Making Time is coming to Sydney! As part of Performance Space’s upcoming ‘Matters of Life and Death’ program, Making Time will be in residence at Carriageworks and the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market from Feb 23 – Mar 9, 2013. Each Saturday between 8am – 1pm we’ll be setting up a temporary experimental kitchen amongst the market, offering a platform for participants to share strategies for preserving food, and human life.
More info here
Our new project just opened at Taylor Square in the old toilets. It’s part of We Make This City, the City of Sydney Public Art Program co-presented by the National Institute for Experimental Art, which also included work by David Cross, Lynette Wallworth and the Magnificent Revolution.
OPEN: 8am – 1pm, Saturdays in March, 2012
*only 2 more Saturdays to go..!!
On the edges of an organic farmer’s market in the thick of the city, a curatorium of thinkers, activists and dreamers is assembled to catalyse another space of exchange, a subterranean ‘dark market’ trading instead in radical economies, growing cultures and craft futures. Every Saturday morning in March, members of the curatorium will meet in the women’s toilet block (used outside these hours to store market infrastructure) for a series of tactical gatherings, making time for sharing old and new strategies – across disciplines, ways of thinking and practices – for rethinking and redirecting how we collectively sustain ourselves in this city, beyond the feel-good rhetoric of sustainability and eco-consumption.
From week to week, traces of these conversations will be made public in the underground men’s toilets, taking shape as an abandoned trade fair where market-goers may encounter such exotic offerings as a jar swap gang, a fermentation club, a radical reading room, an unreal estate agency and a nu-craft think tank. Making use of an antiquated hobby letterpress, the curatorium will also produce a collection of handmade communiqués advertising – and theorising – such emergent (or forgotten) practices.
Weekly conversations are directed by invited guests with expertise in a particular area. Week One was led by design theorist and educator Matthew Kiem, with guests John von Sturmer, Rebecca Conroy, Zanny Begg and David McNeill. Other participants have included Lara Thoms and James Arvanitakis. Future weeks’ attendees to be advised.
Michael Stevenson
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
6 April – 19 June, 2011
[Highly Commended for the 2011 Frieze Writer’s Prize]
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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:
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
Tomorrow morning 9am (for 9:30 start) will be the final Sweet Damper and Gossip Society meeting before Saturday’s public open day. Our guest this time is Jeremy Steele, who will be presenting some of his research on the Aboriginal language of Sydney, the sound of which once filled this place. See his blog naabawinya and MA thesis
RSVP on the website below or by emailing direct (bakery@makeshift.com.au), all welcome. Rosella shortcrust cakes & various tasty teas will be on hand.
Come!!!
www.makeshift.work/deliriousbakery
Tomorrow (Saturday 15 Oct) will see our first weekend meeting hosted in The Delirious Bakery. For those of you willing to brave an 8:45am arrival (for 9am start), we’ll be providing sweet potato and wattleseed cinnamon scrolls and lemon myrtle scones to accompany John von Sturmer on invented histories.
RSVP as always, the sooner the better.
Note: This will be one of the last meetings as our time is almost up!!!
ATTENTION: Next meeting will be held tomorrow evening, Tuesday 11 October, at 6pm. RSVP required – go to www.makeshift.work/deliriousbakery – where you can also sign up to the mailing list if you haven’t already. Our special guest is Ross Gibson (Professor of Contemporary Art at University of Sydney) – you can read an article he wrote about William Dawes and Patyegarang some years back in Meanjin here
TONIGHT the first meeting of the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society will take place in The Delirious Bakery, at 6pm. Our special guest on this auspicious evening is Michael Paton, a polymath who brings tales of the ground and disposition of Sydney Cove. Attendees are encouraged to bring along their own stories of dissent and dispossession in the Rocks area, to be exchanged after Michael’s talk over an appropriate baked treat.
RSVP required as places are limited. Society members will be given preference.
Email: bakery@makeshift.com.au
If you also wish to become a member of the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society, please send an email with your contact details and a brief outline of your interest. Members will have the opportunity to recount stories heard at meetings to others on bakery open days (Sat 22 Oct 2-4pm and other times TBA), and will receive an official badge.
Subscribe to the Delirious mailing list at www.deliriousbakery.com for information on future meetings and open days.
Before Try This at Home opens on Friday night at Object, we’ll be at the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship finalists’ exhibiton at Artspace on Thursday (7 Oct), 6-8pm. Come on down – one more chance to see Land-escapes, & if you’re quick you might catch a pikelet with sugarbag honey.
