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jack in a box: notes on kaldor public art projects, michael landy and the archive

jack in a box: notes on kaldor public art projects, michael landy and the archive

February 2021 — 

0. connected, communicative and co-dependent

Albanian contemporary artist Anri Sala’s film Intervista (Finding the Words) (1998) explores the traumatic legacy of the communist period in Albania. In the work, the artist reconstructs the soundtrack of a mute video reel of a political gathering that features his mother. Then translating the silence into sound, Sala confront his mother with the results, creating a work that comments on the uncertainty and subjectivity of memory and remembrance.

Art is a story with many beginnings and possible endings. Central to mapping these storylines is the archive — a system of storying, logging, pigeonholing, registering and recording. The archive, whether real or virtual, offers recorded material a logical order, framing its meaning while preserving its access for the future. In recent history, cultural institutions have transformed historical conceptions of the archive — once synonymous with boxes of unloved static documents — by imbuing them with life and a sense of happening to reveal the tensions, hidden stories, and interrelationships that are a part of people, projects and processes.

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) in Forest Houses, Bronx, New York was conceived as a monument to Italian Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. The work featured a rolling program of philosophy lectures, poetry readings, performances, radio shows, and art workshops hosted across the structure/monument.

A primary means to animate the archive is the exhibition (although I should note that many archives are comprised of exhibition remnants). A public display of material, the exhibition is one of many, albeit the most popular, vehicles for the learned study, criticism and display of artworks and information. Exhibition making is fundamentally a question of connection, with curators tasked with finding ways to connect art with the world outside of the gallery. Through their own questioning, assessing, judging and interpreting, it is the curator’s role to empower artists with the information, and confidence to communicate their stories — and in the most meaningful exhibitions, stories that aren’t heard, or whom no one thinks they want to hear, or haven’t yet heard.

This writing, Jack in the Box: Notes on Kaldor Public Art Projects, Michael Landy and the Archive exists as part of the Kaldor Public Art Project’s desire to animate their own archives. At the organisation’s invitation, I have woven together a loose catalogue of thoughts that thread together eleven objects selected from the Kaldor Public Art Project Archive. Borne from my self-directed research into the realities and contradictions of this archive, I’ve focused on the agency and materiality of the archives themselves in my research, selecting items that reflect upon Michael Landy’s role in using the archive as a means to create new artistic outcomes, Project 35: Making Art Public (itself a project of animating archives) while also exploring Landy’s relationship to John Kaldor and Kaldor Public Art Projects.

1. touching history

The art world tends to shy away from destruction. Often when destruction takes place in a gallery or museum —sites devoted to the preservation and protection of cultural material — something has gone awry. However, against this understanding, destruction is a powerful and tantalising idea that can generate new forms of knowledge, aesthetics and exchange. In the case of British artist Michael Landy, destruction has served as a key impulse in his practice. In his performance Break Down (2001), which brought the artist to international attention, Landy gathered his 7, 222 possessions in a former clothes shop in central London on Oxford Street, London.

Michael Landy, Break Down (2001).

Functioning as a forum of ownership and self, the project was witnessed by public who watched a team of assistants dissemble Landy’s possessions methodically, with each object eventually broken into its material parts, sent on a conveyor belt and sorted neatly into different material categories.  Landy finished Break Down with nothing but the blue boiler suit which he had worn during the two-week projectand nearly six tonnes of debris which was taken to landfill.

There is a fascinating thread that connects Landy’s practice of carnage as a creative act, and how we understand the past through the archive (which can arguably be regarded as left overs of history):

  1. In Landy’s world nothing is forever, yet the archive is an attempt to preserve history forever;
  2. Landy’s Break Down was a comment on systems of value — what’s important and what matters in contemporary society; similarly, an archive seeks to preserve objects in the hopes that are judged as important with time;
  3. Many of Landy’s works exist as monuments to failure, and the archive is often a repository of failure, documenting stillborn projects, and half-ideas as in the case of Landy’s own Kaldor Public Art Project history.

For Project 35: Making Art Public the artist conceived the exhibition as a series of 4m x 4m x 3m tall archival boxes, which contained archival materials, newly commissioned works, along with various exhibition strategies to reconstitute the projects, without necessarily restaging them. The idea was to break down and re-imagine the Kaldor Public Art Project Archive into its constituent parts, unveiling the guts of each project as a way to examine the organisation’s fifty year legacy.

Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects from Kaldor Public Art Projects on Vimeo.

2. What can images achieve?

Mate. What’s this sh**t? (2019) Drawing for Kaldor Project Art Project 35: Michael Landy, Making Art Public, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 September 2019 – 16 February 2020 © Michael Landy.

One of the first objects in the Project 35 archive is this item, a drawing by Landy. The title draws from an encounter between John Kaldor and a member of the public during Public Art Project 16: Gregor Schneider’s 21 Cells (2007) when the artist installed 4x4m steel cells on Bondi Beach in Sydney to resemble a prison. The work commented on terrorism and detention, issues occupying Australia’s political consciousness at the time. Reflecting an Australian irreverence in questioning of the purpose and meaning of the work, the man asked Kaldor, “Mate, what is this shit”? While Landy didn’t title the retrospective this, despite wanting to, he eventually found a use for the title — this work.

Kaldor Public Art Project 16: Gregor Schneider’s 21 Cells (2007) 

Mate. What’s this sh**t? captures the essence of the creative process. For artists and curators alike, the process of making an artwork, or putting together an exhibition is like tree climbing. As you struggle upwards, you’ll meet different branches which you must choose between. And similarly when you make your way down, you may take the same path, or more likely, opt for a different path altogether — all while without an aerial overview, or a map to plot your travel. And yet somehow, when recounting the making of an artwork (exhibition making, or tree climbing) after the fact, your decisions seem so self-evident, knotted together in a neat narrative. And while there exists a tendency to explain an artist’s process or an exhibition process as a streamlined, coherent narrative, these explanations have little to do with reality. Creativity is a rhizomatic process of searching, stopping, questioning, figuring, and asking. There is frustration, confusion and struggle.

And I felt this drawing really captured this sense: the organised chaos, the non-linearity and the interconnection.

3.  a set of aesthetics

Drawings by Michael Landy for Making Art Public at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 7 September 2019 – 20 February 2020. 

I was particularly drawn to this floorplan as it conveys the importance of spatial awareness and audience experience in developing any exhibitions. For all curators, it is crucial to understand how audiences will interact with artworks. This is an interesting document that offers insights into how Landy — as both an outsider to Kaldor Public Art Projects (he’s not part of the ongoing team) and insider (as a former artist/collaborator) — made sense of the projects, and how audiences might engage with them. While the image displays a chronological floorplan, Landy eventually opted for a non chronological plotting of the exhibition, reflecting my actual experience of the exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which was more haphazard and messier. These were qualities that I very much enjoyed as I discovered different archival boxes out of order and seemingly, without a clear, rationalised logic. Such a layout reflects more recent curatorial trends to create exhibitions that complicate (rather than dictate) the relationships between objects.

Press image of Documenta 11 (2002).

By way of context, the collision between the archive and exhibition gained traction in the early 2000s. American art critic and theorist Hal Foster titled this shift, the ‘documentary turn’ or ‘archival impulse’ and illustrated this shift with the example of influential Nigerian-born, New York-based curator Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11, Kassel — considered a landmark exhibition in the visual arts by many Western curators and scholars. The exhibition featured several artists who used documentation and the archive to explore how, and create new paths for images, texts, narratives, documents, audiences, and institutions to relate to one another. For an in depth discussion of the exhibition, consult Anthony Gardner & Charles Green.

