13 September - 14 October 2011 Two artists question the uncomfortable pleasure of the spectacle tinged with horror, and fascination with media events as shared cultural and generational memories. The Fall Before Fall contemplates the destruction of the World Trade Center a decade after the event. Conceived as a memento mori (a reminder of death) the exhibition considers processes that animate our understanding of 9/11. ACCOMPANYING PUBLIC PROGRAM: PANEL DISCUSSION followed by exhibition opening: Tuesday 13 September 4.30pm FLOORTALK with Daniel Mudie Cunningham: Thursday 15 September 1pm ARTIST ‘IN CONVERSATION’ with Elvis Richardson: Thursday 13 October 1pm ISBN: 978-0-9807595-3-2 Design: JULdesign
Daniel Mudie Cunningham (b. Melbourne, 1975) completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies & Visual Culture in 2004 and Bachelor of Arts - First Class Honours in Art History & Criticism, both at the University of Western Sydney. Based in Sydney, Cunningham’s work interrogates visual histories, popular cultures and oppositional identity politics. Primarily working with video, performance and installation, Cunningham draws upon and re-imagines the vernacular image streams of everyday life and its connection to the past through the use of found photographs, video, music and text. Recent solo exhibitions include Rhymes with Failure in 2010 and Oh Industry in 2009 (both held at MOP Projects). In 2012 his acclaimed 2007 project Funeral Songs will be exhibited at Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart as part of MONA FOMA and their permanent collection. Cunningham is a widely published arts writer and cultural critic and has been active as a curator since the mid-1990s. He is currently the Chair of dLux MediaArts and works as Senior Curator at Artbank.
Elvis Richardson (b. Sydney, 1965) completed her MFA at Columbia University in New York in 2002 while on a Samstag Scholarship, and BFA at the University of NSW in 1992. Currently based in Melbourne, Richardson is known for a multi-disciplinary practice that explores patterns of recognition and memorialisation through installations of found objects. Personalised massproduced items such as 35mm slides, YouTube videos, trophies, home-recorded VHS cassettes, carpet, and interview data becomes the raw materials to construct new stories of collective recognition and public nostalgia. Recent group exhibitions include Photographer Unknown at Monash University Museum of Art and I Walk the Line: new Australian drawing at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Housed at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne and Because I am Different at Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide. In 2010 Richardson conceived of and opened the artist/curated gallery DEATH BE KIND. Elvis Richardson is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.
www.danielmcunningham.com
www.elvisrichardson.com
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
THE END, 2008 Video still, 8 mins. Soundtrack: Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by various performers (source: YouTube) Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
UTS Gallery supported by Oyster Bay Wines & Coopers. Media Partner: 2ser
UTS:GALLERY Level 4, 702 Harris Street Ultimo NSW 2007 Australia +61 2 9514 1652 www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au Monday to Friday 12 - 6pm
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM ELVIS RICHARDSON 13 September - 14 October 2011
Falling
“The Fall Before the Fall”: we all know what we’re talking about here, so close to the ten year anniversary of the event. On the other hand, the refusal to specify also raises doubt. The repetition of the word “fall” itself suggests an aporia, a vertiginous spiral of movement and of meaning so that we no longer know which fall is which or which comes first. Of course there is the famous, photographed fall of one man among the two hundred or so who fell from the burning towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which inspires Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work in this show. That fall, and beyond it the almost incomprehensible fall of the iconic twin towers marked the end of a summer, the start of an American Fall and with it a kind of biblical fall from wilful ignorance. “The fall of the World Trade towers on 9/11, could well represent the fall of America from its once proud pinnacle of moral integrity to its present position of failed moral leadership in a rapidly interconnected world”, writes Tom Junod in the now famous article in Esquire (September 8, 2009). The fall of the towers might not have changed the world as we knew it, as some of the people whose reflections on the events were gathered by Elvis Richardson in Fremantle seven years later seem to say. But if it was not a turning point in history, it was still perhaps a turning point in everyday Western consciousness, a turning point inseparable from the global reception of images. The images of 9/11 now seem indistinguishable from the event. Many of Richardson’s participants (who had been photographed by artist Christine Gosfield for her work defining home in Fremantle in the days following the event) had witnessed the events live on television, courtesy of Fremantle’s particular time zone. Those of Richardson’s interviewees who heard the news on the radio seemed unable to comprehend it without them. Images are so often thought to be secondhand, poor, degraded traces of the real, substitutes for actual experience. But what
