Contemporary Visual Art + Culture BROADSHEET | 43.2

contemporary visual art+culture

broadsheet CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

VOLUME 43.2_2014

www.greenaway.com.au

www.gagprojects.com

June 25 — July 25 :

Juz Kitson

July 30 — August 31 :

Nicholas Folland / Jack Trolove

August 13 — 17 : GAGPROJECTS at Melbourne Art Fair Dani Marti / Ariel Hassan / Juz Kitson / Julia Robinson / Jenny Watson / Sally Smart

]

David Griggs

[

September 3 — 28 :

39 Rundle Street, Kent Town, SA 5067, Australia

GAGProgram 6/14 - 9/14

Julia Robinson, ‘Twitch’, 2012, boiled wool, thread, timber, press studs, fabric, 130x50x30 cm

boat-people, Daniel Boyd, Søren Dahlgaard, Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Karla Dickens, Fiona Foley, Tony Garifalakis, Sandra Hill, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Romaine Moreton, Nasim Nasr, Polixeni Papapetrou, Elizabeth Pedler, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, The Telepathy Project (Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples) and The Tjanpi Desert Weavers Project with Fiona Hall

CurAtors: Natalie KiNg aNd djoN MuNdiNe

16 August – 16 November 2014 oPENING Hours Tuesday to Sunday 11:00am – 5:00pm Open public holidays PRINCIPAL SPONSOR

ADMIssIoN $7.50 adults; $5 seniors; pensioners, students and children free MAJOR PARTNER

In partnership with the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development

t (03) 5957 3100 E museum@twma.com.au 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Rd, Healesville, Victoria MAJOR SPONSOR

www.twma.com.au This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body

Tony Garifalakis The hills have eyes (detail) 2012. fabric collage 170 x 127 cm Courtesy of the artist

Contributors Zanny Begg: Sydney-based artist, theorist and curator; PhD in Art Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, (2012); director, Tin Sheds Gallery (2010-14); her recent curatorial projects include Baadlands: An Atlas of Experimental Cartography, The Right to the City, Tin Sheds Gallery and There Goes The Neighbourhood, Performance Space, Sydney Rebecca Coates: Melbourne-based curator, writer and lecturer. She teaches contemporary art history and art curatorship in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne Alan Cruickshank: Editor Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet and Executive Director Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Adelaide since 2000; prior to that artist, writer, and independant curator and publisher since 1980; publisher of numerous catalogues, mongraphs and anthologies since 2004 through the CACSA Pedro de Almeida: Program Manager, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; writer of essays, reviews and interviews for American Suburb X, Art Monthly Australia, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture BROADSHEET, Photofile and the occasional exhibition catalogue Fulya Erdemci: Istanbul-based curator and writer; curator 2013 Istanbul Biennial; curator 2011 Turkey Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale; Director, SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte) Foundation for Art and Public Domain, Amsterdam 2008-12

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

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); Co-founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN); currently teaches in the Painting Studio, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney

Subscriptions: Contact the Administrator, Contemporary Art Centre of SA—admin@cacsa.org.au

Adam Geczy: Sydney-based artist and writer, and lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts; most recent exhibition (in collaboration with Blak Douglas aka Adam Hill) BOMB, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art (AAMU), Utecht, Holland; editor of the Australiasian Journal of Popular Culture, his latest book (with Vicki Karaminas) is Queer Style (Bloomsbury)

RICHARD GRAYSON UK Artist, lecturer and writer, London

Kon Gouriotis: Sydney-based independent visual arts curator and writer, currently the Director of Artist Projects; recent curatorial projects are Longitude/Latitude: Stephen Copland and Generation 5; or The Little Homonculus: John von Sturmer; has also held various visual arts leadership roles including, Director, Australian Centre for Photography, Director Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts, and Director Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, all Sydney Wes Hill: Art writer, artist and curator who lectures in art theory and curatorial studies at Southern Cross University; has a PhD in art history from the University of Queensland; regularly published in visual art magazines and journals such as Artforum, Frieze and Art & Australia. Speciality research areas include contemporary art, the ‘folkloric’ and the nature and representation of ‘criticality’ in cultural practice.

Curated exhibitions include This is what I do (Metro Arts, Brisbane, and Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart), and Living Things (Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore). As an artist specialising in the medium of installation, he has exhibited with Wendy Wilkins as ‘Wilkins Hill’ at numerous national art institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art and Artspace, Sydney, and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Natalie King: Melbourne-based curator, writer, editor and Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne; prior to this was the Director of Utopia, a pan-Asian incubator at Asialink; curated exhibitions for numerous museums including the Singapore Art Museum, National Museum of Art, Osaka, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tjibaou Cultural Centre, New Caledonia and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; co-editor of the anthology Art in the Asia Pacific: Intimate Publics, Routledge, 2014 with Larissa Hjorth (RMIT) and Mami Kataoka (Mori Art Museum) Andrew Mackenzie: Director at the Melbourne-based architecture and design niche publisher URO, and director at the architectural consultancy CityLab; a contributing editor to Architecture Australia and has recently taken up the position of the Australasian correspondent for Architecture Review UK; an independent writer on art, architecture and design for the Australian Financial Review and other publications both within Australia and beyond; prior to this Editor-In-Chief of Architectural Review Australia, (Inside) Australia Design Review and the design portal australiandesignreview.com.au; has worked across the fields of architecture, art and design for over twenty-five years as an editor, curator, writer, documentary maker and artist Guy Mannes-Abbott: London-based writer, essayist and critic; author of a singular series of texts: poems, stories and aphorisms called e.things, which have been exhibited, published and performed alongside the work of leading British and International artists; In Ramallah, Running (2012) is the longest and latest in this series of texts and projects; recently collaborated with Bombay-based CAMP on a film for Folkestone Triennial Djon Mundine: OAM is a member of Bundjalung people of northern NSW; has an extensive career as a curator, activist, writer, and occasional artist. In 2005-06 he undertook a residency at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan as a Research Professor in the Department of Social Research, prior to which he was Senior Consultant and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; has taught at the National Art School, Canberra and has held curatorial positions at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. More recently, he was Indigenous Curator–Contemporary Art at the Campbelltown Art Centre presenting Sunshine State–Smart State and More Than My Skin exhibitions; currently a PhD candidate at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales Ahmet Öğüt: Turkish conceptual artist living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands; works with a broad range of media including video, photography, installation, drawing and printed media; represented Turkey in the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennial, 2009 Chris Reid: Adelaide-based freelance writer on contemporary art and music; has an MVA from the University of SA and briefly lectured there. He is a former Board member of the CACSA

volume 43.2 JUNE 2014

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:

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 RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia/Finland Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Faculty Member, Post-Graduate Studies, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic TONY GODFREY Singapore/Manila Art historian, writer, curator SIMON REES Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki, Auckland

Australia:

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

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

volume 43.2 JUNE 2014

COVER: Daniel Boyd, Untitled, 2014; oil, charcoal and archival glue on canvas 81.5 x 71 cm., from The TarraWarra Biennial 2014: Whisper in My Mask, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne 16 August–16 November, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne. Photography by Mick Richards.

14 the politics of withdrawal 14

Neither here nor there: biennales and global culture Alex Gawronski

20 a question of ethics

The Biennale of Sydney and artists’ protest Ahmet Öğüt | Zany Begg

22 art does not come from a clean white room

Biennales, corporate sponsorship and dirty money Fulya Erdemci | Alan Cruickshank

26 be careful what you wish for The Biennale of Sydney Adam Geczy 36

31 imagination and desire

The Biennale of Sydney Pedro de Almeida

36 to boycott or who to boycott: from the guggenheim adu dhabi, sydney and istanbul biennials, to boots and brecht Guy Mannes-Abbott

40 whisper in my mask

An interview with the curators of The TarraWarra Biennial Natalie King | Djon Mundine | Alan Cruickshank

40

44 ngv now

Melbourne Now Andrew Mackenzie

49 melbourne then, melbourne now, and melbourne’s future Melbourne Now Rebecca Coates

53 the outmoded in contemporary digital culture On Claire Bishop’s ‘Digital Divide’ Wes Hill

57 #nofilter 44

On the (digital) photography of Michael Cook and Joseph McGlennon Pedro de Almeida

61 the art of making

Evaluating the art of Johnnie Dady Chris Reid

64 khaled sabsabi and the infinite

Khaled Sabsabi’s 70,000 Veils Kon Gouriotis

69 two and a half

Intolerance and freedom of speech Alan Cruickshank 61

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/

SOUND SERIES : PERCH EXHIBITION AND PERFORMANCES FROM 31 JULY TO 2 AUGUST CATHERINE CLOVER in collaboration with ALICE HUI-SHENG CHANG and VANESSA TOMLINSON Curated by ANDREW TETZLAFF WWW.BLINDSIDE.ORG.AU

Sound Series: Perch has been supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.

BLINDSIDE is supported by the City of Melbourne.

Catherine Clover akk akk akk (detail), 2013 courtesy of the artist

James Dodd, Exit, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist, Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

sabotage in conjunction with the 2014 SALA FESTIVAL

JAMES DODD 25 JULY_29 AUGUST. 2014

Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia 14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063

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

+618 82 72 26 82 cacsa.org.au

BLUE DISTANCE IZABELA PLUTA 3 June – 4 July PRESSURE VESSEL PAUL GREEDY 29 July – 29 August

UTS GALLERY Level 4, 702 Harris St Ultimo, NSW 2007 art.uts.edu.au | @+/utsart Image: Izabela Pluta Fibonacci collage #4 2014 (detail) Untitled-3 1

2/06/14 12:43 PM

26 JUNE - 10 AUGUST

Justene Williams The Curtain Breathed Deeply A major new commission supported by Catalyst: Katherine Hannay Visual Arts Commission

Artspace is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. Artspace is assisted by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Artspace is a member of CAOs (Contemporary Art Organisations Australia).

43–51 Cowper Wharf Road Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 Sydney Australia www.artspace.org.au

T +61 2 9356 0555 artspace@artspace.org.au Gallery 11am–5pm, Tues–Fri and 12pm-4pm, Sat-Sun

Image: Justene Williams, The Curtain Breathed Deeply, 2014, production still, courtesy of the artist, Sarah Cottier Gallery and Artspace, Sydney

Mother Nature is a Lesbian Political Printmaking in South Australia 1970s-1980s 10 May - 13 July 2014 Flinders University City Gallery State Lib rary of Sout h Aust ralia North Terrace, Adelaide Tue - Fri 11 - 4, Sat & Sun 12 - 4 www.flinders.edu.au/artmuseum Anarchist Feminist Poster Collective, Mother Nature is a Lesbian (detail) 1981, serigraph, colour inks on paper, 38 x 51.3cm, FUAM 2879.007, courtesy the artist

MUMA

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS

Fiona connor: WALLWORKS 18 July – 20 September 2014

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

Fiona Connor Box of wall labels found in collection storage, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne photo: Andrew Curtis

south australian living artists festival

1 – 24 AU GU ST 2 01 4

salafestival.com

Artist: Nicholas Folland, Untitled (study) 2014

www.unisa.edu.au/sasa-gallery

Image: Brigita Ozolins, The Secretary, 2013-4 From the upcoming SASA Gallery exhibition, Book Futures

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26/05/2014 3:01:26 PM

Cao Fei, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning, 2007 RMB City developed by Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy) & Vitamin Creative Space Facilitator: Uli Sigg (SL: Uli Sigg Cisse) Photo courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

CAO FEI’S THEATRICAL MIRROR: LIVING IN BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE UNREAL Videoworks 2004–2013 2014 OZASIA FESTIVAL in conjunction with the Adelaide Festival Centre

cao fei (china) 12 SEPTEMBER_20 OCTOBER. 2014

Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia 14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063

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

+618 82 72 26 82 cacsa.org.au

VCA School of Art

Live your art The School of Art offers undergraduate, graduate coursework and research higher degrees in Drawing and Printmedia, Painting, Photography, and Sculpture and Spatial Practice.

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

Melanie Irwin, Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art), Distension (Assembly) 2013.

Our programs include: Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (Visual Art) Graduate Certificate in Visual Art Master of Contemporary Art Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) by Research Applications close 30 September 2014

vca.unimelb.edu.au/art

CRICOS: 00116K

ZO470050

To find out more visit us on Open Day, Sunday 17 August 2014 or at Graduate Study Week, 15-19 September 2014

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time Thomas Merton

S T U DY A RT H I S TORY with THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE and the ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

2014 MID-YEAR POSTGRADUATE COURSES: Modern Australian Art, Curatorial and Museum Studies, MA Dissertation Online courses: Indigenous Art Installation view: Heartland: Contemporary Art from South Australia featuring Yhonnie Scarce The Cultivation of Whiteness.

For more information visit www.arthistory.adelaide.edu.au, phone 08 8313 5746 or email catherine.speck@adelaide.edu.au

the politics of withdrawal

?

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contemporary visual art + culture broadsheet 4 3 . 2 2 014

ALEX GAWRONSKI The recent controversy surrounding founding Biennale of Sydney sponsor, Transfield’s simultaneous operation of the Manus and Nauru Island refugee detention centres ultimately raised some much broader issues. These concerned questions of contemporary global art’s intertwining with what appear to be otherwise opposed phenomena. Indeed, at first glance there could apparently be nothing more diametrically opposed than a multinational corporation capitalising on human suffering and a cultural event, implicitly believed to democratically celebrate global difference.

However, the consternation voiced by local and global art communities over the revelation of Transfield’s parallel operation of detention centres could be viewed as somewhat disingenuous.

Certainly it is no secret that all major global arts events, of which biennales are but one platform, are routinely sponsored by global corporate entities. It is the only way that the resources required to produce, support and promote events of this type and scale might be galvanised.

Crucially though, some greater contemporary concerns arise from this situation, that pertain specifically to a politics of the image and its dissemination, as a dissimulation serving to maintain a notion of art as inherently idealistic. Such an image is historically bound by the politics of German idealist philosophy most apparent during the late eighteenth century at the advent of Romanticism. Moreover, from a contemporary global perspective, the dissimulatory politics of images and their constant circulation, speak in the end to two conjoined images of containment, the one literal and laid bare, and the other concealed behind a discourse of democratic liberalism. The latter discourse uses art imagery and cultural events like biennales to create an artificial separation between ‘real life’ political manifestations and a cultural sphere where such events might be illustrated negatively—but only as a means of proving the ethical superiority of a particular image of an enlightened contemporary culture. The increasing scale and number of biennales globally further succeeds in concealing the true economic base of these events. The circulation of a surfeit of often predictably spectacularised and ‘participatory’ art diverts audience attention from thoughts of where such art comes from in the first place. And again that is true, even if such art contains critical references to contemporary political realities. Fatigue and boredom also underscore the inflated expansion of biennales, where there is always too much to see.

Similarly, there is increasing evidence of an analogous fatigue with contemporary forms of democracy, where genuine participation is barely representational. Curiously, this fatigue is conditioned by the imperative to produce more and at all times, even if today post-Fordist work dynamics make it seem as though there were more free time and less control from external sources.

Of course, given art’s idealist lineage, the seeming ‘solution’ faced with unethical activity is protest and the supposed subversion of existing frameworks by highlighting such transgressions within them. But as is well understood, this is precisely how

such events function ‘democratically’ to continually absorb otherwise indigestible content. On the contrary, perhaps the answer lies in a politics of active withdrawal, not as a simple binary act of protest, but as a specific, in fact non-defeatist, attitude towards life and art. With this year’s Biennale of Sydney, the issue of withdrawal arose most literally in relation to a highly publicised open letter drafted to the Board by a working group of concerned artists. This letter expressed the artists’ misgivings about Transfield’s tainted sponsorship of the exhibition. Collectively they stated: [W]e will not accept the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, because it is ethically indefensible and in breach of human rights; and that, as a network of artists, arts workers and a leading cultural organisation, we do not want to be associated with these practices.1 Despite this, while initially calling for a boycott of the exhibition, at no point in the letter itself did the artists threaten overtly to withdraw their participation, understandably locating responsibility with the Biennale of Sydney as an institution and not with Juliana Engberg as the curator. Events took an even more interesting turn when following on from the threat of further artist withdrawals, the Biennale of Sydney issued its own statement explaining its intention to sever ties with Transfield thereby, according to some, endangering the Biennale’s future altogether.2 This decision coaxed most of those artists intending to withdraw their work back to the exhibition.

Not wanting in any way to underestimate Transfield’s involvement with Australian operated detention centres, it is true that it is but one of many examples of the ways by which art is actually brought to public attention. From a historical perspective, even aspects of some of modernism’s most revered avant-gardes were financially buoyed by corporate funds. More generally, it took the commercialisation of art to allow it to be seen as autonomous, that is, free from explicit use to State and religious institutions.

Recently, protests arose over Turkey’s largest conglomerate Koç Holding’s sponsorship of the 2013 Istanbul Biennale, over its activities as a producer of arms and military hardware and, as has been claimed, a corporation with many vested interests in the strategic urban and touristic transformation of the city of Istanbul.3 Contemporaneously, it has come to the attention of human rights organisations, and argued by cultural theorists like British artist Guy Mannes-Abbott4, that construction works connected to the Abu Dhabi branches of the prestigious Louvre and Guggenheim museums are being carried out by migrant construction workers who daily “face destitution, internment and deportation”.5 Finally, the routine interconnection of large-scale, global cultural events put forth as celebrating such things as “happy anarchy”6 and the harsh realties of their means of facilitation, point to a fundamental disjunction between the way the art world operates and how its institutions choose to represent themselves.

THE POLITICS OF WITHDRAWAL

The origins of this disjunction stem from a basically Romantic conception of the artist as an unassailable idealist, whose task is to make the world ‘better’, even if indirectly. Ironically, this occurs at precisely the same time that “artists imitate a product particular to the post-industrial economy: the administrative, affective, and intellectual power of institutions”.7 It is no surprise then that art institutions themselves have begun internalising this idealism habitually believed to be a defining characteristic of artists. Such idealistic self-representations are then re-voiced via institutional and corporate structures, such as those underpinning global biennales. For example, an exhibition like Manifesta 5 held in San Sebastián, Spain in 2004 had the theme of “closing one’s eyes” and was conveniently able to implicate itself as being in league with a more general idealistic struggle against social and territorial controls. At the same time, the exhibition could effectively ignore both a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its institutionalising structure and the contested local context in which it was presented.8 In a similar vein, and before any of the controversy surrounding Transfield’s involvement was aired, the 2014 Biennale of Sydney claimed in its press release that the aim of the exhibition was to, [remind] us that powerful art is not divorced from the cultural conditions, political, social and climatic environments in which it is generated. That indeed it often exists to provide a meta-commentary on these aspects of society—and even, sometimes, act as an antidote and proposition. As a future vision.9 Furthermore, it concluded by saying the exhibition, …seeks splendour and rapture in works that remain true to a greater, even sublime visuality. Today these things co-exist and overlap, and the tactics of theatricality cannot be separated from overtly socialsituationist inspired works, just as they are central to works engaging with humanity at a grand scale. Extra energies are sought in works that unleash physical and psychic intensity. A happy anarchy is produced with works that activate the power of imagination through laughter and activity.10 The hyperbolic string of artistic clichés, generalisations and extreme contradictions this statement presents is doubly revealing for its highlighting of an image of contemporary art as a powerful subjective and social force. Never mind that the alleged “anarchy” it purported to embody was simultaneously the result of intense bureaucratic micro-management and immersive media promotion. And despite the use of the sociopolitically loaded word “anarchy”, its inoffensive definition here as “happy”, assured audiences in advance that there was nothing to fear from the exhibition; its humanist engagement “at a grand scale” was wholly metaphoric and therefore ultimately palatable.

The metaphoric and dissimulating aspect of such statements point to a particular politics of the image that is central to contemporary

neoliberal forms of democracy. In the contemporary cultural sphere, biennales are perhaps the most emblematic form of a parallel democracy.

The type of democracy thus evidenced is one in which annunciation is everything, to speak is to present an image of conviction and/or belief.11 The managerial aspects of this type of democracy are highly dependent on self-presentation, where the self is also increasingly conceived as a kind of image to be traded, whether by artists, celebrities or politicians. And this situation occurs in a supposedly borderless and deregulated world where, superficially at least, all images are equal. It is a radically aestheticised form of democracy, where values are levelled of the image and where democratic choice merely represents reproduction of the same. Unsurprisingly, such a vision of democracy is accompanied by the levelling of value under a globalised regime of capital, to which all contemporary phenomena must defer. The repetitiveness of this mechanism of constant deferral to the assumed necessity for concrete measurable values means that in a global art context, images must speak at all times, they must mean something, their social and material value must be made readable and available. Beyond semiotics, the question of meaning in the terrain of the rootless digital imagery that surrounds us, coagulates as a condition where in practice, as presaged by Walter Benjamin, the “image is dialectics at a standstill”, because “the image that is read… [is] the image in the now of its recognisability”.12 Therefore, as far as democracy in both its political and cultural manifestations is concerned, recognisability as repetition and reiteration is paramount.

The cyclical aspects of such a model means that as with the globalised economy and transnational artistic manifestations like biennales, which are increasingly a by-product of it, circulation circulates itself. The meanings expected to be encountered within a biennale, which might even speak of such things as internment or othering, are themselves part of a system of othering and containment. The stasis of the image as the most insistent and inescapable cultural currency of our global-contemporary age —while imagery circulates ad infinitum as at no other moment in history—testifies in fact to a freedom conditioned by the most stringent and covert controls. Recognisability facilitates an essentially informational understanding of content.13

Of course, cultural events like biennales continuously emphasise the role of art as fundamentally communicative.

This would explain as well, why the primacy of the biennale as a Western construct, regardless of where it is situated, begins to function according to a fundamental logic of visuality reminiscent of that developed by the medieval Christian church.14 Despite the fact that visitors to biennales are undoubtedly more literate than their medieval antecedents, the truth remains that both the early Christian church and the diverse displays assembled by biennales rely heavily on the presentation of readable narratives presented in spectacularised visual forms.15 That is not to say that biennales simply enact a crude revivified form of Western colonialism either (although they do that too) but that the global neoliberalism on

17

which they depend16) needs to be able to communicate endlessly in as many diverse contexts as possible, thus the centrality of the images produced by them.17 Biennales need to create an informational environment requiring that viewers submit to learning from them. They inculcate a belief in their educational necessity as a wholly contemporary form of understanding the world visually. In doing so, they preempt a parallel sense of the necessity for their continuity. This assumed need for the continuity of such large-scale transnational cultural expressions, reiterates the repetitive circulatory channels of the contemporary global economy.

As a result, the possibility of offering alternatives that refuse to defer to the production of yet more images is frequently forestalled. This situation is attested today by the fact that there would appear to be almost no other way to imagine a world not wholly enclosed by exchangeable imagery, especially when the images so readily accessible are often undeniably compelling in themselves. This question of the image is not simply literal either: the extreme burgeoning of performative and ‘relational’ practices common to contemporary biennales in no way escape the prevailing regime of the image; their instant consumption as art already creates an image of them. From this point of view, the reduction of human life to “bare life”18, as is most blatantly evidenced by conditions experienced by, for example, the asylum seekers detained at Manus and Nauru Islands, is but the literalisation of a global democratic system that disguises control in the image of fluidity, diversity and free choice.

This situation is also exemplified by the frequently discussed move within current democracies, from industrial to post-Fordist models of labour. In the latter, the figure of the artist is paradigmatic, as artists have long-been expected to be flexible, hardworking, quasi-itinerant, resourceful and willing to produce at short notice for comparatively little economic reward.19 Furthermore, because the artist is in a sense always at work it means that unlike the fixed labour time workers spend in offices or factories, the artist’s labour is perpetually productive.20

In principle, this makes the resultant production of ideas constantly available to deregulated markets, where they can be repeatedly capitalised upon. This is particularly the case in a so-called ‘knowledge economy’ like ours linked to a global system of dematerialsed commerce. Once more, the paradoxical aspect of the contemporary artist’s reinvigorated idealism comes to the fore at exactly the moment, when the work practices he or she believes to be an alternative to consumerist norms, are in fact central to them: the closer the contemporary artist’s work seems to approach ‘real life’ the closer it is to the existing networks of the global economy.21 This would explain why “artists who make lifelike22 art are more inclined to obfuscate their relationship to commerce as biennale artists tend to do”.23 As for biennales as organisations, their parallel championing of contemporary enlightenment rhetoric is equally paradoxical, given that they frequently ape a global schema whose negative effects they profess to criticise. Recognition of this situation would have undeniably

contemporary visual art + culture broadsheet 4 3 . 2 2 014

rendered Transfield’s relationship to the Biennale of Sydney natural rather than compromised.24 Of course, there is a significant dimension of exhaustion and fatigue engendered by this scenario: artists are expected to produce more and more, while biennales are expected to grow ever larger presenting evermore ambitious, that is to say spectacular, art works. The sheer inflation of biennales on every level, even though it means from one point of view there is potentially more ‘good’ work to see within them, becomes exhausting in a normative setting where more is never enough.

Meanwhile, artists who recognise their basically inescapable complicity with the cultural and economic systems they seek to critique are frustrated once they realise that criticism and dissent have become staple spectacles of the institutionalisation of a global contemporary culture that a priori speaks for ‘others’. At the same time, the artist as public citizen is often disillusioned with an image of contemporary democracy that similarly speaks representationally for them, while wholly disregarding their actual values and desires. Considering these basically dystopian circumstances, what is an artist, let alone anyone else, to do? If an artist cannot effectively use predominant structures to criticise them from within, because the results will always be representationally reframed from outside, what, beyond indiscriminately seeking solace in cynicism, should they do? How should they work? In the end, the potential answer demands a much broader speculation on a politics of active withdrawal that refuses to submit to the demands of a global system of insatiable consumptive appetites.

In the most literal sense, returning to the controversy surrounding Transfield’s involvement with both the Biennale of Sydney and offshore detention centres, surely the singularly most forceful protest in such a situation would have been the immediate refusal to participate. It is hard not imagine—and some of the Biennale’s artists obviously did imagine—just how disruptive to an exhibition as visible as the Biennale of Sydney, the sudden appearance within it of empty galleries as zones of nothingness, would have been. Yet, this question of the nothingness that is left in such a scenario is not simply one relating to obstinacy.

Withdrawal then need not be a giving up. This is because it also indicates a very particular recognition of the elusiveness and flexibility of the artist’s choices. Beyond a wholly professionalised vision of contemporary creative activity (of the sort promoted by prevailing econometric discourse) the very ambiguity of what artists do remains. So too does the potential difficulty in reading what artists produce. Jacques Ranciere echoes this understanding, The carpenter, baker, shoemaker, blacksmith, all must remain tied to their stations in life. The ‘office’ of the artist, however, is ambiguous. It is like a phantom profession, one that permits the artist to simultaneously work and not work, to have ‘real’ job, and a fictional job. And nothing is more subversive than showing other workers the pleasure of not engaging in productive labour.25

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The question of withdrawal also suggests a somewhat Situationist celebration of the right to choose not to do certain things and to reconfigure artistic practice as separate from, albeit linked to, a practice of life. And this is definitely not to espouse a romantically bohemian conception of the artist either, as this image has already returned to the global art scene with a vengeance.26 Now the image of the bohemian has been comprehensively professionalised and bears with it stock-in-trade discourses about a return to beauty and a fixation with aesthetics.

Similarly, the recognition of the practice of art as partaking of a broader attitude to a life that refuses, or at least seriously complicates its marketable packaging, cannot be answered by the production of relational art, which is by now so generic as to represent the status-quo. Relational art only succeeds in formalising aspects of life while refusing in its habitual good naturedness to acknowledge that “power is relational”.27 Much relational art favoured by biennales avoids questions of power altogether by embracing the type of communicative and socially interactive processes central to the casually networked systems of power by which neoliberalism operates. And from a different perspective, cultures of militant protest could also been seen as contributing to the structures they despise, because aren’t “the forms of agency that we commonly associate with resistance not modes of high performance themselves?” Don’t they “actually exemplify the core momentum of high performance… they make something happen and deliver an event”.28

The contemporary democratic spectacle of which biennales for better or worse, are increasingly a key part, demand participation and dynamism, constant interaction, communication and discourse, regardless of whether or not artists or individuals are genuinely, or even want to be, engaged.

