is not located in the Atlantic Ocean where we might expect to find an island with such a name. It is however, literally on the other side of the earth from Australia, the opposite side of the world, where we might presume the world to be different from our own Antipodean shores. Santorini offers a framework layered with enough association and speculation to bring with it a sense of mystery and wonder.3

61 contemporary visual art + culture b roa d sheet 41.1 2 012 Folland adopts the motif and methodology of antipodean inversion throughout his art making practice, underscoring Bernard Smith’s assertion that The Antipodes are more relation than place.4 In his preparatory drawings for Untitled (Jump up) Folland plays with inverting the entire archipelago—tipping the composition from one hemisphere to another, seeking out the work’s antipodes. Furthermore, Folland’s antipodean process extended to the hours he kept while installing the work. Due to its technical demands the constellation was constructed at night, while the museum and the rest of Adelaide slept. What were once vessels —drinking glasses, bowls and decanters, collected by the artist from around the city over many years—hover together in a precise balancing against, their form and functionality overturned.

The ocean The ocean is an enduring metaphor for longing.5 The mantle of the explorer or seafarer, who looks to land or sea for salvation (but often finds tragedy), has been a recurring trope for Folland. The placement of Folland’s Untitled (Jump up), in conversation with colonial, specifically South Australian paintings depicting hazardous sea voyages underscores the key themes of speculation and risk in the work. This placement also reminds us of his ancestral ties with these narratives of loss, longing, anxiety and desire. Folland elaborates; “Within this wing there are numerous works depicting the moods of the ocean, and I suspect that this is partly because the first view of Australia for colonial settlers was from a ship out to sea, and once here a fortress of ocean secured the deal.”6 In White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (1998), art historian Ian Mclean asserts that; “Australia’s antipodality is a sign of its oceanic origins.

Like Ocean, the Antipodean never becomes, never is, but is condemned to a perpetual becoming, a constitutional rootlessness and mobility, an ‘in-betweenness’.”7 This condition of liminality, of being on the threshold between one thing and another, manifests itself throughout Folland’s oeuvre. In 2008 he made mock-minimalist paintings titled Indian Blue and Pacific Blue. The works were in essence maps of those oceans bereft of inhabitable landmass. As maps they were unreadable, unknowable, underscoring our cartographic horror vacui. The irony of a map that depicts that which is forever moving and changing was not lost on the artist. Through these works Folland revealed our land loving, our terrestrial and territorial selves. In his own words; “I am trying to find a point between two worlds or two realities where something can exist precariously, with the surface of both, acknowledging each other, reliant on each other even; a point where two potentially discrete and opposing notions support one another, but also where they must make way.”8 The fiction During their preliminary planning for Parallel Collisions, curators Bullock and Glass-Kantor worked with “the black swan of trespass” as part of the exhibition’s title and conceptual premise. The phrase provided a succinct call to action to a new generation of Antipodean artists to trespass into alien waters—to storm the museum and its collection. Taken from a poem by Ern Malley titled ‘Durer: Innsbruck, 1495’, the full phrase “the black swan of trespass on alien waters” is the final line in the poem, inspired by Dürer’s watercolour made two years after the Nuremberg Chronicle was printed. The poem uses the ancient art of ekphrasis to bring to life Dürer’s painting of the mountain-locked city of Innsbruck. A floating apparition of turrets and spires, the watercolour with its glacial luminescence bears more than a passing resemblance to Folland’s Untitled (Jump Up).

‘Durer: Innsbruck, 1495’ was the first poem by Malley to be sent to Max Harris and John Reed, editors of the Angry Penguins journal, which at the time was based in Adelaide. The poem and Malley’s remaining opus were acclaimed

by Harris and Reed and subsequently published in a commemorative issue of the Angry Penguins in 1944. It was subsequently revealed that Malley was an ornament of fiction. Invented by conservative Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart, it represented a creative protest to avant-garde, Modernist writing.9 Within the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, there is a portrait of Ern Malley painted by Sidney Nolan in 1973, some thirty years after the hoax.

Folland, fascinated by these fictions, says; “This is history, prone to slippery and selective translation, and this same allusive reality gives me permission to select and distort the versions of history that I come across in my research.”10

Furthermore, Folland’s work proffers an ongoing obsession with Antipodean heroes, hoaxes and failures. Held in the Gallery’s collection, Folland’s earlier sculptural installation Mount Hopeless (2001)—consisting of a series of large heated boulders—is a eulogy to explorer Edward John Eyre and his efforts to reach Central Australia and the fabled inland sea. The title of the work is taken from the name given to the stony rise where Eyre abandoned his 1840 expedition.

This site also featured in the expeditions of Charles Sturt and Burke and Wills.

These figures, and to a lesser extent, locations of heroic failure recur in Folland’s work and of course it is the eulogised misadventures of such figures that adorn gallery walls. Historically we have immortalised those who try but fail as much as those who succeed, because in some strange way those who suffer the most in their quest have tried the hardest, and have put up the true challenge.

The black swan Also part of the Art Gallery of SA’s archive is an early eighteenth-century engraving by an unknown artist, based upon a 1726 work by Johannes van Keulen held in the National Library of Australia. The engraving depicts black swans (abnormally enlarged) observed during Willem de Vlamingh’s 1696 voyage to the west coast of Australia. Displayed for the first time recently in the Elder Wing of Australian Art (inviting a parallel collision with the Nuremberg Chronicle in the adjacent wing), the work was first published in François Valentijn’s The Old and New East-Indies (c.1724-26). Documented and collected during de Vlamingh’s expedition11, black swans represent the ultimate antipodean anomaly. With glossy black feathers and scarlet beaks, the birds embody alterity. According to historian Tim Bonyhady, birds were at the forefront of the colonial encounter with the Antipodean natural world—they registered the strangeness of the new world.12 Black swans were also the first export, taken alive but arriving dead, in Europe as naturalia and exotica —trophies from the perplexing and increasingly pluralistic new world. For Folland; “Black swans speak of the fantastic, understood as nothing more than mythological creatures prior to the discovery of Australia, their existence must have inspired the possibility of the fantastic in the minds of logical and sensible people. I think that what attracts me to the narratives of exploration is that they document a searching desire for the next black swan.”13 The archipelago In his 2009 Tate Triennial: Altermodern, French curator, art historian and cultural theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud invoked the archipelago as a model for artistic production and a metaphor for globalisation. He stated; “Contemporary culture has become an archipelago: no longer an entire continent, but islands of thoughts and forms, no longer a totality but separated fragments connected by unusual circuits.

