Broadsheet Journal | 45.1

BROADSHEET JOURNAL

JOURNAL 45.1 ART / CRITICISM / THEORY

VOLUME 45.1 2016

Galleries | 10 Chancery Lane | 303 Gallery | A | Acquavella | Aike -D ellarco | Air de Paris | Alisan | Andréhn -S chiptjenko | Applicat -P razan | Arario | Arndt | Athr | Atlas | Aye | B | Balice Hertling | Beijing Commune | Bernier /E liades | Blindspot | Blum & Poe | Boers -L i | Marianne Boesky | Ben Brown | Buchmann | C | Gisela Capitain | Cardi | carlier gebauer | Carlos /I shikawa | Casa Triângulo | Chambers | Chemould Prescott Road | Chi -W en | Yumiko Chiba | Mehdi Chouakri | James Cohan | Sadie Coles HQ | Contemporary Fine Arts | Continua | Pilar Corrias | Alan Cristea | Chantal Crousel | D | Thomas Dane | Massimo De Carlo | de Sarthe | Dirimart | The Drawing Room | E | Eigen + Art | Eslite | Gallery Exit | G | Gagosian | Gajah | Galerie 1900 -2 000 | Gandhara -A rt | gb agency | Gerhardsen Gerner | Gladstone | Gmurzynska | Goodman Gallery | Marian Goodman | Richard Gray | Greene Naftali | Karsten Greve | Grotto | Kavi Gupta | H | Hakgojae | Hanart TZ | Hauser & Wirth | Herald St | Xavier Hufkens | I | Ibid. | In Situ - fabienne leclerc | Ingleby | Taka Ishii | J | Bernard Jacobson | Jensen | Johnen | Annely Juda | K | Kaikai Kiki | Kalfayan | Paul Kasmin | Sean Kelly | Tina Keng | Kerlin | Kewenig | David Kordansky | Tomio Koyama | Krinzinger | Kukje /T ina Kim | L | Pearl Lam | Simon Lee | Lehmann Maupin | Lelong | Dominique Lévy | Lin & Lin | Lisson | Long March | M | Maggiore | Magician Space | Mai 36 | Edouard Malingue | Marlborough | Hans Mayer | Mazzoleni | Fergus McCaffrey | Meessen De Clercq | Urs Meile | Mendes Wood DM | kamel mennour | Metro Pictures | Meyer Riegger | Francesca Minini | Victoria Miro | Mitchell -I nnes & Nash | Mizuma | Stuart Shave /M odern Art | mother’s tankstation | N | nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder | Nadi | Nagel Draxler | Edward Tyler Nahem | Nanzuka | Taro Nasu | Nature Morte | neugerriemschneider | nichido | Anna Ning | Franco Noero | O | Lorcan O’Neill | Nathalie Obadia | One and J. | Ora -O ra | Ota | Roslyn Oxley9 | P | P.P.O.W | Pace | Pace Prints | Paragon | Peres Projects | Perrotin | PKM | Plan B | Platform China | Polígrafa | Project Fulfill | R | Almine Rech | Nara Roesler | Tyler Rollins | Thaddaeus Ropac | Andrea Rosen | Rossi & Rossi | Lia Rumma | S | SCAI | Esther Schipper | Rüdiger Schöttle | ShanghART | ShugoArts | Sies + Höke | Silverlens | Skarstedt | Soka | Sprüth Magers | Starkwhite | STPI | Sullivan+Strumpf | T | Take Ninagawa | Tang | team | Thomas | TKG+ | Tokyo Gallery + BTAP | Tolarno | Tornabuoni | V | Vadehra | Van de Weghe | Isabelle van den Eynde | Susanne Vielmetter | Vitamin | W | Wentrup | Michael Werner | White Cube | White Space | Wilkinson | Hubert Winter | Jocelyn Wolff | X | Leo Xu | Y | Yamamoto Gendai | Yavuz | Z | Zeno X | David Zwirner | Discoveries | 11R Eleven Rivington | 313 Art Project | a.m. space | Sabrina Amrani | Artinformal | Isabella Bortolozzi | Thomas Erben | Experimenter | Selma Feriani | François Ghebaly | Hopkinson Mossman | Pippy Houldsworth | Darren Knight | Michael Lett | Mujin -t o | Night | Raster | ROH Projects | Rokeby | Side 2 | Société | Weingrüll | Workplace | Yeo | Insights | 1335Mabini | A Thousand Plateaus | Antenna Space | Arataniurano | Beijing Art Now | Hadrien de Montferrand | du Monde | EM | Fost | Gallery 100 | Ink Studio | Yoshiaki Inoue | iPreciation | L -A rt | Lawrie Shabibi | Leeahn | Liang | Longmen | MEM | Osage | Park Ryu Sook | Pékin | Pi Artworks | Star | This Is No Fantasy + dianne tanzer | Vanguard | Yamaki | Yang

MUMA

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS

Borders, Barriers, Walls 30 April – 2 July 2016

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

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

Tony Schwensen, Border Protection Assistance Proposed Monument for the Torres Strait (Am I ever going to see your face again?) (detail) 2002. Image courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

CONTRIBUTORS PEDRO DE ALMEIDA is an arts manager, curator and writer. Since 2012 he has been Program Manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. His writing on art has been published in exhibition catalogues, artists’ monographs and publications including ArtAsiaPacific, Art Monthly Australia and Broadsheet Journal. He is currently undertaking a MPhil (Fine Arts) at UNSW Art & Design with the research topic of art and the politics of urban renewal within public housing sites.

FRANCES BARRETT is an artist and curator based in Sydney. She is currently Curator of Contemporary Performance at Campbelltown Arts Centre. She is a leading artist of Brown Council with fellow artists Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith. In 2016, BC will be presenting new work commissions as part of the Biennale of Sydney and Art Gallery of New South Wales. Across both 2014 and 2015 she presented, Canvas, FBI Radio’s weekly arts program.

Frances’ work has recently been presented at Liquid Architecture, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Performance Space, and Firstdraft. In 2016 she will be co-curating with Liquid Architecture FM[X]: What would a Feminist Methodology Sound Like? and presenting work as part of Roundtable x 4A at Art Central (Hong Kong) with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. DR REBECCA COATES is a curator, writer, lecturer, and director of SAM, Shepparton Art Museum, in central Victoria. In October 2016, SAM presents a major survey exhibition of Nell’s work, including The Wake (2014-16) commissioned for the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. DR ANN DESLANDES is a writer and researcher in Sydney with interests in visual culture, urbanism, and the politics of solidarity. Her opinion writing and cultural criticism has been published in The Postcolonialist, The Global Urbanist, Junkee, and The Sydney Morning Herald; and her academic work has been published in Cultural Studies Review, Reconstruction, and Australian Feminist Studies. Ann has a PhD in Gender & Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney and has taught sociology, politics, and gender studies at the University of Sydney and the University of Technology Sydney.

ALEX GAWRONSKI is a Sydney-based artist and writer; publishes widely and a regular contributor to Broadsheet Journal; he holds PhD from Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney; co-fo unding director of a number of independent artist spaces including the Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN 2007-2014) and presently KNULP, Sydney (2015-); currently teaches in the Painting Studio, Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney.

PARIS LETTAU is an independent arts writer based in Melbourne. He is a sessional tutor in art history and currently completing a Juris Doctor at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne.

DR BILLIE LYTHBERG is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland Business School (NZ) and Affiliated Researcher at Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (UK), and was recently appointed Contributing Editor for the Arts of Oceania to Khan Academy (USA). Billie works Executive Director Editor Production Manager Designer Publisher Printing

Liz Nowell Wendy Walker Sarita Chadwick David Corbet Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc. Newstyle Printing

ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2016, Broadsheet Journal, the authors and artists. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. Print post approved PP53 1629/00022 Editorial inquiries, advertising and subscriptions may be sent to the Editorial Office: BROADSHEET JOURNAL 14 Porter Street, Parkside, South Australia 5063 Tel +61 [08] 8272 2682 • Email: admin@cacsa.org.au • www.cacsa.org.au

Broadsheet Journal can be viewed and downloaded, cover to cover, from www.cacsa.org.au

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at the junction of economics, anthropology and art history, specialising in ethnographic studies and object-centric research. She is especially interested in possibilities for reframing historical interactions and collaborations between Europeans and Polynesians, and their material, artefactual and philosophical legacies for contemporary communities.

DR JACQUELINE MILLNER is Associate Dean Research at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, where she also lectures on contemporary art theory and history. She has published widely on contemporary Australian and international art in key anthologies, journals and catalogues of national and international institutions. Her books include Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art (2010, Sydney: Artspace), Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (with Jennifer Barrett, London: Ashgate, 2014) and Fashionable Art (with Adam Geczy, London: Bloomsbury, 2015). She coconvenes the research group Contemporary Art and Feminism at the University of Sydney.

MACUSHLA ROBINSON is an emerging theorist and Assistant Curator at the New School Art Collection in New York, where she is also completing graduate study with the help of the John Monash Scholarship. She has published in Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australia, ArtAsiaPacific and Imprint as well as several exhibition catalogues.

TERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor of Art History and Social Theory at the European Graduate School. In 2010 he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate, and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham, and in 2014 Clark Fellow at the Clark Institute, Williamstown. From 19942001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. In the 1970s he was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, New York, 2012), and Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015). He is editor of many others including Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2008). A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a Board member of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. See www.terryesmith.net/ web/ The views and/or opinions expressed in Broadsheet Journal are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, staff or Board of the CACSA. Front cover image: Aroha Rawson performs during the activation of Rosanna Raymond’s SaVAge K’lub (2010-ongoing) on the opening weekend of ‘The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Photograph Joe Ruckli. Image courtesy the artist and QAGOMA. This magazine is produced on Titan Gloss 250gsm FSC Mix certified cover and Grange offset 120gsm PEFC certified text. Both papers are Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF) and using ISO 14001 certified mills. Product is printed by an ISO 14001 certified printer using vegetable based inks.

Broadsheet Journal is assisted by the Government of South Australia through Arts SA and the Australian Government through the Australia Council and supported by the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory governments.

BROADSHEET

JOURNAL 45.1 CONTENTS TERRY SMITH

After institutional critique: curating as a discursive practice

BILLIE LYTHBERG

21st Century South Sea Savagery: Rosanna Raymond’s Savage K’lub at APT8 PEDRO DE ALMEIDA

The wondrous art of Eric Bridgeman, briefly ALEX GAWRONSKI

Barbarians at the gates: corporate art institutions against the ‘people’ JACQUELINE MILLNER

A preview of the 20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed: The Embassy of Disappearance REBECCA COATES

Profile of Nell: Earth, Wind And Rock FRANCES BARRETT

Performance and Art Development Agency: Frances Barrett speaks with co-directors Emma Webb and Steve Mayhew ANN DESLANDES

Form after function: Sydney’s Mortuary Station and the 20th Biennale of Sydney MACUSHLA ROBINSON

Living the past within the present: Australian artists at Performa 15 PARIS LETTAU

Review of Technologism at Monash University Museum of Art

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TERRY SMITH

AFTER INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE: CURATING AS A DISCURSIVE PRACTICE

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n recent decades professional curators of art have become more visible as actors in local and international artworlds, attracting the ire of those who devote thousands of words to insisting that works of art must ‘speak for themselves.’ The fact that such critics, for all of their bombast, typically say nothing substantive about artworks, and even less about exhibitions, may be one of the reasons that some curators have come to talk more often, and more publicly, about what they do and how they do it. Another, deeper cause is the curatorial activism of artists within museums during the 1970s that coalesced into the well-known, and now historical, phenomenon of ‘institutional critique.’ It increasingly took highly reflexive, discursive forms.1 During the 1990s, art and curatorial practice, now closely fused, took an ‘educational turn,’ in which discourses of all kinds became the definitive mediums.2 For all the role-swapping, backtracking, and ship-jumping that has occurred since then, there is no denying that, in general, curators today talk less guardedly, and in more depth than ever before, not only about what they do and how, but also about why they do it. My recent book Talking Contemporary Curating is, first of all, a testament to the fact that discourse, in all of its various senses, is now upfront and at the centre of curatorship.3 What is distinctive about this kind of curating, when practised at its best?

Those involved speak more searchingly about curating as a practice that is as grounded in processes of conceptualisation, and as committed to the production of new knowledge, as it is in its more traditional pursuits: the pragmatics of caring for collections, planning programs, working with artists, mounting exhibitions, attracting viewers and educating them. Of course, curators tend to discuss such continuities and changes primarily with other curators, but they also regularly link their projects to the thinking of philosophers and historians, scientists and sociologists, while maintaining their long-running connections with the ideas in circulation within more closely related professions and pursuits, such as art history, art criticism, art dealing, and the cultural industries. Through these exchanges with each other and with others, curators are building the Left: Installation view of When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/ Venice 2013. From left to right: works by Gary B. Kuehn, Eva Hesse, Alan Saret, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Richard Tuttle: Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina Venice , 1 June – 3 November 2013. Photograph: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada.

EIGHT KINDS OF CONTEMPORARY CURATING • Art historical retelling or revision; art critical presentation • Subjective exhibition making • Programmatic curating • Curating as medium, or mediated curating • Radical museology • Recuration (reflexive curating) • Dramaturgic curating • Infrastructural activism sense that, for all of its competitiveness, conflicting orientations, and inner diversity, their enterprise is a shared one. Alongside the generational shift of independent curators into positions within museums – that are themselves internally diversifying – and in the light of the longevity of not-for-profit, alternative artspaces and the hard-won professionalism of those who work within them, this shared sense has been vital to the current merging of museum-based and independent curating, and, overall, to the broadening, diversification, and maturing of art curatorship as a profession.

In Talking Contemporary Curating, twelve curators of art, artistic directors of biennials, art museum directors, art historians, critics, and theorists reflect upon the challenges of curating art in contemporary conditions – worldwide and in a variety of different contexts. They offer carefully thoughtthrough answers to a number of questions that are central to debates within the field, and that often puzzle outside observers. What kinds of curating are most responsive to the world as it is, in all of its complexity, its intimacies, proximities and distances? What are the most responsible kinds of curatorial acts within such a world? What is so special about cuBROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1

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TERRY SMITH rating art when ‘curationism’ appears everywhere in today’s networked, spectacle cultures? 4 How much have professional curators learnt from the curatorial activity of artists, and vice versa? Is there really a fundamental divide between the modern museum-based, scholarly curator and the contemporary independent curator of temporary exhibitions, biennials, events, and processes?5 More broadly, what are the similarities and differences between the modern, the postmodern, and the contemporary art museum, and how does curating operate within each of these paradigms?

How does one negotiate an environment in which all three types of museum co-exist, often in the same city, and sometimes in the same building?

In the larger, global cities, a vast array of exhibitionary venues continues to grow, and to refine its formats, whereas in many places around the world it is a daily struggle to simply build basic infrastructure for art to be seen and interpreted.6 These, then, are some of the challenges facing those for whom art remains the main avenue through which to understand our contemporaneity. They are taken up, boldly and with subtlety, in practice and in these conversations, by all of the interlocutors in Talking Contemporary Curating.

What is so special about curating art when ‘curationism’ appears everywhere in today’s networked, spectacle cultures?

Like much to do with curating, the book took shape in somewhat adventitious ways. The precipitating factor was the publication of Thinking Contemporary Curating in 2012 (New York: Independent Curators International). Its exploration of the question ‘what is contemporary curatorial thought?’ led to widespread discussion among those interested in curating, in thinking about thinking, and in what it is to be contemporary. As I travelled in response to invitations to speak about the book, I participated in many such events. It soon became obvious that some of the most innovative curators and museum directors practising today were reading it, and had strong responses that they wished to share. Wow! I thought: here was a chance to learn more about contemporary curating from those most directly engaged in its practice, from those who have given it the most thought. As well, questions concerning curatorship were engaging many art historians, theorists, and philosophers. In today’s world, each of these professions seems to need something from the others in order to keep doing what it does, and to do it better. Talks turned quickly into debates, dialogues became conversations. Some are based on acquaintances, or friendships, that stretch across decades; others are the outcomes of first meeting. Not everybody who might, ideally, be expected to appear in such a volume is included. Some were unavailable during the months of my journeying. Some conversations that did occur did not take a publishable shape. Some outstanding curators simply do not work discursively.

Nevertheless, taken together, these conversations provide, I believe, a vivid sense of contemporary curatorial thought at work. They also enable us to discern a number of different kinds of curating being pursued today.

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I have identified eight kinds. Allow me highlight them as I describe, briefly, the content of each conversation.

THE INTERLOCUTORS Philosopher Boris Groys is well known for his astute and provocative comments on modern and contemporary art, and for his writings and exhibitions about Moscow Conceptualism, a Russian art movement that spanned the 1970s and 1980s, in which he was an active participant.

Groys argues that there is a fundamental distinction to be drawn between the curating of exhibitions that show aspects of the traditional narrative of the history of art and those that manifest subjective selection of artworks by the curator—the latter often tend toward being Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art precipitating mind-blowing experiences for all the senses. The first kind of exhibition, he suggests, is the outcome of the revolutionary overthrow of the European monarchies, in France and Russia most influentially, which led to the spoils being presented to the new democratic publics, re-interpreted as art. The second has become prominent since the 1960s.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of dOCUMENTA (13), among other major biennials, including Sydney 2008 and Istanbul 2015, explores the arguments in Thinking Contemporary Curating in close, sympathetic, but skeptical detail. In response, I advance an interpretation of dOCUMENTA (13) as offering the visitor an experience of the often violent and tortuous impact of world differences, especially wars, on artists and artworks, and extend Christov-Bakargiev’s metaphor of ‘the brain’ to propose that the exhibition was designed across its venues as a brain inside a dispersed body. Throughout the discussion, Christov-Bakargiev paints a striking picture of her own, highly personal approach to exhibition making, exemplifying the subjectivist curatorial perspective. Yet even this apparent non-discursivity is partially so, and is structured, if not over-determined, by her ‘30/30/30’ rule of thumb, recently described to a journalist as: Thirty percent of the artists should come form the location of the exhibition, 30 percent should be ‘question marks’ – ‘artists I’ve never worked with before or who I don’t fully understand’ – and 30 should be the ‘core,’ which she describes as ‘people with whom I have a strong intellectual connection’… The last 10 percent, she said, should be non-artists.7 In our conversation, Okwui Enwezor revisits the passions motivating his series of exhibitions from the mid-1990s onward about historical transition on the African continent, and the ideas of provincialising Europe and the post-colonial constellation, which underlay his direction of Documenta 11 in 2002. His career might be seen as an outstanding instance of a third kind of curating, that which prioritises a program of necessary change, not only in art historical and art critical perceptions, but also in historical, social, and political worldviews. We see this in his direction of the 2015 Venice Biennale, and we might call it ‘programmatic curating.’

Best known among high-profile curators today is Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose ubiquity as an international art world figure is unmatched within the profession. Our discussion explores the conceptual underpinnings of

his practice, especially the inspiration he has drawn from artists, his understandings of contemporary life, and his commitment to developing exhibitionary forms— from DIY enactments to interview marathons— that seek to enable the present to make itself manifest. As well as having curated over 250 exhibitions since 1991, he has conducted over 2,400 hours of interviews. More than any other curator, he has embraced discourse as a medium that can itself be curated, and, through the marathons staged at galleries, worked out a way of exhibiting it as it happens.

