Julie Rrap: Remaking the World

Julie Rrap

Remaking the World

Julie Rrap

Artists dreaming

Remaking the World

Julie Rrap. Remaking the World The Vizard Foundation Contemporary Artist Project 2015 Curator Dr Vincent Alessi Published by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, on the occasion of the exhibition Julie Rrap. Remaking the World, 23 July–15 November 2015.

Text © 2015, the authors and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne.

Images © Julie Rrap.

This catalogue is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-0-7340-4910-0 Design by 5678 Design Printed by Adams Print, Melbourne The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia Email potter-info@unimelb.edu.au www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au Patron Lady Potter AC

The Vizard Foundation

Julie Rrap has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, for the production of several works in the exhibition.

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Artists dreaming

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Nicole Walkerden Justene Williams Sam Schoenbaum Kate Murphy Ben Ali Ong Daniel Mudie Cunningham Janet Laurence Hilarie Mais Joyce Hinterding Cherine Fahd Todd Robinson David Collins Michael Goldberg Irenaeus Herok Liz Day Richard Goodwin Matthys Gerber Lindy Lee Gary Warner Jessica Mais Wright Eugenia Raskopoulos David Haines Ben Denham Julie Rrap Anthony Bond Mikala Dwyer Anne Graham Anne Ferran Barbara Campbell Adri Valery Wrens

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Foreword Kelly Gellatly, Director

The Ian Potter Museum of Art is delighted to present Julie Rrap. Remaking the World, a major exhibition of the work of one of Australia’s most celebrated and innovative multidisciplinary artists. Remaking the World is the fifth in the Potter’s series of Vizard Foundation Contemporary Artist Projects, a creative initiative of the Vizard Foundation which offers mid-career and senior artists a significant grant to produce new work.

Following on from previous exhibitions by Jenny Watson (2011), Geoff Lowe/A Constructed World (2012), Philip Brophy (2013) and Stephen Bush (2014), Rrap’s expansive and ambitious conception of the project has seen the artist create an entirely new body of work—ranging from photography, installation, video, interactive screen-based work to sculpture—that both ruminates upon and investigates the role of the artist and the genesis of the creative act; at once elusive, determined, ‘magical’ and meaningful.

Through the exhibition and this accompanying publication—both deliberately open-ended and exploratory in design and approach—we are encouraged to quite literally reflect upon the motivations and potential contributions of artists, and the way in which Rrap and her artist colleagues, through their respective practices, effectively ‘remake’ the world. Not surprisingly for Julie Rrap, an artist whose work has revolved around the art—and act— of performance for several decades, these questions continue to involve the use and representation of her own body as performer, subject and object in an ongoing dialogue around consumption, voyeurism and display.

This handsome publication includes new writing on Julie Rrap’s practice by philosopher Adrian Parr and the exhibition’s curator, Dr Vincent Alessi, and I thank them both for their contributions and the insights they contain. Thanks are also due to the Vizard Foundation for their ongoing support of the Potter, this exhibition, and the Contemporary Artist Project series as a whole. The invaluable acknowledgement and encouragement that the Foundation provides artists at this important stage of their careers is unique within Australia and their generous contribution continues to resonate.

Thanks are due to the Potter’s Curator, Joanna Bosse, who valiantly took over the coordination of the project following Vincent Alessi’s recent departure from the museum to pursue a role in academia; Collections and Exhibitions Officer Steve Martin and Museum Preparator Adam Pyett, as well as to all of the Potter staff for helping to ensure the exhibition’s success. Finally, we warmly congratulate Julie Rrap and thank her for her work.

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Remaking the World Adrian Parr

The spectator’s eyes rest upon solitary bodies deep in slumber. They are surrounded by emptiness and yet filled with dream states. Eyes shut, the faces of sleep are simplified by rest and intensified by the piercing gaze of a witness. These bodies do not return the spectator’s gaze. Inside the building they are suspended upside down. Outside, their sleep forms dreamscapes that activate public space with extraordinary intimacy. The viewer looks up from the street to a sky laden with the solace of sleep and the allure of infinite departure. Despite turning their head away the images of sleep endure for the viewer. So too, the curious contemplation of what the sleeping bodies are imagining persists.

No longer visible and yet present, sleeping bodies become the imagination of the waking.

