Contemporary Visual Art + Culture BROADSHEET 43.3

{ 43_3 } CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

broadsheet CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+CULTURE

Dirty Money Hollow Men Egyptology Anew: Damien Hirst Reverse Racism in Australia New Textuality+The Academy Interview with Lisa Havilah Madison Bycroft Angelica Mesiti

China+the Global Cultural-Industrial Complex Chinese Business: Us and Institution Interview with Uli Sigg Mobile M+: Neonsigns.hk MAAP: LANDSEASKY No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia

[

] 39 Rundle Street, Kent Town, SA 5067, Australia

www.greenaway.com.au

Oct 15窶年ov 16 2014

ARIEL HASSAN

CAPITULATION OF DISCOURSE

www.gagprojects.com

2014 BolognaFiere Shanghai International Contemporary Art Exhibition

Contributors Brad Buckley: Sydney-based artist, activist, urbanist and Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; editor, with John Conomos, of Republics of Ideas: Republicanism, Culture, Visual Arts (2001), Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy (2009) and with Andy Dong and Conomos, of Ecologies of Invention (2013); his most recent large scale installation The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries (L’Origine du monde) and I wonder whether that’s Joanna Hiffernan with a Brazilian (revisited) was shown at the Australia Centre for Photography, Sydney 2013 Biljana Ciric: Shanghaibased independent curator; recent exhibitions include Institution for the Future (2011), Taking the Stage OVER (2011-12), Alternatives to Ritual (2012-13), and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back–Us and Institution, Us and Institution (2013); in 2013 she initiated ‘From History of Exhibitions towards Future of Exhibitions Making’, an ongoing seminar platform that proposes to revisit importance of exhibition making and the history of exhibitions in China, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand; a regular contributor to Yi Shu journal, and has been nominated for an ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award Rebecca Coates: Melbourne-based curator and writer; has a PhD in Art History from the University of Melbourne; teaches contemporary art history and art curatorship in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne John Conomos: Associate Professor, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; artist , critic and writer; his latest exhibitions include The Spiral of Time, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Insomnia, ICAN, Sydney and Dada Buster, Plato’s Cave, New York (2012/13); has been invited by leading French media artist Robert Cahen to collaborate with him and Kingsley Ng for Etudes for the 21C, Osage Gallery/Art Foundation, Hong Kong; his latest books include the monograph with Brad Buckley, and Andy Dong, Ecologies of Invention (USP) and has edited (with Brad Buckley) the forthcoming Erasure–The Spectre of Cultural Memory (Libis, UK); recently contributed to Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas’ collection Relive : Media Art Histories (MIT Press, 2013)and Matthew Perkin’s forthcoming Video Void (Australian Scholarly Publications, 2014 ). He is currently working on three new books, on surreal documentary cinema (with Brad Buckley), international curating, and new videos (editor: Joshua Raymond) and a personal essay documentary on his mother The Girl from the Sea (filmed by Virginia Hilyard) Janelle Evans: Sydney-based MFA degree candidate, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; in 2013 awarded the Dr Charles Perkins, A.O. Memorial Prize, University of Sydney and The H.S. Carslaw Memorial Scholarship, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge; her art practice encompasses printmaking, video, and performance Ray Forrester: Adelaide-based independent curator and writer; graduated from the South Australian School of Art majoring in Art History & Theory and also completed a Graduate Diploma in Arts & Cultural Management and Graduate Diploma in Art History at University SA and Adelaide University; co-founder of FELTspace and has curated and contributed towards exhibitions in Adelaide, Belgium and Japan; recently co-curated the 2014 Artists’ Week symposium Adam Geczy: Sydney-based artist and writer, and lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts; most recent exhibition (in collaboration with Blak Douglas aka Adam Hill) BOMB, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art (AAMU), Utecht, Holland; editor of the Australiasian Journal of Popular Culture, his latest book (with Vicki Karaminas) is Queer Style (Bloomsbury) Tony Godfrey: Singapore and Manila-based curator and freelance writer; curator at Equator Art Projects, Singapore. Past books include Conceptual Art and Painting Today (Phaidon); currently working on books on Indonesian Painting and the relationship between poetry and art

contemporary visual art + culture b r o a d s h e e t Editor Assistant Editor Advertising Manager Publisher Design

Alan Cruickshank Wendy Walker Sarita Chadwick Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc. Alan Cruickshank, Nasim Nasr

ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2014, 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 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 SHEYMA BUALI UK Writer, London NAT MULLER Netherlands Curator and critic, Rotterdam ASTRID MANIA Germany Editor, writer and curator, Berlin CHRISTOPHER MOORE Germany Writer, Berlin; Editor-in-Chief, Randian online, Berlin VASIF KORTUN Turkey Director Programs & Research, SALT, Istanbul Basak Senova Turkey Curator, writer and designer, Istanbul RANJIT HOSKOTE India Curator, writer, art historian and poet, Mumbai

Paul Gladston: Associate Professor of Culture, Film and Media and Director of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham; between 2005 and 2010 served as inaugural Head of the Department of International Communications and Director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. He is Principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art; has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art with specific reference to the concerns of critical theory. His book-length publications include Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005), China and Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009), Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists (Blue KingfisherTimezone 8, 2011), Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality, a special edition of the Journal of Visual Art Practice coedited with Katie Hill (Intellect, 2012), ‘Avant-Garde’ Art Groups in China, 1979-89 (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Contemporary Chinese Art: a critical history (Reaktion, forthcoming 2014)

PHIL TINARI China Director Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Daniel Szehin Ho: Editor in chief of randian, a bilingual online magazine on contemporary art in China and beyond. Translates for museums and publications in China; writes on contemporary art and culture

RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia/Finland Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Faculty Member, Post-Graduate Studies, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki

John Mateer: Perth-based writer and curator. He was on the steering committee of the Melbourne-based international venture The South Project, and the Australia Council’s inaugural art writer-in-residence at ACME, London. In 2013 he presented a seminar series on the metaphorics of the museum at the Maumaus School for Contemporary Art, Lisbon and convened the symposium The Ambiguity of our Geography at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, in association with the exhibition he curated, In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art. Currently he is working on a project with the Malay communities of Katanning and the Cocos Islands as part of the Spaced2: Future Recall Biennale

LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic

Christopher Moore: Berlin-based publisher of Randian. From 2008 to 2010 he was the Shanghai correspondent for Saatchi Online and has contributed to various journals and catalogues. He is writing monographs on Xu Zhen, MadeIn and Shi Jing, and in 2012 he co-curated an exhibition of Xu Zhen’s pre-MadeIn work, Forbidden Castle, Muzeum Montanelli, Prague Robin Peckham: Hong Kong and Beijing-based curator and editor; founded and operated the independent exhibition space Saamlung until 2013, and has organised exhibitions for institutions including the City University of Hong Kong, the Goethe-Institut, and most recently Art Post-Internet, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; has lectured at the University of Hong Kong, Christie’s Art Forum, Asia Art Archive, and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. His writing is published regularly in Artforum, Yishu and Pipeline, as well as books for the Minsheng Art Museum, Para/Site Art Space and Timezone8, including publications on video art pioneer Zhang Peili and architectural interventionists MAP Office. He holds editorial roles with LEAP, The Art Newspaper China (Hong Kong Edition), Randian, and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Uli Sigg: Swiss media executive and former ambassador to China, widely considered the most influential collector of contemporary Chinese art in the world. In 1998, he created the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards to honor achievement and talent within the Chinese art scene. In 2012 he donated his large collection of contemporary Chinese art to the M+ Museum in Hong Kong Wendy Walker: Adelaide-based author, art critic, occasional curator and the chair of the Adelaide Visual Arts Critics Circle. Since 2005 she has been the assistant editor of Broadsheet

volume 43.3 SEPTEMBER 2014

COLIN CHINNERY China Artist, writer and curator, Beijing; Artistic Director, Wuhan Art Terminus (WH.A.T.) BILJANA CIRIC China Independent curator, Shanghai JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Curator, art critic and writer PATRICK FLORES Philippines Professor, Dept Art Studies University of Philippines, Manila

TONY GODFREY Singapore/Manila Art historian, writer, curator SIMON REES New Zealand Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 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 BLAIR FRENCH Sydney Assistant Director, Curatorial and Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia ADAM GECZY Sydney Artist and writer, Senior Lecturer University of Sydney ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Sydney Executive Director, Artspace Visual Arts Centre CHARLES GREEN Melbourne Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne IAN NORTH Adelaide Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor of Art History, University of Adelaide

{ 43_3 } COVER: Madison Bycroft, Entitled/Untitled, (video still) 2014, from Synonyms for Savages, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide,18 July–16 August, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

6 dirty money hollow men

Art patronage, ethics and principles Brad Buckley | John Conomos

18 egyptology anew: damien hirst, ancient egypt and the big money How meaning and historical allusion disappear in the process of capitalisation John Mateer

26 in awe of the new: china’s entry into the global culturalindustrial complex China’s museums, biennales and arts infrastructure development Paul Gladston

32 fifteen years of the ccaa: interview with uli sigg

The history and philosophy behind the Chinese Contemporary Art Award Christopher Moore | Uli Sigg

36 chinese business

Active withdrawal and re-imagining existing art system relationships Biljana Ciric

41 neon hong kong

Exploring, mapping and documenting Hong Kong’s neon signs Robin Peckham

45 no country

The Guggenheim’s UBS Map Global Art Initiative, Volume 1: South and Southeast Asia Tony Godfrey

51 revisiting spatiality in video art

MAAP’s LANDSEASKY at OCAT Shanghai Daniel Szehin Ho

54 the shaman and the squid

Madison Bycroft becoming animal Ray Forrester

57 the music of language

Angelica Mesiti’s The Calling Rebecca Coates

60 reverse racism in australian indigenous popular culture Recent usage of Blackface and the black white binary Janelle Evans

64 a canvas to our imaginations

Carriageworks’ dynamic expanding multi-disciplinary program Wendy Walker | Lisa Havilah

68 the new textuality for the visual arts: entrenchment in the academy Broadsheet can be read cover to cover and texts are available to download. cacsa.org.au/?page_id=2901 For additional commentary see Platform. cacsaplatform.org.au/

Rationalisation by stealth Adam Geczy

21 AUGUST - 12 OCTOBER 2014

On Return and What Remains Khadim Ali Bonita Ely Harun Farocki Omer Fast Richard Mosse Baden Pailthorpe 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 Gallery 11am–5pm, Tues–Fri and 12pm-4pm, Sat-Sun

Image: Omer Fast, Continuity, 2012, still from digital film, courtesy of the artist; Arratia Beer, Berlin; and gb agency, Paris

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 arts funding and advisory body. Artspace is a member of CAOs (Contemporary Art Organisations Australia).

revisiting spatiality in video ar t

National Art School Gallery Forbes Street, Darlinghurst nas.edu.au

21 August—11 October 2014 Griffith University Art Gallery Queensland College of Art, South Bank griffith.edu.au/art-gallery

1 October—18 October 2014 24 October —15 November 2014 Please check venues for full schedule of artists and public programs.

Paul Bai (Australia) Lauren Brincat (Australia) Barbara Campbell (Australia) Sim Cheol-Woong (Korea) Jan Dibbets (The Netherlands) Shilpa Gupta (India) Yeondoo Jung (Korea) Derek Kreckler (Australia) Giovanni Ozzola (Italy) João Vasco Paiva (Portugal/Hong Kong) Kimsooja (South Korea) Craig Walsh (Australia) Wang Gongxin (China) Wang Peng (China) Zhu Jia (China) Heimo Zobernig (Austria) Curated by Kim Machan

LANDSEASKY is a MAAP (Media Art Asia Pacific) Touring Exhibition presented in partnership with Griffith University Art Gallery.

Supported by The Confucius Institute at Queensland University of Technology.

Media Art Asia Pacific

MAAP (Media Art Asia Pacific) programs are supported by the Australian Government through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, Queensland.

dirty money hollow men

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BRAD BUCKLEY JOHN CONOMOS We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men (1925) Much has been written over the past several months (including in the pages of Broadsheet) about the funding of arts organisations and the relationship between them and their patrons, sponsors and artists. Although most of the recent debate centred on the Biennale of Sydney and the participating museum and gallery partners, there was also some criticism and examination of performing arts organisations.

Perhaps this could be attributed to the fact that these worlds are populated by rather different people. This characteristic mélange of agendas, contexts, policies and actors in our cultural landscape is at least in part shaped by global capital markets, and results in some confusion, dislocation and exploitation. Artists, curators, academics, cultural bureaucrats and politicians see and have different expectations of what patronage is in twenty-first century art and of its elaborate, shifting connections to State funding and corporate sponsorship.

Tension between artist and patron is hardly new, but there is now a realisation by some members of the Sydney art world—and artists beyond our ‘fatal shores’—that corporate patronage is more often than not tinged with a whiff of ethical and moral dilemma.

PATRONAGE As Dutch curator and theorist Henk Slager reminds us, “the paradigm of the public exhibition was formulated at the time of the French Revolution in the eighteenth century”, and since that time the relationship between artists, curators and museums has undergone various permutations, and has been influenced by a spectrum of factors, from commerce to morality and politics.1

Contemporary art is now caught between being entertainment for the general public and serving various other masters, including museum trustees and directors, curators, the new breed of collector/benefactor /patron, corporate sponsors and State and Federal governments and their agencies, such as the Australia Council for the Arts. All these individuals or groups are patrons in various guises, offering support to the artist, but at a price. The relationship between artist and patron can take on a Faustian dimension where the artist, if not vigilant, is reduced to little more than a stooge, clown, dandy or flâneur, a performing seal, if you will, for the amusement of the patron. As American scholar Marjorie Garber has observed: Artists, who often have little money, could occasionally live as if they were rich, or at least live among the rich, receive invitations to their parties, and be received at the city and county homes. And patrons, who have often, though by no means always, possessed considerable artistic vision and taste, could experience pleasure in a creative society of people and be made to feel that their place in the world might transcend the means by which they came to financial and social prominence. By mobilising the fantasies that artists have about patrons, and vice versa, productive instances of patronage can be forged and precipitated.2 So the relationship between artist and patron can in some cases lead to projects or exhibitions that without such support could never be realised. The question that artists must grapple with is where is the moral and ethical line which cannot be crossed? Does such a line exist at all?

SPEAKING OUT With the recent election of Australia’s very own Tea Party,3 we have seen a lurch to the right on everything from social justice, climate change and refugees to, most notably, the systematic destruction of the country’s research infrastructure through the cutting of funding to the CSIRO and universities. Suddenly a generation of students has awoken from the long sleep to find not Prince Charming, but a level of student debt that will cripple any possibility of an education that does not have a readily defined employment opportunity waiting at the end of the proverbial rainbow.

One could speculate that it is the election of the current government that has made people conscious of what is at stake if we do not speak out about injustice and moral issues. There have been, over the years, instances where artists and like-minded people have banded together to protest, for example, the blatant manipulation of appointments to various institutions. The appointment of John McDonald as Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in 1999 stands out: this was opposed by four hundred and fifty artists, curators and writers who petitioned the Council of the NGA seeking his removal.4 What is perhaps more instructive is the list of artists who did not sign the petition, citing fears of retribution by the NGA. Some years later it was rather astonishing to see a number of these artists describing themselves and their work as political. For them, speaking out was fine as long as they had nothing to lose, personally, professionally or financially.

What is predictably disappointing with such artists is their incapacity to see how consumerism, domination and exploitation have stamped them, as cultural producers and citizens of our common world. Lacking the courage to question their lives and accomplishments in the ‘24/7’ global hyperbolic carousel of the international art world, they typically also fail to articulate their own horizons. In short, they resemble American writer and critic William H. Gass’ telling and sad description of the artist as a “swaying tamed bear in a cage”.5

Cao Fei, Haze and Fog (video still), 2013 HDV, 46min 30sec Produced by Eastside Projects, Birmingham, and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou Commissioned by University of Salford and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Eastside Projects, and Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University, with Vitamin Creative Space

in conjunction with the Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

CAO FEI’S THEATRICAL MIRROR: LIVING IN BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE UNREAL Videoworks 2004–13

cao fei (china) 12 SEPTEMBER_19 OCTOBER, 2014

Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia cacsa is assisted by the commonwealth government through the australia council, it arts funding and advisory body, and the south australian government through arts sa cacsa is supported by the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments

14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063 +618 82 72 26 82 cacsa.org.au

DIRTY MONEY HOLLO W MEN

It is not only a question of a systemic ignorance of aesthetics and politics and how the two may dialectically figure in one’s life as an artist, it is also a question of taking risks in your own lived world as someone who is seeking to shape the chaos and flux of everyday life. All of us are obligated to engage in a selfreflexive questioning of our own lives within the broader ecology of the art world. We all need to grasp the fact that the logic of domination that characterises ‘the society of the spectacle’ has, in many and complicated ways infiltrated the very logic of its critique.

Just as it is heartening to see students demonstrating about their future, it has been surprising and inspiring to see artists speaking out about the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru. There were certain triggers that prompted this move, from studio politics to realpolitik: the most obvious and tragic was the death of Reza Barati on Manus Island. One of the many issues identified in a review by Robert Cornall of the events of the 16–18 February 2014, “was the loss of control during the incident” at a time when responsibility for security was in transition from G4S to Transfield Services, which had won part of a billion dollar contract from the Australian Government.6

As artists Zanny Begg and Ahmet Öğüt rightly point out in ‘A question of ethics —the Biennale of Sydney and artists’ protest’ in the last issue of Broadsheet,7 it was Sydney academic Matthew Kiem who first drew attention to the link between Transfield Services, the Manus Island contract and its sponsorship of the Biennale of Sydney.8 This led to a series of meetings in Sydney and Melbourne and to the withdrawal of nine high-profile artists.

The ensuing publicity looked set to swamp the Biennale of Sydney, and after a standoff with the Board and the deafening silence of the Artistic Director, Juliana Engberg, the longstanding Biennale Board chair resigned. At this point, seven of the artists decided to opt back into the Biennale, even though Transfield’s money and logos remained. So what was achieved by this protest besides the scalp of Board Chair Belgiorno-Nettis (who has no direct relationship with Transfield Services) and the alienation of one of the few people with deep pockets, who has a genuine engagement with contemporary art in Australia? It did, for a few moments, shine a brilliant spotlight on what is a travesty of human rights—Australia’s participation in

the establishment and maintenance of what are concentration camps in everything but name —and maybe that was enough. However, German-born, Australian philosopher Raymond Gaita, in a recent timely and perceptive essay on Simone Weil, the French philosopher and her posthumously published tract The Need for Roots (1949 [1952]) and the government’s policy on asylum seekers, presents the telling point that we as artists and citizens need to re-examine the limits of such concepts as dignity and human rights, in order to hear the silent cry of asylum seekers and the dispossessed.9 To do this, Gaita deploys Weil’s sharply nuanced concept of being rooted in one’s national culture as a basic form of existential and spiritual nourishment, and of country as “a vital medium”.10

To illustrate this, one need not go further than John Hughes’ moving and resonant television documentary Love and Fury (2013) shown recently on the ABC, about H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, the seminal postwar cultural policy mandarin, and the poet-activist Judith Wright, and their clandestine love for each other over twenty-five years. This was perhaps one of the best-kept secrets in Australian literary and political public life.11 Both Coombs and Wright, through their mutual love for Australia and its first peoples, which animates every archival frame of this film, exemplify a most profound and poetic understanding of what it means to accept and value this country and its first inhabitants (in a non-jingoistic way) and to welcome asylum seekers into our body politic. Depressingly, one of the few areas where there is bipartisan political support at the federal level today is asylum seeker policy, which reeks of draconian cruelty and the ever-lingering remnants of our past White Australia Policy. If these asylum seeker “boat people” were white South Africans or third-rate English academics rather than people fleeing countries that are at war, what would be the response of our politicians?

The question remains to be asked: what is it that artists in general—and more specifically, those protesting at the Biennale of Sydney (who, at the best, could be said to have achieved a Pyrrhic victory)—should know that others in the same culture do not?

This question is always at the foreground for artists who primarily seek to speak of their contemporary condition in critical and probing terms, because they see art as self-critique and as a voice for utopian thinking. This suggests

a basic willingness to create, to find new ways of speaking about the present in continuing dialogue with the past, and a constant refusal to accept current explanations of our contemporary condition.

An artist worthy of such a description is someone who has knowledge that propels them towards an anti-presentist view of their own self-interest and horizons. Art as an expression of ‘untimeliness’—it is about neither now, nor the past or the future. An artist is someone whose creative output is significantly shaped by their own singular relationship to their own time.12 Artists, in their strategies and methodologies of art making, are engaged in a continuing conversation about the larger questions of aesthetics, culture, economics, ideology, power, space, spectatorship, technology and time. For French philosopher Jacques Rancière, artists need to be aware of the complex dialectic between art and politics, in trying to understand “the state of things” in one’s society, that one should be equally critical of the global modernist grand narratives of post-Enlightenment thinking (linear historical time, optimism and progress) and of the pessimist and reactionary dystopian scenario of humanity negating itself through its allconsuming frenzy for consumption.13

The banalities of the Biennale of Sydney typified the commodification of the spectacle that has indelibly marked art, daily life, culture, politics and time, what UK-based cultural theorist Mark Fisher has recently coined “capital realism”. He is suggesting, through this term, that it is more convenient to visualise the end of the world than the end of late-capitalist culture, and that the artists who protested manifested a simplistic, self-serving understanding of the many intricacies and nuances of the relationship between art and politics.14

Rancière’s concept proposes a crisscrossing, multiple-temporal model of artistic creativity and cultural diagnosis in which artists explore “the potentialities of forms of art that work at the crossroads of temporalities and of worlds of experience”.15 He supports questioning, disrupting and distending the domination of the global market. Following Foucault’s model of “heterotopias”, Rancière has articulated a possible new way of approaching the politics of art, a “heterochrony” where artists can create new ways of seeing the present by intertwining different times within little machines (dispositifs).16

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Page 6 Yue Minjun from the Hats series, 2005 Photo courtesy the artist Right Hong Kong auction house 2013

THE SPOILS OF WAR When the English nobleman, Lord Elgin, in 1801 decided to ‘save’ what are now known as the Elgin Marbles, but are in fact part of the Parthenon Frieze, and when the English took possession of the Rosetta Stone from the French, who had stolen it from the Egyptians—both pieces are now housed in the British Museum —they demonstrated a sense of cultural superiority, a worldview that placed the British Empire of the time at the centre of civilisation.

Or perhaps they saw themselves as the keepers of the flame against the uncivilised pagan hordes which would eventually wreak carnage on these cultural artefacts. These attitudes continue unabated to this day: the governments of Greece and Egypt have called for the repatriation of these artefacts on numerous occasions, but the British Museum, along with the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Louvre Museum in Paris and numerous other museums in the West, have all resisted such calls.

With such powerful global institutions positioning themselves as the saviours of civilisation’s visual and material culture, it is not surprising that the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales have also become embroiled in scandals about the origin and provenance of artefacts, particularly from South Asia.

The illegal trade in artworks and artefacts continues to operate on a global scale, plundering other civilisations’ culture; essentially, the West takes from the East.

The scope and scale of this trafficking is exposed in Crimes in the Art and Antiquities World: Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property by Stefano Manacorda and Duncan Chappell, in which they explore these issues from a legal viewpoint and make this salient point; “For those source countries whose rich cultural heritage has been subjected to systematic plunder, often over many generations, an awareness of the losses involved and a desire to achieve the restitution of looted items has already tended to become deeply embedded in their respective national psyches.”17

Are our institutions driven by the same attitudes as Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? One might ask why two of Australia’s leading cultural institutions have been involved, over an extended period, with the shady New York art dealer Subhash Kapoor and his gallery, The Art of the Past? Why did the NGA ignore legal advice when buying Shiva?18 The key to understanding this compulsive and aggressive collecting of other cultures’ artefacts, where any sense of ethical, moral or in fact legal values are overridden, could be as Douglas Crimp has explained: It wrests its objects from their original historical contexts not as an act of political commemoration but in order to create the illusion of universal knowledge.

By displaying the products of particular histories in a reified historical continuum, the museum fetishises them.19 THE CHINESE LAUNDRY In the last three decades, alongside the hypercapitalist consumerist and theatrical tropes of the international art world, there has been a massive geopolitical shift of capital, labour and technology from the West to the East: in particular, to China, whose insatiable industrial economy and its constant need for minerals

from Australia has decisively affected (amongst other significant international and local factors, actors and agencies) our economy, our foreign and domestic politics, and our national aspirations and horizons.

Former prime ministerial economics adviser Andrew Charlton, in his Quarterly Essay ‘Dragon’s Trail’, persuasively makes the case for Australia having been, since 2010, a crucial part of China’s supercharged rise as global superpower.20 So much so that Australia and China are now two indispensable entities bound together into a whole: “We are yin and yang.”21 Charlton’s cautionary conclusion indicates the many paradoxes of prosperity, and claims that we have not thought enough about its economic, technological and political implications: …understanding China’s growth model helps explain why Australia has done so well in the twenty-first century. But it also explains why, at the same time, our economic anxiety is reaching a zenith: why Holden is leaving, why the budget is in such an apparent quagmire, why house prices are soaring, why the dollar is so volatile.

China’s growth has brought us a windfall, but it is a precarious sort of prosperity.22

CASULA POWERHOUSE ARTS CENTRE PRESENTS

11 OCTOBER 23 NOVEMBER Festival day 25 OCTOBER Featuring work by Eric Bridgeman, YAL TON and Shane Cotton ALSO SHOWING RICHARD BELL: IMAGINING VICTORY

An Artspace exhibiton, toured by Museums & Galleries of NSW

CASULA POWERHOUSE 1 Powerhouse Road, Casula NSW 2170 (Enter via Shepherd Street Liverpool) e. reception@casulapowerhouse.com t. +61 02 9824 1121

Image credit: Haus Man (still), 3 channel video installation with audio, YAL TON 2012.

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH MELBOURNE FESTIVAL

art as a verb

MUMA

3 october - 16 december 2014

Marina Abramovic Vito Acconci Bas Jan Ader francis alys Billy Apple John Baldessari Brown Council Clark Beaumont Martin Creed DAMP George Egerton-Warburton Ceal Floyer

Andrea Fraser Ryan Gander Agatha Gothe-Snape Matthew Griffin Bianca Hester Tim Johnson Peter Kennedy Allan Kaprow Anastasia Klose jiri kovanda George Kuchar Ian Milliss

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

Bruce Nauman Yoko Ono Campbell Patterson Kenny Pittock Robert Rooney Martha Rosler Eva Rothschild katerina sedA Christian Thompson Rirkrit Tiravanija Gabrielle de Vietri and many more…

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

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DIRTY MONEY HOLLO W MEN

Left Performance staged in Tate Britain 20 April 2011 by Liberate Tate Photo courtesty Liberate Tate; http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/liberating-tate/about/

Nonetheless, given the many myths that are part of our current understanding of China, as one of the two most dominant global superpowers vying for market and geopolitical supremacy, the evidence needs to be carefully weighed concerning its rapid success as a nation of post-postmodern artists, curators, galleries and museums located in modern metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Let us, for the moment, put aside the view that contemporary Chinese art constitutes a kind of xerox art whose concerns, tropes and direction speak of, at the best, Anglo-American and European modernism and postmodernism.

And let us assume as certain commentators on present-day Chinese art have, that the country has now unequivocally entered a critical stage of historical development, and has found its own aesthetic, cultural and technical identity and autonomy through its past essentially simulacral grounding in Western art traditions and paradigms.

Recent commentators such as Alexandre Errera, Fausto Martin De Sanctis and Sophie Song have described various techniques of money-laundering through art used by contemporary wealthy Chinese.23 Song suggests they are transferring cash by buying expensive art (bypassing Beijing’s strict capital restrictions), and so moving their money by moving their art. Beijing’s capital

restriction laws stipulate that any individual can only transfer $US50,000 a year out of China.

