GATHERING 1993

Ken Thaiday

Beizam {shark) dance mask

painted wood and mixed media construction

GATHERING An Exhibition from the Griffith University Art Collection

1992

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GATHERING is a group of works gleaned from the Grilfith University Art Collection by Filipino Writer-in-Residence Marian Pastor Roces. working in cooperat.ion wilh Griffith Artworks' Curator, Beth Jackson.

Our premise for the exhibition was the possibility of illuminating aspects of the University's Art Collection from new cultural vantage points.

The Griffith University Art Collection works within the same educational principles as the rest of the University, promoting interaction between various intellectual disciplines in the rontext of continuous cultural. social. and economic change.

The Art Collection reflects debates taking place within the University's teaching and research in areas such as Ethics. Media Studies.

Environmental Sciences, Asian and International Studies, and Cultural Policy Studies.

The Art Collection also forms part of the everyday learning and working environment of the students, staff. and visit.ors to the University. It is widely exhibited in public spaces through various campuses. and is one of the few large collections in Australia which is accessible after hours, most days of the week.

Our approach to the Art Collect.ion is to acqui1•e contemporary Australian works and place them in contexts which raise questions about human nature, society, and knowledge. Exhibitions such as GATHERING examine the nature of art and its dialogue with the fields of history, sociology, economics, politics, and other cultural forms.

Recent acquisitions in the Art Collection have examined questions of identity in a post-colonial society based on diverse geographical and cultural sources. The works in this exhibition have origins in Darnley and Badu Islands in the Torres Strait; Alpha in Western Queensland; and Mexican. Malay, Greek. Koori. and Macedonian languages and cultures.

The Griffith Artworks Residency program has afforded the opportunity to assemble some of these works as a meeting place for the discussion of diverse cultural values, spiritual poetics, and power relationships. The questions which arise deal with the role of cultural production in the evolution of self definition as it relates to gender. race, ethnicity, class, nation, self. and generation.

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Marian Past.or Roces is a cultural rommentator whose range is international, but whose origin and perspective is the Asia-Pacific region from the specific base of her home in the Philippines. In 1986 she was the founding Direct.or or the Museum of Philippine Culture in Manila. Her provoking questions about the ambiguous and concealed messages she perceives in our collection of contemporary Australian art are here presented via a uniquely Filipino use of the English language which works by "fluttering from metaphor to metaphor, from resonance to resonance. rather than from definition to definition". 1 These meditations emanate from a culture which traditionally had no single word to describe the various objects. practices, and cultural forms which (in the European tradition) we call "art".

They form a conversation along with our own Curator's observations about these works in the context of the debates current in Australian cultural dialectics. particularly those which deal with the ontological problem for all creators faced with the slippage between object and subject.

The exhibition, and the residency from which it arose are part of a shared endeavour to look at ways in which institutions. diverse traditions, and relationships can be contextualised to contribute to creative cross­ cultural constructs.

Through projects such as this. Griffith Artworks aims to place the work of Australian artists in an intellectual and physical environment which offers continuous challenge to students, staff. and related communities.

Dr Margriet Bonnin Direct.or Griffith Artworks October 1993

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Marian Pastor Roces 'The Outer Limits of Discourse," Shift Confererx:e Papers (Brisbane: Institute of Modem Art, 1993).

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(a conversation GATHERING. not collecting, not amassing, not foreclosing, not harvesting, not a lusting after, not "social gathering" (the bourgeois institution). not the creation of a defined collective.

Rather. it might be a summoning up. of energy. of thoughts. of "wits". with meditativeness but also urgency. 'I gather that..." is not the same as "I know." It might be a receiving of additions, the creation of mass. Although perhaps not quite bricolage, yet it might be a keen-ness t-Owards concealed knowledges. Too, there is deat,h, as when one is gathered up to one's ancestors, whoever they may be. A storm gathers, like an ominous swelling, or a momentum with no clear trajectory -- possibilities in the charged chemistry of a site.

In clothes-making, gathering is to draw together in folds and wrinkles. In book­ binding, it is take a group of leaves, imagining and insisting on an order. The same word has female and male inflect.ions, neither of which is essentially liberating nor essentially oppressive.

Gather carries only a spectral recollection of gathering as cosmology: hunter­ gatherer. Yet gathering seems to be. always, vis a vis threat. Gather the clothes. A storm is gathering.

Sons: in the world's dominant cultures. Tarzan exists within the semiotic field of everyboy. The beautiful dominant primate of the "the jungle" (who naturalizes male ascendance), signs Darkness. begone! So does "Titian". on the other side of popular culture, signify luminosity of logos. banishing "the jungle". Enlightenment. Let there be light! issues out of th. e genesis myth of the Christianity out of which the triptych format served to illumine pagan souls with a white light. The fascist longings in these canonical dualisms can only be exposed via a synchronic viewing, which is also a subtle dismanUing that inserts a moving, diffused locus: the person(s) migrating out of or expelled from One History.

