Sarah Goffman: Garbage and the Flowers by Deakin University Art Gallery

Sarah Goffman Garbage and the Flowers

Deakin University Art Gallery 24 May – 8 July 2022

Sarah Goffman Garbage and the Flowers

teaches us that qualities which lack originality are to be shamed and looked down upon. Goffman would be the first to call herself a copyist. Many of her works in this project are exacting replicas of highly valued artefacts recreated using

The Deakin University Art Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Garbage and the Flowers by Sarah Goffman, the artist’s first major institutional solo project in Melbourne after an extensive record of exhibitions across Australia for over two decades. It has been especially meaningful to finally bring this project to realization after an initial invitation to exhibit at Deakin in 2020. Two years later at the same time as developing this project at Deakin, Goffman has presented the major project Applied Arts for the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. The title of this exhibition, Garbage and the Flowers, is borrowed from a line of the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne (1967) that explores ideas of love, nature, the fleetingness of beauty and destruction. These are key themes that connect directly with Goffman’s creative research around consumerism, value systems and our over dependence of single use plastics. Holding regular exhibitions since the early 1990s Goffman has an extensive record of research investigating our use of plastics through installation and her everyday life. Early works by Goffman utilised plastic bags as a material for flags and banners. Other projects made use of recycled cardboard and found materials to make cars and structures that signalled the impending ecological crisis. In other works, Goffman metaphorically broke down plastic into its oily primordial substance separate from water to metaphorically connect our consumption of plastic and fossil-based fuels to our bodies.

Doctor Goffman

In 2005 Goffman was inspired by a local story that the roof of the newly built Asian Art wing of the Art Gallery of New South Wales suffered leaks in heavy rains and precious artefacts were at risk of damage. Troubled by this, Goffman began making loving versions of ancient Chinese and Japanese artefacts that could be found at a scholar’s desk including brushes, ink pots, pottery and jade items using found plastic waste, Styrofoam and paint. The resultant artworks were then submerged in a water tank as part of the survey exhibition Situations at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, curated by Russell Storer.

Since then, Goffman has recreated numerous forms of ceramic and porcelain artefacts using found PET plastic drink bottles and discarded food packaging. Goffman, acting out of necessity, uses the discarded waste readily available around her. This exhibition focuses on these various series of tributary items and brings many of these works together for the first time. As articulated in Jacqueline Millner’s considered essay, Goffman employs trompe l’oeil to great effect in creating a magical aura from found plastic rubbish, and in questioning what we value and to find a shared joy in the artifice and Westernpresentation.arthistory

9 plastic waste and a modest supply of paint, glue, markers and ink. Taking inspiration from antiques on display in auction sales catalogues and from museum collections around the world, Goffman transforms plastic drink bottles into art. In doing so, Goffman makes representations of differing vessel forms and adorns these with folksy adaptions of various ceramics patterns. In the presentation of this exhibition, I have come to better understand the deeper complexities of this exercise. Goffman’s plastic forgeries mimic ceramic patterns and designs that go back hundreds of years. Many of the designs she focuses on are appropriated from European ceramic companies established as early as the 15th century. These designs are their own complex forms of appropriation and influence. Delftware, for example, dates back to the Dutch Golden Age (1588-1672) when potters from the Netherlands produced inexpensive earthenware interpretations of fine Japanese and Chinese porcelain for the European markets.i Another later style, Chinoiserie, is a largely French 17th and 18th century interpretation of ancient Chinese and Japanese designs.ii The familiar Willow pattern is very much a British construction dating back to the 1780s and were interpretations of blue and white fine porcelain from China, which was in turn inspired by ancient Japanese myth and design.iii

Goffman’sMuseum.plastic-topia

Fine porcelain objects were once considered a form of ‘white gold’ and were traded as currency across the globe as a symbol of wealth.iv This continues into the present with examples of fine porcelain still sold as luxury goods and valued for their outstanding qualities in a global marketplace. Like a game of whispers Goffman recreates her own forgeries to simulate the authenticity of valuable artefacts in threads of multiplication and repetition, challenging notions of wealth and permanence.

Stepping further along these lines of thought, what do we mean by the concept of an ‘original’ anyhow? And what are the distinctions that make something just a mere ‘copy’?