4.  systems of information

Screenshot of KPAP’s website featuring incorrect contents for Project 24: Michael Landy’s Acts of Kindness.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995).

Much has been written about the archive and how it influences and interreact with society. The idea that the archive is inseparable to systems of power and knowledge was brought to prominence by French theorist Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, 1966, and Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969) and expanded upon by Jacques Derrida (Archive Fever, 1995). One of their key arguments was that the archive was inherently political, and archives can never be neutral or innocent as they are not encyclopaedic. Archives record history from a very particular context and perspective. As consumers of information, we must question the authority of the archive and recognise its limits as a complete record of history. As with all official records, absence and distortion exist.

In my research of Project 35, I wanted to understand how Landy would re-interpret his Project 24: Acts of Kindness, where he created a 13-metre installation in lower Martin Place that mapped the Sydney CBD to reveal where 200 stories of kindness were placed throughout the city streets. Unfortunately, there was an error in the archive. Project 24 contained material for Project 25, Thomas Demand’s The Dailies (2012) — an error which perfectly speaks to the critical idea above — archives are in fact another form of fallible human record subject to accidental and intentional distortion.  

5.  unexpected questions

Penelope Seidler correspondence, for pre project etc for Project 24: Acts of Kindness.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of American art historian Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971) — a landmark essay that analysed how women have historically been barred from achieving success in the art world. She explains that institutional barriers (like organisational structures, terminology, and coded systems) rather than individual barriers (i.e. an inherent deficiency in female artists) could explain the lack of ‘great’ women artists in the Western art tradition.  

It was serendipitous that I discovered this email correspondence between John Kaldor and Australian architect and arts supporter Penelope Seidler. Until more recently, Seidler’s role in supporting the first Kaldor Public Art Project, Christo and Jean-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia (1968–69) where the artists wrapped the coastline of Little Bay, Sydney in fabric, had largely existed as part of the oral, rather than written history of the project. As noted by gallery director Rebecca Coates, Seidler was left in charge of the Sydney project and corresponded between Kaldor and the artists while he was abroad during August and September 1969. It’s a lovely note to find in light of Nochlin’s essay and for me a real testament to Seidler, her vision, commitment and practicalities which are finally being recognised in the wider public sphere.

6.  if there’s one thing you could destroy, what would it be?

Envelope from Thomas Dane Gallery, hand-delivered to John Kaldor at the Duke’s Hotel, London, containing a Sydney, Australia postcard, showing the Sydney Opera House disappeared, created by Michael Landy. 

Artmaking for many artists seems to be a form of faith, a private foray into the unknown. From my relationships with artists, the process of making art is like reaching a hand out and feeling around to find innovation, beauty, meaning and originality. But sometimes, much like any faith, prayers can go unanswered. Prior to Acts of Kindness, Landy had proposed several projects that remain uncompleted. I mention these projects as I believe that failure, for many artists, curators  — and especially in Landy’s case who celebrates failure — is fundamental to realising creative outcomes. In an interview with Landy, he noted “all artists dream about people talking about their work, responding to it and remembering it. No one wants to make art that people forget”, and with these unrealised projects, Landy is true to his statement.

 7 & 8.  back and forth

Left: Email from Michael Landy to John Kaldor containing an update on an invisibility project, including research into illusions, physics and projections etc., 25 January 2008. 
Right: Email from Michael Landy to John Kaldor containing suggestions for achieving an invisibility project in Sydney, specifically making the Sydney Opera House disappear, 20 February 2008. 

Landy proposed to disappear the Sydney Opera House’s clouds (which often are referred to as the building’s ‘sails’) —  taking on one of the most iconic Australian buildings and intruding upon it. The correspondence illustrates the back-and-forth problem solving required to achieve a project like this, while underscoring how art is not a discrete field, but something that flows into and out of various other disciplines and industries.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Break Down (2001), 111 c-prints.

It’s also interesting to note that Landy himself does not keep an archive of his own practice. After Break Down (2001), the artist opted not to keep an archive. At the time, German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who had just won the Turner Prize in 2000, documented Break Down (2001) in 106 photos. Months after the project, he sent the images to Landy in a box where they remained for twenty years. They were recently published in the newspaper The Financial Times. Landy admitted, had the photographs arrived during the project, they would similarly have to be destroyed with the rest of his belongings, available here.

9. the price of things  

Various printed images showing straight Australian roads in the ‘outback’. Concept and research images likely supplied by Michael Landy in relation to his Bend in the Road project proposal. 

Another suggested project was Bend in the Road where the artist proposed to put a bend in Australia’s longest road, which measures 146.6km long in Western Australia. The estimated cost to relay one kilometre of road in remote Western Australia was $350 000 – $400 000 per kilometre (in 2009).

10.  a cluster of possibilities

Seven Michael Landy preparatory mock-ups, featuring towers of rubbish inserted into Sydney real estate photography. 

Landy also proposed House Stack, a sculptural tower comprising houses stacked vertically on top of one another. In a series of correspondence between John Kaldor and his team, the issue of expense comes up a few times. An early estimate provided by Seidler was in excess of $2 000,000. It is a clear illustration from these unrealised examples that creativity and the visual arts are very much connected to capital and money.

11.  destruction (cont.)

The National Gallery, London, postcard from Michael Landy to John Kaldor, featuring Michael Landy’s ‘Chest Beater’ (2012) “Dear John, find enclosed ‘connectors’ All the Best, Michael Landy”. 

The best types of working relationships with artists are the those which extend far beyond a single exhibition into a lifetime of exchange. I thought that this postcard, sent to John Kaldor in the lead up to Landy’s exhibition, Saints Alive at the National Gallery, London illustrates their respect for each other. The exhibition grew from an invitation by the National Gallery of a two-year residency at the gallery. After this period of residency, Landy’s ideas culminated in an exhibition of kinetic figures of saints, who, with all the clumsiness of Victorian automata, attacked their own bodies with the instruments of their martyrdom. 

The exhibition, which I saw, was captivating in the flesh. The works were Landy’s way of animating these two-dimensional works in the Gallery’s historic collections. In a very different vain but related to the eventual Project 35: Making Art Public project, Landy was pulling people into the paintings by animating them through these chimeric sculptures — much like the very different looking, but equally inviting archival rooms of projects that pulled audiences in, around and through the exhibition. Part Frankenstein’s monster, part Victorian steam machine, Saints, alive captured the saints in all their grandiosity, but foregrounded their destructive and martyred narratives.

Earnest, lyrical and beautiful. And following from Landy’s quote (point 5), hardly forgettable.

Michael Landy, Saints Alive trailer.

12. on and on


In leading you into the archive, I wish to also lead you out the other end. Over the past several months, I have worked with Kaldor Public Art Projects and three high schools to animate the Kaldor Archive through a series of student led ‘exhibitions’ that have taken the form of Instagram pages, PowerPoints and texts. Using this text as a springboard for the students, and corresponding with them through Zoom and detailed annotations given via Google, the process has been one of learning and insight.

