CharlieTuttoSofo
Deakin University Art Gallery 15 February – 25 March 2022 CharlieTuttoSofo
I first encountered Sofo’s practice with his exhibition Wander at Heide Museum of Modern Art (2010). In this project a collection of brightly coloured ball shaped objects were placed alongside furniture that was part of the original modernist building and wonderful videos of everyday encounters that had become musical. This exhibition at the Deakin University Art Gallery brings together an installation of twelve video artworks dating back some eleven years. Curated by the artist, Sofo has created his own play list and mix tape from his archive of existing digital video. In this installation screens flicker at different levels and angles across the space with sounds spilling from one timeline to another and dis-located objects and bodies coming together to form a changing score and collage. The installation is supported by a collection of ad hoc university and domestic furniture retrieved from hidden storage rooms, streets, studios and friend’s homes. The furniture both supports and scaffolds the videos alluding to systems of storing, categorizing and the pedologic setting of the university gallery. A place of knowledge production, creative research and also a corporate business. Sofo has always been careful to resist objectification in his practice and more generally in fixing things solidly in place. Instead, he often creates collections of things which can continue to grow and change, as well as observations, video, texts and sound works that are more like conversations inspired by walking, wandering and relationships. Whilst his practice borrows heavily from the language of Minimalism, he favours materials and things that are transformed by the people that use them and the ingenuity of users to change meanings according to necessity. Like the dog-eared pages of a book or the various heavy objects that can be used to stop open a door or window. Sofo finds beauty not in the pristine and the clean but in the grit and grime of human touch, in patterns of use and in the exposure to the elements. In this way, his works are temporal, changed by time and specificity - a blending of the material, subject and the environment both open and affected by each other.
4 Tutto At the beginning of 2022 the Deakin University Art Gallery is delighted to present the exhibition Tutto by Charlie Sofo. Focusing on his video and moving image artworks spanning over a decade, the project invokes a universe of objects and things that shapes the ways our lives are lived.
This small but expansive survey exhibition has come to fruition after a number of rescheduled attempts and two years of extended periods of lockdowns and isolation. COVID 19 has drastically shifted our worlds in many ways, from changing the way we work and live to major impacts to the economy, culture and education. With stay-athome orders and restrictions to travel, the domains of study, work and labour for many of us has now become an embedded part of domestic home life and the traditional boundaries have collapsed between private, public, work and leisure.1 From moment to moment in our lives, we have seemingly had to navigate a precarious balance orientating one’s attentions between different modes of being. Sofo’s practice is particularly relevant in this context not just in the ways he explores the textures and materiality of daily life but in the ways, he highlights everyday modalities: our attentiveness, awareness and the senses in a changing world.
‘There are names for things’ so declares an unseen narrator in Sofo’s video A short film for Gertrude (2013). One function of cataloguing is naming and describing things but the narrator in this video gently alludes to the ways names are seemingly arbitrary, accidental and objectless as they float in realm of language. Similarly, in other videos different sound effects and soundtracks create unexpected associations and contrasts. These strategies loosen the object (the signified) strictly from its sign. This release imbues Sofo’s approach with an air of lightness.
As I sit down to write these thoughts a new context for our experience is emerging. Things are weighing heavily, constrained by forces of gravity, meaning and history. In contrast, Sofo’s practice remains playful, leaving little of his own trace behind.
The whole universe 2021 is a key artwork in establishing Sofo’s artist led curation of this exhibition. The video takes the form of an advertisement inspired by an online retail store that potentially claims to sell everything and anything in the known universe, from old fashion rotary phones to pet food to aeroplanes etc… Here Sofo envisages the artist as a cataloguer, annotating the ever-various things in the world in an ontological and deadpan manner.
James Lynch
2. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyscho-Analysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller and Trans. Alan Sheridan, Norton, New York, 1978, p. 112
Illuminated in this exhibition through the medium of video Sofo elaborates how when we use some things repeatedly is to also create an affection for it, an attachment, that forms feelings or intimacies that can be shared with others.
As Lacan explains with his treatise on object a, there is always something more we desire, more knowledge, possessions etc... and therefore, it is difficult to make sense of this lack in our being. 2 Some objects come to mask this lack. They also, set desire in motion as we shift from wanting one thing to another. So on and so forth. But there is nothing intrinsic to them, except that they occupy coordinates on a changing map.
