Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Notes
The following posts were written a while ago; I have only got around to putting them up now. Hope they make an interesting read anyways.
Sydney Biennale Review
Sydney’s history of spectacular exhibitions stretches much further back than just to the inaugural Biennale of Sydney in 1973. In 1879 Sydney held its International Exhibition, replete with its own grand, and now largely forgotten, reference to London’s Crystal Palace, the Garden Palace. Set in the Royal Botanic Gardens it was just a stone’s throw from Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser’s activated tent work for this biennale, Occupied, 2008. Today Deacon and Fraser’s work sits in the shadow of a glass pyramid which houses the gardens’ tropical plants collection. In 1879 this was the site of the International Exhibition’s Fine Arts Annexe, which at the close of the exhibition, became the first official housing for the Gallery of New South Wales. Significantly, in the current context of a biennale which brings together 154 artists and collectives predominantly from Europe and the United States in a 7:3 split favouring historical works, one the founding sentiments of the Gallery of NSW was a vision of Australia as a latent safe deposit box for European culture in what were turbulent times in the Northern hemisphere (Art Gallery of NSW).
This small history lesson in the early geography of Sydney illustrates the way that apparently diverging trajectories of world exhibition history, of Sydney’s history, of the history of art and its presence in Australia and the Biennale of Sydney 2008 rise up and disappear throughout each other’s paths. Spasmodic and ruptured, diverging and cascading away in schizophrenic ‘lines of flight’, yet weaving together again and again, the structure of relationships evoked between artists, the city and history in the Biennale of Sydney 2008 seem akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations around rhizomatic multiplicities. These multiplicities are characterised as ‘libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive’ and they are ’...composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold in its relationship.’ (1988: 33)
So it is that an initial reading of the historical works of the biennale, especially at the venues of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Gallery of NSW could easily criticise a tokenism that seems apparent in the selection of uniconic works by historically iconic names (or if you are cynical; drawcards) such as Man Ray, Robert Smithson and Yoko Ono. Yet, upon closer inspection, art historically regimented lineages and hierarchies of movements such as Formalism, the Ready-made, Performance, Feminism (and so on) begin to rupture and flex when the works are presented in a forum which is, in structure, like Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus. The exhibition seeks to set historical and contemporary works on an even footing, without hierarchies and without a regimented ordering through which to travel from work to work or from venue to venue. Juxtaposition of works through proximity in installation is often based on counterintuitive connections, or arbitrary practicality.
In certain instances, the artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, seems to have taken active steps to undercut reverence that might be directed at canonical works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Wheel (1913) at the Gallery of New South Wales to establish this even footing. In this instance, the work is placed against a wall at the bottom of a stairwell, in an access way to the rest of the gallery; any viewers prostrating in front of the work would quickly find themself trodden upon. The work is grouped with works around the image of the bicycle, rather than with works that could be explicitly considered disciples of Duchamp’s ready-made. To the left is Bari Kumar’s video Army of Forgotten Souls 2005 depicting the back of a rickshaw driver amongst the enveloping colour and sound of the rapidly developing Indian city which threatens the man’s livelihood. To the right of the work is another video, Klara Liden’s 2006 Bodies of Society. In a much less cinematic style, Bodies of Society shows a woman violently and unrelentingly beating a bicycle in an apartment. Similarly to the installation approaches taken toward Wheel, the 45-minute documentary film of the late Gordon Matta-Clark’s Program Eight: Office Baroque (1977) finds itself, volume turned right down, in an access-way next to the bag check.
Although this approach to installation frustrates and occasionally seems simplistic it does prompt the viewer to seek out their own connections between works, and to use the language of the rhizomatic multiplicity, to ‘deterritorialise’ the work from its physical site in the gallery and ask the audience to envisage their own ‘lines of flight’ from one work to the next (1988: 32). Christov-Bakargiev hits the ball into the court of the audience; physical mapping which favours arbitrary connections and practicality, facilitates a focus on the audience mapping psychologically for themselves.
The aforementioned Robert Smithson Island Project Drawing (1970) suffers a fate of hanging close to the floor, highlighting the absence of both the artist and Spiral Jetty in Lia Perjovschi’s Subjective Art History from Modernism to Today (1998-2004/8), which sits above the Smithson work. The highlighting of this gap in Perjovschi’s self-reflexively haphazard history makes the rupturing of narratives and connections in the histories of modern and post-modern art at this biennale in general seem logical.
Deleuze and Guatarri speak further on the nature of rhizomes; a ‘rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’ (2007: 10). This system of thought speaks to the biennale’s flicking in and out of movements, of diverging and ‘entangled lines’ (Deleuze and Guatarri 1988:32) and a tide like return and withdrawal of revolution as a premise to the exhibition’s structure.
Traditional notions of art historical lineage are splintered and take off on unorthodox lines of flight. Rather than envisioning historical figures as the cornerstones of clear, continuous narratives into contemporary practice, they are instead more like the revolutionary moment itself; a point of divergence in many strange directions, and sometimes a point of collapse and seeming withdrawal, followed by points of unexpected return via unorthodox paths. Installation techniques employed in multi media practices across the biennale reflect this, for example, Mike Parr’s 1971-2008 retrospective MIRROR/ARSE on Cockatoo Island has obvious connections in content and ‘period’ to Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 Meat Joy, both with their probes into the meeting of the abject with the spectacle and fetishism of the body on camera. However, despite there being only a few years between Meat Joy and the earliest of Parr’s works in the program, the visceral presence of Parr’s works in the dilapidated sailors quarters is in clear opposition to the depoliticised and mediated display of Schneemann’s work on a flat screen television in a corner of the white cube of the Gallery of New South Wales. The contrasting experiences of these works rupture the meaning of a timeline in which Parr’s work follows obediently on from Schneemann’s in a step-by-step lineage of ‘performative body art’.