The artist is now a traveller who constantly trespasses the ancient borders existing between disciplines.”14 This riposte to the metaphor of the explorer would appeal to Folland, who is described as such in the curators’ essay. Similarly, Bourriaud’s claim that there are no unknown lands, no terrae incognitae finds resonance in Folland’s statement that; “We assume to have discovered most of what is to be found on the earth, and in our informed perspective Atlantis remains a myth.

However, as a basic notion it partners the height of success with total failure, and paradise with inevitable demise, but as a location of desire it still relies on our imagination to take form, and is open to a variety of diverse interpretations.”15

Bourriaud’s assertion that time is the last continent to explore resounds with the 12th Adelaide Biennial, which takes temporality as its central tenet.

Folland however, would have us believe that there is a final, overlooked continent, that of the imagination.

Notes 1 Prue Gibson interview with Nicholas Folland, Art World, August 2008 2

Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992

3

Interview with artist, November 2011

4

Peter Beilharz, Imagining the Antipodes: culture, theory and the visual in the work of Bernard Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997

5

ibid.

6

Interview with artist, op cit.

7

Ian Mclean, White Aborigines: identity politics in Australian Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 6

8

Interview with artist, op cit.

9

Coincidentally, Justin Clemens, one of the contributing authors to the Parallel Collisions catalogue, published his own poems in response to Malley’s in Jacket magazine 2009. Available online: http:// jacketmagazine.com/39/ra-clemens-malley.shtml 10

Interview with the artist, op cit.

11

De Vlamingh’s expedition was ostensibly a search for survivors of a ship thought to have been wrecked on the west coast of Australia 12

Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000

13

Interview with the artist, op cit.

14

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Travels’, Altermodern Tate Triennial, London: Tate Publishing London, 2009:122

15

Interview with the artist, op cit.

Opposite: Nicholas Folland, Floe, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist and Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane

WHERE IDEAS AND IMAGES COLLIDE MARIA KUNDA Pat Brassington’s new works for the Adelaide Biennial, a suite of monochromatic digital prints entitled A heartbeat away, presents us with a theatrical space rather like a stage set, not quite reality and not quite representation, but experiential; a place that is fundamentally transgressive, unsettling and playful.

Over the many years she has been active, her work has been the subject of much lucid writing that invariably makes reference to Surrealism and psychoanalysis in accounting for the enthralling-yet-repellent double valency typical of her imagery. Though her works do not literally rely on a physical cutand-paste, they nonetheless exploit the mechanisms of Surrealist collage to explore a frontier between reality and dream. Brassington’s work gained traction from the time she undertook a Master of Fine Arts at the Tasmanian School of Art in the early 1980s, and she came to critical attention soon after.

A heartbeat away reprises themes developed over three decades, but it presents a departure from a type of photographic surface tension Brassington has tended to pursue in her digital prints from the latter 1990s. Indeed, numerous commentators have elucidated the photographic impulse that has persisted with her transition from analogue to digital, and the tense interrelation that it poses between reality and the unconscious. However with its rich, velvety blacks, textures and moiré patterns, the present series leans toward an aesthetic of illustration and historical print media. Perhaps it is a return to origins, in matter and form, as Brassington underwent training in printmaking as well as photography.

In the realm of dream and obsession there can be no closure, no synthesis and no formal resolution. Images that summon this domain by way of collage necessarily have a level of fragmentation and openness that inveigles the imagination of the audience. Nonetheless, those that comprise A heartbeat away show bravura and have an almost inexplicable binding force as a group. They recall the stage-like space in many early Surrealist pictures, particularly a pre-Surrealist 1920 collage

by Max Ernst, as much for its title as its appearance: The Master’s Bedroom, It’s Worth Spending a Night There. There is a type of mastery here, even if it is of a supremely contradictory nature.

In 2006 Anne Marsh published Pat Brassington: This is not a photograph.1 Marsh focuses on Brassington’s works from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s and as the title indicates, she addresses the way Brassington problematises film-based representation through the means of appropriation and collage-montage. Like other notable writers before her, including Juliana Engberg, Marsh writes about the way Brassington not only photographs her own subject matter but plunders the archive of accrued images, re-ordering them in an unconventional and resistant manner. She claims that while the pictorial elements might tempt us to try and structure a narrative around them, ultimately we will be foiled. Addressing a work of 1986, The Gift, Marsh accounts for the directorial aspect of the artist’s method: [We] can see how Brassington uses the tools of the film director with a keen eye on an experimental, avant-garde method, which slices and cuts up narrative sequences to make montages which operate, at their best, as a mark of resistance to conventional language. Every viewer will put the images together in different ways, and in the end the experience may be exhausting and frustrating since the images resist our desire for closure. These collated images are like triggers that tempt our fears. If they represent anything specific it is the movement of desire captured by the glance, a desire that is forever circular and certain never to be satisfied. This is what draws us in: the postponement of satisfaction, which is the mechanism of desire’s becoming.2

Above: Pat Brassington, Forget your perfect offering, 2008 Opposite: Pat Brassington, A heartbeat away, 2011-12; Parallel Collisions: 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Page 64: Pat Brassington, Bloom, 2003 Photos courtesy the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney; Arc One Gallery, Melbourne; and Bett Gallery, Hobart

While these remarks hold true for the construction and viewing effects of A heartbeat away, in the present suite the mechanisms of allure, menace and revulsion are different from much of Brassington’s framed work over the last several years. They are less cinematic in their effect, though again the incisiveness of the editorial act of cut-and-paste is to the fore. In the way the images interrelate there is a type of theatricality at work. They operate as a set of correlates or correspondences, amounting to something like a psychological complex: a core pattern of emotions or desires arranged around a theme or traumatic event—real or imagined, remembered or forgotten. There is a difference here to the unrequited response that Marsh identifies above, since due to the physical sumptuousness of the prints, there is an atmospheric presence and a sense of tantalising proximity —a heartbeat away.

At the time of writing, the Adelaide Biennial was still some time away.

When I visited Brassington to view her work in progress, we sat at her kitchen table and surveyed a set of roughs, Blu-tacked to the cupboard in a group formation.

