Peter Hennessey: making it real

Peter hennessey making it real

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First published in 2015 by The University of Queensland Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Peter Hennessey: Making it real UQ Art Museum, Brisbane: 14 March – 12 July 2015 Š 2015 The University of Queensland, the artist and authors This publication is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced by any means or process without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to locate the holders of copyright and reproduction rights of all material reproduced in this publication. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any reader with further information.

Views expressed in the publication are not necessarily those of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator:

Littley, Samantha, author.

Title:

Peter Hennessey : making it real / Samantha Littley, author ; Peter Hennessey, artist ; contributors, Andrew Frost, Stuart Harrison, Allison Holland ; Campbell Gray, foreword ; Evie Franzidis, editor.

ISBN:

9781742721330 (hardback)

Subjects: Hennessey, Peter, 1968---Exhibitions.

University of Queensland Art Museum--Exhibitions.

Art, Modern--20th century--Exhibitions.

Art, Modern--21st century--Exhibitions.

Artists--Australia--Exhibitions.

Architecture, Australian--Exhibitions.

Other Creators/Contributors:

Hennessey, Peter, 1968- artist.

Frost, Andrew.

Harrison, Stuart.

Holland, Allison.

Gray, Campbell, writer of added commentary.

Franzidis, Evie, editor.

University of Queensland Art Museum, issuing body.

Dewey Number:

709.2

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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Curator Samantha Littley

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Foreword – Campbell Gray..................................................................................................................................6 Peter Hennessey: Big ideas – Samantha Littley..............................................................................................13 Transforming and un-forming reality – Allison Holland...................................................................................37 A pathway out of time: Peter Hennessey’s science fiction aesthetics – Andrew Frost.................................57 An interview with Peter Hennessey – Stuart Harrison....................................................................................73 Curriculum vitae.............................................................................................................................................. 130 Exhibition checklist......................................................................................................................................... 132 Contributors..................................................................................................................................................... 136 Acknowledgements......................................................................................................................................... 138

My Burnt Frost 2008 installation view, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide 5

On entering The University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum on my first day of work in early March 2011, I was confronted by a large, brooding form in the foyer. With light pouring in from the surrounding windows, it was presented in silhouette and was thus difficult to discern. It was nearly three times my height and precariously supported on a shallow pedestal. I finally recognised it as a black, life-sized version of a Humvee, or four-wheel-drive military vehicle, positioned nose first on its bull bar. However, it was intricately fashioned entirely from plywood – even the wheels and tyres.

in critiquing the ethically messy political systems (which we are informed are) vital to our society’s security and progress.

My recognition of its identity triggered three concurrent responses: an acknowledgement of the deep sense of irony emanating from this invasive military device rendered impotent (its rugged mechanical form made quite truthfully from an un-mechanical material); a sense of awe for the artist’s technical and intellectual capacities; and an understanding of the vastness of the metaphors that such a paradoxical assembly creates.

My Humvee (Inversion therapy) sits prominently in this exhibition, Peter Hennessey: Making it real. Chronologically, the work is located almost at the mid-point in the span of production that the exhibition surveys. It is neither a turning point nor a consolidation point in the trajectory; rather, it is an excellent example of Hennessey’s continuing exploration of forms, technologies, ideas and metaphors.

This work, Peter Hennessey’s My Humvee (Inversion therapy) (2008), was given to the UQ Art Museum by the Melbourne Art Fair Foundation in the year it was made. Because of its physical and intellectual scale, the work requires an institutional home to present and store it, and to unpack and disseminate its discourses. However, no agreement for a gift was negotiated until well after the work was made and first displayed. This demonstrates the remarkable commitment Hennessey has to his work, and to his role 6

The strong discourses of social justice and the dilemmas of technology that pervade Hennessey’s work, together with the sophisticated methods he uses to raise the issues, are ideal for the special opportunities that university art museums enjoy. The work was readily accepted by the UQ Art Museum’s former director Nick Mitzevich, and a commitment was made to plan a substantial survey of Hennessey’s works and ideas.

I am grateful to my predecessor, Nick Mitzevich, for his foresight and courage in accepting Hennessey’s monumental artwork. At this time, I am also particularly grateful to Samantha Littley, UQ Art Museum Curator, for the initiative and rigor she has brought to Peter Hennessey: Making it real and for her elucidatory essay in this accompanying publication. I appreciate her leadership over both exhibition and publication. My sincere gratitude is also extended to the authors of the essays and the interview for their penetrating analysis of Hennessey’s work and the contexts that give it energy and purpose.

Over the past year or so, Peter Hennessey has led student engagement projects in the UQ School of Architecture and held an artist residency with UQ’s Centre for Hypersonics. The conversations around these projects have been productive for all involved and have yielded works for the exhibition. My thanks go to Dr Allison Holland, Lecturer in Art History at UQ and the UQ Art Museum’s Coordinator of Academic Relations, for engineering these great projects. I am also most grateful to Professors Michael Smart and Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, from Hypersonics and Architecture respectively, for their enthusiasm and support of these projects.

The relationships that have arisen between research, residency, student engagement, exhibition, and publication, and the lectures and discussions that will follow are exemplary of the most fulfilling kinds of engagements with contemporary art and artists that university art museums can

produce. I am enthusiastic about all that has developed and will develop through our association with Peter Hennessey.

I am deeply indebted to Jan Minchin and Paul Greenaway OAM, Hennessey’s agents in Melbourne and Adelaide respectively, for their generous assistance with these projects. Also, I am very grateful to the private lenders who have generously lent works for the exhibition, particularly given the size and complexity of these works.

Finally, I express sincere appreciation to the wonderful professional and student team whom I work with at the UQ Art Museum for their outstanding work in accomplishing this publication and exhibition, and to the Australia Council for the grants they have awarded to the project.

Dr Campbell Gray Director

right: My Humvee (Inversion therapy) 2008 installation view, Melbourne Art Fair 2008 7

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Peter Hennessey’s project – to reconstruct technically complex, often large, objects in exacting detail – inspires awe. While the child within him remains fascinated by big machines, Hennessey’s intent goes beyond the desire to leave his viewers spellbound. His sculptures are vessels that carry forth the equally weighty ideas that preoccupy him, ideas that revolve around social justice and the political systems that dominate our lives. With his training in architecture and his background in new media, he is equipped to recreate structures that indulge his fervour for spacecraft, satellites and other technology, and allow him to explore their symbolism.

While other artists might legitimately outsource production, Hennessey has the skills to realise his own dreams.

My Humvee (Inversion therapy) 2008 plywood, automotive enamel paint, aluminium and steel Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of the Melbourne Art Fair Foundation, 2008.

This career survey Peter Hennessey: Making it real encompasses the past 10 years of the artist’s practice, and illuminates key themes in his work: our quest for knowledge and the limits we face in pursuing it; the gulf between things we ‘see’ virtually and those that we are able to experience; and the part that communication systems play in enabling geopolitical powers and creating new corporate empires. These themes are reflected in the exhibition through four bodies of work: objects that consider the social, political and conceptual implications of the Space Race in historical and contemporary terms; artworks that emphasise technology’s fallibility and bring us face to face with mortality; works that capture the choreography of explosions and uncover their role in constructing our world; and recent sculptures that examine the reach of the Global Positioning System

(GPS).1 These thematic groupings elucidate Hennessey’s overarching drive to explore ‘the space between images and experience’ and to engage with the issues of our times.2 Hennessey, like the great Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) whom he cites as an influence, trained as an architect but was always more interested in ‘the idea of architecture than the business of it’.3 Indeed, Piranesi’s statement, ‘I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it’,4 could well be Hennessey’s mantra. The challenges Hennessey sets himself equate to the task that the eighteenth-century Venetian assumed to produce a vast body of etchings and engravings of Ancient Roman ruins and imaginary prisons, the Carceri, over a 35year period. From 1990 to 1995, Hennessey studied architecture at RMIT in Melbourne, where he was less interested in CAD, the computer-aided design and drawing system being introduced there, than in digital imaging and Photoshop. Self-taught, he trained fellow students in imaging, and developed his own competencies, motivated by the urge to ‘find ways to represent ideas virtually’ and to tackle the ‘intrinsic discontinuity between representation and reality’.5 His artistic impulses had already found an outlet in The Basement Project, an artist-run initiative he established in 1991 with his future wife Patricia Piccinini.

The venue provided Hennessey with a space to exhibit his own art and the work of others, a formula he would later adapt in the new-media design studio Drome, which he cofounded with Piccinini in 1996.

From 1991 to 2004, Hennessey curated 13

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exhibitions and exhibited in shows, such as Closer (2003), that examined the relationship between communication and technology.6 Throughout this period, Hennessey honed his skills in interactive design that would later allow him to manufacture the large-scale objects for which his name has become synonymous.

My Voyager 2004 plywood and steel Collection of the artist installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales

These experiences, and his disillusionment with the restraints imposed by digital technology, fed into what he refers to as his ‘first serious solo show’, Repercussions: Individual and collaborative works by Peter Hennessey and Patricia Piccinini, held in 2004 at Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide, as part of the Adelaide Festival. Eschewing the virtual world he had long inhabited, Hennessey set out to ‘undigitise’ things known through reproduction or the Internet – to make them ‘real’. The exhibition, which featured the first incarnation of his sculpture My Voyager (2004), introduced viewers to ‘a class of things that we can see anytime but never see’.7 This linguistic contradiction lies at the heart of Hennessey’s endeavour to bring objects outside our actual experience – space probes and other scientific technology we know through images alone – within our reach. Garnering information available on the Internet and other publicly available sources, he sets out to satiate his own curiosity and to provide others with the means to appreciate the magnitude of these structures and the issues that underpin them. Replicas in scale but not materials or functionality, these sculptures infer, rather than duplicate, the original. In Hennessey’s words,

My objects are as dimensionally and formally accurate as I can make them but they will never be mistaken for the actual thing. I choose to work with a limited palette of materials – plywood, galvanized steel, canvas – to make obvious the process of transformation that has taken place … That is why it is My Voyager not The Voyager.8 Space: The final frontier My Voyager (2004) is, then, the artist’s account of the Voyager 2 probe, one of two that the US launched in 1977 that are still in transit.9 For Hennessey, the spaceship exemplifies the political expediency that drove its development during the Cold War, and the idealism of the NASA scientists who designed it and were committed to the project’s emblematic value. Indeed, Hennessey equates the space program’s theoretical imperatives and, by association, his own practice with Conceptual Art. Acknowledging the limited impact space exploration has on our daily lives, he argues that the Voyager mission should be appreciated ‘like all great art … for the scale of its ideas and its symbolic intensity, rather than its practical efficacy’.10 An aspect of the Voyager project that gave Hennessey scope to emphasise its contemporary relevance is the Golden Record that was produced to accompany the mission. Philanthropic (and, one might say, naïve) in spirit, the record contains 115 black-and-white images and a variety of sounds deemed representative of life on Earth. The gold-plated LP was intended to communicate with any extraterrestrials that encountered Voyager 2, and contains rudimentary guidelines to assist in 15

accessing and interpreting the material.

