Contemporary Visual Arts + Culture BROADSHEET 43.4

{ 43_4 } CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

broadsheet CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+CULTURE

The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures Contemporary art: drained and confused Modernism: more popular than populism National Aboriginal+Torres Strait Islander Art Award Double desire: becoming Aboriginal

Primavera: forever spring?

Omar Chowdhury: Ways The (continuing) story of Ai Youth culture: The List James Dodd: outside in

Contributors Stephanie Bailey: Managing Editor of Ibraaz, also writes for Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, ART PAPERS, Modern Painters, LEAP and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art, as well as Notes On Metamodernism and Hyperallergic; a contributor to and assisted in editing You Are Here–Art After the Internet, edited by Omar Kholeif, and also assisted in the editing of Volumes 01 (Uncommon Grounds), 02 (Archival Dissonance) and 03 (Future Imperfect) of Ibraaz Publishing and I.B. Tauris’ print series on Visual Cultures in North Africa and the Middle East Rex Butler: Reader in Art History at the University of Queensland, Brisbane; his most recent book is a Zizek Dictionary (2013). He is currently completing a history of UnAustralian Art with A.D.S. Donaldson, which will be out early 2015 Pedro de Almeida: Sydney-based arts manger, curator and writer. Since 2012 he has been Program Manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and previously worked at Campbelltown Arts Centre as Program Coordinator (2010-11) and Program Support Officer (2008-10) Anthony Downey: Director of the Masters Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College and sits on the editorial board of Third Text, is the Editor of Ibraaz, and is a Consulting Editor for Open Space (Vienna) Alex Gawronski: Sydney based artist and writer; recent art projects include Camouflage Cultures, SCA Galleries, Sydney; Easy Listening, West Space, Melbourne; Black Square–100 Years, AEAF, Adelaide; Look This Way, UTS Art Gallery, Sydney; Living in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century, UTS Art Gallery, Sydney; Paris Atelier, University of Sydney Art Gallery (2013), Formal Intensity, Tsagaandarium Art Gallery and Museum, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, ICAN Occupy’s EIDIA, Plato’s Cave (EIDIA House) Brooklyn, NY, USA (2012), We are all Transistors,Aratoi/Wairapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton NZ (2011); Publishes widely, regular contributor to Broadsheet and Column (Artspace, Sydney); Cofounding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN); currently teaches in the Painting Studio, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney Adam Geczy: Sydney-based artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. His most recent exhibition was S/M Wonderland (2014) at the Australian Centre for Photography, and soon to appear (co-authored with Vicki Karaminas) is Fashion’s Double: Representations of the Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (Bloomsbury, 2015) Paul Gladston: Associate Professor of Culture, Film and Media and Director of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham; between 2005 and 2010 served as inaugural Head of the Department of International Communications and Director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. He is Principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art; has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art with specific reference to the concerns of critical theory. His book-length publications include Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005), China and Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009), Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese Artists (Blue Kingfisher-Timezone 8, 2011), Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality, a special edition of the Journal of Visual Art Practice coedited with Katie Hill (Intellect, 2012), ‘Avant-Garde’ Art Groups in China, 1979-89 (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Contemporary Chinese Art: a critical history (Reaktion, forthcoming 2014) Samantha Littley: Curator, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane Ian McLean: Research Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong. He has published extensively on Australian art and particularly Aboriginal art. His books include Arte Indigena Contemporaneo en Australien, How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art,White Aborigines Identity Politics in Australian Art, and Art of Gordon Bennett (with a chapter by Gordon Bennett) Maurice O’Riordan: Director of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), Darwin.

Recent curatorial projects include Under my skin: Polixeni Papapetrou (NCCA, 2014), PROOF: Photo Essays from the Top End (co-curator, NCCA, 2014), and Treaty, yeah? (Chan Contemporary Art Space, Darwin, 2013); a former editor of Art Monthly Australia (2008-14) who has written on contemporary art and culture since the early 1990s

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

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

ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2014, Broadsheet, the authors and artists.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.

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

Editorial Advisory Board International:

RICHARD GRAYSON UK Artist, lecturer and writer, London SHEYMA BUALI UK Writer, London NAT MULLER Netherlands Curator and critic, Rotterdam ASTRID MANIA Germany Editor, writer and curator, Berlin CHRISTOPHER MOORE Germany Writer, Berlin; Editor-in-Chief, Randian online, Berlin VASIF KORTUN Turkey Director Programs & Research, SALT, Istanbul Basak Senova Turkey Curator, writer and designer, Istanbul RANJIT HOSKOTE India Curator, writer, art historian and poet, Mumbai PHIL TINARI China Director Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing COLIN CHINNERY China Artist, writer and curator, Beijing; Artistic Director, Wuhan Art Terminus (WH.A.T.) BILJANA CIRIC China Independent curator, Shanghai JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Curator, art critic and writer PATRICK FLORES Philippines Professor, Dept Art Studies University of Philippines, Manila

Jack Persekian: Currently Director and Head Curator,The Palestinian Museum; founding director of Anadiel Gallery, the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem; exhibitions he has curated include Disorientation:ContemporaryArabArtists from the Middle East,Haus der Kulturen derWelt,Berlin (2003), The Jerusalem Show (2007 and 2009), DisOrientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities, Abu Dhabi Art (2009). He was chief curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005) and artistic director of the 8th and 9th Sharjah Biennials (20-09)

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

Basak Senova: Ankara-based curator and designer. She studied Literature and Graphic Design (MFA in Graphic Design and Ph.D. in Art, Design and Architecture at Bilkent University) and attended the 7th Curatorial Training Program of Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. She has been writing on art, technology and media, initiating and developing projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. She is an editorial correspondent for ibraaz.org and one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organiser of ctrl_alt_del and Upgrade! Istanbul. Senova was the curator of the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). As an assistant professor, she lectured at the Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University (2006-10) and is currently teaching at the Department of Media and Visual Arts, Koç University. She co-curated UNCOVERED (Cyprus) and the 2nd Project Biennial of Contemporary Art, D- 0 ARK Underground (Bosnia and Herzegovina). She is the curator of the Helsinki Photography Biennial 2014, Jerusalem Show, and is the SIGGRAPH 2014 Art Gallery Chair in Vancouver

SIMON REES New Zealand Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth

Tina Sherwell: Currently the Director of Academic Programs, The International Academy of Art Palestine, previously Program Leader of Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Executive Director,Virtual Gallery, Birzeit University; the author of various texts on Palestinian art published in catalogues, journals and books, including a monograph on Sliman Mansour for which she was also the curator of the retrospective Exhibition:Terrains of Belonging, 2011 Murtaza Vali: Brooklyn-based freelance critic and curator who lives and works between Sharjah, UAE and Brooklyn, USA. He edited Manual for Treason, a multilingual publication commissioned by Sharjah Biennial X (2011). He is a visiting instructor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn and contributing editor for Ibraaz and Art Asia Pacific, also contributes to Artforum.com, Art Review, Art India, Bidoun, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Modern Painters and Nukta Art and has written several monographic essays on contemporary artists from the Middle East and South Asia; he was guest curator Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2013, Art Dubai

volume 43.4 DECEMBER 2014

LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic TONY GODFREY Singapore/Manila Art historian, writer, curator

NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki, Auckland

Australia:

ROBERT COOK Perth Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia RUSSELL STORER Brisbane Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery REX BUTLER Brisbane Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland BLAIR FRENCH Sydney Assistant Director, Curatorial and Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia ADAM GECZY Sydney Artist and writer, Senior Lecturer University of Sydney ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Sydney Executive Director, Artspace Visual Arts Centre CHARLES GREEN Melbourne Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne IAN NORTH Adelaide Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor of Art History, University of Adelaide

{ 43_4 } COVER: Omar Chodhury, Locus II (still), 2014

from the exhibition Omar Chowdhury: Ways, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney 30 May–2 August 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

6 drained and confused

48 an index of the divine

14 forever spring?

52 outside in

19 modernism: more popular than populism

56 <<it would be great to live in a society where aboriginal people could make [art] work that didn’t just pertain to being aboriginal>>

Insistent voices on ‘the contemporary’ Adam Geczy

Primavera 2014 Alex Gawronski

The public sphere and contemporary art Rex Butler

29 the jerusalem show <fractures> 30 outside the gates of heaven Preface Jack Persekian

31 fractures

Introduction Basak Senova

35 a view from afar: outside looking in taking a title and running with it Framing the contemporary from a global perspective Stephanie Bailey

40 fractured city a view from jerusalem Archives and historical resonances Tina Sherwell

44 the (continuing) story of ai: from tragedy to farce The story of Ai Weiwei continues Paul Gladston

Broadsheet can be read cover to cover and texts are available to download. cacsa.org.au/?page_id=2901 For additional commentary see Platform. cacsaplatform.org.au/

Omar Chowdhury at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art Murtaza Vali

James Dodd and Sabotage: graffiti as a form of social networking Samantha Littley

31st Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award Maurice O’Riordan

60 inventory management: the list

Campbelltown Art Centre’s bold statement on youth culture Pedro de Almeida

65 double desire: becoming aboriginal

31st Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award Ian McLean

erratum

Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet vol. 43-2 June 2014, the photography for the front cover image of Daniel Boyd’s Untitled, 2014, from the TarraWarra Biennial: Whisper in my Mask, was by Mick Richards Photography, Newfarm, Brisbane.

MUMA

Monash university museum of art

Justene williams the curtain breathed deeply

7 february – 2 april 2015

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

Justene Williams Yves Klein Eyes, film still 2014 courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

Sole Founding Partner

drained and confused

Adam Geczy At the beginning of 2014 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York staged a grand retrospective of the work of Christopher Wool. Born in 1955, with an exhibition like that behind him, the artist now has a legal licence to print money, and will live out the rest of his days like a caliph. During the exhibition several works passed hands through Sotheby’s in seven figure sums. Wool is in many respects an optimal choice for the encounter with what most of contemporary art has become. He is marketable, because he is a painter. His works are mostly in black and white, which means they will find a home anywhere. But it is the content that is the most appealing. Wool begins by making a gestural, non-objective painting, then photographs it, then re-renders it from a set of (usually four) silkscreens, which he will de-register slightly. This destabilises the expressive force of the gesture, displacing the language of the gesture and an authentic index of a living person into a strategy. The openended meaning of the dramatic act of gestural painting, with its language of uniqueness, is neutralised through its reduction to a set of rules and the ruse of a particular method.

Hence the cynical genius of Wool’s art: should you choose to buy into the language of abstract painting, you can have it mean something, but the secondary technique that the artist deploys also drains it of meaning. So it is also always about nothing. It is art as pure simulacrum and spectre. Called “post-conceptual”, Wool’s work is what comes after the concept; it represents the void after ideas have dissipated. There are also his trademark text pieces with disarticulated phrase patterns that are like the discovery of a clever art student out for a prank, doing quick work so he can get on with something more interesting.

Although Scott Redford does not mention Wool, in a recent polemic posted on the Daily Review,1 he sifts through the many components of contemporary art that have led the phenomenon of an artist like Wool on the way to desirability, and celebrity. In a meandering stream-of-consciousness critique, Redford has many pertinent things to say, which resonate with what a number of artists and critics have begun to say in recent years.

But because of the so-called end of the art critic, the points he makes are erratically and still too

rarely published. Nor have they been taken up by institutions with any great seriousness.

Using a review of an exhibition at the newly refurbished Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Expansion of the Combat Zone: 1968-2000 as a point of departure, Redford considers a variety of aspects that have increasingly turned contemporary art into a form of cultural amusement. With Juliana Engberg’s unforgettable statement that she wanted to use “entertainment as tactic” still ringing in some ears, Redford’s qualms are timely, and many of them prescient. In keeping with the boast in the wake of every Biennale of Sydney in recent memory, Redford bemoans the premium that institutions put on visitation numbers, and on ‘diversity’. Audience diversity is a direct translation of the diversity of the artists that are chosen into any large art events. In Redford’s words; “So now we celebrate our contemporary art and artists (well, those who get chosen) for their ‘difference’, their ‘heterogeneity’, their ‘multiculturalism’, their ‘identity’, their ‘political art’: all accepted, recognised and invited tropes or conventions.” Artists, he suggests are made to “perform the role of ‘contemporary artist’ in

7

this endless Holy Grail quest by art museums: INCREASED AUDIENCE NUMBERS”.2 There are several points here, and they have been made before but they are worth rehearsing because of the extent to which they remain aggressively unheeded by the institutional establishment.

The problem of racial diversity in exhibitions is that it is a misrepresentation of the actual status quo. For while directors of large-scale exhibitions work hard to build the impression of inclusiveness, the same circumstances are not played out in world politics. Minorities continue to be under the thumb, while hard statistics repeatedly show that the plight of Chicanos and Afro-Americans is far harsher than it is for whites—and so on.

Indeed as perverse as it sounds, it is tenable to argue that the mandatory inclusiveness of contemporary art exhibitions is detrimental to the campaign for racial diversity in the so-called real world. For the staging and the spectacle of celebrated difference (vive la différence!) only diverts attention to the grimmer and sadder fact that difference continues to be ignored, repressed or converted. By enacting difference we are afforded false assurance of a better state of affairs that then allow the same old problems to persist, unheeded.

As for audience numbers, this is a bugbear that runs deep in the fabric of contemporary art and is symptomatic not only of rationalisation and popularism, but also of what is widely viewed as the demise of the critic and a decline in interest in critical responses to exhibitions.3 This is not to say that criticism does not exist, for indeed it does, and perhaps paradoxically in greater magnitude and profusion than ever before. But it is secreted in blogs and remains fragmented and diffuse.

It is hard to say when criticism and critical influence began to fade, although it cannot be viewed in isolation. It certainly has been muted by the cynicism of artists and curators whose principle ends are to be bought (artists) or visited (curators). With the separation of global wealth in widest proportion since the eighteenth century, it appears that the new millennium is steering a course in the direction of the patron classes who are the arbiters of taste.

The artists commanding the highest sums are supported by a small number of patrons who themselves are tied in some direct or de facto way to large corporations, who also purchase artists’ works, but also seek cultural cachet through sponsoring exhibitions. Since it its

cultural cachet they are looking for, it does not serve them to be associated with controversy.

Or—and this is a chilling point that exists parallel to the elaborately orchestrated fiction of cultural diversity—the controversy exists solely to propagate the impression that the sponsoring corporation is tolerant, temperate, and permissive. But the most important factor of all is that lots of people come to see the show.

The prioritisation of audience numbers justifies the sponsorship and ensures that knowledge of said sponsorship gets disseminated. Hence the sum is bigger than the parts and what is at a premium is the residual idea of magnitude over any lasting, or indeed measurable, cultural effect.

A trawl though the websites of the many biennales will reveal one striking common denominator, namely that they calculate their success according to visitation numbers. Here the spectacle is in full force, drained of adjective or anecdote and reduced to plain numbers. This is where sustainability in the traditional sense might be written into the debate, to the extent that cities are expected to cope with the influx of larger and larger numbers of people. The influx of visitors was salutary for the formerly obscure city of Bilbao, so much so that the attraction of the architecture gave birth to the term “Bilbao effect”. But the amount of biennales and the numbers expected to visit them begs the question whether there can be so much decent art, and what is the experience of these pageants after all? One answer is that of ‘net effect’: one had a ‘cultural experience’ from which we extract one or two works that we ‘liked’.

This like—together with the ‘likes’ some of us are expected to make in a world where everything is expected to be rated—forms the basis of some anecdotal conversation, that is, if you still converse, given that it is much easier to ‘chat’ through truncated, written text. But the culture of ‘liking’ can only lead to the admission that the exponential profusion of liking and disliking is only to conceal the more sinister truth that reasoned opinion is rare. But the obsession with visitation numbers reveals imperturbably that reasoned opinion is not what is valued or even desirable. Hence, as Redford himself states:

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

Contemporary art is now firmly a part of popular culture, that’s obvious. It functions like sport for a large sector of the population.

But art and sport are in fact combat zones operating within their own, closed circuit systems. It’s this masking of combat by comfort that is the beginning of the key to our present cultural condition.4 These are harsh words, but they are true.

What makes them harsher still is the extent to which it has been embraced by museums, curators and their associated benefactors.

From the age of patronage since the Renaissance, art has always been associated with the leisure class, but it is now noticeably at the service of the leisure industry, a cultural pastime.

Since Julian Stallabrass’ coinage of the phrase “High Art Lite” in 1999, a topic of critical debate has been the way art is in the service of entertainment and, with it, the demise of critical debate. Public museums and art festivals like biennales are made possible by the support of public funds, donors and corporate sponsors.

While public institutions are subject to questions of propriety, donors and sponsors are steeped in vested interests. Few are the sponsors who will give money to the kinds of commentary

new passports new photography

Opens 15 November 2014 free entry | artgallery.wa.gov.au

Principal Partner

Petrina Hicks | Jackson and Tiger 2005 | lightjet print | 85 x 80 cm | State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the TomorrowFund, Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation, 2014

DRAINED AND CON F USED

that actively undermine the interests and procedures, which the wealth came from in the first place. However sponsors, individual and corporate are eager to subsidise work that looks and smells edgy, lest they disclose the dubious contradictoriness of the entire dynamic.

To be too cloying is to give the game away.

This meretricious and disingenuous doubleplay is described by Slavoj Zizek as follows: If you accuse a big corporation of particular financial crimes, you expose yourself to risks that can go even as far as murder attempts; if you ask the same corporation to finance a research project on the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, you stand to get a good chance of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars.5 The bleakness of this state of affairs is in the manner in which the corporate sponsor stands as gatekeeper to ensure that the commentary is ‘not much’. But what is so dangerous is that critical commentary is allowed to exist, but always in a diluted form. The quandary of the so-called post-democratic age that contemporary art finds itself in is more sinister than the culture of totalitarianism.

For the socialist realism of totalitarian art is so unerringly predictable and monotonous that

it all but spells out that it is the false patina, the scrim behind which lurks a more vibrant, more courageous and more authentic vision of things. Public contemporary art, the art funded by government grants and sponsors, is given a pre-ordained limit: it is decaffeinated and pasteurised (an apt metaphor as we may note that it is impossible under lawful circumstances to get in Australia the delicious unpasteurised cheeses available in Europe). Can we imagine a biennale staging a work such as Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), in which he had a friend shoot at him, or Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), where she slowly unravelled a long paper text from her vagina while reading from it, let alone Polixeni Papapetrou’s images of her own children, lest it incite some Family First lobbyists. Public galleries really love abstract art because it can mean nothing, which also accounts for the museological emasculation of a lot of traditional art, which is read as abstraction and decoration.

The watered down form of dissent to be found in the large public exhibition is in the same grouping as armchair left politics: it is easy to talk, but midway measures are where the activism stops. To account for this, it is also worth looking back to the genealogy of the large public exhibition, namely to the very first, which was the French Salon that was founded in 1648.

While its establishment was in line with that of other academies, such as the French Academy in 1634, the Salon served a very shrewd, pragmatic purpose. This was to work on human selfinterest and need for acclaim in such a way that artists would come together of their own volition, after which they could be grouped and rated, all the better for future State commissions and purchases by the wealthy. Biennales may be slightly different, such as those organised by a single curator—now known as an ‘artistic director’ suggesting that a certain auteur-ism has snuck into the business—but remembering the historical origins of the mass exhibitions also serves as a reminder of the extent to which they are powered by State interests, and those who prop up the State, which are the wealthy.

As for Australia’s entrants to the Venice Biennale, the most recent choices expose a kind of product management system devolved to artists. This essentially means that artists are chosen and managed according to a set of criteria, which is based on self-consciousness of how we are perceived by the outside. In this sense artists are ‘cast’ in a way that is not unlike actors in a film, in which special assurance is

made that there is gender balance and racial representation. Ricky Swallow, was, for example an obvious choice over any conceptual artist, because his evident virtuosity was a sure stopgap to appreciation if his ideas didn’t pass muster (curiously however, he fell flat with observers from places like Germany, which have a wood carving tradition that goes back centuries). Then there was Shaun Gladwell, who made sure that the Australianness was ramped up to the fullest: kangaroos, outback, red centre, cars and bikes. But after such a brash and brazen show of masculinity, it would have been unconscionable to have another white heterosexual male. This made the succession, if it can be called that, by Simryn Gill a predictable option. And Gill’s work, which is arguably the most legible and literal form of postcolonial complaint, coupled with her Malaysian heritage makes her, from the point of view of the Biennale selection committee, a rather phenomenal package. In short, the artists are not chosen first for the art, but according to a series of logistical expedients in which vetting, censorship and financial strategy are the tacit drivers.

To this end, the other attribute attractive to corporate sponsors, and to governmental bodies, and which is tied to the hysterical need for audience numbers is participatory and immersive art. As Redford also comments, “It seems strange now that contemporary art has migrated back to the museums with the supposed rise in popularity of an [sic] ‘immersive’ or ‘participatory’ institutionalised contemporary art”.6 If the audience can play with it or is engulfed by it, then it is a definite winner—we need only recall enthusiastic publicity over Pipilotti’s Rist’s installation in the last Biennale of Sydney, in which the room was filled with cushions and bags so viewers could chill-out while watching what was arguably a rather saccharine and soporific, yet spectacular, work. Here art is a special kind of visual muzak, in which the aim is not to challenge audiences but rather the reverse, to bring them to a state of torpor.

Redford ends his piece with what he calls “a number of Elephants in the Room of current art”. The first is the “Fear of a Pop Culture Planet”. The second, “Transparent Acknowledgment of the Role the Majority of Artists Play: The Dirty Secret”. His explanation of this is beautiful: the ‘dirty’ secret is the way young artists are exploited, used as cannon fodder:

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Excuse the awful pun, but the hierarchical system employed by our curators and institutions is a pyramidal power structure which ensures that virtually all young artists who flesh out a biennale or triennale or major survey of ‘new art’ will be forgotten as soon as the show is over. So the system as it stands is one big Ponzi scheme that uses art college graduates as sheer numbers of ‘bodies’ in the whole art process and then discards them just like neo-liberal capitalism does.7 The truth of this is hard to measure but worth reflection. What is certain is the way in which artists, especially the ones that are lesser known, are used as quantities in the respect of race, place and medium. Artists living in Hobart are proportionately more likely to be included in a show or to get a grant than one in Sydney or Melbourne. If you are an indigenous artist working on the cutting edge of the most contemporary digital technology you are proportionately more likely to get exhibited by dint of the fact that there are far fewer of you than there are painters. And finally, an indigenous artist is more likely to succeed than a non-indigenous artist (and we return to the old chestnut of the discord between moral inclusiveness in art institutions as against the disgraceful state of Aboriginal affairs).

Writing over ten years ago about the forced obsolescence in the artworld, the New York artist and filmmaker René Green commented on the “proximity of art and fashion”: “Fashion—as in style or what is in style, in fashion—and that which is presented as art have become interwoven in a shared consumerist frenzy, where obsolescence is necessary in order to keep the cycles of capital in motion.”8 In other words, artists represent relatively fixed quantities with circumscribed use value. Artists play cameo roles in which their expendability is intimated in advance.

They become part of a haze of novelty. If there are ideas laying in wait they are incidental, supplementary and perhaps discouraged, as ideas require reflection. What is more desirable are effects and surfaces. Abstraction is generally good because it is safe and always courts the possibility of saying absolutely nothing.

Redford’s third “Elephant” is “Unchecked and Stunningly Out of Control Market”, while the fourth is “The Utter Hypocrisy of Most Art Writing”: “The nice sounding ‘concerned’

rhetoric pumped out by curators and writers must stop. Their actions are at total odds with words. Let’s call a sham for what it is.”

(I wonder what his verdict on this essay would be.) Number five is the “End of the Artist and Rise of the Viewer”: We show any bit of kitsch rubbish, bad Aboriginal art or Zombie abstraction as art as long as it comes with THE pedigree. But we cannot, and will not show Pro Hart, Ken Done, Thomas Kinkade, Norman Lindsay (well, a bit) or Norman Rockwell. Why? Then we don’t need taste or curators we [sic] just need a computer program.9 The very absence of such artists is the sign of the deeply sinister condition of politics and criticality in so much contemporary art.

Ironically, were the artists Redford mentioned shown in ‘serious’ art exhibitions it would catalyse a critical response, acting as a kind of chemical reagent on an organism, opening up a space to view the exhibition warts and all: stripped of the veneer of concern and benevolence it would be easier to see the agendas and interests behind the artists chosen.

Let’s put this another way. In totalitarian regimes everyone knew the State-sanctioned artwork to be mendacious and stupid. A social realist painting, or say, Tony Abbott standing out at a port at the Top End with his left arm around the shoulders of young blackfella and his right held aloft with handkerchief waving blissfully at a boat full of asylum seekers is its own grotesque farce. And curiously, the work admitted by totalitarian States, from Maoist China to Stalinist Russia bears uncanny resemblance to each other. It is so false and contrived that people knew there lurked something underneath. What is far more dangerous is the pantomime of taste and socio-political commitment played out by institutions and their associated curators.

Here we appear to be given the right stuff, which precisely withholds, as it were, the right stuff from us. We are gulled into believing we are given a healthy feed of ‘critical’ art, but it has undergone rigorous vetting procedures, if unspoken.

Together with inclusiveness and diversity, another buzzword is “sustainability”.

As the 19th Biennale of Sydney amply showed, it would appear that the large art festival has already evolved into something very different

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from what was intended. As opposed to a critical snapshot of the main artistic preoccupations of the present, it is now a vehicle for tourism and leisure—evidenced by the retention of Cockatoo Island. To venture a serious critique of the exhibition or even its individual contents is increasingly something of a misplaced enterprise. The bigger they become, the more the artists become lost in the haze. But maybe the question of the sustainability of these exhibitions needs to be inverted to what these exhibitions help to sustain.

Art students reading this will see a rather bleak landscape before them, a bit like Neo in the Matrix who sees the wasteland behind the matrix. It would be false to talk about hope or change. But it is only by being pragmatic about the realities that some alternatives can arise. However bellicose or insistent, voices such as Redford’s are necessary to cut through the din of craven banality. Art can still be interesting, it is just that you need to know where to go. Currently, it is less and less in places where you would expect it to be.

Notes 1 Scott Redford; http://dailyreview.crikey.com.au/scott-redfords-polemic-and-the-rise-of-comfort-over-combat 2

ibid.

3

See for example Hal Foster, ‘Post-Critical’, October 139, Winter 2012 4

Redford, op cit.

5

Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003: 44

6

Redford, op cit.

7

ibid.

8

René Green, from Artist Questionnaire, October 100, Special Issue: Obsolescence, Spring 2002: 76-77 9

Redford, op cit.

Page 6 Chris Burden Shoot, 1971 Photo courtesy the artist Page 7 Christopher Wool, Blue Fool, 1990 (presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 2014) Photo courtesy the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Page 10 Carole Schneemann Interior Scroll, 1975 Photo courtesy the artist and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

www.unisa.edu.au/sasa-gallery

Image: Wendy Fairclough, Amber Palace, Jaipur (detail), 2014.

From the upcoming SASA Gallery exhibition, Translucent Shadows.

Photography by Grant Hancock

THE SKIN OFF OUR TIME

Rokni Haerizadeh, Reign of Winter (video still), 2012-13 single channel colour video animation (rotoscopy), 8 min 42 sec.

Photo courtesy the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

JAMES TYLOR | SERA WATERS | ABDUL ABDULLAH | ARLO MOUNTFORD (AUSTRALIA) ROKNI HAERIZADEH (IRAN) | ALI CHERRI (LEBANON) 26 FEBRUARY_29 MARCH, 2015

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

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

forever spring?

