UNKEMPT COGNITION
ELLA BARCLAY
Canberra Contemporary Art Space Board and Staff respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Kamberri / Canberra and the ACT region, the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri peoples on whose unceded lands our galleries are located; their Ancestors, Elders past and present; and recognise their ongoing connections to Culture and Country. We also respectfully acknowledge all traditional custodians throughout Australia whose art we have exhibited over the past 40+ years, and upon whose unceded lands the Board and Staff travel.
Cover ELLA BARCLAY
Towards a parasitic infinity of hot takes (After W Kherbek) (detail), 2024 160m of LED Silicon lights, aluminium, dimensions variable
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
UNKEMPT COGNITION
CANBERRA
ELLA BARCLAY
Enhanced Entanglements 16 (To Become What We Mean), 2023
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Inkjet on archival cotton rag, 84 x 61.4cm
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Absorbed Coping: Ella Barclay’s Expanded Field of Cognition
By that time we were in another chapter and confused About how to achieve this latest piece of information. Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind
With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem)
John Ashbery, from ‘Soonest Mended’ (1966)1
In an article in the New York Times in 1983, the perpetually disappointed American writer and thinker Daniel Boorstin drew a useful distinction between information and knowledge, suggesting that excessive information could actually play a role in crowding out knowledge.2 Decades into an ostensible information age that Boorstin and others theorised as riven with pitfalls and dead ends, we now find ourselves deep in what he called ‘the fog of information’. The sheer proliferation of information makes us less ‘informed’. What does it mean to live in a moment when access to information becomes less a means to liberation than as an eternally updated anatomising of our dispossession, informed but powerless, in the words of Radiohead’s ‘Fitter Happier’?3 This is a question with no answer, or indeed so many possible answers as to render closure impossible. Such perpetually opening questions are the special geography of contemporary art, as well as the eternally transmuting landscape on which the art of Ella Barclay situates itself. Barclay’s works occupy an inclusive uncertainty, bleakly and playfully aware of the centrality of stasis in our contemporary condition and the consequences of this state of affairs on the contemporary subject.
This essay takes its title from a concept articulated by the philosopher N. Katherine Hayles, a significant figure in the evolution of Barclay’s thinking about how complex systems interact. In the book Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), Hayles applies the term ‘absorbed coping’ to designate processes that involve cognition but not conscious awareness.4 Such ‘auto-pilot’ experiences make up the bulk of human action, opening doors, putting one foot in front of the other while walking, various forms of chewing, we are ‘there’ but not ‘present’ for these activities, cognising but not recognising it. In such situations, the body and mind ‘cope’ with what surrounds them in part from muscle memory and in part from latent forms of awareness. Though Hayles narrowly construes the term, one could posit that more and more of our coping is being absorbed by the mind, creating a kind of ambient anxiety in which one is a participant but not necessarily the protagonist. Barclay’s works regularly explore the edge cases of presence; the body is present, or has been present, its traces are visible, the edges of its intentions are visible if not entirely intelligible.