In Elizabeth Gertsakis' Beautiful Sons what is immediately evident is the textual production of the work - glamorous, private, history - the compartmentalisation of these various forms of representation and their consequential relative equivalence. What is also immediately evident is the binary opposition between so-called 'high art· (Titian's Self-portrait) and so-called "popular culture' (Johnny Weismuller) which is simultaneously de-fused by this textual equivalence. What is perhaps not so immediate is the temporality of the image (as opposed to its historicity), its re­ ordering of history into a synchronic gathering, ordered by subjective memory (of her father) and collective experience (of TV and masculine icons).

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It is tempting to believe that to write from/ represent one's own experience is inherently valid, is the thing that will cease the fractal­ like processes of colonisation, providing a (moral) limit. In Tracey Moffatt's Pet Thang, subjective experience is an illimitable nihilism as the Western project of knowing and othering unveils layer by layer its darkened objects of desire. Moffatt orchestrates her own unveiling in this act of self-voyeurism, where she is both torturer and victim, master and slave; where she is expiated and humiliated in a private sado-masochistic fantasy.

Christopher Koller's Ex Voto and Eugenia Raskopoulos' Untitled from Goddess mother daughter series further confound discourses of centre/periphery. They invoke a bizarre logic: the law of the Father may be overcome by praying to the Virgin; or matrilineal knowledge echoes to silence in a vessel of 'the feminine'.

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Daughters: increasingly. ·it is a dangerous conundrum why it was the Christ. not his mother, who said. Gather my children unto Me. Frightening riddles have been the quotidian for too many women, as fragmented images and ideas have, with people. migrated about. and have been dis-, mis­ placed - even as Power continues to re-crystallize itself out of even the ruptures. The grand themes of the West, for instance -- mother, Father, paradise, The Fall -- stray into paradoxical spaces. The pre-Christian Hellenic mother is as muted in gray reproductions as th. e silenced woman who suffers today because of. so it is said. a power regime that materialized long ago in the same "Hellenes". The Virgin Mary, mediatrix between "mankind" and the im-mutable God the Father, becomes the ironic woman par excellence ("eastern" woman in a "western" church?) in myriad geographies where female knowledges are eclipsed by her male religion -­ therefore by her closure/virginity. Artists gather and reconfigure the incunabula of dispersion. and they find their names -- or the names of their activities -- according to the specific crucifixions. on the axes of paradox, that they witness. or live out.

These metaphors of the Father, who now comes in many guises, these dreams, fantasies, and prayers, cannot be extracted (either meta-textually or sub-textually) from daily realities. Rather they operate synchronically in the psychic grab-bag of the individual, the nation, or the television. Peter Lyssiotis collages documentary images of Australian factories with their pools of migrant labour. His act of outlining the women and collaging them is so careful. It neither adds to nor subtracts from the surreal quality of their actual position.

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Dispersal reverberates violence. It unsettles the grand oppositions (good versus evil. for instance), but relocates conflict in the most differentiated of specificities. Often the fights are amongst the powerless, instead of against Power: wounds may be "setr"-inflicted. An otbe1' is further displaced. often enough by people who were recently "othered". and the protagonists -- and the locales of protagonism -- each time mutate a new chtbonic creature. Consider. for instance, the gazed-at willing a gazing back. by violating the discreteness of subject and object. Here is a gathering of paganisms that are only paganisms within the tropes of illumination, though the subject;:::Object twists around and strikes: beware the thang that thinks strategically! Consider, too, an entirely different thang: the "stranger" who prefers to "represent" "setr' or "authenticity" using emblems that alert to "fake" "aboriginality" . And yet another creature: the pliant-autonomous object, simulating subjectivity by pegging prices to a calibrated yielding to the enterprise of subjugating / subject-ing, who nonetheless annihilates the basis of desire in the "innocence" of the edenic other.

Sue Elliott's Stranger 29 and Mervyn Bishop's Warning Sign are enactments of self voyeurism - Aboriginal people gazing at themselves mobilising a completely modern sensibility. Dot painting which is not 'real' dot painting, a photograph of a sign which says 'do not take picture' - ambivalence towards and mimicry of sacred traditions which reflect the cultural impoverishment of colonisation.

This emergence into text or discourse, this move from invention to intervention, follows on the heels of violences.