To paraphrase Song, before the explosion of contemporary Chinese art, the most common way to ‘launder’ money was through the casinos in Macao or by producing inauthentic trade invoices. But now the most fashionable way is to buy paintings, calligraphy pieces and sculptures, then sell them at an inflated price outside China. The profits that flow from this are in foreign currencies, and are thus ipso facto ‘clean’. Another popular technique is for someone to purchase a work of art from abroad for a highly inflated price and then transfer the money into an offshore bank account. According to Paul Tehan of TrackArt, a Hong Kong-located art risk consultancy, many works of art can be bought and sold anonymously, because of the availability of secret and elaborate ownership schemes.24 These illegal and fuzzy practices also allow people to easily move artworks across borders; a corollary is that they also make fakes enormously difficult to identify.

Given the customary secretive nature of the art market generally, China’s art market is especially suited to illicit activities. And because there are no visible paper trails for these activities, those who are working in the legitimate Chinese art market are finding this a major problem. The amount in illicit capital emanating from authentically documented

acquisitions of artworks in China is generating much confusion for people who wish to collect and invest in art. In recent years, however, the government has had some considerable success in arresting certain schemers.

This last point has also been made by Errera in his scrutiny of certain popular myths surrounding this subject.25 He critiques these myths around the following sub-headings: (a) speculation; (b) forgery; (c) there are no rules; (d) it’s only a local market; and (e) it’s all about Mao. With respect to speculation, Errera maintains that the Chinese art market did have spurious art funds, but that they closed rather quickly, perhaps due in part to greater scrutiny by the government. He also claims that there are genuine Chinese collectors who do not focus on making a profit; they spend their money on developing museums and foundations such as K11 or the Long Museum. Like any other country in the world, China has its fair share of people for whom “selling to the right person is more important than printing an invoice”.26

On the key issue of forgery, Errera indicates that this is more prevalent with traditional art and antiquities in the country, and that it is not necessarily the case with contemporary art, because the contemporary artist is alive and the studio can authenticate the artwork. Nevertheless, Errera concedes that there continue to be those claiming that China’s art market is flooded with fakes, despite the fact that China is now one of the top three art markets of the world.

He does acknowledge that while the art market in China is still in a very chaotic state, there have been recent encouraging developments: for example, the start ups of international auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Of course, as we know, these auction houses are not without their flaws, scandals and critics. Working in China means a steep learning curve for everyone in the art auction and dealing business. Amusingly, a Mr. Zang, the head of the Auctions Associations in China, was quoted in a 2013 The New York Times article on art fraud in China: “Bringing

15

Western auction houses [to China] was like putting a crocodile in a pond. It makes the fish swim faster.”27 Regarding the often-heard assertion that it’s only a local art market, and that Chinese collectors are only interested in buying Chinese contemporary art, there is now emerging evidence, Errera states, that this is not necessarily the case. Buyers of Chinese contemporary art are starting to appear all over the globe; this trend, Errera indicates, is likely to continue. Also, Chinese buyers are definitely starting to buy American and European contemporary art. However, as previously noted, some of this might be part of a wellestablished laundering money strategy.

Finally, apropos the general claim that Chinese contemporary art is often kitsch, repetitive, only about Mao and the Cultural Revolution and lacking in innovation, Errera advances the view that there is a new and promising generation of artists blessed with originality, imagination and visual wit: generally speaking, he says, “the first generation of Chinese artists took some time to digest Western influences, [but] the game is now completely different”.28

Adopting an international criminology perspective, Fausto Martin and De Sanctis, looking specifically at Chinese art auction houses, suggest that they are seriously marred by fake certificates of authenticity and much collusion between auctioneers, buyers and sellers for the purpose of artificially inflating art prices, laundering money and tax invasion.29 They suggest that there are numerous records of officials being bribed to over-appraise works of art—a number were indeed sold for extraordinary prices at Hong Kong auctions. Quoting from Priscilla Jiao’s 2011 article for South China Morning Post, De Sanctis claims that leading venues were involved in either tax invasion or reporting artificially inflated annual earnings.30 DOES THIS LEAVE ARTISTS AS THE HOLLOW MEN? Let’s begin with the institutions. Certainly it is clear from media reports that the ex-directors of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales have used questionable practices in their acquisition of works of art and other cultural artefacts which have allegedly been stolen from their country of origin, many bought with a mix of private and public money. This illegal global

trade in antiquities is accompanied by highly organised, money-laundering schemes across Asia, but particularly in China, which has involved museums, contemporary art galleries and artists. Then there are the big corporations such as British Petroleum (BP) and Royal Dutch Shell, who seek ‘social legitimacy’ through their extensive sponsorship of the British Museum, the Tate and a host of other cultural institutions. Of course, this reliance on big business is not confined to Britain; museums in the USA and Australia have over the past two decades, as the public purse has shrunk, moved from sponsorship by individuals to corporate partnerships.31

So where does this leave artists?

With much soul searching to do, one would think. To return to the Biennale of Sydney and its highly publicised, socio-cultural white noise of art and politics, unfortunately, any moral authority and credibility these protesting artists had evaporated when they rejoined the exhibition. Here one is reminded of a remark often attributed to a former Prime Minister, Paul Keating: “You can always rely on selfinterest”. Any analysis of the protest shows that these artists, in the end, put self-interest before their ethics and principles and should be considered nothing more than hollow men and women.

Notes 1 Henk Slager, The Pleasure of Research, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 2012: 12 2 Marjorie Garber, Patronizing the Arts, Princeton University Press, 2008: 1 3

The Tea Party movement is an American political movement known for advocating a reduction in the national debt and federal budget deficit by reducing government spending and taxes; http://www.google.com.au/search?client=safari&rls=e n&q=tea+party&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=zJbQU9TF6aN8Qez44H4CQ 4

In response to the appointment of John McDonald as Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia in 1999 a petition was sent to the Chair of the Council of the NGA, Kerry Stokes, “expressing our profound concern” at the appointment—the protest was led by a working group, which consisted of Jane Barney, David Bromfield, Brad Buckley, Rex Butler, Ben Curnow, Susan Hempel, Simon Ingram, Victoria Lynn, Linda Michael, Bernice Murphy, John Nixon, Robert Owen, Leon Paroissien, Mike Parr, Anna Schwartz and Nicholas Tsoutas 5

William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, Boston: David R. Godine, 1979; see ‘The Artist and Society’: 276-88 6 For an extended article on the death of Reza Barati and the ‘Review into the Events of 16-18 February 2014 at the Manus Regional Processing Centre’ undertaken by Robert Cornall, AO, see Martin Mackenzie-Murray, ‘Deadly Oversight’ in The Saturday Paper, 21 May 2014: 3 7 See more at: http://www.cacsa.org.au/?page_ id=3008#sthash.UwcdJzNY.dpuf

c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 3 . 3 2 014

8 Matthew Kiem, ‘Should Artists Boycott the Biennale over Transfield Links?’, The Conversation, 12 February, 2014; http://theconversation.com/search?q=Should+Artists+Boycott +the+Biennale+over+Transfield+Links%3F 9 See Raymond Gaita, ‘Obligation to Need’, in Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally, A Country Too Far, Melbourne: Penguin/Viking, 2013: 90-102. See also Simon Ley’s recent translation of Weil’s essay, On The Abolition Of All Political Parties, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2013 10

Gaita, op.cit: 99

11

John Hughes’ film was first aired on ABC Television on 2 February 2014 12 Nietzsche’s theses in his Untimely Meditations (1876) form the basis of our present understanding of the idea of the ‘untimely’ and its implications for modern and contemporary art. See Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary’, in Giorgio Agamben, What is an An Apparatus and Other Essays, David Krishik and Stefan Pedstalla trans., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009: 39-54 13 Jacques Rancière, ‘In What Time Do We Live?’, in Marta Kuzma, Pablo Lafuent and Peter Osborne eds, The State of Things, Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway/ London: Koening Books, 2012: 12-37 14

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Zero Books, UK, 2009

15

Rancière, op. cit: 37

16

ibid: 34

17

Stefano Manacorda and Duncan Chappell eds, Crimes in the Art and Antiquities World: Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property, New York: Springer, 2011: 2 18 For an extended article on the Shiva scandal, see Joel Meares,‘Vigilance is vital to avoid risky purchases of cultural objects’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14-15 June 2014: 32 19 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993: 204 20 Andrew Charlton, ‘Dragon’s Tail’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 54, 2014 21

ibid: 6

22

ibid: 71

23

See Alexandre Errera, ‘Five Myths About Chinese Contemporary Art’, Forbes Magazine; http://www.forbes.com/ sites/alexandreerrera/; Fausto Martin De Sanctis, Money Laundering Through Art, Dordrecht: Springer, 2013; and Sophie Song, ‘China’s Money Laundering: Wealthy Chinese Smuggling Cash Out Using Art’, International Business Times, 21 February 2014; www.ibtimes.com 24

Song, ibid.

25

Errera, op. cit.

26

ibid.

27

ibid.

28

ibid.

29

De Sanctis, op. cit.

30

ibid: 116

31

Sharon Verghis, ‘The Colour of Money’, The Weekend Australian, 12-13 April 2014: 6-7

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egyptology anew: damien hirst, ancient egypt and the big money

JOHN MATEER I think you have begun with the final act, my dear.

Lucian Freud to Damien Hirst THE STORY Everyone knows the story of the Golden Calf.

Moses had been summoned up Mount Sinai in what is still now far eastern Egypt, and while he is gone the Children of Israel start questioning their faith. Feeling that it might be safest to return to the religion of the country they’d just left, a call is made for the gold jewellery the women had carried with them.

From the metal an idol is fashioned that they worship, until Moses, descending the mountain

catches sight of them, throwing down the stone tablets bearing the recently received Ten Commandments. As every child who has attended Sunday School knows, this is a lesson about behaviour in the absence of the Father, about the temptation to indulge in the familiar instead of trusting in the imminence of the moral. Of course, that it is a calf is key—the idol is not even of a human-like god!

It is this story that the provocative artist Damien Hirst was more than alluding to when he showed a sculpture of that name in his now infamous, straight-to-auction exhibition Beautiful in my Head Forever; more

than alluding, because the entire event was as excessive as it could be, using all the tricks of shock and strategy that he had learn over the course of his two decades as the enfant terrible of the Young British Art movement.1 The twoday auction resulted in sales over £111 million.

Even the automation of the financial industry seemed part of the excess of this event, with the collapse of the global economy, precipitated by the losses of various USA banks, beginning, literally, the next day. The centrepiece of this uncanny auction, which even included a kind of unicorn, was Hirst’s The Golden Calf. In a later monograph a critic wrote:

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Undoubtedly intended for the cameras, to be an icon of the entire bizarre venture of the auction, The Golden Calf was also a kind of tabloid-friendly admission of guilt—Hirst, it could seem, was parodying his own greed and parodying the entire high-end artworld.

He was cashing out just before the walls of Casino Capitalism were about to come down.

Even the name he gave to the auction Beautiful in my Head Forever echoes the live-fast-dieyoung aesthetic he shares with the other artstars of his generation, among them Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Sue Noble and Tim Webster.

In the midst of this bizarre theatre something else was going on. This particular incarnation of the Golden Calf was not as “random” as it seemed. Certainly it was not as random as its description by the above critic, who was writing in the book accompanying Hirst’s first and vast retrospective at his exhibition at Tate Modern, which was sponsored solely by the Qatar Museums Authority,3 and on for the duration of the London Olympics, later travelling to Doha.4 The critic was not alone in failing to realise that Hirst’s Golden Calf was in fact a gilded version of one of the most famous images of Ancient Egypt, the Apis Bull. He was not alone in that, as I haven’t found a single text that has remarked on the iconology of Hirst’s work. Despite the extreme obviousness of almost every aspect of Beautiful in my Head Forever, excepting perhaps the logic of the purchasers, it appears no-one was looking at the sculpture itself, nor asking whether the object was suggestive of something beyond the either-or reactions of the mediatised event. Hirst’s ability to be divisive was so successful that contemplation, something usually synonymous with art, was completely forgotten.

for artists. Perhaps the paintings that most famously depict the scene of the worshipping of the Golden Calf—even if the nature of worship is unclear in Biblical accounts—are Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Adoration of the Golden Calf (1653) in the Manchester Art Gallery and Nicholas Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (1636-37) in London’s National Gallery.

These works, both housed in major British museums couldn’t have been unknown to Hirst.

In comparing them, it is clear that both Lorrain and Poussin made very particular decisions —“readings” we might say—in creating the iconicity of their golden calves. Lorrain’s small idol on a plinth reveals a due consideration of the origin of the gold, even as it creates an ideal, classical scene: the statue is small enough to allow us to imagine that it might have been formed out of bits of metal gathered from the Israelities. Whereas Poussin’s calf, standing on a substantial plinth like a Greco-Roman sculpture, while in the foreground the Israelites dance around in a light-hearted bacchanal, is almost an hallucination of gold, a figure of imagined excess. How could that have been made while Moses was up the mountain! The work derives its composition, in part, from a 1519 fresco of the same name by the school of Raphael in the Vatican.

The resemblance Poussin’s calf bears to Hirst’s sculpture and to the Apis Bull is what led me to the subject of this investigation.

Why had no-one remarked on the possibility that Hirst’s The Golden Calf originated in an image from Ancient Egypt? I wondered why it was that Poussin had based his idol on the well-known Egyptian god, why he had figured the bull quite specifically and yet had refrained from placing a sign of the moon on its head.

It is that lunar sign referring to the cult figure that makes Hirst’s work an irrefutable evocation of that Egyptian tradition. Of course, the iconicity of Ancient Egyptian art needn’t be immediately apparent to everyone who sees Hirst’s work. Yet it is extraordinary, considering the amount of public attention given to his Golden Calf, that even the authors of commissioned texts for substantial books on his work failed to consider its lineage, it specificity.

EARLIER PAINTINGS As an allegory of the human tendency to return to familiar, material patterns of thinking instead of adhering to the immaterial laws, the Golden Calf has long been a popular tale and subject

THE APIS BULL The Apis Bull was first discovered by a French archaeologist in Serapeum, Saqqara, in 1850.

There were several cults dedicated to gods who took their earthly form as bulls, but it

At the centre of this unifying sensibility was The Golden Calf—a formalehydedipped bull, whose horns and hooves were cast in 18-carat gold and whose head was topped with a solid-gold disc. While the work directly referenced the Bible, its effect could be likened to Ancient Minoan or Assyrian sculpture.2

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was the Apis cult that was most widespread and important, having its heyday in the late Dynastic (664-332 BC) and Ptolemaic periods (332-304 BC), and lasting until 365 AD.5 There were two other major bull cults: Mnevis, the sacred animal of the god of Heliopolis, and Buchis of Armant, an animal connected to the Gods Ra and Montu. Some Egyptologists see the origin of these cults in earlier fertility worship. In the case of the Apis Bull, it is believed that it was only later in the history of the cult that the animal became seen as an embodiment of the creator god Ptah.

The Apis bulls were chosen through a process of identification, in which certain physical marks were key: a light triangle on their forehead, a certain pattern on their back, double hairs on their tails and a scarab-like mark on the tongue. Once chosen, the Bull was installed by means of a sacred ceremony, after which it lived a luxurious life in a shelter with a window, through which it could be seen by the public and it even had a “harem” of cows.

It is thought that the Apis Bull functioned as an oracle whose predictions were determined by the interpretation of its movements. Simply being in its presence could bestow on one additional virility.

Hirst’s depiction of the Golden Calf as the Apis Bull goes far beyond the act of alluding to the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicholas Poussin and their precedent in the Vatican, by making explicit the presumption that the regression the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai were guilty of was not only the worship of an idol, but actually of a specific idol, which meant they still accepted the power of an Egyptian god, before their own immaterial and all-mighty Lord. (None of Hirst’s three precedents adopts those distinguishing marks that would irrefutably identify the Calf as part of a specific cult.) Implicit in this, one can assume, is the usual Judaic fear of unrestrained sexuality, an element that is clearly illustrated in Poussin’s work. According to Hirst the Golden Calf is the Apis Bull, with his calf being entirely modelled after figures of the Bull easily found in many British museums. As is usual in his practice, The Golden Calf is not really a sculpture, rather the thing itself, a careful pickled animal, augmented with real golden hooves and horns, and the ornamental headdress.

It is striking that Hirst’s interest in the art of Ancient Egypt has drawn no interest, because his long-standing fascination with death and the preservation of flesh

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egyptology anew: damien hirst, ancient egypt and the big money

London Underground advertisement for Charles Saatchi’s Be the Worst That You Can Photo courtesy www.ravishlondon.com http://www.ravishlondon.com/ items/(1481).html

is so much a part of the European idea of Egyptian civilisation. Wandering through his retrospective at the mausoleum-like Tate Modern, through room after room containing walls of cabinets with vials for pharmaceuticals and of works that take decaying flesh as their subject, it seemed to me that the magic he wants his art to have is one that can bestow not virility but immortality. It is as if Hirst has always been aware of Herodotus’ observation that; “The Egyptians were the first people to put forward a belief in the immortality of the soul.”6 TOTEMS To think that Hirst’s concern—if that word could be applied to an artist like him—might be with the historicity of the Egyptian image is to misunderstand the originality of the circumstance in which he is presenting his works. It would be better to see The Golden Calf as a symbolic repetition of one of his already successful and archetypal works—the famous preserved tiger shark known as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). Like the shark, the Golden Calf is an image of greed. It is similar to the shark in another way, too, in that it represents a surfacing from the depths. Whereas the shark surfaces violently from the depths of an oceanic

subconscious, the Golden Calf arrives in the bright light of day from the twilight world of the West’s repressed memory of Egypt.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Hirst’s most famous work, is a powerful precedent for The Golden Calf, in that both can be seen as indicating the peculiar nature of the icon—or idol—in the contemporary art market and the broader world of the media. Although Hirst, along with the other London artists of his generation known as the YBAs, was brought to global prominence through the collecting of the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, it was this work that came to stand for their collective audacity.7

What was this new, cool, British audacity? It was the impulse to admit the crucial role of money in every aspect of life to turn what previously would have been seen as something that might be crass, a source of embarrassment, into something entertaining. In the case of Hirst’s shark, something museumological became a thing at once immaterial—art with a capital ‘A’—and commercial. The animal demonised through the movie Jaws had become an emblem of neoliberal fun. Thanks to Hirst, the tabloids, always so important in public life in Britain, could simultaneous ridicule the absurdity of High Art and celebrate the class

victory of a lad from Leeds. There is another dimension to this that is more disturbing.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was sold on auction, at its peak price, for $US12 million to the USA collector and hedgefund manager Steve Cohen. Cohen kept it in his London office as a kind of trophy, or hyper-capitalist memento mori. Writing about seeing the work in Cohen’s office in Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk, a book on the structural failings of the global financial industry, the Australian economist Satyajit Das reflected that it was typical of that era of excessive aggression and ethical indifference. What seems key to me in the parallel between the shark and the Calf is that both images disrupt those aspects of contemplation on an artwork that might be thought to be typical, resulting in a lack of reflection on the absence of symbolic meaning, social significance or moral concern.

By comparison with the radical nullity of the shark, The Golden Calf is a traditional work, an embellished object with various cultural allusions, even moral—or Biblical—implications. Even if it were the case that the calf were not based on the Apis Bull, the symbol of the cow or bull is itself intrinsically connected to the brute simplicity of exchange value: the word “cattle” originated in thirteenth century Anglo-French and is related to the Old French “chatel”; the medieval Latin “capitale” originally referred to livestock of various kinds, and in the late sixteenth century it came to apply specifically to cows and bulls. Although there is the inevitable tendency to relate The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and The Golden Calf to ‘bullish’ images, it might be that the works are more akin to that very English tradition of the equestrian painting, which was visual proof of ownership of that kind of sleek gambling machine.

AUCTION As a body of new work, an intentionally pan-mediated event and sale, Beautiful in my Head Forever might be regarded as one single, epic artwork: a defining statement of Hirst’s vision as an artist, in which the relationship between art and its ‘value’ (culturally, financially, spiritually) achieved a seamless co-dependency—thus further amplifying its stark commentary on those fundamental concerns it addresses.”8

23

This is how writer and critic Michael Bracewell described Hirst’s straight-to-auction exhibition, an event, as I mentioned above, that took place on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis. In its double-speak, its evasion of the use of the word “greed” and its weak attempt to present the auction as a kind of self-critical Gesamkunstwerk, Bracewell has failed to appreciate that what Hirst was about to achieve was not principally about The Art Market, but about The Museum and how it establishes—institutionalises —value by producing and housing the historical. The audacity of this event went far beyond anything Hirst had attempted before, because it undermined those agents in the artworld—gallerists, curators, critics, historians—whose roles are intended to gradually create the circumstances that make possible collecting and the collection’s eventual incorporation, through the Museum, into the broader culture. By sending the work straight to auction, Hirst evaded the time and the commercial and intellectual labour it takes to enable work to accrue value. Instead of the artobject passing from the hand of the maker to a sales-person, then under the eyes of the critic and historian to a collector and then, as a part of a collection, to an institution, this body of Hirst’s works went straight from his workshop to an auction and then to an art warehouse or bank vault. In a certain sense it would seem there is no difference between the vault, in which expensive, hard-to-insure contemporary artworks are kept and a tomb in which precious sculptures have been placed around an important person’s mummified corpse.

In both their works, value is invested and activated in something called The Afterlife.

Sold to an unknown buyer for £10.3 million, Hirst’s The Golden Calf has not yet, as far I am aware, been exhibited. Like so many other works sold in the upper-reaches of the global art market, it is a kind of cypher of capital, an idea of the Image.

Yet this calf, as much as that sculpture of the original, biblical incident, is not mere graven image. In its particularity, its iconicity, Hirst’s Calf demonstrates how meaning and historical allusion disappear in the process of capitalisation. Not even one of the many people who wrote on his work thought to consider the Egyptian aspect of the icon! Even in the midst of the auction, which attracted a huge amount of attention from the international news media, the blindness of contemporary art’s commentators increased. In fact it could be said that an art

auction itself is that theatre, that strange kind of peepshow, in which capital’s acceleration leads to the disappearance of the Image itself. It is as if Hirst’s work, especially The Golden Calf, could be said to have been made only for the eyes of the undead, the zombies of accelerated capital.

Understood within the broader context of changes taking place in the global artworld and in the strange, fast-evolving intimacy of new technologies like Facebook and iPhone, the example of Hirst’s The Golden Calf, its illustration of value and of the emptying of the historical iconocity of its Egyptian tradition should meet with recognition in the context of the study of the post-colonial. Just as the imperial West neutralised signs of African civilisation by ripping the artefacts from the original circumstances of their use and meaning, so too contemporary capitalism wrenches the Image from the attentive process of looking and contemplation. One journalist, interviewing an international banker at Hirst’s Gagosian show in Moscow was told: “The oligarchs know about assets like oil-fields and factories. They only buy art for fun... to be famous and entertaining. It’s a toy to them.”9 Enough said?

This, our idol, Hirst’s The Golden Calf, in its ambiguous gesturing and figured vacancy, even as it awaits its return to the spotlight of another auction from its London or Ukrainian vault, is a vivid example of this kind of devolution, this particularly contemporary art.

POSTSCRIPT This essay was presented as a paper at the visual arts panel of the Afro-Europeans: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe conference in London in 2013, and so was written with a sense of how an audience familiar with the pillaging of Africa and Egypt might understand a contemporary version of the icon of the Golden Calf. Yet it had its origin in time I spent in the city the year before when I was investigating the relationship between British public art institutions and the global art market.

In attempting to understand the lack of prominence of the art of so-called peripheral countries in the mainstream of the global art market, especially in the auction houses, I had started to reflect on the nature of iconocity in contemporary art. It seems to me that today writers on contemporary art seldom address the iconological nature of images, their sets of allusions and deeper histories, even while

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the art market depends heavily on powerful, atavistic images, just as advertising does.

Hence, my interest in that unholy trinity: Hirst, the Golden Calf and Saatchi. But this must leave us, viewers on the periphery, if not of the networked world at least of the global art market, wondering what effect this particular kind of vacuity of the image has on us? For instance, how should we see those icons-yet-to-be that were displayed to us in the relatively recent Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now?10 Or how reassured can we be by the acclaim implicit in Ben Quilty’s current exhibition of paintings11 at the Saatchi Gallery in Sloane Square, the heart of London’s luxury shopping precinct?

Notes 1 The pre-auction exhibition was held 5–15 September, 2008 at Sotheby’s in Old Bond Street, London, the traditional heart of the British art-market 2 Michael Bracewell, ‘Beautiful in my Head Forever’, Ann Gallagher (ed.), Damien Hirst, London: Tate Publishing, 2012: 180 3 The Chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority is Sheika al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, the thirty-one year old sister of Qatar’s emir. It is thought that the organisation has an annual budget for acquisitions of up to $US 1 billion. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/ arts/design/qatar-uses-its-riches-to-buy-art-treasures. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 4 Another extraordinary event at the time of Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern (4 April–9 September, 2012) was the British Museum’s Hajji: Journey to the Heart of Islam (26 June–15 April, 2012) which, like Hirst’s show had, principally, a sole affluent sponsor, the King Abdulaziz Public Library of Riyadh, albeit supported, too, by HSBC Amanah 5 For further reading see Patrick F. Houlihan’s The Animal World of the Pharaohs, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996 6 Herodotus, The Histories, John D. Marincola (ed.). London: Penguin, 2003: 178 7 Any visitor to London at the time of Damien Hirst’s Tate Modern show, an exhibition intended to be the art show for visitors in the city for the Olympics, would have also seen advertised in the Tube and on other public transport posters for Charles Saatchi’s new book Be the Worst You can Be: Life’s too Long for Virtue and Patience, which had been published in the same month that Hirst’s show opened.

If I recall correctly, the image on the poster was a photograph of a horned Saatchi 8 Bracewell, op cit: 180. This is cited in one of the most insightful essays written about the work of Hirst. Interestingly, it is an extended text on marketing written by three scholars at London School of Business. Like sociologists, these authors see how Hirst’s work is about a special understanding of the conjunction of contemporary economics and theatricalised consumption. Jorg Reckhenrich, Jamie Anderson and Martin Kupp, ‘The Shark is Dead: How to Build Yourself a Market’; www.innovation.london.edu 9

20 July–23 October, 2011

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Ben Quilty, 4 July–3 August 2014. This exhibition is part of his winning the inaugural Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Art, an award for art from what is called on the Saatchi Gallery’s website “the Greater Asia region”.

Consultation of the Award’s own site reveals that this larger region is divided into twenty smaller ones; and that Quilty won both the painting category and the overall category for 2014

E D I T I O N S C A C S A

JAMES DODD LIMITED EDITION GICLÉE FINE ART PRINT Exit 2014 © James Dodd Limited edition Giclée digital print on Hahnemülle 310gsm German etching paper 25 signed and numbered by James Dodd Dimensions unframed 329mm x 483mm Dimensions framed 515mm x 625mm AUD$ 220 unframed AUD$ 350 framed James Dodd’s artworks traverse the boundaries between visual street culture, alternative use of urban space and existing gallery conventions. Principally working as a painter, his work revolves around the use of found text such as graffiti. Hacking, mischief and disobedience are all variously combined with small acts of rebellion and soft signs of resistance in a DIY alchemy. James Dodd is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide and Ryan Renshaw Gallery in Brisbane.

For order and delivery enquiries please contact CACSA: admin@cacsa.org.au

Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia 14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063 +618 82 72 26 82 cacsa.org.au

Now on at the Art Gallery of WA | Tickets available at artgallery.wa.gov.au ANNUAL SPONSORS: WeSFARmeRS ARTS – PRiNCiPAL PARTNeR, 303LOWe, The SUNdAY TimeS, AUdi. Principal Sponsor

Truman Capote, writer, October 10, 1955. Photograph by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York and The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

in awe of the new: china’s entry into the global cultural-industrial complex

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c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 3 . 3 2 014

Paul Gladston The art world is the enemy of art.