Many of the students had existing understandings of the archive – whether their phone photo albums, text logs or diaries – and the through light guidance and the occasional prompt, they were able to apply their virtual search skills and curiosity to the project and develop rich exhibitions that both riff on the archive and are archival in themselves. There’s a lot to grapple with and even more to learn from their texts; take your time and experience the work of these Future Curators. And hopefully, you might catch Derrida’s Archive Fever.

In the meantime, I leave you with another artist whose process might also be described as archiving ‘junk’…

Robert Rauschenberg, Mirthday Man (detail) (1997), who was known for his subversive use of found objects, images and ‘junk’ in his painting-collages.

END.

_________

This text was commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects as part of the Future Curators Program, where three Australian curators researched the Kaldor Archives to develop a text/exhibition that could be used as an educational resource in NSW secondary schools.

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dedicated to a happier year


dedicated to a happier year 

November, 2020

Living in a society defined by profit, power, and dehumanisation, it seems as if our feelings were not meant to survive. Much of contemporary art today is made in this vein; preoccupied with aesthetics at the expense of life outside the gallery. Particularly now, where few words, if any, can describe the heft and strangeness of pandemic life, the space to feel — and express our feelings — is even more necessary. In recognition of this, artist Jason Phu has created a project that expresses shades of feeling, documenting the things we feel, but don’t articulate. 

Jason Phu, be as strong as a mountain and as fluid as a river they said. they were wrong, the mountain was a mound of old tv monitors and the river was a dry bed of ox bones, 2020, photograph, photographed by Sly Morikawa, 80 x 120 cm, framed. Image courtesy Chalk Horse.
Sly Morikawa, yev – psyklz clubsport, 2020, photograph. Image courtest Sly Morikawa.

In collaboration with photographer Sly Morikawa, best known for her ethereal portraits saturated with glamour and sex, what we used to be, where we used to go Jason Phu’s research into Chinese history, culture and mythology. Across twelve photographs — whittled from five-hundred images — Phu has imagined this folklore through his peculiar, but recognisable punk-graffiti-irreverent aesthetic. In a soft focused haze, Phu dismantles these histories, sifting through what matters most to him and plunging these scenes into the borders of narrative. Phu notes “there are strands of mysteries in the show. It’s a reference to us as creatures, to the big bang, the future, the expansion of the universe and how an artist might interpret that. It’s about all these grand narratives, and the petty, small ones. That’s what I enjoy the most… the big and small in the same place, not where things are big or small, but just exist.” 

In be as strong as a mountain and as fluid as a river they said. they were wrong, the mountain was a mound of old tv monitors and the river was a dry bed of ox bones (2020), eight colourful figures, dressed in fluorescent cloaks wear roughly hewn cardboard masks decorated with long strands of hair — a reference to Chinese antiquity, where long hair constituted Confucian piety and respect. These sages, shot in a suburban swimming pool, are a manifestation of the Chinese dragon King — the god of weather and water. Unlike the original folklore’s four dragons, Phu has multiplied them into eight dragons — an act of mistranslation that reflects the ever-changing whittling down and workings of oral history traditions like the Chinese diaspora culture of which Phu belongs. He says, “that’s the thing about ancient mythologies. They’re mutable, especially when retold in the new country. There is a shallow shell of authenticity from the mainland that is frozen in time and doesn’t exists anymore.” 

In the daytime counterpart of this tale, imagine being the eight dragon kings of all the seas with all the power of the forces of nature and mystical powers of everlasting life and wisdom of the ages and still drowning in your own soup of feelings and left-on-read messages, 2020 depicts the same water dragons with a different and stranger unremarkableness that drains them of any higher spiritual authority. In this contradiction — depicting serious subject matter through the comical pointlessness of the everyday — lies the magic of these works. The jumble of individual jokes, references and poetry of the titles correct, contextualise, and revise each other. If you are deeply attentive to the chaos, your mind will be quieted by the subtlety of the works.  

Jason Phu, imagine being the eight dragon kings of all the seas with all the power of the forces of nature and mystical powers of everlasting life and wisdom of the ages and still drowning in your own soup of feelings and left-on-read messages, 2020, photograph, photographed by Sly Morikawa, 80 x 120 cm, framed. Image courtesy Chalk Horse.
Image: politics and history of men’s hair in China. Courtesy Nancy Duong.

It is jumble of artistic strategies which stirred Morikawa and Phu to collaborate. Phu describes this collaboration ‘a bit more fun, a bit more intuitive’ than his recent history projects, including The Burrangong Affray at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, where the artist explored Australian Chinese race riots during Australia’s gold rush in 1860 – 1861. While the stakes might seem lower, without having to carry the load of academic research, field work and community stakeholders, what we used to be, where we used to go still carries Phu’s hallmark sense of complication and expansion — blurring conceptions of identity, community relationships and history. Into this mixture of conceptual interests, he drops into the ingredients of deadpan humour, non-sensical narrative, biographical details and poetry in order puzzle, awaken and torment his audiences as they spend time with these compositions. 

Through mutual respect, the artists were able to find a familiar dialect, fusing the gap between their different backgrounds — fashion photography and fine art respectively. Phu tells me, “Sly brought a whole new language to the project, how to talk to the models, how to position them. Those instructions are like brushstrokes. It was a nice collaboration; giving up control.” By working together, the pair have created a time capsule of a moment in culture and their own lives. The result is a set of images that explore identity through poetic metaphors, critical intelligence and a humour and irreverence that is never heavy handed or laboured. 

Jason Phu, what we used to be, where we used to go (installation view), Chalkhorse Gallery November 2020. image Credit: Docqment.

Gliding through different registers, mythologies and moods, each scene in what we used to be, where we used to go forms a loose web that adds up to a wider picture. By leaning into the photographic medium, Phu has tapped into a new language to express the ideas of his practice. And in doing so, these works open a new emotional register; straining with unacknowledged feeling and a mystery that speaks to the current moment. It is this sense the knowing and unknowing of these scenes that gives this series their potency. This is classic Jason Phu — something new from something gone. 

END.

This text was originally commissioned by Chalk Horse.

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robert mapplethorpe: phillip prioleau, NYC (on pedestal side facing)

robert mapplethorpe: phillip prioleau, NYC (on pedestal side facing)

March 2020

American studio photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe’s (1946 – 1989) lens has roved across taut skin, muscled limbs, leather harnesses, fabrics, flowers and phalluses. Conferring a classical glow to these subjects, his identifiable photographic style is marked by his meticulous and flawless black and white technique that emphasises the sculptural beauty of his tight and geometric compositions. Speaking about his portrait photography he said, “I want the person to look at least as interesting as they can look … I try to catch something unique in him that no one else has/ That quality is what I want to come across, not the superficial prettiness, even though I love photographing beautiful people.”[1]

Robert Mapplethorpe: phillip prioleau, NYC (on pedestal side facing) (1979), gelatin silver print, 348 x 348mm. Image courtesy of Webbs.

In 1978, Mapplethorpe would produce his infamous portfolios of themed imagery, “X” of masochistic images and “Y” of floral still lives. These portfolios would highlight the formal connection between flowers and genitalia; using metaphor and allusion to breathe desire and life into flowers, while ossifying sex acts into cool geometries. This image, Phillip Prioleau, NYC (on pedestal Side Facing), 1979 was created following this period, when Mapplethorpe worked on his subsequent portfolio that could complete the series, “Z” nude portraits of African American Men released in 1981. Prioleau, who Mapplethorpe hired to work in his studio and then convinced to pose, regularly featured in the Z portfolio and sat for images that typify Mapplethorpe’s classicising figure studies of this period. 

Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979) photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 61.2 x 58.6 x 3.8 cm. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. 

This elegant and crisp arrangement of Prioleau perched on a pedestal highlights Mapplethorpe’s undeniable interest in Classical Greek and Roman sculpture. Admiring this genre for its pursuit of idealise male forms, Mapplethorpe sought to reinterpret this practice by inviting chiselled young men to strike Michelangelo like poses. In this example, Prioleau is lit with a heavenly beam of light, creating a chiaroscuro effect that brings the mottled shimmer of the sitter’s muscle to the fore. In many of Mapplethorpe’s images, he used beauty as a means to provoke and challenge viewers to not avert their gaze from the troubling societal topics of his time. Here, the idealised image of African American man, sitting prized on a pedestal, is at odds with the troubling African American race relations of the time — revealing a deeper agenda that runs throughout Mapplethorpe’s work.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Tulip (1985), gelatin silver print on paper. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. 

This image of Prioleau also foreshadows the movement in the early 1980s from taking erotic pictures — which have always occupied a disproportionate importance in his canon — to his concentration of nudes, portraits and still lifes. Remarking “I’ve already recorded that,” Mapplethorpe’s icy and idealised forms — which is beginning to become apparent in this image — would take centre stage for the rest of his career until his death in 1989, at age 43. The legacy of Mapplethorpe’s work would crest in 1990, when prosecutors indicted the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre, along with its director, on obscenity charges for exhibiting a touring exhibition of his work, interpreting his elegant geometries as offensive S&M scenes paid for using public funds (the National Endowment for the Arts granted $30 000 towards the exhibition). While Art Centre ultimately won the case, conservative politicians, led by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, led a national debate on the self-indulgent excesses of culture and art during this time. Through this case, the name Mapplethorpe in American culture, would go on to become a byword for controversy and the culture wars of the 1990s — speaking to the frictions, tensions and contradictions that give Mapplethorpe’s images their undeniable energy.    

END.

This text was originally commissioned and published by Webb’s Auction House.

[1] Mapplethorpe, quoted in “Robert Mapplethorpe, Portraitist and Photographer of the Erotic.” In Robert Mapplethorpe: Perfection in Form (New York: teNeues, 2009).

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The year without summer

The year without summer

Febuary 2020

Sydney blanketed in bushfire haze during the Summer 2019-2020 bushfires.
Map of active fires during the 2019-2020 bushfires.

A coastal city par excellence, Sydney is known to empty of residents during summer, allowing those few staying in town, as well as visitors, to fully appreciate the charms of antipodean living. However, as this summer draws to an end, there are few halcyon beachside memories to take into autumn. A catastrophic bushfire season has seen over 11 million hectares of Australian landscape ablaze, causing real and widespread suffering. Sobering, unfair, and urgent, the summer of 2020 has been a perilous period in Australian history. It is against this backdrop that A Sullen Perfume, by Sydney-based artist Dean Cross, emerges.

Gordon Bennett, Home Décor (Relative/Absolute) Flowers for Mathinna #2 (1999), acrylic on linen, 182.5 x 182.5cm. Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, purchased with funds provided by the MCA Foundation, 2012.

The various paths charted by artists and historians alike while they traverse through Australian history reveal historical terrain seeded with bitterness, sorrow, and outrages against Indigenous communities. This is compounded by the fact that Australia’s troubled and troubling relationship with its Aboriginal inhabitants has almost entirely been told by its colonisers. It is apt then, that Yavuz Gallery has invited Cross to develop a suite of landscapes rooted in his sensitivity and knowledge of Country for their fourth exhibition in Sydney. Cross follows a lineage of Australian Aboriginal artists who offer an unsparing reckoning of their country’s past, like Gordon Bennett (1955 – 2014). Already, Cross has exhibited in a number of high-profile group exhibitions, including Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2017) and the prestigious Indigenous Ceramics Prize at Shepparton Art Museum (2018).

Born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and of Worimi descent, Cross spent his formative years on a farm near Canberra. There he experimented with painting while training as a professional dancer. He likens his painting process to developing a choreographic composition: “When you make dance, it often starts with a gesture, a waving of the hand. It has no inherent meaning, but once you add in other gesture, a nodding of the head, you develop a relationship. And that’s how I’ve built up the works in this exhibition.” In this way, Cross relates disparate pieces of material, studies, and elements to assemble paintings with discontinuous narratives that are both finely controlled and complex, creating, in this case an undertow of anguish.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Cargo X (1989). Photography by Jed Downhill.

Cross describes the exhibition’s mood as symptomatic of a broader society awash with unrest. As climate crisis devours our coastlines, drought withers our farmlands, and fires ravage our forests, Cross attempts to make sense of our ecological, cultural, and political reality. Rather than creating art that is an emblem of excess in a stratified society of haves and have-nots, he is motivated to make decisions and take actions that inform, inspire, and elevate the public conscience. Here, Cross uses abstraction as the means to lay bare the disquieting truths beneath the surface of the ‘lucky’ country. He imparts, “every Aboriginal person is a landscape through their connection to Country and so every self-portrait can be read as a landscape”. The works in A Sullen Perfume are a search for catharsis, and a way of dealing with the unfolding events before Cross. 

Dean Cross, You, Me, Us + Them (2009-2019), synthetic polymer, and charcoal on canvas with carpet, found image and possum skin, 224 x 210 cm. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz.

You, Me, Us + Them, (2009 – 2019) comprises of an abstracted aerial landscape, set against oxblood and yellow painted planes of canvas, alongside a Fauvist-coloured head that hovers in the midst of a parchment coloured, sun-baked panel. The combination of these elements suggests a narrative, rather than imposes a strict reading. We ask: Who owns this head whose expression seems to tug at tragedy? What is the significance of a horseshoe shape against a vast plane of thick mustard yellow? When was this photograph taken? By working in this way, Cross offers his audience a world of suggestion, allowing them to interpret, and in a way, co-produce and finish the work of art. Cross admits that he is much less interested in plot than in the creation of a sense of momentum, an emotional velocity. Interestingly, the respective components of his paintings have followed him around the globe over the past ten years as he has repeatedly worked the recto and verso of the material. Deceptively simple, these compositions are in fact an accretion of detail and of nuance containing special oddities.

Dean Cross, I WILL NEVER DANCE AGAIN (2009-2019), oil, synthetic polymer and charcoal on unstretched canvas and linen, synthetic polymer paints on acrylic (panel), 200 x 160 cm. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz.

I WILL NEVER DANCE AGAIN, (2019)builds on this aesthetic language, while introducing text, a recurring motif in his work. The phrase, ‘I will never dance again” is scrawled repeatedly in a dark inky font that bursts with frustration. When asked, Cross explains that this element is autobiographical: “There’s no more dancing in the world. Dance has an inescapable joyfulness to it. And at this moment, it is at stake.”  Cross continues to use text to add powerful texture to his paintings in Mine/Mine, 2019. Comprised of a visual pun wrapped in a homophone, the work draws attention to the politics of mining practices and its impact on Indigenous communities.