Likewise, documentation of other historical works with performative elements such as Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void” 5, rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960 (1960, reprinted 2008) or Valie EXPORT’s Touch Cinema (1968) do not necessarily sit comfortably with What a Fucking Wonderful Audience (2008), a performance ‘by’ Dora García. In one sense, García directly undercuts the notion of the artist’s body as a medium by employing another artist, Kate Blackmore, to perform the work. Thus, in a biennale that is so heavily populated by historical works, Dora García’s work forges connections between her practice and the artists that she speaks about, Guy Debord, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. And yet with the final artist she speaks about, Chris Burden, the connections back to this tradition of the body in performative practices rise up again in an unexpected way.
In her keynote address, Christov-Bakargiev addressed the etymology of the word revolution: ‘volvere; to turn and revolvere; to turn again’. She stressed that in this sense the exhibition is focused on ‘the formal gestures embedded within the word revolutions; it is not an illustration of revolutions’ (June 26 2008). This seems significant given Dora García’s disconnection from and reconnection to earlier practices in the biennale. However, Oxford American Dictionary cites the etymology of the word revolve slightly differently; as volvere; to roll, + re; back; revolvere: to roll back. As a formal gesture, this etymology alongside Christov Bakargiev’s seems significant in the Sisyphus like motion it evokes. A gesture of the stone rolling back to the bottom of the hill seems fitting in Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s REVOLUTION (2008). The video is a bricolage of scenes appropriated from cinematic versions of revolutions, following the narrative of the birth and crowning of royalty, and then the encroachment of terror upon the luxurious bubble of royalty as revolution approaches. The looping of the video medium highlights that the chaos and debris left in the wake of the revolutions is also the breeding grounds for new leaders to rise to power.
The process apparent in this sense of time in revolution also seems present in the subtext of Pierre Huyghes work A Forest of Lines (2008); over 1000 plants and trees installed in the main theatre of the Sydney Opera House. As oxymoronic as this statement might sound, this work is the one work at the biennale that will be better for those who did not experience it. The beauty of the sentiment of the work suffered in its realisation through wilting plants, overbearing safety precautions, erratic smoke machines (that had the odour of a disco rather than fog) and an evidently exhausted singer. However, within the context of the biennale’s structure of lines of flight that depart from revolutionary moments and individual artworks alike, the work in its abstract state becomes clear and quite beautiful. Focused around the notion of a radically monumental effort to achieve a fleeting image, after the event, the apparition becomes memory and rumour and disperses along tangential narrative lines (Huyghe and Christov-Bakargiev, 10 July 2008).
As a final point, Ryan Gander’s performative piece Loose Associations Lecture (Version 1.1) (9 July 2008) fittingly also reflected the structure of the exhibition as a whole, the first section of the performance focusing around all manner of lines, desire lines, trauma lines, passivity lines. Then, from the image of the interrogation room with its Robin Day polypropylene chairs the lecture took off on a trajectory line of its own, a roller-coaster of Bob Dylan, Gillian Wearing, John Thor - Inspector Morse, the artist formerly known as Prince, London cabbies, and Doctor Mark Chan (the linguist who invented Klingon).
So too might the visitor to the Sydney Biennale find themselves on an unlikely line of flight from Len Lye’s kinetic sculpture Storm King (1964) to Piero Manzoni’s drawing of a line in a tube Linea m10,42 (December 1959). Or from Lene Berg’s interdisciplinary installation in a cottage on Cockatoo Island, The Drowned One, 2008 which questions the properties of truth in photographic images, to collective Claire Fontaine’s Sharing of Private Property (2006), an educational video on how to pick locks. The individual artworks, deterritorialised from their individual spaces to form rhizomal connections with historical and contemporary works alike from across the biennale echoes the aims of the biennale format in general, to deterritorialise art from its site of production and make available (and hopefully relevant) elsewhere (Christov-Bakargiev, 26 June 2008) and indeed, those original desires of the founders of the gallery of NSW.
Bibliography
Art Gallery of New South Wales: History of the Art Gallery http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aboutus/history
Deleauze, Gilles and Felix Guatarri “1914:one or several wolves?” A thousand plateaus: capitalisma and schizophrenia trans Brian Massumi London: Athlone Press, 1988 pp 26 -38.
This small history lesson in the early geography of Sydney illustrates the way that apparently diverging trajectories of world exhibition history, of Sydney’s history, of the history of art and its presence in Australia and the Biennale of Sydney 2008 rise up and disappear throughout each other’s paths. Spasmodic and ruptured, diverging and cascading away in schizophrenic ‘lines of flight’, yet weaving together again and again, the structure of relationships evoked between artists, the city and history in the Biennale of Sydney 2008 seem akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations around rhizomatic multiplicities. These multiplicities are characterised as ‘libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive’ and they are ’...composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold in its relationship.’ (1988: 33)
So it is that an initial reading of the historical works of the biennale, especially at the venues of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Gallery of NSW could easily criticise a tokenism that seems apparent in the selection of uniconic works by historically iconic names (or if you are cynical; drawcards) such as Man Ray, Robert Smithson and Yoko Ono. Yet, upon closer inspection, art historically regimented lineages and hierarchies of movements such as Formalism, the Ready-made, Performance, Feminism (and so on) begin to rupture and flex when the works are presented in a forum which is, in structure, like Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus. The exhibition seeks to set historical and contemporary works on an even footing, without hierarchies and without a regimented ordering through which to travel from work to work or from venue to venue. Juxtaposition of works through proximity in installation is often based on counterintuitive connections, or arbitrary practicality.