1. Beatriz Colomina, Pyjama Party: What We Do in Bed, Architectural Review, https://www.architecturalreview.com/essays/pyjama-party-what-we-do-in-bed/10041105.article, [Accessed 16 July 2021]
With this exhibition Tutto he unpacks the normal-ness of everyday life, well known things can be seen new again and alternate perspectives and possibilities emerge.
Other short videos capture more fleeting collections of things. Such as a record of all the cats that the artist has seen walking through the streets of Northcote one day or the rubbish left over on the blue stone gravel of train tracks, abandoned by commuters out the window of a passing train. Sofo bears witness to these seemingly random groupings of things from everyday life. We all desire different things, differently and have our own personal histories of desire.
5
Today, I’m sitting here writing a text for C’s exhibition. C is an artist. And an old friend. We chat often, so the writing feels like a series of extended messages. I have no interest in analysing his work, that’s best left to others; besides, the distance required to do this doesn’t seem possible. I tell myself I’m in the middle of the message, travelling back and forth along invisible cables that connect what he’s making with what I’m writing. But it doesn’t have to be writing. It could simply be looking. It requires an odd kind of work not to clutch an object, or try chase it down with argument, categorisation, analysis. To remain open to the act of perception as it is being perceived, loosening one’s grip, being alongside the work, travelling with it, and not needing to capture it.
6 and days; days exist... Inger Christensen, alphabet Middle of the day. Hot. Dog is lying flat on the kitchen floor like a rug. Washing machine swishes water and clothes back and forth. I can hear the beep beep beep of a truck reversing as an email arrives from D. She sends a note about O: He had the ability to turn the most quotidian, overlooked elements of life into something extraordinary, and simultaneously see the ordinary behind the exotic and bizarre. I move between this sentence and the floor (with the dog) and then back to the computer. I stick my head out the window. No breeze. Back to the computer.
Meanwhile, S is in Singapore trying to persuade a museum there that her work of washed-up glass fragments, which she collected along the shores of Singapore’s islands in the early 90s, should be returned to the rising oceans. Because of Singapore’s extensive land reclamation projects, these shores no longer exist. Let the pieces of glass continue to breakdown, be reshaped by the currents, let them wash-up someplace else, I imagine her saying to anxious curators.
Phone buzzes. A message from C: was also thinking about Everything as embodying an attitude of acceptance? Of whatever rises to the surface on the day? He sends a photo of a page from a book of Zen koans: Everything is Best When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.
“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.
In this tradition, enlightenment comes about by chance, is overheard or maybe tripped over. Puzzled, you become aware of the inadequacies of logical reasoning; there’s a lucid surprise in doubt and confusion; you stop thinking through selection, through intention; stop thinking-as-grasping. Knowledge and possession are strangers.
“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.” At these words Banzan became enlightened.1
Middle of the message
The authors write of ‘epistemic virtues’: norms that are internalised, enforced and reproduced through techniques and practices particular to a discipline, in this case, Science. 2
Not long after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, just after investment banks that were ‘too big to fail’ received bailouts, I was in Naples, living on savings and looking for work.
Each day I would walk to The Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, which like most of the city is built over ancient Greco-Roman ruins, reminding you that life happens not after, but on top of, the past. The building, which dates to the nineteenth century, was originally owned by the Banco di Napoli, before being converted into a Banco dei Pegni (a pawnshop). In the 1980s, after it survived a deadly earthquake, it became a school for training administrative staff, then a warehouse for the bank, and then, as now, a contemporary art museum. Though it remained open during constantly updated austerity measures, many of its staff had already lost their jobs, so the museum was mostly empty, with nobody there to watch over the collection.
There was something about how the artworks looked in those quiet and deserted spaces. It was as though they had been abandoned or let loose; they seemed to be settling back into themselves, surrounded by the history of the city, collecting its dust, reacquainted with its broken public telephones, piles of rubbish and thick graffiti. After a few visits I began to relate to the works differently. I took pleasure in leaving fingerprints on a painted and polished stainless-steel sculpture made to look like a balloon; I ran
Virtues have a way of becoming invisible, hidden by the layering of labour and tradition, so that what is seen and thought is what has been taught to be seen and thought. During the European Enlightenment, these atlases became tense objects entwined with notions of fidelity, the ideal, the typical. The atlas makers’ task was to determine what was essential, what was Nature. To do this, they had to, often with great angst, decide what objects to include and what to leave out; what to identify as typical, characteristic, and what to discard; what specimens to collect and steal and what to brush aside; what to authorise as knowledge and what to forget about as non-knowledge; and, because knowledge and progress are coterminous in this tradition, what and who to enlist into the making of civilisation and what and who would be ‘left behind’ in sloth and savagery. * What happens to art when it falls into the world of everything? When it finds itself socialising with all the other stuff? When it goes through a process of de-selection? Or when you realise that it is only though a tradition of disinterested judgement that the object remained separate, cut-off, in the first place?