Comparing these efforts to commune with aliens with Australia’s more recent failures to reach out to people seeking asylum, Hennessey produced the accompanying audio work, My Golden Record (Fitzroy remix) (2004). The artwork features the voices of Australian migrants offering greetings in their own languages to imagined aliens. My Voyager resonates with another sculpture Hennessey made in 2004, My Ikara, in which he ‘reenacted’ a missile the Australian military built in the 1960s to launch torpedoes at submarines offshore.11 Developed and tested at Woomera in the far north-west of South Australia, an area now notorious as the site of the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre (1999–2003), Ikara embodies Australia’s sense of itself as a nation under threat.12 As Hennessey asserts, ‘I am interested in the way that it represents the changing fears of Australia as a political entity … the sea remains as the medium that conveys these fears; whether it is the stealthy approach of Russian submarines or the refugees that come in leaky boats.’13 Other works from this period include My Mission Control (The act of observation changes the object observed) (2005) and My Lunar Rover (You had to be there) (2005), which reflect on the Space Race and the material culture left behind on the moon, as well as the leap of faith people must take to believe the landings actually took place. As an adjunct, Hennessey made a number of inkjet prints that highlight the hidden cost of the space programs. Not a victimless science, the projects saw a number of animals, 16

including a stray dog named Laika, sent into space with no plans for their safe return. In the prints, Hennessey has immortalised Laika’s fate and that of the rhesus monkey Able, who returned to Earth following space travel but died shortly afterwards from medical procedures.

Remember you must die Vulnerability and the possibility of death inform a group of works that Hennessey produced between 2006 and 2008, which are dark in colour as well as tone. Of them, My Humvee (Inversion therapy) (2008) is the most ambitious, and exemplifies the irony that permeates these sculptures, and is a recurring feature of Hennessey’s work.

For My Humvee, he recreated the hulking form of the US military carrier, the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (M1025 HMMWV), or Humvee as it is commonly known, in 3,000 pieces of lasercut plywood and upended it, parodying the power that this vehicle is meant to represent. Unable to function, the structure can instead be read as an emblem of excess – both the military version and the Hummer, the civilian spinoff it has inspired, consume huge quantities of oil, the resource the Humvee is sent into war zones to protect.14 In this respect, My Humvee pays homage to the Ant Farm’s Cadillac ranch (1974), a work of Earth Art that the group made in response to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, in which they interred 10 gas-guzzling Cadillacs, tailfins up, in a Texan wheat field.15 With its inky surface, Hennessey’s sculpture likewise comments on the economic and political value of ‘black gold’, while the edifice itself is a memorial to lives lost. As Hennessey writes, ‘Sadly, the Humvee is the epicenter

of any number of tragedies, personal, political and environmental.’16 My ejector seat (Upside down changes everything) (2006), which shares My Humvee’s DIY aesthetic, contains similar inferences. Here, the ejector seat of a B-52 bomber, the workhorse of the US Airforce, stands as tacit acknowledgment that, despite technological advances, things can and do go wrong. For the artist, the added paradox is that an aircraft designed to destroy thousands of lives encompasses a mechanism to save one. Like Hennessey’s Humvee, however, his ejector seat is inverted and cannot serve its purpose. As he explains, the escape chute is ‘no longer secure. It is threatening, but it is the threat of falling over, collapsing … something mighty has fallen, but it is hard to be sure how we should feel about that.’17 No such ambivalence is present in My NICU (2006), which Hennessey made after becoming a father. Suddenly and palpably aware of the fragility of new life, he was moved to recreate a Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit that ‘we could possibly access but in truth would rather not’.18 Tapping in to people’s fears of the unimaginable rather than the unknown, the artwork is possibly the artist’s darkest, yet it retains a measure of hope. The existence of the technology gives us faith, not in the fabulous, abstract science of the space program, but in an applied science capable of sustaining life on Earth.

In the blink of an eye Like My NICU, Hennessey’s ‘explosion events’ are situated in the real world, and relate to things that most people have not directly experienced. As Hennessey

recounts, ‘Roads, steel, electricity, concrete all have an explosion somewhere in their life cycle … yet [they] go largely unnoticed.’ 19 For these works, Hennessey builds, explodes, and salvages the remnants of objects, creating altered yet visually cohesive artworks in the process. The videos, ‘debris pieces’ and photographs that document the explosions differ in form from much of his work; in many ways, they depart from his trademark exactness. The element of chance, which Hennessey regards as a ‘compositional device’, comes into play in ‘micro performances’ that he designs but cannot control.20 While a performative element is present throughout his practice – he sees the process of reconstituting digital images, and the structures themselves as ‘performances’ – the explosions are the clearest expression of this impulse. Tellingly, Hennessey studied acting at the University of Western Sydney’s now-defunct Theatre Nepean before beginning his architecture degree, and these works highlight his stage manager’s instincts. His directorial hand asserts itself in the records he chooses to represent these events.

Unsurprisingly, Hennessey’s subjects are dictated by historical and politically charged incidents that allow him scope to ruminate. For instance, My Burnt Frost (Explosion event) (2008) references the US Navy’s destruction on 21 February 2008 of a damaged spy satellite USA-193 (NROL-21), said to be carrying 450 kg of toxic hydrazine. ‘Operation Burnt Frost’, as it was code-named, saw the satellite destroyed by an SM-3 missile for the ‘public good’, though many interpreted this as the US government’s excuse to test its missile defence system. Veiled in secrecy, the 17

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satellite was both physically inaccessible and classified, leaving the artist to reconstruct it from guesswork alone. His audience is a further step removed, having access to the detritus, photographs and videos that record the destruction of the artist’s rendering, but never the original.

In capturing the explosions on highspeed cameras or casting their residue in bronze, Hennessey gives viewers access to things they could never actually see. The photographs in particular, which recall the stop-motion sequences taken by pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830– 1904), speak of time arrested.21 Hennessey’s photographic series ‘My Hells Gate’ (2010) exemplifies the generative power of explosions. It was inspired by one of the biggest pre-nuclear detonations ever undertaken – the 1885 demolition of submerged rock in an area of the East River, New York City, known as Hells Gate. Rocks in the strait presented a hazard to shipping and were targeted in a blasting program that began in 1851 and continued intermittently for 70 years.

The largest detonation, in 1885, saw Flood Rock destroyed with 140,000 kg of explosives.22 For his version, Hennessey rescaled and restaged the incident by using a minute amount of explosive (half a ‘squib’) and a tonne of water; his photographs, nevertheless, reveal an explosion of surprising force. Suspending and deconstructing the moment in which his materials are transformed, the images capture what he calls ‘our debt to detonation’.23 Far from being destructive, however, the results are aesthetically compelling and creative in their own right.

In this sense, the project invokes the Auto-

Destructive Art movement that Gustav Metzger (1926–) initiated in 1959 and Metzger’s precept ‘destroy … and you create’.24 Hennessey will create a new site-specific controlled explosion event for this exhibition. The structures he will design will ‘examine the idea of an object … constructed purely for the purposes of destruction’ and question ‘how we can make this waste worthwhile and maximise the beauty … derived’.25 The ends of the Earth Hennessey has always been drawn to structures that are inherently aesthetic.

Indeed, he chooses his objects not only for their symbolic value but also because they are visually and physically engaging. This is true of works from his recent series ‘Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones’ (2014), in which he comments on the pervasive reach of satellites. The title refers to a Medieval Latin phrase that was used on maps. The idiom was marked on regions that had not yet been explored and were, therefore, beyond the limits of knowledge.

For Hennessey, the GPS satellite is a modern-day metaphor for mapping and the power it confers in our global, networked age. As he reasons, ‘much as the great world empires have succeeded, other giant corporate empires are rising, and they, too, define their ubiquity through maps’.26 In the key work from the series, Where we are now (Navstar Block II-F satellite, USA), Hennessey recreates the satellite’s front panel, or ‘face’, invoking the technology we all rely on but rarely see, asking us to consider the forces driving this technology’s development. In his words, ‘I am interested in examining that ubiquity and disrupting that invisibility.’27 19

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previous page, left and right: My Hells Gate (North of the river I–V) 2010 five c-type photographs Collection of the artist 21

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Like the other satellite faces Hennessey has crafted – re-enactments of Russian, Chinese and EU systems – Where we are now (Navstar Block II-F satellite, USA) makes a broader comment about cultural imperialism and control. Unlike its counterparts, however, the wax-coated plywood Navstar is displayed horizontally on a table top, imbuing the work with an architectural quality that invokes images of Modernist, utopian cities. The small, digitally printed figures Hennessey has made to populate the sculpture enhance these inferences, and distort our sense of its proportion, making the life-sized object appear more like a scale model.28 The figures, Hennessey argues, ‘add a layer of narrative to the works, converting them from objects into spaces’.29 Through this device, we become aware of how things beyond our literal comprehension have become embedded in our lives. Crucially, each of the satellites is distinct despite performing similar functions, attesting to the culturally determined aesthetics of the nations that have constructed them.

previous page and left (details): Where we are now (Navstar Block II-F satellite, USA) 2014 plywood, ABS plastic, wax and steel Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2014.

Another work from this series, Overlooked (Street View capture apparatus), has the appearance of a Constructivist tower, recalling Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin’s Futurist Monument to the Third International (1919–1920), as well as the work of Hennessey’s contemporary, artist Peter Cripps, who is similarly interested in materiality and the confluence of art and architecture. On a conceptual level, Overlooked is a reminder of the corporate application of mapping systems, and of our complacency in the face of Google’s increasing omnipresence.

Through this work and others in this series,

Hennessey asks us to ponder our own sense of omniscience – the idea that, through technology, we are all knowing.

Two works, in particular, undermine the ‘promises and assumptions around technology’: The explanation (Cockpit voice recorder) and The wait (Flight data recorder).30 At the time that Hennessey was making these models, the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane MH370 and its data recorders was reaching a crescendo. His re-enactments of these objects serve as potent reminders that black spots on our maps still exist. The point is underscored by another series of related maquettes that hark back to previous work. Maquette for a monument to unknown space #1 is a model of the deep-sea vehicle Alvin, while Maquette for a monument to unknown space #2 recreates the Chinese lunar rover Jade Rabbit, or ‘Yutu’, that touched down on 13 December 2013, becoming the first spacecraft on the moon since the Soviet probe Luna 24 landed there in 1976.31 Both represent our pursuit of knowledge, and signify the constraints we face in attaining it. Alvin, for example, is the world’s oldest submersible research vessel, and has made more than 4,600 dives since it was commissioned in 1964.32 Yet, as Hennessey notes, ‘we still know almost nothing of the 60–70% of the world that lies beneath the deep oceans’.33 Likewise, an earlier work My giant squid (Stranger than fiction) (2007) contemplates the mysteries of the ocean’s depths embodied by Architeuthis dux, a creature that, until recently, occupied a space between myth and reality.

Hennessey observes, ‘For me, the giant squid’s transitional status exposes the 25

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Enlightenment’s process of mapping the world and bringing all of its hidden mysteries to light. This extraordinary cephalopod symbolises the inevitability of this process but also questions its perfect rationality.’34 What becomes clear when discussing Hennessey’s work from the past decade is the consistency of his vision, and the verve with which he has pursued it. Committed to experiencing and understanding things that elude us because of our distance from them, his self-appointed mission has been to give them shape. He does so with no small degree of irony, acknowledging that his structures are no more than understudies. He nevertheless finds delight in giving objects known predominantly through the digital realm three-dimensional form, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Altruistic and optimistic, Peter Hennessey creates work that challenges our paradigms, with a view to a more humane world.

Ultimately, his sculptures are what he hopes they will be: ‘eloquent objects … that speak beautifully about ideas’.35

1. Also included are a group of new works that have emerged from Hennessey’s recently completed artist’s residency at UQ’s Centre for Hypersonics, which Allison Holland discusses in her essay in this catalogue.

2. Peter Hennessey, “My Burnt Frost,” Peter Hennessey (website), http://peterhennessey. net/shows/10My_Burnt_Frost/text/00Artist_ Statement.htm.