In the suite of drawings COUNTRY (2019), Cross continues testing poetic potentials of positive and negative forms of colour. He explains that, “we have a tendency to not properly look at the world around us. We’re so mediated and disconnected from what’s in front of us with our digital distractions, that we tend to completely miss the point.” It is for this reason that Cross relishes these works in the exhibition: they are pure, potent and full of potential, drawing upon autobiographical signifiers from his family farm, from dance, and from Country. As with any good abstract expressionism, the paintings succeed in conveying profound human feeling while also refusing reductive explanations.

Dean Cross, COUNTRY (2020), oil, synthetic polymer and oil stick on 600gsm Saunders smooth cotton cold pressed paper 163 x 124.5 cm (polyptych, framed). Courtesy the artist and Yavuz.

As we settle into the year, Australia finds itself in a cultural, political and ecological maelstrom. Dean Cross’ A Sullen Perfume is an invitation to ask ourselves probing questions to make sense of the world around us. In a series of works that are as much public or political as they are private or personal, Cross refuses give us a straight answer. This is precisely the point and half the task. If we dare to look at Australia’s past history for guidance in the next decade to come, the exhibition confirms that making sense of it all is hard enough, and ponders, perhaps making things different could well be impossible.

Dean Cross, Mine/Mine (2019), oil stick on unstretched linen, 208 x 196 cm. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz.

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This text was originally commissioned and published by Yavuz Gallery.

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On Daniel Boyd: ‘And the horizons swallowed the tortoise’

On Daniel Boyd: ‘And the horizons swallowed the tortoise’
June 2020

There is a tendency in Australian art history to segregate the art of Aboriginal people from the broader field of Australian art. Separatist terms such as “Aboriginal Art”, “Urban Aboriginal Artist” or even “Folk art” reflect an ongoing colonial hierarchy that contemplates Indigenous communities and their culture, as distinct from the concerns and agendas of Australia today. To conceive of Australian art and Aboriginal art as separate streams of practice reflects a misunderstanding of the independence of Australian culture.

Art Gallery of NSW

Sydney based artist Daniel Boyd is testament to an expanding field of artists working to create a more self-aware set of cultural relations in Australia that celebrates the nuance, potency and urgency of Indigenous practitioners and their histories. A Kudjla/Gangalu man from North Queensland, Sydney based Boyd has achieved international acclaim for his practice that reframes Australia’s foundational myths as an ongoing history of Aboriginal survival and resistance. What concerns and obsesses him is the injustice meted by Australian settlers and the glorification of this history in visual art

Daniel Boyd, We Call them Pirates Out Here, 2006, oil on canvas 226 x 276 x 3.5cm.
Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia.

After graduating from the Canberra School of Art in 2005, Boyd exhibited a series of paintings that shifted the landscape of Australian art history and history painting. Using Western canonical history paintings as inspiration, he reimagined Captain Cook and colonial explorers as pirates and murderers, using eye-patches and the occasional parrot as signifiers of their criminality in dispossessing Indigenous people of their land. Inscribed beneath each portrait is the expression ‘no beard’, alluding to accounts that Indigenous Australians first thought Captain Cook and his explorers were women as they had no facial hair.

Daniel Boyd, Untitled (SCAMSCI), 2018, oil and archival glue on linen, 189 x 266.5 cm.

Boyd would continue surveying colonial images and mythologies, eventually apply his understanding of particle theory — a theory that notes that all matter and objects consist of small particles that are in constant motion, vibrating with energy — to his practice around 2012. Utilising predominantly found colonial images – often drawn from Museum collections, including the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in London, Boyd would reconstruct these archival images using a field of acrylic pointillist dots painted against dark backgrounds.

These dots, a reference to Modernist painting techniques and Western desert painting traditions, were partial splices of imagery that require viewers to step back and decode the larger image held depicted within the cosmos of paint. By engaging in the mechanics of seeing, Boyd alludes to the fragmentary nature of knowledge and history — highlighting how Aboriginal people exist in the dark spaces of history. The work asks audiences to slow their pace of looking, ponder each image and reflect on Australia’s colonial settler history and the ongoing effects of the terra nullius legal doctrine that disavowed Aboriginal people of their land and personhood.

Daniel Boyd, Untitled (FF), 2017, oil and archival glue on linen, 193.5 x 302 cm.

Boyd has since deepened his practice by developing new paintings, video works and installations for a number of high-profile exhibitions, including Where The Oceans Meet, Museum of Art and Design (2019) curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015) curated by Okwui Ewenzor, Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations, Kochi, India (2015) curated by Indian artist Jitish Kallat and David Elliot’s Moscow International Biennale for Young Arts: A Time for Dreams (2014). In each exhibition, Boyd demonstrated fiercely interrogative journeys into the mouth of history in search of human pain, labour and stoicism against the nefarious forces of Colonial relations and histories. The result were powerful statements of colonial legacies and its lasting impact on indigenous and coloured people around the world.   

Daniel Boyd, Untitled (SOAGS), 2020, oil, acrylic, charcoal and archival glue on canvas, 350 x 570 cm.

Boyd’s exhibition And the horizons swallowed the tortoise at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery continues this trajectory by uniting three highly personal subject matters. In an ode to his mother, Boyd has painted sunsets that recall a sentimental, secluded beach near his childhood home in Cairns, Queensland. Unable to travel and visit his mother during the coronavirus lockdowns, these brooding scenes beat with the longing of family to be reunited. The beach is an important familial reference point for Boyd, whose grandfather settled on a beach after being expelled—among others—from his Anglican Mission following an uprising. 

The exhibition also includes depictions of the Australian native Bush stone-curlew, a bird known for its ominous shriek. Found across most of Australia, these nocturnal birds carry associations of death in many Aboriginal Australian cultures — a haunting reference to the time of coronavirus. The exhibition also touches upon Greek mythology, taking inspiration from Achilles’ paradox — one of many philosophical problems described by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (c.290 – 430 BC). While his paradox has been rebutted and purported to have been solved by theorists and mathematicians, Boyd’s interest lies in the theory’s application to assess the risk of infectious diseases without detailed datasets.

Zeno’s paradox. Image from Medium.com

Boyd notes that these works emerge from the unique conditions of lockdown. Social distancing is pre-pandemic for those people who are exiled, marginalised or displaced. These communities, of which many Aboriginal people belong to, have historically had to communicate with loved ones far away, while enduring feelings of isolation, uncertainty, depression and trauma under the watchful eye of the state. While the pandemic represents death, it is also tied to feelings of estrangement. It is this estrangement that is suffused this latest body of work. Boyd notes, “these opportunities his been given have allowed me to fulfil my responsibilities to fill my people. It’s always amazing when young people come up to me to thank me. That’s why I started to paint and make art – I quickly understood this was the forum to question and create a dialogue.” 

Daniel Boyd, And the horizons swallowed the tortoise, 2020, installation image.

At this time when the global pandemic threatens the livelihood and safety of populations, Aboriginal people, like many other Indigenous peoples across the globe are at risk of become “asterisk peoples”. This is the risk of being represented as asterisks in large data sets, existing as just footnotes in more dominant conversations about health, cultural and economic life. It is this continual struggle, especially during times of crisis, that gives such gravitas to artists like Boyd who express histories of oppression and resistance. In creating spaces for questions and dialogue in art, Boyd places the Aboriginal experience closer towards the centre contemporary Australian art, drawing attention to the potency of Indigenous practitioners working today. However, the final push towards a more encompassing set of cultural relations and concepts of reconciliation lies with us: as readers, as consumers, as influencers, as collectors and as people capable of tangible action. It is time to question what has, and is, happening around us, and what this might mean. This is power of Daniel Boyd.  