Things may yet change if we start to think about withdrawal as an active refusal to contribute to the endlessly cyclical production of the language and imagery of freedom as containment, for “reflexive withdrawal… does not entail a retreat into inactivity, but the opening up of a space for radical change”.39 The refusal to appear, or to reappear where least expected, or to disengage in our search for creative “forms of non-alignment, non-compliance, noncompliance, uncooperativeness”30 is an active search for genuine disruption, of a way of living practice contrary to the stasis of its myopic characterisation as nothing but a series of representative professional outcomes.

Notes 1 ‘Open Letter to the Board of the Biennale by Participants of the 19th Biennale of Sydney’; http://xborderoperationalmatters.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/letter-biennaleartists/ 02/02/2014 2

Andrew Taylor, ‘Biennale of Sydney facing uncertain future after severing ties with Transfield’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March, 2014

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6 19th Biennale of Sydney press release at https://www.biennaleofsydney.com. au/19bos/exhibition/exhibition-overview/BoS 7

Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, London: Pluto Press, 201: 152

8 San Sebastián is located in the Basque Autonomous Community and therefore within a region of continuous politico-cultural contestation 9

press release, op cit.

10

ibid.

11

“Advertising, politics, and the media speak a self-declared language. Nobody believes in the truth of public statements. The value of the commodity is established on the basis of a simulation in a relation that no longer follows any rules.” Franco Berardi, After the Future, Gary Genosko & Nicholas Thorburn eds., Oakland & Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011: 116 12

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, trans, 1999: 463

13 “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.” Walter Benjamin quoted in Peter Osborne, Anywhere if not at All, Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London, New York: Verso, 2013: 62 14

And before that, although to a lesser visual extent, the Romans

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Most obviously in Christian churches in the guise of polychromatic stained glass windows 16 “[A]rt biennales demonstrate effectively that a country aims to function within the rules of neoliberalism: liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation”. Alana Jelinek, This is not Art, London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013: 37 17 “If you want to make yourself known everywhere and establish dominion over the world, manufacture images instead of writing books… This is the moral of the story which all empires have known, from the Byzantine to the American.” Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, London, New York: Verso, 1996: 155 18 Giorgio Agamben’s theory of ‘bare life’ relates to a conception of life as a condition of meagre survival, where all sense of aspiration and futurity has been halted. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995 19 “Artists, with their idealism, flexibility and enthusiasm to work even under precarious circumstances, became the role model for a new concept of capitalism.”

See Anthony Davies, Stephen Dillemuth & Jakob Jakobsen, ‘There is No Alternative: The Future Is (Self-) Organised Part 2’ in Stine Herbert & Anne Szefer Karlsen eds., Self-Organised, Hordarland Art Centre, London: Open Editions, 2013: 30 20 In theory that is, not withstanding that most contemporary artists often work other, usually multiple jobs in order to produce work in the first place 21 Thus,”Only a radically failed society could give birth to fantasies of triumphant communality such as relational aesthetics.” Gregory Sholette, op cit: 154 22 Theorist Alana Jelinek conceives ‘lifelike’ art as representing those practices within art aimed at drawing issues of art and daily life closer together. She contrasts this with ‘artlike’ art that is primarily concerned with discourses around art.

See Alana Jelinek, op cit: 102 23

ibid.

24

ibid: 89

25

Jacques Rancière quoted in Gregory Sholette, op cit: 52

26

Such an attitude is clearly evidenced by the language used in the Biennale of Sydney press release 27

Alana Jelinek quoting Michel Foucault in, This is not Art, op cit: 81

3

Ozge Yilmaz, ‘Protests at Istanbul Biennale’, The New Contemporary; http:// thenewcontemporary.com/2013/06/06/turkish-protests-reach-art-scene/, 06/06/2013

Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform’, from a pamphlet edited by Stuart Bailey on the occasion of Art Sheffield 2008: 92

4

29

Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, London, New York: Verso, 2012: 110

30

Jan Verwoert, op cit: 92

See also Guy Mannes-Abbott and Samar Martha, In Ramallah, Running, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012

5

David Batty, ‘Conditions for Abu Dhabi’s migrant workers ‘shame the west’’, The Guardian, 22 December, 2013

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a question of ethics

Ahmet Öğüt | Zanny Begg Curated by Juliana Engberg, the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine what you desire opened in March 2014 overshadowed by weeks of controversy over links between its founding sponsor Transfield and mandatory detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru. Together, and independently, the authors of this text participated in the campaign against Transfield Holding’s sponsorship of the Biennale of Sydney. (Ahmet Öğüt is an Istanbul-based artist—selected by Juliana Engberg to participate in the Biennale—who worked within the group of protesting artists. Zanny Begg is a Sydney-based artist, who hosted the Sydney public meetings and was involved in the public campaign.

Both Begg and Öğüt have been involved in solidarity work with refugees as activists and in their art practice: for example Öğüt is the founder of the Silent University, an autonomous knowledge exchange platform led by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants; and Begg has been helping publish ‘zines created from regular drawing workshops inside detention centres in western Sydney and hosted by the Refugee Art project.)

The issue of Transfield Holding’s sponsorship was first bought to public attention through an online article by University of Western Sydney lecturer Mattew Kiem, published on 4th February on the Crossborder Operational Matters website.1 On the 17th and 18th of February, this issue surged into the public arena with back-to-back meetings in Sydney and Melbourne. A key issue in the early stage of the campaign was the complex corporate structure of the Transfield group, a family company that has grown from its relatively humble beginnings in construction into three legally distinct corporate entities: Transfield Holdings, Transfield Services and Transfield Foundation, only one of which, Transfield Services, is directly involved in the $1.22 billion government contract to operate the offshore mandatory detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

Those involved in the campaign felt that such corporate complexity should not obscure complicity—the links were sufficiently traceable to justify a protest. Both Transfield Services and Transfield Holdings contribute to the Transfield Foundation, through which the arts are sponsored. The three companies are separate entities but trade with the same name, the same logo and form part of the same corporate brand. On 17th February, several weeks of peaceful protests by refugees on Manus Island ended in the brutal attack on refugees by locals, police and detention centre staff that led to the death of one person and injuries to seventy-seven others. Two days later a group of participating Biennale artists, The Working Group, issued an open letter calling for the Biennale Board to “act in the interests of asylum seekers” and “withdraw from the current sponsorship arrangements with Transfield”. The letter was signed by twenty-one of the ninetyfour participating artists, with another twenty-five eventually adding their names to the list. Over one thousand people signed a petition supporting the artist’s demands. The Board’s response was intransigent: “the only certainty is that without our Founding

Partner, the Biennale will no longer exist.” Furthermore the Board threw responsibility for the crisis back onto the artists stating they “must make a decision according to their own understanding and beliefs”.2 Faced with this immovability a smaller group of artists began discussing withdrawing their works from the exhibition.

On 26th February five artists, Libia Castro, Ólafur Ólafsson, Charlie Sofo, Gabrielle de Vietri and Ahmet Öğüt withdrew. They were joined by four more, Agnieszka Polska, Sara van der Heide, Nicoline van Harskamp and Nathan Gray the following week. Simultaneously high profile curators and critics such as Charles Esche and Nikos Papastergiadis added their voices to the protest,3 several exhibition installers walked off the job, a second meeting was held in Sydney, and another major sponsor, The City of Sydney (committed to providing $300,000 for each of the next three Biennales), questioned the Biennale of Sydney’s relationship with Transfield.

On 27th February the “Biennials: Prospects and Perspectives” conference opened at ZKM in Karlsruhe, with a keynote lecture by Ute Meta Bauer, situating future prospects for biennials and referring to several cases including the events in Sydney. She applauded the artists’ decision to withdraw and presented the conference’s audience with pertinent questions concerning corporate sponsorship of the arts. On 4th March, the Biennale of Sydney-Transfield sponsorship issue was raised in Australian Federal Parliament with Green’s Senator Lee Rhiannon moving a motion (defeated by the major parties) in support of the artists.

On 7th March, two weeks before the exhibition’s launch, Biennale Board Chair Luca Belgiorno-Nettis made the surprise decision to step down (a position he had held for over fourteen years) with the Board announcing it was severing its forty-four years of association with Transfield, founder of the Biennale of Sydney in 1973. After Belgiorno-Nettis’ resignation, seven of the nine artists who had announced their withdrawal—Libia Castro, Nathan Gray, Ólafur Ólafsson, Ahmet Öğüt, Agnieszka Polska, Sara van der Heide and Nicoline van Harskamp —re-entered the exhibition. The two remaining artists Gabrielle de Vietri and Charlie Sofo decided not to.

We have chronicled this rough timeline to convey how quickly the issue unfolded, from initial interest to partial resolution. The campaign against Transfield Holding’s sponsorship of the Biennale of Sydney presented a ‘perfect storm’ combining an irresistible number of important elements each of which was crucial for its success. The decision by the artists to withdraw their works was crucial for the campaign, as it threatened the heart of the exhibition itself. This withdrawal was supported by numerous other forms of withdrawal—the volunteers and installers who walked off the job, locals who withdrew from their collaborative partners, guests who returned their tickets to the opening party, the arts educators who threatened to keep their classes away, the ‘zine makers who organised an alternative ‘zine fair outside

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the Museum of Contemporary Art and so on. Their withdrawal was however, importantly accompanied by a politicised engagement—three public meetings held in Sydney and one in Melbourne, activist group protests outside Biennale events, artists planning protests within Biennale events, the possibility raised of alternative exhibitions and catalogues, the social media campaign, support letters from Australian academics and the marshalling of international pressure on the Biennale. Crucial to the campaign was the role played by a group of participating artists who worked together in researching and analysing the issue and releasing several carefully worded statements and letters.

When embarking on this campaign, both of us were fairly confident it could change the Board’s position. That it only took two and a half weeks was testament both to this collective organising but also the fragility of art institutions that depend on an aura of credibility to maintain their cultural position. While severing the Biennale’s ties with Transfield Holdings did not end the policy of mandatory detention, it gave a fillip for refugees and their advocates. Bilquis Ghani, who came to Australia as a refugee in the 1980s and is a refugee activist, explained at a meeting in Sydney on the 18th of March, “nobody expected that the boycott would end mandatory detention in one swoop. But it does show that artists and members of the public can affect change”.4

On 9th of March Nicholas Pickard, a former arts adviser to the federal and New South Wales governments, wrote an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald arguing that the protest had kicked an “own goal” and that Transfield Services was still contracted in running the mandatory detention centres.5 Our campaign had made it clear that its preferred option was that Transfield maintain funding for the Biennale, but renege on its government contracts for Manus Island and Nauru. Pickard’s article missed the point of our campaign, yet his headline included an inadvertent sting. In the immediate aftermath of the campaign there was a wave of public criticism and accusation. The rapidity of events left little time for the issues and relationships within the campaign to mature: it was as if the Australian art community had barely had time to digest the concept of an art boycott before they were forced to grapple with its victory.

Even if we define this campaign as one simply of ‘cleaning up’ the arts—for many involved it was perceived as broader than this—forcing the Biennale to sever its relationship with Transfield hasn’t affected the latter from continuing to sponsor the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Accessible Arts, the Boards of various art schools, and more. We consider that winning these campaigns will be harder as these institutions are less vulnerable to international pressure and have far more entrenched local structures. Illustrating how difficult it is to sever ties between Transfield and the arts, those artists who rejoined the Biennale after Belgiorno-Nettis’ resignation struggled to find a Biennale venue that wasn’t supported by Transfield.

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Some critics of our campaign have argued that a boycott was pointless as “all money is dirty” and any attempt to disengage from one aspect of capitalism leaves you hypocritically connected to others. For us this was not an argument against divestment, but merely an excuse for inaction—the sponsorship of Transfield had created an environment that we considered no longer compatible with the critical production or consumption of art. In this context we felt it wasn’t simply enough to criticise the policy of detention of refugees within our art: artists were being forced to take social responsibility for issues that had been ignored by institutions and their funding supporters.

One of the recurring criticisms of our campaign was that it was aimed at the wrong target—a divestment campaign exerts pressure on the administrators of mandatory detention but leaves the government unscathed. Those supporting this view argued that targeting the Biennale—which was one step further removed from government policy than Transfield—was hitting a soft target for no gain. We felt that everyone is responsible for his or her immediate sphere of influence and for us as artists this included the Biennale of Sydney. It can be measured how uncomfortable this has made the government, with comments by ministers such as Malcolm Turnbull who accused artists of “vicious ingratitude”, and the heavy-handed response by the Minister for the Arts, George Brandis, who wrote a “strongly worded letter” to the Australian Council for the Arts indicating that he would seek to punish any arts organisations which rejected corporate funding on the basis of ethics; “You will readily understand… that taxpayers will say to themselves: ‘If the Sydney Biennale doesn’t need Transfield’s money, why should they be asking for ours?’”6

The campaign to change the sponsorship arrangements of the Biennale of Sydney made a critical step towards breaking links between our immediate sphere of work and/or influence and mandatory detention. To actually end the policy of mandatory detention, we will need to extend this sphere of influence and those we share it with.

Notes 1 Matthew Kiem, ‘Should Artists Boycott the Biennale over Transfield Links?’, The Conversation; http://theconversation.com/should-artists-boycott-the-sydneybiennale-over-transfield-links-23067, accessed 07/05/14 2 Biennale of Sydney website, http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/wp-content uploads/2014/02/Biennale_of_Sydney_Board_Response_to_Working_Group_21_ February_2014.pdf <http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/wp-content/uploads/ 2014/02/Biennale_of_Sydney_Board_Response_to_Working_Group_21_ February_2014.pdf> , accessed 04/04/14 3 Helen Hughes and Nicholas Croggon, ‘Biennale of Sydney 2014 and Transfield: A Discussion’, Discipline magazine, accessed 07/05/14 4 Bilquis Ghani, 18 March, 2014, speaker on the panel “Making Art on the Run, Imagining Change, Desiring Freedom”, as part of the COFA Public Lecture Series 5 Nicholas Pickard, ‘Arts kicks own goal in Biennale of Sydney stoush and risks vital clash’, The Sydney Morning Herald, http://www.smh.com.au/comment/arts-kicksown-goal-in-biennale-of-sydney-stoush-and-risks-vital-clash-20140308-34dzu.html, accessed 07/05/14 6

Chris Kenny, ‘Sydney Biennale “shame” risks funding, says George Brandis’, The Australian, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/sydney-biennaleshame-risks-funding-says-george-brandis/story-fn59niix-1226853051859#

art does not come from a clean white room FULYA ERDEMCI | ALAN CRUICKSHANK Broadsheet/Alan Cruickshank: You visited Sydney in the aftermath of the Transfield-Biennale of Sydney corporate sponsorship drama, that saw a small group of artists withdraw in protest at the commercial links between that company that sponsors the Biennale and the Australian government’s policy of mandatory offshore detention of refugees, the Biennale of Sydney initially standing its ground on its association with Transfield, then capitulating after the dramatic resignation of the Biennale Board Chair (who also happened to be Chair of the corporate sponsor).

There have been polemic views expressed in the media and arts sector about the outcome of these events, the opportunistic mixing of minority group politics for political gain with the vexations of government and corporate funding of the arts, the impulsiveness of the protesters and their apparent mimicry of similar events over last year’s Istanbul Biennial, a coercive if not threatening government response, the sponsorship cessation seen as an “own goal” pyrrhic victory and the uncertain impact upon the corporate realm’s desire for future funding of the arts without being caught up in similar political complications.

Many pages of this issue of Broadsheet are focused on a spectrum of issues, of a dilemma of amplifying proportions for not only the Biennale of Sydney and any other Australian arts institution with or seeking significant corporate sponsorship, but for the future relationship between art, corporate goodwill and government scrutiny. The Biennale of Sydney is not alone in finding itself in the middle of an unsought sponsorship-and-credibility dilemma. The 13th Istanbul Biennial, of which you were the artistic director, in the lead up to its presentation in September 2013 had preliminary programming and performances interrupted by activists protesting against the influential (and Turkey’s top industrial conglomerate) Koç Holding, the sponsor of the Biennial, and the İKSV, which is funded by the industrial group Eczacıbaşı Holding. Broadsheet has covered these events in prior issues.

Having experienced both the Sydney and Istanbul events to varying degrees, in responding to the question of corporate sponsorship of the arts and ‘dirty money’ you responded categorically that, “art does not come a clean white room”.

Fulya Erdemci: Actually, art’s relation with power is a historical one. Just to take a look at the Italian High Renaissance —art’s interconnectedness with the Church, Medicis or the Monarchs—indicates this long-term relationship. What I am trying to articulate is that the production relations and representational regimes of art cannot be abstracted from the systems that it realises itself. It takes form in the middle of the systems/economies/societies that it responds to. However, unlike many other fields, art has the capacity to unfold critically the systems—from within—that it takes part in. Since 1970s, artists such as Hans Haacke, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Martha Rosler, Andrea Fraser or more recently Hito Steyerl have been working around the issues in connection with art, capital and institutional critique.

Along with neo-liberal funding policies, art institutions have become more dependent on private funding and commercial support globally, and have thus been criticised, protested against and boycotted for serving to whitewash ‘dirty money’, as well as for being the epicentres of the distribution of neoliberal culture and mechanisms. As you mentioned in the introduction, because of its funding sources, a group of activists protested against the 13th Istanbul Biennial starting from the first press conference in January 2013 onwards, while the 19th Biennale of Sydney was boycotted by the participating artists just before its opening date for the same reason and the Biennial responded to the protests with the resignation of its Chair. The Manifesta Biennial that will be realised in St. Petersburg in June 2014, on the other hand, has been criticised and boycotted because of the legal pressure on gay rights in Russia. In a way, biennials have become more politicised international platforms and the target of protests to bring crucial issues to the attention of larger publics, while through the art projects examining the art system critically, they have also become the prime sites for institutional critique.

For instance, Hito Steyerl’s Is a museum a battlefield?

(2013) a lecture-performance and videowork produced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial is exactly unfolding the relationship between art institutions and power. Unfolding the historical alliances of art spaces and museums with power, she alludes to the nature of art institutions as war zones. With the same token Steyerl asks what potential connection exists between the funders of Istanbul Biennial and the military industry.1

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Broadsheet: In an online interview, Turkish artist Ahmet Öğüt, one of the protesting Biennale of Sydney artists who, after having withdrawn in protest then returned to exhibit, in response to the question how artists might have the most impact on a political situation, either through their participatory artwork or by their withdrawal, responded; Since I make no distinctions between art and life, I don’t see a need to choose one of these two options. I rather see it as fusion of both. For me, the argument [is] that ‘all money is dirty’ should not be used as an excuse to deliberately compromise social responsibility. Simply providing space for criticism is an attempt to place all the responsibility on the shoulders of the artists.

Institutions and curators should share this collective responsibility by being critical, in a creative way, of their own administrative structures and bureaucratic agendas. Artists have a right to act, when necessary, beyond the body of their works—if the institutions and their funders undermine their social values and basic human rights.2 Publicly voicing one’s opinion is unquestionably acceptable practice, but it would seem inconclusive in this context that a minority influence might presume a validity or defendability to materially disrupt and/or economically subvert a significantly larger cultural entity that professionally represents more than their composition. As a sporting example (perhaps somewhat anathema to The Arts in Australia), it is commonly held that ‘the game is bigger than the individual’ (who professionally plays it and receives significant remuneration), with codes of behaviour and contractual agreements. Even sportspeople, no different from other citizens, though seemingly removed from the perceived intellectual certainty of the Left and The Artworld, equally have the right to a moral determination and expression, as did one team of professional basketballers in the USA (at the time of writing) against their owner for his racist remarks, but their publicly overt group action did not economically sabotage (even by default) the event-platform that professionally supports them.

In returning to your comment above, that biennales are “becoming more politicised platforms”, over an extended period your Istanbul Biennial, though hindered by protests and rupture, nonetheless provided an extended citywide platform for conflicting dialogue—Hito Steyerl’s Is a museum a battlefield? video and performance was a specific example of an artist exercising a “right to act” by occupying a resonant place within that discourse rather than without. Perhaps more intriguingly, and one might wonder how the following premise might stand up in Turkey and other countries experiencing similar issues, was a comment made on an Australian blog at the time of the Biennale of SydneyTransfield issue, a more wary interrogatory perspective, that the actions of the Biennale of Sydney artists were predominantly “about distancing [themselves] from being magically contaminated” by their exposure to ‘dirty money’, that it was an instance of,

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…art’s hopeless striving to make itself pure. Either in believing that purity is art’s ‘natural’ state or in striving to cleanse itself from the perceived filth of [the sponsor], art just wants nothing to do with the dirty world.3 Fulya Erdemci: Today many artists experiment with art and activism to question the limits between these two—perhaps related but different—forms of resistance; for example Group Etcetra from Argentina, or Laurie Jo Reynolds from the USA, whose 2013 award-winning project addressed prison reform through utilising the extensive possibilities of art and the art world.4 Here we can see different shades and grades of experiments and attempts in the practices of mostly socially engaged artists. As I mentioned before, artists have creative potentialities unlike many other fields of activity that are disadvantaged by their absence. Being detached from such potential I see as a missed opportunity, as through their creative acts, artists can create a deeper, longterm impact upon society and its issues, as in the case of Hans Haacke’s “Shapolsky et all. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971”, that remains one of the most resonant examples in relation to urban usurpation and gentrification, as well as institutional critique. The project presented documentation and photographs of one hundred and forty two properties in the lower East side and Harlem in New York in relation to the ownership and control of urban space, and was originally conceived for Haacke’s exhibition at MOMA, in New York. The project however, was cancelled by the director of the museum. This example also points out that even “simply providing space for criticism” is not an easy task for art and cultural institutions that are functioning in the midst of the dominating economic, social, and political coordinates of their time.

This particular work of Haacke not only established a reference point for gentrification and control of urban public spaces, but it also inspired a new generation of artists and activists today. For instance, “Networks of Dispossession” (2013–), an online “collective data compiling, mapping and publishing project on the capital-power relations of urban transformation”initiated by the artist Burak Arikan5 as a part of his practice, but developed further by activists, journalists, lawyers and so on during the Gezi Park resistance. Having been triggered by similar concerns about the unjust transfer of land through urban transformation, “Networks of Dispossession” compiled data on the protagonists of urban transformation in Istanbul and Turkey—being mainly the developers, government and media, to create maps that highlighted the relationship between them. As one of the projects in the 13th Istanbul Biennial it included three maps—of mega projects such as the third bridge across the Bosphorus, airports or dams in Turkey; another of the protagonists and processes that deprive minorities of their properties; and the third on urban transformation protects in Istanbul—that included one of the sponsors of the Istanbul Biennial. Certainly, I can understand the impulse of artists to divorce themselves from ‘dirty money’.

ART DOES NOT COME FROM A CLEAN WHITE ROOM

However, this search for purity—a church of art—has also a dangerous essence in itself and refuses to take the challenge that life poses for us.

In my talk “Impotence of Action and the Search for the Poetic Act” at Artspace Visual Arts Centre in Sydney (27 March, 2014), I mentioned that I learned of the connection between the main sponsor of the Istanbul Biennial and the military industry through the protests, starting from the very first press conference of the Biennial in January 2013. Some people asked afterwards that if I knew about this information before accepting the position of artistic director would I have become involved with the Biennial?

I said at that time, yes definitely, because either we have an extensive international platform to make such situations visible and debatable, or not. I contended that this was an opportunity, through the power of art, to convey such critical issues to public scrutiny and consideration. Certainly, it was a challenging process in every sense, including its administration, but we took up this challenge—my curatorial collaborators, participating artists and the organisers of the Biennial. I believe that it is an urgent task for the art world to open up discourse on such burning issues and start institutional critique from within the system for change.

Broadsheet: At this stage the fate of the Biennale of Sydney‘s funding and international reputation is unknown. It would be reasonable to presume it has several major issues to resolve to regain internal and external confidence. As examples, in the past the next artistic director would more than likely have been announced, substitute corporate sponsorship remains unidentified, and it will also need to recruit a new Chief Executive Officer.

It’s worth conjecturing where the events of last year will lead the Istanbul Biennial, given not only its prior history of protest and discontent, in 2007 over Hou Hanru’s Biennial and What, How & for Whom/WHW’s in 2009, its ongoing sponsorship of Koç Holding, but also operating within the ongoing political dramas in Turkey. What might be the legacy of your Biennial for future Istanbul Biennials? The context for this concluding reflection was announced 14 May (at the time of writing) that the 14th Istanbul Biennial in 2015 will be “drafted” by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev which according to her, “will embark looking for where to draw the line, to withdraw, to draw upon, and to draw out. It will do so offshore, on the flat surfaces with our fingertips but also in the depths, underwater, before the enfolded encoding unfolds.”

This might seem to be an inconspicuous distancing from the issues of 2013, perhaps, at least for now?

Fulya Erdemci: In my talk at Artspace I stated that in wanting to discuss with the artists, activists and others the course of action after the Gezi Park protests—being the withdrawal of the Biennial from urban public spaces—we made two public announcements to meet in the Cihangir neighborhood park, where we were expecting those protesters to join us, or to react against us. However, they didn’t attend these forums. Similarly, we opened the 13th Istanbul Biennial on the 14th of September to the public without any official

ceremonies or cocktail parties that by nature necessitate inclusion and exclusion. Again we were expecting protests from the same group, or others; however, there were none. Nor were there during the whole period of the Biennial exhibition. There may be three major reasons for this. In the Biennial exhibition, there were two activist groups/collectives from Istanbul—Sulukule Platform and the Networks of Dispossession—and this may be one of the reasons. The Koç Group—the main sponsor of the Istanbul Biennial, that is involved with the military industry—curiously came out of the Gezi Park protest as one of its supporters by opening up the Divan Hotel (located next to Gezi Park) to the protesters seeking refuge from the police attacks. However, even more importantly, I believe that the Gezi resistance presented the phenomenon of unexpected coalitions and collective actions of multiple publics, even contrasting ones—the anti-capitalists Muslims, Revolutionary Muslims, nationalists, leftists, anarchists, revolutionaries, women’s rights movement, environmentalists, syndicates, chambers of lawyers, architects and medical workers, and even inimical football fans of competing clubs. Instead of an antagonistic, polarised public debate, there were attempts to create an agonistic public sphere. So, I believe that such a radical, almost utopian experience, even though only for a very short time, may have mutated the psyche of the Biennial protesters as well. The political agenda in Turkey has reached such extremes that they may have chosen between other diverse urgencies and avoid the Biennial in the meantime. So, this was a rather more complicated issue than it looks in retrospect.

I am not informed about the plans of the next Istanbul Biennial—I am interested in learning more how the it will continue to respond to the heated social climate in Turkey.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s thought-provoking quote appears rather abstract right now, but I believe that art can be political per se, by proposing subjective transformative experiences, thus opening up those utopian moments in our daily rhythms without being thematically political. Her statement is more inspirational than explanatory at this moment, but we know her work/ curatorial approach and I’m rather hopeful for the next edition of the Istanbul Biennial.

Notes 1 Quoted partly from the curatorial text of Fulya Erdemci in the end-publication of the 13th Istanbul Biennial that will be launched in June 2014 2 http://creativetimereports.org/2014/04/01/editors-letter-april-2014-ahmet-ogutbiennale-of-sydney/ 3 Helen Razer, ‘Sydney Biennale: artists divide over dirty money’; http://dailyreview. crikey.com.au/sydney-biennale-artists-divide-over-dirty-money/ 4 The Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change; see http://creativetime.org/ summit/prize/ 5 Taken from the Guide Book of the text written by the participants of the Networks of Dispossession, 13th Istanbul Biennial, ISKV, 2013: 297

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be careful what you wish for

Adam Geczy Since their rise as a global phenomenon in the 1980s, biennales have undergone a striking evolution. They were first touted as offering their local publics a snapshot, or slice, of what was happening around the world, so that one emerged with a general impression of the main preoccupations of contemporary art of recent time. This proved far too arduous, maybe hubristic a task and curators turned to philosophical propositions hopefully germane to the near present moment, into which the chosen artists could be positioned. This too proved rather specious, since most artists were either hanging on the theme by their fingernails or not at all. Now it is neither of these so that art may just be art; ideas have become freeform, while the curatorial dogma lapses into a comfortably torpid, incontestably everything-and-nothing abstraction. The Transfield sponsorship debacle that flared up as the Biennale of Sydney was being launched only served to highlight the extent to which such large and expensive festivals are in the hands of corporate interests. Hence the crisis of the biennale model that has been the topic of much debate amongst critics and curators for the last decade is an integer of a much greater crisis that includes that of democracy itself, and the extent to which it is beholden to large corporations. Now that biennales have abandoned any ambition to make any great claims about what is a dizzyingly diffuse artworld, art can be served up as its own special kind of entertainment, basking in the afterglow of corporate beneficence, whose sole request is that there be someone diligent standing at the turnstile counting the visitors.