She was finalising which images to incorporate into the ultimate installation and rehearsing a grid configuration. She said that the body of work was coming along very, very slowly. I could quite see why every decision would be a protracted process of minor adjustment, tuning and tweaking. As I took them in, I found there was little I wanted to quiz her about: the images started to work on me; we sat and quietly contemplated them. In each one, the corner of a poky room is depicted:

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bare floorboards, patterned wallpaper, plain ceiling. This room’s style belongs to a loosely determined time, the late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century, but it could still exist in the present as a dated, neglected and musty place.

There is a mild spatial distortion; the floor tilts forward slightly, and although the dimensions of the room are constant throughout the series, it is differently rendered between images. Sometimes hazy, sometimes crisp, the room pulses between moods: dreary, dank, sordid, bleak, morbid, forbidding, but all the while entrancing. The stage is set for a series of centrally placed figures and objects.

These apparitions too have their origins in the past. Somehow they belong to us all, as a shared repertory of pictures, a store of phantasms.

A child stands in the centre of the room, a doll-like girl in an old-fashioned dress. Like an illustration from a greeting card there is something unnatural—too cute—about the depiction of her petite physique. It is stunted perhaps, but the anatomical anomaly is difficult to pinpoint. In a melodramatic posture she shields her face with upraised arms and out-turned hands, as if guarding her eyes from the glare of excoriating light. It could be an attitude of self-protection and decisive refusal. What is the spectre that besets her and which she resists?

Brassington had pinned up several copies of the girl figure, and explained her intention to repeat the image, possibly framing a concentration of other images central to the grouping. The girl’s inwardly turned gaze operates in relation to the other scenes, as if she cannot bear to contemplate them.

An old fashioned bed appears in a couple of the images. The bedstead is truncated as though adapted for an adult of short stature but, disconcertingly, it’s of normal height. This bedroom receives strange visitations. One is a man with a blanched face, sporting a straight jacket. He may not be immured against his will; could have donned the jacket of his own volition? The idea seems fetishistic, embarrassing and funny. Another figure is masked and awkwardly clad in a long coat. He could be on stilts. None of the figures is clearly coded, and herein they open onto suggestion. To me, the two faceless figures speak of the horrors of war, it doesn’t matter which: they seem like broken men caught up in something infantile, compulsive and self-defeating.

In another frame a wrecking ball occupies the floor, a lumpen thing in an inert state that can only imply incipient violence, and it underscores an imputation of wreckage in the other images. Compositionally, the ball serves to gather up the energies of the other frames unto itself, creating a centrifugal force.

Another picture is heavy with imputation: it is the figure of Punch, recognisable in silhouette with his hooked nose and hump back. His sinister shadow ascribes the scenario with an archaic, senseless but compelling brutality.

Gross and excessive, the quarrelsome figure of Punch is known to us all. Over centuries, to gales of laughter all over Europe, Punch and Judy have played out their marital strife. Embroiled in this is their baby, often sacrificed, along with a fairly restricted set of secondary characters and accoutrements: the standards, to my knowledge are a policeman, a crocodile, a baton and a string of sausages. The knockabout drama of Punch and Judy turns on events that don’t exactly amount to a story, rather a cycle of incidents in which Punch defies the law and decorum, and Judy plays the avenging harpy. Neither the detail of everrepeated events nor the outcome is of primary importance in a Punch and Judy show, as it is a foregone conclusion that Punch prevails. The performance is all.

What matters is the energy and spiritedness of the high-jinks: it must amount to rampage. Punch represents irrepressible human defiance. He has full power to disrupt and disturb, to be in breach of all convention. I wouldn’t be the first to compare the extravagant energy of Punch with the Freudian Id.

It seems to me—and this is a point of glory rather than frustration—that the practice of Surrealist collage has always been in advance of theory. It cannot be subjected to symbolic interpretation, psychoanalytic reading or decoded or talked away. For one thing, it is terribly hard to generalise about the mechanism of Surrealist collage. Throughout its history, some examples have been predicated on the deliberately awkward juxtapositions of elements, thereby dramatising the arbitrariness of the conjunctions. In other examples, the tensions between elements have been dynamic rather oppositional, and in some instances (now I am thinking of Max Ernst’s collage novels) a strange and perplexing coherence is achieved, in which fragments provisionally unite, not to form a system or a story, but to provide a visual plane upon which pre-coded elements start to work upon the beholder, such that they destabilise what was previously known. To come to grips with how Brassington’s work extends upon the Surrealist project, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the Parisian Surrealists’ response when they first encountered the collages of Max Ernst in the early 1920s. André Breton wrote of them; The external object had broken with its normal environment and its component parts had, so to speak, emancipated themselves from it in such a way that they were now able to maintain entirely new relationships with other elements, escaping from the principle of reality but retaining all their importance on that plane.3

Here Breton provides a key, and we can see today in Pat Brassington’s work that it maintains a link with reality, but not with visual immediacy or literalness.

The eminent theorist Rosalind Krauss has written extensively on the way that Surrealist collage works to upset a paradigm of vision that assumes the immediacy of vision.4 In other words, she argues that it alerts us to the way our sight is pre-encoded, and serves to destabilise these codings. In addition though, at its very best, Surrealist collage may not only shake our preconceptions but also begin to forge a re-envisioning. Not only deconstructive—or destructive (the wrecking ball), or simply engaged in repeating and re-rehearsing the same old cycles of violence and transgression (Punch and Judy), it can have the effect that faced with an impossible image, we are jolted to rub our eyes, figuratively speaking, in order to reopen them and see a little more freshly; a little more quizzically. Within A heartbeat away, the gesture of the pint-sized girl could be a rubbing of disbelieving eyes.

We do not simply behold Pat Brassington’s Surrealist constructions; they do not simply exist in a space external to, but also reside somewhere within us.

In writing this text I have not yet had the opportunity to view the large wall of black and white prints, as they will be configured in the Adelaide Biennial. There is another aspect to the Surrealist legacy: that is the way the Surrealists heightened the theatricality of the exhibition space and the way the viewer is implicated within it, a key aspect of their latter formal experimentation. Beyond the images, A heartbeat away will become a space for encounter. Who knows whom you may meet there.