this forgets is that to be struck by an image, to be shocked by it or seized by it is an experience, as any one feeling the full force of the affective power of those particular images could testify. The vision of onlookers’ faces is mentioned by several – it acted as confirmation of their own feelings, even as it amplified and intensified the horror they already felt. If the experience of images is inescapable today, it is also the case that even our unmediated experiences are only apparently so, mediated in reality by the structure of human perception, by previous experience and the way we have integrated it into existing frameworks of meaning, and by memories explicit or implicit, including memories of other images. Experience of the images of planes flying into buildings, of burning towers, of collapsing skyscrapers was inevitably, for many, underwritten by the explosions familiar from action movies. But whether this kind of familiarity numbed us to the power of the 9/11 images or amplified their awfulness, whether it made them easier to integrate into an understanding of the world or more difficult, remains an open question. Richardson shows all people’s reflections on their experience as images, soundless words transcribed onto a used blackboard in unsteady lines of sometimes shaky handwriting in the impermanence of chalk which seem at times to fade like memory itself, these lines comprising a writing over of an imperfectly erased – or imperfectly preserved – past. Recalling as rewriting. Memory as a process which transforms as much as it preserves, as now supersedes then and inevitably rewrites it. This work of transformation is perhaps analogous to (or maybe is) the work of mourning, in which what is lost is introjected, as the psychoanalysts say – that is, it comes to be felt by the mourner as a part of themselves, fully identified with, so that over time loss becomes less painfully felt as absence, it becomes memory, a kind of release from the object even as the object is in some way preserved by it. What seems to be a fall, or fading
from memory, is actually a remaking, a way of turning it into something with which we can live. One image especially crystallises this process. The image of the Falling Man taken by press photographer Richard Drew, is iconic. The lines of its composition are all vertical: the buildings, the body. This produces a downward motion, but in the process it engenders a fantasy of clean and direct descent, even though the fact that descent is head-first must presage an awful end. It condenses so much into a single frame, this economical image whose simple, striking composition makes it perfect for circulation and repetition in new contexts as distance from its origin grows. But as the Esquire article makes clear, it only shows a nanosecond in time: an instant in which things arrange themselves by a freak of chance into a composition, an instant of visual order in what is really a chaotic descent in which a body flails in a void, and a person, winded by the sheer force of the fall, gasps for air. The way the image arranges the body suggests direction, choice – as if with the gracefulness of a high dive in which perfection is snatched from the air in that illusory instant before the body is compelled by the inexorable force of gravity to be destroyed beyond recognition, beyond even forensic identification, by the impact of landing. This instant happened. Yet the photo of it is not simply “true”: it has become an image in the sense that André Kertész once realised his writing of Holocaust testimony might become simply “a story”. Not untrue, but too well-formed, too organised, too designed, too integrated, to be adequate to the messy, overwhelming, unstructured horror of traumatic experience. As a documentary image, the photograph is problematic. But it refused to disappear. Its censorship in mainstream media relegated it to internet gore galleries turning viewers into voyeurs. Omitted from the official record, it continued to circulate in other contexts, including art. Art is not simply one more institutional means among many others –
museums, memorials, documentaries – of making cultural memory. Rather, art renders visible and palpable what might be in the air, but too ephemeral or intangible to be grasped by other means. It seizes a moment, or rather it seizes something – a latent possibility – from a moment: it extracts the virtual and makes it real. Or virtually real. Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work is exemplary. He extracts from the iconic photograph an image of another world. Our world. Our world conjoined with the worlds of the perhaps two hundred people who fell or jumped (who can say) from the towers that day. His floating figures – them, and us –are held in an impossible space between a void and a vortex, between the open empty sky streaked with cloud that only emphasises its boundlessness, and the sucking twisters that swallow all in their path only to spit it out in unrecognisable form – that is, as precisely formless; abject. Between them he opens an instant in which we can only hold our breath, suspended in the space of anticipation, momentarily displaced, like the breath displaced from the lungs of the winded, falling bodies and captured, precariously, in Cunningham’s wonderful, hopeful, balloons. We are all falling, all the time, he seems to say, and the balloons are a form of essential, indispensable denial in going on being even in the process of falling.
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM
ELVIS RICHARDSON
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
Now 7 Years Later, 2008 Digital video (still), 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
In the next room Elvis Richardson stages Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata 2 in a relay of YouTube performances as if we are all playing this, everywhere, all the time. Recover, the title of her enigmatic black shroud of sculpture enjoins us. Then again aporia opens between “re-” and “cover” as we contemplate what might be the remains of a last supper, or the image of the covered corpse of a city, shrouded in black dust, but still, obdurately, there.