Working with video, sculpture, performance, technology and photography, Julie Rrap has over the course of her practice developed a relational aesthetics. Her work is a little like a playful and ironic version of contact sport, except in place of aggression and competition she presents a quirky spin on the ordinary, discovering intimacy in the most unlikely places and objects. Rrap tensions the fanciful with the banal, connecting the natural and artificial to create quasi-surreal topographies. Her differential combination of bodies, technology, imagery, and objects works to transform the possibilities of what can be seen, felt, and thought. As Elizabeth Grosz writes: ‘Art enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify—to resonate and become more than itself’.1 In Remaking the World bodies, affects, surfaces, textures, interior and exterior spaces, images, mutating forms, and durational forces form a poetic constellation. The differences between these are not fixed. Indeed, they defy measurement, the logic of reason, and the finality of signification. These are qualitative differences that playfully combine the factuality of existence and concrete matter with the ebb and flow of dreaming and imagination.

Observing the sleeping figure, the viewer witnesses a moment of making that is ultimately unknowable. For in sleep subjectivity is opened up infinitely. Sleep deterritorializes a body, loosening up the fixed relations of everyday motions and habits, lightening the muscles and deepening the breath, stillness takes hold and the unexpected is embraced.

Dreaming deterritorializes space, opening up conventional spaces of order and division to the oceanic realm of nomadic smooth space.2 Dreaming deterritorializes time, blending the sluggish with the choppy, creating multiple rhythms and thrumming counterpoint.

These invisible spaces and times of artists’ dreaming and dream world excess are potential worlds drifting around the gallery, destabilizing the formalism of the white cube as they entice the viewer’s imagination with their immanence.

Remaking is a re-turning, dappling the present with the futurity of memory.

Dreaming is a truth, an incomplete truth.

Shards of time circulate tiny clues ready for the taking.

A sleeping body presents a constellation of reverberating sensation, soaked with imaginative cues space is saturated.

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Each body exists in its own space and time. Bodies form constellations of wakefulness and sleep. Durational combinations link different events—sleeping, witnessing, and moving images—that overlap and underwrite collective imaginings. Collective imaginings are therefore constituted relationally. The invisible and visible, form and formlessness, space and time, fixity and change differentiate each other.

In the gallery adjacent to where the hanging screens of sleeping artists are, is Remaking the World: In Her image, an installation of photographs, sculpture, video, and kinesthetic devices. Four large photographs depicting images of the artist on cloth, twist, tumble, collapse, and fall as they are blown from the artist’s lips. These red, blue, and yellow images conjure up the elements: fire, earth, and water. The photographic series culminates in an image showing all the cloth images combined to form the earth. Dispersed throughout the gallery are shiny aluminum sculptures of the artist’s hands enticing the viewer to engage with them by taking a peek through the peephole they form or to join in on the clapping. The artist’s hands are gesturing wildly, whimsically, steadily, stridently, and softly.

Meanwhile, a video follows Rrap’s eyes in close-up as her pupils steadily expand to the point where her entire iris becomes black, only to then unexpectedly turn white. The all-seeing eye turns blind.

It is almost as if this nearly hallucinatory constellation of video, photographic, and sculptural elements come together to produce the depths of formal excess. Together, fact and dream constitute collective imaginings in Remaking the World. The specular structure of the imaginary is alienating; it brings disjointed images into relationship with a reflected image of unity.3 Yet this unity is merely the excess of a fragmented real. What Rrap has done is make the excess productive, infusing the ‘unified’ image with collective imaginings to make apparent an inherent chaos, understood in the sense that Grosz does when she explains chaos consists of a ‘plethora of orders’ not ‘absolute disorder’.4 This has the effect of stimulating the energetic forces and raw materiality of image making. And for this reason the relational form conditioning Remaking the World is utopian.

Rrap’s utopianism emerges from a formalist register, in the manner of Fredric Jameson’s understanding of the term. That is when utopianism presents a ‘future, imaginary or not’ which ‘also returns upon our present to play a diagnostic and a critical-substantive role’.5 The politics of utopia does not arise from ideal representations of how the world should be, this being a normative framework with a powerful moralizing undercurrent. The former presents an image of future perfection to unite the present; the latter tempts the present with the unpredictability of the future. The former also offers the safety of a clear beginning and end, freezing time in its tracks; the latter is persistently unforeseeable, dynamic, and alive. What makes utopian thinking political is less a matter of content than it is form, in other words from the very act of asserting or invoking the potentiality of change. Put differently, the politics of utopianism comes from the very practice of re-making the present through a stretch of the imagination and presenting alternatives to what currently exists as a way to test and experiment with the present.

