29:
Michael Stevenson
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
6 April – 19 June, 2011
[Highly Commended for the 2011 Frieze Writer’s Prize]
o
0
There is something serendipitous in Michael Stevenson’s twenty-year retrospective being the final exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art before it closes for long-awaited and controversial renovations. As the institution prepares to reinvent itself with a new wing laying claim to a little more of that glittering waterfront real estate, Stevenson’s work is quietly undoing boundaries inside – between the public and private spaces of the gallery, between historical fact and imagination, and between the economically rational and absurd. This is a curiously fitting exhibition in many ways, circling around issues pertinent to the MCA redevelopment but also to the role of art in relation to society and its possible futures.
Curator Glenn Barkley charts a rich, dense journey through Stevenson’s diverse years of practice, in which changing fortunes, myth and unusual transactions recur in thoughtful and provocative configurations. As Stevenson notes, it is a show characterised by doubling. The most obvious example might be the artist’s ‘renovation’ of the gallery from within, opening up wall segments to reveal building infrastructure and appropriating a basement storage area for the display of works encompassing sculpture, installation, drawing and film. The installation is presented as ‘a new artwork articulated across two levels’, framing the objects within it (both what is art and what is not) in ways that are opportunistic and surprising.
Our first encounter is with The Gift (2004), Stevenson’s full-scale reimagining of the raft built by artist Ian Fairweather for his unlikely voyage across the Timor Sea in 1952. Further on, a painstakingly recreated letterpress print of The Times article, Timor Sea Crossed on Raft (2004), tells of Fairweather’s intention to ‘call on an old friend in Indonesian Timor’ equipped with only rudimentary navigational skills and a ‘30s compass. Made with parachute sail roped to a base of aircraft fuel tanks – materials literally fallen from the sky – and resting on stacks of National Geographic magazines, this museological artefact gains particular poignancy amid contemporary debates around ‘illegal’ boat arrivals from that region. The work also resuscitates an epic adventure that sidestepped conventional monetary exchanges; the original was kept by Rotinese fishermen on whose island Fairweather washed up, destitute and eventually deported to London, where his passage was paid by ditch-digging in Devon.
This narrative of blind optimism followed by a dramatic fall, of exuberant over-investment or the extra-market circulation of the gift, repeats itself throughout the exhibition. A New Zealander based in Berlin, for Stevenson the Pacific is another trope looming large; here is where Marcel Mauss theorised gift exchange, where the 18th century South Sea shipping bubble brought financial ruin to many, where in effect nothing is certain. In Revolutions in New Zealand (2002), screen-prints of 1982 headlines sandwich together shock at the crumbling of the national stock market with commentary on visiting German artist Jorg Immendorff, another figure emblematic of the art world’s interdependence with broader economic and political dynamics. Declaring SUSPICION PUSHES DOWN MARKET, JORG BOUYS AUCKLAND’S CONFIDENCE and “I HATE CHEAP CHAMPAGNE”, these are historical objects deployed to tell a story in which the pathos of human folly is weighted equally to the forces of globalised macro politics.
Upstairs, the disjuncture between the specific and the universal returns in photorealist drawings of newspaper images (of the politically motivated vandalism of Guernica and ‘cash will crash in a flash’ on a TV screen, amongst others), in paintings of hymnal books tracing Stevenson’s religious upbringing, and in the poetic and allegorical film On How Things Behave (2010). Looping and somnolent, this work is a collection of tales that begin with Man, a hermit artist to whom the tides, and their bounty from passing trade ships, are given ‘in perpetuity’, until the arrival of a catastrophic oil spill. Against sliding shots of a concrete sea wall (one of several limited views), the narrator slips into the ‘80s economic crash and Hume’s proposition on the absolute uncertainty of the sun rising tomorrow. The crux of the film, resonating across the exhibition, lies in Man’s stunned rebuke to the Sea: ‘How can I account for this? Why did you not think to forewarn me?’
Stevenson is an artist for whom the business of recounting, and of accounting for, is taken seriously and with a wry wit. In the Annex, Barbas y Bigotes (2011) and its inverse, Sin barbas y sin bigotes (2011), are two large display cabinets whose contents do include beards and moustaches, alongside nods to other works and their origins: an empty bottle of Möet, a Guatemalan banknote, a model of The Gift, maps and videos with titles like Portrait of the Artist as a Tax Evader. Here also is Contadora (2011), a money-counting machine now flipping words, a (double) doubling of two works secreted in a downstairs ‘gallery’: Introducción a la teoría de la probabilidad (2008) and The Fountain of Prosperity (2006).
Discovered only by closely inspecting the room sheet or chancing upon the goods lift, both works are worthy rewards for the persistent traveller. Introducción… is a video reflecting on probability and political intrigue on the South Sea island of Contadora off Panama; The Fountain of Prosperity an elaborate hydraulic instrument demonstrating the workings of the Guatemalan national economy during the 1950s CIA-led coup in that country. Dimly lit beneath exposed air-conditioning ducts, this replica of the ‘Moniac’ machine purchased at that time by the Guatemalan bank – deliberately left unattended to run down – is very much at home though certainly out of place (and time), orange liquid dripping through tubes and filters to a low motor hum.
In the film we are told that ‘in the finite world, no shuffle is fair. The deck is always stacked’. Hands play out a perpetual game of cards as a voice in Spanish meditates on the machinations surrounding the Shah of Iran’s political asylum under General Torrijo in Contadora in 1979. Drawing largely on the recollections of Torrijo’s bodyguard, a professor of mathematics and philosophy, the work unfolds in much the same way as the entire exhibition: with perambulations that are cyclic and oblique, and meticulous in their materiality.
For Stevenson, doubling provides access to the historical; the doubled form is permeable and can be manipulated to at once represent and critique the original. Here is a way the past can be approached as more than an accumulation of data by which to predict future trajectories, but rather as an opportunity to step outside complacency and the expectation of continuity, to perhaps process the finitude of the flawed systems we rely upon and rethink how we might structure our relations with each other and the world that sustains us.
– Tessa Zettel
IMAGE CREDITS
TOP LEFT:
The Fountain of Prosperity, 2006
Plexiglass, steel, brass, aluminum, rubber, cork, string, concrete, dyed water, pumps and fluorescent lamps
2.5 x 1.6 x 1m installation view, Vilma Gold, London, 2007
Image courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
© the artist
TOP RIGHT:
On How Things Behave, 2010
still from HD and 16mm film transferred to DVD
Image courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; Vilma Gold, London; and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
© the artist
02:
Utopia
Cao Fei
Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
2 May – 27 June, 2009
[Highly Commended for the 2009 Frieze Writers’ Prize – judges were James Elkins, Ali Smith & Jennifer Higgie]
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Cao Fei’s Utopia is both a place and a non-place. It is a daydream, a fiction and a collective longing. Then again, it has three rooms, it has light projected on walls and captured on photographic paper, and it can be arrived at through a winding labyrinth of gallery spaces at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. A joint project with Artspace in Auckland, this is the young Chinese artist’s first solo exhibition in Australasia, and it includes work made over a number of years in a variety of media: photography, film and virtual architecture.
