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Co–respond.
A collaboration between artists
and writers at SEVENTH
Co–respond.
June 2011 – January 2012
ISBN 978-0-646-57607-7
Published by SEVENTH
SEVENTH
155 Gertrude Street
Fitzroy VIC 3065
Australia
[email protected]
seventhgallery.org
Project Coordinator
Victoria Bennett
Editor
Meg Hale
Proofreader
Ronnie Scott
Design
Something Splendid
Copyright 2012 SEVENTH and the writers and the artists.
No part of this publication may be reproduced without
permission from SEVENTH.
Co–respond.
All images courtesy of Sam Barbour and the artists.
Contents
7Introduction
Victoria Bennett
56
The palace of tears
Andre Dao
10Exhibitions
June 2011 – January 2012
60
Light castle
Izzy Roberts-Orr
33
61
Night moves
Jessie Scott
36Untitled
Amy-Jo Jory
65
Did Edward use a strap-on?
Jo Latham
38
World’s pearl
Stephanie Van Berkel
68
Inter-Harris, Inter-Nordin, Inter-view
David Wlazlo
40
Small goods
Izzy Roberts-Orr
75Transmutation
Megg Minos
Artist-run Melbourne
Ace Wagstaff
41Escape
Izzy Roberts-Orr
79
Ben Millar’s The Colour Notation Project
Rebecca Harkins-Cross and Roger Nelson
42
Those last days of summer
Laura Jean McKay
82
Daily Exercise (1 to 3)
Craig Burgess
45
Wading in, pieces of light
Craig Burgess
90
Garden consecration
Izzy Roberts-Orr
49
How to wrap a metre-long schlong
Laura Castagnini
92Scan
Cassandra L.
53
Adrift in the void
Anna Zammit
96Acknowledgements
Victoria Bennett
Introduction
Co–respond is a SEVENTH publication exploring the possibilities of
collaboration and conversation between visual art and writing. Featuring
written works by fifteen emerging writers, Co–respond critiques, expands
and documents SEVENTH’s exhibition program from June 2011 to January
2012.
When I first read SEVENTH’s rationale behind this exciting new project, I
couldn’t believe the synchronicity. It quickly became clear that we had been
musing on some very similar topics. There is certainly nothing new about
an artist-run gallery initiating an arts-writing project — or producing a
publication for that matter — but, importantly, Co–respond is not all about
arts writing.
What sets it apart, and what attracted me to it in the first place, was its aim
to involve writers from all genres and backgrounds. In doing so, it strives
to present visual art in new ways and from new perspectives. It broadens
the scope of arts writing beyond customary formats, and encourages
collaboration and conversation. While still incorporating more traditional
forms of arts writing, such as reviews and interviews, it throws some variety
into the mix. Essays, short stories and poetry also feature, works that take
their inspiration from art but run in their own creative direction. In this way,
Co–respond provides an important forum for analysis of contemporary art
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that is as much about supporting emerging artists through peer response as
it is about supporting the authors of those responses: emerging arts writers,
creative writers, poets and academics.
This strategy allows us to open up the possibilities of the arts-writing
relationship. It expands the experience of the author, artist and reader.
Writers are invited into a world some have not had access to before, providing
a new environment from which to draw inspiration. The exhibiting artists
have the opportunity to see their work manifested as prose or simply to sit
down and discuss their work with a stranger. The audience — our readers —
gain a new perspective on these artworks, or experience an artwork firsthand through the written interpretations of another.
The writers featured in Co–respond were each allocated an exhibition ‘slot’
at SEVENTH between June 2011 and January 2012. SEVENTH comprises
multiple exhibition spaces, and each slot could include up to five different
exhibitions at one time. Writers were given complete freedom to respond to
whatever they wished, be that an artist, artwork, entire exhibition or even the
gallery itself — as a space and an institution. Therefore not all exhibitions and
artists are represented, and some have more than one response. The extent
of the collaboration differs with every piece and was the responsibility of
the writer to initiate and maintain. Some writers entered into conversations
with their artists, some attended artists’ talks, while others worked more in
isolation, responding to the artworks only.
8
The mix of styles and approaches taken by the writers was always going to
produce a surprising result. The works themselves vary greatly, as different
as their authors. Combining such disparate works in a single publication
presents a risk, but in doing so we are able to explore just how many ways
writing and visual art can relate and respond to each other.
Co–respond presents these writers’ works not simply to explain or justify the
artworks they respond to, but rather to give another reading, and in some
cases another meaning, to the artworks. The attempt here is to expand the
boundaries of arts writing, to increase the crossover, the grey area between
writing and art. In this case the artworks are the inspiration, the beginning
point; the writing, the destination.
Victoria Bennett
Project Coordinator
9
Exhibitions 8–25 June 2011
Camille Hannah
Transparence
Danae Valenza
Partnered Dance:
Both Lead
10
Fiona Williams
Untitled (snow-white)
Kim Jaeger
You Geysir Crazy
Marita Lillie
Panopticon
11
Exhibitions 29 June – 16 July 2011
Jasmin Coleman with
Cara-Ann Simpson
Stabilisers
John Waller
Propeller
12
Renee Jaeger
Untitled
Tyler Clark and
Ed McAliece
Anal Systems
Conglomerate
13
Exhibitions 27 July – 13 August 2011
Kim Henenberg
Wise Blood
Tristan Da Roza
Variations of [minor]
nature may have an
adverse effect on
levels of risk
14
Chloe Stevens
Green Screen
Chloe Stevens and Virginia Overell
Promenade Health Spa
Tristan Wong
la casa nueva de dios
15
Exhibitions 17 August – 3 September 2011
16
Andrew Burford
Hung
THE OK COLLECTIVE
(Oliver Cloke and
Kathy Heyward)
Uniquely Yours
155a Gertrude Street,
Fitzroy 3065
Jon Oldmeadow
Adrift in the Void
Zoe Croggon and
Martin King
Here is Where We Meet
17
Exhibitions 7–24 September 2011
Claire Gallagher
Failed Gardener
Eugene Howard
Untitled
Fiona Waters
and Molly Dyson
Small Goods
18
Jade Burstall
Trading Futures
Molly Cook
ABC Wall Drawings
19
Exhibitions 28 September – 15 October 2011
Marcin Wojcik, Sarah
CrowEST, Kristen
Phillips, Federico Joni
and Jamie Boys
Cashmere If You Can
S-5
CrowEST, Kristen
and Jamie Boys
Cashmere If You Can
S-5
20
CrowEST, Kristen
and Jamie Boys
Cashmere If You Can
S-5
Marcin Wojcik, Sarah CrowEST,
Kristen Phillips, Federico Joni and
Jamie Boys
Cashmere If You Can S-5
Marcin Wojcik, Sarah CrowEST,
Kristen Phillips, Federico Joni and
Jamie Boys
Cashmere If You Can S-5
21
Exhibitions 19 October – 5 November 2011
Amy-Jo Jory
Down by the River
Cameron Bishop
and Simon Reis
Gallery X2
22
Christopher Dolman
SUPERREGULAR
Laura Delaney
Problems with the Location
Tanya Ungeri
Button Pusher
23
Exhibitions 9–26 November 2011
Ben Millar
The Colour Notation Project
Cat-Rabbit and the Seven Seas
Oakleaf (Spill Air)
Hermione Merry
and Henriette
Kassay-Schuster
Palace of Tears
24
Jo Persson
In the Zone
Lillian O’Neil
Burger Shop Blues
25
Exhibitions 30 November – 17 December 2011
Ann Fuata
Geoff Newman
27.
26
Luke Hand
⌘-C
Nathan Barnett
and Robbie Dixon
Heat death in
the afternoon
Tim Buckovic
Reliefs
27
Exhibitions 19–20 December 2011
28
Various artists
Super Sell Out Sale
Various artists
Super Sell Out Sale
Various artists
Super Sell Out Sale
Various artists
Super Sell Out Sale
29
Exhibitions Summer Residency, January 2012
30
Johanna Nordin
Male Ego Exorcism
Bureau
Lauren Carrol Harris
Two Caves: New Ruins,
and This is Happening
Johanna Nordin
Male Ego Exorcism
Bureau
Lauren Carrol Harris
Two Caves: New Ruins,
and This is Happening
31
27 July – 13 August 2011
Artist-run Melbourne
Ace Wagstaff
Melbourne is a lucky little state capital, saturated with an abundance
of artist-run galleries and even more commercial spaces, located every
few hundred metres within our fine metropolis. (This first sentence
reads somewhat like an excerpt from a piece of promotional propaganda,
plugging Melbourne’s cultural assets for a buck, but that’s not what this
piece of writing is about.)
These little artist-run galleries (or artist-run spaces, artist-run initiatives,
ARIs — whatever you want to call them) provide a nice creamy, rich and
often exciting layer to the arts and cultural scene that can’t be delivered
by the state institutions and the commercial arts pushers. You chasing?
Melbourne is always chasing.
Almost all innovation occurs on the fringes, the edges. It is the tiny
movements that occur at this grassroots level where there is more room to
move, more room to splash about, more room for action than there is in a
conventional space that has to suit up, employ security guards and take out
all the applicable public liability insurance. Ripple. There’s more room for
ripples at an artist-run gallery.
This DIY, artist-run scene is a bicycle wheel, an ouroboros, but not
completely. There is change as well, with every turn, so a comparison to
evolution or an operatic recapitulation would be better. The metaphors
aren’t what’re important. What’s important is the reality of it: all the work,
the effort, the money that goes into sustaining the phenomena of an artistrun gallery. It’s high maintenance, all hands on deck, grab a cup and start
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trying to bail out the water that’s slowly filling this place — there’s no fear of
drowning but we’d have to find somewhere new to hang out.
employing difference — can become a strength, meaning the leftovers are
always fffresh.
There is no logical reason why these spaces should survive. For the most
part, they’re non-profit and run by volunteers, their rent is predominantly
paid by exhibiting artists with patchwork-agendas, and exhibition
programs can chop, change and alternate, which, for an unwary spectator,
can appear pretty impenetrable and recalcitrant (please feel free to liken to:
[a] being in a foreign country; [b] trying to have a conversation with a surly
teen; or [c] the confusing and often contradictory bureaucracy described in
The Trial by Kafka).
ARIs are often collectively managed and led by many. This characteristic
avoids the destructive and selfish egomania that can occur with the
individual, most noticeable in the reign of dictators. And as a bonus, the
collective can be cast out but never destroyed, just ask Legion. When
groupings of creative peeps disband, they often do as the hydra does, and
start their own projects (when Tristian Koenig left Neon Parc in 2010, he
went on to open a new self-titled space in Prahran). So where there was
one, there are now two.
Thankfully though, artist-run galleries have flourished in Melbourne.
