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 21^st 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.