Attributed to Robert Hughes In his early counterblast to institutionalised postmodernism—Modernism, Postmodernism, Realism: a Critical Perspective for Art, the critic and art historian Brandon Taylor presents a striking statistical analysis of the expansion of modern artistic production and display in the USA during the latter two thirds of the twentieth century. As Taylor indicates, during the early 1940s there were a mere handful of galleries exhibiting modern art across the whole of the USA with little more than twenty artists of any stature regularly showing work there.

By 1986, the year before the publication of Taylor’s book, the USA had over two thousand modern art galleries with around six hundred and eighty of those galleries and one hundred and fifty thousand artists of non-amateur status producing modern works of art located in New York City alone. If one estimates a production rate of ten works of art by a single artist each year, suggests Taylor (an arguably conservative projection), then the number of modern artworks produced in New York City in 1986 would have been around 1.5 million compared with perhaps two hundred per annum in the early 1940s1; a prodigious increase of well over seven thousand percent in less than half a century.

The expansion of modern artistic production and display in the USA from the mid-1940s onwards came about as the result of a combination of discursive factors.

These factors include: widening access to arts education during the post WWII period; the establishment of modern art as a popular locus of social critique during the counter-cultural liberalisation which took place in the USA from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s; the recuperation of historical avant-garde and neo avant-garde art by the established art market and museums sector; the co-opting of modern art to the projection of USA soft power before and during the Cold War; and the rolling out of government supported public arts programs extending socially progressive principles established as part of the New Deal during the 1930s.

The combination of these and other factors coalesced to make the pursuit of a once highly specialised, male-dominated and largely bourgeois career as a modern artist not only more widely accessible, as well as desirable

in socially progressive terms, but also, in principle if not always in practice, materially viable across the class spectrum.

Similar discursive conjunctions also took place at more or less the same time in Europe and other Western and Westernised States. In post-WWII Europe, for example, a proliferation of public museums, private galleries, artistic foundations and recurring festivals dedicated to the showing of modern art—including the Venice Biennale (from 1948 onwards) and documenta (begun in 1955) —first provided a platform for post-conflict reconciliation and reconstruction, as well as a counter-authoritarian (or not so counterauthoritarian) upholding of the values of Western modernism, before becoming a focus for the self-reflexivity of postmodernist identity politics and post-colonialism.

Since the ending of the Cold War, the prodigious expansion of modern artistic production and display that first took place in Western(ised) spaces has now extended to other geographical areas as part of an increasingly globalised contemporary art world. If one were to conduct a statistical mapping of this global expansion of contemporary artistic production and display similar to that put forward by Taylor, the exponential curve described by the numbers involved would point towards a vast trans-national network whose materiality and possible significances not only exceed the imagination but also, by extension, any categorical form of representation. In short, as objects of interpretation contemporary artistic production and display are dauntingly sublime prospects.

Among the more conspicuous contributions to the globalisation of contemporary artistic production and display in recent years is that which has taken place in the People’s Republic of China. The accelerated development of the PRC’s infrastructure following the country’s accession to the WTO in 2001 has not only included manufacturing, finance and communications, but also the art market and creative industries sector. After Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour of 1992—which re-established the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to reform after the conservative crackdown that took place in the wake of the Tiananmen protests of 1989—there was significant growth in the commercial art sector in mainland China, with numerous galleries,

auction houses and art districts, including Beijing’s 798 and Shanghai’s M50, emerging in major urban centres throughout the PRC. One of the consequences of this growth was a major and increasingly large injection of international capital into the indigenous Chinese art market that from the late 1990s until the Global Financial Crisis of 200809 significantly enriched individual artists and gallery owners, as well as supporting the production of ever-more ambitious art works both in terms of scale and technical sophistication. Throughout the 1980s the numbers of individuals involved in the making and showing of contemporary art in the PRC was relatively small, numbering perhaps in the hundreds rather than the thousands; a vanishingly small number in the context of a country with a population of well over one billion. By the 2000s this number had grown significantly, both as a result of the production of several cohorts of graduates by the PRC’s rapidly modernising art academies and the increasingly attractive status of contemporary art as a modern, socially progressive and potentially lucrative career option.

The consequent increase in the production of artworks was also great, providing an everincreasing flow of commodities to fuel the continuing expansion of the PRC’s indigenous arts infrastructure, as well as trade in contemporary Chinese art on the international art market.

Another salient aspect of the development of the PRC’s creative infrastructure during the early 2000s is the proliferation of numerous public art museums and recurring exhibitions dedicated to the showing of contemporary art. Major public museums that became a focus for the showing of contemporary art in the PRC in the early 2000s include the Shanghai Art Museum, the Guangdong Museum of Art and the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen.

While these public museums remain subject to close governmental scrutiny as a consequence of their official status, since the early 2000s they have nevertheless been allowed to stage numerous exhibitions of contemporary art that would have been unacceptable to the authorities in the 1990s. Among these were major retrospectives of the work of the exiled artists Huang Yongping and Chen Zhen at the Shanghai Art Museum.2 The first major

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recurring exhibition of contemporary art in China is the Shanghai Biennale, which in 2000 under the curatorship of Hou Hanru established itself as a platform for the surveying of international as well as local developments in contemporary art. Among the other recurring exhibitions of contemporary art to have become established since the early 2000s is theGuangzhou Triennial, which has been staged at the Guangdong Art Museum in the southwestern Chinese city of Guangzhou since 2002. The first Guangzhou Triennial in 2002, Reinterpretation: a Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), can be perceived as important not only because of its standing as the first Page 26 Shi Xinning Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition in China, from Another Mao Painting series, 2000-01 Photo courtesy the artist Above Installation view, ’85 New Wave: the Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, 2007 Photo courtesy the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Beijing

major international exhibition of contemporary art to be held outside Beijing and Shanghai, but also as the first major retrospective of experimental Chinese art to be held in the PRC. The exhibition, which was curated by Wu Hung with the assistance of Feng Boyi and Wang Huangsheng, represents a significant step forward in terms of the scholarly presentation of contemporary Chinese art, not least because of its substantial catalogue comprising several essays that together present an assertively detailed view of the critical significance of experimental art in China, in addition to related exhibitions and writings.3 As such, Reinterpretation is open to interpretation as a critical rejoinder to the durable and highly generalising international view of contemporary Chinese art as a focus for oppositional dissidence and post-colonialist resistance first established by exhibitions outside the PRC in the early 1990s, such as China’ New Art Post ’89, which was first staged as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 1993 before touring to numerous venues world-wide. Other recurring

exhibitions in the early 2000s include the Chengdu Biennale and the Guiyang Biennale (Guiyang Art Biennale Exhibit) in Guizhou.

While some of these recurring exhibitions, for example the Guangzhou Triennial, are State sponsored, others are supported entirely by private finance or a mixture of private and State sponsorship in a manner similar to that used to support public exhibitions of contemporary art in Western, liberal-democratic contexts such as the UK and Germany. In all cases, however, the controlling hand of the State ultimately remains ever-present. The presence of State-control has remained a significant factor, for example in the staging of the Shanghai Biennial, which in 2012 attracted significant international opprobrium for its lack of critical content, something that contributed to the withdrawal of at least one international artist.4

Reinterpretation is nevertheless one of a number of exhibitions staged by Chinese curators since 2002 that seeks to present a searching art-historical understanding of the development of contemporary Chinese

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art. Other significant examples include Gao Minglu’s The Wall: Reshaping Chinese Contemporary Art, which was staged initially at the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing in 2005, before travelling to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries in New York State in 2005-06, and Farewell to Post-Colonialism, the third Guangzhou Triennial. The growth of the infrastructure for contemporary art in the PRC since 2001 has been matched by developments internationally, including the establishment of a China pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

The same period has seen a number of substantial published writings that also seek to present a searching art-historical understanding of the development of contemporary Chinese art, including Gao Minglu’s book The Wall: Reshaping Chinese Contemporary Art accompanying the exhibition of the same name5 and Lü Peng’s epic text A History of Art in 20th Century China.6 In most cases, the accounts of the development of contemporary Chinese art put forward by these published writings proceed from an explicit or implicit resistance to non-Chinese perspectives. Most also rely heavily on largely unreflexive forms of historical narration of a sort long-since questioned by Western scholars and/or exhaustive, but critically unmediated accumulations of documentary evidence. Other attempts to establish a more substantial base for the art-historical analysis of contemporary Chinese art include the setting up of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong in 2000.

Alongside the proliferation of public art museums and recurring exhibitions in China since the early 2000s, there has also been a significant growth in non-government supported public art museums. Among these public museums are the Today Art Museum in Beijing’s Chaoyang district (the first not-forprofit non-government supported art museum, which was established in 2002), the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in the Pudong district of Shanghai (established in 2005) and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 art district (established in 2007). Since their opening, all of these museums have staged major exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art, including a highly ambitious retrospective of the work of the ’85 New Wave (the name widely used to signify the development of contemporary art in the PRC during the latter half of the 1980s) curated by Fei Dawei

and titled ’85 New Wave: the Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, which opened at the Ullens Centre in 2007.7 This establishment of nongovernment supported public art museums since 2001 has not only assisted in raising the profile of contemporary Chinese art on the international stage, but also the value of contemporary Chinese art on the international art market. At the same time, it has also served as a stimulus for growing indigenous public interest in contemporary art, not least among younger generations of Chinese.

The proliferation of such public art museums since 2002 has been accompanied by an increasing commercialisation of art districts, many of which, including Beijing’s 798, have seen a displacement of idealistic artists and curators—who during the 1990s sought to combine avant-garde notions of social intervention with financial entrepreneurship —by others focused more narrowly on the commercial potential of contemporary Chinese art. Alongside the narrowing effects of increasing commercialisation, art districts and private art galleries are also subject to continuing governmental surveillance.

This surveillance is conducted by plain-clothes officials, as well as individuals working for galleries in the pay of government agencies.

Governmental controls on the work of private galleries are both vague and mobile. As a consequence, government agencies have significant scope in interpreting the actions of private galleries. Galleries who are perceived to have transgressed governmental limits on their actions are subject to sometimes highly intrusive sanctions, including the summary closing down of exhibitions, seizure of published materials and the arbitrary administration of an already ill-defined bureaucratic process.8

In recent years the Chinese Communist Party has sought to co-opt contemporary artistic production and display both to the projection of soft power through organised cultural diplomacy and as part of the development of an indigenous creative industries sector. In the Party’s 12th Five-year Plan (2011-15) cultural industries are identified as a key area for development. In particular, the plan highlights the development of museums as a national priority, stating that each region must have at least one comprehensive museum and that there should be one hundred and fifty national ‘first-level’ museums. In addition, the plan states that there should be a minimum of

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three thousand five hundred museums across China with ten thousand exhibitions and audiences of five hundred million annually by 2015. There is also a commitment to protect exhibits, optimise museum regulations and build a nationwide database of artefacts, alongside a process of modernisation to increase the popularity of museums. As a consequence of this five year plan, the PRC is now in the throes of a major museum-building program including the construction of numerous museums dedicated to the showing of contemporary art.

Newly opened museums include the Power Station of Art (housed in a decommissioned power station on the former 2010 World Expo site) and the China Art Museum, both in Shanghai.

To put the CCP’s 12th Five-year Plan into perspective in relation to the showing of contemporary art, it is perhaps useful to make a comparison with Australia as one of the PRC’s regional neighbours. China has a population of over 1.3 billion, one hundred and twenty-eight public museums, eight hundred and sixteen commercial galleries, forty-three art spaces and ninety-three art foundations involved in the showing of contemporary art.

By contrast Australia has a population of just over twenty two million (that of a major city such as Shanghai), one hundred and eighty public museums, two thousand and seventeen commercial galleries, one hundred and sixty two art spaces and six hundred and sixty five art foundations involved in the presentation of contemporary art.9 Seen in this light, the CCP’s desire to establish a more comprehensive museum infrastructure to match the PRC’s world-leading economic stature is a highly understandable one. At the same time, the CCP’s plan for museum development smacks to some degree of the forced nature of similarly centrally-driven national projects, such as the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which aimed to match Western industrial and agricultural productivity, but in combination with adverse weather conditions resulted in famine and the deaths of millions.

Although the PRC’s current museum building program is unlikely to lead, on its own at least, to widespread death and destruction, it does however beg the question as to whether there are enough artefacts of sufficient quality and interest currently available to fill the museums in question. There is an inescapable sense that the CCP’s plan is in this respect less a response

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to actual need than one fuelled by a desire to match in numerical terms the standing of the PRC’s cultural and economic competitors, not least the USA. One might add that the figures involved suggest a continuing governmental allegiance to the traditional Confucian conception of “Da“ (vastness and magnificence) as an aesthetic associated with over-awing displays of authoritarian imperial power.10

Equally, we should not run away with the idea that the PRC’s current program of arts infrastructure development, which involves public and private investment, is a wholly artificial one diametrically opposed to the organic development of that which preceded it in the West and Westernised spaces. Both are ultimately enmeshed with complex discursive structures that bind artistic production and display to State power. State control in Western(ised) spaces may often be less obtrusive than in the PRC, but ambient discursive limitations in relation to, for example, applications for public funding and the art market’s preference for bourgeois-friendly plurality are in many ways no less restrictive /coercive in their effects. Moreover, both are part of a globalised art world, which in an international context at least, espouses postEnlightenment values of freedom of public expression and criticism of authority, but in practice has significantly limited the critical agency of artists both through the workings of the market and the dominance of a managerial political correctness. The global expansion of contemporary artistic production and display is widely envisaged as a platform for progressive criticism of and resistance to authority. It also extends a democratisation of the production and reception of art characteristic of modernism and postmodernism in liberal-democratic contexts (although it should always be acknowledged that no level playing field has yet been established across gender, class, ethnic and cultural boundaries in this regard). However, it is by no means clear that the global cultural-industrial complex which supports that expansion and extended democraticisation is in practice wholly commensurate with effective critical resistance to authority. The politics of identity and relationality that presently dominate the international art world, alongside an emerging return to pre-postructuralist notions of oppositional/antagonistic agency11 (such as those associated with the anti-capitalist

movement) are under the spectacular discursive frameworks described here arguably rendered little more than institutionalised symbolic forms and sops to bourgeois conscience. While institutionalised poststructuralist discourses are very much open to criticism as reproducing simplistic managerialist notions of relations of dominance in the guise of a more searching critique of authority, the projected return to almost counter-cultural forms of opposition is itself irrevocably caught up in the underlying rationalist dialects of authoritative dialogue.

Furthermore, the sheer quantity of artworks needed to supply the expanded field of global artistic display has led to a conspicuous relaxation of judgements in relation to questions of quality both in terms of making and significance.

As I argued in a previous two-part article for Broadsheet, ‘Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao: a Stratagem towards a Post-crisical Art’12 it has therefore become necessary to re-think the nature and circumstances of artistic critique.

In those articles I pointed towards the particular discursive conditions of artistic production and display within the PRC where contemporary art more often than not involves critical strategies at variance to those dominant internationally and especially within Western(ised) liberaldemocratic spaces. I did so not so much to develop a singular blueprint for a newly critical art, but instead to draw attention to the persistent need for variegated strategies of resistance and criticism in relation to differing spatially and temporally located discursive conditions.

The globalisation of the art world and its underlying cultural-industrial complex is not simply an extension of the former conditions of Western post-Enlightenment artistic criticality. It is instead a translation.

Not only has the international art world longsince recuperated Western(ised) forms of artistic critique, the inescapable variations which characterise contemporaneity significantly problematise the idea of a single steadyState global cultural sphere. Moreover, the international art world abounds with surreptitious cultural exclusions of one sort or another, including in the PRC a marked reluctance to acknowledge contemporary Chinese diasporic art. If art has any remaining currency as a locus of critical thought and action at the end of what might be seen as the longue durée of Western(ised) Romanticism,

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then it must surely lie in an active disjointedness from present attitudes and circumstances; one that may take it away from the established significance of art as a locus of critique.

Those whose careers and livelihoods are predicated on the continuing expansion of the international art world may demur.

Notes 1 Brandon Taylor, Modernism, Postmodernism, Realism: a Critical Perspective for Art, Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987: 77-78 2

Li Lei, Chen Zhen, Shanghai: Shanghai Art Museum, 2006

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Wu Hung (ed.), Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002 4 Daniel Szehin Ho, ‘Future perfect and great expectations: “Reactivation”, the 9th Shanghai Biennial’, in Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet: 42-1, 2013: 48-52 5 Gao Minglu, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, Buffalo and Beijing: Albright-Knox Gallery and the Today Art Museum, 2005 6 Lü Peng, A History of Art in 20th Century China, Milan: Charta, 2010 7 Fei Dawei (ed.),’85 New-Wave: the Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, Beijing: Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, 2007 8 Rebecca Catching, ‘The New Face of Censorship: State Control of the Visual Arts in Shanghai, 2008-2011’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11 (2+3) (2012): 231-249 9 See the Art Asia-Pacific; http://www.artasiapacific.com/; accessed 1 July 2014 10 In traditional Chinese culture, there is no term corresponding exactly to the Western concept of “the sublime”. The Confucian notion of da (“big” or “vast”) is, however, broadly equivalent. In The Analects, Confucius uses the term da to praise the Emperor Yao. According to the present-day Chinese philosopher Liu Yuanyuan, da is used by Confucius in this context to signify the limitlessness of Yao’s power which, he asserts, can be understood to instil feelings of horror and fear in the viewer. See Liu Yuanyuan, ‘Kongzi de “da” he “zhunagmei” yu xifang “chonggao” meixue de yitong’ [孔子的“大” 和“壮美”与西方“崇高”美学的异同, ‘The Differences and Similarities between Confucian“Giant” and “Magnificence” and the Western “Sublime”’], Lilun Jianshe [理论建设, Theory Research], ix, 2006: 69-70 11

See, for example, J.J. Charlesworth and James Hearfield, ‘Subjects and Objects’, http://blog.jjcharlesworth. com/2014/06/24/subjects-v-objects/; accessed 10 July 2014

12 Paul Gladston, ‘Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao: a Stratagem towards a Post-Crisical Art’, in Contemporary Visual Art+ Culture Broadsheet 42-3, 2013: 174-179 and 42-4, 2013: 241-249

Page 30 An everyday scene at the Shanghai Biennale, this one in particular in 2008

fifteen years of the ccaa: interview with uli sigg Christopher Moore ULI SIGG Uli Sigg: I always wanted to resolve this (the difficulty of presenting Chinese art to the world) as a person myself, but this proved much more difficult than I thought. This brings us to CCAA. I set it up there but I always felt it should be the Chinese people deciding what meaningful art is—and therefore to put (CCAA) in their hands—but that proved quite difficult. Some think it should be even more associated with my name, and that it would be beneficial to the award, while I thought I should be totally dissociated from it. So now we are somewhere in between. As a procedure, CCAA has been totally disconnected from me—not totally, in that I’m a member of the jury, but I am one of many. For a long time, there is this myth I am the person deciding, but of course I am not.

Uli Sigg describes himself as a mere researcher, belying the transformational scope of his contribution to art and China. For two decades Uli and Rita Sigg have collected Chinese contemporary art, forming the largest and most important collection of its kind. In July 2012, the Siggs gave 1,463 works to Hong Kong’s nascent M+ Museum of Visual Culture, including many uniquely important historical works, a donation among the most important to any museum in recent decades. To coincide with the opening of the fifteenth anniversary exhibition of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) at the Power Station of Art, Randian’s Chris Moore spoke at length with Uli Sigg about the history and philosophy behind CCAA, still the most respected art award in China.

Above: Uli Sigg Photo courtesy randian online

Chris Moore: What makes contemporary art and what makes contemporary art Chinese?

US: What makes contemporary art is art that speaks to our time and the language is from our time, if not the content. If I searched for one element—representing our time—we could go on for hours as to what makes it contemporary, but basically either the content or the language is about our time. When I set up the award, there were several debates, whether it should be called the “Chinese Contemporary Art Award”—or “Contemporary Chinese Art Award”. This brings us to your question: is there a “Chinese” contemporary art? Is it Chinese in its essence or just art made by Chinese people? Or is it made in China? Or is it made in the Chinese cultural space? The latter is the definition I prefer. Chinese contemporary art is art that is made in the Chinese cultural space—you may say, greater China.

CM: That’s extremely wide. For instance, that could include someone like David Diao, who has actually spent the vast majority of his life as a Chinese migrant in America.

US: Yes, it is very wide. There are some, shall we say, impositions inherently in this, like whether this applies to the whole diaspora.

But if it has to come out of someone very close to the Chinese cultural space and accepts to be part of that space, then probably the answer is yes. I had such discussions with people like Gu Wenda. We talked about the fact that a large number of people think that many in this generation of Chinese artists in the diaspora were playing the Chinese card as a very successful strategy in the West. And his response was, “What do you expect me to do? I grew up in China. I spent twenty-eight important years of my life there. I got my education and whole background there—do you expect me to throw this away when I move to the ‘States’? Even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t.” On the other hand, I’m not necessarily interested in art produced simply by someone with a ‘yellow face’. That doesn’t make it Chinese! Because some artists, unlike Gu Wenda, left China with a very clear purpose, to abandon their Chinese identity and not have any relationship or be associated at all with China. Maybe that person leaves the Chinese cultural space. This probably illustrates what I mean by Chinese contemporary art.

There is this very popular notion of having the global world and national identity not playing a role anymore. I don’t believe in that. For me there still is Chinese art. There is also Swiss art or American art, even though we may look at it as simply contemporary.

I understand those Chinese artists who intend to be just one good artist among good artists, and to get away from being perceived as Chinese—there are reasons for it—but in

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the end you have your cultural roots, your upbringing, and it will always shape your art, and it probably would be wrong to deny that in your impulse for artistic creation. I always think of, say, Richard Prince, who many people think of as a global artist—but he could only become ‘Richard Prince in the USA’ (I’m thinking of his cowboy and his pop nurses, joke paintings etc).

So if you look at his oeuvre, it has a very strong national identity, even though we would call him a global artist—what we broadly consider as Western—he still shows strong traits of a national identity. That is highly desirable, from my perspective.

And if we look at Chinese art, you have it departing from a very specific situation and specific look, like in 1979 and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, because the artists led a distinctly different life from their peers in London or New York or wherever. Whereas now, all of a sudden, they have access to the same information and the same books, they have access to the Internet, they travel and exhibit with other people, so their lives are sort of similar now. A lot of the art looks alike, but also a lot still does not. These are the issues for me when you talk about Chinese contemporary art; the art is still a reflection of a specific situation—in China, in London, in New York—but it still remains specific to a degree.

CM: A good answer, not everyone gives an answer to that question as good as yours.

US: Yes, for you it is an issue, I guess. It’s just this not to be seen as a mere Chinese artist—“I want to be a good artist!” otherwise there is this fear “I have been invited because of my Chinese passport” or something. I don’t understand it, but it’s there.

CM: Paranoia is part of the artistic condition, isn’t it?

US: And it went from being a disadvantage to be Chinese for so very long to becoming a strong advantage—only in terms of being seen, because then every gallerist, curator, museum director and collector go on pilgrimages to Beijing and Shanghai—so the artists got seen by so many people. If they had been living in New York or Berlin, that definitely would not have happened. It flipped from having been at the periphery of attention to having many

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Below:Yan Xing Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art (No. 3), 2013 2012 Best Young Artist, Chinese Contemporary Art Awards Photo courtesy the artist and randian online

opportunities which others don’t have in other capitals of the world. Though of course, the Western world still provides the gatekeepers to the big events, the documentas, Venice Biennales and so on. We see more balance in the power game than in the past, in the sense that the gatekeepers are still Western, but the Chinese artists get more and more attention.

CM: This raises another dilemma. Artists from the 1990s—Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang and even Xu Bing—have the problem of being more than mid-career artists. What do they do now?

How do they reinvent themselves when China is already very much part of the international art world? I think some of them are struggling.

I think Xu Bing is, partly because he is now very much part of the administrative system in China through his role as Vice-President of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts Zhang Xiaogang seems to have drifted a little bit. Yue Minjun has kept clear of these structures, and perhaps he is reinventing himself now—his more recent work I find quite interesting; I’m not popular in saying that, but I think it is. Do you feel this is an issue?

US: I feel that these are two different issues.

Can you be involved in the official apparatus of China and still maintain autonomy and creativity? And then there is the general issue of the mid-career artist. On the first, it’s difficult for me to comment. Can one have a foot in each camp? I expect some people can, successfully.

I wouldn’t want to make a judgment on Xu Bing’s creativity—it still seems to be there.

But if we talk about mid-career artists—this generation you mention, so successful in the 1990s, having this problem, having had very strong ideas, having exploited those ideas fully, and now having to create a second or third idea of equal artistic strength, maybe we are too demanding in that we expect artists to reinvent themselves a few times in their life? I always think of Giorgio Morandi, who painted his ten bottles for fifty years; we think these are great paintings. So it has to do with our times, which are so demanding that we expect an artist to come forward with something entirely new every few years. Of course, the great artists did that, but already to have had one strong idea is a big artistic achievement—it separates them from millions of other artists. Are they able to

fifteen years of the ccaa: interview with uli sigg

that everyone would ‘do’ a China exhibition.

But they would see the artists and art that they liked, and they would show it abroad.

Both these reasons worked, in a way.

CM: To create a platform within China and, secondly, to create a destination…

US: Attention and opportunities outside China.

That worked very well and very quickly, with for example, Harald Szeemann, being the first, taking twenty artists to the Venice Biennale in 1999 after he had been in the jury and I had travelled with him and visited many studios together.

CM: I didn’t realise that.

have a second one, or in some cases a third or a fourth one? They have the personality, but it can take ten years to develop that second strong idea. For the artists it is very difficult to sustain such a period, but they all have the kind of artistic personality that any day they could hit upon a new idea. Additionally, this generation has grown up rubbing up against the system, against some very firm beliefs, and all of a sudden it’s as if their enemy has died. Of course, there is still resistance there, but now the system is much more agile. So as an artist, one has to find a new paradigm, and that is not an option in the same way—they must find another impulse. Cynical Realism came out of 1989 and out of the very specific condition they were in, of being disillusioned, resigned, of not wanting to contribute to this ‘new China’. That created a very strong movement and a very strong impulse; it was that kind of resistance against which they created their art, and now their environment is totally different. If you grew from that mould of producing art, how do you find a new mould—giving you the stimulus? I think this is now the broad problem of that generation; some have found something very successfully, and others haven’t.

CM: Probably out of all that group, Cai Guo Qiang has maintained the greatest flexibility.

US: Yes, probably true. Of course, for a painter, the field is much narrower, probably a more difficult problem to solve.

CM: We should turn to Chinese Contemporary Art Awards. What are the origins of the award?

US: I saw all these very good artists in the 1990s, but I also realised that there wasn’t an internal debate in China that went beyond the academic circles of the contemporary art world. Also internationally, nobody paid any attention to these artists. I was thinking what I could do to improve that situation. Of course, today it’s hard to imagine that no one knew about Chinese art and that nobody took any interest. Today it’s very different. It’s hard for us to imagine that fifteen years ago, this was not the case. There were exhibitions abroad and now people talk about them, but they were mainly in second-tier cities, museums, small places, and they were seen by a specialist public—fans of China, sinologists, etc., but they were not in the big venues. I thought that if I created an art award—since there wasn’t one in China—maybe at some point it would become something like the Turner Prize in the UK. Maybe that could raise interest domestically, beyond the more academic circle, and it would allow me to bring in the international big shots to see Chinese art and incorporate Chinese artists into their projects. It wasn’t so much

US: Yes, that’s the only reason! He made several trips and jury meetings on his first trip in 1998.