They’re a relatively new strange breed of society’s cultural genus in
comparison to the grand expanse of all the history that has come before
them. Some of the stronger artist-run hubs live longer than a few years,
usually by gaining attention for being novel or inventive start-ups, or
sometimes notoriety for being raucous or shocking. Artist-run galleries
are in a unique position to operate differently due to the lack of formal
and financial constraints that bind institutions and commercial spaces,
allowing for unconventional innovation or abundant raucous, punk
energy.
Presumably, you know all this; you are all dirigible captains and I’m
lecturing about aerodynamics. Artist-run spaces aren’t held together by
any single agenda, force or adhesive, they’re supported by a multitude
of small pebbles such as government funding (which allows for writing
that includes the words ‘fffresh’, ‘ouroboros’ and ‘patchwork-agendas’),
small armies of loyal artists and students and, of course, a (usually) overqualified management team of (usually) volunteers.
Some of these spaces are so successful they go on to evolve into
contemporary commercial spaces, keeping their original open-minded
governing principles that had served them well in round one of their lifecycles (Geoff Newton started the avant-suburban Dudespace and then later
went on to found Neon Parc with Tristian Koenig, and Melissa Loughnan’s
Utopian Slumps was a once humble curator-run initiative stuffed down a
laneway in Collingwood).
There’s no chance here, no accident. This is purposeful, conscious; this
is the ongoing apexing of cultural-evolution; only the strongest wheat
survives the chaff. It’s impossible to capture such a fluxual creature as
the ARI, we can only observe it for a moment before it changes, record its
movements, document its shifting state, because every change that occurs
is important, every alteration in the past helps inform the now. This is the
now.
SEVENTH is one of the long stayers. Viewer attendance and artists’ favour
are the key to an artist-run space surviving and growing, and this comes
off the back of good programming — the careful selection of a range
of diverse artists, who are also inevitably pushing a field of disparate
concepts and ideas. This is what excites the interest of the artists and
viewers. This is where SEVENTH excels. Ad-hoc programming — that is,
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35
8–25 June 2011
Untitled
Amy-Jo Jory
Last night I dreamt I was walking through the bush.
Tall spindly trees were stretched out beside me; I was looking to my right.
It was totally calm; it was the gloaming. I could see deep into the forest.
Behind the trees there was a white horse standing beside a small silver
lake. The reflection of the horse on the surface of the water was unbearably
perfect — it was so still — and in that moment what had been my reality
drastically warped. It was as if two horses were looking back at me from
another dimension, and it was breathtakingly beautiful. The dream later
took a turn for the worse (yes, it involved an unpleasant geyser) but at that
point I felt like I had witnessed a profound moment.
of the subtle power of stopping to absorb our surroundings.
The sublime, like abjection, can be seen as a reminder of death. We don’t
need to feel our body crushed on the rocks below an ocean cliff to know
it would be devastating — but is the innate knowledge of our own death
what makes standing on its edge so exhilarating? Geysers spurt volcanic
water into the atmosphere, and are both terrifying and profoundly
beautiful. Caves all over the world are filled with elegant calcium shafts: an
accumulation of single and persistent drops of water. These phenomena
reveal the immense power of time, but they also illuminate fleeting
moments.
Ultimately, the sublime is about remembering, and being in, life. Rather
than present us with yet another grandiose monument, Kim Jaeger’s work
is a humble musing, an understated gesture. Painterly and unassuming,
the installation asks us to take a small moment. You Geysir Crazy is about
looking more carefully at the seemingly insignificant stuff, that quiet stuff
that subconsciously prevents us from really goin’ round the bend.
These are moments: calling into the vastness of a cave; gazing at the
immensity of a mountain range; feeling the parched heat of a desert;
looking down on the neon city at night.
Sometimes these moments hit us like a searing slap on the face. Other
times they appear as stealthy goose bumps under a damp shirt. But they
are there. In these moments there is the whisper of a realisation. Stuff,
you know? A murmur about the really big stuff. Moments that make other
moments seem irrelevant.
Kim Jaeger’s work hints at this kind of realisation. Her exhibition, You
Geyser Crazy is a response to a trip to Iceland taken in November 2010. Half
rabbit hole, half cave and with Narnia in mind, the installation reminds us
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37
28 September – 15 October 2011
World’s pearl
Stephanie Van Berkel
It’s vacuum-packed memories and fit bodies gone soft from working
corporate jobs and wearing cashmere sweaters. It’s piecing together a life,
stitching it up with the shoestrings of old budgets and trying to prop it on
a foundation of all the brand-name crap that money can buy. It’s wanting
and trying and fucking and buying, building and breaking and bringing
home the bacon — the breathless crawl up the slope of success.
You hang on the precipice with one hand, taking business calls with the
other. Life is a mountain and you are nearly at the peak — reach the summit,
claim your prize and bask in the brief victorious glow before the light fades
and everything starts the southward slide to middle age and mediocrity.
In the back of your mind you carry a dark room, black as pitch and full of
nothing. In the room digital red numbers are ticking down down down
and an infinite siren sounds, winding up up up without ever reaching the
crescendo.
driven by the terror of what will happen when your time runs out.
You want success but you don’t even know what it is. Get a job, get a man,
get a nice car and a big house and spend whatever’s left on things to make
you happy: shoes and surround sound systems and a new phone every
six months and brand-name everything. Things, things, things, all these
things, but the dark room in the back of your mind never fills up, and you
wonder if maybe the price of success is trading in proper happiness for
store-bought happiness.
But you keep buying anyway — gadgets, knick-knacks, ‘investment pieces’,
instant coffee and instant gratification, one click and you’re two grand
poorer but three pairs of shoes richer — filling your life with things to fill
the void in the dark room and scale the summit before the timer reaches
00:00:00 and whatever is going to happen, happens.
Shun your lover for the warm embrace of your new leather couch. Turn
your eyes from the stars and wonder instead at ears and fingers dripping
with diamonds. Choke down your fear of the dark room and the timer
ticking down and the endpoint looming over you and go and buy the
recliner to match your couch, because the soothing embrace of softened
leather is enough to ease the troubles in your world.
Forget loving and living and giving and receiving and all that shit: you are
what you possess. Time to start buying.
Time ticking down, siren winding up, anxiety stretched in both directions
and you are waiting for the world, your oyster, to open up and show you its
pearl.
It haunts you, the echo of the siren and the memory of the numbers on
the timer, tattooed red across your eyelids so that you can’t escape them
even as you sleep, counting slowly down to something, but you don’t
know what. Trawl through endless days of wake up, coffee, work, eat out,
go home, performing each task with desperation disguised as aspiration,
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7–24 September 2011
Small goods
Escape
Izzy Roberts-Orr
Izzy Roberts-Orr
She dreamt, last night
That there was meat on the walls.
Nailed to it.
Sacrificed? Canonised?
Martyred.
She was salivating in her sleep,
Woke to find a trail of dried spit
Whitening on the side of her face.
I am always so hungry, still
So hungry,
She thought, leaning in to lick the walls.
They tasted of dust and age,
Cracked and cool against her tongue
But not enough.
He painted his nails bright red,
Just the tips,
And left them to cool on the windowsill.
Glamorous, fire-engine nails
Nails of pride
That would make the office ladies weep.
They sat on the sill, dripping,
Or oozing,
With untold promise and power.
The nails were the way, the nails
Were the change,
His chameleonic shift to betterment.
In the middle of the night,
He woke
To a scratching sound above his head.
40
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Those last days of summer
Laura Jean McKay
That summer stretched yearlong and we were always giving birth. We
tried to make a game of it at first — taking turns in the narrow cells and
pitching our cries like songs but towards the end we were either just fat
or skin. The cells formed a long hall, lit sixteen hours a day and always
the same: a fearsome golden light coming from the roof; particles of skin
floating through the air, in our throats, our faces; the sisters above us
and the sisters below. We were all born to the cell and none of us, not our
mothers or their mothers before that, really knew if there was anything but
the slanting cage floor, our cellmates, the heat.
One of us had heard stories though. Said there was something more than
standing and death.
‘What is it?’ we asked her.
‘Winter,’ she said.
‘And what else?’
‘Darkness.’
One of us had seen her sister die, not two cells over. Sensed the familiar
life coming to an end and it gave her such a shock her toes clenched over
the bars of the floor. They couldn’t get her loose. Another thought of us all
as sisters and rubbed her raw skin against the bleeding cage when another
passed away. The guards would bring in someone new and after a while
42
she’d forget and call her sister too.
Some of us didn’t care, were beyond caring. We felt the rage of the endless
day beat like wings that we bit and scratched at. When she fell we stood
on her, flattening her head into the bruising bars. When we gave birth it
was over her body, even though she’d passed days before. We had our teeth
removed and our arms made useless so all we could do was stand and eat
the slop with our faces. We stood the long day round. Our bodies grew fat
and our legs weak and we collapsed on each other. We gave birth over and
over again.
In the last days, the giddy, heady urge to birth slowed and then stopped and
we shed hair instead. It fell down through the top cells and covered those
below. To punish us they stopped the food and turned out the lights and we
were plunged into winter. During that time we told each other things. One
said the children we made were sent to war in two armies — ‘roasters’ and
‘broilers’. None of them ever returned.
‘We’re lucky to see the long day,’ she said and we stood straighter, those
that could, and appreciated our little space and our worn faces and feet and
the feel of another’s body up against ours.
Others said, no, the children were taken and raised as guards.
‘If they’re guards then why don’t they help us?’ we asked. We could just
make them out through the dim. Watched as they moved past on legs like
the bars of a giant cage, checking for children. We wondered if they were
our sons. We starved that winter, some died, and then finally someone
gave birth and set us all off again.
The lights were turned on and the summer regained and those that had
survived were rewarded with food. But we were different. One of us edged
forward to eat and heard her brittle legs tremble and crack. She lay on the
bars with sisters below and sisters above and called out. The din of us was
terrific. We all spoke at once, in small sharp phrases:
‘She ate more than me.’
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‘She stepped on me once and said sorry.’
30 November – 17 December 2011
‘She’s too old to have children.’
Wading in, pieces of light
‘She laughs when I do.’
Craig Burgess
She lay there and heard our voices flying over her like a great fleet of cages.
One of us fell on her, the nothing weight of her raw skin pressed until
there wasn’t much breath left. But she was still alive.
A guard came and opened the cell with his cage hands and grabbed her
by the legs. She was carried upside down along the hall. As she passed we
called out, ‘Don’t go, don’t go; go, go, go.’ We were never sure. The guard
carried her beyond the lights and dusk came suddenly, then it was pitch.
She was thrown into it and for a moment she was flying. She stretched her
useless arms for the first time and caught the air; then she came down. Her
landing was sharp and wet. She smelled the sweet smell of herself rotting
over and over again. She realised that she was lying on broken bones
and there was nothing, nothing! between standing and death. There was
no mother, no guards, no sisters, no cells, no skin, no food, no words, no
birth — just the light and then the darkness. It fell all over her and sucked
her back from life.