END.

This text was originally commissioned and published by Art Collector.

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The Economics of Solidarity

The Economics of Solidarity
May 2020

Over the past half century, the visual art world has undergone an exceptional transformation, with the public, private and commercial art spheres booming with greater ambition. Underwritten by the availability of capital and connectivity, visual art has never been so available to collectors, accessible to appreciators and outward looking in its approach, enveloping a range of cultural references, societal movements and technologies. These circumstances have birthed generations of artists who now work in contexts far removed from the solitary, tortured artist-as-martyr-madman-shaman conceptions that once prevailed. In order to earn their living, artists today rely on a complex ecosystem of support structures that include public and private grants, prizes, galleries, commercial opportunities and private philanthropy.

A bidder at a Sotheby’s evening auction.

Their careers tend to be guided by amorphous and transient opportunities that are contingent on timing and circumstance. In navigating this reality, artists must rely on their entrepreneurial skills to move and work across different projects, events and galleries. These working conditions are further compounded by a financial insecurity, the lack of discernible career structures, trade unions and the social benefits that other industries take for granted such as a fringe benefits. This precarity has made the sudden fall brought on by coronavirus much more painful for artists. Every aspect of the art world, from the mightiest museums, to emerging artists have been devastated by the pandemic lockdown, with the economic futures of the sector left uncertain.

Still from Bonnie and Clyde, 1967.

While an economics of solidarity is finally emerging, with private foundations and state and federal government supporting Australian artists, these opportunities are nonetheless coloured by the limited view of how Western societies understand visual art and capital. There is a dissonance between the cultural value and the capital value of artists. This is in part explained by the difficulty in quantifying artistic labour which is often intangible and exists independent from formal markets where prices can be easily determined (say a slice of banana bread from your local café or perhaps a gold bullion bar).

In grappling with this tension, artists have developed strategies to challenge the ever-accelerating cycles of consumption and obsolesce in the Western world; conceiving of art world disconnected from the capitalist systems of exchange that force artists to work and exist so precariously. For example, French curator Nicolas Bourriaud observed a generation of artists in the 1990s who drew upon strategies of institutional critique from the 1960s and 1970s whereby artists disappeared the art object in favour for art works and ideas that resist commodification. This movement, which he titled Relational Aesthetics, reframed audiences as a collective social entity capable of temporary utopian encounters.

Liam Gillick, discussion platforms, 2010. Installation view Casey Kaplan Gallery.

Artists like Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Christine Hill and Vanessa Beecroft created contexts where audiences could resist the intensely commodified, transactional and virtual relationships heralded by Globalisation. These gatherings, which Bourriaud called “microtopias’, were opportunities for audiences to pause and inhabit the world in a different way. The artist was the designer of social interactions, co-opting their audience through different prompts to create art gatherings disconnected from the typical acts of purchasing, contracting and schmoozing that typically take place.

Still from the film, Bicycle Thieves, 1948.

This historical movement is an example of artist led cultural reform that emphasises human care and empathy above economic interests. While critics like English historian Claire Bishop have criticised Relational Aesthetics as a toothless naïve exercise, the movement’s idealism is critical in reconciling the role of artists, and to understanding how and why our era of hyper Capitalism has let them down. These relational encounters offer us a loose template for care and consideration that will guide us through this crisis. After all, without imaginary ideals like this, there is no possibility of a radical reimagination of this status quo.

The coronavirus pandemic has foregrounded the wealth inequalities in all industries. In the case of the cultural sector, vulnerable arts organisations, arts workers, and artists are clamouring for answers. And in this uncertainty, the pandemic offers the potential for action and leadership. This time calls for a recommitment to artists, resetting our all-pervasive economic rationalism in favour for a system of open-ended concern for human wellbeing and quality of life — expanding Bourriaud’s concept of a ‘microtopia’ into a ‘macrotopia’. Such a system could include reduced working hours to ensure artists are better able to devote time to their practice in lieu of their day jobs, basic income guarantees, or a reorientation of existing state provisions that better compensate artistic practice — an extension of the economics of solidarity that has been partially put in place by the Australian State and Federal governments to tide furloughed or laid-off workers during the lockdown. Such measures would recognise the social value of creative endeavours, better protecting and supporting artists who are the creative backbone of the country. Artists do not act in isolation; much like anyone else, they affect and are affected by government and business decisions.

Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (still), 1989, video, monitor or projection, colour and sound, 29:00. Collection, Tate Gallery.

A new paradigm that redresses this precarity would also require the distinctions between the sanctity of art and the grubbiness of money to be collapsed. We must abandon prejudices against artists open to commercialism who are often vilified as sell outs. This system would also need to rewrite the idea that artists can be paid in ‘exposure’ and ‘opportunity’ instead of money for their time and labour. With this in mind, I have suggested propositions for contemplation and action while we rally together during the pandemic and consider how we can reset economic, social and historical relationships to build a society that we want. Only in this way, can we finally begin to recognise and the resolve the precarity of artists which has been for too long been ignored and dismissed as simply a necessary condition of art making. 

END.

This text was originally commissioned and published by Art Collector.

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Place and Time: Rirkrit Tiravanija

Place and Time: Rirkrit Tiravanija
August 2020

Much of Modern art history is marked by manifestoes, militant supporters and competing visions of art that propelled artists to innovate and meld together different styles, mediums and ideas. However, by the 1960s, this model reached its apex and utopian hopes for a better future, the avant-garde and definable styles lost momentum as cornerstone ideas in Western art history. The conditions of globalisation dramatically altered this Modernist trajectory. Communication technologies like the mobile phone and internet, market liberalisation and the flow of travellers shaped a new set of socio-political circumstances unrecognisable to the Modernists of yesteryear. Instead, these conditions gave rise to a new generation of artists, critics and curators who employed new strategies to articulate polemical insight into the late 1980s and 1990s. 

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 1998, cover.

New York based, Rirkrit Tiravanija is one of the artists who defined this period. Spanning installation, video, print, painting and text, Tiravanija and his role in the Relational Aesthetics movement offered art history a new “ism”. Described by American art critic Jerry Saltz, Relational Art ‘reengineered art over the past fifteen years or so’.[1] French art critic and curator, Nicolas Bourriaud (1955—) originally coined the term in 1998 to describe and interpret the work of artists like Tiravanija, Liam Gillick and Pierre Huyghe who linked their art to politics by creating encounters where audience members could relate to each other and build potentially transformative experiences.  Bourriaud used the term ‘microtopia’ — a fusion of “micro” and “utopia” — to describe these moments of social exchange.

In relational works, social exchange was the art and the artist — who had historically been stereotyped as a lone figure — was cast into the role of a gregarious mediator. Bourriaud wrote about the ‘birth of the viewer’ describing the importance of audiences in conceptualising and completing relational artworks.[2] Audiences were offered a reprieve from the draining service-based information economy which strained human relationships in the Western world. Instead, they were able to connect vis-à-vis, without the interreference of the information era.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (Free), 1992. Installation view: 303 Gallery, New York.