I think in January 1999 he was appointed curator of the Biennale, so he only had about six months to organise it—while on the jury he had seen a lot of Chinese art and that made him decide to give such a platform to Chinese artists.1 Plus there’s a big difference between the 1993 and 1999 Biennials. In 1993 China had a pavilion but it was in the remotest part of Il Giardini. I saw it maybe two months after the opening and there were not even doors on the building. It was just the worst thing, and nobody went there. The Chinese artists were very excited, and I think it was Armani (the fashion designer) paying for the whole thing—it wasn’t something official, it was an ‘Armani pavilion’, and very shabby, in very poor condition. The artworks were very good but nobody saw them. Whereas in 1999, Harald Szeemann opened the entire Arsenale for the first time as part of the Venice Biennale.2 The international public, who would never go to a Chinese art exhibition, for the first time had to walk through an exhibition of the twenty Chinese artists. They had no choice!

All the major professionals, museum directors, institutions and collectors who never looked at Chinese art, all had to. That is why 1999 was so important. But that was just one exhibition.

There was also Alanna Heiss of PS1 who exhibited Chinese artists, Chris Dercon (now director of Tate Modern) showed Ai Weiwei in Munich, Ruth Noack showed Lu Hao, Xie Nanxing, Hu Xiaoyan and Yan Lei in documenta XII and so on.

CM: CCAA works on a two-year cycle, with one year for art and one for writing. Why do you also want the prize to be for art criticism?

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US: I always thought of CCAA as a tool to contribute to the “Chinese art operating system”, as I call it. Each nation has its art operating system of galleries, museums, art critics and artists, collectors and so on. I could see such an interesting art operating system emerging in China. This is why I consider myself as a researcher, not so much a collector, and that’s why I thought an art award would be a very useful contribution. To see it as a tool, I thought another issue that needs more attention is art criticism. Again I hoped that through creating an award I could contribute, not to solve the problem but to create attention to it and put it on the agenda for consideration.

There is a need for independent art criticism.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there was none due to censorship. There were magazines, but of course there was a lot of ideology and people couldn’t write freely. Then along came the art market and it became so strong that auction catalogues would say what was good art and what was not. The collectors and maybe some gallerists sourced their information through the auction houses, through the art market. Naturally, the art market is also very strong in the West, but it is balanced by the institutions, museums etc., which can present their exhibitions differently to how they are in China, and through independent art critics.

This balance is quite lopsided in China, because while art criticism was dependent on political issues until the 2000s, suddenly art critics had to write books for many artists. And this created another type of dependence. One can’t write books for artists and remain independent.

That is a contradiction! So one dependence was replaced by another. For an independent magazine, it is very difficult to survive. It’s not that these people are not interested in being independent art critics, but how can you survive in this environment as an independent critic?

For all these reasons, I thought such an award would bring attention to the situation and, as a by-product, maybe allow a text to be written that probably wouldn’t be written because the market wouldn’t pay for it. If you think of the first winner, Pauline Yao writing about what I call the “semi-industrial production methods” of Chinese artists, I think this is a topic the market and the galleries wouldn’t finance.

So in that sense, a text can get written that otherwise wouldn’t have been. I also still see it as a tool to point to other issues in the art operating system of China. This award is a good tool, it creates attention, gains publicity, it maybe even creates some solutions. There are many more issues that could be looked at.

But of course, I have my limitations. So far, with few exceptions, I have paid the bill.

There is a limit to what we can do for financial reasons. We did get sponsorship from M+ for the last years and in the past, from time to time, we got a little contribution from sponsors.

I was always hoping I would find Chinese institutions, Chinese collectors, individuals, media, whatever, and I would be so happy to hand it over to them. It shouldn’t be an ‘Uli Sigg thing’. I’ve said this so many times!

But so far it hasn’t happened. I am convinced it is a very good concept, not because I created it, but because it is really a very useful thing to develop this Chinese art operating system in a good way, since it creates debate and contemporary art is about this. It ought to exist in order to debate, to develop through and to find its place through debate. That place, of course, is a dynamic issue. It’s not exactly, “so this is the winner”; it is more why is this the winner, or why would other people not consider this to be the winner? It is really about this.

Whether or not ‘so-and-so’ is the best artist in China is not the point, but why could this artist be considered the best? I think we have contributed much to this debate.

CM: There are other awards now, but the award that really counts is still the CCAA. US: This is true because of three things.

Firstly, it is totally independent, it is not tied to a company name. It would have been very easy for me to bring in a sponsor or someone to foot the bill if I were to allow a name other than the CCAA, but this would then create some dependency. Secondly, there are absolutely no ties to an artist. With other awards, the winner must donate a work. It’s a very mixed blessing when the winner is obliged to give them a work. With the CCAA, there is absolutely no obligation upon an artist. He or she simply receives the prize and that’s it. Thirdly, it has a purely academic jury of very important people of the art world: for example Harald Szeemann, Alanna Heis, Chris Dercon, Ruth Noack or Hans Ulrich Obrist. Then there are the Chinese jurors who all have weight in the Chinese art scene.

I try to bring in the people who will do the next big thing, so that they can see the Chinese art before they do it. This has had a big impact.

If you look at the documenta of Ruth Noack, there were seven or eight Chinese artists.

With the last documenta, Carolyn ChristovBakargiev was not introduced, let us say, in a systematic way to Chinese contemporary art and so only two mainland Chinese artists were

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included. It made a difference. (Actually, she was a jury member after documenta. I invited her to participate, to get to know her.) But it makes a big difference—it means twice as many Chinese artists in documenta and the Venice Biennale, because somebody recommends them. So the jury has been very important to me. I want it to be half Chinese—Chinese experts—and the other half international experts.

CM: What are your hopes for the CCAA’s future?

US: I hope it will gain a place like the Turner Prize has done in the UK in setting and magnifying an agenda for debate. I would also hope for more Chinese people participating in the running of the award. The CCAA is not to do with me, it is there for China. And more awards under CCAA, because there are still topics that need to be debated in China.

Notes 1 “[Szeeman] became the first curator to include multiple contemporary Chinese artists in a traditionally Westernoriented institution. He also juxtaposed more well known artists with up-and-coming ones in the same spaces. In order to achieve his vision, Szeemann pushed for the elimination of a previously set age limit to exhibit in the Biennale.” Melanie Tran, ‘Treasures from the Vault: Harald Szeemann’s “Project Files”’, The Getty Iris, 31 May, 2013; http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/ treasures-from-the-vault-harald-szeemanns-project-files/ 2 A sprawling forty-five hectare shipyard and armory complex dating from 1104. Szeeman “supervised the partial renovation of the historic Arsenale complex, which includes the Corderie and Artiglierie, to be used as exhibition space. One of these buildings was designated for artists whose identifying nations did not already have pavilions of their own…”. ibid.

This interview by Christopher Moore is an edited version of the interview first published in randian online 26 April, 2014; http://www. randian-online.com/np_feature/15-years-ofccaa-interview-with-uli-sigg/. Launched in 2010, randian-online.com seeks to promote independent cultural debate in China and to foster intellectual exchange between China and the rest of the world. This means independent commentary on art, artists, exhibitions and galleries, as well as video, architecture and design. Published in Chinese and English, it regularly updates readers on artists, events, exhibitions, film, news, opinion, performance, projects, publications and video; http://www. randian-online.com/

Page 34 Zhang Peili A gust of wind, 2008 2010 Lifetime Contribution Award, Chinese Contemporary Art Awards Photo courtesy the artist and randian online

chinese business

Biljana Ciric The title of this text is borrowed from Mladen Stilinovic’s artwork produced in 2010, which I presented at the Times Museum, Guangzhou, in 2013, in the exhibition One Step Forward, Two Steps Back–Us and Institution, Us as Institution. Stilinovic’s Chinese Business is comprised of black and white photographs of miners and steel mill workers, which he had cut out from Swedish publications relating to industrial history, during his residency at Iaspis (International Artists Studio Program in Sweden). The final image in this series shows the workers lying on the ground. What had happened? Did the value of their labour become such that they couldn’t continue working?

Were they taking a break between shifts; were they just too tired? Or maybe they were on a strike? This last image is very much connected with his earlier work Artist at Work from the 1970s, showing artists in bed, sleeping or thinking, depending on the perspective of the viewer. This work was Stilinovic’s critique of former socialist Yugoslavia’s ideological imagery of labour and workers. What Stilinovic evaluated in former Eastern European artists’ existence as crucial was the luxury of leisure time, or what he called “laziness”, stating that without “laziness” there is no art.

Being in the midst of Hong Kong Art Basel, when all are working towards capitalising upon this opportunity, the notion of leisure, if we still remember how, is something to embrace later—though that temptation presents its difficulties. Indulging in leisure while one’s art peers are taking part in biennales, art fairs and seminars consumes us with the fear of

being left behind, with important opportunities missed. This desperate urge (for production) doesn’t only reflect upon this mania within the art system in China, but the supply-demand relationship of global art.

When Slovene art historian, curator, writer and essayist Igor Zabel talks about the former Eastern European art context, he places The Museum at the pinnacle of the art system.

However, today in China, the art market is at the top of the art system, which changes both the focus and the inner dynamics of this environment immensely. With the art market commanding such a lofty position, it dramatically changes protocols and relationships, where emerging artists have their first solo exhibitions in commercial galleries, and where all the networks within the system—critical writing, museum exhibitions, media and the evaluation of artworks—are very much in keeping with the demands of that market. These conditions not only affect the practices of artists, but also the system’s curatorial standards and ecology.

I would like to reflect upon exhibitionmaking practice within this landscape. When I began working in museums in 2004, artistorganised exhibitions and the role of artist-ascurator were vital for the shaping of my own understanding of what exhibition making might be. Since the late 1970s in China and across the region, most experimental exhibitions were organised by artists and not by us, the curators.

This phenomenon slowly began to change after 2006 with the rapid decline of the artistorganised exhibition, such that today I can say

they barely exist. In contrast to the situation in Southeast Asia, where artist-run initiatives remain a very important aspect of critical discourse in that region, in China the majority of artist-run spaces that opened during late 1990s and early 2000s have closed, mainly due to their failure to redefine their role within their new environment. A further development within the art system has been the professionalisation of the role of the curator, which emerged as the art market’s ruling force between 2006 and 2010. The occasional critics involved in organising exhibitions in the 1980s, who became important mediators for foreign curators in the 1990s, became a professional force around this time.

Introduced into this rapidly developing art system and its networks, ‘the curator’ saw the role as a necessary service—instituting art through his/her own connection to exhibitions. Even today, the role of curator as someone who produces, communicates and organises knowledge is not something widely accepted and supported in China. But unlike the earlier years, the majority of exhibitions are now driven more as a point of engagement for commerce, rather than for any possible interpretation of an artist’s practice and an introduction to new readings or encounters, resulting in what I might refer to as “artists’ happy ending” art production (for commercial outcomes). But here the artist is not solely to blame, for the institutions and the curators are also involved in this process. My working strategy within this environment has been to attempt to slow down the art production-line

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dynamic by curating longer term projects and exhibitions, requiring greater time and space for discussion and the establishment of secure relationships, so that the project might fully develop in all its capacities.

Within China’s larger and more complex role in global political and economical contexts, we will witness further changes in the negotiation of relationships reflected through cultural interaction. One interesting example is the recent exhibition Master of Impressionism: Claude Monet in Shanghai K11, a shopping mall with a gallery space. Showing Monet paintings from a major European museum collection in a shopping mall would have been unheard of fifteen years ago, but now, it seems it will become a more common event in years to come.

China, while it presents a threat through its domestic art market to its European cultural institutional counterparts is thus also their saviour.

While Japan’s regional presence closely reflects that country’s political and economic interests, China—although politically overt in the Southeast Asian region—further exists in conflict with the USA. Whereas the Chinese diaspora—or “huaren” (overseas Chinese)—tends to dominate the economies of most of Southeast Asian countries, there is considerably less desire to be actively involved in broader regional cultural exchange, except when promoting Chinese identity, or the same ‘race, blood and culture’.

Chinese contemporary artists have more or less participated in many regional exhibitions as a point of (politically motivated) inclusion. However, the sporadic nature of this participation has not cultivated any greater interest in developing a discourse with neighbouring localities, and there seems to be little indication that this will change in the future. Conversely, collectors from Southeast Asia compete to buy Chinese artists’ works, their interest directly related to market prices, to which many artists respond as a importance reference, as a symbol of prestige and status to both.

The notion of withdrawal, or laziness, which inspired Stilinovic’s exhibition, actually has its roots in Eastern philosophy and thinking, the seeking of retreat, a place to stay away from public affairs and to contemplate—withdrawal from the mainstream; withdrawal that brings autonomy; withdrawal as an active observer; withdrawal as a form of self-cultivation.

A number of important figures from the

1990s, who used this strategy of radical withdrawal included Song Haidong, Qian Weikang and the New Analyst Group among others, resisted the beginnings of this supplydemand relationship, which is today the common mode of operation.

After Song Haidong’s Venice Biennale participation in 1993, he slowly withdrew from contemporary art circles, although he still maintains his practice today. In organising a number of exhibitions in Hua Shan Art School with Shi Yong in the early 1990s, Qian Weikang proposed a new understanding of art beyond an ideological reading, making a radical departure from the art world in 1996. In an interview I conducted with him in 2009 he recalled; “Socialist countries at certain stages all develop this response, you feel very disgusted by these affairs… and hate these approaches. You would search for freedom that has nothing to do with ideology”.

The New Analyst Group, consisting of artists Gu Dexin, Wang Luyan and Chen Shaoping, began as a collective in 1988. After their first exhibition they realised that their work had transcended the gallery wall—their practice requiring reading, as books, rather than the visual experience of the exhibition —becoming a considerable challenge for them as this necessitated the revoking of the gallery work of art as the final presentation in the art system. They ceased collaborating in 1995 while in the middle of exhibition discussions with the Guggenheim Museum, when they could no longer justify continuing. In many ways the New Analyst Group’s working methodology was closely connected with Gu Dexin’s withdrawal from active involvement in the art system—probably the last artists to pursue this strategy.

Today the notion (if not practice) of withdrawal is rare, as many artists eagerly embrace the protocols of the art system, seduced by the desire for prestige and wealth, while very few decide to remain at the margins. This latter positioning does not represent nostalgia for the ‘old times’, nor does it suggest antipathy for capitalism and the economic order it imposes.

For those who do it, it is not a face off against the institution of art. Rather, it is not giving oneself over to any order. Some artist examples.

This practice of active withdrawal can also be traced to the performance art of Manila-based artist Judy Freya Sibayan, who began to redefine her position in 1994, initiating Scapular Gallery Nomad with artists’ ‘art exhibitions’ carried in

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hand sewn pouches (scapulars) in her clothes, her body being the gallery site. This later developed into Museums of Mental Objects (MoMos), in which artists whispered their artworks to Sibayan, their exhibition being the recitation of the artists’ names and works and the ‘artwork’ wholly dependent on how well they were retained as memories. This de-centred art practice presented the flow of the everyday, the unseen, the unnoticed, the banal, the common, the routine, registering the small and inconsequential, in contrast to the significant or momentous in an artist’s life.

It is therefore an alternative to the heroic, the spectacular, the precious and the extraordinary in art. As a parodic inversion and an institutional critique, it located the everyday within the same space as that of dominant art, discourses and ideologies.

The Singaporean artist Tang Da Wu’s influence on the local art scene is considerable and especially his performance interaction Don’t Give Money to the Arts (1995) is both legendary and of mythical status in the region.

It is important to note that his importance is actually as a result of his actions and contribution to the local art scene, rather than through any institutional recognition. Although the Singapore art environment is flourishing through a strong art market and government investment in infrastructure (museums, art fairs, biennales etc.), he still refuses to be canonised by the latter. The Singapore Art Museum has for a number of years tried unsuccessfully to present a solo exhibition of his work, but in response he organised his own exhibition of paintings and performance documentation in front of the Museum, handing out his catalogues to the visiting public. This action not only presented a critique of the institutionalisation of art, but was also that of the role of the artist within that dilemma.

Don’t Give Money to the Arts was his response to the government’s then recent banning of performance art; his action being an insight into the current art system. During the opening of Singapore Art ’95, Tang Da Wu staged a “performance intervention” directed towards, as sole-audience member, the then President Ong Teng Cheong. Tang, wearing a black jacket, the back of which featured a sign that read, “Don’t give money to the arts” gave the President a note, on which was handwritten; “Dear Mr. President, I am an artist, I am important, yours sincerely, Tang Da Wu.”

CHINESE BUSINESS

Zheng Guogu began his Empire project in Yangjiang in 2001, determining a new positioning within in the Chinese art system.

In 2000 he bought a piece of land from a farmer on the outskirts of Yangjiang, after which he acquired more and more land, continually expanding, reflecting upon the computer game Age of Empires, where Empire, although “not a fixed, viewable work enclosed within an interior space… extended into an even truer living space, which comprises the entire process of dwelling in a spatial location, from conceptual ideal to practical implementation, to day-today living”.1 The project later became Liao Yuan, or the “Accomplished Garden”, a kind of artificially created literati garden with several buildings serving as studios and exhibition halls, a retreat for artists, where “everything can be art and art is everything”. In contrast to this idyll however, Liao Yuan’s existence was far more complex. Through the action of retreating into this space, the artist became immersed in the greyer areas of China’s society and legal system, especially the purchase of land.

Above Li Liao Art is Vacuum installation views White Space, Beijing, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist Opposite Li Liao Spring Breeze, 2011 Performance Photo courtesy the artist

After being a very active member of the Thai art community during the 1990s, Bangkokbased artist Chitti Kasemkitvatana undertook an eight-year hiatus as a monk in the forest monasteries of Chiang Mai, returning as an artist in 2010. His Buddhist thinking has deeply influenced his practice and interpretation of the everyday. Kasemkitvatana’s objects are minimal in nature, their role being a device of decoding publicly shared information and objects through the acts of both appearance and disappearance. His work stands as “a concept of emptiness, of the presence of the absent/absence with particular focus on its permeability. The Thai artist draws no distinctions, either between various positions in the art world, or between art and everything else, spirituality for instance”.2 Kasemkitvatana has said of his work that it has gone beyond the white cube, the construct of the art exhibition and being part of art history. What remains is the memory of the work and the experience of those involved around it. Kasemkitvatana keeps rubbings from his work, before giving them another life by giving them away. This act of giving away, of revoking the art object, is seen by the artist as an act of transmission, rather than one of negation, making the status of the art object and the authority of the artist both temporal and dynamic. This approach, more crucial to individual experience, also creates a testing ground for the act of seeing or looking at art, which is very much embedded in the museum and white cube tradition.

Another Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong, also Bangkok-based, attempts to redefine an understanding of Stilinovic’s Artists at Work and what it means for the artist to both work and take ‘time out’. His art practice re-proposes the rituals of labour and human agency through a larger social context. One of the better-known examples of his work is the Give More Than You Take (2010) project, in which during a residency in France he travelled to northern Sweden to join Thai workers picking berries. While there he sent text messages each day to his project curator in France about the weight of berries he had picked, whereupon the curator had to collect materials of an equivalent weight to present in the gallery, thereby presenting the curator with the responsibility of realising the artwork. His constant research in countries such as Africa, or his homeland Thailand, at first glance seems to have little in commonality, but by using global circulation and exchange networks, and turning them into tools for selfreflection, Pratchaya Phinthong has explored important issues relating to transaction and exchange regulated by the rules of commerce and economics.

In order to present the work Give More Than You Take for the exhibition One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Us and Institution, Us as Institution, I proposed, together with curator Maja Ciric, establishing the project Gift Exchange, which would further reflect upon the possibilities of exchange within the art system and the so-called global art network.

Initiated in 2014, the project attempts to create

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CHINESE BUSINESS

alliances between institutions, individuals and sites that lack connectivity within the global art system, based on their lack of economic ties, but which share similar positions as platforms for the activation of new connections and research. This initiative, concurrent with the Give More Than You Take project will attempt to explore the possibilities of existence beyond the exhibition period, through a research residency program for artists, taking into consideration Pratchaya Phinthong’s practice of art beyond the gallery space, where the latter’s presentation is only the final point in a sequence of ongoing negotiations.

Among the younger generation of artists, it is a somewhat problematic idea to discuss the concept of active withdrawal as a way of ‘involvement’, as this methodology not only requires time for consideration, selfreflection, positioning and repositioning, but taking such a stance is less acceptable to the art system.

A number of artworks by Shenzhenbased artist Li Liao takes up this position of “laziness” referred to earlier in the work of Stilinovic. In his exhibition Art in Vacuum at White Space in Beijing in 2013, Li presented a neon light work in Chinese calligraphic characters that translated into the exhibition title, as well as Marathon—a performance simultaneously broadcast on a television in front of him—where he slept on a sofa for four hours. In Spring Breeze (2011) he was affixed to an office building for a day by a bike lock around his neck.

Tang Dixin, in his recent ongoing performance work titled Rest is the Best Way of Revolution No. 1 (2013) literally forces us to ‘take a break’. Viewers are coerced by the artist through the placing of plaster casts on their limbs into immobilising their movement.

These occasional ‘breaks’ are of only a short duration, but Tang thus “controls the spatial relationship between his own physical form and that of the viewer… he is aware that this space is temporary and theatrical, and performs the epitome of unstable systems of the art world and society”.3

As New York-based performance artist Andrea Fraser has stated, “we are all trapped in our field”.4 This current predicament has forced many regional artists to reflect upon the art system as an institution of multiple complexities operating simultaneously on local and international levels, uncovering previously unacknowledged questions of the kind of systems in operation and how to respond to the danger of being consumed by them.

This ‘new guard’ of regional artists, through their active withdrawal, has exposed a discursive reflection from within, upon both knowledge production and critique of these systems and the larger social framework.

Through their art practices, they have posed questions such as: what does it mean to be an artist and to exhibit something? What does it mean to exhibit yourself, to be seen in such a way? What does it mean to dream of exhibiting in a museum, and to reconfigure the museum ritual (of exhibiting, performing, etc.)? In doing so, they have not only interrogated the mechanics and protocols of the art world, but also those of the artist and the curator, between action and statement.

It is obvious that the younger generation is withdrawing from both spectacular and abstract social themes in their artwork, retaining some connectivity however, through the concept of the everyday. Social and political critique in Chinese contemporary art and the greater region has become quite clichéd, having standardised local expectations, with critical writing and/or journalism presenting very little constructive contemplation of new operating models as opposition to the existing State system.

Again, the younger generation is mostly, with the exception of a few individual artists, accustomed to engaging the white cube and its settings, so rarely do we see work that critiques that dynamic. This overall acceptance of the white cube has much to do with the differing environments, in which these artists began their artistic practices, in contrast to the previous generation, where collective self-organised work and self-initiated

exposure brought them new possibilities of understanding the exhibition space and making work in public. What is lacking today in many regional artists’ work is the desire to re-think the exhibition ritual, or to cite Dorothea von Hantellmant words, “to give back to the autonomous object something of the embeddedness it has generally lost in being exhibited; to anchor it, not only in context but in a ritual, in a temporally, socially and intersubjectively situated event.”5

Such contemplation of the exhibition ritual might pose a new set of relationships within existing institutional models. Only through expanding the relationship between time and space, between the artwork and the exhibition, between artists, curators, institutions and the audience, and analysing the conditions of encounter between all elements, can a new set of system protocols emerge. I view this as a possible avenue for active withdrawal—a withdrawal from the image of the artist as cultural entertainer that the popularisation of culture is forcing upon us (and not only in China)—an understanding of active withdrawal as a strategy for rethinking and re-imagining existing art system relationships, as opposed to the pursuit of commonplace rituals, as a reflection of the powerlessness of our imagination.

Notes 1 http://www.vitamincreativespace.com/en/?artist=zhengguogu 2 http://www.berliner-kuenstlerprogramm.de/en/gast. php?id=1240 3

http://www.otafinearts.com/en/exhibitions/2014/post_97/

4

Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, Artforum vol. 44, no. 1, 2005: 278-285 5 Dorothea von Hantelmann, ‘Notes on the Exhibition: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 088’, 100 Notes-100 Thoughts/100 Notizen-100, Gedanken: documenta 13, 2012

This text is an edited version of the paper presented 17 May 2014 during Art Basel Hong Kong, at the seminar ‘Art and Values’ in Hong Kong, moderated by David Elliott, organised by Osage Art Foundation and City University of Hong Kong, in conjunction with the exhibition Market Forces: Erasure–From Conceptualism to Abstraction, curated by Charles Merewether.

Other speakers were Kurt Chan, Jens Hoffmann, Charles Merewether and Enin Supriyanto; see http://www.oaf.cc/Projects/Market%20 Froces%202014.html

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neon hong kong Robin Peckham When, early in 2013, reports came to light that the iconic neon cow advertising Sammy’s Kitchen, which hangs over Queen’s Road West was scheduled to be removed at the end of the year, its disappearance was hardly a foregone conclusion. Public opinion, in the media and in the legislature, was squarely on its side, but the Buildings Department had somehow discovered, thirty-four years after it was installed that it extended into public space; following the redevelopment of Sai Ying Pun, driven largely by the Urban Renewal Authority, as well as the entrance of food-and-beverage entrepreneurs, this came as no surprise.

The real revelation was that the artefact would be acquired and preserved by none other than M+, Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture. This object is a fittingly odd addition to the collection: green and blue neon on the field of a brown cow, protruding from a tight corner roughly demarcating the turn from gentrified Sheung Wan into gentrifying Sai Ying Pun, surrounded on all sides by stores selling offerings and sacrifices for the dead. Of course, what accompanies the sign as it enters the museum is more than its immediate context.

It also bears with it the mythology of Sammy’s, itself something of an outlier situated several gastronomic notches above the “soy sauce Western” of Tai Ping Koon, which nevertheless retains the aura of a theme park diner. In its signifier and in its signified, Sammy’s represents not the garishly elegant noir of cinematic Hong Kong, but rather a place equally as contrived but far less composed.

When curators speak of urgency and the need for certain projects to be realised in the right places and at the right times, the vocabulary is usually either one of social justice or political intervention. In the case of M+, it seems more than likely that their entire neon research project was propelled by the debate around Sammy’s sign and its eventual acquisition. Nevertheless, as a field of analysis the neon sign is a fascinating thing.

Above Sketches from the archive of Nam Wah Neonlight & Electrical Mfy Ltd and Neco Company Ltd since the 1940s, created by designers whose names remain unknown; http://www.neonsigns.hk/making-of-neon-signs/neon-sketches/?lang=en#2 Photos courtesy M+, Hong Kong

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As Aric Chen, curator of design and architecture at the museum, notes in his introduction to the project, it is positioned at the intersection of industry or technology, craft or design and visual culture. Neon is overdetermined in Hong Kong popular culture, a fetish object of the local cinema, as well as the current nostalgic lust for authenticity that has made its presence felt across the board, from contemporary art to comics and poetry. In this light, the neon sign both opens itself up to public interpretation and offers a surprising test case for the stillcontroversial methodologies at the heart of M+’s curatorial structure in terms of interdisciplinarity, locality and contemporaneity.

What is urgent about neon, then, might not be Sammy’s cow at all, but rather the definition of M+ as an institution, particularly as it ventures beyond the more familiar territory of the contemporary art museum for one of the first times. (Its maiden voyage into design was the exhibition Building M+, which exhibited material related to the future museum building, as well as tangentially related works from the art and architecture collections.)

This raises questions about the nature of curatorial scholarship in contemporary design, particularly as it is practised in Asia.