As perverse as this may at first sound, one could also say that the Transfield sponsorship issue was salutary. Salutary because it allowed the artists to show the public how thoroughly engagé they really were and to give the sense, however remote, that they were independent of the invidious corporate rod. However, “thoroughly” and “really” are perhaps ill-chosen words, since most of the artists who withdrew ended up exhibiting. Others were content with signing a petition, the most bloodless and meekest form of protest, a protest that will always be ineffective if it has nothing to do with the constituency of a marginal political seat. Certainly bitterness eroded the extraordinarily feel-good air that artistic director, Juliana Engberg engendered in press releases and the Biennale’s catalogue. In her essay for the latter she avers that “artists are active philosophers”, which lends an air of high-mindedness to the whole affair, especially for those with no investment in art or philosophy. The simple truth is that art is not philosophy, which is why it is art. Their concerns may overlap but their approaches and the way they are apprehended remain dramatically different. While in any large spectacle there are bound to be works with profundity and complexity, to dignify some of the works in this Biennale as philosophical is equivalent to expecting to be able to discuss John Duns Scotus’ “univocity of being” with Kim Kardashian.1

Nonetheless, Engberg’s catalogue spin drew from the ragbag of Continental philosophy, with conveniently glancing references to Nietzsche, Kant, Baudelaire and Sartre. With the swagger of a seasoned intellectual confident enough to lapse into bathos, Engberg ends the first section with: “But I’m with Seal (and Patsy Cline). We’re never gonna survive, unless we get a little bit crazy. And so enters desire.” Here the artist as philosopher is effectively jettisoned as soon as he or she is named, becoming the whacky, crazy jester, the left-of-field eccentric, the lateral thinking bon vivant. In this examination of the term “desire” we meet Freud, Aristotle, Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. Art is formulated as “the ungraspable, unsayable surplus” that arises from the endless production of desire that is at the core of our being. This is lofty and somewhat open-ended. It is so abstract as to be almost incontestable: we know that art is art because it is not anything else; it is not a newscast or a manifesto, but rather communicates through abstractions and gives us access to what simpler forms of language cannot manage. Art’s interminable ambiguity means it must be interpreted and intuited, and thus its ability to dig us to the quick is also what enables it to misunderstood and maybe ignored. Art embraces the irrational and, yes, offers us views of the world that are different from those conventionalised by social mores and the media (if these haven’t already merged). So after we have walked through the pantheon of august (all male) personages we end up at square one: “I give you art in all its glory.” In the catalogue and in various press statements Engberg enthuses about “joy”, “hope” and “love”.

But this air of positivity, in such statements and press releases was so thick that it began to beg a greater query, not least about the diversionary nature of entertainment, and again, what art might best achieve in the present age. As any clinical psychologist is apt to tell you, one of the causes of suicide in all ages is that of the expectation that one should be happy. We live in a secular world in which religious belief is widely discredited, telling us there is no afterlife—and yet in the same breath we are told to be hopeful. We live in a world in which we are asked how we are by people unknown to us, to which we reply positively irrespective of our status. We live in a world where people tell us to have nice day and where cities and countries are rated on their level of happiness. Today’s obsession with happiness occurs at precisely the time when there are numerically more unhappy people than ever lived in the history of mankind, and where this unhappiness is jealously maintained.

Curiously enough, the title for this Biennale, “Imagine What You Desire”, is a phrase that conjures its cynical counterpart, “be careful what you wish for”, a corrective that pits desire against its factual consequences. Contemporary society has not only imagined, but realised a great deal of desire (not to mention the hyperbolic proportion of pornography on the Internet), which has had disastrous consequences. This is not to argue that curators should be presenting a vale of death, and a biennale about the

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depressing state of the world may be a little too heavy-handed.

Yet a biennale that was less sure of itself and more interrogative of what contemporary art means, and the values we choose to evaluate it, a biennale about uncertainty and instability, would have been more stimulating and, philosophically, more exciting.

Of the greatest concern, however, was the perceptible absence, or near-absence, of the word “critical”, or even associated words such as “rupture”. Art’s ability to offer alternative views is precisely what makes it subversive, and is a main agent in revealing the apparent smoothness of the socio-economic system to be a ruse, indeed to reveal this system to be an incoherent weave of many systems. In other words, to remove the radical and subversive potential of art, or to mute it, or to reorient it to a place where this potential is enlisted ultimately for ends that serve other interests is, from an ethical standpoint, to play a rather dangerous game. The ethical dilemma that this Biennale faces is brought into sharper focus in the interview conducted by the Museum of Contemporary Art Public Relations Manager, Nicole Trian.2 Somewhere in the middle of the interview Trian asks the very pertinent question; “How do you respond to critics who say that art shows like the Biennale are increasingly about creating spectacle?” Here is the whole reply, so as not to get anything out of context: I refer to Gaston Bachelard, quoting Baudelaire, who says the spectacle inspires inner grandeur. People (especially those still wed to the Guy Debord idea of the Spectacle) are inclined to think if something is spectacular that it is empty and without serious content.

I don’t actually agree with this, even while allowing that sometimes this can be so. In the 19th Biennale of Sydney there are, I hope, a number of spectacular things, but each of them has content, each of them has a relationship to an aesthetic, philosophical and political history, each of them seeks to engage the audience with those histories—sometimes using entertainment as a tactic.3 The last phrase “entertainment as a tactic”, is deeply problematic.

If we draw as amply from the well of modernist theory as Engberg does, we might recall what one of Baudelaire’s greatest interpreters, Walter Benjamin, observed about the specular nature of film. In his famous artwork essay, he noticed that film’s verisimilitude, its narrativity and its overall appeal to the senses had the capacity to educate the masses about alternative modes of thought and being. Yet, he ruefully warned, in his time it was best deployed for propaganda purposes, and was therefore a false witness. Here entertainment was a tactic, one in which entertainment was used to give people false hope, create false fears, and to indoctrinate them with highly questionable values.

In our present era, where flows of information are exponentially greater than in Benjamin’s time of writing (1930s), entertainment is one of the biggest global industries—we have become inured to its processes, structures and rhythms, in ways that can be so subliminal as have made it merge with our language and mores.

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To think to turn it into a tactic is either naïve or obfuscatory, if there is no clarity given as to what that tactic is and indeed what that is for—particularly in the absence of an articulated strategy. Engeberg is revealingly silent in this regard. While there were works that clearly dealt in some measure with social and political issues, they did not benefit from a more robust critical speculation by Engberg as to what art ought to be doing in these times. Entertainment is comforting, while art has the power to be an irritant. Art can of course be entertaining, and most of it is to varying degrees, but this is something different from “using entertainment as a tactic”. We might recall a set of essays by Georg Lukács (written about the same time as his classic text of twentieth century Marxism, History and Class Consciousness in 1923) was titled Tactics and Ethics (1919). One may be forgiven for fearing whether this use of a loaded term like “tactic” is now just the taxidermic, bedizened corpse, the emasculated afterthought of a once heroic aspiration, reduced from struggle to play; reflection reduced to distraction. Moreover, if art aspires to be entertainment then it will usually do so badly, since it is vying with industries that in budget and scale are well beyond its scope. And with art’s tactics devolved to entertainment, the average depoliticised viewer looking for nothing but a good day out, can have his cake and eat it.

Cockatoo Island, the site most popular for family weekend daytrips, seemed particularly geared towards “entertainment”. Callum Morton’s The Other Side made explicit references to sideshows and carnival amusement. Simulating a chamber of horrors, what was most striking about the work is how often it broke down, rendering the work inoperable and dormant. Morton is otherwise a skilled, astute and talented artist; his works dealing with architecture and urban space have been highly resonant if not captivating; however, this work was bereft of such qualities. The periodic dysfunctionality of this work was complemented by that of Swiss artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger, whose Bush Power (2014) was a fantastical environment of motley paraphernalia centred around nautilus gym equipment, which viewers were invited to use, their movements powering and altering connected objects nearby. As an unaccountable encounter between a fitness studio and a crèche, again, many of the machines broke, and those who persisted with the interactive component were repeatedly advised by invigilators to go easy, unwittingly playing the obverse of the personal trainer (do less!). Inadvertently, these works highlighted the pitfalls when art aspires too much to be entertainment: it will only emphasise how it will always be the distant cousin to the entertainment industry.

Cockatoo Island’s carnival atmosphere was sustained with the video performative work of Austrian artist Marko Lulic, Space-Girl Dance (2009). Troping from the 1970s series where Raquel Welch made her televisual debut, Lulic has his actors mimic Welch and her attendant extras in futuristic Courrèges-like suits, cavorting and gambolling around the huge angular metal sculpture on the estate of Erich Hauser, a German sculptor. While this work had the possibility of provoking ideas about bodies in relation to made and natural space, it was bizarrely comical, yet

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

not comical enough, making the tension lie in the viewer’s own quizzicality rather than in any quality of the work. It may have been to mutual advantage to have these dancers partake in the sculptures of Danish artist duo Randi and Katrine’s The Village (2014), a stylised, motley fairytale European village. The website write-up bore the uncanny resemblance to an advertisement for mini-golf, “a scaled-down Danish village for viewers of all ages to explore”. Meanwhile, the work of Susan Norrie, a video of Japanese protest against the use of nuclear energy, was affirmation that works of political naïveté continue to be made. While the point is open to debate, in the context of so-called ‘global art’, it is insuffucient for the artist-tourist with only anecdotal investment in the issues of another nation to masquerade political voyeurism as politically committed art. To peregrinate onto one socio-political problem after another, pointing to crisis, is a form of veiled mendacity that in fact helps to sustain the status quo, since, in aestheticising what is effectively news (which itself is already aestheticised), it emphasises passive spectatorship over agency.

A similar political disingenuousness, or faint-heartedness permeated the work of Hubert Czerepok Let’s Change it All (2014), a series of performance events in which the artist assembles children and has them write banners relating to what they wish for, or what they want changed. The children’s exhortations ranged from the frivolous (more Lego, more sport etc.) to the precocious (about world events). They then paraded their slogans in public places. This seemed to reduce to caricature what has been one of the most important means of popular dissent—especially in the artist’s home country, Poland, whose public movements contributed in no small part to Perestroika. It cutesified and, by extension ridiculed a form of protest whose effectiveness is now uncertain (as with the Occupy Wall Street movement), yet still a last resort of subjugated groups as witnessed in recent years in the Middle East. To make light of public protest like this is comparable with the way in which commercial news agencies package world events into anodyne, digestible units, dimming our personal affect, rendering the viewer dissociative and apathetic.

Two works were a critical foil to this example of ersatz political concern. The first was the monumental digitally generated video installation by Danish artist Eva Koch of a waterfall. Using the capacious space of the Turbine Hall at Cockatoo Island to stunning effect, its audience saw the projection sited at one end, its thunderous crashing sounds filled the voluminous space. To argue that this work was mere entertainment is specious, as its simplicity belied a much deeper set of concerns, such as the way that nature is increasingly a construct which stands against the modalities of culture and technology. Koch’s work also suggests that the ecology movement is itself a demarcated, quarantined subset of what is a much greater problem, namely the effects of overpopulation. But it is because of the need for space and the environmental devastation that will ensue that will also require us to call on virtual replicas of what once was, and given that the extinction rate of animal species is greater than any other time in history. And instead of the disingenuousness of many other works, in which participation is

a supposed strategy for social inclusion, Koch’s work reminds us just to what extent we have been reduced to passive spectatorship, and that there are powers well beyond our knowledge or control.

With the intriguing title Fashioning Discontinuities (2013-14), the other work was by Bianca Hester, who embarked on a series of interventions both on Cockatoo Island and within the city of Sydney itself. Fluid and open-ended, Hester’s work stems from Fluxus and the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, who explored the possibility of intervening in social spaces to induce a momentary break from habitual ways of seeing the world, much in the manner of the Situationist détournement. But Hester is not working in the shadow of this arc, rather her projects have traditionally sought to reach points of extremity, namely the line between art and not-art, while constantly inquiring as to the difference between an action pure and simple and an action in the realm of art. Hence the objects in her works are merely points of juncture between different modalities of viewing, creation and intervention. Hester is perhaps also the only artist in the Biennale to have responded to the Transfield drama in a way that resembles political sophistication. While I uphold that the petition was a myopic and naïve act—insofar as it does not recognise the extent and complexity of the imbrication of corporate interests in any large cultural event—since the controversy Hester reoriented her work to engage in an ongoing dialogue with spectator/ participants in interviews and conversations. This level of commitment to keeping discourse open and mobile stands in stark contrast to the artist ventriloquising her political concern in laconic acts of engagement.

In the middle of a rather empty-feeling main chamber of Carriageworks was stationed Dutch artist Gabriel Lester’s large visual one-liner, of a colonial style wooden house, every window from which were billowing curtains frozen in motion. Although haunting, it seemed to rely too heavily on its cleverness. Installed in one of the corners of the spaces, Tinka Pittoors (Belgium) had assembled a massive jumble of tinsel, poles, bubble-like forms, plastic bladders and other shapes made from synthetic materials.

In the rising list of approaches and motifs in contemporary art that should be forbidden, of which skulls occupy the top of the list, somewhere high is also “art stuff”. This is an approach where the artist gathers a whole lot of ‘stuff’ and installs it in (hopefully) a large space in such a way as to give the work an air of intentionality. Such works are typically accompanied with lofty titles, in this case The Dysideological Principle (2103-14), an incomprehensible neologism that echoed the work itself.

With sophistication and wit, the work of Austrian artist Mathias Poledna was a welcome respite. Walking in on A Village by the Sea (2011), one could have mistaken the film for an excerpt from a 1940s black and white musical, in which a man and a woman sing to one another in a nicely appointed Manhattan apartment.

However, the sequence is not feature length, only about five minutes. Beautifully resolved, the work was unencumbered with the superficial political urgencies of other works, which allowed it to stage issues of gender relations, nostalgia and the

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stylised, packaged nature of culture. Complementary to this work was the video by Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács, Mastering Bambi, installed nearby, consisting of scenes from a 1942 Disney animation about the sweet-talking deer faun, but with said deer faun visually removed, leaving a landscape more sinister than saccharine. It was as if the artists had removed the popularist agendas of mass entertainment to reveal the sinister ideological underbelly.

Across town in the Art Gallery of NSW, Meriç Algün Ringborg (Turkey) produced what might be called a classic biennale-style work, The Library of Unborrowed Books, Section III: SMSA Library, Sydney (2014), where viewers could peruse an assortment of books (which had suffered neglect) from the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Art Library. As the title suggests, this was its third iteration, previously derived from the Stockholm Public Library and New York’s Centre for Fiction. But as the examples of the first two versions suggest, there is no connection between the libraries, which would have made this project marginally more interesting. Once the first flush of fascination had subsided, one could only be cynically impressed with the ‘have idea, can travel’ structure of the work. From the meretricious to the harrowing, Bindi Cole’s We All Need Forgiveness (2014) was a multi-channelled grid of video monitors enframing faces—crying, grimacing, uncomfortable, and serene—uttering, “I forgive you”. In a time when words like “research” are being used for art (and a work such as Ringborg’s could easily vie for that status), Cole’s work was a poignant example of the redemptive power of art, both in its aesthetic form and in what it conveys. Communicative and compelling, this work was deeply moral and political without in any way being didactic, since it drew from the immediacy of human experience, where strength and frailty conjoin. It could also be interpreted as a trenchant reminder of the Stolen Generation, as well as a response to the inertia that followed the 2007 prime ministerial apology: “We forgive your inaction”. This work was also about neglect, but of a very different kind, and one that transcended clever conceptual one-liners.

A similar viscerality was afforded by the Biennale’s poster showpiece, Douglas Gordon’s Phantom (2011), an installation with cinders of a grand piano presided over by a sinister blackened eye, which is the anonymous, impartial witness to a ballad by Rufus Wainwright about love and loss. This work made one reflect on how many Australian artists have the ability for conveying deep melancholy. Given so much of our culture’s amnesiac buoyancy, the poetic rewards of melancholy are not as deep as in countries where the winters are darker, colder and wetter.

Fellow Glaswegian Jim Lambie lifted the tone with his iridescent floor installation with the funky title Zobop (2014), made of vinyl tape based on the physical contours of the rooms. As an architecturally based work it was not only optically and physically striking, as the viewer was made self-conscious of his/her own movements, while walking through the empty museum space.

Of the works at Artspace, perhaps the most resonant were the photographs by Chinese artist Taca Sui, The Book of Odes (2011),

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a series of black and white silver gelatin prints based on an ancient text of transcribed oral poems from rural China. The photographs were not of the frenetic modernising behemoth of China but of the countryside. In the abstraction that black and white can bring, these works had a silent, wistful quality that was suffused with innumerable forgotten and untold stories from remote areas.

The crisp bareness of these works exuded an almost forensic detachment, as if the artist and his subject are permanently riven.

One of the frustrations of large visual art events (like biennales) is that it is difficult to make sense of the whole, and it is even harder to form a comprehensive critique. In this instance, of the Australian artists the majority were from Melbourne, which was hardly encouraging from the point of view of opportunity or representation—or maybe artists from Melbourne are more responsive to the rhetoric of wonder with which the media hyperbole was so thick? Returning to the motif discussed earlier and accepting Engberg’s assertion that “artists are active philosophers” (the word “active” here is also ambiguous), and her citation of Socrates and Žižek in her catalogue essay, in an essay on the former East German dramatist Heiner Müller, Slavoj Žižek discusses the potential for ideas to shatter and disrupt. Invoking the ideas of political philosopher Leo Strauss, Žižek remarks; The inherent crisis of democracy is also the reason for the renewed popularity of Leo Strauss. The key feature that makes his political thought relevant today is its elitist notion of democracy, i.e., the idea of a ‘necessary lie’, of how the elites should rule: though they are aware of the actual state of things (driven by the brutal materialist logic of power, etc.), they feed the people with fables designed to keep them satisfied in their blessed ignorance. For Strauss, the lesson of the trial and execution of Socrates is that Socrates was guilty as charged: philosophy is, in fact, a threat of society.

By questioning the gods and the ethos of the city, philosophy undermined the citizens’ loyalty, and thus the basis of normal social life.4 In this regard, at least, Engberg is right, artists are like philosophers as they wield the potential for a reorientation of power, if however sporadic or brief. Some art had this quality, but this Biennale, as with others, in thrall of dealers and sponsors, would benefit greatly from a little less ‘crazy’ and a great deal more ‘danger’.

Notes 1 John Duns, commonly known as Scotus or Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308), was an English philosopher and theologian; he influenced recent thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze and John Milbank 2 http://www.mca.com.au/news/2014/03/06/imagination-and-desire-cued-biennalesydney/ 3 4

ibid.

Slavoj Zizek, ‘Heiner Müller Out of Joint’, in The Universal Exception, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens eds, London and New York: Continuum 2006: 56-57; emphasis the author’s

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imagination and desire Pedro de Almeida The 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire got me thinking: who reads Byron anymore? I don’t. You don’t either.

I’m confident in the validity of my presumption based on two convincing observations that can fairly be representative of broad contemporary tastes and patterns of poetry’s consumption.

First, any honest bookseller or librarian will tell you that people generally don’t read poetry, certainly not regularly, most certainly not its epic forms and lengths. To recalibrate one’s ideas and ideals to the rhythm of iambic pentameter—why bother anymore?

Let dead poets tell us how that used to feel. Second—and here lies the material evidence of poetry’s present neglect—browsing through Turkish-born artist Meriç Algün Ringborg’s The Library of Unborrowed Books, presented as part of the Biennale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I immediately picked out abandoned collections of Arnold, Blake, Dryden, Milton, Wilde and Byron (including the salacious biography, Byron: The Fallen Angel) among an otherwise forgettable ensemble of pulp historical fiction, sci-fi adventures and dull histories left at the altar by the promiscuity of the Wiki. Consisting of books that have never been borrowed from the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts Library, Ringborg’s collation of some three hundred publications presented rows of paper tombstones in front of which I only pretended to mourn.

These unborrowed books belong to a venerable institution that from its founding in 1833, its website cheerily boasts, was “the leading provider of adult education in the colony, running a lending library, conducting classes and holding lectures on everything from phrenology to chemistry and the poems of Lord Byron”. Some time between then and now we lost, misplaced or just plain ignored Byron. No one, excluding scholars of English poetry (the Australian variety of whom surely dwell in ivory towers whose doors have locks on the outside), really sits down to read (preferably aloud) all sixteen cantos of Byron’s masterpiece of Romanticism, Don Juan, with its 16,000 lines of… what, exactly?

Imagination and desire. Byron famously possessed and scandalously satiated both in abundance. Very few people in the modern era, much less poets, have ever shot to celebrity as feverishly as Byron did thanks to a perfect storm of cultural and industrial apparatus across Britain and the Continent that stoked the imagination and desire of his public.1 When he sat down to compose the first cantos of his Don Juan in Venice in 1818, Byron referred to his mock-heroic project as an “epic satire” that reversed the legend of the Spanish womaniser by casting his protagonist instead as someone easily seduced by women. He had already begun to question, in the most public of manners, the limits of the imaginary comforts and the spiritual worth of the libidinous impulses he surrendered in the hundreds (allegedly thousands)

Page 30: Callum Morton The Other Side, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist and Rosyln Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

of consummated encounters with chambermaids, sailors, soldiers, countesses, hostesses, principessas and Venetian-masked ball-goers. It’s this conundrum that the 19th Biennale of Sydney intimates: how far does imagination command desire and desire command imagination, and what might this mean for creative endeavour?

As artistic director of Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) since 2002, Juliana Engberg has had the vision, conviction and good fortune to be able to push artists, her team and audiences to experimentation and brilliance. One need have experienced only a handful of ACCA’s exhibitions over the years to gain a sense of the quality of her métier. The projects she leads present as conceptually, formally and stylistically of a piece in their ascetic comportment that impeccably complement the dynamics of probably the finest architectural space in which to present contemporary art in the country. She is virtuosic at working with scale, for instance, and powerfully astute in calibrating the ideas and sensations that art emanates in minutely subtle ways, which make ACCA’s assortment of spaces really sing. Less is always more for Engberg, as is illustrated by her brief articulation of her curatorial theme, “You Imagine What You Desire”. Taking an idea for a short walk in her introductory essay in the exhibition’s catalogue—a preamble that passes by Socrates, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Freud, Žižek, Lacan and Bachelard, among others—Engberg arrives at succinct summation of the beating heart of her Biennale: In this title is held potential, and it is this idea of potential that delivers to art its raison d’être. This is the reason I suggest that artists are active philosophers, inasmuch as they continue to propose problems through which they work in hopeful, surplus ways, expecting their desire to perpetuate yet another problem, to rebuild desire—ad infinitum.2 Set in play across the Biennale’s four principal venues, You Imagine What You Desire’s potential was developed along almost divinatory impressions. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) was sensed as an air/water venue that “insinuates the more liminal, libidinous, liquous items”. The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), an earth/air space as Engberg reads it, explored “alchemical, tabula rasa images of protest, to Promethean fire plays”. At Carriageworks ideas of the sublime, theatricality and the psyche were staged in its cavernous ex-film studio-leased bays. Cockatoo Island’s layered history of power generation, shipbuilding and incarcerations was cast as a “wild, desiring place where happy anarchy can take hold”, while at Artspace the anarchy was tempered so that we might instead “take joy in flights of fancy”. Engberg’s was a sensitive reading whose interpretive distinctions across venues were readily registered and absorbed by keen eyes and ears, not always the case in experiences of art festivals of this size.3

IMAGINATION AND DESIRE

Extending the role of interpretation, filed under a chapter headed ‘Thoughts’ in the exhibition’s catalogue are short contributions from Engberg’s cerebral colleagues that are notable for their lack of intellectual vulnerability. There is much scaffolding around granite-strength façades at the expense of blocking the front door so that others might stroll in to take a look around. Daniel Palmer’s summary of ideas of the sublime, which for Engberg “pivots on a moment of transference between divinity and humanism”4, dutifully cites no less than sixteen philosophers, theorists, historians and critics that has the cumulative effect of a roll call in a classroom whose students have jigged school. I held my breath for a reference that would show (not tell) us something of the ways “our bodies seek out sublime experiences” (especially a confession of how Palmer’s own body might grapple with this), but then more Burke and Berger and Benjamin get crammed in, when in fact Voss would do better in illustrating the point.5 Elizabeth Grosz constructs an ironclad battleship of intellectualism that is impenetrable to all but commissioned officers from the academy.

Her heavy reliance on Deleuze dulls rather than sparks the imagination by the time you reach its fifth page. Edward Colless, one of our finest thinker-writers in artistic circles, comes closest to opening up: “Drink me”, he deliciously begins, quoting from Alice in Wonderland. More successfully than his colleagues, Colless convincingly encapsulates the paradoxical operating principle of imagination and desire as applied to cultural production, while at the same time prefiguring my own thinking about Marx’s idea of “estranged labour” and my mother in relation to this Biennale (it’s personal, more on that later) when he states: Desire is filthily yet rigorously embodied, complimentary to the imagination’s heady unworldliness. Given its embodiment in art, desire is productive work. It is not only labour (we work at our desires to cultivate their pleasures, civilised or not); it is also laborious.6 I think it’s fair to say that leading into this Biennale the feeling in the locker rooms was that a figure of Engberg’s esteemed professional pedigree and intellect would nimbly bypass the traps of fly-in-fly-out contract work that are (quite understandably) a common occupational hazard of the international biennale circuit.

Contextualising the work of artists who work in diverse contexts —not to mention the more consequential question of local indigenous inclusion—is fraught with difficulties no matter how much one might wish to think of oneself as a global citizen.

The last go round, we had a majority feel-good experience in Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster’s All our relations (2012), whose “framework of mutuality” and aim of “purposeful connectivity” in contemporary art circles paradoxically underscored the (non-art) world’s most blatant refusals of this sentiment in, for example, perpetual separation (North/ South Korea) and intractable suffering (Israel/Palestine).7 Before this, David Elliott’s The Beauty Of Distance: Songs of

Survival in a Precarious Age (2010) had enough dazzling, conceptually strong and visually memorable highlights to overcome the title’s bum first-note to Australian ears in its affinity with our night sweat fears of the “tyranny of distance”.8 Wind back a few more years and one recalls the questionable import of the historical impulses of radicalism in Carolyn ChristovBakargiev’s Revolutions–Forms That Turn (2008). No matter how much punning conjoined the seismic explosions and aftershocks of violent political change to artistic experiments in (and out) of tune with modernism’s goosestep, her central premise felt slightly incongruous within the relative politically benign context of modern Australian democracy, which has experienced next to nothing of real revolution. You have to go back a decade to Isabel Carlos’ On Reason and Emotion to unearth a curatorial rationale that, like Engberg’s You Imagine What You Desire, eponymously signalled cerebral rather than geo-political concerns. That they both should have done so by implying dichotomies is indeed curious—but the brain has two sides after all.

