Burn what you cannot steal

Burn what you cannot steal was a slightly bigger project than this statement makes out, ultimately encompassing solo exhibitions by Brook Andrew, Deborah Kelly and Praneet Soi at Artspace in Sydney and the group exhibitions From blank pages that I worked on with Heejin Kim for Art Space Pool in Seoul and Burn what you cannot steal hosted by What, How & for Whom/WHW at Gallery Nova in Zagreb. Artists included Brook Andrew, Alicia Frankovich, Deborah Kelly, Jung Yoon Suk, Donghee Koo, Minouk Lim, Daniel Malone, Hiroharu Mori, Bona Park and Rho Jae Oon. This text was originally published with two brochures with beautiful designs, the English by Ricardo Filipe, and the Serbo-Croatian by Dejan Kršić. It was actually the introduction to a much longer essay included in the book on the project, published by Artspace as issue 9 of Column, which I may post in full when I finally get over my embarrassment at the scope of its ambition. Anyway.

Let’s speak to odd old ghost for a moment—the ghost of the readymade, yet to make its exit from the stage of art. Or is it that art has yet to exit the readymade, that the avant-gardist gesture constitutes an unsurpassable horizon of the art of our time? Exit ghost, exit stage: that would be the proposition. For the readymade is not simply one aesthetic strategy among others. It has for some time been regarded as a classic, a localised response to transnational curiosities taught as universal history, a recognisable sign within the system of legitimations according to which a given practice might be defined as ‘contemporary art’. But let’s give the readymade its due. Almost a century on from its stage debut – it was never anything other than a ghost, taking the form of the most modern and infantile of sanitary conveniences – the readymade maintains its significance. Indeed, its meaning seems to have accumulated over time. Whatever role its classical status may have played in this, in sustaining the audience’s attention, it is the readymade’s ghostly aspect that continues to harrow the world with fear and wonder.

The readymade is the afterlife of the commodity, that base unit of capitalist society, which, brought to exchange, obscures the conditions of its production by arousing in its audience extraordinary desires. It is not for nothing that Marx spoke of séances and Benjamin phantasmagoria when their studies of the capital came to the commodity and the cities and worlds built on its fetish. But if the commodity specializes in enchantment, the readymade operates through disenchantment. In death, the commodity becomes its own weird parody. The real rupture effected by the readymade was the introduction of a rhetorical dimension into a field formerly limited to the contemplation of autonomous objects. This was the category of the performative. The discovery of meaning in the relationship between the artistic gesture and the frameworks of interpretation, effectively the alteration of space over time, queerly mimicked the process by which ordinary objects of sensuous human production assume values far in excess of their simple usability.

Burn what you cannot steal is a preliminary sortie into this territory shared by the readymade and the commodity, one of the points at which art and topographies of the social intersect. Its gallery-based manifestation brings together the work of six artists, all of whose practices developed in the Asia Pacific region. This part of the world may be far from the cultural centres of Western Europe and North America, but its conceptions of the contemporary in art and the avant-garde in art history remain in thrall to their hegemonies. Contemporaneity has yet to divest itself of the expansionist and exoticising logics of modernity. Culture, in this sense, appears as another ghost of capital, here to remind us that the world is certainly not flat, that the flow of goods, information, finance and labour facilitated by so-called globalisation remains subject, as ever, to access and proximity to instruments of power. The structural barbarism of this process should not bear repeating, but still does. On this, Gene Ray is most eloquent: ‘We have not yet seen a world worthy of the name “postcolonial”, but nothing today is more urgent than our need to bring it into existence.’

The project’s title refers to the critique in acts that ensues when the complex of forces that the commodity structure holds in tension are brought to the point of explosion. As liberal responses to the recent London riots have shown, burning and looting is often read as the mindless destruction and reappropriation of property by a mass blissfully unaware of its own subjectivity, a tragically misdirected expression of social and economic isolation at best, a warts and all enactment of the values of system based on greed at worst. Without discounting the very real terror that accompanies such violence, it is possible to read the riots as a critique in acts of an urban geography constructed around the circulation of commodities. Looting is simply the logic of fetishism and abundance taken to its natural conclusion, desire held in abeyance for so long by separation from the means of its realization that the force of its inevitable explosion circumvents the niceties of exchange. Those who have read Debord properly will know that: ‘Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence.’

Naturally, the privileged stage of contemporary art, no matter how marginalized it might find itself in its geographic dispersal and in the creeping Bolognafication of the world, cannot match the poetic immediacy of burning and looting. But then the ghost of a warrior king serves a purpose other than extending and fortifying the borders of his land. This exhibition is aimed squarely at teasing out the contradictions of the commodity fetish, and in the process proposing new modes of production, circulation and exchange. The afterlife of the avant-garde, for all its own internal contradictions, provides fertile ground for a range of aesthetic strategies that may be applied to questions of authorship, agency, the production of value and the propriety of space, time objects and ideas. In the process it takes in geographical and linguistic authority, the still-problematic realms of representation, sexuality and race, proposing the body, the city and the symbolic field as objects ripe for reframing, reinterpretation and reuse.

A Revolution with Harbour Views

So while we're on the topic of the Biennale of Sydney, it turns out I wrote quite a lot about the 2008 edition, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's Revolutions – Forms that turn. I dashed this piece off in the first couple of days for a crazy deadline from Art & Australia, who wanted a quick overview for the Spring 2008 issue. It's chirpier than I remember, but I got snarkier as the show sunk in.

If one of the most regularly voiced criticisms of biennales concerns the format’s complicity with global spectacle culture and local political agendas alike, another is that at the apparently straightforward level of visitor experience, the vast majority of biennales have not been particularly engaging. The practice of biennale curatorship is, after all, a relatively young one, still finding its political and methodological feet. But so too are biennale criticism and spectatorship, practices that continue to struggle with the vastness of the biennale enterprise, both in terms of the scale of individual exhibitions and the apparent limitlessness of their much-discussed proliferation. The attendant phenomenon of ‘biennale fatigue’, an energy-sapping combination of jetlag, overstimulation and critical inertia, has created a demonstrable jadedness toward the format, one that anticipates, and treats as inevitable, viewer disappointment.

Perhaps this is why the mood around Sydney was so buoyant after the opening of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Revolutions — Forms that Turn. Let’s face it: despite numerous high points, no Biennale of Sydney in the past decade has been declared a resounding success by the critical community. Whether resigned to disappointment or suspicious of grand claims, it seems that this time around, the Sydney art world and visitors from around the region have been pleasantly surprised. If initial responses are anything to go by, Christov-Bakargiev’s attempt has at the very least reinvigorated the institution in the local mindset.

Christov-Bakargiev’s much-publicised curatorial intention has been to re-semanticise the word ‘revolution’, problematising its strictly political reading by drawing on its etymological connotations of turning and revolving. While this approach immediately throws up several questions — not least how anyone seriously advocating radical social change at a structural level could view art, and its catalogue of compromises with state and commerce, as an appropriate site to stage a revolution — there is a dynamism with which Christov-Bakargiev invests both senses of the term that is played out in the vitality of her installation.

Crucial to this is her employment of a strategy, last explored in Rene Block’s 1990 Biennale, The Readymade Boomerang, of juxtaposing new and recent efforts by contemporary artists with historical works from certain ‘revolutionary’ periods in the twentieth century. While Block’s biennale constructed a non-linear history based around the iconic figure of the readymade, Revolutions — Forms that Turn seems more directed toward the performative. While it is tempting to view the inclusion of work with kinetic or revolving elements, such as a Tinguely Bascule, Michael Snow’s De La or a rotating canvas by Atsuko Tanaka, as overly literal, they retain an allegorical aspect that is more productive in consideration the real revolutionary impact of avant-garde art, and by extension the social role of art in general, functioning less in terms of tangible social change and more as a performative gesture, a rhetorical rupture in a prevailing symbolic order.

It is this linguistic performativity, rather than the isolated formal operation of turning, that finds the greatest resonance among the contemporary artists in the exhibition — Renata Lucas, for instance, whose use of an outmoded sliding wall system at the Art Gallery of New South Wales subtly disrupts the very fabric of the exhibition, indeed incorporates it into the fabric of her work; or Geoffrey Farmer, presenting a play of sorts in the storage spaces between the MCA’s walls; or Tony Schwensen, appropriately turning sausages outside the Museum of Contemporary Art to implicate the biennale itself in the construction of a class system among artists. Most audacious is Gordon Bennett’s unrealised proposal to include works by Indigenous artists in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s colonial and modern collection hangs.

Such approaches are reflected in the exhibition’s staging. Its installation across all venues is competent yet playful, refreshingly sparse in some places, engagingly chaotic in others, and, in the case of a confronting but timely retrospective of Mike Parr’s performance documentation, appropriately disconcerting. Of equal importance, though, is the choice of venues, all of which are blessed with harbour views, topped off by the biennale’s innovative use of Cockatoo Island, a former shipping works in the middle of Sydney harbour, accessible only by ferry. Unlike the MCA, the Art Gallery, Artspace and even Pier 2/3, Cockatoo Island possesses precious little history as an artistic venue in the public imagination; the experience of spectatorship is further complicated by the time and effort required to locate and view the exhibition.