3. Peter Hennessey, “The occupation: Installation artist,” Desktop, 5 November 2011, http://desktopmag.com.au/features/ the-occupation-installation-artist/#.

VEXDIL6p2JU. 4. Giovanni Piranesi, in Wendy Thompson, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778),” Heilbrunn time line of art history, October 2003, http://www.metmuseum.org/ toah/hd/pira/hd_pira.htm. While Piranesi 28

studied stage design, Hennessey studied acting; the work of both artists is distinctly theatrical.

5. Peter Hennessey, conversation with the author, 24 October 2014.

6. Closer was a collaborative project Hennessey developed with contemporary dance company Chunky Move, which was shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, in 2003, and at the Perth Festival in 2004.

Hennessey videoed a single dancer then devised a program whereby viewers were linked via pressure-sensitive pads to a digital version of the performer. When the person wearing the pads moved, the virtual dancer made a corresponding move on screen.

7. Peter Hennessey, “About My Voyager,” Peter Hennessey (website) http://www. peterhennessey.net/shows/01My_ Voyager/text/01Artist_Statement.html.

My Voyager was also shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2004–05 (2004–2005); at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) as part of the exhibition My Voyager: Peter Hennessey (2005); and at ACMI in Star voyager: Exploring space on screen (2011–2012).

8. Peter Hennessey, “My Voyager – PICA,” Peter Hennessey (website), http://www. peterhennessey.net/shows/05PICA/ text/01Artist_Statement.htm.

9. Both Voyager probes have crossed termination shock, a boundary of the solar system that marks one of the outer limits of the sun’s influence. On 25 August 2012, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space, and is further from the Earth than any other manmade object. See Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s fact sheet “Voyager: The interstellar mission,” http://voyager.jpl. nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html.

10. Peter Hennessey, “About My Voyager.”

11. Hennessey produced My Ikara to scale as well as in an edition of five maquettes.

These small-scale models are now the only extant form of the sculpture.

12. The rocket-launch range at Woomera is the site of the forthcoming test flight of the scramjet, an air-breathing engine designed by engineers at UQ’s Centre for Hypersonics who hosted Hennessey’s 2014 artist’s residency.

13. Peter Hennessey, “My Woomera project

My giant squid AL (Stranger than fiction) 2008 powder-coated aluminium and steel Collection of the artist

(What do you fear?),” Peter Hennessey (website), http://peterhennessey.net/ shows/02My_Ikara/text/01Artist_ Statement.htm.

14. The Humvee burns five litres of fuel per km. See “Fuel for thought,” UQ News 578, October 2008, 15.

15. Hennessey’s public artwork Car tower (2011) shares an aesthetic link with these works.

16. Peter Hennessey, “My Humvee (Inversion therapy),” Peter Hennessey (website), http://peterhennessey.net/shows/12My_ Humvee/text/00Statement_for_My_ Humvee.htm.

17. Peter Hennessey, “My ejector seat (Upside down changes everything),” Peter Hennessey (website), http:// peterhennessey.net/shows/08My_Ejector_ Seat/text/00Artist_Statement.htm.

18. Peter Hennessey, “My NICU,” Peter Hennessey (website), http://www. peterhennessey.net/shows/07My_NICU/ text/01Artists_Statement.htm.

19. Peter Hennessey, artist’s statement, The University of Queensland Art Museum artist file, 4 August 2014.

20. Ibid.

21. Another contemporary artwork that shares a visual relationship with Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographs is Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage one (2004), which includes nine ‘exploding’ cars suspended in a sequence that mimics stop-motion animation. This installation was displayed on Cockatoo Island during the 17th Biennale of Sydney, The beauty of distance: Songs of survival in a precarious age (2010), which also featured Hennessey’s My Hubble (The universe turned in on itself) (2010). Known for his work with explosives, Guo-Qiang recently realised Elegy: Explosion event for the opening of Cai Guo-Qiang: The ninth wave (2014) at the Power Station of Art, Huangpu District, Shanghai.

22. The detonation has been described as ‘the largest, planned explosion before testing began for the atomic bomb’, although a blast during the 1917 Battle of Messines was larger. See “Hells Gate,” http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate.

23. Peter Hennessey, artist’s statement, The University of Queensland Art Museum artist file, 4 August 2014.

24. Gustav Metzger cited in Stuart Jeffries, “Gustav Metzger: ‘Destroy, and you

create’,” The Guardian, 27 November 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2012/nov/26/gustavmetzger-null-object-robot. Metzger has been active in the campaign against nuclear weapons, and was arrested for civil disobedience during a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) protest in the early 1960s.

25. Peter Hennessey, artist’s statement, The University of Queensland Art Museum artist file, 4 August 2014.

26. Peter Hennessey, Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones (Melbourne: Tolarno Galleries, 2014).

27. Ibid.

28. See the interview between Stuart Harrison and Peter Hennessey in this catalogue.

29. Hennessey, Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones.

30. Peter Hennessey, conversation with the author, 17 July 2014.

31. Yutu has suffered mechanical problems and system failures but is still gathering data. It is likely to remain on the moon.

See Katia Moskvitch, “China’s lunar rover limps into another long night,” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, 20 June 2014, http://www.nature.com/news/ china-s-lunar-rover-limps-into-another-longnight-1.15428.

32. Hennessey’s version of Alvin is based on images of the submarine as it looked in the 1970s/1980s. The vehicle has undergone numerous upgrades over its lifetime and remains state of the art, despite having spent 50 years in service. Refer to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “Human occupied vehicle Alvin,” http://www.whoi. edu/main/hov-alvin/.

33. Peter Hennessey, “My giant squid (Stranger than fiction),” Peter Hennessey (website), http://peterhennessey.net/shows/11My_ Giant_Squid/text/00Statement_for_ De_0vercant.htm.

34. Ibid.

35. Peter Hennessey, conversation with the author, 23 October 2014.

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left and right (details): My NICU 2006 plywood, wax, silicone, plastic and steel Collection of the artist 31

Able (d. 1959) 2005 inkjet print on paper Collection of the artist 32

Laika (d. 1957) 2005 inkjet print on paper Collection of the artist 33

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Every scientific proposition and every technical gadget has an aesthetic quality, just as every work of art has an epistemological and political quality.

More significantly, there is no basic distinction between scientific and artistic research: both are fictions in the quest of truth.

—Vilém Flusser1 The philosopher Vilém Flusser argues that, unlike in the real world, scientific experiments do not take place in an open system. Variables are reduced in order to focus on the dynamics of scientific laws and theories or to reveal patterns in data flows. This failure to recreate the entirety of a natural system means it is impossible for experimentation to be anything more than hypothesis or deductive fiction. Despite this inherent dilemma, scientific research presents its findings as reproducible facts rather than fragments of possible truths. Complementing the observations and experimentations of the scientist and engineer, the artist is transparent in their modelling of reality, prioritising imagination and possibility over reproducibility. Moreover, the artist is in the privileged position of taking data from the trans-historical realm of science (that is, from an eternally timeless and spaceless ontology) and, through a creative process, transforming it into cultural objects.

Invested with social value and relevance, these cultural objects, which Flusser calls ‘facta’,2 are tied to the time and place of subjective experience.

Parallel cartography (Glonass-K, RUS) 2014 aluminium composite panel and steel Collection of the artist

Scientists and artists alike create models to reaffirm our position within a greater existence, and, through these simulacra,

highlight certain perspectives while eclipsing others. In combination, these observations of art and science generate a multifaceted and complex reality based on interrelationships. Despite being exclusive and elusive, scientific research and development seek to benefit humanity in the world. In contrast, the creativity of the visual arts encourages popular engagement and critical reflection on the human condition. When art presents science to the general public, it can provoke open discussion on the consequences of maintaining the status quo against the impacts of innovation.

As a part of the platform for the 2015 Making it real exhibition, Peter Hennessey participated in an artist’s residency at UQ’s Centre for Hypersonics. Professor Michael Smart, Head of the HyShot Group in the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, and his team are globally recognised for their innovative development of scramjets. Envisioned to traverse the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, scramjets are air-breathing Supersonic Combustion RAMJET engines.

What arose from Hennessey’s residency was a unique synergism that combined his ongoing fascination with space technology and the fundamentals of engineering; in particular, space aeronautics. The HyShot team appreciated Hennessey’s fresh approach to their research, which challenged established parameters of experimentation.

The concept of scramjets emerged following World War II and, since the 1960s, new designs have continued to be developed and tested. Characteristically, 37

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the engines have no mechanical compressor or rotating machinery. Instead, the air inlets are designed to direct and compress the vast quantities of oxygen required for combustion.3 In 1964, Antonio Ferri promoted scramjets as fuel-efficient alternatives to other engine designs, despite the restraints of only being able to fly within Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere.

Current prototypes reach speeds above Mach 5 – that is, 5,000 km per hour or five times the speed of sound. At this speed, hypersonic aircraft gain lift from the body of the fuselage, which reduces the need for expansive wing surfaces. However, to achieve this initial speed, the scramjet needs to be launched by a conventional carrier aircraft. It is predicted that within 50 years, hypersonic aircraft could traverse the Pacific Ocean in half an hour, travelling at Mach 10 and at an optimum altitude of 100,000 feet.

Compound eye (Galileo GIOVE B satellite, EU) 2014 birch and gaboon plywood, wax and steel Collection of the artist

Hennessey is interested in the sites of social debate where ‘scientific idealism rubs up against political expediency’.4 In the case of the scramjets, there is a broad scientific imperative to improve aeronautic design as well as develop energy-sustainable technologies. More immanent are the military application of scramjets for hypersonic missiles and unmanned surveillance aircraft. Aside from carrying high-value payloads across the globe, the research undertaken by the HyShot Group is focused on the potential for scramjets to launch satellites into the outer atmosphere. Satellites and clandestine surveillance were central to Hennessey’s last exhibition Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones,5 where the artist recreated life-sized models of

various contemporary satellites. Laser cut, they were assembled from aluminium composite, and birch and gaboon plywood.

As with the ‘real’ satellites currently on their geostationary orbit around Earth, Hennessey’s models of China’s BeiDou1A and the Russian Glonass-K were positioned to face off the European Union’s GIOVE B and the USA’s Navstar Block II-F. This politicised juxtaposition within the gallery was evocative of the equatorial Clarke Belt where the orbit of surveillance technologies knows no geographical boundaries.6 In his review of Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones, Robert Nelson comments on the ‘contradiction of archaic conservatism and technological progress’ that is evident in the exorbitant amounts of fossil fuels required to launch satellites and the transcendence of the digital information they relay.7 Michael Smart considers energy sustainability as primary to the HyShot Group’s research. He explains that the air-breathing function of the engine negates the need to carry liquid oxygen as a part of the payload and therefore dramatically reduces the weight of the launcher. At UQ Hypersonics, engineers focus their analysis to the flow of gases, and the associated shockwaves, that move in and around the scramjet at speeds greater than Mach 8. Vast amounts of data are collated on temperature, combustion rates and changing properites of gases as they flow at hypersonic speeds over the reduced-scale models of the scramjet tested in free piston shock tunnels.

The results are then reinterpreted into Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations for analysis. High-speed 39

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cameras also document the tests that last only a few milliseconds. These out-of-thereal-world tests are designed to closely simulate the environmental conditions at the zone between the Earth’s atmosphere and space. Significantly, such simulations have inherent limitations; in this case, the model remains spatially fixed and the controlled air flow over the engine design can only be sustained for an exceedingly brief moment.