All this considered, Engberg has disappointed some critical quarters given the relative limited range of countries of residence of her selected artists.9 There are two ways this might be viewed. First, to take our own region as one case in point, one shouldn’t reasonably expect a flush of art from the Asia-Pacific in Engberg’s Biennale given the fact that under her twelve-year artistic directorship of ACCA not a single artist living and working in this region has been included in its exhibition program. You have to go all the way back to 1999 to have enjoyed AWAS! Recent Art From Indonesia, which included Agus Suwage, Arahmaiani and Heri Dono among others.10 Ironically, Kunsthallen across Germany, on which ACCA models its mission, have generally been more engaged with our region than this. Taking up the devil’s advocate position requires more qualification. In assembling her artists Engberg has resisted the urge of geographical tokenism and instead heavily weighed her focus on artists, who live and work in the U.K., Scandinavia and the European countries that gather either side of a straight line between Brussels and Kiev. The latter is a region not especially well represented in Australian exhibitions and few can argue that Engberg is not expert in foraging these fields. To reduce this issue to crass geographical audit, the exclusion of work by artists living (with sustained commitment, not sojourning) in Latin America, Africa and anywhere across Asia and the Pacific (other than Beijing) is obvious. But that’s not this Biennale. When one looks back in future years it might well be precisely the point of difference that will distinguish Engberg’s project from more prosaically inclusive United Nations Conventions of Contemporary Art (it’s been coined). As ACCA’s programming suggests, contemporary art from Asia is not Engberg’s primary area of interest, so why pretend? This reasoning will surely never appease the more militant globalists, but the necessary limits of personal investment are what impart character on otherwise all too easily corporatised creative endeavours. After all, what exactly were the advantages and benefits of the designedby-committee efforts of the twenty-seven member curatorial team

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of last year’s Singapore Biennale? Titled If The World Changed and offering a yawn-inducing “invitation to artists to respond to and reconsider the worlds we live in and the worlds we want to live in”,11 I personally wouldn’t stake my hopes on anything changing much at all if group consensus among curators more numerous than ministers in Singapore’s parliamentary cabinet is prerequisite (and, yes, I’m aware of the potential to infer from this statement support of a single party State, but the transposing of this view from creative endeavours to political ones is where the argument goes too far). In this respect, the strategic move awaiting the Biennale of Sydney Board for 2016 is to mix things up a bit and appoint, for the first time, an artistic director from anywhere else: Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East. I’d lay a tenner on a Mexican (the clue is in GDP growth).

Juliana Engberg’s solo vision was strongly disposed towards a surrealist’s turn of mind, which was redolent in perhaps the most subliminally suggestive concentration of works on the MCA’s third level. Lining a long wall, French-born Aurélien Froment’s black-and-white photographs offered a taxonomy of the weird and wonderful creations of the widely admired outsider artist, Ferdinand Cheval. As a curious postman Cheval spent a goodly portion of his lifetime building his Palais ideal in provincial France, beginning in 1879 before completing what would become his mausoleum in 1924. As photographic diminutions of figments of a naïve imagination tempered by religious iconography, mythologies of the ancients and the idols of exoticised world cultures, Froment’s appropriation of Cheval’s trinkets carved from unknown thousands of stones placed us at two removes from the latter’s naked spirit of creation. It at once jettisoned the pleasure of tactile experience and re-birthed the cultish allure that so charmed the European avant-garde between the wars, including the likes of Ernst and Picasso. Tightly clustered opposite these inky portals to private passions were James Angus and Benjamin Armstrong’s modestly-scaled sculptures that set off associations in tangled trajectories: Picasso subtly present in Angus’ Yellow Pipe Compression (2012), so evocative of the morphology of his bathers from the late 1920s; and again in Armstrong’s plastercast Couples, disembodied upturned heads with painted incisions and bulbous protrusions, pupils turned inwards. A few steps away, sensitively placed in the MCA’s skylight-filled gallery, Roni Horn’s Ten Liquid Incidents (2010-12) rounded out this sensation with vitreous chambers whose cornea-like surfaces shimmered with reflections of the autumn sun overhead.

This arrangement was complemented by a small gallery lined with John Stezaker’s capricious collages of recent years. I must confess this was a real treat for this writer who has longed to encounter Stezaker’s work following his being awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize—as far as accolades go, probably the best annual indicator of serious accomplishment in the photographic arts—for his 2011 solo exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. In his brutal slashing of ‘virgins’, a euphemism for the anonymous and failed film actors that appear in his collection of mid-century publicity stills for

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movie roles they never got to fulfil, Stezaker aligns the details of vintage postcard nature scenes with his virgins’ facial features and bodily contours. Doing so, he tramples all humanising traces of the portrait in a stampede of postcard-size aides-mémoire made alien by manifest and latent desires transmuted by photography’s subconscious. Wonderfully contrasted with TV Moore’s phantasmagorical multi-portraits that pervert expectations of how the surface titillation and tactile seduction of painting, photography and collage differ from each other with their slipslop-slap protection against aesthetic and material conformity, this combo simultaneously stripteased and sucker punched leering eyes. And then with eyes wide shut, I heard him. Sailing across the floor, up through the feet in a mainline to the heart, the voice of Rufus Wainwright. Seduced, I entered a cavernous space with a stage set for concentrated sensation. Douglas Gordon’s Phantom (2011), conjuring the presence of his musical collaborator from which this voice emerged, presented a Steinway, another burnt to ashes, and a giant hovering eye encircled in kohl and projected in hold-your-breath slow motion as it delicately transitioned from presence and disappearance. Douglas has revealed in interviews that Phantom was created within a realm of deeply personal, lifechanging transformations that took place following his relocation to Berlin,12 none of which would matter if the artist had failed to distil his succour into something others can imbibe. Fortunately for him and us only a little Rufus makes you drunk.

Rather than booze, collapsing in stoned stupor is close to how it felt encountering the panoptic splendour of Piplotti Rist’s large-scale video installation, Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014).

My natural prejudice against all things psychedelic pricked up first—oh no, pleasure-seeking hippy abandon, I thought.

Cocooned in mirrored and montaged fields of wild flowers and dissolves of sun-kissed ocean break and sparkling constellations, I thought I knew exactly where Rist would take me. But as so often in this game, I was wrong. Joining other gallery-goers on the carpeted floor in something approaching communal postcoital repose was, as they liked to say in the 1960s, an experience.

Complementing this was another filmic work created especially for the Biennale in Emily Wardill’s singular accomplishment, When you fall into a trance (2013). No other work in Engberg’s lineup came anywhere close to leaving such a deep impression on me. Splayed on a beanbag, I lay mesmerised for the duration of its seventy-two minutes—not twice, but three times. But I suspect that’s superfluous to anyone but myself. Who can say why it affected me so powerfully or why it invariably failed to leave a mark on others? Whatever can be gleaned from Wardill’s weaving of a trilogy of deconstructed narratives whose centrifugal focus is a neurologist’s relationship to daughter, lover and patient, I’d prefer to let it be. The vertiginous trance of desire is best savoured by foregoing psychoanalysis of its intuitions. Sometimes, ceci n’est pas une pipe and I don’t need to know why. Mel O’Callaghan’s Parade (2014), by contrast, invited analysis. Housed in Cockatoo Island’s eastern industrial precinct and encircled by works that revelled in their in-built potential for release of kinetic energy

—Ross Manning’s Spectra IV (2014), a mobile of fluorescent lights driven by cheap plastic fans; Eva Rothschild’s Boys and Sculpture (2012), a closed-circuit recording of pre-pubescent boys’ destruction of the artist’s sculptures that every art therapist should watch; Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger’s Bush Power (2014), a popular hit with punters of all ages as they mounted exercisemachine gizmos covered in flora—Parade presented me with a chest-high platform for a theoretical argument. Nothing to do, not much to see: ladders and a few pulleys attached to red, yellow, blue and black Euclidean forms. I hung about and waited. At the rostered time O’Callaghan’s troop of performers took to their stage whereupon a silver-haired elderly man caught my attention.

Dressed in ascetic uniform of black tights and tunic shared by his younger, more nimble colleagues, he gingerly stooped to grasp a black cube on the end of a pulley whose tensile force was balanced by a black-haired woman seated on a stool. The scene had my mind racing back to Gustave Courbet’s The Stonebreakers (1849).

Painted a year after the revolution that ushered in the French Second Republic and Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, the self-proclaimed père of Realism knew all too well that his painting of two men—the elder on bended knee chiselling away at stones, the younger heavily weighted with a basket of the desultory fruits of their labour—would be destined to become an art historical relic of an idea of the proletariat. Art historian

T.J. Clark, perhaps Courbet’s most able interpreter, has recognised in this lost masterpiece (it perished along with 25,000 souls in the Allied bombing of Dresden) the French painter’s ideological wrestling with his own “radical incomprehension” of the psychology, if not the dignity, of his hired labour subjects.13

To compare Courbet’s subject with O’Callaghan’s project may well be unfair for obvious reasons, not least given all artists’ perfectly self-entitled pursuit of other criteria for artistic enquiry.

But every time I suspect an artist of employing choreography of this nature to scrutinise empty (i.e. politically evacuated) notions of ‘process’ and ‘the body in space’ at the expense of a convincing identification with anything approaching an empathetic.

Yet critical engagement with a palpably coarse, dirty and dense social context, I think of my mother, who despite her repetitive strain injuries caused by a quarter-century of cleaning trains and wealthy folks’ homes, could still make hay of such listless performers given a fraction of the inclination. Notwithstanding potential accusations of embarrassing working class heroism (I can take it), I can only confess that the more I try to engage with such wearisome spectacle the more I lament the regression to formalist principles in art. At their most refined, such exercises can impart a sense of charm and grace and glamour unencumbered by the sin and shame and shit of the world. At their most self-involved, the devolution of anything approaching political complexity

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is accomplice to enacting the logic of a manifest destiny whose terminal point, ironically, is but to privilege laissez-faire aesthetic contemplation. As I see it, Parade’s back-and-forth-and-up-anddown-and-push-and-pull is far less enlightening of the rituals of the Greeks and Sisyphean myth, as is claimed for O’Callaghan’s practice,14 than Marx’s idea of estranged labour. When her performers finish their bit and step off their stage, leaving the artist’s dumb props inert, it’s the spectre of Marx that is raised: The product of labour is labour, which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification… as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.15

sung from a politically correct song sheet until it stepped off the social media stage into the world of consequence. As easily predicated from the start, the spectacle of specious reasoning and patently misguided targets for ethical cleansing trumped real efficacy for the unfortunate souls incarcerated on Manus, Nauru and Christmas Islands. How could it not, when the Pyrrhic victory of a handful of artists is plainly no obstacle for the glacial inertia of the majority electorate’s gilded slide away from collective moral accountability? Like I said at the beginning, the 19th Biennale of Sydney got me thinking of Byron, whose Don Juan shamelessly boasted: A little still she strove, and much repented And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented.17

If this sounds heavy-handed, IT IS WHAT IT IS. This might instead have been what Nathan Coley’s illuminated sloganeering texts, positioned as large-scale outdoor signs throughout the Biennale’s venues, have said rather than “YOU CREATE WHAT YOU WILL” at Cockatoo Island, for instance.

Why bring Marx into it? In raising desire as a central idea of the Biennale, I expected the curatorial mix to have grappled more energetically with the dynamics of its operating manual within hyper-consumer societies, for surely the question of desire is not merely one of cerebral detachment from the insidious contagion of capital. Rosa Barba’s Time as Perspective (2012) at AGNSW, a ghostly projection of a gritty 35mm film flyover of an endless Texan landscape heavily pock-marked by oil derricks got us there, beautifully and hauntingly so. By contrast, Tinka Pittoors’ Dysideological Principle (2013-14), a towering installation at Carriageworks made of everyday detritus including piles of newspapers (‘Crunch time for pay demands’ heralded the Australian Financial Review of 15 January 2014, illustrating that the more things have changed since Marx, the more they’ve stayed the same), looked amateurish and unresolved. Similarly, that whiteknuckled sexual desire should be so estranged from Engberg & Co.’s otherwise philosopher-laden contributions to the exhibition catalogue and the vast majority of the art itself, was perplexing.

As far as more explicit concentrations of the desires of the fleshy nature were concerned, The Good Sex Guide to the 19th Biennale of Sydney would have inexplicably consisted of a three-line index to the works of—Kelly, Deborah; Rist, Pipilotti; and Wardill, Emily.

And that’s really pushing it. The truly horny were forced to rely on their imaginations. Even Marx would have liked more sex; Byron a whole lot more. But the first rule of desire is that you can’t always get what you want. Which brings me to addressing any expectations that the already much discussed artists’ boycott threat and its lamentable denouément will be methodically dissected in this short review. Here I can only disappoint, suffice to say that to view it all in light of Polish artist Hubert Czerepok’s Let’s Change It All, a staged peaceful protest march reprised for local children, in which “the artist plays with our perception of the idea of protest and transforms it from a negative event into a positive affirmation”,16 it had all the dressings of a pantomime

Notes 1 Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 2

Juliana Engberg (ed.), You Imagine What You Desire (exhibition catalogue), Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, 2014: 64

3

ibid: 65

4

ibid: 63

5

Daniel Palmer, ‘Overflow: Tales of the Sublime’ in Engberg, op cit: 70-71

6

Edward Colless, ‘Secret Life’, in Engberg, op cit: 79

7

Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, ‘Artistic Directors Foreward’ [sic] at https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/about-us/history/2012-2/ 8

Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1966

9 For example: “The heavy emphasis on Scandinavia doesn’t make much of a case for this region being a neglected powerhouse of contemporary art. It requires no special insight to realise that countries such as China and South Korea are producing a far superior brand of work”, John McDonald, The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March 2014 10 As evidenced by ACCA’s exhibition history provided at https://www.accaonline.org. au/exhibitions. AWAS! Recent Art From Indonesia (27 November 1999–29 January 2000) was guest curated by Mella Jaarsma, Diwi Marianto and Damon Moon. The only artists of Asian cultural backgrounds I can identify in ACCA’s exhibition history for the period 2000-14 are Hiroshi Sugimoto (included in Cinema Paradiso, 2007), who has been a resident of New York since 1974, and Fiona Tan (Fiona Tan: Saint Sebastian, 2005) who is Indonesian-born, grew up in Australia and lives and works in Amsterdam 11

Curatorial statement published at http://www.singaporebiennale.org/

12

Douglas Gordon interviewed by Jonathan Chauveau on the occasion of his exhibition, Phantom at Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, 2011 as viewed at http://vimeo. com/28660808 13

T.J. Clark, The Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973: 178. See also Clark’s The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973 14

Engberg, op cit: 217

15

Karl Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’, first published in manuscript form, April 1844; collected in Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, English trans. by Martin Mulligan, available for download at https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-PhilosophicManuscripts-1844.pdf 16

Promotional blurb at http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/19bos/artists/czerepok/

17

Lord George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, canto VII, stanza 117, 1823 Page 34: Douglas Gordon Phantom (installation view), 2011 Photo courtesy the artist and Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris

to boycott or who to boycott: from the guggenheim abu dhabi, sydney and istanbul biennials, to boots and brecht Guy Mannes-Abbott I’m talking with a migrant construction worker of some rank about the conditions that he and those under him live and work with on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi. He speaks calmly and authoritatively in Urdu and English in response to questions and prompts from others, adding queries of his own as we proceed.

This conversation, in the narrow confines of a labour camp on the outskirts of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) capital city, details the crude exploitation of south Asian men entrapped here by debt, low pay and no rights as such.

What is being described are the “conditions of forced labour”1 that NGOs identify and which I have witnessed myself.

These are the conditions in which Rafael Vinoly’s New York University campus is being completed, under which thousands of men are building Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi and which trapped those that lay massive foundations for Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum and will build it out unless there is urgent change. None of these men can express grievances without going to significant lengths and do so only if visas are expiring and they want to leave, or they’re completely desperate.

If they try to organise a collective response, they are summarily deported. If I disclose more detail about anyone, they would face the same outcome.

A fiery sun descends through the men while we talk.

I point a camera at ‘nothing’ so that it will record their voices at least. When I watch later, ‘nothing’ has been transformed into the booted feet of men just returned from the day shift. I’m transfixed by the dust on the tips of their boots, beneath the measured detailing of systemic abuse. A dust rendered invisible in this place: obsessively swept out of sight like the men themselves but which, once located, speaks with resonant affect.

This year I’m in the Gulf largely to research labour camps in and around Abu Dhabi, along with others from the GulfLabor coalition of artists and writers.2 We were invited

by TDIC (Tourism Development and Investment Company, government-owned “master developers”)3 to meet and engage with them on steps to address the conditions on Saadiyat Island, particularly the recruitment fee debts which imprison so many.

This is the fourth year that some of us have come together in

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The Gulf from many shifting locations in the world, and the second time some of us have attempted a direct, rather than ‘deniable’ dialogue since the boycott campaign was launched in March 2011.4 We met here originally as artists and writers in the Sharjah Biennial and Art Dubai’s related programs and embraced responsibilities that come with those gratifying privileges.

As GulfLabor the former extend to challenging Abu Dhabi’s government and global brands like the Guggenheim to treat the construction workers who make it all possible with proper respect. To match Emirati ambitions for a post-oil economy—in this case the $27 billion development of Saadiyat driven by highlyengineered architectural spectacles—with investment in the lives and dignity of those building and servicing it all. Many of the artists whose work the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi needs for its museum to gain credibility are committed to GulfLabor’s boycott until these issues have been addressed.5

The museums will form Saadiyat’s Cultural District and offer the usual package of curation, exhibitions, conservation, and education, to draw in tourists primarily, but also a nascent Emirati audience. A Norman Foster-designed National Museum will narrate the UAE’s identity with the help of the British Museum, who were keen to finance an extension in London.6 There will be a ‘universal’ museum in the form of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, based on the model of a ‘public art museum’ that was borne of Republican revolution in 1793. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will cover modern and contemporary art with a focus on the MENASA region, and be the biggest Guggenheim in the world. In time, Zaha Hadid will provide another “cherry” for this somewhat decadent cake 7 with a planned performing arts centre.

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Saadiyat represents a deadeningly familiar production of economic globalisation, in which art has become the most liquid asset of our time. For art globalisation to maintain growth it needs new audiences in rapidly developing countries with their matching airports, cultural institutions, universities, museums, and extended art infrastructure. Along with these apparently credible elements, Saadiyat will host a vast range of five-star hotels and golf courses, an enormous connective retail arcade for elite brands, plus masses of restaurants, cafes and coffee bars to keep foreign currency churning.

Meanwhile, I’m listening to men who build all these possibilities, including their own labour camps. Men who have been here for months through years, beyond the first two spent paying off recruitment fees8 and into decades. They’ve come from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal in a tradition that stretches back decades, even centuries, in time and trade. Indeed, the UAE contains archaeological evidence of 7000 years of links with the Indus Valley Civilisation. Individually, I speak to Nepalis who have been in Dubai for thirteen years, Pakistanis who have been in Sharjah for fifteen, others in Abu Dhabi who have worked globalisation’s circuits throughout the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore for longer still. None, of course, can ever gain residence here.

I hear men describing jobs in general construction on wages that start at 572Dh with food allowances of 210Dh —$AUD166 and $AUD60 a month—and commutes of up to three hours, six days a week, to sites on Saadiyat Island. Details.

In the dust there are details, real human experiences being relayed by the people they shape and define. Details which TDIC ignore

TO BOYCOTT OR WHO TO BOYCOTT: FROM THE GUGGENHEIM ABU DHABI, SYDNEY AND ISTANBUL BIENNIALS, TO BOOTS AND BRECHT

and which are unsought by ‘starchitects’ who free themselves of any responsibility for the builders of their ‘palaces’.9 Details which massed PRs or PR-driven directors of Western museums breezily reject while trying to belittle or swat us away too; us and our wellresearched concerns, alongside the hopes, dreams and concrete lives as well as deaths of the migrant workers they exploit.

All of these are things that brought us here in the first place and bring us back now, in complex matrices of desire, dreams, demands, needs, and meetings only possible here in the Gulf, one of the global cusps of still-negotiable futures. Everything is in play in urgent as well as dynamic, expansive and threatening ways. We find ourselves doing academic research, social work, political activism, camera and sound operators, and utilising languages we were born into or, in my case, learnt in the adivasi or tribal regions of India, where Naxalites find sanctuary today.

Some of this will become our work as such, understood as the once-liberating, increasingly banal breadth of visual production now. Indeed, we’ve had invitations and meetings here about collectively participating in art’s grandest ‘spectaculas’.

We came to listen to the dust that speaks to us because we are able or perhaps merely willing to listen. How do we gauge effect? NGOs point to our relative freedom of movement, ability to generate publicity and function with unbiddable independence.

Certainly any attempts to stop or silence international artists or writers while investing in a global art hub would be recklessly stupid of authorities in Abu Dhabi. At the same time, we’re calmly aware of being flotsam in these oceans of oil money and sovereign wealth funds.

I arrived in The Gulf from Australia where I’d been performing my book, In Ramallah, Running in art contexts in Adelaide and Sydney, facilitated by the CACSA in Adelaide.10 I also presented a talk on GulfLabor’s activity at Artspace11 as

a tangential response to the boycott by Biennial of Sydney artists objecting to the founding sponsor and ongoing Chair’s links with offshore detention centres. Within hours of that talk, unrelated to my words or presence, the Board Chair Luca Belgiorno-Nettis had resigned from the Biennial, although he remains a Director of the founding sponsor, Transfield Holdings. The policy of the government and Transfield’s lucrative role in it also remains unchanged.

One of the boycotting artists came to my talk on GulfLabor’s boycott of the Guggenheim during which I drew a couple of lessons from that campaign. I emphasised the need to be well researched and then precise in criticising the UAE or Guggenheim on its treatment of migrants, in a context of crudely prejudiced and ignorant attacks. A boycott also needs to have a clear idea of strategic effect, to hit or trigger levers of actual change. Finally, success is likely to involve compromisingly small reforms, and yet correcting injustices, or forcing change upon national governments or global corporations is also always big.

It requires us to do many things publicly, privately, more or less constantly, and not go away. As I write, TDIC have responded dismissively to GulfLabor’s report containing our research and recommendations, despite our sincerity in engaging them and the ease with which they could adopt our recommendations if they recognised the urgent reality and dreadful legacy that “conditions of forced labour” are building on Saadiyat. Apparently not. I will refrain from listing all the other alliances, international bodies and ongoing campaigning strategies, some of which are slow, or invoke established juridical mechanisms. They may come too late or all together with overwhelming momentum to force change. Let’s see.

Meanwhile, globalisation envelopes these specificities and precise contexts. We are a long way from socialising and politicising spaces of economic globalisation that formed at the end of the last century. We are also far from articulating any form of political subjectivity at a global level. From recognising ourselves in the twenty-first century migrant condition and articulating a new political subject: a global citizen, let’s say.

Far from, yet close to. Majority populations of migrant workers are likely to become global citizens in this formal way at least as soon as Emiratis or the peoples of neighbouring Gulf countries become citizens of formally constituted democracies. As such the former is a more radical as well as more realistic outcome to work for.

I’d like to refer to Hito Steyerl’s recent work to address two last points. If we accept, as she so eloquently puts it, that ours is an “age of mass art production”12 then what is an artist-actant to do? If we also accept that the money that oils art globalisation, from sponsors of biennials that soften-up a territory’s image, and open new territories to trade and tourism, to arms funding and ‘regeneration’ with architects, global corporations, curators and armies folding-in on each other, then again, what are artists, writers, thinkers, rebels or coming global citizens to do? How do we assemble alliances to act globally and develop ways to institutionalise an inventive radicalism?

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To boycott or who to boycott is not a very interesting question, actually. Of course there are extreme circumstances which require categorical responses—South African apartheid, Israeli occupation, Saadiyat’s feudalism, etc. But, generally it’s more productive, radical and unsettling to be constantly at this work, strategically aligned, lean of body and well-researched mind (with aleatory habits) than to look for things to boycott. Boycotting can merely confirm the totalising effects of globalisation, when what is required is the imagining or conceptualising of a certain exteriority to it, or the embodying of antagonistic thresholds.

I did not have to decide on my involvement in the Biennial of Sydney. If forcing the break with one sponsor was in some sense a success, what next? Transfield are old hands at supplying large-scale frigates to the Navy, which uses them to patrol and detain asylum seekers at sea. The contract to take over the detention centres was worth $AUD1.2 billion and on its announcement, Transfield’s share ‘value’ rose by over $100 million in one day. Artists ought to ask whether they benefit from such a vile business, but the attendant complexities highlight an abyssal circuitry at work. If sufficient artists had earlier planned a boycott of the Biennial in toto unless Transfield withdrew bidding for the contract or the government changed policy, what then?

The simple problem is that all money on this scale is sure to be tainted. Corporatised democracies that treat asylum seekers inhumanely, or which occupy Iraq with staggering death tolls, or autocrats that treat migrant workers like we all treat animals, are no better. I’d advocate Steyerl’s response in her Istanbul Biennial commission: Is the Museum a Battlefield? “Rather than withdraw from such spaces because of their connections with military violence and gentrification, I would on the contrary try to show the video work in every single artspace connected with this battlefield.”13 Her references are specific to the film’s narrative loops but take in all that we recognise as globalisation today, symbolised by one of her targets: Koç Holdings. Koç have sponsored Istanbul’s Biennial since 2006, while their corporate portfolio also includes Otokar’s military hardware and, of course, major regeneration plans in the city.

Steyerl names other Biennial sponsors and details Siemens’ willingness through its Nokia subsidiary to aide regimes in Bahrain and Syria and their role in her own career. The content of the work is well targeted and its trajectory takes in Gehry and Saadiyat too, but what is most significant is that she performed it in the enemy’s arena. She used the resources to undermine them with resonant precision and the greatest degree of amplification.

Rather than calibrating boycotts or withdrawals, the radical response to our situation is to perform this kind of Brechtian staging in the face of the beast, within its presently glittering ‘palace’. Globalisation means that everywhere is linked to the battlefield Steyerl describes. As brilliant as her well-prepared performance in Istanbul was, to repeat it too easily or often would undermine its achievement and lose the crucial element of surprise! In fact, artists must not repeat or be predictable.

Change requires greater rigour and agility and this underscores

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what is so demanding for those committed to radicalising forms of making, thinking and freelance living. Boycott can be an answer but there are others. The overriding imperative is to engage battlefields, take the fight to them, assert presence where they are most comfortable and complacent, take up, activate, instrumentalise, occupy, radicalise, invert and reinvent these spaces of globalised capital and banalised culture until futures that we can barely dream of are actualised.

There is in this prescription a little bit of broken-down and composed14 or anyway stitched-together Utopianism I’m unafraid to say. It’s essential in our ongoing battle not to cede the spaces of globalisation but precisely to take place within it, recompose its spatiality and establish grounds from which to fight, enjoy and invent. If, that is, we really do want to change things.

Notes 1 “In light of the continued prevalence of workers reporting the payment of recruiting fees—the single greatest factor in creating conditions of forced labor—all parties must make a clear, unequivocal promise to ensure that workers are reimbursed any recruiting fees they are found to have paid to secure employment on the island.”