Its first sited play between the imaginary and the real is a video projection, Whose Utopia (2006), which takes us into a light bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta. Fluorescent tubes, ordinary globes and miniature halogens dance and whirl with mechanical grace, revealing a hundred tiny movements and component parts. Already, these are no longer the inert, mute objects we switch on and off each day. As workers faces and hands begin to appear, sorting and pushing and hovering as machine-like as possible, we can begin to see the outlines of a narrative around these ubiquitous everyday things that travel to us from so many miles away. As Part II begins, a pair of French tourists sits down beside me and offer popcorn; on screen a lilting piano accompanies the workers surreally performing their personal fantasies on the factory floor, individuals now with their own spreading stories and dreams. Amongst rows of mechanical arms and the continuing rhythms of factory life, they twirl in tutus, play rock star guitar and breakdance in slow-motion. With a yearning whistle, Part III brings portraits of the workers back in their monotonous surrounds, still and expressionless, and staring directly back at us over karaoke words to lulling Indie pop that keeps asking elusively ‘and to whom … do you … beautifully … belong’ long after I’ve left the gallery.
Fei is based between Beijing and her hometown of Guangzhou. Part of an emerging generation of artists born after the more dramatic episodes in China’s communist past, her work inspects the disparities and inconsistencies of the new China, as experienced by ordinary citizens inhabiting a rapidly changing industrialised urban landscape. Whose Utopia comes from a broader project shown at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, What are you doing here? (2006), in which Fei spent time interviewing the factory employees, making and distributing a newspaper, Utopia Daily, and organising the creation of theatrical performances and installations by (and for) the workers and their families. Rural immigrants with little control over their lives are thus introduced to a different kind of production, one in which their answers to questions like ‘where is your dream’ and ‘what is your utopia’ can ricochet to places as far flung as here.
In the next room, a series of large photographs, UN-Cosplayers (2006), depict figures dressed in the outlandish costumes of fictional characters from pop-culture, embedded (or abandoned) in the stage set of ‘ordinary’ street life. As with her 2004 film COSplayers, this series draws on the contemporary phenomena of cosplay (role-playing in costume) as a form of reimagining both individual identity and the often dehumanised environments we inhabit. In this instance the ‘players’ are older Beijing residents, and the scenes they animate have an eerie quietness – traditional hutong buildings have been reduced to rubble or piled with garbage, empty swathes of road stretch out beneath high-rises. In front, hybrid superheroes pose theatrically with borrowed props (a light-sabre, a laser blaster, a pick-axe), sometimes leaping on rooves or crouching through their built surroundings as though in a video game. Spiderman pops up again and again; in one photograph meeting himself in the way that new players in Second Life must use a standard ‘avatar’ (a fantasy self) also worn by others. In Housebreaker (2006), a Star Wars stormtrooper in electric blue bodysuit wields a shovel before a handful of bemused bystanders, one pauses his bicycle, another looks up from his newspaper; a third turns out to be the unidentified character from a different photograph, his shiny yellow suit and cap recalling some kind of comic wise-man from Monkey Magic. These images are saturated with colour, poised at a moment of stilled tension between crushing reality and a craving for transcendence that is itself pilfered and re-made from imported consumerist visual culture.
From this fractured fantasy of Beijing, the final place I am transported to is, quite naturally, the virtual world of Second Life – the digital heartland of dreams and desire – where Fei has constructed an entire metropolis on the Creative Commons island of Kula under her avatar ‘China Tracy’. RMB City (2008) is encountered here in ‘real space’ as a fly-through video swooping and diving on a rollercoaster tour of the heaving city amidst remodelled icons of Chinese culture and urban life. A huge bicycle wheel spins industriously, factory chimneys pump out flames, flying commuter trains zoom past, and a panda and the new CCTV headquarters swing off either end of a floating crane. Tiananmen square is a leisurely swimming pool, vehicles disappear into and out of tunnels, but there is a curious absence of people. Though wild and fantastical, the experience explodes with physical, felt fiction in every direction, a tumbling sensation akin to my own half-remembered dreams of flying over water. I want to ask, ‘how does this world work?’ ‘Who lives here?’ ‘Is it better than ours?’ ‘what kind of futures are we dreaming of?â€.
On my way out towards mangrove-scented air, I pass the words ‘my future is not a dream’ flickering on the wall in the first room. Utopia is always a dream, but futures must eventually be lived. Circling this imaginary territory to re-inscribe the complexities of human desire onto the socio-political (and architectural) landscapes we occupy from Guangzhou to Brisbane, Fei opens up new ways we might conceptualise and orient our potential shared futures. How we get there is another story.
Image credit: Cao Fei, Housebreaker, 2006. Image from www.caofei.com
14:
avoiding myth and message: Australian artists and the literary world
7 April – 12 July 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
[Produced as part of the Eat Your Words writing mentorship program. First published in October 2009 in Artworker Issue 4 Special Edition: Writing for Art. Reproduced courtesy of Artworkers Alliance.]
Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn’t much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso.
We might imagine that language is something solid, fixed, dependable even, when in fact it is rather slippery, and at any time can be disassembled and remade in ways that subtly or dramatically alter how we see and inhabit the world. Language is a structuring force as well as a destabilising one; it declaims: here, there is a beginning and an end, a right way of looking, a story worth telling.
avoiding myth and message: Australian artists and the literary world, a collections-based exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), traces a lineage of artists who have broken down the constituent parts of language – word-shapes, the typed page, the book, the sounds of speech – and reconstructed them as poetic devices for reimagining or making sense of their surroundings. Alongside these more concrete intersections between art and ‘the literary world’, it also features the work of artists who have cast sidelong glances at literature, poets who have crept up towards the materiality of visual arts, and the many gradations of porosity and overlap in between. Located in a distinctly Australian context, these diverse encounters appear in the form of artists’ books, loose pages, videos, drawings, posters, screen-printed telegrams, assemblages and floating text.
LETS WALK A SKY TOGETHER STOP
AND HAVE SILENT WORDS STOP
SOMETIME SOON STOP
(TELEPOEM 1969) “HEIDE”
Somewhere between Robert MacPherson’s folios of literary instructions and Ruark Lewis’s pristine renderings of fragmented sounds from overheard conversations, I am struck by the sheer weight of the words, of layers upon layers of voices demanding pause. This is an unusual exhibition that traverses much time, space and subject matter, speaking in a variety of tongues that include the unique (though under-studied) language of word-image combinations. As such it requires a kind of translation which is immersive and intuitive, and in attempting to process the whole I find myself drawn to specific, rather quiet works, such as Tim Johnson’s silvery, paint-weathered Poem (1977) – ‘At the start I begin … when all eroded earth has been surrounded / tropical mountains tropical monoliths / endless sea of calm / glimmering haze golden age / how can you tell anyone this… ‘.