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The sleeping bodies of Remaking the World do not assume that humanist values drive how the world is made and re-made. This is not the individual subject who exercises their powers of reason and moral judgment to respond to the question of change. Rather this is a poetic subject transversally conditioned in a matrix of reason and unreason, humanity and technology, pragmatic thinking and experimental dreaming, not unlike what Rosi Braidotti calls the posthuman.6 In particular, the sleeping bodies render humanist distinctions between self/other, subject/object, center/margin, nature/culture, rationality/irrationality uncertain. The work appeals to a collectivist impulse literally bringing into the fold fellow artists from across generations with different races and sexes and who also have very different art practices. They have agreed to share their time in sleep in Rrap’s studio by poetically creating a shared dreamscape of sleeping bodies, who, together with the artist and audience, all constitute a virtual community of poetic subjects.

It is the potential of change that creates an abstract arc across the sleeping bodies, the artist, and audience. They are connected not by meaning, or the order of grammar as Lacan described the socialization of infants, or even a representation that synthesizes a manifold of images in the way Kant understood imagination. Instead, they are associated by a principle of relationality that invokes the individual faculties of imagination as socially constituted and politically constitutive.

If there is any political reality at all to be gleaned from aesthetic practice in the age of digital reproduction and mass media communications then it would come from the innovative relationship art making generates between episteme (knowledge), techne (craft), poiesis (poetic creation), physis (physical world), praxis (practice), and phronesis (practical reason). Provocatively synthesizing these aesthetic processes breakdowns the operation of violence that structures everyday reality—the exploitation of people and natural resources; the uneven relations of class, race, gender, sexuality, and speciesism; skewed power relations; and unequal access to opportunity and health. Art under these circumstances can subvert or even dismantle the aesthetic operation of subjective violence that has resulted in the affective power of images being turned into a political displacement activity.7 As Rancière incisively points out, it is through the distribution of the sensible that human perception is delimited demarcating the visible and what remains invisible, who is heard and unheard, and what is thought and unthought. As such, aesthetics takes on an especially political tenor. It is capable of redistributing the sensible, hereby re-organizing the social field and bringing what was otherwise invisible and inaudible in to the light of day. In this way, relational aesthetics introduces a hypothetic site of creative production whereupon alternative political affects are mobilized.8 The very act of distributing and redistributing the sensible is, for Rancière, inherently political because it sets the limits of possibility for how political subjectivity is thought and practiced. Rrap’s Remaking the World offers a clarion call to harness the affective, energetic, materialist, and temporal registers of life in all its unpredictable motion in a collective effort to re-make the world. The sleeping subject as a pragmatic force in the process of re-making the world deterritorializes the liberal humanist project of a ‘rational’ individual citizen who makes the world through political representation. This is the one-man one-vote central to Western representative democracy. It assumes a fully coherent and unitary subject whose intact self-representation arises from the exercise of reason and the politically charged location of citizenship. In Remaking the World the locus of change is the imagination and it occurs through the unstable and fluctuating states of dreaming.

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The relationality Remaking the World invokes is not between finite beings; rather it is a power that traverses the intellectual boundary inscribing these. Remaking the World does not holistically fuse together difference, it activates libidinal energies and releases fragments of creative production that defy unification in an imago of the Lacanian mirror image. The relationality of re-making plays an ‘ontological role’ where relations operate as ‘transversal and interdependent’.9 A community of makers comes into being not because of a lack they collectively share; such as the resilient subject Brad Evans and Julian Reid trenchantly critique10 or through a ‘shared vulnerability’ as Braidotti justifiably interrogates.11 Here a community is formed through acts of collective imagining that operate across multiple spaces, various times, and in a variety of ways (sculpture, performance, moving image). Through sleep the collective operation of imagination is re-organized.

Rrap combines the vulnerability and uselessness of slumber with the intimacy of private imagining and the public realities of collective witnessing and spectatorship. Dreaming bodies oscillate from a lived presence, to a video simulacrum to an intangible relation occurring between viewer, sleeper, artist, and video monitor.

Descending quietly, the event of us disappears but never entirely.

Unspoken, frozen, nothing left to speak, everytime, everything, all in succession, and no crimson ribbon to tie the every together, that is except for collective imaginings.