Human Rights Watch, ‘The Island of Happiness Revisited’, 2012 http://www.hrw.org/ node/105799/section/2 2

www.gulflabor.org

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www.tdic.ae

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Abu Dhabi Guggenheim Faces Protest By Nicolai Ouroussoff March 16 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/guggenheim-threatened-with-boycott-over-abu-dhabiproject.html?_r=1& 5 Signatures were gathered during 2010 and went public in 2011 here: http://gulflabor. org/sign-thepetition/ 6 My British Museum FOI request in December 2013 yielded an admission that “Underwriting of £3m of this total cost from funds generated through the ZNM project has been agreed.” The deal was linked with the extension when Abu Dhabi announced it in 2009 and finances 20 full-time members of staff in London to this day 7 Rem Koolhaas; “Neoliberalism has turned architecture into a “cherry on the cake” affair ... I’m not saying that neoliberalism has destroyed architecture. But it has assigned it a new role and limited its range.” Interview with Star Architect Rem Koolhaas, Der Spiegel issue 50, December 2011 8 TDIC’s EPP (http://www.saadiyat.ae/en/about/about-tdic/worker-welfare/employmentpractices.html) obliges contractors to reimburse all relocation and recruitment fees which are technically illegal in the UAE. The incidence of workers having incurred these debts has risen since monitoring began to 86% in 2013, cf PWC (http:// www.tdic.ae/pdf/pwc’s_tdic_epp_annual_report_2013.pdf) A TDIC official who wished to remain anonymous told GL in March 2014 that he did not believe anyone who said they had not had to pay these fees 9

‘Palaces for the People’, Al Manakh v1, Archis vol 12, Amsterdam, 2007: 330

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The author’s visit to Australia was hosted by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Adelaide; with a presentation as part of the 2014 Adelaide Festival’s Artists’ Week program 11 A film of which can be found here: http://artspace.org.au/public_upcoming. php?y=2014&i=85 12

Hito Steyerl, I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production, Former West, House of Word Cultures, Berlin, 18 March 2013

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Hito Steyerl, Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), 2013 Istanbul Biennial

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Of course I am referring to Latour’s construction but radicalising it. Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto’, New Literary History, 2010, 41: 475 Page 37: Dust on boots, labour camp, Abu Dhabi, 2014 Page 38: Gorica labour camp, Jebel Ali, Dubai, 2014 Photos courtesy the author

whisper in my mask forms, mythologies and folklores. In 2012, Victoria Lynn curated Sonic Spheres, an assemblage of contemporary Australian visual artworks engaged with music, sound and voice. This year’s Biennial, Whisper in My Mask, will be for the first time curated by a collaborative duo—Natalie King and Djon Mundine. Whisper in My Mask takes its thematic cue from Grace Jones’ evocative lyrics in Art Groupie (1984), using this song as a “prelude for an exploration of masking as a psychological state alongside secrets or hidden narratives”. Would you elaborate upon both this and the vision behind your collaboration?

Natalie King: We are mindful of the TarraWarra Biennial’s significant trajectory and aware that it is rare for indigenous and non-indigenous curators to collaborate. The Biennial is an extension of our co-curation of the Asialink touring exhibition Shadowlife, which featured the work of nine photo-based Aboriginal artists (and one non-indigenous collaborator) that toured to Taiwan, Bangkok, Singapore, culminating at Bendigo Art Gallery. We also included a short film by Aboriginal filmmaker Ivan Sen, who recently released Mystery Road. Inserting a cinematic experience within an exhibition expands the audiences’ viewing parameters, slowing down time. The Biennial will include a film by poet and filmmaker Romaine Moreton. We were interested in extending our curatorial modality to conflate indigenous and non-indigenous artists. We hope the title is capacious as it derives from the lyrics in a Grace Jones’ song that signals mobilising the senses: Touch Me In A Picture Wrap Me in a Cast Kiss Me in a Sculpture Whisper in My Mask

NATALIE KING | DJON MUNDINE | ALAN CRUICKSHANK Broadsheet/ALAN CRUICKSHANK: The TarraWarra Biennial was inaugurated in 2006 as a signature exhibition to identify new currents in contemporary practice. The first Biennial, Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today curated by now Museum Director Victoria Lynn, presented her independent view of Australian painting practice influenced by contemporary cultural and political environments. In 2008, Lost & Found: An Archeology of the Present, curated by Charlotte Day, presented Australian and New Zealand artists who reinvent traditional techniques evoking historical

In 1984, Grace Jones composed this song and around the same time, her body became a painted surface for graffiti artist Keith Haring, subsequently photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe.

There are a number of historical recursions in this song and its manifestation. The Biennial commences with this song, like a soundtrack alongside two key works from the Eva and Marc Besen Collection: Howard Arkley’s Tattooed Head (1983) and Robert Dickerson’s The Clown (1958). These works act as a prelude at the museum entrance or threshold, ushering in ideas of masquerade, bodily inscription, disguise and transformative personas.

We were conscious of TarraWarra as a special location, embedded in a verdant landscape in a valley with a collection amassed by the founders. It is important to consider the context and situation at TarraWarra, which means “slow moving water” in the local Aboriginal language. We have conducted research at Coranderrk which was the site of upheaval and dispossession on Badger Creek

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WHISPER IN MY MASK

near Healesville and consulted with Wurundjeri elder, Aunty Joy Murphy. We are keen for the Biennial to radiate out from the museum and be embedded in the local community and situation.

So we are speaking with the local pub as a site for a dreaming project and video. Wherever possible, locals are involved in various projects such as Danish artist Soren Dahlgaard’s Dough Portraits, whereby a mass of bread dough is placed on the head of the sitter as both a gesture of obliteration and a sculptural cast that is nonsensical.

We are less interested in Whisper in My Mask as a literal evocation. Instead we are looking at works that suggest disguise, hiding, coverup, concealment, as well as the associative range of whispering. Whispering is an intimate act, an utterance or gesture: a coded form of speech. A number of the works have sound and suggest other forms of communications. We want to make sure there are surprises and diversions in the Biennial. We are interested in a porous type of collaboration that is open and generative.

Our conversations are ongoing and expansive plus we have been travelling to undertake research in a number of cities including Sydney, Adelaide and Alice Springs. Our process involves an ongoing open conversation of ideas, thoughts, ruminations, ramblings and dreamings, even obsessions. Interestingly, the etymology of the word mask derives from the Latin word for image or “imago” which means death mask. Image and mask are inextricably linked.

Broadsheet: All three prior Biennials have presented to some degree indigenous artist participation, from the singular Richard Bell in 2006 to Yukultji Napangati, Christian Thompson, Ray James Tjangala and Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula in 2012. Given your dual curatorial vision, how do you see the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous (and here this does not necessarily mean just Anglo-European) presentations; how might this build upon prior exhibitions?

NATALIE KING: Many of the artists we have included come from complex and sometimes fraught or contested cultural backgrounds. Polixeni Papapetrou flexes the camera’s hold on her subjects: her children dressed in vintage clown costumes. She grew up in a Greek-speaking household in Melbourne in the 1960s as the child of immigrant parents. She had no English when she started school and felt like an outsider. Her photographs have a haunting, otherworldly quality. Nasim Nasr is an emerging artist of Iranian background based in Adelaide. She explores some of the repressive conventions relating to gender especially the chador in a poetic and hypnotic way. Her film Unveiling the veil comprises close-up black and white footage of her rubbing her eyes so they weep as a form of emotional intensity and erasure. Interested in time, space and memory, Daniel Boyd’s paternal grandfather was part of a group taken from Vanuatu to the sugarcane fields in Queensland as a slave in the late 1800s, while his mother is Kudjila/Gangalu.

For the TarraWarra Biennial, he has sought permission to paint an historical painting in his signature black and white style overlaid

with tiny blackened dots, as if the painted surface is obliterated or concealed. He is also responding to the surrounding landscape by allowing small apertures from a window to reveal a galaxy of portals. This is a glimpse of how the artists are responding to situation and place.

Broadsheet: One issue emanting from the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art over recent editions has been the relationship between artwork made over the preceding two years and commissioned works. With the Adelaide Biennial’s brief of presenting ‘the latest’ in contemporary practice, its commissioning of new works presents a questionable outcome of artworks undoubedtly influenced by or directly illustrating the curatorial theme, presenting ‘the latest’as a two-way curatorial safe bet.

Given the TarraWarra Biennial’s similar brief undertaking to identify new currents in contemporary practice, what is the relationship between existing and commissioned work? And in this context you have expressed your interested in Jens Hoffman’s idea of the “para-curatorial”, being the auxiliary activities such as performances, happenings, recitals etc. How will these be invested in the exhibition?

Djon Mundine: Grace Jones’ title song rolls off a set of senses —taste, touch, hearing sound, and sight. Historically all Aboriginal art was personal and event and site orientated and worked with all the senses in its expressive form. Visual art was created from the coming together of a number of related people, across age and genders, to collaborate along set lines with song, dance, what could only be described as performance art or installation.

An arrangement of site-constructed presentations appeared along a temporal structure, an evolving centre of one-on-one lectures, durational enactments and focused theatrical showings—in fact something along Jens Hoffman’s revolving, peripheral perspective events. We never wanted to have the advertising agency label, the latest, the newest, the most exciting, the most agile, the most extraordinarily nimble. The reality of cultural life is that creativity often organically appears on the margins, in regional centres and sites of curious, little visited gatherings. In taking this commission we were looking for people of ‘like minds’, with empathy, and shared experience—not necessarily the latest superstars, otherwise one could end up with cynical parodies and contrivances of the Top 40 art circus, something ring-mastered by commercial galleries, agents, politicians, and shysters, with a given State apparatus and ‘the polis’ background of the ‘smoke and mirrors’ spectacle (bread and circuses).

Nearly all the artworks are recent, if not commissioned.

A significant number involve performance (but few of song and sound), some projection and some painting, of sorts. We never prescribed art form, age, or ethnicity—we weren’t just ticking bureaucratic boxes. One wonders, in fact, at the purpose of ‘the spectacle’—the ego of the artist-curator, a ‘smoke and mirrors political masking’—a diversion before the federal budget?

In a 2014 cartoon by Pablo Helguera,1 four talking heads are

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aligned horizontally, with the captions left to right; “Curators are the new artists”, “Collectors are the new curators”, “Socialites are the new theorists” and “Artists still think it’s about them”!

Is Grace Jones’ song Art Groupie, in fact a ‘masking’, poking fun at the ‘too cool for school’ art world in-crowd? Masks may be intentional or accidental, worn voluntarily or imposed upon us. We have any number of masks forced on us by society—see the mask of makeup in Naomi Wolfe’s The Beauty Myth, or the timely quip from Gloria Steinem, “We are all trained to be female impersonators”, or Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask; and there are others that sneak up on us, to whisper to us seductively in my mask.

Broadsheet: You have announced that you have selected works which “elicit an emotional and sensory response, returning us to human senses and the Aboriginal Djambarrpuyngu people’s palate, experienced on a scale from ‘monuk’ (salt) to rapine (sweet)”. How have you worked with collectives, collaborators and artists in remote communities, as an extension of your curatorial modality?

Djon Mundine: “Remote” and “regional” are contested terms. Filmmaker John Pilger once described remote Aboriginal communities as “gulags”, places where “nonpersons” are held, “masked”, quarantined from contaminating the rest of society, contaminating Australian society with the truth of the crimes inflicted in the colonising of Australia perhaps. Of course, from an Aboriginal perspective these places are our homes and very highly regarded spiritually, and definitely not thought of as remote. Two of the exhibition’s most ambitious conversations are concerned with the visible and the invisible masked presences and memories; firstly through the haptic work of Adelaide-based Fiona Hall, collaborating with women of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers collective from the N.Y.P. Lands of central Australia.2 So far a germ of a synergy in thought and purpose has appeared around animal species threatened with extinction, and the memory of the attempted human extinction that occurred with the atomic bomb tests in this region in the 1950s. The other is the Telepathy Project (Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples) that attempts to collaboratively join conversation with the spirit of the surrounding Tarrawarra, upper Yarra Valley region, in engagement with the local Aboriginal community (Corranderrk). A third intervention is the result of a NORPA3 initiated collaborative workshop by artist Karla Dickens—with a ‘homeless’, socially challenged, outsider group in regional Lismore on the north coast of New South Wales—utilising found object material from the local recycle centre. A bittersweet portraiture of veiled but optimistic lives.

The work of Daniel Boyd, the 2014 Bulgari Art Award recipient, points to the invisible, the dark matter of the universe, the unseen, the social, intellectual, and spiritual ‘invisible’ landscape and not the obvious visible vista of colonial landscape painting. One of the most contested debates in Australia over the last twenty years is what has come to be called the “culture wars” or “history wars”.

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This debate concerned the masked view of Australian history centred on the mass killings and dispossession of Aboriginal people from their lands across the Australian continent (including the Wurrundjeri of the Tarrawarra district). To a lesser extent it folded into this discourse the gains under the feminist and multiculturalism movements. Our paired, gender balanced curatorial team’s conversation, although nuanced through sophisticated art practice reading, is curiously joined through a social history consciousness of Holocaust experience (Aboriginal and Jewish). This is embodied within the exhibition’s catalogue essay by Professor Diane Bell on the gender and race history ‘masking’ contested in the 1990s Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal people’s Hindmarsh Island Bridge controversy in South Australia. Further, a panel discussion on the masking of Australian history will be held in October at Tarrawarra as part of the Melbourne Festival with myself, artist Fiona Foley and Professor Henry Reynolds.

The relationality of curating individual artists, community, society, inside and outside the gallery, and creating a conversation between objects and community, through a number of devices and on a number of levels, is something we unconsciously thought was our normal practice and what we aimed for from the beginning. It’s about re-reading the archive, but creating new archives and memories of the now.

NATALIE KING: Djon and I have a shared history of genocide, an attachment to community and a hearty sense of humour.

We exchange literature, ideas and thoughts, sometimes barely in formation. We are both reading Henry Reynolds’ This Whispering in our Hearts (1998) in which the role of listening, acknowledging a troubled conscience and hearing disquiet is enunciated.

As curators, we hope to listen to the murmurings of artistic production and listen to the things that are being said not only in whispers but also in forms of disguised and coded speech: how can we amplify these utterances in a biennial space for encounter and exchange?

Notes 1 http://pablohelguera.net/ 2 Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council, land across southwest Northern Territory into Western Australia and the upper northwest of South Australia 3

Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA)

Page 40: Soren Dahlgaard Bobby Bunnungurr, Dough Portrait, 2014 Photo courtesy the artist Page 41: boat-people Documentation of Muffled Protest, Sydney Harbour Bridge, 2010 Photo courtesy the artists

ngv now Andrew Mackenzie Where does one start a review of this cultural leviathan? With its free entry, its busy public program and its extensive industry participation, it should not be surprising that Melbourne Now was both popularly successful and culturally important. It deserves to be applauded for representing a seachange for the Gallery in its attempt to reinvent the summer blockbuster, one that would have been unthinkable under the previous leadership. It invested heavily in the creative here and now, from lo-fi street culture to data-driven research, from the exotic to the quixotic, from the performative to the meditative. Surely any criticism of this audacious project runs the risk of naked carping? Yet, beyond the marketing superlatives, the dozens of curators, hundreds of artists, acres of space and millions of dollars, lies a project with some deep flaws, stemming partly from the show’s confused curatorial framing and the simple fact that it was rushed.

Since being announced as the National Gallery of Victoria Director, Tony Ellwood’s stated goal has been to shake up the gallery and to transform it into an outward looking and publicly engaged institution. Prior to this, Ellwood spent five years raising the profile and audience numbers at Queensland Art Gallery and GOMA (now known by the unwieldy portmanteau QAGOMA).

His mission now, as it was then, is to revitalise the program of a venerable, much loved institution, and to increase numbers through the ticket box. After all the NGV may have the largest art collection in the southern hemisphere, but to many the NGV program had started to sprout weeds.

Thus Melbourne Now represented an unprecedented investment in dusting the NGV down and opening its doors to contemporary creative practice, using public engagement and industry collaboration as key tools to that end. This approach, which is of course very au courant, was kicked off by a series of open forums, where outsiders and insiders together helped define and fertilise the ground. Since then, many of those outsiders (independent curators, producers and arts professionals) have been invited into the tent as guest curators and collaborators.

Most were well chosen and have responded with generosity and vigour, with the promise of bringing depth and diversity to Melbourne Now. So far so good.

Ellwood however, is also very much a product of a highly conservative and hierarchical museum management culture that is determinedly vertical. His CV reflects a textbook career progression up through the ranks, if somewhat swifter than is typical (his first directorship of Bendigo Art Gallery, was at the tender age of twenty-eight). Upon taking up NGV’s top job he has been very deliberate in reforming the gallery’s organisational structure, which has included the selective pruning of the old regime, since replaced by a number of old colleagues from QAGOMA. Consistent with such nuanced staff grading, the exhibition credits in the Melbourne Now catalogue read like that of a movie, in descending order of rank and position, from director to executive managers to senior curators, curators, assistant curators, all the way down to the interns. Therein lies the curious and not altogether successful mashup of two distinct curatorial models. Part old-school vertical hierarchy with director directing from top down, and part crowd sourced and democratically cogenerated. The conflict in this was tangibly evident throughout the exhibition. Which is perhaps why, having visited and immersed myself in the exhibition’s sprawling network of spaces over several days, I found myself torn between two conflicting experiences; between enjoying its many discrete moments of intensity, curiosity, confrontation and joy, and a slow growing frustration with the exhibition’s thwarted ambition.

At times the hang was overly didactic and ideological, at other times opaque and failed to cohere. Its multi-disciplinary inclusiveness was patchy and token, while its almost complete failure to connect programmatically with the actual city of Melbourne betrayed an institution that remains defensively territorial. Inevitably, even this exhibition with hundreds of participants appeared to have a number of very notable omissions.

There is also, perhaps inevitably, vanity here too. Hidden within the rhetoric of locality and cultural community Melbourne Now could not help but rehearse that familiar yet exhausting claim,

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that Melbourne is Australia’s creative capital, the Manchester United of the ‘creative city’ premier league. Personally I think entrenched sectarian regionalism is the last thing the creative industries need.

Then there was the rush. Enthusiasm and ambition are important qualities in Ellwood, but in this instance it led to justin-time curation that placed enormous stress on both industry collaborators and gallery staff alike. This may have served a strategic gallery need, but it served neither the work nor the exhibition. While the first talk of this exhibition began well over a year before it opened, sleeves did not get rolled up until six or seven months before the launch, with some participants learning of their inclusion in the weeks running up to doors were opened.

To put this in context, Hans Ulrich Obrist is working on a similar endeavour in London. It will take him five years.

The strategic gallery need in question is, of course, a little thing called “NGV Contemporary”. The idea’s been around for a while, and while it is little more than an idea as yet, Ellwood is impatient to build momentum. So while the exhibition’s audience is ostensibly the public, streaming into the NGV in record numbers, its other audience is that body of politicians, funding bodies, sponsors and patrons that the NGV needs to impress if it’s going to get his Contemporary.

For this exhibition Ellwood specifically leaned heavily on Senior Curator for Contemporary Art Max Delany. With the time available, working across both NGV International and Australia, co-coordinating a cast of thousands including a clutch of independent curators, it must have felt less like hanging an exhibition than herding cats. Delany’s reputation, after his years at Gertrude Street followed by Monash Museum of Modern Art, is deservedly of a curator with a deft hand and conceptual depth, which he has applied to many exhibitions. Yet here the storytelling failed on entry. I was dumbfounded by the lobby at both venues.

The ambition NGV set for itself, to tell the story of Melbourne’s contemporary creative world was a big and difficult one.

If the NGV is serious about expanding its audience for this kind of exhibition and of building stronger ties with the wider public, this exhibition needed an introduction, an overview or some kind of orientation. I found it dense and difficult to navigate. In entering one venue you could see a delightful but unedifying blooming installation, entering the other you encountered a group of faux domestic settings made from icing sugar. There were pamphlets and catalogues and guides etc, however spatially visitors were dumped straight in there, left to fend for themselves in one of the most conceptually demanding exhibitions the gallery has ever presented.

This lack of contextual setting was also notable in the design components of the exhibition that popped up here and there. Good design has never been more vital, yet less understood.

The spread of knock-off designer furniture and Channel 9 makeover shows has given design a reputation for the superficial.

This exhibition could have told a different, richer story, of the complexity of design development, the wonders of new materials,

the ethics of production and the challenges of making it all economically viable. All of which were there, implicitly, in the considered selection of some great design work, but not unpacked through its exposition. Instead we encountered some handmade shoes here, or a collection of furniture there, with little if any elaboration. Table, light, chair. Nice timber. Next.

Simone LeAmon’s collection of Melbourne’s better industrial design was well chosen and theatrically presented, rendering a Koons-like Neo Geo spectacle of consumption.

Yet the story did not unfold. The products kept their stories to themselves, of dogged journeys through trial and error, of eureka moments, of opportunities fought for, and of the Melbourne David competing against the global Goliath, and winning.

Fleur Watson’s journey through a selection of Melbourne architecture wisely acknowledged its limitations, in titling that section Sampling the City. The immersive sound and image environment that she curated was evocative and compellingly sampled. Architects narrate ideas and inspiration over a montage of images of the city. For those who take the time and get immersed this space is deeply rewarding. However, the room next door was not so successful, where a dense montage of objects, drawings, photographs and materials was utterly left to its own devices, and was consequently opaque and disjointed.

The ideas within Sampling the City resonated with other work in the exhibition. Or might have, if there had been time to explore relationships; for example with the urban glimpses of painter David Jolly, the spatiality of time in the video work of Daniel Crooks or the abandoned industrial spaces in the work of David Chesworth and Sonia Leber, to name a few. I promised myself not to play the game of who’s missing, but I have to say that given the urban backdrop to so much of the exhibition I was surprised not to see a more tailored inclusion of Callum Morton.

There are few Melbourne artists who have responded to space, architecture and the urban condition as compellingly as Morton.

Imagine his 2007 Venice Biennale installation placed somewhere in the vicinity of Federation Square. Instead, he was represented by a few smaller works from the Collection. These opportunities, if carefully explored, might have really taken the audience on an extended journey through the gallery and through connected ideas. But that’s hard to do when the clock’s ticking.

But despite time constraints, placing limitations on how complex a story could be told about design, architecture, fashion, painting and sound art, some portion of the personality and attitude of each invited curator was evident in their section.

The selection and display of each section was clearly the product of an attitude—the curator’s. That was not such a bad thing, rendering a degree of heterogeneity that could have been positive, if marshalled effectively under the one roof. Unfortunately for the drawings included in Drawing Now, curated by John Nixon, it was not so much the curator’s attitude that was visible but his dogmatism. This in turn robbed the drawings of much of their capacity to be seen. Undoubtedly Drawing Now was this writer’s low point in the exhibition.

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Drawing is rarely given the attention is deserves, often seen as support to the main act and increasingly marginalised by technology. Yet for some artists the modest technology of graphite on paper for instance, can provide a window into a world that is immediately available and uniquely intimate. Exhibiting drawings does however require great care, perhaps more so than other art forms. Lighting is incredibly important, as is scale and adjacency.

It is important, that is, if you are interested in the drawing’s intrinsic qualities. Sadly, Nixon rather was interested in how the work of other artists, largely taken from the Collection and with little consultation with the author, could reflect his own artistic and ideological position, thus transposing his art practice onto the work of others.

Those who visited Nixon’s ‘retrospective’ at Kaliman Rawlins gallery a few of years ago will have encountered the even distribution of dozens of paintings and drawings hung with cool neutrality, as a series of equivalent objects, without any suggestion of ranking—of importance, chronology, material or intent. As is typical of Nixon, the exhibition’s hang refused to differentiate individual works, presenting the oeuvre not as a group of distinct objects, but as a continuing, some would say dogged, life-long project. That indeed, has been Nixon’s firmly held ideological position for decades.

And what did we encounter on entering Drawing Now? A selection of other artists’ work hung with cool neutrality, as a series of equivalent objects, without any suggestion of ranking —of importance, chronology, material or intent. The setting for this was a large square room with white walls washed by an even flood of light. It is possible that the works occupied less than two per cent of the wall space, strung out on a datum line like so many tea towels, making it all but impossible to engage with the work on its own terms. The room is however easy to traverse. In one door, cross the floor and out the other. On the day I was there that is what most people did.

So much for one half of my bi-polar experience of the exhibition. The other half was simply that of the work, which when relieved of the duty to represent an institution, a discipline or an ideology was often richly rewarding. Conventional I know, but given the amount of work it seemed to make sense to think in terms of media clusters.

Photography threatened to steal the show. Georgia Metaxas’ suite of portraits, of Nonnas in mourning set against a bible black background was as timeless as a Dutch still life, and just as intense. It was one of the surprisingly few works that registered the profound impact of Greek culture on the city. Another photographer Polixeni Papapetrou also presented portraits of a sort, though her Ghillies series were portraits of strange mythological figures set in various wild landscapes, appearing to have emerged from the mud and magma of the earth.

Siri Hayes’ mural sized back screen projection Wanderer above a sea of images was from a series entitled En plein air. Like Papapetrou her figures occuped a strangely disquieting landscape, though I was reminded of Jeff Wall’s studied historicism, in their revisiting

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of landscapes once romanticised by Smike and Bulldog, here featuring distant power stations and deforested hills.

Indeed Hayes’ work was one of a number that cried out for the hang to allow creative historical adjacencies, given it was hung within the NGV Australia gallery. From London to New York, Tasmania to Adelaide, museums have been exploring the creative interweaving of contemporary work and historical collections to great effect. Last year I entered the august Art Gallery of South Australia and was confronted by two entwined monumentally life-sized horse carcasses hanging from the ceiling.

It was surrounded by the museum’s otherwise polite historical collection. This work by Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere had barely raised an eyebrow when exhibited in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne) the year before, but here within this mausoleum of history painting and naked bronzes it provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor. It even raised a voice or two on local talkback radio. Clearly AGSA director Nick Mitzevich knows that context matters. Here, associations in Hayes’ work to the locally revered Heidelberg School abounded, and thus the work was crying out for a conversation with the Collection; with Arthur Streeton’s Our untidy bush (1927) or Tom Roberts’ Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look (1887-88). Both, by the way, are in the NGV Collection.

It was surprising not to see more digital media work.

From that respect Melbourne Now was surprisingly low on screens.

One screen that I did enjoy was Daniel von Sturmer’s Small World, which continued to alchemically transform modest objects into magical performances. What might have been called Big World, but was in fact called ZOOM, was a multi-screen vision of Melbourne as seen through terabytes of information. It was curated by Ewan McEwan and featured the ‘data tapestry’ of Greg More, who specialises in taking buckets of data and transforming it through bespoke designed coding into visually comprehensible information. It was twenty-first century storytelling. More once said on TEDx that “data can shape a better city, it can make our cities more sustainable”. Whether a deliberate sleight of hand or temporary excess of zeal, there is little doubt that data needs a little help to reach its potential.

But then the top end of technology does have a tendency to inflect good intent with a measure of hubris. The wall of screens was impressive, and there was no doubt this form of visual transliteration can help stimulate a better understanding of complex things, such as urban environments. Organisations like Space Syntax in London has been working in this vein for many years, helping government bodies make better infrastructure and urban design decisions. In the context of this exhibition ZOOM represented a sophisticated and genuine attempt to change the audience’s understanding of what creativity can be, and to what ends it can be put.

NGV NOW

It was great to see that Marco Fusinato’s heart-stopping audience blaster continued to pump adrenalin as it did five years ago at ACCA’s NEW09. Aetheric Plexus (Broken X) was recreated and now joins the NGV Collection. One of the great things about Melbourne Now that absolutely must be celebrated is the NGV’s support of contemporary artists through such commissions, $1.5million being spent on such for this exhibition.

References have been made to the exhibition’s ‘biennalelike’ scale and ambition. Yet biennales, for better or for worse, are typically grounded in one person’s informed perspective. This year sees Juliana Engberg’s Biennale of Sydney, which is likely to reflect her penchant for the psychologically charged and viscerally profound. Alternatively, a biennale by Massimiliano Gioni is likely to be a bit surreal, looking to the cultural margins. A biennale by Okwui Enwezor is likely to cast the conceptual net far, exploring a wide world of social relations. Each curator can be expansive and accommodate diversity, yet will each create a biennale that is the product of a unique creative projection. This of course explains why biennales can so neatly side-step the need to be all-inclusive, as they are understood to embody a single perspective—they are not a generalised compendium, as was the underlying expectation for Melbourne Now.

Melbourne Now was also distinguished from the typical biennale by its institutional exclusivity. While the Venice Biennale for instance, is centred around Il Giardini and the Arsenale, there are always many satellite events, salons, project spaces and plug-in activities. Some are official and some are guerilla, dispersed across multiple venues, from large to small.

This approach allows multiple third parties to participate and enhance the overall event. This did not happen at Melbourne Now.

Ordinarily it is understandable that the NGV is a fortress, given the insurance and liability conditions that govern exhibitions of French Impressionists or Pablo Picasso. Here however the lack of any meaningful connection with other spaces or galleries in the city has no such justification, particularly since Melbourne has depended for decades, generations even, on the vibrant and dynamic activities of dozens of artist run initiatives.

Indeed, it is impossible to celebrate the qualities of innovation and experimentation in the work of Melbourne’s artistic community, including dozens of those participating in this exhibition without also celebrating the pivotal role of ARIs over the years.