Disclosing the instability and transformative potential of language is one of the key ways this exhibition works upon its audience, and is a potent and empowering statement for any exhibition to make. It acts in two other notable ways: encouraging us to see value and poetry in the everyday; and telling an art-historical story about the linkages between art and text in Australia’s cultural past, as yet not fully recognised or documented. This latter is the intent most fully articulated in the exhibition’s neat and comprehensive catalogue text and, as the curator Glenn Barkley offers, it is a story told here only in part, which by necessary omission asks for a fuller telling by another not restricted to the collection of a single institution.
All the burnt places
hang out
through the town
& tell the poets
meet in them
Everyone
is discovering
art is made
from abandoned things.
The (art-historical) story
Nonetheless, the exhibition does a good job of reasserting the role and breadth of local artist/writer collaborations and influences. Pivotal Sydney artist-run spaces from the 1970s, Inhibodress and the Tin Sheds, are revived here in a selection of important works that include poem paintings by Tim Johnson; a video by Tim Burns called Ask me anything about John Forbes (in which the poet was locked in a room and spoke with the audience via a TV); and Mike Parr’s Black Box of Word Situations (1971-91), featuring countless sheets of typed letterforms using various function keys on the typewriter, and amongst other things, confirmation letters from participants asked to destroy a poem at an appointed hour – the whole mass occupying almost an entire room. Seeing these antiquated pages (reproduced here in colour photocopies) brings to mind similar typed works by Simryn Gill, shown on this same floor only days earlier, in which the tight little letters seemed to dance too, ‘each rifleshot hammerstroke another notch / in the silence’.
Ephemera and small-press publications from this period like Magic Sam, platforms for writers to intermingle with artists, also act as an obvious historical counterpoint to contemporary zine-makers like Vanessa Berry (whose twelve-year back catalogue has been reprinted for the show). Additionally, some older text-based works – mostly poems (concrete or otherwise) by Rudi Krausman, John Forbes and others – have been newly translated here into vinyl lettering on the wall or floor.
Remaking language
Turning to those works that deliberately break down and reconstitute language, Sandra Selig’s surface of change (2007), literally slices voids into the pages of children’s science books to construct semi-‘found’ poetry from the fragments left behind – ‘your eyes act like you were real’ poised beneath a grainy image of a hand-held lens refracting light. A similar unhinging of (sensible) words can be found in the work of concrete poet ∏.O, who turns Ezra Pound’s The Cantos into unrecognisable sounds mouthed on video and tumbling across the wall in iz az ez oz (2008). In the catalogue text, Barkley draws a relationship between this work and that of poet John Tranter and artist Rosalie Gascoigne, positing that all three are ‘trying to find a new way to interpret the Australian landscape by fusing native and introduced sounds and textures’.
whitefella
housefella
strongfella
brick
blackfella
campfella
housefella
sick
blackfella
diefella
whitefella
trick
This process of (mis)using language to make sense of and come to terms with one’s place runs as an undercurrent through the exhibition – which itself acknowledges where it is, in space as well as time. Gordon Bennett’s Untitled (1989), a play on word and image (dismay, displace, disperse…) overlays critical resistance to European invasion onto the actual historical site, the nearby window directly overlooking the site of Governor Phillip’s first steps on contested land. Tucked away to the side of this same window is a lesser-known stanza of Slessor’s Five Bells, through which one can see the harbour and the Opera House (with its own high-profile artist/poet collaboration inside, John Olsen’s 1973 mural Salute to Five Bells). Its spidery words, ‘Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face / In agonies of speech on speechless panes? / Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!’, carrying particular resonance in light of both Bennett’s work, and that of Vernon Ah Kee opposite, whose vinyl cut text many lies (2004) and video whitefellanormal (2004) both grapple with and undermine the colonising force of language. These, and even Patrick Hartigan’s sound piece installed in the gallery toilets, Sounds 1–6 (1. Writing a word using Letraset; 2. Sharpening my pencil; 3. Writing numbers 1–10 using a graphite pencil; 4. Notes on my ruler; 5. Tearing sheets of A4 paper from top to bottom, slowly; 6. Tying my shoelaces) (2006), seem to reach out and grasp language as it is used from day to day, unpack it and remould it on-site.
Poetry in the infra-ordinary
So
we attach this worded regard
to an instant.
The artists whose work lingers most when I step outside the gallery into the glinting harbour light are those that recast the mundane stuff of the everyday as richly poetic material. Patrick Hartigan’s pseudo-scientific observation of his neighbour, My Neighbour Is a Painter (2006–07) is a curiously engaging work presented across multiple media – found objects in a cabinet (‘evidence’), grainy video footage of the neighbour in question, or rather his shuffling reflection in a window, and a series of pages pinned to the wall that outline ‘episodically’ daily life in the apartment building, centred on the neighbour but straying into more general philosophical enquiry, combining something of the field note and short fiction. Perhaps the story here works in part because it adopts a format that is the most recognisable and familiar of languages, a written text with beginning and end, not to mention narrative, characters and dramatic action. I wonder whether words, those which demand the viewer spend enough time to follow a passage from beginning to end, are things people have more confidence in interpreting as meaningful communication, the safely glowing beacons of myth and message.
How can we give an account of what goes on every day and goes on going on from day to day – the banal, everyday, obvious, common, ordinary, infra-ordinary, habitual background noise of living? How do we approach it, how can we describe it? … What we must question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, our timetables, our rhythms of living.
Robert MacPherson’s Mayfair Bar (1983), an obsessive recounting of a lunchtime sandwich routine is another work that both sits within a broader interrogation of the act of painting and suggests the richness and beauty in more marginal, even faintly autistic ways of reading daily life as colour, placement and pattern. Such evocative readings are also to be found in Bicycle (1992), Noel McKenna’s unassuming row of ceramic tiles on which a poem by David Malouf is written in ink alongside McKenna’s personalised and vaguely illustrative ink wash drawings. There is something here about two distinct poetic and artistic visions of the world combining to make an especially resonant imaginative response to something as ordinary as a bicycle, or if you like, ‘a stranger from the streets / a light-limbed traveller’.
This capacity to read what is ‘utterly ordinary’ in critical and poetic ways, something both artists and writers seem peculiarly adept at, is ultimately what sustains the passage of this exhibition beyond the walls of the gallery and the few hours we might spend with it. Its title is a somewhat ironic nod to conceptualism and the refutation of artifice, of myth-making from nationalism to creative genius, common to many explosive avant-gardes of the 1970s which sought to ‘breach the gap between art and life’ but inevitably perpetuated their own equally precious mythologies and manifestos. It’s also a line from a poem by John Forbes, ‘a few signs’, which gain their transformative power from the closed loop formed by reader and author, whether in a bedroom or released to intermingle at a particular time and place with other artistic visions on the fourth floor of the MCA.