Through sleep the body is plunged into a chaosmos, composed chaos, as Deleuze and Guattari might say.12 Sleeping bodies are not merely empty vessels at rest, they are intensely complex, both material and immaterial, or ‘matter-realities’ to borrow a term Braidotti develops to refer to practices and theoretical paradigms that focus on ‘the force and autonomy of affect and the logistics of its actualization’. What this means politically is that the emphasis is given to the ‘micro-politics of relations’.13 In Remaking the World pragmatic configurations of affects, forces, matter, and energy congeal into vulnerable constellations founded on estrangement, curiosity, and wonder. Vulnerable not in the sense of being at existential risk, rather vulnerability is produced through tentative qualitative configurations that consist of intimacy, sensitivity, disobedience, and speculative strength.

The undifferentiated flux of dreamscapes escapes the order of Law, the myth of social hierarchy, psychic lack, and the authority of sovereign power. Provisionally ordered dreaming is relationality formed amidst people, technology, duration, and multiple contexts.

Together these articulate the indeterminate character of both the present and future.

Ultimately, this constellation affirms the political potential of relational aesthetics.

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Imagination begins with a drive for co-creation, promiscuously combining matter, duration, force, sensation, and bodies forming unholy alliances across space and time. Imagination begins when making is considered poetically, eliciting wonder, sensuality, and memory; arousing anxiety and hope; all the while straddling a fine line between danger and delight.

Imagination begins with a simple choice of making. And yet imagination proceeds not by choice or even by the will of a single agent, rather through an act of falling: falling out of habit and falling for the lure of unfamiliarity. Imagination begins by falling in love despite an ability to choose otherwise. It therefore begins the moment absolute freedom is suspended.

It is a moment when pre-personal forces connect with intellect and together they succumb to the productive motions of desire in all its energetic intensity. Imagination returns the sun’s rays to the lights of the night sky. It recalls he tenuous ghosts of yesterday hiding amid the shadows of the present, feeling the darkness of being amidst the lightness of a spring shower. Pinpointing the forest inside the trees, art emboldens the idiosyncratic and eccentric. In making new worlds imagination re-makes the world.

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Grosz, E, Chaos, territory, art, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, p. 4.

2 Deleuze, G, & F Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans.

Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987, pp 481–482.

3 Lacan, J, The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1 Freud’s papers on technique 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, WW Norton, New York, 1991, pp 73–80.

4

Gross, p. 5. op. cit.

5 Jameson, F, ‘The politics of utopia’, New Left Review, 25, Jan-Feb, 2004, accessed 10 May 2015 <http://newleftreview.org/II/25/fredric-jameson-the-politics-of-utopia> 6

Braidotti, R, The posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013.

7 Parr, A, The wrath of capital: Neoliberalism and climate change politics, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013, pp 130–144; and Zizek, S, Violence: Six sideways reflections, Picador, New York, 2008.

8 Rancière, J, The politics of aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum: London & New York, 2004.

9

Braidotti, p. 93. op. cit.

10 Evans, B & J Reid, Resilient life: The art of living dangerously, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2014.

11 Braidotti. op. cit.

12 Deleuze, G, & F Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, pp 204–205.

13 Braidotti, p. 95. op. cit.

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Julie Rrap: Remaking the World in Her image Dr Vincent Alessi Astronomy compels the soul to look upward, and leads us from this world to another.

Plato 342 BCE In March 1990 NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit embarking on the most ambitious and knowledge-changing project since Galileo pointed his telescope skywards. Since then, Hubble has completed over a million observations in space, transmitting images back to Earth with the explicit aim of enabling us to begin to understand the birth of the universe and our place within it. These images of the familiar, such as finely rendered depictions of our nearest planetary neighbours, to the hauntingly strange formations of collapsing stars or gas-induced cloud-like columns of distant solar systems, constantly surprise and astound us. They compel us because, as Plato declared, they lead us imaginatively and spiritually from this world to another. They capture the early incarnations of solar systems, planets and other celestial objects. They effectively open a window for us on creation at its most powerful, a chance to see the making of solar systems and planets, the making of other worlds. Julie Rrap’s photograph Remaking the World #4 could very well be part of Hubble’s amazing gallery of images.