Importantly, though, the biennale does not disrupt the spectacle of the major exhibition, as some advance publicity had boldly claimed. If exploring an island filled with compelling works of Australian and international art on a clear Sydney winter day seems all too perfect, it’s because it is too perfect. The 2008 Biennale of Sydney’s great innovation is that it does not attempt to elude the spectacle of intellectual and cultural tourism endemic to its format. Rather, it embraces the sense of adventure and the pleasure of knowledge central to tourism’s economy of desire and uses them as a platform to present an engaging but critical exhibition. And it is an exhibition after all, a show, a spectacle with many, many standout experiences on offer — and a quick roll call would include, but not be limited to, works by Gerard Byrne, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul Chan, Sam Durant, Harun Farocki and Adrei Ujica, Dan Perjovschi, and Susan Philipsz — but a spectacle all the same. It is from this platform, the process of its creation and its reception, that any revolutionary experience associated with it will be had. Whatever that might mean, of course.

Contact and contamination: 2006 Biennale of Sydney

This is some angry young bad art writing. Some context is probably necessary: it was written for Zones of Contact: a critical reader, which I edited with Natasha Bullock for Artspace in July 2006 (another version appeared in Broadsheet a couple of months later). This was part of a series of such volumes that Artspace produced as quick responses to each edition of the Biennale of Sydney. Writers were given 5 days to view the biennale and come up with a quick 2000 word essay on some aspect of the event, and the book was designed and printed up to be on the shelves within in month. Ricardo Filipe's tidy design meant that it sold like hotcakes, but also gave the book far more authority than I think it deserved. Natasha and I wrote an introduction, and I threw together some thoughts by way of conclusion. Looking back, I'm certain I wouldn't express myself this way now – the tone is bratty and arrogant, and quoting an essay by the exhibition curator from two decades earlier was a gratuitous move – but I agree with the gist of it: the 2006 Biennale of Sydney was a very good exhibition badly installed, let down in large part by limitations of the biennale structure.

We’re a tough bunch to please aren’t we? After all, the overwhelming sense of relief that after a series of misfires, the Biennale of Sydney has finally delivered a sensitive, well-researched and above all coherent exhibition comes tempered with a degree of suspicion about the role of the event within the broader context of Australian society, and its positioning within the global flows of cultural capital. Perhaps this was because things got off to such a shaky start, with none other than Biennale chairman taking to the floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition launch to remind the audience present — the MCA’s usual blend of artists, curators and gallerists — of exactly who was paying their wages. This intervention came after a decidedly jejune speech by the Howard government’s Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan — who was really only present for ceremonial reasons as the sitting MP of the day — was drowned out in chatter motivated as much by ennui as by genuine political objection. Seizing the microphone unannounced, the Biennale chairman took the liberty of introducing himself before instructing the talkers in the audience that while Coonan was the representative of a conservative government, this was the conservative government that initiated the Myer Inquiry in the Visual Arts and Craft, and whose structural reforms to a sector apparently neglected under Labor had delivered a Biennale we could all be proud of. Coonan had, in his logic, given us all a reason to be there.

There is of course a litany of banalities that might contradict such claims as to the Howard government’s genuine concern for the arts — among many others, the compounded delays in the delivery of the inquiry’s report; the failure to implement a significant portion of the report’s recommendations; the recent restructuring of the Australia Council for the Arts; and the consistent sniping at ‘elite’ arts around election time.  Or indeed a failure to resource the Biennale adequately enough to have such an ambitious exhibition ready and operating in time for international visitors — an increasingly key audience for these sorts of events — to actually see before they jetted off to their next stop on the global art circuit.

Validating political meddling in ostensibly independent arts-funding bodies and politicising the presence of a bureaucrat at an opening, as if we should have been grateful that the arts minister had even turned up, is, moreover, quite obviously ethically fraught. Yet aside from these very valid objections, the Biennale chairman’s intervention had an unexpectedly critical function: it drew attention to the broader social and political context in which the Biennale was being presented, to its role — and, by extrapolation, that of other forms of artistic practice and presentation — in the contemporary spectacle.

It is worth acknowledging that Zones of Contact, the 2006 edition of the Biennale of Sydney, is an exhibition deeply aware of this context and probably didn’t need its chairman to draw attention to it in such an indelicate manner. Artistic director and curator Charles Merewether has produced an exhibition whose reflexivity in this regard is apparent even without — and, truth be told, in spite of — the buzzword-laden publicity that surrounded it. For the first time in a decade, relationships constructed in the process of selecting art and artists for a Biennale of Sydney have actually produced an engaging thread that runs consistently through the entire exhibition, and which furthermore seems in every way to have reflected the artistic director’s intentions. Here Merewether’s Biennale distinguishes itself quite markedly from no less than its last four successive predecessors. Jonathan Watkins’ 1998 Everyday, despite a prescient selection of artists in terms of subsequent trajectories, didn’t quite tease out the political and ontological complexities of its subject, opting instead to project a polemical, quasi-metaphorical model of simplicity against perceived theoretical loftiness, a distinction not borne out in the selection of works. Its successor jettisoned curatorial thematics — not to mention a title — altogether in favour of what seemed like a organisational profile-raising exercise complete with a star-studded line-up, a big-name curatorium and even a few collector’s corners. These were followed by two vaguely-titled exhibitions, Richard Grayson’s (The World May Be) Fantastic and Isobel Carlos’ On Reason and Emotion, both of which, for different reasons, would have been more suited to the smaller and more focused format of an institutional group show, and both of whose premises were frankly too brittle to stretch to the considerably larger and more broad-ranging model currently being commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney.

In contrast, Zones of Contact is a biennale intent on engaging in dialogue with the global proliferation of biennales — a phrase so well instituted as to approach cliché — about the patterns and effects of globalisation, fully aware of the problematics of this proliferation within the context of globalisation, that is, as a cultural lubricant for the flow of transnational capital. It is in a sense one big tautology; intent on both emulating and critiquing a particular strand of exhibition making that has come to dominate the post-Soviet era, exemplified by such widely discussed presentations as Magiciens de la Terre, America: Bride of the Sun, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Documentas X and 11, and the Cities on the Move series. Drawing on the postcolonial theory of the 1970s and 80s in addition to increased, if often forced, mobility, as well as rapid advances in communications technology, these exhibitions — all of them blockbusters and canonical fulcrums for critical discussion — were marked by a distinct politicisation and an inclusive approach toward artists practising or at least originating from outside traditional Euro-American centres (even if this occasionally manifested itself as an orientalist fetishising of otherness and identity, inclusiveness in some instances serving as an end in itself). Increasingly however, they have also demonstrated a certain reflexivity, due in no small part to the influence of the more speculative, less didactic ‘laboratorial’ curatorial strategies that emerged in response to developments in artistic practice toward collaboration, engagement and conviviality during the 1990s. Zones of Contact sits squarely within this tendency — and self-consciously so — as a truly international biennale, light on Western European, North American and even Australian content, and invested with a rigorous theoretical approach through culture to the synthesising and homogenising effects of globalisation on culture.

In the foreword and preface to a catalogue packed full of elegant design and provocative contributions, the Biennale’s chairman and outgoing managing director respectively put the coherency of Zones of Contact down to Sydney’s apparently distinctive strategy of consistently appointing a single curator — ‘an individual’ — this year operating with increased funding from the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy to realise 'a personal vision and process'. Quite aside from the rather patriarchal tone of this formulation and its reliance on a questionable ontology and dubious ‘heroic’ authorial model — biennale as one man’s quest — these introductions make clear even to readers unfamiliar with publishing schedules and the editorial process that their catalogue contributions were written well in advance of the exhibition’s installation. For while Merewether’s much-publicised ‘framework’ is certainly solid and reflected beautifully in his cogent selection of artists, the physical placement of the show’s constituent works often and unfortunately falls short of its promise.

This is especially obvious in the two larger institutional venues, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, where potentially fruitful dialogue is truncated by isolating certain works that would benefit from a little more flow-through and conversation, such as complex installations by Ruark Lewis and Daido Moriyama, in discrete rooms dictated by existing architecture; or leaving them largely overlooked in transitional spaces, a fate that has befallen Akram Zaatari’s, Zarina Bhimji’s and Olga Chernysheva’s contributions, the last stretched over two venues, around a corner and over an elevator door. Or dialogue is over-simplified by forcing other works into incongruous juxtaposition, such as the head-scratching pairing of Imants Tillers and Lidwien van de Ven at the MCA — aestheticised indexical appropriation juxtaposed with sensitive interrogations of the representation of place — or a frustratingly over-packed room at the Art Gallery of NSW squeezing together works by Savandhary Vongpoothorn, Lu Qing and Ghada Amer. The tendency towards imbalance is no more clearly demonstrated than at Pier 2/3, where Antony Gormley’s Asian Field, centred around 180,000 clay figures produced by three hundred and fifty ‘helpers’ in China’s Guandong Province and largely reliant on epic scale along with romantic notions of the individual amongst the masses, takes up the entire upper floor of the one hundred and forty metre building — and the lion’s share of press attention — while fragmented across the entrance to the floor below and therefore difficult to appreciate in its totality is Cao Fei’s What are you doing here? — a wittier, more playful and ultimately more sensitive collaboration with Osram factory workers from the same region.