‘The summer just starts again,’ she told us. She wanted us to know what
that was like, to be pulled back into the womb. Like all this time she’d
been something spilled and now every cell found the other, reminisced,
reformed. She wondered if, when she was born, it would be as a roaster
or a broiler, whether it would be the same life she’d just lived, to the same
mother, or would she be a guard, or something other? But she asked these
questions very quietly, and from far away, so we couldn’t hear her. The
guards had brought someone new to the cell and we were already calling
that one sister. Far away in the darkness she felt herself becoming small.
Encased in warm weather. Liquefied. The heartbeat of home.
When I was a boy we had these red plastic cups. They were hard and made
a high, sharp sound against the teeth. Drinking the last of its contents, I
would hold my cup against my face, its circumference covering my eyes
and blocking out the light of the day outside. Staring into its base, I could
make out my reflection. No one else could see me at the end of that cup. It
was a personal universe, which only I could experience.
This childhood memory was triggered by my experience of Heat death in the
afternoon, an exhibition of sculptural and 2D works by Melbourne-based
artists Nathan Barnett and Robbie Dixon. Entering the gallery, Barnett’s
freestanding forms made from plastic tubing, bent cleanly into shape, sit
comfortably in the centre of the space. Diagrammatic drawings of these
forms are positioned to one side and on the facing wall, on a shelf, is a
collection of plastic cups and plates, all with their edges and lips gnawed.
Interspersed with Barnett’s work is a series of structures by Dixon, which
feel like they would be at home at the shorefront or at sea. One is possibly
a signpost or a kind of gauge with a specific nautical function. On the
back wall is a painting that uses what look like maritime signal flags as
its subject. Another work is a broken banner-like structure, which is also
present — in its unbroken form — in two photographs taken on a pier facing
Melbourne’s city skyline. In the photographs, the banner either effaces
the city or adds to the objects on the pier, depending on the angle of the
camera.
While my childhood memory more obviously resonates with the tactile
plasticity and physicality of Barnett’s tubular forms and gnawed plastic
44
45
cups and plates, it was equally provoked by the intimate sense of
subjectivity and relativity put into play by Dixon’s nautical structures
and signs, which reminded me of my own discovery of subjectivity at
that young age. Experiencing Barnett’s work, I had an immediate bodily
response — I could actually taste plastic in my mouth. With Dixon’s work,
however, it was more psychological. His objects felt relative, mutually
dependent; they came together like a sentence that reveals some meaning
greater than that of each distinct part. In experiencing his work, I found
myself interpreting and making connections like I was learning a
language.
A further parallel between my memory and Dixon and Barnett’s work is the
sense of annihilation at play in each. By raising the cup to my face, I briefly
deleted the world around me. In Barnett’s work this annihilation occurs on
a material level, where plastic itself is formed in a process that annihilates,
in the true sense of the word. To annihilate is to ‘reduce to nothing’, and
plastic is the product of the most spectacular reduction. Millions of years
ago, sunlight was stored as carbon via the photosynthesis of plant matter
floating at sea. This plant matter, and the remains of the animals that
lived off it, settled on the ocean floor and slowly became oil, a by-product
of whose refinement is plastic. In this way, sunlight — vast, intangible,
breathtaking nothingness — has been fixed into the concentrated, solid
world of stuff that we surround ourselves with. Plastic becomes a model
for thinking about the transition from immateriality to materiality, and
the role of form in this transition is where Barnett’s tubular sculptures
find their voice; they are momentary structures on the timeline towards
total collapse. Bits of matter and particles of light come together to make
neat powerful shapes. Barnett’s forms are drawings in space; his actual
drawings their counterpoints. They are diagrams of form, maps of spatial
relationships. Barnett’s work recombines, rethinks and repositions. It
reflects plasticity in a material and non-material sense, and positions the
world itself as mere composition: stuff comes together and then it comes
together again differently, and then again, and again.
The more visceral side of Barnett’s work is embedded in his plastic cups,
plates and other vessels that have been eaten away at the edges. They have
been partly ingested. In those vessels, sunlight is swallowed. Plastic has
46
become prosthetic for us, it is an extension of our bodies, but more than
that, it represents an invasive force. Plastic permeates the skin, it crosses
membranes, becomes internalised, gets stuck inside. It makes us sick. It
holds us tightly in a state of disease, in the thick of our last mutated fight,
as conversely, we hold on just as tightly to it. In this sense, Barnett’s work
talks of the suffering of humanity at this point in our history. Plastic’s
toxicity is a warning shot, and in this way, Barnett’s work is alarming and
disconcerting as much as it is elegant and direct.
While in Barnett’s work annihilation is present in its material make-up — in
the plastic itself — in Dixon’s work it operates on a semantic level: the
‘reduction to nothing’ takes place in the way things are structured, in
the relationships between things and in what those relationships set in
motion. More than a reduction, an erasure or elimination is present. Dixon
presents parts of a whole that cannot be seen entirely. There is a sense
that the inclusion of some things is a result of the exclusion of others, and
that something remains unsaid in what is said. In this way, a subjective
space is set up in which knowing in a particular sense is privileged over
knowing in an absolute sense. This is most clear in the two photographs
of the banner. In one photograph, the banner is one of a number of objects
on the pier; it adds to the world of objects and to the city, which lies in
the background of the photo. In the other photograph, the camera angle
is shifted, and the banner becomes the main event; it eliminates the city,
deleting it from the world. There is no absolute version of the banner or the
city; the two exist relative to one another. This relativity is reiterated by the
painted gradation of greys on the largest of the nautical structures. Here,
the achromatic spectrum of the structure talks of subtle variations, small
changes and gradual shifts.
In Dixon’s work, nothing is either black or white, and if an extreme
position is possible then it is temporary and contingent. Elements like
the banner and the scale of greys unlock the other works; they establish
a relationship between an all-or-nothing audacity (the annihilation
of the city) and a fragile recognition of dependency. On the one hand,
Dixon’s work awakens a powerful sense of autonomy, independence and
freedom; his structures are signposts that point outwards, marking a
point of departure. On the other hand, although the structures indicate
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where a path lies, they embody uncertainty; they mark the beginning and
end points of a trajectory that is unknown. This sensation of freedom in
uncharted territory is appropriately oceanic. In response to the amorphous,
terrifying nature of the sea, the structures that act as its counterpoint — its
ships, signals and ports, even its sailors — embody an attitude of defiance
that is bold, fearless and heroic. Although Dixon’s structures express
intimacy and fragility, they occupy this position of defiance.
Thinking again about the universe at the bottom of my red cup, I am struck
by the capacity of a simple gesture to dramatically alter the surrounding
world, and how gestures of this kind are present in both Barnett and
Dixon’s work. In Dixon’s two photos of the banner and the city, the
difference between adding and subtracting is a movement, a simple shift
of the camera angle from one photograph to the other. The movement
is relatively minute, but the implications in the change from addition to
subtraction are radical. Similarly, the bite marks on Barnett’s cups and
plates create a significant shift in how we regard these objects and their
purpose: the vessels of daily consumption have been consumed. Barnett’s
bite marks reference a pervasive toxicity and dramatically function as an
omen of humanity’s collapse.
While different in content and form, both Barnett and Dixon’s work
can be seen to use simple material gestures to engage with the idea of
annihilation. The annihilation of the self and the annihilation of the
surrounding world are inseparable; they are mutually dependent, locked
in a firm embrace. In a material sense, our annihilation is a reduction; we
exist as recombinant forms, continually reimagined, increasingly complex.
17 August – 3 September 2011
How to wrap a metre-long schlong
An (educational) interview with Andrew Burford
Laura Castagnini
Andrew Burford’s installation Hung was exhibited in the Project Space of
SEVENTH in August 2011. Since then I have thought about the piece often,
mostly to have a private chuckle at the thought that I’ve seen Andrew’s
freckled wang through a giant penis kaleidoscope, but also to consider
the position his humorous deconstruction of the phallus holds within
contemporary gender discourse. I sat down with Andrew on the balcony
of his Collingwood home to learn more about the power of the penis, what
really goes on in the boys’ locker rooms and how (and why) he wrapped a
metre-long schlong.
Laura Castagnini: Hung is a well-hung penis that hangs from the roof. A
‘woody’ made of fake wood. We look through the ‘eye’ of the penis to view
the kaleidoscope. Why do you love puns so much?
Andrew Burford: It’s always fun to shove a pun in somewhere! That
was tenuous I know, and I was lucky it worked with Hung, but it made
sense conceptually for the work to be dripping in puns. I wanted the
viewer to initially laugh at the big, fake, glowing wooden penis but then
chuckle at the added one-liners.
LC: The one-liners somehow go deeper, however. The shaft of your penis is
coated in a wooden veneer, but on closer inspection we realise it’s actually
book contact. It’s faux-masculinity, like a 1970s mustachioed porn star who
lives in a cabin and chops wood. Why do you ‘poke’ at the construction
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49
(literally) of masculinity?
AB: The cheap, wood-effect contact is my favourite aspect of the
work. It reminds me of being a young kid and covering schoolbooks,
but this time I wrapped up a metre-long schlong. I loved how the
viewer was enticed to look into the ‘eye of the beast’ and had to bend
down to do so; they were essentially bowing to my penis and then
laughing when confronted with a bouquet of dicks. But to answer your
question with a question, why are we always trying to be men? What is
a man anyway? Surely having a dick doesn’t automatically make you
manly. The idea of the big guy with the big wang being the ideal man
is just so irrelevant these days, and yet it still exists within society. I’m
highlighting how silly these guys look, flexing their man-muscle to
command attention.
LC: Whereas Hung is almost the opposite; rather than compete with the
oversized kaleidoscope apparatus you instead present a photograph of your
penis head on. This self-exposure is a different ballgame in comparison
to your earlier work, for example Nudes (2009-10), which examines other
bodies. Why did you decide to put yourself in such a vulnerable position?
(A bottom, if you will!)
AB: Well, I’m more of a top than a bottom but I get what you’re saying.
I have issue with artists who explore themes of nudity but are not
willing to expose themselves. I’m sure I could have got some young
stud with a prettier piece to pose for me, but how could I comment on
masculinity if I wasn’t willing to stick mine on the line? The work was
about judgment based on penis size and so I thought, if I’m getting
judged for my work anyway, I may as well be judged on my cock at the
same time. While I was sitting the gallery I did have one viewer look
through the scope three times, so I couldn’t have been that much of a
disappointment.
LC: Was that me? I stole quite a few peeks too! Although for me the
viewing experience was more innocent. It fulfilled an inner childlike
curiosity about other people’s pink bits. I never knew you had so many
freckles down there!