Hennessey has creatively responded to the incompleteness of the hypersonic testing by focusing on the two distinctive data sets – thin slices of fact – that the HyShot Group generates. The first is photo-documentation, comprising moving image and photographic stills, which allow objective analysis of the event from the outside. The second are the CFD simulations that hypothetically recreate what occurs on the inside. Both visualise, literally and metaphorically, what is going on in the system at a moment that is so brief that it is beyond our physical comprehension. Hennessey’s challenge was to make this instant cognisant in his work, and establish a meaningful dynamic between the originating scientific event and the viewer’s mediation of it.

Intermittently, Hennessey spent several weeks immersed in the daily routine of the team, observing their research culture and collaboratively developing his own experimentation using the HyShot test tunnels. Being free and unaccountable in his experimentation, the artist was open to, if not expectant of, the possibility of unknown outcomes. As a Do-It-Yourself scientist, Hennessey promotes the primacy 42

of observation and our intuitive response to it, as well as returning to the origins of experimentation that are both playful and unconditional. Fascinated with the natural and human-initiated explosive events that occur in our daily lives, the artist has previously choreographed a series of explosions, among them My Burnt Frost (2008) and My Hells Gate (2010).

Hennessey articulates his conceptual and philosophical approach to his experiments as producing compelling moments of observation that are not documents of destructive processes, but rather allow one to see things ‘un-form’. These releases of energy are significant in their essentiality and ability to make apparent the process of life and matter moving from one phase to another.

Resisting the predictability of testing an aeronautical model, for his experiment at UQ, Hennessey devised a simulation of the conditions meteorites experience as they fall to Earth. In Celestial choreography #1 (Re-entry re-enactment) (2014–2015), the artist wanted to make perceptible the ‘un-forming’ of our planetary interlopers, natural as opposed to alien. A collector of meteorite debris, the artist selected several palm-sized remnants from China. Some were molten smooth, others rough and iron-oxide red. Initially, Hennessey made moulds and cast prototype meteorites out of plaster and resin. However, during the testing, ice, or the solid phase of H2O, responded more effectively, while frozen salt water best survived the time required to prepare the test tunnel.

The HyShot engineers almost exclusively experiment with materials used to

construct aerospace vehicles and instrumentation. The researchers focus on creating objects and developing technologies to propel them beyond gravitational forces. The artist’s ice clusters were innovative test subjects for the shock tunnel conditions, which replicate an object 30 km above Earth falling at an air speed of 0.98 km per second. The impact on the object at around a half an atmosphere of pressure is measured in a fraction of a second, faster than the blink of an eye.

Within this closed system and under the impact of the shock wave, the icy meteorites fractured and partially transitioned from solid to liquid. The experiment’s resulting entropy was both predictable, given the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the tendency of all things to move toward chaos and dissolution), and surprising. Not all fragments that broke away from the main body of ice were carried in the direction of the flow; some were propelled forward, which would not occur in an atmospheric re-entry.

previous page: Here be dragons / Hic sunt dragones 2014 installation view, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

The trajectory of these fragments was captured as black-and-white digital images, which were taken with a fully automated camera at 36,000 frames per second.

Through repetition, splicing and speed variance, the moving-image component of Hennessey’s Celestial choreography #1 (Re-entry re-enactment) presents a complex, non-linear experience that evidences the manipulation of scientific observation and data into cultural ‘facta’. Hennessey’s experiment on ‘the apparatus’ dissolves into the realm of

science fiction as the work’s voiceover articulates the motivations, expectations and vague mutterings of ‘the researcher’: In truth, what he was searching for was located somewhere that his naked vision could never visit. Only the complex mechanism of the apparatus could tear open and spread out the tiny packets of time and allow him to peer into them. What he saw through its lens was flawed but without it, he saw nothing at all.

In this work, the fictive and real become an enticing combination of veracity and speculation, where the research and testing undertaken by the artist imitates the engineer, and the work of art simulates the vaporisation of a meteor. From imagination to laboratory to real world, Hennessey’s test dummy alludes to the scientific and the social connotations of ice, asteroids and meteorites. On 15 February 2013, a Near-Earth Object (NEO) fragment, measuring nearly 20 m, hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. Dropping through the atmosphere at 67,600 km per hour, around Mach 60, the meteorite exploded 30 km above the ground with a force 30 times more powerful than the atomic bomb the USA dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The spectacle of this superbolide meteor lighting the skies over Chelyabinsk quickly became a phenomenon on social media. Within a few hours of the occurrence, 100 amateur videos, mostly taken on mobile phones or Dash Cams (motor vehicle dashboard cameras), were posted on the Internet and had received 7.7 million True Reach views.8 While most of the world comprehended this spectacle via the mass media, 43

scientists were on the ground gleaning information about the NEO’s cosmic origins from the debris. An analysis of the molten jadeite contained in the meteorite fragments indicated that it was created when two asteroids collided in excess of 290 million years ago.9 Celestial choreography #1 (Re-entry re-enactment) offers the viewer multiple imaginings of an NEO, formed from explosive origins millennia ago, being flung across the cosmic void to its next point of impact. Capable of an earthly Armageddon or changing our planet, as a panspermic carrier with microbial life embedded in its icy crevices, a meteor has both destructive and generative potential. Like the ancient fragment it is modelled on, Hennessey’s icy cluster reveals the cycle of the re-formed, trans-formed, and un-formed.

1. Vilém Flusser, “The photograph as postindustrial object: An essay on the ontological standing of photographs,” Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986): 331.

2. Ibid., 329.

3. Bruce Dorminey, “Hypersonic scramjets still key to future of aerospace,” Forbes, 12 August 2014, http://www.forbes. com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/08/22/ hypersonic-scramjets-still-key-to-future-ofaerospace/.

4. Peter Hennessey, “My moon landing,” Peter Hennessey (website), http://www. peterhennessey.net/?show=04My_Moon_ Landing.

5. Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones was held at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, from 16 July to 23 August 2014.

6. Clarke Belt is named after the great futurist Arthur C. Clarke, who calculated that three ‘space stations’ in geostationary orbit around the equator could facilitate total global radio coverage. Arthur C. Clarke, “Extra-terrestrial relays: Can rocket stations give world-wide radio coverage?,” Wireless World (October 1945): 305–308.

7. Robert Nelson, “Peter Hennessey: The artist as astronaut,” Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 2014.

8. ‘True Reach’ is the number of that people directly accessed the images.

Visible Measure Corp, “Meteor over Russia hits Internet with 7.7 million video views,” 15 February 2013, http://www. visiblemeasures.com/2013/02/15/ meteor-over-russia-hits-internet-with-7-7million-video-views/.

9. Shin Ozawa et al., “Jadeite in Chelyabinsk meteorite and the nature of an impact event on its parent body,” Nature: Scientific Reports 4, article no. 5033 (May 2014): http://www.nature.com/ srep/2014/140522/srep05033/full/ srep05033.html.

left and following pages: HyShot residency 2014–2015 45

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Maquette for a monument to contested space #1 2014 plywood and wax Collection of the artist 51

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Maquettes for a monument to escape velocity #1 2014 pewter and wax Collection of the artist 53

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Peter Hennessey’s work possesses a quality that is distinctly science fictional.

Across various installations, sculptures and videos, Hennessey has explored the aesthetic possibilities of the technological object – from the Voyager 2 space probe to a fighter aircraft ejector seat, from Apolloera Lunar Rover and Mission Control panels to more recent apparatuses such as the Google Street View capture camera and the Global Positioning System (GPS). The invocation of science and technology in these works is already explicit and, while Hennessey’s engagement is speculative and critical – key qualities of science fiction (SF) literature and cinema – these are not the only reasons his works are imbued with SF aesthetics. To more fully understand this connection, it’s necessary to understand the critical status of SF today.

left and above (detail): Overlooked (Street View capture apparatus) 2014 plywood,ABS plastic and steel Collection of the artist

Since the early 1990s, the critical analysis of SF has moved from defining the genre by its common features and familiar tropes towards embracing its totality as an effect.

This contextual reading stemmed partly from post-structuralist theory becoming integrated into a late-modernist academic reading that regarded SF’s contemporary tropes and iconography as an historical inevitability. Since its inception in the mid1920s, the modern genre evolved, slowly reconfiguring itself over the decades until it arrived, fully formed, in the present moment. While SF might be broadly considered as a genre that engages with the idea of the potential effects of technology in future settings via narratives featuring the familiar iconography of the spaceship, the alien, the supercomputer, virtual reality, etc., it could also be argued that these things are expressions of a wider

sense of contemporary culture as much as they are genre signifiers.

The critic and theorist Istvan CsicseryRonay Jr. argues that ‘SF embeds scientifictechnological concepts in the sphere of human interests and actions, explaining them and explicitly attributing social value to them’, and since ‘the role of science and technology [is] in defining human – i.e. cultural – value there can be as many kinds of SF as there are theories of culture’.1 As genre film historian and critic Vivian Sobchack argues, SF offers an understanding of ‘the cognitive mapping and poetic figuration of social relations as these are constituted by new technological modes of “being-in-the-world”’.2 In the broadest sense then, SF isn’t so much a defined genre but rather a mode of thinking. In the case of Hennessey’s work and that of a number of other Australian and international artists, it is also a powerful aesthetic field that conjures up the consensus reality of the present.

Hennessey’s work has an SF resonance, since it initially appears to engage with aspects of the real world via objects referenced in sculpture, derived in part from space and mapping technologies.

However, ultimately, these are things made strange by a mixture of fantastic potential readings that disrupt what might otherwise be seen in the same context as historical re-enactments or tribute pieces.

Key links between Hennessey’s art and SF can be found in many of the works’ formal qualities. In older pieces, such as My Voyager (2004) and My Lunar Rover (You had to be there) (2005), through to more recent works, including Overlooked 57

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(Street View capture apparatus) (2014), Hennessey has repeatedly used plywood over a steel skeleton structure to produce exact scale versions of ‘real world’ objects.

Using this material has a two-fold effect.

First, plywood tends to infer a tentative status on the object; with wood instead of plastic or steel, the object seems to declare that it is not the real thing, but a model, a simulacrum, a substitute for something absent. This sense of reference gives Hennessey’s re-contextualisation another kind of kick, providing a commentary on the object, a narrative on the thing without being the thing.

Simultaneously sign and icon, the inverted My ejector seat (Upside down changes everything) (2006), the vertical, totemic car in My Humvee (Inversion therapy) (2008), and the ambiguous technology of Compound eye (Galileo GIOVE B satellite EU) (2014) function in much the same way as Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity (2013) deployed known technology. In Gravity, the panoply of NASA space tech, including the space suit and the space shuttle, is combined with the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, appearing to signify the real, while simultaneously being a fantasy.

Celestial kingdom (BeiDou-1A satellite, CHN) 2014 aluminium composite panel and steel Collection of the artist

Second, this contested signification produces another key effect of Hennessey’s work: a keen sense of estrangement. Our willingness to suspend disbelief in SF – whether accepting the fiction present in a narrative or the deployment of special effects in a movie set on an alien planet – is equally present when viewing Hennessey’s sculptures.

Indeed, when presented with his work, we

willingly enter the world of the sculpture and the model, a space that is familiar to us, yet one that we recognise as different.