Tiravanija’s Untitled (Free), 1992 is the gold standard of Relational Art. Staged at 303 Gallery in New York, U.S.A. the artist transferred the contents of gallery’s back of house — including the dealer and her staff — into the gallery space. The office space was then transformed into a make-shift restaurant with seating and cooking utensils where Tiravanija cooked and served curry and rice to visitors without charge. This radical intervention, or invasion, of the gallery’s sanctified serenity and reversal of spaces challenged its function in Western art. Rather than the typical acts of purchasing, contracting and schmoozing that take place at galleries, the work allowed the audience a moment of exchange unmediated by technology or capital. Tiravanijaconceived Untitled (Free) as an exercise to repair and reconstitute the personal fragmentation caused by global capital and its impulse to diminish the human spirit. He explains, ‘I am growing up in this contemporary modern structure to be fragmented, influenced, and subconsciously colonised. All the things I have been doing are about getting myself back.’[3]

Image of popular thai noodle dish pad thai.

It is important to note his decision to serve curries and the popular Thai noodle dish, pad thai in this work and its following permutations and reperformances. These dishes stamp his multicultural upbringing and biography onto a Western art tradition and the typical Western audiences who experienced visual art in New York at this time. He notes, ‘in the ‘80s, Thai food wasn’t something that everyone had experienced. It was still something on the edge, something exotic, perhaps; it definitely challenged your normal sense of food.”[4] Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires in 1961 to Thai parents, raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada, before studying in Canada and the U.S.A. As a result of his globetrotting upbringing, cultural challenge has remained steadfast in his practice as he continues to champion a polyphonic interpretation and engagement with the world; recognising the individuality and difference present within it.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, The Land, 1998. Installation view.

This ambition is also evident in The Land, 1998 a collaborative project conceived with Thai artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert. Located on the outskirts of Chiang Mai in southern Thailand, the site-specific project is contemplated as a self-sustainable environment where invited artists develop ecological art projects on the commune. Among a number of projects, Danish art group, SUPERFLEX developed a biogas system that fuelled German sculptor Tobias Rehberger’s set of gas lamps. By presenting a new model of living and societal relations, The Land extends the ideas expressed in Untitled (free) to its logical conclusion.

Tiravanija and Lertchaiprasert describe themselves as the project’s founders not owners. Each artist is responsible for funding and maintaining their project; itself an incentive to develop a contribution that furthers the overall ambition of building an autonomous commune. While the project has been criticised by Western scholars like Clare Veal for its long-term viability, as some of the projects have fallen into disrepair, the project stands as an important example of a contemporary art work in Thailand that recognises local Thai narratives while engaging with global art conversations.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2016 (freedom cannot be simulated, south china morning post, september 26-27-28-29-30, 2014), 2016, oil on newspaper. Installation view, Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

These thematic issues — identity, sustainability, disengagement from capital exchange and the importance of collective environments — are threaded throughout the strands of Tiravanija’s practice. His text paintings appropriate English slogans and phrases by painting them onto large canvases of collaged newsprint. This treatment of language highlights how English can be deployed as a weapon to embed power structures and hierarchies of Western societies through news and political rhetoric. The mobilisation of athletic phrases such as, “FREEDOM CANNOT BE SIMULATED” or “DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY” or “ASIANS MUST EAT RICE” challenge the politics of globalisation and its unequal economic, racial and political hierarchies by asking his audience to ponder these provocations.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2010 (BBQ corner), 2010, Chromed stainless steel panels, barbeque, and gas bottle, 91.4cm x 91.4cm x 91.4cm.

Tiravanija is well known for chroming seemingly unremarkable everyday objects in works such as Untitled (The Future will be chrome), 2010 or Untitled (The Future Will Be Chrome), 2008. Reflecting his interest in museum culture and their normative collecting paradigms that privilege high art when shaping their historical archives, Tiravanija valorises popular, everyday objects — like BBQs, packaging or a table tennis. By chroming these objects, Tiravanija recontextualises them, reclaiming with cultural worth — commenting on society’s limited appreciation of minority cultures and histories. Implicit in this act is a questioning of what constitutes culture, who decides this, what biases affect their decision making and why is this so.

In revisiting Tiravanija’s impact on contemporary art, English art critic Clare Bishop has criticised Relational Art and Tiravanija’s practice as lacking the critical ability to reshape relations — suggesting that the comradery of his practice lies in a shallow grouping of people from a common background, as opposed to democratic exchanges punctuated by randomness and friction.[5] However, Tiravanija’s recognition of Capitalism’s failings and the power of the collective human spirit take on a prophetic and profound quality during this era of strained human relations. As the recent Black Lives Matter campaign have highlighted the racialized and discriminatory structures across America, Australia and elsewhere, status quos across the globe are buckling against the global mass protests and solidarity movements.

In speaking about the contemporary experience, Tiravanija notes “Today it’s even more important because we are living in more fear. We are afraid of more things, we are afraid of more disease, we are afraid of everything going wrong to the point that we have become paralysed. At the same time, there is an amnesia; we are forgetting what we’ve already done. We are forgetting that [Jean] Tinguely blew up a sculpture in the middle of the Museum of Modern Art. Today we couldn’t put a Coca-Cola on the marble of Philip Johnson’s garden, you know? Those are the kinds of things that are always a challenge. It’s always something to push against. The institution has to be opened up.”[6]

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2017 (fear eats the soul) (white flag), 2017, nylon, hand appliqué, 121.9 × 182.9 cm.

This demand for dialogue, human care and empathy beyond economic interests is timelier than ever. As societies look to reset and recollectivise with greater societal equality, it is necessary to refer to ideal conceptions of utopia to reimagine our futures. The task is ultimately to balance these imaginary ideals with the pragmatism of social positivity without lapsing into naïve territory. The seriousness of this endeavour is mighty and will require monumental collaboration, imagination and labour. Afterall, this is the price of justice and as Tiravanija paints, freedom cannot be simulated.

END.

This text was originally commissioned and published by VAULT.

References:

[1] Renate Dohmen, “Towards a cosmopolitan criticality: Relational aesthetics, Rirkrit Tiravanija and transnational encounters with pad thai,” Open Arts Journal 1 (2003): 35 – 46.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Liz Linden, “Alone in the Crowd: Appropriated Text and Subjectivity in the Work of Rirkrit Tiravanija,” Third Text 30, no 3-4 (2016): 159 – 172.

[4] Daniel Birnbaum and Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Rirkrit Tiravanija: Meaning Is Use” Log 34, no 1 (2015): 163-170.

[5] Claire Bishop, “Art of the Encounter: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” Circa, no 114 (2005): 32 -35.

[6] Daniel Birnbaum and Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Rirkrit Tiravanija: Meaning Is Use” Log 34, no 1 (2015): 163-170.

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Ian Scott’s Lattices

Ian Scott’s Lattices
August 2020

Ian Scott, Lattice No. 95, 1982, acrylic on canvas, 152.5 x 152.5cm.

Unceasingly for nearly forty years until his death, English born New Zealand artist Ian Scott produced abstract paintings of the grid. The representation of the grid, as described by American art critic Rosalind Krauss, is a defining principle of twentieth century Modern art. From Cubism to De Stijl, and American Minimalist Donald Judd to American painter Agnes Martin, the reoccurring motif enabled artists to detach their work from the imperfect happenings of the twentieth century. Rather than represent the chaos, trauma and inequity of their world grappling with technological, economic and political change, abstraction and the grid, presented an opportunity for artists to cage narrative and emotion behind unyielding bars of non-representational lines — offering art works as not yet imagined spaces to reconceive the world anew.

