Wednesday, 23 December 2015
Thursday, 10 December 2015
Studio 5, the Stars
This essay, originally published in Broadsheet, was unusual in that it described an artwork produced for an exhibition that never took place – the 2010 Scape Biennial in Christchurch that was cancelled for awful, tragic, tectonic reasons. It's probably the zenith (or nadir, depending on your perspective) of my attempted adaptation of live performance writing to gallery-based art. I know for sure that I was experiencing SNRI withdrawals when I wrote this one, which explains the quasi-libidinal referencing of authorial limitation, to say nothing of the general tone of heightened anxiety. It was written in an eight-hour burst between two Yokohama cafes, my apartment in Kannai, the office I was sharing in Hinodecho, and, finally, BankART Pub.
It’s a pretty
magisterial piece of work, one that’s really going to put Christchurch on the
map. A drawcard, a marquee structure, like the Sydney Opera House, or
Guggenheim Bilbao—world famous, the kind of building that even the canniest
tourist will photograph in order to perform their ontological function as a
tourist. And not just any tourists. Art
tourists. The best kind. No crass souvenir shops cluttering up the sidewalks,
no—it’s Apple stores, Illy cafés and tastefully appointed bookshops all the
way. Maybe even New Zealand’s first Zara. Maybe even Beams! And all for this. Gardensity. Looking like something from
the Usborne cities of the future book I saved up all my pocket money to buy
back in 1983. Looking downright amazing, actually. Folding the city’s extensive
parkland into its functionalist centre. Taking brutalist buildings for plinths,
perching on top of them artist studios, a public office, an urban laboratory, a
winter garden housed in a fetching agglomeration of geodesic domes, even a
visitor’s centre. Knowledge production keyed to oxygen production. Swathed in
greenery, self-sustaining, entirely fictional.
Produced for Scape
2010 in collaboration with architect Dorian Farr,
digital artists Patrick Gavin and Chris Toovey, and graphic designer David
Campbell, Gardensity is Keating’s
site-specific insertion of the field of utopian architecture into debates
around urban planning. Or rather, in the ambiguity of its keynote presentation,
a sophisticated virtual tour that seems to parody the medium that celebrates
its subject, it is Keating’s attempt to encourage debate within what passes for
debate. As with so much of Keating’s work, it is photogenic to point that its own
seductiveness calls itself into question. Once again, this is Keating the
performer, even if the artist is not physically present, taking his act as the
embodiment of cultural contradictions, artistic conceits and flimsy democratic
values to ever-greater levels of visibility within the public sphere. Sure
there’s a message, a thoroughly researched and pretty-much incontestable one,
but there’s a curious undertow to the spectacular tide in which Keating’s
increasingly ambitious presentations would immerse us, even amidst the spume of their
profuse offshoots—installations, performances, photographs, videos, more
performances, more photographs, nothing wasted in the festival of waste. There
is a marked lack of closure Keating’s work, clearest in its confusions of ugliness and beauty, of the
anthropomorphic and the inhuman, of what is useful and what is superfluous. So
much of this is corralled into affect, of course, but there is always a
remainder, something integral to the work’s status art, rather than simply incidental.
This is the ambiguity of the avant-gardist gesture, whether a pseudo-rational
reordering or a quasi-anarchic disordering, on which his practice ultimately
depends, not a corruption of language as such, but the search for a new
language and, more pressingly, for a public capable of understanding it, of
thinking and dreaming in it.
I first met Ash
Keating in 2006, while researching a project for Artspace and the Contemporary
Art Centre of South Australia that I called Publicity.
The focus of my research was the intersection of artists’ practices with the
public sphere, particularly those practices that stressed a continuity between
public space and those normative loci of art production and exhibition, the
studio and gallery. To put it another way, I was interested in artists whose
work suggested that the supposedly autonomous spaces of art might be subject to
the same forces as those instituted elsewhere in the public sphere, that it was
a specific coding, rather than any quality inherent in art itself, which
differentiated these structures from other sites of interpersonal engagement.
In its capacity to reflexively deconstruct certain forms of behaviour, modes of
spectatorship and patterns of communication at work in art and public space
alike—or, more properly, in art as a fluid yet situationally defined subset of
the public sphere—I saw in such work the promise of an agency that was
qualitatively distinct from fetishisations of the studio and the gallery,
either in uncritical embrace or outright rejection.
‘Intervention’ is an
overused term when it comes to contemporary art. When applied to the convention
of situating art in nominally public space—as a performance, say, or a large
sculpture, a video projection or an architectural fixture—the word tends to
overstate art’s impact, as if the work irrevocably alters the course of daily
events, when in fact the reception of art of even the most radical content
tends to be absorbed into the spectacle of urban geography. Curiously, just as
he was equally at home in the gallery and the street, Keating seemed capable of
effecting
actual interventions, concretely diverting the flow of commodities and
information, while constructing arresting and, despite their occasional
aesthetic ‘ugliness’, ultimately edifying spectacles. Here his work suggested a
second, though perhaps more elusive, continuity, that between image and action,
between witnessing an event and actually taking part it, a continuity of
sensorial register measured only in the proximity of bodies, those awkward, messy,
desirous organisms whose coming together or apart bears scant regard for such
categories as public and private, still less so that of art.
Keating had found in
this zone a theatre in which ambiguity could be performed, mobilising the
problematics of, among other things, a vague criminality, having made off with
five percent of a free commuter newspaper’s weekly run before it could be
distributed, or as interceptor of the remains of petrochemical works of art,
disposed of by various institutions and headed for landfill. These materials, all too readily available as Keating had observed from his
days working as a waste auditor, were then returned by the artist to the street
and the gallery for appraisal, subject to certain formal shifts—ordering on the
part of the newspapers, a sublime disordering when it came to former
‘ephemeral’ works of art. Suddenly, a glaring discontinuity appeared, that of
liberal ethics, Keating’s two major performance personas of the time, the
return-of-the-repressed garbage monster and the everyman commuter—complete with
ill-fitting suit; there was a young-kid-out-of-his-depth pathos to
this—bringing happy live-and-let-live morality into direct conflict with the
popular ideal of environmental sustainability, superimposing two grids produced
from the same notional ethical formula and finding them incompatible.
The question these
actions produced might be understood as inquiring as to which grid is the more
useful as a framework for action in the world. At first the answer seems simple,
for isn’t ecological stability the prerequisite for material survival? There is
little nobility in damning the world to death by professional courtesy. But to
reduce such an urgent existential dilemma to a simple dichotomy is to overlook
the specific codings of Keating’s work as art, its formal dimension, and above
all its barely concealed paeans to the perfection of ambiguity. The polis, that
total complex of human relations, that republic of bodies that can just as
readily shit, fuck or kill, will only find grids, binaries and certainties
useful until they come into contact with other grids, binaries and certainties.
To be radical is to go to the root of things; clearly there is a problem with
the original formula.
‘Critical Art and
Metaphorical Publics’—this is one of one million self-generating
back-formations posed by the Mumbai-based collective (actually ‘space’) CAMP to
justify their acronym, left tantalisingly undefined. In many ways it
encapsulates the forces at work in the exchanges that take place in Keating’s
actions. The literal public is that which bears witness, the metaphorical
public that which remains in the realm of possibility: possible past agent of
repression; possible future subject of liberation. Critical art, we might say,
poses the possibility of a metaphorical public; a revolutionary art would bring
it into being, making it literal (to recall Ezra Pound for a moment, if only in
order to forget him). The metaphorical public is not the freehold of critical
art, of course; it is also—and by and large; let’s have no illusions here—the
audience for the political imaginary, the dream life that hovers above every
polis. We’ve been here before (me especially): Benjamin’s ‘phantasmagoria’,
that phase of reification whereby the city both celebrates and obscures its
origins in the consolidation of alienated labour, the aestheticisation of daily
life, which makes the symbolic order a perfectly suitable field on which art
might realise its critical potential, its capacity for the production of publics. Parts of CAMP’s self-description are worth quoting here as points of
intersection with and clarifications of Keating’s practice:
… we try to move
beyond binaries of commodity markets vs. 'free culture', or individual vs.
institutional will, to think and to build what is possible, what is equitable,
and what is interesting, for the future.
We wish … to
consider thresholds of ownership and authority as challenging sites for art
practice. To test the ground between aesthetics and multiple ideas of the
public (or open), private (or closed), personal (about one's world), and power
(about the world).
On the topic of
ownership, then, it has to be said the littoral legality of Keating’s early
actions hinges on the questions of property. When does a freely available
commodity become freely available? When its producer can guarantee its
advertisers that their investment will reach its target audience? How long does
propriety of an item of waste extend? Until it is safely buried beneath soil it
will poison for millennia? The unconscious from which the repressed returns in
these cases is that of property relations, the circulation of capital and
commodities that brings bodies together, stimulating and exploiting them in the
sophisticated factory-marketplace we call the city, now extending, via vast
communication networks, across, around and through the body of the earth, beneath whose surface, and deep in
whose waters, lurk all kinds of petrochemical monsters, many of which once
constituted critical and ephemeral art. Here then is another secret that
Keating’s work whispers to anyone capable of hearing it, independently even of
Keating himself: if there was ever a time for a thorough re-examination of
Marx, for the formulation of a communism proper to the 21st century,
it is now; now before the only possible form of love, of the communion of
bodies and consciousnesses, is cannibalism—killing, fucking and shitting
condensed into a single movement.
This, at least, is my compression of the
visions of the future offered to us by a dejected Robert Smithson in 1970, and
when the garbage-disposal chutes of a chic apartment block backed up in JG
Ballard’s High Rise, with its
frightening vision of publics constituted by compound failures of technology
and architecture. One finds a compelling anticipation of these critiques in the famous lament of
the ill-fated lettrist Ivan Chtcheglov, under the pen name Gilles Ivain, that
when ‘presented with the alternative of love or a
garbage-disposal chute, young people of all countries have chosen the
garbage-disposal chute’. Chtcheglov’s solution, which would become a central part of the program of the
Situationist International, at least in its formative years, was the creation
of a new urbanism, an architecture that would engender new conceptions of
space, time and behaviour. Chtcheglov took de Chirico’s uncanny perspective as
his model; later situationists proposed de Sade, the postman Cheval, Ludwig II
of Bavaria.
Naturally, Chtcheglov, confined to a mental
institution shortly after, realised not a single structure, let alone the
entire city he had envisaged. Nor would his comrades, the exigencies of whose
times would soon lend their work a radically different dimension. It must be
said, however, that this dimension was not at all an inconsistent one; here I
challenge anyone bemoaning the end of the utopian period of the Situationist
International to confront the Algerian struggle in all its gravity. Anyone
looking for the roots of May 1968 need look no further than here. Moreover, Chtcheglov’s
observation forms a certain operative core within the most advanced
developments of situationist thinking, a point of departure from which a
sophisticated application of the theory of commodity fetishism might be
exercised. Anyone looking to understand the awesome threat posed by the
environmental crisis need look no further than the riddle of the commodity.