After visiting Jingdezhen (known as ‘the porcelain capital of China’) in 2014 for her research, Goffman witnessed first-hand how an entire city was dedicated to the reproduction of willow-ware in all its forms and where copies are manufactured by the thousands for markets across the world.v With the lack of history or originals to be seen Goffman realized the romanticized image of China’s past is perhaps a fiction.vi Instead, the priceless original objects are hidden far away in distant institutions such as London’s V&A

deliberately tries to reference this continuing exchange of commodities and power relations that extends back through international sea trade routes and the Silk Road. Her works also allude to how many of the plastic items we use (and unwittingly consume) today are manufactured in China and South Asian countries and are then subsequently exported as plastic waste to countries without financial advantage. In doing so, Goffman aims to present a complex system connecting users, consumption, production, value, waste and the environment.

10 An idealised perfect original versus a degraded second-rate copy is an antiquated concept in the digital era. Copying is used as a scapegoat, allowing us to imagine that these things can be identified, fixed, judged and punished or removed, so that we can live in a world where everything is what it appears to be. Philosopher Marcus Boon uses Buddhist epistemology to better reflect our cultural moment of infinite copies without an original:Themultiplication of nearly identical images is understood not as the degradation of an original, but the invocation of an impermanent, provisional form with the goal of training the mind to recognize its own true nature.vii

James Lynch i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delftware ii https://www.britannica.com/art/chinoiserie iii https://vgm.liverpool.ac.uk/blog/2021/willow-pattern/ iv https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/white-gold [Accessed 17 June 2022]

vii Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2010, pp. 63 viii Sarah Goffman in email conversation, 1 June 2022

Every copy and every act of exchange, presupposes the establishment of an equivalence between A and B, the assumption that they are like or equal to one another in some way. But there are different kinds of economies, all of which manage or appropriate mimetic energies. Copying is also an intrinsic human act, a way of learning and forming different knowledges; it is through the act of copying that one better comprehends and venerates the subject, rather than simply capturing its essence. This seems to better reflect the intentions of Goffman’s project, where the act of copying is rooted in a lifelong love planted by her mother who made costumes for the theatre in San Francisco.viii For a moment, I return to the image of a leaking vitrine at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the precious contents ominously at peril, whilst a storm rages heavily outside. The scholar’s desk has become a recurring metaphor in Goffman’s exhibitions and installations. While we often diminish the contributions of artists by labelling them inspired eccentrics or social misfits, the figure of the scholar is both poet and politician, with their works, values and moral positions known publicly. Goffman uses the practice of art as a form of political poetry, so we take greater responsibility for our ongoing consumption, actions and legacies in this precious finite world. For this, I thank you, Doctor Goffman.

vi Sarah Goffman, Trash Converter: The Process of Contemporary Alchemy, University of Wollongong, 2017, pp.53

v back%20over%202%2C000%20yearshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingdezhen#:~:text=It%20is%20known%20as%20the,stretches%20[Accessed15June2022]

Goffman has over many years honed the ability to transform everyday waste into compelling works of art. The techniques are not complex, nor the materials precious: combinations of spray enamel, hot glue and texta are used to apply decorative patterns copied from a range of sources onto discarded plastic containers. Yet with these cheap, often free, and readily available elements, Goffman’s practice enacts the ultimate DIY alchemy, producing intricate and beautiful objects that exude cultural capital. Exhibited en masse according to museological conventions, the elevation is complete. What is indeed priceless is the artist’s sensibility, her aesthetic sophistication and erudition, her capacity for imagining what might be possible beyond mainstream thinking. All of these underpin an ethical commitment to make do with what is at hand: the artist celebrates the potential of taking care and time to imagine a new life for a used object and reminds us not only that alternatives to thoughtless consumption exist but that they may be more enriching.

With her canvas now ready, Goffman then selects which pattern to apply and sets about layering the different paints, an activity that, while second nature to her, never ceases to give her pleasure.

With the sharp eye of an op shop habitué, Goffman is an inveterate collector of all kinds of things and has amassed an archive of old china that is one source of inspiration for her designs. But her knowledge of and respect for antiquities also comes from a lifelong fascination with museums, in particular collections of applied arts that emerged from Orientalist impulses. Her repertoire of designs borrows freely from Islamic patterning, Medici porcelain, Ming, Qing, Dutch Delftware and English Chinoiserie, cultural practices whose value has been vaunted by their constant replication. Mimicry of ‘great art’ has historically been key to artistic training,

Garbage and the flowers

Goffman’s process begins with neighbourhood walks and her everyday life as a gleaner who reappraises what others have thrown out through her own creative resourcefulness. Picking up litter, she gathers her ever-abundant materials, the seemingly benign but ultimately toxic single-use plastics that surround her. This daily ritual is imbued with several levels of care: care for self, for community, for the discarded, and for her artistic practice. The next level of care comes with the labour-intensive cleaning of each component, this handling also enhancing the artist’s understanding of each form.