Ian Scott in his studio.

Following this lineage, Scott’s Lattice series represents an important contribution to the history of abstraction in New Zealand. Each work in the series forms part of Scott’s larger mission to explore the potentiality of formal qualities in painting such as colour, line, form and pattern in shaping meaning and the perception in art. Appearing as if interwoven together, the repeated diagonal bands of colour operate as extensions of the canvas. The angularity, flatness and repetition of these bands replicate the weave and shape of the canvas. By echoing the physical form of the canvas in the contents of the painting, the Lattice works are a self-referential intellectual puzzle of sorts, commenting on the relationship between painting, abstraction and the canvas.

When reading these works, Scott’s compositions contain a fictive depth; there is a 3D illusionistic space within these paintings despite the work’s flat surface. This challenge to the viewer’s perception forces a “moving back” of the viewer in order to understand the ambiguities and spatial illusions of Scott’s grid. This second moment of viewing and comprehension forms part of their pleasure.  

Kenneth Noland, Shoot, 1964, acrylic on canvas, 263.5 x 321.9 cm.
Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Painting in west Auckland for most of his career, Scott incorporated subtle references to architecture and objects such as deckchairs and fences into his paintings. Part ode to his surroundings, this decision also reflected his desire to localise and contextualise the utopian vocabulary and culture of Euro-American Modernism which informed his practice. Artists of this genre, including American abstract expressionist Kenneth Noland, are also typified by the lack of physical brushwork and the use of acrylic paint, paper or canvas supports, and masking tape used to ensure the machine-like accuracy of the paint application — steadfast qualities of Scott’s series.

Through this interest in these global artistic dialogues, Scott’s abstraction came to represent an important thread in New Zealand art history, offering an unique, geometric and bold coloured counterpoint to the work of Scott’s contemporaries, including the successful painting practices of Ralph Hoetere (1931 – 2013) and Colin McCahon (1919 – 1987), the latter his teacher while Scott studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, who tended to use a darker colour palettes and more expressive linework. 

Examples of Scott’s lattice works are held in New Zealand Institutions such as Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

END.

This text was originally commissioned and published by Webb’s Auction House.

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in any given moment: eugenia raskopoulos

in any given moment: eugenia Raskopoulos

August 2020

Representations of women in visual art have historically defined female experience through difference, weakness, passivity, sexual availability, domesticity and, perhaps most unintelligent, an object to be represented in art rather than a maker of art. For centuries these assumptions have dangerously masqueraded as normal; however, successive generations of artists have worked to rebut this putrid sexism that lies beneath the filthy bandages of Western art history. Eugenia Raskopoulos is part of this chorus of artists, producing work that untangles the relationship between women, art, identity and the veiled patriarchal power relations in Western society.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order (2019). Installation view at The National, Carriageworks, Sydney. Image: Zan Wimberley.

In her most recent large-scale installation, ORDER-(DIS)ORDER (2019) for ‘The National’ at Carriageworks, Sydney, Raskopoulos staged a performance where she topples a tower of discarded white goods, which was then projected onto the same site to achieve a ghostly palimpsestic effect that stretches conceptions of time and place. Alongside a topography of the destroyed white goods, the video-installation was framed by a neon pendulum sign alternating the words ‘order’ and ‘disorder’. Challenging the sexual power system of the patriarchy, Raskopoulos selected the whitegoods for their connotations of the domestic, feminine and servile, repurposing these objects and their meaning in a shattering act of apocalyptic and dystopic proportions.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order (2019). Installation view at The National, Carriageworks, Sydney. Image: Zan Wimberley.

In this process of creation and destruction, Raskopoulos confronts Western society’s conception of women as masters of the domestic universe. Conceiving of herself as a master-hero figure of a different sort, the work uses metaphor and symbolism to remind her audience that supposedly innocent objects, words and their associations have come to embody the status quo of structural sexism and a class system. And while these systems continue to restrict many women, small act of resistance like this are possible and available. In this way, Raskopoulos asserts text, images and objects are never simple, neutral tools that describe the world. They are coded by conventions and rules that reflect broader power relations. To understand any differently, is to be complicit in this system.

Throughout Raskopoulos’ forty-year career, the artist has maintained a deep interest in changing the present by challenging the ways in which we describe the past. She has woven her own image and experiences into a series of photographs, films and installations to articulate the constant negotiation that migrant bodies face in foreign cultures. She notes, ‘I am interrogating the concept of the fragmented body. As an immigrant – a Czech-born woman of Greek descent – my identity is made up of different parts that don’t always sit neatly together. And in the same breath, I want to defy all these labels and break apart traditional conceptions of the body, identity and art.’

Eugenia Raskopoulos, rootreroot (2016), HD video, 8:45 and routereroute (2016), murano glass neon, dimensions variable. Installation view, Tarrawarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation. Photo: Andrew Curtis.

Rootreoot (2016) embodies in this interest. The split frame video filmed in an aerial shot features two female figures played by the artist. In the upper section, the figure drags an olive tree in an ongoing clockwise circle, while in the bottom section the same figure simultaneously drags a wattle tree in the opposite direction. Moving at their own rhythms and in opposing parts of the video frame, the circles created by each figure eventually intertwine, creating a moment of completeness as the bodies meld into one another and then dissolve away, concluding the work.

Eugenia Raskopoulos, Rootreroot  (2016), HD digital video, 8:45. Image courtesy the artist.

The circular journey of the characters mirrors the complexities of migrant and female bodies, capturing something important about their daily experience. While not a strict self-portrait, Raskopoulos plays the central figure in the composition as she does in many of her other works. By drawing upon the tradition of the self-portrait, Rootreoot explores the interface between the way we present ourselves to others and how others see us. This technique forms part of the many artistic strategies employed by Raskopoulos to explore and challenge codes of thought and behaviour.

Complementing Rootreoot is Routereroute (2016), two circular neon signs that spell the title of the work – one in Greek, the artist’s first language, and one in English. Reflecting the duality of video work, these neon works depict the tectonic reality of migrants in which meaning, identity and conceptions of self are slippery and language (particularly the foreign language of a migrant’s new home) serves both to elucidate and limit these understandings. This particular experience – one of many experiences faced by migrants – speaks to Raskopoulos’ own experiencing growing up in Australia, when she was often required to translate English to Greek for her grandparents; ‘I was a translator from a very young age. That’s when I learned its power. If ever anyone would say anything mean to my grandparents, I would mistranslate the words and protect them … the discrimination we would face.’

Eugenia Raskopoulos, diglossia #1 (2010), digital pigment print on archival paper, 142cm x 95cm. Image courtesy the artist.

Reflecting on her methodology, Raskopoulos notes, ‘I’m at my best when I’m in the studio. I’m happiest in the making process where you get to read and research. It’s all part of it, looking and relooking. I love the repetitive kinds of traces and motions that the body is working through. It’s an important life lesson – just doing this type of work and being diligent about it.’

In thinking about the next set of milestones, Raskopoulos gives little away about her upcoming project at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne. Scheduled for 2021, the works continue the artist’s lifelong flirtation with the power of language and photography as poetic metaphors for life. After all, as Raskopoulos conveys in her work, art is not simply a dream or a vision of a female nude; it’s the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change and a bridge across our fears to new ideas, to experiences and (if we’re lucky enough) to where we have never been before.  

END.

This article was originally commissioned and published by Artist Profile.