Anna Gibbs
Falling
“The Fall Before the Fall”: we all know what we’re talking about here, so close to the ten year anniversary of the event. On the other hand, the refusal to specify also raises doubt. The repetition of the word “fall” itself suggests an aporia, a vertiginous spiral of movement and of meaning so that we no longer know which fall is which or which comes first. Of course there is the famous, photographed fall of one man among the two hundred or so who fell from the burning towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which inspires Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work in this show. That fall, and beyond it the almost incomprehensible fall of the iconic twin towers marked the end of a summer, the start of an American Fall and with it a kind of biblical fall from wilful ignorance. “The fall of the World Trade towers on 9/11, could well represent the fall of America from its once proud pinnacle of moral integrity to its present position of failed moral leadership in a rapidly interconnected world”, writes Tom Junod in the now famous article in Esquire (September 8, 2009). The fall of the towers might not have changed the world as we knew it, as some of the people whose reflections on the events were gathered by Elvis Richardson in Fremantle seven years later seem to say. But if it was not a turning point in history, it was still perhaps a turning point in everyday Western consciousness, a turning point inseparable from the global reception of images. The images of 9/11 now seem indistinguishable from the event. Many of Richardson’s participants (who had been photographed by artist Christine Gosfield for her work defining home in Fremantle in the days following the event) had witnessed the events live on television, courtesy of Fremantle’s particular time zone. Those of Richardson’s interviewees who heard the news on the radio seemed unable to comprehend it without them. Images are so often thought to be secondhand, poor, degraded traces of the real, substitutes for actual experience. But what
this forgets is that to be struck by an image, to be shocked by it or seized by it is an experience, as any one feeling the full force of the affective power of those particular images could testify. The vision of onlookers’ faces is mentioned by several – it acted as confirmation of their own feelings, even as it amplified and intensified the horror they already felt. If the experience of images is inescapable today, it is also the case that even our unmediated experiences are only apparently so, mediated in reality by the structure of human perception, by previous experience and the way we have integrated it into existing frameworks of meaning, and by memories explicit or implicit, including memories of other images. Experience of the images of planes flying into buildings, of burning towers, of collapsing skyscrapers was inevitably, for many, underwritten by the explosions familiar from action movies. But whether this kind of familiarity numbed us to the power of the 9/11 images or amplified their awfulness, whether it made them easier to integrate into an understanding of the world or more difficult, remains an open question. Richardson shows all people’s reflections on their experience as images, soundless words transcribed onto a used blackboard in unsteady lines of sometimes shaky handwriting in the impermanence of chalk which seem at times to fade like memory itself, these lines comprising a writing over of an imperfectly erased – or imperfectly preserved – past. Recalling as rewriting. Memory as a process which transforms as much as it preserves, as now supersedes then and inevitably rewrites it. This work of transformation is perhaps analogous to (or maybe is) the work of mourning, in which what is lost is introjected, as the psychoanalysts say – that is, it comes to be felt by the mourner as a part of themselves, fully identified with, so that over time loss becomes less painfully felt as absence, it becomes memory, a kind of release from the object even as the object is in some way preserved by it. What seems to be a fall, or fading
from memory, is actually a remaking, a way of turning it into something with which we can live. One image especially crystallises this process. The image of the Falling Man taken by press photographer Richard Drew, is iconic. The lines of its composition are all vertical: the buildings, the body. This produces a downward motion, but in the process it engenders a fantasy of clean and direct descent, even though the fact that descent is head-first must presage an awful end. It condenses so much into a single frame, this economical image whose simple, striking composition makes it perfect for circulation and repetition in new contexts as distance from its origin grows. But as the Esquire article makes clear, it only shows a nanosecond in time: an instant in which things arrange themselves by a freak of chance into a composition, an instant of visual order in what is really a chaotic descent in which a body flails in a void, and a person, winded by the sheer force of the fall, gasps for air. The way the image arranges the body suggests direction, choice – as if with the gracefulness of a high dive in which perfection is snatched from the air in that illusory instant before the body is compelled by the inexorable force of gravity to be destroyed beyond recognition, beyond even forensic identification, by the impact of landing. This instant happened. Yet the photo of it is not simply “true”: it has become an image in the sense that André Kertész once realised his writing of Holocaust testimony might become simply “a story”. Not untrue, but too well-formed, too organised, too designed, too integrated, to be adequate to the messy, overwhelming, unstructured horror of traumatic experience. As a documentary image, the photograph is problematic. But it refused to disappear. Its censorship in mainstream media relegated it to internet gore galleries turning viewers into voyeurs. Omitted from the official record, it continued to circulate in other contexts, including art. Art is not simply one more institutional means among many others –
museums, memorials, documentaries – of making cultural memory. Rather, art renders visible and palpable what might be in the air, but too ephemeral or intangible to be grasped by other means. It seizes a moment, or rather it seizes something – a latent possibility – from a moment: it extracts the virtual and makes it real. Or virtually real. Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work is exemplary. He extracts from the iconic photograph an image of another world. Our world. Our world conjoined with the worlds of the perhaps two hundred people who fell or jumped (who can say) from the towers that day. His floating figures – them, and us –are held in an impossible space between a void and a vortex, between the open empty sky streaked with cloud that only emphasises its boundlessness, and the sucking twisters that swallow all in their path only to spit it out in unrecognisable form – that is, as precisely formless; abject. Between them he opens an instant in which we can only hold our breath, suspended in the space of anticipation, momentarily displaced, like the breath displaced from the lungs of the winded, falling bodies and captured, precariously, in Cunningham’s wonderful, hopeful, balloons. We are all falling, all the time, he seems to say, and the balloons are a form of essential, indispensable denial in going on being even in the process of falling.