This much is recognised within the exhibition, with kudos heaped on both independent exhibition spaces and their printed corollaries in un Magazine and others. However, in failing to program beyond the gallery’s territory, while internalising the cultural capital that so many small, marginally sustainable spaces have helped generate, one cannot but feel a deal of cultural expropriation here, not to mention audience hoarding. It’s great that NGV’s numbers have boomed over the last few months, but what effect has that had on galleries across the city? My understanding is that many have suffered the ‘Olympic Games’ effect, of crowds drained from all around, sucked into NGV’s marketing vortex. So despite its scale and ambition, Melbourne

Now has neither the generosity nor clarity of a good biennale. It is an instrumental blockbuster for a director in development mode.

It has probably served its function of rebranding the NGV as a forward-looking and locally engaged institution—an old dog with new tricks. In doing so Melbourne Now does capture a good deal of great contemporary Melbourne creative practice, however in the manner of its execution it has sacrificed what it could have been, which sadly may also reflect the contemporary world of arts funding and the art of chasing an audience.

Page 44: Christopher Langton Away with the fairies (detail), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Page 45: Anastasia Klose One stop knock-off shop–Marcel Dachump, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Above: Linda Marrinon installation view Photo courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

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melbourne then, melbourne now, and melbourne’s future

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Rebecca Coates Thus endeth the first lesson. As Melbourne Now drew to a close, we the public were able to reflect on what had been the largest, most ambitious, and most extensive exhibition of contemporary art that the National Gallery of Victoria has ever presented. Running for four months over summer, from November 2013 to March 2014, while not technically a biennale, it had biennale ambitions in its breadth, scale and reach. It aimed to put contemporary art from Melbourne on the world map. Free admission, an exhibition that featured the work of over three hundred and eighty-seven artists spread across two venues with an exhibition space of 8000sqm, over six hundred programs, and a budget estimated in December 2013 at $5 million, Melbourne Now was described as the most popular exhibition nationally in recent years, with attendance exceeding 700,000.1 These are quantitative statistics that any State or national gallery director would die for. From a ‘bums on seats’ point of view, the exhibition has been a huge success. But, as recently appointed director Tony Ellwood sagely states, this is not the only way to judge success. What is the legacy, longevity, and impact of this exhibition, and was it any good?

The brain-child of Ellwood, Melbourne Now signalled a new direction and exhibition focus for the NGV, in which contemporary art, audience development and Ellwood’s own inimitable entrepreneurial style are king. Ellwood was familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the institution and what had to change, and change fast. He had previously worked there in the 1990s under James Mollison, and later in a deputy role after a highly successful time as Director at the Bendigo Art Gallery.

His recent appointment came on the back of an equally successful, if occasionally polemic period as Director at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane. In 2010, attendances to QAGOMA reached 1.8 million, making it the most visited gallery in the country. There, he had introduced a series of highly successful and well-attended exhibitions, which combined spectacle, audience engagement, kids programs, specially commissioned projects and contemporary art.

Ellwood was familiar with the widely held perception that the NGV had lost touch with its contemporary art audiences and community.2 And, as is now widely acknowledged by contemporary art critics, art historians, curators and artists, exhibition histories can have a cultural and historic impact on an institution and the wider cultural landscape.3 Ellwood understood how an ambitious and challenging exhibition could signal institutional change and artistic innovation. The NGV’s own history provides examples, though smaller and in keeping with the spirit of their times. The groundbreaking exhibition The Field (1968) was held to celebrate the reopening of the National Gallery in 1968 in Roy Grounds’ starkly Australian modernist building on St Kilda Road. It championed Australian artists whose work reflected the influence of American hard-edged abstraction, Greenbergian theory and colour field painting. One of the most important aspects of this exhibition was its emphasis on the relationship between the art museum and contemporary local artists.

The significance of this ambition was again signalled when the NGV opened its second exhibition space in Federation Square in 2002, the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. The first exhibition in the new space was titled Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968-2002 (2002), which took its point of departure from The Field.

Like The Field it re-engaged contemporary artists and audiences with a survey of the most important developments in Australian art from 1968 to 2002 according to the NGV curators.

Both these notable exhibitions signalled institutional change, albeit on a traditional exhibition scale rather than a vast biennale model. One other NGV exhibition also provided a model for Melbourne Now. The exhibition 2004 occurred on Ellwood’s watch as deputy at the NGV. It pushed the boundaries of exhibition scale and ambition. Curated by a curatorium of fifteen curatorial staff from both institutions, 2004 was shown across two institutional spaces in Federation Square–NGVA and ACMI, and showed over one hundred and twenty artists.4

Described as a “snapshot of the most exciting things happening in Australian art today”, its focus was not purely local. Instead, it attempted to present a national survey of contemporary Australian visual culture, “based on fieldwork and consultation with artists around the country”.5 This exhibition manifested ambitions to be a biennial-style show, an exhibition taking place every two years, showing across multiple venues, vast in scale and with global ambitions. Although there was no 2006 exhibition to establish a biennial series, 2004 had many other biennial-like features.

The exhibition showcased creativity on a biennial exhibition scale. The accompanying catalogue, its paperback size clearly referencing the short guides produced for international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and documenta, presented Melbourne as a laboratory of all things creative, with full-bleed colour

photographs featuring aspects of Melbourne’s creative ecology —its cutting-edge architecture, laneways, graffiti, design culture, as well as contemporary art. This exhibition came four years after Melbourne’s one and only biennial, Signs of Life (1999), the Melbourne International Biennial curated by Juliana Engberg (and affectionately dubbed the Melbourne one-ennial). This biennial included a monumental central exhibition featuring the work of over sixty local and international artists spread throughout the shell of an eight-storey, decommissioned telephone exchange in the city centre, and a further eleven national pavilion exhibitions that co-opted many of Melbourne’s contemporary art spaces.

Melbourne Now placed Melbourne squarely on the cultural map. Like 2004, it was curated by a collective of curators, a “collaborative curatorial model”, led by Ellwood and the

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newly appointed Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Max Delany, with a team of over twenty NGV curators, design and public programs staff, and external design and architecture curators. While this approach reflected contemporary curatorial practices, it risked a fragmentation of curatorial scope, focus and direction. A visit to the NGV offices in the early stages of the exhibition conception revealed large cardboard panels lining the corridor walls, with photocopied images, cut-outs, and other 2D renderings of artists’ works (pinned in clusters) from recent and notable exhibitions, suggesting the beginnings of curatorial themes. Images and art appeared to precede any clearly articulated curatorial frame.

Like 2004, Melbourne Now was to be based on extensive research and development, and meetings with artists in their studios and colleagues across the city. The ambition and rapidly growing scale of the exhibition, and speed at which curators had to work, meant that this sort of in-depth and time-consuming research was always going to be compromised. In his foreword to the exhibition guide, Ellwood articulated the exhibition’s premise as “the idea that a city is significantly shaped by the artists, designers, architects, choreographers, intellectuals and community groups that live and work in its midst”.6 It was to explore how Melbourne’s visual artists and creative practitioners contributed to the dynamic cultural identity of the city. Delany talked about the exhibition not as a systematic survey, nor a critically framed argument, but one that aimed to celebrate the community of the contemporary creative arts in Melbourne. And the exhibition certainly did that. With this all-inclusive approach, however, what was to be excluded? How would it be possible to draw the line? The exhibition filled foyers and hallways, temporary and permanent exhibition spaces, and invited audiences to engage and participate in activities that spanned music, art, performance, design, architecture, and sustainable and ecological food practices in a way that the NGV had never attempted before.

Engagement with audiences was a clearly articulated aim. Artists used the Gallery as a meeting-pace, an impromptu studio with good coffee, and as a showcase for recent work in museum quality surrounds. They benefited too from the sheer numbers of non-dedicated, contemporary art audiences, who happened across their work in this mainstream art museum space. This of course affected attendance figures over summer at other arts institutions in Melbourne that present the work of local and international contemporary artists. Their numbers were down, though some would say that the best show always wins out. It was difficult, however, for smaller organisations to compete with the massive marketing budgets and signage that permeated every part of the city, from the airport’s luggage carousel halls to street bunting and signage. But even cynical arts insiders found it difficult to ignore Melbourne Now and its successes. The opening night party had atmosphere and buzz, as a mass of art world insiders moved in a tsunami from one location to the next.

The sheer proliferation of art and artists meant that it was very hard not to see the exhibition as doing far more good than harm.

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So what of the exhibition itself? There were good sections, and some that didn’t work quite so well. There were some good works, and some that were flat. In an exhibition of this scale and breadth, so much is to be expected. There were existing works seen in a new presentation context, shown alongside new art commissions, and as at GOMA, commissions developed specifically for children and young audiences. Some of the strongest galleries were at the NGVI. Patrick Pound’s The gallery of air (2013) presented a wunderkammer of works relating to the topic, drawn from the artist’s and the institution’s own collections. It was an instant success with the public and art crowd alike, crossing traditional borders of high and low art. Asthma inhalers and other objects with splendidly obscure connections and links jostled alongside old master paintings and modernist masterpieces. A cheesy soundtrack on the same theme was piped through the toilets, more MONA than the staid and stuffy personality of the traditional museum.

Works like these permitted contemporary artists to work closely with NGV collections and curators, getting to know the breadth and depth of the permanent collection in a way that had not been allowed for many years. Drawing in the galleries led by artists was reintroduced: an instant success. The Telepathy Project offered another approach to recurating the NGV’s historic collection.

An ongoing collaboration between artists Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, Dreaming the collection (2013) gathered together works featuring sleeping figures as a catalyst for a series of dreaming events, in which artists recounted their dreams over seven nights. The only disappointment was that the sleepovers at the NGV proposed as part of this project never actually eventuated.

If there was a thematic framing for any of the galleries, this was most clearly visible in the NGVI gallery featuring work by Tom Nicholson, Brook Andrew, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green with Jon Cattapan and Juan Davila. Themes of archival history, political and social representation, the politics of war and contested histories appeared in various guises in each of the works. Even then, this was a pretty broad sweeping set of themes. Paintings

by Moya McKenna and sculptural figures by Linda Marrinon were also shown in this space, though their connection with these themes was more tenuous. Another theme explored in NGVI was national identity, albeit via the adoption of vernacular language and imagery in a contemporary context. Jon Campbell’s DUNNO (T.Towels) (2012) installed printed tea-towels featuring overlooked suburban motifs, language and images, an Australian form of Pop Art imagery and text echoing the country’s ‘gidday maate’ salutation. Who doesn’t remember the block of frozen orange ice called a Sunny Boy, bought from the tuckshop on a sweltering forty degree day? Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s installation of shields The Belief made between 2004 and 2013, was inspired by the NGV’s own collection of shields from Papua New Guinea. Their interests in the legacies of modernism, feminism, psychoanalysis, film, literature and design imbued these examples with a form of reverse ethnography.

MELBOURNE THEN, MELBOURNE NOW, AND MELBOURNE’S FUTURE

Another device that enabled the curators to include the work of many artists was through artistic collectives. These included the artist as curator, such as John Nixon’s drawing project. He invited fellow artists and colleagues to each present one drawing, which was then hung in a single line, centrally positioned, around the room. Nixon’s experimental music group, The Donkey’s Tail, also presented two projects, one in the NGVI on the mezzanine floor as an interactive project for kids, and another as a sound project that was used for performances in the gallery space during the course of the exhibition. Warren Taylor, a designer who founded the important design gallery The Narrows, curated a collection of exhibition posters, the Then Posters, which attempted to blur the disciplines of graphic design, advertising and art. Artists and designers were paired, and these posters appeared in and around Melbourne throughout the exhibition.

un Magazine, a contemporary art magazine published in Melbourne curated un Retrospective, a selective history of artists, writers and art practice in Melbourne since 2004, assembling recent local works of art alongside correlating text in a range of forms (essay, review, interview). Their inclusion reflected the important and central role that art journals of this kind play, reinforced by the curating of the Reading Room, which also gathered together examples of Melbourne’s independent art magazines and journals.

Amongst many other collectives involved, a notable and highly visible project was Stuart Russell’s Flags, printed by his design and printing studio Spacecraft, which was displayed in the Great Hall. Again, this project included designs by some of Melbourne’s leading contemporary artists, from emerging to well-established.

Hung from the black steel supports of Leonard French’s much loved stained glass window in the NGVI’s Great Hall, it offered a contemporary re-interpretation of this architectural space. Another set of these flags was hung in and around the city of Melbourne, and a brief appearance of a giant flag on the West Gate Bridge seemed an ambiguous and fitting conclusion to this hugely ambitious exhibition.

The legacy of this exhibition, however, does not rest there. Ellwood has ambitions to grow the collection through these mega-exhibitions, and do it in a way that brings the public, as well as existing and potential donors with him. In a newspaper article accompanied by an image of Anne-Marie May’s RGB (Mobile) (2013), a mobile of coloured transparent plastic, Ellwood made a public call for funds to acquire it: the most talked about work on social media from the exhibition. This public appeal gave the community, who had visited and viewed the exhibition in droves, the opportunity to be part of a crowd-sourcing campaign to directly support the institution through financial contributions, however small. It was reminiscent of public calls to support the acquisition of works of art from exhibitions in the past. It also meant that major works and commissions from this significant exhibition could be acquired for the permanent collection, building the institution’s holdings of contemporary art quickly and publicly. This was a key acquisition strategy implemented

by Tony Ellwood’s predecessor at QAGOMA, Doug Hall.

He acquired extensively from temporary commissions as part of QAGOMA’s triennial exhibition, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, so that it now has international works by leading contemporary artists unrivalled by other States, and even some international museums. The strategy, however, can skew an institution’s contemporary collections, with criticisms levelled at an institution’s selection for major commissions based on an artist’s cachet to the permanent collection.

It has long been asserted that the failure to create a recurring exhibition placed Melbourne at a cultural and artistic disadvantage. Given the richness of Melbourne’s artistic ecology, in this instance, this is clearly not the case. But in terms of Melbourne Now’s success as a possible successor to a biennial model, its endorsement by the public, politicians, policymakers and sponsors alike, was reflected in Ellwood’s announcement that the NGV would host a triennial exhibition of cuttingedge art and design scheduled to start in 2017. In a nod to the traditional Melbourne/Sydney rivalry, the announcement was made on the eve of opening of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ participation in the Biennale of Sydney. This announcement signalled a desire to position the institution firmly as a world centre for contemporary art. Ellwood noted that a NGV triennial may have “fewer artists, but bigger gestures” than its 2013 predecessor. It allows Ellwood to put a third venue dedicated to large-scale contemporary art back on the agenda—Melbourne’s Turbine Hall perhaps, but without the historic building. That Melbourne needs, or could even support, another contemporary art venue remains a moot point. What is clear is that without Melbourne Now, Ellwood would have found it very hard to get this triennial off the ground. The Melbourne king may be quiet for the moment, but he’s certainly not dead.

Notes 1 See Matthew Westwood, ‘The NGV’s Tony Ellwood is a man of zeal’, The Australian, 6 December, 2013; and Matthew Westwood, ‘NGV’s triennial cutting-edge exhibition to build on Melbourne Now’, The Australian, 19 March, 2014 2

See also Helen Hughes, ‘Melbourneness and Melbourne Now’, Art & Australia, vol 51.2, 2013: 251–257

3 See for example Bruce Altshuler’s two extensive volumes on the subject: Salon to Biennial, Exhibitions that Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863-1959, London: Phaidon: 2008, and Biennials and Beyond – Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume II: 19622002, London: Phaidon, 2013 4 National Gallery of Victoria curators: Anonda Bell, Jane Devery, Kelly Gellatly, Charles Green, David Hurlston, Jason Smith; NGV Curatorial Advisors: Julie Gough, Frances Lindsay, Judith Ryan, Katie Somerville; Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) curators: Spiro Economopoulos, Alexie Glass, Rhys Graham, Meliinda Rachjam, Clare Stewart. See 2004 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria: Melbourne, 2004: 220 5

Charles Green, ‘2004: Mapping contemporary Australian art and new media’, 2004 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004: 21

6

Melbourne Now exhibition guide, National Gallery of Victoria: Melbourne, 2013: 4

Page 50: Polixeni Papapetrou Ocean Man, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist

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the outmoded in contemporary digital culture

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Wes Hill Culture today is infatuated with the styles of the past. We can see this not just in music, music videos, advertisements, film, fashion and a huge array of social media platforms, but of course, in art as well. The artworld’s preoccupation with the nostalgic past has been characterised by some key commentators over the last few years as a kind of return to modernism, in part as an attempt to address the perceived inadequacy of postmodernism as a theoretical concept, and the widespread scepticism over the new. In turning one’s attention to digital art, which is a relatively recent area of concern for art historians, the proliferation of retro aesthetics and outmoded forms is particularly apparent, defying the future orientation often expected of new media.

Digital photography applications such as Instagram, with its filters that imitate the period-look of photographs taken by old film cameras, are emblematic of the nostalgia permeating today’s creative disciplines. We could also think of Lana Del Rey’s National Anthem (2012) music video as a popular representative of this; a video in which rapper A$AP Rocky plays Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy to Del Ray’s own Jackie Kennedy and Priscilla Presley persona, filmed in retro settings through Instagram-type colour filters. Del Ray emerged a few years ago at the peak of mainstream interest in 1950s and 1960s music, associated with singers such as Adele and Amy Winehouse, as well as the intentionally derivative work of Lady Gaga, who draws heavily from the 1980s. It is easy to think of a plethora of visual artists who could be similarly placed within this Instagram mentality of contemporary culture; choosing to speak to the present moment through obsolete technologies or through retro-looking imagery and materials.

This was the subject, in a roundabout way, of a 2012 Artforum essay by Claire Bishop, the renowned art critic and associate professor of art history at the City University of New York. Titled “Digital Divide: Whatever Happened to Digital Art?”, the purpose of Bishop’s essay was not to show how contemporary artists are uninterested in digital media, but rather to reflect on what she sees as a shortage of artists who really capture, or intend

Above: Image created by Flash “make your own Jackson Pollock” program created by Miltos Manetas

to capture, what it is like to live in a world that has been reshaped by digital media. The essay focused on the mainstream art world, arguing that artists are less interested in confronting digital media directly, and are more interested in the analogue, the archival, the obsolete and pre-digital modes of communication.

In focusing on the mainstream art world, Bishop’s essay—which provoked much criticism over its narrow view of digital art—sought to diagnose why artists working with the latest technologies and digital tropes are still very much the fringe dwellers in the dominant discourses and institutions of art. Here I will discuss the essay at length in order to take this argument further than Bishop. I will try to show that the prevalence of outmoded aesthetics and outmoded technologies does not so much highlight a division in the representation of digital or new media art, but instead indicates that the outmoded is the most effective language to communicate something of the speed, chaos and uncertainty that marks life in the Internet age. Bishop begins her essay with a well-grounded passage that is worth reproducing here at length. She writes:

THE OUTMODED IN CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL CULTURE

Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never really gained traction—which is not to say that digital media have failed to infiltrate contemporary art. Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption. Multichannel video installations, Photoshopped images, digital prints, cut-and-pasted files (nowhere better exemplified than in Christian Marclay’s The Clock, 2010): These are ubiquitous forms, their omnipresence facilitated by the accessibility and affordability of digital cameras and editing software.

There are plenty of examples of art that makes use of Second Life (Cao Fei), computer-game graphics (Miltos Manetas), YouTube clips (Cory Arcangel), iPhone apps (Amy Sillman), etc. So why do I have a sense that the appearance and content of contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution?

While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematise this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?1 Here one can imagine the inspiration for Bishop’s hypothesis as stemming from her search for timely reflections on digital culture in leading commercial art galleries and large-scale exhibitions, but instead finding mainly nostalgia driven works. It is fitting then that early on in the essay Bishop turns her attention away from the likes of Arcangel and Trecartin to focus instead on those artists who seem to avoid the tropes of digital media, but nonetheless still suggest a relationship to our contemporary culture—pursuing what Bishop calls a “contemporary mode steeped in the analog”.2

Bishop claims that many of the artists whose work revolves around obsolescence adopt archival forms, and she goes on to discuss artists such as Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Matthew Buckingham and Fiona Tan. These artists, although displaying a fidelity to the past, do not obviously direct their work towards a critique of medium, reinvention of medium or a critique of the institutional context of art. This is particularly apparent when juxtaposed with the archival and outmoded themed work of earlier artists such as Fred Wilson and Mark Dion, who in reflecting on issues of institutional context, employ a didacticism that younger artists often try to avoid. In discussing Tacita Dean’s and Zoe Leonard’s work in particular, Bishop seeks to go beyond the readings of Rosalind Krauss, which she claims reiterate Walter Benjamin’s idea that the critical potential of an object may be unleashed at the very moment of its obsolescence. In this earlier theoretical model, which is marked by the writings of the Frankfurt

School theorists, the true potentiality of a new technology was considered to be present at its conception, but is quickly shrouded in its adherence to utility and commodification. Because in capitalist life all things become obsolete within a certain nexus of capital, technology and labour, obsolescent technologies—in their very failure—were thought to heighten an awareness of State and capitalist directives that might otherwise be hidden.

In Reinventing the Medium (1999), Krauss expanded on Benjamin to show that, through outmoded media—which, in her argument concerns the adherence of photographic and video technologies to the law of commodity production between 1960 and 1990—artists are able to redefine prior determinations of medium.

James Coleman and William Kentridge are understood by Krauss as distinct from those earlier conceptual and post-conceptual artists who used photography as a critical or theoretical object —those who were representative of Krauss’ post-medium hypothesis. Instead, Kentridge and Coleman employ outmoded technologies in ways that reinvent the expressive potential of their given technical supports. Such practices open up “new relation[s] to aesthetic production”, and aid Krauss’ claim that medium is still relevant to interpretations of art, if understood as comprising the given technical supports through which expressive possibilities and aesthetic conventions are performed.3

While within the frame of much media theory, discarded technologies remain relevant because they can reveal past ideologies, contradictions, material conditions and failures, to which contemporary culture might otherwise be blind (due to the relentless innovations of capitalism), Bishop claims that the

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use of such technologies in contemporary art no longer speaks to an earlier vocabulary of re-invention, revelation, oppositionality and critique. Citing how fashionable it has become to use old film stock in video art, or to use slide projectors and other old-fashioned mediums, Bishop essentially argues for a new way to comprehend the critical directives of these works. In making her point, she refers briefly to Nicholas Bourriaud’s essays on relational aesthetics to remind the reader of how he posed old-fashioned face-to-face relations over the virtual and the representational.

Here she draws a direct connection between the prevalence of analogue technologies in contemporary art and the widespread shift over the last decade towards more homespun, unrefined and handmade art activities.

While Bishop cites history as important to contemporary artists, she attempts to show that historical critique is not performed in the same way that preoccupied modernist and postmodernist artists. In discussing the prevalence of “retrocraftiness”, she argues that the German artist Isa Genzken is representative of an older model of bricolage, because the histories behind her objects are treated as if incidental, compared to the way younger artists such as Carol Bove or Rashid Johnson maintain the “cultural integrity” of their reused artefacts. Bishop’s main point is that artists such as Bove, Johnson, Dean and Leonard approach the contemporary through disavowal; their works appearing as if they are stuck in the past, yet ultimately maintaining something of the “operational logic” of the digital era. Towards the end of her essay she employs the phrase “the new illegibility”, coined by Ubuweb founder Kenneth Goldsmith, to describe contemporary art that

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declines to speak overtly about the conditions of living through new media. This new illegibility is in line with Bishop’s account of contemporary art’s propensity to reject direct classification, and is perhaps yet another term for what many have called the post-critical condition of contemporary art. Works such as Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all (2008)—which comprises more than four thousand postcards of Niagara Falls—attest to the possibilities of internet searchability, but are ultimately situated between the historical and the contemporary. In a way, such a work is also caught between critical reflection and pastiche or formal play—staging a spectatorial condition characterised by the skimming or scanning of a work or an exhibition for information, similar to how we skim or scan online information. Following this line of thought, Bishop refers to the expansion of festival-style art exhibitions over the last decade to claim that they enact a similar mode of interaction, with exhibitions that are so large no one could ever possibly see their entire contents, and so viewers are compelled to view works quickly.4

While Bishop discusses many artists who favour anachronism over more direct confrontations of digital media, she refers to just a few artists, including Ryan Trecartin, Cory Arcangel and Thomas Hirschhorn as “exceptions [that] just point up the rule”.5 However, a cursory glance at their work would actually suggest that these artists similarly rely on outmoded, retro or out-of-fashion aesthetics, belying her diagnosis of a digital divide. Against many of the harsh responses to Bishop’s article by proponents of new media and online art, my understanding of Bishop’s essay is not, despite its flaws, that she is ignorant of the value of new media or experimental online practice—which was not her focus anyway—but that she could have gone even further in claiming that outmoded and anachronistic forms dominate mainstream contemporary art.6

Ryan Trecartin, who was named by the New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as the “most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s”, clearly has a preference for late-1980s and early-1990s digital graphics, old-fashioned editing techniques and clunky post-production.7 Although prompting reflection on contemporary digital culture, his aesthetic sensibility draws from many earlier digital forms, and exploits what The New York Times’ critic Holland Cotter has called “the retinal extravagance of much 1980s art”.8 Like Trecartin, Cory Arcangel’s work is similarly steeped in early digital nostalgia; an artist best known for his hacked computer games Super Slow Tetris (2004) and Super Mario Clouds (2002), the latter comprising just the blue backdrop and slow moving clouds of a Super Mario Brothers landscape.

The humour of past (failed) technologies and past critical visions forms the thrust of Arcangel’s work, emphasising the re-use value of tools such as Photoshop, 1990s plotter machines and early video games, in dialogue with an art historical vocabulary of readymades, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and the avant-garde.

Less ironic than Trecartin and Arcangel, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn can similarly be situated in terms of this outmoded trend. While unquestionably tackling the effects of digital culture

THE OUTMODED IN CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL CULTURE

on our perception of social change and social injustice, he often expresses this through forms such as old mobile phones, old television sets, pixelated prints from the Internet and numerous other symbols of outdated, outmoded or cheap technologies.

Signs of the historical are often blended with the amateur or makeshift, as in his ongoing series of altar works that memorialise historical figures such as Piet Mondrian and Raymond Carver.

Sharing an affinity with Trecartin’s own experiments in DIY sculptures of human figures and domestic objects, Hirschorn’s work stages a gulf between the act of detachedly trawling through online information and the more difficult reality of being able to effect social change or prevent social injustice.

Perhaps if Bishop addressed the language of the outmoded in those artists who she believes do confront what it means to live with digital media, and focused more explicitly on why the contemporary moment finds its expression through older forms, her essay might have been less polemical. Because I began studying visual art at a tertiary level in 2000, this shift in the representation of digital art—from a futuristic vision to a tool for revitalising the past—seems particularly clear, so too the diminishing of artworld hype about its revolutionary future.

Digital technology has in many ways moved away from being associated with big utopian or dystopian themes—as in the digital works of, say, Mariko Mori or Patricia Piccinini—to its more normalised representation today, in which digital technology typically appears more as a tool than as a central theme. I could go further to say that mainstream examples of digital art have shifted from being located around virtuality—as an ideological remnant of postmodernism—to in more recent years being located around obsolescence and technological precursors.

The British cultural critic Simon Reynolds has noted this fundamental shift towards retro forms of cultural expression, stating in his 2011 publication, Retromania, that “never before has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artefacts of its own immediate past”.9 Reynolds makes the distinction between vintage and retro in his analysis; the former referring to an interest in the actual objects of the past, the latter referring to the simulation of past styles. From this generalisation we can understand Bishop’s essay as focusing primarily on those artists who adhere more to a vintage aestheticism; those who stage obsolete media in order to “maintain the cultural integrity of the reused artefact—to invoke and sustain its history, connotations, and moods”.10 However, this prioritisation of technical apparatuses over imagery has resulted in Bishop overlooking some of the more pressing questions raised by her premise.

Whether retrieved or simulated—which might correspond to a distinction between historical and pastiche treatments of media —why are past forms so ubiquitous in contemporary art, and why do their invoked histories often appear as at once factual and indeterminate? In an increasingly connected world, in which digital technologies are rapidly evolving, artists can be understood to be employing outmoded aesthetics in order to beat the inevitable out-of-fashion-ness of their work to the punch.