Does his practice suggest a fourth kind of paradigm, in which curating becomes a medium in itself, a vehicle for exhibiting the processes of exhibiting as they are playing themselves out, in increasingly diverse forms, in the larger culture?

Many of the curators and museum directors who participated in these conversations established themselves outside the museum sector, as independent curators or workers within alternative art spaces. They came of age during the heyday of contemporary art that, along with biennials and temporary exhibitions, initially found its natural home in such spaces, before the growth of museums dedicated to today’s art, and its dominance within the auction houses and the new private collection museums.

How have these curators made the transition to the now quite elaborate cultural complex that supports art of all kinds? Have their energies been absorbed by museums (where many of them now work), by the industrialisation of culture, and by the private collector market, or have they been able to change these institutions and settings in significant ways?

The next four conversations explore this last possibility, and do so with a full awareness of the challenges posed by the commercial values pervading the system yet also with an optimism not shared by many of its critics.

Art historian and critic Claire Bishop, in discussing her book Radical Museology, or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2013), asserts that certain museums have again become loci of radical change, despite decades of institutional critique, capitalist incorporation, and conservative pushback. She highlights innovative changes in the recent re-installations of four European collecting institutions: the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Moderna galerija and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, both in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Radical museology is a good name for the daily work of Zdenka Badovinac, director of the Moderna galerija and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana. Responding to the need to develop a new national museum of art after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, while at the same time wishing to keep alive the spirit of internationalism that had inspired ‘self-managed socialism,’ she devised the concept of ‘the museum of parallel narratives,’ which allowed for two linked institutions and two different forms of collection display. She likens her museological innovations to the artistic practice of the avant-garde artist collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, with whom she has worked for many decades.

Accordingly, at the Moderna galerija, the modern art rooms are shown as lines of continuity, one artistic movement leading to another, while the work of the early twentieth-century avant-gardists, the Partisan artists

Installation view When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013.

From left: works by Barry Flanagan, Richard Artschwager, Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz. Photograph Attilio Maranzano.

Courtesy: Fondazione Prada.

during the Second World War, and the art of the retro-garde art groups during the 1980s are shown as ruptures within this trajectory. Meanwhile, at Metelkova, the rooms are structured around the responses of artists to the variety of temporalities that co-exist today, of which no fewer than eleven distinct kinds are identified! Contemporary art in the region continues this tradition of engaged artistic activism, to which Metelkova remains devoted, despite the recent rise of neoliberalism and conservative nationalism.

Curators working in Asia face challenges that parallel those in Eastern and Central Europe, but are quite distinct in other ways. During a conversation at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, chief curator Mami Kataoka reflects on the impact on current Japanese art of 3/11, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which was showcased in her exhibition Roppongi Crossing 2013: Out of Doubt. She also details the vicissitudes of curating in the context of Asian, Western, and local perceptions of what it is to be Asian.

These viewpoints, often at odds with each other, form the subject of some of her group exhibitions, such as Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past (2012). They also surface in her exhibitions devoted to individual artists, such as Lee Bul and Ai Weiwei.

Mari Carmen Ramírez, who is Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and founding director of its International Center for the Arts of the Americas, has dedicated her career to countering essentialist perceptions of Latin America and reductive readings of art from this region—which, after all, consists of twenty nation states and many more ethnicities. Our conversation explores the contested nature of identity formation within this multitude of art centres, and the constant trafficking between them. More thoroughly and more boldly than any other curator, her exhibitions have addressed the question of BROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1

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TERRY SMITH Latin American vis-à-vis European avant-gardism, and the intersections between modernisms on both continents and in the United States.

Badovinac, Kataoka, and Ramírez are examples of museum-based curators who have broken the stereotypical view that art historical scholarship in curating is relatively passive and retiring. Along with many of their contemporaries, they are bringing reflexive museology out into the light, literally putting it on exhibition, and are radically transforming museums in the process.

Reflexive curating, that which takes the nature and history of curating as its subject, parallels theoretical reflection and art historical research in its modes of thought. But it works, often, by using the medium most natural to curators, the exhibition itself. The subjectivist, Gesamtkunstwerk mode of exhibition making that is now so prominent burst into visibility in 1969, when Harald Szeemann curated Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works–Concepts–Processes–Situations–Information at the Kunsthalle Bern. This event, which is a matter of vivid memory and of intensive photographic evocation, has become legendary, both within curatorial discourse and in the histories of curating now being written. Could it be revisited, directly, in actuality, as a re-curated exhibition? A very contemporary question, which was answered in the affirmative when a near simulacrum of the 1969 exhibition was displayed at the Fondazione Prada, Venice, in June 2013. When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/ Venice 2013 quickly became the most talked about exhibition of that year, and comes up in nearly all of the conversations in the book. In the conversation with Germano Celant, director of the Fondazione Prada, who gave the opening address at Bern in 1969 and was the curator of the 2013 restaging, both exhibitions are examined in detail.

When Attitudes Become Form is also a landmark inspiration for Jens Hoffmann, who, in 2012, while director at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, mounted an exhibition of works by contemporary artists who were inspired by the artists included in Szeemann’s exhibition, and by its legacy. A miniature model of the Bern installation in the first room, together with historical documentation, set up the scenario. Throughout his career, and in his current position as deputy director of the Jewish Museum, New York, Hoffmann has continued to present exhibitions in relation to novels, plays, texts of various kinds, and other exhibitions. As a leading exponent of this style, Hoffmann has been influential in establishing the overtly staged, or dramaturgical, exhibition as a distinctive mode of curating.

Beyond the museum sector, and outside the well-funded precincts of the private foundation, the mid-size and smaller, not-for-profit, often artist-run, collective ‘art spaces’ that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and then sustained themselves and expanded in many places are now undergoing a war of attrition due to cutbacks in public funding and competition from private foundations. Yet they were, and in many cases remain, the sites most conducive to experimental art and reflexive curating. Infrastructural activism has become, in effect, another mode of curating; it is especially urgent in situations where contemporary art is a rarity, and 10

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has a fragile existence in complex cultural, legal, and political settings.

Zoe Butt, a graduate of the University of New South Wales, is executive director and curator of Sàn Art, a small space in Ho Chi Minh City that has become a vital centre of experimental activity since it was established in 2007. She is inspired by groups of local artists as they build platforms on which artistic ideas can be proposed and discussed. Only some of them are actually realised, usually against the grain of intense, uninformed, and inconsistent official interference. Provisional platforms such as these are appearing in many places: they hold out hope for the future of art, and for engaged curating, in an increasingly troubled world.

Almost all of the themes that occur throughout these conversations come up in the discussion with curator, art centre director, and theorist Maria Lind. We explore in depth her controversial concept of the curatorial; the artist-curator interface; activist curating; organising visual arts infrastructure at the ‘relative peripheries’ within the European Union during the neoliberal turn; and her policies as director of the Tensta Konsthall, an alternative art space in a Stockholm suburb heavily populated by immigrants.

The conversations in Talking Contemporary Curating are their own demonstration of the fact that the contemporary curatorial process, at its best, is as thought-filled, as cognitively driven, as the processes of the most influential critics, historians, and theorists of art who are currently practising. I hope that your reading of it will convince you that the discourse itself—in the person of these curators and their colleagues, as they operate through and between the modes of contemporary curating that I have identified—is also contributing significantly to the broader articulation of what it is to grasp, critically, our contemporaneous differences and our potential for coeval connectivity.

ENDNOTES 1. See Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson eds., Institutional Critique; An Anthology of Artist’ Writings, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.

2. See Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson eds., Curating and the Educational Turn, London, Amsterdam: Open Edition, de Appel, 2010 and Ester Lázár’s useful entry ‘Discursivity,’ in Tranzit’s Curatorial Dictionary, at http:// tranzit.org/curatorialdictionary/index.php/dictionary/discursivity/.

3. Terry Smith, Talking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International, 2015.

4. David Blazer, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Artworld and Everything Else, Toronto: Coach House Books; London: Pluto, 2015.

5. Hal Foster, ‘Exhibitionists,’ London Review of Books, June 4, 2015: 12-13.

6. This is a question pursued throughout Thinking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International, 2012.

7. Emily Stokes, ‘Strange Magic,’ T: The New York Times Style Magazine, December 6, 2015:151.

30 July–1 OctOber

30 July–1 OctOber

30 July Onwards

22 OctOber–24 December

Rana Hamadeh Luke Willis Thompson Vernon Ah Kee

Inaugural Courtyard Commission

Address Ground Floor, Judith Wright Centre 420 Brunswick Street | Fortitude Valley Brisbane QLD 4006 | Australia Please see our website ima.org.au The IMA is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, and from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, and through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Federal, State, and Territory Governments. The IMA is a member of Contemporary Art Organisations Australia (CAOs).

Frontier Imaginaries Maryam Jafri Nicholas Mangan OngOing

Rana Hamadeh | The Sleepwalkers, 2016

14 May–9 July

Co-commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary, The Showroom (London) and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane)

20 February–30 april

BOO! ABORIGINAL GHOST STORIES AND OTHER SCARY MATTER

Australia has a thriving imported heritage of nursery rhymes, fables, Halloween celebrations and Day of the Dead, but spooky spirits are also located within Aboriginal cultures.

Bronwyn Bancroft, Joel Birnie, Destiny Deacon, Nura Rupert, Jacob Stengle Curator: Troy-Anthony Baylis

24 FEBRUARY – 23 APRIL 2016, MON - SAT 10AM - 5PM

Kaurna Country 253 Grenfell Street, Adelaide www.tandanya.com.au

Joel Birnie Screenshot from The Messengers 2016

Selected works from the Eva and Marc Besen Gift to TarraWarra Museum of Art Curated by Anthony Fitzpatrick and Victoria Lynn

Part One: 12 March – 15 May 2016 Part twO: 19 May – 31 July 2016

311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Rd, Healesville, Victoria t +61 (0)3 5957 3100 e museum@twma.com.au

IMAGE: Tony Clark, Sections from Clark’s Myriorama 2009, acrylic and permanent marker ink on linen 2 panels, 240 x 360 cm. Acquired 2009, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection.

PRINCIPAL SPONSOR

MAJOR SPONSORS

www.twma.com.au MAJOR PARTNERS

BILLIE LYTHBERG

21ST CENTURY SOUTH SEA SAVAGERY: ROSANNA RAYMOND’S SAVAGE K’LUB AT APT8

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peaking to notions of identity and geographic centres, renowned author Albert Wendt once said, ‘I carry my centre with me.’1 ‘What I am beginning to learn now is that wherever I’m at, and wherever I’m writing in a particular time, becomes my centre.

But at the back of my head is Samoa, always. I carry it with me everywhere I go.’2

Like Wendt, artist and author Rosanna Raymond has learned to activate her centre wherever she is, collapsing spatial divides through her understanding and employment of the Samoan vā, the dynamic space that relates and connects all things. Vā is central to both the orthography and ethos of Raymond’s SaVAge K’lub. For Raymond and her fellow SaVAges, the vā is pregnant with the potential to engage with the past in the now. It is the vā which permits living dynamics to be performed and embodied, and allows all places and people to be creative and constructive centres. Significantly, the generative acts of art making and writing – or tā (the marking out of time) – contribute to the instantiation of this centre, bringing time and space, past-present-future, into glorious communion.

Drawing from and cleaving to the creative ancestral power of the vā has been critical for Raymond, whose career is wide-ranging both in terms of her practice and the places it has taken her. Born in Aotearoa-New Zealand of Samoan descent, she travels widely and almost constantly, and has recently re-established a home base in Auckland after more than a decade spent living in London. Lecturer, story-teller, champion of exhibitions, ‘actiVAtions’ and interventions in museum and gallery spaces worldwide, since 2010 she has convened the SaVAge K’lub in locations throughout the UK, Europe, Canada, America and Australasia. A safe-haven for experimentation, confrontation and fabrication, the SaVAge K’lub is for ‘21st Century South Sea SaVAgery, influencing art and culture through the interfacing of time and space, deploying weavers of words, rare anecdotalists, myth makers, hip shakers, navigators, red faces, fabricators, activators, installators to institute the non-cannibalistic cognitive Left: Horomona Horo in Rosanna Raymond’s SaVAge K’lub (2010 – ongoing) at the opening weekend of ‘The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Photograph Joe Ruckli. Image courtesy of the artist and QAGOMA.

consumption of the other.’3 Membership is fluid, inclusive, semi-automatic – if you have to ask, you’re not a SaVAge. The SaVAge K’lub is site-specific, but never location dependent. It has occupied museums, lounge-rooms, tea shops, subterranean wine vaults and Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn (where Schwitter was inducted posthumously into the K’lub). It has a life force and energy almost beyond that of its creator, who professes a certain reluctance to formalise either membership or proceedings lest this energy be compromised. In Raymond’s words, it is ‘a space for the revision and creation of new VA-ried conversations, relationships, and artworks’.4 The power of such revisions and creations, she explains, is that they can take effect in diverse geographical and dialogical spaces, and be carried to different parts of the world by the bodies of the people involved. This, it seems, is the perfect premise for APT8, with its curatorial focus on how the body is employed in space to engage with broader social, political and cultural transformations.

The origins of the logistics and underlying concepts of the SaVAge K’lub arguably lie in Raymond’s multiple collaborative exhibitions that juxtapose artists inside the museum (see Pasifika Styles5) with museums inside the artist (ethKnowcentrix http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/exhibitions/2009eth/). But the K’lub itself was established in 2010, during Raymond’s residency at the Museum of Anthropology and Art (MOA) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Raymond had been exploring the museum’s founding anthropological collection, donated by a man named Frank Burnett. With access to his personal diaries, she found he once gave the Canadian ‘Savage Club’ a talk about his adventures in the South Seas. Raymond was intrigued; her research began.

The first ‘Savage Club’, apparently named for Richard Savage (1697– 1743), a free-spirited English poet, had been convened in London in 1857. Outposts flourished throughout Britain’s Commonwealth: ‘bohemian’ gentlemen’s spaces with ‘Ladies’ welcomed a few times a year.

Though ostensibly founded to promote liberal arts such as their namesake’s, many of the clubs also referenced Indigenous peoples in their ceremonies, regalia, private art collections and branding, and some continue to do so to the present day. Perhaps in memory of their hosting Oglala Lakota leader ‘Red Shirt’ in 1887 (as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West), the BROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1

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BILLIE LYTHBERG homepage of the London Savage Club’s website (savageclub.com) still depicts a warrior in a feathered war bonnet, preparing to blow a party whistle, while the Melbourne Savage Club refers to ‘a wry double-entendre on the spirited nature of its founding members’ (melbournesavageclub.com).6 In response to (and revision of) this twenty-first century club’s continuation of notions of a savage ‘Other’, and more particularly to their exclusion of women, Raymond decided to form her very own SaVAge K’lub. At her invitation, the chief of the Musqueam people attended the first K’lub gathering, which marked the opening of the new MOA galleries in 2010, and gave a poignant speech on the notion of the savage and its implications for life in this century. Thus, Raymond’s own SaVAge K’lub was launched.

In Queensland, the SaVAge K’lub is showcasing artistic and performative contributions from more than 20 artists (listed below), in conversation with priceless treasures from QAGOMA, Queensland Museum and Queensland University collections and numerous private collections.

Throughout the duration of APT8 (to 10 April 2016) it is being actiVAted by a series of performances and lectures. In this venue it’s a literal clubhouse: a discrete gallery space adorned to excess, complete with a shoes-off policy for all visitors and a (QAGOMA supplied) noticeboard advising ‘adult themes’ at its doorway.

But clothing and body art are not easily animated or activated without the body. Nor is a SaVAge K’lub.

The space itself is a riot of colour, texture, sound and moving image.

Mats cover the floor; a chaise suggests photo opportunities and offers a platform from which to view multiple audio-visual works; and an outrigger canoe hangs from the ceiling. This suspended vessel alludes to voyaging and connections throughout the Pacific. It is a literal vessel for traversing the connective quality of the vā, which underpins Tongan writer Epeli Hau`ofa’s famous proposition that we might view the vast Pacific region as a ‘sea of islands’.7 Expanding on this idea, Samoan Albert Refiti has described the Pacific Ocean as ‘the single most powerful architectural device in the evolution of Polynesian architecture and culture… Islands enabled the location of identity and the boundary of cultures, but the sea, with its changing currents facilitating migration and exchange, also meant that boundaries were often dissolved and redrawn. The ocean provided separation and connection, an in-between space where commonality and difference coexist.’8 In other words: the vā.

Within the architectural device of the gallery, the SaVAge K’lub materialises this in-between space of coexistence. The SaVAge gallery, which occupies one wall is an excellent example. Portraits of contributing artists cluster around an oil painting from the late nineteenth century: Girolamo Nerli’s The Savage Chief (1897). A peculiar portrait that appears to depict a 16

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European masquerading as Māori, it was presented to the Auckland Savage Club in 1897, by its maker who was himself a Savage Club member.

We might imagine it hanging in the clubrooms some years later, in 1925, when renowned Māori scholar, leader and statesman Sir Peter Buck, a life member of the New Zealand Savage Club, became the Auckland club’s ‘Rangitira’ or chief. Grouped together, Nerli’s ‘Savage Chief ’ and the SaVAge K’lub portraits begin to explore the commonality and difference between the ‘Brother Savages’ of the Savage Clubs and the brother and sister SaVAges of Raymond’s K’lub. In this space they seem able to coexist. Likewise, Savage Club booklets share cabinet space with taonga tuku iho (treasures from the ancestors). It is tempting to read a similar inclusive tolerance (or might it be provocation?) in the Auckland Savage Club’s 25th Anniversary function programme, which declared: ‘Come one, come all, o’er land and sea; A splendid thing is savagery’.9 With an emphasis on the splendid SaVAge body and its accoutrements, Victorian vitrines within the K’lub recall the fit out of Savage Club rooms and contain garments and items of personal adornment, including a precious Māori cloak incorporating albino Kiwi feathers. Layers of richly patterned barkcloths tumble from the room’s four corners, while Raymond’s signature ‘The Dusky ain’t dead she’s just diversified’ backless barkcloth gown, worn by her Back Hand Maiden, clothes a mannequin.

These are more than mere fabrics and frocks. The plants, birds and animals cultivated and carried within and between the Pacific sea of islands

by Austronesian ancestors, and the migration and evolution of their cultural practices throughout the Pacific, still form the backbone of art practices today, particularly those associated with the body.

As Chloe Colchester – who has worked with Raymond – explains, the Pacific ‘was a region where the body provided the main locus of visual and material expression and of ritual-cum-political activity. A whole range of body arts, including diverse forms of clothing, wrappings and coverings – made from materials taken from trees, plants and birds’ feathers, and embellished with mud, tree sap and soot – were involved. These diverse complexes of body art and clothing are believed to have developed from a common Austronesian cultural substrate, and many ‘traits’, such as the use of barkcloth, or paper body wraps (made from the felted inner bark of the paper mulberry tree) in ceremonial practice as well as in everyday dress can be traced back to a shared founding ‘technology’ of dress.