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM
ELVIS RICHARDSON
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
Now 7 Years Later, 2008 Digital video (still), 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
In the next room Elvis Richardson stages Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata 2 in a relay of YouTube performances as if we are all playing this, everywhere, all the time. Recover, the title of her enigmatic black shroud of sculpture enjoins us. Then again aporia opens between “re-” and “cover” as we contemplate what might be the remains of a last supper, or the image of the covered corpse of a city, shrouded in black dust, but still, obdurately, there.
Anna Gibbs
Falling
“The Fall Before the Fall”: we all know what we’re talking about here, so close to the ten year anniversary of the event. On the other hand, the refusal to specify also raises doubt. The repetition of the word “fall” itself suggests an aporia, a vertiginous spiral of movement and of meaning so that we no longer know which fall is which or which comes first. Of course there is the famous, photographed fall of one man among the two hundred or so who fell from the burning towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which inspires Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work in this show. That fall, and beyond it the almost incomprehensible fall of the iconic twin towers marked the end of a summer, the start of an American Fall and with it a kind of biblical fall from wilful ignorance. “The fall of the World Trade towers on 9/11, could well represent the fall of America from its once proud pinnacle of moral integrity to its present position of failed moral leadership in a rapidly interconnected world”, writes Tom Junod in the now famous article in Esquire (September 8, 2009). The fall of the towers might not have changed the world as we knew it, as some of the people whose reflections on the events were gathered by Elvis Richardson in Fremantle seven years later seem to say. But if it was not a turning point in history, it was still perhaps a turning point in everyday Western consciousness, a turning point inseparable from the global reception of images. The images of 9/11 now seem indistinguishable from the event. Many of Richardson’s participants (who had been photographed by artist Christine Gosfield for her work defining home in Fremantle in the days following the event) had witnessed the events live on television, courtesy of Fremantle’s particular time zone. Those of Richardson’s interviewees who heard the news on the radio seemed unable to comprehend it without them. Images are so often thought to be secondhand, poor, degraded traces of the real, substitutes for actual experience. But what
this forgets is that to be struck by an image, to be shocked by it or seized by it is an experience, as any one feeling the full force of the affective power of those particular images could testify. The vision of onlookers’ faces is mentioned by several – it acted as confirmation of their own feelings, even as it amplified and intensified the horror they already felt. If the experience of images is inescapable today, it is also the case that even our unmediated experiences are only apparently so, mediated in reality by the structure of human perception, by previous experience and the way we have integrated it into existing frameworks of meaning, and by memories explicit or implicit, including memories of other images. Experience of the images of planes flying into buildings, of burning towers, of collapsing skyscrapers was inevitably, for many, underwritten by the explosions familiar from action movies. But whether this kind of familiarity numbed us to the power of the 9/11 images or amplified their awfulness, whether it made them easier to integrate into an understanding of the world or more difficult, remains an open question. Richardson shows all people’s reflections on their experience as images, soundless words transcribed onto a used blackboard in unsteady lines of sometimes shaky handwriting in the impermanence of chalk which seem at times to fade like memory itself, these lines comprising a writing over of an imperfectly erased – or imperfectly preserved – past. Recalling as rewriting. Memory as a process which transforms as much as it preserves, as now supersedes then and inevitably rewrites it. This work of transformation is perhaps analogous to (or maybe is) the work of mourning, in which what is lost is introjected, as the psychoanalysts say – that is, it comes to be felt by the mourner as a part of themselves, fully identified with, so that over time loss becomes less painfully felt as absence, it becomes memory, a kind of release from the object even as the object is in some way preserved by it. What seems to be a fall, or fading