A kaleidoscopic circular form sits dynamically against a deep endless black background; Remaking the World #4, looks like a photograph of a planet or constellation of stars floating in space. We are seduced by its dynamism and colour, by its perfectly retained circular shape; a consequence of gravitational forces, which ensure spinning matter holds together in such splendid symmetry. However, upon closer inspection—a natural human response when confronted with objects of both beauty and intrigue—we note that this celestial formation is in fact a constellation consisting of thousands of images of the artist tumbling through space. Artists have always interrogated the world in which they live, drawing on its complexities, diversities and co-existing parts for inspiration and subject.

However, in this work, Rrap extends this long-held tradition to effectively create a new orb on which we might exist. It is an image that, like the others in this exhibition, interrogates the role of the artist and creative practice more broadly. Like the images produced by Hubble’s inquisitive peering lenses, Rrap presents an image of wonder, which is open for personal and communal interpretation. Remaking the World #4 is both part of and central to the understanding of the other works in this exhibition, and while Rrap has often started a series of work with a central image or idea which plays the role of catalyst from which other works are created, it does not mean that her exhibitions are narrative based. Rather, they are held together by a conceptual logic where one idea can flow into another or deflect the artist into associated but unchartered waters. Rrap’s art, as described by Victoria Lynn, ‘emerges from a period of overlapping and independent streams of activity, and calls for a variety of ideas to be discussed.’1 This exhibition continues this practice and while there is no definitive first work one can see both conceptual and aesthetic relationships throughout, such as the recurring use of an image of Rrap’s body as a floating form or the mechanical structures that present and frame sculptural and video based works. Likewise, this exhibition of new work has intimate links with past works and installations: Remaking the World is part of Rrap’s artistic continuum.

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Rrap’s practice has been defined by its purposeful aesthetic diversity. At its core are performance, photography, the body and the complex relationship between the artist, the art and the viewer. However, Rrap has never engaged with these elements didactically or within the accepted parameters established by those before her. Instead she has interrogated and critiqued all of these aspects. Her performances cannot be viewed within the traditional parameters of performance practice as we understand it. They are not public, instead only visible in reproduction: mostly photographic but also sculpturally. The use of photography, described by Blair French as the ‘conceptual touchstone’ of Rrap’s practice, was a logical extension from her previous career as a commercial photographer for fine art publications, magazine and exhibition catalogues.2 This technology, which was both comfortable and familiar, was used as the core medium for the works in her first exhibition, Disclosures: A photographic construct (1982), and has continued to be a mainstay as a means of conceptually interrogating the art historical canon, in particular, the representation of the female body in a male dominated history. For Rrap, photography plays a central role in the objectification of women. Her use of it inverts the power relationship and takes ownership of representation. Rrap’s interest in the body has always been central to the work she has created. Describing ways of beginning to understand her work, Rrap declared that the body ‘is a common reference point through which to engage the viewer more directly.’3 She has done this most challengingly through the repetitive use of her own body, placing it at the core of her oeuvre, represented photographically and sculpturally, complete and dismembered, static and in motion. The final aspect, which has come to define Rrap’s work, is the relationship between the artist, the art and the viewer and how, as Rrap has commented previously ‘each is transformed by the others’.4 Rrap believes that this symbiotic relationship needs to be one that is challenging and open to interpretation. It should ask many questions of the audience and challenge them to take a leap of faith to unravel what is before them. She demands of her audience to do some work. Explaining her intense interest and belief in this sort of relationship Rrap declared to Terence Maloon in 1998:

The work I make now is not so easy to grasp, nor to convert into language. That doesn’t worry me. I think I’ve developed a secret space for myself again. I also believe there’s a power in imagery that can be mysterious without being obscure.

I feel more and more—and this is really an Australian problem—that people here are rather suspicious of the power that something visual can have: they’d prefer to fill it up with language and with explanation… Now I spend more time trying to imagine what a work would look like and how it would affect me if I were to walk into a room, rather than thinking: ‘What does this mean, and how can I form some rhetoric around it?’

All of these four key pillars of Rrap’s practice are present in this current exhibition. They all co-exist as well as inform and play against each other; all having an equal place in completing the work and the experience.

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Remaking the World brings together many of Rrap’s concerns across two gallery spaces.

Like many well-known opposites—dark and light, night and day, life and death, awake and asleep—the two spaces co-exist and are reliant on each other to complete a whole. The exhibition is not lineal: one does not walk through one space to the next in some sort of logical or predetermined path. Instead the viewer can enter and exit at any point, begin with any work, and the experience remains the same. These two spaces—one titled Remaking the World: Artists dreaming and the other Remaking the World: In Her image are defined by the communal and the personal. Both are ruminations on the creative process: how it has been viewed in the past and how we understand it today. Moreover, they pose the question of the role and perception of the artist and their capacity to remake worlds.