Thus body art and clothing – together with the imagery that clothing produced, and as opposed to sculpture, monumental art, or painting – provided the fountainhead for the stylistic development of sacred art and religious-cum-political practice in the region as a whole.’10 But clothing and body art are not easily animated or activated without the body. Nor is a SaVAge K’lub. Prior to opening to the public, SaVAges from Aotearoa-New Zealand, alongside their K’lub members from Australia, had actiVAted the K’lub room itself, to create the conditions conducive to a safe, inspiring and instructive experience for all concerned – ancestor artworks included.

On opening night, they enticed the crowds into attendance, calling

through cavernous gallery spaces, leading and shepherding people into the K’lub. Once inside, audiences were regaled with song, dance and spoken word: warm bodies welcoming, challenging and beguiling. SaVAge brothers and sisters spoke to their own artworks and art practice, and placed particular emphasis on the significance of bringing living bodies into contact with the treasures of their ancestors. Gently but passionately, they conveyed the importance of conservation of even the most prestigious and priceless of treasures through handling and reinvigoration by the descendants of their makers. Equally gently, when the clock struck the hour at which they had been told nudity could be tolerated, garments slid slowly from some shoulders, SaVAges were dressed and redressed both within and beyond the K’lubroom itself, and Back Hand Maiden embarked on a tour of the APT8 in its entirety. If this disrobing/re-robing caused any discomfort at a sponsor-attended gala opening, it might be tempered by the knowledge that earlier they had draped brightly coloured lengths of fabric known as lavalava around nude statues in the QAGOMA forecourts, perhaps causing regular gallery attendees to look again, more closely. Raymond and her SaVAges understand the power of both the clothed and unclothed body, and how either might be employed in space to provoke ‘cognitive consumption’.

SaVAge K’lub at APT8 participants include: Margaret Aull, Jess Holly Bates, Eric Bridgeman, Salvador Brown, Emine Burke, Precious Clark, Croc Coulter, Lisa Fa‘alafi, Charlotte Graham, Mark James Hamilton, Katrina Igglesden, Jimmy Kouratoras, Numangatini MacKenzie, Ani O’Neill, Maryann Talia Pau, Tahiarii Pariente, Aroha Rawson, Rosanna Raymond, Reina and Molana Sutton, David Siliga Setoga, Grace Taylor, Niwhai Tupaea, Suzanne and Rameka Tamaki and Jo Walsh.

ENDNOTES 1. Michael Neill and Albert Wendt, ‘Albert Wendt / Interviewed by Michael Neill,’ in In The Same Room, eds. Elizabeth Alley and Mark Williams, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992: 111.

2. Ibid: 110.

3 Rosanna Raymond, (2015). The SaVAge K’lub Inaugural High Tea Invitation, Tautai Trust: http://www.tautai.org/the-savageklub-inaugural-high-tea/ (accessed 1 February 2016) 4 Rosanna Raymond, personal communication, January 2015.

5. Rosanna Raymond and Amiria Salmond (eds), Pasifika Styles: Artists inside the Museum, Cambridge: Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2008.

6. Dagmar Wernitznig, Europe’s Indians, Indians in Europe: European perceptions and appropriations of Native American cultures from Pocahontas to the present. Lanham: University Press of America, 2007.

7. Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. Edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hau‘ofa, Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993: 7.

8. Albert Refiti, ‘Making Spaces: Polynesian architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand’, in pacific art niu sila: the Pacific dimension of contemporary New Zealand arts. Edited by Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimalo Pereira, Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2002: 209.

9. Auckland Savage Club Collection, Auckland War Memorial Museum, MS 90/76, Item 67. Cited in Leonard Bell, ‘A very peculiar practice: investigating Girolamo Nerli’s ‘The Savage Chief ’ (1897)’, The Journal of New Zealand Art History 26, 2005: 26–39.

10. Chloe Colchester,‘Intro’ in Clothing the Pacific. Edited

by Chloe Colchester, Oxford: Berg, 2003: 6.

WRITER & ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE EXHIBITION

5 FEB – 30 MARCH

THE UNIQUE CREATIONS UNFOLD… FRIDAY NIGHTS 5 FEB TO 11 MARCH, 5–10PM HALLWAY GALLERY Lorelei Medcalf We’ve got the sky to talk about

Enjoy diverse arts and music in a picturesque riverside setting with food and drinks from the Arts Bar.

DEDICATED TO THE CREATION OF LIVING CULTURAL DIALOGUES AND LOCAL CREATIVE EXCHANGE LOUNGE GALLERY Veronica Calarco Once upon a time/un ar adeg

GARDEN GALLERY Lisa Harms continues her Transformation project, currently collaborating with Kaurna Custodian, Georgina Williams

Visit our website for further details, opening times and upcoming studio residencies

www.onkaparingacity.com/sauebierhouse

21 WEARING STREET, PORT NOARLUNGA 8186 1393 |

Onkaparinga Arts

BROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1

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MONYET GILA: EPISODE ONE 11 March – 23 April Shaun Gladwell Adri Valery Wens Curators Natalie King Mikala Tai Image credit: Shaun Gladwell, Tripitaka (2015-16). Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Melbourne, Analix Forever Geneva and Mark Moore, Los Angeles

181-187 Hay Street Haymarket Sydney 4a.com.au

The Mnemonic Mirror 10 May - 1 July UTS Gallery Kylie Banyard Troy Anthony Baylis Gary Carsley Emily Hunt Deb Mansfield Linda Marrinon Clare Milledge Archie Moore Debra Phillips Robert Pulie Aaron Seeto Tony Clark Curated by Kylie Banyard and Gary Carsley

Image: Emily Hunt, The Hand of Sabazius I, 2015, raw copper & clear glaze on stoneware, 40.00 x 22.00 x 8.00 cm.

Courtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

UTS Gallery Level 4, 702 Harris St Ultimo NSW 2007 art.uts.edu.au

PEDRO DE ALMEIDA

THE WONDROUS ART OF ERIC BRIDGEMAN, BRIEFLY

Figurín de mierda, she called me. You think you’re someone but you ain’t nada. She dug hard, looking for my seams, wanting me to tear like always, but I didn’t weaken, I wasn’t going to. It was that feeling I had, that my life was waiting for me on the other side, that made me fearless. When she threw away my Smiths and Sisters of Mercy posters – Aquí yo no quiero maricones – I bought replacements.1 Looking back on it now, one might wonder what all the fuss was about.

Spanglish they called it, a portmanteau that signalled nothing more that the homogeneity of the literati’s social strata, at least in most quarters.

At the time, I was working in the so-called refined arena of publishing, a middling assistant in a company with the kind of name that signalled a stolid British law firm, and it was plain as day that only so many stories were being told about only so many lives lived by so few. And so I can say this with some confidence: in the world of books, variety of perspective is diminished and so it remains. The reasons for this are more historically complex than the present torrent of pithy, check-your-privilege twittering might have us believe and especially so if, to get to the heart of the matter, one is impelled to ask corollary questions about power and class that are deemed distasteful to even whisper in polite company. This reservation aside, I was grateful to have the job, granted on merit so it seemed, following years superintending bookshops and working my way through more paperbacks than most. My early vocation’s principal perk was certainly not the pay, but early insider access to whatever rolled off the printing press, laying hands on publishers’ page proofs before they went to market.

It was via this mode of arrival that Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao dramatically descended upon the literary landscape. The year was 2007; I was living near the racetrack at Randwick, and the epiphany and recognition came at the bus stop on Prince Street: Aquí yo no quiero maricones. De-italicised, the copyeditor will notice, i.e. only foreign for some; for others, Google Translate if you must. I mouthed it again: Aquí yo no quiero maricones. You had to laugh and hard.

Junot Diaz and his novel marked a watershed in American literary culture, one that made waves that were felt elsewhere. Not since Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) had a novel absorbed the American idiom’s particular state of flux with such verve. As a means of reconfig20

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uring the American experience from the outside in, Diaz celebrated the linguistic patina of a New Jersey Dominican as Bellow revelled in that of a mid-century, Chicago-born Jew. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao took Bellow’s brash take on the bildungsroman form, defined by Augie’s memorable determination to ‘go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle’, into twenty-first century America, by way of its too often maligned colonial cousin, la isla de Hispaniola. Diaz’s metafiction cast a family’s five-decade struggle against the fukú – ’generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World’ – in bas-relief upon the desecrated altar of Rafael Trujillo’s brutal totalitarian Dominican Republic and, later, the streets and strip malls of the family’s adopted home of Patterson, New Jersey. When it dropped, critics’ confessions of the text’s ‘challenging’ use of Spanish, as if it weren’t no thing; ‘gritty’ b-boy neologisms that yielded no results in the Oxford thesaurus; ‘transgressive’ interbreeding of juvenile sci-fi, magical realist and highbrow, tricksy genres; and ‘politically incorrect’ lusting after all and any tetas y culo with a heartbeat, signalled that there was a new kid on the block of the cultural firm.2 As the game is played, this conferred the respect and admiration the book had already garnered from all who twigged onto the Diaz experience as something like their own, which is to say ordinary readers like myself saw wider cultural purchase in its symbolic import.

This too long preamble is offered here to underscore the promiscuity of artistic influence, delineated only by an individual’s actual and imagined cultural purview, and how art does nothing so well as bridge connections between artist, subject and audience. To put it more succinctly, let’s just come out and ask: is it acceptable, much less appropriate, to compare and contrast the artistic impulse and affect of Junot Diaz, writer of fiction (b.

1968, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), with that of Eric Bridgeman, younger visual artist from the other side of the world (b. 1986, Redcliffe, Queensland)? There’s an answer to this that art historians would promptly and dismissively provide in tandem with certain breeds of straight jacketed curators: no, we think not. Thankfully, I am neither and so instead I counter with the observation that the Comp. Lit. crew know Right: Eric Bridgeman, Yal Ton, Willy Bernadoff, D.K. 007, Miro and Sesmo, Haus Man, 2012, production still; 3-channel digital video installation, colour, sound, tarpaulin, canvas, timber, paint.

Courtesy the artist and Gallerysmith.

PEDRO DE ALMEIDA a thing or two about how to approach this kind of paradigmatic paralysis.

Do your own homework and you may come to recognise this as shorthand for proposing that the unbridled right to disciplinary collaboration and unrestricted permeability is a dictum conducive to truth seekers, be they artists, novelists or otherwise.3 Finding myself in a comparative frame of mind over recent conversations with Eric Bridgeman got me thinking. For instance, noting that just as Santo Domingo is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas, the Redcliffe peninsula north of Brisbane is the site of the first European settlement in Queensland and the naming of both the Antillas Mayores and Bridgeman’s ancestral home of Nueva Guinea has been fashioned by the seafaring Iberian tongue. And on it went as mental notes to self until, weighing the various analogous aspects of these two artists prompted me to write this text. Exploring themes of racial and national identity; questioning assumptions of masculinity, and resolutely addressing forgotten, ignored and contested histories alongside contemporary realities of their often fractious ancestral homes – this comparative alliance captures the spirit, in which I offer here a response to the wondrous art of Eric Bridgeman, briefly.

Like many other notable queer artistic mavericks ... Bridgeman submerged himself in what bourgeois society terms bad taste, not drowning but waving with glee.

Born to a mother of the Yuri clan, Gumine District, in the Simbu Province of Papua New Guinea’s Highlands, and a father from the central Queensland gold mining town of Cracow, who worked in telecommunications in PNG in the late 1970s, Eric Bridgeman grew up in Brisbane and first visited his ancestral home as a twelve-year-old to bury his grandfather. Bursting out of the Queensland College of Art at the age of 22 with the cacophonous performances and associated videos and photographs under the rubric The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules (2008-09), Bridgeman proposed a highly provocative confluence of sport, sexuality, race, labour and ‘low’ culture as the central themes of his early art practice. Performed and presented in various iterations at galleries including Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, Melbourne’s Gallerysmith and at Federation Square as part of Next Wave’s 2010 festival, Bridgeman’s series confronted issues, which were at that time fuelling public debates and denunciations sparked by ABC TV’s investigative journalism program Four Corners’ shocking exposé of numerous claims of sexual abuse against women by National Rugby League (NRL) football players.4 Intentionally aesthetically puerile from inception, this body of work set Bridgeman apart from his peers by at least emboldening the young artist with the confidence to revel in trash culture. Like many other notable queer artistic mavericks, though admittedly not many from non-white cultural perspectives, Bridgeman submerged himself in what bourgeois society terms bad taste, not drowning but waving with glee.

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In the same year Bridgeman unveiled Wilma Jr. (‘Blacky’) in the 2010 Basil Sellers Art Prize, an annual acquisitive prize that seeks to promote art that is a critical reflection of sport and sporting culture in Australia. A sculptural installation centred upon a fibreglass cast of the artist’s friend Willy James, Wilma Jr. stood as if a sentinel within the white cube of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, mocking rather than protecting the masculine ideal of sporting glory and its perceived rewards. In its twisted take on blackface (and naked black body with exposed gold cock at that), Wilma Jr. merges the form and symbolic function of the ubiquitous plastic, gold sporting trophy with the far less innocent flipside of what near limitless adulation of sporting ‘heroes’ can mask – such as vile sexist and racist behaviour for starters. Proving that this is a subject that remains doggedly relevant, Bridgeman’s All Stars of 2012, an installation created for the exhibition SEXES for Performance Space and staged at Sydney’s Carriageworks, presented Tom of Finland-esque illustrations of toned torsos: some with tattoos, some not; some with Y-fronts pulled down, some with none at all; all with raging and enviably large hard-ons.

Mounted as timber cut-outs upon shipping pallets, the All Stars may or may not have resembled real-life leading players, the legal representative of one such player allegedly making his displeasure known to the artist via a strongly-worded letter. Bridgeman’s subsequent decision to mask the head of each figure with red cloth only added a delicious layer of symbolism to this extraordinary rendition of facial recognition, as the saying goes in our age of terror and surveillance.

The second central theme of Bridgeman’s work over this period has been a coming to terms with his place and ongoing spiritual and familial navigation within his clan of the Yuri, especially as an individual, who is also an artist first trained in Western methods and means. Working in the medium, in which he was most formally trained at art school, Bridgeman’s New Photographs from the Kokwara Trail series of 2010 employed family and friends as subjects for portraits, which present challenging collages of uncomfortable signs and signifiers within already racially fraught fields of aesthetic and moral interpretation. These images openly evoke the ethnographic studies of Australian photographer Frank Hurley, whose famous Papua New Guinea expeditions of 1921-23 garnered over 1,000 photographs later sold to the Australia Museum, and another kind of fame in New York fashion and celebrity photographer Irving Penn’s 1970 images of Papuans. Bridgeman’s Kokwara Trail photographs are at once oddly vulnerable and absurdly defiant, daring the always easily agitated instincts of political correctness to call them out on their satirical use of minstrel archetypes, while at the same time revelling in the uncomfortableness of the viewing situation – for some. Similarly, his memorable video work The Fight (2010) rests upon a razor’s edge with satire and seriousness present on either side of the blade. As the artist explains of his collaboration with a group of young men and boys (who were relatives from the clan) in a video that depicts a clash between them: I was looking at historical ethnographic films of New Guinea from the early twentieth century and responding to the boys’ idea of staging a fight. There was an unusual dynamic premised on the real differences between how genuine and mock fight footage was shot back

then and how we perceive it now. It was humorous because a lot of people were taking it quite seriously; there was a big fight afterwards between them, blaming one another for not acting serious enough.5 More recently, Bridgeman was invited by Rosanna Raymond to contribute to her ongoing project SaVAge K’lub (2010-) for the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT8) at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). The APT is perhaps the most significant recurring exhibition in Australia, due to its capacity to engender a legacy that encompasses the building of mutually rewarding relationships between individuals and groups within our region, to the more hard-headed realities of market transactions in the museum’s enviable amassing of commissioned works for its collection. Something of this binary reality – let’s call it artistic goodwill up against the experience economy – was on show over the opening night and weekend of the APT8 in late November last year, which saw Raymond’s collaborators perform among the throng of gallery-goers. These performances were conceived as an extension to the SaVAge K’lub installation, Raymond’s challenge to the historical and ongoing objectification of Indigenous peoples. More specifically, as a New Zealand artist of Samoan heritage her challenge to the imperialist foundational premise of the ‘wall-to-wall ooga-booga’ interiors of the nineteenth-century men’s clubs brought to mind recent admissions by men in power.6 Indeed, the bizarre fact of the superannuated survival of such associations into the present day appear as grossly defiant monuments built to honour a colonialist’s counterfactual fantasies of empire in full bloom and natives forever under the thumb of king and country. Bridgeman made use of this opportunity to contribute print, photographic, sculptural and performance pieces that held deep personal resonances for him: When I returned from a trip to Papua New Guinea in the middle of last year, I was in the throes of preparation for the APT. A friend of mine had recently acquired a shield from Simbu, dating back to 1950. My performance for the APT8 was the first I had done in quite some time. It was basically an act of presentation. I stood at the front entrance of GOMA for some hours, holding the shield, which hadn’t been held for decades. I felt the power of this relic, not physically because they are quite light; perhaps spiritually, but maybe more mystically. It was neither a welcoming shield nor a curse. But in the truest sense and purpose of these traditional shields, the act was meant to dazzle, to throw off approaching enemies and negative energies. I titled this act The Keeper of the Toilet, referring to the name we (in PNG) give the Willy Wag-tail, who is known to dwell and protect the out-house.

I’d been interested in traditional war shields from my region in PNG for some time now, while also playing with contemporary shield designs abstractly based on the originals. These I called my ‘12 Moon’ designs. I had many ideas for these designs – works on paper, collage, large-scale painting, shields, wallpaper, wearable bags and cloaks. For the SaVAge K’lub, I contributed one of the 12 Moon designs as wallpaper that covers one of the four walls of the clubroom. Another exam-

ple in the show is my Awari (Flying Fox) shield, constructed from a tin wheelbarrow. This shield was a dedication to my late cousin and best friend Awari Gelua who had passed in PNG in late 2013 – a critical event that saw my health spiral. Rather than being just a shield with personal significance, it’s a memorial plaque. The traditional war shields that we know of were both practical and functional objects, whilst also having deep symbolic meaning engraved into them. The warrior was also the designer, and the design was a personal signifier for the warrior on the battlefield and in life. As I was creating my own personal shield designs with 12 Moon, I decided to create a posthumous shield design for my cousin Awari.

Regrettably, to take my own observations of Bridgeman’s singular performance on opening night, much of this depth of feeling and context was surely lost on an audience piling into GOMA’s atrium, heading for the bar. I mean no condescension in judgement; I too, certainly, expect merlot on arrival, and it’s commendable that QAGOMA extends its openings to the public (at least following VIP hour), as any publicly funded institution should, yet so few of the big museums do. But one has to question the decision to program Bridgeman and his K’lub cohorts into conditions highly unfavourable to mutual recognition between artist and audience.