Since its early, sometimes lonely, guerilla
manifestations—one can only smile at the romantic beauty of a city wall
splashed with paint of different hues each time the artist passed it as a
student—Keating’s practice has grown both more ambitious and more situated.
Beginning with his enormous, collaborative 2020? project at
Melbourne’s Arts House Meat
Market (2008), and subsequent articulations inviting other artists to
participate in his ‘festivals of waste’, such as Labelland (Seoul, 2008) and Activate
2750 (Penrith 2009), Keating’s work has expanded to such a point
that it is impossible to recognise him as the specific, heroic identity of his
earlier performances. Is this a disappearing act or has the artist simply
ascended further up the chain of command, so that like a film director we only
experience his presence in cameo? But is this presence so integral to the work?
After all, we don’t ask the same of a painter or a photographer; still less a
filmmaker. The tension here is that after being seduced by the outsider
romanticism of his earlier actions—not to mention a certain art-world notoriety
as a result of his incisive critiques of the environmental effects of art
production—we might find his mobilisations of bureaucratic, administrative and
commercial forces to mimic precisely those forces against which he was once
perceived to rally.
At this point I have to say that as much as
the anarcho-purist in me would like to find this aspect of Keating’s work
problematic, I simply cannot develop a critical apparatus by which to reproach
his current practice. So much of what would attack it is dependent on a figure
commodified to such an extraordinary degree—that of the masculine outsider—that
it bears no relation to the actual form, content and context of the work
itself. Other critiques, which consistently invoke the artist’s readiness to
document his practice, usually evidenced by the presence of multiple still and
motion picture cameras, seem to ignore certain documentary conditions of
performance and to embrace, most problematically of all, the notion of the
authenticity of the original event, as if Péret insulting a priest, to give
just one canonical example—and one conveyed more by its caption than by the
image itself—occurred without the presence of a photographer, and was inscribed
in the pages of art history by the indexical magic of the revolutionary event
itself, like so many shadows on the walls of Hiroshima. There are far greater
forces at stake than the memory of what once was seductive.
And here we arrive back at Gardensity, a proposition that is
seductive in an entirely different way. Gliding effortlessly around
Christchurch’s grey-green centre to a laidback beat, we surrender, however
momentarily, to the dreamlife of the polis, the possibility that the forces of
capital might realise the perfect affluent city in the perfect stable social
democratic nation, that we might breathe the fresh air of the southwest Pacific
in a carbon-neutral, artist-friendly space, that even on waking our era will
dream the next. And then we realise that we are not in the space of
architecture but that of art, a slippery, ambiguous realm in which questions
are posed even as they are answered. This is a building that is not. The
Hacienda will never be built, and even if it were, what form should it take?
What would be its impact? Who would it be for? And who, ultimately, would foot
the bill, if we were to trace the base metals whose compounds make up Gardensity’s elegant framework back to
their muddy, dangerous origins? This is what we want, though, isn’t it? Isn’t
it? Over to you, metaphorical public.
Monday, 7 December 2015
The Colour of Avocado
I wrote this as a joke that no-one got. I was asked to provide a catalogue essay for a small show MOP Projects were organising for the 2006 Adelaide Festival, but having no idea which artists or works were in the show, or even what it was about, I just riffed on the title. Fortuitously I was in the middle of a Howard Hawks / John Ford binge, having decided that zombie movies were actually Westerns, at least in a structural sense. The rest came from my library of cut-price editions of classic works of literature and poetry. I wrote this one Sunday afternoon in February 2006 with a stack of books and a six-pack. I spent a lot of the time digging around in volume one of Capital for a footnote I remembered but couldn't find. The text was actually scanned and uploaded at the time to the original version of The Art Life, where it accumulated some weird comments that are probably lost to internet history, and the dashing image below. The 'uncredited film note' at the end is actually from Debord, but at that point I was a bit sozzled and acting like an asshole.
...but I own to you that when I cast an eye on this globe, or rather on this little ball, I cannot help thinking that God has abandoned it to some malignant being. I except, as always, El Dorado… — Martin, the old philosopher, in Voltaire's Candide, 1759
Next time you shoot somebody, don't go near 'em till you're sure they're dead — John Wayne as Cole Thornton in Howard Hawks' El Dorado, 1966
It is the surprisingly eschatology of this particular pearl of expansionist wisdom that Marx caught most acutely in his observation that 'Modem society, which already in its infancy had pulled Plato by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its inmost principle of life.' Discussing the determination of exchange-value as the total accumulation of human labour-time expended in the course of the production of a commodity, Marx noted that it would be unlikely for the price of gold, the universal standard par excellence, to ever accurately reflect the sheer amount of energy that humans have exhausted in search of it. And indeed, Columbus's letter would set the tone for the wholesale rape of the American continent, a rape undertaken with a fervour that not only bordered on the religious, but which exploited it to the hilt.
Shortly after Columbus had set out his manifesto of avarice-most-pious, tales began to circulate of a mysterious ritual performed by the Chibcha people in what is now Columbia. According to the legend, the Chibcha would cover their chief in gold dust, which would then be washed away in a lake as emeralds were cast into the water in tribute to the earth mother Bachué. Among conquistadors obviously eager to confirm their places in heaven, the story was embellished first to describe a mythical king they called 'EI Dorado', the gilded one, and then to encompass an entire country of the same name, where gold was said to be as plentiful as sand.
The influence of this myth was profound, its evolution from tale of simple potlatch to a legend of untold riches indicative of the mania for wealth that continues to characterise modern society. But in its elusiveness, confounding even the efforts of Sir Walter Raleigh as he attempted to regain Queen Elizabeth's favour after marrying her maid of honour, El Dorado also came to represent an arcadia untouched by European greed: paradise in and of itself. When for instance Voltaire's youthful adventurer Candide stumbles into El Dorado, he discovers 'men and women of surprising beauty' and fleet-footed 'red sheep' - presumably llamas - surpassing 'the finest coursers of Andalusia, Tetuan and Mequinez.' He concludes - perhaps glibly - that he has discovered a country that is 'better than Westphalia'.
Candide is taken to meet with an elderly courtesan - 'the most communicative person in the kingdom' - whose explanation of the country reflects much of the shift in ideology of Enlightenment Europe: The Spaniards have had a confused notion of this country, and have called it El Dorado; and an Englishman, whose name was Sir Walter Raleigh, came very near it about a hundred years ago; but being surrounded by inaccessible rocks and precipices, we have hitherto been sheltered from the rapaciousness of European nations, who have an inconceivable passion for the pebbles and dirt of our land, for the sake of which they would murder us to the last man.' This section of Voltaire's book ends with a return to the legend's origin in potlatch, with Candide and his companion Cacambo hoisted over the mountains onto two 'red sheep', accompanied by one hundred 'pack sheep' bearing provisions, curios, and a range of precious stones.
El Dorado, then, holds a dual role in culture. It is at once a panacea and a territory ripe for exploitation. And though that theme resounds painfully throughout an entire history of conquest and subjugation of which the murder of the Americas was but a bloody, drawn out moment, it is a tension from which the best and worst of Western culture has emerged. As a country always 'Over the mountains of the moon/In the valley of the shadow', when this very shadow is that which has fallen over the heart of Edgar Allan Poe's gallant knight as he realises that he has found 'No spot of ground/That looked like Eldorado', El Dorado also represents the melancholy that inevitably follows from this anxiety. These threads converge in what Debord describes in his Critique de la separation as 'the sphere of loss'. All this, says Debord, 'finds in that strangely apt old military term, en enfants perdus' - lost children - 'its intersection with the sphere of discovery, of the exploration of unknown terrains, and with all the forms of quest, adventure, with the avant-garde. This is the crossroads where we have found ourselves and lost our way.'
As in a blurry drunken vision,- the memory and language of the film fade out simultaneously. — uncredited film note
Monday, 26 October 2015
What I'd like to talk about when I talk about biennales
I don't even remember writing this essay, which gives a pretty good indication of where my head was at by the end of 2009. I do remember it being published though (in Broadsheet, volume 39, number 1, March 2010), because on reading it I realised that in my eagerness to come up with a critical framework for evaluating biennales, I managed to completely depoliticise WHW's 2009 Istanbul Biennale, which was, of course, completely political.
This is my attempt to have done with the biennale debate, my concession to that conceit of modernist criticism that exceeds even the idea that through expertise, connoisseurship and social standing one possesses the authority to pass judgment, and that is to have the last word. And yet a combination of personal insecurity, persistent suspicions about the currency of art criticism — and, indeed, of art, more of which shortly — and professional experience of the biennale form’s ability to reinvent itself lead me to the understanding that there will be no last word on anything, at least until the ice caps melt or some future dystopian state bans art criticism for its sheer uselessness. Failing that, I have resolved to limit the frequency of my reflections on biennales to once every two years.
I should also say at this point that the idea that biennales might have some speculative and propositional function with regard to the nature of art is not new. I, for one, first encountered it in Terry Smith’s address to the opening symposium of the 2004 Biennale of Sydney, which argued that biennales had succeeded criticism — now ‘largely promotional’ — in attempting to articulate the state of contemporary art. Smith’s observation was muddied somewhat when, shortly after he made it, biennales demonstrated that they could be as largely promotional as art criticism, a development exemplified by the impact of a peaking art market on the production and reception of the 2007 Grand Tour. Now that things have settled down a little, though, the point stands.
It has, moreover, been beautifully illustrated by What, How & for Whom/WHW’s recent Istanbul Biennale What keeps mankind alive?, whose deft execution and careful contextualisation clearly proposed an empowering and anti-spectacular role for art. WHW eschewed the intellectual and presentational sprawl that has come to typify so much biennale-making to construct instead an organised and accessible platform for a tight, focused selection of work to deliver a vision of art that drew explicitly on Brecht’s notion of education as a process of providing agency.
What keeps mankind alive? was educative in a three closely integrated ways. Firstly, a direct sense, in a manner that Charles Esche later described as ‘art as informative intervention’, offering ‘possibilities for learning [that] ranged across geographies and cultures’ — Sanja Iveković’s report into the status of women in Turkey, for instance, scattered across all the major venues as screwed up balls of paper, unnoticeable apart from their searing red colour; or Marko Peljhan’s eerily clinical installation of documentation relating to the planning and execution of the Srebrenica massacre. But also reflexively, problematising the language of representation, the very medium that offers art its informative possibilities, through the affecting mechanism of personal reflection — Rabih Mroué’s lectures on the role of photography in political propaganda are exemplary here, as is Deimantas Narkevičius’s almost autobiographical interview with Peter Watkins on the ethics of documentary. In contrast to the more standard role of the audience as passive consumers whose reflection on the cultural production is at best evaluative, such insertions offered an appropriately critical standpoint from which to consider the various discursive encounters presented by the biennale, imbuing a final sense of the education as the production of agency.
