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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vernon Ah Kee: Belief Suspension

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

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

The odd angry shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the beach

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

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

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

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

The last wave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of bestial acts and rabbits in hats: Zanny Begg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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