International Travel – Pat Hoffie by Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

PAT HOFFIE 1

An exhibition of ‘works on paper’ that critically considers what might still ‘work’ on paper in an era of global communication. Exhibition dates Thursday, 9 April–Saturday, 25 April 2015 Crane Arts www.cranearts.com 1400 N. American St. Philadelphia, PA 19122 215.232.3203

PAT HOFFIE

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

This body of work titled International Travel falls within my ongoing series Fully Exploited Labour, which has continued through a number of iterations for over thirty years. During that time, a range of materials and approaches—including performance, video, installation, embroidery, billboards and painting—have been used to explore changing ideas about what constitutes work, and to simultaneously ask how this is reflected by, and in, the practice of what we call art. William Platz’s essay here, “Works on Paper”, continues and extends the enquiry through his consideration of just what might or might not ‘work’ on paper. Or, to be plain: how can works on paper work? And, in the case of this particular body of work, how can works-on-paper-about-work work? Prefacing the essay with a quote by Salman Rushdie, Platz points out how, although ‘works on paper’ have provided a means through which to memorialise lives, knowledge, data lived and lost, the drive to destroy those archives shares a similar motivation to the drive of men to annihilate the “ground upon which they stand”. Rushdie describes works on paper as “noble stuff [that] endures”, and yet watercolour on paper appears—at face value at least (and,

as Platz points out, to the conservator’s understanding)—as the most fragile of mediums: thin, transparent, fugitive. The choice of subject matter for this body of work seems critically questionable: Carriers features representations of men obviously from the ‘third world’ carrying brutally heavy loads. The representations risk tumbling into either sentimental images, celebrating picturesque otherness, or crude critiques of the inequities of global politics. The subject matter depicted in Seven Days features cameo vignettes from an imaginary apocalypse, and runs equally dangerous risks through addressing a genre that tends towards being ultimate and prosaic. And if the choice of such subjects as art is fraught, then the effort of rendering them through a medium associated with a different set of heritage associations seems perverse. Watercolour on paper is recognised as a genteel craft—one suited to deft, nimble, and sensitive treatment— and the subject matter for the medium has tended to be discreet and delicate. But the material nature of the medium has particular virtues; light and portable, it is suited to being worked on in a range of locations. Its results are relatively

efficiently transportable—able to be packed up and shipped out with the minimum of costs and fuss for material goods And yet, even so, in a virtual world, a comparative assessment of its weight and presence make the costs of its transport and preservation over-priced and obsolete. The medium is material evidence—it exists in the finite world of the past as an artefact, the residue of a practice mired in tradition with all the accompanying heavy baggage of love-ofmaterials, acknowledgment of the past, and a dumb commitment that knowing comes from an immersion in doing. Praxis. The occasion of exhibiting in another country (in this case, the US) gives an artist the opportunity to consider the extent to which there may be any ‘sense’ in doing so. This exhibition was borne from international travel to another destination; construed along the trails of the Everest Base Camp route in early 2014, the musings that produced Seven Days came later. I’d taken my first walks in that region in 1978, and, in the thirty-six years between, great changes are evident, while some things have remained the same. There is a lot less snow on the mountains: locals say it’s because of the expanding industrialisation from China to the north and India to the south. All the

signs of global networking are in evidence: my phone worked better on the trail than it does from my own home in Australia. Tourist travel to the region has escalated exponentially, and the people are as in touch with what life can be in a globalised world as anybody else on the planet. Yet, despite their diminished snow-caps, the tallest mountains in the world retain their sense of awe and magnificence. And, although the walking tracks that skirt across their flanks have grown wider with the international tourist traffic, they have still not yet been carved to carry cars. So, the men bearing heavy loads still walk them: up and back, slowly on the ascent, bouncing-quick on the descent, every day of the year. These men understand the weight of supply and demand. They experience it physically—every gram of it. So what might it mean that this exhibition was conceived elsewhere (Nepal), created in another elsewhere (Australia), with the intention of being crated to yet another elsewhere (the US) to be exhibited? Certainly, part of the answer would lie in the subject matter of international travel and the extent to which this practice extends or contradicts traditional practices. In a perverse sense, it could be argued that, in terms of exhibiting

art, the practice is a continuation of the tradition of artist-journeyman, a term used to describe someone who, not yet a ‘master’, continues to practice his or her trade in a range of destinations to gain experience and to glean responses. The term itself comes from the French term journée, one that not only refers to a day’s travel, but also to a day’s work, and is used as a measurement to delineate the suitable recompense for that unit of endeavour.

What remains central to this body of work is the subject of work itself: changing values of work, of mediums and media; the changing nature of work; the changes in what constitutes an artist’s work; and the recognition that, at least in part, an artist is always trying to work out what might work best in terms of visually negotiating new pathways—flight paths or earth-bound—towards understanding the fragile world we share.