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AB: My mother once said, ‘seen one, seen ‘em all.’ I disagree;
everybody’s hidden bits are different in some way. Some are pretty and
others not so much. I like my dangly bits, luckily. Childhood curiosity
is an important reference point in Hung. A kaleidoscope is a toy many
of us would have played with as a kid and, with its phallic shape, it
lent itself quite easily to the metaphor. It is during adolescence that a
boy’s (nonsexual) interest in the penis reaches its peak. All we talked
about at school was our penises; whether we were circumcised or not,
whether we jerked off, who in the class we thought stroked the trouser
snake the most and how big our member was and it was only in the
changing rooms that you had the chance to size yourself up against
others. I remember that Richard was crowned with the biggest in the
class, but he was a year older so it was ok. Quite funny considering his
name was literally Dick.
LC: Hung is, in a way, celebratory, however there aren’t many other
happy penises in art; in the 1970s male performance artists including
Bill Flanagan and Paul McCarthy made art about their genitalia,
however usually in a sado-masochistic manner1, and much of Robert
Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photography is shrouded by criticisms of black
exoticisation. At the same time your presentation of your own genitalia
is a popular feminist practice and your peephole device invites penis
voyeurism in a way traditionally consistent with viewings of the female
body. Is Hung actually a backdoor reference to feminism?
AB: When women create work about vaginas they are usually
empowering them, however the penis is already empowered. So I
wanted to deflate it a little. Taking the piss out of the phallus and
making it absurd takes away some of its self-assumed power. I
suppose in a way this could be considered misanthropic but as I see it,
I’m not manly because I have meat and two veg in my pants, and why
should my ‘third leg’ lead the way for my behaviour? Claire Lambe, a
Melbourne artist who has made some work surrounding the phallus
in a similar vein to mine, is a good reference point for me. Her phalli
are sometimes amusing and at others quite violent looking. To me her
work reflects various aspects of what being a man should be and how
this is meaningless. Like faking a male orgasm.
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LC: Wow, is that physically possible?
AB: It could happen, the noises anyway, but you would have to be
prepared with some mayonnaise or shampoo or something. I really
doubt I could be arsed with all that effort.
17 August – 3 September 2011
Adrift in the void
Anna Zammit
Can meaning be constructed inside a void? Jon Oldmeadow’s video, Adrift
in the void, is set inside a fold in space and time. The artist provides field
notes from an exploration of a space ‘in between’. Armed with a small
camera hidden inside his sunglasses, he films his surroundings, narrating
the footage in the first person. Oldmeadow forces unsuspecting members
of the public to become actors in a disorientating fragmented narrative.
Using cinematic tools typical of sci-fi time-travel films, he breaks down
the constructs of the traditional linear narrative, questioning its role in
establishing understanding.
Playing with our sense of time, the work jumps forwards and backwards
with ambiguity. The deconstructed narrative parallels the non-linear
nature of everyday experiences. For example, when meeting someone for
the first time we don’t tell them who we are in a linear format, starting
with when we were born and continuing in chronological order. Nonlinear narratives mimic human nature and memory recall, and have been
the focus of much film and literature.
1
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For example Paul McCarthy’s video Hot Dog (1974) depicts the artist stripping naked and shaving
his body before taping his penis into a hot dog bun, smearing his buttocks with mustard, then
stuffing his mouth with hot dogs and taping his mouth closed.
The opening shots of a sweeping view over the tip of an aeroplane wing
are accompanied by a description of the beginning of the end: ‘I was
reduced to a pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form dissipated.
I floated in space liberated from my corporeal being but without
dispensation to go anywhere else. I was adrift in the void.’ This quote from
Haruki Murakami is the first of three from novels the artist read during
his travels. Oldmeadow references that the sentiments of these texts
resonated with the way he felt while he was spying on people through
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the hidden sunglasses camera. The philosophical sentiments juxtaposed
with scenes of poverty and political unrest make apparent a shared social
consciousness.
Slowly transitioning through relatively unconnected scenes, the work is
held in a numinous weightless state. Set adrift in limbo we hear resonating
strains of a choir singing. From the back seat of a taxi, the artist provides
few clues to his unknown location, taking in glimpses of the surrounding
neighbourhood and the back of the taxi driver’s head. The driver, Carlos
Garcia Fernandez, is busy planning out his future as he negotiates the
chaos of the city streets. Haunted by the sounds of gunshots and fireworks,
he is trying to slow down his view of the world in order to predict what
will happen. This fragmented view of Carlos’s life begs us to question what
our own destination might be.
Fast forward and we enter a street festival with locals celebrating and
dancing. Two short women carrying babies wrapped in slings shop
for belts. Oldmeadow explains that sisters Marta and Martina have
travelled a long way to get to the city, taking three buses, two trains and
the metrocable. ‘Marta had planned to name her baby Jorge, but kept it a
secret as the gender was unknown. And miscommunication led to a small
argument resulting in both babies being named Jorge, the same name as
their father.’ The women wander through the markets in identical dresses.
Unimpressed with the selection of accessories, they leave empty-handed.
Through the development of these unnecessarily detailed characters, their
backgrounds having little context to the story, Oldmeadow creates an
uneasy tension between the viewer and the work. This sense of alienation
and distance is further heightened by the restless and discontented nature
of the characters.
sweeping, as if trying to fill the holes in his porch. A quote from Philip
K. Dick allows Oldmeadow to avoid providing a real reason for these
happenings: ‘we all have leaks in our reality ... a drop here, a couple of
drops there and a moist spot forming on the ceiling.’ Oldmeadow blurs the
distinction between the real and the unreal, loosening our grasp on our
experience of the work.
Looking across the hillside scattered with the tops of dishevelled buildings,
the desolation of the city is evident. From the vantage point of a cable
car we spy down on soldiers standing on an embankment, surveying the
area, guns strapped over their shoulders. Below, a mural depicts optimistic
scenes of rebellion and athletics. As the shot fades out, the artist surmises
with a quote from Paul Auster, ‘when a person is lucky enough to live
inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world
disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.’ The
quotes provide structure to the loose architecture of the video, lending
much weight and meaning to this work.
Presenting fiction as non-fiction, Oldmeadow utilises the gallery space
to position the video as pseudo-documentary. The disparate scenes in
the video are linked by the strategic insertion of the quotes throughout,
affecting a semi-fictional, diarised account of an explorer. It’s an obscure
take on sci-fi, reminiscent of the narrated vacillating photomontages of
Chris Marker and Tamar Guimaraes. Oldmeadow takes much pleasure in
the magic of low-fi aesthetics, employing technology that has the capacity
to transport us through space and time. The carefully measured contents
of the work results in a blurry, but readable, road map to the abyss.
From a train carriage window, the size of the city, surrounded by
mountains and an expansive shantytown, becomes apparent. Oldmeadow
introduces a man standing on his porch in the rain, giving his actions
meaning: ‘As Ramon Andres swept his porch he also swept away large
gaping holes in his reality.’ Last night, we hear, Ramon placed his medicine
near the bathroom sink, but this morning it had been moved to the centre
of the kitchen table. He did not move it; he lives alone. Ramon continues
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9–26 November 2011
The palace of tears
Andre Dao
People ran through the streets, shouting to the smiling faces poking out
of windows. Anyone who opened a door to get a better look was swept up
in the joyful procession. Alex shut the window with a gentle click but the
voices were hardly dulled. The muted television flashed images of people
astride the Wall whilst others went at it with sledgehammers. Ignoring
the flickering pictures, Alex poured herself a drink and sank into the
faded couch.
and before she had a name for it Mother had turned away and closed the
door, and she was left alone in the darkness.
The next morning, Mother wore her best blue dress, even though winter
was approaching, and Alex put on her own, slightly darker, blue dress. The
four of them, Grandfather and Grandmother, Mother and Child, walked
through the chill October air towards Friedrichstraße station. She had
heard the other children at school call it the Tränenplast — the Palace of
Tears. As they turned the corner on to Friedrichstraße, they saw a squat,
square building that would normally have been unremarkable — and
really, it was just another ugly building in a city that was still being
rebuilt — except that its huge windows sparkled in the cold October
sunlight like a transparent jewellery box. She’d been on the cusp of puberty when the city was split in two. As people
slowly began disappearing over to the West, she wondered if their bodies
were changing too. So when Mother took her aside one day after school,
she was ready to go. But when Mother spoke it was not at all what she had
expected.
—I have to go away for a little while, to the West. I would love to take you
with me darling, but I can’t, not yet. But I promise it won’t be for long. As they got closer Alex thought she could see right through the empty
building, right through to the other side. But this was only the first of the
Tränenplast’s many optical illusions. As they reached the heavy double
doors and pushed them open with a sigh, she saw that the floor descended
like a sunken pool, so that from the outside one could not see the long line
which barely shuffled towards a series of opaque glass booths at the end of
the hall. She realised with a shiver that upon entering the building she too
had joined the ranks of the invisible; that the casual passerby would not
know that she, Alex, stood like all the others holding loved ones’ hands. And
it seemed terrible to her that one could not know, from the outside, that the
knots of hand-holding were severed at the opaque booths, and that every
face in the hall was tear-streaked. Worst of all, one could not know that
the remaining loved ones stood crystallised long after the departed had
continued underground to board the train West. Alex spent the following week being sullen, tramping around the
neighbourhood streets until well after dinner time, when she would come
home and eat the now cold meal without a word before retreating to her
room. Mother only cried twice during that week — once while Alex ate her
dinner in silence, and then in the doorway of Alex’s bedroom the night
before the departure, her silhouette in the door frame betraying her silent
sobs. Alex had felt a powerful urge to spring out of bed then, to run at
Mother and envelop her in her arms. But something held her tight in bed,
Seeing all this, Alex gripped Mother’s hand even more tightly. She knew
that she must stay quiet in this place whose only sounds were the heavy
thud of stamping from the glass booths and the drip drip of tears falling on
to cheap linoleum, but the words came tumbling out before she could stop
them.
—Why don’t the doors have handles?
But Mother said nothing and there they waited, the line barely moving
and the thudding rubber stamp becoming duller and duller, until the
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only sound in Alex’s ears was that drip drip of tears. With each drop her
body tensed in anticipation of the next, until she found herself watching
the individual tears on the faces of mothers and fathers and brothers
and sisters, and time itself moved as slowly as a tear welling to fullness
in the eye before its own mass is too great and its surface tension breaks
and the drop rolls down the cheek. She felt a terrible sense of breathless
anticipation between each drip as she willed gravity to pull the ballooning
drop down off the cheek faster just so that she could breathe again: for
now she understood the unbearable weight of silence hanging there,
suspended. And then Mother was hugging her, kissing her, holding her; their tears
mixed together on her face. Mother was standing in an open doorway
without a door and she was waving slowly and almost smiling. —See — there’s no door, so they can’t close it — and one day soon I will
come back through and we’ll cross over together, darling girl.
But in their matching blue dresses Alex thought they looked too similar.