Here the answer is simple: for the most part, it simply does not exist. Design research at M+ will have to draw from a constellation of resources, including folk collections of consumer objects like Douglas Young’s G.O.D. Street Culture Museum and the Tao Heung Museum of Food Culture; commercially oriented venues like the OCT Creative Exhibition Centre or OCT Art and Design Gallery in Shenzhen, both of which exhibit but do not research or collect; and events like Beijing Design Week, which are arguably home to some of the more rigorous, if necessarily compromised design research in Asia. (A recently announced collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the developer China Merchants Group, also planned for Shenzhen, could shift this status quo.) In this scenario, the interdisciplinarity of curatorial research, as opposed to historical scholarship in the academy, becomes particularly important, as M+ will be able to draw on a variety of methodologies as it looks toward design—the neon project, for instance, provides thoughtful discussions of art, film, photography, and ethnography that inform its core design research. M+, in this regard, is quite unique as a museum that essentially consists of teams of independent curators; clearly, much

has been learned in the explosion of curatorial practice outside of the collecting institution over the past two decades, and it is an exciting experiment for these lessons to be brought back into a canonical cultural organisation.

All this is brought to bear most directly on the two signs that have made it into the M+ collection to date: the cow from Sammy’s Kitchen (designed around 1977), and a rooster from the Kai Kee Mahjong Parlour (designed around 1976 and previously located in Kwun Tong, consisting of a detailed rendering of a painted bird surrounded by the same bluish neon silhouette). But, from a curatorial perspective, some of the most interesting inclusions in the collection might actually be the archives of two neon workshops, Nam Wah Neonlight & Electrical Mfy. Ltd. and Neco Company Ltd., which have contributed to the museological project an extensive series of full-colour sketches of signs that offer insight into the visual vocabularies of sign production at various historical junctures. The sketches are invariably anonymous, but are often signed by the client, and colourfully painted blocks contrast with more casual pencil markings that demarcate the forms, logos, and processes behind the work. The notational vocabularies of these archives are most effectively mobilised

by Keith Lam, a designer and researcher with Hong Kong Polytechnic University, whose

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commissioned essay ‘The Architecture of Communication: The Visual Language of Hong Kong’s Neon Signs’ breaks down elements such as sign placements and orientations, the roles of Chinese and English typography, the influence of calligraphy, and the contrast between night and day visuals, in order to build an understanding of how these signs have contributed to the visual texture of the urban fabric.

In addition to being the nascent museum’s baptism into the world of curatorial design research, Neonsigns.hk, as indicated in the title, is also M+’s first online-first project, with the bulk of its content and production housed on a website, rather than digital content following events or sites. Several of the institution’s previous initiatives, including the popular series of lectures and panels ‘M+ Matters’, have also had remarkably strong web presences; one of the series of talks under this mantle, ‘Framing Asian Design Histories’, makes available a handful of scholarly papers on the work of design research.

This focus on the internet as a platform displays a strong grasp of core audiences: Hong Kong, with a smartphone penetration rate pushing ninety percent, is a place that exists online as much as it does on the map, and likewise is situated within a series of networks—the global art world among them—that makes audiences

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for its cultural conversation a rather distributed proposition. What happens in Hong Kong curatorial research matters almost as much for mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore as it does for Hong Kong, for instance. By building its programs along these lines, Neonsigns has managed to engage its audiences on multiple levels, presenting commissioned essays in parallel with a crowd sourced map of neon signs across the city. The museum happens, so to speak, in sites potentially far removed from its home in West Kowloon.

This matters because M+ has not yet moved into its proverbial home, and is currently in the process of defining itself solely through projects like Mobile M+. A rare opportunity, perhaps, as the program is built solely on the activities of collection, exhibition, and interpretation, rather than the cohesiveness and engagement of a piece of public infrastructure.

Neonsigns.hk is the seventh such exhibition or event to contribute to this effort, and fits well in the general scheme of things: like the crowd-pleasing outdoor sculptures of Inflation!, its crowd sourced elements speak directly to public exposure; like M+ Matters it produces serious research; like Yaumatei it operates in neighbourhoods and locations that would not necessarily be on the international art radar of the city. Thanks to Matters and Neonsigns, M+ has identified its form of curatorial practice with publishing—often in novel forms beyond the standard coffee table tomes of current catalogue formats—as much as with exhibitionmaking, and has so far avoided the perils of the wonkier side of art historical research (the audience is assured that this will slowly make its way into the program once a significant level of public interest has been established). Again one is reminded of the intersectionality and interdisciplinarity that neon signs represent, speaking as they do to vernacular visual cultures, film, art and graphic communication, in addition to the man on the street; their selection and treatment here speaks to the freedom of non-institutional curatorial practice, as much as the potential foundation for a rigorous design museum.

In many ways, the vernacular language of Hong Kong culture is circumscribed far in advance. Particularly in the decade spanning 2000-10, one could hardly visit a painting show, watch a film, open an illustrated book, read a poem, or listen to independent music without happening upon “tonglau“ tenement facades, “chacaanteng“ diner floor

tiles and formica booths, pineapple buns, public housing window grills, mahjong tiles, or hand towels printed with roosters. While the texture of Hong Kong is varied across the city, certain elements build into a consciousness of place that is remarkably uniform, amplified in a limited number of media sources, paper and electronic, that are redistributed to a finite audience. It is difficult for art to intervene in this cultural space, and indeed many artists are crippled during the emerging stages of their careers by a hyper-awareness of identitarian quirks that proceed from post-1997 debates about “Chineseness” and international “universalism”. Before contemporary art hit the mainstream around 2007, Hong Kong visual culture was far better defined by the novel ideas produced in popular music, video production, independent film and local theatre. With Neonsigns.hk, one possibility for the interpretation of these relationships finally arises, but its enthusiasm for making connections fades precisely when a turn towards criticality becomes necessary.

For this project, for instance, M+ curator Tobias Berger authors an essay surveying the history of neon in art, primarily European, American and Japanese, and the novelist Lawrence Pun writes on the appearance of neon in film and literature. Unfortunately, their references do not come together on a level that could be further constructive in terms of actually analysing the specific phenomena at hand; Keith Lam’s design research, for instance, does not draw from these texts.

There is certainly no shortage of celebration of the local and vernacular here.

The short web video The Making of Neon Signs, immaculately produced by Cpak Studio, speaks directly to a very hip visual language that has emerged from Hong Kong cinema and spread through various global fashion communities, and was by far the most widely circulated artefact of the Neonsigns project, exceeding even participation in the crowd sourcing photography exercise. Then there is cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s video essay Filming in the Neon World, consisting largely of collected clips of movies on which he has worked. Finally, photographer and director Wing Shya includes a series of portraits and textual vignettes on people living above or adjacent to particularly bright neon signs. These aspects of the project serve to personalise it and make an argument for

the role that neon signs have played in Hong Kong landscapes, both cultural and geographic. Nevertheless, something is missing when it comes to connections that could be made between these various forms; there is something just slightly too cloying, sentimental when it should be critical. M+ has been open about its fundamental need to build an audience, but it should be doing so in a way that goes beyond reinforcing and celebrating the beliefs and predispositions potential viewers already hold.

Perhaps this is the key question that M+, and any institution belonging to the contemporary art world in Hong Kong, needs to locate a balanced answer to: how far should it go in indulging an audience for the sake of audience, and how far should it go in challenging this same audience? Neonsigns.hk is cognisant of the fact that it needs to keep both terms of this equation in mind, which is why it commissions both a half dozen well-researched essays on various topics and a beautiful and sprawling map of the city, to which anyone can upload annotated photographs of neon signs.

It has both engaged a cross-section of its publics and taught them something in the process.

But there is a certain form of work that goes unconsidered here, and that is the presentation of analysis based on data and other material collected in public crowd sourcing efforts.

Like Asia Art Archive and Para Site before it, M+ appears particularly strong in crafting personal narratives to explain broader cultural phenomena. With Neonsigns, this includes a series of commissioned audio tours of neonheavy blocks narrated by Liu Wai Tong, a poet and Choi Sai Ho, a musician, among others.

But as to how this extremely local geography might feed back into the art historical processes Tobias Berger discusses, or how Christopher Doyle’s neon-tinged camerawork might be critically analysed against the specific cultural formations of the Hong Kong street or contemporary art—the audience is left to its own devices (or, worse, left with the ravings of an unreliable narrator) precisely when it most requires an interpretive guide. While M+ has succeeded in constituting a new geography for art in Hong Kong, its map remains imperfect.

Pages 42-43 Public photo submissions of Hong Kong neon lights http://www.neonsigns.hk/?lang=en Photos courtesy M+, Hong Kong

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no country Tony Godfrey No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, held first at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, then in Hong Kong and at the recently launched Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore, is an exhibition of thirty-two artworks by twenty-seven artists or groups from twelve countries.1 The exhibition’s full title—or so it is announced on the catalogue cover—is Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative, Volume 1: South and Southeast Asia.

It has been curated by the Singaporean June Yap. The eighteen countries of South and Southeast Asia have over 2,200,000,000 million people living in them.

Can we close our eyes and imagine that the whole history of colonisation, capitalism and industrialisation was different?

Can you imagine East is West and West is East?

Imagine further and that not New York City but Singapore has been the centre of the cultural world for the last sixty years. I know it’s a hard thing to imagine, but try! This exhibition No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia would be like giving some lucky white curator a grand budget of maybe $AUD500,000 to mount an exhibition to show what is happening in the art worlds of Europe, North and South America (plus Australia) in a couple of small galleries in the rooms of the world famous Singapore Art Museum.

(The population of those four continents is in comparison a mere 1,700,000,000.) Would you be excited as an Australian to be so represented (assuming an Australian artist would sneak in to such a construct) and would you be excited when the exhibition finally came to Sydney?

Certainly this exhibition has been touted as something quite extraordinary in Singapore. Partly, this has been understandable in it being selected by one of its nationals, curator June Yap. More so it is over hyped, seen as giving art from the region some very real validation. Given the problematic nature of the title and the sheer indigestibility of the official title, it is no surprise that it is invariably

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called “The Guggenheim Show”. Perhaps that should be put in capitals—THE GUGGENHEIM SHOW! In the consumer culture of Singapore brands matter and Guggenheim is one of the biggest art brands. What this implicitly signifies is an acute lack of cultural self-confidence.

Neither an artist nor an art scene has ‘made it’ until acknowledged by an art authority from either the USA or Western Europe. Despite the plethora of museums, auction houses and galleries, Chinese artists still see an exhibition in the West as a crucial sign of recognition.

This is, of course, neither a new phenomenon, nor one confined to Asia. It demonstrates they are of international standard—Australian artists were desperate to be shown in the UK in the 1950s, English artists were desperate to

be shown in the USA during the 1960s, and so on. Reputedly when the artists of the Italian Transavantgarde (Clemente, Chia, Cucchi & Paladino) first showed abroad in Germany in 1980, all they wanted was to be able to say; “We have shown abroad” and gain some cultural kudos back home by doing so. It was a big surprise when they sold work there and rapidly became galacticos of the 1980s Art World.

This over-excitement at Guggenheimisation also reflects upon the structural failure of the art institutions within Southeast Asia. (I should add here that most of my remarks relate specifically to Southeast Asia. India and the other South Asian countries are a continent in themselves. It is absurd to put them all together in one exhibition.

Most artists in Southeast Asia relate more to China than India and of course even more to the West.) There are no museums here that have anything remotely like the history or international prestige of the Guggenheim.

In fact there are very few museums showing contemporary art and most of those are chronically underfunded. The Singapore Art Museum has yet to convince many people in the region of its calibre; university museums such as Vargas and the Ateneo in Manila, or National University of Singapore have serious programs but limited funding. The National Museums in Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta are stymied by their lack of funds and clear governance. There is a growing number of private museums, the most prestigious and

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long standing being the OHD museum in Magelang, Indonesia, but they are inevitably partial and disinclined to either support anything that might be termed “research” or art outside the personal taste of the owner.

Sometimes the word “museum” is used here in a way that should warrant prosecution under a trade descriptions act: in Singapore the so-called “Museum of Contemporary Art” or “MOCA” is in fact just a commercial gallery devoted to selling third level kitschy Chinese art.

Validation for artists in Southeast Asia, in the absence of both a museum structure and any serious art magazines, comes more from auction sales, not just Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but an increasing number of local auction houses. Asian collectors like buying

from auctions. The auction houses, including Sotheby’s and Christie’s ask for and collect works, mainly paintings, directly from many artist’s studios, something unheard of in Europe or the USA. This in turn has a negative knock-on effect on commercial galleries, which being thus undercut are less able to support adventurous art. The somewhat spurious validation that the auction houses offer does not inevitably extend to artists making installations, videos, films or anything photographic.

(No Country has three paintings only so it can be seen as presenting exactly what the auction houses do not.) Regional biennales such as those in Jogjakarta and Singapore may give some validation to an artist, but a biennale external to the region counts for far

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more. As international curators rarely visit places such as Manila or Jogjakarta—and if they do it is only for the briefest and most superficial of glances—those artists subsequently included in international events and publications are those who have moved to New York or a European metropolis. Typically, the only artist from Southeast Asia included in the main exhibition of the last Venice Biennale was Vietnamese-born Danh Vo, who has lived in Denmark since the age of four. There were a small number of Asian artists included in Benjamin Buchloh et al.’s Art since 1900, but all of them had lived in New York. Melissa Chiu’s Contemporary Asian Art included more artists living in New York City than in the whole of Southeast Asia. Inevitably then, a gig at the

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Guggenheim is a very big deal if you come from Southeast Asia and haven’t got the money to live in New York. No one from this region is going to protest against a New York museum showing some interest in ‘far away places’.

To be honest, all attempts to show art from different countries and cultures are a thoroughly good thing. But when one researches the plethora of websites about this Guggenheim “initiative” they may start to feel somewhat uneasy—“The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative allows us to spotlight regions often underrepresented in the international art scene. These regions have immense economic potential and are challenging assumptions in many disciplines. Many of our clients are passionate about art, and our collaboration with the Guggenheim is an ideal fit with our long-term objectives: the promotion, education and collection of art among a wide audience both international and local” (my italics).2

There was certainly an extravagant handing out of hardback exhibition catalogues and a comparable opening. From another website it can be discovered that UBS supposedly put $US40 million into this and two subsequent exhibitions of Latin American and Middle Eastern art. (One could suspect a surprisingly small amount of that has gone into acquisitions, perhaps less than five percent.

As often occurs when a pile of money gets thrown at the art world, the artists get very little of it.) “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (Beware of Greeks bearing gifts)” are the words Virgil put into the Trojan priest Laocoön’s mouth in the Aeniad. Perhaps we should also beware of gifts from international bankers.

It won’t be the first or last exhibition wafted to the gallery on the breath of international finance and I guess we just have to live with that. But what sort of exhibition is it? The title gives it a poetic quality. Or is it an exhibition with a critical premise? Or, just a survey, or even an exhibition of recent acquisitions by a museum?

It’s all of those.

I am apprehensive about the title.

Yap explains its source at the beginning of her catalogue essay, which approximates the opening line of William Butler Yeats’ 1928 poem Sailing to Byzantium—“THAT is no country for old men”.3 Perhaps because I have an MA in Anglo-Irish literature (or Hiberno-English if one prefers) and studied Yeats quite intensely, using this from his poem in this fashion here is irritating. I am not against poetic titles—nearly thirty years ago curators Barry Barker and John Thompson used a poem by T.S. Eliot as part of an exhibition and a line from it as its title: ‘Falls the Shadow’ at the Hayward Gallery in London.

It made sense. One read the poem then anew,

printed in the catalogue and pasted on the wall as well, because of the works—and the works anew because of the poem. But in this instance, Yeats’ poem is not included in the catalogue and if it were I doubt anyone in Singapore could work out how it connected to the exhibition.

The phrase was used by Cormac McCarthy for his 2005 novel which was later shot as a movie by the Coen brothers in 2007. What Yap claims is to “draw from this intertextual journey of this title and theme (from poem to novel to movie to exhibition) the ideas of transmission, translation and adaption across place, time and form that characterise the histories, cultures and knowledges of the region”.4

Yap reiterates in an interview that, “the title in its literal sense is about the idea of borderlessness—the possibility of exceeding geopolitical delineations and confines, or not privileging the standard categories invoked in regional exhibitions. No Country reflects a shift of curatorial framing from didacticism to a more dialogical approach.”5 Elsewhere, in a press release, she writes that “In this exhibition, the intention is to present the range of aesthetic developments and subjects of interest to contemporary artists, and to challenge the privileging of nation and national narrative as a basis for understanding them.”6

So it is not really a poetic exhibition: is it one with a critical premise? The above could be read as a disclaimer to having a clear theme or premise, other than that things are always changing. And if we are honest, there is no way that a production of this size could be coherent and good as an exhibition, unless it was so tightly themed as to be in no way representative.

Is it a survey? The curator June Yap says; “The goal was to present notable artists with critical practices whose works, in being absorbed into the museum’s collection, can become the foundation for further engagement and research into the region.”7 So it is a ‘sort of’ survey, but only of those artists with a critical practice. How do you define that? How do you assess when an artist has a critical practice or not? And critical how, and of what? Politics?

Art institutions? Formal issues? Globalism?

Surely every artist would claim to be thoughtful about what they do—medium, context and meaning. Call it “recent acquisitions” and we are being honest, but of course such a title does not appeal to the marketing team, who more or less run the mega museums.

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One would expect an exhibition of recent acquisitions to state these are the best or most representative works of a region. Is there not something a bit odd about an exhibition of recent acquisitions for a museum that is a “selection of artworks that possess dialectical character, in that while endeavouring to forge community in the region, they also engage with the complications of the identity and representation of those entities that go by the name of nation”?8

One realises what an impossible position the curator is placed in: no-one from South or Southeast Asia would turn down the chance for a fellowship at the Guggenheim Museum and curate an exhibition. But the reach of this resulting exhibition is ridiculously large. The phrase “no country” looks like a very reasonable way of sidestepping the need to talk about the very different regions and seventeen very different nations. The inclusion of the Otolith group from London is a further device for pointing out that this is more about art and thinking about art (“critical practices?”) than nationalisms. But Yap’s remit was to produce something like a survey, show it in a relatively small space in the Guggenheim Museum and buy the works with an inadequate budget.

And for professional recognition, to also make it seem coherent somehow—an impossible task.

In English schools now students receive prizes both for succeeding and for trying the hardest.

Here Yap certainly deserves the second. She has probably made the best of what amounts to an untenable situation and a flawed proposition.

What else did the Guggenheim Museum acquire last year? As far as one can deduce from their last five-year acquisition show, not great things by auction standards.

The explosion or hyperinflation of art prices has left museums stranded. Like it or not, many of the best (or at least most influential) artists by any standards are on the auction circuit. How much would it cost the Guggenheim to buy museum quality works by Koons, Kiefer, and Murakami for example? Even a good painting

by Beatriz Milhazes will now cost $US2 million.

Even in Southeast Asia much art is now relatively expensive. The entire budget for this exhibition wouldn’t acquire a single painting by Masriadi, the most highly priced Indonesian artist, let alone a sculpture or installation by the remarkable Thai artist Montien Boonma. As elsewhere, some works that are ‘big in the market’ are spurious trash, of course, but some are also the best and most

influential. Arguably, the both artists are astute and honest enough to make both works that are desirable and works that are critical. Leslie de Chavez, Aytjoe Christine, Louie Cordero, Yee I-Lann, Geraldine Javier, Eko Nugroho and Agus Suwage all feature regularly in auctions and make installations that have little appeal to collectors. This exhibition is actually colourless without artists such as these.

Overall, it seems quite an academic choice—having a critical practice seems like house code for an artist an academic can have a proper conversation with, or for works with ‘issues’ that can be discussed and theorised.

Nevertheless, Yap has managed to buy some remarkably good works: the trio of films shown by Anwar at documenta some years back with their extraordinary images of the IndiaPakistan border crossings intercut with private meditations; a curiously sensual sculpture by Sopheap Pich, and the video by Ho Tzu Nyen shown three years ago at the Venice Biennale.

Curiously “critical practices” inevitably, often, pace the exhibition’s title, requiring that they be attentive to the culture and history of particular nations: how can you understand Vandy Rattana’s photographs of ponds if you don’t know they have been made by American bombs during the Vietnam War, or Anwar’s films if you know nothing of the history of Partition between India and Pakistan? Similarly, malaysian artist Vincent Leong’s work depends on an awareness of racial politics in his country, as do Anwar’s films.

Yap presents her position well, albeit in rather academic language, but one may ask why are the artists themselves without voice in the catalogue: artists from Southeast Asia remain rarely quoted or heard, whereas other parts of the world are awash with interviews.

Ultimately, what is most disturbing about this exhibition is firstly how little note was taken of it in New York and secondly how little criticism, negative and positive, has been made in Southeast Asia. One has to ask, how often will these works be shown in the assorted Guggenheim outlets? Will this Guggenheim initiative be “the foundation for further engagement and research into the region” that Yap asks for or is it just another token gesture?

Fundamentally, I have an uneasy feeling about this exhibition. Despite all the ‘issues’ offered it is rather polite. This thought struck me quite forcibly when I went to Artjog earlier this year. Artjog in Jogjakarta, Indonesia is the only art fair I know that is organised by

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artists, not galleries. At the opening I saw a painting by the senior artist Djoko Pekik of a giant crocodile beside a deep mine shaft, with crowds approaching it, led by the artist himself with his white beard, holding a paint brush like a spear. What does the crocodile represent?

The caption beside the painting read: “Many lives have been lost in our fight for freedom.

It has been sixty-nine years since the declaration of our independence, but the last forty-nine years have seen us torn apart by the gripping forces of the foreign capitalists, who plundered the wealth of our nation down to the roots.

The successors of our nation need to restore our dignity and put a stop to these foreign capitalists’ continual plundering.” The artist stood beside his painting, people smiled to see it and congratulated him. Everyone knows that, as he was associated with the Communist Party, he had been imprisoned for six years under the Suharto regime and almost all his works burnt.

It may not be a sophisticated painting and it may lack academic “critical practice”, but it spoke directly to a wide audience in a way that No Country did not.

Notes 1 In fact not all works were shown in either Hong Kong or Singapore: works by Randy Vattana (Cambodia), Araya Rasjarmrearnsook, Kamin Lertchaiprasert (Thailand), Wah Nu and Tun Win Aung (Myanmar), The Propeller Group (Vietnam) and Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore) Simryn Gill (Malaysia/Australia) amongst other being absent from Singapore 2

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/guggenheim.html

3

June Yap, ‘No country: contemporary art for south and South-East Asia,’ introduction to Guggenheim UBS Map Global initiative. Volume 1: South and South-East Asia, New York: Guggeinheim Museum, 2013: 19 4

ibid: 19

5

June Yap interviewed by Richard Vine; http://www. artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/juneyaps-asia/ 6 http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/press-room/ releases/5867-map-singapore-opening 7

June Yap interviewed by Richard Vine, op cit.

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ibid: 21

Page 45 Tuan Andrew Nguyen Enemy’s Enemy: Monument to a Monument, 2012 Pages 46-47 Navin Rawanchaikul Places of Rebirth, 2009 Page 48 The Otolith Group Communists Like Us (video still), 2006 Photos courtesy the artists and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

revisiting spatiality in video art

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Daniel Szehin Ho LANDSEASKY: Revisiting spatiality in video art, a thematic exhibition of video works meditating on the motif of the horizon, revolves around Horizon, a key series of videos by the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets. The exhibition is structured in search of commonalities in the treatment of horizon, perspective and spatiality, with artists of varying ages and stages in their career, particularly from Australia, South Korea and China, the three countries where this exhibition is touring. Curated by Brisbane-based Kim Machan of MAAP—Media Art Asia Pacific —the Chinese leg of the show was hosted at OCAT Shanghai, a relatively new branch of the OCAT network of exhibition spaces (in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Xi’An, and largely funded by the Overseas Chinese Town, a real estate conglomerate in China). OCAT Shanghai is specifically devoted to media and new media art, and is directed by the celebrated Chinese video artist, Zhang Peili. Such private funding of rather experimental art is not unusual in China—others include the K11 Foundation, Minsheng Museum, Taikang Space, Chronus

Art Center and Yuz Museum, among others— but the institutional context of the exhibition is perhaps worth bearing in mind, as is the news that MAAP has suffered funding cuts in Queensland.1

Jan Dibbets’ three 1971 video works (Horizon I–Sea, Horizon II–Sea, Horizon III–Sea) form the nucleus of the exhibition and inspired its title with the key elements of the horizon. Rather unfortunately, the Chinese translation Hailukong (海陆空; literally “Sea Land Sky”), also evokes militaristic connotations worthy of Paul Virilio, as the term normally refers to the combined armed forces of the army, navy, and air force—whereas the exhibition by and large does not explicitly deal with themes of war and video. Dibbets’ three pieces are relatively short videos in which the horizon of the sea is manipulated and/ or tilted in order to frame the sea in different ways. By manipulating these “real”, indexical moving images, these “natural” landscapes are transformed into geometric abstractions, which disrupt the illusion of reality, while flattening the pictorial space.

It is well worth situating Dibbets’ work within his oeuvre and specifically within the larger context, in order to tease out the actual dialogue between this and other works in the exhibition, as well as to understand some of the possible vectors. Dibbets is in many ways a link between minimal (art), land (art) and video art. One early work by Dibbets, Construction in a Forest, featured one row of tree trunks in a forest painted to a height of six feet, which in its seriality shows the influence of minimalists like Carl Andre and Donald Judd.2 With Minimalism’s interest in seriality and overall spatiality,3 in the late 1960s one move (to put it rather schematically) was a shift to transcend the limitations of space in a studio or gallery into the broader physical field of the outside world by executing Land Art projects; such practitioners include Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long and Christo, among others.4 Yet with interventions into the natural world, the problem of documentation and presentation emerged.

REVISITING SPATIALITY IN VIDEO ART

As these land art projects were rather inaccessible, “artists are then dependent upon the art system for the dissemination of information through exhibitions of photographs or diagrams and through articles, films, and videotapes”.5

Jan Dibbets offered one way out early on with his “perspective corrections”—by focusing specifically on photographs and later videos of landscapes. Unlike much earlier video art in the 1960s and 1970s, which were either documentations of performances (Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, for instance) or deeply involved with the body and endurance (like Chris Burden, with later parallels in China with Zhang Huan), Dibbets manipulated images in order to create an abstraction, the while maintaining an indexical reference to reality (notably with Dutch Mountain, Big Sea 1A, where the flat Dutch countryside was transformed into a curved landscape).

Additionally, Dibbets presented works on television, with Gerry Schum’s Land Art TV broadcast in Germany, alongside pieces by Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Richard Long (among others).6 Schum’s Fernsehgalerie (Television Gallery) envisioned televison as a site or medium with which to communicate such art pieces to large audiences. Dibbets’ 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective (1969) shown on Land Art TV, presented an isosceles trapezoid in the sand, which then appeared as a rectangle due to the perspective of the camera.7 In a way, one can see different vectors: a desire for mass appeal, an engagement with the “land”, and an interest in the horizon and perspective. Some writers have seen a connection here with traditional Dutch landscapes and Piet Mondrian.8

Returning to the exhibition at OCAT Shanghai, one clear theme, noticeable to all, was the preponderance of water and the horizon.

Poetic, abstract and yet indexed to the real, these works (including Dibbets) suffered from the almost overbearing reading of the theme of the horizon. Aside from Dibbets’ work, the most prominent in the presentation in Shanghai9 was João Vasco Paiva’s Forced Empathy (2011), where the artist froze the orientation of a buoy in the centre of the frame, with the intensely urban Hong Kong landscape around it shifting instead. Nauseating and yet hypnotic, the viewer is taken to the buoy’s “view of the world”, a manipulated machine vision of the Hong Kong harbour, perhaps. Other watery

imagery abound: Giovanni Ozzola’s Garage —sometimes you can see much more (2009-11), with a garage door opening onto a seascape, reminds one of the tunnel-like vision of the camera; Kimsooja’s Bottari—Alfa Beach Nigeria (2001), which presented the seascape of an historical site, where slaves were shipped; Derek Kreckler’s Untitled destabilised the projected image with the fan behind blowing at the striped screen.10 There were more “watery” works, which at times seemed to belabour the theme.