It is perhaps pertinent that in parts of Europe, moving from place to place as a wandering journeyman was considered to be an important part of the training necessary to be recognised as a master. However, in such cases, the use of the medium of watercolour was considered only suitable as a preparation for the more important ‘finished’ work that would invariably be completed in oils on canvas. To some extent, this medieval conviction has persisted. Therefore, my decision to retain watercolour on paper as the final, rather than the preparatory, work, can only be understood as a conscious departure from any notions about the benefits of ‘mastery’ and hierarchies of genre.

Pat Hoffie

BIO Professor Pat Hoffie is a visual artist who has worked extensively in the Asia-Pacific region for the past three decades. A monograph on her work, Fully Exploited Labour was published by The University of Queensland Art Museum in 2008. She has exhibited regularly as a visual artist for over four decades, and her work is included in a number of important collections of contemporary Australian art in Australia and overseas.

curator, researcher, and writer, she is a regular contributor to journals, magazines, and newspapers and is currently a Professor at the research focus group SECAP (Sustainable Environment through Culture, Asia Pacific) at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and was appointed the UNESCO Orbicom Chair in Communications by Griffith University.

Her curatorial projects have involved international collaborations with artists from the Asia-Pacific region, and include work with The Baguio Arts Festivals (the Philippines); ARX (Perth); Art and Human Rights (Canberra); Future Tense (Brisbane), The Second and Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane), and Figuring Landscapes (Tate Modern, London, touring Britain and Australia). She has also led a number of collaborative research projects, including Art and Human Rights, QPACifika, The Peel Island Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Residencies and Planet Ueno (Tokyo/Brisbane). She has been the recipient of awards and residencies and has also contributed to the establishment of artists residencies in Australia and overseas. Internationally recognised as a

WORKS ON PAPER

…this noble stuff endures — if not for ever, then at least till men consciously destroy it, whether by crumpling or shredding, through the use of kitchen scissors or strong teeth, by actions incendiary or lavatorial, — for it’s a true fact that men take equal pleasure in annihilating both the ground upon which they stand while they live and the substance (I mean paper) upon which they may remain, immortalised, once this same ground is over their heads instead of under their feet… — Salman Rushdie1

‘Works on paper’—this damningly inclusive and common phrase can be found in archives, curatorial statements, conservators’ laboratories, and art histories. What is being defined and opposed in this phrase? Tellingly, the wording also circulates in critical responses to disconnected, misguided, illinformed, and destructive policies—mandates and decrees to which one may say, “Yes, it ‘works on paper’, but…”. Photographs, books, maps, drawings, prints, and documents are collectively demarcated in this framework of fragility and ephemerality. For example, the National Gallery of Australia’s web page on ‘Works on Paper’ is littered with subheadings such as ‘reducing deterioration’, ‘inherent instability’, ‘handling’, and ‘pollutants’.2 Paper, as both a material and a vector of action, can be easily undone with gnashing teeth, an abundance of humidity, or too much touching. Does an artist ever set out to make a ‘work on paper’? The noun is the problem here. Certainly, the artist sets to work on paper, and may even overwork a sheet of paper, but, like ‘drawing’, ‘work on paper’ is inconveniently both action and object. Also, inconveniently, it is impossible to penetrate the noun to reveal the action. We must rely on our fantasies. Pat Hoffie’s Carriers and Seven Days series from International Travel are works on paper. They are also, of course, pictures of work 6

(on paper). Nevertheless they defy an easy assessment that they render distant labour or a picturesque apocalypse. The approaches to labour and apocalypse shift the terms of the exhibition from ‘what is working’—a euphemism for imperialism—to what is being simultaneously uncovered and lost in the blank spaces and fugitive figures of these paper-based workers. To expose work(er)s on paper is to threaten them. The menace of degradation, disintegration, and infection haunts them. Work production that has been mythologised as ‘strong’, ‘secure’, and ‘stable’ manifests in the drawings through brittleness and uncertainty. These workers bend their backs for indefinite purposes in fields blanked by catastrophe and capital. This latest series of drawings is part of an ongoing thirty-year project titled Fully Exploited Labour. Fundamentally concerned with exchanges of labour, history, product, art, craft, and humanity, the massive collection of work hinges on Hoffie’s authoritative position as an artist—one who makes things that will be curated, contexualised, and collected as art. Hoffie recently told me that she realises she can only call herself an artist because labour imbalances and stratifications enable the meaningfulness of an artist’s work. The Carriers and Seven Days series are the latest to contend with Hoffie’s uncertain position