Notably, a number of Hennessey’s recent sculptures are not made from plywood but from aluminium composite panel, among them Celestial kingdom (BeiDou-1A satellite, CHN) and Parallel cartography (Glonass-K, RUS) (both 2014). While the first aspect of the re-contextualisation of his previous work is perhaps absent, a very different kind of estrangement comes into play. Entirely mounted on the gallery wall, Celestial kingdom is a curved, reflective metallic surface, dotted with raised circular points. Parallel cartography is a far more complex object, featuring cones, spikes apparently made from numerous interlocked panels. Although both of these works reproduce parts of actual communications satellites – one Russian, the other Chinese – the sort of immediate identification with real-world objects conjured in Hennessey’s previous work is absent.

In The poetics of space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard contemplates the nature of the scale model and the miniature, suggesting that they are ‘false objects that possess a true psychological objectivity’ and that, in the transaction between an object and the viewer, a ‘particle of dream’ is transferred from one to the other.3 In Hennessey’s two metallic sculptures, that sense of objectivity is heightened by the abstract nature of their form. Looking at Parallel cartography, one imagines a scale model of a futuristic city; perhaps a factory from which the object itself was made, or even a launch facility in the deserts of 59

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Kazakhstan. But hanging vertically from a wall, and with its detailed and antiillusionistic qualities, it defies creative interpretations. Similarly, Celestial kingdom offers no such interpretive possibilities; its function and origin – and its relationship to a real-world object – remain ambiguous.

While the titles of both works hint at the origins of the design and detail of these objects, what they are, and what they do, remain a mystery.

SF requires a degree of realism to convince its audience that its evocation of the world is plausible. This is a key difference between SF and other genres such as horror and fantasy where considerations of how and why can be simply deflected by the use of magic or the summoning of the uncanny. By contrast, while we know that none of the fiction in SF is real, the rational aspect of SF is the fine grain of its argument. Hennessey’s work evokes that sense of rationality, not only because of the cool aesthetic of the construction and display of the individual pieces, but also because an engagement with an abstracted and fictionalised sense of the real is heightened by the techniques used to realise the work.

Hennessey’s My Hubble (The universe turned in on itself) (2010) balances its effect on this play between realism and fantasy. A full-size version of the Hubble Space Telescope, constructed for the 17th Biennale of Sydney: The beauty of distance: Songs of survival in a precarious age (2010), was mounted at a 45-degree angle from the floor of the exhibition space, the high end of the sculpture accessible to viewers by a three-stage gantry. Visually 62

impressive in both scale and fabrication, the work offered a spectacle despite being made from the artist’s habitual materials of plywood and steel. However, once the visitor had climbed to the top of the gantry, the full nature of the work was revealed: a hollow, if massive, cylinder – an outline of the real thing. A small amateur telescope was mounted inside the sculpture through which one could see a piece of wood painted black and covered with a dash of glitter. When seen through the tiny telescope, it appeared to be the night sky.

J.G. Ballard’s SF works, particularly his novels and stories published in the 1960s and 1970s, engaged with a very similar kind of aesthetic play between simulation and a revelatory reflexivity. Ballard deployed popculture imagery and the iconography of the Space Race in a number of experimental novels and stories, which resulted in a kind of magical-realist SF. Ballard’s aesthetic was of abandoned materials and structures: stained concrete launch bays and rusting metallic gantry towers, empty engine test facilities, the overgrown and desolate wastes of an abandoned Cape Kennedy.

Together, these formed a remarkably continuous and dream-like setting. As SF critic and academic Brian Baker observes, Ballard’s refiguration of the NASA program as a symbol for both human error and human potentiality, while at the same time abandoning the actual possibilities of orbital, lunar, inter-planetary or deep space exploration, foreshadows the fate of both NASA and the Soviet space programs at the hands of science fiction.5

Baker argues that while popular SF largely abandoned the real world of NASA and Russian space programs for the fantasies of Star Wars, the symbolism of that technology remains potent: In [Ballard’s] fictions such as A question of re-entry (1963) (which posited the arrival of a dead astronaut in the South American jungles as a kind of cargo cult) to the ‘fugue time’ stories . . . where the NASA space program ‘cracks the hour glass of time’ and leads to various forms of ‘space sickness’, the astronaut is a central and symbolic figure, a kind of evolutionary mistake which leads nonetheless to a pathway out of time.6

previous page: My Hubble (The universe turned in on itself) 2010 plywood and steel installation view, 17th Bienniale of Sydney, The beauty of distance: Songs of survival in a precarious age (2010) no longer extant

One cannot help but think of the recurring ritual objects in Ballard’s fictions when looking at Hennessey’s sculptures.

Hennessey’s icons of the Space Race, such as the rover and space suits of My Lunar Rover (You had to be there) and My Mission Control (The act of observation changes the object observed) (2005), might have easily appeared in Ballard’s late 1960s fiction, while the militaryvehicle-turned-luxury-object, My Humvee (Inversion therapy), is a potential piece of set dressing for Ballard’s Cocaine nights (1996) or Super-Cannes (2000).

Meanwhile, the neo-natal unit in Hennessey’s My NICU (2006) suggests the workplace of any number of Ballard’s disgraced doctor characters. While these correlations between Hennessey’s sculptures and Ballard’s fictions offer an intriguing set of coincidences, more

importantly, perhaps, is the convergence between Hennessey’s aesthetic and the world conjured by the adjective ‘Ballardian’.7 As The encyclopedia of science fiction notes, Ballard remains one of the genre’s most influential writers because, like the highly influential SF author Philip K. Dick, he focused his ‘transformative energies on the marriage between Inner Space and the world’.8 And so too Hennessey explores the imaginative potential of the known for something more fantastical. Within the realm of simulated and reproduced surfaces, in scaled-down or full-size objects, symbols of progress and technology are repurposed as recursive fictions, the artist working in a narrative mode imbued with an SF aesthetic. In his recent video and photographic works, such as My Burnt Frost (2008) and My Hells Gate (2010) – the background to which are discussed in detail in Samantha Littley’s accompanying essay – Hennessey captures the moment when various materials are detonated using explosives.

The effect is much like the abstract qualities of his metallic sculptures; we know what we’re looking at even as the unreal qualities of these frozen moments are heightened by this very act of recognition. This is what Bachelard meant by ‘false objects’ possessing a kind of ‘psychological objectivity’: an image that can only be achieved using shutter speeds faster than human perception itself to capture explosive motion, but forever suspended, both fictional and real, hanging forever out of time.

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1. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, “The SF of theory: Baudrillard and Haraway,” Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 3 (November 1991): 387.

2. Vivian Sobchack, cited in Storming the reality studio: A casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction, ed. Larry McCaffrey (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 11.

3. Gaston Bachelard, “Miniature,” The poetics of space (New York: Orion Press, 1964), 148–49.

4. John Clute, “William Gibson,” The encyclopedia of science fiction, 13 November 2014, http://www.sfencyclopedia.com/entry/gibson_william.

5. Brian Baker, “Space is the place (utopia and silence),” (SF) 365, 19 November 2012, http://sciencefiction365.blogspot. com.au/2012/11/space-is-place-utopiaand-silence.html.

6. Ibid., original emphasis.

7. The Collins Dictionary defines ‘Ballardian’ as follows: ‘Resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’, http://www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/english/ballardian.

8. John Clute, “J.G. Ballard,” The encyclopedia of science fiction, 10 November 2014, http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ ballard_j_g.

left, right and following page (detail): My Lunar Rover (You had to be there) 2005 plywood, steel, canvas and Velcro Private collection, Melbourne 65

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Sea of Tranquillity 2005 inkjet print on paper Collection of the artist 68

Sea of Serenity 2005 inkjet print on paper Collection of the artist 69

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Stuart Harrison (SH) Peter, being in this wonderful studio that you share with Patricia Piccinini in Collingwood, it’s great to see so much evidence of making – there’s a real sense of fabrication and testing. As an entry to your work, I want to discuss the idea of the ‘prototype’. You talk about your work as not being fakes, particularly the works where you’re simulating things such as the Hubble Space Telescope. When I look at them, they look a bit like reverse-engineered prototypes. Do you think about this idea of prototyping as a sort of device?

Peter Hennessey (PH) That’s a really interesting observation. I would never have thought of them in terms of prototypes, but I definitely see them in terms of reverse engineering. Part of both of those processes is using the construction or reconstruction of objects as a way of understanding and examining them. Observation plays a large role in what I do, which is an attempt to fully come to grips with an object, a thing in the world. Not only is its physicality important, but also the kind of symbolic resonance that the object has.

I’ve often described my works as performances of objects. The analogy I often use is re-enactments; like when people get dressed up in Napoleonic War uniforms and have carefully remade muskets and they re-stage the Battle of Waterloo or whatever.

There is enormous attention to detail and enormous care to get everything right so that they really understand

what they’re doing, but, at the same time, there’s never a sense that they are actually at the Battle of Waterloo.

SH There’s always an awareness that the thing in question is not actually the

original thing.

PH Exactly; it’s about understanding a thing that you can’t actually access yourself.

That’s what I’m trying to do with my work.

There is that sense of reverse

engineering, of taking what I can find easily about a thing and trying to reconstitute it out of nothing.

SH Let’s talk about your process in the My series, where particular pieces of infrastructure – typically, space infrastructure – are examined. Trawling through available information, you reconstruct, digitally at first, a model of the thing. Then, in the same way as the general trajectory of your career, you move from the digital into the analogue, and build a 1:1 version, typically out of a material, such as plywood, that’s very evidently not the original material.

I wanted to discuss materiality with you, particularly because plywood is a marginal material; you obviously made a very conscious choice to use it?

PH Yeah, absolutely. Plywood means many things to me. For one thing, I am interested in its ordinariness. It also has a particular kind of historical significance; plywood emerges out of the Industrial Revolution and the early-twentieth century. So it has this very particular connection to the history of the modern world.

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SH Particularly through people like Ray and Charles Eames.

PH Yes. Plywood is this amazing combination of the high-tech industrial world and the natural world. While it retains this beautiful naturalistic grain, the process involved in making it is almost ludicrous; this spinning around of giant tree trunks and the shaving of fine sheets is mind-boggling.

I love the combination of these two elements – an ordinariness that requires an extraordinary industrial base. You can’t whittle your own plywood, which I think is also significant. By taking the objects out of their ‘spacey-ness’, I also reduce that sense of being a fake. You can go to museums and see reproductions of Voyager space probes, which are fakes – they were never used. They inspire questions like ‘What am I looking at?’, ‘Is this the real thing or something else?’. It is often difficult to tell. That is not something I want with my work.

One of the things that always strikes me when looking at the objects used

by NASA is how unbelievably bespoke they are in real life. Every space suit is hand-sewn, made to measure. I feel these objects are actually quite artisanal rather than industrial, even though they require this massive industrial base.

SH I wonder if that’s a consequence of them being at the tip of modernity – that space travel was, for a long time, modernity’s peak. I guess the

‘replicability’ of things was always a long-term aim, that we might all have space suits. But the space program may be concluding, a program that never got out of that prototyping phase in itself.

PH That’s right, exactly.

SH In your practice, there’s a blurring between art and architecture. How do you think your training as an architect has affected your career as an artist?

PH I think there’s definitely a very obvious trajectory there for me. I worked as an architectural model maker and then I went to RMIT to pursue architecture, where the focus was very much intellectual and philosophical rather than practical.

I arrived there just as the computers were coming in. I started on drawing boards but by the time I left, they were pretty much disappearing; everything was becoming increasingly digital.

So while I had a very strong interest in a physical approach, I found the virtual, non-material practice there quite fascinating. I had some great teachers and so I became immersed in that way of understanding architecture as a mode of representation rather than just as an adjunct to the building industry.

I also was quite intrigued by the possibilities of digital technologies; I grew up making plastic models and in the computer club and playing 75

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Dungeons & Dragons, so it’s kind of inevitable that I should end up where I have.