from memory, is actually a remaking, a way of turning it into something with which we can live. One image especially crystallises this process. The image of the Falling Man taken by press photographer Richard Drew, is iconic. The lines of its composition are all vertical: the buildings, the body. This produces a downward motion, but in the process it engenders a fantasy of clean and direct descent, even though the fact that descent is head-first must presage an awful end. It condenses so much into a single frame, this economical image whose simple, striking composition makes it perfect for circulation and repetition in new contexts as distance from its origin grows. But as the Esquire article makes clear, it only shows a nanosecond in time: an instant in which things arrange themselves by a freak of chance into a composition, an instant of visual order in what is really a chaotic descent in which a body flails in a void, and a person, winded by the sheer force of the fall, gasps for air. The way the image arranges the body suggests direction, choice – as if with the gracefulness of a high dive in which perfection is snatched from the air in that illusory instant before the body is compelled by the inexorable force of gravity to be destroyed beyond recognition, beyond even forensic identification, by the impact of landing. This instant happened. Yet the photo of it is not simply “true”: it has become an image in the sense that André Kertész once realised his writing of Holocaust testimony might become simply “a story”. Not untrue, but too well-formed, too organised, too designed, too integrated, to be adequate to the messy, overwhelming, unstructured horror of traumatic experience. As a documentary image, the photograph is problematic. But it refused to disappear. Its censorship in mainstream media relegated it to internet gore galleries turning viewers into voyeurs. Omitted from the official record, it continued to circulate in other contexts, including art. Art is not simply one more institutional means among many others –
museums, memorials, documentaries – of making cultural memory. Rather, art renders visible and palpable what might be in the air, but too ephemeral or intangible to be grasped by other means. It seizes a moment, or rather it seizes something – a latent possibility – from a moment: it extracts the virtual and makes it real. Or virtually real. Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work is exemplary. He extracts from the iconic photograph an image of another world. Our world. Our world conjoined with the worlds of the perhaps two hundred people who fell or jumped (who can say) from the towers that day. His floating figures – them, and us –are held in an impossible space between a void and a vortex, between the open empty sky streaked with cloud that only emphasises its boundlessness, and the sucking twisters that swallow all in their path only to spit it out in unrecognisable form – that is, as precisely formless; abject. Between them he opens an instant in which we can only hold our breath, suspended in the space of anticipation, momentarily displaced, like the breath displaced from the lungs of the winded, falling bodies and captured, precariously, in Cunningham’s wonderful, hopeful, balloons. We are all falling, all the time, he seems to say, and the balloons are a form of essential, indispensable denial in going on being even in the process of falling.
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM
ELVIS RICHARDSON
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
Now 7 Years Later, 2008 Digital video (still), 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
In the next room Elvis Richardson stages Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata 2 in a relay of YouTube performances as if we are all playing this, everywhere, all the time. Recover, the title of her enigmatic black shroud of sculpture enjoins us. Then again aporia opens between “re-” and “cover” as we contemplate what might be the remains of a last supper, or the image of the covered corpse of a city, shrouded in black dust, but still, obdurately, there.
Anna Gibbs
Falling
“The Fall Before the Fall”: we all know what we’re talking about here, so close to the ten year anniversary of the event. On the other hand, the refusal to specify also raises doubt. The repetition of the word “fall” itself suggests an aporia, a vertiginous spiral of movement and of meaning so that we no longer know which fall is which or which comes first. Of course there is the famous, photographed fall of one man among the two hundred or so who fell from the burning towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which inspires Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work in this show. That fall, and beyond it the almost incomprehensible fall of the iconic twin towers marked the end of a summer, the start of an American Fall and with it a kind of biblical fall from wilful ignorance. “The fall of the World Trade towers on 9/11, could well represent the fall of America from its once proud pinnacle of moral integrity to its present position of failed moral leadership in a rapidly interconnected world”, writes Tom Junod in the now famous article in Esquire (September 8, 2009). The fall of the towers might not have changed the world as we knew it, as some of the people whose reflections on the events were gathered by Elvis Richardson in Fremantle seven years later seem to say. But if it was not a turning point in history, it was still perhaps a turning point in everyday Western consciousness, a turning point inseparable from the global reception of images. The images of 9/11 now seem indistinguishable from the event. Many of Richardson’s participants (who had been photographed by artist Christine Gosfield for her work defining home in Fremantle in the days following the event) had witnessed the events live on television, courtesy of Fremantle’s particular time zone. Those of Richardson’s interviewees who heard the news on the radio seemed unable to comprehend it without them. Images are so often thought to be secondhand, poor, degraded traces of the real, substitutes for actual experience. But what