In this fast paced context we are living in, such artworks are not relegated to history, so much as immediately aligned with a history of the artist’s choice. However, as Bishop intimates, these artists rarely seek to explicate a singular message, or to essentialise their relationship to the past. Taking advantage of the speculative possibilities of signs that have already been deemed dead, many contemporary artists portray historical context as both real and imagined, treating their historical analogies open-endedly.

In the 2013 film Her, Spike Jonze tackled the speculative genre of science-fiction to produce a vision of our future aesthetic that was informed by the tastes of early twentieth-century sophisticates. This is typified by Joaquin Phoenix’s character whose clothes and glasses are suggestive of the 1940s, and whose smartphone-like device that he falls in love with was based by Jonze and production designer K.K. Barrett on an Art Deco cigarette lighter. Loss and the contemplation of death are prominent themes in the film that Jonze used to structure his account of artificial intelligence and the ways in which the body might make an inexorable contribution to cognition and being.

While toying with the idea of technology as alive, Her ultimately poses life with technology as a (paradoxical) sense of ease with the uncanny. Both dead and alive, digital technology is depicted as a mode of animation—programmed yet not bound by the intentions of the programmer, and with the capacity to animate us in turn.

The proliferation of outmoded forms in contemporary culture might be considered along similar lines, with past tropes being animated to shape our present in ways that acknowledge both their factual (programmed) historical status as well as their relative agency. This contemporary stance is somewhat different from the heady revisionism associated with postmodern art, and is in keeping with the relevance of less prescriptive and more pragmatic accounts of culture in recent years; suggesting an impasse with critical reflection that strangely manifests itself in our seemingly endless conversations with the past.

Notes 1 Claire Bishop, ‘Whatever Happened to Digital Art?’ Artforum, September, 2012: 437 2

ibid: 437

3

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium,’ Critical Inquiry Vol. 25, No. 2, 1999: 296

4

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13–with its side events in Afghanistan, Egypt and Canada–is indicative of this trend, as if emulating what might be termed the “curatorial sublime”

5

Bishop, op cit: 436

6

See Paul Teasdale, ‘Net Gains’, Frieze 153, 2013, and a collation of online responses to Bishop’s article: http://artforum.com/talkback/id=70724 (accessed 14/1/14) 7

Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Party On,’ The New Yorker, June 27, 2011: 84

8

Holland Cotter, ‘Like Living, Only More So,’ The New York Times, June 24, 2011: 56

9

Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past, London: Faber and Faber, 2011: 351

10

Bishop, op cit: 438 Pages 54-55: Christian Marclay, The Clock (video still), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist

#nofilter

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Pedro de Almeida If you’re in the business of image making and manipulation, the professional skill set par excellence of our simulacra saturated age, you’ll generally know how to tread the fine line between using and abusing the available tools of pixel enhancement. Whether it’s Photoshop™, Lightroom™, Capture Pro One™, DxO Optics Pro™, or a master’s deft handling of all four market leading proprietary photo editing tools, the urge to bury the roughness, ugliness and banality of reality’s rawness under masked layers of fiction and airbrushed fields of vision is near insatiable. But whom am I kidding? This has been distinctly old-fashioned thinking for decades, a bad case of what these days is pejoratively referred to as the perceptual limits of a “Gutenberg mind”. And publically admitting to possession of one of those damn near makes one unemployable, if not entirely invisible—live online or perish.

The digital toolbox for the manipulation of photomedia is an area of perpetual technological innovation, yet the brief remains the same as it ever was: disguise anything unpalatable and push product. Among my own generation and the baby consumers that have followed, if we’re identified by marketing gurus as digital natives—and for the record, puberty arrived before dial-up internet connection for me—then I suspect that if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re mostly restless and occasionally heretical ones.

To expect a causal link between visual and factual authenticity in the photographic image and its trillions of exploding death stars across digital platforms is and always was a mug’s game. From William Henry Fox Talbot’s sunlit photograms of delicate pieces of Victorian lace, to today’s teenagers’ self-destructing saucy Snapchat selfies, it’s all essentially one school of image-making, for which admission isn’t pegged against an age or even a style, but an attitude. And attitudes, however conveniently inspired or stylistically insipid, are usually reliable surface indicators of deeper political positions.

It’s utterly commonplace to state, and certainly a conceptually banal point to make, that all photographs are abstractions of reality and never truthful referents of what they purport to show. Unfortunately this has not stemmed the tide of PhD dissertations and curators’ verbiage on the subject that cascades from ivory towers and the walls of white cubes alike, confetti upon a passing parade whose human traffic is instead transfixed by the warm glow of mobile devices. With heads down and eyes glued to tiny handheld screens, most people prefer to let the distinction between reality and fantasy slide, in lieu of a thrill beyond being lectured in a truism they long recognised themselves. What’s more interesting to plot is the practical application of the ideological frameworks of such academic discussions: whose interests are advanced when truth, historical fact and cultural identity is said to be merely a question of relativist perspective? In this light, the practice of photo manipulation is integral to any attempt to grasp the historical weight and ongoing consequences of this question. Whether trickster sleights of the analogue hand or confabulations of digital wizardry, it hardly

makes a difference. The art of photo re-touching is but a nineteenth-century technological update to the practice of damnatio memoriae, employed by vindictive senators of ancient Rome who, in a rare but strategic act of collective judgement, would quite literally condemn the memory of a treacherous political opponent to oblivion by destroying all material evidence of his existence from the historical record following his death (most likely assassination). Shifting a few millennia closer to our present circumstance, taking in Trotsky’s disappearance from Lenin’s side in Red Square for reproduction in Pravda, through to the streamlining of Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen’s distractingly lush Amazonian bosom on the cover of Vogue, the nip and tuck of photography’s reality principle rests on a fulcrum shaped by power and desire, perceived and performed.

When thinking about the art of photographic re-touching of the kind whose political objective is to invent either more conciliatory or confrontational versions of history, it’s easy to recall the purges of Communist Party members of the Soviet and Maoist variety. Such is the stark contrast between the cold-blooded political expediency of their intentions and the often ham-fisted optics employed in their erasure from the twentieth-century’s photographic record. But this is a genre of the photographic project that is not limited to subtraction. The addition or composite of dishonest or invented elements in the photographic palimpsest is the flipside tactic of the same strategy. So, to take perhaps the most prominent Australian historical example, when Frank Hurley inserted a sky of Wagnerian drama in life-affirming rays of sunlight shot through clouds atop a landscape of Passchendaele’s purgatory of mud and merde, his tableaux only superficially cast the sacrifice of lives as worthy of transcendence into a young nation’s founding myth, while in fact propagating the same moral codes as the hubristic heart of Empire. Fast forward a century and the mirage of the DPRK military’s fearsome-looking amphibious hovercraft or the spectre-like floating bodies of CCP officials from the city of Ningguo over a preposterous figurine of a one hundred and three-year old citizen—just two recent examples of the contemporary genre known as Epic Photoshop Fails to do the rounds on online news aggregators and the social media hit parade—signals the enduring selective blindness of absolute power in acts of reflecting its own image unto itself. We’re no longer seriously expected to believe in photographic veracity, but it’s hoped that we might yet fear the omnipotent power of its illusionists.1

In this respect, Joseph McGlennon’s Strange Voyage (2011), a series of large-scale colour photographs depicting taxidermied macropods, is more than a bunch of kangaroo snaps.

Eight muscular, seemingly self-composed fine specimens loom large, taking up a king’s portion of each picture. They in fact have every right to be considered portraits, such is each marsupial’s commanding physical stature and characterful presence—they quite literally have a twinkle in their (glass) eyes. Bathed in the

#NOFILTER

kind of luminosity only a professional’s suite of studio softboxes can provide, McGlennon’s kangaroos exist in an illusory pictorial space that is at odds with the available light source from the distant heavens in each background, the manipulated depth of field of near-fugitive middle ground, and the framing of the immediate foreground by wisps of what looks like English ivy studded with assorted beetles, bugs and butterflies. Frozen (such) as they are, one is struck by the peculiarity of their forelimbs, as if for the first time, a truly weird animal design logic that somehow escaped evolutionary propriety. It’s no wonder Cook and Banks wherewere so perplexed by the creatures upon their first sighting across Antipodean beachheads in June 1770, understandably clutching at analogical straws in European greyhounds, wild dogs, hares and deer, as recorded for posterity in their Endeavour journals. But McGlennon’s kangaroos are a long way from down under, transposed instead upon moody mountainous and lakeside scenes of London’s St James’ Park, the Lake District of Cumbria, Snowdonia National Park in North Wales and the majesty of Scotland’s Highlands. In this way the artist draws on the legacy of the refined English sub-genre of animal painting, whose master George Stubbs’ Kongouro from New Holland (1772), the first depiction of Australian fauna in European oil painting, was based on a flayed specimen brought back to England by Banks.

McGlennon’s colleague, fellow South Australian trained artist and photographer, Mark Kimber, sees Strange Journey as

“seeking to locate the proud but (to European eyes) exotic animal within an unfamiliar (to Australian eyes) and equally exotic European landscape, thus immersing itself in the dialogue that continues to this day to establish visual definitions of what was and truly is Australian”.2

Forget that the medium is the message for a moment: I suspect the sentiment behind these pictures is concordant with the principles of flattery which governed the Grand Manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds and his subjects of Great Britannia. Not the equivalent, mind you, that’s quite rightly beyond reasonable doubt based on the available evidence, but very likely and suspiciously borne of an inherited affinity with the apprehension of pride in one’s civilisation’s compass of discovery—otherwise, why pay such devout homage to the subject at all? Though not in disagreement with Kimber’s view, I would extend philosophical considerations to the fate of the animal itself, not just to academic questions of art historical visual definitions. McGlennon’s kangaroos are solitary and solemn reminders of anthropocene indifference. Whether you regard these creatures as stuffed and preserved museological specimens of colonial acquisition, revered personal totems and ancient spiritual beings, or flesh-and-bone inventory of component parts stripped and re-purposed as tourist tat in shoddy pelts and trinkets, or a $40 main at a posh restaurant, I suspect it’s the same difference for the poor creature. What’s certain is that humanity will always put its self-interest first.

As McGlennon’s more recent series Thylacine 1936 (2013) intimates, stylistically of a piece with the kangaroo series, but instead with the eponymous subject erected plinth-like atop rocky outcrops overlooking expertly designed vistas of imagined Edens, Nature had better get on the bus of human progress or get left for dead.

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The Tasmanian crackpot’s belief that he might one day stumble across a live specimen in what’s left of ‘the wild’ is analogous to our continued faith in photography’s special relationship to evidential significance, another iteration of Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot—failure to disprove dogma does not a truism exonerate.

Getting on the bus of social progress is what comes to mind in one of the most striking images from Brisbane-based artist of Bidjara heritage Michael Cook’s new series, Majority Rule (2014).

On a bus of distinctly vintage design are seated twenty passengers and an extra standing at the rear. They are duplications of the same Aboriginal man whose salt and pepper hair and stubble suggest middle age, while his sartorial ensemble coupled with the monochromatic idiom of the photograph suggests a period between the 1930s and 1950s. For the most part frozen in subtle inflections of the kind of thousand-yard stare public transport passengers routinely adopt to avoid social interaction, one of the men in the seat nearest the front reads a copy of Walkabout, the popular illustrated magazine modelled on the American LIFE and National Geographic, whose back cover advertisement comically bears the copy line, ‘Train your eye to see QUALITY!’ Registering a cool temperature across its brilliantly dispassionate surface, Cook’s bus ride is marked by its impressive non-didactic approach to relating meaning, allowing a multiplicity of readings whose density percolates according to one’s self-investment in the journey. With charm and humour the artist invites all aboard, but

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he’s not telling us what route we’re on much less when the next stop is. So, for instance, taking up a seat my mind jumps to Robert McFarlane’s well-known portrait photograph, Charles Perkins going home on a bus from Sydney University (1963), which so indelibly crystallises the agitated hunger of the great social activist’s ambition that was soon to be demonstrated in the Freedom Rides of 1964-65 across New South Wales, a defining historical event of the civil rights movement for indigenous Australians. Or, in another of Cook’s images, the lemming-like formation of clones of the same Aboriginal man along the steps surrounding Brisbane’s Shrine of Remembrance, only this time in a cream, three-piece suit, bowler hat and clutching a briefcase, immediately conjures the spectre of Magritte and his surreal relation to repressed urban psycho-geographies.

Delving deeper, in the paradoxical relationship between Cook’s multiplying subject and the profound minority in numbers of Australians who identify as indigenous or of indigenous heritage (around four percent of the population), the numerical advantage within the public realm framed by these photographs underscores the otherwise practical invisibility of black Australians in most Australians’ urban experience. Whether a literary influence on the artist or not, the setting of the Shrine of Remembrance is an elegiac thread to Ralph Ellison’s ground-breaking mid-century novel of black-white race relations, Invisible Man, that memorably held that “humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat”, a fitting dictum in front of a memorial to the Anzacs.3 Moreover, what lifts Majority Rule above so many other attempts

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to question racial presumptions and questions of cultural visibility in contemporary art is its profound visualisation of what sociologists and politicians alike refer to as “demographic threat”, a concept that is most commonly and unscrupulously charged as the destablising force of a minority ethnic group on the rise to majority in a given country. As political manoeuvring and exploitation of fears already in play around the world only too well illustrate—for example, in the USA where Hispanics are projected to make up the majority by 2046, or Israel’s unease toward Arab rates of fertility within its own (disputed) borders—the democratic commitment to ‘one man, one vote’ might seriously be tested in the near future. In this sense, Majority Rule is by my estimation a distinctly more nuanced, complex and politically charged body of work than Cook’s earlier series, such as the widely exhibited Undiscovered (2010). The latter’s whimsicality and its approach to picturing Captain James Cook’s ‘discovery’ of Australia in a slick illustrative narrative of role reversal, whereby an Aboriginal man (the same model employed in Majority Rule) dons the colonialists’ dress and accoutrements, is certainly stylishly achieved but somehow unsatisfying in the end. Across ten frontal views of a misty shoreline whose powdery sea spray fills the atmosphere to create a dreamlike veil, Cook presents a proscenium upon which symbols of indigenous and imperial presence—a cast of native animals in kangaroo, emu, dingo, crocodile and wombat for the former; a musket, naval telescope, bicycle, wheelbarrow and ladder for the latter—tread the boards in a curious dance of competitive unison. Yet here Cook’s allegorical subtlety in relating an indefinite meaning clings too loosely to his purpose in reimagining this history.

In Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, historian Bain Attwood’s seminal work of cultural criticism (though he probably wouldn’t call it that), this predicament was similarly analysed within the annals of recent decades of ideological skirmishes of Australia’s history wars. In his view of the ways historians have approached the whole question of relating frontier conflict in our nation’s colonial past, Attwood recognised an approach he termed “reading the signs” that, in particular, exposes an unavoidable link between epistemology and ethics, when it comes to grappling with the enormous difficulty of discerning where the authority of material records should yield to other ways of relating to the past, such as oral history, myth and tradition. It is worth quoting here at length: Page 58 top: Michael Cook Civilised #10, 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane Page 58 bottom: Joseph McGlennon Thylacine Study #3 from the series Thylacine 1936, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist and Michael Reid, Sydney Page 59 top: Joseph McGlennon Kangaroo Study #3 from the series Strange Voyage, 2011 Photo courtesy the artist and Michael Reid, Sydney Page 59 bottom: Michael Cook Civilised #11, 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

Whereas the earlier work [historical realism] was done by historians who did not doubt that the historical actuality of the frontier could be represented, the later studies were undertaken by historians who questioned whether it could be. They have treated the historical archive, like language more generally, as both referential and representational. While they have considered language as something that can and does refer to reality, they have also conceived it as something that represents and so shapes reality. Thus they have distinguished between what can be called documentary and the worklike aspects of language. This is to say that they do not regard historical sources as just texts, which simply document or index a basic reality, or divulge facts about it; instead, they also regard historical traces as texts that creatively process or rework reality in some way or another. As such, the task of the historian is not simply one of extracting information or quarrying facts from historical sources in order to reveal some reality…

Instead, the role of the historian is also one of discerning meaning in historical texts by attending to their creative dimension in order to suggest what the reality might have been [my emphasis].4 Here’s an exercise in art historical equivalence: read Attwood’s words again, only this time replace “historians” with artists, “language” with photography and “frontier” with commerce.

Is this a new kind of commentary in the philosophising of contemporary art? Hardly. But it doesn’t have to be for it to bite.

Placing pixel wizardry to one side, the challenge for artists like Cook and McGlennon remains their audience’s prejudice against refutations of their chosen medium’s ability to separate historical event from representation. Any assessment of how either artist lines up on the bell curve of contemporary relevance is necessarily inflected by where their audience sits along its standard deviation of majority values. If today’s historians must ask themselves how far they will go in suggesting what reality might have been whenever the question of equality of representation in the historical record is concerned, then the contemporary artist might be equally compelled to scrutinise the net results of their fineart-grade buffed and polished rejoinders to the Twittersphere’s trafficking in amateur snaps tagged as #nofilter, a caption whose self-confessional sigh reveals a collective mistrust of digital fabrications and an old-fashioned yearning for the mirage of unfiltered fact.

Notes 1 ‘Did North Korea Photoshop its hovercraft?’, The Guardian, 27 March, 2013; ‘Nine worst doctored photos of Chinese officials’, South China Morning Post, 30 October, 2013 2

Mark Kimber, introduction to Strange Voyage–Joseph McGlennon (exhibition catalogue), Michael Reid, Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, 2011: 4-5

3 4

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, New York: Random House, 1952:445

Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005: 163

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the art of making

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CHRIS REID I set myself a short exercise: to cut and fold a large cardboard box into the form of a Vespa (at real scale) that was parked outside the studio. I intended the cardboard to remain as a continuous piece so the task had to be approached by folding rather than being constructed from fragments. I wanted, if possible, to retain the identity of the box. Having managed to realise a version of the scooter I then repaired and reinstated the box to its former volume.

Johnnie Dady, Notes on Vespa, Rome Studio, 20061 CARDBOARD Conceived and executed during a residency in Rome in 2006, Johnnie Dady’s Vespa is an instructive starting point for the consideration of his recent work. The crucial element in Vespa is not the production of an object, which is a life-sized 3D cardboard model of a Vespa motor-scooter, but rather the process involved —the transformation of materials over a period of time through a roughly planned creative performance that requires a degree of improvisation as the work proceeds. The execution involves the conversion of a large cardboard box (which we might see as a readymade) into another form. But the cardboard scooter existed only briefly before the cardboard was returned to its box shape, bearing the scars of its transformation—taped-up cuts—and the initial drawing of the scooter’s outline.

Dady’s art is about engineering and manufacturing processes. It is also about the nature of an object in space.

An object exists at the material level and the idea of it functions at the cognitive or conceptual level. The cardboard scooter is simultaneously a material object (cardboard), a representation of another object (a scooter) and a record of a process.

The transformation of the cardboard (cutting and repair) causes decay, so that its transformation as a physical form is recorded within it—it becomes a carrier of information. When it is returned to its original shape (packaging) it bears the traces of its transformation and so it can no longer be seen simply as discarded packaging or a readymade or found object, but is instead a novel work.

The record of Vespa’s creation now exists only in the form of the artist’s own photographs of it.2 This visual record, which, together with the above quote itself constitutes a documentary artwork, portrays several stages in the engineering process. As Dady shares his solitary investigations in the studio with us, we gain a new awareness of process, objects and materials generally.Vespa recalls Joseph Kosuth’s seminal conceptual artwork One and Three Chairs (1965). But while Kosuth showed a work comprising a chair, a photograph of the chair and the

dictionary definition of a chair as parallel representations of the idea of a chair, he did not show, for example, the cutting of the timber from which the chair was made or the process of printing the definition and photograph, nor was there any trace of their manufacture. Kosuth’s were static objects, and we are left to infer the creative process. If Kosuth’s concern is with the relationship between an object and its visual and verbal referents and the uses and meanings of signs, Dady’s concern is with the human transformation of objects and materials through various states of existence and, in parallel, our evolving awareness of them including our naming and usage of them, and our interactions with them—our intentionality with respect to them.

At the time of writing, Dady is undertaking doctoral research at the University of South Australia, and a central focus is his work An Uncertain Vessel, which was shown at the CACSA Contemporary 2010: The New New. An Uncertain Vessel comprises a row of cardboard sheets like ribs slotted into a cardboard frame and forming the outline of a boat hull (10 x 3 x 2.5m) that sits tilted on wooden supports. It resembles a life-size 3D engineering plan or maquette, again using cardboard (this time new rather than used) to model a familiar and very large form. In a draft chapter for his thesis he states, “I have taken the vessel as a sort of standard or archetype for major human endeavour; the making of a boat or building having a certain historical weight as human achievement, desire, aspiration, making meaning of one’s existence.”

An Uncertain Vessel represents a vessel in a latent state, and Dady was influenced by Herman Melville’s description of the preparation of the whaling ship the Pèquod in his 1851 novel Moby-Dick. In designing An Uncertain Vessel, Dady established parameters to circumscribe his own interaction with the materials and to relate the finished form to the space in which it was constructed. The length was limited to the length of his studio and the height and width to the reach of his own body. He did not use a tape measure or other mechanical aid, instead pacing out the form and drawing by hand within those parameters.

The result thus represents the action of the human body in a given space and demonstrates the human capacity for design and manufacturing within prescribed means. Though a magnificent form, it bears visible alterations that attest the developmental process embodied within it.

In November 2013, he showed Five Caravans at the CACSA; five life-sized cardboard caravans in kit form and incompletely assembled, the work forming an intermediate stage in the existence of the objects and materials and representing latency. The fresh, smooth, machine-cut cardboard sheets exemplified mechanical rather than human engineering processes.

As well as having an iconic status, caravans are dwelling spaces

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and these model kits suggest the potential for habitation but not its actuality. The CACSA brief was to make a work that almost filled the gallery space, and Dady incorporated this design element into his construction to make what amounted to a roomsized box-full of components. The result was a claustrophobic but highly sensuous experience for the viewer who was obliged to squeeze between the kits and the gallery wall. Dady has also made a series of forms resembling mirror image versions of grand pianos out of discarded cardboard packaging, which investigate the curved shape of the piano’s body, experiment with curved legs that suggest human legs and explore the idea of the piano as a piece of furniture occupying space (A Series of Propositions [2008]). Dady ‘played’ one cardboard piano by hitting it as if it were a percussion instrument, thus damaging the cardboard, and then made a cast iron version of it, Standing Work #3 (2008), exploring the engineering issues involved in making a casting of a cardboard form. Built in sections bolted together, Standing Work #3 refers only obliquely to a real piano and is instead a durable and imposing replica of a fragile, damaged, cardboard model piano.

It is a compelling piece of sculpture and represents a unique and profound conceptual and engineering trajectory. Important in Dady’s work is the element of uncertainty in both the process and the outcome, and the concept of success and failure. He considers that An Uncertain Vessel failed because it did not sufficiently reveal the limitations imposed on its manufacture.

DRAWING Drawing is fundamental to Dady’s oeuvre and he is a superb draughtsman. Again embodying a process of transformation of materials through planned performance, and often on a massive scale, his drawing is more complex and nuanced but no less imposing than his cardboard forms. Drawing, naturally, precedes the creation of the cardboard forms, commencing the elemental process of thinking and planning as well as producing an object of contemplation. Dady refers to all his work as drawing in two and three dimensions. Whether in 2D or 3D, all his work may be considered to be a form of drawing and it thus expands the

concept of drawing. His Unknown Vessel, version 1, on two sheets of heavy drawing paper totalling four metres in length, is a series of short vertical pencil lines that together establish a long grey horizon line at the end of which is the image of a boat bearing a neoclassical dome. The heavily-worked drawing of the boat is in vivid contrast to the expansive sea of white paper. A second version, Unknown Vessel, version 2, was created in pencil on the SA School of Art Gallery wall, extending twenty-three metres around its perimeter, as if the boat is circumnavigating and thus mapping and occupying the space. The viewer becomes aware of Dady’s regimented execution, which involved hours of repetitive work, each stroke of the pencil becoming a marker of time passed like days marked off on a calendar or a seismographic record of earth tremors. The emphasis on process in this work alludes to the Sisyphean nature of human endeavour. Dady states in his thesis draft, “The various drawings and sculpture around this idea are driven by an event of making or attempts to find an analogue for a/my making experience of a vessel; making as a mode of thinking a thing. If the first three-dimensional work was a process based attempt at building a boat (a procession of making in this case...) the later drawings were a discovery (or experience) of a vessel’s scale by literally walking its length in drawing terms as a procession of marks over a distance of surface.”

In contrast to the Unknown Vessel drawings, the Barcelona Room drawings are visual representations of his attempts to recall rooms in which he has lived or worked —memory transposed onto paper. The viewpoint in these drawings is from an elevated, external position, as if he is watching himself from outside the room and mapping his transient existence within an outline of the space. The detached observer views the space occupied by the artist from the artist’s retrospective, but emotionally engaged observation point. Dady suggests the Barcelona Room drawings are about the “habitation of ‘paper space’ by the individual”, but there is also a suggestion of the subconscious emerging here.

This action and the positioning of the figures within architectural space are powerfully theatrical, and the heightening of the figures conveys Dady’s emotional memory. The figures are often overworked as Dady struggles to represent them accurately but, in the process, the paper degrades to the point where it almost disintegrates, leaving behind a trace of successive approximations or failures. The decision to stop the process at a particular point can be arbitrary—the drawing and erasing process could continue as long as the paper holds together. But the emotional expressiveness conveyed in the damaged paper can potentially elicit an emotional response in the viewer, particular when the imagery is of sexual activity, as for example in Paris Room #1 (2004).

The Barcelona Room drawings appear grounded in the aesthetics of traditional drawing. They are enchantingly beautiful and very different from the sometimes whimsical, anthropomorphic cardboard forms. These drawings entice viewers to think beyond the object that is tangibly before them, while at the same time immersing them in their tactility and fragility.

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CONCEPTUAL ART Dady is clear that his is conceptual art. But it is tangential to much other conceptual art. While Kosuth, for example, meditates on the representation of the object, Dady contemplates the making or ‘authoring’ of the object, especially the maker’s intention to make. He states in his draft thesis, “I draw no particular distinction between thinking and making; intention drives every move and every move drives intention. It [making] might be best viewed as a physical thinking.” The starting point for his work is thinkingmaking, rather than employing a particular artistic genre, style or theory. He is testing himself as an artist by setting goals and trying to achieve them within self-imposed limitations, and is experimenting with ideas, materials and processes to see what comes out. He says, “The goal is arbitrary—like the cochonnet thrown out in Pétanque, you hope you won’t hit it. It is the gap that is the interesting point.” Such a process will frequently yield incomplete or inaccurate results that convey the work’s humanness. Dady’s work can also possess a strongly corporeal, visceral quality.

There are varieties of failure: the failure of the materials, which break down with use, and the failure in the execution of the plan, for example the inability to draw a perfectly straight line. He notes, however, that the plan should not be overly contrived. There can be failure in the conceptualisation. Whereas a work’s failure can arise from the vicissitudes of its planning and execution, a work’s success is related to the non-functionality of the object and to the poetics of the incorporation of accidental elements into its progressive execution and resulting re-conception.

He tries to stabilise the work so that it holds a certain position prior

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to completion, saying, “At what point do you stop? It is the loose ends that are of interest. The Vespa was set up knowing it would not survive—its (programmed) non-survival is inherent in the process—it is sent back to the street.” Temporariness is his way of expressing the thinking or making of a thing in time by a human.

Dady’s cardboard work could suggest Arte Povera, because of the material involved and it inevitably prompts us to question the value of material goods. However, his work is not a revolutionary attack on high art or consumer culture, but a speculative, experimental investigation of time, materials and processes and the way in which we invent meaning. He is fascinated with the intentionality of making and states that “to think things-in-themselves converts them into things-for-us”.

His art is not so much inherent in the physical object but in the triggering of our awareness of the object. The shift from passive to active consideration—that moment of recognition of our own shifting intentionality—is the crucial moment at which a work becomes art.