IMAGE CREDIT
Noel McKenna
Bicycle 1992
6 ceramic tiles
overall 15.2 x 82.5 cm
Image courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney © the artist
21:
2. Field Work
Lisa Kelly & Dennis Tan
4 – 18 October 2008
Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Sydney
[First published in July 2009 in runway, Issue 14: Futures. Reproduced courtesy of The Invisible Inc.]
Seen at a glance, this rice straw may appear light and insignificant. Hardly anyone would think that it could start a revolution.
o
I’m eyeing off another piece of crumbly, caramelised cake laced with public mulberries (part of Working System), still warm from being baked in the oven at the back of this former community hall-turned council-run gallery. Tennis balls thud lazily just outside open glass doors that let in the afternoon sun and a steady stream of more would-be cake-eaters. It is the final day of Lisa Kelly and Dennis Tan’s second collaborative endeavour in the expanded neighbourhood of Newtown-Camperdown, and both mulberries and conversation are in plentiful supply. 2. Field Work is a continuation of their first exhibition project, and again the objects they present – homely armchairs, a table covered with official-looking papers and mulberry branches, team flags hung from the ceiling, a line of lemons that include a stray tennis ball – have arrived via a process of curious enquiry into what lies just outside.
Kelly and Tan recast the gallery as an evolving space that generates (and documents) an ongoing dialogue between the artists and the community. Rather than a static receptacle for finished works, it is a platform for contemplation and sometimes tense negotiation of what it means to live within a particular neighbourhood at a particular time. Relational modes of practice are at play in the sharing of food and the productive role given to conversation, with the exhibition unfolding as a series of small gestures, quiet moments and busy experiments.
A more intriguing reading can be found by turning to the project of ‘Sustainment’ , at present the domain of design philosophers including Tony Fry, Anne-Marie Willis and Ezio Manzini. Such theorists have recognised emergent creative practices that do not fit within existing delimitations of art and design, and are ‘sustain-able’ in that they enable behaviours and ways of living which are locally specific, less resource-intensive and regenerative of environments and the communities they support. Most recently, in Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, Fry argues for the development of a widespread ‘design intelligence’ that would deliver ‘the ability to read the qualities of the form and content of the designed environment in which one exists’ as well as ‘the means to make crucial judgements about actions that could increase or decrease futuring potential’.
Visual artists, especially those who work in an investigative mode like Tan and Kelly, seem peculiarly well-positioned in this regard. In Field Work, the artists unpack their surrounding (designed) world in a variety of rigorous and insightful ways, in conversation with one another, and with reference to their differing positions as local and visitor. For Kelly, whose work often discloses institutional frameworks, this means interrogating the building (its retrofitted hanging hooks abandoned as The Gallery System in favour of dowel on jute straps, Hanging System) and the bureaucracy of the local council (printed correspondence with whom constitutes The_Hall). As in previous projects, Kelly’s interventions mirror the (past) functional identity of this site – its flags, its paperwork, its emphasis on food and sports – considering how the space works, what its parameters are and how it could be stretched, made more elastic and dynamic.
Singapore-based Tan sets about inquiring into his temporary home – meeting the neighbours, talking/collecting/assembling/borrowing. He dismembers the art journal Broadsheet to make expandable paper screens following the pattern of the tennis court fence; upends an oversized council broom with a fluorescent light, later sprouting a head of branches. Objects appear and change and in the final days collapse into specially-made cardboard boxes. In response, the room sheet taped to one wall becomes covered in scrawled revisions that track changes in the naming and reorganisation of the space. This ongoing remaking has resonance with Heidegger’s analysis of phüsis – that all things exist within complex ecologies of exchange and are in a continuous process of becoming – an understanding crucial to sustaining and sustain-able artefacts.
There are nods to a lineage of conceptual/minimalist sculpture, many objects being material traces of an action or social exchange. Pennants suspended from the ceiling, The journey is the object, were lent by the older men from the bowling club next door, the result of Tan’s efforts to build lines of communication between the gallery’s disparate neighbouring communities, as are the hand-copied lawn bowls rules pinned to one wall – Theory and Practice (The front ditch is the ditch at the end of the green which is directly in front of the player when they stand on the mat). Tan promises a local tennis coach he’ll leave behind Working title: court ribbon, a fading pink ribbon woven through the court nets.
These dialogues are given shape through the artists’ own presence as active and ongoing interlocutors. Working on alternate days, Tan and Kelly intended to ‘shift the space from one of presentation to continuous production’. On my earlier visit, Tan happily became a live catalogue text/tea-pourer, his makeshift cutting mat turned into seating for an afternoon of meandering conversation. In this way transmuted objects facilitate the creation of a space for what Manzini calls contemplative time – ‘doing something (walking, eating, talking with people…) at a slower pace’.
Manzini writes of the need to envision future ‘scenarios of wellbeing’, locally-specific and regenerative of physical and social common goods. In 2. Field Work, Kelly carries out a tactile exploration of the neighbourhood, researching ‘public fruit’ online and by foot and sharing her findings with visitors. Plane tree seeds gathered from nearby Camperdown Park, Planting Planes, are raised in jiffy pots in preparation for future projects , recalling the grown tree at the centre of 1. The Lively Plane. The recurrence of these slow-moving living components suggest a conception of time at odds with the usual two-week exhibition, the kind of time-frame evoked by Joseph Beuys’ planting of 7000 Oaks decades earlier at Documenta 7. Both Tan and Kelly play with the relationality of things over time and space, the dynamic complexity of interconnected causal relations not yet accounted for in Western rationalist thought, but central to design intelligence and to forming more sustain-able practices and the future scenarios that bring them into being.
Kelly’s work intersects most with the act of creative futuring in Potential__, a neat grid of hand-rolled, unfired clay balls that contain a mix of compost and grain, herb and flower seeds suited to dry conditions … millet, nasturtium, thyme, dill, sunflower. Devised by Japanese farmer and scientist Masanobu Fukuoka (whose tattered manifesto The One-Straw Revolution also appears in the gallery) as a form of non-invasive farming, they suggest ways of engaging with our landscape other than the rationalist planning dominating council planting and modern agriculture. Their reappropriation also illustrates the ability of the artist to find and extract ‘design and sustainment principles’ from historical material and then ‘transpose them into appropriate futuring forms’.
In the fading light, Kelly takes a small girl who likes gardening and a few other stragglers across the road into a fenced-off area of council land, overgrown with weeds and due to be sold off. Together we fling the seedballs into the wilderness and hammer in a bright yellow stake bearing a photocopied chapter from The One-Straw Revolution. This participatory gesture brings into being new ways we might live in our cities, grounded and enacted in the everyday. As my crumbling seedball flies off to places unseen, Field Work invades ‘our conversations and dreams’ , envisioning a future where vacant lots are shared micro-farms and (re)valued commons include cooking and eating mulberry cake gleaned from neighbourhood streets.