Hayles writes in Unthought that cognition could be understood as ‘a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning. The writers Alice Marwick and danah boyd offer the concept of ‘context collapse’ as an accurate description of the contemporary digital cultures birthed by the infinite scroll and the parasitic infinity of hot takes it engenders.5 Barclay’s tongue in cheek (and occasional head under sheets) response to this pervasive structural tension infuses the works Quiet
Following Page
Above ELLA BARCLAY
Towards a parasitic infinity of hot takes (After W Kherbek) (detail), 2024 160m of LED Silicon lights, aluminium, dimensions variable
ELLA BARCLAY
Unkempt Cognition (Canberra Contemporary Art Space exhibition installation), 2024
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Serfing 1, 2 and 3. A Barclay-esque form lies obscured beneath a black blanket with only colourful crocs (the official footwear of coping) and a curly shock of blonde hair visible. To hide from the world, however, is increasingly impossible. The world has a way of creeping in, of finding you, of making you intelligible for purposes you may not comprehend. How does one create a space of privacy or solace in such a permanently fragmenting context? The answer may not lie in the distorted reflection given back by the blankets of Quiet Serfing, or the sculptural manifolds of Hypomnesic Cognitive Assemblage 1, 2 and 3, but the distortion itself is part of any answer: we are humans, but we are also topologies. We look different to different regimes of vision. In making this point, Barclay’s works could be positioned within a cloud of contemporary artists including Zach Blas, James Bridle, or Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, who have explored the ways in which one can make oneself illegible to the ecologies of surveillance in which our lives are lived. However the tension between what is concealed and what is visible, and what is revealed by concealing has been a subject of art stretching back centuries and involving landmark works by Man Ray, James Ensor, Duchamp and many others, and perhaps relate to the most fundamental question of art: how does the individual consciousness process the world outside. How this question is answered, inevitably, is conditioned by the context in which it is asked. The exhibition’s title, Unkempt Cognition, provides some sense of how coping (and indeed ‘cope’ in the Reddit parlance) is absorbed. We comb out the nits, the aporias of our experience in order to wrestle some sense or some pleasure from it. The journey is long, uneven, and perhaps is narrated by an unreliable source. Indeed ‘unkempt cognition’ necessarily evokes its opposite concept. What does ‘kempt cognition’ look like? One can almost hear the sniffling in the air as a Slovenian accented voice pronounces the word ‘ideology’.6 Barclay’s works do not suggest we can escape from the trappings and the trap of ideology as we absorb, assimilate and cope with the world around us, but they argue for a more encompassing vision, the embrace of a way of seeing the world that does not crave resolution.
William Kherbek
July 2024
William Kherbek is the writer of the novels Ecology of Secrets, ULTRALIFE, New Adventures, Best Practices, and the forthcoming Fail Worse (2024, Arcadia Missa, London). Kherbek’s art journalism has appeared in a wide range of publications including Flash Art, Spike, Burlington Contemporary, AQNB, and other titles. His collected art writings were published under the title Entropia by Abstract Supply (London) in 2022. He lives in London.
1 Ashbery, John. The Double Dream of Spring. (1966).
2 Gamerikan, Barbara. ‘Working Profile; Helping The Library of Congress Fulfil its Mission’. The New York Times. 8 July 1983.
3 Radiohead. OK Computer. (1997).
4 Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought. (2017).
5 Marwick, Alice; boyd, danah. ‘I Tweet Honestly I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.’ New Media and Society. Vol 13. Issue 1. 7 July 2010.
6 Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. (1989).
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Quiet Serfing 2, 2024
Acrylic, Crocs, blonde wig, beach volleyball, 230 x 120 x 40cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Quiet Serfing 1, 2024
Acrylic, Crocs, blonde wig, beach volleyball, 230 x 120 x 40cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Tertiary Retention (boob bongs) 1, 2024
Acrylic, hand blown glass by
silicon, aquarium electronics, rotating crystal display units, UV desk lamps, dimensions variable
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Nadege Desgenetez,
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Unkempt Cognition (Canberra Contemporary Art Space exhibition installation), 2024
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Unkempt Cognition (Canberra Contemporary Art Space exhibition installation), 2024
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Enhanced Entanglements 1 (Deployments and Abstentions), 2023
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Inkjet on archival cotton rag, 84 x 61.4cm
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Entanglements 15
Image ELLA BARCLAY
Enhanced
(Edge Lords of Emergence), 2023
Inkjet on archival cotton rag, 84 x 61.4cm
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
UNKEMPT COGNITION
ELLA BARCLAY
13 July - 14 September 2024
The artists thanks Marley Dawson, ZK/U Berlin, ANU School of Art & Design, CCAS, and Raquel Ormella
CCAS Lakeside
44 Queen Elizabeth Tce
Parkes ACT 2601
Open 11am–5pm Tuesday to Saturday
www.ccas.com.au
Supported by