7 S and I speak over the phone. She and I are reading the same book, about the production of scientific atlases during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: compendiums of images and texts that sought to teach students how to identify, say, bacteria, sperm, skeletons, plants and animals, snowflakes, clouds and so on.
8 my fingers over an architectural construction made of Plexiglass; I looked through a mound of rags wedged between a sculpture of Venus and the wall; and when I came across a group of kids drawing all over a mural that read THINGS THROWN ONTO THE BAY OF NAPLES, I simply smiled at them and they giggled back at me – for they already understood what I was only beginning to see. Everything was permittable, possible. We* need a ‘non-concept of the eye’ said Nietzsche. A confusing phrase to sit with. A non-concept. He was insisting we ‘be wary of the dangerous old fairy-tale which has set up a pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’; suggesting instead that seeing can only ever be perspectival, never abstract or absolute, and the same goes for knowing: the “more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’”. 3 We get to something called seeing, called knowledge, then, not through occlusion or austerity but through difference and abundance, where unexpected patterns emerge. As* of this writing I’m remembering a conversation I had with O. I had asked him, over the phone, why he chose to write for a newspaper, instead of writing books.
It’s less like writing, more like a radio, all I do – and this is the real work – is remain open to the frequencies of the day.
When people speak about C’s work they often talk about his attentiveness, his gleaning and gathering of things that would otherwise remain unseen, unnoticed. In other words, the focus tends to fall on the objects themselves, as though all the meaning is embedded in his choice, his choosing (this way of reading the work positions C within a comfortable tradition of artists turning non-art stuff into art: like the scientist selects Nature, the artist selects Art). But another way to think about it is that C is tuning into different frequencies, and the objects that are gathered – fruit, pebbles, strands of hair, whatever – are not entirely within his control. His works become ways of receiving and transmitting whatever rises to the surface on the day. Each work acting like a device. Each work becoming another part of an odd machine. An everything machine. Maybe this is what C is making? *
Because books are far too formal, too finished, he said. I could almost hear him smile. The newspaper comes and goes, passes like a train, today’s story will become tomorrow’s wrapping paper, or will be used to cover up a shop’s window. So how do you write so often, about so many different subjects? I asked.
1. Paul Reps & Nyogen Senzaki, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings, New York & London: Penguin, 2000, p.56
3. Fredrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 87
9 I have come across everything machines in other settings and for other purposes. Perhaps you know of some, too? They are usually makeshift inventions that crank histories of selection and/or denial in reverse and let whatever happens to be out there, whatever was left out or deemed too small or irrelevant, assemble. These machines usually aren’t fancy, they can be simple devices with a specific application; they tend towards the miniscule, the peripheral. Perhaps the most rudimentary example is a child’s pocket, which runs on intuition, gathering the day’s odds and ends without necessarily knowing what patterns will appear later. A record of the day, a description, accumulating today and gone tomorrow.
2. Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books, 2007
Tom Melick
4. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, N1a,8, p. 460
It is an older-than-old method, I suppose: working with what is leftover, forgotten, discarded, stepped over or on; what falls behind, is on the move, stuck between. Some call it gleaning, or bricoleur, while others have argued that it’s the only way to think about history: ‘the rags – the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.’4 Images and objects of history as by-products of History; not as a way towards high concepts but as a way of remaining open to possibilities hidden in the always unfinished everything. A way of glimpsing something of the passing whole, by which I mean a moment, a day. A way of remaining in the middle of the message, with one hand in a pocket.
Odds and ends: the phrase, I learn, comes to us from the leftover bolts of cloth, the odd end, and since the mid-eighteenth century, miscellaneous articles, or remnants. Add to this pixels, threads, crumbs, specks and fragments that are always there, accumulating, while you go about the day. It does not so much matter what the odd end is, though that can be interesting, the real question is what happens to them when they are welcomed into the imagination, when it becomes possible to receive and transmit a pattern, a series of messages.