In certain instances, the artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, seems to have taken active steps to undercut reverence that might be directed at canonical works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Wheel (1913) at the Gallery of New South Wales to establish this even footing. In this instance, the work is placed against a wall at the bottom of a stairwell, in an access way to the rest of the gallery; any viewers prostrating in front of the work would quickly find themself trodden upon. The work is grouped with works around the image of the bicycle, rather than with works that could be explicitly considered disciples of Duchamp’s ready-made. To the left is Bari Kumar’s video Army of Forgotten Souls 2005 depicting the back of a rickshaw driver amongst the enveloping colour and sound of the rapidly developing Indian city which threatens the man’s livelihood. To the right of the work is another video, Klara Liden’s 2006 Bodies of Society. In a much less cinematic style, Bodies of Society shows a woman violently and unrelentingly beating a bicycle in an apartment. Similarly to the installation approaches taken toward Wheel, the 45-minute documentary film of the late Gordon Matta-Clark’s Program Eight: Office Baroque (1977) finds itself, volume turned right down, in an access-way next to the bag check.
Although this approach to installation frustrates and occasionally seems simplistic it does prompt the viewer to seek out their own connections between works, and to use the language of the rhizomatic multiplicity, to ‘deterritorialise’ the work from its physical site in the gallery and ask the audience to envisage their own ‘lines of flight’ from one work to the next (1988: 32). Christov-Bakargiev hits the ball into the court of the audience; physical mapping which favours arbitrary connections and practicality, facilitates a focus on the audience mapping psychologically for themselves.
The aforementioned Robert Smithson Island Project Drawing (1970) suffers a fate of hanging close to the floor, highlighting the absence of both the artist and Spiral Jetty in Lia Perjovschi’s Subjective Art History from Modernism to Today (1998-2004/8), which sits above the Smithson work. The highlighting of this gap in Perjovschi’s self-reflexively haphazard history makes the rupturing of narratives and connections in the histories of modern and post-modern art at this biennale in general seem logical.
Deleuze and Guatarri speak further on the nature of rhizomes; a ‘rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’ (2007: 10). This system of thought speaks to the biennale’s flicking in and out of movements, of diverging and ‘entangled lines’ (Deleuze and Guatarri 1988:32) and a tide like return and withdrawal of revolution as a premise to the exhibition’s structure.
Traditional notions of art historical lineage are splintered and take off on unorthodox lines of flight. Rather than envisioning historical figures as the cornerstones of clear, continuous narratives into contemporary practice, they are instead more like the revolutionary moment itself; a point of divergence in many strange directions, and sometimes a point of collapse and seeming withdrawal, followed by points of unexpected return via unorthodox paths. Installation techniques employed in multi media practices across the biennale reflect this, for example, Mike Parr’s 1971-2008 retrospective MIRROR/ARSE on Cockatoo Island has obvious connections in content and ‘period’ to Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 Meat Joy, both with their probes into the meeting of the abject with the spectacle and fetishism of the body on camera. However, despite there being only a few years between Meat Joy and the earliest of Parr’s works in the program, the visceral presence of Parr’s works in the dilapidated sailors quarters is in clear opposition to the depoliticised and mediated display of Schneemann’s work on a flat screen television in a corner of the white cube of the Gallery of New South Wales. The contrasting experiences of these works rupture the meaning of a timeline in which Parr’s work follows obediently on from Schneemann’s in a step-by-step lineage of ‘performative body art’.
Likewise, documentation of other historical works with performative elements such as Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void” 5, rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960 (1960, reprinted 2008) or Valie EXPORT’s Touch Cinema (1968) do not necessarily sit comfortably with What a Fucking Wonderful Audience (2008), a performance ‘by’ Dora García. In one sense, García directly undercuts the notion of the artist’s body as a medium by employing another artist, Kate Blackmore, to perform the work. Thus, in a biennale that is so heavily populated by historical works, Dora García’s work forges connections between her practice and the artists that she speaks about, Guy Debord, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida. And yet with the final artist she speaks about, Chris Burden, the connections back to this tradition of the body in performative practices rise up again in an unexpected way.
In her keynote address, Christov-Bakargiev addressed the etymology of the word revolution: ‘volvere; to turn and revolvere; to turn again’. She stressed that in this sense the exhibition is focused on ‘the formal gestures embedded within the word revolutions; it is not an illustration of revolutions’ (June 26 2008). This seems significant given Dora García’s disconnection from and reconnection to earlier practices in the biennale. However, Oxford American Dictionary cites the etymology of the word revolve slightly differently; as volvere; to roll, + re; back; revolvere: to roll back. As a formal gesture, this etymology alongside Christov Bakargiev’s seems significant in the Sisyphus like motion it evokes. A gesture of the stone rolling back to the bottom of the hill seems fitting in Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s REVOLUTION (2008). The video is a bricolage of scenes appropriated from cinematic versions of revolutions, following the narrative of the birth and crowning of royalty, and then the encroachment of terror upon the luxurious bubble of royalty as revolution approaches. The looping of the video medium highlights that the chaos and debris left in the wake of the revolutions is also the breeding grounds for new leaders to rise to power.