Alex Gawronski Writing about the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s Primavera as an exhibition concept is difficult primarily because of the sheer diversity the exhibition embraces from year to year. The nature of this diversity depends not only on who the curator is, and whether or not they are an artist/curator or curator ‘proper’, but on artist intention and the types of works exhibited. While certain curators have attempted a loose thematic, others have chosen Primavera principally as platform to highlight the early career achievements of particular Australian artists under the age of thirty-five. Indeed, the only pervasive theme Primavera suggests, centres on the youthfulness indicated by its title. There is an implicit assumption that those artists exhibiting in Primavera are at a milestone in their emerging careers, moving from the fecundity of spring to a fully exposed place in the midday summer sun. Certainly there is no hint of a winter to come. This emphasis on youthfulness in the context of heavily promoted exhibitions like Primavera, and supported both by funding bodies and advertising in general, can however also read as a double-bind, one that binds the ‘emerging’ artist to an image of youth which then must be re-performed ad-infinitum.

Another flipside to this youthful image of the emerging artist is the consequent expectations it engenders in audiences and sponsors who expect such artists to go on to fulfill a very prescribed career path. Retrospectively, primacy has always been given to those artists ‘emerged’ out of Primavera, who have successfully followed a familiar career trajectory composed of high-profile exhibitions in all the ‘right’ places. Yet this type of career expectation is by no means assured Primavera exhibitors.

Perhaps it is this core ambiguity that, since the MCA’s renovation, has placed the exhibition in decidedly more cramped quarters. Such confinement, even though Primavera remains highly visible on the entrance level of the museum, can also force the show to read as supplementary to the other ‘real’ exhibitions that occur within it.

Caitlin Franzmann Dissolve, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist Photography Alex Davies

Another aspect that defines Primavera as an exhibition is its survey status. There are in fact very few surveys of this kind in the Australian contemporary cultural landscape.

The other most notable is the annual NEW exhibition held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. Yet NEW is non-ageist and attempts to lay more claim to a type of zeitgeist presentation; variations of the show, arguably as diverse as those staged within Primavera, seem at least to grapple with claims to a broadly thematised relevance.

Similarly, a relatively small-scale survey show like Australian Perspecta (1981-99), occurring in the gap-year between Sydney Biennales, once aimed to present the work of particular local practitioners whose practices were considered especially pertinent at the time. Nonetheless, if there were a commonality between Primavera and NEW, and perhaps to a lesser extent Perspecta, it would be a self-conscious obsession with contemporaneity as a value. This would certainly explain the repeated emphasis on diversity that permeates almost all these shows.

Diversity as a standard under the regime of the contemporary has replaced temporality with

difference. Such an emphasis on difference is in many ways a very positive development as it displaces traditionalist privileging of Anglocentric individuality for a recognition of the complex ethnic and ethical makeup of most contemporary societies including Australia’s.

However, one of the biggest problems arising from a primary emphasis on difference is the tendency to reduce genuine ongoing social fracture with an image of diversity as capitalist abundance to be exploited.1 In this image—a static image as befits a concept like ‘the contemporary’ that has no past nor future only instantaneity—the present exists to sell as many different iterations of itself as possible.

Thus, it is unlikely that within the curatorial structure of an exhibition like Primavera, and in fact of many if not most globally promoted exhibitions of contemporary art, evidence of real antagonistic difference will appear. Within the art world such smoothing over of dissent or agonism could be presaged on the notion that many artists, especially younger artists, practise in a progressive spirit of mutual co-operation and respect for others and against old-school self-obsessed art heroism.

15

Such a claim may be true to some extent, and if anything, younger artists working in what is a relentlessly conservative and bigoted political climate, might be expected to be more likely than most to perceive rampant prejudices.

Nevertheless, the narcissism structurally inherent to the widespread use of social media among younger generations might also point alternatively towards a lack of interest in broader political and social issues particularly issues of (non-virtual) public dissent. Such a prognosis is also theoretically likely within a milieu like the Australian art world where opportunities to exhibit in highly visible venues are relatively limited. This means that issues of self-censorship among younger ambitious artists cannot be discounted. A tendency toward self-censorship among contemporary artists is especially ironic though, given that the mantra ‘democracy’ and its attendant implication of free-speech, rings through mediated channels today with even more frequency than ‘the contemporary’. What this ‘democracy’ amounts to really is just a dissimulated image of democracy, a pretty picture of equality and respect for others that utterly conceals the callous and calculated economic managerialism that drives actual contemporary democratic manoeuvering. Recognition of this, even if unconscious, is surely the reason younger artists are at times uninterested or dismissive of politics. Likewise, public institutions like museums tend to ultimately embrace the historical legacy of an Enlightenment model and are unlikely to see their role as consciously highlighting conflict. Rather, and pertaining to well-intentioned Enlightenment idealism, the museum will often see its role as symbolically healing cultural rifts and of indicating possible solutions to social ills. Unfortunately, what such an approach, as admirable as it is in a general climate of corruption and self-interest, hides is the fundamental reality of the museum as a site of ideological conflict. Yet, that conflict exists and may be highlighted within museum exhibitions would not automatically undermine the museum’s authority but could be used to discuss the inescapability of a genuine difference beyond its enshrouding in ‘neutral’ aesthetic discourse. Eminent French theorist Jacques Rancière would in any case squarely place the aesthetic within the conflictual domain of the political.2

Clearly, specifically emphasising aesthetic criteria can be a means of blanketing difference, where the agonistic heart of real difference is forced to play out within the more readily acceptable arena of ‘merely’ aesthetic considerations. Therefore, when aboriginal artists from remote communities are paired-off with economically privileged young middleclass white artists in what is framed first and foremost as a productive aesthetic encounter, as has been the case in numerous Primaveras, then questions of a perhaps irreconcilable difference are dispensed with.3 That is not to say that curators or viewers should be beholden to the assumed impeachability of ‘aboriginality’, which is its own problem. It is to suggest though that where this work is ideologically located is potentiality inaccessible on purely aesthetic grounds; the (usually) European connoisseur wants access to a secret that he or she will never attain and can only guess at, a key mechanism of desire played out in exacerbated fashion in the contemporary art market. But then again, this question of the irreconcilability of different viewpoints does not simply extend to indigenous artists but to all artists. Take Primavera 2014 as a case in point.4 Overall this exhibition adopts a deliberately maximalist approach mingling and overlapping works, rather than strategically juxtaposing and highlighting individual artistic approaches.

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This curatorial attitude is extremely interesting in its attempts to tackle space restrictions to accommodate the work of quite a large number of artists.5 Driving this approach seems to be the desire to foreground an almost utopian cultural notion in pointed opposition to the typical privileging of art world singularities as discreet ‘identities’. From this viewpoint it is a communal and generous approach rather than a myopic and individualising one.

Fittingly too, the way the essentially cramped exhibition space is utilised does not attempt to cleverly allay a sense of claustrophobia, but to deliberately enhance it. The visitor is immersed from the point of entry. However, in this instance, maximalism—an approach functioning to extremely acute effect say in the work of an individual contemporary artist like Swiss-born Thomas Hirschhorn—tends to dissipate the agency of the difference it contains.

This is because the little space available makes it difficult to focus on singular intent, thus works begin to read mainly according to material and aesthetic analogy. Evident is a repeated emphasis on the hand-made and lo-tech—quilts, ceramics, paintings, prints, timber constructions, post-Surrealist bricolage. Naturally these are accompanied by numerous high definition videos. But even the content of the videos speaks of a very particular, almost primitivist leaning. Here difference in its universalising

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

ARTISTS INCLUDE: Big Barge Arts Centre Emma Washer (Cocos Islands) Bruce Bradfield (WA) Susanna Castleden (WA) Dave Carson & Paul Houghton (WA) Jo Darbyshire (WA) Michele Elliot (NSW) Teelah George (WA) Sonal Kantaria (UK) Rebecca Mayo (VIC) Tim Pearn (WA) Perdita Phillips (WA) Shane Pickett (WA) Snapcat Renae Coles & Anna Dunnill (WA) Vanessa Russ (WA) Nien Schwarz (WA)

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17

inclination, heroically tries to blend everything for the sake of everyone. The disquieting dimension of this experience is actually the seamlessness of its overall effect. So while individual works testify to a certain anger even if it is largely comic, the amplitude of that anger and what it speaks of6 is mitigated by the generalising aesthetic field it establishes within the confines of the museum space. The show then points internally to ‘art’ and not to what art points to in the world outside.

Related to this subjectivising inwardness is the show’s highlighting of “Surrealism… ritual… witchcraft… alchemy, dreaming and telepathy”.7 The specific incurring of Surrealism is revealing, if we consider that movement’s historical trajectory from psychoanalysis, to Marxism to mysticism.

Surrealism’s famed, and unsurprising, failure with the communists is still perhaps one of modernity’s most revealing moments.

Disillusioned with the possibilities of enacting concrete change via radical, though politically orthodox means, Breton led his followers instead to the temple of the obscure. The withdrawal evident in this gesture signalled for many the end of Surrealism’s revolutionary phase and its ossifying canonisation in the art markets of Europe and North America.8 This turn from an admittedly stultifying

and compromised political agenda to the realm of myths and mysticism indicated a deep-rooted alienation from a belief in the possibility of actually changing the world other than imaginatively. Surrealism moved in the opposite direction towards fantasy, embracing precisely, ritual, witchcraft, alchemy, dreaming and telepathy. What then does this return to an interest in mysticism, amply apparent in Primavera 2014, indicate today if not a related sense of frustration with the world as it is?

The only problem though, and one experienced

by Breton and his compadres in the 1940s and 1950s, is that the privileging of heightened subjectivity in art is one of the principal expectations of conservative art lovers. The most familiar role such audiences expect the artist to play is that of the ‘seer’ who is ‘different’ from the rest of us. It is desire for access to this coveted ‘abnormality’ that many collectors crave. Ironically, they crave what they already know, the representation of an impossible freedom. Unlike Breton’s earnest belief in the metaphorical agency of myth and mysticism though, many of the ‘magical’ citations in the works of artists in Primavera 2014 bear the stamp of a self-knowing irony, even kitsch. This further evidences a sense of frustration that is aware it cannot really be fulfilled in fantasy. Not even the fantasy of the museum as a haven from ‘real-

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

world’ disappointment can alleviate this sense of alienation. This is where the real productive fissures in this exhibition begin to illuminate.

Of course with an exhibition like Primavera, concerns about generalisation extend through many of its previous outings.

One of the principal reasons for this would be the simple difficulty in trying to curate a show that could adequately represent the diversity of practices of younger Australian artists. It is telling then that while certain Primaveras have at least hinted at some extremely broad themes underlying them, other Primavera curators have stated outright that their principal intention was always to exhibit the work of successful emerging artists.9 The nature of this success is difficult to quantify, but is usually connected to opportunities such artists have attained already through recognised channels like grants, residencies or commercial representation, as well as by word of mouth. On one hand, the honesty of stating from the outset that Primavera was simply a survey show of young Australian artists is refreshing, as such an attitude does not attempt to overwhelm artists’ ideas by asserting a nominal theme over them. On the other hand, the simple survey attitude can risk appearing as offering nothing but a smorgasbord of ‘hot new things’ to curious awaiting gallerists and collectors. Otherwise, the thematic attitude

F OREVER SPRIN G ?

fairly compellingly that as far as imagination connects to unconscious desires, it is more real then the visibly real. Nonetheless, recourse to the imaginative spaces of fantasy can too often harbour a desire to retreat to a pre-extant image of art as a traditional domain offering escape. But what if there were no escape?

What if viewers were asked to reconsider art as something other than a variety of contemporary entertainment or connoisseurship, by being posed with implicit problems of how art, as a potentially active deconstructive practice, is seen in the first place? Then again that would be a completely different sort of show that would deliberately subvert rather than assuage viewer expectation.

Notes 1 See Slavoj Zizek, ‘Multiculturalism or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism?’, New Left Review I/225, SeptemberOctober 1997 2 “The politics of works of art plays itself out to a larger extent—in a global and diffuse manner—in the reconfiguration of worlds of experience based on which police consensus or political dissensus are defined. It plays itself out in the way in which modes of narration or new forms of visibility established by artistic practices enter into politics’ own field of aesthetic possibilities”. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’, Continuum, London/ New York: 2004: 65

can function as it usually does in megashows like biennales, as nothing but a vague coverall, a wishy-washy phrase that curators and institutions hope publics will remember.

But this does not mean, as is readily apparent, that there has not been any number of truly ambitious and investigative works shown in Primavera and the same holds true for its current expression. Nor does it mean that curatorially the exhibitions necessarily suffer from their survey status, because such a status can easily incorporate very strong work and arguments.

Still, what would it be to curate a Primavera that deliberately did not seek to speak —‘democratically’ or statistically—inclusively for a particular generation of Australian artists

Page 15 Sean Peoples Supreme Universal Order (still), 2013 Photo courtesy the artist Page 17 Ishmael Marika Galka (still), 2014 Photo courtesy the artist and The Mulka Project,Yirrkala, Northern Territory Above Emily Hunt Dread Life (detail), 2014 Photo courtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney All photographs Alex Davies

under thirty-five? Problematic to such a nondemocratic approach though, are the external interests of institutions to ‘fairly’ represent a perceived range of different social, cultural, political interests. One thing that seems missing from many survey style exhibitions such as Primavera is the presentation of difficulty, a show uncompromising in what it demands of viewers. So instead of automatically seeking diversity, difference and abundance, qualities which might be admirable in themselves, maybe the real challenge for a show like Primavera would be to show less rather than more. And that is not to say that fewer artists be shown necessarily, but that the exhibition might be used to open up a space that self-consciously recognises its place within the museum.10 This would be a show, which attempts to highlight the act of exhibiting and how museum spaces are, like all spaces, narrative spaces that could be utilised in ways that might prompt viewers to think about where they are and why? With fewer things to see, visitors might start to consider how art, and widely speaking this relates to art made by artists of any age, can indicate how it concretely connects to the actually-existing world. Naturally the world of the imagination is by no means less real than what exists visibly. In fact, it can still be argued

3 Of course this is an issue of recognition as well. After all, why should and how could an exhibition focused on young Australian contemporary artists not address the inclusion of indigenous art? Yet, the issue of irreconcilability is actually one that accepts true difference for what it is and not for how it can be consumed or forced to conform to the expectations of the dominant culture 4

Primavera 2014 was curated by the well-known Sydney artist Mikala Dwyer, herself an early Primavera exhibitor

5 Primavera 2014 includes the work of no fewer than thirteen artists 6 Evident in the lurid quilts of Paul Yore that incorporate much sexual imagery juxtaposed with repeated references to Australian racism, bigotry and homophobia. The artist’s works, which have previously incurred legal intervention, are simultaneously humorous and angry in equal measure 7 MCA press release for Primavera 2014; http://www.mca. com.au/exhibition/primavera-2014-young-australian-artists/ 8 Curiously, Breton, a writer, remained more or less impoverished for most of his life unlike many of his cotravelling visual artist friends who, over time, became increasingly famous and successful. Many of these he had fallen out with in any case in part over what he perceived as their selling out to the bourgeois art market and to counterrevolutionary values. See Mark Polizzoti, Revolution of the Mind, The Life of Andre Breton, London: Bloomsbury, 1995

9 2008 and 2010 Primavera curators, Hannah Matthews and Katie Dyer respectively, specifically stated in press releases their non-intention of providing an over-arching curatorial theme 10 Sydney artist Gail Hastings who appeared in Primavera 1992 alongside Mikala Dwyer, attempted to do this in Primavera 2001, in which I exhibited. The show marked the ten year anniversary of the Primavera and was subtitled ‘The Blind Spots We Sometimes See’. In it Hastings curatorially aimed in many instances to narrativise the spaces of the museum as spaces of fiction

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

modernism: more popular than populism REX BUTLER “What colours! What drawing! It’s a van Dyck…

It’s a Rubens… It’s marvellous. It’s stunning”, says a well-dressed upper-class woman in a bustle to her two equally well-dressed male companions, who flinch away equally from the painting and her remarks (La visite, 1857).

A top-hatted connoisseur makes like Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass, scrutinising a painting at close range, hoping to winkle out of it qualities that no one else sees (Eh! bien en regardant, 1865). “What a strange idea, that someone would think of making something like that!” says a gap-toothed, lower-class man to his crone-like wife, both of them dressed in only occasionally-worn Sunday best clothes that do not properly fit (Dis donc, not’homme, 1852). “You do the left-hand side and I’ll do the right, and when we get home we can compare notes”, says a petrified petit-bourgeois husband to his similarly terrified wife as they walk down the imposing banks of paintings looming overhead (Ma femme… comme n’aurions pas le temps…, 1859). These four lithographs by Honoré Daumier were published in the weekly newspaper Le Charivari, where Daumier worked for some thirty years between about 1830 and 1860. They in fact belong to a well-established genre of caricature, recently the subject of some scholarly attention, devoted to the Salons, the annual art exhibition first held in 1699.1 Other prominent exponents of the genre were JeanLouis Hamon and Cham (Amadée de Noé), the latter of whom worked for the rival L’Aurore, and scholars often draw a distinction between the conservative pro-Monarchist stance of Cham and the Republican Daumier. The most prominent age for the genre was undoubtedly the mid-nineteenth century period of the Second Empire, when both Daumier and those others worked, after it became possible for newspapers

to carry pages of illustrations, but before the new photomechanical techniques did away with the need for the laborious methods of hand-made etching and lithography. Salon caricature, however, continued all the way through the nineteenth century, until the Salons themselves began to decline in importance, and I am sure that most of us can remember from our introductory Modern Art courses the famous caricatures of Manet’s Olympia and Courbet’s The Stonebreakers (apparently, this kind of attack got Manet down, while Courbet wore it as a badge of pride).

The Salons of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture were established to display the work of the recent graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts and took place at the exclusive Salon Carré before being moved to the bigger Louvre in 1725 and then the much bigger Palais de l’Industrie in 1857. At first, entry to the show was restricted to aristocrats

and Academicians, but in 1737 under Louis XV the public was admitted one day a week, and in 1831 under Louis-Philippe a more general policy of admission was initiated.2 This, along with the fact that after the Revolution artists did not have to go to the École des Beaux-Arts but anyone could enter (later a jury of Academicians was reinstalled, but it exerted progressively less and less influence), meant that we had the creation of a “public” space, which marks the beginning both of a certain modernism and the problem of what we might call aesthetic judgment in the proper sense. (The Salon of 1864, for example, included some 3468 paintings, sculptures and etchings.) What was previously the preserve of selected jurists and critics was now open to all to make up their minds (a lot like the Melbourne Art Fair). Indeed, as the century moved on, due to this opening up of a wider judgement, the Salons began to lose their credentialising power, with artists increasingly refusing their monopoly over taste. History is full of examples of “incorrect” judgements being made by the jury (a Cabanel portrait of the Emperor being awarded the Grande Médaille the same year Manet’s Olympia was so publicly mocked), and in 1863 Napoleon III inaugurated the Salon des Refusés to show work rejected by the official Salon, and later in 1874 there was the first Impressionist Exhibition and in 1884 the first Salon des Indépendents, which would include such artists as Seurat, Cézanne, Pissarro and Cassatt. (It is, of course, to this exhibition that the alternative to this art fair’s Spring 1883, held at the Windsor Hotel, alludes.) Nevertheless, something like the Salon model continued on

Honoré Daumier Croquis pris a l’exposition: Moi ce que j’aime dans la sale de sculpture, 1852

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21

into the twentieth century, seen in such things as the famous Salon of Independent Artists in New York, which Duchamp shocked in 1917 by submitting his urinal, or the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, which ran in Paris immediately after WWII.

It is the changed circumstances of the entry of the public into the business of judging art that Daumier seeks to address in his lithographs. Of course, the first Salons and the Academy behind it were an attempt to impose an official taste, to state the rules by which artists should be judged and recognised.

But with the admission of the general public, who did not know the rules and were not qualified to make judgements, all of this was transformed. Now judgement was not certain, and there was the necessary attempt to educate the masses. The Academy did not control its

own rules any more—it had allowed itself to be subject to the judgement of others—but this new public also did not know the rules—it was in turn judged by the work. In a way, both are thrust into a modern situation—this will be the series of avant-gardes that the opening up of the Salons to the public will inaugurate—in which the criteria for art are contested, up for grabs, able to be variously claimed by one party or another. And this in a sense is the comedy of Daumier’s caricatures. When the bustled woman says she loves the work without knowing by whom it is painted or a crowd of top-hatted gentlemen all crane for a look at what they cannot see (Aspect du salon le jour de l’ouverture, 1857), the point Daumier is trying to make is the hidden conformity, the desperate search for reassurance, that characterises modern art. No one has a clue, and all one

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can do—instead of truly judging oneself—is appeal to an assumed consensus, a particular constituency, secretly look around at others (or even, as it were, ask the work itself) and see if they think the same. For all of the new world the opening of the Academy up to the public suggests, Daumier reveals that we are each afraid of our new-found freedom. We do not judge before others (we seek to conform to the work), just as those others wait for us (the artist looks to their audience before making their work).

In other words, for all of art history’s attempt to align Daumier to a modern taste (the only way, it appears, we can justify him, the reason he is preferred over his historical rivals), in fact what Daumier prefigures is a critique of modernism: its hidden conformity, the ignorance driving it, the unacknowledged

MODERNISM : MORE POPULAR THAN POPULISM

human dimension in its apparently disinterested appreciation of art. Daumier—and we will come back to this—is almost something of a Hans Haacke in laying bare the repressed socio-political conditions of modernism.

And yet there is another aspect of Daumier’s satire that appears to go against this, or at least complicates it, and is not so sympathetic to our tastes. For if Daumier wants to prick the pretensions of the nouveaux-riches who seek to emulate the aristocrats of the Academy, it is also the complacency of the great unwashed, the workers, who do not take art seriously.

If he is critical of those who pretend, he is equally scornful of those who do not pretend, who wilfully don’t get it. Or, rather—and this is Daumier’s true brilliance as a parodist—of those who merely pretend not to get it, who stubbornly refuse to play, because art truly is for all. “I like coming to the sculpture room.

You can always get a seat”, yawns one man to another quietly dozing away, and this might appear authentic (Moi ce que j’aime dans la sale de sculpture, 1852). But the point of Daumier’s caricature—the much-acclaimed way in which he draws his figures—is that this is just as much a pretence as the art he scorns, equally done only for the unconscious approval of his colleague, performed only for an imagined audience.

The young scholar Julia Langbein’s 2014 PhD from the University of Chicago, ‘Salon Caricature in the Second Empire’, is well worth reading in this regard. In it she identifies a certain structure of doubling or

redoubling in caricature, in which, as she puts it, the objective becomes the subjective, or put otherwise in which the caricaturist no sooner laughs at another than they also laugh at themselves. As Langbein writes: “The comic artist cultivates his dédoublement and wields it with an extreme self-awareness that appears as self-ignorance… He maintains the relational pair—the ‘two beings present’—within himself”.3 And we might see this here because, insofar as Daumier laughs at the pretensions of those who take art seriously, he is necessarily laughing at himself. That is to say, if there is in his work a turn towards the “commonsense” of ordinary people who do not fall for the seductions of art—and this is part of the subsequent mythologisation of Daumier as a “man of the people”, who stands outside of the pretensions he mocks—we can also see that he laughs at these people too. It appears—and this is perhaps the true doubling at stake in his work—that there is no easy position to take on art in Daumier’s caricatures. We are always either too high or too low. We cannot be inside the art system, subject to its illusions and deceptions, but we cannot be outside of it either. We cannot get it right (as opposed to the claims of so-called experts), but there is also no way avoiding it (as opposed to the claims of the so-called non-experts). I know that this will sound counter-intuitive, but it seems to me that the best word to describe the attitude revealed in Daumier’s lithographs is populism.

On the one hand, he is opposed to the attempt to take art away from ordinary people and make it the province of the experts, and on the other art is for everyone and everyone must engage with it. But if populism is a kind of doubling, with no clear inside but also no clear outside, it is underwritten by something else, a further doubling or self-reflection. The place of this populism, where it is spoken from—and we will come back to this—is not necessarily accessible to populism itself.4 In fact, the greatest triumph of any caricaturist, the evidence of the total world-view they create, is that there is nothing outside of caricature, and even the straight, the normal, the undistorted, comes across only as the greatest distortion, another caricature.5 Everything is doubled, rendered uncertain, open to further judgement or the search for ‘higher’ or more universal grounds, by the power of art as seen in the caricature.

It is all of this that Charles Baudelaire intuitively understood when he wrote about Daumier and caricature in his two great essays,

‘Some French Caricaturists’ and ‘Of the Essence of Laughter and Generally of the Comic in the Plastic Arts’, and made him the basis of his modernism in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. (Commentators have suggested that Baudelaire was actually meaning Manet when he made Constantin Guys the embodiment of his modernism in that essay, but it is also Daumier.) It was Baudelaire as much as anyone else who constructed the myth of Daumier as an implicitly Leftish man of the people, an anti-Monarchist and advocate of democracy (this is the argument of the essay largely devoted to Daumier, ‘Some French Caricaturists’). However, if we read those two other essays closely, we can see—and this is not so often discussed—Baudelaire’s brilliant linking of Daumier with modernism. Beyond any political recognisability of Daumier’s social critique, Baudelaire is suggesting that what is radical about his work is his modernism, and that this modernism is indicated by laughter. Laughter points to what is currently unrecognised or inexpressible—it is indicated by no particular outward form—and yet is what is truly, beyond any actual public or social program, universally shared. Laughter is perhaps the impossible acknowledgement—and Baudelaire more or less says this—that there is nothing outside of artifice, that the straightest is only the greatest cover up, that art doubles the world and that any judgement made concerning it always ultimately falls upon the one making it. This is what Baudelaire says in ‘Of the Essence of Laughter’: “It must be added that one of the most distinctive signs of the absolute comic is to be unconscious of itself. That is to be seen, not only in certain animals like monkeys, in whom gravity is an essential element of their funniness… but also in those Chinese grotesque figures which we find so diverting, and which have much less of a comic intention than is generally believed.”6

It is populism, of course, that is the pressing problem of art today. Indeed, we might even say that populism is virtually synonymous with the contemporary, which is now so dominant as a category for thinking the art of the present. Populism is at once this art’s most obvious fact (spectacular shows like Melbourne Now, the world-wide spate of biennales) and its hidden secret, the unspeakable thing it cannot do without. In a way, there is nothing more obvious than this latest ‘movement’ of art, the contemporary.

It is marked by no style, no technique, no

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geographical origin or source, no history or pre-history, no first or primary artists.

It suddenly just appears and anything can be it (nothing is excluded from it in advance).

The work simply is contemporary, evidence for the contemporary—and that is all contemporary art is: evidence for its contemporaneity, in an endless and self-validating circularity. And yet at the same time nothing is more testament to the inventive or doubling power of criticism: if there is no evidence for it, this non-evidence, this tautology or self-equivalence, is the very sign of something’s contemporaneity.

The contemporary is signalled not directly but only negatively, by the very absence of qualities: it is not modern, not post-modern, not colonial, not post-colonial. If something is not any of these things, then it has a chance of being contemporary. (This, as we know, is the strange criterion the contemporary enforces, which is why all of the art being made today is not contemporary: only work that is empty of all of the usual styles and categories has a chance of being contemporary.) But, in an uncanny kind of way, the critic must necessarily miss the contemporary when they try to point it out. The very book that inaugurates the category actually devolves into a series of other styles, each of which is precisely not it: remodernism, retrosensationalism, altmodernism, spectacular art and architecture and a post-modern turn.7

The same thing can be said of populism. Populism is necessarily a love that cannot speak its name. Certainly, museums and art galleries, both abroad and here in Australia, are moving towards populism as a curatorial logic. In America, the recently deceased Director of the Metropolitan Museum, Thomas Hoving, in his appropriately titled autobiography Making the Mummies Dance, claims to have invented the blockbuster through such things as a show of Egyptian tomb gold and exhibitions mixing Poussin, David and Pop Art.8 The further reappointment after twenty years of self-confessed populist Glenn Lowry as the Director of Museum of Modern Art, New York has set off predictable criticism by ex-curator of the institution Robert Storr, who said of him that he has “gutted the museum in terms of its curatorial traditions”.9 And we see the same thing in Australia with the undoubted king of the populist exhibition, Tony Ellwood, who is the mastermind behind such shows as Optimism (2008) and 21st Century (2010) at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane and, more recently, Melbourne Now (2013) at the National

Gallery of Melbourne. Ellwood, needless to say, has been the subject of much criticism for his exhibitions, by the likes of the conservative critic for The Australian, Christopher Allen. (And we might say that one of the key signs of populism, one of the things that makes it popular, paradoxically, is that no one likes it: it is opposed by both progressives like Storr and conservatives like Allen.) This is what Allen has written, for instance, of 21st Century at GoMA: “Families in shorts and leisure-wear, children and teenagers: the gallery is probably delighted to attract all these new customers, but they’re mostly there for the carnival and not to look at the art with any attention.”10

Now, in a subsequent interview, Ellwood was easily able to bat this criticism away on populist grounds, and who—for this, after all, is populism we are talking about—could not but agree with him? Without specifically referring to Allen (because such criticisms are beneath the notice of a king), he says: “There are lots of people who seem to think that engaging children, and large numbers of teenagers, young adults in their twenties, is something to be dismissive of… I see twenty year olds walking in with their mates, by choice, and I’m just proud of that.”11 And yet, in another way, such defensive reactions also miss the popular. They appear too much a kind of strategy, as though Ellwood is hiding his real motivations, as though there is something else behind what he says and this could not be all he means. (People coming to shows as their only justification? Surely not.) As Daumier well knew all those years ago, populism cannot speak for itself. We can never make coincide populism and the place from where it is spoken.