One could charitably argue that the restrictive theme of the horizon and of perspective was inevitable given the transnational/multi-national composition of the exhibition. How else, one supposes, would works that come from (possibly) incommensurate social and artistic contexts and backgrounds be shown, other than with recourse to basic themes, which one hopes might be universal? It is certainly a formal, phenomenological angle. Yet due perhaps to the very mediated nature of video and more specifically to the disruptions to the image, at the very least these works avoid a naive, unreflective view of “nature” (which Bruno Latour so memorably called “that blend of Greek politics, French Cartesianism, and American parks”).11

One work, which opened up the notion of the horizon was Zhu Jia’s Beyond My Control (2014), created in dialogue with Dibbets’ piece. The video showed a hand drawing an angle according to perspective, which is then projected on the corner of a wall and floor.

In this case, perspectival vision corresponds to the actual reality—which all the more highlights the construction of space in the originally flat surface of the paper.12

Of course, within traditional Chinese art, the use of perspective and horizon was exceedingly rare (with the only exceptions being Jesuit paintings in the late-Ming and the Qing dynasties).13 While Dibbets could be said to be playing with these themes in relation to tradition, the Chinese artists at least are not responding to such an historical tradition in this way—even if it must be noted that perspectival techniques have since been taught within the “Western” oil painting tradition by way of Socialist Realism and French Academicism.

On the other hand, Chinese video art, while new from Zhang Peili in the late 1980s has not been devoid of the “horizon” and

“perspective”, if read in the same selective, detached way as this exhibition. Examples include Zhang Huan’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (1997) (originally a performance), Yang Zhenzhong’s Light and Easy (2002) (where the artist manipulates the Shanghai skyline so that the iconic Pearl Oriental Tower in Shanghai is balanced on a man’s fingertips), and at a stretch, Wang Gongxin’s Sky of Brooklyn (1995) (where the artist dug a well and presented the sky of Brooklyn on a video, coupled with a menacing sound message to repulse the viewer). Related works dealing with the more specifically urban landscape could include Zhu Jia’s Forever (1994), where the artist tied a video camera to the spokes of a bicycle, creating a dizzying whirl of circular images, or the same artist’s Never Take Off (2002), where a plane taxies around on the runway but never takes off. One could even more loosely include Ai Weiwei’s Chang’an Boulevard (2004) (where for forty-five kilometres on a major Beijing artery, the artist recorded a single frame for one minute at each fifty metre increment), and the work Zoom (2014) by a younger artist, Li Ming, where the artist used the optical zoom to discover a site, and then physically went there, continuing the process from Hangzhou to Shanghai, a distance of four hundred and sixty kilometres—among others.

Part of the problem with the exhibition is perhaps a problem with much transnational curation: how to present works from varying, divergent contexts and yet engage with them within those contexts? Certainly, efforts to present works from other countries must be commended; if viewers outside China still think contemporary Chinese art is all about Political Pop, then something worthwhile is gained. But within the context of China, the focus on one formal aspect of the “horizon” is a bit troubling (even if many video artists or artists generally in China are not fixated on the social or the political, at least not superficially).

The “horizon” as a concept is so rich and profound in suggesting the unknown limits of perception and awareness, with so much potential, that the end result in the exhibition was slightly disappointing. Perhaps we can see some of the possibilities in a few of the works which highlight the fabrication of spatiality, as already seen in Zhu Jia, but also Yeondoo Jung’s On the Dividing Line between Body & Soul, with a tender interview of a man talking about his lost love on one screen and a pre-recorded video

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footage of a train-track stage set. The layered production of the space in the latter echoes, enriches and entwines with the reconstructed memories of the man, poignantly highlighting the multiple layers, ellipses, and lacunae in storytelling. Another work is Wang Peng’s Feeling North Korea (2007), where the blacked out half of the screen highlights the very limits of the viewer’s horizons with respect to the other half, which depicts footage discreetly filmed in Pyongyang. Yet another direction was Shilpa Gupta’s 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India (200708), where the video featured representations of the Indian map drawn from memory by one hundred Indian adults. The notion of the “horizon” is here productively thrown off course in being read as the physical boundaries of the State, with the “faulty memory” manifesting the ambivalent relationship between individuals and the nation-State.

The specific presentation of the works matters. The initial presentation of LANDSEASKY in Seoul offers an interesting comparison (this account is from second-hand sources as this writer was not present in Seoul): at Artsonje Center, only three pieces were presented—the same works by Jan Dibbets, João Vasco Paiva and Kimsooja, all formally oriented pieces focusing on the horizon, with different trajectories that lead outwards to the other works presented in different galleries in the surrounding neighbourhood of Samcheongdong in Seoul. Of course, this raises different institutionally related problems of production and presentation, but this permitted a formal kernel to radiate outwards, allowing for the possibility for the works to fruitfully disrupt the original curatorial conceit. In OCAT Shanghai, in contrast, one had the impression that whatever new possibilities of the “horizon” were being presented, were hammered back in to fit the overarching theme, seemingly restrictively, in part due to the dispersed placement of the works dealing with the horizons in relatively formal ways.

Page 50 Yeondoo Jung Handmade Memories On the Dividing Line between Body and Soul, 2008 Photo courtesy the artist Page 51 Jan Dibbets Installation view Horizon I, II & III–Sea, 1971 Photos courtesy the artist and Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands

In the expanded field of global art curation (which is historically recent), there are many questions about how to attend sensitively to specific contexts and yet make comparisons intelligible globally/transnationally without on the one hand homogenising and instrumentalising the understanding of artworks, and on the other retreating into islands of localism or nativist cultural essentialism. Currently, at the Jewish Museum in New York, a global reprise of the landmark Primary Structures Minimalist Art exhibition (curated by Kynaston McShine in 1969), entitled Other Primary Structures is taking place.

The exhibition shines light on minimalist works from around the world from that same period.

In one way, it is a laudable attempt to recover forgotten or neglected works from the global periphery. And yet, as one writer asks: Can there be one global definition of Minimalism? Or is putting all these white objects in relation to one another a case of ‘pseudomorphism’, calling similar-looking things alike when they are conceptually and contextually dissimilar? More importantly, does the artist’s nationality mean nothing when we are looking at art—can we look at Minimalism as a global art movement defined by ‘simplicity’ and a ‘spiritual, essential mode of life’?14 Perhaps globalism “only makes sense at a certain level of generality”15; perhaps local specificities always threaten to unravel the possibility of global comparisons. Between this Scylla and Charybdis, there is no easy way out. Or perhaps we can bear in mind Elena Filipovic’s words: An exhibition is the form of its arguments and the way that its method, in the process of constituting the exhibition, lays bare the premises that underwrite the forming of judgment, the conditioning of perception, and the construction of history. It is the thinking and the debate it incites. It is also the trajectory of intellectual and aesthetic investments that build up to it, for artist and curator alike. But, most importantly, it is the way in which its very premises, classificatory systems, logic and structure can, in the very moment of becoming an exhibition, be unhinged by the artworks in it.16

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Notes 1 http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/features/all-arts/ queensland-arts-cuts-the-real-story-197608 2 Peter Selz, Art in Our Times: A Pictorial History 1890-1980, New York: Abrams, 1981 3 See Robert Morris’ “maximal awareness of the object”; Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part I’, 1966; Republished in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock (ed.), New York: Dutton, 1968 4 Another parallel move historically was a reaction against the supposed Minimalist phenomenological purity of space and the position of the viewer by recourse to larger social issues like gender and the body: “[a]fter twenty years of feminist discourse and feminist theory we have come to realise that ‘just looking’ is not just looking but that looking is invested with identity: gender, socioeconomic status, race, sexual orientation… Looking is invested with lots of other texts. Minimalist sculptures were never really primary structures, they were structures that were embedded with a multiplicity of meanings. Every time a viewer comes into the room these objects became something else…you realize suddenly and very quickly that aesthetic choices are politics.”

‘Felix Gonzalez-Torres interviewed by Tim Rollins’, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, New York: Art Resources Transfert (A.R.T.) Press, 1993: 21 5

Peter Selz, op. cit: 494

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http://medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/89/

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http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/education/land-art-andchanging-perspectives/ 8 See Erik Verhagen, ‘The Horizon according to Jan Dibbets: an Endless Quest’, in Depth of Field, vol. 2 no. 1, June 2012; http://journal.depthoffield.eu/vol02/nr01/a02/en. Indeed (to elide landscape and seascape a little), W. J. T. Mitchell has argued rather provocatively that “[l]andscape might be seen more profitably as something like the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism” 9 The presentation in Seoul was different, by all accounts (I only read accounts of the exhibition), while the exhibition in Brisbane has yet to take place 10 It should be noted that Paiva’s Forced Empathy was part of a series of work, one of which, Anchored Monument, a mechanical buoy object that moves in inverse to the image, was not presented.

11 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, Catherine Porter (trans.), Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004: 5 12 The title turned out to be ironic and prophetic: originally intended to be a two-channel projection, where a hand is drawing in the projection and then transitions to the other wall, in the presentation only one was presented (reportedly due to technical problems); http://artforum.com.cn/ archive/6594# 13 There was, of course, the literati landscape tradition, where these themes were certainly not the major focus 14 Maika Pollack, ‘”Other Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum’, galleristny.com; http://galleristny.com/2014/03/ other-primary-structures-at-the-jewish-museum/ 15 To quote James Elkins out of context; http://www. jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/255-theterms-western-and-nonwestern 16 Elena Filipovic, ‘What is an exhibition?’ in Jens Hoffmann (ed.), Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, Milan: Mousse, 2013: 77

the shaman and the squid RAY FORRESTER Madison Bycroft has been developing a consistent body of work that investigates philosophical ideologies through sculpture, video and performance. By challenging modes of being and rethinking linguistic ontologies —how we might understand, communicate and inevitably limit representation—Bycroft’s work uniformly and optimistically presents empathetic and mystical ways of becoming ‘other’. Animism, sympathetic magic and language are ongoing points of reference and research. Her experiments in sculpture and film fall into several categories of concern playfully yet critically engaging with notions of the self and the Deleuzian idea of “becoming-animal”.

Throughout the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the concept of “becoming-animal” is prevalent. In its basic form we can understand it as a movement, in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability, but is rather wrapped in an almost nomadic mode of existence, in which one is an anomaly, inaccessible through any form of definition or distinction. Opposed to a kind of animal metamorphosis one can potentially achieve non-identity; a freedom from cultural, historical representation as well as categorical and colonial thinking. It is in this division between unity and strength and an interminable state of disarticulation or disfigurement that Bycroft’s research lies. By dismantling hierarchal relationships between animals, non-living things and humans (as well as their associated languages and societal structures) Bycroft seeks to look beyond these predisposed boundaries by engaging with unified relational ways of understanding the world.

Madison Bycroft has been living her own form of a nomadic existence for roughly two years since completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts with first class honours at the University of South Australia in 2012. From residencies in Beijing to New York she has been creating and exhibiting a body of work that is very much focused on habitat as well as her interests in animistic philosophy. She is a 2014 recipient of the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and will next research this relationship between place and the other at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.

Her exhibitions from artist-run initiatives to ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) in New York have provided a platform to experiment with traditional and non-traditional sites as well encouraging her own personal investigations in sculptural, material making, multimedia, film and performance. Nature and our surroundings are key elements in visualising this process of transformation and unity in her work.

The artist and writer, Oxana Timofeeva proposes a comparable belief in her article The Negative Animal:

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In the case of nature, with its variety and multiplicity, one becomes ‘other’ in itself, and spirit externalises itself only through individualisation of beings in their singularity, not their mixing.

Nature, the distorted mirror of spirit’s unity, is the domain of difference. This is how it manifests itself as substance becoming subject, given that subject is not only what transforms itself but also what always remains the same within this transformation. The inner dialectic of becoming expresses itself in a given shape that of a flower, mineral, tree, horse or woman. All this can exist only in totality, the one being a truth for the other and coming to relate to it.1 For Bycroft we see the incarnation of spirit through her sculpture, both relating to herself as a human and their surroundings where her performances take place. This variety and multiplicity of components is widely spread amongst her installations, giving viewers the opportunity to engage with it in its totality.

Her sculptures take various shapes, either boulder-like; archaic forms echoing a kind of pre-history, or geometrical structures that sit in relation to, or rest on, the other.

In 2013 Bycroft’s solo exhibition It Division at the CACSA’s Project Space was a defining presentation marrying her sculpture, film and research into a consolidated series of works that could be read individually or almost entirely as one. Becoming Still (2012), a video work, sees the artist attempt to sit on the ocean floor cradling a large stone. A sense of unity can be seen between the object, the artist and their surroundings, as the stone’s weight acts as an anchor assisting in the artist’s futile act of becoming one.2 For a moment we see the artist’s eyes open and stare back at us; a moment of calm clarity during this enduring task. However, this encounter is broken and challenged when their unavoidable differences are brought to light—the artist’s need for air.

This exchange between the stone and the artist, although knowingly vain, is still important in its practice. The act of ‘relatedness’ and testing

of multiple meanings is vital in interpreting our psychological and spiritual connections with each other, and beyond the other.3 By posing the question of animating or reanimating the inanimate we catch a glimpse of our position within this assumed hierarchy and are offered ways of challenging these predetermined ideals.

Her first major solo exhibition Synonyms for savages at the Australian Experiment Art Foundation, highlighted the artist’s ability to bring together ancient and historic ideologies, which concern present day mores through contemporary mediums and techniques.

Investigating the prehistoric and mythological nature of being a human and that, which distinguishes itself from the animal, the work traverses a number of anthropological and etiological theories. The exhibition’s motivations focus on language, its inseparability from knowledge and its formation as an archive, and humanity, a catalyst for utopian and apocalyptic action unified with, or acting against, man or animal.4

The “confusion of tongues” has been described as the initial fragmentation of human language in the Book of Genesis as a result of the construction of the Tower of Babel. It is implied that prior to the Tower’s demise, humanity spoke one unified language derived from the Adamic language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise. After the destruction of the Tower, language was confounded and man was scattered across the planet. This tale resonates strongly with the artist and informs her cultural and linguistic theories on history, authorship and the idea of an archive. For Bycroft: This formula of the archive can be applied to how we understand and categorise the world. Everything exists within a name, and the name has a genealogical significance and universal meaning written by the few.5

THE SHAMAN AND THE S Q UID

This offers a paradoxical and enigmatic enquiry into Bycroft’s practice. How can one communicate and better our understanding of the world without direct representation and appropriation of our (limited) existing linguistic archive? This impasse is at the centre of her work; by holding one’s gaze between existing modes of reference and our own phenomenological confinement, Madison exposes these overlapping philosophical states.

First alphabet of... (2014) is an enormous series of ceramic, plaster and found objects that commanded the main exhibition space of the AEAF. Here, Bycroft imagined rearticulating language as one coalesced alphabet for the animal, made by a human.

Twenty-six forms sat in a row, each handcrafted and devised from materials both known and unknown to the artist. This alphabet challenged our cultural heritage and past discourses in the hope of emulating a future archive that is void of authority or entitlement. The artist suggested the existence of a primitive language; one that is magical and an assemblage of conglomerated histories questioning the formation of words through intangible matter.

Humanity is dealt with carefully and wisely by the artist. While appearing confrontational and sometimes brash, Bycroft’s experiments exhibit the truest form of sympathy and appreciation for her subjects, objects and surroundings. Entitled/Untitled (2014) is one such work where the object and artist humbly make contact in one scene; the corpse of an octopus is (literally) unpacked (a symbol of man’s ruinous effect on the ocean and its inhabitants) and is laid to rest on the lap of the artist while she, in an act of humanity and connectedness, attempts to offer a part of her physical being (in this case shaving her hair)

Page 54: Madison Bycroft Rag of Cloth: Ode to the Vampire Squid (production still, detail), 2014 Photo courtesy the artist Page 55: Madison Bycroft Nupta Contagioso/Primordial Sound (production still, detail), 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

with that of the corpse. The artist’s attempt at a conscious experience through this interaction is careful and enveloping. For a moment we see their physicality intertwined; the octopus resting on the artist’s face, while she strokes its tentacles, as though they were her missing strands of hair. This action reaps no reward or recognition—our civilisation has adversely affected that of the octopus and no equality could ever be reached; however, during this film there are moments of empathy, which express the possibility of some sort of union.

Again, we can sense a kind of futility in the performance—although an experience can be staged, we can never know how it truly feels to be an octopus. Our subjective experience is limited and contemporary analysis is almost robotic so we are left with a schematic conception of what it is like.6 Entitled/Untitled references a number of important elements in Bycroft’s oeuvre.

While contemplating contemporary approaches of “becoming-animal”, the artist exposes the catastrophic environmental effect humans have had on our shared habitat. This work is exposing for both the artist and the viewer; we are a shared projection of our accumulated history, but how do we make an individual difference to society and our environment in this technological and industrial age?

Selected for this year’s PRIMAVERA at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia by artist (and now) curator, Mikala Dwyer, Rag of Cloth: Ode to the Vampire Squid (2014) is a highly stylised video work matched with DIY aesthetics. Here we see the cephalopod (an animal of great significance and importance to the artist) as a “champion of the unknowable”; a being without community and the antithesis of human experience existing in the dark abyss.7 The environment of the vampire squid remains untouched and unknown by man. In opposition to Entitled/Untitled, the vampire squid (the last known surviving member of its own order) is heroic and empowered, unscathed from human infliction. Mimicking the representation of squids in sci-fi films and popular culture (think Jules Verne), the King Squid challenges mankind utilising our language, over-naming, and archive. The squid and his/her minions call out to man and question whether a union could be forged between our worlds. In this work we can see the hierarchy of animalman shift, our archive is used against us (as opposed to legitimising us) and the squid

remains unassailable. Here, Bycroft references weird and speculative fiction, this champion feeds of the words of humans, yet nothing can gratify it. Rag of Cloth is an impressive element within her Synonyms for Savages exhibition; it is a fine example of her pursuit for new and contemporary forms of conscious experience.

The film collage (which has been edited to an almost psychedelic state) is an ode that empowers not only the ‘savage monster’ of the deep, but asserts Bycroft’s unwavering commitment to furthering her practice through new formats in video and sound.

Synonyms for Savages is an important example of Bycroft’s practice and the sophisticated way that she explores animating inanimate matter. Through extensive research and experimentation she consistently tests the idea of contemporary animism beyond its primitive classification.

Bycroft makes purposeful choices in her artistic output, subtly swapping the changing connections between cultural, social and temporal contexts. The dualistic divide between subject and object (or habitat and culture) has been a resonating investigation for the artist.

Through her historical and cultural assemblages she succeeds in creating new perspectives within a field that is heavily influenced by colonial perspectives. Utilising a myriad of materials and contemporary technologies, Bycroft harmoniously reflects upon critical phenomenological theory while posing future paradigms. Bycroft’s work is a deeply thoughtful and realistic view of everything that surrounds the human experience.

Notes 1 Oxana Timofeeva, History of Animals: An Essay of Negativity, Immanence and Freedom, Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012: 274 2 Katrina Simmons, In the heart of a stone (exhibition catalogue), Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Adelaide, 2013 3

ibid.

4

Cooper Francis, Synonyms for Savages (exhibition catalogue), Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2014 5

Madison Bycroft email to the author, 22 July, 2014

6

Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, 1974, http:// rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1000/Nagel.pdf

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Madison Bycroft email op cit.

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the music of language Rebecca Coates There’s a moment in Angelica Mesiti’s fourchannel video installation Citizens Band (2012) when you can almost watch audience members become seduced. The figure of the blind accordionist playing and singing in the Paris Metro is hauntingly beautiful, and the two other male musicians are meditatively poetic as, in moody hues, they respectively play a Chinese cello and whistle. But it is the combination of colour, movement and musical sound created by the young African woman, as she drums the water surface standing waist deep in the shallow end of a Parisian pool, which really brings the viewer to a halt. I’ve watched this process now a number of times: at the work’s premiere as part of NEW12 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; as the winner of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 2013 Anne Landa Award for video and new media; and most recently as part of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Mom am I Barbarian? (2013). As this list attests, the work has attracted widespread interest locally and internationally.

What is it about Mesiti’s immersive, cinematic-quality installations that captivates audiences, collectors and curators? Mesiti suggests she wanted to explore the cultural histories carried by and expressed through music in Citizens Band (2012).1 This work does just that, but there is clearly more that tantalises audiences to stay much longer than the standard exhibition stop before a video work—typically two to three minutes unless there’s good seating and their legs are tired.

Even in video-laden biennial contexts, viewers consistently stayed for more than the full cycle.

In Citizens Band, Mesiti captures the heightened states of rapture and performance of these everyday musicians. Arguably, her work enables audiences to share this internalised state—as if the musical rhythms pass into and via their own physical bodies, and the audiences become part of the visceral experience of making a musically transcendent sound.

Mesiti consistently explores the emotional and physical states of transformative sound and rapture. Rapture (silent anthem) (2009), a high definition video of approximately ten minutes, captures close-up details of exquisite youths’ faces and expressions. We are unclear what has generated this state. It could be a religious experience—Christian youths attracted to the gospel of a charismatic preacher—or more possibly, celebrity and musical cult idolatry at a rock concert. All that is missing is the accompanying sound: instead, the massed voices surging in an ecstasy of transformative sounds must be conjured in each viewer’s head, as each scripts his or her own soundtrack.

Presented at the 2014 Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What you Desire, Mesiti’s recent video installation, In the Ear of the Tyrant (2013-14), again explored the transformative power of the human voice. It was inspired by songs of lamentation from southern Italy and the women whom a community traditionally employed to sing songs of mourning for the death of one of their own. It has a particular resonance for the artist, whose own origins hark from the Italian South. Mesiti re-interprets the grieving ritual in collaboration with the Italian vocalist Enza Pagliara. The performance is filmed in the flawless acoustics of an ancient limestone cave—known as the Ear of Dionysius—near the Sicilian city of Syracuse.

A series of highly charged and emotive closeups and panoramas of the singer in this extraordinary, natural cathedral-like space lured many in the audience into a reverential swoon. In its use of musical traditions and the power of the human voice, it was reminiscent of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s cinematic video installations some fifteen years earlier, shown to critical acclaim at the Venice Biennale. Turbulent (1998), Neshat’s two-screen video installation contrasting the voices and performances of male and female Iranian singers became a powerful musical metaphor for gender and cultural

difference examined through the traditions of ancient Persian music and poetry. The viewer became an active part of the experience: located between opposite screens featuring the two singers as they sang the public and private songs of a musical tradition in a fundamentalist State. In the Ear of the Tyrant did not actively co-opt viewers in the same way. Instead, audience members were spectators to a highly charged drama played beneath a geological proscenium arch. The video work’s pathos was a little like a bel canto vibrato: without a very deft touch, it can be light on subtlety and appear overblown.

The Calling (2014), Mesiti’s most recent video installation, sees her returning to a quieter, more measured and nuanced exploration of cultural histories expressed in musical form. It reflects on a globalised world encroaching on ancient traditions and linguistic customs. Its subject is the whistling languages of three cultures, Kuskoy (Turkey), Antia (Greece) and La Gomera (the Canary Islands).

It examines the ongoing survival and usage of these ancient traditions of language and sound in the face of globalisation, technological progress and environmental flux. Interest in the whistling language developed from Mesiti’s earlier work Citizens Band, in which one of the four featured musicians whistled as his instrument of choice. Whereas that work was about music making, and the way that music transcends cultural difference and specificity of race, The Calling is about broadly dispersed languages sharing a feature now almost lost.

Popular in linguistic research in the 1960s, the study of whistling languages and other less common forms of communication now seems to be relegated to an obscure cultural rarity—occasionally profiled on National Geographic’s Discovery Channel on cable TV, programmed late at night.

As a form of communication, however, it captures our imagination. It’s at odds with

THE MUSIC OF LANGUAGE

our technologically assisted channels that keep us all tied to our electronic devices, and eternally linked. Mesiti’s poetic video reveals this disparity. As indigenous languages disappear and many others are anglicised through neologisms, capturing the essence of a language—quite possibly without notation or written form—from a visual art perspective rather than an anthropological position seems timely.

Above and opposite: Angelica Mesiti The Calling (video stills), 2013-14 Photos courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

Mesiti’s The Calling is the inaugural Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, a collaboration between The Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The commission aims to allow a mid-career artist to produce an ambitious new work, which demonstrates a major development or shift in their practice. Mesiti talks about the impact of this commission on her working methodology in her interview with Amita Kirpalani for the exhibition room brochure. She notes that it allowed her to slow down her working process, developing the work over a full year. She was able to take an observational approach when visiting the

locations and communities for the first time, slowly developing an understanding of how the language was used in its specific cultural and geographic terrain. Filming and performances on a second visit were thus less formal than in many of Mesiti’s earlier works. Feedback from the communities was integral to the process, and this ensured that the filming of everyday actions and activities, though scripted, appeared natural and unstaged.

In each of these locations, the whistling language is used for different purposes and captured in different ways.

The film starts in Istanbul, a city that straddles East and West, with swallows swooping over

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rooftops as a lone figure is silhouetted against an pink-hued sky. The sounds of traffic, call to prayer, and birdcalls create a muted music of everyday noise. On moving to Kuskoy, a remote mountain village in Turkey’s mountainous parts, the camera lingers on the sur-suration of water over pebbles, or the threshing of corn from a pre-industrial past. We see the women picking tea tips, gathering them into coloured, cloth-bound bundles, and waiting for the truck to arrive to take away this seasonal crop.

These people are not trained actors: they go about their daily life. Whistling in this context is used as a language to alert those in the fields to everyday events—to come in for lunch, or that the truck has arrived. The language is active, and continues to be passed down from one generation to the next. In the Greek island of Antia, however, the whistling language has all but disappeared. The population is aging,

younger generations have disappeared to capital cities, and global industries and new technologies have arrived. Electricity pylons contrast with goats, as we are alerted to their movements via the gentle ringing of their bells, or the sound of a bell tolling from an Orthodox church. The slow whomp-whomp of a wind-farm’s turning blades contrasts with the quiet sounds and rocky terrain of the once agricultural community.

In the Canary Islands, the language has been resurrected. Again, Mesiti focuses on small details that are easily overlooked —the tracery of a spider-web woven between cactus spikes, as it floats gently in the breeze.

A grandfather whistles across a crevasse to his grandson on the side of a road, who responds in words. The whistling language, for this younger generation, is now part of a school curriculum that differentiates their culture from other parts

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of the globe. Government support via education programs ensures that the language does not completely disappear. Instead, it becomes a product of the economics of conservation and tourism, a curiosity or sideshow for hungry visitors searching for something unusual, artisan and ‘new’.

Mesiti’s video installations may have explored notions of transcendence and the performativity of musical language in its various forms. The very success of The Calling lies both in its exploration of language, music and different cultures and the everyday, and once again, in what Mesiti leaves unsaid.

Note 1 Angelica Mesiti interview with Charlotte Day, curator Anne Landa Award for video and new media 2013, AGNSW, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/channel/clip/480/

reverse racism in australian indigenous popular culture Janelle Evans During the last two decades Australian popular culture has seen a resurgence of blackface parody. Mainstream television, most notably on the ABC and Nine Network, have encouraged the lampooning of black people through blackface performance. In 1989, a group of medical students, The Jackson Jive, performed a skit in blackface on the vaudevillian segment of Channel 9’s Hey, Hey It’s Saturday. Ten years later, controversial football commentator Sam Newman donned blackface to replace an absent guest, the Aboriginal Australian Rules footballer, Nicky Winmar.1 In 2004, comedian Chris Lilley devised a show Indigeridoo, where he impersonated a Chinese actor, Ricky Wong, performing as an Aboriginal with singers and dancers from the Chinese Musical Theatre.2 The Indigeridoo song and dance routine (featuring Lilley as Ricky Wong, the cast from the Chinese Musical Theatre and an embarrassed indigenous Olympic athlete Cathy Freeman) was staged for the broadcast of the 2006 Australian TV Week Logie Award.