So I left architecture school and started working as a designer using interactive design and new media.

SH Which was a very new industry at the time.

PH Yes, it was called ‘new media’ then because it was actually ‘new’. At the time, it felt like you could do anything, although I became increasingly dissatisfied with the gap between what the digital and virtual world promised and what it tended to deliver. It’s interesting that all this VR stuff, Oculus Rift and stuff...

SH … is now back on the agenda.

PH Yes, but it was the same narrative 10 years ago, and I found myself increasingly dissatisfied. Working as an artist in that world and making interactive installations that required constant attention, I felt these things were just so marginal because of the technology. It’s changed a lot but that’s partially due to the time. I also found myself hankering for the physical.

A key thing for architects too is that, no matter how sophisticated the representation of a space is, your initial experience of it in reality is inevitably different from your expectation. Every person who’s ever built anything has walked into it and 78

gone, ‘Huh, that’s not exactly what I expected.’

SH No matter how many renders you might have done of it.

PH Exactly. You may have even had your 3D goggles on, but there is something intrinsically different about the physical that the digital is – certainly at this point – incapable of replicating. Yet, there is this sort of assumption that there isn’t. There’s the assumption that there is a kind of equivalency between the virtual and the actual.

In a lot of ways, my practice is about that space in between. I’m curious about what changes. I’m not saying that it’s a massive change; I’m not saying that one’s terrible and the other’s fantastic. But I do think that there is a thing that sits in between the two of them and that thing, to me, is really interesting to examine.

SH It’s also particularly apt that your process involves both the physical and the digital as well. It’s not a reaction to the digital in the sense that you’ve abandoned the digital; you’re still incredibly reliant on it.

PH Absolutely.

SH Because that 3D model is still the source for the process…

PH The ‘un-digitising’ of that.

SH ‘Un-digitising’ is a great term. It’s interesting that you talk about your need to get towards the tactile and away from digital forms of expression.

I’ve seen the same thing happen in the architectural profession, where there’s a sense that overrepresenting something can be quite dangerous. Because of the dangers of representation, clients might expect too much and the built outcome is not exactly like the render; things continue to be fluid and change.

PH Yes, allowing the possibility for that fluidity is extremely important. The decisions that you can make while building that diverge from this predicted outcome are often the things that will provide the most richness.

SH I agree.

PH So it’s also about understanding that making is a process, and that’s part of the danger of representation. As you say, it locks you into something when, traditionally, a building process took time and things happened in between…

SH Yes, things get added in. It’s not something that architects talk about a lot, but things do change on site. As an architect, I have seen the return to physical models, a return to the idea of making 1:1 pieces of building, which has been a healthy shift. I think that reaction has been felt quite broadly.

There’s now a snobbery around computer representation.

PH Yes, I think that it’s about understanding how these things – the digital and physical – work together. An ‘either/or’ dichotomy is kind of useless. I can’t draw but I feel incredibly comfortable coding and building things in 3D. For me, it’s a more honest way to draw than on paper because that’s where my skills lie. It’s about a kind of honesty to whatever process allows you to express the things you need to in order to start, but it’s very much the beginning of a process and I think the outcome of the process are things.

The prospect of architecture, the size of the things and their permanence, was always kind of terrifying for me, but I still find myself drawn to large objects. I find myself connected to the human body as a sort of basic point of scale. I’ve been making smaller objects recently, and I find them quite difficult to come to terms with; I can only see them as maquettes. Once they’re small, they seem more like models rather than things.

SH I’ve heard you talk about the expectations of size – particularly in the 1:1 projects, the My series – where things are a different size to what you expected them to be. I got the sense that My Hubble was bigger than what you thought it was going to be.

PH Yes it was. I knew exactly how big it was, dimensionally. Even though I had lots of images of it, with smallscale people standing next to it, it was massive compared to what I thought 79

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it would be. But, getting back to the performance metaphor, the show must go on. You begin with an idea, which then has to become a thing, and you go through a process where you think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how we could do that.

I could see how that’s going to work.’

Then you get to a point where you think, ‘I don’t know if I can – I hope I can – do that.’ Then you have to build it. So there’s this nice thing of pushing myself to the edge of what I can do because I’m making it myself. I love that sense of having a certain degree of risk going from the idea.

Returning to that idea of prototypes and the architect, it’s interesting to note that in architecture, there is a history of making maquettes and models for buildings that will never exist, like Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International.

SH Which was quite a big model, wasn’t it?

Five metres high or something.

PH Yeah, it’s massive, but it’s not the thing.

SH No, but it sort of became the thing.

previous page: Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones 2014 installation views, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne left: Car tower 2011 powder-coated steel Chisholm Automotive and Logistics Learning Centre, Melbourne

PH Exactly, it became the thing. Moreover, it almost rendered the thing itself unnecessary. The work was done in generating that smaller object, the maquette. Sometimes, I think the work to scale up a model is not necessarily worth the investment in material, time and resources.

SH I want to talk a bit about two car-based works – My Humvee (2008), which

is in the show at UQ Art Museum, and Car tower (2011), which is very much a piece of public art outside the Chisholm TAFE in Victoria. Are these works doing the same thing?

PH No, they’re quite different actually. I have made a few public artworks and I tend to approach them quite differently to how I approach my gallery works.

This is because I think that the audiences are fundamentally different, and I feel that it’s really important to respect your audience and work with them rather than drop something on them.

My public artworks are created with a different expectation of the way that people will understand them.

Of the two car works, Car tower is a more abstracted form. It’s a whole bunch of car forms that have been mashed together into this one large abstracted totem, whereas My Humvee is an incredibly careful re-enactment of the object, in as much detail as I could get, to scale, and in plywood. As a work, My Humvee is quite menacing and far from celebratory – it’s quite a mournful piece – whereas Car tower is very upbeat. It sits outside the Chisholm Automotive and Logistics Learning Centre in Melbourne.

SH And there’s a direct relationship between the work and the building to the content of the work.

PH Definitely. Patricia and I work with some amazing spray painters who are 85

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out there. I have a huge respect for what they do, so I wanted to celebrate automotive forms and what spray painters do. The work is full of little car details; you can walk around and pick out the little bits of Mitsubishi Colt or Holden station wagon. It’s all kind of mashed together into this sort of sharp series of steel forms.

SH I guess with an outdoor public artwork like Car tower, you’ve got certain material requirements, and plywood probably wouldn’t have worked.

Because of their placement, public artworks are also forced to become closer to being architectural works than straight works of art.

PH Public art is a very difficult line to walk.

While a few artists are lucky enough to get a work commissioned – asked to make an enormous piece that somebody wants to stick somewhere – most of those who work in public art go through a commissioning and presentation process. I find it quite difficult to find something that satisfies me as an artist and also satisfies a brief and a bunch of people who, on the whole, aren’t particularly interested in art. You feel like you’re trying to sneak something past them that will enrich the experiences of the people who walk past it on a daily basis. left and following page (detail): Hanabi 2014 Aluminium composite panels, painted aluminium and steel installation view, 180 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne

SH It’s kind of an agency for the city or an agency for enrichment. Almost everything you just said there regarding ‘art’ could be substituted with the word ‘architecture’.

PH Exactly.

SH The idea of an architect trying to wrestle a brief with your own interests and with the wider interest of the city and users. Trying to sneak something through for the greater good.

PH Exactly; you’re trying to give people what they need but they don’t know they want.

SH Yes. PH Which sounds incredibly patronising when I say it aloud, but through public art, I am trying do something that I believe will enrich the life of the city. I think to myself, ‘What would I need?

What would I prefer to walk past every day to my job?’ I think ultimately it’s this person I’m making a work for. One of the reasons that I’m not an architect and that I am an artist is precisely because this kind of process [i.e. the public art process] is so difficult and so fraught and so often unpleasant and stressful.

Part of being an artist is that you just make what you want and to hell with the committee, and maybe somebody will like it. While on one level, I find the public art process really difficult, on another, I actually find it quite engaging because it does feel a bit like architecture school. Also I think it pushes you towards things that you might otherwise not look at.

For example, you are forced to look at materials that aren’t necessarily those you feel comfortable with. I’ve started 87

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working with aluminium composite panel for that reason. It’s the world I worked in at 180 Lonsdale, for Hanabi (2014).

SH Yes, this work strikes me as indicating a bit of a shift in terms of the materials, the use of aluminium panels such as Alucobond...

PH While it is a shift on one level, it isn’t a shift on a conceptual level, because Alucobond is the corporate plywood.

If you want to think about an ordinary kind of material, if you’re interested in everydayness and urban texture, then Alucobond is perfect. Despite its shininess and its perfection, it has this incredible ordinariness, which attracted me to it. I could also take it on as a material because it’s incredibly efficient. It’s lightweight...

SH It’s rigid. … it’s got a permanent factory paint finish.

PH Exactly, all that stuff. It’s a pain to work with in the way that I work with it.

I mean, I’m not doing with it what it’s supposed to do. However, in a funny sort of way, I like it because it’s a material with almost no character.

technologically, aluminium composite panel and plywood probably require a fairly similar level of technology and industry to create. I would say plywood is no more low-tech than composite panel; plywood just looks woodier.

SH Hanabi is placed within a corporate context and therefore that kind of generic aluminium cladding surrounds it. Alucobond comes in lots of different colours, and Hanabi is incredibly colourful and enriching in that foyer, which is a reasonably stark, large space. Obviously, it was a very conscious attempt to add some colour in there?

PH Yeah, essentially.

SH In a very floral sort of way.

PH Yes, very floral.

As an artist, doing something like that is actually quite scary. It’s going to be colourful and it’s going to be flowers and you think, well, that doesn’t sound like art.

[Laughter] SH That doesn’t sound like your art.

SH There are lots of evident fixings on the Hanabi piece as well; it’s covered in screws.

PH Yes, I love the honesty that comes from those things. The made-ness of it is really important; I want people to look at it and go, ‘Oh yeah, someone made that.’ I would guess that,

PH No, it doesn’t, but I was thinking about what would grow in a space like that.

What is the flora and fauna of that environment? It just seemed natural in the way that plywood seems natural.

What is the nature of that kind of space? It isn’t actual trees – that’s just as contrived as anything, really. There 89

is something else that occurs in these environments. So how do you try to create objects to represent – or indeed monumentalise – that kind of a reality?

I’m quite interested in monuments because most public art from the past were monuments. You look outside the front of the State Library of Victoria or whatever, and there are these guys on horseback.

the recreation is the same size as the original. The second is the 100:1, the enlargement. And third, there’s work in that realm of the model or maquette and you’re representing scale through the use of figure people, which is a traditional architectural thing to do.

PH That’s right. Interestingly, the works you’re referring to, which have the little human figures [part of Here be dragons], are actually all at 1:1.

SH That were typically 1:1 or thereabouts.

PH Well, a bit over, but designed to look like they’re 1:1.

The monument is actually an incredibly difficult thing to pull off in our relativistic society. It’s difficult to define…

PH Exactly, that’s right, and it’s difficult to find things that you can feel comfortable about monumentalising.

PH Yes, they’re actually at 1:1. For example, there are the black box flight recorders from a commercial airliner, which I reproduced at 1:1. However, in reproducing them, they started to look like scale models. So I introduced these little figures to play on this, and disrupt the reading of them as reproductions.

SH So you’re happy with the terms ‘monument’ or ‘monumentalising’ as a way of describing your work?

SH Well, it becomes almost impossible to read them at 1:1 once you put those small people there.

PH Yeah, absolutely, but I don’t think all monuments need to be celebratory.