This, again, is that reversal of subject and object Langbein identifies, in which the popular can never be seen as such, but only through its failure. It can never be claimed by oneself, but only attributed to others. Populism, properly speaking, is like the king in Poe’s famous short story concerning the purloined letter: it does not speak for itself (as we say, it is characterised by no positive values, there is no actual reason for it), but is what everybody else speaks for, has to try to take into account. Populism does not sound too good when it has to justify itself: it always appears too trivial, too defensive.

(Ellwood, finally, strikes us as only anti-Allen’s anti-modernism.) True populism—like a gallery director like Ellwood—is powerful only in being spoken for, or ghost-written, like those

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Director’s Forewords at the front of catalogues.

It is what stands behind others, and whose motivations (even though it has none) remain mysterious and having to be guessed at.

It is that which—again, this is the subtle point of Daumier’s caricatures—lies in full view, behind its own appearance, so that the conventional is transformed into the greatest distortion. This is why a show like Melbourne Now is so discussed, so praised, so criticised, so (in the only way that counts, like Facebook Likes) popular: because it has absolutely nothing to say, about art or anything else.

But art—or rather art criticism —always misses this: it always aims too high or too low. It cannot grasp the popular, but can see it only as hiding something, as being ironic.

We find this with perhaps the first (consciously) populist art movement, the one that ushers in the category: the YBAs of the 1980s. Critics had a very hard time understanding the populism of the YBAs. The very title of Julian Stallabrass’ well-known book on the subject, High Art Lite, tells us this. It implies that the YBA artists intended to make high art and failed, or that their art is a kind of high art manqué.12

Page 21 Damien Hirst A Thousand years (detail), 1990 Photo courtesy the artist Opposite Honoré Daumier Les Moments Difficiles de la vie: Une visite a l‘atelier, 1864 Above Honoré Daumier Le Public du Salon Un jour où l’on ne paye pas…, 1852

MODERNISM : MORE POPULAR THAN POPULISM

Ash Keating NGV International, Melbourne, north wall billboard intervention 22 November 2013 for the launch of Melbourne Now Photo courtesy the artist

And we see this also in more academic treatments, which were written, at least in the first accounts of the movement, using the then-predominant method of Leftist social art history. Take, for example, Gene Ray’s ‘Little Glass House of Horrors: High Art Lite, the Culture Industry and Damien Hirst’, which uses the word “philistine” in relation to the art, alluding to the Biblical Philistines, who precisely pretended to be less intelligent than they were in order to defeat the neighbouring Israelites.

That is to say, Ray is suggesting that the art and its audience cannot really be doing what they appear to, but are deliberately dumbing themselves down. Or it is as though the work licenses a sort of socially-sanctioned stupidity or atavism, with which both it and its audience should not be confused. Here is Ray on Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990): “As I watched the flies a group of two couples, heterosexual, thirtysomethings, gathered opposite on the other

side of the piece. I became interested in their responses. Quite clearly, the piece brought out a sadistic streak in the two men. They soon let themselves go, roaring cheers whenever a fly was electrocuted. Eventually the women too began to smile. I then noticed my own reflection in the vitrine and left in disgust.”13

But we would say that this populism is also very hard for art itself to maintain.

Take again, for example, A Thousand Years.

We would want to suggest that one of the things that characterises contemporary art is a different, non-aesthetic conception of the image. The image in contemporary art is no longer aesthetic, but alternately biological, pornographic, religious, like advertising.

It reverts to the status of the image before the (Western) history of art. We see this in much of Hirst’s work, and it is certainly the case with A Thousand Years. The point of the work is to reduce art to a biological impulse, a circularity without remainder, part of the eternal cycle of life and death. The flies over the course of the show hatch in the rotting cow’s head, fly around the glass vitrine, return to lay their eggs in the head and the cycle begins again. Art is nothing more than this natural process. And yet, of course—and this was Freud’s point too in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’14—art is this cycle.

The flies that pass through the insect-o-cutor and enter the gallery are something like the death drive, that which exceeds the cycle of life and death; but, in another way, they are also what brings news of, makes apparent to us, this cycle. The fly is art, which is nothing more than the place from where this equivalence of life and death is remarked. The buzzing of the fly as it enters the gallery and thus becomes art is the buzzing of the space of enunciation itself—a pure signifier without signified —which exceeds all attempts to reduce it to the natural order. And this is like the Holy Spirit in Hirst’s Jesus and the Disciples (2003), which is to be attained only by the scouring of the flesh, reducing it to the material. Only by destroying what is—hence the notional poses of the various Apostles at the Last Supper, prefiguring the suffering that each will undergo—can we see what remains, can we find the Spirit, which is only that excess produced by rendering the spirit equivalent to the flesh.15

In the end-of-semester exam for my Contemporary International Art course, I always have a question that goes “The story of art after WWII is that of the collapse of high art into the popular. Discuss using examples”.

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Of course, the answer I am looking for is the obvious, post-modern one that, no matter how close art and popular culture get to each other, they can never be the same. That, while the whole history of late twentieth-century art is the story of the gradual coming together of art and life—through Neo-Dada, Pop, Minimalism and up to forms of Conceptual and participatory art—the two can never become identical, because it is the very admission by art that this is the case that means that art stands outside of this equivalence. It is the classic Arthur Danto argument concerning Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.16 Indeed, I have just used it myself with regard to Hirst. But what if we reversed this argument and began to think that it is art’s apparently small saving irony that has produced today’s populism, the passage of the image into inconsequentiality, into everyday life? The critic Claire Bishop is, of course, now well-known for her argument that the recent wave of socalled Relational Aesthetics—you know, art in which the artist does something like cook rice in a gallery or drive a taxi for a week as a way of making contact with their audience and offering another model for society—is not at all radical but commensurate with contemporary neo-liberal society. It does not only propose no change to society, but in its “outsourcing of authenticity”, its model of having others, that is, artists, make contact with others for you, is the very emblem of an increasingly atomised and alienated socius. As Bishop writes: “The self-effacing implications of the artist/ activist position bring to mind the character Grace in Lars von Trier’s 2003 provocation Dogville. Her desire to serve the local community is inseparable from her guilty position of privilege, and her exemplary gestures perturbingly provoke evil eradicable only by further evil.”17 But we might, indeed, go further than Bishop and begin to identify a whole lineage of post-War art that makes sense only as populism, or at least in the light of populism.

Again, what defines our contemporary populism? What is its single —and perhaps only—condition? Exactly, as in Daumier, its crowd, its audience. Indeed, we would say that in contemporary populist art the art is its audience (both the art is judged by its audience and the art aims to present its audience to itself). Think in this regard of the real difference between the average post-War art work and the latest museum blockbuster.

What actually distinguishes people walking on Carl Andre’s 144 Magnesium Squares (1969) and the art show judged by numbers past the door? What is the difference between Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970), in which the art work surveys the audience, and an attendant with a clicker as you enter the gallery or an intern with a clipboard, asking you whether you enjoyed yourself, as you leave? What is the difference between relational aesthetics and the average children’s room now appended to every blockbuster, designed to keep you there longer than you want to, insofar as you once decided to reproduce? Or even, to extend the logic, what is the difference between those famous avantgarde gestures like Duchamp and Yves Klein inviting an audience to an empty room or Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni at the last minute cancelling their exhibition and the average blockbuster where, due to the very excess of the crowd, you cannot see the work or, indeed, the average contemporary art video, whose very point is that you are not going to stay in front of it and watch it, when what you have effectively come to see, or even all that you actually can see, is others (not) seeing the work because of you or, put otherwise, seeing yourself up there instead of the work? Two extraordinary images or emblems of our new contemporaneity: one ubiquitous, anonymous, everyday; the other famous, much discussed, singled out—one social, interactive, meant to be shared; the other lonely, solipsistic, meant to be kept private. But both essentially following the same logic and produced in the same way. We are, of course, able to trace a long genealogy of the smile in art, from the subtle, aristocratic grin of Raphael’s Castiglione, writer of a manual on courtly diplomacy, bearing an expression that is meant to be recognised by few, that makes a distinction between inside and outside —through the smile of Warhol—camp, disdainful, still the preserve of a privileged (or oppressed) minority, who recognise each other through secret gestures, who constitute a new, this time self-proclaimed, aristocracy or subculture of ironists – and on to the smile of Jeff Koons—dumb, pseudo-ironic, heterosexual, promising entry to all, excluding no one, a populist smile, a smile that hides nothing, the smile of The Simpsons or South Park, which has lost all critical edge, a smile of the collapse of the distinction between inside and outside, a masturbatory, pornographic smile, in which the viewer simply is the art work. All of which reaches its nadir today in this smile: the smile

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of the so-called selfie, which the populist museum encourages its audience to take with an iPhone, in which the entire purpose of looking at art is to be photographed with it, like visiting tourist sites that one knows nothing about but that one can later say one has seen. The contemporary museum wants you to take a selfie as a way of getting you there, but it doesn’t—and, by the rules of the game, cannot—actually say what it wants to do with you once you are there. This photo here, of course, witnesses exactly that collapse of the distinction between the subjective and the objective that Langbein speaks of, and it awaits only its modern Daumier to give it its caption.

And Thomas Struth’s series of Museum Photos (1989-90), I would contend, represents much the same thing. Or take another genealogy, another decline or declination: from Duchamp’s urinal —in its original instantiation an admittedly ironic riposte to the levelling of taste (yes, indeed, it was not unDaumier-like in its skewering of upper-class pretensions with regard to art), against the making of the work of art whatever you will, in somehow trying to locate that empty point from where value in art arises18—to Bruce Nauman’s Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966)—in which Nauman attempts somehow to inhabit Duchamp, make equivalent if not quite yet the spectator and the artwork then at least the artist and the artwork—and on to Australian Rugby league footballer Todd Carney’s spectacular selfie, in which he as it were completes Nauman’s project, producing an entirely self-referential perpetual motion machine, in which what goes out also comes in, with the spectator pissing into their own mouth in actually becoming the urinal. Looking is pissing is being looked at is being pissed on with the work of contemporary art.

Whatever was it that Minimal, Performance and Conceptual artists thought they were doing by including the audience in their work? Dealienation? Political activation?

The production of undercover agents ready, like Jason Bourne, to spring suddenly into action whenever the signal was sent? Whatever it was, it has come entirely to be realised in the new populism, in which the audience is king, in which the artwork is judged by its crowd, or even the crowd constitutes the artwork.

The look of the audience upon itself, which was once understood to be driven by something like instrumental curiosity, a form of critical interrogation, is now revealed, as in Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror

MODERNISM : MORE POPULAR THAN POPULISM

(1975), to be more like tent-preacher demagoguery, with the artist himself being merely the first spectator, sending back incessant updates on their state of mind in a series of Twitter-like reports.19 The look of Jeff Koons before he masturbates upon Cicciolina is like the look of an artist like Michael Zavros upon his own image reflected in a BMW is like the intended look of the spectator upon both of them (and we are always tempted to check where the hands are in Zavros’ self-portraits).

Of course, the word commonly used to describe Zavros’ work is “post-critical”.20 It is precisely a way of describing the shift from the irony of Castiglione and Warhol, in which there was something held back behind the work, not visible to the spectator, some power of sprezzatura given to art to dissemble, to hide in full view, to double or redouble the world. Now, it is suggested, all of this is over. The work simply presents us, our desires, back to us unmediated. Our look upon the work is like Zavros’ upon himself, as though we were all pissing or even masturbating upon each other in Todd Carney’s toilet cubicle.

Indeed, it is tempting—and this is not meant as a simple criticism, more like a buying recommendation to this well-heeled and conservative-leaning crowd—to see Zavros’ art as the art of our times, the best expression we have of our current political

Andy Warhol Brillo Soap Pads Box, 1964 Photo courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

regime. Social-history analyses of the type practised in the 1970s by such figures as T.J. Clark internationally and Terry Smith here in Australia are now sadly out of fashion.

You know the kind of thing: your first-year Art History lecturer showed you a slide of Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1890), then followed it up with a documentary photo of shearing practices at the time Roberts made his painting and asked such questions as: Where are the mechanical clippers? Where are the Aboriginal shearers?21 We are tempted to do this with Bad Dad, Zavros’ 2013 Archibald Prize self-portrait, in which he stares at a reflection of himself in a swimming pool and apparently thinks. We are tempted to ask, in a manner like those social art historians, what is it that Zavros is thereby not thinking of? What other objects floating on water at the exact moment Zavros made his picture does he exclude, but are there nevertheless in ghostly and transparent form? The refugee boats (not the Koons-like inflatables), depicted by the likes of John Cattapan, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green and Pat Hoffie, amongst others. Yes, we are tempted to describe the populist, post-critical art of Zavros as the exact equivalent of Liberalism.

But it is Liberalism with a capital L, that of the Federal Liberal Party. The work is simply a very brilliant—if inadvertent—allegory of Australia’s public narcissism, xenophobia, self-absorption and underlying prickly self-defensiveness, with the artist himself playing the role of an Australia doing its best to ignore the suffering going on around it, a true regional bad dad. But, I’m not simply putting this forward as criticism: it truly would be interesting to take up Zavros’ work as a kind of equivalent of the art of the French Restoration, and Zavros as the revival in spirit of such painters as François Gérard, Claude François Delorme and François Joseph Heim.

All of this brings me finally to the Melbourne Now exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria last year. In fact, what I have said of Zavros and all of those other artists does not quite stand up. There is no way directly to criticise populism: like a king (or a performer dispensing chocolate coins stamped with the date of his birthday to his loyal subjects), it is necessarily dumb or let us say Real. Words cannot touch it. Or, like Dupin in Poe’s detective story, we can take our vengeance only under its ignorant but all-seeing eye (the subject of populism is a subject that knows not what it does). There is no direct critique of populism possible, because this critique can merely

confirm its popularity. Populism is not diminished by it: it is criticised only because it is popular; it is criticised only to make it more popular. The only critique of populism possible—as in Daumier—is not that it is popular but that it is not popular enough. And so it is with Melbourne Now. Of course, Melbourne Now was a show that was populist in its very conception. In principle, it adopted a policy of total inclusion: literally everyone in Melbourne (and not just its artists) would be up there on the walls, leaving no one outside to criticise it. Put simply, its spectators were meant to see themselves up there on the walls. They were the works of art they came to see (or, at least in Laith McGregor’s case, to play ping pong with).

Unexpectedly perhaps, if we follow Michael Fried’s famous analysis of the historical origins of the contemporary inclusion of the spectator in the work of art,22 we might say that the show was Rococo in its aesthetic, and its keynote work—Ash Keating’s spraypainting from a cherrypicker of the concrete walls of Roy Grounds’ NGV in a variety of day-glo colours, was the equivalent of a Rococo ceiling painting as we looked up from under it. (Another great Rococo ceiling painting, with the same incorporation of the spectator inside the work, is Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003) at the Tate Modern.) And we might think in this light of another of the signature works of the show—Daniel Crooks’ videogame-like corridor of infinitely receding laneways—as also being Rococo, as well as a little Heidelberg School in its typical Melbourne self-regard. (Substitute the tea being brewed up in Roberts’ The Artist’s Camp (1886) with a barista making coffee in all of the laneways in so many of the works in the show and you get the general idea.)

The true brilliance, the true capaciousness, the true populism of the show was the way it attained infinity by including its own critique within it. In one of its innumerable Library of Babel-like alcoves was an installation featuring local magazines, including the aptly-titled un Magazine, which either in an issue actually in the show or immediately preceding it (a magnificent example of biting the hand that feeds one, but also of the hand feeding the mouth that bites it) published a blistering critique of the exhibition, denouncing it amongst its many other failings precisely for its populism: “What prevails is a suffocating consensus, which, in the case of the NGV, has morphed from an in-house treadmill diffused by a closed circuit of power to a consumer-driven merry-go-round.”23

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However, as we have said previously, a critique of populism is evidence only of its popularity, functions only as another face in the crowd: the museum attendant clicking their counter does not care what kind of an experience you had when you walk out. But, deeper within the show, there was another work that perhaps did lay bare the logic of Melbourne Now and serves as a kind of summary of all we have been saying. It is by artist Helen Johnson, and it is a painting of a Kant reading group that took place at the University of Melbourne from 2008 to 2012, which includes both her and her now partner, the Melbourne-based writer and critic Justin Clemens. (I am going to go out on a limb and guess that this is how they met.)

The group was an attempt to think how Kant’s great text on aesthetics, The Critique of Judgement, could be used to engage with contemporary art, and if we look closely we can see a number of passages from Kant’s masterpiece scattered around the canvas, which serve both as Kant’s thoughts about art and perhaps Johnson’s about her soon-to-be boyfriend: “Beauty still bears this relationship to the logical judgement that it may be presupposed to be valid for everyone.”24

As is well known, there is a certain “universalisability” at stake in Kant’s conception of art, just as there arguably is in Melbourne Now. This universalisability can, indeed, be understood as a kind of populism: in principle, everyone likes the same thing, everyone agrees, aesthetic taste goes beyond any individual desire (although not quite yet).

Taste is famously “disinterested” in Kant’s conception: it is not a mere liking or preference but a universalisable truth. (This is why that fat judge on Master Chef, Matt Preston, eats only small portions or even spits his food out after he has tasted it: because, if food is to be an art form, it is not to be confused with any actual appetite, which is always too partial, too embodied—like Hitchcock liking blondes or Max von Sydow’s character in Hannah and Her Sisters selecting a painting because it goes with his couch.) Now, of course, this universality is invariably particular—this is Haacke’s critique in his MoMA Poll and Shapolsky et al. (1971): that the apparent universality of modernism is underpinned by a specific social constituency (wealthy, well-educated, Upper West side as the actual demographic of MoMA), made possible by an exploitative socio-economic structure (Shapolsky was a slumlord real estate company on whose Board several Trustees of the Guggenheim sat, allowing them to make

donations). However, the universality Kant is speaking about is not to be confused with any actual universal. Rather, it holds open the speaking position for the kind of critique of actual, historical, real-world taste, or let us say distortions of taste, that Haacke proposes.

(Again, shades of Daumier.) “Universalisability” is a kind of unfillable gap or space, let us call it the buzzing of a fly, that we call art.

And here we come to the real consequences of all we have been saying to this point. It is modernism in this Kantian sense, as the history of the attempts to be universal, that opens up a space to speak of populism.

An elitist, old-fashioned modernist like me has nothing against populism per se, but merely wants to ask the question, the one question that cannot be asked of it, of where it is spoken from. (And, again, Zavros’ performance on the opening night of the Melbourne Art Fair was symptomatic because it revealed that populism is always secretly authorised by a king.) In a sense, we might even say—it goes against our usual understanding of the supposed classism, Eurocentrism and sexism of modernism: all true, but modernism is also the only way of overturning these—that modernism is more popular than populism. It is what every populism strives for but always falls short of.

It is something like this modernism behind

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populism that we find in Daumier, which is why, instead of any kind of juste milieu or compromise between high and low taste, we might say he comes from a position that is at once higher than high taste and lower than low taste. No one can definitively speak for good taste: each attempt to do is faked, distorted, put on. Modernist taste is, as it were, double: good taste is no sooner stated than it is bad taste, bad taste is what is about to become good taste. This is why, indeed, through Daumier, Baudelaire associates modernism with laughter: it is nothing but a series of failures, signalled each time by a kind of laughter.

It cannot be positively embodied except as the sound of laughter, which, like the buzzing of a fly, points to that empty space from where the reigning consensus, the popular, is remarked.

Laughter in Daumier is the sound of the popular falling short. And this is what Kant means too by the sensus communis that gathers around art, which is alluded to in another of the passages Johnson reproduces in her piece: “From a subjective universal validity, i.e, the aesthetic, that does not rest on any concept, no conclusion can be drawn to the logical, because judgements of this kind have no bearing upon their object.”25 The sensus communis is not a simple agreement, but the continual buzz or murmur of disagreement; but no one disagrees without also agreeing, it is just that they don’t know it yet. It is not in what the two parties are saying, but in the sound of their voices, the place from where they are speaking, that agreement lies.

We see this with the notion of the contemporary, the art-historical equivalent of populism. (And, of course, like all contemporary art shows, the only real subject of Melbourne Now, as signalled by its title, was its contemporaneity.26) It is meant to speak of the now, the present, the co-presence of all places at once. It is an extraordinarily productive concept, opening up new ways of thinking art history, appropriate to our global, inter-connected, post-provincial reality.

But—remembering our Derrida—what makes all of this presence possible? A kind of différance.

Above Jeff Koons Arousing Curiosity, 2011-13 Photo courtesy the artist

MODERNISM : MORE POPULAR THAN POPULISM

It is always a matter of what makes, and in what time, this simultaneity or at-the-sametimeness possible? It is a question that, as Derrida reminds us, goes all the way back to Plato and all the way forward to Francis Fukuyama and his prediction of a neo-liberal end of history.27 In fact, we might call the deferral that allows the contemporary—it is not a critique of it, but is what makes it possible—modernism. When Michael Fried argues for an anti-theatrical art, for a modernism as opposed to a Minimalist literality, it is not a definitive victory he is contemplating. Rather, what was once antitheatrical can become theatrical (Millet), just as the anti-theatrical arises only through the defeat of theatricality. Despite the way he is often read, Fried is not trying to pick winners but proposing a dialectic (between scepticism and conviction) that runs throughout history, a dialectic that is history. (Fried, like his colleague, the philosopher Robert Pippin, maintains a fundamentally Hegelian conception of art history, for which both have been praised by the likes of Slavoj Žižek, if you want radical Leftist credentials.28) And this is to say that modernism is never complete and is what means that nothing in art is ever complete.

And this is the case again even with Melbourne Now. Although populism purports to be a total principle, unappealable, ahistorical, irrefutable, the question remains what makes it possible, from where it is spoken. The time of populism.

And the fact is that populism knows that it is not complete. For precisely after such an encyclopaedic, google-like aggregation, which included everyone and everything to do with Melbourne, there were plans afoot for another iteration of the show, and another after that, to bring the story up to date. (May I make a recommendation that the NGV include the extraordinary RMIT-trained but now living in Iraq Azadeh Akhlaghi, who makes what I would describe as Jeff Wall in Tehran?

But perhaps she isn’t “Melbourne” enough.)

Melbourne Now thus reveals itself as partial, historical, incomplete. Something bigger than Melbourne Now is suggested, something even more popular than it, that universality towards which it aspires, which is also from where it is spoken. Each Melbourne Now will end up turning into a Melbourne Then, and what we will have in the end is a particular, though undoubtedly very informative, history of the art of Melbourne in the early twenty-first century.

Notes 1 See for example, Thierry Chabanne, Les Salons caricaturaux, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 1900; and Denys Riout, ‘Les Salons comiques’, Romanticisme 75, 1992: 51-62 2 See Thomas Crow’s discussion of the rise of the “public” (: 6) and the “popular” (: 102) in relation to the Salons in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985 3 Julia Langbein, ‘Salon Caricature in Second Empire Paris’, PhD, University of Chicago, 2014: 45 4 See on this the theme of judgement falling invisibly upon itself in Daumier: the artist painting his own self-portrait using a mirror from the side (Un français peint par lui-même, 1848); the ongoing series on political representatives (Les Répresentans Représentés, 1860-2) 5 See on this Daumier’s series of images of real-life people looking like the figures in paintings (Comment se termine après diner, 1846, Comment, c’est dans cette cave que…, 1857) 6

Charles Baudelaire, ‘Of the Essence of Laughter’, in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972: 160 7 Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009

22 See Michael Fried, ‘Introduction’, in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980: 1-5 23 Aodan Madden and Beth Rose Caird, ‘The Whore’s Hustler and the Hustler’s Whore: A Speculative Review of Melbourne Now’, un Magazine 7(1) (http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/ issues/issue-7-1/the-whore-s-hustler-and-the-hustler-swhore-a-speculative-review-of-melbourne-now/). This piece also makes the point that, like any good populist, Ellwood is against what he calls “philistinism”, the idea that anyone can stand outside of or exempt themselves from art 24 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, § 6. For the reasons I am about to give, Johnson would be strictly incorrect in thinking of her partner in terms of the Kantian category of the “beautiful”, but this mistake is entirely understandable 25

Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 8

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21st Century was another show that highlighted its contemporaneity, and more generally we might say that for all of those shows with strictly meaningless titles – All our Relations, You Imagine What You Desire – their contemporaneity is in fact their default position, what they want to indicate through their very lack of meaning

8 See Thomas Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993

27 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Note on a Note from Being and Time’, in Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982: 55-58; and Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, London: Routledge, 1994: 15-16, 56-58

9 Randy Kennedy, ‘Museum of Modern Art’s Expansion and Direction Draw Critics’, The New York Times, 21 April 2014: A18

28 See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2012: 253-5

10 Christopher Allen, ‘Carnival Capers’, The Australian, 9 April 2011 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/carnival-capers/ story-e6frg8n6-1226033122793) 11 Rosemary Neill, ‘Mass Appeal’, The Australian, 12 July 2011 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/mass-appeal/storye6frg8n6-1226084238179) 12 Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, London: Verso, 1999 13 Gene Ray, ‘Little Glass House of Horrors: High Art Lite, the Culture Industry and Damien Hirst’, Third Text 18(2), March 2004: 131 14 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991: 264-68 15 The same with “beauty” in Hirst: it too arises from the reduction of the work of art to the flesh, the material, as seen in Mother and Child Divided (1995) 16 See Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’ (1964), in Joseph Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987: 155-67 17 Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum 44(6), February 2006: 185 18 See on this Thierry de Duve, ‘Marcel Duchamp, or The Phynancier of Modern Life’, October 52, Spring 1990: 2-74 19 A point nicely brought out in Canadian performance artist Adad Hannah’s series of parodies, Rehearsing Dan Graham (2008) and Performer/Audience/Remake (2008) 20

Robert Leonard, ‘Michael Zavros: Charm Offensive’, Art & Australia 49(1), 2011: 102 21 See ‘The Social Context of Shearing the Rams’, in Terry Smith, ‘The Divided Meaning of Shearing the Rams: Artists and Nationalism 1888-1895’, in Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Nineteenth-Century Landscape, Colony and Nation, Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002: 82-83

This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at the forum ‘Going Public–The Public Sphere and Contemporary Art’ for the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair, which accounts for its spoken tone. The author would like to thank Nikos Papastergiadis and the Melbourne Art Foundation for their kind invitation to deliver this lecture.

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the jerusalem show <fractures> Following Broadsheet’s previous inquiry into art and cultural activities in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region, in conjunction with Ibraaz Online platform and the Istanbul Biennial; Australian artists presented at the Sharjah Biennial, Art Dubai, the Qalandiya International (which in 2012 included Melbourne-based artist Tom Nicholson) and other international events in the region; and MENA artists, curators and critics who in 2013 visited Australia for the Shifting Sands Symposia in Adelaide and Sydney, this issue continues this extended focus upon the role of art during times of conflict; and as a precursor to the Australian–Turkish Year of Collaboration art projects in 2015. The following texts were originally published on Ibraaz.org as part of The Jerusalem Show VII’s online catalogue, which was produced in collaboration with Ibraaz, media partner of The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures, and with the support of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation.