The cringeworthy performance, which saw the entire ensemble (apart from Freeman) wearing painted body suits, lap-laps, kangaroo skins and blackface, mocked the cultural cluelessness of the Chinese (with their limited knowledge or understanding of Australian indigenous culture), as they hopped around the stage like kangaroos, waving spears and boomerangs, singing: Indigeri-Now, Indigeri-Then, Indigeri-Why, Indigeri-When, Indigeri-Us, Indigeri-Them, Ahhh Ahhhh Ahhhh Ahhhh3

The performance was met with thunderous applause by the Australian acting fraternity audience, who seemed strangely blind to the history of blackface entertainment in Australia.

It was not until the notorious reunion of the Jackson Jive act for the revised television show Hey Hey It’s Saturday4—where the group again parodied the Jackson Five in blackface and Michael Jackson in whiteface—that Australia was confronted with the knowledge that the mask it presents to the world as a “post-racist multicultural society …came off as some sort of grinning, mugging version of Alabama 1956”.5 The performance created an international uproar after guest judge, the American actor Harry Connick Jnr. denounced the skit as racist, for the way in which the contestants mocked African Americans as buffoons by their Sambo speech and dance moves. Even more insulting, the segment had been sponsored by the makers of Vegemite, after a previous week’s contestant had smeared the jet-black goo all over his naked body.

In 2013, an Australian woman, Olivia (surname unknown), celebrated her twenty-first birthday party with an African theme. This event became an Internet sensation after images of guests in blackface and Ku Klux Klan garments were posted on her social media site. Although Olivia removed the images, she vehemently denied that any of her guests’ antics were racist or meant to demean black people.

The Huffington Post on the 21st October, 2013 reported on this incident and also commented on the increasing popularity of blackface parties amongst college students in America.6

A quick search of the Internet reveals a video of an Australian Federal policeman donning blackface and a noose at a private party, as well as various media personalities donning blackface, or posting Twitter feeds in support of others wearing blackface. More recently, ABC Television commissioned a new series from Chris Lilley, Jonah from Tonga which screened in 2014. In this series, the comedian blacks up as a troubled Tongan teenager, who after a series of events, ends up in gaol. Despite sustained community outrage that the series was racially stereotyping Tongan teenagers, ABC Television went ahead with its broadcast.

Questions were raised as to why a middle-aged white man felt he should be the one to depict, albeit humorously, the internecine conflict within the Tongan community. Invariably, in all these instances responses to the charge of racism reveal an ignorance of the history of blackface in Australia and a tendency to claim humour as the driving motivator behind such performances.

The disavowal that the lampooning of black people can be seen as racist denies all ownership of racism in Australia; it certainly denies the massacres of Australia’s first peoples, the forced assimilation and absorption programs, as well as Queensland’s notorious Blackbird slave trade of South Sea islanders in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Australian popular culture has a long history of wrapping racism in larrikinism and supposed humour, using mockery to keep alive stereotypes of black people as buffoons and outsiders. Bindi Cole (Indigenous) and

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New Guinean/Australian Eric Bridgeman are two artists who have used blackface in parody to challenge these stereotypes. This has led to social commentators, like Andrew Bolt, questioning the legitimacy of such practices by naming them a kind of reverse racism. Is the use of such tropes by black artists legitimate where other instances are not? Or are these incidences also racist, especially as most Australians claim that blackface performance does not have the same connotations here as it does, say, in America? A short history of blackface in performance is therefore warranted?

Blackface minstrelsy as a form of popular culture has a long and varied history.

Essentially it is a performance by white people (usually men) blackening their faces and bodies to parody black people in song and dance. There are instances of blackface emerging during the medieval period in Europe to depict ‘the Moors’ in masquerade and theatre. Performances of Shakespeare’s Othello, for example, cast white actors in blackface and in the sixteenth century, Queen Anne appeared in blackface at a masked ball. English Morris dancers and Commedia dell’Arte’s Scaramouche character (which flourished during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) had historical associations with black masks. Scaramouche was often portrayed as a cowardly buffoon, rascal or scamp, who entertained the audience with his facial grimaces and affected language. Scaramouche’s transmogrification into Harlequin in English pantomime allowed the actor to portray conflicting positions and multivalencies.

Pantomimes such as Harlequin Mungo (1789) established Harlequin in blackface as a useful character to discuss slavery and the abolitionist movement. Historian Jenna Gibbs states that theatrical and pantomime performances during this period were the only legitimate venues in which it was legal to ‘black up’ and that theatre patrons and playwrights would have been aware of the codes which rendered the blackface slave/black-masked Harlequin “subject to multiple valences of race, class and status”.7 In 1807, playwright James Powell appropriated the Harlequin character for his abolitionist play Furibond; or the Harlequin Negro, which opened at Drury Lane Theatre Royal on the 28th December as a Christmas extravaganza.

Roughly coinciding with the Abolitionist Bill to end the slave trade, Powell’s pantomime of song, dance, mime and speech featured actors in colourful costumes and masks representing Britannia and her abolitionist agents, with a

white actor in blackface makeup playing the supplicant, grateful slave. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Harlequin was appropriated by plebeian gangs (‘the Blacks’) who applied blackface as a form of subversive, anti-government radicalism and protest.

Appropriating well known blackface theatrical characters (like Harlequin) and staging mock ceremonies, where they termed themselves “the black chief and his sham negroes”, Irish and English working class members of subversive trade organisations donned blackface, not only to hide their identities, but also to associate themselves with Africans and the abolition movement, in order to “stage a kind of resistance to power”.8 Thus blackface became associated with Africanness and rebelliousness.9

In the USA, blackface was first popularised by itinerant actor Thomas Dartmouth (‘Daddy’) Rice (1808-60) on a Louisville stage in 1828, with his skit, Jump Jim Crow. Rice’s comedic caricature of Jim Crow, a folkloric-trickster character popular in African slave culture, inaugurated and set the conventions for later minstrel shows of the mid-nineteenth century. His Jim Crow persona, with burnt-cork face, battered hat over a dense, matted wig, torn shoes and ragged clothes, mimicked black speech and syncopated dance patterns. His skit, performed between acts, presented Jim Crow as an uneducated, disabled stable hand, with a crooked leg and deformed shoulder, who sang a little ditty, then jumped: Oh, Jim Crow’s come to town As you all must know, An’ he wheel about, he turn about, He do jis so, An’ ebery time he wheel about He jump Jim Crow.10 Rice subsequently built a career performing ‘negro’ segments between acts, on both sides of the Atlantic. Rice was at the height of his popularity between the 1840s and 1850s.

He introduced the characters Zip Coon, Jim Dandy and Sambo as counterparts to Jim Crow. They quickly became comedic stock characters in minstrelsy and were portrayed as singing, dancing and grinning fools.

Rice’s progressive paralysis, brought on by alcoholism, which affected both his speech and walking, was incorporated into his act and no doubt further contributed to the negative and stereotypical idea of African Americans as drunkards, stupid, irrational and inherently

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less human than whites. It was a humiliating and degrading racial caricature contrived to flatter contemporary belief in white superiority.

It quickly caught the public imagination and spawned thousands of imitations.

During this period, blacks in America were being victimised by lynch mobs fuelled by the racism propagated in Rice’s performances, as well as in popular novels, songs and plays, which mimicked a ‘black culture’ marketed for white profit. Minstrel shows appropriated characters and story lines from Harriet Beecher Stow’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and inverted them for anti-abolitionist purposes to argue the supposedly benign nature of slavery. The shows were usually set in the South and featured white actors in blackface to represent buffoonish African Americans as being either too ‘stupid’ and ‘lazy’ to take up freedom and emancipation, or as happy and contented slaves. These performances of course, were imaginative and born of extreme racial conflicts. The voices, gestures and costumes that the white actors donned, although conforming to minstrelsy’s conventions of blackface, were nevertheless a mimicry or approximation of an imagined ideal of blackness. Well into the nineteenth century, blackface was adapted to portray Victorian views of race, with Jews, Cockneys, Italians, Asians and the Irish at different times, being ‘blackened’ or ‘niggered’ in minstrel shows. As a result, blackface performers were always very careful to distinguish themselves as separate from the racialised figures they portrayed.

Their theatrical billings always depicted them in blackface makeup, alongside portraits showing their natural ‘white’ selves, in order to reassure their audiences. Long after the death of Thomas Rice in 1860, and as a result of the popularity of his performances, Jim Crow became a generic term for the comedic blackface portrayal of slaves. Despite the waning of blackface performances from the 1870s, the Jim Crow name was appended to the racial segregation laws, which were enacted between 1876 and 1965 primarily in the Southern and border States of the USA. The Jim Crow Laws legitimised anti-black racism, with Church ministers, newspaper columnists, educationalists and other representatives of major institutions evincing and supporting the suppression of African Americans.

REVERSE RACISM IN AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS POPULAR CULTURE

Despite Hey, Hey It’s Saturday TV personality Red Symons’defense of the Jackson Jive skit, and his assertion that Australia has no history of blackface performances,11 there is strong evidence to show that from the 1830s, blackface minstrelsy was a popular form of entertainment in Australia. Its first recorded performance was in Henry Melville’s theatrical play The Bushrangers, first performed in Hobart in 1834, in which a white actor in blackface portrayed Murrahwa, an Aboriginal ‘Native Chief’ as a buffoon and simpleton. On the 28th August 1838, “the celebrated popular song” Jump Jim Crow was first performed in Sydney at the Royal Victoria Theatre by the American banjo-playing blackface minstrel, Archibald Ferguson. From 1839, local artists, including actor/manager Joseph Simmons, quickly adopted the popular skit and gave numerous performances of Jump Jim Crow and other minstrel songs at the same venue. Before this, Australian native peoples were usually depicted in ethnographic terms. In 1855, Charles Backus and the famous San Francisco Minstrel quartet toured Australia to resounding success and in subsequent years, waves of American minstrel groups also toured. Minstrelsy remained a popular form of entertainment well into the mid-twentieth century with the British produced Black and White Minstrel television show beaming into Australian lounge rooms.

Notably there was no concept of ‘black’ in Terra Australis before the arrival of Europeans. Instead, there were indigenous clans who were bound to the land under language and kinship ties under law. It was this that created difference, not the colour of one’s skin. White constructs its idea of self in binary opposition to the ‘black’. To be white means to be on the side of the coloniser. In America, negroes (and I use that historical term for the purpose of its racialised construction of the African slave subject) were ‘blackened’.

Native Americans existed outside the binary opposition of white/black. They were segregated onto reserves and classified as fauna. In Australia there were no other blacks (i.e. African slaves) apart from the natives, onto whom the colonists could construct their sense of white self. The ‘blackening’ of native Australians denied them their right to sovereignty by placing them within the racially constructed blackness of African Americans.

Native Australians were also assimilated, with the intention of breeding or bleaching out their ‘blackness’ and “savagery”. Those who were

segregated in remote communities became part of a fearful unknown. White imaginings of the remote other allowed for cultural stereotypes to be overlaid onto the Aboriginal subject: the noble black warrior, spear in hand, standing on one leg, gazing off into the distant horizon as his days were numbered. White imaginings of ‘black’, also allowed for the ‘niggering’ of the Aboriginal subject: the drunken buffoon on the streets of Sydney crying out that his “boomerang won’t come back”12.

Due to segregation policies combined with the White Australia Policy, most Australians during the greater part of the twentieth century had never encountered a black person. Blackness therefore had to be constructed to give the white Australian a sense of self. The absence of black people in Australia allowed for the rise of blackface in film, television and theatre. Charles Chauvel was one of the first actors to adopt blackface when cast as a native in film. Interestingly though, in 1955 when he produced Jedda, he cast Aboriginal actors rather than white, in blackface, with the exception of one white actor in blackface who played a half-caste. This was the first Australian production to cast Aboriginal actors. Despite this, white actors in blackface continued to be cast in productions such as the Boney television detective series in the 1970s.

Following the Australian 1967 Referendum, where Aboriginal peoples were finally counted as Australian citizens and many came off the reserves and missions in the 1980s and 1990s, white Australia faced a certain crisis of identity. Who now would be the ‘black’ to which white Australia could construct its sense of self? In 2007, I was associate producer on an SBS commissioned documentary,13 which responded to a white woman’s claim that she did not know any Aboriginal people when she was at school, nor did she encounter any during her day-to-day life. Why was this?

And who were Aboriginal people? Popular series like Redfern Now are bringing Aboriginal lives into the mainstream, but prior to this, the way that twenty-first century urban Aboriginal people live was still largely unknown to most Australians.

It is no coincidence that it is from the 1990s that we see the resurgence of blackface in Australian popular culture. Again, it is a layering of imagined blackness onto comical and buffoon characters, very much in the genre of American blackface minstrelsy. Many Australians don’t see blackface as racist.

Ravenscroft argues that this is because they ‘desire’ the black in order to construct their own sense of self-identity.14 They desire the black, but are also repulsed when authentic —used here advisedly for the sake of distinction —black people become too close for comfort.

This construction of what we might call an imaginary black allows white Australians to play out their fantasies of racial superiority.

Even those of ethnic origins other than Anglo-Celtic take on an honorary whiteness in Australia, when they push through class boundaries. As American Professor of History David Roediger points out, this allows them to construct a white identity by donning blackface, which in turn constructs blackness in white terms.15 For example, during the controversy surrounding the blackface performance of the Jackson Jive on Hey, Hey it’s Saturday, it was assumed that all the performers were white. But only one was Anglo-Celtic, the others, in presenting an imprint of what would increasingly be touted as our vaunted multicultural world, were Sri Lankan, Indian, Lebanese and Greek.

By behaving in ways that were expected of white middle-class medical practitioners, their whiteness was increased, placing them as honorary whites within the “fully racialised and racist belief system that stretches from larrikinism to bogans”.16 So if Sri-Lankan, Indian, Lebanese and Greek Australians who have swarthy skin colour identify as white, where does this place the fair-skinned Aboriginal person, who is trying to come to terms with what it means to be black in the postmodern and postcolonial context?

If ‘blackness’ is a racial construct at the heart of white Australian subjectivity, why are indigenous artists donning blackface and can this been seen as reverse-racism?

Bindi Cole’s Not Really Aboriginal series of photographs (2008), in which members of her family wear blackface with red headbands, was produced in response to questions about her claims to indigenous heritage. The series was made in response to how she perceived the world was perceiving her as not being really Aboriginal because of her skin colour. She explains that “the thought of people trying to deny that heritage in me actually made me really uncomfortable. But then, I thought, stuff it, I’m actually gonna go right into that feeling of discomfort, get it out, put it out there on display for everyone to see.”17 Her claims were motivated by the

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question of how ‘black’ does she need to be, to be considered Aboriginal and how “white aborigines” (not a term fair-skinned indigenous people usually use to describe themselves) cross the cultural divide.18 In the four years following the exhibition of this work, Cole has established herself as a leading contemporary Australian artist and voted as one of Victoria’s hundred most influential people. Some see her as opportunistic and racist.19

While donning blackface might have expiated Coles’ existential angst about her identity, and may have been received approvingly by white (and other) Australians, the work is nevertheless highly confronting and uncomfortable for indigenous viewers. Not only is it white subjectivity that is being spoken to, but the blackness (such a very black ‘black’), of the ‘negro brown’ and ‘minstrel black’ makeup Cole used, reinforces and reinvigorates the “hallmarks of American slavocracy and the meanings given to white-black and master-slave relations formed under these conditions”.20 The red headbands worn by Cole and her family are also culturally inappropriate.

These headbands are only worn by initiated men versed in traditional law. It is highly offensive for anyone to wear them who does not have the right, but particularly so for women.

Cole states that in appropriating these cultural signifiers, she was attempting to parody the stereotypes often associated with Aborigines.21 More recently, Cole has announced that she is moving away from these kinds of representations of indigineity in her art practice. I can’t help but feel that this is a sensible development, as that (despite the attempts of certain misguided commentators to suggest otherwise) has never been about skin colour, but rather is bound up with kinship, cultural and community relationships.

Her Not Really Aboriginal series (2008) though, continues to be highly visible and attracts vitriolic public comments, most notably on Andrew Bolt’s blog site, with his readers questioning why Coles’ work is art but blackface performance in general is considered to be racist. They accuse her of reverse racism.

Such accusations however, are not levelled at New Guinean Australian artist Eric Bridgeman’s use of golliwogs and blackface parody in his satirically slapstick works The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules (2008), produced in the same year as Coles’ Not Really Aboriginal series. Bridgeman’s website biography reads, the “dominant focus of his work involves the discussion of identity and self-design; performance in social and cultural domains; and the dissection of contemporary taboos”.22 Bridgeman and I were art students together at Queensland College of Arts in 2008 when his video installation Lik Lik Mary Muffett (from the series The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules) was produced. In this work, Bridgeman “playfully subverts conventional representations of race, gender and sexuality”23, by performing in blackface and drag. On first seeing this work, I and several other indigenous students felt offended by what we thought was some white person making racist parodies of Aboriginal women, in particular the artist Tracey Moffatt.

We invited Bridgeman to address our concerns, which he most generously did. It was only then that we learned of his New Guinean ancestry.

The rationale of his work, he explained, is informed by the duality of moving between his Australian and ancestral PNG cultures and is deliberately meant to invoke white stereotypes of blackness, in the form of golliwogs and little black sambos drawn from children’s books.

Despite this explanation and the knowledge of his black heritage, Bridgeman’s justification appears unconvincing.

Although both artists use blackface performance to challenge white stereotypes of black people, while addressing their own individual concerns about identity, is it reasonable to suggest this is some kind of reverse racism, ie. is it appropriate for a fair-skinned person of black heritage to don blackface (with all its connotations) while asking white people not to do the same?

Or more to the point, isn’t it time that Australians as a whole step out of the black/ white binary, which continues to feed the powerful prejudices that keeps alive these negative stereotypes of black people?

As cultural theorist Greg Tate observes, by wearing blackface in performance, white people (or those who can pass as white) have everything but the burden of being black.24

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Notes 1 The Footy Show, Nine Network, March 1999 2 We Can Be Heroes: Finding The Australian of the Year, ABC Television, 2005 3

Hey Hey It’s Saturday, Nine Network, 7 October, 2009

4

Chris Lilley, ABC Television, 2005; www.abc.net.au/tv/heroes/ricky/lyrics.htm 5 Guy Rundle, Jackson Jive: the return of Aussie racism?, Spiked, 12th October, 2009; http://www.spiked-onlie.com/ newsite/article/7522#U8SEvVbyDwl 6 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/african-themed21st-birthday_n_4138573.html 7 Jenna Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theatre and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850, Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2014: 76 8

John O’Brien cited in Jenna M. Gibbs: 76

9

ibid.

10

Lawrence Estavan, San Francisco Theatre Research, Vol. 13, Minstrelsy Work Projects Administration, Northern California, 1939; http://black-face.com/jim-crow.htm 11 Red Symons, ‘Red Symons: …and then nobody laughed’, Crikey, 9th October 2009: http://www.crikey.com. au/2009/10/09/red-symons-and-then-nobody-laughed/

12 My Boomerang Won’t Come Back was a contentious record by British comedian Charlie Drake in 1961 about a young Aboriginal male cast from his tribe due to his inability to throw a boomerang 13 Embedded with the Murri Mob, Circe Films and SBS Television, 2007 14

Alison Ravenscroft, The post-colonial eye: white Australian desire and the visual field of races, Surrey, UK and Burlington: Ashgate, Vt, 2012: 131

15 Roediger cited in Jon Stratton, ‘The Jackson Jive: Blackface today and the limits of whiteface in Australia’, The Journal of European Association of Studies on Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011 under the auspices of Coolabah Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona, 2011: 38 16

Jon Stratton, The Jackson Jive, ibid.

17

Bindi Cole, video interview: http://museumvictoria.com.au/ immigrationmuseum/discoverycentre/identity/people-like-me/ expressing-ourselves/challenge/ 18 Courtney Kidd, ‘Debutantes: Bindi Cole’, The Art Collector 55, 2011 19 http://www.nelliecastangallery.com/uploads//Artists/bindicole/downloads/BC_Artist_Profile_2011.pdf 20

Ravenscroft, op. cit: 131

21

Liza Power, ‘The Spirit Wakes Anew’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 October, 2010; http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/the-spirit-wakes-anew-20101007-169e0. html 22

Eric Bridgeman, http://ebridgeman.wordpress.com/about/

23

Primavera 2011; http://www.pv11.com.au/blog/?p=165

24

Greg Tate, Everything but the burden: what white people are taking from Black culture, New York: Broadway Books, 2003

a canvas to our imaginations Wendy Walker INTERVIEW WITH Lisa Havilah Generating culturally diverse and younger audiences, Carriageworks’ dynamic and uncompromisingly contemporary and expanding multi-disciplinary program—given greater impetus through affordable admission prices—has come to encompass the visual arts, dance, theatre, new music, fashion and food. At the 2013 Sydney Music Art & Culture (SMAC) Awards at Carriageworks, director Lisa Havilah was the recipient of the SMAC of the Year Award, an acknowledgment of her role as “one of [Sydney’s] most dynamic and hard-working cultural figures... someone who has transformed spaces we had forgotten into spaces that push artistic boundaries”.1

Having taken up the directorship of Carriageworks in January 2012, Havilah’s greatly expanded 2013 program—which included the successf ul staging of the inaugural Sydney Contemporary, as well as the hosting of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week—took visitor numbers to 400,000. It represented a quadrupling of attendance figures, anticipated by a similarly remarkable escalation (from 30,000 to 190,000 per year) in the course of Havilah’s six-year tenure as director at Campbelltown Arts Centre, where the location and its cultural and social relevance were integral to the development of a communityengaged contemporary arts program.

From working with a programming team of specialist curators (led by Associate Director of Programming Lisa French), to the forging and importantly the nurturing of partnerships with like-minded organisations, the collaborative model is fundamental to Havilah’s strategy. Whilst “support from all Above Tehching Hsieh One Year Performance 1980-1981 (detail) Photo courtesy the artist

tiers of government is critically important” —Carriageworks receives a quarter of its funding from State and Federal government sources—Havilah regards Carriageworks as “a new generation of major cultural institution in Australia, which acts entrepreneurially to build commercial income from major event and commercial partners using its extraordinary infrastructure as a resource to do that”.

Certainly, the positivity of her approach runs counter to the prevailing sense of art world gloom, associated with the apparently accelerating closures of long-established galleries, cuts to funding, the recent Biennale brouhaha over sponsorship and so on. In the course of the last year, Carriageworks utilised its capacious public space to present a number

of major exhibitions by international artists: Beijing-based Song Dong’s floor installation Waste Not (in association with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and the Sydney Festival); Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh’s extraordinary, durational performance work One Year Performance: 1980-1981 or Time Clock Piece (supported by the College of Fine Arts) and Christian Boltanski’s monumental installation Chance (in association with the Sydney Festival). Boltanski observed at the time that he was impressed by Carriageworks’ industrial heritage and wanted Chance “to resemble the type of monumental machinery that might once have operated in the former Eveleigh rail yard”.2

Of particular interest to the visual arts sector was the doubling in 2014 of the available presentation space, allowing Carriageworks to become for the first time a major partner venue for the 19th Biennale of Sydney (positioning it therefore alongside the MCA and the Art Gallery of NSW). The vast new space shares elements of the (historical) imprint of toil, as well as the grandness of scale that also lends (readymade) atmosphere —appropriated to great advantage by successive Biennales of Sydney since 2008, to the structures at Cockatoo Island. In 2016, Carriageworks will again be a major venue partner for the Biennale of Sydney. As Havilah observes, the institution offers “new opportunities to the Biennale, as we have spaces that can support the presentation of large scale visual art works and cross-disciplinary works that engage with contemporary music, performance and dance”.

In addition, “Carriageworks provides a different context for the Biennale because of our location in Redfern—this provides many exciting curatorial opportunities for both Australian and international curators.”

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Wendy Walker: You’ve stated that your favourite award is the 2013 FBi SMAC (Sydney Music Art & Culture) of the Year Award, which “recognise[s] the hard working and talented people who have contributed something special to Sydney’s creative culture”. The award specifically acknowledged your “engagement with local communities, the connecting of unlikely groups”, and the fact that you had “made the arts accessible, in every sense of the word”. It also noted that in the short time you’ve been at Carriageworks, the numbers of visitors have quadrupled with a “dazzling array of events”.

Can you discuss the ways in which you’ve striven to achieve such accessibility across art forms and the new audiences attracted to Carriageworks as a consequence?

Lisa Havilah: The significant growth and profile that Carriageworks has achieved over the last two years has emerged from the development and production of a contemporary multi-arts program that reflects and engages with the social and cultural demographic of Sydney.

The Carriageworks artistic program works across forms to commission and present large scale ambitious contemporary works across the areas of contemporary dance, visual arts, performance and music. We also are interested in arts and cultural excellence more broadly and collaborate in the areas of food, fashion and across the creative industries. From the beginning of the implementation of our new artistic program in 2012 our audiences have doubled each year. This has happened because we are committed to reflecting the cultural demographic of Sydney. Because of this our program is focused on commissioning and presenting work from across Asia and the Pacific in tandem with the commissioning of new urban Aboriginal works. In addition, we have set our ticket price at $35. As a result we access new audiences, which are young, culturally diverse and have a strong appetite for contemporary large scale immersive experiences.

Accessibility is directly connected to cultural relevance. Audiences want to engage with contemporary work that enables them to reflect on their own lives and their place in the world. When Carriageworks presented Song Dong’s large-scale installation Waste Not last year, it very much told a very personal family story of social and political change in China. This story resonated very strongly with Chinese-Australian audiences in Sydney and large family groups across a number of

generations engaged with this work over the period of the exhibition. Carriageworks is very much about context and location. The building and precinct are over twenty thousand square metres and at one time in the building’s history, over six thousand people worked here every day. As a place, it has a history of work and of influence—the suburb around Carriageworks is made up of houses that were built for people that worked in this building. It has a history of influencing contemporary politics and culture —it was one of the first places that employed Aboriginal people on equal conditions.

The artistic program engages with this history of production, the scale of the architecture to deliver on the ambition of artists in the development and presentation of new work.

WW: How did you foresee the evolution of Carriageworks when you arrived in January 2012?

Were there, for example, overseas models you looked at? Where do you position Carriageworks within the current cultural landscape and what distinguishes it from other contemporary spaces?

LH: Carriageworks is the most significant contemporary multi-arts centre of its kind in Australia. It is distinctive, in that it is actively commissioning and presenting international and national work across the areas of contemporary performance, dance, visual arts and music. We have been able to build capacity quickly within our artistic program by taking a collaborative partnership approach to commissioning and presenting new work.

Carriageworks is committed to supporting artists to work ambitiously in new ways.

This year in partnership with the Biennale of Sydney we commissioned Tacita Dean to make her first live performance work. The resulting season of ‘Event for a Stage’ presented during the Biennale’s middle program also exists as a work for radio—made in partnership with the ABC’s Creative Audio Unit—and will also become a Tacita Dean film. Through its producing structure, Carriageworks has the capacity to make international scale work in collaboration with artists. In partnership with the Esplanade in Singapore and the Vienna Festival, Carriageworks has commissioned a major performance work by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, which will be presented at Carriageworks in 2015. This work will be presented alongside a large-scale commissioning program—24 Frames Per Second, which has commissioned twenty-four

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Australian and international artists to make new work across the areas of visual arts, dance and film. This project will present eighteen new Australian commissions in tandem with six new international works.