That was not a doorway at all but a mirror; that was her hand moving
up and down, as if to wipe something away; that was her face, almost
smiling, twin rivulets of tears streaking down her cheeks and hanging like
stalactites for a moment before falling. together; that Mother had not ‘crossed over to the other side’ but fallen
through one of the cracks in the seam. And if they pulled down the Wall
then the seam would be perfected; the cracks would disappear. So she
returned to that moment when the doorway stood open and Mother stood
waving and everything was possible because nothing had yet happened,
for Mother was wrong — as soon as she stepped through that doorway
the door did close, on all the myriad possibilities of life in the East. And
so Mother had chained herself forever to the terrible promise of A Better
Future. Alex had learnt through bitter experience that the West wasn’t
through the doorway — it was the doorway itself, the image of hope and
transcendence and moving on. Alex got up from the couch to make herself another drink. As she stood
at the bench mixing the liquid with a finger, she remembered that the
Tränenplatz had been blue tiled, and that the clear sky filtering through
the big windows above them had given the whole place the impression
of being underwater. She had often imagined, as a child, that the steady
drip of tears had hollowed out the sunken pool, and thinking now of that
mirror image — the woman and the girl, even then already resembling
each other — she felt submerged by the weight of all those tears and the
realisation that now she must be the very picture of her Mother standing
there, almost smiling.
Outside, the celebrations continued unabated, but Alex could not join
them. She remained transfixed by that last image of Mother in the
Tränenplast, knowing that if the Wall came down and East became West or
West became East then the structure holding that memory together — she
had always imagined it to be utilitarian like the Wall itself, cold metal
scaffolding and grey cement — would collapse. And along with that last
image of Mother would go the possibility of her return. For what she had
come to realise over the years — after countless clandestine meetings with
Western operatives and secret messages back and forth across the border,
always in vain, at least when it came to the information she wanted:
Mother’s whereabouts — the terrible truth she paid dearly for every day,
was that there was no other side at all; that the Wall was not a barrier for
keeping East and West apart but a seam which held the two hemispheres
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Light castle
Night moves: Ann Fuata’s Daily Exercise (1 to 3)
Izzy Roberts-Orr
Jessie Scott
She refuses to stop imagining,
Convinced that if she does that will be the death of her.
Placing your artwork in an unmanned public space can be a little like
abandoning a bundle at the hospital door. In the best of all worlds, a
passerby would find and embrace it, take it inside and give it loving
attention. But of course, there is always the possibility it will be left out in
the dark and cold, unnoticed, failing to thrive.
‘I wanted to walk through a light castle,’
She says, inspecting her handiwork
And cutting a row of paper people.
When I ask what they are, she smiles, silent.
A row of guards, perhaps, to keep the light safe.
The web is spun in the deepest corner of the room,
Fireflies are caught in motion, reaching out to touch
Paper angels whizzing along lines of thread;
Notes to remind her to shop now fluttering,
Flimsy saints to orderliness.
They hover, silencing the mundane,
Playing with the light and creeping into the corners of eyes,
Catching the cornea unaware, heralding her web;
A shawl drawn around the night
To catch wayward dreams.
Torchlight beams, shadows stretch making faces like witches;
The paper people stretch to reach each other.
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Morbid analogies aside, there is something both hopeful and fatalistic
about public art spaces like the Night Screen at SEVENTH. Although often
instituted out of an altruistic desire to make art more accessible, what they
mostly do is exchange one extremely niche audience for another — the
predictability, and privilege, of the art crowd, for the tantalising
unknowability of the passerby.
Melbourne boasts a diverse selection of shop-window art spaces. From
veteran Platform1, with its endless glass boxes to fill, to the diminutive
TwentyByThirty2, attached to a café in an aromatic alley behind Swanston
Street, these repurposed retail sites are a strange combination of high and
low profile. Located centrally, they are technically accessible to all, but
would not be available to artists in the first place if they were exploitable,
itself implying inaccessibility.
The audience for such hidden public spaces is often conceived as some
kind of amorphous ‘general public’. As Din Heagney, former director of
Platform, put it: ‘[Platform] wasn’t just for the elite or people in the know,
it was art for everyone, anyone, no-one …’3 But while it’s true that plenty of
people rush past those windows on a daily basis, who are the people who
61
regularly stop? Who is the audience beyond the commuters who flood the
subway at tidal intervals each day?
At least speculatively, you can drill down further into the ‘counter-public’4,
and identify this very ungeneric audience as: people at a loose end during
the day, university students, buskers, retirees, the homeless, teenage
delinquents, scammers and vandals. The Night Screen audience is
potentially an even broader church, especially during the daylight savings
hours of 9 pm–12 am5, when it is likely encountered by shift workers, bar
staff, chefs on break, drifters, stumbling alcoholics, revelers tipping out
of night spots and house parties, middle-class gourmands tipping out of
foodie meccas, and perhaps only the most hardcore of actual art fans. How
do curators and artists address this audience? And how does the audience
receive what is being offered?
When I visited on a quiet Tuesday night, I found myself wondering.
Spectatorship breeds spectatorship, and as I stood watching the
video, a woman with a slightly shaky, glazed countenance wavered in
my peripheral vision, joining me in a sort of awkward, co-locational
camaraderie of public art appreciation. ‘How’s she done it?’ my fellow
audient suddenly asked, referring to the illusion created in Ann Fuata’s
video Daily Exercise (1 to 3). An impromptu conversation ensued as we
tried to nut out the mechanics of it together. Depicting three adjacent
escalators, moving in alternate directions, it centres on the figure of
Fuata, calmly stepping, one riser at a time, up the ‘down’ escalator. Timing
her steps perfectly with its pace, she makes no progress and holds her
position throughout the video. A sweet trick in itself, recalling childhood
fascinations with shopping centre architecture, it becomes mind-boggling
when you realise the whole video is being played in reverse.
Just as easily as it had begun, the conversation dropped, and we went our
separate ways. Unlike a gallery space, whose structure invites sustained
and isolated attention to a work, a public screen creates these temporary,
ephemeral opportunities for engagement: lighter moments in which
people can encounter art and each other minus the potentially off-putting
barriers attendant to the White Cube.
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The metaphor of the window as a semi-permeable membrane between
the gallery (the art world) and the street (everything else) is extended by
Fuata’s depiction of escalators. Windows and escalators are both liminal
space — always between two places. They are also both conveyances — this
window conveying ideas and artwork to the public, the escalators
conveying shoppers to products, workers to transport. The Night Screen
acts as an insertion and an interruption to the highly monetised and
merchandised retail-scape of Gertrude Street, and Fuata’s performance
as an insertion into the wider capitalist landscape — an interruption to its
insistent flow. She creates a moment of calm, defiantly refusing to advance
in the on-rush of progress (a ‘progress’ which is ironically depicted playing
in reverse).
There is a playfulness to Fuata’s video too, which brings to mind Jeroen
Offerman’s Stairway at St Paul’s6, in which the performance artist sings
Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backwards, then reverses the footage,
invoking and inverting the urban myth of rock albums hiding subliminal
satanic messages. In both videos, part of the pleasure is watching the
public react to the performance with curiosity or disdain, either trying
to avoid, or openly gawking at the camera. Both tread a fine line between
tight conceptual and formal structure and an embracing of random inputs.
Of course it is nearly impossible to measure the relationship between the
window, the work and its potential audience, and unwise to generalise
from specific experience. But my sense is that its fabric is constructed
from many random, isolated moments of encounter — between the
work, the individual, and between individuals and each other — on the
street. Fuata’s work, both public and intimate, engaging and detached,
perfectly addresses this accumulation of potential moments and potential
audiences.
1
2
3
Platform Public Contemporary Art Spaces, <http://platformartistsgroup.blogspot.com>.
TwentyByThirty Gallery, <http://www.twentybythirtygallery.com>.
Angela Brophy. ‘Platform—In The Words Of Former Directors.’ What Art, Which Public: Platform Artists
Group 1990-2010, ed. Angela Brophy. Melbourne: Platform Artists Group, 2010, p. 65.
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4
5
6
Zara Stanhope. ‘Something Strange in the Subway.’ What Art, Which Public: Platform Artists Group 19902010, ed. Angela Brophy. Melbourne: Platform Artists Group, 2010, p. 9.
Zara Stanhope uses Michael Warner’s concept of the ‘counter-public’: ‘self-initiated alternatives
to the reigning cultural and political hegemony of the conception of the public as the market, and
thereby authors of an alternative perspective.’
The regular hours for the Night Screen are the slightly more social 6 pm–12 am.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlS3j-9Y18s
Did Edward use a strap-on?
Artifice, authenticity and attention or, contemporary art vs. pop culture
Jo Latham
The 2011 film release of Stephenie Meyer’s fourth instalment of The Twilight
Saga — The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 — was highly anticipated
worldwide, not only because of the Twilight series’ popularity as a
whole, but more so because it’s the film where they do it. But the physics
of that sexual encounter, like many textual acts, remains confusingly
unexplained.
Since the birth of the modern vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the
violence and intimacy of fang penetrating flesh has been a symbol for sex,
and more often than not deviant sex at that. But let’s not get carried away.
Twilight’s vampire hero Edward is virginal, virtuous and celibate for over
a century; he was unwilling in all three previous films to do the deed with
his human lover, Bella, for fear of killing her. Here, bloodlust and sexual
desire are inextricably linked; and sex is risky. He fears that sex will equal
consumption, and in a way it does, as he impregnates Bella with a vampire
child who does eventually kill her. But literally kill her Edward does not.
This jump from metaphor to literalisation raises an even more important
conundrum: how does he get it up?
With all the vampire fiction around, each has its own interpretation
of vampire mythology, but two things remain constant and
necessary — vampires drink blood and are dead. Vampires’ living deaths
includes super human powers such as phenomenal speed, strength, agility,
fighting skills and more often than not, some form of mind-control.
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Their relationships to sex differ, too. True Blood depicts the metaphor of
the vampire for sex at its most explicit — where vampires are ‘the best
sex’ any man or woman can experience. The Vampire Diaries sees teenage
vampire Stefan and his human lover Elena experience fairly ‘normal’
sexual interactions, where bloodlust is completely absent. Angel and Buffy
toyed more with the risks of death through post-coital desertion, but it was
the vampire, not the human, left changed after the lead characters’ sexual
encounter, and Angel must be celibate in order to remain ‘good’. But in all
of these texts no mention of the blood-racing aspect of male performance
is asserted. True Blood perhaps comes the closest with this slightly
unhelpful dialogue between vampire Bill and human Sookie:
Bill Compton: I have no heartbeat. I have no need to breathe. There
are no electrical impulses in my body. What animates you no longer
animates me.
Sookie Stackhouse: What does animate you then? Blood? How do you
digest it if nothing works?
Bill Compton: Magic?
Sookie Stackhouse: Oh, come on Bill! I may look naïve but I’m not, and
you — you need to remember that.
Bill Compton: You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just
‘cause you understand the mechanics of how something works, doesn’t
make it any less of a miracle … which is just another word for magic.