Notes 1 Anne Marsh, Pat Brassington: This is not a photograph, Hobart: Quintus, University of Tasmania, 2006 2

Anne Marsh, ‘A Surrealist Impulse in Contemporary Australian Photography’, Papers of Surrealism, issue 6, Autumn 2007

3

André Breton, ‘Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism’, in Surrealism and Painting, New York, 1972: 64

4

Amongst numerous publications by Rosalind Krauss, perhaps most pertinent here is an essay entitled ‘The Master’s Bedroom’, in Representations No. 28, 1989: 55-76

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ON POST-CRITICAL ART

WES HILL As facilitators of artists’ practices, as well as art history, curators are often faced with the task of bridging theoretical concerns with more concrete accounts of artworks. In fact, one of the defining features of postmodern art was the rise of curated exhibitions that served to direct artworks to the latest theory explaining where art was at. Although the contemporary era has been more reluctant to agree upon an art zeitgeist, curators are becoming increasingly interested in reflecting upon this impasse, and are beginning to place certain artists within a post-critical art-historical trajectory.

In mid-2011, Robert Leonard, the New Zealand-born curator and director of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, wrote of a “post-critical turn [which] increasingly informs the conditions under which artists work”.1 In an essay in Art & Australia on the Queensland-based artist Michael Zavros, Leonard associated Zavros with contemporary art heavyweights such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takeshi Murakami—all of whom “fudge the once-presumed divide between high-minded art and entertainment”. Attempting to point the reader to an artist and a theory, which encapsulates the elusive and heterogeneous nature of post-1990s art, Leonard wrote that, rather than presenting “a critique of something or

other… these days, some prominent art seems to be on an entirely different track, preferring instead to be appealing, entertaining and affirmative”.

Leonard’s essay reconsidered the relevance of criticality in contemporary art, and presented this timely issue within an Australian art context. As a provocation rather than a clarification, it was also necessarily limited in its scope—boldly applying post-critical concepts in order to reconceptualise Zavros’ work. Rather than responding to it throughout, here I will take it as an indication that the notion of post-critical art has become a significant curatorial concern, instead of just an art-historical one.

Critical, as in post-critical, is a surprisingly difficult term to pin down. It can refer to negative judgement, rigorous judgement or judgement that identifies a crucial point; however, especially in art writings, it is often uncertain towards which of these meanings critical is actually being directed. The term presents further problems when art writers do not make it clear, whether they are attributing critique to the artist, or to the artwork in relation to the writer’s interpretation of it.2 Above: Annika Larsson/Augustin Maurs, Divertimento – 4 movements for voices, whistles and strings, 2011; Restless: Adelaide International 2012 Photo courtesy the artists

Although it is a relatively murky concept, describing an artist or art writer as critical typically refers to someone who has identified an important juncture that separates from, or questions, the basis of common knowledge.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: “Given to judging; esp. given to adverse or unfavourable criticism. Involving or exercising careful judgement or observation; exact, accurate, precise, and punctual.”3 For self-proclaimed critical theorists Richard Paul and Linda Elder, critical thinking is “thinking that explicitly aims at well-founded judgment and hence utilises appropriate evaluative standards in the attempt to determine the true worth, merit, or value of something”.4 It is in this sense that critical can suggest essentialism; centring on the discovery of a vital element, objective foundation or ground rule that lies behind phenomena.

The counter-term “uncritical” therefore encompasses judgements that are careless, fetishistic or have failed to adequately identify a unifying element of knowledge.

In his claim that Zavros’ work is “utterly, rigorously, and deliberately uncritical”, Leonard polarised the terms of his argument and then wrestled with the resulting complexity—in an attempt to avoid the kinds of critique or complicit discussions that are synonymous with the dominant art writings of postmodernism. He stated that Zavros’ works “eschew criticality” but also that “the presence of criticality in Zavros’ works… serves to innoculate his works against critique”.5 Provocatively calling the artist a “pervert” because perverts “know exactly what they want” Leonard then argued that Zavros “accidently engenders a critique of criticality” whilst being “shamelessly complicit”. The complexity of the post-critical issue is evident here by the ease with which “critical” can become an ineffective slogan, suggesting that there are more deep-seated reasons motivating the representation of certain artists as “uncritical”.

The problem with analyses that are directed towards polemical critical categories is that they tend to depict artworks as having singular or essential meanings, as well as depicting self-consciousness as totalising.

Assessments of aesthetic value made in relation to their critical or uncritical properties have largely served to place aesthetics in an absolute framework, concerned with judgements that are convincing and true, or else are unconvincing and false.

The critique or complicit debates surrounding postmodern art were played out in the clash between artists who were thought to display a fetishistic or fan-like approach to art making, and those art writers who exalted artists that appeared to intentionally question norms. Leonard alluded to the relationship between post-criticality and fetishism when he discussed Zavros’ numerous “references to his life—his love of horses and chickens, his children, his possessions and pleasures” as well as his “symbiotic relationship to lifestyle magazines”. However, the subsequent claim that “Zavros’ media visibility is currently so high that we cannot see the work ‘in itself’”, suggests a Kantian notion of criticality, and a postmodern take on post-critical as a stance that reveals the absence of truth—exemplified by Leonard’s description of Zavros’ work as a “hall of mirrors”.

Although one of the central beliefs of postmodern thought was that emancipatory discourses such as Marxism or psychoanalysis were neither objectively true nor inherently superior perspectives on cultural life, there were widespread attempts to maintain an essentialist conception of criticality within a pluralist ideology, particularly in discourses concerning the art market. Artists who dominated theoretical discussions in the 1980s were those who appeared to resist the (fetishistic) grasp of capitalism by means of irony, appropriation or by adopting conceptualist methodologies that summoned comparisons to post-structuralist thought. The pluralism of postmodern art may have been easy to identify stylistically, but it was difficult to resolve with this conception of criticality. Artists and art writers alike reinforced the inherited notion of criticality as a singular mode of selfawareness, and sought to occupy liminal critical stances by confronting the limits of cultural contingency and autonomy.

It was in this environment that appropriation-based artists such as Richard Prince were typecast as fully conscious and detached subjects, thereby denying that the appropriated material itself might be casting a mythical spell on the artist. Instead of deconstructing myth, since the early 1990s Prince has been generally understood as an artist who

identifies myth as important to cultural life. While he and other artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Takeshi Murakami and Damien Hirst have become archetypal figures who fit more within a contemporary postcritical conception of art than a postmodern one, it is important to note that post-critical does not describe an aesthetic, but the way that criticality has taken on anti-essentialist, particularised and performative associations.