The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures (24 October– 7 November 2014), curated by Basak Senova and organised by Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, is presented in the framework of the second Qalandiya International (Qi), Archives, Lived And Shared.

Qi is a coalition of local institutions working together to feature a month-long program of live events, talks, exhibitions, guided tours, symposia, film screenings and performances.

The Jerusalem Show VII is an integral part of the 2014 edition of Qalandiya International, (22 October–15 November, 2014), the latter the culmination of the vision and effort of a group of prominent Palestinian cultural institutions focusing on contemporary art.

Jamal Jamaliev Line of Fire, 2010 Photo courtesy the artist

Ibraaz* is the leading critical forum on visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East, initiated by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in 2011. Ibraaz publishes an online, bi-annual Platform and monthly rolling content in both written and video format, with a recently launched Ibraaz channel that will be regularly updated with interviews and performances.

Ibraaz’s editorial policy relates to the formal and conceptual issues informing art as a practice, seeking to analyse how artists connect with local and international audiences.

In a broader context, Ibraaz is interested in examining how art as a practice contributes to the long-term production of infrastructures and institutions. While the focus of Ibraaz is

primarily on an extended region (which can be broadly conceptualised as the Middle East and Global South), these issues require consideration of how, for one, contemporary art practices develop internationally and in conjunction with one another. Ibraaz, accordingly, engages with North Africa and the Middle East as a productive prism through which to consider art and its institutions in an increasingly globalised context.

* Ibraaz: http://www.ibraaz.org/; see for The Jerusalem Show http://www.ibraaz.org/ publications/#4

outside the gates of heaven PREFACE: Jack Persekian The Jerusalem Show (‘Ala Abwab Al Janna) borrows its English title from the vivacious and atypical formats of the Saturday Night Live show and the Muppet Show, whereas its Arabic title “Ala Abwab Al Janna (Outside the Gates of Heaven)” references the sacramental veneration that is bestowed on Jerusalem.

A similar ludicrous dichotomy is ostensible to Jerusalem’s inhabitants (including us at Al-Ma’mal Foundation).

It is quite confounding to be literally inside the city walls, in physical contact with its shrines and monuments, yet not able to liberate ourselves from our purgatory: neither able to be part of our natural extensions into the West Bank and Gaza; nor desire to comprehend and be content with our hopeless situation, the remorseless occupation, and the unlawful annexation to Israel. Hence the pun on the ‘Show’ format.

The Jerusalem Show is neither a biennial nor a one-time event. It is neither a large-scale show nor an international grand exhibition. We like to see it as an attempt to intercede between the apocalyptic decadal tides of upheaval under which the city kneels, stealing time during the ebb of violence (yet sunk neck-high in hatred and discrimination) to wage an action of covert resistance to the forced hegemony of one creed and one people on the city. In a way it can be perceived as a political action, and so we tried to garner as much support as possible from institutions, organisations, youth centres, clubs, etc., which operate in the city. The Jerusalem Show presents works, performances, and interventions throughout the Old City as unique actions that promote a re-reading of the city in a creatively open, accessible, and interactive manner.

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan from the project The Recovery of an Early Water, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

Page 31 Hiraki Sawa Migration installation, 2003 Photo courtesy the artist

From 20 to 30 October 2007, edition 0 of The Jerusalem Show was launched. Sixteen artists from Palestine and six from abroad presented their work (painting, photography, sculpture, installation, sound, and video) in various locations in the Old City. The audience participants were taken on guided tours into the city, through its narrow streets and alleys, up onto rooftops and into community centres and clubs, stopping for a coffee break at Haj Ahmad Al-A’raj’s coffee shop, after passing through Hamam Al-Ain to see the works of the artists as they negotiate their way in this overwhelming city.

Jerusalem is an oxymoron, an aporia of faiths, ethnicities, and cultures.

The unacknowledged and insufferable multiplicity of the city has cost a lot of lives —not that many more lives all over the world have not been wasted on far more trivial conflicts and issues. Yet what’s perplexing is that it is the ‘means to an end’ that lie at the heart of the conflict. The ‘means’—as in the physical entities, the symbols, the shrines, the monuments, the walls—are what count and

what people and governments kill and die for.

It is the shells, the covering, the casing, the skins of people and not what they are and what they stand for. It seems that what matters is how Jerusalem seems and not what it is; hence the Israeli slogan (that sounds like a broken record) “united Jerusalem—the eternal, undivided capital of Israel”. In a simple exercise, just criss-crossing the city from end to end, north to south, east to west, one would find it impossible not to notice how un-united the city is and how caustic the tensions at the seams. I am not only referring to the iniquitous East-West (Palestinian-Israeli) divide but also thinking of the convoluted relations between the different communities, ethnic groups, convictions, and nationalities.

In negotiating an action in the city such as The Jerusalem Show, one would need to navigate a very complex terrain, colluding with some, persuading others and, most importantly, avoiding uncharted territory.

This brings to mind an attempt a few years ago to organise an exhibition in Jerusalem in one of the sites usurped by Israel along the Green Line (which used to be part of noman’s land before the 1967 war). A parachuted vulgar logic of manifestations prevailed and, as much as they struggled to (artificially) superimpose a dialogue and an engagement with the city and its context, in my humble opinion, all their endeavours hit an iceberg instead and sank disgracefully. This in no way means that I, or we, at Al-Ma’mal claim that we’re able while others are not or that we have the right while others are wrong. My aim is to redefine our work and position in Jerusalem from that of artistic space-fillers to activists.

In a context and time such as this, art, culture, activism, manifestations, political protest, social work, etc., are all part of our actions and our understanding of what a show in Jerusalem should entail.

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fractures INTRODUCTION: Basak Senova An event in a defined setting is never experienced, perceived and remembered in the same way. In Deleuze’s words, “events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes”.1 Accordingly, ‘time’ perceived by the witness, the participant or the follower of any event cannot be the same.

The sensuous links between the internal and the external realms are always diverse, and therefore the perception of time becomes fractured within them.

The starting point of Fractures is Jerusalem, a city that persistently folds multiple pasts into contradictory presents.

In this line of thought, Fractures gathers research-based projects that detect and process multiple realities and perceptions of events and conditions in relation with different time sequences while taking Jerusalem as the nucleus of this attempt. The basic aim of the project is to establish and discover links between diverse artistic research, cases and actions accumulated in the course of the project and the daily realities of the city.

Fractures is not about perceiving multiple time segments co-existing in this historical city, but is an attempt to describe how visions and sights can be read from different points of view. The core challenge is to read affectual flows in-between fractures of time. The aim is to detect similar details and hidden mechanisms in order to open up new platforms of association and conversations on life, politics, culture, economics, psychology, and art. Within this, the deeper question is how to process Jerusalem as the ‘standing reserve’ of this course of action. Fractures has been developed and shaped by artistic research, enquiries, approaches, viewpoints, and projects that revolved around The Jerusalem Show and the context within which it is staged. It is composed of seven chapters that unfold simultaneously

during the course of The Jerusalem Show, and in the framework of the 2nd Qalandiya International: Archives, lived and shared.

CHAPTER 1: INTENSITIES Al Ma’mal (The Tile Factory) By definition, “intensity” refers to the degree or amount of strength or force that something has.

The perception of its velocity is based on the interpretations of ideas, of attention, duration, and correlations with other things or beings.

Deleuze considers intensity as a spatio-temporal dynamism and links it directly with the degree of differences. From this point of view, intensity has a connection not only with difference, but also with desire. By referring to music, he points out that intensity could be perceived at the level of ‘the in-between’.

Basically, in music intensity is the measurable acoustic counterpart of perceived loudness.

Starting from this line of thought, the exhibition will focus on the different levels of intensity that can be detected and processed from the projects produced for the exhibition that link the observed and perceived intensities felt within Jerusalem. At the same time, the exhibition will examine the relationship between events and their unsettled intensities.

The exhibition takes place at Al Ma’mal, located at the Tile Factory, which was originally founded in the Old City of Jerusalem at the turn of the century and operated up to 1975, functioning as one of the two primary traditional tile-making factories in Palestine, and which was then transformed into a space for art and culture. The history of the building has been one of the anchors for the exhibition; it physically designates the starting point of The Jerusalem Show by housing works that deal directly with the city and the region.

fractures: introduction

The exhibition starts with a film The Goodness Regime (2013), written and directed by Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle. The film, shot both in Norway and Palestine, probes into the foundations of ideology by intersecting different time sequences and conditions with one common denominator: The Oslo Peace Accords.

The film, which employs a cast of children, re-enacts the adventures of Nobel Peace Prize winner Fridtj of Nansen—who aided displaced victims of World War I in the 1920s as a commissioner for the League of Nations —alongside a study into the political failure of the Oslo Accords in 1993, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation and facilitated by Norway as a peacemaker. The film brings different imaginaries, political visions, ideologies, histories and realities together to be perceived simultaneously.

The exhibition continues with Adel Abidin’s installation Yesterday (2014). The work starts with the word “yesterday” rendered in solid bronze and located on a wall in an isolated room. Then, it spreads all around the Old City of Jerusalem with a subtle presence through a number of standing displays that repeat the

Pages 32-33 Ceren Oykut Atlas of Interruptions site-specific installation, 2014 Photos courtesy the artist

word in white on white surfaces. It is a simple word, referring to countless time and memories.

Within the Tile Factory inhabits an extensive spatial installation, The Temporary Archive (prelude) (2014) by Benji Boyadgian. It is a part of an ongoing project titled The Temporary Ruin, in which the artist records the valley of Wadi el-Shami with watercolour paintings created in-situ. In the Tile Factory, he represents the topography of the valley with the walls and these paintings, which question the temporality of land in a broader sense, while evidencing the fragments of the traditional Palestinian landscape.

Pekka Niittyvirta’s aerial photography series Obliquity (2014), which depicts Jerusalem by night, oscillates between a fictional setting and a fact-based document.

These photographs interrupt our acknowledged imagery of Jerusalem, derived from well-known media images. In a similar manner, Bashar Alhroub’s ink drawing Less Holiness (2014), which illustrates Jerusalem in details, swings between the touristic imagery of the city and a segregated zone with invisible barriers, thus creating a sense of dislocation between these two contradictory urban states. In this sense, Hiraki Sawa’s video work Dwelling (2002) further underlines the notion of dislocation with grainy black and white footage of miniature aircrafts flying around in an apartment setting, while Cevdet Erek’s installation with drawings, words, and sound, Why can’t I be there now?

(2014), brings another twist. The intention of the work is to justify Erek’s excuses for his absence in Jerusalem, based on fractures of time and space: multiple crossings of events, travels, and deadlines in his schedule.

CHAPTER 2: DETAILS Site-specific Projects: Arab Catholic Scouts, Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family, Gallery Anadiel, Hammam Virgin Mary, Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Saint Francis Store, Patriarch’s Pool, The Swedish Christian Study Centre, and Nicola Zaphiriades’ Shop A detail indicates a type of voyage that starts a voyage through the activation of memory.

A detail always has the potential to become the evidence that gives further information about a state of a conflict, confrontation, struggle, calculation, adaptation, exclusion, occupation, acceptance, and resistance. Therefore, the primary point of convergence, which generates the whole conceptual frame of this chapter, is

processing details in a flux of time segments.

For this chapter, therefore, artists produced and/or re-shaped their existing projects in synch with their detail-based research and findings on mixed, discontinuous and dislocated structures, events, stories, and memories both of Jerusalem and overlapping cases from different geographies.

Rula Halawani’s photography series Confused Memories (2014) is located at Hammam Sitna Mariam, and displays dreamlike landscapes of Palestine. In this abandoned venue, the artist processes the current state of Palestine with extracted memories from her childhood. Respectively, Noor Abuarafeh’s work also resonates between the collective and the personal, by recalling the past on the bordeaux walls of the Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family, proposing a different perspective with which to read an archive based on personal stories. Abufareh does this by re-archiving her grandfathers’ family archive of black and white photographs that were taken in Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. Jesper Just’s video installation Intercourses (2013) transforms the derelict Hammam Sitna Mariam into an architectural pastiche along with suspended screens from the domes of the building, bamboo, special LED lights for plants, and light bulbs left over from Ramadan. On three screens, the film monitors three men, interwoven within the scenes, by taking the city as the main character.

The amalgamation of the past, diverging memories, obscured dreams, and lost stories operate together in this enchanted setting.

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s work is based on research she conducted around the Patriarch’s Pool: a project that focuses on one of Jerusalem’s lost water supplies. By reviving the memory of the water with an architectural intervention at the emptied pool, The Recovery of an Early Water (2014) questions the social, political and historical memory of the city. Her entire research is also being documented and presented at Nicola Zaphiriades’ Shop.

Hiraki Sawa, also presenting in Chapter 1, presents Migration (2003), which explores the fragile experience of reality—ever-changing, intangible, not easily outlined or defined.

Sawa captures the sense of being nowhere, a continued displacement and migration: a relentless and transient homemaking by investigating the different meanings of moving, travelling and changing places: of going beyond the border, or the gaps between things.

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Jonathan Loppin and Paul Devens approach Jerusalem’s local realities as outsiders; from different points of view, they observe, witness, and underline what has been repeated on a daily basis not only in the city, but in the country itself. Devens’ site-specific soundbased installation Drop (2014) at the Center for Jerusalem Studies-Al Quds Courtyard, takes the act of ‘listening’ as “specific, directive and political next to its everyday manifestations” through a sonic experience based on sounds movements and specific field recordings. On the other hand, Loppin performs Blocus (2014) with fifty objects, which were prohibited from entering the Gaza Strip by Israeli authorities (listed in 2010 by Gisha, an Israeli human rights association), first in Jerusalem and then in other Palestinian cities. Each performance leaves a trace through a video documentation that will be accumulated at the Swedish Christian Study Centre during The Jerusalem Show.

Ceren Oykut’s extensive spatial installation Atlas of Interruptions (2014) at Hammam el-Shifa, is a modest intervention with light and shadow, and is presented alongside Carta-Magica (2014) at the Arab Catholic Scouts—Jerusalem: both of which respond to the realities of the city by hinging on its details. Gülsün Karamustafa’s project The Bookbinder Lived and Worked in Jerusalem takes over Gallery Anadiel and reanimates a bookbinding shop by rediscovering traces of the past. Karamustafa customises the shop by uncovering and adding old information with new materials. The echoing memories of the place are also carried by and with the visitors; they can be old friends of the shop or newcomers, sharing unspoken memories within the space.

Majd Abdel Hamid also uses a shop window at the same street. His work Hourglass #1 (2014) displays hourglasses in different sizes on a shop window in the old city of Jerusalem.

The powder in this hourglass consists of crushed cement chipped from the Wall in the West Bank mixed with sand grain. In the same vein, Zehra Şonya’s work Red Clouds (2014) located at Arab Catholic Scouts, investigates the links between cities and personal memories as a way of reading history. Red Clouds is based on the idea of attempting to collect untainted memories and to overlap them with the untold stories of the Old City of Jerusalem through the venue. Accordingly, the artist started her work by detecting and collecting stories from her memory. Then, she asked two people who

speak Arabic and English, to retell her stories as their own, which are then processed through semi-transparent red clouds. The presence of ‘light’ in the work underlines an individual metaphysical approach by indicating the notion of hope and the act of healing.

CHAPTER 3: INTERVALS Site-specific drawings: Centre for Jerusalem Studies (Hammam el-Ein and Hammam al-Shifa) Will we then come to the realisation that our thought has become afterthought, a thought across, to the other side of a lapse?

Jalal Toufic2

Intervals are about possibilities: they show that other orders and potentials do exist. They indicate in-between situations and sometimes a lapse with endless prospects and intensities.

The unpredictability of their potential always creates a tension between an indefinite process —insignificant and ephemeral—and an expectation, which foreshadows a striking event, yet to come. But we also perceive a sense of order and time only through intervals.

Conor McGrady and Ceren Oykut participate in this chapter with their site-specific drawings, which have been directly applied to the interior walls of Hammam el-Ayn and Hammam el-Shifa. Both hammams will be subject to renovation by Al Quds University within

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six months: the traces of both artists and their work in these deserted venues will fade away in definite time.

Atlas of Interruptions (2014) by Ceren Oykut compromises of detailed drawings in various sizes, spread across the walls of Hammam el-Shifa. These are mundane and familiar details, extracted from daily life, indicating no information regarding time and space. Through her drawings, she discovers new lands and diverse realities while invoking the sense of trespassing. Once again a city—this time Jerusalem—is not only the setting but also the background of her obscure dreams.

On the other hand, Hammam el-Ayn, which is located across Hammam el-Shifa, Conor McGrady confronts another structure—an uninhabited hammam—with massive drawings.

Conor examines architecture as a means of containment and controland this time, and in Peripheral Vision (2014), structure does not only manifest an indication of power and protection, but also an aspiration associated with healing. The work inhabits imageries and architectural indications of other overloadeded power structures, such as prisons, bunkers and military installations. Once hosting people from all around the world, now these two hammams welcome other perspectives and journeys.

fractures: introduction

CHAPTER 4: MEASURES Khalidi Library In the relation between what is said and its taking place, it was possible to bracket the subject of enunciation, since speech had already taken place.

But the relation between language and its existence, between langue and the archive, demands subjectivity as that which, in its very possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech. This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak.

Giorgio Agamben3

It would be a delusion to consider an archive as a stable source for truth. Nevertheless, the act of archiving and collecting is very important for uncovering—whether objective or biased —unspoken and neglected issues. It presents a potential to challenge the user to confront muted realities. Therefore, an archive may also become a tool for tactile, emotional, and experience-based communication and could open up a space for exchanging ‘unrecognised’ and ‘unregistered’ information for its users.

In this chapter, the very act of collecting and archiving is linked with a presence of a library. Thus, two distinctive projects, based on extensive research by Tom Nicholson and Raqs Media Collective, route their way in this presence. The sitespecific installation The Unwritten Library (2014) seeks new ideas and thoughts as the neglected outcome of difficult times. The work is about “the idea of books that are simultaneously unwritten even as they are erasures of books already written”.4 Hence, The Unwritten Library invites the viewer to collect past and future dreams, ideas, and thoughts. Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah) (2012–14) is based on a long-term research on the Australian Eucalyptus trees in the ancient Ma’man Allah/ Mamilla cemetery in Jerusalem. The work traces a walk through sixty-nine seeds, displayed at Khalidi Library, accompanied with a book and a proposition for a future monument as another walk in another landscape.

CHAPTER 5: LINES Screenings: African Community Youth Centre and Al Ma’mal Foundation of Contemporary Art. All the propositions in projective geometry occur in dual pairs, which have the property that, starting from either proposition of a pair, the other can be immediately inferred by interchanging the parts played by the words ‘point’ and ‘line’.

Johnson Casey5

In Deleuze and Guattari’s work there is an emphasis on the expression “se rabat sur”, which refers to the phrase “to fall back onto”: a term in projective geometry.6 It is like knowing that a line that appears short actually indicates a long line with an angle when rendered on an architectural plan. Or it is like knowing that things, events, and people can be perceived and experienced differently, and it is only a matter of where points and lines are placed, positioned, or intersect. Our distances and viewpoints to different realities, different lives, different conditions, different dreams, and different fallacies shape our assumptions in life. This screening program, which consists of four chapters and a feature film, responsively reflects on such shifting perspectives.

CHAPTER 6: WRITING Performances, talks and walks: Al-Ma’mal (The Tile Factory), Swedish Christian Study Centre, the Old City of Jerusalem

A musician acts both vertically and horizontally in multiple time segments while performing with an instrument and notes. Reading the notes on both treble and bass clefs at the same time signifies the vertical reading; reading the ‘yet to come’ part while playing in the present time, when connected with the performed element, indicates a perception of multiple times simultaneously. All forms of performance constitute the act of writing rather than reading for the audience. The question, then, is how to multiply and superimpose this act within a current situation in the city. Artist walk by Benji Boyadgian: The Old City, perched on a rock, has been destroyed, rebuilt, venerated and contested throughout its history. While the brutal contemporary fracture unfolds in our sight, there is no escaping the fractured sediments of its history. Experiences are numerous while meandering through the

Kasbah fabric and every stone has stories to tell. In this timeless labyrinth networks of walks and ideas collide. The exhibitions are scattered around the city in different venues, their localities invites different routes. Three different walks encompass all the sites, every route tells a different story of the multiple facets of Jerusalem.

CHAPTER 7: FABRIC Books: Swedish Christian Study Center

This chapter is dedicated to the presentation of the following artist books: Hani Amra, Works Ahead!, Jerusalem: Al Ma’mal Foundation, 2014; Banu Cennetoglu, catalogue, Pavilion of Turkey, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009; Anita Di Bianco, Corrections and Clarifications, 15 editions: various publishers, 2001-14; Cevdet Erek, SSS–Shore Scene Sountrack, Istanbul: BAS, Bent series, 2008; Ciprian Homorodean, Survival Strategies. Take the Book, Take the Money, Run!, 2010; Maxime Hourani, Book of Songs and Places, Basak Senova (ed.), Istanbul: IKSV, 13th Istanbul Biennial, 2013; Daniel Knorr, Sanatçi kitabi, Istanbul: BAS, 2013; Jill Magid, Failed States, Publication Studio, 2012; Tom Nicholson, Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah): A Guide Book to a Collection of 69 Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Seeds in the Khalidi Library, Jerusalem: Surpllus, 2014; Uriel Orlow, Unmade Film, Andrea Thal and Uriel Orlow eds, Zurich: Edition Fink, 2014; Raqs Media Collective, The Great Bare Mat and Installation, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2012.

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, Tom Conley trans, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992: 60 2 Jalal Toufic, ‘Afterthought by the Editor’, Lapses/*2 The Book Series of Pavilion of Turkey in the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennial, Jalal Toufic (ed.) First Vol. Istanbul: IKSV, 2013: 7 3 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, New York: Zone, 1999: 146 4

Artistic statement of Raqs Media Collective

5

Johnson Casey, ‘Theory of Duality and Reciprocal Polars’, A Treatise on the Analytical Geometry of the Point, Line, Circle, and Conic Sections, Containing an Account of Its Most Recent Extensions, with Numerous Examples, Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co, 1893: 382 6 Projective geometry is branch of mathematics that deals with the relationships between geometric figures and the images, or mappings that result from projecting them onto another surface. Common examples of projections are the shadows cast by opaque objects and motion pictures displayed on a screen; http://global.britannica.com/ EBchecked/topic/478486/projective-geometry

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a view from afar: outside looking in taking a title and running * with it Stephanie Bailey

This essay will take the title, “Fractures”, as a point of departure from which to consider this exhibition and its sentiments from afar through physical absence and virtual presence.

A fracture, after all, suggests a split: a crack through which we might view an inside from the outside. At the same time, a fracture heralds an emergence, in that substance once contained below the surface might seep out into the open through a gap.

I will consider how the title of this exhibition frames the contemporary moment from a global perspective. A time in which a new world is emerging out of the structures of the twentieth century and its nation-States and moving into an era shaped by burgeoning global infrastructures and extrastatecrafts.1 This exercise takes into account the relationship between mass mediation and migration—what Arjun Appadurai posited are the “two facts that underpin… the cultural politics of the global modern”.2 These are, after all, transglobal times. A time in which, as Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “globalisation does not simply sweep away regional, national, and other cultures, but combines them in a peculiar way”.3 And we are transglobal citizens, too: even if our experience of the world beyond our locales is purely—or

Cevdet Erek from Why can’t I be there now? installation, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

A VIE W F ROM A F AR : OUTSIDE LOO K IN G IN TA K IN G A TITLE AND RUNNIN G W ITH IT

predominately—virtual. This is something (Turkish artist) Cevdet Erek highlighted by submitting a project to The Jerusalem Show VII that essentially explains the reason for his absence: “a series of texts and drawings that document the process and the content of two new works—Faça (2014), shown in Athens, and A Room of Rhythms (2014), shown at Curva, MAXXI, in Rome”.4 Both were presented just before and during the opening of The Jerusalem Show VII.

A such, what better way to consider this contemporary moment than through an art exhibition that has brought together twenty-five artists from around the world to respond to a city that recalls Hobsbawm’s assertion that, “though the globalised world leads to a kind of assimilation to a predominant (Western) pattern within technologically-governed sides of life” (office and airport design, for instance), “it has also lead to a heterogeneous cultural confusion, coexistence and syncretisms”?5 When it comes to the palpable changes unfolding globally today, it is in Jerusalem—this contested and divided space—that such global confusions converge and collide. (“Can the outlines of the future be read in the small towns of Ecuador and the nightspots of Lhasa?” Hobsbawm asked. “But why not?”)6 Indeed, when considering the dynamics that exist within Jerusalem, a point Illan Pappé made during

a discussion with Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (DAAR: Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman) at Tate Modern in May 2014 comes to mind. Discussing the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict through DAAR’s presentation of a collective practice that works within the Palestinian territories and camps, Pappé noted that the world is experiencing a transition from a national to post-national condition.7 His observation could not have been timelier. Soon after the event, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge over Gaza: an event that confirmed what was concluded during the question and answer session at that Tate Modern discussion. This is not only a post- but also a neo-national era: something the conflict between Israel (a national body maintaining its fragile Statehood) and Palestine (a national body asserting—even defending—its right to Statehood), clearly demonstrates.

This is the transition point Pappé pointed out: a meta-condition that constitutes a state of flux between a past and a future located in the space of the present, which here operates like a fracture or a gap—a space that joins two halves together as they continue to move apart.

Appadurai picked up on such dynamics in the 1990s, when he wrote: “As the nation-State enters a terminal crisis… we can certainly expect that the materials for a post-national imaginary must be around us already.8

Here, we return again to the title of this exhibition, Fractures, and the city within which it is being staged. The fractious conditions we might perceive in Jerusalem, let alone the State of Israel, extend far beyond the Palestine-Israeli conflict and its myriad schisms. Take Europe, where a kind of post-nationalist unification has produced a rise in neo-nationalism in recent years. In fact, in September 2014, The New Scientist released an issue on the end of the nation-State with an editorial suggesting that “the nation’s time may be drawing to a close”.9 The example of post-nationalism cited in this editorial was not only the European Union, “which is trying—much to the disapproval of many Europeans—to transcend its member nations”, but ISIS, too, and its designs for a neo-caliphate that recognises no borders.10

Interestingly, the New Scientist editorial described ISIS as hypermodern: “more of a network than a nation, having made canny use of social media to exert influence far beyond its geographical base”.11 This brings to mind Appadurai’s view of diasporic public spheres —“the crucibles of a post-national order”:12 produced through mass mediation, and which link producers and audiences across national boundaries. These spheres are intimately connected with international migration and the transnational movements of national ethnicities who—for one reason or another—operate beyond the confines of a single nation-State.

As members increase, multiple nodes within a larger diasporic public sphere emerge.13

This brings us back to The Jerusalem Show VII and its title, now considered here in the plural. Fractures suggest multiple ruptures: a breakdown of form into an archipelago of pieces that still constitutes a whole somehow marked by the fractures themselves—a delineation of a network. In many ways, it is in this condition that the Palestinian State exists, fragmented both locally within the Palestinian territories, and globally, in the form of the refugee camps and the diaspora. Yet, this networked, transnational existence is not limited to the Palestinian experience, nor is it limited to the temporal context of now. After all, if history tells us anything, it is that globalisation is really nothing new.

Take Constantine Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek who wrote his poem Ithaca in 1911. It was modelled on the Homeric story of Odysseus, the man who, due to the forces of world history, was somehow ripped from the place of his birth and cast adrift. The lesson

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Cavafy imparts through Ithaca is the act of letting go to the illusion of what has already been lost. In the end, home—“Ithaca”, though any other name would do—becomes an illusion.