this forgets is that to be struck by an image, to be shocked by it or seized by it is an experience, as any one feeling the full force of the affective power of those particular images could testify. The vision of onlookers’ faces is mentioned by several – it acted as confirmation of their own feelings, even as it amplified and intensified the horror they already felt. If the experience of images is inescapable today, it is also the case that even our unmediated experiences are only apparently so, mediated in reality by the structure of human perception, by previous experience and the way we have integrated it into existing frameworks of meaning, and by memories explicit or implicit, including memories of other images. Experience of the images of planes flying into buildings, of burning towers, of collapsing skyscrapers was inevitably, for many, underwritten by the explosions familiar from action movies. But whether this kind of familiarity numbed us to the power of the 9/11 images or amplified their awfulness, whether it made them easier to integrate into an understanding of the world or more difficult, remains an open question. Richardson shows all people’s reflections on their experience as images, soundless words transcribed onto a used blackboard in unsteady lines of sometimes shaky handwriting in the impermanence of chalk which seem at times to fade like memory itself, these lines comprising a writing over of an imperfectly erased – or imperfectly preserved – past. Recalling as rewriting. Memory as a process which transforms as much as it preserves, as now supersedes then and inevitably rewrites it. This work of transformation is perhaps analogous to (or maybe is) the work of mourning, in which what is lost is introjected, as the psychoanalysts say – that is, it comes to be felt by the mourner as a part of themselves, fully identified with, so that over time loss becomes less painfully felt as absence, it becomes memory, a kind of release from the object even as the object is in some way preserved by it. What seems to be a fall, or fading
from memory, is actually a remaking, a way of turning it into something with which we can live. One image especially crystallises this process. The image of the Falling Man taken by press photographer Richard Drew, is iconic. The lines of its composition are all vertical: the buildings, the body. This produces a downward motion, but in the process it engenders a fantasy of clean and direct descent, even though the fact that descent is head-first must presage an awful end. It condenses so much into a single frame, this economical image whose simple, striking composition makes it perfect for circulation and repetition in new contexts as distance from its origin grows. But as the Esquire article makes clear, it only shows a nanosecond in time: an instant in which things arrange themselves by a freak of chance into a composition, an instant of visual order in what is really a chaotic descent in which a body flails in a void, and a person, winded by the sheer force of the fall, gasps for air. The way the image arranges the body suggests direction, choice – as if with the gracefulness of a high dive in which perfection is snatched from the air in that illusory instant before the body is compelled by the inexorable force of gravity to be destroyed beyond recognition, beyond even forensic identification, by the impact of landing. This instant happened. Yet the photo of it is not simply “true”: it has become an image in the sense that André Kertész once realised his writing of Holocaust testimony might become simply “a story”. Not untrue, but too well-formed, too organised, too designed, too integrated, to be adequate to the messy, overwhelming, unstructured horror of traumatic experience. As a documentary image, the photograph is problematic. But it refused to disappear. Its censorship in mainstream media relegated it to internet gore galleries turning viewers into voyeurs. Omitted from the official record, it continued to circulate in other contexts, including art. Art is not simply one more institutional means among many others –
museums, memorials, documentaries – of making cultural memory. Rather, art renders visible and palpable what might be in the air, but too ephemeral or intangible to be grasped by other means. It seizes a moment, or rather it seizes something – a latent possibility – from a moment: it extracts the virtual and makes it real. Or virtually real. Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s work is exemplary. He extracts from the iconic photograph an image of another world. Our world. Our world conjoined with the worlds of the perhaps two hundred people who fell or jumped (who can say) from the towers that day. His floating figures – them, and us –are held in an impossible space between a void and a vortex, between the open empty sky streaked with cloud that only emphasises its boundlessness, and the sucking twisters that swallow all in their path only to spit it out in unrecognisable form – that is, as precisely formless; abject. Between them he opens an instant in which we can only hold our breath, suspended in the space of anticipation, momentarily displaced, like the breath displaced from the lungs of the winded, falling bodies and captured, precariously, in Cunningham’s wonderful, hopeful, balloons. We are all falling, all the time, he seems to say, and the balloons are a form of essential, indispensable denial in going on being even in the process of falling.