Of course, this is not so much of a problem if the Istanbul Biennale is considered in the context of its propositionality. It is one argument among the great many being offered by biennales around the world at what is no longer a startling rate. What distinguishes it is the clarity and effectiveness with which the point was made. From a critical perspective, we can say that because What keeps mankind alive? made its point about contemporary art clearly, it was a good biennale, and here the traditional evaluative function of art criticism — the temerity to ask ‘is this good or bad?’ — can be live a little longer.
It was a good biennale because it respected the intelligence and patience of the viewer — the biennale was broken into three smaller exhibitions at the main venues, each of which, though substantial, was not so vast as to not be experienced in a single visit. It was a good biennale in its approach to constructing its propositions through the judicious selection of individual works without sacrificing the need for the works themselves to be shown in the best possible light, which is to say, the need for the works to maintain a margin of their autonomy within the overall conception of the biennale. Here again, the biennale is no major departure from regular exhibitions. And it was a good biennale because it was even handed, its curators resisting the urge to apportion disproportionate space, resources and attention to ‘show-stopping’ works at the expense of others; this was a boon not only to the consistency of the exhibitions in an experiential sense, but also, one imagines, to the artists in an ethical sense.
The need for ethics of exhibition-making of compelling relevance to biennale-making is an important point to raise here as it functions as another perspective from which to determine the success or otherwise of such projects. One framework for thinking through such an ethics has been offered by Raqs Media Collective, hinging on the notion of curatorial responsibility, who ask: ‘What does it mean to undertake to bear the burden of work of representation of our ideas and concepts in and through the bodies and bodies of work of people other than ourselves?’ What responsibility does a curator hold, in other words, to those whose productive capacities they mobilise in their service, or in and possibly against the service of forces to which they themselves are subject, which is to say, in the exercise of their critical agency?
We should, by now, be familiar with the notion of the curator as a critical agent, or at least that of the figure of the curator who, at the historical nexus of a complex of power relations, has lately found itself possessed of an agency that like all agency has the potential be exercised critically. Without this agency there would in fact be no such thing as a curator; rather, there would be an amalgam of social forces going by the name of curator. Each iteration of that word, curator, would be entirely contextually determinant, relying for precise interpretation on the particular manifestation of those forces at any given moment in the performative exchange between speaker and listener. This is not to say, however, that the meaning produced in this exchange would be discontinuous, any more than the social forces at work in its construction would be discontinuous; nor would the curator radically indeterminate. The curator would emblematically reliant on the context that produced it, and subject to shifts in that context. Critical agency, the capacity to think and feel, to form opinions and to act on them, is what provides the figure of the curator with its continuity, and is thus a vital element in considering what curators produce — exhibitions, biennales and so on — in relation to the forces and imperatives that would seek to determine them and in whose service they often act. It is here that those generic aspects of biennales criticised to the point of cliché — locality branding, gentrification and cultural diplomacy — have their relevance, but only in negative relation to the precise and particular manner in which the curator’s agency is exercised against them.
What Raqs, for their part, in effect propose is the responsible exercise the agency at the disposal of the curator — curatorial responsibility — in the simplest of terms, and that is the production an exhibition ‘that can look good and think acutely’, which can in this thinking offer ‘a sustained productive contemplation, not just the curation of experiments and experience, but also the curation of reflection, a practice that dares to be theory and which must be held to account if it fails to be theory’. Taking aim at ‘shoddily mounted exhibitions prefaced by badly written, lengthy theoretical discourses’, they add that this thinking must be sophisticated enough to ‘withstand ruthless interrogation, at least at the hands of the artworks that constitute the exhibition itself’. An exhibition or a biennale must say what it does, do what it says, and do both to the best of its ability if it has any respect to those who produce its content and to those who constitute its public. In relation to the criteria for the judgment of biennales established at the outset of this essay, then, we might say that in order to be properly propositional, that is, to ask what art is, what it can be and what it can do, and to do so incisively, a biennale must in the first instance be responsible, but that at the same time, if responsibility entails a daring to become theory, then propositionality will always be what is produced.
What, then, have we learnt of art from the thousands of biennales that have taken place over the past two decades, and where might this knowledge lead us? I want to close this essay not by attempting answer that question, but by constructing a possible framework in which it might be considered, a framework that is, appropriately enough, an admixture of the work of others.
We have to note that the expansion of the notion of contemporary art that has taken place alongside and through the emergence of the biennale-form as the critical register of contemporary art — at least at a mediatic level — has, for all its challenges to Euro-American cultural hegemony, nevertheless occurred under the sign of a contemporary art that remains disturbingly closely calibrated to that of Western art. Contemporaneity has yet to divest itself of the expansionist and exoticising logics of modernity, engendering an orthodoxy according to which, to quote a recent text by Omnia El Shakry, ‘only non-Western art is expected to have questions of identity as a touchstone’. More provocatively, El Shakry adds that ‘art reduced to the status of geo-political identity politics is evacuated of all meaning’. Speaking on a panel during the opening week of the Istanbul Biennale, Bassam El Baroni observed that the practice of representing identity, initially deployed as a defence against the homogenising effects of globalisation, is inadequate to the task on account identity’s fragility, its tendency to fragment under the monolithic weight of capital (leaving behind, we would have to assume, the hollowed out image of its own otherness). Against this ‘aesthetics of identity’, El Baroni proposed a ‘logic of assemblage’. The oddly avant-gardist tone of this proposition echoes a surprising point made by Paolo Virno in a recent interview published in the journal Open. In response to a question about the importance of art to political movements, Virno offered the following: ‘… the most important effect of art is set in the formal sphere. In that sense, even art that is remote from political engagement touches upon the social and political reality … It demonstrates the inadequacy of the old standards and suggests, in the formal sphere and through the formal work of poetry, new standards for the appraisal of our cognitive and affective experience.’
In cobbling together these important observations, I don’t want to suggest that the best thing we can learn from the biennales of the past two decades, responsible and irresponsible, propositional and otherwise, is that the best course for art is an escape from representation or from political engagement, that the most ethical position is one of hermeticism and disengagement, of effectively disavowing agency. Nor — should there be any misunderstanding — do any of the artists or theorists to whom I have just referred. But I do feel that if a biennale, or any other exhibition for that matter, is to exploit effectively the integral relationship between responsibility and propositionality, it will ask fundamental questions of art and aesthetics. These questions, if they are to be taken up by curators, need only be modest — probably should only be modest — but they should be properly artistic questions — what art is, what art can be, what art can do. Then criticism, once it is finished with its evaluations, will have something it can really engage with.
Saturday, 24 October 2015
The Set-up: Performative performance in ten uneasy stages
'The Set-up' was a catalogue essay of sorts for an exhibition that didn't know whether it was a group show or three solo shows - all of which were terrific - by Justene Williams, Meiro Koizumi and Damiano Bertoli. I suppose it would have been a group show if I'd had more money and space, but then again it simply could have been five solo shows. It was first published in Column 8 (2011, pp. 61-6). The title was swiped from here:
Stage one
Stage two
Theatre has retained the word ‘proscenium’ from the Greco-Roman era to describe specific structures that replicate the predominant spectator/performer relationship of that time. A proscenium theatre is one in which the audience faces the stage directly, generally — though not exclusively — viewing the action through a framework known as a proscenium arch, the window that implies the presence of a ‘fourth wall’. In Latin, however, it simply means ‘in front of the scenery’, denoting the stage as such. Modern French has translated the term literally, rendering it as avant-scène, but shifts its emphasis to refer specifically to the apron, the part of the stage that places the performers in front of the proscenium arch, in front of the curtain, dangerously in the littoral space between performer and audience, leaving one or both dangerously exposed. Julian Beck situated his Living Theatre directly in this space. We see it parodied to a certain extreme in the notorious 'Be Black, Baby' sequence from Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom!, where the stage is defined purely in temporal terms, a bourgeois audience allowing itself to be brutalised in the most appalling fashion by an experimental theatre troupe, then applauding them at the completion of the performance (‘Great show, great theatre’ … ‘I’m tickled I came’ … ‘Clive Barnes was right!’). There is no such humorous let-off in Hideo Nakata’s Ring: the piercing of the fourth wall of the television screen comes with the traumatic realisation that as performers, we have foregone the agency of our spectatorship. At least De Palma allowed us room for disinterested critical judgment, no matter how much he lampooned it; the most terrifying aspect of the electromagnetic avenging kaidan Sadako is that she precludes any such possibility.
Stage three
Chieko! Toshio Anazawa’s Ki-43-IIIa fighter took off from Chiran airfield on the morning 12 April 1945, carrying 250 kg of explosives. It plummeted into an American destroyer off Okinawa shortly after. ‘Chieko’, read a letter that his lover received four days later, ‘I want to see you … I want to talk to you … honestly’. Chieko! A photograph of a group of schoolgirls waving goodbye to Anazawa was circulated as propaganda before Japan’s war came to a horrific halt that August. Chieko! His letter formed the basis of a wildly popular but deeply ambiguous manga by Koji Seo, whose publication in 2007 coincided with a problematic revival of the figure of the kamikaze as part of the founding mythology of post-war Japan. Chieko! In 2010, artist Meiro Koizumi, having sought to deconstruct the ongoing romance of this figure over a series of videos and performances, adopted the form of Anazawa’s ghost as he made the final steps of a sixty-five-year stagger home, traversing some of Tokyo’s most iconic locations, not to Ikebukuro station where the pilot last saw his love, but to Yasukuni shrine, where his soul had been interred along with that of 2,466,000 other war dead, among them fourteen Class A war criminals. Chieko! In Ginza, passers-by stopped to ask if the hideous figure was alright as he lurched forward, stumbling, clutching the side of his face as if to keep his jaw from swinging off. Chieko! In Shibuya they ignored him, even when his agonised gait left him stranded in the middle of Hachiko Crossing as the lights turned green. Chieko! Koizumi later recounts how the pedestrians knew exactly what he was doing, how they did not judge. Chieko! His disappearance beneath Yasukuni’s imposing stone torii was documented from afar by a static camera shot along with the distorted recording of his voice and those of the shrine officials and right wing thugs forced to deal with him. Chieko! Fade to black.