This perception informs Hiraki Sawa’s work, presenting two projects as part of The Jerusalem Show VII: Dwelling (2002) and Migrations (2003).

These explore the sense of being nowhere, the continued displacement of migration, and the different meanings of moving, going beyond borders, and the gaps between things. Indeed, as Cavafy concluded, home is not so much the destination as it is the journey: the movement from one place to another. Decolonising Architecture’s Sandi Hilal made the same point in 2014 when discussing the Right of Return and asking a question that recognises the reality that Palestinian homes have been lost and lands have been irrevocably changed: “return to what”?14

Thus arises the need to perform archaeologies of history, memory and experience, and to produce proposals for future architectures beyond our desire to resurrect a spectral past: that elusive ‘home’.

Only then might we be face an inconclusive present mired by global inequality and instability for what it is, and make something more out of it. It is this logic that informs Bashar Alhroub’s project, Less Holiness, a drawing presented at Al-Ma’mal (The Tile Factory), which intends to dismantle the stereotypical image of Jerusalem as a holy city so as to expose what lies behind it: what Alhroub calls “a reality of struggle and fragmentation”.15 In the case of Benji Boyadgian, his response also seeks to bring another view of the city to light through paintings depicting the ruins of field houses, Qusurs or Manateers, in Wadi el-Shami: what he describes as “a timeless journey in this fractured landscape, transcended from its context”.16

In this, the theme of The Jerusalem Show VII—being part of the wider program of the 2nd Qalandiya International and its myriad events organised under the notion of lived and shared archives (launched this year against all odds and thanks to a network of supporters within Palestine)—presents a proposition. An invitation to find ways of repairing, or transcending, a fractured territory in fractured times by filling social, political, and even historical gaps (or erasures) with relational—and creative—flow. It is an approach encapsulated in Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s site-

specific installation The Recovery of an Early Water, which retraces the presence of one of Jerusalem’s lost water supplies, Hezekiah’s Pool: once a reservoir that was built during the reign of King Hezekiah, and which has been dry since 2010.17

Büyüktaşçıyan’s idea is simple.

In attempting to revive the memory of this water, which in turn was connected to the city’s ancient water systems, she attempts at producing a sub-cartography that transcends surface division and uncovers unseen connections and relations. Water, after all, is a connector: Adelina von Furstenberg’s 4th Thessaloniki Biennale was themed around the Mediterranean as a unifier, just as DAAR is now exploring the Mediterranean as a site of return. Indeed, through her research, Büyüktaşçıyan visualises the invisible connections between things, just as the space between artworks in a curated show is activated by the connections and observations made not only by curators, but by viewers, too. Here, space impregnated with histories, experiences, and lessons becomes the fracture that connects rather than divides: because gaps can be filled not only with bodies, structures and objects, but also with meaning.

In thinking about this, let us return to that description of ISIS as hypermodern—more of a network than a State—and Appadurai’s conceptualisation of the politicised diasporic public sphere. Both notions recall what Jolle Demmers has asserted in terms of how conflict today has changed because “nationalism has changed: the phenomenon has outgrown its definition”.18 Demmers continues: “globalisation (including the internationalism of labour, mass migration) has not meant the end of nationalism. Instead, nationalists… have begun to carry out their struggles on a global scale. National communities are being ‘imagined’ in a new, (delocalised) way”.19 In this emergent post-national—fractured —world of networked States, nations, and subjects (not necessarily bound to territory), we see what Appadurai calls an emergent postnational order that operates as a system “based on relations between heterogeneous units (some social units, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some non-governmental organisations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies)”.20 In other words, a system that operates horizontally as a matrix, a network, or a web, in which dissonance rather than consensus is the norm.

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We might consider the global art world one such system, with its myriad international exhibitions, biennials and art fairs (The Jerusalem Show included) and the increasing need for cultural practitioners to travel extensively.

Take the multiple levels of circulation embedded in Jonathan Loppin’s performance project, Blocus. Travelling to Jerusalem for The Jerusalem Show VII, the artist will unpack a box of items in five different locations, each item collected from a list compiled in 2010 by Gisha, an Israeli human rights association identifying what has been prohibited from importation into the Gaza Strip by the Israeli authorities.

In this, the presentation of Blocus treads a fragile line: in an attempt to carry an entire list of prohibited goods over into Palestine, Loppin is using his role as a trans-national artist—and the universal framing of these objects as art —as a position with which to transcend border restrictions while drawing attention to them.21 It is an approach that recalls Markus Miessen’s view that, though the autonomy of the art world can render its spaces privileged, introverted and apolitical, “this autonomy, on the other hand, is its potential: a test-ground”.22 To this effect, is the art world also hypermodern and post-national, a space in which the traces of the future might already be found?

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Of course, when thinking about the challenges that come with post-national emergences, Appadurai noted that we must bear in mind “whether… heterogeneity is consistent with some minimal conventions of norm and value, which do not require a strict adherence to the liberal social contract of the modern West”.23 For Appadurai, this will be answered “by the negotiations (both civil and violent) between the worlds imagined by these different interests and movements”,24 and in the short run, what we experience, he said, “is likely to be a world of increased incivility and violence”.25 Here, let us consider Miessen’s words again, this time on the legitimacy of conflict, which he insists “must be fostered in a productive way”. That is, “to be able to appear as one voice which still maintains the potentiality of divisions, breakages, and individual positions of its members”.26

How we negotiate social and global conflict, not to mention State and corporate violence, is the challenge we face in our fractious times: a hypermodern age in which nation-States are subsumed, infiltrated and, in many ways, diluted within the frame of contemporary globalism (and capitalism).

No context is isolated: as social contracts are broken and contested around the world through such waves as the Arab uprisings, the indignant and Occupy movements and, most recently, the Gezi and Hong Kong protests, the twenty-first century is raising questions that are global in nature. Jumana Manna and Sille Storhile’s The Goodness Regime, filmed between Norway and Palestine and which charts a relation between modern Norway and the “theatre of the Oslo Peace Accords” reflects on this explicitly.27

In this, the question of what positions we take in response to what we witness—even at a distance—is paramount. It is a challenge not unlike the experience of viewing—and interpreting—an art exhibition, or even the experience of artists tasked with producing art works that speak to a city that is not their own. Indeed, it is a relational challenge that arose in much broader terms when Operate Protective Edge unfolded in the summer of 2014, during which John Pilger observed: “The attack on Gaza was an attack on all of us. The siege of Gaza is a siege of all of us.”28 Here, what was and remains at stake—aside from localised and indeed delocalised struggles for self-determination and basic rights—is the wider narrative of global conflict that has exploded post 9-11: a state of exception that

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has become the norm, in which, as Agamben once observed, “emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible”.29

Perhaps the ultimate challenge is how we view and experience not only our immediate realities, but also those that are experienced online, or at a certain remove.

How do we engage with global culture and its fractures either from within, or from without?

If we can figure this out, then we might imagine ways to live together, albeit in some kind of affirmed (indeed, fractured) dis/harmony.

As Adorno once wrote, “knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions, and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience”.30 When discussing the Palestinian experience today, DAAR writes: “the only state we know is a state of conflict and struggle”.31 And this struggle, as Sandi Hilal explained in 2014, is one that imagines a world the day after revolution, or a world in which revolution—that violent rupture—is not the end point. After all, as Appadurai predicted some twenty years ago: the work of the imagination and the emergence of a post-national order (or a new global imaginary) are linked.32 We must bridge that gap.

* This essay’s subtitle was conceived with Guy Mannes-Abbott’s In Ramallah, Running (Black Dog Publishing) in mind.

Notes 1 “Extrastatecraft”, a term coined by Keller Easterling to describe a portmanteau that means both outside of and in addition to statecraft, recognises that infrastructure generates emergent new constellations of national, international, intergovernmental and transnational administration and generates undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate it. See http://extrastatecraft.net/About

2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis MN: University of Minesotta Press, 1996: 21 3 Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, New York: The New Press, 2014: 24 4

To see more of the project on Ibraaz, follow this link: http://www.ibraaz.org/publications/4#_ftn8 5

Hobsbawm, op cit: 26

6

ibid.

7 Stephanie Bailey, ‘Architecture After Revolution: Decolonizing Architecture at Tate Modern’, Ibraaz.org, 29 July 2014; http://www.ibraaz.org/news/100 8

Appadurai, op cit: 21

9 Editorial, ‘State of the Nation’, The New Scientist, 6 September 2014, No.2985: 3. For the online version see: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329851.500-inour-world-beyond-nations-the-future-is-medieval.html .VEezdOfHMXw 10

ibid.

11

ibid.

12

Appadurai, op cit: 22

13

ibid.

14 Stephanie Bailey, op cit.

15

To see more of the project on Ibraaz, follow this link: http://www.ibraaz.org/publications/4#_ftn6 16

To see more of the project on Ibraaz, follow this link: http://www.ibraaz.org/publications/4#_ftn4

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26

The Violence of Participation, op cit.

27

http://www.ibraaz.org/publications/4#_ftn

28

John Pilger, in a text adapted from John Pilger’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture, delivered in Adelaide, Australia, 11 September 2014: http://johnpilger.com/articles/breakingthe-last-taboo-gaza-and-the-threat-of-world-war 29 Giorgio Agamben, The Age of Exception as a Paradigm of Government, Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 2005: 22 30 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, E. F. N. Jephcott trans., Bristol: NLB, 1974: 80-81 31 Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, Architecture After the Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013: 31 32

Appadurai, op cit: 22

17 To see more of the project online, follow this link: http://www.ibraaz.org/publications/5#_ftn3 18 Jolle Demmers, ‘Diaspora and Conflict: Locality, LongDistance Nationalism, and Delocalisation of Conflict Dynamics’, The Public, Vol.9 2002: 1: 93 19

ibid.

20

Appadurai, op cit: 23

21 To see more of the project on Ibraaz, follow this link: http:// www.ibraaz.org/publications/5#_ftn8 22 The Violence of Participation, (ed. Markus Miessen), Sternberg Press, 2007: B26 23

Appadurai, op cit: 23

24

ibid.

25

ibid.

Page 36 Ceren Oykut Atlas of Interruptions site-specific installation, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist Page 37 Majd Abdel Hamid Hourglass #1, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist Pages 38 top | above Hera Büyüktaşçıyan from the project The Recovery of an Early Water, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist Page 38 bottom Rula Halawani Confused Memories, 2014 installation at Hamman Sitna Mariam Photo courtesy the artist

fractured city a view from jerusalem Tina Sherwell

This year’s Qalandiya International theme is archives, or borrowing the exhibition statement’s words: “the narratives and daily lives of nations and communities, and archival practices take on a particular resonance in our collective search to understand our past, present and to shape our future”. As the statement continues, an unprecedented archive fever has swept across the region, which is why the topic has this year taken centre stage.

Of course, the importance of archives and the urgency with which to compile, maintain and preserve them, has accompanied Palestinians across the decades owing to a legacy of dispossession. Under this broad theme, The Jerusalem Show VII, also explores the question of archives through different

resonances among artist practices both Palestinian and international, weaving art works across the urban terrain of the Old City of Jerusalem in thirteen different locations from a historic bathhouse, to local shops, an Austrian hospice, to the Khalidi library and the galleries of Annadiel and Al-Ma’mal: formerly a bookbinder’s shop and a tile factory respectively. Placing less emphasis on the city’s religious sites, for which it is arguably most famous, the locations employed for The Jerusalem Show shine a light on the many other historic sites that exist in Jerusalem, and which reveal the city’s varied cultural legacy, not to mention its important position as a place of knowledge, recreation and trade, interwoven with numerous family histories.

Yet, in the severe political context of Jerusalem today, such sites have been forgotten, as this historic city’s arteries are choked by Israeli policies restricting movement and growth, which severely hamper social development.

These accumulative Israeli policies towards the city and particularly the Palestinian population, have continued to intensify throughout the past decades, and have served to work twofold: to prevent the creation of a holistic community while erasing out traces of the past. This is most strikingly experienced when one walks through Jerusalem with people who have lived here for generations, listening to them describe how the city streets were once. This ritual of recollection and detailed description of what once was has become a crucial part of the Palestinian memory of Jerusalem especially in the face of occupation and its apparatus, which continually transform the city space in line with Israel’s political agenda. The importance of archives, therefore, is paramount: personal, institutional, oral, visual, the need to re-visit, mine and engage with archival material however fragmented has become a cornerstone of Palestinian identity but can get forgotten in the daily struggle to survive occupation. Through this process of archiving, the rich detail of life in the past comes to the foreground, and when artists and creative practitioners undertake this task, the results are haptic. They engage our senses and produce threads that communicate a relationship between past and present, which is pivotal when a community’s history is continually being targeted with policies of erasure which target each individual as well as the physical urban and rural landscape and historic sites.

In this light, what does it mean to undertake an exhibition like The Jerusalem Show zat this time? It is significantly challenging to pursue cultural interventions in a city drenched with tension. You can feel it the moment you enter, as so many people have

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noticed, accompanied by continued military and police presence. Today, Jerusalem has become a severely isolated fortress city: the population of the West Bank are forbidden from reaching the city centre and draconian measures operate over the city’s Palestinian ‘residents’, who encounter the stringent laws on movement, trade, residency on a daily basis, in which every activity such as getting to work, going to school is met with series of restrictions and regulations. Any attempt at political protest is swiftly followed with night raids and arrests that serve to cast a blanket of silence over the population. Most Palestinians live in parts of the city that are severed and isolated from each other through checkpoints and the partition wall, which has further unravelled a sense of collective community over the past fourteen years, emptying a city that was once a hub of cultural activity and an epicentre of creativity, discussion and debate.

In such as context The Jerusalem Show and Qalandiya International attempt to challenge this isolation and fragmentation through a program which involves thirteen Palestinian cultural institutions with sixty-six events in fifteen cities and villages, over twenty-six days, with the participation of over one hundred Palestinian and international artists, producing and participating in exhibitions, tours, symposiums, film screenings, performances, workshops and book launches.

After all, for decades East Jerusalem was an important cultural centre, with gallery spaces, cinemas, cultural centres, and theatres.

Zahra Street, for example, hosted the gatherings of intellectuals and artists in the 1960s and 1970s, while Al Hakawati Theatre was a hub of cultural resistance activities in the 1980s with art exhibitions, theatre shows and discussions.

The segregation of the city within itself and with the West Bank has served to cut all lifelines to the city. Narrowing of roads, the introduction of the Israeli light-railway, a building ban for Palestinians, checkpoints, partition walls, continually heavy police and military presence materialise in an aging historic city is left bereft a city that becomes a ghost town by night. Once filled with people coming to the city for work, leisure, trade, religion and tourism, such activity has significantly decreased; certain crafts have diminished; public baths have closed. All emphasis has been placed on the city’s religious significance, which sidelines its rich history as a cosmopolitan city interwoven into the fabric of the Arab World.

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Pages 40-41 Tom Nicholson from the book Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah): A Guide Book to a Collection of 69 Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Seeds in the Khalidi Library, 2014 Photos courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

As such, cultural institutions such as the Al-Ma’mal Foundation and Al Hoash Art Court now engage not only in severe struggles to survive, facing often insurmountable challenges with funding, rent charges and enabling Palestinians of the West Bank to attend their events, but in the struggle to create spaces through which a communal culture can exist. Of course, in such contexts it is important to see beyond the here and now of occupation and really look at the undertakings of creative initiatives spearheaded by the art and cultural institutions in Jerusalem through their programs, interventions and exhibitions.

Key in this as Jack Persekian highlighted in the press conference of Qi is the need not to be in continual position of re-action to Israeli occupation but to set our own agendas and the importance of engagement with each other and the public. Qalandiya International is a grassroots approach: this biennial exhibition is not organised by the city or the government but by independent institutions. It is an attempt to bring together the collective efforts of visual art institutions throughout the territory, with a joint program of art initiatives that weaves itself across Jerusalem, Gaza, West Bank and Haifa, Through such joint co-operations, initiatives like

Qalandiya International endeavour to challenge and to re-suture the geographical segregations that divide Palestinians. After all, art enables us to pause and see the world differently, and it is through art that new realities can be imagined and created, even if only temporarily.

Recently, I was asked what the public reaction to Qalandiya International would be this year. Would there be a large public turnout?

Are the public thirsty for cultural events?

Has contemporary art practice become an elite activity? Will the public engage? Or is there an atmosphere of apathy, with the odds stacked up against the pressures of daily life under occupation, political instability especially in a political context accompanied by continually skewed media representations? There is a deep uncertainty and sense of foreboding since the assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014. Yet, these uncertainties make questions hard to answer. We exist in a small crowded place, which one experiences as a continually shifting plateau: indeed, as Edward Said suggests, “Cover a map of Palestine with the legends, insignia, icons and routes of all the peoples who have lived there, and you will have no space left for the terrain.”1 But The Jerusalem Show VII serves as a reminder, or indeed, a wake up

F RACTURED CITY A VIE W F ROM J ERUSALEM

call, to delve into our relationship with the city and its layered histories; for us not to just accumulate archives but to examine, reflect on, and listen to archives however fragmented they are. We must revisit a past that is continually confiscated by others.

Nevertheless, after the assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, there was significant discussion between thirteen organisations about where to go from here, in light of such massive loss of life and destruction.

The collective decision was to continue to pursue programs such as Qalandiya International.

The reason being these events propose the important strategy of steadfastness, something heralded by the Palestinians for decades.

And so, with this edition of Qalandiya International, there is an undoubtedly rich program of interventions from participating artists, with significant debates scheduled around the question of archives. These include a three day symposium organised by the Palestine Museum, Ramallah Municipality, Khalil Sakakini Culture Centre, A.M Qattan Foundation and Al Hoash Art Court including local and international participants such as Michael Rakowitz, Doreen Mende, Salim Tamari, Ann Butler, Oraib Toukan among others, titled ‘Qalandiya Encounters’, which will explore themes from self-historicalisation to the first intifada. The ‘Off Qalandiya Forum’ is a one-day forum that aims at unpacking the role of ‘visual art’ in the current crisis of the Palestinian Liberation, the shift in societal values, as well as the relationships between cultural actors, the Palestinian and the international audiences, curated by Alia Rayyan and Yazid Anani. Then there is the ‘Location, Location, Location’ symposium, which is organised by the International Academy of Art, Palestine, in which Tirdad Zolghadr and Emily Jacir will be exploring the question of Location with speakers Sarah Pierce, Gerard Byrne and Uzma Z. Rizvi. The aim here is to discuss the tired language of “centres versus peripheries”, the challenges of institutional agency, as well as the representational burdens and blessings of contemporary art. In the end, can an intelligent definition of the ‘local’ escape the quandaries of representation?

top Benji Boyadgian The Temporary Archive (prelude), 2014 site specific installation, Al Ma’mal (The Tile Factory) Photo courtesy the artist

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At the same time, the theme of archives itself is explored from a kaleidoscope of perspectives through artists practices, artworks, and site specific installations with use of historic locations, screenings and performances.

This serves to bring the archive of location, history of belonging and place to the forefront, placing archives a centre stage particularly in the city of Jerusalem whose inhabitants live under the daily iron fist of occupation which has a corrosive affect on population. The Jerusalem Show—through its form of not confining itself to the gallery space, takes us on a visual and sensual journey through the city, winding its way through passageways and unfolding new narratives of untold stories that probe us to question our relationship to our many pasts.

“Fractures” accurately describes the Palestinian condition: the breaks, tears, and sutures: these are not pristine archives, after all—Palestinian archives contain experiences of war, destruction, confiscation and scattered loss. They are living archives that are shared through exhibitions and events.

Of course, when it comes down to that question: how will such initiatives as The Jerusalem Show and Qalandiya International work towards producing new realities in such a fractured space as Jerusalem? Here, Beshara Doumani’s words linger like a spectre: “Palestinians are still incapable of stopping the continued and accelerating erasure of the two greatest archives of all: the physical landscape and the bonds of daily life that constitute an organic social formation.”

Yet, in this multitude of events and the creation of interventions in a city under occupation, the spirit of solidarity and co-operation among thirteen organisations amidst the challenges is an attempt to put a pause in this escalation described by Doumani, even if only temporarily, and there is no doubt that what these endeavours will remain as a testimony for the archives of tomorrow.

1Note

Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, London: Faber and Faber, 1986: 63

opposite bottom Raqs Media Collective The Unwritten Library, 2014 Site-specific installation Khalidi Library Photo courtesy the artists above Tom Nicholson from the book Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah): A Guide Book to a Collection of 69 Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Seeds in the Khalidi Library, 2014 Photos courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

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the (continuing) story of ai: from tragedy to 1 farce Paul Gladston Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ THE STORY OF AI (WEIWEI) CONTINUES… Recently, Ai Weiwei has become embroiled, yet again, in apparent controversy. Following reports of the artist’s name having been expunged entirely from the fifteenth anniversary Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) exhibition as a result of pressure by government officials prior to its opening at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai in early May, Ai chose to withdraw, on his own volition, three works

due to be shown in an exhibition at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing. Ai claimed that during preparations for the exhibition Hans van Dijk: 5,000 Names (celebrating the achievements of the late Dutch historian Hans van Dijk, dealer and collector of contemporary art from China), his name was purposely omitted from a press release by the Centre resulting in what he asserted is a falsifying of history. In particular, it would appear that Ai took serious umbrage at the effective airbrushing of his close collaboration

with van Dijk and Frank Uytterhaegen on the development of the China Art Archive and Warehouse, an early attempt to memorialise ‘avant-garde’ and experimental art within a mainland Chinese State, where all forms of public anti-authoritarian dissent are habitually suppressed. Ai is also reported to have called on other Chinese artists to withdraw their works from the exhibition. A major exhibition of Ai’s work at UCCA scheduled to open in 2011 was cancelled reportedly as a result of official pressure.

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Between 23 and 25 May, 2014 Ai recorded a series of conversations with Philip Tinari, lead curator at UCCA, Marianne Brouwer, guest curator of the van Dijk exhibition, and Xue Mei, CEO at UCCA. The conversations, transcripts of which have appeared on the Hyperallergenic. com website—following their initial posting on Ai’s Instagram site—show Tinari, Browuer and Xue striving unsuccessfully to placate a relentlessly accusatory Ai with explanations and justifications of their actions and decisions relating to the van Dijk exhibition.2

Ai’s withdrawal from the van Dijk exhibition has provoked contrasting responses.

In an open letter dated 28 May, UCCA claimed that there had not been a blanket exclusion of Ai’s name from press releases and other written texts accompanying the van Dijk exhibition.

Indeed, the letter asserts that Ai’s involvement in the development of contemporary art in China is clearly signposted in the exhibition, and that the inclusion of his works would have reinforced this; something which Ai himself acknowledges.

This open letter notwithstanding, some artists have spoken out against UCCA’s reported actions. Among them are Sun Yuan and Peng Yu best known internationally for works of the late 1990s involving violence to animals and the displaying of human corpses.

Sun and Peng issued a statement on Weibo (China’s equivalent to Twitter) describing UCCA as “dogs and slaves of officialdom” and questioning the difference between the privately financed centre and State institutions.3 Another artist, Cui Cancan voiced criticism in a rather less direct fashion, asserting in a lengthy statement on the Art Ba-ba website personal “steadfastness to basic questions and awareness within the exhibition system”.4

Others have spoken out against Ai, including the artist Yan Xing, who, writing on Facebook (a platform officially blocked in China) on 27 and 28 May, claims that Ai has sought to gain market advantage by promoting himself internationally as a ‘heroic’ dissident opposed to government suppression of artistic freedoms within China. Yan also claims that Ai had demanded solidarity among other Chinese artists in a suppressive authoritarian manner. Yan praises those artists who chose not to withdraw their works from the van Dijk exhibition for their moral courage in saying ‘no’ to Ai. While Yan is keen to distance himself from suppression of artistic freedoms, he also seeks to avoid ‘taking sides’ by asserting that

Ai’s actions involve a questionable alignment with Western anti-Chinese sentiment. Yan’s stated position, though highly critical of Ai, should not therefore be conflated with what he claims was a positive, politically conservative audience response to the exclusion of the artist’s name from the CCAA exhibition. Yan can also be understood to imply that Ai’s withdrawal from the van Dijk show amounts to an act of sensationalist opportunism, rather than one of principled resistance. For want of any hard evidence one way or the other, such a view can neither be substantiated nor refuted categorically. As I indicated in an earlier article for Broadsheet published in 2011 titled ‘Silence and Recuperation: the pitiable sacrifice of the artist Ai Weiwei’5, Ai’s position is predicated not only on humanist notions of the fundamental importance of individual freedom of expression, but in addition the assertion (widely misattributed to the eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke) that “all that is necessary for the forces of evil to succeed is for enough good men to do nothing”. Such sentiments are, of course, from an enlightened perspective beyond general reproach. However, we should be careful not to let them pass unexamined in abstract detachment from prevailing localised material and discursive conditions.

In my earlier article for Broadsheet, I sought to point out that official restrictions placed on Ai’s movements and freedom of speech following his indictment for tax evasion in 2011 have placed the artist in an invidious double-bind. Since his indictment, Ai has been prevented from travelling outside China and has been instructed not to make public statements critical of the Chinese government.

Although Ai has transgressed the latter instruction to some degree on a number of occasions—notably through participation in the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry—his criticism of the Chinese government, which is for the most part intended for reception by international audiences outside mainland China, has been noticeably less frequent and vehement. If his passport was returned, Ai could of course choose to live (Solzhenitsynlike) in exile outside China in a Western(ised) liberal-democratic State, from where he would be ‘free’ (and almost certainly encouraged, if not expected) to launch unrestricted invective aimed at the Chinese State. However, while life in exile would no doubt cement Ai’s existing international reputation as a high-profile dissident, heavy restrictions on the media

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in China would continue to severely limit the impact of his challenge to governmental authority in that context. Moreover, given the persistence and even deepening of a by no means unreasonable anti-Western sentiment in China in recent years, it is far from clear —as Yan Xing’s posting on Facebook amply demonstrates—exactly what depth of support an exiled Ai would have there.

It should be noted that UCCA, like all public institutions engaged in the displaying of art in China, is subject to close official scrutiny as well as possible censorship. While this state of affairs is thoroughly reprehensible, it is simply not possible for an institution like UCCA to exist, never mind function, without finding ways to manage the constant threat of suppressive State intervention. Going openly against authority in China, as Ai himself knows all too well, is almost certainly to invite unwelcome and ultimately disciplinary governmental action. To function as a public institution in China and to keep the possibility of some sort of critical discourse alive is to accept the necessity in that context of a pragmatic-relativist, rather than an absolutist point of view. Ai’s upbraiding of UCCA is disingenuous; it applies absolutist standards of behaviour that he has arguably failed to live up to fully himself under the threat and exercising of State violence. Indeed, it might also be argued that the transcripts of Ai’s conversations with Tinari, Brouwer and Xue take a denunciatory line echoing that associated with terroristic political violence meted out in China during the Maoist era before and after the Cultural Revolution.

My intention here in making these observations is not to issue a terminal council of despair. Critique of authority is, I would wish to assert, in spite of the restrictions that constantly surround it, a crucial aspect of an enlightened, politically progressive life without which social development is at best atrophied and at worst always in danger of a descent into violent despotism. However, we should not run away with the mistaken view that there is such a thing as absolute freedom of expression or indeed critique. As Michel Foucault has persuasively argued, all thought and action is subject to the limiting as well as enabling effects of prevailing discourse. Prevailing discourse is that which is accepted as true and real at a particular place and time. As such, it not only disciplines and enables social action, but in doing so upholds (invariably self-contradictory) norms in relation

THE ( CONTINUIN G ) STORY O F AI : F ROM TRA G EDY TO F ARCE

to which active forms of critical resistance in the service of the care of the self and wider society may be launched—resistance which from a Derridean perspective opens up the possibility of a deconstructive displacement of authoritative meaning. Discourse therefore establishes certain contingent patterns of thought and action—règles du jeu, if you will—that shape the localised nature of both complicity and resistance often problematising any absolute distinction between the two.