The artistic direction of Carriageworks is focused on commissioning and presenting large scale ambitious works across disciplines that are responsive to its scale and context and work that is culturally relevant to the contemporary communities, who engage with our programs. Artists now don’t think in terms of disciplines in the same way that they used to. The way we commission and the way we produce is both responding to and influencing the way artists work.

WW: Consistent with the community-engaged programming which characterised your direction at Campbelltown Arts Centre, you’ve commented on your commitment to developing programs that echo the cultural demographic (and history) of Sydney.

Can you outline the importance for Carriageworks of the Aboriginal community in Redfern and its reflection in the programming. In a significant initiative, I believe that you are also developing a Redfern archive at Carriageworks. Can you elaborate upon this project and those who are involved?

LH: The first project that we undertook under the new artistic direction in January 2012 was Black Capital. This project was developed in partnership with Sydney Festival and the Aboriginal communities of Redfern. The project involved a number of new commissions, one of which was the commissioning of a new work by Brook Andrew. The resulting work —Travelling Colony included six caravans that were painted in traditional Wiradjuri patterning and inside each caravan was a video interview with a member of the local Redfern Aboriginal community, talking about the impact the gentrification of the area was having on their personal experience of living within Redfern.

The caravans were also part of a large-scale performance work that was a feature of Festival First Night.

Carriageworks has an ongoing Redfern Aboriginal social history project that includes recognising important community histories; these exhibitions have included the National Black Theatre, Koori Radio and Hereby Make Protest, which recognised the Aboriginal leaders and activists who rallied from across the country in 1938 to an allAboriginal Conference held at Australia Hall

A CANVAS TO OUR IMAGINATIONS

in Sydney’s Elizabeth Street to declare a National Day of Mourning. As part of the building of this nationally important archive, Carriageworks commissions artists to make new works that engage with these histories. In relation to the Aboriginal archive, Carriageworks has an Aboriginal Advisory Committee that is chaired by Jason Glanville, who is the Director of the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence based in Redfern.

The Committee is made up of key Aboriginal leaders within Redfern who advise on the direction and implementation of the Strategy and provide ongoing advice regarding the program and its engagement and relevance to communities.

WW: In the past year, Carriageworks staged major visual art exhibitions by Christian Boltanski, Tehching Hsieh and Song Dong. The doubling of presentation space to more than twenty thousand square metres allowed Carriageworks to become not only one of the major venue partners for the 2014 Biennale of Sydney, but has also positioned it alongside other major contemporary visual art spaces such as the MCA and Artspace. How did the conversion of the space formerly leased by George Miller’s film studio/company come about and what is it now able to offer? Will this newly reclaimed additional space be dedicated to the presentation of the visual arts and if so, how will that be sustainable?

LH: The Carriageworks precinct has undergone enormous growth over the last two years. This growth has been physical in regard to doubling in size, but it has also undergone significant growth in programming.

The Carriageworks’ institutional model is focused on innovation in partnership and collaboration. Because of this approach, as an institution we have been able to build capacity within the program quickly and respond to new opportunities as they arise. Carriageworks is a new generation of major cultural institutions in Australia, which acts entrepreneurially to build commercial income from major event partners using its extraordinary infrastructure as a resource to achieve that. While support from all tiers of Government is critically important to grow sustainably, we entrepreneur seventyfive percent of our income through commercial partnerships. Carriageworks provides an extremely high return on investment.

Our commercial income goes directly into our Artistic Program. Within the new spaces we now have significantly enhanced capacity to commission and present large-scale visual arts projects. We have a range of national and international partnerships that are in development to continue to increase our commitment to contemporary visual arts projects. Our partnership with the Biennale of Sydney provides distinctive spaces for the presentation of works alongside our capacity to produce complex and large-scale works

across a number of disciplines. The enlarged precinct now offers four flexible theatre spaces (self-contained black boxes) of varying capacity (100, 150, 300 and 800 seats), in addition to a range of large-scale industrial spaces (which can be built into), including the new space, which is a seven thousand five hundred square metre open space. We have an artistic programming team led by Lisa French, that works across artform areas and sometimes on the same project.

WW: At Casula Powerhouse, Campbelltown Art Centre and now Carriageworks you’ve established a pattern of forging strategic partnerships/ collaborations (often long-term), in order to stage major productions/exhibitions. Can you cite some (rewarding) examples of these partnerships and discuss the importance in your view of this kind of collaborative model, which is (as you’ve mentioned) only partially reliant on government funding?

LH: Carriageworks builds long-term partnerships with both artists and companies.

These types of partnerships benefit both artist and audience. Carriageworks has worked with the internationally renowned New Zealand Company MAU—Lemi Ponifasio to present and commission work each year over the last two years. The Company will come back to Sydney in 2015 to premiere a newly commissioned work. The multi-year relationship between the artist and the

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institution assists the very expensive process of making work more sustainable, but also assists in audience growth and the opportunity to develop a more in-depth relationship with the audience. We also hope to bring Ryoji Ikeda back to Australia next year following the extraordinary response that we had to the major installation that we presented in 2012, where forty two thousand people engaged with his work over a period of three weeks.

We also have developed multi-year partnerships with our major event partners, which include Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Australia and Sydney Contemporary. These large-scale events, which attract large arts and cultural audiences, reinforce our commitment to excellence in contemporary arts and culture and work with us to build our national and international profile.

WW: At this year’s Biennale of Sydney it was apparent that there were very large numbers of youthful visitors, including young families. In the course of the last decade international institutions have observed a dramatic growth of interest in their contemporary art galleries representing a “paradigm shift in audience art-preferences”. Notable also is a growing youthful audience—accustomed to image-saturation—which enjoys the “challenge of seeing something startling, new and different”.3 The immersive installation Test pattern [no 5], presented as part of the 2013 Vivid Festival by apanese sound artist Ryoji Ikeda, coincided with the launch of video for Instagram. Staged in the largest of Carriageworks’ self-contained theatres, it was a dramatic example of the potency of social media, since it attracted (as you’ve stated) 42,000 people over three weeks. You’ve discussed the ways that Carriageworks has managed to “access new audiences, which are young, culturally diverse and have a strong appetite for contemporary, largescale, immersive experiences”. Can you talk about the implications of social media for spaces like Carriageworks?

LH: With projects like the Ikeda installation, it is our audiences that promote the work for us by taking amazing video and images of themselves within the work. Our audiences have a huge appetite for large-scale work that you exist within, rather than standing outside and observing—this is very different to a whitewall gallery experience and is what makes our visual arts program distinctive and experiential.

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WW: In the past few years there has been a growing number of fashion or fashion-related exhibitions in museum spaces, as well as an increase in critical commentary. Fashion historian Sally Gray makes the observation that: “The newly energised presence of fashion exhibitions in art museums is currently being contextualised and theorised in scholarly publications like Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye’s (with Jeffrey Horsley) Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971 (2014) and Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson’s Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice (2014).”4 Fashion seems to be an interest for you. Where do you see it sitting within the contemporary cultural landscape?

a strategy that everyone has agreed to. It is a shoulder-to-shoulder situation with a team of people completing daily tasks that they care about doing well. The longer you do it—the braver you get and the bigger risks you can take. I always want the institutions that I work in to be learning ones where change is seen as normal and not the exception. Institutions learn through taking risks and always working outside their current capacities.

LH: Fashion has always been innately multi-disciplinary—the nature of fashion as an industry and an art form is that it is collaborative. This year we commissioned Romance was Born to create their first public exhibition in collaboration with Australian artist Rebecca Baumann. The result was an extraordinary installation that extended the practice of both artist and designers.

The exhibition was part of Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Australia, which we present here each year. Carriageworks is very much a home of fashion in Australia and we receive many commercial and cultural benefits from that—we are interested in how our programs can continue to intersect with the work of contemporary Australian designers. Fashion is just another medium or discipline that artists work in and of course fashion designers are artists as well, increasingly looking to collaborate across mediums.

LH: I like a deadline and six years has been my deadline to date. I believe in artistic and organisational renewal for contemporary arts institutions. I also believe it’s important for there to be opportunities and pathways for the generation behind me to take up roles such as this one.

WW: With commentary such as “Carriageworks’ 2014 Program cements its place as Sydney’s rising arts star’ and ‘Carriageworks’ rising status as one of Sydney’s major cultural institutions has been confirmed by the official announcement of its 2014 Artistic Program”,5 there has been substantial (and very positive) press coverage. Looking back on your time at Casula Powerhouse, then Campbelltown Arts Centre and now Carriageworks, are you able to reflect on your own directorial development or evolution and what might characterise that?

LH: I see the role of directing a contemporary arts institution as a profession—that is developed through practice. In many ways the role is an intuitive one—in other ways it is the daily task of being the CEO of a company —delivering on the ambition that is laid out in

WW: What is behind your decision to remain as director for only six years at each of these institutions?

WW: And finally, what do you consider is yet to be accomplished at Carriageworks?

LH: The ambition of Carriageworks is to realise its potential as a major arts institution in Australia that is also making an international contribution to contemporary practice. As an institution we are only in our infancy, with an artistic program that has only existed for just over two years. While there have been some significant achievements, we are only a tiny way down the road.

Notes 1 See ‘SMAC of the Year: Lisa Havilah’, transcript from FBI SMAC Awards ceremony at Carriageworks, 14 January, 2014; fbismacawards.com 2 Andrew Taylor, ‘In art and life, Christian Boltanski takes a chance’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January, 2014 3 Glenn Lowry, Radio National, Artworks, interview with Amanda Smith, 27 June 2010; see http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ artworks/stories/2010/2936189.htm 4 Gray also notes that “Exhibiting fashion in its own right really began with Cecil Beaton’s ground breaking couture exhibition, Fashion: an anthology at the V&A in 1971.”

Email communication with the author, 4 August 2014 5

James Gorman, The Daily Telegraph, November 15, 2013

Opposite Ryoji Ikeda Test pattern [no.5], 2013 audiovisual installation at Carriageworks commissioned and presented by Carriageworks and ISEA2013 Photo courtesy the artist

the new textuality for the visual arts: entrenchment in the 1 academy

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Adam Geczy In the era of the avant-garde that began roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century until the late 1960s, artists could still distinguish themselves according to their affiliation with the academy. “Academic” when applied to art had a withering ring that suggested sclerosis, sameness and complacency. Today the art academy is all but ubiquitous, leaving the self-taught to the reckless or the very lucky.

The exponential rise in world population means that certified qualifications are a must, and, unlike several decades ago, a Bachelor’s degree is the new starting point, and not the door-opener it used to be. It is now the norm for art competitions to stipulate that an art degree is a mandatory prerequisite for entry. Moreover, almost all art schools around the world are tied to a university, and the degree is ostensibly on par with other disciplines in the same institution. It is also now all but accepted that art is a form of research. Yet the introduction of this term, more typical to science, is marred by an unresolved wager. For while artists in art schools jockey for parity with the rest of the institution, agreeing to wearing new clothing, this clothing is still ill fitting. Curiously, art is considered research, but it is what in Australia is called “non-traditional”, which means it does not accrue the kind of collateral funding open to “traditional” forms, namely writing.

Caught in this condescending bind, in order to leverage income, art schools find themselves in the quandary where they need to support forms of research that they can justify, that is, which can be rationalised. The answer is to encourage staff and postgraduate students to deliver conference papers on their studio activities.

Under the rubric of “practice-based research”, this predicament has created a new trend and a new breed: the artist driven to write more than make, to spill talk than spill paint.

But first, let us look at some of these new terms. Not only are student-artists now researchers, but postgraduate students are “HDRs” (Higher Degree Researchers); a plain descriptor (postgraduate: after graduating from the basic degree) is transformed into a phrase that is not only carries an elevated air (“higher”) but also makes a claim. With blithe semantic fast-tracking, the question as to whether these students are learning to research, is comfortably elided. Next: “non-traditional” forms of research, a term that deserves some scrutiny because of its presumptions and misprisions.

For if we are to be captious, we might point out that the visual image predates the written word. Here “tradition”, with no indication as to when this tradition began, really means forms of research linked to the model of scientific verifiability and peer review. More to the point it is a euphemism for “unconventional”, or, more aptly still, forms of research that do not suit the standards of those with which we are comfortable, that is, forms (most of ‘us’ in the academy) recognise as research. In other words, once we scrape away the mystification, to abut “non-traditional” next to “research” is a way of undermining research without risking too much offence. With this in mind, the phrase “practicebased” now becomes ironic, since almost all the sciences are such. There is a blatant Platonism at stake here, since the term is used far less in the sciences than it is in the applied arts. The list of qualifiers has a motive of describing, while tacitly undermining; the need for a qualifier makes the discipline somewhat ‘less’.

The real problem is that art is not verifiable, for as Wittgenstein observed, art does not ask a question, it answers one. But it still remains unresolved amongst both students and academics what the ‘artist-researcher’ must be doing. Must s/he set about finding the question to which the work of art is answer?

Another vexed issue arises in the Visual Arts PhD. While a Masters degree requires the demonstration of a high level of proficiency in making works of art, and their critical analysis and historical positioning, a PhD is “new knowledge”. This is fairly easy to understand when it comes to science (e.g., the isolation of a protein, correcting a hypothesis etc.) and to the humanities (e.g., new historical insights, rethinking an historical problem, exposing theoretical inconsistencies etc.), but when it comes to visual art it is unique from the very beginning. But whether it is new knowledge is another matter altogether that hinges on whether the art is ‘good’. But before we get ahead of ourselves we need to ask whether art ever deals in new knowledge at all, or simply reasserts fundamentals about existence.

It would be absurd then to attempt to evaluate this, to gauge whether a work of art increases our awareness of something more or less, since there is no effective standard on which to base this critique. We are back to the beginnings of art history and its foundation in the connoisseur, the one who simply knows better due to greater

knowledge and better taste, a quality that can never be wholly taught. The academic examiner is placed in this role, but plays at it imperfectly, since what the criteria are remain obscure. Any academic who has done enough examinations will be forced to admit that students can pass on mediocre work. As against a good artwork with a poor thesis—there the flaws in a written thesis are easier to pinpoint and justify—a forcefully written dissertation will do much to get an indifferent work over the line.

Another argument in support of artistic research as “research” that is back-to-front (accounting for the uniqueness of something that is already unique), lies in the difference between researching and inventing. Let us take a fairly popular and tried artistic formula of identity art. Someone who is not an artist seeking to find more about his or her historical background, like those voyeuristic, selfindulgent and maudlin television shows of minor celebrities tracing their past, will go to archives, conduct web-searches, perhaps go on some personal pilgrimage. An artist embarking on a similar task will perhaps begin in a similar fashion. This stage of unearthing, ordering and justifying data is, indeed, research. It identifies a gap (there is stuff about granddad I didn’t know) and closes that gap with information (granddad was a Nazi!), the more dramatic the better. After that, what the artist does is something different, hopefully, although the recent bluster about research has precipitated forms of art that actively pursue a fairly dry model that reflects a research model (hence the rhetoric about ‘the archive’ and the like).

Producing art about this subject matter will use it as a basis, a touchstone, for generating a series of imaginary attachments that make the transition from unearthing facts to invocation.

Say the artist goes to a site with special historical resonance and makes film footage or takes photographs or makes drawings.

The film may have an evidential quality, but that will not be its sole purpose, nor the photograph or the drawing, for the medium will be a vehicle to a wider imagining that is speculative and prospective. It reaches to areas of thinking, perception and experience that are not limited to the material substance of the site, and are beyond that site itself. To use this case study as a model—and there are many others besides of course—the work of art uses facts to reach to spaces to which raw factuality is

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inaccessible. My Nazi granddad was here and executed a bunch of gypsies—how was it?

In many cases to find out the facts is to lose the wonder, and delight in wondering.

This example serves the purpose of demonstrating that works of art engage in a refashioning, in which facts are but an integer in the process. Because of this refashioning, reshaping, the result is generally different from the original intention. This surprise in the final form is the basis of most analytical inquiry. In a recent book dealing with the way artists create knowledge, Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher begin their preface with the plain statement that “artists often begin something without knowing how it will turn out. In practice, this translates as thinking through doing”.2 In order to evaluate what has been done, the artist-”researcher”will embark on an explanation of what the artwork means, and weigh up the effectiveness of its content and approach, almost turning him or herself into a personal critic. This is one beneficial outcome of the research process, as it helps to refine the sense of self-criticism and self-valuation that, at best, assists in independent reflection. But the advantages of this approach are only dependent on certain forms of art practice. For art may be rich in meaning and insight, but it also embraces the oblique and the obscure. Fisher and Fortnum assert the currency, alive in art, of “a kind of liminal space, where not knowing is not only not overcome, but sought, explored, and savoured; where favour, boredom, frustration and getting lost are constructively deployed alongside wonder, secrets and play”.3

The traditional and scientific model is about overcoming wonder and mystifying, while art is about keeping it alive. If the riddle in the work of art is solved, then it dies. This is the double bind that the artist researcher is ultimately faced with: demystify or risk not being taken seriously. The best that the artist researcher can wish for is to play at unpacking while ensuring that the work of art stays shrouded in its own perpetual ambiguities.

One way of doing this is to provide “artistic context” for the work of art. Here, the candidate places the studio work within the terrain of his or her peers, and attempts to cite the family values, in terms of artistic examples from other artists either contemporary or historical, which amount to a particular sensibility. This is far less problematic at Masters level, which only needs to demonstrate a firmness of knowledge without the onus of large claims of importance

or originality. If we are to run with the above example, let us also pretend that this is a PhD candidate in his/her mid-twenties. It is feasible that in one part of his/her writing s/he will compare herself to other artists in this vein, from Tacita Dean to Christian Boltanski to Gerhard Richter. It is tenable to explain his/ her areas of affinity and also of difference, but the question of parity—which is theoretically necessary to defend the originality of her contribution—is altogether moot.

The process of mounting an argument for the relevance and importance of the work of art has led to its own enclave of jargon. This is much the same for art academics who now need to write short manifests to the research office for each of their “non-traditional research outputs”. In other words, “traditional research” such as the peer-reviewed journal article, can simply be submitted as an example of research activity, while the “non-traditional output”, such as an exhibition, must be accompanied by a text explaining the work’s “outcomes” and “significance”. In so doing the artist makes a case for the originality and, in the end, aesthetic usefulness of the work.

This is not so hard if an artist is using technology or the work avails itself of some dimension with some orientation to outside of the aesthetic—the ‘merely’ aesthetic remains an anathema. Heaven help a painter working in the still life tradition. Ironically, the word tradition comes up again, but one that is very important to art, since many practices work closely and within established traditions, continuing them.

The purpose is not to do something new, just to do it well, which is to participate in a dialogue with the past and to safeguard a tradition into some imaginary perpetuity. So a ceramicist would likely lose out, but to make traditional pots in a glaze with a new chemical compound would be of interest to research. Abstract painters are also in jeopardy, since it is typically the purpose of non-objective abstraction to reach to where words cannot. The best that they can hope for is to receive reviews and other forms of media attention which account for the work’s “impact”, irrespective of the history of art being full of key works that got lost in the critical mail when they were first exhibited.

To counteract this is a list of words that I like to call “vector words”. They are like the verbal Viagra for the explication of artworks. Here are a few examples: “challenge”, “dispute”, “reposition”, “gap in knowledge”, “respond to a lack”, “mobilise”, “cross-disciplinary”, “new

knowledge” and “cross-pollinate”. It is unlikely that a research manifest will not have these words, which begs a very big question as to whether the value of the work rests ultimately in the written argument. While the postgraduate student (HDR) will have his or her work shown alongside the written thesis, this is not so for the art academic, for whom the visual work ends in words. His or her research is ultimately at the behest of a different medium and a different logic. Excepting the few and the fortunate, artists are expected to write more in order to stay artists. In a recent talk for PhD students in the symposium ‘Painting as Research’ at the University of Arts in London, Ian Kiaer makes the familiar, but still relevant observation that there is a “problem [with] the relationship between writing and making the work, it’s a problem for the PhD but it’s problematic anyway. From the beginning I would think about this distinction… the very nature of how an artwork works is so different to [sic] how a text works, how thesis works—a written claim”.4

The antagonism between the written word and visual image, as well as their symbiosis, is a venerable one. The most famous statement from Horace’s Ars Poetica is ut pictura poesis—“as is painting so is poetry”.

But this was famously countered in the first studied examination of the formal properties of the arts by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Lacoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Lessing emphasises that painting is a spatial and more or less instantaneous phenomenon, while poetry and writing is diachronic and unfolds within time. And although time is recommended to study good painting, one’s apprehension remains within the confines of what is materially given; it unfolds in a completely different way from painting.

By the time of Russian and Greenbergian formalism, this was a distinction that was taken as a given, and was used to distance the visual, in late modernism, primarily painting, from the written word, which resulted in a phase where painting attempted the sublime and numinous (as with say Barnett Newman and Rothko).

This leads inevitably to a form of mysticism, which once the enthusiasm wears off, enforces a silence, a wordlessness, that can be quite boring. However, statements such as those

by Kiaer above, which have been sounded many times, are not to be seen in the same context, but rather are sounded by the consciousness of what visual artists need

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to do to get a higher degree, which means write and use linguistic channels foreign to the artistic process. Anyone who has observed the march of professionalisation and the art academy, and the development of the visual arts PhD in the new millennium will have observed candidates who are very good artists but whose suitability is less than appropriate, because they are not particularly good writers. This means art PhDs are of a particular genus, and the long term effects remain to be seen.

The mandate of writing for artists and academics is only compounded by the need to show a work or an exhibition’s importance according to citable values.

As any experienced artist knows, reviews are arbitrary at best: it is either to do with the venue, the subject matter, or whom you know.

Few magazines run reviews and newsprint is only interested in what the non-specialist public is likely to read, such as the current blockbuster at a national gallery. One way to address this is to give conference presentations on “practicebased research”, where the artist effectively writes an analysis of the studio work for formal discussion in an academically sanctioned environment. Leading conference organisations like the College Art Association (CAA) or the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCACA) and their various offshoots such as the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (POPCAANZ), are all now open to contributions by “studio researchers”, and actively encourage them to deliver together with those presenting more traditional kinds of papers. This would have been the exception in the 1980s, and unheard of earlier, unless the artist also had an established reputation as a writer (e.g.

Robert Motherwell). Today, the testimonial model is unquestioned and welcomed. Yet there are obvious virtues to the traditional default, in which the externality to the artistic process admits of a more objective setting for ideas and observations. An artist discussing his or her own work has a fundamentally limited amount of critical distance. Another positive justification for the testimonial style conference paper is exposure against a publicity market that is erratic, fickle and fashion-conscious. There is as yet little agreement on the form and shape of the research testimonial (the artist giving a formal presentation on his or her own work).

For example there is little account taken for the fact that the overuse of the first person pronoun actually dims the critical faculty, on the part

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Page 68 Joseph Kosuth Texts for nothing (Waiting for–), 2011 installation view Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich Photo courtesy the artist Left Christopher Wool Untitled (detail), 2010 Photo courtesy the artist

of both deliverer and audience. In so writing, the artist enters into a quasi-diaristic genre, in which subjective choice and point of view are privileged over dispassionate evaluation. And the process of self-promotion can only go so far—an over-enthusiastic presentation can have the opposite effect. Nonetheless, there are now a growing number of artists in conferences, as there are journals about the artistic process.

More knowledge and more opportunities are welcome, but we might also reflect on how this knowledge is skewed, and the forums in which it is aired. Art is now not only exhibited, it is exhibited for the sake of being turned into an academic presentation and article.

Marcel Duchamp’s lapidary statement, “stupid as a painter” was meant to be provocative and ironic. It both defended and satirised the romantic stance of the modern artist who protected himself from the barrage of verbiage through the bastion of a visual domain that words found impenetrable. It also suggests that the artist has an air of the stupid about him/her to anyone else who isn’t an artist.

Then there was the statement made by Georges Braque that “one can explain everything about a work of art except the bit that matters”. Perilously misunderstood, it does not discount words altogether, since it can suggest that in the explanation one can come closer to the “bit” in question.

The conceptual artists from the 1960s responded to what they thought was an anti-intellectualism that had seeped into art; the high modernist belief in a pure presentational visuality had run its course, the exclusion of words was deemed specious and overly severe. (Let us also not forget, as Tom Wolfe famously remarked in his classic study of Abstract Expressionism, The Painted Word, that the movement about pure visuality had hitherto never been so insulated by so much writing.)

But the new textuality in the academy is something different again, a kind of rationalisation by stealth. In the end, it might be salutary to notice that in art’s campaign to find parity with “traditional research models”, it runs the risk of escaping itself. As art in institutions continues to curry favour with other disciplines, the reward for compromise is so far only the prize for second place.

Notes 1 See Adam Geczy, ‘Art is not Research’, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet 37.3, 2008: 76-79 2 Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum eds., On not knowing: how artists think, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013: 7 3

ibid., emphasis in original

4

Ian Kiaer, ‘Studio’, ibid: 120

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A broad range of mediums is available including Art Spectrum oils (artists’ and student quality), watercolours, gouache, pastels, primers, mediums, papers, stretchers (and stretching service), linens and canvasses. We also stock sable, bristle and acrylic brushes and easels. Reliable technical advice is available.

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Industry Success of Adelaide Central School of Art

Drawings by Godwin Bradbeer and Christopher Orchard 3 September - 17 October Wish you were here!

A fundraising exhibition of postcard-sized works in support of our students.

25 October - 15 November

Drawing Month 29 August - 3 October Adelaide Central School of Art, supported by the Helpmann Academy, Adelaide College of the Arts and South Australian School of Art, UniSA, will launch Drawing Month, a program of exhibitions, events and workshops, exploring contemporary Australian drawing.

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Adelaide Central School of Art prides itself on the industry success of its lecturing staff and graduates.

The School employs leading contemporary artists to develop and deliver our award course program and actively supports the ongoing success of our graduates. Adelaide Central School of Art congratulates our lecturers and graduates on their recent achievements, including: • • • • • • • • • • •

Morgan Allender Country Arts SA Breaking Ground Regional Arts Award winner SALA 2014 enabling her to travel to the Netherlands Roy Ananda - Slow crawl into infinity, Samstag Museum of Art assisted by Arts SA Nic Brown second annual Cibo Espresso Studio Residency at the British School at Rome in 2014 Deidre But-Husaim The Collectors Project, Art Gallery of South Australia and Guildhouse (concludes 7 September) Nic Folland 2014 Wakefield Press Monograph recipient and SALA exhibition The Extreme Climate of Nicholas Folland at the Art Gallery of South Australia (concludes 30 November) Rebecca Hastings finalist in the 2014 Archibald and Sulman Prizes Glenn Kestell Rip It Up Publishing Artist Award winner SALA 2014 Julia McInerney Helpmann Academy Project Grant, Art Start, Australia Council for the Arts and NAVA Sainsbury Sculpture Grant. Residencies at Artspace, Sydney, SIM, Berlin and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin Fleur Elise Noble recipient of the 2013 ArtsSA Triennial Project Grant and winner of the Bessie Award for most Outstanding Visual Design (Life of Her) Julia Robinson Dark Heart: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia Sera Waters Ghostscapes, Fontanelle Gallery, Project Grant Arts SA and Mid-career Grant Australia Council for the Arts

2014 SA Architecture Awards Renovation of the historic buildings at Glenside for the Adelaide Central School of Art won Grieve Gillett Architects the Heritage Section Architecture Award.

Images L Am I missing something... (detail), 2014, timber cabinet, chandelier, ceramic basin, refrigeration unit, 12v lighting, 150 x 72 x 48cm.

R Nicholas Folland with his work Untitled (study), 2014, taxidermy deer, chandelier crystal, 100 x 65 x 60cm, Courtesy of Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, Art Gallery of South Australia and photographer Saul Steed.

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2014 BolognaFiere Shanghai International Contemporary Art Exhibition