The space Remaking the World: Artists dreaming consists of one work: an installation of twenty suspended monitors projecting thirty randomly appearing artists in a state of sleep.

Each artist, including Rrap, lies in a bed of crisp white linen, filmed from above, amplifying their skin tone and hair colour. The use of this simplified composition has strong parallels with the art historical canon. The framing of the figure from the waist up creates a crucifixlike structure, reminiscent of endless religious paintings, while the minimum appearance of colour, dominated by white, relates to the early modernists, such as Kazmir Malevich and the later minimalists, like Donald Judd and Robert Morris.

Always appearing inverted with their heads closest to the ground, the installation of artists resembles a colony of suspended bats. However, these artists are not merely asleep: they are in the more active state of dreaming. Thirty artists were invited by Rrap to visit her studio and to sleep and subsequently dream on the concept of remaking the world.

As Rrap declares, the practice of visual artists ‘manifests a type of remaking of the world through their perceptions and realisations’ and the collection of these works by institutions and individuals alike, catalogue and reflect these personal artistic responses.6 The absence in this installation of any of the artist’s work or any of the artistic outcomes they conceived post their dreaming period clearly places the process of thinking (the conceptual) at the core of creative practice. The audience completes this conceptual symbiosis, as Rrap writes, by reflecting ‘on each artist’s production as a hypothetical site, which they in turn imagine by familiarizing themselves with each artist’s practice by simply Googling their names’.

Rrap’s challenge to her peers and friends also plays with the notion of the artist as an elevated and enlightened individual—a position of prestige bestowed upon artists since the Renaissance period—and playfully asks us the viewer to consider whether artists are always in such a state of creativity. If they are not, then are they simply asleep enjoying random and perhaps even mundane dreams and if this is the case then what are they doing in a gallery? This ambiguity is central to Rrap’s long-standing intentions of only alluding to meaning and her aim to disrupt any sense of smooth and comfortable resolution in the work. Furthermore the work is playful and humorous, qualities that have always stood side by side with the seriousness of Rrap’s investigations.

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The other space in this exhibition, Remaking the World: In Her image acts as a counterpoint to Remaking the World: Artists dreaming. In this room we move from the absence of any material outcome of the artists’ dreams to a gallery with an excess of works: the physical manifestation of Rrap’s own dreaming of the world. Hovering above the space like a protective god is a video projection of Rrap’s eyes mutating from a closed state through to an uncomfortable gaze of opaque white pupils. These dominant eyes give physicality to the idea of the mind and draw the cerebral and retinal into a holistic entity. Peering into another’s eyes has long been argued as being the path to one’s mind—that space of creativity.

Below this projection we are presented with works in mediums that have come to represent Rrap’s practice: video, photography and sculpture. Central to all of these, is the use of Rrap’s body as subject. Four large-scale photographs dominate the space. Three of these include the artist’s red lips exhaling a confetti-like stream of tiny representations of her own body. Each a different orientation, they give the impression of wind blowing the fragments through the air, of rain cascading from the heavens and a volcanic eruption spewing skywards through sexually charged lips. Individually colour-coded—red, blue and yellow—these three photographs come together in a final image where bodies from all of the photographs coalesce to form a hyper-coloured orb spinning in space. The image of Rrap’s body found in these photographs is also present in the interactive video Murmuration (2015). Replicating the formation of birds, usually starlings, coming together in the sky to create a rhythmic cloud, this work entices the viewer to come closer to see this amazing natural phenomena. As we approach the screen the cloud disintegrates, sending the flock of tiny bodies into the distance. This movement is captured also in the video work Uplift (2015) where we encounter the artist as a singular figure waving a cloth that contains an image of herself. However, it doesn’t have the same fluid movement as we experience in the photographs and in Murmuration. It is uncomfortably disjointed: a physical representation of Rrap’s pursuit of disrupting meaning and, like Murmuration, never allowing the viewer to grasp the image and its meaning on first sight.