Perhaps such is the curators’ anxiety and fear of looking like anything but high-wire masters themselves – balancing on the cutting edge of contemporary performance, dance, live art and relational actions, or whatever mishmash term encapsulates the latest mutation in fashion – that the very idea of attempting to assemble such gestures in a more directed manner, such as designing a space, which might encourage a unidirectional field of attention upon a stage, or simply subtracting booze and DJ from the setting, risks accusations of conservatism in the means and methodologies of the already fraught undertaking of performance in the museum.

“The traditional war shields that we know of were both practical and functional objects, whilst also having deep symbolic meaning engraved into them.“ So, as Bridgeman performed in headdress, feathers and shield with skin painted black with white markings, an individual’s corporeal presence already made vulnerable by his determined will to communicate these ideas was buffeted by punters staring at the screens of their devices, gazing over each other’s shoulders and inching along in search of the next curious encounter. Of course, this is no kind of argument for unrealistic expectations from inconsiderate audiences (of which I am sometimes part), but nor should it be so easily conceded that performance art’s purpose these days is measured by its popularity on Instagram. This single observation is underscored by another: during the height of the opening an unfortunate man standing by my side began fitting (presumably epileptic) and what happened next was a disgrace. While I and a few others came to this man’s aid, holding his head so that it wouldn’t hit the polBROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1

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PEDRO DE ALMEIDA ished concrete floor and rushing to reception to call for urgent medical assistance, more than one person in the jostling crowd looked visibly annoyed at being temporarily blocked, whilst another actually stepped over the fitting man’s body to reach the bar.

Not having been a witness myself, I note that journals of record and colleagues more senior than I recall with fondness and respect the way performance was incorporated in earlier editions of the APT. For instance, Michael Mel and Anna Mel’s performance Ples namel, held within QAG’s Watermall at the opening of the APT2 of 1996, was staged within a dedicated space, which replicated the village centre of the Hagen region of the Papuan Highlands and included other artists’ works within a larger installation. Looking at the photo documentation of that performance, alongside Michael Mel’s own written record, it seems to me that the principal artistic, historical, social and ethical concern underpinning the rationale to present SaVAge K’lub at APT8 – namely enacting a re-contextualising of one’s own body, material culture and meaning, thereby reasserting one’s right and power to do so – was of course already a pertinent discussion around live work in museums in the mid-1990s, as shall it remain into the future. A difference perhaps, if I may be so presumptuous, as to take up a comparative frame of mind again in reference to a culture and experience not my own, is that Mel’s similarly ironic and, it must be said, darkly humorous challenge to his audience was only strengthened by the more structured presentation of its confrontation, with the artist firmly holding his ground, staring down his assembled audience eye to eye, to pronounce: Come ladies and gentlemen to the world of the native. Located here for all to see, framed and captured. Now we shall see the native.

Framed in this way we can watch from a distance and talk about, discuss and write with confidence and the security of home. It is safe.

Come and see for yourselves, the specimen of a native. Never seen before, now made present before your very eyes. But ladies and gentlemen we should allow the native to sing, dance and perform for us.

We want to see them play for us. We like that, don’t we?7 Mel’s barbed question is one that Bridgeman has simultaneously played up to and refuted in his art practice, testing and taking to task at times contradictory sides of its ethical dilemma as any good artist should. As I finalise this text, Bridgeman is en route to Simbu to be joined by documentary filmmaker Aaron Burton, who will assist in the production of video work and the recording of monologues – by the artist’s fellow clan members – on the subject of the shields and designs from his clan, the Yuri. As a young artist living and working between his island homes of Australia and New Guinea, Bridgeman is increasingly wise to the traps and predicaments that all too often appear between intention and affect.

Sometimes the most sagacious manoeuvre is to keep it to yourself, while at the same time not needlessly disabling the opportunity for engagement at some point in the round. Reflecting on his experience of artistic collaboration with family members and friends in the making of the video installation Haus Man, first unveiled in late 2012 in the exhibition TABOO

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– curated by prominent Aboriginal artist Brook Andrew for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia – Bridgeman confesses: I wasn’t sure what the result would be, but I was happy when we celebrated the work as something we all made together rather than solely a reflection of myself. Many loved it, some called it rubbish, but I didn’t care at that point because its meaning was our secret, it was coded and sacred to us – it was none of their business.

You don’t need to be able to read Spanish, let alone the Dominican dialect at that, to understand that love and loss are at the heart of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But you do need to give its pages – all of them – the degree of attention that all complicated and compromised art requires from readers, who must in turn become complicit in its fiction, and in so doing reach its truth. To do so is only the first but necessary step in prompting recognition and acceptance and, yes, sometimes even wonder too, however prolonged or brief that may be across lives that at once entreat distinction of identity and seek recognition in polyphonic voices.

Unlike the images of idols stuck on the wall of teenagers’ bedrooms and museums alike, in living cultures you can’t simply arrange replacements for that which is lost or taken away. The trick, as Oscar learns in the end, is to be fearless, so that one may live to discover ‘The beauty! The beauty!’

ENDNOTES 1 Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, London: Faber & Faber, 2008. All Diaz quotes are taken from the publication.

2. ‘While the book often was referred to as ‘Spanglish,’ it was clearly an Englishlanguage book. I once did an approximate language count and came up with only about 18 per cent Spanish. In fact, what made Oscar Wao feel like Spanglish was precisely the way Junot used English – sometimes closely following Spanish syntax, sentence length and rhythms … Additionally, the book is linguistically promiscuous: there are phrases in Creole, Japanese, even Urdu,’ recalls Diaz’s translator and friend Achy Obejas in ‘Translating Junot,’ Chicago Tribune, 14 September 2012.

3. Unlike Diaz, I offer no sardonic explanatory notes here, but simply recommend consulting the likes of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, starting with her Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

4. ABC TV, Four Corners, ‘Code of Silence’, Sarah Ferguson (reporter), first broadcast 11 May 2009. Full transcript: http:// www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2009/s2567972.htm 5. The artist in conversation and correspondence with the author, August 2015 to January 2016. All other Bridgeman quotes taken from the same.

6. Rosanna Raymond as quoted by Andrew Stephens in ‘Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2015 steps on “savage” ground,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November 2015. A year earlier, Australia’s Attorney-General, George Brandis was mocked by Labor Party Senators Stephen Conroy and Doug Cameron for being a member of Melbourne’s Savage Club, as in Cameron’s quip; ‘‘This is what the Coalition frontbenchers are engaged in – it’s like Tarzan calling on Jane.’

Emma Griffiths, ‘George Brandis defends membership of men-only Savage Club, debate sparks chest-beating in Senate,’ ABC News Online, 25 September 2014.

7. Michael Mel, ‘Encountering Ples namel (Our place),’ Art Monthly Australia, Issue 121, July 1999: 17-20.

Radical Ecologies 3 1 J U LY – 14 SEPTEMBER

ARTISTS N AT H A N B E A R D

LOREN KRONEMYER

MIKE BIANCO

ROSE MEGIRIAN

TIM BURNS

REBECCA ORCHARD

PETER CHENG & M O L LY B I D D L E

P E R D I TA P H I L I P S M E I SA R A S WAT I

STEVEN FINCH STELARC CAT J O N E S K AT I E W E S T

PERTH CULTURAL CENTRE JAMES ST NORTHBRIDGE PICA.ORG.AU | 9228 6300

Image: Peter Cheng and Molly Biddle, The Superior Animal (film still), 2015. © and courtesy the artist.

ALEX GAWRONSKI

BARBARIANS AT THE GATES: CORPORATE ART INSTITUTIONS AGAINST THE ‘PEOPLE’

I

n her essay ‘Toward a Curatorial Activism’,1 Dr Maura Reilly made a forceful argument about the severe under-representation in contemporary art institutions, of women and artists of non-Western backgrounds. Such a scenario is shocking in our supposedly global era and moreover depressingly familiar. Clearly the terrain sketched out in Reilly’s article is appalling and embarrassing to anyone willing to think its implications further. Not denying issues of gender and race or their critical centrality to the representative functioning of contemporary cultural institutions, another trajectory can be traced from Reilly’s article. This trajectory concerns the interpolation of institutional operations, their mediated self-representations and the greater terrain of contemporary politicised economics.2 For example, if inequality is so clearly institutionalised in contemporary art and exhibition worlds, which it obviously is, surely it is because the very foundations on which such organisations are increasingly based, are likewise situated on the most onerous, divisive and essentially exploitative structures. These structures appear against the backdrop of our ‘post-ideological’ globalised world, a world constructed around the profoundly ideological contemporary union of representative democracy and the allegedly free market (surely one of the most blatantly ironic terms ever coined). The world of global art institutions is based, at least in theory, on the capacity to adequately represent liberal ‘free-spirited’ contemporary artists. Yet what does it mean when apparently progressive art is exhibited in the same high-profile international museums that largely relegate women and artists of non-Western heritages to silence and invisibility? What does it mean when the rhetoric of freedom of speech, which evidently forward-looking institutions deploy as part of their democratic self-imaging is not ratified by curatorial example? Surely this undeniable state of affairs indicates that the problem of the role of global museums lies not so much with questions of content, what they actually exhibit, but more broadly with their effective dissimulation of their public presuppositions. The main issue then is one of contemporary forms of institutionalisation more widely and not simply a question of adjusting the types of exhibition.3 Given that museums and highly visible contemporary art galleries have been increasingly corporatised over the past decade at least, is it really surprising that they have begun to structurally concretise the underlying exclusionary values of the corporate world? To ensure greater represen-

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tation for women and artists from non-Western backgrounds under these conditions may in fact only force practices of a certain critical agency into supplementary or tokenistic relationships to their corporatised contexts: everyone represented, but only so far as dominant corporate structures remain unaltered and business continues as usual.4 Of course, access to the career benefits granted by institutional exposure is something most contemporary artists understandably seek. To imagine that so-called ‘marginalised’ artists5 would be happy to only exhibit elsewhere, in less visible contexts, when in fact they are given no opportunity to exhibit institutionally, is ridiculous. Alternatively, to imagine that corporate interest will solve glaring ethical problems of under-representation out of an enlightened spirit of progressivism is equally absurd. The success of corporations is obviously based on their ability to generate revenue as widely possible. As a result, numerous exhibitions are conceived today almost wholly outside the domain of curatorial decision-making6 by marketing and promotional bodies, which see art predominantly as part of a much more generalised, and questionable, entertainment/lifestyle package. This is certainly nothing new, but its impact is felt especially acutely today under implosive economic conditions.7 How do artists believe then that under corporatised conditions they can just institutionally do or say what they want? Or that artists who may be most inclined to critique the underlying corporatisation of supposedly public institutions will be openly welcomed? Naturally the impression that contemporary artists simply do what they want is part of what traditionally makes contemporary art so appealing: contemporary art is habitually viewed as a rare domain where artists, as hyper-individualists, are seen to be free to explore various interdisciplinary crossovers between aesthetics, politics, social theory and more commonly today, activism. Exploration and the admixing of multiple disciplinary fields has in the past, been almost entirely inadmissible in other professional areas. Today however, with the contemporary shift to post-Fordist labour,8 creative interdisciplinarity is expected within many other professional territories. The proliferation of Start-up9 initiatives worldwide, as well as companies that trade primarily in immaterial branding and the marketing of a mind-boggling diversity of product ‘concepts’ has challenged art’s historical jurisdiction over the final frontier of its conceptually dematerialised identity. How then do contemporary artists deal with this paradox? Likewise, how do art institutions focused more than ever on marketing and profits, capitalise on a phenomenon

whereby the cultural worker is theoretically supposed to always be at work? Without, that is, completely alienating their work force.

From a dystopian perspective, where large-scale art institutions are forced into situations from which they can longer realistically review their activities from a creative rather than financial perspective, it is no surprise that many alternative exhibition models have arisen. Such alternative expressions often parasitise dominant artworld models, especially the biennale. Examples are numerous and include internationally the Athens Biennale (2015-2017), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale at Kerala, India (est. 2012), the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti (est. 2009), and the Jakarta Biennale (est. 2009).

Local examples include the biennial Cementa in Kandos (2013-2015) rural New South Wales, the West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial, Melbourne (2009) and the UnSound festival including UnSound 2006 in Wagga Wagga, also in rural New South Wales. All of these have sought in a diversity of ways, to re-think dominant practices evident in the global artworld. They have done so by specifically addressing issues of community embedding, racial and gender exclusion and, to greater and lesser degrees, pre-established concepts of hierarchisation. In many of these instances work by internationally established artists has appeared beside that of unknown artists. In the case of Cementa in Kandos, well-known artists have presented work in a host of locations around the small rural town alongside actions, events, presentations and art by members of the local community. In this way art and non-art was juxtaposed in ways that tended to focus attention away from artworld identities and rituals (whilst nonetheless capitalising on these) and onto the abuttal of regional and global perceptions of current creative endeavour. Given these examples, generally characterised as being more ‘humane’ and open, the question remains though of the extent to which they will or can allow ‘negative’ expressions of social, cultural or artistic tension. Are expressions, by no means merely reactionary, that do not automatically defer to community goodwill in these contexts, universally unwelcome? If this were the case, then such alternatives promote as censorious a spirit, albeit from a reverse ‘positive’ angle, as that apparent in the verticalised corporatisation of contemporary art museums.

The notion of absolute inclusiveness can also come with its own restrictive and naive assumptions. On the one hand, questions of ‘quality’ are often specious, uneven, because frequently institutionally strategic, difficult to

support theoretically and usually disguise the more covert though apparently informed, operations of institutional power. On the other hand, propositions of a universal ‘everyone’ or that everyone can (or should) be an artist, are equally spurious if not largely undesirable.10 Total inclusion is a myth that plays well into Western liberal democratic self-representations. In these everyone supposedly has access to avenues, through which to explore their particular cultural/racial/sexual identities: fine in principle but rarely evidenced by the reality of contemporary global life, where the majority increasingly lives under repressive conditions in poverty and/or as slaves to neo-liberal financial networks. At least superficially though, compartments of globalised difference are allowed to intermingle so long as the basic tenets of the Western liberal democratic capitalist ethos are upheld.11 Indeed, heavily mediatised defences of difference and multi-culturalism frequently mask deep-rooted chauvinism towards others.12 ‘Progressive’ media representations can often simultaneously be seen to collectively allow Western powers to effectively expunge a lingering sense of guilt towards the others its economic systems brutalise and exploit. Such fallout is implicitly excused as just an unfortunate side effect of an advanced globalised system of representative democracy. Predictable recourse to humanist myths, of which art regularly partakes, may be invoked to defend the necessary evils of global post-colonialist life. Wars are waged on behalf of Western powers on the basis that they are necessary to prevent the emergence of greater evils, such as that apparently signified by the rise of radical Islam for example. Rarely is it mentioned that the conditions under which ‘aberrations’ such as ISIS13 emerged are not isolated, but provoked by globalised conditions, in which Western liberalism is viewed as the only ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of human existence.14 The appearance of such evils often promises or eventually makes way for, the creation of new possibilities primarily aimed at global profiteering. The contemporary humanisation of the market likewise enables it to appear intrinsically benign and universally useful.15 Out of this background, corporations (which they essentially are) like MOMA and the Guggenheim for instance, represent, in a globalised context, Western corporate self-interest. Western corporate imagery, logos and brands,16 and the basically ‘mysterious’ values they suggest, are traded in a supposAbove: Tita Salina, 1001st Island – The Most Sustainable Island in Archipelago, video still, detail, 2015. Photograph Yopie Nugraha.

Courtesy of the artist.

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ALEX GAWRONSKI edly entirely trans-nationalised scenario, as though they were universally valid. It is no surprise then that the art of privileged white male Western artists,17 has become so normalised globally as to suggest that it is just generally, ‘naturally’, better. Sounds outrageous and so it is. That the art of women and practitioners from non-Western backgrounds can still be relegated to specialist thematic exhibitions18 seems appalling. It seems especially appalling in an age like our own, where such bigotry, at least in ‘developed’ nations and many others besides, has been addressed in the Academy and in the streets for generations. But of course the types of dissimulation employed by contemporary Western governments and corporations, is a powerful means by which basically neo-colonial actions may be made to appear contemporaneously impossible.19 Those artists, who today cling to concepts of total inclusion within systems determined by corporate interests, frequently disregard the fact that institutional inclusivity is not high on corporate agendas. Targeted audiences and tailored exhibitions are. There is no way to seriously redress issues of inclusion politically and socially, without fully confronting contemporary realities of corporate interest and its control of ostensibly public institutions. 20 Ultimately, museums and contemporary art institutions remain important vehicles in principle for the presentation of advanced ideas. They are in fact, at their most thoughtfully committed, vital to the cultures in which they are embedded. Understanding the extent of their importance is to reclaim something of the enlightened spirit, the idealism, out of which museums were born. The contemporary museum still has the potential to lead by example on a range of issues and to be their champion in the public realm. This is not to argue for the museum’s primary role as simplistically educational. Nor is it to uphold an image of the function of museums and contemporary art institutions that sees them addressing social issues in ways that are necessarily palatable to an economically anticipated (or invented) public. On the contrary, the contemporary museum or public art institution partakes of enlightened discourse, as far as it is willing to challenge and complexify commonly held beliefs about art and its role in contemporary society. The educational role of the museum does not automatically mean that it need be a place whose self appointed task is to illustrate specific ideals and earnestly coerce through artistic example, audiences to live their lives a particular way. Rather, the museum or art institution embraces an educational outlook as far it is willing to challenge ‘site-specifically’ the obviously paternalistic, class-based, gender and racist shortcomings of the museum as it was conceived in the past, and as it appears to have become again. The contemporary museum or art institution needs to be a place capable of tackling as part of its core operations, challenging and potentially controversial subject matter without automatically resorting to spectacle politics. Too often in a contemporary cultural climate, the notion of ‘challenging’ art is associated with predictable mechanisms of shock value. Such effects are derived in fact more from the world of popular entertainment than art. High profile art museums and other such institutions should instead be free enough to challenge audience expectations about what cultures perceive as normal, not by exaggerating the expected exceptionality of the artist, but by exposing the diversity of outlooks that comprise any genuine democracy.

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by Aristotle was the political and cultural means, by which the property-less poor could actively participate in public life. In the end it was public choice, irrespective of economic means, which nominated political leaders and the quality of cultural life. In this sense democracy, while propounded as universally ideal, at the same time took into consideration the specific social needs and demands of local populaces. Democracy was both universal and site-specific. Culture was not that produced by everyone, but that which was perceived to embody the ethos of an inclusionary ideal.21 The dominant and dominating type of Western neo-liberal democracy we know today has very little to do with the Greek origins of that term. Corporatism has taken over from public interest. Public interest does not equal populism though: populism is a knee-jerk response to a ‘democratic’ system experienced as fundamentally exclusionary, socially and economically divisive.