Stage four
When performance, presented to one public in one public space, is documented and presented to another public in another public space, where is the art? According to one line of argument in recent theory, what is encountered in galleries these days is often not so much art as documentation — the art has already taken place, and has taken place elsewhere. But what of performance that is performed in order to be documented and presented in a gallery? Or when there is no primary register as such, when performance, documentation and presentation cannot be isolated as priorities within an artist’s methodology? In documentation, a first public can themselves be documented, their interaction with the performer drawing them into the work. In a perverse and terrifying inversion of Sadako’s traumatic annulment of the fourth wall, the line between spectator and performer is dissolved to find the first public on the other side of the screen. Trapped in a looped sequence of temporalities, they are subject to the gaze of the second public. All they can assert is their chronological precedence as a public, an outdated, unfashionable claim to originality, perhaps, but entirely keeping with the touristic logic of the vernissage, where one allows oneself — no, forces oneself — to be seen to see, to be seen to be the first to see. We know where our publics are, then, but where is that art? There is only a sequence: set-up, performance, set-up, performance. Can installation perform? In the sense that it is performative, yes. It is a rhetorical gesture, a temporary structure that takes on meaning only within the less temporary structure in which it is presented, which is to say the gallery space, the site it points away from but according to which it is always defined. Set-up, performance, set-up, performance. The doubling here is specular, queering the membrane between spectator and performer on both sides of the screen.
Stage five
To stage: Desire caught by the tale was a play written by Pablo Picasso during an idle moment in occupied Paris, eliciting Gertrude Stein’s famous advice that the painter stick to his day job. Indeed, it was staged by its author precisely once, three years after its completion, as a private reading in the apartment of Louis and Michel Leiris, with a rather extraordinary cast that included the Batailles, the de Beauvoir-Sartres, Georges Braque, Albert Camus, Jacques Lacan, Henri Michaux and Raymond Queneau, complete with a two-metre swastika swiped from the entry to the Louvre by none other than Samuel Beckett. The work is so self-consciously absurdist, so purposefully difficult, in a theatrical sense, that is has seen few revivals (although its proponents have been notable, among them Dylan Thomas, Lynda Benglis and Julian Beck himself). No staging has been so celebrated as the work’s first full-scale production by the radical raconteur Jean-Jacques Lebel in 1967, whose own cast may have been lesser-known than Picasso’s but no less intriguing, featuring nouvelle vague actor/director László Szabó and Warhol fixtures Taylor Meade and Ultra Violet (Meade would later direct the Benglis production). It is, in short, an art-historical oddity, capable of attracting luminaries from across disciplines but remaining utterly anonymous.
Stage six
To restage: Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa draws on the Picasso and Lebel versions of Desire caught by the tail and collapses them into the aesthetico-political universe we know as Damiano Bertoli. Bertoli has created an installation out of a play and previous stagings of the play in their own theres and thens, restaging it and them for his here and now, restaged in the Bertolian universe of Superstudio collage aesthetics — Cartesian grids; disjunctures of perspective, light, colour and texture; dialectics of figure and ground, of presentation and representation, of yearnings for pre-representational presence; tails by which to catch desire; pretty girls — collage being at once more violent and reflexive than montage, its severed edges and brutal tonal shifts announcing itself as collage, never anything less, which is to say, never anything like the seamlessness of the image, that slick negotiator of spectacular social relations. To stage, to restage: staging as spatiotemporal performance (there can be no stage without other stages). To stage, weirdly transcendent in the agency this gesture asserts over space and time, at least insofar as a given space and time is defined as the stage on which to stage. In this ahistorical act of historical retrieval, the artist might slow what once was moving down to complete inertia. But this inertia is the bearer of a terrible momentum just waiting to be released, shivering between collapse and explosion, a romantic, wholly problematic absurd sucked into a black hole only to be spewed back somewhere else in space and time.
Stage seven
All of history all at once! Here is our ghost—speak to it, Horatio! ‘Chieko!’ is all it can muster in response. But then history never appears as just one ghost. Just as there is more than one communism, our spectres are always multiple (by how much do the dead outnumber the living?). Should we be so bold as to articulate our relationship to history along the lines of the proscenium structure, and even bolder as to complicate that relationship by introducing the screen, many screens, it would look something like Justene Williams’ Hot Air Hillbilly Weekend Workshop, a barrage of screens unravelling time not in sequence but in simultaneity. In Williams’ work, the performance never was. Any notion of originality, of the smooth and regular passage of time is carved up, looped mouth to tail and strung together sideways, like a ball of string presented in section, ruffled a bit for effect. Elaborate costumes, props and sets are created, activated, recorded and destroyed, all except a ragtag bunch of chairs, rigged to infantilise their sitters with torches shining up though holes cut for ablutions — to perch on one while watching the bank of monitors aggressively looping snippets of Williams’ non-performance is to participate in the crazy spectacle as some kind of demented pre-schooler. The room is a haphazard grid of fluorescent yellow punctuated with blue and pink, like a drunken antipodean flirtation with the ghost of Piet Mondrian, while a masked accordionist provides the jaunty soundtrack to a host of weird tasks undertaken by a stout Judge Judy character, a chaotic female authority figure who bosses her way around a set that she seems to have risen out of, the first sign of egocentric life to emerge from the primordial swamp of twentieth-century avant-gardism, genomic Picassos and Lebels no doubt lying somewhere within (but oh, for a history of twentieth-century art containing only women!).
Stage eight
Even the authority of the first public as historical precedent has been annihilated. We experience the gesture all at once. The only difference between audiences is not time, but the gesture’s framework. Are we in the reflexive space of the gallery, or are we so many passengers on a train? When a young man awakes to find himself in theatre’s dreaming on a beautiful afternoon, we see him for the first time whether we are on the train or in the gallery. The same as if instead we were seated near young woman, attempting to comfort him, from another train going in another direction at another time. The privilege of being a gallery viewer is being able to see the two together in imaginary conversation, joined across time and space by apposed projections. This is not a historical authority as much as it is the joy of confluence, of being present to witness the second set-up performing. The players here are not star-crossed lovers like Toshio and Chieko, nor are they sexually assertive archetypes like Picasso and Judge Judy; their tension is that uneasy one between masculine and feminine modes of emotional collapse, or rather, between modes of emotional collapse that might be gendered masculine or feminine, tragic in the sense of the former, hysterical when it comes to the latter. What sex is your nervous breakdown? Hamlet or Ophelia? This is Koizumi’s Theatre Dreams Again of a Beautiful Afternoon, which, as it happens, is only half a remake of an earlier version of the same work, the recurring dream of theatre, with qualifications. One might be tempted to read the work as the coming to consciousness of a character within a vignette — not an actor, a character — that he is nothing more than a fiction, and that this might find its parallels within contemporary life. Surely it is not for nothing that he is a commuter on a train? But the majority of the character’s breakdown occurs off-camera, which is to say off-stage. When he collapses to the ground, he is out of view, he is behind the proscenium arch. He has left the avant-scène, leaving us with nothing but his first public, an audience facing an audience, being seen to see.
Stage nine
Set-up, performance, set-up, performance: to stage, to stage, to re-stage. A mise-en-abyme of mise-en-scène, art becoming documentation becoming art, all of it shuddering inexorably toward some paradoxically receding denouement, like the two sides of a single train speeding in opposite directions. The train never reaches its destination, history appears all at once, and two stages are collapsed to constitute a third stage. Performance here depends not on its immediacy but on its mediation. In a sense, there can only be representation, whether it occurs in the street, on a train, in an apartment, a theatre, a gallery or a chaotic cardboard video set. Is pre-representational purity ever possible? Can mediation not find its own immediacy? To be immediate necessarily implies occurring without mediation, but there is no requirement that mediation itself cannot occur without mediation. Nor does it preclude performance itself from being mediated performatively. In another sense, immediacy means to happen at once, and in this sense there is no temporal difference between the melodrama that unfolds on the train and the melodrama that unfolds on the screen. Indeed, the reduction of a performance to a plurality of instances occurring at once is arguably more immediate than its ‘pure’ unmediated duration. In performance, time is shared between performers and spectators. But there are, effectively, two times to which installation has access: that of its performers and that of its spectators. What is most provocative about this is that the performative stage can never be reduced to pure temporality. The organisation of space assumes a real centrality. This perhaps is the strongest contribution of such work to the symbolic field, in a general sense. Set-up, peformance, set-up, performance; in the avant-scène, before the proscenium, in the staging of every action, the uncertain ground shared by performers and spectactors, by their agencies, which in themselves are at once in conflict and in common, the organisation of space is paramount. Such is the lot of art at this moment in history, telling us what capitalism already knows.
Stage ten
Chieko! Fade to black.
Friday, 23 October 2015
Person showing his penis: A test case in knowledge production
This essay is from Broadsheet volume something, number something something, probably 2009 sometime. The lateral leaps in this one are pretty funny, but I stand by what I said about Burn after reading. It was written in one go at the kitchen table.
For what Sierra did deliver was Verwoert’s dick in a box, but not his phallus. The box was a rather tatty empty office at the top of a narrow flight of stairs on Wellington’s Dixon Street. Symposium delegates, eager to see Sierra’s pirate one day sculpture — competing, against the rules, as it was, with Billy Apple’s one-man campaign to have the wax removed from a nearby Henry Moore — were lined up at a doorway, into which young artist and project ‘producer’ Reuben Moss was allowing one person at a time. ‘Where are we?’ asked a colleague I’d arrived with, who was standing in front of me in the line, ‘I mean, what was this place before?’ ‘I don't know … an architect’s office maybe?’ Moss replied, evidently entirely comfortable in his role as unforthcoming Gehilfe — and so much for site specificity. Once inside the office, we were initially confronted with an old bulletin board punctured with a few odd pushpins; only on suspecting an Ondakian anti-climax — or perhaps that, like another Ondak performed throughout the city, the line itself was the work — and turning to leave did we encounter a sad looking man with his head hanging down and his flaccid member protruding from his fly at the mercy of the dry Wellingtonian air. I say we but I’m talking about me. In any case, I didn’t get the phallus, but I did get the joke.
But what ultimately was delivered? Was it what we, I, expected? The oscillation between collective and personal pronouns here comes naturally, because though individuated, so much of the work was experienced collectively — such is the peculiar duality of queues, one that speaks of the true extent of community as it constitutes itself in civil society. What was not expected was that everyone involved did precisely what was expected of them — One Day Sculpture artistic director Claire Doherty generously encouraged symposium delegates to rush over to see Sierra’s work during their lunch break, fully aware of the possibility that the whole thing might be directed against her project; delegates eagerly and patiently lined up to catch a glimpse of exactly what Sierra was doing; Moss performed his unforthcoming Gehilfe act to a T; the sad old man stood for three hours as strangers filed past to look at his penis; Sierra, an artist known for exploiting institutional elements, often to political ends, did just that, and in the most matter-of-fact and juvenile way possible, whose deadpan pragmatism was illustrated beautifully in the work’s tautological title, Person Showing His Penis; and so on. And if everybody did precisely what they were expected, if everybody did their job, the real question around this work is not so much what did it all mean, but what was produced out of all that work? And did we learn anything?