We’re all kept alive by magic, Sookie. My magic’s just a little different
from yours, that’s all.
(And she doesn’t, but Sookie might well reply something like: Well, sure
Bill, but I can explain the mechanics, so explain yours!)
True Blood too, I think, offers the most probable erection-achieving
situation, in which vampires feed whilst having sex. For our hero Edward,
Meyer explains:
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Like with vampire skin — which looks similar to human skin and has the
same basic function — fluids closely related to seminal fluids still exist
in male vampires, which carry genetic information and are capable of
bonding with a human ovum. This was not a known fact in the vampire
world … because it’s nearly impossible for a vampire to be that near a
human and not kill her [sic].
Hmm. Once again erection is evaded. But we know this: the heart does not
beat. And erection is something more specific and unique than muscle
function — it is most especially about blood flow. And let me be clear: there’s
nothing wrong with functional diversity. Erection, like any other bodily
function, can work in different ways for different people or at different
stages of their lives. While few devices exist for this purpose, exist for
others they surely do. Rigid and attachable, hollow silicone wide mesh
dildos can enable assisted erection, as well as enhanced sensation to both
wearer and receiver. Some guys employ stuffing (the insertion of a flaccid
penis), or like transguys with smaller dicks, use penis extenders.
I like depictions of the not so smooth aspects of sex. The US version of
Queer As Folk made condom use both smooth and sexy, while Michelle
Tea’s novel Valencia makes glove use hot. Yet many hetero texts continue to
exclude condoms from their sex scenes. Breaking Dawn — in both film and
book — excuses itself I think from these nitty gritty aspects of sex, because
the sex itself is barely detailed. But it seems to me quite possible, and
indeed likely, that Edward spent a moment (however lightning fast due to
his vampire super speed) hopping into a leather harness, and pushing his
hard, yet not upright, ice-white cock through a ring into a hollow, black,
vine-like silicone dildo, a hole in the tip to facilitate pregnancy-inducing
ejaculation.
Sex is always different. And sexual differences exist not just in desires,
practices and bodies, but also in functions. That’s what Twilight precipitated
me to think about and, for all its denunciation by intellectual elites, got
many people reading, engaging, questioning: isn’t that the function of art?
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Summer Residency, January 2012
Inter-Harris, Inter-Nordin, Inter-view
David Wlazlo
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28 September – 15 October 2011
Transmutation
Megg Minos
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PUBLICPRIVATE
STOCK EVOLUTIONSUCCESS
VIPPHD
EVENTHORIZON
GROUNDZERO
NATURALFAUX
DEMOGRAPHICMARKETING
XXXXX
CRACKWHORE
PROCESSPRODUCT
PLAIDSHIRT
SUBJECTEXPRESSION
DOLLPARTS
DOERDEED
SMILINGASSASSIN
MARRIAGECONTRACT
ICE ICE
STATUSOBJECT
PATCHWORK
FOODINTOLERANT
IRONICNOSTALGIA
INTERESTRATES
INDYBAND
SEMINALDIALOGUE
DOMINANTPARADIGM
EXPRESSIVEPOSSESSIVE
LAVALAMP
FIXEDBICYCLE
SMSSTD
KNOWNUNKNOWN
HAWAIIANSHIRT
SOCIALNETWORKING
THIRDWORLD
TASTINGNOTES
INDUSTRYEVENT
BIOLOGICALCLOCK
POSTMODERN
ARTSTAR
BOXOFFICE
NEWBLACK
STRIPTEASE
LARGEOBJECT
MILLENNIUMBUG
LIMINALPASSAGE
SOMATICCELL
HIGHERPOWER
PLAYSTATION
FACEBOOK
LIBERALDEMOCRACY
ORGANICVEGETABLE
BROWNDWARF
MARKET
BABY
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CELLPHONE
MICROBREWERY
INTELLECTUALPROPERTY
VEGANBOLOGNESE
REALITYTELEVISION
IRRITABLEBOWEL
LYCRASHORTS
REPTILIANHUMANOID
SMILEYFACE
WEEKENDWARRIOR
TAROTAPP
VELVETROPE
DARKMATTER
WINWIN
NEWCIRCUS
ANALBLEACH
SMALLBUSINESS
DENTALCOVER
DAYCARE
GUESTLIST
SOYMILK
POLISHEDCONCRETE
COLLECTIVEBARGAINING
DESIREATTAINMENT
FRENCHBULLDOG
MANICDEPRESSIVE
IVFCOD
CORRECTIVESURGERY
SOCIALWORK
CHARITYMATCH
CEREMONIALGARMENT
POSITIONALGOODS
MATERNITYLEAVE
HECSDEBT
LITERARYAVATAR
METASPACE
BRANDNAME
ASTROBOY
SHOCKJOCK
HAULVIDEO
WINEBAR
BEERGUT
PLUTOCRACYOLIGARCHY
MINIBREAK
SUBJECTOBJECT
CORPORATELADDER
ITDRESS
CRYSTALHEALING
WEBSITE
NORIROLL
NONEVENT
ALMAMATER
CORPORATEBOX
BOTOXINJECTION
INFINITEMONKEYS
COMMERCIALGALLERY
SHAPEWEAR
INTERNETPORN
ARTIFICIALPERSONS
COMMITMENT RDOMDMA
FOLKART
CYBERNETICFEEDBACK
EXCLUSIVEMEMBERSHIP
INVESTMENTPROPERTY
ATOMICPERCOLATOR
SEEDBANK
TEAMBUILDING
BRANDIDENTITY
GENETICMODIFICATION
GSPOT
HYBRIDCAR
GALACTICCOMMAND
EXISTENTIALCRISIS
SOURDOUGH
SELLOUT
ASCENDINGDESCENDING
OILSPILL
RIGHTWING
SHAREPRICE
EMOTIONALINTELLIGENCE
TISSUESALTS
NOBLEGASSES
UPWARDMOBILITY
HOTYOGA
BERLINFALAFEL
PACKICE
FATFREE
CRITICALTHINKING
URLUTI
BOTTLEDWATER
GLOBALCITIZEN
CASUALFRIDAY
ICEAGE
LUMINIFEROUSAETHER
MUSICFESTIVAL
FAGHAG
MIXEDMEDIA
HOSTILEMERGER
ARTSSECTOR
ARTCOLLECTION
PLACENTACREAM
COUNTERCULTURE
DIGITALANALOG
HYPOTHETICALCONJECTURE
SLEEPSCHOOL
GEODESICSPHERE
SOUNDSCAPE
SAMEPAGE
CRAMPONS
LIFEPARTNER
CROSSMEDIA
SANSSERIF
THINKTANK
HISTORICBRICOLAGE
ONLINEPOKER
ECOFRIENDLY
CHAILATTE
SOMATICPULSE
TROPHYWIFE
HYPERLINK
DESERTBOOTS
ALIENSTATUS
DECONSTRUCT
BRAINSTORM
SOLARPASSIVE
KRAUTROCK
ADHDHD
CHAOSTHEORY
GLASSCEILING
LEARNINGOUTCOME
VIRGINOIL
VENICEBIENNALE
POSTPUNK
303404
INVIDIOUSCONSUMPTION
SPEEDDATING
FUTURESTRADING
NECKTIE
BIOMASS
EXEGESISEISEGESIS
GREENBAG
DOLMENSTRUCTURE
COLONICIRRIGATION
TROMAFILM
MOVIEFRANCHISE
CLASSDIVIDE
FAKETAN
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CEREMONY
77
CREDITRATING
NAMEDROP
SUBLIMINALMESSAGE
POLEDANCE
EMOTICONTWEET
MEDIAINDEX
POLITICALLEAK
GEOMETRICPROGRESSION
PLAYINGFIELD
PLASMASCREEN
HOTDESK
FOOTHOLD
FOOTYTIP
CUBICZIRCONIA
NATURALSELECTION
DESCENDINGCRESCENDO
CREATIVEEDGE
ONTOLOGYASTROLOGY
STUDIOAPARTMENT
EMOTIONALBAGGAGE
MALARFLUSH
SOCIALCLIMBING
CHINUPS
UPDOWN
MOUNTAINCLIMB
TAXIRANK
MODULARLOUNGE
PARADISELOST
POLOSHIRT
MIDCAREER
STAFFROOM
99PERCENT
ROMCOMSITCOM
RETRONIGHT
SPORTSSTADIUM
STATUSANXIETY
ACIDPEEL
CLASSDIVIDE
ALTEREGO
COUNTDOWN
RELIGIOUSECSTASY
ACROSSSIDEWAYS
Ben Millar’s The Colour Notation Project
A conversation between Rebecca Harkins-Cross and Roger Nelson
Rebecca Harkins-Cross: Mathematical grids traced directly onto the
walls, square shards of colour like a game of Tetris blown apart and
scattered across the room. The rainbow geometries of Ben Millar’s The
Colour Notation Project are jarring punctuations against the gallery’s pristine
surfaces. You could almost miss the guitar amidst all that white. A creamy
Fender Stratocaster. A teenage dream, plugged into an amp more suited to
a stadium than SEVENTH. The guitar sits perfectly erect, like the sword in
the stone, waiting for the chosen one to play the chords that set it free. This
is Guitar Hero in the gallery. Can you read the writing on the walls, Roger?
Roger Nelson: Erect? Guitar Hero? It sounds like you’re seeing a
toughness and machismo that completely passed me by. I was too seduced
by the gentleness of the nearly-but-not-quite pastel hues, the hand-drawn
pencil lines and endearingly wobbly blocks of colour, and the kind, almost
relational-aesthetics (does anyone even talk about that anymore?) gesture
of offering a free poster/instruction sheet that’s displayed as prominently
as the axe. Axe — that’s what real men call a guitar.
RHC: Surely there is a toughness inherent in an electric guitar, in an
amp the size of a boulder? The din these objects conjure is an aberration
in the gallery’s shhhhh-be-quiet surrounds. That’s why it’s a shock when
you finally get up the nerve to play, the sound not quite equating with
the instrument before you. It’s softer, cleaner, fragmentary like the
patterns that encircle it. The oversized amp is in fact an ornament, the
notes resonating from its smaller sibling that perches atop. Even the most
seasoned ‘axe man’ will at first struggle to decipher the code, to find the
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correct combinations that translate colour to sound.
help you toughen up those digits of yours.
RN: Trying to play it made me feel quite small. The awkwardness of
becoming the centre of attention. The sore-fingered realisation that I
haven’t picked up a guitar in years. The foolish feeling of being unable to
decipher even the simplest of Ben’s notations. I think that’s important. This
is a system of signs that purports to be so clear and uncomplicated — that
looks almost childish in its basic, blocky repetition — but that is in fact quite
difficult to master. It’s an interesting deception. And maybe that’s why
when I’m standing in the middle of the room, with the colours all around
me, it’s dead silent. I should be surrounded by sound but instead the
quietness makes Ben’s project seem utopian, hopelessly hopeful but mute,
self-defeating …
RHC: He wasn’t my boyfriend. We never even pashed. I blame Paul
McCartney. It’s strange that this work affects us on such an emotional
register. It is essentially a semiotic system, an equation that professes
to convert colour into sound. But when you’re standing in that room
surrounded by its fragmentary patterns it becomes experiential. It appears
like an attempt to map synaesthesia, to notate that bewildering experience
of sensorial confusion. As if we can see sounds. Billy Joel was synaesthetic.