The process apparent in this sense of time in revolution also seems present in the subtext of Pierre Huyghes work A Forest of Lines (2008); over 1000 plants and trees installed in the main theatre of the Sydney Opera House. As oxymoronic as this statement might sound, this work is the one work at the biennale that will be better for those who did not experience it. The beauty of the sentiment of the work suffered in its realisation through wilting plants, overbearing safety precautions, erratic smoke machines (that had the odour of a disco rather than fog) and an evidently exhausted singer. However, within the context of the biennale’s structure of lines of flight that depart from revolutionary moments and individual artworks alike, the work in its abstract state becomes clear and quite beautiful. Focused around the notion of a radically monumental effort to achieve a fleeting image, after the event, the apparition becomes memory and rumour and disperses along tangential narrative lines (Huyghe and Christov-Bakargiev, 10 July 2008).
As a final point, Ryan Gander’s performative piece Loose Associations Lecture (Version 1.1) (9 July 2008) fittingly also reflected the structure of the exhibition as a whole, the first section of the performance focusing around all manner of lines, desire lines, trauma lines, passivity lines. Then, from the image of the interrogation room with its Robin Day polypropylene chairs the lecture took off on a trajectory line of its own, a roller-coaster of Bob Dylan, Gillian Wearing, John Thor - Inspector Morse, the artist formerly known as Prince, London cabbies, and Doctor Mark Chan (the linguist who invented Klingon).
So too might the visitor to the Sydney Biennale find themselves on an unlikely line of flight from Len Lye’s kinetic sculpture Storm King (1964) to Piero Manzoni’s drawing of a line in a tube Linea m10,42 (December 1959). Or from Lene Berg’s interdisciplinary installation in a cottage on Cockatoo Island, The Drowned One, 2008 which questions the properties of truth in photographic images, to collective Claire Fontaine’s Sharing of Private Property (2006), an educational video on how to pick locks. The individual artworks, deterritorialised from their individual spaces to form rhizomal connections with historical and contemporary works alike from across the biennale echoes the aims of the biennale format in general, to deterritorialise art from its site of production and make available (and hopefully relevant) elsewhere (Christov-Bakargiev, 26 June 2008) and indeed, those original desires of the founders of the gallery of NSW.
Bibliography
Art Gallery of New South Wales: History of the Art Gallery http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aboutus/history
Deleauze, Gilles and Felix Guatarri “1914:one or several wolves?” A thousand plateaus: capitalisma and schizophrenia trans Brian Massumi London: Athlone Press, 1988 pp 26 -38.
Contesting Space - Biennales and Protest?
On August 24th 1967 Abbie Hoffman staged an anti-Vietnam war protest at the United States Department of Defence, also known as, the Pentagon. Over 50,000 people focused their psychic powers in an attempt to levitate the building. Almost forty years later, at the inaugural Singapore Biennale, artist Daniel Malone reworked the action as an exercise in relational aesthetics and performance. Malone rallied together 400 school children, local business people and biennale visitors in an attempt to levitate one of the exhibition sites, the Singapore City Hall. The title of the performance ‘Steal this :-)’ at once pays homage to Hoffman’s anarchist politics, while adding artificial sweetener to the slogan, playing off a surface cuteness with a strong undercurrent of irony. Within the climate that Malone’s work was staged, it prodded at local issues of conformity and the state’s imaginative takes on the meaning of free speech, and reflected back upon more global issues of the decay and indeed failure of the protest format in contemporary western society.
Furthermore, this work is a point to begin a discussion of certain works at the Biennale of Sydney 2008 because its meaning doubles back and forth based upon the site the protest is levelled at; the specific site of the city hall-come-white cube. This is a site both loaded in terms of its political and social status within Singapore, and secondly as a space that embraced many of the tropes of the curated gallery for the duration of the biennale. What is most significant about Hoffman’s protest, Malone’s performative artwork and the contestations of the space of the Gallery of New South Wales by Renata Lucas, Dan Perjovschi and Nedko Solakov is that they level criticisms of larger issues or cultural tendencies toward the spaces which both symbolise and epitomise these things.
Hal Foster’s article ‘Archive without museums’ perhaps gives inroads in to why these artists graffiti the gallery’s exterior, turn its central foyer into a work site, and refuse the premise of the gallery as a set and controlled space. Foster posits that the gallery is a turbulent site because of its historical desire to both separate art from the world, to give it its own history and autonomy and yet also connect this art with the social conditions in which it was made and exists in the present. Obviously these two desires ‘are in tension, and the tension runs through the discipline like a fault line…how can art be autonomous and imbricated in social history?’ (101). In many ways the contestations and attacks upon the traditional gallery space constitute a working through of this tension; a question asked of the gallery as a white cube (and as specific site loaded with its own history and politics) but unfolds a parallel dialogue into criticism of museums and galleries as sites symbolic of broader political and social situations.