Talking about such production is not new in contemporary art discourse. Rex Butler wrote of the Queensland Art Gallery blockbuster Optimism, in the last issue of Broadsheet no less, of an ‘equivalence made between the works and the audience’, that ‘the work actually is its crowds’, that ‘it actually is made by its spectators’. Brian Holmes is particularly good at it in describing ‘museums that work, museums that form part of the dominant economy, and that change at an increasing rate of acceleration imposed by both the market and the state’. But we’re not talking about museums here; we’re talking about work, the working of the work, the art work. Arguably, though, the terms of the discussion are not dissimilar. After all, isn’t Sierra’s work — and one can argue this about the entirety of his oeuvre — concerned with mobilising precisely the forces that manifest themselves in the new museology, a museology no longer concerned with the self-affirmation of rational, individual bourgeois subjects, but with the wholesale production of human consciousness; mobilising them and turning them against themselves? The work is political then. Or, given our participation, is it politics itself, the shifting ground against which we might define ourselves? Is politics what is produced here?
Let’s step back from that dead-end equation for a moment — if politics is what is produced then we ourselves must also be what is produced, which is not you’d expect from simply lining up to see a person showing his penis — and look elsewhere in art for some kind of clue. Exactly four weeks before a man climbed a staircase and unzipped his fly, an exhibition of the work of Deimantas Narkevicius opened at the Van Abbemuseum in the industrialised Dutch town of Eindhoven. A version of a major retrospective of the important Lithuanian artist’s work prepared by Chus Martinez for the Reina Sofía in Madrid, economised by Martinez and Van Abbe curator Annie Fletcher to provide an elegantly paced, engaging installation in the museum’s historic old wing, The Unanimous Life seems like an odd consideration to raise in the circumstances of trying to come to grips with Sierra’s intervention into One Day Sculpture. The relationship between Narkevicius’s complex cinematic proposition on the nature of memory and truth in a post-Soviet context and Sierra’s self-consciously dirty provocation is not quite clear until we return to the two questions posed earlier, ‘What did we learn?’ and ‘What was produced?’ The only thing that could have been both learned — even if we’re fucked if we know what that was — and produced is knowledge. The staging of the event in its Gehilfe-like structure did not provide any conclusive form of knowledge because it could not; it could only produce it. That knowledge is a function of truth and memory, a circuitous play between proposition, interpretation and retention, qualifies Narkevicius’s work as useful in a discussion of Sierra’s.
This relevance, however, can only be seriously underscored by an unpacking of Narkevicius’s own production in relation to that of two further artists, both of whom are provided, appropriately, by particular instances of his work’s staging—El Lissitzky and Zhang Dali. The relationship of Narkevicius to Lissitzky is the more programmatic, a particular construction of Van Abbemuseum director Charles Esche’s stated desire to link ‘the beginnings of the Soviet experiment with its aftermath’, to ‘bridge the commonly perceived divides in Western European understanding’. The comparison with Zhang Dali is more incidental, and stems from a particular resonance that occurred between works by the two artists through their inclusion in the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, and the critical position that they occupied within a trend in the international exhibition framework that suggested the emergence of the documentary form as commonly understood signifier for ‘world’. There is, of course, far more nuance and structural consequence to these conjunctions than this essay is capable of even touching on, but at the risk of coming over as instrumentalising and production-oriented, there are, for the moment, questions that need to be answered.
To work efficiently and chronologically, then, Fever Variations, the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, included Narkevicius’s 2005 video Matrioškas, which took the form of a series of recollections by three young Lithuanian women describing their experiences as economic émigrés exploited as sex workers in Belgium. Static shots of reflective windowpanes, city views and portentous religious sculptures intercut with handheld ‘talking head’ sequences suggested a work coherent with the popular documentarian style whose aesthetic function is to express the actuality of trauma through its representation. Halfway through the work, however, the process was suddenly interrupted when one of the women supposedly interviewed recounts her own murder, adding the detail of the subsequent disposal of the body with an appropriately pained expression. The women are actors, not simply actors employed by Narkevicius to recount a fictionalised narrative, but actors from the popular Belgian television serial after which the work was named (screened internationally as Russian Dolls), rehearsing the plot of that program from personal recollections of their characters’ points of view. Extraordinarily, though, rather than treating this repositioning of the viewer’s techniques of interpretation as a punchline, a moment of revelation, a dick in a box, Narkevicius continues with the narrative, allowing the third woman to tell her story, which ends, after a short, poetic and oddly redemptive pole-dancing sequence, on the sombre note of a visit to her friend’s grave.
In another part of the biennale building, Zhang Dali presented the entirety of his A Second History—China History Photographic Archive, consisting of a vast collection of images produced and circulated by the Chinese Communist Party. Over the course of 120 didactically installed panels, Zhang systematically demonstrated the extent of the role played by photographic manipulation in the construction of official histories of China. There is nothing new about drawing attention to the propaganda strategies of totalitarian states; such is their familiarity that, for example, those of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the most visible of surviving Stalinist regimes, are now relentlessly parodied to the point of cliché in Western popular culture. The significance of Zhang’s work was not so much its presentation of extreme manifestations, such as the rather chilling removals of various party functionaries from the pages of history, but its highlighting of the prosaicness of the majority of the alterations — placement of figures against more photogenic or symbolically important backgrounds, for example; cropping for composition; airbrushing the occasional wrinkle. The implication of the China History Photographic Archive is that manipulation is intrinsic not just to representations of centralised power, but to its more dispersed form in ‘democratic’ political propaganda and general advertising, and ultimately to representation itself.
Possible readings of Matrioškas are many — Simon Rees has suggested its relevance to the ‘calcification’ of ‘certain stereotypes’ in ‘Western media depictions of Lithuania’ — but in the context of Zhang’s archive, the question of truth in art becomes paramount. But where can this problematisation of truth lead if not to a smug relativisation represented traumas, represented realities? Deimantas Narkevicius’s work never comes across as smug; we can see this across the body of roughly a dozen years of production at the Van Abbe — the tone is sensitive, sincere, reflective, only ever approaching anything like smugness in its caution to avoid sentimentality, but only the resentful could seriously describe such carefulness as smug. How, moreover, do we move from the problematisation of truth and the production of truth? How does the one work do both? Let us look back to the Van Abbe, for this is where Lissitzky comes into play.
The Unanimous Life was presented alongside a pithy selection of works from the museum’s substantial Lissitzky collection, the largest outside the former Soviet Union. This was not the first time that Esche had positioned the two artists alongside one another — Narkevicius’s 2000 film Energy Lithuania, his contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale, was screened alongside a group of Lissitzkys for around a year following its acquisition by Esche in 2004. Whatever Esche’s specific motivations might be for developing this ongoing dialogue between the artists’ works — and whatever their problematics — the question of ‘What is produced?’ is again what I want to ask here. For Lissitzky could hardly be understood as a partisan of the problematisation of truth. Indeed, as an occasional propagandist he could have been expected to rely to a certain degree on the suspension of doubt in the truth of art, or at least to be aware of the mechanics of that doubt’s negotiation. There is, precisely, an element of exclusion in Lissitzky’s work that reflects the erasures, highlighted by Zhang, of historical figures from history as it is officially recorded, represented at the Van Abbe by a masterfully constructed Proun (1922–23), a sketch for which reveals the excision from the original composition of the spectral name ‘Rosa Luxemburg’. Even if that excision was aesthetic, a purely painterly vanity directed toward the perfect pictorial unity that the Proun incontestably manifests — and there is little in Lissitzky to suggest that it was anything more than aesthetic — it nevertheless constitutes an acknowledgment, no matter how tacit or inadvertent, of representation’s contingency, or of the contingency of truth in representation.
What Lissitzky proposes is a working through of this contingency that produces new truths, truths perhaps not as self-reflexively immunised to their own contingency as the process might suggest, but truths that might at least challenge prevailing frameworks of meaning — counter-truths, or ‘second histories’ as Zhang’s project suggests — or that might participate in the construction of new histories. Again, I’m moving through this quickly; if my logic sounds like totalisation, this is probably because it has been infected with a certain confidence that comes staring too long at Lissitzky’s paintings. Totalisation might be perceived there, too, but it has to be remembered that this kind of avant-gardism was not yet the official artistic language of Soviet Communism, nor did it ever become that language; that honour was of course reserved for socialist realism, which Lissitzky’s and other canonical avant-gardist practices like it existed alongside in a plurality that, for a time at least, included other, more traditional forms. Such considerations are important, for as Reina Sofía Director Manuel J. Borja-Villel reminds us in his preface to the catalogue for The Unanimous Life, ‘To analyse European painting in the 1940s or 1950s, for example, without knowing that it coexisted with neo-realism’ — here he is writing about cinema — ‘is to understand only a part of the story’. Narkevičius does the same with his film The Head, the first work encountered in the Van Abbe exhibition, a documentary assembled from found footage that details the construction of Lev Jefimovich Kerbel’s bust of Marx, which Narkevičius had attempted, but failed, to have relocated from Chemnitz in the former East to the Westphalian town of Münster for the 2007 Sculpture Project — socialist realism is proposed as the excluded other of Western art history. Any totalisation that my line of thinking might express should be tested against such complex understandings.
So the equation as it pertains to Narkevičius goes something like this: if his work suggests that truth is contingent on its representation, that representation inherently problematises truth, it does not necessarily propose that this truth is irrelevant, and in the same process proposes new truths, or at least new understandings of truth. In the case of Matrioškas, for example — one of the works, incidentally, that was not included in the Van Abbemuseum iteration of The Unanimous Life — the unaffected perpetuation of a mythology it has already identified as such serves to remind viewers reassessing their own recollection of mythological narratives presented under the guise of fact that there might still be some relevance to the material. Whatever the accuracy Christa Blümlinger’s assessment of the work that ‘the fact that the story suddenly slips into fiction does not make it invalid but vividly shows the ruining of the lives of Baltic youth’, what remains is that Narkevičius allows the narrative to run its course and mechanics of documentary construction to unfold themselves, which is to say that it is presented for us to make of it what we can, to learn from it what we can.
Now, none of this is intended to suggest that there is a necessarily immediate correlation between what Narkevičius’s work produces and what Sierra’s work produces — both are, after all, very different artists who make very different machines. What I am trying to get at here is a particular function of art, one that Narkevičius’s work at times embodies, and one that might shed at least some kind of light on Sierra’s. What the two artists do have in common is that meaning is performed in or by their work, which is to say that rather than lie in wait for a particularly insightful exegete, meaning manifests itself in the process of encounter, and that it is contingent on the conditions of its presentation, at least to the degree that language is both shared and prone to slippages. The work of both artists therefore operates with a considerable degree of porosity, not to the point of subscribing to the rhetoric of ‘open-endedness and viewer emancipation’ associated with those practices privileged as relational art in the 1990s and in certain degraded forms still visible today, but through the capacity of each to resist reduction to the singular intentional readings — this is why Sierra’s work doesn’t ‘mean’ so much as ‘produce’. Certainly the audience is far more visible in Sierra than in Narkevičius, but each works to destabilise and confuse individually and collectively held notions of truth without outwardly proclaiming its total irrelevance. This is the knowledge they both produce.