I think some of my works are less sanguine than others. What I was trying to do with My Humvee was very much a monument, but with a funereal feel to it.

PH Yeah, and the people change the focus away from the object and towards a certain sort of narrative; they become narrative vignettes. In one of them, a big queue of people is waiting. In another, a cluster of people seem to be talking. They represent the bizarre banality of air travel. I travel with my children a lot and our standard joke is that travel is all about standing in line. That sort of banality of queuing is

SH …whose monument it is for?

SH I think the issue of scale is interesting.

I feel there are three scales that you tend to operate at. The first is the 1:1, with works such as the My series, where 90

SH So, I was just reading them automatically as pieces of infrastructure on a smaller scale?

juxtaposed against the extraordinary achievement of sticking 400 people in a piece of metal and flying them across the world. The banality of the ordinariness of travel against the intense tragedy of the loss of a plane.

SH Where the black box recorder becomes very prominent, the thing people are talking about.

PH Exactly, that’s right. The idea that we can lose an airliner is beyond belief but also somehow almost ‘morally’ wrong; that we could be denied the proper understanding of what went on is viscerally upsetting.

SH A Boeing jet is a sort of aged piece of technology now, a 40-year-old design.

The space shuttle is also like that and now retired. The even older Russian Soyuz rocket is now the primary vehicle for getting people into space, the car equivalent of everyone going up in a Gemini or something.

SH Yes, I saw. Is this at the Centre for Hypersonics?

PH Yes. They’re working on scramjet design, which is the next generation, super-high-speed jet engine.

Intriguingly, they are trying to think of a new way of dealing with what they call ‘access to space’.

It’s quite amazing to think about how we currently practice ‘access to space’; essentially, we use disposable rockets. Someone at the Centre likened our space travel to buying a Porsche to drive to the shops, leaving it there and walking home. Then you buy another one next time you want to go to the shops. It’s mind-boggling how little of this stuff gets re-used. So they’re looking at a new way to access space. Rocket science, they laughingly insist, is actually pretty straightforward and hasn’t changed much in 40 years.

PH Or a Lada Niva or a Trabant.

[Laughter] SH Interestingly, space infrastructure now has its own history and is old technology now.

PH Yeah, space is kind of retro.

It’s interesting, as part of this project at UQ, I’m doing a residency with the HyShot Group.

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A rare occurrence (Of gigantic orchids: S. Australis vs D. Maculata) 2005 plywood, stainless steel and automotive paint installation view, Mercer Building, Melbourne following pages: My Burnt Frost (Explosion event I–IV) 2008 four c-type photographs Collection of the artist 93

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previous page (detail) and left: The wait (Flight data recorder) 2014 plywood, ABS plastic, wax and steel Collection of the artist 107

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The explanation (Cockpit voice recorder) 2014 plywood, ABS plastic, wax and steel Collection of the artist 109

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previous page: Maquette for a monument to unknown space #2 2014 plywood and steel Private collection, Hobart left: Maquette for a monument to known space #1 2014 plywood and steel Private collection, Hobart 113

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Maquette for a monument to unknown space #1 2014 plywood and steel Private collection, Hobart 115

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Not My Voyager, ten trillion kilometres 2004 inkjet print on paper Collection of the artist 117

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Not My Voyager, termination shock 2004 inkjet print on paper Collection of the artist 119

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Not My Voyager, debris 2004 inkjet print on paper Collection of the artist 121

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My Mission Control (The act of observation changes the object observed) 2005 plywood, steel and two-channel video, silent Private collection, Adelaide 123

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My Ikara (sculpture) and My Woomera project (video) 2005 plywood, steel and single-channel video with sound installation view, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne sculpture: no longer extant; video: collection of the artist 125

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My ejector seat (Upside down changes everything) 2006 plywood, steel, calico, LD45FR foam, webbing, plastic and aluminium Private collection, Hobart 127

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PETER HENNESSEY Born 1968, Sydney Lives and works in Melbourne EDUCATION 1990–1995 Bachelor of Architecture (First Class Honours), RMIT University, Melbourne SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS 2014 Here be dragons / Hic sunt dracones, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 2010 My Hells Gate, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 2008 Two projects: Sea and Sky, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne My Burnt Frost, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide 2007 My NSAT-110, Project Space Kandada, Tokyo, Japan 2006 My NICU, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide My ejector seat, Tolarno Galleries at the Melbourne Art Fair 2005 My moon landing, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne My Voyager, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 2004 Repercussions: Individual and collaborative works by Peter Hennessey & Patricia Piccinini, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide Closer (in collaboration with Chunky Move), Perth Festival 2003 Closer, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne Booth, ACMI, Melbourne 1996 ICU, The Basement Project, Melbourne 1995 TerrUrbanism (with Patricia Piccinini), Australia Centre, Manila, Philippines PathL, The Basement Project, Melbourne 1994 TerrUrbanism (with Patricia Piccinini), Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne MPath, The Basement Project, Melbourne 1993 Two hertz (with Peter Zellner), Temple Studios, Melbourne 1991 Heretical gestures at the birth of Enlightenment, Swanston Street Gallery, Melbourne Recent works and collaborations, Charles Williams Gallery, Melbourne SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2011 Star Voyager, ACMI, Melbourne 2010 The beauty of distance: Songs of survival in a precarious age, 17th Biennale of Sydney 2007 De Overkant / Down Under: Contemporary art from Australia and the Netherlands, Den Haag Sculptuur, The Hague, Netherlands 2006 Greenaway Art Gallery at ARCO Madrid, Spain 2004 Anne Landa Award, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Proof, ACMI, Melbourne 2002 Akihabara TV, Tokyo, Japan Click, Bendigo Art Gallery, Geelong Art Gallery, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Mildura Arts Centre Gallery and Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery 2001 LumpCD, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne 2000 LumpCD, Impact Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands 1999 LumpCD, Spiral TV, Tokyo, Japan 1997 Protein lattice remix screened at SIGGRAPH 97, Los Angeles, USA pH2, Interact Multimedia Expo, Melbourne PathL, screened as part of ArtRage on ABC-TV and at SA Stage Gallery, Adelaide 1996 Vert, Experimenta TV commercial project, TEN 10 Basement, Test Strip Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand Full stop, The Basement Project, Melbourne Robotica, Melbourne Town Hall 1995 RMIT Department of Architecture Major Project Exhibition, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne Since the accident, The Basement Project, Melbourne Arts & Industry Design 95, The Arts & Industry Gallery, Melbourne 130

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Critical mass, Arts Victoria Gallery, Melbourne Humanetics, New Media Network, Melbourne Scission, The Basement Project, Melbourne (exhibitor and curator) City screens, Melbourne International Festival Projections Pure cinema, Charles Williams Gallery, RMIT University, Melbourne Vitae, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne Deliquescence, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne (curator) Deliquescence, Canberra Contemporary Art Space (curator) Deliquescence, First Draft West, Sydney (curator) SuperMart, Blaxland Gallery, Melbourne The overexposed city, Swanston Street Gallery, Melbourne

SELECTED COMMISSIONS 2014 Hanabi, 180 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne 2012 My Voyager redux, Westfield Sydney Sky Lobby 2011 Car tower, Chisholm Automotive and Logistics Learning Centre, Melbourne 2010 Root level, Global Switch Building, Sydney 2008 My Humvee, Melbourne Art Fair Commission 2005 A rare occurrence, Mercer Building, Melbourne SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Bellamy, Louise. “Notes in plywood bottles.” The Age, 29 January 2005, 7.

Burne, Rosemary. “Peter Hennessey’s ICU.” Mesh 8/9 (Winter 1996). http://www.experimenta.org/mesh/mesh08/8burn.html.

Crawford, Ashley. “Peter Hennessey: A space oddity.” Australian Art Collector 33 (July – September 2005): 106–113.

DiPietro, Monty. “The satellite in the room.” The Japan Times, 26 April 2007. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2007/04/26/arts/thesatellite-in-the room/#.VIkV3Mm0SuM. Frost, Andrew. “BOS2010: Peter Hennessey.” The Art Life, 4 June 2010. http://theartlife.com.au/2010/bos2010-peter-hennessy/.

Gallasch, Keith. “Who wins: Video or new media art?” Realtime 65 (February – March 2005): 30.

Hennessey, Peter. My Voyager. Perth: Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2005.

Hill, Peter. “How video art rates.” The Age, 10 January 2005, A3.

Macarthur, John. “Peter Hennessey: Will therapy be enough?” in New: Selected recent acquisitions 2007–2008. St Lucia, Qld: The University of Queensland Art Museum, 2008, 110–111.

Nelson, Robert. “Artist as astronaut builds new world.” The Age, 23 July 2014, 46.

Palmer, Daniel. “Peter Hennessey: The impossibility of understanding space.” Art World 4 (August – September 2008): 96–100.

Pegg, Cameron. “Fuel for thought.” UQ News 578 (October 2008): 15.

Raj, Hari. “Creative space.” The Weekly Review, 8 September 2011. http://www.theweeklyreview.com.au/well-read/interviews/1822612creative-space/#.VJojev96IFk. Sakaguchi, Chiaki. “Peter Hennessey.” ART iT 16 (Summer/Fall 2007).

Snell, Ted. “Watch this space and wonder.” The Australian, 26 March 2004, 19.

Stanhope, Zara, and Peter Hennessey. Repercussions: Individual and collaborative works by Peter Hennessey & Patricia Piccinini.

Adelaide: Greenaway Art Gallery, 2004.

Stephens, Andrew. “Peter Hennessey’s dragon quest.” The Age, 7 July 2014. http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/peter-hennesseys-dragon-quest-20140707-zsypb.html.

Storey, Rohan. “Scission.” Architecture Australia 83, no. 5 (September/October 1994): 20.

Van Schaik, Leon. “Asymptote & Drome.” Architectural Review Australia 74 (2001): 42–47.

Yarwood, Tracey, and Susan Gaylor. Picture this: Create a career in visual arts, crafts and design. Melbourne: Arts and Recreation Training Victoria, 1996.

COLLECTIONS The University of Queensland GRANTS 2014 Australia Council New Work Grant APPOINTMENTS 2002–2004 Australia Council New Media Arts Board Member 131

Measurements are in centimetres, height x width x depth, rounded to the nearest halfcentimetre, and describe the image/object only, unless otherwise indicated.

All works of art are courtesy of the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, and GAGPROJECTS/Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, unless otherwise indicated.