Nedko Solakov’s work consists of two wall painters locked into a Sisyphean loop; one paints a large wall of the foyer white, while the other paints the other main wall of the foyer black, and then they swap. A mess of blue painters’ tape, plastic drop sheets and conspicuous labourers dressed in paint splattered overalls, the work exposes the systems of labour and construction which the gallery as a white cube so painstakingly hides in the presentation of final exhibitions. Not only does the work call into question the totality of the gallery in the full throws of a major exhibition there is a second level apparent on closer analysis of the work. While the workers’ presence continues pervasively throughout the show, what they paint is also highly pervasive. This is a stark reminder of the ways in which certain politics of the white cube as a space are incumbent. In the context of the Gallery of NSW an example of this would be that the gallery held no works by Aboriginal Australians until 1956, at which point a small collection was donated by an independent organisation.
Renata Lucas’ work consists of wall segments on tracks that the audience can shift around the greater part of the Biennale space in the Gallery of NSW. Lucas’ work undoes the white cube in a literal sense; for example the first segment in the piece, which, although not fully detached, disrupts the long line of Fischli and Weiss, photographs. Aside from disrupting the white cube as a literal space, her moveable walls allow for the viewer to define the space of the gallery within the frame of their own personal agendas, undercutting the notion of the gallery as a space that reflects the ideologies of an institution. Power over the space is placed in the hands of an individual’s concerns.
Perjovschi covers the exterior of the gallery in notebook style, chalk drawn graffiti. Perjovschi is able to negotiate the façade of the gallery in a way that is complex and meaningful in terms of both the autonomous and imbricated nature of the space behind. As a third and final example of the negotiations of the autonomous nature of art and its overlap with broader social politics Perjovschi evokes the autonomy of the gallery with the humour he employs. Much of the humour in these drawings relies on a prior knowledge of art and its history. For example, the drawing that juxtaposes a character flexing its bicep (labelled modernism) with another character with no arm, but a speech bubble containing an image of a flexed bicep (labelled post modernism) relies on an understanding of what the two labels mean for the cleverness and humour of the image to be fully realised. Perjovschi’s work also doubles back on itself, the façade as an austere border between the gallery and the art it holds and the rest of the world is contested in a way that is meaningful to a broad audience by evoking the long history of the vandalism of walls in traditional graffiti as representative of an undercurrent of dissent in society.
Bibliography
Hal Foster, “The Archive without Museums” in October Volume 77 (Summer, 1996), pp. 97 – 119.
Furthermore, this work is a point to begin a discussion of certain works at the Biennale of Sydney 2008 because its meaning doubles back and forth based upon the site the protest is levelled at; the specific site of the city hall-come-white cube. This is a site both loaded in terms of its political and social status within Singapore, and secondly as a space that embraced many of the tropes of the curated gallery for the duration of the biennale. What is most significant about Hoffman’s protest, Malone’s performative artwork and the contestations of the space of the Gallery of New South Wales by Renata Lucas, Dan Perjovschi and Nedko Solakov is that they level criticisms of larger issues or cultural tendencies toward the spaces which both symbolise and epitomise these things.
Hal Foster’s article ‘Archive without museums’ perhaps gives inroads in to why these artists graffiti the gallery’s exterior, turn its central foyer into a work site, and refuse the premise of the gallery as a set and controlled space. Foster posits that the gallery is a turbulent site because of its historical desire to both separate art from the world, to give it its own history and autonomy and yet also connect this art with the social conditions in which it was made and exists in the present. Obviously these two desires ‘are in tension, and the tension runs through the discipline like a fault line…how can art be autonomous and imbricated in social history?’ (101). In many ways the contestations and attacks upon the traditional gallery space constitute a working through of this tension; a question asked of the gallery as a white cube (and as specific site loaded with its own history and politics) but unfolds a parallel dialogue into criticism of museums and galleries as sites symbolic of broader political and social situations.
Nedko Solakov’s work consists of two wall painters locked into a Sisyphean loop; one paints a large wall of the foyer white, while the other paints the other main wall of the foyer black, and then they swap. A mess of blue painters’ tape, plastic drop sheets and conspicuous labourers dressed in paint splattered overalls, the work exposes the systems of labour and construction which the gallery as a white cube so painstakingly hides in the presentation of final exhibitions. Not only does the work call into question the totality of the gallery in the full throws of a major exhibition there is a second level apparent on closer analysis of the work. While the workers’ presence continues pervasively throughout the show, what they paint is also highly pervasive. This is a stark reminder of the ways in which certain politics of the white cube as a space are incumbent. In the context of the Gallery of NSW an example of this would be that the gallery held no works by Aboriginal Australians until 1956, at which point a small collection was donated by an independent organisation.
Renata Lucas’ work consists of wall segments on tracks that the audience can shift around the greater part of the Biennale space in the Gallery of NSW. Lucas’ work undoes the white cube in a literal sense; for example the first segment in the piece, which, although not fully detached, disrupts the long line of Fischli and Weiss, photographs. Aside from disrupting the white cube as a literal space, her moveable walls allow for the viewer to define the space of the gallery within the frame of their own personal agendas, undercutting the notion of the gallery as a space that reflects the ideologies of an institution. Power over the space is placed in the hands of an individual’s concerns.
Perjovschi covers the exterior of the gallery in notebook style, chalk drawn graffiti. Perjovschi is able to negotiate the façade of the gallery in a way that is complex and meaningful in terms of both the autonomous and imbricated nature of the space behind. As a third and final example of the negotiations of the autonomous nature of art and its overlap with broader social politics Perjovschi evokes the autonomy of the gallery with the humour he employs. Much of the humour in these drawings relies on a prior knowledge of art and its history. For example, the drawing that juxtaposes a character flexing its bicep (labelled modernism) with another character with no arm, but a speech bubble containing an image of a flexed bicep (labelled post modernism) relies on an understanding of what the two labels mean for the cleverness and humour of the image to be fully realised. Perjovschi’s work also doubles back on itself, the façade as an austere border between the gallery and the art it holds and the rest of the world is contested in a way that is meaningful to a broad audience by evoking the long history of the vandalism of walls in traditional graffiti as representative of an undercurrent of dissent in society.