Although the post-critical issue is more conspicuous in artists who appear to be fetishists or unapologetic fans, it should not be confused with the adoption of an uncritical stance.6

The word “fan” is derived from “fanatic”, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “characterised, influenced, or prompted by excessive and mistaken enthusiasm”, someone who is an “unreasoning enthusiast”.7 The fan is thought to have a singular obsession with a mistaken object, one that inappropriately, and excessively, stands in for healthier, normal object choices. One of the dominant features of the post-critical concept is that it effectively disassociates fan-like practices from philistinism. Opposing the pejorative tones of such complicit and interested approaches to art, the contemporary artworld—in contrast to postmodern artworld—places significantly less emphasis on the need to prove that certain people are insufficiently aware of their own gaze.

For Kant, fetishes were lacks of judgment, and he described the fetishistic subject as having a debased aesthetic sensibility. This sense of aesthetic incapacity was widely viewed by European intellectuals in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries as the devotion of primitive societies to artefacts. For Marx, the term “fetish”, as in commodity-fetish, was taken from Enlightenment mythology. In his early years he read Charles de Brosses’ On the Worship Of Divine Fetishes (1760), in which the term was first theorised. De Brosses argued that primitive people worship actual objects and animals as gods. Rather than representing or symbolising gods, these objects are gods in the eyes of the believers, just as commodities appear to be alive and endowed with certain qualities in the eyes of the commodity fetishist.8 Marx, when writing notes on The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1871) by the English polymath John Lubbock, claimed that fetishism is destructive of that which it venerates, and functions as a kind of submission to objects. Contrary to the fetishes of the primitives as interpreted by de Brosses, Marx thought that objects of commodity fetishism do represent something else, but the fetishist does not realise this. He therefore defined the fetishist as a creature of myth.

Capitalist-led modernity could spawn a backwards leap into the mythical, which would also mean a return to primitive and unenlightened ways of life.9

If the post-critical quality of contemporary art equates to a kind of crisis of criticality, it is because some commentators retain the view that certain fetishistic works of art forego an (enlightened) awareness of reality, or that they promote devolutionary perspectives. However, Pierre Bourdieu argued in The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996) that the beginning of scientific wisdom was precisely to see that all art is a fetish; an institutionally constructed object of lived belief.

Given this, he considered the scientific approach to understanding art as fetish is to analyse not only the processes producing the works themselves, but also those producing the belief that there is such a thing as art at all.10

Bourdieu claimed that understanding how art functions as fetish might be analogous to how Marcel Mauss in Theory of Magic (1902) pondered the principle of magic’s effectiveness, and found himself moving back from the instruments employed by the sorcerer to the sorcerer himself, and from there to the belief of his clients, and little by little back to the whole social universe, wherein the magic evolved and was practised. In other words, he thought that one should focus not on the magic or formal transcendence of art but the context that enables such perceptions. He stated: “[I]n the infinite regress towards the primary cause and the ultimate foundation of the work of art’s value” one must “replace the ontological question with the historical question”, in which it is the “the artistic field” that enables and fosters such transfigurations.11 He argued that, in not seeing all art as fetishistic, critics sought authentic justification for certain (fetishistic) practices over others, thereby perpetuating the magical character of aesthetic value.

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In a post-critical scenario, criticality is unstable—and blind spots can be identified in every cultural expression in particular ways. This stems from the understanding that any work, statement or posture enframes certain codes over others; providing conceptual focal points that can only be known as focal points by their relation to subsidiary points of reference.

A critical blind spot is therefore a relative notion rather than an absolute one. As Sven Lütticken has stated: ‘[C]riticality’ is only to a limited extent a result of the artist’s subjective intentions. Nor is it a stable attribute of any image or text. Rather, it is something that results from the use of a text or image by an artist or critic, or other viewers. Apparent criticality can at any moment turn out to be a form of complicity, something seemingly different and new that is in fact just cleverly repackaged identity.12 While I realise that it is probably necessary to write in archetypal or iconic tones when articulating these issues, Leonard’s concentration on Zavros in relation to Murakami, Koons, Hirst, Warhol and Dali could unintentionally represent the post-critical concept as a kind of quasi-fetishistic style. It is significant that Leonard’s account of the post-critical turn has no room for Ai Weiwei—an equally iconic artist whose work could just as easily be located in this context. Simply put, the contemporary era is post-critical in the sense that we can no longer rest on an assumption that it is critical rigour which justifies the value of our preferred aesthetics. In accepting that no one has access to exterior cultural perspectives, terms such as “critical” and “outsider artist” lose their exclusive connotations.

Entailing a fundamental pluralism which is fundamentally pluralist, Boris Groys aligned this condition of contemporary art with economic and populist persuasions of power. For Groys, artworks might “create the illusion that they invite the spectator to a potentially infinite plurality of interpretations, that they are open in their meaning”; however, “this appearance of infinite plurality is, of course, only an illusion”.13 Instead, he claimed that the artworld and “international exhibition” represents, in “our allegedly post-ideological age”, an image of “the perfect balance of power”.14

Although Groys referred to criticality primarily in negational and essentialist terms, he did capture the seemingly uncontrollable nature of aesthetic value in contemporary art. The seemingly random trajectory of global contemporary art is not governed by the evil image of an all consuming market; rather, it embodies a more general play of power. Artists, viewers, writers, curators and the artworld in general do not reduce themselves to the “representation of power”, they participate in the struggle for power that they (we) interpret as the way in which the balance of power reveals itself.15

Addressing a similar issue of accountability, in 2010 Ronald Jones proposed that “post-criticality means an engagement for artists and designers with proactive strategies triggering entrepreneurial—not necessarily in the business creation sense—interdisciplinary, innovative and attainable solutions to our collective challenges”.16 Here, post-critical stands for a pragmatic approach to art, following the idea that cultural expressions should be directed towards the improvement of life rather than, in the words of the French sociologist Bruno Latour, producing “more iconoclasm to iconoclasm”.17

Pragmatism also guides post-critical architecture, where the term has existed since the early 1990s. It was initially coined in reference to the architects Michael Hayes and Rem Koolhaas, and set in opposition to so-called “deconstructivist” and critical approaches which sought to subvert capitalist demands through design strategies. Post-critical architecture has since become aligned with the use of diagrams to model the inputs and variables of given projects, following the idea that such diagrams, if detailed enough, will allow designs to emerge involuntarily.