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The documentary record may actually say too much. Artmaking can be called upon not to critique, reference, or increase layers of signification, but to arrest the constant flow of images which have surely reached saturation point. I-Lann Yee pastes her family photos face down. The viewer chooses to look or not look. She arrests an automatic gazing and allows desire and volition to gather again. The large image is part of the visual carnage - wasted, over-reproduced, over-blown, fading from us.

In these works there is as much desire for concealing as revealing. In giving Frida Kahlo a beard, Luke Roberts doesn't so much masculinise her or obscure her as he veils her or disguises her. When/why this need to declare ethnicity, cultural identity, sexuality, race, gender? Nicholas Nedelkopoulos' That great Australian dream is a biting satire of Australian "multiculturalism".

Cultural differences are subsumed and regulated by consumer capitalism. Ethnicity is signified as an affect, as costume, as disposable, as profit extracted from the diaspora which is itself propelled by late global capitalism.

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Migration is grotesque reenactment of The Fall, the expulsion not so much from a "country'' or "culture" as from an imagined state of grace. and, by the power of riddle-like reversals. the mirages or cden are conjured on the "new" (front) rather than the "old" (back) horizon. Indeed. if paradise is the abode of the f'ather which has twisted upon itself in history to be the abode of the other. what spaces beyond Tarzan's dominion (or "Titian's" contempt) are available for the erstwhile pagan. now also a creature of diaspora ? Within the available technologies of representation. it is impossible to be nameless and yet specific. though nameless-yet­ speciftc is the only way to assert that there is no eden (there is only this group and that group, all different. negritude is not aboriginality, ad infinitum). Neither is it possible to say, without being accused of or lapsing into either romanticism or satanism. that pagans do survive in myriad guises in myriad suburbia an(! indeed forests, and still speak in strange tongues. However: s/he was never "pagan", is not a relic. only different. and changing from out of that difference.

Head hunting and trading in Torres Strait Island is a simple image - a narrative which draws upon coastal New Guinea art and the stories told to Nona by his grandfather. But the subject (of the work and perhaps Nona himself) is positioned at the limits of knowing. Head hunting, at least in its metaphoric capacity, is a "familiar' concept in the West, (head hunting as corporate jargon).

This is obviously, in no way, the same head hunting of which Nona speaks. How to conceptualise head hunting without first subtracting modern notions of individualism, competition, and insatiable subjectivity? There are limits. Differences can be irreconcilable.

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Another impossibility: the nameless-yet-specific. to be represented. is forced to assimilate within the named-and-globalized picture of the current "human condition". The "tribal" problem in the Philippines is perforce linked with the "tribal" problems in Australian jails and Brazilian rainforests. ''fribal" problems are perforce linked with misogyny, with homophobia. with the hole in the ozone (yes. yes, all these are the sins of the father, again ad infinitum). And of course a semblance of this totalized postcoloniality is played out daily, in macabre microcosm, in every metropolis. But then again. all impulses towards unitary talk•· the hegemonic construction of resistance -- is a trap. f'or the universalized does not allow space for, say, an obscure town named with a Greek Alpha. in the middle of Queensland, vis a vis which an artist gathers a sense of an ironic center/ periphery map, as he also gathers a personal male/ female map. as he also gathers a "personal"/ "iconic" riddle. And yet: how is there to be a "personal" (or "iconic" or "center" or "periphery") outside the canonical formations9 4

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These were gathered by another "person": a mask. a double sign of pseudo-shark. ambiguous reference to "tribal". ambiguous reference to "conceptual art", ambiguous reference to "person" (for a mask disguises I limns a face). The gathering is not even comprehensible via the word "hybrid". which assumes discrete. crystallized canons commingling. Yet the mask gazes back, though sightless. and confounds the voyeur. lt snarls/ smiles, although, in fact, mouth-less (speech-less?) and actually, tooth-less.

Who is the author? The only answers are more riddles about the now­ tormented agency of the subject, and the possibilities inherent in the pain of the object. There is a gathering or ghosts around words which have flown about and have become masks of unknown entities.

The Shark mask is a disguise, a costume. Dance masks with moving parts are traditional in the Torres Strait Islands, although Thaiday creates his own forms rather than following from a family tradition. Thaiday gathers togeth�r PVC and black cockatoo feather, creating an identity which is neither authentically traditional or modern. Thaiday creates a performative space for his identity - a mask which negotiates between artist and audience. It presupposes both traditions of ceremony and a society of spectacle. It is a frame for self-portraiture, not a self-portrait; a platform for speech, song or silence.

Gathering, as not necessarily coming from one mind (like ordering or collecting) but a coming together from multiple directions, for an occasion, a reason, or a sympathy, which necessitates a role for volition and trust. Family gatherings often dispel the fantasy of "family', yet they persist as sites of exchange. Gathering as negotiating.