This is, in general terms, no less the case in the supposedly free (neo-) liberal-democratic ‘West’ than it is in more conspicuously authoritarian States such as China (the two cannot, in any case, as part of an increasingly globalised world be categorically separated).

As Marcel Duchamp (an artist much admired

by Ai) can be understood to have demonstrated through his constant invocations of and allusions to the game of chess—with its seemingly limitless interactive permutations within tight regulative structures—a progressive critical art is by no means immune to such pervasive discursive conditioning.

Recent events surrounding Ai’s withdrawal from the van Dijk exhibition take place in relation to what are, given his starkly absolutist view of the importance of freedom of artistic expression, a more or less predetermined array of possible positions of complicity and (oppositional) resistance.

None of the moves in the ‘game’ (if such a word can be used given the enduring brutality of political authoritarianism in China) have so far been unpredictable, whether they fall on the side of Ai or not. Even Yan Xing’s critique of Ai with its somewhat ‘have one’s cake and eat it’ stance of not taking sides with Western or Chinese authority does not occupy a position entirely outside the oppositional discursive logic invoked by Ai—Yan in the final analysis relies on an exceptionalist position no less crudely antagonistic than the anti-Chineseness he claims to abjure. As Guy Debord might have observed, Ai’s starkly oppositional resistance to authority (which draws heavily upon a highly romanticised Western view of the artist as heroic individualist), as well as arguments in support of or against his position amount to reassertions, rather than fundamental problematisations of the spectacular (dialectical) logic of authoritarianism.

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We have yet to see whether any of the presently executed moves (including perhaps this one), or any still to come will sufficiently displace the prevailing authoritarian dialectic of the continuing story of Ai to take us (provisionally, at least) someplace else. Until then it looks as though, borrowing from Marx’s injunctions in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ that events surrounding Ai have shifted ineluctably through repetition from tragedy to farce. As recent public demonstrations against governmental restrictions on democracy in Hong Kong demonstrate, attempts at effective political intervention do not reside with individual ‘dissident’ artists, whose supposedly resistant actions are in any case too closely enmeshed with the stymieing influences of the market and its attendant spectacle and are therefore little more than symbolic forms of revolt. Rather they coalesce often unforeseen in carnivalesque ways through the actions of groups and mobs, which despite efforts by the media to identify their (‘heroic’) leaders (in the case of recent events in Hong Kong, for example, the seventeen year-old Joshua Wong) are almost always both profoundly anonymous and chaotic. This blank, anti-heroic stochasticism at the heart of popular revolt is something a personality-driven and market dependent contemporary art cannot readily live up to.

Notes 1 A version of this article was initially posted at RandianOnline; http://www.randian-online.com/np_feature/thecontinuing-story-of-ai-from-tragedy-to-farce/ 2 http://hyperallergic.com/129989/ai-weiwei-posts-curatortranscripts-after-censorship-row/ 3 http://www.weibo.com/1043763533B5O3C3XVv?mod= weibotime 4 http://www.art-ba-ba.com/main/main.art?threadId= 79609&forumId=8 5 Paul Gladston, ‘Silence and Recuperation; the pitiable sacrifice of the artist Ai Weiwei’, Broadsheet 40.3, 2011: 178-181

Pages 44, 46-47 Ai Weiwei S.A.C.R.E.D, 2013 installation views at Church of Sant’ Antonin, 2013 Venice Biennale presented by Zuecca Project Space and Lisson Gallery Six dioramas in fibreglass and iron composed of (i) Supper; (ii)a Accusers; (iii) Cleansing; (iv) Ritual; (v) Entropy; (vi) Doubt Photos courtesy the artist, Lisson Gallery, London and Ai Weiwei Studio, Beijing

an index of the divine

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Murtaza Vali For Omar Chowdhury filmmaking is a ritual, a spiritual means through which transcendence may be attempted and possibly attained in this world. His works are the result of extended periods of deep immersion in the communities, sites, and events that are their subjects. Like a mystic ethnographer, Chowdhury spends years doing field research, simply inhabiting and observing his subjects, eventually identifying who, what and how he wants to shoot. Taking cues from the teachings of Zen Buddhism, Chowdhury—who operates his own camera and works with a small crew of three—attempts to be wholly present whilst filming, taking cues from and intuitively reacting to the specfic visual, spatial, sensorial, and phenomenological characteristics he encounters on site.

The countless hours of footage shot while on location, some totally unplanned, others carefully composed and scripted, are reviewed and gradually distilled and edited into films of substantial length. Long, dense condensations of experience and memory of specfic spaces, times and events, Chowdhury’s films push the limits of our capacity as viewers. Experiencing them is also a ritual of sorts. Affect and meaning accrue gradually, finally rewarding our faith and continuing engagement.

Chowdhury’s installations could be characterised as visual ethnographies that investigate and reflect on the changing status of the traditional—of rural life, of religion and spirituality—in the modernising East.

However, his motivations are more subjective and deeply personal, driven by aesthetic and formalist concerns. His works avoid the many pitfalls of traditional ethnography specifically by introducing techniques, forms and structures borrowed from the history of avant-garde film, art cinema and experimental documentary.

There is no authorial voiceover; ambient sound dominates the soundtracks. Chowdhury edits to create a particular rhythm or pace, dividing footage up into discreet spatial and temporal packets of filmic data; the continuity of orthodox cinematic reality is shattered, each resulting shard offering its own perspective —minimal, conceptual and abstract. This formal abstraction introduces a critical distance from the subject without entirely othering it. Similarly, the stationary camera and the extended duration of many of the shots subvert the easy logic of identification with the image

central to conventional film. Instead, these strategies demand significant commitment and investment from the viewer resulting in a peculiar intimacy between the audience and screen image that resists exoticisation of the latter. Viewing Chowdhury’s films is a phenomological experience, akin to encountering the Minimalists or Light and Space artists; we are repeatedly reminded that perception is always an embodied act.

Rigorous, rhythmic and ritualistic, Chowdhury’s three moving image installations hover between modernist autonomy and postmodernist embrace.

In the three-channel Vastness in Eclipse (2014), Chowdhury—who has vivid memories of a childhood in a tea plantation—attempts to present the particular rhythm and pace of rural life, its archaic slowness, without devolving into clichés. The installation, the result of two and a half years spent researching and shooting on and near one such plantation, does this by playfully blurring clear distinctions between documentary and fiction. The first channel suggests a narrative—of an elderly farmer struck by a dizzy spell while tilling his fields, an incident that causes him to reflect on his impending mortality—that could be read as an allegory of the diminishing role the rural plays in contemporary Bangladesh. In contrast, the second channel, which features the same farmer and some of the same locations, presents an account of rural life by creating a distinct sense of space, place, time, routine and rhythm through a series of discreet cinematic tableaux.

It opens with a beautifully misty shot of two modest village dwellings in the crepuscular light of the dawn just as their inhabitants begin to stir. The structures have a minimalist simplicity to them, their strong horizontals and verticals framing the execution of morning rituals and chores. As the film progresses we get snippets from the farmer’s day. He bathes in the makeshift bathroom. He prepares food for a young child. He tests two others on their schoolwork. While it manages to capture and convey the relaxed pace of a rural existence, the film’s abstract structure resists it being easily sentimentalised. The third channel literally turns the apparatus back on the artist. Through fragments of recorded exchanges between him and one of his collaborators, Chowdhury attempts to deconstruct and interrogate his

aesthetic intentions and process, revealing the logistical, philosophical, and ethical challenges faced. Together the installation demonstrates the constructed nature of any and every filmic text, be it fiction, documentary, or meta-critique.

The single channel Torsions (2014) is divided into two chapters, each capturing the distinct multi-sensory experience of different religious processions—one Hindu and the other Shia Muslim—that wind through the narrow crowded streets of Old Dhaka.

The first chapter opens with an intense closeup of the side of a young man’s head as he shuffles around, tying one end of a rope to a roadside pole. Torsions is marked by precisely this sort of intense proximity between camera and subject, a total submersion of the recording apparatus (and through it the viewer) into the spatial, temporal and sensorial thickness of the event it is attempting to capture. Torsions I focuses on the Roth Yatra, a procession honouring Krishna, during which a chariot housing idols is pulled through the streets, accompanied by throngs of singing, dancing worshippers. Such processions always involve months of careful planning and both chapters of Torsions show the build up and the preparations undertaken before the event even begins through a series of largely stationary shots. In Torsions I we see a man bathing and groups of singing and dancing worshippers eager to get started. Through what follows, however, the camera is rarely stationary. Mobile and restless it is constantly turning, twisting, pivoting as it navigates the devout masses. In one of a few silent sequences Chowdhury follows the idols being carried out of their sanctum; he is jostled around like one might expect of a person in a crowd caught up in religious fervor. Sunlight breaking in from above threatens to bleach the frame and the image eventually loses its sharp focus dissolving into a shifting abstract composition of pale undefined shapes and searing white highlights.

The sound starts up again, drumming and chanting punctuating the grumble of the masses, as the filmmaker, camera, image and viewer are absorbed into the blinding sensorium of the surrounding crowd. And for just a few seconds the ineffable becomes perceptible.

Opposite Omar Chowdhury Locus II (video still), 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

AN INDE X O F THE DIVINE

Chowdhury uses distinct means to achieve comparable effects at later points in Torsions I. A long sequence shows women gathering in front of a marble platform that fills the left edge of the shot. Some touch their foreheads to the ledge; others caress it with their hands, pressing palms together in a gesture of deference.

Throughout, the divine object, the idol being worshipped, rarely enters the frame. Instead, here and through the scenes of chanting and dancing that follow, Chowdhury focuses on acts of devotion, on the body language, movements and facial expressions through which people perform religious belief, on the often very material and physical encounter between human body and religious entity. Through this approach divinity is made manifest through the worshipping body. Transcendence is achieved through unrelenting focus on the immanent.

The subject of Torsions II is a commemoration of grief, not joy. Over ten days and nights and reaching a crescendo on the day of Ashura, Shias gather to collectively and ritualistically remember and mourn the massacre of Hussain, the Prophetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grandson, and his family and followers, at Karbala, in modern day Iraq.

Like the first chapter, Torsions II begins with a series of shots that establish the setting and show the extensive preparations. And it also

highlights the small gestures of devotion, reciting mumbled prayers into upturned hands, attempting to gain blessing by rubbing inscriptions, by sprinkling water, by holding onto and tying threads to the grills that border the shrines. Despite the different tenor of the proceedings there are many unexpected similarities: the rhythmic beat and repeated chanting that keeps the procession moving: the groups of swaying, twisting bodies, sometimes bloodied, as men collectively self-flagellate, most dramatically with blades; and the chaos of a crowd caught up in religious fervor. Finally, both chapters underline attempts to achieve spiritual transcendence through not despite the human body.

No thought, no reflection, no analysis, No cultivation, no intention, Let it settle itself.

Six precepts of Tilopa1 If Torsions is about sense and event, Locus I and II (both 2014) are about space, time and the everyday. Meditations on the architectures of belief, both physical and ideological, each presents a portrait of a place of worship, a distinct spiritual locus in Old Dhaka: Locus I was filmed at an ISKCON2 temple while

Locus II documents activities at a Sunni mosque by the side of the Buriganga River.

Neither structure seems particularly ornate or monumental making them especially apt sites for Chowdhuryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s investigation of the quotidian practice of religion yet hinting at its innate expression of ideology, wealth and power.

Shown on facing screens, they are a succession of carefully composed long shots, each captured using available light with a largely stationary camera. Barely moving, the apparatus feels heavy, weighed down, anchoring the images, sounds and actions it captures in the space and time of their unfolding. Rarely featured in mainstream cinema the stationary camera has been used extensively by avant-garde filmmakers, such as the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, who used its capacity for capturing presentness to visualise the Zen Buddhist ideas of transcendence. While this is also true for Chowdhury, in his case the stationary camera may also serve as an instrument of emplacement, of rooting himself to the country of his birth.

The bulk of the sequences in Locus I are shots of monks and worshippers completing the modest, repetitive tasks and actions that are a necessary part of the daily routine of worship at the temple. Some prepare offerings and cook and serve food while others clean and groom themselves. They all appear totally absorbed in what they are doing, no matter how humble a task it may be and the focused cinematography emphasises the simple and literal beauty of such sequences. There are expected moments of transcendence as young men, crowded into a room, work themselves into a trance through drumming and chanting. But there are unexpected ones too, like a twenty-minute long shot that places the viewer across from a monk or devotee seated on the ground behind a low tabletop. The extended duration forces us back from the unrelenting progress of filmic time back into the present of real time as we sit with him as he asks for and waits for his food, eats his fill, periodically chanting and singing in rapturous joy. It pushes the limits of our ability as viewers to focus on, be attentive to and draw meaning from the filmic text. Like religious belief, it tests our conviction and rewards our commitment.

Locus II similarly explores the unique space and time of a Sunni mosque. This work is also punctuated by sequences showing people engaged in daily tasks. As the adhaan or call to prayer begins, Chowdhury cuts to a curious

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but beautiful shot of a one armed man, standing alone on the structure’s unfinished roof, carefully trimming his facial hair despite his handicap. It is a subtle but evocative image that emphasises the simple actions that surround belief. In contrast to Locus I, the spoken word seems to dominate the ritual life of the mosque. We follow a small group of the devout into a nearby industrial building where they go door to door proselytising and recruiting residents for prayers at the mosque.

We hear a preacher recount, in macabre detail, the differential fate of the mortal remains of believers and non-believers on the day of judgement. In yet another sequence, the mosque’s muezzin enters and solemnly recites the Quran into a microphone. However, this recitation is not, or not only, an act of worship but also a test of the mosque’s broadcast system; religious ritual can be both exceptional and incidental, an index of the divine or a simple extension of everyday life.

The juxtaposition of these two site-portraits reveal both similarities and differences between the rituals and rhythms of worship conducted there. The films show these sites not just as places of worship but as spaces for living and communing, for resting and eating. These spaces promising transcendence through religion remain undeniably physical, material, and corporeal and their everyday immanence demonstrates the importance of always being attentive to the present, to the ever fleeting now.

That sort of presentness is itself transcendent.

Though Chowdhury’s motivations extend beyond mere anthropology his approach could be considered the cinematic equivalent of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously termed “thick description”, a mode of ethnography so rich in detail that it reveals knowledge not just about the specific subject of the study but also its broader social and cultural context.3 While his multi-channel moving image installations overwhelm and immerse us in a density of cultural information, both consequential and seemingly incidental, their minimal and abstract structures help guide us through the abundance without limiting our

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own capacity to see, feel, think and understand —to come to our own interpretations and conclusions. Together they provide intimate, fascinating and multifaceted insights into the changing fate of traditional forms of life.

Notes 1 Alan Watts, ‘Six Precepts of Tilopa’, quoted in The Way of Zen, New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1957: 152–153 2 International Society for Krishna Consciousness, more commonly known as the Hare Krishna movement 3 Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture’, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 1973: 3-30

First published in the exhibition brochure to the exhibition Omar Chowdhury: Ways, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney 30 May–2 August 2014

Opposite Omar Chowdhury Locus I (video still), 2014 Above Omar Chowdhury Torsions (video still), 2014 Photos courtesy the artist

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outside in SAMANTHA LITTLEY Words can deceive, as the title of James Dodd’s exhibition Sabotage attests.1 “Sabotage” implies the artist is hell-bent on destruction—the saboteur infiltrates, disrupts, destroys. Certainly Dodd’s history as a street artist engaged in “clandestine public creativity” brands him a vandal in the eyes of the establishment.2 But while he embraces the role of the hacker, occupying a place that hovers somewhere between graffiti artist and enfant terrible, his instinct is egalitarian. Alive to the possibilities of graffiti as a form of social networking, and driven by a delight in the mark-making of others, he rides a liminal wave that straddles public spaces and galleries alike. His art brings the world outside the gallery in and vice versa, and is the stuff of life.

Dodd is not alone in having successfully crossed the line between ‘public menace’ and recognised artist. The street art movement in Australia has, over the past decade or so, intentionally or otherwise found mainstream credibility within the hallowed walls of State galleries, and taken up in exhibitions like the National Gallery of Australia’s Space invaders: Australian street, stencils, posters, paste-ups, zines, stickers (2010 and touring). There is, however, something surprisingly altruistic and good-natured about Dodd’s forays into both worlds. He is just as inspired when sharing a found image or phrase as he is riffing on his own visual grooves. And, as he explains, “we can examine the psyche of a place via its public inscriptions”.3 Dodd, then, practises a kind of public art that is almost anthropological, observing, recording and collaging the scribbled rants and asides of those compelled to communicate, though denied a conventional forum for their voice.

James Dodd studied at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, and has been exhibiting regularly since he graduated in 2000. He was included in the 2002 Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, in Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art (2008) and most recently in Conflict: Contemporary responses to war, The University of Queensland Art Museum (2014). His solo exhibitions, which include Paradisiac, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane (2009), Outback explorer, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra (2010) and Top End scrawl, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide (2012), reveal his fondness for travel and the opportunities it presents him for new work. It is his communityorientation, though, which underscores his urge to share ideas and art. Apart from the graffiti he makes to commune with a wider and non-elitist demographic, he has also worked with students attending schools at Fremantle, East Arnhem Land and Adelaide, among other places.

Through these projects, he arms young people with the materials and techniques to converse visually, directing what could be a latent desire to deface towards creative outcomes.

The 2014 exhibition Sabotage presented recent artworks in tandem with a publication, which allows his audience to consider the themes that have preoccupied the artist over the past five years or so.

A significant work from 2009, the bus shelter Sunset dreaming illustrates his mastery over text as image. Inspired by travel to the Top End, the reconstructed shelter is festooned with a compilation of found graffiti, reconceived over a rainbow roll of colour that evokes a Darwin sunset, and the supersaturated hues achieved with aerosol cans. A palm tree sets the scene in the tropical north, while the text itself is both universal, being the irreverent expressions of a marginalised youth, and specific—the tags scrawled over the shelter’s surface denote the identity of specific crews, the Lajamanu

Boyz, for instance.4 What emerged from the cacophony of imagery and script was a kind of roll call of those who have been there and made their mark. Dodd paid homage to each one, weaving their words into a living social network.

The fabric of society forms the basis of Dodd’s enquiry. The public structures and signs of city life he brings into the gallery space recreate the familiar, and make a focus of what is being said. His other works from 2009, Fuck tha police and Bin sabotage speak of the street both in terms of their subject matter—the everpresent paddywagon and the wheelie bin—and the subcultures, within which these things take on added significance. The word sabotage functions here as a kind of counter-cultural thread as symbol of civic enterprise; i.e. waste control and law enforcement, butt up against phrases that reject their validity.

By conflating these things, Dodd opens up a debate around social equity. He has written that “my relationship with graffiti has been to engage with… egalitarian voice[s] and to explore their potentials in conventional contexts”.5 Works from 2011 continue this theme but more obliquely. Fence, for instance, repeats the use of black silhouettes over a setting sun, but here the text is both subtle and illegible. Instead, the subject itself, a barbed wire and cyclone wire barrier that has been infiltrated, acts to signify transgression and dissent.

Recent works continue in this more restrained vein—no longer overt statements of rebellion, Dodd’s paintings and bicycle projects have nonetheless seen him challenge social norms in “more abstract ways”.6 The paintings Breach and Exit (both 2013), are distilled

Opposite James Dodd DIY Google Street View (video stills), 2013 Photo courtesy the artist Photography Sam Roberts

INSIDE OUT

versions of earlier artworks. Exhibiting a more painterly quality, Breach does away with text altogether, while Exit plays on the disjuncture between the edict on the hand-written sign, ‘NO EXIT’, and the title of the work. The subject too, relates to Dodd’s interest in the margin—the fence line forms an unstable barricade to the prickly pear, an introduced species that wrought havoc across Australian farmland before its spread was slowed by biological controls.7 The plant still crops up in odd places, a gnarly and tenacious coloniser. Of the series of which these works are a part, Easel Rider, Dodd has written: “Fences in various states of repair, plants that overcome their man-made restrictions and abandoned suburban residues come together … to form a conversation that revolves around rules, containment and order in our own backyards.”8

All this speaks of perceived threats, of tensions between those in an inner sanctum and those excluded, whether from mainstream society or high art. These political concerns are at the heart of Dodd’s practice and his campaign to engage in a dialogue within the public sphere.

As he has described, “my approach to public space definitely comes from [a]… drive to reach towards broader… audiences”.9 The Easel Rider paintings were made as part of a project that connects to Search online for Jimmy’s tall bike adventures (2013). Conceived as a self-portrait for his entry in The University of Queensland National Artist Self-Portrait Prize 2013: remix. post. connect. (NASPP), the work has evolved into a larger investigation of social engagement and intervention. The ‘tall bike’, a type of ‘freak bike’, which has been modified by its owner with the only proviso that it can still be ridden, is emblematic of a subculture averse to authority and convention. As an aficionado of the ubiquitous ‘pushie’, a classless mode of transport, and an advocate of DIY and alternative lifestyles, the tall bike personifies the artist. Connecting the artwork to the social networking premise of the 2013 NASPP, he recorded his adventures on the bike in a blog, as he describes:

Top James Dodd Exit, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist Photography Sam Roberts

Bottom James Dodd installation view Sunset Dreaming, 2008 Photo courtesy the artist Photography Sam Roberts

Page 55 James Dodd Jukung Bike, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist Photography Sam Roberts

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This project has allowed me to expand the ways in which I view cycling, an art practice, and their potential intersections. The bike has become a catalyst and site for exploration on many levels. I have documented my experiences in a blog, and used social media sites such as Facebook to engage people with the content. These platforms allow for the rapid and wide dissemination of ideas, and engage audiences who, in the past, may have been restricted by the physical and social constraints of the gallery space.10 Here Dodd’s impulse to share his art-making processes and to facilitate an engagement with the result are evident—the tall bike was shown in the exhibition, while the website extended the reach of the work, with Dodd the conduit between his art and its audiences. Significantly, the tall bike generated encounters that connect to Dodd’s interest in surveillance and privacy, as he explained: I have decided to make a DIY Google Street View. I have made an arm that fixes to my handlebars with a camera at more or less eye height, recording what I see... With this in mind I have set out to extend my [self] portrait project by making a portrait of my suburb.11 In an ironic and apposite twist, Dodd was asked to remove the camera by a vigilant member of the police concerned with protection of the privacy of citizens. So what Google satellites capture and circulate through a global network is beyond the bounds for a lone tall biker. The project says more about Dodd than his interest in testing the mainstream. Woven into the blog is a discussion about art and life, specifically “art life and bike life”.12 Where and how, Dodd asks, can they meet? He considers, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle wheel (1913) and his efforts to unite art and the everyday, and Australia’s plein air tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that saw artists such as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton camp out with portable equipment and paint. In this vein, Dodd’s tall bike has an attachment that allows it to operate as an easel, which he sees as “a metaphor for this project as a whole, where the bicycle is the primary site for creativity”.13

The bike-painting projects Dodd has engineered in 2014 extend this thinking in significant ways.

For example, his take on Indonesian jukungs, seagoing canoes traditionally used by fishermen but now frequently operated as dive craft. On a trip to Bali earlier this year, Dodd became fascinated by these ornately decorated vessels, which employ dual outriggers and booms with a distinctive gull wing shape. True to form, he has created a visual riposte to the boat with a ‘floating’ bike painted up like a Balinese sunset, and suspended from a wooden frame that recalls the curves of a jukung. In Sabotage, the structure is placed “in a kind of staged relationship” with a related canvas that sees Dodd “using paintings as gallery/formal art world props or extensions of… objects which live most ideally outside of a gallery”.14 Another bike painted in punk black and accessorised with amplifiers and oversized speakers sits in conversation with a black scratched-surface painting.15 The installation harks back to Dodd’s bus shelters from 2009, and speaks of masculinity within Australian car culture, where the size of the sound system counts.16 These personalised bikes embody his yen for mis/adventure, and his commitment to pushing at the periphery.

Notes 1 Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 25 July-31 August, 2014 2

James Dodd, email to the author, 16 June 2014

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James Dodd, Outback explorer, http://james-dodd.com/solo/ outback_explorer/ 4 Lajamanu is an indigenous community approximately 890 kilometres south of Darwin, and 550 kilometres south west of Katherine on the edge of the Tanami Desert 5

James Dodd, email to the author, 10 April 2014

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ibid.

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The prickly pear was trounced when the South American moth Cactoblastis cactorum, whose caterpillars eat the plant, was introduced to Australia 8

James Dodd, Easel rider, http://james-dodd.com/easel-rider/

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James Dodd, email to the author, 10 April 2014

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James Dodd, artist’s statement, The University of Queensland National Artist Self-Portrait Prize 2013: remix. post. connect 11 James Dodd, DIY, Google and Street View, http://wildmotion.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/diy-google-street-view.html.

12 James Dodd, Precursors: Art world: Bike world, http:// wild-motion.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/precursors-art-worldbike-world.html.

13 James Dodd, Bike easel: Plein air action, http://wild-motion. blogspot.com.au/2013/06/bike-easel-plein-air-action.html 14

James Dodd, email to the author, 19 June 2014

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ibid.

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The title Sabotage also references the 1994 track ‘Sabotage’ from the fourth studio album of the American band Beastie Boys, Ill Communication

<< it would be great to live in a society where aboriginal people could make [art] work that didn’t just pertain to being aboriginal >> Maurice O’Riordan What lies at the heart of a political artwork?

Has it more to do with the politics around a work—where and how it is shown, its audience—than with the political intent of the artist as expressed by or through the work?

Is its politics only effective when these two aspects converge, when the artist, perhaps, has perfectly pitched their own politics in the work to its time and audience?

Tony Albert’s We Can Be Heroes (2013-14), a photographic-based work, which won the overall award at this year’s 31st Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA), is generally described as a political work, as belonging to a practice which is also considered political—by the artist and his audience. The central concern of Albert’s practice, it would appear, revolves around the politics of representation particularly as it has impacted and continues to impact on indigenous Australians. Much of Albert’s work is ‘peopled’ by images or objects depicting Aboriginal people. In many cases, these are drawn from Albert’s extensive collection of

‘Aboriginalia’ kitsch—plates, head-plaques, coasters, paintings, ashtrays etc.—which he reworks and reconfigures as large-scale installations, for instance, or to form large-scale words and phrases such as “Sorry”, “Exotic Other”, or “Ash On Me”. The very staging of this ‘Aboriginalia’ is a kind of counter-attack, presenting broader Australian society with the damning depths of its racism and racial stereotyping, and challenging them again in the way Albert recasts this evidence within current political debate.

In other examples, such as We Can Be Heroes, Albert peoples his artwork with images of real Aboriginal people, rather than imagined or distorted ‘types’. These are images generated

by Albert, usually through photography.

Often they have multiple iterations in his art, sometimes strategically poised among the Aboriginalia, sometimes forming their own installation or simply shown as photographic prints. Often these have been images of family or related community members, such as with his No Place (2009) series, which involves

portraits of young men from Albert’s hometown of Cardwell in far north Queensland. Each of these young men is portrayed wearing the colour-spangled masks associated with Mexican wrestlers, in designs that echo the ochre-painted iconography of the region’s rainforest shields in particular.

We Can Be Heroes delves into similar terrain as No Place. The focus on young Aboriginal men is maintained, as is the intention to portray them as heroes, or warriors, resilient and ready to combat the barrage of forces against them. The twenty young men portrayed in We Can Be Heroes are, according to the work’s statement, teenagers from Kirinari Hostel in south Sydney, a hostel for indigenous and young children undertaking secondary school away from home. Interestingly, the statement avoids any mention that Albert is also one of the men portrayed, in the work’s top left corner. Born in 1981, Tony Albert is a little beyond his teenage years, perhaps standing in as a show of solidarity and brotherhood. We Can Be Heroes does after

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all come from his Brothers series first shown in 2013 at Sullivan & Strumpf in Sydney.

Albert’s Brothers series initially came about in response to the police shooting of two Aboriginal teenagers (David Carr and Troy Taylor) in Sydney’s Kings Cross in the early hours of 21 April 2012. The teenagers were part of a group of four youths who were chased by police after spotting them in a stolen car.