Thus, while coherent and productive dialogues occur across the biennale as a whole, they seem unable to articulate themselves on ground level. This isn’t so much of a problem in the myriad smaller venues scattered across Sydney, the experience of which is mediated through the process of negotiating one’s way around the city to see modest presentations of provocative and challenging art. But it certainly comes to the fore in the larger venues where a lack of spatial dynamism and some jarring transitions have the fatigue-inducing effect of a salon-style hang, much to the detriment of some truly exhilarating work. As a colleague of mine conjectured, it is as if with the artists and venues in place, the placement of the work had been approached like a jigsaw puzzle.

But is this not unavoidable when an exhibition of such scale operates under the control of a single curator and a visibly stretched support staff? After all, while the injection of funding thanks to the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy has certainly enabled an expansion of the Biennale’s scope and ambition, it doesn’t seem to have resulted in much of a bolstering of the structure of its managing organisation, such that an exhibition designer or a team of assistant curators could be commissioned to oversee the exhibition’s installation at its many and varied venues. In this sense, the Biennale of Sydney as an organisation is caught between the weight of, on the one hand, a combination of certain historical associations with ‘major’ venues and its perceptions of its own rationale, and, on the other, the day-to-day logistics of coordinating a large-scale exhibition on a budget which, despite obvious improvements in the last couple of years, is still far from comparable to that of other international art festivals. And unfortunately this tension translates into visible disjunctures in the flow of an otherwise coherent exhibition.

Which brings us back to Helen Coonan’s apparent right to introduce a Biennale of Sydney, whose framework is for the most part structured around addressing precisely the kind of dispossession effected by her own government’s policies. For what the biennale chair made clear is that the exhibition — and by association the Australian art world as a whole — depends largely on the ongoing patronage of the state and the civil relationship that entails. And, unintentionally, that the question of what we can realistically expect from a state-sanctioned exhibition is inextricably tied to the broader question of what we can realistically expect from the state. To take the liberty of radicalising the point somewhat, this question should extend not just to the governance of any particular party — an ideological position all too easy to stop at in a two-party system — but to the very structure of the state itself. As a reflexive take on postcolonial exhibition practices, Zones of Contact is a biennale premised to some degree on interrogating the politics of representation — of cultures, of conflicts, of the land — and there is no reason that such an interrogation should not extend to representational politics. This is not so much a matter of 'How do we want to be governed?', recently posed as the title of a travelling exhibition by Documenta 12 curators Ruth Noack and Roger Buergel, but of 'How do we want to govern ourselves?'

Quite consciously, Zones of Contact operates in a cultural landscape defined by 9/11 and its aftermath. Anyone involved in any kind of activism in the past decade will remember the excitement generated by the new forms of autonomous organisation and engagement being explored — for all its whims and complexities — by the anti-globalisation movement, followed by the sudden decline, at least in the West, of these activities in the wake of the events of 9/11. In the past five years, the mobilisation of liberal democratic societies against more retrograde, concentrated forms of spectacular organisation, be they theocratic, dictatorial or simply terrorist phantasms, has gone hand in hand with an intensification of internal policing, culturally as much as juridically, to a point where any position outside of the dialectic of terrorism and state is presented as marginal. As Hou Hanru writes in one of the many insightful contributions to the Biennale catalogue, 'this reality is exerting a huge impact on every affair in daily life and social organisation, including on cultural institutions.'

Why, then, does a biennale so acutely aware of this state of affairs need to default to the hierarchical model of a single artistic director in pursuit of a unique vision, especially when a more fluid, integrated structure would do much to overcome many of the current organisation’s logistical shortcomings? There is no compelling reason why the Biennale needs to stay moored to the major institutions, at least in the present form of that arrangement, where significant gallery space at the MCA and the AGNSW is given over when smaller, more surprising engagements with their often difficult architecture would suffice. Or that there should not be more consultation and collaboration over a longer period of time with smaller venues, who could actively facilitate direct and sustained contact between visiting artists and their own diverse constituencies and local communities. Or that the biennale cannot extend this collaboration into still smaller spaces, the artist-run initiatives and other autonomous projects that lend a tangible richness and vitality to Sydney’s cultural life. Hou writes that to 'propose solutions as to how contemporary art should develop through the constant reinventions of its infrastructure', it is useful to conceptualise a viral model of communication through self-organised 'collaborations, exchanges and mutual support for alternative forces'. In Hou’s articulation, 'Mutual contaminations among different self-organisational practices have proven highly fruitful ... A major event like a biennale or triennial should take this advantage, and turn itself into such a "zone of contamination".'

Despite Charles Merewether’s valid assertions on the Biennale’s role as a framework by which to expose local audiences to new international art, and the numerous ‘contacts’ between works, and between works and audience that occur across the breadth of his exhibition, Zones of Contact retains a somewhat generic feel. This sense derives in some part from the Biennale’s awkward installation, as if it could have been configured for any given space or city, but also from its overall structure as a spectacle that we can only view and never really engage. There’s no real specificity here, no opportunity for genuine, ongoing dialogue, only fleeting encounters. Writing in 1984 in the catalogue to his exhibition Art & Social Commitment at the Art Gallery of NSW, Merewether noted that the Great Depression and the rise of fascism constituted for many artists a shattering of the ethical order that was 'everywhere symbolised by visions of the modern city, the "city of dreams", where the beliefs and ideals of humanity would be progressively realised, unfolding into a future of harmonious accord.' In a strange way, the Biennale of Sydney, in its current form, symbolises Sydney’s own dreamlife as a global city, open-minded, open-bordered, sharing the international stage with a host of other metropolitan centres from other affluent nations.

Things that think, critically, compulsively: avant-gardening with Koji Ryui

On Koji Ryui's Mutual Obligation at Artspace, Sydney, 29 May to 27 June 2009, originally published in Column, issue 5, 2009, pp. 88-93.

The phrase ‘mutual obligation’ has a special resonance for Australians. From 2001 to 2007, it was the official name of a policy of John Howard’s conservative coalition government, under which welfare recipients were required to ‘give something back’ to the community that supported them. Let’s not even try to be impartial about this — for all the rhetoric of civic responsibility, budget-balancing and punishing welfare fraud that accompanied its establishment, ‘mutual obligation’ was a populist punitive measure directed against those deemed incompatible with Howard’s vision of Australia: single mothers and ‘dole bludgers’. The cornerstone of the policy was the Work for the Dole program, under which the long-term unemployed were forced into ridiculously menial labour for incomes well below minimum wage, for the ostensible purpose of increasing their prospects of future employment. The exercise of ‘forcing the poor to work’ wasn’t simply ‘arguably pointless’, as Koji Ryui put it in statement when he took the term as the point of departure for an artistic project of the same name; it was pointless, at least insofar as the policy’s declared goals were concerned. As another recent work to appropriate the term, Raquel Ormella’s striking Australia Rising #1 (2007), makes clear, ‘mutual obligation’ was simply another facet of the obfuscating management language Howard utilised in tandem with patriotic symbolism to create an amenable aesthetic context for policy delivery. The reality, understood by the program’s supporters and detractors alike, was completely in keeping with the Howard government’s ongoing process of exclusion, whereby marginal social classes were identified and public othered as ‘un-Australian’, paradigms against which the illusory Australian community could define itself.

On first glance, Ryui’s take on Mutual Obligation had little to do with the sense of cultural struggle Australians might remember from the Howard years. Even a comparison with Ormella’s work fails to clarify its relationship to the continent-wide gated community Howard sought to create. Ryui’s muted whites and unfinished pine are a long way from Australia Rising’s dizzying bricolage of primary colours, his pared-back assemblages nothing like its complex stitch-work, his enigmatic opacity offering none of its evocations of street protest and suffrage marches. Sprawling with its own intriguing internal logic across the floor of Artspace’s central gallery, its topography rising now and then to peak sharply just beneath the ceiling, but spending most of the time at knee height or lower, Mutual Obligation was more like a carefully landscaped garden, if not of earthly delights then the accoutrements of earthly activity, constructed, as it was, largely from unremarkable domestic objects — buckets, plastic bags, foil, dowel, string — a garden in which long-term welfare recipients might, two years earlier, have found themselves toiling on pain of losing their benefits. Closer inspection, however, revealed that the realities of the policy had not been lost on Ryui’s generous sense of humour: next to the sheer glass façade of the space sat a selection of window cleaning tools and cheap paintbrushes, albeit sprouting weird, limb-like and altogether useless wooden appendices, or flaunting handles into which fetching spirals had been gouged with a sensitively applied power sander (a motif that would be repeated throughout the installation).