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18 Grip 2021 3 minutes 4 seconds
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20 The whole universe 2021 8 minutes
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22 Undone 2019 52 seconds
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24 Library 2019 1 minute 9 seconds
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26 33 objects (that can fit through the whole in my pocket) 2013 1 minute 28 seconds
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28 Mulch 2019 4 minutes 30 seconds
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30 A short film about Gertrude 2013 2 minutes 30 seconds
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32 Cracks, faults, fractures 2012 2 minutes 8 seconds
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34 At the moment 2013 55 secs
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36 Cinecitta 2021 13 minutes
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38 Tracks 2013 1 minute 2 seconds
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40 Cats 2010 1 minute 2 seconds
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43 Biography After completing studies at the Australian National University – School of Art, Canberra in the mid-2000s Sofo has exhibited widely in both national and international exhibition projects, as well as, presenting regular solo exhibitions with Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. Sofo has participated in numerous group and thematic exhibitions, including: We Change the World, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, Melbourne (2021); All that was solid melts, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand (2021); On Vulnerability and Doubt, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2019); Queer Economies, Bus Projects, Melbourne (2019); occupy and echo ( a stage ), ReadingRoom, Melbourne (2019); The Score, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017); As the Moon Waxes and Wanes, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea (2016); The Documentary Take: Walker Evens and Selected Australian Art, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2016); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Reinventing the Wheel: The Readymade Century, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne and Everyday Magic, Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (all 2013).
Acknowledgements
Charlie Sofo lives and works in Naarm/ Melbourne and currently teaches at Monash sofo.infoUniversity.
I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to artist Charlie Sofo for his generosity, resilience and determination in realizing this exhibition amidst the various stops and starts of the pandemic. I also wish to thank his representative Darren Knight Gallery for loaning the various artworks for the exhibition. I also wanted to thank my colleagues in the Art Collection and Galleries team here at Deakin – Julie Nolan and Claire Muir for their assistance and Senior Manager, Leanne Willis for her unwavering support of the exhibition. I also wish to thank Sean Magee, Campus Logistics and Darren Morton from the IPG group at Deakin for their assistance. Thank you to Margaret McDonald from Aussie Rentals, designer Jasmin Tulk, photographer Jacqui Shelton, Cameron Ross from FSG printing and exhibition technician Oliver Piperato for your incredible work and service. James Lynch Thanks to Debris Facility for many years of help, advice, and friendship; Tom Melick for writing thoughtfully about Tutto; James Lynch for generously and patiently facilitating the exhibition at Deakin; Deb Kunda for lending a few items for the show including a charming ironing board, and Caroline Anderson for such a beautiful doll house. Thanks to everyone who has assisted in my works over the years: Brennan Olver, Javed de Costa, Leilani Turner, Patrick Hartigan, Liang Luscombe, Amy Stuart, Hanna Tai, Jeph Neale, Hilary Jackman, Isadora Vaughan, Helen Grogan and for the support of Artery Cooperative, which has been my artistic community for the past 13 years. Lastly, thank you to my family Maria, Francesco, Daniel, Adam, Jimi and Liv. Thank you to everyone and everything. Charlie Sofo Tom Melick writes and edits. With Simryn Gill, he runs Stolon Press. With Elisa Taber, he edits the online pamphlet series, Slug.
Jacqui Shelton unless otherwise stated. Image measurements are height x width x Publisheddepth.byDeakin University Catalogue400978-0-6486747-4-0copiesdesign:Jasmin
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Exhibition Curator: James Lynch All works are © copyright and courtesy of Charlie Sofo and Darren Knight Gallery, PhotographySydney.isby
44 Charlie Sofo Tutto Deakin University Art Gallery 15 February to 25 March 2022
CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B Deakin University acknowledges the Wadawurrung and the Wurrunderji people of the Kulin nation and the Gunditjmara people, who are the traditional custodians of the lands on which our campuses are based. We pay our respects to them for their care of the land. This exhibition is part of the Sustaining Creative Workers Initiative supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Regional Arts Victoria.
Cinecitta 2021 digital video with sound Inner front cover: Charlie Sofo Library 2019 (detail) digital video with sound Inner back cover: Charlie Sofo The Whole Universe 2021 (detail) digital video with sound
CharlieCover:FreeTuesdayGallerywww.deakin.edu.au/art-collectionartgallery@deakin.edu.auhours-Friday10am-4pmEntrySofo
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