Sven Lütticken, cautioning against the trend in art world rhetoric toward parodying scientific language — think of how frequently, lately, you hear the terms ‘research’, ‘laboratory’ and ‘knowledge production’ itself — as an instrumentalisation of the necessarily inconclusive outcomes of artistic work toward quantifiable ends, and worse, as contributions to the contemporary knowledge economy, invokes a widely publicised speech by Donald Rumsfeld, which, on reflection, the exchange at the end of Burn After Reading seems to beautifully satirise. ‘Building’, he suggests, ‘on a famously rambling epistemological statement by Donald Rumsfeld, in which the then US Secretary of Defense mused about the “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns” in the war on terror, one could say that such practices’ articulate the “unknown knowns” of society — its ideological unconscious, its repressed knowledge.’ Lütticken is writing of a specific set of practices he describes as reflexively ‘symptomatological’, but his description that they ‘produce dubious knowledge about knowledge’s other’ is appropriate for my purposes to thinking through the productive aspect of Sierra’s intervention. So I want to hijack it. This is one thing we might have learned from Person Showing His Penis. Something dubious. Which, as it turns out, we probably knew at the time.
Thursday, 22 October 2015
Raquel Ormella: She went that way
Among the dozens of projects I worked on in my time at Artspace, Raquel Ormella's 2009 survey "She went that way" and its accompanying catalogue are among the things of which I'm proudest - largely thanks to the integrity of the artist, which made for a satisfying exhibition. This was the lead essay I wrote for the catalogue.
‘Where is the artist?’ This is the question that occurs to me most frequently when appreciating the various threads of Raquel Ormella’s practice. Such is the consistency of the voice with which the work speaks, its unmistakable timbre across the drawings, textiles, installations, interventions, publications, videos and multiples that make up Ormella’s multifarious oeuvre. Yet it is a voice that gives away little of the body from which it issues, even when this body is pictured directly in the work. ‘Raquel Ormella’ is never articulated as a specific identity, only as the unmistakable author of a complex of traces, vestiges that might reveal the shape but never the substance — nor, in the final analysis, the whereabouts — of the presence that left them, only ever offering directions.
This is why the phrase that gives the publication, and the exhibition project it complements, seems, to my mind at least, the best possible answer to that question — ‘She went that way’. It suggests the simultaneously elusive and irreducible relationship of an artist to her work, and the experience of encountering that work, of registering its distinctive voice in the absence of the artist. Rather than being merely incidental, by-products of the work’s presentation as art, these relationships and encounters sit close to its productive core. They are, as much as anything else, the politics that constitute the work’s immediate field of operation: shifting economies of power and desire that manifest themselves visually, spatially and discursively in patterns of which the artist is clearly not unaware and demonstrably not uncritical. As astutely as Ormella engages social questions, her work is characterised by its critical self-awareness and its persistent consideration of the ethical roles and responsibilities of the artist, always articulated with that aesthetic consistency, that clear and singular voice.
In Ormella’s work, the inherent reflexivity of contemporary art provides a mechanism for interrogating the artist’s own agency and authority as she interfaces with questions of relevance to the world at large. The preoccupations with political and environmental issues that become manifest in Ormella’s art-making do extend from, as well as into, sustained, in-depth research and close involvement with a number of social movements. But her work is singular in its capacity to constructively problematise romantic notions of art and activism alike. For all its social and political relevance, it regularly returns to properly artistic questions; if the work prompts me to ask ‘Where is the artist?’, surely, then, this can only be because the artist has already asked ‘What is an artist?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist in the world?’
In this sense, Ormella’s practice is a sophisticated and evolving process of self-reflection, a means by which the artist attempts to take account of her place as an agent in the world, and to act on it. In this critical understanding of aestheticising tendencies in approaches to art and to social change, exercised by an artist committed to exploring both, and to doing so aesthetically, an interrogation of the relationship between authorship and authority is paramount, manifesting itself at different levels of Ormella’s production. She has, for example, consistently explored various modes of collective and collaborative production as an extension of both her studio practice and the broader social concerns of her work. Personal and collective memory emerge as further themes in the artist’s own reflections, in histories recounted by others and in encounters staged between the two. Significant also is the issue of space, from questions of propriety as they pertain to the use of urban geography, to provocative investigations of the impact of human activity on the natural environment. These questions extend to the politics of appropriating socially, collectively or anonymously authored narratives and cultural objects, and presenting them as the work of a single artist through their configuration within the gallery space.
And yet, for all this reflection on authorship, very little of the author is evident in the work at the level of content. At a time when the stake of the political in art is so often invested in a politics of identity, or even, in broader aesthetic terms, to the very production of identity through art, Ormella’s relationship to her work is that of an identity that produces. It is not so much that the artist strives for anonymity — the gendered pronoun ‘She’ in ‘She went that way’, suggestive as it is of a specific sexual politics, also implies a specific person, a specific artist — but that she attempts, at least, to resist the autobiographical impulse. Each time a reference to the self appears — the ‘I’ pronoun in Ormella’s banner works and slogans; images of the artist in certain videos and photographs; clear traces of her hand in sewn, drawn and painted works; even snippets of personal correspondence — it is decontextualised, such that as in a first-person novel, it poses the possibility of its own fiction at the same time as acting as a point of identification for the audience. Even when elements of autobiography do slip through, as in the family postcards on whose verso are drawn stills from Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the important but underseen work While Sleeping (2000), they are fragmented, obscured and distanced enough to negate the possibility of a confessional or exhibitionist reading.
‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ — the phrase exemplifies the open-ended reference to self that appears throughout Ormella’s work. The artist acknowledges her presence, admitting her anxieties about the process in which she is engaged as if to declare them as a variable that might affect the work’s outcome. At the same time the phrase expresses a recognition that art is not documentary; Ormella’s reflexive approach to art making is both particular, insofar as it relates to a specific project, and general, in the sense that it offers an observation about the nature of art, or at least of how art might differ from other modes of cultural production and, importantly, what relationship it bears to truth. And in introducing the figure of doubt, it suggests the artist’s own fallibility. ‘I am the author’, it seems to say, ‘but I don’t have the authority to tell you what to think.’ More so — in this fallibility it proposes the need for an active and inclusive political space marked by debate and discussion rather than simple consensus, the ‘agonistic public sphere’ as Chantal Mouffe has framed it, inviting a certain agency: ‘Let’s have a conversation.’
The phrase originated in the process of Ormella’s researching and reflecting on the work I used to live here (2001–09). Created for the group exhibition Temporary Fixtures, curated by Jacqueline Phillips for Artspace in 2001, I used to live here explores the recent history of the Gunnery building through interviews with a number of the artists who had famously squatted in the space prior to its conversion into an arts facility, now dominated physically — and publicly — by Artspace. Through slide projections, diary notes and a video documenting traces of the building’s previous inhabitants, the work details the integration of the Gunnery squat with local activist histories, particularly the antinuclear movement, and the rapid transformation of Sydney’s urban geography during the 1990s. In the process, though, it also evinced conflicting accounts and longstanding personal enmities between participants. Ormella’s reflection on the difference between artistic and documentarian approaches to history and truth suggests that collective memory can be just as contested a ground as public space.
The first person pronoun, however, is not limited to this single phrase. It recurs in text form throughout Ormella’s practice, most notably the extensive series of double-sided banner works, not included in She went that way, collectively titled I’m worried this will become a slogan (1999–2009), through such poignant registers of creative and ethical uncertainty as ‘I’m wondering whether this says anything’ and ‘I’m worried I’m not political enough’. The tense in these works is significant; what Ormella describes as their ‘continually present moment’ — ‘I am’, ‘this would’ — distinguishes them as works of art, objects that will be encountered in a gallery as a form over time. This is further emphasised in her decision to revisit certain works in She went that way, in particular I used to live here, updated and restaged in the very site it dealt with and in which it was first presented eight years earlier, grounding the work, and indeed the exhibition, within a particular institutional history.
The materiality, the physical detail of the works, is important to their status as art, to the politics of their reading within the reflexive and institutional context of the gallery, and to the historical associations that might be produced by that encounter. That the hand cut letters sewn to a sheet of plain flannelette to read ‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ simultaneously recall suffragette banners, protest workshops and the yellowing documents of a post-object ‘aesthetic of administration’ is appropriate to the complex dialogues with feminism, activism and conceptualism in which Ormella has engaged across her practice.
Crucial, though, is the anonymity of the ‘I’, the work’s reluctance to give away any more than what is contained in the text. Ormella clearly realises that one of the specificities of the use of language in art, as opposed to everyday speech, is its capacity to allow the viewing subject to inhabit the empty pronoun. It becomes a possible locus of engagement in which the artist’s disclaimer that the work is authored and the viewer’s desire for meaning might coalesce and commune as a singularity; it is the self that never closes itself off to the other.
What of Ormella’s specific presence might be detectable in her work, and this is precisely what gives her practice its aesthetic consistency, is her tendency to utilise the ‘I’ as a limit — a hermeneutic limit, in the sense that so little of the author is presented as an aid to interpretation, forcing attention back onto context and location, and ultimately toward the issues at hand; and a formal limit, the hand-made quality of so much of her work, which, though assured, seems to internalise the possibility of its own failure, a very human failure. This second aspect is most visible in the hand-drawn lettering of the editioned field guides to the problematic Indian Myna that make up one part of the set of multiples concerned with the bird, Varied, Noisy (2008), and in the painterly hesitancy of the wall drawing on which she collaborated with Melbourne artist Andrew McQualter to complement the presentation of the multiples in She went that way. It can also be seen in the felt-tip pen ink that soaks the dozens of postcards and cardboard figures of While Sleeping (2000), and in the erratically sized lettering of I’m worried this will become a slogan, the Howard-era newspeak phrases that adorn her Australia Rising and Things that have not changed banners, and of course ‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ itself.