Koji Ryui, Mutual Obligation, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

Still, Mutual Obligation was hardly the kind of work that anyone would describe as activist. Ormella’s work is invested with a palpable political immediacy; after all, it was produced while the policy of Mutual Obligation was still in effect, for direct insertion into the context on which it commented. Ryui’s installation, on the other hand, uses the term not as subject matter, but as the starting point for an examination of broader trends within society and culture. Here, ‘mutual obligation’ represents a distinctly binary logic, describing a problematic and ultimately fallacious relationship between the individual and the state that caricatures dichotomies which, despite decades of deconstruction, pervade the production and reception of art. For Ryui, sculpture bears its own obligations to contrasting conditions simultaneously — positive and negative space, subject and object, sculpture and installation, and so on — all of whose persistent art-historical and pedagogical framing maintains a tangible impact on the way in which art is understood and, to varying degrees, actually made. There are, of course, occasional nods to the political reality of mutual obligation — Ryui deliberately chose to work with materials that were either cheap or free, while the fragility of their construction and installation, like that of a chair-like structure balanced tenuously between a length of dowel and one of Artspace’s columns, certainly references the precarious living conditions in which many artists find themselves. Such relevance aside, however, Ryui’s work is primarily a means of thinking through the dichotomous structure of artistic convention in practice, a practice that entails assembling and arranging things in the service of thought, of creating things that think.

A slight anecdotal divergence might be helpful in shedding light on how Ryui does this. Near the entrance to the gallery, Artspace’s technician, in diligent and highly admirable observation of his health and safety responsibilities to the viewing public, had placed a small sign. Simply worded and entirely innocent, the sign found itself drawn, despite the protestations of its sobre font and symmetrical organisation, into a dialogue with the work that produced an unanticipated double entendre. In retrospect, though, it’s a little obvious: when introducing mutant squeegees, panoptic bowls and nihilistic paper cups, how else could the legend ‘TRIP HAZARD’ be interpreted but as health department­–style advisory on the possible psychedelic effects of Ryui’s work? Happily, this slip of the institutional tongue was perfectly in keeping with the artist’s intentions. As with the unpretentious materials he employs in his work, hallucination for Ryui is not so much the wild delirium of Hollywood movies and 1960s psychedelia — be it revelatory or horrifying — but an occurrence embedded in the everyday: a mirage, a trick of the light, of tired eyes and perhaps the odd flashback to half-remembered episodes from idle teenage drug experimentation. In this sense Mutual Obligation was anything but supermarket surrealism or overwrought quasi-mystical vision, humble enough in materials, craftsmanship and presentation to differ only slightly from what is commonly understood as reality, and formally consistent enough to constitute a plausible corner of the world. The most effective hallucinations are not the most dramatic, but the most convincing; Mutual Obligation was less a radical reordering of perception than an acknowledgment that the notion of familiarity might not be so easily defined by its other — contra Howard.

Indeed, Mutual Obligation is pervaded by a sensibility for the indefinable, for spaces and gestures that are neither one thing nor other, or which appear to fulfil the requirements of a certain category while doing the same for its supposed opposite, ultimately eluding both. We could even say that Ryui’s work is defined by this indefinability. The enigma of Marcel Duchamp looms large here, not so much in Mutual Obligation’s obligation to the legacy of the readymade — Ryui’s sculptures are at once readymades and they are not — but in his consistent evocation of the indefinite and happily undefined quality Duchamp designated ‘infrathin’. Without it, the art-critical couplets Ryui is so intent on exploring can only be partially successful in apprehending the world; the perceptual slippages produced by their failure are as inevitable, and arguably as interesting, as that failure itself. This might explain Ryui’s embrace of hallucination in its most accessible mode, constituting, like animism and daydreaming, a framework by which inanimate objects can be ascribed a representational function, such that they take on recognisably human characteristics, or in which at the very least the relationship between subject and object is compressed toward an infrathin distinction.

Koji Ryui, Mutual Obligation, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

When Ryui included in Mutual Obligation a pair of crystals whose combination is apparently the most powerful in the universe, offset by an abandoned coffee cup that he found scrawled with a singularly negative combination of curses — FUCK YOU! FUCK THE PLANET! FUCK YOUR MOTHER! FUCK GOD! FUCK LIFE! — he entered the work into current debates on art’s thingness, opening it onto messy discussions of ‘quasi-subjects’ and ‘quasi-objects’, and the proposition that there might be some continuity between self and world, that what has come to be institutionalised as modern thought would rather avoid. Here he gleefully asserts the irreducibility, rather than autonomy, of his work’s artness as a quality that exceeds all pre-existing categories, no matter how vigorously it may flirt with them. This is art as spillage and then some, the muck left on the floor after the critics have tried to clean up. Imbuing the work with anthropomorphic qualities, with hidden powers of its own, he suggests that what he assembles in his studio, transports to the gallery floor and painstakingly and sensitively arranges is something other than an object — it is a thing. And things, as WJT Mitchell informs us, ‘are no longer passively waiting for a concept, theory, or sovereign subject to arrange them in ordered ranks of objecthood.’ Thingness, in other words, is theory production embodied.

Koji Ryui, Mutual Obligation, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

The theoreticality of things, their capacity to think for and even independently of their authors should not, however, be taken as a given. Like their authors, certain things think more astutely than others. Let’s picture Ryui, then, as the caring horticulturist, skillfully raising his things to think for themselves. For all of its raffishness, the harmony of his arrangement in the space is disarming, bringing to mind Guy Debord’s description of the garden Asger Jorn raised between a few old houses in Albisola:

The painted and sculpted sections, the never-regular stairs between the different levels of ground, the trees, the added elements, a cistern, vines, the most varied sorts of always welcome debris, all thrown together in a perfect disorder, compose one of the most complicated and, ultimately, one of the best unified landscapes that one can traverse in the space of a fraction of a hectare. Everything finds its place there without difficulty.

Brought together with its comrades in a similar sort of ‘perfect disorder’, the Ryuian thing is no ordinary thing; in a further departure from the hermetic logic of late modernism Ryui made it clear that he considered his trip hazard to be a nothing less than monument to contemporary society. Negotiating lengths of sander-gouged dowel draped in crushed but delicately shaped foil as they stand watch over hesitant floral shapes thrown in twine across the floor, it is difficult to envisage those monuments to which Australian audiences have become accustomed, certainly not in immediate memory of the Howard era. No beating flag or patriarchal bust; no gleaming shards of steel or faux-rusted metal either. Instead they are replaced with prosaic watering cans, folded and woven tyvek, an upturned garbage bin on top of which two pillows sit anxiously, bound together with bright yellow rope like a couple of hostages awaiting their fate, this slightly disturbing scene enlivened by the presence of good-natured smiley faces on balls and plastic bags around the room. Everything here is fragile and fragmented, so precariously poised that one senses that the greater hazard, should a viewer happen to trip on one of these items, would be to the work itself. This, of course, is entirely appropriate: just as Mutual Obligation is nothing less than a monument to contemporary society, we might also say that it is also nothing more.

Koji Ryui, Mutual Obligation, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

Psychedelia takes many forms, having mutated over the ages like a slow burning hallucination into experimental media that demand ever-newer types of sensory engagement. Electronic, industrial and noise music, for example, have departed from the standard rock and roll registers of rhythm and melody to operate on different levels of perception, be they physical, visceral or cerebral. Black metal is arguably one such genre of pop cultural underground, it's a-syncopation and indistinct sonority offering a listening experience that is closer to ambient music and free jazz than it is to other forms of hard rock and heavy metal. Moreover, the aggressively anti-academic stance of its producers — so bleakly rendered as to exceed even the nihilism of Ryui’s coffee cup — provides a means of understanding the theoretical operation of Ryui’s eminently more affable version of psychedelia. ‘My music does not come from a philosophy’, the Italian metal artist Ovskum stated recently, ‘but from a precritical compulsion, an instinct which comes prior to the thought and does not depend on it’. Whatever Ovskum’s motive in attempting to preclude any speculation as to motive, this formulation is interesting — if the process of creation is precritical, it is not necessarily anti-critical. Precriticality, in fact, actually supposes a critical moment; it is simply that this moment is located subsequent to the production of the work.

To include the notions of criticality and compulsion within a conception of a given thing’s becoming-art complicates the thinking that traditionally opposes them, in which artistic expression and artistic rationality are incommensurable. Moreover, it stresses that theory does not have to precede practice, that it can happily occur at some point during the process of becoming-art. This much was noted in a New York Times review of Hideous Gnosis, the academic conference on black metal in which Ovskum was quoted. ‘Their work is basically philosophy’, it argued. ‘It is theoretical, a grid for looking at life, with ancient roots’ — noting, lest the assertion appear hysterical to those less inclined to take the légions noirs and their apologists so seriously, that it ‘could do with a critical apparatus’. 