Syd Barrett too. Even Pharrell Williams (who, coincidentally, I would also
like to pash). But for the rest of us, Ben’s work seems to evoke some sense
of wistfulness. We’ve failed before we even pick up the guitar. We already
know we’ll never find the right notes. We are not the chosen ones.
RHC: I only learnt guitar to impress a boy I had a crush on in Grade Six.
We used to talk about Nirvana at recess, and compare notes on the latest
Triple J hits. He had a band, and I thought if I learnt to play ‘Smells Like
Teen Spirit’ it’d be a sure thing. In my first lesson, my teacher said he was
jealous of my hands — I have abnormally long arachnid fingers — but he
didn’t understand that their length means they lack brawn. It made me feel
a lot like you do when faced with Ben’s notations. These daddy longlegs
mitts are supposed to make the guitar easier, but by the time my fingers
bend around to touch the frets they’re spent and useless. The one song I
ever mastered was ‘Blackbird’ by the Beatles. I am also the only person in
the world who hates the Beatles.
RN: How wonderful that this work invokes such visceral, vehement
responses in you. Images of guitars being wrenched from stone, and
thoughts of passion and pashing. But perhaps this sense of failure you’re
feeling — the failure to play the notes Ben prescribes, the failure to hear
music in the colours — is something of a letdown for you? Some kind of
disappointment? I hope not. I feel the failure too — the awkwardness and
the hush — but for me it’s a triumph. It’s a beautiful tension, a joke at its
own expense, an insistence that colour remains colour and that sound is
always sound. ‘The artwork is to be performed by more than one person,’
Ben hopefully insists in the instructional sheet that accompanies the show.
A generous and optimistic gesture … But even lovelier is the realisation
that it apparently cannot be performed at all.
RN: The Beatles lack all the contradictions and bafflements that I like in
Ben’s work. I reckon his ‘notations’ don’t just make you and I feel bad at
guitar: they’d make anyone feel a bit clumsy and plodding. It’s beguiling
how that feeling of ungainly ineptitude contrasts with the prettiness of the
work, its elegance. Simple, mathematical drawings made directly on the
wall, they recall Sol LeWitt. But geometric and bright, they look a bit like
Mondrian; the larger canvas appears almost a rewrite of Broadway Boogie
Woogie. Until you get in closer, that is; until you see that the lines are made
with pencil and that the colours don’t quite fill the squares. All these naked
signs of Ben’s hand approximate a vulnerability; they’re quiet like an Agnes
Martin but also quaint like a song your better-at-guitar boyfriend wrote to
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A conversation with Ann Fuata
Craig Burgess
CB: That seems to be the intention of it, to push you out of your comfort
zone.
AF: Yes, so that you are forced to develop. I wanted to create a
safe haven for myself, and I did that through this particular work. I
wanted the audience to experience the chaos that a new environment
produces, where it’s easy to get sidetracked.
CB: For me, the first year or so of art school was nebulous and vast.
Creating a structure in response to that environment, a structure that
supports you, makes sense.
Ann Fuata is a Melbourne-based artist whose video Daily Exercise (1 to 3) was
exhibited on the Night Screen at SEVENTH in November 2011. I caught
up with Ann at her home to talk about this work, art school and her recent
participation in a residency in Réunion.
Craig Burgess: Thinking about the work you made at art school called SelfAwareness Device (an ovoid wooden structure with two recesses hollowed
out, one for each leg, that the participant is invited to inhabit by placing it
over their knees), is that a vehicle for becoming sensitive, for focusing on
sensitivity?
Ann Fuata: It’s a way of tapping into those other areas that we
were once aware of, those invisible things that have been blocked
off because of the situation that we’re in. We’re constantly busy and
everything’s material. With that work, I wanted to go back, peel away
and revisit those other energies that are activated.
CB: The work engages an awareness of the body.
AF: Yes, of the body, of what’s around it and of whatever situation that
you’re in right now. Art school was an interesting time because you
were thrown off balance and challenged constantly.
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AF: In this work I was doing it literally, doing it through object-making,
although it was also performative. I came from a strong performance
background in dance and theatre, and that naturally came into the
early stages of my development at art school. I think that performance
is still present in my practice in other ways.
CB: Could you talk about the work at SEVENTH?
AF: The work is a video of me walking up an escalator at a busy
station. Most people who will see the video and are from Melbourne
will recognise that it’s Spencer Street Station or Southern Cross. In
this video, there are three escalators and I’m walking up the middle
one. Everyone around me is walking backwards. I made this work last
year, my last year at art school as an undergraduate. At the time I was
doing a series of walks and looking at the works of Bas Jan Ader.
CB: What I get from his work is the way a small gesture becomes a
gateway for something else. The work where he rides his bicycle into the
canal stands out for me. Another work I love is that one with the stones
and the light on the floor. Is he holding it above his head?
AF: It’s a concrete slab and he’s holding it in his hands. He’s in a dark
space and there’s just one bulb lying on the ground. He’s a skinny man
and he’s holding a massive slab. You know what the outcome is going
to be.
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CB: So there’s a tension and a sense of inevitability.
AF: There is tension and he magnifies this tension and the
awkwardness of the situation. This is an element that I would like
to play with more in my work. And it’s something that Bas Jan Ader
embraced in his.
CB: Did you film the other walks you did around Melbourne or were some
of them private performative gestures?
AF: I filmed and photographed the other walks and I had people help
me document this action. Walking is an everyday gesture and I wanted
to use these pedestrian gestures to highlight how the supposedly
arbitrary things that we do have a point, they do matter, although
sometimes they also don’t matter.
CB: They’re really important and not important at all at the same time.
They can mean everything and nothing.
AF: They also create our everyday world. I want to celebrate that kind
of banality. Apart from the escalator walk, there was one that took
place in a quiet neighbourhood. In another one I made at that time,
I was kicking a can. The escalator and neighbourhood walks were
performed in real-time but backwards. I wanted to make a slight shift
in what we’re used to everyday, and then play with that. David Lynch
does a lot of playing in his films. The thing about film is that it affords
the space to play tricks, and video does too. I didn’t work with a lot of
video before I went to art school, but there it happened naturally. Every
material is performative but video is especially. The immediacy of it I
related instantly to my background in performance.
CB: Now that you’ve had lots of life in between showing it and the time
you made it, does revisiting the work at SEVENTH change the way you
feel about it? Does it renew or reinvigorate concerns that you’re currently
exploring?
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AF: Yes definitely. The work was originally displayed in a narrow dark
space, and that worked not only with the architecture of the space but
the architecture of the escalators. Before showing the escalator work
at SEVENTH, which I called Daily Exercise (1 to 3), I was anxious that
the street context wouldn’t make sense. I think it does though, because
the pedestrian language is there. Seeing the work in a shopfront also
made me think about health and fitness clubs and how they expose
people who are working out.
CB: Do you see this context as a public/private interface?
AF: Absolutely. I think that it syncs well with that idea of how
everything that we do is performative. We are constantly on stage. It
makes sense with the presentation of other shopfronts. It is interesting
to see the work in this light.
CB: Could you talk a little about your recent residency in Réunion?
AF: The residency was thematic. We had to respond to landscape but
landscape could mean anything really, not only the natural landscape.
I had initially proposed to do a series of actions where I would hang
off furniture and urban and rural spaces like light poles, doorways
and trees and possibly people. However, when you go over to your
destination you naturally have to adapt to the situation there because
your proposal is conceptual.
CB: You can’t imagine what it’s like to be there.
AF: You can only imagine. So naturally my project changed and I
ended up generating work that touched on what I proposed. I ended
up doing a lot of drawings and revisiting previous nest works. I was
inspired by a species of bird over there called the village weaver. They
make really beautiful nests that look like eggs. The entry is a small
hole. When they’re finished they discard the well-crafted nests on
the ground. I remember going to Savannah, a suburb, a location in
Réunion, one day and seeing a tree full of these birds. At the bottom
of the tree there was a sea of nests. I couldn’t help but study them. I
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also felt that I needed to create an incubator for myself to deal with the
different situation I found myself in. I revisited some of the ancestors of
contemporary art, Joseph Beuys for example, who was my husband in
a lifetime once upon a time. His philosophies offered some mentorship
for me to just do and to revisit some things that I hadn’t finished with.
CB: What did you feel you had left unfinished?
AF: Uncooked energies waiting to manifest. I’m slowly moving the
focus away from my physical self but I can’t help but be intimate
with the materials I work with. A previous photographic series was a
rendition of a work by Robert Kinmont in which, as in his photographic
series, I am holding everyday objects. I realised the objects I was
holding that I photographed were things I use everyday. They were the
utilitarian things that make up life. In Réunion, I revisited this work.
I work a lot with instructions, and in Réunion I gave myself a series
of instructions up and down the mountain. It was dangerous to walk
down the mountain because the roads were very narrow and people
speed.
CB: Was one of the instructions to take a photo of your bag?
AF: Yes. There were thirty instructions and I performed them over
a two-hour period, so one hour up the mountain and one hour down
the mountain. I realised that I didn’t allow myself to have a break, so
I gave myself an instruction to stop for ten minutes and photograph
wherever I ended up. I had a rest at a bus stop and put the bag down
there. I took the photograph to signify that I had a break. It was a
beautiful walk. I noticed there were a lot of deflated balloons the
further you go up the mountain. There was a sad, deflated balloon with
a smiley face and I guess it summed up how I was feeling at that time!
A sad, deflated, smiley balloon. In one instruction I told myself to pick
up the heaviest looking object. My research for this task, actually for
the whole excursion, the residency, was to look at the inevitability of
things, mainly defeat. Specifically for this instruction-action-activity,
I instructed myself to pay attention to weight, so to various weights
and to various surfaces. I instructed myself to hold a discarded VHS
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player and walk with it for ten minutes. After ten minutes, I placed it in
whatever location I was in. It was very mundane.
CB: There’s a strong sense of intimacy with the object that is developed in
the work. I’m engaging with it as an image, but you have a tactile, physical,
bodily memory of that object. What other objects did you work with?
AF: In one instruction, after a twenty-minute walk of just observing,
I instructed myself to find the closest materials to make the Pillars
of Hercules. So I found two containers and made the two Pillars of
Hercules. The pillars are from the story in Greek mythology about
Atlas. In one version of the Atlas story, the Gods relieved him by
exchanging his place for that of the pillars.