From a contemporary art perspective, art museums and related institutions need to wrest power from corporate interest and return it to curators, or more specifically to curatorial idealism. The conjunction of superstar career curators (and artists) is perfectly aligned with the corporate horizon. Global curators of this ilk suit corporatised structures, because both rely intrinsically on a managerial approach. The corporate executive and super-curator both administer large numbers of people and resources. They delegate responsibilities to numerous ‘underlings’ whilst claiming absolute economic and authorial control. Likewise, both depend on an exaggerated sense of self-importance and personal power that has a destructive effect on the culture of art as a multiplicity of intellectually propositional practices. Against this type of corporate image of the curator, enlightened curatorial practice should be driven by and in accordance with artists and their practices. This would mean that contemporary art institutions would not be motivated by careerist attempts to merely fulfil preemptive curatorial briefs in accordance with themes whose popularity seems assured. It would also mean that current glaring problems of under-representation could be mitigated by curatorial practice modelled as research. Instead of occasionally pre-packaging shows of ‘marginal’ art, genuine curator-artist relationships would more likely redress organically what is missing from current institutional programming. Such a shift would occur with the specific output of local artists in mind against the implicit institutional pressure, to habitually source art from the centres of global political and economic power, most often North America and Europe. To defer to the economic clout of global centres, as regularly happens today regardless of certain decentralising discourses of globalisation, undermines the vitality of local cultures. As a result, artists craving maximum institutional exposure appear more and more to tailor their work explicitly, even if unconsciously, to the superficial appearance of contemporary art trending in art world epicentres.22 With generationally declining awareness of precedents, aesthetic concerns dominate conceptual and contextual ones.

The answer to this situation would obviously not entail regressively championing a narrow parochialism: contemporary art is fundamentally a global exercise, for better and worse. Alternatively, contemporary art could be an internationalist practice that was predominantly determined

by the free-association of artists around the world, as the underrepresented ‘people’ comprising the democratic majority, yet dominated by global economic expediencies. Internationally networked artists – often already highly aware of exclusionary mechanisms, because of an equally high sensitivity to the scarcity of institutional opportunities – could exert a greater influence on institutional contexts by collectively insisting on the nature and extent of their participation. This would contribute an antidote to the willing tendency of artists to rely on pre-existing mediatised models to legitimise their work, tailoring it to what they perceive as unquestionably ‘contemporary’ elsewhere. Meanwhile, contemporary art institutions would do well to question the rise of quantative approaches to curating. Today, evidence of empty space in museums seems to be perceived by those in charge as a waste of space. The forging of contemporary curatorial styles based on the appearance of a type of crass abundance, appears to conform to a situation where presentation is everything; who cares about the social, cultural and intellectual origins of the work, so long as it all looks good together. Rather than critically informed, this endemic type of contemporary curating dilutes specificities, including those related to questions of exclusion and inequality. Hard questions are replaced by fictionalised excesses suggestive of populist types of capitalist overproduction: more art for your buck or as theorist Paul Virilio would have it, ‘art as far as the eye can see’.23 Such a curatorial attitude is obviously at variance with the notion of the space of the museum as contemplative. Museum space becomes instead a random field of distracted browsing, where every possible attempt is made to al-

Andy Ewing Broadsheet other font outlines.indd 1

lay the potential boredom of visitors. Imitative of ecologies and practices of digital and online browsing, where virtual space is typically crammed with information, the reconfiguring of contemporary museums and other art institutions recasts them as ‘boredom free’ zones. Unfortunately, the spaces filled to the brim in contemporary art museums do not necessarily include the habitually excluded. In fact, they, women, artists of ‘minority’ backgrounds as well as artists working in ‘unpopular’ ways – unless they can be used to enhance an institution’s liberal self-representation – are the empty spaces covered over. This situation is unlikely to change unless those involved, directors, curators, artists are prepared to take risks, in difficult times, and embrace the possibility of futures not fundamentally beholden to the limits of the possible, the usable and economically accountable. The risks are precipitous for sure but for many already, there is no alternative and nothing to lose.

ENDNOTES 1. Dr Maura Reilly, ‘Toward a Curatorial Activism’, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF), Queensland Government: Arts Queensland, 2011.

2. Or perhaps more accurately, ‘economised politics’. In our era, such a description would more accurately convey what has been described as ‘financialised life’. Yanis Varoufakis, Sydney Opera House, November 29, 2015.

3. Although is obviously still a problem.

4. Represented in the artworld as ‘the current blackmail in which artists are offered all kinds of opportunities to make a difference, on the condition that they give up on their desire for radical change’. Always Choose the Worst Option: Artistic Resistance and the Strategy of Over-Identification. BAVO in ‘Cultural Activism Today; the Art of Over-Identification’, Episode, Rotterdam, 2007: 28.

Endnotes continue page 30

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ALEX GAWRONSKI 5. That is, artists who do not self-identify as such but who are marginalised by lack of opportunity.

6. And almost entirely out of reach of the input of artists.

7. The so-called global financial crisis has caused numerous art museums around Europe to close or at least to seriously curtail their collecting and exhibition practices. See Nina Siegal, ‘Euro Crisis Hits Museums’, Art in America online; http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/newsfeatures/magazine/euro-crisis-hits-museums/ May 03, 2013.

8. A term currently in frequent use, post-Fordism refers to labour practices fundamentally distinct from traditional productivist, factory-style Fordism (named after the US automotive Industrialist). Post-Fordism is notable for its consumptionist emphasis on ‘free creativity’ of the sort normally associated with artists and the productivist activation of ‘free’ leisure time.

9. A new model of, generally momentary, business designed to generate maximum profit over the shortest time, usually on a ‘creative’ ‘cottage’ scale.

10. Holland, in what would appear an enlightened gesture, introduced a basic wage for resident artists who could prove through exhibition record, that they were ‘professional’. Artists were required to donate a percentage of their yearly output to the State. This resulted in a massive influx of unwanted art that went immediately into storage.

11. ‘Democracy must not be allowed to change anything’. Quote by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble as recounted by ex Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, Sydney Opera House, November 29, 2015.

12. See Slavoj Zizek, ‘Liberal Multiculturalism Masks an Old Barbarism with a Human Face’, the Guardian online; http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/ immigration-policy-roma-rightwing-europe, Oct 4, 2010.

13. ISIS, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, symbolically claiming religious, political and military authority over Muslims worldwide and the West’s current Public Enemy Number One. 14. Francis Fukuyama’s proposition in his book The End History and the Last Man (1992) that liberal democracy represents the ‘best possible solution to the problem of human existence’ unfortunately still exerts a disproportionate influence on those for whom this statement is most convenient, ie. neo-liberals.

The statement is especially disturbing in the finality of its juxtaposition of the binary terms ‘problem’ and ‘solution’, as if life, as lived, ever had a ‘solution’.

15. In its most extreme neo-conservative cases, such an attitude tends to lay the blame with those unable to maximise their individual, or community, potentials. Failure to make the ‘best’ of a difficult situation is interpreted as an internal failure of individuals and particular, usually non-Western, groups.

16. This also includes the idea of art as an effective brand such as Van Gogh, Monet, Warhol, Koons ‘brands’ for example.

17. And here I am speaking as one.

18. Dr Maura Reilly, ‘Toward a Curatorial Activism’, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF), Queensland Government: Arts Queensland, 2011.

19. Indeed, the very frequency of the contemporary use of the term ‘post-colonial’ effectively renders the mechanisms of colonialism absent while they most obviously still exist. This inversion is possible because current forms of colonialism more frequently assume invisible economic guises that can be made to appear benevolent: for your own good.

20. In the same way that ecologists, who protest against global warming frequently do so in denial of the need for any further structural demands against the system of global capitalism. A global system fundamentally founded on the need for profit at all costs, is not going to reverse negative ecological effects, even if it can profit from the crisis.

21. Unfortunately such an ideal of inclusion did not include women at that time, a fundamental and compromising paradox.

22. While decentralised theories of globalisation argue that the era of epicentres is over, it would be difficult to seriously argue that international economic hubs like New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and more recently, Shanghai and Beijing, do not heavily influence the rest of the contemporary artworld. The largest markets, and the highest concentration of art related press mean that these centres promote professional and aesthetic identification.

23. See Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See, Oxford, New York: Berg Press, 2007.

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Image: Anna Gore, Untitled, 2014, oil on canvas, 181 x 167 cm James Field Photography

MARCH ANNA GORE SLIME TIME

ELLA SOWINSKA

THE ONE ON ONE (WATCHING US WATCHING THEM)

Opening: 2nd March Running: 3rd - 19th

Wed 1pm - 4pm

MAY JAMES GERAGHTY

Sat 10am - 4pm

READYMAKERS

LUKE WILCOX

I LIKE DANCING AND DANCING LIKES ME

Opening: 4th May Running: 5th - 21st

JUNE BENJAMIN CROWLEY I WANT TO BELIEVE

BERNADETTE KLAVINS

WEIRDOS FROM THE SAME PLANET

Opening: 2nd September Running: 3rd - 19th

Thur 1pm - 4pm Fri 1pm - 7pm

12 Compton Street Adelaide 5000 www.feltspace.org feltspace@gmail.com Supported by

THE 64th

BLAKE @PRIZE Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre Exhibition 13 February - 24 April 2016 The Blake Prize is one of Australia’s longest standing and most historically significant art prizes. It is an opportunity for contemporary emerging, established and self-taught artists to engage in conversations related to religion and spirituality. The 64th Blake Prize celebrates the diversity and aesthetic practices related to belief and non-belief within communities across Australia and internationally.

Artist (from left to right, top to bottom): Cigdem Aydemir, David Frank, Robert Hauge, Laim Benson, Tom Lawford, Fassih Kesio, Shannon Johnson, Valerio Ciccone.

CASULA POWERHOUSE ARTS CENTRE 1 Powerhouse Rd, Casula (Enter via Shepherd Street, Liverpool)

www.casulapowerhouse.com

JACQUELINE MILLNER

PREVIEW

THE 20TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY: THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE – IT’S JUST NOT EVENLY DISTRIBUTED: THE EMBASSY OF DISAPPEARANCE

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O

ur sense of time, the relationship between what is thought to be past and what is current, and the roles of memory and history in the construction of our realities, have preoccupied many artists and cultural theorists in recent years. With time clearly a central theme of this year’s Sydney Biennale, these questions have been set up for intense consideration in one of the biennale’s seven ‘embassies of thought’. The Embassy of Disappearance at Carriageworks will engage with ‘absence and memory, including disappearing languages, histories, currencies and landscapes’, in acknowledging that today, amid a crisis of cultural and social memory, art has become one of the most important agencies for memory-work. The Embassy of Disappearance brings together an impressive range of artists, working largely with moving image, performance and installation; among them are award-winning filmmakers, long-term activists and the driving forces of contemporary art scenes in their various countries (with a substantial representation of artists from Taiwan and Colombia). Many make imaginative, personal interventions in the official histories of contested places, embodying singular ways to perform the memory-work essential to countering the crisis of social and cultural memory.

Historians have proposed various theories to explain how we arrived at this crisis, but there is consensus that there are three broad causes1.

First, the crisis is seen to stem from the breakdown in traditional forms of community, which resulted in social memory becoming unanchored from specific places and experiences, and the consequent mania, fuelled by endemic social uncertainty, to preserve all the past and all the present as well. This ‘hypertrophy’ of memory produces what Pierre Nora has called ‘les lieux de mémoire’ – artificially simulated memory sites – as opposed to ‘milieux de mémoire’ that form part of lived, everyday experience. According to Nora, ‘[m]emory and history, far from being synonymous appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name…history on the other hand is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer’. Whereas memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects, history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. The moment of lieux de mémoire occurs at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of memory disappears, surviving only as reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history. Lieux de mémoire like museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, monuments, ‘mark the ritual of a society without ritual…are signs of distinction and of group membership in a society that tends to recognize individuals only as identical and equal’.2 Artists undertaking memory work often attempt to provide alternatives to such lieux de mémoire.

The second broad cause of the ‘crisis’ is that the ‘imagined communities’ of nation, which replaced traditional forms of community and provided Left: Lee Mingwei, Guernica in Sand, 2006 and 2015, mixed-media interactive installation, sand, wooden island, lighting, 1300 x 643 cm.

Courtesy of JUT Museum Pre-Opening Office, Taipei. Photograph: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei.

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JACQUELINE MILLNER a powerful source of social remembering, have themselves broken down in the wake of the total war and genocide of the twentieth century. As cultural historian Andreas Huyssen argues, this has resulted in ‘a reorganization of the structure of temporality’, in which the assumptions of a unitary progressive movement from remembered past to optimistically envisioned future has been jettisoned.3 Nations are no longer the embodiment of civic values; they have been reduced rather to the bare bones of location and origin and as such become easily hijacked by essentialist and racist discourses. Artists working in post-colonial, globalised contexts are all too aware of this; the global nature of contemporary art has rendered it a particularly apposite site for examining this restructuring of temporality.

Finally, the fragmentation of social memory is thought to be aggravated by the ‘new’ media of mass culture, from film, to television and the internet. In this mass circulation of images and texts, the boundaries between different phases of experience – between past and present, reality and simulation, knowledge and entertainment – are relentlessly blurred.

While for Huyssen this aggravation poses a serious threat to a culture’s capacity for critical thinking and resistance,4 according to some cultural critics it is a healthy development. American cultural studies scholar Alison Landsberg, for example, argues that the fluid, non-essentialist memories that circulate publicly on TV and the internet – what she calls ‘prosthetic memory’ – have the potential to radically democratise history, through challenging the idea that memory is the exclusive preserve of particular groups. That is, contemporary technologies of mass culture make it possible for ordinary people to assimilate as personal experience historical events, through which they themselves have not lived, opening up the potential to ‘produce empathy and social responsibility as well as political alliances that transcend race, class and gender, revealing perspectives otherwise inaccessible by addressing the individual body in the intimate ways in which they do.’5

What are the dangers of considering the images of history, the audiovisual record of the recent past, as simply part of an image bank, material available for poetic or metaphoric use?

What role does art – particularly that based in photographic and moving image and the invocation of documentary languages – play in the process of cultural amnesia and its resistance? Can it facilitate the formation of privately felt public memories, and how? Can it ‘retemporalise’ us and counter ‘uncreative forgetting’?6 What are the dangers of considering the images of history, the audiovisual record of the recent past, as simply part of an image bank, material available for poetic or metaphoric use? For film theorist Robert Burgoyne: This form of visual history… that uses documentary images in the service of storytelling that freely mixes fictional, factual and specula34

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Aura Satz, Between The Bullet and The Hole, 2015 (video still), HD film, 10 mins. Courtesy the artist. Co-commissioned by Dallas Contemporary, Texas and The Bluecoat, Liverpool. Funded by Arts Council England.

Photograph Aura Satz.

tive discourses gives us a history of the future that is in some ways very like the mythic histories of the past… Perhaps documentary images may no longer signify the facticity of past events, per se, but convey the sense that they are a representation of the past, a representation that may be employed for the purposes of metaphor, irony, analogy or argument, and that may be used in such a way that a certain poetic truth may emerge in the telling.7 Perhaps its ability to evoke a poetic truth may be one way to judge the ‘authenticity’ of the representation. Many of the works in the Embassy of Disappearance could be seen to aim for this; they exist in a generative space between fact and fiction, memory and history, potentially allowing us to bear witness to the histories that have founded and continue to confound our identities, and providing a locus, in which the recognition and reconfiguration of memory can be communicated and shared.

Chen Chieh Jen, Charles Lim, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Robert Renhui Zhao all mix fact and fiction, linking different temporal, geographic, emotional and intellectual zones in their questioning of assumed truths and in their explorations of alternate ways of knowing.

Chen Chieh Jen’s longstanding practice explores Taiwan’s modern history, from colonial domination, through Martial Law, to its transformation into a key player in global neoliberalism (similar concerns drive Yao Jui chung, and appear in relation to Korea in Minouk Lim’s work). In his search for new ways to make art with those excluded by dominant systems of production, Chen developed his signature ‘staged’ videos: site-specific projects made in collaboration with local residents, based on their stories, executed with their labour and often featuring them as actors. Happiness Building I, for instance, is set in a rental apartment building slated for demolition, and relied on the stories and labour of a group of down-at-heel university students. Chen makes art in the hope of providing an opportunity for healing, in the belief that re-imaging, re-writing and re-embody-

The correspondence between the physical and the ideological in the creation of (unreliable) knowledge underpins the work of several Embassy of Disappearance artists. ing personal and community memories may ‘drive off ghosts…that reside in that field of erased collective memories’ and thereby ‘reunite with the people who were silenced’.8 Acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul also mixes documentary and drama, preferring non-narrative structures and non-actors.

His debut, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), for example, featured Thai rural dwellers recounting their versions of a traditional folk tale. Traditional knowledges such as folklore and religion appear on equal footing with conventional scientific and historic perspectives in Weerasethakul’s films. He experiments with ‘retemporalising’ the viewer to evoke the political reality of Thailand’s repressive regime – where for example dissenters are required to sign ‘attitude adjustment’ agreements under threat of further incarceration – while maintaining safe and expansive spaces for imagination.

An imaginative engagement with political history, this time Singapore’s, distinguishes Charles Lim’s films, including his SEA STATE series. SEA STATE, based partly in field research, features sublime footage of sea and human interaction, but aims to bring to light the erasure of Singapore’s unique ecology by aggressive land development and heavy industrial use of its surrounding waters. Whole islands around the city have ‘disappeared’, not because the sea has subsumed them but because bureaucrats have wiped them off the map under political directive. Lim travelled around the physical boundaries of Singapore, documenting objects and sites, crafting a two-way experience that looks both out from, and into, territory to ‘reclaim memory’, powerfully drawing analogies between the biological and political contours of the city.9 Traumatic histories and current political evils drive the work of French artist Melik Ohanian. His recent practice has focused on the treatment of migrant workers in the UAE (I See what I Saw and what I will See, 2011, commissioned by the Sharjah Biennale but eventually withdrawn) and the legacy of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Ohanian’s Streetlights of Memory, A Stand-by Memorial Project (2010-15) formed part of the award-winning Armenian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale 2015. The exhibition brought together artists of the Armenian diaspora in an ancient Armenian monastery on an island in the Venetian archipelago, enacting a kind of ‘transnational assembly’ through artworks that included historical archives, personal stories and cultural heritage. Ohanian’s outdoor installation already had another history: it comprised the junked remains of sculptures originally commissioned by the city of Geneva to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian genocide, a project that like I See what I Saw was pulled in controversial circumstances after official complaints.

The artist’s desire to provide opportunities for those still alive to heal

historical wounds through re-imaging memories is also at the heart of the work of veteran Indonesian activist FX Horsano, who has played an important role in Indonesia’s contemporary art for the past 40 years.

Renowned for his ‘civil courage’, Horsano’s work has consistently sought to give voice to the silenced, especially ethnic minorities (given his own Chinese ethnicity), and to imaginatively pinpoint the exclusionary discourses of national history and identity.10 Horsano’s practice often takes the form of a wildly heterogenous archive, agglomerating found objects, old documents, and his own past artwork to reinforce the power of the viewer to read histories differently and to create their own knowledge.