These same terms apply to Ryui’s work — which, in contrast to black metal, does operate within a critical apparatus, as limited as the art world and its own understanding of what it does may be — describing in the best way possible the function of things assembled to think through a problem or set of problems. They start to produce theory at the point at which they internalise art’s paradoxical obligations to mutually contrasting conditions, standing, however precariously, as ciphers for theory’s incapacity to grasp the excess and complexity of art, or spilling across the gallery floor, mischievously daring us to trip over them, to stumble as we try to pick our way around the room as a reminder that we don’t quite understand the contours of the garden we have entered. Sculpture, of course, rises up from the ground, and falling is just another way of meeting it half way. But then taking up its enjoinment to think for ourselves is far safer.

Vernon Ah Kee: Belief Suspension

On Vernon Ah Kee's Belief Suspension at Artspace, Sydney, 8 February to 1 March 2008, from Column, issue 2, 2008, pp. 106-10. 

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

The odd angry shot

A shotgun blast is the first you know of it, before you even open the door. Then comes a low, metallic scraping. Finally inside, an uncanny doubling: in a darkened corner, the bleak image of a lynched ‘dead board’, bound in barbed wire, hung like a violated corpse from a tree, peppered with bullet and shot holes, all this projected onto multi-planed screen made up of six ghostly white surfboards suspended in space. As the projector light plays across their irregular surfaces, now and again bringing the brutally ravaged dead board and the central board of the arrangement into perfect alignment — oddly satisfying in its geometrical congruity, like slotting in the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle — it casts impressive shadows from the sleek forms of the six makeshift screens onto the wall behind them. Any sense of edification, formal or otherwise, is short lived, undercut by the morbid buzzing of flies, those blasts come without warning, causing the board to pitch violently on its barbed wire axis as surface fragments explode into nothing, and that persistent scraping.

Down a wall off to the side are two imposing printed slogans, ‘We grew here’ the more familiar, one half of a glib rhyming couplet popularised during the casual racism that run unchecked during the Howard years, ‘Not a willing participant’ equally blunt but more obscure — participant in what, exactly? These are punctuated by an arrangement, pointedly elegant, of three more boards, which, unlike their solemn counterparts in the last room, are animated by vibrant designs in red, black and yellow, their undersides revealing hand-drawn close-up portraits of two older Aboriginal men and a boy, deftly executed in black, white and grey, their expressions, their gaze, blank and yet pregnant with meaning, or the potential for meaning, the potential to mean. The energy of these surfaces is underlined by traces of wax smeared across one of the surfboards — it has actually already been used. 

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

In the next space, the tone lifts again, stereo speakers belting out the Warumpi Band’s anthemic Stompin Ground as the soundtrack to two right-angled wall-to-ceiling projections of images collectively titled Cantchant II. If the imagery in the first room seemed to emerge from the murky depths of the popular imagination, the narratives in these videos run curiously counter to it, professionally shot and edited footage of a young man surfing on the waxed board filling one wall, while all three boards appear in the other channel, brandished somewhat awkwardly by Aboriginal men in garish surf-wear, who, importantly, never enter the water as they pose on and around a Gold Coast beach. If the imagery of the young surfer is hypnotic and that of the men humorous, both ultimately read as statements of defiance, assertions of a certain sovereignty in the face of a beach culture whose implicit racial codification has gone unremarked until very recently. This becomes especially apparent as the music fades out and the three men occupy the beach in silent dignity with their boards held upright, like shields in an ethnographic photograph. All the while, the lynched board from the first video, or what’s left of it, hangs in the corner like a presence, low spotlight seeping through the gaping holes left by gunshot.

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

The shifting emotional responses elicited across this installation, cutting seamlessly from confrontation to meditation to exaltation, from bluntness to elegance, from overload to restraint, are the unmistakable hallmarks of the work of Vernon Ah Kee, the products of whose artistic practice depart from and beautifully, disturbingly, problematise the tensions and contradictions of Australian society. A development of his Institute of Modern Art project Cantchant, Belief Suspension presents an Indigenous perspective on the role of the beach in the construction of Australian identity, and its recent emergence as a contested space, a site of racial and social tensions played out most dramatically between surf communities during the Cronulla riots.

Vernon Ah Kee, Belief Suspension, installation view, Artspace, Sydney

On the beach

For a nation without land borders, it is certainly notable that Australia so often defines itself by its limits. Seemingly endless drought, a recessional agricultural sector and the implacable withdrawal of services, both public and private, from rural communities have seen ‘the man on the land’, for so long the emblematic figure of Australian culture, lose its luster, replaced in the popular imagination by a bikini clad Anglo-Celtic model, swearing casually and coquettishly on an empty beach. The shift is not unreflective of social and economic reality, of course — more than ninety per cent of Australians live in urban centres dotted along the continents vast coastline, clustering in its temperate south-east, while agriculture now accounts for less than four per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. But the significance of this symbolic shift to Australian society’s conception of itself, to its very behaviour and to its organisation of space, cannot be discounted.

In the honeymoon period of its first six months in office, it seemed that the most sustained criticism Kevin Rudd’s federal Labor government could attract was that it dealt largely in the purely symbolic. Ratifying the Kyoto protocol on climate change, convening a summit on ideas for Australia’s future and, most pertinently with regard to Vernon Ah Kee’s work, issuing an official apology to the Stolen Generations were perceived by many commentators to be gestures directed toward establishing in the public eye the new government’s social democratic credentials, which required little in the way of actual policy commitment. But then Rudd was only continuing a strategy employed, to slightly different ends, of course, but to quite extraordinary effect by his predecessor. If John Howard’s frequent invocation, in person and through governmental decree, of ‘traditional’ Australian symbols — the flag, the national anthem, the Australian cricket team, the nation’s garish sporting colours — was understood by certain sectors of society to be twee or even comical, it had a profound effect on the nation’s self-image. And this image, more than simply projecting a representation of selfhood, served in many ways to constitute that very selfhood, to establish the nation as nation, to define its points of difference from other nations, to define itself by its limits, at its limits, limits to be defended absolutely. 

During Howard’s tenure, the physical limits of the nation became the locus of national identity, of national self-imaging and imagining, the leisure, body and surf cultures attendant to the notion of what we might facetiously call ‘coastality’ fueling an unsustainable property bubble. Water, whose very scarcity contributed so heavily to Australia’s turn away from its dead heart, was recast as an urban amenity, ‘the central article of faith’, as David Teh has put it, ‘in Sydney’s real estate ecstasy’ — evangelised nationwide from Perth to Port Douglas — ‘and the international propagation of Brand Australia’ (cue bikini model).

Not surprisingly for a commodity, there is a duality to this limit. As the point of contact between the interior and the exterior, the cradle of Australia’s identity and the identity projected to the world, a cyclical representation, the beach also has a historically imbued use-value as the first point of resistance to invasion, maintaining a sense of contestation. Which is to say that the country’s most idealised space is also its most contested, ever in need of vigilince. Witness the border panic of the Howard years, the fact that a television network could even consider airing a program called Border Patrol, the fact that anyone would even watch it — such was Howard’s mastery of the aesthetic dimension. Witness the brutal organisation of space in the state of exception imposed on harbourside Sydney during APEC. Witness Cronulla, not a boil-over of frustration at police harassment and social exclusion as in Redfern and Macquarie Fields, but the very act of exclusion itself, perpetrated by a White Australia fearing for its purity, its sovereignty, its place on the beach, in the face of migrant miscegenation and, by association, Indigenous peoples themselves in search of sovereignty. There was a certain symmetry to it all: occurring in the last term of Howard’s eleven-year tenure, it bookended nicely with the Hansonite paranoia of the first, both drawing their rallying points, their very language, from the aesthetic order Howard himself had constructed.

The last wave

Invaders know the necessity of defense only too well. Thus rejoinder Ah Kee’s extra-bold wall text offers to the strategic disingenuousness of ‘We grew here, you flew here’: actually, we grew here. The fundamental veridicality of this statement is conveyed in the matter-of-factness with which the comic trio from Cantchant (we grew here) 2, the two-channel video in the adjoining space, stare into the camera as they stand their ground on the beach, a gesture echoing the gaze of faces on the boards they carry.

This kind of picturing constitutes a rich strand within Ah Kee’s practice, beginning with the suite of drawings he titled, after Australia’s somewhat erroneous conception of its own virtue, Fantasies of the Good (2005). These images were based on, and in some cases drawn directly from, the typographical photographs taken by Norman Tindale in his famous attempt to ‘map’ Aboriginal Australia, among which Ah Kee had actually found two of his ancestors. Tindale’s undertaking was among the first to establish notions of territory among Aboriginal people, helping to dispel the notion of Terra Nullius that had been used to justify European land claims. But at the same time, as Ah Kee has observed, Tindale’s methodology of framing each subject squarely and ‘objectively’, to the point of dressing them clean white shirts, constituted an act of assimilation. With its slightly off-centre figures and focus on the proud, questioning or probing gaze — depending on your point of view — Fantasies of the Good, as with the vast quantity of work that has proceeded from it, is a reclamation of portraiture as a mechanism for representing Aboriginality.