Bibliography
Hal Foster, “The Archive without Museums” in October Volume 77 (Summer, 1996), pp. 97 – 119.
On Claude Glasses and Biennales
The curious ‘black mirror’ or Claude glass was a mirror not dissimilar in size and shape to a cosmetic compact mirror. The difference was a dark tint and slightly convex surface. Geoff Park uses the literal lens of the Claude glass as metaphor for the social, political and emotional lenses that affect the process of looking and tint the image that results. Park focuses largely on the symbolic role of these lenses in the transition of rural land into ‘landscape’. However, there are parallels between the anxieties that the popularity of the Claude glass reflected and the fruitless search of Mitchell’s European tourists’ for the ‘real’ Orient outside of their own representations of it, both in literature and at the numerous international expositions held since the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” in London in 1851.
The Claude glass provided two useful illusions for the artist or tourist chasing the picturesque in the 18th and 19th century. The first effect of the Claude glass was to render sight / the site more ‘picture-like’; the dark tint separated out tones and the convex shape softened the edges of the objects. The sprawl of suburbia during industrial revolution had made strange once familiar countryside environments, and in their place, the pictorial representations of such sites must have seemed more and more familiar, allowing the beholder to indulge in a nostalgic and sentimentalised relationship with places that only existed in images (Park, 118). This ‘picturesque’ vision that the Claude glass made clear to the viewer allowed the world to be quickly marked out as an object, an object at least partially determined by what the viewer believed it should look like.
The second effect of the convex surface of the Claude glass was to miniaturise the landscape, far beyond the scope of the camera lucida, to render any outlook literally in the palm of one’s hand. This miniaturisation, alongside the picture-like rendering, gave a sort of control paired with detached, diplomatic immunity, because of the artificial distance it created between the viewer and the site. This is not specific to the Claude glass-wielding suburbanite of imperial Britain. Like Mitchell’s tourists in Cairo equipped with dark glasses and camouflaging attire, the Claude glass allowed its user the possibility of an ‘observing gaze’; to be ‘surrounded by yet excluded from’ the scene before them (Mitchell, 223). Indeed, this desire to hold the whole world in one’s hands spills over into the international exhibition, a much more spectacular reflection of the same desires and fears. Mitchell emphasises, ‘World exhibition here refers to…the world conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition’ (Mitchell, pp 222, my italics). The term grasped connoting not only the will and desire to know, but to have and to contain.
In the case of contemporary exhibitions, curatorial desire and pressure to contain and condense the world continues. One of the significant roles of biennials across the world today is as ‘the places where things perceived as irreconcilable are brought together from all directions’ (Hug pp. 33). Furthermore, Hug sites the specific goal of the São Paulo Bienal as the making possible a redistribution of culture in the world (32). The goal of the biennial curator is to leave no margin outside of their hand, that no new talent may remain hidden (Hug, 33). Yet, Hug’s declaration that the city of São Paulo echoes the ‘showroom’ of the exhibition (34) reminds us that a world held so tightly, miniaturised like an image in a Claude glass is both constructed around the fears and desires of its holder but as an image also constructs and informs further images (Mitchell, 224).
Bibliography
Alfons Hug, “The Bienal as a Free Territory” in 2004 São Paulo Bienal. São Paulo: Fundação Bienial de São Paulo, 2004, pp. 30 – 37
Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:2 (April 1989), pp. 217 – 236
Geoff Park, “Theatre Country” in Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and Whenua, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113 – 127
The Claude glass provided two useful illusions for the artist or tourist chasing the picturesque in the 18th and 19th century. The first effect of the Claude glass was to render sight / the site more ‘picture-like’; the dark tint separated out tones and the convex shape softened the edges of the objects. The sprawl of suburbia during industrial revolution had made strange once familiar countryside environments, and in their place, the pictorial representations of such sites must have seemed more and more familiar, allowing the beholder to indulge in a nostalgic and sentimentalised relationship with places that only existed in images (Park, 118). This ‘picturesque’ vision that the Claude glass made clear to the viewer allowed the world to be quickly marked out as an object, an object at least partially determined by what the viewer believed it should look like.
The second effect of the convex surface of the Claude glass was to miniaturise the landscape, far beyond the scope of the camera lucida, to render any outlook literally in the palm of one’s hand. This miniaturisation, alongside the picture-like rendering, gave a sort of control paired with detached, diplomatic immunity, because of the artificial distance it created between the viewer and the site. This is not specific to the Claude glass-wielding suburbanite of imperial Britain. Like Mitchell’s tourists in Cairo equipped with dark glasses and camouflaging attire, the Claude glass allowed its user the possibility of an ‘observing gaze’; to be ‘surrounded by yet excluded from’ the scene before them (Mitchell, 223). Indeed, this desire to hold the whole world in one’s hands spills over into the international exhibition, a much more spectacular reflection of the same desires and fears. Mitchell emphasises, ‘World exhibition here refers to…the world conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition’ (Mitchell, pp 222, my italics). The term grasped connoting not only the will and desire to know, but to have and to contain.