The correspondence between the physical and the ideological in the creation of (unreliable) knowledge underpins the work of several Embassy of Disappearance artists. Some, such as Gerald Machona, Miguel Angel Rios, and Yuta Nakamura, explore this link through the capacity of particular materials to carry memory: Machona uses non-legal tender, the obsolete currency of Zimbabwe; Rios ‘paints’ with coca leaves and dollars to viscerally embody ideas of Colombia’s recent history; Nakamura’s palm-held ceramic tiles evoke the lost local architectural heritage of Japan’s Jizo shrines. Singapore-based photographer Robert Renhui Zhao uses research into the natural world as a base to test the ideological assumptions we make about the world as represented by science. He aims to hone the viewer’s powers of observation and their skepticism of images, particularly of nature.11 In recent years, his practice has developed under the auspices of his self-devised Institute of Critical Zoology, which has showed up the credulity even of scientists, when certain representational conventions are in place (for example, The Great Pretenders, 2009).

His ‘documentation’ of genetically modified species, including the common apple, which comes out square, is both witty and deadly serious.

Several artists in the Embassy of Disappearance explore the process of memory-making through the interaction of public and personal actions.

Taiwan-born Lee Mingwei – ‘one of the undersung heroes of relational art’12 – draws on the legacies of both Zen philosophy and Allan Kaprow and Suzanne Lacy’s early participatory art. His ‘social sculptures’ often have at their heart a gesture of generosity from artist to audience, intended to activate personal memories and reflections on the relationship between private and public histories. Lee, like many of the artists in the Embassy of Disappearance, imagines a role for art beyond existing economic and historical systems, rather as an unpredictable force that changes the dynamics between viewers and public space. For the Biennale, Lee will recreate Guernica in Sand, a floor sand painting that will be gradually obliterated over the course of the exhibition by audience interaction.

Maria Isabel Rueda belongs to an increasingly distinguished generation of Colombians whose work has pioneered artistic approaches to cultural memory (Doris Salcedo is perhaps the best known, while another, Miguel Angle Rios is also included here). Her videos and photographs are rarely populated by humans; rather, they scan the landscape for traces of story. Rueda’s practice seeks out the correspondences – in form but also in inherent qualities such as instinct and sexuality – between landscape and the human body, and between private life and public memory. The Real.

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JACQUELINE MILLNER El retrato de Norman Mejia (2004-2013) is a series of slides of an abandoned house, which, as the title indicates, also serves as a portrait of Norman Mejia. Mejia was a renowned modernist painter in Colombia whose disturbing, violent images of women eventually led to his persecution.

Local vigilantes drove him from his home on the outskirts of a remote seaside town, a castle-like structure covered in his artistic vision of ‘demonic women’. Rueda has captured the ruins many years after nature has devoured the house in an eerie and mesmerising suite of images.

Private effort and public history also intersect in Spanish born, UKbased Aura Satz, whose work explores the obscured role of women in technological innovation. Her film Between the Bullet and the Hole (2015), for example, reminds us of the crucial role female data compilers played in ballistics research (and by extension, computer programming); it reconstructs this forgotten history through seemingly abstract material traces such as sound wave images and diagrams. This is far from straight documentary: Satz’s treatment challenges viewers to make their own sense of these traces, thereby also honouring the unsung virtuosity of these women.

Erasure and absence and their relation to memory feature in different ways in the work of Neha Choksi, whose performances – such as the beautiful Iceboat (2013), where the artist rowed on a boat made of ice while it slowly melted – are little reminders of our transience and absurdity, themes very present in Lauren Brincat’s durational performance. With such a spectrum of approaches, the Embassy of Disappearance would appear to promise a memorable experience of artists’ memory work.

ENDNOTES 1. See Geoffrey Cubbitt, History and Memory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

2. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, Spring, 1989: 7-24.

3. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003.

4. Ibid.

5. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

6. Huyssen: op cit.

7. Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film, Hoboken, N.J.: London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

8. Chen interviewed by Leslie Urena, Artforum, November 2012.

9. Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, in ‘Navigating the Unseen: An interview with Charles Lim and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa’, Art Asia Pacific, Issue 93, 2015.

10. Hendro Wiyanto, in Life and Chaos: Objects, Images and Words.

The Prince Claus Award for FX Harsono, Jakarta, 2015.

11. See Art Asia Pacific, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/88/RobertZhaoRenhui 12. Pauline J Yao, ‘Lee Mingwei and his relations’, Artforum, September 2014.

University Collections curating and collaborating researching and documenting engaging the community presenting events enhancing university experience supporting university values

With its illustrious history, the University of Adelaide holds over 40 collections which form in effect a decentralised museum with many branches and facets.

We share our collections with the public through a dynamic program of cultural activities and invite you to register for electronic invitations and see what we are up to: unicollections@adelaide.edu.au adelaide.edu.au/uni-collections

image Smith Elder & Co Physiological diagram The Organs of the Senses Plate 1, 1876 photograph: Catherine Buddle

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REBECCA COATES

PROFILE OF NELL: EARTH, WIND AND ROCK

A

s a child growing up in Australia in the 1970s, Sunday nights were part of a ritual. 6.30 pm was the moment, to be precise. To miss this much anticipated ceremony instilled a certain feeling of quick death – certainly social ostracism – in the school ground the following day. Thought panicked around what you had missed, and what excesses might have been revealed. Feelings swirled around the loss of that brief half hour of transgression, which promised to prolong the freedoms of youth from the more responsible, adult, world that we were being taught to aspire to. The program, its often-unexpected approach, and popular content, reflected the potentially transformative qualities of the music of our day. Not to be part of the fandom was to seriously miss out.

I speak of course, of the ABC TV program Countdown, beamed into so many suburban lounge rooms each Sunday night. There was a marvellous irony that as Australian society’s commitment to formal religious worship waned through the 1970s, a secular service like this youth-driven, contemporary music program attracted a fevered response and took the place of more formal religious worship. In classic Aussie vernacular, it certainly shat all over the much tamer British alternative, Top of the Pops, which felt like Blue Peter with electric guitars.

The show’s significance for this youth generation has now been well, possibly overly, documented. While it’s easy to inflate the significance of cultural moments with the passage of time, it remains uncontested that many of the most exciting acts were Australian owned, and sometimes bred. For a country still suffering the tyrannies of distance and cultural cringe, this was an exciting reversal.1 It catapulted us squarely into the vanguard of international popular culture. At the same time, the world got a little bit smaller, as an Australian youth shared the irreverence and raw energy of the headline bands of the day – AC/DC, Suzi Quattro, and many more. AC/DC’s now famous 1976 Countdown video clip featured the band playing their anthem, ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)’, complete with bagpipers from the Rats of Tobruk memorial pipe band, on the back of a flat-bed truck, slowly rolling down Swanston Street – Melbourne’s main drag.

For a girl from Maitland, growing up in rural NSW and conservative Baptist traditions, the transformative power of this music on records and

Nell, The wake, Installation detail, 2014–16, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, and STATION, Melbourne. Photograph: Ivan Buljan

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REBECCA COATES film was a siren-call to rebellion and possible escape. It shouted of wider horizons and an army of like-minded fans. The very name denoted ambiguity: the term AC/DC often used to allude to sexual ambiguity, while the lightning bolt dividing the letters made it clear that change was not tame. The font used by AC/DC, and so many other rock ‘n’ roll bands, was both medieval in origin and also very contemporary. The titles of songs became an anthem for living. ‘Highway to Hell’, ‘Back in Black’ or ‘Ballbreaker’ were emblazoned across T-shirts in various stages of decay, denoting membership of the clan.

This music could also transform minds. Nell frequently co-opts the raw energy and emotive quality of AC/DC’s music and lyrics into a meditative experience. Chanting to Amps (2012) is a performance or video, where the ancient mantras used for meditative Buddhist chanting are swapped for AC/DC lyrics. It’s reminiscent of fans chanting at a concert … ‘Angus! An-Gus! An-Gus!, until they are sated, or temporarily quieted. If rock ’n’ roll is about movement and life, meditative chanting is about transcendence to another spiritual plane, where the amplifiers become the altar, and the Zen Buddhist robes the liturgical gown.

Nell’s interest in religion is not always Eastern, though in her own life and practice, she remains a committed Buddhist, who took her vows in an ancient Chinese ceremony. The traditions of Sunday School, the repetition of psalms and prayers, and a religious education are all hard to erase.

They appear as Catholic religious iconography in Nell’s many installations and large black and white canvases, altars, crosses, and Biblical text – reminiscent of the great New Zealand Modernist painter Colin McCahon’s vast white on black text painting I AM – questioning existence and the voice of God.2 Let There Be Robe (2011) is a mish-mash of iconography: various fonts picking out AC/DC and other rock anthems painted on a black Zen Buddhist robe, hung lifelike on a mannequin with outstretched, crucifix arms, and swathed with Tibetan beads, and Converse sneakers.

It adds up to a very twenty-first century reworking of tradition. The surrounding gallery walls are festooned with crosses created from drum sticks and paintbrushes gifted to the artist by fellow artists and musical gods, or purchased on e-bay in a spooky sort of online fandom, where we can now purchase the used jocks and socks of rock ‘n’ roll greats. (It all has a whiff of the reliquary traffic of splinters of the True Cross and dismembered saints’ body parts from previous ages…). If we bow to the altar of the rock ‘n’ roll god, and the life of the artist, we too can participate, by taking a small white piece of plastic – or guitar pic – that transubstantiates for a wafer or a spiritual grain of rice.

Nell’s sustained groupie-like loyalty to these now-cult, heavy metal music boys, Australia’s own (though, as with every good migrant story, Scottish-born), is not without subversive reflection. In restaging AC/DC’s now famous anthem It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll) (2012) in Sydney and Hobart as part of Dark MOFO in 2012, Nell swapped the all-boy line-up for an all-girl band, learned the guitar, and took centre stage. ‘Recreated for recreation’ she noted in a play on words, describing an experience that was just too ‘damn fun’.3 Happiness and joy are frequently part of Nell’s work. Her chrome plated 38

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sculpture, Everyday Happiness (2010), depicts a large pile of shit, or a turd, artfully coiled and with a little flick on the top, with a simple smiley face inscribed in its surface. In 1961, Piero Manzoni, most famously canned his own shit, labelled it (Artist’s Shit), and sold it as a work of art. While Nell’s work clearly acknowledges Manzoni’s seminal conceptual gesture, her casting of the material into shiny metal with signature smile suggests that we all need to find joy in the little things in life. Nell’s smiley faces appear frequently in her work, often juxtaposed with or on other images and symbols, such as the simplified cloud-puffs and tear-like water drops in her site-specific neon light project for Allens, Sydney, Made in the Light (2011-12), visible from the building’s glass lift as you moved up and down the building. The naive, childlike graphics have a simple message: be happy, enjoy the moment, and be aware of the weather and where you are now.

Over the years, apart from Nell’s love of AC/DC, perhaps the most constant thing about Nell’s practice is the sheer variety in her range of materials. Painting, installation, music and video are all co-opted to examine the big questions: life, happiness, spirituality and structured forms of religion, silence and noise, and the darker sides negativity, sadness or death.

While the language may be simple, her understanding of its philosophical underpinnings and art historical context is not. Her darkly humorous tombstone, Happy Ending (2006), complete with smiley face, alerts us not only to her interest in co-opting different materials in her work, but also the fact that for Nell, the ending of a life on this earth doesn’t have to be all sad.

Nell’s interest in these universal ideas has largely been drawn from her first-hand experiences of other cultures, through residencies undertaken in Rome, Beijing, Paris, and an earlier period spent studying in L.A. Nell felt, however, that lacking in these experiences was a first-hand knowledge of her own country, and particularly remote Indigenous Australia and its people. In a conversation with curators Nici Cumpston and Lisa Slade of the AGSA, Nell reflected that it is relatively easy for artists to get residencies and other opportunities to live and or work overseas, but there are few – if any – opportunities to have the same sort of immersion and engagement with Aboriginal culture and communities in our own land.

So, through the relationship developed by AGSA, the curators arranged for Nell to work at the eastern end of the Musgrave Ranges in the far north west of South Australia, with the Aboriginal community Ernabella Arts in Pukatja Community, the oldest continuously running Indigenous arts centre first established in 1948.

In more recent times, the craft room at Ernabella has introduced a range of media, through which local artists can depict their Tjukurpa, or sacred stories of country and law. Their work in ceramics has gained significant attention, and is frequently featured in ceramics awards, such as SAM Shepparton Art Museum’s important Indigenous Ceramics Art Awards.

Women’s work is particularly noted. Nell was able to work side by side with some of the Ernabella artists on her visit, and the introduction to senior Ernabella artist, Pepai Jangala Carroll was particularly formative, although traditional laws dictate that men and women are not able to

collaborate, or work together, due to the nature of the stories that they are able to tell.

Following her residency and the opportunity to spend time with people and place at Ernabella Arts, Nell elected to continue to work with ceramics and installation for her project as part of the 2016 Adelaide Biennial.

For this two-year project, she created a series of ‘spirit creatures’, who sit perched atop a selection of second-hand and pre-loved stools. The lives of their previous owners are still apparent, through the splodges of paint (possibly from another studio, garage, or DIY project), along with other marks that allude to the patina of time and use. She created forty of these little creatures over a two-year period, thirty-one from clay, and a further nine from a mixture of bronze, glass, concrete, a little gold leaf, and even included a meditation cushion. Four of the ceramic forms were made and fired in Ernabella. The work is titled The wake (2014-16), reflecting once again Nell’s enduring interest in life and death and those traditions that have evolved to help us grieve.

Each of these forms has a face, however abstracted. Nell believes that once you put a face on an object, you give it a spirit (who knows, perhaps even a soul?), something that she has consistently incorporated into many of her earlier works. In 2013 she travelled to Japan, where she discovered the ancient Japanese unglazed terracotta figures called Haniwa. Built up through coiling clay layer upon layer, these figures were buried with the dead as funerary objects during the Kofun period (3rd to 6th centuries AD)

and were thought to ward off evil spirits. Like these early Japanese Haniwa, each of Nell’s creatures is subtly different – different gestures and faces, and one of them even left blank. Sticks, feathers, and dried flowers protrude from their heads, a form of bodily adornment, or perhaps a more ambiguous magical decoration with spiritual powers.

Nell’s new work for the Adelaide Biennial opens up new ground, while offering us more of the things that we have grown accustomed to look forward to and love in her work. There is her delight in materiality – from the ceramic forms, the re-purposed stools, to the sticks and twigs or the tipi shelter made from branches and hand-painted canvas. Her little creatures have an anima, while their abstracted smiley faces remind us to enjoy the little things. And as ever, there is a strong spiritual underpinning to all that Nell does. Simplicity, stillness, and joy are often difficult commodities to come by in our twenty-first century world.

ENDNOTES 1. Terry Smith had of course written his now famous essay ‘The Provincialism Problem” for Artforum in 1974, a problem of distance and centre that Australia shared with other parts of the globe. Artforum, XIII, No 1, Sept 1974: 54-9.

2. Colin McCahon, Victory over Death 2, 1970, collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

3. Correspondence with the artist, 17 December 2015.

Big Cheese Stephen Birch Alex GAwronSki SeAn kerr petrA MAitz DAniel Mckewen JelenA telecki JuStene williAMS 10 June - 17 July 2016 Curated by Alex Gawronski and Justene Williams WWW.Contemporaryarttasmania.orG

Image: Justene Williams, Ceremonial hat worn for eating finger cheese (detail) 2014, still from HD video. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier

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FRANCES BARRETT

PERFORMANCE AND ART DEVELOPMENT AGENCY: FRANCES BARRETT SPEAKS WITH CO-DIRECTORS EMMA WEBB AND STEVE MAYHEW

Near and Far was the inaugural program of Performance and Art Development Agency (PADA), a new Adelaide-based arts organisation co-directed by Emma Webb and Steve Mayhew. PADA is an organisation that aims to strengthen and diversify the local arts ecology of Adelaide and South Australia, and increase the reception and opportunity for experimental practices both locally and nationally. Emma Webb is a creative producer, curator and activist, who is currently Creative Producer of Vitalstatistix in Port Adelaide. Similarly, Steve Mayhew works regionally with Country Arts SA as Creative Producer, and is a director, dramaturge, creative producer, and curator. PADA is a consolidation of their shared experiences, interests, and creative vision. Over four days in October 2015, live performances, installations and conversations were presented at Queens Theatre in Adelaide, in a carefully considered and modest event. PADA positioned the works of artists such as Sarah Rodigari, Sarah-Jane Norman and Jason Sweeney in a thematic dialogue that focused on collaboration, sustainability and communication.

FB: So what is a ‘Development Agency’? What do you hope its impact will be?

was interested in marking this specific time in the organisation’s development – a time of aspiration and big vision emerging in such a precarious and anxious climate across the arts sector. I spoke with Emma and Steve about their decision to initiate a new organisation, how they were going about it, and where they were next headed.

FB: How important is it to locate yourselves in South Australia and in the CBD of Adelaide? How important is it to look at the ecology locally, as opposed to looking on a national level?

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Frances Barrett: Why did you initiate Performance and Art Development Agency (PADA)?

Emma Webb: Over a number of years Steve and I have worked together and collaborated through our two organisations, Vitalstatistix and Country Arts South Australia, and on a range of independent projects.

At one point we were having a conversation about all of the different arts organisations across South Australia and how they formed. We saw a need for more of the types of organisations that we worked for in Adelaide. We asked ourselves: ‘How is it that you set up a new arts organisation in South Australia and how is it that you get curatorial diversity and a diverse ecology in a small state with a very small funding pool?’ We decided to put in an application to Arts South Australia and said that PADA is something that complements what we are already doing, as well as the broader ecology of the arts sector. We were funded for 2015 and we have just received funding this year at a slightly smaller level – which is totally fine, given that everyone is currently under a dire funding environment federally and on many state levels – to continue. We are taking it one step at a time, as it’s really about being a focused curatorial project based in the CBD of Adelaide.

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EW: We are not a management for artists’ services or a presentation organisation, we are about relationships with the artists that we commission and curate. What we mean by ‘development’ is providing artists their own creative development opportunities, and in the development of performance and art in South Australia. We want to contribute to the reception, ecology and conversations around contemporary performance, live art and multidisciplinary art, and to the future of those forms of practice in Adelaide and South Australia. We are also interested in the notion of agency, not in being agents for artists but as in social engagement, agency in a broader sense outside of art.

Steve Mayhew: I think it is important, but you always need to keep an eye as to what is going on nationally. Sometimes South Australia looks quite insularly, and I see that occur across a few artforms. I am not saying that PADA is the panacea to that, but even regionally you can tap into a national conversation if you choose the right work and really push boundaries.

FB: Can you elaborate on what you mean by insular? What informs this mentality?

SM: I’m not quite sure what informs our insularity. It might be our free settler history, sometimes surprisingly championing new ideas and at other times tending to be conservative, cautious, or even quite colonial. It might be our geography, always contending with the rest of Australia before we get anywhere overseas. It might be that talented South Australian artists often leave for other cities and rarely return, so that there is little knowledge exchange from these experiences.

FB: And Emma, how important is it to look locally?

EW: All we can do is work in our own location and environment. If we

both try to imagine what the arts sector might look like in South Australia in 50 years time, the only way to get there rather than broad statements of intent or policy is to actually walk the talk. PADA may survive for two years, it may survive for five years, it may still be around in 50 years, in the meantime, we will make a contribution to the individual artists that we work with, and certainly to the flavour of what people can see or experience in South Australia.