In a further reiteration of Fantasies of the Good, Ah Kee’s second wall text, ‘Not a willing participant’, a statement of refusal directed toward White Australian attempts to improve conditions for Aboriginal people that do little to help, and in some cases cause more harm than good. ‘Not a willing participant’ specifically refers to the imposition of ‘dry’ conditions as a means to combat alcoholism in Aboriginal communities, when far more complex strategies are employed to deal with the problem elsewhere in the community — how well has prohibition worked in the past? But it equally encapsulates the artist’s indifference Rudd’s apology, delivered shortly after Belief Suspension opened to the public, which stopped decisively short of providing any form of compensation to the Stolen Generations.

Complementing these resonances across Ah Kee’s practice, Belief Suspension engages in a complex dialogue with the work of other artists, situating the specific questions raised by the project within the context of a broader field of artistic enquiry into the conditions of contemporary life. He is not alone, for instance, in challenging the trite sloganeering of Cronulla, his ‘We grew here’ joining Tony Schwensen’s inversion of the similarly glib ‘Australia: love it or leave it’ in his performance Rise (2007). With its evocation of Australia’s atrocious history of Aboriginal genocide, Ah Kee’s hanged and buckshot surfboard (also called Belief Suspension, 2008) corresponds neatly with Christian Marclay’s extraordinary Guitar Drag (2000) and its chilling reference to the 1998 lynching of James Byrd Jr, an African-American man literally dragged to his death behind a pick-up truck.

But it is Ah Kee’s dialogue with fellow Brisbane artist Scott Redford that is most clearly articulated through this project, helping to clarify the relationship of both artists to mainstream Australia society. As Robert Leonard noted of the first installment of Cantchant at the Institute of Modern Art, Ah Kee ‘colonises Redford’s territory’ — dead boards, beach culture, the imagery of the Gold Coast — reveling in similar ‘paradoxes of identification and opposition’ that distinguishes it from so much straightforward, heavy-handed political art. Ah Kee himself has professed to never having surfed, the waves near his family home in North Queensland having been broken by the Great Barrier Reef long before the swell reached the shore. Likewise, as an Aboriginal man, his feelings of alienation from white Australian society are made manifest throughout the exhibition, violently in the Belief Suspension installation, humorously in the beach fashion scene of Cantchant 2. But it is the other half of Cantchant 2 that adds an element of porosity to the project, as we follow the sublime skills of Aboriginal pro-surfer Dale Richards as he executes his moves on Ah Kee’s custom-made board. Indeed, the very quality of the boards, their craftsmanship, is testament to Ah Kee’s reluctance to dismiss surf culture out of hand.

Paradox is one thing, Belief Suspension seems to suggest, and Australian society is full of it. The trick is to make it work.

Of bestial acts and rabbits in hats: Zanny Begg

From Broadsheet, vol. 38, no. 3, 2009, pp. 195-7.

Zanny Begg, Treat (or Trick), 2008, film performance, installation, 7 min, DVD, PAL

Every performer, implies Zanny Begg’s 2008 video installation Treat (or Trick), relies to some extend on the complicity of their audience for the success of a given act, be it the distribution of the wealth or just pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It is an implicitly Brechtian conceit, an element underlined in the work’s inclusion in the 2009 Istanbul Biennale, What Keeps Mankind Alive, themed, as it was, after the final song in the second act of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. In a curatorial framework circulated in advance of the biennale, What, How & for Whom (WHW), the four-woman, Zagreb-based curatorial collective behind the event, asserted that ‘bringing back Brecht is an attempt to think about the role of artistic endeavour in the conditions of contemporary capitalism, to reevaluate our everyday practices, our value systems and modes of operation’; Brecht, they argued ‘invites us to rethink our position again and again’. This is very much the logic that seems to underpin Begg’s work; certainly Treat (or Trick), but also, and irreducibly, her entire practice as it sits within a general movement toward the visibility of the political in contemporary art.

Interestingly, in terms of its construction of a relationship between a work and an individuated viewer — or, to use logic of the work itself, a performer and their audience — Treat (or Trick) is as close to the conventional staging of aesthetic experience as Begg’s work has come in recent years. The work invites the viewer into a black circus sideshow tent to see a video shot and projected in the same tent, a three part treatise-cum-magic show in which the ‘invisible hand’ of the market plays the magician whose rabbit assumes the mystical form of the commodity, at once the objectification of labour relations and the object of consumer desires. The viewer assumes the role of the audience, otherwise detectable only by a canned laughter and applause, an audience which, intertitles tell us, is all too aware that it is being duped by Mr Invisible Hands, but goes along willingly to the show, for the top-hat that produces the rabbit is where the audience’s seemingly bottomless desires find their home. In its ironically seductive presentation of the performer-audience dynamic, Treat (or Trick) proposes an awareness of similar relationships within the field of art, and begs the question of how they might relate to the social relations objectified in the commodity.

Zanny Begg, Treat (or Trick), 2008, installation view, Istanbul Biennale

If we are to take the work’s references to Marx as more than a repudiation of free market theories of economic management — which, truth be told, even Kevin Rudd is offering these days — and understand it as illustrating a critique of a social alienation whose origin lies in the division of labour, then this is a critique that operates from and is embodied within Begg’s practice as a whole. Works like Treat (or Trick), in which Begg is credited as the sole artist, are complemented by a cluster of collaborative projects. Notable among these are her work with Viennese artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler, with whom she produced the film What Would It Mean to Win? as well as an accompanying installations at the 2008 Taipei Biennale and Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen, and with Keg de Souza with whom she organises the activities of Sydney artist collective You Are Here. Complicating this are the multidisciplinary practices these collaborations and Begg’s individual work involve, embracing critical, curatorial and pedagogical activities alongside art production, as well as the often simultaneous character of these projects, and their varying timeframes — 2016: Archive Project, one of the chief undertakings of You Are Here, is an evolving, decade-long commitment to explore and record the rapid changes underway in the inner-Sydney suburb of Redfern.

These projects have manifested themselves at quite staggering levels of scope and ambition. The You Are Here-curated project There goes the neighbourhood, for instance, successfully positioned debates around the transformations in Redfern within the context of global artistic investigations of gentrification and urban planning. In addition to a major publication and exhibition at Performance Space, There goes the neighbourhood took in artist residencies, public programs and a restaging of Alan Kaprow’s participatory installation Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hoffman, coordinated by Nick Keys, Astrid Lorange and Lucas Ihlein at Waterloo artist-run initiative Locksmith. The work of local artists dealing with highly sensitive issues of immediate relevance to the Redfern-Waterloo community, as well as an information centre on grassroots activism within the community itself, were complemented by contributions by such high profile international artist-activists as Michael Rakowitz, Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas of New York’s 16 Beaver group, Miklos Erhardt and Little Warsaw, Brazil’s Bijari, Spain’s Democracia, Chicago’s Temporary Services and Jakob Jakobsen of the self-dissolved Copenhagen Free University, with Temporary Services and Jakobsen visiting Sydney for the installation and accompanying events. It was a mammoth undertaking, but its vibrancy, impact and critical acuity were such that it was arguably one of the most important artist-driven projects to take place in Sydney for some time.

Whether working individually or collaboratively, Begg is careful to consider the role of the audience. Though highly political in its subject-matter, her work marks a shift away from the dry earnestness often associated with certain activist art practices, and she has developed a characteristic humour and humility most clearly expressed in the elegant, affecting, hand-drawn animations that accompany the live footage in Treat (or Trick), What would it mean to win? and her 2008 film Don’t Say Goodbye: an exploration of spatial politics in Hong Kong. Moreover, Begg’s work operates at a range of social registers, from sophisticated analysis of the strategies and motivations of social movements, to projects geared toward audiences located well beyond the traditional activist and artistic communities. In 2008, for example, Begg and de Souza created a psychogeographical representation of Kali Code, a previously unmapped long-term squatter settlement in Yogyakarta, in collaboration with community members, including local children whose drawings of the area, generated in workshops run by the artists, were added to a giant map. For There goes the neighbourhood the pair hosted similar workshops at Redfern Community Centre to produce animated counter-narratives addressing daily life in the area, while in collaboration with software developer Andy Nicholson, they devised Pemulway Dream Team, a distribution-ready computer game pitching boxers, played by members of the Tony Mundine gym, against property developers and general injustice. 

Begg’s expanded conception of artistic practice integrates the socially engaged function of self-organised activity, the strategic constitution of new publics, with the socially concerned content of her more properly artistic works, which offer a symbolic imagining of the political sophistication — potential and actual — of these new publics. Through this dual politicisation, Begg and her complex network of Australian and international collaborators, a continuation of the activist networks developed by the 1990s social movements who first realised the communicative power of the internet, participate in a significant revitalisation of the social function of aesthetic production that works with and against existing institutional structures to stake a claim for symbolic and political autonomy.