Scattered throughout the exhibition is a collection of ten sculptures, all titled Instruments. Aluminum casts of Rrap’s arms and hands in an assortment of vernacular gestures, they are an extension of the photographic representation of her body. They are also engaged in an ongoing commentary on the art historical canon: a central preoccupation for Rrap. These sculptures undermine the usual academic language of high art. They purposefully dispose of the use of bronze, the material of weighty sculpture. They are gestures, but not like those seen in historical paintings, which signify identity or roles and aid the viewer to navigate towards the most important aspects of a composition. Instead, they celebrate the everyday gesture: pointing, framing, counting or spying. They are meant to be fun; in Instrument: Measuring the audience is able to set the distance between two hands to indicate the size of an object that does not exist.

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Remaking the World is a celebration both of the individual and the communal. It highlights the capacity as well as the importance that artists have in helping us to understand our world and also in creating new worlds for us to enter, explore and enjoy. It highlights the significance of the conceptual in contemporary practice and places it on a par with the aesthetic. The exhibition, while not a survey, is representative of all the key elements that have shaped Rrapâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice over thirty-plus years. It reveals her own unique take on performance: one that is private and manifests in other mediums such as photography, video and sculpture. It demonstrates the centrality of the body in her work. It also speaks of her process, where images inform and shape other works, where the whole is more important than the individual, and where relationships between works are integral to completing the experience. This exhibition with its two distinct spheres also reveals the role of ambiguity, silence and the unmentioned. Rrap purposefully muddies and disrupts any form of clarity creating an open rather than a prescriptive space, where the audience is encouraged to find their own meaning through direct encounters with the work. She understands the capacity of the imagination, especially that of the audience, who are able to find meaning even in the obscure. Likewise she believes in the power of the visual and that art consists of multiple worlds, those which we find familiar and those which we remake.

1

Lynn, V, Julie Rrap: Body double, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and Piper Press, Annandale, NSW, 2008, p. 9.

2

French, B & Palmer, D, Twelve Australian photo artists, Piper Press, Annandale, NSW, 2009, p.153.

3 Alexander, G; Moore, C; Maloon, T; & Schoenbaum, S, Julie Rrap, Piper Press, Annandale, NSW, 1998, p. 122.

4

ibid., p. 122.

5

ibid., p. 121.

6

Artist statement provided to the author, February 2015.

7 ibid.

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Remaking the World: Artists dreaming

Remaking the World: In Her image

Artists dreaming 2015 20-channel HD video with customised supports

Double Eclipse 2015 single-channel video projection

Anthony Bond Barbara Campbell David Collins Liz Day Ben Denham Mikala Dwyer Cherine Fahd Anne Ferran Matthys Gerber Michael Goldberg Richard Goodwin Anne Graham David Haines Irenaeus Herok Joyce Hinterding Janet Laurence Lindy Lee Hilarie Mais Jessica Mais Wright Daniel Mudie Cunningham Kate Murphy Ben Ali Ong Eugenia Raskopoulos Julie Rrap Todd Robinson Sam Schoenbaum Nicole Walkerden Gary Warner Justene Williams Adri Valery Wrens

Firefly 2014 single-channel video projection Instrument: Spying 2015 cast aluminium and steel 162 x 35 x 25 cm Instrument: Framing 2015 cast aluminium and steel 175 x 35 x 35 cm Instrument : Hooting 2015 cast aluminium and steel 166 x 35 x 25 cm Instrument: Making 2015 cast aluminium and steel 162 x 35 x 25 cm Instrument: Whistling 2015 cast aluminium and steel 156 x 35 x 25 cm Instrument: Peeping 2015 cast aluminium and steel 164 x 35 x 25 cm Instrument: Counting 2015 cast aluminium and steel 157 x 35 x 25 cm Instrument: Clapping 2015 cast aluminium and steel 156 x 35 x 25 cm

Instrument: Measuring 2015 cast aluminium and steel 151 x 35 x 25 cm Instrument: Touching and Pointing 2015 cast aluminium and steel 140 x 135 x 25 cm Uplift 2015 single-channel video projection Murmuration 2015 single-channel interactive video projection Remaking the World #1 2015 pigment print on paper on aluminium triptych: 150 x 450 cm Remaking the World #2 2015 pigment print on paper on aluminium diptych: 300 x 150 cm Remaking the World #3 2015 pigment print on paper on aluminium diptych: 300 x 150 cm Remaking the World #4 2015 pigment print on paper on aluminium 4 panels: 300 x 300 cm

All works are courtesy the artist, Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

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Biography

Julie Rrap commenced her career in the mid-70s in Australia working in the mediums of body art and performance. This arena has continued to influence her practice as it’s developed to encompass photography, painting, sculpture and video in an on-going project concerned with representations of the body.