as, in Tim Morrell’s words, “a privileged Australian artist dealing with the injustices that privilege creates”.3 Incommensurability is foundational to an understanding of Hoffie’s work as well as to an understanding of the organisational ethos of ‘works on paper’. We see International Travel in a context in which a photograph, a signed treaty, and a stochastic watercolour drawing of a bent carrier are regularised as works on paper; and we see it in a context in which social documentary, tourism, advertising, and art are regularised as content. The experience of incommensurability is a vital countermeasure to an ordered system in which such equivalencies go unexamined. The Seven Days series is apocalyptic. The imagery of the apocalypse is canonical— hellish landscapes, viciousness, cataclysm, death. We also recognise the hubris that precedes ruination—the futile effort to erect tall towers or to dominate the beasts and the land. Hoffie’s drawings are faithful to the etymology of ‘apocalypse’, a word that is best understood here in terms of its origins as an uncovering or unveiling, especially of knowledge. This is characteristic of her work. The drawings can be utterly wretched and yet still sting us with the promise of transformation, and perhaps redemption. She amplifies this spirit through the

use of polychromatic watercolours that employ methods and aesthetics that are most reminiscent of medieval illuminated manuscripts. They seem to blend the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever and the carpet pages of insular gospels. Flat pattern and horror vacui combine with imagery of futile labour, slaughter, and urban banality in a vivid light. The light that reveals knowledge of the work of others, it seems, is over-exposed, radioactive, and candy-sweet. In one panel, a nonchalant harvest of carcasses is smashed into a cloying pattern of pink, orange, and green cells that becomes a shabby cityscape in the upper third of the picture, juxtaposed against a benign and transparent blue sky. We can imagine the conservator’s anxiety at the menace of ‘deterioration’ and ‘inherent instability’ at play in this work on paper. The Carriers series operates by exchange and transformation. Each of the works exists as a coherent poster and as an operation of fissures and fragments seeking order. The conventional technique of transparent watercolour requires economy and restraint. The paper must ‘carry the load’ of the pictorial form, which is to say that the blank spaces— the untouched paper—are manipulated into being through the addition of colour, line, and shape. Techniques considered essential to watercolour practice, such as control of 7

transparency and opacity, saturation, lifting and resists, take on significance beyond the elegant deployment of a venerable drawing and painting medium. Hoffie masters this moment in which method meets motive. Her relationship to these hunched figures and their corporate/cultural baggage can only proceed through vehicles of resistance, loss, and deliquescence. In addition to the human subjects, overlaid on several of these wet-paper workers are grids of smile buttons in which the smiles have been pared back to blank dashes. Stoicism is an important feature of the myth of the heroic labourer. In these drawings, tampering with expression both implicates travelogue fetishism and the specific role of watercolour as a medium of travelogue fetishism. International Travel is a provocative extension of Fully Exploited Labour. Whereas previous works employed labourers from beyond the Australian frame to paint, carve, or construct, this new work most explicitly uses and aestheticises foreign bodies and foreign labour—inspired by a Himalayan trip—in a symbolic pictorial language. The disquiet that accompanies such privileged looking and making breaches our expectations of heroism or oppression, and implicates the method and medium itself. Works on paper are impotent in the face of 8

such immense and complex matters and also, paradoxically, crucial to extending our knowledge of fully exploited labour. Pat Hoffie’s drawings don’t feign slushy concern or dispassionate documentation. They represent a deeply human peculiarity in the face of so much incommensurability. Dr William Platz

Salman Rushdie, East, West: Stories (New York: Vintage International, 1996), 63, original punctuation. “Collection Conservation: Works on Paper,” National Gallery of Australia (website), accessed 13 March 2015, http://nga.gov.au/conservation/prevention/paper.cfm. Tim Morrell, “Pat Hoffie,” in Fully Exploited Labour, ed. Sally Butler (Brisbane: University of Queensland Art Museum, 2008), 101.

BIO Dr William Platz is an American-Australian artist, educator and writer. He lectures in Drawing at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. His previous academic appointment was in the Fine Art department of the Southwest University of Visual Arts in New Mexico. Platz is a member of the International Neosymbolist Collective, which exhibits in the United States, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. He is also the co-convenor of the the drawing research project Drawing International Griffith. Platz regularly exhibits his work and publishes his writing in the United States and Australia. Recent projects include the International Drawing Annual (INDA8) chapter â&#x20AC;&#x153;Drawing Liveâ&#x20AC;?, the exhibition of contemporary Australian prints and drawings Body Politic in Philadelphia, and curating the exhibition Drawing {A,B} in Brisbane.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ISBN: 9781922216663 Editor: Evie Franzidis Photography by Anthony Hamilton. This exhibition is supported by the Griffith University Centre for Creative Arts Research. Catalogue designed by Lisa Koesterke at Liveworm Studio, South Bank.