In conversation with Justin Clemens toward the end of 2007, Anthony Gardner noted the clarity of recent shifts in institutional and commercial legitimations of the political in art. Where the most visible art of the 1990s often concerned itself with fashion, advertising and film — ‘different uses of the image’ — Gardner observed that the past few years have seen a turn toward more explicitly political work, at least at the level of those more readily available art barometers, international biennales and widely distributed magazines like Frieze and Artforum. Although never entirely absent from contemporary art discourse, politics has arguably moved away from the margins to which it was relegated in the embodied subjects of 90s ethnographic art, and toward the very centre, where it has become a regular justification for a range of curatorial and critical conceits.

Apart from important questions about the capacity of the market to appropriate practices oppositional to it, a capacity that is especially pronounced with regard to art, this new legitimacy for the political in art derives in part from concurrent expansions of both fields activity, that is to say, a general broadening of the practices deemed acceptable in both art and politics. While ‘the political turn’, as this shift in art world preoccupations has somewhat problematically been described, has channelled aspects of the artist as ethnographer model into a liberal democratic conception of globalisation where ‘trauma’ and ‘difference’ become roughly synonymous with ‘world’, there has also been a shift toward accepting as art practices that are political in form as well as content. In a general sense, this means that as art has become more socially engaged, its modes of production, distribution and presentation have themselves become more socialised. What is produced by these practices is not simply a series of works concerned with issues of relevance to the public sphere, but also an assertion of artistic agency within the total complex of human relations.

The rise of the curator, whether interpreted as an opportunity for critical agency or simply ‘middle management jostling for a place in perpetuity’ (as Claire Bishop recently put it), has arguably overshadowed similarly marked shifts in what is broadly legitimated as artistic practice. Just as the role of the curator, at least in its ideal form, has absorbed both the reflexivity of the artist and the authority of the critic, the division of labour traditionally excluding discursive and organisational activities from the purview of the artist has undergone significant erosion in recent years. This is, of course, an erosion that has occurred largely on institutional and commercial terms — Marcelo Expósito has pointed out that challenging the division of artistic labour is itself a tradition within historical avant-garde practices and a necessity in others, specifically marginal or emergent fields like video art before the mid 1990s; one might add to this practices operating in contexts with limited cultural infrastructures, particularly the work of artists in the global South. And while this erosion reflects the shift toward flexible and communicative labour of post-Fordist societies, certain symbolic hegemonies are maintained in the name of economic and political interests — thus the presentation of the curator rather than the artist as the subject of substantial functional transformation.

As much as Begg’s practice constitutes an embodied critique of the conventional division of artistic labour, it is at the same time a tactical exploitation of her role as an artist within persistent cultural hegemonies. The figure of the artist, with its perceived position of subordination within these hegemonic structures, will always retain a greater potential to resist professional codification than that of the curator. The sheer breadth and ambition of Begg’s practice is an attestation that the activities which an artist might undertake alongside and as an extension of conventional artistic production — that is to say, as an actor within a given system of relations — are boundless, providing a mobility that, if exploited carefully, can produce real effects in the world. Her work is motivated by the same contingencies that led Simon Sheikh, several years ago, to ask the question, ‘What can we do for ourselves?’, playing out the ‘ongoing negotiation, translation and articulation between interested agents and groups’ and fulfilling the necessity he perceived ‘to establish networks, to compare and mediate practices as well as theories.’ ‘Art matters, certainly,’ he concluded, ‘but art is not enough.’ What matters more, Begg seems to suggest, is the socialisation of the artist. In highlighting the dynamic of the performer and the audience, the implication of Treat (or Trick) is that the audience divests itself of the performer’s tricks, or better, that it becomes the performer itself, not to deceive, entertain or conceal the ‘bestial acts’ that Brecht concluded keep mankind alive, but as a performer whose audience is only made up of other social actors. In answer to the age-old question of the relationship between politics and art, it introduces the figure of the artist as a political being. Art becomes political when the artist asserts their agency in the world. It becomes politically effective when it encourages its audience to assert its own agency.

Working with Tension and Time: Maria Cruz’s One Million Dollars

'Maria Cruz: One Million Dollars', Artspace, Sydney, 27 September to 21 October 2006, originally published in Artspace Projects 2006, Artspace, Sydney, 2007, pp. 101-8 (and swiped from Maria's website).

Maria Cruz, One million dollars
Installation view, Artspace, Sydney, 2006

In his first major work, Giorgio Agamben sought to explore the peculiar duality in the thinking of art, the doubling that takes the form of a split between poiesis, making, the production of sense, and aesthesis, sensing, the apprehension of sense; that is to say, between art as the creative activity of the artist and art as it is experienced by the spectator. And while it was principally the more violent manifestations of this split that Agamben, invoking the principle according to which ‘it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time’, dealt with as a means of glimpsing the original project of Western aesthetics, the suggestion remains from his analysis that the tension between poiesis and aesthesis is common to all artistic works; certainly to their presentation, their potential to be encountered. Maria Cruz’s One Million Dollars project, undertaken at Artspace as a studio residency and gallery installation in 2006, represents a single instance that might be considered illustrative in this regard; exemplary, perhaps, because of the subtle way in which it dramatises what Agamben describes as both the ‘speculative centre’ and the ‘vital contradiction’ of art in our time.

To the casual viewer, One Million Dollars consisted of three physical elements staged in a gallery setting. The dominant element was an entire wall layered from floor to ceiling with overlapping black and red dots applied in heavy acrylic, each around two centimetres in diameter, arranged in accordance with no visible system. In the centre of the space, brightly coloured party lights dangled from the roof beams; the bulbs themselves had been crafted haphazardly from some rough material and hand painted, but their fixings and the electrical cord that strung them together were authentic and, one would assume, operable. On the gallery’s front desk, which also occupied the space, sat a stack of photocopies of a paint-stained two-page spread from a graph-ruled notebook, handwritten entries listing nothing more than dates and a series of numbers: ‘Sept 9. 280, 920, 200, 134’; ‘Sept 10. 528, 528, 528, 945, 870’; and so on.

The immediate correlation between the three elements, other than their spatial convergence, was an aesthetic consistency. They shared the same pure hues, the same plasticity, they were each ‘painterly’ in the broad sense that they bore the trace of the artistic gesture — they were discernibly products of the same artist. There was little attempt at artifice, no apparent desire to appear polished or prefabricated, only the minimum requirement that they maintain their form for the duration of the exhibition, and that, like stick figures, they act as shorthand ciphers for what they were intended to be, or rather, to represent, where representation might be required. But at the same time the presentation was sparse, considered; it lacked the overloaded anti-aesthetic sensibility of the sort of process art that seeks to resist or otherwise deflect its inevitable manifestation as sense-producing data. The selection of elements appeared specific, as if anything superfluous has been edited out. Their configuration in the space may not have been particularly legible insofar as no meaning or intention was immediately conveyed, but there did appear to be a particular logic to their inclusion. Each had a reason to be there according to a certain teleology: it had a purpose. As much as it was indisputably an object, One Million Dollars was also, quite clearly, a project.

Looking back over Cruz’s recent practice, we can see that this duality between project and object, between work as labour and work as product, is far from uncommon. The most significant — or, more properly, sustained — outcome of this tension, if we are to consider it as dialectically generative, has been the enormous quantity of Yoko Ono paintings that Cruz has dedicated herself to producing since 1999. In this series, each title of Ono’s recorded output is rendered in two colours in simple sans-serif capitals on the unadorned ground of its own discrete, modestly scaled canvas. While these are reasonably strict parameters, the artist’s means of addressing them has varied playfully over time. In the first major presentation of these canvases, 2000’s salon-style Feeling the space, Cruz confronted viewers with a rich wall of colour, the juxtaposition of contrasting hues producing quite striking optical effects. Just over a year later, The hard times are over offered a more restricted pallet, reds and blacks on white whose economy privileged the evocative language of the song titles over their visuality, but whose constructivist genealogy implied that they be read within the broader context of art history.

These shifts suggest that the orientation toward process in Cruz’s practice is more pragmatic than programmatic. On the one hand, many artists have insisted that instituting a framework facilitates production insofar as aesthetic decisions only have to be made once. In the case of the Yoko Ono works, the subject matter, general form and individual titles are determined in advance, and while the quantity is not fixed — Ono has released more recordings since Cruz’s project began — it is still, to some extent, beyond the artist’s control. But on the other hand there is no direct elision of the aesthetic, of the work’s function as a sense-producing object. Like the rules of a game, Cruz’s parameters create a space for play, allowing the artist to engage with the sensuousness of the mark-making process without denying the viewer the opportunity to do the same. As Robert Ryman once put it in relation to his own evacuated canvases, such play-tactics within strategies of reduction allow for ‘clarification of nuances in painting’. In Ryman’s terms, the question is not what to paint, but how. And while this process is geared towards production, there is no attempt by the artist — by Cruz or indeed by Ryman — to channel that production away from its ultimate manifestation in the form of an object, an encounter, a thing.