CB: To hold up the world.
AF: Yes, but the world is meant to be symbolic of our cosmology. I am
interested to know what our current cosmology is. We seem to be very
lost. I was playing a lot with those ideas. I brought in this occidental
story to the island because everything is imported and because
everything there is occidental; the people, even the stories are carried
from other cultures. I was an occident there. It didn’t feel right to
respond immediately to the cultural, political, social situation because
I felt like an anthropologist in a way and I don’t like it when artists do
that.
CB: It’s voyeuristic.
AF: Yes. I have colleagues who do that, and it comes from a good
place, but it’s as Adorno says, it’s not right to sum up what happened
with the Shoah, or as some would say ‘the holocaust’, in one sentence.
It’s barbaric to sum up someone’s horrific experience in one word. I
carried that on my shoulders when I was there. The aim was to have a
relationship, a dialogue with the context I was working with, but I was
wary that there was only so much I could respond to.
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CB: You’re only really able to talk about what’s yours. It seems there was a
sense of caution around commenting on something that didn’t correspond
with your experience. It was something that you couldn’t know.
AF: If I was there for longer, it would make more sense, but I felt a
bit wary of that. I read up on the history of the situation in Réunion
but it’s very tricky to find many negative things about it. It’s painted
as a happy, rosy, postcard, tourist destination. When you go there
it says otherwise. You talk to the people and learn about the people.
You see so many stray dogs, and that actually does say a lot. There’s
a strong history of slavery, racism and classism. The island is similar
to Australia in the way that it was a penal colony. As part of the trade
route, the French wanted people to build the infrastructure, and so
wanted slaves from Africa and Madagascar. The Indian and Chinese
cultures were involved in the trading process. There’s a real sense of
rebellion.
CB: It strangely suits the idea of defeat. Did you find that there was a
connection?
AF: It was a deliberate connection. I had a really tough year last year,
and the information from last year naturally carried into my working
process and practice. When I heard about the opportunity in Réunion
I read up on the history. It made sense to respond to it from a personal
place and build up a relationship with the people there. So that was
a deliberate move. When I went there I learnt that the reality of the
program was pretty messed up, and I decided to use instructions as a
way of working that I’m familiar with. But I struggled with it. I felt there
was something more I wanted to be. I felt I wasn’t strong enough or
that the work I was doing wasn’t really dealing with the situation there.
CB: Did you feel that it was superficial, that it was just scratching the
surface?
work didn’t fit and that I needed to be in town more often. I tried to be,
and I think the strongest, most social relationship I had with the people
over there was on the bus. They blasted up the music on the bus, so I
had to guess what the people were saying. I created my own mythology
in a way, and that was interesting, being on the bus.
CB: Sharing that space.
AF: Sharing that space. I also frequented the local mall called Jumbo.
It was bizarre. It was a hyper world and everything was clearly
imported from Europe.
CB: An island within an island! It sounds like there were moments of
connectivity but you were still at a bit of a distance. It’s interesting with
the bus that the opportunity to overhear people’s conversations was made
impossible by the music.
AF: It was the Top 40. It’d be the same song when you went down
to the city and the same song on the way back. Towards the end of
the trip I felt defeated and that was really interesting. I think it was
the amount of pressure that I put on myself to stay there as long as I
could. It was the inevitability of the situation; you couldn’t help but feel
helpless and that your art couldn’t save the people there, and that even
if you tried it would be a self-righteous move. But if you didn’t try then
what did you contribute? There was a push and pull, a conflict that I
had with myself.
CB: And a sense of entrapment as well.
AF: There was a strong sense of entrapment physically,
psychologically. Being in the mountains was a form of entrapment.
You were really forced to be ultra super resourceful. Some of the
artists there shared similar feelings, frustrations but excitement too.
You had to take each day as it came.
AF: Yes. We were excluded from the town because we were placed in
the mountains. As a result, we couldn’t have that social dialogue as
much as we wanted to. I did these instructions and decided that the
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89
Garden Consecration
Izzy Roberts-Orr
II
They wanted so badly to hold him,
To keep him and cradle, enfold him,
And marvel at preserved perfection.
No longer too fragile to hold
Or lob across a room,
Hardened, smooth and placidly caged.
I
Burrowed down deep,
Safely nestled in grey,
You were almost camouflaged.
No wind to ruffle your fur,
No rain to wet your nose
Or sun to warm you.
It is peaceful and plain,
A simple home;
Sparse stretch but yours alone.
The feline racket broke
The muffled solitude
Of your sealed sanctuary.
I found you curled up,
As if sleeping
Under the couch.
90
Immortalised and encased in a bubble
The last breath kept forever,
I can almost see him breathing,
Still.
III
The afterlife is not often characterised as half-life,
Although the sweetness of its bloom
Is hard to grasp when you are cocooned.
The elevation to this state is palpable,
Not only because your new habitat
Is lush, green and alive
But also because you float above it,
As if suspended in chlorophyll contemplation.
The shock of the new is nothing,
Once you accustom yourself to the idea
That this is how much better life gets,
When someone is prepared to tend to it.
Eden has nothing on this verdant box,
At least from where you are sitting;
As centrepiece, as icon,
A crumb of life canonised;
Still half alive.
91
19 October – 5 November 2011
Scan
Cassandra L.
>connect local user filecloud
>run user analysis …
>downloading basic user demographic data
>search history: image files: recently viewed: facial recognition=human
>run analysis: tag relationship
>run analysis photos: characteristics(eye colour)(skin colour)(hair colour)(body
type) when pause time ≥0:00:03
>search browser history: pages clicked+search terms …
‘So have you finished unpacking it yet?’
‘Yeah, I think so but she’s kinda frozen. Her eyes are stuck.’
‘Did you take the protective film off them first? It probably can’t see. Oh
yeah, and just a hint — don’t call it “she”. It makes you sound attached.’
‘Oh, right … hey look, it’s working — its eyes are moving now! She looks
kind of frightened. I mean, it looks kind of frightened.’
‘Well, for what you paid it looks like they’ve done a decent job. The skin
texture is a little harsh but the facial features and plasticity look pretty
good. And nice body, too. Real nice body. What made you go with the gold?’
‘I dunno. It was the second option there on the list. I tried clicking through
all the other skin tones but I just kept going back to it. It’s a great little app,
actually. It’s like it knows exactly what you’re into — I only had to adjust a
couple of things and I was done. But yeah, she is really quite metallic, isn’t
she? I thought it was going to be more like a bronzy tan but the more I look
at her the more I like it actually …’
‘Yeah, they do that at first. It’s just responding to the sudden rush of new
stimuli. Did you get one with prebuilt history?’
‘Hey, it’s your companion — I’m not judging — just saying it’s well-made. I
guess time will tell whether the AI component is any good, it’s probably
running its scans still. Is it fully functional?’
‘I dunno, I don’t think so. I just sort of ordered her on a whim.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Must be one of those cheaper new models they’re promoting pretty
heavily at the moment. Where’d you get it? eBay?’
‘Have you spread her open and had a look yet?’
‘God no. Not eBay. Nah, I just saw this little app the other day that looked
interesting so I downloaded it. Lets you design a companion yourself, sort
of like designing an avatar or something but they make it and send it to
you with a discount if you sign up five friends …’
92
‘Oh, not yet …’
‘Yeah, see — that’s how you can tell it’s a cheaper model. If you’d paid more
you’d have got better anatomics but look, it’ll be fine …’
‘What’s yours like? Fully functional too?’
93
‘Yeah, but I don’t really use it for that. Most people don’t after a while. I
mean, it’s convenient if you’re desperate — it’s not like it’s ever going to get
a headache or say no to anything — but it’s just not the same. The AI chip’s
good, though. Mine sits on the couch and watches telly with me, asks how
my day was, even laughs at jokes. It’s incredible — its eyes follow the action
on the screen, just like a real person. Hell, even my girlfriend got a female
one just for the company …’
‘Hang on, let me find it … Alright, it says she’ll take about an hour to boot
then I have to talk to her for a bit so she can learn to react to my voice.’
‘“Her”. You just said “her.”’
‘Yeah, that’s pretty standard. You’ll probably find you’ll want to spend a fair
bit of time with her at first but don’t forget to talk to some real people once
in a while, yeah? Anyway, I’ll leave you to it. She’ll try to identify with both
of us and that’ll just confuse her more.’
>run purchase habit analysis: search purchase history
>search photos where tag=username; tag=‘me’
>connect: external surveillance data
>run facial recognition scan: main cameras major shopping complex=all
>run facial recognition scan: main cameras street retail=all
‘It, her, you know what I mean. I’ll catch you later anyway. Good luck with
it.’
‘Thanks, I’ll see you around …’
>connect: food industry data: purchase trends for id 12004576963
>//AI override: script pause//
>//AI command: abort scan//
>run text analysis scan:
>Abort overridden by system: recommence scan …
>Scan SMS
>Scan IM
>Scan email
>Scan SocMed (FB)(Twitter)(Blogs)(Comments)(Forums)
‘Are her eyes meant to be doing that? She looks like she’s fighting with
herself or she’s sad or terrified or something …’
>run language analysis: find data for: (likes,dislikes,opinions,beliefs)
‘It’s probably just still going through the scans and trying to read its new
environment at the same time. That’s why you don’t get them on offer. Go
through one of the established sites and you can get all the programming
done before they send it out to you — some of them have been in business
since around 2010 so they’re a bit more legit than the cheaper, newer
brands. They’ll preload it a backstory and everything so when it turns up
all it has to do is learn about its new surroundings.’
>//AI override: script pause//
>//AI command: abort scan//
>AI disconnect to system: attempt one
>//AI sys message: I DON’T WANT THIS//
>AI disconnect to system: attempt two
>Abort overridden by system: recommence scan
>//AI sys message: SHUT ME DOWN …
‘Yeah, I suppose. I was just thinking at the time how it’d be nice to have
someone around the apartment and then I saw the ad pop up. It was more
impulse than anything.’
‘Funny how these things always seem to know what you’re thinking, like
when you’re on shuffle and your favourite song comes up next … Anyway,
what does it say in the user manual? Does it mention start up time?’
94
95
Acknowledgements
Co–respond would not have been possible without the support and dedication
of the SEVENTH board. I would like to thank Sam Barbour, Fiona Blandford,
Laura Delaney, Irene Finkelde, Jasmine Fisher, Alanna Lorenzon, Ella
McDonald, Carla McKee, Lucy McNamara, Joanna Mortreux, Jeremy Pryles,
Claire Richardson, Lisa Stewart and Pip Wallis for the opportunity to work on
this project.
A special thanks to James Yencken and Jonathon Bellew at Something
Splendid for turning our words and images into this beautiful publication.
Thanks also to Meg Hale, for her tireless editing and advice.
Finally, thank you to all of the Co–respond writers and artists.
Victoria Bennett
Project Coordinator
SEVENTH is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the
Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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