However, as Diana Mihai has argued: Post-critical architecture pretends to be politically neutral/post-political and rejects social critique, but the fact that it is modelled on contemporary business practices and market mechanisms renders it inherently political and partisan.18

Because post-critical sometimes infers the belief that cultural acts can exist beyond an intention or political motivation, the term might end up having only a limited resonance in contemporary art. Hal Foster, who is acutely aware of how these post prefixes in art can distort the issues they purport to clarify, claimed in 2010: “For several years now there has been talk about the post-critical, but I do not buy it. The young artists and critics I know are very concerned with critical projects. They simply approach critical in different ways.”19

In applying these issues to a curatorial context, it is important to resist the promotion of post-critical as an aesthetic category. Instead, the impasse the term describes is arguably the actualisation of many of the liberal political advancements attributed to postmodern thought. Foster is in a certain sense correct; the post-critical turn is not the rise of uncritical approaches to art, but a reconsideration of what it means to be critical.

Notes 1 Robert Leonard, ‘Michael Zavros: Charm Offensive’, Art & Australia Vol. 49 No. 1, 2011:102-107.

The following quotes by Robert Leonard are taken from this essay 2

Etymologically, “critical” can be traced to the Greek verb krínein, and the Indo-European skeri, both of which refer to the act of separating or splitting. Greek terms such as kritos (chosen), kritikos (able to discern/judge), kriterion (standards) and krisis (crisis) also belong to this word family. The German equivalent to critical (kritisch) also belongs to this lineage, and its negational connotations stem from the common usage of criticism (kritik) from the sixteenth-century to refer to censorious judgement 3

The Compact Oxford University Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981:108

4

Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Thinker’s Guide to the Art of Socratic Questioning, Tomales: The Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2006: 69

5 It is no surprise that Prince, Warhol, Koons, Murakami and Hirst have all owned extensive collections of art, and have previously acknowledged that many of their artworks come from stylistic obsessions.

Prince is actually one of the most notorious fans in contemporary art, having acquired an enormous stockpile of books and cultural memorabilia. He has stated: “I don’t see any difference now between what I collect and what I make. It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will, a lot of times, end up in my work.”

6

Richard Prince, ‘Art Features’, New York Magazine, (ed.) Karen Rosenberg, 21 May, 2005: 45

7

The Compact Oxford University Dictionary, op cit: 226

8

Ken Hillis, Ritual Fetish Signs, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009: 83

9

Kevin McLaughlin, Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995: 6

10

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emmanuel, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996: 280-295. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randall Johnson, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993: 35 11

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, op cit: 290-91

12

Sven Lütticken, ‘The Feathers of the Eagle’, New Left Review Vol. 36, 2005: 124-25

13

Boris Groys, Art Power, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008: 3

14

ibid: 49

15

For Jorg Heiser, heterogeneous approaches to art and particularised understandings of criticality have created a phenomenon that he terms super-hybridity. Hybridised approaches to art have, according to Heiser, “moved beyond the point where it’s about a fixed set of cultural genealogies and instead has turned into a kind of computational aggregate of multiple influences and sources”. See Jorg Heiser, ‘What is ‘Super-Hybridity’?’, Frieze 133, 2010: 35 16

Ronald Jones, ‘Analyse This’, Frieze op cit: 57

17

Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30.2, 2004: 225 18 Diana Mihai, ‘Post-Critical Architecture: Going Rouge for Maverick Regimes’, paper presented at ‘Politics of Fear; Fear of Politics Conference’, University of Brighton, 16 September 2010; http:// artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/research/centre/CAPPE-centre-for-applied-philosophy-politics-andethics/ (accessed 18/1/2011) 19 Hal Foster, ‘An Interview with Hal Foster: is the Funeral for the Wrong Corpse?’, Platypus Review 22, eds Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain, 2010: 12

PROGRESSIVES AND PROVINCIALISM ART CRITICISM AND MODERNISM IN ADELAIDE

Margot Osborne What do you know about art in Adelaide from 1940 to 1980? This was the period spanning the creation of a voice for Australian modernism with the formation of the South Australian branch of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in 1942, to the beginnings of postmodernism. Much of what happened in those years is still to be collated, analysed and made accessible in general reference works or exhibitions. Until then, evidence of the period remains in academic studies of particular artists or groups; in archival source material held in public and private collections; in the memories of those who experienced it; and in newspaper reviews.

Until the 1980s, Adelaide’s daily and weekly newspapers were the main forum for art criticism in South Australia and the primary record of local art activity.1 Compared to the present situation, when News Ltd’s newspapers in Adelaide have virtually abandoned local art commentary and criticism, during those years the two major dailies The Advertiser and The News, and the weekly Sunday Mail all employed art reviewers and published weekly or twice-weekly reviews. These included Ivor Francis, The News 1943-55, Sunday Mail 1964-74, The Advertiser 1974-6; Elizabeth Young, The Advertiser 1952-74; Geoffrey Dutton, The News 1958-62; Stephanie Britton, The News 1971-77 and Sunday Mail 1980; Ian North, who temporarily replaced Britton at The News from November 1971 to December 1972 and again in 1974; David Dolan, Sunday Mail 1974-77, The Advertiser 1977-80; Noel Sheridan, Sunday Mail 1977-80; and Peter Ward, The Australian, 1976-2002.

Their reviews give a unique insight into the artists and underlying, pervasive themes impacting on art practice in South Australia: the constant flux in the Adelaide art scene, as Adelaide-trained artists left to seek success elsewhere, to be replaced by post-war European émigrés and artists from other parts of Australia; the impact of major National Gallery of South Australia (now Art Gallery of South Australia) exhibitions, and of the Adelaide Festival of Arts from 1960; the difficulties for progressive art/artists in a provincial, often conservative cultural milieu; the constant tensions between a parochial and national consciousness, between regionally specific factors and the impetus of international and national art movements. In contrast to the relatively high level of regular art reviews in Adelaide newspapers, in the national arena writings about modern art in South Australia were largely invisible. Robert Hughes came for the first two Adelaide Festivals in 1960 and 1962 and wrote an unflattering portrait of the local scene in ‘Adelaide Sketchbook’ for Nation: The Athens of the South, trim in its bluestone, grid streets and white cast iron, is not a good place for painters…

Amateur newspaper criticism, too-slowly developing market, bureaucracy everywhere, an unsinkable Establishment with too much power over taste and next to no contact with contemporary art.2 Geoffrey Dutton, who wrote art criticism for The News from 1958-1962, wrote art reports as well for The Bulletin in the early 1960s. After it was established in 1964, Art and Australia published the very occasional report on the Adelaide art scene, usually based on the exhibitions’ program of each Adelaide Festival. The only living South Australian artist to be given an extended profile in Art and Australia throughout this entire period was Franz Kempf, who was profiled by David Dolan in 1976.3 But to a large extent what happened in Adelaide stayed in Adelaide.