IMAGE CREDIT
Lisa Kelly & Dennis Tan, 2. Field Work 2009, installation view
Photo by the author
23:
Reflecting on Hiromi Tango’s Absence
by Tessa Zettel
Absence
Hiromi Tango
2 – 31 May 2008
Platform, Melbourne
[First published in November 2008 in un magazine 2.2. An earlier version also appeared in Hiromi Tango‘s single-edition artist book, Absence (2008).]
Dear Hiromi,
At the opening of Absence, midway through Hiromi Tango’s month-long residency in the grimy underground transit space of Platform, clumps of people holding plastic cups of wine gather around a tiny shop window plastered with psychedelic sticky notes in fruit tingle colours, edges peeling away with scrawled messages that include ‘I really hope this never ends’ and ‘I still love you’. Through what’s left of the glass the occupied interior is just visible – an improbable tangle of spidery webs of wool and thread, balloon strings and little blank gift tags. Peering into this miniature world, Hiromi herself can be seen pinning up pieces of paper with outlined letters that offer cups of tea from a newly acquired electric kettle and elusive statements like ‘I am so sad and I miss you terribly’. When a packet of jelly babies pokes out of a letterbox in the door, someone politely bends down and takes one, returning a minute later to slip through a drawing in return, which subsequently turns up in a clear patch of window, sticky-taped from inside.
There are many kilometres of suburbs and dry farmland and rainforest and bitumen stretching between us now, and I wonder where you are exactly and if you are sewing a floating page of someone’s diary into the folds of someone else’s handwritten note to no-one in particular.
A week later, two teenagers are writing letters at a nearby ledge piled with pens and notepads. Hiromi drops in to collect something and a guy in a puffy black jacket asks her bluntly what ‘this’ is. She beams and tells him it’s whatever he wants it to be. He seems disarmed and asks if it’s hers, to which she answers ‘it’s ours!’. This brief exchange somehow captures the simplicity and sincerity at the heart of the project, which unfolds as an open platform for interaction, a multi-directional conversation that is shaped and owned by participants. Usually based in Brisbane, Hiromi has spent eighteen months researching for the project in the USA, New Zealand and around Australia, collecting letters and notes and personal objects from people she encounters and stitching these into little books that are micro-architectures of human emotion and our capacity to share pieces of ourselves with complete strangers. These handmade books form part of the installation at Platform, as do plastic milk crates laden with bunches of pink and yellow fabric flowers and moments of unexpected intimacy that bloom between cracked concrete and stuffy air.
Your work makes me think of the Pitjantjatjara concept of reciprocity, Ngapartji Ngapartji, which is also the name of an intercultural arts and language project based in Alice Springs that Karl and I have been working on as designers for the past few years. We work with them remotely and have only been to visit once. I’d like to go back and see everyone again but the plane tickets are so expensive. Ngapartji Ngapartji underlies social relations in Pitjantjatjara culture and means ‘I give you something, you give me something’. In this case I give you a page torn from my diary, you give me a biscuit, I give you a bedraggled piece of my heart or a date-stamped sticky note with the words ‘raisin toast makes me happy’, you give me a wide open-eyed smile or maybe one end of a ball of red wool.
Much discussion has taken place in recent years around relational aesthetics, whereby an artwork is judged in terms of the inter-human relations it prompts or provokes. Regular passers-by become attached to Absence and bring presents; around the subway floats a kind of ad hoc, temporary community, a space between people that is active and real and would otherwise be absent from this somewhat dank corner of the city. There is an inherent tension between absence and presence in the work and the way we encounter it. Stories of loss and distance remind us that physical absence is always there, hovering at the edges of daily interactions and routines that connect us to the circumnavigations of work and life. But we are also being asked to make presence matter, to be present in the moment and not absent from it, to make the present meaningful and connected.
Karl and I ended up at an opening at the Blender one night, which I remembered was the warehouse you were camping in. Behind the gallery I found your tent wedged between studios, and was astonished at how similar this makeshift living space was to the installation at Platform, dripping with plastic flowers and half-buried between notes and books and multi-coloured paraphernalia which, in its obsessive compulsive profusion of detail, somehow looked deliberate and ‘artful’. In front was a cardboard sign that said: ‘In memory of Hiromi Tango, Died 24-5-08, Age 32, four months pregnant, Franklin St. Melbourne’. There were a lot of people around, drinking and whatnot, but no-one I knew, and perhaps they hadn’t yet noticed the sign. I felt very quiet and anxious, and when we eventually came across Tai she thought we’d had a fight. Actually I was worried that you had in fact been killed in some kind of car accident. I had expected you to be there but you were not.
Andrew Benjamin describes the city as ‘a site of movement’ in which interventions undo the rigid distinctions of modern urbanism. The insertion of a space for lingering, for laughter, surprise and memory, into a thoroughfare connecting retail space to networks of transport and labour certainly complicates our experience of urban space. There are threads here leading back to the Situationists who, in 1940s Paris, proposed ‘constructed situations’ as an antidote to the burgeoning spectacle of modernity. These engineered moments combined environment and people to generate new ways of seeing the world and behaviours evoking a future social life of human encounter and play. The Situationists envisaged the reconfigured city as a heterogenous patchwork of different emotional zones -– the Happy Quarter, the Bizarre Quarter, the Sinister Quarter and so on. The most tangible articulation of this was Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, a vision of a new city overlaid above the existing one, with moveable superstructures allowing drifting, experimental interaction. It is tempting to see in Absence a tiny, inverted pocket of New Babylon, overflowing with melancholy, heartfelt expression and offered up for ordinary citizens to construct as they wish. At this micro-scale the world is accosted with a post-it note that declares ‘I feel like destroying something beautiful’.
Thanks for sending me your ‘special pregnant woman love wave (5 months limited edition)’. I hope you are in good health and have found time to take something of a pause … Karl and I both miss having you nearby and look forward to spending some time in the same city one day soon, when we can cook delicious soup and go for walks together whenever we like.
On the final day Hiromi lies stiff and unmoving across a row of milk crates outside the curved shopfront, head resting on an embroidered silk pillow, arms folded over a bouquet of flowers. There are towers of little books everywhere, spilling from the wall and the floor and Hiromi herself. What does it mean for art practice when a work occurs just below the rhythms of daily life; with the artist present and able to respond, so that it can continue to bounce back and forth and take on new intentions and formulations as it grows? Perhaps under these circumstances the city can breathe through it. In the Next Wave festival program, Absence is credited as a collaboration between ‘Hiromi Tango and the people of Melbourne’. This is suggestive of the warmth and generosity behind the work, and of the potential empowerment at stake when an artist takes the risk of inviting ‘audiences’ to become active producers of ‘public’ art. As a kind of elegy to departures and dreams, she rests
silently beneath a kaleidoscope of colour and words, in which the city is broken up into a million tiny pieces and refracted back in shifting human patterns that fall away and recombine on every turn.
