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).
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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:
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.
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.
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| Koji Ryui, Mutual Obligation, installation view, Artspace, Sydney |
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.
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