The car eventually crashed into a footpath, injuring two pedestrians. Police shot at the car, injuring the two teenagers, with CCTV footage showing one of the police dragging an already wounded Taylor from the car and repeatedly punching him in the head. The incident triggered public outrage, the actions of the police widely condemned as excessive, yet another case, as Albert contends, of young Aboriginal men being singled out as targets.

“Were they targeted because of the colour of their skin?”, Albert asks. “In all likelihood, the reality is that—like the shooting of Trayvon Martin in the United States—they were.”1

Such incidents quickly come to symbolise the racial political divide, with the State and its instruments (the police) seen to continually reinforce their power over Aboriginal people, and of seeing Aboriginal men, in particular, as a threat. The divide is spelled out in We Can Be Heroes through the red targets painted on the chests of the young Aboriginal men. ‘Though we are marked out as targets’, these young men seem to say, ‘we are standing strong’. The red-banded target is a recurring motif in Albert’s work, which underscores the brutality and persistence of the colonial frontier, as much a state of mind as a particular period of post-contact history.

On some level, showing the young men as targets is what makes the work political in a direct and obvious way, as though they bear the targets in a collective act of protest. Would the work be just as, or more political, however, if the young Aboriginal men were shown without the targets? Would it be more subversive to simply show them as they are, not as they are seen or defined by others, by the oppressor?

“It would be great to live in a society where Aboriginal people could make [art] work that didn’t just pertain to being Aboriginal”, said Tony Albert in an article in The Australian newspaper reporting on his NATSIAA win.2 This seems an ironic statement given that the very subject of Albert’s We Can Be Heroes is Aboriginal male youth, that this work won a national indigenous art award, and that

representations/concepts of Aboriginality and race have largely informed his practice to date.

With this logic one may argue that Albert’s portraits in We Can Be Heroes would be stronger by not showing them as targets, by them not pertaining to being Aboriginal as the State or mainstream society views Aboriginality, or views young Aboriginal men in particular.

If colour (rather than race alone) was the reason for the Kings Cross police shooting in 2012, as Albert suggests, one might also wonder whether his portraits could have moved beyond the subject of Aboriginality to show coloured/ black young men of various ethnicities. As it is, the skin tones of the young men in We Can Be Heroes range from pale to dark which affirms the contemporary reality of Aboriginal identity but which also suggests that targeting Aboriginality and targeting skin colour may not be the same thing.

Albert’s remark was part of the article’s case for revamping the Awards, with definitions of ‘Aboriginal’ in art being seen as too restrictive, and with Allan Myers, Chairman of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT, the Awards’ host), declaring the difficulty of judging works by remote-based artists alongside those by citybased indigenous artists, and acknowledging that the sphere of Aboriginal art practice had outgrown its parameters since the Awards were first instituted thirty-one years ago. At that time, in the early 1980s, the so-called desert acrylic movement was just beginning to flourish and the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Sydney was still a few years away from launching their urban-based indigenous perspective on contemporary art. The urban/ remote ‘issue’ has been a persistent one with the NATSIAA with varying complaints over the years that the Awards are more NT/Top Endbased than national, and that judging tends to favour remote-based artists working with more classical or tradition oriented forms. The issue belongs to a broader concern that the relevance of the Awards has been in sharp decline over the past few years, coupled with the declining functionality of MAGNT due to a raft of budgetary and staffing/curator shortfall issues.

The related comments from Albert and Myers in The Australian suggest they also question the relevance of the Awards as it currently stands.

The NATSIAA finalist exhibition is certainly not as big as it used to be, now housed in a single gallery space, which this

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year showed sixty-five works, whereas in past years finalist numbers would reach around one hundred. MAGNT has, to some degree, tried to reassert its relevance by introducing a new Youth Award category this year (for artists up to twenty-six years of age), and through a more formal partnership with the Award’s related Salon des Refusés exhibition.3 This year, for instance, with the Salon’s second edition, the NATSIAA entry form gave entrants the option to be considered for the Salon show, if not preselected as a finalist. These changes were accompanied by the loss of the Award’s New Media category (due to the very small field of entries in previous years) and by MAGNT’s own renewal as an institution, severing its departmental ties with the NT Government and returning to its former status as an independent statutory body (from July 2014).

MAGNT has no control over which works the judges favour, though it does, of course, choose the judges and for a few years now, each judging panel has remained consistent from pre-selection to finalist exhibition stages. Albert is the second urban-based NATSIAAs winner in a row; last year ACT-based Jennie Kemarre Martinello won with her blown glass entry Golden Brown Reeds Fish Trap. Albert’s We Can Be Heroes is also, to my knowledge, the Award’s first photographicbased overall winner, though not much seemed to be made about this fact. Coming after thirty-one years of the Award, this is perhaps considered not so much as a breakthrough as a reminder of the ways in which the Award is seen to be out of step with contemporary practice.

While I have my own reservations about the conceptual premise of We Can Be Heroes, it is easy to understand why it was chosen as the winner. Aesthetically, the work does hold an alluring strength and sophistication, from the neat grid formation for the twenty black-framed portraits to their slick studio photography—their spot-lit, targeted torsos emerging out of the blackness.

The work was also well served within the aesthetic of the exhibition hang, placed on its own feature wall near the main entrance to the gallery. Albert’s focus on masculinity and youth seemed to play out (in) or mirror other aspects of the Award: MAGNT’s ‘rebirth’ as an independent entity, the new Youth Award category, and the predominance of male artist winners this year, with Albert joined by Daniel Walbidi (General Painting Award; Walbidi,

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born in 1983, also relatively young), Garawan Wanambi (Bark Painting Award), Alick Tipoti (Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award), and Kieren Karritpul (Youth Award). Adelaidebased Nici Cumpston was the lone female award-winner (Works On Paper).

It’s difficult to see how the Awards can address the concerns of Albert and Myers, as quoted in The Australian, about its parameters for indigenous art, or being more relevant to both urban- and remote-based indigenous artists. Judging by Albert’s comments, it would seem the NATSIAA is an impediment to indigenous artists because it continues to marginalise their practice. “While I’m proud of where I come [from]”, said Albert, “I’m very proud of my work, too; and I don’t really know why it has to be separate from any other work by contemporaries in the art world, either nationally or internationally.”4 Is this really the case, for Albert and many other artists represented in this year’s NATSIAA? Does entering the NATSIAA really jeopardise whatever mainstream contemporary art gallery relationships they maintain, or diminish opportunities to participate in more broadly themed shows? And exactly what definition of indigenous Australian art does the NATSIAA actually prescribe other than work made by someone who identifies as indigenous Australian and according to the varying predilections of each year’s judging panel?

Myers’s apparent ‘apples and oranges’ dilemma about judging urban- and remotebased indigenous art together seems misguided, although at heart his comment may also be understood as one, which seeks to uphold the intrinsic value of indigenous aesthetic traditions. The only problem here though is that the expression of such traditions is not necessarily a matter of where an artist was born, grew up, or currently resides, and that such traditions themselves are essentially dynamic and open to reinterpretation by artists depending on a range of factors, such as the work’s medium, its intended exhibiting context and audience.

The NATSIAAs usually register some hint of scandal or controversy each year, and it’s tempting to review The Australian article in this light—a ploy, perhaps, to conjure some controversy, where this was lacking in the finalist works on display, and ultimately lacking in Albert’s winning work the shooting controversy which inspired it and despite its breakthrough win as a photographic work.

The biggest ‘scandal’ this year, at least to my mind, was the fact that only four bark paintings made the final cut (the Salon des Refusés show, by contrast, included seven bark paintings), which doesn’t augur well for the competitive strength of the Awards’ bark painting category.

Even though the existence of this category goes against the grain of the Awards’ national reach, it would be a devastating blow if the category continued on this path and proved to be unviable. One of these four bark paintings was Lightning and the Rock by senior Yirrkalabased artist Ngonggirrnga Marawili, a towering sheet of bark supporting a loosely minimalist composition of meandering, black-and-white banded lines. The style is very much her own; the iconography informed by her various clan and country affiliations. Although this work had been preselected it was apparently lucky to make the hang, with the imperfections of this large bark misunderstood (at the receiving end) to mean a ‘damaged’ work. One wonders

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whether it was actually part of the judging, a work, which has more political depth than many, may care to realise and without protesting as much.

Notes 1 Tony Albert, Artist Statement, We Can Be Heroes, 31st Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award brochure, Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin, 2014 2 Aimos Aikman, ‘Prize plea: don’t frame art by culture’, The Australian, 9 August 2014 3 The Salon des Refusés exhibition is organised by Paul Johnstone Gallery and Outstation Gallery; this year the exhibition was held at Stokes Hill Wharf, Darwin: www.salondesrefuses.com.au 4

Aikman, op cit, 2014 Opposite Tony Albert We Can be Heroes, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney Above Garawan Wanambi, Marrangu (detail), 2014 Photo courtesy the artist All photography by Nicholas Gouldhurst

inventory management: the list

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Pedro de Almeida Campbelltown Arts Centre’s The List was more than anything a bold statement of conviction towards strategic momentum. It’s hard to deny that Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) has deservedly earned a reputation for a sustained and significant investment in a certain model of artistic programming that might accurately be termed community engaged, but might more appropriately be categorised as committed to tactical pursuit of relevance to its local communities. CAC’s principal achievement has been not simply an understanding that the latter is no pro-forma result of undertaking the former, but an ambitious expansion of the scope of curatorial approaches to the whole idea of the ‘local’ and ‘community’ that at the same time harness the global trends and consequences that converge upon its specific locus in Western Sydney. CAC’s program of visual art, dance, music, theatre, live art and performance has always been more interdisciplinary in intent and effect, rather than merely multidisciplinary, given its cultivation of a dynamic of experimentation between artists, curators, producers, community and audiences that wisely encourages painting outside the lines.

Under the leadership of current Director Michael Dagostino (since 2011) and before him inaugural Director Lisa Havilah (2005-11), CAC has taken advantage of its good fortune of achieving a relatively healthy funding stream and consistent advocacy at Local, State and Federal Government levels to attract a committed team of professionals, who bring their own experiences and networks into the fold, ensuring that whatever the quality of its activities as judged by outsiders, the accusation of ‘near enough is good enough’ would be, at very least, demonstrably unjust in any fair measure of its motivations in partnering artists with communities. This is not necessarily the case at other arts centres around the country, whether comparable in strategic mission or operational scale, and is one more reason to appreciate the momentum that CAC has sustained for nearly a decade in advancing its model of artistic programming. Since C’town bling, its inaugural exhibition as the relaunched contemporary arts centre in 2005, the collective ethos of the organisation could be summed up by the declaration: “we have to have an idealistic view of what contemporary art, or we as individuals, can influence—not unlike

the idealism of youth”.1 Brought forward to The List, this energy was in robust evidence and seems far from dissipating anytime soon.

Curated by Michael Dagostino and Megan Monte, The List seemed to me, in the first instance, a disarming title for an exhibition of contemporary art. Was this a confession of what curators at base level might actually do—draw up lists? Was its potential use as noun and verb symbolic of the double bind of prescriptive definitions of art and community within a conceptual structure that is significantly framed by broader social and political agendas?

Or was it simply intended to be met at face value: exhibition as index of subjects, as in the back of a sociology textbook? Either way, The List as exhibition was but the public culmination of eight months of stuff you don’t see as a gallery visitor, namely the fostering of working relationships and connections made between artists, the young people of Campbelltown and a range of youth organisations and service providers at work in the south-western suburbs of Sydney.

Emerging from a process predominantly defined by relatively medium-term residencies by the thirteen participating artists (some lasting for several months), the twelve projects commissioned especially for The List signalled that, at very least, content would be manufactured locally for potential global distribution, rather than imported at less favourable terms of cultural trade. Even if artists’ involvement precluded escape from the necessary constraints of fly-in-fly-out working status due to the understandable incompatibilities of individual lives and livelihoods, this professional arrangement nevertheless always holds the potential to be mitigated by adventurism in lieu of timidity, generosity over opportunism, and the demonstration of artistic resolve, where the indecisiveness of the time-rich might otherwise prevail. That’s the theory anyway, before personalities and ideas populate the construct.

Mulling this over, I entered CAC’s familiar atrium to confront a wall where one expected the galleries to be, branded in purple and pink signage, which listed the artists whose contributions were to be found on the other side of a door. The intended effect, no doubt, was to symbolise a sanctioned trespassing into the self-defined world of youth, rather like being

admitted past a teenager’s bedroom door decorated with posters. Entering the galleries, the first work to be encountered was Daniel McKewen’s Dialog (2014), a six-channel video presented in a gridded bank of screens emitting disorientating overlapping sound bites.

A compilation of looped lines of dialogue from movies and TV shows (mostly American and hence, one suspects, the reason for the American spelling of “dialog”), McKewen’s supercut of close-ups of actors’ mouths de-contextualised from faces and the narratives of their source characters certainly took the curatorial premise of The List literally, the result of an online survey of local teenagers conducted by the artist. As a frolic through American cultural imperialist infiltration of local youth culture tempered by a flexing of the intertextual muscle of contemporary video art, Dialog seemed slight in both form and effect, aping as it did the babel of a billion blogs, in lieu of a singular clarity of purpose in expression. To stick with the jargon of literary theory, one sensed that McKewen forswore metanarrative in favour of différence and lost this reader in the process. Similarly, George Tilliankis’ VIDEO D (2014), a kind of lo-fi horror movie populated by teens in perfunctory ghost and zombie costumes, was utterly baffling in its motivation. Shot in an infrared palette of high-key monochrome and set to a soundtrack of pummelling electric guitar feedback, VIDEO D reminded me of the kind of music video clip, in which nothing much seems to happen and whatever does happen you’re sure you missed it. But for an acknowledgment in the wall label that the artist worked with a group of young ‘clients’ of Macarthur Disability Services, the connection to the curatorial premise was lost if not abandoned altogether somewhere between intent and content.

Running up against Jakarta-based Indonesian artist Hahan’s mural Past/Present/ Future (2014), one began to detect the limitations of list-making as an explicit curatorial construct, if only because it seemed to invite quantitative proliferation over qualitative acumen. But I was prepared to cut this sentiment loose in favour of some fun. Splashed across a large wall, one at least began to engage with iconography that energised the eye and tickled the funny bone.

Easily mistaken for a giant cartoon spermatozoa (it’s a genre, Google it) in triumphantly

INVENTORY MANA G EMENT : THE LIST

Page 60 Uji Handoko Eko Saputro (Hahan) Past/Present/Future, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist Above Abdul Abdullah We Want 2014 Photo courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne Page 63 Michaela Gleave Closed Loop, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

victorious repose (keep imagining) aloft an armature of a half dozen rubber-faced muscle-heavy figures—think Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, multiplied, who paraded his bulbous form (let’s assume it’s a boy) beneath a starry night sky (you’re there, aren’t you?).

Hahan’s phantasmagorical creation was instead his idiosyncratic dedication to none other than Fisher’s Ghost, the nineteenth-century folk tale of a disappeared convict turned farmer, which Campbelltown has cultivated as a city brand identity exercise, since the inauguration in 1956 of the Fisher’s Ghost Festival, now one of the longest running community festivals of

its kind in Australia. As a mural that showed little evidence of collaboration, the kids were to be found in a booklet that collated drawings of ghosts, demons and other bogeymen by local high school students, evidence of Hahan’s homework in running workshops at Eagle Vale and Ingleburn high schools. How Past/ Present/Future synthesised this very local tale with Javanese traditions of ghost stories and curatorial claims for some relevance to postSuharto Reformasi which, we were informed via the wall label, saw the use of “’ghostly’ terror as an instrument of political control in order to limit the movement of individuals at night”, is anyone’s guess. In theoretical pretext and historical association it’s an amusing and simple affair unnecessarily compromised by an unconvincing hypothesis. Stripped back to its essential modesty, however, as paint on wall it rocked.

Yet thankfully, all of a sudden things got real. Bullying, violence, suicide, sexism, the demoralising expediency of authority figures, who serve their own interests with little care or concern for young people: just some of the subjects broached by fourteen-yearolds Brittany, Jessica, Vea and Taylor in Kate Blackmore’s peerless video work, Girls (2014).

Opening with a shopping trolley sitting idly in a field of grass, Girls began its dual monologue confessions with the wistful preamble; “When I was young…”, which more than anything signals the sobering realities of growing up fast in Claymore. As a suburb with a decades-old reputation for severe disadvantage in all of the social and economic measures that matter, in purely demographic terms Claymore is more than anything a community of young people.

The fact that children in this patch of Sydney’s suburban fringe continue to be marginalised is no unforseen misfortune of class struggle.

Nor is it an unfounded corollary of the endemic failures of a built environment designed as landscaping solution to ideological renovations of the social contract. Seemingly trapped in a demonstrably deteriorated public housing estate that is a monument to nothing more than the scandalous reverberation of almost four decades of State government neglect—that’s changing, but not nearly fast enough—the girls in Girls understand the all too human motivations that inculcate this state of affairs: “No offence, but it’s kinda selfish”, they say of teachers whom they accuse of neglecting the welfare of students. That Blackmore’s art beautifully intimated the presence of mutual recognition

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and trust between artist and subjects, as to what might be achieved by such an enterprise, was nowhere more evident than in the naturalism of the girls’ presentation to camera.

This quality was elevated further by the sensitive handling of the more formal concerns of light and shade, figure and ground, time and sound, which resonated in every dual-channel sequence of Girls, especially in the closing scene of a violet gloaming, the girls atop a highway overpass trying to attract a horn-blow reaction from the speeding drivers below as they disappear into the horizon on their way to somewhere else before darkness falls.

By contrast, the wide open road that Girls presented as a visual metaphor for the fight or flight response that can change futures in a single decisive act, was stretched to a certain conclusion in Zanny Begg’s The boys home (2014). A collaborative project between the artist and four teenage boys incarcerated in Reiby Juvenile Justice Centre situated near the banks of the Georges River in Airds, like Claymore one of the poorest and most disadvantaged suburbs in the region, Begg’s installation of photographs, drawings and a video work, Doing time, grew from the artist’s four-month residency that allowed her extraordinary access to the boys and demanded an equally extraordinary sense of responsibility in representing their experiences to an outside world. This meant that Begg was understandably careful not to reveal the names or faces of her subjects, which was at least in part overcome by an emphasis on capturing their voices in intimate confessionals, tempered by a troubling sense of the inevitability of their situation. To hear a teenager matter-of-factly declare, “I’m doing my debt to society” in a tone that evacuated any notion of self-pity was at once admirable and dispiriting, the latter sentiment bolstered by one’s own lament for the manifest inequities and failures of society to steward our young people far from a place such as Reiby. Invited to design their own hats, jackets and hoodies under the artist’s steam, the boys devised an assortment of warrior shields that appropriated brand logos such as Adidas, Nike, Versace and Ralph Lauren Polo in individualised coats of arms that signalled pride in their cultural heritage, such as a blazing ‘Koori Brothers 2014’ stretched across the back of a boy pacing the barbed wire perimeter of Reiby’s yard. What this artistic exercise might have meant to these boys is hard to decipher from the removed vantage point of the gallery

goer, but we might surmise that it would be a trifling gesture on our part to underestimate the deeper reverberations of its collaborative heart. In this regard, if being a teenager is all about learning, adulthood can often seem like a lifetime’s unlearning, and artists are not immune to this paradox (has anyone illustrated the veracity of this better than the nonagenarian Picasso?). Whereas Begg’s approach signalled a convincing marriage of courage and connection, the contributions from fellow artists Pilar Mata Dupont, Robin Hungerford and the brothers Abdul Abdullah and Abdul Rahman Abdullah could have benefited from clearer aesthetic articulations of their relationship to the curatorial premise. Cumulatively the effect of these other projects was one of trafficking in suppositions as opposed to real insight, adding little to the scope of ideas within the construct of The List.

A different order of engagement was on display in Shaun Gladwell’s 2014 trilogy of works, Attempt to maintain stillness and balance (Campbelltown version), Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force and He was fucking his shows up so I gave him mine (D.C.’s). The latter two acted as a reprise of Gladwell’s work by

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the same name that was first commissioned for C’Town bling a decade earlier, only this time the artist’s re-thinking around the exchange economies at play within Campbelltown’s skate park subculture resulted in an uncharacteristically unfocused work —visually speaking, with its dizzying handheld camera footage, and conceptually in terms of its reliance on curatorial crib notes to reveal vital connections. To witness actors assume the role of soldiers, advance upon the skate park and exchange new skateboard wheels for old with a couple of bemused skaters, was perhaps a metaphor pushed too far in service of a desire for conceptual continuity across a decade of the artist’s practice, which has seen him produce incomparably superior works from his experience as an official war artist, who spent time at Australian Defence Force bases in Afghanistan and the Middle East in 2009. To conflate the psychological warfare techniques of the Australian army’s pacification strategies in recent theatres of war (older viewers will recall that Hanoi had another, less propagandistic term for this kind of thing), with an inexplicable connection to Campbelltown’s sister cities Coonamble in

INVENTORY MANA G EMENT : THE LIST

disquiet of uncertainty, at once a potentially debilitating condition and a pregnant prelude for change. In this sense, Polo’s graphically simple work amplified complexities that some of the more elaborate projects in The List couldn’t grasp for lack of emotional reach.

Inspired by overheard conversations gleaned from public transport trips taken all over the western suburbs, ALL I KNOW (2014) was Polo’s idiosyncratic contribution, which nominated but one of the presumably hundreds of recorded lines of dialogue he jotted down —inane and thoughtful, vain and concerned —as worthy of blowing up to a thankfully absurd scale in the form of six hand-painted billboards. Punctuating a landscape demarcated by the fringes of house and land package developments running parallel to the train line into Campbelltown, Polo’s advertisements for the self stood tall on their timber stilts with charm and a cheeky probity. Even if one caught a glimpse of only a single word flashing past, as the syncopated arrangement of billboards faced train passengers not otherwise glued to the screens of their smartphones, for a split second everything was illuminated:

regional NSW and Koshigaya in Japan, was baffling. Overall this video lacked the poise and purity of action that one has come to expect from Gladwell’s work. Exhibited alongside his 2014 work Attempt to maintain stillness and balance (Campbelltown version), in which the artist enacts the explicit directive of the work’s title aloft a BMX bike against various Campbelltown backdrops, the contrast in production values was clear. To contrast this last work in particular with the wild abandon and dizzying buoyancy of the gymnastic prowess of students from Campbelltown Performing Arts High School in Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s The YOLO Wallpaper (2014), a truly delightful theatrical exercise of tumbling and narration as parable for ancient rites of passage, suggested that the more interesting relationships to be deciphered in Gladwell’s intervention were to be made in relation to others’ work rather than his own.

In the end, the two artists not afraid to be the most literal in their interpretation of list-making, Michaela Gleave and Tom Polo, were ironically the most ‘performative’ in their works, if one applies the correct definition of

that word.2 Gleave’s Closed Loop (2014) elevated The List to its most explicit conclusion, making her achievement of producing perhaps the most psychologically affecting work in the exhibition all the more impressive. Gleave’s aquarium-like interrogation room, separated from the rest of the gallery spaces by a wall with rectangular porthole, through which one could peer into a white cube marked by a large-scale projection of key words taken from a from a survey about the future conducted on the streets of Campbelltown, was the residue of a performance long-gone by the time I visited. Entranced by a synth-heavy remixed soundtrack of the INXS ballad Never Tear Us Apart, one confronted a rolling thunder of words: SAFETY ESCAPE HAPPINESS OWNERSHIP RISK FAITH POSITIVITY SUPPORT DETERMINATION MOTIVATION RESPONSIBILITY AMBITION. The effect was strangely clinical and intimate at the same time.

Perhaps one sentiment that young people no doubt mutually recognise within themselves and the fundamentals of a yearning, searching, always questioning artistic impulse, is the hazy

all I know is that we just keep doubting ourselves.

The List, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney 8 August–12 October 2014 Notes 1 Lisa Havilah and Anne Loxley quoted in ‘C’town bling: a different type of shiny’, curators’ introductory essay, C’town bling (exhibition catalogue), Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 2005: 10. Campbelltown Arts Centre was opened in June 2005 following a $15m capital development program undertaken by Campbelltown City Council in partnership with the NSW Government to redevelop the Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery (established 1988) into a contemporary multidisciplinary arts centre. In addition to the vision and support of local prominent and grassroots advocates, this development grew out of A Strategy for the Arts in Western Sydney (1999), a strategic plan issued by the NSW Ministry for the Arts and the NSW Government’s Office of Western Sydney under the leadership of the then Premier and Minster for the Arts, Bob Carr, and Minister for Western Sydney, Kim Yeadon 2 According to the Oxford English Dictionary: of or relating to performance; (Linguistics and Philosophy) designating or relating to an utterance that effects an action by being spoken or by means of which the speaker performs a particular act

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Opening night performance The YOLO Wallpaper, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist

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double desire: becoming aboriginal Ian McLean Our young fellas are only interested in rap, and hip hop and smart phones right now… not interested in hanging out with the Elders… so we gotta put our stories away now for later.

Daisy Ward1 The profound rupture, the profound break, for which there is no healing, is the deep recognition that this culture cannot go home again. It is destined to write the story of departing and going home forever… What you write is, in part, what you can’t be, you write across the gap, you write into the absence, you write into the void, but not because at some point you really will write the origin again… You write the lack of being able to go home again.

Stewart Hall2 Stewart Hall’s lament on the African diaspora, wrenched from its homeland by white and black slave traders, resonates with the Australian Aboriginal experience. It also resonates with the experience of modernity and migration more generally—which created a rift between city and country, past and future. Thus nostalgia, which attempts to retrieve the sense of a lost unity, is a pervasive contemporary emotion.

Some modernists, like Freud, argue that it is a universal psychological condition that shapes our adult life, and others, like Hall, exchanged it for a cosmopolitan ethic that embraces difference and the other rather than the sameness of home. As two alternatives that structure the contemporary condition, nostalgia and cosmopolitanism are particularly evident in the Aboriginal art world.

Sophisticated urbanites like Hall have made from this cosmopolitanism a modest redemption for contemporary life, but much Aboriginal discourse remains ill at ease with it. It has produced what Nicolas Rothwell calls a “fundamental disconnect” between the producers and consumers of the art: “Desert men and women of senior rank want to keep their traditions strong, and more and more to build a fence around the secrets of their law”, in order to guarantee the inviolability of country or homeland, whereas the urbanites who buy the art and “the experts and art-world insiders who study and explore the desert’s cultures seek to break that wall”.3 If these urban consumers seem to be colonising the indigenes all over again, it is, implies Rothwell, not out of malice but in the cosmopolitan spirit of the contemporary, which seeks to live with difference and know the other.

The disconnect is fundamental not just because it is irresolvable, but also because it cannot escape the structurally embedded ontology of the contemporary, in which even the most remote indigenous communities are implicated and on which their art movement is dependent as an industry.

The disconnect was evident this year in the two longest running Aboriginalonly art events in Australia, the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award at the Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory in Darwin, and Desert Mob at the Araluen Centre in Alice Springs. Tony Albert’s winning entry in this year’s Telstra Award, We Can Be Heroes, went to the heart of the matter and was specifically singled out as a symptom of this disconnect. Made in response to the shooting of two Aboriginal youths in Redfern in 2012, the work alluded to the ambivalent

DOUBLE DESIRE : BECOMIN G ABORI G INAL

intersection of two laws, Aboriginal and Western—ambivalent because the intersection occurs in the singular bodies of young men.

Comprising twenty, dark Caravaggesque photographs, individually framed but butted close together, from a distance We Can Be Heroes resembles Warhol’s detached renderings of celebrity and trauma—those silkscreened canvases of repeated images of Marilyn or Jackie or FBI mug shots or a car crash or a race riot. Get a little closer and twenty spot-lit, barechested Aboriginal youths look back at you with the cool nonchalance of rappers. Each has the familiar Aboriginal roundel motif in the centre of his chest, like tribal body paint or a tattoo, as if urban boys indelibly marked by their Aboriginality and its law.