From 1986–94, Rrap lived and worked in France and Belgium, which gave her the opportunity to ground her work in a more international context and exhibit widely in Belgium, Switzerland, France, Holland, Germany and Italy. After she returned to Australia in 1994, she held a survey exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (1995), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, subsequently held a major retrospective of Rrap’s work titled Body double in 2007, curated by Victoria Lynn.

Rrap’s work has been included in a number of major international exhibitions including The Australian show, which toured to the Frankfurter Kunstverein and other venues in Germany (1989), Edge to edge: Australian contemporary art exhibition to Japan, shown at major museums in Japan including the National Museum of Art, Osaka (1988–89), Strangers in paradise: Contemporary Australian art to Korea, National Museum of Seoul, Korea, & Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1992), Systems end: Contemporary art in Australia, various venues in Japan and Korea (1996), and Turbulence: 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland (2008).

Other significant group exhibitions in Australia include Photography is dead! Long live photography!, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1995), Body, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1998), Fieldwork: Australian art 1968–2002, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2002), the Biennale of Sydney (1986, 1988, 1992) and most recently, Revolutions – Forms that turn, Biennale of Sydney (2008), Theatre of the world, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart (2013–14).

Julie Rrap has been short-listed for numerous major prizes including the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award (2002); the National Sculpture Prize, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2003), and the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, the National Gallery of Victoria (2009). In 2001, she was awarded the Hermann’s Art Award for her photograph Overstepping, the Redlands Westpac Art Prize in 2008 for a mixed media work titled Stasis symbol. Her video work 360° self-portrait won the University of Queensland National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize in 2009. This work was exhibited in The trickster at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea (2010), and also selected for the 14th Jakarta Biennale (2011) and shown at the New Media Gallery, Vancouver (2014).

Major publications include Julie Rrap, Piper Press, Sydney (1998), and Julie Rrap: Body double, Museum of Contemporary Art & Piper Press, Sydney (2007).

Rrap has also been the beneficiary of several grants from the Visual Arts and Craft Fund of the Australia Council, including a Creative Fellowship in 2002.

Julie Rrap’s work is held in all major public collections in Australia as well as many corporate and private collections both here and overseas. She is represented by Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

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Artist’s acknowledgements

I would especially like to thank all my artist collaborators who so willingly came to my studio to sleep and dream on the concept of Remaking the World. We will never know what they were dreaming but can imagine through all their wonderful art practices what they might envision for an artwork that “remakes the world”.

I am also grateful to Gary Warner for his constant advice and skill in helping me to realize images and video works, Irenaeus Herok (Irek) for his creative digital skills in mastering photo and video works with me, while the craftsman-like skill of Phillip Sticklen makes all object-making possible. I would also like to extend special thanks to Jon McCormack and Elliot Wilson for their wonderful realization of the interactive animation.

My thanks to Warren Macris at High Res Digital Giclee, Graphic Art Mount and Crawford Castings for their quality input into the making and finishing of the work and designer Jisuk Han for her invaluable insights.

I wish to extend my thanks to Fran Clark and Suzanne Hampel at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley and her team at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, for their ongoing support and the Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, for their provision of time for research for this project.

I would also like to thank Vince Alessi for all his thoughtful comments and good advice as the work progressed through its many stages.

Special thanks go to my niece Adrian Parr for her understanding and support of my practice over many years. Her essay contribution to the catalogue extends Remaking the World into other worlds.

I give my sincere thanks to Kelly Gellatly, Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art and The Vizard Foundation for selecting me as the Vizard Contemporary Artist for 2015. The financial and institutional support has enabled a substantial new body of work to be realised.

Uplift, 2015

Firefly, 2014

Remaking the World #2, 2015

Remaking the World #3, 2015

Remaking the World #1, 2015

Remaking the World #4, 2015

Double Eclipse, 2015

Murmuration, 2015

Instrument: Framing, 2015

Instrument: Hooting, 2015

Instrument: Whistling, 2015

Instrument: Spying, 2015

Instrument: Measuring, 2015

Instrument: Counting, 2015

Instrument: Clapping, 2015

Instrument: Peeping, 2015

Instrument: Making, 2015

Instrument: Touching and Pointing, 2015

Julie Rrap

In Her image

Remaking the World

Julie Rrap

Remaking the World