Maria Cruz, Palette (with coins) 2002
Oil on canvas, Australian 5 cent coins, 35.5 x 30.5 cm

Correspondingly, Cruz maintains an awareness of the symbolising function of her work, even when working non-figuratively. This is best illustrated in the series of paintings that served, appropriately enough, as the means by which the productive framework for One Million Dollars was developed, and it is here that we might begin to understand the logic behind this last work’s material realisation. Undertaken in close parallel to the Ono canvases, both chronologically and conceptually, these works in turn find their point of departure in three small paintings produced in close succession between 2002 and 2003. The first, Palette #2, consists of a ground of heavily textured hues resembling an artist’s palette — one of the tools utilised in the work’s production — onto which are placed thirty-three Australian five-cent coins. The second, Palette #7, duplicates the relationship between a daubed, polychromatic ground and an overlay of circular, coin-sized forms, but is executed entirely in paint. The appearance of the disks that make up the painting’s foreground is clearly derived from the coins in Palette #2, to the point of their black, grey and virescent hues alluding to the unique grubby lustre of the five-cent pieces, but their surfaces reveal no face value, only traces of painterly gesture with no obvious reference to their formal origin. A third, untitled, painting from 2003 discards the palette ground entirely, the artist having opted instead for a flat base onto which the disks are applied thickly but evenly in such a way that each forms a discrete, monochromatic plane. While the restricted colour range of the preceding work is retained, the green in the third work is more pronounced, and it is presented in several different but clearly defined shades that substitute the grubbiness of the coins for the luminosity of pure hue.

Maria Cruz, Palette (traces of coins in grey) 2002
Oil on canvas, 25 x 20.5 cm

Over the course of the three paintings, we see a shift from the use of painting as a mimetic technology, as a process that would represent or refer in some way to the coins, toward a foregrounding of the abstract sensuality of the paint itself. This aspect is emphasised by the edges of the disks actually overlapping in the final work with no dilution or mixing of shades, an effect that could only be achieved by allowing each successive layer of paint to dry completely before another is applied. Through the use of this method, the artist introduces to the work a depth of field, but also — and inseparably for the viewer — a temporal aspect, a simultaneous privileging of the visual and a sense of time spent in the production visual, which when combined characterise the artist’s activity not as painting something, but as painting as such.

What makes the differences between the three works more pronounced, however, is that Cruz’s practice does not deal exclusively with abstraction; indeed, a good deal of her work is testament to her skill as a figurative painter. This is not a general shift away from representation, but a particular one, and could only have been prompted by a realisation arrived at in the course of presenting the first work. And that is that money, while an object like any other — or, to be precise, a quantity of metal with a fixed weight — has, at least in the context of liberal-capitalist society, a signifying function that is not only excessive, as with all signification, but irreducible — an excess that no recontextualisation can alter — and that, for an artist interested in dealing exclusively with its formal qualities as an object, systematic abstraction is the only option short of total revolution.

What is this irreducible signifying function? We know from Marx that the substance of value is labour, that the value of a given commodity, when brought to exchange, is determined not by its usefulness but by the amount of abstract labour-time, the average unit of total sensuous human activity, expended in its production and distribution. This, perhaps the most contested of Marx’s theories — insofar as critiques of Marxism are actually directed at the work of Marx himself — should not be construed as a simple economic proposition but as a social one. As an exchange value, the commodity is at once the physical embodiment of a certain social relation between producers — between, putting it very crudely, property owners and propertyless workers — and the concealment of that relationship. It is the appropriation of the productive capacity of humans made rational, ‘the definite social relation between men themselves’ assuming ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’. Money’s irreducible excess of signification lies, therefore, in its role as universal equivalent, as the commodity form par excellence, standing in for all other commodities as the social incarnation of human labour and the ultimate manifestation of the activity of alienation that labour constitutes (which of course for Marx represents the appropriation of humanity’s very essence).

If Cruz’s strategy of introducing practical parameters to reduce the number of necessary aesthetic decisions is understood as a decentring of ‘the primacy of individual subjectivity as the locus of art production’, as it was for the early conceptual painters, then it is appropriate that the artist should also problematise the metaphorical aspect of the art object. Rather than originating in a rhetorical denial that such a function is possible, however, the process of abstraction as seen over the course of the three coin paintings instead demonstrates a tacit acknowledgment of money’s irreducible excess of signification, an awareness that dealings in the metaphorical, especially in such loaded territory, have the capacity to be wildly misread, forcing the responsibility for aesthetic judgment back on the artist and postponing further artistic production until such judgments can be made.

Of the three coin paintings, it was the third that would serve as the template for the body of work that would develop out of this process, representing the point at which the artist found her parameters comfortable enough to institute a new system of making. While the shape and size of the small circles that are central motif of these subsequent works hark back to the coins from which their forms were derived, reference to the social and cultural significance of this originary material is kept in abeyance, with the artist effectively excluding it from the visual field. Furthermore, the works’ titles — One Thousand Nine Hundred Seventeen; Eight Hundred Forty Five; Three Thousand Twelve — are little more than reflexive allusions to the process of the paintings’ construction, announcing nothing more than the total number of ‘dots’, visible and hidden behind others, contained within their individual pictorial planes.

Maria Cruz, Three hundred forty eight 2005
Oil on primed lined, 40.7 x 31 cm

Exclusion, though, is never absolute. Whatever is excluded must bear a relationship to that which it is excluded from (or which excludes it), and in the necessary reciprocity of this relationship there is a paradoxical inclusion in the form of immanent potentiality. A thing is included insofar as it is not. Thus, the elision of the signifying power of money haunts the body of work that proceeds from the first coin painting as an unresolvable tension, regardless of the individual characteristics of the objects themselves: they are products of a project from which it has been consciously excluded. Importantly, though, this is a tension that can only be felt by the artist as definer and executor of the project, and only understood by the informed viewer as witness to that definition and execution; the objects themselves do not betray it. And so to the two tensions already underlying Cruz’s practice — project and object, inclusion and exclusion — is added a third, that between making and sensing, between poiesis and aesthesis.

It is possible that these hitherto subliminal tensions within Cruz’s practice emerged because of the gravity of the project. One Million Dollars marked both the culmination of the process developed in the coin paintings and a substantial shift in its articulation. While the earlier paintings had sat discretely within the frame of small canvases, all of which were well under a metre square, the painted component of One Million Dollars occupied an entire wall almost six metres long and over three metres high. Moreover, the work could in no way be considered as painted component alone, accompanied as it was by a sculptural element, the string of roughly crafted party lights, and a documentary element in the form of the stack of photocopied workbook pages, and therefore could no longer be considered as simply pictorial, but as spatial, temporal and discursive.

Maria Cruz, One million dollars
Installation view, Artspace, Sydney, 2006

If we are to follow the logic behind the quantitative titling of the coin paintings, the sampling of diaristic entries in the workbook could be read as a register of the number of dots painted in each session, emphasising the sense of temporality already present in the layering of different colours. As the record of an activity, the photocopies performed a second, related operation as a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, albeit an obliquely poised one, geared toward demystifying the physical processes behind the work’s fabrication — an afterthought, perhaps, but a significant one. Most pointed, however, was the return the excluded signifier, money, physically in the poverty of form of the party lights — self-consciously cheap approximations of a cheap emotional effect — and discursively as outright acknowledgment in the project’s title. Each small red or black disk being roughly the size of an Australian one-dollar coin, the work was, tautologically, one million dollars. Or at least it aspired to be one million dollars; the amount has too much cultural resonance, acting still, in spite of inflation, as the figurative horizon of wealth to the non-wealthy, to have been arrived at after the fact by Cruz, as a precise representation of the quantity of dollar-sized circles making up the wall painting. In any case, the sheer scale of the work, the overlapping layers of paint and the limitations of the selection from the artist’s workbook — it is clear from the page that it only covers a short period of the time invested in the work — mean that there is no way for the uninformed viewer to know whether exactly one million dots were actually painted, or even how close the artist came to that figure.

Here again we find the work’s dramatisation of the split between art as experienced by the artist and art as experienced by the viewer. By presenting the diary excerpt, whose suggestion that the object is also a project ironically also presents the project as an object, and by confronting the question of value through the work’s sculptural element and its title — which is itself both proscriptive and elusive — Cruz placed her creative activity as an artist on the same plane of visibility as the product of her labour, but did not, could not, provide access to the authentic experience of that activity. Instead, One Million Dollars operated as a zone of indistinction between poiesis and aesthesis, between the provision of sense and its apprehension, painting as performance performing as painting. And located within this zone, hovering there still, were those questions, ever-present even in their absence, of value and work — work as labour, as product, as creative activity, work as the operation of the work, as the creation of human essence and its appropriation and alienation — frustratingly, yet tantalisingly, unanswered.