With love, Tessa
IMAGE CREDITS
TOP & BOTTOM LEFT: Hiromi Tango Absence (2008) – Photos by Jorge de Araujo
BOTTOM RIGHT: Hiromi Tango Absence (2008) – Photo by the author
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Postcript (November 2008)
After reading Claire Bishop – ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its discontents’*
I read this article not long after I’d finished writing the above piece about Hiromi Tango’s Absence, and took the opportunity to reconsider the work in light of some new ideas. It dates from a few years ago and attempts to sketch out some kind of interpretive framework for contemporary relational art practices. She’s critical of how much discussion of collectively-produced or participatory art projects concentrates only on the ethics of the work’s production and the decentralisation of its ‘author’. This is probably true of my piece about Absence, which was, however, always meant to be personal, and that was very much my own overriding personal reaction – a kind of wonderment at Hiromi as a character and at the expansive ‘heteronomy’, the blurring of art and life that she seems to embody.
It does seem that I was perhaps overly struck by the simple fact that Hiromi allows participants to be co-creators, by her deployment of a ‘superior model of collaborative practice’, preferencing true and authentic respect for the other. Perhaps if I were writing it now I would refer to Bishop’s reservations about this evaluative response. I might look a little closer at the nature of the work’s content, ie. the messiness of human separation/absence; the alienation of the modern, globalised city in which we are rendered passive consumers and often simply don’t have the time or space to connect with each other in meaningful ways or reflect on personal loss or melancholy (perhaps a reference to the cemetery here would be interesting, public mourning, a shared space to confront grief); the attempt to piece together some kind of temporary community, founded upside down on those who are missing.
I would probably place this type of work in opposition to that of groups like Oda Projesi, in that Hiromi’s own distinctive aesthetic sensibility dominates and even structures how Absence operates (the attention to detail; the fracturing into small, perfectly polished pieces; the valorising of the mundane – I remember she once said to me ‘I always enjoy what I eat, whether it’s a lolly or a beautiful meal’; the transformation of this ‘nothingness’ – ordinary string, gift tags etc. – into something more than itself, something monumental and phantasmagoric). Perhaps I could have teased out some of the contradictions at work here: the happiness of the lolly-pop psychedelia against the melancholy content of the expressions, the festive Mexican mortality of it all; the articulation of loss and distance against the apparent coming-together and participatory operations of the work; the intense presence of the artist as a central figure against her inevitable departure; the serious appreciation and engagement of most participants with the proposed theme of the work against the sly (but welcomed) resistance of some: the evangelists, the silly, the crude (in some ways the embrace of this rupturing reminds us to not take the Artist at face value, to not assume that their preoccupations resonate at all times with all members of the public).
Why is it surprising and pleasurable for us to hear intimate stories from strangers? Is it simply a voyeuristic impulse, a grim fascination with the suffering of others, consumed from the safety of our own anonymity? Maybe it is also disarming because it reveals how little we do know about our neighbours or the people we share our streets and shops and office buildings with, how rarely we speak to each other, openly and sincerely, about what depresses, haunts and saddens us. In this sense the work traverses what Bishop refers to as ‘a more complex knot of concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement and the conventions of social interaction’. It lets slip how little room we make in our lives for these internalised absences, allowing us briefly to indeed ‘confront darker, more painfully complicated considerations of our predicament’. And perhaps this art – autonomous, unexpected and temporal – can produce such contemplative ruptures, like tiny air-bubbles in dough, precisely because of its ultimate location outside those passages of daily life.
*Published in Artforum, Feb 2006.
17:
Approaching Sean Rafferty’s Ghost Mountain
by Tessa Rapaport
Ghost Mountain
Sean Rafferty
15 January – 1 February 2009
MOP, Sydney
[Published as typewritten text in Locksmith Project Issue 2, 2009, Locksmith Project Space, Sydney]
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Around 800 words.
Structure to reflect the way Ghost Mountain stages itself.
Begin by identifying building as a key concern for Sydney artist Sean Rafferty, whose work consistently exposes how things are built, by us, in certain ways (houses, art installations, memories, ideas of ‘nature’ or ‘home’ etc.). Also note the artist’s particular interest in the role of images in shaping such constructions.
Writing to remain in provisional note form, as in fictional works by Georges Perec and others (see Dave Eggers’ Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone).
Setting 1. Exterior – A temporary cardboard wall on timber frame, leading off into a dark passageway. Two framed photographs, scraps of paper taped to and around wall, one being a photocopy from the artist’s journal in which he considers what to include in this installation (diagram of sun-bleaching frame etc.). A receipt of films borrowed (Long Weekend, We of The Never Never, Walkabout, Alvin Purple, The Story of The Kelly Gang). Copied pages from Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood and Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard. The photos, and nearby shimmering lead drawings on black painted cardboard, Ascent II (2008) and Ascent III (2008), are of still, ominous landscapes (scenes from the above movies?).
Setting 2. Interior – Ghost Mountain (2008) Projected image of photo showing a white gate beneath a mountain ridge and dense sky. Whistling wind fades out as image disappears, leaving a large piece of cardboard on which the curving lines of the gate can still (somehow…) be dimly made out. On opposite walls, two more shadowy drawings of woods and/or clearings: Ascent I (2008) and Approach (2008).
Refer to underlined Murakami passage: Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.
Outline Rafferty’s sun-bleaching process, whereby an image is ‘faded in’ to cardboard by exposure to sunlight through a glass stencil. A version of technique used in earlier work at Artspace – (the making of) a temporary home theatre using the sun-bleaching frame in an orchard and Brick Veneer II (XL) (2007) – in which shadows were created by furniture in a sort of stage set installed in a timber/cardboard frame outdoors. Exposed/bleached cardboard then exhibited as framework for viewing video of said structure in orchard. Again the half-built house forms a provisional gallery space, ie. even our viewing experience is a construction.
Consider sharing quiet encounter with artist’s family while viewing Ghost Mountain: (Older woman says to child, ‘that’s the view from John’s window, when he was a little boy’, and to man, ‘that’s your parents place, isn’t it, from the island?’).
Regarding images as ‘unfinished’ subjects of construction and interrogation – worth noting that Rafferty presents a specific picture to us in a number of guises: as a family snapshot, as a building block in a work of fiction (a movie, a story, even an installation, since Ghost Mountain is a kind of exposition of process), as a theatrical and even magical object (in the home cinema, appearing to burn into the cardboard as it fades). Hence the image of a particular landscape takes on our own projected associations and anxieties depending on the context we view it in, our relationship to it, and how it figures in our personal memories or experiences.
It later transpires that I have misheard ‘Ireland’ as ‘the island’.
Compare how Ghost Mountain works (disconnected atmospheres that allude to a real and personal narrative) to either a half-remembered dream or the scaffolding of an abandoned novel.
MOP website informs me that the Cooley Mountains have a particular foreboding relating to myths and the troubles of Northern Ireland (Rafferty’s grandmother warns that ‘evil still lurks among them’), however my impression of an isolated colonial homestead on a rocky Pacific island, home perhaps to restless natives and impenetrable interiors, is stubborn to dislodge.