In the case of contemporary exhibitions, curatorial desire and pressure to contain and condense the world continues. One of the significant roles of biennials across the world today is as ‘the places where things perceived as irreconcilable are brought together from all directions’ (Hug pp. 33). Furthermore, Hug sites the specific goal of the São Paulo Bienal as the making possible a redistribution of culture in the world (32). The goal of the biennial curator is to leave no margin outside of their hand, that no new talent may remain hidden (Hug, 33). Yet, Hug’s declaration that the city of São Paulo echoes the ‘showroom’ of the exhibition (34) reminds us that a world held so tightly, miniaturised like an image in a Claude glass is both constructed around the fears and desires of its holder but as an image also constructs and informs further images (Mitchell, 224).
Bibliography
Alfons Hug, “The Bienal as a Free Territory” in 2004 São Paulo Bienal. São Paulo: Fundação Bienial de São Paulo, 2004, pp. 30 – 37
Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:2 (April 1989), pp. 217 – 236
Geoff Park, “Theatre Country” in Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and Whenua, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113 – 127
Monday, October 13, 2008
Middle as End as Beginning
Sanderson, Anna. “Brainpark” and “Haesje van Cleyburgh” from Brainpark. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006: 9 – 16.
It seems fitting (and I’m guessing not entirely coincidental) that the final words in the reader, that has guided these blogs for this year, might be used as an eloquent metaphor for thinking about the importance of reading theoretical material as a creative practitioner. The final words are as follows: ‘As long as you keep looking, she keeps forming and reforming’ (Sanderson, 16).
Writer and one-time artist, Anna Sanderson, in her essay from Brainpark, is here referring to the process of looking at a painting of the woman Haesje van Cleyburgh by Rembrandt. The words guide the reader to think about the work perhaps, more than anything, as a series of shifting possibilities. Formally, flesh has the possibility of a double life as a ‘swirl of greenish yellow, a quietly roaring pink, a murky brown orange’, while what is signified slips between the fingers or oscillates between ‘something humbled’ in her character and something ‘superior’. It seems that this slow and contemplative process of ‘forming and reforming’ sits in relation to the gathering and dissipation of relationships and connections; how one positions one’s body, how the woman’s character unfolds and then collapses again in relation to the time it takes to look at her, how the work appears the same or somehow different with each visit.
Though the excerpts from Sanderson’s Brainpark stand out as probably the most strikingly different in style from the other parts of the reader, this final sentence is a reminder that ‘with time, the development of relationships is inevitable. Entanglements occur.’ (Randerson, 242). The positioning of this piece of writing within the context of the reader is sensitive to the possibility of a development of relationships outside of the piece itself. In this sense, though the Brainpark excerpt comes at the end of the reader, and the excerpt itself is taken from the beginning of a larger work, in terms of a set of relations that the practice of reading for creative practice establishes, this piece of writing may well later be found reformed in a centre, below a surface, at a periphery, at a beginning or at an end.
Works Cited
Bywater, Jon., ed. Critical Studies Reading Group Readings 2008: FINE ARTS 756 &790, PGDipFA & BFA(Hons). University of Auckland: April 2008
Randerson, Jo "Everything We Know" in Are Angels OK?: The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists. Callaghan, Paul and Bill Manhire (ed.s) Victoria University Press, 2006: 237 - 255.
Sanderson, Anna. “Brainpark” and “Haesje van Cleyburgh” from Brainpark. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006: 9 – 16.
It seems fitting (and I’m guessing not entirely coincidental) that the final words in the reader, that has guided these blogs for this year, might be used as an eloquent metaphor for thinking about the importance of reading theoretical material as a creative practitioner. The final words are as follows: ‘As long as you keep looking, she keeps forming and reforming’ (Sanderson, 16).
Writer and one-time artist, Anna Sanderson, in her essay from Brainpark, is here referring to the process of looking at a painting of the woman Haesje van Cleyburgh by Rembrandt. The words guide the reader to think about the work perhaps, more than anything, as a series of shifting possibilities. Formally, flesh has the possibility of a double life as a ‘swirl of greenish yellow, a quietly roaring pink, a murky brown orange’, while what is signified slips between the fingers or oscillates between ‘something humbled’ in her character and something ‘superior’. It seems that this slow and contemplative process of ‘forming and reforming’ sits in relation to the gathering and dissipation of relationships and connections; how one positions one’s body, how the woman’s character unfolds and then collapses again in relation to the time it takes to look at her, how the work appears the same or somehow different with each visit.
Though the excerpts from Sanderson’s Brainpark stand out as probably the most strikingly different in style from the other parts of the reader, this final sentence is a reminder that ‘with time, the development of relationships is inevitable. Entanglements occur.’ (Randerson, 242). The positioning of this piece of writing within the context of the reader is sensitive to the possibility of a development of relationships outside of the piece itself. In this sense, though the Brainpark excerpt comes at the end of the reader, and the excerpt itself is taken from the beginning of a larger work, in terms of a set of relations that the practice of reading for creative practice establishes, this piece of writing may well later be found reformed in a centre, below a surface, at a periphery, at a beginning or at an end.
Works Cited
Bywater, Jon., ed. Critical Studies Reading Group Readings 2008: FINE ARTS 756 &790, PGDipFA & BFA(Hons). University of Auckland: April 2008
Randerson, Jo "Everything We Know" in Are Angels OK?: The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists. Callaghan, Paul and Bill Manhire (ed.s) Victoria University Press, 2006: 237 - 255.