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7 October – 23 October 2011
43 – 51 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Sydney Australia
Gallery Open
11am – 5pm Tues – Sun
IMAGE: Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe Land-escape I (detail), 2011
CALL OUT FOR PARTICIPANTS
‘6 JARS’
a project by makeshift (Tessa Zettel & Chay-Ya Clancy) for
Try This at Home, Object
8 Oct 2011 – 8 Jan 2012
This is a co-op without borders. A weekly jar swap. Fill 6 jars with something good and delicious, Keep 1 jar and forward on 5. Your participation will manifest tenfold expanding outwards from your house onto the streets and flowing onwards, creating community and filling our cupboards. The revolution is here. In our kitchens and in the jars we carry in bike baskets into the hands of new friends and ones we don’t see enough.
An invitation
You are cordially invited to become part of the revolution. It begins in your kitchen. Six volunteer households in the vicinity of Object (ie. Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Redfern etc.) are required to form a pilot ‘6 Jars’ collective, making a commitment to circulating jars of homemade food or other household goods over the course of the exhibition. Each week the group will meet to exchange jars – everyone going home with an assortment filled by other members.
Up for negotiation as the project unfolds are decisions about the contents of jars (organic, local, wild foraged/urban gleaned, vegan?), how and where weekly meetings take place (your place or mine, and is someone cooking?), and what equipment/resources people are willing to share (blenders, ovens, food processers, backyard produce…).
Some aspects of the group’s journey will be tracked on a blog and in the gallery space. We would particularly like to include people who are willing to document their involvement via photographs and/or short written updates for the blog. However your interest in the project and commitment to trying something different and seeing it through for the three months of the exhibition are the most important criteria for selection.
To get involved, email us right now at mailbox@makeshift.com.au with a brief description of why you’d like to be part of ‘6 Jars’. … You could also come along to the artist talk at Object (Project Space) on Saturday 8 October at 11:30am.
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A little more about 6 Jars
‘6 Jars’ is a system for sharing time and resources within micro neighbourhood-based groups, posed as a viable alternative food source for bottled/packaged goods. It was devised by Chay-Ya Clancy in Melbourne in 2010, and now comes to Sydney in the form of a durational social experiment for Try This at Home. The basic philosophy is that all processed foods and most household products can be made from scratch. This means you know exactly what is in it, are directly involved in the process of life by creating what you use, save money and can choose to source ethically, sustainably and locally. It is also easier to make a large quantity of something rather than make all the different things that you use. This is where the 6 jars ethic of sharing comes in: you make one thing and share it with a few houses in your local area and in return you get 5 more jars of other things. Read more about the idea and Melbourne group here
[First published as catalogue text in Kathryn Gray (ed.) Rules of Play, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney 2011]
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North: so spades is always the highest, isn’t it?
South: no that’s only in the bidding
West: you’ll learn by playing, you will.
North: let’s just have a crack
East: that’s not a bridge term
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West: Now, as I understand it, I could start modestly, because that seems to be the way … it’s a modest game
Orchestrating an impromptu game of bridge between artists, overworked and time-poor, and all but one of whom have never played before, may not at first seem the most expedient way of advancing a catalogue text for an imminent exhibition featuring said artists. Nonetheless, an unlikely proposition born of delirium and misadventure has somehow become a concrete actuality, and here we are on a Saturday night, clumsily acquainting ourselves with the rules of a rather old-fashioned game that originated in nineteenth century Russian ‘biritch’ and whose modern form was popularised throughout Europe from the late 1920s. A game of skill and chance described as ‘tactical, with inbuilt randomness, imperfect knowledge and restricted communication’,1 which also happens to be a neat characterisation both of Rules of Play as a curatorial event and of the individual artist projects it brings into being.
South: It’s always good to lead with your heart
We have at our disposal a digital copy of Learn Bridge in One Hour, 2 some hastily prepared soup and one player’s recollections of heavily bastardised high school matches. Seated as instructed around a square(ish) table in the cosy surrounds of the Bill + George Librarium, we also have a set of starting parameters that curator Kathryn Gray offered all the artists, Australian and Austrian, for the exhibition’s first iteration at Bell Street Project Space in Vienna late last year. Her directives to ‘identify all specificities and objectives’, ‘make sure that everyone understands’, ‘do everything required’, ‘feel the affect’, ‘remember what came before’ and ‘repeat more than necessary’ seem oddly appropriate at this juncture, working as we are in teams (North-South, East-West) to negotiate unfamiliar terrain where memory, commitment and shared learning have a high exchange value. Also, as we are all on stolen time in this nebulous work/play zone, we might as well enjoy it.