FB: What do you see as the priorities of the South Australian arts sector in 50 years?

EW: It’s an interesting question as the arts sector in Adelaide is currently having these conversations through a formal consultation process. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about the sector as a whole and in fact we need to differentiate interests (both thematic and political interests, more). While unified voices can be important, we need to talk more in the arts sector about equity, power, size, resources and the role we play in broader cultural commentary. I am interested in how to increase the understanding and appreciation of experimental practices both within and outside of the sector.

FB: Let’s talk about the organisation itself. How is PADA structured?

SM: PADA is a not for profit organisation. Emma and I are co-directors and we have a board of three members, who share similar ideas to us about what South Australia and Adelaide might need culturally. I found that setting up an organisation with a new constitution was quite liberating, because it enabled us to start from zero and work on the rules of an organisation instead of inheriting one.

FB: Were there other arts organisations that informed the way you have

envisioned and developed PADA? EW: I think it is really common for arts organisations to take the general not-for-profit constitution and apply that to an organisation without thinking critically about the model they are adopting. PADA is very much about artists and arts workers informing the organisation, whilst the direction of the company stays with Steve and me. We don’t have a membership, what we have is an organisation where Associate Artists – anyone who we have worked with, programmed or employed over that time – will be able to vote on and have input into the future direction of the company after the first two years of the founding period of the constitution.

SM: We are yet to get to that point. Our foundation period lasts until the end of 2016. So we might find that by applying our rules of our constitution there will be a shift in the organisation, which will be really interesting to navigate.

FB: I see it as a way to keep responsive and in some ways, nimble.

EW: Nimble is absolutely the key, I agree.

FB: Why do you perceive ‘Performance’ and ‘Art’ as two separate things in the organisation’s title?

EW: It is about being accessible and explaining that ‘Performance Art’ is one thing, ‘Live Art’ is an other, ‘Performance’ is one thing, ‘Art’ is an other. All those terms are quite loaded. Although we come from theatre Above: Jason Sweeney, Silent Type installation view, 2015, PADA Near and Far, Adelaide. Courtesy of the artist, and PADA

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FRANCES BARRETT and performance backgrounds we are both really interested in multidisciplinary work that sits across multiple contexts or genres.

SM: I’m also interested in blurring the lines between audiences, community and participation.

FB: Why is it important to blur those lines?

SM: Because they are terms that are indiscriminately used to impose some sort of status or economic relationship between the artist (or funding body) and the person receiving the work. I want to challenge the expectations of the public and to create a space for people to actively question how are they an audience, how are they a part of a community, and how do they participate. At the moment I tend to consider ‘participate’ as the most appropriate of the three terms in relation to the projects PADA presents, not necessarily taking part in an action but a form of participation that embraces observation and reflection. I would like to think that PADA accommodates emboldened yet challenging forms of participation.

FB: How does PADA build relationships with artists? What has been your strategy?

SM: Artists either approach us, or we approach artists. Then we talk and view and talk some more… Through PADA I would be interested in developing some sort of benefactor platform that doesn’t necessarily rely on government funding, goodwill and free labour so that these relationships can be less arbitrary.

EW: PADA is foremost about creating relationships with artists rather than any particular project they may be working on. Whilst we did commission work for Near & Far, and will do a call out this year, we are not about scouting around for work to present but rather investing in artists we are interested in over time.

EW: … and artists finding ways to survive. Maybe people will take a longer amount of time to develop bodies of work and long-term investigations. Which is tricky, because the environment we are working in and bumping up against is that federal funding isn’t supporting residencies, fellowships or long-term studio practice. I am very interested in long term relationships with artists over a series of works and I think that that is an important part of PADA, into the future as well.

FB: What do you see as being the future of PADA? EW: In 2016 we are going to focus on the ‘development’ side of the Development Agency. We will be primarily focused on commissioning a series of artworks over at least two years, and present a public program and public exhibition in 2017. We feel that it is likely that PADA will have this cycle where in one year there might be a public program or several public programs, and in the other year there will be a focus on the commissioning and development of artists.

FB: Is that how you imagine PADA balances ‘sustainable vision’ with ‘big vision’?

EW: Yes, it is definitely about sustainability – giving time and space to artists – but it is also about the current funding environment and I think those two things are unfortunately counterposed. We are not naïve about the current environment, we want to take our time with building the organisation and make it sustainable for ourselves.

FB: So in terms of the work that you presented at your inaugural program, Near and Far, were there any shared sensibilities, themes or preoccupations between the works?

FB: Considering the aftermath of the former Arts Minister George Brandis’ actions in 2015, how has the current funding climate impacted on you?

EW: When we first started out we were interested in this notion of global and local collaboration, how that actually occurs and exchanges between artists. This then made us look at climate change and sustainability. The title, Near and Far, encapsulates in some ways those themes around collaboration, sustainability and communication.

EW: When we were first funded by Arts SA in November 2014 it was at a time when there was a lot of ambition, excitement and positivity about where federal funding was going for the arts. There was a sense that the Australia Council for the Arts was asking people to be ambitious, that the sector and the ecology might change, but that change will most likely be for the better. But now, a year later, we are obviously in a different environment and so we are trying to be quite pragmatic about that. We are just going to work slowly with artists on the ground, quietly and hopefully, ethically.

FB: What do you think artists are currently experimenting with and pushing against in the form of performance?

SM: I think what we are possibly going to see over the next many years are artists getting more political, and their work a little more outspoken; about basic human rights, the freedom of speech and thought in an overly digitised and monitored globalised environment, the role that art and culture plays in our societies, and the way it is made will more than likely be self-funded, and more localised. Thinking on the flipside we’re going 42

to get major and grand projects funded through a government program that will ‘catalyse’ works to be bloated, ostentatious and not as outspoken or original [Laughs]. Not many people remember the dreadful work that was funded through this country’s bicentennial arts fund back in 1988; I’m using that experience as an example.

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SM: It was certainly the weirdest year to set up a new organisation.

EW: We’ll see if we can survive. There is no guarantee, no promise.

SM: We will see.

ANN DESLANDES

FORM AFTER FUNCTION: SYDNEY’S MORTUARY STATION AND THE 20TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY

‘[T]he building has been stripped of [purpose], becoming all aesthetic form with no material function. Functionless form is pure art.’ 1

line near Central Station, leading many commuters to reasonably believe that Taylor was the Mortuary Station’s architect. However, the station was completed in 1869, ten years before Taylor’s birth.

n the early twenty-first century, the New South Wales rail authority commissioned a mural next to Sydney’s Mortuary Station, which commemorates Florence Mary Taylor, Australia’s first female architect.2 Taylor is depicted in feminine Edwardian dress, flanked by the arch of the Mortuary Station building, the flounce of her skirt matching the flow of the truss. The mural is a prominent sight along the railway

An unmistakably Victorian structure in the popular nineteenth-century Gothic Revival style – characterised by elements including ornamental openwork patterns and pointed arches – Mortuary Station has frequently been subjected to misrecognition and contestation. Its construction in the mid-nineteenth century attracted considerable public criticism at the time, due to the grandeur of the project relative to its objective, which was to transport the dead and their mourners to the Rookwood Necropolis, about eleven miles down the line.3 From 1869 to 1938, funeral goers

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Above: Charwei Tsai, Spiral Incense Mantra, 2014, 150 cm each.

Installation of hand-inscribed spiral incenses. Courtesy the artist.

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ANN DESLANDES would gather at the station, the coffin would be loaded onto the train, and, thus equipped, the party would travel to Rookwood to bury their departed. As rail historian Jim Longworth affirms in this essay’s curmudgeonly epigraph, once the station lost its purpose (closing when funeral trains were no longer required), authorities struggled to find another sustainable use for it.

Indeed, Mortuary Station has had a number of impermanent incarnations over the past sixty-eight years. It fell to ruination in the post-war period, marginalised perhaps by the contemporary fetish for modern infrastructure. It acquired a heritage listing in 1981 and subsequently underwent restoration in 1983, reflecting that period’s interest in the preservation of urban history. A fifteen-year lease was provided to a local entrepreneur, PJ Shields, to run ‘The Magic Mortuary’; a facility consisting of a period style train carriage converted into a restaurant,4 where meals were ordered at the station’s ticket window.

The building is anecdotally remembered as a venue for hosting raves and recovery parties in the 1990s, and one wonders whether its status as a largely disused public building caught the imagination of local artists and students around this time. To be sure, as the millennium gathered pace a number of artist-run, sub-cultural venues of artistic production thrived, with spaces like Imperial Slacks, blaugrau, Serial Space and First Draft paving the way for White Rabbit Gallery, Carriageworks, and Fraser Studios.

Today, Mortuary Station is available for hire (at the discretion of the rail authority) for weddings, fashion shoots, product launches and other time-constrained events, which require a grand setting. It is also used to display vintage trains and trams, and, on occasion, it is opened to the public for viewing. Its use is thus rather limited, and the building has predominantly remained empty and inaccessible. When conservation architect and heritage consultant, Paul Rappoport developed the station’s Conservation Management Plan in 2000, he too confirmed the failure of the building’s various authorities to achieve a sustainable ongoing use, noting its resistance to adaptive reuse.5 However, 2016 may mark a turning point in this fallow existence. From March 18 to June 5, Mortuary Station will be the 20th Biennale of Sydney’s ‘Embassy of Transition’; housing artworks by Marco Chiandetti and Charwei Tsai in the liminal register of rites of passage and cycles of life and death. At the time of writing, it is not known precisely how these artists’ works will inhabit the Mortuary Station, though artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal advises that Chiandetti’s work focuses on the common myna6 – an introduced species symbolic of the uneasy occupation of Australian society, the fruit of a colonial invasion, devastating to the Indigenous population and its culture. Indeed, Mortuary Station is built on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose sovereignty was never ceded, and whose living culture is represented in nearby venues such as the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence in Eveleigh, and sites such as The Block in Redfern.

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Culturally and aesthetically complex, the station is certainly an apt site for engagement by contemporary artists. Colonial architect James Barnet was commissioned to build it for the ‘novel’ affective purpose of ‘[aiding] the process of mourning’ whilst demonstrating the authority of a public building in the unsettled colony of New South Wales.7 The design of the station was distinctive, as was Gothic Revival in its period. Barnet chose the Italian ecclesiastical style of thirteenth-century Venice, with the edifice also clearly influenced by Classic Revivalism, Palladianism and Ruskinianism.8 The approach to the building is distinguished by an octagonal porte-cochere; an ‘entrance porch…strikingly composed as a Gothic Temple of the Winds with a high-pitched roof rising into a square flèche set up on the diagonal, which acts as a bell turret.’ As Paul Rappoport has stated, ‘[t]he balance of the arches and strong cornice-line with the sweep of the roof makes for great architecture.’9 These arches are particularly Ruskinian in character: ‘[relating] directly to the facades of the Ducal Palace adjacent to St Mark’s Square… one of Barnet’s favourite buildings.’10 With a tessellated tiled floor and crowned by a spired bellcote, the station is carved with angels, cherubs, peacocks and gargoyles, along with flowers, pears, sycamores, apples and pomegranates; the work of sculptors Thomas Ducket and Henry Apperly. The station’s primary material is brown and white sandstone, lending the highly manufactured structure the organicism typical of its Arts and Crafts conceptual heritage.

As Sydney’s Cockatoo Island, the renovated Carriageworks at Eveleigh and parts of the redeveloped Carlton United Brewery site are testament, ‘characterful’ buildings are an increasingly popular choice for the exhibition of artworks; vital atmosphere is conferred by buildings/spaces with a curious (often industrial) history and/or alluring facades. Sociologist Hanna Katharina Göbel suggests that such exhibition strategies can be viewed as part of ‘the emergence and stabilisation of an interdisciplinary “regime” of urban design practices that fabricates its own epistemologies and politics of aesthetics bridging the disciplinary borders of architecture and urban planning, the arts and urban activism’. In such a way, buildings like Mortuary Station ‘possess atmospheric agency in urban practices of re-use’, where ‘atmosphere [is] a social entity of the culturalized city’ – a ‘culturalization’ that is isomorphic with the gentrification of inner cities.11 Indeed, Mortuary Station’s reanimation as the Biennale’s Embassy of Transition will doubtless underscore the presence of cultural and creative production in the inner city of Sydney, a shift regarded as intertwined with the gentrification of the district – although this view is the subject of lively debate12 – and the skyrocketing price of property amongst so many renovated terraces, laneway bars and sparkling-new apartments.

Whereas the station was once a service offered to the masses and paupers were able to board the funeral trains for free (for example, when it hosted the public mourning of labour martyr Merv Flanagan during the 1917 General Strike),13 its use is now subject to the movements of the outsourced state.

As atmosphere, though, perhaps Mortuary Station can remain a holding space for the liminal, while the neighbourhood around it is redefined by the flows of finance capital and creative class identity. Alongside Chiandetti’s myna bird, insisting on its presence between invasion and settlement, Charwei Tsai’s work is a reflection on the transience and precariousness of life itself14 – themes especially apposite to the Mortuary Station, since not only is it constructed from sandstone – a porous material subject to decay from natural elements such as salt and moisture – but its function was to transport and assist mourners in the observation of funeral rites. Furthermore, its architectural style is differentiated by ornate carvings, which were intended in faithful Gothic style to ‘[remind] all who pass through that humans, creatures, and flowers are passing things that have their moment of glory, and then fade’. 15 In recasting Mortuary Station as an artefact wrapped around the theme of transition, in celebration of ‘pure art’, the Biennale of Sydney may have well have found purposeful form in the wake of terminal functionlessness.

ENDNOTES 1. Jim Longworth, ‘Reading the railway landscape, Strathfield to Central’, Australian Railway History, May: 189, cited in Stuart Sharp, 2015. ’Mortuary railway station at Regent Street, Sydney: A visit by members of the Australian Railway Historical Society’, 2010: 34 available at http://www.arhsnsw. com.au/lunchclubnotes/1504mortuarystn/1504MortuaryStation.pdf 2. See aprilkeogh.com

3. Sharp: 20-22, 34.

4. By 1989 The Magic Mortuary pancake restaurant had closed.

5. Paul Rappoport Conservation Architects and Heritage Consultants, Conservation Management Plan, Mortuary Station, 2000: 120.

6. ‘Sydney Biennale 2016: Myna bird stars in new artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal’s program’, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 28, 2015. Available at http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ art-and-design/sydney-biennale-2016-myna-bird-stars-in-new-artisticdirector-stephanie-rosenthals-program-20151027-gkjnf1.html 7. Rappoport: 84.

8. Rappoport: 59-63. Two of John Ruskin’s publications, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (185153) greatly influenced the Gothic Revival movement.

9. Rappoport: 84.

10. As Rappoport notes, the Gothic Revival parsed many of the socialist ideas of Arts and Crafts movement figure William Morris, at a time where Christian church organisations were solidifying their role as administrators of public institutions overseeing mass morality.

11. Hanna Katharina Göbel, The re-use of urban ruins: Atmospheric inquiries of the city. Routledge, London, 2015: 4.

12. See ‘There goes the neighbourhood: Redfern and the politics of urban space’, Zanny Begg & Keg de Souza, Performance Space, Sydney, May 2009.

13. Lucy Taksa, ‘Merv Flanagan, labour martyr: The Mortuary Station, Regent Street’ in Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill (eds), Radical Sydney: Places, portraits and unruly episodes, 2010: 136-143.

14. See https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/20bos/artists/tsai-charwei/ 15. Rappoport: 85.

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MACUSHLA ROBINSON

LIVING THE PAST WITHIN THE PRESENT: AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AT PERFORMA 15 VARIOUS LOCATIONS ACROSS NEW YORK CITY NOVEMBER 1 – 22, 2015

T

hree years ago, the long-standing New York performance festival Performa established its Pavilion Without Walls. This program piggybacks the concept of the pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but dispenses with the permanent architectural infrastructure, allowing a variety of exhibitions, performances and public programs from a single country to spill into venues across the city.

The inaugural Pavilion Without Walls featured work from Norway and Poland. Focusing on Australia, Performa commissioned new works in cooperation with Australian institutions, such as Artspace and Performance Space; the artists included Agatha Gothe-Snape, Brian Fuata, Richard Bell (with Emory Douglas), Vernon Ah Kee, Stuart Ringholt, duo Zheng Mahler, Justene Williams, WrongSolo (Gothe-Snape, Fuata and Shane Haseman), with archival works by Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy, John Hughes, Andrew Scollo and Bonita Ely.

What are the implications of this model? Taken at face value, it means that Performa can more comprehensively represent a geographical region than the United Nations-cum-Olympic Games model favoured in Venice.1 Biennales, from Performa to Venice, inevitably make generalisations based on geography and can give the impression that the curators have ‘discovered’ the artists inhabiting the far-flung regions of the world, then validating them by presenting them in a world centre like New York.

But selecting just one country as the focus generates an additional anxiety, namely that this opportunity will not arise again, and one must therefore strive to represent the region. The pavilion structure therefore requires the represented country to ‘perform’ a version of itself to an international audience.

While Performa’s focus is on commissioning and thus emphasising new, previously unseen works, many of the works in the Australian Pavilion had some kind of historical resonance. The inclusion of a series of films of performance pieces suggested a desire for us to assert our history. It was appropriate then that expatriate theorist Terry Smith, who penned the essay The Provincialism Problem2 over 40 years ago, officiated over the film series. From the Archive: 1970’s Australian Performance Videos featured Peter Kennedy, Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, John Hughes and Andrew Scollo, as a pointed reminder that Australia has had a rich history of performance 46

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movements. Indeed Terry Smith was in the audience for many of the selected performances.3 This sequence of historical pieces and the accompanying discussion placed the live performance pieces at Performa in an historical context, specific to Australia. As a curatorial manoeuvre, it sought to identify a lineage, prove a history, and thus show the breadth of Australian practice.

Of course the history of Australian art is well documented. But like the art of most other nationalities, it remains somewhat invisible within the global cultural aggregator that is New York. Thus in the context of Performa, it seemed, it needed to be restated. It is natural for curators and art historians to delve into and reanimate the archive – to recover histories of which most of New York remains unaware. But many of the Australian artists in Performa themselves delved into the archives in one way or another.

Brian Fuata’s A preparatory/predictive performance for a circuit of email and the living related to the context of Performa and New York, through its resonance with American artist Ray Johnson’s mail art archive. Fuata’s performances, whether in the flesh or in the form of emails, are idiosyncratic, casual and strangely poetic. For the New York performances, Fuata taped out a large square on the ground, designating that site a stage, just as he turns the screen of your computer and email inbox into a theatre.

While Fuata’s work for Performa was linked to Ray Johnson’s archive, his work typically defies conventional, institutional archiving processes.

There is no clear, conventional way to store and exhibit the email performances. Would it be OK, for example, to print out each email and keep it as hardcopy in a curator’s file? Or can they only be properly experienced scattered among the barrage of constant business, social and advertising emails, which fill our inboxes every day?