But beyond the clear traces of the artist’s hand, it should be said that her body and its operation also act as formal limits for works utilising more mechanical, which is to say less immediately gestural, technologies. The recent Walking through clearfells (2009), for example, whose dual-screen, full wall projection confronted viewers on entering She went that way, owes a good part of its effect on the relationship of the artist’s body to representational technology as a marker of her irreducible role in producing the material form of the work. Consisting of two channels of high-definition video, it tracks in great detail the passage of a female and male figure — the artist and the cinematographer — as they traverse zones of increasing devastation left in three clearfell logging areas in Tasmania’s Styx and Florentine Valleys. Deliberately eschewing Romantic traditions of picturing landscape according Cartesian principles, the camera is pointed down to what once was a forest floor, offering no horizon for viewers to orient themselves against, instead slowly revealing the fire-ravaged ground, empty stumps and various debris left by large-scale commercial logging. Using a radically reductive method of framing, the inclusion of the legs and muddied boots of the camera operators, and the contingency of the camera’s movement on that of the figures as they carefully negotiate the landscape continues Ormella’s self-reflexive acknowledgment of her role as an author and mediator. The much earlier Mission Brown (1999), though shot in the contrastingly outmoded medium of Video 8, is similarly reliant on the physical limitations of a technology and its operator. Taking its name from the shade of paint used by local councils in the Sydney basin to erase graffiti, it documents, without comment, the odd shapes produced by mission brown paint hastily splashed over graffiti at Doonside station in Sydney’s west. Each shot lasts roughly a second, but the precise duration varies — Ormella edited the work in camera, attempting to stop the device from recording immediately after activating it.
In all of these cases, the fallible or doubting self remains the pathos of the work, but this self’s refusal to fixate on itself as content is the critical mechanism that enables the political aspect of the work to exceed mere content, constructing a properly political space out of the space of encounter. In other words, it is in the work’s specificity as a work of art, rather than as a piece of propaganda, that it provides the ground for discussion of the issues with which it grapples. It is political in operation as well as content. That it exists so exclusively within the rarefied space of the gallery is certainly not lost on the artist, but then Ormella’s practice is not the search for a mass audience; it is the investigation of modes of engagement that differ qualitatively from those put to work in the mass media and in the spectacular aspects of daily life — urban geography, commodified leisure time, representational politics, and so on.
This problematising approach to modes of aesthetic address, and to the political authority of the author, extends to Ormella’s incorporation of collaborative strategies into her practice at various levels. Her invitation to Andrew McQualter to join her in the production of a setting in which to present Varied, Noisy is not isolated within her practice. Since 2002, she has worked with Sydney artist Regina Walter to write and illustrate the fanzine Flaps, now running to sixteen issues. Walking through clearfells and the trio of whiteboard works that connect it to While Sleeping in a formal sense — Poster Reduction (2005), 130 Davey Street (2005) and Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney (2008) — developed out of a long-term and continuing engagement with the Wilderness Society and its campaigns to protect old growth forest in Tasmania and rivers in Queensland, an engagement undertaken from a perspective that constructively critiques certain aspects of the society’s activist aesthetics. At another level, Going Back / Volver (2006) involved the cooperation of large number of Chilean émigrés whose hands were photographed holding snapshots of their families in transit to Australia. Ormella’s friends and fellow artists are often involved in the production of technically complex works such as Walking through clearfells and the labour-intensive stitching and unpicking of the Australia Rising and Things that have not changed series, whose genesis, Ormella has noted, owes much to the involvement of a number of women in stitching the iconic Eureka flag.
Another form of collaboration is presented by The Domain, Sydney, February 2001 (2001–09). The work deals with a similar council cleanup to Mission Brown, involving a site very close to Artspace, on a wall erected next to the Eastern Suburbs Railway Line as it enters a tunnel under the expansive parkland of the Domain. Reproduced as a postcard is a photograph of an ugly, brown, enamel patch on the wall’s original bare concrete, next to which Ormella has daubed, as a matter of public record, ‘The political graffiti, which lasted on this wall for more than 10 years, was recently painted mission brown’. A sketch on the rear of the postcard brings the original slogan, concerning the visit of a US nuclear ship to Sydney Harbour — a campaign with which the Gunnery tenants at the time were involved — back to life. The postcard form opens up the possibility of the viewer taking the image out of the gallery, of dispersing copies into the world, perhaps even of comparing it to the original site, which, one might discover, is now blocked by strategically planted trees, and, with the exception of a small patch of concrete near Sir John Young Crescent, painted entirely mission brown.
Domain’s decentering of presentational authority is extended in Varied, Noisy through the a range of modes of viewer engagement offered by the series of multiples whose dispersal, moreover, bears conceptual significance to its subject matter. Varied, Noisy accords its audience the status of participants in the framing and distribution of the work and in the production of its meaning. Alongside the field guide, the series of editioned multiples includes a field guide, a parallel groove record and sets of woven patches and rubber stamps. Varied, Noisy deals, like Walking through clearfells, with the impact of human activity of the environment, in this case through the figure of the Indian or Common Myna. The Myna, whose raucous call gives the work its title, thrives in areas of human habitation, threatening local bird populations through its aggressive territorial behaviour. The form of the multiples is important, as their dispersal mimics the patterns of the human activity — road building and land clearing — that aids the distribution of the Myna. This is emphasised by the inclusion of interactive works, the record whose parallel grooves on both sides play different tracks depending on where the viewer places the stylus, and rubber stamps through which the audience becomes a collaborator in the physical production of the work.
As much as these gestures constitute a dispersal or redistribution of authorial responsibility, they fall short of negating it outright. That the work is clearly authored, and that it announces this aesthetically and discursively, suggests the impossibility and therefore the disingenuousness of abrogating its authorship from the point of view of accountability. And this, I believe, is what the relationship between authorship and authority in Ormella’s practice turns on. The question of the location of the artist within the exchange between the work and its audience, or between an object that the artist produces and the world it is inserted into, is, ultimately, an ethical question. It is an ethics that underscores the political in Ormella’s artistic output, whether this is considered in the narrow sense of the issues, raised by the work, that have great significance to the social and cultural context in which the artist operates, or in the broader sense of this very operation. Or, perhaps more accurately, in the continuity of these two senses — the commonality of the ‘I’, of what is shared in the performative exchange between the work and its public and what is produced in that interaction, suggests that the ethics that underpins the political content of the work is inseparable from that which informs its production and presentation.
As an ethical proposition, Ormella’s work returns us again and again to the question of world, of what it means to be and to do in the presence of others. Does it matter, then, where the artist is in this world? Which way she went does not seem to be a question that can ever be adequately answered by the work alone. But it undeniably does matter, for the location of the artist, even if it can never be divulged to the audience, is of fundamental importance to the artist herself. And, given the embeddedness of her work, its tendency to defer attention away from its author to its context and location, it certainly matters where she has been. But the question I have been asking all along might be the wrong one. What really matters is not so much where the artist is, but what she does there. And it matters also that this doing is accompanying by a self-reflection as rigorous as the criticality that might be applied to the world. Never self-negating, it is always mutually empowering. By inviting us in, by making us pause to consider the figure of the artist as an actor in the world, by allowing us, however briefly, to inhabit the ‘I’ and to resist, as it does, the closure of our own selves to others, Ormella’s work tells us that it matters what we do as well.
‘Where is the artist?’ This is the question that occurs to me most frequently when appreciating the various threads of Raquel Ormella’s practice. Such is the consistency of the voice with which the work speaks, its unmistakable timbre across the drawings, textiles, installations, interventions, publications, videos and multiples that make up Ormella’s multifarious oeuvre. Yet it is a voice that gives away little of the body from which it issues, even when this body is pictured directly in the work. ‘Raquel Ormella’ is never articulated as a specific identity, only as the unmistakable author of a complex of traces, vestiges that might reveal the shape but never the substance — nor, in the final analysis, the whereabouts — of the presence that left them, only ever offering directions.
This is why the phrase that gives the publication, and the exhibition project it complements, seems, to my mind at least, the best possible answer to that question — ‘She went that way’. It suggests the simultaneously elusive and irreducible relationship of an artist to her work, and the experience of encountering that work, of registering its distinctive voice in the absence of the artist. Rather than being merely incidental, by-products of the work’s presentation as art, these relationships and encounters sit close to its productive core. They are, as much as anything else, the politics that constitute the work’s immediate field of operation: shifting economies of power and desire that manifest themselves visually, spatially and discursively in patterns of which the artist is clearly not unaware and demonstrably not uncritical. As astutely as Ormella engages social questions, her work is characterised by its critical self-awareness and its persistent consideration of the ethical roles and responsibilities of the artist, always articulated with that aesthetic consistency, that clear and singular voice.
In Ormella’s work, the inherent reflexivity of contemporary art provides a mechanism for interrogating the artist’s own agency and authority as she interfaces with questions of relevance to the world at large. The preoccupations with political and environmental issues that become manifest in Ormella’s art-making do extend from, as well as into, sustained, in-depth research and close involvement with a number of social movements. But her work is singular in its capacity to constructively problematise romantic notions of art and activism alike. For all its social and political relevance, it regularly returns to properly artistic questions; if the work prompts me to ask ‘Where is the artist?’, surely, then, this can only be because the artist has already asked ‘What is an artist?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist in the world?’
In this sense, Ormella’s practice is a sophisticated and evolving process of self-reflection, a means by which the artist attempts to take account of her place as an agent in the world, and to act on it. In this critical understanding of aestheticising tendencies in approaches to art and to social change, exercised by an artist committed to exploring both, and to doing so aesthetically, an interrogation of the relationship between authorship and authority is paramount, manifesting itself at different levels of Ormella’s production. She has, for example, consistently explored various modes of collective and collaborative production as an extension of both her studio practice and the broader social concerns of her work. Personal and collective memory emerge as further themes in the artist’s own reflections, in histories recounted by others and in encounters staged between the two. Significant also is the issue of space, from questions of propriety as they pertain to the use of urban geography, to provocative investigations of the impact of human activity on the natural environment. These questions extend to the politics of appropriating socially, collectively or anonymously authored narratives and cultural objects, and presenting them as the work of a single artist through their configuration within the gallery space.
And yet, for all this reflection on authorship, very little of the author is evident in the work at the level of content. At a time when the stake of the political in art is so often invested in a politics of identity, or even, in broader aesthetic terms, to the very production of identity through art, Ormella’s relationship to her work is that of an identity that produces. It is not so much that the artist strives for anonymity — the gendered pronoun ‘She’ in ‘She went that way’, suggestive as it is of a specific sexual politics, also implies a specific person, a specific artist — but that she attempts, at least, to resist the autobiographical impulse. Each time a reference to the self appears — the ‘I’ pronoun in Ormella’s banner works and slogans; images of the artist in certain videos and photographs; clear traces of her hand in sewn, drawn and painted works; even snippets of personal correspondence — it is decontextualised, such that as in a first-person novel, it poses the possibility of its own fiction at the same time as acting as a point of identification for the audience. Even when elements of autobiography do slip through, as in the family postcards on whose verso are drawn stills from Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the important but underseen work While Sleeping (2000), they are fragmented, obscured and distanced enough to negate the possibility of a confessional or exhibitionist reading.