Note at this point Rafferty’s engagement with place and remembered landscapes, having lived in Ireland until moving to Australia at the age of six. All borrowed films are Australian and would likely be considered significant moments in the construction of an Australian collective identity, as defined by and against an unfamiliar and threatening wilderness.
The final ghost I am left with is the cumulative recollection of teenage video marathons, of childhood fears and holidays and the curious intermingling of lived experience with cinematic imagination. In this displaced and reconstructed home theatre there is a kind of vicarious pleasure in unwittingly appropriating the memories of others through the trace of their captured image, particularly those of a ‘compositionist’ as deft and thoughtful as Rafferty.
Murakami addendum: And then, after hovering there for a few seconds as if to watch its curved line of light blend into the wind, it finally flew off to the east.
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IMAGE CREDITS
TOP: Sean Rafferty Ascent I (2008) pencil and acrylic on cardboard
BOTTOM: Sean Rafferty Cardboard Wall (detail) – miscellaneous project sketches and stimuli
All photographs taken by the author
29:
Notes on Notes on the Art and Manner of (Dis)arranging One’s Books
by Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge
[A review of Notes on The Art and Manner of (Dis)arranging One’s Books*, which took place in September 2008 at CarriageWorks as part of the LiveWorks festival of live art. / First published in December 2008 in runway Issue 12: Make Believe. Reproduced courtesy of The Invisible Inc.]
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1.
1. 4. Things which aren’t books but are often met with in libraries
Photographs in gilded brass frames, small engravings, pen and ink drawings, dried flowers in stemmed glasses, matchbox-holders containing, or not, chemical matches (dangerous), lead soldiers, a photograph of Ernst Renan in his study at the Collège de France, postcards, dolls’ eyes, tins, packets of salt, pepper and mustard from Lufthansa, letter-scales, picture hooks, marbles, pipe-cleaners, scale models of vintage cars, multicoloured pebbles and gravel, ex-votos, springs.
2.
Over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be called sculptures: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the end; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.
3.
The vast foyer space housed a handful of large-scale works that could be called ‘live’ sculpture: an inflatable dome that is also a cinema; a curving ‘whisper room’; a woman giving foot-baths to seated, spotlighted participants in a circle of hand-felted shoes of human hair.
4.
The strange and beautiful building materials that lay in a tangled heap just near the loading dock.
5.
What a wonderful building, moving in itself, held up by itself, forming figures, giant wings, canyons, and high mountains … and suddenly, there: a door so far off that maybe only birds have ever felt that kind of distance.
6.
Behind these, an altogether quieter construction, consisting (first) of a narrow wooden desk holding a flashing, half-open contraption, from which also emerges a tapping sound and a bundle of red wires strung over a high concrete wall.
7.
The walls are high. … I go there often, searching for objects that can be found nowhere else: old fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible.
8.
Someone is moving around in the next room, coughing, dragging his feet, moving furniture, opening drawers.
9.
Racing up a staircase, we saw, from the gallery above, a crowd of grey-haired people with umbrellas examining a gigantic mock-up of the universe..
10.
The artists present an ever-changing installation; a working studio environment that they inhabit intermittently throughout the exhibition period.
11.
I took in the piece of plush that hid the one-legged table, the shiny upholstery of the only armchair, and the two little threadbare pancake-cushions of Algerian design on the other two chairs. The mantelpiece served as a bookshelf.
12.
They sat perched at the edge of room: one intently operating a telegraphic device whilst peering over the wall, the other typing loudly onto a yellowed, uneven spool of paper that also spilt over this wall.
13.
In his hand he held a book, which he was reading attentively.
14.
In fact, both looked to be transcribing from books held open in front of them. Text in faintly scrawled chalk also appeared on various surfaces both inside and outside the room.
15.
The narratives are neat, often grafted from the metafictions or hypertexts of Borges and Calvino, as a kind of dazzling annotation of those writers.
16.
Reading these disembodied passages, it becomes evident that the work is playing with (and off) site, engaging in stilted and appropriated conversation with both its immediate location and its broader contextual environment.
17.
The narrator, realising that everything is collapsing, rushes from the house to watch it fall under the moat, the reflection eating the original.
18.
Like some kind of unhinged research machine, it spits out a recreated textual narrative in response to everything within sight – the contested suburb it finds itself in (‘It was from Redfern that so many political marches, for citizenship, for land rights, set out to rallying points in the city’), Sydney’s urban history, the industrial relics of this former railyard, the performance events happening nearby, the pneumatic form at the other end of the foyer, and especially that which comprises the installation itself – books, cases, writing, telegraphic communication, sculpture.
19.
These operations are superfluous, they replicate what’s already there and make it proliferate like a disease.
20.
The source of these often fictive fragments is a temporary public reading room housed in a battered traveller’s trunk
21.
Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. … Also through here passes a spiral staircase which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances.
22.
A portable library with books left sprawled open mid-chapter; just-finished cups of tea.
23.
The questioning of public art needs poetic language.
24.
What is public and what is private is not entirely clear in this lichen-like space stretched over and around its smooth concrete wall. Of those that actually discover the reading room, some stop at the top of the staircase and peer in, as though watching a live, silent performance; others settle in on the rug to read their favourite lines aloud.
25.
Sometimes in the mornings they would have a businessman looking for his umbrella or a schoolgirl looking for a lost coat.
26.
More and more spidery text collects around the walls of the building and on these makeshift introduced objects.
27.
It is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation.
28.
The spool of paper looping down over the wall grows slowly but steadily longer, finally pooling in a heap on the ground beside the desk. I realise they are endpapers and title pages of weathered paperbacks, sliced out and sutured together with masking tape.
29.
To perpetrate acts of violence upon the venerable printed word is regarded by many still today as ‘disturbing’, even when committed as a means of reinvention.
30.
Australians have so little of the built past to remind them of their history. If they go, the opportunity will be lost forever to see and feel a greatness as it existed. History will exist only in books.
31.
The book is interrogated as an everyday object and as a repository of authorised knowledge and shared history. If literature is recast back onto real space, dismembered and exploded outwards, will its scattered debris tell us anything new about location, about memory, about the poetics of a place which is real and messy and very much at stake?
32.
Collage is like a grid, a promise and a condition of discovery. … It is the will to place oneself in a lineage that takes all of past writing into account. In that way, you bring your personal library to life, you reactivate your literary reserves.
33.
And then the masquerade draws to a close. The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end.
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*Notes in this text were (mostly…) drawn directly from the installation.