Newspaper art critics have been categorised as falling into three groups —the gatekeepers, who see their role as making judgements on which art of the day is good or bad, and which will have lasting value for posterity; the evangelists, who argue, often passionately, for the latest art or worthy causes; and the cartographers who map out the territory more dispassionately.4 One of the revelations of my research was how often the most passionate evangelical writing about Adelaide art was to be found in the racy tabloids—The News and Sunday Mail—rather than Adelaide’s more sober daily broadsheet, The Advertiser, where art criticism until well into the 1970s reflected the voice of the Adelaide establishment.5 There is only space here to briefly cover the writing of Adelaide’s two longest serving art critics, Ivor Francis and Elizabeth Young, who as evangelist and gatekeeper respectively exemplified the tensions between progressives and conservatives in the Adelaide art scene.

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Pioneering modernist artist Ivor Francis, who was one of the founding members of the CAS (SA), was a fervent evangelist for local artists. In his writing we gain a view of the post-war Adelaide art world where modern artists contended with a legion of forces: the monopoly of gallery space by the conservative Royal South Australian Society of Arts (RSASA); an unsympathetic public which derided their work and preferred traditional pictorial art; a National Gallery of SA which virtually ignored local contemporary artists in its acquisitions; and omission of South Australian artists from publications and major exhibitions which professed a national perspective. According to Francis, this was an unjust rejection of Adelaide artists, the best of whom could stand comparison with artists in the metropolitan centres of Sydney and Melbourne, as shown by their success in national competitions. Artists whose work he advocated over many years and whom he regarded as being neglected by the powers that be included Horace Trenerry and Dorrit Black in the 1940s, surrealist Dusan Marek, abstract expressionist Wladislaw Dutkiewitz and pioneering op/kinetic artist Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski during the 1950s and 1960s.

The failure of the National Gallery of SA to acquire works of modern art, and especially its neglect of South Australian artists, was a recurring theme for Francis. From 1951 to 1953 he mounted a continuing campaign criticising the gallery’s policies. On 10 March 1952 he secured a front page banner headline in The News, ‘What is happening to our National Gallery?’ and proceeded to blast it for acquiring the work of only eight South Australian artists from 1946-51—Max Ragless, T.H. Bone, Stewart Game, Clive Stowart, Louis McCubbin, Robert Pauleine and Geoff Wilson: If you are an artist and want to see one of your paintings hanging in the National Gallery, your chances are practically nil if you are unfortunate enough to be a South Australian… It is a sad story, in which you will find Horace Trenerry, a South Australian and one of the finest artists Australia has ever produced, being better represented in a dozen Adelaide homes than he is in our art gallery; where Dorrit Black, for all the years she worked here in her unique style is represented by one single oil from her middle period.6 Again in May 1953 he lambasted the Gallery: If instead of trying to follow in the footsteps of every little provincial gallery in England, the Board were to concentrate mainly on the purchase of practically nothing but the best contemporary art, especially Australian, ours would become in a few years the most talked about gallery in the world… the in-the-rut attitude of our art institutions seems never to have been in so much need of a good earthquake.7 Francis was also a trenchant critic of the RSASA for its virtual monopoly of exhibition space in Adelaide. He argued that RSASA’s monopolistic control of a government-provided space was not in the interests of artistic freedom, that RSASA was interested in exhibitions which sold well rather than those which might have artistic merit, and that the Act should be changed to make the gallery free to artists: It is my own considered opinion that the Society of Arts’ past control of the gallery primarily as a money making concern is solely responsible for the dearth of creative and contemporary painters in this State, and also for the fact that we are a hundred years behind the times here in our standard of art appreciation. It is intolerable that a conservative institution should receive State aid to control all art tendencies in the State. The answer is an independent, State-controlled gallery for exhibition purposes, detached from the Public Library, and, if possible, housed with the other arts.8 His call for a government subsidised gallery for contemporary art (possibly integrated in a centre for the arts) was visionary for its times.

It was to be repeated by others many times over the years, as have his criticisms of RSASA’s poor artistic standards and its privileged position in a government building.

Another controversial theme was Francis’ criticism of Arunta (Aranda) Aboriginal art of the Albert Namatjira school of painters as being “pseudo Aboriginal cum European”. According to Francis; “There is no doubt at all that had our Arunta natives been encouraged to develop their own art forms with modern art equipment instead of being taught to ape white man’s painting, Australia today might have come to be regarded as the centre of a new, vigorous art activity and a fresh source of inspiration for artists everywhere.”9 This is precisely what Bardon did at Papunya several decades later to launch the contemporary Aboriginal painting movement.

In October, 1964, after a break of nearly ten years, Francis returned to reviewing as art critic for the Sunday Mail.10 While in the 1940s and 1950s he was closely aligned with the generation of Adelaide modernists, now those artists and Francis represented the old guard. Although he was often supportive of the new generation, he was not always in tune with the spirit of the times, and this became especially apparent in his response to post-object art of the 1970s. His longevity as an art critic (he finally retired from The Advertiser in 1976) can be attributed in part to his lively, opinionated and unpretentious style, and in part, to his ability to argue an issue succinctly and usually with close reference to the artwork in question. As in his previous reviewing for The News, Francis had his favourites amongst the artists of his generation. Over the next decade he regularly reviewed optical/kinetic artist Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski and surrealist Dusan Marek, acclaiming them as overlooked but great artists.

While Ostoja-Kotkowski would achieve recognition in the 1960s, when his work aligned (almost coincidentally) with the international op art movement, Marek would not receive recognition until the early 1970s, after working more than twenty-five years in near obscurity.

In his review of the 24th annual members’ exhibition of the CAS at its new Parkside gallery in 1965, Francis singled out Ostoja-Kotkowski as exemplifying the new international trend of op art.11 He was to be one of the few Adelaide artists to gain a national profile during the late 1960s. Francis followed Ostoja-Kotkowski’s career, reviewing his kinetic Sound and Light projections at the Adelaide Festivals from 1964-70.12 When the artist completed a major eighteen panel mural commission at Melbourne University, Francis covered it in The Advertiser. He gave a glowing review of his 1976 exhibition at Lidums Gallery, writing that by embracing new media he was achieving “luminosity and brilliance of colour undreamed of” by painters. Ostoja-Kotkowski’s Laser-Chromason Mk2 created coloured images in harmony with sound and responded to viewer movements within the room. Francis noted that despite OstojaKotkowski’s brilliance and innovation “not a single permanent example of his major work is to be found here, not even at the Festival Centre.

