‘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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