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NOTES
1. see ‘Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books’ by Georges Perec, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, p. 151-152
2. see photocopy of ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ by Rosalind Krauss, taken from The Anti-Aesthetic, p. 32
3. see ‘While I was waiting…’ by Gert Khue, in Live Art, No. 4, p. 84
4. see ‘The Uses of Williamson Wood’ by Peter Carey, in Collected Stories, p. 206
5. see passages by Rainer Maria Rilke, in ‘Public Art and the City’ by Siah Armajani, in Public Art: A Reader, p. 67
6. see ‘Book Case in Flight’ by Kate Zettel, in Metafictions, p. 29
7. see Nadja, by André Breton, p. 46-52
8. see ‘A Man Asleep’ by Georges Perec, in Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep, p. 137
9. see ‘The Visit to the Museum’ by Vladimir Nabakov, in Collected Stories, p. 283
10. see ‘En Plein Air’ by Michaela Gleave, in Drop down: NSW Artists in the 2008 Next Wave Festival, p. 2
11. see ‘The Kepi’ by Colette, in The Rainy Moon and Other Stories, p. 186
12. see Zettel, op. cit., p. 31
13. see ‘Zadig’ by Voltaire, in Zadig / L’Ingenue, p. 92
14. see Art in Unlikely Places by Gert Khue, p. 60
15. see ‘An essay, some quotes, occasional rhizomatic pieces, sideways glances, and a small amount of useful information on Domenico De Clario’s The Universe As Mirror’ by George Alexander, in Artspace Projects 2005, p. 26
16. see ‘Imagining site: a brief exchange’ by Kate Zettel, p. 13
17. see ‘Books of Things: Architectural Fictions’ by Robert Harbison, in Eccentric Spaces, p. 92
18. see Khue, op. cit., p. 88; see also ‘Remembering: Aboriginality, public art and urban design’ by Catherine De Lorenzo, in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Vol 1, No. 2, ‘public/non-public’, p. 143
19. see ‘Leaving Home: Notes on Insertions into the Public’ by Vito Acconci, in Public Art: A Reader, p. 30
20. see Zettel, op. cit., p. 31
21. see ‘The Library of Babel’ in Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, p. 78
22. see Gleave, op. cit., p. 3
23. see Armajani, op. cit., p. 68
24. see ‘The Reading Place’ by Gert Khue in Metafictions, p. 25
25. see ‘The Uses of Williamson Wood’ by Peter Carey, in Collected Stories, p. 206
26. see ‘Under the pavement’ by Kate Zettel, in Works in Progress, p. 106
27. see ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’ by Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, p. 59
28. see Zettel, op. cit., p. 30
29. see ‘Part 4: Artefacts or Artworks?’ by Simon Gregg, in Artefact: A Melbourne Keepsake, p. 16
30. see Australian Outrage by Donald Gazzard, p. 29
31. see Khue, op. cit., p. 80
32. see Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos, p. 347
33. see The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabakov, p. 173
26:
We’ve both had some writing published in local art journals of late – you can find a co-written response to Notes on the Art and Manner of (Dis)arranging One’s Books in the new runway (Issue 12: Make-believe); and Tessa has a piece about the work of Brisbane-based artist Hiromi Tango in un magazine 2.2.
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We’re hoping to post both texts here in full in the new year.
05:
1.The Lively Plane
Lisa Kelly & Dennis Tan
15 February – 1 March 2008
Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown, Sydney
Inside a small room with white walls and polished timber floors, a plane tree sprouts snug and unassuming from one corner of a raised wooden platform, its top leaves flattened awkwardly against an indifferent ceiling. Also on the platform is a woven mat, a ‘domestic space differentiated from the wilderness’, placed neatly under the shade one imagines might be cast if this tableau were not in fact indoors. The titles of these works (for they are, as it turns out, discrete works by two separate artists), No Street Tree… and Working title: Private space on constructed space on Institutional space,suggest two things that lie at the heart of the objects and actions unfolding from this exhibition: the multi-layered and contingent nature of urban space, and the artistic processes used in interrogating and intervening in that space.
These concerns tend to fold in and over each other at different points throughout the exhibition, the product of a loose collaboration between Sydney artist Lisa Kelly and Dennis Tan, visiting from Singapore. Tan’s month-long residency at ICAN has resulted in a series of thoughtful gestures that respond to phenomena and relations observed by the artists in various urban contexts. As if to prevent an unsightly sag or sudden movement, Kelly’s displaced tree is bound tightly by jute straps stretching taut across the room to uprooted timber stakes leant against the wall. Miniature sandbags bearing images of saplings constrained/supported in the same way, tree prop (circle) and tree prop (triangle), hold open wide, heavy doors. Nonetheless, 1.The Lively Plane manages to quietly evade the gallery space, tumbling gently into the surrounding streetscape in both a literal and figurative sense.
There are multiple perforations and lines of dialogue at work in this exhibition, between the two artists, between the art and the site, between the inside and outside of the gallery. These are traced over with lines of sight, as the room designated ‘institutional space’ opens directly onto the shared living space of an inner-city street … rows of terraces, a café, passing cyclists and a solitary police car, cruising. On this languorous Sunday, a doorstep lined with worn tiles acts as a cosy border zone, a kind of pivot point around which everything else turns. It is where one of the artists sits talking to visitors who engage with the works without necessarily entering the gallery, and affords a view of both the ‘lively plane’ inside and the footpath rolling away with its own broad, sweeping trees straining their allotted concrete plots.
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A handful of unauthorised but plausibly ‘useful’ objects have also landed surreptitiously on this patch of cement – besser blocks containing sand, plants and cigarette butts (Kelly’s ashtray and ashtray – – planter); and a chair with one shortened leg propped up by the doorstep, itself supporting a similarly incapacitated stool that suggests something of an alternate, tiered escape route (Tan’s Lean on). In Diagram (Concrete cover), Tan has inscribed diagrams on the gallery window for a proposed guerrilla amendment to the pavement architecture below, its otherwise unobtrusive ‘telecom cover’ tipped at a jaunty angle. Facing the window here, it is possible to see at once the reflection of the street, the imagined intervention, and the urban (re)constructions inside.
In many ways these works have a tendency to ‘melt into, and out of, the site – not as an art form but as an event, and as a trajectory for events’. The actions they describe have a subversive play about them, as well as a more serious engagement with the politicisation and regulation of public space. Salvaged timber from the nearby CarriageWorks development is recast as raw material; the tree it supports is a species widely loathed for its fluffy seed. As a collection of unstable and interdependent artefacts in conversation with the spaces they occupy, the exhibition creates room for unexpected urban encounters and more fluid modes of art practice – a plane of lively possibilities indeed.
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Lisa Kelly’s website – www.studiononstop.net
& Dennis Tan’s – www.tanboonwee.net
– Tessa Zettel, 2009
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IMAGE CREDITS
TOP LEFT: Dennis Tan Diagram (platform) (2008), white paint marker on window
TOP RIGHT: Dennis Tan Working title: Private space on constructed space on institutional space (2008), found recycled timber from CarriageWorks and ICAN, roofing spans, nails / Lisa Kelly No Street Tree… (2008), plane tree, jute strap, timber, linen thread, hardware
BOTTOM LEFT: Dennis Tan Lean on (2008), chair, stool, nails
BOTTOM RIGHT: Lisa Kelly ashtray – – planter (2008), besser block, Sydney sand, soil, rubbish plant, cigarette butts, rubber, tape, hardware
All photographs taken by the author
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