All his recognition has come from other States and Canberra”.13 Unfortunately when the artist died in 1994, he was still largely unrecognised in his home State and has never received a retrospective exhibition or publication.

In contrast to Francis’s advocacy of local art, Elizabeth Young, during her very long reign as art critic for The Advertiser 1952-74, clearly saw her role as being a gatekeeper for the conservative art values which then dominated the National Gallery of SA, where her husband Robert Campbell was director from 1951 to 1967. Both she and Campbell rejected abstraction as a passing fad and the work of “charlatans”. Young struggled with modernism, and especially the more expressionist and Tachiste extremes, while in her later years she found Pop was totally beyond the pale. She wrote (or appeared to write) from a position of comfortable certainty that her values were in accord with others of taste, education and discernment. In one of her early reviews she wrote of understanding the public “shock” at the purchase by the National Gallery of SA of works by three young contemporary British sculptors—Eduado Paolozzi, F.E. McWilliam and Lynn Chadwick. Of Paolozzi’s sculpture she wrote: Personally I must be bold enough to admit it gives no aesthetic pleasure at all, which is what I expect of a work of art. It is even less amusing than much doodling which many people think only fit to grace a waste paper basket, not to perpetuate in clay in an art gallery.

The only person whom I feel it might mean very much to is a psychiatrist.14

Perhaps Young’s most notorious case of poor judgement, due in part to her more general resistance to abstraction, was the damning review she gave to the August, 1961 exhibition by Fred Williams at Bonython Gallery.

With the exception of three or four paintings, the colour is deadly pedestrian, perspective largely, and no doubt deliberately ignored. Composition, it seems, is rarely considered, nor even spontaneous in its childlike pattern. Nor are we treated to intriguing textures or experimental devices which in much contemporary painting compensates to some extent. In watercolour, this painter’s technique is a pallidly incoherent sequence of blobs, nebulous and insignificant… as a whole this exhibition is as insipid and inspiring as a row of suburban Georgian house-fronts.15 Disdain for abstraction and preference for figurative painting would remain Young’s fixed position. It gave her a major blind spot in writing informed criticism of Australian modern art of the 1950s and 1960s.

It is unfortunate that she used her influential position as an art critic for Adelaide’s major newspaper for over two decades to reinforce public antipathy to modernism and to espouse artistic conventions identified closely with the conservative boards of the National Gallery of SA and the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board.

Notes 1 South Australian subscription newsletters which provided avenues for contemporary art criticism were the national and local versions of the CAS Broadsheet (roneoed or offset printed sheets prior to 1986), Mary’s Own Paper (1950-61), published by Max Harris and Mary Martin, and Ivor’s Art Review (1956-60), published by Ivor Francis 2

Robert Hughes, ‘Adelaide Sketchbook’, Nation, 7 April 1962

3

David Dolan, ‘Franz Kempf’, Art and Australia, Vol.14, No.1, 1976: 79-86

4 Peter Plagens, ‘At a crossroads’, in R. Rubinstein (ed.), Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice, Massachussetts: Hard Press Editions, 2006: 115, first published in Artforum, February, 2005 5

Lloyd Dumas, Managing Director and then Chairman of The Advertiser 1929-67, was also an influential Board member of the National Gallery of South Australia (now Art Gallery of South Australia) from 1945 and its Chairman 1955-63. The Advertiser did not become part of News Ltd until 1987

6

Ivor Francis, ‘What is happening to our National Gallery’, The News, 10 March 1952

7

Ivor Francis, ‘Art is ignored’, The News, 30 May 1953

8

Ivor Francis, ‘Artists and “free” gallery’, The News, 3 July 1948

9

Ivor Francis, ‘Our native art’, The News, 16 June 1950, and other reviews on this theme ‘Aboriginal artists’, 8 September 1945; ‘Arunta artists pictures haunting’, 12 March 1946; ‘Natives’ art stereotyped’, 5 December 1950; ‘Critic’s view on native art’, 9 December 1950; ‘Aranda art is boring’, 1 December 1953; and ‘Art show has some exciting work’, 3 August 1955

10

Francis had edited and written for Ivor’s Art Review, but this was a small subscription newsletter aimed at the faithful

11

Ivor Francis, ‘Current styles – Contemporary Art Society’s 24th exhibition at Parkside’, Sunday Mail, 11 December 1965: 89

12

Ivor Francis, ‘This stimulates the imagination’, Sunday Mail, 19 March 1966 review of Sound and Light at 1966 Adelaide Festival

13

Ivor Francis, ‘Playing a mural by hand’, The Advertiser, 20 December 1975 and ‘Ostoja a unique artist’, The Advertiser, 13 March 1976 14

Elizabeth Young, ‘Shocks in new sculpture’, The Advertiser, 25 March 1953

15

Elizabeth Young, ‘Uninteresting exhibition’, The Advertiser, 15 August 1961, reproduced in Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982, Melbourne: Murdoch Books, 1980, revised edition 1996: 123

Page 65: Article by Ivor Francis, The News, 15 June 1955 Above: Stan Ostoja Kotkowski street decorations 1966 Adelaide Festival of Arts Photo by Robert Walker, courtesy Estate of Robert Walker

2.12 mber:

A NETS Victoria touring exhibition curated by Emily Jones An exploration of contemporary collage, featuring works by leading Australian and international artists including Christian Capurro, Simon Evans, Elizabeth Gower, Mandy Gunn, Deborah Kelly, Nick Mangan, Stuart Ringholt, Joan Ross & Heather Shimmen.

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Counihan Gallery, Brunswick 5 April - 13 May For more information visit netsvictoria.org.au Nick Mangan, Flohetrauling (detail), 2008, collage, 5 panels: 30x24cm, 30x21cm, 24x30cm, 35x25cm, 30x40cm. Image courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.

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The exhibition has been supported by Minifie Van Schaik Architects and Fabio Ongarato Design

The Art Gallery of South Australia – Adelaide Biennial is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. The Art Gallery acknowledges exhibition partner The Balnaves Foundation.

2 March — 29 April 2012 / Art Gallery of South Australia / artgallery.sa.gov.au

12th ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART

detail top: Rosemary Laing, groundspeed (Rose Petal) # 17, 2001, Courtesy of the Artist & Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. detail bottom: John Glover, A View of the artist’s house and garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land, 1835, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.