Sanderson, Anna. “Brainpark” and “Haesje van Cleyburgh” from Brainpark. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006: 9 – 16.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Camouflage
Sholette, Gregory. “Disciplining the Avant-Garde: the United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble”, CIRCA: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland 112, Summer 2005: 50 – 59
Gregory Sholette writes from the perspective of what I have earlier termed, a ‘slasher’ (see my blog, on Seth Price from earlier this year). He occupies the roles of artist, activist, writer and academic simultaneously and through the course of this article demonstrates the degree to which United States’ Homeland Security constructs all of these positions as ‘enemy’.
Yet, Sholette is the first to admit that the ways in which artists, writers and academics (and many others) have become artist/activists, writer/activists, academic/activists (etc) in the past are now ‘largely useless’ within the deterritorialised political environments of contemporary culture. Political power operates anonymously and therefore eludes confrontation (4). Sites or individuals that were once the targets of direct confrontation have traded in their bullseyes for camouflage, the activist who is also artist, academic or writer may well be armed, but has precious little to aim at.
Daniel Malone’s Steal this :-) at the in inaugural Singapore Biennale is an example of the way that seats of power are have become deterritorialised and anonymous. Malone restaged a well-known 1967 protest as a performative artwork and exercise in relational aesthetics. Steal this :-) hinged on the tension between the protest organised by Abbie Hoffman in its original context (at the pentagon in 1967) and that this protest had been reconfigured as an ‘artwork’ within the context of the biennale. The work acknowledged a slippage and confusion as to who or what exactly the protest in its restaging was being levelled at; the building that the crowd attempted to levitate was both the Singapore Town Hall and one of the exhibition sites (or was this site a stand in for the Pentagon?). Likewise the majority of participants in Steal this :-) were children visiting the exhibition on school trips, leaving a sort of reflexive openness about the political legitimacy of this artwork as protest (Malone).
Given local issues of conformity and freedom of speech in Singapore it is strangely perhaps the ‘fuzy’ (Sholette, 5) nature of this work that allowed it to take place at all. The work, by giving a sweetened, general idea of a protest, by adopting its own camouflage, is perhaps able to prod (albeit gently) at those local issues. That the work existed as an artwork and not as a protest whose success would have been measured on scale of real political outcome reflects back upon (and indeed protests against) the decay, and indeed failure, of the traditional protest format in contemporary western society.
Sholette, Gregory. “Disciplining the Avant-Garde: the United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble”, CIRCA: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland 112, Summer 2005: 50 – 59
Malone, Daniel. Artist’s Talk. Bachelor of Fine Arts (Third Year). Elam Lecture Theatre, Elam School of Fine Art, University of Auckland. April 2007.
Blindness...but what if there's nothing to look at anyway?
Campbell, David. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”. Journal for Contemporary Cultural Research. Vol. 8, No. 1, Routledge, 2004: 55 -74
The key agenda of David Campbell’s article “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media” is to unravel some of the hidden narratives behind why certain images of horror and violence go unpublished in mainstream media. Yet, its secondary agenda seems to be to actually tell some of these stories that hitherto have gone untold in their fullness, for example, the Bahr el Ghazal famine (68 – 69). The stories that Campbell tells are in part to illustrate his points, and on the other hand for the sake of their being told. Given this, it strikes as somewhat odd that these stories themselves go unillustrated. Perhaps Campbell sees that the fact that these stories have been told at all as some sort of inroads to the problems he outlines, in which case, the power of no images comes to the fore.
One horrifying story in the news in 2007 and 2008 was the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal. This disappearance, like many disappearances, was characterised by a continuing lack of images, as Madeleine went unfound, with only her portrait and the blank façade of the holiday park repeating in the media day after day. Hope for her safe return was constantly problematised by this lack of images. This lack created a scenario wherein the worst (whatever that may have been for each viewer) remained and remains constantly possible.
The Telegraph online archive page
Works Cited
Campbell, David. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”. Journal for Contemporary Cultural Research. Vol. 8, No. 1, Routledge, 2004: 55 -74
Madeleine McCann – Latest News of the Search – Telegraph 12 October 2008. Telegraph.co.uk accessed 12 October 2008
The key agenda of David Campbell’s article “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media” is to unravel some of the hidden narratives behind why certain images of horror and violence go unpublished in mainstream media. Yet, its secondary agenda seems to be to actually tell some of these stories that hitherto have gone untold in their fullness, for example, the Bahr el Ghazal famine (68 – 69). The stories that Campbell tells are in part to illustrate his points, and on the other hand for the sake of their being told. Given this, it strikes as somewhat odd that these stories themselves go unillustrated. Perhaps Campbell sees that the fact that these stories have been told at all as some sort of inroads to the problems he outlines, in which case, the power of no images comes to the fore.
One horrifying story in the news in 2007 and 2008 was the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal. This disappearance, like many disappearances, was characterised by a continuing lack of images, as Madeleine went unfound, with only her portrait and the blank façade of the holiday park repeating in the media day after day. Hope for her safe return was constantly problematised by this lack of images. This lack created a scenario wherein the worst (whatever that may have been for each viewer) remained and remains constantly possible.
The Telegraph online archive page
Works Cited
Campbell, David. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”. Journal for Contemporary Cultural Research. Vol. 8, No. 1, Routledge, 2004: 55 -74
Madeleine McCann – Latest News of the Search – Telegraph 12 October 2008. Telegraph.co.uk accessed 12 October 2008
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