The phrase originated in the process of Ormella’s researching and reflecting on the work I used to live here (2001–09). Created for the group exhibition Temporary Fixtures, curated by Jacqueline Phillips for Artspace in 2001, I used to live here explores the recent history of the Gunnery building through interviews with a number of the artists who had famously squatted in the space prior to its conversion into an arts facility, now dominated physically — and publicly — by Artspace. Through slide projections, diary notes and a video documenting traces of the building’s previous inhabitants, the work details the integration of the Gunnery squat with local activist histories, particularly the antinuclear movement, and the rapid transformation of Sydney’s urban geography during the 1990s. In the process, though, it also evinced conflicting accounts and longstanding personal enmities between participants. Ormella’s reflection on the difference between artistic and documentarian approaches to history and truth suggests that collective memory can be just as contested a ground as public space.
The first person pronoun, however, is not limited to this single phrase. It recurs in text form throughout Ormella’s practice, most notably the extensive series of double-sided banner works, not included in She went that way, collectively titled I’m worried this will become a slogan (1999–2009), through such poignant registers of creative and ethical uncertainty as ‘I’m wondering whether this says anything’ and ‘I’m worried I’m not political enough’. The tense in these works is significant; what Ormella describes as their ‘continually present moment’ — ‘I am’, ‘this would’ — distinguishes them as works of art, objects that will be encountered in a gallery as a form over time. This is further emphasised in her decision to revisit certain works in She went that way, in particular I used to live here, updated and restaged in the very site it dealt with and in which it was first presented eight years earlier, grounding the work, and indeed the exhibition, within a particular institutional history.
The materiality, the physical detail of the works, is important to their status as art, to the politics of their reading within the reflexive and institutional context of the gallery, and to the historical associations that might be produced by that encounter. That the hand cut letters sewn to a sheet of plain flannelette to read ‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ simultaneously recall suffragette banners, protest workshops and the yellowing documents of a post-object ‘aesthetic of administration’ is appropriate to the complex dialogues with feminism, activism and conceptualism in which Ormella has engaged across her practice.
Crucial, though, is the anonymity of the ‘I’, the work’s reluctance to give away any more than what is contained in the text. Ormella clearly realises that one of the specificities of the use of language in art, as opposed to everyday speech, is its capacity to allow the viewing subject to inhabit the empty pronoun. It becomes a possible locus of engagement in which the artist’s disclaimer that the work is authored and the viewer’s desire for meaning might coalesce and commune as a singularity; it is the self that never closes itself off to the other.
What of Ormella’s specific presence might be detectable in her work, and this is precisely what gives her practice its aesthetic consistency, is her tendency to utilise the ‘I’ as a limit — a hermeneutic limit, in the sense that so little of the author is presented as an aid to interpretation, forcing attention back onto context and location, and ultimately toward the issues at hand; and a formal limit, the hand-made quality of so much of her work, which, though assured, seems to internalise the possibility of its own failure, a very human failure. This second aspect is most visible in the hand-drawn lettering of the editioned field guides to the problematic Indian Myna that make up one part of the set of multiples concerned with the bird, Varied, Noisy (2008), and in the painterly hesitancy of the wall drawing on which she collaborated with Melbourne artist Andrew McQualter to complement the presentation of the multiples in She went that way. It can also be seen in the felt-tip pen ink that soaks the dozens of postcards and cardboard figures of While Sleeping (2000), and in the erratically sized lettering of I’m worried this will become a slogan, the Howard-era newspeak phrases that adorn her Australia Rising and Things that have not changed banners, and of course ‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ itself.
But beyond the clear traces of the artist’s hand, it should be said that her body and its operation also act as formal limits for works utilising more mechanical, which is to say less immediately gestural, technologies. The recent Walking through clearfells (2009), for example, whose dual-screen, full wall projection confronted viewers on entering She went that way, owes a good part of its effect on the relationship of the artist’s body to representational technology as a marker of her irreducible role in producing the material form of the work. Consisting of two channels of high-definition video, it tracks in great detail the passage of a female and male figure — the artist and the cinematographer — as they traverse zones of increasing devastation left in three clearfell logging areas in Tasmania’s Styx and Florentine Valleys. Deliberately eschewing Romantic traditions of picturing landscape according Cartesian principles, the camera is pointed down to what once was a forest floor, offering no horizon for viewers to orient themselves against, instead slowly revealing the fire-ravaged ground, empty stumps and various debris left by large-scale commercial logging. Using a radically reductive method of framing, the inclusion of the legs and muddied boots of the camera operators, and the contingency of the camera’s movement on that of the figures as they carefully negotiate the landscape continues Ormella’s self-reflexive acknowledgment of her role as an author and mediator. The much earlier Mission Brown (1999), though shot in the contrastingly outmoded medium of Video 8, is similarly reliant on the physical limitations of a technology and its operator. Taking its name from the shade of paint used by local councils in the Sydney basin to erase graffiti, it documents, without comment, the odd shapes produced by mission brown paint hastily splashed over graffiti at Doonside station in Sydney’s west. Each shot lasts roughly a second, but the precise duration varies — Ormella edited the work in camera, attempting to stop the device from recording immediately after activating it.
In all of these cases, the fallible or doubting self remains the pathos of the work, but this self’s refusal to fixate on itself as content is the critical mechanism that enables the political aspect of the work to exceed mere content, constructing a properly political space out of the space of encounter. In other words, it is in the work’s specificity as a work of art, rather than as a piece of propaganda, that it provides the ground for discussion of the issues with which it grapples. It is political in operation as well as content. That it exists so exclusively within the rarefied space of the gallery is certainly not lost on the artist, but then Ormella’s practice is not the search for a mass audience; it is the investigation of modes of engagement that differ qualitatively from those put to work in the mass media and in the spectacular aspects of daily life — urban geography, commodified leisure time, representational politics, and so on.
This problematising approach to modes of aesthetic address, and to the political authority of the author, extends to Ormella’s incorporation of collaborative strategies into her practice at various levels. Her invitation to Andrew McQualter to join her in the production of a setting in which to present Varied, Noisy is not isolated within her practice. Since 2002, she has worked with Sydney artist Regina Walter to write and illustrate the fanzine Flaps, now running to sixteen issues. Walking through clearfells and the trio of whiteboard works that connect it to While Sleeping in a formal sense — Poster Reduction (2005), 130 Davey Street (2005) and Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney (2008) — developed out of a long-term and continuing engagement with the Wilderness Society and its campaigns to protect old growth forest in Tasmania and rivers in Queensland, an engagement undertaken from a perspective that constructively critiques certain aspects of the society’s activist aesthetics. At another level, Going Back / Volver (2006) involved the cooperation of large number of Chilean émigrés whose hands were photographed holding snapshots of their families in transit to Australia. Ormella’s friends and fellow artists are often involved in the production of technically complex works such as Walking through clearfells and the labour-intensive stitching and unpicking of the Australia Rising and Things that have not changed series, whose genesis, Ormella has noted, owes much to the involvement of a number of women in stitching the iconic Eureka flag.
Another form of collaboration is presented by The Domain, Sydney, February 2001 (2001–09). The work deals with a similar council cleanup to Mission Brown, involving a site very close to Artspace, on a wall erected next to the Eastern Suburbs Railway Line as it enters a tunnel under the expansive parkland of the Domain. Reproduced as a postcard is a photograph of an ugly, brown, enamel patch on the wall’s original bare concrete, next to which Ormella has daubed, as a matter of public record, ‘The political graffiti, which lasted on this wall for more than 10 years, was recently painted mission brown’. A sketch on the rear of the postcard brings the original slogan, concerning the visit of a US nuclear ship to Sydney Harbour — a campaign with which the Gunnery tenants at the time were involved — back to life. The postcard form opens up the possibility of the viewer taking the image out of the gallery, of dispersing copies into the world, perhaps even of comparing it to the original site, which, one might discover, is now blocked by strategically planted trees, and, with the exception of a small patch of concrete near Sir John Young Crescent, painted entirely mission brown.
Domain’s decentering of presentational authority is extended in Varied, Noisy through the a range of modes of viewer engagement offered by the series of multiples whose dispersal, moreover, bears conceptual significance to its subject matter. Varied, Noisy accords its audience the status of participants in the framing and distribution of the work and in the production of its meaning. Alongside the field guide, the series of editioned multiples includes a field guide, a parallel groove record and sets of woven patches and rubber stamps. Varied, Noisy deals, like Walking through clearfells, with the impact of human activity of the environment, in this case through the figure of the Indian or Common Myna. The Myna, whose raucous call gives the work its title, thrives in areas of human habitation, threatening local bird populations through its aggressive territorial behaviour. The form of the multiples is important, as their dispersal mimics the patterns of the human activity — road building and land clearing — that aids the distribution of the Myna. This is emphasised by the inclusion of interactive works, the record whose parallel grooves on both sides play different tracks depending on where the viewer places the stylus, and rubber stamps through which the audience becomes a collaborator in the physical production of the work.
As much as these gestures constitute a dispersal or redistribution of authorial responsibility, they fall short of negating it outright. That the work is clearly authored, and that it announces this aesthetically and discursively, suggests the impossibility and therefore the disingenuousness of abrogating its authorship from the point of view of accountability. And this, I believe, is what the relationship between authorship and authority in Ormella’s practice turns on. The question of the location of the artist within the exchange between the work and its audience, or between an object that the artist produces and the world it is inserted into, is, ultimately, an ethical question. It is an ethics that underscores the political in Ormella’s artistic output, whether this is considered in the narrow sense of the issues, raised by the work, that have great significance to the social and cultural context in which the artist operates, or in the broader sense of this very operation. Or, perhaps more accurately, in the continuity of these two senses — the commonality of the ‘I’, of what is shared in the performative exchange between the work and its public and what is produced in that interaction, suggests that the ethics that underpins the political content of the work is inseparable from that which informs its production and presentation.
As an ethical proposition, Ormella’s work returns us again and again to the question of world, of what it means to be and to do in the presence of others. Does it matter, then, where the artist is in this world? Which way she went does not seem to be a question that can ever be adequately answered by the work alone. But it undeniably does matter, for the location of the artist, even if it can never be divulged to the audience, is of fundamental importance to the artist herself. And, given the embeddedness of her work, its tendency to defer attention away from its author to its context and location, it certainly matters where she has been. But the question I have been asking all along might be the wrong one. What really matters is not so much where the artist is, but what she does there. And it matters also that this doing is accompanying by a self-reflection as rigorous as the criticality that might be applied to the world. Never self-negating, it is always mutually empowering. By inviting us in, by making us pause to consider the figure of the artist as an actor in the world, by allowing us, however briefly, to inhabit the ‘I’ and to resist, as it does, the closure of our own selves to others, Ormella’s work tells us that it matters what we do as well.
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