Fuata also participated in Agatha Gothe-Snape’s newly-commissioned Rhetorical Chorus, as a kind of master of ceremonies. This elaborate performance addressed the question of the archive, inasmuch as it was based on archival footage of the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. Gothe-Snape encountered Weiner by chance at Los Angeles International airport some

years ago. At the time she was making work based on Weiner’s hand gestures and for this commission she returned to that research, schematising his gestures and, with composer Megan Clunes, developing a code by which they were interpreted chorally. Given conceptual art’s typical negation of the ‘hand of the artist’, this focus on his body language can be seen as both inversion and historical reimagining.4 Another group of artists in the Pavilion Without Walls asserted Australian history with an explicitly political purpose. Richard Bell’s Aboriginal Tent Embassy, soon to feature in the Biennale of Sydney, transposed a physical structure, which has occupied the lawn of Old Parliament House in Australia, and which various authorities have tried to erase since 1972.

Bell’s work of reconstructing and transposing could be read as a form of archival practice that fits within the broader turn towards re-enactment in contemporary art.5 The space was host to talks and workshops, but most of all asserted the ongoing presence of those precarious structures. On the outside of his tent was a sign reading, ‘White invaders you are living on stolen land’. Even though the physical structure has been demolished or moved on again and again, this fact remains the same.

Bell’s semi-permanent fixture became the site of a series of public programs and performances, including a screening of Vernon Ah Kee’s powerful video work Tall Man (2010). The piece is edited together from many hours of archival footage documenting the riot and subsequent burning down of a police station on Queensland’s Palm Island, following the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee (tribal name: Mulrunji).

This story, and Ah Kee’s video representation of it, is one of Australia’s most important cultural productions. In a poetic accident, red and blue police lights flashed against the walls throughout the screening of this work and the subsequent discussion, which repeatedly returned to the police brutality directed at both African Americans and Aboriginal Australians.

Following the screening, a conversation between Ah Kee, Bell and Emory Douglas (formerly Minister for Culture for the Black Panther Party) with curator Maura Reilly centred on questions of solidarity. Amongst other things, the conversation addressed the historical links between the American-founded Black Panthers and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. In 1971, Dennis Walker (son of prominent Aboriginal activist Kath Walker) formed the Black Panther Party of Australia and this little-known history speaks to the relationship between the organisation of African American and Australian Aboriginal identities.6 It was interesting, however, that throughout this discussion indigenous American cultures remained unexplored.

Following this discussion, Stuart Ringholt hosted one of his Anger Workshops, an evolving series of participatory performances in the form of a group therapy session, in which people experience anger followed by love.

The staging of this piece on the night of Ah Kee’s screening was pertinent; what did it mean to hold such a therapeutic exercise inside Bell’s tent? The juxtaposition foregrounded the way in which anger functions in

our society; is it something that needs to be ‘managed’, indeed repressed, or might anger be productive, even as it is uncomfortable and accusatory?

Performance art was originally a means of dissolving the art object, yet has increasingly become an archived, and archivable, practice. Further, the archival aspect subtending the Australian pavilion was an understandable response to a once-in-a-generation opportunity demanding that we prove ourselves, show our best and brightest, and lay claim to our territory and history. This could be seen in the breadth of practices on display. Gothe-Snape and Fuata acted to complicate the archive through their esoteric strategies, whilst Ringholt looked to a more social/relational perspective. Justene Williams’ and Zheng Mahler’s pieces combined installation strategies with performance, bringing in autobiography, narrative and the carnivalesque. Bell and Ah Kee’s work made the most political claim, and by suggesting continuity with the land and their ancestry, asserted, as with all Aboriginal art, that Australia ‘always was, always will be Aboriginal land’.

It might be obvious, yet it remains important to note that by establishing a history, one can claim the right to a future. Historical continuity is crucial to the present moment; cultures across the world reference their traditions and historical rootedness in order to assert their continuing presence. The presentation of Australian art on an international stage – namely New York’s Performa – returns us to Terry Smith’s provincialism problem, leaving us to wonder how we are to relate to this metropolitan centre of the arts, whether it still feeds upon artists from all over the world, who cannot be recognised in their own countries, until they have passed through this rhetorical centre? As Smith himself wrote about the New York art world, ‘It casts most of us all the time, and a few of us some of the time, into the provincialist bind, whether we live in New York or outside. The further away we live, the less we can rationalize our entrapment.’7 Performa nonetheless shares some of the problems of biennales in general which have been widely discussed following the recent announcement of Australia’s selection of Tracey Moffatt for Venice 2017.

ENDNOTES 1. Terry Smith, ‘The provincialism problem’, in Artforum, vol. XIII, no. 1, September 1974: 54-59.

2. Correspondence with Amelia Wallin, 31-01-16.

3. Amelia Wallin, ‘Behind the scenes: Agatha Gothe-Snape’, in Performa Magazine published online: http://performa-arts.org/magazine/entry/ behind-the-scenes-agatha-gothe-snape, accessed on 25-01-16.

4. See Rebecca Schneider, Performing remains: art and war in times of theatrical reenactment, New York: Routledge, 2011.

5. For further information see Kathy Lothian, Moving Blackwards: Black Power and the Aboriginal Embassy, accessed from http://press.anu.edu.au/aborig_history/ transgressions/mobile_devices/ch02.html, accessed on 13-01-16.

6. Smith, op cit: 58.

BROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1

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PARIS LETTAU

REVIEW

TECHNOLOGISM MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART 3 OCTOBER–12 DECEMBER 2015

ebrated this ‘technologically’ transformed paradigm. Under these new conditions, according to Technologism, art has been licensed to upturn old hierarchies and disrupt the centralised control of media by corporate and government interests—whether this means that art wilfully exits the art institution, or re-materialises within it. Another important theme is the shift from technology as an external, objectified tool at the beck and call of the human subject, to it being an integral part of this subject. Marshall McLuhan discussed this issue in the 1960s, but a turning-point in our contemporary consciousness was also Donna Harraway’s 1983 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in which she proclaims ‘the cyborg is our ontology.’2 Australia’s living artist-cyborg, Stelarc, was notably absent at Technologism, but Hershman Leeson’s Cyberoberta (1996), Ricky Swallow’s iMan prototypes (2001) and Mark Leckey’s GreenScreenRefrigerator (2010) entered the cyborg’s territory.

T

echnologism was the final instalment of MuMA’s trilogy of historical exhibitions exploring landmark moments in twentieth century art—following Reinventing the Wheel: the readymade century in 2013, and Art as a Verb in 2014. Curated by Charlotte Day and featuring 43 historical and contemporary works, Technologism surveyed the artistic engagement and critique of electronic systems (radio, TV, the Internet, social media, smartphones, surveillance etc) since the 1960s.

If Technologism has a central theme, it is technology’s dematerialisation and re-materialisation of art. In Sean Dockray’s catalogue essay, he refers to Jack Burnham’s famous 1968 essay, Systems Esthetics, to describe the ‘paradigm’ shift from the artistic production of art objects to the production of ‘unobjects’, such as systems and environments.1 The exhibition celAbove: Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer, Simon McGlinn (Greatest Hits) - all 1985, Once mysterious became secret then became private, 2015 (detail), Ceiling mounted wifi access points, smartphone location analytics software, mini computer, dimensions: 588 square metres. Courtesy of the artists, Commissioned by MUMA (Monash Univeristy Museum of Art) for Technologism. Photograph Christo Crocker.

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Technologism, however, did not simply celebrate ‘techy’ electronic and new media art (decried by Philip Brophy in his polemical catalogue essay).

The ‘retro’ aesthetic of some work actually had an element of nostalgia, no matter the apparent irony of its intention. For example, Matt Hinkley’s Untitled (MH10-9) (2010) and Untitled (MH10-31) (2009), a found TV remote and old-school cordless phone encased by the artist in Perspex, looks like an aestheticisation of ‘80s and ‘90s tech. The irony is the labour intensive extension of Hinkley’s drawing practice. With Dremel and scalpel he intricately traces new textures and naturalistic aging effects into the plastics. This reification of waste affirms Arte Povera as it now exists in the art museum as the ‘perverse’ inversion of its original Dadaist intentions, except Hinkley shows that today’s impoverished objects are discarded, obsolete electronics.

Hinkley’s work also demonstrates that Technologism avoids a cheap shot at traditional mediums and skills, as if wanting to claim continuity with the institutional project of art, rather than, like Arte Povera, declaim against it. Ulla Wiggen’s intricate acrylics of electronic circuitry from 1963-1969 sit comfortably with John F. Simon, Jnr’s transformation of drawing into writing. In Colour Panel v1.0 (1999), for instance, software produces shifting colour-contrasting grids on a disembodied Apple PowerBook LCD screen, running iterations of colour possibilities taken from Bauhaus colour theory. Simon writes the software himself, in what he has called ‘cod-

ing as creative writing’. He thus demonstrates the equivalence of image and text in the age of digital reproduction: every digital image is written in text containing the information required to pixelate it.

This symbiotic relationship of image and information, of image and memory, is also evident in Harun Farocki’s two-channel video installation, Serious games III: immersion (2009). The work documents a demonstration of ‘Virtual Iraq’, a simulator used for virtual reality exposure therapy with Iraq War veterans suffering PTSD.3 Eventually we, the spectator, ‘wake up’ to the fact that the veteran is a salesman demonstrating the technology to U.S. Army therapists—complete with a pre-memorised trauma, he is met with sober applause from the audience.

Another artist documentary in Technologism, Aleksandra Domanović’s, From yu to me (2013), questions the physical archive when the material traces of digital memory have faded. It tells the ‘techno-political’ story of the founding of .yu (the former Yugoslavia’s top-level Internet domain) in the Spring of 1994, as the country began to disintegrate. The domain expired in 2010, and in the second half of the documentary a curator at the Museum of Yugoslav History describes the dilemma of preserving the immaterial .yu as a national artefact. If art dematerialised (according to Lucy Lippard’s well-known thesis from 1967), then with the Internet so did the artefact—and therefore so did history.

The Internet’s transformation of the cultural archive is further highlighted by New Jersey-based artist, Jeff Thompson, in his Netflix induced Computers on Law & Order (2012). It is a blazing three minute, 24 second video showing screenshots of every Law & Order scene featuring a computer. In quickly staggered stills, the video documents the emergence and migration of the computer around the workplace over the span of 20 years, from 1990 to 2010, when Law & Order aired its final season.

If Thompson transforms popular culture into historical memory (as though restoring the Homeric tradition of cultural memory through popular poetry), then, like Hinkley, Benjamin Forster’s room-sized installation of over 7,000 books, titled Slow fires (2015), shows that the future of waste and obsolete technology is art. The books, which all come from the Australia Council Research Library decommissioned in 2014, are rescued as Forster transforms the print archive into art (itself a kind of archive).

This, then, emerges as a third theme of Technologism: the renewed power of art in the digital era, the very moment it was seemingly condemned to obsolescence. Unlike Forster’s Slow fires (2015), however, art’s renewed power also came from its autonomy from art institutions. For example, Internet users today (whether family members or ISIS propagandists) can post photographs, video and text on social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, in such a way that as theorist Boris Groys (somewhat provocatively) claims, they ‘cannot be distinguished from any other conceptualist or post conceptualist artwork.’4 Rabih Mroue illustrates this condition in Pixelated revolution (2012) — originally presented as a video lecture performance — in which he analyses grainy Dogme 95 style cellphone footage uploaded to YouTube by Syrian protestors. And

in Untitled black video (2009), Amsterdam based artist Martijn Hendriks displays the democratisation of online media commentary and trolling.

Hendriks projects blacked footage of Sadam Hussein’s hanging, which was unofficially recorded on a cell phone in 2006. In place of image, the projection displays the video’s YouTube comments: ‘There was WAY too much slack in that rope,’ writes one user.

Before the Internet, television was the dominant network of mass public communication. Seizing on TV as the new medium, Technologism illustrates the way in which many artists entered McLuhan’s global village, jamming and critiquing the intrusion of the screen into the home, as seen in Nam June Paik’s (in collaboration with John Godfrey) Global groove (1973), or Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/transformation: Wonder Woman (197879). Jan Dibbets’ TV as a fireplace (1969) — originally broadcast on network television — also touches on the transformation of the hearth into a TV set. Art historian David Joselit argues television is a privatised and inherently undemocratic corporate structure that ‘turns light into private property.’5 In Richard Serra’s short sardonic video work from 1973, he declares that TV ‘delivers people to an advertiser’. Like the Internet, however, TV also empowered artists to deliver art directly to the people (thus bypassing art institutions), as seen in Chris Burden’s hijacking of the airwaves in The TV Commercials 1973-1977.

In her essay Too Much World: Is the Internet dead?, Hito Steyerl describes a ‘post-internet’ condition in which images ‘started moving offline’, becoming integrated into the world of real things, as a spirit migrates between possessed hosts.6 This condition, where images or artworks happily shift between the immaterial and the material as online/offline hybrids, was present in a number of works in Technologism. Forster’s editionless editions from Slow fires (2015) includes a set of ebooks presented on iPads, but also available for download.7 Antoinette J. Citizen’s SIMS inspired biometric prototypes entitled Ideas on paper (2010-2015) are open-source and can also be downloaded.8 Cory Archangel’s hack of the Nintendo NES in Super Mario Clouds (2002), in which he removes all game elements except the monochrome sky-blue background and white clouds, are also opensource and available online.9 Jenny Holzer’s early internet art Please change beliefs (1995) and Leeson’s Cyberoberta (1996) also make use of the Internet,10 as does Scott Mitchell’s Expanding foam with selfie stick (2015), which, when tweeted (@expandingfoam) autonomously expends some foam, takes a selfie and posts it on its own twitter feed.

Alongside these ‘Internet works’, the majority of video works in Technologism are freely available to view through Vimeo or YouTube, and documentation of non-video works can be easily accessed via the Internet (simply Google!). This questions the necessity of visiting a museum to view the works. Technologism provided an oblique—albeit unintended— reflection on the changed conditions of artistic production following the ‘technological revolutions’ of the post-1960s period. The obvious question raised is the role of the museum as a format (i.e. as a technology—now over 200 years old) for art. The museum has been modernity’s dominant institution in the production, distribution and presentation of art. Since the 1960s, however, many artists, critics and historians found BROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1

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PARIS LETTAU the museum’s obsolescence to be increasingly problematic, and through technologies, such as television and the Internet sought alternative means to produce and distribute art.

Technology’s capacity to dismantle old hierarchies (one of Technologism’s self-proclaimed themes), therefore, did not just entail the reaction against centralised media control celebrated by Technologism (as if MuMA were its righteous ally), it also led to a reaction against the centralised control of art by the art museum and other art institutions. Anyone can put anything on the Internet without censorship by the museum, gallery or curator.

This problematic was implicitly raised by many works in Technologism, but was not explored by the show in an explicit and self-critical way. That is, Technologism did not directly address how artists used the Internet to bypass the art museum, and how this has re-formatted, re-assembled (materially and immaterially) the networks that now govern art’s production and reception. From this perspective, Technologism was not able to deal with the full significance of its subject matter. This repressed aspect of the exhibition was evident in the neologism ‘technologism’, as if MUMA had attempted to re-write art’s technological imbrication into the familiar museological category of an ‘-ism’.

Indeed, works in Technologism appeared at home within the art museum. A work like Please change beliefs (1995) — a website based artwork11— for example, was displayed using a Compaq Armada E500 running Netscape Navigator web browser, thus returning the viewer/user to the authenticity of a 1995 web browsing experience. This retro aesthetic of the show confirmed the power of the museum to ‘re-originalise’ the artwork—in spite of so many tendencies in art from the last 50 years to permit the seductions of translation, and thus collapse the distinction between original and copy, as evoked in Oliver Laric’s Versions (2012), as well as Joshua Petherick’s ongoing Glass tables IV (ditch presences) (2015).

Rather than take a position of neutrality on these changed conditions of art production described above, it would have been valuable to see MUMA use Technologism to critically reflect on the way in which the art museum was itself transformed by these conditions.

Once mysterious became secret then became private (2015) by artist group Greatest Hits (Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn) did engage with this condition. An enormous work measuring 588 square metres, it was also the least visible (probably visitors didn’t notice it, even if it noticed them). Made of the same stuff as sunshine, Once mysterious was an ‘all-over’ electromagnetic picture: a Wi-Fi network, linked via ceiling mounted wireless access points (WAPs) to a store-room computer running location analytic software. The work collected data on visitors’ movements by detecting the regular wireless search ‘Pings’ automatically emitted by all Wi-Fi devices such as smartphones. When a Ping is detected, the software determines the visitor’s position by ‘triangulating’ the signal received by the WAPs (similar to technology used in Apple’s ‘Find my iPhone’ feature). The data is collected, stored, and accessible only by Greatest Hits.

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The work was a machine for surveillance and the mining of big data. On the Internet there is total, ontological, visibility—nothing is mysterious, everything is recorded and in principle traceable. (This problem of total visibility is also invoked in Hito Steyerl’s work How not to be seen, a fucking didactic .MOV file, 2013.) Once mysterious also took down the gallery’s wireless Internet capability, thereby cynically expelling the art museum from the Internet’s res publica (with the result that Leeson’s and Mitchell’s Internet works could not be demonstrated in real time). The work thus lays bare a power reversal in art brought about by the Internet. Greatest Hits simply records visitor data, but this data has the potential to be interpreted and utilised—perhaps sold to the museum to help it maximise visitor attendance. The existence of large reservoirs of ‘big data’ is characteristic of the digital age, where information is scraped from every digital activity we engage in (and such activities, as Greatest Hits demonstrates, include walking through a gallery). It leads to what David Joselit calls the ‘epistemology of search’, in which knowledge today is predominantly produced by constructing meaningful and useful patterns out of the content of existing raw data, rather than in producing new data.12 In art, traditionally the curator and the museum had a monopoly over the epistemology of search. Artists produced a plethora of content (art works) and curators, art historians and museums formatted this content (into styles, movements, themes, -isms etc) to make it intelligible for an audience—as Google now uses algorithms to make huge data banks searchable. Greatest Hits lays bare the ‘epistemology of search’ in art after the Internet. Firstly, that the museum has lost its monopoly over the epistemology of search. Secondly, that this monopoly has been privatised.

In this case, in the hands of Greatest Hits—which means, in the hands of the artist.

ENDNOTES 1. Sean Dockray, Melting Points, in Technologism, Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2015: 71.

2. Donna Harraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review 15, no. 2,1985: 66.

3. Their website is titled ‘Virtual Iraq - Virtually Better, Inc.’ 4. Boris Groys, ‘The Weak Universalism’, in Going Public, Berlin; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010: 116-17.

5. David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007: xi.

6. Hito Steyerl, Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, eflux 11, no. 49, 2013.

7. Available at: https://www.editionlesseditions.com/bookshelf.

8. Available here: http://antoinettejcitizen.com/prototypes/sims-needs-meter/.

9. Available here: http://www.coryarcangel.com/ things-i-made/2002-001-super-mario-clouds.

10. Available here: http://www.adaweb.com/project/holzer/cgi/pcb.cgi.

11. Ibid.

12. David Joselit, ‘What to do with Pictures’, October 138, Fall, 2011: 83.

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