The roundel is widely used in desert paintings to signify ancestral sites, and body painting is an insignia of the ancestral spirit’s presence, so that the dancer becomes the ancestor, a medium for its message. So are these twenty youths looking back at us as ancestral beings whose law calls our gaze to account, or are these machined roundels pop art targets: twenty men facing their executioners; a riff, perhaps, on Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964)? The answer is obvious to anyone familiar with contemporary art: the success of the work lies in its ability to hold the tension of both meanings, one associated with Aboriginality and the other with contemporary art. This double desire erodes the credibility of Aboriginality as a unifying ideology. Instead, Aboriginality becomes a site of transculturation, of living within difference, a way of becoming rather than being.

This is why Warhol is an important reference for Albert. Warhol turned the question of being and its stark existential choices that haunted the post-War generation into the ones of becoming that have framed the tenor of our times. Albert uses Warhol’s principal pictorial device for accomplishing this, the “intrusion of difference within repetition”, in which each repeated image is slightly different from the other. This simultaneous weak difference and incomplete repetition creates an ambivalent rather than contradictory or self-negating relation, compromising both the notion of an undivided self and the absoluteness or incommensurability of difference. In this way the perpetual delay of becoming displaces the existential intransigence of being.

This is evident, said Richard Meyer, in the way Thirteen Most Wanted Men “crosswires the codes of criminality, looking, and homoerotic desire” in the one image. Albert’s crosswiring is much the same, with the added circuitry of race.

The ambivalence, says Meyer, introduces a beguiling interactive element, embedding the viewer’s desire into the meaning of the work,4 thus dissembling (but not erasing) the difference between the artist and the viewer, author and the reader, and one might argue, difference as an ontological catgeory.

Such doubling and re-doubling of desire produces an unrelenting ambivalence that has become a characteristic emotion in the contemporary world where the certainties of religion, race, gender and other identity formations no longer hold. The ambivalence of being caught between worlds is no longer the tragedy it once was when our horizon was delimited by existential identity discourses.

Instead of choosing between antinomies, which is always a transaction of loss, one finds something more between them. A good recent example is The Shadow King (2013), Tom E. Lewis and Michael Kantor’s brilliant Aboriginalising of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which dramatically mixes multiple Aboriginal languages and English into a play that excavates a shared Aboriginal/Western mythological narrative.

Aboriginal-only art exhibitions might seem an obvious way to keep the elephant out of the room, i.e. ignore the contemporary artworld and the grand antinomy of colonisation, but Albert brought the elephant charging in. The Aboriginal-only Telstra Award is usually an event in which Aboriginal artists from remote art centres elbow urban artists offstage. In this context the Aboriginality of We Can Be Heroes—the roundel body designs —might seem a pose, a trick, to stay onstage.

This latter thought niggled Allan Myers, QC, chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Council and chairman of the Museums and Art Galleries Board of the Northern Territory.

On Albert winning the prize, Myers worried about “classifying art as indigenous simply because it was ‘created by a person who identifies as indigenous’”.

I don’t know how you judge the artistic work of an inner-city born and bred Australian who identifies as indigenous against the work of someone who has been brought up in traditional culture in a remote location.5

Albert agreed: “Our culture is completely different from place to place, so the blanket of ‘Aboriginal’ is a problem in itself.” But he took the thought a little further: It would be great to live in a society where Aboriginal people could make work that didn’t just pertain to being Aboriginal… I don’t really know why it has to be separate from any other work by contemporaries in the art world, either nationally or internationally.6 Albert is not the only Aboriginal artist to feel this way. The remote artist Michael Nelson Jagamara, for example, happily collaborates with the sophisticated postconceptual urbanite Imants Tillers in a way that their very different approaches happily coexist on the same canvas without the need of negation or its corollary, resolution—what might be called an abiding in difference without anxiety about identity, or the delay of becoming. However, Myers’ sense of a fundamental difference between Aboriginal and Western cultures is difficult to shake. When these parallel worlds collide, as on this occasion in Darwin, ambivalence provides no refuge from such categories. So deeply are they embedded in our mindset that we can only conclude colonialism still haunts our thinking.

Unlike the Telstra Award, Desert Mob avoids such troubling categorical imperatives as it only includes art from remote art centres.

There are no urban artists to trouble the carnival. The art coordinators of the forty odd desert art centres select their best work of the last year for a Salon type hang, after which a market is held in a busy annual sale. This year Desert Mob was celebrating Desart’s twentyfirst birthday. Desart is the Alice Springs based umbrella organisation of the desert art centres.

Desert Mob is Desart’s open day.

Thus the best foot is put forward. Appropriately, it’s a time for celebration, not critique. Its oneday ‘symposium’, which is emphatically an all-Aboriginal affair—except for the occasional white art advisor sitting on the side prompting the artists—is modelled on the traditional Greek symposium, which was not a critical forum but an in-house party to celebrate men coming of age or their victories in sports or arts contests.

However, women took centre stage at this year’s symposium, with the likes of Iluwanti Ken, Mary Pan and Nyurpaya Kaika-Burton from Tjala Arts (with the help of Linda Rive’s translations) demonstrating the effectiveness of Desart’s strategy of promoting, without

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ambivalence, the Aboriginality of desert art.

In 2012, Rothwell complained that the symposium did not address the “fundamental disconnect” that Albert’s win at Telstra Award highlighted. That year Margo Neale did the honours in an address that canvassed the wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives. There are those who believe it is a “dynamic culture which evolves to survive as it has always done and disruptions are not a threat to continuity”; others take a “salvage mentality” which believes “the culture should be preserved in aspic”, and there are those who see themselves as “protectors”, “guardians of their culture and their knowledge”, “advocates and mentors who guide their artists through the dark forests of the outside world, protecting them from would-be exploiters”.7

Quoting Philip Watkins, CEO of Desart, Neale made her position clear: art centres are “places of innovation and bridges for reciprocal engagement with the wider world”.8 “Whether we call it collaboration, reciprocal engagement or just working together”, said Neale, “the way of the future lies in this fertile zone.”9 Rothwell clearly thought that such thinking elided the “fundamental disconnect” that threatened the future of the art centres. Even though he has been a severe critic of art centres, this year’s symposium should have made him happier.

In her keynote address, Hetti Perkins took the bull by the horns in a stirring sermon on the virtues of art centres and Desart and the vanities of the white mainstream artworld, which has exploited art centres for a quick profit or its own discourses—thus starkly shining the spotlight on the fundamental disconnect.

Perkins hesitated to damn the mainstream artworld in toto but the message was clear: without the art centres the Aboriginal art movement would never have happened; art centres don’t need the artworld; and the only good dealer is one who does the art centre’s bidding. In the other keynote address, the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi conceptual artist Jonathan Jones gave a similar message to artists wanting to collaborate with indigenous artists —an increasingly common phenomenon.

In short, know your place and stay there.

Elsewhere Jones has been sceptical of any collaboration between indigenous and nonindigenous artists because of the inherent imbalance of the power relations between them. He made a scathing remark about an unnamed white woman artist, who had

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collaborated with unnamed Aboriginal artists in an unnamed art centre.

Together their talks gave the sense of a strong Aboriginal nation—with its own united identity and cultural expressions that the Aboriginal-owned art centres guaranteed.

Identity, after all, is most clearly defined not through an abiding in difference but a discourse of difference, a naming of the other. I came away with the impression that being Aboriginal requires eternal vigilance against the white enemy. The largely white audience applauded.

Given the history of colonialism and also the ace that art centres have up their sleeves—the art—this combative stance of Perkins and Jones is understandable, some would say necessary and admirable. Arguably, the tactical error that many Aboriginal clans made at the point of first contact was to be too welcoming, not realising how many white people were coming. It is the sheer number of whites that overwhelmed. Remote Aboriginal art is strong because it is made on Aboriginal communities, where whites are a minority and where Aboriginal agency is paramount.

Perkins had another point as well: unlike the Western artworld, Aboriginal owned art centres are focused on the culture and the community not the art. The GFC or the latest

artworld -ism is not an art centre concern; what matters is the strength of the culture.

Art is merely a means to make culture stronger.

As Desart’s logo says: “culture first”. Like an anchor driven deep into country, Aboriginal art centres hold the community fast against the wild currents of modernity that ravage these places.

However, if art centres are about culture, culture is not the bulwark that Desart imagines it to be. Rather, it is double-edged, because, as Hall said, it is “permeable to cross-cultural influences”. Not all cultures “transculturate to the same degree… But all transculturate, to some extent.” In short, transculturation “is not the exception but the norm”.10 Parallel universes are destined to cross if they are cultural entities. This means that culture is strengthened not by building defensive walls around it but by engaging with other cultures. This was evident in the early days of Papunya Tula—the model for today’s art centres—which began from a desire to make public traditional secret knowledge, first on the school wall and then in the white market place. This required creative changes to secret designs, so that they simultaneously emanated ancestral power and disguised its source.

This camouflage, a characteristic of the double

desire of modernism, remains the aesthetic strategy of desert art. A consequence of going public was, as the Papunya Tula artists discovered, the strengthening of culture, as if the market and the ancestors were in collusion.

If Desart wants to keep culture strong the mantra should be: “it’s the market, stupid”.

However, transculturation—and the market is one such space—only works if both sides can maintain agency in the exchange, otherwise the weaker is assimilated or acculturated into the stronger. This has been the fundamental dilemma of an Aboriginal culture caught in the differential power relations of colonialism and postcolonialism. Because in art centres Aboriginal agency is paramount, they are exemplary spaces of transculturation, though you wouldn’t know it at Desert Mob or indeed in most discourse on Aboriginal art, which speak to the relative weakness of, and sense of embattlement in, these communities.

Thus Alison Anderson’s poignant message to the white artworld—poignant because of its defeatism: Don’t try to learn… the hidden meanings behind the surface stories.

Don’t try, because with every single thing you discover, you weaken us, and weaken our culture… Just be happy with the beautiful surface.11

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Not that Anderson, who is a painter from Papunya, is a friend of Desart or the art centres.

Art centre coordinators, she says, are “white art mafia” telling Aboriginal artists how and who they should paint for.12

The hinge figure in the double desire of art centres is the art coordinator, who is virtually invisible in Desert Mob and the Desart website. From my experience, art coordinators also work hard to remain invisible, as if anxious about disturbing the agency of the artists necessary for transculturation. However, as the broker between the artists and the wider world, the art coordinator is the lynchpin in the operation. This is why art centres are so important for remote communities: they are a portal between the community and the world, “that threshold space where Westerners and desert people encounter each other, and work together”,13 looking inside and outside simultaneously.

Another portal is something more conceptual: it is the way the art is branded in institutional discourses, be it Western institutions or Aboriginal ones like Desart.

For example, when Aboriginal art is branded as primitive, as it still is in some places, such as the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, all bridges to the contemporary world are burned. This is why its rebranding from primitive art to fine art in the 1950s was such a good thing. The rebranding wasn’t that successful because in most people’s minds it simply became primitive fine art. State art galleries, which collect fine art, began establishing primitive art departments, which in the 1980s morphed into Aboriginal art departments. The story told in these Aboriginal fine art departments remained different to that told in the Western fine art department. Even today these parallel departments seem fearful of colliding.

More successful was the 1980s rebranding of Aboriginal art as contemporary art. This was another institutional move, and one in which art centres and artists also participated. In 1981, when most Aboriginal desert communities were generally hostile to Papunya Tula, its new art coordinator, Andrew Crocker, decided to market the paintings as contemporary art and ditch the largely anthropological branding of primitive fine art.

This was a brilliant move because the art looked like contemporary art—large abstract acrylic paintings on canvas—and seemed a radical departure from traditional Aboriginal art.

In this way Papunya Tula was able to seize

upon recent developments in both the artworld and the Aboriginal world, and thus claim to be the face of a new Aboriginal movement of selfdetermination and modernisation. This perhaps explains why the Warlpiri community to the north at Lajamanu, which opposed the Papunya Tula painting movement, was keen to also be branded as modern and not be left behind.

They seized upon the opportunity to make a ground painting for the Paris Festival in 1983, declaring: “We want to show the people of Paris that our culture is as modern as today.”

As if unafraid of modernity, they declared: “Our ceremonies still have the power to control our young people. Our young men go into Alice Springs or to Darwin for a Western-style education—but, when they return to Lajamanu, they are deeply pleased and satisfied to follow the dictates of tribal Law.”

At the same time, they would have nothing to do with that Papunya Tula mob.

“We are not, and do not, ever, want to become professional painters. We will never put this kind of painting onto canvas, or on to artboard, or on to any ‘permanent’ medium.

The permanence of these designs is in our minds. We do not need museums or books to remind us of our traditions. We are forever renewing and recreating those traditions in our ceremonies.”14

They soon changed their minds and took to canvas, as did other communities.

The new paradigm of contemporary art created an art movement. However, there was clearly a competing paradigm at work in the thinking of the Lajamanu artists: that of authenticity and tradition—which is why French critics were not convinced of their modernity. This competing essentialist paradigm of authenticity and tradition was necessary if one was to win a land rights claim through making a painting.

It is also a useful rallying cry in much activist identity politics. Aboriginal curators of an activist bent—like Perkins and Brenda Croft —can push the contemporaneity of Aboriginal art because for them there is no antinomy between tradition and the contemporary.

Contemporary art as they define it, is simply that being made now. However, what makes art contemporary today is the contemporaneity of its elements (or simultaneity of its differences); thus contemporary art is geared to cosmopolitanism, globalism, creolisation and diasporic relations, discourses that have generally been hostile to the essentialism embedded in the notion of Aboriginality.

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The question is not how to make Aboriginal art today, but how to make it cosmopolitan?

How do art centres brand Aboriginal art now?

The current badge of Desart, taken from its website, is: “Aboriginal traditional law or culture is the foundation for all the art.” Compare this to the call of well-known members of the Brisbane-based ProppaNow collective (which nurtured Albert’s practice), Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee, for remote artists to abandon tradition and address contemporary issues, like ‘The Intervention’ (The Northern Territory National Emergency Response).15

The Desart mantra is not imposed from above but is the firm conviction of most art centres and its artists, as was very apparent at the Desert Mob symposium this year. Further, while ignoring any reference to contemporary in its branding, perhaps in the cause of clarity, Desart recognises that the contemporary cannot be abandoned. As if aware that contemporary art is something more than art made today, a new paradigm has emerged in Desart rhetoric: innovation. Rothwell put it this way in his review of Desert Mob this year: Tradition remains at the heart of desert art-making; the preservation and refinement of tradition have been the core of the movement throughout the 24 years since Desert Mob was first staged in Alice Springs—but innovation is the magic in the mix, the vital spur.16 By innovation Desart seems to mean new media and new methods of art making rather than new content, as if innovation is a way of being contemporary without any of the transcultural implications implied by current theories of contemporary art. Rather than transculturate you can innovate. Thus the drive to innovate has not compromised the ideology of Aboriginality that underpins Desart’s approach. Rothwell might judge that, “It is no accident that the three chief examples of fierce innovation on view in the galleries of Araluen were all produced in community art centres with keen-eyed new co-ordinators at the helm”, but he says, “whatever is new in technique or palette is swiftly woven into the patterns of the past.”17 Culture triumphs over art, being triumphs over becoming. And, somewhat ironically, while new media is a feature of contemporary art, much contemporary art is not adverse to the archaic and outmoded.

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Albert, a mixed rather than new media artist, follows in the footsteps of those urban Aboriginal artists who, in the 1980s, turned decisively towards the values of contemporary art. First evident in the transcultural styles of Trevor Nickolls and Lin Onus and the hybrid curatorial strategy of the exhibition Balance (1990), it came of age in the more radical work of Gordon Bennett. Bennett, who repudiated the label “Aboriginal art” for a more cosmopolitan position, was the most articulate artist of his generation. Fluently speaking the rhetoric of the new postcolonial cosmopolitanism in a talk in London in 1994, he rejected “the grounds of any ethnic essentialism”—what he called the “trap” of “Aboriginality”—and the polarisation of “identity into black and white opposites”.18 Bennett’s bête noir was racism, not whiteism.

He never denied his Aboriginal (or British) heritage, but he was dismissive of the discourse of Aboriginality and its identity politics, which he believed was a form of primitivism that locked anyone tarred with the name “Aborigine” out of the contemporary artworld.

He wasn’t an anti-Aboriginal artist, but an Aboriginal artist: he put the name in erasure.

While you won’t find this sort of thinking on the Desart website, the thirty threeyear old Albert is keen to keep it alive. Bennett’s work has been pivotal to his practice. Albert’s winning work for this year’s $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize (which has no racial or ethnic entry requirements), Once upon a time (2013)14, is a typical Albert rap of different images that, in this case, relate to racism in sport.

His trademark roundel/target is a recurring motif, and also included is a letter to Gordon Bennett—which is not his first homage. If Desart foregrounds culture, Albert’s call, quoted at the beginning of this text, was taken from an article in The Australian newspaper with the headline: ‘Prize plea: don’t frame art by culture’. Albert’s point however, is not that we have to choose between art and culture, but a simpler one: there is no one Aboriginal culture. It is plural.

Nor does this plurality just reflect the different experiences of urban and remote Aboriginal life.

For example, urban-based Perkins, Croft and Jones are enthusiasts of remote art centres, and divisions between remote centres were even apparent at the convivial Desert Mob symposium this year when Jones made the scathing remark about an unnamed art centre.

Jones was referring to the Ninuku art centre at Kalka, which had invited the Sydney artist Ildiko Kovacs to visit—hardly an unprecedented phenomenon in art centres. Art centres are generally collaborative studios that have built on the traditional collaborative nature of indigenous art production. In this case, Kovacs worked with the Pitjantjatjara artists Molly Nampitjin Miller, Yaritji Connelly and Harry Tjutjuna. While he didn’t say it, Jones was not just expressing a personal opinion. He was also speaking for Pitjantjatjara artists to the east, in the Tjala art centre at Amata, who had objected to the collaborations at the Ninuku art centre.

Also speaking for them was Rothwell: “The line dividing desert custodian and creative visitor is increasingly ambiguous and under threat.”

He reported Tjala’s chairman, Frank Young, saying: A lot of people are trying to get into the world of our stories. Outside people want to come in. When an exhibition’s on, they want to know the real, inner story. And here, this way, in these paintings, now, we draw the line.19 With all the fuss this created, the Ninku artists were moved to write a letter of support for Kovacs, who had been caught in the crossfire between two communities. Doctrinal tensions between eastern and western Pitjantjatjara recently boiled over in another project, the Ngintaka exhibition in Adelaide. They might share the same Dreaming story, but what is public to one is secret to another; and one can add, what is public one day can be secret another. Such differences between and even within Aboriginal communities is nothing new.

For example, after playing an Aboriginal outlaw in Tim Burstall’s The Naked Country (1985), Lewis—who is from Ngukurr country—had a “death warrant” put on him by “elders back home… blaming me that I was selling culture to be famous. Bit like Salman Rushdie, but in an Australian version”,20 he quipped. As Albert said, “our culture is completely different from place to place”.

Aboriginal culture is a highly politicised space because, as in any mix of diverse cultures or nations, there are many transcultural tensions and unresolved differences at work. It is no different in urban zones. For example, Boomalli, the Aboriginal Artists cooperative established in Sydney in 1987, withdrew its support from Balance (Queensland Art Gallery, 1990), an exhibition

being organised by the Campfire collective in Brisbane, which included the likes of Bell, because a third of the artists in the exhibition were white. Like Desart, Boomalli generally presents itself as a community rather than a contemporary arts organisation.

Modern Aboriginal politics is an outcome of the history of global anti-colonial struggles that themselves have not been immune to internal differences. On the one hand, black nationalism and pan-Africanism of diasporic African communities in America and Europe have been very influential. They drew on the same ideologies that inspired nationalist movements across the world, their closest parallel being contemporary Jewish activists, who sought to secure a homeland, as if the cause of their oppression was their own diasporic existence. Paradoxically, this Jewish yearning for a national homeland was imagined in terms of the very ideologies that, in the twentieth century, instigated the Holocaust: racism and nationalism.

There were also prominent opponents of Jewish and black nationalisms. For example, Jewish intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin opposed Zionism (Jewish nationalism) with a diasporic cosmopolitanism. Similarly, Edouard Glissant, Stewart Hall and Okwui Enwezor opposed black nationalism with “creolisation”. Black nationalism, said Hall, “is predicated on the notion of ‘roots’, whereas creolisation deploys the logic of ‘routes’.” For the black nationalists, he continued, “creolisation is a disaster, because it weakens by an intolerable ‘mixing’ or hybridity the purity of faith and ‘tribe’, and commitment to a redemptive return.”21

A similar range of positions division is evident in Aboriginal politics. While echoes of Aboriginal nationalism could be heard in Australia in the earlier twentieth century, it didn’t really emerge as a political movement and ideology until the late 1960s and then rarely in a fully blown separatist form. Rather, it sought to organise Aborigines on a national level as if they were a parallel nation within the Australian nation united around the notion of Aboriginality. Its best known advocate, university educated Charles Perkins, admitted that it was a view to which his own Arrernte people, from which he had been taken did not subscribe. His support came from a similarly educated and emerging urban Aboriginal intelligentsia that took much of its inspiration from the black rights movement in the USA.

71

Its moment in the sun was the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. At the time Chicka Dixon commented: “Looking back on the movement, from the time we went on the 1966 Freedom Rides... things have changed tremendously. In those days you could only get two blacks involved—me and Charlie Perkins—with a lot of white students on a bus. Today when you ask blacks to move on a certain issue, you can get a heap of them.”22

The Tent Embassy even had its own flag—all the trappings of a nation but without a territory or a central government. However, its principal causes, Land Rights and selfdetermination, mean something very different to the urban diaspora than it does to those living close to their homelands in remote Australia, such as those who formed the Papunya Tula cooperative in the year of the Tent Embassy.

The idea of an Aboriginal nation never really took hold. Ironically, the idea of Aboriginality has had a greater impact on how white Australians conceive their national identity than on orchestrating an Aboriginal nationalism.

Despite the flag, Aboriginal Australia is much more like a cosmopolitan space, a series of localities organised in a network of relations, than a nation. If they have a sense of unity it is not political but cosmological—a point that Walter Benjamin also made about Jews.

While nationalism was a product of the colonial era, the cosmopolitan model better reflects the post-national globalism today—though this might strike activists who every day have to deal with the institutions of the nation-State as naïve. Remote Aboriginal art and the art centre model are well placed to prosper in a globalised space of the contemporary artworld, if the art centre envisages itself as a collaborative transcultural space, in which difference is something to be translated and brokered rather than jealously guarded. This in fact is what’s happening. And I don’t just mean that the kids are on facebook and the artists have mobile phones. The opening act at the Desert Mob symposium—an example of innovation—concerned the collaboration between the Sydney filmmaker Lynette Wallworth, the New York transgender singer Antony—of Antony & The Johnsons—and Martu artists from the Martumili Art Centre.

It was shown at the recent Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and its overly romantic view of remote Aboriginal life no doubt suited the Desart agenda, just as it will draw the ire of

Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee. Currently the Italian artist Georgina Severi is doing a collaborative artwork with Balgo artists for next year’s Venice Biennale. Art centres take their artists back to country and out into the world.

There is not necessarily a problem with the Desart mantra “Aboriginal traditional law or culture is the foundation for all the art”.

Arguably, traditional culture provides remote artists with the confidences to engage the wider world, and strengthens the sense of the local that globalisation is in the process of liberating from the nation-State. But what is the point of tradition if it is simply something behind which to retreat, as if the purpose of tradition for artists is “to defend their children and grandchildren from the dark temptations of modernity”23—to quote Rothwell speaking for Hector Burton and some other men from Amata. Tradition is only of any use if it is a launching pad into, and a way of engaging with, the contemporary globalising world.

The governing assumption of the Aboriginalonly Telstra Award, and others such as the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards, might be founded on a dubious idea of Aboriginality, but because they are open to all Aboriginal artists and emphasise art not culture, they better reflect the radical differences of Aboriginal art than Desert Mob, and in so doing inadvertently put the myth of Aboriginality under erasure.

If, like Allan Myers, you are uneasy judging “the artistic work of an inner-city born and bred Australian who identifies as indigenous against the work of someone who has been brought up in traditional culture in a remote location”, then I suggest you stick with Desert Mob, where the world can seem a long way away.

Notes 1 Quoted in Margo Neale, ‘Art Centres are “our” stories’, address to the Desert Mob symposium, 2012. Thanks to Margo for sending me a copy of the address

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

6

ibid.

7

Neale, op cit.

8 Philip Watkins, art centre panel, 15 September 2011, Canberra 9

Neale, op cit.

10

Stuart Hall, ‘Creolisation, Diaspora and Hybridity in the Context of Globalisation’, in Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo and Others eds, Créolité and Creolisation: Documenta 11_ Platform3, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003: 185-98 (190-91).

11 Quoted in Kieran Finnane, ‘Desert Mob: This Is Who We Are’, Alice Springs News, 10 September 2014; http://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/2014/09/10/this-is-whowe-are/; Accessed 19 September 2014 12 Jeremy Eccles, ‘War Declared’, Aboriginal Art Directory; http://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2011/04/war-declared. php; Accessed 27 September 2014 13 Nicolas Rothwell, ‘A Grand Tradition Flourishes in a Tumult of Desert Colours ‘, The Australian, 18 September 2014 14 Lance Bennett, ‘Aboriginal Participation: “Ground Painting” Made by 12 Members of the Warlpiri Tribe’, D’un Autre Continent: L’australie Le Rève Et Le Réel, Paris: ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983: 41-64 15 See Archie Moore, ‘Black Eye = Black Viewpoint: A Conversation with Proppanow’, Machine 1/4, 2006: 2-4 16 Rothwell, ‘A Grand Tradition Flourishes in a Tumult of Desert Colours ‘; http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/agrand-tradition-flourishes-in-a-tumult-of-desert-colours/ story-e6frg8n6-1227061874321; accessed 19 September 2014 17

ibid.

18

Bennett, ‘The Non-Sovereign Self (Diaspora Identities)’: 120, 125 19 Nicolas Rothwell, ‘Mysteries of Desert Kings Stay Concealed among the Trees’, The Australian, 1 March, 2012 20 Monica Tan, ‘Tom E Lewis: An Aboriginal Lear on Walking the Black/White Divide’, The Guardian, 16 September 2014; http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-cultureblog/2014/sep/16/tom-e-lewis-an-aboriginal-lear-on-walkingthe-blackwhite-divide; accessed 25 September 2014 21

Hall, op cit: 39

22

Cited in Julia Martinez, ‘Problematising Aboriginal Nationalism’, Aboriginal History vol. 21, 1997: 133-47 (140) 23 Nicolas Rothwell, ‘Mysteries of desert kings stay concealed among the trees’, The Australian, 1 March, 2012; http://www. theaustralian.com.au/arts/mysteries-of-desert-kings-stayconcealed-among-the-trees/story-e6frg8n6-1226285518199

2

Stuart Hall, in ‘Open Session’, Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo and Others eds, Créolité and Creolisation: Documenta 11_Platform3, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003: 47-59 (54)

3 Nicolas Rothwell, ‘Desert Mob Lays out the Legacy’, The Australian, 13 September, 2012a; http://www. theaustralian.com.au/arts/desert-mob-lays-out-the-legacy/ story-e6frg8n6-1226472919897; Accessed 13 September 2012 4 Richard Meyer, ‘Warhol’s Clones’, in Monica Dorenkamp, and Richard Henke eds, Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, New York: Routledge, 1995: 98-99. See also Douglas Crimp, ‘Getting the Warhol We Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture’, In[ ]visible Culture, 1999; https:// www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/crimp/crimp. html; Accessed 25 September 2014 5

Amos Aikman, ‘Prize Plea: Don’t Frame Art by Culture’, The Australian, 9 August 2014

Page 65 Nici Cumpston Scar Tree, Barkindji country, 2014 Page 67 Kieren Karritpul Yerrgi, 2013 Page 68 Alick Tipoti Kaygasiw Usul, 2013 All photographs courtesy the artists All photography by Nicholas Gouldhurst

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