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM
ELVIS RICHARDSON
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
Now 7 Years Later, 2008 Digital video (still), 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
In the next room Elvis Richardson stages Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata 2 in a relay of YouTube performances as if we are all playing this, everywhere, all the time. Recover, the title of her enigmatic black shroud of sculpture enjoins us. Then again aporia opens between “re-” and “cover” as we contemplate what might be the remains of a last supper, or the image of the covered corpse of a city, shrouded in black dust, but still, obdurately, there.
Anna Gibbs
13 September - 14 October 2011 Two artists question the uncomfortable pleasure of the spectacle tinged with horror, and fascination with media events as shared cultural and generational memories. The Fall Before Fall contemplates the destruction of the World Trade Center a decade after the event. Conceived as a memento mori (a reminder of death) the exhibition considers processes that animate our understanding of 9/11. ACCOMPANYING PUBLIC PROGRAM: PANEL DISCUSSION followed by exhibition opening: Tuesday 13 September 4.30pm FLOORTALK with Daniel Mudie Cunningham: Thursday 15 September 1pm ARTIST ‘IN CONVERSATION’ with Elvis Richardson: Thursday 13 October 1pm ISBN: 978-0-9807595-3-2 Design: JULdesign
Daniel Mudie Cunningham (b. Melbourne, 1975) completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies & Visual Culture in 2004 and Bachelor of Arts - First Class Honours in Art History & Criticism, both at the University of Western Sydney. Based in Sydney, Cunningham’s work interrogates visual histories, popular cultures and oppositional identity politics. Primarily working with video, performance and installation, Cunningham draws upon and re-imagines the vernacular image streams of everyday life and its connection to the past through the use of found photographs, video, music and text. Recent solo exhibitions include Rhymes with Failure in 2010 and Oh Industry in 2009 (both held at MOP Projects). In 2012 his acclaimed 2007 project Funeral Songs will be exhibited at Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart as part of MONA FOMA and their permanent collection. Cunningham is a widely published arts writer and cultural critic and has been active as a curator since the mid-1990s. He is currently the Chair of dLux MediaArts and works as Senior Curator at Artbank.
Elvis Richardson (b. Sydney, 1965) completed her MFA at Columbia University in New York in 2002 while on a Samstag Scholarship, and BFA at the University of NSW in 1992. Currently based in Melbourne, Richardson is known for a multi-disciplinary practice that explores patterns of recognition and memorialisation through installations of found objects. Personalised massproduced items such as 35mm slides, YouTube videos, trophies, home-recorded VHS cassettes, carpet, and interview data becomes the raw materials to construct new stories of collective recognition and public nostalgia. Recent group exhibitions include Photographer Unknown at Monash University Museum of Art and I Walk the Line: new Australian drawing at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Housed at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne and Because I am Different at Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide. In 2010 Richardson conceived of and opened the artist/curated gallery DEATH BE KIND. Elvis Richardson is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.
www.danielmcunningham.com
www.elvisrichardson.com
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
THE END, 2008 Video still, 8 mins. Soundtrack: Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by various performers (source: YouTube) Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
UTS Gallery supported by Oyster Bay Wines & Coopers. Media Partner: 2ser
UTS:GALLERY Level 4, 702 Harris Street Ultimo NSW 2007 Australia +61 2 9514 1652 www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au Monday to Friday 12 - 6pm
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM ELVIS RICHARDSON 13 September - 14 October 2011
13 September - 14 October 2011 Two artists question the uncomfortable pleasure of the spectacle tinged with horror, and fascination with media events as shared cultural and generational memories. The Fall Before Fall contemplates the destruction of the World Trade Center a decade after the event. Conceived as a memento mori (a reminder of death) the exhibition considers processes that animate our understanding of 9/11. ACCOMPANYING PUBLIC PROGRAM: PANEL DISCUSSION followed by exhibition opening: Tuesday 13 September 4.30pm FLOORTALK with Daniel Mudie Cunningham: Thursday 15 September 1pm ARTIST ‘IN CONVERSATION’ with Elvis Richardson: Thursday 13 October 1pm ISBN: 978-0-9807595-3-2 Design: JULdesign
Daniel Mudie Cunningham (b. Melbourne, 1975) completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies & Visual Culture in 2004 and Bachelor of Arts - First Class Honours in Art History & Criticism, both at the University of Western Sydney. Based in Sydney, Cunningham’s work interrogates visual histories, popular cultures and oppositional identity politics. Primarily working with video, performance and installation, Cunningham draws upon and re-imagines the vernacular image streams of everyday life and its connection to the past through the use of found photographs, video, music and text. Recent solo exhibitions include Rhymes with Failure in 2010 and Oh Industry in 2009 (both held at MOP Projects). In 2012 his acclaimed 2007 project Funeral Songs will be exhibited at Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart as part of MONA FOMA and their permanent collection. Cunningham is a widely published arts writer and cultural critic and has been active as a curator since the mid-1990s. He is currently the Chair of dLux MediaArts and works as Senior Curator at Artbank.