11 Sarah Goffman’s art invites us to play and to imagine, to marvel and to laugh, modes of being that are sorely needed to confront the ravages of contemporary life. Rarely are we afforded the opportunity to cultivate our creative thought or our moral attunement in respect of the social and political problems we face. More often, we are overwhelmed and immobilised with anxiety, or seduced by the rituals and material benefits of consumerism that distract us from recognising our own agency. But Goffman’s objects hold our attention long enough to plant the question: what do we value, and why? And what could happen if we valued different things?

This illusion of cultural value is particularly effective when the objects are displayed in vitrines that appropriate the display conventions of the cabinet of curiosities – the artist has said that ‘it isn’t until I install the work within vitrines that I can say it is “complete”’.i

The resulting objects are neither forgeries or pretences, although they are trompe l’oeils: they do fool the eye, appearing at first to be unique and precious antiquities. But it is this momentary seduction through beauty and artifice that is key to the enjoyment of the work. It maintains our attention on expectation of cultural value, before alleviating the serious moment of encounter with high art: the riddle is unlocked, the laughter unleashed, the artist’s pleasure shared.

12 as practitioners attempt to embody the skills of the ‘masters’ and ‘mistresses’. But also, in perpetuating such designs in unlikely places and materials, Goffman’s gesture exemplifies Walter Benjamin’s argument that its reproduction radically democratises art by allowing us to encounter it in our everyday lives.

This important antecedent of the modern European museum is a tradition that Goffman (like many artists) greatly admires. The cabinets were showcases of the marvellous, testament to the worldliness, wealth and taste of the enlightened gentleman who had collected the various curio on tours throughout Europe and its colonies, then arranged them to bedazzle his noble visitors. As such, the cabinets are carefully curated forms of self-portraiture. We might also think of Goffman’s displays as personal statements that speak of her life and identity: the aesthetics she admires, the values she holds dear. She describes the gallery, and its installation possibilities, as a place where she can live out her interior décor fantasises, experimenting with placement to ‘explore the dialectics between things’.ii This exhibition, Garbage and the flowers, brings together a suite of works that Goffman has made over the last fifteen years or so, the title immediately positioning us in the push and pull of what we consider valuable. Here we get a sense of both the consistency and the variations in her practice: her continued dedication to the moral urgency of environmental thinking and consumer consciousness, as well as the potentially infinite aesthetic transformations she can perform given the endless supply of plastic waste. We also get a sense of the effects of different installation approaches, from small glass shelves that single out individual pieces for contemplation, to the glorious assemblage of Plastic Arts (2005-2022) in all its sensual abundance. And we are privy to the artists’ process: The Scholar’s Desk (2005-2022), which also recalls the workstation of a museum conservator, is a little slice of the artist’s studio where her simple tools and materials belie the intricate, exotic objects that glow around us.

To the artist, such copying is an act of veneration. She genuinely loves the original works, working primarily off her own taste and what she is attracted to: she recreates them so as to surround herself with their simulations given they are too precious to own.

Garbage and the flowers provides a variety of entry points into this at once sophisticated and accessible body of work, because an invitation to the audience to spend time, to wonder, is integral to the artist’s purpose. Goffman’s practice is generous: as she says, ‘As an artist I want to share it. I want to take it and give it to you’.iii In sharing her aesthetic pleasure, her wit, and her passion for antiquities and gleaning, she is also inviting us to see our own environment afresh and reconsider the values we take for granted. What is worthy of being collected and displayed in our palaces of cultural capital? What deserves to be thrown away? What alchemy are we ourselves capable of if we flip the consumerist script?

iii Sarah Goffman quoted in Sarah Price, ‘Recycling artist Sarah Goffman’, The Saturday Paper, May 27June 2, 2017, No 158