Notes 1 www.johnniedady.com 2

ibid.

Page 62: Johnnie Dady Tuneless Whistling, 2012 Page 63: Johnnie Dady An Uncertain Vessel, 2010 Photos courtesy the artist

khaled sabsabi and the infinite Kon Gouriotis To imagine the infinite is difficult and Australian artist, Khaled Sabsabi knows that, but this is what he strives toward through his media installations. He does this by using an individual language via electronic media, the last ten years of practice dominated by these two main flows. For imagining a notion of the infinite, he draws on the Islamic Sufi teachings. This engagement doesn’t appear to be some disconnected appropriation of Islamic Sufism, but a central belief. This would assume the origin of everything happens via this specific form of Sufism. However, he is most concerned with Sufi philosophies that exist outside hierarchical structures. This is a transgressive view of major monotheistic religions, including Islam—such religious belief systems tend to limit and eliminate other non-religious experiences. Sabsabi reminds the viewer of his work that traditional and modern Islamic Sufism transcends a wide range of beliefs. Today’s scholars recognise more than three hundred living traditional and contemporary Sufi orders and few dispute that Sufism predates Islam. Over many centuries, most Sufi orders have successfully connected to Islam, while others have connected to Hinduism, Buddhism and Hebraism. These centuries of ever-expansive Sufi connective-ness form a critical platform for his media work. According to Sabsabi, to connect is also about disconnecting and between these somewhat flowing dualities is an expression to the infinite. Most Sufi scholars state that from the beginning, a traditional Sufi was centred on the individual’s search for the infinite. Many names have been given to the infinite, including Allah, Divine and God; numerous prophets and saints have heralded their existence, such as Jesus and Mohammad, and various artists have represented their images, prophecies and beliefs. Sabsabi claims these prophets and artists are part of a chain like everyone else.1 Here he perhaps provocatively connects and disconnects to hierarchical systems. It is these Islamic Sufi inspired dualities that have become a characteristic, intriguing and at times a contradictory feature of his work.

Sabsabi’s latest project is titled 70,000 Veils (2014), which originates, as Hicham Khalidi explains from the Prophet Mohammed’s teaching, that “there are 70,000 veils of light and darkness separating the individual from the divine”.2 Sabsabi’s interpretation is a transgressive view. It falls somewhere between being a respectful witness and an outsider to Islamic teaching.

His is a continuum between these positions, a notion of the infinite bringing centuries of Sufism spirituality into the now.

Sabsabi has utilised this approach before in Naqshbandi: Greenacre Engagement (2011) and Air Land (2011), but not to the profound spiritual depths and scale of 70,000 Veils. Like Colin McCahon, Sabsabi’s spirituality is not about religion. Most monotheistic religions tend to set rules to contain infinite spirituality. Sadly, most artistic expressions of religious content are didactic and creatively limiting. On this point, Sabsabi, McCahon, Bill Viola and Yayoi Kusama are exceptions. These artists tend to share Viola’s view “that everything one does has a meaning in eternity”.3

There are many interpretations given to the notion of the veil in Western and Eastern religions, all of which tend to converge at a high spiritual point, where god’s presence is fully revealed. The 70,000 veils reference in Islamic Sufi literature tends to appear in the Hadith. A Hadith in religious use is often translated as “tradition”, meaning an oral report of the deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad two centuries after his death.

The instructive nature of this Islamic Sufi teaching is rather similar to the instructive works of conceptual artist Ian Millis and performance artist Tehching Hsieh. Like Millis and Hsieh, Sabsabi’s precise work involves imagination on the part of the artist. He is theoretically enquiring into how to experience the infinite message of 70,000 veils from a physical finite world.

He has exploited the physical evidence of his memory to experience the spiritual essences within the teaching of 70,000 veils. With the realisation of numerous extensive works and projects within an extraordinaryily short period, Sabsabi may be accused of not having intensely thought them through.

His reliance on actions to understand his enquiries supposes an answer. Yet from his own admission Sabsabi is happy to not receive anything in return.

Doubtless, 70,000 Veils is Sabsabi’s most ambitious and successful expression toward his ideas on the infinite.

At more than three years, this is the longest production period he has undertaken. Articulated as an autobiographical 3D media landscape, it is the first time Sabsabi has used 3D technology.

It also has Sabsabi’s characteristic adaptiveness to spatial context.

When 70,000 Veils was internationally premiered at the 2014 Marrakesh Biennale 5 Morocco (28 February-31 March 2014), it was presented as a five-channel, digital HD projection, on a 15 x 1.7 metre wall. Three weeks after the Moroccan launch 70,000 Veils was exhibited as a one hundred digital HD monitor installation at Milani Gallery in Brisbane. Supporting the monitors was a

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constructed 13.2 x 2.4 metre wall, in an irregular right angle shape to the rectangular gallery. It suggested the internal space of a cube that referenced Sabsabi’s earlier work Mush (2012).

In Mush digital images were projected onto the surface of a floating cube. Accompanying the Milani presentation in the two upper galleries was Guerrilla 2007 and Guerrilla 2014. Guerrilla 2007 was first presented in the exhibition ON ‘n’ ON of the same year

by Lisa Havilah at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, in Sydney as part of a major exhibition of nine new works, including seven media installations, and separate sculptural and photographic installations. Upon reflection, ON ‘n’ ON announced his new ideas about connective-ness and dualities, especially between politics and spirituality. These notions would be explored further in later works including 99 (2010), Syria (2013) and indeed 70,000 Veils.

Yet it is Guerrilla 2014 that was the surprise inclusion, introducing thirty-three hand-coloured photographs as a new element. Sabsabi decided to present these photographs after eight years of gestation.

Contextualisation of Guerrilla 2007 and Guerrilla 2014 is inseparable from the comparative and contrasting nature of 70,000 Veils.

All thirty-three images in Guerrilla 2014 were shot soon after the 2006 Lebanon War and offer another perspective on its representation. Each hand-coloured photograph depicts a bombed site, of which Sabsabi took hundreds. From this archive he symbolically painted and presented thirty-three to mark each day of the 2006 War, the hand colouring process heightening the realism of the coloured photographs, a method that dates back to the 1840 daguerreotype photographs of Johann Baptist Isenring.

Sabsabi’s photographs were painted with acrylic, watercolour and gouache on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper. One of the many features of this paper is its resistance to light fading, and its longterm, dark storage. Sabsabi has selected this paper to build a lasting content. The ‘entire’ 2006 Lebanese War archive and the sound from Guerrilla 2007 have been rendered into 70,000 Veils.

The folding and unfolding sound and animation obscures their identity. The devastation they portray is reconstructed with past and current poetry—English and Arabic, old and new architecture, the dead and the living, all merged into this finite archive to represent the infinite.

Guerrilla 2007 is accompanied by three audio-visual portraits, each giving an account of the war. The footage was recorded in private domestic environments and their opposing perspectives are considered controversial. The projection is gridded into three channels and presented as a landscape approximately 1.2 x 4 metres. However, they are portraits of two women and one male, the youngest female appears to be in her twenties and the others in their forties. All reveal who they are and speak in Arabic, with English subtitles. The structure of the projection is in trios—three channels, three portraits, three scenes. The three subject scenes are mostly the portraits, the aftermath of the bombing and a political pamphlet narration.

A pamphlet depicts historical images, one projection presents a series of stills, the other two present a book with turning pages.

One projects the book changing pages from left to right, the other

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changing pages from right to left. The next three projections cut to people walking and moving vehicle scenes. Two of the three depict strollers in bustling marketplaces, with sometimes a view of chaotic overhead power lines. The other scene shows a moving vehicle in a rural setting, with Israeli observation towers, sometimes blurry, sometimes clear. All three scenes then show bombed domestic buildings, followed by a female in mid-profile, crying while smoking. Next is a left and right projection fixed on a serene Mediterranean sunset. Between the sunsets, the artist walks narrow streets, with camera lens initially at eye level, shifting to a sky blocked by closeups of more chaotic power lines. Sabsabi’s lens is again a witness, but never reveals him. From there, all the projections move closer to the second female. Her face is revealed but sometimes concealed by a prominent focus upon her hands.

One excerpt resonates, as she declares; “I remember as a child railway tracks and I was told that they lead to Palestine, so I asked my mother is there a train or not? She said no, but once there was.

So I said why all this fighting when we can all follow the tracks and get to Palestine”? The next scene returns to the bombed domestic buildings, showing a boldly defiant Lebanese flag.

The last scene has the right and left projection of the artist walking through street markets and driving into the country’s borders, again with the lens at eye level. The seventieth anniversary of the destruction of Palestine will take place in 2017. Guerrilla 2007 and Guerrilla 2014 are offering a new way to tell an unresolved history.

Sabsabi is creating for a new archive, recordings of devastation.

As a young artist, Sabsabi began experimenting with sound and poetry within the hip-hop group COD (Count on Damage) in Granville, Sydney. He gradually moved to soundtracks for short and feature length films. It was to be media that eventually connected his sound and images and for 70,000 Veils is one of the main devices. The sounds and animated images are both separate and united, but fittingly reflect the compression of the work in total, working together to set the mediative hum with the interchanging animated 3D images. They change every second; 70,000 seconds of sound and equivalent animated images, collected through Sabsabi’s day-to-day experiences of local and international places, people, buildings, family and friends. All sound and imagery has been sourced from video, audio and photography recorded over ten years. The preparation of the sound involves a process of stripping back high frequencies, and distribution through each of the one hundred monitors on seven hundred second loops. The connecting sound is from a centrally located sub-woofer, where the bass is concentrated. Together they resemble a deep rumbling hum. The animated images have been gathered from ten thousand archival photographs, each photograph electronically stripped and reconstructed into a new image.

These images are then processed through a 3D analogue and digital animation. Unlike the sound, they are only presented across one hundred monitors. Each monitor contains seven hundred animated images, which loop at a clockwise and anticlockwise direction. Collectively they number seventy thousand animate images.

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Curiously 70,000 Veils’ human scale and length is consistent with a ‘piece’, which in graffiti terms resembles a large, complex and labour-intensive painting. A piece often incorporates 3D effects, arrows and many colour transitions. Without the 3D glasses each monitor resembles a sketch for either a block or a calligraphy/ graffiti throw-up. The throw-ups’ characteristic outline and minimal one or two fill-colours look like 70,000 Veils nominal colour palette.4

Amongst the seven hundred image rotation within every monitor there were unexpected accidents. Approximately every thirty seconds, one or sometimes two of the monitors would revert to a blank monitor. This would happen across the entire one hundred monitors. Perhaps these accidental moments suggest finite and infinite movements. Here the artist acknowledges the new possibilities of others engaging with the work. They also highlight a new interaction between energy and non-energy.

According to Sabsabi, the control of this random energy “depends when the work is switched on and in what order this sequence happens according to the one who has the remote”.5 By allowing these blank monitors, he is perhaps connecting his ideas to the dualities of the visible and invisible. In addition, there is a slight time difference between each monitor in the loop time.

When Sabsabi introduced 3D technology, it added a new emotive element to his media work, deciding upon a ‘passive’ as opposed to ‘active’ application. To be ‘passive’ is to contradict.

Thereby he is resisting hatred for love; resisting violence for peace; and resisting greed for generosity. The other emotive element of this technology is that the images are interleaved in space as opposed in time. Single images are collected in parallel lines for both the left and right stereo images. The monitors’ LCD panel also has polarising filters. The 3D glasses used contain polarising

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filters, one over each eye. The 3D glasses feed different images into the eye. Each monitor is displaying two images simultaneously.

Without glasses the images appear out of register. The red and blue filters on the glasses separate the two different images.

This ensures each eye receives each image separately; together the 3D effect is created. With this passive 3D technology the parallel resolution is halved limiting the pixel image. That is why the image is low and colours are a minimal palette of yellow, blue, green and red with white and black tones. This diminution of colour from the images contributes to the overall compositional harmony of 70,000 Veils. One of the most absorbing visual aspects of 70,000 Veils is how the 3D perspective changes according to the viewer’s position. The depth of space between the moving positions and changing images are sublime experiences in Sabsabi’s work. Depending on the animation of the image plane, this depth often creates vanishing points, lending another possible impression of the infinite.

Unlike the five-channel projection in Marrakesh, the one hundred monitors in Brisbane offer a deeper 3D visual experience. The projection even with the 3D glasses flattens the 3D occurrence more. These monitors created heat where the projections did not. The heat, which created warmth to and around the work, added a new emotional element to this work, the closer the viewer came to it the greater the warmth. This warmth relied on electrical energy, without which the monitors would quickly go cold. There is a vulnerability to media, that cannot be said about painting or sculpture. The hot and cold or the life and death are controlled by one switch. Its physicality is temporary as is a finite life.

KHALED SABSABI AND THE INFINITE

The eleventh-century Islamic scholar Al-Biruni speculated that Earth’s rotation of time and longitude could be connected.

The monitors and projection in 70,000 Veils create a natural grid formation, to form an orderly association with time and longitude.

Rows and columns of the monitors are unevenly numbered.

They are stacked in rows of five, with contrasting columns of thirteen and seven, uneven numbers, which in Islamic culture directly link to the belief in the Divine. In the Qur’an there are approximately twenty-five references to the number seven, including seven heavens and seven periods of creation etc.6 This symbolic use of mystic numbers has long been a connective signature in Sabsabi’s work. For Plato, “where there is number there is order; where there is no number there is nothing but confusion, formlessness and disorder”.7 In his work Mush, Sabsabi emphasised the importance of the number eight in ancient living cultures, connecting Sufism and other cultures to traditional Aboriginal women’s ceremonies. In his soundsculpture Sale (2007), eight yellow bikes with cylinders which looked like rocket launchers, played on the never-ending resistance to Israeli violence.

Sabsabi did not know that he was to begin development of 70,000 Veils in 2003. At that time of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, he first travelled to Morocco, Turkey, Syria and to his birth land Lebanon. He was twelve years old when he left with his family for Australia and Lebanon was already five years into a civil war which lasted for fifteen years, until 1990. In 2003 two crucial and alternating events took place. From Sabsabi’s own accounts they would transform his practice and life. The first was in Tripoli (Lebanon), where he visited a sacred site and witnessed the origins of his Islamic Sufi lineage which originated from Iraq in the seventh-century AD. The other was in Morocco, where he came in contact with the Sufi teachings of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165-1240). Arabi established the Akbarian Islamic tradition that is embedded in the Qur’an. Arabi’s scholars espoused his universal philosophy including “that each person has a unique path to the truth”8 and “that woman and man are absolutely equal in terms of human potentiality”.9 Some scholars identified Arabi’s legacy as the school of knowledge in Islam. However, the school of love in Islam was attributed to Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273). Historically these two master Sufis had overlapping lives and each knew the work of the other, but it is unclear whether Arabi and Rumi ever met. Rumi’s well-known passion for music, poetry and dance as a way to the Divine is an inspiration to Sabsabi. The mystic’s philosophy that an individual can express the infinite through creativity appears to be a source of inspiration for 70,000 Veils. However, unlike Rumi, Sabsabi questions whether the accumulated memory of life can represent spiritual essence as a way to imagining the infinite.

By 2013 Sabsabi had visited Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Morocco several times. He also visited China, Cyprus, Germany, Holland, Malaysia, Poland and the United Arab Emirates (Sharjah and Dubai). In Cyprus in 2011, he met the Sufi Shekih Nazim Al-Haqqani (b.1922), a controversial Sufi

teacher of the Nasqshbandi-Haqqani Order and currently exiled in Cyprus from Turkey. Al-Haqqani was the inspiration for the Naqshbandi: Greenacre Engagement and 70,000 Veils.

Al-Haqqani’s website features many audio recordings and transcribed interviews—a standout quote from his reflections and contemplations, translates everyday observations into philosophical statements about life; “use it (life), so that you do not come to this world as a colt and leave it as a donkey”.10

Some who experience 70,000 Veils may be disconcerted that Sabsabi doesn’t lay everything out openly. The avoidance of definition and lack of narrative can register as a form that is too direct. Yet the knowledge and experience that has enabled Sabsabi to reach this place, has an element of sadness, because they are moments of change, regardless of their emotional openness.

In 70,000 Veils, much of what is experienced is distorted. In this ever-changing twirl of memories from the finite to the infinite, the details of Sabsabi’s community engagements cannot be realised but only imagined. This includes his work in Palestinian refugee camps and with young Arabic and Aboriginal children in suburban Miller, in Sydney. 70,000 Veils highlights the awakening relationship contemporary orthodox Islam has with traditional Islam, how polarised these views are and how desensitised we have become to their difference. Then there is the ease to disconnect then connect to a living human being, ironically from the very discipline that Sabsabi uses. 70,000 Veils will ask us to explore questions we are sometimes afraid to ask. This inspiring work is humbling in its omission to the finite experience of art to the infinite.

Notes 1 Khaled Sabsabi in conversation with the author, 14 April 2014 2 Daniella Rose King, ‘Where Are We Now?’, www.ibraaz.org/interview/121, 2014.

This quote by Khalidi originates from Khaled Sabsabi’s project concept document for the 2014 Marrakesh Biennale: “The Prophet Mohammed says there are 70,000 Veils of light and darkness separating an individual from the Divine and an individual is drawn towards the Divine according to their relationship with the Divine.”

3 Rachael Kohn, Bill Viola’s Spiritual Art, ABC Radio National, 24 October 2010.

Interview with Bill Viola 4 Peter McKay (curator Contemporary Australian Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane) in conversation with the author, 29 March 2014 5

Khaled Sabsabi in conversation with the author, 29 March 2014

6

M. Sahibzada, The Symbolism of the Number Seven in Islamic Culture and Ritual; see: www.wadsworth.cengage.com, 1 March 2014

7 Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, London: Random House, 2013: 29 8 Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi 1165-1240 AD, The Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, http://www. ibnarabisociety.org/ibnarabi.html; accessed 17 February 2014 9 Souad Hakim, Ibn ‘Arabî’s Twofold Perception of Woman-Woman as Human Being and Cosmic Principle, first published in the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, Volume XXXI, 2002: 1-29 10 Sheikh Nazım Al Haqqani Al Qubrusi An Naqshibandi, www.saltanat.org/ 10 March 2014

Pages 66-67: Khaled Sabsabi 70,000 Veils (installation views), 2014 Photos courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

two and a half

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ALAN CRUICKSHANK Two and half events involving art over the past six years have much to say about the animus within Australian society since the turn of the millennium, offering an argument that the conservative and censorial disposition of the post-Second World War boom years re-materialised during the 2000s and as something more sinister since 2008.

One: In that year the artist Bill Henson was vilified,1 insulted, offended and humiliated by several small but vociferous groups over his presentation of artworks of naked teenagers in a Sydney art gallery. Their strident invective, whipped into further delirium by an opportunist media, was benevolently encouraged by, of all people, the Prime Minister, who as leader of the nation, expressed “as a dad” on morning television that Henson’s artworks were “absolutely revolting… whatever the artistic merits of that sort of stuff… there aren’t any”.

In a climate of increasing moral anxiety, if not outright panic over the perceived undermining of society’s virtues, in part courtesy of the ever expanding ubiquity of photography, and online and mobile communications technology (and here one might remember the now nonsensical hysteria over upskirting and downblousing), even the son of a national icon whose photographic corpus was his representation between the two World Wars of the beach and the nation’s “body culture”, was harassed and reported to the police for emulating his father’s oeuvre.2 In that other period of great (Western) social unease and intolerance it was “Reds under the bed”. At this time, and seemingly since, under every bed there is a pedophile (when not at the beach or the swimming pool). This moment of “The Henson Affair”, though small in time, has since presented a profound disjunction in the equanimity of the national psyche, to severely query our society’s collective maturity and intelligence.

For when the Director of Public Prosecutions, after the police confiscated Henson’s artworks and investigated the author and the artistic integrity of both, saw no reason to charge the artist with any criminal offence, that didn’t seem to satisfy those minority convulsions that still continued to shriek “child pornography”.

Half: In September 2013, Art Gallery of South Australia Director Nick Mitzevich, in introducing his theme for the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Dark Heart, described it as “one that explores the underbelly of contemporary culture”. One of the artists named was Bill Henson. In his February 2014 media kit he further branded the Biennial as one that “taps into the hearts and minds of the nation… [it] explores Australia’s cultural identity”. One of the artists not named was Bill Henson. In seeking to tap into “the hearts and minds of the nation—probing the… political and psychological dimensions of contemporary issues in Australia”, Dark Heart achieved those “psychological dimensions” more than

was artistically intended by Mitzevich. Bill Henson’s absence from the exhibition was the result of his further vilification, by the “uninformed” fears, and bigotry of at first one person, the situation again provoked by an opportunist (print) media.

Henson withdrew from the Biennial after it was revealed on The Advertiser’s online platform that a senior South Australian police detective had written to the State Premier, as Arts Minister, urging him to “intervene” in the artist’s inclusion. Writing in “a private capacity”, though still obviously wearing the heavy cloak of a Detective Brevet-Sergeant and key investigator in several major South Australian pedophile cases, he expressed his “concern the exhibition may include graphic images of naked teenage children similar to those that prompted police action at exhibitions in New South Wales” in 2008. (my emphasis) The detective, in persisting that the images taken by Henson have been “unusually popular’’ among a number of pedophiles he had dealt with, and believing that such an exhibition “can only further encourage them to morally neutralise their behaviour’’, demanded of the Premier; “I call on you to take a stand against the sexual exploitation of children and prevent this from going ahead.” AGSA Chairman Michael Abbott, QC, stated in response that the detective “has made an assumption which is entirely incorrect and has used some aspects of his (Henson’s) work to damn every aspect”.

Additional contributions to this injudicious purge came from the Adelaide Anglican Archbishop and the president of Adults Surviving Child Abuse. The former stated with (perhaps) unthinking hypocrisy given The Church’s historical international litany of accusations of child sex abuse, that “a line needs to be drawn to protect prepubescent and pubescent children… the journey of young children towards sexual maturity needs a special kind of protection… it comes from some of the painful lessons of recent decades, where we have come to understand much better the complex factors that open children to exploitation and abuse”; while the latter, in calling on both the State Government and the Art Gallery of SA to “carefully consider’’ the types of images displayed by Henson, said “They need to very carefully consider what these images portray and the potential impact the messages are giving around children to the general community…

In this climate… any images or any suggestions that are sexually exploitative must be viewed very seriously.” (my emphasis)

Biennial curator Nick Mitzevich affirmed in his selection of Henson, “Bill has had an extraordinary career and his work is very much in keeping with the theme of ‘dark heart’… He is one of the world’s leading photographers who evokes emotion using light and dark and will be showing a new body of work that will be revealed close to the launch.” AGSA Chair Michael Abbott reinforced that “none of the works were of children”, and in an interview with ABC Radio, said that “The recent works of Bill Henson that we were considering… were landscapes and doorways, though such a banal description does not do justice to their artistic merit.”

THIS IS WHAT I THINK OF RATIONAL DEBATE BUDDY...

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The president of Adults Surviving Child Abuse was quoted as saying while she had not seen any of the images she was aware of the prior controversy surrounding them. In fact none of Henson’s accusers had seen them, had they?

Two things emanated from this half episode, half because it was expediently and calmly terminated by Henson himself (“I believe it is in the best interests of all if I withdraw from participation in the 2014 Adelaide Biennial.”) One is the forced irony of what emerged, a more veracious indication of an uncultured “dark underbelly of the nation” than Mitzevich imagined, further highlighting the disquieting atmosphere within which artists and art are now engaged; the other—politics of fear, a minority’s impulsive reaction to deny (or vilify) the unseen with complete intolerance.3 As one arts administrator commented at the time, this situation “allowed the lowest common denominator to dictate the freedoms of the rest of us”.4 Two: In this edition, the Biennale of Sydney’s corporate sponsorship drama is covered by numerous comprehensive perspectives, the core of which need not be repeated here, though it can be iterated that a small group of artists and activists, through their successful protests against a longterm, benevolent corporate sponsorship, vilified that sponsor, the Biennale and some of its personnel, for what can be seen as their political virtue.5 For in attempting to terminate the targeted government policy, nothing changed.

By conflating the emotionalism of polemic national politics with the soft target of corporate investment in a high profile international cultural event, this protest achieved, apart from an as yet unmeasured degree of displeasure from some sections of government, nothing but distress for the Biennale’s reputation (especially internationally—who might want to take on the job now of artistic director?), and the continuance of a questionable national predilection towards giving tangibility to rambunctious minority voices. Regardless of moral rectitude or corporate immorality, if all of the above was simply a case of wearing the colour of one political ideology in opposition to the other, this protest only succeeded in draping itself in the red of embarrassment, by denying both the short and longterm partypolitical history of the particular government policy concerned, and demonstrating what could only be construed as duplicity, that after achieving their ‘pound of flesh’ with the demise of both the Biennale/sponsor Chair and associated corporate sponsorship, the majority of the artists who had initially withdrawn from the Biennale brazenly wanted back in. Regarding the latter, the argument that accepting federal government funding, either at other times or in this context via The Australia Council funding of the Biennale while protesting against that same government over its immigration policies, might be seen as deceptive was unsurprisingly denied. The defence of one of the protesting artists who withdrew (and did not return), was that “Government grants are distributed at arm’s length… and by participating in a government-funded event… does not necessarily condone other

contemporary visual art + culture broadsheet 4 3 . 2 2 014

government activities”.6 It would seem that there are two definitions of the meaning of “arm’s length” operating here, the above instance artfully self-serving. As is well known, Transfield Holdings, the privately owned company sponsoring the Biennale, is a minority shareholder in the publicly listed Transfield Services which won the contentious government contract. To quote Transfield Holdings’ website, “Transfield Holdings does not have a representative on the Transfield Services board and has no influence on the business activities or decisions of the public company.” Arms length it would seem. Lamentably, rational discussion over a topic of varying social sensitivity was annexed by identity politics and minority influence.

The affliction of political correctness has long contaminated the supposedly admissible conduct of the expression of ideas and language in our society and especially the highly scrutinised public realms of government, education, sport and ‘the arts’, such that Australia seemingly excels in it. And like sport, drilled into its young protagonists from pre-school days and beyond as ‘Australian’, political correctness has incontrovertibly become the de rigeur code from then onwards. In being politically correct its exponent demonstrates an attitude or policy of being extremely careful not to offend or upset particular groups of people or individuals in society, by avoiding vocabulary that is considered offensive, discriminatory, or judgmental. Identity politics are interpreted as political arguments which focus upon the self-interest and perspectives of self-identified interest groups, with minority influence that takes place when the majority is being influenced to accept the beliefs or behaviour of a minority, being a central component of identity politics. The jury remains out on the issue of government policy, but doubly ironic, what’s of most interest in these two and a half dark episodes, as examples of questionable maturity and sophistication in recent and current public debate, is that it was expressed under the omnitude of freedom of speech.

Notes 1 Here, unlike the current debate’s usage of the word in reference to the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 Section 18C, “vilify” means according to the Cambridge Dictionary, “to say or write unpleasant things about someone or something, in order to cause other people to have a bad opinion of them” ; and “To speak or write about in an abusively disparaging manner, make vicious and defamatory statements about, to speak ill of; to belittle through” 2

D. D. McNicholl, ‘Dupain’s beach snaps draw police focus’, The Australian, 9 December, 2006

3 All quotes from: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/sa-artgallery-will-not-put-rating-system-on-bill-henson-images/story-fni6uo1m1226719306608; http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/arts/bill-hensonpulls-controversial-exhibition-at-art-gallery-after-call-from-detective-to-jayweatherill/story-fni6um7a-1226722039572; and http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/09/19/ henson-hysteria-in-adelaide-merely-uninformed-panic/ 4 http://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/opinions/visual-arts/henson-withdrawalis-the-real-dark-heart-196715 5 According to Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, Biennale of Sydney Chair he had been “vilified with insults” and Biennale staff had been “verbally abused with taunts of ‘blood on your hands’”. Matthew Westwood, ‘Biennale cuts Transfield free after detention uproar, The Australian, 8 March, 2014 6

See Matthew Westwood, ‘Hollow victory for Biennale activists’, The Australian, 11 March 2014

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