makeshift journal

Field Work as Sustainment: The Futur(ing) of Art Practice

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. ¹
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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, ² 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’ ³, 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’ ⁴ 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’. ⁵

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. ⁶

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’. ⁷

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’ ⁸ 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 ⁹, 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’. ¹⁰

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’ ¹¹, 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

Collected Fictions

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

Recent Writings

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.