Beth Jackson Curator Griffith Artworks

Marian Pastor Roces Writer-in-Residence Griffith Artworks

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Elizabelh Gertsakis Beautiful sons (from A glamorous private history) cibachrome photograph 1989

Mervyn Bishop Warning sign, 30km from Maningrida N. T., 1974 photograph 1974

Eugenia Raskopoulos Unlilled (from Goddess, mother, daughter series) gelatin silver pholograph 1991

Tracey Moffalt Unfilled (from Pet Thang series) cibachrome pholograph 1974

Sue Elliott Stranger 29 acrylic on cardboard 7

1991

Peter Lyssiotis Tangible assets (from the series Industrial woman) gelatin silver photograph 1979

Christopher Koller Ex Voto (Gracias Virgencita para et sueno que me canto que yo nunca agradaceria a mi padre) (Thank you Dearest Virgin for the dream which told me that I would never please my father) type C colour photograph, tin plate construction

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1990-1991

Dennis Nona Head hunting and trading in Toffes Strait Island colour linoblock 1991

I-Lann Yee Snapshot I anitec reprolite photographic paper 9

1993

Luke Roberts Bearded Frida watercolour on paper 1992

Nicholas Nedelkopoulos

That great Australian dream etching aquatint

1987 10

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Elizabeth GERTSAKIS

Beautiful sons (from A glamorous private hfstory'J

Tracey MOFFATI

Untitled (from

Sue ELLIOTI

W O R K S cibachrome photograph

51.0 X 50.0cm

1989

cibachrome photograph

!09.0 X 81.6<:rn

1992

Stranger 29

acrylic on cardboard

38.2 X 42.9cm

1991

Mervyn BISHOP

Warning sign, 30km from Maningrida N.T., 1974

photograph

30.4 X 40.3cm

1974

Christopher KOLLER

Ex Voto (Gracias Virgencita para el sueno que me.c,onto que yo nunca agradaceria a mi padre)

type C colour photograph, tin plate construction

198.5x 118.0 x57.0cm

Eugenia RASKOPOULOS

Untitled (from

Goddess, mother, daughter series)

gelatin silver photograph

80.3x 1135cm

1991

Peter LYSSIOTIS

Tangible assets (from the series Industrial woman) gelatin silver photograph

36.5 x 26.6cm

1979

I-Lann YEE

Snapshot I

anitec reprolite photographic paper

198.0 x 194.5cm

1993

Dennis NONA

Head hunting and trading in Torres Strait Island

colour linoblock

39.7x54.3cm

1991

Luke ROBERTS

Bearded Frida

watercolour on paper

27.3x 21.scm

1992

Nicholas NEDELKOPOULOS

That great Australian dream

etching aquatint

100.2x so.ocm

1987

Ken THAIDAY

Beizam {shark) dance mask

painted wood and

Pet Thang series)

1990-1991

1992

mixed media construction

68.0x50.5 x 40.0cm

Curated by: Marian Pastor Roces (Writer-in-Residence) and Beth Jackson (Curator, Griffith Artworks) Curatorial assistant: Kath Kerswell

ACK N OWL E D G E M E NTS Marian Pastor Roces gratefully acknowledges lhe assistance during the residency or the siarr or Crimin Artworks. the Office of University Relations, and colleagues at Griflilh Universily in 1he

lnstllllle ror Cultural Policy Smdies. Accommodation Services. the Olfice or Community Services. Photography and Publication Design. lnformauon Services. Thanks are also extended LO: Eye/ine magazine, the Queensland Art Gallery, the lnsLllute of Modern Art. and the Writers' Week Commiuee / Brisbane Warana Festival.

Images reproduced by kind permission of the artists.

The Re.!lidency has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Auslralla Council, iw arts funding and advisory body.

Griffith Artworks is assisted by tile Queensland Ollice of 1he Arw and CulUJral Development.

P,lnted by Tennyson Printery Pty. Ltd.

ISBN O 86857 420 1

ARTS QUEENSLAND

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GATHERING An fxhibition from the Griffith University Art Collection

Luke Roberts

Bearded Frida

watercolour on paper

1992

you and your friends are invited to the opening night of

GATHERING An Exhibition from the Griffith University Art Collection

Curated by: Marian Pastor Races (Critical Writer-in-Residence) and Beth Jackson (Curator, Griffith Artworks) 7 - 9pm Monday 4 October t 993 Central Theatres Gallery, Nathan Campus, Griffith University. to be opened by Nicholas Tsoutas (Director, Institute of Modern Art) 4 October - 5 November 1993 9am - 8·30pm weekdays

Griffith Artworks Is assis1e.l by lhe Queensland omce of the Aris and CulUJral DevelopmenL The Residency has been assisled by the Commonweallh Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Image reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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ARTS QUEENSLAND