Jacqueline Millner

i Sarah Goffman quoted in Katrina Liberiou, ‘Artist Interview: Sarah Goffman’, Muse Magazine, September 2021, Issue 27, University of Sydney ii Sarah Goffman quoted in Andrew Frost, Trash Converter, Artlink , 34:4, 2014

images

Garbage and the flowers installation view p. 17 I wish this were bigger 2018 cardboard, spray enamel, found PET, permanent marker, adhesive, silicon and metallic paper pp.18-19 Plastic Arts 2005-2022 acrylic, MDF, found PET and various plastics, concrete, spray enamel, permanent marker, water, bamboo, pins, adhesive, resin, agate, glass, costume jewellery, ceramic, and Posca pen pp. 20-21 Scholar’s Desk 2005-2022 found PET and various plastics, acrylic, mirror, oil paint, concrete, spray enamel, permanent marker, cotton thread, glass, paper, wood, wire, pencil and plastic chair pp. installation22-23 view left glass cabinet, from top to bottom: Tahara 2016 found PET and various plastics, adhesive, wire and gemstone After Daniel 2021 found PET and various plastics

List

Black and Gold 2012 found PET and various plastics, synthetic polymer paint and spray enamel right glass cabinet, from top to bottom: Funeral Urn 2022 Plastic Arts 2005 Plant Pot 2012 found PET and various plastics, hose, ceramic, spray enamel, permanent marker, adhesive and cycad branch I am a 3D printer 2017 acrylic, found PET and various plastics, spray enamel and adhesive pp. 24-25 Smoking Table 2022 faux satin, found PET and various plastics, spray enamel, synthetic polymer paint, permanent marker, acrylic, synthetic leather, branch and granite pp. 26-32 installation details Plastic Arts 2005-2022 acrylic, MDF, found PET and various plastics, concrete, spray enamel, permanent marker, water, bamboo, pins, adhesive, resin, agate, glass, costume jewellery, ceramic, and Posca pen p. 33 After Daniel 2021 found PET and various plastics of

34 All images are copyright and reproduced courtesy of the artist Photography by Ross Coulter pp. Digital2-7 scans of pages from the artist’s journals consisting of drawings and notes, dating from 2015-2022 pp. 14-15

Sarah Goffman

Acknowledgments

James Lynch Thanks to Leanne Willis, James Lynch and Oliver Piperato for their support and efforts in developing and presenting this exhibition. Great thanks also to Peter Jackson, Liane Rossler and all the artists who continue to inspire me forever and always. In memory of my father, Ben C. Goffman who showed me so many museums around the world.

I wish to sincerely thank Sarah Goffman for her patience and generosity in developing this exhibition over testing times of the pandemic and for her resilience and fortitude in bringing the project to fruition. I also wish to thank the Art Collection and Galleries team at Deakin including Collections Officer, Claire Muir and especially, Senior Manager, Leanne Willis, for her unwavering support and encouragement of the project. I also wish to thank exhibition technician Oliver Piperato, designer Jasmin Tulk, photographer Ross Coulter and contractor Stephen Inggall for their expertise and service. Thanks to Senior Lecturers John Cripps Clark and Jo Raphael from the Faculty of Arts and Education as educational partners for the exhibition. And lastly, I wish to thank artist Masato Takasaka for sharing his personal thoughts for our in-conversation event.

is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University. Her books include Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (Ashgate, with J. Barrett, 2014); Fashionable Art (Bloomsbury, with A. Geczy, 2015); Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes, (Routledge, co-edited with Catriona Moore, 2018); Contemporary Art and Feminism (Routledge, with Catriona Moore, 2021) and Care Ethics and Art (Routledge, co-edited with Gretchen Coombs, 2022).

35 Biography

Born on the Eora and Gadigal lands of Sydney, artist Sarah Goffman first studied photography at East Sydney Technical College, graduating in 1994 and followed by further studies completed at the National Art School (2000). Since the mid-90s Goffman has an extensive record of solo and group exhibitions. Goffman received her PhD from the University of Wollongong in 2018. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Applied Arts, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney (2021); Bridge to Asia, Murray Art Museum (MAMA), Albury (2019), and I am a 3D Printer, Wollongong Art Gallery, Wollongong (2017). Selected group exhibitions include: Female Driver s, Regional Art Gallery, Maitland (2022); I’ve never seen the sky like this before, Southwest Contemporary, Adelaide (2020); How the City Care s, Customs House, Sydney (2019);Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2017); Subject to be, DAGC Gallery, Philippines (2012); Chain Letter, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, California (2011); Cryptophilistinism, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne and CAST, Hobart (2009); Situation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005) and Perspecta, Artspace, Sydney (1999).

Drsarahgoffman.comJacquelineMillner

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flowers Deakin University Art Gallery 24 May to 8 July 2022

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