Elvis Richardson (b. Sydney, 1965) completed her MFA at Columbia University in New York in 2002 while on a Samstag Scholarship, and BFA at the University of NSW in 1992. Currently based in Melbourne, Richardson is known for a multi-disciplinary practice that explores patterns of recognition and memorialisation through installations of found objects. Personalised massproduced items such as 35mm slides, YouTube videos, trophies, home-recorded VHS cassettes, carpet, and interview data becomes the raw materials to construct new stories of collective recognition and public nostalgia. Recent group exhibitions include Photographer Unknown at Monash University Museum of Art and I Walk the Line: new Australian drawing at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Housed at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne and Because I am Different at Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide. In 2010 Richardson conceived of and opened the artist/curated gallery DEATH BE KIND. Elvis Richardson is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.
www.danielmcunningham.com
www.elvisrichardson.com
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
THE END, 2008 Video still, 8 mins. Soundtrack: Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by various performers (source: YouTube) Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
UTS Gallery supported by Oyster Bay Wines & Coopers. Media Partner: 2ser
UTS:GALLERY Level 4, 702 Harris Street Ultimo NSW 2007 Australia +61 2 9514 1652 www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au Monday to Friday 12 - 6pm
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM ELVIS RICHARDSON 13 September - 14 October 2011
13 September - 14 October 2011 Two artists question the uncomfortable pleasure of the spectacle tinged with horror, and fascination with media events as shared cultural and generational memories. The Fall Before Fall contemplates the destruction of the World Trade Center a decade after the event. Conceived as a memento mori (a reminder of death) the exhibition considers processes that animate our understanding of 9/11. ACCOMPANYING PUBLIC PROGRAM: PANEL DISCUSSION followed by exhibition opening: Tuesday 13 September 4.30pm FLOORTALK with Daniel Mudie Cunningham: Thursday 15 September 1pm ARTIST ‘IN CONVERSATION’ with Elvis Richardson: Thursday 13 October 1pm ISBN: 978-0-9807595-3-2 Design: JULdesign
Daniel Mudie Cunningham (b. Melbourne, 1975) completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies & Visual Culture in 2004 and Bachelor of Arts - First Class Honours in Art History & Criticism, both at the University of Western Sydney. Based in Sydney, Cunningham’s work interrogates visual histories, popular cultures and oppositional identity politics. Primarily working with video, performance and installation, Cunningham draws upon and re-imagines the vernacular image streams of everyday life and its connection to the past through the use of found photographs, video, music and text. Recent solo exhibitions include Rhymes with Failure in 2010 and Oh Industry in 2009 (both held at MOP Projects). In 2012 his acclaimed 2007 project Funeral Songs will be exhibited at Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart as part of MONA FOMA and their permanent collection. Cunningham is a widely published arts writer and cultural critic and has been active as a curator since the mid-1990s. He is currently the Chair of dLux MediaArts and works as Senior Curator at Artbank.
Elvis Richardson (b. Sydney, 1965) completed her MFA at Columbia University in New York in 2002 while on a Samstag Scholarship, and BFA at the University of NSW in 1992. Currently based in Melbourne, Richardson is known for a multi-disciplinary practice that explores patterns of recognition and memorialisation through installations of found objects. Personalised massproduced items such as 35mm slides, YouTube videos, trophies, home-recorded VHS cassettes, carpet, and interview data becomes the raw materials to construct new stories of collective recognition and public nostalgia. Recent group exhibitions include Photographer Unknown at Monash University Museum of Art and I Walk the Line: new Australian drawing at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Housed at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne and Because I am Different at Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide. In 2010 Richardson conceived of and opened the artist/curated gallery DEATH BE KIND. Elvis Richardson is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.
www.danielmcunningham.com
www.elvisrichardson.com
Hold Your Breath, 2011 Stills from multi-channel HD video installation Animation: Wendy Chandler | Sound: Heath Franco Courtesy of the artist
THE END, 2008 Video still, 8 mins. Soundtrack: Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by various performers (source: YouTube) Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
UTS Gallery supported by Oyster Bay Wines & Coopers. Media Partner: 2ser
UTS:GALLERY Level 4, 702 Harris Street Ultimo NSW 2007 Australia +61 2 9514 1652 www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au Monday to Friday 12 - 6pm
DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM ELVIS RICHARDSON 13 September - 14 October 2011