My Golden Record (Fitzroy remix) 2004 single-channel video with sound 00:05:00

My Voyager 2004 plywood and steel 650.0 cm (h) page 14 Not My Voyager, debris 2004 inkjet print on paper 30.0 x 60.0 cm page 120

Not My Voyager, ten trillion kilometres 2004 inkjet print on paper 30.0 x 60.0 cm page 116

Not My Voyager, termination shock 2004 inkjet print on paper 30.0 x 60.0 cm page 118

Able (d. 1959) 2005 inkjet print on paper 28.5 x 48.5 cm page 32

Laika (d. 1957) 2005 inkjet print on paper 28.5 x 48.5 cm page 33

Maquette for My Ikara 2005 plywood and steel 90.0 x 40.0 x 40.0 cm Private collection, Adelaide My Lunar Rover (You had to be there) 2005 plywood, steel, canvas and Velcro 298.0 x 206.0 x 396.0 cm Private collection, Melbourne pages 64, 65, 66

My Mission Control (The act of observation changes the object observed) 2005 plywood, steel and two-channel video, silent 120.0 x 180.0 x 110.0 cm; video 00:05:24 Private collection, Adelaide pages 122, 123 Sea of Serenity 2005 inkjet print on paper 28.5 x 48.5 cm page 69

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Sea of Tranquillity 2005 inkjet print on paper 28.5 x 48.5 cm page 68

My ejector seat (Upside down changes everything) 2006 plywood, steel, calico, LD45FR foam, webbing, plastic and aluminium sculptural element 240.0 x 120.0 x 170.0 cm Private collection, Hobart pages 126, 127

My NICU 2006 plywood, wax, silicone, plastic and steel dimensions variable pages 30, 31

Debris pieces I–III 2008 bronze three parts, each 10.0 x 15.0 x 20.0 cm Private collection, Adelaide pages 134, 135

My Burnt Frost (Explosion event) 2008 single-channel video with sound 00:03:30

My Burnt Frost (Explosion event I–IV) 2008 four c-type photographs each 80.0 x 100.0 cm pages 94, 96, 98, 100

My Humvee (Inversion therapy) 2008 plywood, automotive enamel paint, aluminium and steel 500.0 x 210.0 x 180.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of the Melbourne Art Fair Foundation, 2008. pages 7, 12, 13 My Hells Gate (North of the river I–V) 2010 five c-type photographs each 100.0 x 100.0 cm pages 19, 20, 21

Celestial kingdom (BeiDou-1A satellite, CHN) 2014 aluminium composite panel and steel 152.0 x 111.0 x 6.0 cm page 59

Compound eye (Galileo GIOVE B satellite, EU) 2014 birch and gaboon plywood, wax and steel 184.0 x 133.0 x 20.0 cm page 38 Maquette for a monument to contested space #1 2014 plywood and wax 35.0 x 52.0 x 38.0 cm pages 50, 51

Maquette for a monument to known space #1 2014 plywood and steel 35.0 x 72.0 x 52.0 cm Private collection, Hobart page 112 Maquette for a monument to unknown space #1 2014 plywood and steel 35.0 x 72.0 x 52.0 cm Private collection, Hobart page 114

Maquette for a monument to unknown space #2 2014 plywood and steel 35.0 x 52.0 x 38.0 cm Private collection, Hobart page 110 Maquettes for a monument to escape velocity #1 2014 pewter and wax installation, 19.0 x 160.0 x 34.0 cm page 52 Overlooked (Street View capture apparatus) 2014 plywood, ABS plastic and steel 190.0 x 145.0 x 145.0 cm pages 56, 57 Parallel cartography (Glonass-K, RUS) 2014 aluminium composite panel and steel 250.0 x 100.0 x 90.0 cm page 36 The explanation (Cockpit voice recorder) 2014 plywood, ABS plastic, wax and steel 17.0 x 34.0 x 20.0 cm page 108 The wait (Flight data recorder) 2014 plywood, ABS plastic ,wax and steel 16.0 x 57.0 x 20.0 cm pages 104, 106 Where we are now (Navstar Block II-F satellite, USA) 2014 plywood, ABS plastic, wax and steel overall 138.0 x 197.0 x 130.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2014. pages 22, 24 Celestial choreography #1 (Re-entry re-enactment) 2014–2015 installation dimensions variable Instantaneous requiem (Explosion event) 2015 Mixed media, explosives, steel and polycarbonate cabinet, and video cabinet: 120.0 x 180.0 x 120.0 cm

Additional images A rare occurrence (Of gigantic orchids: S. Australis vs D. Maculata) 2005 plywood, stainless steel and automotive paint installation view, Mercer Building, Melbourne pages 92, 93 My Ikara (sculpture) and My Woomera project (video) 2005 plywood, steel and single-channel video with sound installation view, ACMI, Melbourne sculpture: no longer extant; video: collection of the artist page 124 My giant squid AL (Stranger than fiction) 2008 powder-coated aluminium and steel life-size, 150 x 150 x 600 cm variable Collection of the artist page 26

My Hubble (The universe turned in on itself) 2010 plywood and steel life-size, main section 1320.0 x 420.0 cm (diam.) angled installation view, 17th Bienniale of Sydney, The beauty of distance: Songs of survival in a precarious age (2010) no longer extant pages 60, 128 Car tower 2011 powder coated steel 930.0 x 440.0 x 295.0 cm Chisholm Automotive and Logistics Learning Centre, Melbourne page 84 Hanabi 2014 aluminium composite panels, painted aluminium and steel 580.0 x 550.0 x 376.0 cm installation view, 180 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne pages 86, 88

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Debris pieces I–III 2008 bronze Private collection, Adelaide 135

Andrew Frost Dr Andrew Frost is an art critic, writer, curator and broadcaster. His articles have been published in Australian and international magazines, journals and websites. He writes art criticism for Guardian Australia and is a regular contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald. Since 2007, Frost has written and presented a number of TV documentaries on contemporary art, including Conquest of space: Science fiction & contemporary art, which aired on ABC1 in November 2014. He is the author of the monograph The boys (Currency Press) and the artist book A personal history of Soviet space exploration (Pretty Bad Horse).

Stuart Harrison Stuart Harrison is an architect, writer and broadcaster. He is a director of the award-winning architectural and urban design practice Harrison & White, and has taught widely in design and architectural history at RMIT University and Monash University, Melbourne. He has broadcast extensively on radio 3RRR, where he co-founded and hosted ‘The Architects’ that ran from 2004 to 2014. Harrison has authored three books on innovative housing and was included in the Australian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale.

Allison Holland Dr Allison Holland is a lecturer in Art History at UQ, and Coordinator of Academic Relations, UQ Art Museum. Previously, Allison worked as a visual arts curator for the National Gallery of Victoria and the State Library of Victoria. Allison has published in the area of Japanese and Australian cross-media art, as well as on prints and drawings.

Samantha Littley Samantha Littley is Curator, UQ Art Museum, where her most recent exhibition was Conflict: Contemporary responses to war (2014).

She has enjoyed a varied career as a curator, writer and educator at institutions including the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery of Australia, Australian National University and Newcastle Art Gallery. Prior to her current role, she was Curator of Australian Art to 1970 at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, where she curated the retrospective Making it Modern: The watercolours of Kenneth Macqueen (2007).

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UQ Art Museum acknowledgements The UQ Art Museum would like to thank the individuals and institutions who have helped to make this exhibition possible. We give special thanks to the artist, Peter Hennessey, for his commitment to the project, and the time and energy he has devoted to it.

We acknowledge the Australia Council for its generous support through a Presentation and Promotion grant and a New Work grant awarded to Peter Hennessey. We thank those who contributed to the catalogue, including the authors, Dr Andrew Frost, Stuart Harrison, Dr Allison Holland, and Samantha Littley, the designer Brent Wilson and the editor Evie Franzidis. Dr Andrew Frost and Rachel Shea are acknowledged for their work on the film. Our thanks go to Peter’s dealers and their staff, Paul Greenaway OAM and Hannah Hutchinson from GAGPROJECTS/Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, and Jan Minchin, Olivia Radonich and Tina Douglas from Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. We are especially grateful to the private collectors who have kindly lent artworks to the exhibition, particularly given their size and fragility.

We extend our thanks to others who have assisted us in realising this project, including our colleagues at UQ, Professor Michael Smart, Chair of Hypersonic Propulsion and Head of the HyShot Group at the Centre for Hypersonics, and his team; Professor Sandra KajiO’Grady, Head of School, Architecture, and her students and staff; Associate Professor Joan Leach, Convenor, Science Communication Program, School of Communication and Arts, and Science Communication student Tara Roberson; Professor José Torero Cullen, Head of School, Civil Engineering; Kevin O’Sullivan, Assets Services Manager, Property & Facilities Division; and Dr Elizabeth Miric, Biological Safety Advisor, Occupational Health and Safety Division.

Our thanks also go to Nick Mitzevich, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia, for his foresight in accepting the gift of My Humvee (Inversion therapy) (2008) from the Melbourne Art Fair Foundation, and for initiating this exhibition when he was Director of the UQ Art Museum.

Artist’s acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have made this exhibition a reality. I thank Dr Campbell Gray and his staff at the UQ Art Museum, particularly Curator Samantha Littley, Project Manager Gordon Craig, Production Manager Brent Wilson, and Lecturer in Art History and Coordinator of Academic Relations Dr Allison Holland, who organised my residency and academic engagement at the Centre for Hypersonics and the School of Architecture.

My thanks go to Professor Michael Smart and his team, particularly Nick Gibbons and Brad Wheatley for their assistance with the shock tunnel testing. I am grateful to the Australia Council for awarding me a New Work grant, which enabled me to make the artworks inspired by this residency. Thanks also to Professor Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, who facilitated my engagement with Architecture students under the watchful eye of Sam Butler from the Fabrication Lab. I thank the contributors to the publication and acknowledge with special thanks the lenders to the exhibition. I would also like to acknowledge the continued support and representation by Paul Greenaway OAM of Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, and Jan Minchin of Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.

My gratitude to Tom Gibson and Aurelia Armstrong, as well as Guy, Mina and Tess, who hosted me in Brisbane during the residency and in the lead up to the exhibition.

Big thanks to the folks in the studio, past and present, who have helped me so much with work: Dennis Daniel, Roger Moll, Alister Pirie, Liz Rule, Fiona Abicare, Scott Ebdon, Maryanne Nairn. Also, thanks to everyone else who had a hand in the production over the years, including Anthony Geernaert, Rusty Johnson, Philippe Lemiere and Peter De Garis.

Love and thanks always to Patricia, Hector and Roxy.

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Curator: Samantha Littley Curatorial Assistant: Emily Poore Catalogue design: Brent Wilson Editor: Evie Franzidis Photography: Peter Hennessey, except pages 22, 24, 36, 38, 40, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 82, 83, 92, 93, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113 Andrew Curtis; 47 Allison Holland; 7 David Marks; 14 Mim Stirling/AGNSW; 12, 126 Carl Warner.

Printed by: Cornerstone Press, Brisbane The University of Queensland Art Museum Board: Louise Doyle, Assistant Director-General, Access and Communication, National Archives Professor Tim Dunne, Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Dr Campbell Gray, Director, UQ Art Museum (ex officio) Associate Professor Jason Jacobs, Head, School of Communication and Arts Clare Pullar, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Advancement) Professor Alan Rix, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Chairperson) Winthrop Professor Ted Snell, Director, Cultural Precinct, University of Western Australia Dr Jane Wilson, Deputy Chancellor The University of Queensland Art Museum personnel: Dr Campbell Gray, Director Nick Ashby, Museum Preparator Gordon Craig, Project Manager Christian Flynn, Registration Technician Michele Helmrich, Associate Director (Curatorial) Dr Allison Holland, Coordinator of Academic Relations and Lecturer Art History Kath Kerswell, Senior Registrar Samantha Littley, Curator Matthew Malone, Registration Officer Emelie McCarthy, (Acting) Executive Assistant/ Administration Officer Sebastian Moody, Digital Communications Officer Emily Poore, Curatorial Assistant Beth Porter, Finance and Administration Coordinator Mariko Post, Visitor Services Officer Alice-Anne Psaltis, Public Programs Assistant Kat Sawyer, Registration Assistant Nicholas Smith, Public Programs Assistant Gillian Ridsdale, Curator Public Programs Fiona Sutton, Advancement Manager Brent Wilson, Production Manager Install team: Madeleine Keinonen, Michael Littler, Lindsay Moffatt, Kate O’Connor, Lucinda Wolber

The University of Queensland Art Museum University Drive, St Lucia Queensland, Australia www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au

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