South: This is a total novice round, this is fine. We’re fumbling our way through it, and some order will emerge
The person who has brought us here, albeit unwittingly, is my great aunt Dora, a champion bridge player until the day she died aged almost ninety-eight, just over a week ago. The game was serious and a touch mystical for this extraordinary woman who spoke seven languages and studied Medicine in Paris, Jews being unable to attend Polish universities. It was at the bridge table that her husband Oskar (a ballroom-dancer from a family of wealthy Russian industrialists) had managed to acquire another player’s unneeded identity papers which, with a little forgery, would enable their passage away from the glinting opulence and terror of 1930s Warsaw and later Vilnius, to this faraway place that would become their home. 3 Over the years we’d often talked about her teaching me to play, but time, as it has a habit of doing, slipped away.
East: Bold move there, South!
To add to its improbability, our game has followed directly on the heels of an erudite three-hour ‘rave’ by legendary Indigenous historian and activist Gary Foley, in the very gallery where Rules of Play will take place. Foley opened with a quote, ‘the past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down’ and indeed his own lived memory is one painfully elided by official histories. 4 To remember what came before is no straightforward act of recall but a generative exercise in (re)construction. There is resonance here with the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer, as cited by design philosopher Tony Fry in Design as Politics: ‘memory must be formed … One has memory for some things and not for others’. 5 To this basic formulation Fry adds, ‘there is no Sustainment without memory’, arguing that ‘in the bleakness of ‘the structurally unsustainable present’ it is crucial to develop ‘another way’ and to defend a memory of an otherwise’. 6 This puts remembering – of a particular ‘otherwise’ kind – at the forefront of future-making; and learning how to do it will require imagination and new value judgements, tactical skill and a recognition of the limits of one’s own knowledge.
South: so that means, we’re projecting into the future, and going, I’m confident, especially when you call out Spades, of having the highest cards.
The online introduction to Rules of Play notes that though establishing frameworks in the present, these artists reach out in a double motion ‘back to what has already happened’ and ‘towards a speculative reimagining of what may yet be possible’. 7 Appropriating past practices and reformulating them into new, futuring forms represents a kind of ‘otherwise memory’ that can be found in the work of several artists in this show. For Sarah Rodigari, in Strategies for Leaving and Arriving Home (2011), walking a distance travelled hundreds of times by plane without thinking forced the artist to consider quite literally what she is capable of. Enacting with cheerful unpreparedness the romantic pilgrim of Walden-like hikes through high and low country (but also the manifest experience of those fleeing persecution or unrest, and indeed of anyone needing to cross country before, or perhaps after, the epoch of cars), Rodigari also played the roles of ‘host, facilitator, organiser, caterer, adventure and tour guide’ for those taking up an open invitation to accompany her along the way. While the artist was bounded by her structure and subject to its rules (more or less), participants were free to do as they pleased, shifting the nature of the walk and its parameters, and in a reshuffling of the values of exchange, ultimately engendering change in the artist’s own being. 8
West: That worked! That was an idea that worked. Amazing
East: You do what you do, to manipulate the game.
In New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson’s film Introducción a la teoría de la probabilidad (2008), shown earlier this year at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the narrator ponders over a perpetual game of cards that ‘in the finite world, no shuffle is fair. The deck is always stacked’. Navigating an advantageous path between the organising principles of economic and political power and everyday survival tactics extending finitude within them might be a question of remembering ahead and understanding what François Jullien calls the ‘potential born of disposition’, a dynamism stemming from the configuration of things that describes one’s ability to best exploit whatever conditions are encountered. 9 Playing new kinds of games, with imperfect knowledge and restricted communication, and seeing where they take us, can reveal just how structured our ways of living are by the inbuilt rules and mechanisms of the world-within-a-world that we have created. If those ludic spaces also generate other forms of exchange and understanding, they then offer up possibilities for how we might remake existing organising parameters to our own advantage, in other words extend ‘the time of enabled Sustainment’ which is not fixed in the future but ‘in the past as it passes from the present’. 10 That is, if we can remember how to get there.
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East: But then, it’s all about the long game, people get an idea of how you play.
North: That’s right, we’re all taking notes. In five years time…
West: No, in ninety years time! I like the idea of preparing for a happy retirement. We can start building some nice, leisurely activities that keep our brains alert.
North: I think I mixed up clubs and spades.
South: it doesn’t matter now. In the context of eternity…
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